Kate's Progress by Cynthia Harrod-Eagles Read Free Book Online Page B

having to live where you work, let alone the dust and everything.’
    ‘You’re very kind,’ Kate said again, and in a spirit of reciprocation added, ‘and any time you and Darren want to go out, I’ll come and babysit for you.’
    Kay’s face lit up. ‘You mean it? You’re so nice! It’d be lovely to have a night out with Darren some time, even if it’s only going down the Royal for an hour or two. We don’t get out much.’
    So with goodwill all round, Kate went back to her new home and started straight in, stripping wallpaper. By the end of the day the sitting room was down to the plaster and she had taken the hardboard off the doors – they were panelled underneath, and not in bad condition, which was a relief – but she had a big pile of the resulting rubbish in the middle of the floor, waiting for the skip.
    It was supposed to come first thing the next morning, but it didn’t appear. It was a lovely sunny day outside, and so in between ringing the skip company and getting either an engaged tone or an answering machine, she took her work outside and began rubbing down and making good the window frames. She eventually got through to the skip firm, who said they hadn’t had one available but would bring it the first thing following morning.
    But again it didn’t arrive, and she had a repeat of the previous day, rubbing down in the sunshine, waiting for the skip, and having abortive telephone calls.
    Which was the point when the Angry Man – surely a local nutter? – turned up, and she decided to walk down to the village and try out one of the pubs for lunch.
    Not
, she told herself,
that I shall be eating out as a regular thing
. She couldn’t afford it, so she shouldn’t get in the habit. And she shouldn’t skive off, either. The sooner she got the boring basic work done, the sooner she could get on to the fun bit, making the place pretty; and also the sooner she could live in a place just a tad less filthy, which was definitely a priority.
    She had a quick wash and changed into a less revolting T-shirt and jeans, and walked down School Lane with a healthy worker’s appetite. If the skip came when she was down there, she told herself crossly, they could damn well come and find her. They had her telephone number. They needed to get it through their heads who was the customer around here. Of course, it was a hopeless attitude to take with skip firms, who were a law unto themselves, and only marginally less autocratic than scaffolding companies. But it felt good while she was thinking it, and it was all part of her new assertiveness, or so she told herself. The new Kate wasn’t going to take crap from anyone – especially not a member of the male half of humankind.

Four
    The two pubs, the Royal Oak and the Blue Ball, sat on opposite sides of the main village road, and could not have looked more different. The Blue Ball presented a long, elegant Georgian stone frontage to the road, three stories high, with the name in large gold letters along the facade. It had very posh hanging baskets, already in full flower, and a cobbled strip in front, divided from the road with white-painted staddle stones and some large wooden tubs containing smartly-clipped box bushes.
    The Royal Oak was also three storeys, but there the resemblance ended. It was a tall, narrow, crooked building, evidently an ancient cottage on to which various additions had been tacked over the centuries, straggling up the slope behind it. It sat on the corner where the valley road crossed the main road. No hanging baskets; the pub sign, swinging in the breeze from a metal bracket between the first-floor windows, was a very amateurish-looking painting of a tree with a crown on top. The window frames, Kate noticed, were painted the same maroon as her own, signifying that it was, or had been, part of the same estate.
    Given her general scruffiness, it was to the Royal Oak that she took her custom that first time. Inside, it was all low beams,