Mary George of Allnorthover

by Lavinia Greenlaw

  ‘Add them up! I tell you, it’ll be 82! You’ll see!’ Hunched with anticipation, his fists clenched and his eyes tight shut to keep the number in his head, Tom heard the click of the tiles being gathered up. Nobody spoke. Chairs were scraped back, and then the door was opened.

  Lucas touched him on the arm, ‘Says you’re right, Tom. But there’s an end to the evening and folks are too tired to be doing sums.’

  Tom opened his eyes to find himself alone in the room. John Kettle, the landlord, was ringing the bell in the Saloon and chanting mournfully, ‘Time please!’ Billy’s elder sister Valerie came through to the Public to clear glasses and was startled to see Tom still there, staring at nothing.

  ‘You look lost!’ She bit her lip. She knew who he was.

  Tom brought his gaze to rest on her – a delicate elf. She lifted the side of the bar and walked towards him. She held out her hands and touched his face, and the numbers and names and places subsided. ‘I’m Valerie Eyre. You wouldn’t remember me but I remember you. I’ll walk you back, if you like.’ She returned to the bar and Tom stared at the space she left behind her, wondering how he had summoned this sprite who looked as if she might break between his hands but also as if she were strong enough to hold anything she wanted to. Eyre: a family of slender, ethereal children came to mind. Could she really remember?

  Valerie returned with a heavy bag that she hoisted onto one shoulder. ‘John will lock up.’ She took Tom’s arm and he followed her carefully.

  By the time they reached the Chapel, ten minutes at most, Tom dreaded her leaving him. He offered to walk her home too, but she laughed and shook her head. She looked intently at him and said, ‘You need to rest. I’ll come in the morning, if I may?’ Then she slipped away.

  Tom’s heart was beginning to patter and thud. The voices of those in the bar raced round his head, overlapping and running into one another, beginning in the middle of an anecdote and ending on half a word. He got himself to the outhouse and, as his stomach contracted and released, vomited up in great hawking acid splashes, the beer with which the villagers had welcomed him.

  Tom laid his head on the stone floor, too weak now to think of numbers or to hold back what lay beneath them. He could not tell if he was dreaming or remembering but what he could not keep from his mind was Iris’s last winter, his last at home, the snow and the talk of water.

  On that Christmas morning, Iris Hepple’s sister, May, got Father Barclay to drive her into Camptown. On the way, she asked him to stop at Ingfield Dip, to ‘pick up the boys’. May knew that Tom hadn’t left the house for years and wouldn’t now, even though his mother was dying, and that Christie, for god knows what reason, simply refused to go. But May had an idea that if she turned up with the priest, not asking but simply expecting them to come along, perhaps they would. Father Barclay’s tinny Triumph skittered along the icy track and shook to a halt outside the house just as Christie was coming out of the door.

  Father Barclay leapt out, pulled his seat forward and gestured Christie into the back. ‘Well timed, Christie! Season’s greetings! Jump in before you freeze!’

  Christie muttered something and then caught sight of May. Father Barclay smiled and rocked, banging his arms against his sides and shaking his head at the weather.

  Tom appeared behind Christie in the doorway. The priest knew him well. He and Tom had had many discussions about the mind, about good and evil. Tom brought him visions of heaven and hell that were so abstract and intense that Father Barclay had done all he could to remove religious significance from the world for him.

  ‘Tom,’ he tried now. ‘Come with me to see your mother today. The roads are empty, no one else will be in town. All’s indoors.’

  Christie moved forward as Tom slipped away back into the house. ‘He does what he can, Father.’

  ‘Ah.’ Father Barclay clapped his gloved hands and rubbed them together. His sigh plumed in the cold air. He shook his head, shrugged, and opened and shut his mouth with a pop.

  Christie looked up at the sky and down at the ground. ‘No, I won’t. Our mother’s not to think of us, now. She’s to think of herself.’

  ‘Her days must be long,’ the priest began, folding his arms.

  ‘I can’t think she knows one day from the next any more. Nor a son from a stranger.’

  May had had enough. She punched the horn and the priest, still smiling, waved elaborately and that got back into the car.

  At the hospital, May wanted Iris to know that she’d tried to bring her sons more than she wanted her not to know that they wouldn’t come. With some difficulty, she held Iris’s hand. Those tiny bones and that papery skin – it was like a reptile’s wing.

  Iris Hepple felt herself always moving now, travelling through tunnel after tunnel of pain: long, curving, dark holes she was hurled into and had to force her way through as they pressed inwards, and then, when she thought she could not bear it and they would crush her, she was out. Then another one began. Even when she had had her injection, she could not rest. The tunnels still came, although they were light and cool for a time. She did not know it was him, but when Matthew held her, she felt still. Someone was here with her now. She knew because she could feel warmth on her hand and a voice saying, ‘They won’t leave the house.’

  At this, Iris opened her eyes and said, quite firmly, ‘Will … will …’ Then her eyes closed again and she turned her head from side to side, as if trying to shake off the pain. ‘Sing to me,’ she whispered. May got up and left.

  Iris Hepple died three days into the New Year, when no one was with her. Christie went to the mortuary and the undertaker’s. He spoke to Father Barclay about the service and to May about the tea. Tom held Christie’s hand as they threw earth onto her coffin. Tom stayed in the graveyard rather than going to the tea.

  The day was extraordinarily clear. The snow was packed hard underfoot. People walked in careful steps that left no mark. There was no wind, just a high-pressure stillness in which sound carried far. A single bell was rung before the service and after the burial, and each toll resounded so powerfully that some felt its metal travel through them. Most of the village came to the funeral. Matthew, Stella and Mary George were among them.

  A week later, Christie came to the Chapel. ‘You’ve to come to Hepworth’s for the reading of the will, tomorrow at three.’ He turned to go almost before finishing his sentence but, in any case, Matthew had not looked up from his plans.

  The next evening, Mary found it hard to eat her supper. Her mother was watching her father. What did she think he might do? He wouldn’t speak or look up from his plate. Mary got nervous and Stella shouted at her for humming, only Mary hadn’t known she was doing it. It occurred to Mary that something had got stuck and that it might be helped if she got out of the way. She took herself off to bed but the house was so small, she could not help but hear.

  ‘The house?’ Her mother’s voice flared. A low sound came from her father. Stella continued, ‘Their home …’ More low sound then an explosion, her mother’s jagged laugh and a higher, sharper voice than she had heard from her before. ‘But, think of Tom!’

  They were in the hall now, and the front door had been opened. Mary crept to the head of the stairs. She could see her father. He was walking out of the door and as he did so, he said, ‘It means nothing. It’s going anyway.’

  What Tom remembered or dreamt of this was very little. He saw his mother as he’d last seen her, when they’d still tried to manage her at home with the tubes, the nappies and bibs, and the district nurse and Dr Burgess coming in and out. He’d tried to help but couldn’t get it right and Matthew was always round, like he lived with them again, and Iris would be quiet then, lean her head against his and whisper. Now Tom knew that she must have been telling Matthew of her plans, although Matthew never said a word, just stroked her hand, nodded and cooed in that odd way of his, a noise that could have been a mating call or a warning, but that Iris responded to as if it were a lullaby.

&n
bsp; Christie couldn’t stand to see it, but Tom made himself stay and watch. It was a lesson to him. When she could still shout, his mother had shouted, not exactly at him, but about him, ‘… useless … broken … stuck …’ And before she’d had the drugs all the time, there had been moments of nakedness, somewhere between consciousness and sleep, when she had gone on about his being so pointlessly afraid, saying he had to go out into the world, Christie too, not ‘stay and suck’.

  ‘Not like lover boy!’ Christie had retorted once and she had changed colour and withered somehow, right there in front of them. After that she rarely spoke, except in a cool moment after one of Doctor B’s injections when she had giggled and slurred out a promise that if she hadn’t been sick, she would have gone and got some dynamite and blown them out of the house herself. Sophie, who was bitter at having spent the first eight years of her married life living with Christie’s family, had laughed right along with her, ‘Good for you, Iris, good for you!’

  Everything changed when they took her in. Tom had known to stay in the house, that that was where he should be, so she’d know where he was and not worry. It was no time to be leaving, however much good she thought it would do him. Christie had gone to the hospital at first, but he’d come home more angry each time. After his last visit, he’d cleared out Iris’s room for June, saying it was ridiculous that he and Sophie were sharing a bedroom with a seven-year-old child, and her six months gone with twins. When Tom had got upset, Christie shouted that the house was going anyway.

  The first talk Tom heard of water was from St John Newling, the local MP. He had come to Allnorthover to open the Brownies’ Christmas Bazaar, a year before. Somehow, he had threaded his speech with talk of water, of thirsty fields and parched machinery and taps running dry. There had been two consecutive dry summers during which restrictions had been imposed. St John Newling invoked them, making water into the element of freedom, money and the future. He warned against the wrong kind of rain.

  From then on, Tom noticed talk of water everywhere. In the local paper, Parish Councillors, farmers and manufacturers gave warnings. They talked of the land as a thin skin, but they built and dug and grew more each year. St John Newling had a field of soft fruit under plastic and had sold off several acres outside Camptown for a sports complex, including a swimming pool. There was a new industrial estate and the Council was building houses on the edge of the village. Tom became agitated. From where would they get their water?

  Ingfield Dip was a natural basin in which there were three houses, a tenant farm and a church; fifteen people at most. Nearby, two rivers drew close together, the Mund and the Soley. The rivers were known locally as the Black and White Waters, as the Mund was stained, deep and slow, and the Soley was shallow and clattered over flint boulders.

  There was passing talk of a reservoir, but much of it was contradictory or unbelievable. Tom heard of a plan to run a pipe from the Black Water into an underground holding tank on the Newling Estate, from where the water would be sold in times of drought. Somebody insisted that the White Water was getting shallower each year and that it was already being diverted. There was talk in the pub of filling the Dip but also of every inhabitant being made a millionaire, so nobody believed it. As the talk thickened Tom began to worry more, but everyone was too busy to bother about it. Iris was sick, and Christie had a young family and his business to take care of.

  Perhaps much had gone on that he hadn’t noticed that winter. It was white and quiet. The snow-filled Dip was a bowl, so sealed and smooth that Tom could see how the Mund and the Soley might pour into it and how it wouldn’t spill a drop. After Iris’s funeral, he had walked down to the bottom of the Dip, to the little church that was unused now, except for Father Barclay’s monthly service. As it grew dark, the pressure in the atmosphere lifted and it began to snow again. Tom had lain down and looked up into the thick fall, not feeling cold or even wet, except on his face where the snowflakes caught and melted, gently, without any sting. He forced his eyes to stay open and stared up into the sky, feeling himself buried a long way down. When he had gone back to the house, his hands and face were burning; inside he was frozen.

  What happened next? Christie was reading papers and letters, and walking to the phone box. Men had turned up with measuring tapes and quadrants, sinking rods into the ground and scooping earth into glass test tubes that they corked. Christie didn’t explain anything to Tom, but sometimes he gave him a look, as if to say he must know what was happening really and that he, Christie, was only trying to keep the worry from him.

  Around the time of the thaw, when the constant, ticking drip of melting ice from under the trees and eaves and window sills made Tom feel as if he were living under a siege of clocks, Christie had said it. ‘We’ve to move.’

  ‘But you’ve refused it, haven’t you?’

  ‘Refused what?’

  ‘The compensation.’

  Christie had laughed. ‘We’ll get none.’

  ‘We don’t want it, do we, anyway? We’ve said from the beginning of this talk, we’ll not be made to go!’ The subject had not been discussed between them.

  ‘I’d not leave for them to fill the Dip with water …’ Christie began.

  Tom grasped him by the shoulders. ‘We’ll stay, won’t we?’

  Christie would not meet his eyes. ‘We, Sophie and me, and June, we’re renting one of the houses in that new close off Back Lane.’

  ‘Then I’ll stay.’

  ‘You can’t. It’s not ours. Ma left it to Matthew George.’

  Tom’s mind, racing into several possible futures all of which involved staying put, and perhaps some great battle with the authorities, could not absorb this piece of news and so leapt over it. ‘Then it’s still in the family! Matthew’s safe hands!’

  ‘He’s not blood.’ Christie shook him off. ‘As far as I’m concerned, this is your home. You stay if you want to. I’ll not help them but I will help you, as far as I can. Any compensation that’s going will be Matthew’s now, even though he’s only owned the house for five minutes. He may have grown up with us but he’s not blood and he and Ma, well you saw how that was. Just don’t expect much when there’s money in it.’

  When Mary could wait no longer, she pushed back her chair and stood up. Without looking at Daniel, she made for the pool steps and climbed out. Returning to the cooler air, she did not hear when someone called after her. She stepped through an open French window and into a large, lit, empty room. The house was quiet. She pulled off Stella’s shoes but still tipped forwards and knew, regretfully, that she was drunk.

  She made her way up the stairs and along the dark corridor, to where she remembered there to be a bathroom, feeling her way slowly past the still half-unpacked boxes. When she reached the door, the light was on. She knocked and it opened. It wasn’t the bathroom. A boy of about ten, with red curly hair, and wearing just a pyjama top, held out his hand. ‘Freddie,’ he said. She glanced past him. His room was painted black. There were luminous stars on the ceiling and a large bolt of lightning glowed on one wall. ‘Would you like to see my rain dance?’

  Mary shook his hand. ‘Mary. No thanks, just the bathroom.’ Looking crestfallen, Freddie nodded to the right and shut his door.

  She blinked out her lenses and after a couple of fumbles, got them into their case. Coming back through the house was no more difficult now that she couldn’t see. At the bottom of the stairs, she made out a light and a silhouette. Assuming she was unseen, Mary moved towards the room, which was the kitchen. She squinted at the woman, who she realised must be Clara’s mother. Mary moved towards her, getting near enough to make her out properly. She didn’t realise that this meant she had entered the room and was standing only a few feet away from Francesca Clough, who wondered what was wrong with this frowning, stumbling girl with screwed-up eyes.

  She waited the few moments it took for Mary to collect herself and smile. Francesca nodded and smiled back, but continued laying a long table for breakfast, w
ith what looked like a dozen places. There were at least six boxes of cereal, a huge bowl of fruit, and several pots of jam and honey. Behind her was a heap of dirty saucepans, bowls, knives and spoons that must have been used in the preparation of Clara’s dinner. She finished, looked up and smiled at Mary who saw she was beautiful and tired. She was wearing a long, loose dark dress that looked old and intricately stitched. Her head was framed by a heavy coil of grey, waving hair and her eyes were ringed with dark circles.

  Mary faltered. ‘Thank you … for having me, for having us,’ she managed.

  Francesca shrugged and smiled again. ‘Our pleasure.’ Her voice was accented and light. She turned away again but Mary lingered, feeling powerfully drawn to this woman’s calm. Mary wanted to stay, to be fed by her, not by Stella or Clara, and not to have to deal with empty swimming pools and edible flowers. Francesca gestured outside. ‘Please.’

  Daniel was standing on the gravel path and as Mary started towards the pool, he stopped her. ‘Let’s not.’ So they set off across the grass, away into the darkness, at a lazy pace as if taking a stroll, only they were solemn and tensely aware of one another. As they reached a row of low, knotty trees, Clara’s scornful laughter followed them. Mary leaned into the deeper shadows of the tangled branches and broad leaves.

  ‘You want to be gone,’ Daniel said. It was not a question. To look purposeful, Mary reached back and was surprised to find the trees were not as deep as they seemed, but were espaliered, nailed and spread against a wall like the thin, submitting trees her mother cultivated. These looked as if they’d grown undisturbed for a hundred years. Mary almost said something and then thought Daniel would have noticed or known this already. She raised her arm up under the leaves and found a fruit so full and soft and thin-skinned, that it almost burst in her hand. She twisted it off its stem and held it out to Daniel, who smiled and shrugged. Did he not know it either? Mary ran her nail along the purple skin and pulled it back. She held the fruit close to her eyes, and studied the red flesh. A fig – something she’d only known dried and chewily sweet. Fresh, it was so beautiful, it had to be far more delicious. She broke it in half and held one piece out to Daniel. He watched her eat and then ate too. The fig was tasteless, a mouthful of hair and seed. Daniel turned and spat, making Mary blush both for his lack of grace and the disappointment.