Mary George of Allnorthover

by Lavinia Greenlaw

  ‘A strange and lovely creature,’ Mary heard Daniel say again but softly, so perhaps not really as, once more, he disappeared quickly and easily out of sight.

  At the end of the first week of term, Mary received a note from her father. ‘Dear Mary, I will be in Camptown next Tuesday afternoon and was wondering if we could meet for tea after school? Say, 4.30 in C & L’s? If not poss, leave a message for me at home. Love, Daddy.’ She was so anxious and excited that she went for a walk, something she only did these days to get somewhere. It was early evening. As she got towards the end of Low Lane, she could see orderly plumes of smoke rising from the harvested fields where the farmers were burning stubble. Mary was drawn by the odd tameness of these fires, how the farmers decided on lines and the flames obeyed. The cropped straw glowed orange and charred black. There would be a glimmer of fire well into the night.

  Mary walked along a track to one side of a field where the fire was still high. The earthy autumnal smell of burning made her wish for cold. Then the wind turned sharply, almost at right angles, as if it had bounced off Temple Grove, and the smoke had Mary surrounded. She couldn’t breathe. A second later, it was blown back.

  Charlemeyne & Lere’s was Camptown’s snobby, dowdy and only department store. The tearoom was on the top, third, floor. The ground floor was crammed with departments that prided themselves on the variety of their stock and the expertise of their assistants: haberdashery, millinery, stationery, hosiery, jewellery and perfumery. Expert at judging customers, none of these slight men and formidable women bothered to offer Mary any help, and they prickled when she ran her hand absentmindedly along a shelf of ribbons, riffled a heap of vellum or stroked a jar of feathers. She scurried into the lift, pulled the concertina door shut and pressed the button. Chains clanked and cables sighed.

  On the third floor, Mary made her way through lingerie, electrical goods and soft furnishings, towards the corner roped off with swagged gold cord, where a counter was staffed by a waitress. There were ten tables covered in glassy beige cotton that passed for linen at a distance and fell in awkward folds to the floor. Peach-coloured napkins, starched and pressed into pleats, were fanned out in plastic clips. Each table held a laminated menu, a bowl of sugar lumps with tongs, and another filled with sachets of salad cream, mustard and tomato sauce.

  Mary could tell from the set of her father’s back that he was not happy and realised how much she’d been hoping for from this meeting.

  ‘God!’ He jumped, turned and quickly smiled. ‘You gave me a shock, creeping up on me like that!’ He looked well, though.

  ‘Sorry, Dad!’ She leant down and kissed his cheek. ‘I didn’t mean to. You looked like you didn’t want to be disturbed.’

  ‘Never mind, never mind.’ He waved a hand impatiently across the table. ‘Sit down, dear. What’ll you have? A milk shake? Would you like that?’

  The waitress loomed. Mary addressed her directly, ‘A cup of coffee, please.’

  ‘Filter or instant?’

  ‘Filter, please.’ It was what Matthew had just had brought to him. The water was still seeping through the grounds in the paper cushion in its plastic ring, into the cup.

  They looked at each other, and then around the empty room.

  ‘How’s school?’ He patted his jacket pockets and brought out a box of matches and a case. She waited for him to light his cigarillo, only to be overwhelmed by the familiarity of its smell.

  ‘It’s my last year.’

  ‘Is it now?’ He’d been caught out. ‘Of course it is!’

  Mary’s coffee arrived and dripped. It was weak, sour and lukewarm but she drank it religiously, in tiny mouthfuls. They talked about school (‘OK, you know, they’re piling it on, at least we can wear what we like, within reason’) and work (‘Red tape, preservation orders, international competitions’). Matthew leaned back and puffed. Mary was as impressed as ever by his air of authority, but she thought she saw his hands shake.

  ‘How’s your mother?’ he asked suddenly, his head veering closer.

  ‘OK, I think.’

  ‘Wary Mary!’ he chanted and, pleased with himself, relaxed again.

  She screwed up her eyes to stop the tears coming. Matthew was busy rummaging in his leather satchel. He had something in his hand but kept it by his side, grinned and shook his head. ‘You don’t have to protect her, sweetheart. After all, you clearly know now how … impossible she became back there for a while. It must have been a shock finding out like that and you were right to, how shall I put it, let me know, but if we are going to help her, you’ll have to be straight. It’s no betrayal, love.’

  Mary stared. ‘I don’t understand,’ she said.

  Matthew put an envelope on the table. It was addressed to him, in Mary’s writing – the package of letters to Iris Hepple.

  It took some time for Mary to make any kind of sense of it. ‘You mean they’re not from you?’

  Matthew’s face hardened and his hand flew into the air and just as quickly, fell again. ‘Did you seriously, for one moment, imagine they were?’

  ‘But I haven’t, I didn’t look …’ This was bad, all wrong, really wrong, and Mary couldn’t work out why.

  Matthew continued. ‘There’s so much you don’t know and, to be frank, that you don’t need to know, sweetie. Iris took me in and brought me up. I wasn’t going to be put off by a bit of blood, shit and vomit.’ Mary shuddered and her father smiled. ‘They couldn’t take it, you see. Couldn’t think of that kind of closeness as being anything other than … nor could they do the other right thing, and go and get on with their lives.’ Then, more to himself, ‘Hung around like watch dogs, terrified I’d – how did good old Father B put it? – “replace them in her heart”. Replace them in her house turned out to be more like it!’

  He laughed drily, ground out his cigarillo in the glass ashtray, looked at his watch and rose. ‘It’s nice to see you but I have to say, I am most disappointed.’ He turned to the waitress, gave her a charming smile which was met with a blank sneer, and left a pound note on the table before ruffling Mary’s hair a little too fiercely and hurrying out.

  Mary felt sick. She stuffed the envelope into her bag, ran out of the tearoom and straight into the ‘Powder Room’, where Dorothy Spence was sitting by the door arranging a shelf of air freshener and disinfectant beside a delicately flowered saucer in which she had placed a small card neatly printed with the words ‘Thank you’. Still sobbing, Mary rushed out back past her. Mrs Spence, unmade-up and unnoticed by Mary, regarded the swinging door. ‘Thank you.’ She was still rehearsing it. ‘Thank you.’

  Once the reservoir had been filled, the machinery driven away, the builders’ huts taken down, the signs put up and the fence completed, the villagers stopped coming to look. Those who had lived in the Dip kept away and later, those who had watched remembered it differently. No one recalled the roar and gush they had expected. ‘A great pipe, like a hose filling a pool for days on end, weeks even.’ ‘It was like a seeping, a slow leak, a muddy puddle getting a bit bigger every day.’ ‘So fast, you blinked and you missed it and then it seemed natural.’ ‘So slow, it seemed natural by the end.’ ‘It took a month’, ‘a year’, ‘ages’. ‘The buildings? That falling-down church and that farm stuck in the Middle Ages? Says it even had a moat! Fat lot of good that did it in the end!’ A delighted, strenuous wheeze.

  It was same with Matthew, his absence seeping and rising and finally levelling. ‘Didn’t he stay up at the Chapel after that wife of his got so difficult? The man had work in the city, on the coast. He has a place out there now, doesn’t he?’ ‘Matthew George the architect? Joe’s son. He grew up here. Doing very well for himself. Nice car. One child, a girl; looks nothing like either of them.’

  Tom Hepple’s departure was not a story that people wanted to be close to, let alone part of. Papers had changed hands and so, then, had the house. It wasn’t right, but it was the law. He had no right to stay, not any more and the place was going anyway. The
boy had no need to disappear completely. There was help close at hand, housing and the hospital, and family, plenty of that.

  Tom remembered the day Matthew finally came to tell him himself. Otherwise, he’d have never believed it. On the wish of his mother and the say of his oldest friend, his home slipped away, like Iris herself, not quite gone but out of reach. He’d felt his skin break then, an unbearable lack of edges. Nothing helped, only going and staying far away, in any opposite place that would have him. The police had traced him and told Christie which hospital he was in, but also that the doctors felt that, for now, he was best left alone. So for the next ten years that was what Christie had done, for Tom’s own good – left him alone. (The days and nights of it. The dreams and voices and determinations, the fearful hopes, the fears.)

  Stella was cutting out something at the table. Everything was laid neatly around her: large pointed and small rounded scissors, and pinking shears; the sewing machine that had belonged to her mother, so ancient it didn’t even have a treadle let alone a plug; a tin of needles, another of pins; tape, ribbon, stiffener and facing; buttons, a box of cotton reels and another of wool. To untidy Mary this looked like instruments laid out for an operation.

  There was safety in her mother’s preoccupation and right now, she wanted her mother. She offered to make them both a cup of tea and Stella, pleased and surprised, accepted. Mary laid it all out on a tray and poured milk from a bottle into a jug.

  ‘What are you making?’ Mary asked, as she poured the tea carefully through the strainer, for which she had thought to provide a saucer. Stella didn’t even do that when they had company.

  ‘A dress for Billy’s Dad.’

  Mary giggled. ‘They’ve roped you in for the Christmas panto again?’

  ‘You know our Violet …’

  ‘I’ve never dared call her Violet!’ Old Eely. ‘She looks down on us, Mum. Why help her out?’

  ‘I don’t mind. And it’s Morris I’m helping right now, isn’t it?’ She held up the voluminous pink dress to which she’d been adding a frill. ‘Just his colour, no?’

  Mary wanted to hug her. I love you, she thought, watching her mother sew and snip, making instant choices from everything laid out around her. Tonight, her mother’s face didn’t look plain. Her scarves and beads were softness on a body in which every last bone was strong. She’s made from girders, Mary thought gladly.

  ‘You’re back late,’ Stella remarked.

  ‘I met Dad. For coffee. He asked me to.’

  ‘Well, that was nice.’

  ‘Not really …’ (Wary Mary).

  ‘Oh, I’m sorry.’ Stella said it so diffidently that Mary found, for the first time, she wanted to tell her mother everything.

  ‘Oh, Mum. I did such a terrible thing. I didn’t mean to, I thought they were Dad’s, I’m sorry, I didn’t know. You’d every right …’

  Stella looked at her, baffled. ‘Slow down, love. What terrible thing?’

  ‘The letters. I got given them by Mr Cornice, to give back!’

  ‘What letters?’

  ‘Your letters! I thought they were Dad’s. I didn’t look, I mean I know letters are private and I thought they were Dad’s!’

  ‘What letters?’

  Mary pulled the envelope from her bag and handed it over. Stella studied the five identically typed addresses and the postmarks.

  ‘Where did you say you got these?’

  ‘Mr Cornice. He said they were to be given back to you.’

  ‘To me?’

  ‘Well, he said to be given back.’ Mary shook as she reminded herself of why she was doing this, not to hurt her mother as she had her father, just to say she knew and that it was alright.

  Stella picked one up. ‘Have you read them?’

  Mary shook her head and watched as Stella turned the letter over. It had been opened. ‘I didn’t look, really. I just sent them straight to Dad. I thought they were his.’

  Stella wasn’t listening. She read the page of dense type that Mary could only just make out through the translucent paper. ‘What does it say?’

  Stella crumpled the letter back into the envelope and snatched up the other four. ‘You thought I wrote that?’ Her face was mottled and she was breathing deeply.

  ‘Not me, Dad. He said –’

  ‘He said what?’

  Mary felt as if someone had hold of her and was turning her very quickly in one direction and then the other, back and forth. ‘He didn’t say, I mean he realised you must have –’

  ‘Must have what? Written this?’

  ‘Written what? Mum, I told you. I haven’t looked.’

  ‘Don’t give me that!’ Stella snapped. ‘You believed every word he said, didn’t you! That I would do something like that! What was the tea for? Felt sorry for your mad old Ma, did you?’

  Mary tried. ‘There’s nothing wrong with wanting to express your feelings, even to someone who’s dead.’

  ‘Well! What a wise little woman you’re growing up to be! I tell you what, listen to your father. He’ll teach you how to look after yourself!’

  ‘Mum. I’m not on his, anyone’s, side.’

  Stella wasn’t listening. ‘Why have you always behaved like some little ambassador? You’re not the United Nations, remember? You’re Airy Mary! Isn’t that what they called you at school? Not the girl who walks on water but the girl who walks into walls!’

  Mary was pleading, ‘Stop it now! Stop it now!’ but when her mother did stop, suddenly shocked by herself, Mary still couldn’t stand it. Next came the super-soft voice, the cooing, the outstretched arms, ‘I didn’t mean it, honey, I was just …’

  Stella came round and Mary moved away, and so they circled the table until Mary made a break for the door then changed her mind and turned, and for the first time in her life shouted at her mother, ‘Now do you see why I thought it was you?’ She made a grab for the letters but Stella got to them first.

  ‘If they’re not yours, you can’t keep them,’ Mary faltered.

  ‘You’ve grown quite a tongue, haven’t you?’ Stella slumped and looked exhausted. She turned away. ‘Just go to bed, why don’t you?’

  The Village Hall where the Harvest Festival Disco was to be held, was out along Low Lane. It was a flimsy building set on brick piers and squashed between a pitched roof and an excessive number of broad front steps. All the village halls Mary had been to looked like this. They must come as a kit, she thought, or arrive ready-made on the back of a long truck, the way houses did in America. The hall accommodated most village groups. It was used for jumble sales, fêtes, playgroups, coffee mornings and pensioners’ clubs. The Cubs and Brownies met there, as did the Parish Council and the Women’s Institute. It acted as classroom, church or shop, and the conversations that were held there about money, families and health, were an extension of those heard in Allnorthover’s surgery, pubs, kitchens and front rooms. The hall could be as dim as the Post Office or as brightly lit as the school. It adjusted itself to the formal murmur of councillors at their single long table as well as it did to the shrieks of toddlers with their rushing about and toys. The floor was polished every week with a machine, and so the place smelt of cedar with undertones of old food, old clothes, baking and sweat. The windows were not often opened, and their aluminium frames had warped and set. There was a small kitchen with a serving hatch, an enormous tea urn, and cupboards full of the same cheap crockery and glasses that were used in the school.

  Jumble sales were tricky as no one wanted to buy their neighbours’ cast-offs. They would pick something up and carry it round the hall till they could pay someone they barely knew. Mary had always loved jumble sales and hadn’t thought about wearing secondhand clothes till Dawn stopped her in the corridor at school once, when she was twelve. ‘Julie says she saw you get that tat at a jumble sale!’ Mary had found a fashionable, if rather worn-out, black smock coat edged with brocade.

  ‘That’s right, Saturday.’ Mary was perplexed. Stella had always bought
things at charity shops and jumble sales, and didn’t hesitate to say so.

  Dawn looked taken aback – as far as Mary could tell beneath her back-combed hair and her chalk-white eyelids. Even Mrs Rike had given up scrubbing Dawn’s face and taking acetone to her frosted fingernails. ‘Wouldn’t catch me wearing someone else’s rags. My Mum wouldn’t let me out the house in that!’ She strutted away with her gang. Only later, at home, did Mary begin to see what had happened and it was as if she had just cracked a code that everybody else had long understood. Doing so brought something the opposite to relief. In those adolescent years, she had felt herself wrenched slowly out of her head and into the world, made to think and worry about things she’d never noticed before. She put on her glasses and looked in the mirror. The coat was a cheap version of what had been modish that last autumn. One pocket was torn, the cuffs were threadbare, the brocade faded and coming apart.

  The Harvest Festival Disco was organised by a subcommittee of the committees for the Church Restoration Fund, the Young Farmers, the Sunday School and the Ingfield Youth Club, together with representatives of the Rotary Club, the Licensed Victuallers’ Association and the Small Tradesmens’ Alliance. The Restoration Fund supported both churches, as well as one in Ingfield. They split the proceeds with the Youth Club whereas the other groups organised donations from their contacts as a show of power and good will: cheap printing, window space for posters, books of tickets, and a wholesale deal on beer, crisps and soft drinks. WI members and the women of other churchgoing families sent along cakes and sandwiches with their children. Several teenagers turned up early, skulking along the lane, trying to hide a tray covered with a teacloth or doily which they would shove into the hands of the nearest person at the hall before hurrying off to make a second entrance with their friends.

  Terry Flux had DJ’ed for this disco for so long that he’d seen some of the teenagers disappear and come back as early arrivals, engaged or married and now serious, dignified and careful with their money. He started the evening with jaunty, familiar tunes that would encourage the girls gathered in threes and fours around the walls to begin swaying and nudging one another to join in. Then a bit of rock ’n’ roll that got the older ones tapping their feet – ‘Rock Around the Clock’ and ‘Runaround Sue’. Somebody’s parents stepped half-way towards the middle of the room to jitterbug, the woman blushing and letting herself be led by the man, who was good and proud of it. He kept his head down and concentrated on his flourishes.