Gentleman's Relish by Patrick Gale Page A

enough of an upturn for them to realize that she now owned their truck or most of their farm. Or rather, that Proveg did. Janice always played a clever game of making out she was just one of the workers and speaking of Proveg as though it owned her too and she was merely another employee, paid just enough to stay loyal but never quite enough to break away.
    She put her father in a home when he went peculiar – a home substantially refurbished by Proveg’s charity. She drove several growers to the wall. There was a suicide or two, nothing compared to what BSE caused, but enough to register as a local outrage. Women in their cups joked that some lucky bloke would get his hands on the money soon enough but no man tamed Janice in matrimony. No woman either, for all the mutinous gossip. She lived alone in the hacienda-style estate that had sprouted from the paternal bungalow. She went to church; her pretence of worker solidarity didn’t extend to attending Chapel. She smoked with defiant satisfaction. She took one holiday a year – in the briefinterval between the end of the winter cauliflowers and the start of the early potatoes – always somewhere fiercely hot from where she would return with a leathery tan that showed off the gold chains that were her only visible finery. She kept a horse and bred Dobermans. She had been bringing the latest puppy to classes for several weeks now. She favoured the lean, houndlike ones rather than the overweight thugs.
    When he had mentioned this, Val said, ‘Lean or no, she’ll never get a husband with those around the house. Devil dogs, they are.’
    â€˜Maybe she doesn’t want one,’ he said. ‘A husband, I mean. Maybe she’s happy as she is.’
    â€˜Happy? Her?’ Val asked and snorted in the way she did when she wanted to imply that there were some things only a woman could understand.
    â€˜Toffee, heel. Good boy. That’s it. Down. Down!’
    â€˜Don’t repeat your order,’ Chris said, as he knew she would. ‘He’ll just learn to ignore you.’ But Toffee went down after a fashion, largely because he was tired.
    â€˜Good boy,’ Perran said, then tugged him back onto his feet. ‘Toffee, heel. Good boy.’
    Val set great store by marriage. She thought he couldn’t understand or wasn’t interested, but he could tell. He saw how she divided women into sheep and goats with marriage the fiery divide between them. Women who lived with a manwithout marrying him first she thought not loose but foolish. She did not despise spinsters or think them sad, not out loud at least, but it was plain she thought of them as lesser beings. Childlessness, her childlessness, was thus a great wound in her self-esteem. He could tell from the way she huffed and puffed over the young mothers in the village who sometimes blocked its one stretch of pavement with their double-occupancy pushchairs.
    â€˜As if they’re something really special,’ she snorted but her glare would have a kind of hunger to it.
    He did not mind staying on to give a statement. He was collecting Val from the First and Last and she wouldn’t thank him for appearing early and cramping her style. He gave his name and recognized the sergeant from schooldays. Garth Tresawle. A mate’s younger brother, forever trailing behind them as they skived off, whining wait for me. And they’d had to wait because even then he had a tendency to take notes and bear witness.
    â€˜And when did you last see Ms Thomas?’
    â€˜Here,’ Perran said. ‘Last time we had a class. We talked a bit about boarding kennels because she was about to go on holiday to Morocco. The next day, she said.’
    â€˜You drove straight home afterwards?’
    â€˜Not exactly. I stopped off at the pub to pick up my wife.’
    â€˜What time was that?’
    â€˜Nearly closing time. Only she wasn’t there. Found out later some friends had