Lots of Love (41 page)

Heart hammering, she stumbled back through the kennels towards the old footpath that led directly to the Goose Cottage paddock. Had she glanced up at the grain-hatch window as she passed it, she would have spotted her trainer swinging from the model aeroplane.

A moment later, Spurs removed it carefully and then slumped on his sofa, hugging it to his chest.

Late that night, long after Pheely had been dispatched to the Lodge, stoned and whisky-soaked, rambling that Spurs should be arrested for leaving a potentially concussed woman to walk home alone, Ellen wrote to Richard.

Those two paragraphs took her hours to write and she found herself weeping stupidly over them, hardly able to bear to part with them because it was like ripping out her hollow heart, knowing that another had filled it. Pressing ‘send’ was switching off a light that could never be turned back on.

Which made it doubly galling when a blunt reply came winging straight back.

Far beneath her leaden feet, Richard was online, reading between lines and playing back old lines.

There was nothing like the shorthand between a long-term couple, the greatest of friends and the longest of rivals. He always knew when she was in love. Although never unfaithful, Ellen had fallen in love many times in recent years.

Fakey – riding the board with one’s left leg in front of the right, as Ellen surfed – had been a private, pillow-talk joke. Richard, a notorious stayer, could take hours to come – and Ellen occasionally faked orgasm to hurry him up. Her fakeys were something they’d laughed about once. Until she had done it every time they had sex. Then it was no joke.

She looked at the kitchen clock, and saw it was past four – early afternoon in Oz – Richard’s favourite beer and alternative surfing hours. In Oddlode, it was almost light, the birds chorusing. She hadn’t even noticed. Her head was still throbbing from the flying Hooch bottle and from staring at a small, flat computer monitor.

She sent the reply and closed her eyes. ‘You’re not that hot,’ she whispered, wincing at the memory of Spurs’ final taunt. He was right. She was far from hot. Richard had spent hours twiddling and stroking and licking, and she had remained as cold as ice.

Within seconds a window popped up on her screen, to the accompaniment of a seagull call. Above a little text box, a message read

Below it, in a jaunty red font, Richard had decided to open his heart, his secret Internet world and the can of worms she’d dreaded.

She closed her eyes. Too often to count.

The reply flew back and then, seconds later, another line appeared.

Ellen looked at the flashing cursor and realised she didn’t really miss him at all. She just missed talking to somebody who knew her so well – better than her parents or her greatest friends. It was a horribly selfish reason to miss someone. More so because Richard only knew who she was when she was with him, and she already felt estranged from the Ellen who had shared his life.

She tapped the backspace button for six strokes and typed,

A little icon appeared beside this message, a face with a tongue hanging out and an animated winking eye.

She looked at the empty box waiting for her. Was this how easy it was to turn thirteen years of friendship into a disturbing conundrum of two strangers typing into small out-of-context boxes?

Slowly, she closed the lid of her laptop, sealing the time capsule, and went upstairs, leaving Richard alone in his chatroom.

The phone started ringing as she was cleaning her teeth.

Ellen looked at her guilty reflection and rubbed her gums raw as she let it ring on for minutes before he gave up.

Three fields away, a damp trainer flew out of a skylight. Inside it was a mobile phone. As it crashed into a wet flower-bed, it went into redial.

When the phone rang again, the birds on the telegraph wire outside Ellen’s bedroom window launched into a competitive impersonation chorus until they resembled the BBC switchboard after a heated lesbian handbagging in the Queen Vic.

Pulling the pillow over her head, she wished with all her heart that it was Spurs calling and not Richard. But that was one wish he couldn’t grant. He had pushed her away, rejecting her big-time. He might excite her more than a thousand Richards, but to him she was just a horny blonde on the rebound and not worth the effort.

It rang on and on.

‘Hello?’ she answered wearily.

Nothing but birdsong greeted her. Clutching the receiver to her chest, she buried her face in the pillow and dreamed of her gorgeous wings.

Poppy, the eager young estate agent, suited her name perfectly. Her dark eyes popped out of their sockets with enthusiasm, her poppy red car was always parked outside Goose Cottage and she took to popping in when Ellen was least expecting it. As soon as she had secured the appointment to sell Goose Cottage, she appeared daily in her glossy scarlet Golf to ‘spruce things up’ for the procession of buyers to follow. She liked to add a personal touch, she explained, and always insisted upon being present at the viewings. Soon every vase was filled with freesias and stargazer lilies from Morrell on the Moor Tesco, real coffee bubbled in the Jamiesons’ filter machine throughout the day, the toilets all acquired little scented rim blocks and never had their seats left up, the dining-table was laid for six and the breakfast-table for four – and Snorkel found herself tethered to the dovecote come rain or shine. Poppy was, as Ellen had promised her parents, very good at her job. But she set Ellen’s teeth on edge.

‘An absolutely
enchanting
cottage with medieval origins . . .’ She’d wave would-be buyers from room to room in a waft of Givenchy, her sing-song voice resembling a fifties fashion commentary.
‘Lovingly
restored by the current owners, who now live overseas. It has
wonderfully
versatile space and, being in such a premium Cotswold village, it represents a
superb
investment.’

‘Lovely
people,’ she said, after every visit. ‘I think they’re keen.’

Each enthusiastically hosted viewing brought a new spin to her patter: ‘As you can see the garden is
beautifully
established and provides almost total privacy, although the neighbours are
terribly
nice.’

‘Yes,
lots
of wildlife – birds, deer, foxes, hedgehogs. Have you seen much during your stay, Ms Jamieson?’

‘Mmm – a badger.’

‘How
gorgeous
!’

When Poppy suggested politely that Ellen might like to tidy herself up a bit, as though she were a dog-eared sofa that needed a neutral Ikea throw to hide its garish upholstery, she decided to steer clear of the daily influx.

At first, the sulky clouds continued emptying their loads on the thatched princesses, not showing them off to their best advantage and making it hard for Ellen to find somewhere to escape to when families came to look around. The jeep had a flat battery, and trips to the village shop or to walk Snorkel around the block were rarely long enough to allow eager punters to investigate the ancient, exquisite cottage and her outbuildings. Some spent hours. From the cameras slung around necks, the guidebooks on the back seats of cars and the holiday wardrobes, Ellen understood what Lloyd had meant when he’d said that viewing houses up for sale had taken over from visiting churches on the tourist trail, particularly in bad weather.

‘Are you a writer?’ they asked her, spotting the laptop on the kitchen table, excited at the prospect that they might be looking at a cottage immortalised in a historical saga or a racy romance.

‘No, I’m just planning a trip,’ she told them.

Spurs’ unpleasant revelations, the badger threat, and Poppy’s confidence that Goose Cottage would now be sold ‘in a trice’ had prompted Ellen to plan her trip properly, eager to set off as soon as an offer was accepted. She’d started drawing up an itinerary, plotting a route on the blow-up beach-ball globe she’d bought from a tourist shop in Bude the day Richard had said he was going to Australia.

She made endless enquiries by email, using the new address given to her by the World’s Favourite Internet Provider to avoid downloading any more of Richard’s bitter missives. She knew it was cowardly, but she couldn’t face his aggressive rhetoric. To her even greater shame, she rarely thought about him at all. It was Spurs’ face she saw when she closed her eyes and lay back in the bath each evening, feeling her heart crashing so hard that the foam around her popped, and the water seemed to boil and bubble. She was humiliated by the enormity of her self-destructive crush. That he obviously felt so little for her tripled the shame but did nothing to curb the obsession. She saw nothing of him, although she learned from Pheely that he rode Otto daily. Given her random and regular excursions around the village and bridleways, he was clearly working hard at avoiding her.

When the sun staged a watery reappearance over the Lodes Valley, Ellen made sure that she and Snorkel were well out of the way for Poppy’s hosted viewings. Several families had come back for a second look already – one couple were on their third visit. Ellen found a patch of four-leaved clovers by the River Folly and plucked one every time she passed, pressing it into her world atlas when she got home and hoping that, with their luck, she would soon be far away from Oddlode.

As well as walking daily laps of the village in search of Fins, or high on the ridge in search of solace, Ellen also spent an increasing amount of time on the Lodge cottage terrace with Pheely, drinking ludicrously strong coffee, watching her sculpt, and listening to her larger-than-life, embroidered tales of village life, which cheered them both up like mad.

‘I can’t do anything to Godspell’s death-mask until she comes in for another sitting,’ she complained, ‘and Lord knows when that will be. I gather Ely has her under house arrest for after-hours drinking at the Lodes Inn.’

The half-finished bust of Godspell Gates sat conspicuously under wet sacking while Pheely concentrated her attentions on a sculpture of a curvaceous mermaid. ‘For Pru’s gallery,’ she explained gaily. ‘Trade always picks up there in summer.’

‘Surely she’s old enough to drink in a pub?’ Ellen asked.

‘Good grief, yes. Pru’s probably eligible for the British Legion supper club,’ Pheely said bitchily. ‘Do you know she’s had two face lifts?’

‘I meant Godspell.’

‘Oh, Ely likes to exert his paternal authority from time to time. Being gated by Gates is a way of life for those children – Enoch was once confined to barracks for the entire summer for bringing a copy of
Penthouse
back from school. I imagine they’ll still get locked in their rooms at night when they’re in their thirties. But I do wish Ely had thought it through on this occasion. He’s the one who wants this wretched bust finished so quickly, and my memories of his wretched daughter are so tainted I can hardly be expected to sculpt from them.’

Her village tales often centred on Ely and his family, Ellen noted.

‘Ely’s definitely got something up his sleeve for the garden party this year,’ she confided one day. ‘You must
promise
me you’ll still be here.’

‘I might,’ Ellen hedged, thinking about the Devil’s Marsh race and imagining Spurs galloping across that jewelled grass on a sweating thoroughbred – all the village booing in his wake.

‘I think he might have a rather grand announcement. He’s probably bought the Manse from the bank that repossessed it from the cult – or he might have found a way to get Noah out of the mill at last,’ Pheely mused. ‘Whatever it is, Ely’s cooking something up. You can always tell when he’s on to a deal, because he starts putting twenties in the church collection – paying God guilt money.’

Ellen hoped it had nothing to do with his desire to buy Goose Cottage at a knock-down price. Poppy had already reported a call from Ely, who had been acquainting the new agents with his silly offer. ‘He couldn’t be behind the dead badger could he?’ she gasped.