Lots of Love (36 page)

‘Is he neutered?’ Lily asked.

What was it with this village and domestic animals’ sexual capabilities, Ellen wondered.

‘Only my Abyssinian is going through her . . .
girl thing
,’ Lily whispered, so as not to be overheard by her husband at the till, ‘and I’d hate her to get raped.’

‘Fins isn’t a rapist,’ Ellen assured her. ‘He’s gay.’

‘Really?’ Lily’s plucked eyebrows shot up. ‘When did you find out?’

‘He came out of the closet about a year ago.’ Ellen cast a guilty look at Joel too, but he was being chatted up by the Oddlode Pensioners Collective, and wasn’t listening.

‘Oh, my. How amazing. Have you taken him to a pet therapist?’

‘No, but he never misses an episode
of Animal Hospital.
He adores Rolf.’

‘How cute! You must miss him so. Ten copies okay for you?’

‘Great.’

The door pinged and Glad Tidings bustled in. She trotted straight up to the posse beside the till with a self-important air. ‘You’ll
never
guess what young Jasper’s done now,’ she panted, having clearly run all the way from the manor to tell the news. ‘It’s nothing short of heinous.’

‘What?’ Her audience surged around her. ‘Do tell.’

‘He’s persuaded that no-good cousin of his to lend him a horse to race the Devil’s Marsh. Ely’s accepted the entry – says he won’t stand in the lad’s way. Probably hopes he’ll go and kill himself proper this time.’

‘No!’ There was a chorus of shocked gasps.

‘After what happened and everything.’ Gladys clutched her quilted bosom disapprovingly. ‘He has no shame. Her ladyship is beside herself.’

‘Can’t she stop him?’

‘Handsome is as handsome does in her eyes – always has been,’ Gladys clucked. ‘Besides, she can’t risk him running off again, not with her wanting to marry him off.’

‘You sure that’s why he’s back, Glad?’

‘Oh, yes, dear. Lady Belling has plans for that young man. We’ve had the vicar to dine every month because she wants a church wedding, and God’s still having a spot of bother forgiving Spurs all them misdemeanours, it seems, especially the ones involving the east transept. I told her a nice ceremony in a marquee at Eastlode Park is just as good. They do a very good fork buffet, I hear.’

Ellen found herself clutching the post-office counter.

‘Are you saying she’s gotten someone to take him on?’ Joel chuckled. ‘From what I hear, he’ll be one helluva handful to take in marriage.’

‘Some fool flibbertigibbet with eyes on that house, I’ll fathom.’ She sniffed, suddenly catching sight of Ellen and giving her a beady look that made it clear her spies had caught all the weekend action in Goose Cottage. ‘She’ll have to be a good breeder, though, to get rid of that bad blood. Shame her ladyship preferred breeding them darned horses. If Jasper had a brother, the Surgeon could disinherit him and favour another but, as it is, he’s stuck with that good-for-nothing. I just hope they’ve found a nice young brood mare for him.’

‘She’ll need a bob or two and all, I reckon,’ laughed one of the pensioners. ‘Rumour has it the Surgeon ain’t got as much as he once had.’

‘Where did you hear that?’ Gladys demanded defensively.

‘Dot Wyck told me he borrowed a tenner off Reg in the bookie’s last week. His credit card had got rejected, she says.’

‘Don’t believe anything that sister of mine says,’ Gladys snapped. ‘She always was a liar. She taught young Jasper everything he knows.’

‘Didn’t you know Gladys and Dot are sisters?’ Pheely laughed when a shocked Ellen told her about the overheard conversation later while patrolling the village on a dog-walking and postering campaign. ‘They’re twins, but they’re barely on speaking terms. Not only did Gladys get
the
plum job in the village, working at the manor while her sister has to clean up after the rabble, but she married a Gates, and Dot married a Wyck. It’s like Aclima and Jumella.’

‘Who?’

‘Cain and Abel’s twins – married their own brothers,’ Pheely explained in an oddly good-girl voice, as though reciting her times tables.

Ellen, who had patiently endured endless scripture with her church-going mother, didn’t remember them. ‘Are you sure?’

‘Oh, yes. Bear in mind that Adam and Eve didn’t have an awful lot of eligible bachelors around to choose from – and neither does any Oddlode parent trying to palm off a brace of girls.’ She let out a delighted cackle.

‘What about a devoted mother trying to palm off her black sheep of a son?’ Ellen tried to steer the conversation back on track. She had only mentioned Gladys’s outburst because she was telling Pheely the far more disturbing news that Spurs was on the marriage market.

But Pheely was eager to impart one of her local history lessons – something akin to a potted
Dynasty
plot set against a bucolic backdrop.

‘Granville Gates and Reg Wyck aren’t
officially
brothers, of course,’ she murmured, ‘but local legend firmly hints at bad old Constantine Senior squiring both their poor mothers. If that’s so then they’re not members of the rival Oddlode clans at all – they’re actually Hell’s Bells’ half-brothers. Oh, it gets even more complicated.’ She laughed at Ellen’s boggling eyes. ‘You have no
idea
how entangled the family trees are around here. They make Ely Gates’s orchard look like bonsai. There’s more mixed blood than a field hospital.’

Ellen was already completely lost. ‘So is Gladys’s husband . . .’

‘Granville,’ Pheely helped her out.

‘Is he one of Ely’s brothers?’ She paused by a lamp-post to Sellotape up a ‘missing’ sign.

‘Granville? No, he’s an uncle. He used to be the manor groundsman, but he was dismissed when he went mad.’

‘Mad?’

‘Yes – good old-fashioned mad. There’s no delicate mental-health descriptions applied around here, and the poor bastard has probably never been referred to a psychiatrist in his life. He’s just mad. I do
so
envy him the freedom.’ She sighed.

‘He’s still alive?’

‘Very much so. He lives in an old railway carriage in the cutting by Eastlode Heath. Glad Tidings still takes him his supper every evening after she’s finished work – carries it across the fields with a tea-towel wrapped around the pot and delivers it to the door before going home to her tithe cottage. Come hail or storm, she does her meals-on-heels run – unless the Bellings are entertaining, in which case she leaves it at the edge of the orchard to save time, and mad Granville collects it.’

‘Does he ever come into the village?’ Not for the first time Ellen suspected her of embellishing the truth, however delectably.

‘Not often, as far as I know. He train-spots – I’m not making it up,’ she said, as Ellen looked sceptical. ‘He sits in his carriage and watches the trains go by although, God knows, after ten years, you’d think he’d get bored of the regular Paddington to Hereford service and take a day trip to Clapham Junction or Crewe.’

‘What made him go mad?’

‘No one knows. It was around the time Spurs left.’ She gave Ellen a weighty look, practically mowing her down with those huge green eyes.

Ellen bit the tape from the reel and fastened the last corner of the poster. At last they had got to the point. The butterfly had landed.

‘I can’t see Hell’s Bells finding him a suitable wife,’ Pheely opined. ‘None of the grander families around here would touch him, and she’s a frightful snob about marrying “down”.’

‘Won’t Spurs have any say in the matter?’

‘I doubt it. Isabel’s class are of the opinion that you can fuck whomsoever you like – discreetly – but you marry the person you are told to.’

‘I can’t see Spurs buying it.’

‘He can always bugger off again. Maybe he already has. Have you seen him yet?’ she nosed.

Ellen shook her head.

‘Good.’ Pheely had only heard edited highlights of Ellen’s weekend in the garden with Spurs, but it was enough to sign her new friend’s death warrant as far as she was concerned.

‘Has he ridden Otto yet?’ Ellen couldn’t resist asking.

‘If he has, he’s done it bareback. I’ve locked the saddle in the woodshed.’

He had a bare back before, Ellen thought wistfully, remembering the muscles moving beneath the tanned, freckled skin.

‘I’m so glad I turned up to rescue you that night.’ Pheely kept pace as they moved on to another lamp-post. ‘God knows what would have happened otherwise.’

I’d have found out what Spurs is hiding, Ellen thought wretchedly. We’d have carried on kissing. And I wouldn’t have lost his trust.

Yet she couldn’t feel angry with Pheely: she valued her company and good humour too much to blame her. If anyone was to blame, she knew that she was wearing her skin. She had thought about calling Spurs, but she had no number and was too much of a coward to turn up at the manor in person, uncertain of her reception. She was far more certain of Pheely, who always greeted her with a smile as warm as a hearth and stories of village births, marriages and deaths.

They made their way across the green, deserted today beneath the grey, threatening skies. Ellen gave Bevis’s bench a friendly nod as they passed it, then called the dogs away from eyeing up the nervous ducks on the pond before walking under the row of horse-chestnuts and crossing towards Manor Lane.

‘The mill-race has been throwing itself about like a white-water run since the storm.’ Pheely went to take a look at the violent swirling beneath the bridge. ‘One day it’s going to sweep all those old vans and cars right into Ely’s orchard.’

‘Who lives in the house?’ Ellen studied the shabby old mill, its grandeur slipping away a stone tile at a time, like a lizard with alopecia hunching its scaly shoulders as it clung to the banks of the swirling stream. Its forecourt was filled with an extraordinary collection of ancient cars and rusting farming machinery, as it had been for as long as Ellen remembered. One Land Rover had been up on bricks for so long that it was overgrown with ivy, like one of Norman Gently’s sculptures.

‘Ely’s younger brother Noah inherited it from Pa Gates’s estate.’ Pheely continued her lesson in the Gates family tree. ‘This is known as Noah’s Car Park – although I prefer to think of it as Mills and Baboon. Noah is
very
unreconstructed, rather like his house.’ She eyed the grubby windows for signs of life. ‘Ely’s dying to get his hands on the building to develop it, but Noah refuses to budge. Sometimes you see him leaning out of his attics, scanning the horizon for a dove with an olive branch, poor sod. Ely can make it very difficult for somebody if he wants to buy them out.’

‘Like you?’ Ellen asked, thinking about the much-envied beauty of the Lodge.

‘I wasn’t thinking of me.’ She glanced at Ellen pointedly then moved on and yelled for Hamlet, who had cornered a cat across the road in the Lodes Inn car park.

‘Do you know something I don’t?’ Ellen hastily checked that the cat wasn’t Fins then hopped after her.

‘Only through deduction.’ Pheely was pulling clematis flowers from stone walls to thread through her curls. ‘You say Ely is behind the one and only – and very silly – offer on the cottage. Nobody else seems remotely interested, despite its obvious charms. QED, he’s putting the kibosh on any other deal. Take it from one who knows, you can’t rely on sly Ely. He has money in his pocket and God on his side. The whole village is under his spell. And some are under his Godspell – mostly teenage boys.’ She giggled wickedly, adding a fat red rose from an immaculate front garden to her Ophelia tiara.

‘How’s the bust going?’ Ellen sensed mutiny.

‘Don’t ask.’ Pheely marched along Manor Lane, then proceeded to tell Ellen all about it. ‘That child is so unpleasant, these days. We’ve had three sittings so far, and she just plugs herself into that ratty-tatty impersonal stereo and sits staring into space. I shall immortalise her with wire coming out of her ears, whatever Ely says. It’s her only distinctive feature. In fact, I may try something a little abstract to express the solitude of stereo,’ she mused thoughtfully, as they paused by a dog-poop bin to attach a poster above it.

Ellen looked at her fifth Sellotaped photostat of Fins, with his furious face and puffed-up black and white chest. He looked like a waiter who had been told that the steak was overdone.

Suddenly it hit her that he might have gone for ever, that he might not return when he was hungry and cold and wet. Because he would be all three right now, and he still hadn’t come back to her. Like Spurs, she thought illogically. He was like a feral cat – independent, wilful, prone to disappearing acts and unwilling to make friends.

‘She’s such a curious child.’ Pheely was still venting her spleen about Godspell. ‘Always has been terribly backward. Never mixes with others her age, and still thinks she’ll be a pop star. She was bearable when she was younger – cripplingly shy, of course, and totally spoiled, but sweet enough, and great chums with Dilly. Now she’s withdrawn into herself, become furtive and bad-mannered. I’m surprised Ely can’t see that the apple of his eye has gone sour.’ She glanced across at the gnarled old orchard. ‘But he always was blind where his children were concerned.’

‘Dilly said that the two of them were no longer friends.’ Ellen pocketed the Sellotape, trying to drag her mind back on topic.

‘Yes, they both shared the pony-mad thing at one time, but Godspell lost interest.’ Pheely led the way past Cider Lane, with its peeling board advertising the antiquarian bookshop that never opened and Prudence Hornton’s failing gallery. ‘She was never very brave, and her father persuaded her to ride the Devil’s Marsh race last year – no Gates has ever taken part, and child Enoch is allergic to horses, so Godspell was to champion the wonder family. But she was so frightened, she fell off at the start and humiliated Ely, who had his camcorder trained and a vast bet laid. Godspell hasn’t been on a horse since, and rather let us down because she was supposed to ride Otto during term-time.’