Chapter 41
FORTY-ONE
Matt was right: she did feel better in the morning, helped by the fact that the house’s silence was broken by the army of tradesmen who arrived shortly before eight.
Three small mechanical diggers trundled down the garden to begin excavating the drainage field; another started on the groundworks for the outbuilding conversions; Steve and his two sidekicks resumed work on the bathroom, while the roofers started to erect scaffolding at the front of the house, the chinking of their metal poles somehow redolent of the sound of an army hammering its weapons.
Sitting in the captain’s chair, watching men with huge spanners shimmy up and down the ladders outside the oriel window, she couldn’t help thinking of sailors manning a ship’s rigging, cutlasses at the ready.
Trade Cottage, she felt, was girding itself for battle.
Buoyed, she phoned Liv, on the pretext of asking about the next book club. Liv sounded pleased to have been called – relieved, even, as if recognising that things had got slightly out of hand before.
‘We’re doing Where the Crawdads Sing,’ she told Kate. ‘Sally chose it.’
‘Great choice – it’s been on my Tbr list for ages.’ Kate hesitated, then said casually, ‘Has Sally said anything about Guy Pelham putting in an application for a solar farm, by the way?’
‘She did mention something, yes. It’s great, isn’t it? Apparently, they can build them off the ground now, so Gordon will still be able to graze his sheep. I don’t know why more people aren’t doing them.’
‘I guess it’s an aesthetic thing?’ Kate ventured. ‘I mean, they’re not exactly nice to look at.’
‘Oh, I love them,’ Liv said breathlessly. ‘Just the thought of all that beautiful clean energy. And if it helps to make a place like Pelham Park financially sustainable too . . . It’s win–win, really.’
Kate agreed that it probably was, and rang off, frustrated. She knew Liv was completely sincere. It was going to be hard to oppose the solar farm without coming across as selfish Nimbys.
While she was thinking about that, her phone rang. It was Mary Snow, the woman who’d lent Fresco to Tilly, before taking him back again.
‘I’m having to use my stable for a neighbour’s horse that’s damaged its leg,’ she told Kate. ‘And, now it’s getting colder, Fresco should really come in at night. I don’t suppose you still have room for him?’
‘Of course,’ Kate said, surprised. ‘Tilly would love to have him back. She adores him.’
‘Well, in that case, she might as well ride him, too. I’ll arrange some lessons with Izzy.’
Kate had absolutely no idea who Izzy was – Rosemary taught Tilly when Fresco was with them before – but, once again, she had the feeling that she and Matt were being talked about, and perhaps, she thought, in a slightly more nuanced way than before the planning meeting.
Later that morning, she went down to the bottom of the garden.
As expected, Paul’s pinwheels had proved completely ineffectual at addressing the mole problem, but the pest controller had suggested sonic mole repellents, which seemed to be working.
To her surprise, the Keep Out signs had vanished from the edge of the wood.
So Will was being allowed to access his dens, as well.
This could only be Rosemary’s doing, she realised.
Was it because, now that the planning battle was lost, she wanted to let bygones be bygones?
Or because Jamie was going back to America, at least for the time being?
Or had Kate’s own plea about the children, that time by the lavender bushes, had an effect after all?
Whatever was behind it, it felt like an olive branch.
She looked up at The Old Tennis Court, wondering if she’d catch sight of her, but its big plate-glass windows were filled only with reflected clouds.
Any hopes that the truce might be extended to Kate and Matt too, though, were scuppered the next day when a letter arrived from the council, enclosing a ‘Remedial Action Notice’.
An officer had visited the property next door, it said, and agreed that the leylandii hedge was blocking the light.
The notice required the entire hedge to be reduced to two metres.
‘Quite why Rosemary and Paul want it done now, when all they’ll see is diggers trashing Trade Cottage’s garden, beats me,’ Matt grumbled.
‘But it looks like we don’t have a choice.
’ So a team of tree surgeons was added to all the other contractors.
It only took two days of men with chainsaws hanging like mountaineers off the leylandii, and the great green cliff was gone, exposing the end wall of the bungalow completely.
At least The Old Tennis Court didn’t have any windows on that side, Kate thought, only a large pane of frosted glass that must be a bathroom. But she felt exposed, all the same.
That evening, she was startled to see Rosemary walking up the lawn, carrying a tray covered in a tea towel.
It looked as if she was bringing them a freshly baked cake, or a lasagne perhaps, that the towel was helping to keep warm.
A peace offering, Kate immediately thought.
Rosemary was about to make another of her apologies – to say what an idiot she was for letting Paul get carried away with that petition, or that she was going to put a stop to this solar-farm nonsense.
Hurrying to the back door, Kate set off to meet her, striding down the lawn, ready to take the tray so she could put it down and envelop Rosemary’s tiny frame in a hug . . .
Then she got close enough to see the older woman’s shell-shocked expression, and that her beautiful wrinkled face was streaked with tears. ‘What is it?’ Kate asked desperately. ‘What’s wrong?’
Mutely, the other woman held out the tray. Kate lifted the tea towel. She saw a heart-shaped face, a stubby curved beak, a mass of fluffy white feathers, and gasped.
It was the owl, dead.
‘He lived in the barn,’ Rosemary said hoarsely.
‘I suppose the work disturbed him. But it’s the rat poison that’ll have done for him.
The mice would have eaten it too, and then, when they were dying, they’d have been easier to catch, and if he ate a few of them, the poison would have got him as well. ’
‘Oh, Rosemary,’ Kate said miserably, ‘I’m so sorry.’
She meant it. That Rosemary had wrung a duck’s neck with barely a flicker of emotion, and that the woods were full of pheasants raised solely to be shot, was beside the point.
She understood completely that owls were as different from those birds as a lion was from a hyena.
It felt as if Trade Cottage had been desecrated, somehow – as if a household god had been slain.
‘I’m so, so sorry,’ she repeated. ‘But the rats were so gross . . . I couldn’t not do anything.’
‘You could have used live traps.’
Kate hadn’t even known there were such things – she’d left it completely to the pest controller. She stayed silent, horrified at her own lack of forethought.
‘They say it’s a curse to kill an owl,’ Rosemary added. ‘They say it brings death. Let’s hope that’s not true.’
Turning, she walked back down towards the gate to The Old Tennis Court, leaving Kate still holding the tea tray with the owl on it, like a tiny bier.