Simon Brett - The Stabbing in the Stables

She, finding that all of her husband’s attractions went away when the money went away, divorced him and married an eighty-year-old shipping magnate, whose last years she determined to make happy-and few.

Lucinda Fleet, meanwhile, continued to run Long Bamber Stables, single-handed. She never remarried or even had a boyfriend, finding, as had many people before her, that horses are much more rewarding companions than human beings.

And the finances of the stables juddered from crisis to crisis until, eventually, Lucinda was forced to sell them.

But that, as well, lay far in the future.

What lay closer to the present was the ring on the bell of High Tor, just after Carole had returned from Imogen Potton’s dramatic revelations and released an extremely disgruntled Gulliver from the kitchen. She moved to the front door with some bewilderment. Jude had just been dropped at Woodside Cottage, so it couldn’t be her, and it wasn’t the general habit of Fethering residents to arrive unannounced.

Carole was astonished and ashamed to open her door to Stephen and Gaby. In all the excitements of the morning, she had completely forgotten their arrangement. Oh God, this was to be the dreadful meeting, when they told her they were splitting up.

Even worse, she remembered that she had promised to cook lunch for them. And she hadn’t done a thing. The joint and everything else were still in the fridge. If there was one thing Carole Seddon hated, it was inefficiency. Particularly when the inefficiency was her own.

Full of embarrassed apology, she announced that they’d have to eat at the Crown and Anchor. Desperately hoping he wouldn’t be full, she rang Ted Crisp to ask him to hold a table for them. He immediately went into a worrying routine about everyone wanting to be squeezed in and how people were having to book weeks ahead because of the Crown and Anchor’s mounting gastronomic reputation. Then he relented, stopped fooling about and said it was fine.

So it proved when they got there. Only three tables were occupied.

Carole, insisting that this must be her treat, went to get the drinks. Both Stephen and Gaby ordered fizzy water, which was worrying and suggested that their mission was going to be an austere one. She ordered herself a large Chilean chardonnay; she felt she was going to need it.

They sat down and raised their glasses in a wordless toast. Then Stephen said, with that heavy formality of which Carole hoped Gaby had cured him, “Mother, there’s something we have to tell you.”

“Oh yes?” Her voice came out very small.

“It is, not to put too fine a point on it, erm…erm…”

Oh no, he was getting just like his father. And at that moment, Carole felt as alienated from Stephen as she was from David. Get on with it, she prayed, tell me the worst.

“Well, the fact is, Mother…you’re going to become a grandmother.”

This was so far from the news she had been expecting that at first Carole thought she must have misheard. But then, in the chaos of conversation that followed, details slowly emerged.

Stephen and Gaby had wanted to start a family as soon as they were married, but for months nothing was happening and they were both getting very tense about it. The day Gaby had sounded so listless on the phone she had just found out she wasn’t pregnant-again.

But then suddenly it had happened. She was only about eight weeks. It was really too early to tell anyone, but they so wanted her to know.

“Does your father know yet?”

“No, we wanted to tell you first.”

Nothing Stephen could have said would have given Carole a deeper glow.

“Current estimated arrival date is the twenty-eighth of October,” said Gaby excitedly.

“Isn’t it wonderful news?” Stephen crowed.

“Yes, wonderful.” Carole agreed.

Her knee-jerk reaction was, Oh dear-another relationship to get wrong. She wouldn’t have been Carole Seddon if she hadn’t thought that. But the anxiety lasted only a second before it was overwhelmed by a warm flood of excitement. Now she really had got something to look forward to.