Sexy it was not, and when I heard someone walk into the hall downstairs I nearly died: my heart certainly stopped and I went still as a mouse. There was no way I was going to let anyone see me like this!
‘Lizzy?’ called a familiar voice.
‘Oh, thank God!’ I muttered devoutly. I’d quite forgotten I’d arranged for Annie to come over and help me sort out Tom’s clothes and personal stuff, a task I’d been cravenly putting off.
‘Come up — I’m in the bedroom,’ I called.
She clumped upstairs and I turned to face the door, striking a soulful pose and twiddling one long gold ringlet round my fingers.
‘Have you already started?’ she was saying as she walked in. ‘I’m a bit late, I—’
Her jaw dropped and her stunned expression sent me into near hysteria. After a dumbstruck minute she started to giggle too and soon we were both entirely incoherent.
‘So,’ I said finally, trying to wipe the tears from my face with a long tress and finding that nylon wasn’t very absorbent, ‘you don’t think I should play the Eve part for laughs, then?’
‘Oh, Lizzy, can you imagine Nick’s face if he walked on and saw you like that?’ she said, sitting down on the bed, limp with laughter.
‘I could — but I’d rather freeze to death first!’
‘Well, you can’t possibly, anyway. But perhaps if you bought a new Spandex bodystocking it might be warmer than that old one?’
‘It hardly seems worth the expense when this is the last year I’ll play Eve.’
‘Never mind, you looked stunning, even in the old outfit, last year,’ she said loyally, ‘though quite indecent from a distance!’
‘Speaking of indecent, I don’t know what Nick intends wearing, if anything. Do you?’
‘I asked him, in case he hadn’t given it any thought,’ Annie said innocently. ‘He said he’d ordered footless tights from a ballet-clothing place and would wear his cricket box under them to protect his modesty.’
That conjured up quite a vision … which I hastily dispelled, though not without some difficulty. ‘He’ll freeze,’ I said with conviction. ‘We both will!’
‘I expect he’ll be all right, because it’s only a few minutes, the Garden scene, isn’t it? Then you can rush into one of the loose boxes and put your warm clothes back on.’
‘Still, that does it — if he’s going to be half-naked, then I’m not going out there padded up like Michelin woman! A new Spandex outfit it is. I’ve still got some car insurance money.’
I thought I might even go completely mad and get myself a pretty frock, too, for Christmas dinner, which we always had up at Pharamond Hall. I couldn’t remember when I’d last bought myself something new to wear that wasn’t vital, like jeans.
I changed back into ordinary clothes and then we got down to sorting out Tom’s stuff, which I’d collected up and pushed into his wardrobe or drawers out of sight.
‘Jasper’s taken a couple of things — cufflinks, mostly — but the rest can go to the charity shop, or in the recycling bin.’
‘I’ll take it all down to the Animal Shelter shop,’ she offered. ‘I brought the car up rather than walk, in case.’
Tom didn’t have a huge wardrobe of clothes, so it didn’t take long. I was so glad I wasn’t doing it alone, though, because memories, mostly painful, tended to tumble out of every open door and drawer.
‘How are you and Gareth getting on, Annie? You’re seen almost everywhere together, like Siamese twins,’ I teased, once we’d loaded her car and retired to the kitchen for a well-earned cup of coffee and a restorative plate of chocolate slab cake. ‘And the cookery lessons too! Is he teaching you anything in return?’
‘No,’ she said, her face clouding over. ‘Lizzy, I enjoy being with him, but I think he’s just being friendly. I’m that type of girl, aren’t I? Men don’t think of me romantically at all, so I expect I’m exactly like a sister to him!’
‘You daft bat!’ I said, regarding her incredulously. ‘He’s absolutely dotty about you! When he looks at you he has that soppy sheep expression in his eyes, and every time he speaks to you he goes red as a beetroot. And he told me he thought you were very pretty!’
‘He didn’t!’ Annie went pink with pleasure.
‘He did.’
She looked at me doubtfully. ‘Then why …? I mean, you must be wrong, Lizzy!’
‘Oh, I’m sure he’s just shy. Encourage him a bit.’
‘I couldn’t possibly! What if he only wants to be friends? Think how embarrassing it would be if I’d made a fool of myself and we had to go on meeting as if nothing had happened …’
‘But you do fancy him, don’t you, Annie? I mean, this is love’s young dream and all that?’
‘More love’s not-so-young dream,’ she said ruefully.
‘Rubbish, we’re still thirty-somethings, and that’s a very good age for love.’
‘It might be, but I daren’t risk destroying my friendship with Gareth to find out.’
‘You won’t. You wait and see.’
‘You aren’t going to do anything, are you?’ Her soft, blue-grey eyes looked at me anxiously.
‘No, of course not,’ I reassured her quite untruthfully. ‘I’ll await events to prove me right and then I expect to be matron of honour at the wedding, in a mid-calf-length puce taffeta dress with those puffed shoulders that make you look five feet wide.’
‘Not puce,’ she said seriously. ‘The church carpet and hassocks are scarlet, so it would clash.’ Then she sighed, her eyes refocusing, as though abandoning a beautiful dream. ‘Anyway, enough of my boring affairs, Lizzy — what about you? The whole village is talking about the way Ritch Rainford flirts with you!’
‘Oh, come on, you must have realised I’m just a smokescreen for the women he is having affairs with, Kylie among others. But I do like him, and I enjoy flirting with him. At least he makes me feel I’m still attractive.’
‘Perhaps, but it’s making Nick jealous, haven’t you noticed?’
I stared at her. ‘Well, yes, but not jealous of me personally — he simply doesn’t like Ritch paying attentions to his cousin’s widow. Come to that, he just doesn’t seem to like Ritch. But I’m sure his attitude’s mainly a territorial thing.’
‘I think you’re wrong, and he’s fond of you,’ she said earnestly.
‘Annie! It’s bad enough Juno and Mimi — and now even Jasper — trying to matchmake, without you joining in!’
‘Do they? I hadn’t realised. But there, you see — even the family think it would be a good thing if you got together!’
‘Annie, it’s not going to happen — and it would certainly be a marriage made in hell, not heaven.’
‘I don’t think Nick would agree with you,’ she persisted stubbornly.
I considered it seriously for a minute, remembering the way he’d kissed me once or twice in a most uncousinly manner, and how he’d referred back to our short-lived romance as if he couldn’t understand why it hadn’t worked out … But apart from that, there wasn’t anything to suggest he was harbouring an undying passion for me.
‘No,’ I said firmly, ‘we bicker more than we agree, and drive each other mad: too many cooks again. He might still fancy me — I don’t know — but he isn’t in love with me.’
‘So you’re just friends — like Gareth and me?’
‘Well, not quite. More sparring partners. The family — and probably the whole village, going by the hints Dora Tombs has been letting fall — just wants a neat and tidy ending: you in the parsonage, me in the Hall, all’s well that ends well. Only life isn’t like that.’
‘I suppose not.’
She sighed sadly, but I was determined that at least her romance would turn out right. All Gareth needed was a bit of encouragement.
That evening Ophelia came round, driven by Caz in his ancient Land Rover (even more ancient than mine and painted with camouflage, just like him sometimes), and to my astonishment asked me if she could buy the qua
il!
‘You haven’t anywhere to keep them,’ I pointed out, ‘and anyway, what would you do with them? You won’t eat them or the eggs, so you’ll be overrun with male quail in no time.’
‘No she won’t, then,’ Caz drawled, leaning against the bonnet, his khaki hat tipped over his nose.
Really, he’s getting almost loquacious! It must be love. Anyone would think it was spring, the way Cupid’s fiery darts are flying in all directions.
‘There’s the old piggery behind my cottage — I can keep them in that for now,’ Ophelia said, rabbited at her lower lip a bit and added, ‘I’ve decided to become vegetarian while I’m pregnant, and eat fish and eggs.’
‘Good idea!’
She gave Caz a half-defiant look: ‘But not flesh of any kind!’
What does she think fish are made of?
‘Right, I’ll start including more eggs in your basket of fruit and vegetables. I wasn’t sure if you were eating them or not.’
‘No, no, no, you shouldn’t! It’s too kind and … and I don’t see why you should be kind,’ she muttered, her bulging eyes taking on that sainted martyr look. ‘I don’t deserve it.’
‘You may not, but we have to think of the baby. It needs good wholesome food to grow properly.’
‘But you carry it all the way up to my cottage and it must be really heavy!’ She wrung her hands in an anguished sort of way. Let’s hope she is never holding a quail — or, indeed, the baby — when she’s in one of these states. ‘Don’t — please don’t do it any more. Caz says he’ll fetch it.’
‘OK — that will be good. I’ll leave the basket near the eggs in the outbuilding on Monday mornings, how about that?’
I couldn’t really see Caz in the Little Red Riding Hood role with a basket, but that was his problem. Maybe he’d bring a backpack.
She nodded like a car mascot and then added, after another of her lip-chewing ruminations, ‘Thank you for the bottled tomatoes.’
‘I didn’t give you any bottled tomatoes!’
She blinked slowly. ‘Yes, you did. They were on the doorstep last night, with that yellow checked material tied over the lid, like all your jars of stuff.’
‘Gingham? I bought a whole roll of it years ago, and never got to the end of it. But I didn’t leave any jars of anything on your doorstep.’
‘But … it must be you. I don’t know anyone else who bottles tomatoes.’
I had a sudden horrible thought. ‘I know someone who tried to,’ I said grimly. ‘Polly Darke! And they gave me botulism or something equally ghastly.’
‘But she’s not … she isn’t … she wouldn’t …’ Ophelia trailed off, and then wrung her skinny hands together again distractedly, her eyelids frantically fluttering.
‘Look, I guessed she was the one who made you do the ARG stuff to me, out of sheer spiteful jealousy. There was no one else it could have been.’
‘But Caz made her stop, so perhaps she’s sorry now, and this is a present?’ Ophelia suggested. ‘But I don’t want her peace offering!’
‘If it is a peace offering. We know she’s spiteful enough to do something nasty. I’d throw it away, just in case, if I were you.’
‘I’ll do that,’ Caz said, the stony expression on his face boding ill for Polly — though would she have tried something that might have harmed Ophelia’s baby? I thought back to what I knew of her, which, due to my avoiding her as much as possible, was not a lot.
‘I could be quite wrong about her, but it is odd that I was the only one who got the dodgy jar of tomatoes when she was handing them out to half the village that time,’ I said slowly. ‘And another thing: although I’ve only been to her house once for a book launch party, I was horribly sick afterwards, though I didn’t hear of anyone else being taken ill.’
‘Toadstool,’ Caz said meaningfully.
‘Toadstool?’ For a minute I thought he’d run mad, then I remembered: ‘You mean that poisonous one you showed me — was it in the basket of field mushrooms Polly brought me to swap for eggs?’
He nodded grimly.
‘And wasn’t it the kind you only get in woods, not open fields?’
He nodded again.
‘Could she be that jealous and vindictive? It’s so downright nasty!’
Caz shrugged.
‘Well, if it is true, let’s hope she doesn’t present any more little gifts to other people disguised as my offerings! I’d better tell Marian Potter tomorrow that someone is maliciously leaving tainted jars of food that look just like mine on doorsteps and she will spread the word. And I’ll stop covering the jars with anything except Cellophane from now on, even if they don’t look as pretty!’
Ophelia had lost interest by now and wandered off to commune with the quail by means of little cheeping noises. She seemed to be frighteningly at one with them mentally, which didn’t bode well for the intellect of her future offspring.
I followed over. ‘So, what are you going to do with the quail?’
‘Give them a happy life and I can sell the eggs, too. I think that’s all right,’ she said earnestly.
‘OK, they’re yours,’ I agreed.
She was totally impractical, but I expected Caz would just quietly go in and do what had to be done with the birds when she wasn’t looking.
They seemed to be settling down into a pair, though an odd couple they made. Maybe knowing secrets about each other forms a bond, for he was aware she was in ARG, and he’d told her what he did with the grey squirrels he caught. And Ophelia seemed very malleable, apart from a bit of occasional stubbornness, so I expected he’d slowly bend her into the shape he wanted over time.
Why did that make me think of brandy snaps?
Caz found some cardboard boxes, which he punched holes into, and loaded the quail up then and there, dismantling the pens and taking those, too, since I would have no further use for them.
What with the big bare space where the greenhouse used to be, and the lack of cheeping, moving feathers in the barn, things were looking quite deserted, apart from the hens and ducks. They’d all sheered off while Caz and Ophelia were there, but now came back looking for any pickings.
With a sigh, I went back into the cottage and looked out my recipe for brandy snaps, even though trying to wind them round the handle of a wooden spoon is such a pain that I couldn’t usually be bothered.
Next day when I was on my way back from a spot of pet-sitting duty, I spotted Caz and Nick in the woods near the drive. Caz seemed to be talking, or at least, replying, which was amazing! Then they shook hands …
What was that all about? Had some kind of deal been done?
On Sunday we were invited up to lunch at the Hall. Actually, we had an open invitation, but sometimes I was too busy, or wanted to go out with Jasper for the day while I’d still got him.
Nick was cooking, as he often did because he said it gave Mrs Gumball a rest. Though she protested at having her kitchen taken over, I think she was quite pleased really: she was no spring chicken any more, after all.
He was in and out of the kitchen when I got there and spurned my offer of help, though he accepted Jasper’s even though he only knows the theory of cooking and not the practicalities. So I left him to stew in his own jus and sat down at the dining table with the others.
Unks smiled at me fondly, then went back to reading the sports section of the Sunday paper.
‘We’re going on a garden tour by coach,’ Mimi informed me chattily.
I stared at Juno. ‘Is that a good idea?’
‘Don’t see why not — I’m fully fit again. I’ll frisk her for knives, scissors and plastic bags before we set off, and I won’t take my eyes off her for a minute within fifty paces of anything green. It’s a late-booking bargain.’
Mimi smiled innocently.
‘I don’t think you will get a lot out of it, Juno,’ I said. ‘You could do with a more restful holiday, after your accident.’
‘There are entertainments in the evenings at the vari
ous hotels,’ Mimi said. ‘It’ll be fun. But Juno and me have got to share a room. People will think we’re an odd couple.’ She giggled.
‘Pity, I was hoping to pick up a toyboy,’ Juno said, ‘preferably a rich one who could whisk me away from this madhouse.’
‘She doesn’t mean it,’ Mimi confided to me. ‘Her heart belongs to Sean Connery.’
‘I’ve never been one of those romantics,’ agreed Juno, ‘but I like a man to be a man.’
‘Do you think Nick is a macho man, Lizzy?’ Mimi asked, with one of her disconcertingly clear looks, just as the man himself strode into the room carrying the soup tureen, with Jasper following up behind with a silver basket of bread.
‘If macho is big, male and overbearingly bossy, yes,’ I said sweetly.
Nick gave me one of his slaty looks, the purple-edged sort.
It was good soup, followed by roast beef and perfect Yorkshire puddings, and he’d made one of his apple pies for dessert, which I have to admit was delicious, though I certainly wasn’t going to tell him so. Instead, I said the pastry was a little dry and asked for more cream.
Jasper and Nick were talking quietly in the kitchen when I carried through the dessert plates, and I hoped it was serious male stuff, because my attempt to discuss Safe Sex and STDs with Jasper certainly hadn’t gone down too well.
Nick seems to be Confidant of the Moment — but not mine. Been there, done that, and once was enough!
I was stuffed to bursting point after the coffee, but then Nick practically dragged me back into the kitchen and made me taste three different coffee granitas before I left. When I said I didn’t think any of them had that extra something, he went very sulky, even though (unlike what I said about the apple pie) it was quite true.
On the way home Jasper said I’d hurt Nick’s feelings and I should have pretended one of the granitas was great, and I said, astonished, ‘Why should I, when he’s always so rude about my cooking?’
‘But you know he doesn’t mean it. He’s just joking — it’s affectionate.’
‘I’m not so sure about that,’ I said darkly.
Anyway, I’m never again going to tell a man something is wonderful when it’s not. It’s my un-New Year resolution.
The Magic of Christmas Page 20