Jilly Cooper - Harriet

Cory lit a cigar. ‘Not unduly.’

‘It was the first time I’d been to bed with anyone. It was like stumbling into Paradise.’ She looked at her hands. ‘I thought it would last for ever. Then one morning we were drinking coffee and he suddenly announced I’d have to move out as his regular girlfriend was coming back that day. I was so stunned, when I found I was pregnant, it seemed unimportant compared with losing Simon. The reason I kept William really was because he was the only thing of Simon’s I had.’

She looked at Cory with huge, troubled, slate-grey eyes.

He smiled. ‘Do you think Jonah’s happy at school?’

She was intensely grateful that he realized she didn’t want to talk about herself any more.

Life became much easier for Harriet after Cory Erskine arrived. It was having a man to make decisions, to shoulder responsibilities, to shut up the children when they became too obstreperous and, most of all, to talk to.

Cory was, in fact, not easy to live with — aloof, peremptory, exacting, often extremely bad-tempered. But in a good mood, Harriet found him lovely company, amusing, never pulling intellectual rank on her, an inspired listener. Yet as weeks passed, she didn’t feel she knew him any better.

He was very unpredictable. Some days he would bombard her with questions, what did she feel about this, how would she react to that. On other days he was so abstracted she might not have been there, or he would suddenly get bored with a conversation and walk out leaving her mouthing like a goldfish in mid-sentence.

He also kept the most erratic hours, working most of the night. Often when she got up because William was crying she would hear the faint clack of the typewriter against the gramophone pouring out Verdi or Wagner. Then he would appear at breakfast looking terrible, read the paper, drink several cups of impossibly strong black coffee, and go out and ride across the moors for a couple of hours.

After that he generally snatched a few hours’ sleep on the sofa in his study (Harriet had a feeling he couldn’t bear sleeping alone in the huge mausoleum of a double bed), and emerged at teatime absolutely ravenous, and often as not wolf all the sandwiches Harriet had made for the children’s tea.

He was also drinking too much. Every day Mrs Bottomley, her mouth disappearing with disapproval, would come out of his room with an empty whisky bottle.

He was obviously miserably unhappy. The drinking to drive out the despair would plunge him next day into black depression, which made him irritable and arbitrary. While he was working he hated interruptions. The children had to be kept out of his way. The telephone rang all the time for him, and he went spare if Harriet didn’t catch it on the third or fourth ring. Always she had to make the same excuse: ‘I’m afraid Mr Erskine’s working. If you leave your number I’ll ask him to ring you back,’ which he so seldom did that Harriet was on the end of a lot of abuse from people — mostly women — who rang a second and third time and were convinced Harriet hadn’t passed on the message. He also made notes, as thoughts struck him, on bits of paper and telephone directories all over the house; and after the day, when she had to go through four dustbins to find the magazine Cory had scribbled a few lines of script on the back of, she learnt not to throw anything away again without asking him.

One afternoon in early March, however, Cory was sitting in the kitchen eating raisins absent-mindedly out of a packet and reading one of Jonah’s comics. William sat propped up on a red rug spread out on the flagstone floor, beating a saucepan aimlessly with a wooden spoon, gurgling happily and gazing at the gleaming copper pans that hung from the walls. Harriet, who’d that morning read an article in a magazine about the dangers of an all-tinned-food diet for babies, was rather dispiritedly sieving cabbage and carrots, when the telephone rang. Glad of any diversion, Harriet crossed the room to answer it, but it stopped on the third ring, then just as she got back to her carrots, it started again, rang three times and stopped. Then it started again and this time kept on ringing:

Sighing, Harriet put down the sieve again.

‘Don’t answer it,’ snapped Cory. He had gone very pale. ‘It’s only someone playing silly games.’

Then it stopped, then started the three rings stop, three rings stop formula again. Then kept on ringing for about three minutes. Harriet noticed the way his hands gripped that comic.

‘I’m going out,’ said Cory. ‘And don’t answer the telephone.’

Next minute she heard the front door slam.

The ringing kept on. It must be the secret code of someone he doesn’t want to talk to, thought Harriet. It was getting on her nerves. She’d run out of bread, so she decided to walk William in his pram down to the village and get some. She enjoyed shopping; she was beginning to know all the shop people who made a tremendous fuss of William.

It was a cold, cheerless day. The only colour came from the rusty bracken and even that lay flattened by the recent snow. The village was deserted except for a few scuttling, purple-faced women in head-scarves. Harriet came out of the bakers, warming her hands on a hot french loaf, and went into the supermarket opposite. She immediately noticed one customer, a girl with bright orange curls, wearing an emerald green coat with a mock fur collar and cuffs, stiletto-heeled green boots, and huge dark glasses. Taking tins down from the shelves she was attempting to lob them into the wire basket she had placed in the middle of the floor.

‘Loves me,’ she muttered as a tin of lemon meringue pie filling reached its destination safely, ‘Loves me not,’ as she missed with a bag of lentils, ‘Loves me not, oh hell,’ she added as she also missed with a tin of dog food. A child with very dissipated blue eyes, and a pudding basin haircut was systematically filling the pockets of his waisted blue coat with packets of fruit gums. The shopkeeper, who was trying to find a packet of washing-up-machine powder for another customer, was looking extremely disapproving.

The girl in dark glasses looked up and peered at Harriet.

‘Hullo!’ she said to Harriet, ‘You must be Cory Erskine’s nanny. I’m Sammy Sutcliffe; I look after Elizabeth Pemberton’s kids across the valley; they’re more or less the same age as Chattie and Jonah; we ought to get them together.’

‘Oh that would be lovely,’ said Harriet, suddenly craving companionship her own age.

‘We’ve been skiing, or I’d have come over before,’ said the girl.

‘You look terribly brown,’ said Harriet.

‘Yes,’ said the girl, ‘but it only goes down to my collar bones. Stripped off, I look like a toffee apple.’

She giggled and took off her glasses to show large, rather bloodshot, green eyes framed by heavily blacked lashes.

‘They’re to hide my hangover, not to keep out the sun,’ she said. ‘You never see the sun in this backwater.’

She put the lentils, which were spilling out of their packet, back on the shelf, took another packet and moved towards the cash desk.

‘And put those sweets back, you little monster,’ she screeched at the small boy, who was busy now appropriating tubes of Smarties. ‘You’ve got the morals of an alley cat. He’s a little bugger our Georgie,’ she added to Harriet. ‘Just like his Dad, except his Dad pinches bottoms rather than sweets.’

Outside she admired William.

‘What a little duck,’ she said. ‘You must be knackered looking after three of them. Why don’t you bring Chattie and William over to tea tomorrow and I’ll fill you in on all the local scandal?’

‘Gosh, thanks awfully,’ said Harriet.