by Fiona Walker
Dawn, who arrived via the back tracks at the farmyard, thought the place looked thoroughly depressing. To the rear, Lake Farm was flat-faced and mean-windowed, covered with pipework and loose wires, and shadowed by red-brick outbuildings that sagged lopsidedly around a muddy yard. This was where Kat parked her car and let the dogs pile out before squelching off to fetch Dawn some wellingtons so that she could cross the twenty yards of stagnant water and sludge to the house.
Constance had stopped using it as a retreat and occasional guest cottage in the mid-eighties when husband Ronnie died. Since then, it had housed several long-term tenants, falling into increasing disrepair. In the years leading up to her death, it had been uninhabited and storms had battered it yet more, breaking down the Edwardian’s landscaped defences. The lake had seeped into the cellars and even the ground floor when it rained hard.
Nothing could have prepared Dawn for the inside of the house, which reeked of damp dog and charred wood. There wasn’t a straight line in the building, from the bowed, smooth-worn quarry stones underfoot, to the bulging, misshapen walls and gnarled beams and the sagging ceilings. Despite the work that had gone into drying it out, it was far from watertight, and this week had been the wettest of the year so far. Drips ran down the walls, through the light fittings and plopped in through the rattling windows. Compared to Dawn’s cosy little terrace, it felt glacial. The logs and kindling in the big inglenook were damp and refused to take when Kat waved a match at them; the night-storage heaters were stone cold, as was the hot-water boiler; there was minimal furniture and no curtains, apart from an incongruous collection of throws and wall hangings in one corner that looked as if it had been stolen from an Indian restaurant after a particularly drunken night out.
It reminded Dawn so vividly of Withnail & I that she expected Uncle Monty to shimmy through a door in a silk dressing-gown at any moment.
Giving up on the fire, Kat stood up, threw out her arms and beamed at her. ‘This is home. Now can you understand why I never want to leave?’
Dawn shuddered and pulled her coat tighter, stepping towards the latticed windows overlooking the lake, which acted like a kaleidoscope, fragmenting the huge expanse of water, trees, parkland and the grand house in the distance into an impressionist’s painting of leaf, lake and light. Even rain-lashed and grey-skied, it was breathtaking.
‘I can understand why you lived there.’ She gazed up at the grand Jacobean façade.
‘We had to duck the falling plaster every time we passed through the main hall. Constance lived in two rooms on the third floor with four oil heaters, and a tennis racquet to hit mice. It is seriously falling apart.’
‘And this place isn’t?’ Dawn looked around the chilly room. ‘Shall I call DIY SOS or will you?’
‘It’s had lots of work done,’ Kat said defensively. ‘Constance sold a William Hodges to pay for it.’
‘Surely you can’t sell people in this day and age. That’s slavery.’
‘It was a landscape of an Indian palace,’ she said witheringly, aware that Dawn was winding her up. ‘It was supposed to pay for the repairs here, but she died before it was complete and work stopped when the legal wrangle started about the ownership of the farm.’
Dawn eyed the many pans and bowls strategically positioned around her to catch drips. ‘So who pays for the roof to be mended now?’
‘That’s my responsibility,’ Kat explained, as she boiled an ancient enamel kettle on an even more historic range. ‘The family won’t have anything to do with it now, which I guess is understandable if a bit depressing. At least they seem to have stopped trying to bully me out. The charity trustees are local do-gooders who are all very sweet but they’re more obsessed by whose turn it is to bake biscuits for committee meetings than getting things done, and they won’t let me take in other old animals or seek proper funding until we know who is buying Eardisford. Constance’s will ensured the house is so tightly tied to its land and farms it can’t be split up, which limits the market.’
Dawn had a certain sympathy for the Mytton-Gough children, hamstrung by their mother’s many clauses while their inheritance mouldered as a depreciating asset. ‘If the old biddy knew it would have to be sold after her death, who did she think would buy it?’
Fetching down mugs, Kat confessed, ‘Royalty.’ She laughed at Dawn’s cynical expression. ‘It’s true! She thought it would suit one of the princes to raise a family. The most recent rumour I heard is a Beijing manufacturing magnate buying a quiet weekend retreat for his son at LSE, but the village is full of rubbish. Last week it was a Hong Kong property tycoon.’
‘Lots of Chinese whispers, then?’
She grinned. ‘Whoever it is, you can bet Dair knows something.’
‘Dair?’
‘The estate manager – he runs the fishery and the shoots.’
‘You know a man called Dair?’ Dawn whooped. ‘You are kidding me?’
Kat laughed, pulling the whistling kettle from the hob. ‘I think it’s short for “Alasdair”. He’s Scottish.’
‘Even better! Please tell me he’s rich and handsome. Is he single?’
‘He’s very tweedy and looks like Elmer Fudd,’ she said, as she slopped boiling water over teabags. ‘But he’s definitely single.’ Dair Armitage still had a bit of a tongue-tied crush on Kat, despite the dirty-tricks campaign he’d been tasked with when the Big Five had wanted her out of the farm. As her closest neighbour – he lived in one of the estate’s lodge cottages – he popped in once in a while with gifts of freshly caught brown trout, but their glazed eyes had seemed to look straight through her and she had no idea how to gut and cook them so she’d secretly fed them to the cats or Ché. Shy, stuttering, yet curiously pompous, Dair seemed equally frightened of Kat’s eyes and never looked into them, although he had no such qualms about staring lustfully at her chest. She’d not seen him since Russ moved in and was glad. Constance, who had been fond of Dair, would no doubt have encouraged the match vociferously, but it was never going to happen.
But Dawn was entranced by the idea of his name. ‘You must have a Dair in your life, Kat. What could be more perfect for the girl who’ll do anything for a dare?’
‘I’m not quite as brave as I used to be.’
‘Trust me, living here is well brave.’ Dawn shuddered, taking a slurp of her tea.
When they’d been student nurses, Kat had been notorious for her pluck. No challenge too great, no risk too frightening. Always the first to volunteer and the last to give up, she’d had a lust for life that left others breathless. At a mock awards ceremony the college put on, friends hailed Kat the ultimate mate they wanted onside in a crisis. At the time, her heart had been set on a career in humanitarian aid work, but then she’d met Nick and her plans had changed. As Kat’s life contracted into the self-protective, imprisoned minutiae of a destructive relationship, she’d lost her natural confidence. It had started to resurface here, in her safe harbour, but it still needed a lot of buoyancy aids.
‘If we knew which of the rumours to believe, life would be a lot easier.’ She sighed.
‘What about the solicitor’s letter on your phone?’
‘They emailed it because the postman won’t deliver anything beyond the first gate. There are owls nesting in the box there right now, so he leaves all our post at the pub for Russ to collect, and he keeps forgetting.’
‘What was in it, Kat?’
‘Owls, I told you.’
‘I meant the letter!’
‘Oh, I haven’t read it. It’ll just be the usual guff about access rights, or another offer to relocate the sanctuary so the farm can be sold with the estate.’
Dawn groaned. Kat had an aversion to formal paperwork, which was probably why she was living in a damp grace-and-favour fleapit while ex fiancé Nick was sitting on mounting equity in the house they’d bought together. ‘So why can’t the sanctuary be moved somewhere else?’
‘Constance was emphatic that it had to be here at Lake Farm.’<
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‘What do the animals care as long as they’re looked after?’ asked Dawn, who now suspected Constance had been certifiable. The place was barely habitable. ‘Why not relocate somewhere warm and dry with a functioning letterbox, somewhere a bit nearer to a road?’
‘I’ll show you.’ Kat whistled for the dogs.
Dawn wished she hadn’t asked as she was forced to abandon her mug of tea and climb back into the whiffy oversized wellies – she suspected they were Russ’s – to squelch outside into the rain again.
It was still coming down in sheets but Kat seemed hardly to notice as she led her out of the farmyard and across a gnarled, skeletal orchard to the oldest oak at the edge of the woods, its girth as fat as a cooling tower’s.
Beneath its vast canopy there was a cluster of tiny headstones.
Dawn’s eyes filled with tears as she read the names – Toby, Alice, Mungo, Hetty, all with such short lives. ‘Oh, the poor little things.’
‘I know, it’s impossibly sad.’ Kat wrapped a comforting arm around her. ‘The family buried all their favourite pets here.’
‘Pets?’
‘Yes. What did you think they were? Children?’
That was exactly what Dawn had imagined lying under their feet, a tragic illustration of infant mortality statistics from another era. Instead she was looking at the graves of some of the Mytton family’s favourite dogs, whose names and dates were etched in the pocked, mossy little slabs. In some cases their likeness had been carved in limestone and marble – Benji, 1892–1904, had been a particularly roguish-looking bull terrier, while Catkin, 1907–23, was a kind-eyed whippet.
Kat patted the tiny domed head. ‘This was one of Constance’s favourite places. She’d talk about her childhood and the pets she remembered, like Catkin here. “Exquisite little thing – always looked like she’d faint if you so much as clapped your hands, but she was as brave as a lion, rather like you, Katherine.”’
Listening to her, Dawn felt the hairs stand up on the back of her neck. Kat had always been good at impersonations – her Björk was a legend, Janet Street-Porter less so – but this was something else. The voice seemed to come from someone totally different: rich, warm and killingly upper class. It wasn’t mockery: someone real was speaking. Any minute now Kat’s head would spin around and ectoplasm jet out. ‘I think you need a holiday,’ she said kindly, wondering how best to get her on a spa break and then back to Watford.
But Kat was gazing at Gretel, 1990–2006. ‘This little dachshund was Constance’s closest ally after she was widowed and left here alone.’ An exquisite miniature dog had been immortalized in pure white marble. ‘Daphne is Gretel’s last surviving daughter, now almost twenty – the last of her line. She refused to get off the bed in the final hours Constance lived. She even bit the doctor. Her head was under Constance’s hand when she died.’
Dawn was unmoved. ‘Exactly how many animals do you look after here? I’m talking the ones that have a pulse.’
‘Twenty-nine if you include chickens, geese and Trevor the peacock.’
‘Christ.’ As far as Dawn was aware Kat had only ever owned one pet (Sooty, 1986–9: a guinea pig that had met an undignified end under the lawnmower). ‘I knew you always wanted a dog, but I had no idea you’d become Watford’s answer to Brigitte Bardot,’ she muttered, looking at the little headstones. ‘It’s like Whistle Down the bloody Wind here.’
Kat’s eyes sparkled, the same vivid green as the moss on the wet tree trunks around them. ‘This is my dream gig, Dawn. I mean, how beautiful is this place? Like you say, I’ve always longed to have a dog and now I have five.’
Dawn prepared to step on a conversational landmine. ‘Didn’t Nick offer to take you to Battersea Dogs and Cats Home and get a dog once?’
The eyes went dull. ‘That was only when things got really bad between us, and he said it had to live outside the house in a kennel. I couldn’t bear that. I didn’t think it was fair.’
Dawn wondered if there was a huge difference between that and a man who forced his dog to be vegetarian, but she said nothing. Instead, she forged on through the minefield: ‘I never knew how bad things had got with Nick, Kat. I’m so sorry. If I’d known I’d have —’
‘It’s forgotten,’ she said firmly, turning to look at the rain-pocked lake, her wet hair deepest scarlet, lashes starred with drops. She put an arm around her friend. ‘I’m just grateful you’ve forgiven me for running off like that.’
‘What’s to bloody forgive? I followed my leader. And I can’t tell you how good it feels to be free.’
They shared a tight hug, hammered by raindrops.
There was a loud splash from the lake. Kat groaned. ‘Oh, shit. Not again.’ She belted off, leaving Dawn none the wiser.
Trailing behind, Dawn saw a huge black beast silhouetted in the lake, with devil’s horns and glinting eyes. She screamed. With a bellow, the beast tossed its head and sent up arcs of spray.
‘Ssh! Try not to frighten her,’ whispered Kat, creeping towards the bulrushes with a bucket. ‘She’s very sensitive to noise.’
‘So am I,’ Dawn squeaked, hiding behind a tree as the beast bellowed again.
Rattling a soggy bucket of nuts at Usha, Kat edged towards the rowing boat that was lying on its side nearby. She was white with fear, Dawn noticed, her teeth gritted determinedly.
‘I had to row out to get her back earlier,’ she explained in a high voice, betraying how great her terror of open water still was.
Dawn wasn’t sure Kat should float to the rescue again, especially now that their conversation had brought so many memories into high relief; nor was she keen to take the oars herself. But this time, for reasons only an ageing and increasingly forgetful water buffalo could understand, Usha waded out of the lake of her own accord, following Kat with docile good manners back to her enclosure.
‘OMG, you’re amazing!’ Dawn followed at a safe distance, incredibly impressed. ‘That is like something out of Crocodile Dundee. You should star in your own reality-show documentary.’
‘Hardly. It’s basic bribery.’
‘So if I bribe you to come back to Watford, will you?’
‘No chance. If I bribe you, will you come and live here?’
‘Only if the buffalo goes, you get under-floor heating and Dair Armitage turns out to be the man of my dreams.’
‘We’d better make the most of this weekend then.’ Kat hooked her arm through Dawn’s and headed back towards the house.
Chapter 5
As soon as she met Russ, the vegan vigilante, Dawn sensed something potentially unpleasant cooking at Lake Farm, and it wasn’t the lentil dahl that had been left on the range too long and burned dry. It was obvious from the way he and Kat looked at one another that they were more than part-time house-mates with a casually kinky Tantric acquaintance, and equally clear that Russ, despite his meat-free diet, was full of cock and bull.
‘The public misconception that shooting game birds isn’t animal cruelty because we can eat them is just wrong.’ Russ clearly loved the sound of his own voice, which was admittedly deep and honeyed with West Country sweetness, but nonetheless monotonous after the third tirade on the monstrous waste of raising game to shoot, then bulldozing the carcasses into the ground. ‘Dair Armitage runs a pheasant concentration camp here. No more than that.’
‘He sounds a great character from what Kat’s told me,’ Dawn said cheerfully. ‘No disrespect, but I could murder some roast pheasant right now.’ Her stomach gave a supportive rumble.
Kat shot her a pained look from the kitchen, where she was scraping smouldering dahl off the range, and Dawn felt a stab of guilt. She knew she should make more effort with Russ, however annoyed she was that their girls-only get-together had been hijacked by someone who looked like a Led Zeppelin throwback, lectured her non-stop, refilled his own glass without offering the bottle around and didn’t lift a finger to help Kat.
Having finally got the fire going by applying a blowtorch, then f
eeding it and the range constant logs, Kat had succeeded in warming the Lake Farm kitchen-cum-sitting-room from damp sub-zero to moist single figures, occasionally dashing outside to collect more logs and check animals, cheerfully dipping in and out of the conversation and trying to steer Russ away from his more extreme monologues on animal cruelty. It was no wonder she’d burned supper. Dawn’s ineffectual attempts to help had thus far put out the fire once, flattened two dogs underfoot and spilled rice all over the kitchen floor. Kat had banished her friend to a damp chair, where she was now weighed down by snoring terriers and listening to Russ, thrusting her empty glass at him hopefully.
