Chapter 5: Country Casual
Guy had gone in to College, Viv had vanished, I knew not where, and Muriel was in full spate in the kitchen. There was nothing for it but to haul on my boots, pour the child into waterproofs (black clouds were now massing over the hills) and go for a walk.
“Stig!” I hollered and rattled a plastic bottle full of stones. At this signal, Stig came belting over the bank from whichever bush he had been investigating and leapt joyfully at my head.
“Down you cursed mutt,” I pushed him away and clipped him onto his lead as he wriggled and thrashed around my legs.
“Cursed mutt!” repeated Rory gleefully.
“Well, it’s cleaner than some of Daddy’s names for him.” I said, grateful that Rory had not as yet uttered the F-word in front of granny.
Muriel jerked her head around the back door as we prepared to exit the boot-room.
“Is this your mobile?” she presented me with a vibrating, jangling device, my new all-singing and literally, all-dancing, phone that Guy, the gadget-geek, had insisted on buying me for my birthday, no matter that I would have preferred book tokens, or lingerie, or anything else, really.
“Bloody thing,” I tutted.
“Can’t see the point of them myself,” sniffed Muriel, “Unless you’re a heart surgeon. Who’s that important they have to be on the end of a phone all the time?”
“Fair point,” I acknowledged, wrestling to answer the thing.
“Grandad!” cheered Rory, the miniature psychic.
“How did you know? Hello Dad,” I said, bemused by my son’s uncanny ability to guess who was calling, “Rory knew it was you.”
“He chose the tune, that’s why,” my dad replied, sounding like he’d gargled with razor blades, his familiar early-morning tone. By the evening, his voice had usually mellowed to that of one who swilled gravel, the legacy of a life-long love affair with the roll-up.
“Oh,” I said, feeling silly.
“We chose ‘Sex Bomb’. Your mother’s favourite - Tom Jones,” he explained.
“Sex bomb!” chirruped Rory at my side.
“Dad,” I hissed, “I’m not sure I want my two year old singing about S-E-X. Couldn’t you have chosen something more appropriate?”
“What could be more appropriate for me?” laughed Dad.
“Spare me the details of your private life. What do you want, anyway?”
“And a good morning to you, my only daughter. Well as it happens, I was thinking about coming up at the weekend. Haven’t seen you all for a while.”
“I thought you were going on one of your exotic holidays.”
“I was, but the political situation has imploded somewhat and the local guides can’t guarantee my safety.”
“I was a bit sceptical about hiking on the Afghan border, father. Why can’t you just go on a cruise like other retired people?”
“Now you’re just trying to provoke me. No, I thought I’d dice with social death instead this weekend. Haven’t you got some event or other going on?”
“The summer fete. You can help Guy with the marquee. Come up and make yourself useful. We’ve got plenty of room, as you know, and it’s not so cold in the east wing at this time of year. Estelle’s coming too, maybe you could give her a lift.”
“She hates my driving. When I gave her a lift after the wedding she made a tremendous bloody fuss. Lovely girl, but very high maintenance. No wonder she’s not married.”
“That’s not very gallant, let alone PC,” I pointed out, “Since when does a woman have to be married to validate her existence?”
“Well even you went for it in the end, it was a long old wait, though. Thank God for my only grandchild. Anyway, looking forward to seeing you on Friday,” and with that, he rang off, coughing. I was left a bit spluttery myself. ‘He only says it to wind me up, he only says it to wind me up’, I repeated the mantra of my father-handling technique.
“Waining,” Rory announced, tipping his chubby face up to the sky.
“Never mind, Stig loves the rain. Any excuse to get wet and filthy.”
“Yes mummy,” Rory assented, “We love muck.”
“That you do.” As we strode on down the road towards the village, I wondered what my dad was up to. He’d cancelled his holiday plans, but he’d also recently cancelled his latest relationship. It was frequently the case that his girlfriends didn’t see eye to eye with him on the subject of vacations, but quite a few were smitten enough to sacrifice a week in the Algarve for that extra bit of edge that my father, even at sixty, still offered. Many of his live-out love interests (he had never, since my mother’s death, lived with another woman) were pretty young; uncomfortably close to my own age, in some cases. It was only the relative certainty that he would never marry again which had allowed me to put up with these liaisons. I kept hoping he’d lose interest (like Kingsley Amis who, at seventy-three, said that the demands of his libido had` been like “spending fifty years chained to an idiot”) or maybe, settle down at last. I grew up with him as my sole parent for fifteen years: the fact that he kept other women well out of the picture during that time was, with hindsight, incredibly selfless. He’d thrown himself into work and his political activities, when he wasn’t keeping a very close eye on me, compensating for the loss of a guiding maternal hand. Now, he seemed to be making up for lost time and dating every female within the M25. I wondered vaguely if there was anyone Vivian might know who he might be interested in. Or would he turn on the mockney and start shedding rolling tobacco all over them if they appeared too posh? Despite referring to my mother as ‘My African Princess’ and humouring her attempts to drag him into the bourgeoisie (she came from a high-achieving Nigerian family and was eternally shocked at his side of the family’s lack of ambition), Dad liked nothing better than a bit of class warfare and I wasn’t sure I wanted it kicking off in my own backyard. He always made remarks about Vivian and her patrician manner and sometimes assumed a fake yokel accent when speaking to her, like one of the lower caste characters in the Archers. Viv, rather astonishingly, seemed to find this heavy-handed comedy turn amusing rather than irritating. Still, at least it meant the outlaws rubbed along reasonably well, so Guy and I didn’t have to suffer too much strain when we all got together.
In the pocket of my raincoat, the dratted phone began to buzz and wiggle again, emitting the unmistakeable chords of ‘Sex Bomb’.
“Grandad!” cheered Rory.
“Now what?”
“You didn’t tell me the most important thing,” accused Dad.
“What? I’m trying to go for a quiet walk in the country here.”
“Durdin’s death. He’s your MP isn’t he?”
“What do you want to know about that for?” I asked, surprised.
“Me and Durdin go way back,” he growled.
“And not in a good way, I’m guessing.”
“Too right. Anyway, off to surf the interweb to find out more. Keep your ear to the ground.” He rang off abruptly.
“Curiouser and curiouser,” I said aloud.
“What mummy?”
“Well, first grandma and now granddad. What is going on with this family. Who indeed was Pinky?”
No sooner had my old journalist’s curiosity been aroused than any routes of speculation were brusquely cut off by the heavens opening and the necessity of retrieving Stig and Rory from a ditch.
“Out you two! Let’s hope the weather gets this off its chest before the weekend. We need a sunny day for the fete.” Whoever opens it, of course, I added silently to myself.