Farm Fatale (23 page)

    Costs like these, Mark knew, were out of the question. He and Rosie simply didn't have the money. Yet the editor wanted animals and animals he would have to have. In which case, the paper would have to pay for them. Mark sent off an email and girded his loins for the reply.

    "You must be bloody joking," shot back the editor. "When I want to blow that much money I'll take up polo."

***

Mark groaned. The morning was turning out to be a nightmare. The concussion incident had been bad enough, but there had also been the visit from the postman. Duffy had breezed in reciting the contents of two red bills and with the news that some film star in the village was planning a lavish party.

    "
Film star?
" exclaimed Mark, his celebrity sensors out on stalks and outraged at the thought that someone famous lived in the village and hadn't personally come round and introduced themselves.

    "Everyone who's anyone in the village is going." Duffy twisted the knife in the wound. "She's even asked Matt Locke."

    "Matt Locke?" wailed Mark. The fact that he had tried and failed to find any story whatsoever concerning the reclusive celebrity was a secret source of anguish. A Matt Locke quote or anecdote would have lifted "Green-er Pastures" into the stratosphere. Neither, however, had been forthcoming, and Mark dreaded the day the editor discovered a famous pop star lived within a hundred-mile radius of Eight Mile Bottom, let alone eight minutes outside it.

    "Not that he's sent his reply card back yet," Duffy added.

    "Who
is
this woman giving the party?" Mark demanded.

    "She's called Samantha Grabster."

    "Never heard of her. Still," Mark said with the air of one who knew all about these things, "I expect she has a different stage name."

    Mark sat staring at the door for several minutes after the postman's departure, grinding his teeth with agitation. "If anyone who's bloody anyone is going, why the hell hasn't she asked
me
? Doesn't she realize I work for a sodding newspaper? Doesn't she know
who
I am
?"

***

Rosie, walking slowly up the lane to Spitewinter, was also reflecting on a miserable morning. She was guiltily aware that, much as she needed to get on with the book drawings, the real reason she had left the cottage so early was to get away from Mark again. Any resemblance between the charming, handsome, witty companion she had shared the London flat with and the carping tyrant with whom she now found herself sharing a collapsing cottage seemed purely coincidental. Their sex life, once so satisfying, was history, as were the days when he spoke to her with anything approaching politeness.

    "Where's the bloody milk?" he had demanded that morning, violently rearranging the contents of the fridge.

    "We don't have any." Rosie sighed, the image of Jack and the feeding bottle springing suddenly to mind. "Honestly, don't you think it
would
be easier if we got it delivered?"

    Mark's refusal to have the milk delivered was meant to be an economy measure, but resulted only in rows about whose turn it was to go to the village shop to buy more. Worse than this, though, was his recent ban on visits to the Barley Mow.

    "But why?" demanded Rosie.

    "Waste of money. Not to mention dull."

    "Dull?" Conversation at the Barley Mow had struck Rosie several times as being far more amusing than that at London dinner parties. The story about Mrs. Vile, the legs, the hole in the fence, and the outside toilet still made her smile, as did Alan's rendition, performed on a more recent visit, of his ill-fated attempts to learn watchmending, parachuting, and ballroom dancing at evening classes. "I'd been paired up with the butcher's wife," Alan had said. "We're both supposed to be doing the quickstep but she starts to rhumba. So she trips me up in a rugby tackle, we both fall over, and I've got me hand trapped under her bust. Her husband runs over and says, 'Oy, what do you think you're bloody doing with me wife?'"

    "Dull," Mark had replied conclusively. "Do you think I've got time to sit around in pubs listening to people going on about ferrets, ballroom dancing, and inventing hen-racing competitions? I've got a column to write, in case you've forgotten. I need to think of material."

    "Milk deliveries," persisted Rosie, "would save you time and be more convenient." And hopefully put you in a better temper as well, she added silently.

    Mark looked at her suspiciously. "What, not getting enough of that sodding farmer even though you're seeing him every afternoon?" he snapped. "Want him round here every morning rattling his bottles as well, do you?"

"Don't exaggerate. It hasn't been every afternoon."

    Yet now, as she lifted the gate to the farmyard, Rosie admitted to herself that Mark had a point. Perhaps she was getting fitter, Rosie thought, but the walk to the farm seemed more enjoyable all the time. Furthermore,
A Ewe in New York was progressing at
an astonishing pace. She had made a couple of visits since the first, none of which had revealed any female inhabitant of Spitewinter beyond the dairy cows. Rosie was intrigued by this, and by the fact that Jack, rather than being out in the fields, was always in the farmyard when she arrived. It was almost as if he was waiting, expecting her, although he was careful always to look surprised when she appeared through the gate.

    Today, though, there was no sign of him. Confused by how disappointed she felt, Rosie started a systematic search of the outbuildings. He must be here somewhere.

    "Round the back of the house," called the low, gravelly voice, accompanied by Kate's familiar bark. Rosie walked quickly down a narrow, mossy alley along the side of the farmhouse to find Jack in the paved yard, bent before a chicken coop.

    As he looked up and smiled at her, her heart lurched unexpectedly. "Come over here and meet Wellington. She's a champion bird."

    "Really?" Rosie peered doubtfully through the wire at a large white hen pecking a tomato. It stopped, one scaly ivory leg raised, and blinked at her. "Champion at what?"

    "Hen racing, of course."

    The hen races at the pub, Rosie thought with a twist of the lips. The ones Mark didn't believe existed.

    "Big village tradition, it is," Jack said. "Everyone who's got hens enters them. But Wellington didn't win last year."

    "I know." Rosie grinned. "A rogue hen from Milton Keynes did."

    Jack looked impressed. "That's right." He stood up, brushing against her in the confined space. Acutely aware of how near he was, Rosie could almost feel the warmth of his skin, the faint peppery scent of his soap. As a blush rose unstoppably to her cheeks, she tried to combat it by summoning images of Mark at his most charming to her mind. Given recent form, it was difficult.

    "How's Oliver?" she muttered, looking up at him through the tousled blond strands of her bangs. Hopefully that way he wouldn't be able to see how red her face was.

    "Back in the field," said Jack. "Greedy little bugger, he is. Still, the quicker he grows, the quicker he'll be off my hands and on someone's Sunday dinner table."

    Rosie, shell-shocked, stared at Jack in horror. "But isn't he your pet?"

    "
Pet
? Of course he's not a pet. This is a livestock and dairy farm. All the animals here are raised for milk and meat."

    "But that's so cruel," Rosie gasped. "How
can
you send Oliver to a butcher? Or any lamb?"

    "You're a vegetarian, I take it." An edge of steel had crept into Jack's tone.

    Rosie nodded.

    "Have you ever considered that if they weren't reared for slaughter, lambs wouldn't exist at all?" Jack began to stride away from the hen coop in the direction of the sunny farmyard.

    "Wrong. What do you mean?" Rosie hurried after him. "They'd exist more, surely. If people like you weren't bent on slaughtering them all."

    "The only reason they're here is because there's a market for them. No one would bother breeding them if they couldn't sell them. No more than we'd bother to breed cows if we couldn't slaughter them for meat or sell their milk. Farming's a job. More than that, it's a way of life. What it isn't is a bloody hobby."

    "But it's so
wrong
," Rosie flung back, passionately. "Animals have rights. Including to be allowed to live."

    "And don't you think I've got a right to make a
living
?" Jack's voice was low and level. "On the land my family has farmed for hundreds of years?"

    "Not if you're killing animals for profit."

    "Profit!" Jack slapped a hand to his forehead. "Some farmers are dumping their sheep at RSPCA centers these days, that's how profitable animals are."

    He turned to look at her, his boot heels grinding stones into the ground, his eyes boring into her like lasers. With a stab of fear, Rosie recalled the hulking, intimidating, suspicious creature she had met on her first day at the farm. As she did so, she wished fervently she had kept her views on animal welfare to herself. A farmer, after all, was hardly likely to sympathize.

    But it was too late. "Have you any idea," Jack demanded, "what it's like to run a farm like this? Last year, I did the lambing singlehanded. There I was afterward, sitting in the bath at four in the morning, knackered and starving, eating baked beans out of a can. I almost gave up on the spot. And do you know why I didn't?"

    "No-o," muttered Rosie, unable to tear her eyes from his freezing Prussian-blue glare.

    "Because I bloody couldn't, that's why. An hour later, I had to go out and milk the dairy herd. And do you know what
that's
like?"

    Rosie dumbly shook her head, aware that she was about to find out.

    "It's like getting out of bed at five on a freezing morning only to be slapped repeatedly round the face by a shitty tail. It's like being casually stamped on by a South Devon or kicked through the door by a bad-tempered Galloway. If you're lucky. Because after they go back out to grass after a winter eating silage, guess what happens then?"

    "No idea," whispered Rosie.

    "Well, let me tell you," bellowed Jack. "Their system goes berserk and they shit all over you, that's what. And all for milk that doesn't even realize the cost of producing it. And it's all your bloody fault!" he shouted.

    "My fault?" Driven into the ground by the tremendous force of his indignation, she was almost prepared to believe that she, personally, was to blame for his woes.

    "Bloody rich yuppies like you. City types, getting everything from supermarkets, giving them the power to drive milk and meat prices to rock bottom. Then you move to the bloody countryside and send the property prices rocketing. Local families can't afford to live here anymore. Let alone bloody farmers."

    "I know," Rosie interrupted eagerly, seeing a chink of light at last and wanting to tell him how often she had this argument with Mark about the Muzzles. Tell him, too, that far from being a rich yuppie, she didn't have a bean in the world apart from those she had planted, more in hope than experience, in the garden border. She felt her hands begin to shake.

    Jack, however, was far from finished. "Don't you understand that it's livestock farmers like me that keep the countryside looking the way it does?" he hurled at her. "Green and pleasant and all that crap? The reason you bloody newcomers come here in the first place? People like you make me sick. You and that bloody stupid woman the other morning telling me my herd was too noisy.
Too noisy!
Someone else from the bloody city. Someone else who thinks the countryside's just Knightsbridge with sheep."

    Rosie was moving steadily backward down the yard.

    "Do you know what we call people like you round here?" Jack shouted.

    Rosie did not stay to find out.

Really, Samantha thought serenely, life was so perfect it was almost worrying. Even the maddening row the birds made, particularly those ridiculous bloody ducks on the pond, seemed less irritating than usual this morning. As the locks of the Jaguar slid back with their reassuringly expensive clunk, it half occurred to her to wonder about the proximity of good therapists. Just in case she came down with a nasty case of Paradise Syndrome.

    The refurbishment complete and all the major decisions having been made about the party, all that remained was to find something dazzling to wear. Samantha considered her wardrobe less than satisfactory, not least because the Harrods furniture deliveryman had smashed it hard against the low ceiling of The Bottoms' front door and had gone on to demolish two light fittings and a mirror as he carried it up the stairs. The theme of the party was now firmly settled on
Arabian Nights
, but something a little more imaginative than Lurex knickers and old velvet curtains was required. Best leave that, Samantha thought pityingly, to Dame Nancy and her troupe. Samantha sighed. If only her own unique dramatic vision had been allowed to prevail. But then a prophet was never recognized in her own country. Let alone the countryside.

    There was, however, one small errand to run before she was free to indulge in retail therapy. Although Samantha had posted most of the party invitations, she planned to deliver Matt Locke's by hand. If she dropped in at Ladymead on the way to town, she might not only meet him but also get a peek at the house as well. No doubt he'd invite her in for coffee; no celebrity ever refused refreshment to another.