I stepped into the room as Ian closed the door behind me. It looked like it hadn’t been redecorated for fifty years. Flowery wallpaper, a yellowing carpet and a pink quilt on a narrow single bed. I pressed my hand on the mattress and winced as a spring pinged underneath it. There was a stuffed ferret with horrid little pink eyes on the mantelpiece. My phone buzzed from inside the bag. It was Lala.
You there? Keep me posted. Xxx
I chucked the phone down on the quilt. Later was fine, I needed to put on my tweed. A few moments later, I looked like a Victorian lady explorer off to discover the dusty crevices of the empire. Was I supposed to look like this? I fished my lip-gloss out of my bag and added some for effect, then glanced in the mirror again. If Joe could see me, he would die of a heart attack from laughing.
There was a discreet knock at the door and a gentle cough outside.
‘Sorry, sorry, just coming.’ I threw the lip-gloss on the bed and opened the door.
‘Magnificent,’ said Ian. ‘Follow me.’
Sedate apparently being Ian’s preferred pace, I followed him back up the carpeted stairs and along the corridor.
‘Lord Jasper,’ said Ian, stopping outside a closed door from behind which I could hear Van Morrison playing. ‘I’ve got the journalist from London here.’
Van Morrison stopped. ‘Oh, Jesus,’ came a groan.
‘She’s not called Jesus, sir. She’s called Polly,’ said Ian.
‘Good one,’ said Jasper, throwing opening the door and smiling at me. ‘Polly, hello, any friend of Lala’s is a friend of mine.’
He was handsome, I had to admit it. And taller than I expected, with blue eyes and dirty blond hair that he swept to the side with one hand. He was also wearing an absurd pair of tweed knickerbockers which gathered just beneath his knees, but his shirt was loose and unbuttoned. He, too, was barefoot. Was nobody in this family able to dress themselves properly?
Jasper held out his hand. ‘How do you do?’
But I didn’t have a second to answer how I was doing, because he immediately turned to Ian.
‘Now, Ian, my good man, I can’t seem to find a single pair of shooting socks. I mean, I don’t know what you do with them. Do you eat them? I buy a million pairs every year and then the shooting season rolls around again and they’ve all gone. It’s the bloody end, I tell you.’
‘I’ll have a look in your father’s room, sir.’ Ian turned and glided silently back along the passage.
‘Right, well, Polly, I’m so sorry. It’s a madhouse here, as you’ve probably already gathered. Did you meet my parents?’
‘Yes, your father was outside with his dog, and your mother was in the kitchen, looking for her trousers.’
‘And here I am, looking for my socks. What a shambles we all are.’ He pushed his hair to the side again. ‘You look superb anyway. Have you been out shooting before?’
I looked down at my tweed self-consciously. ‘Oh, thanks. And no, I haven’t.’
Jasper started doing up his shirt. ‘Well, give me two seconds and, socks permitting, we can be on our way. How are you with dogs by the way?’
‘With them?’
‘Do you mind them? Do you like them?’
‘Oh, no… I mean, yes. I love them. I’ve grown up with them. My mother has a small terrier called Bertie.’
‘How sweet. Mine is an abominably badly behaved Labrador called Bovril. Do you mind being in charge of him today while I shoot? I’ll tell you where to stand and all that.’
‘Sure. No problem. What about the interview though?’
‘What interview?’
‘Well, I need to sit down with you at some point and chat about, you know, the pictures in the paper and…’ I trail off, nervously.
‘Oh, don’t worry about that, we’ll have acres of time tonight over dinner. Now, let’s go and find these socks.’
An hour later, I was standing behind Jasper in a field on the side of a steep hill, holding on to Bovril’s lead with one hand, and my hat with the other. There were five other men spread out along the field, each holding a gun, each with a woman standing dutifully behind them, also holding some colour of Labrador on a lead. The wind was blowing odd noises towards us from a wood at the bottom of the field, some sort of weird warbling and the sound of crashing footsteps through thick undergrowth.
‘What is that?’ I asked Jasper.
He didn’t reply.
‘Jasper?’ I tapped him on the shoulder and he looked around. ‘What’s… that… noise?’ I mouthed slowly at him and pointed at the trees.
‘Hang on.’ He reached into his ear and pulled out an orange earplug. ‘What?’
‘Sorry. I just wasn’t sure what the noise was.’
‘It’s the beaters. They’re…’
‘What are beaters?’
‘They’re the people who flush the birds out. And they’re down there, in the woods, walking towards us from the other side to flush out the birds, to make them fly over us. Then… bang. See?’
It didn’t seem very fair, a load of people hollering in a forest, trying to make the pheasants fly towards a line of armed men standing on a hill. Beside me, Bovril yawned and lay down. I fished in my pocket for my phone, my hands already numb from the cold. ‘Beaters people who chase birds,’ I tapped into my notes with stiff fingers. ‘Jasper has dog called Bovril. Duchess mad, stuffs all family pets.’
A sudden, loud bang to the right made me jump so I slid my phone back into my pocket and looked up in the air to see a pheasant whirling in small circles towards the ground. It hit the grass with a thud. Bovril looked at it, then looked up at me, then whined.
I jumped again as Jasper’s gun went off. The smell of gunpowder floated through the air and there was another thud behind us as that pheasant tumbled to the ground.
‘Let Bovril off his lead, will you?’ instructed Jasper, eyes still on the sky as if scanning for the Luftwaffe.
Bovril, pleased to be free, bounded towards the dead pheasant, picked it up by the neck, and trotted obediently back, dropping it on my boot. I looked down at it and inched my foot away, uncertain of Jimmy Choo’s policy on accepting back boots which had pheasant blood on them. Frowned upon, probably.
The sound of gunshots rang out. Suddenly, dozens of birds were flying out from the wood. I clapped my hands over my ears and looked up into the sky. Pheasants poured overhead as the shooting continued, some tumbling from the sky like stones, some flying straight on over the hedge behind them. I’d keep flying if I were you, I willed them, keep going until you get to somewhere nice and warm, like Africa.
Jasper muttered the odd ‘fuck’ and a small pile of empty red cartridges piled up behind him. Bovril, meanwhile, galloped back and forth, fetching pheasants and proudly creating a pile at my feet. Some were still twitching, which made me grimace. Urgh, what was I doing standing in this cold field? All I wanted was to sit down with Jasper and get the interview done.
A whistle blew and Jasper put down his gun. ‘Well, that wasn’t too bad, was it? Must have been sixty or so birds that came out of there.’
Poor things, I wanted to say. ‘Hmm,’ I said instead. ‘How long have you been doing it?’
‘Since I was six.’
‘Six?