‘I beg your pardon?’
‘I shouldn’t have come. People disappear when I approach them. They form groups to exclude me.’
‘Surely not? This is England. This is Yorkshire.’
‘Oh, I don’t blame them. They aren’t being callous. They just can’t cope. Oh God, here comes poor Neville who talks about his dead wife and has tears in his eyes. You’d think a solicitor would know that grown men don’t cry. It’s so embarrassing.’
‘Neville!’
‘She’d have loved this day. She adored Jenny.’
‘What can I say?’
‘Precisely. Leave me be, Ted. I’m a ship without a rudder, drifting on a cold grey sea.’
‘Exactly! So you’re the very man.’
‘What?’
‘I know a harbour where there’s a peeling old houseboat that could do with a lick of paint.’
‘Peeling old houseboat?’
‘My wife. She’s in the garden. She’s finding this difficult too. Would it be too much trouble for you to …?’
‘… bring my charm to bear? Why not? There’ll be some point in my existing for ten minutes or so.’
‘Take her some tuna fish vol-au-vents. She loves them.’
‘Right. I’ll just top up my glass and … steam in.’
Neville Badger turned away to collect his cargo of vol-au-vents, and Jenny bore down on Ted.
‘Hello, Jenny!’ said Ted with an exclamation mark in his voice which meant, ‘How lovely you still look.’
‘I’d like to feel that our two families can be friends,’ said Jenny.
‘Oh, so would I. Very much so. Very much so.’
‘Go and talk to Mum. I’d like you to get to know her better.’
‘Bloody hell. I mean …’
‘Please! She won’t eat you.’
‘Possibly not.’
‘If only you’d give her a chance, I’m sure you’d get on. She isn’t too bad.’
‘No, I … er … I’m sure she … well … right … yes … OK … I’ll … I’ll give her a chance, Jenny.’
Jenny led Ted over to Liz, who was at one of the windows, admiring the peacocks with Laurence’s Aunt Gladys from Oswestry.
‘Such stylish birds,’ Aunt Gladys was saying. ‘They quite put some people to shame.’
‘Do you mind if I borrow Mum, Auntie Gladys?’ said Jenny.
‘You may borrow your mother,’ said Aunt Gladys. ‘But I do hate to hear you call her “Mum”.’
Aunt Gladys sailed away, an old tea-clipper, splendid and obsolete. She had found an artificial pearl in her portion of cake, and Liz had felt that her outrage was almost as much because it wasn’t real as because it shouldn’t have been there at all.
‘Mum?’ said Jenny. ‘I want you and Ted to be friends.’
‘Oh! Well, that’s nice.’ Liz’s eyes met Ted’s briefly. Neither dared hold the look for long. ‘That’s very nice. Well … I don’t see why we shouldn’t try to be friends, do you, Ted?’
‘No. No, I don’t. No … I don’t see why we … er … shouldn’t try and be friends at all.’
‘Good.’ Jenny moved off, with the satisfaction of a job well done.
‘If she knew,’ said Liz.
‘I know. I feel terrible,’ said Ted.
‘Oh Lord. You don’t suffer from post-coital depression, do you?’
‘Liz! Please! I mean … really! Liz!’
‘Do you want to forget it happened and make sure it doesn’t happen again?’
‘You know I don’t.’
‘Well, then. Nobody’s suffered. Nobody knows.’
‘I think Laurence suspects.’
‘Well, yes, possibly. But Laurence and I have an arrangement. I do what I want, provided I’m reasonably discreet, and he doesn’t do anything.’
Ted looked round nervously. Nobody was listening. ‘Liz!’ he said. ‘I don’t regard what we did today as reasonably discreet. I’m out of my depth.’
‘You’re going to find that you’re a better swimmer than you ever believed,’ said the bride’s mother.
‘Oh heck,’ said her new lover, who had so recently promised himself that he would give her up.
The glider was barely more than a speck now, the same size as the kestrel that was hovering above the grounds in the gentle but freshening breeze.
Rita still sat in her comer, behind the urns, beside the hydrangea, protected from the breeze by the mellow brick wall, recently rather untidily repointed by employees of J. G. Frodsham and Nephew.
‘Hello! There you are!’ said Laurence, as if he’d been hunting for her for hours.
‘Yes. Here I am. Hello.’
Rita made an effort, and smiled. Despite her smile, Laurence sat beside her and rested his arm on the bench behind her, as if to suggest that, had the back of the bench not been there, he would have embraced her actual flesh.
‘You know, Rita, you and I have a lot in common,’ he said.
‘How do you make that out?’
‘Well … I may seem to you to be the happy professional man … successful society dentist, lovely house, beautiful wife, two highly satisfactory children, suave, good-looking, confident. Actually I’m a seething mass of doubts and inadequacies.’
‘Are you suggesting that I’m a seething mass of doubts and inadequacies?’
‘No! Good heavens, no!’
‘Well, why do you say we have a lot in common, then?’
The breeze brought the first faint smell of tomorrow’s rain over the warm, walled garden, stirring the shrubs. The symmetrical elegance of the place was defiled by abandoned plates, with dollops of wasted pilchard mousse and mayonnaise.
‘Why on earth should anybody think you aren’t good with people?’ said Laurence.
‘Who told you that?’ said Rita. ‘Who sent you?’
‘Oh Lord,’ said Laurence. The faint gleam in Rita’s eyes disconcerted him, and the knowledge that it was there surprised her. It was a faint indication that somewhere, beneath all the anxiety, there still remained vestiges of a sense of humour, that all might not yet be completely lost in the fragile, never-to-be-repeated adventure that was Rita Simcock’s brief life on earth.
‘People are being sent out in streams to see if I’m all right,’ she said. ‘It’s very worrying.’
‘Aren’t you going to come in? It’s cooling down.’
‘In a minute. Now, please, Laurence, leave me alone.’
‘Right. Right.’
And Laurence Rodenhurst returned to the Garden Room, not feeling quite as suave and confident as he had when he came out.
And Rita sighed with relief and stretched