Chapter 15

When she was eight, a rapturous Emily Smeed was crowned (with a Claire’s Accessories tiara) princess of the village fete.  Her hair a spangling riot even then, she grinned cherubic through crepe paper streamers on the float which bore her through the village.  It was an image she could never expunge, since the photo – Thelma’s favourite – had bedecked the coffee table ever since.  Dom had (oh, how that past tense hurt her) thought it adorable too.

These Whit Sunday fetes at Lower Bratchley Cricket Club were the high spots of little Emily’s springtimes.  She inevitably outgrew this enthusiasm, skipped three years during her uni absence – and was here today solely to support Robyn and her line dance lot, whose displays had been a fete fixture forever.

It seems dragged up from some obsolete era, Emily thought, as she stood in the sun letting it all eddy round her.  A welly-hurling contest; kids running riot with tiger-painted faces; the wheeze of the WI tea urn; the frying doughnuts and pancakes vying to mask McCain’s odours.

This would all end up in the journal, of course: that repository of poetry, vignettes and reflections on soured love. 

There was something bittersweet about feeling out of things; about gazing unseeingly at assembling line dancers in a field on a beautiful afternoon, while pining her recent more cultured adventures.  Nothing like a dose of heartache for honing one’s creative writing skills.  Emily had never written so prolifically.

Honking laughter barged in on her reverie.  Emily scowled seeing Heidi’s rubbery body entwining Rowan.  It seemed to ram in her face somehow the fact that she’d had one woeful text from Dom since his abscondment a fortnight ago.  Sent, curiously, at three this morning in his stiff textspeak:
I HAVE GONE AWAY FOR A SHORT WHILE.  NEED TIME TO THINK.  WILL CALL YOU WHEN I RETURN.  D XX

Robyn was unimpressed.  ‘Time to think about what exactly?  Where he can buy a spade massive enough to deepen the hole he’s dug himself?  More spineless excuses to duck out of interaction with your friends?’

‘He’s shy, and you know he was ill that time.’  Emily’s defence of him was perfunctory and dutiful, though; her voice betrayed no effort to convince.

‘Horse shit!  He starts chucking up two minutes before he’s due to meet us at the Plough and phones you while we’re in the bar.’

Emily gave her friend a sharp look, but resisted retaliating to the swipe.  Dom’s excuses and martyrdom had been indulged far too long.

‘What’s he hiding, Ems?’

‘A wife, according to you, I’m sure.’

‘Well weren’t you a bit sceptical about the “landlord visiting his mother in Southsea”,’ Robyn crooked her fingers into quotation marks, ‘or wherever he said it was?’

Emily examined the final spatter of coffee in her mug, as though it were a potion providing enlightenment.

‘I’ll have it out with him when he gets back.’

‘Better still – be AWOL yourself.  Get your arse down to the Holiday Hypermarket tomorrow, get some air miles under your belt – wasn’t that the entire point of having a gap year?  Let him come back from his little finding-himself trip and find you’ve had it on your toes on Air Qantas.’

‘Tempted as I am, I’m committed to this work placement now.’

‘Oh yeah.  When’s that again?’

‘Starts a week Monday, for a fortnight.  Could go afterwards, I s’pose.’

‘Too right you could!  I’m proud of you, Ems.’  From her opposite sofa, Robyn gave Emily’s foot a little tap of support with her big toe.  ‘Let Dom the dipstick pursue you to the other side of the earth if he wants you back.’

‘Ooh, Ro, wish us luck.’  Heidi burrowed her face in Rowan’s neck, in mock dread of her debut line dance.  ‘Hope I don’t forget left from right!’

‘You’ll do fine,’ Rowan chuckled in her squeeze.  They’d become good friends since failing to click as bogus lovers.

‘You going to get over there and stand with your girlfriend?’

‘I wish she was that.’  Rowan gazed through Heidi’s hair extensions towards Emily, but his eyes fell defeatedly away. 

Heidi slapped his arm.  ‘Go and have a natter with her while we’re doing the dance.  I know full well you haven’t come here to see me or your sis!’

‘Maybe.’  Rowan shrugged shyly.  ‘Rob says she hasn’t quite finished things with that Dom, though.’

‘The girl can still talk to you.’

This dialogue went unheard by Emily, who misread the body language in front of her.  In her tender state, Heidi’s bum in those micro yellow shorts, and her spider grip on Rowan, seemed angled to mock.

‘Better go, we’re starting in a sec.  Oh shite, it’s him!’  ‘Dirty’ Dennis Passey was by the Rotary Club stall with a plastic glass of tepid beer, chatting with Ellery – who Heidi was similarly loath to see.  ‘He was always talking to my tits at them bloody golf club dos.’

‘My turn on the tombola, vicar.’  Dennis was booming, distinctly unembarrassed by his recent red-top headline.  ‘Should have been old Ronnie P’s by rights, but he’s living it up at his Far Eastern hideaway.’

Elaine Carroll, now openly his partner, was next to him with the raffle ticket book, her magenta lips puckered as though she’d eaten a rotten olive.

Rev Crisp had reached Emily in his glide through the throng.  He was enjoying an ice cream, and his squashy face had started to look sorely sunburnt, as though unacclimatised to the outside.

Rowan had attempted a beeline for Emily also – but shied back when the vicar outdistanced him, as though he’d moved merely to bag a better vantage point for the dancing.

‘Now there’s a plucky young lady,’ Ellery waved his cone towards Heidi.

‘That’s one way of putting it.’ 

Ellery turned his neckless body sharply at Emily’s uncharitable tone.  ‘The Lord helps those who help themselves – and she’s certainly restructured her life and interests since my last encounter with her.  I confess I’m quite surprised that you two are friends.’

‘Oh, we’re not really, it’s just – ’

‘Our Linda’s just told me yer gooin’ on that ’Oo Wants to be a Millionaire,’ one of the WI bevy cut in, taking five from the cake stall to chomp a hot pork sandwich, ‘best of luck to you.’

‘Thank you, Mrs Bunn,’ the vicar twinkled.  He nodded at Emily, including her in his news.  ‘Yes, filming on Friday in fact.’

‘I love that Chris Tarrant, me.  Saw him in a petrol station once in Birmingham, yonks agoo.’

‘I’ll ask if he remembers you!’

‘You’re a card, vicar,’ Mrs Bunn nudged his ice cream-free arm.  ‘Ooh look, the line dancing’s starting.  That’s our Linda there, in the orange top.’

‘Good afternoon ladies, gentlemen, children, dogs.’  Robyn looked so comfortable with the microphone, her voice frothed so infectiously, and Emily gleamed with ‘that’s my friend’ pride, and found herself glad she’d come.  ‘Hope you’re all enjoying yourselves on this gorgeous day.  My Wednesday night line dance group are going to entertain you for the next fifteen minutes or so.  We’re going to kick things off with a number they’ve been rehearsing like mad for the last couple of months, so please do give them your warmest support – this is the Tennessee Tush Tap.’ 

Robyn pressed play on the museum-piece music system; country guitars juddered across the cricket pitch.  The CD was turned up too high, and its feedback caused many a hearing aid to buzz.

‘And a-one, two, three, four – ’

Sixteen people in leggings and denim began, under Robyn’s exuberant tutelage, a routine of turns and steps with names like the ‘grapevine’ and ‘chasse.’  Some of the group performed as though at gunpoint, and in unblinkingly following Robyn, for fear of losing their thread, forgot to smile.  Then there were the cocky ones in proper cowboy boots, who embellished their choreography with sound effects and ‘lasso’ actions.  The majority did manage to pivot in the same direction at the same time.

Heidi, towering over the others, gamely tried to follow the steps, though her legs were too spaghetti-like to oblige.  She was forever wrenching her swaying long hair behind her ears.  She cannily distracted from her inelegance in a little primrose top and those bum-clenching shorts.

A muscle-bound distraction threw her off balance – literally.  The guy had wavy long hair and Latino skin tone, was poured into a pair of cycling shorts and possessed an ice cream-licking technique far less prim than the vicar’s.  A stunning, much older woman in a lilac halter-neck was hooked to his arm, but there was no harm in rubbernecking.  Or wouldn’t have been had Heidi stepped forward when she should have and not been whacked in the back by the advancing Winnie from the line behind.

She stumbled; the spectacle of her arched over, bum in the air, made several of the men’s weekends.  Dennis Passey, now gnawing on his customary cigar, goggled ecstatically – to the fury of Elaine, marooned behind the tombola, hating this day enough as it was.

‘I don’t know why you’re looking like a cat’s arse, Elaine,’ the hunk’s companion said pleasantly, ‘you should know what he’s like.  Trouble is, the way you found him could well end up being the way you lose him, sweetheart.’

‘Noreen?’  Dennis’s cigar dropped in his teeth.  He hadn’t seen his neighbouring ex for a few weeks, and gathered she’d been away.  Somewhere scorching, if her colouring was anything to go by.  With her short hair trendily chopped and highlighted, skilfully natural make-up and a dress cut to emphasise new muscle tone, there was a bounce about her. 

This was the woman he’d left for Elaine with the citric acid lips?

‘All right are you, Den?’  Noreen used the same charming tone on him.  ‘Just had myself a little break to Rimini to celebrate the Decree Nisi.  Brought a lovely souvenir back with me.’  She smiled ravenously up at the mutely smouldering Italian, then flung a pound coin at Elaine, whose eyebrows were charging up towards her Botoxed hairline.  ‘Now let’s have a strip of tickets.  We’d love to win a bottle of whisky, wouldn’t we, Vittorio?’