Going Too Far

by Catherine Alliott

  ‘OUT OF THE WAY!’ roared an irate Daphne Heggerty as she thundered towards us in her open-topped Range Rover, grey curls blowing in the wind and a horse box rattling around behind her. ‘Stop bloody snogging and get out of the road!’

  We flattened ourselves into the hedge as she roared past, leaning heavily on her horn. She was still purple with fury and a boot-faced Clarissa was sitting beside her, to tally devoid of a red rosette or a silver cup, I noticed. So Lime-green Shell Suit had won the day after all.

  ‘Try brushing up on your prizegiving rather than your sexual prowess!’ was her parting shot to us as she flew over the brow of the hill and out of sight. The horse box nearly took off as it bounced around behind her, a surprised-looking pony nodding out of the back. We watched her go and giggled.

  ‘She just can’t believe Clarissa hasn’t won the cup for the fourth year running, can she?’ said Nick with a grin. ‘Still, she’s given me a marvellous idea. Come on!’

  He seized my hand and pulled me towards the stile in the hedge. We climbed over into the field and he hurried me along, down towards the copse that marked the very edge of our land by the Helford River.

  ‘Where are we going?’ I panted, hobbling in my heels and rather unused to so much exertion.

  ‘For a walk, and then perhaps a rest. It is, after all, a very hot afternoon, isn’t it? Don’t you think a little relaxation is in order? And then, as Daphne said, there’s our prowess to brush up on, what d’you think?’ He grinned and squeezed my hand.

  I laughed, suddenly feeling decidedly happy. As I hobbled along I marvelled at how quickly and dramatically my moods could change. Odd, wasn’t it, how one minute I could quite cheerfully slit my throat and the next I could skip happily through a meadow with my husband, on my way to an alfresco assignation?

  We made our way through the long spring grass, already lush and sprinkled with cow parsley, across to the valley on the opposite side of the field, and beyond that to the gravel path that led to the river. We wound our way down, hand in hand, and reached the little copse that edged the bank. It was cool and secluded and we lay down on the mossy grass together with a sigh.

  ‘A siesta?’ I muttered, as Nick’s arm curled around me.

  ‘Absolutely,’ agreed Nick, ‘or rather,’ he added with a smile, as he removed my crushed hat from my head and tossed it into the river, ‘what I like to call a siesta complet.’

  Chapter Two

  The next morning I opened my eyes and lay in bed, listening to the birds singing outside my window and watching as a shaft of sunlight fell in a small bright square on my duvet cover. I stretched out a hand to check if Nick was beside me. He wasn’t, of course, been up for hours no doubt, but I always liked to check.

  I languished there for a while, thinking back to the events of the previous day. I smiled. So I’d mucked up the prizegiving, so what? What did a piffling little thing like a prizegiving matter when I had the most unpredictably sexy husband in the world? When was the last time Daphne Heggerty was seduced by her old man in a secluded copse down by the river bank, eh?

  I swung my legs over the side of the bed and grinned to myself as I wandered down to the kitchen in search of calories. The sunlight was streaming in through the kitchen windows. I pushed open the back door, stuck my head out and was immediately ambushed by the sweet Cornish air. I inhaled deeply, held it a moment, then let it out with a contented sigh. Ahhh … pure nectar. You don’t get air like that in London, you know, not much carbon monoxide in that little lungful. Someone really ought to bottle it and send it up to the poor old townies to waft over their cornflakes. I stuck my chest out and took another bracing snort, but it was a snort too far; my twenty-a-day lungs objected wildly to this sudden onslaught of purity and I had a major coughing fit. Gasping and wheezing, I reached hastily for my cigarettes on the Welsh dresser, desperate for my more usual morning fix.

  With fumbling fingers I lit the first of many over the gas ring and predictably singed my fringe at the same time. When I’d pulled all the burned bits out and sworn sufficiently, I tugged my T-shirt-cum-nightie down over my bottom and settled down on the back doorstep, determined to enrich at least one of my senses. It wasn’t difficult. I might have comprehensively fouled up the smell of the morning air with burnt hair and low-to-middle-tar tobacco, but nothing could foul up the perfect pastoral scene that greeted my eyes. As I rested my chin on my knees and gazed out at the patchwork of fields and woods in the distance, I blew smoke rings in the hazy blue air and counted my seemingly endless blessings.

  You’re a lucky girl, Polly Penhalligan, I told myself sternly, a very lucky girl indeed, and don’t you forget it – just look at this place! The sweeping, majestic lawn, the meadow beyond dotted with sheep and spring lambs, and even further away – I squinted my rather myopic eyes – the glassy Helford River shimmering in the distance. Magic. And here you sit, on this well-worn manor-house step, mistress of all you survey. I frowned and tapped some ash on to the grass. Well, no, all right, perhaps not the river, perhaps I wasn’t mistress of that – I had a feeling, English laws being what they were, that that probably belonged to everyone – but, certainly, this particular view of it was mine, wasn’t it?

  I leaned back on the door frame happily, then frowned again. Try not to be too smug, Polly; it’s not very attractive. But then again, I mused, plucking at a daisy, it was so terribly hard not to be smug. And it wasn’t as if I didn’t appreciate it all – God no, on the contrary, it still made my eyes boggle just to think about it. I let them boggle quietly for a moment as I sat and quietly savoured the joys of being Mrs Nicholas Penhalligan.

  I smiled. It had, let’s face it, been pretty convenient of me to fall in love with a man who owned quite a sizeable chunk of Cornwall, hadn’t it? Not that I’d have minded if he’d been a pauper or anything, an estate agent even – Lord no, I’d have had him anyway; he was my idea of heaven with or without the lucrative trappings, but it did somewhat cushion life, didn’t it? It was, shall we say, a nice little bonus, to get not only a handsome (very), intelligent (screamingly), sensitive (sometimes), loving (at unpredictable moments like yesterday) husband, but also Trewarren House and a thousand acres of Cornish countryside thrown into the matrimonial contract just for good measure.

  Ah yes, the countryside. I sighed and stretched my legs out into the dewy grass, aware that there was no holding back the smugness now. It really was such bliss. How could I ever have been happy in London? God, the noise, the traffic, the pollution, the crime! Whereas down here, well, none of that, and all the good things were just so – well, so abundant, weren’t they? Look at that grass, for instance – I tugged at a clump with my toes – have you ever seen such luxuriant growth? My eye snagged suddenly on my bare legs, and I frowned and tucked them up beneath me. Well, yes, OK, there was some pretty luxuriant growth on those too, and perhaps they were a trifle fatter than they’d been in the past, but what did it matter? I wasn’t about to pour them into ten-denier tights and excruciatingly uncomfortable four-inch heels and totter off to work for my living, was I? No, I was simply going to squeeze them into my oldest jeans and take a leisurely stroll around the farm. When I felt up to it, of course, in an hour or so perhaps. No rush.

  I rested my head lazily against the door frame, feeling the sun on my face. Yes, in an hour or so I’d probably amble off and check out the cow sheds, pass the time of day with the farm hands, chew on a straw, lean on a gate, that kind of thing – nothing too taxing for a Monday. Then I might pick a few flowers for the house and ask Mrs Bradshaw, my daily, to arrange them attractively in a crystal vase, and then when Pippa arrived I’d pretend I’d done them myself and – Christ! I sat bolt upright with a jolt. Pippa! I’d almost forgotten she was coming – what time had she said? Mid-morning? I turned round and craned my neck to see the kitchen clock. Ten thirty. Phew, relax, Polly, bags of time. Mid-morning was about one o’clock in ad-man speak; she wouldn’t be here for ages.

  I shook my head and sighed. Poo
r Pippa, it would be lovely to see her again, but what a shame it wasn’t a purely social call, what a shame she was down here on business. Couldn’t stop long, she’d said, too much to do. Looking for a location, she’d said, to film yet another grotty commercial, no doubt. I plucked a dandelion and frowned, twirling it in my fingers like a parasol. Yes, poor old Pippa, still stuck in the ad racket. When I’d bailed out two years ago to marry Nick, the Penhalligan part of Penhalligan and Waters, Pippa had wrung her hands in dismay, claiming the typing pool would never be quite the same without the other half of the dastardly secretarial duo. She’d stuck it out solo for a bit, but when Nick finally sold his half of the agency to Waters and we decamped down here to his farm on a permanent basis, Pippa had decided that that was definitely the moment to throw in the Tipp-Ex and go.

  And off she’d gone, surprisingly – considering her secretarial background of answering the telephone only on the twentieth ring, reading Harpers & Queen whilst typing memos and only taking a letter when severely bullied into it – to become really quite something of a high-flier in a film-production company.

  She raved about it of course, but then she would. It sounded like bloody hard work to me. Whenever I rang her for a two-hour long-distance gossip she always seemed to be dashing off to a shoot or a meeting or some such other ghastly corporate event. It made her tetchy too – why, I remember once I’d had to drag her out of a meeting to ask her something absolutely crucial – like whether I should pick out the pink or the green in the drawing-room curtains when I recovered the cushions – and she’d been absolutely livid.

  ‘Polly, have you seriously dragged me out of that presentation to ask me about your sodding cushions?’ she’d hissed down the phone. Most huffy, and quite unlike her usual do-the-bare-minimum-and-piss-off-on-the-dot-of-five-thirty self.

  I bit my lip thoughtfully as I twiddled my toes in the long grass. I did hope she wasn’t turning into a career girl or something dreadful. Work really was so terribly overrated. What she needed, of course, was a husband, preferably a rich one. I’d tackle her about it when she arrived, find out more about this chap she’d been seeing, Josh, or something. She’d gone awfully coy about her love life recently and I suspected it was going downhill fast.

  Still, I mused, as I reached up to the shelf by the back door and flicked the biscuit tin down in a practised manner, I really ought to get dressed before she arrived or she’d be under the mistaken impression that all I did as a married woman was sit around in my nightie eating biscuits when nothing, actually, could be further from the truth.

  I prized the lid open eagerly and my hand hovered nervously as I braced myself for the biggest decision of the day. I dithered. Hobnob or WI flapjack? I mustn’t be greedy, and to have both would be just that. In the end I plumped for one of the larger flapjacks and wondered, as I masticated idly, just how long it actually took to get to one’s hips. Were we talking hours? Days? Weeks? Or was it, in fact, almost instantaneous? I glanced down thoughtfully, but not too censoriously, at my increasingly generous hip, bottom and thigh lines. Something really had to be done about all that. Tomorrow. Yes, tomorrow I’d start a new regime. I’d go into Helston and buy some bigger clothes. I sighed. I did what I could with leggings and baggy jumpers of course, I’m nothing if not imaginative, but there was no denying the fact that two years of doing little more than reaching for the biscuit tin was beginning to take its toll on my sartorial style.

  Yes, it was two years now since Nick and I had finally, and blissfully, tied the knot in that heavenly little church in Manaccan. Clutching my posy of orange blossom and white lilies I’d floated up the aisle in a sea of raw silk, followed by a flurry of darling little bridesmaids whom I’d never seen in my life before. In a state of pre-match nerves I’d sobbed to Mummy that I simply must have some tiddly attendants and why the hell didn’t I have any handy nephews and nieces we could wheel out like everyone else did, so that finally in desperation I think she’d resorted to Central Casting, or an agency or something. Anyway, they’d all looked divine and the whole thing had gone off tremendously smoothly and everyone said it hadn’t mattered a bit that I’d passed out cold on the wedding cake just as Nick and I had been about to cut it. I’d obviously slightly misjudged the amount of champagne needed to steady my nerves and numbed them instead, but, as I said, it hadn’t mattered, and Nick had just been thankful he hadn’t cut my head off with the bogus regimental sword Mummy had also rustled up for the occasion. The cake had been surreptitiously scraped off the floor straight on to plates, my dress had sponged beautifully and I’d come round in an alcoholic haze, headdress askew, just in time to articulate my goodbyes to a few remaining guests before being whisked away to the most romantic honeymoon imaginable in Antigua.

  I helped myself to a Hobnob and settled down to bask in the memory of that idyllic little hotel on the sundrenched beach, where the only minor inconveniences had been the wrong socket for my hair dryer and the Spanish honeymooners in the next room who’d insisted on shouting ‘Arriva! Arriva!’ – rather competitively we thought – through the thin rush-matting walls.

  I smiled and crunched my way nostalgically through a few more calories, but as I did so I heard a crunch of an altogether different kind coming from the other side of the house. My mouth froze in mid flapjack. I listened. Christ! That sounded suspiciously like tyres on gravel. Pippa couldn’t be here already, could she?

  I jumped up in alarm, ran through the house to the large sash window in the hall at the front and peered out. Sure enough, a very sexy little red Alfa Romeo was cruising to a halt in my front drive. Groovy car, I marvelled enviously, could that really be Pippa’s? What on earth were they paying her these days? I watched as the car door swung open and one long, slim, sheerly stockinged leg appeared, followed by another. They straightened to reveal the rest of Pippa’s most elegant self, immaculately clad in the most prohibitively expensive-looking drop-dead Chanel suit I’ve ever seen.

  ‘Pippa!’ I squeaked, bursting forth through the open window in a flurry of excitement and chocolate-stained T-shirt. ‘You’re early! Hang on, I’ll come to the front door.’

  She waved back, but looked rather dubiously at the craters in the drive that she was apparently required to cross in order to gain access to the house. I shut the window and ran to the door. When I flung it open she was still poised nervously by the car, clutching her quilted handbag and surveying the puddles, a vision in pale pink with black trimming, her shiny blond hair blowing out behind her like a silk fan.

  ‘What’s happened to your drive?’ she wailed. ‘It’s like a bloody assault course!’

  ‘We ran out of money,’ I shouted. ‘Had to put a new roof on the cow shed instead!’

  ‘Well, I’m glad the cows are all right, but what about my heels?’

  ‘Oh, come on, Pippa,’ I grinned, rather enjoying her townie predicament. ‘Just get a move on and stop making such a fuss!’

  ‘Oh, all right,’ she grumbled, nervously picking her way through the mud. ‘Come on, Bruce,’ she threw back over her shoulder. ‘Wake up, for God’s sake, we’re here!’

  A blond head suddenly popped into view above the dashboard in the passenger seat and a pair of bleary blue eyes were rubbed sleepily. Bruce? Who the hell was Bruce? She’d brought a man with her and I wasn’t even dressed? I pulled my T-shirt down over my bottom and hid behind the door.

  ‘You didn’t say you were bringing anyone!’ I hissed, as Pippa finally made it across the threshold.

  ‘Oh, it’s only Bruce,’ she said airily, hugging me enthusiastically and thrusting a bunch of tulips up my nose. ‘He’s the location-finder, had to come with me to check out the venues, you see. Gosh, it’s good to see you, Polly – come on, Bruce!’ she yelled back at the car.

  Bruce opened his door but appeared to be equally put out by the drive.

  ‘Couldn’t you have got a bit closer?’ he wailed plaintively. ‘I’ve got my Gucci loafers on!’

  ‘Oh, stop being such a p
ansy and hurry up. I want you to meet Polly.’

  ‘You’re cruel, darling,’ muttered the gorgeous, suntanned blond creature who stepped gingerly from the car, ‘very cruel. But luckily, Brucey Boy’s used to it.’

  I instinctively pulled in my tummy muscles and sucked in my cheeks as he tiptoed across clutching a little black bag, but I couldn’t help thinking I’d never seen such a fuss over a little bit of mud, especially from a man. Of course, as he reached us, it took less than a nanosecond to realize that Bruce was not your average man, at least, not one of the red-blooded heterosexual variety I’m so fond of.

  ‘Bruce, this is Polly; Polly, Bruce,’ announced Pippa as he climbed shakily up the front steps, looking back over his shoulder like someone who’s just scaled the north face of the Eiger.

  ‘Terrible drive,’ he muttered, taking my hand, ‘terrible. But none the less, enchanted, my dear, positively dazzled, by both the house and your good self, and dying to take a peek inside.’

  Hoping fervently that he was referring to the house and not my good self I ushered them in.

  ‘Bruce is a professional nosy parker,’ explained Pippa as I led them through the vast hall smothered in ancestral portraits. ‘He gets away with it by calling himself a location-finder but it’s really just an excuse to poke around other people’s houses.’

  ‘Oh, but this is divine!’ squeaked Bruce, clasping his tiny hands together with joy and twirling round the hall. ‘Oh please, no further! Let me linger a moment and savour!’

  We lingered and he savoured, prowling excitedly around the portraits, touching frames, peering at signatures.

  ‘Oh yes!’ he breathed. ‘Yes! Utter magic, utter, utter magic!’

  He tore himself away from the pictures and stood back to survey the whole hall, taking in the ancient banisters, the flagstone floor and the huge chandelier hanging from the heavily corniced ceiling.