‘Ah, they’re good at that.’ The woman extended her hand, ferreting it in under the leather jacket and crash helmet to find Posy’s. ‘Come along in and get cleaned up, oh, and warm. Your hands are frozen.’
‘Thank you. Your husband said you’d probably be able to give me directions, a short cut to Swindon?’
The woman nodded. ‘Can do. Will do. Come along in and have a cup of tea while I scribble something down. The Sunday roast is well under way, so there’s plenty of time for a cuppa. You pop through here into the kitchen to clean up, and I’ll put the kettle on.’
Posy did as she was told. The scent of roasting lamb and rosemary swirled round her, making her more violently homesick than ever. At about this time the kitchen at Sunny Dene would be smelling much the same, as her mother prepared lunch for her dad and Dom and anyone else who happened to drop by. Any B&Bers who were staying at Sunny Dene on the Sabbath were always assured of a full roast.
She swallowed again and ran water into the sink. Persephone watched her carefully as she tried not to get grease all over the draining board. Dilys always had a fit if the draining board at Sunny Dene showed even the faintest trace of motorbike or railway engine.
Posy’s hostess turned from filling a cavernous teapot. ‘Won’t be a sec. Like to leave it to brew. Can’t be doing with tea bags. You just have a cuppa while I draw you a map, then you can be on your way. Though why anyone’d want to go to Swindon if they didn’t have to, I have no idea. Do you have to go there? For work or something?’
Posy leaned her elbows on the scrubbed wooden draining board, letting the suds slither up her arms, and shook her head. ‘No, well, not really. But I am looking for a job and somewhere to live and Swindon seemed like a good idea. At least, it did yesterday.’
The woman hauled a massive brown teapot on to the table and unhooked a couple of flowery cups and saucers. Having thrown biscuits on to the tiled floor for Persephone, she pulled out two chairs. ‘Why don’t you sit down here and tell me all about it . . .’
And that was how it happened really, Posy thought, as a couple of hours later, and after a Sunday roast that had been almost as perfect as her mother’s, she and the BMW roared back towards Steeple Fritton.
Swindon’s magic roundabouts had changed her life.
Getting lost and feeling homesick and meeting Persephone and her owners and well, everything, had convinced her that running away was possibly not the brightest idea she’d ever had. That and the fact that there was apparently a huge employment crisis in Swindon.
According to Persephone’s owner, all the telecom and internet companies had taken a proper pasting in the global trading downturn, and there were now fifty applicants for any one vacancy. Posy had also gathered that hotel live-in posts were like gold dust with year-long waiting lists; shop jobs, ditto.
Neither would she be able, it appeared, at the grand old age of twenty-five, to compete with the influx of pert seventeen-year-olds made redundant by the call-centres, all of whom understood the words on the latest Slipknot album and were prepared to flash their navel rings and work for less than the minimum wage.
‘If I was you,’ Persephone’s owner had advised after hearing the whole sorry tale, ‘I’d go home and hold your head high. Cock a snook at your ex and his new wife and show the whole damn world that you don’t give a fig.’
‘Yes, but I do.’
‘Of course you do, but they don’t have to know that do they? Now, if they comes back from their honeymoon and find that you’ve skedaddled, they’ll know that you care like mad and they’ll have won. It’s your home, dear, and your B&B is your livelihood and the village is your life. I’d go back there, make a success of whatever it is you want to do, and make them do the grovelling. You shouldn’t run away. After all, there’s more to life than men.’
‘That’s what my mother said.’
‘Bright woman, then, your mother. Look dear, if I’d ever been blessed with a daughter and she found herself in this very predicament, I’d tell her to be brave, never let anyone see how she really felt, get on with her life, and sod the lot of them.’
‘Sod the lot of them’ had become a sort of mantra all the way home to Steeple Fritton. Posy found it gave her courage, and she was well aware that she needed all the courage she could get. If she’d thought that running away was a hard thing to do, then coming back to live in the village with a broken heart and never show it, was surely going to be a total impossibility.
‘Oh, God,’ she muttered into the folds of her scarf as the BMW throbbed towards the Lesser Fritton, Fritton Magna, and Steeple Fritton signpost. ‘How on earth am I going to be able to cope with the rest of my life? What am I going to do to show Ritchie and Sonia and everyone else that I truly don’t give a damn?’
As she cruised the BMW through Steeple Fritton’s Sunday afternoon lanes, there was fortunately no one around to notice that Posy Nightingale’s running away from home had lasted less than twelve hours.
The village was already swathed in mist from the previous night’s frost and the day’s perpetual dampness, making it fuzzy and soft-focused. With its crisscrossing pathways through the scrubby grass, and its glossy tangled mounds of brambles, and its hidden alleyways of drooping hazel trees leading to who knew where, it was gloriously peaceful. And, without Ritchie in her life, forever lonely.
And lonely Sunday afternoons had to be the peak time for depression, surely? Especially winter Sunday afternoons in the fading light. Everyone had someone to be with, something to do, on a Sunday. And if you didn’t, then the isolation was magnified a million times.
Get a grip, Posy thought crossly. One session of tearful self-indulgence is quite enough for one day. Now, you’ve come back to start your new life, so pull yourself together and damn well get on with it.
Parking the BMW and her crash helmet beside the war memorial – she had no desire to return to Sunny Dene immediately in case anyone laughed – she decided to wander round the village and compose her reasons for returning in her head. It had been so easy pouring it all out to a total stranger, things had become much clearer. But she still had her pride – and a lot of family ‘I told you so’s’ were not what she needed right now.
The Sunday-silent village was like a film set. A perfect English rural scene suspended in aspic. White cottages and mellow brick houses complemented a short row of bow-fronted shops. The tiny creeper-covered pub, The Crooked Sixpence, squatted in an oasis of golden gravel, with shingle paths and dusty single-track roads shooting away from it like a starburst. There was no noise, no traffic, no people in sight.
Steeple Fritton looked as deserted as a Take That memorabilia shop.
Posy wasn’t fooled. She knew that on the other side of the village, past the church and the new Bunny Burrow housing estate, there would be chilly children shrieking in the recreation ground, cold teenagers eyeing each other up in the bus shelter, a posse of elderly men wearing scarves and gloves sitting on the bench by the village hall, and noise and life and rural chaos.
Later, she’d seek out Amanda and Nikki and join in the Steeple Fritton buzz – but at the moment, this solitude suited her perfectly.
‘Bugger me! Vi Bickeridge said you’d left home this morning!’
The sound of another human voice booming through the silence made Posy jump.
‘Up here!’ The voice echoed from the cottage garden to her left. ‘Haven’t you gone yet?’
Looking left and upwards, Posy smiled in spite of herself. It was all a bit Alice in Wonderland except that Glad Blissit, muffled in a brown cloth coat tied at the waist with string, a woollen headscarf knotted under the chin, a pair of zip-up bootees, and standing precariously on top of a stepladder, was no Cheshire Cat.
‘Been and gone and come back again.’
Glad Blissit, clutching secateurs in one hand and a clump of ivy in the other, wobbled rather frighteningly. ‘Good Lord, Posy Nightingale! Ain’t you kids got no staying power?’
Still cricking her
neck, Posy shrugged. ‘I changed my mind. Women’s prerogative and all that.’
Gladys, who was well into her seventies, had scrambled down the stepladder with remarkable agility and was now regarding Posy with a pair of fierce blue eyes. ‘What sort of daft stunt is that, then? We can’t have a decent chinwag about you decamping if you’ve damn well come back straight away, can we?’
‘“We” being you and Rose Lusty and Tatty Spry, I suppose?’
‘Ah – and Vi Bickeridge and the Pinks. Darn you, young Posy! Now what are we going to talk about?’
‘Sorry,’ Posy said, not sounding it. ‘Anyway, you can tell the coven that I refuse to run away. Ritchie, um, Ritchie and Sonia don’t bother me at all. I’ve decided to carry on as before. That’ll give you all something to cackle about. After all, this is my home and Sunny Dene needs me and –’
‘Sunny Dene!’ Gladys rocked on her zip-up bootees. ‘Sunny Dene don’t need you to make its beds and butter its toast. No one stays at Sunny Dene any more, do they? Not like in the old days.’ She suddenly screwed her head round towards the cottage and raised her voice. ‘Ellis! There’s someone here I want you to meet! Posy Nightingale. She’s a runaway jilted bride!’
‘No, I’m not! I’m –’
An upstairs window flew open before Posy’s further protestations could be heard, and Alice in Wonderland turned into Cold Comfort Farm at a stroke.
Chapter Three
Seth Starkadder, naked at least to the waist, leaned recklessly – considering the plummeting temperatures – and gloriously from the upstairs window. ‘Sorry, Gran. I was in the shower. Didn’t quite hear you . . .’ He looked down at Posy and seduced her with a smile. ‘Oh, hi.’
‘Er, hello.’ Posy cricked her neck even further and gazed at this vision of youthful male loveliness, who, like Ritchie, deserved ritual disembowelling simply because he was a man.
‘A runaway bride, are you?’ The Seth Starkadder lookalike continued to grin down at her. ‘If you’re at a loose end then, maybe you’d like to show me the sights of Steeple Fritton?’
‘My ends are all nicely tied, thank you, and it’s getting dark, so I’ll decline the sightseeing tour if it’s all the same to you.’
‘Shame.’
Gladys waved the secateurs in a threatening arc towards the upstairs window. ‘Ellis! You get some clothes on this minute! And you’re to leave this piece alone, she’s been through enough – and you know what you’re like with floozies!’
‘I’m not a floozy –’ Posy began, as Ellis obediently and rather boringly she felt, hauled his nakedness inside the upstairs window.
‘They’m all floozies once he gets hold of ’em,’ Gladys frowned, ripping at an ivy root. ‘So, what you doing back here, then?’
Posy explained about the roundabouts and the problems with the motorbike and the meeting with Persephone’s family and the lack of jobs in Swindon. And the homesickness. Especially the homesickness. There was no point in lying to Glad – the Steeple Fritton coven would soon ferret out the truth anyway. They always did.
Glad smiled gummily. ‘I reckons you’re doing the right thing. Brave of you, though, to make a fresh start here where you belong. Put it all behind you and don’t let anyone see that you gives a damn. I felt right sorry for you yesterday at the church. Nasty thing to happen to a nice young girl like you. Mind, the reception was a real humdinger. They had to carry Clive Bickeridge home well before seven.’
Posy winced. She really didn’t want to hear about the wedding reception – not unless the happy couple had been struck down by botulism before the cake-cutting.
Seth Starkadder could be heard singing lustily through the upstairs window.
‘Er – I didn’t know you had a grandson.’
‘He’s my Alfie’s youngest. You remember Alfie? Married Diane Skrimmett from Lesser Fritton, or maybe that was way before your time. They lives up in the wilds of Scotland. Young Ellis finished university last summer, had a bit of trouble, and needs somewhere to stay for a bit, to keep him out of a bit more trouble, if you get my drift.’
Not really, Posy thought, and not caring.
‘You and him should have a bit in common, he’s near on your age, twenty-four last birthday. I always send a postal order. He didn’t go to college straight away, see. Bit of trouble, again. But like I said, you don’t want to get tangled up with him love-wise. Charms the birds from the trees, but he’s a havoc-maker, just like his granddad.’
His granddad? Jim Blissit? Three teeth and a wall eye?
‘My Jim, God rest his soul, was a fine figure of a man in his prime,’ Gladys said archly, obviously reading Posy’s mind.
‘I’m sure he was.’ Posy tried not to laugh. ‘And I won’t ever be getting tangled up with Ellis or any other man. They’re all the same.’
‘Ah, they are, right enough. Thank the Lord.’ And hunching herself even further into the brown coat, Glad turned her back on Posy and concentrated again on her unseasonable gardening.
As this seemed to signify the end of the conversation, and as the evening was making rapid inroads on the afternoon, Posy trudged off in the direction of the Bickeridges’ corner shop. It wouldn’t be open on a Sunday, but it would delay going home for a little bit longer. Delay admitting that she’d been wrong and her family had been right, and that the only way to lay the ghost of Ritchie and Sonia was to meet it head on.
With its two commons, Steeple Fritton was shaped much like a penny-farthing bicycle, Posy had decided in childhood. The front wheel was the huge circular groundswell of the original village itself, with Sunny Dene and the recreation ground and the war memorial and the Cressbeds council estate and a few cottages and the village hall, joined by the curving lane to the rear wheel rest of the village which seemed to rather reluctantly circumnavigate the second, smaller green.
The Crooked Sixpence, with its wide gravelled forecourt and darkened windows, looked as if it was glowering at her from beneath shaggy eyebrows, so unkempt was the thatch. Fritton church, complete with eponymous steeple, was now silent and shadowy after yesterday’s act of calumny, and the glorious cottages and houses surrounding the smaller green – which, in high summer, had ducks and reeded ponds and the thwack of leather on willow and the merry cries of apple-cheeked children – all appeared uninhabited.
Steeple Fritton’s parade of shops had probably been built at the turn of the twentieth century, and must have come into their own during the thirties and forties. As well as the Bickeridges’, there was Rose Lusty’s hairdresser’s – an aggressively bright pink place dedicated to tight perms, skinny rollers and hood-dryers – and Tatty Spry’s alternative therapy parlour. The fourth shop had been empty since a raid by the fraud squad about twenty years earlier.
Everyone in the village caught the infrequent buses into Reading or Newbury for proper shopping.
Pausing in front of the row of shops, Posy sighed. Once, many moons ago, she and Ritchie had talked about buying this fourth shop after their marriage, and about working together, being together every day. They were going to turn it into a sort of permanent village bring-and-buy. A junk shop, bric-a-brac, antique shop, anything really to keep them together. It had been a lovely dream.
She turned away from the dark, sad, lifeless windows. Every stone, every blade of grass, every inch of the village would always remind her of Ritchie. Staying put was the right thing to do, she knew that, but when would her heart take instructions from her brain? How long was it all going to take?
‘Is it as bad as it looks?’
Posy jumped as the voice echoed in her ear. She didn’t need to turn round. She could see Ellis standing behind her, dressed now in jeans and a dark jumper and a thick denim jacket, reflected in the Bickeridges’ shop window. She really, really didn’t want to talk to him. Not today. Not ever.
‘What? Steeple Fritton? It’s just a typical Sunday, that’s all, but as you won’t be around for long I shouldn’t let it worry you.’
She hoped thi
s sounded haughtily dismissive. The last thing she wanted was some man, especially one who thought he was God’s gift as Ellis obviously did, picking up on the lone-woman-broken-heart vibes and thinking he was needed.
‘Hey!’ Ellis held up his hands. ‘Don’t go all carnivorous on me. And I’ll be here for a few months at least.’
Oh, great. Posy shrugged. ‘Really? I can’t imagine why. There’s not a lot of work and the house prices are sky-high.’
She certainly wasn’t going to tell him about the Bunny Burrow starter homes estate or the rural district council’s scabbing of the countryside with a small and ugly, but vital, industrial complex on the Fritton Magna road. She didn’t want to encourage him in any way.
Ellis smiled cheerfully. ‘Not a problem for me. I’ll be living with Gran and she’s got all sorts of jobs lined up to keep me out of trouble. Then I intend to start my own business.’ He looked at the picture-perfect small common. ‘Is this the posh end of the market? Is this where the landed gentry live?’
Posy nodded. ‘Although most of the locals have been priced out. Oh, you’ll find some die-hards still here, but most of these houses belong to incomers, and some to people from London. The ones who appear every so often with their green wellies and silly hats and think they’re real country folk. Still, at least when they’re down they fill up The Crooked Sixpence on a Saturday night.’
‘But it’s the weekend now and there’s no one around.’
‘Such ignorance of the true workings of a country village! The incomers don’t mix, and the weekenders will all be snoozing over their Sunday supplements after yomping across the countryside this morning leaving a trail of devastation in their wake. Then they have a brief lunch-time drink at The Crooked Sixpence, defrost a carton of Coronation Chicken, and relax before heading back to London. They don’t actually come out to play.’
Ellis nodded towards the shops. ‘Why aren’t these open, then? The weekenders must have loads of cash to spend?’
Tickled Pink Page 3