Robbie's Wife Read Free Page A

written almost nothing and had grown tired of crushing cockroaches as big as mice, mice the size of rats, and everything I owned seemed soft with dampness. I was certain the laptop would seize up at any moment. When Friday came I told Mr. Orchard my plans had changed and I wouldn’t be staying on for the month as I had planned, there was an emergency and I had to go back to the States. Fortunately the deposit covered the first week and I knew he expected something more than just a goodbye but I wasn’t about to spend any more and Saturday morning I was back on the road, no destination, just driving the maze of “fookin’ hedgerows” as the kid in London had said.
    He was right about how easy it was to get lost. I went from village to village, finding a corner where a signpost showed arrows to half a dozen villages, and perhaps Dorchester further on, and when I got to the next intertwining of roads it seemed like the same signposts were there, different village names, Tolpuddle, Stourpaine, Hazelbury Bryan, Shillingstone, Maiden Castle, they all had the ring of some other time. Each was tiny, a church, a pub, a few stone houses, no more than wide places in the road. The roads were narrow, hedges rose on both sides and only occasionally was there a break where I could see into fields that were a rich green, clouds piled up along the horizon, the sun coming and going.
    At noon I stopped in Mappowder at the Flying Monk, where I found four men in a room with a ceiling so low that the tallest one continually stooped when he stood up. I ordered a beer and was asked by the girl behind the bar, which one?
    “What should I have,” I said to the man next to me. He turned and said, “You a Yank, are ye?”
    “Yes.”
    “Thought so. You sound like it. I’ve had American beer. I’d drink horse piss before I’d have any again.”
    “Which one of these are you drinking?” I gestured toward the handles in front of the girl.
    “Badger’s not bad. Depends on your taste, don’t it?”
    I learned in the next half hour that Badger beer was made in a town not far away, that I should have the ploughman’s lunch, a chunk of rich cheddar cheese and a generous piece of warm crusty bread, several silvery pickled onions and something that looked like relish and was sweet. My neighbor told me it was pickle, and when I said in America a pickle was a cucumber soaked in brine he put his hand to his crotch and made like he was jacking off and said, oh, that kind of pickle, yes, that was a pickle here, too, but this was Branston pickle. We had several more beers. His name was Will, the other three were his two brothers and a cousin and they didn’t say much, just nodded their heads while Will talked non-stop about John Wayne movies and did I know the Terminator and he’d like to get a leg over Sharon Stone if you know what I mean. I ate my ploughman’s and another pint came.
    “Can’t eat without sommet to wash it down,” Will said, and I bought the four of them another beer and realized I had gone through twenty pounds.
    “Time we was back at work, Mary,” Will said, draining his glass. He heaved himself off the stool, wished me luck, and his three silent partners followed him to the door. I was alone with Mary, the girl behind the bar.
    It was nearly two o’clock and I didn’t feel like driving the narrow roads. What I wanted to do was take a nap.
    “Do you rent rooms?” I asked.
    “No,” she said. “There’s just us what lives here. You can find some that do, though. Through the village and take the road to Cerne Abbas you’ll find a farmhouse, Sheepheaven Farm. Robbie Barlow and his wife does bed-and-breakfast.”
    Sheepheaven Farm turned out to be a square box of a house set on the road with a farmyard beyond it, some outbuildings, a battered old Land Rover and a small sign on the corner of the house that had only the letters B&B, so small it would have been easy to miss. I had the feeling I had passed it earlier.
    There