Wild Oats Read online

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  WILD OATS

  Veronica Henry is the author of four novels, Honeycote, Making Hay, Wild Oats and An Eligible Bachelor, all of which are published by Penguin. She lives in North Devon with her husband and three sons.

  www.veronicahenry.co.uk

  Wild Oats

  VERONICA HENRY

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  Published by the Penguin Group

  Penguin Books Ltd, 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

  Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, USA

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  Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

  www.penguin.com

  First published 2004

  10

  Copyright © Veronica Henry, 2004

  All rights reserved

  The moral right of the author has been asserted

  All characters in this book are imaginary and are not

  intended to represent any actual person living or dead

  Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject

  to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent,

  re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s

  prior consent in any formof binding or cover other than that in

  which it is published and without a similar condition including this

  condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser

  ISBN: 978-0-14-192287-4

  For Jacob, Sam and Paddy

  Acknowledgements

  With huge thanks to Louise Treutlein of the Bugatti Owners Club for her kindness and patience in answering all my questions, and for taking me up the famous hill at Prescott. Any mistakes or technical gaffes are entirely mine…

  Thanks also to Julia Simonds for her insight into running an estate agency, and Dr Alisha Kaliciak for medical advice.

  1

  Jamie Wilding thought it ironic that, of her somewhat epic journey from South America, the final leg from Paddington to Ludlow had been the most traumatic. She’d missed her connection at Hereford, and the next train had come to an agonizing standstill in the wilds of the Shropshire countryside for no apparent reason – at least, none was given. By then she’d been travelling for over twenty-four hours. Now, with judicious use of her elbows and a certain ruthlessness, she finally managed to push her way through a dithering gaggle of American tourists, extricate herself from the train carriage and alight on the platform. She was tired, dirty, hungry and thirsty. As she struggled out of the station with her rucksack, she prayed there would be a taxi. There was. ‘Bucklebury Farm, Upper Faviell,’ she told the driver, and flopped into the back seat wearily. The smell of the driver’s cigarette combined with the sickly smell from his Wallace and Gromit air freshener turned her empty stomach, but she didn’t care. She was nearly there.

  The cab nudged its way slowly through the midday traffic and up the hill to the town centre. Jamie feasted her eyes on the familiar buildings: the black-and-white timbered edifices bowed down with age juxtaposed with the more gracious red-brick frontages introduced in Georgian times. She wondered which she preferred, then decided it was the contrast that was so charming.

  As they pulled into the town square, the farmers’ market was in full swing. Stalls with gaily-coloured awnings to protect them from the summer sun were crammed with vegetables: rows of cauliflowers, creamy white, luminous green and purple, enormous pods bulging with broad beans, punnets of voluptuous red strawberries. Other stalls were selling delicious-looking pies and jams and cakes; local honey; pots of herbs to take home and plant; handmade ice cream thick with raspberries or ginger or chunks of bittersweet chocolate. Someone was cooking free-range sausages on a portable barbecue to entice customers: the smell drifted in through the cab window and made Jamie’s mouth water. She was ravenous. There’d been no buffet car on the train. Her last meal had been an unedifying airline breakfast in another time zone. She was tempted to ask the driver to stop, but knew that would just be prolonging the agony. It was something she could look forward to after months of meagre and monotonous rations: coming to the market, chatting to the stallholders, trying their samples, coming home with a basket groaning with fresh produce. As the traffic nudged along, she caught sight of Leo the cheesemonger, with his mop of unruly black curls, deep in conversation with a customer, talking her through his mouthwatering selection of wares, paring off slivers for her to try. You could have a full-blown meal just by sampling what was on offer at Ludlow market, starting with marinated olives, moving on to cured meats and home-baked breads, finishing with a slither of lemon tart or apple cake.

  At the far end of the square the castle overlooked the bustling scene with an air of benevolent superiority. It had, after all, been there the longest, long before Ludlow became renowned as a gastronomic and epicurean mecca. Tourists swarmed over its ancient ramparts, armed with lurid ice creams and guidebooks, spilling out of its magnificent gates to discover the rest of the town’s treasures.

  At last the cab was free of the traffic. It crossed over the river and on to the road that led to the Faviells. As they sped along the winding lanes, hedgerows thick with emerald greenery, Jamie felt the faint drumming of butterfly wings against the wall of her stomach. Why was she nervous? She was coming home, that’s all. She had no need to be nervous.

  Yes, she did. After all, she had no idea what to expect on her return – what she was going to find, how she was going to be received. Or what she would do and say. Jamie always feared the unknown, because her imagination worked overtime and presented her with the worst-case scenario. Give her a rope bridge to cross or an unbroken horse to ride and she had nerves of steel. But when she wasn’t sure what to expect, her courage seemed to fail her.

  Only too soon they arrived in Upper Faviell. The village hadn’t changed, which was hardly surprising, as it hadn’t changed for as long as Jamie could remember. The hanging baskets at the Royal Oak were sporting a blue and white colour scheme this year, compared to yellow and red the year before, and there was a new ‘Please Drive Carefully Through Our Village’ sign, but otherwise it was the same as it had been when she’d left, almost a year ago now.

  Half a mile outside the village, on Jamie’s instruction, the driver pulled into a gateway. Weeds and grass poked through the cattle grid; the sign that would have told passers-by that this was Bucklebury Farm was overgrown with brambles.

  ‘I’ll walk from here,’ Jamie told the driver, and thrust a crumpled tenner at him. Heaving her rucksack back on to her shoulder, she stood for a moment, heart thumping, knowing that by walking this last quarter of a mile she was delaying the moment of reckoning yet again.

  She trudged down the drive, a simple track flanked on one side by orchards and on the other by pastures dotted with grazing sheep. Her feet kicked up the dust of earth dried by the midday sun, but the heat was nothing compared to what she
had endured over the past few months. Instead, she relished the gentle breeze that swished through the boughs of the trees and set the buttercups, sprinkled like gold dust over the fields, nodding furiously. Eventually, two stone gateposts and another cattle grid pronounced the entrance to the farmyard, whereupon the track became tarmac and led past a decrepit hay-wain and a magnificent Victorian stable yard, before coming to a halt in front of the house itself.

  Bucklebury Farm embraced the two styles of architecture that typified Ludlow. The oldest section was seventeenth-century black-and-white timber, irregularly shaped and peppered with leaded windows. The floors inside were wooden and leaned at alarming angles, the rooms were predominantly wood-panelled, the ceilings low, the staircases winding and narrow and crooked. Upstairs, one frequently had to bend to avoid concussion on a beam or a sloping roofline. Overall, it gave one the impression of being on board a rather cosy ship. In the late nineteenth century someone had obviously found its confines claustrophobic rather than charming, and had made a red-brick addition to the house that was stout and square and perfectly proportioned, allowing a rather grand staircase, a large dining room, a study and some sensibly sized and shaped bedrooms. Jamie infinitely preferred the older part, where her bedroom was tucked into the eaves up its own little staircase. The windows were tiny but gave a magnificent view of the rolling countryside, and in the distance she could see the ramparts of Ludlow Castle standing guard over the town.

  Ignoring the imposing front door, with its arched fanlight, that was only ever opened to people who didn’t know any better, she made her way around the side of the house. She couldn’t help noticing a general air of neglect about the place: the lawns and hedges were badly in need of attention, and the vegetable patch, once immaculate with its regimented rows of carrots and cabbages and lettuces all neatly netted to protect them from the rabbits, had become rampant and choked with weeds. But then, her father had never taken any great interest in gardening. Never mind; she could bring things back into order soon enough.

  As she walked past the kitchen garden to the back door, a brace of Jack Russells came tearing round the side of the house with a volley of barks, leaping up at her with muddy paws, stumpy tails wagging furiously.

  ‘Parsnip! Gumdrop!’ She dropped to her knees and embraced the pair of them as they sniffed at her in disbelieving delight. Overwhelmed by their greeting, she was struck by the absence of a further presence. Their vanguard would once have been followed by her mother vainly calling them off; the little dogs were the one thing over which Louisa seemed to have no control. They were notoriously quite the worst behaved dogs in the county, over-indulged and under-disciplined, saved from being thoroughly dislikeable by their ebullient mischief and effusive welcomes. Now, Jamie noticed, they could both do with a good bath and needed their nails clipping. If she needed any further reminder that her mother was no longer here, then this was it…

  She’d been working in California when it happened. An American family who had hired her to look after their first child when they’d lived in London, had her flown over to San Francisco when number two arrived. It had been a very happy few weeks; the baby was an angel, Marin County was heaven and the Knights treated Jamie like one of their own. For the first time, she was seriously tempted when they begged her to stay on. It was one of her golden rules, why she’d chosen maternity nursing over nannying, that she never got attached to a child or a family, that she only stayed eight weeks maximum, and that once the mother had recovered from the birth and the baby had settled into a routine, she was gone. That way, she could be sure of her freedom. She could pick and choose her jobs, and never be at anyone else’s beck and call.

  Her father Jack had phoned on a Sunday morning, when they were all about to set off for brunch at a harbour-side restaurant in Sausalito.

  ‘It’s your mother.’

  Jamie could tell by the strain in his voice that something was badly wrong.

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘She…’

  ‘What?’ Jamie couldn’t keep the irritation out of her voice. It was one of her father’s more annoying habits, not being able to get to the point when there was something unpleasant that needed saying.

  ‘The doctors say she probably won’t make it through the night.’

  Jamie was stunned into silence for a moment, then delivered a barrage of questions.

  ‘What do you mean? Why? What’s the matter? Has she had an accident?’

  Jack gave a heavy sigh in response.

  ‘She’s got cancer, Jamie.’

  To say Jamie was shocked was an understatement. Her mother couldn’t have cancer. She was never ill. At first she told herself there’d been some mistake, that the phone would ring and Jack would tell her to relax, Louisa had made a recovery, her notes had been mixed up with someone else’s. But when kindly Dr Roper, their GP, had called ten minutes later, Jamie could tell from the tone of his voice that the situation was as grave as Jack had outlined. Louisa had been diagnosed with secondary cancer six weeks ago. It had reached her lymph nodes. There was nothing on God’s earth to be done.

  Jamie had tried valiantly not to become hysterical, but the harsh reality of being thousands of miles away with her mother on the brink of death made it hard. The Knights booked her a flight, repeatedly reassured her that she wasn’t letting them down, helped her pack and drove her to the airport. Mrs Knight slipped her a couple of Valium for the journey. Jamie didn’t dare take them. She wasn’t sure what effect they’d have. And if she got there, and her mother was still alive, she wanted to be fully aware.

  As hard as Jamie had willed the plane to go faster, the hours had slipped through her fingers. As she waited for her connection at JFK, she called home. Dr Roper broke the news as gently as he could: Louisa had passed away during the night. She sat on the final eight-hour flight numb with shock. Someone, she couldn’t remember who even now, had met her at Heathrow and driven her home on what had become the most pointless journey of her life.

  Even worse than her mother dying had been what she perceived as her father’s betrayal. Perhaps that had been the easiest way to deal with her grief, to displace her anger on to Jack. She was incandescent with rage, and vented her fury upon him with little or no thought for his own feelings. Why on earth hadn’t he warned her? Phoned her? Called her back home as soon as they knew the awful truth, the moment her mother had been diagnosed? He put up a weary defence.

  ‘It was what she wanted, Jamie. She wanted you to remember her as she was. She didn’t want you to see her sick.’

  Jamie couldn’t accept his justification.

  ‘What do you respect?’ she’d stormed. ‘The wishes of someone who’s about to die? Or the feelings of the person who’s got to live with it afterwards?’

  ‘Don’t think it was easy for me, Jamie.’

  ‘I don’t understand. I don’t understand.’

  ‘You wouldn’t have wanted to see her. There was no point, believe me. It was harrowing. She wasn’t your mother…’

  ‘I’d like to have been given the choice.’

  There was no point in railing at him. He stared catatonically into the middle of the room, eyes red-rimmed, the beginnings of a beard that Jamie had been shocked to see was white. Jack the dandy shaved twice a day, and smelled of spicy, woody aftershave. Now he was beginning to have the waft of an old man who hadn’t bathed for several days.

  She tried to remember the last time she’d seen Louisa. She’d spent a weekend at the farm just before she went to California. Had her mother known she was dying then? She tried to recall her mood, whether she’d said anything significant, whether she’d held on to her a fraction too long when she’d kissed her goodbye. But as far as she could remember the weekend had been the usual glorious whirl of dogs, horses, people, music and endless food and drink that was Bucklebury Farm, just the tonic Jamie always needed after a gruelling few weeks looking after a newborn.

  The funeral was hideous. The church was packed, the vic
ar effusive in his eulogizing, the profusion of flowers giving off a sickly scent. Jamie took the Valium Mrs Knight had given her for the plane journey. She didn’t want to sit next to Jack, but how could she not? She didn’t want people surmising, conjecturing. Her mother deserved a gracious send-off, not to be a source of gossip. Back at the house, she supervised the funeral tea like an automaton, desperate to snarl at people for their sympathy and platitudes. Nobody, thank God, said it had been a shame that she hadn’t made it back in time to say goodbye. Nobody was that insensitive. But Jamie couldn’t help wondering if perhaps they were all thinking it.

  She’d barely spoken to her father, and when she did it was only to consult him on practicalities. They’d operated as islands, moving like ghosts around the farmhouse, praying for each day to end as soon as it began. A week after the funeral, when she’d replied to all the letters of condolence, chosen the gravestone and tidied away the most evident of Louisa’s possessions – the gumboots by the backdoor, the Agatha Christie on the coffee table, the few of her garments in the washing basket – she bought the Rough Guide to South America, spent a couple of hundred quid in Millets on sturdy outdoor wear and a rucksack, and booked a one-way flight to Peru.

  Perhaps it had been irresponsible. It was certainly running away. But she couldn’t stay at home, burning with resentment at Jack, expecting her mother to walk in through the door at any moment. And she couldn’t work. Numb with grief, she didn’t trust herself to be in charge of a newborn baby and a hormonal mother. Hers was a job that took patience and tact and a strong constitution for what could be weeks of interrupted sleep.

  More than anything, she was angry. With whoever it was who’d taken her mother away – God, presumably, though Jamie wasn’t a great believer. With her mother, for not having the will to fight. But most of all with Jack, for not having the strength and the foresight to go against Louisa’s wishes. It was typical of him, to go with whoever shouted the loudest and not stand up to them. Out of sight, out of mind. Anything for an easy life. That was Jack.