Chapter 15
FIFTEEN
The weather turned that week. Summer, which had looked as if it might linger as long as half term, suddenly collapsed like a soufflé toppling under its own weight, storms and rain piling in from the Atlantic.
Sitting on Fresco had been rearranged for the weekend, but when the day came it was lashing down hard enough to put Will off, so Tilly went on her own.
Predictably, she fell in love with Fresco at first sight, and arrangements were made to transfer him to Trade Cottage on loan.
Kate, who knew nothing about horses, felt completely overwhelmed by the prospect of being responsible for one, but Rosemary assured her she’d be on hand to answer any questions, as well as to supervise Tilly’s riding practice.
‘She’ll be doing little jumps in no time.
And it’s safe as houses – Fresco’s completely bomb-proof.
‘Oh, and by the way,’ she added, ‘we were thinking – well, Paul was – that Will might be feeling a bit left out, now Tilly’s got a pony. So he wondered if Will would like to learn to shoot.’
‘Oh,’ Kate said, surprised. She instinctively wasn’t a fan of shooting, though she suspected Will, with his love of video games, might be. But she didn’t see how someone with MND could possibly supervise a loaded gun safely.
‘Not here, of course,’ Rosemary said, noticing Kate’s hesitation. ‘There’s a gun club over at Four Marks. He can start off with Paul’s .410 – it’s lighter than a full-size shotgun, so there’s hardly any recoil. Paul would watch and give him tips.’
Kate said she’d ask Will, but in fact she spoke to Matt first, that evening.
Was learning to shoot normalising violence?
But, as Matt pointed out, Will was already gunning down various monsters and baddies on a screen, and shooting clay discs might teach him that weapons had real-world consequences.
‘I’m quite jealous, actually,’ he added. ‘It sounds fun.’
Will, as expected, also leapt at the idea. ‘That’d be really cool.’
So, on Saturday mornings, Tilly had riding lessons on Fresco, trotting round and round the paddock on a lunge rein under Rosemary’s watchful eye, and in the afternoons Will went with Paul and Rosemary in the Popemobile to the gun club.
He came back from his first lesson bubbling with excitement.
He’d hit over sixty per cent of his clays, he told Kate proudly; the man who ran the club said he had an eye for it.
‘If I can get to eighty per cent, I can apply to join the under-fourteens team,’ he added. ‘Paul thinks playing Metroid Prime must have given me fast reactions.’
The weeks went by without the weather improving. But both children still went out in the rain to practise – Tilly in her hand-me-down riding gear, Will decked out in wax jackets and flat caps from The Old Tennis Court.
‘Paul says there’s no such thing as bad weather,’ he reported solemnly to Kate. ‘Only bad clothing.’
‘Our children are becoming countrified,’ Matt commented, watching Will climb into the Popemobile one day, while the heavens opened overhead.
She glanced at him. ‘You don’t mind, do you?’
He shook his head. ‘They’re making the most of their opportunities. It’s great.’
It became too muddy to walk Biddy, but the children still went round to The Old Tennis Court to play with him.
On one occasion, they were gone over three hours.
Kate worried they might have overstayed their welcome, so she went round to collect them.
She found Tilly and Rosemary doing a jigsaw, and Paul and Will at the telescope with a book on wildlife identification.
It was really no trouble, Rosemary told her as Kate coaxed them away.
Quite the opposite, in fact: Paul looked forward to Will’s visits immensely, and she and Tilly got on like a house on fire.
Eventually, the storms blew through and the rain stopped. Kate realised she hadn’t been to the orchard since the bad weather began. Taking a bowl, she headed down the slope.
The ground was littered with fallen figs, mushy from all that rain, but there were a few russet apples that yielded to her experimental twisting of their stalks.
She’d picked half a bowlful when she happened to glance across at the fruit cage.
It was full of leaves, she noticed; autumn was coming faster than she’d thought, and the leaves were turning in the breeze .
. . And then, with a shock that rippled right through her, making her jump backwards, she realised they weren’t leaves at all, but rats.
Half a dozen rats, the size of rabbits, feasting on the fallen fruit.
Matt was at work, and her phone was back in the house, charging.
She had to speak to someone right away – she’d always loathed rats, and her disgust and shock needed an immediate outlet.
She hurried through the gate in the hedge, up to The Old Tennis Court.
When Rosemary opened the door, she gabbled at her – rats in the fruit cage, and, as she’d dropped the bowl, she’d seen more under the fig tree—
‘You’d better come in,’ Rosemary interrupted. ‘It’s only rats – they’ll have made a hole in the wire. That must have been what had a go at that duck, too. You can call someone out to deal with them.’
Shocked into silence by the other woman’s uncharacteristically unsympathetic tone, Kate followed her inside.
‘We’re through here.’ Rosemary led her to the room at the back, the one with the huge windows that overlooked Trade Cottage’s garden. Paul was already there, gazing at the view. As he swung his wheelchair around, using the joystick, she saw he had a glass of champagne in his other hand.
‘Ah! Kate, my dear!’ he cried. ‘We were just talking about you!’
‘Why’s that?’ she asked.
‘Glass of champagne? We’re having a little celebration, actually. Fetch the bottle, will you, old thing?’ he called to Rosemary.
‘No, I don’t . . .’ Kate said quickly, but Rosemary had already disappeared into the kitchen. She turned back to Paul. ‘What are you celebrating?’
‘Rosemary said you’d very kindly offered to host us at Christmas,’ he said. ‘Incredibly good of you, but as it turns out, Jamie’s going to be over with his family.’
‘Oh, that’s terrific,’ she said, relieved that Rosemary’s awkwardness was simply because she was worried about offending Kate over the Christmas arrangements.
As Rosemary came back with the bottle, Kate smiled at her.
‘No, thank you, but I’m so pleased for you about Jamie. How long are they over for?’
‘Well, that’s the amazing thing. He’s relocating – they all are.’ Paul was bubbling over with excitement. ‘He’s going to look for a job in the UK.’
‘How wonderful!’ Kate glanced at Rosemary, whose face was still oddly blank.
‘It’s what we’ve always wanted,’ Paul agreed. ‘Though we’d almost given up hope. Hamish turns thirteen in two weeks!’
‘I think you need to spit it out,’ Rosemary said to him fiercely. ‘There is absolutely no point in beating around the bush like this.’
‘Indeed,’ Paul said. He sat back in his wheelchair and smiled at Kate. ‘We’d like to buy back Trade Cottage.’