The Lovers of Pound Hill Page 5

  Health and Safety went back to the more immediate task of removing the village’s conker trees. The danger of falling and damaging yourself on the hill was, they considered, nil. The danger of a conker falling and killing an old lady passing beneath the tree with her innocent little shopping basket was, they considered, high. The case looked hopeless. Miles owned a valuable resource, something people would pay good money to see, and he could not exploit it.

  The only chink of light in the whole proceedings came from Dorcas who, after the ice-cream suggestion, wondered whether if Miles were to propose a project whereby there would be a proper little museum tracing the history of the Gnome and some artefacts from other local sites, and a visitor centre, and perhaps a small car park at the foot of the hill, he just might get away with it. ‘After all,’ she said, ‘although you are not permitted to deny locals access, it does not say that you cannot charge for the privilege.’

  Miles was so ecstatic at the thought that he did not notice the glitter of mischief in Dorcas’s eye as she spoke. ‘Dorcas,’ he said, ‘you are a woman after my own heart.’

  What Dorcas thought at this statement was possibly unrepeatable. What she said was that he could have the Gnome covered by a protective erection (she used the term advisedly) and then charge quite a high entrance fee (for maintenance) if he got the proposition right. They could provide a viewing platform (she really was having fun here, and Miles, blind to anything but the hope of success, was easy to tease), which would sort out the flagrant locals’ misuse of the place. Never again would anyone demand their ancient rights. Of course, he would need to build the museum and visitor centre and have staff there, lay the asphalt for the car park, staff that, too with at least one attendant – and provide literature – though in time all these costs might be recovered.

  Miles spent several happy hours plotting and daydreaming and told Dorcas to get on to it. She most obligingly came up with some carefully adjusted costings. On reading the costings, Miles required an ice pack for his head, which Dorcas provided, and suffered a sensation akin to losing the will to live for several days. Miles was not poor, but neither was he that rich, and anyway it would hurt far too much – even when Robin’s inheritance was finally his – to spend that kind of money. But Miles was also, unfortunately, a man with too much time on his hands. The fight would go on.

  Dorcas wrote letters dictated by Miles, Dorcas made telephone calls at the behest of Miles, Dorcas attempted to get local radio interested, as Miles requested. All came to naught. And then a miracle happened. One beautiful February day, a gift of a day, with sunshine and hints of warmth and a light breeze that lifted the budding branches of the trees, the sort of day when hope can be rekindled in the most jaded of souls, Miles Whittington received a letter from Brewer and Gould, solicitors, of London, saying that if he were the owner of Pound Hill then they would be obliged if he would be in touch with them in the light of a request made by their client, Miss Margaret Bonner. Miles did so. Miss Bonner had a propositon to put to the owner of Pound Hill which, if agreed upon, would be paid for by Miss Bonner. A further letter from Miles to the solicitor produced no more detail except that the Miss Margaret Bonner in question was the granddaughter of Arthur Bonner, the archaeologist, who had once worked on the site of the Gnome.

  An appointment was made. Miles was half ecstatic, half demented. The Bonner name was looked up on the Internet and found wanting, as Miles informed Dorcas. The assumption was made that any grandchild of Arthur Bonner’s would be elderly and therefore malleable. Miles flexed his (very) metaphorical muscles. He would wrap her around his little finger. He would extricate the last drop of blood from her stone, the final squeaking pip from her lemon. That is what he dreamed about each night as he waited for the appointed day. And now this person had arrived and stones and lemons were as ash in his dreams.

  This Miss Bonner was no malleable spinster, fluttery and unsure of herself. Here she was now, in his house, and it was all quite wrong, obviously. Although the Bonner person had not set out her plan, Miles’s hopes for he knew not what were dashed on the rocks – this was by no means the kind of person he had been expecting. From the way she spoke about the wretched thing, whatever she was about to propose would be very much on her terms. Negotiations regarding covered erections, turnstiles, staff, tickets and car parks seemed a long way off. Miss Bonner did not look like the kind of young woman whom Miles could persuade, some might say bully, into submission. Dorcas, he noted, was looking equally astonished. He doubted if even her charms could win this one over. Damn. He was extremely tempted to turn Molly Bonner down flat, even before he had heard the full Monty, but a delicate word from Dorcas stopped him from making the statement. ‘Wait and see,’ she counselled, and the two women exchanged yet another look of understanding. It seemed, as he listened, that there was nothing this young woman wished to say to him that would help him one iota with his quest to get the Gnome of Pound Hill out of the public domain for good. Nothing. Well, nothing yet. One must, he decided, go forth in hope.

  The wind had got up and cooled Pinky’s burning face as he and Susie made their way back down the Hill. He had no idea where she got her energy from but it was disturbing (and flush inducing) to recall how her cries had caused a riot among Farmer Braddle’s braver sheep. Most had kept a good way off as usual but, in the way of sheep, familiarity in one or two of the bolder variety bred the ability to ignore so that the rest came closer to the site. They could be heard happily tearing grass and munching away, very close to Pinky’s ears, when Susie made a particularly blood-curdling cry which had the munchers jumping four of their even-toed sheep-feet right off the ground before launching themselves over and away at an astonishing rate. Straight into the knees of Farmer Braddle they ran, knees that were not so firm as they once were and knees which, if punched repeatedly by the blindly panicking heads of heedless bovids tended to give in gracefully. He and his knees collapsed. It was an experiment for the sheep to be up here at all and it was not a successful (or strictly allowable) one. Miles’s charges were not peppercorn and the damage to the frightened animals made it pointless.

  The ensuing scene had not endeared the couple to Farmer Braddle, nor had their helping him up off the ground assuaged his wrath. Susie’s cheerful parting shot that he should ‘never mind because they would make him a godfather’ extracted the kind of suggestions from that potential appointee that had more to do, in Pinky’s opinion, with the Marlon Brando approach to the role, than with the humble servant of God and babe. He could well imagine rage like that embracing the idea of a sheep’s head tucked into the divan.

  ‘That is it, Susie,’ he muttered as they tottered down the Hill. ‘That is the very last time.’

  ‘Over my dead body,’ said his wife.

  ‘That could be arranged,’ he nodded to himself, but he kept his voice very low. ‘That could be arranged.’ Pinky was upset. Until that moment he had never wavered in his love and admiration for Susie, even if he had wavered in other respects. But now he felt something almost akin to hatred for her. A feeling new to him and a feeling that, once experienced, justified his being upset. Life was not supposed to be like this for a married couple. They were in love, they had all the time in the world to indulge that love, but there seemed to be only one manifestation of it preoccupying his wife. He began to think of himself as duped. He began to think that he no longer loved his wife after all. But still he kept his counsel.

  In Beautiful Bygones Nigel took his father his morning cup of coffee, with biscuits, on a tray and properly presented in a cup and saucer that might have graced the table of Jane Austen. His own morning beverage was made in a very large blue and white striped mug. You could, he thought, as he set the tray down, construe from its contents the natures of the two men. While his father enjoyed two bourbon biscuits, Nigel’s piece of sustenance was a Wagon Wheel. He had never been able to give them up and Julie Barnsley, by way of showing her love, added a box of them to the pub food order from time to tim
e – Peter Hanker did not notice – and Nigel was never without.

  He looked at the wrapper of chocolate wheel: yes, there was the covered wagon with its two rearing horses, there was the cowboy whipping them along in what looked like a race against certain death. It was a picture full of adventure and daring and always cheered him up, though he knew that he could never get that close to a horse. Horses frightened him. His father had attempted to get him involved with the hunting set but at the first kill, when he saw the purplish pink entrails being pulled from the fox, he fainted. Since the horse was fifteen hands high it was a painful experience in every way. He looked at the Wagon Wheel again and had only the most fleeting regret. In abandoning Julie Barnsley for his new love he would lose the endless supply of these delights. His new love did not look like a woman who would understand Wagon Wheels. He thought of that pink flouncy skirt again. But what was one small sacrifice to gain all that?

  In The Orchard House Donald had slowly and with some dignity removed himself from the breakfast table and made his way to an upstairs bathroom where he sat down heavily on the edge of the bath and slowly began to remove his clothes. He left these in a heap on the floor and stepped into the shower. He took with him the copy of the Lancet, which he dashed under the water to see if he could remove the stains.

  Extraordinary behaviour, he thought, Winifred must be losing her marbles. All over the tablecloth and the carpet the tea had gone as well as all over himself, and lucky that it was stewed. Through the steamy shower door he stared at the pile of clothes on the floor: almost new dogtooth jacket, a light blue crease-resistant shirt, a pair of good grey twills, one vest, one pair of pants, two socks and his dark tan brogues. Of all the items, these last were the only objects to suffer very little – he kept them polished – or rather, Winifred kept them polished (hah – foiled by her own hand!) and the tea would brush off easily enough. He thought the jacket might be all right, the trousers would certainly come up if Winnie got them to the dry cleaners in time and the socks would wash, but as to the others – it was to the bin for them. She’d have to get him a replacement shirt as well. He shook his head under the stream of water and realised that he had kept the Lancet there for too long; not only was it nearly clean of the tea, but it was rapidly disintegrating in his hand. So much for the fascinations of DNA.

  As he stepped out from the shower he wondered if that might be a metaphor for his life? Disintegration. Winnie had never done anything like this before. She had – it was true – occasionally sat sighing at breakfast and he had – it was true – tried to avoid noticing it. But he was not a bad husband, after all, he had given her status in the village without her having to earn it in any way whatsoever; and if, like this morning, the sighing went on too long, he always enquired what it was about. And, it was always about the same. It was to do with Winifred being bored – he had enough of that in the surgery to know that this was a common problem among women of a certain age – and short of shaking his wife, and his patients come to that, and saying just get on with it you silly girl, he was stumped. He wished now that he had never taken Winifred to the local school’s production of Comus … They had met Dorcas Fairbrother coming out and she’d said that ridiculous thing about it not being spiritual at all, really, but more a comment on Milton’s sense of entrapment within his marriage. Winifred had got rather excited about this and sent for a copy of the text and read the damn thing, cover to cover, at breakfast without so much as one sigh. ‘You should read it, dear,’ she said, when he asked if she could bring herself to participate in the passing of the marmalade. ‘It is full of a subtext that I think you and I might recognise rather well.’

  Pills, he thought, going into their bedroom. As he walked over to the wardrobe to find a change of clothes he observed himself, naked as the day he was born apart from, obviously, some surface hair, but – Oh damn and damn again – he was still wearing his watch. Which dripped malevolent drops on to his foot. Buggered. Good watch, too. Pills would do it. He would have to persuade Winifred, as he might any patient, that removal of some of the surface tension from everyday life was A Good Thing and not likely to become addictive. Not if you were careful, anyway.

  Later, as he left the house for the surgery, he heard his wife in the kitchen declaiming poetry. Pills, he thought, as he quietly closed the front door, to the fading sound of ‘Milton! thou shouldst be living at this hour: Winnie hath need of thee …’

  *

  Miles hovered as Molly sat, barefoot now, boots neatly placed to one side of her chair, scarlet briefcase tidily on the other side, hands folded in her lap and looking most composed. Dorcas jumped up and said, ‘What are we thinking of? Would you like tea? Coffee? Something stronger?’ She looked at the agonised Miles and added with the slightest hint of amusement – ‘Beer?’

  ‘Oh nothing, thanks,’ said Molly Bonner. ‘Let’s get on with the business, shall we? Crack on, as my granny used to say. I’d like you to take me up the Hill and show me this famous priapus at close quarters. It is a bit overgrown, isn’t it?’

  Miles sat down very heavily on the pile of books that Molly had removed and placed on the other chair. They and Miles tumbled to the floor. Montmorency opened one yellow eye and looked profoundly satisfied before closing it again. Dorcas, suddenly caught in a persistent bout of coughing, went to help him up. He almost batted at her with his hands, and his curt refusal of assistance was decidedly waspish. Molly did not take to this man. But she needed his agreement. She would be vigilant. She kept her face as straight as she could.

  Three

  IN THE OLD Holly Bush Julie Barnsley was slowly taking the cloths from the pumps with her mind on other things. You did not see much pink in Lufferton Boney, nor did you see much knee and thigh – except her own occasional and honourable exceptions. Come to that you did not see bounce and smiling very much either. And she had definitely seen a shadow of a movement from the window of the room above the shop. The room in which Nigel spent much of his time tinkering, restoring, polishing and anything else connected with the business that did not bring him into contact with either the customers or his father very much. Nigel, she knew, was hot-blooded. The wearer of the pink looked as if she, also, might be hot-blooded and might induce hot-bloodedness to surface in another. And Julie did not like this at all. Nigel was made weak by the feminine, this she knew, which is how she had pinched him from the Braddle girl, but he had prospects, excellent prospects, and Julie planned to keep those prospects in the vicinity of Julie Barnsley.

  She took the last cloth from the pumps, folded it and bent to put it away beneath the counter with the others. As she did so she heard a noise behind her and managed to straighten up and move sideways just in time. Peter Hanker, she knew, still found her curves irresistible and although she did not blame him, neither did she feel it was right to allow him access when she was betrothed to another, even if it was secretly. True, she had once been engaged to him, so it would almost be like keeping it in the family, but it would not do for any word of scandal to creep around her until that wedding band was safely on her finger. Nigel was many things that did not make an entire range of sandwiches in the picnic basket, but he was not completely stupid. He was also fickle. She must do nothing to allow that fickleness to raise its ugly head. Peter was the past. Who wanted to be a publican’s wife? Nigel was the future, and she would be a high-class antique dealer’s wife. And have her own cleaner.

  ‘Morning, Peter,’ she said crisply, then went to open up. Across the way she could just make out the shape of Miles Whittington sitting looking out of his window, and the other pink person to one side of him, her face in shadow. It looked for all the world as if he were interviewing the visitor. She hoped to Jesus that he was not replacing Dorcas with a newer model and one who would hang around so temptingly.

  ‘What’s taken your eye?’ asked Peter, coming up beside her. He too peered at the house across the street. ‘That all looks a bit formal,’ he said. ‘Wonder what’s going on. Looks li
ke a meeting of some sort. I don’t trust that Miles. Never have. He’s up to something and it’ll be something to do with the Hill and the Gnome.’ For a moment his cheerful face darkened. ‘Our birthright.’

  Julie turned away from the door and went back to the bar counter. ‘Well, I don’t care what happens to that thing up there,’ she said. ‘It’s not worth bothering about.’

  Peter smiled. He did, she thought, have the nicest smile, sort of lopsided and cheeky … ‘That’s not what you used to say,’ he said meaningfully.

  She threw a cloth at him. ‘You be quiet, you,’ she said, and quickly removed the pleasantness of the memory from her mind. He peered out again. ‘Looks like they’re deep in conversation about something,’ he said.

  Ten minutes later Julie heard the clack of those boots back on the street. Leaving Old Jim Parsons to hold his half-full cider glass, she rushed to the door again. The three of them, Miles, Dorcas and the mysterious stranger, were about to walk up the Hill, but not through the little gate at the side of Miles’s garden: they were accessing it from the street, where everyone else began their ascent. Indeed, they had paused and were looking very carefully at the access point. How curious, she thought. I wonder why? When she returned Old Jim Parsons held out his empty glass. ‘You were about to oblige?’ he said, with a wink. She refilled it, still pondering what she had seen.