by Unknown
After a promising start, Poppy had reported a hitch. One or two low offers had already dribbled in, but almost all of the buyers had commented on how offputtingly dark the cottage was, with its low, hooded windows and the Jamiesons’ love of rich, sombre colours.
‘It is dark – old cottages are,’ Ellen grumbled. ‘I know Mum and Dad’s taste is a bit traditional, but they had an army of decorators to do all this.’
‘I could help you repaint it!’ Dilly sat up excitedly. ‘It wouldn’t take more than a couple of days to cover those dreary downstairs walls.’
‘I don’t know if it’s worth it – whoever buys it will redecorate straight away.’
Dilly had an obvious ulterior motive. ‘We could get Spurs to help. He helped you before, didn’t he?’
Ellen tried to imagine Spurs’ face if she turned up saying, ‘Let’s forget about the badger and the fact I’m not hot enough to sleep with. My second wish is that you make over the cottage.’ She still hadn’t caught sight of him all week, although she looked up with sickening excitement every time she heard horse’s hooves passing by, and her walks inevitably seemed to take in the loop past the manor. ‘I’m sure he has better things to do,’ she said quickly. ‘And the cottage really isn’t that bad.’
But Dilly was inspired, already bounding inside to take a look at the project, alarmingly like Lawrence Llewellyn Bowen in a curly blonde wig. ‘If you painted all these walls white, it would show off the stonework and the beams,’ she pointed out. ‘It would make it look really medieval.’
‘That William Morris wallpaper cost my parents a fortune.’
‘But it’s so gross. This place is so gloomy and depressing. And it looks like a chapel of rest with all these flowers littered about.’ There was nothing like a teenager for summing things up.
Ellen started to laugh, cheered by her energy.
‘Oh, come on,’ Dilly pleaded. ‘I’ll help you for nothing – I’d just be grateful for something to do.’
‘What about riding Otto?’
‘Spurs is far better at that than me. Actually, I get a bit freaked out by him. He scares me.’
‘Are we talking Spurs or Otto this time?’
‘Both.’
Having convinced Dilly that they really didn’t need Spurs’ help, Ellen took her to the bizarre higgledy-piggledy hardware store in Market Addington where they bought several litres of one-coat emulsion, two trays and two rollers.
‘You are so good at maths.’ Dilly whistled, as Ellen calculated how much paint they’d need.
‘My mother read me times tables in bed instead of stories,’ Ellen joked, although it was closer to the truth than she cared to admit.
‘My mother told me about her boyfriends,’ Dilly giggled, ‘so I only ever got up to the two-timed table. She has a crap love-life. It’s the only thing we have in common.’
With the stereo blaring and all the doors and windows open to disperse the fumes, they slapped on paint and found a tremendous ability to render each other senseless with giggles. To Ellen’s shame, the source of a great deal of this laughter was Pheely’s eccentric attitude to motherhood.
‘She didn’t bother getting a push-chair when I was a toddler, just used the wheelbarrow to take me out, trundling me back from the village shop with a crusty loaf and a Daily Telegraph. I always smelt of compost and potash. She says we had to beg, barrow and steal the show because we were so poor after Grandpa died. She’s such a bloody exhibitionist – apart from when she has an exhibition and she gets so nervous she hides.
‘When I was little, she used to give me lumps of clay to play with because she couldn’t afford toys,’ she told Ellen, as she trailed masking tape along the wooden skirting-boards, ‘and I’d just poke my fingers into them. Mum glazed and fired everything I did because she couldn’t bear to throw it away. That was around the time the Spring Open Studio Week started in West Oxfordshire and art-lovers would troop in. She was furious that my stuff sold out and hers didn’t. That was when I got my first pony.’
Ellen couldn’t help wondering how a mother who couldn’t afford to buy her daughter toys could find the money to keep a pony or send her away to school. She must have charged a fortune for the finger sculptures.
‘That was the year we moved out of the Lodge and into the cottage,’ Dilly explained. ‘Mum simply couldn’t run the big house any more. Things became a lot easier after that, although I missed the television.’
‘Couldn’t you move that to the cottage?’
‘Mum’s work was getting very experimental at that time, so she smashed the screen and filled it with little clay people trying to fight their way out. It was pretty cool, actually, but nobody bought it.’
Dilly clearly had a classic love-hate relationship with her mother. Given such a Bohemian childhood, she was wilful and more than a little spoilt, and she patently resented the lack of luxuries that her schoolfriends had taken for granted.
‘She’s not mean, but she just doesn’t understand or want the same things as other people. She’s never seen a soap opera in her life, or worn a pair of trainers. She thinks entertainment is reading a favourite chapter of Iris Murdoch or playing a Carpenters LP – an LP! I ask you! Who has vinyl any more? Most of my friends’ parents are much older than Mum, but they know what a DVD and an Mpeg are. They have cars they can teach their kids to drive in, they watch Big Brother, and they have a social life.
‘We hardly ever went on holiday – Mum can’t drive and we’ve always had a dog, so it was hard to get away. We took Gertrude – that was our old Labrador – to Wales once on the train to go camping. It was only when we got there that Mum admitted we didn’t have a tent. She’d brought the drain rods and a couple of old tarpaulins because she thought she could “fashion” something, but it was a total disaster and all the B-and-Bs were too expensive, so we caught a train straight home.’
Her funny stories and her extraordinary blend of innocence and cynicism made her beguiling company, although she lacked her mother’s naughty but wise wit and self-deprecation. Ellen was reminded again and again of how childlike both women were, little girls who had grown up in a fairy grotto and been sent away to old-fashioned schools, destined to spend holidays playing solitary games and only conversing with one – very eccentric and equally childlike – adult. And, just like Pheely, she got the impression that Dilly longed to break free from the spell that had trapped her in time. Her vivacious energy had a curious anger to it.
‘Do you want to be an artist?’ Ellen asked, as she watched her slapping on emulsion with gusto.
‘God, no – it’s so lonely. Mum wants me to become a doctor or a solicitor. Boring! I’ve always had other plans.’
Ellen expected her to announce the desire to be rich and famous in common with her sometime-friend Godspell. But, to her surprise, Dilly said, ‘I want to get married as soon as possible.’
‘And . . . ?’
‘And have lots of babies.’ She loaded her roller and attacked a fresh wall. ‘I want to make a big, boisterous family to fill the Lodge. Mum can live in the cottage and baby-sit when she’s not sculpting. It’ll be perfect.’
Ellen couldn’t see Pheely taking to an annexed-granny role, but she kept schtum. ‘What about university? I thought you had a place?’ She remembered Pheely boasting proudly that Dilly would have the academic opportunities that young motherhood had denied her.
‘Yeah, and I’ll take it if I don’t meet my husband this summer – it’s a good hunting ground for husbands, and I’m bright enough to get a degree while I’m at it. But I’d rather not go away again. I love this place. I belong here.’
Ellen couldn’t have got it more wrong. Dilly just wanted to share the magic Lodge with a proper family at last, one of her own making.
‘It’s a shame Mum hasn’t ever married – she just borrows other people’s husbands.’ She gave Ellen a mischievous look. ‘But she’s still young enough to have more babies, so maybe we can do it together. That would be beyon
d cool. Can a mother and daughter marry a father and son, or is that illegal?’
Ellen tried not to laugh. ‘Who did you have in mind?’
‘I’m not sure yet.’
‘Well, it would certainly get Lily Lubowski going.’
‘Too right!’ Dilly shrieked with laughter. ‘I might put an ad up in the post-office window. They’ll need to be local, ideally, and very rich – the Lodge needs thousands of pounds of work.’
Ellen was having trouble getting her head around Dilly’s plans. She couldn’t tell whether she was extraordinarily naïve for seventeen or wise beyond her years. She certainly had a strange attitude to men. ‘Do you have any contact with your father?’
‘He died when I was a baby,’ Dilly said flatly.
‘I’m sorry.’
Dilly sent showers of paint over herself and the floor as she overloaded the roller and drew great white zigzags across the dark blue flowered walls. ‘He was an artist like Mum, one of Grandpa’s students. Mum says he was the most beautiful man in all the world. He was the love of her life, her true soulmate. If he hadn’t died, they’d still be together, living at the Lodge with hordes of children. He was killed in a motorcycle accident.’
‘I’m sorry.’ Ellen saw the sting in Dilly’s childlike fairytale plans. She wanted to create the life that a tragic death had stolen away. Her heart went out to Pheely, who had never breathed a word, or shown any self-pity for the love that had been taken from her.
Dilly dipped her roller again. ‘I never knew him, so I don’t really miss him – like Mum not having a mother to look after her when she grew up. I want to meet my soulmate while I’m still young, so that we can have our whole lives together. I planned to do it when I was sixteen, like Mum, but I’m crap at flirting and exams got in the way. Bloody all-girls’ schools are hopeless. Did you go to an all-girls’ school?’
‘No, I went to the local comp.’
‘God, I envy you.’ White paint splattered over the T-shirt Dilly was wearing. ‘I wanted to, but Mum said I had to go away and get a proper education – so she could get sloshed and behave badly while I wasn’t around to see. Did you have lots of boyfriends at school?’
‘No. I met a boy at sixteen and we were together until quite recently.’
‘But you never married or had children?’
She shook her head.
‘In that case, he can’t have been your soulmate.’
‘He was once.’ Ellen thought about Richard. ‘But I was very different at sixteen. We both were. Souls grow up too, you know, and they can grow apart.’
‘Yeah, well, I’m seventeen now – so I know more about what I want. I’m ready to get married.’
‘I’m twenty-nine, and I’m not.’ Ellen laughed. ‘Are you sure you’ll feel the same way in ten years?’
‘Absolutely. I know it’s time. I think Rory might be my soulmate. Or, at least, I did,’ she heaved a deep sigh, ‘until I met Spurs. Now he is gorgeous. Do you think he fancies me?’
Ellen’s roller hissed against the wall as she waited to breathe normally, anxious not to react with a stupid, jealous blurt that would give away her feelings. ‘Bound to,’ she said finally, looking across at the blonde curls spilling from their scrunchie and the pretty face covered with paint speckles, forcing herself to give Dilly a cheery smile that said, ‘What man wouldn’t?’
‘Really? Has he said something?’
‘I haven’t seen him lately.’ The goosebumps sprang to attention as they always did when she spoke about Spurs.
‘I see him around all the time.’ Dilly sounded surprised, then thought about it, pressing the roller to her chin. ‘Maybe it’s fate.’
‘Maybe.’ Ellen painted carefully around a light fitting.
‘I believe in fate. Like him coming back to the village this summer. And I’ve just studied Romeo and Juliet for A level.’ She waved the roller excitedly, revealing a white beard where it had been pressed to her chin.
Ellen was too jumpy at the subject matter to risk arguing about the spurious connection between the two. The Bellings and the Gentlys were hardly the Montagus and Capulets of Oddlode, but Dilly’s romantic interpretation was pure teenage Juliet, and Ellen was a reluctant Nurse, listening to her flights of fancy. Somewhere in the outskirts of her mind, this triggered a thought she couldn’t quite grasp – something or somebody Dilly reminded her of.
‘I can’t see Spurs making a very reliable husband,’ she mused, before remembering suddenly that Glad Tidings had said Hell’s Bells was determined to marry him off. She felt spiteful fingers pinching her heart.
‘I don’t want a stockbroker, I want a soulmate,’ Dilly said petulantly.
Ellen tried to imagine Dilly having anything approaching a normal marriage, and couldn’t. It would be wild and wonderful, and almost certainly disastrous unless she found somebody wild and wonderful enough to take her on. Then her pinched heart turned over as she registered that she was being handed a golden bow and a poisoned Cupid’s arrow.
They did look beautiful together, Ellen conceded, thinking back to the day in the garden. They would have stunning children. Perhaps Dilly was the angel Spurs needed to lift him from disgrace. They could be eccentric and lawless together in the decrepit old Lodge. He could paint and ride and revel, and she would have his babies. If only the mothers-in-law could see the sense in it . . .
‘I thought you two got on really well.’ Dilly was fishing, radiating as much heat as a Ready Brek kid.
‘I hardly know him.’ Ellen turned to look into those sparkling green eyes, caught up in a frenzy of goosebumps and heart rush. ‘But I know his soul very well indeed. I recognised it straight away.’
‘You did?’ Dilly didn’t think this odd at all. ‘And what’s it like?’
Ellen bit the corner of her mouth before saying truthfully, ‘It’s very like mine.’
‘You fancy him, then?’ The plump lower lip was thrust out huffily.
‘Oh, Dilly, he’s not my soulmate,’ she lied. ‘We’re sole survivors from two separate shipwrecks that washed up on the same shore – or, in our case, the same landlocked village. I’m leaving as soon as I can float this boat.’ She jerked her head around the room. ‘Spurs only stopped by to help me put it back together – like you are.’
‘Like me.’ Dilly drew in a little breath. ‘That is so beautiful.’
Ellen coloured against the white wall she had just painted, aware that she had got thoroughly swept up in Dilly’s ingenuous fairytale world of love-ever-after.
‘It is fate, isn’t it?’ Dilly smiled widely, cracking her painted white beard. ‘Village fate!’
Ellen nodded. It was, in fact, a village fate worse than death, as far as she was concerned. Meeting Spurs was confusing enough, but playing the Good Witch to his wizardry and to Dilly’s Dorothy made her want to join Richard in Oz.
By late evening, they had painted the dining room. Dilly dashed home to check whether Godspell had gone and to invite her mother back for a drink, leaving Ellen to scrub paint splashes from the flagstones. A strong wind blew blossom in through the open door and drew long, mournful breaths in the chimneys.
Ellen folded up the old sheets that she had used to cover the furniture and carried them through to the sitting room, ready to tackle it the next day. Dilly had been right. The white walls transformed the dining room, so that moving between it and the dark reds of the sitting room was like walking from heaven to hell. Fitting, then, that she was in hell when she heard hooves on the lane and looked out to see Spurs riding past on Otto with Dilly walking beside them, chatting eagerly. Spurs was dressed in an old hay-covered sweatshirt with a rip in one shoulder and jeans so faded they were almost white. His cheeks were high with colour and, from the dark sweat glistening on Otto’s neck and flanks, he had clearly been for a gallop.
He reined Otto to a halt at the gate and Ellen ducked down to peer out through a vase of orange chrysanthemums strategically placed by Poppy, cursing Snorkel who was barking an ecs
tatic greeting from her tether. The wind was buffeting Spurs’ curls and whipping Otto’s pink mane into a Mohican as he snorted nervily, nostrils flared like two red trumpets.
‘Ellen? Are you there?’ she heard Dilly call, and ducked down again, accidentally catching the lip of the chrysanthemum vase with her baseball-cap peak and knocking it over so that a litre of smelly flower water cascaded into her cleavage. She lunged just in time to catch the vase as it rolled off the window-sill and clutched it to her dripping chest, holding her breath. Why was it that every time she saw him, she got absolutely soaked? Still, at least it cooled her down.
‘Ellen?’
When she took another peek, she could see Spurs’ forehead creased as his silver eyes watched the window. He said something to Dilly, and shook his head.
Dilly was clearly trying to persuade him to hang around, pointing first at the cottage, where Ellen was lurking, then down to the paddock where Rory’s jumps were still set up from a fortnight earlier. But Spurs just laughed and reached down to ruffle Dilly’s hair before he rode away.
Ellen felt a stab of pain so sharp in her fast-pumping heart that she gasped. She couldn’t believe how jealous she felt, just because Spurs had made an affectionate gesture towards Dilly. She was in agony, and close to tears. It was pathetic.
‘Oh, wow, oh, wow!’ Dilly gasped, as she dashed inside. ‘Ellen? Where are you? Something so fantastic has just happened! Oh – you poor thing. You’re all wet. Jesus! You’re bleeding!’
Ellen looked down to see red marks spreading through the wet fabric of her grey T-shirt. ‘Shit!’ She’d been clasping the vase so tightly to her chest that it had cracked, a sharp edge cutting into her skin. She put it carefully to one side and pulled up her T-shirt to look. ‘It’s okay – it’s just a scratch.’ She watched the little beads of blood gathering in a fringed line along her breastbone.
Dilly dropped to her haunches beside her and started gathering the orange flowers from the flagstones, breathless with excitement. ‘Spurs has just asked me out!’