Silver Birches

by Adrian Plass

  “Actually they did,” said Angela, answering Graham’s question, “but all she could or possibly would say was that ‘mummy’s arm came out of the black.’ ”

  “And into the red,” was Mike’s annoyingly meaningless attempt at a witty rejoinder.

  Angela smiled generously. “Actually, Mike, that’s not so very far off the truth. Selling up so quickly and unexpectedly probably did put the poor old Pattersons solidly in the red, just like me now. Speaking of which, what I could do with is discovering a spot of treasure trove or a few doubloons hidden around the place. I suppose none of you have become incredibly rich, have you?”

  Peter stirred his angular body on his chair as though he was trying to unstick it.

  “I think the whole thing sounds thoroughly satanic and dreadful,” he said worriedly. “If it had been me, Angela, I would have gone round and prayed in every room and corridor in the house after hearing that awful story. I really would.”

  “We did exactly that, Peter,” replied Angela quietly, the firm lines of her personality fading and losing their power of direction before our eyes for the first time since the beginning of the weekend. “Alan and I prayed in every room and in all three of the attics and most of the outhouses. We prayed for the people who’d used them and lived in them over the centuries, and for all the people who were going to visit and enjoy them when we got the place up and running. Every night after dinner we prayed for ourselves and our marriage and our future and the children we might have. We prayed a lot. It was exciting. It was part of being us. I was stupidly happy — stupidly happy.”

  A slight unease fluttered our spirits. Not so good. It was like your mum being ill. Get better soon, Angela, so that you can look after us all.

  “What I do think remarkable, Angela,” said Jenny, carefully dispassionate, “is that you were able to go on living here at all after hearing that story. You had to go along that landing every day, I expect?” Angela nodded. “And sometimes even go up into that very same loft.” Screwing her eyes tight shut. “I know I couldn’t have done that. I know I couldn’t.” She glanced briefly and nervously over her left and then her right shoulder. “It’s bad enough thinking of going up to bed tonight, let alone living here on my . . . well, er, you ended up on your own, didn’t you? Oh, dear, please forgive me. I set out to change the subject and ended up working my way round to the place where I didn’t want to be.” With an embarrassed glance at me: “Why am I so good at putting my foot in it? That’s the second time this weekend. I can’t believe it. I am such a twit!”

  Seeing the purple confusion that accompanied the conclusion of this well-meant speech, Angela reached out and patted Jenny’s hand. Her smile switched itself on once more, kind and reassuring, making her strong again. I sighed, as imperceptibly as possible, wondering what it would be like to kiss Angela full on her warm, soft mouth. A picture of her profile and the side of her face as she sat in front of me next to Jessica in the group all those years ago flashed to the front of my mind. I breathed deeply and abandoned my speculation, just as I had often done in those days.

  Angela spoke reassuringly, “You’re no such thing, Jenny, I promise you. I know perfectly well you were rescuing me, you twit. Oh, no! You’ve got me doing it now!” Everyone laughed comfortably. “In any case, if we’re going to talk about twits, then we might as well talk about me. My brain’s been falling apart lately. You would not believe what I did the other day! Just listen to this, everybody.”

  Angela gestured with open hands to include us all.

  “I went to see a friend of mine over between Stroud and Gloucester because I needed a bit of practical advice on business strategy, right? Quite important stuff. Okay, so I’m sitting opposite my friend at her kitchen table, and when the right moment comes I lean forward, very intense and serious, her eyes and mine locked together and all that, and I say, ‘Look — Rachel, what I really want you to do, if it’s okay, is to let me pick your nose.’ ”

  We all burst into laughter. Mike nearly expired. Angela flapped a hand, begging to be allowed to finish her story.

  “Listen! Listen! Poor Rachel went on looking into my eyes for what seemed like an awful long time, and then she said, very slowly and with a sort of edgy, ready-to-run wariness, ‘Angela, I really am praying very hard indeed that you meant to say “my brains.” For one horrible second, I’m sure the poor girl was terrified that I was inviting her to become my partner in some brand-new, sad little perversion. So — Jenny, twit me no twits. I am the champion!”

  I let the laughter subside to nearly nothing before I said, “So, losing Alan was worse than any ghostly encounter?”

  Angela had been in the process of tilting a half-full wine bottle toward her glass. At my words she froze for an instant, then very slowly returned it to an upright position, placing it back on the table with meticulous care. When she did look up at me at last her gaze was calmly challenging.

  “I hope you’re as ready to answer questions like that as you are to ask them, David.”

  “I . . . well, you’d better talk to Jenny about that.”

  “What? Oh!” Jenny clicked into comprehension with a little start. “Yes, well, that’s right. Up on the hills today I, er, I told David how desperately in love with him I used to be at St. Mark’s, and he told me — ”

  “I’ll tell you who I fancied!” Jenny’s constructive bridging exercise was crudely interrupted by Mike’s loud voice. He had clearly found this fresh subject, one that Jenny must have hoped would flitter quickly by like an anonymous little brown bird, very much to his taste. “Anyone remember the name of that girl from Becket Memorial who only came for a while?” He clicked his fingers twice in frustration. “You know! Long black hair, confident type, never quite learned the lingo. Fabulous chest.”

  “Her name was Amanda Nichols,” supplied Graham, adding pinkly after a minuscule delay, “Yes, you’re right, she did have very long black hair.”

  “She never made a commitment as such,” said Peter sadly, “but I seem to remember she came very close.”

  “She definitely came very close to me,” hooted Mike raucously. “Hands up who remembers that youth weekend they took us on down in Dorset one year, when we stayed at some kind of posho girls’ boarding school in the middle of nowhere.”

  “Everyone here was definitely there,” asserted Peter confidently, looking and sounding rather like a Tenniel character from Alice in Wonderland as he bobbed a knuckle toward each of us in turn as though he was counting.

  “Anyway, this girl — ”

  “Oh, I remember that weekend.” Jenny’s smile was rueful. “There were about eight of us girls sleeping in a sort of dormitory place, and after we’d woken up on the first morning we all got our Bibles and notebooks out like good little Christian girls, and I felt guilty because, although I did pray and read the Bible quite a lot, I didn’t always have a quiet-time in the morning at home, and I thought all the others probably did, but I didn’t want them to know. How silly! I don’t suppose half of them did either.”

  “Amanda and I went — ”

  “Well, I didn’t for one,” said Angela, “and I’m pretty sure I was in the same room as you. Now I come to think of it, nor did — nor did the girl in the bed next to me. She told me she didn’t. Funny. I’d forgotten all that. It matters a lot at that age, doesn’t it, what other people think. But — ”

  “Jessica, you’re talking about?”

  “Jessica, that’s right, David, yes.”

  Linking my fingers behind my head, I tilted my chair back on two legs, physically retreating from what I was about to say. “Look, please can I just make it clear, everyone, you don’t have to leave Jessica’s name out of the conversation because I happen to be sitting here. She wouldn’t want that and neither would I. Okay? I really don’t mind her being talked about. Well, I do. I mean, I did. But I don’t. Oh, dear! I don’t know what I’m talking about — ”

  A truly blessed, entirely unexpected guffaw of laughter esca
ped me at this juncture. Despite everything, another striking aspect of that church weekend in Dorset had bounced abruptly to the surface of my memory. I swung my chair forward on all four legs with a bump.

  “Hey! Remember the six-inch rule and all the bother that caused?”

  This sparked off a general hubbub of laughter and reminiscence. I had guessed it probably would. The infamous six-inch rule had been devised by Malcolm, our curate leader, and Ethel, his assistant (not in the same room together without anyone else present, of course) presumably to ensure that no “hanky-panky” blotted the escutcheon of our church youth weekend. To be fair, their motivation may have been on a slightly higher level than that. Possibly the idea was simply to prevent the general loss of cohesion that might have resulted from couples winding themselves round each other on the periphery of the main group. Or perhaps they just wanted to avoid unnecessary distractions from the spiritual content of the weekend. Whatever the truth actually was, this rule, stipulating that boys and girls must not, at any time during the weekend, allow themselves to come within less than six inches of each other, led to nothing but trouble.

  Apart from anything else, it was somehow typical of those who concern themselves with the sexual morality of the young that they should have (quite innocently on a conscious level, I’m sure) elected the sacred measurement of six inches to be a suitable distance for couples to maintain. Ribald jokes on the subject abounded among less reverent members of the St. Mark’s male contingent, particularly as we were all at an age when the size of our genitalia was what St. Paul might have described as a burning issue.

  The main problem, though, was that the first evening and the following morning of the weekend were dogged, as far as poor Malcolm and Ethel were concerned, by the punishingly visible, bonelessly limp depression of a handful of heartbroken couples, tragically pining for each other on opposite sides of the room where we all met to be inspired as a group. Quite honestly, this cast a much greater sense of gloom and disunity over the proceedings than if each of the couples in question had spent the whole weekend in a sleeping-bag on one of the dining room tables. It all got sorted out in the end somehow, but a very great deal of time was wasted.

  At that stage Jessica and I weren’t yet going out together. I never dared say so at the time, but I would have cheerfully settled for being allowed to spend the whole weekend at a distance of six inches from her.

  There was a lull. Mike tried again.

  “One night this girl and I — ”

  “Wasn’t there something about a hummingbird?” asked Graham, by now in a state of blissful relaxation. He seemed hardly able to contain his pleasure at being part of all this drinking and talking and laughing and remembering.

  “The speaker!” Looking more like Beardsley than ever, Peter sat rigidly upright, that knuckle of his uncurling into a bony finger on the end of a quivering, outstretched arm, pointing in Graham’s direction as though he had solved some great mystery of the universe. “He told us we shouldn’t be like South American hummingbirds!”

  “Eh? What?” Momentarily distracted from his story by this extraordinary comment, Mike frowned and rubbed his eyes. “What do you mean he said we shouldn’t be like hummingbirds? What’s that all about? Don’t smoke, don’t drink, don’t go with women, and, whatever you do, folks, don’t ever make the mistake of sucking nectar from flowers while you’re flying backward. Can’t say I remember that one.”

  “It was the man who came to speak to us during the weekend,” said Peter. A succession of memories illuminated his face like lights being switched on one by one in a dark church hall. “He came on Friday evening, and he had a brown leather briefcase, and he did a short talk in the getting-to-know-each-other slot after dinner to say that his sessions were going to be on the subject of ‘Love Your Neighbor’, and — ”

  “And he was very tall with red hair and he blinked a lot,” added Angela, apparently infected with the general fever of recollection.

  “But what was this thing about the hummingbirds?” asked Jenny when the noise had died down. “That wasn’t made up, was it? I think I can just about remember him mentioning something like that, but I don’t have a clue what it was. Hummingbirds?”

  “It was quite a good point he made, actually,” said Peter with judicious earnestness.

  Friendly groans from most of us. We’re gaining in confidence, I thought to myself. Safe and warm with each other — for this evening at least. All at once, unnervingly, for the first time since her sad, sad death, I wanted more than anything else in the world to talk to these people about my Jessica. Now. But it wasn’t my turn. Not yet. Would I still want the same thing later on?

  “I remember what it was now,” announced Graham triumphantly, tapping rhythmically on the edge of the table with one side of his finger. “He said that most of us are very selfish and only think about ourselves, and he said that it was important for we young Christian people not to be like a hummingbird that he’d personally seen during a missionary trip to South America.”

  “Yes!” raved Mike wildly, balling his fists and grinding the words out through his teeth, “but we want to know why not! Please tell us! What appalling, dreadful, evil thing do these sodding little birds do?”

  “He said,” explained Graham, in a triumph of recollection, moving his outstretched hand through the air as he spoke, presumably to mimic the flight of a hummingbird, “that as they fly along, they go, ‘ME-ME-ME-ME-ME-ME-ME-ME-ME-ME-ME-ME-ME!’ ”

  So, where were we?”

  “Well,” I replied to Angela, “let me see now. You were avoiding talking about Alan and I was avoiding talking about Jessica. Jenny tried to help by starting to talk about what happened up on the hills today but was interrupted by Mike, who was doing his best to tell us about some teenage sex romp with what’s-hername— Amanda Nichols — but never did get round to it, partly because we really didn’t want to hear it, but mostly because we got on to the subject of the six-inch rule and the man who told us we shouldn’t be like hummingbirds. Is that about it?”

  My little summary was greeted with laughter and a spontaneous patter of applause from the others. We seemed to have successfully transferred our newfound atmosphere of warmth and togetherness from the dining room to the kitchen, where, thanks to energetic efforts by Mike in his cooperative mode much earlier in the day, and acting under strict orders from the lady of the house, another blazing log fire awaited us.

  “No alcohol” was Angela’s arbitrary rule for this part of Saturday evening, and probably a wise one if people were genuinely intending to talk about things that were important to them. The belief that alcohol improves performance is, for most people, as deluded in relation to conversation as it is in relation to driving or sex. On the low table before us stood two tall cafetières of strong coffee next to milk, sugar, and a bowl containing the less popular remnants of Jenny’s chocolates. We had all helped ourselves to both before settling back into the sofa and four deep armchairs that made up the sitting room end of Angela’s long kitchen. Much as I agreed with the “no alcohol” dictum, I couldn’t help reflecting on the fact that not so much as a drop of wine had passed Andrew’s lips in advance of his calculated attack on Mike last night. Perhaps, I thought, it would have been better if he had downed a glass or two. One brief little bank holiday would surely have done him no harm at all.

  “Come on, then, Mike,” said Angela, “if you really must get it off your chest, tell us what happened with Amanda Nichols. But we insist you keep it either clean or interesting.”

  Mike was comfortably ensconced on the sofa beside Jenny, sitting, in fact, exactly where Andrew had sat the night before.

  “Ah, well, yes.” He did a slightly unpleasant, relish-filled wriggle into his corner of the sofa. “Yes, you see, Amanda got it into her head that she and I should slip out on the Saturday night and go for a swim in that big pond down behind the trees at the bottom of the field at the back. Remember the pond? So I told her that was all very fine as
an idea, but I hadn’t got any swimming things. And she said she hadn’t either, but there was no reason for that to be a problem, was there? Well, I mean — I just goggled at her! Thought for a minute she meant we’d swim in our clothes. Then I saw the way she was looking at me and it clicked. Wow! My first time coming up. It’s a good job no one else was in my head for the rest of that day, I can tell you. Eat your heart out, you sad little hummingbirds.”

  “Are you seriously saying that this happened during the St. Mark’s youth weekend?” Peter’s eyes bulged as if someone was inflating them from behind with a bicycle pump. “What if Malcolm and Ethel had found out?”

  Clearly, the idea of “Malcolm and Ethel finding out” invoked as much spine-tingling horror in Peter today, now that he was in his thirties, as it had done when he was a lad of sixteen or seventeen.

  “I expect they’d have joined us,” replied Mike flippantly. “They’d have probably said it’s perfectly all right to swim together in the nude as long as someone else is there at the same time — all right, all right, you can put your jaws together again, Pete, me old mate. That was just a joke. You’re right. They’d have gone raving mad and sent us home — and then forgiven us after a decent interval.”

  “So, did you go?” Graham sounded slightly hoarse.

  “Did I? Wouldn’t you have gone?”

  “Well, I’m not sure . . .”

  I felt absolutely sure that Graham would not have gone. I was fairly sure that he would have wished he had afterward.