The Archers

by Catherine Miller

  ‘Hello, gorgeous, don’t you look a picture!’ hollered Dottie as Kitty drew near.

  ‘And you, I do like your hair like that.’

  ‘I done it special. But look at this bleedin’ tent I have to wear.’ Dottie held out the voluminous material. ‘I ain’t seen me ankles in a month.’

  Kitty took up the rear, following them from the bright outside to the dim interior of the pub. She faltered slightly when she realized Gerald Pargetter had fallen into step beside her. As he pushed past her, he said ‘War!’ hotly, slyly, into her ear.

  Peculiar, thought Kitty, and put out a hand to stop Caroline disappearing into the forest of legs.

  Everyone who was anyone was there, as the saying goes, but everyone who was no one was also there. Squashed, hemmed in, Kitty had little choice where she went. The tide of people swept her up and set her down beside Nance Seed, Brown as was. Not a Brown anymore.

  They weren’t close, but they had the camaraderie of young women to call upon. Kitty knew Nance was shy, that her role as the village’s dolly in her lace and her veil didn’t come naturally. ‘Soon be just you and Morgan,’ she said.

  ‘Yes, yes.’ Nance’s eyes didn’t meet Kitty’s. ‘We have a hotel.’ She seemed both mortified and thrilled. ‘Just one night.’

  Kitty leaned in. ‘Relax, Nance, he’ll know what to do.’ She read much in Nance’s expression.

  ‘But…’ Nance pulled a face.

  ‘No buts today!’ Kitty squeezed the bride’s hand. Felt how it shook. Remembered that poor Nance had no ma. Mind you, given the advice Kitty’s mother had given her on her wedding night – Sure, lookit, it’ll be over soon enough and it won’t kill you – perhaps that didn’t matter. ‘The big secret, Nance, the thing they don’t tell you, is that it’s fun!’

  ‘Horses doovry?’ Agnes thrust a platter of eggy somethings between them. She had stepped in for Connie Horrobin at the last minute, and was now a hybrid guest/waitress. Connie lay in bed at home, silent and braced for the bad news she felt sure was her due. ‘Dunno what Dan Archer’ll make of the catering, Nance. All them eggs is illegal.’

  ‘True,’ said Nance. ‘But Doris supplied them, so…’

  ‘Lovely brooch,’ said Kitty, pointing with an egg (she was starving) at a sparkly diamante swirl on Agnes’s lapel.

  ‘Isn’t it just,’ said Agnes. ‘A present from me admirer.’ She pirouetted away on knitting needle legs.

  The food heightened the mood every bit as much as the alcohol. If asked, most of those present would have admitted they didn’t think much about food before the war; now it was a preoccupation. The spread was no feast, but it was considered and special. Mrs Endicott took her life in her hands with three vol-au-vents, one after the other.

  Arranged along a wooden bench, Blanche sat against cushions borrowed from Lower Loxley, a satin quilt covering her knees. She was perfumed, curled and a little grotesque, her eyes sparkling with consumptive vitality. As she called out to people they came to her, and bent or knelt. She was greedy for company, scooping it up, holding onto hands, and throwing back her head to laugh.

  Kitty felt bold enough to smuggle some closeness with Alec under the cover of chit chat. ‘Say hello to Mr Pargetter, Caroline.’

  ‘No!’ Caroline guffawed at her own wit.

  ‘Pick her up,’ said Kitty. ‘She loves it when you throw her in the air.’

  ‘Everyone can see.’

  ‘But even Walter Gabriel picks her up. It doesn’t mean anything.’ She leaned in, spoke lower. ‘I love it when you and Caroline play together.’

  ‘It’s not seemly.’ Alec felt her recoil. She sometimes shrank when his vocabulary became what she called ‘too Brit’. Bob’s comment about Kitty trapping a man by making him a father figure had lodged in his mind.

  ‘Right y’are,’ said Kitty, her smile taking on a rigid quality. ‘Gerald called me a whore,’ she said, just realizing it. The boy hadn’t known to pronounce the H. That was what he’d meant by ‘war’. ‘Alec, oh Jesus, Gerald knows.’ She took in his fastidiously even expression. ‘And you know that he knows!’

  ‘Kitty, not here, please.’

  She smiled still. Her eyes sparkled; pain and happiness can have the same effect on beauty. ‘Holy Mother of God, Alec, could you not trust me with that?’

  ‘Not. Here.’

  ‘This matters, Alec.’

  But he had moved away.

  The thick old walls, white-plastered once but now drab with smoke, absorbed talk as they had done for decades. From the back room came the drone of the Home Service, serving up not music but facts and figures that had oppressed the village for days.

  Or, those villagers who took note. Death was far away, muffled by the acres of tilled land that swelled and sank between Ambridge and Dunkirk. Jane heard the phrase ‘Over sixty-eight thousand men are expected to be evacuated today alone’ and reached for another sherry.

  Beside her Frank Brown took up a fiddle, and played. It was the first time he’d ever done so in public, and his face was pink with pleasure. The shopkeeper had hidden depths, as does everyone. Ambridge’s hidden depths had been excavated and reported on with salacious joy; the triumphalism of a wedding, its two fingers to the war, helped them forget the enemy in their midst. They had a day off from being spied on.

  The air Frank played was quick and flighty, and Walter Gabriel took up the tune after a fashion.

  The radio couldn’t compete.

  Jane sought out Denholm, stage-managing it so she walked backwards into him. She regretted refusing his proposal. She regretted it more than anything else she had ever done, but then, she had done so little. Denholm was the road not taken, the prize left unclaimed.

  She decided – it was a firm decision, made with the same conviction as a captain turning a liner – that she loved him. It felt so good to love. It suited Jane, and woke up all the kindest parts of her. For years, Jane had felt herself wither and desiccate, as mean thoughts multiplied. Loving Denholm made her soft, and sweet.

  ‘Denholm!’ She feigned surprise and begged his pardon, and arranged herself so that he could notice how well her blue two-piece suited her. ‘A day like today,’ she said, her lips delicate around the words she had prepared, ‘leads one to dwell on what might have been, does it not?’

  ‘Does it?’ There was salad cream in Denholm’s eyebrow. ‘Keeping well, I hope? Good.’

  She hadn’t answered. Jane was not keeping well. ‘You seem altered,’ she said. She spoke quietly; a Victorian ploy to make sweethearts lean in.

  He didn’t lean in. ‘Do I?’ Denholm had put on weight. His hair needed a cut. He smelled, slightly, of mould. ‘Are you going to finish that sandwich?’

  ‘Um, no, do have it, I insist.’ Jane watched her triangle of bread and fish paste disappear. ‘You are welcome to unburden yourself to one who understands, one who is, oh, how can I put this, in the same exquisite pain.’

  Denholm looked suspicious. He stopped chewing.

  ‘You seem depressed, dear Denholm,’ said Jane. ‘Are you? Are you awfully sad?’

  ‘No,’ said Denholm slowly. His expression suggested he was trying very hard to understand what Jane was talking about.

  ‘Oh,’ said Jane. Then, clearing the disappointment on her face, she said, ‘Good, good, I’m glad. Yes, that’s right, you toddle off to the buffet and we’ll speak again later,’ she said to Denholm’s vast back.

  The groom, on a processional with his new bride, asked Jane if she was enjoying herself, if she had everything she needed.

  ‘Now there’s a question,’ said Jane. She found herself tearful when Nance kissed her cheek. As if a goddess had leaned down from Olympus. The white dress transformed the shopkeeper’s daughter; Jane would never experience such a metamorphosis. ‘Don’t mind me,’ she said, as she hunted in her handbag for a handkerchief. ‘I’m just an old fool.’

  ‘You have a tender heart, Jane,’ said Morgan, in the same voice he used when he cajoled her out of her fea
r of ghosts. ‘This is a day of high emotion.’ He put an arm out and caught his sister-in-law as she passed. ‘Isn’t it, Magsy?’

  She was in heavy crepe, the colour of spinach. ‘I do love it,’ she said, attempting girlishness, ‘when Morgan calls me that!’

  Morgan could indulge his sister-in-law – ex-sister-in-law? – today. He had woken up fretful that a poison pen would spoil his wedding. But the service had gone off beautifully, and the sight of Nance in white, along with the emotional wallop to the chops of being a married man once more, all intoxicated him.

  The fiddles set toes tapping. The courtiers around Blanche changed shift; the older, the infirm, the averse to dancing, settled down with her.

  The reels set Lisa fidgeting. She was spick and span, blameless, characterless, with her grey bob and her plain suit and her flat shoes.

  ‘S’all right, Mum,’ murmured Doris. She had searched for and found a safe spot. Lisa was propped against a dark wood pillar in such a way that, to the casual onlooker, she was merely lounging as opposed to being supported. Doris knew that in a small community like Ambridge there’s no such thing as a casual onlooker. She was on high alert. Ears pricked. One eye on her mother, the other on the crush, over the rim of her glass.

  Doris had never been one for drink. Now, though, she envied Stan his befuddlement as he slouched in the back room. She could do with some oblivion. She took a large gulp and almost choked on the sherry’s nutty fumes. No, sobriety it would have to be.

  ‘Chrissie!’ she called, and yanked her daughter to her, straightening her hairband and smoothing the shoulder of her blue dress. Doris had been intensely proud of Christine’s solemnity as she followed Nance up St Stephen’s aisle. She should tell the child so. Instead she found herself saying, ‘Don’t you spill nothing on that dress after all those hours I spent on it.’

  ‘Christine!’ The girl was enveloped in a hug. The bride, still on her rounds, seemed relieved to have reached the Archer corner. ‘You look a picture,’ she said into Chrissie’s ear. And to Doris, she said, ‘I’m getting so many compliments for my dress, Doris. I never thought I’d wear something so beautiful and it fits like a glove.’ The dress was plain, like Nance, and lovely, like Nance. ‘When I was stood on your kitchen table and you were hovering around me with pins in your mouth, it was like I was a daughter again for a little while.’

  ‘Oh, love,’ said Doris.

  The crowd spirited Nance away.

  * * *

  ‘We should begin our farewells,’ said Pamela, as she pushed away from the long table. It was covered with a medley of tablecloths and splattered with the fall-out from cheese and potato pie and a roast chicken or two and a strange dessert which involved powdered egg and mock cream. The finale of strawberries, red and sexy and bursting with summer, had incited a cheer. ‘Before the serious drinking begins.’

  ‘Bit late for some.’ Alec was monitoring the back room, where Stan’s shape had turned devilish as the day wore on. More hunched, more malevolent, more pissed. ‘Won’t it be rude, darling, if we’re the first to go? People notice what we do, you know.’

  Pamela looked at him. Levelly. For quite a while. ‘You are so transparent,’ she said eventually. She sat back down. ‘Another half an hour. Then we go.’ She lowered her voice. ‘I offered Lower Loxley to Morgan for the celebration, but instead he chose this.’

  ‘It’s the bride’s family who organizes the “do”, Pamela. Frank Brown loves The Bull.’

  ‘And it’s cheap,’ said Pamela. ‘I do wonder at Morgan. Allying himself to trade, after marrying a Furneaux.’

  He could have said it. But he didn’t. Alec could have reminded his wife that her family were ‘trade’, that her father’s money couldn’t rewrite history. Instead he said, ‘Pity Ronald couldn’t make it today. He’s very fond of Morgan. Considers him more a brother than a brother-in-law.’ Alec was privately relieved that Ronald Furneaux was absent; Pamela was wont to make a fool of herself, showing off ‘my dear friend, the member of parliament’.

  ‘Of course he’s not here!’ Pamela scoffed at his naivety. ‘Ronald can’t possibly approve of this marriage.’

  ‘Ronald takes people as they are.’ Alec swallowed hard as he saw his wife reach out and catch Kitty.

  ‘Will you dance, Kitty?’ asked Pamela, her smile a slash of vermilion. ‘I suspect a jig will break out any second.’

  ‘I don’t know.’ Kitty was alarmed. Like Bella the cat when she sensed Hero on the path. ‘I might. If anyone asks me.’

  ‘You must have a queue of suitors.’

  ‘Not really.’

  ‘I can see you with a settled, older gentleman, Kitty.’ Pamela was this side of arch; she knew her husband well enough to know he hadn’t told Kitty she was rumbled. ‘Somebody like Morgan, but sadly he’s taken. Nance has done well, has she not?’

  Before Kitty could answer, Alec stood and said, ‘Ask any fellow here and they’ll tell you Morgan got the best of the deal. Nance is quite the best-looking, most sweet-tempered girl for miles.’ It was neat, he thought later, how he managed to offend both his wife and his mistress with that remark. He strode to the bar.

  ‘I should find Caroline,’ said Kitty. Serene in her belief in Pamela’s ignorance, she followed Alec. He sped up. He avoided her. She stopped, irresolute, lonely in the midst of the babble.

  Magsy took Alec’s vacated seat, and sat herself down next to Pamela. At last, they both had a conspirator. Magsy gently maligned Nance’s dress, her veil, her accent. None of it explicitly bitchy, all of it drenched in envy.

  Only when the vicar joined them did their talk turn vanilla once more.

  ‘Don’t, Kitty dear,’ said Mrs Endicott as she passed her, ‘even consider dancing after such a meal. You could drop down dead of the head staggers.’

  ‘I’ll remember that,’ said Kitty gravely. She took another glass of whatever Agnes was handing out, and asked her, ‘Are you getting a chance to enjoy yourself, Agnes?’

  ‘You bet your life I am,’ said Agnes, shouldering past. She was, Kitty realized, plastered.

  Mrs Endicott wasn’t done. ‘If we’d started a pig club when dear Jane suggested it, we’d have roast pork today. But oh no, nobody listened. Brampton Green’s pigs are beauties, I hear.’ With a sly glance at Kitty, she beckoned to a tall man trapped by the vicar’s wife in intense, mundane intercourse. ‘George! Frances, dear, might I borrow young George?’ Without moving her lips she whispered to Kitty, ‘Handsome, isn’t he? And a bachelor.’

  Introductions were made. Mrs Endicott’s shorthand was comprehensive; Kitty discovered that George Seed, Morgan’s remaining son, was a ‘boffin’, engaged in something so very clever and secret that he couldn’t even tell them where he did it. George, in turn, was furnished with the information that Kitty was a widow, a mother, ‘an Irish colleen’, and gentle and nice and kind and all those uber-feminine attributes Mrs Endicott so admired despite working her way through Ambridge society like a steamroller.

  ‘The old puss is matchmaking,’ said George, as Mrs Endicott discreetly backed away to hector Bob about The Bull’s hygiene.

  ‘Is she?’ Kitty laughed. She felt unmatchable, as if she was covered in scales beneath her pretty dress. Only Alec would do. Only Alec could understand her strange ins and outs.

  ‘How d’you do?’ George stuck out his hand. He was tall and man-shaped, blondly forgettable. Urgent eyes, maybe, with a vulpine glint, but essentially just another chap. ‘Mrs Endicott got it a little wrong. I can tell you that I’m based at RAF Bawdsey in Suffolk. People say my work’s very important, but how do they know? Perhaps I’m just a coward who doesn’t want to fight. Much as I’d like to, I can’t tell you what I’m working on.’

  Kitty, who had no interest in what George did, feigned disappointment. ‘How mysterious.’ Her eyes tracked Alec.

  George downed his drink. ‘God, I hate weddings.’

  ‘What have weddings ever done to you?’

  George looked at Kitty
as if just noticing her. ‘Aha, a feisty one!’

  ‘Not really.’ Kitty edged an inch away. George edged an inch nearer. ‘I suppose you’re glad to see your father happy?’ She gestured at Morgan, his arm around Nance’s waist, both of them enduring the vicar.

  ‘Happy?’ George let out a little hmm. ‘We’re none of us happy. Not since Anthony.’

  ‘I’m sorry.’ Kitty felt her peep-toe court shoes turn to heavy boots. ‘I didn’t think.’

  ‘You don’t have to think. You’re far too pretty to think.’

  ‘Surely, we all have to think.’ Kitty – feisty, far-too-pretty Kitty – didn’t like being described to herself by this man, bereaved or not.

  ‘Come on, relax.’ As George put an arm clumsily around her, Alec looked their way.

  ‘I am relaxed.’ Something stopped Kitty shoving George. Something that had been piped into female veins since time immemorial. She didn’t want to cause a scene. ‘Hands to yourself, please!’ She kept it light.

  ‘Kitty, Kitty, Kitty.’ George sighed her name on a sliding scale, as if she’d been giving him the runaround for years.

  Magsy inserted herself. ‘George, dear, it might be time to switch to lemonade.’ She didn’t seem able to translate the look he gave her. She carried on, turning to Kitty. ‘I do have to babysit this boy-o! I’m more than a mother to him, especially since I lost dear Anthony, and—’

  ‘I lost him,’ growled George. His pink-pale face flared red. ‘You didn’t. You can say you’re our mother ’til hell freezes over but that doesn’t make it true, Auntie.’

  Kitty put a hand on Magsy’s arm.

  ‘Georgie,’ began Magsy.

  ‘Don’t call me that.’ George turned away, as if dismissing a valet.

  ‘Let’s get some air, Magsy,’ whispered Kitty.

  ‘No, I’ll, it’s quite all right.’ Magsy blundered away, almost treading on Caroline.

  ‘There you are.’ Kitty gathered up her daughter. Inhaled her myriad smells of clean hair and dirty hands. Thanked God for her. Felt sorry for her. And danced on the spot with her until Caroline laughed.