‘Everyone wants to examine your equipment,’ mocked Joey. ‘Wherever he rolls up to sort trees, you see wives hanging out of the window.’
‘But the husbands always put you down,’ sighed Woody, ‘saying they’d do it themselves if they had the time. The real battle is views versus privacy. “My neighbour’s perfectly happy for you to cut down those trees,” they say, so you pick up your axe, then the neighbour rolls up with a shotgun.’
‘No cream?’ joked Joey, the morning Etta provided hot scones and home-made bramble jelly. As she got a carton of cream out of the fridge, Woody patted his flat stomach: ‘We’ll have to get out of our jeans into elasticated waistbands soon,’ he teased.
Sitting at the table in Etta’s dark kitchen, he confessed he felt hellishly guilty about planting the mature hedge that blotted out her sunlight.
‘Valent insisted to please Bonny Richards, and when he asks, you jump. I would have planted hawthorn or beech, but I assumed you’d be an old cow like Romy. Sorry, Etta.’
‘Romy’s always shouting at the lads for making a noise drillin’ or hammerin’,’ grumbled Joey. ‘Then she went ballistic when they wolf-whistled at her in a tight jumper. Affront to her dignity, she said.’ Joey laughed. ‘Front was the operative word. She made Martin ring up Valent and complain. Valent took no notice.’
‘Bonny Richards doesn’t want anyone spying on her,’ explained Woody. ‘Journalists were renting houses all round her place in London. You don’t look like a member of the paparazzi, Etta, although I’m not sure I’d trust that Dora.’
As the dark, merry eyes of Joey, who’d been given half the Daily Mail’s fee by Dora, met Etta’s, they shifted.
‘What’s Bonny like?’ asked Etta.
‘Bit skinny for me, likes to preserve a respectable image but covered plenty of sheet miles in her time,’ said Joey. ‘She’s tryin’ to improve Valent. “If you stop droppin’ your haitches, I’ll drop my knickers” sort of thing. She thinks he’s rough and she hates the country, so Valent’s trying to tempt her with the house. God, these are good.’ Joey reached out for a third scone.
‘Finish them,’ cried a delighted Etta – it was such heaven to cook for people who liked her food. ‘When’s Valent moving in?’
‘Depends on her, probably end of next year. He paid four mil, done up proper it could go for 12 mil. Reassures the locals if a lovely ’ouse is restored, improves the whole village, puts everyone’s prices up.’
‘Yours included,’ said Woody, who lived with his mother on the Salix Estate.
‘I like your house, Joey,’ said Etta. ‘Nice and roomy for all your children.’
‘Willowwood don’t think so. Direct Debbie and Phoebe and Toby are petrified Woody’s going to chop down trees round it so they’d ’ave to look at something common that ruins their rural idyll.’ Joey laughed fatly and unrepentantly.
Woody put down the Racing Post and picked up Etta’s garden plan.
‘Those are the plants – foxgloves, hostas, Solomon’s seal, ferns – I’m hoping to put in,’ she explained.
‘Shade-tolerant.’ Woody shook his head. ‘I’m sorry, Etta. I’ll dig out a flower bed for you and bring you some manure from the stable.’
‘Oh, how kind! Dora was telling me about your syndicate. I’m so pleased you saved Not for Crowe.’
‘You’ll have to come and see him race, or we’ll bring him over to see you. He never stops eating, he’d love your cakes. Syndicate’s cheap in the summer. He’s been outside, now he’s got to come in and go racing.’
Later they showed Etta a video of Not for Crowe and Family Dog, who had a broad, cheerful face and very short legs. Both horses looked as though they could easily get overtaken by the donkeys at Grange-over-Sands.
One evening, Niall Forbes the vicar, slim, blond and baby-faced (fractionally aged by wearing spectacles), dropped in to welcome her. ‘I do hope you are a worshipper, Mrs Bancroft,’ he said, in a high, fluting voice, and then asked Etta if she was straight yet.
You’re certainly not, thought Etta, as Niall downed four glasses of sherry. Under Etta’s sweet, sympathetic gaze, he tearfully confessed that last week he’d broken the news that he was gay to his parents.
‘They were so good about it. But after I’d gone to bed, I couldn’t sleep and came down for a cuppa and found my father crying his eyes out in the study. I wanted to hug him, but felt it might make him uncomfortable.’