“We may have to dress like peasants,” complained Maddy, spraying the damp garments with the best part of her new bottle of Jo Malone Lino nel Vento, “but we don’t have to smell like them!”
The next day and with Maddy lunching with Lillian, Izzie’s project was to prepare for the Country Lifestyle interview. She took a long cool look at the house and garden. Pru had been right in her debriefing after the Daily Mail feature hit the newsstands. They really hadn’t been convincing enough.
She tried to imagine what Pru would say . . . “Think peasant—but sexy. More organic, darling. I want to smell the authenticity!” Okay, then—this called for some capital investment.
The out-of-town supermarket in Ringford prided itself on its out-of-season fruit and veg—“queer gear” they called it. Into her basket went everything that looked luscious and wholesome and she returned to Huntingford House in triumph!
An hour later the kitchen and hallway were bestrewn with galvanized buckets of eggs, bowls of earthy mushrooms, pots of growing herbs (plucked from the plastic and cellophane wrappers and plunged into clay pots of compost). Janet’s quilts and woolly wraps replaced Maddy’s suede jackets and pink Boden mac, and Izzie had carefully rubbed soil into the gleaming limestone floor.
“It looks like shit!” exclaimed Maddy delightedly as she arrived back. “You’re a genius! Let’s have a cup of coffee and then we’ll tackle the garden together once we’ve picked up the kids. Have we got anything to feed them?”
“Yeah—I did Tesco. Sausages, pizza, alphabet potatoes, pasta, and peas. Everyone’s taste catered for.” Izzie put the kettle on. “How did it go with Lillian?”
“She’s a funny old stick.” Maddy sighed, pulling off her shoes and wiggling her toes. “She’s so prim and proper—Simon used to reckon she needed a good rogering—but d’you know I think we may have underestimated her. It took two dry sherries to get her to loosen her stays a bit—and by the end she was quite pink in the face and giggly. Thanks.” She took a gulp from the mug Izzie put in front of her. “She earns a packet, it turns out, and there’s no way we could match what she’s getting, but I think she liked it here. She kept talking about that night with the team and the doughnuts, and I have to say I shamelessly played on it.” Maddy smiled smugly. “She starts on Tuesday.”
“Result!” Izzie punched the air. “This calls for a biscuit.”
“No, it doesn’t,” said Maddy, reaching for her bag. “This calls for a fag.”
Ten minutes later Maddy set off to collect all the children, after Izzie had run through the drill at St. Boniface’s, and left Pasco helping Izzie prepare supper. With everything cooking away in the Aga, Izzie and Pasco wandered out into the almost untouched garden. Among the dormant shrubs, daffodils were starting to peep their heads, and purple crocuses and snowdrops nestled around the bases of the trees. Box plants and tatty lavender lined the brick pathways. Someone long ago had obviously designed it with care, but now the remnants of last summer’s perennials still cluttered the borders and slimy leaves clogged the bases of the hedges. “Just you wait and see, Mr. Pasco,” she said, nuzzling his ear. “It may not look much now, but by tomorrow, it will even impress Alan Titchmarsh.”
The children piled out of Maddy’s car a short time later and ran screaming with excitement up the stairs, leaving a heap of school debris in their wake. “Supper won’t be long,” Izzie called after them.
“Well,” said Maddy, dropping her keys on the sideboard. “St. Uglyface’s was an education. I can’t remember the last time I saw shell suits, and so many of them in one place. I must alert Vogue that they are staging a comeback. And what about that woman who looks like Jimmy Savile? Frankly some of them gave me an apocalyptic vision of what can happen when cousins marry.”
Izzie chuckled. “You snob! Better steer clear of Jean Luc then.”
“I’m sure I heard someone call a child Lacey-Marie. What’s that about?”
“I thought you were impressed by double-barreled names? We’ve got plenty of them at St. B.’s too you know . . . the trouble is, it’s their first names.”
Fed and replete, the children went out into the garden to burn off some energy, pursued by their mothers. “Right, I’ve got a plan,” said Izzie. “The magazine is bound to want to photograph your gracious garden, so here’s what we do . . .”
By the next morning, which dawned bright and sunny, they had perfected their spiel. One thing Pru had stressed was that they weren’t to be New Age in the orthodox sense—not Glastonbury and free love. They were to be in the vanguard of a New New Age, so New, in fact, that it was Old. Well, it had made sense when Pru had said it . . . This wasn’t the quasi-Eastern stuff people had been kicking around since the turn of the millennium—the yoga, the chakras, the yin and yang bullshit. This was to be a return to pagan European spirituality, with female wisdom in harmony with nature and in tune with the seasons. That was why Izzie knew the garden had to be just right. She’d seen photos of the veg gardens at Villandry in the Sunday papers and that, in a kind of tatty version, was what she had wanted to achieve.
They were lying in wait for the journalists this time, seasoned campaigners that they now were, like actors awaiting their cue. Izzie was in the back garden, with a cotton scarf tied round her head and a hoe in one hand. Maddy had rolls, bought from the deli that morning, warming in the Aga, ready to pop into a huge basket lined with dock leaves. As the Alfa crunched its way up the drive, Izzie threw herself into concentrated hoeing—realizing belatedly that she didn’t actually know what this entailed. But she swung the metal bit at the bottom to and fro a bit, trying not to damage any of their arrangement. Once she was reasonably sure she’d been clocked, she turned round and gave the newcomers a seraphic smile and a wave of welcome.
“Oh, I’m sorry. I must have lost track of time. When I’m out here, I just forget everything else. It’s so peaceful! Let me introduce myself. I’m Isabel Stock. You must be Araminta, and Giles, is it? Lovely to meet you. Shall we go into the house? I think Madeleine is still baking for the day.”
These two are a bit posh, Izzie reflected worriedly. Araminta was unhealthily thin, very fair, very county, although she looked like the sort who’d be allergic to horses. Giles was the beefy type, resplendent in thick cords, a waistcoat (he would have pronounced it “wesskit”) and the sort of horrible tweed jacket that country blokes wear shooting. He was lugging an aluminium box of cameras and seemed to do most of the talking.
“Smashing part of the world this. Used to have a bit of a bolt hole over Rousham way. Jolly cold in winter, though. Could never get the bloody fire going. Took a girlfriend down there one time—she had to skip with my dressing gown cord in the morning to get warm. Funny thing—never really saw her after that.” Funny thing, thought Izzie. Is missing the subject out of a sentence part of the curriculum in private school?
They went through the story again, with far more aplomb this time and took it in turns to bustle about like headless chickens, engaging in pointless domestic tasks—wiping mushrooms, pretending to churn butter (they’d tipped a few spoonfuls of marge in the bottom of the tub and produced it with pride after a couple of turns of the crank), prodding at the centpertuis, and slowly melting the beeswax. Pasco pottered around the floor, looking a bit girlie in one of Janet’s treasured baby smocks. They were both hoping he wouldn’t hitch it up to reveal his disposable nappy. By the time they provided lunch—goat’s cheese quiches and a gnarly salad, distressed to make it look homemade—they’d already posed for at least two rolls of film. It seemed to be going rather well.
As they made their way out into the garden, Izzie could hear herself waffling on about the product. “We believe strongly in natural remedies—organic, of course—and we use them on ourselves and the children—and the animals.” What the hell had made her say that?
“Oh, you keep livestock too?”
“Um—yes. Of course. Not much, you know, just some chickens and a goat or two.”
“O
h, maybe we could do some pictures with them later. That would be terrific.”
“Ooh, no,” said Izzie hurriedly. “The . . . the billy goat is very aggressive—doesn’t like men. He’d butt Giles soon as look at him!”
“So would I,” breathed Araminta fervently. “But he’s got a fiancée.”
It didn’t take long to set up the first shots in the garden. Against the background of apple trees, Izzie and Maddy posed decoratively, making sure that their petticoats showed below their dirndl skirts.
In the vegetable patch, the serried ranks of broccoli were wilting a little, even though Izzie had watered the florets when she’d stuck them into the ground. The leeks were standing up well, though, as were the carrots, bought at huge expense with leaves still attached and thrust into the soil in neat rows. There was a sticky moment when Maddy caught one of the red cabbages with the heel of her clog, and it rolled out of alignment with the others. Fortunately, Araminta and Giles were engaged in a rather heated private conversation of their own and didn’t notice Maddy busily trying to nudge it back in place.
The couple broke off and continued with the shoot in a slightly embarrassed way. They’d got a lovely scene set up, with Maddy holding a basket over one arm, while Izzie sat on a wooden bench, struggling to shell peas. What was it with mange-touts?
When Crispin arrived back with the children, he’d entered into the spirit of it all—if anything a little too enthusiastically. All collarless shirt and moleskin trousers (tied with string below the knee, presumably to keep his ferrets where he wanted them). He introduced himself as the gardener, and Izzie let him wax lyrical about the soil and the composting operation he claimed to have set up.
The children’s costumes were not quite so successful. Izzie and Maddy had laid out four outfits in Florence and Will’s bedrooms, and left instructions that they were to put them on as soon as they got back from school. Just like dressing up—what fun! The girls had complied reasonably well and looked ducky in their little pinafore dresses, but Florence appeared in her Barbie clippy-clop shoes, and Jess was waving a magic wand. The boys had got halfway there—Will had donned the cord breeches but had on his Toy Story check shirt and cowboy holster. Charlie had put on all the gear but had also found some hair gel and a pair of sunglasses—Men in Taupe. The children were all ravenous, as ever, and a mutiny was steadily brewing over the lack of Jaffa Cakes, normally a permanent fixture on the kitchen table. Wholemeal shortbread just didn’t fit the bill. They were pressed into staying still for the last few shots with whispered promises of as many Jaffa Cakes as they could eat, and Araminta and Giles pulled out of the drive at last.
Over supper—peanut butter sandwiches and a mountain of biscuits by way of compensation—Izzie voiced something that was worrying them both: the looming specter of the Easter hols.
“Well, I hate to say it, but once again state wins over private! We only get two weeks at St. Boniface’s and they can do the play scheme for the first week. My parents, God bless ’em, have offered to have them for the second, so I’m going to be able to work pretty much as normal.”
“Yeah, yeah! I know—pay more, get less. But can Charlie spell bugger? You see, we get a better class of swear words at Eagles. I’m just going to have to muddle through with the kids here. I mean, it works all right with Pasco, so it can’t be all that much worse, can it?”
Izzie shrugged eloquently and passed along the Jaffa Cakes. “We’ll soon see, won’t we?”
Geoff Haynes, the accountant Peter had suggested, was definitely more of a Geoffrey. Geoff was far too common for a man of Haynes’s imposing presence. Nor was he the stringy, greasy stereotype Maddy had always imagined accountants to be. And it wasn’t just his height—though he was a towering six foot two at least. He had the dark gray suit, perfect midnight-blue shirt, and cufflinks (always a sign of class) of a man who would cut a much more appropriate dash in a boardroom in Canary Wharf than on Ringford High Street.
He looked too young to be completely retired—he couldn’t have been more than fifty—but when Maddy had called him over the weekend, he had been evasive about the type of companies he had worked with in London, just referring to the bit of consultancy he did “here and there.” She’d come across types like him before, though, through work events with Simon, and gut instinct told her that he had been involved in some fairly blue-chip stuff. He was certainly more FTSE than face balm, and anyway Peter wouldn’t have put her in touch with a wide boy, would he?
In fact, Maddy suspected that Peter had already squeezed in a phone call to Geoff since his visit on Friday, and when Izzie and she met him the following week at Locations, a rather chichi joint in Ringford (or, correction, the only chichi joint in Ringford), he seemed a bit more briefed and ready for their sales pitch than perhaps he ought. Maddy just made a mental note to thank Peter when she got home.
Pen at the ready, she had knuckled down to listen to what he had to say. After a couple of hours and a couple of bottles of very drinkable Bordeaux, she had pages and pages of information about what the two of them needed to do to get the business kosher.
“I think, ladies,” he concluded as he stirred his coffee and flashed a fabulous set of teeth, “that you have a very interesting idea here, and if it would help I would be delighted to act as your consultant, if you will. Leave the tiresome details to me. You just need to concentrate on getting your product out, but we can arrange regular meetings, perhaps twice a month while things are getting under way and then take it from there.”
“But, Geoff . . . rey,” drawled Izzie, her face flushed from the effect of the wine, and pretty punch-drunk by the force of his dynamism, “you can’t be doing this out of a favor to Maddy’s stepfather. How much do we pay you for your services?”
“Let’s just see, shall we?” he replied. “I’ll very much take a backseat, and we’ll see how things pan out. Perhaps when you float the company, I can become a shareholder.” They all laughed heartily at this—imagine Maddy and Izzie on the stock market with their little pots of gunge.
Out on the street, he kissed them both on the cheek in a very gentlemanly fashion, and they all made a date to meet again the following week.
“He’s a bit of a dish.” Izzie giggled, taking Maddy’s arm as they walked off down the street. “That distinguished gray hair and those twinkly eyes. I could rather go for him.”
“You are a woman of eclectic tastes, Mrs. Stock. I thought you went for the bronzed agricultural type.”
“Oh, give over,” Izzie laughed and punched her, rather too enthusiastically, on the arm.
The following morning they met at nine thirty outside the bank and, with Pasco holding hands alongside, they made a beeline for the business manager. The whole ordeal was pretty painless, no thanks to Pasco’s attempts to dismantle the point-of-sale boards, and within minutes they had opened a healthy business account with the funds to date transferred from Maddy’s account. Izzie rubbed her hands with glee. “Once that fat checkbook arrives, it’s payday!”
By the next day, Lillian was ensconced in Maddy’s study. She had arrived like a gust of wind in a curious pale green mohair coat which, with her orange hair and one of Maddy’s cream pashminas, made her look not unlike the Irish flag. Within minutes she had unloaded a PC from the back of her car (“I filched it from Workflow Systems before the liquidators moved in,” she explained sheepishly), had handed an astonished Maddy a list of stationery she would need, and was beginning to put names and addresses into a database.
“Well, Hurricane Lillian is here,” whispered Maddy to Izzie when she arrived later in the morning. “I offered her a cup of coffee a few minutes ago, but she says she doesn’t have a break till eleven.”
“At least someone knows what she is doing around here.” Izzie took off her coat and hung it over the back of the kitchen chair. “I had a call from that business banker yesterday afternoon. She said she didn’t want to say anything in front of you at the branch yesterday, but Marcus and my banking rec
ord is so poor they are a bit dubious about allowing me to open another account.” She slumped into the chair, almost in tears. “They say I need a reference. Who the hell will vouch for me?”
Maddy stopped midway through filling the coffee mugs. “I don’t believe it. They can’t do that!”
“Oh, Maddy darling. You are so wonderfully naïve. Of course they can. I don’t think Marcus and I have been in credit since he was made redundant. Once the mortgage payments and all that go out each month, the bank has to fund everything. I almost wrote to them last year to thank them for our Christmas presents. She was very apologetic but certainly got her point over.”
“Well, I’m phoning Peter.” And before Izzie could stop her, she lit a cigarette—her first of the day, boy, was she doing well—picked up the phone, and was dialing.
Rather disconcertingly Peter confirmed everything Izzie had said. “They are powerful institutions, these banks. Listen, darling, leave it with me and I’ll make a few calls. Would Izzie mind giving me her banking details, and I’ll see what I can do?”
“Now sod them and listen,” said Maddy, putting down the phone. “We’ve got work to do. Here’s Lillian’s list—and we need a ton more Jiffy bags. I’ll get on with straining the next batch. Can you get down to that wholesaler outside Ringford and get the stuff from this list? Oh, Izzie, get—”
“A receipt!” Izzie laughed and slammed the door behind her.
Will and Florence’s schools both broke up for the Easter holidays the following Friday lunchtime. Bloody private schools, thought Maddy again, as she collected Will, plus his bin liner full of Easter cards and fluffy chicken pictures which she’d have to leave lying around the house for a time until it was safe to bin them.
“Maaaddy,” came a shriek from across the car park as she stuffed bags and the children into the car. Sue Templeton, the other disadvantage of private schools, loomed into view, with Josh and Abigail-the-angelic by her side. “I haven’t really seen you for simply ages. You seem to fly in and fly out these days. And who on earth was that chap who collected them last week in the corduroys tied up with string? Keep hearing about you everywhere. Hardly recognized you and Izzie in your . . . unusual outfits. Quite the country image you appeared in the Mail.”
Goodbye, Jimmy Choo Page 19