Farm Fatale (27 page)

    Jack finally liberated the cheese, opened the two bottles of beer, and passed her one. The ale was deliciously cool and nutty. As he drank, Rosie watched the muscles in his strong throat work the liquid down.

    Rosie demolished a hunk of bread and cheese and sighed happily. "This is wonderful," she said, beaming at him. "Thank you so much."

    Jack did not reply. His eyes had flicked upward.

    "Listen." Jack spoke suddenly. "The lark. Can you hear it?"

    It was the high, sweet sound she had heard earlier. "I've never heard one before," she confessed, entranced by the rising and descending notes.

    "Don't hear them that often these days. It's just up there, look. Tiny black dot, over to the left."

    As Jack pointed into the sky, Rosie squinted desperately, scanning the blue without result. Suddenly, her eyes seemed full of dots: floating contact lens debris, transparent worms, and hazy blotches drifting past like plankton. None of them seemed much like larks.

    "Can you see it?"

    With a surge of relief Rosie finally spotted the tiny creature pulsing upward into the sun. They watched until it finally disappeared and the distant hum of a plane replaced the fizzing song.

    "I never get tired of this view," Jack said after a pause. "Even though I've seen it every day for the last thirty years."

    "It's magical." Rosie raised herself on her elbow. "I've been looking at those hills over there," she added quickly. "Very odd shapes." She stopped short of telling him she had compared them to sharks' fins and collapsed dragons. No doubt he would think that just the kind of absurd romantic fantasy typical of a city dweller. Did she not realize these hills were working hills?

    Jack nodded. "Strange, aren't they? Amazing knobbly spines. I know it sounds mad"—he shot her a shy look—"but I've always thought they looked like dragons or something. Sort of collapsed. As if they'd been fighting each other."

    Their eyes locked in a smile.

    As he leaned over to kiss her, Rosie's pelvis melted into liquid fire. Liquid everything, as Jack, sliding a pleasingly confident hand between her legs, eventually attested. Pushing up her shirt, he brushed his glistening forefinger over her hardening nipple and covered it with his lips.

    It felt like wrenching herself from quicksand.

    "I've got a boyfriend," Rosie muttered, turning her head away and addressing a clump of cowslips that nodded understandingly in a sudden breeze. Surely Jack must know about Mark? Even if Mrs. Womersley hadn't filled him in, it was impossible that Duffy had passed on the opportunity to do so.

    Jack sat up abruptly, his arms hanging over his knees, and tore at the head of a dandelion.

    "I can't leave Mark," Rosie said gently. "We gave up everything we had in London to come here…been together for years…he couldn't afford the cottage by himself…" Even to her own ears, her voice rang hollow. Who, after all, was she trying to convince? And yet…

    Jack nodded, his mouth a set line. "Well, I have to respect that, I suppose." He paused, as if struggling with what to say next. "At least you're not one of those women who ride roughshod over relationships. Stringing two blokes along at the same time and all that."

    "No." Rosie twisted a blade of grass nervously around her fingers. "I've never been very good at that femme fatale thing."

    "I'm glad to hear it." Though he was muttering to his knees, he seemed to be doing so with feeling. Was he speaking from experience?

    "But we can still be friends, can't we?" Rosie ventured. "I mean, I can still come up here? I'd like to…"

    Jack nodded slowly. "Of course. Besides…"

    "Yes?" she looked at him apprehensively.

    "You might change your mind."

    Rosie reddened, his wry smile tugging at her heart.

    "I'll be here if you do," Jack said.

The evening sun was gilding the fields in a filter of yellow light as Rosie walked slowly home. Her brain ground like a pestle against the mortar of her skull. She had regretted spurning Jack's advances the second the Spitewinter gate had closed behind her. For what, after all, had she spurned them? Spiteful, carping, explosively badtempered Mark…Well, she'd had enough of that, Rosie decided as she approached the cottage. The worm had turned. From now on, she would fight fire with fire. Any displays of bad temper would be more than matched. Then, at least, she would not have turned down Jack for nothing. To her amazement, however, she arrived at the cottage to find Mark positively skipping round the sitting room.

    "Amazing church," he said.

    "You were
in church
?" Rosie's feeling of guilt intensified. Unprecedented though it was, Mark had spent the afternoon in the house of the Lord, while she, harlot that she was, had spent the afternoon on the verge of contravening the Ten Commandments. Nevertheless, she looked at him with concern. Had things gotten so bad that he had sought divine help with "Green-er Pastures"?

    Mark nodded. "The vicar was showing me round. Pretty bloody old, some of it. There's a tomb of some medieval bloke who fought against Joan of Arc…What's that bloody awful burning smell?" Rosie fled to the kitchen, where the toast Mark was making sat incinerated in its racks, the smell drifting in a dense cloud round the room.

    "So you were looking around out of interest?" Rosie asked. Odd that the tomb of a fourteenth-century knight could form the centerpiece of the column when all other aspects of the village had failed.

    "Yes, sort of," said Mark quickly. Telling Rosie that he had spent the afternoon in semidarkness with a film star suddenly struck him as too much information. He
had
been talking to the vicar anyway. When, that was, the real vicar had turned up, saying he had been telephoned by a parishioner claiming to have seen some funny-looking people entering the church.

    Hilarious, Mark thought, how he and Samantha had imagined each other to be the vicar at first. Anything less like a person of the cloth was impossible to imagine. The miniskirt out of which those gazellelike legs had spilled had been short of material in general, being the approximate width of a hairband. Rosie never wore miniskirts, despite having legs that were more than reasonable. These days, she rarely seemed to be out of the ancient jeans and shapeless fleece she wore for her visits to the farm. By contrast, Samantha had been all woman. All older woman too. He'd always had a slight Mrs. Robinson complex, all the more so after Samantha told him that
The Graduate
role had gone to Anne Bancroft only after she'd turned it down herself to do some film about punks. Funny, but he hadn't realized punks were around in the sixties. Funny, too, that he recognized none of the titles of her films. But then he hadn't been listening all that closely. Not after he had worked out that here— right here in front of him, asking for his help—was the woman the postman had mentioned, the woman about to give the biggest and grandest party Eight Mile Bottom had ever seen. The party that after days' festering about the fact he had not been invited, Mark now felt ready to kill to go to.

    "What's the vicar like?" asked Rosie.

    Mark rolled his eyes. "Happy clappy. Full of jokes about having once been a rep for an industrial bulb company until he saw the light. Had a road-to-Damascus conversion on the road to Scunthorpe or something."

    "He sounds great for the column."

    Mark flared his nostrils and pursed his lips. "
I'll
decide what is or isn't good material, thank you. Actually, what
was
really interesting was that he was helping someone exorcise."

    "Exercise?"

    "
Orcise
. Ex
orcise
. This, um, woman thinks her house is haunted and wants the vicar to get rid of the evil spirits."

    "And will he?"

    Mark shook his head. The vicar had pissed on Samantha's parade well and truly by saying he wouldn't get rid of her ghosts and that the party would have to go ahead with them on the guest list, or was that the ghost list, ha ha. Samantha had not appreciated this joke. As sticky moments went, Mark considered, that one was a full-scale toffee pudding.

    Until he himself had brilliantly come to the rescue. "Why don't you have a marquee
outside
?" he had suggested to Samantha. "No need for anyone to go in the house then. It would fit in better with the
Arabian Nights
theme as well."

    Samantha had practically had an orgasm on the spot. She'd kissed him, hugged him, called him a genius, and promised to send him an invitation to what she made sound a more celebritypacked event than the Oscars. At this point, Mark, eager to acquit himself of obscurity, had mentioned—just dropped into the conversation—the fact that
he
, as it happened, was
quite well
known himself, thanks to having his own column in a national newspaper. In which, yes, well, it wasn't impossible—he might well see his way to mentioning her party. Samantha had almost gone into orbit. It was a pleasant memory.

    "Why won't the vicar exorcise the ghosts?" repeated Rosie loudly, wondering why she had had to ask three times. And why Mark had that soppy grin on his face.

    Mark tuned back in with a shock. "Doesn't believe in it. Thinks that ghosts have got every right to be there and that she should get used to them. Said it wasn't up to newcomers to start calling the shots with people who've lived there before them. Even if they happen to be dead."

    "Yes," said Rosie. Satchel's football began thudding against the outside wall once more. "Just what I've always said about the Muzzles."

    Mark threw her an irritated look and dived to the door. His expected howl of rage did not come, however. He stood apparently paralyzed, looking out into the lane.

    "What's going on?" Rosie asked. Everything had gone suspiciously quiet.

    Mark looked tragically over his shoulder at her. "Bella's here. With the Antichrist."

    Rosie hurried to the door to see Bella, resplendent in brand-new jeans and virgin trainers emerging from a BMW as dark and shiny as her hair. As she swung up the lane with Ptolemy in one hand and a bottle of champagne in the other, the church clock chimed thirteen.

    "Beware of parents bearing champagne," Mark snarled, beating a hasty retreat to the neglected box room. "It means they know their kids are a nightmare."

Rosie, although desperate to discuss the matter, was unable to tell Bella about Jack until Mark had gone upstairs.

    "A farmer fatale!" Bella's eyes lit up. "I must say, I'm dying to see him, darling."

    "We-ell…" Rosie said doubtfully. Jack had said she could go back to the farm, but whether he would welcome half of Islington as well was another matter.

    Bella, however, had made up her mind. "It would be
marvelous
for Tolly to see a real farm," she pressed. "As you know, darling, part of the
entire
reason I've brought him up here is so he learns not to be afraid of the countryside."

    Rosie avoided saying she had never met a child less afraid of anything than Ptolemy. Bella's fears that, as a delicate London infant, her precious son would not mix well with tough country children had proved unfounded as, within minutes of his arrival, Ptolemy had leaped on Satchel and started pounding him into the road. This marked the first-ever occasion on which Mark had smiled at Bella's son. His smile soon vanished when, told to calm down and do something peaceful, darling, by his mother, Ptolemy proceeded to color in the seagrass mat before the fireplace with felt-tip pens. Told to stop this, darling, by his mother, he then began to explore the different ways of entering the room through the windows. Told to stop this, darling, by his mother, he began jumping on the sofa with his shoes on and kicking the cushions in the air.

    Bedtime, when it finally, thankfully, came was shattered by a terrifying tantrum once Ptolemy realized he had forgotten his bath toys. The resulting deafening flamenco of tiny feet (Ptolemy did not seem to have been taught to pitter-patter) on the wooden floor of the bathroom seemed certain to result in the complete capitulation of the woodworm-weakened planks. "Little sod," Mark snarled through clenched teeth. Rosie sensed it was beginning to dawn on him that there were children in the world who were if not worse than the Muzzles, then just as bad. Children, puzzlingly, vastly better educated and privileged into the bargain.

    But the effort required to deal with Ptolemy had one beneficial effect, which was to distract Bella's attention from her sleeping quarters. Their sleeping quarters to be precise—Rosie and Mark had given up their room and faced the daunting prospect of the sofabed downstairs. Rosie was aware that their damp-speckled, grit-flecked bedroom might not coincide with Bella's idea of luxury. Despite the fact that she had put a vase of flowers on the window sill.

    Yet Bella had, so far, been exceedingly polite about what Rosie remembered Nigel describing as the "transitional" nature of the cottage interior. She seemed less alarmed, in fact, by the bathroom door being off its hinges and the wind whistling all night through the gaps surrounding the bedroom window frame than she was by Rosie looking "really rather rustic, darling."

    "Don't you think you're letting things slip a little?" she asked when Rosie confessed after Bella's morning bath that no, she didn't have a hair dryer.