by Jane Gardam
They sat at supper together at each end of the table, both of them in sweaters and boots. Jocasta saw that Jack’s fingers were purple with cold. ‘We should wear mitts to eat,’ she said. The wind howled outside through the broken stones. ‘Poor sheep tonight,’ she said. ‘I hope Toots and Dolly are all right.’ She looked at Jack. ‘It’s time I saw them again. I was taken up with . . . all that other business the last time.’
It occurred to them both that if they were to take Faith together to her grandparents it might seal this evening they were passing together so extraordinarily. So quietly.
‘I don’t get on with Toots,’ she said. ‘Your mother’s all right.’
These were things she had never said.
‘Nobody gets on with Toots, I’m afraid.’
‘He has a right to see Faith,’ she said, surprising herself. ‘I’ll drive you down there if you like.’ She waited. There was a very great pause and she felt afraid.
‘Oh, there’s no need. Pammie Jefford will want to go down and they’re keen to meet her. She’s a jewel of a woman.’
‘Very well.’
‘Unless of course you particularly want to go?’
She thought of her last visit to the old creatures with Andrew, though Andrew hadn’t reached the end of the journey. She thought of the delirious hour with him on the way home, the wonder of being alone with him as her lover again. The clinging together, the warmth of him, his skin, the certainty of him. She waited for the familiar surge of love and longing for Andrew to warm her to the heart. She concentrated on the first time she had seen him after Holly’s death, here, in this room, at the window, the child on the table ignored. His head leaning on the glass, ‘I want you in my bed. My tongue in your mouth.’ She waited for the lurch of lust.
It took its time coming. It subsided feebly. She saw herself, this now older creature, shabby in every way, morose, looking down at empty hands in a cold kitchen with the man who was her uncaring husband.
Quickly she said, ‘Jack, we must take Faith to them. Right away. Anything could happen. They’re old. If they were ill, or if it snowed so they couldn’t get here, they’d not see her even for Christmas and it would be scandalous. I don’t mean it would be thought scandalous, though it would; it would be scandalous. Oh, you childless people—oh Lord! I’m so sorry.’
‘It’s all right,’ he said, quite kindly. ‘Yes, we’ll go. If we can prise the child from Pema.’
‘Let Pema come too. She’d get on with your mother and give Toots plenty to talk about for months.’
‘I’m not sure that Toots—’
‘Oh, never mind him. If you won’t go down with her I’ll take her myself. Or I’ll go with Philip.’
He stared. ‘Of course I’ll go,’ he said.
‘With me? Are you sure? Alone?’
‘I will. We’ll go together, there is nothing against it. We won’t tell them, just turn up. They’re never out.’
‘I have a chicken. I could cook it tonight. Oh yes, and I bought a chocolate-log thing.’
He thought, This is Jocasta. We sound married. We never did sound married. This sounds like an accustomed marriage.
Unable to go on with this, he jumped up and said he was going across to the chapel.
Steam rose from the huddle of sheep and also from the sheds of the Tibetan women as he crossed the cloister. The smell of spice from the sheds was so pungent he thought, It’ll make the sheep’s eyes water, and then: Rather a good joke, that. I must tell Jocasta. After his prayers he came back across the courtyard and thought that the wind had dropped a little and that it seemed warmer.
‘It is warmer,’ she said in the morning. She was dressed for out-of-doors, standing by the hot stove they’d all now mastered. ‘It’s definitely warmer. There’s still frost and it’ll be snowy on the top but we could drive there perfectly well if we’re careful. I’ll go over and ask Pema and they can get Faith’s foods together and her stuff. They’ll want to dress her up.’
‘Oughtn’t we to be doing all that?’
‘Some hope. Pema won’t let anyone near Faith. Jack . . . ?’
‘Yes, I know.’
‘Pema’s going to be bereft. Do they really mean it, that they’re going?’
‘Don’t ask me. I understand nothing,’ he said, suddenly sounding like his father.
The low moon lit the sheep as Jocasta crossed to the sheds to tell of the visit. The A-level girl was there. Pema, she said, was not well. Yes, the others could get Faith ready but better not tell Pema she was being taken fifteen miles away. Let her think she was just going to spend the day over in the kitchens.
‘If you’re all going away for ever, Pema will have to get used to being without her.’
‘I’ll say,’ said the girl, ‘that’s what we tell her, don’t fret. You can’t reason with her. She’s very old. And look what she’s been through. Ten years ago she walked out of China. Six hundred miles. You lot knows nowt.’
There was no sign in the sheds of Faith, who was in her hammock slung in the roof struts, subsumed into the place, into the smells of spices and cigarette smoke, dark cloths and the flickering row of lamps that the third woman—there seemed to be only three Tibetans to be seen now—was lighting. The lamps were arranged along a shelf. They had grown fewer, too, the last weeks.
The girl had told her there was a lamp for every human soul living at The Priors. Jocasta wondered for a moment about Faith wrapped tightly in the nest of these cocksure foreigners. She realised that she was putting her mind into the mind of the baby and felt obscure unease.
In the house she found Jack holding up an old flannelette blanket. The carrycot Faith had arrived in was standing on the table.
‘I think it may be too small for her now,’ he said, to her and his own surprise.
She said, ‘My goodness. Yes. I suppose it is. Obviously. I don’t notice these things. Phil always travelled on my back. I’d better have her on my lap in the car.’
‘Won’t Pema want to hold her?’
‘Pema’s ill,’ she said. ‘We’re going alone. You’ll have to drive. You can’t hold her. You’ll forget she’s there.’
‘I’m not exactly the best driver . . . ’
‘You are,’ she said. ‘You can. Oh, Jack . . . ’
They packed up the old car with Christmas presents, in case Dolly and Toots didn’t make it on Christmas Eve, and the carrycot full of Faith’s belongings. They carried Faith out to the car. As usual she was passive and sleepy. Ernie appeared.
‘These sheep’s left to me, then?’
‘Get Nick to help you.’
‘He’s useless.’
‘Get the Tibs.’
‘Where’d yer be widout me?’
‘Lost,’ said Jocasta, and smiled.
Ernie stood looking after the car, wondering if he’d seen aright. The two of them together with the baby.
When Nick came frowsting out of his room with the A-level girl, his arm round her neck, Ernie said, ‘Yer to ’elp me, the pair of yer. They’re away down to Toots an’ Dolly. Jocasta’s pleasant.’
The moon had set and the sun was reluctantly rising as the car made the ridge road. The white moors stretched pure. The sheep were all down in the pastures and there were no birds, the road silken, lavender-pink, as the low sun shone between miles of empty frozen heather.
‘What time do we get there? Ten o’clock?’
‘Maybe a bit later but it will be just about right,’ he said. ‘They’ll be up and dressed. It takes them ages.’
‘Take care, Jack. We slithered. You’ll destroy the Saxon cross.’
But Jack was taken up with the glory of God arranging itself down the valleys, the sky turning to ice-blue above the early warning system of the golf balls.
38
Toots sat in noble silence for the first five m
iles. Dolly was keeping up a loving monologue addressed to the taxi driver, saying how good of him this was. So early. Such a wintry day. So hard on him to have to turn out at such an hour and then to be having to hang about through lunch, waiting to bring them home. She was absolutely sure there would be some lunch for him and anyway she had brought mince pies. Yes, it was a remote place but he’d find it very interesting and there was only one field gate to open now. When she and Mr. Braithwaite had been younger and driven their own very nice little car, such a good little car, she’d been able to jump out at every gate for him to drive through. There had been seven gates. It was still a lovely drive of course.
After another few miles she asked him if he knew the way. Well, what a shame. But it didn’t surprise her, there were very few Teesside people bothered with the moors, it was all Spain and Tenerife. Five miles more and she informed him that her son, who lived on the moors, was an unusual person. It was a priory they were going to. A ruined priory. Her son was a clergyman.
The driver lit up a fag.
Toots said, ‘Put that out, boy. Mrs. Braithwaite has a chest.’
The driver put it out. But spat.
‘Oh dear,’ said Dolly, ‘it does seem a shame to ask you. People used to smoke all the time before the Tory government. It must be hard on you now, when nobody does.’
‘Plenty do in this taxi,’ said Toots. ‘It stinks. Here, watch out. Where are you going? Left here—left over the bridge. By gad, the river’s full. Look at that snow up the top there. Rotten rattle-trap taxi, this. Filthy, too. Is it going to get there?’
‘It’s the recession,’ said Dolly. ‘Everything used to be so different. Leather seats and little tassels and concertina stools. Lovely for weddings.’
The driver said nothing but took the next hill at speed. They climbed above an icy reservoir in its girdle of pines and the strange knoll that bulges out of the first stretch of moorland like a grassy abscess.
‘A Roman lookout,’ said Dolly. ‘Now, when we were young people, Mr. Braithwaite and I used to come up here spooning, and to watch the moon rise.’
The driver still preserved his silence but the taxi met the information with a heavy and threatening clanking.
‘Whatever is that?’
‘Exhaust,’ said the driver. ‘We’ll look in at a garidge.’
‘What garage?’ asked Toots, surveying the horizon. He was beginning to enjoy himself now, with the excitement of the event heightened by the imbecility of the taxi driver. Empty snowy acres on every side were lit by a sudden torch of sunlight.
‘Now that is wonderful,’ said Dolly. ‘Isn’t that wonderful, Toots? Do you want a hot drink? Do you want—you know—the bottle?’
‘Landsakes, we’ve not been going half an hour.’ Toots was cheering up no end. He was in the thick again. ‘They think we’re daft, you know—women,’ he told the man. ‘Light up, laddie. We’re up in the fresh air now; we can open the window.’
The driver spurned this suggestion, pressed hard on the accelerator and the loose exhaust pipe roused itself to a crescendo of drumming and fell off in the road. The driver got out and threw it away in the snow. When he reached the bottom of Ellen’s Bank he took another confident left fork and roared up the corkscrew hill to Ellen Brow, where a garage of a sort stood to the side of the road near a shuttered and barred hotel, the hotel in which Thomasina and the general had debated the pros and cons of the Seton-Fairley wedding.
The driver slammed off. They heard him round the back of the garage beating on a door.
He returned and said, ‘It’s gonner tek time, it’s morent exhaust. Yer can get yersens a sarnie int pub,’ and went off again.
Dolly said that she sometimes understood why North Country people were thought to be common. Toots said that the man was plain scum.
Dolly undid herself from the strap and managed in a moment to get out of the car. She put her feet down carefully in the sharp, crunchy snow and, holding the side of the taxi, sidestepped crabwise round to the boot, where, balancing herself, she toppled out the zimmer frame. ‘I’m not having you sitting frozen here,’ she said, opening Toots’s door and presenting it to him.
‘Hold on, now,’ he said. ‘Do nothing we’ll regret. We could sit tight.’
‘I’m going to get you in the warm. There’ll be a door open to the hotel somewhere; they’d not leave it all winter empty.’
Toots grasped the handles of the frame. ‘Take it easy, now,’ he said. ‘Stop getting hysterical.’
‘I’m not uttering one word. Get your feet down.’
Toots did so, took his bearings, then gazed into the distance. He started with a few hiccuping steps very slowly towards the hotel and fell heavily on the flagstones outside its front door.
‘It’s all up,’ he cried. ‘We should never have come. Broken leg. Possibly pelvis. I’m finished.’
‘I’ll go and fetch someone. Don’t move.’
‘I can’t move, you silly woman.’
‘I’ll get the blanket. There’ll have to be an ambulance. It’ll be hypothermia in no time. I never knew such a driver. This country, now . . . ’
‘Get yourself off inside the hotel and keep warm. Send someone out for me. Whatever’s this now?’
It was the dogmatic waitress in her bulging turquoise jacket arriving in her car. The jacket she whipped off and had over Toots in thirty seconds. She fastened it round him, hauled him up to his feet and balanced him on his legs.
‘What’s this, then? Dead drunk at ten o’clock in the morning? Now, then, arms round me neck, we’ll see you right. Whatever you doin’ ’ere?’
‘Get Dolly some brandy—she’s a sick woman,’ said Toots in the bar. ‘Look at my trousers. Best suit. Feller’s gone round the back of the garage. He can stay there. He can rot. If you hadn’t come we’d be finished.’
‘Well, I did. So what were you on with? Skiing holiday? Sit down. We’re closed, so you can have your breakfasts int’ bar. Are you right? I can ring t’ doctor. He’s very good; he’d come. Dear oh dear, ’ere’s some buns with your tea. Where you off to?’
The driver came in.
‘What the hell you mean leaving them out there, yer daft soggit! Fallen int snow and yer liable. Oh, yes—when they’re in yer care, yer liable. I’ll be witness if there’s a leg broke.’
‘There’s a car broke. It’ll tekt morning. I’m ringing in: where’s telephone?’
‘Station Taxis was always a disgrace. Get yerselluf away. I’ll tek ’em on wherever.’
‘It’s Ellerby Priors. Our son is a clergyman there and we’re visiting. Just for a very short spell.’
‘A very short spell? You don’t mean Jack’s? Yer off for a spell wi’ Jack?’
‘Well, only an hour or so. We’ve come up to see our grandchild.’
‘But would you ever get down that lane? Did they say it was clear?’
Toots said, looking out of the window, vaguely, ‘Perfect day for the drive, we both thought.’
Dolly said, ‘We didn’t actually say we were coming. It was to be a surprise.’
‘Git off, then, yer great lump,’ said the waitress. ‘I’ll see to them. No distance. Get yerselluf together and be ready when we come back. You’re a scandal.’
‘I’m afraid there’s quite a lot of things in the back of the cab,’ said Dolly, ‘and a chair.’
‘Then he teks it all out and loads it up in my car,’ she said, ‘while you drink your teas and rests.’
‘You are very good. I can’t tell you how good.’
‘Deserve a medal,’ said Toots. ‘Proper recognition. I’ll write to The Gazette.’
‘Write to nothing. Are you ready?’
‘I’d like the cloakroom,’ said Dolly, and while she was gone Toots had a go at catching hold of the waitress’s hand and she had a go at slapping him off.
Outside, while the taxi driver blackly struggled with the chair on which once upon a time Jack had been held in Dolly’s arms, Jack himself drove by unseen with Jocasta and Faith, heading in the direction of the estuary.
‘It’s all right,’ Jocasta was saying. ‘There’s been a car up just now.’
‘How is she?’
‘Just lying here looking at me. She looks puzzled. Sometimes puzzled and then she screws her face up and looks amused. They’ve dressed her to kill. She’s like a furry monkey. A mini-yeti.’
‘I think we’ll get something of a reception.’ He smiled at Jocasta in the mirror.
Half an hour later the waitress’s car nosed its way slowly and jerkily down the lane towards Ellerby Priors. Sheep stood about there, blinking their eyes, in the company of a languid girl and The Smikes, who were battling with more sheep in some pens. There was an air of emptiness, somehow.
‘They’ve gone down to thee,’ said Nick. ‘They’ve tooken Faith to show yer. Did yer never pass them? The phone’s gone down. We can’t ring.’
‘Is nobody here?’ asked Dolly. ‘Isn’t even Philip here?’
‘No, they’ve left him int school.’
Dolly began to cry.
39
It was a curious quartet that was proceeding up the A1 on the twenty-second of December. It was much later than Pammie had planned but she had decided that there were things that must be done about her private life if she was really contemplating leaving it behind for good. Or even perhaps only for the spring. Jack had been having many humble conversations with her now for over a fortnight, almost every evening at first but now more intermittent. Neither of them fully addressed the matter in hand, what her duties were supposed to be, her terms of employment, her accommodation, how long she would stay. They talked of the weather, the Nativity tableau, the difficulties of bereavement, of Pammie’s parish church and how it would be the first time in years she would be missing its Christmas services. Jack had said, ‘Perhaps you should just hop on a train and come up right away? Don’t think of luggage. I don’t want to beg you—what right have I? But we do miss Alice Banks.’