Philippa Gregory - Zelda’s Cut

‘I didn’t want to make a fuss.’

‘You should make a fuss,’ he corrected her. ‘They may be the publishers but you’re the author. Where do they get their living from, that’s what I’d like to know?’

‘They look after me very well,’ she said. She put his toast down before him and poured his tea. She wondered at the readiness of the lies that were sliding from her mouth.

‘I sat next to James Ware,’ she told Philip. ‘Of the Sunday Times .’

‘Did you tell him what I said about that last review of your book?’ Philip asked.

‘No,’ she said. ‘We talked about Spender.’

‘Fat lot he’d know,’ Philip said crossly, and opened the newspaper. ‘You should have told him what I said. If I’d been there I’d have made sure that he knew he had completely the wrong end of the stick.’

She hesitated. ‘What are you going to do today?’

He looked around the paper. ‘Nothing,’ he said. ‘My exercises, the crossword, lunch, walk, tea. What are you doing today? Writing?’

Isobel looked at her navy calf-length skirt with mild dissatisfaction. ‘I thought I might go to Tonbridge and look at some clothes. I’m so bored of all my clothes.’

‘Why bother?’ he asked. ‘You hardly go anywhere. What d’you want a smart dress for?’

‘I don’t know,’ she said wearily. ‘I just thought in London yesterday that the cream shift is awfully – ordinary.’

He smiled his charming smile at her. ‘We’re ordinary people,’ he said. ‘That’s our strength. We don’t need the gloss. We have genuine substance.’

‘I suppose one could have both,’ she said. ‘Gloss on the outside and substance underneath. We don’t have to be wholly solid and worthy and always wearing flat shoes.’

Philip looked puzzled at her disagreement. ‘Of course you can’t have both,’ he said. ‘You’re either a trivial person or a deep one. You either care about the things that matter or you run continually after fashion. We know who we are. How we appear doesn’t matter.’

‘Yes,’ she said reluctantly. ‘Yes, I suppose so.’

‘So no point wasting your time and our money on shopping.’

‘No,’ Isobel conceded. ‘I’d better get to work.’

She closed the study door behind her and pulled out her chair. She switched on the computer and watched the screen come to life. She thought that she had been doing these actions, like a line worker in a factory, every morning at this time for the last six years. It seemed very odd to her that this was perhaps the first morning ever that she had resented it.

It had been the conversation at breakfast. Philip’s certainty in her seriousness, in her moral values, should have been a matter of joy to her. That her husband thought well of her should please any woman. But because she was held so high in his esteem she was never given new clothes. Because he admired her intellect and her seriousness, she was never given treats. He discouraged her from taking an interest in fashion, or from changing her appearance in any way. Isobel had worn flat shoes, calf-length skirts and her hair tied back at their first meeting when she had been a scholarly postgraduate; and nothing had ever changed. Isobel thought that she was fifty-two and she had not known till yesterday that she had a beautiful neck. Perhaps fifty-two was rather late to discover such an asset. Who would admire it, other than well-trained shop assistants selling earrings? Who would notice if she had her ears pierced? Who would run a finger from ear lobe to collarbone? Would anyone ever sweep up her hair and kiss the nape of her neck and graze the skin with his teeth?

Isobel clicked on the file marked ‘Letters to the Bank’ and put the vision of a man caressing her neck out of her mind. She had made a commitment to Philip and a promise to herself, never to look back, never to wonder how their marriage might have been if he had not been ill. She believed that she should be grateful only that he had lived. That was the most important thing. Shopping, and a man with a liking for long necks, and vanity were supremely irrelevant. She opened chapter one and started to format and print it.

Isobel carried the first ten chapters of her novel into the village post office and put it on the scales. It weighed as much as a complete manuscript of one of her usual books. She paid for it to be sent recorded delivery to Troy’s office, and then stepped back from the counter. Isobel normally never ate sweets of any kind. She had been forbidden them as a child, except for one chocolate egg at Easter, and had never acquired the taste. But she felt that the posting of the first instalment of the Zelda Vere novel deserved some reward. And she was certain that Zelda Vere ate chocolate.

She looked at the confectionery counter. There were few things she remembered from her childhood. Then she saw a large box of chocolate brazils. She smiled. Of course Zelda Vere would eat chocolate brazils, probably while drinking crème de menthe. ‘I’ll have them,’ she said, pointing.

‘For a present?’ the woman asked, reaching for the large box.

‘Yes,’ Isobel said.

‘Lucky lady,’ the woman said.

‘Yes,’ Isobel agreed. ‘She is terribly lucky.’

She parked on the side of the road on the way back to her house and ate a dozen of them, one after another, with intense relish, filling her mouth with the sharp taste and then savouring the warm nuttiness of the centre. When she had eaten so many that she felt slightly, guiltily queasy, she hid the rest of the box under a scarf on the back seat. She was just about to start the car when she remembered Troy’s warning that the compartments between Isobel Latimer and Zelda Vere must be watertight. She must be like a spy. Reluctantly she got from the car and looked at the land falling away from the road – a patchwork of fields intersected by half-hidden lanes, a farmhouse down to her left, her own house hidden by the fold of the hill. With a powerful overarm throw she flung the box high into the air. It went up in a grand arc into the blue sky and then turned over in the air and scattered chocolate brazils like a rain storm of incredible richness. Isobel clapped her hands together in delight and watched the expensive chocolates tumble recklessly down on Kent.

‘That was pure Zelda Vere,’ she whispered to herself and wiped the chocolate from her lips, pulled up the sagging waistband of her navy skirt, got back into the car and drove home.

‘Did you get some whisky?’ Philip asked her. ‘We’re nearly out.’

‘Didn’t you put it on the list for Mrs M? It’s her day to shop tomorrow.’

‘I don’t like her buying my whisky,’ Philip complained.

‘I don’t see why not.’

They were at lunch together. Isobel, a little sick from too many chocolate brazils, was eating very little. Philip had a green salad before him and a slice of cheese on toast.

‘Doesn’t seem right,’ he said.

Isobel raised her eyebrows. She knew that she was being unusually impatient with Philip. Something of the spirit of Zelda Vere had entered her with the chocolate brazils.

‘Well, I wasn’t planning to go down to the village again,’ she said shortly. ‘I want to work this afternoon.’

‘I suppose I’ll have to go then,’ he said. There was a pause while he waited for her to say that she would drive down rather than make him go. Isobel said nothing.

‘I could walk down and you could pick me up,’ he said. ‘It could be my afternoon walk.’

Isobel hesitated for only one moment and then she experienced the familiar rush of guilt at the thought that she was being selfish and ungracious to Philip. ‘Of course,’ she said. ‘Shall I pick you up from the pub at two thirty?’