Miss Coulson also tells me that walking is at last coming out from under the shadow of jogging as the way of keeping fit. Just forty minutes, four times a week, at a speed of three miles an hour will make you lose between 10lbs and 15lbs in a year without any changes to your diet. If you’re walking at the right speed, you should perspire gently and be able to exchange the odd word with a companion. If you can have a good chat, you’re too slow.
The American television writer, Anne Havesham, who had admired the lit-up trees on her evening walks, told me she saw them as a perfect illustration of the sort of community spirit she hoped to soak up by the gallon for her latest project, ‘Atlantic Cousins’, set in two small communities, one English, one East Coast American.
Six
‘Have you come across a woman called Anne Havesham?’ Nancy demanded of Ted Brain as she stood in the vicarage porch, waiting to be given the keys to the church. It was her turn on the brass-cleaning roster.
‘Who?’ Ted shifted from one foot to the other, his slight frame barring the entrance to the hall.
‘Anne Havesham. According to the Village Diary she’s some American television person and she’s just moved here. And then there’s this Agnes Coulson. I didn’t see any lanterns in the trees did you?’
‘I don’t take the local paper,’ Ted said with an air of not listening. ‘If you know where these people live, I’ll pay them a visit. It does occur to me, sometimes, that the local estate agent sees more of my parishioners than I do.’
‘Rubbish. It’s just we’ve had quite a few people coming and going lately.’
‘Rich commuters coming, and villagers going.’
‘I do so hate that expression “rich”,’ Nancy snapped. ‘It sounds so, so envious. Anyway, if you meet her, you do meet some of your parishioners occasionally I presume, do tell her I’d love her for the League.’
Ted, who, to Nancy’s knowledge, never joked, quipped, ‘Served up with two veg and mint sauce,’ making Nancy wonder why he bothered now.
‘Well then, if you’ll excuse me…’ he handed Nancy the keys to the church and with a little nod, closed the door in her face.
The vicar is getting more peculiar by the day, Nancy thought as she strode off towards the church. Her friend Pat had twittered something about comings and goings at night, but Nancy had not really listened; Pat’s conversation was like drizzle on hard ground, it left little impression.
Later that evening Nancy, placing a starter of smoked trout in front of her husband and sitting down herself, said, ‘For once I agree with the vicar. With all this infilling and redevelopment and all these city types moving in and out, one might as well live on Waterloo Station for all the sense of community one gets in this place.’
‘I’ve told you that for years,’ Andrew looked pleased with himself. ‘You can run around doing your bit until you’re blue in the face, but Tollymead is and will remain nothing but a collection of houses. All that rot about village life—’
‘That’s not true,’ Nancy yelped. She felt as upset as a mother complaining about her child and finding everyone else agreeing with her.
After dinner Andrew picked up the Tribune. Being a major advertiser through his farm supply business, Sanderson’s Seeds, he liked to check each edition for clarity of print and correctness of positioning. Nancy had left the paper open at the Diary section and, reading the entry for Tollymead, he suddenly banged his fist down on the arm of his chair. ‘That bloody woman again!’
‘Who?’
‘Evelyn of course. There was no agreement from Tim about that tree. He had to give in to blackmail, simple as that. No, she’s gone too far this time. She’s never off my back about supplying pesticides. Times are hard enough without some unhinged old bag like her putting people off.’
Nancy winced. Somehow, when he got angry like this, Andrew’s whole being coarsened alarmingly. Not only his words, but his face, always on the heavy side, reddened in a frown that turned his face into a messy jungle of features: bushy eyebrows, flaring nostrils sprouting black hair, grooves like dried-out river beds across the forehead. She looked hard at the Telegraph’s crossword puzzle as he carried on:
‘The other day she actually tried to block one of my lorries trying to enter Campbell’s Farm. She’s got a bee in her bonnet about the insecticide we supply. The woman is unhinged, no doubt about it.’ He gulped down some brandy, and seemed to calm down as he leant back in the chair, the colour subsiding from his face.
‘Often happens apparently to spinsters, as they get older. Whatever these magazines you like to read say, you women need us to keep you on the straight and narrow, eh?’ He gave his wife a little nod as their eyes met, the rescuer and the rescued, comfortable once more in their allotted roles.
Nancy had only to close her eyes to be Nancy Rogers once more, smelling the early climbing rose that spring morning years ago. Andrew’s mother, who had extended her friendship to dear little Mrs Rogers for many a morning coffee and afternoon tea, was visiting and Nancy, Mrs Rogers’s wide-boned, moon-faced daughter, had sat on the bench outside the open window, reading.
‘She’s so clever, your Nancy.’ Those kind words that somehow managed to sound not so kind when coming from Mrs Sanderson, made Nancy put her book down.
‘Such splendid news her making it to Oxford, and so lucky. She’s always struck me as the sort of girl who will need to earn her living and what better start than that. Of course dear Andrew says he’s really quite glad not to have made Oxbridge, Bath is quite the place now I believe. Charlotte, of course, isn’t bothering with any of it, she doesn’t need to, the lucky girl. Do you know, just the other day we had a call from Lady Hill saying that her son absolutely refused to leave for America and that they were all convinced it’s because the poor boy can’t bear being parted from my Charlotte. No, there will be a wedding before the year is out. I said to her, “Charlotte,” I said, “leave the study to girls like dear clever Nancy; what do you need with it?”’
The words had dropped from Mrs Sanderson’s lips like the poisonous pellets her husband manufactured, and all that could be heard from Nancy’s poor fluffy rabbit of a mother were little mewls of agreement. What triumph, what bliss then, when the wedding at the end of the year had been between ‘poor dear Nancy’ and Mrs Sanderson’s own son, Andrew.
Thirty years on, the memory still warmed her like the glow from a bonfire blackening your neighbour’s washing. Charlotte, ‘the dear unfortunate child’, as she was referred to for ever more by Nancy’s mother, in a silky voice that drove Mrs Sanderson to silent fury, got herself involved with a married man, and the less said about her the better.
Nancy would tell her own children, Piers and Louise, that she never regretted her wasted university place. She knew her achievements as a magistrate and member of the parish council were seen by Andrew as an indulgence, rather like a weakness for buying extravagant hats, and smiled upon as long as it did not interfere with her role as his wife. She did not mind; first and foremost, flirtatiously and wonderfully, she was Mrs Andrew Sanderson.
‘My career will come first,’ Louise had announced the day she left home for university. In a voice calculated to upset her mother she had added, ‘And when I have children they’ll come first. I don’t know that I’ll bother with a husband.’ Nancy did not like to think of the expression on Louise’s face that day.
‘Poor old Evelyn,’ she said now, and she got up from her chair and went across to Andrew, planting the lightest of kisses on his head.
Without looking up, Andrew said, ‘Sounds an interesting woman, this Anne Havesham. Television, eh?’
‘Get off my property!’ Nancy heard Andrew’s voice the second she got out of the car. It was Thursday, Nancy’s day for doing the weekly shopping in Fairfield. She had forgotten to ask Andrew that morning if there was anything she could get for him on the way in to town, so she stopped off at Sanderson’s Seeds. But something was wrong. There, on the tarmac forecourt in amongst a crowd of amused
shoppers, Andrew stood shouting, his face red and his eyes bulging. Who was he yelling at? Nancy elbowed her way through the crowd.
‘You evil old woman, I’ll get you for this!’ Andrew’s voice soared so high that it broke and it was Evelyn Brooke he was shouting at. Evelyn, wrapped up against the autumn wind in a floor-length astrakhan coat with a huge velvet shawl collar, was carrying a placard saying ‘A £ spent at Sanderson’s – a £ spent on the Death of Our Planet!’
‘Do stop shouting, Andrew,’ Evelyn said, as she paused momentarily in her march up and down the forecourt.
‘I’m telling you for the last time, get off my property or I’ll hurl you off myself!’ Andrew screamed, taking a step towards her. Another step and his left foot hit a multi-coloured circle of spilt motor oil. His leg went up in the air as if pulled by a bad tempered puppet master, making him fall flat on his back at Evelyn’s feet. As Nancy rushed to his side, the laughter started, a bit nervously at first but, as Andrew sat up, apparently unharmed, it erupted all around from the customers and onlookers and, worst of all, from the sales staff inside, watching from the windows. Even Miss Trent, Andrew’s secretary whom Nancy had long pitied in the belief that the poor woman was hopelessly in love with Andrew, even she could be seen through the panorama window of the little office, doubled up over her desk in helpless laughter.
‘Time to go home I think,’ Evelyn smiled graciously at Nancy. ‘Must be tea time.’
Close to tears, Nancy blinked up at her. ‘You’ve made a fool out of him, Evelyn. You’ve gone too far this time, really you have.’
Autumn: pretty, decaying autumn. Evelyn shivered in her woollen tartan dressing-gown, as she scrapped the toast crumbs from her plate onto the bird table. The short days allowed for too much thinking. Until Evelyn herself had grown old, she had assumed that with age came an acceptance of mortality, a gentle resignation to the inevitable; but not a bit of it. Life was just as endlessly fascinating as it had always been and Evelyn, looking round her sleeping garden, was not ready to leave.
‘You’re just resting,’ she murmured, running her hand down the rough bark of the copper beech that spread its naked branches across the top lawn. ‘But for me it’s terminal. Autumn leads to winter, but there will be no spring. Your life is a circle, mine is a line. Lucky you.’ She shook herself and, wrapping the worn dressing-gown closer, she padded back inside.
As soon as she had dressed in her tweed gardening skirt and her mother’s old cashmere jersey (Evelyn had no truck with wastefulness, and her mother had worn out and died well before the excellent two-ply knit) she was on her way outside again. A few hours’ digging would put a stop to morbid thoughts. In the hall she paused to fetch her post. She had become quite a celebrity in the weeks since her sit-in over at the Haville-Joneses’ field and the protest outside Sanderson’s Seeds. There had been an appearance on local radio that, Evelyn had to admit, had gone very well (although that twit Sanderson had threatened to sue) and almost daily a whole heap of fan letters arrived.
Normally Evelyn did not get much post. In the past she had carried on long and stimulating correspondences with other environmentalists, but most of her old colleagues were dead now, or as good as; too feeble in body and spirit to write. That was the worst of growing old: your world, as defined by the people you shared it with, shrank before your eyes, until there was no-one left of your time but you. Family, friends, colleagues, hacked-off crumb by crumb, your references fading, so in the end you bumbled round life like a blind person in a strange house. No wonder such worship was accorded to people like Bob Hope and the Queen Mother; after all, they were still there.
But the garden, that was different. It never died, it just slept; even in its winter sleep it stirred and muttered, with buds and winter blooms appearing like contented dreams. Evelyn was smiling as she opened her mail. There were five letters today; three were from people saying they had stopped buying their milk from Daisy Dairies. One was from a young mother thanking her for making a stand on behalf of future generations. The last was unsigned. Evelyn stopped smiling. Her hands, holding the letter, began to tremble.
‘People have had enough of your shenanigans,’ the letter said, and it ended with a warning not to meddle in legitimate country business, or she would get her interfering fingers badly burnt. Evelyn dropped the letter as if it were already singeing her flesh. After a few moments’ thought, she went to the telephone and, hands still shaking, dialled the number of Home Farm.
‘That was a very ugly thing to do.’ Her voice, too, was unsteady.
‘What are you talking about Miss Brooke?’ Tim Haville-Jones sounded weary. ‘You’re not on about that damn tree again? You got your way didn’t you?’
‘I’m talking about the letter.’
‘What letter? I don’t know anything about a letter. Now if you’ll excuse me, I’ve got things to do.’ He hung up, leaving Evelyn standing, the dead receiver still to her ear, the letter in her free hand. Next she called Sanderson’s Seeds. ‘I wish I’d thought of it,’ Andrew Sanderson said quite calmly, ‘but I didn’t, so don’t you go and cause more trouble or an unpleasant letter will be the least of your worries.’
When Liberty called round half an hour later, she found Evelyn by the stream, digging, like a giant mole in her shiny black-brown oilskins.
‘The artery carrying blood to my creation.’ Evelyn leant against the shovel, waving towards the slow-running water and the tiny pump-house by the wooden fence. ‘Irrigation, the new Messiah.’ She grinned and slipped off her heavy-duty gloves. ‘So what can I do for you?’
‘Nothing really, I’m just here to waste your time. I’m supposed to be on a walk.’ Liberty perched on a tree stump, feeling the slimy moss against the palm of her hand. ‘I’ve got time to kill and I’m out searching for a weapon: slow strangulation? Death by television?’ She wiped her hand absent-mindedly on her jeans. ‘You know, I used to get up at five in the morning, pottering down to my word-processor with a feeling in my stomach as if I was meeting my lover. Three hours of exquisite agony interspersed by cups of coffee … it’s not that I like coffee all that much, it’s more that cosy “I’m an artist working away in my garret, this is all that keeps me going” feeling. Thursdays I would be especially busy, with Tom coming down and Johnny too every other week-end as well.’
‘What you need is shape,’ Evelyn said.
‘I do exercise. A bit,’ Liberty said, hurt.
‘To your day, silly child.’
‘Oh. Well I have drawn up a kind of schedule: three hours translation work after breakfast, then a long walk (that’s the point I’m at now) followed by more translation, then the day finished with an imaginative candlelit dinner for one; to show I care.’
‘Why isn’t that Tom fellow here?’
‘Oh, we broke up. He was right to go. As my friend Penny said, I wept more for my rejected book than for him. I miss him, though. It’s funny, but it’s things like his toothbrush being gone that upset me most. There’s something rather sad about a single toothbrush in a mug where there used to be two. But he left his shaving foam; he knows I like using it for my legs.’
‘Come inside and have a cup of coffee.’ Evelyn propped the shovel carefully against the tree. ‘I’d like to have your opinion on something.’ She led the way through the french windows, not stopping to take her boots off, but leaving little deposits of black soil across the sun-bleached oriental carpet. ‘Here,’ she handed Liberty the letter with a muddy hand.
‘Someone educated, good grammar and spelling,’ Liberty frowned. ‘Could be Tim Haville-Jones.’
‘Says he knows nothing about a letter.’
‘What about Nancy Sanderson’s husband? Didn’t you picket his store the other day? And then there was the radio. I heard you. You were very good, I thought.’
A small, smug smile spread across Evelyn’s face. ‘Thank you dear. But I don’t know that I think it was him either. He sounded genuine enough when I confronted him. Anyway it was only a sma
ll protest, more of a gesture really. It wasn’t my fault that he went and fell flat on his behind. And as you said, I was very fair on the radio.’
‘I didn’t say you were fair. Anyone else you’ve upset?’
Evelyn, looking offended, shook her head. ‘My dear girl you make it sound as if I make a habit of upsetting people.’
Liberty allowed the remark to pass. ‘What about that business with the delivery truck?’
‘Oh that was nothing.’ Evelyn’s voice held the bravado of a guilty child. ‘One of Sanderson’s lorries was delivering its poison to Campbell’s Farm. I just persuaded the driver to turn back, that’s all.’ She dropped her coat on the crested chair in the hall and stomped through to the kitchen. Liberty watched, amused, while she battled, cursing, with the gleaming chrome espresso machine that made such momentous sounds as it worked that Liberty thought it ought to produce a Booker-prize winner at the end, not just a tiny cup of sour-tasting coffee.
‘Are you taking it to the police – the letter I mean?’ Liberty put her cup on the table.
‘I don’t think so,’ Evelyn shook her head so hard that her chins quivered.
‘I think you should.’
When they finished their coffee Evelyn walked Liberty back out along the path to the gate. She stopped to point out to Liberty the solitary purple rose that flowered amongst the dying leaves of the Rosa rugosa. Burying her nose in the moist petals with a clumsy gesture and inhaling noisily she said, ‘It hasn’t got a rose scent as such of course, but,’ she sniffed hard again, ‘it has a lovely freshness, like the skin of a new baby.’
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