The Budgens’ house, called The Old Manor and situated just North of Fedborough, was even more luxuriously appointed than the Playfairs’. Felicity told Jude that they had bought it before her husband’s final ambassadorial posting with a view to spending their retirement there. Its splendour suggested there must have been family money around as well as a Foreign Office income and pension.
When Jude had got through on the phone and said what she wanted to discuss, Felicity Budgen had not hesitated about asking her over. ‘Don’s out playing golf. By the time he’s had a couple at the nineteenth hole, he won’t be back till eight at the earliest.’
This was yet another part of the investigation in which Jude could not involve Carole. She felt bad about it, but there was no way she could introduce a stranger into the kind of conversation she was shortly to have.
Though she had expected Lady Budgen to be at best glacially polite, the woman’s manner came across as warmer than that. But presumably that, too, was part of her diplomatic training. If you spend your entire life expressing interest in things that are not intrinsically interesting, you must get very good at faking quite a range of emotions.
Jude was ushered into a sitting room twice the size of the one at Winnows, which had received the same level of attention from interior designers. She accepted the offer of coffee. Felicity said she would get it herself. ‘I’ve given Inez the afternoon off.’
While her hostess was in the kitchen, Jude took in the room. On the mantelpiece stood an array of photographs of Sir Donald in the company of Her Majesty the Queen, as well as a lot of other recognizable foreign dignitaries. The display on the piano featured pictures of three unfeasibly good-looking children at various stages of development, usually on yachts or ponies.
Jude didn’t exactly feel nervous, but she felt tense. There had been a strange quality in Felicity Budgen’s manner both on the phone and now at the Old Manor House. A kind of resignation, as if she had been long expecting an encounter of this kind. As soon as Jude had mentioned ‘what happened in Paris’, Felicity seemed to recognize that the moment had come.
She brought the coffee on a lace-covered silver tray and poured it. There was not the slightest tremor in her hand as she did so. Then when they had both taken elegant sips, she said, ‘Who told you about Paris?’
‘I read about it in Wally Edgington-Bewley’s book.’
‘Ah.’ Lady Budgen let out a light laugh. ‘I had completely forgotten the mention of it in there. I remembered when he first published the book, we were a bit worried. But gradually, as nobody said anything, we realized that we couldn’t be safer.’
‘Oh?’
‘Well, although almost everyone at the club bought a copy from Wally, none of them did more than look at the photographs. I’m sure there’s not a person in the world who’s actually read Courts in the Act.’
‘Well, I read enough to be intrigued. . particularly in the light of Reggie Playfair’s death.’
‘Yes.’ Felicity Budgen looked elegantly thoughtful. ‘Reggie Playfair’s death has been a game-changer in many ways.’
‘Was it in Paris that the relationship started?’
‘Mm. The attraction had always been there, we admitted that to ourselves afterwards. But we never saw each other alone. Always a spouse on the scene. And of course we were preoccupied with our own lives, and in my case with the children. Anyway, I was abroad most of the time, supporting Donald as he climbed the greasy pole of the Foreign Office.’
‘Until Paris.’
‘Yes.’ She sighed. ‘I had come over to settle our youngest into Eton, you know, his first term. I’d done that with all of them when they’d started boarding school. Donald thought I was mollycoddling them. He kept saying that he’d just been sent off to board from India by his parents from the age of seven, and it’d never done him any harm.’
‘And do you agree with that?’
Felicity Budgen smiled. ‘How very perceptive of you, Jude. Donald always said that boarding school had made him the man he was. . and I’m rather afraid that may have been true.’ Not wishing to dwell on what was tantamount to a criticism of her husband, she went on, ‘Anyway, I was in a rather vulnerable state at that time, round the Paris trip. . you know, my age for one thing. Feeling that I was entering a distinctly less glamorous stage of my life. Also I tended to stay with my mother when I was in England, and that was never easy. She didn’t belong to the generation who thought you should bolster your children’s confidence. Rather the reverse.
‘And with the youngest child off at school. . was there any role left for me in life? Except for being frightfully loyal to Donald and smiling at a lot of people for whom I had no feelings at all? Many women perhaps would have been very happy with that situation. Maybe I should have been. But I can’t pretend. I wasn’t.’
‘And then you have the offer of a jaunt to Paris in Wally Edgington-Bewley’s Road-Eater?’
‘Yes. And the dates just worked for me. And we’d both be there without our spouses. I think we both knew something was going to happen. There was a degree of calculation on both sides.’
‘So his offer to accompany you shopping was pre-planned?’
‘We hadn’t actually talked about it, but we knew it was going to happen.’
‘Did you go back to the Cimarosa Hotel?’
‘God, no. He always had more style than that. He booked us into the Georges V.’
‘And the affair continued after Paris?’
‘Yes. When I was in England. Which wasn’t very often.’
‘And when you were back in England the two of you met at the Lockleigh House tennis court?’
Felicity Budgen arched a perfectly sculpted eyebrow. ‘You have been doing your research. Yes, we tried hotels at first. But then I nearly bumped into a colleague of Donald’s at The Dorchester and I realized it was just too risky. The one thing I could not allow to happen was for Donald to find out. My husband is an incredibly straight, uncomplicated man, who thinks the world is equally straight and uncomplicated. If he found out that his wife was having an affair, well, it would destroy him.
‘So my lover and I were like two randy adolescents, desperate to find somewhere we could be alone together. And his place was out of the question because of his wife. So yes. . we ended up with squalid encounters in the club room of Lockleigh House tennis court.’
‘You won’t have been the last couple to do that,’ Jude observed.
‘Oh?’
‘Apparently Ned Jackson has been known to take his conquests there.’
As soon as she’d said it, she realized she shouldn’t have done. She was, after all, speaking to the wife of the Lockleigh House club chairman. And she knew from George Hazlitt that Felicity Budgen had a particular concern for the welfare of Tonya Grace. All in all, what Jude had just said was very stupid. Angry though she was at Ned Jackson’s treatment of Tonya Grace, she didn’t actually want to be the cause of his losing his job.
But fortunately Felicity Budgen seemed too caught up in a reverie of the past to have registered what she said. ‘Yes, I suppose to an outsider our encounters would have appeared squalid. Squalid, but marvellous.’
‘And,’ asked Jude, ‘was it for another squalid but marvellous encounter that you asked Reggie to meet you at the court in the early hours of the Wednesday before last?’
For the first time in their encounter Felicity Budgen’s perfect demeanour cracked. Her jaw dropped and she looked totally flabbergasted as she said, ‘Reggie? What’s he got to do with it? It wasn’t Reggie I went off with in Paris. It was Piers.’