Mary George of Allnorthover

by Lavinia Greenlaw

  They walked quickly away, still following the wall, and came to a toppling brick archway overgrown with heavy-headed roses. They squeezed through and stumbled among long, dry grass. Mary stubbed her bare toes on a stone and picked it up. It was a fallen apple. Thick branches from close-planted apple trees merged above them, making a low canopy beneath which they crouched. They stopped and held one another tightly and blindly, then moved apart.

  Mary began to walk backwards, ‘How far can you see me?’

  She was no more than six feet from Daniel when he said, ‘You’re gone.’

  She ran and crashed into his arms as he let himself fall backwards, pulling her over into the grass.

  For a long time Mary lay still on top of him, feeling her pressure against Daniel’s body take shape. She kept her head buried in his neck as he stroked her legs, each stroke ending higher, lifting her dress inch by inch. When her dress was round her waist, he grasped her and sat up, pulling her legs round him. Daniel kissed her hard, pushing into her mouth so her head was forced back. She felt herself about to fall again, when he caught hold of her dress and lifted it over her head. Mary had never felt the air on her skin like this. She didn’t think about being almost naked in somebody’s garden, or even of this boy, almost a stranger still, with her breasts against him. It was too unreal, this sense of freedom that intensified to pleasure as Daniel kissed her, as if his mouth were opening her and letting in light.

  He lifted her onto her feet and, kneeling, pulled down her pants. His breath against her thigh created such a hard and fast surge of desire that her body kicked. He stroked her once, very lightly, and she was wet. Daniel murmured something, almost a word, but not quite. Mary was about to ask what he had said when she realised that she couldn’t feel him near her anymore. She waited and when nothing happened, opened her eyes. She looked around and could just make out Daniel doubled over on the grass, as if in pain. Mary picked up her dress and held it against her.

  ‘I’m sorry, did I –?’ she began. All she had known before had been uncertain: fumblings and directives that overwhelmed any feeling she might have had with bashfulness and a notion of sex as comically lonely. She was shocked now at how her body had taken over, at its obviousness and force. I am too much, she thought.

  Daniel eventually spoke. ‘Not you, me. I couldn’t … stop.’

  For a moment Mary didn’t understand what he meant, and then she did and wanted to say that it didn’t matter, but didn’t know how to. She put on her dress and sat down beside him. He turned away and curled up tightly on his side.

  Three hours later it was dawn, and Mary and Daniel woke together in the grass. They stood up and Daniel reached out a hand that Mary was about to lean her head into, but he was pulling grass from her hair. She straightened her dress, wiped her mouth and squinted towards the house.

  ‘Do you want to go in?’ Daniel asked.

  ‘Oh no. I’ll go home.’ She didn’t want Clara to see her so dishevelled.

  They walked round the edge of the lawn, negotiating the heaps of machinery and skirting as much of the gravel drive as they could.

  When they reached the road, Mary turned to say goodbye, but Daniel said, ‘I’ll walk you.’

  They carried on, apart, both made shy by their dirt, sweat and sour breath. The clean air and blue light made them feel even more shabby. Neither spoke. Then, Daniel stopped and almost shouted. ‘My god! What’s that?’

  Mary screwed up her eyes, trying to focus the fractured fuzzy outlines of the trees and buildings ahead.

  Daniel was walking faster. ‘Come on, I think it’s a fire!’

  She stumbled after him, wincing as her bare feet caught on sharp things she couldn’t see to avoid, peering and craning, What fire, where? Then she realised he was making for the Chapel and that its windows were full of white light.

  As her panic rose, Daniel slowed down. ‘Oh, I see.’ They were almost at the building now and as it became clear to Mary, the light shrank and consolidated itself into candle flame. At the same moment, the last darkness slipped from the sky, and the flames were reduced to pale flickers.

  The door was open and Daniel was going in. Mary stayed behind him, anxious that the place should give no clue as to who lived there, who had once worked there, who she was. Daniel walked from one window to the other, blowing out the candles that had almost, in any case, burnt themselves down. Mary trod in something warm and liquid that oozed between her toes. She gave a small blurted scream, then peered down and realised she had trodden in molten wax, and that there were streams of wax running along the window sills and down the walls, dripping onto the floor, pooling and congealing. As she drew her foot away, a sticky wad of paper came with it. She pulled it off her skin so fast that some tore.

  Daniel hadn’t noticed. ‘What is this place?’

  ‘A workshop, I think.’ Mary was shaking. What if he was upstairs? What if he heard them and came down? ‘I want to get home.’

  She moved towards the door but Daniel was fascinated. ‘Why the candles? They look like they belong in a church.’

  ‘A chapel.’ Mary couldn’t stand it any more. She turned and began to walk quickly on into the village.

  Daniel ran up behind her. ‘Sorry. It gave you the creeps, didn’t it.’ His smile was so wide, his body so relaxed, she realised he’d sensed nothing.

  ‘Yes. Something like that.’ She tried to laugh but her throat was so constricted that it sounded more like a whimper. He took her hand, but she stopped and stood in front of him. ‘I’ll be fine from here. You go back to Clara’s or you’ll miss your lift.’ For a moment he looked confused, even angry, then he smiled again, as widely and easily as before, kissed Mary crisply on the mouth and walked away.

  She tried to watch him, but his outline soon disintegrated, as if there were several of him, walking a little to the left and right of each other, in black suits fading to grey and fair hair dissolving completely.

  Mary went to bed but woke again when the church bells began to ring in the looping, cajoling but light-hearted peals that Father Barclay favoured. The sun was high and strong again. After Stella had left for Mass, Mary ran herself a shallow bath and was startled by the grainy bruise spreading out from one nipple and the delicate graze on her shoulder. The orchard, the swimming pool, Daniel even, seemed part of an overheated dream.

  She was drinking tea and still dreaming when Billy arrived. He was carrying two motorcycle helmets. ‘Sundays are shit,’ he said, flopping down in the armchair. ‘Let’s go for a ride. I’ve even got a sidecar now.’ Mary scribbled a note to her mother, found her newly mended glasses, put her keys and money and a book in her army bag, and followed him out onto the Green.

  Mary was used to the motorbike. It was Billy’s father’s old Norton, black and squat. The sidecar, she’d not seen before. It was wooden, varnished and shaped like a clog. ‘Billy, I am not riding around in a shoe!’

  Billy looked hurt. ‘But it’s beautiful! I saw it in Fred Spence’s yard and couldn’t resist it!’

  Mary considered its absurd little windscreen and flapping plastic hood. ‘I’m not surprised!’ But she was bored and wanted to get out of the village, so she took the helmet he offered her and climbed in.

  As Billy kickstarted the bike, it gave such an ancient splutter that Mim, who was panting and dozing in a scrap of shade by the front door, leapt up and howled, thinking a bus was about to arrive. Mary got out of the sidecar to reassure her and to shut her in the house. They set off along the High Street, the exhaust belching black smoke, the engine struggling and the throttle raging, the noisiest, dirtiest thing in a quiet, clean village closed down for a Sunday morning.

  As they rode out through the Verges, Mary was getting used to the noise and enjoying the breeze. When Billy turned off towards the reservoir, she tried to shout to him, but he couldn’t hear her. He slowed down at the end of the lane and bumped gently along the track, stopping under the pines. They pulled off their helmets and Billy saw how nervous M
ary was.

  ‘I saw him this morning, going into Christie’s. He didn’t look well.’ Billy shook out his long hair. ‘So he’s not going to be here. This is our place, remember?’

  She wanted to agree so she followed him through the Other Gate and out along the rim of the water, to the tree. Billy lay on the bough, leaned back against the tree’s trunk and pulled out a tobacco pouch. He rolled a joint, lit it and passed it down to Mary who had stayed on the ground, crouched in the tree’s shadow. They smoked in silence, and Mary began to enjoy the peace, the open sky and brilliant water.

  ‘Why do we never swim here, Billy?’

  ‘It’s too deep.’

  ‘Do you think it’s true?’

  Billy took so long to respond, she thought he must have fallen asleep. ‘If you kept going and believed yourself able to …’ he began.

  ‘I meant the house, not me!’ She interrupted him. ‘Is the house still there? I mean, didn’t they just knock everything down? The church and Goose Farm and the houses?’

  ‘You know they say that on a stormy night you can hear the church bells.’

  ‘Nonsense!’ Mary was angry now. ‘They wouldn’t have left all those buildings in a place they wanted to fill with water!’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘They’d … get in the way?’

  Billy snorted. ‘Of what? The fish?’ And the vision of pike swimming in and out of windows and through garden gates made them both laugh and then they couldn’t stop.

  When the laughter finally subsided, they sat for a long time just looking out over the water, neither wanting the other to know they were looking for clues. Again and again, Mary traced a line out along the bough onto the water but there was no change of colour, no shadow or ripple. As soon as her eye let go of the tree, she couldn’t make sense of what she was looking at.

  Billy and Mary drove on into Camptown, looking for something to eat and drink, something to do. The High Street was empty except for the detritus of Saturday night – crumpled cans, spilt takeaways, pools of vomit, the odd shoe. The only people around walked gingerly through all this, mostly still in their going-out clothes, fragile and awkward and eager to get home. Nobody stopped to look in shop windows at jewellery or washing machines or houses for sale. The precinct was locked away behind an iron grille. The corner shop that would sell them beer had sold its last Sunday paper and closed and the one in the bus station hadn’t opened. Billy took them back out of town, to the Malibu Motel. Outside the Amber Grill, they counted their money and went in.

  ‘Look what the cat dragged in!’ Julie Lacey grinned as she marched up to their table. She stroked Billy’s head. ‘A natural blonde and silky smooth! I’m so jealous, Bill!’ He wriggled away but pouted and blew her a kiss, which made them all laugh. Julie leaned down to the table and whispered, ‘Look, have what the fuck you want. Barry’s not around. I’ll just take a quid.’

  So Billy and Mary, hungry after smoking the dope, passed the rest of the afternoon eating burgers in fluffy white rolls stuffed with sliced dill pickles, bacon, tomato sauce and melting squares of cheese, and handfuls of skinny, sodden chips. They drank pink, yellow and brown milk shakes that all tasted the same and came piled with rosettes of soapy cream topped with hundreds and thousands and a paper parasol. When they left, achingly full, they walked out into the glare of the sun, arm in arm, each holding a tiny parasol over the other’s head.

  When they reached the bike, Mary said, ‘Will you wait? I want to phone my Dad.’ She walked off down the sliproad to the phone box by the roundabout rather than go back inside and risk having to explain herself to Julie.

  Mary reversed the charges. Matthew agreed to pay and they were connected. ‘Mary, sweetheart, what’s happened?’

  ‘Nothing. I just …’ She thought of him in his house by the sea. Could she really hear waves and gulls? He did sound far away.

  ‘Well, it’s lovely to hear from you. I didn’t know …’ Mary waited but he didn’t finish the sentence. When had they last met? Easter? She had gone down to the coast, and he had taken her to the Royal Hotel and given her a glass of champagne and smoked salmon sandwiches, and had insisted that she try an oyster.

  ‘Can I see you?’ She found herself shaking, almost crying, and Matthew must have heard something of this in her voice, because his voice changed, becoming more definite and serious.

  ‘Whenever you want, darling.’

  ‘Now?’

  ‘Now?’

  ‘Now. I’m not at home, you know. I’m outside the Malibu Motel.’

  ‘Mary, I –’

  It rose up in her. ‘Come now, Daddy. Come now!’ she sobbed and couldn’t hear what he said next. She put the phone down.

  Billy saw her leave the phone box and revved up the bike but when Mary reached him, she explained she wasn’t coming back now, that she was waiting for her father. She knew it would take an hour for him to drive there, so she went into the Amber Grill’s toilets, washed her face and tried to smooth her hair. She felt sick and excited, and sorry that she was wearing this ripped t-shirt and tatty skirt. There was time for a cigarette, and time to sit in the shade of the back of the building, keeping the sliproad in sight. After an hour, Mary walked to the roundabout and then she walked back. Two cars came up behind her but she wouldn’t turn round. For another hour, she walked back and forth. She sat in the grass and wouldn’t look at the road directly or at her watch. He would see her. He would call to her.

  At last a car slowed. It wasn’t Matthew but Stella, who left her rusty orange Mini in the middle of the road with the door open and strode across the grass to Mary. ‘That bastard!’ she spat.

  When Stella was angry with Matthew, Mary felt she was angry with her. So when Stella threw herself down on the ground and held her hard, Mary felt as though she were being attacked. ‘Get off, Mum!’ Mary pulled herself free.

  ‘He’s not coming.’

  ‘He said he was.’

  ‘He’s not.’

  ‘He’s not coming?’

  ‘A misunderstanding, he said. He has a deadline, he said, so couldn’t possibly come. He said you’d probably realise and turn up on the bus but I wasn’t going to leave you waiting around!’

  Mary still felt Stella was angry with her and she was also cross with herself. She went over the conversation with her father. He hadn’t actually said he’d come; she hadn’t really listened. She was stupid. It was her fault. He would have come if he could have, but he couldn’t and she should have let him say so.

  Stella helped her up and they walked back to the car. As they drove home, Mary felt the silliness of the little car and how cramped it made them. She was incredibly tired.

  II

  It took several months for Matthew George to leave his family. He did it in stages. After he inherited the Hepples’ house, he spent longer days away on site visits or at work in the Chapel. Christie continued to work with him and Tom continued to live in the Dip. Letters came to the Chapel originally addressed to ‘The Occupier, Back House, Ingfield Dip’, which Tom had scribbled on and redirected to ‘The Owner of’. After a while, Matthew opened them and filled in and returned the forms, and then they began to be addressed to him directly.

  At Easter, he took Mary and Stella away for a few days on the coast. Each afternoon they had walked along an endless exposed beach, and the more Mary delayed them by picking up a shell, or by getting sand in her shoe, the faster he hurried away. Mary watched him getting smaller and disappearing, something she found hard to believe when she thought of it later, as her eyes had grown so weak since then. On the first afternoon, Stella had hurried after him, calling out and pulling Mary along and snapping at her if she couldn’t keep up. The next day, when Matthew disappeared again, she had sat down and suggested they build a sandcastle with such intense enthusiasm that Mary took it as an order and obeyed. From then on, they separated from Matthew almost as soon as they reached the beach.

  When they returned home, everything that had gradually
been changing became suddenly different. Matthew didn’t unpack his suitcase but left it by the front door. There were times when he didn’t speak for days on end and then one evening he would start pacing around the room, picking things up and putting them down, running a finger along the mantelpiece, a windowsill or tabletop, walking into the kitchen and back, and when Stella was so agitated that she could do nothing but wait for him to start, he would begin. ‘What did you make me put those big windows in for?’

  ‘I didn’t, you …’

  Matthew stood back in outrage. ‘God, Stella, you are unbelievable! You insisted!’

  ‘I didn’t, it was your …’

  ‘Don’t quibble! Why do you do this? Why do you always blame other people for your decisions!’ This would go on for hours, with Matthew attacking Stella for the white walls, or the garden, or their coming back to live in the village in the first place. When he ran out of surroundings to complain about, he began on her. Why did she always look so miserable? He’d given her a home and she had her own business. Her hair was too long, too girlish for her age and who did she think she was wearing those pathetic ribbons and beads? Why did she always look at him like that? Like what? As if he’d caused her some terrible injury. Why was she so fucking indignant? She’d taken over his childhood home and was forcing him to find somewhere else. Otherwise, he’d have nowhere. She’d made him take the Hepple house. Want, want, want. Grab, grab, grab. Greedy, heaving cow. He had to go out, he couldn’t stand her fat, righteous face any more and when Mary came rushing downstairs, weeping and clinging to his legs, he pushed her away because he couldn’t stand her terror, either.