Quick Changes

Episode 11: Quick Changes

    Ya know that sinking feeling when your little curly-headed research assistant comes in and stands on one leg and croaks: “Um, I thought you ought to know—"?

    I’m down at the cottage and for once I’ve been making some actual notes, so I put my pen down on my newly installed varnished wooden desk that almost manages to look as if it belongs in the same room, if not the same century, as John’s big roll-top desk, and croak: “What, Greg?”

    He comes up to the wide, low, double-sided bookcases, Susan’s choice, that serve as room dividers and, managing not to knock over the maiden-hair fern in the really nice flowery china pot that John’s sister Fiona insisted on giving us, answers my question with a question. In the way little curly-headed research assistants do when they know you’re not gonna like what they’re gonna tell you. “You know Medlars Lane?”

    Sinking feeling or not, I give him a dry look. Hogs Lane, is what he means. It’s off Dipper Street, which leads off the High Street up towards our end of it, just before the road starts to rise: just past the arty-tarty shop. You go north up Dipper Street and Medlars Lane, so-called, is on your left about six houses before the big dip, which one faction of local historians maintains is the derivation of Dipper Street’s name. Others holding out for something Dutch. Medlars Lane leads up the hill, more or less in our direction, westwards, that’d be, towards what used to be a patch of common ground covered with oak trees, where the village pigs used to be allowed to forage for acorns. There is a technical term: the right of mast. Ya didn’t wanna know that—right. Anyway, the old name for the lane was Hogs Lane, before Mr and Mrs Granville Thinnes, no hyphen but it is a multiple surname, the last bit being pronounced “Thins”, ya really wanted to know that, bought an unnamed, tumbledown cottage in it, planted a medlar tree in its front garden, re-named it Guess What, and re-named the street Medlars Lane and had it paved. His brother was on the County Council, that probably helped. This all was so long ago it’s lost in the mists of time: 1969, in fact. The younger generations of villagers don’t even know Medlars Lane used to have another name. –Look, if ya don’t know what medlars are, don’t break ya flaming heart over it! All it proves is ya haven’t read that Jane Grigson book of John’s and ya weren’t around in 1969, and good on ya!

    “What about Medlars Lane, Greg?” I return pointedly, answering his question with yet another question in the faint hope it’ll force him to divulge whatever it is.

    He smiles feebly and outs with it. “Euan Keel’s bought a cottage in it. On the sunny side: next but one to Medlar Cottage. Further up.”

    “What?”

    “Yeah,” he says uncomfortably. “Um, it’s one of the dilapidated—”

    “Greg, who told you?” I shout.

    “Old Mr Granville Thinnes,” he admits glumly. “He was terribly pleased: he recognised him.”

    He would. They’re the sort that’ve been watching arty-tartified Shakespeare and Dickens on the Beeb since Judi Dench was a baby in naps.

    “They were afraid that Bob Stoker from Portsmouth was gonna buy it,” he elaborates.

    Bob Stoker’s a retired butcher, very successful, owned a chain of shops, some of which have been judiciously sold out over the years to large supermarkets. And why he’d want to retire to Bellingford, God only— “Oh, shit, ya mean he got it instead of the Stokers?”

    “Yeah,” he says, grimacing.

    “Bugger it, Greg! I was all set to document the precise reaction of Medlars Wanking Lane to anything as loud and down-market as Bob Stoker! And all other considerations aside, we haven’t got a category for bloody Euan! And we know him; I mean, granted I know most of the villagers, too, but— Shit.”

    “Um, yeah,” he says, grinning uneasily. “I thought of that, too. S’pose we could lump him in with the yuppy weekenders.”

    “We’ll have to.”

    He nods and smiles uneasily and silence falls…

    “Why?” I croak at last.

    “Um, dunno. He hasn’t rung you, has he?”—I shake my head.—“Um, has Katie rung you?”—I shake my head.—“It’s a long way from London, for a weekend retreat,” he notes.

    “Exactly! And how the fuck can he afford— My God, maybe he’s given up the glossy bachelor pad?”

    We stare at each other.

    “I wouldn’t,” admits Greg.

    “No, but you’re a Londoner. He’s a mean Scot, and last time I spoke to Katie she did mention he’d started complaining about the mortgage repayments… But he needs a London base, after all.”

    “Yes. Um, well, you’ve always said he was a sheep,” he reminds me uneasily. “He knows Katie’s very fond of you, and she’s friends with Velda, isn’t she? Um, well, he’s copying you and Velda?”

    Copying John and Duncan, more like, in the hopes of having something like what they’ve got… Oh, God. “Something like that,” I admit. Then an Awful Thought dawns and I stare numbly at him with my mouth open.

    “What?” he croaks.

    “The thought’s too awful to voice, really… Did, um, did Mr Granville No Hyphen Thin-nes Pronounced Thins actually say Euan had bought it?”

    “Yeah, that’s what I’m saying!”

    “No, I mean, like, did he know if it was in Euan’s name or,”—I have to swallow—“their joint names?”

    “Their j—?” He breaks off, gulping. “She wouldn’t be that silly,” he says feebly.

    “Greg, you were there, that bloody time we went to the wanking Mountjoy Midsummer Festival in Michael’s wanking village!” I shout. “Can ya get much sillier than that?”

    “Y— But putting her money into a house with him?”

    I shrug grimly.

    “She has got a bit of sense,” he protests limply.

    I shrug grimly.

    He shifts uneasily from foot to foot. After a bit he offers: “It’ll give us a real in, at Medlars Lane.”

    I shrug grimly, and he gets the point and disappears in the direction of the kitchen.

    Jesus Flaming Christ! Like, One, people we know settling down in the middle of our sociological study, Two, it being bloody Euan Keel, ex-crush on yours truly and all, and Three, Katie possibly putting her hard-earned cash into joint anything with him? Boy, has that made my day! Just when it was all going along really good, too! Well, the research. Not the John-being-overseas bit, thanks all the same.

    Greg was very pleased to have me come down here, he was lonely. Not so pleased to see Aunty Kate, true, but we only got to wait until Christmas, make that New Year’s, and provided that I can find someone suitable to keep me company and help look after Baby Bunting or provided that John’s back— Yeah, yeah. Folks, she’ll bloody well have to go, she’s booked herself in for a trip to Egypt. Why Egypt, at this point in Earth history, you may well ask.

    Funnily enough the day before we got down here the builders from Portsmouth arrived and in spite of the uncertain English autumn weather got going on putting up two nice little brick cottages on the bumpy paddock to the left of the cottage as you look at it from the beach. So John musta rung them up the morning after he’d suckered me into agreeing to it all. But then, he’s like that: I’d agreed, so there was nothing more to discuss, geddit? Noise and mud all day long—you said it. Greg and me have given in and got earplugs, it isn’t the hammering so much, though there’s a fair bit of that, but the builders’ ghetto-blasters. True, the earplugs have had the result, think I mean corollary, of maddening Aunty Kate, because we can’t hear a word she says to us, like do we want lunch now or she’s taking Baby Bunting up to the shops, but can that be altogether bad?

    The cottages are coming along nicely but Jack Powell’s beating them to it with the garage up the top of our drive and the flat over it. He got going on that practically the minute John asked him if he’d like the job. (No, folks, the Jag’s in Portsmouth being looked after by the usual naval slaves, he didn’t suggest Aunty Kate might like to drive it. Well, to be fair, he was exposed to her driving when we stayed with them in Adelaide on that so-called honeymoon.) Greg’s thrilled about the flat, he’s over there with Jack every spare minute. Well, there’s nothing much to do in the garden at this season, that’s for sure.

    Later. Aunty Kate’s got it out of me about Euan and the cottage. Well, took one look at my face and knew there was something up, kind of thing. She’s urged me to give Katie a bell but I’ve explained that I’m waiting for her to ring me. (Added to which I’ve chickened out, I can’t face it.) She thinks it might not be that bad, it might just be his mad idea. She wonders why he hasn’t told me but then works it out for herself, comparing the local prices grimly with those of old bluestone dumps in Adelaide. Unless it was in very bad repair and he got it for a song? I explain that it was, but he wouldn’t of, considering who else was in the running and that the seller, a youngish Ken Green who inherited it from a spinster great-aunt, is an accountant in Portsmouth with all his wits about him. As witness the fact that he refused to cut down old Miss Green’s huge gnarled quince tree in the front garden, even though Mrs Ken said it was unsightly and blocked the view from the front windows. Mrs Granville Thinnes, on the other hand, waxing ecstatic over it and in fact being very jealous that their medlar tree hasn’t grown as big in the last thirty years. No, well, it wouldn’t, would it? I’m not taking this as gospel but according to Greg’s tree book the thing must be over two hundred years old. As close as can be told without cutting it down and counting its rings.

    Aunty Kate’s very keen on taking a look at it. Why not? I’m sick of the sound of circular saws, hammering and ghetto-blasters, they’re starting to penetrate the earplugs. So as Baby Bunting’s predictably woken up, frisky as all get out, after his post-prandial nap, we pop him in his pram, well wrapped up, and go. Tim’s terrifically pleased to be out in the fresh air with his humans, Baby Bunting’s gurgling happily, he loves the motion of the pram, and grey, windy and overcast though it is, at least it isn’t raining. At the top of the hill we pause for breath and Aunty Kate wonders, panting, why people haven’t built up here: what a view! So I have to explain about it all belonging first to John’s ancestor and now, at least our side of it, to John. She’s terrifically pleased: all of it? She had no idea! Bummer, wish I hadn’t told her, now: she’s gonna write home skiting about it. I throw in my own idea that the village was never built here in the first place because, in addition to the lack of fresh water, it’s much windier on our side of the hill. As we start down the slope on the village side, finding we can actually stand upright, she admits she sees.

    The first site of interest is Dipper Street. Mr and Mr Granville Thinnes have long since got a very smart Ye Olde signpost on it, one of those ones with a long finger (not shaped like a hand, no, that’d be too down-market, just Ye Olde style.) This looks very nice, dear! And the place Euan’s bought is up there? I admit it is, so we go up Dipper Street and turn left into Medlars Lane. This is pretty! I just nod, as we push on up the slope to Medlar Cottage, isn’t it lovely, more nodding, let her stand and gawp—the Granville Thinneses done it up like that for the porpoise, after all—and push on, this is it.

    Aunty Kate gapes at the tumbledown stone cottage with its patched roof almost hidden by the huge, knotty grey branches of the old quince tree. Weakly she concedes it is very striking… But surely the roots…? Yeah, quite. That is, if there are any drains to clog. I don’t mention that, sufficient unto the day. We get three min’ to ourselves gawping at it, plus and the red “SOLD” notice plastered across its “For Sale” notice, and then Mrs Granville Thinnes pops up like the genie.

    “Oh, it’s you, Mrs Haworth!”—She’ll of seen us from her front windows: knows who John’s family are, ya see.—“Good afternoon!”

    By now I know the drill so I reply in kind and introduce my aunt. Mrs Granville Thinnes sizes her up in one swift glance, from the firmly controlled yellow curls and the careful make-up and carefully painted fingernails just for a country walk, right down to the smart London boots. And after a very brief coo at Baby Bunting, strikes. “I’m afraid it’s gone.”

    Afraid my arse, she’s very relieved that a person with a strong Aussie accent wearing discernible make-up for a country walk isn’t gonna get the chance to live next-door but one. But I allow politely that I’d heard. But of course, she smiles, I must know him!—They do watch The Captain’s Daughter, they’re not so up-market as to despise it. Actually the only person I know who doesn’t watch it is Perry Horton. He hasn’t even got a telly.—Cautiously I allow that Euan was thinking of buying a place down here. So she confides that they’re so pleased it was him. But if my aunt is interested—sideways glance at the boots—there is another place further up the lane—

    We don’t admit Aunty Kate isn’t interested in buying an overpriced ruin in Medlars Lane and go further up, and there is another place, on the same side, too, facing south, Mrs Granville Thinnes assures us that it’s the choice side. No, well, of course Number 32 does need rather a lot done to it— But it would be quite an investment.

    Yeah, right, once you’d put on a roof and added an inside toilet. Plus and a damp-proof course, choice side or not. Valiantly Aunty Kate agrees with every word the cow utters and adds politely that she thought her place was lovely. Mrs Granville Thinnes smiles gracious acknowledgement and departs.

    “What was all that about?” says Aunty Kate numbly, standing there like a nana up the muddy end of Medlars Lane, the paving ends at Number 24, in fact if you look at the maps this end officially isn’t a road any more. “Does she own it?”

    “Nope. Just general nosiness and officiousness. And if you were expecting her to ask us in for afternoon tea, think again.”

    She nods weakly.

    “The retirees are mostly like that. She’s an extreme example, of course.”

    She nods weakly again and we retreat.

    Back down in the High Street we cross over, with due precautions as to speeding BMWs and triple-parked Volvos pulling out without looking, lasso poor Tim to a lamppost, and pop into the Superette.

    Belinda’s on duty looking harried, and greets us with an exasperated: “Why on earth are they all asking for dried Chinese mushrooms, for goodness’ sake?”

    “Dunno, Belinda. Makes a change from asking for fresh coriander, I s’pose.”

    “That Ms Deane Jennings was in after that again!” she reports in exasperation.

    “Shoulda told her to try the Garden Centre,” I offer.

    “I will!” she agrees with a snigger, relaxing.

    Helpfully Aunty Kate suggests that the dried mushrooms must be because of that thing on TV last night. Only they were Italian, not Chinese. Belinda looks blank and admits that they watched the old Clint Eastwood movie last night. Was it a cookery show, Kate?

    She reckons it was, but I elaborate: “Not quite. One of those shows where they travel around and show you, um, I was going to say recipes, but they never give you the actual recipe, do they? Show you dishes, I suppose.”

    Belinda nods and smiles but you can see she’s wondering why the fuck we watched it instead of Clint.

    So Aunty Kate explains: “I was thinking about Italy, on the way to Egypt. Well, it’d be silly to miss it, wouldn’t it? Though John says it can be very cold at that time of year.”

    By now Belinda’s come out from behind her counter and has picked Baby Bunting up. She explains it won’t be nearly as cold as England and asks me whether John and me are definitely going down the Valley of the Loire in May next year.

    “If he’s not away with his ship, ya mean?”

    “Rosie, that’ll do,” says Aunty Kate firmly.

    Sighing, I admit: “Yeah, it’s as definite as it can be. Well, for his next spot of leave.”

    “That’s where all those lovely old chateaux are, you know,” she tells Aunty Kate—ill-advisedly: of course she knows. But the two of them then have a lovely chat about the old chateaux and Aunty Kate thinks that maybe next time, with Jim. Gee, thought she’d forgotten she’d ever had a husband. And I can’t say I’m not familiar with the feeling.

    Belinda then notes they were surprised to see me down here so soon, because what about the guest spots for Henny Penny?

    Aunty Kate looks up sharply. Certain people were under the impression that I’d finished all the filming for Henny Penny.

    “Oh—those. I dare say I can fit them in.”

    “Not more? You haven’t told John about them, have you?” she gasps.

    “Oh, Rosie!” cries Belinda reproachfully.

    “No, well, he never tells me about anything until it’s jacked up.”

    Evidently that’s quite different, blah, blah. Might of known the two of them would be on his side.

    And eventually, not without a lot of marriage guidance counselling from Belinda, plus and the information that she’s let Murray go over to Portsmouth with Terry to a football match this afternoon because it wouldn’t have been worth the sulking if she hadn’t (so much for her marital relations), we buy a couple of tins of custard, in Blighty it comes all ready custified in tins, and some more milk, and escape while Belinda’s telling a scowling weekender in heavy laced safari boots, flared jeans and, blow me down flat, an Afghan coat that’s a dead ringer for the Seventies gear in Mum’s photo albums, that they don’t stock dried Chinese (sic) mushrooms but (very sourly) the chilli powder’s over there. Past the biscuits.

    “That’ll be fourteen P worth of chilli powder,” I conclude.

    “Mm,” Aunty Kate agrees numbly. “Are those coats back?”

    “Either that or it got it off its mum.”

    “Oh!” she says, sagging. “Couldn’t you tell what sex it was, either?”

    And since babies aren’t welcome in Dimity’s, the posh tea shoppe—Aunty Kate’s never heard of such a thing!—we head for home and afternoon tea with Greg and Jack and quite probably the builders from the cottages. Oh, well. At least it’s not me that’s been slaving in the kitchen over real scones for the pack of bludgers.

    It was all her own idea! Ged— Oh, ya did get it. Sorry.

    Two days later. Baby Bunting’s had his dinner and had a little play and been changed and put to bed again, and Aunty Kate’s pointing out that the tinned custard’d be nice on that frozen apple pie for our pudding tonight, when the phone rings. And Greg comes into the kitchen to report that it’s Katie.

    “Thanks,” I croak. “Think of something you’d fancy for ya main course, wouldja? Me and Aunty Kate can't come up with any inspiration.” And I totter out, ignoring the complete run-down of the entire contents of the freezer plus and what she’s perfectly willing to do with them going on to my rear.

    Katie’s very Up. Oh, God. And guess where she is! Guess where she is? I’m past guessing, I’m almost past speech. “Um, dunno.”

    “Here!” she reveals with a giggle. “Well, in the village. We’ve bought a cottage!”

    “We?” I croak without hope.

    “Euan and me, of course. Well, just as an investment, really,” she says gaily. “Do you know Medlars Lane?” –Etcetera, etcetera and so forth. Oh, my God.

    “Does your dad know you’ve sunk your meagre capital into a leaking ruin in Bellingford? With another person that might not wanna get his equity out of it at the time you need to get yours?” I finally venture.

    No, he doesn’t, fancy that.

    “Well, um, has Euan given you any indication of whether he might eventually want to sell or, um, live in it, or what?”

    “Well, use it as a weekend retreat, of course!”

    “It’d have to be a long weekend if he’s acting in London or Stratford, wouldn’t it?”

    “She’s saying it’s a long way from London and Stratford; I told you she would!” she says gaily.

    In other words he’s right beside her; in fact they’re probably sitting in that bloody shiny car of his under the interested gaze of Ma Granville Thinnes... “Eh?”

    “I said, we’ve got all this lovely fish that we bought in Portsmouth, from the shop you said John always goes to, and if you haven’t got guests or anything, what say we come over for dinner?”

    I suppose we might as well get it over with. And at least it’ll solve the dinner problem. “Yeah, great. Um, hang on, this fish hasn’t been sitting in a warm car all day, has it?”

    “No, it’s in an esky!” she reports with a loud giggle.

    My vernacular—right. “Good, then we might not all get ptomaine poisoning. Hang on,” I say in a lowered voice: “ya do know Aunty Kate’s still here, do ya?”

    “Yes, of course,” she says blithely. Oh, God. “Euan says, can we pick up anything for you at the Superette, Rosie?”—Smothered giggle.—“A cheesecake, anything like that?” she says airily.

    “No, thanks, we’re planning on frozen apple pie with tinned custard tonight,” I reply blandly and she collapses in helpless giggles. There’s a male remark or two, very tolerant, about daft wee hinnies, and then he comes on the line. Seriously we don’t need anything, thanks, Euan. Except chapter and verse on why ya bought the bloody cottage and why ya dragged her into it, but then, do you even know, yourself? I don’t say it and he hangs up very pleased with himself.

    Much, much later. They came, the fish was excellent—Aunty Kate’s claim that she knows how to cook fish musta been true after all—and we had some of John’s lovely white wine with it, German or something, anyway the label was unpronounceable and Euan was terrifically impressed by it. Then we just played board games for a bit with some lovely Mozart CDs on. And so Euan and Katie depart for the pub and their roomful of fake horse brasses and fake warming-pans and fake brass-rubbings, not to mention the fake four-poster, very pleased with themselves.

    “How old is that girl, Rosie?” she says heavily.

    “Um, well, going on twenty-one now, I guess,” I croak.

    Deep breath. “I suppose it’s pointless to inquire if she has the faintest idea of what she’s doing?”

    “Yeah. And before you ask, her dad doesn’t know she’s sunk all her Henny Penny money in the bloody cottage, no.”

    “I’m sure he doesn’t! Look, Rosie, it isn’t that I dislike Euan. But—well, dear, he doesn’t strike one as a—as a dependable type.”

    She’s hit the nail on the head, there. “No. Well, Katie never breathed a word she was gonna do it.”

    “No,” she says, sighing. “Girls will be girls…”

    There’s a gloomy silence during which Greg mutters something and slides out to the kitchen.

    “I suppose we can try to keep a bit of an eye on her,” Aunty Kate says dully.

    “Yeah. Only the thing is, it probably won’t do any good, because people have to go to perdition in their own way.”

    She looks very startled. “Er—that bad, Rosie?”

    “No, didn’t mean to put it like that, Aunty Kate, sorry. Well, Euan at his very worst would be. But I think Katie’s too nice to bring out the worst in him.”

    Greg’s come back, chewing, and shoves his great oar in. “Thought the minute your back was turned he took up with that Black actress?”

    Limply I reply: “I was taking up with John at the same time.”

    “That isn’t the point, Rosie!” says Aunty Kate sharply. “You said yourself he told you he wanted to settle down and start a family! What if you’d taken him seriously? A considerate person doesn’t say one thing and then do the exact opposite!” She frowns over it. “I think I mean a trustworthy person.”

    Ouch.

    Bridget’s come down for a couple of days, she’s thrilled with the cottage in Medlars Lane. Gee, that’s good, maybe if Euan changes his mind, either about the cottage or about Katie, or both, she’ll want to buy him out. It’s nippy but not raining, Bridget says it’s a typical crisp autumn day, take her word for it, we don’t get crisp in NSW. With the scent of burning leaves in the air, mm! I’d call it the stink from old Pop Granville Thinnes’s bloody incinerator, but if she says so, so be it. We gotta go for a lovely walk to celebrate this crisp stuff. All right, we’ll go up to Upper Mill Lane, that’ll give you a good view over the valley, Bridget.

    “See?” I say to the Herlihy sisters as I lean heavily on Perry Horton’s battered wooden gate.

    “Oh, yes!” cries Bridget, her eyes lighting up and her face, what with the enthusiasm and the exercise and the autumn wind, actually flushed with pink for once. “It’s charming!”

    Actually I was gonna point out what a dump it is, Perry Horton’s let it go to rack and ruin, and Greg’s recent tidying, in his jobbing-gardener rôle, hasn’t done much to improve it, but I nod tolerantly.

    “It’s lovely,” concedes Katie, hanging on like grim death to Tim’s lead in spite of having been told that Perry Horton won’t give a stuff if he races across his garden pretending to chase rabbits, or possibly actually chasing rabbits, Greg reckons there are some suspicious holes and hillocks up the far end near the old stone wall. “But, um, well, it’s not neat, is it?”

    “Who wants neat?” I say blankly.

    “Mrs—Granville—No Hyphen—Thinnes!” she chokes.

    Oh—right. Ma G.T. has started making noises about maybe Bellingford in toto, Upper Bellingford included, ought to go in for some daft village garden competition next year. Most dinkified village in England—that sorta crap. She doesn’t envisage they’ll win: there’s very stiff competition indeed (there must be, judging by the villages in those Midsummer things with John Nettles), but it’ll get them started.

    “Who else?” agrees Bridget, smiling, but still looking dreamily at Perry Horton’s garden. He’s got some lovely trees. Old and big and grey. Deciduous, most English trees are. Not that eucalypts don’t drop leaves like billyo, too, only they never lose them all. These big old grey trees have got rough bark, not the sort that comes off in strips or patches, and brown kind of scalloped leaves, largely fallen off. Oaks?

    “See that tangle of sticks on the house?” The front of the house is visible, now that Greg’s cut back the section of jungle that used to completely cover where the garden path once was. Perry had made a little track, well, not deliberately made it, it was like a sheep track, the result of continual to-ing and fro-ing, skirting that part of the jungle, to get to the front door. Murray Stout doesn’t deliver up this way but his son, Terry, told me that any vans from Portsmouth would just dump whatever it was, heavy parcels of books, usually, at the gate. And not even bother to go and ring the doorbell to tell him the parcel had come. But thanks to Greg you can now see that, if someone put in a lot more work on it, there would be a real path.

    “Mm,” murmurs Bridget.

    “It’s wisteria. It used to look wonderful when it was out. I haven’t pointed this out to Greg, only when he cut back all the stuff over the front path he ruined it.”

    “It is still there,” objects Katie.

    “Yeah, but it used to absolutely smother all the trees, Greg reckons they were meant to be bushes, along the path. It was the most incredible sight.”

    “Then why did he let him cut it back?” cries Bridget in agonised tones. Katie meanwhile is looking dubious: she can see the attraction of a giant mountain of flowering wisteria, but on the other hand she can also see the virtue of a front path that you can actually use. Which come to think of it, sums up the difference between them rather well.

    “Dunno. Probably didn’t care.”

    “Didn’t care?” Bridget gasps in horror.

    “Didn’t care or didn’t notice, one of them. Or both, come to think of it.”

    “Then he doesn’t deserve to have it,” she decides tightly.

    Katie tries to argue. “But it’ll still look pretty, on the house.”

    “Pretty! It must have been… miraculous,” she decides softly.

    “Yeah, it was,” I admit mournfully. I go on leaning on the gate. Bridget goes back to staring dreamily at the wasteland that’s Mr Horton’s garden.

    After a while Katie ventures: “What are those, um, sort of sheds over at the back, there?”

    “That’s not the back, by any means. Greg hasn’t cut his way through the jungle over there, or you’d see there’s half an acre more. He thinks it might have once been a bean patch, but the beanpoles have sprouted and the branches are all interwoven. Those aren’t actual sheds, Katie, they’re the hollow men.”

    The Herlihy sisters both look at me with identical blank expressions, oops. “Um, The Wasteland,” I mutter.

    “Good name for it,” Katie agrees. “Why hollow men, though? Are they hollow?”

    Why did I start? I know Katie’s been doing science, and Bridget left school at seventeen to take up acting. She’s read a lot plays since, but not much else. “Perry Horton calls them that for a joke,” I mutter.

    “Oh,” they say blankly.

    I'm not gonna mention T.S. Eliot because, just in case the name does ring a bell, I don’t want to get into an argument over bloody Cats. So I just say: “Mm,” and go on leaning on the gate. Bridget goes back to gazing dreamily at the wild garden and Katie looks carefully at the neato two-storeyed stone house, said by Mrs Guess (no hyphen) Who to be a perfect early Georgian gem, pretty obviously working out how she’d do it up, and its garden, if it was hers.

    “Oops!” I say with a laugh as this distracts her from her self-appointed task and Tim gets free, leaps the crumbling mound of grass with a few stones showing through it that Greg reckons was once a real drystone wall, and streaks across the wasteland.

    “Help! Sorry!” she gasps, very crestfallen.

    “It’s okay. I said: Perry Horton won’t give a stuff.”

    “But what if he’s got hens or something?” she croaks.

    “Hens? You gotta be joking! Wild ducks, yes. Moorhens, very probably. Coots straight out of Arthur Ransome, I dare say. But hens? Domestic hens?”

    “Hah, hah,” she says, trying to grin.

    “It was a silly suggestion,” murmurs Bridget.

    “Yeah. Added to which, if he did have hens, his friend Reynard,” I carefully close one eye, “would settle their hash in two seconds flat.”

    There’s a moment’s silence and then they both gasp: “A fox?”

    “Ssh!” I grin. “Ma G.T. doesn’t know. Yeah. It’s not a pet, in any sense. He doesn’t feed it or like that. Merely, he co-exists with it, and if he does happen to have any unwanted scraps, he chucks them out in the general direction of where it often comes through his back hedge. Well, hedge is a misnomer, it’s a minor jungle, but ya know what I mean.”

    After a minute Katie gulps: “But Rosie, Mr G.T. keeps pheasants, does he know?”

    “Nah, I just said!”

    “No, I mean, doesn’t Mr Horton know about the pheasants?”

    “Dunno. Dare say Reynard wouldn’t say no to a fat fuzzy pheasant chick or two, though, you’re not wrong there. Well, come to that, Perry probably wouldn’t say no to a full-grown plucked and drawn one, and nor would the rest of Bellingford and Upper Bellingford, but no-one’s ever been offered one.”—They’re both looking at me in a mixture of indignation and awe.—“Reputed to sell them to a very posh butcher’s shop in Portsmouth, and in a good year to an even posher shop in London.”

    “He would,” says Katie tightly.

    “Yeah: anal personality, isn’t he?” I say without thinking before I open the fat mouth. They both blink, and look at me uncertainly. “Uh—forget it. Mean minded, mean natured, and tight-fisted.”

    “He’s that, all right!” Katie agrees with feeling.

    “Yeah. Has Mrs asked you in for a cuppa, yet?”

    “Um, yes, but it was only because Euan was there, too. She spent a whole hour asking him about all the famous actors he knows.”

    “It took an hour?”

    “Don’t,” murmurs Bridget, trying not to laugh.

    Katie just grins and says: “Well, the telly actors don’t count, of course, Rosie! But it did take that long, because she had to tell him about all the things she’d seen them in.”

    “God. –Didja get biscuits as well as the actual tea?”

    “Is this vulgar curiosity or sociological research, Rosie?” she asks airily.

    And I admit, grinning, a bit of both, so she then admits that there was a plate of biscuits, very small, dainty ones. Bought, of course. But—getting enthusiastic—Medlar Cottage is lovely inside! Tolerantly we let her tell us all about it, though after a bit Bridget’s attention wanders back to Mr Horton’s garden.

    Eventually the mention of tea, even such a mean one as Mrs Granville Thinnes’s, recalls us to ourselves, and we whistle up Tim. Let me rephrase that: try to whistle him up, the blighter.

    “Tim! TIM! TIM! Come HERE! TIM!”

    After quite some time, we’ve all tried yelling but he doesn’t respond to their fluting tones any more than he does to my stentorian bellow, I admit: “John says he knows his way home.”

    “No!” gasps Katie in horror. “We can’t leave him, Rosie!”

    No, well, I don’t much fancy it, myself. Added to which I wouldn’t put it past him to have a go at those ducks that lurk in the swampy bit beyond Mr Horton’s back wall. Or at Reynard, if he got a sniff of him.

    “No; and with the traffic in the High Street, he wouldn’t be safe!” agrees Bridget anxiously.

    Traffic? Well, there’s triple-parked Volvos pulling out without looking, yeah. But Tim won’t go that way: he’ll go up over the hill that shelters Upper Bellingford, down its other side, cutting across diagonally to our hill, and then down that way, missing the village and the roads altogether. If he’s got any sense. Only how much sense has he got? “Come on,” I decide, opening the gate.

    The Herlihy sisters gulp and exchange nervous glances, but do come on.

    “TIM! TIM! Come here, you wanker! TIM!”

    “Tim! Tim!” echoes Bridget anxiously.

    “Make a noise like a fridge door!” suggests Katie with a nervous giggle.

    “Hah, hah. –TIM! HERE!”

    We cross the wasteland of stubble to the left of the house, yelling, but can’t get round that way, because of the forest of grown-together beanpoles. So we retreat, and try the other side, Bridget and Katie casting nervous glances at the front windows we pass them. I don’t bother to say that if Perry Horton’s in there he’ll have his nose in a book and wouldn’t notice World War Three breaking out on his front lawn. “TIM! Where are you, you pest? TIM! Come HERE!” We fight our way through some scraggy bushes—the Herlihy sisters try to keep to the stepping stones but since I’ve got gumboots on I don’t bother—and emerge breathlessly at the side of the house. “Currants!” I gasp in explanation.

    “Don’t they smell wonderful?” agrees Bridget dazedly.

    “Yeah. Greg reckons they crop like mad. The thing is, will Perry Horton bother to pick them? TIM! Here, boy! Here!”

    “TIM! TIM! –Look,” says Kate dazedly as we reach the corner of the house, “this could be a proper herb garden!”

    “Yeah, Greg thinks it once was. Sheltered, ya see? TIM! TIM! Come HERE! TIM!”

    “Here he—Oh!” shrieks Katie in horror. Bridget just gasps in horror and shrinks.

    And up he rushes, soaking wet and covered in mud and very old leaves, with the maw sprouting a large, soft, feathered creature that probably is not yet dead, no.

    “It’s a duck,” I ascertain grimly.

    “I think it’s still alive,” gulps Bridget on a hopeful note.

    “Yeah, alive with his teeth in it.”

    “Aren’t retrievers supposed to be soft-mouthed?” she gulps.

    “Are they? You ever seen him with an old boot? The teeth marks go right through the leather.”

    “Tell him to drop it,” prompts Katie somewhat limply.

    “And then what? Let it stagger off and die under a bush?”

    We all exchange helpless looks and then look limply at the hunter and he looks up at us proudly and waves the tail in huge sweeps… This goes on for some time.

    “Hadn’t one of you better tell him to drop it and wring its neck?” says a dry voice from behind us.

    And we all shriek, and jump like billyo and swing round.

    Mr Horton’s standing on his back step looking very dry indeed, holding a book with his finger in it at his place.

    “Hullo, Perry,” I say feebly.

    “Hullo, Rosie.” He doesn’t repeat his earlier suggestion: he knows we heard him.

    “Um, sorry about the duck,” I croak.

    “I’m rather sorry, myself.”

    “It’s my fault!” blurts Katie, very red. “I let go of his lead! Um, can I pay you for it?”

    “Certainly, if it would make you feel better, but they’re not my ducks,” he says in his polite upper-class voice.

    “He doesn’t own them, you birk. They just live here,” I explain clearly.

    “The technical term is ‘wild’, but one understands your hesitating to use it, Rosie. They are fairly tame.”

    “Yeah, well, I wouldn’t call Tim a great hunter,” I admit. “I don’t think he could catch a really wild one. I don’t mind wringing its neck, but the thing is, I’m not sure how. I might just torture it rather than giving it the happy dispatch.”

    “I see,” he says mildly, ignoring the fact that the Herlihy sisters are now staring at me in naked horror. So he puts his book down on the step, steps forward, says sharply to Tim: “Good boy! Drop it!”, grabs the duck, and wrings it neck before we even realise he’s gonna.

    “Whew. Good on ya, Perry,” I say numbly. “Thanks.”

    “Not at all,” he says mildly.

    And at this point, folks, Bridget breaks down in snorting sobs.

    “Bridget!” hisses her sister, absolutely puce with embarrassment.

    I’m busy grabbing Tim and telling him he was a clever dog but not to do it again—what a hope—so I can’t put an arm round her.

    “You’d better come inside, Bridget, and have a cup of the universal panacea,” Perry says calmly.

    For cripes’ sake! A person that’s bawling doesn’t want to hear wanking upper-class English jokes about universal panaceas! “Look, Perry, that wasn’t funny. If you’re offering the poor girl a cup of tea, for God’s sake say so! And try to sound sympathetic, or would it kill ya?”

    He’s not phased: don’t think much would phase him: the Hon. Perry Horton is, appearances to the contrary, a very hard case indeed. Probably had to be, to stand out against the huge family and social pressures that didn’t think he ought to turn out like he has done and lead the sort of life he does. As for appearances: he’s medium height, slim but wiry, thin-faced, brown-eyed, with an olive skin due to the fact that his mum was Egyptian, though mind you as upper-clawss as the rellies on his father’s side, or even more so, if Ma G.T.’s got it right. The hair’s dead straight and still very black, even though he’s about John’s age—the upper-clawss mum and dad originally met in Cairo during the War, his background’s entirely like something out of an Evelyn Waugh saga, poor Mr Horton. And at the moment the hair’s in a state of total elegance because Georgia Carter, the hairdresser’s apprentice from Sloane Square Salon, has been practising on him. She often does. It isn’t at all clear to John and me whether he actually wants her to, but being the sort of man he is, he’d never dream of saying if he didn’t. Last year she put streaks in it, it was really awful: he went about for months with mixed yellow and silver streaks in the black until they grew long enough to be trimmed off. John reckons that one time, this must’ve back when she’d just started her apprenticeship, she permed it, but that was before my time.

    Calmly he says: “Very well, then, Bridget, come inside and have a cup of tea.” And he picks up his book and goes in, duck and all.

    Katie looks at me uncertainly and even Bridget gives me an uncertain look through the tears.

    “Give her a hanky, Katie, and come on in.” I head for the door.

    “You can’t take Tim inside!” she gasps. “He’s filthy!”

    “I’m only gonna take him as far as the back passage, but believe you me, Perry Horton won’t care if he comes right into the sitting-room. And in case that plum-in-the-mouth accent of his was fooling ya, lemme warn ya, just don’t expect nothing ancestral or antique. Come on!” And me and Tim go inside, where I lasso him to the stout kitchen table that adorns the Horton residence’s back passage and order him to Sit! He sits, panting and grinning.

    Katie and Bridget are coming in slowly, Bridget blowing her nose and gulping, and both of them squinting into the gloom that pervades the passage.

    “Come in. Ya won’t fall over anything, there’s nothing to fall over.”

    And they totter in and follow me in numbed silence, not even Katie suggesting that I might take my gumboots off. Being as how Mr Horton’s passage hasn’t got any carpet or rugs or matting, it’s got black unpolished wood. Plus and the bare kitchen table, period.

    Gee, folks, the sitting-room’s more of the same. Not a rug in sight. There is a sofa, it might be characterised as Sixties Horrible. Fuzzy wool and nylon mixture, at a guess, in a bumpy fabric in shades of tan and orange. With skinny wooden arms, varnished, and removable seat cushions. There’s a chair to match, except that it’s in a dark brown wool and nylon mixture with turquoise flecks. The sort of style you see in very cheap motels in the middle of the Great Australian Bugger All, though it’s vanished entirely from all but the scungiest student flats in the urban areas. I think the Herlihy sisters are overlooking the fact that the sound system is state-of-the-art and very, very expensive—easy to do, what with the giant magenta cabbage roses on the full-length curtains at every window. Unevenly faded magenta, more accurately. The room looks as if he moved into the place as the last owners had left it and put in the minimum of cheap furniture bought as a job lot from the nearest auction place. And ya know what? Its looks don’t belie it.

    “Sit down, Bridget,” he says, possibly obeying orders and trying to be sympathetic. Casually he dumps the duck on another wooden kitchen table, handily positioned near the fireplace with one high-backed heavy old dining chair, elaborately carved and leather-seated, drawn up to it. The table already sports a clutter of fishing tackle, a brown teapot with a chipped spout, a half-done chess game (a very cheap mini-set, think they call them travelling sets), a small tortoise, and a volume of the full set of the Oxford English Dictionary. I mean the full set, the sort that only very large public libraries and university libraries buy, because it costs a fortune. I pick this last up and restore it to its place in the set, on the bottom shelf of one of the multiplicity of bookcases that line the walls. And put the tortoise on the floor.

    Smiling shakily, Bridget sits on the sofa. “Thank you. I’m all right, really. It was a bit of a shock. I’ve never really seen anything dead, before.”

    “She is practically a vegetarian,” I admit on a dubious note.

    He gives me a dry look: he doesn’t say anything but it’s written all over his face that he fully appreciates my sloppy phraseology and is entirely sceptical about any semantic message the statement might be supposed to have.

    “She eats eggs, though,” her sibling objects. –Well, quite!

    Unemotionally Mr Horton asks: “What’s this one’s name?”

    “I’m Katie Herlihy,” she says, scowling. “And I am capable of speaking for myself.”

    “So I see.” He picks up the teapot. “Do you want tea, Katie?”

    “It’s all right, the teapot’s quite hygienic,” I say kindly as she looks sideways at it.

    “You do surprise me!” she says with vigour.

    Mr Horton’s sallow, sardonic face doesn’t express anything at all as he goes out with the teapot.

    “Katie, honestly,” protests her sibling feebly.

    “Oh, pooh! He was having a go at me!”

    “Something like that,” I agree mildly. “Well, at all of us, really. He’s like that.”

    They eye me dubiously but apparently conclude I’m genuine. After a bit Katie ventures: “He’s not married, is he?”

    “Are you joking? I mean, look at the place! What woman’d put up with this?”

    “All right, I could have guessed. But next time I really want to know I’ll ask Mrs G.T.!”

    “Yeah. Ask her about the Egyptian mum, too, it’s like something out of—uh—not exactly Brideshead Revisited, though there’s bits of that, too. Sword of Honour.”

    They’re blank for a moment and then Katie says: “Oh! I know! I thought it was quite well done, on the whole, but some of the characters were really exaggerated. I mean, that Major Hound, I thought the director should have stopped that actor. Well, I mean, can you see Paul putting up with that sort of over-acting? And that Guy Whatsisname, he was an unbelievable doormat, wasn’t he? I thought that actor overdid it, too.”

    Yeah, right. I thought they were the two characters closest to the book as she was wrote. I don’t say anything, I’ve already discovered that this generation, make that the last two generations, min.’, of semi-educated Brits don’t read their own semi-classic literature, they just wait until it comes on the box.

    Bridget blows her nose and puts Katie’s hanky in her pocket and says: “I liked him—Guy Whatsisname. I thought he was lovely.”

    “Bridget, imagine having to put up with a man that was that much of a doormat in real life!” urges Katie with feeling.

    Bridget looks dubious. “I didn’t think he was that much of a doormat, really.”

    “He was!” Energetically Katie proves it. Ending: “Don’t you agree, Rosie?”

    “Depends.”

    “On what?” she demands defiantly, as Perry comes back with a tray of tea and doorstep sandwiches.

    “What depends on what?” he says, setting the tray down.

    “Guy Crouchback being too much of a doormat depends on whether one’s talking about the TV series or the book,”—I eye Katie drily—“and whether or not one’s taking into account the plot device.”

    “Waugh, is this?” he says in a vague voice. “I find him unsatisfying—shallow—though gripping enough when one’s wading through them. Would you call it a plot device, precisely?”

    “Yeah,” I say, fixing him with a hard stare. “It enables the narration to proceed, in other words, the plot to unfold. What would you call it?”

    “A narrative device,” he says smoothly and Bridget gives a startled giggle.

    “Do you like Sword of Honour?” he says, actually giving her an interested look for a split second.

    “Um, I did like it, though I agree with Katie that a lot of the acting was overdone.”

    “Oh? I think we may be talking at cross-purposes,” he says in a horribly uninterested, dismissive sort of voice and poor Bridget goes bright puce.

    Katie’s also turned puce and is scowling horribly. “What cross-purposes?” she demands in a loud, rude voice.

    “Katie, Perry hasn’t got a TV. Well, look around you,” I invite her.

    There’s a moment’s silence while they both look.

    “Some people keep the telly in the bedroom,” announces Katie grimly at last.

    “Logical,” he says in bored voice. “How do you like it?”

    “Your tea,” I explain as Katie just stares blankly. “Weak, strong, milk, sugar, lemon?”

    Numbly she tells him how she likes her tea. “Bridget?” he asks smoothly.

    Bridget by now has registered that his tray holds, alongside the pile of doorstep sandwiches on a chipped heavy white plate that looks about as old as he is, an exquisite little porcelain saucer containing slices of lemon. “Um, weak, with lemon, please, Mr Horton!” she gasps.

    “Perry,” he corrects unemotionally, starting to pour, as that makes four of us that like it weak. True, I have seen him pour and drink something stone-cold and almost black, but that was because he’d forgotten to pour it when he made it.

    “That—that isn’t a Spode saucer, is it?” she stutters.

    Blow me down flat, a flicker of interest passes over his face. “Yes. Pretty, isn’t it?”

    “It’s lovely!” says Bridget fervently.

    Smiling just a very, very little, he hands her the saucer. After a moment she says in a shaken voice: “It isn’t old Spode, is it?”

    “Yes. Didn’t you just say so?”

    “Um, yes. But— I’ve only seen it in museums. Well, and sometimes in Country Life. You know, in the advertisements for auctions,” she says, her face flaming again.

    “Yes,” I agree. “They have lovely pics, Perry.”

    “I know. My dentist has them in his waiting-room,” he agrees calmly. –Look, the man’s got megabucks, he’s got that huge flat in London that’s let to a banker and a giant share portfolio! So he could more than afford to buy as many Country Lifes as he fancied. But I’m not gonna stick my neck out and ask him why he doesn’t.

    Bridget puts the saucer back very carefully on the tray and he says: “I’ve had that for years. Picked it up in a little junk shop in Brighton when I must have been about your ages. I can’t imagine how it survived the rock-throwing and the consequent manhandling by the police. Possibly proves there is a God, after all.”

    Of course he says that sort of thing to provoke his audience. Well, and to see what they’re made of—though at the same time without expecting that the answer’ll be anything interesting, he’s too old and cynical to hope to encounter anything approaching a kindred spirit. Given that, to hear him tell it, he’s managed to alienate or grow out of all the ones that he used to think were. I know that syndrome—well, heck, look at me and Joslynne! We were best friends for years without a thing in common except the fact that we lived next-door to each other throughout our teens and both had to suffer the agonies of St Agatha’s Putrid Academy for Putrid Young Ladies. All we can really talk about these days, apart from the ever-engrossing topic of sex, is our kids. Well, and Joslynne’s very interested in anything to do with The Captain’s Daughter and the Lily Rose Rayne crap, but on the other hand, I’m not.

    Bridget isn’t up to what passes for sparkling repartee with Perry Horton and besides is a very sweet and easily crushable person. Whereas Katie, who isn’t up to his level of bloody intellectual repartee, either, is a very contumacious person, and he’s just the type to drive her into being really rude, the more so as she’s certainly bright enough to see he’s completely deliberate. So I say quickly: “You can drop that, Perry, they’re not interested in the iniquities of the bloody Tory party, now or in the distant past, and don’t bother to mention Greenham Common, thanks, they don’t wanna know.”

    “Can’t you let them speak for themselves?” he says very, very mildly. Ouch. Look—out.

    “In this instance, no. And just lemme add, the only God whose existence it might prove would be one that loves you and old Spode china, so who gives a rat’s?”

    “The peroration was good. Though didn’t you let yourself down, rather, in the exordium?” the wanker replies smoothly. “You used a possessive pronoun correctly.”

    Naturally the Herlihy sisters are both blank at first, sod him for the wanking, upper-clawss, educated Pommy git he is. But suddenly Katie gives a choke of laughter.

    “You did, too, Rosie! ‘Whose existence it might prove!’ I see. You were trying to get a rise out of all of us, weren’t you, Perry?”

    “Of course he was!” I say impatiently. “Pass me a sandwich, wouldja? I’m starving.”

    He passes the plate, though noting: “They’re home-made pâté.”

    Right: fair warning. “Home-made how long ago?”

    “Yesterday,” he says mildly.

    “He has got a fridge, he just doesn’t always use it,” I tell the Herlihy girls, taking a sandwich. Yum! “Perry, you’re a genius! Did Tom Hopgood have another special on pig’s liver?”

    “What?” says Bridget faintly, looking sick.

    Katie’s taken a sandwich but at this she stops with it halfway to the gob and also looks sick.

    “He had a special, um, when was it? Back when me and Greg first came down, I think. He doesn’t advertise it, because Ma Granville Thinnes and the rest’d all leap on it for their horrible ultra-lite, nouvelle-cuisine-inspired, so-called pâtés.”

    “Yes,” confirms Perry placidly. “I’m afraid I haven’t got anything practically vegetarian, Bridget,” he says politely.

    “No! That’s quite all right!” she gasps, poor girl.

    “Ignore him,” I advise briefly. Ooh, yum!

    He helps himself to a sandwich. “Oh, talking of the Granville Thinnes woman: I bumped into Royal Pursuivant at the club last time I was in town.”

    He means London, of course. “And?” I ask, eyes shining in anticipation.

    “Well, Granville, or variations thereof, is a very old English name. But Thinnes, however pronounced, is entirely suspect, and the combination of the two even more so.”

    “I knew it!”

    “Mm. Though there is no actual law in England against putting up a decorative plaque in one’s front hall.”

    At this the penny drops and Katie gasps ecstatically: “You mean it’s fake?”

    “So it would seem,” he says smoothly, and she goes into a paroxysm.

    After this one of us isn’t entirely surprised that she eats her sandwich up and announces it’s delicious and takes another one. He’s looking very mildly amused but frankly, I wouldn’t like to say exactly why. And I suppose John’ll be pleased to hear he took enough notice of my last session of wittering on at him to remember to ask his heraldic mate about the name Granville No Hyphen Thinnes, given that he’s the sort that thinks people like Perry Horton need taking out of themselves. Even though he does make a conscious effort not to be critical of him, and does genuinely like him.

    The sandwiches have all gone when Bridget, who hasn’t said a thing since his bloody “practically vegetarian” dig, stiffens and gasps: “It’s alive!”

    We follow the direction of her starting eyes and, sure enough, the small tortoise that I took off the table is making its way slowly over the floor.

    “Muggeridge? Yes, of course he is,” says Perry Horton at his mildest.

    “Muggeridge?” she echoes faintly.

    “Yes, well, small and wrinkled. Though I grant you he should have been a snapping turtle.”

    They don’t get it, serve him right. Katie smiles uncertainly and Bridget doesn’t pay any attention: her eyes are riveted to Muggeridge. “Where’s he going?” she whispers.

    “Well, no idea, Bridget, he comes and goes as he pleases. May be making his way to the back door, in search of a juicy dandelion.”

    She nods, still watching Muggeridge breathlessly.

    After a moment Katie, who’s been frowning, demands: “Why was he on the table? Wouldn’t he kill himself if he fell off?”

    “Probably. Crack his shell, very likely. I was giving him some rocket leaves. You can’t see any because he ate them all. I’m afraid I forgot he was there. He’s not a pet.”

    “I see: he’s wild,” she states grimly.

    “Is the back door open?” demands Bridget abruptly.

    “No idea, I’m afraid, Bridget. Did you girls close it after you?”

    She gets up. “I’ll just see. Excuse me.” She goes out, looking determined.

    After a moment or two Perry notes: “She’ll have a long wait if she’s waiting for Muggeridge to make his way to the door.”

    Idiot. “She’ll be inspecting the back steps, to see if he really can come and go by himself or if the whole bit was just you being you,” I say with a sigh. “Come on, I'll give you a hand with the washing-up.”

    Katie gets up. “And I’ll give Muggeridge a hand, Bridget’s silly enough to stand there waiting for him till Doomsday.” She marches over to the unfortunate tortoise and picks him up.

    “Come on, then,” says Perry on a resigned note, picking up the tray.

    I grab up Bridget’s abandoned cup and saucer and go with him.

    “That was pretty typical of both of them,” I note, as he puts the tray on the sink-bench and then just stands there looking blank.

    “Mm? Oh—yes. It’s the little, pretty one that’s in the television series, is it?”

    “Yes,” I admit, eyeing him dubiously. Surely he can’t have fallen for Katie? Well, he does prefer people who stand up to him, that’s true. And she is very pretty. And a lot of older men think that contumacious manner’s cute. Yes, me and John being another case in point, right, ya spotted it, well done! No, well, the difference is, that John takes me seriously when I’m being serious, unlike the rest of them.

    But no: Perry says vaguely: “Mm… Something of your stubbornness, Rosie—without the brains, I’d say. Certainly without your education.”

    “You hypocrite! Who was it said I've got an eclectic smattering of knowledge that barely approaches an education?”

    Unphased as usual, he says: “That’s what I mean.” Yikes, is it? Poor Katie.

    He goes on staring blankly in front of him. After quite some time I work up the guts to say: “Well, did you like them?”

    “Mm? I suppose I didn’t dislike them… Bridget’s older, is that right? I suppose not technically as pretty… Rather delicate looking, isn’t she?”

    “Yes, but she’s one of those slender people who are actually very fit and hardly ever get sick. Not that she’s one of those aerobics fanatics.”

    “Mm? Oh—glad to hear it. Young Georgia Carter’s got another set of exercises: something off the television, I think. Even sillier than the last, if that were possible. Though I dare say she won’t stick to them any more than she did to their predecessors.”

    Crikey, did she come over and demonstrate them? Gulping, I manage to ask this and he says of course she did, he's known her all her life and she looks on him in the light of a grandfather. I’m sure she does, and let’s just hope that young Grant Hutchinson from Fullers Lane is capable of grasping the notion.

    He turns the water on but forgets to put the plug in, so I have to point it out.

    “What? Oh—yes. I was surprised that Bridget recognised my Spode saucer,” he says, carefully washing it first and putting it to drain.

    “Mm: she’s got quite an eye, John says. She spends quite lot of time at the museums on Sundays, or when she’s out of work. She’s an actress, too,” I explain.

    “Mm…” Carefully he washes the heavy old white plate and sets it to drain. “Was she the one who went to America with you?”

    “Yeah. I was sort of hoping she’d get it together with John’s son, Matt, only it never came off. Well, they liked each other, but there was no spark,” I explain glumly.

    “I see. And what’s she doing now?”

    I tell him about the bit parts in the telly Shakespeare series, and who’s directing it, forgetting that he hasn’t got a telly so it’s unlikely he’ll have heard of him.

    “Aubrey Mattingforth?” he says with startled distaste.

    “Yeah, do ya know him?”

    “I knew him slightly when I was up at Oxford.”

    Well, A.M. is pretty loathsome, this is true, but it’s a bit odd that he should remember him so clearly. “When was this?” I ask uneasily.

    “Oh… ’73, I suppose: Watergate. I remember I was reading one of the articles in The Observer—actually I can see that photograph of John Mitchell as clearly as I see you,” he says, frowning. “Turnip head.—And David O’Malley came in and said— It doesn’t matter.”

    “Well, it might, Perry.”

    “We didn’t have any proof… David used to call him Tricky Aubrey. The rumour was that he got some hack to write his essays for him.”

    “Cheating? Shit. But what about exams?”

    “I forget. I think he did take his degree,” he says indifferently.

    Right; this would be after the Hon. Perry Horton got himself arrested and thrown in clink and refused to let Daddy or Grandpa bail him out. Subsequently serving the sentence for whatever, forget whether it was anti-nuclear protesting or smoking pot or bashing a policeman that was bashing him for taking part in a peaceful demo. He admits himself he was a pretty typical young idiot in those days. After that he didn’t exactly see the error of his ways, as Daddy and Grandpa had bitterly predicted. More like he saw the pointlessness of the lot, the pot-smokers’ side as well as the Establishment’s, and just went off and did his own thing. No, not ashrams or Kathmandu crap, he’s far too intelligent to believe that any sort of religion holds any answers about anything, let alone that the more exotic and incense-laden it is, the more it’s got to be right. He served on cargo ships for ages, and then did a stint on the oil rigs. Then he went off to Canada and did some lumberjacking. I think it was about then that his grandfather died and left him a whacking great lump sum, all tied up in trust, plus and the flat in London. Being him, he just ignored the whole bit.

    Then he got mixed up with some daft woman that was trying to start some sort of organic farm over there. He didn’t believe in that any more than he believed in anything else, but it seemed, according to him, harmless and wholesome, so he put his savings into it. Of course it went bust: for one thing the organics market hadn’t taken off, and for another thing she didn’t have any commercial acumen at all, and he didn’t bother to apply his brains. And for a third thing she brought in another joker that embezzled the funds as well as getting her up the spout. There wasn’t even enough left to get them from the farm to the next town after the bank repossessed it, so he had to go cap-in-hand to his trustees. By himself he’d just of hitched, or jumped on a freight train, but the poor cow was about to give birth. So he paid for all that, plus and bought her a nice little flat, but that doesn’t mean she wasn’t very bitter when he walked out on her. But what did she expect? She must have been both incredibly dumb and incredibly vain not to realise that Perry Horton would be the last man alive to put up with being betrayed like that. He went down to Florida and then simply disappeared into the Caribbean. To do what, he’s never let on, not even to John, but it wouldn’t have been anything to do with drugs. People smuggling, I expect.

    Quite some time after that he turned up in Cairo, where his mother’s family gave him a rapturous welcome and married him off to a pretty little Egyptian thing half his age. He let them, it was him or a fat old banker old enough to be the poor kid’s grandfather. Things went along very peacefully at first: they had a pretty little farm not far out of Cairo that fortunately had a competent manager, and Perry raised a few horses, and they had a little girl. But when she was five the family was in a car accident and she needed a blood transfusion. So they tested Perry. Gee, incompatible. And the doctors had to admit there was no way he could be the kid’s father. So it all came out: she’d been up the spout when he turned up and the family had jumped at the chance of foisting her on a sucker that hadn’t heard the rumours. The official dowry, you understand, being supplemented by a huge payment to Perry’s Egyptian rellies. Well, you’ll be glad to hear the little girl recovered. But as you can imagine, Perry was furious that the wife hadn’t admitted it all to him. They had a flaming row and she walked out, taking the kid. Her family wasn’t that sympathetic and if Perry had made enough of a fuss he could have got her back, but he didn’t try, he just disappeared. –John, incidentally, was terrifically disapproving of this: he did the opposite when he found out Matt wasn’t his, stuck by him through thick and thin, kind of thing, though he did divorce that bitch of a Sonya. But personally I can sympathise with Perry.

    I got the last bit off John, but Perry talks about it all quite readily, if asked. Only, rather as if he was detached from it all. With less interest than if it had happened to somebody else.

    He’s staring blankly in front of him again so I prompt: “Those cups won’t wash themselves.”

    “What? Oh—no.” He gets on with the washing up. After a bit he says: “I thought there was a bit more to Bridget than to young Katie.”

    Crikey. “Uh—yeah. There’s quite a bit to both of them. Katie’s got a more up-front manner.”

    “Mm. And no interest in old Spode,” he says on a dry note. “Neither of them seemed to notice my books.”

    “Thought you despised people that bleat ‘You’ve got a lot of books, have you read them all?’” I bleat in a silly voice.

    He smiles slightly. “Despise would be too strong a word.”

    Boy, is that him all over. He’s waiting for me to say it, of course, so I don’t. “Yeah. But all the same.”

    “Rosie,” he says with a tiny sigh, “you made a bee-line for my bookshelves less than two seconds after you first walked into the room.”

    Yeah, thought that was what he meant. “They’re not readers. Most people aren’t. This is the twenty-first century.”

    His lips twitch ever so slightly and there’s a tiny pause. Then he actually says it, not sure if this is an actual break-through or not. “Not here, it isn’t, thank God.”

    He’s not the sort of man you’d squeeze the arm of companionably, so I don’t. “Yeah,” I say in a sort of a verbal squeezing the arm, and we finish the dishes in a comfortable silence.

    As we walk back down Upper Mill Lane Katie blahs on about what an interesting character he is, but Bridget doesn’t say anything until we’re opposite Number 8, where Georgia Carter’s family live. Then she looks about her in a startled way and says: “He hasn’t got any near neighbours at all.”

    “No. There’s no numbers 2 to 7,” I agree. “Well, think that’s why he picked it. That bend shields him nicely from the rest of the street, too.”

    “What there is of it,” she says numbly: Upper Mill Lane is no longer well populated, there were a few more cottages here, once, but the bricks and stones have long since been salvaged by enterprising other cottage builders.

    I nod, and as Mrs Carter’s come out of her house and is calling: “Hullo, dear!” cross over to her gate. She hasn’t met the Herlihy sisters but of course, Georgia’s done Katie’s hair! Katie grins and acknowledges that Henny Penny let her have it trimmed by strange hairdressers. Grandpa Carter, not Mr Carter’s dad, his grandfather, he’s in his nineties, has come out of the house, chewing a giant slab of bread and jam, and agrees round it: “Georgia’s strange, all right,” and is ordered briskly to “Get on out of it, Grandpa!” Which he ignores. And Mrs Carter ascertains we have seen Mr Horton and asks me how I thought he was.

    “Um, well, the same as usual, Mrs Carter.” What does she know that he hasn’t let on?

    “Ye-es… Well, that’s what Georgia said. She went up to show him them potty aerobics of hers. I did say a gent like him won’t want to see you in your gym gear, Georgia, but of course she took no notice.”

    “Most gents wouldn’t ’alf mind.”

    “Shut up, Grandpa. Did he tell you why he let that Greg of yours tidy up his garden?”

    “Um, no. Hasn’t he let on to you—?”

    No. We stare at each other. Finally I admit that it certainly needed it and perhaps even Perry Horton noticed that it did. She sniffs but agrees that anything’s possible. And—shaking slightly—tell that Greg that she can let him have a nice dock root any time he fancies it!

    “Thought it was a ’erb,” clarifies Grandpa Carter helpfully. “Up that warm spot of Mr Horton’s, near where the fox comes through. –Eh? For God’s sake, Christine, Rosie knows!”

    “We do, too!” says Katie eagerly. “Have you ever seen it?”

    “Seen it loads of times. It’s just a fox. Seen ’undreds of em. Never seen one lower down, though, Missy,” he says, looking her up and down, “if that’s what you’re wondering.”

    Given that Upper Mill Lane winds into Lower Mill Lane, which leads off the top of Dipper Street, Katie promptly collapses in ecstatic giggles.

    “Ah,” says old Mr Carter, terrifically pleased, grinning broadly and revealing the fact that he’s been getting through that bread and jam without the aid of his false teeth.

    “Give over, Grandpa, for the Lord’s sake! Well, they’re all the same, aren’t they, dear?” she says comfortably to me. “Nine or ninety, only got to see a pretty girl and they go silly as nothing.”

    “Mad as a March ’are,” confirms Mr Carter, grinning and winking. “Seen any of ’em?”

    “Hares? Are there any?” gasps Katie.

    “Did use to be. Mr Horton, he says they come out to box up in Mill Field, that’s over the back of his place, Missy. So I said, why don’t you write to the BBC, Mr Horton, and maybe they’d send that there David Attenborough down to film ’em!” Shakes all over, terrific joke.

    Katie smiles uncertainly, not sure exactly what the joke is. “I’m sure they would.”

    “’E ain’t got no telly!” he wheezes. “’E don’t want no telly types round the place!”

    “No more do the rest of us, and get on in,” says his granddaughter-in-law, giving him a push.

    “Any more jam?” he asks hopefully in his cracked old voice.

    “Yes, if you like to trudge down to Stouts’ and buy it!”

    Winking, the old man retreats to the cottage.

    “Mind you, boxing ’ares are a pretty sight, only it don’t do to encourage ’em,” states Mrs Carter firmly.

    “No, ’cos they’re all the same, nine to ninety!” I agree with a laugh and the Herlihy sisters, who’ve been looking puzzled: why would you not want to encourage hares? smile and nod in great enlightenment.

    And with fond enquiries after Baby Bunting and a reminder that Pauline and Georgia have got a special on this week, shampoo and set at half price, we’re allowed to go.

    Katie blahs on happily about village characters and foxes and hares for ages, but Bridget doesn’t say a thing.

    The head of Medlars Lane is in sight before she asks: “What does Mr Horton do?”

    “Nothing very much, Bridget. He has been known to write the odd book review for the TLS, um, Times Literary Supplement, and The Observer or The Guardian, but as he’s liable to write what he actually thinks, he doesn’t often get asked. Well, they all get considerable advertising revenue from the publishers.”

    “I’d have said those reviews were perfectly genuine!” cries Katie indignantly.

    “They probably are, but that’s because the papers choose the sorts of reviewers who’ll toe their particular version of the Establishment line. Perry Horton’s not like that.”

    “No,” agrees Bridget in a small voice. “Um, but that can’t bring in much, Rosie.”

    “No. Well, you ever heard the expression ‘remittance man’?”—No. Right.—“It’s what they used to call the witless scions of wealthy upper-class families who’d blotted their copybooks and were sent out to the Colonies to work as jackaroos, like in the Twenties and Thirties.”

    “He didn’t strike me like that at all,” says Bridget uncertainly.

    “No, me neither,” agrees Katie. “Um, well, apart from that accent,” she admits dubiously.

    “Yes. Well, his family’s very posh, they don’t have anything to do with him—no, it’s the other way round, really: he’s never done anything very dreadful except go on anti-nuclear and pro-pot demos when he was a student. The family would be quite glad to welcome him back into the fold, but he’s not interested. But on the other hand, he’s never done anything that toes the Establishment line, either.” I don’t give them the full story, I just add: “He’s bummed around the world a lot, and he’s got enough to live on, and as he’s not interested in the pointless acquisition of consumables, he can afford to live the way he wants to. And every ten years pay a jobbing gardener to tidy the place up a bit.”

    “A modern hermit, in fact!” says Katie with relish.

    “Not quite. If he was, he wouldn’t have anything to do with his neighbours, would he? Let alone encouraging Georgia to demonstrate her blessed aerobics. No, well, he says himself she looks on him in the light of a grandfather.”

    “He’s not that old!” says Bridget in a startled voice.

    “Um, well, he’s a year or two younger than John, I think. Old enough for little Georgia not to see him as a man,” I add with a smile that’s not entirely ingenuous.

    “Yes. It must be a terribly lonely life, all the same,” she says in a low voice.

    “He’s got his books and his animals!” Katie objects eagerly. “I think he’s wonderful, to have the guts to live his own life!”

    “You’re romanticising him, Katie.”—And if she is, God knows what Bridget’s doing, she’s miles more romantically-minded than Katie.—“They’re not his animals, and he really would have let the tortoise fall off the table, whether or not he’s christened it something silly. It’s not that he’s absent-minded, it’s that he doesn’t fundamentally give a shit about anything emotional. He’s completely detached, see?”—They don’t, they’re both rather pink and glaring indignantly, oh, God.—“He’s deliberately detached himself from all emotional ties,” I spell out grimly. “He’s been through all that and had enough of it. Geddit?”

    Bridget nods, blinking, and whispers: “It’s very sad.”

    Right, well, sad or not, let’s hope it really has sunk in.

    “Can a person be detached from all emotional ties, though?” asks Katie, frowning over it. Well, she has got that sort of mind: as well as being bright and enquiring, she likes everything to be cut and dried.

    “As much as is humanly possible, then. Oh, and while the pair of you are turning him into some misty Romantic figure that he isn’t,”—they’re both red and indignant again—“lemme just add that emotional ties don’t include sexual ones. He had an affaire with Christine Carter’s sister Gloria for about three years, a bit back, until she found a bloke in Portsmouth that was willing to marry her. She’s about two years older than Mrs C., and even blonder and blowsier, in case you were wondering.”—I think they get it, they’re glaring as if they do.—“Yeah. At the moment he’s got a mistress in Portsmouth. This is well documented, because Belinda Stout’s brother lives two doors down from her. A Mrs Anne Leaman, divorced, schoolteacher, about his age, suitable in every way, is the consensus. One son at uni, so no encumbrances. Mrs Carter’s opinion is he’ll never make the commitment, and I have to agree with her.”

    They swallow.

    And we head up Medlars Lane to the cottage. Katie’s soon chattering nineteen to the dozen again, but Bridget is very, very silent. Is this good or bad? I hear you cry. Folks, I gotta admit I dunno. Well, if she’s been put off any idea of ever looking twice in Perry Horton’s direction, I’d say it’s good, because if he hasn’t committed to the suitable-in-every-way Mrs Anne Leaman, how likely is it he’ll ever commit to any woman, at his age, with his history?

    It’s pouring like buggery, and here we are incarcerated in ruddy Eddyvane Hall on the outskirts of Michael’s village filming the great Series Five carry-over episode that’ll leave the punters breathlessly hanging on for Series Six. Just in case I’ve totally lost ya, Series Four is currently going to air, and it’ll be followed by Captain’s Daughter The Christmas Special which features the great Daughter-almost-busting-up-with-Commander scene and the great Daughter’s-wedding-to-Commander-in-full-length-white-velvet scene—goddit? Katie’s not in Four, her first series is Five, slated to go to air around March next year. And to make the situation totally clear, Five and Six will not only out-country-village and out-nostalgia Heartbeat, they’ll have it eating Brian’s shorts or he’ll know the reason why.

    The reason we’re in the actual Eddyvane Hall instead of the village pub is first, there’s a huge crowd of us, second, the Mountjoy Midsummer Festival isn’t on, it’s autumn, and third, Brian knows the powers-that-be of the Mountjoy Festival Trust or whatever they call themselves and they were only too eager to rent him the dump in their off-season for megabucks. Not to say cash in on the extra publicity.

    Of course, the tribes of caterers and so forth they have during the festival aren’t here, so Henny Penny’s got the firm they usually hire when they take a cast on location—a sufficiently rare occurrence, Brian much prefers to send one O.B. van and one crew on a meal allowance. The firms that provide this sort of service specially for film and television companies all have silly names and our one’s is 4 Lunch. And so what’s on offer for lunch, no pun intended, thanks, is their usual thin, leathery sandwiches with slices of pale pink plastic and anaemic lettuce inside them, or, as a concession to the 21st century and possibly the European Union, slabs of intensely leathery self-styled baguette with slices of pale pink plastic and anaemic… Yeah. Or factory-made meat pies. So I’m having one. With real tomato sauce out of a bottle.

    Euan comes and sits down beside me with a sigh. Heh, heh, he’s broken down and chosen a pie, too! “What dreary weather.”

    “Yep, the English countryside at its best.”

    “How in God’s name do you manage to remain so chirpy all the time, Rosie?”

    Stupid twit. Largely by not thinking about the fact that my hubby’s in the Persian Gulf launching spy-planes and worse to fly over the poor miserable peasants. “Partly temperament, I guess. No, well, partly being married to the man I love, even if he is utterly elsewhere.”

    “Mm,” he says, the nice, rather curly mouth tightening.

    Baldly I say: “I won’t ask what’s gone wrong between you and Katie, I’ll just say that whatever’s gone wrong is entirely your fault and I’m bloody sure you know it.”

    “Nothing’s gone wrong,” he says grimly.

    I just eat pie before it can turn stone-cold and glue itself to my plate.

    Euan eats his, too, possibly not noticing that he’s doing it. Then he says glumly: “She’s so young.”

    I lick my fingers carefully. “Yeah. Well, she’s certainly not old enough to make allowances for nervy up-themselves artistic idiots that were apparently born with an urge to self-destruct.”

    “How well you know me,” he says wanly. There’s a pause but I don’t fill it, I just sit there hoping he won't say anything else, what a hope. “We don’t seem to connect, any more.”

    “Gee, clear as mud, Euan. Must you fall back on Nineties clichés?”

    “Earlier than that, isn’t it?” he says wanly. “No, um, well… She claims I’m leaving all the practical arrangements at the cottage to her, but what else can I do?”

    Gee, make an effort? Not spend so much time sucking up to the Stratford super-pseuds and putting in appearances at this, that and the other wanking first-night or club opening? (Don’t say it.) “You could try being nice to her, Euan.”

    “Nice!” After a moment he blinks. “Oh. I think I see what you mean.”

    “That’s good. Well, what I don’t mean is showering her with stupid consumer items she doesn’t want and doesn’t understand the value of if she does want them.”

    “Aye, I did get that. But—” He breaks off and stares glumly at his plate. His eyes have filled with tears, I can see that even though he’s staring at his plate, so I don’t say anything else.

    At long last he comes out with: “Derry Dawlish has been threatening a film of the Daughter again, did you know?”

    “No,” I reply cautiously.

    “He wants me to do the husband… No, well, I think he envisages splitting Rupy’s rôle. I wouldn’t do the social climber stuff, just the romantic bits.”

    “Regardless of the fact that the GBP will of got used to seeing you as Macfarlane?”

    He gives a limp shrug.

    “Yeah, well, he can do it without me.”

    “He swears he won’t, Rosie.” I don’t react. “Um, well, he’s been making noises about using the Sydney production studios.”

    “Eh?” I reply in spite of myself.

    “Mm. Um, well, he mentioned Singapore, too. Wasn’t the Navy there at the time?”

    “Yuh—Uh—” According to John it was, yes. Mother and Father were stationed in those parts for a while. Household slaves to do every last task for them, all she hadda do was invite the other bridge-playing Navy wives. Well, no different from the current load of Aussie expats that infest the place, I do recognise that… Singapore? Goddit. Five’ll get ya ten he’s planning to film the steaming-jungle bits of it in Queensland!

    “What?”

    “Nothing,” I say, clearing my throat. “I don’t deny I’d like a trip home at Derry Dawlish’s expense, though ya needn’t bother to pass that on, thanks, but I’m not into the fillum-star shit, and D.D. knows that.”

    “Aye,” he says heavily.

    “Um, sorry, Euan, I suppose it’d be good for your career,” I admit, biting my lip.

    “Mm. Though I’ve got quite a bit more telly Shakespeare in the pipeline, still: Aubrey seems to think I can manage more than I thought I could,” he says with a sort of twisted smile that indicates he may be becoming marginally more self-aware. Certainly as far as his profession’s concerned, anyway.

    “Crumbs. Well, that’s great. Go on, tell me what.”

    “Richard II,” he reveals, eyeing me cautiously.

    I’ve never read it. Um, hang on, when I was at uni they showed a really blurred version at the uni film society, musta run out of wanking Eighties German gloom starring bad American Method actors, that week. “Um, where did he fit in?”

    Apparently he was the one that Henry IV chucked out by some nefarious something that I don’t listen to, because various scenes in that grainy B&W thing have come back to me and if he wasn’t gay I’m Charley’s Aunt from Brazil where the nuts— Feebly I agree that it’s a peach of a part. And so who’s doing Henry? Adam McIntyre’s gonna do Henry, fancy that. He explains at great length how Aubrey’s techniques are gonna combine those of the stage and the TV studio so that the result will be eminently viewable while not getting lost at Stratford— Blah, blah, who cares, at least he’ll be in work even if I turn down D.D.’s offer.

    Shit, what I am thinking? When I turn down D.D.’s offer, of course!

    “But between you and me, wee Rosie,” he says, grinning, he’s cheered up terrifically, “a pairson canna do the Bard all the time!”

    “Not and retain his sanity, right,” I agree, also grinning.

    “Aye!” Then his face falls. “Damn. I really miss that time we were together,” he admits glumly.

    Oh, shit. “Euan, this woulda been that time I was mostly lying to you,” I remind him. “What with not letting on I was doing the Daughter crap for months and then when I finally did let on, not admitting that it was part of my sociological research—”

    “Och, I didna mind that,” he says dully.

    “No,” I agree cautiously as, thank God! Paula O’Reilly comes up to us with a plate of leathery sandwiches and a cup of weak coffee. She sits down heavily at our table and sighs. “Bloody weather, isn’t it?”

    Automatically we both agree, though anybody less focussed on her all-engrossing job than Paula is could see with half an eye that our minds are not on the problems of filming the crucial Series Five carry-over episode and the Series Six episode which succeeds it in the freezing English rural autumn weather.

    Later. Rupy’s come into my room to watch the telly news telling us about the belting rain we already know about. He pulls the duvet more firmly over our legs and concludes: “Rosie, darling, if Euan knows he’s doing it, or not doing it—”

    Yeah. Quite. “Don’t ask me, my name’s not Sigmund. Pass me what’s left of those chocs, wouldja?”

    We munch companionably…

    “What else?” he says at last.

    Knows me too well, ya see. Sighing, I report the latest crap in the ongoing D.D.-making-a-film-of-the-Daughter saga, this has been going on, folks, believe me or believe me not, since the second round of auditions for it. So, Rupy doesn’t get too hysterical at this latest report. But he does say cautiously: “Sydney, darling?”

    Glumly I admit it is tempting.

    “Derry Dawlish is known for his low cunning,” he reminds me. “And I suppose you’d only need to be on location for six weeks. And John might be at sea again. But what about Baby Bunting?”

    I burst out with a full-blown scheme in which Mum takes over the baby-sitting—try to stop her, more like—and Yvonne might like to spell her when I’m not filming and she’s not doing Personal Dresser, and blah, blah. Poor old Rupy gulps and can’t even smile.

    “It’s just… I don’t want to be a fillum star,” I admit shamefacedly. “But I enjoy the work.”

    He puts his hand over mine, sticky though they both are, and squeezes hard. “Yes. Some of us were wondering if you’d ever admit that, Rosie, darling.”

    “Um, but a person can’t do both,” I protest feebly.

    “Why not?” he says comfortably.

    I just gape at him.

    “There’s no Universal Law that says a person can’t do well at two professions,” he says comfortably. “I don’t mean full-time, dear, that’d be silly. But let’s face it, only fillum-stars are really full-time: the rest of us just scrape along, doing voice-overs and commercials and anything that offers to, um, fill the coffers!” He grins at me. “Sorry! You’d be spared that, with your sociology. And it’s not as if— Well, I mean, nominally you are full-time at that, I suppose, aren’t you? I suppose you’d have to clear it with your professor?”—In spades I would! I nod numbly.—“Yes. But certainly for the next few years, while you work on the village stuff, you’re relatively flexible, aren’t you?”—I nod numbly, not mentioning the preliminary geographical-distribution results that are absolutely fascinating and that I’m working up into a paper, or the large conference Prof.’s got me slated to deliver a paper at next year…

    Rupy’s concluding I can easily fit it in!

    “Yes, um, but John might be wild,” I croak.

    He reminds me that at the silly Chipping Ditter Festival 2000 we all went to with Gray just after me and John had got it together, John did say to me that he’d got the impression that I enjoyed the acting—or don’t I remember telling him that?

    “Um, yeah, you and me and Gray were having morning tea in the Boddiford Hall Park Royal’s Solarium and John was walking Tim…”

    “Yes,” he says, sneakily taking the last choc. “John knows you enjoy it. And so long as you don’t let Brian and Sheila sucker you into any more Page Three shots, I really don’t think he’d kick up.” He chews slowly. “Yum! That wasn’t a hard one after all, it was a soft caramel! –So long as you tell him about it first and don’t spring it on him,” he says sternly.

    “Yeah,” I agree glumly.

    He turns the telly on again but it’s still showing crap on all channels. Blurred crap.

    “No, hang on, Rupy! Is that dog trials?” No, it’s an ad, and he turns it off again.

CAPTAIN’S WIFE

(vaguely)

Well, yes, Janey darling, he is a pleasant young

man… We’ve known his family forever…

CAPTAIN’S DAUGHTER

(eagerly)

There you are, then, darling Step-Mummy Miffycent!

Me and Ludo will encourage Ginny to see some-

thing of him! And of course it’s vulgar to talk about

his pots, but he has, you know! Ludo’s friend

Teddy’s in the City, you know, and he says Vyvyan

Carteret-Brown’s fwightfully up with the play!”

    Gee, only one lispy W, is this a record? Incidentally, “Step-Mummy Miffycent” is Varley’s own: Amaryllis’s character’s name is Millicent, some of us suspect entirely so as Varley could work in the nauseating appellation. She was a friend of Daughter’s late mother, so the story-line runs, and Janey used to call her Aunty Miffycent, being unable to pronounce it in her adorable toddler days… This all was revealed to the breathlessly expectant public in a totally nauseating scene with a faked-up family album. Unfortunately Mum was only too glad, Brian having gone to the expense of a toll-call all the way to Sydney, to supply a genuine Polaroid featuring my ruddy golden curls and tummy button. Plus and a frilly bikini bottom, at least my family weren’t into starkers shots of the kids on the back lawn in order to embarrass them and their progeny forever, yea unto the fifth and sixth generations… So then the studio whizz-kids re-photographed it and faked it up into a genuine-looking piece of Fifties memorabilia, which if ya work it out, musta been taken around 1935, so possibly the all-pervading sepia was justified. On the other hand, Miss Hammersley’s got loads of shots in her albums from that era and none of them are sepia, just faded B&W taken with box Brownies. The fact that kids in the Thirties didn’t wear frilly bikini bottoms, bikinis not having been invented, escaped everyone’s notice, apparently.

    Paul hasn’t said anything so me and Amaryllis continue to sit “confidentially,” quote unquote, on a sofa in an “embrasure,” quote unquote, of the so-called Merrivale Abbey ballroom, actually Eddyvane Hall’s freezing-cold mirror- and glass-filled conservatory. Finally Jerry, Paul’s obbo, says: “Was that okay?” and our Grate Director comes to with a start and yells: “CUT! Can’t you apes understand when a scene’s over without having to be TOLD?”

    Amaryllis then asks Jake, one of the lighting men, whether that was better, and he agrees it was much better, and everyone looks hopefully at Paul but he’s gone into a brown study… Finally he orders someone to get Terry in here at the double, he thinks there’s too much blue in this scene. Too much blue? Who the fuck does he imagine he is, Sir Joshua Reynolds?

    Me and Amaryllis exchange resigned glances and she produces her battered paperback Ngaio Marsh from under the spreading skirts of her midnight-blue full-length satin evening-gown made from a genuine Vogue photo of a genuine Dior model. (Effing and blinding ensued from poor Ruth, she couldn’t see how the Dior workroom had— And it was all very well for Terry and Dinah to say cobble it together anyhow, it didn’t matter what it looked like underneath, but it had to be comfortable! Terry and Dinah clearly didn’t care if Amaryllis suffered the tortures of the damned in it, though they didn’t go quite so far as to say so.) And I produce my Dick Francis from under the spreading skirts of my ruddy ice-blue satin princess-length with the great steaming piles of nylon net petticoats under it, every time I play a scene sitting down the whole things shoots up into my face and Ruth and Jilly have to rush forward in tandem and remove a couple of them, then rushing forward again to replace them when I have to play a scene standing up or dancing…

    There is NOT too much blue! Terry has designed the whole ballroom sequence in shades of green and blue against the gilding and glass! And the chandeliers are NOT whatever-it-was and blah, blah, blah… Amaryllis finishes her Ngaio Marsh and looks wistfully at my Dick Francis. Actually I’ve just discovered I’ve read it before: it’s the one I had on the plane going to America to see John, I can never remember the plots of books I read on planes until I’m two-thirds into them for the second time. So I nobly resign it to her and plunge myself into— Uh, well, not plunge: the impossible-to-pronounce Alleyn (at various times she said it’s not “Allen” and not “Allayne”, so what the fuck’s left, folks?) is incredibly up-himself in the light of not a few real blokes, not to say a real upper-clawss English hubby, in the fourteen years or so since I first read them goggle-eyed, and could only be made bearable on-screen by someone with as much SA as Adam McIntyre himself… Hey, that’s a thought! Gee, and maybe if I got someone, preferably not me, to drop it in Derry Dawlish’s shell-like he’d forget any idea of Captain’s Daughter The Movie…

    Huh? What? Oh, God. Different filters. Paul’s conceded the blue so far as the dresses and the stripes on the sofa (one square inch visible because of our spreading aforesaid), but that doesn’t mean we have to look like a pair of ghouls. Jake’s changing the filters…

CAPTAIN’S WIFE

(vaguely)

Well, yes, Janey darling, he is a pluh—

PAUL, AS HIMSELF

(screaming)

NO! God Almighty! CUT! Lily Rose, get that bloody

book out of sight before I dock you half a day’s pay

for farting about and wasting everybody’s time!”

    Folks, less experienced telly actors or those who don’t know ruddy Paul Mitchell might at this stage allow their jaws to sag or exchange glances with Amaryllis or— Forget it. I just shove the Ngaio Marsh under my ruddy ice-blue satin skirts and get on with it.

INT.  ThE BALLROOM OF MERRIVALE ABBEY - NIGHT

Captain’s Daughter, in full-skirted ice-blue princess-length satin, and

Captain’s Stepdaughter, in full-skirted Royal blue chiffon looped up over a

turquoise underskirt (you’re right, folks, Varley must of been reading the actual Fifties

mags, no-one could of imagined anything that gruesome) discovered giggling

together in a corner.

CAPTAIN’S DAUGHTER

Don’t be horrid, Ginny! Vyvyan Carteret-Brown’s

tewwibly attractive!

CAPTAIN’S STEPDAUGHTER

(tolerantly)

Oh, sure.

CAPTAIN’S DAUGHTER

(giggles)

But he is! I think so!

CAPTAIN’S STEPDAUGHTER

(shrugging)

Maybe. But none of these Limey bozos you and

Mom keep throwing me at ever do anything, Janey!

How can a girl respect a man that doesn’t do

anything?

CAPTAIN’S DAUGHTER

(eagerly)

But darling Ginny-Pinny, that’s what I’m trying to

say! Vyv Carteret-Brown does do things: he does

things on the Stock Exchange, he’s tewwibly clever

about all those stocky and sharey things!

    And so on… One of the most boring scenes ever written in the English language: right. Eventually Paul stops us and sends everyone else off for a break. Evidently we haven’t been getting the proper sisterly intonations. But we’re not sisters, and Ginny was at school in America for yonks— None of this is listened to and he sits us down and takes us through the dialogue.

    Take forty-two.

CAPTAIN’S DAUGHTER

Well, if you really don’t fancy dishy Vyv Carteret-

Brown, Ginny-Pinny, um, well, me and Ludo

thought… Well, what do you think of Christopher

Macfarlane?

CAPTAIN’S STEPDAUGHTER

(chewing; indifferently)

Not much.

CAPTAIN’S DAUGHTER

(uncertainly)

I’ve always liked Christopher.

CAPTAIN’S STEPDAUGHTER

(drily)

Yeah, and he’s always liked you.

Their eyes meet. They giggle together.

    Sisterly, geddit? In the background, Paula’s looking confusedly at her script and Paul’s waving his hand round and round in a keep-it-rolling gesture at the cameraman, who woulda kept it rolling anyway, he never stops until Paul yells “Cut!” Because if he did use any initiative, Paul would kill him. Oh, ya gathered that? Yeah.

CAPTAIN’S DAUGHTER

(weakly)

Yes, well, never mind that. I think Christopher really

likes you, Ginny-Pinny. And you must admit, he is a

dish!

    In the background, Paula’s goggling at her script with starting eyes.

CAPTAIN’S STEPDAUGHTER

All right, I admit it!

(loud giggle)

    Paula’s turning the pages of her script over frantically.

CAPTAIN’S DAUGHTER

(weakly)

Yes. Um—well, they’re both sure to be at Lady

Mary’s ball.

    Paula’s found the place. She scowls horrifically. She only took her eye off the Grate Director for ten minutes…

    Aunty Kate missed most of it, she took Baby Bunting off to the room Wardrobe’s using, so as Ruth could have a good long admire of him. “So, how much did you get through, dears?”

    Like, since breakfast? “Um, that scene and the one with Amaryllis,” I croak.

    “And the close-ups!” says Katie quickly. “They’re tricky, you see, Mrs McHale; Yvonne had to redo Rosie’s makeup, didn’t you?” (Like, a dozen times, yeah. Guess why? Because of the aforesaid cold blue look of Terry’s aforesaid décor. Using a much pinker powder and a warmer foundation and—You’re right: bloody boring. I’ve stopped.)

    Oops, Paula’s thrown her script to the ground and is marching up to Paul.

    “What the bleeding HELL did you imagine you were doing to MY SCRIPT?”

    Aunty Kate’s jaw drops: what with the frayghtfulleh nayce acc’nt and the terrifically good school and the Oxford degree, she’d thought Paula was One Of Us. Well, one of John’s lot.

    “Can we go to the other pub? Aunty Kate! The pub at the other end of the village!”

    “Oh! Yes, all right, dear. Nothing too fattening, though, after those sausages—”

    Yeah, yeah. And we totter off to change…

   Over lunch she of course chats nicely to Katie and Yvonne, eventually asking Katie who’s going to take the part of this Vyvyan character. And she reveals it’s Adam McIntyre. Gasp, shock, joy! When will he be on set, dears?

    Katie produces her shooting schedule and decides it can’t be tomorrow or the next day, it must be the day after: look, these are the scenes where Daughter was dancing with him and where Stepdaughter’s gonna be dancing with him. Aunty Kate’s looking bewildered on top of the excitement but we don’t bother to explain that Brian won’t pay for a genuine Adam McIntyre for a week when Paul can shoot all his scenes in a day. But she says: “How exciting!” anyway.

    “Yeah. We’ve got so popular the Big Names are lining up to be in the show.”

    “Of course, dear! –I would have thought that Adam McIntyre was a bit too old for the Stepdaughter, actually, Katie,” she says kindly.

    “Yes,” she agrees happily, “he is. Heck, he’s well into his forties, did you know that?”—Aunty Kate nods kindly.—“Only he’ll be playing under his actual age, of course!”

    “I see,” she says kindly.

    “Yeah. Totally dishy. More suitable for you than Euan, but,” I state belligerently.

    Poor Katie’s turned absolutely scarlet, oh God, sometimes I forget how very young she is. “What do you mean?” she gasps. “Adam McIntyre’s happily married! And why isn’t Euan suitable for me?”

    “Ecstatically happily,” I admit limply. “I’m sorry, Katie: I didn’t—”

    “So why isn’t Euan suitable for me?” she persists grimly.

    “I meant for your character,” I say limply.

    “Look, if you’re going to tell me yet again that he’s got as much determination and individuality as a sheep—”

    “No! Well, he has. Though actually I was thinking he’d improved a bit: he seemed almost self-aware when I was talking to him over lunch the other d—”

    “Flirting with him over lunch, you mean,” she states grimly.

    Jesus. Paul oughta be here, talk about sisterly, this is much more like the real thing. “I wasn’t.”

    “Rosie, you always do!” she cries angrily.

    “Calm down, Katie. Far be it from me to find her blameless, but it is just Rosie’s way. Well, her mother was exactly the s—”

    “Mrs McHale, you weren’t there!” she cries. “She was smiling like anything and—and he was looking at her as—as if—” She breaks off. Her lower lip trembles.

    “Look, we’ve got a history, the man was remembering it, all right? And I never encouraged him to. And just stop!” I say loudly.

    She’s stopped but she glares at me.

    I take a deep breath. “I was not referring to your relationship with Euan, you deluded clot, I meant the Macfarlane character! I meant Vyvyan Whatsisface is more suitable for the Stepdaughter than that wittering Scotch Macfarlane, for Chrissakes!”

    There’s an uncertain silence, into which Yvonne unexpectedly puts: “I think she’s telling the truth, Katie.”

    “Thanks,” I say limply.

    “So do I,” says Rupy supportively.—Gee, that’ll make a lot of difference.

    After a bit poor Katie manages to say: “I’m sorry, Rosie.”

    “Forget it,” I order cheerfully.

    “Mm,” she mutters. “Sorry.”

    At this point I decide to stop telling her to forget it, because she’ll only go on apologising, it’s the English syndrome, sensible little character in most aspects of life though she is…

    And so the week goes on. Euan’s behaviour does improve marginally, that is, he is seen to smile at Katie and voluntarily go and sit beside her during other people’s scenes or at lunch, but the whole company knows they’re not sharing a room. No-one, including me, dares to ask her what about the cottage? Largely because we’re afraid of what the answer might be.

    After a bit we notice that nice little Darryn Hinds (Lieutenant Welwich in the show) has developed a crush on Katie. In reality, I mean, not in the plot. Darryn’s very sweet, and very good-looking: dark, with an oval face and a straight nose. His rôle is nothing very much but they’ve kept him on because of his appeal to the younger set, or so the story runs. He’s quite a competent actor but in spite of the looks hasn’t got much screen presence. Not very much older than Katie is, not very strong-minded, though determined enough about his career to spend a year’s income on the teeth: ’member that scene between him and Euan back before Baby Bunting came along? Like, several lifetimes ago, yeah. The one where Rupy clocked Euan, now do ya remember? Right! In the opinion of some, Katie’d be just the girl to keep him on the straight and narrow and, in the unlikely event his career really takes off, keep him from following in the footsteps of Mr Big Star Keel. In the opinion of others, of course, she’d boss the socks off him and he’d end up realising it and resenting her for it—

    Paul’s torture sessions are over for the day and we’ve had tea, such as it was, and Rupy and me are in my room under the duvet again, the place is freezing.

    Yes, Rupy: why am I so pessimistic about Katie’s relationships? I have to admit that I don’t know why, exactly, but the thing is, she’s so strong-minded, and if he really wants to know she reminds me horribly of me at that age. So poor Rupy gulps a bit but eventually concedes he thought that might be it.

    “She needs a bloke that’s her equal, not one that’s gonna be a doormat to her. And how many John Haworths are there in the ruddy twenty-first century?” I say sadly, if redundantly.

    “Well, one. No, well, none of his Navy pals that I’ve met are in the least like him.”

    “Stop looking at me hopefully, you sulphur-crested clot,” I groan. He’s been giving his hair the treatment. Don’t ask me what: it entails rubbing something in till it goes all spiky— Nothing to do with In looks! Something medicinal. Or, uh, therapeutic? It has to sit for a while, or rather, stand up like a sulphur-crested cockatoo. And then he washes it all out again.

    “It’s the treatment,” he says huffily. “But you might at least try to introduce her to a few of them, instead of keeping them all to yourself!”

    I do not! While I’m still glaring he launches into a full-blown scheme for delish little cocktail does at the flat, blah-blah, inviting the ones John likes.

    “And their wives.”

    “No, well, they can’t all be married!”

    “Of course they can. At his age? And his friends are miles too old for her, Rupy. We need to find someone, um, his type, but, um, younger,” I end lamely.

    “Well, um, garden party?” he says wildly. “Invite nice Velda and Duncan Cross and lots of their nice friends? You found nice Jimmy Parkinson for Barbara that way!” he urges.

    “Not by giving a flaming garden party, you nong! Um, no, it’s an idea… I guess I could make John think it’d be a nice idea to invite his subordinates.”

    “He’ll be thrilled, darling!” he urges, beaming. “The right thing for a captain’s wife to do!”

    Ulp: yeah, come to thing of it, so it would be. How awful. “Yeah. Well, we’ll have to wait until next summer. Provided World War Three isn’t in full swing.”

    “I’ll remind you,” he threatens. He looks in the bedside drawer and then asks. “Did we finish those chocs?”

    “Yeah.” And we lean back on our pillows, sighing and thinking longingly of Room Service, and start, strictly speaking recommence, channel-hopping…

    Knock, knock!

    We look at each other wildly. Can’t be Aunty Kate, her and Ruth and Yvonne are watching The Sound Of Music, I kid you not, in her room. A video, don’t think any of the Brit. networks are mad enough to screen it on a week-day evening when it’s not Christmas or Easter. Uh—Michael’s village’s morals police? But it’s not what it seems!

    Knock, knock!

    “Tell them to come in, it might be someone with a packet of bikkies,” he sighs.

    “Come in!”

    The door opens. Euan. Groan. He wonders if I might fancy the pub.

    “In this weather? Get real!”

    “One would have to dress, dear,” Rupy explains kindly.

    “Yeah, and become vertical,” I add.

    “Aye, well, I’m tired maself, after that marathon in the ballroom,” he admits plaintively.

    Oh, what the heck. “Join us. This bed is huge,” I say graciously. “You can help Rupy to—”

    Oh, dear, the silly fellow’s face has lit up like Christmas.

    “–channel-hop,” I say as he comes over to my side all lit up. Oh, what the heck: soon as I lift the duvet he’ll discover— Graciously I lift the duvet, and Euan’s face falls ten feet. What the Christ did he expect me to be wearing? There’s no central heating and it’s bloody brass monkeys! So he gets under the duvet next to my huge daggy black sweater, very, very old baggy black tracksuit pants, and the giant fuzzy red socks that I got at that department store round the corner from Henny Penny, and we all settle back to channel-hopping…

    “Isn’t it rather blurred?” ventures Euan.

    “Yeah,” I agree. “Is there anything to eat in your room?”

    “Er—no. Oh, I have got a bottle of whisky, though; shall I—?”

    He better, is what, so he hurries off.

    “Go on, Rupy, try something else. God, what’s that?”

    “No idea, dear. Innards?”

    We stare groggily at a documentary about—putatively about—innards…

    Knock, knock!

    “What’s he knocking for, he was here two minutes ago,” he groans. “What does he imagine we’ve got up to in the meantime? Come in!”

    The door opens and Katie appears in her fuzzy blue dressing-gown, looking meek. “Hullo. I thought you two might be watching telly.”

    “What else is there to do? Apart from practising one’s impersonation of a sulphur-crested cockatoo, of course.”

    “Aren’t they all sulphur-crested?” she says doubtfully.

    “Nope. Misconception of the North. Sit,” I offer, graciously raising the duvet.

    Rupy begins: “Um—” and then thinks better of it.

    “Isn’t it time you washed that out?” I say as Katie’s neat blue dressing-gown gets in beside my daggy black gear and she notes gratefully: “Ooh, you’ve got the electric blanket on!”

    Rupy explains in a very dignified manner that he’s timing it, as Katie settles back and goggles blankly at putative—

    “What?” he groans. “I refuse to watch computer-generated pictures of atoms and stuff at this hour!”

    “At least it isn’t innards, after all.”

    “There’s a play on in a bit,” offers Katie.

    “Who’s in it?” he replies suspiciously.

    She thinks Amaryllis has got a small part in it. Um, she’s not sure, but she thinks it’s set in the country. I’m threatening it better not include garden parties, when the door opens.

    “Here! I got some soda water from the kitch—”

    And they both go very red.

    “Euan was here before,” says Rupy quickly, while I’m just waiting to see what’ll happen.

    “Mm, actually he was sitting right where you are,” I admit. Not really intending to provoke anything, more as a sort of horrible-silence filler, y’know?

    “Then I’ll go,” says Katie in a strangled voice.

    “You don’t have to do that,” he replies, also in a strangled voice. “I’ll go.”

    “Don’t be daft, Euan, you’ve got the whisky. If you two have had a row—and nobody’s asking, thanks—sit by Rupy instead. Or as a last resort, leave us the bottle.”

    “Honestly, Rosie!” cries poor Rupy, now he’s gone as red as the two of them. Well, heck! Think of something better to say, in the bloody circs!

    “Aye, I’ll do that,” says Euan on a grim note, obviously now thinking this is all a plot.

    “It’s a pure coincidence,” I say hastily.

    “Is it? I’m beginning to recognise your pure coincidences, Rosie,” he says grimly.

    “It is!” says Katie loudly, getting out of bed, oops. “You were here first, so I’ll go!” And she marches straight past him and out the door.

    Me and Rupy are just sitting there like a couple of turds. Well, go on: what would you do?

    Looking very grim, Euan comes over to Rupy’s side of the bed, puts the whisky bottle and the soda down, turns on his heel and marches out.

    “Thanks,” we chorus lamely as the door closes after him.

    After quite some time Rupy offers: “Maybe he’ll run after her and—um, no.”

    “You were a lot of help!” I snarl.

    “I was paralysed!” he objects.

    I’m just about to wither him when the alarm clock shrieks at us and we both jump ten feet where we sit.

    “Time to wash it out,” he says thankfully, getting out of bed and vanishing into the ensuite.

    That leaves me with the bed and the whisky and the sole possession of the blab-out and that wanking documentary on innards—uh—no, atoms. Whatever. All right, then, I’ll pour myself a big— Um, that pic of John on the bedside table’s looking at me. All right, just one very small one, I have fed him tonight, after all.

INT.  a glitzy night-club - EVENING

Captain’s Wife (in pink sequins) and elegant friends (in evening dress)

discovered sitting at a small table, drinking champagne cocktails. Enter a gaggle of

paparazzi.

Paparazzo 1

Smile, dear! Lick the lips—love-ly!

Paparazzo 2

Over here, Lily Rose! Show us the tits—that’s right!

The flashbulbs pop and flash.

Paparazzo 3

What about that rumour that Derry Dawlish is

making a film of it, dears?

(coyly)

Aw, go on, tell!

ELEGANT FRIEND 1

(laughing slightly)

Only a rumour at this stage, lads! But I can tell you

we’ve got something very exciting lined up for the

fifth ser—

Paparazzi

(together: interrupting)

{ Is it true Adam McIntyre’s—

{ Is it true you’re writing out Lily Rose’s p—

{ Is it true Lily Rose is gonna divorce Command—

{ Is it true Euan’s character’s gonna play a much—

ELEGANT FRIEND 1

(laughing slightly)

Slow down! No, well, I can tell you that we’ve been

lucky enough to get Adam McIntyre as a Special

Guest Star, yes—for several episodes. And besides

that, I’m very glad to confirm that we’re giving

Euan’s part very much more emphasis in the next

series, and we’ll also be introducing the Captain’s

Stepdaughter. But as for divorces! Lily Rose and

Commander aren’t even married yet, you know!

(jolly laugh)

That’s coming up in the Christmas Special!

ELEGANT FRIEND 2

You’ll love it, dears. Positively delish wedding dress,

wonderful old church exteriors!

Paparazzo 4

(eagerly)

Do you wear full dress uniform, Rupy?

ELEGANT FRIEND 2

Can I say, Brian?

(getting the nod)

Yes, lovely uniforms all over the shop, and a naval

guard of honour, just like the real thing!

ELEGANT FRIEND 3

(drawling)

He means like Lily Rose’s real wedding to her real

Royal Navy Captain, lads.

(slings arm casually round Captain’s Wife’s

shoulders; directs charming smile at

paparazzi, raising his glass)

And I will be doing quite a lot in the next series, yes.

I’m looking forward to it tremendously. Well, we

both are, aren’t we, Lily Rose?

(lovely smile)

The flashbulbs pop and flash…

The flat, Nov. 1st.

Dear John,

    In case you haven’t seen it yet I’m enclosing a pic from a stupid tabloid that they took of me and Euan at a stupid night-club. Brian dragged us to it, it was all publicity. Penny was there too only she’s not in shot. He only put his arm round me because of the paparazzi. And I think probably to spite Katie. She wasn’t there: I mean to spite her when she saw the paper.

   Aunty Kate says it’ll cost more to send this because you’re not allowed to enclose things in airmail letters. And that’s no way to start a letter to my husband. So I apologise. Also for letting her look, only I couldn’t stop her. (She’s gone into the kitchenette now, she’s making a stew.)

    Me and Baby Bunting are good. We went to the doc just for a check-up and he says he’s never seen two more splendid specimens of womanhood and babyhood. There were 5 ladies in the waiting room, 2 were pregnant and 3 had their babies with them and they all wanted my autograph. I must say I thought I might be free of it at the doc’s.

    Mum sent a new creeper-suit, it’s really cute, it’s green and yellow stripes with a matching hat with a pom-pom on it but Aunty Kate thinks he looks like the One-day cricket team in it. Ours, I mean. I mean the Australian one.

    We’ve finished the filming unless the colour went wrong or like that so we’re going back to the cottage as soon as she’s finished her shopping. Possibly within the millennium—yeah.

    Blow, she came back and blasted me. I think I’d better stop, John. I’ll try and write after she’s gone to bed only it’s awfully hard because she always makes sure my light’s off before she goes and then I just pass out, must be the milk, still. NB. He still doesn’t like the bottle so much as me but Mrs Morrissey says Arthur was just the same and at least he’s taking it.

    Susan Corky rung up, she thinks she’s found a chair that would be much more suitable for your desk than the one it’s got so I told her you like that chair, hope that was OK. Well, you did say it belonged to your great-uncle.

    That’s all the news for now. Lots of hugs and kisses from

Your loving

Rosie.

P.S. I miss you awfully, John.

A million XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX.

PPS. I forgot to say, the dress in the pic was pink sequins and it belongs to Henny Penny, I didn’t waste our money on it, don’t worry. And when I tried it on in front of the mirror it didn’t look nearly that low, honest.

    He must of got that letter because this gorgeous huge bunch of pale pink rosebuds arrives for me. The card says: “Darling Rosie, Super frock. Love your letters, they’re so you. Miss you. A million Hugs & Kisses, John.” Even though it’s in green ink in fat curly florist’s writing I bawl all over it. It’s not only the message: the rosebuds are the exact same as the very first bunch he sent me and as the bunch he got me when Baby Bunting was born, that I gave to poor Fred Stolz.

    Later. I rung Bonnie Stolz, we never liked each other much but heck, what the fuck does that matter in the face of everything? She was very, very pleased to hear from me and very sympathetic about John being at sea. And asked for a pic of Baby Bunting. So there you are.