Rivals by Jilly Cooper Page A

'treasures' was a far worse sin in Gloucestershire than stealing somebody's husband.
        Lizzie wandered on. Having had no lunch because she was on a diet, she kept stopping to eat blackberries, which didn't count. Up on the left, dominating the valley, Rupert's beautiful tawny house dozed in the sunshine. The garden wasn't as good as it had been when Rupert's ex-wife Helen had lived there. The beeches she'd planted round the tennis court were nearly eight feet tall now. Rupert should fly a flag when he was in residence, thought Lizzie. One couldn't help feeling excited when he was at home.
        Half a mile upstream, the village of Penscombe, with its church spire and ancient ash-blond houses, lay in a cleavage of green hills like a retirement poster promising a happy future. Lizzie, however, turned right, clambering over a mossy gate into a beech wood, whose smooth grey trunks soared like the pipes of some vast organ. Following a zig-zagging path upwards, which three times crossed a waterfall hurtling down to join the Frogsmore, Lizzie finally stumbled and panted her way to the top.
        Across a hundred-yard sweep of lawn, which was now almost a hayfield, rose the confusion of mediaeval chimneys, pointed gables, gothic turrets and crenellated battlements that made up Penscombe Priory. On either side with the sun behind them like a funeral cortege towered great black yew trees, cedars and wellingtonias. To the left of the lawn, where once, before the dissolution of the monasteries, the nuns must have strolled and prayed, grew a tangled rose walk.
        Poor O'Haras, thought Lizzie, as she hurried along it. After divorce and death, moving house is supposed to be the most traumatic experience. But, as she skirted a large pond overgrown with water lilies, round to the front of the house which faced into the hillside for shelter, she was suddenly deafened by pop music booming out of two of the upstairs turrets, and opera, she thought it was Rheingold, pouring out of the other two.
        The old oak front door, studded with nails, was open. On the sweep of gravel outside a van was still being unloaded. Peering inside, Lizzie noticed some very smeary furniture (the O'Haras would be needing a 'treasure' after all), a grand piano whose yellow keys seemed to be leering at her, and several tea chests full of books.
        Sprawling over the front porch was an ancient clematis which acted as a curtain for the bathroom window above and covered the doorbell, which didn't work anyway. Inside Lizzie called 'Hullo-oo, hullo-oo,' in a high voice.
        Next minute a very plain, self-important black and white mongrel appeared, barking furiously and wagging a tightly curled tail.
        Turning right down the hall into the kitchen, which was situated in the oldest, thirteenth-century part of the house, Lizzie found a woman, whom she assumed must be Declan's wife Maud. Ravishing, but inappropriately dressed in a pink sequinned T-shirt, lime-green tracksuit bottoms, with a
        jewelled comb in her long red hair, she was very slowly unpacking china from a tea chest, stopping to smooth out and read each bit of paper it was wrapped in, and drinking whisky out of a tea cup.
        On the window seat, training a pair of binoculars on Rupert
        Campbell-Black's house, knelt a teenage girl with spiky short
        pink hair, a brace on her teeth and a pale, clever charming
        face. In her black clumpy shoes, wrinkled socks and black
        woolly cardigan, she looked like a tramp who'd just changed
        into his old clothes. Neither of them took any notice when
        Lizzie came in. But a very tall girl in jeans and a dark-green
        jersey, with a cloud of thick black hair, strange silver-grey
        eyes, and a smudge on her cheek, who was quickly unloading
        china, looked up and smiled.
        'I live down the valley,' announced Lizzie. 'I've brought you some eggs and a bottle.