Garden, she wrote, then she messed about some more in her desk drawer until she found a red biro to underline with. She might end up a sort of mix between Evelyn and Penny. It would be a bit late in the day, but Johnny would like it. All that time while she had been working his childhood away, writing, typing and translating other people’s manuscripts, filling in at the local bookstore, teaching, writing some more, he had probably nurtured a dream of an apron-clad, bread-and-butter-pudding mother with flour, instead of ink stains, on her fingers. So he was grown-up. What a grandmother she would be! She buried her head in the crook of her arm and wept.
Minutes later, with an irritated swipe at the tears, she began a plan of the garden. She sketched in a small rectangle close to the back door, for vegetables, before fetching a book on plants called A Gardener’s Calendar that Hamish had given her when she first moved to the cottage. With its help she began making notes, filling page after page in her sprawling, slanted hand, getting pleasure from the act of catching words and pinning them down, like moths, to the paper. When she had finished, she sat back and looked out again across the garden, blinking when she saw, not the richness of fruit and flowers bathed in golden summer sunshine, but an unkempt lawn boarded by naked rosebushes and hydrangeas whose heads, dried to the colour of dead leaves, remained on the shrubs like the memories of a faded beauty queen.
She was stretching and yawning at her desk when the doorbell went. Oscar apologized for disturbing her.
‘I should have phoned first, but I’ve just been across to see Evelyn.’ He looked tired and seemed glad of the offer of coffee. ‘I wanted to have another word, if you’ve got the time.’ He followed her into the kitchen, and as they passed the hall mirror Liberty tried to catch a glimpse of her face, but failed. Her hand went up to her cheek, fingering the scar.
Oscar looked hard at her for a moment, then he said, ‘It was good of you to call last night. The old girl’s more rattled than she lets on.’
In the kitchen Liberty offered him a chair. She moved round him in the small kitchen, filling the kettle, spooning instant coffee into the mugs, pouring milk into a small china jug with painted pink roses and a chipped handle. Oscar leant back in the white-painted chair. With a gunshot sound, one of the wooden ribs snapped in two. He leapt up, spouting apologies in every direction.
‘Don’t worry,’ she smiled. ‘It happens all the time. Here.’ She pulled out another chair and, with a suspicious look at it, he sat down again.
‘Have you called the police?’ she asked, putting the mug of coffee down in front of him.
‘No. Evelyn told me to stop behaving like a demented hen and keep my beak out of her business.’ As he spoke, Oscar pointed to the black notebook Liberty had left on the kitchen table. ‘Writing again, that’s good.’ He smiled, a nice open smile, Liberty thought. A nice smile on a sad face.
‘No, I’m not. That really is all over. I’ve…’ She paused, pleased at how light her voice sounded. She imagined it soaring through the sky like an air balloon that had ditched its passengers and every ounce of bagged-up sand. Noticing that Oscar was waiting for her to continue, she hastily carried on. ‘I’ve wasted enough time flogging a dead horse.’ She added as an afterthought, ‘It makes your arm hurt. No, those are my gardening notes.’ Without thinking, she picked up the notebook and put the open page right up to her nose, closing her eyes and sniffing the ink-filled paper. She opened her eyes again, pulling a little face of embarrassment. Oscar grinned back. He looked nice in her kitchen, she thought, rather big, with those long legs stretched out, but comforting somehow, and calm where Tom had been restless, given to pacing and picking things up, returning them always to the wrong place. There was a stillness about Oscar as he sat in her chair. Maybe he was just scared to break it again. She realized she was staring at him. ‘Do you like it down here, running the Tribune?’ she asked. ‘It must be very different from the way you lived before.’
‘It is different, but that was what I wanted. Had there been a newspaper on Mars, I would have gone there.’ He was quiet for a moment. ‘There are things I miss, of course, bound to be when you leave one kind of life for another.’ He fell silent and stared morosely into his coffee.
Liberty looked at him, her head a little to one side. ‘Funny things sometimes, I bet,’ she said. When Oscar said nothing she continued, ‘I know, the other day when I was in the Sports Centre, this group of lissom young bodies entered from the changing rooms just as I emerged from the water, and I remembered how I used to be able to tell myself, “All right, so you have cellulite, but at least you’re an author with cellulite.”’
‘Why don’t you write just for yourself?’
‘I ask myself that.’
‘And what do you answer?’
Oh dear, she thought, the problem is to make sense of an answer you know too well. She looked thoughtfully at him, resting her arms on the table.
‘Do you not sometimes think that whoever or whatever created us installed a fail-safe mechanism in our brains?’ she asked him instead. ‘You know – something to stop us really comprehending that we are actually just on one long, forced march to the grave, that we’ll grow old and surplus to requirements one day, that none of us actually matters two hoots, that sort of thing? I mean if we did understand, we’d dig our little feet into our mother’s womb and refuse to budge.’
‘I only asked why you couldn’t write just for your own pleasure,’ Oscar said mildly. ‘You can solve the meaning of life tomorrow.’
Liberty blushed. ‘Sorry. Well, it’s a bit like cooking really.’
‘Really,’ Oscar smiled politely.
‘Well, think if, night after night you put your soul into preparing dinner, using all the most precious and wonderful ingredients you could find. You’d lay the table, light the candles, pour the wine and then you’d wait, and each night your children would rush through the kitchen saying could they please just have a sandwich, and your husband would switch on the television and say thanks, but he had eaten already. Eventually you’d decide to hell with it and take up stamp collecting or wind surfing or something. Well, that’s how it was with me.’
‘So now you’re going to garden instead?’
‘Absolutely,’ Liberty said without much enthusiasm. ‘And I’m sorry. You came here to talk about Evelyn.’ She looked down at her hands, embarrassed. She had a habit she herself deplored, of breaking her long periods of silence with reams of speech, as if she were paid handsomely by the word. As a child she had always hoped to find a book where the heroine had the same problem, but invariably the only girls who did were the heroine’s silly friend, or the comic nurse. The exception, of course, was Anne of Green Gables, but she, on the other hand, was unbearably winsome and never drew breath at all.
‘You know these people, Haville-Jones and Sanderson?’ Oscar said.
‘Not that well, but I find it hard to believe they’d behave in such a nasty, childish way.’
‘I know what you mean,’ Oscar agreed. ‘But she’s been carrying on these mini-crusades for years. I remember she asked me to put her on to a printer some while ago. She wanted to distribute a pamphlet about a company she said was dumping toxic waste. As you say, there must be dozens of people gunning for her. You’ve lived next door to her for years; you can’t think of anyone in particular?’
‘I haven’t had very much to do with her work, other than admiring it from a safe distance, I’m afraid.’ She felt unhelpful with Oscar looking up at her, with those blue eyes fixed on her with such intensity; it was as if she carried the power of life and death in her answers.
Disconcerted, she went on, ‘I do worry about her, and I felt you should be told about what happened, but I didn’t really think there was anything very serious behind these incidents.’
‘I don’t really think it’s anything much either,’ Oscar agreed, getting up suddenly. ‘I just want to keep an eye on things, that’s all.’ He gave her a quick smile, his face relaxed again. ‘If anything els
e unpleasant happens, will you let me know?’
As she saw him out, Liberty assured him that she would.
In the door, Oscar turned. ‘That scar, it doesn’t matter you know. Not in the slightest.’
Scar or no scar, Oscar thought as he drove off home, it was an odd sort of face, Liberty’s. Dimpled and creamy-skinned, framed by all those blond curls, she looked like a doll but for those long, green eyes; a hospital doll, like the one they had given Victoria’s little sister, that came ready injured for you to bandage and make better.
Eight
‘I must say it will be a great relief, not having those rockets going up all over the place, scaring man and beast.’ Neville Pyke was speaking ostensibly to his wife, but he had long given up believing she listened. But silence disconcerted Neville, and directing his flow of words towards her at least saved him from the ignominy of talking to himself. Neville was sitting at the G-plan dining-table, working on the broken Chinese pot which Nancy Sanderson had let him have. When he was done it would go down a treat at the jumble sale, together with that old pushchair he had rescued from a skip. A bit of attention to the brake, some rust remover and a good clean, and it would be as good as new. Neville placed the last-but-one piece in its place along the rim of the pot, wiping the glue carefully from the edges and holding it in place with a stained thumb and finger.
Gladys was watching Knot’s Landing on television. Before Knot’s Landing there had been Neighbours, and later on she would settle down to Home and Away and Eldorado, before switching sides to Coronation Street. She had never been much of a talker, Gladys, and when they first met he had believed her the perfect listener. That was until he realized that the polite little half smile on her face remained the same whatever he said, leaving Gladys’s mind free to wander as it wished between Ealing and Hollywood. This morning the only thing she had said apart from, ‘Your dinner is in the freezer,’ was, ‘I don’t care what anyone says, I like Eldorado.’
Still Neville chatted on stubbornly. ‘It’s very heartening, the village getting together and acting for the best. People complaining about this place don’t know what they’re talking about, that’s what I say. They should read the paper. He waved the Tribune at his wife. Neville always had to read it on a Monday; his pension did not seem to stretch as far as it used to, so he relied on Nancy Sanderson passing on her copy to him.
Gladys sighed and leant closer to the set. She was wearing her smart pistachio green suit, bought for a nephew’s wedding three years earlier. Neville liked the suit, it brought happy memories of when they used to go out together. Nowadays Gladys hardly ever went out, not even at week-ends; week-ends there were the omnibus episodes, but she still wore the suit, every Monday, for Knot’s Landing. She painted her nails, too, on Sunday evenings. She’d sit up in their queen-size bed, an old copy of Hello to protect the sheets, and she’d paint her nails bright scarlet. Neville liked to watch her. When they first met it was her hands he’d noticed; small and so white, it was as if she’d taken off her gloves for the first time just for him.
‘Although I must say, there never seems to be that much going on here on Bonfire Night anyway. Now you mention it, I can’t think when we last had a proper Bonfire Night party in Tollymead. You remember me saying it was a crying shame people had to travel to Everton for a display. Still, the kiddies should at least have a proper bonfire, seeing they’re so good about the rockets. I think I’ll go and pay Nancy a visit, see what she has to say.’ He heaved himself up from the armchair and stomped off towards the door. In the doorway he stopped for a moment to give his wife a little wave. ‘Don’t worry if I’m late dear,’ he said unnecessarily. ‘Nancy might ask me in.’ He lingered in the doorway for a moment then, as Gladys turned the sound up on the remote control, he hurried off.
Andrew had come back late for lunch that afternoon. He always came home for lunch, something that both pleased and irritated Nancy. It showed that she knew how to look after a husband. Not like poor Charlotte going through her second divorce and pretending she liked living on her own. But it did tie Nancy down. She could not just take off for the day, go up to London for a matinee or a gallery or a day’s shopping, and on court days it meant getting up extra early to prepare something ready for him to heat up in the microwave. Andrew did not like the microwave. ‘It’s the last refuge of the sloppy housewife,’ he had said when she first bought it, but for once Nancy had ignored him. She did not use it more than she had to, and the steak and kidney pudding for his lunch today had stewed slowly on a low setting in the gas cooker.
‘I think I saw that American writer woman this morning, outside the Post Office,’ Andrew said.
‘It’s not open Mondays.’
‘I expect she didn’t know that. She hasn’t been here very long. Good-looking woman actually; redhead. Big, in that way American women are. Can’t think who else it could have been.’
Nancy tipped a large helping of steak and kidney on to Andrew’s plate, for once not bothering to make it look appetizing. Then she served herself.
‘You still haven’t managed to find out where she lives?’ Andrew shovelled a huge forkful of pie into his mouth.
‘I can’t say that I have particularly tried,’ Nancy snapped. She patted her hair nervously with her square-fingered hand. What was the matter with her, carrying on like that. He’d always liked looking at pretty women, flirting at parties when dinner carried on late and there was plenty of wine and port. She never worried. He always came home with her. She even got a funny sort of pleasure from watching him, enjoying the hot colour rise in his face, the excited glances and the little squeezes, as if they had been directed at her. Then she would choose her moment to rein him in, walking up and putting her arm through his, listening with a little smile as he introduced her as his wife. So why was she snappy now? All he’d done was say the woman was handsome. She forced herself to smile while she waited for him to finish.
‘No-one seems to know anything about her,’ she said, ‘but then that’s not unusual for Tollymead, not these days. I mean, how come we’ve never met Hester Scott? I mean, we would expect to have been introduced to someone like her.’
There was a loud knock on the door. ‘It’s bound to be for you,’ Andrew said, settling back in the chair and picking up his pipe.
Nancy opened the door to Neville. With ill-concealed impatience she asked what it was he wanted. ‘We’re just finishing lunch.’
‘It’s about Bonfire Night,’ Neville said, his watery grey eyes beseeching her to share his excitement as he took a step closer to the door, peering inside the hall with a hopeful smile. ‘Seeing the kiddies are being so responsible about the rockets, I thought we should reward them, so to speak, with a really good old-fashioned Bonfire Night celebration over at the recreation ground, with a Guy and everything.’
Nancy did not ask Neville in but she said, ‘I saw that piece in the Diary too, but there’s no mention of who these paragons amongst us are.’ She guffawed, ‘No-one’s asked me whether or not I am likely to want to fire off a rocket or two from my back garden.’ Neville laughed at the joke, loudly. ‘Still,’ Nancy said, ‘a Bonfire Night party is a good idea. I’m for anything that brings the village together as you know. I’ll talk to the school, I’m sure the children could get a morning off to help. I’ll give the headmaster of Tollymead Manor a call too.’
Neville smiled delightedly at her, and the smile was still there as Nancy closed the door on him. Andrew was waiting for his coffee as she returned to the kitchen. She made some Nescafé for them both, weak with sugar and milk, neither of them cared for that strong continental stuff everyone raved about, and as she came up behind him she had to bend down to brush a kiss against his neck that was brown still from last year’s summer sun. Andrew shrugged her off with a little flinch, as he always did, good-humoured or irritated, depending on his mood that moment. She did not really mind the way she had when they were first married. Instead, she repeated like a mantra her well-used phrases
of comfort: I’m his wife; I’m the woman who shares his bed; only I know the expression on his face when he’s making love; only I know the little sounds he makes in his sleep. Nancy stood poised over her husband, the mug in her hand, a rapt look on her big, weatherbeaten face. As he turned to reach for the coffee she rearranged her features until they were back to their usual expression of capable good sense.
‘Thanks old thing,’ Andrew said, his eyes still on the paper.
Village Diary
Tollymead: We still need more fireworks for Bonfire Night, so if anyone would like to help, Neville Pyke has set up a collection point at his home, ‘Wee Nooke’, The Street, Tollymead.
A suggestion for how we could all help to make our village a more beautiful place has come from Miss Agnes Coulson, who tells me, ‘My walkers and I never go anywhere in the autumn without a bulb or two in our pockets. Then when we pass a dull spot we bung one in. Now if every gardener in Tollymead would do the same, we’d have a village that would make the poet Wordsworth sit up in his grave.’
Miss Coulson’s idea is bound to find favour with many Tollymead residents. Mrs Laura Brown, who recently moved down from London with her four young children, says, ‘It’s just the sort of community action that makes taking a break from the rat race and moving down here so worth while.’
Mrs Brown, who was an advertising executive, tells the Diary that she finally took the decision to leave London when, after a week-end visit to the country, her three-year-old son asked where the cows worked during the week.
There are whispers around the village that the vicar is planning something special for us all. I have not been able to find out exactly what, but I’m sure that a visit to Sunday’s Family Service will reveal all.
Nine
When Liberty arrived in church on Sunday morning she could hardly find a spare seat. Looking around, pleased for poor old Ted, she caught Neville Pyke’s eye.
A Rival Creation Page 10