A Surrey State of Affairs Read online

  A Surrey State of Affairs

  A Surrey State of Affairs

  Ceri Radford

  PAMELA DORMAN BOOKS

  VIKING

  VIKING

  Published by the Penguin Group

  Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, U.S.A. • Penguin Group (Canada), 90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700, Toronto, Ontario, Canada M4P 2Y3 (a division of Pearson Penguin Canada Inc.) • Penguin Books Ltd, 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England • Penguin Ireland, 25 St. Stephen’s Green, Dublin 2, Ireland (a division of Penguin Books Ltd) • Penguin Books Australia Ltd, 250 Camberwell Road, Camberwell, Victoria 3124, Australia (a division of Pearson Australia Group Pty Ltd) • Penguin Books India Pvt Ltd, 11 Community Centre, Panchsheel Park, New Delhi—110 017, India • Penguin Group (NZ), 67 Apollo Drive, Rosedale, Auckland 0632, New Zealand (a division of Pearson New Zealand Ltd) • Penguin Books (South Africa) (Pty) Ltd, 24 Sturdee Avenue, Rosebank, Johannesburg2196, South Africa

  Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

  First American edition

  Published in 2012 by Viking Penguin, a member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  Copyright © Ceri Radford, 2011

  All rights reserved

  A Pamela Dorman Book / Viking

  Publisher’s Note

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

  Radford, Ceri.

  A Surrey state of affairs / Ceri Radford.

  p. cm.

  ISBN: 978-1-101-56124-9

  1. Middle-aged women—Fiction. 2. Family secrets—Fiction. 3. Self-actualization (Psychology) in women—Fiction. 4. Surrey (England)—Fiction. I. Title.

  PR6118.A333S87 2012

  823′.92—dc23

  2011037624

  Printed in the United States of America

  Designed by Carla Bolte

  Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

  The scanning, uploading, and distribution of this book via the Internet or via any other means without the permission of the publisher is illegal and punishable by law. Please purchase only authorized electronic editions and do not participate in or encourage electronic piracy of copyrightable materials. Your support of the author’s rights is appreciated.

  ALWAYS LEARNING

  PEARSON

  To my husband, Chris.

  And to Constance’s loyal online friends on

  the original Telegraph.co.uk blog:

  Expat in the US, Dolores Doolittle, and Canary Islander.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  I would like to thank my mum for providing the occasional inspiration for the character of Constance, but without running away to Argentina; and Bev for her constructive badgering.

  A huge thank-you to Pamela Dorman for delicately transplanting Constance to American soil. I’m also indebted to Julie Miesionczek, Grainne Fox, and Peter Robinson for their enthusiasm and support.

  For reading my manuscript and helping to put Constance on the right track, thank you to my talented friend Sophie Hardach.

  At the Telegraph, thanks to Marcus Warren, Shane Richmond, Kate Day, and Lucy Jones for their input, ideas, and humor while I was writing the blog.

  Table of Contents

  January

  February

  March

  April

  May

  June

  July

  August

  September

  October

  November

  December

  TUESDAY, JANUARY 1, 2008

  I suppose that this, my inaugural “blog,” represents at least one new element to the New Year. If my son, Rupert, is to be believed, it may be read anywhere from Milton Keynes to Mauritius. This would certainly be a marked expansion from the usual audience for my reflections, which consists mostly of Darcy, my Eclectus parrot. He is a magnificent specimen who has been a great source of comfort since the children left home, but his attention span is not unwavering. Occasionally he punctuates my stories—on Natalia, the housekeeper’s, blunders, or Miss Hughes, the bell ringer’s, bunions—by breaking open a Brazil nut with a resonant crack. At that point I usually try calling my daughter, Sophie, or Rupert, who suggested last time that I might like to tell the World Wide Web all about it, rather than him. He is such a thoughtful boy.

  In any case, now that Sophie has got me all set up—she also seemed to think that a blog would be a wonderful idea—and kindly shut herself away in her room to give me some privacy, I had better find something to tell you about. I may as well start with last night’s little gathering. Now, I don’t know how you feel about New Year’s Eve, but, at the age of fifty-three, I have come to greet the passing of one year and the beginning of the next with a certain sense of jaded déjá vu. Party poppers and the like are best left to excitable eighteen-year-olds like Sophie.

  And yet, for my husband, Jeffrey’s, sake, I decided to rouse myself and organize a Murder Mystery evening. As he is a lawyer, I thought it would appeal to his professional powers of deduction. He may be specialized in mergers and acquisitions rather than homicide, but I imagine there are underlying similarities. And seeing as he has been a little cranky recently, I thought the distraction would do him good.

  The evening began well. I wore an elegant old velvet dress of Mother’s, several strands of pearls, and a fox stole—which blended nicely into my bobbed auburn hair—to play the countess. Jeffrey was the count, which suited his dignified manner. His brother, Edward, wore a stethoscope to play the physician, while my sister-in-law, Harriet, was a nun. Mother played an exiled French aristocrat with impeccable haughtiness. Reginald, our vicar, gamely took the part of the butler. Sophie avoided the proceedings entirely by staying at a friend’s house for the evening. This was just as well, given that the last time she saw my fox stole she screamed.

  Natalia played herself. I doubt whether the housekeeper of the original tale was a surly Lithuanian with a tenuous grasp of the Queen’s English, but one must make do with the materials at hand. To her credit, she topped up Jeffrey’s wineglass very diligently, although the girl really should sort out some sturdier buttons for the front of her blouse. Perhaps I should have given her a new one for Christmas, instead of the flashy ostrich feather earrings that Jeffrey had given me seven years ago.

  After dinner, I paced in the drawing room, as the instructions recommended, while the other dramatis personae scattered themselves throughout the house. Then the lights went out. There was a brief, manly gasp, which was almost immediately drowned out by the shrill, theatrical screech of my sister-in-law, Harriet. The nun was dead.

  The ensuing investigations were quite good fun, with Reginald blushing lest he should cause offense to anyone by implying even fictitious guilt, and the corpse rising from the dead to demand a glass of port. Jeffrey was the only one shrewd enough to guess that Natalia, who had remained impassive throughout, had committed the dastardly deed. He has a fine legal brain. Mother slapped him on the back so hard that he nearly choked on his brandy. At midnight, there was a cheerful ambience as we clinked our crystal champagne flutes. H
arriet threw off her wimple, and Reginald attempted to dance, with the same jerky motion of a shot crow plummeting to the ground. Even Mother managed to smile.

  The evening may have been a success, but I went to bed for the first time this year with the memory of that curious, masculine gasp ringing in my ears long after “Auld Lang Syne” had faded.

  WEDNESDAY, JANUARY 2

  Forgive me for going on a bit yesterday. I don’t know what got into me. The ease of tip-tapping away on this new LapTop must have gone to my head. I haven’t even introduced my-self yet.

  My name is Constance Harding. I am wife to Jeffrey, a senior partner at Alpha & Omega; mother to Rupert, a twenty-five-year-old IT consultant, and to Sophie, a slightly directionless adolescent who will shortly be returning to her gap-year project counting stickleback at an eco lodge in the Ardèche.

  I am currently sitting in my favorite cream Regency-style chair in the drawing room, typing on the computer that Jeffrey gave me for Christmas and Rupert obligingly set up with the necessary “software.” While I write, I am attempting to peel off a small, obstinate Alpha & Omega sticker, which Jeffrey must have affixed to my gift in an absentminded moment of corporate loyalty.

  Our home is a comfortable five-bedroom Georgian house located on the outskirts of a pleasant village in Surrey. Our community has a green, a pub called The Plucked Pheasant, a church called St. Mary’s, a florist, a restaurant, and a post office: in short it is quintessentially English, with the exception of the tea shop, which has unfortunately been converted into a faux-Italian, chrome-furnished café selling biscotti and lattes.

  This information will have to suffice for now. I will not be more specific lest rampaging hordes of Internet users trample my snowdrops, smash the French windows, and steal the candlesticks. Such things occur. I have read about them in the Daily Telegraph.

  THURSDAY, JANUARY 3

  Jeffrey was in a funny mood this morning. He hardly paused to kiss me good-bye as he hurried off for the 7:22 to Waterloo, leaving behind two toast crusts smeared with marmalade and half a tepid cup of Earl Grey.

  Perhaps he is sad that it is time to return to work after the Christmas break, and that Sophie will be leaving for France soon. Or perhaps he is simply irritated by Natalia’s increasing slovenliness. Despite my reprimands, she keeps leaving her underwear to dry in his study, eschewing the foldaway rack I put in her room expressly for this purpose. Cluttered house, cluttered mind, I have always said. No wonder he looked so distracted. To make matters worse, the undergarments in question are made of some sort of unpleasant, black polyester material. I worry that they might melt and mark the radiators, which I had the handyman regloss only last autumn. I will have to have words with her again.

  Anyway, after Jeffrey had left I put the dishes to one side for Natalia, poured myself a coffee, and went to sit in the conservatory to read a magazine. I’m not the idle type, but I don’t believe in denying myself life’s little luxuries either.

  I had just finished a good article on the resurgence of floral wallpaper, of which I approve, when I spotted an advertisement in the classified section that shocked me to the core. It was for something called Illicit Encounters. “Married, but want some excitement back?” it queried, offering “free gold membership for women” and “complete confidentiality.”

  Now, I’m not saying we should go back to the days of horsewhipping adulterers, but I do think there’s something very wrong with our society if a service that explicitly promotes infidelity can advertise in a magazine aimed at respectable women.

  I felt a little sordid just reading it. But mainly grateful that Jeffrey and I have such a stable, trusting marriage.

  FRIDAY, JANUARY 4

  Why is it that no sooner has Jeffrey taken the Christmas tree down each year than newspapers start haranguing us to lose the weight we presumably gained by following their festive recipes? The newspaper today carried a “New Year, New You” diet feature, which advocated cabbage soup as the means of transformation.

  I find the modern attitude to food most alarming. It is all Belgian chocolate torte with panna cotta one day, “detox” diets of hot water and coal the next. Stuff and nonsense, I say. Women of my generation know the simple truth: if you want to lose weight, eat less and move more. I may not be quite the lithe young wraith that I was on my wedding day, but I am still more hourglass than port glass, so Jeffrey has no cause to complain. I do hope Sophie doesn’t succumb to all the mumbo jumbo. She is as thin as a reed—as I was at her age—so certainly doesn’t need to, but, then, she is at a delicate and impressionable age.

  Earlier, as she was sprawled across the sofa reading a trashy-looking magazine, I attempted to talk to her about how im-portant it is to keep a healthy attitude toward her figure. Just as I was getting into my stride on the benefits of light, regular exercise such as brisk walking or gardening, she rolled her eyes, popped a mince pie into her mouth, and turned the television on.

  Nine days until she returns to France.

  SATURDAY, JANUARY 5

  Once again I have been lured by the ease of this “blog” writing into saying more than I should. I do not want you to conclude that I am earnestly counting down the days until my daughter’s departure. It is just as well that I changed the title of my blog as soon as Sophie had set me up (“Silver Ringer” has a nice, yet anonymous, ring to it): I certainly would not want her to read it and conclude the same. I shall miss her. The days after she has left always drag; the clock ticks more loudly, Natalia’s singed omelet chafes the palate, I find myself pacing the hallway as I wait for Jeffrey to get home. And yet, as any mother of teenagers will realize, affection and frustration are not mutually exclusive. I can only hope that a year of counting sticklebacks will add some much-needed patience and poise to her character. And that should she happen to meet a respectable young man, he won’t be put off by the sight of her in Wellington boots.

  SUNDAY, JANUARY 6

  The usual activities today: church and a visit to Mother at The Copse. I imagine the name of her retirement home is supposed to evoke a pleasant image of a small group of trees, possibly waving in the breeze, but unfortunately some reprobate keeps spray painting in an extraneous r.

  Much of the day was spent listening to monologues of a moralistic bent, which Reginald delivers as a vocational duty, and Mother, a hobby. The contrast in their approaches is marked. Whenever our dear vicar speaks, he assumes a look of mild physical pain, as if one of the pins from the parish notice board had been slipped into his vestment, and seeks to involve others as quickly as possible. He insisted on asking each member of the congregation in turn how we would renew our faith this year. I only just managed to elbow Jeffrey awake in time for his turn.

  Mother does not share Reginald’s pluralistic zeal. A light goes on in her eyes when she begins to speak, which intensifies to a laserlike fury should anyone interrupt. My small initial question—about how best to stop Natalia from drying her underwear on the radiators—prompted a lengthy discourse on the role of the servant, the decline of morals, the decline of girdles, the importance of hierarchies, the empire, and the penal code. It culminated in the recommendation that I lock Natalia in the larder for two days. This is certainly a tempting prospect, but Jeffrey tells me it would contravene modern employment legislation.

  MONDAY, JANUARY 7

  Today I took Sophie shopping. I had hoped to find her some warm, practical, yet elegant clothing for the winter, which despite global warming is quite chilly this year in the south of France. I had also hoped, perhaps optimistically, for an op-portunity to impart a little valuable advice before she leaves. To these ends, I was prepared to undertake the ultimate maternal sacrifice—much like a lioness hurling herself in the path of a stampeding elephant to save her cubs—and endure both the London Underground and the January sales.

  The day did not begin auspiciously. As soon as we sat down on the train into town, Sophie plugged herself into the tiny pink iPod that I had reluctantly given her for Ch
ristmas, making conversation impossible. If only I had not succumbed to her hunger strike and bought her the accursed thing.

  When we finally arrived in central London, having been pitched into a roiling bath of malodorous humanity on the Underground, I immediately craved the safe haven of John Lewis. Sophie favored H&M, a shop that resembles a jumble sale held in a hurricane-struck brothel. She prevailed.

  A similar conflict ensued at lunchtime. I wanted to go to the tearoom in the Victoria and Albert Museum, where they do lovely open sandwiches and scones, and Sophie wanted to go to a cramped canteen with an incomprehensible menu called Wagawama. Once again, I complied, in the hope of putting her in the right mood for a nice chat, but the wretched din and clatter of our fellow diners ruled this out. I muttered into my misbegotten noodles that one should never trust boys who don’t own cuff links. Then I requested a knife and fork.

  Things did not improve after lunch. My offer to buy her a smart pair of shoes with a low, practical heel was rebuffed. My offer to buy her a cashmere cardigan was rebuffed. In fact, throughout the course of the entire day, our tastes coincided on one single item: a pair of woolen mittens, which I deemed practical, and Sophie, “retro.”

  By four P.M., I had resigned myself to a fruitless day. I shepherded Sophie toward the Underground, steering her away from a long-haired vagrant on the street corner. To my horror, she brushed me aside, ran up to the malingerer, and flung her arms around his scrawny, tan-colored neck. It transpired that the young man was Nicolas, the elder brother of her school friend Jessica and a distant cousin of Lady Zara Phillips.

  When did the upper classes forget how to dress?

  TUESDAY, JANUARY 8

  There is a circus in the village. First I saw the gaudy pink and yellow posters, then I saw the line of caravans desecrating the village green. I have told Jeffrey to make sure that all our valuables are safely locked away. When I was a little girl, circuses meant candy floss, lions, and clowns. Now, they mean Lycra-clad Latvians and a dramatic spike in local crime rates.