One Day in May - Catherine Alliott [28]
‘No, that’s it.’
‘Thank the Lord. Come on, let’s pack up and go home.’
The rest of the weekend flew by in a relaxing, country house manner, the like of which I wasn’t accustomed to. It was punctuated by huge fry-ups, long walks, pub lunches, and culminated with a drinks party on Sunday evening hosted by the Forbeses.
‘A grisly little ritual we Tory wives are supposed to throw on a regular basis,’ Letty confided to me in the kitchen as we sliced lemons and cucumber. ‘I do about one a year. All the great and the good come. Most are over seventy, and even the men are lavender-tinted. You’ll love it,’ she promised with dark foreboding.
‘But who wants to turn out on a Sunday evening?’
‘Oh, never underestimate the snoop factor.’
True enough, on the dot of six, the house filled up with what looked like a Saga holiday coach tour. Bright eyes darted around the sitting room like magpies, not missing a trick. Amongst the wrinklies, an old boyhood friend of Dominic’s called Hugh, whose parents lived in the big house on the hill, and who was down from London for the weekend with his wife, Carla, a sulky-looking beauty who folded up her long limbs on the sofa to chain-smoke, occasionally hissing in Italian at her little boy, a skinny, plain child with a withered arm, who slunk about miserably. Hugh was sweet, though, and funny. He pointed out all the local gentry to me, chatting genially as they came up to wring his hand enthusiastically. Then, as they tottered away, he’d mutter in my ear, ‘Chartered Accountant. Two months for white-collar fraud in an open prison in Hastings.’
‘No.’
‘See the wife? Dear old soul in beige? Shot her sister in the knee in ’67 to stop her running away with her lover, who turned into the accountant.’
‘What about the one with the eye patch?’
‘Disgraced standard bearer from the British Legion. Turns out he was never in the army at all, and there’s nothing whatsoever wrong with the eye. They took away his flag last Remembrance Day. He didn’t give it up without a struggle, though. Nasty scene at the war memorial on the village green.’
I giggled, and thus a merry evening was filled, fuelled by buckets of Pimm’s, as I listened to Hugh’s no doubt apocryphal, but colourful take on the community.
‘So you don’t see yourself coming back to live here then, amongst the good burghers of Thame? I mean, presumably the house will be yours one day.’
‘You must be joking,’ hissed Carla, who’d left her perch momentarily to join us. ‘If I had to leeve here, I’d slit my wrists. No, we leeve in London and Firenze, don’t we, Hughie?’
‘We do,’ admitted Hugh, sadly.
‘Come.’ Carla stubbed out her last cigarette in a pot plant. ‘Time to go. I can bear it no more. Poor, poor Letty.’ This to her hostess, in commiseration. ‘She will go to seed,’ she lowered her voice in an aside to me. ‘They all do, in this place. Her hair one day will be blue. You’ll see.’ She swept out.
‘Lovely to meet you,’ I told Hugh as I said goodbye. I meant it. He’d made me laugh.
‘You too.’
‘Back to London?’
‘Yes, back to London.’ And I thought he’d looked wistful.
‘Nice couple,’ I said diplomatically to Dominic and Letty later as we were collecting up glasses and ashtrays.
‘He is. She’s a cow,’ Letty informed me cheerfully as she drained her glass. Her voice was slightly slurred. ‘She got her claws into Hugh a few years ago, then suddenly she was pregnant, and that was it. Bye-bye, Hughie.’ She threw her hands up for emphasis.
‘Letty, should you be drinking?’ asked Dominic mildly, not quite out of my earshot as I went back for more glasses.
She looked surprised. ‘I’m not drinking, darling. I’ve had two glasses, which my GP says is absolutely fine. Do lighten up.’
On the way back to London in the convertible, bundled up beside him in a huge old overcoat he’d lent me, Dominic confided: ‘Letty finds all the constituency stuff a bit of a strain, I’m afraid.’
‘I’m not surprised,’ I said staunchly. ‘It’s hardly her age group.’
‘No, true,’ he conceded. ‘In fact, there’s hardly any young blood in the party at all, apart from