Friday morning was Josie-time, my own private quality time. Each week I left the village at eight thirty-five prompt. If I passed anyone – and today it was Fred Tregothnan apparently arguing the toss with Nick Thomas as they stood outside the village shop – I waved, but no one in the village knew where I went. Maybe they thought I had an assignation with a secret lover – and I was happy to keep it that way. Actually, they’d have been half right. Piers, the instructor, and I did have the odd highly pleasurable shag, and it was always nice to know I could pull a bloke half my age, but the main business of the morning was a flying lesson. I’d gone on the principle that if Sarah Ferguson could fly a helicopter, so could I. I’d no ambition, as she did, to write children’s books about choppers. Certainly not children’s books about choppers! I just did it for the pleasure. It invigorated me for the whole of the next week. Well, the flying or the recreational sex.
I always got back in time to open up the bar, remind Lindi exactly what she was supposed to be doing and get into the kitchen. There was more passing trade on Fridays, people nipping off to their holiday homes or heading back to the city a day early to beat the weekend M5 jams. Today I was gratified to have quite a run on the organic steak I’d brought back with me, and plenty of favourable comment. I’d made sure I marked it up as a Special, lest people compare the price with the one in the menu. When I had a new menu printed, the prices would be even higher, so I could sell it at a profit, not just little more than cost.
As soon as Reg Bulcombe registered the offer on the blackboard, he strode over to me, jabbing at my chest. I stared down at his parsnip of a finger.
‘Yes, Reg. What can I get you?’ I asked before he could speak. ‘Your usual?’
‘I can’t have my usual, can I? ’Cos you’ve slapped a fancy great price on its head. Going organic, are we? We’ll see about that. You mark my words we’ll see.’
‘If you mean to get rid of the Portaloos again, you’ll find I’ve trumped you. Now, do I draw you a nice cool pint or are you going to throw your toys out of the pram and stump off with your thirst still raging?’
There was a murmur from his cronies. His round, was it? I filled half a dozen glasses, some scrumpy, some bitter, passing them over in pairs.
As he took the last, he hissed, ‘You turn your nose up at good meat at my prices – you’re off your head, woman.’
‘I told you, Reg – I need paperwork for my accountant. You come up with the documentation: I might do business with you again. We’ll have to see, won’t we? After all, like it says on the board, this is an unrepeatable offer. Or did you leave your reading specs at home?’
‘Your fancy writing, that’s the problem. That and the fancy prices.’
‘He’s right,’ Fred Tregothnan, who’d just appeared, butted in. ‘You need to keep your prices down, if a man’s going to eat and pay his vet’s bills before Christmas! You’ll just have to get in the queue, Josie.’ His tone was jocular enough, but I fancied the message wasn’t. Reg’s farm never had paid well, according to the village, which is why he’d turned the flattest of his fields – coincidentally the one most prone to flooding - into the mobile home site. I didn’t know how campers rated such facilities, but I couldn’t imagine Reg earning the equivalent of a Michelin star. His preferring the foetid old privy to the Portaloos didn’t augur well, did it?
Fred had his usual brandy and soda. It was unlike him to drop in in the middle of the day, still less like him to order food and sit on his own to eat it. He had the last of the organic steaks.
‘So is there any real difference,’ I asked as I took it to his table, one of the patio ones, ‘between organic meat and your bog standard commercial stuff?’
He shook his head. ‘Some folk even think ordinary husbandry’s better for the animals, because they get more preventive medicine –’
‘As in antibiotics,’ I put in.
‘– and I’d be hard put to tell the difference between the two. But I can tell the difference between any meat and that from beasts given Angel Dust –’
‘Angel Dust?’
‘It’s highly illegal, so you won’t be asking me to prove it with a blind tasting.’
‘Where did you have it?’
‘Over in the States. It’s a hormone-based growth accelerant, banned throughout Europe. They even have the sense to ban the US meat produced with it. It makes the animal grow very quickly, and to my mind gives nasty, spongy meat. Pap.’
‘But you won’t be top of the queue if I go completely organic.’
‘There are good organic farmers and bad organic farmers. A lot depends on the butcher, too – how long he hangs his meat, and in what temperature. Beef, now, it needs to go really dark, not this bright red stuff people like from their supermarkets.’
I didn’t point out I’d spent more years at college than I liked to recall learning about the colour of meat. Customers liked to think they know best. ‘These new suppliers said they knew every animal by name – oh, I know they were playing the sentimentality card – and had them slaughtered locally. At least they died happy.’
‘That’s a factor. The enormously long journeys the poor beasts make to slaughterhouses – they’re unforgivable. But that’s the government’s fault, all this bloody red tape they tie us around with.’
I nodded. I’d come across Compassion in World Farming during my travels on the Net.
By now he was well into his stride. ‘No wonder more and more vets are turning away from large animal practices and sticking to tabby cats and terriers. Which reminds me,’ he said, smiling ironically, ‘will you be serving the stirrup cup to the hunt this year?’
But at that point one of the walkers asked for his bill, and I didn’t quite hear Fred’s question. Accidentally on purpose. I still hadn’t made up my mind. But if Sue could refuse to bless them, I was that much closer to refusing to serve them. Why didn’t they do what other hunts did, gather at some big house? I could have volunteered Mrs Greville as hostess there and then.
Now, why hadn’t Fred joined his mates? For all he was a professional man, educated and not short of a pound or two, he usually mixed with the settle crowd. It was their highest praise, that he didn’t have a bob on himself. Maybe that quip about money had offended them. Maybe it wasn’t a quip at all. Both Reg and Ted Gay had got up to lean over his table, talking earnestly. Or was it meanly? Gay was jabbing the air, his dirty finger an inch from Fred’s nose. How on earth had dear little Lucy managed to spring from loins like those?
Fred managed to ignore any threat, smiling and leaning back in his chair as the others slouched off.
Lindi began to saunter round collecting glasses, and, even as I watched, what did the bloody man do but put his hand up her skirt and goose her?
I was at his table before he could remove it. ‘Mr Tregothnan, if you can’t treat my employees with more respect I shall have to ask you not to patronise this pub. Lindi, there are people waiting to be served.’
‘But it was only a bit of fun, Mrs Welford,’ she bleated.
‘It may be, until you decide to sue me for not protecting you from sexual harassment. Off you go. And you, Mr Tregothnan, have to choose whether to keep your hands to yourself or drink elsewhere.’
I wasn’t surprised when there was a thundering on the kitchen door five minutes later. I hadn’t seen him off the premises, nothing confrontational like that, so I should imagine this was his way of proving he wasn’t going quietly. I stepped out, closing the door behind me. No rows in my food preparation area. Not with all those knives ready to hand.
‘How dare you, you cow?’ he began.
I summarise: every word was accompanied by a profanity. Not that I could complain. I was about to use quite a few myself.
‘I’ll tell you how I dare,’ I said. Years before I’d heaped curses on Nick Thomas’s head. I repeated them now with interest. My voice never got above a quiet monotone. I might have discussed the weather with more animation. But he got my drift: you didn’t mess with Josie Welford. ‘So now you know,’ I finished. ‘You’re welcome here any time, any day. But you do not lay a hand on my girls. Ever again. Now, go and castrate a cat and chew on my words.’
I turned on my heel and returned to the kitchen.
A few minutes later Lindi appeared, lower lip trembling. ‘All those things you said, Mrs Welford – did you mean them?’
‘Of course not. But he needed scaring. Men have to learn that “no” means “no”, Lindi, and we’re the only ones to teach them as far as I can see. And that means some of us have to learn to say it. Go on: have a try. Go on. You don’t have to be rude. But you mustn’t giggle and wiggle your bum while you’re saying it. “Stop that, please. I don’t like it.” Go on. I mean it, Lindi.’
I was out and about early on Saturday too, equipped with secateurs and leather gloves. Sue had persuaded me against my better judgement that I had flower-arranging skills that could be used by the women decorating the church. Women? Silly me. Ladies, of course.
In the summer most of the flowers came from local gardens. At this time of year they came from a flower wholesalers in Exeter, Sue setting out well before six every Saturday morning to collect them. We tended to work in threes, the rota apparently having been worked out at random. But Jem and his wife had decided to sneak a rare weekend away from the shop so I’d been pulled in as substitute for Molly.
Sue had put the flowers – gladioli, asters, dahlias and chrysanths – in a couple of deep black plastic buckets that could, with the addition of a wodge of Oasis, double as vases. More than half, a vivid mix of colours with Michaelmas daisies and some of those imported daisies, turquoise and orange and bright blue, which always reminded me of a child’s scribble, had already been removed and lay on a groundsheet. You’d need sunglasses to work with them.
We had three or four displays on ordinary Sundays, and they’d usually last, with a bit of judicious dead-heading, for a couple of weeks, and maybe, in chilly weather, even longer. Our church didn’t, after all, run to much in the way of heating.
I checked the vase on the altar – no, nothing could be retrieved from that. And the water was so rank it turned my stomach. Out to the compost heap, then. I propped the empty vase under the stand-pipe we use, hoping the force of the water would wash away some of the green sludge, and wandered off to look at the graves, pulling weeds here and there as I went. My route took me down towards the stream I’d walked beside earlier in the week. How many folk had died in times past because they drew their water from a stream polluted by the graveyard, innocent, clear water, but far from pure? I leaned on the wall and peered.
Pink water? Not pink as in strawberry ice cream, but pink as in the water left when I soaked Tony’s handkerchiefs he really should have thrown away after one of his nosebleeds. Why should the stream be any sort of pink? It wasn’t as if we’d got any industry to turn it that colour. I’d once been to some ancient abbey up in Yorkshire only to get hay fever from the river – it ran past a shampoo factory, and frothed myriad bubbles, giving off the richest of pongs. Unforgivable, of course, but in those innocent days before tight environmental controls it was almost funny. Our stream didn’t smell, though.
The altar vase still did, but not so much. I gave it another swirl, resolving to bring rubber gloves and a scourer next time.
By now the other lady was back from wherever she’d gone. No explanations for arriving, sorting flowers and then popping out again.
‘Those are my flowers,’ she greeted me, flexing her secateurs.
I didn’t need to ask which. ‘Very well. And where are they to go?’ Though I could have put money on the answer.
‘On the altar, of course. Where is the altar vase?’
I passed it to her; it was still dripping, of course. How she’d deal with the wet bottom and the altar’s pristine white linen cloth, I had no idea.
‘I don’t know you, do I?’
How could some only five foot two look down her nose at me? ‘Josie Welford.’ I put out a friendly hand, ready to shake hers. She neither shook it nor responded with her name. ‘And you’re…?’ I prompted.
‘Mrs Coyne. You’re from?’
From? Ah, which house! Brean Park or Teign Court, that sort of from. ‘The White Hart.’
‘The publican! What on earth are you doing here?’
‘Arranging the flowers beside the lectern.’ I suited the deed to the word.
‘A publican. Arranging flowers.’
The conversation didn’t develop much. I didn’t know my Bible well enough to tell her exactly what dealings Christ had had with innkeepers, but I did want to mouth words like ‘pharisee’ and ‘whited sepulchre’ under my breath. Anyone else I might have made a quip about water and wine and the pink stream, but any more snubs and I might forget Whose house I was supposed to be decorating.
Mrs Greville’s, I suppose, to judge by the memorials and brasses. Well, Mrs Greville’s husband’s ancestors, at least. It wasn’t a terribly distinguished church, every period having had a little go at it, the Victorian Grevilles most of all, with a floor tiled in glossy blood and custard. But I enjoyed decorating it, all the same, tucking vases into niches that might once have held statues, before Cromwell or someone knocked them off their perches. I was happy to let Mrs More Money than Taste go wild with her colours. My restricted palette did very well as far as I was concerned – whites and yellows, yellows and oranges, oranges with russets. Halfway through, I produced the flask of coffee I always shared with my usual partners, Jem’s mother Rose and an aunt of Lucy’s. I unscrewed a cup – would she like to join me? She shook her head abruptly: she was busy on far more important things, the gesture said. She was, too. Her masterpiece was no more than halfway complete.
The church door opened gently to admit a lady in her sixties, terribly thin with the consequence that she looked amazing in her jeans and jerkin. Sue’s bête noir, Mrs Greville. She smiled vaguely at us both. ‘Barbara. Mrs Welford. I’m sorry I’m so late. One of the dogs… I waited ages for Mr Tregothnan but there was no sign of him at his surgery this morning. I suppose he must have had an emergency somewhere.’ She looked around the church, spreading her hands as if genuinely embarrassed. ‘There doesn’t seem much for me to do.’
‘Is the dog very ill?’ I asked. ‘I’m Josie, by the way.’
‘Caro. I take it you and Barbara have already introduced yourselves.’ She put out her hand for me to shake. She could have done with a good manicure. ‘Spud? He’s just off his food. So unlike him, though. Now, why don’t I make amends by sweeping up? That’s coming along beautifully, Barbara – such verve. And Josie – now, there’s only one thing wrong there, my dear – no one’ll see it, tucked away down there. Let’s pop it onto a kneeler, shall we? Did I ever tell you about my favourite kneeler? It’s in Hereford Cathedral. The SAS one. Such a hoot. You can just imagine them all blacked up for some terrible mission and one of them saying, “Hang on, Sarge, just got to finish this corner.”’
Our laughter rang round the church. Why on earth had Sue so taken against her?
We lifted the vase as she directed and stood back to survey it. Yes, I felt quite proud.
She applied herself to the broom, me busy with the dustpan and brush. While we waited for Barbara to stick in the last few dahlias, I asked, ‘Have you noticed the stream recently? It’s gone a funny colour.’
‘The rain, of course,’ Barbara cut in.
Why didn’t she ask what was funny about it? ‘I’m sorry?’
‘All that rain – it’s bound to discolour the water.’
‘But to turn it pink?’
‘Pink?’ Caro repeated, the same disbelief in her voice as in my head.
‘Have you never noticed how red the soil is in parts of Devon?’ Barbara snipped an end, letting it fall on to the floor. Caro bent, rather stiffly, to pick it up. Yes: her knuckles were slightly swollen – maybe her knees or hips were already arthritic.
Actually, I had. I’d been to a sleepy little village with some bloke I’d met on the Internet. Dawlish. And the stream there was a deep terracotta colour after a thunderstorm. Not pink, though. And come to think of it, we weren’t in Devon, but in Somerset. Just.
One part of her perfect triangle stood up too high, mocking the rest. It would have been the work of seconds for me to nip it out, but I refrained. Caro, winking with the eye Barbara couldn’t see, gave it a deft shove.
‘Ladies, I’m sorry to be such a bore, but I must have another go at seeing the vet. Can I offer you a lift, Josie?’
She was the sort of woman to whom I could pat my buttocks and say, ‘I need the walk, thanks. I hope your poor Spud improves.’ Then I had a spurt of courage. If Sue could do it, so could I. ‘Actually, there’s something I need to ask. I’ll walk with you to your car, shall I?’
She raised a well-plucked eyebrow, but held open the door with a friendly smile.
‘I was wondering if you’d mind the hunt meeting at the Court,’ I began. ‘I hate to break a village tradition but –’
‘You’re anti-blood sports too.’
‘’Fraid so –’
She gave a snort of laughter. ‘My dear, I loathe them too! Why do you think it stopped gathering at the Court and moved to the White Hart? Tell you what,’ she added, dropping her voice to a stage whisper, ‘Ask Barbara Coyne. She’d love to think she’s one up on me!’ With a wink, she let herself into her car, not the huge four-wheel drive I’d have expected but a fairly elderly Volvo Estate. Spud lay in the back looking, even to a non-doggy person like me, pretty miserable.
I got back to find some of Barbara’s flowers in my arrangements – my lovely golds dotted with turquoise, that sort of thing. ‘I found I had some to spare,’ she smiled graciously.
‘But there are a couple of gaps in your own,’ I said, pointing them out and returning my lectern arrangement to the original. ‘There.’
By the time she’d rearranged them to her satisfaction I’d retrieved some bright pink carnations from my bronze chrysanthemums – not my favourite flower, I have to admit, but it would have been churlish to spurn Sue’s choice.
‘They stick out a bit,’ I said, aiming for apologetic.
She pulled her half-moon specs a little lower down her nose, and looked slowly from me to the flowers and back again. She didn’t need to say it: the interlopers were a metaphor for newcomers to the village. I was a shocking pink carnation amid the mature, sensible natives. I could have pursued the theme: we were more fragrant, easier to arrange and a good deal less unyielding. As it was, I simply held her gaze longer than she thought comfortable.
To do her justice, she fished the carnations out and shoved them into her medley. If I’d been more charitable, I’d have said it was a wonderful floral image of a multicultural city like dear old Brum. As it was, it simply added to the mess.
She might see my suggestion about the hunt as a peace-offering, or even as a desire to appease. Hell. In any case, was it my place to ask her? That had never stopped me yet. I plunged in.
For all I might have been suggesting she host a drug-taking convention, she was tempted. I could see that. She agreed, with a show of reluctance, to discuss it with the Master. We bade each other extremely courteous farewells and I left.
The feel of the secateurs in my hand reminded me of another job involving cutting. The obstruction on the footpath. When I took my walk that afternoon I went armed. First of all I photographed the tangle of barbed and razor wire. Then, with my pliers, I attacked it, piece by vicious piece. It wasn’t as easy by any means as I’d expected, and I was glad of my old outsize gardening jacket over my Barbour, not to mention two pairs of leather gloves. With my walking stick, I shoved the stuff into the brambles beside the path. I didn’t want to be accused of theft, did I?
Rain came squalling down. I ignored it for a couple of hundred yards, but it was really so unpleasant I gave up with ill grace and headed back to the sanctuary of my living room.
There was an excellent turn out for Sunday lunch, the organic rib of beef earning a lot of plaudits, which I was happy to pass on to my Sunday chef, a bone thin lad called Tom Dearborn, who looked as if he couldn’t tell the time of day, but had the nose and palate of an angel. He responded with a close inspection of his clogs.
‘Thing is, Mrs Welford, I don’t think as how I can work here any more.’
‘Tom! But you know I was hoping to take you on full-time as soon as the restaurant was up and running. You’re more than good enough.’ He was: he was wasted on simple Sunday roasts.
A further inspection of the clogs.
‘Have you had a better offer? I’ll match it if I can.’
‘’Tisn’t that, Mrs Welford.’
‘And you’ll be working in a brand new kitchen, with all that state of the art equipment.’
‘I know. It’s just that …’
I closed the kitchen door so we wouldn’t be overheard. ‘Just what?’ As he hesitated, I asked, ‘Has someone suggested it would be better if you didn’t work for me? Just because I’m a grockle? Hell, Tom, there aren’t many employers round here who aren’t grockles! There aren’t many employers round here full stop.’
‘I know. And you’re a very good one, don’t get me wrong. And I told him –’ He wrung his hands miserably, the big knuckles crunching.
‘Told who, Tom?’
If there’d been a crack between the floorboards, he’d have tried to disappear down it. ‘This bloke. You don’t know him.’
‘Did he want you to work for him or just to stop working for me?’ I didn’t need to wait for an answer. ‘Did he threaten you? What’ll he do to you if you don’t do as he says?’
‘He says he’ll stop me seeing my Sharon.’
‘Come on, he can’t play Montagues and Capulets in the twenty-first century! And you’re a bit old for Romeo and Juliet,’ I added, in case he hadn’t followed me. He still didn’t, of course.
‘Thing is, she still lives at home. And – I’m going to be a father, Josie.’
I hugged him. ‘That’s wonderful!’ If bringing a child into the world without a roof of your own was wonderful. ‘When?’
‘In February. Thing is, he knocks her about when he’s had a few – I –’
‘Then the first thing to do is get her out of there. Now. Today.’
Even as his eyes lit up, reality hit him. I fancied it had hit him quite a lot in his short lifetime. ‘But where –?’
‘Here, of course. You’ll have to rough it in the B and B rooms for a bit. But I always did plan to turn the old stable block into accommodation for the chef – we discussed the plans, remember.’
There was a bit in Shakespeare, Hamlet, as I recall, about one auspicious and one dropping eye. That was Tom to a T.
‘Go and talk it over with her. It’s not the Ritz, and everything’s pretty tatty. But it’s better than being beaten up and putting a baby’s life at risk.’ Even as I said it, I wondered how much more they might be at risk if they accepted my offer. If a violent father didn’t want his daughter’s young man even working for me, how much more of a provocation would it be if his daughter sought refuge under my roof?