Mary George of Allnorthover

by Lavinia Greenlaw

  He said nothing about his work, so it was from May that Stella heard he was involved in the plans for the reservoir. Everybody in the village knew, but no one said anything to him directly. They watched Tom in the Dip, Christie in his new home and Matthew up at the Chapel. They heard the shouting and they knew that official letters were being sent. They waited.

  That summer, Stella and Mary went to London. Mary liked being fussed over by Stella’s friends, and being taken on rides on buses and in a boat down the Thames. She was pleased to see her mother looking lively and happy again. Matthew came to get them in the orange Mini. Mary curled up in the back trying not to think about the lorries overtaking them, so much larger, heavier and faster that they could roll over their little car and not even notice. It was getting dark when Matthew pulled onto the hard shoulder.

  ‘I need a piss,’ he said as he got out. Mary was startled by his language. When Stella got out as well, Mary clambered into the front and followed her. They had stopped beside some open wasteland, riddled with paths and patches of scrub. When Matthew reached the first clump of bushes he didn’t stop. He was walking away again and when Mary realised this, she began to follow, calling ‘Daddy, wait! Daddy, stop!’ as she stumbled through tufts of grass, brambles and rabbit holes. She was falling and hurting herself over and over, and nobody stopped her. The last time she picked herself up, it had got much darker and she couldn’t see Matthew any more. She looked back and could only just make out Stella in the deepening haze. Mary made her way back to the car. Stella turned towards the traffic and Mary waited beside her and then screamed as her mother threw herself forward into the road.

  A police car swerved, braked and pulled in. Two officers got out, fixing the straps of their helmets under their chins. ‘You could have got hurt there, missis,’ one began, shaking his head, as his fingers fiddled with the helmet’s buckle.

  Stella was finding it hard to speak, her voice veering from high to low, loud to quiet, rushing and catching. ‘I had to stop you, had to, my, her father, walked away, over there, you see he didn’t want her house but now he’s got it and he won’t let go because she, can you find him, can you find him now, can you take us home?’

  Mary remembered making herself stay very still because Stella was so frightened, something she had never seen before. She also remembered having to wait a long time. Clouds pressed down through the dark. The policemen wrote in their notebooks and talked on a radio. A van came, and another man got out with two big dogs that had chains round their necks attached to thick leather leads. The man was wearing shiny black gloves and was waving a dazzling torch around. The dogs terrified Mary. Then she realised they were going to hunt her father and she wanted to stop them, but everything was beyond her now. She couldn’t remember anything else Stella said or did, or how they got home.

  Three days later, Matthew reappeared when she was doing a puzzle on the table. He helped her for a while and then said that there were some pieces missing and there was no point in trying to put any more of it together. Mary got upset, saying they were there, just mixed up with her other puzzles. He left again but she looked through and found them, and put the completed picture out for Matthew to see. He didn’t come back that night, at least not before Stella had made her go to bed. When she came down in the morning, Stella had cleared the puzzle away.

  After that, Matthew spent most nights at the Chapel. Once or twice Mary woke to hear someone coming in or out of the front door, but it was Stella, and Mary was shaken to realise that she had been left alone in the house as she slept. Stella said little to Mary these days. She played with her, fed her and got her to school, but Mary knew she was miles away.

  By Hallowe’en, the reservoir was becoming visible. Huts were being replaced by brick buildings; huge machinery, pipes and pumps, were installed; there were channels and tunnels, ridges of concrete and the growing raw wall of the dam. All of this would disappear again behind trees, under earth and water, like secrets.

  The Compulsory Purchase Orders arrived. All the explanations and warnings that had preceded them did nothing to reduce the shock. Bill Bennett out at Goose Farm received his and had a stroke the next day. He was in Camptown General, the whole left side of his body crumpled and limp, and whatever anyone remembered of a man who’d been drunk and furious and purple-faced half his life, they nonetheless put the blame on the Order. Over the winter, others in the Dip moved out although the money they were offered was not enough for a new home. Some moved into Allnorthover and others to Ingfield, absorbed by the neighbours they had in any case known for years, but adrift in their new council-houses packed together on new roads. Some liked these houses because they were light, warm and neat, but others felt exposed. Living in the Dip had meant a view from the window of grass and trees that rose up above your house to the faraway sky.

  Apart from Bill Bennett, the people of the Dip were shy and dutiful. They didn’t question the judgement of authority nor could they imagine what it meant for their homes and land. The idea of the Mund and the Soley turning and pouring a torrent of black and white water into the Dip was so apocalyptic as to be unreal. They moved out, not quite realising that they were doing so.

  Mary had got used to the idea that Matthew was at the Chapel. She had one parent at a time now – her mother in the mornings and at night, and her father, when he appeared at the school gate or took her off somewhere at the weekend. On Guy Fawkes Night, he turned up in a new car and drove her to Camptown Park for the fireworks. When he took her home, he said goodnight on the doorstep and drove away so fast that she worried that he would shoot past the Chapel and have to turn back. It was then that Stella explained that he had bought a house on the coast. He came once a week, always collecting her from somewhere outside the village, till the reservoir was finished and then he joined an architects’ practice in London. He refused to speak to Stella, to answer her letters or return her calls. Sometimes he remembered Christmas and Mary’s birthday, and sometimes he didn’t. There were times when he phoned her every other day and then weeks of silence. A postcard would arrive from a foreign city.

  One morning, Stella took Mary to Mortimer Tye station and as the new commuter train from the coast sped through, she held the child high in the air. They were close to the tracks and Mary felt the noise of the train through her body, a deep vibration, as if her blood were separating. Stella looked at Mary’s terrified face, running with tears, and held her tightly, saying ‘Sorry, sorry, I wish, I can’t, I only wanted, sorry, sorry.’ They both cried on the drive back to Allnorthover and Stella kept Mary off school. The next day, they were back at the station again and Mary pulled away when she heard the train coming, but Stella held on to her hand. She had a large yellow umbrella with her this time and as the train came through, she opened and raised it above them both. ‘He can’t not see us now.’

  The yellow umbrella haunted Mary’s dreams. They had gone back to the station every week, all through that winter. She tried to remember seeing her father’s face in a train window once, but decided she must have imagined it. Later, she heard her parents argue about money and the cottage and Matthew going away, but neither of them ever mentioned those vigils. For years, the umbrella was kept under the bench in the hall and Mary measured herself against it. When she grew old enough to be able to go out alone after dark, and to carry it and not be afraid, she took it over to the Common where a bonfire was being built for another Guy Fawkes Night, and pushed it deep into the pile of broken chairs and bits of fence, boxes and branches. It had disappeared that night in the spitting yellow flames.

  The heatwave continued into August and held the village under constant pressure. The boredom of the summer holidays was concentrated by the monotony of equally hot days and nights. The dark made little difference to children who could not settle in their airless rooms and then could not rest in the bright day but ran around, red-eyed and hectic. Games became more dangerous. The little ones chose higher trees to climb and higher walls to jump from. Th
ey built fires in the woods because the grass and twigs were so dry, they crackled underfoot and fire suggested itself. They moved on from salting slugs to throwing stones at chickens and tying up cats. The older ones were bored with the bus stop, the sign post, and the trips into Camptown with no money, where they just walked up and down the precinct and the High Street, and then got the bus back home again. The boys took their air rifles into the fields and shot rabbits that were riddled with myxomatosis and dying anyway, or tiny birds that made a pathetic handful of feather and bone. Dissatisfied, they took pot shots at farmers and walkers, and someone lost an eye. The girls tried on each other’s clothes and lay around stewing in bedrooms with shut curtains, reading each other’s diaries in the pink light, plucking eyebrows, borrowing each other’s make up, and betraying secrets.

  Kevin Lacey was twenty and was four years into his printing apprenticeship. He had saved up enough now to buy his own car. He would cram in five of his friends and speed off down the lanes, thrilled to be so suddenly and easily away from the village. They would find a pub that would serve them, and maybe meet some girls and squeeze them into the car too, then set off again, Kevin half-drunk and a bit scared but proud and ready to go faster than anyone would expect him to, skidding round corners, racing blind across junctions, making the girls sitting on boys’ laps in the back lurch, shriek and beg him to slow down. The best bit was the straight stretch that ran all along one side of the reservoir. You could get some speed up there.

  If they made it to Camptown, there would be gaggles of other teenagers as bored, drunk and ready for anything as they were. Some of the boys waved broken bottles around. They might come across hippies or arty student types, whom they mocked. Skinheads, Teds and bikers they stayed away from.

  Mary slept most mornings and was awake much of the night. She read books and listened to records. In the evening, she watched television if she could get decent reception on their battered old black-and-white portable set. The aerial had been broken a long time ago, and replaced with an extruded wire coat-hanger. Allnorthover was on the cusp of broadcasting regions, so London-based channels clashed with local eastern ones. Sometimes Mary could get both, sometimes neither.

  Or she met Billy. The less there was to do, the more they focused their attention. They could spend hours lying on their backs in the church fields, ‘watching the earth revolve’. When the evening finally grew dim, swallows circled and dived to feed on the gnats. Billy and Mary would count them and compete to be the first to spot a bat, then the lowest flying bat. The bats and swallows might briefly be in the air together, the bats slewing past at abrupt angles, bouncing around in their sonar net; the birds repeating and repeating their circles. Billy and Mary could use up more time later, arguing over whether it was better to be a bat or a swallow, the merits of flight, and who had the most insect bites. Then there would be bursts of childish energy during which they would take over Billy’s mother’s big kitchen and experiment, trying to make things they’d never known to be made at home such as coconut ice and butterscotch sauce. They would eat these sticky messes in front of the television and if it was too early in the day for there to be anything on, they would watch the testcard and argue over which one of them looked more like the girl beaming out from its centre. Billy usually won, on the basis of his long blonde hair.

  Daniel had sent another card, this time from Italy. He was on holiday there with his family and wouldn’t be back for three weeks. Mary did not see or hear from Clara, although something made her half expect to. Stella was at the shop all day, selling pine spice-shelves, bunches of dried flowers and jars of salt to people on their way home from the sea.

  Perhaps because she was so bored, Mary got out the bundle of letters Ray Cornice had given her. She hadn’t forgotten about them but had rather been avoiding them. She was not surprised, now, that just holding them made her hands shake. Mary recognised the type-face. It was that of the machine she had in her room now. The one that had been downstairs in Matthew’s study. The characters were clenched and narrow with slab serifs, and printed themselves unevenly apart, making the words look unsettled on the page. The ‘i’ was slightly raised and the ‘s’ clogged almost into an ‘o’.

  There were five letters. They had been slit open along one side (Ray Cornice or some Post Office official looking for a return address?) and then taped shut, like a trap opened and re-set without being sprung. Mary held the first one up to the light. The envelope was thick manila. She turned the letter round and round, over and over, wanting to solve the mystery without having to open it.

  If Matthew had written to Iris after her death, what would he have had to say? Would it be about her sons? The house? The reservoir? There was so much that Mary couldn’t remember. How the Dip had been before, was beyond her. Her memory reached back and then stopped. Her father’s leaving was a muddle of fragments and she could only just remember Tom Hepple and when he had left, but the idea of him being forced out of his home made her think of a snail being torn from its shell, a tortoise prised open, something vulnerable and raw.

  These letters might help. Her father might have told Iris why he had left, why he sold the house and made Tom go too. ‘Just ask him,’ Billy had said, exasperated, when Mary had tried to explain. ‘Ask anyone.’ But it wasn’t as simple as that. There were other things Mary remembered like the hospital visits and seeing her father lying on the bed with that withered old woman in his arms. How could she ask him?

  As Mary considered all this, her feelings about the letters began to change. They were not bombs about to go off but something precious and secret, something of her father’s that she had been trusted with. She would show her father that she was grown up, sensitive and discreet. She took the letters downstairs and put them in a larger envelope, sealed it without adding a note, addressed it to him and took it straight to the Post Office, where Ray Cornice weighed it, tore the right stamps out of his book, took her money, and said nothing except ‘Good morning’ and ‘Thank you’.

  On Saturdays, Mary helped Stella in the shop. It never went well. Stella told Mary to dust everything and then hovered close by, worrying that she would knock a pot over or break a handle or scratch a veneer. If the phone rang while she was serving someone, she would let Mary answer it, then interrupt and instruct Mary on what to say until nobody could follow the conversation, and then she’d grab the phone and leave Mary to deal with the customer who smiled pityingly at her.

  One day May Hepple came into the shop and asked Mary if she could help out in her hairdressing salon. Mary was surprised. Stella had talked several people in the village into giving her work and it had always gone wrong. She tried babysitting for the Baskin triplets but could not keep up with their trail of clothes, food and toys. Melanie Baskin had quizzed her on her secondhand clothes, thinking that she was forced to wear them by Stella. She felt shabby in the Baskins’ new home. She’d tried a paper round but got in a muddle and delivered the papers at random which led to refreshing arguments between neighbours who’d undergone equal and opposite changes of view.

  May was looking for someone to help out over the summer as Tracey, the shampoo girl, had gone off to a pop festival and had not come back. She thought Mary was quiet enough but not as hopelessly shy as June. She was bright and spoke well. Mary agreed to start on the following Monday.

  May Hepple’s salon was tucked in between the newsagent’s and the King’s Head, in the Square. It wasn’t a square with buildings round the outside and space in the middle, but the opposite. The buildings backed onto one another, facing four ways, skirted by the High Street and three lanes. The Head was where the gentry drank, old and new. Its whitewashed walls were three feet thick. May’s salon huddled alongside, a converted cottage with a sign in art-nouveau script, ‘Marie’s’, and a woman’s pert profile in silhouette. May had refused to let her girls put a sign in the window saying ‘Unisex’.

  The first morning, Mary was to sweep up and make tea. The salon was the two front ro
oms of the cottage knocked together. Its pink paint was flaking in the damp corners of the low ceiling and peeling from the beams. The linoleum floor’s geometric design of thin lines of lavender, cream and beige was now puddled with grey. The little windows were covered with frothy net curtains and their deep sills were lined with framed photographs of royalty and hairdressing models cut from magazines. The reception desk was a compact wicker affair, behind which May positioned herself like the captain of a cramped and rickety vessel. She had everything in reach – the appointments book, the telephone, the saucer of boiled sweets, the jar of pencils, the hand mirror and the clothes brush. The tight silk rosebuds in a pewter vase were so old, they had yellowed like teeth. She thought of her salon as a feminine and relaxing place but unlike Mary, who’d never been inside before, May had long stopped noticing the noise and the smell. Three vast hairdryers droned over customers trying to enjoy themselves and read magazines while their heads ached from the drag of curlers, the boring in their ears and the scorching air. The atmosphere had a sour-sweet, eggy tang made up of ammonia from dyeing and perming solutions, and sugary droplets of hairspray. Underneath this, was more than a hint of decay. The cottage was damp, the customers mostly geriatric, the plumbing leaked. Everyone who worked there wore perfume, talc and deodorant, and took little breathfreshening pills, thickening the air with synthetic scents of lily of the valley, parma violet, lilac and mint.