The Archers

by Catherine Miller

  It was still dark, even though it was already tomorrow. On the doorstep of the house before Kitty’s place, he saw a tiny shape crouched. Bella the cat was being disloyal, too, as she lapped milk from a bowl.

  Somehow, he would square matters with Pamela, end it all. The language would arrive when he needed it. That doesn’t matter now. Just as Blanche’s imbecilic spree didn’t matter, and the war didn’t matter.

  The universe had narrowed to Kitty’s outline.

  Her gate. Her path. Her door. Alec knocked, then hammered. His teeth framed in the letterbox. ‘Let me in! Please!’ Did it matter if anyone heard him? Not anymore.

  Pounding round to the back of the house, Alec battled the dogwood and stood in the skeleton of a rose bush to peer in at the sofa and the shelves and the rug.

  They were still, as rooms are at night.

  The back door was unlocked. Once in, Alec swarmed over the house like smoke. It was empty.

  Not just of people. Of things. Kitty had erased herself and Caroline in a matter of hours. The only evidence they had ever been there was Emily reclining stiffly on a footstool.

  Alec held the doll to his face. It smelled of Caroline. He made noises into it. Animal sounds. Then he rubbed his eyes with his knuckles like a baby in a picture book.

  Kitty’s nearest neighbour opened his door with an aggrieved look, both for the hour and possibly for Mr Pargetter’s wild expression and the doll he held to his chest.

  ‘There’s a telegram,’ said Alec. He was gabbling. He didn’t care whether he was convincing; if he could have shaken the man for the information he would have. ‘It came to Lower Loxley by mistake. Where’s Mrs Dibden-Rawles?’

  ‘She gave Bella to me to look after, asked me to be kind.’ Each word was reluctant, the still-sleepy man standing well back from the whirlwind on his step. ‘Said she was leaving. She seemed upset.’

  ‘Leaving? Leaving, you mean leaving? When?

  ‘A few hours ago. Look, all I know is Kitty went off about nine o’clock in George Seed’s car.’

  At dawn, Alec finally left Noon Cottage.

  He looked back through the front window at the denuded house, at the doll prim in her tartan on an armchair. He wanted to take it with him, but Pamela would ask questions. He had made Emily comfortable, posing her stiff limbs.

  Birds, who didn’t know about the war and hadn’t heard that Alec had ruined his life, sang crazily around him.

  Too late. Too late. Alec’s wisdom arrived too late. Now, in the ruins of their love affair, he saw Kitty’s vulnerability. Too late. She had been reduced to accepting an offer – of what? – from the likes of that Seed man.

  He entered his solemn house and hated it.

  * * *

  From mouth to ear, over teacups and pints, the news covered ground rapidly.

  The identity of the poison-pen writer knocked Hitler off Ambridge’s front page. Agnes did her best with the dissemination, and Walter was no slouch. Nobody was above discussing it. The vicar found time for it even while formulating what he would say when he visited the Gilpins, for visit them he must.

  ‘Blanche has a nasty mind,’ the vicar’s wife said to Frank and Nance over the pitiful loaf they allowed her. ‘She listened to everything we all said, and put two and two together to make five.’

  ‘She’s brought unhappiness to many homes,’ said Frank. He was measured when he talked about Blanche. Careful.

  Not so Pamela. ‘She should be run out of town,’ she said confidently to Ronald Furneaux, when she picked up the phone and hung onto him instead of passing the handset to Alec. ‘Not the anaemic little sister, just Blanche.’ She listened, then laughed, prettily, not the way she laughed around Alec. ‘Ronald, you’re so right! The cabinet could make good use of her espionage skills! Here’s Alec, and do be gentle with him, he’s moping around like a lovelorn housemaid.’

  The baddie herself was seeing her sitting room and kitchen in daylight, and she found them lacking.

  So shabby. Jane shouldn’t be trusted with décor. Sludgy colours with no light and shade to the whole. Blanche needed sensuality, something to stroke. Downstairs was all worsted and hemp and Jane’s walking shoes lying dejected on the mat.

  She took up a magazine and put it down again.

  I am in quarantine. Like an imported pet with flecks of foam on its snout. No visitors, and Jane kept to her room. Her faithful crow, a raised eyebrow in human form, tended her with rude succinctness. They were all eaten up with curiosity. How she’d done it, how she knew such arcana.

  Because deep down they all know the letters speak the truth.

  They may deny her to each other, and add slander to her crimes, but they knew she had put two and two together and made exactly four.

  While they slept she’d been haunting Ambridge, breaking flowerpots and scaring cats. One midnight had delivered her a wonderful gift: Alec Pargetter taking his leave of Noon Cottage, and Kitty’s dressing gown suggesting her nakedness beneath it. Blanche had been obliged to shrink into the camouflage so handily available at that time of night, and had just missed bumping into the boy, Gerald, as he tailed his father back along the lane.

  It was child’s play to deduce who had given Alec his shiner. Then, the divine moment of inspiration. She still mewed when she remembered it. Why not devise a game that entangled the entire village? Like they were dolls. Like she was Nero. Like she was God.

  Hippity hop to the gate of the church where Blanche pinned up her first note. Safe from suspicion, with her withered legs and all. She wore the coat she’d pinched from Stan Horrobin one night as he slept off a skinful outside The Bull. She’d simply sauntered over and plucked it from where Bob Little had laid it over the sleeping man. It transformed her from genteel to dangerous; she liked its heft and its yeasty smell.

  The commotion in the village was exhilarating. She would write one more. Just the one. About herself and Whitey White. It would absolve her for ever from any suspicion.

  It was something else, too.

  Blanche never confronted just how much she enjoyed having Whitey lie across her bed. It was a simulacrum of the romps hinted at in the novels she read and reread. The closeness. The interlocking of male and female. Blanche wondered what sex was like, knowing she had relinquished it along with responsibility or expectation or duty when she disembarked in her wheelchair. Letter number two had the delicious stink of wish fulfilment.

  The third letter, read out at the wedding, took the wind out of her sails. It didn’t bother Blanche that she would go to her grave damned for it, but the mystery intrigued her. She hadn’t written the letter exposing the Browns and she wondered who hated them enough to do it?

  I’ve taken the fall for you, whoever you are.

  Unwilling to have some stranger call time on her game, Blanche had rushed out a fourth poison pen. And found herself in the arms of a man for the first time when she’d been caught.

  Jack Archer had been so hard, all knobs and gristle, and so unexpectedly strong. But Blanche had wriggled and kicked and scooted away. The loss of her precious, cleverly worded note had irked her for days but then, when she’d all but forgotten it, Jimmy’s sight returned.

  Funny, that.

  She and Jimmy had both used the night to show their true selves. Sitting cross-legged at her window, eating toffees and throwing the wrappers over her shoulder, Blanche had glanced next door at The Bull and seen Jimmy creep, sure-footed, out into the yard. He had bent his head over the photograph of, was it Hilda, yes, that was her name. He spent ages mooning over his land girl Cleopatra. He wept. He kissed her image. The blind boy was, like herself, a malingerer.

  She stood and prowled the room. Despite years of practice, Blanche was bad at waiting. The fifth – and alas final – note lay unread in someone’s pocket. She put her money on sly old Walter Gabriel. It would surface; she had whetted everyone’s appetite with her mention of murder.

  People, thought Blanche, are very simple, when it comes down to it.


  The ‘how’ of her crime was simple enough. But the ‘why’ of it? That was a secret even to Blanche. She didn’t know why she enjoyed sowing misery and wasn’t curious.

  It’s fun.

  * * *

  Fog made a Gothic apparition of Denholm’s house.

  Jane, scarf up around her nose, knitted hat limp on her fringe, stared up at the windows of Turnpike. The man of the house was absent, its windows black. A niece was looking after him as his leg healed, according to the crow; she had her ear to the ground even when the ground was November-hard.

  What must Denholm think of me? Some of Blanche’s infamy must surely rub off on the sister who shared their small quarters. Denholm’s regard, proven by his proposal, was one of the struts that held up Jane’s frayed tent.

  It was hard to trust now. Not just people, but her thoughts. Old certainties had turned to dust. The spectral children were gone, replaced by something much worse. Jane’s head was a derelict place.

  The cold bit into her joints and made her feel ancient. She had never been young, it wasn’t her thing. As the ‘late arrival’ in her parents’ lives she had been earmarked to see them through their old age. With Blanche incapacitated, Jane had nursed their mother through a long illness, only for her father to succumb, with perfect timing, to his own malady. As one parent was waved off at St Stephen’s graveyard, the other started a nasty cough.

  I could never leave.

  It pleased Jane to think she’d have been brave enough to do so.

  Despite the fog, another circuit of Ambridge was preferable to going home. A queer, wintry stasis prevailed as the village waited for the last letter to be found, and she met nobody. It was an odd hour, just after dinner, when children were got to bed and pipes were smoked. She had nothing to return to, except anger.

  Every sugar bowl had been smashed, but it had not satisfied her rage, which renewed itself overnight, every night. If her name was not held in high regard in Ambridge, well, then Jane was nobody.

  Through the years she had begged God’s forgiveness for the petty revenges she wreaked on Blanche. A lukewarm hot water bottle. A delay in ferrying the newspaper upstairs. Now all that was expunged, forgotten; she could have done worse and still not scratched the surface of what Blanche truly deserved.

  She heard the truck before she saw it. The mist gave it up suddenly, like a pantomime genie. Its lights were blinkered.

  ‘Brookfield?’ said the man who wound down the window. ‘Can’t see a thing in this fog. Not that there are any signs if I could see.’

  ‘That way, up there, take a right.’ Jane pointed with her glove.

  ‘Thank you, ma’am.’

  ‘Ma’am’ pushed Jane from old to Neolithic. Time to go home. She wouldn’t speak to Blanche. She would keep the promise she made the night of the pageant, and never address her sister directly again. Thank God for Agnes. Not a statement Jane had ever thought she’d make, but Agnes was somebody to talk to, somebody who shared her distaste for Blanche.

  Visitors would return. Blanche would be rehabilitated to some extent. Jane would never falter, though; she would keep the sooty flames of remembrance burning.

  * * *

  Doris heard, then saw the truck rumble through the goose-grey mist. It parked down by the five-bar gate. ‘He’s early,’ she thought, but it wasn’t Dan’s mate come to collect rams for auction. It was, she realized, Mr Wyer.

  Glen led the way to the gate, his tail a flag. A figure firmed up in the fog as they picked their way along the tyre ruts. ‘Jez,’ called Doris. ‘Do me a favour and round up Eugene and Dan. There’s a bigwig from War Ag checking up on us and no doubt he’ll want to talk to you all.’

  ‘Glad to, missus. All right if I pop to the house first? I left me glove.’ He waggled a bare hand.

  ‘You don’t have to ask, Jez.’

  He blew her a kiss.

  * * *

  Kids banished, Lisa napping, Doris went about her Sisyphean kitchen work as Dan and Robert Wyer talked at the table.

  Between less affable men it could have been tense, but Mr Wyer managed to lean on Dan for results and Dan managed to defend himself without rancour. A pity, thought Doris, that Winnie and Adolf can’t take a leaf out of their books.

  ‘How’s the census going?’ Mr Wyer set everything down in small, cryptic writing.

  ‘Great guns,’ said Dan. ‘It’s all in this folder. Every labourer, every machine, every clapped-out little nag.’

  ‘You included telephones, like I asked?’

  ‘Not many to include,’ laughed Dan.

  ‘You know you’ll be getting a telephone?’

  Dan pulled in his chin. ‘Cripes,’ he said.

  ‘Us?’ Doris was astounded.

  ‘Yes, Doris, you,’ said Mr Wyer, smug with his largesse. ‘Now, rabbits. They can’t move for the little blighters over Lyttleton Cover.’

  ‘Stan Horrobin’s doing his level best. Goes against the grain, letting him poach, but needs must. You might have a word with the powers that be about coal, Mr Wyer. I couldn’t get my hands on nearly enough for the steam traction engines this harvest.’

  ‘Noted, Dan, noted.’

  Butting in with scones – and luxuriating in their appreciation for such wonders – Doris added a gripe of her own. How, she asked, was she supposed to manage with untrained, unwilling labour?

  ‘No point in giving farmers silly targets,’ she said, hands on hips, using her I-made-the-scones power while it lasted. ‘If you only give ’em incompetent men.’

  ‘Fair dos, Doris.’ Mr Wyer reached into a briefcase. Took out a folder that tore and showered the table with documents. ‘Let’s see if we can sort you out.’

  Dan took out his pipe and, on a squinted signal from Doris, put it away again with a slight, almost interior sigh.

  ‘Here we are.’ Mr Wyer smoothed out a form. Neat copperplate writing trammeled by boxes. ‘Yes, yes, oh, that’s not right.’ He looked up, took off his glasses. ‘It’s damn silly, one labourer’s insufficient for a farm the size of Brookfield.’

  ‘Two,’ Doris corrected him, and then, hastily, ‘That still isn’t enough!’

  ‘No, one.’ Mr Wyer swivelled the paper to show her. ‘A Eugene Haldane.’

  Jez did not appear anywhere on the official paperwork. Dan remembered noticing that, and creating a supplementary form, assuming it was an oversight. ‘I gave it to Jez to post,’ he said, the sentence slowing as they recognized its implication.

  As for Doris, she remembered waving Jez into the truck at Hollerton.

  Hey, you! You for Brookfield?

  The two-second delay. The nod. Her senses in revolt as she ignored her intuition.

  And then Dan’s bemusement about the lack of reply from War Ag. Then finding Jez’s wages from the farm’s pockets, knowing they’d be reimbursed.

  Doris ran, with neither coat nor hat, to the men’s digs. He was gone, of course, as were his meagre belongings. There was a dent in the bedclothes where he had sat to pack.

  Back at the house, she shoved Dan out of the way and began to open drawers. Jez was a germ floating through the war, and she had ushered him into her kitchen. She checked her handbag. She checked her purse. She checked the scullery.

  ‘Come on, love,’ said Dan. ‘He’s hardly going to steal your pickled onions, now, is he?’

  * * *

  Peggy was back.

  ‘You again?’ Stan Horrobin slouched in the doorway. ‘It’s a long hike from London for a little piece like you.’

  ‘Is your wife in? I prefer to deal with the organ grinder, not the monkey.’ Peggy pushed past him. It had been a long hike. ‘Down, Wizbang, I haven’t come to see you.’

  She petted the grubby dog all the same. And called to Stacey, who limped over to lick her hand. ‘Still missing your master, eh?’

  Connie, wiping her hands with a cloth, hurried in. ‘We all miss our Cliff,’ she said, and she seemed happy to see Peggy, who didn’t know how unusual this was.
>
  Later, as Peggy gathered her handbag and her coat, she said, ‘Here you go, Connie,’ and held out some rolled notes.

  Connie’s hand was a blur as she grabbed the money and secreted it into a hidden pocket.

  ‘That’s for the boys, got it? Not booze for him.’ Peggy nodded at Stan, asleep in the one soft chair. ‘You giving them some veggies? And a bit of pudding and custard now and then?’

  ‘I look after them like they was my own.’

  That was what Peggy was scared of. ‘I’m still reeling about what you told me, the crippled lady and her poison pen.’ Peggy went to the broken mirror and surveyed the Picasso face it threw back. ‘Who says nothing ever happens in the countryside?’

  ‘You are lucky,’ said Connie, keeping a respectful distance from Peggy as she tucked her hair into her fluffy beret and applied a dab of lipstick to her cupid’s bow. ‘Going back to London.’

  ‘Yeah. Well.’ Peggy’s mouth turned down. She was still pretty; it didn’t matter what she did with her features. Peggy was used to her own beauty and it had stopped impressing her. The Blitz was beyond Connie’s comprehension. Before the middle of September it had been beyond Peggy’s; now she was a ‘plucky Londoner’ picking her way through fallen masonry to get to work. ‘You’re lucky, Connie, that nobody’s bombing the tripe out of you.’ She wheeled around, arms outstretched; this cuddling business was new, but felt right. ‘All right, kiddos, I’m off.’

  The boys had been spirited today; the oinking whenever Connie said Peggy’s name would have earned them a glare at home, but not here. She didn’t care overmuch about manners or reading or behaviour. She had no ambition for her brothers beyond getting them through the war in one piece; Billy and John had become important to her. No longer short-trousered cyphers who got under her feet, it had taken distance, and danger, to render her little brothers fully three-dimensional. Her anxiety was a stiff wind that kept blowing her to Ambridge. ‘John, love, I’ll be back before you know it.’

  He had to be peeled off his sister. Even Billy’s oinks didn’t help.