by Unknown
But Pheely was eager to impart one of her local history lessons – something akin to a potted Dynasty plot set against a bucolic backdrop.
‘Granville Gates and Reg Wyck aren’t officially brothers, of course,’ she murmured, ‘but local legend firmly hints at bad old Constantine Senior squiring both their poor mothers. If that’s so then they’re not members of the rival Oddlode clans at all – they’re actually Hell’s Bells’ half-brothers. Oh, it gets even more complicated.’ She laughed at Ellen’s boggling eyes. ‘You have no idea how entangled the family trees are around here. They make Ely Gates’s orchard look like bonsai. There’s more mixed blood than a field hospital.’
Ellen was already completely lost. ‘So is Gladys’s husband . . .’
‘Granville,’ Pheely helped her out.
‘Is he one of Ely’s brothers?’ She paused by a lamp-post to Sellotape up a ‘missing’ sign.
‘Granville? No, he’s an uncle. He used to be the manor groundsman, but he was dismissed when he went mad.’
‘Mad?’
‘Yes – good old-fashioned mad. There’s no delicate mental-health descriptions applied around here, and the poor bastard has probably never been referred to a psychiatrist in his life. He’s just mad. I do so envy him the freedom.’ She sighed.
‘He’s still alive?’
‘Very much so. He lives in an old railway carriage in the cutting by Eastlode Heath. Glad Tidings still takes him his supper every evening after she’s finished work – carries it across the fields with a tea-towel wrapped around the pot and delivers it to the door before going home to her tithe cottage. Come hail or storm, she does her meals-on-heels run – unless the Bellings are entertaining, in which case she leaves it at the edge of the orchard to save time, and mad Granville collects it.’
‘Does he ever come into the village?’ Not for the first time Ellen suspected her of embellishing the truth, however delectably.
‘Not often, as far as I know. He train-spots – I’m not making it up,’ she said, as Ellen looked sceptical. ‘He sits in his carriage and watches the trains go by although, God knows, after ten years, you’d think he’d get bored of the regular Paddington to Hereford service and take a day trip to Clapham Junction or Crewe.’
‘What made him go mad?’
‘No one knows. It was around the time Spurs left.’ She gave Ellen a weighty look, practically mowing her down with those huge green eyes.
Ellen bit the tape from the reel and fastened the last corner of the poster. At last they had got to the point. The butterfly had landed.
‘I can’t see Hell’s Bells finding him a suitable wife,’ Pheely opined. ‘None of the grander families around here would touch him, and she’s a frightful snob about marrying “down”.’
‘Won’t Spurs have any say in the matter?’
‘I doubt it. Isabel’s class are of the opinion that you can fuck whomsoever you like – discreetly – but you marry the person you are told to.’
‘I can’t see Spurs buying it.’
‘He can always bugger off again. Maybe he already has. Have you seen him yet?’ she nosed.
Ellen shook her head.
‘Good.’ Pheely had only heard edited highlights of Ellen’s weekend in the garden with Spurs, but it was enough to sign her new friend’s death warrant as far as she was concerned.
‘Has he ridden Otto yet?’ Ellen couldn’t resist asking.
‘If he has, he’s done it bareback. I’ve locked the saddle in the woodshed.’
He had a bare back before, Ellen thought wistfully, remembering the muscles moving beneath the tanned, freckled skin.
‘I’m so glad I turned up to rescue you that night.’ Pheely kept pace as they moved on to another lamp-post. ‘God knows what would have happened otherwise.’
I’d have found out what Spurs is hiding, Ellen thought wretchedly. We’d have carried on kissing. And I wouldn’t have lost his trust.
Yet she couldn’t feel angry with Pheely: she valued her company and good humour too much to blame her. If anyone was to blame, she knew that she was wearing her skin. She had thought about calling Spurs, but she had no number and was too much of a coward to turn up at the manor in person, uncertain of her reception. She was far more certain of Pheely, who always greeted her with a smile as warm as a hearth and stories of village births, marriages and deaths.
They made their way across the green, deserted today beneath the grey, threatening skies. Ellen gave Bevis’s bench a friendly nod as they passed it, then called the dogs away from eyeing up the nervous ducks on the pond before walking under the row of horse-chestnuts and crossing towards Manor Lane.
‘The mill-race has been throwing itself about like a white-water run since the storm.’ Pheely went to take a look at the violent swirling beneath the bridge. ‘One day it’s going to sweep all those old vans and cars right into Ely’s orchard.’
‘Who lives in the house?’ Ellen studied the shabby old mill, its grandeur slipping away a stone tile at a time, like a lizard with alopecia hunching its scaly shoulders as it clung to the banks of the swirling stream. Its forecourt was filled with an extraordinary collection of ancient cars and rusting farming machinery, as it had been for as long as Ellen remembered. One Land Rover had been up on bricks for so long that it was overgrown with ivy, like one of Norman Gently’s sculptures.
‘Ely’s younger brother Noah inherited it from Pa Gates’s estate.’ Pheely continued her lesson in the Gates family tree. ‘This is known as Noah’s Car Park – although I prefer to think of it as Mills and Baboon. Noah is very unreconstructed, rather like his house.’ She eyed the grubby windows for signs of life. ‘Ely’s dying to get his hands on the building to develop it, but Noah refuses to budge. Sometimes you see him leaning out of his attics, scanning the horizon for a dove with an olive branch, poor sod. Ely can make it very difficult for somebody if he wants to buy them out.’
‘Like you?’ Ellen asked, thinking about the much-envied beauty of the Lodge.
‘I wasn’t thinking of me.’ She glanced at Ellen pointedly then moved on and yelled for Hamlet, who had cornered a cat across the road in the Lodes Inn car park.
‘Do you know something I don’t?’ Ellen hastily checked that the cat wasn’t Fins then hopped after her.
‘Only through deduction.’ Pheely was pulling clematis flowers from stone walls to thread through her curls. ‘You say Ely is behind the one and only – and very silly – offer on the cottage. Nobody else seems remotely interested, despite its obvious charms. QED, he’s putting the kibosh on any other deal. Take it from one who knows, you can’t rely on sly Ely. He has money in his pocket and God on his side. The whole village is under his spell. And some are under his Godspell – mostly teenage boys.’ She giggled wickedly, adding a fat red rose from an immaculate front garden to her Ophelia tiara.
‘How’s the bust going?’ Ellen sensed mutiny.
‘Don’t ask.’ Pheely marched along Manor Lane, then proceeded to tell Ellen all about it. ‘That child is so unpleasant, these days. We’ve had three sittings so far, and she just plugs herself into that ratty-tatty impersonal stereo and sits staring into space. I shall immortalise her with wire coming out of her ears, whatever Ely says. It’s her only distinctive feature. In fact, I may try something a little abstract to express the solitude of stereo,’ she mused thoughtfully, as they paused by a dog-poop bin to attach a poster above it.
Ellen looked at her fifth Sellotaped photostat of Fins, with his furious face and puffed-up black and white chest. He looked like a waiter who had been told that the steak was overdone.
Suddenly it hit her that he might have gone for ever, that he might not return when he was hungry and cold and wet. Because he would be all three right now, and he still hadn’t come back to her. Like Spurs, she thought illogically. He was like a feral cat – independent, wilful, prone to disappearing acts and unwilling to make friends.
‘She’s such a curious child.’ Pheely was still venting her
spleen about Godspell. ‘Always has been terribly backward. Never mixes with others her age, and still thinks she’ll be a pop star. She was bearable when she was younger – cripplingly shy, of course, and totally spoiled, but sweet enough, and great chums with Dilly. Now she’s withdrawn into herself, become furtive and bad-mannered. I’m surprised Ely can’t see that the apple of his eye has gone sour.’ She glanced across at the gnarled old orchard. ‘But he always was blind where his children were concerned.’
‘Dilly said that the two of them were no longer friends.’ Ellen pocketed the Sellotape, trying to drag her mind back on topic.
‘Yes, they both shared the pony-mad thing at one time, but Godspell lost interest.’ Pheely led the way past Cider Lane, with its peeling board advertising the antiquarian bookshop that never opened and Prudence Hornton’s failing gallery. ‘She was never very brave, and her father persuaded her to ride the Devil’s Marsh race last year – no Gates has ever taken part, and child Enoch is allergic to horses, so Godspell was to champion the wonder family. But she was so frightened, she fell off at the start and humiliated Ely, who had his camcorder trained and a vast bet laid. Godspell hasn’t been on a horse since, and rather let us down because she was supposed to ride Otto during term-time.’
‘What exactly is the Devil’s Marsh race?’ Ellen asked, distractedly Sellotaping Fins’ poster upside down on a silver birch.
‘Oh, don’t mention that Godawful cavalry charge.’ Pheely shuddered, forgetting that she was the one who’d brought it up. ‘Dilly’s got it into her head that she should take part this year – probably as one in the eye to Godspell. I know there are always plenty of kids on fat ponies and housewives on cobs bringing up the rear, but she can be so reckless.’
‘Is it like a gymkhana race?’ Ellen persisted.
Pheely laughed. ‘Not quite. Come and look.’ She beckoned Ellen from the lane into Manor End, which led past Ely’s beautiful farm to his less aesthetic money-spinners. Casting furtive looks up at the glossy, Bible-black sash-windows, they passed the tall, wisteria-covered Queen Anne house and went on towards the trout farm, hooking a stealthy left through a gate marked ‘Private’, which was opposite the back entrance to the little industrial estate. Some way along the overgrown farm track that wrapped their calves with wet nettles and grasses, they reached a rickety wooden footbridge across the river Odd. On its far side was a huge flat water-meadow, which stretched from the railway line on the right across acres of wildly tufted terrain to a wooded coppice far to the left, which hid it from the Goose End bridleway and prying ramblers’ eyes. Pimpled with clumps of sedge and rush, and dusted with marsh marigold, ragged robin, yellow iris and cuckoo-flowers, it stretched like a ravishing beaded velvet hem beneath the uniform rape and corn in the hills above.
‘Beautiful, isn’t it?’ Pheely breathed. ‘Unchanged for centuries because it can’t be farmed – it’s only dry for three months a year. The rest of the time you could drown crossing it. Ely’s father spent years trying to drain it, but it just sucked up the ditches and spread itself back out like crème caramel when you draw lines through it with your spoon.
‘There’s been a horse race across Devil’s Marsh for as long as anyone can remember,’ she went on. ‘The Romanies held it every year before the big summer horse fair in Morrell – they’d tether their horses on the land here, get tanked up on Manor Farm cider and gallop all over the place causing havoc. Somebody once told me they called it the dragonfly race because there are hundreds here and it takes a fast horse to catch one – the gypsy who caught the most got the highest price for his horse. I hope it’s true. It was a wonderful sight, by all accounts, and the local daredevils would join in – from dashing Constantine sons on hunters to farmhands on shires. But Ely’s father put a stop to it when he bought the farm from the Constantines and banned the gypsies from his land.
‘When Ely inherited the farm, he started holding his ridiculously show-off garden party during Ascot week.’ She scooped up a handful of blossom and scattered it into the river, playing her own dreamy game of Pooh Sticks on the bridge. ‘And he decided to resurrect the race to rival the action on the royal turf, at first inviting a very select group of riders, who all wore proper silks and tried to horsewhip each other into the river when they learned the prize was a thousand pounds.’
‘A grand?’ Ellen whistled, half tempted to enter herself. That would pay her way into a few nice hotels on her world tour.
‘Oh, yes.’ Pheely gave Ellen a wise look. ‘Ely doesn’t think a competition is worth running without a decent pot – and his parties are always very lavish. He even had a gold-plated cup made, so ostentatious, like a Formula One trophy. That was about fifteen years ago, and it’s been going ever since, attracting more and more riders every year. It’s more chaotic now than it was when the gypsies held it, I imagine. Someone always gets hurt.’
Ellen remembered Dilly saying that somebody had been killed one year, but before she could mention it her mobile rang in her pocket. She grabbed it hurriedly, hoping the feckless Lloyd was getting back to her at last. But it was her father, with an even more satisfying result. ‘Your mother agrees that you can appoint another agent, duckling,’ he told her. ‘Just get them to fax us through the details. They’ll have to work fast, mind you.’
Ellen couldn’t wait to get on the case.
Seaton’s great rival, Fox-Day’s, were only too happy to give a valuation that afternoon. To Ellen’s amazement, they suggested increasing the asking price. ‘The property market has boomed in the last six months,’ explained Poppy, the eager agent. ‘I really think we can sell this in no time – I have clients I can bring round straight away. It’s a smashing little cottage.’
Telephone calls and faxes flew back and forth between the Costa Verde and Morrell on the Moor that afternoon, until everyone was satisfied that Goose Cottage was now the new gem on Fox-Day’s books and Seaton’s were history. Theo Jamieson made the call personally to Lloyd to break the news.
Within an hour Lloyd was on Ellen’s doorstep, abandoning his Merc at an angle across the lane, the engine still running and Kylie chirruping from the stereo.
‘You can’t do this!’ he blurted, when she opened the door.
No longer lifestyle-advert slick, he looked as though he’d leaned down to adjust the volume on his Blaupunkt car stereo and found his hair sucked into an air vent. The treacle-coloured floppy fringe was on end, his tie was skew-whiff and he’d spilled coffee down his shirt. ‘I thought we had an understanding,’ he wailed.
‘That you would pull your finger out to try to sell this cottage, yes,’ Ellen agreed, ‘and you haven’t even started.’
‘You’ve hardly given me five minutes!’
‘You had seven days to get things moving. You blew it.’
‘This is completely unreasonable. Let me come in and talk about it, at least.’
He tried to shoulder his way past her, but Ellen stood her ground. ‘Why haven’t you returned my calls?’
Suddenly that big white smile sprang up, calming the chaos running across his handsome face. ‘Is that what this is all about?’
She stared at him, wondering what she had ever found attractive about him. His eyes were too close together, his thick hair showed a decidedly threadbare patch at the crown, and the square chin, now that she looked at it again, was distinctly Jimmy Hill. ‘I’m sorry, Lloyd, but my parents aren’t going to change their minds. You’ve had your chance.’
‘You don’t understand.’ His eyes darted over both his shoulders, as though they were being watched, and he dropped his voice to a whisper, the pseudo-accent long gone. ‘You can’t do this to me. I’ll lose my job.’
‘You should have thought of that before. I’m not surprised your job’s on the line if the dotted ones on all the sales contracts you handle are as blank as this one.’
‘Ely Gates’s offer is still on the table,’ he rallied, thrusting out the huge square chin.
Ellen took a step back into th
e porch and blinked as it suddenly hit home. ‘He bribed you, didn’t he?’
Lloyd looked shifty, his chin swinging backwards and forwards like a great bulldozer bucket.
Ellen realised what Pheely had been hinting at, and could have hit herself for not seeing it earlier. ‘He bribed you to make sure nobody else wanted Goose Cottage so that he could get it cheap, didn’t he? It was his mother’s favourite cottage – a sentimental addition to his property empire, just so long as he gets it at a bargain price. He probably bribed the Wyckses too.’
‘He’s my uncle,’ Lloyd confessed, his big chin hanging loose as he gave up the show. ‘I had no choice. He’s bailed Mum and Dad out loads of times. We owe him. If he doesn’t get this place, you have no idea how bad things could get for us.’
‘He can have it,’ Ellen said simply. ‘He just has to pay the asking price.’
‘He won’t do that.’
‘He can afford it.’
‘His pride can’t.’ Lloyd sounded defensive. ‘He doesn’t like outsiders to profit from the village.’
‘My parents lived here for over a decade.’
‘My mother’s family has lived here for twenty generations.’
‘Then we have nothing more to say.’
‘Please!’ he begged. ‘For my sake – I thought you liked me. We kissed.’
‘That was a mistake.’ Ellen looked away guiltily. Then she took a deep breath. ‘You are a nice guy, Lloyd – or you could be. You just have to start thinking for yourself. You’re bright enough and good enough at your job to rise above Ely and twenty generations of bigotry. You have to break free from your family some time.’
‘You don’t understand life around here!’ he exploded. ‘If you’d got to know me a bit better, you would. We have so much in common, Ellen. I think we’re made for one another. I think—’
They both turned to the lane as a clatter of hooves heralded a bitter laugh. ‘Before you set about making the earth move, would you mind moving your bloody car?’