Goodness, Grace and Me Page 3

  ‘Amazing.’ Amanda looked me up and down, taking in every aspect of the thirty-eight- year-old woman that that fourteen-year-old had become. ‘Both of you teachers? And how amazing that you’re married to Nicky.’

  Nicky? You had to be on pretty intimate terms to call my husband Nicky. Said it reminded him of a dog’s name, and had always much preferred the more down-to-earth Nick. I began to get the feeling, glancing over to Nicky and then back at Mandy, that I might have to do some serious calling to heel.

  The Hendersons’ dining room was every bit as stylish as the room we had just departed. Classically understated, the huge oval table was a work of art, each of the twelve place settings a masterpiece of gleaming cutlery, cut glass and crisp cream linen. Amanda obviously had no truck with elaborate, silver candelabra; instead there were lone red candles, each one adrift in a jasmine-scented lake contained in receptacles reflecting the mellow hues of autumn. The last of the Floribunda roses, blowsy as ageing call girls, flaunted their all in shades of scarlet and brass, while a wooden bowl of orchard apples, flushed with their own success, made an original centrepiece to the table. The overall impression was one of falling leaves and Harvest Home. I could almost smell garden bonfires burning, and the words of Ted Hughes’ poem, ‘October Dawn’, danced around in my brain, looking for release.

  October is marigold, and yet

  A glass half full of wine left out

  To the dark heaven all night, by dawn …

  By dawn what? For the life of me I couldn’t remember what happened with the dawning of, well, dawn.

  I closed and screwed up my eyes in a bid to remember the lines I’d last recited in A-level English class.

  ‘Are you alright?’ The voice to my right held misgiving rather than concern.

  ‘What? Oh sorry, I was just trying to remember the words of a poem. The colours on the table reminded me of a poem about October.’

  He laughed and said, ‘Thank goodness for that. I thought you’d had too much champagne and were going to be sick.’

  ‘No, don’t worry. It’s my turn to drive tonight. I’ve had my allotted units, and I’m now on water.’ I held up my glass of sparkling Perrier as added proof I wasn’t about to vomit over him. I held out my hand. ‘Hi, I’m Harriet. We weren’t introduced in the sitting room.’

  ‘Mike Rawlinson. Hello. How do you know David and Mandy?’

  ‘I didn’t until this evening. At least I didn’t know David. Mandy, I now realise, I was actually at school with. She was head girl when I was in the third form. We’re here because my husband, Nick, met David through business.’ If I didn’t acknowledge the fact that Nick was intent on becoming part of David Henderson’s business, I could forget about it for a while. No such luck, it seemed.

  ‘Ah, I wondered which of these guests was David’s latest protégé.’ If I hadn’t sneaked a quick look at Mike Rawlinson and seen otherwise, I would have wagered the last fiver in my pocket that his tanned face held a sneer rather than the perfect smile he actually proffered.

  ‘Protégé?’ I asked nervously. ‘What exactly are David’s protégés? How many has he got?’

  ‘Oh you know,’ he answered as he accepted the breadbasket doing its journey around the table. He took one of the warm, fragrant rolls and broke off a piece, buttered it lavishly and popped it into his large mouth.

  ‘No, I’m sorry, I really don’t know and why do you assume that Nick is the latest one?’ I didn’t like this man with his cavernous mouth and large white teeth. It was a bit like sitting next to a contemptuous shark.

  Mike Rawlinson took a sip of wine and leaned into me. ‘Look,’ he smirked. ‘Just look around you. David is a very wealthy, very clever man. He’s made enough to sit back on his laurels and enjoy the fruits of his labour. But he’s driven. He’ll always want more, so he homes in on those who he feels may be of use to him in his next project.’

  ‘Which is what?’ I asked.

  ‘No idea,’ Mike said. ‘He usually has several ideas kicking around in that complex head of his, and he certainly won’t let the fact businesses are failing daily put him off. Tough economic times will probably spur him on further. If your husband is ambitious and determined and not afraid to take risks then he’ll make a success of whatever David has in mind for him.’

  Risks? Oh shit. I didn’t do risks. I did security: a roof over our heads, and bank balances in a nice soothing black colour rather than the devilish red that had characterised our morning mail when Nick’s business was crumbling.

  ‘And if he doesn’t?’ I realised I’d been holding my breath.

  ‘Doesn’t what?’

  ‘Doesn’t make a success of it?’

  ‘Then he’ll chew him up and spit him back out right where he found him.’

  ‘And you’re sure about this, are you?’ I asked.

  ‘Does Pinocchio have wooden balls?’ He smirked once more and I turned away from him and looked over to where Nick was deep in conversation with Amanda. He looked animated, alive, full of the same restless energy he’d had when I first met him and throughout the early years of our marriage when he’d been building up and making a success of The Pennine Clothing Company. Amanda was laughing at something he’d just said and was leaning towards him, her hair almost touching his shoulder – surely for far longer than was absolutely necessary – and I felt the hairs rise slightly on the nape of my neck. It had been a long time since I’d just sat and looked objectively at this man to whom I’d been married for over fifteen years. We never seemed to have time these days to just sit, never mind sit and look at each other. Nick hadn’t altered much at all, really. He was still tall and chunky with dirty-blonde hair that lightened in the sun, and his eyes were the same melted pools of Galaxy-chocolate that I’d wanted to drown in the first time I met him. He loosened his tie slightly, revealing that lovely hollow at his collarbone, and I knew that if I were to go over there right now and press my face against it, the faint citron tang of Dior would be lingering on his still-tanned skin.

  I loved him, every tiny little bit of him.

  Amanda now touched Nick’s hand, fleetingly but with an intimacy that set my heart racing, before rising and leaving the table. This was ridiculous. I was a grown woman, and yet Amanda Goodners was having the same mesmerising, almost hypnotic affect on me now as she’d had when Grace and I had adored her at the age of eleven. The same affect, I could see, that she was having upon my husband.

  Chapter 2

  ‘Good-looking man, your husband.’ Mike Rawlinson had followed my gaze across the table to where Nick was in the process of topping up the now absent Amanda’s wine glass.

  ‘I think so,’ I said shortly, wishing I could be rescued from this patronising marine-life on my right. I turned towards the man on my left to whom I’d been chatting earlier in the sitting room, but he was in the middle of telling what appeared to be a long and complicated joke to the people around him.

  ‘Yup,’ the Great White continued, drawing out the word as he leaned right into me once more. I really wished he’d stop doing that. I couldn’t compete with those teeth, but if his leg pressed against mine just one more time I’d give it a bloody good kick. ‘I can see he fits the Henderson bill exactly – and not just with Mr H, if you get my drift. I don’t think you’ll be seeing much of your husband over the next few months.’

  When I didn’t reply, Mike Rawlinson moved in even closer. His breath smelt of stale wine and bad digestion and I recoiled slightly, as much to remove myself from these fumes as from his insinuations. ‘I mean, could any man resist the delicious Mandy?’ he drawled. ‘Look at that face, that mouth, those tits. I think you’ll find, Harriet, you’ll be spending a few evenings alone in the weeks to come. Now, if that’s the case and you need a little comfort …’

  I extricated my leg from Mike Rawlinson’s, turning my back on him and, hearing what I assumed to be a joke-teller’s punchline, joined in with the laughter emanating from the guests on my left. My laughter seemed t
o go on longer and louder than anyone else’s, but what the hell, I was in, a fully paid-up member of the joke-telling crowd, rescued from Mike Rawlinson’s insinuations, and the only currency needed had been to laugh like a drain at a joke I hadn’t even heard.

  I spent the next fifteen minutes or so swapping jokes and making small talk with the Tony Blair lookalike on my left, only interrupted by mouthfuls of the most divine food I think I’ve ever eaten. It was so sensational I found myself gazing wistfully at the barely touched plate of the Prada-clad anorexic seated on David Henderson’s left. She must have felt my eyes upon her because she suddenly turned in my direction and barked, ‘So, Harriet, I believe you teach?’ Her words were so clipped as to be almost non-existent, the vowels presumably swallowed instead of the delicious food.

  ‘Yes, that’s right,’ I smiled.

  ‘St Andrew’s or Beldon House?’ she asked, naming the two most expensive and prestigious private schools in the area.

  ‘Stanhope Junior in Farsley actually,’ I said politely, moving to one side slightly as one of Amanda’s little helpers for the evening laid a plate of pink, succulent lamb in front of me.

  ‘You teach in the state system?’ If I’d told her I worked as a pole dancer in the newly opened Girls R Us in Brandon, the notoriously sleazy area just outside Midhope town centre, I don’t think she could have looked any more astonished.

  ‘Gracious, you are brave aren’t you?’

  ‘Brave?’

  Ignoring her food in favour of a very large glass of wine, she took a huge glug and went on, ‘Well, one reads such stories about state education. Are they true?’

  The phrase, ‘Get a life, Lollipop Head,’ sprang to mind, but to my horror I heard myself saying, ‘Tell you what, Suzy, why don’t you come and find out for yourself?’

  ‘How do you mean?’

  ‘Well, we have a new head teacher. He only started with us a couple of weeks ago and he’s determined to have an open-door policy. He’s always happy to have parents and visitors in the classroom.’ Quite the opposite of Harold Parkin, our previous head, who had been equally determined to ‘Keep the buggers out.’ ‘Come and spend an afternoon with us instead of believing all you read in the papers.’

  ‘Do you know, I’d really like to do that.’

  I don’t think I’d ever seen such a tiny person consume so much alcohol. Another full glass went down, her eyes gleamed and I could see that she was filled with a missionary zeal to see how the other half lived. ‘Farsley’s on the way to my gym,’ she said, her voice slurred. ‘I could pop in and see you after my advanced step class. Do you have a card with your phone number?’

  Oh God! Grace and Valerie Westwood, my deputy, would have a field day if Suzy actually turned up, never mind the kids who wouldn’t understand a word she was saying.

  ‘’Fraid not,’ I smiled, reaching into my bag for pen and an old used envelope. ‘State school wages don’t run to such luxuries.’

  The evening seemed interminable, and was not made any easier by my lack of alcohol intake as everyone around me seemed intent on getting as much down their necks as was possible.

  I sipped my water and looked over to where Amanda was now talking to a rather voluptuous redhead seated to her left. There was no doubt about it, Amanda was still as beautiful as when I used to crane my neck to see her as she sat on the prefects’ bench in assembly. There was a sheen about her that reminded me of whipped egg white when it achieves that glossy look, as meringue ready for piping. Her hair, still ash-blonde but now with different coloured lowlights, fell to her shoulders in a fashionably straight curtain. Her breasts, displayed to full advantage in a stunning copper-coloured dress, were high and tanned but there was nothing of the leathery handbag about them. A smattering of freckles across both her décolletage and the bridge of her nose gave an air of youthful dewy freshness to her whole countenance, and the few lines that the years had added around her eyes did not detract from her overall beauty. She was one sassy lady.

  Amanda continued chatting to the redhead, but I could see her attention was wandering. Even as she smiled and made small talk, her eyes would constantly move away, coming to rest again and again on my husband and, when Nick moved to refill her water glass, she laid her hand on his arm once more but now kept it there in a gesture of possession.

  She must have become conscious of my gaze because she suddenly broke off mid sentence, turning those cool, appraising, almost navy-blue eyes in my direction and raising quizzical eyebrows as she did so. Flustered at having been caught blatantly gawping, I was relieved when Tony Blair tapped my arm in order to attract my attention.

  As I dutifully sent on the large decanter of port that had arrived in front of me, Amanda insisted we all change places. Thank God she hadn’t suggested we leave the men to their port and business deals and retire elsewhere. Modern woman she might be, but I bet some of her mother’s ideas on good form still lingered. It was well after eleven and I began to worry about Jennifer, the sixteen-year-old babysitter. Liberty and Kit, my two elder offspring, had both escaped babysitting duties and, with my mother-in-law away for the weekend, I’d had to draft in the daughter of a school colleague to take care of five-year-old India. I was trying to catch Nick’s eye as Amanda came round the table and seated herself in Mike Rawlinson’s vacated chair.

  ‘Now then, Harriet, you do know about the Midhope Grammar School get-together, don’t you?’

  Did I? I vaguely remembered a letter about some reunion arriving a month or so ago, but hadn’t given it another thought. I’d more than likely tossed it into the dresser drawer where it would stay amongst the bits of Lego, rubber bands and India’s art work until the drawer no longer closed, heralding a major clear-out.

  ‘I think something did come in the post, Amanda, but I have to say I didn’t really take much notice of it. Reunions are not really my thing.’

  The look she gave me was reminiscent of twenty-five years ago. I might as well have said going out into the wet playground wasn’t my thing.

  ‘Oh, but you must come. It’s the school’s 100-year anniversary in a couple of weeks. Sally Davies, Andrea Collins and I are helping to organise it, and the head teacher there at the moment has given us permission to meet actually in the school rather than in the hotel or pub that we’ve had to use in the past.’

  The thought of going back to what had been Midhope Grammar and meeting up with old girls, and presumably staff too, was actually quite exciting, but I was only going to go if I could persuade Grace to come too. Amanda reached into the drawer of a bureau behind her back, and fished out replicas of the letter I now recognised as having received just a couple of weeks ago.

  ‘Leave it with me,’ I said, putting the letters into my bag and simultaneously pushing back my chair. ‘Actually, Amanda, we really must be making a move. I told the babysitter we wouldn’t be too late.’

  She crossed one elegant leg over the other before asking, ‘How many children do you have?’

  ‘Three. Liberty is fifteen, Kit almost fourteen and India is five. The elder two are staying with friends and I’ve left the little one with a new babysitter.’

  ‘You’re lucky still having them all at home. We’ve just got the one, Sebastian. He’s twenty-three now and has found it difficult to settle down to the idea of working for a living. He finished university, but has had wanderlust ever since. He’s travelled to Europe, South America and has even been involved with some project in the Antarctic. He’s been in New Zealand for the last six months, but he’s actually on his way home at the moment.’ Her face softened as she spoke of her only child.

  ‘What’s he been doing out there?’ I asked, genuinely interested.

  ‘David’s brother owns a sheep farm on the South Island and Seb has been there since last March, having an absolute ball by all accounts. He’s coming back via Australia, Fiji and Thailand, and is back in Midhope in a couple of weeks. I can’t wait for him to come home.’

  Her excitement was palpa
ble, but tinged with sadness. ‘I say home,’ she went on, ‘but I can’t see it will be long before he’s off again.’

  ‘What did he study at university?’ I asked.

  ‘Law, same as me. Both of us studied law at Oxford.’

  ‘Did you ever use your law degree?’ I was curious about what Amanda had been up to since coming back to Midhope.

  ‘I didn’t finish Oxford. I was married and had Seb when I was nineteen. I transferred to Leeds to finish my degree when he started school, and now I help David out whenever I can. I’m really hoping that Sebastian will do articles and settle down once he gets home.’

  I glanced at my watch again, and jumped up. ‘Sorry we’ve to leave so early, but I’m afraid tonight it was a choice between a get-home-early-babysitter or no babysitter at all.’ I still had to drive Jennifer to the other side of town once we’d got home.

  Suzy seemed to have disappeared – possibly under the table. As Nick and I made our goodbyes, The Great White shark waved a dessert fork in my direction, presumably as a gesture of farewell. Whatever its intention, it gave a whole new meaning to the phrase, ‘Prick with Fork’!

  Nick closed his eyes and stretched himself out full length on the passenger seat as I manoeuvred the car between what must have been a half million pounds worth of upmarket wheels parked in the drive.

  ‘Well, I think that went pretty well,’ he grinned. He was the metaphorical cat that had landed the cream. Any minute now he’d be purring.

  ‘So what did you think?’ he demanded as he buckled himself in to his seat belt.

  ‘What did I think about what?’ Normally there was nothing I enjoyed more after an evening out than a good old dissection of who’d been there and who’d said what, but seeing Amanda Goodners again after all these years had made me irritable, if not nervous.

  ‘Well, David, Mandy, the house?’