‘You don’t have much to do with them on a social level then?’
She grimaced. ‘They’ve certainly never invited us round to dinner, and I’ve never had much to do with their two children. Cordelia’s younger than me anyway, and the oldest, Anthony, I don’t think I’ve seen since we went to a party at the vicarage when I was five and he must have been about eight. Poor sod was sent away to school after that; his parents must have worried that he’d catch something nasty from the village children.’
‘Well, I look forward to an interesting evening. I’ll be fed, at least. I get sick of eating out of the microwave. Talking of food, what’s the word on the pub in the village?’
‘The Foresters Arms? I worked there last summer, doing the washing up. The scraps they threw at us were always very tasty.’
‘Great, we should try it. How about tonight?’ He grinned at her astonished look and rose to his feet. ‘The dryer has stopped so I think your clothes are ready, and I can hear Duchess whining. She’s fed up with being confined to the kitchen; I’ll let her through; she should be dry by now and she can make her apologies.’
He opened the kitchen door and the spaniel shot across the room, making a huge fuss first of her master and then, turning her attention to Alison, tried to climb into her lap. Alison laughingly fought the dog off, but her mind was fully occupied with the implications of Simon’s invitation. She’d never been taken out to dinner before; she really liked his company, but how would they get through a whole evening without running out of things to talk about? He was so much older than her. What would people think? What should she wear? And what about Al? Should she say no?
‘Here’re your things,’ he said, returning. ‘Bit stiff, I’m afraid. They probably need washing properly. I’ll give you a lift home.’
‘You don’t have to do that. I can walk. It’s not far.’
‘I won’t take no for an answer. I want to meet your family; they sound fascinating, and now I’m a neighbour …And anyway, if I’m going to take you out to dinner tonight, I need to know where to pick you up. That is, if you’d like to come, and if you’re not doing anything else?’ He could see that she was hesitating. ‘Also, I’d like to make proper amends for nearly drowning you. Besides,’ he added simply, ‘I’ve really enjoyed the last hour, but I feel that I’m definitely in need a more detailed briefing before I go to dinner with the Lesters tomorrow night.’
* * *
It was in an unusually thoughtful frame of mind that Charlie took himself off across the fields after his supper, to have a drink with his mates at The Bunch of Grapes, as he always did on a Friday night, and to see if he could pin Beth down to another date.
Although he might pretend otherwise, Charlie was disconcerted by Lenny’s teasing. Sarah had phoned him earlier and he still hadn’t the heart to tell her it was all off. She had sounded very tearful and said she had to see him, she had something to discuss, but she wouldn’t say what over the phone. With a sense of foreboding, Charlie had agreed to meet her after work, the following evening.
The way he saw it, he didn’t have to take Elsie’s threats seriously, not just yet. He had a whole year to find a piece of crumpet he fancied enough to marry, or to find some way to persuade Elsie to change her mind, and he was confident of doing one or the other.
However, the problem that preoccupied Charlie was not Elsie, but how he was going to meet the bank’s demands, and deciding what to do about the farm. He smiled sourly when he thought of the three thousand he was about to earn from the hire of the field. It would give him great pleasure to be able to slam down the wads in front of that slimy bastard, Mr Gordon White, who clearly thought he’d not be able to find the wherewithal. But it was a bitter pleasure. He consoled himself with the thought of the other two K… that was a nice consolation prize and he, Charlie, was blowed if the bank was going to get its sticky paws on that!
But there was no ignoring the problem that, come the end of October, he’d have to find another three K, and where was that going to come from? They needed to do something big, something drastic, to pay off the debt and get the bank off their necks for good. But what?
In his opinion, diversifying was playing kid’s games… Rare breeds, what bloody good would that do? No, they had to think big. If only the farm wasn’t so flat… In his mind’s eye, Charlie could see the whole of Marsh Farm laid out as a motocross circuit, with the farmhouse in the middle. ‘We could shift some earth, build hillocks, plant a wood,’ he said aloud, in his enthusiasm. ‘Bugger the bank, we’ll sell some land for house building and get started… We’ll get big business investing and then, when we’re not using it for motocross, we could use it for paint balling… Brilliant idea, my old fruitcake!’ Charlie had been paint balling, once, for a friend’s stag party, and next to motocross, could think of no better way to spend his time.
Putting his dream on one side, he returned to the immediate problem of the farm, and Stephen. Without making a big deal of it, they both knew the cows weren’t paying their way. If they got rid of the herd, Charlie reasoned to himself, they could turn the entire farm over to cash crop and cereal production. That was where the money was these days, not in milk. If they were to do that, they could cut their overheads – they wouldn’t need the Merfield meadows for a start – and start making a profit instead of feeding it to the cows. That would see off Gordon White. But could he persuade Stephen to see the sense of it? He was devoted to those bloomin’ animals. But he’d have to, ’cos if he didn’t, the whole shebang would go to the wall, cows an’ all…
With that depressing thought, Charlie arrived at The Grapes. Pushing open the door to the public bar, he was greeted with hoots of laughter, a cracked rendition of ‘The Farmer Wants a Wife’, and someone playing ‘I’m Getting Married in the Morning’ on a kazoo. Six or seven of his friends and drinking companions, Spike among them, filled the bar. As they completed their cacophony, Spike thrust a glass of Babycham into his hand and Robbie, a mischievous, red-headed, pig man from a nearby farm, whom Charlie known since he was a child, liberally sprinkled him with confetti. Dusting himself down, and spitting stray bits of paper out of his mouth, he demanded to know what the hell his mates were playing at.
He should have known.
With shouts of laughter, led by Robbie who had himself married a year ago, and Spike, who had once vowed no woman would ever tie him down, they demanded to know whether what they’d heard on the grapevine was true, that his gran had said he was to find himself a wife or she’d cut him out of her will…
Charlie sat down, a sickly grin on his face and tried to bluff it out, ‘I don’t know who’s been saying things… Whad’ya mean? Wife? Me? You must be joking…’
But they were not to be fobbed off and the noise grew more raucous. Inwardly, Charlie seethed. How had they found out? Who’d blabbed? Lenny – he wasn’t there, but he was Charlie’s best mate… Lin? Surely not.
Stan came bustling over from the bar. ‘OK, lads, I don’t know what the joke is, but you’ve had your laugh. Keep the noise down now, please, you’re disturbing the rest of my customers.’ He saw Charlie dejectedly picking confetti out of his hair. ‘What’s all this then, Charlie? You getting married, or something? Are congratulations in order?’
‘No, no they’re not,’ said Charlie through gritted teeth, but inwardly relieved, for if Stan didn’t know, then it wasn’t Linda who’d spilled the beans. ‘I don’t know what they’ve heard, but the word seems to have got about that my gran has told me I’ve got to get a wife.’
Stan chuckled. ‘ That’s a tough order. And are you?’
‘Not bloomin’ likely!’ said Charlie, fervently. ‘Me? Lookin’ for a wife? No way!’
A little later, having recovered his sense of humour, Charlie pushed his way to the bar in search of a pint – and Beth. When she saw him, she grinned. ‘What’s this I hear, Charlie? You’re looking for a wife?’
‘No, I’m not,’ he said, for the umpteenth time that evening. ‘I’m looking for a pint of Sam, Beth, and another date with you. How about tomorrow night? We could go out after you finish here, like last Saturday…’
‘The pint of Sam is easy, Charlie, so long as you’ve got a couple of quid. The date…well, that’s not so easy.’
‘Why?’
Beth pulled him his pint and set it on the bar before she replied. ‘Two reasons, Charlie. One, I’m not the marrying kind, leastways not yet, and if I go out with you, everyone knowing you’re looking for a wife…’
‘But I’m not!’ he expostulated, loudly.
‘If I go out with you – in your circumstances – anybody I might be interested in having a good time with will think I’m in the marriage market too, which I’m not.’
‘That’s crazy logic, Beth…’
‘Nevertheless, that’s what I think. And the other thing against my going out with you, Charlie…’
‘Yeah?’
‘…Is your whiskers.’
Charlie was flabbergasted. ‘What?!’
‘Your whiskers. You’re great fun, Charlie, and underneath all that hair, you’re probably quite good-looking. I just couldn’t bear the way everyone was looking at you the other night and sniggering. I know you don’t care, but I felt stupid. I don’t want to go out with a guy I have to apologise for.’
‘I don’t want you to apologise for me – I can take care of myself, thank you.’
Beth shrugged her shoulders. ‘Well, maybe you can, it’s just that if I go out with a bloke, I want to feel proud of him; I want other girls to look at my fellah and think “he’s a bit of alright”. The more good-looking, the greater my kudos – get it? With those whiskers, I can hear them thinking, “What a clown.” And then they feel sorry for me and I am rock-bottom. There’s no way I’m gonna be put in that position. And Charlie, while we are about it…’
‘Yes?’ Said Charlie, feeling wretched.
‘Have you ever thought what it must be like to kiss someone with all that facial hair? Ugh – gets up your nose and turns your chin red as a beetroot.’
Charlie’s ego was shrivelling by the second. ‘No one’s ever complained before.’
Beth tossed her hair and her eyes flashed with contempt. ‘So? I’m me, and I’m telling you why I don’t want a date. I’d better go, Linda’s firing daggers at me for talking to you for so long.’
‘Beth, wait… Gran’s ultimatum apart, would you go out with me if…if I shaved my sideburns?’
‘I’d consider it,’ was the unsatisfactory reply, and he didn’t manage to speak to her again the entire evening.
11
Elsie wrapped Ron’s silk dressing gown tightly round her thin frame and carefully carried the plate into the bedroom.
‘I’ve got a dark chocolate torte this week, Ron. It’s a reward for being a clever boy!’
Ron beamed happily from the bed. He had a very mischievous streak, and had had great fun devising the elaborate little charade. ‘I was afraid I’d give the game away. I just wanted to laugh. My, I’m glad you’re not my landlady, Elsie love, you’d terrify the daylights out of me. She didn’t guess, did she?’
‘Not for one minute. She thought you were “absolutely bonkers” and couldn’t wait to get away. Maybe you were a bit too convincing – she thinks I ought to report you to Social Services, and now she’s fussing about how safe I am with my other tenants.’
She climbed into bed and cuddled up to Ron. The physical side of their relationship was not quite as active as it used to be; inevitable, perhaps, considering their age, but they still derived great pleasure from touching and caressing each other, and celebrating the occasional conjugation. Their affair began a couple of years after she became a widow. They had known each other for some time when both were happily married to their respective partners. Ron’s wife died first and then, when Thomas Tucker died, Ron and Elsie had grown close. When they first became lovers, they talked about marrying, but Elsie, more forcibly than Ron, rejected the idea, having no wish to become involved, in any way, with Ron’s offspring, or to complicate the various legal settlements in place. No one knew about their affair, which added a certain spice to the relationship.
‘Perhaps you should employ her on a regular basis,’ Ron suggested, gently stroking her cheek. He loved this fierce little old lady and secretly worried about her, but knew far better than to give her any hint of it.
‘Twenty pounds a time, I couldn’t possibly afford that! I made an exception this time because I realised the poor child was going through the entire holiday without a farthing, but I couldn’t possibly do it on a regular basis.’
‘Once a month, love. It’s not much, really. I know you worry about the family taking advantage of you, but quite frankly, Elsie dear, they wouldn’t dare.’
‘That’s probably true, Ron, but as I’ve explained to you before, I worry that if they know just how much they will have when I am dead, they won’t try hard enough now. Thomas and I made Marsh farm what it was without any help from my father, and we were proud of what we achieved. I want to see Charlie and Stephen, and Alison, too, get somewhere by the sweat of their own labours.’
‘Well, you know your family best, and maybe you don’t want to ask either of the boys to accompany you, but I repeat what I said, I do think you might employ young Alison to help you. I know you like to do the rent collections yourself, but I think it’s important not to take unnecessary risks. I realise she is only a slip of a girl, but just having someone else with you is a good idea…After all, if you got knocked over and were robbed, the insurance company would take a very dim view of your lack of protection.’
Business sense was always the best sort of sense as far as Elsie was concerned. ‘I’ll think about it. Now, how about a piece of that torte?’
* * *
The kitchen clock showed that it was nearly three-thirty. Half an hour before Nicola was expected for tea. Jenny hummed happily to herself as she smeared olive oil spread on the sliced bread (Weight Watchers had convinced her that anything containing olive oil would help her lose weight). Gran might threaten, the bank might threaten, but life seemed suddenly to have changed for the better. Not that they were any the less broke, far from it. In fact she was worried because she had not heard anything from Mrs Moorhead, who was normally extremely punctual with her payments. Still, she thought, looking at the kitchen table with pride, she wasn’t going to let Stephen down, or Ali, come to that.
Now that had been unexpected, Alison coming back with that nice man. He had seemed so concerned about the accident, even though Alison seemed none the worse. And lucky Alison – being taken out for dinner like that… Jenny couldn’t remember the last time anyone had taken her out to dinner. Jim must have done once, but she really couldn’t remember. And Simon seemed so interested in the farm, asking her all sorts of questions, really polite. It was only natural for her to invite him to tea this afternoon as well. She could see Alison was uncomfortable about it, but he’d accepted.
‘It was lucky I found that old tin of sardines in the back of the cupboard’, she thought happily to herself, ‘I’ll mix them up with a bit of low cal mayo for sardine sandwiches…’
The cake had sunk in the middle, but Jenny sacrificed the bar of chocolate she’d set aside to treat herself after her Weight Watcher’s weigh-in, and iced the cake with it. With the biscuits that Jeff said he’d bring, some scones she’d rescued from the deep freeze, and a pot of her own strawberry jam, ‘Why, it’s like a proper farmhouse tea!’ she exclaimed.
That was Jeff’s reaction when he arrived, armed with an M & S carrier bag, a short time later. ‘And I’ve bought one or two little things to add to the feast,’ he added.
Jenny’s eyes popped. It wasn’t just chocolate biscuits. Jeff had bought three different packets of fancy biscuits, some crumpets, and a l
arge, rich, fruit cake.
‘I’m rather partial to fruit cake,’ he said, apologetically. ‘I hope that’s alright.’
Jenny, misty-eyed, silently vowed to make him a fruit cake at the first opportunity.
To say that Stephen was nervous would be an understatement. Normally the alarm for the early morning milking dragged him reluctantly to his senses. Today he had left the house before the alarm had gone off. He’d been unable to eat anything at breakfast or lunch. He’d sat under the shower attachment in the bath and washed his hair and every inch of his body. He had raided Charlie’s supply of cologne; changed his shirt three times; brushed his teeth at least twice and then had waited and sweated.
He was dimly aware of his mother’s effort in the kitchen, and was grateful. He was dimly aware, too, that there would be other people to tea. Not Gran, to his great relief, and probably not Charlie, who had reacted to the idea with a snort, and the sentiment that he had better things to do. The thought of Charlie turning his charms on Nicola had made Stephen uneasy, so he did nothing to encourage his brother to change his mind. He had barely registered the fact that Alison’s new boyfriend would be there, or that Jeff was also coming.
All he could think about was Nicola on his farm. He would show her the cows, and the lovely little heifer calf that had arrived the day before – he was going to call her Nicola; that is, if the real Nicola didn’t mind; he would take her for a walk along the river – most of the best wild flowers were long gone, but Purple Loosestrife, Great Willowherb and Himalayan Balsam were growing in profusion along the bank, and the water lilies, both gold and yellow, could be found in the still margins of the river. Maybe then, remembering Angela’s advice, he would try and hold her hand. And if she didn’t draw back, then, under the old grey ash tree, on the riverbank, he would lean her against the trunk, and kiss her… At that his imagination failed and panic set in. What if he kissed her wrong…his breath smelled…she wouldn’t hold his hand…she didn’t like his cows…she didn’t turn up!
A Tangled Summer Page 18