Farm Fatale (40 page)

    "
You told me
," Jack said, biting off each word he spoke, "that you weren't interested in me because you had a boyfriend already. I accepted that. I'd hate to make someone else suffer like I did when Catherine…" He paused, his throat working furiously. "I hoped you might change your mind—"

    "Yes," said Rosie, half eager, half panicking. "That's what you said.
If you have a change of heart, let me know.
Well, as it happens…" She took a deep breath. Why wasn't he understanding what she was about to say?

    "And the next thing I hear," Jack cut in, "is you left the party with some bloke who's just landed one on your boyfriend."

    Rosie's knees wobbled. "What?" She could recall only a voice, the comforting press of a hand, a reassuring presence. But surely not…?

    "Yes," said Jack, bitterly attacking his boots again. "With Matt Locke."

    Oh, God. Hadn't he left after the…attack? Had he really seen fit to hang around and get her in even deeper shit than she was already? Went home with her, to all intents and purposes. Rosie gave Jack an incredulous smile. "But I hardly even know him. I'd never met him before. I mean, he didn't even give me his real name."

    "Ha!" Jack's laugh was rasping and humorless. "That's not what your boyfriend thought, I hear. And, bloody hell, do you think that makes it better? Running off with some bloke you've only just met?"

    It was a bad dream. It was unbelievable. It got a million times worse with whatever she said. Rosie looked pleadingly at Jack. How could she get it through to him that of all of the ends of sticks to be got, this was the wrongest?

    "Who have you been talking to?" Rosie wailed, realizing, as she did so, that she already knew. Duffy. She had, after all, had a pretty colorful version of events herself from the postman. Her head started to throb violently.

    "Jack, please. None of this is true. I came to tell you that I changed my mind. That I was wrong to stick with Mark. That it's all over with him."

    "Very convenient that. Now that he's dumped you."

    "Dumped
me
?" Rosie fought to contain her temper, which was in danger of escaping through the splits now forcing her head apart. "That's not what happened.
I'm
leaving
him
, because I've had enough of his behavior. And because of you." She swallowed, aware of the danger of sounding desperate. "As I say, I've changed my mind. If you still want me."

    "I was an idiot," Jack said, as if to himself. "A gullible fool. Fell for one city lass and got my fingers burned, only to do exactly the same with another. So," he said, lifting a set face to Rosie, "I'll be turning down your kind offer, if it's all the same to you. Besides," he added, his voice dropping, his eyes small and mean, "what do I want with another man's castoffs?"

    "Castoffs?" Rosie finally saw red. A blaze of fury swept through her. "How fucking
dare
you!" she shouted. "You haven't the foggiest idea about what really happened at the party. Just whispers from that sodding postman. But you don't want to know the truth, do you? You're not interested in what's
real
. Only in comparing every woman you ever come across to your fucking wife who left you because all you ever do is moan about
this sodding farm
."

    Rosie paused for breath, reeling with the pain in her head, the blood thundering in her ears, and the irresistible force of her own anger. All the hurt, disappointment, and shame that had been festering for the past week came bursting out like a lanced boil.

    Bella was absolutely right about Jack.

    "Talk about farm here to eternity," Rosie echoed, casting a scornful glance around the chaotic yard. "The land of your fathers," she snapped. "Well, as far as I'm concerned, your fathers can fucking have it."

    Jack's face paled at this. Had Catherine, she wondered, said the same thing when she left? Well, she had one more, entirely original, thought of her own by way of finale.

    "And if you're so worried about getting your fucking fingers burned in the future," Rosie yelled, "why don't you go and get some sodding asbestos gloves?"

    She had made it across the first field before the sob struggled out. More followed. After the storm in her heart, the rains fell thick and fast down her cheeks.

***

Later, calmer and having sluiced her eyes in cold water to address the swelling, if not the redness, Rosie decided she might as well face the music—or the football results, depending on what the radio was tuned to. Holding the white suit, she knocked on Mrs. Womersley's door.

    Tight-lipped, the old woman let her in and immediately scuttled back to the stove in the corner of the room where she was ostensibly making lunch. Warming himself, despite the sunshine outside, by the fire as usual, Mr. Womersley shifted awkwardly in his seat and flicked an unhappy glance Rosie's way.

    "Are you both all right?" Rosie asked with a strong sense of déjà vu.

    "
We're
all right," said Mrs. Womersley. The clear implication was that someone else wasn't.

    "The suit," Rosie muttered, all fingers and thumbs as she scrabbled at the plastic supermarket bag Mrs. Womersley had originally given it to her in. "Everyone loved it."

    "Yes, I heard it was much admired," said the old lady darkly.

    Rosie flinched but plowed on. "I've had it cleaned. There was a stain on the back—someone bumped into me with a sausage…,"

    "Aye," said Mrs. Womersley in freezing tones. "I heard
that
as well."

    I have, thought Rosie, beating a hasty exit, been dumped by two men, one of whom I wasn't even having a relationship with. Furthermore, I made an exhibition of myself at a party with an international celebrity, my neighbors are barely speaking to me, and no doubt the entire surrounding area believes me to be a woman of low morals. Hardly how I imagined country life, really.

    Reeling into the sitting room of Number 2, Rosie hurled herself on the sofa and gave way to tears again. Moving to the country had not been a wonderful new start, but a slow and painful end. And whose fault had that been? Hers? Mark's?

    "Or Matt bloody Locke's?" Rosie howled, pounding the cushions with her fists so that clouds of dust exploded into the sunbeamslanted air. Now, with hideous clarity, she recalled his mocking voice. "More's the pity." Well, he was too bloody right there. More's the pity, Rosie thought, I ever clapped eyes on him. It had been Matt, she now remembered quite clearly, who had walked her home, drunk and distressed, from the party. And straight into her career as the scarlet woman of Cinder Lane.

    Feeling Mrs. Womersley's disapproval beaming through the dividing wall like a laser, Rosie decided to go out. The cottage and its contents were a constant reminder not only of what had ended but of what was yet to be resolved. She would have to leave the village, of course. She could not afford the cottage on her own, and the publisher's advance from
A Ewe in New York
would clearly not be enough to cover the mortgage for long. But what was there to stay for, in any case?

    Yet the thought of going back to London was not a welcome one. The property boom in the capital having penetrated even the consciousness of one as vague as she, Rosie was aware that returning might mean not so much broom closet as shoe box. Matchbox, even.

    She could move in with Bella—temporarily, of course—as Bella would insist Rosie did the moment she found out what had happened. There was a spare bedroom next to Ptolemy's suite. A port in a storm, Rosie supposed, even if sharing a landing with the Antichrist was a far from inviting prospect. But Bella need know nothing about what had happened. Yet.

    By now, Rosie had reached the top of the hill. She gazed miserably at the village spread around and beneath her. Never had it looked so perfect. The pond on the green sparkled, the rose-towered church stood proud in the sunshine; even the roofs of Cinder Lane cottages running up behind it looked an adorably rickety huddle. Beyond the village, hills rose like green waves into the next valley, then the valley beyond, and beyond that until, finally, they flowed into the purple sea of the moors. Could she really leave all this behind? Did she have much choice?

    Rosie jumped as someone suddenly appeared beside her. Someone with black hair and a great deal of eyeliner.

    "Hey, there," drawled the girl from The Bottoms. "That's a bit of luck. I was just coming to check you out. We never introduced ourselves the other day." She stuck out a narrow hand heavy with silver rings. "Iseult. How's it going?"

    "Rosie. And badly." One of the many recent decisions Rosie had made was to stop saying things were all right when they weren't.

    The girl nodded. "Me too. My stepmother's driving me crazy. I sing in a band called Thrilled Skinny, right, and she won't even let me play my goddamn demo tapes. Says that if that's the future of music she doesn't want to be alive. And I'm with her on that. I don't want her to be goddamn alive either. So"—Iseult looked Rosie swiftly up and down—"what's eating you? Man trouble, at a wild guess?"

    "Among other things."

    "Thought so. That boyfriend of yours seems to have moved in with us." Iseult fished out a cigarette pack and offered Rosie one.

    Rosie shook her head vigorously. "He's
not
my boyfriend. Not anymore." Was this why Iseult had come to look for her? Mark had been in residence at The Bottoms for a week or so now; were the Grabsters already desperate to get rid of him?

    "No?" Iseult's lighter clicked and she disappeared behind a cloud of smoke. "But you wigged out completely when you thought he'd handed in his lunch pail. Better dead than alive, was he then?"

    "Sort of."

    Iseult drew on her cigarette sympathetically "So what are the other things? That are wrong, I mean."

    "Oh, just that I might soon be homeless as well. My boyfriend paid half the mortgage," said Rosie, resisting the temptation to add "sometimes." "So I might have to move back to London."

    "Far out." Iseult opened her blue eyes wide. "I mean, that's cool, isn't it? You'll be able to get out of this shithole and back to where the action is. I only wish
I
could."

    Rosie looked at her in surprise. "But you've only just got here, haven't you? Rapturous reunion with your father and all that?"

    "As soon as I persuade Dad to up sticks and come back to London, we're out of here," said Iseult decisively. "I'm here on a rescue mission, see. Dad can't stand the friggin' country. Hates it. Don't you?"

    Rosie paused. In the adjacent field, a bird spilled a succession of high, pure notes on the air. "No," she said, her heart lifting as she recognized a lark, then lowering again as she remembered Mark's comment about fizzing noises and modems. How could she have lived with him for so long?

    "But you can't possibly
want
to stay here."

    "Actually," Rosie said as the realization crystallized, "I do."

    Isuelt's brow knotted as it wrestled with what was obviously to her a conundrum of spectacular proportions. She inhaled again and blew out contemplatively. "Well, I suppose I can understand it in your case. You have pretty good reasons, after all."

    Rosie was staring at the two collapsed dragons, just visible in the valley after the next one. Their crumpled tips shone in the sun. Warming their old bones, she thought, her mind suddenly full of Jack and the afternoon when they had eaten the cheese and, afterward, shared that amazing kiss—although in retrospect perhaps that was the wrong way round to do things. He'd been so charming then. Damn him.

    "Matt Locke, for example," pursued Iseult.

    Rosie came storming out of her reverie. Not this again. Had Duffy been spreading rumors to Iseult as well?

    "Whatever you've heard, it's not true," she said hotly. "I don't even know Matt Locke. I'd never seen him before the party and I never want to see him again."

    There was an astonished silence.

    "Freaky," said Iseult, giving Rosie the sort of mixed fear and pity look usually accorded to the terminally insane. "Because Matt Locke sure wants to see
you
again."

    "What?" Rosie was shocked. Then she seethed. Bastard. No doubt he wanted to hear firsthand what the results of his actions had been. No doubt, too, he would find the whole thing hilarious. What did the mess she was in matter to him, after all? He was rich, famous, invulnerable.

    "I've been trying to call you, but you haven't been answering your phone. He came round to The Bottoms to find out where you lived. Fortunately," Iseult said, grinning, "Mark was in the garden with my stepmother at the time." Her eyes widened with wonder. "Oh, man, he's gorgeous."

    "But what did he want?" As if I care, thought Rosie, tightlipped. Matt Locke was emphatically not gorgeous. As far as she was concerned, he had all the charisma of a tax return.

    "Your address. He has a message for you, although I got him to leave it with me." Iseult rummaged in her beaded bag, dragged out a crumpled envelope, and held it out. "Here."

"Don't you want to know what it
says
?" Iseult, still holding out the envelope, blinked her kohl-lined eyes in amazement. "A
megastar
has just sent you a letter. An
icon
is trying to communicate with you. Aren't you
interested
?"

    "Not really." If it was Matt Locke, it was bound to be trouble. Rosie glanced suspiciously at the envelope, half expecting an evil green glow to be seeping from the sealed flap.