When she got home, Andrew was already there, sitting in the tall-backed armchair, a glass of whisky in one hand, reading the paper. He looked up at her over the top of the page. ‘You’re late. Where have you been? You’re absolutely filthy.’
Under his gaze Nancy felt the heat rise in her cheeks and she turned her head away. He had no right to speak to her, to look at her, like that. She was tired. In the kitchen there was fish waiting to be skinned and boned, potatoes to be peeled. And there was Andrew looking at her with much the same expression as her own when she had looked at those unappealing children. Close to tears she lowered her gaze to the mudsplattered hem of her shapeless blue skirt and her thick ankles disappearing into the mucky lace-ups that had left a trail of mud on the carpet. Where, she thought, was her friend? Where were the comforting arms waiting to envelop her?
Suddenly angry she said, ‘I suppose you’d prefer it if I sashayed round the village in a mini skirt and stiletto heels like that American woman?’
Andrew lowered the paper, a look of interest replacing the frown for a brief moment. ‘You’ve seen her, have you?’
Nancy pulled off her shoes, slamming each one down on the blue carpet. ‘No, no I haven’t.’
‘So how the hell do you know how she dresses?’ The frown was back in place, fitting as snugly as if it had never left.
‘Oh do stop frowning, just for once!’ Nancy shouted, swinging round in her stocking feet off towards the kitchen.
She filleted the fish and put it in an oven-proof dish, and was turning her attention to the potatoes when the hard set to her jaw began to soften. Poor Andrew, she thought, he was under a lot of pressure. It was not long before she was asking herself what kind of a wife she was, attacking her husband when he was worried and tired and most needed her understanding and support? She picked up his napkin from the dresser and smoothed it out before rolling it up again and pushing it into his napkin ring. How hard he worked to keep her in their lovely home. Of course he got snappy from time to time, it was only natural. She shook her head. Poor Andrew.
The fish was poaching in the oven and the potatoes were on, and in her stocking feet she padded into the sitting-room and up to the armchair where Andrew was sitting, still reading the paper.
‘Had a bad day?’ She was bending down to kiss him when he passed the paper to her with such violence it almost hit her face. She flinched but took it. ‘Whatever is the matter?’
‘I would have told you when you got home but you were obviously in a foul mood,’ Andrew said, and the unfairness of it all brought her close to tears once more. But she said nothing and Andrew carried on, ‘Read it and see for yourself what your chum Evelyn has cooked up this time. Old cow.’
‘Andrew please don’t use that expression, it’s so coarse. There was this dreadful boy over at Campbell’s farm.’ She told him about the children. ‘I can’t stand that expression, it’s so … so ugly.’
‘Oh don’t become the Lady Magistrate with me. I should have known you’d stick up for the old bat.’
A fat tear rolled down Nancy’s cheek and she wiped her eyes with the back of the hand, smearing the layer of Max Factor concealer stick. ‘I’m not siding with Evelyn,’ she said tiredly, then, pulling herself together she added, ‘I’m very cross with her.’ And suddenly she was angry. It was Evelyn’s persecution of him that had made Andrew so out of sorts lately. It was damaging his business, too. As she read on, fury swelled up from the pit of her stomach, clawing its way up through her chest.
‘The Killer In Our Midst’ Evelyn’s article was headed, and what followed were two columns about the dangers to the community of pesticides, some of them known carcinogenics, entering the food chain. These pesticides, Evelyn’s article said, were of the kind supplied by well-known local companies, and used by local farmers.
Nancy sat down on the window seat close to Andrew. Struggling to remain calm, the way Andrew preferred, she said, ‘You can sue you know. She doesn’t mention Sanderson’s Seeds by name, but you should talk to Nick Hudson, or maybe a London solicitor, for something like this. I’m sure if I asked one of the other magistrates—’
‘Let me handle this, will you.’ Andrew seemed almost cheerful as he heaved himself out of the chair. ‘Dragging us all through the courts with her bleating on about the safety of future generations. The papers would have a field day and before we knew it, every greeny lefty trendy in the country would be on our backs. No, for once, Nancy, let me handle things my own way.’
‘Have you spoken to Oscar Brooke?’ Nancy asked, in a voice that tip-toed around the words. ‘You know best of course dear, but—’
‘I have. He tells me the article was taken on its merits as a valuable input to their debate on environmental issues.’ Andrew made his voice all minced and sleek. ‘Not because bloody Evelyn is his aunt. Now could we please have supper.’
‘Maybe if I called Evelyn, appealed to her.’ Nancy got up, too, putting her hand on his arm. ‘If I tell her how much distress she’s causing and—’
‘I said let me handle this.’ Andrew shook her hand off and strode off towards the kitchen.
‘I’m sure she’d see sense.’ Nancy hurried after him.
In the hall Andrew stopped. With something close to glee on his face he said slowly, ‘You obviously have no intention of serving any supper, so I’m going out. I don’t know when I’ll be back, so don’t bother waiting up.’
‘But Andrew, darling, I’ve got it all prepared. It won’t be two minutes.’
Andrew looked at her for a second before slamming the door, leaving Nancy alone in the hall. ‘It isn’t fair,’ she whispered. Andrew was not fair. It was Evelyn he was angry with, but he was punishing Nancy, as if she were an old dog to kick whenever he felt small. It wasn’t right. She should not be treated like this.
Eleven
Two buses had been laid on by Tollymead Manor to transport the boys to the recreation ground at the northern end of the village where the bonfire, as tall as a one-storey building, held centre stage. Liberty spotted her father stepping off the bus behind the tumble of boys, each carrying a torch. Hamish carried a lantern which he directed on the large, white painted sign telling dog owners not to let their pets foul the playing fields. Underneath the sign curled a large defiant turd.
‘Robert you clumsy boy, watch where you put those big feet of yours!’ Hamish barked. Robert’s brown lace-up squelched down on the mess, and Hamish closed his eyes and shook his head.
‘Long grass boy, go and find some long grass.’ As Liberty came up to him, Hamish smiled delightedly and kissed her on the cheek. ‘It’s as I suspected,’ he said, ‘literacy amongst the canine population is at an all-time low. I blame television.
‘Hey, Dominic.’ Hamish left Liberty, to hurry after another small boy who was walking slowly off across the field with his torch turned straight back into his eyes.
Looking around the crowded playing field, Liberty could put a name to only a handful of faces. With a small estate erected here, a couple of cottages infilled there, a family going, another coming, even Ted Brain had given up trying to call on every new resident. With the shop gone, too, and most of the children bussed to the school from nearby villages, there were times when Liberty felt as if each villager were moving round the place in his own plastic bubble. It had not always been like that of course. For the few days following the great storm in 1987, when most of the village was cut off from power and phone lines and even water, the spirit of the Blitz had come to Tollymead. Waiting outside the Post Office for the water van, names were exchanged, help was given and there was much talk of how splendid it was that at last people were getting to know each other. There were even plans for starting a weekly meeting point in the village hall, like the one they had in Everton. Then each house got back their power and water and now, Liberty thought, Tollymead could well be a haven for Nazi war criminals for all she knew.
‘Your lips are moving but nothing is coming forth.’ Hamish had return
ed, putting his large, shapely hand on her shoulder.
‘Just hankering back to the days when it was not just the smell that alerted you to your neighbour’s death.’
‘Gruesome girl.’ Hamish smiled, but in the light of the torch she could see his eyes flicking across the crowd, like a restless guest at a cocktail party.
Who was Hamish today? Liberty wondered. He was wearing heavy, worn-in tweeds and a deer-stalker, but in a way that was more old-world gent than Sherlock Holmes. When a small group of boys came rushing towards him and Hamish shifted his hand from Liberty’s shoulder to the tousled head of the nearest child, her face brightened; that was it, Edwardian pater familias.
‘Sir, are they setting off the rockets?’ one of the boys asked. ‘I’m bloody freezing,’ he added before the admiring glances of his friends.
‘Language, you little wart,’ Hamish said. ‘At break tomorrow you can write, “Swearing shows a sad lack of vocabulary” a hundred times.’
‘Can you still give people lines?’ Liberty asked, awed.
‘Certainly.’ Hamish lit his pipe. ‘I can’t beat the little so-and-sos, but I most certainly can still give them lines. By the way, Penny sent her love. Little Fred or whatever the youngest one is called—’
‘Edward.’
‘Edward, well anyway, he’s got a bug, nothing serious, so they won’t be coming tonight.’
‘I can’t see Oscar Brooke either.’ Liberty, searching the crowd, was surprised at how disappointed she was. ‘I wanted you to meet him. His wife’s very sweet too.’
‘Are you saying Oscar Brooke is sweet and that so is his wife, or is the wife alone in this nauseating attribute?’ Hamish puffed at his pipe.
Liberty gave him an evil look. What a posturing old sod he was. Parents had a trigger, no doubt about it, that, when pressed, set off the memories of a thousand past injustices and irritations that lodged like delayed-action poison pellets in the minds of their children. And who else but a posturing old sod would name his daughter Liberty Bell? As for his explanation … Liberty glared at her father who was smoking his pipe so contentedly, surveying his charges, as if there were no daughter standing at his side wanting nothing better than to kick him in the balls.
She could hear her father now, his voice close to breaking as he told the tragic story to yet another table full of sympathetic guests. ‘She was named in honour of dear Sofia’s final words, “Liberty, Liberty at last!” I’ll never forget it. Everything had happened at once, nurses calling out, doctors running, machines, tubes. At the end I stood there, bending over my newborn daughter’s cot and I looked at her and whispered, “Welcome little Liberty, welcome.”’
‘Why didn’t you go the whole hog and call me Last?’ Liberty had shouted once, upsetting the whole party. ‘“Last Bell”, that really would have satisfied your instinct for the theatrical.’ She had been eighteen and she had had enough.
Now she looked at Hamish, trying to quell her rising irritation. ‘Don’t bear grudges,’ she told herself. ‘It’s ugly and takes up valuable space.’
A rocket shot into the sky from between two Roman candles, then Ted Brain stepped out from the crowd and up to the bonfire, lighting a petrol-soaked rag at the base. Within minutes the fire was licking the feet of the Guy. Liberty turned away. She never did have a taste for burning Guys. The scarecrow figure in his borrowed clothes seemed to take on such human qualities just as the flames engulfed him. Anyway, she was frightened of fire. There was nothing like it to remind you of the fragility of life. One moment you could be cruising along the motorway, chatting to a friend or listening to the radio, thinking of your dental appointment or the wedding reception you thought lay ahead at the end of the journey, then Bingo, you were screaming in agony as you burnt to death, a picture of your twisted metal torture chamber ending up as breakfast news.
The fire crackled and spat as Liberty made her way back towards the cricket pavilion at the edge of the playing field. She spotted Evelyn and, as she came closer, Oscar standing a little way off, his arm round his wife’s shoulders. He was looking at Liberty. She gave a little wave, embarrassed. Realizing you were being watched was like finding a silent queue waiting as you stepped out of a public loo still doing up your trousers. Had she been absent-mindedly picking her nose, or been stooping, chest and stomach sagging?
She was only feet away when there was a sharp whistle, followed by a bang and a fountain of multi-coloured lights, not in the sky above the field, but half a mile away, out by River Lane.
The crowd let out surprised oohs and aahs as heads turned away from the bonfire in one long movement as if a single thread connected them all. Then another rocket shrieked its way into the night sky above the river.
Oscar pulled his arm away from around Victoria. ‘It looks like it’s coming from your garden,’ he said to Evelyn. ‘I’d better go and see what the hell’s going on.’ He disappeared off towards the cars parked at the entrance to the grounds.
‘Typical,’ Victoria complained. ‘He was the one who wanted to come tonight, he’s got an absolute thing about fireworks, and now he’s going to miss it all.’
‘He’s right, it is coming from my garden.’ Evelyn grabbed Liberty’s arm. ‘Some little so-and-so is firing rockets in my garden.’
‘We’ll take my car,’ Liberty said. Turning to Victoria she asked, ‘Coming?’ But Victoria decided she’d wait for them where she was.
A cascade of stars rose through the shattered glass of Evelyn’s workshop, as flames took hold on the far side gable.
‘My papers, the seedlings…’ Evelyn’s voice was a whisper as they rounded the corner of River Lane and approached the house. Two minutes later, Liberty turned the car up the drive, skidding to a halt on the gravel courtyard.
Oscar came running from the workshop and flung open the car door on Evelyn’s side. ‘I’ve got some of your stuff out and I’ve called the fire brigade, they should be here any moment.’ His eyes were streaming and his face was streaked with soot and sweat. ‘Make sure both gates are open, will you,’ he shouted as he ran back towards the fire.
Liberty stared after him and then at Evelyn who sat, grey-faced and silent, at Liberty’s side. Then, as sirens reached them from a distance, she hurried from the car and up to the gate, opening both sides right back against the hedge. Within seconds the fire engine was through, the men running towards the blazing building with giant hoses dripping water like salivating sea snakes. Evelyn appeared. For a moment she stared at the flames then, before anyone could stop her, she ran towards the burning building and disappeared into the smoke.
Twelve
‘The police seem to think it was just children playing,’ Victoria said. They were sitting in Evelyn’s kitchen, looking out at the drive and the blackened corner of the workshop. ‘You’re so lucky the house itself didn’t catch fire.’
Oscar had tried to run in after Evelyn, but he had been held back. ‘It’s only a small fire, but there could be a lot more smoke inside, and then there’s that bit of glass roof,’ he was told as two firemen with masks went instead. The flames were put out within minutes, but it was another long moment before Evelyn came out. Oscar had taken Liberty’s hand, giving it a small squeeze as they waited. Finally, Evelyn emerged, pulled along by one of the firemen. With a grin on her blackened face she had hurried across to Oscar, passing him the bundle in her hands as carefully as if it had been a newborn baby.
Now she sat at the kitchen table, wrapped in her tartan dressing-gown and two wool blankets, her hair singed and her bandaged hands clasped round a mug of warm milk. The police had come and left again with a bag full of shrivelled cardboard from a cluster of used fireworks. ‘One thing we know for sure,’ one of them said, ‘is that someone chose to set this little lot off inside that building.’
‘There was a lifetime’s worth of work in there,’ Evelyn said, her voice trembling. ‘I could have lost it all. Those seed trays I brought out, there was more than ten years of research riding in them.
’
‘Of course it could just be irresponsible children,’ Oscar said, ‘but coming after those letters and that very nasty little gift of two dead rabbits, I wonder…’
‘It’s really terrible, what’s happened,’ Victoria’s sloe eyes were expressionless, ‘but Oscar did warn you about writing that article after everything else you’ve done.’
‘What are you saying, Victoria?’ Evelyn looked coldly at her, but she clasped the mug harder.
Liberty felt herself going pink. She loathed scenes and here was one about to happen. Hamish created scenes: all her childhood, at airports and in department stores, in restaurants and in front of her friends, happy scenes, angry scenes, noisy scenes, quiet scenes, it did not really matter. He made himself conspicuous, that was enough. Once, at Heathrow, he had goose-stepped through a crowd of elderly German-speaking tourists he decided were queue-barging, his hand raised in a Nazi salute, only to find they were a group of travellers from Haifa being ushered through first because of the special security precautions. These days Liberty could not even bear to watch someone cause a fuss on television without switching off, or at least putting her hands over her ears and singing very loudly; and here was Victoria, chin jutting and her eyes, as yielding as one-way mirrors, looking straight out at nothing as she said, ‘Well you must admit you’ve caused a lot of people a lot of trouble lately.’
Oscar looked tiredly at his wife. ‘Come on Victoria, that’s not very helpful just now. Anyway, it was most likely a childish prank gone wrong.’
‘I know who it is you remind me of Oscar,’ Liberty exclaimed. ‘Peter O’Toole, that’s who. When he was younger of course. Don’t you think so Victoria?’
Oscar looked up at her, surprised, then he smiled, a sudden smile that made Liberty’s throat constrict; beautiful things had that effect on her.
‘I don’t think so at all,’ Victoria said.
‘I’m going to bed.’ Evelyn tried to get up, but fell back onto the chair again with a little thud. Oscar leapt up and helped her to her feet. ‘We’ll stay the night.’
A Rival Creation Page 12