Up To No Good

by Victoria Corby

  Instead we went via a narrow road, so rarely used that it had grass growing up the middle, with a magnificent avenue of welcomingly shady chestnut trees along it. I’d been hoping we’d make a grand entrance via the front of the château, which was a long, low building of ivy- covered honey-coloured stone with dark red shutters at the windows and turrets with pointed roofs like witches’ hats at either end. Instead, Maggie was waiting, almost visibly tapping her foot, by the entrance to a cobbled courtyard. ‘The winery,’ she said importantly, waving a hand at a row of buildings jutting out of the back of the château. Two men who were closing a huge pair of double doors with elegantly curved tops on some impressively technical machinery, turned at the sound of her voice and bade us a courteous ‘Bonsoir', while they made a lengthy examination of her legs as if they were commit­ting them to memory.

  ‘This is a proper working château, you know,’ she went on. ‘Tom will probably give you a tour if you’re interested.’ Her tone implied that we’d all better be. The two men disappeared through another large set of doors, leaving the courtyard quiet and still in the evening heat. The only movement came from a pair of fat fan tail pigeons pecking lazily at the ground, who were being watched idly by a black and white cat, comfortably stretched out on the top of a disused well half covered by a rampant honeysuckle.

  The pigeons raised their heads and eyed us as if they were wondering whether they could be bothered to move at all before very slowly launching themselves into the air to go and perch on the top of a stone pigeonnier shaped like a beehive in one comer of the courtyard.

  It was wonderfully quiet, wonderfully peaceful. I began to think that perhaps there might be some good things to be said for being here, after all. I breathed in deeply as a distinctly vinous smell wafted out of a couple of open doors. What’s more, I realised, making a determined effort to look on the bright side and finding it quite easy in this atmospheric spot, Maggie might not be my personal flavour of the month, but at least she wasn’t going to drive me up the wall by constantly asking if I shouldn’t go and have a little lie-down. And I’d kept my own room, I thought in satisfaction. So really, things weren’t going to be too bad, were they?

  CHAPTER 2

  ‘I knew you’d like it here,’ said Oscar in a self-satisfied tone, reading my expression and sounding a tad relieved. He’d probably been imagining he was going to spend the next fortnight getting it in one ear from Maggie and in the other from me. At least one ear was safe now.

  Maggie marched us back out of the courtyard again, saying she had just been letting us have a little peep. Skirting what she informed us was the barrel store, she opened an iron gate in an outside wall and herded us through a neatly tended vegetable garden. A middle-aged woman, wearing a print apron around a figure that sug­gested she was fond of la bonne cuisine, nodded politely to us and continued to carefully select green beans, putting the satisfactory ones into a bucket by her side. Maggie clicked her tongue impatiently at our slow pace and strode off down a paved path as Phil closed the gate setting the antique latch clattering. A baying that would have done justice to the Hound of the Baskervilles started up from somewhere and she jumped back with a loud shriek of alarm as two dogs, making enough noise for a pack of Great Danes, rounded the corner of the house and charged at us. One was an overweight and elderly Labrador; the other a Dalmatian, which was simultaneously barking, wrinkling up its lips and snorting in the most extraordinary fashion. ‘Help! It’s coming for me! It’s showing its teeth! And snarling! It’s about to bite!’ Maggie shrieked, dodging behind Phil for protection. ‘Get away from me, you vicious animal.’ Phil didn’t look particularly thrilled at being thrown into this manly role.

  The Labrador was snuffling round our feet in an arthritic manner, wagging its tail enthusiastically. Maggie moaned as it sniffed at her bare toes. ‘It’s not going to bite you. Come on, you must have met these animals before,’ Phil said impatiently as she grabbed onto him as if she was planning to leap into his arms out of harm’s way. ‘How long would your precious Morrisons be able to go on letting their cottage if the dogs were in the habit of eating the visitors?’ he demanded rather hoarsely, prising her arms from their stranglehold grip around his neck.

  ‘The only way this old thing is going to be able to bite anyone is if somebody stumps up for a pair of dentures first,’ said Charlie, hooking his fingers in the Labrador’s collar and pulling it away from its dangerous investiga­tion of Maggie’s feet.

  ‘And you’re just pleased to see us, aren’t you, my beautiful?’ Oscar bent down to stroke the Dalmatian which was weaving around his legs and threatening to trip him up at any moment. ‘My parents had a terrier who used to smile like this,’ he added, rubbing his hand along the dog’s back. In reply it wrinkled its nose up so much in a grin it made itself sneeze.

  It should have been obvious to anyone that the two dogs belonged to the lick-’em-to-death category but all the same Maggie still stayed behind the safety of Phil’s not very broad back, ignoring his commands to stop making such a godawful exhibition of herself, until a dark-haired woman, dressed in a baggy white collarless man’s shirt and shorts, came tearing around the comer.

  ‘I’m so sorry, I didn’t hear you coming in. I hope they didn’t scare you to death,’ she said breathlessly. ‘I try to get Lily shut up before visitors arrive - she’s still young and hasn’t copped on yet that most people don’t enjoy seeing a grinning dog coming at them at high speed, but I forgot the time. Here,’ She snapped her fingers, and the Dalmatian ambled back to her side, then turned around to give us another unrepentant grin and sneezed explosively yet again.

  ‘No, no, we weren’t frightened at all. Anyone can see the dogs are friendly,’ said Maggie, stepping out from behind Phil. I had to hand it to her, from the gracious way she introduced us all to Janey Morrison, you’d have thought that she’d spent the whole afternoon at a garden party, rather than the last few minutes cling­ing onto her boyfriend for dear life.

  Janey kissed Oscar, saying it was lovely to see him again, and looked the rest of us over with a friendly smile. ‘How nice to meet you all. Welcome to Château du Pré.’ She was a tall, deep-bosomed woman in her early thirties, with a slight snub nose and the sort of strong-boned face that really comes into its own as you get older, and large, brown eyes, half hidden behind a pair of zebra-striped sunglasses. There was something vaguely familiar about her; maddeningly I had no idea whether it was her face or her name that had rung the bell. She turned to Oscar to ask him how he was and they moved off, flanked on either side by a wagging tail, while the rest of us followed.

  I trailed behind, partly because it was still obvious that neither Maggie nor Sally had forgiven me for disobeying orders and partly because I wanted to be able to have a look at what was around me. And this was well worth looking at. One of my work-mates had said, somewhat witheringly, that this part of France was downright boring, it was all vines, vines and more vines. True, there were a whole load of them, but the squares of vines were broken up by copses of trees and fields of livestock so it was hardly as if this was some sort of vine prairie. And the low hills all around were enough to satisfy any romantic’s heart, especially as a distant summit had been crowned by a ruined castle with only half a tower. I wondered if I’d be allowed to go and explore it. Maggie, who was already halfway down a flagstoned terrace lined with huge stone urns packed with geraniums and petunias in vivid pinks, reds and oranges, turned around to frown at me. Obediently, I speeded up a little, pausing only to sniff at the glorious scent rising from a bed of dark red roses.

  A pair of tousle-headed little boys, pink, plump and stark naked, just like a pair of Raphael’s cherubim, were industriously excavating the earth between the roots of a venerable cedar tree at the end of a large, beautifully kept lawn. A dark-haired girl, with long brown legs and the shortest pair of shorts this side of decent, lay stretched out on the grass improving her tan at the same time as keeping a watchful eye on the twins. Janey leaned ove
r a splendid baroque balustrade and called something to her. The girl sat up to reply, showing that not a lot of material had gone into the making of her top either. Phil, who was patently uninterested in the beauties of nature, was so entranced by this view that he walked into a flower pot, setting it rattling in a very obvious fashion, and got a ferocious scowl from Maggie for his clumsiness.

  Janey giggled. ‘Somehow I have a feeling it wasn’t Adam and Miles who made his eyes pop out like that,’ she murmured to me.

  ‘It’s unlikely,’ I agreed. ‘Phil has a reputation as the fastest pair of hands in West London, and from what I hear there’s something about girls in shorts that just brings out that old roamin’ instinct in him.’

  ‘Really?’ asked Janey. ‘I hadn’t noticed.’ She looked down at her own shorts, made a slight face and said, ‘But then if he were to get excited by these, he’d have a serious problem.’

  I wouldn’t put it past him, and she had good legs too. Phil was a legs man. Phil was an everything man, accord­ing to what Oscar had told me in a warning voice. Oscar takes my welfare very seriously, though quite why he thinks I’ve reached the grand old age of twenty-eight without being able to recognise a man who makes passes at every female who crosses his path is quite beyond me.

  One of the little boys turned around, saw Janey and began waving a plump arm. ‘Aren’t they gorgeous!’ I said, gaining myself a pleased smile. I wasn’t being merely polite - at a distance they looked quite enchanting, though from my experiences with my godson and his brother I knew this angelic impression might not last on closer acquaintance. ‘Are they yours?’

  ‘The twins? Afraid so,’ she said, her dismissive tone doing nothing to conceal buckets of maternal pride. ‘The junior demolition team, Tom calls them.’ So I was probably right about their general behaviour, I decided, reckoning it was fortunate that as a paying guest I was unlikely to be called on to babysit. Maggie and Sally were virtually frog-marching their respective partners away from the dangerously enticing view, though I couldn’t help noticing Phil taking another quick look sideways before he was led inexorably towards the table and chairs set out next to the swimming pool at the far end of the terrace.

  It was then that the vague little niggle that had been playing at the back of my mind exploded into a horrible certainty. I turned to Janey and said hesitantly, ‘This Jed who’s coming to stay in the cottage... is that his nickname?’

  She looked at me in surprise. ‘No, his name. He’s Jed Conway, a journalist - we worked together years ago.’

  ‘Thank God!’ I breathed. For a horrible moment I had been absolutely convinced that Janey was going to say Jed was a nickname for George Edward Delaney. A long shot maybe, but there had been stranger coincidences, you saw them in the tabloids every week. And with Oscar around it wouldn’t even have been a coincidence. For some reason he’d thought George and I were ideally suited - still did think so, in fact, even though I’d told him on several occasions that there were many things I was prepared to do for love but handwashing was not one of them. Oscar and I had come to verbal blows before over the way he occasionally tried to manipulate events for me so I’d been suspicious from the moment he’d casually suggested I spend my convalescence in a cottage in France. I’d made him swear George wasn’t going to be a member of our party, but having him staying up at the château was exactly the sort of scenario that would delight Oscar’s Machiavellian mind.

  Janey cast me an amused glance. ‘Afraid Jed might have been an ex-boyfriend?’

  I nodded ruefully.

  She laughed. ‘Gosh, talk about a holiday wrecker. I’ve found myself in some pretty sticky situations, but none to match that. Though I had a spectacular break-up with a boyfriend in the middle of the Nullabor Plain in Australia. We were on a packed bus and we couldn’t get anyone to swap seats with us, so we were forced to sit next to each other, glowering in silence for three days and nights. I didn’t dare go to sleep in case my head slipped sideways and I ended up accidentally touching him, and he took it as meaning I wanted to make up. I was virtually hallucinating from sleep deprivation by the time we reached Sydney. Probably why I weakened and agreed to give it another go,’ she added thoughtfully.

  ‘How long did the reconciliation last?’ I asked.

  ‘Until the flight back to England. It was half empty so I moved down a few rows to stretch out across a row of seats. When I woke up I saw the stewardess sitting on his lap and giving an entirely new meaning to the words “cabin service”. Needless to say, we didn’t make up again,’ she said with a grin, pushing her sunglasses back up her nose. ‘The last I heard of him, he was living on a small-holding with no sanitation on a Welsh hillside, so all things considered I reckon I had a lucky escape, even if he was very good-looking.’

  She waved for a last time to the twins and said, ‘We’d better go and meet the others, not that there are many of our lot around at the moment, I’m afraid. Rob, Venetia’s man, has gone off to meet a friend who’s doing a wine tour around here, and Tom and Jed are in the tasting room with a couple of tourists, but I don’t expect they’ll be long. I do hope you don’t mind putting Jed up? I was wondering if Maggie was just assuming that everyone would agree ...’

  She was observant then. I cleared my throat as we walked off down the terrace and said, ‘No, I don’t mind at all, but Maggie made a bit of a mistake. I hope Jed won’t object to the sofa bed because Oscar and I aren’t actually sharing a room.’

  ‘I wondered about that.’ Janey didn’t look in the least bit surprised. ‘From the moment I saw you it didn’t seem as if you were really Oscar’s type, if you know what I mean.’

  A recumbent figure lying on a steamer chair by the pool idly leafing through a magazine looked up, and seeing Janey and I were still talking got to her feet, pulling down a skirt almost as minimal as the nanny’s shorts, and sauntered over to a teak table, large enough to seat at least ten people, laid with long-stemmed wine glasses, bowls of olives and thinly sliced saucisson. She picked a bottle of rosé from where it was keeping cool in a pottery wine cooler and handed it and a corkscrew to Phil. He seemed to be having problems connecting the screw with the cork. Maybe because his eyes weren’t on the job but on the woman’s lean, long-legged figure which seemed to be the result of a fortuitous combination of the right genes and a taste for going to the gym. She looked over her shoulder as we approached, tossing back an enviable quantity of superbly cut pale red hair over her shoulders, and said in a pointed tone, ‘I hope you don’t mind me taking over your role as hostess, Janey, but I know what you’re like when you get chatting. I thought I'd better give everyone a drink before our guests began to think this was a drought area.’

  I saw Janey’s shoulders tense for a second under the big white shirt, then she said expressionlessly, ‘Thank you, Venetia. That’s kind of you.’

  Venetia shrugged and handed a glass of wine to Sally. ‘It’s nothing,’ she said. ‘Now, has everyone got what they want?’ she asked the group cheerily and turned towards me, her delicately sculpted brows rising in query.

  So that was what had been bothering me, I realised with a flicker of relief. The name Morrison had triggered off a distant memory. I hadn’t thought about Venetia Morrison for years, but now it all came flooding back. I could even recall her telling me about her father’s place in France. But she hadn’t had a stepmother then so Janey must be quite recently married. ‘Hello, Venetia,’ I said. ‘How are you?’

  She looked at me blankly, obviously not having the slightest clue who I was. I was about to give her a hint when her green eyes widened behind tortoiseshell sun­glasses and she exclaimed, ‘Good Lord! It’s Nella, isn’t it? Nella Bowden. What on earth are you doing renting my father’s cottage? It’s years since I’ve seen you. I wouldn’t have recognised you - you’ve changed so much.’ Even Venetia, who had never been particularly tactful, must have realised that she was rapidly heading into muddy waters here, for she visibly floundered. ‘It’s not surprising really,�
� she said finally. ‘You look so different now you’ve lost so much weight.’

  Thanks, Venetia. Everyone turned around as if they were attached to a single eye and looked at me, wondering what I must have looked like hidden under a mountain of blubber. ‘I would have known you anywhere. You haven’t changed one bit,’ I said. She hadn’t either. As I said, she’s always been a dab hand at the tactless remark.

  Oscar said with loyal indignation, ‘I can’t believe you were ever fat, Nella.’

  ‘No, she wasn’t, not when I knew her,’ Venetia said earnestly. ‘But she told me herself her brother nicknamed her Nellie the elephant, though that was some time ago. That’s why everyone calls her Nella, rather than Eleanor.’

  I began to wonder about the other skeletons which I’d thought were safely hidden at the back of cupboards. Were they all going to find themselves being taken out for an airing over the next week or so? But surely I hadn’t been much in the habit of confiding in Venetia during the brief time in which we shared a flat, had I? We were so completely different in every way that we’d maintained a cool and rather uncomprehending distance. But there must have been the inevitable evenings that happen in every flat when we were both in and there was nothing to watch on the box. There’s no accounting for what secrets come spilling out between flatmates when you’re whiling away your boredom by working your way down the better part of a bottle of Spanish red. And, afterwards, you can never remember exactly what you’ve been indiscreet about until your confidante, who’s been sworn to utter secrecy, tells a whole roomful of people.