Muddy Waters Read online

  About the Book

  Stella works as an agony aunt for a teenage magazine. She lives on Pansy Island, a self-consciously arty community on the Thames, where her husband Adrian writes erotic novels in a summerhouse by the river, while her two teenage children prepare themselves for adult life in various ways not necessarily recommended in the pages of their mother’s advice columns. Stella’s friends assume that she has no problems of her own, and shamelessly come to her for the advice she dishes up for a living on the magazine; Stella, however, finds herself with a problem she cannot handle when Abigail, her rich and glamorous friend from university, comes to stay. Abigail has been deserted by her husband, and has decided that Stella’s life, and more particularly Stella’s husband (with whom she once had a fling in their younger days) will fill the gap nicely.

  Contents

  Cover

  About the Book

  Title page

  Dedication

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  About the Author

  Also by Judy Astley

  Copyright

  MUDDY WATERS

  Judy Astley

  Although the location and characters in this book

  are entirely fictional, I can’t deny being locally

  inspired. This therefore comes with sympathy

  and good wishes to all those artists who lost

  their studios and workshops in the Eel Pie

  Island fire of November 1996.

  Chapter One

  ‘Martin has taken a tart to New York!’

  Stella, holding the phone containing Abigail’s shrill anger a little away from her ear immediately pictured a peach flan, neatly parcelled in one of Maison Blanc’s pink and white patisserie boxes. She imagined Martin, tall, dark and thoughtful, hesitating before allowing the pretty package to be passed through the X-ray machine at the airport, afraid that it might later irradiate those who were to eat it. In her mind he was swinging it gently and indecisively from its silver ribbon bow, while co-travellers (the female ones anyway) wondered why so attractive a man should look so concerned. Her attention meandered back to Abigail, who could, she thought, at least have started the call with ‘Hello Stella, how are you?’ after what must have been at least a year (not counting the gilded-Virgin Christmas card) without communication.

  ‘Stella, are you still there?’ Stella looked at the phone as if expecting Abigail’s skinny body to follow her sharp voice out of it. The Archers theme music, drifting through from the kitchen, sounded quite gently soothing by comparison.

  ‘The tart’s got yellow hair,’ Abigail hissed.

  Stella’s sympathy was at last hooked and landed. ‘Oh goodness, poor you. How completely dreadful.’ She sat down on the window seat and prepared to give Abigail her full attention.

  ‘I don’t care what they say about blondes having more fun, she won’t be having much of it with him, I can tell you,’ Abigail told her. ‘He’s forgotten what it is. At least I thought he had,’ Abigail continued, and Stella heard her pause for a deep intake of breath and a Rothman’s kingsize.

  ‘Is it serious? Permanent? Do the children know?’ Stella wondered if somewhere in a guidebook to modern etiquette there was a list of all the correct things she should be saying. She might be making things worse for all she knew. She could hear Abigail sniffing, which might mean tears, but it wasn’t far off summer and she did get hay fever, Stella remembered.

  ‘I don’t know.’ Abigail’s voice sounded smaller, as if having psyched herself up to say the big thing, she’d now run out of energy. It must have taken a lot to admit she’d been left. Stella couldn’t remember any of Abigail’s previous men doing the leaving, that had always been her role. She’d always fancied herself as something of a bolter, like Fanny’s mother in The Pursuit of Love. After her own mother had met Abigail, Stella remembered her saying, with wary admiration, ‘She’s a heartbreaker, that one,’ as if it was some sort of dubious talent like being able to do the splits or hail cabs by whistling. Stella remembered at the time feeling quite grumpily envious that such a disreputable description was unlikely ever to be applied to her. ‘Responsible’ and ‘conscientious’ had been the most used words on all her school reports. ‘Flighty’ might have been fun occasionally, ‘temperamental’ even better, but only to be dreamed of.

  ‘He hasn’t taken much with him, just the usual business trip clothes and this slut called Fiona. You wouldn’t think a “Fiona” would do a thing like this, would you? It’s such a good-girl name. Though of course being blond . . . Oh Stella, could I come and stay for a little while? Please? Just till I know what’s going on? It’s so awful here all alone . . .’

  Stella had said yes because that was what you said to your oldest friends when they asked you for help. You didn’t stop to think about whether it was a good time to have a visitor to entertain, or how the rest of the family might feel. ‘That’s how they get to be your oldest friends,’ she told her reflection in the driftwood mirror as she paused by the kitchen door on her way out to break the news to Adrian, working down in the summerhouse at the end of the garden. She hoped he’d be pleased. At college the three of them had been such close friends – she and Adrian the settled cosy couple while Abigail’s boyfriends came and went from her room next door to Stella’s and, Abigail liked to half-boast, were changed almost as often as her knickers. Back in those days, if life could have been compared to a box of chocolates, sex definitely resembled After Eights, with everyone secretly getting through as much as they thought they could get away with and later pretending it wasn’t them. Sex didn’t come, in those days, with government health warnings and the threat of a grizzly death. Stella, who had only enjoyed rampant promiscuity vicariously through the giggled-over Adventures of Abigail, nevertheless felt quite sad that her own teenage children, bombarded with warnings about everything from sexually dreadful diseases to the dangers that might lurk in eggs, beef, tap water and sunshine, didn’t even have the option of wild and perilous living.

  Stella had met Abigail on the first day of their first college term twenty-five or so years previously. They’d been a pair of awkward new girls, eighteen years old and trying to look nonchalant, waiting to be shown to their rooms in the once grand, but now gently decaying, Queen Anne premises by a volunteer band of mostly male second-year students. Other new students were accompanied by parents who wouldn’t leave until they’d made sure their first-time-away-from-home babes had somewhere suitable to settle, somewhere they could picture them cosily making coffee, making friends. Abigail and Stella stood aloof and together linked by their sophisticated independence, scorning the embarrassingly fussing mothers and the tetchy fathers who looked at their watches.

  ‘Bit bloody far from town,’ Abigail had grumbled half under her breath, eying with hostility the once grand building’s crumbling portico and peeling paint, and cursing the former protectors of young ladies’ virtue for siting teacher training establishments just that bit too far from urban temptations.

  The second years eyed the newcomers and took their time, loitering with cigarettes and insider gossip. Abigail had tapped her long slim foot and made complaining, what’s-keeping-them faces at Stella. Then the two of them were joined by a third lone girl on whom the boys suddenly swooped like ravens on a carcass, bearing away girl and baggage with over-eager speed, leaving both Stella and Abigail open-mouthed and outraged.

  ‘Are we so truly repulsive or something?’ Abigail had asked the empty air.

  ‘She’s tall and gorgeous and blond,’ Stella, small, and roundish had pointed out.

  ‘I’m tall!’ Abigail had fumed, leaving the ‘and gorgeous’ unsaid but implied and undeniable.

  ‘That leaves the blond then. It’s just because she’s blond, that’s all. That’s all men see,’ Stella said. She’d looked at Abigail whose shaggy-layered hair was a deep rich red, about the colour of a wet fox, she’d have guessed. Her own was conker-brown, shiny, short and straight and cut, as it still was, in a childlike bob.

  ‘Idiot men fall over themselves for any old dog with yellow hair. They get everything. I hate them,’ Abigail had stated with considerable venom. She meant blondes, not men. It had quickly become clear that she didn’t hate men.

  As she thought about what to tell Adrian, Stella noticed that her own hair was looking quite a lot lighter these days. It would never be a youthful, man-snaring yellow of course, not now, but it seemed to be well on its way from its original deep chestnut to an almost golden walnut. Most of this was thanks to Wayne the hairdresser who, just lately, had been tactfully highlighting with ever-paler streaks.

  Becoming more or less blond herself one day, she realized, was not now completely out of the question. Unfortunately I’ll be far too old to get the benefit by then, she decided gloomily, not to mention all those women like me and Abigail who would distrust me on sight.

  Adrian, in the octagonal summerhouse built onto the riverbank wall, was putting the finishing touches to his day’s writing. He closed down the computer with enormous care, murmuring the small procedures out loud just to make sure he’d done them all. He barely trusted either himself or the computer to remember its password from one day to the next. Then he went outside, double-locking the door on the chaos of paper and reference books and abandoned crosswords. The computer was stuffed full of the highly erotic fiction that earned him a comfortable, though uneasy living. Sometimes when he’d written a particularly carnal passage, he wondered why the computer didn’t explode, or why a message of indignant moral protest didn’t appear on its screen, as if he had his Methodist grandmother reading over his shoulder. The password and the double-locking were left over from when Ruth and Toby were young and inquisitive – now they’d probably not give his works a second glance, on the basis that, when it came to sex, what could an idiot parent possibly know? From what he remembered about being a teenager, they could get sexually frantic from just the thought of a word like ‘nipple’. They didn’t need whole novels full of titillation. Still, something that resembled a wary conscience kept Adrian securely locking the door as if the lustful shameless writings had a nightlife of their own like the undead in a horror movie. He couldn’t help feeling the words just might slither out under the door and spread themselves into the sleeping psyches of the other Pansy Island residents, giving them dreams of unspeakable pornography that would haunt their horrified days and send them scurrying to counsellors and therapists. He could imagine Willow, the aging hippy, wondering which aromatherapy oil would be best for soothing away unbidden thoughts of dissipation and sweet young Charlotte, who painted naive street scenes, wondering why she felt a sudden urge to splash her canvases with lurid genital close-ups.

  He put the keys in his pocket and sniffed at the air, identifying a roasting chicken wafting down the garden. From the path beyond the hedge he could hear the chatter of eager would-be artists on their way to Bernard’s evening life-drawing class at the boathouse gallery. He’d always wondered why, when Bernard himself (quasi-famous artist-in-residence) specialized in nudes of teenage girls, he always gave his pupils a gnarled and shivering pensioner to paint. Probably something to do with light and texture, Adrian supposed charitably. Down below him on the river, a family of mallards had drifted across to the island from the opposite bank and was squawking urgently round old Peggy’s houseboat, expecting to be fed that day’s food scraps. I wonder if they have a sense of smell, he thought, closing his eyes and breathing in, along with the chicken from his own kitchen, the tempting aroma of Peggy’s sausage and beans supper wafting up the barge chimney.

  He looks like a badly groomed old gundog, scenting at the air like that, Stella thought affectionately, hesitating by the clump of agapanthus to see if they were intending to send up more than three flower stems that summer. Looking down the garden from the top of the terrace steps she watched him stretch his long limbs and yawn hard as if he’d just reluctantly climbed out of bed rather than finished a day’s work. It crossed her mind that perhaps he had actually been sleeping, down there overlooking the river, in his big, cream leather all-ergonomic, pretend-executive chair, snug as a business-class passenger on a corporate freebie. No one would know, at least not until his royalty cheques stopped coming. Adrian liked to be left well alone when he was writing, so interrupting him had become, over the years, a matter of weighing up the urgency. Wandering in to ask whether he’d like plaice or halibut for supper wasn’t really on, though Toby had found he was always welcome with the latest cricket scores.

  ‘Adrian, supper’s just about ready,’ Stella called down to him. He stopped in mid-stretch and smiled up the garden at her.

  ‘I’m starving!’ he shouted back, rolling his shoulders to free the tension from them and ambling up to join her. ‘I ran out of biscuits.’

  ‘Oh, that’s tragic!’ she laughed. ‘There’re plenty in the house; you only have to come in and find them. Anyway, guess what, Abigail phoned. She needs to come and stay, so I said yes. You don’t mind do you?’ She said this with the kind of voice that expected an acquiescent response, but to make sure followed up with, ‘It’ll be nice to see her again, won’t it? It’s been ages.’ She didn’t want to watch Adrian’s face, just in case it registered ‘Oh God, not her’, so she bent to examine the agapanthus more closely. The innermost leaves, deep in the plant waiting to be pushed up, bulged promisingly. There would be clouds of fat blue flower heads in August then, she thought with satisfaction, trying to recall where she’d read some know-it-all expert claiming with years of unobservant authority that they wouldn’t grow anywhere north of Dorset.

  Adrian, when she looked at him, was frowning thoughtfully. ‘We haven’t heard from Abigail in ages. Why does she need to come and stay? More man problems, I expect. I suppose she was bound to ask you to sort her out, occupational hazard. Got a problem? Ring up your friendly local Agony Aunt. Mind you, Abigail’s never been known to admit to “needs”. She’s always been more inclined to have “wants”,’ he chuckled rather spitefully, adding, ‘perhaps it’s her age.’

  ‘Hey, careful, she’s the same age as me!’

  ‘Yes, but . . .’

  Stella laughed and prodded him none too gently in the ribs and marched on ahead of him into the house. ‘Yes, but . . .’ hung around, buzzing like a lazy wasp in her head. He obviously saw them as completely contrasting women – Abigail wild and sexy and still with a glamorously chaotic life, herself as tame and domestic and safe. A sleek predatory panther next to a plump, dozy pussycat. She would like to be thought of, just now and then, as being just as capable of unreliable and tumultuous passions as Abigail. She didn’t yet feel too old for all that, not too old to surprise him. It was only when she looked in unexpected mirrors and saw someone undeniably not twenty-five that she felt reminded of the creeping years, and confusion as to what they were supposed to imply. Middle age was such a peculiar thing. Often she felt she just didn’t fit the time properly – in terms of, say, footwear, she thought, as she went up the steps to the door, she felt too old for Doc Martens, and far too young for the Doc Scholls, but could rarely find anything really comfortable and stylish in between.

  In the steamy kitchen she lifted the chicken out of the oven and vaguely wondered if the children would remember to come in and eat it. Adrian was opening a bottle of wine very slowly and distractedly, looking out of the window and not concentrating. Bits of the foil from round the cork were shredded on to the table as if peeled off nervously by someone waiting to see a dentist.

  ‘Sorry,’ Stella told him, ‘maybe I should have said something to you before I said yes to Abigail. I should at least have put a time limit on it, said something like, “OK, come for the weekend.”’

  ‘God, you mean you didn’t?’ Adrian looked quite comically terrified and she felt like giggling at him.

  ‘No of course not! I mean, you don’t, do you, not when you’re caught up in the moment. Perhaps you think I should have been even more coolly businesslike, saying, “I’ll look in my diary and call you back.”’ Adrian grinned reluctantly, an admission that that was exactly how he’d have liked her to be. But that wouldn’t have ‘helped’, Stella thought to herself. Where Abigail was concerned, in spite of her giving the impression of being invincible, somehow Stella had acquired a long, long habit of being helpful.

  Stella assembled the vegetables and listened for signs of Toby and Ruth homing in for supper. She relied on them being like the ducks around Peggy’s houseboat, drawn to meals by instinct and an acute sense of smell, too teenage-flaky to think about using a watch. Just as she was pouring port into the roasting tin she heard the distant creaking of the handle on the ferry raft that linked, by means of its platform of old wooden planks and a rusty chain, the island with the river’s east bank. Well, someone’s coming over anyway, she registered, listening hard to calculate whether the handle was being turned fast and furiously by starving youth or slowly and laboriously by some tired, work-worn resident.

  ‘I could smell roasting chicken all the way from the garage,’ Toby said, bringing in with him a less tantalizing whiff of engine oil and old car. ‘Funny how I could tell it was yours and not, say, the MacIver’s or Peggy’s.’ He slumped heavily but elegantly into the nearest chair, as if the effort of making his way a couple of hundred yards from the garage on the shore, across the ferry and along the path was all slightly too much for him. Stella wondered if that could be put down to his age too. ‘Outgrowing his strength,’ her mother had sniffed on her last foray from Yorkshire, unable to approve of her good-looking grandson beanpoling so fast past the six-foot mark and reminding her that great-grandmotherhood was not now out of the question. ‘Catch the MacIvers using all that tarragon. They’d think it was horribly smelly and foreign! Anyway, on Thursdays they have what Ellen MacIver calls “high tea” or rather “hay tea” as she pronounces it, so they can go and sit at Bernard’s feet and pick up artistic tips.’