by Peter Benson
One of the ravens left its perch and flew across the fields that folded away around us. It glided for a while, beat its wings once, twisted its tail and turned away. The Colonel said ravens had a sense of humour.
I could make letters out of the way some hedges crossed the fields - an E, an F, an H and an L.
20
Marjorie spent the last ten days of her life in pain I could see. I called Dr Thubron a couple of times, but he only repeated what he’d said before about hospital and left stronger pills. I recognised them. They were blue.
She struggled to keep a grip on her senses, but it was hard work. Once or twice she was strong enough to curse her body for letting her down, but most of the time she resigned herself to a dignified retreat. The Colonel agreed that this was a brave thing for the old girl to do, but didn’t stay long. For once, he let his act slip, and became a frailer old man than I’d seen before. ‘The only parties you end up going to are funerals,’ he said. He sucked his pipe. It made bubbly sounds. ‘It’s not right, is it?’
‘I don’t know,’ I said. I was cooking lentils. ‘I don’t know anything about it.’
He looked at me for a long time before saying, ‘I like a man who owns up to not knowing something. You’re honest.’ He hissed air through his teeth. ‘She did well.’
‘All her life,’ I said.
‘Truer words…’
She ate soup, but nothing else. Her arm began to tingle madly, and when Dr Thubron visited, sat on her bed and said that this was a good sign, the arm was healing, she laughed a quiet, silvery cackle that hung in the air and made us smile. ‘Good,’ she whispered. ‘I like a bit of good news.’ Then she told him to get off her bed.
She couldn’t write lists any more, but I knew what had to be done. Once, she said I was a good nurse. I’d propped her up with three pillows behind her; her hair was spread across them like frost, and her face had sunk, but behind it I could see her young. Years are cruel to women, I thought. Sadie had absolutely smooth, clear skin. By moonlight, her stomach was like a mirror, and her breasts were like oranges. Carrying bales and churns and moving calves across sheds had given her strong arms, but they weren’t overdeveloped. When Marjorie whispered, ‘I know what you’re thinking,’ I didn’t argue. She couldn’t resist, so I bent over and kissed her. She smelt of soap and candle wax. Before I left the room, I helped her have a crap, but she didn’t want me for anything else.
In the forest, nothing seemed to move, though I could hear sounds all around me. Some were high, in the branches, and others were on the ground, close. I sat with my back to a tall larch tree. Its branches were covered in bright green new shoots. ‘Larches are the only common coniferous trees that shed their needles in winter’.
You could live in the forest and if you were careful, no one would need to object, and you wouldn’t need to worry. You could trap rabbits, work for people in exchange for vegetables and water, and charm someone into letting you borrow their bath. You could refuse to tell anyone anything about yourself, and become a mystery, or you could tell lies and become a lie.
In Roman times, the forest stretched from Charmouth inland in every direction. It is difficult to imagine what that looked or felt like.
From a hill, the only sign of life would be two or three thin columns of smoke pluming out of an unbroken sea of trees; at Exeter and Dorchester there were forts the size of a large car-park. At Axmouth, an estuary provided anchorage for galleys, and facilities for sailors who didn’t dare venture inland. One decent road bisected the forest; other lonely and dangerous tracks wound through the undergrowth and trees. Few people knew what was further than five miles away; those who did were magic. Only birds were safe, and took on mythic status, like Marjorie.
At Bettiscombe, ‘Home of the Screaming Skull of Bettiscombe Manor’, we had walked around a cold, dark church, and Marjorie had picked up a book about the place - Bettiscombe, by Michael Pinney.
Dr Anne Ross, the Celtic scholar and archaeologist, has put forward a suggestion that Haucombe, the oak wood of Marshwood Vale, may be the remaining trace of a great forgotten Celtic, Druidic sacred forest, through which a known Celtic treasure was brought from Europe in Roman times…
She liked the idea of a known Celtic treasure being carried through the forest. Was it wrapped in sacks to make it look ordinary, or paraded? Who was responsible for it? What was it? I didn’t know, and didn’t want to know. Knowing that there had been a known Celtic treasure was enough. After some thought she agreed with me, and said I could be quite intelligent.
On my own in Haucombe Wood, I got the feeling that I was being watched, but when I turned round there was nothing there. The larches grew like excuses for the trees that had grown there before. Each one was planted exactly the same distance from the next, and all were the same height. No undergrowth grew around their trunks - the forest floor was beige and springy. I thought I saw Bambi, but he was a shaft of sunlight lighting a clump of scrub beyond the larches, where the forest was less of a desert, and a hedge ran towards the fields.
The mechanics of looking after a dying old woman came easily to me, and Marjorie resigned herself to losing dignity when I lost my temper at her with ‘Dignity doesn’t mean anything! Everybody’s got to shit! A baby doesn’t think about dignity!’
She shifted in her bed.
I said, ‘It enjoys it.’
She said, ‘I don’t.’
‘You know what I mean,’ I said, and wiped her face. We’d had soup for lunch. ‘People make up the idea of dignity to give themselves something to cling to. Real dignity is not worrying about something like that.’ I pointed to the bedpan.
‘Bloody soup,’ Marjorie mumbled, ignoring me. ‘I hate it.’ She gulped, tipped her head back and smiled. ‘I want some roast beef. Something I’ve got to chew.’
‘Marjorie?’
‘Roast beef,’ she whispered, as if it was a perfume.
Or, on another day, she insisted on being carried downstairs and outside. The sun was very bright. No clouds in the sky. I lent her my shades and set her up by the Alfa. She had the shotgun. She was going to shoot a jackdaw.
I couldn’t persuade her that it wasn’t a good idea. Most of the beans had been lopped already, but if she wasn’t going to cheat death, she was going to deliver it (her idea). She used the car to hide behind, but didn’t get anything.
21
On 30 March, Sadie called at the lodge. I’d promised to meet her after milking, but couldn’t leave Marjorie. She was having trouble breathing, so I’d called Dr Thubron again. He said she had eight hours to live, gave her a shot of morphine and shook his head. He was good at that.
Sadie sat with me in the kitchen. She was wearing a blue and white cotton skirt, a white top and looked fragile to me. I wanted to get close to her but something held me back - an idea of what she would look like as an old woman, or the feeling that it was raining. The day was warm and sunny. I could hear birdsong. The cats were skittish. I hadn’t done much work - I’d been drinking since lunchtime.
‘How is she?’
‘Asleep,’ I said. ‘I don’t know if I’ll…’ I couldn’t finish what I was trying to say: I hung my head, and when Sadie put her hand on it I felt a charge from her, like a wish.
At half past nine in the evening, Marjorie began to tell me her life story. I’d been sitting with her since seven. She’d been asleep for most of that time, but when she woke up and demanded a whisky, and managed to sit up by herself, I listened as if the story would beg questions in the morning and get answers. When she started to speak, her voice was weak but it grew in strength, so for a few minutes I thought I was dreaming, but then I wasn’t.
‘When I was six I got an encyclopedia for my birthday. I remember it almost as if it’s in front of me now. There were pictures of machines and plants, and rare animals, but the ones I liked best were of countries. Natives standing in the desert with sticks…
‘All the photographs were in that brown sort of black a
nd white. You know?’
I nodded.
‘I used to look at the faces of people in Africa, Australia, the Pacific, and I’d wonder if they could see me! I used to think that when I was a little girl!’
‘I used to wonder how televisions worked,’ I said. ‘I used to think the people had to live inside them.’
‘I was never that stupid.’ She didn’t mean it.
‘No,’ I said. ‘I bet you weren’t.’
‘Father was hard at work all day. War had broken out - he volunteered but they wouldn’t have him. Everybody knew why except me. I never knew, but he got a contract to make army shirts. He made money from the war, and I think he hated that, but it didn’t stop him. And I think he compensated for not fighting by working so hard. Maybe that made Mother drink. I don’t know…
‘We were living in Bristol, then, after the war, after I left school, I trained to be a nurse.’ She laughed. ‘That’s funny now, isn’t it?’
I didn’t say anything.
‘I moved to London - that’s where I met Alice.’ She licked her lips. ‘It’s a lovely name, isn’t it? Alice…’
‘Yes.’
‘We were the new girls on the ward. We’d qualified on the same day, but in different places.’ She fished under her pillow for a handkerchief, and dabbed at the corners of her eyes. ‘It’s funny how little things throw people together, isn’t it? We were totally different, but the same. Do you know that? Have you ever felt that with someone?’
‘No,’ I said.
She managed a smile. ‘She spent all her money on the Party, I spent mine in the cinema, or drinking. We argued half the time, but joked the other. “The terrible twins”, we were. And it was wonderful, wonderful for a few years. I met your mother when she was six. I remember sitting on the floor, playing with her dolls.’ Marjorie nodded at me. ‘What do you think about that?’
‘Amazing.’
‘But it wasn’t enough.’ She cut herself dead, drank some whisky and said, ‘Not playing with your mother - I didn’t mean that. But I wanted some adventure. Those pictures in the encyclopedia had stayed with me. They haunted me, so I packed in the job and took a train to Bristol. I was expecting Father to forbid me to leave the country, but I was surprised. He wished me luck and gave me twenty pounds! Mother didn’t care what I did, but he did. I think he wanted me to have something he never had.’
‘My dad was the same,’ I said.
‘I went to Australia. I nursed in Sydney - it was tough, but that’s what I wanted, I think. I bought a motorbike - you know about that…’
‘I wouldn’t mind it again.’
‘No time,’ she said.
In 1939 she returned to England. She was thirty-two. Her mother was dead, and her father had retired to a cottage in Dorset, where he was writing a book about shirts. He had become quite eccentric, but was respected by the other people who lived in Birdsmoorgate. She was working at a naval hospital in Portsmouth, and visited him whenever she could.
She remembered the Second World War with affection as well as horror. Men without legs would apologise to her for the trouble they were causing. Blinded men would describe her features perfectly. ‘There,’ she said. She pointed to her dressing table. ‘Top drawer. There’s a photograph of me.’
She was in her uniform with looks that stunned me. ‘Is that you?’ I said.
‘Gregory! What’s the matter?’
I didn’t tell her. I put the picture back. Little flecks of spit had appeared at the corners of her mouth. I was going to wipe them for her, but she stopped my hand. Her fingers were thin and the knuckles stood out like bolts. Her face was almost gone, and her hair was like fog; her eyes were pale and the blisters on them had grown. It was hard to see anything in her that was in the photograph, but her mouth still had the same edge to it - a lopsidedness that hovered somewhere between a smile and sadness. As she held my arm with one hand and wiped her mouth with the other, and then put the handkerchief down, I kissed her lips. She didn’t flinch. I could feel her breath leaving her body and going into me, like a guest, or someone who occupies your heart.
‘I went to Africa in ’46/’47. I’d stayed with Father for a year after the war, helping him at the cottage - like you’ve been doing. He was very happy. The book was finished - nobody was interested in publishing it - but he’d taken up gardening. Vegetables mainly. He had a better plot than that one.’ She gestured towards the window. ‘And he walked a lot too. We walked over to this place then - I remember. It’s funny, isn’t it?’
I nodded.
‘Have you ever been to Africa?’
‘No.’
Marjorie looked away from me and stared at the night before telling me that I should go before it was gone. ‘They were very friendly to me,’ she said. ‘And keen to learn. Keen as mustard…’
‘To learn what?’
‘Anything. Anything - how to tie shoelaces, speak English, give injections, set a broken leg - anything. How to scramble eggs!’
In 1951, she was organising a malaria immunisation programme near Beni, Congo, on the Ugandan border. Her clinic was miles from the nearest decent road, surrounded on three sides by impenetrable jungle. She was explaining to some village elders about the importance of hygiene when a thin messenger came from Butembo with a letter for her. The elders were anxious to keep the stamp. King George the Sixth was known as a fair bloke. The letter was from Dorset. Marjorie’s father was dying.
She left for England in the morning. The journey took two months - her father was dead and buried by the time she reached Birdsmoorgate, where she was greeted with a great deal of suspicion.
‘I stayed six months before going back. I sold the old cottage - when I left I never thought I’d see England again. I was cutting all my ties. I hardly felt English any more - I don’t know who I thought I was, only that I wanted to go home.’ She laughed. ‘Home?’
‘Roots,’ I said.
‘What did you say?’
I shook my head. ‘Roots. People look for their roots.’
‘People look for a lot of things,’ said Marjorie.
She went back to confusing native Africans with plasters and antiseptic creams. She suffered a year of regret - not knowing her father as well as she would have liked, not keeping up with Alice, wishing she’d found a sense of adventure in England - but this feeling passed, and she was left with herself. ‘You have to find it in yourself,’ she said.
‘What’s it?’ I said.
‘I can’t tell you that. If you don’t know what I mean - what’s the use?’ She smiled. ‘But I think you’re lying. You do know what I mean…’
True.
She stayed in Africa - Zaire, the Congo and Uganda - for twenty-six years. She found all the adventure she wanted - was lucky to escape with her life five times, was written into tribal folklore as the spirit of an invincible antelope, and she spread her message of hygiene over thousands of square miles. Her hair was bleached white by the sun, so she could be seen coming from miles away, as if a mirror was balanced on her head. She wore loose clothes and carried a bag that became known as an antelope’s udder.
Then, in 1977, aged seventy, she woke up from a dream in which she’d smelt the fields that grew around the cottage in Birdsmoorgate, and realised that she had to see England before she died. ‘I never thought I’d last this long,’ she said. ‘I thought I had three or four years. No more. Not twelve.’
‘Why didn’t you go back?’
She thought. ‘I don’t know. Maybe I was stupid. Maybe Alice…’
‘What about Alice?’
‘We were very close, before the war. I left - I was always guilty, or felt I was. She stayed and tried to make a better world. Or she thought she was making a better world. I went off and pleased myself.’
‘You didn’t!’ I cried. ‘You did more than Alice ever did! You made people well. You taught them…’
‘That was just an excuse.’
‘Marjorie!’
She
looked at me. True. I shook my head.
She said, ‘The M’Bochi respect the dying. Old people are venerated all over Africa. I never thought I’d become the local witch! You know, once I was stripped naked and painted head to foot in the colours of an Eagle God! I could fly to heaven!’
‘You will,’ I said.
‘Maybe,’ she said. ‘Maybe there’re people out there who’d have died without me.’
‘Not maybe,’ I said, but she didn’t say anything else.
I went downstairs to make her a fresh hot water bottle. The cats were sitting around the Rayburn, and hassled me when I went to the fridge for some milk. I gave them some crunchy biscuits, but they looked scornfully at them, and then at me.
Marjorie never needed the hot water bottle. She had died with her eyes closed and a smile on her lips. I took two of the pillows away, and laid her flat on the bed. I straightened the covers and folded her good arm over the broken one before phoning Dr Thubron. When he came, he completed the death certificate, retrieved two bottles of pain killers and asked me if I was all right. I nodded, and said, ‘Yes.’
22
Undertakers took Marjorie away in the morning, and in the afternoon Mr Kelman, the solicitor, phoned.
‘Miss Calder was very specific,’ he said. ‘Maybe you could visit the office at your convenience.’
We arranged a date.
March 31 was a cold foggy day.
The cats knew she was dead.
Maybe some M’Bochi had picked up the scent, and were displaying mourning beads.
The forest was bastard dark, even in the middle of the day. I watched the trees from the kitchen window, but didn’t go for a walk. I watched a few birds defend territory and build nests, and once, I saw a rabbit.
I lost interest in the vegetable garden, but still chopped logs (out of habit). I barrowed them to the shed and stacked them the way she’d shown me.
I moved a mattress into the kitchen.