Making Hay

by Veronica Henry

  Rick pointed out the Chinese takeaway he lived over – disconcertingly named the Golden Swallow – and the beauty salon his sister Kelly ran.

  ‘She’s moving into the flat with me this weekend.’ He grinned a trifle ruefully. ‘Farewell, bachelor life. Hello, Marigolds and empty ashtrays. But I don’t mind. She’ll look after me.’

  Damien felt a momentary flash of envy. He had no one to look after him. Well, only people he paid.

  The Mercedes ground to a halt at the far end of the town. Half the road had been dug up and there was a queue of traffic waiting in front of a man with a lollipop that read STOP. The traffic from the other end had just filtered through, the lollipop was twizelled to read GO, and Rick was about to put his foot down when another car decided to whizz through from the other side.

  ‘Wanker!’ swore Rick.

  Damien looked up to see a dark-haired young man in an open-top Austin Healey car roar past and up the high street.

  ‘Nice car,’ he remarked.

  ‘The bloke’s a tit,’ reiterated Rick.

  ‘Who is he?’ Damien was always curious about people. And their relationships with other people. He was intrigued to see that Rick’s face was thunderous. Definitely no love lost here.

  ‘Patrick Liddiard. His family own Honeycote Ales. He’s an arsehole.’

  ‘Why?’

  Rick explained. His own parents had been tenants at the Honeycote Arms for over twenty years. The brewery had as good as run the place into the ground over the past twelve months. And now that Ted and Eileen had taken early retirement, were in fact leaving that very weekend, Honeycote Ales had announced they were doing the pub up and completely relaunching it. They hadn’t allowed his mum so much as a new deep fat fryer, and now they were spending thousands.

  ‘Patrick’s overseeing the revamp. God knows why they’re letting him get his hands on it. He’ll completely fuck it up.’ Rick changed gear viciously, bitter resentment clouding his features.

  There was obviously more to the story, but Damien left it at that for the moment, satisfied he’d found Rick’s Achilles heel. He was glad about that. He prided himself on being able to divine people’s weaknesses. It was the only way you could really control them and use them for your own ends. He’d noticed the brewery, of course – it was at the other end of the village from Honeycote Grove, and you could smell the brew if the wind was blowing in the right direction. Damien wasn’t a real ale man, but he thought Honeycote Ales was worth investigating. He knew small breweries struggled to keep afloat these days. And that large ones were predatory, always on the lookout for another niche, another novelty. He wasn’t entirely sure how this suited his own ends, but Damien was nothing if not an opportunist. If there was a deal to be had, he could find it.

  But before he started thinking about the future, he had to get today out of the way. He was meeting Marco Dinari to finalize a price, before signing the papers the following week. Damien wouldn’t be able to relax until the money was actually in the bank. So as they sped towards Bristol, he put the brewery to the back of his mind, in a file marked ‘pending’.

  3

  Ginny Tait debated the wisdom of trying to reverse the Shogun into the driveway and decided against it. The parking space was only marginally bigger than the car, the gateposts were decidedly close together, and she couldn’t see out of the back over the pile of boxes and paraphernalia. Instead she pulled up on the road outside Tinker’s Barn and went round the back to open the boot.

  Her twin daughters slid out of the back. Kitty, who loved dressing up for any occasion, was wearing a pair of workman’s overalls and a Hermes scarf tied pirate style round her head. Sasha, still in denial about the move, sported white jeans and a pristine pair of Dunlop Green Flash. Ginny herself had on baggy tracksuit bottoms, a bleach-stained sweatshirt and her hair tied back in a scrunchie, face already red and shiny from the anticipated exertion. She caught her reflection in one of the windows of the barn and shuddered with revulsion. It was no wonder her husband had left her. She summoned up her brightest, most enthusiastic voice.

  ‘Shall we get started? Or shall we make a cup of tea first?’

  ‘You two start. I’ll make tea.’ Sasha wandered up the path without taking her nose out of Now magazine, totally uninterested in her new home. Kitty smiled sympathetically at her mother.

  ‘It looks… sweet.’

  For sweet read tiny, thought Ginny. She didn’t know how the three of them were going to manage. She’d only found the house three days before, and taken it on in desperation. Four hundred and fifty pounds per calendar month. Which left five hundred and fifty for them to live on, going by the budget she’d worked out for herself. Interesting times, she thought. Interesting times.

  Most of her friends had been appalled when they learned she’d agreed to sell the family home and move out before she’d even contacted a solicitor. But she thought there was no point in being difficult. David had made up his mind. And she wanted a fresh start. Though looking at it now, Tinker’s Barn didn’t look quite as appealing as it had done when she’d looked round three days before. Now she noticed the weeds peeping through the cracks in the path, the dirty windows, the broken rotary dryer making a half-hearted attempt to rotate. Never mind, she told herself. It was all cosmetic. A bit of elbow grease and the place would be fit to move in to tomorrow. And Ginny was good at elbow grease.

  Sasha walked back out of the house looking thunderous.

  ‘I suppose,’ she demanded, ‘two bedrooms mean that we’re going to have to bloody share?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Ginny defiantly. ‘You bloody are.’

  ‘Well, I hope you’re going to let us have the big room.’

  Ginny sighed. Of course she’d have to. You couldn’t get two beds in the other room. Nine foot by eight. Smaller than her walk-in wardrobe in the other house. She shut out the memory.

  She should have suspected an impending mid-life crisis when David had bought an MGF, which he insisted on driving with the roof down in all but the most appalling weather conditions. The Oakley sunglasses had been the next give-away, especially when he started wearing them on top of his head. Extra long sideburns had been the third sign. Ginny had itched to shave them off. They made him looked completely ridiculous.

  He was a dentist, and he’d run off with his hygienist. What an unbelievable cliché. What was so tempting about someone who scraped plaque off people’s teeth for a living? Though she supposed you only had to look at Faith Bywater to get the answer. With her long shiny (dyed) auburn bob and bulbous green eyes – Ginny thought she looked like a fish – she was all crisp white coats with a hint of stocking underneath. Efficiency combined with repressed sexuality. She could imagine her thrusting her cleavage towards her more attractive male clients, and chastising them for not flossing. She was any middle-aged man’s fantasy, including, it seemed, David’s. Ginny had been beyond reasonable when it had all come out. No plate-throwing hysterics or bitter recriminations. She’d swallowed hard and asked him, just once, if they could make a go of it. Surely he owed it to her and the twins to try and overcome this overwhelming passion? He hadn’t quite looked her in the eye when he’d replied.

  ‘I can’t. She’s pregnant.’

  Fish-face was obviously cleverer than she’d given her credit for. They had a plan, evidently. A plan that didn’t bode well for Ginny. They had already put an offer in on a big wedding-cake house in Cheltenham. The bottom half was going to be converted to a surgery. David was going to move his practice there. And of course, once Faith had the baby, she would recommence her plaque-scraping. The upper half of the house would contain their living accommodation – they were going to convert the attic into a suite for the live-in nanny.

  Meanwhile, the Tait family home would have to be sold, so he could realize some capital. Fish-face had done very well on her own property, apparently, and had put down a substantial deposit on the house itself, but David needed money to kit the place out, get new equipment for th
e surgery – he was going massively upmarket, concentrating more on cosmetic dentistry, so the place needed to be decorated accordingly.

  David wanted to be fair, he insisted, but the truth was there wasn’t going to be much cash left, what with setting up a new business and the baby arriving… He was, he insisted, going to find it as hard as Ginny. He wished as much as she did that it had never happened, but you couldn’t argue with fate. The sooner he got the new business up and running, the sooner he’d be able to reap the profits and pass them on to Ginny and the girls by way of a settlement. So they’d sold the house and split it fifty-fifty for the time being, which didn’t actually leave a lot once the mortgage had been paid off. Ginny was left with a hundred and ten thousand in the bank. Not enough to buy anything decent, unless they moved to the Outer Hebrides. Or France. Now that was tempting…

  She tried very hard to be positive. Think about this as a new start. She was wiping the slate clean and being given the chance to be whoever she wanted to be. She was only just forty-three, after all. But then she laughed – she had nothing but a very out-of-date clutch of nursing qualifications which, even though the country was crying out for nurses, wouldn’t get her a decent job. Plus she had the twins to worry about. David had offered them a room in the wedding-cake house, if they liked, and as much emotional support as he could give them, but, as he pointed out, they were eighteen now. Ginny had been very touched that they had rejected his offer, and wanted to stay with her. But sometimes she suspected that was because she was such a soft touch, picking up after them and making their clothes smell of delicious fabric softener, cooking them meals uncomplainingly at whatever time their appetites or their social lives dictated and providing a twenty-four-hour taxi service. She didn’t think Fish-face would be happy to wait on them, and David would be far too busy bleaching teeth to be much help.

  All in all, rented accommodation seemed the only answer, until she knew for definite what capital sum she was going to be left with, and had worked out what she might do for a living, because whatever she got it wasn’t going to sustain her for the rest of her life, that was for sure.

  She’d found the barn at Honeycote by a stroke of luck. One of her friends worked for a company that rented out upmarket holiday cottages. Tinker’s Barn had been rejected by them recently as the facilities didn’t match their exacting requirements, although she’d insisted to Ginny that it was perfectly habitable. Ginny had whizzed over to have a look and decided that, although it was tiny, it gave her a strong feeling of reassurance.

  It was part of a small courtyard development just off the high street in Honeycote, which was only six miles away from their old house in Evesham. There was a small kitchen separated from the living area by a breakfast bar, and the entire downstairs wasn’t more than twenty foot by fifteen. But it was light and airy because of the floor to ceiling windows, with a dinky wood-burning stove and a sea-grass carpet and two ‘shabby chic’ sofas – admittedly more shabby than chic. Upstairs, tucked into the roof space, were a bathroom and the two bedrooms with wooden floors and Velux skylights. If you sat up in bed too quickly in either of them you’d crack your head open on the ceiling. But they were warm and cosy. Yes, they were definitely cosy all right.

  Ginny surveyed the contents of her boot thoughtfully, and decided it was going to take at least three more trips back to Evesham before all their stuff was safely transferred over. It was already getting gloomy and it was going to take them all evening to clean the old house. She knew she needn’t be quite so meticulous about the cleaning – she didn’t suppose the next incumbents would actually thank her for rigorously bleaching every single kitchen shelf – but she couldn’t bear the thought of leaving even a trace of dirt for them to wrinkle their noses at. The irony of it was she knew the last tenants of Tinker’s Barn had had no such conscience.

  She put on her best ward sister voice, the no-nonsense one that had always struck fear into even the most irascible of her patients, and began to supervise the unloading of the car. The twins knew better than to argue with her in this mood. Their mum might be a pushover in some circumstances but they knew when she meant business.

  Damien lay back in his whirlpool bath, enjoying the force of the water jets as they massaged his weary muscles. It was unusual for him to be tired from physical labour: it was usually mental gymnastics that wore him out. But he’d spent all day arranging and rearranging the furniture in his house, until it was just to his liking. At his side was a chilled bottle of Smirnoff Ice. Moby was playing through the hidden speakers that the developers had so thoughtfully installed in every room.

  For most people, this would be bliss. But instead of being relaxed, Damien was on edge. He felt like a little boy who’d been expecting a bicycle for his birthday and been given a geometry set instead. For his reception from the inhabitants of Honeycote over the last couple of days had been lukewarm, to say the least. He’d been treated with, if not outright hostility, then at best suspicion. He didn’t expect a red carpet, or for people to prostrate themselves in front of him. But he would have thought they could have managed to be polite.

  The woman in the post office, for example: Coral, with her apricot poodle perm and her badly applied lipstick, which hardly made her fit to judge. He’d gone to put an ad up for a cleaning lady, and she’d practically split her sides laughing. She pointed out, rather patronizingly, that no one in Honeycote got out of bed for the sort of money he was offering. The reason for that being that outsiders (accompanied by a meaningful glare) had pushed the house prices up so high that locals of the type who would be prepared to skivvy for him could no longer afford to live in the village. Damien had been rather hurt. He thought eight quid an hour was more than generous, and he could hardly be blamed for the rocketing property market. He hadn’t set the price; just paid it. She’d also remarked on the apparent need for security at Honeycote Grove. Until the arrival of outsiders (again that look), she claimed it had never been necessary to lock one’s back door, or one’s car, or indeed anything. The implication being that the likes of Damien were to blame for the upsurge in crime.

  The local dairy, too, had been difficult. How were they supposed to deliver his milk when they were ostensibly locked out? They refused to leave his bottles outside the gates, because if they were pinched they would have no proof they’d been delivered. Damien had run out of patience and told them to forget it.

  He couldn’t compare notes with his neighbours, because he didn’t have any yet. His house had been the first to be finished: carpenters and plumbers and decorators were still filing in and out of Honeycote Grove finishing off the other four dwellings. At least when the other residents moved in he might have some allies, and wouldn’t feel single-handedly responsible for upsetting the locals. So for the time being he was living in splendid isolation and getting all the flak for what was obviously a local bone of contention; a planning scandal; a blot on the landscape of the picture-postcard perfection that was Honeycote. He consoled himself that it was jealousy, because they would know he could afford to pay eight hundred grand for his house, and because some property developer had obviously done very well out of the whole deal when they probably couldn’t get permission to erect a garden shed, hoist by their own petards.

  Perhaps the locals would be nicer to him when they saw Anastasia. Children were a great ice-breaker; they melted the stoniest of hearts. He was collecting her from his mum’s tomorrow. Maybe once she arrived, he’d be on the road to acceptance. No one had made him feel welcome at all. In fact, the only person to extend an invitation had been Rick. Damien hadn’t been sure whether to accept when he’d asked him along to his parents’ farewell party at the Honeycote Arms. He didn’t want to get too close to his employee; it didn’t do to blur the edges. But he was curious. And lonely. He didn’t want to sit alone in his castle on a Saturday night. So he’d said yes. He could always leave if he didn’t like it.

  Rick stubbed out his fifth Camel of the evening and thought regretfully of
his mates gathering at their favourite haunt on their motorbikes for a Saturday night out. It was too late to join them now. He had hoped the speeches would be over early and he’d be able to slip away, but things were dragging on a bit. It didn’t matter. His parents obviously appreciated him and his sister Kelly being there for their leaving party, and he supposed it was for them, too, in a way. After all, the Bradley family had been part of the fixtures and fittings here at the Honeycote Arms for twenty years. It was certainly the only home he could remember. OK, so he’d moved out two years earlier, to his flat over the Chinese takeaway in Eldenbury, because he wanted the freedom to shag a different girl every night if he wanted to without getting a reproachful look from his mum. But nevertheless, it was going to be strange not having her nearby, to rustle him up a proper meal when he tired of chicken fried rice, and to do his washing. He visited the pub at least twice a week – and not just when he wanted something. They were close. He loved his parents.

  He took a look around the lounge bar, wondering if he would miss the pub too. It was so familiar. It had hardly changed in all the time they’d been there: the green and gold patterned carpet, the horse brasses, the rickety tables covered in ring marks and fag burns; the dartboard; the dark red velvet curtains that had been faded by the sun; the smell of disinfectant that never quite disguised the underlying hint of stale wee that wafted in every time the toilet door was opened; his mum’s writing on the menu board, with its spelling mistakes – ‘lasagna, chili con carn, chicken curry all served with jack pots or rice’. He knew the builders were coming in to gut the place on Monday, because one of his mates was in the gang. Rick and him had already done a deal with a local salvage yard: all the baths in the en suites upstairs had claw feet behind the formica that was boxing them in. They should get a couple of hundred quid out of it between them. Every cloud, it seemed, had a silver lining.