by Barbara Vine
I pulled up the boot lid. The tools were inside, and the spare wheel. There was something else too, a square scarf in emerald-green chiffon, rumpled, loose, looking as if someone had dropped it uncaring on the boot floor. I took it out. It may have lain there for twenty-five years but it was quite clean and it still smelt of something, a very stale, musky perfume. Green is a colour Stella never wears, very wise in my opinion as nothing could be more unlucky, so the scarf couldn't be hers unless her tastes had changed. I took it into the kitchen and hung it over the back of a chair.
The sight of it hanging there carried me back sixteen years to something I'd hardly thought of in all that time: Janis and me divining for our true loves in the kitchen at home on St John's Eve. We'd performed the prescribed ritual, laid the table with a supper of bread and cheese, then taken off all our clothes and hung them over the backs of two chairs. I had a green skirt that my dad had given me, to defy Mum I suppose, and that's what I hung over the rest of my things. We left the back door on the jar and went upstairs, waiting and listening for the men to come.
I was frightened when I heard the footsteps, much more frightened than Janis was, though she was younger, and at first I wouldn't go down, I wouldn't even look over the banisters. But she got hold of my hands and dragged me and we found Peter in the kitchen, eating our supper and drinking a Coke he'd got out of the fridge. She swore she hadn't invited him, she hardly knew him then apart from being in the same class at primary school – but seven years later she married him. So was he her true love?
As for me, no one came. Not my boyfriend of the time, not Mike, not Ned of course, casting his shadow before him. I put it down to the green skirt and I've never worn green since. The scarf, the colour and the square shape of it, brought all that back, but I left it hanging on the chair, not knowing what else to do with it.
Then I remembered the photograph I'd promised to fetch. This time I could see the woman was Stella, but the man no longer seemed like anyone I knew. The stony, cliff-like background now plainly appeared as what it was, the flint wall of Molucca. Over the years the happiness in the picture was still radiant, the charge between the man and the woman, the heat of love.
It made me think of Ned. I was walking down the passage to the front door, I'd got my hand on the discoloured brass knob, when a thought came to me. Why shouldn't Ned and I use this house on the cold, dark winter evenings? We had nowhere else to go and it would be months before the spring. I had a key. No one would know.
Why shouldn't we come here to Stella's house?
8
A year ago I wouldn't have dreamt of doing something like that without asking permission. I've said that doing one wrong thing has made me more conscientious in other areas of my life, but it isn't true. When it's love in question and being alone with the person you love, considerations of morality and decent behaviour disappear.
Love is all and it justifies everything. That's what I tell myself and I don't listen to the cold, quiet inner voice that says otherwise. Love doesn't listen to it either but puts forward very convincing arguments: Stella had entrusted me with a key, she was happy for me to clean the place, if she decided to sell she would let me handle the selling of it. I was practically the caretaker. To spend a couple of hours there once in a while was taking it one step further, that's all.
Stella made no mention of the house when I saw her in the morning. Perhaps she had forgotten or else she could think of nothing but being taken out somewhere by Richard. This was odd in itself. With her fear of cars, Stella only goes in them for essential journeys: to her radiotherapy, to the dentist. She didn't tell me where she was going but she dressed up for it in the blue spotted dress with her cream linen coat over it and she was wearing all her rings, the engagement ring with the sapphires and the eternity ring that's a hoop of diamonds which she wears on her other hand.
Richard arrived at nine-thirty. He was wearing a suit but a lightweight one, made to look quite casual, and carrying a parcel. I saw him from the window of Maud's room. He walked over from the car park to the front door the way he always does, lively and brisk, looking as if he enjoys life, yet as if he thinks a lot too. He's not one of those happy-go-lucky, easy-going people whose heads are empty. Thinking seems to make us sad as often as not, and it's rare to find a clever, sensitive person who's also carefree. That reminded me of Ned, as so many sights and thoughts do, and made me think of his frequent sadness and the frustrations of his life.
The reading stand Stella had asked for was on the bed when I went into her room after she and Richard had gone. That must have been what was in the parcel. Stella had left her book on it, the place marked with the four-leaved clover I'd given her. I was the one it had brought the luck to, though, and on the 13th. As Mum always says, those four-leaves are a powerful charm.
It was a lovely day at last, the rain all swept away into the North Sea, and I was walking back from settling Sidney in his chair under the mulberry tree, when Richard came down the steps from the front door. He hadn't had Stella out for long.
‘Only as far as Diss,’ he said, though I hadn't asked.
‘Was she all right in the car?’
‘She was fine.’ He smiled. ‘I drive very slowly when she's with me. I'm a menace to everyone else on the road. They all hoot at me and Mother says how noisy the roads have got, nobody ever used their horn in the old days.’
That made me laugh. He'd said it very kindly and lovingly, not in Lena's way which is to send up the old folks. I asked if Stella had had her morning coffee out, because it was almost midday, but he said they hadn't stopped for that, he had taken just a few hours off and now he had to get back to the medical centre.
‘Mother had some business to see to. I took her to the door and came back for her after an hour.’
I said it was a long way for him to come when one of us could have taken her, I could have taken her.
‘I know you could,’ he said. ‘I'll remember that next time.’ He hesitated. ‘It's very strange, isn't it, this car phobia of hers. It started when I was a child. I can remember when I was a little boy of six or seven I loved tunnels and a big treat was for her to take me and a friend and drive us through the Dartford Tunnel and back. It must have been a bore for her but she didn't complain. She was quite a dashing driver, and very stylish.’
‘Her fear of cars started soon after that?’ I said.
‘I've always connected it with my father's death, though he died when I was six and I'm sure we did that Dartford Tunnel thing after that. Anyway, Dad didn't die in a car crash, he died in a train. Well, he was taken ill in a train. He died in hospital.’
‘Did your mother just stop driving?’
‘Yes, but a good while later. I can't remember when and it's not the sort of thing I can ask her, though I don't quite know why I say that. A bit of a mystery, isn't it? I must be off. I've got a surgery at one.’
Stella must have brought her children up on her own then, a boy of six and a girl of – what? Fourteen? Fifteen? It gave me a surprise. I had thought of her as being widowed perhaps five years before. But Richard is the same age as me, which means his father had been dead for twenty-six years, or as they always say in the papers, more than a quarter of a century. I wondered why he couldn't ask her the reason for her car phobia, but he seemed not to know the reason himself, only to know perhaps that he would be approaching an area Stella always kept private.
She stayed in her room for the rest of the day and in the afternoon she had a long sleep. I looked in once and saw her lying on the bed, wrapped in her black satin dressing-gown, her eyes closed and her breathing steady and peaceful. On the dot of four I left, called in at home to pick up the clean curtains, and at the village store in Curton bought up their entire stock of candles. If I'd done that in Tharby it would have made for talk. ‘Your Jenny was in here, Diane, and she's cleaned me right out of them decorative candles we got in for Christmas. What's she want them for, then? Her and Mike've never had their electric cut
off, have they?’ But I doubt if a Tharby woman has ever set foot in the Curton shop, though it's only four miles distant. I never had since I was a child and my dad used to take me across the road and buy me Maltesers.
Having re-charged the Dustette battery overnight, I did a bit more cleaning. I even managed to heat up some water on the oil stove, though it was a slow process. The curtains had faded in the wash and were raggedy round the hems, but they looked a lot better than they had done. I hung them up. A day of sunshine had dried the sheets I'd spread out. I made up the bed and when the kettle boiled at last I put in a hot-water bottle.
It was a fine evening, though autumnal. But autumn is the prettiest time in the fen when the dogwood turns dark red and the elder fades to yellow. The old man's beard was a mass of silky grey hair and the willowherb underneath it white like goose down. Long tree shadows fell in stripes across the grass in front of the house and the setting sun was a glitter behind the darkness of the woods. Everything was still and windless, and there was a fresh greenness in the grass and the wild plants from all the rain, like a false spring. I picked some sprays of mountain ash berries from the tree by the door and put them in a blue china vase. Tomorrow, I thought, I'll strip our garden of dahlias and chrysanths before the first frost gets them and bring them here and fill the place with flowers.
Before leaving I went round the back and had another look at that car through the garage window. I don't know why, but now I liked the house, now I had done so much to the house and made it better, I didn't like that car being there. It was the flaw that spoiled the whole, as Ned once said about something quite different. It was the maggot, plum-coloured and wriggling, you find inside the Victoria plum that looked perfect on the outside. I told myself it was only an old Ford Anglia, it couldn't hurt anyone, it probably wasn't even drivable. It was no more important than the rusty hulks of cars you sometimes come upon in the depths of the fen, dumped long ago and overgrown now with wild hops and brambles.
Springing surprises isn't always a good idea. Janis and Nick and I had planned a surprise for Mum on her fiftieth birthday. She knew something was going on and she let us blindfold her and walk her to Nick's car, didn't say a word when we drove her round and round to put her off the scent, but she wasn't too pleased when she found herself in the village hall and a hundred of her friends and relations waiting for her, singing Happy Birthday to You. You see, she'd worked it all out and she thought the surprise was going to be a show in London, in the West End, Miss Saigon or Les Misérables, and a night afterwards for her and Len at the Strand Palace Hotel. All that driving around made it worse because she reckoned we were taking her to the mainline station at Diss.
So I knew it was a risk arranging a surprise for Ned, but I couldn't see what could go wrong, and in the event nothing did. He was all amazement and appreciation. The scent of the flowers I'd brought took away the musty smell and the evening was too mild to bother with the oil heater. I'd put blue candles with gold stars on them on the dressing cabinet and a red sugarstick candle on each bedside cabinet. He once said he liked Australian Chardonnay, so I'd got a bottle of that and kept it cool by running cold water over it in the sink. While I waited for him to come I washed and polished Stella's crystal glasses I had found in the sideboard.
He was a bit early, which was good because it meant I didn't have to wait and worry. And when he came in and put his arms around me I felt that this was how it would be every evening if we lived together. I showed him round. I showed him everything except the two empty rooms and the car. It was as if the house belonged to me and I was offering it to him.
‘I hope it takes your friend months to sell,’ he said.
‘Only months?'
‘It isn't going to be many months before you and I are living together, when we're beyond needing borrowed houses and –’ he put out his finger to the flame that made a glow by the bed – ‘Christmas candles in September.’
That made me smile but it embarrassed me too because when I bought the twisty red candles I hadn't noticed that the pattern on them was holly leaves and mistletoe. Still, I liked him always saying we'd be together one day, we'd have our own home, even though I knew we never would. It's what women say and then complain because men don‘t. Men say, let's enjoy what we have, or, let's not waste time making plans – at least, according to Mum they do. With us the roles are reversed, he talks of permanency and I try to live in the present.
He wouldn't drink the wine, he said we didn't need wine, and maybe he'd have a glass later. It's love, he says, that turns him on. He needs nothing else. Tell me you love me is what he says, and telling him that is no hardship for me. I loved him more than ever that evening. He held me against his body in Stella's warm, soft bed, all the length of him and all the length of me, folded into each other and fitting each other so closely, and took his mouth from kissing me and said,
‘It's been so long, Jenny. Don't let it ever be so long again.’
He is a lean brown man with long bones and flat muscles. I like the silky dark hair on his head, almost black, and the two peaks of hair on the nape of his neck. No, I love it. I love the smell of him, which doesn't come out of a can or a bottle and isn't sweat, but the smell of skin and hair and nails. His teeth taste of minty water and his tongue is clean and smooth like a live fish. When I tell him these things he says I'm like whoever it was wrote the Song of Solomon in the Bible.
‘Behold, thou art fair, my love; thou hast doves' eyes within thy locks.’
‘I never said that,’ I said. ‘I don't even know what it means.’
‘And you never said my hair was like a flock of goats or my neck a tower of David, but you've got the general idea.’
‘Would you mind if I said those things?’ I said.
‘I don't mind what you say, Jenny. You can write poetry to me if you like. If you love everything about someone you don't mind.’
Did Nan's love philtre do all this? Would he have loved me anyway even if I hadn't slipped that powerful charm into his drink? I'm glad I didn't risk it, I didn't leave it to chance, and I'll bolster it up when I can.
He closed his eyes. I held his head on my shoulder and gently stroked his hair but when he was asleep – I knew he would sleep only briefly – I slipped out of bed and found his clothes and put a fern leaf I'd kept from Edith's funeral into his left shoe. For if a woman does that, Nan says, without fail the man will love her marvellously.
The remission Stella was having, due to the radiotherapy I suppose, went on right into October. She still had secret cigarettes in the grounds of Middleton Hall, sitting on a stone bench and wrapped up in her thick winter coat, and she still claimed to dislike cars, though she went out a couple more times for rides with Richard. According to Pauline, she still ventured into the dining room for her evening meal, asked for her gin and tonic, her glass of wine and sat alone at her own table.
Marianne came from London to see her. She arrived in her boyfriend's car with the boyfriend, a very tall, rather fat man, and the teenagers from Stella's photograph, Jean-Paul and Kelda. Those two don't speak to their nan but sit about sullenly or else explore her room, picking up books or looking inside her desk. They were on their way to stay with a friend of Marianne's who has a big house called Something Grange near Sandringham. Though an actress, Marianne never seems to have any work and she has friends living in mansions and castles all over the place who all want her to come and stay.
Stella hadn't said any more about selling Molucca. It's funny how when we worry about having not confessed something, we try to make up for it by telling the person something else, some other semi-secret thing. Ned says it's what psychologists call displacement. I wasn't going to tell her Ned and I had spent three evenings in her house and had made love in her bed, I wasn't going to say a word about the scarf in the boot of the car, because then she'd think I'd been prying. But I did tell her about the champagne.
It had an effect on her I hadn't anticipated. She spoke like someone who's got
a stammer, like someone with a stammer who can control it after muddling up the first few words.
‘Genevieve – Genevieve, did we really leave that in the fridge? It – it can't be. After so long? Oh, Genevieve.’
Who's ‘we’, I thought, but of course I didn't ask. ‘I don't suppose it's drinkable now.’
‘I don't know, I don't know. Isn't wine better for keeping?’
She looked very pale and shocked, so I told her the tale of how when they were doing some restorations at the Legion, Mum found a bottle of port pushed into an old bread oven behind the fireplace. Someone must have put it there to warm and then forgotten it, so it had got warm and cold and warm and cold for about a hundred years. It smelt fine and Mum and the workmen thought they'd have it for their tea but when they drew the cork it tasted like a mixture of vinegar and paint.
Before I'd finished I could tell Stella hadn't been listening. Her eyes glittered. They had a feverish look. ‘Genevieve,’ she said, ‘I must have a cigarette. I'm going to have a cigarette.’
It would have been less against Lena's rules if Stella had taken all her clothes off and gone running down the passage to Arthur's room. I said it was risky, I said that if she'd had a shock I'd gladly fetch her a nip of brandy.