by Fiona Walker
‘I’ve not been gone very long.’ There was an abandoned wheelbarrow outside the stables her horses had been using, Ronnie noticed. ‘Was Lester here?’
‘Never mind that. I have a proposal. The others have agreed to it because they don’t think you’ll do it.’
Pax had clearly been arguing, her voice even deeper, hare eyes wide, ready to box or bolt. Ronnie recognised herself in her, and it made her heart hammer hard because she knew how hot-headed that made Pax for all her diplomacy.
‘The door stays open until Christmas,’ Pax told her.
‘To do what?’
The eyes screamed into hers. ‘Come back.’
‘I told you I don’t want to—’
A hand went up. ‘It took a lot of persuading.’
‘Pax, I have a life away from this place,’ she said carefully.
‘And we have a death here, remember? The door stays open until Christmas. The legal side will take that long to sort anyway, so this place can’t be sold until after then. There are conditions attached.’
‘I thought there might be.’
‘You put up the money. You write a business plan. You don’t make any decisions about breeding, selling or anything else without the trust’s approval.’
‘I can’t agree to that.’
‘Have it your own way.’ She nodded tightly. ‘Funeral in a fortnight. No jazz, guns or punch. But it will be big and you will behave.’ She found her calm bass note at last, struggling to hold it. ‘I’ll see you there. I love you too by the way.’ Distractedly handing over the mug, she hugged herself tightly, ducking behind the lorry, footsteps retreating.
Smelling Scotch, Ronnie looked down at the innocuous brown tea and almost gagged. Her father had enjoyed two fingers of rare malt every night at precisely yardarm; Johnny, by contrast, had laced everything he drank with it, from his wakeup mug of Tetley’s to his cocoa nightcap, with a bottle of Famous Grouse in between.
‘My poisoned chalice raises a toast to Captain Jocelyn Percy,’ she muttered, tossing its contents away, inadvertently dousing the fox terrier that was now snarling at her dogs from behind the wheel arch.
Ronnie hurried around the lorry in pursuit of Pax, but she’d already disappeared into the house. In her place, Pip Edwards was parading across the cobbles with a stack of Tupperware containers and an excited smile, bulgy eyes huge with gratification. ‘A little bird tells me you’ll be moving back soon!’ She thrust her plastic tower at Ronnie. ‘The house is lovely and clean for you. Just call the moment you want a bed made up. I’ve baked these for you – and Blair – to enjoy. Just a few cupcakes, fondant fancies, tarts and pastries. Call me day or night.’ She dropped her voice. ‘I had that word with Alice about the grief boat. I think it went down well—Oh, not that one!’ She plucked the top box off the pile. ‘Where’s Lester gone?’
‘Give me to the end of the drive and you can tell him it’s safe to come out.’ Ronnie sighed, climbing into her lorry cab with the cake boxes and then stepping quickly back out to scoop up the older of her two dogs while the youngster sprang in behind them. She reached into her glovebox for the Churchill crown and kissed it for luck before starting the engine.
*
‘Sorry, sorry, sorry I’m late!’
Petra’s perfect mother-in-law welcome shifted the moment she dashed onto the platform at Broadbourne station still wearing her breeches and hairnet to find Gunny sitting irritably on a bench, posting insults about bad timekeeping and the station’s grubbiness on Instagram. She knew she’d been cutting it photo-finish fine, trying to squeeze in a ride with the girls before collecting Gunny, but it was such a lovely day and they were so enthusiastic, no doubt subliminally trying to delay the inevitable as much as she was.
Charlie’s parents had been separated for at least a decade when his philandering father had suffered an untimely heart attack, but Barbara had adopted the role of widow with such conviction that nobody dared question it, least of all Charlie, who had accepted her claim on his father’s estate without a fight, a decision that meant the perennially shaky Gunn finances stayed in the red while Barbara splashed out on a lock-up-and-leave penthouse on the south-east coast, a sports car, a new wardrobe and a lot of cosmetic work. An old-fashioned battle-axe, softened with just the slightest hint of camp and a lot of facial filler, she was now enjoying a high life of holidays, self-improvement, spa treatments and leisure sports, all documented in her blog and on her Twitter feed @GunnPoint. She had carved out an enjoyable life for herself in her beloved Kent. She claimed in her blog to be devoted to her son and grandchildren but, to Petra’s relief, that didn’t involve seeing them very often. Summer was an exception, and she always set aside at least a week to take up occupancy in the farmhouse annex and criticise the way Petra ran her home, her marriage and her children. Having been on several expensive writing courses in Mediterranean spa hotels, to which she attributed the quality and popularity of her blog, Gunny was particularly fond of needling her daughter-in-law on literary technique.
Over the years, Petra had developed a plethora of coping mechanisms for Gunny’s visits, among them industrially strong gin and tonics, fraught texts to friends, lots of dog walks and occasionally running into an empty room to punch a cushion.
Always immaculately coiffured, pearled and suited, Barbara Gunn’s Botox and ill humour had conspired to prevent her smiling since the noughties. Dark glasses propped in her expensively streaked bob, tailored sundress crease-free, despite a morning’s travelling, make-up immaculate, she regarded her daughter-in-law’s appearance with dismay, taking a photograph of Petra to add to her feed. ‘Did you fall off?’
‘Several times. Dragged by the stirrup across three fields. Had to pop my dislocated shoulder back in. Sorry again.’ She offered a kiss on both cheeks, which Gunny took with a chin-back nose-crinkle at the smell of horse.
‘I can never tell whether you’re joking or not, Petra.’
‘I was joking.’
‘Sarcasm rarely suffices with a sophisticated audience, I find, and I’m speaking as someone voted wittiest over-sixties blogger three times in a row by Good Housekeeping online. They’ve stopped reviewing your books, I noticed.’
‘Everyone’s stopped reviewing my books online, Barbara, but that’s no bad thing, given social media’s largely populated by trolls, egoists and bullies. Thankfully, by some miracle, people are still reading them. Good journey?’
After that, the visit grew even less picture-perfect on the @GunnPoint streams. Having complained non-stop about her crowded train, the sudden heatwave, and the strange smell in Petra’s car – later identified as an abandoned riding hat – and the state of the house (‘Is this what they call shabby chic?’), Gunny settled down in the sun-drenched walled garden to eat a simple lunch of fluffiest home-made smoked-mackerel mousse, pea-shoot salad from Kenneth’s veggie plot next door, and the farm shop’s poshest artisan horseradish soda bread.
Petra had been confident the food, at least, would pass muster. But the martyred smile said it all.
‘What a coincidence! I had the loveliest smoked-mackerel mousse with Desi Ballantyne in Seasalter last night. It’s Michelin-starred – you can’t beat Kent for fish.’
By a cruel (surely not deliberate) twist of Fate, she found a small bone in her first mouthful and staged a Queen Mother choking fit, washed away by Prosecco that she identified in her near-death throes as a sub-fiver Aldi bargain – ‘Two stars in the Daily Mail.’
‘Eat marshmallows, Gunny!’ insisted practical Bella. ‘Mummy always makes us do that when we get her fish bones stuck. Wait there! I have some in my room.’
‘Once,’ Petra breathed. ‘You got a bone stuck once, Bella Gunn. A supermarket fishcake. They gave us cinema vouchers when I complained and you asked for those fishcakes every day for a month afterwards.’
Bella returned, bearing a fistful of Flumps from an old pick-and-mix stored under her bed for weeks, several headless Gummy Bears attached. Gunny lost her appetite
.
‘Thank you, Arabella, but I’ll just sip some water, if I may,’ she said sweetly. ‘Is the marshmallow trick a Yorkshire thing, Petra?’
Why did her mother-in-law always make her feel so inadequate and uncouth and northern? she fumed, as she stomped outside with a freshly filled water jug rattling with ice and citrus slices. And why, as soon as Gunny arrived, did her children become co-conspirators in an all-out campaign to discredit her catering?
Prudie now claimed to have bitten into a minuscule slug on her home-grown salad leaf, pea-shooting it across the table at her sister, who retaliated with a blade of the artisan bread crust as sharp as an arrow tip. Looking up wearily from his phone screen, Fitz – whom Petra had bribed to charm his grandmother with compliments – muttered, ‘Gunny, we deserve better than this,’ and retreated to his attic room once more.
‘Is he worried about his GCSE results?’ Gunny asked insightfully, taking a close-up shot of the smoked-mackerel mousse, by now a sun-melted slagheap of bony peril subsiding into its cucumber garnish.
Ed coughed into his hand. To a finely tuned mother’s ear, the word ‘wanking’ was just about audible. Mouth full, Petra found fishbone and crusty bread shooting up her nose.
‘He fancies the new cleaner,’ Ed was telling his grandmother. ‘She has tattoos and huge—’
‘Strawberries!’ Petra leaped up to fetch pudding, quietly choking even more when she found a text from Charlie on her phone. Busy day. Tied up until late. ETA 22.47 train. Cx
Not for the first time, she closed her eyes to a split-second’s collision of literal and imaginative interpretation: her husband in a Chelsea basement in studded-collar bondage, looking up Chiltern Railways train times.
‘When’s Charlie due back?’ Gunny asked, as strawberries were dumped in front of her along with tubs of farm-shop ice-cream, which had a strange crystalline texture after melting and being refrozen.
‘When he’s untied. Madagascan vanilla soft scoop, lime sorbet or fresh cream?’
‘Is it whipped?’
‘Lightly flagellated.’
At that point, Wilf gambolled winningly across the lawn to Gunny, charm assassin to the rescue with his handsome spaniel smile – ‘Charlie’s dog really is such a sweet chap, isn’t he? Just like his master’ – and disgraced himself by cocking his leg on her handbag.
Which at least gave Petra the excuse to take him out.
The children had started to play croquet on a striped baize green lawn, their grandmother prowling eagerly around the Pollock-colourful herbaceous borders, snapping photographs of Upper Bagot Farmhouse’s contribution to Open Garden Week, lupins fat as loofahs, aliums like lollipop ladies and rambling roses dancing with butterflies.
Chasing Wilf’s waggy, stumpy liver and white tail through the orchards, Petra walked to Lord’s Brook in his wake, breathing deeply, and ringing Gill, whom she’d last spoken to when trading a large bay dressage horse for her car the previous afternoon.
‘Where have you been all day?’
‘Gunny.’
‘Oh, yes. Going well?’
‘Probably slightly better than usual. I’ve only tried three different ways of murdering her so far. None worked, although I got close with cheap fizz.’
‘Give it time. You wait until you hear the latest from the stud. This’ll take your mind off it. Flynn’s just popped into the clinic and apparently the Bolter’s been back. Nobody’s seen her, but I have it on very good authority she was here in the village.’
Petra watched Wilf snaking back and forth in the stream, pausing to pant up at her, smiling and bouncing with a tail-wagging invitation to join him. ‘Really?’
Ronnie Percy had something quite magical about her, the sort of charm one wanted to keep all to oneself.
‘She’s bound to be sniffing round the pot,’ Gill was saying.
‘Or paying her respects to a father she’s just lost.’
Gill let out a sceptical harrumph. ‘Bay’s already let slip the Austens are buying the Sixty Acres by the church meadows. It has the best coverts in Fosse and Wolds’ country.’
‘That’s the field with the cedar?’ The Percy family tree. No wonder it had been fought over by the families more often than Berwick-upon-Tweed.
‘That’s right. That tree marks the end of a famous Percy family point-to-point back when Georgian gents raced horses between churches. Bay came to pick up a pony this morning and was full of talk about hunting there before Christmas, but I think this thing has a long legal tail. Oh, he also said he’s getting a drone, so make sure you keep your bathroom curtains closed. He was telling Paul it’s an MoD-issue super-surveillance one with night vision that can practically take your fingerprints without being heard. Your neighbour Kenneth has a contact apparently. All very hush-hush.’
‘Who knew? By day a mild-mannered gardening enthusiast, by night a spy in the sky.’
‘Code name Rhododendrone from the Royal Air Squadrone.’
‘Ha-ha-ha. His Open Garden’s like Waterloo station today. Ours is a ghost town.’
‘That’s because you’ve got two of the most off-putting things growing in it.’
‘What?’
‘Teenage boys.’
*
At the farmhouse, Fitz wandered outside after his mother had set off with Wilf, drawn by the hard click of croquet mallet against ball. Ed was loudly changing the rules so that the hoops were time portals into another galaxy, the balls transportation devices for Jedi masters and Rebel Alliance captains, and the mallet a meteor storm.
The last of the local strawberries still lay sun-softening sweetly in the big Emma Bridgewater bowl on the garden table, half a bottle of Prosecco bobbed in its ice chiller in the shade and his grandmother was napping on the sun swing, mouth open, iPad in her lap on which a photograph of his mother’s favourite herb trough was captioned: All this mint and no Pimm’s on offer? It would never happen in Kent!
He’d just checked his dad’s old phone. Things had hotted up since Fitz’s You bastard message, which was hardly surprising given the BlackBerry had been passed from father to son months ago still logged onto all its accounts. It meant the sender was displayed as Charles G, and whilst Charlie secretly knew full well what a bastard he was, he didn’t like admitting it, even to himself.
Since discovering the app, Fitz had been so filled with hostility that he preferred to imagine he wasn’t Charlie Gunn’s biological son. The fact that his parents had married several months after his conception had never been a secret, the bump conspicuous in all the arty photographs of a windswept wedding in Yorkshire. They’d always insisted it would have happened regardless of Petra’s pregnancy, but Fitz had his doubts based on years of evidence gleaned at close quarters.. He’d also done the maths. He was a Millennium-night creation, a Y2K XX game changer conceived the final time his mother partied like it was nineteen ninety-nine. And his current, comforting fantasy was that it had been a party which Charlie Gunn hadn’t attended.
Petra Shaw had partied hard through the late nineties among the glittering young publishing set, according to Fitz’s funky godmother Pearl, a glamorous whirl of private members’ clubs, book tours, launch parties and big advances. Fitz had read the inscriptions in the books on the landing shelves, many signed by male authors she’d met on the road – rebels of chemical fiction and high-brow concept, edgy music journalists and lad-lit chancers – and decided he was the result of a passionate affair with a secret literary lover, who’d abandoned her pregnant and in need of a father elect. Why else marry a 404 like Charlie, whose favourite authors were Jeremy Clarkson and Dan Brown? She hadn’t so much settled down as dumbed down.
Fitz now saw right through his father, picking apart the very fabric of the man and finding not a thread of himself in him; even if they did share strands of genetic DNA, there was no moral fibre. His grandmother was another matter. He couldn’t help admiring Gunny’s hardball gall, and although he loathed her being such a bitch to his mother, he sensed she wo
uld make a far better ally than enemy. Besides, she gave huge Christmas and birthday cheques and was friends on Facebook with more people than he was.
He settled beside her, making her start awake.
‘Oh, it’s you, William.’
‘Everyone calls me Fitz.’
‘Not everyone, William.’ She smiled tightly. ‘Have you finished whatever you were doing – er – upstairs?’
He shrugged. Now that he’d checked the app on the phone in his bedside drawer, he could see he’d triggered a bit of a Situation. As he’d suspected, his father coming home late had nothing to do with work.
‘Now tell me, William, are you looking forward to your A-level studies?’
‘Haven’t really thought about it.’ Not strictly a lie. A-level studies were no longer on this year’s agenda, so Fitz hadn’t spent much time thinking about politics, economics and history or moving across to Upper School, with its communal kitchen and fraternity feel. He felt tiny again, facing a world his mother had tried to convince him was Hogwarts, not warning him that home would crumble while he was away.
‘I remember your father starting his sixth-form years,’ Gunny was eulogising. ‘Gunnpa and I were so proud of him, driving him there in the Jag, stopping off for lunch in the Cotswolds as usual – the smart end, near Stow. We lived in Surrey then. Gunnpa was still working in insurance in the City. I played tennis five times a week and chaired local ladies’ charity lunches. I bet that’s hard to imagine!’
‘You still play tennis and have lunch, don’t you?’
‘Less, William. It’s a widow’s duty to be circumspect as well as merry.’
‘How long ago was it Gunnpa died?’
‘Gosh. Well, it must be, what, eight years?’
‘Is it true you were getting divorced?’
She looked so startled for a moment Fitz thought she was going to tell him to keep a civil tongue in his head, but she’d always indulged him, especially when he did his Tom Hiddleston smile.
