by Barbara Vine
‘You know I can't.’
‘Because of Hannah?’
‘No, you can't because of Hannah. You know that, don't you? You know you can't.’
‘I know,’ he said. ‘Well, I think I know. But there has to be a way. There's always a way, isn't there?’
‘No,’ I said, to avoid saying yes.
So we lifted aside the branches and went into the little sheltered grassy place and made love on the warm dry ground.
*
When I told Stella I'd been to her house she blushed. I used to think old people couldn't blush but they can, just like anyone else.
She was in her room, having her mid-morning coffee, and I sat with her. It was Maud's day at the hospital for her radiotherapy, Arthur had been taken out by his son, and I hadn't much to do, having settled Gracie in front of a video of The Inn of the Sixth Happiness. I expected Stella to ask me all sorts of questions about the house but she was a bit subdued, she seemed more embarrassed than anything. The blush died away and she gave me a long, curious look as if I'd changed from the woman she knew into someone else, as if seeing her house had in some way altered me.
‘Don't you want to hear about it?’ I said at last.
It was a strange answer she made. ‘I suppose I must.’
‘Shall I just tell you, then?’
The word isn't one I'd usually have associated with her but she looked a bit sulky. A bit like a child who's had a disappointment. ‘I didn't believe you when you said you'd go there so quickly,’ she said.
‘If you'd rather not talk about it, Stella, it doesn't matter. It was no trouble going there. We can forget it.’ I looked round the room for inspiration. ‘I see you've had another card from Corfu. Is your daughter having a nice time?’
‘Don't humour me, please, Genevieve. I'm not in my second childhood.’ She had never spoken to me so sharply before, she had never spoken to me at all sharply before, and I was taken aback. I wouldn't have guessed that voice could have a hard edge to it.
‘I'm sorry,’ I said.
She was straightaway remorseful. ‘Oh, Genevieve, I'm the one that's sorry. I shouldn't speak to you like that. It's just that one of the things I like about you is the way you don't talk down to me the way the others sometimes do. It's a very common attitude to old people, it's as if when you get to seventy, no matter what sort of a person you are or how much intelligence obviously remains to you, you're to be treated like a child. Especially if you're in a home. There's no more speaking to you as if you're a rational being, you have to be cajoled and – and bullied and lied to.’ She drew breath, she gasped throatily, her face flushed again, more darkly this time. ‘Please don't change and become like that. It would be too much. I couldn't – I really couldn't bear it.’
This outburst shocked me. It was so unexpected, it was such obvious evidence of how upset she was. I wanted to put my arms round her and hold her until the fast beating of her heart slowed. But that would have been disaster. That would be to do just what she had warned me against. All I could do was apologize and wait for her to make the next move.
‘Stella, I'm sorry, I really am. It was clumsy of me but it was because I didn't know what to say.’ I dared the next bit. ‘I don't well, I don't understand your attitude to your house, so I'm sort of in the dark, I don't know what to say or do.’
She looked down, shaking her head a little. The cough she gave reminded me she had, after all, got cancer of the lungs, she was dying of it. She put out her hand, covered mine and squeezed it. ‘Tell me, then.’
‘There really isn't much to tell. It's all OK there. Just dusty.’
‘I suppose the fen has grown up right against the walls, has it?’
‘Yes, but it looks all right. There's a mountain ash with berries on it by the front door.’
She closed her eyes briefly. ‘How strange. How strange it all is.’ After a little hesitation, she said, ‘Did you look in any of the cupboards or drawers?’
It's a weird thing, but maybe because I have to lie about Ned, or not tell the whole truth, I've become specially careful not to tell lies in other areas of my life. Still, I wanted to lie then. There was no reason for me to have looked in that drawer but nosiness. You don't like to have to admit to being nosy, it puts you on a par with Shirley Foster. I told myself I couldn't afford to be proud and said yes, I did, I'd looked in the sideboard and found some paintings and a photo of a man and a woman.
Old people are always saying they know how much they've changed but they don't really. They don't know that the face they had thirty or forty years ago isn't just a younger version of the face they've got now, it's utterly different, it might be a different person. And that's why Stella looked disbelieving when I talked about ‘a woman’. She even smiled, shaking her head.
‘Didn't you recognize me, Genevieve? I was that woman. I suppose it's my hair turning white…’
A bit of belated tact made me say quickly that I'd thought it was her. In fact, it hadn't crossed my mind. For one thing, I don't know why, I'd always supposed she'd been blonde. A change of subject seemed in order and I told her about the car. Having started off truthfully, I kept it up – it's amazing how you can get into good habits if you try! – and I said I'd tried to unlock the garage door but couldn't find the key so I'd done the next best thing and looked through the window.
‘Your car's still there, safe and sound. It'll soon be vintage.’
She didn't smile. ‘Not mine,’ she said. ‘Not my car. But it doesn't matter.’
‘Here's your key back,’ I said.
She seemed to flinch from it. I expect that was my imagination. ‘No, you keep it. I want you to hold on to it.’ Some explanation for that was called for and she said, after a moment's hesitation, ‘If I do decide to sell someone should have a key for the agents…’ She made it sound like some vague future possibility, but she had no future, she only had months.
‘Do you want me to phone an agent for you?’ I said.
‘Not yet. Perhaps not at all. I don't know. I really don't know why I asked the solicitors to send me those deeds.’ She cleared her throat. ‘It's not as if I needed deeds.’
‘You can send them back. It's easily done.’
She didn't answer. She said, like someone making small talk, ‘My husband was a solicitor. Did I ever tell you that?’
She hadn't told me anything about him. ‘Was that in Bury?’ I said.
‘In Bury. It was a family firm. His grandfather started it. They were called Newland, Newland and Bosanquet. Later on they changed it but that's what its name was when I first worked for them. Solicitors always have ridiculous names like that, don't they? My husband's first name was Rex, which I thought sounded like a dog when I first heard it. I was his secretary, that's how we met. He was twenty-two years older than I. That's too much, Genevieve. Is Mike older than you?’
I was afraid to get on to me. Mike was just six months older, I said, and then, ‘Was it Newland, Newland and Bosanquet who -’ I had to search for the right word – ‘who acted for you in the, with the, buying your house?’
It was a very strange look I got then. ‘That would hardly have done. Oh dear, no. I used some people in Ipswich. Don't you think we've talked enough about me for one day? I seem to dominate all our conversations.’
She was chatty and bright, her voice clearer, the throatiness gone. Sharon put her head round the door, then came in and took the coffee tray. Stella waited till she'd gone, looked down at her red fingernails. ‘How did you meet your husband, Genevieve?’
‘I didn't exactly meet him. I'd sort of always known him. You do in a village. We went to the village school before they made one big school for all the villages at Thelmarsh.’
‘He was the boy next door?’
‘Not exactly next door,’ I said. ‘Near enough.’ I was the one who was blushing then and I hated it. I could feel my face go burning red. Stella had her eyes on me and a look had come into her face of deep sympathy, of deep understanding
and kindness, though why she should have thought I needed those things I don't know. ‘We went to the upper school together and I stayed on into the sixth form. He left at sixteen. We were going out together by then. He wanted to do a City and Guilds building course to get the qualification.’ Why on earth was I going on like this? This wasn't what she'd asked me. I just blundered ahead. ‘But he had to start earning. He's a good earner. We got married when we were both nineteen.’ I looked up at her, right into her eyes. ‘But please don't say it's romantic, don't say that.’
‘I won't,’ she said, and her hand which had slackened held on tightly to mine.
‘We're going to have our thirteenth wedding anniversary this year. It was never romantic.’ I looked away, out through the window at the garden and the roses shedding late summer petals. ‘And now I don't know what will happen because I'm in love with someone else.’
4
Village life seems strange to townsfolk and no one really knows about it till they've lived it. It's the only life I've ever lived but I've talked to enough people and read enough books to know it's different. We, the people, in a place like Tharby, are like a big family. There may be four hundred of us but everyone knows everyone else and everyone uses first names. You'll have been at school with all your generation and your parents with their generation and your grandparents with theirs. You'll marry the boy next door, as Stella put it. Take my mum, for instance. It doesn't sound very country village-ey to have had three husbands and a live-in boyfriend, but my dad and the one after him were both Tharby boys and Len the lover's got a smallholding at Tharby Heath. Her third was the only outsider and he came from Eye, which is hardly a foreign land.
Lots more people go away than they used to, they can't find houses to live in for one thing, but fresh people don't come in. Not our sort, anyway. Some come here to retire, but they keep themselves to themselves. It's not too far from London for commuters, for the truth is that some will commute from anywhere to anywhere, but there aren't many of them, and there are only two sets of weekenders. Even in these days Mr Thorn up at the hall gets called the squire, and not always with the tongue in the cheek.
I've said we're a family but you have to remember families are where most of the trouble starts in this world. We don't all get on, far from it, but I reckon we'd all stand together against an enemy. Still, I expect they said that in Bosnia and look what happened there. Anyway, for good or ill we all know each other better than we know anyone else, we know whose mother someone is and who's niece to this one or brother-in-law to that one. That's the sort of thing we never make mistakes about. More important, we feel comfortable with each other. Going to a country-music evening in the village hall like the one where I met Ned, you know just who will be there, you needn't feel shy the way you would going to some gathering in Bury or Thetford, it'll be the same old faces and the same people you sat in the classroom with when you were five.
Except that, this time, Ned and Jane were there.
The purpose of it was to raise funds for something, probably the church bells. I don't know how it can cost a hundred thousand pounds to re-cast some old bells and hang them up in the belfry again, but that's what they tell us. So we're always having music evenings and dances and bingo and car-boot sales to raise money for the bells. It was a Saturday and Mike was home. We got there a bit early. Mike gets everywhere early, he's one of those obsessively punctual people. He put on a suit but I refused to dress up. Isn't it crazy to wear a dress for country music? If I'd had them I'd have liked to wear cowboy boots and a jacket with fringes but I hadn't, so I settled for a good pair of Levi's and a checked shirt.
My sister Janis was there and my brother Nick with his girlfriend Tanya. Mum had left Shirley Foster in charge at the Legion and was doing the drinks. She looked a bit like she came from Nashville herself, did my mum, in a miniskirt and leather jacket with a ten-gallon hat. Janis had told her to stop wearing miniskirts, it was the limit at her age, and when Mum said she was only fifty-three and her legs were thirty years younger, Janis said, ‘It's not your legs, it's your face,’ which was unkind, but Mum didn't seem to mind and she went on wearing short skirts. A lot of Mike's relations were there and Philippa, who's been my best friend since we were given our names together at one of the vicar's mass christenings. Even my dad turned up with his girlfriend Suzanne, who's younger than me. Everyone was there, including the Thorns and one of the retired people called Lady Something and all the commuters and the weekenders who've bought the mill.
They stuck together, of course. They always do. Mr Thorn called Mike over and got him to move two tables side by side and all the chairs so that the nine of them could sit together. He called him over as if he was a servant and when he'd done it he didn't thank him. I ought to be used to that sort of thing, I've seen it all my life, but I still don't care for it, and if it was me he'd asked I like to think I'd have the guts to say do it yourself. But maybe I'd just do it meekly, like Mike did.
When the other weekenders came in I expected them to make straight for those tables. I hadn't seen them before, not many of us had seen them, and we all stared, some of us openly and some with a bit more discretion. The woman was tall and thin, about thirty-five, with a thin, pointy face, one of those foxy faces, and a mass of ginger hair. I mean ginger, not red or carrots or auburn. She wasn't pretty and she was very plainly dressed in black linen trousers and jacket with a white T-shirt, but she was easily the most elegant woman in the room. The man was Ned.
Mr Thorn got up when he saw them and so did the couple from the mill. I couldn't hear what was said, they were obviously introducing themselves and inviting the new people to their table, but not succeeding. A long time afterwards I asked Ned how he'd got out of sitting with the squire and the rest of them and he said he'd told them the truth, that he'd cause too much disturbance. Their daughter wasn't well, and though they'd left her in bed with a sitter in the house he wouldn't feel easy if he didn't go back and check up on her a few times during the course of the evening. The truth, or half of it.
‘I did a programme last year about people like James Thorn,’ he told me a lot later. ‘The subject was the remains of the squirearchy and we called it The Rich Man in his Castle.’
‘From the hymn,’ I said. I'm proud of myself if I can keep up with Ned. ‘From “All Things Bright and Beautiful”.’
‘I didn't think things would have been too bright and beautiful for me if he'd remembered who I was.’
But that was in May and the country-music evening was February. It would be ridiculous to say that I fell in love with Ned the first moment I saw him. You only do that if you think love is just going to bed with someone. When I saw Ned I did have an immediate reaction. I thought, what must it be like to live with someone like that, to see his face on the pillow when you wake up in the morning, to know that he's yours?
Well, he got to be mine. In a sort of way. If anyone ever is anyone else's. A month later I was fathoms deep in love, but not then. Not then. Like the rest of the village, I turned my head to look at Ned and Jane, to see what they would do. And what they did was come up to us.
Ned said afterwards, a long while afterwards, that he and Jane were used to going up to people at parties and introducing themselves. They were trained to it. In their jobs – she's a casting director – they were always meeting new people. They couldn't afford to wait to be introduced, they couldn't stand about in silence (like Mike and I would have) waiting for someone to take pity on them. He said he saw me and ‘liked the look of me’, those were his words, and the rest of us, that is Philippa and her husband Steve and Janis and her husband Peter, they looked all right, about their own age. It never occurred to him that we weren't his class and if it had I don't think he'd have cared. We were a better bet than the squire and the snobbish couple from the mill and so he came up to us and said,
‘Hallo. I'm Ned Saraman and this is my wife Jane Beaumont.’
I could see they were all digesting that, thinking fa
st. It's not exactly the usual thing for married women in Tharby to have different names from their husbands.
‘We've taken the house called Rowans,’ he said.
I was the first to hold out my hand. I wanted to find out what his hand felt like, the touch of it. He had a firm handshake – has, I suppose, though I've never shaken his hand again. I'm not really a shy person but I found myself shy with him. Women are, I think, with men who attract them. Mike wasn't shy and Steve wasn't. They started giving advice about Rowans, though neither Ned nor Jane had asked them for it, all about how it must need rewiring, and how it was twenty years since that tiling job had been done on the roof, it was Steve's uncle who'd done it, and all the problems there'd be if a proper damp course wasn't put in. Janis wasn't to be outdone and was reeling off the names of people who'd deliver their papers and do their dry-cleaning.
Philippa, on the other hand, was as silent as me. I could tell what was passing through her mind, I often can, she was thinking the same as I was, that this was the first time in her memory, the first time to her knowledge, that people like that (Nan's gentry) had ever associated with people like us at one of these dos. It was the first time we'd ever seen that kind of people act as if we were all the same class.
As soon as there was a break in the conversation Ned looked at our glasses and asked if he could get us another drink. It was only Janis and me that wanted anything and we both said white wine. Jane spoke for practically the first time.
‘Right, darling, go and see what the superannuated Dolly Parton can come up with.’
There was a sort of embarrassed hush. I didn't know what ‘superannuated’ meant then but I knew it wasn't polite and I was angry. Ned began to make his way over to the bar Mum was running and I caught up with him.
I said, ‘Excuse me.’
He turned round and smiled. He's very tall and he had to bend a bit to talk to me. His eyes are a clear very dark grey with black round the irises. ‘Jenny?’