The Village Fate

by William Hadley

  “So what are we going to do to help you get fitter?” Claudilia asked. “Not that you need to. But there must be something you can do that doesn’t involve dressing up and making yourself a laughing stock. How come you can’t use her gym anyway?”

  “She says all the equipment is set up just the way she likes it, and that damned woman, Tish the trainer, has said it needs to stay that way for her to get the best results. I paid for it all, you would think I would be allowed in there from time to time.” Angus sipped his coffee and chomped on a biscuit.

  “So what do you like to do, what can you do that works up a bit of a sweat.”

  Angus smiled. “Well, there is that I suppose. But it’s been a while, and she’s moved me into the spare room because of my snoring.”

  Claudilia smiled and wondered what it would be like to help him lose a few pounds that way.

  “Okay, okay. Apart from that, what can we do?”

  Angus noticed that she’d said “we”, and with some shock realised he quite liked the sound of it. “I like to get out in the country, that’s one of the reasons I moved here. I like the smell, the feel, the sun on my face in the summer and the crisp winter’s days. Sometimes you can almost taste the air, it’s so clean. And the noises of nature are so much better than taxis, emergency sirens and underground trains. I’d rather be held up behind a tractor than waiting for a hairy arsed lorry driver to turn across two lanes of stationary traffic into a building site between fifty storey office blocks.”

  “Wow, that was quite a speech, you’ve been thinking about this haven’t you.”

  “Yes I guess I have, but not intentionally. I love it here and so do the kids.” A brief shadow of sadness crossed his face. “When they’re here anyway, but Maggie insists that boarding school is better for them. And she’s talking about us moving back to London. She says it’s too quiet here, too rural and she misses the social life.”

  More coffee, another biscuit. “Did you know she has a brother? He’s called Trevor. He’s a stage director or something like that. He lives in New York and he’s gay. He lives in Greenwich village with his partner who happens to be a personal trainer. Maggie wants us to go over there so I can get some health tips from Toni with an “i”. By the way, he’s very big in colonic irrigation. Maggie wants to do some shopping at the same time, as if we don’t have shops in England.”

  “It sounds hideous. Expensive, perverted and hideous.”

  “My feeling exactly. I can’t see the point in flying across the Atlantic, first class of course, so some fairy can pump warm soapy water into my arse and then tell me to eat more kale and asparagus. Maggie will be busy wasting God knows how much money on shoes she’s never going to wear and we we’ll be dragged out each evening to see some experimental production in a flea pit of a theatre somewhere terrible.”

  “You’re not enthusiastic then?”

  “Whatever gave you that idea? I don’t know what I’m going to do. I’ll have to invent some business appointment in London at the last minute, something that can’t be missed. I’ll send Maggie on her own and try not to cry when the credit card bill arrives.”

  “Well whatever you choose, I’m sure you’ll make the right decision. If you need a cover story, just let me know and I’ll do what I can.”

  Angus collected his shoes and sat down again to put them on. “I’ve been out long enough to cover her majesty’s route I think. If I’m lucky she’ll be in the gym with terrible Tish and they won’t notice I’m back. I’ll have a shower and disappear down to the office.” Angus stood. “Just one thing though, if you happen to see her, remember I haven’t been here won’t you.”

  “How can I remember I haven’t seen you when you weren’t here to not see,” said Claudilia. Looking at her watch she continued, “I must get up to my office too. The grape vine is bound to be in full swing by now and they’ll start inventing stories about yesterday’s accident to spice it up a bit.” She shuddered at the memory, as if it wasn’t bad enough without embellishment. “I want to nip it in the bud before they get too outlandish.”

  Angus moved in to hug Claudilia and kissed her on the cheek. Just then another tractor and trailer roared past on its way to the anaerobic digestion plant. The noise was deafening with the windows open and Angus looked horrified.

  “What on earth! Was that one of our tractors? Why haven’t you said something?”

  “It starts at about seven in the morning and often they are still passing after dark, I’d like to say you get used to it - but you don’t.”

  “I’ll do something about it right away. We can slow them down to start with, they shouldn’t be traveling that fast through the village. We’ll limit the time they can use this route too.” And with that he grabbed another biscuit, winked at Claudilia and waddled back to his bike.

  Claudilia tidied away the coffee things and put the left-over biscuits back in the barrel. She called Max from his place on the sofa … fine guard dog he is, a strangely dressed man comes into the house and the stupid mutt doesn’t move a muscle. I could have been ravaged - with a bit of luck. On the way to the office they gave Pumpkin his morning apple and looked for signs of distress from the previous day’s excitement. Satisfied the horse was free of mental anguish she patted him on the neck and promised to be back later.

  It occurred to Claudilia that riding was her way of keeping fit, riding and swimming in the river. She wondered if Angus could ride, it would be good to show him around on horseback.

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  “I’d almost given up on you,” said Hubert when his sister walked into the office. “I thought you had gone down to the boat house for a couple of hours quiet fishing or something.”

  “Not at all. Angus turned up on a push bike of all things, all dressed in bright lycra and shoes that would cripple any normal person. It’s Mrs Muck’s idea, she wants him to lose weight and get fit, so she’s dressing him up like a fairy and sending him out on bike rides. Then expecting him to be grateful. I took pity and offered the poor sod coffee and biscuits. We chatted for a while, that’s all.”

  “I’m going over there later today, the council are delivering the trial skip-load and I want to have a look at what we’re dealing with. I’ll take the chipper and set it up, we might run some of the material through if it all looks good.”

  “I was thinking about that. Will the smell be a problem, if it goes ahead that is.” Claudilia asked.

  “I’ve read about this on the internet. We might need some short term sealed containers, just in case, but so long as the material’s processed within a day or two of delivery then no, it won’t cause us any trouble.”

  “Your using the “us” word again Hubert. Remember we haven’t seen his books yet. Don’t go getting too emotionally sold on the idea, at least not before looking at the figures.”

  “Okay.” He sighed. “Try this. Smells will not be a problem for the company, whoever it is that ends up running the facility, as long as it’s done with care.”

  “That’s better.”

  “Do you want to come?”

  “No, I’m going to check on the spring barley in the big field, the one on the far side of Monk hill. But if you see Angus would you do something for me. Would you ask if he knows how to ride a horse?”

  “Okay but why?”

  “Because a horse is much more dignified than a bicycle.”

  Their conversation changed tack as Sally came into the office with coffee. She wanted to know about the accident, she wanted details, gore and all. She was fascinated by how the body changed appearance when stung by so many bees. She wondered out loud how much poor Tony would have been able to feel. Claudilia remembered Tony telling her that it would take about a thousand stings to kill a fully grown adult, if he was in good health. As few as one if he had an allergy.

  “As there were about fifty thousand bees in the hive we can assumed that quite a few got to him quickly. It wouldn’t have been nice, but it would have been fast.”
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br />   Claudilia’s mind wasn’t on the job, and she decided not to stay at the office for more than an hour or so. She went through the post, there seemed to be much less these days, and then attended to her email. If the postbag was shrinking then the number of emails she got each day was more than making up for it. She answered a few customer questions, confirmed an appointment with her dentist, and thanked the friends who had written to check she was okay. Yes, she was fine and no, she’d not been injured. Yes, Pumpkin was fine too and no, she didn’t want them to come over and talk about it or go to their house for a chat. Ghouls the lot of them, she thought as she cleared the emails into the trash and closed down her PC.

  Just after one o’clock she left the office and, with Max trotting behind her went back to the stables, where she changed into her riding clothes. The afternoon ride wasn’t very satisfactory. First Max kept getting in the way and she thought he’d be trodden on. Then a fool of a walker had left a gate open and some of the sheep had gone through to nibble the barley. At last, when she’d herded them back in their own field, she confirmed her original worry. The barley had a large amount of wild oats and blackgrass coming through between the plants, it would need a spray with herbicide soon or the crop would be crowded out.

  Claudilia chatted to Pumpkin and Max about the problem, then made a note to talk to Bill and Alistair about sprays. Claudilia often thought her dog and her horse were better listeners than people, they never answered back, never butted in and could be trusted with all of her secrets. Today her mind was elsewhere and her heart wasn’t in it, so after the briefest of inspections she turned Pumpkin for home. By three o’clock she was drinking tea in the tack room and the horse was in his field.

  Claudilia walked back to Bindweed Cottage. On her right she could see Pumpkin munching on grass, and further across, Hubert’s tatty old Range Rover was bumping down the farm lane towing the new wood chipper…the one that’s so simple even I could use it, followed by a tractor with a loader on the front. “They’re on their way to Mackintosh Energy,” Claudilia said to Max, who lolloped along next to her.

  Claudilia had nothing urgent to do and she felt restless. She toyed with the idea of going to the boathouse for a row or a swim. Maybe she’d sit on the jetty and try to catch a fish or two. In the end she shut Max inside the house, grabbed her bicycle and went through the village in the direction the tractor and chipper had taken. She peddled fast, but not so fast she’d arrive in a puddle of sweat, after all she’d seen how unflattering that had looked on Angus just a few hours earlier.

  Hubert and Angus were standing in the yard and talking like only two blokes can. They leaned on the chipper which had been set up near to the loading bay for the digester. Hubert’s tractor driver was making some adjustments to the machine, its delivery shoot was pointing straight into the hopper for the anaerobic tank. A short way off, a skip which must have been the one Hubert had told his sister about, appeared to be overflowing with kitchen waste. Claudilia could see vegetable peelings, small lumps of meat and all manner of other material; it was a warm afternoon and there was an unpleasant smell coming from the heap. An ominous cloud of black flies were buzzing above the it.

  “It’s a bit ripe Angus,” said Claudilia.

  “Yes, well this load has been hanging around for a few days at the council depot,” said Angus. “When we go into production, material will be delivered from the council in sealed tanks on the day of processing. We’ll just break it open when we’re ready to feed the digester.”

  Their conversation was interrupted by the roar of a diesel engine, the chipper had come to life.

  “My God Hubert, how powerful is that thing?” shouted Angus, trying to make himself heard above the howl of the engine.

  “It’s two hundred and forty horsepower. They make one of over five hundred but this will handle a tree trunk twelve nches across. I don’t think the odd chicken bone is going to be a problem.”

  They all moved back a few steps as the driver got into his cab and, using the hydraulic grab on the telescopic loader, plucked a giant fistful of material from the skip. It hung, dripping liquid back onto the heap, until he swung it across and deposited it into the business end of the chipper. The tone of the motor didn’t change, the conveyor eased the material forward and it disappeared between rotating knives. Almost at once, a fine jet of liquid was sprayed from the shoot, landing in the centre of the feedstock hopper. The chopping ability of the machine was impressive, it looked as if their trial would be a success.

  “We can’t put kitchen waste in on its own, if we want the quality of the gas and the speed it’s generated to remain constant. We’ll need to mix it with silage,” Angus shouted over the noise of the motor. A second tractor had delivered a load of silage from the clamp, and it mixed with the food waste. “To keep it fed all night we can put up to twenty tonnes into that mini hopper over there.” Angus pointed at a container with a belt leading to the main feed station. “It releases material throughout the night when the sensor in the main hopper gets down to a set level. It’s much quieter and means we don’t need people working here twenty-four hours a day.”

  “You mean it keeps generating gas, even when you’re not here, it just looks after itself?” said Hubert.

  “Yes, we fill the hopper at five o’clock and then when the last person leaves, around six or half past, they switch the feed belt on and it runs through the night. Most mornings there will be a bit left in the tank when we get in, I think it could feed itself for about eighteen hours if you left it alone.”

  “But you still need staff at weekends don’t you? That’s expensive,” said Claudilia.

  “No, if we haven’t got deliveries of fresh feedstock coming we just load the hoppers in the morning and again in the evening. We don’t need to stand here and watch it work,” Angus answered. “The monitoring is all electronic and if there is a problem, for instance the gas pressure falls too low, it automatically sends a text alert to the person on call. They take it in turns to be available and so far it has worked very well.”

  “But you’re taking deliveries seven days a week at the moment, aren’t you?” said Claudilia.

  “Yes, everyone is making silage and delivering it to us. We’re getting six or seven deliveries an hour.”

  “I know,” groaned Claudilia, “they all come past my house.”

  “Yes, well it won’t be for much longer, and I’ve instructed the drivers who come through the village that they’re not to deliver before eight in the morning and to keep their speed under twenty miles an hour. That’ll keep the noise down a bit.”

  “Right. I’d love to stand and chat but I have a plane to catch,” said Angus.

  Claudilia looked surprised. “A plane, where to?”

  “I’m flying to Inverness. I’m off to the Highlands. An old friend from the city’s picking me up at Wellesbourne air field, we’re joining a shooting party for the weekend.”

  “Is Maggie going with you?”

  “God no. She can’t stand the Highlands, won’t set foot north of Carlisle if she can avoid it. Anyway I want to enjoy myself and I can’t do that if I’m limited to a diet of couscous, lettuce and sparkling water, not to mention all that meditation and Tai chi.”

  Hubert tried not to laugh. “meditation and tai chi!”

  “I said not to mention it,” laughed Angus. “It’s her latest thing, it goes with the bloody cycling and vegetarian diet, apparently I have to get my mind fit as well as my body.” He looked dejected for a moment. “But this weekend I’ve said to hell with it all. I’m off for two days of massacring birds by day and gastronomic gluttony by night.”

  “Just one thing Angus before you go,” Said Claudilia before he walked away. “Can you ride a horse?”

  Angus turned and looked at her. “What?”

  “Can you ride a horse? Big thing with four feet and metal shoes. Teeth at one end, tail at the other. Shit comes out to put on roses and rhubarb, you can have custard if you like, on rhubar
b, not roses. Custard on roses wouldn’t do at all. So, can you ride one Angus? A horse.”

  “Well yes. I guess so, but it’s been a few years and even then it was only a few times at a riding stable. I didn’t fall off and it generally went in the direction I asked it to.”

  “That’s good enough,” she said, and left it at that.

  Claudilia and Hubert walked back to where his car was parked. With care she’d rested her bike against the front wing, not wanting to add to the impressive collection of scratches and dents.

  “Are you coming for dinner?” Hubert asked his sister.

  “I was there last night; don’t you think Marie would prefer you to herself?”

  “Don’t be daft, and anyway I think she wants to talk to you about Helen. There’s something going on that I don’t understand. Probably some sort of boyfriend thing …I wouldn’t bet on it, and whatever it is, you’re much better at explaining stuff than I am. See you at seven, bring some of your disgusting wine if you like; and the dog, we may as well have the house full.”

  Hubert collected his tractor driver, they were leaving the loader where it was for the weekend. With a belch of black smoke from the exhaust, he pulled out onto the road and turned in the direction of the village.

  Claudilia got onto her bike and peddled around to the control panel of the chipper. The key was still in the ignition. There was a button to start and stop the blades and another to advance the short belt which moved material into the chamber. Hubert was right, it was simple, even she could see how to work it. She smiled and turned her bike towards the gate, but before she reached the road she was passed by Angus. He waved from behind the wheel of his near silent hybrid Porsche. The indicator flashed left and the petrol engine took over. It howled, four hundred and sixteen angry horses went from a gentle walk to full gallop at the touch of a peddle. The brake lights flashed on for a moment, then they were off again. The beast from Leipzig disappeared around the corner and the noise faded away. Claudilia smiled to herself, boys and their toys. Do they never grow up?