flourish. ‘Foolish of me not to have done that before,’ she remarked. Then she turned to face us, hands on hips. ‘Now. Who’s for a sticky?’
‘A what?’ Jennie frowned.
‘A sticky. You know, Calvados, Drambuie, that sort of thing. What about you, Pete?’
‘Er, well, I’m not convinced I’ve ever had anything like that before,’ Pete said, palpitating nervously. ‘This Muscadet’s nice, though,’ he said, pronouncing the t.
‘Ah, but then you’ve never joined a book club before, have you?’ Peggy murmured, slipping down onto the sofa. She patted the space beside her. ‘Come. Sit.’ He obeyed, as if in a trance. ‘So many firsts in one evening. Oh, sorry, Angie, were you sitting here?’ She moved to accommodate her irate friend, who’d clearly been usurped, having nipped to the loo to refresh her lipstick. Peggy perched on the sofa arm instead. Lit a cigarette.
‘Pete here was telling me earlier that he’s got a furnace in the back of his Land Rover.’
‘Well, of course he has; he’s a mobile farrier,’ Angie said testily.
‘Frightfully mobile, I should think.’ Peggy looked him up and down appreciatively.
‘Was Sylvia livid, Peggy?’ Angie asked nervously. Angie sat on the parish council with Sylvia; she was also very much on the same dinner-party circuit.
‘A bit, but she’ll live.’ Peggy flicked ash in the fireplace. ‘Must get terribly hot in there,’ she murmured to Pete. ‘In your Land Rover. Very cosy.’
‘Well, I’m not actually in it much, except for driving. And the furnace isn’t on then, of course.’ Pete was looking pretty hot and flustered himself.
‘No, no, of course not. And what else d’you make, Pete? Apart from shoes? With your furnace? I say, aren’t your thighs enormous? It’s a wonder you can squeeze them into that armchair. You were saying?’
‘Um, w-was I?’ Pete blotted his perspiring forehead with his cuff.
‘Yes, about what else it is you make. Aside from horses’ shoes.’
‘Oh … well, I do the odd bit of iron railings and the like. But it’s not on a regular basis. More one-off commissions, that type of thing.’
‘Iron railings, do you really?’ Peggy’s eyes widened. ‘D’you know, I was just thinking the other day I was bored with the white picket fence outside my house and could do with some darling little railings there instead.’ Her smoky-grey eyes gazed innocently into his. ‘You couldn’t pop round next week and give me a quote, could you? Gone down the wrong way, Angie?’ She turned to pat her friend on the back. Angie, who appeared to be having a coughing fit, shot her a blistering look and stormed off to get a glass of water. Once she’d gone, Peggy laid a hand on my arm.
‘I say,’ she murmured, nodding towards the other side of the room, ‘Jennie’s having a nice time, isn’t she?’
I turned to see Jennie, at the far end of the room by the French windows, talking to Simon. He was standing with one hand resting on a beam above her head, leaning in towards her as they chatted. Jennie’s cheeks were flushed, and as she threw her head back and laughed at something he said, it occurred to me that I hadn’t seen her look like that for a long time. Hadn’t seen her look so pretty. It also occurred to me that I’d been incredibly dim.
11
‘She’s infuriating!’ Angie stormed the next morning when she and I popped round to Jennie’s for a cup of coffee and a post-match analysis. ‘She’s like some ghastly Carry On character: how hot is your furnace, Pete? Do you ever take your shirt off, Pete?’ she mimicked. ‘I mean, honestly.’ She sank down in a heap at Jennie’s kitchen table. ‘I thought: any minute now she’ll be feeling his biceps!’
Jennie and I exchanged a guilty glance. After Angie had left early – in a bit of a huff, it has to be said – there had been a bit of bicep comparing. Quite a few people had rolled up their sleeves in a bid to compete with Pete’s monumental brawn. But, in our defence, we had all been terribly drunk, what with Peggy’s Calvados slipping down a treat and not having had any supper apart from a few meagre bits of smoked salmon. It had all got faintly giggly. Possibly out of hand. Angie had missed quite a party.
‘Peggy just gets a bit overexcited,’ I assured her, trying not to recall the arm-wrestling match between Peggy and Saintly Sue, with Pete as referee, the rest of us cheering them on. Sue had