A peaceful Sunday in Ambridge. Helen, whose judgment is never likely to give Solomon sleepless nights, thought it a good idea to give her abusive husband, Rob, a simple Sunday supper – tuna bake with apple pie and custard – before announcing that she was leaving him. Wiser wives would prefer to break these glad tidings on a postcard from Ayers Rock.
It all led to what politicians call a full and frank exchange of views and Rob pinned to the floor of Blossom Cottage with a knife. (This worried me for a while as it would have worried Miss Marple. Neither a fish knife nor a pie slice seemed quite cut out for the job.) Rob and Helen made it safely past the tuna bake but when the apple pie caught fire she spoke up. “I don’t care! I’m leaving and taking Henry with me.” Henry, for late arrivals at the scene of the crime, is her small son. They say everyone’s for mother love, apple pie and tax relief and here we have the first two in one explosive bundle.
Two and a half years of slow thumbscrew torture came to a helter-skelter, hugger-mugger confusing conclusion. Did Rob taunt Helen to kill herself? Or dare her to kill him? Is he, indeed, dead at all?
It was, unusually, a two-hander. One of those head-to-head encounters that are used sparingly but to great effect in EastEnders where Sean O’Connor, The Archers’ exciting editor, comes from and where he is shortly returning. Ambridge, which allows no occasion to go uncelebrated, is even now planning a pageant.
Helen and Rob were alone as they have always been alone. A village where every second person is related to Helen and no one minds their own business has been blindingly oblivious to something very nasty going on in the woodshed. Coercive control is not an easy crime to spot or even spell. It’s quite hard to put your finger on it. As Helen told a helpline, helplessly: “I can’t explain exactly what he does.” It is probably not unlike being married to Dr Jekyll. Everyone pities him for having such a twitchy wife.
Helen’s pregnancy has lent a particular poignancy to her slavery. Now there is the question of the baby, Rob’s unborn son. Just when you thought it was all over, it has barely begun.
