Country Plot (6 page)

Unless he begged her
, the tiny voice added as a caveat, but she ignored it resolutely.

‘I've done it,' Oliver said proudly, emerging from the house on a warm evening a few days later. ‘I am brilliant, a genius, an unparalleled fixer. Feel free to worship me, oh mere mortals.'

Sybil and Jenna looked up from deckchairs where they were chatting and enjoying the last rays. The children (who should have been in bed) were playing at the other end of the garden, making the most of the oversight and effacing themselves in the shrubbery in the hope of extending it.

‘Fixed what?' Sybil asked. ‘I hope you mean that dripping tap in Jenna's bathroom?'

‘Do I look like a plumber?' Oliver demanded scornfully. ‘Did Churchill go to Yalta to unclog the sink? Did they discuss drain-busting techniques at Bretton Woods? Anyway, why don't you get Mr Thing in?' he descended abruptly from the heights of rhetoric.

‘Because he has a call-out charge now,' Sybil said reasonably, ‘so I was waiting for more than one thing to need attention. Thirty quid's too much when it's only a fifty-pee washer that needs changing. I'm sure you could do it, if you put your mind to it.'

‘We're losing sight of the big picture here,' Oliver said, frustrated. ‘We're not supposed to be talking domestica. I have news of great joy, news of great mirth. I've solved Jenna's problem.'

‘You've found me a job?' she said, feeling a little curl of excitement in her stomach.

‘A job that will feel just like a holiday,' Oliver said, taking the empty chair opposite the women. ‘I spoke to Michael and Rock and then I rang Ma, and she's just rung back to say it's fixed.'

‘Oh my God, I'm not going to have to be a chambermaid in someone's villa?' Jenna said. ‘She's offered me up at slave wages to someone she owes a favour to!'

‘
No
!' said Oliver. ‘Really, Jen, have a little faith.'

‘In Ma? I can't think of any other reason she'd try to help me.'

‘Have faith in me, I mean,' Oliver said. ‘It's true she wasn't keen to stir herself, but when I hinted that unless we thought of something she'd be forced to invite you out for a long rest, she sprang into action.'

‘Positively Machiavellian,' Sybil drawled. ‘If this is going to be a long story, I need a drink. Oh goodness, those children! They ought to be in bed.'

‘Give them five more minutes, while Olly tells us the plan,' said Jenna, ‘and then I'll help you with them. I want to know my fate.'

‘You'll love this,' Oliver promised. ‘There's this old relative, a sort of cousin of Ma's, called Kitty Everest.' He pronounced the name Eave-wrist. ‘It's spelled like Mount Everest, apparently, but it's pronounced like that. Anyway, she lives in this gorgeous old house in the country – like a stately home but in miniature – and she needs a live-in assistant, someone to do inventory and cataloguing work for her, and some secretarial. No special training necessary. Nothing a normal, literate, intelligent person can't handle. But she's a bit particular and doesn't want a complete stranger, so you'd fit the bill perfectly.'

Jenna looked doubtful. ‘Live-in assistant to an old lady? I'm not going to end up helping her into the bath and seeing she takes her pills, am I?'

Oliver laughed. ‘No, she's not old like that. She's only about Ma's age, perfectly fit and compos mentis. I probably shouldn't have called her old. I mean, sixty isn't old these days – look at the Major. Rock says Ma told her she was quite a tearaway in her youth. And Michael's met her, and he says she's nice – bright and funny.'

‘Met her recently? I don't remember Ma talking about her.'

‘He met her a couple of years ago. Something legal she went to him for, because of the family connection. I think that might have been when her husband died – did I mention she was a widow? He and Rock remembered her being around when they were little – they called her Aunty Kitty – but Ma sort of lost touch with her over the years. You know the way it goes. I mean, we never see any of our cousins, do we?'

‘True. So how did Ma know this cousin wanted help?'

‘It was Michael suggested it. He'd heard from a friend of a friend that Mrs Everest was thinking of selling some of the contents of Holtby House and needed someone to help with the inventory and so on. I rang Ma and put the fear of God into her. Ma rang Mrs E, Mrs E rang Michael, Michael rang me, I rang Ma again, Ma rang Mrs E again, and now all we've got to do is to confirm you're going, and when you'll arrive. It was as simple as that.'

‘Wait, wait. You're going too fast. I need to think about it,' Jenna protested.

‘What's to think about?' Oliver said. ‘Look, it's live in, lovely house, gorgeous countryside, a little light clerical work and bags of time off to wander about the lanes and so on. You'll get your keep, plus pocket money, fifty a week, cash. OK, it's not a fortune, but frankly, there'll be nothing to spend it on so you can stick it straight in the bank. And Michael's got her to agree to a minimum of one month. So if you find there isn't much of a job there, you can spin it out and enjoy yourself. And if it turns out that she needs someone permanent, Michael says he'd be glad if you'd help her recruit your successor, because he doesn't want the old girl to get ripped off, or end up with some complete bastard living in her house.'

‘He likes her, then?' Sybil said. ‘He wouldn't be worried if he didn't think she was nice.'

‘He says she's quite a character. He thinks Jenna would get on well with her. Come on now, Jen, what do you say? Isn't it the perfect solution? A real holiday in the country, with a little light work to keep you from getting bored.'

‘And as long as no one tells me where Holtby is,' Sybil added happily, ‘I'll be able to tell Patrick I've no idea where you are.'

Patrick! Jenna had forgotten about him for a blissful moment. Memories came crowding back in. She needed to get away. It was too easy to think about him here in London.

‘In any case, even if you don't like it, it's only a month,' Oliver said. ‘You can put up with that. But you'll probably have a whale of a time.'

‘I'll do it,' Jenna said. ‘Thanks, Oliver. Where is this place, anyway?'

‘La la la,' Sybil said loudly, putting her hands over her ears. ‘I can't hear you. I'm going to put the children to bed. Wait till I've gone to tell her.'

Jenna had mixed feelings about the countryside. When she was little, before her father died, they had had a country cottage for weekends and holidays in the depths of rural Buckinghamshire. She remembered wet weekends, when the cottage had a strange, mushroomy smell about it, and the bed sheets felt sticky with damp. The rain teemed down endlessly from a sky like the underside of a submarine – grey, dark and featureless. It dripped monotonously from gutters and branches and the eyelashes of morose cows in sodden fields. There was nothing to do, the sulky wood fire did little to mitigate the clammy cold, and even the cardboard of the indoor games went soft. Enforced walks were torture, for the mud stuck to your wellies in great joke clumps, weighing down your baby legs until you could hardly get along. You couldn't even sit down and throw a paddy because the grass was soaking and it was impossible to get dry again.

She remembered weekends for the tedium of packing to go down there – everyone had to help – and being crammed together in the car with bags of this and cardboard boxes of that, the biscuit tin never within reach, and the handle of Pa's precious frying-pan, swathed in newspaper, sticking into your back. And then there was the doom-filled moment on Sunday afternoon when Pa announced it was time to pack to come home, and you knew the weekend was over and it was school tomorrow.

But then there were the summer holidays, when cloudless days seem to stretch into a golden eternity, week upon glorious week. The meadow grass was waist high, patched with vivid wild flowers – poppies, moon daisies and cornflowers, scarlet, white, gold and blue – and the thick trees spread delicious cold shade under their skirts. Your hot skin smelled like biscuits, and you ran about barefoot in nothing but shorts and T-shirt day after day. There were ponies for riding and dogs for taking for walks. There was swimming in the cold-smelling river, and fishing for sticklebacks, standing calf deep in the little stream at the end of the field.

There was the church fête, with skittles and guess-the-weight-of-the-cake and a game where you rolled wooden balls down a slope into numbered holes, and stalls selling home-made sweets. The vicar who smelled of mothballs came round selling raffle tickets and Ma got into an argument with him, saying raffles were the same as gambling and therefore not Christian, and hurt his feelings. There was the village sports day, with egg-and-spoon and sack race and heart-bursting running, barefoot over the baked ground, with the smell of bruised grass and the delicious, maddening whiff of hot diesel from the fairground just warming up for later. And most of all there was the heavenly do-nothing of childhood summer afternoons, when the stunned heat lay over the land and you were content to lie on your back on the grass and chew a stem of rye, stare up at the deep, deep, endless blue and wait for teatime.

The strange thing was that in her memory both states, wet and dry, seemed to have been continuous, which was clearly impossible. The other permanency, of course, had been the presence of Pa, tall, balding, delicious smelling, his big hands always ready to whisk you up into the air and dangle you, shrieking with pleasure because you knew he wouldn't let you fall; telling you fascinating things about insects and plants; showing you how to do an archaeological dig in the compost heap; standing at the stove in the dark little kitchen, experimenting. He loved to cook, and at the cottage was his only opportunity. One year he had collected a whole basket of fungi in the woods and fields and fried them in butter, and no one would eat them, because Ma said he didn't know a mushroom from a toadstool and would poison them all. He had eaten them himself, and Jenna had been racked with torment because he looked so hurt and disappointed. Even now, years and years later, she wanted to go back and eat his ‘fungus feast' with him and make it all right at last. When you were little you thought your parents would last for ever, like the sunny days; and when they were gone you remembered most of all the times you had missed a chance to make them happy.

She was old enough now to know that a month in the country would not be either perfectly wonderful or perfectly horrible, and that was good enough for her. She was looking forward to it, and her first sight of the village of Holtby was encouraging. It seemed prosperous: near enough to the motorway to attract the well off, and far enough away not to hear it. It looked very pretty, with stone-built houses along the main street, a few interesting-looking shops, a snippet of village green with a row of handsome chestnuts and a stone horse-trough. She wound down her window and drove slowly, enjoying the afternoon air and the way the sunlight poured gold-green through the chestnut leaves. The horse-trough seemed to be full of water, which was unusual these days, and suggested a horsey local community. There was a handsome church and a nice-looking pub opposite it, The Crown and Cushion, with colourful hanging baskets and a sign saying ‘Home Cooked Food' and ‘Garden at Rear'.

The only problem was that she missed the turning for Holtby House on the first pass. Mrs Everest had sent her instructions but she somehow didn't see it and found herself trundling out of the village at the other end into open countryside, and had to look for a farm gate to turn round in. She spotted it on the second pass – a narrow lane just past the post office that hardly looked like a real road – but too late to turn into it, so she had to loop round the village green and make a third run. After that it was quite straightforward and in moments she was pulling into a stable yard through big stone gateposts which bore small notices, one of which said HOLTBY HOUSE and the other DELIVERIES ONLY. The coach houses had evidently been turned into garages at some point in the past, but the stables looked intact – though sadly empty – and one side of the square was a small stone cottage, behind which rose the blank wall of the main house, to which it seemed to be attached.

Jenna turned Florence and parked modestly at the side in front of one of the garages, and climbed out. The air was warm and still and smelled of grass, and somewhere nearby a blackbird was singing. She looked about her and felt a deep contentment stealing over her. She was glad to be here.

A small sound made her turn, and she saw a woman coming in through a gate in the wall beside the cottage, through which she could see a glimpse of sunny garden.

‘There you are!' the woman called in a glad voice, as if she had been longing for Jenna to arrive. She was small and spare, dressed in jeans and garden clogs and a T-shirt, and had a Boris Johnson-esque shock of unruly blonde hair. The overall impression was so youthful that Jenna said doubtfully, ‘Mrs Everest?'

Only when she came close did it become apparent that the blonde hair was shot through with grey and silver and ash and the face was that of a woman of mature years. Even then it was remarkably smooth and unwrinkled, betrayed only by lines around the eyes and mouth; but she smiled with an energetic impishness, and her eyes were bright and intelligent. ‘Bless you for pronouncing it right!' she said, putting out her hand. ‘But you must call me Kitty if we're to live together. And I hope I can call you Jenna? What an interesting name, by the way.'

‘I don't know what my mother was thinking of,' Jenna said smilingly, shaking the lean, firm paw. ‘All the rest got perfectly plain, simple names. I think she'd run out of inspiration, or patience, or something, by the time I came along.'

‘Five
is
a lot,' Kitty said gravely. ‘For a human, anyway. Dogs manage things much better. But Jenna's a pretty name, and it must be nice to be different. There were six Katherines in my year at school. I'd lost touch with your mother before you were born, so you won't remember me. Harriet was just a babe in arms, and Oliver a toddler, but I knew Michael and Rachel. But why are we standing in the yard talking? You must need a drink after your journey. Was it difficult?'