Close to Death

‘It’s very rude of him!’ Teri Strauss blinked, her eyes bright with anger. She waved a delicate hand over the refectory table. ‘I go to all this effort to make it a nice evening.’ She remembered that she was not the only one who had been put out. ‘And Felicity! I know how very, very hard it was for you coming here. It’s not fair!’

‘It’s wrong of them.’ Felicity looked defeated.

‘It’s not just rude, it’s extremely inconsiderate,’ Gemma Beresford weighed in. ‘We’ve had to pay Kylie extra to babysit tonight.’

‘I thought Kylie lived with you,’ Teri said. Kylie was the nanny, originally from Australia, who looked after the Beresfords’ twin daughters.

‘She does. But we still have to pay her if she works overtime.’ Gemma went over to her husband. ‘Tom’s exhausted. He was woken up at four o’clock this morning . . .’

‘By Giles Kenworthy,’ Adam muttered, sourly. ‘I heard him too.’

‘The only reason we’re here is because we wanted to have it out with them,’ Gemma said. ‘I don’t mean to insult you, Teri. It’s a lovely spread. But it’s just too bad . . .’

‘I did want to talk to them about the fence,’ May said. ‘I know it’s not our fence, but they won’t stop going on about it.’

‘That woman won’t leave us alone,’ Phyllis added. ‘She was around this morning – making threats.’

‘The swimming pool!’ Felicity insisted. ‘We have to stop them. You have no idea. It will be awful!’

Adam held up a hand for silence. ‘My friends,’ he began, ‘I feel terrible about all this. After all, I was the one who sold them Riverview Lodge in the first place. It certainly wasn’t my intention, but I was the one who brought all this trouble into our lives. Even now, I ask myself if I should have asked more questions when I met them, or perhaps explained things better.’

He paused, his face full of regret.

‘I met both the Kenworthys,’ he continued, ‘and it never occurred to me that they would be so . . . complicated. They seemed very pleasant to deal with, although it’s true that Giles Kenworthy did behave badly. I’ve made no secret of the fact that he reduced his offer one day before exchanging, knowing that I’d have no choice but to go along with it. But then, he’s a financier. I assumed that’s how these people behaved – and to be fair, quite a few issues had shown up in the survey. I would have sold the house to someone else if I could have, but there were no other serious buyers.’

‘Nobody blames you,’ Teri said. Her face challenged anyone in the room to disagree.

‘The question is . . . what are we going to do? What can we do?’

‘Maybe we should give them a taste of their own medicine,’ Tom Beresford suggested. ‘Let’s see how they feel when they find their own cars barricaded in.’

‘We could have a few parties of our own,’ Gemma added. ‘Blast music at them in the middle of the night and litter their front drive with champagne bottles the next day, like they do. I think Tom’s right. We’ve all been far too polite about this.’

‘Could I have a drop more vodka?’ Phyllis asked. ‘But this time without the mango juice?’

Andrew Pennington had stepped forward. He was a quiet man, but he had a way of commanding a room that came from years spent in court. He waited for everyone to stop talking. Then he began.

‘If I may advise you,’ he said, ‘the one thing we shouldn’t do is engage in a war of attrition. The sort of neighbourhood disputes that we have been experiencing are terribly common, I’m afraid, and they have a nasty way of escalating. It’s always better to discuss things in a civilised manner.’

‘We can’t do that if they don’t show up,’ Roderick Browne pointed out.

‘We can write to them. I’d be happy to draft a letter setting out our concerns.’

‘What makes you think they’ll even read it?’ Gemma asked.

‘We’ll cross that bridge when we come to it. But in the meantime, we must take things one step at a time – and whatever we do, we must remain within the law. We should record everything that happens from this moment on. Tom, if the drive is blocked, make a note of the time, and if Giles Kenworthy is offensive to you, try to record it on your iPhone. The same when they have parties or allow their bottles to litter the close.’

‘What about their children?’ May asked. ‘I don’t like the way they go whizzing around on their skateboards. One of them nearly crashed into me the other day.’

‘I called out to him and he gave me the finger,’ Phyllis said.

‘Language, dear!’

‘Well, he did.’

‘There is a code of conduct that we all signed when we moved into the close,’ Andrew Pennington reminded them. ‘It precludes ball games and the use of bicycles, although I’m not sure if there is any mention of skateboards.’

‘And cricket!’ Gemma added. ‘They whack the ball around like nobody’s business. They almost hit Kylie once. What if it had been one of the girls? It could have been a nasty accident.’

‘They need to move that bloody camper van,’ Tom Beresford said. ‘Surely they can’t just leave it sitting there the whole year round.’ He turned to Andrew Pennington. ‘Can’t we sue them or something?’