by Fiona Walker
‘The pheasant murdering finished a fortnight ago,’ he was saying. ‘But they’re still massacring deer, if you’re a fan of wild venison, Dawn. They pick off the females because they’re the population drivers, always aiming behind a front leg to get the major organs, although it usually takes two or more bullets to get the fatal shot. Even then they can take an hour to die.’
‘That is really awful.’ Dawn was genuinely appalled and wished he hadn’t told her that.
‘All meat is murder, Dawn. There’s an animal’s death in every mouthful you eat.’
He was obviously very intelligent, occasionally surprisingly funny, vaguely sexy in a grubby, hippie Russell Brand sort of a way, but Dawn didn’t understand what Kat saw in him. It wasn’t that Russ was ugly – far from it – but he possessed a face in which what should have been handsome features appeared in the wrong places. It was as though a child had taken a Mr Potato Head and crammed on Brad Pitt and Pierce Brosnan’s best bits in random order – the dark eyes were too close together, the vulpine nose too high and the full-lipped mouth off to one side. The white-tipped hair was weird. She thought he was opinionated and not a patch on Nick, the hard-working charmer with the heroic job and perfect manners.
Since he’d arrived, he’d done nothing but expound his strong political beliefs from the confines of the one dry, comfortable armchair in the house, which he’d cranked as close as he could to warm his feet at the fire, now blocking the heat from the rest of the room while a noxious odour infused it.
In turn, it was clear that Russ thought Dawn was shallow and whingeing, believing that her obsession with the body beautiful was a sign of self-absorption. She also suspected that he saw her role as silent witness to Kat’s history as a threat. After all, Dawn had known Nick. She’d stood by and let things get so bad that Kat had been forced to run here. For Kat’s sake, Dawn decided to make an effort and include Russ in the warm spill of her friendship. ‘As the curry’s a bit burned, why don’t I treat us all to an Indian takeaway? There’ll be veggie options for you, Russ, and I know Kat loves a hot one – remember the Phall-lick from Balti Towers on the high street, hon? You still hold the Watford Pussy Posse record.’
‘Tania’s hen night,’ Kat remembered. ‘I was on the loo for a week.’
‘Worth it to fit in that size eight dress from the Karen Millen sale.’ Dawn got up, spilling elderly terriers, and wandered into the corner that was draped with saris. ‘Have you got any takeaway menus?’
‘If you can find one that’ll deliver around here I’ll eat my foot,’ Russ muttered.
‘Surely, as a vegan, you don’t eat cheese,’ Dawn said brightly, then realized her humour was getting too sharp, picked up a feather fan and started an Indian dance.
Now holding the kitchen door open for Daphne, who was taking her third rain-sodden pee break in an hour, Kat was uncomfortably aware that her two closest allies loathed each other on sight. Russ wore the calculating look he adopted when lined up in the pub with the village ‘earthmen’, the Brom and Lem Hunt foot followers who enjoyed baiting him, just as he relished outwitting them in return. Dawn’s face bore the cheery, professional I-take-no-shit expression she’d reserved for dealing with quarrelsome elderly patients when she was still nursing. It was her own fault for suggesting Russ join them for supper, Kat thought. He’d offered to give her some space, but she’d really wanted them to meet, never imagining there’d be such instant antipathy.
‘Tell you what, let’s call a cab and I’ll treat us to a night out in Hereford,’ Dawn suggested, eager to find bright lights and busy bars full of strangers.
‘We have no phone,’ he reminded her, his voice developing a devilish edge. ‘There’s no way to contact the outside world in this little backwater.’
‘Can’t you use your walkie-talkie in the tree-house?’
‘I have a better idea.’ His dark eyes flashed as he looked at Kat. ‘Why don’t we take Dawn into our arms tonight?’
Dawn let out an amused snort, but her eyes darted nervously towards her friend for reassurance. It was obvious Kat found Russ seriously sexy, but this was way beyond their friendship boundaries. ‘This is a joke, right?’
Kat laughed. ‘He’s talking about the Eardisford Arms, our local pub,’ she explained to Dawn, grateful for the suggestion. She was sure they would get on in a more relaxed atmosphere with a roaring fire and some rocket fuel in their bellies. ‘It serves a mean T-bone, and the scrumpy’s fantastic. We don’t have to worry about drinking and driving because the roads are private all the way there. Let’s get rat-arsed.’
Dawn cheered. ‘I’ll just get changed. Give me five.’
‘It’s not really a dress-up sort of a…’ Kat’s words trailed away as her friend shot up the stairs two at a time, heading joyfully for the Topshop dress, ‘… place.’
For all his boring lectures, Russ was very generous at buying rounds, Dawn conceded, as she lifted her third pint of scrumpy to her lips. In fact, her opinion of him was rapidly changing in the light of his behaviour in the busy little pub. He’d been keeping the friends regularly supplied with drinks and bar snacks in their quiet corner of the snug, crouching at the table for a quick chat each time he returned to them, then drifting back to talk to his cronies at the bar where he’d left his drink. It was clearly a position he took up regularly – Dawn suspected that Russ’s orchard arboriculture work involved a lot of testing the end product – but with an end product this magical, she could hardly blame him.
‘Dave would bloody love it here.’ Dawn gazed around mistily, largely because the turquoise lenses made her eyes smart.
‘Do you miss him?’
‘I miss what we had at the very beginning. I want that with somebody else.’
The scrumpy was filling Dawn with the glow of goodwill and Cupid’s arrows. It was Valentine’s Day tomorrow and she suddenly longed for new love. Kat had warned her to go easy on the local brew, which had a lethal reputation, but it held no fears for Dawn, who had won bets based on being able to drink her way through the cruise ship’s entire cocktail menu before performing ‘Non, Je Ne Regrette Rien’.
The Eardisford Arms was tiny and old-fashioned, perched on the bank of the river by the bridge that divided Upper from Lower, its half-timbered walls decked with hunting prints and horse brasses. The small public bar was packed with locals, all agog to know who Dawn was, and satisfyingly appreciative of her Topshop dress and turquoise eyes. One of the better-looking men had been staring at her in open-mouthed admiration from the moment she arrived.
‘Calum the Talon,’ Kat told her, in an undertone. ‘He’s a falconer. He handles the hunt’s eagle owl for them.’
‘Should I swing a piece of meat around on a string to beckon him over?’
‘His girlfriend’s the one with the pink hair serving behind the bar, so don’t encourage him. The last time there was a fight in here, she knocked someone unconscious.’
Dawn studied the small, stocky Tank Girl lookalike, who was laughing with Russ as she loaded the dishwasher, reaching out a tattooed hand to ruffle his white-tipped hair affectionately. Her square face was so heavily disguised with piercings and eyeliner it was hard to tell her age, but she guessed she was about forty.
‘She a relative?’ She knew Russ had family in the village.
‘No, but they’ve known each other since they were kids – she used to babysit for the Hedges family,’ Kat explained. ‘That’s Mags.’
‘That’s Mags?’ Dawn remembered the mention of the old friend who hung around at Lake Farm. ‘The one with the band?’ She’d somehow imagined a cross between Courtney Love and Gwen Stefani, not Peppa Pig with piercings. On closer inspection, Dawn realized she was the sort of earthy, buxomly extrovert woman who probably looked fantastic in full rock chick regalia rasping out ballads in a smoky spotlight.
‘They’ve just formed a new line-up,’ Kat said proudly. ‘It was called Dirty Mags, but they’ve decided to change it to broaden its appeal. Russ wants them t
o call it Animal Magnetism to help raise money for the sanctuary. Mags is onside – she helped organize an open day for us last year, although it was mostly hairy bikers and music fans who turned up and there was a bit of a fight there too.’
‘Don’t tell me she broke that up as well?’
‘She started it, actually.’
They watched as Mags pretended to swing a punch at Russ, cackling loudly. Heavily tattooed and wearing more chunky jewellery than Mr T, she possessed a dirtier laugh than Sid James. ‘I know she looks scary, but she’s soppy about animals,’ Kat insisted. ‘She cried so much when we watched War Horse on DVD that her one of nose piercings blew out. Calum’s birds of prey are her babies. Nobody messes with Mags, so it’s great she looks out for Russ and me. She’s like a big sister to him.
‘Bill Hedges, Russ’s uncle, almost gave up on him as a teenager – he was always in trouble when he came here for summer holidays – but Mags helped smooth things over.’
‘I thought he grew up in the village.’
Kat shook her head. ‘His mum did – Bill’s younger sister Gloria – but she ran off with one of the fruit pickers. They’re all from Eastern Europe now, but back then they were mostly university students on summer vacation.’
At sixteen Gloria, a day-dreaming good-time girl, had fallen for wild-haired, cricket-mad politics student Paul. At the end of the summer break, they had moved into his student digs in Bristol together, and six months later she’d discovered she was pregnant. Paul was determined to do the right thing, which delighted Gloria, who found herself marrying into his wealthy Hereford brewing family, only to have her dreams shattered when he turned his back on the family fortune to become a maths teacher and lay preacher in one of Bristol’s toughest suburbs, devoting himself to God and the Labour movement. To her family’s surprise, Gloria embraced city life and trained as a teaching assistant, supporting her husband in all he did. The couple became key members of their teaching union, church and human rights campaigns.
‘Have you met them?’ asked Dawn, thinking they sounded incredibly heavy-going. No wonder Russ was such a moral crusader.
She shook her head. ‘They run a mission school in Africa now and have adopted several children out there. They don’t get back to England often.’
‘Tough on Russ.’
‘He thinks it’s great now – he always had this place. It’s been his second home. I think he had a lot of issues with his parents when he was young – that’s why he took the name Hedges – but he’s dealt with them now.’
As a child, Russ had sometimes joined his parents at religious retreats, trade-union conferences and on third-world volunteer work, but he’d always preferred spending the school breaks with the Hedges family in rural Herefordshire, where he could enjoy the space, freedom and wildlife, and was treated as the son they’d never had. Although Russ shared his father’s passionate dislike of blood sports and outspoken opinions on redistribution of wealth, clashing regularly with his intransigent, terrier-loving uncle on the subject, he adored Bill’s positive outlook and the country wisdom he passed on.
‘His political beliefs drove him to try to take on the hunt single-handed – that was when he got into trouble as a teenager, spraying ALF slogans everywhere and sabbing, although he was nothing to do with the official antis then. They always focused on hunts closer to the cities, so the Brom and Lem had never had much trouble until Russ arrived with his aniseed spray. You can imagine how embarrassing it was for Bill, who’s been a life-long hunt supporter. So Mags helped out – she got Russ interested in Compassion in World Farming, plus the music. She taught him to play the guitar. And Bill gave him more work to do round the farm, which he loved. Russ always wants to learn about new things.’ His greatest love remained the cider orchards, which the Hedges family had tended for two centuries, where he had set up camps as a boy and dreamed of a simpler life away from cityscapes. Hence his interest in arboriculture, which he had studied at university.
‘He stayed on to take his master’s in conservation and woodland management,’ Kat added. ‘Then he took a placement in Tower Hamlets to study urban forestry, where he got interested in animal communication.’
‘Ah, yes, the wild, roaming herds of east London,’ Dawn mused.
‘He was attacked by a pitbull,’ Kat explained. ‘Several, actually. It got him thinking about the way we domesticate animals – or don’t. He went to Thailand to rehabilitate wild dogs, and the year after that he spent the summer at a bear-rescue centre in Cambodia.’ He’d remained a familiar figure in Eardisford, returning most summers and Christmases, although he was banned for a few years after the notorious Boxing Day meet when he took his anti-hunting stance too far by hijacking the hound lorry with thirteen couple on board. Nevertheless, the villagers remained fond of ‘Rebel Russ’, largely because of his two champions: the popular and kindly uncle who doted on him, and Mags, who mothered him mercilessly.
That’s where all the free drinks were coming from, Dawn realized. It’s like one big happy family in here, she thought, in a glow of scrumpy. She’d met red-faced Bill Hedges and his jolly, laughing wife, with several characters Kat had referred to as the ‘earthmen’, who appeared to have only one full set of teeth between them, but made up for it with half a dozen terriers straining on leads tied to their barstools. There were also young couples and old ladies, a posh toff and a bunch of girl grooms drinking in hay-scattered riding gear, all on friendly terms with Kat and welcoming to Dawn. Kat was liked and accepted, Dawn realized.
Although Dawn had lived in and around Watford all her life, there wasn’t a pub she could go into these days and guarantee that she’d know anybody. Even the gym she’d belonged to for the best part of a decade had no real social side, the same faces she’d seen on the same evenings every week plugged into iPods, staring at MTV and lost in their own worlds. Being in here reminded her of life on the Caribbean liner, where the crew had become like family, the spa staff, cabaret stars and dancers always partying together late into the night. Out at sea, she’d been in suspended animation, always travelling and never arriving, until she’d grown weary of the tiresome customers, the repetitive work and the cramped accommodation. Here, there was a sense of permanence. Nobody wanted to leave. Even the lady in the great house had hung on into her ninety-fifth year.
She was starting to understand why Kat loved Eardisford so much that she’d stayed on to take up the new challenge after Constance had died, and even why she now shared her dilapidated home with Russ, the dark-eyed rebel. Kat had always been attracted to alpha men. This key player was a sexy maverick, unbothered whether he was accepted or not.
Almost everybody in the pub seemed connected with the hunt in some way, conversation at the bar revolving around that day’s sport. Russ came in for a lot of goading, yet they all seemed to accept it as a part of a ritual.
‘How does he cope?’ she asked Kat. ‘Is he working deep under cover for the League Against Cruel Sports?’
Kat laughed. ‘They all know he hates hunting, and that he’ll kick up a fuss and take the rise if they want a debate, but they’ve had every argument over the years, and they know that’s the way it is. Besides, they’re all united in a new cause at the moment, so there’s an armistice.’ She raised her eyebrows. ‘Attendance at my self-defence class has trebled since the oligarch rumour started. The villagers think Eardisford’s going to be awash with Kalashnikov-wielding heavies leaping from cars with blacked-out windows if the rents aren’t paid on time.’
‘You run a self-defence class?’ Dawn was impressed.
‘It’s more boxercise, with a few gym kicks and throws. Monday evenings in the village hall, winter and summer, Pilates in spring and autumn. I also do Bums and Tums on alternate Thursdays. Then I have riding lessons on Wednesdays and Saturdays and meditation sessions Fridays and Tuesdays.’
‘Packed schedule, then. What’s with the meditation?’
‘Tantric,’ she mouthed, and they collapsed into giggles. ‘It�
�s just something I’m trying out.’ Kat wiped her eyes. ‘It’s all about breathing so far – more like casual omming than casual sex. We keep all our clothes on.’
‘Probably wise in a house as cold as yours. So it’s not serious between you and Russ?’
Dawn sensed the relationship was perhaps not as destructive as she’d feared. Kat was going steady on the scrumpy, she noticed, but the glow was blossoming in her cheeks, and the lingering looks she was exchanging with Russ were getting hotter. With her gleaming hair falling over her shoulders like red liquorice and her deep green eyes drinking in the affection surrounding her, she looked a million miles from the wreck who’d left her nursing career, her fiancé and home on one fateful day two years earlier.
Dawn felt she should mention Nick again, but Russ had appeared at the table clutching two shot glasses brimming with something so lime green it was almost luminous. ‘Hopflasks by way of apology from the kitchen. The food’s delayed. Jed the chef’s just heard a rumour that Eardisford’s buyer’s from Yorkshire and called Seth. He’s run up to the church tower with Mags’s Nexus to Google it.’
