Lots of Love (32 page)

‘Bollocks! She can’t even sit to the trot properly.’

‘It’s what they like to hear. That’s what they pay me for – that and the good looks.’ He managed a short, sweet smile. ‘If she thinks that she and her carthorse are capable of getting to the Olympics then let her.’

‘Rory hates teaching
ordinary
people to ride,’ Spurs explained to Ellen, in an undertone.

Ellen thought it hardly surprising that the yard was doing so badly.

‘You can have the old rustics,’ he said to Spurs. ‘Do you have a trailer with you?’

‘No. They can go on the roof of the Jeep.’

Rory raised an eyebrow and looked at Ellen. ‘You ride, then?’

‘I think they’re for Dilly,’ she explained.

‘Dilly?’ He cracked a huge, stale yawn.

‘You know her.’ Spurs watched him. ‘Has a nice roan.’

Rory’s arrogant face lit up. ‘From Oddlode? Pheely’s girl?’

‘She says she fancies you too.’ Spurs laughed.

‘Really?’ Suddenly he appeared quite goofy.

‘Think she could use your help with her horse – when she’s back for the summer holidays.’

‘Sure – absolutely. She can bring him up here any time.’ He grinned.

‘Come down this afternoon if you like,’ Spurs offered.

‘Can’t.’ He pulled a regretful face. ‘I’m on my own today. Sharrie’s taken a couple of the youngsters to a show.’ He glanced towards Ann, who was now struggling to breathe. ‘I guess I’d better get back. The jumps are in the flat field behind the barn, okay?’

‘Thanks.’ Spurs slapped his back again and set off to fetch them.

As they heaved a heavy wooden upright on to the jeep roof, Ellen tried not to feel jealous that he was going to such an effort for Dilly, or resentful that he was using her diesel, strength and time to do so.

With the jumps secured to the roof, they left Rory being circled by poor, red-faced Ann and set off again, driving out of Springlode and into the valley once more.

‘Fuck – he’s pissed already.’ Spurs rubbed his eye sockets with the balls of his hands.

‘He was drunk?’ Ellen turned to him in surprise. She hadn’t spotted it.

‘Probably from last night.’ He lit a cigarette, and cranked down the window. ‘Although you can bet he’s already topped up his coffee. Fuck.’

Rory hardly seemed old enough to drink, let alone to have a problem.

‘We start young round here,’ Spurs laughed bitterly, ‘and having me around didn’t help the poor little sod.’

Ellen negotiated the hairpins as the jeep groaned down the hill, its roof creaking beneath the load.

‘He must have been pissed not to fancy you.’ Spurs flicked his ash out of the window.

‘I look like sin.’

‘Exactly – you’re irresistible. My beautiful sinner.’

Ellen narrowly missed cannoning into the bridge over the Odd. ‘What about Dilly? They seem pretty well suited.’

‘He’ll have to sober up before I let that happen.’

‘What are you? Her father?’

‘In this village,’ he threw his cigarette butt out of the window, ‘anything is possible. Let’s go and pick some strawberries.’

‘I thought we were going to buy bedding plants?’ Ellen asked distractedly as she pondered Dilly’s paternity.

‘I never bed anything on an empty stomach. The nursery has a market garden. We can pick strawberries for lunch.’

On cue, Ellen’s stomach let out a hungry growl and she remembered that she hadn’t eaten all day.

‘Hear hear.’ Spurs patted his bare, brown belly cheerfully. ‘I hope they don’t mind topless fruit pickers. When I was a kid, the place was run by a band of Christian brothers, but the new owners are a bohemian lot, I gather. Mother disapproves so much that she sends Gladys to the farmers’ market in Morrell. They’re both convinced the couple there run it as a cover for a cannabis farm.’

‘Pixie and Sexton,’ Ellen recalled.

‘You know them?’

She shook her head. ‘Pheely’s good friends with Pixie.’ The name had cropped up more than once. And, according to Pheely, Pixie’s husband Sexton indeed grew so much illegal produce in the hothouses that he was known to his select clients as the British Hempire.

When they drove into the little organic market garden and nursery, which was offering Pick Your Own on large, lopsided signs at the gate, they were greeted by a rabble of dogs and children. The pack circled the jeep as it bounced across a rutted field to park by a vast greenhouse.

‘You tourists?’ the children demanded.

‘Woof, woooooof,
WOOF!’
The pack jumped up at Snorkel, claws skittering against the paintwork.

‘No.’

‘Not from London, then?’

‘No.’

‘Wooooof!’

‘Can your dog play with ours?’

‘Okay.’

‘Jesus.’ Spurs stood back as Snorkel joined the rabble and they all tore off behind the greenhouse. ‘Are you sure that was wise?’

‘She can look after herself,’ Ellen said, but wondered exactly the same thing.

They took their empty strawberry punnets from a distracted, blue-haired woman who was reading an Open University prospectus by a long potting bench, a wilting courgette plant in one hand.

‘The best fruit is up by the sheep, to your right,’ she said dreamily, waggling the courgette towards the door. ‘Enjoy!’

That, Ellen guessed as they headed outside again, had to be Pheely’s chum, Pixie. In the flesh, she was far less ephemeral and menacing than she had imagined. Ellen only wished the same could be said of Spurs, who got more bewitching by the second.

Ten minutes later, he laughed at her. ‘You have to eat them!’

‘I can’t.’ She dropped another strawberry into her punnet.

‘You can.’ He held out a plump red heart, tracing it tantalisingly across her lips before burying it in his own mouth, drawing it in with those white teeth.

And she did steal strawberries, unable to resist his lures or the moreish taste of the red fruit.

Pink juice dribbling from their lips, she and Spurs picked one and ate one in the traditional way, trying competitively to fill their own punnet first, while at the same time greedily incapable of stopping themselves cramming the best of the crop into their mouths.

‘I always think these places should weigh the punters along with the punnets before letting us loose,’ Ellen said, as they worked their way along opposite sides of the same row, bumping heads as they looked for hidden gems beneath the shark-toothed green leaves.

‘How much does a guilty conscience weigh?’

‘More than a bellyful of strawberries.’ Ellen watched as Snorkel and her new pack charged up to another car bumping across the ruts in the parking field. ‘Why?’

‘Just wondering. How much soft fruit does a thought that weighs on your mind weigh?’

‘Three strawberries and a loganberry.’

‘And how many strawberries does it take to pull your weight?’

‘More than a weight off your mind but less than it takes to throw your weight around. Is this going anywhere?’

He looked up, holding the fattest, juiciest strawberry Ellen had ever seen. ‘No. I like going nowhere with you just as much as I like going places.’ He put the strawberry to her lips.

‘Stop it,’ she breathed, and turned her face away.

‘Sorry?’

‘You heard.’

He tapped the strawberry against his nose, then laid it carefully on top of his punnet. ‘You’re funny.’

‘If you say so.’ She wiped the sweat from her forehead, longing for the storm to break.

Blue-haired Pixie had gone when they walked back into the glasshouse. In her place was the eldest of the many elfin children, scribbling doodles on the OU prospectus and chatting on her mobile phone. She watched Spurs with interest as he gathered several trays of bedding plants from the tables in the centre. Then he spotted a big bucket filled with citronella torch candles in the shape of stars and gathered up the lot. He marched to the till and gave her his devilish smile.

She weighed the strawberry punnets and rang them up, along with the bedding plants, chatting all the time. ‘Yes, he’s
still
with her, although fuck knows what he sees in her, and she has a singing voice like a cat that’s just been sat on by a pensioner. Thirty-five pounds sixty.’ She looked up at Ellen and Spurs.

‘How
much?’ Ellen hastily hid the twenty she’d fished from her shorts.

‘Thirty-five pounds sixty. Thanks.’ She took the fifty-pound note that Spurs was offering and gave him a ravishing smile as she rang his change through the till. ‘Dilly reckons Ely Gates is still trying to split them up – her mad mum is like a witch or something and she always knows what’s going on. Yes, I know she’s a bit stuck-up, but I reckon Dilly’s quite cool as it goes. Fourteen forty.’ She handed Spurs his change with a wink.

As he and Ellen headed towards the doors again, the girl whispered into her phone, ‘I just had a
right
stud buying stuff here. Shame he has a wife. You should
see
him. No – definitely not local.’

‘That,’ Spurs breathed as walked outside, ‘is manna to my ears.’

‘Being a right stud?’ Ellen cuffed his arm.

‘Nope.’

‘Oh, you mean the fact she didn’t recognise you as local?’

‘No.’ He looked at her through the bedding plants, silver-bullet eyes scoring direct hits. ‘She thought you were my wife.’

‘Ha ha.’

‘We could be married,’ he pointed out, dead-panning her. ‘We’re at a garden centre, after all.’

‘We could be brother and sister,’ she retaliated. ‘You dared me to jump off a hill and made me cry.’

‘We could be mistress and gardener,’ he offered.

‘Or colleagues in a strawberry-jam-manufacturing business?’ She looked at the overflowing punnets.

‘Or just greedy bastards?’

‘Fly-hating arsonists?’ She propped the citronella torches against the jeep bonnet.

‘Lovers.’ He leaned against the car while she unlocked it.

‘Strangers,’ she reminded him. ‘We hardly know each other.’

‘Oh, we do.’ He smiled. ‘We so fucking do.’

‘Friends.’ She looked at him levelly.

He shook his head, still smiling. ‘I don’t do friends any more.’

Ellen left him laying the trays on the back seat and went to gather Snorkel, who was happily joining in her new gang’s attempts to mug a well-dressed couple with a pair of furious pugs on their parcel shelf.

‘You tourists?’

‘Woof, woooooof,
WOOF!’

‘Yes.’

‘You from London?’

‘No – Ashbridge.’

‘Wooooof!’

‘Can your dogs play with ours?’

‘Absolutely not – shoo! Shoo!’ they told Ellen furiously. ‘Your children should learn a little respect.’

Spurs laughed his head off when she told him as they drove back. ‘So you’re my wife and we have uncontrollable children – why am I seeing my future flashing in front of my eyes?’

Ellen put her foot down, ignoring the rattling above her head and in it.

While Spurs was unloading the jumps from the jeep, Ellen stashed the strawberries in the fridge, then walked through the house, letting herself out of the low cellar-steps door so that she could creep to the pond and fish out the scuppered paper boat and the horseshoe. She rinsed both under the outside tap, but the paper shredded and fell apart in her hands.

She clipped the hose on to the tap and went back to the pond to wash the last of the algae from the liner, first scooping out the slop with a bucket.

‘What is it with you and that pond?’ Spurs asked, when he came to find her.

‘I like to be near water,’ she explained, poking a stick into the fountain nozzle to remove the gunk that had built up there.

He picked up the hosepipe and she thought he was going to drench her with water, but instead he directed it at one of the big flower-beds under the hedgerow, showering it with great spectrums of droplets to soften the earth for planting.

‘My father dug this pond himself,’ Ellen told him, her pride fierce, not knowing where this outburst was coming from. ‘He’d just had a heart-attack, but he was still out here with a shovel day and night. He could never stand still.’

‘Like you.’

‘Maybe.’

‘Is he okay now?’

‘So-so – he still pushes himself too hard, and I think my mother is terrified that he’ll drop dead the moment this place is sold and leave her alone half-way up a Spanish mountain. She thinks he’s on borrowed time, but Dad never borrows anything he can’t repay. He’ll be around for years.’

Spurs was creating another small water feature now as one corner of the bed filled up with dark, swirling earth. He hardly seemed to notice that he was watering the same spot continually. ‘How can you be so sure?’

Ellen looked up from poking at the fountain. ‘Because I want it to be true.’

‘Don’t you think it’s better to prepare yourself?’

She threw the stick into the reeds and clambered out of the pond. ‘I’ve seen him attached to tubes and monitors and machines that kept him breathing. We were told he wouldn’t survive the first attack. I was prepared then, but he wasn’t. He thinks he’s immortal. Why shouldn’t he be allowed to live for ever if he wants? I’m not going to stand in his way.’

He was still soaking a tiny patch of bed so that muddy water spilled out on to the grass. ‘I only ask because my mother is quite ill. Very ill,’ he corrected himself. ‘My mother is dying.’

‘Oh, Christ, I’m so sorry,’ she breathed.

He was soaking his own feet now. ‘She refuses to tell anybody that she’s terminally ill. I only found out by accident,’ he grimaced at the enormity of the secret. ‘Christ knows, I should have guessed. She’s so driven now. And she’s in such a hurry – she has an awful lot to sort out before . . . before she . . . goes.’

‘I’m so sorry,’ Ellen said again, standing beside him, her feet sinking in his man-made bog. ‘Do you know how long?’