Edward laughed politely, slid from Carnaby’s grip and edged towards the group by the window, who were talking about hedges in tones of some desperation. As he did so Helen passed him; her neck was red, a sure sign of agitation. She hissed, ‘Do do something about the Taylors and old Mrs Phipson. They’ve been stuck together for hours.’ How?’ enquired Edward; he meant it — he had absolutely no idea of the mechanics involved.
Helen gave him a look of fury. The group by the window turned to him anxiously: ‘Is that hedge yew, Edward? None of us can decide.’ Really, thought Edward, people must be out of their minds, submitting themselves to this sort of occasion quite voluntarily.
Kill or cure, Helen had thought. As soon as she set eyes on Giles Carnaby again she knew that whatever it was it was not a case of cure; her heart thumped, she felt unstable. There he was. Here he was. Smiling at her over people’s shoulders while she could not move because someone was telling her at length how much she must be missing her mother. And then she saw him talking to Edward and Jean Powers and then someone had mislaid their glass and she had to find another and then there was the problem of the Taylors and old Mrs Phipson. And then eventually she could cross the room towards him. ‘There you are,’ he said. ‘I have been most restrained — I could see you had your hands full.
But I have met your brother at long last and Mrs Powers has been regaling me with the most fascinating pieces of village gossip.’ This set Jean Powers off on a torrent of exclamations and denials so that Helen could not have got a word in had she wished to; she stood and looked at Giles Carnaby and tried to be calm. She tried to see him dispassionately as a grey-haired solicitor rather too well endowed with easy charm; indeed, she saw him thus, but she also saw him otherwise, and could not help herself. When he turned to look intently at Jean Powers she felt a twinge of jealousy; his arm, brushing momentarily against hers, made her tingle all over. This sort of thing was bad enough at eighteen, she thought; at my age it is ludicrous and humiliating.
Jean Powers moved away. Giles said ‘Dear me, what a demanding woman. She’s not a great friend, I hope? Anyway, now that I’ve got you to myself for a moment can we make some plans? First of all, am I going to be able to persuade you to. . ‘Oh Helen!’ cried the doctor’s wife, appearing at their side, ‘We’re going to have to rush off, I’m afraid. John’s on call today.
But first I must just have a word with you about. .
She attended to the doctor’s wife. She got the doctor and his wife into their coats and saw them out of the front door. She returned to the sitting room and struck Tam, who had knocked the bowl of biscuits from the table and was wolfing them off the carpet. She refilled three glasses. She went into the kitchen to gee if there was another packet of biscuits. I am not enjoying myself, she thought — but then I was never supposed to, was I?
She sought biscuits in the bread bin, the vegetable rack, on the dresser. No damn biscuits.
Giles appeared. ‘Is there anything I can do? You look harassed.’ ‘I am harassed,’ said Helen. ‘Edward’s wretched dog has eaten the biscuits.’ People can live without biscuits.’ I know,’ she replied. ‘But it doesn’t seem so at this moment.’ I just may burst into tears, she thought. I just might, appallingly, sit down on the kitchen chair and start to weep… Giles put his hand on hers: ‘Stop worrying about the biscuits and talk to me. We were interrupted. I was in the middle of trying to find out if you’ll come and have dinner with me next week. At home. I’m not much of a cook but I do a passable roast. Thursday? Friday?’
She subsided onto the chair. She was not, she found, going to burst into tears after all. The biscuits became unimportant, and the guests. ‘Thursday,’ she said. ‘I’m not doing anything on Thursday.’ The kitchen became a warm and friendly place; she sat in it smiling at Giles Carnaby. I’m happy, she thought in surprise, at this precise moment I am happy.
NINE
Hemp agrimony — Eupatorium cannabinum — flourished in the Britches, as it happened; Jean Powers was not so wide of the mark. Edward of course was unaware of its connotations and encouraged it as a handsome and relatively uncommon plant. It grew in a boggy area where there was a spring and a small stream which flowed in a desultory way after the autumn rains but almost dried up in summer. Other water-loving species turned up here from time to time also — Mimulus and forget-me-not and Water Speedwell. The Mimulus was in fact a garden escape, but he allowed it all the same, while conceding that a purist would not. Once there had been kingcups, but none had been seen now for at least ten years. The whole area was much dryer than it used to be, and Edward suspected that something had interfered with the water table; there had been nesting moorhens at one time — now only the occasional toad was left. But the hemp agrimony continued to grow strongly, rather swamping the more genteel species, indeed. Now and then he was obliged to curb it in order to give a chance to the bluebells and the wood anemones, which were both getting sparse to the point of extinction. He sometimes had the feeling that all the more delicate growths were being quenched and ousted by the rougher stuff, if one did not intervene. He saw himself as a wise and benign deity, presiding over his kingdom and seeing to it that evil did not always prevail; a hollow symbolism of course and anyway he rather liked hemp agrimony and ground ivy. The real war was waged against nettle and bramble — now there you really could persuade yourself that some malign force was at work, set upon reducing the whole place to a rank and thrusting wilderness, in which the weakest went to the wall.
Edward felt that he and the malign force were fairly evenly matched. In a few hours of concentrated assault he could destroy months of determined surreptitious growth; but then he would discover some other, overlooked area where things had been going to the dogs unheeded and some valiantly struggling patch of wood anemone or bluebells had been choked to the last gasp.
One thought, of course, in such terms: malign, surreptitious, struggle, valiant. He was well aware of the anthropomorphism and indeed found it satisfying; it was as though, in the Britches, thigh-deep in lashing nettle and octopus strands of clutching bramble he was coming to grips at last with a great many things and, as often as not, getting the upper hand.
He spent the afternoon in the Britches, as soon as the last of the party guests had departed. Half of a perfectly good Sunday had been wasted, but there were still several hours till dark. He was working in a thicket of briar, elder and dead wood from a fallen tree. From time to time he resorted to the saw; the noise he was making deafened him to Ron Paget’s approach. When he spoke Edward jumped so violently that the saw fell from his hand.
‘You’re not getting far with that, are you?’ said Ron. ‘Tell you what, I’ll have one of the men come over with some proper equipment. Have that lot out in no time.’
Edward picked up the saw. ‘Thanks, but I can manage perfectly well.’ And get out, he fumed, you’ve no business marching in here like this. Through the gap in the fence, I suppose, the place I didn’t wire up.
Ron gave him a look of amusement. ‘You do like to do things the hard way, don’t you, Mr Glover? I heard you at it so I thought I’d pop in and pass the time of day. How’s Miss Glover, then?’
‘She’s very well,’ said Edward.
‘I’m glad to hear it. I’ve a lot of respect for your sister. Quiet but got a mind of her own, know what I mean?’
Edward stared coldly.
‘I’ve lost track of how long it is now we’ve been neighbours. I was saying to Pauline the other day, there’s some people you
grow old with, willy-nilly, without noticing it — not that we aren’t all wearing pretty well.’ Ron laughed.
Edward thought of the previous, discarded Mrs Paget. He made no comment.
‘You remember my first wife, of course. Well, these things happen, don’t they? You pick yourself up and soldier on, don’t you? Of course, you’re not a family man yourself . . — Ron’s eyes flickered momentarily — ‘… but we all have our ups and downs, I daresay life’s dealt you out o
ne or two, one way or another.’
Shut up, thought Edward. And go away.
‘Anyway — it’s nice to have a word from time to time. I miss your mother, I really do — we had our differences but we’d got the measure of each other, as you might say. I often think of her.
Gary doing his stuff all right in your vegetable garden?’
‘I think so,’ said Edward. ‘It’s my sister’s preserve.’
Ron’s glance had fallen upon the huge mound of nettle roots and bramble stems that was the product of Edward’s afternoon.
‘I don’t know why you bother doing all this by hand. Half an hour with a drum of selective weed killer and a spray and you’d put paid to that lot for good and all.’
‘Plus much else.’
‘What? Oh, the wild flowers.’ Ron smiled indulgently. ‘A year or two and they’d be back. But you wouldn’t catch me sweating my guts out like that when there’s an easy way to set about it.
Take advantage where you can, that’s what I say.’
‘I’m sure you do,’ said Edward.
Ron looked at him narrowly. There was a brief silence. ‘Well,’
said Ron. ‘I’d better be off — Pauline’ll be after me. And remember, any time you feel like changing your mind about what you’re going to do with this place, let me know. I’ll be ready and waiting — put a cheque in your hand any time you want it.’
Edward sighed. ‘I’ll remember.’
He listened to Ron crashing his way out of the Britches. At last there was silence. A robin began to sing, and presently a chaffinch. The light was fading and it was getting cold; Edward decided to pack it in. But first he would have a few minutes of self-indulgence. He sat down on a log and tried to perform what he thought of as the vanishing act, whereby you became insofar as it was possible a part of the surroundings: breathing, seeing, hearing only — merely an aspect of the place, a dimension, like the robin or the moss-covered log or the leafmould on which his feet rested. You tried not to think or to feel — just to be. Whimsy, as he well knew — an affectation, even — but satisfying nonetheless.
There he sat, and the Britches darkened around him.
For Helen, all that week, Saturday shone like a distant sunlit hilltop. She was in no hurry to reach it — contemplation was almost as satisfactory as arrival. Anticipation is one of the choicest forms of pleasure; it was a long time, she realised, since she had experienced it. Conditioned to observe, she noticed what it did to her; the feeling of vigour, the brisker step, the tendency to be nice to others, to talk to those whom one usually avoided.
In the library she negotiated a cease-fire between Joyce Babcock and the new trainee, a girl fatally endowed with enthusiasm both for books and for people, and therefore threatening the entire ethos of Joyce’s empire. The girl, Lorna, announced her intention of applying for a transfer: “I don’t know how you’ve stuck it with her so long, I really don’t.’ Helen replied enigmatically that it was all just a question of experience.
Monday gave way to Tuesday, the day on which she did not go to the library. She walked to the village shop to collect the bread and was waylaid four times and treated to opposing viewpoints on the two current matters of local dispute. Helen, neutrally listening, anaesthetised by her state of uplift, thought that they nicely illustrated the condition of the place. One controversy was about visual amenities; the other concerned noise. Both had implications about prosperity and the power of cash. Someone had applied for planning permission to knock down an old cow-byre in his garden and build a bungalow; the environmentalists raged at this further desecration, the laissez faire element saw no reason why people shouldn’t do what they wished with their own. The village youths had taken to roaring round and round of an evening on highly powered Japanese motorcycles from which the silencers had been removed; those distressed by this were invoking the law, the youths laughed, their friends and relations pointed out that they’d paid their road tax, hadn’t they, like anyone else? Words like freedom and rights were bandied around on both sides.
‘Your mother would have been with us,’ said one of the waylayers with a touch of reproach, presumably sensing Helen’s lack of commitment. He was right. Dorothy, in her time, had been an active member of an organisation called the Noise Reduction Society, which had campaigned valiantly and indiscriminately against lawnmowers and jet aircraft. It had disintegrated (in despair, one assumed) many years ago, but Dorothy continued to bawl furiously at passing vehicles and to write letters to the commanding officer of the local airbase, who returned each time the same duplicated reply of infinite courtesy and obscurity.
What is at the bottom of all this, thought Helen, is that people — some people — have inappropriate expectations. This is the country. The country is supposed to be peaceful and beautiful.
Traditionally people — some people — have retreated to it in search of spiritual solace. Others, of course, have seen it quite differently — as a source of income or a place of work. These points of view are now fatally and perhaps finally opposed.
Money and technological advance intensify the problem.
She considered all this as she listened to the heated opinions forced upon her outside the shop (where the throbbing engine of the Findus delivery van obliged everyone to shout), on the corner by the church and at two other points on her route back to Greystones. And at the same time, behind her own thoughts and over the faces of those who spoke to her there hovered the mirage of the distant sunlit hilltop: promise and expectation. ‘How are you, Helen?’ people said, without waiting for a reply, and silently she answered: I am really quite extraordinarily well, thank you, I have something to look forward to, I believe I am happy.
Edward was crossing the hall as Helen came down the stairs. He halted and stared at her. She had put on a pale green dress that she seldom wore. She had added a largy floppy white collar bought in Spaxton, and one of her few pieces of jewellery — a Victorian cameo on a gold chain. The effect of the collar and the cameo were remarkable, as Helen herself had dispassionately noted a few minutes before in her mirror: they made her look softer, prettier and younger. She saw this again in Edward’s stare.
‘I’m going out,’ said Helen defensively. ‘I’m having dinner with Giles Carnaby. I told you.’
Edward snatched off his glasses and began to scrub them. He peered again at Helen. She could see fly across his face a whole sequence of emotions and responses. ‘What shall I eat?’ he enquired petulantly.
‘Anything you like. There are fish fingers in the fridge. Or some ham. Or tins in the cupboard.’
He put his glasses back on and rallied, with dignity. ‘What time will you be back?’
‘I’ve no idea.’
‘I won’t lock the front door, then. I hope he isn’t going to expect you to listen to him singing again.’
‘Don’t be silly, Edward,’ said Helen.
He looked at her bleakly and turned back into the kitchen. As she put her coat on she could hear him rattling about in a conspicuous way with pans and dishes, and talking to Tam. Just as she was about to leave he came out and complained that he couldn’t find the tin-opener. ‘Try the right-hand drawer,’ she said.
‘Where does he live?’
‘In Spaxton. I told you that, too.’
‘It’s pouring with rain.’
‘I’m intending to drive there,’ said Helen. Not walk.’
Edward returned to the kitchen, banging the door. Helen, ruffled but in control, hurried into the car.
By the time she reached Spaxton her control was a little less certain. She stood paralysed for several moments on Giles Carnaby’s doorstep. Her mother stood behind her, giving tongue: ‘He’s got you on the end of a string, that fellow, hasn’t he? Like some silly schoolgirl. You’re fifty-two, Helen. I don’t know what you think’s going to come of it. Riding for a fall, I’d say.’
She rang the bell, and there he was, suffused in the warm golden light of the hall, his sleeves rolled up, p
ushing that silver forelock back from his eyes. There was the smell of meat roasting. They both spoke at once: cries of welcome from him, apologies for lateness from her (she was, by sixteen minutes). He drew her inside, removed her coat, shepherded her into the sitting room. ‘So here you are,’ he said, beaming. ‘What a becoming dress, if I may say so.’ He glanced at his watch, became distracted: ‘Forgive me just a moment — kitchen duties.
Make yourself comfortable. A drink? On the side there. Oh, I have been looking forward to this evening. .
He went. She sat. Then rose and strayed around the room.
She looked again at his wife, securely smiling behind the glass of her photograph. She noted the flowers agreeably disposed in a vase on the mantelpiece, the recent issues of magazines arranged upon the table, the Radio Times open upon the desk with a programme encircled in red biro (a talk on Handel operas). An orderly man. I know nothing about him, she thought, nothing at all; he could have robbed banks for all I know.
He came back into the room. ‘All is well. I tend to panic unnecessarily. And you haven’t given yourself a drink. Sherry?
Vermouth? Sherry — right.’
No, country solicitors don’t rob banks. But there are other offences, less conspicuous. The point is, I seem to be past caring.
‘And what has your week been like?’ he said. ‘Mine has been unspeakably mundane. By the way, we progress a little with the Probate Office — but I’m not going to talk business tonight. That will do for another time.’ He came to sit beside her on the sofa; she felt him look at her, intently.
‘I’ve had a good week’, Helen said. She told him about dissension in the library, about the village feuds. He appreciated; he laughed; he pressed for further details. She was made to feel
witty and entertaining. She expanded like a plant turned to the sun; she flourished and was gay. The room enclosed them both: exclusive and private.
The door bell rang.
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