Farm Fatale (31 page)

    There were a lot of things he hadn't seen since coming to The Bottoms come to think of it. Samantha in her full split-crotch raunch regalia, for one thing, Lalla's phone number in his mobile address book, for another. The whole point of marrying Samantha, after all, was that her bedroom technique had been second only to his mistress's. Marina's lack of enthusiasm for sex had been one of the main reasons for their split. That and Marina's discovery that Samantha was making up the deficit.

    Yet Guy, whose sex drive seemed only to increase with the years, had been more than happy to sacrifice the peace of the domestic hearth if it meant hitting the ceiling in the bedroom. The problem was that since Samantha had buried them in the country, the ceiling had remained unassaulted for quite some time. It infuriated and frustrated Guy that the only ceiling hitting authorized by Samantha was by the various minions putting chandeliers up in the Casbah, while the only permitted erection was Sholto's. Guy stiffened as he heard the hated voice shrieking instructions about curtains. "I like them very well hung."

    Guy struggled up from the bench where he sat brooding. He needed to go for a walk as well as make a phone call. Marina's last call about Iseult had concerned him. It was more than time to ring and find out the latest news. He mooched down the drive and dug out the mobile.

    A man answered at Marina's. Guy's hackles rose, knowing it to be Jez, the Royal Opera House ice cream hawker his ex-wife had recently taken up with. "I'll get Rina," he drawled in a mid-Atlantic accent that made Guy boil.
Rina!
"Who's calling?"

    "Her
husband
," Guy said emphatically. "Ex-husband, I mean," he muttered.

    Marina came to the phone. "What do you want?" She was, Guy knew, suspicious about his new interest in their daughter. He had no explanation for it himself apart from suddenly feeling bitterly ashamed of his past neglect. Neglect that, although he could not blame her entirely, Samantha had enthusiastically encouraged. Nevertheless, he persevered and succeeded in extracting the information that, following her expulsion from school, Iseult had left home "to stay with some friends."

    "What friends?" Guy demanded.

    "School ones, I think," Marina said vaguely. "You know. People from that band she's in."

    "Band?" Guy had not realized his daughter was in a band. She had never struck him as the sousaphone-playing sort. Marina did not enlighten him further.

    "Look, I really have to go," she said. "I'm doing
La Traviata
set in a commune and it takes ages to get my flares on. I have to lie down on the floor and zip them up."

    Commune?
La Traviata
? "You mean the Paris Commune?"

    "No, well,
yes
, it is a commune in Paris, I suppose. Viletta and Alfredo get it together during a love-in. It was Jez's idea."

    "Ah, yes. Jez," said Guy. "Ice cream seller or something, isn't he?"

    "Director, thank you very much," snapped Marina. "Don't you start on him as well. He had enough to put up with from Iseult."

    A wave of approval for his daughter coursed through Guy. "Don't they get on?"

    "Not brilliantly," Marina admitted. Mr. Whippy, as Guy was determined to think of him, was obviously still in the room. "But she's at that difficult age. She says I'm a drag and I wig out on her too much."

    "What?" A vision of Marina in a vast rainbow-colored Afro hairpiece flashed up in Guys mind.

    "You know, get cross," said Marina impatiently. "She talks in this weird seventies Californian slang, for some reason. I suppose all the girls at the school must do it. By the way, she said she was trying to ring you. Haye you spoken to her?"

    "No." Guy's suspicions were aroused. Had Samantha been intercepting the calls? Did bears piss in the woods? Was the pope a Catholic?

    "I must go," Marina said urgently. "She'll be back, don't worry. She's just being a bit rebellious at the moment. You can't blame her—it was you, after all, who made her take her GCSEs at fourteen."

    "Did I? Christ, what a bastard I was."

    "Competitive, you called it. But she'll be fine. She'll ring me when she's ready. She always does."

    "You seem very sure about it," Guy snapped. He felt furious. The thought of Samantha taking Iseult's calls was more than he could bear.

    "If by that you mean I'm a bad mother, you can sod off." Marina's tone was sharp. "Who's been bringing her up all this time while you've been swanning around with
that slapper
? Or else buried in your bloody bank."

    "Yes, well, I know I haven't been…I mean, I was hoping things could be sorted out a bit now. You know, I'd really like to see her. You too. We need to try to work as a family a bit more…"

    An amazed silence ensued from Marina's end. Then, to Guy's horror, she laughed.

    Guy was indignant. "What's so funny?"

    "Jez is just showing me the rest of the Violetta costume. There's a huge rainbow-colored Afro wig."

    It was odd, Guy thought, putting the mobile away, but since the heart attack, work had become less important than it had been. Having been reminded of his mortality in so dramatic a fashion, thoughts unprecedented in their paternalism had begun to occur to him. Now that Samantha, always opposed to children, was also opposed to all activities that usually led to children, Iseult looked to be the only person to carry the Grabster seed into future generations. Being on nonspeaking terms with her just to please his wife seemed to Guy to be an increasingly stupid idea. Not least because Samantha was making no efforts whatsoever to please him.

    Iseult had been trying to ring him and he hadn't known. He'd kill Samantha for this.

    When she rang again, Guy promised himself, he would try to persuade his daughter to stay at The Bottoms for a while. And
bugger
whatever Samantha thought about it. He smiled. If she rang again. His smile faded.

    Suddenly, Samantha appeared at the top of the drive. His courage evaporating, Guy shoved the phone back into his pocket. "Going out, are you?" she yelled after him in a voice implying he should be spending the afternoon ironing rose petals or whatever other absurd tasks Sholto had been going through with her with the clipboard this morning. "Remember that we're one belly dancer short. She needs to double up as a cocktail waitress as well. One of them's not coming. Mother's dying of cancer or some such crap."

    Guy nodded curtly and shuffled out through the gate. Just where was he supposed to find a cocktail waitress in Eight Mile Bottom? Most of its female natives looked as if the nearest they came to a Rusty Nail was the one in the outside loo on which they hung their torn-up strips of newspaper.

    His thoughts returning to his daughter, Guy's mood plunged as he heaved up the hill past the pub. He considered going in but decided against it, not being in the mood for Alan's banter. The fact that Sholto had taken to dropping in "for the atmosphere" posed an additional risk. Guy did not want his cover blown by Sholto. He didn't want anything blown by Sholto.

    By the time he stomped up the road to the church, his spirits had plummeted still further. He stopped and leaned against the churchyard wall, looking without interest up the small lane of scruffy cottages in front of him. Cinder Lane, he read on the sign attached to the crumbling wall. It looked like a godforsaken bloody place to him. Even if the church was practically on top of it.

    Exhausted, Guy closed his eyes for a few minutes and opened them again. And opened them wider. A smile spread itself slowly across his face. For walking down the lane directly toward him was one of his favorite sights. A pair of really nice big breasts, albeit with a rather large baby plugged into one of them. Those nipples, he thought, were just
made
to have big silver tassels attached to them. Against all the odds—and some of the women in this village looked pretty bloody odd—he'd found a belly dancer. A cocktail waitress as well. Someone, he knew instinctively as he caught the woman's bold gaze, who knew exactly what went into a Slow Comfortable Screw. Not to mention a Screaming Orgasm.

***

"It's the party tomorrow and I haven't a clue what I'm going to wear." Although dreading the event itself, Rosie had seized on it as a subject with which to break any ice that had formed on Jack since Ptolemy's visit. She was also at pains to conceal from the farmer that she knew about his ex-wife. Jack would no doubt be furious that Duffy was peddling his troubled romantic history for chocolate chip cookies. Even if he was unlikely to be all that surprised.

    Except, Rosie thought, that she didn't know all about it, Mark's arrival having stopped the postman's revelations about what had happened. But it had clearly been seismic. Perhaps his wife had died, left him a young widower with a farm to run. She considered Jack's habitual crushed look, his hurt expression, his bouts of temper as if railing against his own unhappy experience. It would explain them all.

    "It says
Arabian Nights
…" She flashed a glance at Jack. His face was set and preoccupied.

    "Aren't you listening?" she asked him playfully. "I've got a crisis on my hands." Mark, certainly, had been determined to view it as such. "So what's bloody new?" he had demanded when she had admitted party-outfit failure, having rummaged through every item in the washing basket, which, increasingly these days, served as a wardrobe. Her panic-stricken scouring of Cobchester had similarly failed to address the situation. Yellow jackets with padded shoulders and rail after rail of beige tents hardly seemed to fit the bill, let alone herself.

    Jack shook himself and looked at her. "Sorry," he said. "I was thinking about a crisis of my own, to be honest."

    Rosie's stomach looped the loop. Was he thinking about his wife and what had happened? Did he want to talk to her about it?

    She felt panicky. How could she possibly introduce the subject? She didn't want Jack thinking her nosy as well as stupid and possessed of ghastly friends with ghastlier children. On the other hand, it seemed rude not to demonstrate a degree of concern.

    "Is one of the animals ill?" she hedged.

    "The animals are right enough." Jack flashed her a white, mirthless smile. "It's the whole farming business that's sick."

    Several minutes later, after Jack had lectured her about Environmentally Sensitive Areas and the chaos that listing fields and hills had brought to Spitewinter, Rosie felt sick as well.

    "Oh God, I'm sorry," she muttered, feeling an overwhelming rush of guilt at having thought for one minute that not having anything to wear for the party counted as a problem of any sort.

    With an effort, Jack retrieved his features from the doomed creases into which they had sunk. "It'll get better. I'm thinking of converting to organic with the cows. It'll add a bit of value and let me keep more of the milk profit. Such as it bloody is," he added savagely. "It'll cost me though. Conversion means a big investment and there'll be a dip in production by at least twenty percent. And even after that, I need to think of other ways to diversify if I'm to keep the place going." He paused. "But why the hell I just don't sell up, I don't know. Hand over the whole lot to some developer and let the whole of Spitewinter get covered in executive homes with brick drives and built-on conservatories covered in plastic bloody squirrels."

    Rosie gasped in horror. "Because Spitewinter's beautiful and your family has had it for centuries," she declared passionately. "Besides, you probably can't develop it. It's an Environmentally Sensitive Area." An oversensitive area, even, she thought, knowing this was what Bella would say and feeling immediately guilty.

    "Yes, of course. I'd forgotten." Jack spoke with heavy sarcasm. "Because farmers aren't allowed to think of easy ways out, are they?" His voice was rising; Rosie's heart sank. Here he went again. "We're the custodians of the landscape even if we work our fingers to the bone and get nothing but grief for it. You're right. My family has had Spitewinter for centuries. But there's no family now, apart from me. Or likely to be," he added bitterly.

    "You were married, weren't you?" Rosie said gently. She had to know. This seemed as good a time as any to find out.

    Jack leaned against the wall of the farmhouse and crossed his arms defensively. "For about a year, yes."

    "Tell me what happened."

    Jack paused before proceeding, as Mark would have put it, to give her the headlines. "Her name was Catherine, she was beautiful, she was from London, I met her in the Barley Mow when she was up for the weekend visiting a friend who lived nearby."

    "She was from London?" This was unbelievable. If Jack had fallen in love with a London girl, why was he so set against city people?

    He nodded. "Yes. We were very happy. For a while. Until a year after we got married, when she…"

    "
What?
" Rosie's heart banged loudly against her rib cage. What had happened? Oh, Christ, she
had
died after all.

    "…screwed the sheepnut salesman in the cow shed," Jack said flatly. He raked a hand roughly through his hair. "I came back one lunchtime and caught her at it."

    "Oh my God," breathed Rosie. Her legs felt suddenly weak with sympathy and shock.

    Jack's eyes hardened. "She thought she'd like the countryside, but she found that actually she hated it. London type, you see. Hated not being able to ever lie in, hated having to get up and do the milking. Always staying in, always mucking out, she used to say. She said it was no fun. Too quiet…" His voice trailed off. "Well, she was having plenty of fun when I found them. Not being all that quiet about it either."