‘Some of them mightn’t,’ she said hopefully.
She got up off the bed, stretched, and said, ‘Oh well, I’d better stop gassing and get a move on to clear up the terrace before Mrs Miskin, the housekeeper, comes back after her lunch. Otherwise she’ll be straight round to Flavia to report I’ve been drinking in the middle of the day, and the next thing you know Flavia will be having little consultations with Jeremy, telling him how worried she is about the amount “Dear Rose” -’ her voice dripped poisoned honey in an excellent imitation of her mother-in-law - ‘is drinking each evening and now she’s afraid it’s started at lunchtime too. I swear she’s bribing Mrs Miskin to tell her exactly how many empties go in the bin; though in truth the old witch has been working for the head cauldron-stirrer for so long she probably doesn’t need bribing.’
‘You could always ask your mates to save their empty gin bottles, then stack them in the wardrobe one day and wait to see what happens,’ I suggested.
Rose hooted with laughter. ‘I might just do that! I wish I could sack her,’ she added vehemently, then seeing my slightly puzzled expression said with a strained smile, ‘Mrs Miskin of course. She may be poisonous and a talebearer for Flavia, but you can’t get rid of people who’ve worked in the place for as long as she has. I wouldn’t mind getting rid of Flavia either, though I don’t need to tell you that. But since the only way I can think of getting rid of her involves a large quantity of arsenic and I don’t want to spend the next few years in prison I suppose I’ll just have to learn to put up with her. I’ll see you later.’ When she reached the door she turned and gave me the critical once-over. ‘I must say you’ve done a pretty good job, you’d never guess what you looked like yesterday morning. Shame it was all wasted,’ she
added callously.
There are some times when I don’t feel I like Rose very much. This was one of them.
‘I’ll tell you what though, you needn’t let all that effort go for nothing,’ she said kindly. ‘I’ll let Jeremy come up and see how you are, you can try vamping him.’
‘You shouldn’t be encouraging me to vamp your husband,’ I said severely.
‘Probably not,’ she agreed serenely. ‘But then I’m quite safe. He’s tramping the bounds or something. All I know is that it involves a lot of walking around and Jeremy and the farm manager knowing better than each other. After a long day like that the only thing likely to get a response out of Jeremy is a glass of whisky.’ The pleased smile that accompanied this statement showed that she wasn’t speaking the truth.
I was spared the effort of trying to vamp Jeremy from within the voluminous confines of Granny’s Christmas present as that evening Rose was forced to admit after a certain amount of argument on my part that I was well enough to get dressed and join the grown-ups downstairs. I’d had enough of lying around in bed and I was determined that if by any chance Luke did pop round again I would be reclining, pale but interesting, downstairs, so there was no chance of Rose getting away with going off for another little walk with him. In the event I did have visitors, but not Luke. The first was Stephen, carrying a bunch of tulips and looking distinctly shamefaced. I got the feeling his mind had been running along tabloid headlines of, ‘My last words to tragic road-accident victim were so cruel... if only I’d known what was going to happen later that evening I’d have never…’
He was almost falling over himself to be nice, telling me to take as much time off as I thought I needed, and not to worry about a thing at the office, in such a comical contrast to his mood on Monday that I began to wonder if it might not be worth getting injured on a regular basis. ‘But you don’t happen to know what happened to those notes I made on the house at Colby?’ he asked casually.
I shot Rose a triumphant glance. ‘The last I saw of them you were about to throw them at me. I didn’t hang around to see what you did with them, but I imagine they’re somewhere on your desk.’
‘I didn’t think of that,’ he said. ‘Perhaps I should clear away some of the mess.’
‘Please don’t!’ I said quickly.
I forced him to swear he wasn’t going to file so much as one bit of paper away. I’d already experienced Stephen’s eccentric attitude to filing, which for reasons best known to himself didn’t always follow the same rules, so correspondence relating to the same house could be found under house name, owner’s name, village or part of the county. Naturally he always knew where everything was and couldn’t understand why I didn’t.
He didn’t stay for long, asking us to convey his regrets about missing him to Jeremy and saying that he had to get home as Liddy was expecting him.
‘Next time you come here you’ll have to stay longer,’ said Rose, who had taken one of her shines to him and kept on sending me ‘Are you mad to be letting this slip through your fingers?’ looks. ‘You are coming to the charity wine-tasting I’m having here, aren’t you?’
‘I don’t know,’ he said vaguely, with an ‘I’m dumping the responsibility for this on someone else’ look that I recognised. ‘Liddy handles the things like that.’
‘You must,’ she said firmly, beaming at him. ‘I’m in charge, so it’s going to be good fun. Susie can give you another invitation as a reminder when she comes back to work.’
I watched with amusement as Stephen at last met his match in a purveyor of the same sort of juggernaut charm as he had himself. Rose held his eye firmly until he gave way and said, ‘Yes, of course we’ll come.’
‘I’ll put both of you down on the list as definites,’ she said, with a look that suggested she’d have been quite happy if there had only been one to mark down. He blinked, looking bewildered but also pleased.
‘Isn’t he a poppet?’ she asked, coming back from seeing him out and throwing herself down on the sofa.
‘You wouldn’t think so if you’d seen him a couple of days ago,’ I retorted.
‘Tush! You don’t know how to handle him,’ she said. I eyed her sourly, but said nothing. Rose reckons she’s an expert at manipulating men which is true but I still thought she’d have met a pretty insuperable challenge in Stephen last Monday. ‘Honestly, I can’t see why you aren’t going in there with all your guns blazing and wrenching him away from this Liddy. Forget female solidarity, he’s gorgeous and she sounds like a complete pain in the neck.’
‘She is,’ I agreed. ‘Yes, he is nice-looking but…’
‘He’s not your type,’ she said with a disgusted sniff. ‘Honestly, Susie, you write off ninety-nine per cent of the male population because they aren’t smaller than you and don’t have a foreign accent.’
‘I was about to say I’d got my hands quite full enough at the moment, thank you very much,’ I said with offended dignity.
She looked up with a quick smile. ‘Yes, I’d forgotten that you’ve been branching out a little.’
‘What’s Susie branching out with?’ asked Jeremy, coming in, looking tired, well exercised and rather pleased with himself, with an equally tired and happy-looking Dexter at his heels. ‘This sounds interesting. Glad to see you up, Susie. Hamish’ll be pleased too. He’s parking his car and’ll be here in a minute.’ He bent down to give Rose a kiss with an enthusiasm that belied her claim that he was only interested in a glass of whisky after a day on the farm.
I studied the view out of the window for a minute or two. It had been a gorgeous warm, sunny day, the sort which gives you a bit of faith that there might actually be an English summer this year, and the honeysuckle climbing rampantly around the wall-length window made an attractive frame for the lawns and a rather nice weeping cherry tree in the mid-distance. Even so, I’d drunk quite enough of my fill of the view by the time movements alongside me told me it was safe to allow my eyes to wander back to the interior again. Rose was tucking a piece of hair behind one ear with a silly expression on her face, while Jeremy politely turned his attention to me. ‘I must say you’re a considerable improvement on yesterday,’ he said on a note of surprise.
‘I
get the impression that the average corpse was an improvement on me yesterday,’ I said.
He thought for a moment, then shook his head. ‘No. Corpses either smell or they come alive and leap up and bite you on the neck. Both are pretty nasty. I preferred you, even if you did look a bit ragged around the edges.’ I didn’t feel I was being measured against a very high standard. There was movement behind him. Dexter had realised I was there and, remembering I’m a dab hand at scratches under the chin, was bounding forward to give me one of his enthusiastic greetings. I held out my hand defensively, my arm might have been better, but it still didn’t need fifty pounds of high-speed dog landing on it. Jeremy snapped his fingers and said sternly, ‘Here!’ To my surprise, Dexter halted in mid-bound, and was back at his master’s feet almost before the words had stopped ringing on the air.
‘I wish you could train your mother’s bloody dog like that,’ said Rose, clearly impressed.
‘I suggest you train Dexter to eat him,’ said Hamish, pushing the door open and looking decidedly irritated. ‘The little sod has just been firmly attached to my leg. I thought I was never going to get him off.’
‘Don’t tell me,’ said Rose in a weary voice, giving a very fair imitation of Flavia, ‘you enticed him to do it in some way.’
‘Come on, darling,’ said Jeremy. ‘Hamish’s love life might be a bit piano at the moment, but I’m sure he hasn’t got so desperate he encourages the dog to roger his leg. He’d at least choose a bitch.’
As she laughed, Hamish turned to me with a smile. ‘Sorry to hear about your accident, Susie, though apart from that rather impressive sling you’re sporting I wouldn’t have known that anything had happened.’ I could have flung my good arm around his neck and kissed him, it felt so good not to be told that I looked as if I’d just been resurrected. ‘I came to see how you were, but I can see that the answer is, recovering quickly.’
I smiled at him with a certain degree of cynicism. He had a black leather briefcase under one arm. ‘Don’t you mean you came over to give something to Jeremy, heard about the accident, and decided to earn a few brownie points by a bit of sick visiting at the same time?’
‘Not true at all,’ he said promptly, sitting down on the sofa alongside me. ‘I could quite easily have faxed these over, in fact I was going to, but then I heard all about the dramatic events of the other night from Stephen, who is suffering from a bad case of acute conscience and seems to imagine he provoked you into hurling yourself in front of a goat. I couldn’t resist coming to see how you were for myself.’
‘It’s very nice of you, thank you,’ I murmured, feeling absurdly pleased with myself for some reason.
‘Stephen’s already been round to see Susie,’ said Rose.
‘Only because he couldn’t find a file,’ I said.
‘You’re so cynical,’ she complained. ‘He was worried about you and you put the worst interpretation on it. And he brought you those flowers too. Honestly, I’m not surprised he threatened to sack you if you have that attitude around him.’
Hamish looked at me with deep interest. ‘He didn’t mention that. Was that why you tried to top yourself by goat? What exactly did you do to merit the sack so soon after starting the job?’
I thought for a moment. ‘I was there,’ I said finally. ‘And before you ask, I did absolutely nothing to warrant having a file thrown at me, apart from ask him to decipher a word I couldn’t read. Anyway, he didn’t actually sack me, he didn’t get as far as the third warning - though that was probably because I bolted out of the door before he could issue it.’
Hamish chuckled. ‘No wonder you felt like taking it out on a goat. What state is it in, or shouldn’t one ask?’
‘It’s a sheep,’ I corrected. ‘Houdini by name and Casanova by nature, so I hear. Unless Mr Cartwright’s carried out his threat to turn him into Lancashire hotpot, he’s fine. He was peacefully munching grass in a field when we left him. It was Luke swerving to avoid him that caused the accident, and his car wasn’t in such a fine state.’
He was stretching out his hand to accept a glass of red wine from Rose, but at this he turned his head sharply. ‘You have got to know Luke Dillon well, haven’t you?’
‘No,’ I said evenly, wondering what was up with these three men. They seemed to bristle like territorial dogs when each other’s names were mentioned. ‘I was having dinner with him, that’s all.’
My look challenged him to say anything more about it. He murmured, ‘The cooking can’t have been up to much if it was necessary to pick up a bit of extra mutton on the way home,’ and asked me what I’d done to myself, a nice innocuous subject with no nasty undertones.
‘Just bruising, but I had no idea that something minor like a bruise could hurt so much,’ I said with a grimace. It reminded me it was time for my evening pill, so I fished the bottle out of my pocket and washed one down with my orange juice.
‘I had these a couple of years ago when I broke my collarbone,’ he said, picking the bottle up and examining the label. ‘They’re very good, but strong.’
I nodded. ‘I can already take fewer than the doctor said I could have and they seem to work perfectly well enough on a lower dose.’
‘What’s the point of lying there suffering if you don’t have to?’ asked Rose. ‘I like my painkillers a bucket at a time, I don’t want to feel anything at all. In fact, let me lie there in a blissful dreamy state, not knowing what the hell is going on, like they used to in the olden days.’
Hamish laughed. ‘That’s because they were taking opium.’
‘Oh,’ she said, then grinned. ‘It’s not a bad way of being ill, is it? Do you think that people were constantly calling the doctor in and saying, Doctor, I’ve got a bad finger and it’s sooo painful, could I have a little of your wonderful medicine?’
‘Probably not, in case he suggested amputating it.’
‘Maybe aspirin’s not such a bad idea after all,’ Rose said thoughtfully.
CHAPTER 11
I insisted on going back to the cottage the next day. My left side still ached, but it was supportable even if I was heartily glad I wasn’t left-handed. A relaxed and congenial supper the night before had done more for my wellbeing than any amount of medication, even if Rose, backed by Hamish, who was even more infuriatingly sure he knew best than she was, had insisted I was sent to bed at ten o’clock. I didn’t want to outstay my welcome, which I could see becoming imminent. Rose had loads of other things to do, like attending committee meetings about this charity do which was now only ten days away. To give her credit, she tried to make me stay on for another couple of days. Jeremy nobly seconded her invitation though I was sure the last thing he wanted hanging around in the evenings with him and his new wife was a red-headed gooseberry. Besides, there were boring domestic matters to attend to at the cottage. If I didn’t get the milk out of the fridge soon it would be battering on the door and claiming it was owed parole.
Rose dropped me of, lingering with anxious enquiries about whether I could cope on my own and making me swear to ring her if I needed anything. In the end, I threatened to have hysterics in the middle of the green where everyone could see if she didn’t get in her car and go now. It was bliss to be back in the cottage, even if it did feel more shoebox-sized than ever after the grandeur of Moor End Hall. I paced it out, and discovered that, as I’d suspected, the total downstairs area of 3, Green Cottages was the same as that of the bedroom I’d just been sleeping in. Somehow, in less than a month this place had become home in a way that the flat in London, which I’d lived in for years, never had. I’d supplemented Preston’s minimalist tastes with my own clutter, slinging the bright tapestry cushions my mother makes as a hobby over the sofa to offset his passion for neutral colours. There was one covering the wine stain on the arm. There was room on the deep bookshelves for a row at the front of colourful, and frankly scruffy paperbacks that all but obliterated the serried ranks of theatrical biographies Preston favoured. I hadn’t dared to ask how
the weight of this useful arrangement might affect the stability of the screws holding the shelves.
I poddled around, tidying up, releasing the milk and something else that looked like I should have sent it to the great dustbin in the sky some time ago, doing the odd chore, happy to be back on my own patch home again. The next morning I woke myself up at five thirty when I turned over and discovered my shoulder wasn’t as well healed as I’d thought. I’d spent so much time in bed during the last few days I was completely over-rested and knowing I wouldn’t be able to go back to sleep again I got up. I had a long bath, got dressed and mooched down to the kitchen, where I made some coffee and picked up my book. But I’d also done a lot of reading in the last couple of days and this book was hardly a page-turner; I put it down and occupied myself by polishing the coffee machine, washed up my mug and wiped the sink. It was seven thirty. I’d done so much cleaning last weekend there was nothing to do apart from cleaning the windows, and I wasn’t bored or well enough for that. I even start to think wistfully of how nice it would be to be able to weed the garden, something that had never occurred to me before. The day seemed to stretch out very long in front of me, as did the whole bloody weekend now I’d had to cancel my trip to my parents.
I decided to go into Frampton, it was only about seven miles and I was sure that whatever Dr Bob said I could manage the driving, providing I didn’t do too many racing-driver-style gear changes as I screamed around corners. I’d get some more books and have my hair washed in the hairdressers in the High Street too as it was something I couldn’t do one handed. In the interests of shopping locally I’d already investigated ‘Mary Anne, Hairdresser’ in the village. Mary Anne, who’d set up just after the war and was still giving her contemporaries perms and blue rinses, said she didn’t do blow drys but could do me a nice shampoo and set. I said hastily that on second thoughts leaning backwards over the basin might be painful for my shoulder and escaped before she could set about me with the giant can of lacquer she was holding in her hand.
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