Carole thought this was a bit rich, coming from a butcher’s wife. “Roddy seems to have breeding too.”
“Oh yes, I’m sure he went to the right schools and all that kind of thing, but I was talking about character. Virginia never drank to excess.” Fiona flashed another venomous look at her husband.
“And where’s Virginia Hargreaves now?” asked Jude.
“According to Roddy,” Fiona’s words were weighed down with scepticism, “Virginia went up to London when she left him.”
“And when exactly are we talking about here? About three years ago?”
“Yes. End of February.” James Lister gave what he hoped was a winning smile. “Friday the twentieth, I remember. Because you gave one of your most successful dinner parties that evening, Fiona.”
But the attempt at ingratiation cut no ice with his wife. With another shrivelling glance at him, she went on, “Virginia had a flat up in London, I believe. But when I last asked him, Roddy said he thought she was living in South Africa, where apparently she had a lot of friends. But, as I say, that’s only Roddy’s version.”
“Did they have children?” asked Carole.
“No.”
“But they still had a bloody au pair!” The last look from his wife had stung James Lister into raucousness. “Which always seemed a bit excessive to me.”
“You wouldn’t understand, James. Anyway, au pair’s the wrong word. But someone like Virginia Hargreaves had her charity work to do. She couldn’t afford to be bothered with domestic details all the time. Some people are just used to growing up with servants.” Fiona Lister beamed magnanimously at the Rev Trigwell. “As you can imagine, I had to make a few adjustments myself when I got married.”
The vicar smiled weakly. Carole wondered what it must be like inside the Listers’ marriage, how James survived his wife’s constant reminders that she’d married beneath herself. She also wondered how much higher up Fiona had really been in the social pecking order. The implication of having grown up with servants didn’t ring true. The Listers’ was just another battle of one-upmanship within the wafer-thin layers of the middle classes.
“Still, the au pair did all right out of it,” Terry Harper observed languidly.
That got a tart response from Fiona Lister. “If you call marrying Alan Burnethorpe ‘doing all right’. I would have thought it was not an unmixed blessing.”
Jude, who’d met Mrs Burnethorpe, asked, “Oh, was Joke the Hargreaveses’ au pair?”
Fiona, happy to be back in her role of Fedborough information officer, was quick to reply. “As I said, au pair’s, really the wrong word, because that does imply an element of childcare. Joke had been working as an au pair for another family in Fedborough, but I suppose for Virginia Hargreaves she was more of a…housekeeper and social secretary. Anyway, that’s how Alan met her. He’s been practising as an architect here for years. Has his office on that lovely old houseboat down by the bridge…do you know the one I mean?”
Carole made the connection with the fine refurbished Edwardian vessel James had pointed out on the Town Walk, but Jude, for reasons of her own, said, “No, I’ll make a point of looking out for it next time I’m down that way.”
“Anyway,” Fiona went on. “Alan couldn’t have avoided meeting Joke. He was round Pelling House so much working on the marina plans with Roddy.”
“And they fell in love?” asked Jude ingenuously.
James Lister, caution loosened by wine, let out a guffaw. “Fell in lust, let’s say. Quite a dishy little number, that Joke, isn’t she? I must say I wouldn’t…” He caught his wife’s eye and backed off. “There are a few men round Fedborough who wouldn’t kick her out of bed.”
The blaze in Fiona Lister’s eyes indicated that he hadn’t backed off far enough.
Jude continued to nudge the conversation forward. “But it wasn’t just an affair. They did get married.”
“Oh yes,” her hostess agreed. “A very correct little aspirational Dutch miss, our Joke is. Alan was still married to Karen and just looking for a good time, but Joke wasn’t having any of that.”
“Or he wasn’t getting any of that until he agreed to marry her!”
The look with which Fiona Lister greeted her husband’s joke would have frozen the jet of a hosepipe at fifty metres.
“Always on the lookout for a new woman, though, Alan is,” said Terry Harper, maliciously casual.
“Ooh, you’re so right!” Andrew Wragg agreed gleefully. “We were talking just now about men in Fedborough having mistresses. A lot of tempting singles and divorcees around this place, you know. Positive hotbed of rampant crumpet, Fedborough is. Or so I’ve been told.” He flicked a dark eyebrow in an exaggerated gesture of relief. “Thank God at least I’ll never have that problem.” He smiled coyly at Terry. “Plenty of others, but not that one.”
Jude remembered the excessive pressure of a hand on hers that evening at the Roxbys. “Are you saying that Alan Burnethorpe has mistresses?”
“He may have done while he was married to his first wife. He’s very happy now with Joke, I believe.”
The frostiness of Fiona Lister’s response showed thatshe was not enjoying the directness of her Fethering guests. They were not suitable for one of her famous dinner parties. Who invited them? Once again, poison shot-across the table towards James.
Carole Seddon, who in her Fethering environment would have behaved very differently, was enjoying the insouciant freedom of being discourteous. “Oh, did he? How many mistresses?”
“I don’t think we should discuss that,” pronounced Fiona Lister, all girls’ school headmistress.
“Ooh, but I think we should!” Andrew Wragg had caught on to the game that Carole and Jude were playing, and wanted to join in. He was also worried that they might be threatening his pre-eminence as the most outrageous person present. “For someone whose architectural practice is based here in Fedborough, Alan Burnethorpe does have to do a remarkable number of trips up to London.”
“Are you suggesting he’s got a little mistress tucked away up there?” suggested Jude, also beginning to have fun for the first time in the evening.
“Why stop at one? He may have dozens,” Carole contributed. This was most unlike her. She hadn’t even met the man in question and she would never normally have participated in this kind of vulgar gossip. But she was really enjoying it.
Terry Harper joined in. “That’s before you include all the ones he’s got down here. Easy for an architect. You go round to these houses. The husband’s away at work…the wife tells him what she wants done…”
There was a chuckle from down the table. Terry’s point had been made, but James Lister couldn’t resist the cue to complete the innuendo. “And he does it for her! Or should I say to her!” In case anyone hadn’t got the joke, he added, “He gives her one!”
His wife’s thin face had turned dusty purple. “Please! I must ask you to stop this conversation. At my dinner table I cannot allow my guests to pass around malicious gossip!”
No, thought Carole, supplying the unspoken final words to Fiona’s speech: Because that’s my job.
Twenty-One
The next day, the Saturday, the rain continued, and the promise of a good summer now seemed to have been a false one. Carole and Jude monitored the media all through the day but there was nothing on until the early evening television news.