Farm Fatale (18 page)

    Mark's deranged and violent stare was all the answer she needed. Looking down again, his fingers began to storm over the keyboard.

    Heaving her bag of compost on her shoulder, Rosie retired to the safety of the garden. Here, at least, it was relatively silent. The children seemed to prefer running up and down the lane in front to being at the back, but, given the condition their garden was in, this was perfectly understandable. One peep over the wall that divided Number 2 from Number 3 had revealed a landscape of sprung and soggy sofas, abandoned stoves, broken concrete slabs, vast and lurid plastic barrels, and household rubbish of every imaginable description. It had made the garden of Number 2, even in its original condition, look like something by Capability Brown.

    Since starting to work on it, however, Rosie had managed to move mountains—of rubbish, at least. In the course of doing this, she had made a number of heartwarming discoveries. A long-buried stone path. An elderly lavender bush, which, once the ribbed plastic tube crushing and strangling it had been removed, had started to recover its strength.

    As geraniums seemed to be on permanent special offer at the garden center, Rosie had planted them everywhere, along with alyssum, lobelia, ivies, and marguerites. Under the wall dividing Number 2 from the Womersleys', she had made a tiny herb border, in which hebe, sage, and mint had not, as expected, given up and died immediately, but actually seemed to be flourishing. The mint in particular, inspiring fantasies of mint juleps and Pimms at sunset in the summer. The result of all this for Rosie was not only something firmly resembling a garden, but the discovery that she had far greener fingers than she had ever suspected.

    That most of the time they were black with soil was not a problem. What was, was that they were no longer black with ink. It was increasingly hard to ignore the fact that, since arriving at Eight Mile Bottom, illustration work had practically dried up. New commissions were, for some reason, much harder to drum up than Rosie had anticipated, despite the many assurances the magazine art editors had given her before she left London. The suspicion that her lack of work was related to her having moved beyond the magic boundary of the capital was one she tried hard to suppress. Even a particularly promising book illustration project, spawned from a party invitation design and practically in the bag when they had lived on Craster Road, seemed recently to have drifted as well.

    Rosie sighed as she pressed the ivies into pots. "Let Me Entertain Ewe" had been a ghastly enough party-invitation-card pun; the design Rosie had come up with to illustrate it, of three sheep doing the can-can, had, if anything, been worse. But the card company had been thrilled with it, and their parent corporation, a big children's publisher, even more so. They had been on the brink of commissioning Rosie to illustrate a whole book based on the characters just before she and Mark had moved to Eight Mile Bottom. Since then, communications had gone dead. "We'll call you back," the previously keen editor would assure her, then conspicuously fail to do so.

    Watering her plants, Rosie made a concerted effort not to think either about this or the precarious state of their finances in general. Mark had never been keen to share with her the fiscal arrangements surrounding "Green-er Pastures," and she had tried hard not to press him. But when she finally did, it was a shock to discover that not only was the fee a pittance, but a pittance forming more or less their entire income.

    "For Christ's sake, this is a great opportunity for me, Rosie," Mark had exploded defensively. "I can't expect to be paid a fortune as well."

    "It certainly is a great opportunity," Rosie returned hotly. "For the paper to set a record low in freelance rates."

    That it was Mark's big break, she was less sure. The column was actually showing alarming signs of becoming his big breakdown. It had not escaped her notice that he seemed to be having problems getting material together. Yet none of the subjects she suggested— Duffy, the Womersleys, the Barley Mow, all apparently bursting with rural color and humor—seemed to interest him.

    "I'll decide what goes in my column," he would snap. "Anyway, isn't it time you started drumming up some work of your own? You're spending far too much time—let alone money—in that bloody garden."

    Rosie, heavyhearted, pulled some weeds from around the base of the lavender. Still, at least the Womersleys appreciated her efforts. Both devoted to their own pristine patch, they were delighted at Rosie's attempts to improve the scruffy plot of land behind Number 2 and had started slipping cuttings from their own garden over the wall to her. "Here," Mrs. Womersley would say, thrusting a plant in a plastic pot at Rosie. "Have one of these."

    The key to Mrs. Womersley's gardening success, Rosie had discovered, was relatively simple. "Slug pellets."

    "But isn't that a bit cruel? I mean, shouldn't you use beer traps and eggshells and things?"

    "Cruel?" The old lady's eyes were steely. "Ever seen what they can do to a garden?"

    Mr. Womersley, meanwhile, was a passionate vegetable grower. "These is my prize-winning onions," he yelled at her one day, brandishing a white-skinned bulb of frightening proportions over the fence at her.

    Rosie remembered the village show notices pinned up around the bar at the Barley Mow. "Of course. And didn't you win the potato class as well?"

    "
Taters
?" Mr. Womersley looked disgusted. "I'd never grow taters, not as long as I live." Rosie, who had not realized she was casting aspersions, racked her brain for a soothing remark. But it was too late. Anxious to distance himself from what he plainly considered the lowest root vegetable of the low, Mr. Womersley had plenty more to say on the matter. "Do y'know," he added contemptuously, "some tater folk have special tater boxes built, so they can carry their prize specimens around with them? Ridiculous, I call it."

    "You really should put the Womersleys in the column," Rosie urged Mark, having repeated the story over the pasta and pesto that now comprised the evening meal with such alarming frequency that she was seriously beginning to wonder about scurvy.

    Her hopes rose when, instead of dismissing her out of hand as usual, Mark looked thoughtful. "I was thinking of something I could do with them," he admitted.

    "Really?"

    "Yes, they could be in my syndicate."

    "What's a syndicate?" Rosie asked. Was Mark considering the national lottery as a way out of their problems? "They don't seem the betting kind," she hazarded.

    "Not a betting syndicate, a news syndicate," Mark said impatiently. "You know," he added as Rosie continued to look blank, "where you get together and take it in turns to go to the newsagent's to collect and deliver everyone's papers. Syndicates work really well. There's a flourishing one in the Lake District apparently."

    "But…" It was hard to imagine Mrs. Womersley agreeing to go all the way to the nearest newsagent's—as far away as the next village, as Mark had discovered to his disgust—and staggering back, presumably on the infrequent local bus, with the entire pile of nationals that constituted Mark's Sunday reading. Rosie sighed. Would an ever-rising tower of yellowing broadsheets be as permanent a feature of their new home as it had been of their old? Apparently not: Rosie tried to disguise her relief—as well as her amusement—when Mark returned the next morning from making over-the-wall representations with the news that the old lady got all the information she wanted from the village newsletter and a good deal that she didn't from the postman.

***

As Rosie reluctantly scattered the most merciful slug pellets the garden center could offer sparingly under her newly planted gooseberry bushes (oh, the pies, crumble, and jam she planned!), the back door suddenly opened and Mark blinked into the wintry sunlight. Rosie quailed, expecting just the furious speech about the neighbors she had come out here to avoid. But he merely said, "Phone for you."

    She slowly followed him in, crossing her fingers that it wasn't the bank manager again. Still worse, the building society.

    Five minutes later she bounced ecstatically back into the kitchen. "Remember that illustrated book those publishers were talking to me about?"

    Mark shook his head. His eyes did not move from his laptop screen.

    "Remember that 'Let Me Entertain Ewe' card I did a while ago? That spinoff book? Well, its finally come off. They were just waiting to get a writer, it turns out, and now it's got the go-ahead. They want it to be about a globe-trotting sheep, called
A Ewe in New York…
" Rosie paused. Mark was not reacting. "They're, um, offering quite a bit of money as well. We can do the roof."

    Even the determinedly optimistic picture the building society surveyor had painted of Number 2 Cinder Lane hadn't quite been able to ignore the fact that when you poked your head through the loft opening in the bedroom ceiling, it looked like the black night sky scattered with vast and brilliant stars. Each star being the most enormous hole. In addition, the wind whistling through the gaps resulted in large quantities of roof grit being deposited into the room below. Rosie and Mark were now used to waking to find their hair and pillows full of debris; brushing the bed before they got in was as much of a nighttime ritual as brushing their teeth.

    "The only thing is," Rosie said musingly, "I'll need some more animals to base the characters on. Cows and sheep to sketch and so on. What I need is a friendly farmer."

    "No such thing, is there?" grumbled Mark.

    "Let's go to the Barley Mow to celebrate," Rosie suggested. Now that money was on the horizon, they could afford a variation in diet. Ann's fish pie, for example. And the pub would be a good place to start inquiring who might have sketchworthy sheep and cattle.

    "Been away, have you?" Alan hailed them as they walked through the door. Rosie shook her head and smiled, reluctant to admit to the whole pub that it had been penury and not Portofino that accounted for their absence.

    "Oops. 'Scuse me," Alan said, diving to answer the ringing phone in the kitchen. "Yes, on today," Rosie heard him assuring someone.

    "These two old ladies," he explained, returning to the bar, "ring up on Wednesdays, regular as clockwork, to check that we've got liver on the menu. Addicted to the stuff, they are. Me and Ann call 'em the Liver Birds."

    "Hate liver, I do," interrupted the man with the white beard, arriving at the bar with a man with a very long, very red, and very wet-looking nose. "Vile stuff. Couldn't eat it. Not even with gravy."

    "Met someone called Vile once, I did," Alan chipped in. "'Vile by name and vile by nature I am,' she told me. She was about twenty stone and said she hadn't taken her makeup off for two years. Mind you, she thought she was gorgeous. Said the bloke next door was a Peeping Tom who'd drilled a hole in the fence so he could look at her legs when she walked down to the outside toilet."

    There was an impressed silence at this. The man with the long nose sniffed. "Your nose is running," said the man with the white beard. "You'd best wipe it."

    "You wipe it," said Long Nose. "You're nearer."

    Shoulders shaking, Rosie nudged Mark. He had missed the whole bizarre exchange. At least he was very obviously not listening to it.

    "Do you know any friendly farmers?" Rosie asked Alan as, some time later, he deposited a huge and delicious-smelling mound of fish pie on the table in front of her.

    "Now there's a leading question," said Alan, eyes twinkling. "I know some pretty strange ones, that's for sure."

    "You bloody would," muttered Mark under his breath.

    "There's some who run a farm two villages away," continued Alan in his quick, high voice. "Family of eight brothers and sisters, who no one ever sees. Avoid people, they do. They're very shy."

    "How do you mean?" Rosie's eyes were round with curiosity. She spoke emphatically to alert Mark to a possible story. Mark, however, positively radiated indifference.

    "Put it this way." Alan pulled up a bar stool. "When the postman tried to deliver a parcel there recently, they wouldn't even open the door."

    "Very sensible of them," interjected Mark sourly.

    "He looked through the letterbox and saw eight pairs of shoes crouched under the kitchen table," continued Alan, unabashed. "Well, I say shoes, but they were pretty strange shoes. Sort of medieval. They wear what their remote ancestors wore, you see. Sort of medieval jerkins and hats as well."

    "Sounds familiar," said Mark bitterly. He was, Rosie knew, thinking of Cinder Lane.

    "And they haven't been to bed for sixty years," Alan added, clearly getting into his stride. Mark made a strangled noise of disbelief.

    "Impossible," said Rosie.

    "Not if you live on Cinder Lane, it bloody isn't," muttered Mark.

    "No, they all sleep upright in armchairs, you see," Alan explained. "Keep the same hours as their cattle. And their dogs sleep in a tree. And the last time one of the sisters appeared in public, she was walking backward down the village street, strangling a rat in a bucket."

    Rosie looked eagerly at Mark. If this wasn't color, she didn't know what was.

    "I think," Mark said, seizing his plate of liver and mash and standing up abruptly, "that I'll finish my lunch outside."

    They walked back to the cottage in silence. Rosie escaped immediately into the garden and went to admire the cattle over the back wall. Gold, white, and auburn backs swaying together, they presented a timeless picture. Looking at their noble heads bowed contentedly to the hillside grass, Rosie felt soothed.