A Wild Affair

When the last wrapping fell away and the polystyrene box was unveiled Mrs Jones and Bobby gazed at it blankly—Quincy had long ago guessed what the package held. The address had been typewritten and there was no letter inside. The transistor had come anonymously as far as Bobby was concerned. Lifting it reverently out of its box, he gave a long happy sigh.

'Oh, wow!'

Mrs Jones looked at her daughter, her face flushed, her eyes very bright. 'You're a naughty, extravagant girl,' she said, and hugged her.

'I didn't send it,' said Quincy, and Bobby detached his adoring gaze from the radio's shiny chrome dials.

'Who's it from then? It's fab, absolutely terrific, it must have cost a bomb. I bet I could get Mars on it!'

'Who sent it, then?' Mrs Jones asked.

'Joe Aldonez, I expect,' Quincy admitted.

Bobby lit up. 'Really? No kidding? Oh, wow!' he exclaimed, and extracted the enormous aerial which waved high above his head as he twiddled with the wavelength dial. 'Hey, I'm going to have a great time with this!' he informed them as he cuddled the radio against his ear and went off with it on his shoulder like some space age Long John Silver, the squawk of the radio fading with him as he vanished up the stairs.

Mrs Jones was still thinking about what Quincy had told them. 'What makes you think Mr Aldonez sent it?'

'He said he would.' She had forgotten, it had entirely slipped her mind since she came back from London, but Joe had not forgotten, he had kept his word.

'Isn't that nice of him? Isn't he a kind man,' Mrs Jones said in delight. 'When you think how much he must have on his mind it's very thoughtful of him to remember Bobby.'

'Yes,' said Quincy. 'Isn't it?'

'We could never have bought Bobby such a splendid radio,' Mrs Jones went on. 'Bobby's right—it must have cost a fortune, it's very generous of Mr Aldonez. Bobby must write and thank him at once.' She went off to point this out to her son and Quincy stared out of the window at the gathering spring dusk, watching small powdery moths tapping at the lighted window, the brush of their wings insistent as they tried to penetrate the glass.

A melancholy enveloped her and she sighed. She did not want any reminders of Joe around at the moment. She had put away her cherished LP until she felt she could bear to hear it again—maybe one day in the dim and distant future she might be able to listen to that smoky voice without wincing, but right now it would hurt too much.

Over the following weeks she had to hear with patience the sight and sound of Bobby and his radio. They were never parted, and her only consolation was that she could always hear them coming and remove herself from the vicinity before they arrived.

Bobby wrote a thank-you letter to Joe and sent it care of Carmen Lister in London. Presumably Carmen sent it on to America, but Bobby had no reply, not that that seemed to bother him much; however, it did nag away at Quincy whenever she stopped guarding her mind from thoughts of Joe.

Her life had returned to normal, or what passed for normal, so far as everyone around her was concerned. The nine days' wonder of her trip to London over, people stopped talking endlessly about it, to her relief, and the subject was allowed to fall into abeyance. Quincy settled back to work in the surgery, she went for drives on a Sunday afternoon with Brendan and took walks with him through the local woods admiring the spring flood of bluebells which began to carpet the leafy moistness of the earth under the trees, filling the air with that special, poignant scent. Now and then they drove to the nearest cinema to

see a film or went dancing in the village hall on Saturday nights. Coming home late they would sit in the car and talk for a few moments before they kissed, and Quincy fought to hide from Brendan that his kiss hardly turned her on, her pulses never so much as fluttered.

Wryly one evening he drew back and looked down at her. 'I'm wasting my time, aren't I?' he said. 'We just don't click.'

'I'm sorry, Brendan,' she began, but he cut her short.

'Don't say sorry, that would be adding insult to injury. If you can't feel any more than that, you can't, and there's an end to it. I don't want you apologising for it.'

'Sorry,' she automatically mumbled again, then gave a nervous little giggle as she caught sight of his face. 'Oh, Brendan, I am—don't scowl like that.'

'Was I?' he asked ruefully, giving a little shrug. 'Shall we call it a day?'

'Friends?' she asked tentatively, holding out a hand.

'Of course,' Brendan said, politely shaking it as though they had just been introduced.

In her bed later Quincy got the gaggles again as she remembered that, but under the laughter she felt faintly sad. If she had never gone up to London, met Joe Aldonez, she might have taken Brendan far more seriously, allowed their quiet companionship to move into deeper waters without any sense of haste or strain. Now she had to admit it would never happen—she had changed too much during her brief stay in London, she would never be quite the same again. As with the end of anything, facing the reality of her break with Brendan saddened her and left her feeling slightly lost. Brendan had been a part of her life for the last five years, their friendship recently holding a hint of something else, and she knew she would miss their evenings together, their long walks at the weekend. It had hardly added up to deathless romance, it had been a cosy habit, nothing more—but she would miss it.

As summer advanced towards its peak, the lanes grew creamy with wild parsley, which foamed in the ditches and clambered up the green banks, while the cuckoo sounded distantly across the fields, coming and going with that deceptive cunning which makes it seem invisible, a voice rather than a living bird. On warm, sunny days, Quincy went off with her father on his rounds if she could free herself from the paperwork of the practice, driving around the farflung district in which he worked, from farm to farm, from village to village; sometimes helping out when he needed a spare pair of hands to hold a calving cow, but often just going along for the ride, wandering off during his visits to explore a secret copse or feed an apple to a horse, or lie in the sun in a meadow watching the tiny black shadows of the larks singing high up in the halcyon sky.

One morning in early June they called at Hough Farm and while her father and Jim Stevens went off to the cow shed Quincy sat in the kitchen talking to Penny and her mother-in-law, who was feeding David a bowl of minced beef and finely mashed carrots; much against his will, since his real interest in the food was an intense desire to grab some and watch it oozing out of his little pink fist as he squeezed it, as he demonstrated whenever Mrs Stevens took her attention off him to look at his mother.

'Eat it, don't play with it,' Penny scolded, pushing back a lock of limp hair from her flushed cheek. 'Isn't it hot today?'

Her mother-in-law looked up from cleaning David's sticky fingers, frowning. 'You don't look well, girl,' she said in her soft burring West Country accent. 'Been pushing yourself, I reckon. You don't need to work so hard, take it easy once in a while.'