Your Roots Are Showing (3 page)

Lizzie knew about her mother-in-law’s version of events because her closest friend in Laingtree, Maria Dennison, had filled her in on it. Naturally, Maria hadn’t heard the gossip firsthand. But Maria’s boyfriend, Laurence, had heard various editions of the rumor in the pub. As a friend of James, Laurence was given all the dirt on treacherous Lizzie.

And, of course, there was also the conversation Lizzie had overheard in The Wisteria Rooms when she’d popped in to buy some sticky buns for the children. She and the shopkeeper had stared at each other, frozen with embarrassment, as Lady Evelyn’s distinctive, carrying voice boomed out from the table tucked around the corner from the till.

“Yes, he’s back at the manor for the moment,” Lady Evelyn was saying. “No, we’re not that surprised . . . Roots will out, I always say, and we knew all along she was
lower
middle class . . . It’s the children one feels sorry for . . . Oh no, the Christmas party business was pretty much par for the course . . . Often felt I should just drop a word about her clothes . . . Poor chaps around here, never knew where to look . . . One used to call that sort of girl a tart . . . Yes, something very
loose
about her, you only have to watch her eat . . .”

Lizzie and the shopkeeper both glanced at Lizzie’s ample bust, which even in a baggy sweatshirt managed to look a bit indecent. Blinking quickly, Lizzie had taken her change and bolted, leaving the sticky buns behind in her haste.

With an effort of will, Lizzie forced her mind away from The Wisteria Rooms. Much better to concentrate on her new neighbor.

She loved the picture Ingrid was scrutinizing so frankly. It was the only decent shot of all of them together, and she was darned if she was going to put it facedown in a drawer, let alone tear it up, as she believed was de rigueur in this sort of situation.

It wasn’t the usual sort of family portrait. It had been taken by a photographer who worked only in black and white, with an old- fashioned manual camera. The woman had come to Mill House in Laingtree late in the afternoon one midsummer’s day, more than half a year ago now. “Let’s see what the light’s like outside,” she’d suggested.

The light had been like honey, or well-steeped tea held up to sunshine. The photographer asked them to group themselves as they might after a picnic. James lounged on his elbow, elegant and obliging. The children, bandy-legged toddlers then, immediately began to jump and climb all over him. Lizzie sat behind James with her legs folded to one side, looking busty and slightly awkward because of the effort of holding her back straight and sucking her stomach in.

About thirty photos had been snapped machine-gun style, but Lizzie and James had chosen this one, which caught him smiling up at her through his floppy fringe in a moment that looked like the sharing of a secret joke, while the children used his long body as a hobbyhorse and climbing frame, their baby faces full of wicked delight at having Daddy at their mercy.

James was the center of that picture. Every eye was on him, every family member touched him, every twinkle and sparkle was aimed at him. James. How on earth was she living and breathing here in this strange house without him? The ache of missing him was constant, underlying all the rest: the anger, the confusion, the out-and-out fear.

“When I was your age, people had more respect for marriage,” Ingrid said, setting the photograph back in its place. “Single women didn’t feel they had the right to go after family men the way they seem to nowadays.”

Lizzie had to smile at her visitor’s convoluted way of asking whether James had run off with another woman.

“Oh no, it was nothing like that,” she said. Would everybody assume she was the scorned wife? “It was . . . well, it was me. I was the one who ended it.”

This wasn’t strictly true, if you were going to split hairs. James had been the one to pack his bags and go. All the same, Lizzie had definitely caused him to leave.

The whole debacle had started with a blunder. One tiny, irreversible blunder, like a misplaced chip with an ice pick that sends out a spiderweb of cracks and causes the whole glacier to come crashing down.

If Lizzie hadn’t been so useless with computers, she’d probably be in her kitchen at Mill House at this very moment, doing something happy and domestic, like sanding away the scratches Alex had made on the kitchen table.

If she hadn’t woken up that day with a sore head and a sense of grievance because the four hours of sleep she’d snatched between Alex’s nightmare and Ellie’s bed-wetting incident had been marred by James stealing the duvet and then not-quite-snoring every few seconds . . . If she hadn’t looked out the window to see yet another iron-gray sky brooding over trees bent double by the wind . . . If she hadn’t felt a pimple forming like a unicorn’s horn between her eyebrows . . . If Ellie hadn’t insisted on wearing her sparkly cowboy boots to nursery school . . . If Alex hadn’t found a rusty compass somewhere and started gouging out train tracks on the table for his Thomas the Tank Engine . . .

The ifs were endless. The long and the short of it was, everything had conspired that morning to propel Lizzie into a heaving great huff.

But the straw that broke the camel’s back, so to speak, was probably the sight of her mother-in-law, dressed in some sort of oilskin overcoat, traipsing through Lizzie’s own private garden with an enormous pair of shears, pruning things right, left, and center without so much as a by-your-leave.

Glancing feverishly out of her window at the overcoat ducking about in the shrubbery, Lizzie fired up the computer and bashed out an e-mail to her sister (who had most inconveniently moved to Australia), writing things that normally she didn’t put into words, not even to herself.

From: Lizzie Buckley [email protected]

Sent: 12 April

To: [email protected]

Subject: Blue Monday

AAAAAARGH!

You know what, Janie? Some mornings I wake up and I’m sick, sick of it all before the day even kicks off. Then, just in case I start feeling better after my cup of tea, one of the children goes and carves out train tracks on an antique table, or throws up her Reddybrek on a priceless Persian rug. I don’t want to scare the daylights out of you when you’re pregnant, but I feel it’s my sisterly duty to warn you that this whole mumsy thing is way more difficult than people let on.

But worst of all is what the little beggars do to your marriage.

By the time James comes home from work, I’ve already HAD my fair share of physical contact (Ellie squishing my cheeks between her hands so I won’t look at Alex; Alex sitting on me to stop me from jumping up to do the laundry), not to mention body fluids (snotty noses, bloody knees, and my personal favorite, the wee-soaked sheet) — and frankly I’m just not up for any more.

Sorting out the sock drawer sounds like a better option to me than sex right now.

I just wish James would go away on business more, and for longer. Things are so much simpler when he’s away. I can have a boiled egg for dinner with the kids, watch room makeovers and plastic surgery on TV, and turn in early without any pressure to light the scented candles, etc.

Another great thing about those business trips: if I have to get up in the night to deal with a twin while he’s away, at least I’m spared the seething resentment I normally feel when I finally stagger back to bed to find that he hasn’t even surfaced out of his REM cycle.

You know, sometimes I think I wouldn’t miss him at all if he just disappeared. In fact, the quality of my life would probably improve. No more of those great big shoes cluttering up the closet; no more chucked-aside underpants to pick up off the bathroom floor.

I don’t know how it’s come to this, really.

I still love him, don’t get me wrong, but it’s more the way you love a comrade- in-arms, or a brother. It’s just not romantic anymore. Poor bloke, at least he doesn’t know how I feel. I’ve done a brilliant job covering up, though I say so myself. But the subterfuge is wearing me out.

All this is his fault, you know. He made me think I wanted it — marriage, children, Spode dinnerware, my own tumble dryer, those blunt little knives with fancy handles for spreading pâté. But I don’t, I don’t. I just want to be left in peace with a Sudoku and a box of chocolates — and nobody nibbling my ear at bloody midnight.

Sorry, I shouldn’t be dumping all this on you now. I’ll try to be more upbeat next time. Has the nausea stopped, by the way? Now that you’re past the first trimester, the worst should be over.

Lots of love,

Lizzie

She read the note through once, corrected a couple of typos, and then pressed “Send.”

It was only when her computer displayed a snappy, efficient note that “Blue Monday” had successfully been sent to [email protected] that Lizzie began to realize she’d made a fairly considerable mistake.

With the quickness of hindsight she knew immediately what had happened. She had typed “ja” for Janie in the “To” box and the helpful e-mail program had prompted with James’s address. It always did this, and she always kept typing until Janie’s address popped up. But this time, perhaps because she was tired and miserable, she’d simply hit the enter key.

Why wasn’t there a way of recalling sent e-mail messages? Surely she wasn’t the first person to send a hugely embarrassing note to the wrong address?

At first, and this seemed amazing to Lizzie later, she wasn’t all that perturbed. She’d felt sheepish, yes, and she could remember suppressing the urge to bang her head against the wall. But she certainly hadn’t panicked. As the day wore on, though, and she waited in vain for James to call in for his daily chat — a ritual he’d never skipped in the six years of their marriage — she began to feel distinctly uneasy.

Every now and then, she’d nod decisively and go over to the phone. Once or twice she even dialed the number of his office in Chipping Norton. But they had a tradition that she never called him at work in case she interrupted a meeting with clients or caught him at some crucial creative moment. She only phoned him in emergencies — when she was in labor, if a child knocked out a tooth on the playground, that sort of thing.

She didn’t want him to think this was an emergency.

If only he’d just ring, she’d be able to say carelessly, “Did you get the e-mail? Isn’t it a riot? I bet I scared the pants off you just for a moment.”

As the afternoon dragged itself toward children’s tea time and no call came, Lizzie’s mind began to race. The situation was beginning to look less promising with every tick of the clock. How on earth was she going to get herself out of the dog box this time?

By six she had a plan.

She put the children to bed a good half hour earlier than usual, warning them that if they dared come downstairs on any pretext whatsoever, they would never watch
Noddy
again. Then she launched into action.

She’d decided that the only way to give the lie to the awful e-mail was to prove to both her husband and herself that she still fancied him rotten.

This should be easy enough to do, she reckoned. Yes, she was a bit out of practice, but she was sure she could still do the dance of the seven veils or something similar. Better set the scene with the old wine-soaked candlelit dinner.

If she’d had her wits about her, she’d have organized a babysitter and booked a table at a restaurant. Instead, she found herself rooting through chicken nuggets, fish sticks, and French-cut green beans in the freezer. At last she came upon a box of rock-solid green Thai chicken, bought from the local let-us-cook-for-you-we-do-it-much-better shop. Perfect. She managed to excavate it from its box, then dropped it with a clunk into an authentic-looking clay casserole dish before sliding it into the oven — so much more romantic than microwaving it seven minutes before they were due to eat. She didn’t have time to be messing with rice; they’d have to make do with defrosted naan bread. Then she jammed two bottles of white wine into the freezer before dashing off to have a bath, shave her legs, pluck her eyebrows, cover up the unicorn pimple, apply perfume to her pulse points, smear body glitter all over, and wind herself up in plastic cling wrap.

She’d read once in a glossy magazine, in the sort of article that gives advice on how to seduce your man and spice up your love life, that no red-blooded male can resist the sight of a woman wrapped in a skin-tight strapless dress, especially one that is totally transparent, a la the Emperor’s new clothes. Such a dress, the magazine advised, was easily constructed from items you already had on your kitchen shelves, namely, plastic cling wrap and more plastic cling wrap.

Apparently, if you looked both dressed to the nines (strappy heels, lots of makeup) and naked at one and the same time, you were guaranteed to drive your man into a frenzy, the likes of which you’d never witnessed in all the years of your marriage.

Creating a dress from a roll of cling wrap was surprisingly difficult, single-handed, and the results were . . . interesting rather than seductive, as she’d been led to expect. To her own critical eyes, she looked like nothing so much as a good-sized portion of deboned, skinless chicken breast wrapped up for a long stay in the refrigerator. Still, it was the thought that counted, wasn’t it? And she was sure she’d look better by candlelight.

Hastily, she flung a red satin robe over the expanses of plastic wrap and headed back to the kitchen. The wine wasn’t quite chilled but it was at least below room temperature. She poured herself a largish glass and then began working on the special effects: candles, perfume, gas fire, acoustic guitar music. Then she made a quick search of the bookshelves for something that would help put her in the mood. By some stroke of luck she found an ancient copy of Jilly Cooper’s
Riders
, probably left over from the days when Mill House was a holiday rental — a definite improvement on her current book, which was about serial murders, especially as some thoughtful person had dog-eared all the sex scenes. She broke out a small bar of chocolate, too, because she’d read somewhere that it was an aphrodisiac.

The only trouble was it was difficult to concentrate because she kept thinking she heard his car coming up the driveway, and she kept being wrong.