But no. Frances got there first. With her usual hobnailed boots. ‘These letters!’ she said, with relish. ‘Two now! Can you believe it? I wonder when the next one will turn up? Are they what you call poison pens?’
Alec stiffened. Another letter. He felt like screaming. What had it said about him? Had it outed Kitty?
Not for the first time he fantasized about throwing the vicar’s wife in the duck pond; the Bissetts were above a certain water line in Ambridge, and were therefore mandatory lunch guests. But good heavens, they were dull.
Nobody expected men of God to be thinkers, but surely they could be relied upon not to lob grenades among the cut glass. The letters had never been discussed at Lower Loxley. Pamela operated on a level above village gossip, and Alec clung to the hope that she was ignorant of the accusation against him. He hadn’t realized there was a second note doing the rounds. He prised at his collar. Had his neck got fatter? He was hot suddenly, and constricted.
‘Written all in capitals,’ said Doris, who was definitely not above village gossip. ‘Cunning, that.’
A second one means they’re a series. Alec took a great interest in his crumble. There would be more. Will they all be about me?
‘I have it here.’ Morgan held a piece of paper distastefully between two fingers. ‘I managed to extricate it from Dottie Cook.’
Pamela queried this with the merest wrinkle of her nose; she couldn’t be expected to know a Dottie Cook.
‘The London evacuee,’ explained Morgan. ‘The one who’s expecting. I felt I should hand the note to you, Alec.’
‘Me? Why?’ Good God, I’ve turned soprano. He had actually jumped.
‘Or perhaps you, Dan, now that you’re War Ag.’
Dan put on his glasses and studied it. ‘My word,’ he said. And then he looked at Alec, and said again, ‘My word.’
‘Read it, man, for God’s sake.’ Alec’s tone let him down. Pamela glanced sharply at him.
Dan read the note aloud, in a stuttering monotone.
DEAR FRIENDS,
IT WOULD TAKE A HEART OF STEEL NOT TO FEEL COMPASSION FOR A LADY WHO HAS LOST THE USE OF HER LEGS.
WHITEY WHITE’S HEART IS SO TOUCHED BY BLANCHE GILPIN’S PREDICAMENT THAT HE VISITS HER DAILY IN HER BEDCHAMBER.
SURELY NOTHING GOES ON? SURELY IT’S ALL INNOCENT? SURELY THEY ONLY SHUT THE DOOR SO THEY CAN TALK IN PRIVATE?
SIGNED
YOUR NEIGHBOUR
‘Nice quality paper,’ said Magsy, as Alec went dizzy at his reprieve.
‘A woman’s hand or a male hand, do we think?’ The vicar steepled his fingers. ‘Hmm?’
‘A woman’s,’ said his wife, emphatically.
‘A man’s,’ said Magsy, emphatically.
‘Certainly this venom could not emanate from an innocent child,’ said the vicar.
Well, obviously, Alec would have liked to say, were there not a holy force field around his guest. Relief made him heavy-handed as he poured himself a restorative glass of burgundy. So, Blanche Gilpin, of all people, was in the firing line this time.
‘Could it…’ Magsy crept along her line of thought. ‘I mean, I can hardly believe I’m saying this, but could it be true?’
Doris made a noise in her throat. ‘Blanche? And the postman? That’d be ridiculous.’
‘Ridiculous things do happen.’ The vicar’s wife did her best to sound regretful and not zealous. Frances leaned forward, avid, starving. ‘That letter’s the reason Blanche’s sister, dear Jane, sent her apologies and couldn’t make it today. I met her on The Green and she was very nervous. She asked me did I feel like the windows in Ambridge had all become eyes.’ Frances tittered.
‘Enlighten me, someone,’ said Pamela. ‘Am I the only person in Ambridge who’s unaware of these letters?’
Alec’s bowels did something complicated.
‘Show me,’ she said, and held out the kind of long-fingered hand familiar from Tudor portraits. She frowned, her pencil-thin eyebrows meeting. ‘What a sewer of a mind.’ She dropped the letter onto the tablecloth. ‘You say it’s the second one? What bilge was in the first?’
Polite amnesia befell her guests. Alec’s bowels were dancing by now. He bent down to rub Hero’s snout, and heard his wife say, amused, ‘Aha! I deduce that my family was the subject. Come now, it’s cruel not to tell me what our bad-minded friend had to say about the Pargetters.’
‘Darling, it’s not worth hearing.’ Alec had considerable sangfroid and he called upon every morsel of it to sound so casual.
With great gentility, Pamela insisted, and the weak link, bloody Frances, the bloody vicar’s bloody wife, filled her in. To Alec’s relief, she only mentioned the portion about Alec’s black eye. The adultery was censored.
Pamela was dry. ‘Darling, I told you people would suspect we’d taken up fisticuffs.’ She allowed the tittering an exact four seconds. ‘The truth was too dull; who wants to believe you walked into the stable door? And yet, that’s exactly what he did.’
‘I dread the next letter.’ Frances’s thin nose quivered. ‘Who will they target? What do they know?’
‘They know nothing.’ Pamela was languid. ‘They were wrong about Alec, and so it stands to reason they’re wrong about Blanche and her paramour. I, for one, plan to ignore the next epistle. Pay no mind to the nasty little brute and he’ll go away.’
Raising a glass, Alec said, ‘To my wife, who really should be running the country.’ As the compliment was echoed, Alec thought, I don’t compliment her enough. He staved off a fresh wave of guilt with another gulp of wine. I should be nicer to her; when had Alec stopped telling Pamela she was clever or funny or good at things?
At the other end of the table, Pamela shushed them all.
Trouble was, complimenting Pamela was like touching the lizard Gerald had once insisted on keeping; neither party really enjoyed it.
Talk veered towards Doris’s mother, and those infamous legs of hers. Alec didn’t understand old ladies’ legs and didn’t care to; the wine carried him softly back in time, to three hours ago.
He’d taken the back way to Noon Cottage; the letter writer might keep watch on front doors.
Kitty’s bed was cold; they warmed it up. She smelled of soap, and then of him. So charming and so needy, often in the same breath. She’d rebutted that: ‘I’m not needy, Alec, you just find it hard to give.’ And then that hot whisper in his ear as he lay trying not to surrender to a sleep that couldn’t last.
‘I am your safe place,’ she’d breathed.
‘You big silly, I don’t need one,’ he’d murmured.
‘Don’t you agree, Alec?’
Doris’s nice plain voice and her nice plain face brought him back. He was glad he’d persuaded Pamela to invite her. They needed to be seen to engage with the normal folk, the ordinary folk. ‘Yes,’ he said, wondering what he agreed with.
It seemed he agreed that the prime minister had ‘a lovely speaking voice’. Doris’s assertion was promptly taken up by Magsy and Frances; it felt obvious to Alec that ‘a lovely speaking voice’ was lady-code for ‘I fancy Neville Chamberlain somewhat’.
Proud of subverting any detailed discussion of her mother, Doris checked her watch. It was seductive, this house, with its air of unstoppable correctness and its layering of comfort upon ease. She would have liked to watch the evening stroll in across the rolled and righteous lawn. But no, back to Brookfield for Doris, back to the tang of new milk and the buzz saw of the children’s complaints about how queer Grandma had been while they were left alone with her. ‘Dan,’ she mouthed. She jerked her head towards the door.
‘Eh?’ Dan could be slow on the uptake.
The doctor let out a barked laugh. ‘Your wife’s right, Dan.’ Morgan turned to Pamela. ‘Thank you for another delightful lunch, but it really is time we left you in peace.’
Napkins were discarded. Coats were found. Gerald was whistled up to say a surly farewell. Hero barked. Morgan stayed behind for the promised cigar, and Da
n commented approvingly on the freshly dug vegetable patch by the terrace as he and Doris set off on foot. ‘Digging for victory, that’s the ticket!’
The rows of cabbage and turnips had previously been a rose garden of thirty years standing. Alec’s mother, long dead, used to breed roses. She named one ‘The Boy Alec’. It was fat, the colour of sticking plasters, and smelled pleasingly of butter. There were acres available to Pamela in which to dig for victory, but she had churned up the Cherry Parfaits and the Blush Noisettes and the only extant example of The Boy Alec.
‘Lovely-looking brassicas,’ said Doris.
* * *
‘Is it rude to say thank God they’ve gone?’ asked Pamela. She took out a hairpin and then pushed it back into the shiny roll that hung over her forehead.
‘It is rather, old thing.’ Alec would have dragged all their guests back again if he could. The house was so quiet, the ticking of various clocks mocking them both. This hour in the drawing room with a book and his wife was the most Sunday-ish part of Sunday. A heavy mass of an hour, it sagged in his hands. Alec feared Pamela could read his mind. See right through his brilliantined skull to his base thoughts.
A Pekinese wobbled into the room. Mavis liked to spread herself flat on the carpet like a neglected bathmat. She panted. Her flat nose was runny and her eyes stood froggily proud of her face. Mavis loved Pamela, but the dog’s relationship with Alec was less warm. She rolled over and he saw the horrid scaly patches on her back legs.
Pamela said, ‘Magsy does nag old Morgan so.’
‘Old?’ Alec was touchy; Morgan sat comfortably in the next decade along, and Alec preferred to think of old men as being twenty years ahead of him.
‘She sees Morgan as her vocation, I fear. He’s very patient with her.’
‘Yes, he is.’
‘That boy of his, George…’
‘Hardly a boy, Pamela.’
‘He’s a wild card, I’ve heard. Drinks.’
‘I’ve heard the same.’
Silence. Silence. Another silence. Alec coughed just to make some noise. Pamela should know better than to try and involve him in discussing their guests. He was incurious about the interior workings of other people, and had been trained from birth not to comment.
Every crossing of his legs, every turn of a page, sounded loud as gunfire in the drawing room.
The fire petered out.
‘Should I?’ Alec cocked his Agatha Christie at the embers. ‘Or is it a waste?’
‘There’s plenty of coal,’ said Pamela. ‘But maybe…’ Everything was a matter of conscience these days. ‘Leave it.’
‘Don’t want you catching cold.’
Silence.
Hero farted on the Persian rug. Alec didn’t smile. There was no space for Hero’s farts in Pamela’s dominion; they unhappened the moment they happened.
As he reread some dialogue, and tried to care who had killed whom, and why, Pamela said, with a lilt to her voice which signified amusement, ‘So, the whole village knows who really blacked your eye.’
He kept staring at the book until it became farcical to do so. He looked up, as if only then realizing she required a response. ‘What? Oh, darling, he didn’t, I told you how my eye happened. It wasn’t Gerald.’
‘You told me two different versions, darling, both of which took place the very same day Gerald needed his knuckles bathed and dressed.’
Best to look straight at her. Even though it was dangerous, like looking at the sun.
It had been a hell of a way to end the old year. The last day of 1939 had been cruelly cold. He’d pulled Kitty tight against his side as he saw her to the bus stop in Felpersham, just a street away from the modest hotel where they had laughed at the grubby furniture and kissed each other and sat about in the altogether. She read to him, her beloved Hardy, and slapped away his desperate hands until she reached the end of the chapter. They were, like the characters, Far from the Madding Crowd.
Just before the bus took her away she whispered into his ear a line Hardy had given to Gabriel Oak. ‘Love is a possible strength,’ she said, inviting him to end the quote.
He was a good student. ‘In a possible weakness.’
Turning into the sleet, it had taken a second or two for Alec to recognize his son in the shop doorway. Gerald was from his other life, the one in sepia. The boy pounced. Never a fighter, he was easily smothered by Alec, but not before he’d landed a lucky punch on his father’s eye in the middle of the crowded pavement.
Bundling him down an alley, Alec let Gerald rage, let him spit and splutter about how he’d followed him out of the house for days on end, followed him to ‘that tart’.
‘Don’t tell your mother,’ said Alec.
‘As if I would! If Mummy—’ Gerald paused at his slip of the tongue. ‘If Mother ever finds out I’ll kill you!’
Here and now, in the room that smelled of polish and, suddenly, his own sweat, Alec said, ‘Don’t judge him too harshly, Pam.’ She hates being called Pam! Why did I call her Pam? ‘I leaned too hard on him. All this business with the school. Probably overdid the stern papa speech and he lashed out. Don’t think ill of the boy.’
‘I don’t think ill of him. If I could pull the odd punch and get away with it, I would.’
‘Goodness, I’d better watch out!’ Alec stood up. ‘I’ll fetch more coal. Just this once.’
‘Ring for it, darling.’ Pamela gestured to the ribbon pull by the mirror.
‘May as well stretch my legs.’ And vomit up my lamb.
When he was at the door, his hand on the brass knob, Pamela, her back to him, spoke without looking up from her magazine. ‘I know, Alec.’
‘What’s that?’ His voice sounded girlishly surprised.
She flicked a page. ‘I’ve known for some time.’
He closed the door and leaned against it. ‘I see.’
‘Do you love this girl?’
‘What?’ Alec flattened himself against the painted pine. Stared at the back of his wife’s head. ‘Pamela, I, that’s absurd.’ He was hot. He was cold. He was not himself; he was that lowest of things, a man caught in a lie.
Mavis stared at him, bug-eyed.
‘I can wait, darling, but not for ever.’ Pamela turned down the corner of a page. ‘Do not humiliate me.’ She twisted in the high-backed chair to look at him. She smiled. ‘Coal, Alec. More coal.’
* * *
Hero was walked good and proper that evening. Round The Green, past the church, past the dark Sunday windows of The Bull. And then another circuit, the dog still sprightly and his owner less so. Their odyssey didn’t take in Noon Cottage.
Love!
Alec was appalled by Pamela’s question. The brazenness of it. The foolishness of the idea. She’d read too many novels. There was no room for love in his life. It would be like planting an oak tree in a geranium pot.
Affection, yes, and admiration, and wild desire. All of that. Kitty deserved to be treated with gentleness and to be worshipped, even; that had been a revelation, the way she made Alec admire her and even envy her in a peculiar way that, come to think of it, was too odd to dissect. He had never told her he loved her; he had never had the thought.
They were not lovers in that sense. They were friends who loved, yes, could that be a way of pinning it down? Alec shied from anything sleazy; he was not taking from Kitty, they were giving to each other. And while it was secret, it was innocent. The vacuum kept it free from taint; if nobody was hurt, then there could be no blame.
But Pamela knew.
Alec had assumed she took no notice of him; her cool eye never seemed to settle on him. And yet she knew. She knows. Nothing could be the same, now. It was as all-encompassing as the declaration of war.
It was an odd juncture to appreciate one’s wife’s emotional wisdom, to realize she knew more about him than she let on.
Alec made his way round to the back of Lower Loxley. He appreciated, too, Pamela’s self-control; if she had sobbed he couldn’t
have borne it; he’d have given up Kitty there and then.
SPRING 1940
And which will my Bride be?
The right or the wrong? ‘The wrong.’
THOMAS HARDY
The Echo Elf Answers
War was good for the legs.
Doris walked much more these days; wasting petrol was punishable with imprisonment and she was too busy to go to jail. She used up all her available puff toiling to Broom Corner, where the Horrobins’ smallholding squatted, and had to lean on where the gate should have been to catch her breath.
A piece of paper tacked to the gatepost made her lose that breath again. Not another of those horrible things, she thought, before reading ‘KEEP OUT!’ It was merely the Horrobin version of a welcome mat.
‘Hello there, boys.’ It took her two goes to get the words out.
‘Go ’way!’ The taller Perkins boy threw a stone at her. Wizbang barked his encouragement.
‘Now, now, Billy,’ said Doris. ‘That’s not nice.’
‘I’m not nice,’ he told her. He threw a stone at a chicken, who dodged it neurotically.
‘I’m nice, Mrs Archer,’ said John.
‘I can tell,’ said Doris, straightening her hat. It was a hat, not a scarf, today; she was on billeting business. Boxes must be ticked and dark corners enquired into. She didn’t relish poking Horrobin dark corners, but duty called. As did the memory of little John’s tears in the village hall. ‘Connie in?’
The boys pointed to the house that leaned to one side and whose chimney stack was jagged. They were filthy, but well fed; Doris couldn’t ask for more than that in such an imperfect world.
‘Connie?’ She waited on the step for an invitation. Archers weren’t necessarily welcome here. There had been run-ins. Dan had warned Stan he’d have to plant up at least two of their fields with sugar beet, and Stan had told Dan to piss off.
‘Who’s that?’
Doris followed the voice into the dark interior. No signs of spring in there, despite bluebells rioting only feet away. It was sooty, an Alice in Wonderland chaos with a bed on its side in the hall and plaster shrinking away to expose the wooden guts of the house. It smelled, too. Of slopped ale and spoilt milk. In the cell of a kitchen sat Connie.
The Archers Page 7