Up To No Good

by Victoria Corby

  ‘Much better, since the alarm system doesn’t bite,’ Robert said.

  ‘Neither do those two.’ Oscar looked at the two dogs, peacefully curled up in their baskets in a corner of the hall. ‘All Lily knows how to do is smile, and Solomon couldn’t bite, he’s got no teeth.’

  The old Labrador gave proof of this as on hearing his name he looked up and yawned.

  ‘You never know,’ said Robert. ‘He could always give a nasty suck.’

  CHAPTER 7

  The next afternoon, I was alone in the cottage, poodling around and clearing up after lunch. ‘As you won’t be doing anything you won’t mind doing the little bits and pieces, will you, Nella?’ Maggie had said sweetly. As a matter of fact, I did mind very much, but I was too chicken to say so. My book had just got to the exciting bit and was screaming out for me to finish it in one galloping session, which ruled out any domestic duties.

  Maggie was in a vindictive enough mood already with­out my adding fuel to the embers. She had announced at lunch that she’d organised a culture vulture tour around no fewer than three of the local châteaux, each of which was in its own way a little architectural gem with many fascinating pictures and pieces of furniture. Two of the châteaux even did guided tours lasting forty minutes each, some of it in English too! The male contingent of the party looked under whelmed at the treat in store, but wise men that they were, they knew better than to argue - especially after the earbashing they’d had about sitting up last night after we got back from supper with Venetia and polishing off the best part of a bottle of armagnac with Jed. It wouldn’t have mattered so much if on their way to their respective beds they hadn’t managed to trip over, loudly, just about every piece of furniture in the cottage. As if any of them had needed more to drink, Maggie had declared in a ringing voice, no doubt relishing the collec­tive masculine wince at her decibel level. It was no excuse, she said, to say they were on holiday and entitled to let their hair down a little, though they made a valiant attempt to pursue this line of excuse until they realised that arguing was doing nothing for their headaches.

  Oscar accepted his punishment with good grace. He enjoys a bit of rubbernecking and since he doesn’t like armagnac very much, it wasn’t going to hurt his head anything like as much as it would Charlie and Phil’s to tilt it backwards to admire a finely painted ceiling. These two remained looking thoroughly depressed until Oscar produced the guidebook he’d bought in the local town yesterday. Since it was written for the French it naturally listed vital information about feeding the stomach as well as the eyes and soul; all three châteaux, it turned out, had vineyards, one of them very good. They sold direct to the public and all offered dégustations of their produce in specially designed tasting rooms. Phil and Charlie cheered up immediately.

  I had declined the not very warm invitation to join everyone on this cultural trip, claiming I was obeying doctor’s orders and was going to rest. Quite why Maggie thought resting included the washing up was beyond me. I like sightseeing, within reason, but I felt three châteaux in one afternoon might result in a severe case of mental indigestion, not to mention the distinct possibility of me saying something stupid about the architecture which would result in my being put firmly in my place by the head prefect.

  I washed everything up and put it all away, too - something I don’t bother with at home and hadn’t been instructed to do either so I gave my halo a quick burnish at the same time - changed into my swimsuit and wandered over to the pool with a cushion, a long drink and my book and prepared for an extended session of peace. I was half aware of a car going past the cottage as I flopped down on my stomach - the road was so small that only about three locals used it as a short cut, or when they had reason to avoid the police checks for papers and insurance that were frequently held on the main road, so Tom had told me.

  I’d just begun the first paragraph when there was a squeal of brakes, a loud crunch and that sound of breaking glass so familiar to everyone who lives in London - the one where you usually discover that your car radio has vanished. A deathly silence followed. As I was scrambling to my feet to see what had happened, the air was split by a terrible squealing sound. I flew to the gates and looked around. A car was half slewed across the road a few yards away, the bonnet inches from demolishing the last vine in a row. The car appeared to be empty though the engine was still running, but I didn’t have any time to wonder where the driver had gone for all I could do was follow the unearthly howls that were coming from further down the road. My heart clenched with fear as I saw Lily lying on the narrow verge, moaning piteously.

  Hardly daring to breathe, I approached her. It was obvious that she had been hit by the car for there was a dark mark where it must have clipped her on her shoul­der. She looked up and thumped her tail weakly though she continued to whimper and howl as I knelt down alongside her and gingerly ran my hands over her body. How on earth did you tell if there were internal injuries? Well, there were no obvious broken bones, and surely all the noise she was making was a good sign. If she was seriously injured, wouldn’t she be conserving her energy? In films didn’t the mortally wounded usually have blood coming out of their mouths? I peered cautiously, remembering too late as she opened her jaws hugely, showing a fine display of large white teeth and an inter­estingly spotted roof to her mouth, that perhaps it wasn’t the most sensible thing in the world to be probing around an injured dog’s mouth. A big tongue came out and licked my face wetly. At least she’d stopped the ear-piercing shrieks, I thought as I tried to wipe the worst off, and wondered how long it would be before my hearing returned to normal. My heart seemed to still as she flopped back inert and I wondered if this was it. Then she opened her eyes, looking at me with a mercifully alert expression and lifted her head. She struggled upright, wincing as she put her weight on her front leg and sat down promptly, holding the paw in the air.

  I patted her head, telling her what a good, brave dog she was, and to stay there while I checked to see what had happened to the driver of the car. It was a bit late maybe, but any vague fears that I might find a corpse had already been allayed by the muffled swearing coming from the other side of the car. Great-Aunt Gwyneth, who had seventeen cats, would have approved mightily of my decision to administer first aid to an animal before a person. Since she was married to the uncle who was such a favourite with the bookies, her belief that animals were vastly superior to humans, especially men, was perhaps understandable. I approached the car with some trepidation, fearing that the driver might not share her opinion.

  I couldn’t tell whether the look Robert gave me as he was levering himself up from the ground was general loathing for my presence or disapproval of my sense of priorities. ‘Oh, it’s you,’ he said as he saw me and shrugged off my offer to help him up. ‘What’s happened to Lily?’ he demanded, his face a curious bleached shade of brown. ‘She’s gone all quiet. Is she dead?’

  ‘Very much alive, if you ask me,’ I said as Lily looked around with an aggrieved air at no longer being the centre of attention and got up, hobbling over to the car to give the wheel a good sniffing. ‘She’s hurt her leg where the car hit it, but it doesn’t seem broken. Otherwise she looks as if she’s escaped pretty lightly.’

  ‘Are you sure?’ he asked, then as Lily limped around to his side and presented her living breathing self for inspection he seemed to lose about ten years in fewer seconds. ‘Thank God!’ he breathed. ‘I was sure that I’d done something really bad to her, broken her leg at the very least. That noise...’

  ‘It was probably just shock. If you ask me, our Lily is just a teeny bit of a drama queen.’

  His relief was palpable; he was still pale but he no longer looked as if someone had rubbed his face in a bucket of ashes. ‘All the same, Janey ought to get her to the vet straight away for a proper check-up. You never know what unseen injuries she might have.’ Not many, judging by the way Lily was snuffling at something in the grass but I saw his point. ‘I’d take her myself except,’ he
gestured to the bonnet ‘this car won’t be going anywhere except the workshop.’ In swerving to try to avoid Lily he’d had the bad luck to hit just about the only serious obstacle for about a mile along this section of road, the remains of an old stone gatepost that stood in the middle of an almost entirely demolished wall. The headlight was hanging out of its socket in a sorry manner and the front wing had been bent right in over the wheel. ‘My mobile’s in the door pocket on your side of the car. Can you get it out and ring Janey to tell her what’s happened?’

  Was he so worried about Janey’s reaction to the news that he’d nearly killed her dog that he didn’t feel up to facing the flak? His mouth twisted. ‘I fell over one of those sodding stones as I got out of the car,’ he said, pointing at the few blocks that were all that was left of the ancient wall. ‘I was in such a hurry to see what I’d done to Lily that I didn’t notice it and went flying.’

  ‘Have you hurt yourself? Do you need a doctor?’

  ‘I banged my knee, that’s all.’ He held up a hand as if to ward off an onslaught of female fussing. ‘It’s fine.’

  Oh yeah? ‘In that case, why aren’t you prancing around the car to fetch the mobile yourself?’

  ‘Because,’ he said through gritted teeth, ‘if you must know, right now it hurts like hell. But it’ll be OK soon - providing I don’t have to jerk it around too much in the next few minutes.’

  I took the hint and fished his mobile out but couldn’t help glancing over at him, wondering if we had an extreme case of stiff upper lip here. He was looking distinctly pale, but I know better than to argue with men when they’re being brave. Besides, he’d already made it quite clear he didn’t want to risk submitting himself to my hamfisted nursing skills. In the circumstances it wasn’t such an unreasonable attitude. Last time he’d asked me for an alibi he’d ended up in jail for the night; if I so much as glanced at his knee, he might end up in the amputations section of the local hospital.

  ‘Janey’s got to hand the twins over to Delphine and she’ll be on her way - in about ten minutes, she thinks,’ I reported a couple of minutes later, after repeatedly assur­ing her that her dog wasn’t lying in pieces on the road and listening to a few choice words about Venetia leaving the gate open again which I thought more tactful not to pass on. ‘And she’s very worried about your knee too.’

  ‘That’s decent of her considering that I’ve just nearly killed her dog,’ he said gloomily.

  ‘I thought so too,’ I agreed, and after a startled glance at me, he laughed.

  ‘She said she’d take a look at you when she got down here and see if you needed to go to the doctor. You might have broken something, and if you’ve cut your knee you’ll have to have a tetanus injection.’

  ‘There’s no need for any of that,’ he said in a throwaway manner. ‘Nothing’s broken and I certainly don’t need a tetanus booster. All I need is to rest my knee.’

  To me it definitely sounded as if the gentleman was protesting a little too much. ‘Did you hit your head when you pranged the car?’ I asked anxiously, as another possible reason for that green tinge to his face occurred to me. ‘You did! I can see a mark on your forehead. You might have concussion, Robert. You’d better go to hospital and have an X-ray.’

  ‘Don’t be so stupid. I don’t need one,’ he said sourly.

  ‘You can’t be too careful with head injuries,’ I said, trying to remember what I’d been taught when I’d done that St John’s Ambulance course. The man taking the course had an enormous and mobile Adam’s apple and I’d tried not to make it too obvious that I was staring at it going up and down when he spoke. That was probably why I’d hardly absorbed anything about first aid.

  ‘Ah!’ I said in triumph. ‘Double vision! If you’ve got it you definitely need to go to hospital. How many of me can you see?’

  ‘One,’ he said, sounding heartily relieved. ‘Look, Nella – I don’t need an X-ray, I don’t need a doctor, I definitely do not need a tetanus injection. Got that?’

  ‘Don’t worry, injections don’t hurt much these days. I’m sure the doctor will use a nice thin needle, you’ll hardly feel it going in at all...’

  ‘Will you just shut up, Nella?’ he demanded in a voice that suggested he did not want to hear another word about needles.

  ‘OK,’ I said amiably. Always indulge the wounded. ‘But you’ll be much more comfortable if you sit down. Let’s wait in the cottage until Janey arrives.’

  ‘It’s all right, I’m fine here.’

  I glared at him, wondering if he was simply being bloody-minded or really thought leaning on his car out here in the middle of the road was preferable to being confined in a room with me. ‘You may be all right, but I’m not!’ I snapped. ‘You might be able to stay out in the sun for hours without turning a hair but I can’t. In fact, I’m already starting to burn. And no, I’m not going to leave you out here alone, playing the macho male idiot who can’t bring himself to admit that he’s hurt himself falling over a stone. So, if you don’t want me to drag you inside you’d better make up your mind to come with me. Now.’

  ‘Your bedside manner doesn’t last for long, does it?’ he asked. I think my remark about macho posturing had struck a sore point, if that wasn’t too much of a pun. He eyed me speculatively. ‘And I wonder if you could drag me.’ I hoped he wasn’t going to put it to the test.

  Just as I was starting to get worried he gave in and said, ‘OK, let’s go inside. Frankly, I’m getting too hot out here too.’ His sharp intake of breath as he took his first step showed that he’d hurt his knee a lot more than he wanted to admit, and I had to get him to lean, heavily, on my shoulder so that we could make it the few yards to inside the cottage. By the time he was sitting on the sofa he was ashy pale with beads of perspiration on his forehead.

  ‘The doctor definitely needs to see that knee,’ I said, stating the obvious. It was swollen and already bruised alarmingly Technicolor shades of red and purple; he must have caught it a terrific bang, though surprisingly he hadn’t cut it, just grazed it a little. I put a tentative hand out to feel how hot it was. ‘Just checking to see if I need to put something on it in the meantime,’ I said quickly, in case he thought I was doing a bit of surreptitious touching up. ‘I’ll see what I can find to act as a cold compress.’

  I remembered reading somewhere that bags of frozen peas are ideal for minor injuries, except the Napoleon of our kitchen (Oscar, who takes cookery very seriously indeed) would have downed his batterie de cuisine immediately had anyone dared import frozen vegetables, and all the little freezer on top of the fridge contained was ice cubes, one of those gel-filled wine sleeves and a bottle of Charlie’s vodka. I didn’t think that Robert would appreciate a tea towel of ice cubes being dumped on his sore knee but, after a moment’s hesitation, for I wasn’t sure who it belonged to, I took the wine sleeve and slit it down one side.

  ‘Unusual,’ Robert said as he took it from me and wrapped it around his knee, ‘but effective. Thanks.’

  He even smiled at me. It was the first time he’d looked at me with even a vaguely friendly expression since we’d met again. Well, there’s nothing like needing to be looked after to make a man feel slightly kinder about his nurse. Though this nurse was wearing a very Barbara Windsor-ish sort of costume, I realised belatedly. I shot into my room and, lacking a crackling white dress and a starched bosom, pulled on my largest T-shirt, hoping that I’d look as if I’d been chilly.

  Janey arrived in a flurry a minute or two later; any worries she might have had that I’d been drawing a tactful gloss over the extent of Lily’s injuries were immediately soothed by the way her dog hopped around her, smiling maniacally in pleasure and still chewing the biscuit she’d wheedled out of me. ‘Of course Rob’s got to see the doctor. Do tell him to stop making such a fuss about it - or perhaps you’d better not,’ she amended. ‘I know Dr Dupont will be on her rounds in the village now so I expect she could pop in and see him quite soon.’ She hesitated, biting her lip. ‘W
ould you mind if she came to see him here? I’d take him back to the château except that the vet closes in half an hour and everyone’s out except for Delphine. If it wouldn’t be too trying for you ...’

  ‘No problem,’ I assured her. ‘He’s being positively nice towards me at the moment - probably afraid I might suggest tapping his knee to test his reflexes if he steps out of line.’

  ‘Let’s hope it lasts,’ she said as she went to ring the doctor. I don’t know if she was naturally more authorita­tive than me or if Robert was just more prepared to accept her word about something, but he took her announcement that he could complain as much as he liked but he was still seeing the doctor, and what’s more he was being left to my tender mercies until the doctor arrived, like a lamb - if anyone who scowls so ferociously can be described as lamblike. That’s what he did when I asked him if he wanted a drink and he said a large whisky and got a cup of tea.

  ‘Honestly, Nella, talk about clichés,’ he grumbled. ‘Any minor crisis and you get the great British panacea poured down your throat.’ He took a sip and made a face. ‘Sugared, too.’

  ‘It’s good for shock,’ I said primly.

  ‘I’m not in shock,’ he snarled.

  ‘And bad temper,’ I added.

  He glared at me, then reluctantly laughed. ‘I suppose it wouldn’t be tactful to breathe alcohol fumes over Janey when she comes back with that wretched hound.’