by Daisy Waugh
‘Hello, hello!’ said Jo, smiling brightly but feeling very tense. ‘What’s the big joke?’
‘There’s a bra firm!’ said Colin, sniggering uncontrollably. ‘We put in booby trap. And a bra firm come up!’
‘Here we are,’ said Grey. ‘This is more like it. Listen to this, Colin. Chloe. Everyone. Listen to this. “In the absence of explosive materials the enemy may resort to non-explosive booby-trap techniques. These may include punji stakes, spiked mud balls, bear traps and scorpion-filled boxes. As a rule, these traps in themselves are not lethal or completely destructive, and as a result may be accompanied by ambushes…” Doesn’t mention cowpats…Still.’
‘You must be Colin,’ said Jo patiently. ‘I’m Jo. I hear they were giving you a rough time in Lamsbury this morning?’
Colin nodded, still chortling about boobies, not yet quite capable of speech. Jo watched a string of spit dribble from the side of his mouth and land in a little puddle on his bloodstained sweatshirt. This, she thought sadly, was not what she’d had in mind when the idea of a celebrity sanctuary had first been discussed.
‘Where’s your mother, Colin. Your mum?’ (Jo corrected herself.) ‘Your mum’ll be worried not to have heard from you. Don’t you think you should call?’
‘No,’ he said simply, wiping his eyes. Jo’s mention of his mother had sucked all the life out of the joke. ‘My mum’s never worried.’
‘Where is she? Is she—’ Jo hesitated, uncertain how to proceed, but very keen to be tactful, ‘in the hospital?’
‘Nope.’
‘Is she at home?’
‘Nope.’
‘So…where is she?’
Colin shrugged. ‘Dunno, do I? Gone on one of ’er walkarounds, I shouldn’t doubt…’ Sagely, without a hint of self-pity, he shook his head. ‘They do ’er no ends o’ good.’
‘And…’ Jo struggled unhappily against the surge of warmth for him which was seeping through, in grave danger of clouding her professional judgement, ‘…When do you expect her back?’
‘That’s up to ’er, innit?’
‘Well – Colin. I don’t want to be rude and – you know – you’re obviously very brave. But somebody must be responsible for you…’
‘Me,’ he said. ‘Jus’ only me.’
‘He’s a fuckin’ prodigy,’ muttered Grey. ‘Takes most people a lifetime to work that out.’
‘Do you have a social worker?’
‘No.’
‘Well. For Christ’s sake, Colin—’ It burst out before she could stop herself. And as she said it she knew that the battle was lost. ‘You know perfectly well you can’t stay here!’
He looked at her with the same calm surprise with which he’d looked at Charlie when Charlie had snapped at him back at the car park. ‘What’re you gettin’ so het up about?’ he said gently. ‘I’m only passin’ through. Jus’ lookin’ at the computer here.’
‘I’m sorry. Sorry, Colin. I didn’t mean to shout.’
‘Of course the question remains,’ said Grey, ‘if you’re only passing through, where exactly are you passing through to?’
Colin scowled at him. ‘What am I, a clerrvoyan—thingemejig? How’m I s’posed to know the answer to a bloody stupid question like that?’
‘Well—’ said Jo. ‘Most people do.’
‘Is that right?’ he said confidently. ‘I don’t think so.’
‘Are you any good with horses?’ Charlie asked suddenly.
Colin shrugged.
‘Or chickens?’
‘How do I know?’
‘Gardening? Chopping wood?’
‘For Christ’s sake, he’s a child!’ snapped Jo. ‘And this isn’t a fucking poor house. He’s not chopping wood! He should be at school.’
Charlie thought of the uncommonly disagreeable St George’s boys he and Colin had encountered that morning. ‘I hardly think so,’ he said. ‘Anyway there are plenty of old books in the nursery if he wants to learn something. But if he’s going to stay at Fiddleford, he’s got to make himself useful just like everyone else.’ He turned to Colin, who was standing there as alert, suddenly, as a hunted animal, his pale face rigid with attention and hope. ‘I suggest,’ said Charlie coolly, ‘and obviously assuming Jo’s all right about it—’
‘Oh God,’ she sighed, gave Colin a grudging smile. ‘Well of course I bloody well am.’
‘—that you stay here,’ Charlie continued, ‘at least until you can work out where you want to go afterwards.’ The width – the amazing width – of Colin’s answering grin made the dried blood on his cheeks crack and fall in little flakes onto the floor. ‘And in the meantime, is there really no one we should call? I bet you’re on some sort of list. People usually are. Somewhere. Shouldn’t we at least telephone the school?’
‘I haven’t been there fer weeks. It’ll only remind ’em. Anyway I reckon they’re pleased to see the back o’ me.’
‘Or – Jo’s already mentioned social workers…’
‘Oh! Ho ho! They used to come round, but they haven’t been round fer months!’ He grinned. ‘’Cos they can never catch up wi’ me! I’m too fast. You saw ’ow I went this mornin’!’
‘I did,’ said Charlie coldly. It was a timely reminder of how the two of them had met. ‘And by the way, Colin, if I hear the sound of breaking glass – breaking anything – I don’t even care if you’re responsible for it – you’re out. Out. Is that clear?’
‘Yes, sir,’ Colin said solemnly. ‘Yes, it is clear. I shan’t break nothin’ at all. I shall only be useful round about.’
Grey laughed, a deep appreciative rumble.
‘How old are you?’ continued Charlie.
‘Seventeen.’
‘Don’t lie.’
‘Fifteen.’
Charlie stared at him.
‘Fifteen. I am! I just look ever so young…all right, fourteen…Fourteen?’
‘You’re not fourteen,’ said Jo.
‘I’d say about eleven,’ said Messy.
‘That’s very close,’ said Chloe. ‘Because I actually know how old he is, don’t I, Colin?’
‘Don’t tell ’em!’ said Colin.
‘Och for God’s sake! You’re behaving like the fuckin’ Gestapo. What does it bloody matter?’ Grey looked down at Colin, smiling gratefully up at him. The boy was not an appealing sight, even to Grey, who had never rated a tidy appearance as highly as other people did. ‘Mind you,’ he said, wrinkling his handsome Roman nose, ‘I don’t give a bugger how old he is, but I think he’d do well to take a bath.’
For a week or so after that everything at Fiddleford worked like clockwork. Even the General showed signs of mellowing. He didn’t participate much. He sat quietly by the Aga in the kitchen, muttering to himself about the disappointing state of the world, but he was slowly discovering that the fresh injection of life into his old home was not entirely unpleasant after all. In fact he’d recently gone to the trouble of identifying two potential new recruits: a British tennis player called Nigel, currently ranked 87th in the world and accused by Davis Cup officials of match-fixing (of purposely dropping a national match for his own financial gain); and an obscure young Royal cousin called Anatollatia, who’d been set up and recorded by a Sunday newspaper negotiating an £85,000 fee to participate in a ‘nude photo-shoot’ for a magazine which didn’t exist.
And though he still didn’t like her much, it would have been impossible for anyone to remain unmoved by Jo’s industry. Charlie pleaded with her to slow down but it seemed that she couldn’t. After so many years in London, fighting to keep her place at the top of the game, she didn’t know how else to approach life. She was a perfectionist, and she couldn’t help it. Relaxing (except on honeymoon) never had been Jo’s greatest talent. And she had recently taken to doing thirty minutes of meditation and yoga every morning, specifically to improve on that.
She worked hard at her pregnancy just as she worked hard at everything. She drove to London once a week for her antenatal cla
sses. She avoided alcohol, cigarette smoke, caffeine, tea, soft cheeses, blue cheeses, cured ham, raw meat, raw fish, shellfish, soft boiled eggs, non-organic dairy products, hot baths, cold medicines, hair dye, heavy weights, steam rooms, mobile telephones, computer screens, loud noises, sudden movements, negative feelings and foot massages. She drank a herbal tea to help prepare for labour and another for inner calm. She took a first aid course, examined the league tables for the local state primaries…She also repainted the boot room, the pantry and the back hall. She negotiated a highly satisfactory Messy exclusive with Too True! magazine. And she found telephone numbers for Nigel the tennis player and for Anatollatia in her contacts book…And she was very happy. As happy as a highly strung workaholic is ever capable of being.
Meanwhile Grey cooked up ever more exquisite dinners; Charlie filled in interminable forms for interminable government departments and even managed to escape his desk for long enough to mend the fences in the top two fields; Colin vandalised nothing at all, and he and Chloe laid the foundations for a new business venture.
Charlie had introduced the children to what was left of the Fiddleford animals – not very much any more: the donkey, his twin sister’s retired hunter, two pigs, a dozen dairy cows, fifty sheep, five peculiarly aggressive geese, and the chickens, whom Les insisted were in a permanent state of shock as a result of the murderous MAFF visits and were consequently no longer capable of laying eggs.
‘You got thirty-six chickens,’ Grey said. ‘That should be near on thirty eggs, which leaves at least two dozen eggs for the village shop every day. Not a fortune, I grant you. But it’s a bloody start, isn’t it? Get the chickens laying – Les’s a lazy bugger, I’ll bet they only need a feedin’. And you can put some money back in the pot!’
With the help of Messy – and later the General, who always found diagrams irresistible – Colin drew intricate, colour-and-date-coded maps of the hens’ living area, making marks wherever he or Chloe suspected there would soon be a stash of eggs. The two of them could think and talk of little else.
Messy took a little longer to fall under the Fiddleford spell. It was only when she discovered the walled garden, on the same day that the dreaded team from Too True! were due to see her, that she really began to get the point of the place. That morning she was trying to make notes for a possible Fatty Revolution sequel. But combined with her terror of the forthcoming interview, the delicious cooking smells wafting up to her bedroom (a continual reminder not just of her nervous love-sick hunger but of its handsome and inscrutable cause) made concentration impossible. After about an hour she gave up and took herself for a walk around the park.
Normally Messy hated walking, but on that day she ambled along very happily: through the ornamental wood to the side of the chicken runs, past the moss-covered tennis court and the croquet lawn riddled with molehills, through an archway of overgrown laurel bushes, to a high stone wall covered in ivy, and an old door which opened only after she’d kicked it several times. Behind it she discovered a garden – smothered in weeds and clearly long since neglected, but which took her breath away.
A straight path ran down the middle of the garden, lined by perfectly spaced rose bushes, all of them eight or ten feet tall and contorted through lack of pruning. Behind the rose bushes there were apple trees with linking branches, planted in perfect parallel lines, and each emerging from a thick carpet of rotting fruit. As she wandered in awe from corner wall to far corner she tried to imagine what the place must have been like in its prime, when all the vegetables and house flowers flourished in meticulous, regimented lines, and the raspberry cage hadn’t collapsed, and the glass in the greenhouse hadn’t been broken, and the beds weren’t overcome by nettles and grass. It must have been perfect once: elegant, functional, busy, required, and it struck Messy, neglected and overgrown herself, as unbearably, extraordinarily romantic. She looked around her, but there was no one there. Nothing. Only waste and chaos and tantalising promises of splendour. Without pausing to consider anything, least of all the enormity of the task ahead, Messy, who had never gardened in her life before, never even considered it, found a fork at the back of the broken greenhouse, and started digging.
‘Excellent!’ bellowed the General, his eyes shining, his face ruddy with joy. ‘Right-i-ho. Thank you very much. And do drop in if you’re ever in the neighbourhood, won’t you? Absolutely! We’re always here! Otherwise we must look out for each other at the old Pearly Gates, what? Ha ha ha. That’s right! Shan’t be long now!’ He said goodbye very merrily, pressed a random series of buttons on his infernal ‘telephone unit’, slipped the receiver into his jacket pocket and headed back out to the hall.
‘Charlie!…Charlie!’
He found his son in the library (in his gumboots because he was still hoping to put in a few hours on the farm), waylaid as always by paperwork; on this occasion by the application form for a Certificate of Safety Approval from the Lamsbury District Fire and Emergency Planning Authority.
‘Charlie!’ whispered the General. He closed the door behind him and looked furtively around the room. ‘Where are the ladies? Are they out?’
‘Hi, Dad. Do you think we’ve got any “explosive or highly flammable materials stored or used in or under the premises”?’
‘What?’
‘They want to know the “maximum quantity…the maximum quantity liable to be exposed at any one time”.’ Charlie scrunched his hair and scowled at the form in front of him. ‘But what do they mean? What quantity? Exposed to what?’
‘I don’t know, Charlie. And nor do I care. Where are the ladies?’
Charlie sighed in despair. ‘Makes no bloody sense at all. I’ll put a “6”. See if that keeps them quiet…Sorry, Dad. If you’re looking for Messy, she’s out in the walled garden being photographed for a magazine.’
‘Oh yes. Of course. Too True! Excellent. Excellent magazine.’ He checked the room for a second time. ‘What about Jo?’
‘They’re together.’ Charlie looked at his father more closely. ‘What’s up? Are you all right?’
‘I think,’ said the General decisively, walking with great gusto to the front of Charlie’s desk, ‘we’ve got the Big One. I’ve been talking to an old chap—’ He chuckled. ‘I think he was surprised to discover I was still alive as a matter of fact. However, in other respects he’s a man very much in the know…And the good news is, he’s going to put in a good word. But it is rather difficult. With Messy, of course…’
‘What’s difficult? What are you talking about?’
‘Mmm? For Heaven’s sake, Charlie, concentrate! Don’t you read the papers?’
‘Not much. You know I don’t.’
‘Dear fellow, does the name Maurice Morrison mean nothing to you?’
HOW TO WASH YOUR HANDS
Always use a wash hand basin provided exclusively for this purpose. Use comfortably hot water and soap. Liquid soap is best because a bar of soap may carry bacteria left by the last person who used it. Use a nail brush to clean your nails after handling raw foods or going to the toilet. Rinse your hands before drying them. There are several methods available for drying your hands including disposable paper towels and clean roller towels. Never dry your hands on a tea towel, service cloth or protective clothing; you could cause contamination.
Food Safety First Principles Workbook, for the Basic Food Hygiene Course. Published on behalf of the Chartered Institute of Environmental Health
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SUPPORT AND DEVELOP APPROPRIATE PROCEDURES
The eternally marvellous Maurice Morrison was experienced enough in the business of his own popularity to be feeling very frightened that morning. He’d seen it happen to colleagues: men who had previously seemed unassailable. One day they find themselves undermined by some silly, unfortunate, wholly unrelated little incident. And the next thing they know their whole damn life begins to unravel. A whiff of vulnerability and suddenly all the worms in the woodwork feel empowered to come out and play. Maurice Morri
son’s marvellous existence was riddled with worms. Rotten with them. He needed to be careful.
Not, of course, that what had happened was in any way his fault. It wasn’t. And the fact that he was being blamed, although inevitable, was also extremely unfair. In fact the more he thought about it the more indignant it made him. After all, wasn’t he still, teeny-tiny secrets and all, just as he had been yesterday: one of the most media-friendly multi-millionaires in the country? Wasn’t he still, as he had been the last time he looked, the Labour Government’s only appointed Minister for Kindness? Wasn’t he as unceasingly generous to charity? And as persistently well-mannered? And as likely to come to the rescue when unattractive lady panellists were out of their depth on influential television shows? And wasn’t he still, in spite of everything, the creator of fulfilling employment for many, many thousands of grateful personnel? Yes, dammit! Yes, he bloody well was!
Yet here he found himself, cowering in the bright white corner of his West London office (which, in lighter moments, he liked to call his ‘Zone-of-Zones’, because of course he had many offices; the top floor of his head office here in Notting Hill just happened to be his favourite). He was too afraid to answer his own telephone, too afraid to look out of his own window, too afraid to get into his own private elevator and walk out into his own steel-and-marble ground-floor reception hall. Too afraid to think straight. Which was very rare.
What had happened yesterday was a tragedy. Of course. There was no other word for it. And he had released a statement saying exactly that. Extending heartfelt – heartfelt – sympathy. And it was heartfelt. But, honestly – he glanced resentfully at the headline in that day’s first edition Evening Standard – if the reporters had only bothered to look at this thing in the perspective of his lifetime’s, of Maurice Morrison’s whole lifetime’s achievements, they would be forced to agree – everyone would be forced to agree – that he was being outrageously shoddily treated.