A Few Green Leaves

by Barbara Pym

  But Emma was going to consult Martin Shrubsole and went into the other surgery, leaving Dr G. with a tiresome woman who only wanted her blood pressure taken.

  Martin had so far had a difficult morning. He had been obliged to tell an elderly woman patient that her days were numbered, for, in his usual frank way, he had not shrunk from the truth. In his opinion it was no good trying to hide things from an intelligent person. But she had come back at him by asking if he believed in life after death. For a moment he had been stunned into silence, indignant at such a question. Then of course he had realised that he couldn’t be expected to answer things like that – it was the rector’s business. The fact that death came to all of us seemed irrelevant at this moment. It was a relief when she slipped quietly out of the room and Emma came in.

  Emma had a slight rash on one of her hands, probably caused by some allergy – detergent, ho doubt – though it might just possibly have some other cause – stress, perhaps – what did the doctor think?

  At the mention of ‘stress’ Martin was at once on the alert. Although his main field of study and interest was geriatrics, he was well aware of the importance of giving full attention to all his patients, for even the young middle-aged would one day be old persons. Besides, he was interested in and puzzled by Emma, who did not seem to fit into any of his prearranged categories.

  ‘Have you been in a particularly stressful situation lately?’ he asked.

  Emma seemed as if she might burst out laughing. ‘Well, who hasn’t, come to that,’ she said. ‘Life is full of stressful situations, isn’t it?’

  ‘Yes, the pace of life these days,’ Martin began, but it did not seem strictly applicable to the village; obviously she must be referring to some particular aspect of her own life. That man in the cottage in the woods, Graham Pettifer (Doctor Pettifer), who had bored them all in the pub one evening, holding forth about something in Central Africa, could he be the cause of her stress? ‘Even in a seemingly quiet life-style,’ he went on, ‘there can be stress.’

  Emma agreed that there could be.

  ‘Having to look after an aged relative, for instance. I’ve seen so much of it.’

  ‘Yes, I expect you have,’ said Emma sympathetically. ‘You specialised in geriatric medicine, didn’t you, before you came here?’

  Martin said that he had, but it was getting to be the wrong way round, the patient questioning the doctor. Then he remembered that Emma was an anthropologist, or at least had been engaged in the kind of work that involved questioning people, so he felt less inadequate. He must press on and try to get to the root of her trouble. ‘Let me see the hand,’ he said.

  Emma placed her right hand, palm downwards, on his.

  ‘It seems rather rough,’ he said. But was he insulting her, suggesting that she didn’t take care of her hands, use hand-cream after washing as his wife and mother-in-law did? And there was such a difference in the feel of people’s hands – a woman’s, a child’s, an old person’s…. ‘Sometimes an unsatisfactory relationship can cause stress,’ he said boldly.

  Emma looked up at his young earnest face, bending towards her. He was really making an effort to get to the cause of her trouble. ‘I suppose I ought to wear rubber gloves when I’m washing up and that sort of thing,’ she said.

  ‘Yes, you could try that.’ Perhaps it was a relief that she had rejected his invitation to confide. ‘And I’ll give you a prescription –come and see me again in three weeks if things don’t improve.’

  The way he had said ‘things’ left the situation open, wide open, really. She could confide her whole life to him, if need be.

  Martin wondered if his wife would be able to get to the bottom of whatever it was and imagined them walking in the woods, Avice beating down nettles with her stick while Emma poured out her heart.

  Emma left the surgery clutching her prescription –‘script’, the junkies called it – grateful that he had not asked her about her sex life or lack of it.

  That same morning, on the outskirts of Birmingham, Daphne was taking Bruce to the vet. The scene in the surgery waiting-room was very different from the hushed atmosphere at the doctors’, with nobody speaking to anybody. Here there was a friendly air and anxious, even searching, enquiry into the ailments and troubles of the patients, cradled in their owners’ arms or shrouded in baskets and boxes on the urine-stained carpet (the result of a nervous animal forgetting itself). Neutering and spaying, the best treatment for worms, the various injections against cat flu, distemper and hard pad were all fit subjects of conversation, eagerly discussed.

  When Daphne’s turn came she found that she was seeing the youngest of the vets – there were three in the practice – and that he had the same air of anxious concern that reminded her of Martin Shrubsole. His kindly manner as he prepared Bruce for his injection – ‘Just a routine jab – this won’t hurt you a bit, old chap’ – made her feel that he would be sympathetic to her own troubles, even advise her what to do for the best. It was a gift some people had, a great asset, as much for a veterinary surgeon as for a general practitioner. How often must this young man have reassured and comforted worried and distressed owners, how many more years of such devoted caring lay before him! But of course she couldn’t really confide in him in the same way she did in Martin Shrubsole, couldn’t burden him with her own troubles – how Birmingham, even the house on the outskirts of the delightful wooded common, wasn’t really proving to be the answer, was really no substitute for the stark white cottage on the shores of the Aegean. And then there was Heather – how much bossier she had become in her old age – and Tom – she sometimes worried about Tom and whether he was getting on all right, and had she done the right thing in leaving him as she had…. But none of this could be revealed to the sympathetic young vet.

  ‘Come on, Bruce,’ she said, ‘let the doctor take your paw.’

  The vet laughed. ‘Funny, my name’s Bruce too,’ he said.

  It seemed to create a bond between them and she felt almost as if she really had confided her worries to him. But all she said was what a shame it was the way you were always seeing notices everywhere about dogs not being welcome in places. Bruce was so well behaved, would never do anything he ought not to. Not like a cat.

  ‘Oh no,’ he agreed. ‘You can’t tell a cat not to do anything. Did you ever have a cat?’

  ‘No,’ she said, ‘though I think my brother would have liked one,’ she added, a shadow crossing her face at the thought of Tom.

  ‘They shall wax old as doth a garment,’ Tom read. Lanatus – buried in wool. Wool, being an animal fibre, would decay, would it not? So there would be little or no trace of the statutory ‘woollen’ in which all were obliged to be buried according to the edict of August 1678. How long did wool take to decay? he wondered. He could not recall any instance of fragments of wool having been found when a grave of the period had been opened and the bones taken out. Of course one did not know personally of anyone having been buried in woollen, apart from Miss Lickerish’s hedgehog and that was hardly relevant.

  Hunger gnawed at his vitals and he paused in his speculations. He believed that Mrs Dyer had left him some cold meat for his lunch, and there was a tin of soup to be heated up. She would know, perhaps, how long wool took to decay, and also what people were buried in nowadays, what shrouds were made of. Hadn’t she a distant relative who worked in a funeral parlour? Mrs Dyer would certainly know all about ‘man-made’ fibres. But he shrank from asking her.

  Over his lunch he read the back page of the Daily Telegraph, the newspaper Daphne had preferred and which was still delivered at the rectory. So many people dying, he read, and none of them buried in woollen! The act had been repealed early in the nineteenth century, as far as he remembered, but there was nothing to stop a person being buried in woollen now if he so desired – a note in a will to that effect…. He ate cold lamb and bread and crunched pickled onions, his eyes moving mechanically and alphabetically down the list of deaths. Driver, Fabian C
harlesworth, he read. ‘Devoted husband of Constance and Jessie …’ an odd way of putting it. Had the man had two wives still living? Tom wondered. And had they got together after the man’s death? And where would he be buried – with the first wife or the second?

  There was still room in the churchyard here for his own burial, he reflected, if he should go suddenly. He was forgetting for the moment that Laura had been buried elsewhere. But supposing he were to marry again, as this man Driver must have done, what would be the position then?

  27

  It was colder walking in the woods than it had been sitting in the train, but it was still a bright day and the slightly uphill walk from the station was invigorating. Miss Vereker wasn’t exactly cold, it was just that the unaccustomed exertion – her West Kensington walks being mainly on the flat – had made her conscious of a sharp pain in her back and she was finding it difficult to breathe. The air this morning had seemed almost mild, but now there was a cutting wind coming at her through the trees.

  She stopped for a minute to have a rest. This, surely, was the cottage where Clegg, one of the keepers, used to live; but it looked in a sad state now, the garden neglected and the curtains in the front windows obviously in need of a wash. Miss Vereker peered, in a way she would normally have thought discourteous, but it didn’t matter since the cottage was clearly uninhabited. Where did the keepers live now then? Probably in some modern bungalow or council house, the wives not caring for the isolation of the woods. A cup of tea or a glass of Mrs Clegg’s elderberry wine, which would have been offered in the old days, would be welcome now, but there was no hope of that. She must go on, ‘press on regardless’, as her nephew was fond of saying. It couldn’t be so very far to the village and she would soon get through the woods. Looking at her watch, she saw that it was half-past one – not a very suitable time to call on anybody. She was surprised to see that it was so late – she must have stopped longer by the cottage than she had realised.

  She walked on with her usual determination, back upright and head held high. The path was clear enough though it was rather overgrown, more than it used to be. Still, this was the path, there was no doubt about that. It was only that the pain in her back was sharper and more continuous now, reminding her of that time when she had had a touch of pleurisy and the doctor had listened with his stethoscope, hearing what he described as a noise like dry leaves rubbing together, the kind of noise she was hearing now as she took a breath, or was it only the rustle of the fallen leaves on the path?

  She realised that she was beginning to walk more slowly. Perhaps it was farther than she had remembered, and now she seemed to have strayed some way off the direct path on to a muddier track, much trodden down by hoof marks, either of cows or horses. The girls had sometimes come riding here and no doubt people still did. She wished she had thought of bringing a stick with her; it would have been useful, not so much to support her faltering steps, she told herself jokingly, as to push aside some of the branches and brambles that were getting in her way. It was so long since she had walked in this wood, or indeed in any wood, that she had forgotten how useful a stick could be.

  And now she found herself in a kind of open clearing where there was a scattering of large stones, the kind one could sit down on for a brief rest. Not that she was really tired, it was only this annoying pain and – more important – the inadvisability of calling on Miss Lee and Miss Grundy at two o’clock in the afternoon. Miss Lee was the kind of person who had a ‘rest’ and might not welcome an unexpected visitor, even an old friend from the past.

  ‘Mummy always has a little sleep after lunch,’ Avice Shrubsole was saying, ‘though she swears she doesn’t. She begins by listening to The Archers, but before Woman’s Hours started she’s dropped off.’ Avice laughed. ‘I like to get out for a walk when I can so I creep out and leave her, though Martin’s always telling Mummy it would do her the world of good to get out into the woods.’

  ‘I’m sure he is,’ Emma murmured. Avice was the last person she had expected or wished to meet at such a time and in such circumstances and she had been unable to pretend that she was going in the opposite direction, had not thought quickly enough – for, after all, she had just been standing, mooning about, one could say – and Avice had looked at her sharply and suggested that it was a bit cold for hanging about (though a lovely bright day for November). So there they were walking briskly away from the village, Avice beating down the undergrowth on either side of the path with her stick.

  ‘I gather you and Martin had an encounter this morning,’ Avice said in a pleasant, friendly way, for of course one did not reveal that one knew about the visit to the surgery, and he had apparently seen Emma getting petrol at the garage.

  ‘Yes – and I went to the surgery about this rash on my hands,’ Emma admitted.

  ‘Oh really? That’s a bore for you – I suppose it’s detergents.’

  ‘Yes, it might be. Or some darker secret might be causing it, stress and that sort of thing – you know what is said.’

  ‘Of course!’

  They both laughed and Avice struck a particularly fierce blow with her stick at a clump of harmless vegetation. Without revealing any secrets, for he was scrupulous about that kind of thing, Martin had said something about Emma being the kind of person who might ‘need help’ and hinted that Avice might be able to supply it. This looked like being just such an opportunity.

  ‘Did you wonder why I was wandering aimlessly in the woods?’ Emma asked.

  Avice was taken aback at her approach. ‘I assumed you were taking exercise,’ she said.

  ‘But you must have guessed about Graham and me, what there was or wasn’t – you may even have heard what was said in the village.’

  ‘I don’t think anything was said, exactly….’

  ‘Oh well, if there wasn’t anything, that makes the whole thing even more humiliating.’

  Emma seemed prepared to leave it at that, making it difficult for Avice to know how best to give the ‘help’ Martin had suggested Emma might need. But perhaps humiliation was something to latch on to — could Emma not be persuaded to enlarge on this?

  ‘Maybe you expected too much,’ she ventured.

  ‘Oh, I didn’t expect anything – what right had I to expect anything?’ said Emma fiercely.

  This seemed an unprofitable line to pursue and Avice decided that she would tell Martin that Emma’s trouble was nothing more interesting than frustrated sex or even unrequited love for that man they had all thought rather a bore, though there was no accounting for tastes. Yet, as a woman, Avice felt that this might be over-simplifying the matter. She did not know how to proceed except by remarking that we never got all that we hoped for out of life and throwing in a hint of her own troubles. Shared confidences might lead to something.

  ‘Yes, of course,’ Emma agreed. ‘Even the happily married woman with a nice considerate husband and splendid children might still feel that something was lacking. If she’d given up a promising career for these domestic things – as a concert pianist or a TV personality or even a social worker.

  It seemed to Avice that Emma was being deliberately mocking.

  ‘Well, it is possible to do one’s own thing, even with a husband and children,’ Avice said defiantly, and of course she did do a lot of useful voluntary work in the district. ‘But there are other problems,’ she went on. ‘Where one lives, for example. Our present house is much too small, especially now that Mummy’s living with us.’

  ‘Yes, I suppose it is. Let me see now’ – Emma was making an effort – ‘you can’t have more than four bedrooms in your present house.’

  ‘No. There’s our room, of course – the boys share at present, and Hannah has the little room in the front and Mummy is in what was the spare room.’

  ‘And that’s the four rooms accounted for,’ Emma agreed. ‘So you haven’t a spare room, and if anyone comes to stay.

  ‘Exactly! There’s just nowhere to put them.’

 
‘And it’s so awful sleeping in somebody’s sitting-room surrounded by stuffed armchairs and standard lamps.’

  ‘We do have a kind of put-u-up in the dining-room….’

  ‘Oh, sleeping in somebody’s dining-room would be even worse! Of course, you could turn your mother out – oh, I don’t mean literally,’ Emma suggested. ‘Would she perhaps like a small cottage in the village, if one was available, or one of those new bungalows opposite the church? That might be a solution.’

  Avice smiled, remembering the conversation they had had when Tom had come to supper. ‘You know what the real solution would be?’ she said.

  ‘For you to get a bigger house, obviously – though you wouldn’t want to leave here, would you?’

  ‘There would be no need to leave here – not if we lived at the rectory.’ Avice’s stick slashed so furiously at an overhanging branch that she might have been cutting down Tom himself.

  ‘But how could you do that? What about the rector – where would he go? Hardly to one of the bungalows opposite the church!’

  ‘No, of course not.’ Avice proceeded to explain about over-large rectories and vicarages and how so many clergy now lived in smaller and more convenient houses. Now that Daphne had gone, a cottage could be found for Tom, or even a small house on the housing estate. It was a mistake to associate the clergy only with large ancient vicarages and rectories, quite against the modern trend which was all for the clergy being in closer touch with their parishioners, more like ordinary people, altogether less isolated and set apart. Why, she had even heard of one London vicar who lived in a tower block! Avice was sure Tom would be much happier out of the rectory.