Bettina shifted around on the blanket. It was almost impossible to get comfortable in any position with her stomach so big. ‘He says that Roger is a fine human being,’ she said to Jean.
‘He is,’ said Jean, not taking her eyes from her book.
‘What are you reading?’
Jean tore her eyes away from the page. She held up the book: Three Lives.
‘Yes, I know what you’re reading. I have eyes. I mean, tell me about what you’re reading.’
‘If you want to know about it, you can read it after me.’
‘I don’t want to read it.’ Nobody wanted to read Gertrude Stein.
‘So why ask?’ Jean raised her eyebrows and smiled. ‘You want my attention?’ Bart often smiled at her in the same way when he thought she was being childish, but whereas his smile was made up perhaps of twenty per cent cruelty and eighty per cent playfulness, Jean’s cruelty was closer to sixty per cent. Maybe even seventy.
‘You have this idea in your head of what lovers do,’ continued Jean. ‘A lovely romantic picnic, you thought. And we’d sit side by side, reading together and sharing our insights and all our clever witticisms and maybe sneaking a kiss using the book as a shield.’
Jean picked her book up again and shifted onto her other side, her back to Bettina. ‘If I’m reading, it means I don’t want to talk.’
Bettina stared at Jean’s back. The sun broke through the clouds again and the shirt became dazzlingly bright.
Megan held Tabby’s hand and carried, with her spare hand, a wicker basket full of wild garlic and wildflowers. Megan was continuously picking wild garlic and bringing it to Doris to put in with the roast vegetables, claiming that wild garlic was full of goodness and not as inclined to pong the breath as regular garlic. The wildflowers, mostly consisting of bluebells, foxgloves and red campion, were put into vases around the house and freshened daily, and some of them – the real ‘dazzlers’ – were pressed into a heavy volume of Shakespeare’s complete plays.
Flowers and laughter and the lemony musk of wild garlic – this was what Megan brought to the house. Earth and beauty. And what, exactly, did Jean bring?
‘Hello,’ said Megan, releasing Tabby, who ran up, pointed to her mother’s stomach and said, ‘Mummy, why is there a baby inside you?’
‘Because I ate one for breakfast,’ said Bettina, grabbing the child into a hug.
‘Mind she doesn’t hurt your stomach,’ said Jean.
‘She won’t!’
‘Shall I take her back to the house?’ said Megan. She waggled her basket. ‘We were going to make a start on ruining Twelfth Night.’
‘Oh, goody. I absolutely loathe Twelfth Night. I might come and help actually.’
‘Should I come too?’ said Jean.
‘No,’ said Bettina. ‘You wanted to read your book in peace, didn’t you?’
She took Tabby’s hand and started for the house, looking back just once to find Jean doing a slow clap – bravo. The clouds were beginning to thicken and grey. Good. Rain on the bitch.
Bettina heard the shouting from two rooms away – she was in the study writing a reply to Bart, a frozen ham bone wedged between her lower back and the chair to ease nerve pain. The temperature had dipped in the afternoon and it was chill now – she’d started a fire in the hearth and it was a strange conflict, the cold ham bone against her back and the skin-tightening heat at her front.
She rushed to the kitchen.
‘You have no right!’ Doris was saying, her face a hot, clammy pink. ‘No right at all!’
Jean aimed a long finger at the older woman’s bosom. ‘I do, though. Pack your things and go.’
‘Ladies,’ said Bettina, quietly.
They both looked at her.
‘She’s trying to fire me!’ said Doris.
Jean looked like someone caught torturing a small creature – a rat, perhaps – but quickly became defiant. It was a rat, after all.
‘I can see that.’
‘She hasn’t got the power to do such a thing,’ said Doris. ‘She’s just a guest.’
‘She was rude to me,’ said Jean. She turned back to Doris. ‘You don’t get to be rude to a guest without repercussions.’
‘She wanted me to change the dinner plans! Like the master of the house! Well, I told her unequivocally that it was not in her power to do so, Mrs Dawes.’
Bettina nodded. ‘Miss Freeman, please come with me.’
Jean stormed out of the kitchen. She was wearing Bart’s slippers.
‘I’ll see you in the study,’ she said, and Jean wrinkled her lip in response, scraping roughly past her swollen belly.
Doris was looking at her with huge eyes, her hands planted on the butcher’s block. ‘Am I really fired?’
‘Of course not. Continue with the dinner plans previously stipulated. With one place fewer.’
‘She’s never liked me. From day one.’ Jean was pacing in front of the fire, smoking her cigarette in vicious bursts and tapping her ash onto the rug. ‘The way she’s always looked at me. And calling me “master of the house” like that. A jab. A dirty jab.’ She stopped pacing and lifted a hand, palm out. ‘I know I took liberties. But honest to God, Betts, if you don’t get rid of that harpy, I’ll…’ She shook her head. ‘If we get rid of her, I can get someone else in, someone better. I know one guy, a sissy, he’d cook up a storm here and we wouldn’t need to sneak around the place.’
Bettina felt cold. Her whole heart felt cold. She was bored – so profoundly bored of all this, of her. But – and she must admit this to herself, she really must – she was also fearful. Not of what Jean might do, but of what she might say. ‘What else do you want to replace?’ she said. ‘Or who else?’ She aimed a loaded look at Bart’s shirt.
‘What are you talking about?’
‘I want you to leave,’ said Bettina.
‘Don’t be foolish, Betty. You’re making a fool of yourself.’
‘No. You’re making a fool of me. How dare you? Firing my staff? How the hell dare you?’
‘This is hormonal bullshit. This is bullshit.’
‘I want you to take off my husband’s slippers and shirt and leave.’
‘You’re serious,’ said Jean.
Bettina’s hands were trembling. ‘Deadly serious.’
‘There’s no coming back from this,’ said Jean.
‘I know.’
‘What about Tabby?’
‘What about her?’
‘You can’t bring me into your family and then yank me away. I can think of nothing more callous.’
‘Oh, please,’ said Bettina. ‘You barely talk to her. Don’t pretend you have these great feelings for my child. Don’t you dare pretend that.’
‘How could you say that?’
‘How? Easily. With my mouth. I make words come out of my mouth following a series of signals sent from my brain. It’s really rather easy.’