Mrs Pargeter swiftly made these calculations, as they passed out of the far side of the field on to the road. Their exit was considerably more decorous than their entrance had been. No pulverized hedgerow this time, no leaves and twigs in their hair. Mrs Pargeter simply stopped the cultivator by a gate, and waited while her trailer passenger opened it.
“Which way do we go?” asked Tammy anxiously, as she climbed back on to her bed of garden refuse.
“Left,” said Mrs Pargeter firmly.
“They’re going to catch up with us! There’re no other routes we could have taken. They know where we are!”
“Yes, but we’ve got a head start on them.” Mrs Pargeter gunned the engine – insofar as the engine of a cultivator/tractor admits of gunning. And what, she wondered idly as she did it, does ‘gunning’ an engine mean, anyway?
“Have you any idea where we’re going?” Tammy Jacket still sounded anxious and a bit whiney.
“Yes,” Mrs Pargeter replied with a confident smile. “We’re going to get help.”
♦
The knot had been tied, the young couple were man and wife, and the reception was going awfully well. The photographs had been efficiently dispatched, and the guests, on arriving at the country house hotel from the church, had been given a glass of champagne before all the handshaking in the reception line – which is always the sign of a well-organized wedding.
The food had been consumed; everyone had commented on how radiant the bride, how noble the groom, how pretty the little bridesmaids had looked; the photocall for the cutting of the cake had passed without a hitch; and the speeches had been unembarrassing. An elderly uncle’s indulgent reminiscences of the eighteen-month-old bride lying naked on a fur rug had prompted appropriate chortles; and the one rather off-colour innuendo in the best man’s speech had fortunately not been understood by those whom it might have offended (while those who did understand it had thought it very funny).
All through, champagne flowed exactly as champagne should. The only person not imbibing was Gary, who sat proudly in his uniform on the periphery of the reception, sipping at a glass of fizzy mineral water.
The bride and groom gazed at each other radiantly. It was all going so well. They’d broken the back of it now, the difficult bit was nearly over. Soon they would change into their ‘going-away’ clothes, be taken by Rolls-Royce to the airport, and finally, mercifully, be on their own. Then the flight to Las Palmas, cab to their hotel, and the wedding night. They had no worries about that last bit; it was the one part of the proceedings they had really practised properly.
The bride glanced at her watch, and the groom took his cue. They’d both been to too many weddings that had gone on too long because the newly-weds had oversocialized rather than doing the decent thing – in other words, going to get changed for departure as soon as possible. So the bride and groom hurried off to the assigned bedroom for a quick change and a quick feel.
They had chosen the right moment. The wedding guests were getting to the stage when they’d soon have to decide whether to start sobering up or to continue and get properly drunk. Long-lost relatives, reunited in the bonhomie of the occasion, were beginning to remember why they’d been long-lost for so long. Tenuous acquaintances, yoked arbitrarily together by the seating plan, were getting to the third cycle of questions about what people did for a living and how many children they had. All good things have to come to an end, and it was time for this particular good thing to come to an end.
In the bedroom upstairs, now dressed in her smart beige ‘going-away’ suit, the bride looked out over the front drive of the hotel while her new husband brushed his hair at the dressing table. “It’s really beautiful, this. We’ll remember it always, won’t we?”
“Yes,” agreed her husband, who had shrewdly recognized early in their relationship that that was going to be the best answer to most of her questions.
“Really elegant,” the bride continued, looking down over the neat gravel between perfectly edged lawns on which dark trees were scattered with an eighteenth-century landscape artist’s skill. At the centre of the gravel circle directly in front of the hotel stood a fountain round which fat stone cherubs curled, dispensing their cornucopia of water.
“Been a perfect day, hasn’t it? Best day of our lives.”
“Yes,” her husband once again concurred, knowing which side his bread was buttered.
Downstairs, Gary and Denise discreetly left the ballroom in which the reception was being held. He wanted to check that all was ready for a trouble-free departure in the Rolls-Royce.
“Oh, for God’s sake!” he said, as he came out of the hotel’s front doors. “Haven’t they got any respect for a classic?”
Some waggish friends of the groom had been at work. Across the Rolls-Royce’s back window the words ‘Just Married’ had been picked out in shaving foam. The rear bumper had been wrapped in pink toilet roll, and a cluster of tin cans tied on to jangle against the road.
Gary moved forward, reaching instinctively into his pocket for a handkerchief to wipe off the foam.
“No, you don’t,” said Denise.
“But it’s my Rolls-Royce,” Gary protested pathetically.
“You don’t,” his wife continued, “a, because that’s what people pay for when they hire wedding cars, and b, because you certainly don’t wipe it off with your clean handkerchief. Is that clear?”
“Yes,” replied Gary, who had long since learned the same lesson as the bridegroom in the bedroom above. “So what do I do?”
“You make no comment at all. You drive them to the airport with the tin cans clanking behind – and you just hope nobody’s stuffed a kipper up the exhaust…”
“Oh, no!” Gary rushed round the back of the car and crouched to check whether his precious Rolls-Royce had suffered this final indignity. He sighed with relief. There was no smell or other evidence of fishy sabotage.
“And,” Denise continued when he rose to his feet, “next time you take a wedding booking – particularly when it involves the Roller – you make sure you charge a lot more.”
“Right.”
“You got to cover the depreciation of your motors.”
“True.”
“So you put on a ‘foam, toilet roll and tin can surcharge’ – right?”
“Right.”
Denise turned at the sound of the hotel front doors opening. “Oh, they’re coming. I’ll get a lift back – see you at home, love.”
“Yes, OK.” Averting his eyes from the desecration of his precious Rolls-Royce, the uniformed chauffeur got into the driving seat and adjusted the line of his cap in the rear-view mirror.
Denise melted back to join the emerging wedding party. The bride and groom, pale-suited and casual, stood out against the crowd of morning dress and hats. Hands were slapped on shoulders, jocular platitudes about honeymoons were tossed into the mealee. The bride’s mother wondered whether it was her cue to have a little cry or not.
At that moment, communal attention was snatched away from the happy couple by an apparition at the end of the hotel’s drive. Through the impressive iron gates, its engine screaming resistance to the way it was being driven, surged, in a spray of gravel, a small red cultivator/tractor with a trailer of garden debris in tow.
The tractor was being driven by a white-haired woman in a bright silk dress. Bouncing about in the trailer behind was a copper-headed woman dressed in an unlikely miscellany of clashing garments. The pair of them were screeching up the drive at a terrifying rate.
Even more alarming, behind them, eating up the space between the two vehicles, surged a huge blue Jaguar. The two grim faces behind its windscreen were oblivious to their surroundings, obsessed only by the imperative of the chase.