Mrs Fytton's Country Life

by Mavis Cheek

  Her son had put the woofer back into his hi-fi. She lay there wondering whether to get up and remove it - yet again - but she just could not be bothered. Somewhere else in the house she heard Claire on the telephone. It was two in the morning. Ah well...

  Archie sat up in bed and nudged his wife. 'Did you hear anything?' he said.

  'Like what?' she asked innocently.

  'Like banging?'

  ‘It'll be those Travellers’ she said. 'They'll be fixing their vans.'

  'At midnight?'

  'It's a bright moon’ she said.

  Archie decided not to go into it any further. 'Did the solicitor send the stuff?' he said. 'What stuff?'

  'Should have been here today.'

  ‘I know.' She smiled contentedly to herself and settled back down to sleep. Beneath her pillow an envelope crackled.

  Out in the moonlight Sammy Lee pushed another piece of wood into place and stood back to admire the structure. Get six in there easily when he'd finished. Just for a week or two his pigs would have to squash up a little and not take so many baths. He set to with the hammer again, whistling under his breath and thinking that one good thing about being on your own and growing old was that if there was no one to go a-wooing, you no longer had to put your false teeth in all the time. And if that was all he could come up with, he decided, it was a very sad day. He made the covered part of the sty secure and waterproof. Just in case.

  8

  May

  The trouble with the rat race is that even if you win, you're still a rat.

  lily tomlin

  Alan Bushman, of Pinnocks estate agency, winked at his soon-to-be-wife Camilla. She tossed her mane of blonde hair in response. Like a fine young filly, he thought, pleased. Somehow, he had always known that a Camilla completed the picture, squared the circle, iced the cake. Girls called Camilla were bred not born, and that she, O joy, out of all the suitable young men in her milieu, should choose him was a piece of fortune in which he daily rejoiced. His transmogrification was almost complete. Once the bond was tied with the well-connected Camilla, he would be serving Chateau Margaux and sausages along with the rest of them. The moment she said, ‘I do’ these people would be his sort too. He could see it now, the pearly white paper, the engraved lettering, Mr and Mrs Alan Bushman, Church Ale House, Overstaithe, Somerset. He sighed. Mission accomplished.

  Where to live had been a tricky one. His deceased father, so Bushman junior maintained in a wonderful fabrication, had lost his shirt, in the shape of the family home in Berkshire, to gambling and fast women. So no shame there, then. He almost believed it. But it did leave the tricky matter of the marital home. He could hardly move Camilla into a semi in Taunton. It had to be the country. And it had to be convincingly potential. And it had to be cheap. She was, after all, the bearer of a few drops of Devereux blood - the last - and though considered a little weak in the head, she would require decent stabling. Then Church Ale House came on the market and there was the answer.

  Of course, it had disadvantages. It needed extending, but he had the right contacts to smooth the path for that. And there was no land to speak of - maybe an acre and a half in all - but the Perrys would probably let him buy the adjoining field eventually. That would give them what could very properly be described as the paddock. For the ponies. When the children came along. And a pool room for him in the outbuildings. He would call it Camilla's project, the house. And she would spend her dowry on it. Or her father would.

  Today, for the first time, he would show his intended her future home. The big surprise. She loved surprises. Practically whinnied over therri. He had won, he had won. He had crossed the social divide and he would never look back: In six weeks' time she would say, 'I do.' As an estate agent, he knew the pitfalls of counting your chickens, but now, contracts almost exchanged, he could hold her back no more.

  'Darling, it is time that you saw our future home.'

  She practically galloped across the room to hug him when he told her.

  'Oh, yummy,' she said. 'Yummy...'

  'Yes,' he said. 'It will be a project for you. A great big project, darling.'

  'A project,' she repeated, tossing her head again and again to show her pleasure.

  She might have added 'At last.' After school her parents, a little at a loss, sent their daughter on a design and deportment course in Kensington. One, as she proudly pointed out, that included flower-arranging. She had never actually used the skills learned, but he could now honourably persuade her to make Church Ale House her very first commission. Somerset was particularly cool about planning permission. She could bash it about to her heart's content in the name of interior design - thereby drawing a veil over the fact that he could not possibly afford the otherwise required alternative, which was to employ a real one.

  Now, here they were, rounding the bend of the Mump Road, on this glorious late spring day, and Camilla had her hands over her eyes as per instructions.

  'Don't open them yet,' he said, pulling in by the old holly hedge at the roadside. He would install an electric gate.

  He switched off the engine. And he sniffed. And then Camilla sniffed. And then Camilla, still with her hands over her eyes, said, ‘I smell piggies,' rather anxiously. 'Do you?'

  And Alan Bushman, though betrothed to her, very nearly said something extremely curt in reply, since to not smell piggies, given the density of the piggy smell, would have required removal of the entire nasal area.

  He sniffed even harder and got out of the car. He very nearly gagged, the air was so rich with the scent of continual porcine dumping. He went up to the gate, sniffing like a bloodhound. The smell was stronger somewhere to the left of the house. He walked along the side of the hedge, still with his nose in the air. And when the holly hedge ended and the field began, he saw whence the rich, disgusting smell came. There was a sty full of the creatures and they seemed to have taken a leaf out of the Entala warriors' bible - to wit, covering yourself in excrement wards off evil spirits. He stared. One or two of them stared back, equally impolitely. But since he carried nothing in the way of a bucket or stick for either of those twin delights of feeding or ear-scratching, they soon lost interest and resumed rooting.

  It would have been quite difficult for any passing phoneti-cist to distinguish between the grunting emanating from the piggery and that emanating from the viewer of the piggery. Both had an inhuman quality. Though to be sure, the grunts of the former held a quality of contentment quite absent from the noises made by the latter.

  Still grunting, Alan Bushman gripped the old five-barred gate and stared into the field. The sty had the look of age about it. Yet he knew very well that when he last viewed the property, no such sty existed. He looked about him. Not a human soul in view. He returned to the gate leading to the front door of Church Ale House. Passing his car he saw Camilla, still sitting with her hands over her eyes. Irritation rose. 'You can open them now,' he said, less kindly than usual.

  She crept out, looking about her fearfully.

  'Darling,' he said, 'your future home awaits.'

  'But the smell’ she said. And she appeared to gag.

  'Temporary.' He waved his hand confidently. And opened the gate. And strode up the path. And banged very, very hard on the front door.

  Which was opened, eventually, by the owner's wife. Who informed him that her husband was not there. That she owned just as much of the house as he did. And that people could do what they liked with their own property until the ink was dry, she supposed. And so saying, the three of them made their slow way around the house.

  Every window was open. Every door was ajar.

  On remonstration, the owner's wife said, 'What smell?' And then, 'Oh, you get used to it.' If she had told them that these pigs not only had wings but took passengers, they could not have been more sceptical.

  'Sammy Lee's pigs are champions,' said Mrs Perry innocently. 'It is very traditional. He's been using that field for hundreds of years.'

  Even
Camilla, reckoned to be a couple of gemstones short of a tiara, blinked at this.

  Mrs Perry realized that she had become a little carried away. 'His family, that is.'

  Camilla's eyes were large and wet above the scarf. You have let me down, was what Alan Bushman read there.

  'Mrs Perry,' he said, 'could we cut across the red tape? My fiancee and I would like to purchase the field, along with this lovely old house, and I can offer you . . .' He named a tidy sum. 'Without the field, I'm afraid the deal's off.'

  Mrs Perry smiled at him with complete understanding. 'Don't you worry. I'll have a word with him’ she said. 'Now, how about a little nip of my mulberry wine and a ginger snap?'

  But the couple declined. Indeed Camilla, keeping the scarf pressed to her nose, declined very forcefully, pressing her free hand into her stomach area and making a little gulping noise.

  Mrs Perry gave her a kindly smile. 'Ah’ she said, 'expecting, are you?'

  Camilla shook her head violently and, for want of any better way to communicate, crossed her eyes.

  'We are not yet married’ said Alan Bushman, with dignity.

  From behind the-silk and Givenchy came a guttural yawp that indicated that there might be something up with his use of the term.

  Yet...

  In the car Alan Bushman closed all the windows and put on his best cheerful voice, the one he had discovered he owned many years ago when, on showing a client around a spanking new barn conversion and closing the front door a little briskly, the entire lintel, arch and lodestone had fallen in on the potential purchaser. To which his quicksilver response was, 'What luck. I'm sure they'll lower the price substantially after that.' To which the client's quicksilver response was entirely unrepeatable.

  Now to his wife-to-be, much as one might inquire of Jackie Kennedy if, despite all that, she thought Dallas a pleasant town, Alan Bushman said, 'Darling Camilla, isn't it the best house in the world?'

  And she, whinnying through her scarf, with a depth of voice he had not known she possessed, just said, 'Drive...'

  Archie Perry received a letter from A. Bushman. Archie Perry wrote a letter in reply. You might give up the house, he thought, but you never gave up all the land. Not if you can possibly help it.

  He then walked down to the letter box by the side of the road and, coming back, rested himself on the five-barred gate, gazing at the pigs. Sam was losing his grip too, then? He had never let his pigs get in such a mess before. Perhaps that old eye of his was roving again, even now. His father had said it to him, and his father before: Never trust a pigman. Should have listened. But she'd be safe with him in the bungalow. At last.

  Of Alan Bushman and the lovely Camilla they heard no more. And neither, quite rightly, shall we.

  9

  June

  I love children, especially when they cry, for then someone takes them away.

  nancy mitford

  Angela sat between two highly articulate furniture removal men as the van rumbled its way down the motorway. Having exhausted the subject of castration for paedophiles and the usefulness of bombing the Chinese in the matter of regaining Hong Kong, they fell to more domestic subjects. 'So’ said one, 'moving, are you?'

  Angela felt the usual female helplessness in the face of such a question. She longed to say, 'No, just fancied a day out in a furniture van.' But instead she said, 'Yes,' and stared fixedly down the road to the west. When you needed the muscle of men, it was no time to start playing around with wit. You bet, she thought, that out there on the savannah, 15,000 years ago, no woman in her right mind would have made anything but humble obeisance until she'd taken delivery of her dripping lump of meat. It was, she supposed, the same oil driving the masculine engine that takes a wench out for dinner, fills and refills her glass, and then nods sagely at her confident pronouncements on the benefits of shooting all cripples on sight until he's successfully got his leg over. She had let the paedophiles and the Chinese go without a murmur. Why object to anything else? So Angela Fytton merely stared on, smiling and silent.

  'Wouldn't get me moving down there’ said one. 'Nor me’ said the other.

  'Country people are nicer than town people’ she began.

  The driver looked at her peevishly.

  If she wanted her furniture delivered without incident, she thought, she must stay humble. It's such a lovely day,' she added lamely.

  'Very backward they are, in the country,' said the young one.

  She closed her eyes and pretended to doze. About her mouth played a little smile of reverie. One might even construe it as smug. When in doubt, drift off into a pleasing memory. So she did.

  She was smiling and remembering the dinner at which she announced her impending move to Church Ale House to her ex-husband and her children. These latter, bang on developmental target, were currently the wholly self-centred fruits of her womb. She chose the Depot, on the river at Mortlake, useful if it all got too hot and she needed to throw herself in; close enough to home if she was made to walk back. A distinct possibility. For they assembled like three innocent little carefree skittles ready to be bowled over.

  Once seated, the first thing Ian said was, 'You've put on weight.' The second thing he said was, 'It suits you.' The thrust of which latter did not ease the delivery of the former. She was riled. But she let them be served. She let those happy skittles chat for a while and eat their first course in peace.

  Only when they were halfway through their confit de canard did she begin.

  ‘I am moving to the country. To Somerset.'

  Ian looked unimpressed. Nothing would come of it. Like her notion to go and live on a Greek island, or to move to Venice and write a biography of Tintoretto's wife.

  'His wife?'

  'His wife.'

  'But why?

  'Why not?'

  'Because it's the painter they'll be interested in!' 'If Virginia Woolf can write about Elizabeth Browning's dog..’

  Of course she never did. His ex-wife was a brilliant pragmatist, not a cultural radical.

  He smiled placidly. Dear Angela, what a good wife she had been. He had tried to be as generous as possible in the settlement because he respected how much he owed her. He could not help falling in love elsewhere. And that was, really, that. But he was still fond of her, very fond of her, and she was still the mother of these. He looked at the two great teenagers fondly. They were going to be terrific, terrific. And he got on with them really well. He was looking forward to having more children. Only this weekend, in one of the supplements, he read that he was genetically programmed to do so. And with a younger mate. It was biology. So it was odds on, really, that if Angie didn't want any more he might look elsewhere. Not that it had been conscious at all, but it did help to know that it was in his genes and older than time. It wasn't his fault he couldn't have children himself. He rather envied women. Women really were wonderful. He had always thought so. But it was, still, a man's world. He'd employed enough women and then lost them to their pregnancies to know that. If you wanted continuity in the marketplace, get a man. Once he might have denied this; a few years into his own business and it had dawned. Not everyone was as able as his ex-wife. What a juggler she had been. Frighteningly good at everything. Frighteningly. The new one was very fluffy in comparison. Dear Angela.

  Angela returned the smile. 'I really thought I had lost it’ she said. 'And then - well, it was a miracle. I went down a second time and - hallelujah - it was mine...'

  With, she must confess, a little drop taken, she began telling them all about Church Ale House. It was more than a little drop, she now realized, because she kept referring to her purchase as 'O Lustworthy Place' and squinting suggestively at her ex-husband as if it were a brothel. Smiling placidity gave way to arousal. Ian looked - quite satisfyingly-alarmed.

  Good, she thought. Good...

  She watched the waiter clearing away the plates as she told them about that second visit. The drive down had been so mournful, and the day so full of d
rizzle and grey, that she arrived feeling damp and cold and miserable. The owner opened the door with a smile like the sun and told her that her lovely home, O Lustworthy Place, was back on the market. It was hers if she still wanted it.

  'The Gods take care of the good,' she said, fixing Ian with a look.