Mary George of Allnorthover

by Lavinia Greenlaw

  Stella had laughed but it hadn’t been a happy sound, more as if she’d dropped the plates in her hands and they were bouncing and breaking on the floor. Matthew had picked up his knife and fork again, although the dishes had been cleared. Then Stella was in the kitchen, banging things.

  ‘She’s a family friend, sweetheart. Iris was my mother’s friend and after my mother died, she was my friend. Now she’s sick in the hospital, I try to comfort and help her.’

  ‘What’s wrong with her?’ Mary remembered how this old woman, in her whiteness and softness, was like snow in winter and fleece in summer, and whose bright eyes had held all colours.

  ‘She has cancer.’

  Mary thought cancer … canker … conker … and saw a spring cloud shrivel and darken to a hard brown shell. ‘Will she die?’

  ‘Yes, she will.’

  ‘Then how do you help her, Daddy?’

  ‘We talk. We tell each other stories just like you and me, Mary Fairy.’

  ‘And do you brush her hair, like you do mine?’

  ‘Her hair’s gone. The medicine … you see, her body needs all its strength to get better and hasn’t got time to be growing any more hair.’

  A shell. Smooth and empty. Mary ran to her mother.

  The winter that Iris Hepple lay dying was a time of locked cold, in which everything held still. Mary would be woken by Stella climbing the stairs with a paraffin heater, its liquid slopping against its sides. She would bring it into Mary’s room and turn the stiff dial that cranked up the wick. She’d strike a match and the room would fill with something warm but so dry it made Mary’s eyes sting before she’d opened them. Bundled up in her dressing gown and slippers, she would follow her mother downstairs and crouch by the fire. The coal smoked and changed colour. There would be porridge, and a trip back upstairs again to wash and dress in the damp bathroom where a single electric bar on the wall gave off a weak glow. Before and after school, it was dark. Even when the snow came and everything was white for weeks on end, it was still dark and her father never seemed to be home. All Mary thought about, though, was trying to get warm.

  On Christmas Eve, Mary was woken by shouting. She crept to the top of the stairs and there were her parents in the hallway. She couldn’t tell if they were holding onto each other or pushing away. Stella was as tall as Matthew, as broad as he was, and as fair. Even though their faces were close together, they were shouting.

  ‘Why go tomorrow?’ Stella’s mouth stayed open after she’d finished speaking. Mary could see her teeth.

  ‘Because neither Christie nor Tom will.’ Matthew looked down and shook his head. Stella put her hand in the hair at the back of his head and tugged, forcing him to raise his face.

  ‘I know Tom can’t, he hasn’t left the house in years … but Christie? Have you really thought about why he doesn’t visit his own dying mother?’

  ‘Can’t face the state she’s in, I don’t know …’

  ‘Can’t face the disappointment when she sees it’s … not … you …’ And Mary’s gentle father had taken his wife’s head in his hands and knocked it hard back against the front door, three times, echoing her words.

  There was another week without school after Christmas during which Stella went away to London. Matthew and Mary did jigsaw puzzles by the fire in the mornings and went over to the Chapel in the afternoons. Mary loved the paper on which he drew his plans, the big squares filled with smaller and fainter squares. Matthew would use a Swiss Army knife to whittle his pencil to a fine, long tip. Then he would adjust his right-angled rulers and fill a blank sheet with rooms, doors, roofs and windows. It was freezing in the Chapel, so Matthew brought the paraffin heaters from home and Mary, who was still too cold to keep still but didn’t want to bother him, would scamper between the heaters and his desk, where she would stop to consider his progress and ask to borrow a word: ‘Axonometric, axonometric …’

  On the second day of Stella’s absence, Matthew put Mary in the car and drove into Camptown. For two hours, they walked up and down the High Street in the cold, going in and out of shops but not buying anything – no meat from the butcher’s, no bread from the baker’s, no buttons from the haberdasher’s, no chairs from the antique shop nor buckets from the ironmonger’s. Mary enjoyed it all but was puzzled. They walked back to the car but didn’t get in. Matthew turned to the big building next to which he had parked.

  ‘I must see a friend, sweetheart.’ He took her hand and they went into the building and through a number of heavy doors like the one at school only they swung open and shut so easily, sweeping the rubber floor with a rubber strip, making only the faintest noise, a suck and a sigh. They walked down a very long corridor with the quietest floor Mary had ever come across. There was another set of doors with three chairs to one side. Mary was more properly warm than she had been all winter.

  ‘You’d best wait here,’ said Matthew, without looking at his daughter. He was gone through the doors before she could respond.

  After that, they went to the hospital every day, without bothering with the shops first. Matthew brought her colouring books, even sweets. Mary hated his smell when he tucked her up at night. It was confusing; it made her think of an attic.

  One day, Mary got bored with swinging her legs in the corridor. She pushed open the doors and went in. She could see some beds and blue screens arranged like tents. She didn’t know where Matthew was but then she heard his voice coming from a small room at the end and he was singing a song she loved, ‘My very good friend the milkman says …’ Mary rushed in smiling to find him but couldn’t see him because he wasn’t there in the room, but there on the bed, curled up with a tiny old woman in his arms, his mouth against the bad egg of her head. She was as brown as a stain. She had tubes coming out of her arms and her bones stuck out everywhere. Her white nightgown was rucked up around the long bones of her thighs and a flat yellow breast lay nestled in the folds of its open bodice, beneath which Mary thought she could see her father’s hand. Machines on either side of the bed bleeped and whispered. Mary screamed.

  When they got home, Stella was there. Mary was sent to bed but kept seeing faces without teeth, eyes or hair in the dark. Stella held and rocked her, and tried to tell her stories but kept stopping. Mary felt as if she were in the grip of an earthquake. She pretended to be asleep so her mother would leave. Then she sent herself away, in her head, off to a cloud or a cave, where, nonetheless, some words reached her: ‘… sick … mother-love … lover …’

  Mary had never seen her mother cry, and could not have imagined the ferocity with which she did so now, remembering that winter. She was sitting on the edge of Mary’s bed, as upright as ever, staring out of Mary’s window. She didn’t look at her daughter who, even if she wasn’t sleeping, could not be reached. Stella knew Mary wouldn’t hear what she said, but she was talking for her own sake. ‘You saw … heard … things and the trouble is now you know and I don’t know, do I really? I know he took you to see her. I expect she liked you. She must have done, Matthew’s only child …’ Her body shook violently, as she sobbed but made no sound. ‘Poor Tom, now he’s come back and the trouble is he’s found you. Matthew’s gone and now that damned family want you, too … his “angel” is what Christie says he’s calling you, as if you can make everything alright for him. I told Christie, I said, That girl can’t see beyond the end of her nose! How’s she going to find a drowned house! Wasn’t it demolished, anyway?’

  On this point, Stella was uncertain. She had always thought of the reservoir as a concrete bowl beneath which everything had been flattened or removed. ‘But tell me, tell me again about Daddy and Iris. You don’t have to keep their secrets now they’ve both gone and I want to … help you, don’t you miss him? Don’t you want to talk to me about that?’

  Around three a.m., the time that day began again, ahead of itself with birdsong in the blue light, Mary woke from a dream of happiness. She was smiling and her face was wet, and as she opened her eyes, she felt her dre
am-self disappearing with whatever had happened or been said, and she waited for the dream to come back to her but wasn’t able to remember anything about it.

  Less than twelve hours after Mary had written her number on Daniel’s arm, she was woken by the ringing of the phone. She flailed around for her glasses only to find them, as she often did, by almost treading on them as she got up. She could hear Stella’s voice and thought she had answered, but the phone kept ringing. Mary was about to run downstairs when she heard another voice, a man’s, and stopped herself. She was still in last night’s clothes. She tugged her t-shirt over her head but it caught on her glasses so she had to pull it back, take off her glasses and start again. She pulled off her trousers and pants, and put her glasses back on as she opened the wardrobe. Then she realised that while Stella was still talking, the phone had stopped.

  There she was in the wardrobe mirror, as pale and bony as everyone said, with heavy hair that was no particular colour, and that tipped her head forward like the failed balancing act of her wide eyes and narrow chin. She took off her glasses and moved right up to the mirror to scrutinise her face: the circles beneath her eyes made darker by a grainy rim of eye-liner; open pores across her nose and cheeks as if her skin couldn’t get enough air; a ragged flush on her face and neck; her dark mouth swollen and cracked. I am so obvious, she thought, then breathed hard on her reflection and went to have a bath.

  Stella was knocking on the door as soon as she had locked it. ‘Mary? I left you my water. It’s still warm.’

  Since the shortage had been announced, people were encouraged to conserve what water they could. The shallow bath Stella had left her had a cloudy sheen and around the edge was a bubbly, creamy scum. The basin was also half full. As quietly as she could, Mary ran a trickle of cold water into a glass, rubbed a dry flannel against the soap and, dipping its corner in the glass, washed herself inch by inch.

  ‘Good morning, Mary Mystery!’ Lucas greeted her without taking his mouth from the rim of his tea cup so the tea spilt over his lips, staining the white stubble on his chin. Mary smiled but squeezed herself past the other side of the table.

  ‘More tea?’ She collected the pot from the table. ‘Any toast?’

  Lucas winced and shook his head. ‘I wouldn’t impose.’ He smoothed the front of his battered raincoat, which was too small and had no buttons, and under which he appeared to be wearing nothing. He adjusted the string he used as a belt and pushed his hand into a pocket. Just as Mary got to the kitchen, he added, ‘I have an egg … if you wouldn’t mind.’ It was strange to see something so fragile emerge from his filthy coat, in his swollen, arthritic hand.

  She took the egg from him and went into the kitchen where her mother already had not only the kettle but a small pan of water on the boil. Mary put the egg in to cook and after a couple of minutes went back to Lucas. ‘And would you like a drop more tea with your egg?’ He gave a small nod. ‘And, while you’re at it, what about a little toast on the side?’

  As they sat down to breakfast together, Lucas took a bite of his heavily buttered toast and mumbled something through his ill-fitting dentures about property.

  ‘What was that?’ Mary asked out of politeness more than curiosity.

  ‘I’ve got property.’ Lucas had lived for twenty-five years in a shed. ‘A caravan.’

  ‘You’re moving into a caravan?’

  ‘Not moving in. I sold it.’

  ‘Which caravan?’

  ‘Mrs Eley, see. She came over and said as how I could live in that caravan she has in her orchard, as how she wanted to put it to good use. To think of it as my home.’

  ‘But you don’t want to live there?’

  ‘I’ve got my shed but I wasn’t ungrateful. I met this bloke in the pub who came down and had a look at it, and made me an offer on the spot.’

  Stella had come in from the kitchen now and explained for him. ‘Lucas was confused. Mrs Eley was offering him the caravan to live in, not to keep.’

  Lucas scooped out the remains of his egg with his fingers, slurped his tea, and gave Mary a sidelong smile. ‘She changed her mind, is all. Now, if you’ll excuse me.’ He heaved himself up, and made his way to the downstairs toilet which he used noisily. Then he left through the front door, without saying goodbye. Lucas’s shed was a short distance across the fields behind the house and he liked to visit that way, coming in through the back-garden gate.

  Stella pulled on her rubber gloves and went to clean up after him. She came back, shaking her head. ‘They’re trying to ban him from the Arms again. He celebrated his so-called sale last night and upset a few of the new customers. I’ve got his shirt and trousers here in the wash.’

  ‘Not with my stuff?’ Mary couldn’t help herself. She didn’t use the downstairs toilet these days, either. Stella frowned and Mary felt worse, so she continued. ‘Well, good for him, getting one over on Violet Eley.’ Mary had never liked that woman, and had thought for years that her name was ‘Eely’ and that it suited her sharp face and wriggling voice. ‘I mean, shouldn’t he be in a council house or something?’

  ‘He’d only try and sell that, too.’

  ‘Like his medals?’

  ‘The medals were really his.’

  ‘I’m off to the Post Office, before it shuts,’ Mary pulled on her boots.

  ‘Don’t forget the Fête this afternoon. I’ll need quite a lot of help getting everything over from the shop to the church fields.’ The phone started ringing again and Mary went to answer it but Stella grabbed her arm. ‘It’s been going all morning. Wrong number.’

  Ray Cornice would have closed up by the time Mary reached the Post Office, as it was a minute after half past twelve, only he was busy helping Alf Kettle fill out a fishing permit and couldn’t get to the door. In exasperation, he had lifted the counter window as high as it would go and had pushed his arms through to point out the words on the form. ‘Start date doesn’t mean today’s date but the date you want it to start.’

  While Alf Kettle chose his date and wrote it in, Ray slipped out from behind the counter and took the door off the latch, closed it firmly and let down the blind. It was then that Mary realised that the person waiting in front of her and behind Alf Kettle, was Tom Hepple. He hadn’t turned round as she came in, or as Ray closed the door. She couldn’t leave now without Tom hearing her, so she waited.

  The Post Office was just the small front room of the Cornices’ cottage. Behind the door was a rack of stationery, arranged in brown cardboard boxes: white and manila envelopes, half a dozen aerograms, parcel paper, biros, blotting paper, carbon paper, pencils, sharpeners, bottles and cartridges of ink, sellotape, pots of glue, rubber bands, scissors and balls of string. Although a small supermarket had recently opened in the village, the Post Office still sold some ‘dry goods’. Ray Cornice was running down his stocks but he still displayed a few bags of flour, tins of peas, mushrooms, molasses and custard powder, Bovril, tomato ketchup and HP Sauce. On the bottom shelf were worming tablets, flea powder, starch and bleach. The L-shaped counter was divided between the Post Office behind a window, and the shop. This last part was kept clear except for a pair of scales. Behind it were piles of magazines, boxes of cigarettes and jars of sweets. There was also toothpaste, shoe polish and hair oil and if Ray Cornice couldn’t find what you were looking for on the shelves, he would go back to the kitchen and ask his wife Joan, and if they had what you wanted in the house, they would sell it to you. Stella once brought home a newspaper to find the crossword half done.

  Nothing was labelled, displayed or priced; you had to ask or guess. As a child, Mary would point at one or other of the jars in the dusty gloom and ask for a quarter or two eighths, and then be astonished when she got outside at the brightness of her sweets, the acid yellow of lemon sherbets and the glossy orange-red of aniseed twists. It had been the same when Stella made blancmange – the pale granules poured from the sachet into hot milk that thickened and turned so pink, that Mary used to call it ‘cartoon p
udding’.

  Ray Cornice stamped the form and showed Alf where to sign it. ‘That’ll be seventy-five pence.’

  ‘What’s that then when it’s at home?’

  ‘Fifteen shillings.’

  Alf pulled some coins out of his pocket. ‘Five new pence in a shilling, right?’

  ‘Right.’

  ‘Five times fifteen …’ He picked up the pen attached to the counter by a string and began scribbling on the blotting pad. ‘Seventy-five pence.’ He pulled a handful of coins out of his trouser pocket then put them back again, took out his wallet instead and gave Ray a pound note.

  Ray gave him his change. ‘There’s five bob.’ Alf tipped his hat and left, with Mary trying to stay hidden by him as he passed, even though Tom didn’t turn round. Ray pulled down the window. ‘What can I do for you, Tom?’

  There was a brief conversation that Mary barely heard as she concentrated on staying still and making no noise. Eventually, a page was torn, a book was stamped and notes were counted and folded. Loose change chinked as it hit the counter, coin by coin. When Ray Cornice stopped counting, Mary turned away and leant into the shelves. She pretended to be looking for something but, though the Post Office was so small that Tom had to brush past her back as he left, its gloom discouraged anyone from looking round them. He did not appear to have noticed her.

  Mary was shaking as she put her savings book on the counter. ‘I want to take some out, Mr Cornice, please, five pounds.’

  He frowned as he flicked through the pages. ‘You know your signature’s nothing like …’ Mary blushed. She had opened this account five years ago, and the signature at the front of the book was all round loops; the dots over the ‘i’s were circles. More recently, she’d been trying to copy her father’s italics and had come up with a rather shaky, spiky new version of her name.