by Unknown
‘Good God, is it that serious?’
‘I’ve never seen anything like it in m’ life.’ She shook her head. ‘They call it love, but I rather think it smacks more of mutual lunacy.’
Ely drew a sharp breath. ‘In that case, we must alert the registrar and consider taking other measures.’
Hell’s Bells gasped. ‘You don’t mean—’
‘No, Isabel, I was thinking of something a little less bloodthirsty than breaking the sixth commandment. Leave it to me.’
Poppy was breathless with excitement as she made an early-morning call to Ellen: ‘. . . a quite exceptional offer. Of course, the Brakespears are terribly disappointed, but I can quite understand why your parents had no choice but to accept. Gazumping is a very broad term, these days, and this hardly even slips under the wire. Market forces dictate new rules all the time and . . .’
God, that woman loves her job, Ellen thought irritably, as she crammed the receiver under her ear and filled the kettle from the kitchen sink, watching Hunter Gardner feed his chickens.
Two sleepless nights were blurring her brain and she rubbed her temples and fought to keep pace, dragging her mind from the why-why-why to the here and now.
Her mother had already pre-empted Poppy’s call with the news that a last-minute – and simply irresistible – offer had been made on Goose Cottage, blasting the Brakespears out of the water. After such months of static, it seemed everyone wanted Oddlode’s prettiest cottage. Ellen’s parents attributed this turnaround to their clever daughter, and claimed that she had always been ‘very lucky’. And despite Ellen’s protestations that it was unethical, Jennifer refused to feel guilty about the Brakespears. She and Theo had already eagerly accepted the new offer.
‘. . . I am only sorry that it involves you vacating the property even earlier than anticipated,’ Poppy went on. ‘That is the only requirement we really must adhere to.’
‘I’m flying a week on Saturday,’ Ellen pointed out. ‘That’s not a problem.’
‘Oh, joy!’ Poppy piped.
Ellen was glad that Poppy found it such a cause for celebration. She would probably be the only person willing to wave her off, although the rest of the village would be there in spirit.
‘Mr Gates will be thrilled,’ Poppy announced cheerily.
Ellen felt like a sword-swallower with hiccups as she fought to talk round the steely lump in her throat. ‘Mr Gates?’
‘You must remember him – the man who made the silly offer early on?’ Poppy confided chummily. ‘Well, be prepared to fall off your seat. He’s the purchaser! He has changed his tune, literally tripled his offer to secure the property at this late stage. He really wants it.’
And wants me gone, Ellen thought wretchedly, propping the phone beneath her chin and wrapping her arms around her shoulders as she slumped her head to her knees and fought a wave of nausea. Ely was even willing to pay a ridiculous trumped-up price for Goose Cottage to ensure that a greater des. res. was within his grasp – the manor house. He was ruthlessly determined that nothing would stand between him and his dream – not his daughter’s happiness, not Spurs, and certainly not Ellen.
‘His one stipulation,’ Poppy went on, ‘is the hasty completion date. His solicitor, Mr Hornton, has even been instructed not to bother with searches. The draft contract is already being biked to your parents’ solicitors.’
Ellen rang off and went to fetch the horseshoe from the mantelpiece, looking at the single nail still lodged in a hole.
So Spurs and Godspell would have their wedding gift of a gingerbread cottage, after all, she realised.
She sank forlornly on to the window-seat in the dining room and pressed her cheek to the deep sill, looking across at the polished table and trying to visualise Godspell, resplendent in gingham oven gloves, settling a steaming hot-pot on a trivet while Spurs waited, knife and fork poised.
She laughed tearfully. It was ludicrous. The whole marriage was ludicrous, concocted by an ambitious social-climber and an impoverished landowner. That their children had agreed, in this day and age, was astonishing.
She had no idea what drove the strange, withdrawn Godspell, and why she would co-operate with her father’s plans. But Spurs, whom she understood only too well, had an overwhelming debt of guilt and duty to fulfil. She knew that he loved her as recklessly and ill-advisedly as she loved him – something undeniable that had caught them unawares, hitting them at such velocity that they had crashed together in a tangle of heartstrings and volatile chemicals, too shocked to realise what was happening.
Ellen sobbed as she laughed. ‘You bloody idiot. You complete, bloody idiot.’ She was speaking for both of them.
She picked at the nail in the horse shoe, remembering Hell’s Bells incanting the Constantine family motto. To break one’s promise is to break one’s sword.
Right now, she longed to pull the sword from her throat and run it through the entire population of Oddlode, with their kowtowing hierarchical hypocrisy and their total deference to a family that no longer existed. Most of all she wanted to run around the manor, cutting down the tapestries and the velvet curtains, slashing the macabre hunting oils, carving graffiti into the oak panelling and sending up sparks from the flagstones. She wanted to leap upon the dining-table, twirling her longsword and screaming, ‘Monkey!’, a small, incandescently angry Samurai warrior, declaring war on Hell and all her Bells.
Spurs had tried to warn her, despite his infatuation. He’d invited her to love him, but never to honour or obey because that, after all, was his job. He had told her from the start not to get involved with him. And she had returned fire by believing that it was far too soon after Richard, by claiming that her heart was frozen along with her desire.
And, as the ultimate irony, he had only agreed to marry Godspell because she had been on her disastrous date with Lloyd the estate agent in the same restaurant.
Ellen threw the horseshoe across the room and howled in fury.
‘You’re the one who believes in fairy tales.’ She watched the shoe spinning on the flagstones. ‘You make the wish.’
‘He’s helping Rory at the kiddies’ riding school until you go,’ Gladys told Ellen breathlessly in the post-office stores, feverish with the secrecy of it all. ‘Fred the kennelman gives him a lift at dawn, and he’s there all day until Stan Baker drives him back to Oddlode again. After that, they watch him like hawks in the big house. He’s been told that if he’s so much as seen walking past your cottage, he’ll lose a finger for each step he takes closer.’
Ellen, who had sloped guiltily into the shop for her first packet of cigarettes in weeks, took a few bewildered moments to take in what was being said. She looked from Gladys to smiling Joel, who gave her a big wink. ‘Spurs is working at the riding school?’ She caught up dimly.
Gladys nodded. ‘But I wouldn’t try to get there if I was you – more chance of getting to the moon. I think it’s ever so mean keeping you two apart like this. That’s what I was just telling Mr Lubowski. I mean, you’re both adults, aren’t you?’
Ellen nodded, remembering Hell’s Bells’ insistence that her housekeeper had no idea Spurs was the one Godspell was to marry. ‘We are.’
‘Unfair to keep you apart, then.’ Gladys tucked in her chin. ‘I mean, telling the poor man he’d lose a finger coming near you. This ain’t the Lebanon. You might be a bit tarty, but I think we should all be a bit more tolerant in this day and age. I’ve told Lady B that if she don’t buck up her ideas, I’ll be applying for a job at the Waitrose in Minster Bourton.’
‘Thanks.’ Ellen was touched by her support, if appalled that everybody seemed to know her business.
Sitting on Bevis’s bench afterwards, she tipped her face to the tiny pinpricks of sun penetrating the horse-chestnut and wondered how many fingers she could live without if she were in Spurs’ place. She stretched up her hand and looked at it, shocked to find it shaking.
The speed with which Glad Tidings had stalked her between manor an
d post-office stores disturbed Ellen, as did the heavy trade that the little shop encountered during their brief conversation. Every pensioner in Oddlode had decided to buy their local paper at the same time as Ellen went in to buy cigarettes. They had shuffled around her in a formidable group detachment, tuning in hearing-aids and peering over half-moons.
‘What was that about?’ Ellen asked Bevis, as her icecream melted on her knee, seeping into the fabric of her capri pants.
Above her the horse-chestnut whispered in the breeze, suggesting that love and thunderstorms were in the air. No caterpillars descended this time. Instead, Ellen watched the leaves move inside the canopy, her own personal comfort umbrella, reassuring her that this was her safe place.
‘I don’t want to be in a safe place,’ she suddenly realised out loud. ‘Safe is somewhere you lock things in. Bugger safe. Bevis, we have to do something!’
The leaves shook under a gust of breeze and Ellen ducked as something resembling confetti tumbled towards her. But then she saw that it wasn’t a paper cascade – it was butterflies. Dozens of white butterflies flew from the horse chestnut and across the village green.
‘“This is the self-preservation society!”’ she sang as she ran back to Goose Cottage to fetch the jeep. ‘“This is the self preser –” oh, bugger.’
The Wycks barred her path at the gate. Like two of Pheely’s weathered gargoyles propping up a row of goofy garden gnomes, Reg and Dot played sentry to a rabble of ape-shouldered youth, Saul at their centre. Ellen quailed, knowing that she couldn’t talk her way out of this one.
‘You bin gallivanting with Belling?’ Dot demanded, fingering her handbag.
Ellen nodded, not trusting herself to speak.
‘Ely bin interfering?’ she persisted.
Amazed at the way news travelled around here, Ellen nodded again, noticing that Saul’s blue eyes were shooting out of his face like gas flames.
‘Go talk to the nutty potter,’ Dot told her. ‘Tell her you needs to know the truth.’
Ellen glanced over her shoulders anxiously. ‘I’m sorry?’
‘Talk to Ophelia Gently.’ Saul translated for his grandmother. ‘She knows why Ely’s doing this.’
‘They was good kids,’ Dot lisped, through her missing teeth. ‘Not like most round here. Belling ain’t never bin as bad as they all makes out. The nutty potter knows the truth. You talks to her, girl.’
Ellen swallowed uncomfortably. ‘Thanks. Would you mind my asking why you are telling me this?’
‘Saul!’ Dot summoned her grandson, making the entire Wyck contingent quail.
He scuffed the ground. ‘Nan reckons as I owes you an apology,’ he told Ellen, glancing at his diminutive grandmother. ‘For the badger.’
Ellen stared at him in amazement. ‘Accepted.’
He scratched his shoulders self-consciously beneath his T-shirt arms, revealing his muscled biceps and the unicorn tattoo. Ellen studied the bareback nymph for a moment, vaguely recognising the pale-faced temptress, although she couldn’t place her.
‘Ely made me do it.’ He didn’t look at her.
‘Ely was behind the badger?’ Ellen gasped.
‘He din’ kill it or nothing. He caught me with it and said he’d report me for baiting – then he said as how I could make up for you mucking Nan about. He said he wouldn’t do nothing about it if I left it here for you.’
‘Did he write the note?’ Ellen wondered what Ely planned to leave her next – a wildebeest in her bed, perhaps, or a pony carcass in the bath?
He shook his head. ‘I got someone else to do that.’
Ellen was too distracted and weary to care. ‘Let’s forget about it.’
‘You’re okay, you are,’ he muttered, glancing at her shyly. ‘We’ll make it up to you.’
She looked at all the Wycks, wondering why they had changed their tune so suddenly.
‘Talk to the nutty potter,’ Saul repeated his grandmother’s words.
Ellen caught Dot’s eye. ‘Okay. I’ll talk to her again. Thanks.’
Pheely, rather embarrassingly, was in the loo when Ellen found her way out of the choked garden maze and into the Lodge cottage.
The sound-effects were not good. A tinny transistor belting out Radio Three failed to mask the noise of a loose bowel movement being evacuated at speed, followed by a long, mournful groan.
Ellen wavered, tempted to bolt back to Goose Cottage and continue walking the carpets bald as she had been all morning. But Hamlet had already lured Snorkel into the undergrowth for a game of rough-and-tumble, accompanied by great growls and shrill barks.
‘Who’s there?’ Pheely demanded, through the bathroom door. ‘Is that you, Dilly?’
Ellen chewed her lip and looked anxiously around. Godspell’s bust had been moved inside to shelter it from the spits of rain that were dancing out of the tall pines. It was even more mesmerising now that Pheely had started to add the final touches before glazing. The limpid eyes watched her suspiciously, the narrow mouth was pursed with disapproval and the spiky hair exploded from the frowning forehead and crown, as wild and black as a thick cloud of crows rising from a crop field. But what Pheely had really captured in that severe, passive little face was the sadness. There was something heartbreaking about it, an unspoken energy that seemed to crack the many angles, gouges and swirling marks in the clay. Compared to the gnarled gnomes and flowery fairies, Pheely had created a masterpiece. It was incredibly powerful.
Dragging her eyes away, Ellen noticed that Pheely had been working on another sculpture on a second stand, this one covered with wet muslin and a bin-liner. She went to take a peek underneath.
‘Don’t look at it!’ howled a frail voice behind her.
Pheely had emerged from the bathroom, looking grey, her bloodshot eyes slitted. ‘My work is private,’ she enunciated. ‘You have no right to snoop. Have you come to apologise?’ She reached for her cigarettes. ‘Make it snappy if you have – I’m not feeling too good.’
She and Ellen squared up to each other, the recent shift from new friendship to enmity awkward and unyielding.
Ellen wanted to wade in with accusations and demands, but instead watched her pale face worriedly, wondering how long she had been ill. ‘Where’s Dilly?’
Pheely misinterpreted the question. ‘If you came to see her,’ she muttered, reluctant to show how disappointed she was to come second best, ‘she’s staying with a friend in Kent for an eighteenth birthday party. She’ll be back at the end of the week. I’ll tell her you popped by.’
‘I came to see you.’
Pheely lifted her chin. ‘Yes?’
‘You were right. Spurs has agreed to marry Godspell.’
‘Of course I was right,’ Pheely snapped impatiently, glaring at Godspell’s bust.
‘I think you know why.’
For a moment the huge eyes were unshuttered and frightened. Then they blinked and reappeared cast in cucumber cool. ‘They must be in love.’
‘No! It’s farcical,’ Ellen raged. ‘They don’t love each other – they barely know each other. Hell’s Bells and Ely are blackmailing their own children.’
‘They could both walk away if they wanted to.’ Pheely touched her belly as it let out a great roar of complaint.
‘No, they can’t. Their hands are tied. Their hands in marriage are tied.’ She laughed hollowly. ‘They’re being held behind their backs while they’re marched up the aisle.’
‘Spurs will leave long before it happens. He ran away last time.’
‘Not this time. He’s got this crazy guilt thing going on, atoning for the past. And this time his mother is d—’ Ellen remembered that she had been sworn to secrecy and stopped herself. She stared at the capsized-hull ceiling. ‘His mother is putting him under a mind-blowing amount of pressure,’ she burbled feebly. ‘I think he’s close to cracking up.’
‘He’s hardly got a reputation for stability. What exactly do you expect me to be able to do about it? Suggest a good therapist?�
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Ellen felt the tears bubbling. ‘I just need you to forgive me for being a lousy friend,’ she whispered hoarsely. ‘I can’t leave this bloody place having screwed up both love and friendship.’
Pheely cleared her throat archly. ‘I was being a very good friend when I told you not to go near him, and now look what’s happened.’
‘I know. I let you down, I let Dilly down—’
‘You’ve let yourself down,’ came the sanctimonious interruption.
‘No!’ Ellen protested hotly, no longer caring if the tears spilled – she couldn’t hope to control them these days. ‘I don’t regret the fact that I love him. Loving him has made me feel alive again. I’ve found a part of me that I thought I’d lost and it’s the best thing that has ever happened to me. It might have cost me my pride, my heart, my savings and my bloody self-control but, Christ, I love him. And don’t you dare tell me that what we feel for each other isn’t love. I don’t care if it’s days, hours or only minutes. Thirteen years with Richard never left me wanting to die for him.’
‘You want to die for Spurs?’
‘I was dying of suffocation with Richard. Now I’m just dying of love.’
Pheely’s own eyes filled with tears, but she set her chin determinedly and looked away. ‘I don’t think I can help you, Ellen.’
Ellen nodded silently.
‘I don’t know what you’re going through, you see,’ Pheely admitted suddenly, in a small voice. ‘I thought I had a working knowledge of love until I saw you and Spurs. How can I help you? I don’t know the first thing about love. Just motherhood.’ She let out a stifled sob and immediately batted out a don’t-go-there hand as she battled to regroup her emotions.
Ellen chewed back the questions, knowing that to ask any of them would excite the full Pheely armoury of defensive fire. Instead, she settled for the simplest and most truthful of facts. ‘You could be my friend again.’
‘Lord, no,’ Pheely muttered, in a choked voice, ‘you’d only mope about being miserable.’
Ellen snorted with unexpected laughter.
Pheely’s huge sad eyes watched her speculatively as they regarded one another with closely guarded affection. ‘Thank you.’ She mustered a pale smile.
