by Fiona Walker
‘You coming?’ Blair was watching her over his shoulder, dark eyes teasing, unaware of how big a deal coming back again was for her. It was threatening to rain, dark clouds moving across the sun.
‘I’ll just grab the paperwork from inside the house.’ How carefree she made it sound, how prosaic. She hadn’t stepped into it for more than a decade; her father had died alone in it; her toxic marriage had almost suffocated her and her children had grown away from her here.
She leaned into the car to grab the house keys and her list from the glovebox.
His hand on her back made her jump. Then she turned and pressed her forehead into his chest, grateful for the arms that locked around her and the silence that went with it. He knew exactly how hard she was finding this. Of course he knew.
*
Fitz pulled out his earbuds and fished down the side of his bed for the iPhone’s charger, cursing its ever-shortening battery life. His mother’s old phone had already been on its last legs when he’d inherited it – she never upgraded anything until it was knackered, which she called Yorkshire common sense and he called being a tightwad – so it took a lot to keep it alive, but he still didn’t want to swap over to his dad’s old BlackBerry, or the Scientific Calculator, as he thought of it, an instrument of torture in life’s unsolvable equation: if truth – x = marriage + affair, calculate the damage caused by x.
He picked it out of his hoodie pocket to switch on and check out the app. What he saw made him look away, shuddering.
He’d been at home on study leave the first time he’d stumbled upon the innocent-looking messenger service among the unfamiliar icons. It had been a few days before his first GCSE and he should have been mugging up on Fleming’s Left Hand Rule, but instead he’d found himself working through English comprehension that was definitely off-curriculum. Fitz had struggled to make sense of it. With Charlie in London, he’d almost asked his mum what it was about before realisation dawned, mortification crept in and he’d switched it off. Then on to look again. Then off. And so it went on, obsessively, until he had it straight in his head.
Fitz’s father was having an affair. He and ‘Lozzy’ had been messaging each other using the app for months, sometimes several times a day. When he’d upgraded his phone, Charlie had signed out but never deleted his account, inadvertently leaving the conversation record for Fitz to stumble upon, the password pre-stored, new messages appearing daily. If he added a message himself – so far test and you bastard – it showed as coming from his father. Neither Charlie nor Lozzy had noticed, but the conversation – which rarely got above crotch level – was hardly Sartre and de Beauvoir.
Fitz knew he should delete the app, but he was a barrister’s son and destroying evidence was not on. He now carried the phone with him at all times, like a loaded gun.
Before finding the messages, Fitz had thought he was pretty wised-up, and certainly more street than his parents, his social-media skills sharper, his porn-viewing sophisticated, sexting skills advanced, and his sexual learning curve on a progressively upward parabola, thanks to Dixie Wish starting him off at fourteen on her parents’ sofa while they were out at the hunt ball, then finishing him off at fifteen in the back of her mother’s horsebox. Then he’d taken long-distance-girlfriend Sophie through the same moves when they were on their Duke of Edinburgh gold award. Fitz was da boss.
Now he felt differently. This thing was way beyond his scope, and he was monitoring the situation for self-preservation’s sake. Nothing new had been added while they were in Italy, but it was full throttle again now.
‘FIIIIIIIIIIIITZ!’ Prudie was outside the door.
He hurriedly switched it off, pulling his duvet over his head.
‘Mummy left you in charge, didn’t she?’
‘I have my webcam trained on your every move.’
‘She said if we got dressed by the time she came back we’d get to play on her iPad.’
‘Get breakfast, eat breakfast, clean teeth, wash faces, get clothes, put on clothes. Simples.’
‘Bella’s just dropped her cereal spoon down the waste disposal and it’s making a funny noise. And Wilf’s been sick. And there’s a woman at the door with a cake-tin, saying she’s Mummy’s friend.’
The woman at the door had mad eyes and a mouth like a piranha. Dressed from head to toe in startling pink, she had a food container cuddled in her arms with a sheaf of papers on top. ‘Hello, William. Is Mummy in?’
‘Out riding.’
‘Of course! Silly me. Shall I wait inside? It’s starting to rain.’
‘She won’t be back for ages.’ He stayed in the doorway, not caring if he was taking his anger out on her. Nobody called him William and was forgiven, apart from Gunny, and she was on borrowed time with her hollow promises.
‘I’ve got plenty to be getting on with.’ She held up the printed papers as evidence.
The top sheet was a registration form for a Civil War re-enactment society, which she’d filled in. Under ‘Occupation’, Fitz spotted she’d put ‘Detective/Researcher’. ‘Do you have ID?’
‘Don’t be silly, I’m Pip! Mummy’s friend. You’re William Peregrine...’
This was even worse. She had used his middle name. Nobody ever used his middle name.
‘...Alan.’
Both middle names. Had she seen a copy of his birth certificate or something?
‘We’re not allowed to let anyone in without ID,’ he insisted, his sisters peeping out from either side of him now, keen noses sensing cake was imminent. ‘I’ll tell her you called. Thank you for these.’ He reached out to take the box.
‘I’d better not give you them.’ She hugged it tightly. ‘They contain lots of caffeine and a splash of alcoholic liquor. Mummy might be angry.’
She’d be angry with Fitz for being rude to one of her village friends, but he’d take that one for the team. He could feel his sisters bristling beside him as the gift was retracted. ‘I’ll tell her you called, Pauline Lesley Edwards.’
Her piranha jaw dropped as Fitz smiled sweetly and closed the door.
23
‘Are you really getting the Redhead’s shoes taken off this afternoon?’ Bridge lamented, as the Bags sheltered beneath the tall arches of the familiar windmill, the black cloud emptying fast now, a rainbow arching across the vale and ending in the Comptons, which were still partially bathed in sunlight.
‘That’s the plan. I have to devote myself to bed-hopping Roundheads.’ Petra hoped there was a crock of gold at the end of this book. It had been a long time since she’d opened a royalty statement without breaking into a cold sweat, the figures shrinking each time.
‘Bloody waste,’ Gill said, doling out the mints. ‘A horse should stay in work.’
‘She will still be working.’ Petra handed hers down to the Redhead. ‘From now until half-term, her job is to prance around the field with her little chums, motivating me to get a first draft together. She’s my muse.’
The other Bags could never understand why Petra insisted on mothballing her riding gear for weeks on end to write. She joked it off all too easily, painting herself as a pregnant medieval noblewoman going into confinement, then coming out at the end of term babe in arms. The truth was less genteel and involved shutting herself in a room day and night, sleep-deprived and manic, in joggers and reading glasses, mind whirring, shouting at a computer screen, tearing her hair out, typing badly and neglecting her children.
‘You’re not wriggling out of the Goose Walk this year,’ Gill insisted.
Petra kept quiet, fully intending to wriggle.
The Goose Walk was a Compton tradition in which a flock of geese was driven through the village on the eve of Michaelmas Day. The drovers, calling at each house in turn, would gather ingredients for the following day’s harvest festival feast in return for a song and a sip of strong local grog, all ending up in the pub for a raucous sing-song. These days, the fattened goose played second fiddle to the grog and folky karaoke.
‘
It’s just an excuse for a drunken night out,’ Bridge pointed out, crunching her mint.
‘It dates back five hundred years.’
‘Yeah, like all Compton village piss-ups – carol-singing, wassailing, May Day, trick-or-treating.’
‘Not trick-or-treating, Bridge, no.’ Gill gave her a withering look.
‘Try being married to a man from Małopolskie.’ Bridge grinned. ‘Village revelry’s in his blood. The wodka is kept permanently by the door.’
‘Paul’s bicycle clips and electrolyte bottle live by ours,’ sighed Gill.
In her pocket, Petra’s phone picked up a rare signal and produced a drumroll of incoming messages and different app notifications, amplified by the roof overhead.
‘They’re playing your tune, screen queen,’ teased Bridge, who, like all the Bags, regularly gave Petra stick for checking her phone so often. ‘I bet that’s Bay telling you it’s not too late to lob on a rat-catcher and join in the murderous fun.’
‘More likely Pip offering to come round with a fudge cake and more research notes,’ she said, glancing at Gill with martyred eyes before retrieving it to check it wasn’t Fitz in a crisis, then groaning as she read the first of three messages from Pip, the one sent most recently. ‘Correction, she’s just this minute been round. This is your fault, Walcote.’
‘I’ve told you, you mustn’t encourage her,’ Gill insisted. ‘You’re too nice.’
Pip had proved very hard to shake off since the Captain’s funeral, posting on Petra’s social-media timelines far more consistently than she did herself, then becoming a text pest once she returned from holiday. In recent days, having discovered that Petra’s upcoming trilogy was to be set in Cornwall during the English Civil War, she’d taken it upon herself to become a voluntary research assistant, sending endless links to Wiki pages usually very late at night. The latest flurry had arrived in the early hours that morning: Wd make great romantic story!
Petra, who had flicked through them over her first cup of tea and discovered that Pip had fixed on a swash-buckling Royalist, whose bad temper and ill-fated marriage she knew well, had already replied: Thanks everso, but Daphne du Maurier got there first! My general’s on the other side with a v. feisty wife, and I already have the plot worked out. I’m all set to go. She hoped it would stop Pip wasting her time, although she didn’t have much of a plot at all, just a heap of messy research notes and a growing crush on a historical figure, which was always her starting point.
Great minds think alike! Am I right? came a reply now, along with a thumbnail of a rare portrait of a seventeenth-century nobleman looking gorgeously like a long-haired, bearded Adrien Brody.
Unnerved, Petra pocketed her phone. Only her agent and publisher knew he was her next hero. Pip was alarmingly good at second-guessing things.
‘Is she still stalking you?’ Bridge was eager for some scandal.
‘More sprouting enthusiasm than full-formed stalk,’ she conceded. ‘I think she means well.’
‘And Bay?’ Bridge’s eyebrows nudged up.
The Bags had been very low on high drama on their past few hacks, the bank-holiday highlight being Begonia-gate when Brian Hicks, the parish council chairman, had judged the flower contest at the Bagot Show with all-out nepotism: he’d awarded his own family a clean sweep. But Petra knew better than to bring her Safe Married Crush into play again, their funeral kiss fading all too swiftly on her lips in Italy to leave a bad taste.
‘Petra’s parked that, haven’t you?’ Gill’s voice was pure iron.
‘Absolutely,’ Petra said firmly, having ignored every message he’d sent in the past week. ‘In a parking Bay, in fact.’
‘Genius.’
‘And how’s the true blue male member doing, Gill?’ Bridge switched target, although the others had always considered Gill’s prudish SMC on their local MP to cover darker desires.
‘Still an upstanding mouthpiece for his female constituents?’ added Petra, catching Bridge’s eye.
‘Yes, he’s back in the Commons for a mass debate on the Finance Bill, I believe.’
At this, Petra and Bridge got silent giggles.
Rain over, they headed out into searing golden sunshine.
‘What will you do for a safe crush now Bay’s parked?’ Bridge rode alongside Petra, wiping her eyes.
‘Tom Fairfax.’ Petra’s next fictional hero was sexy parliamentarian ‘Black Tom’, the rider of the white horse, a raven-haired Yorkshireman, who had led the New Model Army to victory. Already more than a little in love with a man whose heroic fairness was the stuff of legend, she hoped being alone in a room with him for a few weeks would make up for her withdrawal from the village. ‘Very level-headed. Political. Super wife.’
Petra kicked on into their next fast ridge-race, the turf track perfect going. She had no need of Bay. The funeral flirtation seemed silly and sordid now. Two weeks in Tuscany might not have mended the splintered wood of her marriage, but it had straightened the dovetail joints and oiled the grain. After a few glasses of Montepulciano, the Gunns had had unusually adventurous sex, Charlie coaxing Petra into trying out all sorts of new things with the aid of a sarong and a bottle of after-sun. If she let herself think about it too hard, though, she fretted that he’d been watching far too much porn in London during the week or, worse, spending time in a BDSM massage parlour.
When they next pulled up for a breather, she caught herself checking her phone again, secretly bucked up to see how often Bay had texted since she’d been back from Italy, less so to find Pip had outnumbered that total in just one morning, along with tweeting on her timeline, pasting on her wall and tagging her endlessly in pictures of—was that Sir Thomas Fairfax? No! Not only was she giving away the plot before it was written, she was claiming part-ownership. Very proud to be Petra’s new researcher on this, she’d posted an hour ago. Taking cakes round to celebrate our Civil War hero!
*
Pip drove at her customary full pelt through Compton Magna, telling herself it was probably illegal to serve walnut caramel coffee cake oozing with Tia Maria to infants, especially rude ones.
She’d hoped to catch Petra with the offering while she breakfasted, imagining an idyllic tableau of children in boaters and blazers drinking freshly squeezed orange juice. She’d even rehearsed her own breezy apology that she couldn’t stop, anticipating the warm smile and a flood of thanks for all her hard work. Instead she’d been made to feel like some wicked witch touting apples by the two suspicious pyjamaed daughters, with chocolate-spread beards, who’d told her Mummy was out hacking, backed up by a teenage son with a gravity-defying fringe, who’d taken a snapshot of her on his phone and demanded to see her ID. There was definitely something not quite right about him.
Cracking a yawn, Pip felt the satisfied glow from her late night’s research threatening to fade. Helping Petra fact-find and ramp up her social-media traffic was an act of kindness but she’d started to suspect history wasn’t really her thing. Unearthing stories from the past was a jigsaw with a finite number of pieces. Modern mysteries had no straight edges. She found it hard to share Petra’s enthusiasm for some dead seventeenth-century war hero, whereas the story of Verity Verney, the fallen countess, and her brutish white stallion, still played constantly on her mind. Frustratingly, she’d had no response to her letter. That felt more of an affront than Petra’s unwelcoming children.
Pip’s need to please was dented but undefeated. Her baked treats would be perfect for Lester to come back to after autumn hunting. He might claim the Austens always laid on a good breakfast spread, but she remembered ferrying the Captain and Mrs Percy around the lanes to catch distant early-morning glimpses of the field, and the food had inevitably been leathery bacon butties in farmhouse kitchens, washed down with vast amounts of whisky milk. Too much dairy played havoc with Lester’s eczema, and he needed more ballast than a few rashers and a bun to get all the horses back out later.
She’d already packed the ingredients into her boot to b
ake some scones for him – it was the perfect excuse to let herself into Percy Place, via the boiler room, the only lock that hadn’t been changed, and reclaim her favourite kitchen. The Aga had been switched off, mice had moved in, and the ancient electric back-up oven infused everything cooked in it with the smell of oxtail, but the Captain’s house was where she felt happiest. In its abandoned state she was its secret custodian, checking its many rooms while Lester’s treats baked.
As Pip rounded the last bend out of the village, a young hound in front of the stud’s entrance made her brake hard, mount the verge and skitter to a halt, missing it by inches. It came and smiled through the window at her, liver and white, with wild, white-rimmed eyes and an enormously long tongue. Pip wasn’t a fan of dogs – especially hounds, which she felt always looked a bit bedraggled and Baskerville-like – but Lester walked hound puppies every year and would be furious if she left a lost one loose on the road so far from the pack. She reached for a cake from the tin on the passenger seat, fed a bit out of the window and inched the car off the grass, dropping lures out of the window at regular intervals as she set off very slowly, her crumbly trail leading him towards the distant sound of the horn.
*
Lester banged his crop against his boot at point, rolling his tongue and whooping, ‘Ay, ay, Charlie!’ along with fellow mounted and foot-followers, the trusted Fosse-and-Woldsers encircling the little coppice. It was a hunting ritual that involved making as much noise as possible to keep a fox in his covert, turning him back if he tried to escape into open country.