Hens Dancing by Raffaella Barker Page A

for purchase. Very shaming moment when I remove the silly slingbacks I had thoughtappropriate when dressing this morning, and find aroma of Emmental clinging to my feet. Rub them on the shoe shop carpet and move to a different squeaking leatherette chair. How does anyone buy summer shoes? Summer feet are clammy and puffy and have red areas and also grass stains on their soles. They are hideous. They do nothing for the flimsy, strappy shoes so fashionable this year. Regretfully, I opt for a pair of clumpy mulish sandals as worn by biology teachers. These will get me through the flower show in comfort, I tell myself, and turn resolutely away from the shocking-pink kitten heels which beckon and tempt from the shop window.
    By the time I have crossed the King’s Road I am in agony, and at the entrance to the flower show I am forced to remove the new instruments of torture and go barefoot. I now have seven blisters bubbling on my feet. With savage pleasure I hurl the nerdy cripplers in a bin and hurry into the floral vortex of Chelsea. So glad I paid for them with Charles’s money out of the children’s account, so have not just wasted £80 of my own. Surely I can now go back for the kitten heels, as I still have no shoes? This uplifting thought carries me barefoot into the throng of well-behaved frocks and hairdos and little notebooks with neat notes.
    Two hours later I am sagging beneath piles of catalogues, and the inside covers of
Devil’s Cub,
my Georgette Heyer of the moment, are dense with illegibly scrawlednames of flowers and cryptic notes. On the train going home, assisted by a gin and tonic, I decipher ‘Heterosexual Lord Bute trailing clouds of perfume’, and give up. Maybe ‘heterosexual’ is ‘heliotrope’, or ‘hemero-callis’. Or maybe it’s a colour code. I don’t know, and what’s more, I just don’t care. For on my feet beneath the Formica table lurks a pair of perfect pink kitten heels. Even the blisters don’t hurt any more.

June 1st
    Chaos of clothing carpets my bedroom as I attempt to find something to wear. I am going for a drink with David to celebrate the near-completion of the bathroom. Initially refused David’s kind invitation, issued just after an outburst on my part at Digger, whom I caught burying a newly bought loaf of bread under the yew chicken. Having stubbed my toe kicking him, I marched round to complain to David, and felt lame and crabby when he spoke first and asked me to go to the pub. Giles overheard me saying rudely, ‘Sorry, I can’t. I’m busy’, as I stood, arms crossed, leaning on the door of David’s ambulance with Digger cowering within. ‘Yes, you can,’ Giles interrupted. ‘Jenny can babysit. You shouldn’t make up excuses.’ Tried to tread on his toe to shut him up but he skipped out of the way, leaving me red-faced in front of David. Had to say yes to diminish embarrassment.
    Jenny, who has a gold tooth, hennaed hair and a flourishing business growing coriander and basil in poly tunnels for local supermarkets, arrives with her boyfriend. He is called Smalls. ‘It’s a nickname,’ Jenny explains, unnecessarily. Smalls turns out to be one of David’shenchmen, and as well as looking like a Warhammer, he is an avid collector of these oddities. Felix and Giles cannot wait to get me out of the house so that they can leap into pitched battle with Smalls and a cohort of wild woodland elves. The Beauty doesn’t need me either. She is fast asleep in her cot, exhausted by the arrival of three new teeth this week. Despite being redundant, I hang around at home making myself late and telling Jenny dozens of ways to deal with The Beauty, should she wake: ‘But of course she won’t, this is just in case.’
    Take short cut to unknown pub selected by David, and become very lost. The Wheatsheaf, East Bessham is somewhere in a valley fringed with