Going Too Far

by Catherine Alliott

  ‘Rubbish, I didn’t work in advertising all those years without knowing we’d get a few hundred quid and a great deal of damage. Now pick up that phone.’

  ‘But, Nick, just think! It could be a going concern, this could be just the beginning, we could let big film companies use it, we’d get thousands, we’d – no! No, don’t – all right, I’ll do it!’

  Nick had reached up to the shelf where the portable phone was, found Pippa’s number in the address book, and was even now punching it out. I grabbed the receiver from him.

  ‘Do it then, Polly,’ he ordered.

  ‘But –’

  ‘Now!’

  I gulped and slowly punched out the rest of the number. I bit the inside of my cheek, feeling truly sick. Pippa would never speak to me again, never, but it was either that or divorce. She answered.

  ‘Hello, Pippa?’ I quaked. ‘It’s me, Polly.’

  ‘Hi! How’s it going? Looking forward to the big day? I can’t believe it’s come round so soon! It’s all going really smoothly this end, I got your list of hotels and kennels so I’ve booked all that, oh, and we’ve got a brilliant crew together, I can’t wait to get going now! How are things with you?’

  My mouth felt sticky, as if I’d been eating neat peanut butter for days. I dredged up some saliva from somewhere.

  ‘W-e-ll, not so good, actually,’ I quavered.

  ‘Oh? Why’s that?’

  I snuck a look at my grim-faced husband. ‘Er, well, you see, it’s Nick.’

  ‘Nick? What’s wrong with him?’

  For one crazy moment I nearly threw myself through this window of opportunity – yes, of course, Nick was ill, terminally ill, we couldn’t possibly have a film crew traipsing round the house; he needed peace, quiet. I glanced up at the grim but healthy face beside me. The window slammed shut.

  ‘Er, nothing,’ I gulped, tightening my grip on the phone. ‘He’s not ill or anything but – well, the thing is, Pippa, he won’t do it.’

  ‘Do what?’

  ‘The shoot. He won’t hear of it.’ I clenched my buttocks hard and shut my eyes. ‘He won’t even consider it. He says no, Pippa.’

  There was a terrible silence.

  ‘Pippa? Pippa?’ I quavered eventually.

  ‘I don’t believe you,’ she whispered. ‘I thought you asked him ages ago; you said it was all agreed. You can’t do this to me, Polly.’

  ‘I know, I know,’ I wailed. ‘It’s all my fault, but you see I kept putting it off and putting it off and actually – I’ve only just asked him. I’m so sorry, Pippa, really I am, but I’ll make it up to you, I promise!’

  ‘I’ll lose my job,’ she whispered.

  ‘No, no, I’m sure you won’t, say something awful’s happened, say the cows have got foot-and-mouth, say we’re riddled with ringworm, rampant with myxomatosis, say no one’s allowed down here, say you’ll have to go somewhere else, say –’

  ‘Polly, you don’t understand!’ she shrieked. ‘The crew is booked, the actors are booked, the client’s coming down from Manchester and now you’re telling me we don’t have a location? We’re talking about next week, Polly, next week! I won’t be able to find a location, it’s impossible!’

  ‘But surely one of the other places you looked at would –’

  ‘Not at a few days’ notice – no, no way! And what’s Josh going to say, have you thought of that?’ Her voice cracked slightly. ‘Have you thought about what sort of a position this puts me in? He’s not just my boss, you know, he’s my boyfriend and things are shaky enough as it is at the moment without me springing this on him – YOU JUST CAN’T DO THIS TO ME, POLLY!’ she screamed.

  I turned to Nick with eyes like saucers. I put my hand over the mouthpiece. ‘I think she’s going to cry,’ I whispered.

  I felt about two inches tall, smaller even. I felt slug-like, worm-like – I wanted to crawl away and die.

  ‘Let me talk to her.’ He took the phone, looking grim. ‘Pippa, I realize this puts you in a tight spot, but this is quite literally the first I’ve heard of this little scheme. Polly sprang it on me a moment ago and I’m afraid there’s just no way, not with spring lambs around and –’ He listened. I watched his jaw drop, his eyes glaze over. ‘Next week?’ he said incredulously. ‘Next week!’ He turned to me furiously. ‘Did you know it was scheduled for next week?’ he hissed.

  I nodded shamefacedly, unable to meet his eye. He licked his lips and addressed the receiver.

  ‘Pippa, I had no idea … Yes, I can see that … Yes, terribly difficult … Oh God, yes, the client … No, of course not, but I still don’t think … Oh, Pippa, look, please don’t cry … No, don’t cry, look, I’ll – I’ll see what I can do … Yes, yes, I will … all right, yes, I promise … It’s all right, it’s not your fault … Yes … Yes, yes all right, we’ll work something out … Yes, I’ll move the animals and … Dogs? What dogs?’

  I stuffed my fist in my mouth, ducked quickly under the blanket and moaned softly.

  ‘I see.’ Even the muffling effect of the blanket couldn’t disguise the steel in his voice. ‘Yes, I see … Well, what can I say? I’ve given you my word now, but I’m not happy. I’m not happy about this at all. How many?’

  I moaned again.

  ‘Really.’ His voice was dangerously quiet. ‘Well, I’ll ring you at work tomorrow and find out exactly what the arrangements are … Don’t apologize, Pippa. It’s not your fault … Goodbye.’

  I stayed exactly where I was, staring into the darkness, biting hard on my knuckles, not daring to move. Two seconds later the protective blanket was whipped abruptly from my face.

  ‘Did you know there were dogs involved?’ he hissed into my nose.

  ‘Yes,’ I whispered.

  ‘And you still said yes? When we have a farm full of sheep and lambs? Cows due to calf at any minute? You still said yes?’ He stared at me incredulously. I couldn’t look at him.

  ‘Christ!’ he muttered eventually, shaking his head. ‘It simply defies belief! What were you thinking of, Polly?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ I whispered.

  ‘You don’t know. I see.’

  There was a terrible silence.

  ‘Sorry,’ I whispered.

  This was awful. I’d never seen him so furious, so white, so quietly livid.

  ‘You put me in an invidious position, Polly,’ he said between clenched teeth. ‘They’re due to start shooting next week. Pippa was distraught – she’d never have found another location. I had to say yes.’

  I grabbed his hand. ‘Oh thank you, oh thank you so much! You didn’t have to, but you did, thank you!’ I kissed his hand madly but he pulled sharply away.

  ‘Don’t, Polly.’

  ‘I promise you everything will be all right,’ I whispered miserably. ‘It’ll be really well organized and if a dog so much as sniffs a sheep’s backside I’ll kill it, I swear, I’ll kill it with my own bare hands, but it won’t, it won’t happen, it’ll all go like clockwork, you’ll see!’

  ‘It had better,’ he said grimly, getting to his feet, ‘because I’m warning you, Polly, if any of the animals are worried in any way, or if any of the crops are trampled, I swear to God I’ll have them off my land before you can say Doggy Bloody Chocs Deluxe, do I make myself clear?’

  ‘Absolutely,’ I gulped.

  ‘I hope so. And one more thing, Polly.’ His eyes bored into me. ‘Don’t ever try to manipulate me like that again. I’m doing this for Pippa’s sake, not yours, please remember that.’

  He turned on his heel, marched out of the room and thumped up the stairs.

  I sat there quaking, listening to him stomping around upstairs. My God, he was mad. Truly mad. To the uninitiated he might seem tight-lipped, even a little cross, but to the cognoscenti like me he was hopping, steaming, irrevocably mad and I knew from experience that I had to keep right out of his way. Let him blow his top in private then wait for the dust to settle. Any sort of interference at an early stage could be fatal; my he
ad could so easily roll.

  I gulped and clutched my knees. Well, that had backfired a bit, hadn’t it? And it had all seemed so harmless, just a bit of fun. I bit my lip miserably. I’d put Nick in an impossible position, I could see that now, and it was only his intrinsically kind heart and concern for Pippa that had stopped him from calling the whole thing off – God, I could have cost Pippa her job, how awful of me! Suddenly I flushed with shame. How dare I push people around like that? How dare I manipulate them? What on earth was the matter with me? Why did I get these little ideas into my head and let them snowball away out of control until they were great big scheming boulders? Did other people behave like this, I wondered, or was it just me? For once I felt truly ashamed.

  I lay down and tucked myself into a foetal position, shivering miserably, hating myself. It was damned chilly without any clothes on, but there was no way I was going upstairs to get any, no way I was facing Nick. I made a little nest out of the blanket and hugged Badger, who’d quivered nervously up to me, sensing the wrath of Nick that was so often vented on him for chewing the furniture, and offering a wet nose, halitosis and moral support.

  I suppose I must have drifted off to sleep because when I opened my eyes the fire had completely gone out and I was absolutely frozen. I wrapped the blanket around me and stole quietly upstairs. The curtains were drawn and the great hump in the duvet indicated that Nick was sound asleep. I slipped in beside him and hugged my knees, trying to get warm. A second later an arm wound round my waist.

  ‘You’re freezing,’ he murmured.

  ‘I thought you were asleep,’ I whispered back, surprised he was even talking to me, let alone touching me.

  ‘Too busy totting up the damage a pack of marauding dogs will cause.’

  ‘I’m really sorry, Nick. I can’t tell you how awful I feel.’

  ‘You’re a total dickhead, Polly,’ he muttered, but not too unkindly.

  ‘I know, but I’ve got great plans to remove the dick from my head,’ I whispered, vastly encouraged.

  ‘See that you do.’ He leaned over and kissed me. ‘Just see that you do.’

  He leaned back on his pillow as if to go to sleep, but I wound my arms round his neck, full of relief and gratitude. I began to kiss him very thoroughly. ‘Thank you, thank you …’ I murmured, working hard on the stony facial muscles, ‘thank you so much.’ I kissed away.

  ‘Polly, if you think you can get round me like this …’ he muttered into my hair.

  I worked harder.

  ‘It takes more than a kiss and a cuddle, you know …’ he grunted, ‘more than that … yes, even more than that … that’s a bit better … better still … keep going … you’re getting there, Poll …’

  Chapter Six

  During the course of the next few days Nick and I made our respective preparations for the shoot. His took the form of moving his sheep out of harm’s way and squeezing as much money as possible out of the production company, eventually bumping our fee up another five hundred pounds.

  ‘Might as well take them for all we can get,’ he said grimly, having clinched the deal on the phone with Bruce. ‘It’s not as if they won’t leave us unscathed.’

  He’d just about come down from boiling point but was still at a slow, rolling simmer and only managed to keep the lid on it if he wasn’t provoked. I have a habit of being unwittingly provocative so I kept well out of his way as he and Larry moved hordes of sheep and cows into distant meadows, muttering dire curses under their breath.

  My own preparations were of a slightly different nature. Having felt genuinely guilty and ashamed of myself, I bounced back surprisingly quickly, and on the day before the film crew was due to arrive I bustled excitedly off to Truro where I availed myself of every conceivable beauty treatment the town had to offer.

  I was plucked, waxed, pummelled, manicured, pedicured, massaged, reflexologied and aromatherapied to within an inch of my life, before finally coming to rest at the most important venue of all, the cut, bleach and blow-dry establishment. As I settled back into my chair I bravely uttered the words every hairdresser longs to hear.

  ‘I’d like to try something different, please,’ I quavered.

  On hearing these magic words my ‘hair sculptor’, as he was pleased to call himself, spat out his gum and flexed his wrists; his scissors flashed and he whirred into action. The result was a chunky shoulder-length bob, a wispy fringe, a head full of highlights, and not much change from £80, but it was worth it.

  In fact, when I saw Nick’s face as I sailed in through the back door of Trewarren armed with carrier bags, I decided it would have been cheap at twice the price. His jaw fell open and he almost dropped the current copy of The Field in the sink.

  ‘Blimey,’ he said slowly. ‘What have you done?’

  I grinned and dumped the bags on the kitchen table.

  ‘I’ve done what I should have done months ago: I’ve taken myself in hand. D’you like it?’

  Nick walked around me. ‘It’s great. You look like you did when I first met you.’

  ‘Really?’ I wasn’t quite sure how to take this. ‘But that was only three years ago – I haven’t changed that much, surely?’

  ‘Well, you were letting yourself go a bit, you know, Polly.’

  ‘Was I?’ I gasped. ‘Why didn’t you say so, for God’s sake?’

  ‘Oh, I don’t mind, not much call for glamour-girl looks on a farm. What’s in the bags?’

  ‘Oh, just a few odds and ends.’

  He grinned. ‘Spent a fortune, have you? Well, it’s about time you bought some new clothes, and I must say, the hair’s a distinct improvement.’ He grabbed an apple from the fruit bowl, took a bite out of it and made for the back door. ‘See you at lunch time.’ He strode out.

  I beamed with delight. Talk about the right result! No more jeans and sweatshirts for me, from now on I’d swan around the farm like something out of Vogue – and I’d smell good too, I thought, reaching into a bag for my new Obsession spray. I squirted some on my neck. No more borrowing Nick’s Right Guard deodorant and thinking that would do in the pong department – no, I’d absolutely reek of Ralph Lauren. I squirted some more on my neck, on my wrists, on the backs of my knees and up my skirt.

  ‘Obsession,’ I muttered, striking a dramatic pose, ‘for the girl who’s mysterious yet sexy, elusive yet sensual –’

  ‘What’s that terrible smell?’

  I swung around. Sarah, my sister-in-law, had walked into my advert. She was wrinkling up her nose in disgust in the doorway.

  ‘Oh, hi, Sarah, it’s called perfume, not much call for it around here, I agree, but it’s something women in civilized societies use to make themselves smell sexy and alluring. It’s instead of the usual cow dung.’

  ‘Oh, right, yes, rings a bell actually. I seem to remember in my far-off distant past squirting something like that behind my ears, when I lived in a town, of course, and wore shoes instead of clogs – gosh, I like the hair!’ She circled me approvingly. ‘Ooh, and what’s in the bags, can I see?’

  She delved in and pulled out a fuchsia pink skirt about eight inches long.

  ‘Hey, look at this! God, how divine, but where are you going to go in it, the Young Farmers’ bring-and-buy? The WI car-boot sale?’ She giggled.

  ‘Why not?’ I said, grabbing it from her. ‘Might shake them up a bit. From now on, Sarah, I’m changing my image. Just because I live on a farm, I don’t have to look like one or smell like one – you won’t recognise me. I’ll be a new woman!’

  Sarah sat down with a sigh. ‘God, I wish I was a new woman, a completely different woman, in fact, not me at all.’

  She ran her hands through her curly brown hair, her sweet, freckled face decidedly gloomy. I dumped the bags on the floor, hoping she hadn’t seen the price tag on the skirt, put the kettle on for coffee and sat down opposite her.

  Sarah was married to Nick’s brother Tim and I was extremely fond of her. As far as female company went she’d saved
my life when I’d moved down here, and not many days passed when we didn’t partake of a tea bag or two in one or other kitchen. She worked her butt off in a riding stables for very little money whilst Tim tried to scrape a living from his terribly correct organic farm. They were very, very Green (in more ways than one, I thought privately) and full of high ideals and marvellous morals, but at the end of the day they were still exhausted and penniless, and, as I kept telling her, what was the good of having high ideals and marvellous morals if you didn’t have any fun or any dosh?

  ‘Trooble oop stables?’ I said sympathetically, passing her a mug of coffee. ‘Still shovelling shit out of some ungrateful stallion’s stall? Tell them to get off their lazy hocks and do it themselves.’

  She sighed. ‘You know I wouldn’t mind the hard work, Polly, if we just had a bit of fun now and again, but we don’t. Nothing ever seems to happen around here, does it? It’s just work, eat, sleep, day after day, that’s all I seem to do. For God’s sake, I’m only twenty-three, and Tim and I never do anything any more; we don’t go out to dinner, we don’t even go to the cinema. I tell you, I’m fed up.’

  ‘Sarah! I’m shocked. You know very well there’s a Friends of the Earth rally in Truro next month!’

  She ground her teeth. ‘Terrific. Talk about life in the fast lane.’

  I grinned. ‘OK, I will.’

  I leaned forward conspiratorially and told her about the shoot. She listened agog, suitably impressed by the fiendish way I’d arranged it all.

  ‘Heavens, Polly, you’re unreal. Isn’t Nick furious?’

  ‘Oh no,’ I said airily, ‘he’s very relaxed. In fact, he’s rather pleased now, quite proud of me, in fact. You see, we’re getting a hell of a lot of money for the location fee and we’ll be able to make all sorts of improvements to the farm. Who knows, we might even plant a few trees, do our bit for the rainforests, that kind of thing.’