Creature Comforts

by Trisha Ashley

  ‘I knew there’d be a catch in it somewhere,’ he said gloomily.

  ‘It would make the entrance look much nicer when your customers drive in,’ I said persuasively. ‘And it would look even better if Dan cut back the trees and bushes along the drive because at the moment it’s one long, gloomy tunnel.’

  ‘I asked Myra whether Baz expected Dan to do anything other than the gardening and keeping the paths and drive clear, like you told me,’ Rufus said. ‘She said no and he was so lazy that he did as little work as possible after Baz moved permanently to the Bahamas.’

  ‘Aunt Debo told Baz when Dan started calling himself the estate manager and harassing her and anyone else that set foot on the estate.’

  ‘Yes, Myra said that, too,’ he admitted.

  ‘Baz rang him and told him to get a grip and get on with the gardening, or find another job, but he didn’t take any notice and Baz didn’t follow it up. He did start paying Olly for part-time gardening, though, when Debo told him he was the only one doing any.’

  ‘Olly does seem to put in a lot of hours. He was out there in the vegetable garden at first light this morning,’ Rufus said. ‘He’s transparently honest, too, so I know anything he says is the plain truth.’

  ‘Yes, there’s no subterfuge with Olly; he says exactly what’s in his mind.’

  ‘When I asked him about Dan, he told me he’d overheard him telling Baz last time he came over that he was doing all the gardening and Olly just mowed the lawns. But Baz told him he knew Olly did more than that, because he’d just seen him pruning the roses.’

  ‘I’m sure Baz did know that Dan still wasn’t pulling his weight, but he just didn’t have the heart to make any changes.’

  ‘He kept the house in good repair, though.’

  ‘Well, Myra is a demon cleaner, it’s a compulsion with her, so the place is always spick and span, and anything that needs attention gets sorted out.’

  ‘I’ve noticed. I even caught her steam cleaning the downstairs cloakroom the other day and when I said there was no need to go that far, she asked me not to spoil her fun.’

  ‘Oh, she loves it, and there are only so many hours she can spend cleaning her own flat in the kitchen wing because it’s not that big. Did she say anything more about Dan?’

  ‘Only that Olly is still doing most of the gardening, despite working at the alpine nursery at weekends. And she seems to be right, though Dan has made one or two token gestures when I’ve been about.’

  His jaw hardened and I thought if Dan expected the new owner to be as easy-going as Baz, he’d mistaken his man.

  ‘Tom’s also confirmed how little Dan has been doing, so since I don’t need any kind of estate manager, either he puts the full-time work into his real job, or he’s out on his ear. And the gun, loaded or not, goes now.’

  ‘He’s not going to like that, after having such an easy life for years.’

  ‘I’m paying his wages and he’s getting his cottage rent free, so he’d better buckle down if he wants to keep it. He can make a start on cutting back the drive tomorrow and then, after that, clear all the paths. That should keep him occupied for a while, and by then I’ll have a whole list of other stuff for him to get on with.’

  ‘What about Olly?’

  ‘He says he’s happy to carry on being in charge of the walled garden and the vegetable patch. In fact, he seems to consider those his personal domain.’

  I shivered suddenly and realised the sun had gone behind a cloud. ‘I’m getting out, I’m freezing.’

  ‘I’ll wait and walk partway back with you … or maybe you’d like to come up to the house?’ he suggested, to my surprise. ‘You can see how the garden antiques centre is taking shape and I’ll give you a cup of coffee to thaw you out. Come on,’ he added as I hesitated, ‘I’ve got that alarming woman Debo made me hire starting today, so it’s the least you owe me!’

  I wavered, but curiosity got the better of me. ‘OK,’ I said.

  We emerged onto the drive by the higher path, after walking silently through the woods.

  As we headed up to the house, Rufus said, out of the blue, ‘Fliss rang last night. I call her Fliss, by the way, because she always hated being called Mum. She warned me not to let Debo take advantage of me, and then said I should take Dan Clew’s advice, because he knew what was what. This, after meeting the man once!’

  Remembering what Lulu had told me about Dan’s boast of spending weekends with Fliss in London, I said cautiously, ‘Judy said when they turned up at the Lodge they were as thick as thieves, so they seem to have hit it off straight away, don’t they? What did you say?’

  ‘I told her to butt out and mind her own business,’ he said bluntly, his jaw setting. ‘She’s done enough damage already, making some other man pay for my upkeep all these years when she must have been sure I was Baz Salcombe’s son all along. I mean, I always wondered where I got my colouring from, because I wasn’t a bit like Hugo Carlyle.’

  He sighed, rather wearily. ‘I suppose I’d better get on to changing my name to Salcombe.’

  ‘Oh, well, one thing at a time. And I can understand how hard it must have been, discovering the man you thought was your father, actually wasn’t.’

  ‘After he found out, he didn’t even want to see me, especially when Fliss sold the conception-in-a-cupboard story to a Sunday rag. You can imagine how I felt about that.’

  ‘Horrible,’ I agreed, thinking that at least I knew who my father was, even if I’d never met him. By the time I was born, the result of a brief fling, he’d gone back to his wife in New Mexico.

  ‘Hugo wanted to sue Fliss for the money he’d spent on my maintenance, school fees and all the rest of it, but apparently he’s been advised it would be difficult. I wrote and offered to repay the money he’d put into helping me start up my first antiques yard, but he didn’t answer. He’s cut off all contact.’

  I could see he was deeply hurt by all this and, despite my loathing of the woman who’d been instrumental in my mother’s death, I was touched that he’d chosen to confide in me.

  ‘Were he and Fliss together for long?’

  ‘No, a brief affair, but she battened onto him like a leech once she knew I was on the way.’

  ‘Perhaps she wasn’t sure herself who your father was?’

  ‘Maybe not, but once I’d seen pictures of Baz and my half-brother, I could see the resemblance in colouring myself.’

  ‘Those light green eyes especially are unmistakable, although you don’t really look like either of them in features. You don’t seem very like Baz in nature, either,’ I added.

  ‘I didn’t get much chance to know him. To be honest, by the time I met him I was too full of anger, some of it directed at him, to give him a chance. And when I found out I’d had a half-brother but he’d been killed in a car accident, I’m afraid some of that anger was directed at you, too, because I’d never get the chance to meet him. But … there’s clearly more to that story than I realised.’

  ‘There is, though the accident was ultimately still my fault. I was the one behind the wheel.’

  ‘But there were mitigating circumstances – it’s not like it sounded when I first heard about it.’

  By now we’d turned a bend and there lay Sweetwell, sprawled in its usual rather ungainly fashion behind a stretch of ragged lawn.

  ‘I’m surprised Olly hasn’t kept the grass down with the sit-on mower that Baz bought him after Myra told him how long it took to cut.’

  ‘Which sit-on mower?’ Rufus demanded, puzzled. ‘I asked Olly about the lawn and he said he cut it when he had time with an ancient petrol mower.’

  I frowned. ‘I wonder if it broke down? Olly was definitely riding round on it the last time I was home, though that’s quite a while ago.’

  ‘Strange. I’ll look into it,’ he said.

  The drive divided into two and I saw that the way to the front of the house was now barred by a new five-barred gate, marked ‘Private’. A large sign pointe
d customers the other way, towards the car parking area behind the separate courtyard, with its surrounding stables, coach houses and barns.

  ‘It’s a pretty perfect set-up for your line of work really, isn’t it?’ I said, thinking about it for the first time. ‘You can keep the business and the house separate.’ A thought struck me. ‘If you change your name, aren’t you going to have to change all your signs, too?’

  ‘Yes, but I’ll have to, because Baz stipulated in the will that I become a Salcombe within a year of inheriting.’

  ‘In that case, you’d better stop being stubborn and get on with it. When are you opening for business?’

  ‘Monday, if I can get everything straight. I usually shut Mondays, but this one’s a bank holiday,’ he said. ‘Come on.’

  He led the way across the courtyard to the office he’d made in the building at one end, which had started life as accommodation for grooms and then later the chauffeur, before finally falling into dusty disuse.

  ‘This has taken shape already,’ I said, perched on a nice old leather office chair.

  ‘It was just a matter of bringing everything up from Devon and installing it here instead. There was already electricity, but next week I’ve got someone coming to update it and put new light fittings into all the outbuildings. Some of the sockets are so old, they’re two-pin Bakelite ones.’

  He looked around the room. ‘I’ve got more room here than I had in Devon, and I could do with another filing cabinet.’

  ‘I need one for my business and I saw just the thing in Ormskirk yesterday, only I’d gone there to buy a storage unit and lots of clothes racks, so there wasn’t enough room left in Judy’s car.’

  ‘I have to go into Ormskirk tomorrow morning, so you could come with me,’ he offered, to my surprise. ‘I’ll take the van, then there’ll be no problem getting everything back.’

  ‘Ormskirk will be very busy tomorrow, since it’s market day and Easter weekend, so we’d have to leave very early,’ I warned him.

  ‘I was going to go in early anyway. I don’t like crowds.’

  ‘OK – and it’s very kind of you.’

  ‘Actually, it’s just that I don’t know my way around very well yet and need a free guide,’ he said, with a brief glimpse of that rare, devastating smile.

  Unleash your secret weapons! a robot voice droned in my head, but I told it to shut up, because there was no way I’d ever get ideas about any son of Fliss Gambol!

  After our coffee, he gave me a tour of the premises.

  ‘It’s good to see the place taking on a new life. I used to come up here with Cam and Lulu to play sometimes,’ I told him. ‘But not Harry and his friends, because they were two or three years older. Harry was at boarding school until he went to the local sixth-form college and he was like a slightly annoying older brother really … right up to that spring when I turned sixteen and suddenly got a crush on him.’

  I don’t know what made me blurt that out.

  He gazed at me with those strangely opaque green eyes, so like Harry’s. ‘Did you? I can see that that would explain a lot about the accident.’

  ‘Yes, though looking back I’ve no idea why I suddenly felt that way about him.’

  ‘Well, we all have unsuitable crushes at that age,’ he said. ‘I was in love with my art teacher and she was not only old enough to be my mother, but married with two young children.’

  The outbuildings were stacked with bits of old wrought-iron furniture, barrows, signs, pots, statues, railings, watering cans … you name it, if it was remotely connected with gardening, it was in there. There were racks of old gardening tools and ancient mowing machines, garden paving and Victorian twisted-top terracotta flower border edging.

  Against one wall stood several old agricultural implements and the sort of scythe the Grim Reaper might pop in to purchase.

  ‘I get a lot of things from France, especially garden furniture, and I go over there on a buying trip about every three months or so. But if I hear of anything interesting for sale anywhere in the UK, I go and have a look.’

  ‘That sounds like fun,’ I said enviously.

  The biggest pieces were all in the centre of the courtyard and included a splendid fountain of a nymph with dolphins, which was probably white marble under the muck and green algae, and some curved stone seats.

  ‘The small, valuable stuff is in the room next to the office,’ Rufus said. ‘Easier to keep an eye on what people are trying to walk out with.’

  He stood and looked around his domain with some satisfaction, the breeze enthusiastically whipping his glossy dark chestnut hair about. ‘I didn’t have as much room in the last place and the yard was just rented, so this is so much better … if the customers will come all the way to Halfhidden, that is.’

  ‘It’s exciting starting something new, isn’t it?’ I said. ‘The first consignments of clothes for my online business should arrive any minute.’

  ‘What sort of business?’ he asked.

  ‘I’ve designed a range of clothes in Indian silk and cotton, retro-styled, based on ethnic clothes of the late sixties and seventies – you know, floaty fabrics, little bells, embroidery, quilted jackets?’

  ‘No, not really,’ he admitted.

  ‘Well, anyway, it’s retro with a twist. I’ve spent the last few years working for a charity that sets up small-scale women’s co-operative textile workshops, so I had all the contacts in place. I brought back the first samples and I hope my website will go live soon.’

  ‘Sounds like you’ve got it all clear in your head.’

  ‘Yes, though I’ve got something to get out of the way first. I’m on a mission. There were two things, but I’ve already almost finished sorting out Debo and the kennels.’

  ‘What kind of a—’ he was beginning to ask, when he suddenly broke off and a faint look of horror crossed his face. The tall and sturdy figure of Foxy Lane slowly cycled into view on a too-small pink bicycle, her bright copper hair standing up like the crest on a helmet. Seeing us, she took one hand off the handlebars to wave, wobbled a bit, and then came on.

  ‘I’ll just set her onto cleaning up that marble fountain and then I’m going to hide in the office,’ he said. ‘She’s scary.’

  ‘Wuss,’ I said, then called, ‘Hi Foxy! I’m just off back to the Lodge – have fun!’

  I totally finished the kennel paperwork when I got home, so that everything could tick over quite nicely from now on with minimal effort, provided we kept Debo on a tight rein. Or at any rate, a tight lead.

  I showed her and Judy the two in-trays, one for kennel stuff and the other for any domestic bills, and they promised to use them.

  Then I told them that Rufus had agreed to a new smaller kennel block, the fence and the roses, though I couldn’t remember if he’d actually come out and said so. On the other hand, he hadn’t said he disagreed …

  ‘There, I told you he’d turn out to be a nice man, just like Baz. It’s unfortunate his mother is Fliss, but I suppose he can’t help that and we’ll have to try not to hold it against him,’ Debo said.

  ‘It was just a brief encounter in a broom cupboard, and Baz was probably drunk,’ Judy suggested. ‘Not Rufus’s fault.’

  ‘No, and his father, or the man he thought was his father, has totally rejected him since he found out he wasn’t his son. He even wanted to sue Fliss to get the maintenance back.’

  This cheered Debo up no end, though she was disappointed that he’d changed his mind.

  Chapter 15: Mission Statement

  ‘S’Izzy,’ Simon slurred, with a lopsided grin.

  I stared at him in amazement. ‘Are you … drunk, Simon?’

  ‘Harry thought it would be funny to spike his juice with a bit of vodka – big mistake,’ Cara said tartly from the back seat.

  ‘Well, I wasn’t to know it would affect him like this, was I?’ Harry protested indignantly.

  I woke in the middle of the night, Harry’s voice echoing in my head, and it was quite
a while before I fell asleep again. But this time I dreamed I was swimming up and down the pool at the Lady Spring with a naked Roman soldier bearing a striking resemblance to Rufus Carlyle, and when I woke the second time I was feeling strangely refreshed.

  Babybelle now expected to come into the Lodge for breakfast every day after her walk, after which she clearly felt that her place was by my side … or under my feet. But today Judy distracted her with a bit of bacon while I made my escape to meet Rufus at the gates. I felt slightly shy, given the way last night’s dream had panned out …

  His Transit van had seen better days, most of them quite a long time ago. It was also emblazoned up the side with ‘Rufus Carlyle Garden Antiques’, so that would be another thing he’d have to change.

  I said so when I got in.

  ‘I know and it’s going to be really weird getting used to being Rufus Salcombe, though at least I have some right to the name. I’m seeing the solicitor about changing it by deed poll next week and then I’ll work my way through altering the website, the cards, the van, the signs …’

  ‘That’s going to cost quite a bit,’ I commented, ‘and everything connected with running one’s own business seems time-consuming, though at least before I came home I’d already sourced most of the labels, packaging and business cards for Izzy Dane Designs and started creating a website.’

  ‘Izzy Dane Designs? Is that what it’s called?’

  ‘Yes, though at first I kept coming up with brilliant ideas for names that reflected what it’s all about, like Eastern Fusion or East Meets West, only of course when I checked online, all the good ones were already being used.’

  ‘There wasn’t another Rufus Carlyle Garden Antiques online and I don’t suppose there’s a Rufus Salcombe running one, either.’

  ‘I could have used my father’s name,’ I said, ‘but although it sounds foreign, it’s the wrong kind of foreign for what I’m making, and anyway, I don’t see myself as a Rodriguez.’

  ‘That sounds Spanish? You’ve never mentioned your father, except that he left you some money.’