Lots of Love (6 page)

Because Ellen had forgotten to buy cigarettes in the shop, and because she hated cleaning at the best of times, she was feeling twitchy and short-tempered. Poor Fins was yowling in his closed-barracks confinement of the utility and boot rooms. She longed to let him out, but she knew that he’d scarper and probably never be seen again. He had to stay there, at least for a few days.

To get away from the noise, guilt and dirt, she headed into the garden and contemplated the jungle. It would take her days to sort it out. The grass was so long that it needed to be strimmed or scythed before she could get a mower on to it. The rampant flowers clogging the beds looked rather spectacular, but docks and nettles that would take for ever to pull up were already bullying them out. The pond was a stagnant pit and had developed a repulsive-looking slime on its surface, which frothed ominously. And the paddock – once let to a local girl for her pony, as she recalled – was now a wild heath through which Snorkel was ploughing twisting furrows as she chased insects, followed enticing scents and sporadically stood stock still to look pleadingly at Ellen.

The collie was accustomed to running miles each day with Richard, swimming in the sea and clambering up and down the steep Cornish cliff paths like a mountaineer. Today’s occasional loo breaks, playtime in the Goose Cottage garden and gander across the village were wholly inadequate.

‘We could head back to the shop for cigarettes?’ Ellen suggested, closing one eye as she tried not to give in to the nicotine temptation. ‘Or I could quit today and take you to see the river.’

Snorkel just barked and bounded stupidly, blinking and sneezing as she sent up a cloud of pollen and grass seed.

Leaving the Goose Cottage doors unlocked and all the windows open – she was accustomed to Cornish isolation – Ellen set off across the lane towards Goose End, pausing under the big lime tree that formed a rural roundabout at the point where all the lanes and tracks met. Tarmac gave way to unkempt gravel as the long drive to Lodge Farm opened up ahead and Goose End swung to the right. Ellen took the latter, looking up at the top windows of the huge Lodge, just visible over its high stone wall.

If Goose Cottage had suffered six months of neglect, then the Lodge had suffered years. It had been empty and dilapidated for as long as Ellen remembered, those high garden walls only just holding back the impenetrable, enchanted forest that sprouted beyond. It was the sort of place that entranced children, their imaginations fired by ghost stories featuring deserted mansions or tales of enchanted gardens. Ellen remembered her father telling her that a famous sculptor had once lived there and that the grounds were full of his bronzes. She longed to open the arched wooden gate, which squatted like a magic porthole half-way along the garden wall, and take a peek inside.

With its mysterious, neglected Lodge and ancient barns, Goose End had once been the forgotten corner of Oddlode, but now it, too, had been touched by modernisation. The barns had been converted into three luxurious houses; the tatty old farm-workers’ cottages beside them had been sold on and spruced up. Yet as the village gave way to the bridlepath, which cut its way up through the hills, it still made Ellen think of the days in which all roads had been like this – simple tracks in which cartwheels got stuck and labourers’ boots sank to the ankle as they walked.

The grassy bridge across the Odd marked the true start of the bridlepath. Despite the scorching heat of the day, the river was as high as Ellen remembered it. After an April where the showers had been non-stop torrents, one sunny, heatwave week in May had barely dissipated the gushing, bubbling force of the little river, which galloped its way through its high-banked winding trench to the north of the village like a bobsleigh along an Olympic course.

While Snorkel plunged into the gravel-bottomed shallows beside the bridge, Ellen climbed up the grassy arch and leaned on the stone wall, looking down into the clear, bubbling depths. Her father had brought her here a few times, excitedly showing off the gudgeon, dace and three-spined sticklebacks that took a patient eye to spot. Ellen had never had the heart to tell him that in the brooks around Treglin these fish were as common as minnows. But by far the most exciting residents of the river Odd were the crayfish that appeared every year for just a few days in such numbers you could catch them with your hands. Ellen couldn’t boast that of Treglin. The crayfish were a well-kept village secret and fishing them was strictly limited, overseen by several self-appointed ‘guardians’ of which Ellen’s mother had been one. Jennifer had been active on village committees. If there was a planning proposal to be fought or an amenity to be saved, she was always in the thick of the action. That well-meaning tenacity had been brought into play when she’d fought long and hard to stop Ellen seeing Richard ‘for your own good’.

Ellen shook her head to stop herself going there. Plenty of time to think about Richard when she was riding across Mongolia or trekking in Tibet or spending time in any number of places that didn’t make her think about him in relation to her mother.

Snorkel was still plunging around in the river’s shallow gravel bed, trying to catch water fleas, her muzzle sending up great fans of drips as she nosed in and out like an ebullient duck.

Ellen crossed the bridge and tried to whistle her onwards, drawing level with a curious building that she’d never really understood – a pillared stone dome, covered with the man-made graffiti of spray paint and nature’s vandalising ivy. Her father always claimed it was an Aphrodite temple, erected for villagers to conduct illicit affairs, but he was given to these flights of fancy, regularly quashed by a furious tut from Jennifer. Ellen doubted that many villagers used it for adulterous liaisons – especially not when they had Goose Cottage at their disposal. Overgrown with nettles and brambles, it would take a brave soul to get down to the buff in there.

‘Horrid, isn’t it?’ said a voice just beside her. ‘Even the glue-sniffers have abandoned it, these days.’

Ellen jumped and swung round to find a woman at her shoulder. She hadn’t heard her approach but if she hadn’t been so blinkered by the thick arms of her shades and the lowered peak of her baseball cap, she would certainly have seen her. Magnificently endowed and as broad-hipped as a lyre, she was an Aphrodite fit for a true Greek temple, albeit a mellow goddess in a slightly ruined one. From the mane of wild dark oak curls through the creased, floaty white smock dress to the camp gold flip-flops, she oozed scruffy sensuality.

‘I hate it – nasty piece of neo-classical junk,’ she told Ellen, in her wonderfully deep, euphonious voice, still looking at the ‘temple’. ‘Looks like a park bandstand or a bus shelter, doesn’t it? I can’t believe there’s such a fuss going on about saving it.’

‘What, actually, is it?’ Ellen asked.

The wide, sunburned nose and cheeks tilted towards her, topped by mesmerising big green eyes. ‘Well, it’s known as the River Folly and the villagers would have you believe some romantic clap-trap about William Constantine building it as a love token for his wife in the eighteenth century, but . . . Ophelia Gently, by the way – call me Pheely.’ She thrust out her hand.

‘I’m Ellen.’ She shook it, rather taken aback by the introduction, made as suddenly as a sneeze and a ‘bless you’ in the middle of the story.

‘I happen to know,’ Pheely carried on, huge eyes sparkling with mischief, ‘that one of the Constantines – a Victorian, so much later – suffered from terrible constipation. He grew terribly bored of sitting for hours on the manor bog and decided to build a loo with a view. But the poor chap was killed in the Boer War before he ever got a chance to use it. Ironic that half the village youth have used it to piss in over the years.’

Ellen stared at the ‘temple’ and secretly agreed that it was a bit of an elaborate eyesore compared to the rough-hewn simplicity of the track, wild hedges and hills. But she didn’t believe a word of Pheely’s story.

‘Oh, God! Hamlet’s raping your dog. Hang on!’

Ellen turned to watch in alarm as Pheely kicked off her flip-flops and rushed down the bank to wade into the river and separate a huge harlequin Great Dane from a very flirtatious Snorkel. With her white smock soaking up water, and the dark curls now full of snowy blossom from brushing past the hawthorns on the bank, Ophelia Gently had been instantly transformed from Greek princess to her Shakespearean namesake.

‘Has she been spayed?’ she shouted, as the Great Dane twisted this way and that, refusing to leave his new girlfriend alone.

‘Yes!’ It was clearly Ellen’s day to discuss her animals’ reproductive systems, she thought, as she waited on the bank beside the gold flip-flops.

‘In that case, I’ll leave them to it.’ Pheely waded out, smiling widely. ‘Sorry – Hamlet’s totally debauched, but harmless. You walking up the path? Shall we trundle together and hope the lovers follow suit?’

She displayed such a disarming friendliness that Ellen found herself liking her immediately. As they fell into step, she realised suddenly that Pheely had set out for a dog walk in the white shift and gold flip-flops. Eccentric and impractical only began to describe it, although on closer inspection the smock looked as though it had been far from pristine before she had taken her dunk. Where the fabric was still dry above the waist, it was covered in muddy red smears and was frayed at the neck. Yet Pheely herself wasn’t as old, dishevelled or plump as Ellen had at first, unkindly, thought. Glancing across as they headed up the hill, she knocked ten years off the forty-something she’d originally taken her to be, and the flapping dress showed that between Pheely’s buxom curves there was a near-Edwardian tiny waist.

‘So you’ve bought Goose Cottage from the dreaded Jamiesons, I gather?’ Pheely was shaking the drips and reeds from her dress, which was also coated with brown, soggy blossom picked up from the river.

‘No.’ She rolled her tongue beneath her bottom lip in amusement. ‘I am a dreaded Jamieson. I’m their daughter.’

‘Oops.’ Pheely didn’t seem remotely embarrassed and let out a throaty giggle that gurgled like the river. ‘I thought I’d have heard about it if it had been sold, but Gladys has been telling everyone you moved in today.’

‘Gladys?’

‘You met her in the shop.’

‘I only met an American called Joel.’

‘GI Joel – he’s a hoot.’ Pheely pulled back her curtain of corkscrews and fixed Ellen with huge, thickly lashed eyes of the same pale green as copper verdigris. ‘Was Lily with him?’

‘Is that his wife?’ Ellen remembered him telling the silent Goth girl that he and Lily had watched the movie together.

‘Absolute
weirdo,
my dear,’ Pheely whispered indulgently. ‘You wait. Anyway, Gladys is about seventy and looks like a Cabbage Patch doll. Unmistakable.’

‘The elderly lady?’ Ellen raised her eyebrows. ‘She only saw me for a nanosecond before leaving.’

‘That’s all Glad Tidings needs to assess your entire personal history.’ Pheely tapped her nose. She was already panting as they started climbing up the cart track, her bare feet following the soft, grassy ridge in the centre because she’d left her flip-flops behind. ‘She can tell your age, nationality, political persuasion, marital status, guilty secrets and likelihood to help out at the village fête from a two-second encounter at the bus stop. And she has eyes
everywhere.
She should work for the police.’

Ellen laughed. ‘And what did she say about me?’

‘Spotted moving into Goose Cottage at one with various animals. Spotted loitering in village shop at two thirty with just one animal in tow. Trying to get rid of all animals, it seems. The spotted-walking-with-Touchy-Feely-at-six bulletin is no doubt doing the rounds now, between frantic preparations for tonight’s jamboree. And you are, I quote, “Not a natural blonde and one of them punky sorts with an earring through her belly button. She’s a bit of a spiky madam – probably unmarried, poor thing.”’

‘Nosy old bitch,’ Ellen said, without thinking.

Pheely snorted delightedly, then turned back to shout for Hamlet. ‘Believe me, she’s not as nosy or bitchy as I am. She’s got a very sweet heart.’ She carried on walking backwards beside Ellen. ‘And she means –
HAMLET!
– well. Lord knows, we’d all need some entertainment after fifty years’ working for the Bellings, and the Constantines before them.’

‘That’s the River Folly man, right?’

‘His descendants, yes –
HAMLET!
– the lords of Oddlode Manor. Or so Hell’s Bells – that’s Isabel – would have you believe, but she was the first Constantine to bag a title. She’s only Lady Belling now because –
HAMLET!
– St John got the ultimate gong when Her Maj tapped the chips on both his round shoulders with her sword. Sir St John! You can’t imagine the trouble the locals have getting their tongues around that. Most call him the Surgeon.’

It was no wonder Pheely was so breathless, the rate at which that hypnotising voice divulged information.

‘St John Belling the politician?’ Ellen had recognised the name.

‘The very same,
HAMLET YOU GREAT OAF!’
Having veered all over the bridlepath while walking backwards, Pheely decided to walk the right way round again.

‘He’s the one everyone says should have been PM, isn’t he?’

‘The nearly-man, yes. And so he would have been, were it not for that Godforsaken son of his,’ Pheely muttered, with surprising bitterness. Then she laughed. ‘Actually, I have very few things to thank Jasper Belling for, but perhaps that
is
one of them. The Surgeon would have taken this country back to the dark ages. When Jasper fucked up this village, he did the nation a favour. Such a noble gesture!’

Ellen was vaguely familiar with the story of St John Belling, long-tipped to succeed Thatcher and much admired by her mother. The owner of Oddlode Manor, one-time local Tory MP and a favourite cabinet minister of the Iron Lady with the soft spot for blue-eyed men, had fallen from grace when his son turned out to be a drug-smuggler or something like that. And that son was clearly Jasper Belling. But the rest of Pheely’s chatter was already flying over her head.