Free An Affair to Remember by Virginia Budd

she would, within reason, seek it elsewhere. He loved her, she knew, and she loved him; he was the father and the intimate friend she’d never had, and on the whole their marriage was a good one.
    She’d met Jack Fulton in the spring while camping at Brown End. She’d gone down there for a few days to organise the builders and discuss plans with her interior designer, a morose young man by the name of Giles Pumfritt. It turned out later that Giles had been a mistake. His designs, once applied, had looked quite ghastly in the simple old farmhouse, and even Sel, who normally left such matters to her, had put his foot down. It had been a wild and windy March day, and driving back from Belchester, her Renault sustained a puncture on the way up Dog’s Head Hill. Jack, in his green Volvo, happened to be passing and offered to change the wheel for her, and they’d got talking. There was something about Jack – hard to say what, she thinks, as she swings her golden brown legs out of bed and pulls on the long, Indian cotton skirt she habitually wears about the house and makes her, so her husband says, look like a ‘high class gypsy’ – he was really nothing more than a big, boastful, rather common commercial traveller with a bristly moustache and a crude line in jokes. However, there it was; he had it, whatever ‘it’ is. Incidentally, Clarrie Woodhouse and Emmie Mallory weren’t the only ones to think this; there were many others who felt the same, and from Penrith to Plymouth, Sunderland to Southampton and all places beyond, Jack Fulton had left a trail of angry, frustrated and randy women waiting longingly for his return.
    He and Clarrie met again on the day following the puncture episode, in a pub on the main Belchester road. After a couple of drinks they’d made love in the back of Jack’s Volvo, and for Clarrie, despite the discomfort of being cramped in the back seat of a car, their lovemaking had been a revelation. After it she had felt wild and wicked, and more alive that she had for months. Before they parted Jack had given her a card with the phone number of the pub he stayed in when in the area, and although hating herself for it, when she and Sel finally moved in to Brown End, she had rung him. That was how it had started; how it would end, heaven only knew.
    “Clarrie, for heaven’s sake come down and get off the phone. I’m expecting a call from the States any minute, and anyway that wretched girl might ring, she’s already half an hour late.” Sel stands at the bottom of the stairs, he’s wearing his heavy hornrims and an ancient cardigan: he looks harassed. A smell of sub-Mediterranean food emanates from the kitchen. Juan, their Spanish chef, (also doubling as butler, manservant and general factotum) will no doubt once again threaten to give in his notice if he has to keep lunch back much longer.
    “Perhaps we shouldn’t wait, Juan can heat something up for the new girl when she finally decides to arrive.” Clarrie ignores Sel’s remark about a call from the States, there won’t be one, she knows; he’s been expecting it every day since they moved in.
    “I could do with a drink first,” Sel, removing his spectacles, leads the way into their enormous sitting room. Once the farmhouse kitchen and adjacent pantry, the room retains its massive inglenook fireplace, but the two casement windows that faced on to the garden and the road to the village have been replaced with massive patio doors. Actually, they’d had a lot of trouble with the listed buildings people over these, but got their way in the end – Sel, despite his slipping celebrity status, still had friends in high places – and now wished they hadn’t. Expensive rugs are scattered here and there on the floor over the original Suffolk pammets; carefully re-laid, sealed and polished by Clarrie’s minions. (The minions would no doubt have been greatly surprised to learn that if they’d dug a little deeper, they’d have hit the