Miss Abigail Tweely and Miss Muriel Arch sat in the drawing-room of Honeysuckle Cottage eating digestive biscuits and drinking cups of strong bohea. They were the village of Whimsy-on-the-Water’s oldest inhabitants. Indeed it was said that Miss Arch’s muslin-flounced wrist had waved from the crowd at King George V’s coronation. Outside the whirr of the developers’ pneumatic drills could be heard tearing up the previously unspoilt meadow.
‘I would have offered you cake, Muriel,’ Miss Tweely now said, ‘only Mr Bunn the baker has had to close his shop.’
‘Poor Mr Bunn,’ Miss Arch sighed. ‘All to do with the new Waitrose at Nether Gussett, I suppose. Do you know, my dear, I saw a ghost yesterday?’
‘Not again! Was it the drowned parlour-maid from Crashing Grange, or the nun who was blown away in a gale – a story, by the way, that I never in the least believed?’
A low droning noise from across the hill now informed them that work on the new motorway had recommenced.
‘Neither. It was the orphan boy who was killed in a shower of hail-stones. However picturesque our lives here, Abigail, it is a great mistake to sentimentalise the countryside.’
‘Do I not know it, Muriel? Only the other day, poor Farmer Wazzock was disembowelled by his own gardening fork. But does it not alarm you, our being so figurative?’
‘I cannot see,’ Miss Arch remarked, eyeing the tractor that was digging up the road outside, and the copy of the Daily Telegraph whose headline read Thatcher’s Boom: Yuppies buy up old country properties; rural life changing, ‘that I am in the least figurative. What I resent’ – she paused to shake the paw of her pet badger, Boffles, who now stole into the room – ‘is the determinism.’
‘Determinism, Muriel?’ A shadow crept across Miss Tweely’s pale, aristocratic face.
‘Precisely. The fact, for example, that we all know you are shortly to die a horrible and suitably emblematic death . . . Muriel?’
But Miss Tweely had already slipped upon the letter from Messrs Shark & Vulture offering to buy Honeysuckle Cottage, fallen full-length into the fire, and been burnt alive. Miss Arch shook her head. In her innermost heart she felt like dressing up as a man and going out to kill some squirrels. There was nothing like getting closer to nature.