"Can't take risks." These days the biggest risk Gary took was stepping out of doors without his baseball cap. Didn't want the wind blowing that streak of hair off his scalp.
She told him once that the Walkman he used to listen to jazz was rubbing on his scalp, making him bald. Mean. He was sensitive about hair loss, but she was sick to the back teeth of hearing the tinny sound. He believed her for a while and took to wearing the headband under his chin, which made no difference to her frustration and just made him look more ridiculous than ever, with his silly spit of hair linking up to form an oval around his head, like a slipped halo.
There had been other boyfriends before Gary. She attracted them, knew how to perform the balancing act between sex and her reputation. She liked men, needed someone to share with. Yet by nature she was not a liberated woman. Oh, she was willing to have a career, make a contribution, but basically what she craved above everything was marriage and children. Chances had gone by. Men more attractive than Gary-men she had slept with-had found other partners and taken jobs in places she would have adored to live in, one in San Francisco and another Paris. Even Aberdeen, where her second lover ended up working for an oil company, would have been an improvement on Foxford, Wiltshire-or Wilts, as she thought of it.
No use moaning, she often told herself these days. Get on with life. The marriage was childless and barren of romance, so she put her energy into her part-time job, three days at the health centre as a receptionist; the garden, which she'd cultivated as a traditional cottage garden, with shrub roses, laburnum, foxgloves and herbs; and amateur dramatics, always a passion, plus her charity work and her support of the church. It was her Christian sense of duty that made divorce too awful to contemplate. True, she had erred and strayed in her youth, but she took the solemn vows of Holy Matrimony seriously. She had not been with another man since her wedding day.
Gary came in around eleven-thirty, after she had rewound Jack Nicholson and was watching some inane Saturday night programme aimed at the teenage audience. He wasn't a smoker, but some of his friends were and she could smell the cigarette fumes clinging to his clothes. He peeled a banana and flopped into a chair, the baseball cap still on. "How'd it go?"
"The fete, you mean?" she jogged his memory. He wouldn't recall how she was spending her day. "Top result. With weather like that, it couldn't miss. We were really busy on the cake stall."
"Did you bring one home?"
She shook her head. "It isn't the thing."
"What isn't?"
"For the people in charge to put cakes aside for their own use."
"Very high-minded. What happened to the ones you didn't sell?"
"Everything went. If you really want cake, I can cook one tomorrow."
"Don't bother. You'll be at church tomorrow."
"Not all day. There's time."
Gary shook his head. "So how did he shape up?"
"Who?"
"The new sky pilot."
"Have some respect, Gary. He's the rector. And he isn't all that new. He's been here since last year."
"A bit flash isn't he? Wears red socks."
"I hadn't noticed the socks," she said casually and untruthfully. "Who cares what colour his socks are if he does his job well? He stayed all afternoon."
Gary laughed. "He couldn't very well bog off, could he? What time did it end?"
"Five, or thereabouts." She chose not to speak of her invitation to the rectory afterwards. Instead she said, "He made a good speech to open the fete. He said the word 'fete' came from 'feast.' He'd found a parish magazine from the nineteen-thirties with a correction notice about a day of prayer and feasting in support of the Congo mission. It should have read prayer and fasting. He's always got a funny story."
Gary said without smiling, "Must be the way he tells them. What are they saying about the bishop, then?"
"The bishop?"
"Yours, isn't he? Glastonbury? It was on the local news tonight. Took a jump, didn't he?"
"The bishop?"
"They found him at the bottom of some quarry and his BMW at the top."
"Oh, that's awful! You're serious? Dead?"
"He made sure of that. The drop looked like Beachy Head. What made him do that, for Christ's sake?"
"I can't believe it. He confirmed me."
"P'raps he was on something. Thought he could fly with the angels."
Gary's tasteless humour left her cold. "Poor man."
They stared at the screen for a while, locked in their own thoughts. Rachel eventually suggested coffee.
"Don't bother." He reached for the remote control and turned down the sound, the unfailing sign that he wanted to say something momentous, however casual he tried to make it sound. "I was talking to the lads. I don't know who mentioned it. Gordon, maybe. There's a travel agent in Frome offering three weeks in New Orleans for nine hundred quid. That's everything. Flight, hotel."
"In America?"
"That's where New Orleans is."
"You're thinking of going?"
"It's the jazz capital of the world. Buddy Bolden, Jelly Roll Morton, King Oliver."
"And you'd like to go?" she pressed him. She would have preferred New York or San Francisco, but she would cheerfully settle for New Orleans, strolling the sunny streets in shorts, eating Cajun food in the French Quarter or on one of those Mississippi paddle boats. It would be the nearest thing to the world tour they had promised each other all those years ago. "When?"
"It has to be soon. The offer only lasts through September."
"I'm game," she said. "We can afford it, can't we?"
Looking uncomfortable, Gary ran his stubby fingers under the neck of the T-shirt and eased it off his skin. "It's a trip for the guys."
"What?"
"If I go, it's for the music."
She sat forward. "I'm not included? Is that what you're saying?"
"Nothing is fixed yet."
"I'm going to bed."
She left him in front of the screen, trying to look as if there was something of interest going on. Upstairs, in the privacy of the shower, she tasted her tears, and mouthed the word "bastard" repeatedly, hating him for his selfishness and herself for letting it get to her. Was this what twelve years of marriage added up to, putting up with life in this poxy village, living decently, staying faithful to a boring, unattractive nerd who ignored her except when he wanted "a ride," as he crudely called it? She felt a visceral rage at the humiliation, the discovery that she hadn't even entered his plans.