‘Yes?’
‘I promise I’ll keep your secret, if you’ll keep mine.’ She swallowed deeply. ‘Don’t tell Frank that I spend so much money on oils, will you?’
Rose’s forehead creased into a puzzled frown. ‘Of course not. Client confidentiality and all that.’
Melissa crinkled her eyes. ‘You’re a pal!’
‘Here.’ She handed her the small bottle of oil. ‘Don’t forget this.’
Melissa looked at the label. ‘“Secret Passions”?’ She gave a wry smile. ‘Thanks. I’d better be off. Catch up with you later.’
Rose closed the door behind her and slumped on to the nearest stair. Melissa certainly had a strange view of life. Rose wondered if there was a certain amount of unavoidable inbreeding in country folk, a bit like royalty but without the Germans. Perhaps she had been wrong to confide in her. Perhaps it was like Dan said and you couldn’t sneeze without the whole village coming to offer you a tissue. Only time would tell. She hoped someone else would do something scandalous to whet Melissa’s suppressed appetite for adventure and let her off the hook. Still, at least she hadn’t told her everything. She probably would never have believed it anyway. There was a certain childlike innocence about Melissa and it was so rare these days – a bit like naturally blonde hair. It seemed churlish to spoil it.
How many people would view the tortuous end of an affair as romantic? It was beyond belief. It was only on the big screen that pain and suffering in the cause of love could be deemed enjoyable. Who was it that said love is ten per cent joy but ninety per cent suffering? Too damn true. There were a lot of adjectives that could have described the end of her affair, but romantic was definitely not one of them. The truth had been pain, suffering, blood-letting and begging.
And doubt? Perhaps out of all the hideous little emotions that could sneak up on you when you weren’t looking, doubt was the worst. Nearly the worst. Had she done the right thing? Would Hugh eventually have been able to deliver all the promises he had so glibly and so frequently made? Now she would never know. Ever. She was an ex-lover, ex-city girl and contemplating ex-directory. Even if he wanted to find her he couldn’t. Her eyes welled up with tears – which seemed so harsh because she hadn’t cried for days now. Well, not really cried. A few measly, easily sniffed-away tears didn’t count.
The problem with devastatingly handsome, intelligent, charming, witty, successful, rich, powerful, influential men who are good in bed was that they were usually bastards. And Hugh was no exception.
Chapter Five
BASIL (EXOTIC)
Exotic basil is a yellow or pale green oil with a coarse herbaceous odour with a tinge of camphor. It is moderately toxic and irritating to the skin. No therapeutic benefits have yet been found. True basil has far more value.
from: The Complete Encyclopaedia of Aromatherapy Oils by Jessamine Lovage
Reg, the landlord of the Black Horse, considered himself on good form. He’d won a few bob on the horses yesterday, the beer was flowing through the pipes with relative ease, and business was booming due to the influx of yuppies bored with the soulless watering holes of Milton Keynes.
There was only one immediate and unavoidable blot on the landscape and it had just walked through the door. Reg could tell by the smell before he turned round. It wasn’t entirely unpleasant, just the faint whiff of someone having left the lid off a jar of Vicks VapoRub.
‘Good morning, Basil!’ Reg said gamely.
‘Is it?’ Basil snapped. ‘What’s so flaming good about it?’
Reg was just about to tell him, but thought better of it. ‘Usual?’ he asked, reaching for a half-pint jug.
‘Does it taste any better than usual?’
‘Not really.’
‘Then half a pint of your finest cleaning fluid it is, landlord.’
Reg pulled the pint and passed it to Basil who looked at it suspiciously through his monocle. The monocle was a relatively new addition to Basil’s inexhaustible list of peculiarities and it suited him down to the ground. It went well with the horse’s head cane that he liked to brandish on his walks round the village. Obviously satisfied that his beer wasn’t about to kill him, Basil raised it to his lips. ‘Up yours, landlord!’
‘Up yours too, Basil,’ Reg said laconically and continued where he had left off – attempting to arrange the pork scratchings artistically on their cardboard display in order to persuade his customers to buy them before they reached their sell-by date.
It was a time-honoured English tradition that all villages should have an idiot, and Great Brayford had honoured the tradition for some considerable time in the shape of Basil. Village idiots no longer had to be possessed of matted hair, Igoresque features and a hump that would do Quasimodo proud. Nineties style village idiots could just as easily come in the form of a retired civil servant, wear a monocle (definite advantage), a rather threadbare tweed suit and Nike Air Pump trainers – although that wasn’t the only mode of dress considered suitable. Equally disturbing to the equilibrium was Basil’s alternative of a lilac shell suit and brown leather brogues. In these politically correct times, however, village idiots were more likely to be called eccentrics.
Eccentricity had always been something that the English excelled at. You could admire the French for their sense of dress, the Italians for their food, but where were they when it came to extravagantly weird behaviour? Nonstarters. In fact, the English could probably be classed as world leaders at it. It was the kind of eccentricity that surpassed all intelligence. And Basil possessed it in huge quantities.
Great Brayford was a pretty village. Not extremely so. And certainly no more so than several other villages in the surrounding area. The village green was no more than a rough triangle of scruffy grass that the council ran its mower over periodically. There was a pond which once may have been sparkling and pure but was now dank and choked with duck weed. This made it slightly smelly. There was an unattractive concrete bench where the village youths hung out at night, but as there were only two youths it didn’t create much of a problem for the residents. They were more into chewing gum than crack cocaine, and even they went home to watch television at nine o’clock, thinking that something more exciting might happen on the BBC after the watershed.
The green was bordered on one side by the post office and general store – nothing less than the prime site for Mr Patel. On the other side was the Black Horse. Reg was an equal opportunities publican and was just as happy serving a pint of mild as he was a Pimm’s and lemonade. If your kind of fun was having cucumber floating in your drink, he was not about to argue the toss. The menu board catered for similarly eclectic tastes. There was the traditional Ploughman’s Lunch – sweating cheddar cheese, lettuce that was predominantly green and sensible, a large brown pickled onion and, the only attempt at exotica, French bread. The other extreme was the Advertising Executive’s Platter – smoked salmon, Parma ham and prawns, an abundance of florid Lollo Rosso adorned with more frills than Mrs Reg possessed on her Ann Summers négligée, all served on ciabatta bread with soured cream dressing. (It would have been focaccia but Mrs Reg felt it sounded too much like an Italian swear word.) Still, it was very popular with the estate agents, oil men and lawyers who had started to frequent the pub since the arrival in Buckinghamshire of two major oil companies. It was equally popular with Reg who couldn’t believe how much people were prepared to pay for what was essentially red lettuce. If only he could convince them that pork scratchings were de rigueur he could go out and happily roll in the clover. For a man whose taste in carpet ran to brown with red and orange flowers, Reg was surprisingly astute.
On the last side of the isosceles was the church. St Botolph’s of the Annunciation. Attractive, mellow stone, old, possibly mediaeval. Next to it was the churchyard. Rows of tombstones tilted like crooked teeth that hadn’t had the attention of a good orthodontist, weeds stretched up, tangling round the remnants of decaying bunches of daffodils – an early indicator of spring in Tesco – th
at had been left in the few plots that had been inhabited, if that was the right term, this century.
Next to that, in an equally shabby state, was the church hall. It was as unattractive as the church was attractive. The mellow stone that it was once built of had been repaired by a mixture of what appeared to be wooden railway sleepers, asbestos panels, breeze blocks and corrugated tin in a violent shade of British racing green. It was in constant use: Cubs, Scouts, Brownies, Guides – trainee youths to replace the two rapidly growing ones; Toddlers’ Group, Women’s Institute, Flower Arranging Club, Line Dancing, and Tums, Bums and Thighs. This was all the more surprising because of the dilapidated state of the building. The gingham curtains at the rotted wood windows flapped in the breeze, even with the windows closed. Illumination was supplied by one naked lightbulb hanging from each of the rickety beams. It was not entirely clear whether the beams were supporting the walls or the walls were supporting the beams, or what exactly was holding the roof up. If anything. The lavatory was outside – pre-war plumbing with a high cistern that objected to being flushed and a smooth wooden seat polished by years of warm bottoms. Creature comforts it had not, but there was usually an assorted assembly of creatures inside it. The sort that David Bellamy would be most interested in. It was just as well that there wasn’t a light in there either, though it would have come in useful the time that Mrs Took went in to relieve herself and sat on the lap of a passing tramp who had popped in to make use of the convenience as his bed for the night.
Apart from the odd passing tramp, there were very few tourists to Great Brayford. Most of them stopped at Stoke Hammond where there were three congested locks on the Grand Union Canal and you could watch the long-boats struggle through the murky water at a pace that was only suited to the terminally dedicated. There was also a pleasant pub and, usually, an ice-cream van whose trade roared like a lion. Studies had shown that the time it took for one boat to pass through one lock was equivalent to the time it took for the entire length of a White Chocolate Magnum to pass from one wooden stick to one person’s stomach. Very few who had enjoyed such rural delights found anything of interest in Great Brayford. Mr Patel stayed resolutely shut on a Sunday morning in reverence to the church opposite, so there was no ice cream. Plus it was the one day of the week when he took his charming wife and his immaculately-behaved children out for a drive in his P-reg Mercedes.
Those strangers who unwittingly did venture into Great Brayford were usually targeted by Basil for a spot of ‘village idiot’ treatment. Unfortunately this robbed Reg of some weekend income from the halves of shandy and the packets of plain crisps that the tourists might otherwise have consumed in his establishment, having found that the village shop was shut. But he wasn’t a man to bear a grudge.
Reg could no longer feign distraction by the pork scratchings to avoid doing the job that landlords hated to do most of all – talking to the customers, particularly when the only customer within arm’s reach was Basil. By way of solace he poured himself a large double whisky. ‘So, old chap, what’s new?’ he asked genially.
‘They’ve given that bloody McCartney chap a knighthood. What do you think of that?’ Basil nodded aggressively.
Heaven help us all, it was definitely one of those days. Reg took a swig of his whisky. ‘Paul McCartney?’
‘Sir Paul to you!’
‘Basil.’ Reg leaned on the bar and exuded as much patience as it was possible to muster for a weary landlord. ‘That hardly counts as new. It was the 1997 New Year’s Honours List. You’re not still brooding over that, surely.’
‘What’s he ever done for Britain? Tell me that!’ Basil prodded the air violently. ‘I spent years pushing paper in the name of Queen and country and what did I get for it?’
A big, fat, index-linked pension, Reg felt moved to say, and a boss that clearly didn’t care that you were completely off your bonce. ‘It wasn’t just for what he’s done for Britain, Basil. It was for the world. He’s one of the most popular entertainers of our time. His songs have made a lot of people very happy. Babies have been conceived to the sound of Lennon and McCartney. He’s sold over a hundred million singles. “Yesterday” is one of the most recorded songs ever.’
‘Bloody layabout!’
Reg closed his eyes briefly. ‘He’s amassed a personal fortune of four hundred million pounds, Basil.’ Nearly as much as your Civil Service pension, you awkward old bugger.
Basil looked unconvinced. ‘It’s about time he got a proper job.’
‘He does endless work for charity.’
Basil’s eyes widened maniacally. ‘He’s not as good as Perry Como.’
Reg realised that this was a battle that was lost before it was started. Best to give in graciously and wave the white flag in the form of an alcoholic sop. ‘Another half pint of cleaning fluid for you, Basil?’
‘Is it your round, landlord?’
‘Yes,’ Reg sighed. He pulled another half and handed the glass to Basil who nodded in thanks. Well, at least that was what he assumed it was; it could have been just a nervous tic.
‘What do you think of the nice young lady at number five, Basil? Have you met her yet?’
Basil shook his head and showered froth over the top of the bar, which Mrs Reg hadn’t long polished. ‘Anise tells me she’s a lady of the night but I’ve heard she’s one of these New Agers. Massage or some sort of funny thing.’ He grimaced. ‘All we needed in my day was a bit of wintergreen on the offending spot and you were as right as rain. She’s probably friends with that Swampy fellow. Next thing you know we’ll have a ruddy tunnel running right under us.’ He took another swig of his beer. ‘She’ll lower the tone of the village.’
‘She seems very nice.’ Reg mopped up the froth with a beer towel.
‘So do they all. At first.’ Basil nodded sagely. ‘Wait till she’s sporting dreadlocks and growing cannabis in her herbaceous borders. See if you think she’s so nice then.’
‘Mrs Reg went to see her about her feet and it stopped, just like that.’ Reg clicked his fingers.
‘What did?’
‘I don’t know,’ Reg admitted. ‘But if Mrs Reg said it stopped, then you can be sure it stopped.’
Basil snorted.
‘The only thing Mrs Reg thought was that she was a bit too young and lively to be living in a place like this. Mrs Reg thought she’d get bored. I think it’s nice to have some young blood in the village, don’t you, Basil?’ Otherwise, they’d all be crusty old buggers like you, Reg thought.
Basil looked down his nose. ‘Say that again when we’ve raves going on all night and hip-hop music frightening the sheep.’
It was a pointless conversation. As most were with Basil. Reg decided to try another tack. ‘I understand you’ve been doing some work for the Weston sisters. Gardening or some such, I heard.’
‘You heard correctly, mine host.’ Basil wiped a soupçon of froth from the ragged ends of his moustache with the sleeve of his tweed jacket.
‘I wouldn’t have thought that was your cup of tea.’
‘Ulterior motive, landlord. Ulterior motive.’ Basil winked alarmingly. ‘Fine filly, that one!’ He winked again. Perhaps it was a nervous tic.
‘Angelica?’ Reg was stunned. ‘You’ve got your eye on the lovely Angelica?’
‘Tish, tosh!’ Basil spluttered into his beer.
‘Let me get this straight then.’ Perhaps he should lay off the Teacher’s so early in the day. ‘If it’s not Angelica, that must mean that you fancy Anise?’
‘Ooerooraw.’ Basil made several Les Dawson-type noises that seemed to signify general approval.
‘You? Fancy Anise?’ Reg repeated it just to make sure his incredulity wasn’t misplaced.
Basil narrowed his eyes and leered lasciviously. It was a terrifying sight. ‘She’s the Queen Boadicea of Great Brayford!’
‘We are talking about the same Anise here, aren’t we?’ It always paid to be absolutely sure with Basil.
‘I should say so!
’ More Les-type noises accompanied the statement. ‘She’s like one of the Spice Girls!’
‘I don’t think there is an Old Stroppy Spice,’ Reg said with conviction. ‘They have to be young and stroppy. That’s the point.’
Basil looked perplexed.
‘Anise is a cantankerous old bat! I wouldn’t have thought she was your type at all.’ Then again . . .
‘I resent you calling the woman I love a cantankerous old bat! She’s a valiant, headstrong, sex-goddess old bat!’ Basil downed his half and slammed the empty glass on the bar. This time he didn’t wipe the froth from his moustache with his sleeve, or with anything else. Or from his beard. ‘In future I shall be taking my business to another, more congenial establishment.’ He stood up and headed for the door.
Reg straightened himself up and with a great surge of effort put the glass in the dishwasher. ‘You won’t get free beer anywhere else, Basil.’
‘In that case, landlord, I shall see you at the same time tomorrow.’
‘See you tomorrow, Basil.’
Reg turned to tidy the beer towel on the bar and the door banged on its hinges, startling the estate agents at the corner table tucking into their Lollo Rosso. Perhaps he should just have another small whisky. This sort of news couldn’t be absorbed when one was entirely sober. Reg knocked the whisky back in a gulp. Tears sprang to his eyes that were incidental to the swift consumption of Scottish water. Basil and Anise! Wait till he told Mrs Reg. He shook his head. If Basil could be that far off beam in his tweed and Nikes, he really should be grateful that it wasn’t a lilac shell suit day.
Chapter Six
‘Why do you call your house Builder’s Bottom?’ Rose was perched on the edge of the dust sheet which covered her treatment couch, watching as Dan knocked the reluctant bricks out of the fireplace with a hammer and chisel.
‘To annoy the neighbours.’ He paused and brushed his arm across his face, smearing it with dust. There was a sheen of sweat on his skin which was glowing slightly pink beneath his tan. He looked a bit like a Chippendale, but without the fake tan. Dan’s smooth brown skin was rugged and realistic, acquired from hours sweating outdoors. When he wasn’t smiling, tiny white lines showed at the corners of his eyes where the sun had failed to shine. It proved that he normally smiled a lot. ‘I have a childish, rebellious streak. They think I’m lowering the tone of the area.’