A Leap of Faith

by Trisha Ashley

  ‘Chuck?’

  ‘Her fifth. He’s nice – small, chubby, seriously rich. He took me to one side and told me that Roxana was “one hell of a sensitive little lady” and he meant to look after her.’

  ‘Sweet but misplaced. She’s got even more of the tiger in her tank than Lili.’

  ‘Yes, but she isn’t getting any younger, and I think she ought to hang on to this one. We had what she called a “little girls together talk” and that’s when she said Ambler must be firing blanks and I should try someone else.’

  ‘What, like the milkman?’ The suggestion seemed a bit over the top, even for Roxana.

  ‘No, of course not! She said it still needed to be a Graythorpe baby, and so it had better be Simon.’

  ‘Simon? The only Simon I can think of is Ambler’s baby brother.’

  ‘That’s the one: only he’s now Ambler’s seriously hunky, nineteen-year-old student brother. They do grow up, you know, Sappho! He also looks like Ambler, except there’s more going on behind his eyes.’

  I stared at her, digesting the implications slowly. ‘But, Mu, won’t Ambler suspect—’

  ‘He won’t know anything about it, and since I’d make sure I seduced him just before any attempt with Simon, even I won’t be a hundred per cent sure whose it is – if it works.’

  She gave a sudden shiver: ‘I do love Ambler, and I don’t want to lose him, it’s just I really, really want a family of my own.’

  ‘I do understand, Mu, but what about Simon? Surely—’

  I stopped dead again, beginning to see even more pitfalls.

  ‘Roxana had already talked to Simon about it, and he doesn’t mind at all. In fact,’ she added primly, ‘he’s always had a bit of a crush on me, and was apparently disappointed when told his personal services weren’t required, just the goods.’

  ‘The goods? Oh – I see.’

  ‘Well, I hope so! I’ve never been unfaithful to Ambler yet, and were I to start it would be with someone a little older than Simon. Not that young, lithe and muscular aren’t terribly attractive attributes in a man.’ She looked pensive.

  ‘Mu!’

  ‘It’s all right, I’m not seriously tempted, and Simon’s promised Roxana he wouldn’t let on to Ambler or do any “wink, wink, nudge, nudge” business. She’s threatened to kill him if he does – or cut off his allowance, whichever is more painful. But I don’t think he would because he’s very fond of his brother.’

  ‘Yes, but isn’t this carrying brotherly love too far?’ I protested weakly. Honestly, that Roxana! The more I thought about it, the more unnatural it seemed for her to be offering her youngest son as stud to his brother’s wife.

  ‘Mu, what if Simon marries and has children, and the cousins meet and fall for each other, and . . .’

  ‘Unlikely – and you, as the godparent, would just have to put a damper on it.’

  ‘Thanks a lot.’

  She shrugged. ‘It probably won’t work anyway, so the problem won’t arise – and we’re hardly talking Flowers in the Attic here, are we? But I might as well try. And I wondered . . . since your cottage is within easy reach of Simon’s university in Bristol, whether we could meet there?’

  ‘You want to use the cottage? Of course you can. But how – you know, if you aren’t going to sleep together, how are you going to do the deed?’

  Call me naïve, but it isn’t something I’ve ever given much thought to. AI clinics just suggest rubber gloves and giant syringes, which actually turned out to be nearer the mark than I expected.

  ‘Turkey baster,’ Mu said.

  ‘Turkey baster? Are you serious? Will you have to call the baby Bernard Matthews? Or Bernadine? Or Cherry Valley—’

  ‘That’s ducks,’ she interrupted coldly. ‘And I could use a teaspoon instead, but a baster would give the sperm a bit more of a start.’

  ‘Yes, but if you used a teaspoon you could call the baby Apostle or Ratstail.’

  ‘Shut up.’

  ‘Or Mustard. Mustard Graythorpe.’ I looked at her sideways and saw her lip twitching as she tried not to laugh. ‘Or then again, you might just get tempted with young, muscular, sexy Simon.’

  ‘I may, but I’d never be able to look him in the eye – or anywhere else – afterwards, and this way I can, because it’s all one remove away. If you were serious about having one too, you could try Simon!’

  ‘You know I don’t go for blonds – I’m looking for someone tall, dark and attractive.’

  ‘Like Dave.’

  ‘Like Dave, but sane – someone I can shake off afterwards.’

  ‘Sappho, you aren’t really serious, are you? I thought you were joking.’

  ‘Wait and see,’ I told her.

  Providing I found a suitable donor, that is, and Old Mortality hadn’t already cancelled my option.

  I still had my doubts about Mu’s scheme, but I’ve never been one to hang back when my friends need help or advice. Miranda clearly needed me to infuse a little bit of backbone into her, too, and, fortuitously, here I was, more or less on the spot.

  They needed a Good Fairy, and I was that fairy. Admittedly a bloody big fairy, but still, never look one in the mouth. Not unless you want your hand bitten off, anyway.

  Titanic Titania.

  Thus it was that one sunny, cold, early March day I extricated two of Mu’s cats from the comfortable leather interior of the Volvo and went to Bedd.

  Bedd is Welsh for ‘grave’, and the village takes its name from the cromlech on the crest of moorland behind my cottage. Clearly, mortality is all around me, since the Acre to Aces Acre was sold off as a burial ground in the eighteenth century, and is full of mossy angels and illegible slabs, but it makes for quiet neighbours.

  I was following on the heels of the small removal van bearing my belongings, augmented by the Fantasy Flowers paraphernalia. Mu was adamant that she’d had enough of it, and I was loath to abandon a business where money oozed in by every post when I’d had one of my brilliant ideas about disposing of it . . .

  It felt good to be on the road in my very own car, although driving habits in Britain had taken a turn for the worse since I last got behind the wheel. About half of all the drivers had lost the use of their indicators, and most men seemed more willing to overtake me on a blind bend at seventy than drive behind me, until I stopped and unpeeled the ‘Women are natural leaders – you’re following one now’ sticker that Mu had put on the bumper, when things improved slightly.

  Have you ever wondered why most men drive with only one hand on the wheel, and what they’re doing with the other? No? Well, my theory is that they’re doing one of three things: some are illegally bleating into mobile phones, another third have a finger stuck up their nose, and the rest are pulling that funny little grimace that means they are adjusting their personal equipment.

  I was so glad I’d chosen such a solid car: Personal Protection. I stuck a tape in the player and my heart was light as the Volvo ate up the miles to my home with all the ponderous grace of a Sherman tank, to the strains of old favourites like Motörhead, Dire Straits and Queen.

  People can be very odd. At one traffic light, minding my own business and harmonizing with Freddie over ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’, I noticed the man in the next lane giving me a very funny look.

  Why? Was I staring at him just because he was playing some inane jingle with a backing beat like two people beating a weasel to death with tennis rackets?

  And if Mu is right about Motörhead being the Mantovani of my generation, he’d better become accustomed to this sort of thing, for in a few years he’ll find little old ladies headbanging at traffic lights, me among them. (In my case, big old lady.)

  ‘Bee-el-zeebub has a devil put aside for me-e-e, for ME-E!’ I screeched happily as the lights changed and the car next to me stalled. After he’d done all that noisy revving up, too.

  ‘Eat dirt, punk,’ I said as he vanished in the wing mirror.

  Before leaving the main roads for the narrow tw
isty lanes of the Gower, I stopped and studied the map, after which I found my way to Bedd with very little difficulty, despite the increasingly heavy showers of rain.

  Three roads lead into Bedd and my cottage is the last house on the narrowest and steepest of them all, the one running up towards the stone cromlech.

  Breasting the final crest of the lane with the rain pounding the roof like mailed fists and the windscreen wipers slowly and heroically pushing waves off the glass, I started down what looked like a river of mud. A lesser car might have floated.

  A small white van was pulled into the side halfway down, with some poor soul crouched over a flat tyre, so I considerately slowed, meaning to give it a wide berth and not add to their misery by soaking them in passing.

  ‘Meaning to’ is the operative phrase, because just as I pulled out to pass, something long, gingery and weasel-like streaked across the road liked greased string, making me swerve violently, and sending a long, curling wave of liquid mud over the head of the unlucky wheel-changer.

  Hello, chocolate soldier.

  There was a bellow of surprise, rage, or shock – it must have been freezing – and of course I pulled in, meaning to apologize and explain.

  I wound my window down and waited, since there didn’t seem much point in my getting drowned just to expiate my sins, and I could see my victim approaching in the wing mirror, growing ever bigger and more glistening.

  ‘Look, I’m terribly sorry,’ I began contritely, the second he was close enough to hear me. ‘I swerved because this weaselly thing ran across the road suddenly, and . . . and . . .’

  I looked up.

  And up.

  Or maybe I was shrinking away to the size of a Christmas fairy doll?

  Out of the mud-plastered visage of the Giant Thing from the Slime Pit two eyes burned with a colourless demonic fire, and wordless (fortunately) rumblings of incandescent rage issued from between wolfish teeth gleaming whitely against the black primeval slime.

  Dragonslayer? Had my characters finally managed to escape from my head and live lives of their own?

  Instinctively I threw the car into gear and took off down that road like a bat out of hell. Sometimes discretion can be the better part of valour.

  A last glance in the mirror before I turned the corner showed me that he wasn’t chasing me but sitting down in the road, probably unintentionally.

  Shaken, I pressed the button on the memo recorder, which was hung from a leather thong around my neck for hands-free great thoughts, and, as I pulled into the yard behind Aces Acre, safely out of sight, began to intone: ‘Dragonslayer rose from the slime pit, his eyes burning through the black coating of . . .’

  Home alone – almost.

  The van had unloaded its strange cargo and gone, but upstairs the electrician was still wrestling with his snaky coils, and somewhere a plumber was swearing (or perhaps Welsh just sounds like that).

  It was all supposed to be finished before my arrival, but they both assured me they were nearly done. They will be, if they’re lying.

  There was no sign of Miranda when I arrived, other than a substantial home-made fruitcake sitting on the kitchen table, though she’d let the workmen in earlier.

  The said table was a strange greenish Formica affair with glittery bits embedded in the top, which presumably the Last of the Aces didn’t want when he cleared the house.

  Neither did I, strangely enough, or the peculiarly slithery leatherette and horsehair sofa.

  Still, the roof was finished and the walls had all been stripped of their cold porridge woodchip, and painted white. The ghastly little lean-to greenhouse thing tacked on to the front of the house, and made out of old window frames and bits and pieces, was still there.

  It was supposed to have been removed by the builders, but it could stay for the moment and house the Fantasy Flowers impedimenta (though I’d make sure the builders didn’t try to charge me for taking it away, when they hadn’t).

  My phone line was installed ready for any relayed bouquet orders from Mu. I could manage those quite easily for the time being – I’d always helped when I was staying there so I can hand-tie a posy with the best of them.

  I was just thinking that with a bit of luck I wouldn’t have to do it for long when, as if on cue, the kitchen darkened like an instant eclipse: something huge was blocking the doorway.

  ‘I-it’s m-me!’ stammered a small voice.

  Chapter 6

  Crackers

  ‘My God!’ I exclaimed incredulously as she moved into the room and the full, eye-boggling horror burst upon me. ‘Miranda?’

  Her huge blue eyes overflowed, darkly splattering the vile tented thing she was wearing.

  ‘I-I know I’m g-grotesquely fat!’ she quavered.

  There is a time and a place for brutal frankness and, this being it, I gave it to her straight. ‘The only grotesque thing is that dress, Miranda. I’ve never seen anything so repulsive in my life! Where did you get it from? The Marquee de Sade? Tents “R” Us? I mean, even if it weren’t that strange cross between khaki and decayed diarrhoea yellow, those psychedelic squiggles would still make it a definite and resounding NO. Have you had a taste transplant, or something?’

  Her tears fell faster and I was just thinking I might have gone a smidgeon too far when I saw she was smiling through them.

  ‘Oh, S-Sappho,’ she quavered, and I sprang up and gave her a hug with my own eyes smarting, although that might have been the op art effect of all those dancing squiggles. ‘And I thought you w-were d-disgusted about my weight!’

  I held her off, slightly amazed. ‘What, you thought I’d say: “Begone, elephant woman, I’ll have no overweight friends?” Really, Miranda! Have you ever said to me: “I won’t be friends with you any more, you’re much too tall and bossy, and what’s more you have size eight feet”?’

  Miranda gave a familiar youthful giggle, an echo of Miranda Past.

  And really, I don’t know what she’s bothered about, for she will always be beautiful: it’s in the bones, even if some of them are buried a little deeper than they used to be. Actually, her head and neck look just the same – lovely cheekbones, upswept corn-gold hair, eyes the French blue of a 2CV . . .

  In fact, it’s just as if a sculptor has started carving out his Galatea from styrofoam, finished the head, but merely blocked out the rest before knocking off for tea.

  But there were advantages, as I pointed out over coffee and her delicious fruitcake, while above us the plumber and electrician discussed rugby in shouts like a celestial fan club. She’d always wanted a cleavage, so why not play up her assets now she’d got them?

  ‘There d-didn’t seem much point in b-bothering once I got over a size fourteen and Chris made it clear he found me emb-barrassing. And it’s not much fun shopping for clothes when most of them d-don’t fit you. Most really b-big clothes are just d-designed for coverage – like summer and winter covers for sofas. Nowadays, if it fits me I b-buy it, even if it’s something I wouldn’t even have given the d-dog to lie on b-before.’

  ‘Ah, yes – how is Spike?’

  ‘He’s fine. Very old for a Labrador, of course, and he’s on a d-diet too. I’m kinder to him than I am to myself. I’ve b-been on every d-diet known to woman for the last three years, and every time I fail, my weight goes up even further than b-before.’

  ‘Yes, I’ve heard that can happen. I read some women’s magazines in Greece, and dieting was the only thing they talked about other than sex.’

  ‘I’m sort of in a vicious circle, Sappho,’ she confided, ‘and I d-don’t know how to get out. The fatter I grow, the more self-conscious I get and the more I stutter. And then Chris says even more hurtful things about my weight, so I feel even worse and eat more for comfort . . .’ She stopped and looked at me helplessly. ‘D-do you see?’

  ‘Oh, yes, I see, all right, and I think you ought to divorce the bastard – the sensible option. After all, he’s just some little red-haired git who’s climbed to fame a
nd fortune on the back of your cookery skills and hard work.’

  Her pretty pink mouth curved into a startled smile. ‘You haven’t changed much, Sappho.’

  ‘No, so people keep telling me. I don’t know if that’s good or bad.’

  ‘Good! I feel b-better already. B-but you d-don’t understand, Sappho – Chris and I are a partnership. TV is all about personality, and I couldn’t d-do that with my stammer, could I? And Chris isn’t creative – he can’t d-do innovative cookery, and that’s where I come in.’

  ‘It would be a partnership if you got any credit for it, but I mean: are you mentioned on the series credits? In the spin-off cookery books? Get paid for your work?’

  ‘Well, no, b-but—’

  ‘He’s a user, and he needs you more than you need him.’

  ‘He could probably manage without me now, b-because they’d just hire a team of ghost cooks to d-do it for him.’

  ‘But he’d have to pay them, and wasn’t Stingy always his middle name?’ I pointed out. ‘Tell me: do you still love him?’

  She was silent for a minute, and then she said slowly and with an air of surprised discovery: ‘Well, sort of. I loved how he was . . . only he seems to have changed and he’s b-been horrible to me since I started putting all this weight on, though that’s my fault, isn’t it? B-but I mean, what would I d-do without him? I’ve never worked, the only money I’ve got he’s given me.’

  ‘Yes, you idiot, but that’s your money, too – you’ve done all the hard work on the cookery, while he’s just the public face. It’s about time you stopped thinking of yourself as some kind of appendage, and think about what Miranda Cotter wants instead – or the Miranda Lacey you were when you wrote The Stuffed Student.’

  ‘B-but I can’t d-do anything else. I’m fat, ugly, useless and in-incoherent!’

  ‘And brainwashed,’ I added, giving her some more coffee, this time adding a small slug of dark rum (possibly my only weakness besides Daniel Day-Lewis). If that didn’t shiver her timbers she was beyond saving.

  ‘The only success I’ve ever had has b-been The Stuffed Student, and now my editor wants me to d-do a new upd-dated edition. I was excited about it, but when I told Chris, he wanted me to put his name on it too, b-because it would sell more! And call me a nasty, mean person, Sappho, b-but I d-don’t want to in the least – I mean, it’s mine.’