out of . . .
‘I’m sorry,’ she said abruptly. ‘It is none of my business.’
‘No bones broken, moi dear.’ Miss Yaxley too seemed to regret the clash, and want to make amends. ‘Thank you for bringing Sepp’s things. The money will come in nicely.’
‘Be careful when you take it to the bank. I think it’s illegal now, to hold so many sovereigns; if you’re not a bullion-dealer.’
‘Not my crime, moi dear. An’ Sepp’s dead, isn’t he? Besides, folks don’t hold with banks much, round here.’
‘Can we . . . stay on? At the cottage?’
‘Stay as long as you like, moi dear. If that’s what you want.’
‘We’ve got a man seeing to us. Nathan Gotobed.’
‘Aye,’ said Miss Yaxley. ‘So I’ve heard. He did for Sepp.’ She said it with a hint of . . . Rose could not fathom what she’d said it with a hint of.
When she got home, Timothy and Jane were still tucking in bits of the newly laid fence.
But Nathan Gotobed and his terrible billhook were gone. And the hedge was only half-laid.
‘A man came for him,’ said Timothy. ‘They had an argument.’
‘What about?’
‘We couldn’t hear. Did you find out anything else about Mr. Yaxley?’
She gave him a startled look. ‘Why did you ask that?’
‘Oh,’ he said with an airy shrug. ‘We just thought you might have heard some gossip in the shop.’ Jane shrugged inscrutably as well.
Rose had that awful feeling that everybody was hiding something from her. But she just said shortly, ‘They think he got drowned on the marshes.’
‘Oh,’ said Timothy. ‘That’s odd.’
‘What’s odd, for heaven’s sake?’
‘I thought he’d wear his rubbers to go on the marshes. And his rubbers are still here.’
Rose couldn’t settle to dusting again. She felt restless, which disturbed her, because she wasn’t normally a restless person. Perhaps it was just the contrast between the warm sunny day outside, and the dimness of the house. She felt things were going on outside and she was missing them. She rationalised it into a trip to the shop. Jane made strenuous offers to go for her, but Rose said tartly, ‘My turn for a nosy!’
As she re-entered the village, her white Volkswagen Golf gave her an appealing look. It seemed terribly stranded and lonely stuck on the grass shoulder where the road ended and the path began. She felt a vague unease at the car being so far from the house, instead of parked in the drive as usual. She always thought it ironical, afterwards, that the first unease she felt was about the car . . .
She checked the doors and trunk. Locked. But, inscribed on the dusty hood by a small finger, she found the legend
THIS CAR IS DIRTY
She smiled a little, because children were the same everywhere. Then she walked round checking the tires. And found scrawled on the trunk-lid, by a bigger finger, the single word
YUPPIE!
Somehow, because the finger had been bigger, it upset her much more. And because she couldn’t have been further from being a yuppie. She got a sense of prejudice, determined ignorance, deliberate unfairness. A sense it was perhaps unfortunate she carried into the shop.
It wasn’t a big shop, and there had been a pathetic attempt to turn it into a mini-market, which made it seem even smaller. Where she had hoped to find brass scales, round blocks of real cheese and enamel adverts for Fry’s Milk Chocolate, she found the thin blue and white stripes of Mace, and garish star-shaped price tags in fluorescent orange. There were one or two women idly contemplating the same old brands with a total absorption that would have done credit to the Buddha himself. Her approach had obviously been observed.
The two shopkeepers stood behind their cash-register, as oddly assorted a couple as she’d ever seen. The man was tall and thin, with a balding sallow streetwise face that could never have been born in East Anglia. He had made some attempt to dress sportingly in an Arsenal sweatshirt, but there was dirt down the front of it from handling boxes. His wife was short and stout, with a very humped back under her navy print dress, and an upper lip and chin that had those straggling strands of facial hair that always made Rose want to curl up inside.
‘Aha,’ said the man. ‘Tracked us down at last, I see!’ He spoke loudly, for the benefit of the whole shop, with that kind of bumptious flirtatiousness and familiarity that always whines, when tackled head-on, that it means no