Guilt in the Cotswolds (2 page)

He frowned. ‘There’s the farm shop, that’s all. It has pies and things. Bread. And there’s the pub, of course. They’ll feed you. Oh, and the Roman villa has a cafe, which I suppose is open for a few more weeks yet.’

‘I’ll manage,’ she said airily. Food was seldom a high priority with her, although she was prone to sudden attacks of insatiable hunger when nothing else mattered but to eat something.

‘There are phone numbers on this list,’ he said. ‘You won’t need them, I’m sure, but I always think it’s good to have them. There’s my mother, my daughter and the usual plumbers and so forth. Just in case.’

‘Thanks,’ said Thea flatly. The same thing had happened in almost all her house-sitting jobs. People thought a phone number could solve all kinds of difficulties. And sometimes they were right, she had to admit.

The man pumped his arms, as if winding himself up. ‘Well, I have to go. I’ve got a visit to make. Then home, I suppose.’ He didn’t look particularly eager. ‘I’ve left my dogs shut in, and they’ll bark if nobody turns up. I think Millie said she’d be home tonight, but I’m not sure.’ He tailed off, looking vague and distracted.

‘Where do you live?’

‘Stratford – half a mile from my mother’s care home.
It’s only about forty minutes away from here, if you need me. But I’m going to be snowed under with work for most of the week, so try to manage, okay? If you do need me, I could drop by on Monday, at a push. Oddly enough, I’m back here again tomorrow, but I won’t have a spare moment.’

‘What do you do, by way of work?’

‘Oh, I’m a vet.’

Thea thought of other vets she had dealt with in recent times, and tried to fit this one into the general stereotype. He had clean hands and tweedy clothes. But he didn’t strike her as particularly outdoorsy. She cocked her head, inviting more detail.

‘I work for DEFRA, mostly, testing cattle for TB. I’m officially part of a practice in Stratford, but these days I don’t do very much with them. There’s so much TB around now that it keeps me pretty busy.’ He shook his head and sighed. ‘Awful business. I have to go to farms and check their animals. I’m doing a follow-up visit in Yanworth tomorrow, before dashing over to Chipping Norton, and somewhere else I can’t remember for the moment.’

Thea could not suppress a grimace. ‘I bet you’re popular,’ she said with heavy irony. She gave him a considering look. His soft pink hands gave him a hint of vulnerability that could make him even harder to like or forgive if he landed some harassed farmer in trouble. ‘Only doing my job,’ he would plead, and they would fume helplessly rather than hitting him.

‘They hate me,’ he agreed. ‘With reason, sometimes. The test is notoriously inexact, so we destroy far too many healthy animals. Nothing more heartbreaking, and there’s nothing I can say to make it better. I seem to spend much of my time defending the indefensible.’

‘Do you have to travel much? I mean – do you have an area to cover?’

He nodded. ‘It’s mostly the whole of the Cotswolds. I’ve got it easy compared to some. Farmers round here aren’t half as curmudgeonly as in Yorkshire or Cumbria.’

‘It certainly doesn’t sound boring, anyway,’ she said, having always believed that the very worst fate that could befall a person – except for getting themselves killed as her husband had done – was to have a boring job. ‘And I’ll try not to bother you. I’ll have everything in nice piles and comprehensively listed for you by this time next week.’

‘Thanks. I really do appreciate it.’

He left her then. She and Hepzie watched him disappear into the darkness, and then closed the door. ‘Here we are again,’ said Thea. ‘Early start tomorrow, my girl.’

Unusually, she had arrived on a Thursday. ‘It doesn’t matter to him what days you do,’ Drew had said. ‘And that means you can settle in and get started before I come over for the weekend. If I do,’ he added, holding up crossed fingers, ‘it’ll be down to Pandora.’

The name always made Thea smile. It belonged to a temporary assistant who was standing in for Maggs Cooper, because Maggs had recently produced a baby daughter. Pandora was fifty-three and immensely efficient. She had no difficulty with dead bodies, coffins, grieving families or unreasonable requests regarding the positioning of a grave. She was equally good with Drew’s children, and was infinitely available thanks to a recent divorce and her own two sons having left home. She had always lived in Dorset, the move to neighbouring Somerset a major midlife adventure.

The probability of having Drew to join her on the Saturday, albeit with his children, was a strong motivation
for Thea to devote the whole of Friday to the house. She would not pause, she promised herself. Chedworth would go unexplored and Hepzibah unwalked. The dog could potter around the good-sized back garden and be thankful. Even with Drew, Stephanie and Timmy there, the work would have to continue, although they had agreed there must be a visit to Drew’s property in Broad Campden at some point.

During the magical summer interlude at Farmington a great many elements had fallen into place. Dilemmas and complications had resolved themselves almost effortlessly. ‘We’ll live in the Cotswolds,’ Thea had said. ‘I’ll sell my Witney house, and you can put Maggs in charge of Peaceful Repose. I’ll work for you full time and we’ll do good business.’

‘But Maggs is having a baby,’ he’d demurred.

‘So we wait until she’s ready to work again. It’ll take a year or so, anyway, to get everything organised.’

Since then, some of the earlier difficulties had re-emerged; not least the appalled reaction from Maggs herself. Pregnancy had done nothing for her temper, which had always been short. Her association with Drew went back to a time just after Stephanie was born and the natural burial ground established. He freely acknowledged that he could not have done it without her. He owed her an impossible debt of gratitude for the support she had given him on every level, and she was not afraid to remind him of it regularly. Thea had stepped into the middle of a relationship that
sometimes seemed more intimate than a marriage.

Maggs’s reaction to Thea was itself an ongoing rollercoaster. At first ferociously protective, Maggs then opted to accept that Drew was at no risk after all. But she had come to see some of Thea’s shortcomings in recent months, with the reappearance of earlier misgivings. ‘You have to be
gentle
with him,’ she said at one point, with a worried look. ‘And instead you just expect him to be gentle with
you
.’

‘Can’t we be gentle with each other?’

‘I don’t know. Can you?’

Thea had gone away with a churning sensation in her stomach. When had she ever been gentle? she asked herself. She was so often impatient, intrusive, rude, reckless. Did she have to change her entire nature in order to be worthy of Drew Slocombe?

Drew himself didn’t appear to think so, which was obviously the main thing. He showed every sign of finding her funny, independent, capable and trustworthy. It was all in the eye of the beholder, anyway, she assured herself. The Drew that Maggs knew and loved was a subtly different person from the one Thea was intending to marry. He knew what he was doing, she supposed. Everything would be fine.

As had become her habit, she phoned him at eight-thirty, after the children were in bed. She shared her observations of Richard Wilshire, the house and the shadowy glimpses she’d so far managed of Chedworth. ‘First impressions?’ he asked.

‘I don’t know. There’s something elusive about it. I know I’ve said the same about other places, but this one really does have some strange levels. I mean – there
are
no levels. Everything pitches at an angle. And there are
two
Chedworths, which doesn’t help. It took ages to find the house.’

‘Which one’s got the Roman villa?’

‘Neither. That’s off to the north, the other side of some woods.’

‘I make that three, then,’ he laughed.

‘So it is. I have a feeling there’s loads of good history attached to the place, but I won’t have time to look any of it up. Tomorrow’s going to be full on, sorting all the stuff that’s here. I can’t decide whether to start at the top and work down, or the other way round. Basically, I just have to open it all up and list what’s here. But that’ll mean moving lots of boxes and making heaps everywhere. Then I’ll have to pack it all up again, with descriptions of the contents on the top of each box or whatever.’ As she spoke, she felt a glow of anticipation at a task that would be full of interest. Who knew what she might find?

‘I think you’ll have to start in the attic, won’t you? I can’t see it working otherwise.’

‘Why?’

‘Well, if you have to put similar things together, you’ll need to bring stuff down. Or have I got that wrong?’

‘I wasn’t planning to rearrange it. Just open everything up and see what’s what. What’s in the attic
can stay in the attic. I was thinking I’d leave that for when you’re here to help.’

‘But all the most interesting stuff is likely to be up there.’

‘I know. But there are spiders in the attic as well. I thought if I made a commotion downstairs, and Hepzie rampaged a bit, they might all decide to move out, before I have to face them.’

‘I see. We should probably have thought of that sooner. A spider phobia rather disqualifies you for the job in hand, don’t you think?’

‘Certainly not. I’ll just go carefully, and shake everything before I start. I can cope as long as they’re not
on
me. It’ll be fun, I’m sure, once I get started. I never dreamt of turning it down just for that. I need the money.’

‘Yeah.’ He sighed. ‘We’ll have to talk about money at the weekend, if we get the chance.’

‘So you can come?’

‘As far as I know, yes. Pandora’s a treasure, you know. She even offered to come here and look after the kids all weekend, so I can come to you.’

Thea’s heart jumped. ‘Wow! And what did you say?’

‘I was so surprised, I didn’t say anything definite. In a way, it would be sensible. There’s a lot of overdue paperwork in the office that she could get on with at the same time. And if there’s a removal, she could easily get Den to help with that. She can call Harriet to babysit.’

‘Harriet’s the girl down the lane, right?’

‘Right. But the trouble is, I’d have to pay Pandora properly for such a commitment. And Den’s not keen on doing removals at the moment, with the baby so new. We’re on a tightrope, in more ways than one.’

‘When were you not? It’s been the same since I’ve known you.’

‘I know. But I really think I ought to bring the kids with me and keep Pandora on standby. I don’t have to pay her at all then, unless she gets called out.’

They chatted for a few more minutes, until Drew instructed her to have an early night and face her fears with fortitude the next morning. Before obeying, she did a circuit of the house – all but the attic – trying to formulate a plan of operation. There were three bedrooms on the first floor, as well as a bathroom and a small area that might once have been called a ‘dressing room’. It was piled high with cardboard boxes. When she peeped inside one, it seemed to be full of clothes.

Downstairs there was a large front living room, and two more rooms at the back. The kitchen ran along one side of the house, light and spacious, with a high ceiling and numerous built-in cupboards of a style long ago past. A back door led out to the garden, through a sort of porch. Another door led into an outside lavatory, which showed little sign of having been updated since the 1940s.

Involuntarily, she was acquiring a picture of the old lady who had spent such a large portion of her life in this
house. The picture was coloured by personal experience, namely that her own widowed mother, in her seventies, was still occupying the family home. There had been six of them in it for a long time, but it was smaller than this handsome Cotswold property. The Wilshires had apparently only managed a single child, and he had duly grown up and left at a respectable age – probably not much later than twenty or thereabouts. There had been no reference to a Mr Wilshire Senior, and scarcely any evidence of him discovered so far. All of which led to a conclusion that the woman had remained here on her own as a widow for a considerable time, free to add clutter, pursue hobbies, with never any need to throw things away. It was in no way unusual. The land was full of similar scenarios. This was not the first instance that Thea had encountered, albeit with variations on the same theme.

This woman had a variety of interests, which were already apparent from the stacks of old magazines that toppled precariously in all the downstairs rooms. Historic houses and country living were not especially surprising. But pottery and medieval French history were more unexpected. There was also a small kiln at one end of the kitchen, with two shelves of dusty equipment close by: a cutting wire with wooden handles, a collection of spatulas and some plastic bottles containing coloured slip that proved to have dried up. No clay was to be seen, and no finished products, which made Thea think it had all been abandoned a long time ago.

Soon after ten, she took Hepzie outside for her routine toileting and then led the way upstairs. The bedroom was large and handsomely furnished with mahogany wardrobe, chest of drawers and dressing table. There was an oak chest, and the headboard on the big, high bed was a semicircle of painted wood that was like nothing she had seen before. However Richard had managed to turn the mattress without assistance, she did not know.

Hepzie jumped cheerfully up, despite the height, and Thea followed a few minutes later. She felt hesitant and oddly guilty. This was another woman’s private room, the bed her own personal space for countless years. She, Thea, was a usurper, with no real right to be there. Mrs Wilshire wasn’t dead. Instead she was in a kind of limbo, the twilight of her days, no longer the same autonomous person she had been, as she waited for the end. How would that feel, Thea wondered. Surely there must be resentment, sadness, resistance, and a craving for all the familiar things that this house contained. Could anyone truly possess the maturity to go willingly into that last phase, full of clean surfaces and excessively cheerful carers? If you still had your wits about you, didn’t that make it worse? Would you have to pretend that it was all all right?

It was a very comfortable bed. Soft and deep, it offered a haven from the world. A person might live in such a bed, strewing books and biscuits across its considerable expanse. In the past, people had ‘taken to
their beds’ and never got out again. It would have to be a bed such as this, to make any sense. There was something deliciously Victorian about it, and Thea felt she ought to wear a long cotton nightdress with tucks and ruches, and a flannel nightcap.

People really should be allowed to take their own mattress into the residential home, she thought. It was such a central factor in one’s life. She remembered her father’s affection for the big marital bed he and her mother had bought when they were first married. Maureen Johnstone regularly told the story of how carefully her new husband had selected the mattress and how important it had always been to him. Mrs Wilshire might well have felt the same. Perhaps her Richard had been born in this bed – almost certainly he’d been conceived in it.

She and Drew, she decided, would buy themselves a top-quality new bed, as soon as they finally came to live together.

Friday morning was there in a flash, after a fabulously good sleep. The spaniel hadn’t moved a muscle all night, the sheets and blankets had moulded themselves to Thea’s body perfectly, and her dreams had been full of contentment.

There were significant differences to this commission from the usual. Primarily, there were no animals to care for. No delicate elderly dogs or stand-offish cats. No lonely donkey or disconcerting parrot. Nothing
downstairs needing food, exercise or love. Another difference was that the actual owner of the house would not be returning to assess her performance. Richard Wilshire might qualify as a replacement, but he would not have the emotional connection that his mother would. What was more, when he came back, everything would have changed. His reaction was uncertain, but Thea was determined to do a good job and earn the fee she’d been promised.

‘To work!’ she announced aloud, sliding regretfully out of the hospitable bed. Its height meant that she almost had to jump off the side, being a short person. It was a moment of nostalgia, taking her back to childhood days when she had barely managed to climb on and off her parents’ handsome bed. She was liking it here, she realised. It was bringing philosophical thoughts that while not quite joyful, certainly weren’t unduly melancholy or worrying. Mrs Wilshire had gone willingly, after all, if her son could be believed.

It was eight o’clock, and she allowed herself and the dog half an hour before the sorting began. ‘Time for a little walk,’ she said.

The house stood on a paved road, which only went a little way before morphing into a footpath – no less than the renowned Macmillan Way. The path crossed a large open field and then disappeared into a stretch of woodland. Thea let the dog run loose in the field, which undulated dramatically, showing evidence of ancient agriculture. There were no sheep or other dogs, and
Hepzie ranged contentedly, nose to the ground. ‘No time to explore the woods,’ said Thea. ‘That can wait for another day.’

As they turned back, she could see part of the village, with grey roofs and stone walls that were a weathered hue of a dark beige that was one of a wide spectrum of Cotswolds colours. In some villages they were much closer to yellow than they were here. Not only did age dictate the shade, but different quarries produced stone of different shades.

Chedworth was essentially an inward-looking place, she concluded. It was not on the way to anywhere, with no large roads within earshot. The A429 was a mile or so distant from the upper end of this long-drawn-out village. There was no enticement for tourists to come here either, with the Roman villa on a quite different road. Its railway had disappeared long ago, and the little River Churn was too small to attract any river-based activities. It offered nothing for visitors, other than a farm shop and the villa. The latter made no discernible impact on the village itself, as far as Thea could tell, although she did spot a faded iron sign at knee level, suggesting that by following the Macmillan footpath, it could readily be reached. She must not fail to go for a look at some point.