Chapter Forty
In the long run, even a dog will compromise with the cat.
(Hungarian proverb)
As evening laps over the solitary little cottage, like a breeze rippling on her favourite lake, Noreen sits beside the crackling fire with her precious white ferret on her lap, knitting a garment that is clearly only suitable for an animal or a small, four-legged child.
The dramas of Las Vegas and Los Angeles appear like the flames in her hearth, flickering yet still dangerously potent.
Occasionally, she wonders how events can in certain ways seem so distant whilst remaining quite firmly etched in her mind.
She hears the familiar sound of sheep being herded and so she sits and waits. Eventually the door opens, and a man enters in a heavy, windproof coat and thick boots, coated and clagged with fragments of wool and fine Cumbrian mud.
“Did you put Ambrose, Lyle and Cleo where they belong?” asks Noreen.
“Yeah,” says the man, “they’re with the other guys in the pen.”
“The little lambs,” says Noreen fondly.
“You’re looking good, sweetheart,” says the smiling sheepherder.
“Well, it’s a big night, isn’t it, love? Hadn’t you better get changed? It’s very late.”
“Hey, don’t you fret. You saw that James Bond movie when he’s got this great tux under his diving gear, sharp as a knife?”
Noreen looks blank.
“No, course you didn’t.” He rips off his coat and waterproof trousers to reveal a dazzling white dinner jacket. “Da da! I ever tell you about my Oooo Oooo Seven series: Dr, Yes!, Thunderballs, For Your Thighs Only?”
It only takes a glare from Noreen.
“Sorry. Old habits…”
A door at the back of the tiny parlour opens and a sudden rush of dazzling golden light floods in. The peace of the cosy room is shattered by a blast of noise, mechanical and human. Pulsating Muzak invades the cottage.
Standing in the doorway, in a glittering, low-cut evening gown is Rosie, late of the Wordsworth Arms.
“C’mon, you two!” she chides, but with a cheeky smile. “Especially you, Noreen Millburn – don’t you know what time it is?” She throws out her bare, freckled arms and begins to sing ‘Maybe This Time’ from Cabaret, until Arnie signals ‘enough’.
As if on a signal, Noreen Millburn shucks off her oldest and lumpiest cardigan to flaunt her own dazzling, figure-embracing evening wear.
Arnie can’t help shaking his head in admiration.
How had he been so blind to this woman? Okay, maybe the cardigans, the bobbly hat, the grime under a plethora of charity cans didn’t help.
And the fact that her true beauty still derives mainly from the very best place – within.
Or, if you’re going to go there, the undeniable truth that deep down he was extremely superficial.
Holding out his arm, he escorts his adored Limey wife to the door.
***
The gleaming casino, newly built onto the rear of Noreen’s ancient cottage, is far smaller than those she once experienced in another brief but eventful life, on a distant, bizarre continent, but in its own way it is absolutely perfect.
There are the usual gambling tables, roulette wheels, slot machines, cocktail waitresses, plus a few stalls representing the Rough Fell equivalents of Tiffany’s and Gucci. And, of course, a well-stocked bar with local brews, because this is England, and nothing happens without beer.
Standing beside the tables and machines, itching for the go-ahead to play and lose their shirts, are the villagers who were once so hostile. Dressed in their finest drab, they turn as one to see Rough Fell’s most unusual yet now most welcome power-couple.
“Hello, everyone,” greets Noreen. “Welcome to Geoffrey’s Palace. Now, come on and just make yourselves comfortable. And remember, all proceeds go to charity.” She catches Arnie’s eye. “Well, almost all. Let’s not get too Mother Teresa about it.”
Arnie moves even closer to her and steals a cuddle as he whispers in her ear, “Have I told you lately that I love you?”
Noreen turns to him and, in that bizarre Lakeland accent he has just begun to decipher and even almost to enjoy, she says so sweetly, “Cut the crapola, Arnie. We’ve got a business to run.”
He smiles and looks right across the crowded and, by now, raucous room.
In a corner, Lyle and I are making the elderly sheep called Geoffrey, in whose honour this very Cumbrian venue is named, magically disappear.
Of course, to anyone watching, it’s just a sheep on its own that keeps vanishing and turning up again, which is quite an attraction in itself.
You probably didn’t expect, did you, when you began this chronicle, this fable of the good and the rotten, that it would end with a spasmodically disappearing, gammy-legged Herdwick in a Lake District casino. But isn’t that the magic of literature?
To paraphrase the last line of that classic Anne of Green Gables, which happily the old Arnie Garth never despoiled: “God’s in his heaven, all’s right with the world,” whispers rakish matchmaker from heaven, the incredible Ambrose, to a highly confused Cumbrian sheep.
Love is composed of a single soul inhabiting two bodies.
Aristotle
(such a sweetheart)