A Regimental Affair (2 page)

‘So?’ said both the others in unison.

‘I’ve heard she’s a bit of a control freak.’

‘In what way?’ said Debbie.

‘She doesn’t drink, for a start.’

Debbie and Josie exchanged significant glances. An army wife who didn’t drink! Was there such a thing? Certainly no one
they
knew was teetotal. Maybe they knew a few who stopped indulging when pregnant. Quite a number didn’t mind staying stone-cold sober to drive their husband home from mess functions, but not to drink –
ever
?

‘Anything else?’ asked Josie.

‘I don’t know if it’s true, but ages ago I heard she keeps a note of every dinner party she’s ever had, who attended and what the guests ate.’

‘You’re kidding,’ said Debbie, with a shriek of disbelief.

‘I said I didn’t know if it’s true. I’m just repeating what I heard.’

‘Scary though.’

The three women exchanged more significant glances.

‘Oh God. You don’t think she’s the sort to think any wife who doesn’t have a full-time job has to be involved in good works?’

Josie and Louise groaned. They thought Debbie was more than likely right and, as none of them had gone back to work since they had had their first children, they knew they were all equally vulnerable. They could see stints of duty on regimental committees beckoning.

Alice was busy directing the removal men when the doorbell rang. She hurried happily down the wide, shallow stairs, taking pleasure from the feel of the polished, curved banister rail under her hand. She had always longed to live in a house with such a staircase and now she did.
Bliss
. She ducked slightly as she got halfway down to see who was standing on the doorstep of the open door.

‘Sarah!’ She ran down the last few stairs and proffered her cheek for her visitor to kiss. Alice’s and Sarah’s husbands had both been at Staff College together, and the wives had been neighbours.

‘Hi, Alice. I thought I’d better drop round and see you, now you’ve arrived. Everything OK?’

‘It’s wonderful. Bob told me that you and Alisdair would be our neighbours again.’ Alice looked past Sarah at the row of officers’ quarters. ‘Which one is yours?’

Sarah pointed. ‘Third on the left. The one with the blue Ford Galaxy.’

Alice noticed that the quarter allocated to the regiment’s second in command was pretty small compared to hers.
Well, rank has its privileges
, she thought smugly. She turned her attention back to Sarah and hoped her tiny moment of gloating hadn’t shown.

‘So how long have you and Alisdair been here?’

‘About three months.’

‘Great. So you’ll be able to give me the low-down on all the other wives. I’m looking forward to meeting them for coffee.’

Sarah shifted a little uncomfortably. She knew Alice’s firmly held views about the role of army wives. She hedged. ‘Quite a few go out to work.’

Alice’s mouth tightened in a small but involuntary grimace. She really didn’t approve. She knew she was old-fashioned but she’d been brought up to believe that the role of officers’ wives was to look after the wives of the soldiers. Her mother and her mother’s friends had been only too aware of that, and Alice couldn’t see why it should be different for her generation. ‘Oh. Well, I suppose it’s only to be expected these days.’

‘Boarding school fees mean most of us have to,’ said Sarah.

‘Do you work too?’ Alice was surprised. She would have thought that Sarah, as the wife of the second in command, would have been far too busy to be able to work as well.

‘Only part-time.’

‘Hmm.’

A man’s voice called down from the landing above. ‘Excuse me, missus, but do you want the bed put together?’

‘Hang on a sec,’ Alice called back. To Sarah she said, ‘Look, now I know where you live I’ll drop round when it’s a bit less chaotic. Lovely to see you again.’

Sarah returned home, duty done.

‘So, has she changed?’ asked Alisdair Milne that evening, when he got in from work.

‘What do you think?’ Sarah snorted.

‘But you used to be friends. When you lived next door you used to think her ways were quite funny.’

‘That was when she was my neighbour. Now she’s Lady Muck, swanning around as the CO’s wife, and I don’t think it’ll be quite so amusing.’

Sarah walked into the small and somewhat tatty kitchen of her current quarter. Alisdair followed.

‘Gin?’ She held up the bottle.

‘Please.’ He watched as Sarah busied herself with the glasses and the ice, ‘So what has she done to upset you?’

Sarah picked up a knife to slice a lemon. ‘Look, I know this is going to sound really bitchy, but you know I went to see her this afternoon?’

‘You said you were going to.’

‘Well, when she asked which house was ours, you could see the triumph written all over her face that we have been given this poky little box and she is there in Montgomery bloody House.’ Sarah sloshed two generous slugs of gin into the glasses.

‘Surely not.’

‘Trust me. You weren’t there.’

Alisdair sighed. It would make his life so much easier if Alice and Sarah got on. But, what the heck. Part of him knew that Sarah’s sour grapes were caused by a modicum of jealousy. Alisdair knew that she would have quite liked to have been the CO’s wife herself but Alisdair could have told her years back that it was never going to happen. Even when they had been cadets together, Bob had always shone as the star. He was always going to be the winner if it ever came to direct competition between the two of them. And now it had. Bob had been picked as the CO and Alisdair was his sidekick. Personally, Alisdair didn’t mind one bit. He really liked Bob and almost from the start he’d resigned himself to being in his contemporary’s shadow. But Alisdair didn’t envy Bob on every level. Alice, if rumours were to be believed, was a bit of an ice maiden; still, that was Bob’s problem not his. Alisdair didn’t think he would like to be married to someone like Alice. For one thing, she was so damn perfect. Everything she did, she did amazingly; cooking, flower arranging, painting, restoring furniture. She’d been a bit of a joke at Camberley – Alisdair remembered hearing from Sarah how the other wives used to take the mickey out of her when she wasn’t around. Well, perhaps Alice’s dedication to being the perfect army wife had paid off.
Although
, Alisdair reflected as he sipped his drink. Although Bob would have more than likely made it to the top even if he’d been married to a nymphomaniac floozy with communist tendencies.

‘And there’s another thing.’

Alisdair turned his attention back to his wife. ‘Miaow,’ he said.

Sarah had the good grace to look a little shamefaced. She laughed. ‘OK, OK. But honestly, even
you’ll
agree that she can’t be normal if she is directing removal men dressed like she’s about to go to a garden party at Buck House. I mean, surely if she was halfway human she’d be wearing old clothes – jeans even – but I swear the jumper she had on was cashmere and her skirt must have set her back at least a hundred pounds, if not more.’

Alisdair didn’t argue. What did he know about fashion? He was either in uniform or jeans and sweatshirts that Sarah bought for him from Marks and Spencer or some such place. But it went against the grain to hear Sarah being disloyal to his boss’s wife. ‘Well, she’s only supervising them, isn’t she? She’s not humping the boxes around herself, is she?’

Sarah took a noisy slurp of her gin. ‘Huh.’

Alisdair gazed out of the kitchen window. He thought it best not to say anything right now – Sarah probably wouldn’t appreciate it – but he would have to remind her at some stage that whatever views she expressed in the privacy of their quarter should not be voiced to the other wives. It wouldn’t be good for the regiment if the soldiers got to hear there was hostility amongst the wives on the officers’ patch. He deliberately changed the subject. ‘I don’t suppose either of the kids have been in touch today?’

‘Will might have emailed. He had a match today so he’ll probably want to let you know how he got on.’

It was the excuse Alisdair was looking for to stop this conversation. ‘I’ll go and check, shall I?’

‘Please.’ Sarah reached forward to the radio on the window sill and flicked it on. The voice of a Radio Four announcer told them it was six o’clock. Sarah took another sip of her drink and began to get supper ready while Alisdair wandered into the dining room that doubled as his study when the kids were away at school.

As always, the room was in chaos; bills, letters and papers were strewn across the centre of the army-issue oak table. The telephone directory was lying open at one end of the table and the computer dominated the other. It was no wonder they never had people round to dinner. It was too much effort to clear the room so everyone could eat at the table. Alisdair walked round to the machine and switched it on.

As the system booted up, he wondered briefly what sort of fist Bob would make of being CO. He certainly had a hard act to follow. His predecessor had been immensely popular, and his wife, a dizzy blonde, had by all accounts endeared herself to all and sundry by throwing outrageously boozy and amazingly fun parties. Alisdair and Sarah had arrived just in time to be present at the previous New Year’s Eve bash, which had served to prove that the reports had not been exaggerated. Somehow, Alisdair didn’t think that Alice was going to plough a similar furrow. He reckoned things were going to be very different on the patch from here on in.

Chapter Two

Megan Davies removed the towel from her head and studied her reflection in the mirror on the wall of the bleak bathroom.

‘Shit!’ said Zoë with a mixture of awe and horror.

Megan felt a frisson of nerves jangle her stomach. This was going to cause trouble – trouble in a big way. She’d known that it might from the moment she opened the bottle of dye, but she hadn’t expected the end result to be quite so … what? Dramatic? Outrageous? Well, it was certainly that. Her auburn hair was now
jet black
.

‘What is Miss Pink going to say?’ whispered Zoë.

Megan met her eyes in the mirror and said coolly, ‘She can say what she likes. It’s done now.’

‘She’s going to be mad, though.’

Megan shrugged. ‘So what’s the worst she can do? Gate me? Big deal. Term ends in a fortnight, there’s no more exeats, and I’m broke, so I can’t afford to go out anyway.’

‘Well …’ began Zoë cautiously. She stopped and wondered if she ought to continue.

Her apprehension, despite her outward bravado, made Megan snappy. ‘Spit it out.’

‘Expulsion?’

Megan’s eyes widened in horror for a split second. Then, ‘Nah. No way.’

Zoë looked sceptical.

‘Of course not,’ emphasised Megan, more for her own benefit than Zoë’s.

‘She expelled Tasha’

‘Yeah, but she was
very
drunk.’

True.’

‘
And
she’d been caught smoking twice.’ But even so, Megan’s confidence wavered. She had been no angel in her time at Downton Manor. OK, a couple of things had been unintentional. The broken window really hadn’t been her fault, nor had she meant to drop the block of sodium into the water, it had just slipped out of the tongs. Still, on the positive side, the explosion
had
been quite spectacular and worth the enormous rifting she’d had afterwards. But the rigging of the school’s public address system on sports day so that Nirvana had belted out over it was
entirely
down to her, as was her idea of writing HELP! SAVE US! in three-foot-high letters in weedkiller in the middle of the hockey pitch. Still, smoking was still considered almost the worst thing Miss Pink’s young ladies could get up to, with drinking just pipping it to the post. None of the girls thought that Miss Pink even
knew
what drugs were – except possibly as the American term for medical preparations.

‘And what will your mother say?’ Zoë voiced a thought that was already present in Megan’s mind.

‘She’ll be cool.’

Zoë’s eyebrows shot into her hairline. She’d met Mrs Davies on several occasions and knew precisely what she was like.

‘Well, she’ll get used to it.’

Zoë’s eyebrows stayed up.

‘Eventually.’

Zoë remained silent.

‘When it grows out.’

‘Yeah, that’s more like the truth.’

At Montgomery House, Alice had cleared away the supper things and was now sitting at the table in her kitchen surrounded by half-unpacked boxes, piles of china, crumpled newspaper and other evidence of the chaos of moving. Part of Alice wanted to get on and clear up the mess but she had firmly decided that she had another task taking priority that evening. Accordingly she had dispatched Bob off to the scullery to plumb in the washing machine and dishwasher, while she got on with organising her first social occasion. Even before she had moved in, she had ascertained the best days for ‘borrowing’ the mess staff to help her out, and now she was checking those dates against her diary and the regimental forecast of events. She sighed as she went through the possibilities of one date after another. Eventually she decided there was no alternative; she would have to have her coffee morning for all the officers’ wives the day after Megan got back from school. It was that, or postpone meeting them for nearly a month. She hoped Megan would understand – and, after all, they would have the rest of the holidays together. Before Alice began to write out the details of the invitation onto her engraved ‘At Home’ cards, she promised herself that she would make it up to Megan with a couple of treats – shopping sprees or cinema trips to compensate for having to be otherwise engaged on their first day together. Ignoring the grunts and occasional swear word from Bob as he struggled to shove a recalcitrant dishwasher into a tight space, she began to write out the cards in careful italics. Bob could get one of the clerks to deliver them tomorrow, first thing.

It was at about ten the next morning that the phone rang at Montgomery House.

‘May I speak to Mrs Davies?’ asked a cultured voice.

‘Speaking,’ replied Alice, recognising the caller as her daughter’s headmistress and instantly steeling herself for the worst.