Fear in the Cotswolds (3 page)

‘Wow!’ she gasped.

‘I know. I was determined not to let it get like this, but it’s an occupational hazard. If you go to any computer geek’s house, it’ll be the same. If you don’t mind, I’ll just close it up and suggest you stay out. If anybody phones, wanting my services – which they will, I promise you – just tell them I’m away until the seventh of Feb. Don’t let them leave anything here. I don’t want to come home to a stack of broken PCs.’

Thea’s experience of computers was not great. Her husband, Carl, had used a standard machine for his work, and Thea had borrowed it for emails and letter-writing, until she’d got a laptop the year before he died. So far, nothing had gone wrong with it. But she knew there were people who were crippled without their computer; immobilised by panic as if their right arm had dropped off. ‘Is there anybody else I could refer them to?’ she asked.

‘Not really. Don’t worry about it. There are plenty of us in the Yellow Pages. Don’t let them dump their problems onto you. The women are the worst – they get hysterical if the screen freezes for two minutes.’

Until then, Thea had not considered the need for computer doctors as being almost as urgent
as that for the more traditional kind. She had a vision of a tower console being belted into a passenger seat and rushed to Lucy for emergency attention. ‘I bet you’re popular,’ she said.

‘I am sometimes, yes. But if I have to declare the thing dead on arrival, it can get scary. I’ve had my face slapped for it, though only once.’

The phone rang at seven-thirty on that first Saturday evening, and when she answered it, Thea was regaled with a confused story about a virus message which had begun replicating itself endlessly all over the monitor screen. ‘Sounds nasty,’ she said, ‘but I’m afraid Lucy isn’t here to help you. You’ll have to find somebody else. Sorry.’ She put the phone down on the anguished female yowl that met this information.

Not only, it seemed, was Lucy’s work desperately needed – it knew no civilised restrictions concerning evenings and weekends. The prospect of more such calls was irritating, but it was a more difficult emotion that Thea found herself assailed by in the strange building with its peculiar spaces and absolute silence. She found herself to be nervous, jumping as the cat came noiselessly into the room, checking that the doors were all locked against the dark and chilly outside world.

The second bedroom was sparsely furnished, as if kept strictly for guests. There were paperback novels in a small free-standing bookcase, a lamp on a table beside the bed, and a wardrobe with a drawer beneath the hanging space, which Lucy had invited her to use. The bed was a generous single, with ample space for Thea and her dog – but not for a second human being. What if Detective Superintendent Phil Hollis had joined her again, as he had done in Cold Aston and Temple Guiting? What if she met a likely man and wanted to bring him back with her? Improvisation, she concluded. The lack of a double bed had never stopped a couple from copulating, she was sure. But the thought of squashing into this particular one with anybody, however appealing he might be, was not tempting. ‘Just us, then,’ she said to the spaniel. Hepzie wagged her long tail reassuringly.

The situation with Phil remained unresolved. There had been no final ending to the relationship, nothing spoken that rendered it irreversibly terminal. As far as she knew he had no other female friend competing for his attentions. They had discovered aspects of each other that they weren’t sure they liked, and Phil had been the one to voice his feelings first. Thea had not behaved very well in Temple Guiting. And in Lower Slaughter she had recognised
more and more of the flaws and failings in the relationship. She couldn’t see quite what a committed relationship with Hollis would bring her in terms of happiness and fulfilment, while at the same time she felt upset and apprehensive at the prospect of losing him completely.

‘But what is it you
want
?
’ he had demanded of her, a few months earlier.

Good question –
very
good. Much easier to list the things she did
not
want: the constraints of constantly having to account for her movements; the endless discussions about food and mealtimes; the daily compromises; the sheer claustrophobia of couplehood. She had tried to say some of this, and Phil, to his credit, had listened carefully.

‘I agree with you,’ he had concluded, thereby almost changing her mind completely. ‘I don’t want those things, either.’ She heard an added
with you, anyway
, that he never spoke aloud, and she felt irrationally rejected, despite everything. She had not liked it when he confronted her with the truth of her own feelings. She had both wanted him and not wanted him, and the craziness of this alarmed her.

She was nearly forty-four. Her birthday would be on 3
^rd
February, while still here at Hampnett. Like any woman of the same age, she was perpetually aware that there was still time for another baby – or even two. She knew women
who had given birth at forty-six. Her only child had been born when she was twenty-two, and she had not wanted any more, for reasons she could hardly now explain. The triangle created with Carl and Jessica had suited her perfectly. He had his little girl, who thrilled him beyond expression. There was a comfort and complacency to this small nuclear family which Thea used as a sort of cocoon. She passed her twenties and thirties in a haze of coffee mornings and outings, friends and conversations that had felt entirely sufficient at the time. She never had a proper job, having taken a degree in history, marrying Carl two weeks after graduation, and delivering Jessica thirteen months later. The degree had mainly been a matter of writing essays constructed from facts gleaned in the library. It had been completely unreal, and left scarcely a mark on her consciousness.

And then Carl had died. Killed in a car crash that nobody could ever have predicted. The indescribable pain of the loss and shock had lasted a year or more, a time of stunned bewilderment that she could hardly remember now. Everything she had taken for granted had dissolved into futility, and since then she had struggled to maintain any kind of purpose. Drifting from one Cotswold village to another, taking a superficial interest in the events that
swirled around her, living for the day – it had been enough to keep her alive. More than enough, when Phil appeared and she felt herself being drawn to him as if wound in by a nylon fishing line. Sleeping with a man who wasn’t Carl had been a richly emotional exercise. With no sense of guilt, she had allowed herself to become lost in the sensations of novelty and recovery. But the novelty had worn off much too quickly, leaving them both wondering what it had all been about.

There had never been the slightest hint of marriage or another baby or a shared home. They had been joined together by a series of police investigations, in which Thea had found herself involved more or less directly, with not a great deal else to talk or think about. Phil was in his late forties, divorced, with a son. His daughter had died of an accidental drug overdose, effectively putting a stop to any furtherance of his police career beyond the level he’d reached. He was bruised, as Thea was, weary from life’s blows and recently physically damaged by a slipped disc. A decent man, sometimes insightful, mostly kind…but…but…shouldn’t there be something more than that?

Her family had done their best to be warily understanding about Phil. As a shattered young
widow, Thea had been the object of appalled sympathy from her siblings and parents, who could find little to say. They had gathered round and offered varying kinds of support, until the advent of Phil Hollis had brought about a collective sigh of relief. She could be treated normally again, now she had another man. When it became evident that this was not to be a rapid courtship and second marriage, they held off and waited patiently for what might happen next.

And so it was that this well-paid exile in a wintry hamlet was also in part intended to be a time of reassessment. She had another forty years of life, in the normal nature of things, and she had no intention of wasting it. Already she had rediscovered some of the pleasures of history, laid out for her on a plate during some of her house-sitting commissions. Walking the deserted uplands, where medieval villages had been abandoned, and megalithic bodies had been buried, she had sometimes felt a strong connection with bygone times. The notion of further organised study held some appeal – a year or two at a university doing a master’s degree, perhaps. But the prospect of such an intense commitment gave her pause. She doubted whether she had the application for it, having found how much she liked the flying-Dutchman
existence of a house-sitter. A few weeks in one place, getting to know new people, many of them under the stress of a sudden violent incident, brought out something she hadn’t known was within her. A clear-sightedness; an ability to make connections and see through prevarications and evasions, had manifested itself, and she liked this new talent.

Sunday was again cloudy, with a spiteful east wind cutting across the wolds. The animals were accorded over an hour’s attention, first the rabbits, then the donkey and finally the unhappy Jimmy. Except the dog seemed less miserable than before, thanks to Hepzibah. The spaniel had gone straight to the conservatory after coming back from the donkey shed, and reintroduced herself to the lurcher. Again he licked her forehead, and she sat amicably beside him until Thea broke it up and took him out to his toilet. He drank a bowl of milk and settled down again on his warm bed.

Later in the morning, she decided it was time for a good walk. She had yet to locate the many public footpaths, or to visit the famous church. Not that a Sunday morning was the best time for that, she realised, unless she joined in the service. Church services were not part of her normal experience, and she inwardly cringed at
the thought of trying to join in with a handful of aged parishioners, intoning hymns she didn’t know and repeating words from a prayer book which had no meaning for her. Except, of course, there was little chance that such a small settlement continued to enjoy weekly services. Places of this size were lucky to get sufficient share of a vicar for more than once-a-month attentions. The whole business was slowly dying away, and few people of Thea’s age and below cared enough even to notice.

So she bundled herself into a thick coat, with scarf and woolly hat, and set out to see what Hampnett might have to offer.

As chance would have it, there was a service taking place in the church, and as Thea and her dog approached, the strains of organ music wafted down the grassy bank to greet her. Three cars were aligned along the edge of the grass, and as Thea strolled past, people began to emerge from the church door. Ahead of the small group came a young woman, head tucked between her shoulders as the wind nipped at her. She wore a thin coat, and looked pinched with cold.

Curious as always, Thea paused to watch this unlikely churchgoer, and as the girl reached the gate leading out of the churchyard, their eyes
met. Thea smiled, and it was as if she had held out a hand to someone dangling over the edge of a deep abyss. ‘Hello,’ she said, unable to repress a slight question in her tone at the naked hope and relief on the face in front of her.

Hepzie, as so often happened, provided the necessary lubricant by jumping up at the new acquaintance, who responded with a small cry of delight. She grabbed the long soft ears and bent down to gaze into the dog’s eyes. ‘Who are you?’ she murmured. ‘Good little dog.’

The accent was marked, but not instantly identifiable. She looked up at Thea. ‘I am Janina, from Bulgaria,’ she said simply.

Thea mentally transposed the Y of
Yanina
into a J, remembering a student friend of the same name. ‘Oh. Pleased to meet you,’ she said. Bulgaria was well beyond her scope, she realised as she quickly scanned her memory for anything at all. Nothing. Did it have mountains? Was it east or west of places like Poland or Hungary? Or did it neighbour Yugoslavia – were the people Muslim? The girl had dark hair and eyes, but her skin was the same hue as Thea’s. ‘Do you live in Hampnett?’

‘I am nanny, over there.’ She waved a hand to a point vaguely northwards where there was a handful of farms and old stone houses. ‘I am free for half a morning, so I go to church.’

‘I see.’

‘I am not interested in church, you understand. It is the only place to escape, where I can sit in quiet. People look at me, but I close my eyes and forget them.’ The English was carefully good, the sentences constructed slightly in advance of their utterance. Thea wanted to retreat from this premature confession, this exposure of an unhappiness that she would far rather not have to face.

‘How long have you been here?’

‘Six weeks,’ came the answer in a flash. Janina shivered. ‘Six long weeks.’

Why did they come? Thea wondered. What sort of life did they expect here – and was it really so much better than what they had at home? Could mere money ever compensate for the loneliness and low status and general unpleasantness?

They had begun walking away from the church, taking the small road in the direction that Janina had indicated. A car passed them slowly, the elderly female driver ducking her head to stare at them shamelessly. This, more than anything, forged a bond between Thea and the young woman. Instinctively she closed the gap between them.

‘How many children are there?’

‘Two. Benjamin is six and Nicholas is almost four. He is to have a birthday party next
Saturday.’ The gloomy resignation in her voice made Thea snort with a brief laugh. ‘Yes, it is funny, I know. A party should be happy, with games and a lot of food. Perhaps that will be how it is, but only if I make it so.’

Thea murmured an encouraging syllable. ‘His mother hates me,’ Janina announced. ‘Because she is stupid and I am not. Because she has made big, big mistakes and is now in a trap. She can see that I know her to be a fool, and that makes her hate. I understand it all, but what can I do? Every time I look in her face she can see what I know.’ This emerged as a prepared speech, and Thea wondered whether the hour in church had been spent in thinking it through. ‘She is a terrible mother, with no love for the boys. She pays me to love them for her.’

‘Where’s their father?’

‘Hah! The father is Simon, who works in a hotel near Stow-on-the-Wold. He is always working, but at home I never saw a more lazy man. He drinks beer. He watches football on the TV. He says he is tired from the guests who bother him every moment of the day.’

Probably true, thought Thea. She had always considered hotel work to be amongst the most demanding and exhausting imaginable. ‘What does their mother do?’ she asked.

‘Oh…she works in advertising. She abandons
her boys for such
worthless
work. Worthless,’ she repeated. ‘It brings no good to anybody. It is about lies and deceit and nothing more. Stupid woman.’

‘What’s her name?’

‘Her real name is Beatrice, but we call her Bunny.
Call me Bunny
, she says as if that were a sort of gift. A grown woman, forty years old, named Bunny. That is stupid.’

Thea began to feel a flicker of sympathy for the maligned employer. This high-minded nanny must be rather a strain to live with, if indeed her scorn was as visible as she believed it to be. There was an uncomfortably obsessive element in this outpouring of bile to a total stranger.

‘My name’s Thea Osborne and this is Hepzibah,’ she said. ‘We’re here for a month.’

Janina paused, as if arrested by a firm hand laid on her arm. ‘Ah, I am sorry,’ she breathed. ‘I have talked too much. How rude. Thea,’ she repeated. ‘And Hep—?’

‘She answers to Hepzie. It was a silly choice of name. I’ve regretted it ever since.’

‘So change it,’ said the Bulgarian, as if the obviousness of this was almost beyond any need to state it. ‘A dog cares nothing for a name.’

‘Too late,’ said Thea lightly.

Janina shrugged.
Not my problem
, was writ large on her face.

‘Did you qualify as a nanny in Bulgaria? Your English is excellent.’ She stopped. Any more questions and it might sound like an interrogation.

The girl pouted contemptuously. ‘
Qualify!
What need for study to care for young children? It is crazy. I have four young brothers – that is my
qualifying
. I mean
qualification
,’ she said the word emphatically, even boastfully. ‘My mother took a new husband when I was twelve and…’ she made a hissing zipping sound, flicking one hand in a horizontal sweep ‘…then there were four small brothers, all in four years, like a magic trick.’

‘Gosh,’ said Thea faintly.

‘Fortunately, I like small boys. They are funny and warm and brave and wild. I was happy to come here to take care of Nicholas and Benjamin, for money. It is good money, I think. And the food is not bad. But the woman is…’ she looked around as if afraid of eavesdroppers ‘…she is a monster. I am sorry to say it, but it is true.’

‘Well…’ said Thea helplessly. ‘I’d better go back now. I suppose I’m rather like you. I have to take care of a woman’s animals, and her house, while she’s away. And my money’s pretty good, too. We’re the new domestic servants, you and me. It’s like it was two centuries ago, when rich women paid other women to do the dirty work.’ Even as she spoke she felt a pang of remorse at
this small betrayal of Lucy, who clearly didn’t object to dirty hands at all.

‘I too have more duties,’ said Janina with a sigh.

‘I’m sure I’ll see you again. This is a very small village.’

‘It is not a village, not at all.’ The raised voice contained a genuine fury and frustration. ‘Here nobody cares for each other, no sharing, no place to gather. This church, today, I expected all the people to come. Instead there were six very old ladies, a man who seemed to be in some deep trouble inside himself, and another man, also very old, who talked aloud to himself. It was like a hospital – a place of dying. They are all there because they are afraid and hope for rescue. But they know it will not come.’ She shook her head in despair at the follies of the English that she had somehow fallen amongst. ‘I will not go there again,’ she added. ‘It was worse than my room in Bunny’s stupid house. Except for the decorations, of course. The decoration is a glory. It reminds me of Rila Monastery at home.’

‘Oh?’

‘You have not seen it?’

Thea glanced towards the church, where a knot of people still hovered in the porch. ‘I’ve heard of it. I’ll come back another day for a proper look.’

‘Any day but Sunday,’ Janina said with a shiver. ‘No more Sundays for me.’

‘Cold in there, I expect.’

Again Janina shrugged. ‘Not so cold as Bulgaria in winter. I come from Plovdiv, close to the mountains. There is snow.’ She stared wistfully at the grey sky.

‘Well…’ Thea tried again.

‘Yes, you must go. I too. No free time for me now until next Sunday.’

‘Surely that can’t be right,’ Thea objected. ‘What about the evenings?’

‘They go out, to see their friends, two, three evenings each week, so I must babysit. And why should I object? I have nowhere to go, nothing to do. The children like me.’ Her face became pinched. ‘Too much they like me. When I leave, they have to begin all over again, to like a new person. It is cruel. They are boys – they should learn about trust and security, if they are to make good husbands and fathers when they grow up. All these two learn is how to bear it when women walk away from them. It will be what they learn to expect – they will push everyone away from them. It makes me very sad.’

Thea’s eyes widened. ‘You’ve really thought about it, haven’t you?’ she said.

‘It was my degree subject – psychology. I did my postgraduate course on how children learn to
form relationships. I understand too much,’ she added darkly. ‘Too much for comfort.’

It was, Thea gathered, all rather a shock for the poor overeducated clever girl, finding herself in the role of servant to a stupid woman. Could it be possible that she earned more in Gloucestershire as a nanny than she would as an academic in her own country? Why did she submit to such a miserable fate, otherwise?

‘Well, I’m glad I met you,’ she said, and then had a thought. ‘Maybe you could bring the children down to the Barn. There’s a donkey and some rabbits they could play with.’

‘Barn?’

Thea explained, and a vague promise was made. They parted with wistful smiles.

A rhythm established itself over the next three days, which left Thea quite contented. She did her routine shopping in the little town of Northleach, where life appeared to have stopped around 1955. The market square was bordered by shops selling basic requirements – bread, groceries and pharmaceuticals, with a post office added for good measure. The excessively large church, built with wool money, stood protectively to the north, but Thea did not visit it. The people she met were almost all over sixty, and she found herself imagining her
widowed mother living there, readily establishing new friendships. But then she noticed a card in the post office window on which a woman in her sixties pleaded for companionship, and wondered about the drawbacks. Northleach was no Blockley, with its legions of clubs and outings and talks and exhibitions. It was calm and quiet and forgotten, entirely beautiful, and probably perfect for a week’s holiday. Further than that, she couldn’t say. But she enjoyed her visits, which she made by car, despite it being scarcely half a mile from Lucy’s Barn to the market square. One day, she promised herself, she’d make the trip on foot, discovering the hidden nooks along the way.

She set up the lacemaking cushion, but found it much more complicated than expected. Putting it back in the bag, she regretfully decided to abandon it until she could find someone to teach her.

Almost she could accuse herself of complacency. None of the dramas that had taken place during previous commissions were going to happen here. How could they, in this tiny place, with the low grey skies and almost total lack of activity?

But there was one small unexpected drama on the Wednesday; the kind of drama nobody could object to.

She had gone out to feed the rabbits as usual that afternoon. They were in no hurry to partake of the food Thea gave them, and only three emerged from the bedroom area in the cage containing the four does. Carefully, Thea unlatched the door into that section, and peered in. A pretty blue-grey ball of fluff was crouched in the corner, nose twitching, eyes wide and bulging. Thea identified Jemima, the one she had cuddled under Lucy’s scrutiny. In another corner was a nest, apparently made of hay, but with some wisps of hair protruding from it. ‘Uh-oh,’ said Thea, capturing a distant memory of rabbits owned by her younger sister, twenty-five years previously. ‘What have we here, then?’

With the gentlest probing fingers, she investigated, and found a toasty warm huddle of babies buried under layers of fur and hay. ‘And how did this happen, hmm?’ she demanded of the wild-eyed mother. ‘Oh well, you seem to know what to do. I’d better give you some extra rations.’

It was a greatly consoling thing to find. New life, the hairless helpless scraps so perfectly protected in the midst of a grey January – it suggested a whole range of happy hopeful feelings. But it also added to Thea’s responsibilities. The other rabbits probably ought to be removed, especially if one of them
was an undiagnosed male. Males were unreliable around babies, and should not be permitted to cause trouble.

But where to put them? The second cage, containing Snoopy, was quite large. Perhaps the three exiles could go in there, and the buck be found some smaller temporary shelter. Meanwhile, everything appeared peaceful in the new family, and she was reluctant to interfere for the time being. Jemima was big enough to defend her offspring against the other three, if it came to it. She would see how things stood in the morning.