The Heart of the Country Read Free

though round every other bend there’s a concrete bunker, a tin barn, a quarry and an intensive pig breeding unit. The fact is, the, heart of the country’s rotten: I really believeit is. No wonder Harry sinned. How can a people be better than its rulers? If the rulers put profit and practicality first, how can the people be expected to do better? Take Harry: now the way out of Harry’s financial difficulties was flight. The most practical person to fly with was not his wife, but Miss Eddon Gurney, who was single, childless and unafraid. Of course he went. It was profitable and practical to do so. Wouldn’t you, in his shoes? No? Look at it this way. Harry and Natalie slept together, ate together, had children together; but that was the limit of their intimacy. They exchanged information, not feelings or ideas.
    ‘I’ve booked the car in for a service, darling,’ she’d say, over breakfast.
    ‘Thank you, darling,’ he’d say, and off he’d go to work. Anyone can talk like that. Why Natalie rather than another? Why stay?
    They were helpful and polite to each other, and never quarrelled. Why bother? They might even have believed they were happy together, had Harry not discovered himself really quite interested in what Marion Hopfoot, voted carnival queen in 1978, had to say, which was that she was in love with him, and Natalie not discovered herself in Arthur’s arms, rolling off the Victorian chaise longue on to the rather nice rag rug before the little coal fire in the register grate, intertwined and even more wonderfully energetic on the floor than the sofa. Ah, conversation. Oh, love. Ah, sex. Oh, again, consequences!
    The consequence was:
    ‘I’d better come round,’ Hilary, Harry’s receptionist, said, and so she did. She had a pale face and a domed forehead and too large pop eyes, and a practical manner. Many a man would follow her to the ends of the earth, had she chosen to go. She knew exactly what to do, and when and how, and would never have dreamed of going. A wonderful gift! She had beautiful breasts too – white energetic domes, cherry-tipped, and these gave her confidence in the world – but Hilary hardly enters the story, she or her chest. She is merely the bearer of bad news, standing in Natalie’s dream kitchen – oak-veneered cupboards, brass fittings, wall oven and ceramic hob, and a black-and-white tiled floor recently rather badly washed by Flora. Hilary’s waist was tightly belted, the better to show off her figure, and her frog eyes were moist with pity and indignation mixed.
    The wages of sin!
    ‘The staff haven’t been paid for two weeks,’ said Miss Hilary Frog. ‘Mr Harris said it was just a cash-flow problem but most of us in computers know where that kind of thing leads. It’s a high risk business, isn’t it? If you haven’t got the capital, that is – and Mr Harris hadn’t. My boyfriend’s father is a friend of the bank manager and he told us Harrix was seriously underfunded. Then, when he didn’t turn up today, and Marion neither –’
    ‘Marion?’ Natalie had never heard her name before. Truly. It’s most often a bolt from the blue which strikes down a good wife and mother, especially when she’s economically dependent. Don’t let me frighten you – unless it’s into getting a training and a job. You know what the statistics for these things are? You know how many marriages end in divorce? One in three. And a recent survey shows that a woman’s standard of living falls on average by 42 per cent after divorce, and a man’s actually rises … Enough!
    ‘Marion?’
    ‘Marion Hopfoot,’ said Hilary. ‘She’s his secretary. He’s been seeing a lot of her. That is to say, not just in office hours, which would be natural, but after hours as well. Well, you must have known. Oh. No? Oh dear! But Marion told us it was all okay, you knew all about it and didn’t mind. And one of the fellers told me you and that antique dealer up by the Castle – but