The Lovers of Pound Hill Read online

  Contents

  Cover

  About the Book

  About the Author

  Also by Mavis Cheek

  Title Page

  Epigraph

  Part I

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Part II

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Part III

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Postscript

  Author’s Note

  Copyright

  About the Book

  The sparkling new novel from Mavis Cheek

  When city girl Molly Bonner arrives in the village of Lufferton Boney, she creates quite a stir. With her non-country-style boots, determined manner and alluring looks, she sets off a wave of intrigue that ripples through the lives of everyone there, from Julie the barmaid at the Holly Bush to antiques dealer Dryden Fellows and Montmorency the cat. Nobody knows exactly what she’s up to, but one thing seems certain: her presence will alter the lives and loves of the village and its people for good.

  Molly is a girl on a mission: to discover the truth behind Lufferton Boney’s much-loved and most notorious resident, the giant (and slightly obscene) Gnome, a fertility symbol etched into the face of Pound Hill. As she works her way into the villagers’ hearts and lives, Molly needs to keep one step ahead. For she has a few personal demons to settle, as she pursues the wonderful secret that only the Gnome can reveal…

  About the Author

  Mavis Cheek was born and grew up in Wimbledon. She began her working life at Editions Alecto, the contemporary art publishers. She then attended Hillcroft College for Women, from where she graduated in Arts. After her daughter Bella was born, she began her writing career in earnest: journalism and travel writing at first, then short stories, and eventually, in 1988, her novel Pause Between Acts, which won the She/John Menzies First Novel Prize. Her thirteen novels include Mrs Fytton's Country Life, Janice Gentle Gets Sexy and, most recently, Amenable Women, described in The Times as ‘a brilliantly funny, warm, intelligent read’. She now lives and writes in the heart of the English countryside.

  Also by Mavis Cheek

  Pause Between Acts (Bodley Head)

  Parlour Games (Bodley Head)

  Dog Days (Macmillan)

  Janice Gentle Gets Sexy (Hamish Hamilton)

  Aunt Margaret’s Lover (Hamish Hamilton)

  Sleeping Beauties (Faber and Faber)

  Getting Back Brahms (Faber and Faber)

  Three Men on a Plane (Faber and Faber)

  Mrs Fytton’s Country Life (Faber and Faber)

  The Sex Life of My Aunt (Faber and Faber)

  Patrick Parker’s Progress (Faber and Faber)

  Yesterday’s Houses (Faber and Faber)

  Amenable Women (Faber and Faber)

  Truth to Tell (Hutchinson)

  The Lovers of

  Pound Hill

  Mavis Cheek

  GNOME

  ‘dwarf-like earth-dwelling spirit,’ 1712, from Fr. gnome, from L. gnomus, used 16c. in a treatise by Paracelsus, who gave the name pigmaei or gnomi to elemental earth beings, possibly from Gk. *genomos ‘earth-dweller.’ Popular in children’s literature 19c. as a name for red-capped Ger. and Swiss folklore dwarfs. Garden figurines first imported to England late 1860s from Germany.

  The Blessed, that immortal be,

  From change in love are only free …

  … Were it not madness to deny

  To live because we’re sure to die?

  ‘To a Lady asking him how long he would love

  her’, by George Etherege (1635?–1692)

  PART I

  One

  THE SUN SHONE out of a clear blue sky and bestowed its gentle rays upon the well-kept exteriors of Lufferton Boney. Lufferton Boney is remarkably well-kept, thought Molly Bonner, as she walked down the village high street. Her boots – long, leather, black and shiny – were not country boots; her skirt – short, muslin, pink and frothy – was not a country skirt; and her hair – close-cropped, redder than anything of a hirsute disposition to be found in nature, and bouncy – was definitely, definitely not a country haircut. And if one were to continue one could cite other outrages; her car, now parked at the top of the street near the church of St Etheldreda (as instructed by Miles Whittington) was nowhere near the kind of car country people drove, it being small, fast and of startling blueness with a silver stripe down its back; the briefcase she carried was scarlet patent leather, the papers inside the briefcase were of a very potent yellow, and the words printed thereon were printed in something that was dangerously near to puce. Miles had told her that the curve in the road where she parked her car designated the separation of the old village from the new, that the church was the marker between ancient and modern. Its porch faced the end of the village street, its entrance opening towards the landscape beyond. So the church seemed to be set there in a stand-off. Fanciful or what? As she passed the old lychgate she looked up once, raising her eyes to the Hill at the end of the village street. Now she could see that the monstrous figure cut into it, though partly obliterated by thorn bushes, seemed to weigh down upon the village below. Maybe not so fanciful then? With a little hiccup of excitement she hurried on.

  You would not, thought Dryden Fellows, as he saw her pass by his emporium, Beautiful Bygones (antiques, ephemera and objects of delight), you would certainly not want your son to bring her home with a view to marrying her into the family … Nigel, Dryden’s son, was of marriageable age, still single and still silly. His only hope, so his father thought, was to marry someone considerably sillier than himself. But whom? Dryden had a very good reason for wishing Nigel married apart from the usual one of parental relief, and he could only live in hope. It was the one wish he could remember being asked of him by his now dead wife (ten years deceased and mother of the very silly Nigel) and that was made on her deathbed. And for various reasons, not all of them human, he wished to get it sorted out and settle the matter.

  The sound of a horse’s hooves clip-clopped away in the distance and Dryden watched, thoughtfully, the chestnut’s shining, undulating rump and the little jodhpured rump above it that also undulated past the Old Holly Bush and disappeared around the curve in the road. That jodhpured rump was unmarried, had blue blood and was born in the same year as his son. There was a terrible yearning in Dryden’s eyes.

  Further down the street in Hill View House Miles Whittington flitted and darted around his beamed and much furnished sitting room like a hornet in heat, or so thought Dorcas Fairbrother, his secretary (Miles was old-fashioned enough to call her that rather than the altogether more charming term Personal Assistant). She sat at her desk in the far corner, very still, very quiet, and tried to concentrate on Miles’s long letter to the local council. This concerned the Gnome of Pound Hill and money – when did his correspondence with the local council not? And she wanted it out of the way so that she could concentrate on this morning’s visitor and – with luck – have a little fun at Miles’s expense.

  ‘May as well keep on at them,’ said Miles absently. ‘Though it is to be hoped that our visitor will have the answer.’ He paused, tweaked a curtain (Colefax and Fowler, 1986) and added with a smile that did not go all the way up to his e
yes, ‘Should she, I wonder, sit facing the window and the sun, or with her face away from the light?’

  Dorcas said nothing. This, she guessed, was a rhetorical question. As was so often the case with Miles, Dorcas was right. After a short pause, and a pose with his hand placed to his brow for maximum effect, Miles answered himself. ‘When they interrogate prisoners they have strong light shining in their eyes. Dorcas?’

  ‘They do, Miles.’

  ‘Good, good.’ He moved the Bishop’s chair (oak, 17th century) to a suitable position and then stood back, hands now at his side, and surveyed the new placement.

  ‘Excellent,’ he said. ‘Excellent.’

  With a spring in his step Miles moved closer to the window and looked up and down the street. His gaze fell fondly, even dreamily, upon a newly deposited, steaming pile of horse manure. Such things added to the rural image and might be an encouragement to future visitors – but … just for a moment he lapsed and then blinked as if remembering the task in hand. He stiffened his back and stiffened his resolve, turned to Dorcas and clapped his hands. ‘The horse, Dorcas, has left a deposit. It might give our visitor a bad idea of the place. Would you take the shovel and …’

  Dorcas, who also smiled, and whose smile did not reach up to her eyes either, said, ‘Miles – what do you think our visitor would make of it if, on arriving, she saw your secretary shovelling up shit?’

  Miles winced. Sometimes Dorcas betrayed her origins. He looked out of the window again. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘I suppose this is the countryside, warts and all. I could have done with it for the vegetables.’ He stood thinking for a moment longer, regret in his eyes. Then he shook his head and went over to Dorcas’s desk and stood, hands on meagre hips, looking down. ‘Now. This is where you come into your own.’ His secretary duly removed her hands from the keyboard of her computer (Dell, 1997) and waited. ‘Refreshments. Your department.’ He strode over to the chair by the fireplace (empty), it being towards the end of March, and absent-mindedly picked up the cat, Montmorency, to put him down on the rug. Montmorency opened one eye, shuddered, and waited. Miles turned his back and Montmorency resumed the chair. The cat had been his absent brother Robin’s cat and for some reason Miles felt he could not dispose of it. Not yet, anyway. Soon, he would croon to himself, soon.

  ‘Dorcas, should I – we – offer her tea or coffee? Or should I suggest sherry? Or beer …?’ He turned to the empty Bishop’s chair and posed as if lost in thought again. Then he twirled in Dorcas’s direction. ‘Beer would be very good, I think,’ he said, malevolently. ‘Put her nicely in her place. I have looked her up on the Internet and the family originates from nowhere. A hundred years ago they were nothing. Well, not in the paternal line. Better on the distaff but only just. Money from trade. Beer it is. That will show her. Do you agree?’

  ‘I think beer would put her in a place, certainly,’ said Dorcas.

  ‘Good, good, good,’ said Miles and he clapped his hands once more.

  Susie and Pinky Smith toiled up Pound Hill towards the Gnome. Pinky, so called for his tendency to go pink in the sun, in the shade, in the pub – and generally anywhere – puffed. Susie, stout and draped in a not very well put together kaftan, snorted through her nose in the determined way that Pinky had come to dread. He looked back down the Hill, past Miles’s house, to the village street and all its serenity.

  ‘Come along, Pinks,’ said his wife. And carried on upwards snorting all the way. She made the same noise when they were having sex. It was the noise of determination. The Smiths had been married for nine years and Susie was determined that this year, the year of their tenth anniversary, would be the year of pregnancy. So far this had not occurred, hence their toiling towards the Gnome. You could almost, thought Pinky through his puffings, see the path our feet have created over the years. His own personal belief, one he kept to himself after the unfortunate occasion, eight and a half years ago, when he voiced it to his new young bride, was that by the time they got to the Gnome and his vital organ, they were both so knackered that the likelihood of conceiving anything short of a snooze in the grass was minimal. Eight and a half years ago, after he spoke these words, Susie had stopped cooking and taken to sitting in the garden with a book, not so much reading it as gripping it as if she would choke the life out of it. And when she did come round, with a dire warning that if he ever showed that kind of defeatism again she would be off, he knew who was boss and what the boss required. It was the same with her crystal garden. He dug the soil over in readiness, regretted the loss of cabbages, and said nothing. Best not.

  Over the years and unobserved from time to time he had slipped out of Chrysalis Cottage to the village street and stared up at the offensively rampant Gnome, and shaken his fist at it. He had sent it a telepathic message, scattered with curses, some of which were very obscene and the upshot of which was that the Gnome had ruined his life. What had once been a gentle art had become a marrow-sucking demand that left him weak and unhappy. His wife’s once desirable and luscious curves left him pale with fear. Sex was a nightmare, and the nightmare was the Gnome’s curse.

  After these bouts of secret rebelliousness Pinky went back indoors and gave himself up to whatever would come – for he was a married man and he had married for better or for worse. And here was the worst he seemed to have married for. On seeking the advice of a therapist in Woolmington (thirty-five miles away to avoid discovery) a few years ago, Pinky was overwhelmed with silence when the therapist leaned forward and said, ‘Trouble in the bed department?’ He had a strange and totally unnerving vision of himself involved in a punch-up in Beds-R-Us. He found his voice enough to say a very faint, ‘Yes’ and was then treated to a long and sympathetic discourse on how to arouse his wife. Since that was very far from the issue he paid his fee and never went back.

  Funny, though – in all those years of going through puberty and beyond when he wanted a randy woman more than anything in the world – any woman – when his thoughts strayed hourly to all kinds of wonderful wickedness – it had never occurred to him that to find one might not live up to his fantasies: not at all, nowhere near, in fact. But then, Susie was not randy in the way he had imagined, no, she was randy in a businesslike way. The Gnome saw to that. Their visits up the Hill were frequent and deadly. She had even taken him up there once in the snow but luckily what it did to those parts of him that were required made this inappropriate in future. Alas, none of the constant demands from this concupiscent wife now felt nice, rude or naughty. It felt – how could he describe it – deadly and determinedly proper. Nor did it help that Pinky was a plumber. The analogies with his craft simply would enter his swirling head.

  Susie was sure the fault lay with Pinky. So, despite going pinker than ever, he’d had a thrill in the fertility clinic when the nurse put on her white plastic gloves and looked up from her tray to give him a lipsticked smile. Thank goodness Dr Porlock had suggested laying off for a while, and not going at it. Dr Porlock had a straightforward way with words – conserving your potency, he called it. Which they did for short (too, too short) periods of time. Otherwise, Pinky was quite sure, he would have been dead within the year. To die from excessive shagging had been his hope and aspiration for much of his early life. But when it so nearly came upon him he found it strangely unappealing.

  The Gnome and his very dreadful member were partially hidden by the thorn bushes and gorse and other hardy verdure that clung to his edges. But the land being mainly chalk, these game bits of foliage scarcely hid the upward thrust of his massive shape. The Cerne Abbas Giant had nothing on him for masculinity. It occurred to Pinky as they clambered over the last few tussocks of grass (for some reason the sheep simply would not graze anywhere near the Gnome – Farmer Braddle constantly tried his best to persuade them but they clearly found the idea offensive – and, looking at it again now, Pinky could hardly blame them) that if Miles Whittington had his way this might be the last time they could enact their marital requirements up here on the free basis
that had been the villagers’ right since time immemorial. Miles had more than hinted that he had a plan to have the Gnome restored to his full … impact, and then to charge for the privilege of visiting him. Well thank God, was all Pinky could mutter, though he had little faith.

  On he toiled with Susie’s happy snorting trumpeting behind him. It was at this point that Pinky always felt a sense of panic; kaftans were strangely unalluring items at the best of times, and none more so than Susie’s. How he longed to tell her that he had never favoured purple, but – fortunately – looking down towards the village, he saw the distant figure of a young woman striding along the main street, wearing long black boots with quite a lot of knee and thigh showing and not a purple billowing in sight. It’d have to do.

  Nigel Fellows, Dryden’s son, was deeply in love by the time Molly Bonner had reached Miles’s door. Being deeply in love was his accustomed state and one that he relished. Love had happened to Nigel very frequently over the past few years, mostly, it should be said, induced by young women whom his father considered highly unsuitable.

  It was the sound of the girl’s footsteps ringing out so loud and clear that first caught his attention. It was the bouncing redness of the hair and the other accoutrements that held it. On the whole the people of Lufferton Boney did not have footsteps that rang out. On the whole Lufferton Boney was a quiet village whose passions and turmoil raged silently within.

  The children of the village lived mostly in the two developments of modern houses on the newer edge of the village, round the curve of the village street and beyond the church. There was a playground there, tucked behind a row of may trees, and that was where they made their noise. Like corralled baby animals, they were kept away from the lower part of the village and – it was to be hoped by their parents – from the sight of the Gnome. If this had a little to do with the superstitions of the ancients about evil eyes and suchlike, it was largely because the modern parents of Lufferton Boney did not want to have to answer the kind of questions that might be asked by their offspring should their houses be set too close to Pound Hill. They were perfectly happy to be sited well out of the way. That this was also convenient for the older, more established members of the village was not a concern.