Fall from Grace

CHAPTER 1 Prospecting Charlie Peace came out of the door of Blackett and Podmore, the estate agents, holding a sheaf of property descriptions. He slipped into his car, parked on the edge of the little square in the center of the village, and began to riffle through them. Ten minutes later he got on the mobile to his wife. "Well, there seem to be several houses here that might suit, going by the descriptions." "You can't," said Felicity. "I know. There are lies, damned lies and estate agents' brochures," he said. "Trouble is, you only get to plumb the depths of their deceptions when you've actually lived in the places they've sold for a few months." "And it doesn't help that we're looking for two places rather than just one." Driving off on a circuit of inspections of exteriors mapped out for him by the maligned estate agents, Charlie echoed Felicity's words. His attaining the rank of inspector some months earlier had coincided with a proposal from his father-in-law, who, on the first hint that the new job might enable Charlie and Felicity to move out of Leeds, had decided that he needed to move in with or close to them. "Close to," Charlie had said firmly. "Not in with." "Not on your life," Felicity had agreed. "I'm not going to be his dogsbody." She knew her father through and through, of course. Rupert Coggenhoe had used people (notably his wife) throughout his life, and Felicity knew that old age would not change him, though she felt twinges of guilt at the thought that the only thing that would change him was by now fairly close. He had made a respectable living writing novels in a variety of genres, effortlessly shifting styles without ever becoming a complete master in any one of them. He had explained to his daughter and son-in-law that his cottage -- a kind of super-cottage, with various extensions at the back, to which he had moved from Luton when he had come into a windfall legacy from a great-aunt -- would fetch around four hundred thousand pounds, a tribute to the enduring appeal of the West Country. He proposed to part-finance his daughter and son-in-law's purchase of a house for their growing family. The only catch was that the house had to have a granny flat, or to be near some other, smaller property which he would purchase for himself. "To which you will be called to cook, clean, garden and hold his awful old hand," said Charlie, not scared of seeming ungrateful when in his opinion so little gratitude was called for. "Just not possible," said Felicity complacently. "I won't be able to leave Carola and Little Fetus." Little Fetus was growing, but they had not tried to learn its sex, so had not given it a proper name. "Could be Evelyn," said Felicity. "Or Hilary or Lesley. Do for either sex." "Evelyn Peace," said Charlie, turning up his nose. "Sounds like a writer of soppy verse." The tour around Slepton Edge, which he'd thought of as a typical small village but which probably housed about two thousand inhabitants, took nearly half an hour. He discarded the few properties with granny flats, not because they were too small, though they were, but because he didn't want his father-in-law so near. Then he started sifting through the rest, noting down the properties he would like to live in that had another, smaller property fairly near that was also for sale. His father-in-law's property in Devon was of the sort that had roses and hollyhocks peeping through its earholes, arsehole and all intermediate orifices. Charlie had taken an instant dislike to it the one time he visited it, at the time of his mother-in-law's funeral. He thought a farmhand's two-up, two-down was not going to be suitable for the old fraud in a few years' time, so he preferred to set his sights on a modern bungalow, with or without roses and hollyhocks. It was a sensible and achievable objective, and heBarnard, Robert is the author of 'Fall from Grace ', published 2007 under ISBN 9780743272209 and ISBN 074327220X.