Chapter 5: Weeding

I had time to suggest that Audrey and Jenny get down to details on the subject of romantic dinners in a woodland clearing, when Cherry stormed in demanding that we return to the dining room. Through the open doors I could hear Geoff haranguing ‘Ma,’ as he persists in calling Belle.

“You must come back and listen to Geoff’s plan. He has worked so hard to put it together.”

“Is it anything like his last plan?” Audrey asked.

“Well, it is a bit,” Cherry conceded. “But this time it’s much better. It will really work.”

Cherry was losing confidence as she spoke in the face of Audrey’s obvious scepticism, so now she turned to me.

“You must come back and listen to him, Bill. Your whole future here depends on Geoff. Don’t you want to know what he’s going to do?”

I was starting to explain my role against the background of Geoff’s monologue when he suddenly bellowed: “Cherubim!” Cherry muttered ‘Oh dear’ and scuttled out, leaving both doors open behind her. Gerry mouthed ‘Cherubim?’ at me and Jenny got a fit of the giggles.

“Belle’s twins were Christened Angela and Cherubim, but we usually call them Angie and Cherry.”

The three of us laughed but Audrey was not amused. She was looking angrily at the door into the hall. Geoff had quieted down somewhat now his sponsor had returned to encourage her mother to listen to her lover. I let my wish override my common sense, deciding that we could leave them to it and get on with our own business.

“Do you have a copy of the plans for the woods, Audrey?”

It took her a moment to turn and refocus on the three of us still standing around the kitchen.

“We have to stop that idiot,” she pleaded, waving a hand towards the dining room. “He’s worse than Chris and her bunch. Someone must do something.”

Audrey was addressing the door, and I wondered who she had in mind and what she wanted him or her to do. I was feeling a good deal of anger, and I wanted time alone to consider things: I was as enraged by Geoff calling Belle ‘Ma’ as I was by Cherry bringing him into our home to bully her mother. The idea of this ugly, rambling mansion being ‘home’ surprised me. I was almost overwhelmed with an urge to take Geoff by the scruff of the neck and throw him out: he was putting yet more pressure on Belle who had more than enough to cope with.

“The plans are up in my room,” Audrey had finally responded to my question. “I can’t think with him shouting in there, Bill. Could I take Jenny upstairs?”

Jenny looked a little apprehensive, so I gave her a reassuring hug. Audrey raised her eyebrows, but she was no more surprised than I was; I have had more embraces this evening than in the past decade. Even for the brief moment we were in contact, Jenny managed somehow to mould her body to me: I could certainly get used to cuddling her! Thankfully, Gerry seemed to be more amused than offended by this manhandling of his daughter.

Geoff’s voice had dominated the sounds coming from the dining room with brief inaudible murmurings when one of the women spoke. His speeches had been getting longer and louder. I waited at the bottom of the grand staircase while Jenny and Audrey climbed to her room, wondering if I should intervene. I was still standing there when the door closed behind the two women, still undecided.

If it had just been Geoff, I would have put an end to things half an hour before. The heart of my problem was that I was reluctant to get between a mother and her daughter. I had very little experience of family disputes and could only guess at the dynamics of the situation. Perhaps Belle felt betrayed because her child had brought in a man to browbeat her, or perhaps she considered her present discomfort the price of Cherry’s happiness, enduring it as a duty.

I had just had the brilliant thought that I could go in there to retrieve a bottle of wine for Gerry waiting patiently in the kitchen, when there was the scrape of a chair pushed violently across the floor and Cherry pleading: ‘Don’t Geoff’ Less than ten heartbeats later Geoff was slumped against the table leg gasping for breath.

On hearing Cherry’s anguished cry, I thrust the dining room door open. Belle was sitting at the head of the table, looking up at Geoff looming over her. There were two spots of colour on her cheeks but otherwise she looked quite composed, which is more than I would have been in her shoes. Geoff had his right arm thrust out with his forefinger extended from his closed fist poised about five centimetres from Belle’s nose. Cherry was behind his shoulder trying to pull him away from her mother.

He turned as I crashed in, his face suffused with rage. He shrugged Cherry off, sending her crashing into the table, then he turned to me, swinging his left fist at my head. I stepped inside the intended punch, jabbing my right fist into the soft tissue of his belly just below his ribs. Fortunately, his momentum carried him clear of Belle as he collapsed with his hands clutching his stomach. She had risen from her chair, but I think she would have been too slow to escape unscathed if he had landed on her.

Gerry had arrived, going at once to Belle, placing his considerable bulk between her and the rest of us. I relaxed knowing that she was safe: he will hit anyone who threatens her, even me, if I showed any aggression towards her. Gerry may not show great initiative as an employee, but he knows how to treat a damsel in distress. Cherry had recovered to become aware of her partner sprawled against the table leg.

What happened next bordered on the farcical. I saw very little of it, being involved too closely in the action, but Gerry had a grandstand view. I was looming over Geoff, who was recovering although still somewhat bewildered; I think I intended to offer him my hand to help him up, but he began accusing me of foul tactics: I had, he said, hit hm unawares.

“Give me a hand up so I can squash you like a beetle!” This sentence was interspersed with swear words, but I omit them since they did nothing to clarify his intentions.

I held out my hand and he pulled me forward onto his other fist swinging towards my jaw. I stepped to the side, expecting some such tactic, and released his hand causing him to stagger back against the table. My sideways movement coincided with Cherry’s return to the fray; she stumbled against me taking a step to regain her balance which thrust her hard against her lover, who pushed her back towards me. I grabbed her round the waist, trapping her arms which she was beginning to flail. I lifted her off her feet intending to deposit her behind me where she could do less damage. She kicked out vigorously as soon as her feet left the ground, catching her lover a crippling blow to his crotch. He went down again, holding his testicles and puking all over the parquet flooring.

“Get him out of here,” Belle demanded, her face twisted with disgust.

“If Geoff goes, you’ll never see me again!” Cherry screamed at her mother.

“Audrey! Go and pack a case for my daughter, please.” I had not noticed until then that Audrey and Jenny, attracted by the commotion, had come down to stand in the dining room doorway. “And will you call Angela and tell her to get over here.”

Gerry and I helped Geoff, a victim of friendly fire, through the kitchen and into the yard where we eased him into Cherry’s van. She fussed over him, cooing and clucking like a hen with her chick. She was still adjusting his seat belt to avoid any contact with his groin when Audrey brought out a suitcase that we loaded in the back of the van. She and I went back inside with Angie who came scurrying across the yard, leaving Gerry to watch the van drive off into the night.

Belle had made it as far as the staircase and she was sitting there looking exhausted. When Gerry returned, he and I made a chair of our hands to carry her up to her suite. She revived on the way, giggling all the time. Audrey preceded us up the stairs, but Angie was standing looking into the dining room where, I later discovered, Jenny was cleaning up the vomit.

“I’ll send the lift down for you,” Belle giggled, tapping Gerry and me on the head.

Audrey had the bath filling when we got to Belle’s room. Then she excused herself, saying she was going to make up beds on my floor for Jenny and her father. He and I went downstairs to help with putting the dining room back in order. We cleared the table and loaded the dishwasher before we settled at the kitchen table with large glasses of wine.

“Is it always this entertaining?” Jenny wanted to know.

“Sunday is family night. This is my third since I arrived, and they’ve all been interesting but never quite so lively.”

I thanked both of them for the civilised part they had played in the events of the evening, asking Jenny if she would still consider working for us.

“Audrey had hardly started when we ran down to see the fun. I like the concept, and I could work with Audrey. Will I be able to recruit my own team?”

“I have no idea what Audrey is planning in that area. Is there someone special you want to bring in?”

“Don’t take the chance of losing the job on my account,” Gerry interrupted. “I told you I’ll get another job, no problem.”

Gerry had been fired by the new owners of Brown’s for divulging secrets to a rival, and Jenny wanted to give her dad a job. While he was maintaining a recently completed garden layout, he had been approached by Charles Junior who was looking for me. Gerry did not know why Charlie wanted me, but he reckoned that it would not be to do me a favour, so he told him nothing. My own guess was that Charlie wanted to beg me to take Hazel back. Someone reported seeing the two men together and, as a result, Gerry was shown the door.

“Both of you start work here as soon as you’re ready. I’ll fix it with Belle and, if I can’t, we’ll all three be unemployed together. ‘All for one, one for all’, as the Three Musketeers used to say.”

Angie came down at one point to make hot chocolate for her mother, but otherwise we spent the rest of the evening talking over old times. I knew Gerry was living with his other daughter and her husband since his wife died. It was a council house, and he had transferred the lease to Peggy. He liked his son-in-law well enough, but he found it a strain living with them. I would have offered him the room next to mine if I could have been certain that Belle would back me.

I knew the broad outlines of Jenny’s history. She was pregnant when she completed her degree in leisure management and had a second child soon after. She had thrown her husband out for cheating, not for the first time, about three years before. Since then, she has been waitressing. I did not know that she was in privately rented accommodation somewhere near the bottom of the waiting list for a council house. She did not dwell on it, but it was clear that she was living very close to the poverty line. She made me feel ashamed for the self-pity I had indulged in when I lost my job and Hazel walked out with all my money.

“This is a rare treat for me,” Jenny sighed after Angie left. “The company of two handsome men who treat me like a lady. And I can feel righteous for leaving the kids with Peggie.” She turned to me: “She’s desperate to start a family but it’s just too difficult at the moment.”

“So, you’re quite happy to be with a couple of codgers old enough to be your father? Hang on! One of them is your father.”

Later, I showed Gerry into the room next to mine before I walked Jenny to her bedroom door.

“Thanks for everything, Bill, and you’re not that old. There’s only about fifteen years difference in our ages and I’ll bet I’ve had more maturing experiences than you have.” It was all very light-hearted, of course, and the kiss on the cheek meant nothing, but I went to bed in a thoughtful mood.

In the morning it was Angie who was standing at the cooker preparing breakfast.

“She wants to see you right away,” Angie told me, gesturing to the tray lying on the table. “Take that up to mum. Are your friends coming to breakfast?”

I knocked on Gerry’s door, finding him fully dressed and sent him to rouse Jenny before I made my way to Belle’s suite. She was sitting up looking none the worse for her adventures the previous evening. There was a sheaf of papers beside her, and she picked them up to wave at me.

“You ejected my new estate manager before he properly got started, and my daughter has left me for good – again. What do you plan to do to make that up to me?”

“Are you using last night’s tiff to blackmail me into taking on the rest of your brood? I thought you had stopped looking for someone else to do all the work?”

“You suffer from the eighth deadly sin, Bill: indifference, and it’s perhaps the worst of all.”

“I don’t think I’m indifferent, but you may be right. I want to give things without strings, letting people repay me in their own way in their own time. I don’t like contracts where I spell out what I offer and what I demand in return. I care about you and your whole menagerie, but I don’t want to haggle.”

“Geoff had no such qualms. He spells it out: fifty thousand plus performance bonus for him, three deputies of his choosing at thirty-three thousand each and twelve assistants at twenty-five grand a time. I’ll accept any reasonable offer you make. Don’t make it a contract requirement, but at least tell me what you would like to get in return for your contribution. Pretend I’m Santa and give me your wish list.”

“Ok Ma, you asked for it.” She grinned when I used Geoff’s nickname for her.

It amounted to very little. Jobs for Gerry and Jenny, the room next to mine and three meals a day for my old friend; permission to hire an architect for the picnic kitchen; and half an acre for experimental crossbreeding experiments.

“And a car with two kids’ seats for Jenny’s exclusive use. You’d better add the usual fruit and chocolate – and a jigsaw, but not too difficult.”

“Get Jenny to give me her details and I’ll get her insured to drive the Renault. I’ll give her cash to buy the car seats when I come down. Go away and let me eat.”

I had arranged to meet Gerry in the greenhouse, and we spent the time until eleven strolling around the kitchen garden. Audrey and Angie brought the tea, and we were briefly joined by a grinning Jenny, brandishing a set of car keys. She would be back with her two children after she had picked them up from nursery. After she had left, Belle came in to drive Gerry home to pack his gear; she had some business with her lawyer and would collect him later in the afternoon.

“I think I know as much as my sister about planting and caring for seeds,” Angie told me, looking more relaxed than I had seen her. “I’ll be staying in the house from now on so you can count on me.”

I gave her a hug, rather to her surprise, although she quickly hugged me in return.

“Delighted to have you on board. Does this mean...?”

“Not before time, wouldn’t you agree?” she interrupted with a happy smile.

When I stepped away from Angie, Audrey stepped forward to mould herself against me, making the hug a sensual experience: “You hugged Jenny and Belle yesterday and now you’ve started on Angie. I’m not about to miss out. From now on you’ll hug us all three times a day after meals!”

I held the greenhouse door open for Audrey to precede me with the tray holding the empty cups. Angie and I exchanged a few more words so by the time I exited Audrey was passing through the arch into the stable yard where she had been accosted by Graham. She nodded her head in my direction, and he came storming over. I still had my hand on the door handle which caused a petulant scowl on his fat face.

“I must talk to my wife.”

“She’s at work and I am unable to allow you to open this door,” I smiled at him, my hand remaining on the handle. “There are sensitive plants in there so the door may only be opened six times a day. It’s a pity you stopped to chat to Audrey while the door was open. Of course, then you’d have had to wait until lunchtime to get out.”

“Don’t be absurd, you cretin.”

He moved towards the door, but I straightened up and looked him in the eye, laughing: “Funnily enough, that’s exactly what Geoff said just before he fell down.”

Graham got a crafty look in his eye, before he forced himself to smile at me, asking if there had been some excitement the previous evening. I told him that all I knew was that Belle had brought home a new friend and he and I had to help Geoff out to the van before Cherry drove away.

“Belle was so upset that she sent to your wife for help; she’s her daughter, you know”

He was speaking very loudly and slowly, demanding details of Belle’s new friend. He was particularly anxious to know where the man had spent the night. I tried to be as helpful as possible.

“I don’t know where exactly he spent the night, but Belle was alone in bed this morning when Angie sent me up with her breakfast.”

He changed direction at that point in our chat, asking where his car had gone. I pretended not to know which car he meant, telling him I thought it belonged to the estate and not to him.

“Yes, yes, the Renault belongs to the estate, but it’s reserved for my exclusive use.”

I finally told him that the new employee had been given the car keys by Belle. He had been looking more perplexed, at least as much by the information I was feeding him as by my ham-handed acting the country yokel. I think it was the idea of a new employee that drove him over the edge. He was pulling out his mobile phone as he turned away from me, stopping when his speed-dialed call was answered. I stood where I was, listening to his side of the ensuing conversation.

“Geoff blew it,” he began.

“I don’t know! He had to be carried out and Cherry drove off with him.”

“Just shut up and listen. There was a strange man stayed the night. And there’s a new employee. I saw her this morning driving off in my car. Quite dishy actually.”

“There’s only the village idiot and Angie here.”

“Audrey’s in the house but she won’t talk to me. Look we need a meeting right away.”

“You’ll have to come and get me. I’ve no wheels remember.”

He closed the phone, ordered me to get back to work and moved through the arch. I was tempted to touch my forelock. A few minutes later the estate Range Rover normally in the possession of Maurice and Christine swept into the yard. Maurice was driving and he was not in the best of moods judging by the fact that he accelerated away before Graham had managed to close the passenger door.

After he had gone Angie appeared: “Sensitive plants that have to be protected?” she laughed. “He’s even dumber than I imagined.”

“I consider you a delicate plant that requires protection,” I grinned back at her.

I worked for the rest of the morning with a smile on my face. Throwing Geoff out of the house the previous evening was a fading memory. He was, presumably, with Cherry but the threat they posed was surely negligible and probably in the past. It was clear that Graham knew what had been planned, but it was hard to take seriously the inept performance of Cherry’s beau. As for Christine and her husband, I had not given them a thought in more than a week. I reminded myself to warn the architect before I let him wander through the woods alone but, again, there seemed very little danger.

Graham was an altogether different matter. His wife had now left him, aligning herself with the opposition. He was still living in the steward’s house across the stable yard from the main dwelling. He seemed to pose no significant threat on his own, although he could certainly be a nuisance. I was sure that he would seek help from Maurice to recover his lost car, but I underrated his value to the pair in the dower house. I should have remembered that an innocuous enemy will often be allowed closer than a more obvious threat. Graham may look and sound like a buffoon, but others can approach hidden behind his considerable bulk.

At lunch of soup and toast, Angie warned me to be wary of her husband. He can be vindictive. Audrey added that Maurice was capable of inflicting real damage when he loses his temper. They both agreed that the chief danger lay with Christine. Hers is the brain behind any scheme that is likely to be hatched; she also has the determination to carry her allies through any doubts they may have.

“She was the one who wanted Daddy’s estate. I was delighted with Belle’s offer – still am. Chris is greedy. She wants it all. If we had taken the money from Belle, Chris wouldn’t have rested until she got control of my share as well as her own.”

Jenny drove up while we were drinking coffee, so I put the soup back on to heat. She had brought her children with her, so I found some fish fingers in the freezer and made them a feast. Jim is only three, clinging to his mummy, he peeked out at us from behind her shoulder. After they had eaten, he went upstairs with Audrey where Jenny put him to bed for an hour. Enid at four was much more sociable; she and I got on well from the outset, probably because I reminded her of her grandpa Gerry.

She happily accompanied Angie and me back to the greenhouse. Neither of us knew a great deal about kids but Jenny had asked us to keep the little girl awake if at all possible. Enid is a fount of knowledge, and she had no inhibitions about sharing secrets with her new best friends. Some of the information was really sad, and I found myself growing angry that a little girl should have to see at first hand the results of betrayal. Her daddy, she told us, loves other ladies more than he loves them. When Angie demurred, Enid gave us an eyewitness account that had both adults weeping.

Some of her chatter was extremely funny, although it was presented with great solemnity. How the topic arose, I cannot remember but we learned that her mummy sleeps in an old shirt of grandpas with tiny little pants. Enid’s vocabulary is good, but it did not encompass varieties of underwear. Not finding the words, she hiked up her little dress to show her own pants, pink with little teddy bears, assuring us that her mummy’s were much briefer. At that point she demanded to know what Angie was wearing under her jeans. I left them at that point, partly to avoid being the next to be interrogated and partly so I did not embarrass the child by laughing at her.

Angie and I spent more of the afternoon together than we normally would because we were both enthralled by the little girl. She received three calls and several text messages from Graham during the course of the afternoon. I could hear her side of the conversations, which were increasingly causing her stress. After Jenny had retrieved her daughter, I asked Angie if there was anything I could do to help. She shrugged off her problems, so I changed the subject to her adroitness in thinning seedlings

“I will try to do as good a job as Cherry,” she smiled, obviously pleased by my praise.

“This has nothing to do with your sister! It is your skill, your dedication I commented on. If there is a comparison it is all in your favour: I really enjoy our time together but I’m always waiting for an emotional outburst when she’s about. You clearly have far more problems than Cherry,” I waved at her mobile phone. “But I feel comfortable with you.”

I left her looking puzzled while I went to the other end of the greenhouse to bring back seed trays I had cleaned earlier. I was inspecting them to decide if they were fit for purpose when Angie joined me, holding out her phone so I could read the message on the screen. Stripped of the invective, it was a list of questions about our recent actions in the big house and our future plans. I briefly wondered if we could feed them misleading information.

Most of my attention focused on Graham’s choice of incentives for his wife to do his bidding, for it was clear that the message came from him. He spelled out in some detail the mental and physical tortures he would inflict if she did not obey him in every particular. He preyed on Angie’s envy for her sister, gloating on how much better Cherry looked and responded to him in bed; he threatened to force his wife to watch as he allowed himself to be seduced by her twin. To an outsider like me, the threats were not credible, but I suppose Angie had been subject to this sort of nonsense for so long that she might believe it.

The physical threats centred on Christine and Maurice. If Graham is to be believed they had seriously strange ideas about love and marriage. Binding and beating were, Graham strongly suggested, their favourite forms of caress. It was not clear whether they practiced on each other since Graham used the text message to gloat over their plans to inflict pain on his wife. When I first met them, I judged Cherry to be ten years younger than her twin; now I marveled that Angie had been so resilient if this sort of abuse by her husband was frequent.

I blurted out that she had to divorce Graham, and she began sobbing. I held her in my arms and when she calmed down, she told me that she was saving every scrap of change from the little her husband allowed her towards the seven thousand it would cost her to employ a solicitor.

“According to your mum, it will cost you nothing. You have no earnings so you will get legal aid. That’s one of the reasons she has me working here without pay.”

We did no more work that day. Belle had not returned but Audrey confirmed what I had told her when Angie confided the whole story. Jenny had received legal aid for her divorce which proved to be the icing on Angie’s cake. I left the three women hugging each other in glee, while I played with the two kids on the kitchen floor. Belle and Gerry brought home take-away Indian food, joining in the party atmosphere. After we had eaten, Gerry, his grandchildren and I took his belongings up to his room. While we were chatting as he put his clothing into drawers, the kids fell asleep on his bed.

Downstairs, the girls had opened several bottles of wine to celebrate Angie’s new status. Belle was most apologetic, accepting the blame for assuming her daughter knew about legal aid.

“I couldn’t understand why you married him in the first place,” she explained, “But then I have no idea why I married any of my own husbands. I suppose I thought you had inherited the family’s curse of picking the wrong man.”

The wine took the edge off Jenny’s comments on the idiocy displayed by her dad and me in letting the kids fall asleep without cleaning their teeth. She got into bed with them, banishing Gerry to the room she had occupied the night before. There was a good deal of more or less good-natured condemnation of the male of the species, so Gerry and I retired early, opening yet another bottle of wine for them before leaving the ladies.

I lay in bed considering my position. Meeting Belle at the market stall had changed my life. I was at a very low point, closer to feeling defeated than ever before but, even in the depths of despair, I was certain that I would not only survive but prosper. Of course, I had no way of knowing what I had let myself in for when I agreed to restore Claude’s market garden. I am strong and healthy but so are thousands of other men who struggle to find work. My optimism must be rooted in self-confidence, even although I consider myself to be modest and unassuming. Perhaps it is this underlying certainty that Belle recognised when she asked me to become more involved in the troubles affecting her family.

Or perhaps she was bowing to the inevitable. For whatever reason I could not keep my nose out of her affairs Today is a prime example: Angie’s marriage is none of my business and yet, as a result of my interference, she is going tomorrow to start proceedings for divorce. Having gone that far I cannot simply abandon her, so I will have to be available to her at least until she has dumped Graham’s fat arse. This morning, Belle accused me of being indifferent: how I wish that were true.

It is time to face the reality of my situation. I am involved in Belle’s family affairs, and I will have to continue to play a part until the road ahead of her is free from obstacles. She employed me to remove the weeds from her market garden but now I must commit myself to removing the weeds from her family. When Belle distributed the seeds of her inheritance some fell, as the Bible says, on stony ground. The problem with weeds is that their roots become entangled with the roots of the plants. When you pull out the weed, you pull the plant out with it.

Then I remembered the parable where Jesus recommended leaving the weeds to grow with the plants, only separating them after harvest. Of course, He was a carpenter. I grinned in the darkness of my bedroom. What He failed to realise, is that weeds are often more robust than the plants. Until the harvest I was going to have to find a way to keep our human weeds from overwhelming our delicate plants. If I could not destroy them, I could try to cut off their plans by detecting them early and nipping off the bud before it had time to blossom.

I was beginning to get sleepy, losing control of my metaphors as my mind wandered off. I was standing amongst stubble in a field that had just been harvested. The only other person in the picture was Ruth, the Biblical maid, gleaning the fallen grain from amongst the stalks. I fell asleep as I got close enough to recognise the young woman as Jenny.