Read Online A Clear Conscience by Frances Fyfield - Free Book Online

evening, when the light seemed endless. Outside the Spoon and Fiddle, a title hidden by greenery, Alistair Eliot sat and regretted the lie he had told his wife. He was not meeting anyone: he had simply wanted to stop and nurse half a pint of lager the way he did once in a while in summer, and even then he agonised about deceit. Last summer, during the reign of a super-efficient, albeit slightly sluttish nanny, alas, now departed, Emily and he escaped their progeny to sit for an hour as he sat now when the house seemed fit to burst and Em had to admit she was going mad. They needed to be somewhere else to discuss their domestic concerns and the show of flowers here was better than any left remaining in their own little garden after the stamp of juvenile feet and the constant cry of ‘Catch this!’
    Emilyhad brief but intense flirtations with places outside home, and for this one in particular, they had cause to be grateful. It was the barman here who had listened to them talking a year ago about what Em described as the rising tide of scum in their house. He introduced them to Cath. Excuse me, he had said with a careful swipe of the table, I couldn’t help listening. I happen to know of someone who’s rated highly. You hear things in here, you see? Shall I tell her to call? Cath had been a godsend, but it did not follow that the Eliots both went back to the Spoon. Emily alone had surmised Mr Fixit the barman was married to Cath, but, apart from that, they did not know quite from whence she came, and cared even less. She was Cath, the Treasure, with no surname and a telephone number only for emergencies.
    Alistair sat, early in the evening, fiddling with his half pint and his good fortune. Raising his right fist level with his mouth in order to sip the drink, he noticed his cuff smelt of perfume, a lingering smell, which had been with him all day, competing with the window-box flowers, irritating and refreshing by turns. It had been pleasant to smell the blossom among the disinfectant fumes of the cells where he had been first thing this morning, but not so pleasant now. The scent of it seemed to have grown stronger as the day wore on. Alistair smiled. He need have no conscience about his wife. He carried her with him, wherever he went. Or it might have been Jane, with her arms round his neck this morning, her nightie soaked with
eau de parfum
.
    Quite aside from the need to have an interval, however short, between the circus of court and the more stimulating circus of home, Alistair stopped at the Spoon and Fiddle to nod to the barman. There were refinements to Alistair’s conscience which Emily did not share. She did not see that once you were bored with a place, you did anything other than simply stop going there, even if the service had been excellent and the memories delightful, and in this wide, pragmatic sweep of temporary patronage she included hairdressers, butchers, bakers and restaurants in the constant search for something new if not necessarily better. Alistair, on the other hand, would have gone to the same small rat-run of entertainments and services, year in year out if left to his own devices. To do otherwise made him feel slightly guilty. Objectively, he was well aware that he owed nothing to the Spoon, with its strange decor of flowers outside and an odd assortment of military memorabilia above the bar inside, either for good times had or for the respite it had given during the difficulties of last summer, nor was there any real debt to a barman because he was so pleasant and married to the cleaning lady. He simply felt a kind of duty to call in from time to time, just in case Joe felt unfairly abandoned. There was another feature, too, in this strange refinement of manners. For all that he was born of patrician stock with a lineage in Debrett, Alistair was secretly more at home with the little people of his world than he was with the great, the rich and the good.
    Inany event, the motives