Farm Fatale

by Wendy Holden

  "Yes, sort of," said Mark quickly. Telling Rosie that he had spent the afternoon in semidarkness with a film star suddenly struck him as too much information. He had been talking to the vicar anyway. When, that was, the real vicar had turned up, saying he had been telephoned by a parishioner claiming to have seen some funny-looking people entering the church.

  Hilarious, Mark thought, how he and Samantha had imagined each other to be the vicar at first. Anything less like a person of the cloth was impossible to imagine. The miniskirt out of which those gazellelike legs had spilled had been short of material in general, being the approximate width of a hairband. Rosie never wore miniskirts, despite having legs that were more than reasonable. These days, she rarely seemed to be out of the ancient jeans and shapeless fleece she wore for her visits to the farm. By contrast, Samantha had been all woman. All older woman too. He'd always had a slight Mrs. Robinson complex, all the more so after Samantha told him that The Graduate role had gone to Anne Bancroft only after she'd turned it down herself to do some film about punks. Funny, but he hadn't realized punks were around in the sixties. Funny, too, that he recognized none of the titles of her films. But then he hadn't been listening all that closely. Not after he had worked out that here— right here in front of him, asking for his help—was the woman the postman had mentioned, the woman about to give the biggest and grandest party Eight Mile Bottom had ever seen. The party that after days' festering about the fact he had not been invited, Mark now felt ready to kill to go to.

  "What's the vicar like?" asked Rosie.

  Mark rolled his eyes. "Happy clappy. Full of jokes about having once been a rep for an industrial bulb company until he saw the light. Had a road-to-Damascus conversion on the road to Scunthorpe or something."

  "He sounds great for the column."

  Mark flared his nostrils and pursed his lips. "I'll decide what is or isn't good material, thank you. Actually, what was really interesting was that he was helping someone exorcise."

  "Exercise?"

  "Orcise. Exorcise. This, um, woman thinks her house is haunted and wants the vicar to get rid of the evil spirits."

  "And will he?"

  Mark shook his head. The vicar had pissed on Samantha's parade well and truly by saying he wouldn't get rid of her ghosts and that the party would have to go ahead with them on the guest list, or was that the ghost list, ha ha. Samantha had not appreciated this joke. As sticky moments went, Mark considered, that one was a full-scale toffee pudding.

  Until he himself had brilliantly come to the rescue. "Why don't you have a marquee outside?" he had suggested to Samantha. "No need for anyone to go in the house then. It would fit in better with the Arabian Nights theme as well."

  Samantha had practically had an orgasm on the spot. She'd kissed him, hugged him, called him a genius, and promised to send him an invitation to what she made sound a more celebritypacked event than the Oscars. At this point, Mark, eager to acquit himself of obscurity, had mentioned—just dropped into the conversation—the fact that he, as it happened, was quite well known himself, thanks to having his own column in a national newspaper. In which, yes, well, it wasn't impossible—he might well see his way to mentioning her party. Samantha had almost gone into orbit. It was a pleasant memory.

  "Why won't the vicar exorcise the ghosts?" repeated Rosie loudly, wondering why she had had to ask three times. And why Mark had that soppy grin on his face.

  Mark tuned back in with a shock. "Doesn't believe in it. Thinks that ghosts have got every right to be there and that she should get used to them. Said it wasn't up to newcomers to start calling the shots with people who've lived there before them. Even if they happen to be dead."

  "Yes," said Rosie. Satchel's football began thudding against the outside wall once more. "Just what I've always said about the Muzzles."

  Mark threw her an irritated look and dived to the door. His expected howl of rage did not come, however. He stood apparently paralyzed, looking out into the lane.

  "What's going on?" Rosie asked. Everything had gone suspiciously quiet.

  Mark looked tragically over his shoulder at her. "Bella's here. With the Antichrist."

  Rosie hurried to the door to see Bella, resplendent in brand-new jeans and virgin trainers emerging from a BMW as dark and shiny as her hair. As she swung up the lane with Ptolemy in one hand and a bottle of champagne in the other, the church clock chimed thirteen.

  "Beware of parents bearing champagne," Mark snarled, beating a hasty retreat to the neglected box room. "It means they know their kids are a nightmare."

  Chapter Fifteen

  Rosie, although desperate to discuss the matter, was unable to tell Bella about Jack until Mark had gone upstairs.

  "A farmer fatale!" Bella's eyes lit up. "I must say, I'm dying to see him, darling."

  "We-ell…" Rosie said doubtfully. Jack had said she could go back to the farm, but whether he would welcome half of Islington as well was another matter.

  Bella, however, had made up her mind. "It would be marvelous for Tolly to see a real farm," she pressed. "As you know, darling, part of the entire reason I've brought him up here is so he learns not to be afraid of the countryside."

  Rosie avoided saying she had never met a child less afraid of anything than Ptolemy. Bella's fears that, as a delicate London infant, her precious son would not mix well with tough country children had proved unfounded as, within minutes of his arrival, Ptolemy had leaped on Satchel and started pounding him into the road. This marked the first-ever occasion on which Mark had smiled at Bella's son. His smile soon vanished when, told to calm down and do something peaceful, darling, by his mother, Ptolemy proceeded to color in the seagrass mat before the fireplace with felt-tip pens. Told to stop this, darling, by his mother, he then began to explore the different ways of entering the room through the windows. Told to stop this, darling, by his mother, he began jumping on the sofa with his shoes on and kicking the cushions in the air.

  Bedtime, when it finally, thankfully, came was shattered by a terrifying tantrum once Ptolemy realized he had forgotten his bath toys. The resulting deafening flamenco of tiny feet (Ptolemy did not seem to have been taught to pitter-patter) on the wooden floor of the bathroom seemed certain to result in the complete capitulation of the woodworm-weakened planks. "Little sod," Mark snarled through clenched teeth. Rosie sensed it was beginning to dawn on him that there were children in the world who were if not worse than the Muzzles, then just as bad. Children, puzzlingly, vastly better educated and privileged into the bargain.

  But the effort required to deal with Ptolemy had one beneficial effect, which was to distract Bella's attention from her sleeping quarters. Their sleeping quarters to be precise—Rosie and Mark had given up their room and faced the daunting prospect of the sofabed downstairs. Rosie was aware that their damp-speckled, grit-flecked bedroom might not coincide with Bella's idea of luxury. Despite the fact that she had put a vase of flowers on the window sill.

  Yet Bella had, so far, been exceedingly polite about what Rosie remembered Nigel describing as the "transitional" nature of the cottage interior. She seemed less alarmed, in fact, by the bathroom door being off its hinges and the wind whistling all night through the gaps surrounding the bedroom window frame than she was by Rosie looking "really rather rustic, darling."

  "Don't you think you're letting things slip a little?" she asked when Rosie confessed after Bella's morning bath that no, she didn't have a hair dryer.

  Rosie countered with what she felt was the ingenuous explanation that the less makeup she put on, the fewer mistakes she would make with it. "You know how you used to despair over my clumpy mascara," she said.

  Bella considered this. "It's all very well looking natural, darling, but you actually have to put a lot of makeup on to make that justscrubbed look work."

  But at least the garden, if not Rosie or the cottage, showed signs of someone having worked on it, and it was out here that Rosie dragged Bella and her son after breakfast. Much
to Rosie's delight, the scented narcissi planted by the previous occupants had recently started to nod from the borders among the pansies and flowering herbs she had put in herself. It was into these, the first flowers in Rosie's first garden, that Ptolemy now started drop-kicking a large and familiar-looking football.

  "He's ruining my pansies," Rosie wailed.

  "Darling," Bella soothed. "You mustn't mind too much. Blue's a dreadfully common color for a pansy."

  Rosie eyed Ptolemy with dislike. How odd that Bella, so acute on every other front, was utterly blind to the faults of her adored son. Just as Bella had always imagined that she, Rosie, was oblivious to the glaring faults of Mark. That, at least, had changed.

  "Let's have lunch at the pub," Rosie suggested. Bella's visit may have meant Ptolemy, but it also meant the opportunity to break Mark's embargo on the Barley Mow. If it got Ptolemy out of the house, he was unlikely to object.

  "Couldn't keep away from the beer forever, then?" Alan called out to Rosie from behind the bar. "The call of the mild?"

  Rosie grinned and introduced Bella. "My friend from London."

  "London, eh?" mused Alan. "Heard the one about the farmer from Eight Mile Bottom who went to London? He found it easy enough to get there—just followed all the signs—but couldn't understand it when he wanted to come home and there were no signs back to Eight Mile Bottom!"

  Bella looked nonplussed at this. Her eyes dwelt on Alan's Green with Henvy T-shirt, and she read the accompanying details about the World Championship Hen Racing.

  "Look, darling," she urged Ptolemy, who was busily inserting his fingers into Alan's sound system. "This gentleman holds a sort of Olympics for hens."

  "Poultry in motion, it is," Alan told him, leaning over the bar and prizing Ptolemy's digits away from the recording buttons. "You should see my champion hens. Fastest birds in the world, they are. Some go at over a hundred miles an hour."

  "That's impossible," snapped Ptolemy. Then, as the landlord shrugged and turned away, he demanded, "Show me."

  Alan sighed theatrically. "I'd love to, believe me," he said, placing both hands on the bar. "But I can't. Wrong time of year for hens."

  "What do you mean?" asked Bella.

  "Bit early for them. They'll be back in the next couple of weeks."

  Ptolemy's red bottom lip was sticking out like the drawer of a cash register. "Where are they?"

  "Africa somewhere," said Alan matter-of-factly. "Didn't you know hens go south for the winter?"

  Bella looked uncertain. Rosie pushed a hand firmly over her mouth but could not prevent her shoulders from shaking.

  "Oh, yes," continued the landlord, catching Rosie's eye. "Great flocks of 'em. You should see 'em when they set off. Millions of 'em, all sitting on the telegraph wires. Amazing sight, it is. And what's even more amazing is that they all come back. Homing hens, you see."

  "I didn't realize hens migrated," Bella said doubtfully as Rosie attempted to convert a snigger into a sneeze.

  "They don't everywhere, but they do this far north. Too cold for 'em here in the winter."

  Bella's eyes widened. "How far north are we?"

  "Put it this way," Alan said, busily polishing a glass. "Go out the door, turn right and up the hill, and it's the North Pole. Now," he added as Bella's eyebrows shot into her hairline in mixed amazement and suspicion, "what can I get you ladies to drink?"

  Rosie, trying to avoid making eye contact with Alan, looked up at the signs above the bar. Mr. Womersley's onion supremacy, she saw, remained intact, although the ferret sign had disappeared. "Gone to good homes, have they?" she asked. "The ferrets?"

  "Dame Nancy Brooke-Sullivan took some," Alan told her, "and the rest went somewhere up your way. Some family up Cinder Lane."

  Rosie swallowed. A few escaping ferrets were all Mark needed to tip him over the edge from hysteria to homicide.

  Bella, meanwhile, was staring in amazement at the beer labels. "Hairy Helmet…Old Knickersplitter…" she read in amazement.

  Meanwhile, Ptolemy, having spotted the potential of the red plush banquette running round the barroom, was now throwing himself up and down on it.

  "Careful, darling," murmured Bella. "Those shoes were awfully expensive."

  The second crisis was when Ann's chips met with Ptolemy's furious disapproval. "They're too thick," he wailed.

  "He's used to McDonald's," whispered Bella apologetically.

  "And what's this?" Ptolemy demanded disgustedly, pulling out large bits of ham from his sandwich.

  "It's very nice ham, carved from a proper joint." Stung by Ann's proximity into defending a meat product, Rosie tried hard not to feel guilty about it.

  "This isn't ham," spat Tolly, his face contorted with revulsion as he examined the thick pink pieces edged with fat.

  "It's just that he's used to that wafer-thin stuff from Sainsbury's, that's all." Bella shrugged at Ann. "Go outside and play, darling," she instructed her son, while Rosie hoped fervently that the Barley Mow had full building insurance.

  Nonetheless, she seized the opportunity offered by his absence.

  "So when can we go and see this farmer?" Bella demanded.

  Rosie hesitated. Desperate though she was for her friend to approve of Jack, she was reluctant to inflict Ptolemy on him. Yet how else were they to meet? It seemed unlikely Mark would baby-sit.

  Just then Tolly came hurtling back in floods of furious, screaming tears. It took some time for Bella, who had immediately imagined a pedophile attempting to abduct him, to discover the cause of her son's distress. "He's been trying to turn himself into Superman in the phone booth," she explained, "but there's some woman in there making a very long phone call apparently."

  Out of the corner of her eye, Rosie saw Alan listening avidly at the bar.

  Once Ptolemy had been calmed down with promises of exotic holidays and expensive video games, he was unexpectedly keen to go along with his mother's suggestion that he sit in the BMW and be quiet. This surprised Rosie until she heard the sound of a car horn blasting repeatedly from the car park. Something cold and heavy, and in no way related to the cheese roll she had recently eaten, slithered through her stomach. The visit to the farm could be put off no longer.

  The trouble started before they'd even gotten to the gate.

  "Look, darling," Bella pointed out to Tolly. "Look at those wonderful sheep."

  Ptolemy immediately clapped his hands to his eyes and marched past the field. "Missed them," he declared triumphantly.

  "Don't you like animals?" Rosie was surprised. Then again, Ptolemy confounded most ideas of what was normal in children.

  "Oh, he loves them, don't you, darling?" Bella rushed in. "Adores his dog, don't you, sweetheart? Although," she added in an undertone to Rosie, "we had to get rid of the last nanny after I caught her putting Berengaria in the microwave. She actually believed Tolly when he told her it was the quickest way to dry her. That's the trouble, you see. He's much too clever for his nannies— don't miss the horse, darling," she suddenly urged her son. "Just look at him there in that bottom field."

  Ptolemy looked with contempt at the big, glossy chestnut. "Hate horses," he snarled. "They're so slow at racing."

  "Slow?" echoed Rosie. The horse, she knew, belonged to the well-to-do wife of one of the local businessmen who rented the field from Jack. Rosie had often seen her belting up Cinder Lane to the farm at a velocity anything but leisurely.

  "He means as opposed to Formula One, darling. He's been trying to persuade Simon to buy him a mini–racing car for ages."

  As she lifted the Spitewinter gate, Rosie tried not to think about Jack's likely reaction to the child. Running him over with the combine harvester, most likely.

  "At least Ptolemy's got confidence," Bella said proudly. "That's the most important thing you can give your children apparently."

  Rosie privately thought that the most important thing Bella could give Ptolemy was a good smack. It was, she had found, one of the few matters on which she
and Mark agreed.

  "And he's so imaginative. The other day we were in Sainsbury's and he spotted a woman in a yashmak. 'Look, Mum,' he yelled at the top of his voice. 'It's Darth Vader.' Can you imagine?"

  "Yes," said Rosie truthfully, before she could stop herself.

  "And he's awfully competitive," Bella continued as they came into the farmyard. "Simon keeps telling him, 'Remember, son, it's not the taking part that counts. It's the winning.' Hilarious, isn't he?"

  "Rib cracking," said Rosie, thinking that, much as she loved Bella, her friend definitely had hidden shallows. As for Simon, his sense of humor had clearly not improved of late. Even when the relationship had been in its heady early days, Bella had confessed that her fiancé was hardly a laugh a minute. Personally, Rosie had always wondered whether he managed a laugh a year.