by Lorna Gray
She nodded madly, returned my smile shyly and then hid her mouth behind her hand and turned wide eyes towards the older woman. I asked carefully, “And you are? I’m terribly sorry, I don’t know your name.” I was hardly going to dare to call the lady ‘Nanny’.
“Mrs Francis.” The reply held a trace of Cheltenham elocution which covered an even fainter undertone of the Gloucestershire burr and it was accompanied by a sharp shove from her hip at the open oven door. It swung shut with a snap. “And Mister Hitchen is in his study. Working.”
Oh. The tone of the reprimand ought to have been rendered considerably less humbling by the fact that she had a kitten somewhere about her person, but it wasn’t.
“But you never call him that. You know he doesn’t like it.”
The small-voiced confusion stopped Mrs Francis’ violent stirring of the gravy in its tracks. Mrs Francis shot her a wild look. It looked for a moment like the old woman might weaken and I swear a corner of her mouth twitched. But then the impulse to establish my status here had its way and, with a waggle of the spoon in her hand, Mrs Francis simply directed me to stop lingering stupidly in her doorway and take a seat.
Oblivious to adult assertions of territory, May decided that this was the appropriate moment to slip from her chair to rescue the kitten from within the heavy folds of the skirt. Remarkably, Mrs Francis still managed to maintain her fearsomeness even when she realised that all this time the creature had been using her as a climbing frame. She resorted to doing something aggressive with roasting vegetables.
“This is Timmy.” The small and slightly resistant kitten was manipulated into gravely offering me his paw. “He’s mine. Do you like cats?”
I shook Timmy’s paw, just as I was supposed to. “I do like cats. I like all sorts of animals.”
“Horses?”
“Yes.”
“Dogs?”
I surveyed her suspiciously. “Is this a trick question given your liking for cats?”
May smirked. “Snails, hedgehogs and birds?”
I didn’t expect my agreement to cause such excitement. I found myself mistress of the kitten all over again and then I was dragged from my seat while the girl’s other hand snatched a pot from the sideboard with one hand and her mouth formally asked Mrs Francis to excuse us. May set off down the hallway at a tearing pace that made no concessions for the state of my limbs. I followed her more sedately. The hallway floor was prettily tiled and it led beyond the stairs towards a door that opened into a garden.
This was a wild place. It ought to have been given over to food production but the only sign of order was the dry brown tangle of neglected beans within a mass of red stems from a dogwood that defiantly contradicted the drab shades of winter. The space was really just a long corridor between high walls and sheds belonging to the neighbouring houses but it all felt incredibly remote. The end of the garden looked out onto the silvery smear of a shallow river. It came as a bit of a surprise when a person walked past on the other side with their dog.
May was rummaging about beneath a dormant plum tree that had kindly decided to drape itself over the wall from next door. The kitten and I followed her rather more gingerly since it required the cooperation of various joints to duck under the mossy boughs. The contents of her little pot were kitchen scraps and she deposited the lot upon the top of a neighbouring bird table. She was, I could see now, small for her age and quite slight, even for a child from the era of rationing. I wondered if she was like her mother.
Adopting a pose of stealthy concealment by my side, May announced grandly, “I’m making a study.” A robin obliged her by fluttering in to land on the bird table. It had such assurance that I was sure it was used to its little audience. There was also a mouse hole by our feet and May shook her head over it. “That’s what the cat is for. I’m allowed to study them in the garden, but Nanny won’t have them in her kitchen; she just won’t have it. Daddy!”
My attempt to find an appropriate response to what were clearly the parroted words of a much older person was rendered unnecessary by her sudden dive from cover.
She was caught as she charged from our hiding place and turned upside down and tucked carelessly under an arm. She was all at once a small child again and laughing hysterically. I heard his voice with a lurch of nerves. Somehow I’d imagined that I’d managed to put off this moment. He said, “What are you doing out here anyway, young lady? Don’t you know it’s dinnertime, hmmm?”
She giggled in a strangled sort of way as he turned about. “We had to feed the birds – it’s their dinnertime too.”
“We?” Adam stopped in mid spin and suddenly saw me, still crouching like an idiot beneath the foliage. “Oh.”
My smile was given awkwardly. As was my murmur of, “Hello.”
I straightened and picked my way out, clutching a kitten and no doubt yet again trailing a certain quantity of filth and matter from my hem.
“Hi,” he said. It was impossible not to notice how mobile his mouth was when he was laughing with his daughter. And how it was now settling towards that familiar calm once more. Although not entirely. This man who had formerly been forced to judge my levels of madness said pleasantly, “Sorry to scare the birds away. Do you like our wildlife haven?”
“Very much. It was clever of you to let it grow so tall and tangled.” Then I realised that he was probably being serious and stammered hastily, “But it is, um, very pretty.”
He replied levelly, “You know, you’re not too big to be tucked under my arm too if you’re going to insult my garden.” He was eyeing me strangely; that is to say he was staring at me as though he was meeting me properly for the very first time and he wasn’t entirely sure he understood what he saw. And why should he when, regardless of who he thought he had brought back from Aberystwyth, now he was meeting only odd Mrs Williams.
Mrs Kate Williams. She felt like a stranger to me too, but she was me all the same.
“You can’t do anything to me,” I said very quickly indeed. “Kitten.” And held it out to prove the excuse.
After a moment’s consideration he only said, “Hungry?” and then set his captive down and ushered us ahead of him into the house to meet Mrs Francis’s wrath and eat her lunch.
Mrs Francis turned out, in actual fact, to be most particularly angry with him. She scowled at Adam as she took her seat beside him and, judging by the faint lift to that man’s eyebrows as he received his plate, I think even he noticed that she had served him the smallest cut of pie. But at least May remained oblivious and incapable of doing anything but chatter continuously to anyone who would listen and thankfully that someone mainly seemed to be me.
She told me about all sorts of things; her plans for the kitten, a plan to cultivate earthworms that might have been about to happen, or had happened, and also her aunt’s allergy to horses. It was wonderful in many different ways, but mainly because her chatter meant I didn’t have to look at Adam. He was alert to everything I said. He was trying to assess just how much I had been improved by rest and I thought I could guess why. I would have been doing that too if I were a parent and I had introduced someone into my house who might just happen to expose his daughter to some deeply unsettling outbursts.
It was as we stacked our plates for May to deposit on the washboard that he finally joined our discussion to say, “Speaking of grubby pastimes, little one, would you like to take a walk in the park later?”
His daughter beamed and then stopped to glower at him suspiciously. “You’re going to send me back to lessons this afternoon, aren’t you?”
Breaking my rule, I saw his smile. “Sorry.”
Reverting back to her usual cheerfulness again, May turned to me. “You’ll like it. There are conker trees, though that’s not now.” A brief calculation of the seasons before she shrugged the complication off and continued brightly, “And birds and lots of paths that go for miles.” She considered me for a moment and then looked doubtful. “It is a very big park.”
“I know,” I said gently. “I’ve walked there many times myself.”
It was about twenty minutes later that I found myself alone and finding respite outside the back door, listening to the run of the stream at the end of the garden. It was a boundary of sorts, but not one I couldn’t escape. I knew my tiredness wasn’t really the tie that kept me here. Nor was it was my promise to tell Adam before I left, and the fact I would have to brave his disbelief a second time in order to do it, and worse, face the probability that his first reaction would be relief. I knew I would have to confront what lay ahead and soon. The simple truth was that it made my soul ache to think of having to leave his peaceful home.
Back inside the kitchen, I knew May was making a determined effort to draw a map of the park, just so I would appreciate how far she was talking about. I heard the distant clatter as she dropped another crayon.
There was a different sound behind and a rustle; an adult’s footsteps on stone flags this time and I felt an excruciatingly thrilling rush of alarm at the thought that Adam might have decided to follow me. The sound of a heavy breath betrayed it to only be Mrs Francis with washing for the mangle. She went past me with barely a glance.
After a moment, I went to help her. I wasn’t sure that she wanted it, and she certainly conceded me the task of sorting the tangled wet clothes very grudgingly, but she didn’t actually go so far as to ignore the garments as I passed them to her so I presume the assistance didn’t go entirely unappreciated.
I bent to tug something from the tangle of laundered clothes. When I straightened she was crushing the water out of a child’s skirt with mathematical accuracy and something in the act prompted me to say, “You’ve looked after him for a long time, haven’t you, Mrs Francis?”
“I’ve known him since he was a boy.” She said it as though I had accused her of being a liar. “I watched him grow up and become a man and marry June. And kept house for him ever since Mr Francis passed. No, the yellow one next.”
I meekly returned the man’s trousers to the pile and picked up the girl’s blouse.
“By the way, since we’re being civil; whatever you’re up to here it won’t work.” She paused in her vigorous turning of the handle long enough to give me an extraordinary glare. “He’s no fool, no matter what fantasy you’re trying to cast him in. And you needn’t look like that either. I know how you single girls and scheming damsels think. You think: Here’s money and fame – reluctant fame, naturally – and he’s a parent to a darling motherless girl and it couldn’t get any closer to the romantic ideal, could it? Only it doesn’t work like that. He’s living flesh. He’s moody and infuriating and driven; and all the more difficult because he’s been away for so many years and been allowed to get away with not speaking for so long. But perhaps you think that means you should save him?”
I could have pointed out that she couldn’t have guessed even half of the roles I had cast him in during the past week. But I didn’t. Instead I picked up the last of his shirts, smoothed the collar and reached for the handle of the heavy mangle.
Mrs Francis straightened. “You look tired. Give me that and go and sit down.” It was an order. I obeyed.
---
There must be, I knew, a sitting room somewhere off the long passage of the hallway. Habit suggested that it would be the room at the front of the house and, putting my hand to the broad wooden panels of the door, I turned the handle and went in. I was wrong, of course.
Instead of comfortable settees, I found Adam at his writing desk in the midst of a chaos of notes and typewriters and piles of books on chairs. He’d lifted his head when the door had opened and now he was looking at me with that blank stare of one who was definitely not used to being interrupted when he was working. It took a while for any kind of smile to reach his eyes.
I was utterly ashamed. “So sorry,” I said and bolted from the room. I did at least think to shut the door behind me. It smothered the call of my name.
The next door was more successful. It opened onto a small room at the back, tucked in the lea of the stairs, and it was perfect. The walls formed a friendly kind of library with shelves from floor to ceiling bearing books and pictures and family photographs, and on one of the nearest shelves, I even found another battered copy of Jane Eyre. It felt very appropriate to read the part about discovering the madwoman living in the attic.
I carefully transplanted some abandoned toys onto a table, tucked myself into a corner of the settee and began to read. It was easier to be calm here in the little oasis of the back room, with no interruptions but the occasional blur outside the delicately latticed window as Mrs Francis huffed by to set to with the grinding again on her mangle. In fact it was very calming because when I woke a little while later, it was to the sensation of the book slipping from my hand and the soft clunk as it hit the floor. I bent to retrieve it, and only then did I notice the weight clamped against my side.
Turning my head, I found the fair hair and curled-up form of the child nestling against my hip with one hand hanging out over the floor. She hadn’t gone to her afternoon lessons after all. She must have crept in to find me and grown tired of waiting for me to wake so she could show me her map and fallen asleep instead. The kitten must have come with her because he in his turn was sprawled across her in a similar pose of slumbering abandonment.
Trapped, I let my head fall back and resigned myself to meet the next wave of sleep. It was an easy slide into oblivion and warm and only seemed to last a moment before it was interrupted again by another soft whisper of paper against my hand. Blearily, I opened one eye against the glare of the window to find Adam standing only a yard from us. He had bent to rescue his fallen book. With a rush I jerked fully awake and with heart beating I hastily tried to sit up but the dead weight of the child was an effective restraint and I had to settle for adjusting my position so that I didn‘t feel quite so much like an ungainly lump.
With a disjointed attempt at a greeting I began to make some kind of explanation, only to realise belatedly that I didn’t even know what it was that I was trying to explain. “Sorry, I er …”
Adam only gave an uncomfortable sort of twisted grimace and set the book down beside me on the arm of my chair. Where its cover had been bent a little I could see the initials JH, his wife’s.
“Sorry,” I said again, uselessly.
He stepped away to the window. “You’re saying that a lot at the moment.”
I wasn’t sure whether to apologise for that too.
He turned back then and suddenly shrugged off all the tension. “It’s not required, you know,” he said with a smile. The first warm smile I had been gifted for days. “We’re going to go to the park at half-past three. Which should be,” – he glanced at his watch – “will be in about ten minutes. Do you want to come? Or would you prefer to stay at home?”
I blinked at him, trying to gauge what he was thinking. It was an impossible task. “I think,” I said, matching his light tone, “I should let you enjoy your walk with your daughter in peace.” Then I realised that this sounded like I was fishing for a contradiction or worse that I was trying to reopen the discussion on my fears of what awaited me outside and with half my mind conscious of the proximity of his sleeping child, I hastily added, “And I’m really very tired so I think I’d better stay here. If you don’t mind?”
“I don’t mind,” he confirmed, mouth contracting to a line once more. After a moment he turned back to the window but not before he had gazed at me with that new assessing expression that made me feel like I was a mistake he didn’t quite know how to undo.
His hand hung loose beside a small table adorned with a line of metal picture frames. There were a pair that were presumably his parents; people from a bygone era. The first image of him was a photograph from some years ago of him and his wife on a seaside holiday taken by one of those opportunist professionals. He was younger, less angular perhaps but perfectly recognisable; she was pretty and lively and they were both to be left for
ever on the brink of laughing. The next was a photograph of a man on leave after Dunkirk. I could tell it was then because he looked exhausted and he’d told me that it was the only time he’d been allowed home. The frontage of his sister’s Cheltenham house was behind him and his daughter was in his arms, a shy little baby of about eighteen months at most. She was tiny. When he’d come home at long last four and a half years later she must have barely known him. It was so very sad.
A few moments later, May came noisily back to life. Guilt had just begun to jerk a fresh attempt to say sorry out of me, only this time I was making the one apology that I really owed him, for invading the precious peace of his family home. I was saved by her sleepy mumble and the disarray as she kicked a cushion to the floor. Then she turned over and very nearly crushed the kitten.
In the ensuing flood of tears and necessary fatherly comfort, I slipped silently to the door. Then, like the coward I was, I dived up the stairs to the relief of his quiet little attic bedroom.
Chapter 24
I wasn’t sure what had woken me this time. It was dark, and the house and the street below were quiet so I hadn’t missed someone bringing me another meal. I didn’t think it had been a dream either, though I couldn’t be sure. At any rate, I couldn’t actually remember revisiting the waterfall and I could only hope to goodness that this wasn’t a version of the incident at the hotel and I hadn’t woken myself – and therefore the whole house – by making some frightened sound.
I lay there for a moment, caught in that familiar trap of blinking at the blackened ceiling, worrying. Then I reached out and switched on the lamp.
The room was its usual harmless, homely self. There were my bags, his piles of unsorted clutter and my coat hanging from a hook beside the towel on the back of the closed door. Beside me was a fresh glass of water that I hadn’t carried up the stairs myself and I propped myself up on one elbow to drink it. Someone must have thought to try winding my watch and had set it too because it now ticked and said a different two o’clock. No wonder the house was silent.