It was a shock, though, and I stood there transfixed and staring at him, one hand to my face, in a silence broken only by the occasional slither and plop of a descending prune. Suddenly finding myself released from thrall, I turned and walked out of the door, dabbing lamb tagine off my face with the hem of my pale green T-shirt as I went, then headed towards the village.
I must have looked a mess, but luckily it was early evening and few people were about, for the Pied Piper of TV dinners had called them all away, using the theme tune of the popular soap series Cotton Common as lure.
I didn’t have far to go for refuge. Annie’s father used to be the vicar here, but now that he and his wife are alleviating the boredom of retirement by doing VSO work in Africa, Annie has a tiny Victorian red-brick terraced cottage in the main street of Middlemoss.
‘Lizzy!’ she exclaimed, looking horrified at discovering me stained and spattered on her doorstep. ‘Is that dried blood on your face and T-shirt? What on earth has happened?’
‘I think it’s only prune juice and gravy, actually,’ I reassured her, touching my cheek cautiously. ‘A bit of plate did hit me, but it must have had a round edge.’
‘Plate?’ she repeated blankly, drawing me in and closing the front door.
‘Yes, one of those lovely green Denby soup bowls we had as a wedding present from your parents.’
‘Look, come into the kitchen and I’ll clean you up with warm water and lint while you tell me all about it,’ she said soothingly.
The lint sounded very Gone With the Wind – but then, she has all the Girl Guide badges and I don’t suppose the First Aid one has changed for years. So I followed her in and sank down on the nearest rush-bottomed chair, my legs suddenly going wobbly. Trinity (Trinny, for short), Annie’s three-legged mutt, regarded me lambently from her basket, tail thumping.
‘There’s nothing much to tell, really,’ I said. ‘Tom flew into one of his rages and lobbed his dinner at the wall.’
‘Oh, Lizzy!’
‘I said something that made him angry and he just totally lost it this time. I don’t think he was actually aiming at me, though it’s hard to tell since he’s such a rotten shot and – ouch!’ I added, as she dabbed my face with the warm, damp lint.
‘The skin isn’t cut, but I think you might get a bruise on your cheek,’ she said, wringing the cloth out. ‘I could put some arnica ointment on it.’
‘I don’t think I could live with that smell so close to my nose, Annie,’ I said dubiously, but her next suggestion, that we break out the bottle of Remy Martin, which she keeps in stock because her father always swore by it in times of crisis, met with a better reception.
‘I think you really ought to leave Tom right away, Lizzy,’ Annie suggested worriedly. ‘He’s been so increasingly horrible to you that it’s practically verbal abuse – and now this!’
‘I’m just glad Jasper wasn’t there,’ I said, topping my glass up and feeling much better. ‘He’s gone straight from the archaeological dig to a friend’s house, and won’t be back till about ten.’
‘His exam results should be here any time now, shouldn’t they?’
‘Yes, only a couple more days.’ I sipped my brandy and sighed. ‘Even though I’ll miss him, it’ll be such a relief to have him safely off to university in October, because I live in dread that Tom will suddenly tell him to his face that he doesn’t think he’s really his son. That would be even more hurtful than ignoring him, the way he’s been doing the last couple of years.’
‘I don’t know what’s got into Tom,’ Annie said sadly. ‘He always had so much charm … as long as he got his own way.’
‘He still does charm everyone else. I’m sure no one would believe me if I told them what he’s really like at home.’
‘True, but he’s so used to me being around, he’s let the mask slip sometimes, so I’ve seen it for myself,’ Annie said. ‘He was all right with Jasper for the first few years, though, wasn’t he?’
‘Well, he didn’t take a lot of notice of him, but he was OK. But he started to turn colder towards me even before he got this strange idea that I had a fling with Nick, so I think whoever he’s been having an affair with since then has had a really bad effect on his character.’
‘You did have a fling with Nick,’ Annie pointed out fairly.
‘Oh, come on, Annie! I was way too young and anyway, it only lasted about a fortnight before he told me he was going abroad for a year because he wasn’t changing his life-plans for my sake. I didn’t see him after that until the day I got married to Tom and he turned up then with Leila in tow – do you remember?’
‘Gosh, yes. She was so scarily chic, in a Parisian sort of way, that she made me feel like a country bumpkin – she still does! But I thought it was nice of Nick to make the effort, even though he and Tom had grown apart over the years. They never had a lot in common, did they?’
‘I think the main problem was that Tom always felt jealous of Nick, since Nick was a real Pharamond and Roly’s grandson, whereas he was just a Pharamond because his mother had married one. Allegedly,’ I added darkly.
‘It’s odd how things turn out,’ mused Annie, putting away the bowl of water and tossing the lint into the kitchen bin. ‘You always had much more in common with Nick than with Tom.’
‘How on earth can you say that, when we argue all the time?’ I demanded incredulously. ‘The only thing Nick and I have ever had in common is a love of food, even if mine is much less cordon bleu.’
Though of course it is true that food has played an important part in both our families. The search for a good meal in the wrong part of a foreign city was the downfall of my diplomat parents and would be the downfall of my figure, too, were I ever to stop moving long enough for the fat to settle.
As to the Pharamonds, the gene for cooking was introduced into the family by a Victorian heir who married the plebeian but wealthy heiress Bessie Martin, only to die of a surfeit of home-cooked love some forty years later, with a fond smile on his lips and a biscuit empire to hand on to his offspring.
‘You and Nick have both got short tempers and you love Middlemoss more than anywhere else on earth,’ Annie said. ‘And of course I know that Jasper is Tom’s son, but it’s unfortunate that he’s looking more and more like Nick with every passing year.’
‘Well, yes, that’s what Tom said earlier, so I reminded him about the rumours that his mother had an affair with Leo Pharamond before her first husband was killed, and that’s what started the argument off! He always flies into a complete rage if I say anything against his sainted mother.’
‘It’s quite a coincidence that Leo Pharamond and her first husband were both not only racing drivers but killed in car crashes,’ Annie said, ‘though there did seem to be a lot of fatal crashes in the early days.’
‘Someone told me they called her the Black Widow after Leo died, so it’s not surprising her third husband gave it up and whisked her off back to Argentina,’ I said.
Tom’s mother had started
