by Wendy Holden
"Yes, she might." At the suggestion, Mark opened his hazel eyes innocently and flashed Rosie a devastating smile. "Why don't you go and ask her?"
"Why me? Why don't you go?"
"You're better at it."
"No, I'm not. You go. You might get something for the column out of it."
Mark snorted scornfully. "Doubt it. No, seriously, you go. I've got work to do. Got to start thinking about the third column."
The knickers and bras were obviously staying. With a sinking heart, Rosie went outside and knocked on the door of the cottage below. A thrill of fear slithered through her stomach. She was about to discover who, or what, lurked behind the mysterious net curtains.
Fully expecting a crabbed and bent crone, Rosie was confounded to find the door opened by a bright-eyed old lady with a flowered apron tied over a polka-dot dress. "Come in, do," she said to Rosie. "I've been meaning to pop round and say hello. But I've been that busy!" She let out a girlish giggle and stretched out a hand. "Dora Womersley. How do you do?"
The first thing about the dark and low-ceilinged interior that struck Rosie was that the air smelled thickly of gravy. Lunch was clearly well on its way. The second was an old man in a burgundy sweater and carpet slippers beside the fire. Despite what sounded like the local sports program turned up to a window-shattering volume, and the radio's position on the mantelpiece on a level with his ear, he seemed to have just woken up. "Hello, duck," he shouted, catching sight of Rosie. "Thought I heard someone come in." He was clearly very deaf.
"Hello," Rosie bawled back. "I'm Rosie. I've just moved in next door."
"That's right," shouted Mr. Womersley. "Come and stand over here by t'fire and get warm." The glowing coals beside him packed the punch of a smelting furnace, Rosie realized as she took up his suggestion. After less than a minute, she had some insight into how chicken tikka must feel in a tandoori oven.
Roasting, Rosie noticed several pairs of old-lady's bloomers strung up to dry on the chimney breast.
"Yon's her Harvest Festivals," bellowed Mr. Womersley.
Rosie stared. What on earth was the old man talking—or rather yelling—about?
To her embarrassment, Mr. Womersley pointed straight at the bloomers. "Them knickers you're looking at. Harvest Festivals, I call 'em. Because all is safely gathered in."
"He's awful, he really is," Mrs. Womersley grumbled affectionately. Rosie smiled. Married several hundred years and still making jokes with each other. Would she and Mark be so comfortable together fifty years from now?
She watched as Mr. Womersley was handed a large glass of something pale.
"Sour milk," explained his wife proudly. "He drinks a pint of it every day with castor oil and sugar in. Best recipe for a long life, according to my mother. She lived till she was ninety. I'm eighty and he's seventy-eight."
"She was obviously right," Rosie yelled politely over the radio, hoping not to be offered some. Glancing at the odd-colored liquid that was exuding an unpleasant smell, it struck her that there were some circumstances in which a short life could be a merciful option.
"I don't know if you take sugar," Mrs. Womersley said, offering Rosie a cup of tea and a saucer, "but I always put a spoon in anyway. Stops you spilling it, then."
"Oh, she's full of them tricks," shouted Mr. Womersley. "Potatoes on t'carpet, tights in t'fridge…"
"Shut up, you." Mrs. Womersley laughed as the radio roared on. "But it's true," she told the puzzled-looking Rose. "If you put packages of new tights in the freezer for an hour or two, you'll get a lot more wear out of them. And there's nothing like a slice of raw potato to treat a burn mark on a carpet. Fancy a scone with that tea?" The old lady rattled a tin out of a cupboard and wrenched off the lid.
Rosie eagerly put her hand in the tin and picked out one of the oddest scones she had ever seen.
"Funny, aren't they?" boomed Mr. Womersley with delight. "Square."
He was, Rosie thought, just like a naughty, if somewhat deaf and ancient, little boy.
"Yes, because it saves you dough," bellowed his wife. "Think of all that waste if you cut 'em into rounds."
"They're delicious," Rosie said truthfully as the buttery scone melted in her mouth. It had been years since she had savored anything as authentically homemade-tasting as this. Outside, the clock struck fifteen. Rosie was reminded that she had not yet broached the subject of furniture.
"Erm…" Her voice was starting to crack. Sensory overload was the last thing she had expected from the cottage next door, but the combined heat, volume, and taste were proving overwhelming. "I just wanted to ask you—"
"Are you liking Eight Mile Bottom?" Mrs. Womersley interjected, her eyes bright and questioning above the rim of her teacup.
Rosie nodded. "Yes, but I need—"
"You'll need to meet some people, definitely." Mrs. Womersley nodded understandingly. "Well, I'd love you to meet my nephew Jack. He'd be a nice friend for you."
"Jack up at the farm? Spitesomething?" Rosie could not quite remember the name.
Mrs. Womersley flew to the radio and turned it down. She smiled and nodded vigorously. "Winter. Spitewinter. So you've met him?" She looked delighted. "He never said. Nice boy, Jack. Works very hard."
"No, the postman told me." In the sudden silence, Rosie's ears were ringing almost as loudly as the radio had been. "Said he'd been having a few problems with his, um, cattle feed."
Mrs. Womersley frowned. "That postman. Sickening nuisance, he is. Poking his nose in where he's no business, left, right, and center."
"Anyway, about furniture," Rosie said, making a final desperate lunge at the subject.
"Slapton," said the old lady immediately. "You need to go to Slapton."
Rosie nodded. Slapton, as she well knew from driving through it from the motorway, was the local small town whose setting at the bottom of a basin surrounded by high hills gave it an aspect of unremitting gloom.
"Bought our settee there when we got married, we did." Mrs. Womersley waved a wrinkled hand at an ancient piece of furniture almost entirely covered with assorted hand-knitted rugs. "Mind you, that were fifty year ago. Fifty year and not worn out yet," she said, glancing fondly at the exhausted-looking sofa.
"Well, I've had you fifty bloody year and haven't worn you out yet," boomed her husband from the fireside.
Mrs. Womersley rolled her eyes at Rosie. "Men, eh? Who'd have 'em? You're lucky to live on your own."
Rosie stared. "But I don't. I live with my boyfriend."
Mrs. Womersley looked amazed and disappointed. "Ooh, I didn't realize. I never saw anyone else beside you and that postman."
"He's a writer," Rosie said, as if that somehow explained Mark's failure to help with the furniture moving. "That's one of the reasons we moved here actually," she added eagerly. "For the peace and, um, quiet."
During the past few minutes, Mr. Womersley had stealthily been turning the radio knob back up. It was now almost as loud as before. "Peace and quiet?" he interjected, hand cupped behind a very large and reddened earlobe. "It's like the bloody Somme up here sometimes—all them kids yelling and banging."
"What kids?" Rosie asked, alarmed. "I haven't seen anyone else."
Kids, however, explained how so many bizarre items had arrived in her grass. A bent tin tray, a doll's head, a deflated football, among others. Not the sort of things a couple of childless teachers would be expected to have.
"Them kids that live next door to you. All away at one of them New Age hippie festivals at the moment, they are," Mrs. Womersley supplied. Rosie's mouth dropped open in shock. "But we don't mind 'em really. They can be a bit noisy though. Fred's deaf so it doesn't bother him."
***
Mark looked up from his laptop as Rosie reentered the kitchen. "It's so peaceful here," he said happily. "Much better to write in than Craster bloody Road."
Thinking of what Mrs. Womersley had said about the absent, noisy children, a tremor of apprehension shot through Rosie. Perhaps this was not
the time to mention them.
"You've been ages," Mark said. "What on earth have you been talking about?"
"Oh, just furniture," Rosie said quickly, slipping out of the back door into the garden.
Outside, she surveyed the as yet undisturbed heaps of rubbish and tried not to think of their rumored provenance. Turning her thoughts quickly to flowerbeds, Rosie did not hear the latch lift behind her. Mark's arms suddenly slid round her waist. "Careful," she muttered as he began to nuzzle her neck. "What if Mrs. Womersley sees us from her back bedroom window?"
"Can't say I care if she does." Turning her to face him, he kissed her long and hard, his probing tongue flicking over and under hers. Without detaching his mouth, he pulled her down to one of the few grassy patches. The slow, steady drumbeat of desire struck up within Rosie.
"I'm going to screw you in every single room," he muttered thickly, holding her eyes with his own. He was always so confident she wanted him. But then he was right. Arching her back with pleasure as he pushed up her fleece and buried his face in her braless breasts, Rosie surrendered. Glancing nervously at Mrs. Womersley's upstairs window, she hoped desperately that she wasn't in the vicinity. And that this episode was not going to appear in the third "Green-er Pastures."
Chapter Ten
Though two days had passed since the Lady Avon's visit, Samantha could swear she still saw Guy's shoulders shaking. She had even cleared her dressing table of makeup because the merest glimpse of a lipstick seemed enough to set him off. She had not known him to laugh so much since the local newspaper interview she had given to trail a pantomime performance. Being reduced to pantomime was bad enough; far worse was the printed plug for the production describing Samantha as "staring at the Theatre Royal, Ilford."
"For Christ's sake," she snapped, spotting her reflected husband giggling to himself as she clamped on her eyelash curlers before the mirror. "Grow up, will you?" Yet her braggadocio hid a secret pain. After the raised social hopes and expectations her advent had occasioned, the reality of the Lady Avon had proved a dire disappointment.
Although Samantha had clacked across The Bottoms' marblefloored hall with her smile undiminished, the first sight of her ladyship had not exactly been as expected. The small, plump figure with the orange-penciled eyebrows had been something of a shock to one like Samantha, who had been anticipating an elegant personage with aristocratic ankles and earls on both sides. There were most certainly pearls on both sides, however—vast plastic encumbrances weighing heavily on each of the Lady Avon's ears.
A second surprise was the extent to which her ladyship seemed occupied by the subject of personal grooming. Over drinks in the drawing room, the conversation had roamed widely over the rival advantages of various mascaras, all of which her ladyship seemed to be wearing at once. During lunch, the talk had moved on to men's moisturizers. It was only when the Lady Avon announced to Guy that it didn't matter if he had skin like a Brillo pad, she just happened to have some male facial serum with her, that everything suddenly made sense. As she opened the case beside her chair, Guy's nonplussed expression gave way to barely suppressed hysteria as he realized that they were entertaining not the Lady Avon but the Avon Lady, a native of Eight Mile Bottom called Lorraine Biggs.
Samantha's reception of the news had taken a different, angrier turn, particularly after she had been informed, as part of a "free facial evaluation," that her crows-feet were "irreversible but possibly disguisable." The trauma had been such that, even after Lorraine had beaten a swift, scented retreat down the graveled drive with her case, Samantha had felt too unsettled and upset to contemplate the planned visit to Dame Nancy of the Amateur Dramatic Society.
Today though, at breakfast on a terrace amid a scenario faithfully copied from a recent front cover of Gazebo Beautiful, Samantha felt the trauma of the last two days begin to melt away. Resting against Cath Kidson floral cushions and carefully pressing a crisply ironed tattersall checked napkin to the corners of her lips, Samantha contemplated with something akin to pleasure the antique biscuit tins, jugs of carefully clashing flowers, vintage porcelain, and deliberately mismatched Victorian knives and forks.
Samantha folded her napkin and placed it on the table beside her untouched croissant. Though she had never been more than a birdlike eater, the Lady Avon disaster had been enough to put her off her food altogether. What she needed was a great social triumph. Inspiration struck as she pondered the possibility of making the postponed call upon the president of the Amateur Dramatic Society. A visit to Dame Nancy would be just the thing to lift her spirits. Once she let slip her acting credentials and suitability for directing all future Eight Mile Bottom thespian operations, she'd be running the show before you could say Steven Spielberg.
Minutes later, she was crunching down the gravel drive in Guy's Jaguar. Dame Nancy might only live next door, but Samantha had no intention of making anything less than a grand entrance. Feeling the powerful car purr beneath her, she felt restored. Omnipotent, even. She put her foot down, hard.
Her contentment was short-lived. As Samantha shot through the gates and out onto the road, she shrieked and slammed on the brakes, stopping a mere few inches from the back of a large herd of cows swaying up the village street.
Nails dug into her padded steering wheel, Samantha stared furiously at the lurching bottoms blocking her path. Bloody farmers. Cluttering up the road with their sodding livestock at times when important people like herself were trying to make important calls.
Cursing, she threw open the car door and stumped to the side of the herd, loathing the inelegant animals as they lumbered clumsily forward, caked with mud—or worse. Catching sight of the swaying, vast, veined udders, Samantha felt sick. "Shoo! Shoo!" she shrieked at the puzzled beasts, waving her arms and stamping her stilettoed feet.
Panicking, the animals began to turn in all directions, including, to Samantha's horror, up The Bottoms' own drive. Bellowing in confusion and fear, the cattle's hornlike blasts counterpointed Samantha's indignant, high-pitched screams as, banging their bony backsides with her Fendi Baguette, she attempted to chivy the beasts back onto the road. "Move, you disgusting, noisy, horrible, dirty things. Ugh!" she screamed, as a stray mud-plastered tail almost scored a direct hit on her beige Armani.
"What the hell do you think you're doing?" A hulking man in overalls appeared, running up from the front of the herd. "What are you doing?" he repeated.
"And who might you be?" Samantha reverted with professional ease to the freezing, interrogative tones that had launched her career. One of her first roles had been as a barrister in Crown Court.
"Jack Meverell. Spitewinter Farm. And this is my dairy herd. Now what the hell are you doing?"
"I am trying to get these revolting creatures out of the way," snapped Samantha, feeling, despite her bluster, slightly wrong- footed that the man before her was not one of the stunted, scrofulous, crotch-scratching examples of local manhood she had glimpsed so far. All his features were not only roughly in the right places but were also actually quite reasonable. Handsome, even.
"Must they run amok all over the road?" Samantha demanded.
"You're new to this village, aren't you?"
Samantha fixed the farmer with a beady, mascaraed stare. "As it happens, my husband and I have just moved here. From London."
"Thought so," said the man.
Samantha dimpled fetchingly, delighted that her air of expensive urban sophistication was evident even to mud-spattered rustics. "How did you work that out?"
"Because otherwise you'd know that my cows cross this road twice a day to the milking parlor," said the farmer flatly. "That's what cows are for. Milk."
Samantha scowled. New to this village or not, she was determined to put her foot down. Lay down some ground rules. Looking at the road beneath the swaying, eye-rolling herd, she saw with disgust that quite a few steaming ones had been laid already.
"But do they have to make such an appalling noise?" she demanded.
&n
bsp; "Don't you think it might be normal for cows to be heard in the countryside?"
Samantha's nostrils flared indignantly. "Unfortunate though, isn't it?" she returned acidly, leaping back in the Jaguar without another word.
***
As Samantha disappeared down the drive, Guy, though relieved, was conscious once again of the oppressive silence of The Bottoms. Perhaps it was the sheer age of the place that made him uneasy; the thought of all those people who had been born, lived, and, in particular, died here over the last five and a half centuries. It seemed to him that the house had a peculiar atmosphere, although mentioning this to Samantha had achieved nothing. But then Samantha was not particularly sensitive to atmosphere. She was not particularly sensitive to anything.
Besides, thought Guy, she had created a pretty peculiar atmosphere of her own. The centuries-old whitewashed walls, expanses of ancient oak, and exposed stonework were now submerged beneath a tidal wave of bric-a-brac.