Mary was thin and pale, with grey patches around her eyes. Their conversation was stilted and strange. They had not spoken since the journey in the ambulance, barring brief, awkward condolences at the funeral.
‘I’ve been meaning to drop in,’ Mary said, ‘you were so kind — and I wanted to thank Miles—’
‘No need,’ Samantha said awkwardly.
‘Oh, but I’d like—’
‘Oh, but then, please do—’
After Mary had walked away, Samantha had the awful feeling that she might have given the impression that that evening would be a perfect time for Mary to come round.
Once home, she dropped the bags in the hall and telephoned Miles at work to tell him what she had done, but he displayed an infuriating equanimity about the prospect of adding a newly widowed woman to their foursome.
‘I can’t see what the problem is, really,’ he said. ‘Nice for Mary to get out.’
‘But I didn’t say we were having Gavin and Kay over—’
‘Mary likes Gav,’ said Miles. ‘I wouldn’t worry about it.’
He was, Samantha thought, being deliberately obtuse, no doubt in retaliation for her refusal to go to Sweetlove House. After she had hung up, she wondered whether to call Mary to tell her not to come that evening, but she was afraid of sounding rude, and settled for hoping that Mary would find herself unequal to calling in after all.
Stalking into the sitting room, she put on Libby’s boy band DVD at full volume so that she would be able to hear it in the kitchen, then carried the bags through and set to work preparing a casserole and her fall-back pudding, Mississippi mud pie. She would have liked to buy one of Mollison and Lowe’s large gateaux, to save herself some work, but it would have got straight back to Shirley, who frequently intimated that Samantha was over-reliant on frozen food and ready meals.
Samantha knew the boy band DVD so well by now that she was able to visualize the images matching the music blaring through to the kitchen. Several times that week, while Miles was upstairs in his home study or on the telephone to Howard, she had watched it again. When she heard the opening bars of the track where the muscular boy walked, with his shirt flapping open, along the beach, she went through to watch in her apron, absent-mindedly sucking her chocolatey fingers.
She had planned on having a long shower while Miles laid the table, forgetting that he would be late home, because he had to drive into Yarvil to pick up the girls from St Anne’s. When Samantha realized why he had not returned, and that their daughters would be with him when he did, she had to fly around to organize the dining room herself, then find something to feed Lexie and Libby before the guests arrived. Miles found his wife in her work clothes at half-past seven, sweaty, cross and inclined to blame him for what had been her own idea.
Fourteen-year-old Libby marched into the sitting room without greeting Samantha and removed the disc from the DVD player.
‘Oh, good, I was wondering what I’d done with that,’ she said. ‘Why’s the TV on? Have you been playing it?’
Sometimes, Samantha thought that her younger daughter had a look of Shirley about her.
‘I was watching the news, Libby. I haven’t got time to watch DVDs. Come through, your pizza’s ready. We’ve got people coming round.’
‘Frozen pizza again?’
‘Miles! I need to change. Can you mash the potatoes for me? Miles?’
But he had disappeared upstairs, so Samantha pounded the potatoes herself, while her daughters ate at the island in the middle of the kitchen. Libby had propped the DVD cover against her glass of Diet Pepsi, and was ogling it.
‘Mikey’s so lush,’ she said, with a carnal groan that took Samantha aback; but the muscular boy was called Jake. Samantha was glad they did not like the same one.
Loud and confident Lexie was jabbering about school; a machine-gun torrent of information about girls whom Samantha did not know, with whose antics and feuds and regroupings she could not keep up.
‘All right, you two, I’ve got to change. Clear away when you’re done, all right?’
She turned down the heat under the casserole and hurried upstairs. Miles was buttoning up his shirt in the bedroom, watching himself in the wardrobe mirror. The whole room smelt of soap and aftershave.
‘Everything under control, hon?’
‘Yes, thanks. So glad you’ve had time to shower,’ spat Samantha, pulling out her favourite long skirt and top,