An exclusive extract from Wives and Lovers, the Great Read in the August issue of The Australian Women’s Weekly.
Wives and Lovers by Jane Elizabeth Varley is a thoughtful and entertaining exploration of contemporary marriage and family relationships, told through the lives of three sisters.
Orion, August, $29.95
Victoria Stratford considered that her husband’s fortieth birthday party was going as well as could be expected. The drawing room hummed with animated conversation, smokers had taken her gentle hint and drifted into the garden and she had so far managed to avoid prolonged conversation with any of her guests. However, the continued absence of her husband was increasingly irritating. She did not fear an accident – or worse: David could be relied upon to be late – only to burst in upon the room – and, with tales of awkward judges and London traffic, apologise for his absence in a way that suggested he was not terribly sorry at all but expected to be forgiven his lateness.
He would be forgiven, by the friends, family and neighbours who had gathered to celebrate his birthday but more especially to gaze upon his Wimbledon house, which after a year of renovations over three floors and thousands of pounds, was now theirs to occupy again. It was his house: although he had been married to Victoria for fifteen years, and they had two children, David was at heart a lawyer and had thus omitted to place the house in their joint names.
There was, moreover, as their guests were to be told in good time, another event to celebrate.
Victoria heard more people arriving. Her daily, Consuela, was stationed by the front door to take coats and point new arrivals in the direction of the drawing room. Six guests had arrived together and were bunched dangerously in the hallway beside two waitresses bearing trays of hot sausages coated with marmalade. Victoria had been unsure of this last concoction but Panda had assured her it would be a certain hit and guests after initial reservations seemed to bear this out.
In truth, Victoria found Panda rather intimidating, but she had been highly recommended by one of the mothers at school and she certainly looked the part – slightly porky, nudging forty, and always dressed in a man’s blue-and-white-striped shirt, navy pedal-pushers and those flat blue pumps with gilt chains across the front that Victoria thought they’d stopped making years ago. One of the last surviving Sloane Rangers still at large in the King’s Road, Panda had made it clear over the telephone that she normally only catered for central London parties but, as it was a quiet time, would on this occasion venture south of the river. Of course, at their first meeting, Panda had rumbled Victoria within seconds – guessed that she had never used caterers before, breezily substituted champagne for white wine and smiled patronisingly at Victoria’s enquiry about serviettes before assuring her that paper napkins would be provided.
But David had been insistent: influential people would be coming to this party, senior barristers, well-connected friends, and the neighbours. Neighbours from their side of the street – the Edwardian semi’s – but more especially from the double-fronted Victorian houses opposite, on bigger plots, with basements, four reception rooms and off-street parking. And the original bells for the servants. Houses that sold before the local agents had time to type up the details – ‘Generously proportioned family home, retaining many period features, in the heart of Wimbledon Village with easy access to the City, benefiting from a choice of excellent private schools.’ Houses lived in by sophisticated people who could not be served Victoria’s party food – toast triangles with smoked-salmon paté, mini vol-au-vents and Twiglets, cheese footballs, peanuts, or anything encased in flaky pastry.
Victoria caught sight of her sister and brother-in-law hovering in the hallway and sprang towards them, relieved to see their familiar faces in a sea of acquaintances.
‘Bottle of red.’ Tom pressed a plastic carrier-bag into her hand.
Cooking wine, no doubt. Victoria made a mental note to give it to Consuela tomorrow. But she was grateful that they had come, aware that Tom detested cocktail parties. ‘You really didn’t need to bring anything,’ she said. ‘And, before you ask, he’s not here yet.’
Tom raised his eyebrows but before he could respond Clara cut across him: ‘Don’t worry about us. You see to your proper guests.’ She spoke with her usual calm assurance. Clara, like Tom, would never have been described as a party animal, far preferring to spend her time researching some obscure point of law in a university library, so Victoria was surprised and touched to see that she had made a special effort with her appearance: she wore a black knitted dress, which was the closest Clara possessed to what other, smarter women would call a cocktail dress. It was not, however, a garment many women would consider wearing to an evening drinks party. Though Clara had donned black court shoes, the opaque black tights she wore with them, not to mention her heavy beaded jewellery and thick glasses, somehow served only to reinforce her dowdiness. Though younger than Victoria by four years, Clara might easily have been mistaken for the older of the two: she had no interest in the touches of make-up that would have accentuated her strong cheekbones, full lips and soft blue eyes, features which were further hidden by the thick auburn hair that fell heavily across her face and on to her shoulders.
Tom’s eyes were already on the miniature club sandwiches emerging from the kitchen. As family, Tom considered himself exempt from any dress code and had complained earlier to Clara that it was a Friday evening when those who really needed to work for a living could scarcely be expected to find time to change. His jeans and denim jacket were his trademark work clothes, an outfit he liked to believe rendered him less official, more approachable, to the poor and dispossessed of the South London housing estate to which he was assigned as the full-time social worker.
In the hallway Victoria made out the Boltons from next door and noted, without surprise, that they were empty-handed. Major Bolton was a stalwart of the Wimbledon branch of the Heritage in Architecture Association and had made a perfect nuisance of himself during the renovations with a stream of helpful suggestions as to period details. This had been all the more annoying because his own decaying house, stuffed with dowdy furniture and mouldy chintz, was all but held together with linoleum and purple-painted Anaglypta wallpaper. The Boltons had surged ahead and were now creating a bottle-neck at the drawing-room door, having stopped to gawp at the newly painted cornicing. Major Bolton was lecturing no one in particular: ‘Good show. Original nineteenth-century colour. Helped them track it down myself. Chap in Wales makes it, natural dyes…’
It was all original – or, at least, authentic and sympathetically restored in keeping with the period. They had had plenty of time to plan the work, ten years to be precise, the time it had taken them to recover from buying the house in the first place, which had been a nightmare on account of the bridging loan they’d been forced to take out when their Clapham flat stuck on the market. But David had been determined. In the late eighties they had despaired of ever affording a house, so they were damned well going to get one in the crash of the early nineties. The building society had wanted a quick sale, and David would give them one. Six weeks from viewing to moving in, and crossed fingers that the repossessed owners hadn’t pushed sardines down the radiators and turned up the heating before their enforced departure. They hadn’t. As Victoria subsequently found out from Mrs Bolton they had been a rather nice couple. He was a City trader; she stayed in touch with them and was really quite upset when the wife wrote six months later to say they were getting divorced.
Victoria could only imagine that he had once been paid stinking bonuses: she and David had moved into a scuffed version of a Las Vegas hotel suite, all spotlights and silk-effect wallpaper and marks on the carpet where white leather sofas had stood. The en-suite bathroom was floor-to-ceiling black marble, apart from one wall of smoked mirror and the bath itself, which was actually a Jacuzzi. The carpet was white and so deep you needed a special plastic rake thing to comb it out properly. It was all very modern, apart from the kitchen in hand-carved rustic oak. And it had been fun to live in with all sorts of gadgets to play with, like electric curtains and a TV console built into the headboard and sunken blue lights along the garden path.
David had tired of it first. After a couple of years, he had started getting the big cases and big money, and invitations to the houses of judges and QCs. Houses that shared a certain classic English style. He would return home discontented and frustrated and, if the house they had visited was particularly grand, ashamed. He no longer laughed when the doorbell played ‘Careless Whisper’. He wanted a house like the others had, with all the vocabulary that went with it. Sofas and pantries and lavatories and cellars and sash windows. Especially the sash windows. Oh, and he wanted a country house, too.
David wanted a country house as only a boy born in a council house could.
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