Invisible Women Read online

  ‘Doesn’t matter! You know how it works, it’ll be up in the cloud and everyone will see it, just like with Jennifer Lawrence.’

  ‘I think, in her case, there was no sexual intercourse involved,’ said Harriet. ‘She’d just taken a private picture of herself. Which then went viral.’

  ‘You seem to be surprisingly well informed,’ said Sandra, ‘for someone so snooty about social media.’

  ‘That’s exactly why I am snooty about it, I can see where it leads. And I honestly can’t imagine why anyone would want to take a photograph of their genitals, even for private use. Sorry if that makes me sound like a fuddy-duddy.’

  ‘Which reminds me,’ said Tessa. ‘I haven’t told you about the little shock I suffered on the stairs earlier.’

  She explained to them about her surprising initiation into WhatsApp. As she told them about the inappropriate photo John had sent her, it seemed even more unbelievable. Harriet looked appalled but Sandra was delighted.

  ‘He sent you a cock shot! Can’t believe it! Show it to me!’

  ‘Deleted, of course. You surely don’t think I’d keep that on my phone.’

  ‘Too late, it’s bound to have gone viral already, in fact, it’s probably pinging its way on to Matt’s phone right now as they’re sitting in the pub, and on to Nigel’s phone, and everyone in there will be laughing at him, the massive cuckold whose wife’s just been seduced by her childhood sweetheart—’

  ‘Stop it!’ said Tessa, ‘It really isn’t funny.’

  ‘It is, though. When you think about it, it’s like a little boy in the playground pulling down his pants to show you his thing.’

  ‘Dear, oh dear,’ said Harriet, ‘I really can’t believe this. Are you sure, Tessa, that this relationship is something you want to continue?’

  ‘I don’t feel so bad about Poppy now I know that my oldest friend is up to the same tricks,’ said Sandra. ‘Are you going to send one back?’

  ‘I most certainly am not!’ said Tessa.

  ‘Was he wearing paisley pyjamas by the way?’

  ‘Paisley pyjamas?’

  ‘Like that MP who got trapped into sexting a tabloid journalist. Everyone was fixated on the pyjama detail, never mind the honourable member.’

  ‘Poor fellow,’ said Harriet. ‘I felt so sorry for him. Right, I’m going to get the brown stew on. That should calm everybody down.’

  *

  Later that evening, under the pink candlewick bedspread, Tessa was sharing the details of Poppy’s photo with Matt.

  ‘Serves Sandra right for being nosy,’ said Matt. ‘I can categorically say I would never invade Lola’s privacy like that.’

  ‘That’s because you might not like what you find.’

  ‘Well that’s true. The thought of seeing her entwined with that caveman—’

  ‘We haven’t even met him! I’m sure he’s very nice.’

  ‘Hmm. But anyway, the whole thing is sick, isn’t it? Like those men who take a photo of their dick to send to someone, can you imagine why you would do such a thing? It’s mental.’

  ‘Mmm.’

  ‘I mean, can you imagine if I sexted you a picture? I’m telling you now, if I ever do anything like that, you have my permission to have me banged up in a loony bin. Use your lasting power of attorney.’

  ‘I believe it’s very common these days,’ said Tessa.

  ‘Really? Not in my world. But don’t worry, my moral code means I will never check your phone, so feel free to sext away to your heart’s content!’

  Tessa’s phone was plugged in, charging on the bedside table, like a sleeping dragon. At any moment and without warning, it could wake up and spit lecherous fire into this sleepy Cotswold bedroom. She couldn’t switch it off; she always kept it on overnight in case Lola or Max suffered some drama and couldn’t get through. And although she believed Matt when he said that he’d never read her messages, supposing he went to the loo while she was asleep and he heard her phone, and just checked to make sure it wasn’t an emergency . . .

  In her mind, she scrolled back through her exchanges with John that evening. First, his apology.

  Hey, hope you’re not offended!

  She’d crafted her reply:

  Not what I’m used to. Untried in funny tricks of modern dating game.

  Then she’d deleted the ‘modern dating game’ bit. Whatever they were up to, it wasn’t a dating game.

  Not what I’m used to. Untried in funny tricks.

  He’d come straight back.

  I like your funny tricks. I like everything about you.

  He’d promised not to do it again, but she couldn’t be sure. What if he was overtaken by the urge to ‘share’ again after a few drinks this evening? With the time difference, that could be four o’clock in the morning, just when Matt was likely to be on his way to the bathroom, in thrall to the demands of his ageing prostate.

  Matt’s voice cut through her reverie.

  ‘So shall we do Broadway Tower tomorrow? Then we’ll drop into the knife shop and you can prepare your quail while Nigel and I go for a couple of pints. Can’t see Sam joining us, can you?’

  ‘Unlikely. And yes to Broadway Tower. Bring a Pre-Raphaelite flavour to the weekend.’

  Broadway Tower was a romantic folly, a fake Saxon castle commanding dramatic views over the Cotswold Way. It was where Rossetti had dallied with the wife of William Morris. That sort of behaviour was alright when you were part of an aesthetic movement. Cheating on your husband didn’t seem at all shabby if you were a Bohemian. If she could only imagine that she was an artist’s muse and John was a dashing poet, it wouldn’t seem so bad.

  ‘Maybe I’ll drape myself in flowers and float down the river like Ophelia’s corpse,’ she said. ‘Did you know that Millais’s painting is the most popular pre-Raphaelite painting, according to Twitter?’

  ‘I do now.’

  ‘Beata Beatrix came second. By Dante Gabriel Rossetti, who was also a poet of course. He changed the order of his names to make Dante come first, so people would make the association.’

  ‘Vain man.’

  ‘Handsome though. Better-looking than William Morris.’

  She curled into her side of the bed, thinking of Rossetti’s dark and handsome face, the Victorian version of Russell Brand with his revolutionary ideas and louche morals.

  ‘We can buy postcards tomorrow then you’ll see what I mean. I couldn’t be doing with Morris’s big grey beard. Night then, sleep tight.’

  Matt nudged up behind her.

  ‘Don’t you fancy a bit of married?’

  ‘Married’ was their term for sex in which she wasn’t fully engaged. The dutiful sort, a throw-back to the days when wives were expected to lie back and think of England. In its most lackadaisical form, it could involve her reading the paper while Matt got on with it. Like a dog worrying a bone, as she sometimes thought. ‘I’ve got my needs,’ he would say, half-joking, and Tessa didn’t object. Sex was the oil that kept the machine of marriage running and there was no denying it improved his mood.

  ‘If you must.’

  She tried not to think about the Tory MP in Paisley pyjamas as they launched into their well-trodden routine. To be fair, Matt wouldn’t be seen dead in any form of pyjamas; he was more a T-shirt and boxers sort of person. She closed her eyes and tried to pretend that it was John who was running his hands and mouth all over her. If she really concentrated, maybe she would be able to replicate the excitement of that first night in Yorkshire. But her powers of imagination fell short of the task.

  ‘How was it for you?’ Matt asked in the humorous tone he always used after a bit of married.

  ‘Earth-shattering.’

  ‘Did the earth move for you, Nancy?’

  ‘Oh yes.’

  ‘Night then.’

  He squeezed her hand in a matey, post-match way and settled down to sleep.

  Tessa lay in the darkness, waiting for his snoring to kick in. She remembered the fairy tale wh
ere Jack hides in the corner until the giant falls asleep so he can steal the gold and escape back down the beanstalk. Once she was sure that Matt was asleep, the snorts subsiding into a steady rhythm, she picked up her phone, its light glowing in her hands, and ran back over the messages. She shouldn’t encourage him, but she couldn’t stop herself.

  Keep thinking of our time in Dursdale Hall. Please don’t reply. Night Night.

  Of course he replied.

  Plenty more of those to come. Good night, beautiful!!

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  ‘Three, or even two, meat meals a day tend to make the world look very black to the middle-aged.’

  Blanche Ebbutt, Don’ts for Wives, 1913, p. 11

  The next morning found Nigel engaged in preparing a killer breakfast. Fat sausages were frying alongside man-sized bacon rashers, a saucepan of scrambled eggs thickening on the stove. First up was the porridge, which he carried into the dining room, where a jug of cream and bowl of brown sugar were already set out on the table.

  ‘Here you go, everyone,’ he said ladling it out into bowls.

  Matt pushed the papers aside. As the man in the post office predicted, he had bought them all. When The Sunday Times made him feel sick with envy, he could turn to the Mirror and feel better about himself. It was pretty obvious that everyone reading that rag earned less than him.

  ‘Thanks, mate,’ he said, pouring in a generous helping of cream, ‘notch up those calories, might as well go for it.’

  Nigel nodded and passed brimming bowls down the table to the others.

  ‘Not for me,’ said Sandra, ‘I’m still full of stew.’

  ‘It’s amazing what you can put away, isn’t it?’ said Harriet. ‘Imagine if we ate like this every weekend, we’d all be the size of a house.’

  ‘Speaking as someone with a gourmet for a wife, you’ll notice that we’re already pretty house-sized,’ said Matt. He knew it wasn’t true. Tessa might be carrying a bit of extra weight, but he was in pretty good shape and was waiting for someone to point it out.

  Sandra obliged him.

  ‘Barratt Home rather than mansion,’ she said, ‘don’t be too hard on yourself.’

  Nigel sat down and stirred four teaspoons of sugar into his porridge. He had already lined up Sandra’s bowl as seconds. She watched him work his way manically through the bowlful, as if his life depended on it. His ferocious appetite was a new thing. She’d read that it was a good sign, that it demonstrated the will to survive in those suffering from depression. Even so, the clinking of his spoon repeatedly against the china was driving her mad. She hadn’t confronted him with her suspicions about Paola, though he made no secret of his increasingly frequent visits to her, on a professional basis of course.

  ‘I think I’ll leave you to it,’ she said, picking up The Times magazine and slipping under the table to crawl back to the door, which was the only way of getting out of the narrow room without disturbing the others.

  ‘Your loss,’ said Harriet, ‘this really is the best porridge I’ve ever had.’

  ‘Toast the oatmeal first, then simmer for eight and three-quarter minutes, pinch of salt, with exactly two and a half times liquid to volume of oats,’ said Nigel, with deadening precision. ‘It’s not complicated to get it right.’

  After breakfast everyone set about preparing to go for A Walk. When they first started coming to this house, nobody bothered, you just went out in your normal shoes. Now they wouldn’t dream of stepping out without their merino and Lycra socks beneath their North Face boots, as if they were taking on Everest rather than a few meadows.

  Sandra announced she was staying behind to make muffins for tea.

  ‘That’s very mumsy of you,’ said Tessa.

  ‘I’m on a bit of a baking roll, and I’ve discovered this fab sugar substitute with zero calories. I’ll leave you to do the townies-on-a-walk thing. You do realise that real country people never go for walks, don’t you? They just drive everywhere and chop wood if they fancy some exercise.’

  ‘We’re driving first, it’s too far to walk,’ said Harriet. ‘Let’s take my car as I’ve got the dog cage in the back.’

  Sandra waved them off, then closed the door, enjoying the silence. The muffins were just an excuse; she had no wish to go tramping across muddy fields, following the hunched shoulders of her husband, hands in pockets as he tried to march his way into feeling better about his life. It could wear you down, that relentless negativity. She didn’t care how they medicalised it; as far as she was concerned, it was just a case of morbid self-pity.

  Her mother would have no truck with it. ‘Snap out of it!’ she used to say if anyone was looking down in the mouth. ‘There’s plenty worse off than you and it’ll all be the same in a hundred years’ time.’ Sandra had since learned that the ancient Egyptians considered light-heartedness a virtue. They should teach that at all these bloody management training courses instead of how to be a leader and a team player, which was of course a contradiction in terms, as she had pointed out to Matt last night. Oxymorons for morons.

  Before starting on the muffins, she stepped out of the back door for a cigarette, and to phone Mariusz.

  ‘Yes, Sandra,’ he said, in his confident, manly tones. She wished he was with her now; she’d like him to arrive in his van and for all the others to melt away on their walk, leaving them alone together. They talked about the quote he had prepared for Sandra’s client, and arranged to drive to a specialist tile shop together next week, to find something for the bathroom walls. He reminded her that he missed her person very much.

  She pushed her cigarette butt into a flower pot and stepped back into the kitchen. It was a far cry from her own modernist style, with its sloping slate floors and Shaker-style cupboards. They’d all been mad for Shakers in the eighties, longing for Amish austerity and pink-cheeked wholesomeness, like Kelly McGillis in Witness. Functional, too, with proper handles on the cupboard doors, as opposed to the sleek surfaces of her Boffi wall of units at home. The architect had insisted on handle-free clean lines, but it was pretty much guesswork when it came to tapping on the correct part of the panel to see if it would open.

  She took out the Valhrona chocolate and her new fetish ingredient, Xylitol. What could be better than something that tastes of sugar which doesn’t make you fat? She couldn’t believe it had taken someone so long to come up with it. Even so, she was using mini muffin cases; there was no need to go completely mad just because you were in the country where nobody would look at you. You must always remember that you were returning to the chic slimness of the city. Jack Sprat could eat no fat, his wife could eat no lean, the other way round in their case, since Nigel had entered his big eating phase and was getting her to fill the fridge with all kinds of carbohydrate stodge.

  Once the muffins were safely in the oven, Sandra went into the living room and stretched out on the Chesterfield, gazing round the room to think about what she would do with it. It wasn’t impossible that Harriet would hire her, Sam was pretty loaded and Harriet would be the first to admit that her understanding of decor was immutably rooted in the 1980s. Sandra could work with her, to bring her gently into an understanding of Modern Country that would harmonise with her traditional values. Think Project Burgundy, deep colours, maturing like a fine wine, lightened with amusing touches of prosecco, a playful chandelier, perhaps, or a line of ironic flying ducks, subverting the hunting-shooting-fishing stereotype. She could come down for weekends with Mariusz while they worked on the project together.

  *

  ‘You go ahead, I’m going to sit here for a bit. I’ll meet you back at the car.’

  Tessa threw her coat down on the grass behind Broadway Tower, then sat on the improvised groundsheet to take in the glorious view. Sixteen counties they said you could see from the top, rolling green countryside with ancient trees concealing houses where you might live happily ever after. Roses growing round the door which you would brush past as you returned from the vegetable garden, your trug f
illed with fresh peas for supper and sweet peas for the table, displayed in a simple jam jar.

  She watched their retreating figures, Matt and Nigel looking out of place in their sharp urban monochrome, while Harriet blended into the landscape with her frumpy tweeds and dogs.

  Once she was sure they were out of sight, she reached into her coat pocket for the packet of ten Silk Cut she had bought from the Spar earlier that morning, after taking a quick look round the shop to make sure there was nobody she knew. You couldn’t get away with anything if you lived in a village, she’d realised; there would always be someone to catch you buying something you shouldn’t, tracking your every move, net curtains twitching as you left the house.

  She inhaled and allowed the first hit of nicotine to conjure up the cigarette she had shared with John in the dark garden of the Manoir aux Quat’Saisons. Imagine if he suddenly turned up now, what would she do? If he came round that corner and said he’d come to fetch her, that they were destined to be together, that he’d waited all these years and now it was their time. Would she stand up and take his hand and walk away to romantic fulfilment and an exciting unknown future?

  As if in response, her phone buzzed. It was early in the States, he must have been kept awake by their exchange last night, unable to sleep for thinking about her. But it was from Lola.

  Got a boring essay to write. I really hate my course.

  Tessa tensed up with the familiar mix of love and anxiety. Could she not for one moment be free of the umbilical link that channelled her children’s unhappiness directly though to her core? It wasn’t as if there was anything she could do about it, miles away and with no idea what the task involved. Her days of supervising homework were dead and buried.

  She tapped out her reply.

  Poor you, but that’s life I’m afraid, it’s not all fun and games.

  And I’ve been really sick. I had to miss the fancy dress ball last night.