Lots of Love (71 page)

Always held on Saturday, the only non-royal day of the famous Ascot race meeting, the annual garden party at Manor Farm boasted endless champagne and Pimm’s, lavish catering, a grand raffle, live music and – of course – the now legendary local horse race. Part village fête, part horse show, part open house, the day was one of the most eagerly anticipated in the Oddlode social calendar.

This year, the village ladies, who had spent months planning their outfits, were in for a treat. Great secrecy surrounded Felicity’s celebrated floral display, which reportedly took up an entire end of the huge open-sided white marquee and was concealed by a vast white screen of cotton sheets until the time came for the dramatic unveiling.

‘Oh, my darling, they are in for
such
an eyeful.’ Pheely clapped her hands eagerly as she danced out of the Goose Cottage gates. ‘I refuse to let you fly away before you see it. I guarantee you will never forget it, even if you can’t remember my name in a month’s time.’

Ellen said nothing as she watched her go, knowing that the butterfly had been fluttering cheerfully from pupa to pin-board, avoiding the nectar that had almost poisoned their friendship.

Pheely had not mentioned Spurs once.

Holding the locket to her cheek once more, Ellen sat down on his favourite garden bench and watched the lightest of angel-wing clouds scud across the blue sky. Not long until her plane cut through it, she thought, imagining feathers floating to the ground as she soared into the air. She would have an empty seat beside her, of course.

The lump was almost cutting her throat now.

It was perfect wedding weather. Across the county, brides were patting their barrel curlers worriedly and knocking back champagne to calm their nerves.

Ellen tried and failed to envisage Godspell under the caring attentions of hairdressers and beauticians, fretting about her veil, a stress spot and the chances of her lipstick lasting.

She climbed up the bunkhouse steps and looked across to the manor, just able to make out a few attic windows. Slumping down on the steps, she pressed the locket to her lips and kissed it for luck.

It sprang open. Pheely had packed it full of her killer grass.

Smiling despite herself, Ellen snapped it shut again and watched two magpies having a heated argument on one of the manor’s chimney stacks.

Two hours later, now somewhat stoned, Ellen watched a procession of colourful hats and dresses float past as she stuffed her rucksack with the few things she planned to take with her. Her more precious possessions were packed in one of the boxes to go to Spain, but most of her stuff had already been donated to a local jumble sale.

Snorkel watched her from the bed, blue eyes troubled.

‘You’ll be fine.’ Ellen ruffled her thick coat, unable to look at her. ‘You’ll love having a live-in boyfriend and a wild garden to play in.’

Horses were clattering past now, already
en route
for the race. Ellen checked her watch and winced. It was after eleven. Her heart spun on its aorta. Time to go. Time to go. Time to go.

She’d planned to put everything in the car and lock up the cottage before making the trip to the Lodge to say farewell. But as she packed up the jeep and checked around the house, making sure that every box was arranged ready for the removers, that the furniture was cleared of clutter, the beds free of linen and the cupboards emptied of contents, she felt a great ball of panic welling up inside her.

I can’t leave him here, she realised. I can’t leave him.

She stopped in the dark turn of the stairwell and took deep, gulping breaths. But the lump in her throat was strangling her now.

During the previous sleepless night, she had made the decision to get as far out of the village as possible before the wedding, even though her flight wasn’t until late evening.

It was already much later than she’d promised Pheely that she would drop Snorkel at the Lodge, but she didn’t trust herself to leave the cottage without breaking down. If he really loved me, he’d be coming with me, she told herself firmly, trying to pull herself together. He doesn’t love me enough to leave.

‘And black is white.’ She heard a voice in her head – brusque and argumentative, too authoritative to deny.

‘Bugger off, Mum,’ she moaned, burying her head in her hands.

‘If
you
really loved him, you would bloody well go there and stand up to be counted. Remember Emily Davison.’

Ellen groaned: Pheely’s dope had got her a lot more wired than she’d planned. She had only smoked the tiniest toke, tucking the rest of the stash into the airing cupboard with a note as a treat for Spurs and Godspell. It was her wedding present to them – God knows, they’d need it. But now her head reeled, as she heard her mother’s imaginary voice in her head.

‘Typical!’ the voice lectured. ‘Getting high on wacky tobacco at the most important moment in your life.
And
you’re driving. Have you
read
the statistics?’

Ellen watched Fins trot up the stairs towards her, eyes shining.

‘Oh, God.’ She covered her own eyes to stop herself seeing things. ‘Any minute now, Richard will demand cybersex.’

On cue, her mobile phone rang.

‘Ellen, dear!’ the brusque voice rang in her ear. ‘Just calling to wish you
bon voyage.
Everything okay?’

Was this still a dope daydream or was that really her mother’s voice, Ellen wondered vaguely. She reached out to tickle Fins’ neck, feeling soft fur slide beneath her fingernails. He purred and pushed against her, collapsing on his back, paddling his paws into her wrist and head-butting her ankle.

‘Mum,’ she felt Fins dig his claws into her arm and watched the beads of blood appear, ‘why doesn’t anything add up any more?’

Jennifer Jamieson coughed. ‘I’ll get your father.’

Ellen cocked her head as a drop of blood landed on her frayed cut-offs. She could hear her mother saying something about ‘. . . must be having second thoughts.’

‘Ellen?’ Theo came on the line.

She burst into tears.

‘Sssh . . . sssh, duckling. What is it?’ her father soothed. ‘Is it Richard? . . . Are you frightened about going away? . . . What is it, my little duck? What can I do to make things better, eh?’

Ellen was sobbing so hard that it took her a while to answer. When she got the words out, they sounded so embarrassing that she laughed as she wept. ‘T-tell me a fairy tale, Dad.’

Theo stalled. ‘A what?’

‘A f-fairy tale.’

‘I don’t know any,’ he confessed eventually. ‘I can tell you a joke . . .’

Ellen sobbed all the harder, ripping the locket from her throat. Pheely had been wrong. She couldn’t see the funny side.

‘An Englishman, a Scot and a Spaniard walked into a bar—’ her father started buoyantly, desperate to cheer her up.

‘Once upon a time,’ Ellen interrupted, watching Fins stalking back down the stairs. He was fatter than ever. ‘There was a little mermaid, who grew up on the sea-bed. Are you with me so far?’

‘Um, yes . . .’ Theo answered cautiously.

‘When she came of age, she swam to the surface of the ocean to sing upon the rocks with the other mermaids. But before she could join them, she saw a man drowning and she saved his life . . .’

‘The cottage door is wide open, Snorkel is rollicking around in Hunter Gardner’s paddock, there’s a rucksack on the bed in the attic and she’s written the weirdest message on that lovely white wall you painted.’

‘Oh, yes?’ Dilly was barely listening to her mother’s breathless report as she tacked up Otto, her head full of thoughts of the race.

‘Yes. It says
MERMAIDS RULE.
Oh dear, perhaps giving her that dope wasn’t such a good idea. Where do you suppose she can be?’

‘At the party?’ Dilly suggested, buckling up the throat-lash with shaking hands. ‘I told you she wouldn’t be able to leave without watching Spurs ride. Oh, God, I wish Rory was here. Why did I say I’d meet him there? I’m too nervous to do this right.’

‘Here, let me.’ Pheely removed her hat, plonked it on the gatepost and took over.

On the manicured Manor Farm lawns, the garden party was already in full swing, and there was an excited air of anticipation as guests held on tightly to their hats in the buffeting wind. Word had got out that Ely was set to make an announcement, and wild rumours had started to pass between the clusters of eager locals. Only a few had heard the engagement story doing the rounds among the pensioners. Most assumed that it was connected to the Gateses’ burgeoning empire.

Almost everybody was aware that Ely wanted to set up a hotel in Oddlode, and villagers knew that he had his eye on his brother’s dilapidated mill. The most popular train of thought was that he had found a way of getting his clutches on it. He was very close to Gina and Pat, the ambitious owners of the Duck Upstream, so it would make sense if they had all got into cahoots and staged a buy-out.

‘The bounder’s planning to set up a theme park, I hear,’ muttered Hunter Gardner, his low-slung chin disappearing angrily into his cravat.

‘Possibly.’ Pru Hornton smiled winsomely, draining her third glass of champagne-and-Valium, convinced that today, at last, Ely would announce he was leaving fat Felicity for her. He had been behaving very strangely lately.

‘Look at him, showing off in that ridiculous car of Giles’s,’ Hunter grumbled as Ely performed another circuit of the huge circular drive that cut through his garden, loudly reminding his guests that there would be a very special surprise shortly before the race. ‘And why, in God’s name, has he put ribbons on it? The chap’s gone totally barking mad.’ His hat flew off in a gust of wind.

Trapped in the Aston Martin with her husband, Felicity was looking anxiously at her watch. The centrepiece of her floral display had still not arrived, and Pheely was not answering the phone at the Lodge cottage. She clutched her mobile to her chest.

‘Fear not.’ Ely patted her large thigh. ‘It will be here.’

‘And what about Lady Belling? She and the Surgeon were supposed to arrive hours ago.’

‘The Belling boy is here,’ he muttered under his breath. ‘He is all we need.’

‘But her ladyship won’t let the ceremony go ahead without them.’

‘Be silent, woman! Today, my little plum pudding, everything will be perfect.’ He started to laugh, running over Hunter Gardner’s Panama hat as he accelerated along the driveway. ‘Welcome, welcome, guests!’ he called out benevolently. ‘Today is a
very
special day. Welcome!’ He parked the Aston at a rakish angle by his gateway and sprang out to greet new arrivals, feeling a young man again.

In the marquee, Lily Lubowski tried very hard to peek round the white sheeting that covered Felicity’s floral display, certain that it housed a scale model of a vast new estate Ely planned to build to house immigrants or dangerous criminals. But she was foiled by the arrival of several Wycks, buckling under the weight of a shrouded object on two sturdy planks.

‘Out the way, missus,’ Saul growled, sweat dripping from his buzz-cut.

At the opposite end of the marquee, Roadkill were performing a sound-check amid screeching feedback and ear-splitting guitar chords. Saul almost dropped his planks as he saw Godspell appear on the stage. Dressed in a long black dress with a fishtail skirt and high pointed collar, she was deathly pale, her witchy white face covered with a black lace veil. She reached out her spiky black fingernails to the microphone, stared straight at Saul, and opened her small black-lipped mouth:

‘Let the
ANTICHRIST
of
HATE
that is
SITTING
on your
GATE
take your
SOUL
 . . .
YEAWWWWWWW-AUGHHHH!’
she sang, knowing that it was his all-time favourite. Saul’s blue eyes filled with tears.

On a little raised platform beside the rose garden, the Lower Oddford string quartet also had tears in their eyes as they raked their way through Vivaldi, completely drowned by the wailing from the tent.

Indulgent Ely, who was tone-deaf, thought the discord rather charming as he towered beside puddingy Felicity at the head of the drive, welcoming their guests who were crossing from the temporary car park set up in the orchard.

‘There you are, Ophelia.’ He greeted Pheely with a steely smile. ‘I must say, I had hoped the bust would be here a little sooner.’

‘Have you seen it?’ Pheely panted breathlessly, having chased her commission all the way to the farm, furious with Ellen whose no-show had made her so behind schedule.

‘Not yet,’ he muttered. ‘Your porters used the back entrance from the farmyard. They’re setting it up in the marquee now, I believe.’

‘Oh, how thoughtful of them!’ Pheely gasped with relief. ‘I’ll go and check it’s okay.’

‘I’ll come with you,’ Felicity offered, but her husband took her pudgy little hand.

‘Later, Pudding, later – we must greet our guests.’ He nodded pointedly at a shiny little Mini pelting towards the orchard. At its wheel, a large woman in a navy blue suit was waving a piece of paper cheerfully, almost crashing into the horsebox in front of her. It was the registrar with the last-minute paperwork permitting a marriage ceremony to take place in Ely’s gardens that afternoon, and which she had agreed, after a little cajoling, to conduct. The backhanders involved had cost Ely a great deal, and Felicity let out a little squeak as he squeezed her hand tightly and shuddered at the thought of the expense.

‘Oh, right, yes – well, I know it will be just super.’ Felicity flashed her auto-pilot smile at Pheely. ‘All your work is, Ophelia. Is Daffodil not coming?’

‘She’s taken her horse straight round to the collecting ring.’

The paddock beside the trout farm was already almost filled with horseboxes and trailers, from which fit, excitable mounts were being unloaded and walked around in anticipation of being tacked up and crossing the private bridge on to Devil’s Marsh for the traditional one o’clock start. In one horsebox, a grey, shaking Spurs was being comforted by Rory and now Dilly too, as he asked over and over again whether he was doing the right thing.