Читать книгу Ten Steps to Happiness - Daisy Waugh - Страница 10

Fiddleford Manor lay deep beneath snow. The boiler was broken, the house was freezing, the roof was leaking and there was a policeman at the bottom of the drive. Jo and Charlie had returned from their Mexican honeymoon only three weeks earlier, besotted, euphoric, absolutely one hundred per cent in love. And yet, as she looked out at the frozen landscape and the heavy, grey, endless sky, she thought for the first time of the perspex desk she had left in Soho, and of the low-fat, high-concept working lunch she would have been enjoying at exactly this moment six months ago, and briefly, treacherously, found herself wondering if she might have been better off staying in London, where mass cullings never interrupted the running of things, and where there was always emergency hot water at the gym.

A ludicrous thought, of course. And wrong, too. Jo loved her new life. She loved her new husband – of course. And she loved her old house.

It would have been difficult not to. Fiddleford Manor, built from the warm red local stone nearly three hundred years ago – vast, elegant and mostly held together by ivy – nestled magnificently inside its own landscaped park and, beyond that, a small and unspoilt and entirely unprofitable agricultural estate. There was a rose garden and a small lake with an old rowing boat to one side of the house, and a decrepit Victorian stable yard with its own broken clock tower on the other; at the front the long, wide lawns stretched past one towering cedar tree and the occasional jungle-like rhododendron all the way to the river bank. The house was a mile from the local village, where there was a church and a school and a small shop, four miles from the market town of Lamsbury and thirty-seven miles from the nearest train station, in the neighbouring county of Devon.

But right now Devon, like everywhere else, was out of bounds. The whole world was out of bounds. Ever since the man from Trading Standards had managed to struggle up the drive, with his appalling lilac-coloured office shirt, his appalling ‘Form A’, and his disinfected Wellingtons, it had been against the law for anyone to come on to or off the estate without a licence. And what with everything else that was going on, the entire countryside and every bureaucrat related to it in tailspin, no one had seen fit to grant a licence to the plumber. So the inhabitants of Fiddleford, Jo, Charlie, their difficult friend Grey McShane, and Charlie’s difficult father the General, huddled together in the kitchen, shivering and waiting.

They had been waiting for three days now. Or five days if you counted from the first telephone call, which was when everything really started changing. It came as they were finishing dinner. The General, who was meant – though he still showed no signs of it – to be in the process of moving into a large cottage at the end of the drive, had said, ‘Who the bloody Hell calls at this hour?’ and Charlie had gone off to find out. He came back into the dining room twenty minutes later, looking very bleak.

‘MAFF,’ he said simply.

Nobody spoke.

‘They’ve found a case of foot and mouth at Tom Shattock’s place. They’re sending a man round here in the morning.’

His father groaned.

‘But, listen, you never know.’ It sounded very hollow. ‘We might be fine…We might be absolutely fine.’

‘Poor old Shattock,’ murmured the General. ‘And it’s definite is it? Confirmed case?’

Charlie nodded. ‘Plus there’s another one suspected. It’s definite all right.’

The morning after that, while a Ministry vet inspected their cattle, Charlie led the lilac-coloured Standards man into the library. He’d wanted to know the exact whereabouts of every livestock animal on the estate: for ‘future reference’, he said; ‘in the event of evidence leading us to suspect…’ But they both knew what that meant. Charlie had been as helpful as he could. Or as he could bear to be.

He listed everything. Every single one of their 542 sheep, including the pregnant ewes, the three-day-old lambs, the seventeen rare and precious Dorset Horns. He told the man about his prize-winning dairy herd, and about his magnificent Jersey bull. He even mentioned his beloved twin sister Georgie’s billy goat which since her shocking death (in a riding accident a year and a half ago) had been bought a nanny companion and allowed to roam freely among the animals.

‘And that’s it?’ said the lilac man, clicking the top of his stainless steel pen and slipping it neatly into his lilac pocket. ‘Nothing else? No pigs?’

‘No.’

‘No new calves unaccounted for?’

‘No. None I haven’t mentioned.’

Lilac man offered a measly smile: ‘No nasty surprises lurking in forgotten corners anywhere? It’s a sizable estate.’

Charlie averted his eyes. He was a rotten liar, and he hated lying, but there were two animals he’d left out, whose existence at that particular moment was causing his body to break out in a cold sweat. Caroline and Jasonette, an ancient couple of Highland cows, had been wandering the park at Fiddleford ever since he and his twin sister were ten. They had been delivered, all those years ago, as a birthday surprise from their mother: twin calves, one for each of her twins. He and Georgina used to spend hours with them during the holidays, lounging around on their hairy backs, taking them on picnics (or taking picnics on them). They pinned photographs of their cows on their bedroom walls at school.

Once, when the twins were still small, and the cows were still calves and the sun was always shining and his twin and their mother were still alive, someone had left the front door open and both animals had been discovered looking bewildered, side by side in the middle of the hall. Their mother (the General had been away at the time, or it never would have happened) hadn’t yelled about the valuable paintings or the boring Japanese urn on the side table. She’d behaved as if everything was completely normal, as if the two little calves were making a perfectly ordinary social call.

She opened the door to the drawing room, since it was ‘nearly drinks time’, and invited the calves to come in. They followed her, the way calves do. The children had fetched bowls of milk from the kitchen, and the five of them had stood about beneath the portraits of disapproving soldiers, while Mrs Maxwell McDonald conducted a jolly conversation with all of them, exactly as if she had been entertaining the local vicar. Charlie and Georgie thought it was the most topsy-turvy thing they’d ever seen. They thought they would die from laughing. And the calves had looked so sweet and confused in the middle of that big drawing room, and their mother had looked so happy. It was one of the last memories they had of her before she fell ill. She must have died less than a year later…

Charlie looked out of the library window over the frozen hills to where the village lay, and the church, whose tower he could see, and the churchyard where his mother and sister lay side by side…He looked back at the lilac-coloured penpusher, with his measly lilac-coloured grin.

‘Nasty surprises?’ he said coolly. ‘At Fiddleford? Certainly not.’

The Ministry vet checked in with Jo and Charlie at the end of the same day. He’d not completed his inspection yet, he said, and he would be back first thing in the morning to finish off.

‘No signs yet, though,’ he said. ‘So fingers crossed.’

It gave them false hope. They all four drank too much that night. And then in the morning the vet returned and within minutes he’d found one of the heifers was limping.

She could have trodden on a sharp stone. More than likely, she had trodden on a sharp stone. Or one of the other cows might have kicked her. Or she’d woken up feeling stiff. It could have been any number of things. But the people from the Ministry weren’t willing to take the risk. Later that night came the official confirmation. There would be no need to take further tests. The limp was evidence enough. Death warrants had been signed and the slaughtermen were booked for Wednesday morning.

Since then, time for everyone at Fiddleford had been passing abnormally slowly. Jo wandered the house with her notebook, making obsessive and pointless notes about facilities which might be required for her future paying guests. Grey and the General, for lack of tabloid newspapers to argue over (their favourite – almost their only – pastime for several months now), were reduced to watching housewives’ television. Charlie, meanwhile, dealt with the animals, the farm workers, and the people from MAFF.

On Monday evening he telephoned the Ministry to inform them that the heifer’s limp had disappeared. On Tuesday evening he called again to inform them there were still no signs of infection among any of the other animals. But it was too late. That night the last of the animals were herded together into outhouses. The pyre was already built, and the sheep crushes and the cattle stocks lay waiting.

The snow turned to sleet that evening, and a cruel wind blew. Grey McShane, in a futile attempt to lighten everyone’s spirits, had lit a fire in the dining room. There was no food in the house, since the garden was covered in three feet of snow, and nobody was allowed out to go shopping. But Grey found an ancient tin of spaghetti at the back of the larder, which he plopped into a saucepan and burnt and then, with absurd fanfare, carried through to the dining room.

He doled out a plateful to Jo, who looked at it for several minutes and then suddenly leapt from her chair and ran out of the room. Charlie found her vomiting over the kitchen sink.

‘Are you all right?’ he said.

‘I’m fine. Completely fine. You go back in.’

‘Was it the spaghetti, do you think?’

She laughed.

‘Oh Christ, Jo, I’m so sorry. This must be awful for you.’

‘It’s fine. Please. Never mind me. I’m fine…I’m fine.’

‘We could get a licence and you could go and stay in London until it was over.’

‘Certainly not!’ She made an effort to smile, but the smile turned into a retch. ‘Oh, God—’ She retched again. ‘I think I’ll go upstairs.’

Jo ran to her bedroom and only just reached the basin in time. She stood there for a while, recovering, thinking, examining the splashes of vomit at her lovely, Mexican-tanned feet. She straightened up, wiped her mouth and, before she could change her mind yet again, headed over to the wardrobe and pulled out the testing kit which had been languishing there, driving her crazy, since the day before the MAFF people first called.

Afterwards she didn’t quite know what to do. Call her mother? No. Anyway she was away in El Salvador, taking artistic holiday snaps. Burst in on Charlie – and Grey and the General – in that freezing cold dining room? Definitely not. Have a bath?

There was no hot water for a bath. She decided to go straight to bed. She took off her uncomfortable urban clothes (skintight jeans @ £125, stripy cashmere jersey with pointless zip and hood), which were so incredibly ineffective in her new rural life, and replaced them with a pair of pyjamas and every jersey she could find in Charlie’s cupboard.

She lay awake for what felt like hours after that, trying to persuade herself it was real, trying to feel what she was meant to feel – fulfilled and magical and womanly and blessed, trying not to feel terrified of how her life, which until she met Charlie had always been so painstakingly well structured, seemed so quickly to be slipping out of her control. But then somehow she must have fallen asleep because she woke with a start at about three o’clock to discover that Charlie still hadn’t joined her.

Out on the icy landing she could find no sign of him either. The house was quiet. The vast, stone-floored entrance hall beneath her was shrouded in black. She bent over the banister and thought she saw a faint crack of light coming from beyond the back lobby, and then suddenly, from the same direction, she heard the muffled sound of something large crashing to the ground.

‘…Charlie?’

The house was old – especially the back part, the part where the noise was coming from. Among her many strengths (her warmth, her determination, her well maintained contacts book and, though she felt far from beautiful that night, her delicate elfin good looks), Jo was a practical woman, not remotely given to superstitious anxieties. But she was terrified.

‘…Charlie?’

No response, just a distant shuffling, followed by a long, low moan.

‘…Charlie!’

Slowly, carefully, in almost total darkness, she followed the sound as far as the back lobby, where she paused for a moment. She could hear breathing very clearly now: heavy, quick-fire, phlegmy breathing, like a sleeping giant. The back lobby led on to the kitchen, and beyond that to the pantry and the boot room, and from there to the stairs which went down to the cellars. The thin stream of light was coming from the cellars, somewhere Jo and her notebook had not bothered to venture before.

Tentatively, she walked down the steps and found herself in a large, dank room cluttered with what looked like pieces of rotting furniture. There was a room on either side of her, both of them in darkness, and in front of her, a miserable, decaying corridor. She could hear the noises coming from beyond it: the breathing, someone hammering and then Charlie, ‘It’s OK, girl. It’s OK. Take it easy. Just a bit of noise. I’ll be done in a sec.’

Which was when she finally saw them. Dwarfing the corridor and the small room at the end of it, dwarfing Charlie: two old Highland cows, covered in cobwebs and flakes of rotting paint, puffing after their strange exertions.

Charlie looked up. ‘Jo!’ he said. ‘It’s—How are you? I thought you were asleep.’

‘What the fuck are you doing?’ she asked.

‘What? Me? Nothing.’

‘Nothing?’

‘Shh! You’ll frighten the girls.’

‘The girls?’ Gingerly, to ensure that she wasn’t dreaming, she edged forward and put out a finger to touch one of them. It responded with a friendly grunt and by wiping its damp nose on the sleeve of her outer jersey. She snatched her hand away quickly. ‘Charlie, they’re not girls, they’re cows. What are they doing in the cellar?’

‘Jo…You’re wonderful.’

‘What?’

‘I’m just saying—’ He hesitated. ‘This has nothing to do with you.’

‘Are you hiding them?’

‘Please. Mind your own business.’

‘What if they’re infected?’

‘They’re not infected. They’ve been nowhere near any other farm animals for almost twenty-five years. But I’m going to let them work out their quarantine down here, just to be sure.’

‘Don’t be ridiculous, Charlie. We’ve got to get these cows back in the shed where they belong—’

‘They’re not going anywhere.’

‘Apart from anything else it’s not—I mean they’re probably not going to make it through the winter anyway. It’s not worth it.’ Charlie glared at her and, without another word, turned back to his hammering. He was trying to fix a plank over a large air vent, but every time he hit the nail, chunks of wall fell out. She watched him for a while. ‘I’m sorry. I don’t mean to be—’ She paused to think of the right word, but all she could come up with was ‘realistic’. She decided not to fill the gap.

‘You must be freezing,’ he said over his shoulder.

‘I’m fine, Charlie, my darling. That’s not really the point.’

‘I know it isn’t.’ He turned back to face her. ‘The point is I’ve got to get this place soundproofed before morning. So please. Seriously. I love you and everything. But either give me a hand, or – go away.’

She looked at the old cows, so gentle and decrepit, their heads and necks still bobbing rhythmically from the trouble of getting down the cellar stairs, flakes of paint the size of saucers hanging off their enormous horns. She looked at Charlie, so utterly in earnest. A year ago, in her more black-and-white days, she might easily, at this point, have decided to bring in the police. That night she didn’t know what to do. The cows couldn’t do any harm, working out their quarantine down here in the cellar, and the idea of getting them out again, and then tomorrow of watching Charlie lining them up for the stocks…

‘By the way, Charlie,’ Jo said sulkily about a minute later, sounding absurdly, self-consciously casual. They were squeezed between the cows and the decaying wall, trying together to fix the soundproofing plank without causing the whole rotten cellar to disintegrate. ‘I’m pregnant. Already. OK?’ (She was embarrassed; it was embarrassingly quick.) ‘I only mention it because we’d better not get caught. I mean I’m definitely not going to prison over this.’

The extermination process was a long and horrible one, beginning before dawn had properly broken, and not ending until dusk on the following day. First to be slaughtered was the dairy herd. It took seven men five hours to dispatch them. Les, the Fiddleford farm hand, would set each one on her journey, steering her the hundred-odd yards through the snow, down the steep path, to the makeshift stall where Charlie stood ready to slip her head into a brace. She would be injected with sedative and then led from the stocks to the land in front of the pyre, as close as possible to the body of the cow which had preceded her, where she would be shot in the head.

Nobody spoke much. The animals rolled in, the animals rolled out, the bodies piled up. The Ministry people had seen it all before. They’d been doing it every day for weeks, which isn’t to suggest that they were enjoying themselves. But it was a job with an hourly rate. It wasn’t their twin sister’s billy goat who was waiting in the yard to have its brain scrambled.

Grey McShane shuffled out to the killing fields just before noon, by which time the slaughterer’s regulation white body suits were soaked in blood. He should have been wearing one himself. One had been left by the back door for him. But Grey was not fond of orders.

In fact he was wearing a Prada suit which had lost its buttons and a pair of the General’s old gumboots. He was carrying a bottle of gin, as he always did, and his big black coat was dragging in the mud behind him. One of the Ministry men hurried across the field to intercept him.

‘It’s strictly no access without the suit,’ he said, inadvertently wiping the blood from his cuff across his nose and forehead. ‘I’m sorry, sir. Someone should have told you. The clothes will have to be burnt now.’

‘What clothes?’

‘The er—suit. Everything. Sorry. Regulations.’

‘Aye,’ muttered Grey distractedly, walking politely around him.

Having offered Charlie his help, and been greatly relieved when it was rejected, Grey had intended to play as supportive a role as he could in the proceedings, but from inside the house, as far away from the smell of blood as was supportively possible. Looking at the carnage, the rows of bodies, the white-suited men with their disinfectant sprays and bloodstains, the sound of the gun, he was finding it very hard to stay focused. He wished he could turn back, but a crisis was developing and he needed Charlie’s help. He took a deep swig at the gin to stop himself from vomiting. He looked back at the Ministry man. ‘Where is he, then?’

‘Who?’

‘Where’s Charlie?’

‘Charlie?’

‘Charlie,’ he said coldly, ‘is the man whose animals you’re in the process of exterminatin’. Charlie Maxwell McDonald.’ Grey glanced disconsolately around the field. ‘Where the fuck is he?’

‘He’s round the corner, by the stocks. But you really can’t—I must insist—’

Grey, thirty-eight years old that summer, had been quite famous once, when he was thirty-seven. Like his friend Jo, he was a refugee from London, from the successful people’s party circuit, but unlike Jo, who’d thrived in it for ten years or more before she pressed the ejector button, Grey McShane had lasted only a matter of weeks. An enormous, miraculously handsome Scottish ex-jailbird, alcoholic and former tramp, he was ‘discovered’ by a handful of fashionable opinion makers, drunkenly reciting his own poetry outside a well-known theatre in Islington. Not long afterwards, Phonix Records had hitched itself onto the McShane bandwagon and offered him an unheard of £1 million contract to make an album of his poetry. The marketing people proclaimed him a genius, a voice for a disenfranchised generation, a living embodiment of a modern generation’s pain. And Grey was one of the few people who had never believed them. Anyway the contract was withdrawn soon afterwards, when Grey was wrongly denounced as a paedophile, at which point (for about a week) he became the nation’s most hated figure, hounded and jeered at on the front of every newspaper. Nobody was surprised when, a week or so after that, the geniuses at Phonix suddenly came to the conclusion that Grey wasn’t a genius after all.

That was back in October. He’d been hiding out with his friends at Fiddleford ever since, the living inspiration for Charlie and Jo’s new business venture, a lonely, private figure who insisted on paying over the odds for his board and lodging, and who so far displayed no signs of ever planning to leave. He was bad-tempered, lazy, reckless, argumentative, funny, brave and, when he thought someone deserved it, heroically loyal. The General adored him. Charlie and Jo, both several years his junior, often suggested that he find somewhere else to live, but they no longer expected it and in fact they would have been quite sorry to see him go. He had been instrumental in bringing the two of them together, and now, as he picked his way through the carcasses, swallowing his own bile and dodging the bossy men in suits, he was about to fight for their interests once again.

‘Ah. There you are, Charlie,’ he said. ‘At last. How’s it goin’?’

‘Hi Grey,’ muttered Charlie, without looking up. There was a cow’s head lodged between his forearms. He was watching intently while a vet emptied his syringe into the vein beneath her tail. A moment later Charlie released the cow and stood back, patting its fat, healthy rump for the last time as it was ushered away. Grey leant towards Charlie. ‘Something’s come up,’ he whispered. ‘You’re needed at the house.’

‘Is it Jo?’

‘Excuse me,’ interrupted the vet, ‘but you need to be wearing one of the suits down here. Someone should have told you.’

‘I know that already,’ said Grey helpfully. ‘I’ve come to fetch Charlie.’ He looked back at the space where Charlie had been standing. ‘…Charlie?’

Grey didn’t catch up with him until they reached the boot room door. ‘It’s nothing to do with Jo, you silly sod,’ he panted irritably. ‘Calm down. It’s yer bloody cows.’

‘Cows? What cows?’

‘Och, for God’s sake! You woke the whole bloody house last night. What bloody cows do you think?’

Just then, from almost directly beneath them, came an unmistakable, ground-shaking bellow. Charlie removed his cap and tugged with embarrassment at his dark hair. ‘Oh. Those cows,’ he said feebly. ‘Has anyone else heard, do you think?’

Grey chuckled. ‘The General and me have bin ignorin’ it all morning, shouting at each other to pass the marmalade, pretending there’s always cows bellyaching through the kitchen floor at us. I swear they’ve been making the fuckin’ windows rattle…I don’t know about Jo, though. I haven’t seen her.’ Grey looked as tactful as he could, but he, like Charlie, had known Jo in the olden days, when she was as priggish as all her fashionable friends. Ex-friends. She was much more laid-back recently, but there were times when she still reverted – especially when she was under pressure.

‘Oh. No. Don’t worry about Jo. She helped me,’ said Charlie. He looked at Grey and smiled slightly. ‘Jo’s fine. Has anyone else heard?’

‘I don’t think so, no. Mrs Webber’s not in today. I checked. Anyway she’s totally deaf. Have you noticed? She can’t hear a bloody word.’

‘What about Les?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘Mr Tarr?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘Have any of the MAFF people used the lavatory?’

‘Fuck, I don’t know. What do you think? I’ve been standing guard here all mornin’? If they had they would have said something. So I suppose not.’

There came another earth-shattering groan from beneath them. ‘Aye,’ said Grey matter-of-factly. ‘It’s happenin’ about every couple a’ minutes. It’s pretty constant. Sometimes they just keep goin’ on. Did you not think about the soundproofing? What were you bloody doing down there all night?’

Neither of them had the faintest idea how many sleeping pills each cow needed but since Grey had only twenty left, they gave ten to each. They ground them into bowls of warm milk and Charlie took them down to the cellar while Grey and Jo – whom they’d found wandering the boot room with her notebook – kept guard and each other company at the back door.

The cows looked resentful, bewildered and slightly mad when Charlie found them. They were covered in sweat and a thick layer of ceiling plaster, which rained onto them every time their vast horns knocked against any of the walls. But they drank the milk without any trouble and Charlie stayed with them talking, reminiscing. They seemed to draw comfort from the familiar sound of his voice.

After a while Jo grew worried that the MAFF people would be missing him, and decided to go down and fetch him out. She found him sitting on one of the straw bales they had carried down together the previous night. He was leaning his long legs against the rump of one of the animals, holding his dark head in his hands, deep in thought. He looked so sad it stopped her in her tracks. She watched him for a moment, unsure how to break the silence. She felt like an intruder.

‘Which one was yours, Charlie?’

He looked up slowly, with a faint smile of welcome. ‘This one,’ he said, nodding at his feet. ‘Jasonette. At least, I wanted to call her Jason. But Georgie said…you know…Jason was a boy’s name…’ He fell silent.

‘Jasonette…’ Jo smiled. ‘You know you should probably get back out there, Charlie,’ she added gently. ‘They’ll be wondering where you are.’

‘I know.’ He didn’t move. ‘I just—it sounds ridiculous, but I don’t much want to be there when they kill…I should never have told them about the bloody goat.’

‘You had to. He’s been living with the other animals. If they were infected—’

‘Which they bloody well aren’t.’

‘Yes, but for all you knew he was infected, too.’

‘He could have been down here now…’

Jo went to sit on the bale beside him. She put an arm around him and they sat together for several minutes without speaking, watching as the animals’ eyelids grew heavy. Charlie was lost in his grieving, and Jo could do nothing for him except sit with him and wait. She had never known Charlie’s sister but he spoke about her so often she sometimes forgot they’d never actually met. Strong-minded, bold, friendly and incredibly hearty, Georgina Maxwell McDonald would have been the sort of girl Jo disliked on sight not so long ago. Now, living in a house with three men, and already far less troubled than she used to be by what passed for urban hip, Jo wished that she and Georgina could have been friends. Sometimes (which she kept to herself because she knew it was absurd) Jo even found herself missing her. At that moment, sitting beside Georgina’s mourning twin and feeling hopelessly inept, hopelessly impotent, Jo didn’t care how absurd it seemed. She missed her sister-in-law, or the sister-in-law she imagined, more than she had ever missed anyone, alive or dead.

‘I’m so sorry,’ she burst out. ‘It must be so awful for you. I wish I could…’ and to her dismay she started crying.

‘Hey,’ he said, laughing slightly and giving her shoulders a squeeze. ‘Hey…’

‘I’m so sorry.’

‘Oh, I know you are, Jo…thank you…’

And they fell silent again, neither noticed for how long. Suddenly Grey (whose natural impatience had been kept in admirable check until then) yanked them rudely back to the moment.

‘Jesus fuckin’ hell, I’m freezin’ my arse off out here! Are they not asleep yet? I can’t hear a soddin’ sound!’

The cows slept all that afternoon and all night and most of the following morning. By the time they started getting restless again it was lunchtime and most of the work was already done. But there were still half a dozen Ministry men hanging around and the pyre was yet to be lit. Charlie, Grey and Jo met up in the cellar to decide what they should do next. They had run out of sleeping pills and the cows had rejected the litre of vodka mixed with milk and golden syrup. Jo produced a small bottle of Rescue Remedy and was arguing about how to get the drops onto the animals’ tongues when Jasonette’s right horn sent the bottle flying.

‘Well, fuck that,’ said Grey. ‘That’s fucked that then, hasn’t it?’ He made the animals jump.

‘Will you stop shouting,’ snapped Charlie.

‘Charlie, calm down. He’s only trying to help.’

‘Well. He’s not succeeding. He’s scaring the girls.’

‘Och, sod off.’

‘Yeah, Charlie,’ said Jo. ‘Actually I second that.’

The humans were growing as tetchy as the animals, and the animals were growing tetchier and noisier with every minute. Nobody noticed the General until he was standing right beside them.

‘EXCUSE ME!’ They all jumped. ‘Sorry to butt in,’ he said dryly, ‘but we may have a small problem. The fellow from Trading Standards has just called. He’s been in touch with the BCMS, whatever that may be. Or the BC something else. Anyway he seems to think there may be a couple of beasts up here which we haven’t accounted for…I told him it was nonsense, of course, but I’m afraid he’s like a dog with a bone. He’s on his way over.’

When he arrived the four inhabitants of Fiddleford were standing in a line at the end of the drive waiting for him. The plan, in as much as they’d had time to form one, was first and foremost to keep him away from the house. It was decided that the General, as soon as things looked dangerous, would discombobulate by feigning some sort of health attack; Jo, who didn’t like long walks, would rush him into the house and then Charlie and Grey, with an air of repressed panic and polite martyrdom, would insist on pressing on with the business, leading him on a circuitous route to the furthest end of the estate. When the man was looking exhausted, blue with cold, faint with boredom and regret at ever having returned to Fiddleford, they would direct his attention to a mound, a little hillock, a snow drift, anything which looked appropriate, and tell him they thought (though they couldn’t be certain what with the snow, and after so much time had passed) it was the place where the cows had been buried eleven years earlier.

It was a ludicrous plan and it didn’t work. Obviously. Because the first thing the man wanted to do, after expressing wholly unfelt regret for disturbing them once again, was to go to the lavatory.

‘Lav’s blocked,’ said the General, squaring his shoulders, refusing to break the line. ‘Sorry about that. Pipes are frozen. Have to go behind a tree…I think—Charlie, didn’t you bring a trowel with you, just in case the fellow came up with something like this?’

‘Certainly did,’ said Charlie, producing one from his back pocket.

‘Oh goodness, not to worry.’ Mr Coleridge gazed longingly between their heads at the handsome building behind them. ‘Isn’t there, perhaps, a functioning toilet I could use upstairs?’

‘No toilets,’ said Charlie. ‘Sorry.’

‘Ah well, never mind. I shall just have to store it up…’ He rubbed his soft white hands together and shivered. ‘Perhaps a cup of tea then? I won’t take up too much of your time. It’s just a simple matter to clear up, as you know. I’m sure it’s nothing. A minor oversight.’

‘Tea’s run out,’ said Jo. ‘Anyway it’s a diuretic. It’ll make you worse. Why don’t you let Charlie and Grey quickly take you off to where the poor old cows are buried? That way we won’t be wasting your time – and goodness knows you must be busy. And then if you get caught short along the way—’

Coleridge frowned. He didn’t like to be outside for any longer than he needed to be and he had absolutely no intention of spending his afternoon trudging through the snow in search of illegally buried animals. ‘This probably isn’t the time to mention it,’ he said, ‘and of course I realise the Act doesn’t, strictly speaking, apply to me. But you should be aware that you are in fact legally obligated to provide workers with a functioning toilet as well, of course, as the usual facilities for making hot beverages. Under the Health and Safety at Work Act. 1974. I only mention it because I wonder how the others are managing. Or perhaps you have provided alternative arrangements…’

Jo opened her mouth to say something appropriately soothing, but the General didn’t give her a chance to speak. He had yet to learn what a powerfully efficient ally he had in his annoying new daughter-in-law, so at the mention of unfulfilled legal obligations, he panicked.

‘Aaarrrggh!’ he cried, clutching his heart melodramatically and staggering forwards.

Immediately and with surprising elegance, Mr Coleridge lunged to catch him.

‘Quickly!’ he shouted, gripping the General’s shoulders. ‘Don’t just stand there! Let’s get him inside the house!’

The General struggled ineffectively for escape, but the man from Trading Standards was not to be put off. Transferring the General into one tight arm, he used the other to loosen his patient’s tie.

‘Get your hands off me, you filthy bugger!’ shouted the General. ‘…Help! Someone!…Charlie! Get this bugger off me!’

Mr Coleridge’s own father-in-law had died from a heart attack right in front of him only two years earlier, and it had been horrible. Whatever the General chose to call him he would do everything he could not to repeat the experience. Amid loud protestations from all four of them, Mr Coleridge lifted the General off his feet and carried him back into the house. Short of knocking the man unconscious, which was more or less out of the question, there wasn’t much they could do to stop him.

‘He needs,’ puffed the lilac hero, after he’d gently laid the General onto the drawing-room sofa, ‘a cup of hot, sweet tea. Don’t you think?’

‘I’m perfectly bloody well all right,’ spluttered the General, puce with rage. ‘Bit of wind, that’s all. And if you touch me again, you officious little bugger, I’ll have you up for assault. Is that clear?’

Lilac Man nodded phlegmatically. ‘I tell you what, though,’ he looked playfully across to Jo, ‘I could use a nice cup of tea myself!’

Just then, from the back of the house, came the unmistakable rumble they had all been dreading. Charlie, Jo, Grey and the General froze. They looked across at Coleridge in trepidation. They waited…

‘Mrs—Maxwell McDonald?’ wheedled Coleridge doggedly. ‘Or failing that a coffee would be super.’

The rumble continued. Was he deaf?

‘Smiley,’ said Jo quickly. ‘The name is still Smiley. In fact. And of course you could have tea, if we had any. But we don’t.’ She paused. The cows were in full voice now, and in unison. It seemed to her that they were getting louder every second. ‘But why are you asking me as opposed to anyone else? We’re all as capable of making cups of tea as each other. Or we would be. If there was any tea. Which as I say there isn’t…Isn’t that right, Charlie?’

‘Mmm? Oh, absolutely. The thing about tea…’

Slowly, at last, the man from Trading Standards held up a finger and frowned. ‘Shhh,’ he said. ‘What’s…that…?’

Charlie clapped his hands together and stood up. ‘So,’ he shouted. ‘Who has sugar? Dad, I know you do. I know you do, Grey. You don’t, do you, Jo. And I don’t either. So the single remaining mystery, on the sugar front, is you, Mr Coleridge. Mr Coleridge, are you a sugar man?’

‘Shhh!’

‘Do you have sugar, Mr Coleridge?’

‘Shhh! Please. Be quiet—’ Still with one finger aloft, he headed into the hall. Charlie followed him.

‘I hate to be rude,’ said Charlie, padding unhappily after him, ‘but the back of the house really is out of bounds. I thought I explained. We can’t just have people trespassing…Mr Coleridge? Please! Where do you think you’re going?’

Mr Coleridge broke into a jog. As Jo had done two nights previously, he followed the by now thunderous noise through the back hall, past the boot room to the cellar door, where he paused and turned victoriously towards Charlie.

‘I have reason to believe—’ he said smugly.

‘What? Reason to believe what?’ snapped Charlie. The cows lowed again, more quietly this time, as if they were settling down at last, now that it was too late, and Charlie looked at him with hopeless desperation. ‘Mr Coleridge,’ he said quietly. ‘Please. Why are you doing this?’

‘For reasons of health and safety—’

‘But they’re in quarantine down there! They couldn’t be healthier or safer!’

‘We’re not talking about the health and safety of your animals, Mr Maxwell McDonald. We’re talking about the health and safety of the community at large. For which, at this moment in time, I am currently responsible.’

‘They’ve had no contact with any livestock for over twenty years, Mr Coleridge. And they’re in quarantine. Please…What harm can they do down there? Can’t we at least test them? Can’t we test them first? And if they’re carrying the disease—Which they aren’t…’

‘My job, as you know, is simply to make a note of all livestock on the premises, and that is what I have come here to do—’

‘But what harm are they doing? What harm can they possibly do?’

‘For reasons of health and safety—’

‘This has nothing to do with health and safety! You know as well as I do the cows are no threat to anyone down there.’

‘For reasons of health and safety,’ he said steadfastly, ‘I must ask you to open that door.’

‘Not me,’ said Charlie. ‘Open it yourself. But watch out. They’ve been known to attack strangers.’

Coleridge hesitated for a second. Highland cows are always gentle, and Charlie’s were the most gentle of all. But Coleridge didn’t know that. He knew only that they were hefty, and horned and very hairy…He considered retreating to fetch reinforcements, but then they might hide the cows somewhere else, somewhere he might never find them. He couldn’t risk it. Plus he had the law on his side, and a delicious, intoxicating sense of his own efficiency. Mr Coleridge garnered all his courage, thought briefly of whom he might sue should anything go wrong, took the few steps to the cellar door and opened it.

The animals had somehow managed to break out of their makeshift stable at the end of the corridor and were standing in the middle of the main room, surrounded by broken bottles and in a large pool of what at first glance looked like blood but was in fact some of the General’s best wine. They greeted Coleridge with a long, low wail of pitiful bewilderment.

Coleridge quickly summoned the vets, the slaughtermen and two of the pyre operators who could be spared, now that the fire was lit. They all looked on (or stood guard) while Charlie coaxed the animals up the cellar stairs again.

‘I am sorry,’ said Mr Coleridge as they passed him – and in his own humdrum way he meant it. ‘I’m sure you will understand, once the heat of the moment is passed, so to speak. I’m only doing my job. Please don’t run away with the impression that I’m enjoying this.’

Charlie shrugged. ‘At least if you were enjoying it,’ he said, ‘there would be some point to the exercise.’

He led them through the back yard, across the yard beyond, to the steep path which led to the bottom field. Grey, the General and Jo walked silently beside him, and, like a gaggle of official mourners, the law enforcers followed close behind. It was dark by then, and their slow journey was lit by the snow’s reflection of the flames from the distant pyre. As the three old friends shuffled along, the one leading the others to their execution, the animals kept up their mournful wails of protest, and Charlie chattered to them incessantly. They were his childhood companions, his link with the past. In their gentle, affectionate souls he felt that a small part of his mother and his sister were living yet, and he felt that his mother and sister were watching him on this long slow walk, and that with every step he took, he was forsaking them.

The cows seemed to have no sense of what was about to befall them until they came to the point, over the brow of a small upward slope, where for the first time the smell of roasting flesh hit their nostrils, and the full, loathsome scale of the burning pyre and the great pile of carcasses which lay illuminated at its base became clear for all to see.

After that the cows wouldn’t move. They were transfixed. Nothing Charlie, or Grey or Jo or the General, or the pyre builders, or the slaughtermen, or the vets said or did could make them take another step. After a while Mr Daniels, the burly senior slaughterman, made a point of looking at his watch. ‘We can’t stand about ’ere fur ever,’ he said. ‘We shall have to kill ’em as they stand.’

‘No,’ said Charlie.

‘But they ain’t movin’ nowhere, Mr Maxwell McDonald. We shall be ’ere all night.’

‘You’re not killing them here,’ said Charlie. ‘You’re not. They need…’ He cast around for something, anything, to delay the moment. ‘They need to be tranquillised first.’

‘With respect,’ said one of the vets, ‘you’re only prolonging the process. They don’t need to be transquillised. As you can see they’re quite calm. They need—’

‘Don’t tell me what they need,’ said Charlie. ‘Don’t fucking tell me what they need.’ He rested his head on Jasonette’s shoulders and all the humans fell silent, looking at him.

Mr Daniels nodded at his assistant and stepped forward, his bolt gun at the ready. The two of them walked around the side of the animals and came to a halt at their heads.

‘Sedate them,’ barked the General suddenly. ‘Why don’t you sedate them?’ Something in his voice made Jo look across at him. There were tears rolling down his face.

‘The longer we stand here,’ the senior vet tried his best to sound as patient as he wished he could feel, after so much killing, ‘the more alarmed they’re going to become. Go on, Mr Daniels. Please. Continue. Get it done.’

Mr Daniels held up his gun and Jasonette stood there, waiting, offering him her large furry temple. ‘We’ll be doin’ ’em a favour, you know,’ he muttered disapprovingly. ‘Old beasts like this. They’re better off dead.’

Charlie leapt at him. Before he had time to think, before anyone had time to stop him. Charlie had never in his adult life hit a single soul, but there was a crack as his fist struck the slaughterman’s jaw. Mr Daniels lurched backwards, blinked in surprise, and immediately lurched forwards again to wreak his revenge. And then Jo, until that point strangely anaesthetised by the horror, sprung suddenly to life. Head down and yelling, she lunged for Mr Daniels’ burly chest.

‘No!’ cried Charlie, trying to catch her before she got hurt. ‘No, Jo, don’t!’

Daniels looked from one to the other in confusion. It distracted him for a second, long enough for Grey, 6′4″, fearless and frightening without even trying to be, to step up between them.

‘Leave it,’ he snarled, glowering down at Daniels. ‘Leave it.’

They eyeballed each other. Daniels hesitated. ‘They’re only a couple of fuckin’ cows,’ he said, retreating with a surly shuffle. And with that, and with Charlie and Jo both restrained by the pyre builders, and the animals standing alone, helpless but not entirely oblivious, he took his gun, took aim and fired.

Bang.

Bang.

They were almost dead. The assistant slaughterer bent over the bodies and inserted his serrated rod into the bullet holes, twisted. With a final jerk, a final grunting, hiccupping moan, Caroline and Jasonette departed.

‘As a gesture of goodwill,’ Mr Coleridge said, ‘I shan’t be making a detailed report about the incidents surrounding this case. Suffice to say, Mr Maxwell McDonald, that all livestock on the Fiddleford estate has now been duly recorded.’