Mrs Fytton's Country Life Read Free

this: men go walkabout if they don't like what they get at home. When Rosa or Clancy came to stay and poked fun at her, Angela would whistle Tammy Wynette's 'Stand by Your Man'. With, as she would say, irony. But she adhered to the principles of Tony Bennett's 'Wives Should Always Be Lovers Too', as if Marilyn French had never been born: 'Hey, little girl, comb your hair, fix your make-up, soon he will walk through the door ...' She might wink at her friends, but she also meant it.
    Ian told her that he loved her, and that he admired her, and that he did not know what he would do without her. If she remembered that Henry II once wrote something very similar to Eleanor of Aquitaine before putting her in a chateau and throwing away the key, she dismissed it. Man might learn from history that man learns nothing from history, she told herself, but women do. She supported and was supported, she loved and was loved, she admired and was admired. It was enough.
    She attended PTA and parents' evenings and did her bit for fund-raising events. She loved her children but, like her own parents with her, she knew that one day they must fly the coop and she was happy to let them go. The better they did at school, the freer they would one day be, and so would she and Ian.
    Her local married women friends bemoaned the passing of romance from their lives. By the time most of them had two children of school age, the private pleasures of their marriages had long since faded against the brilliance of the domestic burden. Not so Angela. She kept down the cellulite and kept up (or down) the seductive underwear, and enjoyed it all for the game it was. Whatever she did now went into the pot for later. Ian Fytton could only look out of the window or up to the ceiling when one of his male colleagues bemoaned the passing of fun, romance and marital relations ...
     

    By the time Andrew and Claire began senior school, the office had long since moved from Francis Street to fine new premises further into town. Angela turned the house back into a complete family home again, so quickly that it was almost a conjuring trick. Let's get it out of the way, she thought. And she did. She worked with Ian three days a week and on the other two she did all the other things a mother and wife and business partner needs to do to survive. Now Ian employed a large staff of young men besides himself, and an unmarried woman of fifty to oversee the office side of things and to be his secretary. Young women came and went in the more menial areas and it therefore mattered not, as he said, when they left to get married.
     
    At Angela's suggestion, they took on a partner. Ian agreed, saying he could do with the help and the extra capital. Angela nodded, keeping quiet about wanting the new working partner to take over for good, eventually, while she and Ian, finally unencumbered by their offspring, circumnavigated the globe. Still young and vigorous - just as she had always planned.
    As the years passed, Ian went from love's delight in all she did to apparent awe of her capabilities. 'My wife,' she once heard him say to his new business partner, Bernard Ball, 'could easily have been a bloody rocket scientist. Put her in Cape Canaveral and she'd have an interplanetary probe on Mars by Monday ...'
    Angela smiled to herself. It was true, she would, if Mars be where her husband stood waiting. She never lost that memory of the God of the Cambridge Union and hot sex in small beds with mulled wine. It was there, waiting for them still, just below the surface, and they would find it again. The day was drawing near.
    To fill up the evening and as a little additional interest she began to look hard at the financial papers and suggested, from time to time, where they might invest any small surplus. Ian could not deny her skill in this department either.
    ‘I sometimes feel redundant ’ he said playfully to her one evening.
    'Redundant is it?' She smiled back, and hauled him off to the