Hot Stew by Fiona Mozley (most interesting books to read .TXT) 📕

wearing the night before. She found her wash bag and started to stuff it inside her rucksack. Bastian was too shocked to stop her, or to say much else. He paced around the room a bit, he tried to drink some of his coffee but by that point it was cold.

She kept shaking her head and calling him a prick. She had gone red and wasn’t meeting his eye. She left and he was too stunned to do anything about it.

Service Station

Agatha sits in the back seat of the Rolls Royce with Fedor the borzoi, his long head resting on her lap. She draws her hands through his fur, teasing out knots with her fingertips. Anastasia is sitting in the front with Roster. There is a barrier that divides the front from the back, so Agatha and Fedor are cut off from their traveling companions.

Agatha doesn’t mind. It gives her a rest from the maternal affection she’s been receiving these last few months. Since her mother came to stay she has offered her opinion on every aspect of Agatha’s life. A couple of days ago, the tension boiled over.

Anastasia saw the photo of Precious. Her daughter is sent material from all the London galleries; she’s a patron of many. Anastasia was riffling through the post and came across the brochure. She recognized the woman on the front as Precious, from the images provided to Agatha by a private security firm she employed. Anastasia flicked through the brochure, and recognized another of the pictures, presented as a thumbnail at the back. She went to the gallery by herself one morning to see the full image, to make sure she hadn’t made a mistake. She asked the attendant if he knew the name of the man in the picture, and he sneered at her, as if she’d just asked him whether Caravaggio was still alive.

“I don’t think it’s listed. They’re all characters from the neighborhood in which the artist immersed herself.”

Anastasia knew exactly who the man was, she just wanted to make sure. She went back home to Agatha with a selection of postcards from the exhibition. She stole the postcards so she wouldn’t have to queue at the counter, slipping them into the pocket of her long trench coat.

She showed the faces to her daughter. Agatha recognized Precious but not the man.

“Why are you showing me this?”

Anastasia thrust the postcard closer to her daughter’s face. “Not the black girl. The man. Look at him,” she implored. “He used to work for your father. He’s just what we need.”

“In what sense is he just what we need?”

“He was a legend back in the day. The hardest man north of the river, and that was only because the gangs in the south wouldn’t come up this way to test themselves against him.”

“Amazing,” Agatha said dryly. She was in her bathroom, flossing her teeth. Anastasia went to sit on the edge of the bath.

“None of your legal methods are working, Agy. It’s taking far too long. If you want any of those new flats built this decade, you need the whores out quickly.”

Agatha continued to pull the thin white tape from the plastic reel. She cut it to size, then threaded it between two incisors. She looked at her mother in the mirror but didn’t reply.

“Did you hear what I said? It’s not working. Nothing is happening!”

Agatha pulled the thread back and forth several times, then repeated the procedure. She remained calm while her mother’s temper swelled.

“You’re a bloody idiot!” shouted Anastasia. She threw the exhibition postcards at her daughter, and stormed out of the bathroom, slamming the door behind her.

It was good to be leaving London. The city felt restless, potentially dangerous, and there had been a couple of strange encounters. The first was with an aggressive canvasser who came to Agatha’s door. The second was with a disgusting-looking tramp who accosted her near her house and kept going on at her about some ancient artifact he’d found, and would she like to buy it off him. The man was obviously crazy.

Agatha has traveled this route many times before. Roster used to drive her from London to her school in North Yorkshire. Now she comes this way to visit her horses, to watch them race, and to stay in her country house.

There’s shooting on the estate but it is not something in which she takes an interest. Landowning neighbors have begged her to keep the gamekeepers on. They offered to help manage the staff, run the shooting, and maintain the moorland to prevent it turning to scrub.

Agatha has no interest in shooting pheasant, nor does she have any interest in allowing rich men from London and Dubai to tramp through her woods and over her moors, firing shot at the sky.

She dismissed the majority of the grounds staff as soon as she took possession of the property. There were complaints from the local community and obnoxious articles in the village gazette. Obviously she didn’t bother to read these, and ultimately it was her choice and nobody could do a thing about it.

While she is here, she will see her eldest sister. Valerie Howard has lived on the land all her life. She was born to Donald and his teenage sweetheart in 1936 and raised by her mother and grandparents in the village while her father made his fortune in the city. She never left. She never married. She worked on the smallholding, milking cows and collecting eggs. When her father bought Bythwaite Hall in the 1960s—bought from the family he’d poached from as a lad—Donald installed his first daughter in the gatehouse, told her to look after the place, paid her a cursory stipend. She has been there ever since.

Valerie has lived off the land all her life. She hates the fucking land. She hates the dirt that gets under her fingernails and into her clothes and hair. She hates the weeds that strangle the crops. She hates the foxes that