‘The Cranleys.’
Despite herself, Laura moaned with pleasure. It was utterly infuriating, how good he was in bed.
‘I’ll tell you if you’re nice to me,’ Gabe whispered, his hands moving slowly down over her belly, his fingertips just skimming the soft fur between her legs. Unable to keep up her resistance any longer, Laura turned around and kissed him, luxuriating in the solid warmth of his body. God, he was beautiful.
‘Go on then, tell me,’ she said, releasing him at last. ‘What are they like?’
‘Ha!’ said Gabe. ‘So you do want to know. I knew it! You’re just a sad old village gossip, Mrs Baxter.’
‘What’s he like?’ asked Laura, ignoring him. ‘Brett Cranley.’
‘Actually, I liked him,’ said Gabe. ‘I mean, I can see how he could be seen as arrogant.’
Laura frowned. ‘In what way?’
‘He’s a big personality. Maybe even a bit of a bully. He obviously favours his daughter over his son, and the wife seems a bit afraid of him.’
Gabe told her about his brief encounter with Logan and Jason today, and about Angela’s nerves the first time they met.
‘He sounds vile,’ said Laura. ‘What on earth did you like about him?’
‘I don’t know, exactly,’ said Gabe, thinking. ‘He’s direct. Honest. I don’t think he’d cheat you in business.’
‘Well he certainly cheats in his private life,’ said Laura with feeling. ‘At least if the press coverage is anything to go by.’
‘Oh, yeah, but that’s different,’ said Gabe.
‘Why? Because it’s OK to cheat on women? Just as long as you’re honest with men, is that it?’
Laura felt her hackles rising again. She loved Gabe but sometimes he could be so … unreconstructed.
Gabe sighed. ‘Give it a rest, Germaine Greer. You asked, I answered. I liked him. Sorry if you and the rest of the village lynch mob have already decided he’s the Swell Valley’s answer to Vladimir Putin. But I do have the advantage of having actually met the guy.’
‘Well, bully for you. I hope the two of you will be very happy together,’ said Laura.
Turning away from her, Gabe turned off his own bedside light.
‘And I’ll tell you something else,’ he added defiantly. ‘I’m going to get him to sell those fields to me. So put that in your bra and burn it.’
‘Have you seen that stack of marked Year Three homework anywhere? The robot sketches?’
Dylan Pritchard Jones ran a hand through his curly chestnut hair and scanned the mess that was his kitchen. Aside from the detritus of breakfast, almost every surface was covered with copies of Country Living, Elle Décor, Period Homes and every other conceivable variety of interiors magazine. Dylan’s wife, Maisie, was expecting their first child and had gone into a frenzy of what the pregnancy websites called ‘nesting’. Apparently this was a woman’s primitive urge to spend thousands of pounds on expensive Farrow & Ball paint and decorative antique rocking chairs. Dylan prayed it would soon pass. On an art teacher’s salary, it was not easy to make Maisie’s Homes & Gardens dreams come true.
‘Last I saw them they were upstairs on the landing.’ Maisie chewed grimly on a piece of dry toast. ‘I passed them on my way to the loo at about five a.m.’
Pregnancy had not been kind to Dylan’s young wife. Relentless morning sickness had turned Maisie’s former peaches and cream complexion an unattractive shade of greenish-grey. At only a few months gone she was already thirty pounds heavier than usual, and her legs were covered with revolting varicose veins that reminded Dylan of mould running through a slab of Stilton cheese. Apparently there were men who found their pregnant wives uniquely attractive and desirable. Dylan Pritchard Jones could only imagine that their wives looked more like expectant supermodels – lithe amazons with compact little bumps beneath their lululemon tank tops – and less like the swollen, exhausted figure of his own other half. He tried to be a patient and understanding husband. But he couldn’t help but count down the days till it was over, and prayed that Maisie intended to get her figure back quickly afterwards. His suggestion last week that she think about hiring a trainer had been met with what he felt was excessive frostiness.
‘Thanks, you’re an angel.’ Kissing her on the head, Dylan raced upstairs, grabbed the work and ran out to his car, a piece of peanut butter toast still clamped between his teeth. St Hilda’s art teacher was perennially late. It was part of his charm, along with his broad, boyish smile, twinkly, bright blue eyes, and the mop of curls that made him look years younger than his actual age of thirty-three, and that women had always found hugely attractive. Dylan Pritchard Jones enjoyed being the ‘cool’ teacher at St Hilda’s, the one whose classes the children actually looked forward to, and with whom all the pretty mothers flirted at parents’ evening. Yes, Fittlescombe’s primary school was a small pool. But Dylan was the prettiest fish in it, if not the biggest. He loved his life.
In the staff room at St Hilda’s, tempers were fraying. The Year Six SAT exams were less than a month away now, but the government had seen fit to choose this moment to dump an enormous amount of additional paperwork on its already overloaded state teachers. This morning’s staff meeting had been called to agree a consensus on whether or not Max Bingley should hire an additional administration person. Cuts would have to be made to pay for such a hire, so it was vital that all the departments be represented. The art department, as usual, was late.
‘We really can’t put this off any longer.’ Ella Bates, one of the two Year Six class teachers, voiced what the entire room was thinking. ‘If Dylan can’t be bothered to turn up for the vote, he doesn’t deserve a say in it.’
‘It’s not a matter of what he deserves,’ Max Bingley said calmly. ‘We need consensus, Ella.’
In Max’s long experience, all staff rooms were political snake pits, even in a tiny, tight-knit school like this one. It had been the same story at Gresham Manor, the private boys prep school in Hampshire where Max had spent most of his career, as head of History and, latterly, deputy head of the school.
Max Bingley had loved his job at Gresham Manor. He would never have taken the St Hilda’s headship had his beloved wife not died two years ago, plunging him into a deep depression. Susie Bingley had had a heart attack aged fifty-two, completely unexpectedly. She’d collapsed at the breakfast table one morning in front of Max’s eyes, keeled over like a skittle. By the time the ambulance arrived at Chichester Hospital she was already dead. Max had kept working. At only fifty-three – with a mortgage to pay, not to mention two daughters still at university – he didn’t have much choice. But without Susie, life had lost all meaning, all joy. He moved through his days at Gresham like a zombie, barely able to find the energy to get dressed in the mornings. The Fittlescombe headship offered a new start and a distraction. Max had taken it under pressure from his girls, but it had been the right decision.
Right, but not easy, either personally or professionally. When Max first arrived at St Hilda’s he’d been forced to cut back a lot of dead wood. Inevitably his decisions to fire certain people had angered some of the remaining staff. As had his hiring choices. The staff room was already divided into ‘Camp Hotham’, the old guard hired by his predecessor and championed by Ella Bates, a heavy-set mathematician in her late fifties with a whiskery moustache, brusque manner and penchant for pop socks that drew an unfortunate amount of attention to her wrinkly knees; and ‘Camp Bingley’, made up of the new teachers and those amongst the old who, like Dylan Pritchard Jones, approved of Max’s old-school teaching style and relentless focus on results. Even Camp Bingley, however, had been resentful of Max’s