Sunshine Over Wildflower Cottage (3 page)

‘Well I never,’ Geraldine said, raising her eyebrows.

‘What?’ asked Viv.

‘That’s very interesting. She’s interacting with you.’

‘Is she?’ asked Viv.

‘Yes, she most certainly is. She’s taken her eyes off you to bend her head. That’s a sign of trust.’

‘Oh.’ That bird was a rotten judge of character, thought Viv.

Geraldine grinned. ‘There is no rhyme or reason why birds love you or hate you. They just do.’ She pointed across to a cage. ‘There’s a red-tail hawk over there called Sistine that I found entangled in thorns and I nursed her back to health. But is it me she’s grateful to? Oh no. She’s Heath’s girl.’

There were hawks and eagles and owls and the ugliest bird Viv had ever seen in her life: a white-headed vulture. The inside of his aviary looked like a Toys R Us for birds. He had a tyre on a rope, a ladder, a huge rubber Kong, a climbing frame.

‘Frank turned up in a Manchester scrapyard. He can’t see very well but he likes to play,’ smiled Geraldine. ‘He’s likely to run off with the hosepipe when you clean him out.’

Viv hoped that Geraldine meant a general ‘you’ and not a specific one. She wouldn’t be cleaning Frank out. Ever.

‘Like fresh eggs for breakfast?’ asked Geraldine as they made a slow walk back towards the cottage. ‘We’ve taken in some ex-battery hens. They’re just getting used to being outside and having room to move. They’re learning to scratch for worms and insects and their egg yolks are lovely and golden as a result.’

That nearly put Viv right off eggs for life. She had always been quite squeamish and once hadn’t eaten cod from the chippy for over a year after hearing that it ate any old rubbish it could get its jaws on, unlike the more discerning haddock.

The sanctuary was also home to three limping geese, all with deformed feet, who still managed to swagger around like drunken John Waynes; and a blind baby goat called Ray who was glued to the side of his sighted twin Roy. In a run with a wooden shelter in the shape of a giant Toblerone were two hedgehogs – a strange albino one who looked as if she would glow in the dark and another with incredibly short prickles, as if he’d had a tough-guy crew cut: they were introduced to Viv as Angel and Bruce Willis. They wouldn’t survive in the wild, Geraldine explained. They’d taken in lots of hedgehogs over the years, and patched them up and sent them out again – but only if they knew they’d be safe. There was a huge black hairy pig called Bertie who had formed an attachment to a beautiful pair of shire horses who looked as if they were wearing shaggy fur boots. As soon as they spotted Geraldine, they started walking across their field towards her.

Even though there was a sturdy barrier between them, Viv instinctively took a few steps back.

‘You don’t have to be scared of Roger and Keith, duck,’ said Geraldine. ‘They’re as gentle as spring lambs.’

‘They’re huge.’ The hairs on the back of Viv’s neck stood up as two tonnes of horse approached the fence. They could cause a lot of damage if they were suddenly spooked: flatten her like a pancake, kick her into Kingdom Come. She’d err on the side of caution, thank you, and not get too close.

‘Roger and Keith have been at Wildflower Cottage for ten years,’ explained Geraldine. ‘Heath’s father took in four shires from a disgusting farm near Saddleworth, but Pete didn’t make it through the first night and we lost John only a few weeks ago.’ She sighed. ‘He was such a dear fellow. I’m only glad that he had a few safe, happy years with us. He’s buried in our graveyard with all his sanctuary brothers and sisters behind the house. I can’t bear the thought if we have to—’ She pulled herself up short and shook her head. ‘Anyway,’ she said then, as if she was forcing herself to move on. She extracted a tube of Polo mints from her pocket. ‘Want to give one to the horses?’

Viv declined hurriedly.

Geraldine tilted her head and looked down into the eyes of the much shorter Viv. ‘I must say, you’re not at all what I expected.’

‘Oh?’

‘In a nice way, I mean,’ Geraldine said. ‘Some people have sounded perfect on the phone and when they arrive . . . well, I’ve known I’ve made a huge mistake. But I don’t get that feeling with you. Though you’re not at all confident around animals, are you?’

‘I wouldn’t do them any harm,’ Viv replied quickly, to dispel any fears Geraldine might have on that score. ‘But admin is more my thing.’

‘Well, that’s what we need really. Someone efficient. Heath has let things slide and hasn’t got the time to sort out the backlog and I’m not very good at that sort of thing. I can’t use computers and I don’t like being on the telephone, as you might have been able to tell. I much prefer to roll up my sleeves and pull a pair of wellies on.’

‘I passed a lady on a black horse when I drove down the hill. Is that one of your animals too?’ asked Viv. Did she see Geraldine bristle slightly?

‘No. That’ll be Antonia Leighton. She lives up in the castle at the top of the hill. Let’s go and get that cuppa,’ said Geraldine. ‘Are you hungry? That’s one good thing about working here; everyone in Ironmist thinks we’re starving, so they’re always sending us cakes and bread from the bakery and pies, butter, vegetables, you name it. It’s a very kind place.’

So that was Antonia Leighton
, thought Viv. She hadn’t recognised her because she looked very different from the smiling picture she had seen in the glossy magazine. She was the daughter of Nicholas Leighton, the man that her friend Hugo had said would be a very useful person to get to know. And he was the real reason why Viv was here.

Chapter 2

‘Bloody hell, Stel, what’s up? Your head’s the colour of a stick of rhubarb with high blood pressure.’

Linda leaned over the coffee table and handed her friend a plastic fan. There were five women in the room and all of them had small whirring blades cooling their faces, even Iris, Linda’s eighty-two-year-old mother. And surprisingly Caro too, who was floating through the menopause as if she was aboard an enchanted craft with an anti-menopause cloaking device, had beads of perspiration pushing out of the pores on her forehead. She dabbed at her temples with her fingertips.
She even makes sweating look elegant
, thought Gaynor.

‘Thought you didn’t get hot flushes,’ she said, tapping her fan on the table, hoping that would somehow rev up the dying battery.

‘I don’t usually. My thermometer might be getting more and more on the blink, but I haven’t had that experience you seem to get where you say you feel it rising up from your feet,’ replied Caro.

‘I used to sweat so much in bed, Dennis used to have to sleep in a wetsuit,’ sniffed Iris, putting down her fan in order to sip delicately from her special china cup covered in irises which she lifted from a matching saucer.

‘Slight exaggeration there, Mother,’ said Linda. Her hair was plastered to her face with perspiration. ‘Dear God, this can’t be normal.’

‘I didn’t get the sweats until I was over a year into the full-throttle menop— oh bugger, my battery’s knackered as well,’ said Stel, banging her fan on the side of the sofa in an attempt to revive it.

‘Here, Stel.’ From a drawer in the dresser behind her, Linda retrieved another fan from the job-lot stored there and tossed it to her. Linda’s husband Dino was a market dealer (Aladdino’s Cave) trading in allsorts and novelties which he imported from the Far East.

This quintet of friends always jokingly referred to themselves as ‘The Old Spice Girls’. They’d known each other for ages; but two years ago they’d decided to make their meetings a regular Sunday event from 5.30 until 7 p.m., to galvanise them for the week ahead with pots of tea and finger food.

If they had been actual Spice Girls, it wouldn’t have been too hard to choose their names. The preened and perfect Caro would have been Posh Spice. With her rounded vowels and cultured ways, she made Victoria Beckham look like Pat Butcher. Iris would have been Blunt Spice, since the brake on her mouth had long since failed, much to the frequent embarrassment of her daughter. Linda would have been Bountiful Spice because everything about Linda was big: her hair, her bum, her appetite and her heart. Gaynor would have been Bitter Spice. She was twisted up in knots about her husband running off almost a year ago with a cheap young tramp, and fed off his frustration that she wouldn’t give him a divorce. And Stel Blackbird would, at the moment, be Sad Spice. Her much-loved only daughter Viv had left home that day in order to work in a godforsaken place up on the moors. She’d said she only intended to work there through the summer, but Stel had said the same to her parents and then had never moved back to the family nest.

‘Linda, you do know the central heating’s on, don’t you?’ said Gaynor, feeling the radiator. ‘No wonder we’re all wilting.’

‘It’s what? But it can’t be . . .’ Linda broke off her sentence as the penny dropped and she turned slowly to Iris, her eyes narrowing to slits. ‘It’s you again, isn’t it, Mum?’

‘I must have forgotten to turn it off,’ said Iris. ‘I thought I’d warm the room up a bit for everyone.’

Linda bobbed next door to turn off the heating, chuntering profanities in her mother’s direction.

‘It’s always cold when you first come in. I was only trying to help.’ Iris lifted up her shoulders and dropped them as if hurt.

‘It’s seventy degrees in the shade today,’ Linda batted back. ‘You can fry eggs on the pavement.’

The Old Spice Girls met in Linda’s ‘party room’. Dino had converted half their enormous garage into an extra reception room so that he and the lads could go and have a game of darts, or watch the football on the sixty-inch screen mounted on the wall whilst partaking of a few beers, and Linda could fill it with her friends on Sunday nights.

‘I thought I was having a hot flush to end all hot flushes. Four years I’ve been having them now and I’m bloody sick of them,’ said Gaynor, wishing there was a turbo facility on her fan. ‘I must be coming to the end of them by now, surely?’ Sometimes Gaynor felt as if nature was against her as well as everything else. ‘Can I open a window, Linda?’

‘Open the bloody lot of them,’ said Linda. ‘It’s like a slow-cooker in here.’ She gave her mother a warning look. ‘And don’t you dare moan that it’s draughty.’

Iris managed to arrange her features into a perfect balance of innocence and disgruntlement.

Caro turned off her fan and put her cup of coffee down on a small glass-topped table with a shelf underneath, She could see a child’s book parked there, entitled
Jolly Jellyfish
. She gave a gasp of joy at the sight.

‘Oh, Linda, has Freddie been round to see you?’

Linda raised her hand and waved it in a gesture of ‘don’t talk about it’.

‘Has he heck,’ said Iris. ‘I put that there because Rebecca said she’d bring him round yesterday for half an hour and guess what, she didn’t turn up. Again.’

Caro didn’t have grandchildren herself, but she could still imagine what it would be like to not be allowed to see them because your ex-daughter-in-law was a controlling cow. She snatched at the nearest passing subject to divert Linda’s thoughts.

‘We should get some tickets and go to the theatre, make an evening of it. We haven’t been for ages, have we?’

‘Well, I’m not going this week,’ said Linda. ‘They’re putting on
Rebecca
. No wonder Laurence Olivier drowned her.’

The Old Spice Girls had gravitated to one another to form a friendship group over the years, as women do. Linda was a nurse and had met Stel at St Theresa’s Hospice, where the latter still worked as head receptionist. Iris lived with Linda, and they and Gaynor lived on the same sprawling estate in Dodley. Stel and Caro first met when their children had been in hospital at the same time ten years ago and they’d bonded in the hospital coffee shop as they waited for good news.

‘Did Viv get off all right, then?’ asked Iris.

Stel didn’t answer, because her throat felt suddenly blocked with a ball of solidified tears.

‘She’ll be all right, love,’ said Linda. ‘She’s a sensible lass, is Viv.’

‘She went off to university for three years, Stel. Surely that acclimatised you for her leaving home?’ said Gaynor.

‘That was different, Gaynor. She was home nearly every weekend and in the holidays. I always felt as if she were on a piece of elastic, but now . . .’ Her voice dissolved into a croak.

‘She’s only gone to the moors, not emigrated to bloody New Zealand,’ said Gaynor impatiently as she got up from the sofa. ‘Think about me. I haven’t seen my Leanne for nearly six months.’

Lucky you,
thought most of the room. Leanne Pollock had been one of those horrible, spoiled kids who had grown up into an even more horrible, spoiled young woman. She took the art of self-serving to new levels. She had done Gaynor a favour by moving down to London to pursue a modelling career; not that any of them would say that to her, with the possible exception of Iris if the opportunity presented itself.

Gaynor snapped her fingers. ‘I knew there was something I had to tell you all. Leanne had an audition for that top modelling agency a couple of weeks ago. You know, the one that Kate Moss used to work for. And they would have taken her, they said, but for one thing, one tiny thing . . .’ She pincered her thumb and finger together. ‘And do you know what it was?’

‘Her face?’ suggested Iris.

‘No, her height.’ Gaynor glared at the chippy octogenarian. ‘She was one inch too short. Would you have thought an inch made that much difference?’

Caro snorted down her nose and Gaynor threw her a dirty look.

‘An inch can make a hell of a difference, Gaynor love,’ Linda winked at her.

‘Oh, I’m going to the loo if you’re going to talk smut,’ said Gaynor. The air seemed to lighten by several degrees when she left the room, shutting the door hard behind her. Once upon a time, thought Caro, Gaynor would have been the first to chuckle at the innuendo.

‘Your father and I were always very active in the bedroom,’ put in Iris, causing Linda to cover her ears.

‘Mum, please.’

Iris huffed in exasperation. ‘That’s the trouble, every generation thinks it invented sex. I used to be a young woman with a figure that your father had difficulty keeping his hands off. We once managed—’