Crowded Marriage by Alliott Catherine

Author:Alliott, Catherine [Alliott, Catherine]
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Publisher: Sourcebooks
Published: 2011-05-01T04:00:00+00:00

Chapter Sixteen

The following day, I rang Kate and told her the whole sorry tale.

“Oh dear, poor you. But you know, he’s right, I’m afraid,” she said to my surprise. “You don’t call a vet out for chickens, certainly not baby chicks. My father used to just wring their necks if they were looking a bit dodgy.”

“No!”

“They’re not pets, Imogen. You can’t get too attached to farm animals. Where d’you think your M&S Chicken Kiev comes from?”

“I suppose,” I agreed humbly.

I couldn’t help thinking she sounded a bit sharp today. It occurred to me that I’d forgotten to return a call she’d left on my answer machine last week and I wondered, guiltily, if she was feeling peeved. “When you’ve got a moment,” the message had said mournfully, and the awful thing was, I hadn’t. Recently, I’d either been painting furiously or running round after the animals. I just hadn’t had time.

“Rufus must have been upset, though,” she went on in a gentler tone, perhaps regretting her no-nonsense approach.

“Yes, he was, but actually he was more furious than anything else. He spent the whole of last night setting traps for the fox.”

Nevertheless, when he’d come home from school, his face had gone white.

“What, all of them? He killed them all, and Cynthia too?”

“I’m afraid so, darling,” I’d said anxiously, twisting my hands. “But the vet says it was all terribly quick, they wouldn’t have known anything about it.”

I didn’t go into the last, dying moments of one particular chick, whose life had been needlessly protracted by a crazy woman shoving it in hot ovens and suffocating it with halitosis.

“Bastard,” he’d said, changing colour again.

“Rufus!”

“Well, he is. I want to kill him.” And taking his frog in a jam jar, he’d stormed out of the kitchen, tears stinging his eyes, to see the rest of the hens.

Luckily I’d had the presence of mind—and the courage, I felt—to dispose of Cynthia’s headless body. With the protection of a pair of Marigold gloves I’d put her first in a dustbin, then, panicking that she’d honk and the fox would come back, had plucked her from the potato peelings and taken her, arms outstretched, appalled face screwed up and averted, to the cow’s field, where, much to the interest of the cows who clustered round, I’d dug a hole, panting and sweating and wielding a pickaxe, the ground was so hard (and this a woman who was more used to wielding a handbag as she sauntered down Putney High Street), thereby disposing of the evidence. Thus it was that now, when Rufus went out to the yard, he found the remaining chickens pecking away quite happily, callously unconcerned that their numbers were reduced.

He was gone for about half an hour, I think for a cry, and then ran back inside to use the phone. Ten minutes later, I looked out of the kitchen window to see Tanya, in a yellow T-shirt and blue leggings, running down the hill and leaping across the stream in the pit of the valley, with what looked like a length of rope in her hands.

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