‘It’s almost full, anyway. I’ll go out the back and get you a new one. In case you want to use it elsewhere.’ She was about to thank him but he had disappeared. When he came back, he was carrying a new blue book and a sheaf of tattered letters, held together with a rubber band. He checked her balance and printed it carefully on the first page of her new book, where she signed her new signature. He counted out five one-pound notes, slipped them inside the book and handed it to her beneath the window. As she turned to go, he came round the other end of the counter. ‘There’s something else,’ he said and held out the letters.
Mary was confused. ‘Who are they for?’ Perhaps he wanted her to deliver them.
Ray Cornice was inscrutable. ‘I’ve been meaning to … these had to be opened see, returned to sender and seeing as how you’re …’
Mary looked at the first letter. It was addressed to ‘Iris Hepple, Back House, Ingfield Dip, near Allnorthover.’ The stamp was in old money. Mary pulled the envelope out and turned it over. It had been slit open and then resealed with tape, Mr Cornice’s official Post Office tape, Mary supposed.
Not wanting to think about what they said or who they were from, Mary wondered instead how Ray Cornice had come to keep them, remembering how many times she had seen him empty the postbox built into the wall outside, so as to have a sack ready when the van came by.
‘Not delivered?’ Mary wasn’t brave enough to ask her question more directly.
Ray folded his arms, as if to stop Mary handing the letters back. ‘Look at the postmarks.’ The letters were dated several months apart in the year when Iris Hepple had first been dead.
‘What am I to –?’ Mary hesitated. Ray Cornice had taken her into some sort of confidence and then seemed to want to hand it over, entire and unexplained.
‘Take them back.’ Ray stepped round her to clear the greetings cards from the carousel in the window. She stayed there, not knowing what to do, as he went into the back and returned with a basket of damp laundry. ‘It’s past closing,’ he muttered, his mouth full of clothes pegs. She stuffed the letters in her bag and slipped out, shutting the door on Ray pegging his socks up to dry on the carousel.
The phone was ringing again when Mary got home and this time she answered it.
‘Mary George?’
She recognised his voice and the way he said her name, with a heavy formality. She put the phone down and then, for a moment, felt frightened and ashamed. He was ill. He might only want to ask her something. The phone rang again and although she couldn’t stop herself from picking it up, she still couldn’t speak and so put it down once more. The fourth time, she replied, ‘She’s not here.’
‘Mary George?’
‘Not here.’
There was a silence in which Mary stopped herself saying Sorry or Would you like to leave a message? but Tom Hepple had put the phone down. It didn’t ring again.
Half an hour later, Stella came in with her arms full of boxes. ‘Good job you left the door open,’ she was saying as she put them down. ‘In fact, I could do with a hand … Mary?’ Mary was crouched on the floor by the telephone, her hands over her ears.
‘He rang again, didn’t he.’ Stella sat down beside her, not quite touching her. Mim came to lie down on Mary’s other side. The dog leant against her, then settled on the floor with her head beneath one paw. Stella looked at them both: ‘See no evil, hear no evil!’ She laughed, then covered her mouth. She could not think what to say next.
It was Mary who began: ‘When he tried before, what did you say?’
‘That you were out, which was true, and then the next time that you couldn’t help him, and then, after a while, I went down to the Arms and got Christie.’
‘Is that why he was here when I got back last night?’
‘Yes. Look,’ Stella was stroking Mary’s hair out of her eyes. ‘I know you must be scared but he’s not going to hurt you. Christie explained that they’ve been to see Dr Clough and Tom’s back on his medication and so he should calm down soon. Christie’s his only family and is very good to him. He’s done up the Chapel for when he’s well enough to live alone.’
‘He’s staying in the village?’
‘He doesn’t know anywhere else.’
‘What about London, can’t he go back there?’
‘He only went there to get away.’
‘Why does he want me?’
‘He doesn’t want you in particular. He wants to be at home.’ Stella hated the blandness in her voice but she was sincere. ‘He’s fixed on you because you were there and then, because you’re your father’s daughter.’
‘But Dad was only …’ Mary felt her mother’s body stiffen. ‘I mean, the reservoir was coming anyway, wasn’t it? Mrs Hepple, she knew that.’
‘There was compensation.’
Mary stood up. ‘I don’t want to hear it.’
Stella made herself leave it. ‘Tom can’t have the house back but he needs to be made to feel at home.’
‘This village doesn’t feel like a home.’ Mary thought of Allnorthover as a starting point, somewhere she was gradually leaving, each journey getting longer and further away.
‘Not to us, no.’ Stella remembered arriving twenty years ago with Matthew. Everything they owned had fitted into the back of his Mini. Many of their London art-school friends were heading for the country and Stella, who had lived in the city all her life, had been delighted that they didn’t have to land somewhere as strangers. Matthew came from a real place and could take her back there. They even had the cottage that Matthew lived in as a child with his father, Joe. His mother, Elizabeth, had died giving birth to him so, like Mary, Matthew was an only child. Joe had been one of the Allnorthover Georges, not quite a First Family but rooted thereabouts for several generations. He had worked on Factory Farm back in the days of the Belgian Farmer, whose real name no one could now remember. The Belgian was the one who’d decided to turn Tye Farm into a factory. He’d designed the barns and the chicken crates to go inside them, the feed and water dispensers, as well as the tracks between sheds on which he ran a small locomotive transporting birds and food, sawdust and eggs around the farm. He had a vision of scale and efficiency twenty years before anyone else in the region began to take such notions on. Joseph George was his engineer and manager. It was he who had turned the Belgian’s sketches into machines. Joe George had been gifted and careful, but since the death of Elizabeth, he had also been brokenhearted. Matthew crept around him, tried to cheer and comfort him, but could not get near. In the end, they lived in a silence that hardened to the point where no one could stand to be in a room with them. Iris Hepple had been Elizabeth’s best friend. She took Matthew just for a few months at first, to give Joe a rest.
Matthew made the cottage his first project, building an extension that added a bathroom upstairs and enlarged the kitchen. He insisted that both these rooms should have huge windows at the back, which he smashed out of the brick. He liked to design windows like these, without panes, so that they looked like empty space. As a child, Mary had found them troubling. To her, they left the cottage unfinished, opened and not closed up again. She liked the old diamond-leaded windows at the front. Stella had hung all the windows, front and back, with muslin curtains, and those at the back of the house were usually kept closed. Matthew painted the interior walls and beams white, stripped and bleached the floorboards and doors, and sank spotlights into the ceilings. Stella bought big pieces of pine furniture with roughly hewn edges and straight lines, and sold off the George family’s furniture and ornaments to the dealer who had bought that of her parents. Only Elizabeth’s little fireside armchair and old sofa remained, both of which were so frugally stuffed and tightly upholstered that they felt no softer than Stella’s wood.
The cottage stood out in a row that was otherwise uniform: net curtains, floral wallpaper and dark furniture bulging under low ceilings. It didn’t fit and it didn’t work. Painting it white created no more space and brought in no more lig
ht. Its bareness and blankness made it as dull as the dusty, overstuffed places next door. The chains of bells and wind-chimes Stella hung indoors and out, only added to the icy atmosphere. The large windows at the back faced north and let in hard slabs of sun at odd times of day.
Stella had made a garden that was both exotic and austere. She had dug out the rose bushes, burned the privet topiaries that Joe had clipped into shape, and planted the front with lavender, rosemary, mint, lemon verbena, parsley and thyme. Each small bed was surrounded by stones she had collected from beaches, which had the kind of shapes and colours that would have looked enticing before they dried. Honeysuckle was the only decorative element, and it had grown so heavily across the garden fence that the smell of its flowers at this time of year was unbreathably intense. The back garden was filled with rows of beans, potatoes, tomatoes, onions, raspberry canes and currant bushes. Three fruit trees, apple, pear and plum, were pinioned to the walls. In addition, Stella grew artichokes, garlic and salad leaves in a cloche. She also picked up the quinces that fell unwanted from May Hepple’s tree next door. To keep the garden going through the drought, Stella recycled all the water she could. There were buckets in the bathroom for the collection of soapy water. The out-pipe of her twin-tub washing machine was used to siphon the grey, sudsy waste water into another. Vegetable water, old tea, everything went in. The garden was surviving, but that year, it would produce little.
There was nowhere to sit or lie down in the garden but Stella didn’t mind because there was the Green. Mary hated this. Nobody sat on the Green. Most people didn’t even walk across it. But Stella would lay out a picnic and insist they eat out there in full view. Recently, she had taken to working out there too, setting up her sewing machine or her pots of glue and paint under an enormous vivid pink, fringed parasol. When she did this, Mary stayed indoors or left by the back gate.
Mary turned to her mother and curled against her. ‘But I can’t help him, can I? And then he’ll be cross and want to hurt me.’
‘Look.’ Stella pulled Mary away. ‘I know it’s troubling but he is sick not criminal and he doesn’t hate you. On the contrary he thinks you’re some kind of angel who will guide him home. What did Christie say he said? Something about settling things, putting things in place. Anyway, it was just chance – but for it to have been you of all people he saw there, that was hard.’
‘Hard? For who?’
‘For whom.’ Stella stood up and began moving the boxes onto the table. She was pulling little ceramic cottages out of tissue-paper bundles, dusting them and wrapping them up again. ‘You’ve always been good at finding things, haven’t you?’
‘Only other people’s.’ Mary got up and began to repack the little cottages. They bulged like loaves, and were crudely painted but identical. Each cottage had two windows, thrown together out of untidy black lines; their doors were lopsided green rectangles with a row of rapidly dotted red flowers on either side; their roofs weren’t the crusty colour of thatch but a deep terracotta and their custardy whitewash looked sunstruck or dirty instead of like sugar or chalk. This was what made them foreign. The people who came into Stella’s shop had just begun to go on holidays abroad and were reminded of Spain or the South of France and bought them because they were like the houses they hadn’t stayed in or been into, but had photographed.
Sophie Hepple came home at midday to find Tom asleep in an armchair. She hadn’t wanted to wake him as he looked so relaxed, so expressionless. She shook him gently and he opened his eyes, but took some time to sit up.
When he came into the kitchen, she laughed, ‘You look as if you’ve left part of yourself asleep!’ and he smiled vaguely. She gave him two of the blue-and-brown capsules, an extra dose to keep him happy. ‘Not to worry. All this rest’s doing you good.’
Yes, thought Tom, but didn’t say it. He was finding, day by day, that there was less he needed to try to say and a great deal he could keep to himself. His thoughts were slow and contained. He liked this dead sleep, going to bed early and waking early, back in his niece June’s room where the people in the posters still smiled at him but from so far away, he smiled back. June had gone to stay with Aunt May till Tom was ready to try the Chapel again. Sophie had extended the boys’ stay with her mother.
Tom liked being able to sit still and feel nothing of his body. He seldom heard his heart, and his arms and legs felt at ease and worked silently and well. When he went outside, things were bright and defined. The world was well made, as he was, efficient and in place. The great restless pain was still there, in his bones, but it didn’t push through him. There was a softening between him and the world, like wool. It was also there between him and his thoughts, but that was good because as he relaxed, his mind gathered energy and speed. There were things to be done, but now he knew there was time, there were days and weeks left of this dry summer. He could wait and think things through, go carefully and not find himself losing sight of the house again because he did not think to look away from the sun.
‘Tom? The phone was off the hook. Did you want to make a call?’ Sophie was so kind, so gentle. He shook his head and felt a pleasant sifting.
‘I wanted to tell the girl I hadn’t meant to …’ Sophie took his hand. He stared down at her plump brown fingers and her shiny pink nails that looked as if they should hurt but didn’t, just brushed against his wrist causing another sifting but this time in a rush through his body, like iron filings drawn to a pole. She was so shiny. Her hair was bleached almost silver and her dress was so white. It smelt of almonds, or was that her hair, her skin?
‘Don’t you worry. Christie had a word.’
Tom felt good, like a good man. He raised his other hand and, as lightly as he could manage, stroked Sophie’s cheek. ‘You are kind.’ She smiled and smiled, and didn’t so much let go of his hand as straighten it out and turn it back on him.
‘Mrs George?’ Father Barclay appeared in the hallway. ‘The door was open.’ He rocked on his heels, nodding and wringing his hands, as if trying to keep warm. His crinkly, receding hair was damp, and his broad farmer’s face fell heavily in jowls that spilled over his collar. ‘I’m portering this morning – ha, ha! – gathering up the goods, not to mention the good people – ha, ha!’ He clapped his hands, then kept them clasped. ‘Ready for the off?’ He picked up one of the boxes while Stella, murmuring her thanks, carried out the other. She would walk along later with Mary.
The back of Father Barclay’s Triumph was already filled with Edna and Harry Lacey, who were as broad and as lame as each other. Edna carried a large handbag that contained all their medication – the pills for arthritis, high blood pressure, indigestion and something to help them sleep. Mrs Eley, driven and bird-like, took exactly the same prescriptions. She knew, because once Betty Burgess had given her the wrong lot and only when she’d finished them and brought the jars back to be refilled, had she read the labels. The Laceys were laden with a box of jam and two bags of knitted toys. The boot of Father Barclay’s car was propped open to accommodate the legs of a tripod, one of which was broken, and a bag of rusty golf clubs. Beneath them was crammed other bric-a-brac donated for the White Elephant stall Father Barclay ran each year: an ornate gilt-framed mirror that had lost most of its silver; a soup tureen, a set of bone-handled fish-knives, a lace shawl, a fox fur – things that had been in families for generations, gathering mildew, moths and dust, flaking and cracking and falling apart in the homes of those who were too old and tired to look after them, or who had no room or no children who’d want them. These were the things that, ten years ago, Stella had sold in her shop, the things that belonged with the heavy furniture nobody wanted any more either.
Father Barclay set Stella’s boxes on the front seat and set off for the church fields. The Summer Fête was held alternately in the grounds of the two village churches. This year, it was the turn of the Catholic church which lay out along Furze Lane, set back on lawns overshadowed by elms. The church itself was plain and functional, but
was lent mystery by its gloomy isolation. Its small cemetery was fenced with iron railings and surrounded by tall poplars.
Father Barclay drove carefully, so as not to upset or break anything but also so as not to miss anyone else who might need a lift. As he turned off the High Street he saw Tom Hepple, walking in the middle of the road in slow, small, regular steps like someone carrying a warning flag, leading a funeral procession or painting a line. Father Barclay stopped the car and wound down his window. ‘I say, Tom, do you need a lift to the Fête?’
Tom kept walking, but turned his head to glance at the full car. ‘How?’ he asked, then added, shaking his head, ‘I’m going to help.’ Sophie had set off earlier, and Christie had been gone all morning. When the house was empty, he had felt like a walk and then thought he could be of use. The walk had been going fine but now, having stopped, he felt very tired and in a flash, Father Barclay had flitted round to the passenger side, guided Tom into the seat and placed the boxes on his lap. The Laceys muttered good morning and then Edna leant forward and put her hand heavily on Tom’s shoulder.
‘You’re back then. That’d have pleased your mother.’
She nudged her husband who opened and shut his mouth a few times before reaching his hand over to pat Tom too, saying ‘You’re alright, my boy.’ Tom felt stifled and small, and sleepier than ever but somehow wonderfully cosy, too.
Further on, they passed Violet Eley backing out of her drive in her Morris Minor. When she saw Father Barclay, she tooted, and he stopped once more and got out. Two trays of pink meringues filled with cream, decorated with glacé cherries and arranged on paper frills were brought from her car to his and passed back to the Laceys who held them carefully raised for the rest of the journey. Tom could smell the cream turning sour already.
Mary George of Allnorthover Page 8