of tea. You must have been up all night baking.'
'Oh, it's not all mine, and when we have a big affair like this, we do it in bits and pieces. We bake things and put them in the freezer, that big thing over there, and then just defrost them in the microwave on the day of the event.'
Agatha picked up her plate of pasties and her teacup and sat down at one of the long tables. Farmer Jimmy Page joined her and introduced his wife. Various other people came over. Soon Agatha was surrounded by a group of people all chatting away.
'You'll know soon enough,' she said at last. 'I'm putting my cottage up for sale.'
'Well, that's a pity,' said Mr. Page. 'You off to Lunnon again?'
'Yes, going to restart in business.'
'S'pose it's different for you, Mrs. Raisin,' said his wife. 'I once went up there and I was so lonely. Cities are lonely places. Different for you. You must have scores of friends.'
'Yes,' lied Agatha, thinking bleakly that the only friend she had was Roy and he had only become a friend since she had moved to the Cotswolds. The heat was still fierce. Agatha felt too lazy to think what to do next and somehow she found she had accepted an invitation to go back to Jimmy Page's farm with a group of them. Once at the farm, which was up on a rise above the village, they all sat outside and drank cider and talked idly about how hot the weather was and remembered summers of long ago, until the sun began to move down the sky and someone suggested they should move to the Red Lion and so they did.
Walking home later, slightly tipsy, Agatha shook off doubts about selling the house. Once the winter came, things in Carsely would look different, bleaker, more shut off. She had done the right thing. But Jimmy Page had said her cottage was seventeenth-century. Nothing fake about it, he had said, apart from the extension.
She kicked off her shoes and reached out a hand to switch on the lights when the security lights came on outside the house, brilliant and dazzling. She stood frozen. There came soft furtive sounds as though someone were retreating quietly from the door. All she had to do was to fling open the door and see who it was. But she could not move. She felt sure something dark and sinister was out there. It could not be children. Young people in Carsely went to bed at good old-fashioned times of the evening, even on holiday.
She sank down on to the floor and sat there with her back against the wall, listening hard. And then the security lights went off again, plunging the house into darkness.
She sat there for a long time before slowly rising and switching on the house lights, moving from room to room, switching them all on as she had done before when she was frightened.
Agatha wondered whether to call Mrs. Bloxby. It was probably one of the young men of the village, or someone walking a dog. Slowly her fear left her, but when she went up to bed, she left all the lights burning.
In the morning she was heartened to see a huge removal van outside New Delhi and the removal men hard at work. Obviously Mrs. Barr did not see anything wrong in moving house on the Sabbath. Agatha was just wondering whether to go to church or not when the phone rang. It was Roy.
'I've got a surprise for you, love.'
Agatha felt a sudden surge of hope. 'You've decided to leave Pedmans?'
'No, I've bought a car, a Morris Minor. Got it for a song. Thought I'd drive down and bring the girlfriend to see you.
'Girlfriend? You haven't got one.'
'I have now. Can we come?'
'Of course. What's her name?'
'Tracy Butterworth.'
'And what does she do?'
'She's one of the typists in the pool at Pedmans.'
'When will you get here?'
'We're leaving now. Hour and a half if the roads aren't bad. Maybe two.'
Agatha looked in the fridge after she had rung off. She hadn't even any milk. She went to a supermarket in Stow-on-the-Wold which opened on Sundays and bought milk, lettuce and tomatoes for salad, minced meat and potatoes to make shepherd's pie, onions and carrots, peas, a frozen apple pie and some cream.
There was no need to do any cleaning when she returned. Doris had been in while she had been in London and the place was impeccable. As she drove down into Carsely, the removal van passed her, followed by Mrs. Barr in her car. They must have been at it since six in the morning, thought Agatha, making a mental note of the removal firm.
She put away her groceries when she got home, found a pair of scissors, edged through the hedge at the back into Mrs. Barr's garden, and cut bunches of flowers to decorate her cottage.
She prepared the shepherd's pie after she had arranged the flowers, thinking that she really must do something about the garden. It would look lovely in the spring if she put in a lot of bulbs but, of course, she would not be in Carsely in the spring.
As she was still an inexperienced cook, the simple shepherd's pie took quite a long time and she was just putting it in the oven when she heard a car draw up.
Tracy Butterworth was all Agatha had expected. She was thin and pallid, with limp brown hair. She was wearing a white cotton suit with a pink frilly blouse and very high-heeled white shoes. She had a limp handshake and said, 'Please ter meet you,' in a shy whisper and then looked at Roy with devotion.
'I see a removal van outside that awful woman's cottage,' said Roy.
'What!' Agatha cast an anguished look at the vases of flowers. 'I thought she'd gone.'
'Relax. Someone's moving in, not out. Say something, Tracy. She won't eat you.'
'You've got ever such a lovely cottage,' volunteered Tracy. She dabbed at her forehead with a scrap of lace- edged handkerchief.
'It's too hot to be dressed up,' said Agatha. Tracy winced and Agatha said with new kindness, 'Not that you don't look very smart and pretty.
But make yourself at home. Kick off your shoes and take off your jacket.'
Tracy looked nervously at Roy.
'Do as she says,' he ordered.
Tracy had very long thin feet, which she wriggled in an embarrassed way once her shoes were off. Poor thing, thought Agatha. He'll marry her and turn her into the complete Essex woman. Two children called Wayne and Kylie at minor public schools, house in some twee builder's close called Loam End or something, table-mats from the Costa Brava, ruched curtains, Jacuzzi, giant television set, boredom, out on Saturday night to some road-house for scampi and chips washed down with Beaujolais nouveau and followed by tiramisu. Yes, Essex it would be and not the Cotswolds. Roy would be happier with his own kind. He too would change and take up weight-lifting and squash and walk around with a mobile glued to his ear, speaking very loudly into it in restaurants.
'Let's go along to the pub for a drink,' said Agatha, after Roy had been talking about the days when he worked for her, elaborating every small incident for Tracy's benefit. Agatha wondered whether to offer Tracy a loose dress to wear but decided against it. The girl would take it as a criticism of what she was wearing.
In the pub, Agatha introduced them to her new-found friends and Tracy blossomed in the undemanding company which only expected her to talk about the weather.
The heat was certainly bad enough to be exciting. The sun beat down fiercely outside. One man volunteered that a temperature of 129 degrees Fahrenheit had been recorded at Cheltenham.
Back at the cottage Tracy helped with the lunch, her high heels stabbing little holes into the kitchen linoleum until Agatha begged her to take them off. There was some shade in the garden after lunch and so they moved there, drinking coffee and listening idly to the sounds of the new neighbour moving in.
'Don't you even want to peek over the hedge or take a cake along or something?' asked Roy. 'Aren't you curious?'
Agatha shook her head. 'I've seen the estate agent and this house goes up for sale next week.'
'You're selling?' Tracy looked at her in amazement. 'Why?'
'I'm going back to London.'
Tracy looked around the sunny garden and then up to the Cotswold Hills above the village, shimmering in a heat haze. She shook her head in bewilderment. 'Leave all this? I've never seen anywhere more beautiful in all me life.' She looked back at the cottage and struggled to express her thoughts. 'It's so old, so settled. There's some
