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By Root 269 0

town in Suffolk. He was married with no children. He had had a vasectomy at the age of thirty-eight, on his wife’s urging. He hadn’t baulked at the idea, having no particular desire himself to father children. The pub was medium-sized, with a lounge bar and a public bar. The lounge bar had a large open fire that was always lit on cold days, even in the summer, if it was wet enough out; and it was popular with the older local customers and the many thousands of tourists who flocked into the town. On one wall of the room hung an original Andrew Haslan – a local artist particularly renowned for his stunning wildlife paintings and etchings. It was of a hare in a wood under a full moon at winter, with snowflakes dancing in the air around him. It had the air of a 1930s Art Deco kind of illustration about it and Andrew Johnson particularly disliked it. But his wife had bought it at a charity auction, for a figure that still made his blood boil, and had insisted that it be proudly displayed so that the world would know what a charitable woman she was.

Charity should begin at home, Andrew would have told her, but he had learned in the many years of their marriage that it was simpler in the long run just to agree with what she wanted. One of these days he was going to toss the bloody painting in the open fire and see what she had to say when it went up in flames. For now, though, he gritted his teeth, sold pints of best or Broadside ale to the customers and listened to their inane CAMRA nonsense, contenting himself with the thought that fairly shortly he would be making one of his little trips. As far as his wife knew, he was going to London on Lodge business or to see his accountants. And sometimes that was true, but it wasn’t the only reason he headed south

Every couple of months or so, when his patience had worn thin and his desires waxed large – desires that could not be satisfied by his wife, for all manner of reasons – he travelled on the railway down from the country to London. It was a six-mile drive to the nearby town of Sudbury, where he would park his car and catch the train to London’s Liverpool Street. It was a pleasant journey with just one change at Marks Tey, and in an hour and twenty minutes he was in the capital.

Andrew liked travelling on the railway, for it gave him time to think of the pleasures that lay ahead. Anticipation was always nine-tenths of the pleasure after all, was it not, as he was wont to joke with his customers when they had to wait for him to change a barrel of the local ale from Adnams brewery. Most of the locals considered Andrew a genial host, and he was. But he was a businessman first and foremost, and his ready smile slipped away when he was not front-of-house.

He always stayed in the same place when he travelled south – a bed-and-breakfast boarding house in Harrow five minutes’ walk from the Underground station. He could have stayed closer to the city centre, but his accountant was based there – going back to the days when he and his wife ran a pub in Northwood Hills, before they sold up and moved to live the country dream. Andrew’s wife had berated him constantly until he finally gave in. She had been addicted to watching Escape to the Country type programmes and was like a dog with a bone about the idea. Country dreams … Country nightmare more like, Andrew thought. The trouble with quiet rural locations was just that. Too quiet, too little entertainment. So the locals made their own entertainment by keeping their noses in everybody else’s business. A short distance from Lavenham was the ancient town of Long Melford, which had the longest street of antique shops in England. It also had two pubs that had topless barmaids working twice a week, and Andrew would dearly have loved to visit them. But he knew that news of that visit would surely fly back to Lavenham and he would never hear the end of it from his wife. As much as he considered himself a pillar of the community, she did even more so. Although she rarely worked, helping out in the pub, she sat on numerous committees and did endless