CATHY WILLIAMS - A Reluctant Wife

She had hated the false gaiety of everyone she met, the constant surreptitious competition with the other women, the lack of personal time it afforded her with her husband. It had been a subject of incessant, corrosive argument. Now the thought of dipping her toes into that again filled her with dread.

‘Besides,’ she said defensively, when her friend continued to stare at her in silence, ‘I have a social life. Of sorts.’

‘You occasionally see a mum from Jade’s school for lunch.’

‘Sometimes for supper,’ Sophie protested, knowing that she was on weak ground because to escalate her social life into anything resembling what a woman of her age should be doing would have necessitated more than simply an exaggeration of the truth.

‘Oh, well, I’m surprised you can contain your excitement at it all.’

‘That’s not fair.’

‘You never go to London. When was the last time you met your group of friends from there?’

‘A few months ago,’ Sophie admitted, stabbing the remainder of her rice with her fork.

‘You used to invite them down for weekends now and again. Well, that certainly went out the window.’

‘It’s hard, doing stuff like that. I’m a mother. What am I supposed to do with Jade?’

‘Get someone to babysit?’

‘Who? Oh, all right. I know there are people willing to babysit, but—’

‘But nothing. Are you busy on the night of the thirtieth of November?’

‘I don’t believe I am,’ Sophie said.

‘Then I’ll expect you to come. I mean, have a heart, Soph. Who am I supposed to chat to for an entire evening at Annabel Simpson’s house? You know the place will be heaving with all her smart London set and her parents’ smart country set. I’ll be like a fish out of water.’

‘Oh, please!’ Sophie said, laughing. ‘You are never like a fish out of water. You can talk to anyone about anything, even if you know absolutely nothing about the subject in question. Why do you think you’re so good at selling houses? You can persuade someone with five homes that they’re in dire need of another.’

‘So, you’re coming, then?’

‘What exactly is it in aid of?’ Sophie asked, as they rose to clear the table, deciding as she eyed the counter buckling under the weight of unwashed dishes that she would do the lot in the morning.

‘Usual pre-Christmas bash,’ Kat said airily. ‘An opportunity for Annabel and her friends to bedeck themselves in splendid designer clothes and show the rest of us country bumpkins just how drab we all are.’

‘Oh, well, that really sounds like the sort of fun social occasion I should be cutting my teeth on.’

‘The one last year wasn’t too bad,’ Kat conceded, making them both a cup of coffee then searching through the cupboard until she located a bar of chocolate. ‘There was limitless champagne. I drank enough to see me through the next twelve months.’ She bit into her chocolate and looked at her friend thoughtfully. ‘Also, I think it’s a sort of party to welcome the new boy in town.’

‘New boy?’

‘The divine Gregory Wallace. You remember him. He was the one who showed you around his house.’

Sophie blushed and wished that Kat would stop staring at her in a suggestive, raised-eyebrows, there’s-a-story-here kind of way.

‘Which is one reason for me to avoid any party at all costs.’

‘Oh, yes? Mind explaining to me?’

Actually, Sophie found that she did mind as she couldn’t quite explain it to herself. ‘I just don’t like him,’ she said nonchalantly. ‘He rubs me up the wrong way. He’s too much like Alan.’

‘He’s nothing like Alan. OK, I’ll admit that they have the money thing in common, but that’s where the similarity ends. Alan, if you don’t mind me speaking ill of your ex, was in love with himself. He thought that he was the sun and everyone else just revolved around him. He also had no time for anyone who didn’t pander to his ego, make him look good or could do something for him.’

‘And Gregory Wallace is different?’ Sophie asked, bitterly aware that the criticism, uncannily accurate, still managed to reflect badly on her.

‘You could come and find out. Besides…’ Katherine afforded her friend a long, speculative look ‘…he might just get the wrong impression, you know.’

‘Meaning?’

‘Well, you know the saying that the lady doth protest too much. He might just think that he has the opposite effect on you if you’re anything but indifferent.’

Which, Sophie thought later as she got ready for bed, had been below the belt. How could she argue when Kat might have a point? The last thing she needed to complicate her life was to have Gregory Wallace thinking that he had any effect on her, and he was too good-looking to think otherwise.

Which was why, on the evening of the thirtieth of November, she found herself in her bedroom, staring disconsolately at the few dresses in her possession which she had kept from Alan’s days. Most she had got rid of soon after they’d parted company when she’d still been fired with bitterness and rage. Then motherhood had taken over and what remained she had simply stuck in a box in the attic, meaning to send them to a similar fate, only to forget them over the course of the years.

Jade was lying on her bed, fetchingly dressed in a long, cream antique nightie which Sophie had rescued from one of her charity sales months previously, and eyeing each creation her mother tried on with a jaundiced eye.

She pointed to a black affair with a plunging neckline, which was small enough to fit into a powder compact, and Sophie shook her head and mouthed, ‘Too tiny.’ She made a face and laughed with her daughter.

‘What about this one?’ she said slowly and clearly, holding up a long, green dress which she remembered as being one of the least provocative ones she had been coerced into buying years ago.

‘Yuck. Dull,’ Jade wrote on a piece of paper. ‘Put on the green one,’ she wrote, signing the message, ‘I love you, Mummy.’ This was followed by a series of kisses and hearts, at which point she appeared to get carried away with the symbols and began to draw lots of smiley hearts floating across the A4 paper.

If Jade thinks it’s dull, Sophie decided, that’s good enough to me. At least, she thought, it doesn’t smell of hibernation in a box. She had had the lot dry-cleaned. Annabel and the rest of her cronies thought she was weird as it was, without adding an odour problem to the list.

She slipped on the dress, without looking at herself in the full-length mirror, and sat at the dressing-table, wondering what to do with her hair. Jade sidled up to her and Sophie recognised that glint in her eye. It was called Operation Hairdresser, one of her least favourite games, but she obediently sat still while her daughter combed her hair with a wide-toothed comb and tried not to grimace too much when tiny fingers intervened to get rid of knots. She should have had the lot chopped off a long time ago, but somehow she had never been able to bring herself to do it.

After fifteen minutes she gave her daughter the thumbs-up sign, even though there was virtually no difference between how her hair looked now and how it had looked previously—still a mass of unruly, undisciplined curls.

Then she applied make-up, something she wore so rarely that she was amazed that her small collection had not gone past its sell-by date.

She brushed on a little powder, dusted with blusher, reluctantly applied mascara and then lipstick. When she sat back and inspected herself she had to admit that she looked good, even though she felt like the Mrs Sophie Breakwell of a few years ago, hanging on the arm of the man who had been the catch of his social circle—someone whose looks had been prized far more highly than her intelligence had been.