Laura is woken at first light by Fred whispering, ‘Come on, Mum, you don’t want to miss the ferrets arriving, do you?’
The bed is warm, Laura’s nose, exposed to the room, tells her that it is arctically cold – she must have forgotten to turn the heater on when she went to bed, out of practice with the primitive system at Crumbly Hall. There is nothing she would like more than to miss the ferrets arriving; she would love to wallow in this soft bed in the room that was hers when she was growing up, watching the light change throught the roses scattered on the curtains, but Fred is tugging at her arm.
‘Come on, Mum,’ he is whispering loudly. ‘If I can get up, I know you can. Dad said he was coming too, didn’t you, Dad?’
Inigo groans and turns over.
‘Mmm, later, just a bit later,’ he agrees sleepily.
Fred pulls back the curtains with a clatter of rings, and Laura braces herself and throws off the covers. The room is icy cold; she can’t face taking her nightie off, so pulls her clothes on over the top. She follows Fred out into the sullen morning, inhaling damp air with each breath. Mud stretches in furrows towards a small copse where Hedley is part of a huddled group of men. They stamp their feet, and flap their arms, pacing around one another, their feet crunching through frosted leaves and crystalline grass. Feeling like King Wenceslas’s slave, but with mud instead of snow, Laura trudges behind Fred to the spinney, half-listening to his torrent of information. ‘… the girl ones are called jills and Hedley says they are more difficult to train, but there’s one I really like here called Precious. They like to eat dried food, but obviously dead things are better.’
This is truly ghastly, thinks Laura, waiting at the edge of the spinney for Fred to make himself known to the group. She wonders how soon she can mutter some excuse and go back to the warm oasis of peace that is the kitchen. Her fantasies about toast, and coffee-scented air, the newspaper waiting to be read, an egg to be boiled and eaten at leisure are broken by Fred. He ambles towards her, waving an animal.
‘Here, Mum, hold this one while I put its harness on. It’s a she and she’s called Precious. I told you about her. She belongs to Jeff, over there.’ A slither of ferret, pink-eyed and wriggling, is thrust into her hands. Intentions of being a ferret whisperer and a great help to her son suffer a setback.
‘Urgh, it stinks.’ Laura drops it at once, repulsed by the foxy aroma and the density of its blonde pelt. There is something unnervingly smug about the ferret; even when dropped it retains self-possession, sniffing keenly at Laura’s feet. Fred retrieves it, with a pained glare at his mother. Hedley nods a greeting to his sister and with Fred turns back to the group. Fred, showing all the ease with which Hedley greets everyone he meets, and none of his father’s reserve, gets involved immediately in mending one of the electric ferret collars which beep when the animal is underground to help the owner find it.
Laura shivers in her coat, tucking her hands up the sleeves and stamping her feet to return some feeling to them. Now she has shown herself to be no use as an assistant, she can watch uninterrupted. This is much better, as she has no further enthusiasm for becoming a ferret groupie, and can think of nothing at all to say to Jeff or any other of the men bundled in balaclavas and muddy waxed coats now preening their ferrets as a prelude to stuffing them down into rabbit holes. A figure appears out of the white fog on the field, jogging towards them, his breath a pale cloud as big as his face in front of him. Laura is impressed to see that it is Inigo, up and dressed already and carrying a camera.
‘Hi, Dad,’ calls Fred in a stage whisper. ‘Come and see.’ He is in his element. Eyes shining, he darts between the three ferret men and Hedley, asking questions, watching each ferret manoeuvre intently. Inigo moves over to where Laura is standing.
‘Some hellish chickens started screeching as if they were being murdered, so I had to get up,’ he says, folding away the lens of his camera and shoving it deep into his pocket.
‘I like your country casuals,’ says Laura, grinning as she takes in his new camouflage trousers and jacket, and his black balaclava, pulled up like an ordinary hat at present. Inigo ignores her; he is fascinated by the group in front of them.
‘I’m actually quite glad I got here so early,’ he says. ‘Tribal ritual like this is so important. Every country has a version of this, with men parading their killing machines in front of their women.’
A pheasant call cracks through the copse, otherwise the muffled conversation of the ferreters is all Laura can hear. Despite the gnawing cold, the unsavoury smell which now hangs on her clothes, and her own inclinations, she lingers. Inigo, still talking in his special, urgent wildlife programme voice, nudges her. ‘Isn’t it interesting? The women have got themselves dolled up, even though it’s dawn in a muddy field. It’s tribal paint, you see.’
Both entertained and exasperated by his commentary, Laura dutifully observes, and agrees that he does have a point – the two women in the group are made up with great care and peacock-bright glamour, and considering the time of day and the circumstances, they are giggling and flirting with unusual energy. Wishing that Hedley would introduce her, but at the same time thinking it silly to need introductions on a ferret hunt, Laura moves closer. The taller woman, Jen, is with the oldest man in the group. She has big fat curls of dark hair, and the red cheeks of a pantomine dame, and is wearing a large squashy coat like a duvet. She is paying scant attention to the ferrets, but with a lot of bobbing back and forth and winking, is making lewd jokes at her husband’s expense as he pulls his ferrets. The jokes are much enjoyed by the trio of slightly aimless men standing about doing nothing because they don’t have ferrets.
The younger woman, Marion, has pale pink lipstick, and a helmet of white-blonde hair which is in dazzling contrast with the flash of electric blue on her eyelids. She is quiet and pretty, her skin as soft and perfect as her pale sheepskin coat. Her boyfriend Jeff has two ferrets as well as Precious, and Marion stands attentively holding them like a pair of poodles on a short red leash.
Inigo moves closer, catching a little of the action on his camera. His somewhat sinister outfit gives the rustic scene an air of brutal depravity. Marion holds Precious up; her pudgy fingers with their blood-red painted nails sweep down the ferret’s coat. Much to Laura’s surprise, Inigo takes the ferret from her, holding it on his chest, stroking it for a moment. Inigo has always claimed to be useless with animals. Perhaps he needed to fondle a ferret to find his lurking animal instinct. Laura turns to Hedley to make sure he has noticed Inigo’s heroic effort. As she moves, Inigo yells and starts backwards, his arms flailing. Astonishingly, Precious is clinging by her teeth to his chin, extended and dangling like a nicotine-stained Father Christmas beard.
‘Bloody bastard rat. Get this hell fiend off me,’ Inigo roars, staggering about with the ferret swaying, her jaw locked onto his chin. No one moves for several long seconds, then Hedley, as if suddenly defrosted, shakes himself and runs towards Inigo, shouting, ‘Don’t pull! Whatever you do, don’t pull!’
It is too late. Inigo has recovered his balance, and with both hands clamped around Precious’s plump waist he is trying to yank her away. ‘My God, it’s a fucking praying mantis,’ he hisses, between clenched teeth. ‘I’ll have to go to hospital.’
The ferret fanciers huddle together, not liking this disaster in their midst, unconsciously forming a human shield around Marion in case anyone thinks it’s her fault. Jen and her husband shake their heads and mutter to one another in disbelief, but no one steps forward to help Inigo.
‘We’d better get on,’ says Jeff. ‘We won’t catch these rabbits standing about all day.’ He and his sidekicks move back into the wood with the other ferrets and become deliberately busy with beeping devices, terriers and nets.
Fred frowns after them. ‘They should help Dad,’ he says. ‘They must know what to do.’
‘They don’t want to be responsible for it.’ Hedley puts an arm around Fred, a rare gesture for him. ‘Don’t worry, we’ll manage.’
‘For Christ’s sake get this thing off me!’ Inigo yells. Laura rushes over, and not knowing what else to do, holds Inigo’s hand, patting it absently. She is suspended between hysterical laughter and tears, and is fighting an almost overpowering urge to pass out. Inigo’s chin with Precious dangling is a demonic sight. Blood begins to soak through and out of the ferret’s mouth, seeping onto her nose, staining her head dark red. Behind Inigo, the hunched figures of Jeff and his friends burying things and crouching over holes in the ground, and the closing in of dank creeping fog, increases Laura’s sense of nightmare. She clings tighter to Inigo’s hand, suddenly letting go as she realises she isn’t being helpful and her squeezing grip could in fact feel like another ferret to a man in shock. She glances up at his face, now deathly pale as though Precious has sucked all the colour out.
Hedley, his expression grim, attempts to prise Precious’s jaws apart. ‘They won’t let go,’ he says regretfully. ‘Their instinct is to hold on, especially if someone has tried to remove them. My hand is too big, I can’t get her to open her mouth.’ He turns to Fred. ‘You’ll have to try, I’m afraid. Sorry.’
Fred steps forward, his face as white as the fog, eyes dark and wide with shock. He reaches up and inserts a finger into the ferret’s jaw. Laura closes her eyes for a quick prayer to beg that Precious does not maim Fred as well. Immediately, though, Hedley’s triumphant voice booms into the fog.
‘Well done, Fred. She’s let go. She’s let go.’ Laura opens her eyes to see Precious coiling down into Fred’s arms, biddable and innocent save for the wine-dark mask which seeps past her eyes and trickles along her back. Inigo’s legs fold and he crumples onto the earth.
‘Christ. I’ve probably got bubonic plague,’ he says, carefully running his fingers over the wound to feel the four toothmarks among the oozing blood.
Fred recovers from his shock the instant the drama is over, and is fascinated by the wounds. ‘They’re like vampire toothmarks. I didn’t think you could get bitten like that in real life,’ he marvels.
Inigo is not impressed. ‘I’m delighted to be able to increase your knowledge of toothmarks,’ he says sarcastically, ‘but rather than leaving me here on the ground as a case study, I think you had better help me up and get me to a doctor before some filthy disease sets in.’
‘Come on. I’ll take you. What a vile thing to happen – it must be a rogue ferret.’ Laura, still suppressing nausea and finding her face creasing into shocked laughter, helps Inigo up from the ground, holding her hankie over her mouth to hide her inane giggling.
‘I don’t have to come, do I?’ asks Fred, with the natural callousness of youth. ‘It’s just that I want to stay and help do some proper ferret work with these guys.’
Hedley laughs, slapping him on the back. Laura leads Inigo, nursing flesh wounds and seething spirits, back to the house to be ministered to and fussed over by the girls.
Tamsin and Dolly are eating toast in the kitchen, both wearing pale green face packs as the final part of a lengthy morning bathroom session.
‘OhmiGod, what happened?’ screams Dolly, cracking the lower half of her mask in her concern for her father.
Tamsin drops her toast and runs to fetch the First Aid kit. ‘I love cleaning wounds,’ she purrs.
‘Good,’ says Laura, who doesn’t. ‘You clean him up then.’
Tamsin and Dolly happily settle down to mend Inigo. Their dabbing with cotton wool to the damaged chin and tender sympathy to the lacerated spirits perk him up a lot. This unexpected attention, followed by a telephone call to the doctor, has a tranquillising effect on Inigo. The doctor takes a suitably serious view of the event and agrees that tetanus is a danger, and that an injection will be necessary. As a committed hypochondriac, this is great news for Inigo. He puts the telephone down and announces triumphantly to Laura, ‘You see, it is very primitive here. I shouldn’t be surprised if you can get the plague too and a lot of other medieval illnesses that have been wiped out elsewhere.’
‘Yes, you can,’ says Hedley, who has just come in and is enjoying this train of thought. ‘You can get ringworm, and cow pox.’
Inigo looks very alarmed; Tamsin rolls her eyes. ‘No one gets cow pox! You’re thinking of chicken pox.’
Inigo’s visit to the local GP is enhanced by a discussion about primitive cultures including those in Norfolk, the doctor sensing a need in his patient to rant for a while after such an undignified accident. By mid-afternoon, Inigo is in recovery, and vocal in his desire never to set foot in the countryside again. Making the sitting room his salon, Inigo lounges on the sofa, his mobile phone in one hand, the television remote control in the other. Next to him, a laptop computer teeters drunkenly on a cushion while his new toy, the digital camera, records what it can see of his recovery from a tripod. The faded paper on the walls, the sagging scant curtains as much as the ash heap in the fireplace make an unlikely backdrop for this nerve centre of modernity. Inigo has made the most of his surroundings. He has readjusted the furniture, arranging a chair to put his feet up on, a table for a mug and a plate and the television all within easy reach of his sofa. Lying there he swigs whisky from Hedley’s hip flask between telephone calls, and with Dolly’s assistance is now working on the lighting.
His phone trills; he reaches for it. ‘Hello, Jack? Inigo here. I’m in Norfolk, we should be back tonight … Yes, I know it’s Saturday. I’ve been thinking about Death Threat—’ He breaks off, waving his arm wildly. ‘No, not there, Doll, now there’s a lampshade frilling over the motor racing – anyway, Jack, are you there? ARE YOU THERE?’ He hurls the phone into heaped cushions beside him. ‘No proper signal here. Why is everything done so badly in the country? There’s no need for it, it’s just acceptance of incompetence.’
Laura, trying to read on the other side of the room, shuts her book. ‘Inigo, we’d like to stay here until Sunday. There’s so much for the children to do, and I’ve hardly seen Hedley, or got anything sorted out with Tamsin. And most of all, I really don’t want to go back tonight.’
The phone cuts through her words and and Inigo dives to answer it. Grinning, he sprawls, listening to Jack. ‘That sounds good – well done … No, I haven’t been running today. I thought I’d give myself a break because I’ve got sodding holes in my face … Yeah, some sort of feral beast called a ferret. I’m thinking of making an installation including a stuffed one and calling it Death Threat II, but I’m worried it would be a bit derivative.’
Laura returns to her book, jaw set, determined that she will not be coerced into going home a day early because Inigo is bored and wants to show off his war wounds. She turns the page, her hand trembling, angry blood rushing, burning her cheeks. Outside is the answer, and a walk, or else she won’t be able to contain her annoyance and she’ll start a row with Inigo.
Dusk is falling as she walks down through the garden and out onto the marshes, the Labrador Diver at her side, his nose down, vacuuming the evening scents as he goes. The fog has lifted, and the last gleam of afternoon sun is a primrose wash across the western sky. Above and below, sky and sea reflect a purple haze, deepening fast as the light fades. The cold air sears Laura’s face, exhilarating and fresh, cooling her thoughts, mending her temper. She thinks back over the past months. These moments of despairing panic are becoming more frequent, more intense. She has a sense of suffocating, a need for air, for space to breathe. When did life become so stultifying, and why does she feel like this? It’s not the children, they’re difficult, but not yet impossible, Laura thinks, remembering Tamsin. They are in a lull before the hormone storm of teendom breaks. It isn’t even really Inigo, although it is always tempting to blame her own lowness on him. But he’s always been demanding and egocentric, and she has accepted it, lived with it and learned to use it as a shield to keep herself out of the limelight. Inigo’s temperament makes it imperative that Laura should the one who walks behind, picking up the pieces, but it’s fine, she is good at it, and she has her own passions which can occasionally be indulged. Or she used to.
Wondering if she can remember what she really enjoys, Laura stops by the duck pond and chucks a stick into the grey water, its surface broken already by the evening breeze. A crashing splash indicates that Diver sees this as a game, then a beating rush of wings heralds three ducks flying up in perfect formation, quacking outrage as they vanish into the dusk. Laura can just make out the darker blob of Diver’s head as he glides silently through the water, the stick borne high above the surface.
‘Come on, boy, let’s go back.’ Laura turns towards home, frowning in concentration, trying to recall any pleasures that don’t involve children, Inigo or work. What does she like? What makes her laugh? All she can come up with are dogs and country and western music – not that any of those songs make you laugh, but they offer incomparable solace. Laura has often felt her interests to be inadequate. With both parents historians and a classicist brother, her degree in film studies always seems lightweight and not worth taking seriously, and with Inigo, it is essential for a bearable life to let his passions come first. Thus Laura knows a great deal she doesn’t want to know about sport, and has been known to resort to reminiscing about her childhood to make it seem that she has hidden depths. Not that she needs them really, as Inigo has so much to say about himself and it’s easier to think about him.
Ruefully she remembers a conversation with her friend Cally when Inigo gave up smoking. Enunciating slowly at first then speeding into a rant, Cally said, ‘I can’t believe this. When you gave up, you didn’t think it was worth mentioning, and I didn’t find out for months, but now you’ve actually rung me up to tell me Inigo’s done it. Honestly, Laura, I keep telling you – get a bloody life.’
Cally’s right; there should be something more to mark the passing years. If Laura were a man, she would label this her mid-life crisis, and perhaps buy a red sports car, or take up the gym. As a woman, social pressure suggests a face-lift or a toy boy, but she cannot imagine herself with either. But what can she have? Can anything physical staunch this sensation of loss and panic, or would it be better to have counselling? Back at college, twenty-year-old Laura would have known that all she needed was happiness. Her older self thinks what she needs is change.
Walking across the barnyard on her way back to the house, she peers through a doorway and into the big barn. Inside, the cavernous space is empty around one small, ancient tractor. Its tyres are almost flat, and dust and cobwebs have given the smudged blue panels a ghostly blur. Inigo would love it; it might distract him from going back to London. Laura hastens back to the house to fetch him to look at it.
The sitting room has traces of Inigo: his computer disks are stacked neatly in two piles, the cushions have been balanced along the sofa back, and a tennis player is thwacking a ball vigorously but silently across the television. Inigo, however, is not here. Nor is anyone else. Laura walks through to the hall to shout up the stairs, sensing more than hearing the pulsing beat of Tamsin’s stereo system far away in the attic and wondering where Hedley and Fred have got to. The telephone rings. Laura picks it up
‘Hello?’
‘Hello, this is Guy. I wonder if I could speak to Hedley?’
‘Guy. Yes. Hello. How odd. I don’t…’ Laura tails off, obscurely embarrassed, suddenly tonguetied and desperate that he doesn’t realise it is her, although she doesn’t know why, and there is no reason why he should.
‘Hello, hello, are you still there? Please could I speak to Hedley?’ Guy speaks slowly, enunciating clearly as if to a long-distance, non-English-speaking operator. He must think she is a half-wit. In fact, he thinks she is Tamsin.
Laura doesn’t speak but says, ‘Mmmm.’
‘Tamsin, would you take a message for me? He wanted to talk to me about organic weed warfare. Get him to call me back when he comes in, would you?’
Laura nods, then mumbles, ‘All right,’ and puts the telephone down. How fascinating that Guy, who has lain dormant in the outer recesses of her memory for years, should re-emerge both in person and on the telephone twice in one week. Cally, who lives on a houseboat in Little Venice with a cat called Hybrid, and has delusions of being a gypsy soothsayer, would insist it was portentous, but Laura knows better.
‘Hi, Mum – look, I shot this pigeon. It was so cool, it just fell out of the tree when I hit it. I missed the other one that was flying – Hedley got that.’
Fred and Hedley clatter into the house. Fred is pink-cheeked and incandescent with excitement, waving his feathered trophy; Hedley, almost as delighted, is a long way from the tweedy academic he was for so long, bearing a gun, a stout stick and some sharp knives. Laura notices how attractive the trappings of outdoor life are, even on her brother. She must try and help him find a girlfriend. A motherly figure is what Tamsin needs in her life too.
Fred slaps the pigeon on the kitchen table. ‘I’m going to pluck it and then we can cook it,’ he says with relish.
‘That’s wonderful, well done.’ Laura wonders what twisted element in her mothering makes her delighted when Fred spends an afternoon murdering helpless creatures but furious and frustrated if he should sit for three hours quietly occupied by the television. She helps them shed their weapons and waterproof coats, and makes tea for the three of them, as no one else is around, listening to their exchanged comments and observations about the marsh, astonished by the interest Fred shows and the knowledge he has picked up over a few weekend visits here.
‘Mum, I think we should move in here and live with Hedley,’ Fred announces, cramming a large piece of cake into his mouth to add, somewhat inaudibly, ‘I don’t ever want to go back to London, there’s nothing to do.’
Laura laughs. ‘That’s exactly the opposite of Dolly’s view. She wouldn’t like it one bit; neither would your father.’
‘No,’ says Hedley emphatically. ‘Inigo couldn’t possibly live here. He’d be a nightmare – I mean he’d find it a nightmare.’
‘Don’t look so worried,’ Laura whispers, leaning across the kitchen table as Fred moves out of earshot to graze in the fridge. ‘It’s never going to happen. Inigo can’t even bear two nights here.’
Hedley’s hairy eyebrows, which have been drifting down over his eyes, leap up to his hairline with surprise. ‘Are you going then?’
Laura shakes her head. ‘No, but I think he might.’
‘He might what? I love it when you talk about me.’ A warm hand runs over Laura’s shoulders; she twists in her chair to look up at Inigo, all trace of his earlier truculence evaporated, now smiling at her, the four puncture wounds in his chin making him look as though he has just been sewn together.
Laura stands up, not ready yet to forgive him for trying to bully them all back to London. ‘I thought you were going home.’
He kisses her forehead. ‘I can’t. I need to be with you. I’m staying for as long as you want to.’ He is trying to be good. Laura decides to thaw.
She smiles at him. ‘I found something you will love in the barn.’
‘Take me and show me.’ His eyes are dark; Laura’s heart races looking into them.
‘I will. After tea I’ll show you.’
Hedley coughs, embarrassed by the intimacy of his sister and Inigo over crumpets and tea. Inigo has always been very un-English in his tendency to touch and stroke, and Hedley has never been able to relax and accept it, tending to look away, leave the room or change the subject while Inigo’s hands move slowly across Laura’s shoulders, or his hands tangle in the weight of her hair. Now is not too bad, they are simply standing still in the circle of one another’s arms, so Hedley fixes his gaze a couple of inches above them and says, ‘Good, so you’re all staying. Marvellous. Let’s tell Dolly and Tamsin.’
Laura breaks away from Inigo. ‘Oh Hedley, I forgot to tell you. Guy rang – he wants to have a word with you about something organic.’
‘How odd, he was talking about you the other day. Did you make a plan to meet up with him?’
‘He thought I was Tamsin.’
Hedley sighs. ‘Well, why didn’t you say that you weren’t Tamsin, you were you?’
‘I don’t know, the moment passed.’
Her brother claps his hand against his forehead in mock exasperation. ‘Anyway,’ he says, ‘it doesn’t matter. We don’t want to go there – we’d have to see Celia and she’s poisonous.’
‘Who’s Celia?’
‘Guy’s wife.’
‘Oh, I see.’
‘Is she poisonous to touch, or just if you bite her?’ Fred has found a miniature axe and is chopping small pieces of kindling into matchsticks by the fire then lighting them one by one. Inigo crouches to help him, showing him how to split the wood so that each splinter comes away whole and springing from the block. Laura walks around the kitchen table in circles, picking up a cup, putting it down again, moving the cake plate from one end of the table to the other. It is disconcerting to think of Guy’s life, and indeed his wife, existing here in Norfolk when, if she had thought about him at all in the past years, Laura had vaguely supposed him to inhabit a parallel universe.
It certainly seemed that he came from one when she first met him. Laura and Hedley were exploring a network of rutted tracks near Crumbly. Hedley had just passed his driving test, and the invisible Uncle Peter hadn’t seemed to mind them borrowing the farm car and heading off all day. Driving in through an entrance surrounded by iron pig-stys, Hedley slewed the car in the mud, but persevered through thick fir trees, their evergreen shade creating a still, menacing light on this dark winter morning. They rounded a final bend in the track and Hedley slammed on the brakes with a jolt. ‘What on earth is that?’ he whispered.
Laura, who had been leaning back to reach for something from behind, turned and the breath stuck in her throat. Towering above them, so near their wheels were on the edge of the first rank of steps leading up to the front door, was a vast derelict building, so ruined it was hard to see whether it had once been a church or a house. A bell tower was tethered on one wall, and half a pediment straddled the front, but beyond the façade, windows without walls or floors behind them revealed the ghosts of rooms, now filled with falling beams and sprouting foliage.
Hedley had turned the engine off, but Laura tugged at him. ‘Come on, let’s go. It’s creepy here.’
‘No way. I want to look round.’ Her brother got out of the car and climbed over one of the ground-floor windows. Laura waited, the radio turned on to keep her company. Hedley returned a few minutes later with another youth his own age.
‘Laura, this is Guy Harvey. He lives here.’
The newcomer had dishevelled blond hair and laughing blue eyes, and when Laura said hello to him she had a flashing moment’s thought that she had stepped into a lopsided fairy story and here was Prince Charming waiting to be rescued. In fact, Guy Harvey was the son of the local demolition man, and the two of them lived in a caravan next to the house. Guy and Hedley became inseparable friends and Laura tagged along with them more often than not, climbing in the ruin. They once had a picnic at night, the three of them lying, looking up at the stars, from a giant Edwardian bath teetering thirty feet up on a heap of rubble in the shattered east wing of the house. Laura was sixteen, and it was the first time Guy ever kissed her.
Alf Harvey, who had notably small feet and a round body which rolled from side to side when he walked, had bought the ruin when his wife died two years before Laura met Guy. His version of moving in was to arrive with a mobile home and a crane dangling a vast black iron ball, his plan to knock the ruin down and build a village of spanking new houses on the site. A man with a mission to flatten and renew, never to preserve or restore, Alf was astonished to find that his idea was met with disapproval in the neighbourhood, and before he could position his crane and ball for maximum effect, the local council’s heritage officer arrived waving a preservation order. The building, or what was left of it, was preserved just as it was, beams exposed like bones on a rotting carcass, and even a shattered four-poster bed twisted in the remains of a doorway. Parking his mobile home in the stableyard, Alf set up residence with his son Guy, and spent the remaining years of his life trying to win over the planners. He had no interest in the fields and woodland, the streams and hedges which lay beyond the four walls of his giant white elephant.
Guy was an only child, fifteen and still missing his mother painfully. He began to mend the fences, lay hedges and unblock the choked stream so water could meander through the low-lying water meadows instead of flooding. Six months after his father and he moved in, Guy let his first field to a pig farmer; a year later he grew a patch of peas and another of strawberries. By the time he met Hedley and Laura, he had left school and was letting and farming the whole two hundred acres around his father’s house and even making a small profit, driven by a barely recognised desire to create order.
Laura had never met anyone, save her Uncle Peter, whose livelihood came from the land. It was both quaint and impressive. She didn’t know anyone of seventeen, either, who had left school. Guy, for his part, had never met a girl who found his life glamorous. They fell in love with the exoticism of one another.