The Country Set

by Fiona Walker

  ‘Lovely house.’ The cleaner was already wiping years of grime from the light fitting.

  Petra reeled sleepily around her kitchen island, picking up the wrappings from several of Fitz’s midnight feasts – at sixteen, he didn’t so much eat as inhale food from its packaging – and apologising while the kettle boiled. ‘I hadn’t expected you quite so early.’ She looked short-sightedly for some glasses, pausing to squint at a message from Gill sent late last night. Gossip! Call me. G.

  ‘We’ve got a lot of work on today.’ The girl was spraying everything in sight with Cif as fast as Petra could clear. ‘Janine said starting here eightish would be fine.’

  ‘That’s a no-ish.’ Petra yawned, having lain awake far too late reading a thriller in which everyone seemed to have dunit. Don’t forget Gunny’s coming 11.21 train, Charlie had texted at seven a.m. ‘I need you to blitz the annex after this – my mother-in-law’s staying there from tonight. She packs white gloves specifically to trail across picture frames and cornicing. Downstairs in this side of the house will need the full monty, too, upstairs just a flick. I’ll try to get the children to tidy before you venture in to vacuum. They can surprise themselves by what colours their carpets are.’

  ‘I’ve only been booked two hours.’

  Petra gritted her teeth. She’d had a weekly half-day Friday-morning slot for at least two years, usually with a team of two. Janine was always doing this. ‘In that case forget upstairs this week. Also the playroom – it’s too messy to go in there now. And ignore my study. It’s beyond hope and I’m not going back in there until September.’

  ‘Janine says you’re a famous writer.’ The girl carried a mop bucket to the sink at speed.

  ‘Half-truths are the foundation of all fiction.’ Petra watched her stoop to cuddle Wilf as she passed. He gave an appreciative body-wag, claws skittering on the flagstones. ‘He’s called Wilf.’

  ‘I love dogs.’

  ‘Wilf’s a Gunn-dog, ha-ha. He’s on gardening leave until October which means he’s a total delinquent. Typical seasonal worker.’

  ‘I think it’s cruel using dogs for hunting.’

  ‘Wilf flushes and picks up rather than hunts – he’s like a menopausal mother of teenagers – but I agree. Dogs should spend their entire lives looking at us adoringly, which is what Wilf does best.’

  The girl started mopping, the flagstones losing layers of grime that Janine usually just polished over. ‘They’re pack creatures, though, aren’t they?’

  ‘Wilf unpacks.’

  ‘You don’t think he gets lonely on his own?’

  ‘Possibly. I’m here most of the time.’ New girl Carly wil be with you furst thing, fully loaded. Gud at grout. Janine T xx, she read now. Her messages were striving to be like Ocado delivery notifications: Carly will be cleaning your house with the pink Henry Hoover 3 at seven thirty a.m. Why was the name Carly familiar? She squinted at her again, battling another yawn, wishing she’d worked out whodunit in her bedside reading before falling asleep with it pressed to her face at three o’clock.

  ‘You could maybe give her a home?’ the girl was saying now. ‘I’ve got pictures on my phone I can show you.’ She fished a sparkly smartphone out of her pocket.

  Gratefully locating a pair of glasses in a fruit bowl, Petra put them on and found herself looking at something that resembled roadkill.

  ‘Like I say, she’s a rescue dog. She’ll be coming up for adoption soon, when she’s healed. You could rehome her here. You’ve got loads of space and you’re obviously animal lovers.’

  Petra could see the girl’s face in focus now, very different without the eyeliner war-paint and with the hair scraped back, but clearly recognisable. ‘OhmyGod, you’re the girl whose children my horse almost jumped on yesterday!’

  ‘Sorry about that.’

  ‘No, I should be the one to apologise. We came back to look for you. I hope we didn’t totally ruin your walk. Were the children terrified?’

  ‘It’s fine. We love horses. All animals.’ She was mopping energetically, throwing chairs onto the kitchen table as she went, like a publican after last orders. There was nothing to her, but she was Herculean.

  Petra moved aside as Carly powered towards her once more. ‘By all means give me the details of the rescue dog. We’d love another, as long as it’s not a pit-bull or anything terrifying.’ Seeing the mop moving towards her, like a swishing jellyfish, Petra hurried to pull on her boots. ‘Just popping out to check over the horses.’

  ‘My baby boy loves your little ponies. We say hello through the hedge on the lane.’

  ‘That’s sweet. Bring him round to meet them properly.’

  *

  Embarrassed by such kindness, Carly rushed to empty the bucket before starting on the utility room, which was three times the size of her own little rented kitchen.

  She already loved the house. It was her dream home, although it needed a much better cleaning team than Janine’s: there were corners hammocked in spiders’ webs, the kitchen kick-boards were a disgrace, and the white goods hadn’t been wiped over in many a month. Yet it was the friendliest and huggiest house Carly could ever remember entering. She wouldn’t have been surprised if the Muppets came bursting out of the hand-made kitchen cupboard to get the party started. She danced a couple of steps.

  ‘Are you the new cleaner?’ A languid blond youth was watching her from the door through to the kitchen, probably no older than sixteen despite gym-squared shoulders and nifty sideburns.

  ‘No, I’m burgling the place. Stop walking on my wet floor.’

  ‘I can walk on water.’ He padded towards her in artfully mismatched socks, holding up a phone in a distinctive pink glitter case. ‘This yours?’

  She reached to take it, but he snatched it away out of reach and took a selfie. ‘Is this model any good? Dad gave me his old BlackBerry when his contract was renewed, but I can’t get my head round it. It looks like a calculator and is full of shit.’ He frowned at the phone, flicking the sliding screen back and forth a few times. ‘This one is way neater.’

  ‘It’s okay.’ Carly had got it cheap off one of Ash’s cousins.

  ‘You ever use the instant-messaging app?’

  ‘Some.’

  ‘There, I’ve added my number to your contacts.’ He handed over the phone. ‘Fitz.’

  ‘Carly.’

  ‘My dad’s a Charlie.’

  ‘That’s his problem.’

  ‘Don’t get snarly.’

  ‘Are you rapping or something?’

  He laughed, moving aside to let her do the bit of floor he was standing on. ‘Nice inks. My kid sister’s pony has dapples like that.’

  Carly tilted her head to look at him irritably. She didn’t have time for some spotty, precocious teenager practising his pick-up lines on her. ‘My husband’s got Roman armour tattooed across one shoulder. Spartacus has steelwork like that.’

  ‘Fitz, you’re up!’ cried Petra’s voice from the patio doors. ‘Gunny’s coming today. I need you to hide the entire top floor of this house. I’m sure you have the technology to cloak it under radar or a force shield or something. Or just pick up all your clothes. Now stop distracting Carla.’

  ‘Lee. Carlee,’ he corrected fiercely. Then, with a wink at Carly, he melted away.

  *

  Janine picked Carly up in her little van just before ten.

  ‘How d’you like the farmhouse? Lovely, yeah?’ Janine waved at their employer as Petra led out her chestnut mare ahead of her little girls with their ponies, all ready to hack out together. ‘Petra’s a doll.’

  ‘It’s okay.’ She glanced over her shoulder as they drove away, longing to hold onto the heart-lift its messy cheerfulness had given her. Petra had made her two cups of tea, fed her lots of double-choc cookies and told her she was Janine’s secret weapon, which she already knew but it was good to hear, especially from someone as smart as Petra Gunn.

  ‘Such a nice lady. I bet you thought Catherine Zeta-Jones
, yeah? Hubby looks like Jude Law. Hot.’ Janine rattled her long nails in a knuckle flick. ‘Bit bald, mind you.’ She turned into the driveway of the stud. ‘That lush son of theirs’ll go the same way, mark my words. Get me. Cougar! I usually clean their house personally, but I had business to attend to this morning.’

  Cooking the books and drinking one too many cans of Monster, Carly suspected, her eyes stretching wide as they drove up the long, potholed tarmac stripe to a house as big as a barrack block. ‘Is this place for real?’ She’d only ever hung over its far fences, carrots in hand.

  ‘There used to be a back drive for trade, Granddad Norm says, but the old man here sold the land and got denied access so we get the full frontal,’ Janine said, as they swung into a big cobbled parking area, already rammed with cars. ‘He dropped dead yesterday. Be a bit sensitive. This lot make the Mitchell family look loved up.’

  Now she tells me. Carly started to panic. She recognised Bay’s Land Rover and Flynn the farrier’s truck, alongside half a dozen shiny saloons and muddy pick-ups, and a few rusting farm vehicles.

  A chunky little woman, who looked like a pug in a fright wig, hurried up. ‘Thank God! There’s not a moment to lose. I’ve made a start in the drawing room where we’re receiving well-wishers and officials. I’ve made the rest of the house off limits, even the toilet, so you’d best start there. The vicar’s looking a bit desperate. Do your magic, Janine.’ She ushered them in through a side door. It was gloomy and dank, the air thick with dust. The smell of old dog, stale tobacco, damp walls and waxed coats was overpowering.

  Carly had never seen a house so old-fashioned, decaying and unloved, its walls weeping leaks and losing plaster, half the lights not working, its many paintings cracked and yellowing beneath thick nicotine stains. Compared to the bright, fragrant shabby chic of the farmhouse, it was a dark, filthy museum.

  The cleaning was industrial in scale but mercifully straightforward. Janine assigned herself polishing, maxing her way through the big boxes of pound-shop anti-bacterial wipes and microfibre cloths as she shone up pottery, porcelain, silverware and bronze, discreetly checking out the bases for manufacturers’ marks, taking a few snaps on her phone of her favourites – ‘In case they accuse us of damage,’ she told Carly unconvincingly – and then getting out her portable steam cleaner for tricky crevices. Carly, tasked with floors, dusting, de-cobwebbing, airing drapes and washing down white goods, was equipped with an extendable duster, a bucket of bleachy water and a sponge.

  Janine’s laziness always maddened Carly, but she was paying the wages and she was at least a good motivator. ‘Doing a fantastic job, Carl. Go! Keep up the pace! Wipe, wipe, wipe. You’re a superstar!’ It was like doing a fitness class with an eager instructor. Ash could learn a lot.

  But it was the house itself that really made Carly race along in her fastest gear, mopping and waxing and dusting and disinfecting, desperate to bring it back to life. The more she wiped away neglect and grime, the more she saw its true colours – bays, chestnuts, greys, blacks and golden duns. She needed blinkers. There were horses everywhere – photographs, paintings, sculptures, shoes, rosettes, certificates, trophies. Horses’ breath was the breeze through this house, their hoofs its heartbeat.

  Pug-eyed housekeeper Pip thrust her head into a room sporadically to check on progress, alternately clutching trays of teacups or arms full of box files. ‘Can you please go faster? Alice is due back any minute.’

  ‘It’s weird,’ Janine whispered. ‘All sorts of suits are here, but none of the family have turned up yet. The bigwigs probably just want a good snoop. Bet they never came here when he was alive. Scary old bastard, may God rest his soul.’ She crossed herself quickly, cloth in hand.

  Carly recalled Ash telling her that he’d been horse-whipped by the owner. She imagined him as Grinch-like and ferociously private, unloved by anyone except his horses.

  But when Alice, the eldest grandchild, arrived, she was a proper swollen-eyed, pale-faced mourner in a black trouser suit and red slash of lipstick.

  ‘Been to the lawyer’s,’ Janine hissed in an undertone to Carly, as they cleaned the big hallway, strata of dust falling from the tops of oil paintings’ frames. ‘Not good news by the look of it.’

  The voices rose and fell in the drawing room.

  Carly took a cigarette break outside, gravitating towards farrier Flynn, who was sitting on his tailgate in his leather apron with a mug of tea, shaking his bleached highlights to his iPod, like a head-banger at a silent disco.

  Flynn was one of Ash’s pre-army band of brothers, this one without leadership or discipline. The kids he’d grown up with, now hulking men, were regulars in Carly’s sitting room where they gathered to play shoot-’em-up games on the high-tech television, a case of beer within easy reach. Carly liked them more than she’d expected to – gentle, silent Ink, a close relative and Traveller, with his wetsuit of tattoos right up to his chin, was surprisingly courteous and polite; Hardcase, the roadie-turned-plumber, played soulful guitar. Of them all, she found Flynn the most accessible, with his ready smile and cheeky banter. He might resemble an indie rocker and his phone contacts read like the register of an all-girls sixth form, but he was brilliant with her kids, and beneath all the painted leather and carousing, there was a hard-working dad.

  Today, in ripped denim and compression T-shirt, he was taking a rest from trimming all the stud horses’ hoofs, back-breaking hours of jabbing his denim hips into their ribs to ask them to raise their feet so he could rasp them, a large-scale Janine giving horsy manicures.

  ‘D’you know what’s going on round here?’ Carly asked him, waiting as he pulled the speaker buds from his ears. ‘It’s well weird in there.’

  ‘Not a clue, sweetlips.’ He raked back the Kurt Cobain hair and flashed his one-wink farrier smile, offering a light for her dying rollie. ‘Lester’s trap’s tighter than a snare on a rabbit leg.’

  ‘Who’s Lester?’

  He pointed out a tiny wizened figure in a three-piece tweed suit with a black armband waving a long stick around as he herded horses into the gated stable-yard. In their midst was a small, familiar gold rebel, with a blond-streaked Mohican mane, black tail high.

  ‘Spirit!’ Carly laughed, running to the gate. The colt gave her a sideways look. She tongue-clicked and chirruped to him, as she had all summer. With a high-pitched nicker, he high-stepped to greet her, stopped to eyeball the farrier’s truck suspiciously, then bounded forwards again, thrusting his nose through the wooden cross bars.

  ‘Get a rope on him!’ yelled the wizened man.

  Flynn was straight over the gate in a move that briefly put Carly in uncomfortably close proximity with his armpit and crotch. The foal charged off across the cobbles with a snare-drum skitter.

  ‘Blast and bother!’ the tweedy old man cursed, as Flynn laughed, arms lifted in defeat.

  ‘That one’s got you beat!’

  ‘If you say so.’

  Proud of the foal for his anarchic streak, Carly turned to watch a fresh convoy of cars arriving in the yard, forced to double-park behind Janine’s van and a row of identikit funeral-director saloons.

  ‘Never known it as busy as this.’ Flynn let himself back through the gate. ‘Just shows it takes a death to breathe life into a place.’

  They were all arriving now. Another Percy-family granddaughter – a jaw-dropping beauty with chestnut hair and a deeply freckled tan – followed by a man in a suit, then a locksmith.

  Carly knew she should get back to work, but she gazed into Flynn’s van as she smoked her skinny down to the last shred, transfixed by the furnace and tools, the shelves of freshly forged metal crescents, the pile of old ones below, twisted nails sprouting from them. ‘Does it hurt the horses having shoes nailed on?’

  ‘No more than Janine’s acrylic jobs hurt you.’

  ‘I don’t let her do mine.’ She showed him her short-nailed fingertips. The heat was coursing through them again, telling her something. ‘Hard-working h
ands, these.’

  ‘Long nails feel good on your back, sweetlips.’ He chuckled, the farrier wink back in play as he struck a Playgirl pose on his tailgate, bent knee under a muscular tanned arm.

  ‘Not so great in your balls,’ she muttered. ‘What’s it like as a job then, farriery?’

  ‘Pays well. Good for booty calls. Shit for your marriage. Horses are thick sods. Ash has already turned me down so no point asking, sweetlips.’

  ‘Come again?’

  ‘I’ve been looking for an apprentice a while now,’ Flynn explained. ‘Most of the lads are flakes. Ash always was a good grafter and has the Turner knack with neds. I suggested he could learn the trade and we’d make it a partnership eventually. Says he’s not interested.’

  ‘He’s going to be a personal trainer.’

  ‘More fool him.’

  ‘He reckons the Cotswolds are full of fat bankers who want to look ripped.’

  ‘And their bored pretty wives.’ He watched her face with a slow, lazy smile. ‘First they get it on at the gym and the shops, then they get on a horse. Costs the same as a new pair of high heels every month, a set of these.’ He picked up a shoe. ‘These are Jimmy Choofs.’

  Dismissing him with an irritated wave, Carly headed back into the house where she found Janine listening in at the closed sitting-room door, leggings straining over a bottom that was twerking with excitement. She waved a microfibre cloth at Carly to keep schtum. ‘I think they’re reading out the will,’ she breathed.

  A moment later, the door burst open and she leaped away, waving her hand-held steamer at a large wooden sculpture of a bear, sporting a lot of hats, as Pip dashed out with the flame-haired daughter and the red-lipped, red-eyed one in the power suit, who cannoned into the other two when she spotted Janine’s cloudy blasts.

  ‘Christ, what is that?’

  ‘The cleaner, Mrs Petty. Very professional,’ Pip assured her.

  ‘The bear in the hats.’

  ‘Mummy gave it to Grumps for his seventy-fifth,’ said the redhead. ‘It came from Germany. It’s been there ages.’

  ‘She can have it back,’ Alice said, with satisfaction. ‘Now let’s find somewhere quiet to telephone a few more names on this list and break the news. The library.’ She opened a door, then backed out as a small, disc-shaped robot shot between her legs.