Mrs Fytton's Country Life (15 page)

'So are most of us.' She nodded at the road. 'Which she'll discover if she gets down here
...'

The dog trotted back and sniffed forlornly. They ignored him.

'What's it worth if I do?' he said, pushing even closer.

She pulled away and patted his arm. 'Your seat in heaven, Samuel Lee. Maybe.' She looked at him hard. Touched his face where the cheeks were sunken. 'Who'd have thought it?' she said. And for a moment her eyes looked at something that was long ago. She touched his cheeks again. 'I do wish you'd put your plate in.'

He said. 'Fat lot of good a seat in heaven is.'

She laughed. 'Where's the harm? Will you do it?'

He winked. 'Old times' sake, is it? When?'

'Soon,' she said, and she whistled the dog. 'Tomorrow.'

'Archie'll complain.'

'Let him,' she said, looking back at Sammy, her face suddenly hard. 'He never complained about anything else.' And she stomped back down towards the house.

Angela Fytton looked at the shiny holly leaf, stolen from the hedge of Church Ale House, now winking, deep green, in the palm of her hand. Like the woman in
Our Mutual Friend,
she could wear it sewn into her petticoats as a permanent mortification, if it would do her any good, bring her any nearer to her goal. And if she wore petticoats.

I shall do what I can to spread good in the world in future, she said that night into her pillow, beneath which rested the holly leaf. And if you let me have Church Ale House I'll live the rest of my life with honour in the cause of good. Sadly, she felt completely safe with this great promise. The Perry woman was clearly beyond corruption. So she could lie here in her London bed and be as pious as she chose. She would never have to live up to her promise.

Her son had put the woofer back into his hi-fi. She lay there wondering whether to get up and remove it - yet again - but she just could not be bothered. Somewhere else in the house she heard Claire on the telephone. It was two in the morning. Ah
well...

Archie sat up in bed and nudged his wife. 'Did you hear anything?' he said.

'Like what?' she asked innocently.

'Like banging?'

‘
It'll be those Travellers
’
she said. 'They'll be fixing their vans.'

'At midnight?'

'It's a bright moon
’
she said.

Archie decided not to go into it any further. 'Did the solicitor send the stuff?' he said. 'What stuff?'

'Should have been here today.'

‘I
know.' She smiled contentedly to herself and settled back down to sleep. Beneath her pillow an envelope crackled.

Out in the moonlight Sammy Lee pushed another piece of wood into place and stood back to admire the structure. Get six in there easily when he'd finished. Just for a week or two his pigs would have to squash up a little and not take so many baths. He set to with the hammer again, whistling under his breath and thinking that one good thing about being on your own and growing old was that if there was no one to go a-wooing, you no longer had to put your false teeth in all the time. And if that was all he could come up with, he decided, it was a very sad day. He made the covered part of the sty secure and waterproof. Just in case.

8

May

The trouble with the rat race is that even if you win, you're still a rat.

lily tomlin

Alan Bushman, of Pinnocks estate agency, winked at his soon-to-be-wife Camilla. She tossed her mane of blonde hair in response. Like a fine young filly, he thought, pleased. Somehow, he had always known that a Camilla completed the picture, squared the circle, iced the cake. Girls called Camilla were bred not born, and that she, O joy, out of all the suitable young men in her milieu, should choose him was a piece of fortune in which he daily rejoiced. His transmogrification was almost complete. Once the bond was tied with the well-connected Camilla, he would be ser
ving Chateau Mar
gaux and sausages along with the rest of them. The moment she said,
‘I
do
’
these people would be his sort too. He could see it now, the pearly white paper, the engraved lettering, Mr and Mrs Alan Bushman, Church Ale House, Overstaithe, Somerset. He sighed. Mission accomplished.

Where to live had been a tricky one. His deceased father, so Bushman junior maintained in a wonderful fabrication, had lost his shirt, in the shape of the family home in Berkshire, to gambling and fast women. So no shame there, then. He almost believed it. But it did leave the tricky matter of the marital home. He could hardly move Camilla into a semi in Taunton. It had to be the country. And it had to be convincingly
potential.
And it had to be cheap. She was, after all, the bearer of a few drops of Devereux blood - the last - and though considered a little weak in the head, she would require decent stabling. Then Church Ale House came on the market and there was the answer.

Of course, it had disadvantages. It needed extending, but he had the right contacts to smooth the path for that. And there was no land to speak of - maybe an acre and a half in all - but the Perrys would probably let him buy the adjoining field eventually. That would give them what could very properly be described as the paddock. For the ponies. When the children came along. And a pool room for him in the outbuildings. He would call it Camilla's project, the house. And she would spend her dowry on it. Or her father would.

Today, for the first time, he would show his intended her future home. The big surprise. She loved surprises. Practically whinnied over therri. He had won, he had won. He had crossed the social divide and he would never look back: In six weeks' time she would say, 'I do.' As an estate agent, he knew the pitfalls of counting your chickens, but now, contracts almost exchanged, he could hold her back no more.

'Darling, it is time that you saw our future home.'

She practically galloped across the room to hug him when he told her.

'Oh, yummy,' she said.
'Yummy
...'

'Yes,' he said. 'It will be a project for you. A great big project, darling.'

'A project,' she repeated, tossing her head again and again to show her pleasure.

She might have added 'At last.' After school her parents, a little at a loss, sent their daughter on a design and deportment course in Kensington. One, as she proudly pointed out, that
included
flower-arranging. She had never actually used the skills learned, but he could now honourably persuade her to make Church Ale House her very first commission. Somerset was particularly cool about planning permission. She could bash it about to her heart's content in the name of interior design - thereby drawing a veil over the fact that he could not possibly afford the otherwise required alternative, which was to employ a real one.

Now, here they were, rounding the bend of the Mump Road, on this glorious late spring day, and Camilla had her hands over her eyes as per instructions.

'Don't open them yet,' he said, pulling in by the old holly hedge at the roadside. He would install an electric gate.

He switched off the engine. And he sniffed. And then Camilla sniffed. And then Camilla, still with her hands over her eyes, said,
‘I
smell piggies,' rather anxiously. 'Do you?'

And Alan Bushman, though betrothed to her, very nearly said something extremely curt in reply, since to
not
smell piggies, given the density of the piggy smell, would have required removal of the entire nasal area.

He sniffed even harder and got out of the car. He very nearly gagged, the air was so rich with the scent of continual porcine dumping. He went up to the gate, sniffing like a bloodhound. The smell was stronger somewhere to the left of the house. He walked along the side of the hedge, still with his nose in the air. And when the holly hedge ended and the field began, he saw whence the rich, disgusting smell came. There was a sty full of the creatures and they seemed to have taken a leaf out of the Entala warriors' bible - to wit, covering yourself in excrement wards off evil spirits. He stared. One or two of them stared back, equally impolitely. But since he carried nothing in the way of a bucket or stick for either of those twin delights of feeding or ear-scratching, they soon lost interest and resumed rooting.

It would have been quite difficult for any passing phoneti-cist to distinguish between the grunting emanating from the piggery and that emanating from the viewer of the piggery. Both had an inhuman quality. Though to be sure, the grunts of the former held a quality of contentment quite absent from the noises made by the latter.

Still grunting, Alan Bushman gripped the old five-barred gate and stared into the field. The sty had the look of age about it. Yet he knew very well that when he last viewed the property, no such sty existed. He looked about him. Not a human soul in view. He returned to the gate leading to the front door of Church Ale House. Passing his car he saw Camilla, still sitting with her hands over her eyes. Irritation rose. 'You can open them now,' he said, less kindly than usual.

She crept out, looking about her fearfully.

'Darling,' he said, 'your future home awaits.'

'But the
smell
’
she said. And she appeared to gag.

'Temporary.' He waved his hand confidently. And opened the gate. And strode up the path. And banged very, very hard on the front door.

Which was opened, eventually, by the owner's wife. Who informed him that her husband was
not
there. That she owned just as much of the house as
he
did. And that people could do what they liked with their own property until the ink was dry, she supposed. And so saying, the three of them made their slow way around the house.

Every window was open. Every door was ajar.

On remonstration, the owner's wife said, 'What smell?' And then, 'Oh, you get used to it.' If she had told them that these pigs not only had wings but took passengers, they could not have been more sceptical.

'Sammy Lee's pigs are champions,' said Mrs Perry innocently. 'It is very traditional. He's been using that field for hundreds of years.'

Even Camilla, reckoned to be a couple of gemstones short of a tiara, blinked at this.

Mrs Perry realized that she had become a little carried away. 'His family, that is.'

Camilla's eyes were large and wet above the scarf. You have let me down, was what Alan Bushman read there.

'Mrs Perry,' he said, 'could we cut across the red tape? My fiancee and I would like to purchase the field, along with this lovely old house, and I can offer you . . .' He named a tidy sum. 'Without the field, I'm afraid the deal's off.'

Mrs Perry smiled at him with complete understanding. 'Don't you worry. I'll have a word with him
’
she said. 'Now, how about a little nip of my mulberry wine and a ginger snap?'

But the couple declined. Indeed Camilla, keeping the scarf pressed to her nose, declined very forcefully, pressing her free hand into her stomach area and making a little gulping noise.

Mrs Perry gave her a kindly smile. 'Ah
’
she said, 'expecting, are you?'

Camilla shook her head violently and, for want of any better way to communicate, crossed her eyes.

'We are not yet married
’
said Alan Bushman, with dignity.

From behind the-silk and Givenchy came a guttural yawp that indicated that there might be something up with his use of the term.

Yet...

In the car Alan Bushman closed all the windows and put on his best cheerful voice, the one he had discovered he owned many years ago when, on showing a client around a spanking new barn conversion and closing the front door a little briskly, the entire lintel, arch and lodestone had fallen in on the potential purchaser. To which his quicksilver response was, 'What luck. I'm sure they'll lower the price substantially after that.' To which the client's quicksilver response was entirely unrepeatable.

Now to his wife-to-be, much as one might inquire of Jackie Kennedy if, despite all that, she thought Dallas a pleasant town, Alan Bushman said, 'Darling Camilla, isn't it the best house in the world?'

And she, whinnying through her scarf, with a depth of voice he had not known she possessed, just said, 'Drive
...'