The Country Set

by Fiona Walker

  15

  ‘Get a wriggle on, Carl, love. I’ve got good news.’ Janine was already waiting at the end of the path for Carly when she’d dropped her kids at her mother-in-law’s maisonette ahead of Feather Dusters’ weekly cleaning assignation at Upper Bagot Farmhouse. It was a gig they now tackled together, along with a teenage Turner niece on ‘work experience’. Ahead lay three hours in which Janine would eye up the Gunns’ collectables and retrieve her robot floor cleaner from spaniel Wilf, the niece fold pretty triangles in the loo-roll ends and Carly do the rest of the work.

  Janine’s long talons drummed a marching rhythm on the gate she was holding open for Carly, nail art currently featuring summery surf boards and sunbeds. ‘We’re on,’ she whispered, as they hurried to the van. ‘Jed and Mark say you can come along tonight.’ She turned to block her way, looking at her victoriously, and Carly worried that she’d forgotten yet another Turner birthday. ‘Easier to see now the wheat’s cut. Should have some good sport.’

  Her throat tightened. She’d always considered Janine’s promise to take her lamping with the Turner boys to be a hollow one, accustomed to her sister-in-law’s watch-out-what-you-ask-for threats. Her bluff had been called. ‘I’m busy.’ She knee-jerked into retreat.

  ‘No, you’re not. I’ve checked. Ash is good to look after the kids. I told him we were having a girls’ night out. Didn’t he say?’

  ‘First I’ve heard of it.’ Not that he’d said anything much beyond ‘Pass the ketchup’ since getting back, the post-gym swaggering lasting until his last chicken nugget over lunch, after which he was straight back on the console ripping into the enemy.

  Janine’s thick, sculpted brows lowered over Turner wolf eyes, alpha to omega. ‘You not interested in coming no more, Carl? It took a lot of persuading to organise this.’

  While Carly didn’t much care if refusing alienated her further – and she had absolutely zero desire to watch animals get hunted down – the need to know more about the dogs involved kept her mouth shut. Whatever the Turners did wouldn’t be on the brutal scale Pricey had been trained for, but there would be lurchers galore, that lean and fast band of trained thieves to which Pricey belonged.

  She thought about the dog’s smiling face snaking into her hot hands that morning, the solid thump of her body wagging against her legs, all the damage deep inside her head still unhealed. Starved to be aggressive, the nurse had said, beaten too.

  ‘You up for it or not, Carl?’ Janine demanded.

  Carly shrugged assent, the pack outsider adopting her customary submissive pose, mind whirring. She’d asked, she’d got. But she’d wanted tell, not show.

  It played on her mind as they cleaned the Gunns’ house, keeping her head down in a frantic whirl of vacuuming and dusting. She looked forward to coming to this farmhouse most of all those she cleaned, loving its homeliness and family chaos, the preparations for setting off on holiday the following morning currently littered everywhere.

  Janine was less impressed. ‘Not dissing Petra, but it’s not like she works hard – hubby’s a brief so must rake it in – and this place is always a pit.’

  Having caught a glimpse of a long to-do list and house-sitter guide abandoned on the kitchen island, Carly reserved judgement. She found the place soulless without Petra, who’d dashed out to the supermarket leaving an apologetic note. Springer spaniel Wilf followed her around, his dark eyes mournful, alert to suitcases open on beds. She hugged him in quiet corners as she plugged and unplugged Henry Hoover.

  ‘Good job his coat’s waterproof. Mum’s always sobbing into it too.’ The oldest Gunn son caught her with her forehead pressed to the dog’s ruff on the attic landing.

  ‘I’m not crying,’ she muttered, starting to dust again.

  ‘You still haven’t messaged me.’ He was watching her from the doorway, all golden tan in faded Hollister shorts and a vintage The Smiths tour T-shirt.

  ‘Funny that.’

  ‘You’ll find me under F for Fitz.’

  ‘And I’m B for Busy, mate.’

  He slid down the wall beside her to a sitting position, head tilted against the end of a bookshelf. Carly had never seen so many books as in the Gunn house, except in libraries. This landing had floor-to-ceiling shelves, from which the teenager now pulled a hardback novel.

  ‘Mum’s friend Pearl.’ He held it up so she could see the name on the cover above a picture of a jar with a butterfly in it. ‘She used to house-sit while we were away.’ His posh-boy voice was redeemed by its faint echo of Petra’s Emmerdale curl of laughter. ‘She’s my badass godmum. Wilf has her number, so the vet bills were off the scale. We’ve got pros coming this time. It’ll be like gundog boot camp.’

  ‘Sounds good.’ She stayed low, dusting the skirting boards.

  He picked another book from the shelves beside him, flipping it open. ‘Love in the Time of Cholera.’ An eyebrow rose as he checked out the cover. ‘Sound like good holiday reading to you?’

  ‘Maybe.’

  To her alarm, he lay down beside her at socket level, his eyes as sweet, dark and beseeching as Wilf’s. ‘What are you currently reading?’

  ‘Elwyn Hartley Edwards’s The Complete Book of the Horse.’ Her village-fête buy was her bible. At least forty years old, well-thumbed and foxed with a first page inscribed ‘Hermione Austen 1973’, she’d read it from cover to cover all summer.

  ‘At least it’s not one of Mum’s. If you like horses, have you met ours?’

  ‘I always say hello over the gate.’

  Grinning, he jumped up. ‘I’ll introduce you properly. The Shetland’s badass. Come on.’

  ‘I’m working.’

  ‘Take a break. I insist.’

  ‘You’re all right.’ She waved him away.

  ‘I know I’m all right. I’ll put the kettle on, shall I?’

  ‘If it makes you happy.’ Grateful to see him go, Wilf bounding downstairs in his wake, she took her vinegar spray and started at the little casement windows, looking out across the orchards to the valley, the sky as perfect hot blue as any she could remember.

  *

  When Kit arrived in Compton Magna, cars were parked to either side of the Old Almshouses. His drive gates were blocked, and more cars were arriving to double-park along Church Lane. A scattering of mourners were standing about, looking hot and uncomfortable in black suits and dresses, some making their way into the church, others admiring his garden where the remainders of his children’s Donald Trump scarecrow topped the bonfire ready for autumn.

  His summer visit was usually his favourite, the start of harvest drawing the skin and pith from the hills as its crops were cut and roots lifted. This should be Hermia’s Lughnasa. But his body now experienced a déjà vu so wintry that iced water might have been injected straight into a vein.

  A pack of men in dark suits were gathered by the lichgate, a tight group of chattering women a few feet away, the two intrinsically connected, like black Labradors being walked by village wives. The little Compton church was very good for funerals, the floral tributes lavish, donations generous, adherence to tradition unswerving and singing voices loud.

  Kit was very bad at funerals. Bloody-minded. Selfish. Grief-stricken.

  Hermia had left no script, no stage plan. It had all been left open to interpretation, her husband’s wishes wholly different from those of her family.

  He had no desire to remember the day they had buried her.

  He drove straight on, almost flattening a wizened couple zimmering across the lane in front of him. In his blinkered haste, he missed the turn beside the Green and found himself shooting out onto Plum Run, driving straight past Upper Bagot Farmhouse, barely recognisable as the place he’d moved into with a young wife a quarter of a century earlier.

  He looked quickly away, the memories still too painful. His children had been born there. His wife had lost her liberty there.

  The view back across the vale through the fruit trees soothed him, the drystone wall reb
uilt with new honeycomb nuggets, the orchards mown, the county boundary sign dug out of the undergrowth and repainted – two counties sharing one of the best views in the Cotswolds. It had been the view from his and Hermia’s bedroom. On a clear day, you could see past the Malvern Hills to the Black Mountains.

  It took all his effort to stay on the road and drive to the Jugged Hare car park where he holed up in the far corner overlooking the orchards, a storm raging in his head. Outside was clear blue sky. The tempest raged just for him, blood drumming through his ears like rain. The pub was taking a delivery, beer kegs rolling down into the cellar in great thunderclaps. An unfamiliar landlord collecting a tray of bottles from the delivery lorry cast a suspicious glance across the tarmac at the ashen-faced man parked in the far corner by a Cotswold Way map and dog-poo bin.

  Kit put his head into his hands. A confirmed atheist who had no truck with superstition, he didn’t believe in ghosts for a minute, but whenever he came back to the village, he could hear Hermia speak as he did nowhere else, that emotionally infused voice stolen from her in the accident, its soft lilt of kindness telling him off for ‘overthinking everything, like Wordsworth’, her Cumbrian husband with a poet’s soul and a mathematician’s logic.

  The storm in his head was passing, his senses picking up fine details again, the tick of the engine cooling, the scent of the roses he’d brought to put on the grave, the buzz of his phone on the dashboard, vibrating with alerts.

  Messages had queued up, most of them from Orla, already out sightseeing with her friends. There were selfies featuring Admiralty Arch, the Mall and Buckingham Palace, all copied to her Instagram and Twitter accounts, no doubt garnering thousands of all-important likes. Her smile was the same in them all – that big red-carpet smile, quite different from her bed smile, the tousled black hair with its trademark red streak falling over sleepy Monroe eyes. He didn’t reply, uncomfortable with the blurred lines between her private life and public image, their one-bowl-two-spoons love affair still far too small to feed the masses on social streams.

  Instead he took a photograph of the most beautiful valley in the Bardswolds, stretched out in front of him, and texted it to Orla, captioned Land thrice racked, a favourite line from the play, referring to excessively high rents.

  To Kit’s consternation, she immediately shared it with a million followers, many of whom – thinking she’d taken it herself while sightseeing in London – asked if it was Hyde Park.

  ‘It’s Jekyll and Hyde Park,’ he muttered. To him, the Cotswolds had always summed up the hypocrisy of country life, all outward respectability and inner lust, a duality he was all too aware he bore like a native.

  The smell of the roses was overpowering, their association embedded with loss. He could no longer tolerate lilies, narcissi or sweet peas for the same reason. Soon all flowers would be lost to him. Maybe he’d move on to plastic windmills, like the Turner family graves. That it would infuriate his in-laws was a very satisfying prospect.

  Turning to buzz down his window to dissipate the scent he found a big slab of a face staring in at him, teeth bared and nose creased, like a shark’s.

  ‘You spying on me, pal?’

  ‘No.’ It had to be the Jugged Hare’s landlord, a tenure that lasted about as long as a pomegranate’s shelf life in the sanitised, smoke-free, fifty-covers-a-night gastropub.

  The once-popular village pub changed hands every few years, each time with a new food angle – wild game, field-to-fork, slow cooking, rare breed meats – the prices always too high and the food too fancy to win back villagers, the trend-setters’ sports cars and four-by-fours flocking there for a few months before flocking off somewhere newer and shinier. In the pre-Millennium glory years, the Jugged Hare had been run by a retired footballer, who had slept with all his barmaids and fiddled the books. Kit had treasured that decade of beer-battered cod steaks, raucous live music and smoky lock-ins before their host whisked his prettiest waitress off to run a beach bar off the Costa Blanca.

  ‘You’re here from the council about the noise, aren’t you?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘If you’re CID about the chef’s tantrum, I fired him.’

  ‘Absolutely not.’

  ‘HMRC?’

  ‘God, no.’

  ‘Selling agent?

  ‘Kit Donne.’ He stepped out to offer his hand. ‘I hope it’s okay to wait out a funeral here.’

  The man, small and stout, in ill-fitting chef’s whites, shook it, glaring at him suspiciously. ‘This car park’s for pub clientele only.’

  ‘Are you open?’

  ‘Licensing hours are eleven a.m. until eleven p.m.,’ he parroted, as though under cross-examination. ‘As it happens, we have a small party of locals gathered in the skittle alley for a sharpener before the funeral. None was served until the hour.’

  Kit glanced at his watch. It was just before a quarter past. Looking across at the wonky metal coppice of signs planted in the verge in front of the pub, boasting FOOD ALL DAY and LOCAL CRAFT ALES, he spotted one offering morning coffee. ‘Espresso?’

  The paranoid landlord closed one eye distrustfully. ‘You from The Good Pub Guide?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Trip Advisor?’

  ‘I just want a coffee.’

  ‘Hmm.’ He reluctantly led the way. ‘Big turn-out down at the church, is it?’

  ‘It’s not small.’

  The landlord looked somewhat mollified. ‘Might get a lunch crowd in.’

  ‘Who are they burying?’

  ‘Old boy from the stud. Customer for coffee, love!’ he shouted, as he swung open the pub door, much as an air-raid warden would announce a Luftwaffe squadron. Kit spotted a woman behind the bar hastily hiding the cash-and-carry firewater she was funnelling into a craft gin bottle. ‘Espresso for the coffin-dodger.’

  ‘You’re not here for Captain Percy’s send-off then?’ She switched on the big coffee machine, lowering her voice beneath its hisses. ‘Left a mountain of gambling debts, they reckon. Place’ll be up for sale inside the year. The daughter’s a right fly-by-night.’ The landlady tapped out the espresso scoop, calling to her husband, as he headed into the kitchen, ‘What’s it they call the Captain’s daughter round here? The Bald Bowler or summink?’

  ‘The Bardswolds Bolter,’ Kit remembered. ‘Veronica Ledwell.’ He recalled the thick cream personalised stationery, letter after letter piling up in his wife’s keepsake box. You will love her. How often had Hermia said it? Enough to render it meaningless. The evidence wasn’t convincing.

  ‘That’s the one! You know her?’

  ‘Only by reputation.’

  ‘She’s certainly got one of those.’ The paranoid landlord chuckled as he swung out of the kitchen door with a box of biscotti.

  ‘One can survive everything nowadays except death, and live down everything except a good reputation,’ Kit quoted Oscar Wilde wearily.

  ‘I knew it!’ The landlord turned to him, white-faced. ‘You’re the new Sunday Times restaurant critic, aren’t you?’

  *

  Carly loved vacuuming with her earphones in, music blaring. No particle of dust was safe. She had it covered, along with Beyoncé, Rihanna, Adele and Jess Glynne.

  It was only when she turned off the power switch that she heard Janine squawking up the stairs, ‘Carl, you’d better get your arse down here! The kid’s just brought a pony in over our clean kitchen floor. Says he won’t take it out until you’ve met it.’

  *

  Soon enjoying a surprisingly good espresso, Kit perched on a barstool in the Jugged Hare’s small, picture-lined snug bar, buried in Paranoid Landlord’s Daily Mirror, a newspaper he hadn’t read for years. He was thoroughly enjoying the prospect of wiling away the time it took for a funeral service to settle into its seats, run through its predictable script and disband.

  He was deep in the sports section when his peaceful hide-out was invaded by village mourners crowding in for last-minute sharpeners, complaining that th
e skittle alley was too hot and the complimentary craft-gin shots had tasted like floor cleaner. He barely had time to look up before they’d surrounded him and, in an instant, he went from avoiding the action at the theatre bar to centre-stage improvisation.

  ‘Alice is in charge of the spread at the stud, so it’ll be a pipette of sherry and weak intravenous tea at the wake,’ said a tall, rakish woman, whose shock of iron-grey hair supported a fascinator as unlikely as a telecom tower sprouting from a heather moor. She plonked a handbag on the open newspaper. ‘Hello there, Kit. Gill Walcote, to spare you the effort of remembering. Tie Cross Cottage, just across the Green from you. Are you coming to the Captain’s funeral, too?’

  ‘No.’ He slid quickly off his stool, already planning his getaway.

  ‘My God, it’s Kitten!’ One of his late wife’s nephews strode up to the bar now, a wide-shouldered tower of blue-eyed Austen bombast. ‘I thought I was seeing things. Hello, stranger!’

  Kit raised a thin smile. ‘Bay.’

  ‘I thought you never came here any more.’

  ‘Very rarely. Just to visit the grave. It’s Lughnasa.’

  ‘Lunacy indeed! What a day to choose! Half the county’s here.’

  ‘Pure happenstance.’ Kit cleared his throat. Getting away wasn’t going to be as simple as throwing down a fiver and nodding farewell. Taking your leave in Compton was a skilled sport.

  ‘By God, this is splendid.’ Bay gave Kit such a back-slapping man-hug he almost swallowed his tongue. ‘What are you drinking? I insist it’s forty per cent proof and at least ten years old. Malt whisky, isn’t it? That’s what we could all do with.’ A nod already had Paranoid Landlord reaching for the top shelf.

  An ability to remember such things, to play host and take charge socially in any situation had put the Austen family in control in this village. Kit might be able to recall whole pages of dialogue, where precisely he’d blocked actors and marked cues, but he had absolutely no idea who drank what, not even his own children.