Lots of Love (7 page)

‘I might even force myself to go along tonight after all,’ she was saying, pulling long grasses from the banks to wave around like a fairy wand. ‘Glad Tidings was very miffed when I told her I wanted to withdraw my promise – she insisted that I couldn’t do it without Lady B’s permission. Can you imagine? That’s when she told me all about you, no doubt trying to take my mind off the subject, which it did. I am such a butterfly.’

With her butterfly mind dancing from topic to topic, Pheely had a tendency to talk about people and things as though Ellen should know the subjects intimately. She was about to ask what was happening tonight but at that moment both dogs thundered up the path behind them, a golden flip-flop in each of their mouths.

‘Oh, clever, clever darlings! What clever dogs! I do like your collie.’ She collected the flip-flops, gracefully offered by Snorkel and wrestled from a reluctant Hamlet. ‘Why do you want to get rid of her?’

‘She’s my ex-boyfriend’s dog. He’s moved to Australia. And I’m going abroad myself after the cottage here is sold.’

‘Oh.’ Curiously Pheely didn’t ask any questions about this. For a woman who proclaimed herself ‘nosy’ and ‘bitchy’, she went rather shy. Now panting hard from trying to keep up with Ellen’s brisk walking pace, she batted away midges, big green eyes downcast. ‘Are your parents well?’

‘Yes, fine.’ Ellen stooped to throw a stick for Snorkel. Beside Hamlet’s great stature, she looked minuscule, like a toy dog. ‘Dad’s heart is always a worry, but he seems to have found a life that suits him. And Mum’s really taken to Spain. I didn’t think she would, but she loves it there.’

‘Giving them all hell about proposed green-belt developments and bypasses, no doubt.’ Pheely winked.

‘I think she’s more worried about Dad’s heart bypass these days,’ Ellen said, more abruptly than she intended. She always got snappy when talking about her mother, and was irritated with herself that she couldn’t loosen up and take her less seriously. But some sense of daughterly duty prevailed.

Pheely clearly misread it as a loving defence of a great mother and apologised profusely. ‘Sorry. I really don’t mean it. I said I was a bitch, didn’t I? Your mother and I never really hit it off, I’m afraid. No doubt she thought me a terrible slattern and a terrible mother, which I am. That’s why I tried to get out of tonight’s promise thing – Dilly’s doing “A” levels and I really must be there for her.’

‘You have a daughter doing “A” levels?’ Ellen stopped in her tracks and gaped. She’d been knocking years off her estimate of Pheely’s age all the way up the path – she was monumentally unfit, true, but that and the deep voice, which spoke in a curiously old-fashioned manner, were definitely misleading. Her face was fresh and girlish, with its huge baby eyes and lack of crow’s feet – after so many summers spent in sun and salt water, Ellen’s own skin was far more haggard. And the amazing, gravity-defying body hinted at someone who had yet to find her metabolism working against her. Ellen now put Pheely at about her own age or even younger.

‘Yes, Daffodil.’ Pheely halted too, with obvious relief, and continued breathlessly. ‘Poor darling – I know I can’t resist giving people nicknames, but perhaps it was a bit cruel wishing one on my own daughter. Imagine going through boarding-school being called Dilly Gently. Awful. But, of course, I was younger than she is now when I had her, so I can’t really blame myself any more. And I must say she’s always been terribly good about it. Gosh – look at the village from here! It could almost be picturesque.’

‘It is picturesque,’ said Ellen, aware that Pheely was changing the subject deliberately. She was starting to get the hang of the topic-hopping. Pheely, vivacious, indiscreet and a babbler, gave information in great dollops, then seized up, like a faulty ice-cream machine. It made her both delicious and irritating.

‘It’s a seething pit of lies and hatred,’ Pheely announced, with only a hint of self-mockery. ‘But, yes, maybe it’s quite picturesque from here. One forgets when one’s lived here so long. All my bloody life, in fact. You never lived here with your parents, did you?’

Ellen shook her head, distractedly doing some mental arithmetic to satisfy her own curiosity. Maths had always been a natural gift – much to her mother’s delight and her own embarrassment – and she had never been able to stop herself adding things up. She now calculated that if a daughter taking ‘A’ levels was older than her mother had been at her birth, Pheely couldn’t be more than thirty-three tops. It rocked her back on her heels to discover that someone so close to her own age could have a grown-up daughter.

‘Lucky you,’ Pheely was saying, throwing the stick that Snorkel had dropped at their feet, which Ellen had been too distracted to notice. ‘It was Somerset your parents moved here from, wasn’t it?’

‘Near Taunton, yes.’

‘I thought I recognised that lovely accent. Did you stay on there after they’d left?’

Ellen, who wasn’t aware that she had an accent and had suffered hours of elocution lessons at her parents’ expense because Jennifer had said once that ‘sounding like a peasant’ would hamper her chances of getting into medical school, found herself deeply self-conscious. She cleared her throat, and said, in a voice of which Henry Higgins would have been proud, ‘I’ve been mostly based in Cornwall, but I’ve worked all over the road – I mean, the place. Here and overseas.’

Too busy stick-throwing to notice the enunciated voice, Pheely sighed indulgently. ‘Oh, lucky you. What is it that you do?’

‘Sports physiotherapist.’

‘Wow.’ Pheely pulled in her stomach and glanced across at her. ‘No wonder you’re so gorgeously trim and fit.’

Ellen ducked her head, biting back the comment that she’d piled on weight lately – which she had, misery-eating over Richard. She knew it wasn’t the thing to say in front of somebody as curvaceous – however stunningly so – as Pheely.

‘Are you working while you’re here?’ she was asking now.

‘No, I’m having a break. I’ve always worked like mad through the winter – out-of-season training, foreign tours, winter sports, that sort of thing. That way, I can have free summers. Me and Rich—’ She stopped herself and tried again. ‘I like to surf.’

‘Sounds lovely. Makes my life seem very dull,’ Pheely seemed wildly envious of any life outside Oddlode. Her butterfly mind, it appeared, was trapped against a window, battering to get out.

Ellen was about to ask her what she did when Pheely clasped her hands to her mouth and let out an excited shriek. ‘How perfect! Does being a sports physiotherapist involve giving massages by any chance?’

‘It’s an important part of the job.’

‘Then you can come with me tonight. Yippee!’ Pheely was hopping around excitedly, green eyes jubilant. ‘You are free, aren’t you?’

‘Er – sort of. What’s happening?’

‘Hell’s Bells has organised an auction of promises at the manor,’ Pheely told her. ‘Oh, please say you’ll come – please! My friend Pixie can’t come now, the bitch, and I hate the idea of going alone, especially with Jasper there, although I’m dying to have a gawp. You can hold my hand and we can gawp together.’

For a thirty-something woman with a voice like a jazz singer and a grown daughter, Pheely could be absurdly childlike, Ellen realised – a spoilt little posh girl who had friends called Pixie and hated going to parties alone. She should be maddening, yet something about her bitchy, witty, frustrated joyfulness was intoxicating. She radiated warm-hearted abandon and instant friendship. Such ingenuous trust was something Ellen had almost forgotten.

‘What does it involve?’ she asked cautiously, proving her point. She’d become too slow-moving lately, no longer embracing the unknown with the impulsive recklessness that she and Richard had shared for so long, marking them apart from others. She missed it like mad. ‘No! Forget that question.’ She stopped Pheely before she could open her mouth to answer. ‘Where shall we meet and what do I wear?’

‘Oh, my darling!’ Pheely let out a little whoop and clapped her hands, her smile as wide and sunny as the view. ‘You are
such
a welcome addition to the village! Wear anything you like. God knows, looking as sexy as you do in builder’s shorts and an inside out T, you could wear a bin-bag and overexcite the locals – although, knowing Hell’s Bells, I’d say maybe wear more. Not because she’s a tartar for formality, which she is, but because the manor is always freezing, even at this time of year. And come round to mine for a bottle of plonk first so that I can fill you in – Gladys mentioned something about a wine crisis, so we must make sure we’ve snuffled some back beforehand.’ She glanced at her watch. ‘In fact – Christ! We must head back and get tarted up straight away.’

Despite having laboured all the way up the hill, Pheely had no such trouble dancing down it again. They were passing the folly and crossing the bridge before Ellen had time to catch her breath, the dogs in hot pursuit.

At the lime tree where the tracks and lanes met, Pheely clasped Ellen’s hands, her face pink from running. ‘Give me twenty minutes to change, then meet me back here.’

‘Can’t I just call at your house?’ Ellen felt a sudden twinge of panic at agreeing to go to a mysterious village event with a stranger, and to share a bottle of wine beforehand. She didn’t even know where Pheely lived.

‘It’s a bit hard to find the way in,’ Pheely said cryptically. ‘Much quicker to meet me here. I’ll phone Gladys straight away and let her know you’re adding a last-minute lot – in fact, Hell’s Bells must be back by now so I’ll tell her. That’ll get the old bag going. Hurry back!’

‘A last-minute what?’ Ellen called, but Pheely was already dancing away through the evening sun in the direction of the magical arched gateway in the high garden wall, behind which lay the secrets of the beautiful, decaying Lodge. A moment later she had pulled it open, letting an amazing green dappled light spill out as the sun, sinking to the west, poured golden rays through the bottle green leaves of the overgrown garden. It streamed through Pheely’s white smock like the beam from the transporter room in the
Starship Enterprise,
silhouetting that astounding, voluptuous hourglass body through the thin fabric before Pheely disappeared through the gate followed by Hamlet, himself dyed green in the light – half dog, half Incredible Hulk.

Ellen smiled to herself. She might have guessed. Ophelia Gently lived in the magical-mystery lodge, in her magical-mystery world of giant dogs, evil villagers and Pixie friends. She wasn’t real. She couldn’t be real.

Pheely’s cottage was a real mess.

It wasn’t the Lodge itself, but a ramshackle building tucked behind the big house that its occupant described as a seventeenth-century Nissen hut. Part artist’s studio, part open wardrobe, its interior was an installation in itself – something Tracey Emin couldn’t hope to achieve in a lifetime of lying in bed sulking.

Having been guided to it through a disorienting maze of overgrown topiary, past astonishing lichen-coated statues, fountains that spurted ivy in place of water, and twisted fruit trees that looked like goblins, Ellen had to look long and hard at Pheely’s mess to convince herself she wasn’t dreaming. No, dreams didn’t contain fifteen-kilo bags of dog food slumped beside a filthy potter’s wheel on which stood an open box of Tampax. Dreams didn’t feature a row of huge red knickers drying on an empty wine rack, or enough washing up in the Belfast sink to keep Nanette Newman’s hands soft for years to come. Compared to this, the Shaggers’ mess in Goose Cottage was a dropped sock in a show home.

‘I had a quick tidy-up in your honour,’ Pheely announced proudly, ‘which is why I’ve only got one eye made up. There’s plonk in the fridge – crack it open and I’ll daub the other.’ She whisked through to the modern lean-to extension, which housed a small bathroom and toilet from which Hamlet was taking a noisy drink.

The ‘cottage’ was as extraordinary as its wild surroundings. Tucked behind the huge boarded-up Lodge, it was little more than a long, low Cotswold-stone barn with a chimney at each end. With its vaulted roof and hefty oak cross-beams, it felt like the hull of an upside-down ship. Perhaps that was why Pheely’s possessions had fallen everywhere when it capsized, Ellen thought, as she picked her way past bags of earthenware clay, and over a carpet of lone shoes and dog chews to the ancient, rust-flecked fridge, which when open revealed nothing but wine and fruit.

Despite the weirdness of the set-up, she found the place surprisingly comforting to mooch around. Like her parents’ dishevelled bedroom at Goose Cottage, it reminded her of surfers’ cottages in Cornwall and crowded camper-vans on the road.

Looking around for a corkscrew, she wondered where Pheely slept. The cottage was just one big double-height room, the fireplace at one end housing a small, grumbling Rayburn and the one at the other a big kiln – the only sources of heating, it seemed. Beneath the illogical untidiness, there was a logical progression between the two, from kitchen-cum-laundry, past a dining-table-cum-paper-mountain to two very high piles of clothes in the shape of sofas, indicating that there was some sort of seating arrangement somewhere below. To one side, in front of a row of huge north-facing french windows, was a series of clay-crusted benches, shelves, another sink and the potter’s wheel with its Tampax installation. Through the open doors, Ellen could see a small terrace cluttered with pots, statues and garden ornaments, some glazed, others left natural and quite a few broken.

But there was no bed. Ellen had no idea where Pheely slept – and she had a daughter living here too.

‘Is Daffodil out?’ she asked, when Pheely emerged, both amazing green eyes now painted with dark, luscious shadow so that they gleamed from her face like slices of kiwi fruit. Dressed in a purple velvet top that clung to her curves and a fantastically clashing long, burnt-orange silk skirt, she looked amazing. Ellen felt very understated in her best cream cord hipsters, a white shirt knotted tightly under her bust. She’d hoped they showed off her tan, but beside Pheely’s colourful presence she felt drab and sepia.