A Banquet of Consequences by Elizabeth George Page B

don’t want you to end up blind drunk on the side of the road,” she said with a laugh.
    He chose the Pimm’s. He followed her to the kitchen to watch her make it, at her invitation. From there, they went to the garden behind the farmhouse. The fields of the original farm stretched out behind it, rich land onto which the village of Thornford had never intruded. They sat in lawn chairs next to a youthful laburnum tree, where long brownpods hung bean-like from glossy-leafed branches, a lovely feature of the garden that she’d not added till her children were adolescents.
    “I was always scared they’d eat the pods as little ones,” she said. “I’d have told them they’re poison, but you know how kids are. And if I’d lost one of them after already losing their dad—” And then quickly, “Pardon, Alastair. That was thoughtless of me to talk about losing a child. I’m that nervous is what it is. I don’t have guests to dinner as a rule. I’m also a bit sloshed.”
    “You’re pink in the face, is what,” he said. Stupid, he thought immediately afterwards. Why had he never been able to speak easily to a woman?
    “Am I?” she said. “It’s not the drink. I . . . Well, I used some blusher, and I generally don’t. I expect I look a dead scary sight if you’ve noticed it. Like a clown, eh?”
    “You don’t look like a clown,” he told her. He took a gulp of his Pimm’s and then another and he hoped the spirit would loosen his tongue. When it did, all he managed was, “How long’s he been gone?”
    She looked only momentarily surprised. She took a sip of her drink. “Kev? More ’n twenty years now.”
    “You never said . . .”
    “How he died? Gangrene.” And when she saw his expression of surprise and horror, “It was his gut. He had a condition he didn’t take care with, seeds and such getting trapped in these odd little sacs that formed in his gut. They got themselves infected. He was supposed to take care with what he ate and he never did and it killed him.”
    “Christ,” he said.
    “No one on God’s green earth should have to die like that. It took months as they carted him in and out of operating theatres, removing more and more of him, but still it came back.”
    “How old?”
    “Twenty-seven when he died.”
    “Leaving you—”
    She reached for his arm to stop him going further. “Alastair, it’s no matter. I mean, it
is
, but we all face something.” And then she added, “How’s Caroline coping? I’ve not seen her at the bakery in a good long time.”
    Since Sharon was the one to introduce the subject, Alastair decided that no disloyalty was involved in revealing a few facts. More than three years since Will’s death and she’d not come back from it, he said quietly. She eats, she reads, and she watches the telly, he said, full stop. His fear—one among many that he had—was that she’d eat herself straight into the grave. Her two diversions were the Women’s League in Shaftesbury and her work for Clare Abbott. Praise God for that last as Alastair thought it was saving her life. It was, he admitted, saving his.
    Sharon looked surprised. He realised that he’d said too much, his tongue too oiled by the drink. He looked away, out towards the fields where a flock of sheep grazed placidly, plump white clouds on a sky of green. Sharon said she was sorry to hear of his struggles and she added, “Especially that last bit. You’re a hard worker and . . . Well, I’m sorry for whatever it is that’s going on between you and Caroline.”
    “Nothing’s going on, truth to tell,” he said with a rueful laugh. “Not in some time.” He didn’t add the rest: that long before Will had died had come a cooling in the relationship he had with his wife. The heady passion he’d felt for her and she for him was not, of course, something that could be sustained. But he’d reckoned on it altering to warmth, affectionate couplings in a marital bed blessed with more