Fair Weather

by Barbara Gaskell Denvil

  “I’d be as bad,” said Wattle. “I don’t want to belong to anyone else.”

  Bertie was in the chair beside the fire, his stretched legs blocking much of the warmth. “Look, I’m no macho pig, or whatever you’re implying here. Come on, stick up for me, Mol. I never tried to tell you what to do, did I? Oh, well, maybe sometimes. But who made last night’s dinner? Who made yesterday’s lunch? Who made breakfast this morning? I even stacked the dishwasher.”

  “I like cooking,” said Wattle. “So that’s irrelevant.”

  We talked from first snow fall until star haloed moon. I went upstairs at two, leaving them both promising to make sure the fire was out before they went to bed. Bertie was still trying to convince Wattle to stay the night. It was so late and so cold, I was quite sure she’d agree.

  When I finally got out of bed the next morning I found she hadn’t, and Bertie had slept the night on the couch in deep depression. I made him breakfast for once, but he didn’t eat it anyway. I went out and tramped the lane down to the stream that ran through the village. I could still see the tyre marks where Wattle had parked and then left. Bird feet, tiny splayed toe stripes, hardly impinging on the crust. A cat had jumped from path to wall, then disappeared into the big silver birch, leaving dainty symmetrical paw patterns. Nothing else spoiled the sparkle of snow under pale sunshine. I spoiled it myself, big boot indentations along the hidden pavement. I stood on the bridge and watched the brook carry fallen lumps of snow from north to south; more rainbow kaleidoscopes of refracted light.

  For once I wasn’t thinking of Tilda. I wished Wattle would go off and live with Bertie. For a start, it would get him out of the house. He was serious about her and that impressed me. It was so unlike him to yearn to settle down, to want just one girl, and to desire commitment. He would be good to her for a while. When they eventually split up, he could stay in her spare room. She would be good for him because she was nice. I wondered just how impossibly selfish of me it would be to encourage them.

  I bought eggs and fresh bread. Aromatherapy. Fresh bread smelled so seductive. I pulled off the heel on the way home and ate the crust still warm. I was still dropping crumbs when I got back indoors and tried to ignore the phone. It was usually for Bertie these days, except when my agent or the publisher made polite murmurings. I crept past the phone as if it might see me if I stood up straight, and went to sit in the kitchen. My computer was on the kitchen table between the bowl of lemons and the dirty coffee cups, but I hadn’t turned it on in ages. Then I unpacked the shopping but the phone kept ringing. Bertie must be out. I answered the phone.

  It was the police. They had found Wattle. They had found her hanging by both ankles, her pretty black curls in the snow, her hands ripped and scratched as if by wild animals. Her face was marked by one violent welt, raised like a burn. She was fully dressed but had been brutally raped. Her throat was cut so deeply that she had been almost decapitated.

  They had found her in the woods where she’d been suspended upside down from a chestnut tree just beyond the river. It had been a beautiful tree with mistletoe in the lower branches. Children, playing in the snow, had found her. Her car had been abandoned on the roadside a mile away. In it the police had found her purse and the radio playing softly to itself.

  The children had been hustled away by their parents, mesmerised by a memory they would never ever forget and which would influence the rest of their lives. Wattle had no more life to influence. She had been twenty three and beautiful and good and I had liked her very much. Bertie had wanted to marry her. A letter from him saying just that, had been found in her bag in the car. It had been the first thing that had led the police to us.

  Chapter Six

  I didn’t find out the details at first. Bertie and I spent most of the day at the police station, strictly separated, and it was later in the afternoon that the actual circumstances were gradually explained. I still had bread crumbs caught in the pink fuzz of my jumper, last night’s mascara was smudged under my eyes, and I was sitting in a draughty police interview room hearing about horrors that couldn’t possibly be true.

  I kept crying. Eventually they got bored with me and drove me home but they wouldn’t let me speak to Bertie. He was still helping them, I suppose, with their enquiries. I hadn’t given Bertie an alibi, but then, he surely didn’t want one and couldn’t possibly need it. I had gone to bed and left them together by the fire, though I had seen Bertie briefly in the morning when I served him cornflakes and packaged orange juice. He’d looked puffy eyed and had obviously slept badly, but that happens when one scrunches up on a couch half the night. But I kept telling the police, as they must have known themselves, that Bertie couldn’t have done it. He was sweet and useless and gentle. The killer must have been someone brutally deranged. Wattle’s throat had been sliced by a long, jagged nail. She had been strung up from the branch with great loops of ivy and mistletoe. Then she had been pinned to the trunk by a stake of sharpened wood right through her stomach.

  When I went back indoors I actually missed Bertie for the first time in eight years. There were echoes and the ashes in the grate smelled of misery and death.

  I heard him come in later. The police had finally let him go at about ten thirty. I felt guilty about not rushing down to talk to him and try and cheer him up, but I couldn’t move. I thought I’d vomit if I had to talk about what had happened. I slept as badly as was inevitable, in scraps interrupted by a heaving stomach, a bitter neuralgia and fits of sudden crying.

  I prayed, literally prayed, that I might leave it all behind and dream myself back to Tilda and Vespasian’s children and the sunshine of the mild medieval winter passing into sweet spring. I prayed for simplicity and the innocent company of my child thieves. It didn’t happen. But then I remembered the scream which had woken me days before on returning from medieval shadows, and the conviction that there had been a link to Vespasian. Now I didn’t know what to think so I tried not to think at all. Then I had to face Bertie.

  I tried very hard to make him happier, but what absurd impossibility in the face of brutal murder. We wondered together about whatever would have made Wattle stop and open her car door to a maniacal stranger on a deserted road in the early hours of a dark winter morning. There were no signs of a struggle at the car. It had been left locked with the hazard lights flashing and the radio running. The battery was almost flat when it was found. Wattle still had the car keys in her jacket pocket.

  “Her name was Doris. She hated it so much. Doris Davidson. So she changed it to Wattle. She was the nicest person I’ve ever met. Apart from you, I suppose. No, including you. She was just so caring. How can something like this happen to a good person?” They were the first coherent words Bertie said after lots of crying and bleak staring over my head and out of the window. It was starting to snow again, little soft flurries against a colourless sky. The birds were busy; hard pickings in midwinter. White horizontal stripes were collecting along the outside of the window frames and the trees were lacy tapestries among bare branches.

  I hadn’t faced housework but I had collected last night’s empty wine glasses and coffee cups. My hands were shaking and I’d dropped one. There had been Wattle’s lipstick smears still on the rim.

  Thinking about my books or escaping the limitations of a loveless marriage, I had often walked in those Gloucestershire woods over the years. The wide open freshness of the hills called me more often, immense views over the nestled villages with wind whistling over stone and scrub. But the woods in bluebell season were a fantasy of petal and frond. Fairy dreams. I must have walked a hundred times past the big chestnut tree where Wattle was found. I have picnicked there, close enough to the spot I think, solitary picnics with a thermos of wine, a cheese sandwich and something to read. I liked the loamy depths and the blue shadows. But I would never ever want to walk in that place again.

  Bertie and I spent more time at the police station but then it was only Bertie they interviewed and they knew I had nothi
ng more to tell them. Poor Bertie had nothing more to tell them either but they kept trying. After a couple of days and once he got legal permission, Bertie packed an overnight case and went up to Birmingham to visit Wattle’s parents. Left alone again, I started pacing the house. I knew how many steps there were from front door to kitchen, how many treads up to my bedroom. I had never counted them before. Now I knew there were exactly eighteen. I trudged endlessly into the village, bought something silly, then went back in the afternoon for whatever it was I had forgotten in the morning. I sat in baths until they were cold, but I didn’t use perfumed oils, even though I knew I was becoming increasingly depressed. The newspapers gradually found something else to write about and Wattle’s pretty face disappeared from the front pages. The weather improved.

  Bertie didn’t come back for two weeks. The Davidson family found him a comfort and perhaps they were soothed by his simple adoration for their lost daughter. Perhaps they just found him a replacement to mother. They didn’t seem to suspect him of any wickedness. When there is the embarrassment of death, people avoid the encroachment, and yet there is such a yearning to talk. With Bertie, the Davidsons could endlessly discuss Wattle and all her bright living memories. The police knew where he was but they didn’t bother us anymore. No one was finding answers to questions too hideous to unravel, so life just went on.

  The first daffodils popped yellow heads into yellow sunshine, sweet jonquil perfume, pretty hedgerows and early puff balls of blossom soon blown by sudden winds. Gales rushed through the valleys like witches on broomsticks.

  It was witches most of the village were talking about. Satanic cults seemed as good a theory as any. I didn’t think the idea silly at all. I was sure that what had happened went beyond the capabilities of basic humanity, but I was thinking of more than that. My own strange experiences were magical too – or maniacal. Beneath the apathy, I was genuinely frightened.

  Shops shut early as winter dark still slunk in by mid to late afternoon and everyone locked their doors, avoided the open roads and stayed in with the telly at night. This horror had happened in our own back yard and we continued to shiver even though the rest of the country moved onto the sensational attractions of other scandals. So when Bertie came back I wasn’t sure if I was pleased or sorry. I wanted someone to talk to but his depression was deeper than my own and hard to live with. A couple of my London friends phoned, curiosity and invitations, but I couldn’t talk. My lovely cousin Sammie, though I recognised sanity and caring, phoned too often and I forbade her to visit me. I didn’t want to be pitied. A Sunday newspaper did an article on Wattle and absurdly linked her interest in aromatherapy and the fact that she’d recently taken a course in astrology, with the possibility of a black magic coven, blasphemies and deviations. The village muttered and Bertie cried in my arms. The local woman who’d taught the astrology course and who also drove the school bus threatened to sue the paper but also cancelled the course. Paranoia swept through our valley like the winter winds.

  I dreamed about Wattle and the scream I’d heard before and then finally my dreams included Tilda. She came tripping back into my night wanderings like the warmth of the sun on my face.

  She wasn’t aware of me this time. She was taller, smoother, and just turned seventeen. More than a year had passed for her, though just a few weeks for me, and although nothing much seemed to have happened in her life, she was enjoying the new March sparkle on the river and the increased supply of food.

  Vespasian had been again to France. He had followed the battle wagons, had bought himself a horse and had gone to help claim Normandy back for the king. He had returned with money and fine stockings and the crown’s favour. The children had eaten well once more but Vespasian had not altered his habits either for king or for country. He sold the horse and bought more chickens, a vat of strong French wine, (no prejudice there), hot pies, fresh rushes and two whole sides of bacon which were hung in the rising smoke under the rafters. Tilda’s unquestioning acceptance gave me no clues as to any of Vespasian’s decisions.

  The scream had not been hers. Nothing terrible at all had happened after I had left the children and their cramped house three narrow streets back from the wharf. Although I was not her and she was separate from me in these short visits, I glimpsed her memories. I knew she had a blister on the side of her foot and I felt her discomfort. She had worn through her shoes but felt that going bare foot like Stephen and Osbert would be sadly shameful. Only Isabel had nice shoes without holes. I knew how Tilda still longed for shoes and I wished desperately that I could give them to her. In other matters, she was happier. I glimpsed her excitement when Vespasian had come home at midnight, clattering up on his tired horse which he’d ridden right into the house, slung its saddle and harness to the ground and left it nosing the pot on the hearth for the night. He had been slightly drunk and noisy with success. I could almost see him in her mind and feel her knee scrunched delight, curled in bed, listening to his laughter, peeping up to see if he would acknowledge her, the glee in accepting the gift he had brought her. Then he had stretched out on the straw pallet, too drunk to fuck with Isabel, and told stories of travel and heroism and exaggerated deeds. I decided again that I hated him.

  Even then, when Vespasian had shoes made for Tilda, and for Osbert and Stephen too, I hated his smug generosity. He always seemed to have shoes himself.

  Chapter Seven

  Richard and Isabel had gone up to the market with Tilda when I became fully her again. Though seventeen now, she was no more a lady than when I had first met her as a child. With a rustle of shifting time, I slipped into her mind so easily that for a moment I forgot I had ever been anyone else. It was the sixteenth day of March and bright. Clouds danced across a faraway sky like children in petticoats playing tag or little sailboats in a flotilla. Tilda and I thought the market glorious.

  I had left Molly and the rest of my consciousness in bed and presumably asleep, but I was not dreaming anymore and I felt very much awake. I hoped I might stay longer this time.

  The rats seemed larger out in the open. They scuttled past our feet, busy for the chicken heads, turnip tops and scraps of fruit dropped behind the stalls. I was suddenly startled by a rat almost as big as a kitten running over my toes and Isabel smirked when I tripped. She was pretty in long blue with a warm pelisse. I knew I was shabby in threadbare lilac like dying lavender but I had new shoes, all soft red leather with a black ribbon, Vespasian’s gift some months ago, so doubly highly prized. I loved her happiness, skipping over the old beaten earth with her, delighting in her delight and in each step of her new shoes. Sharing Tilda’s joyful and undemanding consciousness again was an immediate pleasure.

  We had silver pennies, worn thin and a little bent, snipped along their crosses into quarters. Fourthlings, said Tilda and I knew she meant farthings. We had come to the market to buy, as well as to steal.

  The stalls wore bright striped awnings over tiny crowded counter tops. Itinerant sellers showed their pins, ribbons and wooden nails on trays hung around their necks. The salesmen carried leather sacks around their waists, jangling silver pieces. There was no other form of currency; just bright pennies, whole and etched with a cross or snipped into the pieces where the crosses marked. A whole unclipped penny was a rare excitement. Every sale rang like little bells as money disappeared into pouches. Butchers, bakers and fishmongers had their own corner, then opened into the brilliance and confusion of fruit, grains, herbs and vegetables. The variety of these foods seemed limited to me, my favourites were missing and much of it was smaller than I was used to, but the colours were brighter and the smells sprang fresh and deliciously vibrant. There were little apples like rubies, hard topaz pears and small onions all moist and sweet scented, caterpillar pocked cabbages as green as limes and peas curled in their nests. Several stalls sold eggs, white and crusted in feathers and straw, still warm. Live hens strutted, free to peck. Others, plucked or still twitching, were strung up by their scrawny feet. I turned awa
y. That had brought reminders I had no intention of remembering now. I moved quickly away from the butcher’s quarter where the warm blood ran into the gutters, suet and lard sweated in bowls, decapitated ooze and skinless flesh with their intestines knotted into bows. It stank of murder.

  Honey was rich golden in sealed earthenware jars or open tubs, sausages hung in neat coils, hams and cured bacon with their dark muskiness, cheeses and creamy thick milk, butter in urns and wooden kegs of wine and ale. Someone was selling rosy faced scarecrows, there were barrows of neatly cut and scrolled peat smelling loamy and moist, faggots of kindling rolled in leaves, quills and parchments, horns of inks from oak gall, tanned leather hides, huge rolls of cloth in many colours, candles both tallow and beeswax and ready made pies and pastries from a stall right in the middle of the cheap.

  There was noise. Everyone shouted and called to buy. Geese, ducks, chickens and pigeons clucked and squawked and bickered. The tooth-puller sat smug in his blood spattered apron, his own grin gaping empty-jawed, the queue in front of him waiting patient and slump shouldered; resigned to the new pain that would overcome the old pain. All around the chatter and laughter, push and pull was loud. I liked the noise. It was small-town-bustling and very friendly. There were no engines, no mechanical buzz, no motor whine and no roar of traffic. The level of sound seemed charmingly personal as if exactly designed for the ear.

  Richard chased Tilda through wool, hemp and fine linens and down into wooden toys. Isabel followed, complaining. She didn’t want to run, it was undignified, but I noticed that she managed to steal a purse on the way. I thought the toys ingenious and I wished I could buy one of the little jointed oxen with its wide horns lowered and its big painted eyes smiling. But Tilda would never have done such a thing, even had she been able to afford it. It would have been a waste of precious money and shockingly childish. She was already conscious of the sweat damp curls around her cheeks.