Miranda’s Family

Chapter Sixteen

As he no longer needed to work all the hours he could stay awake to build up his finances for what he thought of as his ‘great escape’, Ryan decided to sit outside on the tiny front porch of his new home for a while. He’d enjoy the fine summery weather while watching people walk by, and he’d watch the small animals and birds too.

Before he’d moved there he’d stood in the back garden, looking along the fence line of the big house to the scruffy little cottage hugging one kink in the fence at the back of the same edge of it, just as his own cottage did nearer the front. He’d guess that the two pieces of land had been selected for the cottages, perhaps to house servants and their families, by the owner of the big house many years ago.

The guy who sometimes lived in the other cottage didn’t seem to be in residence at the moment. Strange how he’d taken a dislike to that chap whom he’d only seen at a distance. They’d never even exchanged greetings let alone had a proper conversation, though that wasn’t his fault. At first when he’d passed the guy in the village, Ryan had nodded to him as you usually did to your neighbours, and he’d seen other people do the same to their neighbours.

The fellow hadn’t nodded back once, let alone smiled, either at him or the others who lived nearby. After getting such an utter lack of response a few times, Ryan had stopped bothering, though he did nod to the rest of the locals – and they nodded back!

Living so close to the cottage, however, he couldn’t help noticing what this fellow did when he was in residence. Not much, was a good summary of what went on at the other cottage. Its tenant polished the shiny red convertible regularly, though, heaven knew why because he didn’t often go out in it and it wasn’t usually dirty as he’d built a small roofed shelter for it at one side of his cottage. He sat in it sometimes, simply sat there like a fool staring into space.

His other main activity seemed to be spying on the big house or watching the people who lived near it. He tried to stay out of Ryan’s sight when he was at home and did his spying from an upstairs bedroom. Only he often used binoculars and didn’t seem to notice how they caught the sun and reflected its light at people.

Well, he was welcome to keep an eye on Ryan and good luck to him with that because there was nothing to be gained from what he saw. Ryan sat outside when the weather was good, painting, or he tended his garden. What he had of most value was inside his head, not external physical wealth-making systems.

He often sat in his small sunroom at the side of his cottage where it was presumably easy for him to be seen, because the walls were made mainly of glass panels. You won’t see me doing anything visually interesting or out of the ordinary, you idiot , he thought sometimes. All he did was use his desktop computer for the small IT jobs which were all he took on these days or else he worked at his easel, painting the pictures of small birds and other creatures that were starting to sell occasionally. That was a far more enjoyable way of earning a living than working on a computer.

Why did that fellow want to see what his neighbours were doing when he didn’t even know them by name? As Ryan’s Lancashire grandmother would have said, ‘There’s nowt so queer as folk.’ Only she’d always pronounced the last word of the old saying ‘fowk’ to rhyme roughly with ‘nowt’. But she’d been right: there was nothing as strange as people and this guy was right up there among the leaders of the stranger inhabitants of the human world.

The people in the village knew when Westerby was in residence, of course they did, and Ryan had first learnt his neighbour’s name by overhearing in the shop some of their adverse remarks about him and his unfriendliness.

He also noticed that they made no attempt whatsoever to chat to the fellow, simply walked past him as if he wasn’t there. They were starting to chat to Ryan, though, and that pleased him. One or two of the oldies had dropped hints about which plants did well round here and when he listened to them carefully and did as they’d suggested, they started to offer him cuttings and seedlings as well, which he’d accepted as gladly as their advice.

Today one or two of them waved to him as they walked past and noticed him sitting there. And of course he smiled and waved back. He felt delighted the first time this happened. He had no desire to live like a hermit but he hadn’t wanted to push himself at them so had waited to let them make the first verbal overtures beyond a hello.

He’d chatted a few times with Greg and Ashley at the shop in their quieter moments, and had got as far as admitting that he was into painting. Ashley had asked if he ever sold paintings and when he admitted that he did, she’d said she’d like to see them. If she thought folk round here might like them, maybe they could try putting one or two up for sale in the shop. They might be just right to brighten up the café’s inner corner.

‘I’ll come over and look at them this afternoon, if that’s all right with you,’ she’d said. ‘It’s usually our quietest time of day. If I can sell one or two, I’ll have to charge a twenty per cent agent’s fee, but we’ll both benefit from any sales, eh?’

‘Happy to have you visit any time. And if you can sell a few that’d be good.’ He didn’t need the money desperately but it’d be good to move in the direction of selling the occasional painting, because the buyers’ remarks gave him pleasure. And it never hurt to bring in a little more money even when you didn’t mind living frugally.

He’d settled into mainly painting flowers, both wildflowers and garden blooms, as well as the little animals and other creatures he saw scurrying about on the ground and among lower bits of foliage round here. And he must have got his market right because a few people had bought the smaller or cheaper paintings from the shop and others had commented on them approvingly even when they didn’t buy.

It wasn’t to everyone’s taste to live with wildlife on the walls, but he loved watching the animals and insects bustling to and fro near his cottage, and often finding a place for themselves in his latest scene as a consequence, even when they weren’t the main focus of that painting. He hadn’t set out to have tiny creatures peeping out from behind his images of wildflowers or from among the foliage of low-growing shrubs, but somehow they often did. And people liked seeing them there.

He’d felt he’d earned some relaxation time today because he’d had a very late night dealing with an urgent IT problem for the owners of the village shop. He’d been there when things went wrong and of course he’d offered his help.

This had turned into a paying job that would bring him a nice little chunk of money to swell the modernisation fund for this cottage, not to mention creating plenty of gratitude and goodwill, which was important too when you intended to make a place your forever home. He charged them only a modest amount because he knew they’d get quotes from others and could guess fairly accurately how much they’d be told it’d cost. So of course he won the job easily. He still made a profit, which showed that prices were sometimes too high for the ‘little folk’ of the business world.

The job he’d just finished had been a bit fiddly but he’d managed to retrieve their customer records after a sudden glitch had thrown their whole system into chaos and left the information in danger of being wiped out permanently. Fortunately they’d had the sense to leave their problem alone and wait for professional help to solve it.

In fact, the shop’s computer system had been rather badly set up by some inefficient amateur and Ryan had thought it best to gently explain to them the details of why it was never going to work in a secure way for them. He wanted to make sure they understood the situation clearly so that they wouldn’t blame him if it still wasn’t totally reliable in future.

Ashley looked at him anxiously. ‘That sounds as if you expect it to go wrong again.’

‘I’m afraid I do.’

‘Could you fix it properly for us if we paid you some more?’

‘Yes, but you’d need to upgrade the software, I’m afraid, and that’d add to the cost. It’s not a gigantic job and not hugely expensive, and I don’t mind if you offset part of the cost in free groceries from your shop over the next month or two.’

He saw her face brighten and knew he’d hit a mutually beneficial target there, so continued to explain. ‘However, doing it properly will cost about three times as much as the adjustments I could make for you to keep things ticking along for a while.’

They both sucked in their breath, looking at one another in shock, then Ashley took over again. ‘Is that your best price?’ She was definitely the money person in their small business and Greg provided the brawn, charmed the customers, male and female, because he was such a nice guy, and supplied ready-cooked meals, both frozen and fresh, because he’d previously been a chef. Good value they were, too.

Ryan knocked fifty pounds off his charges and they hesitated.

‘If you do that for us, will it be completely reliable?’ she asked. ‘Greg and I can’t afford to lose vital information. We need to keep our customers, stock and purchasing information absolutely safe.’

‘Yes, of course it will be reliable, very reliable in fact because I can guarantee that any system I put in will do what I promise and not let you down. I can’t do anything about overall outages of electricity that switch things off temporarily at the server and hit all the local customers, though.’

‘We’ll do it with you, then.’

‘You’ll have to give me a couple of days to finish another job first, then I could start work on yours. If I do another late night on it as I get to the final major changeover, you and your customers won’t be greatly inconvenienced.’

Ashley took a deep breath and nodded. ‘We’d be really grateful if you’d do that for us, then. Would you be interested in a deal for us paying you half in cash and half in Greg’s cooked meals? We’ll give you a discount on the value of the latter.’

‘Sounds great to me.’ He held out his hand and she shook it, letting out an audible sigh of relief.

Three days later, after careful preparations, Ryan kept his promise and worked through the night for a second time. This earned Greg and Ashley’s gratitude and, he hoped, cemented the good start he’d made to finding a new personal friendship as well.

As he’d hoped, he was now starting to pick up occasional clients from the other two villages nearby – though Fairford Magna, the biggest village by far, boasted its own resident IT person, a lively young woman with a small baby and no husband or partner to go with it. She seemed to be doing all right so he tried not to tread on her toes as a fellow professional, but she stopped him in the street one day to introduce herself and say there was more work around than she could cope with on her own and how did he feel about her passing some queries on to him. So he stopped worrying about her.

He reckoned that whatever big businesses in this area offered, some people still preferred to find experts to work on their problems from as close to home as possible and to have people recommended by word of mouth.

Well, he was similarly inclined and much preferred to have the services of a person not only recommended by someone but to like or at least respect that person when he got to know them. It might seem old-fashioned to some of the younger folk, but he reckoned it was still a better way of finding regular and reliable long-term help than making guesses from online adverts, which might or might not be telling the truth.

He suddenly saw a car he didn’t recognise slow down and turn off towards what locals still called ‘the big house’, so stayed on his front porch, wondering how long it would take these people to find that the track led nowhere.

Only they didn’t come back to the main road again. Could this be the new owner everyone was speculating about? If so, it was about time the person opened up the house again. It was a shame to let beautiful old homes go to rack and ruin.

As the minutes continued to tick past with no sign of the car leaving again, he rolled his eyes at himself for being so stupid as to wait this long to decide that it must be the new owner. He hadn’t seen anyone else turning off on the rough dirt track that led only to an unoccupied house recently, had he? Both he and the guy in the other cottage had their entrances the other side of the big house’s grounds, via a meandering dirt track leading from a narrow road which wound along the rear of the village street and served several other cottages set back from the main road.

The small track that led to the big house didn’t even have a signpost on the main road indicating where it led but these people had turned into it without hesitation and not come out again.

Maybe he should amble down to the end of his long, narrow vegetable garden at the rear and find out what they were doing. He’d have a clear view of the big house from there. Yes, why not? There was still an outside chance that they might be thieves, but he didn’t think it likely, not when they’d come here so openly. And he wanted to see what they were like because they’d be his next-door neighbours, or as near as you could get to calling someone that in this village, which had big gardens or chunks of land separating locals, and a rather higgledy-piggledy layout.

He wanted to know who was living nearby, for security reasons – and also, he admitted to himself, out of curiosity. He was amused at himself for that. He hadn’t been at all like that when he lived in London, because he hadn’t cared about the busy district with its anonymous crowds. He also hadn’t been planning to stay there for longer than necessary, so he’d worked every hour for which he could find the mental energy. Most people there seemed to have been the same, too busy to be neighbourly.

But this village was an attractive place and had felt like home right from the start. He’d do his bit to help keep it safe and attractive. So here, he wanted to meet some of the neighbours, perhaps even make a few friends. Settle down.

People were slowly making him feel he could become one of them and if you lived in such a small community, it wasn’t every day you acquired a new neighbour, was it? Or even every year. So the heir’s arrival was an event worth watching.

Aw, who was he kidding? He was being plain, old-fashioned nosey, had the time for it these days.

Was one of these two smiling women really the heir?

He couldn’t help wondering which of them might be the new owner, the one with silvery streaks at the sides of her hair or the younger one with the gleaming dark brown hair who looked closer to his own age? They’d been driving slowly enough for him to take a good look at them as they passed his cottage.

Miss Westerby had apparently collapsed several weeks ago, just after Ryan came to live in the village and he’d never even seen her. Fortunately the housekeeper had not only called an ambulance but had gone to the hospital with her employer.

It had been like watching a TV show, he was told. The unconscious woman had been taken to hospital in an ambulance with its siren blasting as it left the village. But it had been hard for them to get updates on how Miss Westerby was doing after that because though her housekeeper lived in the village, she was a nasty, stuck-up snob from a local family that wasn’t liked, and she didn’t even try to associate with anyone.

Strange how some people were like that. Did they consciously decide that they were superior to other people? Or were they simply born unfriendly? Who knew? As a result the only information that was verified every now and then came from other stray sources and was that Miss Westerby was still in the nearest local hospital.

The housekeeper, Selma Parnham, had apparently come back from hospital the first time and found that a lawyer’s clerk had already brought in a locksmith to close up the house and change all the external locks. And another outsider, this one a female, had come with him to clear out the perishable food from the kitchen, which Selma could have if she wanted, otherwise it’d be given to a local charity.

She’d also told Selma that her services as housekeeper would no longer be needed, since her former mistress wasn’t expected to recover.

Well, Selma had worked that out already from what the doctors at the hospital had said, hadn’t she? What she hadn’t expected was that the woman had already invaded her rooms and packed up all her possessions without letting her back into the house to check.

She decided to go and live in the cottage her family had left to her and her brother, and hope that her mistress would beat the odds and recover.

However, a few weeks later she’d come home from the shops in Fairford Magna to find a clerk waiting to give her the information that the old lady was dead, out of sheer courtesy he said. She hadn’t left Selma anything.

So she’d had no excuse for getting back into the house. She’d tried to explain to the lawyer about the box and asked to be allowed to collect it. She’d been refused permission, however, because her former mistress hadn’t said anything about it in the Will.

‘We’ll mention it to the new owner and she can deal with it once probate has been granted,’ was all they would say.

Various versions of this story were told to Ryan with relish and no sign of liking or sympathy was shown by anyone for the dead woman or her former housekeeper. Well, even in his short time here, he’d realised that though she came from a family long established in the area, Miss Westerby hadn’t been either a good neighbour or a decent landlord, unlike previous generations of her family.

And the housekeeper seemed to be disliked even more than her mistress. That was apparently partly because she came from a village family whose members were not noted for their honesty and were not averse to playing dirty tricks on anyone who crossed them. The Parnhams had been known to use violence like broken windows or slashed tyres to get back at people.

‘Never trust either of those two,’ he was warned by several people with much wagging of right forefingers. ‘That brother of hers has only just been let out of jail for burglary and as for her, she might not have been caught out by the police for doing anything wrong but she’s as devious as they come. If sly tricks were an event in the Olympics, she’d win a gold medal for it, that one would.’

Ryan wondered vaguely how old the heir would be, because if she was another elderly person, she’d have trouble looking after that big old house. Would she hire the Parnham woman as her housekeeper? And come to think of it, would she have enough money to hire the necessary domestic help to deal with a house that was quite big, going on for two hundred years old, he’d guess, from the style of architecture, and in obvious need of serious maintenance and repairs?

After a few weeks had passed without anyone in the village seeming to know what was going on at the big house, Ryan had asked a woman who lived a couple of doors away from him if anyone had heard what was going to happen now.

‘No. But it shows that even she couldn’t have her own way in everything, doesn’t it? Members of her family usually live to a ripe old age, but she didn’t. Well, we all have to die sometime, don’t we and no one knows when it’ll happen.’

He blinked at the tone of her voice.

‘She’d left general instructions to keep her alive if it was at all possible and they did everything they could when she stopped breathing that final time. Money always talks, doesn’t it? But for all their efforts, she didn’t show any signs of responding from a stroke that bad, so in the end they gave up, pronounced her brain-dead and turned off the life support.’

He nodded, hoping she’d go on sharing information. ‘I was surprised that no one from the village had offered to look after her house and garden while she was ill, as I heard that neighbours had done for another older woman who was taken suddenly ill. Was there some reason for that?’

His companion rolled her eyes at his question. ‘Did Miss Westerby ever even nod good day to you?’

‘Well, no.’

‘She didn’t nod to anyone in the village either, even those who rented houses from her. Not even to him, the one in the cottage just up the field from you, and he’s a distant relative of hers. And yet, some folk have lived here for many years, just as she had.’

‘I couldn’t help noticing that no one had anything positive to say about her.’

‘Well, you would. It stood out a mile that she considered herself superior to the other folk who lived nearby. After she inherited the house from her aunt, you’d think she was queen of the district.’

‘I hope the new owner will make a more pleasant neighbour for us all.’

‘Only time will tell. You’ve fitted in well, but no one knows anything about this new owner. If she’s anything like her great-aunt, you’d better not hold your breath and wait for her to say hello.’

And now, it looked as if the heir had arrived. Neither of the women in the car had been old, though, so he probably wouldn’t be left with a crumbling ruin next door. She’d do something about maintenance, surely? After sitting there for a few more minutes, he gave in to temptation and ambled to the far end of his long narrow back garden, trying to keep out of sight behind a massive rhubarb plant that seemed to love where his predecessor had planted it, while he watched what the two women were doing.

The first thing he saw was them checking all round the outside of the house, which showed they had some common sense. He’d have done that too if he’d been taking over a place that had been left standing empty and without a modern security system for weeks.

He also saw something they clearly couldn’t. The old man who’d been sleeping rough in one of the sheds was standing behind some tall bushes in the overgrown track that ran along that side of the block of land watching them as well, looking anxious.

He was taking advantage of the abundant foliage to keep out of sight but still keep an eye on the new arrivals. So Ryan couldn’t help watching him as well as them. Poor old chap, to be reduced to living and sleeping rough.

After a while, as they started going round the big garden to check the sheds, the old man walked slowly down to the main road, looking very droopy and despondent.

Ryan felt sorry for the old fellow, who didn’t look at all well, though he wasn’t sorry enough to take him in. There were too many people in trouble to help all the ones you encountered. He’d done his share, more than his fair share probably, and helped people every now and then, but at present he was desperate for some quiet time for himself to recover from working too hard for a long time. He’d run himself ragged putting together enough money to buy a house and land in the country.

Apart from anything else, he wasn’t sure how well he was going to settle into a life that was this quiet after working so hard for years. It had surprised him how long the evenings could seem when you were on your own. He’d have to find something other than watching TV to fill them now he wasn’t working such long hours, because the television companies were showing some right old rubbish at the moment.

Well, hopefully he’d gradually make a few friends round here and maybe go out occasionally for a drink at the village pub. And perhaps there were clubs he could join. And there was apparently a library in Fairford Magna. Who knew what else he’d find to do?

He hoped the heir would be a nicer person than the old woman who had died and they could have the occasional chat over by the back hedge.

His life here was just starting. He had no idea where it would lead him. And she must be in the same position.