John Halkin - Squelch

Her heart beat faster with a rush of mixed emotions when she heard that Lesley was about to be discharged from hospital. She was genuinely overjoyed for Lesley’s sake; impulsively, she ran out to gather the children around her and give them the news, only to be brought up short when Wendy said in her two-year-old innocence:

‘Did she get a divorce in hospital?’

It was like a cold slap in the face. Even when Frankie screamed with laughter and with all the wisdom of her six years made fun of her sister for not knowing what a divorce was, even then Ginny still felt humiliated. Had the children noticed already?

But they had kept deliberately apart, she and Bernie: an unspoken agreement between them that nothing must happen — nothing — while Lesley was still in hospital. Occasionally his hand had brushed against her arm accidentally and she’d seen from his face how he too experienced that strange, disturbing thrill of desire and apprehension at their touch. The knowledge that Lesley was at a disadvantage acted as a protective barrier for both of them. Now that she was coming out — however much they wanted her home and longed to see her well again — they felt the rules were changing.

He’s just as scared as I am, Ginny thought as she gazed up at his face. She loved him even more for it.

They were standing on the driveway in front of the house and he was about to get into his gleaming white Rover 3500 which he’d washed and polished in celebration of the homecoming. Instead, they lingered for a few moments longer. This would probably be their last moment alone together for some days at least.

‘I’ll have a meal ready when she gets here,’ Ginny was saying. ‘Something light. Then after we’ve eaten I think I’ll go back to the cottage.’

‘No need to move out, love. Not tonight, anyway.’

‘Oh yes, there is!’ she retorted uncompromisingly. ‘I’m a working girl, remember? I’ve been neglecting things.’

‘I wish you would stay, at least till tomorrow. Move back in when it’s light. Insects have some sense that tells them when a house is empty. You come back and discover they’ve taken over.’

‘Nobody’s seen any caterpillars for a week.’

‘There’ve been no more reports,’ he agreed. His hand rested on her wrist as he spoke, his thumb caressing her. ‘That could mean they’ve entered the chrysalis stage.’

‘All of them? Simultaneously?’

‘I don’t know,’ he admitted. ‘But there’s no point in taking unnecessary risks. As caterpillars they’re obviously at their most vicious because that’s when they do their feeding, as I think you know.’

‘I’ve read the books,’ she mocked him drily, but she looked up at his smile and was conscious of the emptiness of parting. ‘You’d better go, darling. Lesley will be waiting.’

He gave her one more brother-in-law kiss on the corner of her mouth, then got into the car. ‘You’ll move into the cottage tomorrow morning then?’

She shook her head. ‘I went there this morning to clean the place up. It’ll be all right. In any case, it’s my day for visiting the agent tomorrow. I’m off to the station first thing.’

His mouth twitched with amusement through the open window, acknowledging that whatever he — or any man — might suggest, she’d always do the opposite out of sheer obstinacy. And he was right, she thought: give a man an inch, as the old saying went…

She watched as he drove off, then went back into the house to tidy things up a little ready for Lesley.

Bernie was right in saying that they had to think of the life cycle of these insects, she decided as she steered the vacuum cleaner around the lounge carpet. As caterpillars the dangers were only too obvious. They spent day and night gorging themselves until they literally burst out of their skins. But then came the metamorphosis. After a couple of weeks as chrysalids they emerged in all their beauty as butterflies or moths, and it was in this final stage that they were really most dangerous, for it was now that they sought out a suitable food plant on which to lay their eggs. It needed only a couple of generations — a single summer in fact if the weather was warm — to increase the population of these creatures many times over.

No one believed it would happen, that was the problem. Not even Bernie who took the caterpillars seriously enough in every other way, but refused to accept that the attacks were more than isolated incidents. ‘It’s been a freak spring,’ he always insisted when she brought the subject up. ‘Wait till the weather changes. They’re forecasting a cold summer, so you won’t be seeing many caterpillars then.’

But he was wrong, she could swear to it.

Lesley’s homecoming was a success. Her loud, joyful laugh rang through the house from the moment she set foot inside the front door. The children plied her with their eager questions and demands, competing with each other to be heard, until at last she collapsed laughing into a chair and kissed each of them in turn. Bernie looked on, beaming with a quiet, self-confident air of happiness that his family was complete again.

Ginny felt she was very much the outsider. With Phuong’s help she finished setting the large kitchen table and served the meal. It wasn’t much — cold ham and pickles with mashed potatoes and a bit of salad — but she’d bought a variety of scones and cakes from the village baker to follow.

‘I’ve found a caterpillar on my lettuce!’ Caroline announced in a highly satisfied tone of voice. ‘Ooh, it’s wiggling about on the leaf. Bet you haven’t got one, Frankie.’

The reaction was electric. Lesley’s chair crashed down behind her as she stood up despite her bandaged foot, but Bernie was quicker. He grabbed the plate away from her while Ginny lifted her off her seat and retreated to the far side of the room.

‘It’s a tiny one,’ Bernie said with an unmistakable note of relief in his voice. ‘And it’s brown, not green.’

‘Not one of ours then.’ To reassure the children, Ginny tried to speak lightly, but the shock still showed on their faces. Caroline was crying quietly to herself. ‘Come on, let’s all sit down again! I’ve got some jelly over here. Anybody want jelly?’

Lesley let out one of her laughs and said she was sure they would all prefer jelly after that, but it was obvious she was shaken. Bernie put an arm around her and kissed her cheek. Ten minutes later the incident might never have happened.

The longer she stayed, the harder Ginny found it to make her excuses and slip away. It was eight o’clock before she stood up and said she had quite a bit to do in preparation for her trip to London the next day. Bernie made no further attempt to persuade her to stay. Lesley even smiled gratefully, obviously wanting to be alone with her family on her first night back from hospital.

They had been deceiving themselves, she and Bernie — that much was obvious, she realised bitterly as she drove back to her dark, lonely cottage. Conned themselves into imagining he was free, when clearly he was not. She should have seen that from the beginning: she had seen it, but ignored it. And where did that leave her?

She parked the car on its usual spot and went inside. Instinctively she checked the room for caterpillars, even lifting her potted plants’ leaves with a Chinese chopstick just to make sure. In the middle of her round table to her surprise was a large vase of the most exquisite tulips she had ever seen. Two dozen of them at least, with elegantly striped petals in mauve, black and ochre.

With them was a fold of paper bearing a message tapped out, she suspected, on her own typewriter. It read simply, Tried to get red roses but the shop hadn’t any .