I visualised a whole family of voracious rats emerging from the shed to attack me with large, yellowed teeth, and my voice went high-pitched: ‘There must be some way of getting rid of them – it!’
‘Terrible lot of trouble we had with rats a year or two back when they was putting the new sewers in. Ran about the village street in droves, they did. Squeaking.’
I clung to the edge of the wooden counter, gazing desperately at her.
‘You need Bob and his Jack Russells,’ she conceded. ‘That’ll fetch them out of there!’
‘Bob and his Jack Russells?’ It sounded like a band or punk group or something.
‘Little terriers, Jack Russells are, but something terrible on rats. I’ll tell him to bring them along tomorrow morning, shall I?’
‘Oh, yes, please!’ I agreed gratefully. Rats definitely have priority over writing.
‘I’ll do that. He’ll enjoy it, Bob will. He’s not more than ten shillings in the pound, mind, but a good biddable lad, as you’ll see.’
‘Not more than …?’
‘Seven months child,’ she explained. ‘And born on the train to London. Ma Slogget wanted to call him Euston, but her husband, Jack, he put his foot down and said if Robert was good enough for his father, it would be good enough for this ’un. But we call him Bob.’
‘Oh …’ I caught myself up with an almost audible grinding of mental gears. ‘Oh, well, thank you, Mrs Deakin! Will I have to give him anything? I mean, what—’
‘Give him?’ she echoed, surprised at my not automatically knowing the right thing. ‘Why, give him some old magazines! Loves magazines, he does. Any sort: comics, ladies’ weeklies, old catalogues. It’s the coloured pictures.’
I’d never have thought of that!
‘Now, what can I get you?’ she enquired.
‘Er … do you have any Batman comics?’
James, informed that the Rat Man Cometh, proved very dubious about the success of the scheme, but was unable to suggest anything else and went to work next day leaving me to await the half-wit’s arrival in some trepidation.
But I needn’t have worried, for he proved to be a resounding success.
Large, curly-haired, and with vacant blue eyes and bashful smile, he presented himself at the back door in mid-morning.
He had, in fact, arrived some time earlier, but had not announced this except by the noise of a large body crashing about in the back garden, yells of encouragement, and barking.
The blond giant on the doorstep whipped one hand from behind his back and held aloft for my inspection an extremely dead rat. He swung it by the tail.
‘I got ’un!’ he said cheerfully.
Naturally I recoiled a bit, but recovered enough to congratulate him on the dogs’ prowess in hunting. The two small, nondescript canines panted happily at his feet.
He showed no sign of leaving, just stood there amiably smiling at me, as one who had all the time in the world, which I dare say he had.
‘Stay there a minute,’ I said, remembering, ‘I’ve got something for you.’
I returned with two Batman comics and a couple of women’s magazines. As I hesitantly offered them to the large, masculine figure ruggedly attired in mired corduroy and the biggest boots I’d ever seen, an expression of child-like pleasure crossed his face, and I was so relieved I also pressed on him a Mars bar and two bone-shaped dog biscuits, so that we parted on a note of great friendliness.
As he turned the corner of the house he was thoughtfully sucking the end of one of the dog biscuits, but I don’t suppose it will harm him.
I was looking forward to telling James all about it, but dinner was cooked and drying out in the oven before he called from Howard’s to tell me he wasn’t coming home that night.
‘But why didn’t you let me know earlier?’ I demanded. ‘Dinner’s ruined, and I was just wondering whether to ring round the hospitals and find out if you’d had an accident!’
‘There’s no need to get hysterical! I was with a client until late, and then I thought I might as well phone you from here. Sorry about the dinner. Look, I’ll pick up a takeaway tomorrow night to make up, how about that? And a bottle of wine.’
Yes, a bottle of very dry red wine, not the medium white I like. And if I don’t drink fast these days, he’s finished the bottle before I’ve savoured a mouthful.
‘I wish you’d come home,’ I said miserably.
‘Don’t be silly. I’ll see you tomorrow. Good night.’
And he rang off.
I gave Bess the dried-out remains of dinner, feeling too depressed to do anything except go to bed, and I even let her come upstairs with me because I felt so lonely. She kept pushing her nose into my hand and sighing, which tickled.
I fell asleep eventually and dreamed that Fergal Rocco, wearing an entirely unsuitable halo and wings (nothing else) told me just how boring I’d become.
‘Get off your horse and drink your milk!’ he drawled, and then rode off into a Technicolor sunset to the sound of bells.
Phone bells.
I reached out a groggy hand for the receiver. ‘Hello?’
There was a smothered giggle, a sudden rustling, and then the phone was slammed down at the other end with some force, leaving me sitting bolt upright with a wildly beating heart.
Was this the next move by the silent caller? Or someone playing a trick on me? Or just a wrong number?
I hadn’t considered before that the silent caller might be a woman …
After a bit I gave up trying to sleep again and made some cocoa, and when I finally returned to bed I found Bess snoring there almost as loudly as James, but looking more attractive while doing so.
She obligingly moved over to let me get in when I insisted on it (also unlike James).
Eventually I fell asleep over a book, but as soon as I woke this morning I put in a request for an ex-directory number. I don’t care what James thinks, I have had enough strange phone calls.
Anyway, he wasn’t there to ask.
Fergal: April 1999
‘WORLD TOUR A TOTAL SELL-OUT
Rumours strengthen that it really is Goneril’s last.
No more tours, but the band goes on, says Fergal Rocco.’
NME
Believe it.
Chapter 12: Mayday!
I was so fed up with James that I ordered another skip for the weekend and ruthlessly herded him out into the back garden on the Saturday morning, despite his mutterings about some class for hams he meant to go to, and the spasmodic April showers.
He did cheer up for a while after I handed him the new scythe I’d bought: the Grin Reaper.
With some gruelling hard work we roughly denuded the long narrow plot from the espaliered fruit trees on Mrs P.’s side (pear, I think), to the vastly overgrown hawthorn hedge on the other.
James began to show vague signs of enthusiasm, despite a whole new set of calluses and a near miss to an extremity with the scythe, and as soon as the ground was cleared he measured it up with my dressmaking tape (getting it very muddy) and bits of string on sticks. At last he is taking some interest in where the patio and flowerbeds are going!
A herd of cows gazed wistfully at us over the fence all afternoon, drooling, which was rather alarming since the fence is not strong and they were pushing at it. I am not afraid of cows, but they are surprisingly big, and I don’t want an eyeball-to-eyeball confrontation across the washing line.
The fence is the responsibility of the owners of the Hall, so now it has been sold I can write asking them to repair it as soon as possible. We still don’t know who has bought it, though Mrs Deakin increasingly favours the Monster Rat rumour, and if so, I hope we are not going to get some sort of Pavarotti in the Park festivals in the grounds.
I asked Mrs Deakin what the house was like, and she said it was ‘old, like, with them funny turrets’ which sounds a bit Victorian Gothic.
After tea James went out in the car to get (ostensibly) some cigars, despite my telli
ng him that Mrs Deakin would have them, even if the Dog and Duck didn’t. But he said he didn’t like other brands, and the ones in the village shop would be mummified remains that had been there for centuries.
He does Mrs D. an injustice there, because she could sell a Centurion tank to a Quaker, and so does not have any problem in turning her stock over quickly.
James gave cigarettes up after a TV programme frightened him, but now smokes expensive and smelly thin cigars instead, which he says are harmless since he doesn’t inhale. (He does.) It’s very annoying watching good money go up in smoke.
Anyway, off he went without so much as asking me if I would like to go with him, so I’m pretty sure he’s meeting some of his friends – probably Rob or Gerry. It’s very hurtful that he doesn’t want to take me out now, but more so that he’s lying to me.
His friends (apart from Howard) are solicitors and accountants and that sort of thing, and they all drink too much and get red in the face and extremely silly, then drive home in that condition. They’re all about James’s age, and have long-suffering wives with well-maintained faces, who drive big off-road vehicles (on the road – they would get muddy, otherwise). It’s amazing how many of them live around here.
He crashed into bed at midnight, distinctly sozzled, and informed me that he’d probably got tetanus from the finger he scratched gardening, and all his friends said it was invariably fatal.
‘Good,’ I said, turning over and going back to sleep. I thought I heard him say,‘Hard-hearted bitch!’ but I think he must have been talking to Bess, because she was lying on the bed in the morning looking smug.
It took ages to prise James out of bed, away from the Sunday Times and back to digging over the garden while I cut back the hedge, leaving enough to hide the barn. He kept moaning about his hangover, but I wasn’t in the mood to be sympathetic.
Then he suddenly threw down his spade, yelled, ‘I’ve found something!’ and held aloft a large whitish object.
I took it from him and gingerly brushed away the earth. ‘Ugh! It’s some kind of tooth – but what a whopper! I wonder what sort of animal it came from?’
‘A mammoth, perhaps? Ancient man probably camped here and tossed the remains of his meals over his shoulder.’
‘This garden must have been cultivated in the past, so there can’t be much left, even if it was a prehistoric picnic site,’ I pointed out dubiously. ‘Still, we can keep our eyes open – and perhaps I could ask the people at the museum what sort of tooth it is. I’m going in on Monday anyway.’
Digging for the rest of the day revealed nothing more exciting than a rubbish heap buried at the bottom of the garden, including a complete dismantled outside toilet, so it was with some relief that I watched the skip finally depart, complete with a wooden toilet seat balanced precariously on top of the debris.
As it moved slowly into the road, Mrs Peach flew with amazing speed down her front garden and stopped it, scurrying back up the path a moment later clutching the loo seat to her bosom with an expression of what I can only describe as senile triumph.
God knows what she wants it for! To frame her Monarch of the Glen print?
We’ve decided on a garage – James sent the order off. It was nice to see him engrossed in the brochures, even if his enthusiasm for gardening was so short-lived.
On Monday I importantly confided the mammoth tooth to a world-weary curator at the local museum, and was instantly deflated when he just shoved it into a plastic bag labelled with my name and the date, dumped it into a bulging cardboard box, and told me to come back in a couple of weeks.
While I was out at the museum the washing I left running turned pink. Why is this? There were no red or pink items in there. James is not amused by pink handkerchiefs and underwear, but I think he’s jolly lucky to have his own personal laundry maid, even if she is highly inefficient!
Bess and I discovered on our evening walk that the overgrown drive to the Hall has been cleared back, and wrought-iron gates were being fitted. The crumbling wall had been repaired too – and this is just an unimportant rear entrance! I told Mrs Deakin and she became almost incandescent with sheer frustrated curiosity. Someone is spending a fortune on the place.
‘Depraved May’, as Eliot put it, was a-coming in and, primed by Mrs Deakin, my alarm clock went off just before dawn.
James flatly refused to leave his bed before five in the morning to, as he put it, ‘Watch a lot of folksy idiots dancing round a painted stick while standing in wet grass.’
‘How can they dance and stand in wet grass simultaneously?’ I asked, but he just groaned and turned over.
He has no sense of fun any more.
Come to think of it, he never did have much.
Dressed warmly in a striped Peruvian serape and jeans I set off for the village green, leaving the Bourgeois Bitch behind, despite all her blandishments, since she specialises in doing her business in front of the largest possible audience.
Walking briskly up the road, I felt suddenly very, very happy, and at one with the world and all that, for already the sun was gilding outlines, birds sang, and the sky grew bluer every minute. A rabbit scuttered away – even I can recognise one of those! – and bluebells, buttercups and pinky-red things flowered in the hedgerow.
One or two cars passed me as I walked past Mrs Deakin’s shuttered shop, strangely naked without its festoons of goods around the door, and lots more were parked near the green.
The sizeable crowd seemed to be made up of village folk with vaguely familiar faces, and what Mrs D. called ‘them Folklore Society people’, who were clad in mobcaps and shawls or beards and woolly hats, according to gender.
Moving among this disparate collection were two strangely dressed figures, one all in green-fronded material from head to toe, giving a loose-leafy kind of effect, and another in top hat and tails and knee-breeches, with odd-coloured stockings and pumps with bows.
A fiddler struck up a few notes and at this signal all the people fell back into a circle around the maypole. On the brightening grass the pole’s tall shadow was joined by the elongated wraiths of the leaping, jingling morris men.
There was something essentially right about it all – that this ceremony should take place on this day, year after year, as it always had and always would …
Or the first convenient Saturday, anyway.
The Green Man and the top-hatted one circled the crowd and sometimes joined in with the morris men, until they danced a final round with a decided air and walked off, leaving the fiddler alone, refreshing himself from a pint mug. An accordionist joined him, and the crowd made expectant noises.
After a minute or two they struck up some music together, the accordionist shouted something, and suddenly everyone was dancing in a huge circle round the pole, with myself swept up with them.
After a few stumbling minutes I got the hang of it, happy to be a part of it all.
Mrs Deakin, flushed and diminutive, was also whirling through the dance, her flowered pinny discarded in favour of a dress of apple-green and white checks.
After the dancing the morris men gave a final performance, and then a collection taken by the man dressed in green fronds signalled the end of the festivities.
I sat on a dead elm to get my breath back and to watch the little groups cluster and disperse to their cars, which one by one pulled away from the rutted grass until quiet descended once more on the green.
Then, looking up into the perfect golden morning, I saw a great pink and silver hot-air balloon, delicate as a mirage, drifting with awesome silence across a clear sky.
Closer and closer it drew, becoming steadily larger, but still blending into the dawn until it was near enough to make out the advertisement emblazoned along its sides, ending in the immortal words: ‘Lip-smackin’ good!’
‘Oh hell!’ My idyll rudely shattered, I turned my back on the apparition, which was by now low enough to be heard making the raspberry noises and strange abdominal creakings of its kind, a
nd strode briskly homeward.
James was just getting up, not at all interested in May Day celebrations.
‘You’ve been ages, and I’ve got appointments this morning.’
‘But it’s Saturday – and this is the first I’ve heard of it!’
‘Well, I’m telling you now, then. Haven’t you ironed any shirts? What’s for breakfast?’
You’d think I was the housekeeper! It struck me suddenly as absolutely ludicrous that one adult human being (if you could call James adult) should expect another to cook for them, and wash their clothes, and nanny them.
He was now attiring himself in natty grey suiting and striped tie (all pressed and ready for him) and had nothing more strenuous to do than sit and have his breakfast brought to him, before driving off to Important Appointments, leaving a greasy pile of washing-up behind him and his dirty clothes on the bedroom floor.
Something suddenly snapped in my head. ‘Oh, get your own damned breakfast for once!’ I yelled at him, and slammed off to my writing room.
I knew he wouldn’t cook himself anything, and after a bit there was a tentative tapping on my door.
‘Tish? I’m going now. I hope you feel better when I get home.’
I flung open the door. ‘Better? Why should I feel better? There’s nothing wrong with me – I’m just fed up with doing everything around here! You expect to be waited on hand and foot.’
He looked as taken aback as if his teddy bear had bitten him. ‘You don’t think I want to work on a Saturday, do you?’ he demanded, aggrieved. ‘I have to do these things to bring in enough money – which you don’t seem to have any trouble spending.’
‘I work too, you know: not only writing but all the housework, the gardening, the cooking, the laundry … not to mention looking after Bess, who’s supposed to be your dog!’
‘But it isn’t real work – you can do it any time. I have a very responsible job. And I don’t know what you’re fussing about – most women would be glad to stay at home doing nothing. You’ve got it made.’
Good Husband Material Page 11