The Planet Dweller

by Jane Palmer

CHAPTER 12

  Daphne gave the grave Mr Turner an insincere smile and assured him, ‘He’s really quite tame, just looks a bit on the ferocious side.’

  ‘That’s as may be,’ replied Mr Turner, who knew better than to contradict her: his farm was rented from her family. ‘But I’m glad I had those fences seen to last winter. He looks a ferocious brute to me, even though you say he isn’t. I can’t say I’m happy about it because children expect to play in that meadow.’

  ‘You own the land,’ snapped Daphne. ‘You might as well have some profit out of it instead of letting it lie fallow.’

  ‘I’m thinking about the other people in the village who’ve come to regard it as a right of way,’ moaned Mr Turner. ‘I’ve got no right to stop that Russian fellow with the telescope leaving his cottage.’

  ‘You’ve got every right. He can run fast enough, and so can anyone else who wants to visit him. The person who bought the lease on that cottage should have remembered to buy a right of way as well.’

  Mr Turner knew the consequences of trying to divert Daphne Trotter’s mind when it was set on something, and leant on the sturdy fence to watch the massive black beast making charges at phantom cloaks. ‘If he’s harmless, I’m the sugar plum fairy,’ he thought to himself as the bull’s sharp hooves ploughed up buttercups and daisies that had been growing quite happily there for years. He racked his brain desperately for some solution that would let him off being party to some poor creature’s goring. This bull was obviously being kept from the performance uppermost in its mind. Being penned in without a girlfriend was hardly going to sweeten its temper.

  ‘Magnificent creature.’ Daphne sighed and her ample torso swelled with pride despite the corset it had been crushed into.

  Mr Turner was nonplussed. ‘Then why put it to grass, Mrs Trotter?’

  ‘I want it to be built up, Mr Turner,’ Daphne lied.

  ‘If that beast is built up any more it’ll be too heavy to serve an elephant,’ Mr Turner quipped.

  She paid no attention, preferring to watch the black brute make practice charges at Yuri’s gate as it swung in the breeze.

  Realising there was nothing legal or illegal he could do about it, Mr Turner resolved to pay a visit to the parish church for the first time in years and see the vicar to make his peace with God just in case. Climbing wearily into his battered land rover, he drove off to go and count sheep out of the dip.