Untimely Graves by Marjorie Eccles

they can before they start, never mind that I might die of passive smoking.’
    She shot an accusing look at Tone, who was about to light up again. He mumbled sorry, put the packet away and shut the window. At that moment, the door burst open and Sue surged in, full of apologies for being late.
    Like many fat people, she moved lightly on her feet, bouncing as energetically as a sorbo rubber ball. She was very pretty, with a round, pink-cheeked face, dark eyes and curly brown hair, and within a few minutes she had Cleo and Tone outside in the yard, the cleaning gear stacked in the back of her van and herself in the driving seat.
    ‘I’ll go in the back,’ Tone offered, insinuating himself in amongst the bottles of Flash and the plastic mop-buckets and the industrial vac, sitting on the floor, thus relieving Cleo of one anxiety at least. She hadn’t fancied being wedged in the front seat of the van between him and Sue. Even though there wasn’t all that much of Tone, there was more than enough of Sue.
    He was very quiet on the way there, but Sue became chatty, once out on the road, explaining how the system worked for MO. ‘We mostly have regular calls, but we do have one-offs as well, like cleaning before somebody moves in and that. Domestic jobs are best,’ she added, ‘doctors’ and dentists’ surgeries mean getting up early, and office cleaning generally means working late.’ She threw Cleo a speculative glance. ‘We often get students helping out, between terms, they’re always hard up. That’s why you’re doing it?’
    ‘That’s right, money,’ Cleo said, and Sue nodded with understanding, seeing this as an entirely satisfactory explanation which needed no elaboration. She had three children, she added, you wouldn’t believe what they cost.
    ‘Hope you don’t mind mucky jobs,’ she remarked, after a few minutes. ‘This one we’re going to, it’ll be pretty rotten. It’s not a regular, though Val thinks we’ll likely have to come at least twice.’ It was only then that Cleo learned they’d been earmarked for work at one of the houses which had been flooded.
    It had a desolate feeling, she thought when they arrived, this
place where the Kyne began. So near Lavenstock, yet it might have been fifty miles away. Even the quality of the light was different, suggesting that the sharp, brilliant sunshine of the morning was only transient. Although the water levels were everywhere going down rapidly, here it was less apparent. Light reflected on flat sheets of still, dirty yellow water that stretched across the reedy terrain, riffled by the wind. Sparse groups of alders still stood with their feet submerged. But the sky was eggshell-blue and clumps of wild daffodils blew on the few patches of higher ground, and in the distance could be heard the calls of spring lambs and ewes.
    A tall, narrow farmhouse, gaunt and unadorned, stood like a grim fortress a few hundred yards away at the end of the lane into which they turned. There was no doubt what sort of farm it was. Tone sniffed the rich aroma as he uncurled himself from the back of the van, announcing ‘Pigs!’ Unnecessarily, since a nearby signboard advertised itself as ‘Covert Farm, Organic Pig Rearing’.
    Val had drawn the van up, not at the farm but in front of a cottage, crouching low to the ground and suddenly appearing in an unexpected dip in the lane. It had probably been two, or even three tiny cottages at one time, where farm-workers had brought up broods of children in rural squalor. The pump still stood picturesquely outside what had once been a barn attached to the end of the row. Now knocked into one house, modernised, centrally heated and with indoor plumbing installed, even in its present surrounding sea of mud, the cottage, with rosy bricks between black beams and wavy, pantiled roofs that sloped nearly to the ground at the back, unexpected windows and crooked chimneys, was the sort that fetched mega prices. It had a twee ceramic