Simply Heaven (11 page)

‘Can you guys just recap a little bit of that conversation?’

‘Sorry.’ Rufus’s head and shoulders pop through the gap between Roly and my seats. ‘Roly’s been shooting with some friends in Hampshire. They’ve got a huge shoot and bagged four hundred birds in a day, though most of them were ploughed under because it’s almost impossible to sell the things in that sort of quantity, let alone eat them. But they keep the whole thing going by renting a day’s sport at a time to foreign businessmen. Corporate entertainment, that sort of thing. I was just wondering if we couldn’t get a bit of that sent the way of us.’

‘Four hundred birds in one day?’

‘I know,’ says Roly. ‘Bit obscene, s’pose.’

‘Too right. And they don’t get eaten?’

‘The great British public,’ says Rufus, ‘don’t like to gut and pluck their own food. And most of them wouldn’t touch game even if it was pre-packaged with a lemon up its arse. I’m afraid it’s not economical to do anything else.’

‘But why kill them in the first place?’

‘’Fraid the German businessmen expect to get value for their two grand a day. Our City traders expect exactly the same thing when they go boar hunting in the Black Forest. There’s not a lot left up to chance these days.’

‘Oh Jeez.’ I can’t keep the disapproval out of my voice.

Roly laughs. ‘I say, Roof, looks like you’ve married a hippie! Vegetarian? Labour voter?’ These last questions are aimed at me.

‘No,’ I protest. ‘No, I’ve got nothing against people killing things they’re going to eat. Or culling pests and stuff. But seriously. They breed these things, right?’

‘Uh-huh,’ they concur.

‘So they breed these things to be shot and buried? Don’t you think that’s a bit –’

‘Townie,’ says Roly, dismissing me with a single word.

‘No. Hold on—’

‘Trouble with townies,’ he says, ‘full of opinions about things they know nothing about. Interfering in country ways. We don’t go up there and tell them not to mug each other, do we?’

I’m stunned; lapse into silence.

‘That’s a bit harsh,’ says Rufus. ‘Come on. It does look a
bit
foul from the outside.’

‘Well, I think their sinkholes of debauchery look pretty foul,’ says Roly, ‘but I leave ’em to get on with it. Stringfellows, Spearmint Rhino – wouldn’t catch
me
taking a young lady to those sorts of place, but live and let live. That’s what I say.’

I start up again. ‘Now, hold
on
—’

‘So what’re you going to ours for, anyway?’ Rufus changes the subject in a pointed manner.

We’re on a road that leads through a grungy-looking estate of two-storey prefabs whose occupants’ taste in garden design is mostly influenced by the fridge-and-nettle school, circa 1976.

‘Dunno,’ says Roly. ‘Got a call from th’mater and thought I’d better oblige. Thought there was probably a drink in it, at least. Something about you coming home.’

‘Oh cripes,’ says Rufus. ‘She’s not put together some grim gathering, has she?’

‘Possibility. Wet the bridie’s head, that sort of thing.’

‘You what?’ I tear my eyes away from a picturesque vista of rusting car bodies beneath a clump of elders and look at Roly in horror. ‘You mean, they’ve … but look at me! I’m not dressed! We’ve been travelling since eight this morning!’

‘Ne’mind,’ says Roly, ‘don’t suppose anyone’ll notice.’

‘Oh good God,’ says Rufus, ‘she could have told us. How many people has she asked, do you know?’

‘Not that many, I don’t suppose. Not a lot of notice, after all. Hunt. Locals. You know.’

‘Oh, well, it could be worse, I suppose,’ he says.

‘No it couldn’t! I haven’t washed my hair in three days! All my slap’s at the bottom of my rucksack and there’s a hole the size of Tasmania in my pants.’

‘Don’t bend over, then.’

‘That’s some help. Thanks. Can we stop so I can brush my hair, at least?’

Roly sucks air through his teeth. ‘Think things kicked off an hour ago. Can’t really be much later than we already are.’

‘How far is it?’

‘Not much further,’ says Rufus. ‘See? We’re on the Stow road already. We’ll get signs in another couple of minutes.’

I glance back out of the window and see that our surroundings have changed dramatically. We’re driving fast along an undulating main road lined with majestic deciduous trees and a dry-stone wall that is so well-covered with lichen that it looks as though it’s been standing there since neolithic times. A wide green verge is broken at regular intervals by neat ditches a foot wide and six inches deep. Side-roads are announced by tidy black-and-white-painted Dick Whittington signposts that break the mileages down to quarter-mile distances. And suddenly, the place names are really, really foreign: The Slaughters; Lower Swell; Guiting Power; Shipton-under-Wychwood; Stow-on-the-Wold. I catch glimpses of thatch, of smokestacks and tiles made from a peculiar golden stone I’ve never seen before: not the strong gold of Gozo, but a gentle, silvery gold: palomino gold. And, despite the fact that we’re driving through a landscape I know to be early winter, it’s so – green. It’s like a kid’s been let loose with a paintbox and tried to come up with as many versions of the same colour as he can in half an hour. There’s lime green and lemon green, rusty green and green so dark it’s almost black. There’s eight shades of khaki and a good dozen of emerald. There’s pea and olive and grass (at least a score of grass), and gold and leaf, malachite and verdigris, bottle and sea, there’s green that flashes bright yellow when the sun breaks through the clouds and green that’s almost oily in the shadows.

‘Wow,’ I say.

‘What?’ says Rufus.

‘This.’

They both look a bit puzzled. ‘
What?
’

‘This! This view!’

‘View?’

I jerk my head at the scene out of the window.

‘Oh,
that
,’ says Rufus. ‘
That’s
not a view.’

‘Looks like one to me,’ I say.

‘No, no,’ says Rufus, as we swing off the main road on to a road signed Bourton Allhallows. ‘
This
is a view.’

As he speaks, the woodland comes to an abrupt end and I see that we are driving along the high back of a rolling hill some hundred and fifty metres high. And on either side, two river valleys meander broad and mellow under a sky so huge it feels as though you must be seeing beyond the horizon.

‘Wow,’ I say.

‘Sheep country,’ says Rufus.

‘Heythrop country,’ says Roly. ‘Best hunting in the world.’

The man’s obsessed. He’s like a surfing bore. Less decorative, though.

‘Wow,’ I say, again. I’m really lost for words. ‘So this is where you grew up?’

Rufus nods. ‘Learned to fish down there,’ he says, ‘and had my first sexual experience over in that field.’

‘Who was that, then?’ asks Roly.

‘Miranda Vaughan.’

‘Ah, Miranda,’ says Roly. ‘She was everyone’s first sexual experience, wasn’t she?’

‘You too?’

‘Pony Club camp, 1988. Asked me if I wanted to help her stuff her haynet. ’f’ya know what I mean.’

‘We hit a patch of stinging nettles,’ says Rufus. ‘Knees like blackberries for a week.’

‘Worth it, though.’

‘Oh, yes. Well worth it. I thought I was King Kong.’

‘Whatever happened to Miranda?’

‘London. Minor modelling career. Lucky escape from drugs hell. Welsh landowner. Tow-headed children. Ponies. Roofing problems.’

‘The usual, then.’

‘Mmm.’

‘Guys,’ I say, ‘I’m delighted to hear these details, but I need some advice here. What should I know before I walk into this party? Who are these people? What do I talk to them about?’

‘Don’t worry, darling,’ says Rufus unhelpfully. ‘I love you, so they’ll love you.’

‘Steady on,’ says Roly. ‘PDA, old chap.’

‘You
are
odd, Roly,’ says Rufus affectionately. He reaches over from the back of the seat and takes my hand. Instantly, I begin to feel better. Not that I’m some sort of little girl who needs Daddy to hold her hand or anything, but the solidarity’s good. ‘No-one’s going to expect you to sparkle, darl. Just be yourself.’

‘If I wanted advice from
Cosmopolitan
I’d have bought a copy. Be myself? Which self is that, then? Bookish self? Dancing on the tables self? Kitten-cuddling self? Trust-me-I’m-a-professional self? Weeping-over-tax-forms self? Which one would you like?’

‘Look: they’ll be curious. And they’ll probably suck up to you, at least for the time being.’

‘Which means?’

‘Uh?’

‘That they’ll stop, yes?’

‘Can’t expect people to suck up to you for ever,’ he says cheerfully.

‘Your mother’s managed it,’ Roly points out.

‘My mother is a very special person,’ says Rufus, and, thank God, I spot a note of irony in his voice.

‘That she is, old boy,’ says Roly. ‘That she is. Front or back, Roof?’

‘Back. Front’ll be crammed.’

Roly, who’s changed down to second, changes back up again and accelerates past a pair of monumental stone gateposts and another road sign that reads ‘Bourton Allhallows: House Only’. The verge has turned into a miracle of mown sward, the sort of grass that looks like it’s been woven rather than cultivated. It runs beneath a six-foot wall, which is, itself, topped by a magnificent topiary hedge in the shape of crenellated battlements, fortified, every fifty feet or so, by a circular turret. Oh my God. If this is what the hedge looks like, what the hell is behind it?

Actually, the hedge is, now I look more closely at it, a bit raggedy: the trees that constitute the topiary have got thinner with age and show skeletal branches through gaping holes. The wall, product of thousands of hours of high-level craftsmanship, bulges in places, and has even, at a couple of spots, fallen down altogether and been filled in with half-hearted concoctions of wooden stakes, chicken-wire and strands of barbed wire. Fair enough, I think, it’s a good few miles long, and keeping it up must be a similar task to painting the Sydney Harbour Bridge.

The wall curves off to the right and Roly changes down to take the corner. Another road sign flashes past: ‘Bourton Allhallows’, it says, ‘Please Drive Carefully’. And then, we’re in the village.

I get a shock. I am slap in the centre of a picture postcard again. The road we’re on cuts through the centre of a perfect triangular green, crosses a narrow little hump-backed bridge over one of those little duck-filled creeks you always fantasise you’re going to see your perfect children playing in one day. And surrounding the perfect green is a perfect village: all thatch and eaves and mullioned windows, tiny little front yards filled with cottage flowers. A fantasy pub, wooden benches and stone millwheels against the walls, to the right. The sort of village shop with the thirty-pane display window that Franklin Mint sell in miniature by the thousand every year, to the left. A squat, comely church, complete with bell tower, straight ahead. Clumps of bulrushes grow out of the stream, a majestic naked oak spreads anciently, a tumble of late roses spilling over a wall.

And then I get another shock. Because, attractive though the initial impact is, it is quickly discernible that, like the boundary wall to the estate, the entire village of Bourton Allhallows is falling down. The thatch on most of the cottages is so bare that you can see the wire that holds it in place. The lich gate of the church lurches at an impossible angle. There are no cars in the pub car park or on the track leading to it, and, on closer inspection, it is pretty obvious that not only is the shop not open today – it never is. In a less peaceable part of the world, those windows would be covered in weatherboard. Paint peels on front doors and window frames. It’s as though the people have simply upped and left. I shiver, but stay silent. I’ll find out later. No doubt.

Past the green, the estate wall swings back up to meet the road: rougher here, the hedging barely trimmed at all, woodland behind. Roly turns the Land Rover up the drive, through slumped white gates that I would guess haven’t been closed in fifty years, and we drive through the woods in silence. Rufus puts a friendly hand on my shoulder and I lean my cheek on it. I’m so nervous now my stomach is turning over and I can feel a twitch in my legs where all the muscles are telling me to turn tail and run. He kisses the top of my head.

‘Stay cool, darling,’ he whispers.

‘I am cool,’ I lie.

‘I know you are,’ he lies back. ‘Don’t worry. It’s going to be great.’

I turn and kiss him, give him a smile. Which plummets from my face as we emerge from the woods and I see my new home.

The ravens are the first thing I notice. Well, ravens, rooks, crows – they could be some kind of funereal local galah for all I know. Black birds, anyway, and scores of them, flying in and out of a hole in the roof the size of a Daimler. But I’ll call them ravens, because I feel a bit like Duncan approaching my doom, and for sure I have my very own Lady Macbeth waiting for me under those battlements.

Although the battlements are only metaphorical. My fantasies of drawbridges and fluttering pennants are dashed on the reality of a hotchpotch of roofs and windows spread out over a few acres of flat ground enclosed on three sides by the weedy arms of an oxbow lake. The fourth side is wall: four metres of flinted grey stone with a huge hole in the middle where the main drive sweeps into a gravelled courtyard. The wall, naturally enough, is on the south side of the house, and produces a deep patch of dank shade where a lawn ought to be. Several dozen cars have been crammed into the yard, and a couple of dozen more are strung out, tyres carving deep ruts in the damp grass, along the edges of the main drive.

‘Hell,’ says Rufus. ‘How many people did you say she’d invited, again?’

‘Looks like one or two,’ says Roly. ‘Glad to see you’ve got the moat filled up again, anyway.’

‘Yes. It did get a bit stinky. Dead fish and stuff.’

‘Did they ever work out what it was?’

‘Bizarre,’ he says. ‘They found a couple of cracks at the bottom, but nothing much else. He said they were probably quite deep and the whole lot had drained into them. Sealed them up with a couple of tons of concrete and it seemed to do the trick. Probably just one of those freak occurrences. It’s not like we’re in the earthquake zone or anything. Just have to keep our fingers crossed.’