Farm Fatale

by Wendy Holden

  "Who are you?" demanded a high, cheeky voice. Iseult turned to see Satchel standing behind her, gawking with unfettered curiosity.

  "An undercover cop," said Iseult, not batting a midnightblue eyelid.

  "Can't be," said Satchel triumphantly. "Police only came round to our house last night."

  Iseult looked at Rosie with a raised eyebrow. "There goes the neighborhood," she drawled.

  Rosie finally conquered the lock and let her in. "They used to drive Mark mad, but I don't mind them. They're rather sweet, in a noisy, irritating sort of way."

  Iseult raked the cottage with her sharp stare. She was clearly wondering how anyone in their right mind could live here. Rosie was, in fact, beginning to wonder the same. She braced herself for reports of her ex-boyfriend's bliss among the manifold comforts of The Bottoms.

  "How's Mark?" she asked, assuming this was the reason for Iseult's visit. Best to get it over with.

  "Being driven slowly insane." Iseult grinned. "He and my stepmother spend all day in what Samantha calls the gaze-bow working on some cheesy film script. At least Mark works on it. As far as I can make out, Samantha loafs around with her feet up banging on about her glorious Hollywood past."

  "Oh, of course. Her glorious Hollywood past." Rosie dimly remembered the Punkawallah conversation during the Insider shoot.

  "But as far as I can make out, Hollywood totally passed on her. Her entire career is TV bit parts, a high spot doing a margarine ad, and a movie that went straight to airline."

  "What's 'straight to airline'?"

  "It's when the movie sucks too much even to go straight to video," said Iseult gleefully. "Punkawallah, it was called."

  Rosie felt a smile pull hard at the corners of her mouth. "How's it all going for you, anyway?" she asked. "Your various plots and things?"

  "OK. The dad one's going like a train. Almost literally—he's desperate to get back to London now. So desperate that I'm having to put the brakes on it a bit."

  "But I thought you hated the countryside."

  "I do." A guarded look rippled across Iseult's resolute features. "But it might do me some good to stay on the scene a bit longer. Now that he's here…"

  "Who?" The possibility that she meant Mark suddenly burst on Rosie. She looked at Iseult in horror. Surely…

  Iseult fumbled in her bead bag and produced a small plastic box. "Like, could you give my demo tape to Matt Locke?"

  ***

  As Rosie left her cottage at the appointed hour the following morning, Satchel, Blathnat, Arthur, Guinevere, and Dungarees were noisily trying to bump-start the still noisier VW camper van down the lane. Dirtier and rustier than ever, a dingy curtain hanging askew in its grubby back window and its interior crammed with broken furniture, the van, which exploded periodically in a cloud of filthy smoke, looked fit only for the least choosy of scrapyards. As it jerked hysterically past the church, something large, smooth, and shining purred alongside it. It was the Mercedes, with Murgatroyd at the wheel. Climbing into the gleaming vehicle, Rosie felt horribly selfconscious, all the more so when, as the big silver car pulled sleekly away, she caught a glimpse of Mrs. Womersley at the window. Lips pursed in disapproval, no doubt.

  Matt was in the long gallery, pacing up and down and talking agitatedly into his mobile. "Look, Geordie, can't you tell them to get stuffed? I'll deliver when I'm ready, and I'm not ready yet…No, I told you, I'm not ruling out collaboration, but I'm not doing it with bloody Posh Spice." Spotting Rosie, he raised an eyebrow, cut the conversation short, and shoved the phone in his pocket. His hand, Rosie noticed, was trembling.

  The smile of welcome Matt gave her did not disguise how tired he looked. Or how miserable.

  "What's wrong?" Rosie asked, taking out her pencils. The knowledge that the drawing sessions were entirely therapeutic was far from flattering but oddly relaxing. It clearly didn't matter how it turned out and she was being paid anyway. And, as power play went, a nursepatient situation was a lot easier than a rich-rock-star-and-poor-artist situation.

  "Everything." Matt groaned. "Geordie's just called with the welcome news that my record company's threatening to drop me altogether if I don't finish the album soon. As if I give a fuck." From the despairing way he buried his head and sprawling, nervous fingers, however, it was obvious to Rosie that he did give a fuck. If not several.

  "Why's it so difficult?" She realized immediately what a stupid question it was. What did she know about hit albums? Hit singles, even? The only singles she knew about were flops. Like herself.

  "Same old sound, same old ideas." Matt rubbed his eyes again and looked blearily at her. "I need a shot in the arm, but fuck knows what. Apart from that, of course"—he rubbed his forearm meaningfully—"but I'm off that shit now." He looked broodingly out of the window, his lips pushed out in resentful, sultry fullness.

  Watching him, Rosie thought she had never seen anyone so despairing look so good. Almost tenderly, she sketched in the long, stray tendrils of hair that flopped over his face and wondered whether she should show him her drawings. They were, after all, going surprisingly well. They might even cheer him up.

  "I know it doesn't matter, but…" Rosie reached into her portfolio and fished out the work she had done so far, holding them up for Matt to see. "OK, they're only therapy, but—"

  "But they're great," Matt cut in, staring at them with what looked to Rosie suspiciously like amazement. "Really, they are. You're good. Very good."

  Rosie felt irrationally thrilled. Even at the beginning of their relationship, Mark had never been as unreserved in his praise as this. Looking into Matt's eyes, green as the parkland outside and glowing in admiration, all her nerve endings tingled.

  The door clicked at the end of the gallery.

  "Hey, Murgatroyd," Matt called as the butler glided silently up with a tray of coffee and biscuits. "Come and cast your expert eye over these."

  Murgatroyd carefully put the tray down. The biscuits, Rosie noted with interest, were shortbread—her favorite. Homemade too. Double favorite. "Very lifelike, sir. If I may say so, I think they do you justice."

  Matt whistled. "That's high praise from Murgatroyd," he said, grinning at Rosie. "He's very difficult to please. I've just had some photos done for the new album and he thinks they're all crap. Censored pretty much all of them, haven't you, Murgatroyd?"

  "With respect, sir, I felt some of them were less than flattering."

  "Murgatroyd has a very good eye," Matt enthused. "And a good ear too. He's an old rock 'n' roller himself at heart. Used to play in a band called Fast Joe and the Accelerators. Supported the Beatles a few times, he tells me. Although even he can't quite come up with what's needed for this sodding album. Not just a case of banging it all back through the reverb, is it, Murgatroyd? We were up all night trying to crack it."

  Rosie looked at the impassive butler in astonishment.

  "We were indeed, sir," he murmured.

  "Makes top shortbread too," Matt added, his thick white teeth sinking into one of the biscuits. "Buttery and crumbly, just like it should be. What's your secret ingredient, Murgatroyd?"

  "Rice flour, sir." Murgatroyd, Rosie saw, was red with pleasure.

  "Oh yes. I'd be up shit creek without Murgatroyd," Matt assured her. "My right-hand bloke he is. Brian Epstein and Jeeves all rolled into one. Even gets rid of the fans at the gate by telling them I've moved to Ireland for tax reasons and no one has any idea when I'm coming back. Oh, and not to take the soil because it's radioactive after Chernobyl. It works too. Used to be coachloads of girls when I first moved here, but now you only get the odd Spaniard or German. Very odd they are, some of them." He grinned. "Stuffing their knickers in the postbox and everything. Bras, garter belts, the lot. Mind you, it serves that nosy bastard of a postman right."

  Rosie smiled. "Yes. Duffy certainly could be said to take an intense interest in the correspondence he delivers."

  "And then some." Matt's spirits seemed to have risen like bubbles in champagn
e. Could it possibly have been the drawings?

  "Let's go out to lunch," he suddenly urged. "You'll have lunch with me, won't you?"

  Doubt and excitement coursed through Rosie before she realized the suggestion was hardly likely to be personal. No doubt Oakie had decreed that the next stage in his rehabilitation was the issuing of a social invitation.

  "But where?" Matt asked himself fretfully. "Rome's been done to death, Paris is too girly, New York is boring, boring, boring. I know," he shouted, clapping his hands. "Let's go to Istanbul."

  "Er…" stammered Rosie, her thoughts flying to her plants. Mrs. Womersley had not directed her helpful all-watering hose over the garden wall recently.

  "Or if I may make an alternative suggestion that may fit better with your schedule, sir," murmured Murgatroyd in silken tones. "I've got a very nice fish pie in the oven. It will be ready in half an hour."

  ***

  Lunch was served in a tiny octagonal room in the tower. Dancing excitedly ahead of her up the stone spiral stairs, Matt explained to Rosie his plans to open Ladymead to the public eventually. "But this tower is all mine. Out of bounds to visitors. But not," he added, flashing her a smile that made her swallow hard, "for friends."

  Seated at the circular oak table, the perfect size for an intimate lunch à deux, Rosie dug her fork into a fish pie that made even Ann's at the Barley Mow seem oddly lacking something. Matt launched immediately into a stream of music-business anecdotes that left her wide-eyed, open-mouthed, bent double with laughter, or frequently, all three.

  "You've never heard that before? But it was all over the papers," he exclaimed in amazement when Rosie professed complete ignorance of the drummer, the tadpoles, and the bath full of cleaning gel.

  "Sorry, I don't read the papers," Rosie mumbled.

  "Why be sorry about that?"

  Rosie sighed. "It used to drive my boyfriend—ex-boyfriend— mad. He hated it that I couldn't have picked Dr. Phil out of a lineup. Or that I didn't know Pee-Wee Herman's real name."

  "Or that you didn't know who I was. Although I suppose the problem there was that he thought you did."

  "Hmm," said Rosie, reluctant to be drawn into discussing the matter.

  For a moment Matt looked as if he were about to discuss it anyway. Then, to her relief, he bounced up and, lunch being over, offered to show her over the rest of Ladymead.

  "Smart, isn't it?" he said proudly as they admired the goings-on of Mount Olympus painted on the ceiling above the staircase. "Took three years to finish. Apparently the artist put some of the Ladymead servants in as well. That toothless old crone in the corner is supposed to be the housekeeper and that fat bloke next to Zeus is the head gardener. He was massive on trompe l'oeil as well…Oh, yes, I can pronounce it." He laughed at Rosie's stare of surprise.

  Rosie blushed. Once again he had read her mind. But she was surprised that Matt seemed to know so much about his pictures. Enough to be irreverent about them.

  "Not bad," he said when Rosie paused on the wide stone stairs to admire a classical landscape. "The main reason I bought it was because I thought the crapping dog at the front was funny."

  Rosie peered. Sure enough, before the depiction of an ivied, crumbling Forum during a golden sunset was a patch of white, which, on close inspection, proved to be a very obviously defecating Jack Russell.

  "Cross-looking Dutch people," he said, grinning when Rosie exclaimed at the workmanship on some seventeenth-century portraits from the Netherlands. "But you're right, they are exceptional," he added with quiet pride. Rosie looked at the pinched and disapproving faces above the starched white ruffs and was strongly reminded of Mrs. Womersley. Whom she had seen neither hide nor hair of— apart from twitches of Number l's curtains—since returning the suit. It was tempting to conclude her neighbor was trying to avoid her.

  This uncomfortable thought was soon dispelled by the joy of exploring Ladymead. Rushing around like an excited child, Matt pointed out everything from the hand-painted Japanese wallpaper in the salon to Queen Victoria's bed.

  "Only she never slept in it," he told Rosie. "They did the whole place up for her visit, but then one of the kitchen maids got typhoid and she never came. Bummer or what?"

  Rosie, her nostrils filled with smells of wood, furniture polish, dust, and age, hurried in Matt's wake as he disappeared down endless twisting corridors, his hands never still from drawing her attention to yet another Ladymead delight. He tapped at windows to point out the beveling, showed her the cast-iron detail of the door locks, gestured at a series of perfect vistas. They passed a wonderful trompe l'oeil hat, ribboned, flowered, and "hanging" in perfect eye-deceiving detail from the back of a door. "And see that enfilade of doors there? Each one framing the one after it. Top stuff, isn't it?"

  He drew her attention to the wide and sweeping park, pointing out the landscaping, the crescent lake, the clump of three oak trees planted by two Bonsanquet sisters in memory of themselves and a third, who had died. "And see that little stone doorway over by the temple of Diana? That's the icehouse, which I've converted. It's my studio now. Bit on the nippy side, but the acoustics are phenomenal. And this is the pub." Matt grinned, taking her into a small sitting room whose every wall bristled with carved paneling in dark wood. Each panel, she saw, held the exquisitely rendered head of a sternlooking bearded gentleman. She looked round. There seemed no evidence of drink whatsoever.

  "Why's it a pub?"

  "One of the former owners bought this lot wholesale from a German monastery," Luke explained. "It's eighteenth century. But it always reminds me of the 'Elizabethan bar' in some pompous, provincial hotel. Believe me, I should know," he added ruefully. "I saw enough of them." Then he darted off again.

  "And here's the chapel," he announced, opening a pair of double doors that stretched to the height of the ceiling at the end of a long corridor. Rosie had no idea where in the building they now were. Ladymead inside was every bit the warren the outside promised it would be.

  "How incredible," she said, "to have your own chapel. A bit like owning God."

  "I think that was more or less the idea."

  The chapel was seventeenth century and very ornate. Although now almost sated with the variety and beauty of Ladymead, Rosie nonetheless found she had room for one last expanse of carved and gilded wood, another eye-tanglingly geometric marble checkered floor, and a final explosion of garish painting behind a heavily decorated altar. All, not that she'd ever say it, just a trifle…vulgar?

  "Bit Donald Trump, isn't it?" Matt grinned, reading her thoughts again.

  Finally, he took her back to the tower.

  "My sitting room," he declared, opening a linenfold paneled door to reveal an imposing but intimate room with a Tudor fireplace and vast, comfortable-looking sofas. "Not that I do all that much sitting in it. Except to watch the telly or a movie," Matt said, revealing with a flick of a small, silver remote control how a huge, flat state-of-the-art TV was concealed behind a sliding panel in the wall. "And this," he added, disappearing up a further flight of narrow spiral stairs, "is my bedroom."

  Rosie hesitated before following him up. Matt beckoned her with the disinterested enthusiasm of a stately home room steward, pointing out the plaster animals, birds, and flowers molded on the low ceiling and the rose tree and lamb panel over the fireplace, picked out in reds and golds. "Restored to their original colors," Matt said proudly. From the deep-silled latticed windows, their panes dimpled and curved with age, Rosie looked across the green and rolling valley to see, in the distance, the top of the spire of Eight Mile Bottom church.

  "And this is my bed." As Rosie glanced hurriedly away from the huge four-poster, something between her navel and her pubic bone plunged downward while excitement mounted in her throat.

  He was, she saw, looking at her, watchfully from narrowed eyes, his lips curved in a heavy, sultry smile.

  "Look inside the canopy. It's carved there as well."

  Striding over, he positioned her in front of h
im and pointed up inside the bed. His fingers, though holding her with an almost infinite lightness, scorched into her shoulders. It was with a mixture of excitement and fear that she saw the carvings were extremely explicit. Figures with enormous breasts and colossal penises; frequently both.

  Quite suddenly he spun her round and kissed her. It happened almost before her brain registered it. Her body, on the other hand, had no such problems. Her lips burned and a feeling of urgent need began to build within her.

  "Oh," she gasped.

  She watched, heavy with longing, as the lips approached again. Contact was explosive; they pulled eagerly at her throat, her lips, her cheeks, her hair. Finally, his tongue still eagerly exploring her mouth, he pushed her closer to the four-poster and in one fluid, practiced movement laid her down. She blinked up at him, modestly averting her gaze from the priapic penises above his head. Although why, as he expertly slipped off her top and began licking her nipples, she had no idea. There was nothing modest about what he was doing.