‘I hate to say it,’ said Simon, using that voice of his which meant he didn’t hate what he was about to say at all, ‘but it’s what everybody is thinking, so I’m just going to say it out loud; after all, someone has to, someone has to be the voice of reason.’
Danny and Frankie looked at him, waiting for him to go on. Sorrel did the same, though with less expectation. It was the first time they had come together since the weekend with Alastair and in the intervening days, they had all doubtless come up with their own thoughts and theories.
It was early evening and the four of them were gathered in Danny and Frankie’s kitchen for supper, the appetising smell of a chicken roasting in the oven and fresh mint added to a pan of new potatoes bubbling on the hob. With Danny opening a bottle of rosé wine and Frankie putting the finishing touches to a green leaf salad harvested from the garden – no air-filled bags of salad from the supermarket at Walnut Tree Cottage! – it was a familiar scene, one which had taken place hundreds of times.
The kitchen here was smaller than theirs, but Sorrel had always liked it. There was a relaxing intimacy to the space, which she knew was down to Frankie’s way of placing things to make the most of them, to bring out their finer qualities. She had a knack for coming across Oriental rugs, watercolours and pottery and making them look like heirlooms that had been in the family for years. Even an uninspiring old jug found in a charity shop somehow came to life in Frankie’s creative hands; she would fill it with a few flowers from the garden and it would instantly bestow a pleasing charm all of its own. In Sorrel’s hands the same jug would simply look horribly out of place, like a bit of gaudy tat that nobody in their right mind would give houseroom.
The ability to bring out the best in things was something Frankie applied to people, and again it was something Sorrel knew she wasn’t good at. Blessed with what Frankie downplayed as nothing more than a skill for homemaking – she called herself an obsessive nester – it was nonetheless a creative talent that had bonded her to Orla in a way Sorrel had never been able to.
It hadn’t bothered her unduly, but there were times when she had definitely felt left out, the gooseberry to their creative club of two. Frankie never did it deliberately – Frankie didn’t have a malicious bone in her body – but Sorrel had the strongest suspicion that Orla had taken pleasure in Sorrel not quite fitting in. She’d had no problem in making someone look stupid either. She had frequently done that through her love of playing practical jokes.
She once told Rachel, when she was only four years old, that raisins and sultanas, very nearly the only things she would eat at the time, were the shrivelled up bodies of spiders. Orla’s justification for her remark was to encourage Rachel to eat something else.
Sometimes when alone with Sorrel, Orla would lapse into a lengthy silence. She was that rare thing, a woman who wasn’t afraid to keep her mouth shut. But two could play at that game and Sorrel took to the challenge with relish as unspoken battle lines were drawn up between them: who would break first? Occasionally they had no choice in the matter when a third party joined them, but even then they would spin it out to see which of them could remain quiet.
Keenly attuned to the oscillating vibrations Orla gave out, Sorrel always felt that Orla could see straight through her, right to the very depths of what she really thought and believed. It was one of the reasons – apart from the very obvious one – that Sorrel had never warmed to her, why she had always been on her guard when in her presence.
Given their history with Alastair, their relationship was destined to be a complicated one, not helped in Sorrel’s mind by Simon’s slavish devotion towards Orla. The woman had been able to do no wrong in his eyes. He wasn’t the sort to take it any further than that, though, if only because it would be a betrayal of his friendship with Alastair.
She could be wrong, of course, but generally wives weren’t. Wives invariably knew if their husbands were being unfaithful, even if they refused to believe it. Denial was such a convenient mechanism to hide behind. Nobody knew that better than Sorrel, or that people lived two entirely different lives – the one others saw, and the secret one hidden from view.
‘Go on, Simon,’ said Danny, pouring wine into the last of the four glasses on the worktop. ‘What is it we’re all thinking? As if I couldn’t guess.’
‘That what Alastair is doing is no more than a classic case of a vulnerable widowed man imagining himself in love,’ replied Simon. ‘This woman he’s met is merely filling a void made by his grief for Orla.’
‘That may well be true,’ said Frankie, hands now thrust into a pair of oven gloves, opening the oven and letting out a cloud of steam, ‘but there’s nothing we can do about it, is there?’
‘Frankie’s right,’ said Danny, passing Sorrel a glass of wine. ‘We may think he’s making a terrible mistake, and to be honest that’s what I wholeheartedly believe, but we can hardly stop him. It’s his right to do exactly as he pleases.’
‘But what if this story of his about Valentina saving him from a jellyfish is a fabrication, a respectable cover story? What if he found her online and can’t bring himself to admit that?’
This was a new theory of Simon’s and one he’d aired that morning while they’d still been in bed. It had come shortly after an attempt on Sorrel’s part to initiate sex. She’d read that first thing in the morning was the best time to try when a couple had reached an age when these things took longer to accomplish. ‘Sorry,’ he’d said, ‘I’m just not in the mood, too much going on inside my head.’ His lack of sex drive had started not long after Orla’s death. He claimed it was shock – shock which was later compounded by Danny’s heart attack. In the early years of their marriage, the thought of going longer than a couple of weeks without sex would have been unthinkable. His disinterest in her hurt, and more than she might have thought it would. Was she facing the reality that she was no longer attractive, not even to her husband?
‘So what if Alastair found her online?’ Sorrel said abruptly, that morning’s humiliation adding sharpness to her words. ‘And supposing he’s not making a mistake? Maybe it’s real what they feel for each other.’
‘But how can it be when they’ve known one another for so little time?’ This was from Simon.
‘Yes,’ agreed Danny, ‘fair enough they’ve spent time emailing and texting each other, as well as calling each other since returning home, but essentially they’ve only spent a few months together.’
Easing the roasted chicken from its metal dish onto a serving platter, Frankie looked at her husband over her shoulder. ‘You’ve always said that you knew the moment you met me that I was the girl you would marry.’
A pained expression clouded Danny’s face. ‘But that was different.’
‘How so?’ asked Frankie.
‘I don’t know, but it just is. We were young and—’
‘Careful, Danny,’ warned Frankie with a raised eyebrow, and pointing the carving knife in her hand at him, ‘please don’t say we were young and foolish, not when one day I want to be able to tell our grandchildren the same romantic story you’ve always told Jenna, that you looked into my eyes and simplyknew.’
‘Of course that was exactly how it happened,’ he said, smiling brightly and going over and giving her an affectionate kiss on the mouth.
‘Sweet man,’ Frankie said, kissing him back. ‘That’s why I married you, because you know just when to say the right thing.’
He laughed. ‘I do when you have a whopping great knife in your hands.’
Their cute display of devotion normally made Sorrel smile, but now, following her husband’s rejection of her in bed that morning, she felt a surge of envy. Why couldn’t Simon be more like Danny? Or was Danny the way he was because he’d been starved of affection as a young boy, not knowing what a caring hug was until he’d finally been given a proper home by his adopted parents? Had that experience made him value love more than the average man?
As though to prove his insensitivity by not acknowledging the tender moment passing between Danny and Frankie, Simon said, ‘One way to look at it, Sorrel, is how would you feel if Rachel announced that she was upping sticks to be with someone she’d only just met? Someone we hadn’t met? Like this Paul character she’s been seeing?’
