Spiderweb

by Penelope Lively

  ‘When am I going, then?’

  ‘Going where?’

  ‘To that college.’

  She was sorting through a pile of bills in the place she called her office. She didn’t look up. ‘You’re mad. What are you talking about?’

  ‘You said I’d got this scholarship.’

  ‘You haven’t got any scholarship. When did you take any exam?’

  He stood there. She went back to the bills. ‘Get out of my hair and go and help your father. I don’t know what you’re talking about.’

  He could hear her voice in his head, telling the woman in the shop in Kingston Florey: ‘Michael’s got one of the scholarships to the agricultural college, one of the top scholarships – we’re going to have to learn to do without him.’ In a loud voice, so people looked round at her.

  ‘You said it in the shop, this morning.’

  She turned. ‘You’re mad. I didn’t say that. D’you think you’re being clever or something? Why would I say something like that?’

  And then he wasn’t sure any more. He told Peter: ‘You were there too. You heard her. Didn’t she say that – about the college?’ And he saw in Peter’s face that he was uncertain now, too. She had always been able to do that – get them so that they didn’t know what had happened and what hadn’t happened. She’d tell them they were lying till they supposed they must be.

  Their father wouldn’t help. Never. He’d either back off or clam up, like with the ranch in California. ‘If that’s what she says …’ They hung about while he fixed the engine and then he drove off and they went to their place in the hedge and banged around with sheets of corrugated iron. They were making a shed. They’d been making it for a long time, mainly because they liked the feeling of swiping away at the metal.

  They were going back to the house when the new woman from Vine Cottage turned in from the lane and came walking down the path towards the mineral line. When she got to the track leading to their dad’s work sheds she stopped and stood staring across at the big tractor. They went to pass her, not looking at her, but she started talking.

  ‘Which of you was it I saw going past yesterday? Tell me something – are all tractors either Massey-Fergusons or Fordsons?’

  Grinning away at them. Silly old cow. The way she talked got up your nose.

  ‘Is it true they come kitted out with stereos and central heating these days?’

  Still grinning. Thought she was being funny. They swerved past, left her standing there. Staring at the tractor. A Fordson, but they weren’t going to say.

  She had been thinking about tractors in Orkney. In Orkney they have the oldest tractors in existence. Pared-down rusting frames, nothing but an engine and a seat and a steering wheel and two great tyres. She used to notice the names when she was working on the island – flowing letters of chrome pinned to the radiator. Massey-Ferguson and Fordson and something else. What was the something else? She had noted them at the time as though the prevalent makes of tractor were also data of some kind, to be filed away along with the complexities of relationship between Fletts and Scarths and Rendells. She stood in piercing winds talking to men with leather faces who sat on their battered hulks of tractors and mildly answered her queries about their grandparents because they were amiable people and you didn’t get a lot of visitors on the island. She was a change from the archaeologists and the bird people, they told her. And yes, my grandfather married a Flett, but my father’s father, now he married an incomer, a Shetland girl … They’d sit on their Massey-Ferguson or their Fordson and the wind blew the pages of her notepad and the sea birds rode above her head calling. Oh, social anthropology is a joyous thing, she had thought, summering among these kindly folk, burrowing in their rich ancestral compost. In her roaring forties she’d been then, her head boiling with ideas and enough energy to walk off the horizon.

  The tractor upon which she now gazed bore litde resemblance to those old crates driven by Orcadian farmers in the seventies. This was a shiny scarlet affair, its cab high off the ground and screened behind perspex windows, its dashboard a marvel of dials and levers. What is that central lever for? she wondered. It occurred to her that this must be the state-of-the-art development of a gear stick she remembered on the Orkney bangers. What was that third trade name? She needed suddenly to know. And so when she caught sight of the two boys she called out to them: ‘Tell me something – are all tractors either Massey-Fergusons or Fordsons?’ She smiled encouragingly. They were sullen-looking boys with crops of dark hair that hadn’t been washed recently enough and a hunched way of standing. Mired in adolescence, poor lads, she thought. She’d been sprayed with muddy water yesterday, as the tractor roared past without slowing down, but never mind.

  No answer. Forging ahead, determinedly avoiding her eye. Not a forthcoming pair, it would seem. She tried again. They walked away, silent.

  No joy there, she thought, mildly put out. She had always got on well enough with the young. She glanced after the boys. In order to reach the mineral line, you had to leave the lane some way beyond the cottages and the Morgan farm and strike off across a field which gave access also to the Hiscox business. A sleazy place, the bungalow and work sheds stuck in the middle of a shaggy area rife with netdes and thistles. A rough track led from the lane across the field to the group of buildings alongside which were ramshackle wire enclosures and wooden hutches. On another occasion, she had glimpsed ducks huddled in one pen, another heaving with rabbits. There were bits and pieces of machinery scattered around, a great pile of rusting metal and corrugated iron, another of old tyres. A couple of carcasses of spent cars. A decayed combine apparently sinking into the ground. Muddy puddles, oil spills. The bungalow was shabby – a stucco job, put up presumably before the time of such refinements as planning permission. A concrete path running up to the front door, the garden a perfunctory affair of unmown grass and some leggy shrubs.

  Mrs Hiscox was a small skinny woman with blonde hair tied back in a pony-tail. She had stopped her car in the lane a few days after Stella moved into the cottage.

  ‘Finding your way around?’

  ‘I am indeed. I haven’t walked so much for years.’

  ‘I’m Karen Hiscox. Our place is along the lane – you’ll have seen. Well, walking’s not something I’ve got time for myself. Family round my neck and a business to run.’ She seemed a person charged with some kind of manic energy; her foot continued to rev the car engine as she talked.

  ‘I’m the idle retired,’ said Stella.

  ‘Plenty of you round here. Well… have to get on … give those louts of boys their dinner. By the way, if you want rabbit for a casserole, or fresh duck, you know where to come.’

  ‘I’ll bear it in mind,’ said Stella to an already moving car.

  Conversational exchange in these parts was most usually carried out between open car windows, Stella had learned, or from window to walker. She now knew by sight and by name the other inhabitants of this small hamlet, but had rarely seen inside anyone else’s home. The Hiscox business was at the end of the lane furthest from her own cottage – in between were three other cottages and a farmhouse. Her nearest neighbours were an elderly couple whose stumpy home of cob and thatch seemed to act as a bulwark to prevent its steeply pitched back garden from cascading down into the road. Old Mr Layton could be seen there, day in and day out, fossicking among his rows of vegetables, while through the front window his wife was visible sitting peaceably in front of the blue glow of the television. Both were born and bred a mile from here, Stella had been told. Their daughter lived in Kingston Florey but their son – well, their son had moved away. Moved right away. To Bridgwater – all of fifteen miles.

  In nice contrast, the neighbouring cottage was inhabited by weekenders – a family from Bristol. Dormant through the week, the place erupted on Friday evenings as the loaded Renault Espace arrived. Whooping children, the smack of a football, whiffs of interesting cuisine. Later, the windows would flare and the garden floodlights snap
on. The parents were Tony and Linda, both IT consultants and loudly amiable. They plied Stella with local information – the best pubs, the sources for organic vegetables. They declared themselves absolutely fascinated by her former occupation and wanted to be given a run-down of a field trip. Egypt they knew well – they’d been on a cruise up the Nile to Luxor. She must come round and tell them how it was for her. But when she accepted an invitation to Sunday brunch the occasion was so corroded by fractious children and the problems of a sulky barbecue that her tentative account of the Delta back then was rapidly quenched. The relationship was diminishing to one of determined bonhomie whenever they passed in the lane.

  The Morgans were the sole farmers. Genial enough but busy – and no wonder since John Morgan appeared to be cultivating much of the surrounding landscape single-handed, save for the considerable efforts of his wife Sue, who was never seen out of gum-boots, stumping resolutely around the barns. Such encounters as Stella had had with either were primed with the sense that some urgent task had been suspended and she would feel obliged to curtail the conversation.

  There was also Stan, who lived in a cottage of such dilapidation that its walls seemed in danger of simply melting into the muddy pitch that passed for his garden. Stan was in business as an odd-job man, occasional hired labourer to John Morgan and purveyor of fuel. The yard behind his house was piled high with logs and sacks of Coalite. Stella had availed herself of this resource and was thus on greeting terms with Stan. They would exchange the mandatory comments on weather and temperature, but that was about as far as it went. Further intimacy was not encouraged.

  That, it would seem, was local community life. As a connoisseur of such, she felt mildly disappointed. Oh well, she thought, it’s no skin off my nose – I never was one who depended on a nice chat over the garden fence.

  ‘Ah,’ said Richard Faraday. ‘Marks and Spencer’s leek and bacon quiche. One of my favourites. You’ve discovered the Taunton shopping facilities, obviously.’

  She had forgotten what a tall man he was. A long, lank figure, his knees awkwardly bumping her too-low table. He had always towered over Nadine. Small, neat Nadine – dumpy in later life.

  ‘If it’s any help, I can let you have a list of local suppliers. There’s a good baker in Williton.’

  ‘Thank you – that would be very useful.’

  A pause. The conversation kept withering. He had arrived on the dot, bearing a bottle of wine. A house-warming present. Not to be drunk now. Unless of course you want to. Personally I don’t drink in the middle of the day.

  ‘I am a member of the local chapter of the Council for the Preservation of Rural England. And the Exmoor Society and the local history group and that sort of thing. You may want to follow suit. It gives one a context. I can send you the addresses.’

  ‘I’ll think about it,’ said Stella. ‘I’ve never been much of a joiner.’

  He wore a tweed jacket and grey flannels – the self-conscious leisure wear of a man who has worn a suit all his life. Poor old Richard. You spend forty years manipulating the economic life of the nation and then end up being the treasurer of the local history society. I bet he’s the treasurer.

  ‘Anyway … you’re settling in all right?’

  ‘Fine,’ she assured him. ‘Just fine.’

  Or you cruise the globe, trying to find out why human beings do what they do, and then … Poor old Stella?

  ‘Anything I can do to help – just give me a ring.’

  ‘That’s very kind – I will indeed.’

  The shadow of Nadine hung there – the uneasy link between them. Something should be said. You must miss Nadine. I wish Nadine and I had seen more of each other. You must realize that Nadine and I hadn’t really known each other at all well for over thirty years.

  ‘We’re entirely different types,’ says Nadine. ‘Probably just as well.’

  She is talking of physical appearance. They are both in their underclothes, getting ready for a commemoration ball. This state of undress points up the distinction, it is true. Nadine is short and plump. She has a pointed cat-like face with notable green-gold eyes and the clear creamy skin that can go with very dark hair. Stella is long and leggy with an undulating pre-Raphaelite tawny-red mane and a permanent rash of freckles.

  ‘Why just as well?’ enquires Stella.

  ‘We attract different types of men.’

  ‘We’re quite different in other ways. It’s peculiar we get on so well.’

  ‘That’s why, silly,’ said Nadine. She stands in front of the mirror, intent upon her eyes, which are being given the full treatment with mascara and eye-shadow. She waves the mascara brush at Stella. ‘Do you want to try some?’

  ‘No. It makes me look like a pierrot.’

  They have arrived here from very different backgrounds, too, propelled on to the level playing field of higher education by brains and application. Stella is the late only child of unassertive parents who are still startled to find that their supposed ugly duckling is apparently a swan, in academic terms, and one of the chosen few. Her father, an accountant, has commuted to the same City office from the same suburban semi all his working life. He is beginning to be alarmed by Stella and will be entirely bewildered as time goes on. Her mother does some voluntary work in the Oxfam shop on the high street and otherwise devotes herself exclusively to scrupulous maintenance of the house and the servicing of the family. She is proud of Stella but becoming increasingly nervous of her. As the Oxford years go by she can find less and less to say to her, except to offer diffident advice about clothes and diet, which Stella smilingly ignores. Stella’s eventual choice of occupation will throw them both into an unsettling state of respect, anxiety and dismay. When they both died in their early seventies, within a year of each other, Stella found that she had loved them more than she knew, but also felt released from some guilty obligation of perpetual reassurance.

  Nadine is the youngest of a brood of five, the children of a showy barrister whose name crops up in newspaper accounts of big murder trials. ‘So embarrassing,’ says Nadine. Her mother is half-Spanish, which accounts for Nadine’s eyes and colouring – an exuberant, cushiony woman who descends once a term, packaged in silks and furs, drifting Chanel No. 5 and shrieking with horror at the spartan college accommodation. Nadine is forever embroiled with her siblings; quarrels and reconciliations reverberate between Oxford and Richmond. Her older sisters arrive, dressed to kill, and sit fastidiously sipping Nescafé in Nadine’s room while they tease her: ‘Miss Education here.’ Her brothers drive down in MGs and sweep the girls off to the Trout or the Bear at Woodstock, where Nadine flaunts them at anyone she knows. One of them takes a shine to Stella and is sharply warned off by Nadine: ‘Don’t you dare! She’s much too clever for you and anyway she’s my friend.’ Stella and Nadine tell one another that they would like to swap families, but neither is sincere. ‘Your parents are so sweet and quiet,’ says Nadine. ‘Honestly, the peace in your house.’ Stella observes the Richmond household with amusement and the occasional twinge or envy, but knows that it is alien to her soul.

  Stella considers other differences between them. Principally, Nadine is not much interested in her overt reason for being at university. She is only committed to her subject in so far as it is her guarantee. She is here for the fringe benefits of higher education, as indeed are many undergraduates. But she is intelligent, or she would not have got a place, she is energetic and she does enough work to get by.

  Stella is frequently absorbed by what she has to read and write. She is simultaneously daunted and exhilarated – daunted by her perception of the range and profundity of knowledge and her recognition of the fact that she can never do more than scratch the surface, exhilarated because she has realized that learning is the arousal and satisfaction of curiosity. And she is abidingly curious. Sitting in libraries, she has come to see that for the rest of her life she will be prompted to ask questions and try to find answers. She feels as though her mind is expanding,
month by month. Sometimes it seems to brim over with discovery.

  She is fond of Nadine. She enjoys Nadine’s company. They are a conspiracy, a gleeful, greedy alliance in pursuit of experience, of pleasure, of laughter, of whatever there is to be had through the accelerated passage of these three heady years. Each recognizes the distinctive flavour of the other and knows that they are not alike, but that, for the moment, they are caught up in the intimacy of being young and about the same business in the same place at the same time – an association as intense in its way as love or marriage, and one which quite eclipses later forms of friendship.

  ‘OK,’ says Nadine. ‘Frocks on!’

  They are both wearing strapless evening dresses. Nadine’s is a froth of lilac tulle over a stiffened nylon petticoat, with a wide satin sash in a deeper shade. Stella is in plain dark green brocade taffeta. Both of them have their torsos clamped tight within rigidly boned bodices. Both wear elbow-length white nylon gloves which will be discarded and lost as the night warms up. Indeed, both dresses will be dreadfully abused. They will be peppered with small burns from cigarette ash, they will be splashed with wine. They will be creased and torn and grass-stained and Stella’s will eventually be so saturated in muddy river water at the bottom of a punt that she will throw it away when she gets back to her college room at eleven the next morning. Track suits might be a more sensible uniform for the night ahead, but that would never do. Nadine and Stella are extravagantly parcelled for one of the major rituals of undergraduate life. Neither of them will lose their virginity tonight because both already have. Nadine will get bored with her escort and make a bid for someone else’s, while Stella will overdo the champagne and end up asleep at dawn in that punt with a man she has never met before.

  But at this moment they are untarnished. They inspect one another.

  ‘Ravishing,’ says Stella.

  ‘Irresistible,’ says Nadine.

  They grin.