Farm Fatale (28 page)

    Rosie countered with what she felt was the ingenuous explanation that the less makeup she put on, the fewer mistakes she would make with it. "You know how you used to despair over my clumpy mascara," she said.

    Bella considered this. "It's all very well looking
natural
, darling, but you actually have to put a lot of makeup on to make that justscrubbed look work."

    But at least the garden, if not Rosie or the cottage, showed signs of someone having worked on it, and it was out here that Rosie dragged Bella and her son after breakfast. Much to Rosie's delight, the scented narcissi planted by the previous occupants had recently started to nod from the borders among the pansies and flowering herbs she had put in herself. It was into these, the first flowers in Rosie's first garden, that Ptolemy now started drop-kicking a large and familiar-looking football.

    "He's
ruining
my pansies," Rosie wailed.

    "Darling," Bella soothed. "You mustn't mind too much. Blue's a
dreadfully
common color for a pansy."

    Rosie eyed Ptolemy with dislike. How odd that Bella, so acute on every other front, was utterly blind to the faults of her adored son. Just as Bella had always imagined that she, Rosie, was oblivious to the glaring faults of Mark. That, at least, had changed.

    "Let's have lunch at the pub," Rosie suggested. Bella's visit may have meant Ptolemy, but it also meant the opportunity to break Mark's embargo on the Barley Mow. If it got Ptolemy out of the house, he was unlikely to object.

    "Couldn't keep away from the beer forever, then?" Alan called out to Rosie from behind the bar. "The call of the mild?"

    Rosie grinned and introduced Bella. "My friend from London."

    "London, eh?" mused Alan. "Heard the one about the farmer from Eight Mile Bottom who went to London? He found it easy enough to get there—just followed all the signs—but couldn't understand it when he wanted to come home and there were no signs back to Eight Mile Bottom!"

    Bella looked nonplussed at this. Her eyes dwelt on Alan's Green with Henvy T-shirt, and she read the accompanying details about the World Championship Hen Racing.

    "Look, darling," she urged Ptolemy, who was busily inserting his fingers into Alan's sound system. "This gentleman holds a sort of Olympics for hens."

    "Poultry in motion, it is," Alan told him, leaning over the bar and prizing Ptolemy's digits away from the recording buttons. "You should see my champion hens. Fastest birds in the world, they are. Some go at over a hundred miles an hour."

    "That's impossible," snapped Ptolemy. Then, as the landlord shrugged and turned away, he demanded, "Show me."

    Alan sighed theatrically. "I'd love to, believe me," he said, placing both hands on the bar. "But I can't. Wrong time of year for hens."

    "What do you mean?" asked Bella.

    "Bit early for them. They'll be back in the next couple of weeks."

    Ptolemy's red bottom lip was sticking out like the drawer of a cash register. "Where are they?"

    "Africa somewhere," said Alan matter-of-factly. "Didn't you know hens go south for the winter?"

    Bella looked uncertain. Rosie pushed a hand firmly over her mouth but could not prevent her shoulders from shaking.

    "Oh, yes," continued the landlord, catching Rosie's eye. "Great flocks of 'em. You should see 'em when they set off. Millions of 'em, all sitting on the telegraph wires. Amazing sight, it is. And what's even more amazing is that they all come back. Homing hens, you see."

    "I didn't realize hens migrated," Bella said doubtfully as Rosie attempted to convert a snigger into a sneeze.

    "They don't everywhere, but they do this far north. Too cold for 'em here in the winter."

    Bella's eyes widened. "How far north are we?"

    "Put it this way," Alan said, busily polishing a glass. "Go out the door, turn right and up the hill, and it's the North Pole. Now," he added as Bella's eyebrows shot into her hairline in mixed amazement and suspicion, "what can I get you ladies to drink?"

    Rosie, trying to avoid making eye contact with Alan, looked up at the signs above the bar. Mr. Womersley's onion supremacy, she saw, remained intact, although the ferret sign had disappeared. "Gone to good homes, have they?" she asked. "The ferrets?"

    "Dame Nancy Brooke-Sullivan took some," Alan told her, "and the rest went somewhere up your way. Some family up Cinder Lane."

    Rosie swallowed. A few escaping ferrets were all Mark needed to tip him over the edge from hysteria to homicide.

    Bella, meanwhile, was staring in amazement at the beer labels. "Hairy Helmet…Old Knickersplitter…" she read in amazement.

    Meanwhile, Ptolemy, having spotted the potential of the red plush banquette running round the barroom, was now throwing himself up and down on it.

    "Careful, darling," murmured Bella. "Those shoes were awfully expensive."

    The second crisis was when Ann's chips met with Ptolemy's furious disapproval. "They're too thick," he wailed.

    "He's used to McDonald's," whispered Bella apologetically.

    "And what's
this
?" Ptolemy demanded disgustedly, pulling out large bits of ham from his sandwich.

    "It's very nice ham, carved from a proper joint." Stung by Ann's proximity into defending a meat product, Rosie tried hard not to feel guilty about it.

    "This isn't
ham
," spat Tolly, his face contorted with revulsion as he examined the thick pink pieces edged with fat.

    "It's just that he's used to that wafer-thin stuff from Sainsbury's, that's all." Bella shrugged at Ann. "Go outside and play, darling," she instructed her son, while Rosie hoped fervently that the Barley Mow had full building insurance.

    Nonetheless, she seized the opportunity offered by his absence.

    "So when can we go and see this farmer?" Bella demanded.

    Rosie hesitated. Desperate though she was for her friend to approve of Jack, she was reluctant to inflict Ptolemy on him. Yet how else were they to meet? It seemed unlikely Mark would baby-sit.

    Just then Tolly came hurtling back in floods of furious, screaming tears. It took some time for Bella, who had immediately imagined a pedophile attempting to abduct him, to discover the cause of her son's distress. "He's been trying to turn himself into Superman in the phone booth," she explained, "but there's some woman in there making a very long phone call apparently."

    Out of the corner of her eye, Rosie saw Alan listening avidly at the bar.

    Once Ptolemy had been calmed down with promises of exotic holidays and expensive video games, he was unexpectedly keen to go along with his mother's suggestion that he sit in the BMW and be quiet. This surprised Rosie until she heard the sound of a car horn blasting repeatedly from the car park. Something cold and heavy, and in no way related to the cheese roll she had recently eaten, slithered through her stomach. The visit to the farm could be put off no longer.

    The trouble started before they'd even gotten to the gate.

    "Look, darling," Bella pointed out to Tolly. "Look at those wonderful sheep."

    Ptolemy immediately clapped his hands to his eyes and marched past the field. "Missed them," he declared triumphantly.

    "Don't you like animals?" Rosie was surprised. Then again, Ptolemy confounded most ideas of what was normal in children.

    "Oh, he loves them, don't you, darling?" Bella rushed in. "Adores his dog, don't you, sweetheart? Although," she added in an undertone to Rosie, "we had to get rid of the last nanny after I caught her putting Berengaria in the microwave. She actually believed Tolly when he told her it was the quickest way to dry her. That's the trouble, you see. He's much too clever for his nannies—
don't miss the horse, darling
," she suddenly urged her son. "Just look at him there in that bottom field."

    Ptolemy looked with contempt at the big, glossy chestnut. "Hate horses," he snarled. "They're so slow at racing."

    "Slow?" echoed Rosie. The horse, she knew, belonged to the well-to-do wife of one of the local businessmen who rented the field from Jack. Rosie had often seen her belting up Cinder Lane to the farm at a velocity anything but leisurely.

    "He means as opposed to Formula One, darling. He's been trying to persuade Simon to buy him a mini–racing car for ages."

    As she lifted the Spitewinter gate, Rosie tried not to think about Jack's likely reaction to the child. Running him over with the combine harvester, most likely.

    "At least Ptolemy's got confidence," Bella said proudly. "That's the most important thing you can give your children apparently."

    Rosie privately thought that the most important thing Bella could give Ptolemy was a good smack. It was, she had found, one of the few matters on which she and Mark agreed.

    "And he's
so imaginative
. The other day we were in Sainsbury's and he spotted a woman in a yashmak. 'Look, Mum,' he yelled at the top of his voice. 'It's Darth Vader.'
Can you imagine?"

    "Yes," said Rosie truthfully, before she could stop herself.

    "And he's awfully competitive," Bella continued as they came into the farmyard. "Simon keeps telling him, 'Remember, son, it's not the taking part that counts. It's the winning.' Hilarious, isn't he?"

    "Rib cracking," said Rosie, thinking that, much as she loved Bella, her friend definitely had hidden shallows. As for Simon, his sense of humor had clearly not improved of late. Even when the relationship had been in its heady early days, Bella had confessed that her fiancé was hardly a laugh a minute. Personally, Rosie had always wondered whether he managed a laugh a year.

    Rather to Rosie's relief, Jack was nowhere to be seen. Almost immediately, neither was Ptolemy, who shot off into one of the barns. Rosie's fear that he might fall in the silage clamp or suffer a hideous, mangled death in some machinery or other—fear in which a certain amount of hope was mingled—proved unfounded when Ptolemy was found safe and sound poking a sharp stick at Wellington in her chicken coop. Dragged forcibly away by Rosie, Ptolemy then attempted to climb inside the large, rusty tube with the conical top that stood in a corner of the farmyard. Only when Rosie explained that it was Jack's grain silo and not the Spitewinter Farm Independent Space Project did he desist.

    "Jack must be out and about somewhere," Rosie suggested.

    Walking them to the fields, she moved as fast as she could in the hope that, by the time they found Jack, Ptolemy would be too exhausted to do anything other than behave himself. But Ptolemy, unfortunately, was as energetic as he was evil. It was, of course, just when, oblivious to Rosie's and Bella's screamed instructions to stop, he was rushing at wailing herds of sheep and pretending to bark like a dog that Jack appeared on the horizon, silhouetted against the sky like an avenging god.

    "What the bloody hell's going on?" he howled, catching up with Ptolemy in a couple of huge strides and grabbing his arm. "You little bastard. How dare you…Rosie!" He stared at the women in astonishment.

    Rosie felt she might explode with shame. Conscious of Bella's amused eye upon her, she clumsily performed the introductions. "Ptolemy has never seen a real-live farm before," she gasped, as if that in some way explained why he was being forcibly restrained by a real-life farmer.

    "Yes," chimed in Bella, flicking her smile on to dazzle. "I was hoping he might learn something about the countryside. Perhaps you could talk him through some of the trees and flowers or something." She batted her eyelids furiously, thrust a hip forward, and shook a glossy black lock wantonly in front of her eye.

    To Rosie's amazement, instead of erupting with fury, Jack merely shrugged. She had forgotten the power of Bella's charm. Or was it the power of Bella's tight little white T-shirt and designer jeans that showed off every curve?

    "Well, you can come with me to the top field if you like," Jack offered. "There's a lot of hedgerow along the lane."

    "Look at the hedges, darling," Bella urged Ptolemy as all three traipsed behind Jack. "The nice man's going to tell you what all the flowers are."

    For a second, Ptolemy looked as if he was going to cover his eyes again. Catching Jack's steely glare, however, he thought better of it and stared resentfully at some buttercups.

    Jack pulled at the lacy, green-white blossom leaning out into the road. "Know what this is?"

    Ptolemy shook his head violently.

    "Cow parsley?" guessed Rosie after a few minutes' silence from the others.

    "Very good." She felt ridiculously proud of his approval.

    "And those are forget-me-nots," Bella said immediately, pointing at the bright blue flowers.

    "Excellent," said Jack, flashing her one of the wry smiles Rosie had grown to regard as her personal property. She felt a stir of jealousy. "And that blossom at the very top is…?"

    "Don't-give-a-toss," spat Ptolemy.

    "Darling!" Bella flashed an apologetic glance at Jack.

    "Nearly," said Jack neutrally. "Love-in-a-mist." He briefly flicked Rosie's eyes with his own. She blushed, and her stomach turned over.

    Jack was now shaking a long, lolling, dusty-red bloom at Ptolemy, who glanced at it with loathing and pressed his hands to his eyes.