Farm Fatale

by Wendy Holden

"If by that you mean I'm a bad mother, you can sod off." Marina's tone was sharp. "Who's been bringing her up all this time while you've been swanning around with that slapper? Or else buried in your bloody bank."

  "Yes, well, I know I haven't been…I mean, I was hoping things could be sorted out a bit now. You know, I'd really like to see her. You too. We need to try to work as a family a bit more…"

  An amazed silence ensued from Marina's end. Then, to Guy's horror, she laughed.

  Guy was indignant. "What's so funny?"

  "Jez is just showing me the rest of the Violetta costume. There's a huge rainbow-colored Afro wig."

  It was odd, Guy thought, putting the mobile away, but since the heart attack, work had become less important than it had been. Having been reminded of his mortality in so dramatic a fashion, thoughts unprecedented in their paternalism had begun to occur to him. Now that Samantha, always opposed to children, was also opposed to all activities that usually led to children, Iseult looked to be the only person to carry the Grabster seed into future generations. Being on nonspeaking terms with her just to please his wife seemed to Guy to be an increasingly stupid idea. Not least because Samantha was making no efforts whatsoever to please him.

  Iseult had been trying to ring him and he hadn't known. He'd kill Samantha for this.

  When she rang again, Guy promised himself, he would try to persuade his daughter to stay at The Bottoms for a while. And bugger whatever Samantha thought about it. He smiled. If she rang again. His smile faded.

  Suddenly, Samantha appeared at the top of the drive. His courage evaporating, Guy shoved the phone back into his pocket. "Going out, are you?" she yelled after him in a voice implying he should be spending the afternoon ironing rose petals or whatever other absurd tasks Sholto had been going through with her with the clipboard this morning. "Remember that we're one belly dancer short. She needs to double up as a cocktail waitress as well. One of them's not coming. Mother's dying of cancer or some such crap."

  Guy nodded curtly and shuffled out through the gate. Just where was he supposed to find a cocktail waitress in Eight Mile Bottom? Most of its female natives looked as if the nearest they came to a Rusty Nail was the one in the outside loo on which they hung their torn-up strips of newspaper.

  His thoughts returning to his daughter, Guy's mood plunged as he heaved up the hill past the pub. He considered going in but decided against it, not being in the mood for Alan's banter. The fact that Sholto had taken to dropping in "for the atmosphere" posed an additional risk. Guy did not want his cover blown by Sholto. He didn't want anything blown by Sholto.

  By the time he stomped up the road to the church, his spirits had plummeted still further. He stopped and leaned against the churchyard wall, looking without interest up the small lane of scruffy cottages in front of him. Cinder Lane, he read on the sign attached to the crumbling wall. It looked like a godforsaken bloody place to him. Even if the church was practically on top of it.

  Exhausted, Guy closed his eyes for a few minutes and opened them again. And opened them wider. A smile spread itself slowly across his face. For walking down the lane directly toward him was one of his favorite sights. A pair of really nice big breasts, albeit with a rather large baby plugged into one of them. Those nipples, he thought, were just made to have big silver tassels attached to them. Against all the odds—and some of the women in this village looked pretty bloody odd—he'd found a belly dancer. A cocktail waitress as well. Someone, he knew instinctively as he caught the woman's bold gaze, who knew exactly what went into a Slow Comfortable Screw. Not to mention a Screaming Orgasm.

  ***

  "It's the party tomorrow and I haven't a clue what I'm going to wear." Although dreading the event itself, Rosie had seized on it as a subject with which to break any ice that had formed on Jack since Ptolemy's visit. She was also at pains to conceal from the farmer that she knew about his ex-wife. Jack would no doubt be furious that Duffy was peddling his troubled romantic history for chocolate chip cookies. Even if he was unlikely to be all that surprised.

  Except, Rosie thought, that she didn't know all about it, Mark's arrival having stopped the postman's revelations about what had happened. But it had clearly been seismic. Perhaps his wife had died, left him a young widower with a farm to run. She considered Jack's habitual crushed look, his hurt expression, his bouts of temper as if railing against his own unhappy experience. It would explain them all.

  "It says Arabian Nights…" She flashed a glance at Jack. His face was set and preoccupied.

  "Aren't you listening?" she asked him playfully. "I've got a crisis on my hands." Mark, certainly, had been determined to view it as such. "So what's bloody new?" he had demanded when she had admitted party-outfit failure, having rummaged through every item in the washing basket, which, increasingly these days, served as a wardrobe. Her panic-stricken scouring of Cobchester had similarly failed to address the situation. Yellow jackets with padded shoulders and rail after rail of beige tents hardly seemed to fit the bill, let alone herself.

  Jack shook himself and looked at her. "Sorry," he said. "I was thinking about a crisis of my own, to be honest."

  Rosie's stomach looped the loop. Was he thinking about his wife and what had happened? Did he want to talk to her about it?

  She felt panicky. How could she possibly introduce the subject? She didn't want Jack thinking her nosy as well as stupid and possessed of ghastly friends with ghastlier children. On the other hand, it seemed rude not to demonstrate a degree of concern.

  "Is one of the animals ill?" she hedged.

  "The animals are right enough." Jack flashed her a white, mirthless smile. "It's the whole farming business that's sick."

  Several minutes later, after Jack had lectured her about Environmentally Sensitive Areas and the chaos that listing fields and hills had brought to Spitewinter, Rosie felt sick as well.

  "Oh God, I'm sorry," she muttered, feeling an overwhelming rush of guilt at having thought for one minute that not having anything to wear for the party counted as a problem of any sort.

  With an effort, Jack retrieved his features from the doomed creases into which they had sunk. "It'll get better. I'm thinking of converting to organic with the cows. It'll add a bit of value and let me keep more of the milk profit. Such as it bloody is," he added savagely. "It'll cost me though. Conversion means a big investment and there'll be a dip in production by at least twenty percent. And even after that, I need to think of other ways to diversify if I'm to keep the place going." He paused. "But why the hell I just don't sell up, I don't know. Hand over the whole lot to some developer and let the whole of Spitewinter get covered in executive homes with brick drives and built-on conservatories covered in plastic bloody squirrels."

  Rosie gasped in horror. "Because Spitewinter's beautiful and your family has had it for centuries," she declared passionately. "Besides, you probably can't develop it. It's an Environmentally Sensitive Area." An oversensitive area, even, she thought, knowing this was what Bella would say and feeling immediately guilty.

  "Yes, of course. I'd forgotten." Jack spoke with heavy sarcasm. "Because farmers aren't allowed to think of easy ways out, are they?" His voice was rising; Rosie's heart sank. Here he went again. "We're the custodians of the landscape even if we work our fingers to the bone and get nothing but grief for it. You're right. My family has had Spitewinter for centuries. But there's no family now, apart from me. Or likely to be," he added bitterly.

  "You were married, weren't you?" Rosie said gently. She had to know. This seemed as good a time as any to find out.

  Jack leaned against the wall of the farmhouse and crossed his arms defensively. "For about a year, yes."

  "Tell me what happened."

  Jack paused before proceeding, as Mark would have put it, to give her the headlines. "Her name was Catherine, she was beautiful, she was from London, I met her in the Barley Mow when she was up for the weekend visiting a friend who lived nearby."

  "She was from London
?" This was unbelievable. If Jack had fallen in love with a London girl, why was he so set against city people?

  He nodded. "Yes. We were very happy. For a while. Until a year after we got married, when she…"

  "What?" Rosie's heart banged loudly against her rib cage. What had happened? Oh, Christ, she had died after all.

  "…screwed the sheepnut salesman in the cow shed," Jack said flatly. He raked a hand roughly through his hair. "I came back one lunchtime and caught her at it."

  "Oh my God," breathed Rosie. Her legs felt suddenly weak with sympathy and shock.

  Jack's eyes hardened. "She thought she'd like the countryside, but she found that actually she hated it. London type, you see. Hated not being able to ever lie in, hated having to get up and do the milking. Always staying in, always mucking out, she used to say. She said it was no fun. Too quiet…" His voice trailed off. "Well, she was having plenty of fun when I found them. Not being all that quiet about it either."

  Rosie's heart contracted with pity. Poor Jack, carrying the burden of Catherine's betrayal around like a snail with its shell on its back. No wonder he looked so crushed.

  "One good thing came out of it though," Jack added heavily. "Bloody animal-feed firm had always been unreliable, but Catherine insisted we buy from them. Once I knew why, I sacked the bastards." He gave Rosie a rueful smile.

  "No wonder you're wary of Londoners." It all made sense now.

  "Well, after that I was pretty wary of women in general," Jack said shortly. "Never thought I'd trust a city lass again, that's for sure." He gave her a piercing glance. "Until now, that is." There was a charged silence before he added, "But you might change your mind. And I can wait."

  Doubt tore savagely at Rosie. It would be so easy now to say she had had second thoughts. As his sad blue eyes under their sloping brows met hers, she opened her mouth to do so. Unlike Mark, he had been hurt. Unlike Mark, he needed her. She could heal him. Make him happy again…

  A sudden screech of tires interrupted them. "Cricket club's in uproar," shouted Duffy cheerily. "They've lost that cup they won last season—rumor has it the vice captain's sold it. Oh," he added as Jack came down the side of the cow shed with Rosie. "Been out for a walk, have you?" He grinned.

  "Walk?" Jack snorted. "Joking, aren't you? Farmers don't have time for walks. Or anything else, come to that. Been checking the sheep in the upper field."

  "Been showing you the ways of the wild, has he?" Duffy turned delightedly to Rosie, who blushed violently. But Jack seemed utterly unruffled. He took the post, turned on his heel, and disappeared into the farmhouse.

  "Looking forward to the party, are we?" Duffy yelled at her as he climbed back into his red van. The party. She'd forgotten about that, and that, as yet, she had precisely nothing to wear. Mark would go spare if she let him down. But perhaps she should let him go spare—on his own, in other words. It seemed the easiest way out.

  "That postman missed his vocation," observed Jack as Rosie ventured into the warm gloom of the Spitewinter kitchen. "Should have been a spy."

  "He talks too much," said Rosie. "And he's not quite got the James Bond looks, let's face it." As Jack handed her a mug of tea, Rosie tried to ignore the animal-feed company logo on its cracked side.

  "Think I might be able to solve your crisis, by the way," he remarked.

  Crisis? What crisis? After all Jack had suffered through his marriage and was continuing to suffer through his farm, Rosie had temporarily forgotten she had any problems at all. "My party clothes, you mean?" Was he about to offer her some of his blue overalls? Did he have a pair of gold lame ones he saved for best?

  "My aunt was a dressmaker in her young days. Got loads of old dresses."

  "Mrs. Womersley?" Rosie's mouth fell open. Sharon Stone may have turned up in a Gap polo neck to the Oscars once, but was Jack seriously suggesting that she should wear one of Mrs. Womersley's castoffs to the Party of the Century? Mark would go ballistic.

  "I'll ring her up later and ask her if you like," Jack offered. "She copied designer clothes for herself and local women who couldn't afford Dior and such-like. Did them all. Pucci, Balenciaga, Chanel, Yves St. Laurent. Still has a lot of them. Won't throw them away for some reason." He looked at Rosie, his mouth turning up again slightly. "Excuse me, but I thought vintage couture was very fashionable. Am I wrong?"

  Rosie nodded. The last Vogue she had done a food illustration for had been practically devoted to the subject.

  "Catherine used to get Vogue, you see."

  Another silence. Bella had been right about his romantic history, Rosie reflected—but she was wrong about him being bitter and twisted. Was he not trying to help her with her party costume, in the full knowledge that she would be going with Mark? Given the circumstances, such generosity seemed positively heroic. Was Jack, Rosie wondered, now trying to change her mind through actions rather than words? As he drained his mug of tea, silhouetted against the window, Rosie couldn't help remembering the feel of his hot, thick fingers, and she tried to divert her thoughts from what was beneath the blue overalls.

  Chapter Seventeen

  Bang, bang, bang. The noise was coming from the back this time. That was the last straw. He'd officially had enough.

  Mark leaped up from his laptop and ran down the stairs so hard his thighs hurt. "Just shut the fuck up, will you?" he yelled as he shot out of the kitchen door into the back garden. The first thing he saw was Mr. Womersley, staring indignantly at him from the other side of the wall.

  "Well!" said Mr. Womersley.

  The old bastard might be as deaf as a post, but he'd heard that all right. "Not you," snapped Mark.

  Bang bangety bang bangety bang bangety bang. As he knew it would be, the noise was coming from the Muzzles' garden.

  "Them!" he shrieked, pointing violently at the wall dividing Number 2's now orderly garden from the Muzzles' rubbishstrewn patch.

  Trampling all over Rosie's flowerbeds, her pansies and narcissi irrelevant in the face of his all-consuming fury, Mark stuck his head through the tattered remains of what had once been a small fence on top of the wall but which the combined and irresistible forces of children and weather had succeeded in destroying almost utterly. Nothing was visible in the next-door garden apart from a sea of rubbish, from the middle of which rose a rickety-looking stick and sheet construction vaguely reminiscent of a teepee. It was from here that the banging noise was coming.

  "Oy!" Mark screamed.

  The banging stopped as if a plug had been pulled out. "What's up, man?" came Arthur's uncertain, reedy voice.

  "What the fuck's going on?"

  The twigs swayed and the sheets surrounding the construction bulged and parted. It seemed to take a full minute for Arthur's lanky body to unfold.

  "Hello, man," he said, blinking in the sunlight. With the parting of the curtains, a powerful blast of marijuana smoke turned on the breeze and hit Mark full in the face. He coughed savagely and his eyes began to stream.

  Once the smoke had cleared, Mark noticed that Arthur's white and skinny arm held a large and battered-looking pair of bongos, their metal surrounds glinting in the dull sun. He looked at them with loathing.

  "Any particular reason why you can't play those inside the house?" he demanded, biting each word viciously as it came out. As a loud crash from Arthur's kitchen was followed by the bull-like bellow of Guinevere and the screams of his children, Arthur's slitlike eyes briefly met his.

  "Well, that, man," he muttered. "Does my head in sometimes."

  A red mist flickered behind Mark's retinas. He was conscious of his heart having picked up speed. The feeling that if he didn't leave the scene at once he might vault over the fence and do Arthur's head in once and for all threatened to overwhelm him.

  Turning on his heel—and Rosie's narcissi—he stomped back over the lawn. As he wrenched open the back door, he noticed Mr. Womersley still standing there watching him. "And you can sod off as well," he snarled.

  Mr. Womersley cupped
his hand to his ear. "Pardon?"

  When Mark returned to his laptop, the envelope icon was flashing in the corner. He'd got mail. The editor would have read this morning's attempt at "Green-er Pastures" by now. It was, Mark thought, calming down slightly, rather a good one.

  After much thought, he had deftly sidestepped the problem of not having his own animals by going to the local children's zoo to write about theirs.

  He had begun, Have you ever noticed the way animals at the zoo stop doing anything interesting the moment you reach their cage? The elephants turn their bottoms to you, the gorilla leaves his climbing frame and goes into a trance…Mark opened the editor's email. Have you ever noticed the way columnists stop writing anything interesting when you send them to the country? You're fired.

  Mark stared at the screen in disbelief. Fired? He was sacked? This was impossible. The editor couldn't just get rid of him. The column represented his sole income. Especially given the fact that, for some odd reason, the paper had been utterly unable to syndicate it. There must be some mistake. Perhaps the editor had meant to send the email to someone else?