The Perfectly Imperfect Woman

by Milly Johnson

  As they talked and picked more strawberries, Marnie discovered that the lilt in Emelie’s speech and the strange pronunciation of some of her words were down to the fact that she had been born in Austria and had never quite lost the accent.

  ‘We had a large house in Salzburg,’ Emelie told her. ‘My father wouldn’t bow down to the Nazis and he was arrested and . . . “pressured”. He was returned to us, fully complicit – or so they thought. We escaped, like the von Trapp family but without the music. My father was a scientist with code-breaking skills which were useful to the British so we were brought to England and changed our name from Taubert to make us fit in better. The government hid us in this village; obviously they must have paid Jago – Lilian’s father – well for the inconvenience because it was clear that he hated us. It was very hard for people to differentiate between Austrians and Germans then. If you spoke German, you were automatically a Nazi to some people, who were hostile to us as a result. The Suttons in particular. Titus’s father was a monster. No wonder his son grew up to be such a liar and a cheat.’ Marnie noticed Emelie’s expression of deep disgust. She thought she knew what that meant.

  ‘Did you invest money with him too?’

  Emelie gave a little trill of laughter. ‘Not I,’ and she shook her head slowly from side to side. My father always taught me that if something looks as though it is too good to be true, then it most likely is. Titus tried to take my money of course. It is foolproof, he said. Only high-risk investments would have paid off what he was promising, I told him and I was right. I know how to play the stock markets, my father was a very rich man in Austria but of course we lost everything when we came over here.’ And she sighed heavily. ‘I have never been back to Austria. I was too afraid of what I would find. Our house was taken from us, everything we owned. I never saw my dogs again.’

  Emelie wiped her eye with a tissue that she pulled from her cuff and Marnie thought she must have worried about them so much. That’s why Marnie chose not to have pets. Any attachments she made didn’t tend to last very long.

  ‘I have always seen through Titus,’ Emelie went on, pushing her tissue back up her sleeve, ‘but he has charm and finesse, or at least he had when he was younger. Now he is growing into the body he deserves, a swollen gout-ridden slug. I want to climb one of the apple trees in my garden and sprinkle salt on him when he passes. Ugh.’

  Marnie started giggling at the mental image of Titus shrivelling under a salt-shower, which set Emelie off too and they laughed until their stomachs hurt. They ventured further into the woods to pick more strawberries but the mud defeated them. It was okay though, Marnie had enough by then. She didn’t want to steal too many from the forest and waste them.

  ‘What are you doing for the rest of the day?’ asked Emelie as they left the shade of the woods for the sunshine.

  ‘I shall take my book and sit in the garden,’ said Marnie. ‘I’m at a really good bit.’

  ‘What are you reading?’ Emelie studied her. ‘Let me think. I can see you as a Daphne du Maurier girl. My Cousin Rachel, maybe? Lilian always liked that one. She will have told you all about her sister Rachel of course.’

  ‘Oh boy, did she,’ nodded Marnie, ‘but I’m going to have to disappoint you. I’m reading Country Manors, the second one. I know it’s trash, I know it’s slightly porny, but I’m absolutely loving it.’

  ‘Many people who didn’t read before are reading those stories,’ Emelie replied. ‘It is like a blood transfusion into the book world. It can only be a good thing.’ She pushed at her old, creaky gate. ‘Marnie, don’t forget where I live. Come and see me again soon. The door is always open and the kettle is always on.’

  ‘I will,’ said Marnie, looking up at the apple tree that stood in Emelie’s front garden and imagined her hanging from the top bough with a bag of Saxa in her hand.

  Herv’s bedroom curtains were open when she passed. Come on, chop-chop, get home. Nothing to see here, said a bolstering voice in her head. She walked across the green and heard someone shouting at her, a male voice that she didn’t recognise. Not her name but ‘Hey, you there’, as if he was telling her off for trespassing on his land. She wasn’t surprised to turn and find the owner of that voice was Titus, walking towards her with a quick step. She prepared herself for battle.

  ‘We haven’t been properly introduced,’ he said, holding out a large hand with short stubby fingers. ‘Titus Sutton. Heard about you, obviously. Hope you’re settling in.’

  The last time Marnie had seen him, he’d been purple-faced with rage at the will-reading. He must know by now what she had found in those ledgers. Or maybe he thought she hadn’t broken his coded handwriting yet. He didn’t look like a man expressly worried as he stood before her with his oily smile. She didn’t buy this super-matey routine, but she was intrigued by it. She’d bring him down soon enough, when she was ready. She shook his hand. ‘Marnie Salt, pleased to meet you at last too.’

  ‘Been meaning to say hello and reset, start off on the right foot,’ he said. ‘Shame Hilary isn’t with me. She goes off to stay with her sister once a month. She’s not been well for years. Hilary’s a southerner. Alas,’ and he guffawed, there was no other word for it. ‘Anyway, very glad to have bumped into you. Must dash.’ He made a pretence of walking off only to turn on his heel after a couple of steps. ‘Meant to ask. Update of parish records, Lionel needs your date of birth. I’m just on my way to see him actually, I could tell him for you, if you like.’

  ‘May the first, nineteen eighty-four.’

  She saw a nerve in his cheek jerk.

  ‘May Day, eh? And George Orwell’s finest work. That’s quite a statement birthdate, if I may say so.’

  ‘I hadn’t really thought about it,’ said Marnie, which wasn’t true.

  ‘Splendid,’ and with that, Titus set off in the direction of the church.

  As she walked the remainder of the way home, she began to wonder if Lionel genuinely had asked for her birth date. It was an approximate one anyway, seeing as no one knew exactly when she had been born because her birth had never been registered by a parent. But Titus didn’t need to know that detail. Parish records or not.

  Titus didn’t go to Lionel’s, instead he thundered into the shop where Kay Sweetman was reading the latest Women by Women magazine behind the counter.

  ‘You all right, Titus?’ she greeted him, wondering why he was huffing like an old steam train.

  ‘No, I am not,’ he replied. ‘Packet of my usual. I need something to calm my nerves.’

  Kay opened the cabinet behind her and got out a packet of Titus’s favoured brand of cigarettes. ‘What’s up?’

  ‘That bloody woman,’ he chuntered.

  ‘Oh, her,’ sniffed Kay. She knew exactly which bloody woman Titus meant. ‘She’s wrecked Una’s marriage, have you heard?’

  Titus hadn’t, so Kay took great delight in filling him in with all the details.

  ‘I wish she’d bugger off back to where she came from,’ she remarked.

  ‘I don’t think there’s much chance of that.’ Titus gave a bark of humourless laughter. ‘There is no mysterious owner of the estate. It’s her, playing stupid games. I’d put my life savings on it. I knew there was something else to this story.’

  Kay was all ears. ‘Oh, what makes you think that then?’

  So Titus told her.

  Marnie took her book out into the garden along with a can of ice-cold cherry cola and an egg mayo sandwich. She’d found a little wooden table hidden in an overgrown rose bush which she’d washed down and positioned in front of the bench. The stream looked thirsty; the banks were dry and crumbly and she thought they’d welcome some rain. She looked ahead at the wood and wondered if Margaret Kytson’s grave was within her sights. The wood surrounded Wychwell on all four sides and unless they dug the lot of it over, they weren’t going to find it by design. Sometimes, when she was down at the bottom of the garden, Marnie thought she detected movement out of the corner of her eye bu
t it was just a trick the sunlight played when it found an opening through the leaves and dived through them. She decided she wouldn’t have minded if it had been the witch, peeping behind a trunk watching her.

  The second book in the Country Manors series was much better than the first. The characters were more rounded and the action pacier, and it was very racy. There was a woman featured called Kate Sowerby whom Marnie wanted to punch. She reminded her of Kay Sweetman in the shop. They even had the same thin-lipped mouth set in a perma-sneer.

  The heat began to make Marnie drowsy. She read until her eyelids felt too heavy to keep open and gave in to the tiredness. It was so peaceful here. She hadn’t imagined she could ever feel such a level of calm, especially with all that she had going on: making enemies of everyone in Wychwell as she prepared to put up their rents, slash their bonuses, split up their marriages. She didn’t want to raise Emelie’s rent but she might have to, just a little so as not to mark her out as a special case and bring the wrath of the villagers down on her too. Then all thoughts of rents and Emelie and witches were washed away by tides of sleep creeping up on her, dragging her down into their warm waters of oblivion.

  She had no idea how long she’d been asleep when she was suddenly awoken by the chill of a shadow falling across her. She was jerked from the depths of unconsciousness so quickly that she almost got the bends.

  Kay Sweetman was bearing down on her, arms akimbo, measly mouth a downward arc like a croquet hoop.

  ‘Can I please ask you what’s going on between you and Herv Gunnarsen?’ There was nothing polite about Kay’s demand, despite the please.

  ‘I beg your pardon? And what are you doing here?’ It hadn’t got past Marnie that Kay would have had to walk through her house to reach her.

  ‘I knocked and when no one answered I came in,’ said Kay, as if this was a perfectly reasonable explanation. ‘So?’

  ‘What on earth has it got to do with you?’ asked Marnie, beyond affronted. How bloody dare she?

  Kay’s head pushed forwards and one hand left her hip to start waggling a finger at Marnie.

  ‘I’ll tell you what it’s got to do with me, shall I? My daughter’s very upset, that’s what it’s got to do with me.’

  Does trouble have me permanently on the end of a fishing rod, thought Marnie.

  ‘She’s had to go to the doctors for some tablets to stop her crying, because of you,’ Kay went on.

  ‘Because of me?’ squealed Marnie. What the actual . . . ? She really was getting absolutely sick and tired of never being able to escape from hassle. If she lived on a cartoon desert island with only a palm tree for company, they’d end up falling out with each other.

  ‘Yes, because of you. Well, I’ll tell you this for nothing, lady. I won’t have my daughter depressed. You stay away from Herv and stop coming between them.’ Kay’s finger was exercising so much it was gaining muscle.

  That was it, Marnie decided. No more Mr Nice Guy. She was an adult now. And self-employed. She didn’t have to shut up and take any crap from anyone. She didn’t have to bite her tongue for fear of getting sacked. She didn’t have to stand the blame for fear of the naughty step or slapped legs. All the good that the strawberry-picking and slug-laughing and sunshine-sleep had done her today had been dashed away with a single wipe from Kay bloody Sweetman.

  ‘Shall I tell you something, Mrs Sweetman,’ Marnie got up slowly from the bench, her voice controlled, hinting at contrition. Kay Sweetman was a tall woman so Marnie still had to look up at her when she was fully on her feet. She smiled, giving no hint of the tirade to come. ‘If I want to talk to Herv Gunnarsen, then I will. If I want to snog Herv Gunnarsen till his lips fall off, then I will, subject to his compliance of course. And if I want to move Herv Gunnarsen into my house and have naked orgies with him and invite half of Skipperstone along to watch, then I will.’ Her voice was now at full volume. ‘How dare you walk into my home and lay down your laws, and if your twenty-nine-year-old daughter’s nose is put out of joint because the man she fancies doesn’t fancy her back then tough tits. Tell her to grow up and move on. Now get out of my house before I grab you by your scrawny neck and throw you out.’

  Marnie registered the expression of horror on Kay Sweetman’s face. She’d taken the threat as a real one that would very likely be implemented – and she was right to. Marnie knew that she could look convincingly murderous because her mother had once told her that she was genuinely frightened of what she could be capable of, which had led her to the conclusion that her true parentage must be right at the business end of the dodgy scale.

  Kay Sweetman began to scuttle back to the house, with Marnie in close pursuit behind her to make sure she went. It was as they walked through the kitchen that Marnie realised Kay would have seen the stack of flat-pack Tea Lady Bakery boxes in the corner. It didn’t help her mood.

  When Kay was finally out of the house, Marnie called after her in a calm voice that belied her inner turbulence, ‘Thank you for coming. Don’t do it again.’

  ‘Not hard to work out why Herv Gunnarsen is sucking up to you and it’s nothing to do with fancying you,’ Kay threw back at her.

  ‘Goodbye, Mrs Sweetman.’

  Marnie shut the door, none too softly. She had no idea what Kay meant, nor was she going to ask her, but still the words wouldn’t quite be as easily dismissed as the woman herself had been.

  Chapter 31

  Kay’s invasion of Little Raspberries totally ruined Marnie’s weekend. She had a dream that night riddled with vivid images of Titus and Kay hiding in her house, watching everything she did and then reporting it all back to her mother. Marnie woke up stressed and cross very early the next morning and decided that she might as well channel that black energy into compiling the first major report for Mr Wemyss to pass on to the new owner of Wychwell.

  Based on what rental properties were going for in the Dales, she’d worked out what the Wychwell locals would now be paying if they hadn’t been so heavily subsidised. But as much as she would have liked to have slapped the standard market prices on people like Kay Sweetman, she knew that Lilian wouldn’t have wanted her to do that. The new rental system she’d come up with reflected the estate’s loyalty to them without being a walkover.

  Considering the price would include all their utilities and maintenance, they really couldn’t complain. Marnie wondered, though, if the present residents did know that any maintenance work on their homes was part of their estate’s pledge to them, apart from the Suttons of course, who had taken full advantage of that perk. Judging by the state of some of the brickwork and windows, she thought they might not.

  Marnie also suggested that the four derelict cottages be restored and rented out too. On the records they weren’t named after fruits like the others, but had their pre-Lilian names: Ironhall, Tin Cottage. Winter House, Summermoor. She asked that the villagers be given first option to rent any of the habitable cottages at the ‘special rate’. Johnny and Zoe Oldroyd and Ruby in particular, because it might do her good to put a little distance between herself and a mother who still treated her as if she were six. All remaining empty cottages would be offered to people further afield and used for holiday lets, at full price. More people in the village should increase the footfall into the shop and the pub and help their businesses so they wouldn’t need the estate funds propping them up as they had been doing.

  She typed all this up and emailed it to Mr Wemyss so that he could forward it to the new owner. After her altercation with Kay, she was ready to let it ripple out towards the villagers that she wasn’t to be messed with.

  Rumbles of thunder began in the early afternoon. The sky started to blacken by the second, the clouds grew pregnant with rain. They were in for some serious showers, but Marnie needed to go out for brown sugar. She could have got away with white, but she was a perfectionist and brown sugar was far superior in a toffee apple crumble topping, giving it a chewiness that a white version wouldn’t. It had just started to spit when s
he set off for the supermarket, heavy warm drops that the grass and the stream would welcome with open arms, she imagined.

  There was a Tea Lady in Troughton, a small town with a big Tesco five miles away. Marnie thought she might kill two birds with one stone, see how her fare was going down and do her shopping straight after. She parked up in the supermarket car park and though the rain hadn’t reached Troughton yet, she couldn’t remember ever seeing the sky so dark during a midsummer day.

  She had to wait ten minutes for a table to come free in the Tea Lady, but it gave her observation time. She watched the expressions of people partaking of afternoon tea and trying her squares of cheesecakes. No one was exactly jumping on their chairs declaring them the best they’ve ever tasted but there seemed to be a general air of ‘yum’ in the café.

  When she was eventually seated, Marnie chose the cheesecake of the day – cherry and chocolate – and a pot of tea. And when she asked the waitress for the bill she asked if she could buy a cheesecake to take home because it was so delicious.

  ‘Isn’t it just,’ replied the waitress. ‘My favourite is the caramel and apple one, but it’s not on this week. We’ve got a new cook in and she’s fantastic. But we don’t do a takeaway cake service, I’m afraid.’

  ‘You should think about it,’ said Marnie. ‘I’d have taken a whole one off your hands.’

  ‘I’ll tell the boss,’ said the waitress, smiling at the tip the nice customer had pressed into her hand.

  So they were going down well, thought Marnie as she headed back to Tesco. Rumbles of thunder immediately followed crackles of lightning. She ran in and bought her sugar as the announcement came over the tannoy that the store would be closing in ten minutes. The rain was bouncing off the floor when she went back to the car and though her head and shoulders were dry, her jeans were soaked from the knee down. It was now falling so fast, before she switched on the wipers, it looked as if she was in the mid-cycle of a car wash.