Dead Ernest

by Frances Garrood

  Finally, when she had satisfied herself that no trace of Simon remained in the flat, she had flung open the window and leant out over the sill between the billowing curtains into the grey, rainy morning. She felt suddenly and inexplicably cheerful. Ridding her flat of Simon had made her feel purged and, in a strange way, empowered. She gazed out over the wet roofs and the glistening roads towards a misty horizon of high-rise flats and factory chimneys. Somewhere out there, there just might after all be someone who would love her just the way she was.

  Ophelia was prepared to wait.

  CHAPTER NINE

  Annie

  If it hadn’t been for the drink, Annie would probably not, as it were, have lost Ernest for the second time.

  In the weeks following his death, Annie had discovered the pleasures of alcohol. Like most people, she had had the occasional drink, and had enjoyed the small glass of sherry Ernest used to pour for her before Sunday lunch. Ernest himself had favoured beer, and a regular nightcap of the whisky he kept in a locked cupboard. But he had never offered either to Annie, and something told her that any request on her part would be met with displeasure. Annie encountered enough of Ernest’s ill-temper in the normal course of things without wishing to risk further outbursts, so she went along with what he appeared to think best for her.

  But the funeral set Annie thinking about that bottle of sherry.

  She had never in her life drunk alcohol on her own, but she could see that that was the way it would probably have to be if she were ever to drink again. And in an attempt to replicate the pleasant sensation of euphoria following her unaccustomedly large post-funeral sherry, she once again got out the sherry bottle.

  At first, she restricted herself to one glass, which she had last thing at night to help her sleep. Annie had never had any problem sleeping, but it was to help him sleep (or so he said) that Ernest had drunk his nightly tots of whisky, and as it appeared that in order to drink alcohol one had to have a good reason, Annie decided this was as good as any.

  But a single bottle of sherry doesn’t last long, and soon Annie found herself adding sherry to her weekly shopping list. At first she felt self-conscious passing through the supermarket checkout with the sherry bottle standing brazenly to attention among her obviously shopping-for-one purchases, but as no one seemed to notice, she became bolder, and even on occasion bought two bottles at a time.

  It wasn’t until several weeks later that she remembered Ernest’s whisky.

  She had run out of sherry and was trying to make do with a (rather unsatisfactory) cup of tea, when her eyes fell on Ernest’s cupboard. She knew where the key was — it was on the bunch which had been returned to her with his other possessions after his death — but so far, something had prevented her from using it. Some of Ernest’s authority still lingered about the house like a malevolent mist, threatening her from odd corners and warning her against overstepping some undefined mark, and so Annie had been reluctant to tackle that cupboard. But Ernest was dead, wasn’t he? His will had clearly stated that everything was now hers, and that included the cupboard. And, of course, its contents.

  Annie was surprised to find not one but three bottles of whisky, together with two bottles of wine, a small quantity of brandy and sundry papers and other oddments. Guiltily, she removed one of the bottles of whisky and poured herself a sherry-glassful.

  The whisky hit the back of her throat like a ball of fire, and it was some time before she had recovered sufficiently to risk another, smaller, taste. But it wasn’t long before she had gone from wondering what on earth Ernest could have seen in this violent, even dangerous, drink, to understanding exactly what he had seen in it.

  “Oh my darling, Clementine,” warbled Annie merrily, pouring herself another glassful and thinking, through a fog of uncaring, that it was a long time since she had felt so cheerful. How could Ernest have been so dour and joyless when he had a cupboard full of this magic fluid?

  The hangover the following morning was something Annie was to remember for some time. With dry mouth and throbbing head, she tottered unsteadily around her still-revolving bedroom, trying to find her clothes (she appeared to have slept in some of them) and her glasses, which had disappeared completely. Of course, she had known there were such things as hangovers, but she had had no idea they felt like this. How had she managed to get upstairs, she wondered, discovering her knickers hanging over the banisters, and, more importantly, how long was this — this condition — going to last?

  In the event, it lasted nearly two days, and while Annie did eventually return to the whisky bottle, she did so with more respect. But as so often happens, respect dwindled upon closer acquaintance, and by the time Ernest had been dead three months, his widow was well on the way to becoming an alcoholic.

  Thus it was that Annie found herself one afternoon at the local police station.

  “I’ve lost my husband,” she confided to the young policeman at the desk.

  “Oh dear. I am sorry.” The policeman looked concerned.

  “Yes. It is a nuisance,” Annie said, wondering if there was a chair she could sit on.

  “A nuisance? Well, I should think it’s a bit more than that. But, are you sure you’ve come to the right place?”

  “Oh yes. Quite sure. You see, I left him on the bus.”

  “I see,” said the policeman, who didn’t see at all but was relieved that at least he didn’t have a bereavement on his hands. He took out a pen and notebook.

  “And can your husband not find his own way home?”

  “No. Not now.”

  “Confused, is he?”

  “Not exactly. Is there somewhere I could sit down?”

  “Yes, of course.” The policeman led Annie into a bare interview room and sat down opposite her. “Now, which bus was it?”

  “The 3.15 to Little Mindon.”

  The policeman wrote carefully in his notebook.

  “And what was your husband wearing?”

  “Oh, he wasn’t wearing anything.”

  “Let me get this straight, madam.” The policeman laid down his pen. “You left your husband naked on the Little Mindon bus?”

  “He wasn’t naked,” Annie explained, leaning forward confidentially. “You see, he’s dead.”

  “Dead,” said the policeman, who was fairly new to the job and still shockable.

  “Yes. I was taking him to bingo. Ernest hated bingo. He wouldn’t have gone if he’d been alive.”

  “No. I daresay he wouldn’t.” The policeman wondered whether he ought to get help. This was outside his normal experience. “So how come nobody noticed? I mean, a dead man on a bus isn’t exactly commonplace, is it?” He thought he detected alcohol on Annie’s breath, which might explain her predicament. Perhaps she was confused. It was quite possible that there wasn’t a husband at all, never mind a dead one.

  “He was in a Tesco bag,” Annie explained. “Well, in an urn, actually. Ernest in an urn. Uuurnest!” She giggled. “It was just his ashes,” she added, patting the policeman’s hand. “Nothing to worry about.”

  “Just his ashes,” said the policeman, relieved. Ashes in a plastic bag shouldn’t pose too much of a problem, but there was still the question of what to do with this woman, who was clearly in no state to go home on her own. “Is there anyone I can contact for you?”

  Annie thought for a moment.

  “There’s the vicar, but I can’t remember his name.”

  A vicar, even to the solidly atheist policeman, sounded just the person, and he energetically began the task of tracing him. Half an hour and several phone calls later, he had located Andrew, who had explained the situation and was on his way to collect Annie. He had also contacted the bus company, who had promised to search for Ernest as soon as the bus retuned to the depot.

  “What were you thinking of?” asked Andrew crossly, over the cup of strong instant coffee he had made back at Annie’s house (Annie certainly needed it, and after this afternoon’s performance Andrew felt he
needed it too). “And how long have you been drinking like this?”

  “Not long.” Annie took a sip of her coffee and grimaced. “I don’t usually drink coffee this strong,” she added.

  “Well, you do today,” Andrew said. “It might knock some sense into you.” It was his day off, and Janet was away visiting an aunt. He had been looking forward to having the house to himself for the afternoon; to reading his library book (a jolly romp of a novel, reassuringly secular in nature), finishing the crossword, and pottering in his greenhouse. He was, therefore, not in the best of moods. “If things are this bad, why on earth didn’t you phone me?” he asked more gently. “I’ll always come round if you need some company.”

  “I didn’t think I did need any company.” Annie’s voice was bleak. “But things get on top of me sometimes, and a drink helps.”

  Andrew, who knew only too well about the helpful nature of drink (he had a modest supply in his own study), softened.

  “I think,” he said, “it’s time we had that talk. Tell me about Ernest. About your marriage. Tell me how it all started.”

  “How it all started,” mused Annie. “Well, it was during the war, wasn’t it? The war was on, and that took over everything. You wouldn’t understand,” she added. “You’re too young.”

  “Try me,” Andrew said. “I’d like to understand. Just give me the chance.”

  Annie closed her eyes, trying to conjure up a past she hadn’t thought of in years.

  “I was quite pretty,” she said, remembering almost with surprise the fair-haired, long-limbed girl who was her child-self. “A bit of a dream-boat, you might say. Not stupid, though. Even my father said I wasn’t stupid.” She smiled. “That was some praise, coming from my father, I can tell you. Some praise.”

  CHAPTER TEN

  Annie’s Story

  “You’re not stupid, our Annie,” her father said, not for the first time. “Even you can see we can’t go on like this. Those damn land girls don’t know a cow’s backside from a pig’s face. You’ll have to stay home and help.”

  It was the spring of 1940 and, as everyone kept reminding each other, there was a war on. Annie, who was bright, and had hoped to further her chances in the job market by achieving at least some basic qualifications, was not best pleased, but there was little she could do about it. She was fifteen years old, as her father pointed out, and her two older brothers were away fighting for their country. The least she could do was to take their place and pull her weight at home.

  Annie did not enjoy her war. The work was hard, the two land girls of whom she was put in charge moody and recalcitrant, and there was no social life to speak of. The farm was isolated, buses were infrequent, and there was no telephone. They had access to more fresh food than most people, it is true, but Annie would willingly have forgone the luxury of eggs and onions for a new frock and a night at the pictures. The flowering of her womanhood (with her strawberry-blonde hair and milky freckled skin, Annie was not without vanity) was wasted on the farm animals, and there was only poor simple Derek, who sometimes helped with the milking, to make eyes at her. Derek hadn’t been the same since he fell into the canal at the age of nine, and therefore didn’t count. It seemed a very long time since everyone had been cheerfully assuring each other that the war would be over by Christmas. Of course the war was never going to be over by Christmas. Annie, who was a realist, could have told them that. She felt sure that she would be an old, old woman by the time the war was over. And then who would want her?

  So the years and the seasons rolled by, with their rituals of sowing and haymaking and harvest, of milking and mucking-out and feeding, of scorching summers and icy wet winters. Annie patched and re-patched her leaking wellingtons (wellingtons were in short supply) and stuffed newspapers round her feet before she went about her tasks. Her father became increasingly short-tempered and her mother, hitherto a cool, practical woman, grew haggard and exhausted, fretting constantly about the safety of her sons, troubled with recurring nightmares of boys on bicycles with yellow envelopes bearing bad tidings from the Front. Doris, one of the land girls, became pregnant. How? Annie wondered. How on earth did anyone manage to get pregnant with no apparent assistance from a member of the opposite sex? The finger of suspicion hovered uncertainly over poor Derek, but there was no proof, and Doris, defiant and unashamed, refused to talk. Of course, she had to go.

  And so they struggled on, one pair of hands short (although, as Annie’s mother pointed out, that particular pair had been better at filing its own nails than doing much in the way of work). Annie, however, was surprised to find that she missed Doris. She might have been difficult, and she was certainly lazy, but she had had a wicked sense of humour, and Annie had grown fond of her. Goodness knows, there had been little enough fun on the farm, but while Doris was around she had contrived to make life a little less humdrum than it would otherwise have been. Now, with Mavis, the remaining land girl, in a more or less permanent sulk because of what she saw as a workload increased through no fault of her own, there was no opportunity for a giggle or a gossip.

  Annie sometimes didn’t smile, let alone laugh, from one day’s end to another. There was nothing to laugh about.

  Annie first met Ernest in the early spring of 1943.

  “There’s a dance on in the village hall, our Annie,” her father said. “You ought to go. Mavis, too. Do you both good. You’re becoming a right pair of miseries. I’ll drop you off in the car, though you’ll have to find your own way back.”

  Annie was not one to let a rare opportunity such as this pass her by. It was unlikely that another offer of a lift would come her way for some time; this one, she knew, was only thanks to a recent illicit deal on her father’s part involving extra petrol in exchange for a side of bacon. The village was several miles away, and at the end of an exhausting day she rarely felt like making the journey on foot. She went off to tell Mavis the good news before her father could change his mind.

  Mavis perked up amazingly at the prospect of a night out, and the two girls set to tackling the problem of what they should wear. The only possibility for Annie was her old Sunday best. Since Sundays came and went unobserved these days (there was simply too much to do) it would at least be a change from gum boots and trousers. The dress would need to be let down, for Annie had grown, but with a wash and a press and her mother’s butterfly brooch it would look festive enough. For her part, Mavis, who turned out to have talents for which there had been little call on the farm, shut herself away with the old Singer sewing machine and emerged in triumph some time later clad in a skimpy little frock made from blackout sateen.

  “What do you think?” she asked, giving a twirl in front of the mirror in Annie’s room.

  “Isn’t it a bit short?” Annie tweaked at the stiff black skirt, trying to keep the envy out of her voice.

  “‘Course it’s short,” Mavis laughed. “My legs are my best feature. Oh!” She gave a sudden groan. “I haven’t any nylons. We’ve got to have nylons!”

  Annie, who had never in her life possessed such a luxury, didn’t see the problem. Apart from the cold — and they were used to that — bare legs would be fine. No one would notice. But Mavis was having none of it.

  “Cocoa. That’s what we need. You mix it with water and paint it on. And black pencil for the seams. I read it in a magazine.”

  So it was that on the night of the dance Annie and Mavis dressed themselves up and teetered forth unsteadily on their unaccustomed high heels, their lips a matching brilliant vermilion (they only possessed the one lipstick between them) and their legs an interesting shade of blotchy fawn, a slightly drunken black line meandering up each one.

  “Not bad if you don’t look too close,” observed Mavis cheerfully, straining to see the results over her shoulder. “Not bad at all.”

  The village hall was dim and noisy, the music being provided by scratched records played on an ancient gramophone.

  “Not my idea of a dance,” sniffed Mavis, who
had been a city girl in her former existence, and was used to better things. “Not even a live band!”

  Annie, who was five years her junior but often felt herself to be at least ten years wiser, forbore to remind her that the players of band music had mostly been called up. But Mavis was soon distracted.

  “Boys!” she breathed, detecting shadowy male figures through the haze of cigarette smoke. “Uniform, too.” And she was off, leaving Annie standing awkward and alone by the door.

  But not, as it turned out, unnoticed.

  “May I have the pleasure?”

  Ernest was somewhat formally dressed in a suit and tie, his shoes highly polished, his moustache neatly trimmed. He didn’t exactly cut a romantic figure, and like Mavis, Annie would much have preferred a uniform, but a partner, any partner, was a passport to respectability at a dance, and Annie gladly accepted.

  As they made their inexpert way round the dance floor (neither, it seemed, had had much practice in such matters) Ernest told her that he worked for a bank. He was obviously anxious for her to know that while he had volunteered for the army, the fact that one of his legs was markedly shorter than the other had made him unfit for active service. Annie, trying not to giggle, was disappointed, of course, but Ernest couldn’t help it. And he looked quite smart in his suit, which made him look older than he was, and almost distinguished.