The Heart of the Country Read Free Page A

that’s none of my business. Well, every marriage is different, isn’t it?’
    ‘I suppose it is,’ said Natalie.
    ‘But this morning, when Mr Harris didn’t turn up, and Marion didn’t either, we got to wondering and one of the technicians called her home and Marion’s mother answered. She said Marion had left a note saying she was running off to Spain with Harry Harris. And it must be true because she’d taken her passport. So everyone reckoned that was that. They called the police because of the unpaid wages.’
    ‘Police?’ said Natalie.
    ‘And then you rang, Mrs Harris. So I reckon that’s that. Sixteen people out of a job, if you don’t count Marion Hopfoot.’
    Natalie sat on the kitchen table, swinging her left leg idly and thinking of Hilary’s frog eyes and that Hilary’s bosom was over the top but unable to take in all that much of what Hilary actually said. She felt like a cobra which has swallowed a donkey and finds it too large to digest and too awkward to spit out. She couldn’t somehow make sense of anything.
    ‘There’s hardly any petrol in the car,’ she observed.
    ‘So?’ inquired Hilary. Hilary was having to do without two weeks’ wages and none at all in lieu of notice, and felt that Natalie was not the only one with troubles. ‘And I’ve got no money and Harry doesn’t believe in credit cards – not for me, anyhow – though he’s got a gold American Express. There’s enough petrol for this afternoon, I expect, but how am I going to get the children to school tomorrow morning?’
    How indeed? Of such boring problems are tragedies made. Natalie, the perfect mother, the tidy dresser, she who turned up at school every morning with her tights unladdered and her face properly made up and a pretty little scarf round her neck, bringing out the colour of her somewhat blank blue eyes – I tell you, little Mrs Tippy-toes was sleepwalking, poor thing, and had been for 15 years or so, ever since she married Harry Harris. Only now she suddenly perceived she might not be able to get to the school gates at all. And this, it suddenly came to her, might well be the wages of sin. The first thing a woman who suffers misfortune feels is guilty. My fault, she is convinced. Something I did wrong. She may well be right.
    And Natalie had a great deal to be guilty about, when you come to think of it. Consider her sins that very day.
    The sin of lust: as envisaged with Arthur. She was looking forward to it. It’s as bad to contemplate it as to do it.
    The sin of envy: envying Flora’s looks, and making her dust an already dusted sideboard. Mahogany – veneered, but sealed with polyurethane and very, very shiny.
    The sin of pride: despising Hilary because she had a too-large bosom (by Natalie’s standards) and frog eyes.
    The sin of sloth: not bothering to know what was going on in Harry’s life, heart and bank account; asking Pauline to deliver her groceries, instead of collecting them herself. Pauline was older than Natalie and had a harder life,
    The sin of gluttony: buying smoked salmon for dinner. Scottish, not Canadian. Twice the price, and pity the poor fish! Followed up by chicken. Horrid white stringy stuff, from a mangy bird which lived and died to a box.
    The sin of avarice: underpaying Flora on Harry’s instructions. The less she paid Flora, the more pairs of shoes Natalie could buy. Natalie loved shoes: they were her extravagance. She owned eighteen pairs, and fifteen of these had high heels, so when the hard times came she had only three for getting about in, and two of those were sandals.
    And the special sin of splashing the poor.
    You may not know about this one: it’s a modern sin. It’s what happens, say, on the School Run. If you’re driving the children to school on a rainy day and you pass too close to the mothers and children who don’t have cars, who have to walk, and you drench them with the mud of your passing. We are here in this world to be scavengers: to pick up