Shire Hell
Shire Hell
By the same author
The Oxford Myth (ed.)
The Mummy Diaries
Notting Hell
Shire Hell
RACHEL JOHNSON
PENGUIN BOOKS
PENGUIN BOOKS
Published by the Penguin Group
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First published 2008
1
Copyright © Rachel Johnson, 2008
‘There’ll Always Be an England’ by Hugh Charles and Ross Parker
© 1939 (Renewed) Gordon V. Thompson Music
Worldwide print rights assigned to and controlled by Alfred Publishing Co., Inc.
All rights reserved. Used by permission of Alfred Publishing Co., Inc.
This is a work of fiction. All characters and events are the product of the author’s imagination.
Any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
The moral right of the author has been asserted
All rights reserved
Without limiting the rights under copyright
reserved above, no part of this publication may be
reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system,
or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical,
photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior
written permission of both the copyright owner and
the above publisher of this book
978-0-14-191574-6
To my father, for everything
Cast of Characters
Mimi Fleming (née Malone): curly-haired former Notting Hill journalist, now full-time Dorset farmhouse-frau, who fights off continuous hunger with homemade scones, and perpetual cold with one of those green padded, poppered jerkins called a Husky, which she even wears in bed.
Ralph Fleming: passionate only about dry fly-fishing and wild trout, Ralph (pronounced Rafe) is a consultant in oil and gas and a pro at avoiding anyone that falls into the dread category of ‘New People’.
Mirabel Fleming: 13, sulky teen who thinks both her parents are, like, totally skanky and sad.
Casimir Fleming: 12, lives for cricket and Clarkson.
Posy Fleming: 9, collects free toiletries from hotels and believes in unicorns.
The Flemings live at Home Farm with Ana from Poland, the au pair girl, and Calypso, the dog.
Rose Musgrove: Honeyborne’s answer to Martha Stewart, with plans for her own heritage cheese, Rose has impeccable taste in everything House and Garden, wears Ralph Lauren tailored tweed and only slips up when it comes to choosing other people’s husbands.
Pierre Musgrove: a sculptor whose glittering future recedes daily, Pierre reserves his artistry for ever more fiendish ways of annoying Rose.
Ceci Musgrove: 13, their perfect only child.
The Musgroves live at The Dairy, which is tended by Rose’s much-coveted daily, Joan.
Catherine Cobb: California-born superwoman, mother of four, châtelaine of Court Place, and owner-manager of the breath-takingly swanky Court Place Farm Shop.
Granville Cobb: the husband and bankroller of the above.
Serena Cobb: the blonde daughter with vanity job in magazine PR.
The Cobbs also have three sons, Hector, Marco and Florian, and also live in Gstaad, Tuscany and California, even though the super-rich can only ever be in one super-prime property at any one time.
Ned Bryanston: local landowner, living on capital, with an expensive second wife.
Lulu Bryanston: former model-actress-whatever, Lulu now wrangles literary figures for display at her annual writers’ shindig, the GodLitFest.
Jesse Marlon Bryanston: Ned’s first son by his starter marriage to Judith (now called Jude, a poet and a lesbian).
Little Ned and Fred Bryanston: 11; spoilt twins by Ned and out of Lulu, although she annoyingly looks much too young and buff to have had one child, let alone twins.
Celia Bryanston: Ned Bryanston’s widowed mother, who takes dowagery spikiness to the next level.
All the Bryanstons except Jesse Marlon live at Godminster Hall.
Sir Michael Hutton: ancient and crusty baronet, married but without issue to Lady Elizabeth.
The Huttons’ ancestral seat plus estates measureless to man is at Hutton Hall, Hutton.
Virginie Lacoste: stone-cold French superfox and children’s culotte magnate who never regrettes rien.
Mathieu Lacoste: her colourless walkover of a husband who is big in L’Oréal.
The Lacostes have three children, Guy, Capucine and Clementine, who love their nanny, NouNou, much more than their parents.
The Lacostes live in Lonsdale Gardens, London, W11.
Clare Sturgis: Mimi’s former neighbour in Notting Hill, Clare is a garden designer and elderly primigravida who bought the shabby Fleming house on the communal garden from Ralph, mainly to install her housekeeper and nanny in.
Joe Sturgis: her toddler son, whom Clare and successful architect husband Gideon are currently failing to enrol in the impregnable Ponsonby Prep, alma mater of Mirabel, Posy and Cas (as well as the adorable scions of many Notting Hill haves and have-yachts).
The Sturgises live in Colville Crescent, London, WII.
Sophy Mills: a hippie herbalist and single mother of
Noah Mills: a teething baby of indeterminate paternity and
Spike Mills: 13, a well-adjusted pupil at Acland’s who is ‘friendboy’ to Mirabel and Ceci.
The Mills family live in the eco-village Spodden’s Hatch, in a pitchy yurt near the handmade house of Jesse Marlon Bryanston, who also dwells there.
Gwenda Melplash: known as Scary Gwenda, and preferring horses to humans, Miss Melplash lives in jodhpurs and cracks the whip at Honeyborne Stables and Livery Yard.
Colin Watts: adopted son of the butchers, Colin is a local log-supplier who has his own van, ergo is one of the most eligible males for literally miles around.
He lives in Stable Cottage.
Henry Pike: the Master of Foxhounds, lunger, toper, shagger and the only resident of Honeyborne who is allowed to enter the Stores on horseback.
Biddy Pike: his Boden-clad wife and stalwart of many Pony Club Summer Camps.
Flavia (Flaves) Pike and Harry Pike are their two never knowingly unhorsed children.
The Pikes live at Lower Foxcombe with their terriers, Jiggy and Frisky.
Mr and Mrs Hitchens: master and mistress of the village Post Office and Stores (aka the gossip-interchange).
Garry and Debbie: publicans of The Stag, in which they serve locals with slopping pints of Badger Ale and keep a wolf.
Dr Ashburton: GP who hunts, grunts and reluctantly runs the surgery in his spare time.
Esmond d’Oplinter: aka the Bonking Baron, a courtly Frenchman married to the defiantly hideous Jacqueline, his even more aristocratic wife. They live in Paris but shoot in the West Country twice a year.
Revd Wyldbore-Smith: vicar of St Mary of All Angels and the go-to man if you want to secure a plot in the graveyard. He lives in The Rectory.
PART ONE
Mimi
I’m sitting in the kitchen, only warm place in the house.
I have a pint of coffee in my Thermos (bought from the Wild Bean Café at service station, price of latte redeemed against price of cup) to my right, and am reading the paper. Calypso is lying pressed against my feet, which are – I’m ashamed to report –inserted into my exciting new fake-fur electric footwarmer with dual-setting massager which I ordered off the Argos website during one of my more recent online shopping jags. (I easily justify the regular delivery of squishy parcels addressed to me by telling myself there are no normal shops – i.e. ones selling Swarovski-crystal-encrusted designer jeans, organic hemp baby-clothes, Elle MacPherson Intimates – within a hundred-mile radius of Home Farm. Works for me.)
The radio is on, and I am half listening to a report on shea butter made by a women’s collective in Northern Ghana on Woman’s Hour.
Inside the footwarmer, I am wearing my favourite cashmere socks from Brora, sadly tiger-striped from having been dried and scorched on the Aga.
I am also ‘working’ some long johns, last year’s ‘boyfriend’ jeans (skinny jeans are so over, according to Mirabel, which is a relief), an M&S merino thermal vest, army surplus jersey, a scarf and a quilted padded waistcoat in army green with brass popper buttons of the type that used to be seen, in the days, on Lady Diana before she became Princess of Wales.
Yes, I am wearing a Husky.
Like tapestry-patterned hand-knitted cardigans with toggles, crewelwork, English teeth, women in rugby shirts tucked into fractionally too tight high-waisted jeans, the Conservative Party, and Grow the Longest Carrot contests, Huskys have never gone out of fashion outside built-up areas.
I am taking full advantage of this reassuring fact.
The telephone.
‘Hello?’ I say, powering up my laptop so I can multitask while taking the call.
‘Mimi?’ comes a tweeting voice I know well. ‘It’s Fenella!’ she announces with excitement, as if she has produced her own grandchild.
‘Hiiiii!’ I cry.
Fenella Prigeon is the beauty editor of Results∗ magazine. We used to work together on the Telegraph, a million years ago. Last glimpsed by me at a tea party in Burlington Arcade for Tatler types and their posh pets (I was returning a pair of Vilebrequin swimming trunks that I’d bought for Ralph as a lovely present, which he had spurned without a second glance, reminding me that his old pair, minus elastic, were absolutely fine, and would be for many years, thank you very much).
‘So, how are you?’ I cry, as if I really really want to know, automatically slipping back into insincere mode. I have never mastered the trick of simply being the same with everyone. With Fenella, therefore, I go all glossy and gushy.
‘Oh,’ comes a faint sigh, an exhalation, as if I simply can’t imagine the suffering. ‘I don’t honestly think I’ve ever been so exhausted. It’s been completely utterly frantic. Really manic.’
I log on, input my password.
‘Why?’ I ask, knowing what’s to come. Ralph has a theory that, if you listen to Fenella talk, you’d think that in harsh contrast to testing cellulite gels and naso-labial creams for a monthly magazine, slogging it out in the trenches of the Somme was a teddy bears’ picnic.
‘It’s the, the spa guide,’ says Fenella, with a break in her voice. ‘I’ve had to write up no fewer than fifty – that’s five zero – spas over the past six months, including some in the Far East and the Caribbean. I’m totally wiped out, before I’ve even begun on the living nightmare that is the annual teenage skincare issue.’
‘You poor thing,’ I say automatically.
‘That’s why I’m calling you, actually…’ Fenella goes on, a wheedling note entering her voice.
‘There’s this new spa, I thought you could go, take Mirabel. You only have to write 150 words, and you’d get, I’d say, at least two free treatments.’ Fenella throws this morsel in knowing full well that there’s nothing, nothing, I like more than a luxury junket.
As she speaks, I am already picturing my eldest daughter and me lounging around in fluffy white robes, having massages to tinkling New Age music – somewhere hot, I’m thinking, Bali, or the Maldives – while demure maidens minister silently and with total concentration to our toenails.
‘Gosh, Fenella,’ I say, playing it cool, wanting her to think I’m still a player, ‘I have a black diary at the moment, things are sooo busy, I don’t know if I could squeeze a minibreak abroad in right now… where is it?’
‘It’s in Somerset,’ she says, in the reverential tones of one who has dutifully swallowed all the guff about expensive English holidays in the rain being so much nicer than cheap hot hols abroad. ‘On an organic farm, where they make their own pizza and muesli and bread, with – hold on, let me just grab the bumf – spelt. Spelt. Apparently it’s some ancient type of wheat – hold on, it’s a grain from the grass family with a fragile gluten content, whatever that means. Anyway, all the therapies in the spa, and treatments, well, they’re spelt-based too, and I just thought, well, you’ve lost your column on the mag, you‘re local, aren’t you? – you’re in Dorset – there’s no way I can fit it in with all my other commitments to do with the eco hair products special issue we’re planning for the spring, just no conceivable way! Not from London. It takes longer to get to Somerset than it does to Ibiza. I can’t pay you, but you could drive over, check it out, file 150 words… I thought it’d be a treat.’
I replace the receiver with a sigh, having promised Fenella that I’d get back to her on the spelt spa gig.
Nothing could make it clearer. My friends, my former colleagues, my old neighbours think I’m flying below the radar. I’ve gone… free-range.
It’s time to face it.
I’m not in Notting Hill now. I am not obeying an unwritten law that all women approaching forty have to weigh eight stone, wrangle with celebrities, interact with the atrophy wives, take their pedigree pets to the new dog spa and deli off Westbourne Park Road, and pretend to each other they don’t suffer from ‘bonus envy’.
I’m not doing the supermodel sweep at the Whole Foods Market on Kensington High Street as they load up on acai berries and seeds from the Food Doctor while bragging about how they, like, never go to the gym, and how they’re, like, so busy running after their kids they don’t need to work out, they’re just naturally this skinny, and they are trying and trying but they can just never put on weight even though we know and they know, it’s nil by mouth for them for literally years at a time.
What a relief, in so many ways.
But.
Because there always is a but.
But, to be brutally honest, though it is a relief, I stand by that, of course – I love the grass, the mud, the fact that I have a view of the rest of Dorset and the sea from my bedroom window (if I stand on tiptoe), and I love drinking in the fresh and clean smell of the countryside, with its wholesome tangy topnote of manure, I love the chill evening airs, the silence, the peace, and I love the fact that I can see all the stars on a clear night, and the Milky Way, and have become best friends with some barn owls, i.e. have allowed myself to be fully penetrated by the beauties of nature – I do still kind of miss it. London. Notting Hill, and all that.
But mainly I miss it because there’s no going back. After all, as everyone knows, and does so love repeating to you, once it’s too late, as if I have made a brave lifestyle choice to dwell in the seventh circle of Hell rather than in an utterly idyllic Dorset model village, ‘Once you’re out of the London property market, Mimi, that’s it, you know! You never get back in.’
All the children are at school, but it’s already 10.30 a.m. so it’ll be dark in a few hours, and if I don’t leave the house soon and walk Calypso I’ll be tempted to go back to bed for a snooze, as that’s so much more inviting a prospect than finally getting to grips with the vegetable patch. My morning dogwalk circuit takes in the Post Office and Stores, the pub, the Stag, and the village green.
OK, the Stag: standard-issue Dorset pub, i.e. it’s wall-to-wall roaring fireplaces, growling local ‘characters’, smell of old pipe-smoke from before smoking ban, nicotine-stained orange ceilings, skull-cracking low beams, Badger ale, famous for… not the beer, not the snug, certainly not the food or the friendliness of its regulars – the chainsmoking woodcutter ‘young’ Colin Watts, the butcher’s son (only young in comparison to most drinkers); the Melplashes; the farmers; the farriers; and so on – but its annual nettle-eating competition, and the house pet.