down the phone on a Sunday night from school, more demanding. And those ripples would surely reach Clemmie and Archie soon too, I thought in panic, as they felt their own father’s absence. Experienced their own void. At least Clarissa and Felicity had had a family unit for a good number of years; at least it had seen them well into their teenage years. Suddenly the enormity of my children’s abandonment dawned on me.
‘You don’t mind them coming, do you?’ Angie asked me anxiously.
I stared at her, uncomprehending.
‘I’ve only got them for one day, thanks to Tom throwing his weight around and saying he wanted to see them. They have to go back to school after lunch.’
I came to. ‘Of course not, I’m thrilled. And mine will be delighted.’
I watched Clemmie’s eyes light up at the sight of them. She threw herself at Clarissa’s legs. Frankie, on the other hand, bit her thumbnail and looked guarded. I turned. Forced myself on.
‘Now, what else needs to go through?’
‘Nothing,’ drawled Peggy. ‘It’s all going like clockwork. Everyone’s very busy.’
‘Yes, well, you’re not, so why don’t you take these round?’ Angie put a plate of sausages in her hands, knowing Peggy’s mischief-making of old. ‘Is she being a pain?’ she asked when Peggy, sliding off her stool and disappearing with a sly smile, was out of earshot.
I shrugged. ‘You know Peggy.’
‘I do. No social code. When Tom went, she said I’d handed Tatiana to him on a plate,’ she said grimly.
I was silenced, because of course we had all thought that. When Angie employed a smiling, honey-haired, heavily breasted maiden from Auckland to muck out her horses and live in her cottage, we’d all wondered what planet she was on. And then watched in horror as Angie had gone off to yoga on a Monday, and bridge on a Thursday. The curtains in Tatiana’s bedroom would close almost before Angie’s car was out of the drive. Peggy hadn’t known, otherwise she certainly would have told her, and by the time Jennie and I had had endless cups of coffee and dithered and discussed and were honestly just about to break the news – it was too late. Angie was left in the gorgeous Queen Anne manor on the edge of the village with its bell tower and tennis court and gables, whilst Tom ravaged his nubile New Zealander in the horrifically sexy-sounding village of Tussle-under-Winkwood. Satisfyingly, when the pair of them travelled all the way to New Zealand to tell her parents the good news and then returned, she hadn’t been allowed back in the country. But that didn’t last long; she winkled her way in eventually, just as she had into Angie’s home, and her husband’s heart.
‘You know what Peggy said to me when we heard about Phil?’ Angie paused to turn and warm her bottom on the Aga.
‘I bet you wish it had been Tom?’ hazarded Jennie.
‘Exactly.’
‘And do you?’ I asked, wondering where I’d put the cake knife, if I ever had one.
‘Of course.’ Angie raised her chin. In the light, her lovely, sculpted face was fretted with fine lines. She shook back her flaming red-gold hair. ‘It would be so much neater, wouldn’t it? No messy stepmother only a fraction older than my daughters, no drifting between two houses. I’m deeply jealous. And look at all the sympathy you get.’ She waved her hand at the gathering in the next room, the flowers, the cards. ‘All I get is – well, of course she had it coming to her.’
‘That’s not true,’ muttered Jennie, knowing it was.
‘And on a more personal note, if I can’t have my man,’ Angie went on, ‘I certainly don’t see why anyone else should.’
‘Whereas, you see, I wouldn’t mind,’ Jennie said airily. ‘I’d quite like Dan to live elsewhere and just visit me at weekends. Someone else could wash his dirty underpants, sort through the insurance claims, the unpaid bills.’
‘No one believes you, Jennie,’ I told her.
‘Ah, but that’s because you don’t think I’ve got it in me,’ she said, dark eyes suddenly flashing. ‘Don’t think I’ll wake up one morning – when the next Troy incident occurs – and say, “Enough!” ’
This, a reference to last Christmas, when Dan, driving home from work after a protracted boozy lunch, pranged his car into a crash barrier on the A41. Sensing he was too pissed to call the AA, he’d left his immobilized vehicle on the hard shoulder and proceeded to walk home. He’d reckoned without a