Free Vacillations of Poppy Carew by Mary Wesley

so.’ Fergus was not to be drawn. He was remembering Poppy’s slip; circuses, he consoled himself, have winter quarters—so?
    Standing beside him, baby on hip, Mary shied away from the thought of the extended family ready with its octopus arms to gather her in, coddle her in its expansive bosom. I can’t live in Spain, she thought, I could never get used to that crowd. I shall get no help from Fergus. Despairingly she looked at her child who looked back at her with his father’s eyes. ‘Oh!’ Mary yelled in frustration. ‘Oh!’
    At this moment Annie and Frances joined them. Both girls now smelled of shampoo. Frances looked extraordinary, which was her intention, in a skin-tight mini-skirt which barely covered her pubic region, an immensely baggy black jersey worn under a man’s string vest, on her wrists a jingling collection of silver bracelets. Annie, demure in a flowing black dress, bare feet, plethora of earrings, red caste mark between her eyes, a diamond clipped to one nostril, had not succeeded in disguising her Sloane Rangership. ‘Coming to the disco?’ they asked Mary. ‘Help us sort out the local boys?’
    ‘All right,’ Mary was obliging. ‘I’ll come as I am,’ she said. ‘You do look an old-fashioned pair.’ She eyed Annie. ‘Are you from the Bazaar or the Souk?’ Annie laughed. ‘You won’t mind baby-sitting Barnaby, will you?’ She held the baby out to Fergus.
    ‘No fear,’ said Fergus, ‘you can take your carrier bag with you.’ He started walking back to the cottage.
    ‘We can’t squash three on to the Yamaha,’ Annie was plaintive, ‘ and a baby.’
    ‘Take us in your car,’ cried Frances to Fergus, ‘be a devil.’
    Fergus went into the cottage and slammed the door, locking himself in with his dogs. He wanted his supper. Fetching some chops from the larder, he watched from the window as the three girls wedged themselves on to the motorbicycle, and proceeded slowly down the track. They would return in the small hours in some local boy’s car, noisy, part-drunk, happy.
    ‘Such nice girls,’ Fergus said to the cat Bolivar who wove silently through the casement window to sit, paws together, preparing to terrorise the dogs with basilisk stare and, hopefully, lick the frying pan when Fergus had finished with it. The dogs shifted uneasily on their hunkers, casting sidelong glances at the cat, licking their lips, unable, since he was a favourite of Fergus’s, to attack as they would have liked. Fergus gave Bolivar a snippet of raw meat, respecting the cat, an entire tom, for having shown guile and agility in escaping the vet on the day of his intended emasculation. Something about Bolivar set him thinking of Poppy Carew’s father, wondering whether there was any similarity. I must not make a cock-up of this funeral, ruminated Fergus, frying his chops. That’s a lovely girl, she shall have what her dad wanted, and who knows, he thought optimistically, it may lead to other work. Eating his supper, Fergus thought about Poppy and was a mite uneasy of the feelings she engendered. For, like Mary, he had a penchant for independence.
    Having eaten, Fergus spent a session on the telephone. Then, plans made, he whistled his dogs and walked up the valley to the downs. Bolivar came too for the first quarter mile, spoiling the dogs’ joy by his sinister presence. Since he had found the hearse mouldering in a barn in France, he had put his savings and everything he could borrow into his business, bought the horses, their harness, the vehicles. Rented the yard and the cottage from Mary’s father and was only now, deeply in debt, ready to start in independent practice.
    Overheads are terrible, Fergus shuddered, thinking of the pile of bills, the monthly payments, the rising bank interest. Treading the springy turf, he blamed himself for being so unsuspicious of Mary’s father who had, long ago, trained horses here, out of sight of snoopers. He reached the top of the valley and looked