Untimely Graves

by Marjorie Eccles

  But no, even as a child he’d known that wasn’t right, and fiercely defended her against anyone who even hinted at it – just living on another plane, but even so quite often able to cut through the conventional ways of looking at things that hampered other people, and to give one a sharp glance and a surprisingly wise judgement. Not mad. Just someone happy not to live her life by other people’s prescribed rules.

  Was she still happy, though? Coming home again after a long absence, Sam had immediately sensed a jitteriness that was foreign to her, a worry at the back of her eyes, an uncertainty that surely hadn’t been there before he went away. She’d never mentioned in her letters that anything was troubling her, though, and he’d read nothing between the lines of her almost impossible to decipher backward script.

  ‘Though of course,’ said Mrs Totty, as if a party to his thoughts, ‘there isn’t as much for me to do as there used to be. Sensible, if you think about it, though, shutting most of the place up. Who needs all that space, living on their own, when all’s said and done? Better live in two tidy rooms than in twelve like a pigsty I say, though I’d never let her come to that, not me, never, you can bank on that, Sam.’

  It didn’t need saying. The kitchen here, though so old-fashioned it might qualify for a Heritage award, was spotlessly clean, as was the bathroom, and the two bedrooms still in use. The bright and sunny former morning room Dorrie had chosen to live in was untidy, as anything around Dorrie was bound to be, but hoovered and polished within an inch of its life by Mrs Totty. But he had been shocked all the same, to see how bad a state of repair the rest of the house was in when he’d gone poking around, searching for his own left-behind belongings on the morning after his arrival. So familiar he hadn’t noticed anything untoward before he went away, but impossible to miss now, with the furniture sheeted up, the pictures removed. Broken cornices, peeling wallpaper, wet and dry rot, mice scuttling behind the wainscotting. It didn’t need Mrs Totty to tell him it had slid into neglect, and he was ashamed he’d never really looked at it seriously before; it couldn’t have reached that stage so quickly. But those few years had signalled for him the passing of the borderline into more responsible attitudes: before then, he’d never noticed such things, and in any case, leaving England so precipitously, so preoccupied with his own troubled mind, he’d been in no state to be thinking about the house, so far were his concerns fixed on other things, or at any rate, on one other person …

  ‘She’ll have to sell, you know, sooner or later, she’ll have to give in. The school keeps pestering her, they’ve offered her a good price, and she could get herself a nice little bungalow, one of those retirement homes up by the rec …’ But even Mrs Totty’s optimism faltered at the idea of Dorrie away from Kelsey Road, living in a bungalow. ‘Well, maybe not,’ she admitted with a sigh. ‘It’d be too much to expect of her, wouldn’t it?’

  ‘So why are the school so anxious to buy?’

  The house backed on to the playing fields of Lavenstock College, the minor public school whose Victorian buildings could be seen in the distance, surrounding the chapel and its clock tower. A familiar, well-loved view. Across the sweep of green turf, the irregular yet orderly grouping of buildings looked serene, peaceful and traditional, especially when a cricket match was in progress, though in truth more pleasing from afar than they did on closer inspection. Once, at a time when the Butterfield-style, polychrome, brick-and-stone-banded school had just been built in the High Victorian Gothic tradition, when the great horse chestnuts surrounding the playing fields were new, Lavenstock College had stood with its back to open fields, the town and its industry falling away below it to the river; now the town had crept upwards and outwards and spread itself around the school, a new housing estate having filled in the last empty space to complete its encirclement.

  He’d asked Dorrie the same question last night – why did the school want to buy? – but she’d shrugged and evaded a proper answer. Mrs Totty, on the other hand, could hardly wait to inform him. ‘Well, you know, they’ve already bought three of the houses either side of here – oh yes, they have, starting when him at number 12 retired and put his house on the market! When the folks next door to him saw what price he’d got from the school, they weren’t slow to follow suit, I can tell you! The school bought that as well, and made an offer for this and for number 18, which 18 jumped at – but not Dorrie! A real thorn in their flesh, she is!’ she finished, not without satisfaction.

  Sam, too, felt indignant on Dorrie’s behalf. She’d been born in the house sixty-odd years ago, and had lived there with every expectation of staying there until she died. Why should pressure be put on her to move if she didn’t want to?

  ‘What it is, you see, lovey, once they’ve got all four, they mean to have them down, to make a new entrance for the school. That new estate that’s been built either side the Tilbourne Road, see, near the present school entrance, well, it’s lowered the tone! Don’t want the posh parents in their Rolls Royces and their Bentleys having to drive through that, do they? They want to make a new entrance along here, and then put up some schoolrooms or whachoumaycallems where the present entrance is, to screen the estate.’

  Sam could see now what the school was after. Kelsey Road was generally regarded as one of the best roads in Lavenstock, quiet, tree-lined, unassuming, houses of different styles and ages mingling easily together, some of them substantial properties with big gardens, some less so. A school entrance leading off Kelsey Road would form a very pleasant and dignified approach to the school. On the other hand, buying four houses to pull down simply for that purpose was going a bit over the top. Wasn’t it?

  ‘ … but you know, Sam,’ Mrs Totty was going on, ‘those Tilbourne Road houses aren’t an eyesore, they’re lovely, really. Wouldn’t mind one myself, anyway.’ She sighed. ‘Chance’d be a fine thing, eh?’

  So it would, Sam thought, with Joe Totterbridge, her useless husband, around. Bone idle before he became entitled to his state retirement pension, he did virtually nothing now except sit on his backside and watch television.

  ‘It’d break Dorrie’s heart to leave this house, Mrs Totty.’

  She paused in the act of picking up the teapot, and stared at him. ‘Sam, I’m as fond of you as I am of my own, but I’ve always said it and I’ll say it again. There’s nobody so daft as a man when he doesn’t want to see what’s right in front of his eyes!’

  With this Delphic utterance, she raised her own eyes to heaven, leaving Sam, for the moment, at a loss, until she went on, ‘Break her heart? Lord love us, she hates this house, always has done, and it’s nothing but a burden to her now! The only thing it’d break her heart to leave is her garden, and I’d like to see the one who could make her do that!’

  Sam blinked and turned a disbelieving regard on the jungle outside the window. At one time, Joe Totterbridge had kept it in reasonable order, until superannuation from his job as a storekeeper down at the glassworks had signalled his abdication from almost any form of physical activity except walking down to the pub. It came as a shock to see what even such a relatively short spell of neglect could do – if a prime example of exponential growth was needed, look no further. It hadn’t been tidied up before the winter and looked forlorn, pathetic and abandoned. Dead herbaceous stems stuck up like witches’ brooms and withered grasses waved in an unending prairie. A rotting pergola had collapsed under the weight of a great, unchecked rambler. Willow herb that was rosily beautiful in summer was ominous in its spread and the threat of its feathery seed heads. Brambles had taken over entirely in one corner. The paths were invisible.

  But even as he surveyed this scene of desolation, determined to set about and tackle it the very next day, he realised Mrs Totty wasn’t speaking of Dorrie’s garden. She meant Dorrie’s garden, a different proposition altogether: the other garden, where once a wide drive and a double coach house had existed, a sunken plot constructed on the site of a shallow bomb crater, the result of a bomb dropped on Lavenstock during
the war. Jettisoned at random by a crippled, home-going German bomber after the raid on nearby Coventry, less than twenty miles away, on the infamous night when a beautiful, medieval city centre and its cathedral had been reduced to rubble, this particular bomb had landed, injuring no one, while Coventry already mourning its dead and injured, was in flames.

  A few years later Dorrie, with who knew what compulsion, had set about making a wild garden of the ugly, empty space which had once been the Victorian coach house and stables. She’d employed workmen to cart the rubble away and to create a randomly shaped pond over the shallow crater, had tons of topsoil dumped around its edges, then dismissed everyone and set to work planting the wild plants she loved: now teasel, red clover, wild sorrel and yellow rattle grew among the pluming grasses. Self-woven into a wattle fence were dog roses, blackthorn and elder, within it in season there grew bluebells, wild scabious, white wood anemones and celandines. A substantial part of her days in the summer was spent on her knees, happily grubbing in the earth, talking to her plants and coaxing small seedlings to grow, aiding nature by art. Blackbirds, tits and pond life colonised what had become a small miracle. The side of the house had become a secluded, sheltered, scented haven, screened from both the road and the next house by sweet-smelling hedges, a living and beautiful thing risen from ashes and destruction.

  No, Sam wouldn’t like to be the one who tried to prise her away from it. Once Dorrie set her mind on anything, she could be as stubborn as a mule, and this time Sam found himself in sympathy with her. More than that, he couldn’t help feeling that Dorrie without her garden was likely to lose even more hold on reality.

  4

  When Cleo announced, after having worked for her father for just two days, that she was going to work for Maid to Order, Daphne lifted her eyes to heaven. And well she might, she told herself. As a teenager, Cleo had occasionally been known to tidy her room, under duress, and now it had to be admitted that she kept it in order – more or less – saying off-handedly that life was made easier if you knew just where to put your hands on a clean pair of knickers when you needed them. Daphne saw to it that she helped with the housework when she was around, though truly she found her daughter more of a hindrance than a help to her own efficiency. And nowadays, Cleo occasionally cleared the table after meals and put the dishes in the dishwasher without needing to be reminded. But dedicated to domesticity she was not.

  ‘Val must be desperate,’ was all Daphne allowed herself to say, in a jokey sort of way, as she whisked around, getting ready to go out. She’d learned to hold her tongue, and sometimes her tight-lipped disapproval. She did try, she really did. As she did now, by changing the subject. ‘Do you like my new bowling skirt?’

  It was important to Daphne that she always looked exactly right, even just playing bowls with her friends, a game they were all currently mad about. She’d have liked George to go with her and had been at pains to explain that it wasn’t just a game for the wrinklies, and what great skill it required, but George only rolled his eyes.

  ‘Mmm, yes,’ said Cleo. ‘Very stylish.’ Like all Daphne’s clothes, the skirt was well chosen and perfectly fitting. She’d kept her figure and the natural strands of silver in her well-styled fair hair only served to give it a fashionably streaky look. People often took her and her daughters for sisters. ‘Nice for me,’ Daphne would say with a light laugh, ‘but poor you. Unfair.’

  ‘It isn’t Val that’s desperate,’ Cleo said now, ‘it’s me. Now that Muriel’s come back, Dad doesn’t need me. I have to find another job.’ In fact, she rather suspected that Muriel’s sudden return wasn’t unconnected with her own unexpected arrival on the scene.

  ‘Oh, now, look –’

  ‘Don’t, Mum.’

  Cleo began to rummage through the stacks of CDs on the rack. There was nothing to be ashamed of in living on the Social if there weren’t any jobs around. Or living at home with your parents. But she’d been independent during the last three years and she’d no intention of going back on that. She’d thought that maybe the best solution would be to buzz off and find somewhere to live in London, like Jenna, who was flat-sharing there, and where a lot of her friends were, but she couldn’t even begin to think of affording that without a job, even if she was sharing, which for one important reason she didn’t want to do.

  ‘That Muriel!’ Daphne was saying, as if what Cleo had said had just registered. ‘And that Hermione! Anybody would think nobody had ever had a hysterectomy before.’ She sniffed. Even she thought of Hermione as a person. Then she looked at Cleo more closely, her eyes worried. ‘Cleo, you could get yourself a good position anywhere, if only you’d …’

  Be content with what there is, she’d been going to say, but she bit it back just in time, seeing the expression on Cleo’s face, which said that was just what she wasn’t going to do. If she couldn’t get the sort of job that demanded a good degree, then perversely, she’d said more than once, she didn’t care what she did. One day she might, Daphne fervently hoped, she just might be persuaded to go back to university and begin again where she’d left off, because, contrary to what recent events had shown, Cleo was every bit as bright as Jenna. Jenna was just more clever at passing exams. On the other hand, Daphne sighed, it was more likely Cleo might not. She seemed to have changed and, in some way, grown older, even more secretive than usual. Certainly more independent, and stubborn. Well, university apart, there were plenty of other opportunities open to clever girls. But going out cleaning wasn’t one of them.

  ‘Oh, Cleo!’ she said helplessly. ‘Maid to Order – I ask you!’

  ‘Mum, I haven’t signed my life away! It’s only temporary! Just until Val gets herself sorted.’

  Having disarranged all her mother’s carefully ordered CDs and not found anything worthy of playing, Cleo knew exactly what Daphne was thinking. But she was never ever going to settle for being somebody’s secretary. That seemed to her more like an admission of failure than taking a job with Maid to Order. And once there, she’d be trapped. She couldn’t say this to her mother, however, who was very proud of her own job as part-time secretary (almost full-time, the hours she put in) to the Bursar at Lavenstock College. The Maid to Order job wasn’t going to do anything to reinforce the impression that she was serious about getting herself together, yet how could she explain that this was something more than just a silly whim? That doing something undemanding would give her a breathing space while trying to do the one thing she really wanted to do?

  ‘There’s a letter from Jenna on the mantelpiece, she’s going to take the job with that big law firm,’ Daphne said at last with a sigh, realising she’d lost the battle yet again. She patted her already immaculate hair in the mirror before going out, looking neat and trim in her white skirt and navy blazer. ‘She might be coming home next weekend.’ She fluffed up a few cushions and blew some imaginary specks of dust off her Lladru collection on the display shelves. Cleo half expected the same treatment, but Daphne only looked at her, then left, with instructions about what time to switch on the oven for the evening meal, and how to peel the potatoes.

  Cleo didn’t read the letter for an hour and a half – an hour and thirty-four minutes, to be precise. She let it sit there, while she gazed out at the semi-detached houses opposite, a mirror image of their own, then back at the neat, familiar script on the envelope, telling herself she wouldn’t read it. In the end, of course, she did. If she’d known what it would contain she could have saved herself one hour and thirty-four minutes biting her nails.

  What had she expected? That Jenna was going to pour it all out, how she’d gone across to visit Cleo at Norwich, met her lover and stolen him? No, she wouldn’t. Not Jenna. Well, not many people would, Cleo had to admit. No one would willingly admit to such perfidy. Perhaps she’d thought Jenna was simply writing to say she’d met this perfectly wonderful man, Toby Armitage, and was going to marry him and could she bring him home and please would Cleo keep out of the way? Preferably for the rest of their
lives?

  Cleo would keep out of the way, all right. She’d seen Jenna only once since that spectacular fight. Toby she hadn’t seen at all. He’d dissolved like Scotch mist when all the trouble arose, leaving Jenna to face the music.

  Oh Lord, thought Cleo. Never mind they weren’t alike, she and Jenna did understand one another, there was a special sort of sibling bond between them whatever they said; until this last thing had happened, they’d always been best friends. Until that night when Jenna had admitted that on those weekends Toby had told Cleo he was going home to see his parents, he’d been seeing her in Cambridge, that they’d developed this grand passion.

  Cleo’s work had already suffered during the last year when she and Toby had no time for anything else except each other, and after he was gone and her exams loomed she was too miserable to apply herself to catching up at that late stage. She’d sort of been running backwards for a long time, anyway. Fighting against the admission that perhaps she wasn’t really university material, which was something just too hard to swallow. You don’t need a degree to be a writer, she’d told herself fiercely, think of all those famous names who’ve never been near a university. Think of Shakespeare. Think of Charlotte Brontë. Think of almost anyone. All the same, it was mortifying for someone who’d intended to be a writer for as long as she could remember to fail in Eng.Lit.

  She was glad that nobody – except Jenna – knew about her ambitions. Still unconfident, unpublished, she wasn’t sure even George would have understood. She knew despondently that her biggest battle was against her own lack of confidence. Why should anybody be interested in what she had to write? With so little experience of the world, did she even have the right to think she could be a novelist?