by Angela Huth
Peggy kept her friend up for a long time with her story.
Squirrels
Vera Brindle lived alone in a state of dishevelled solitude which the social workers who called upon her could not believe was desirable. They had begun their interfering ways some years ago now and their visits to her cottage were becoming more frequent. One or other of them – sometimes two together like policemen on the beat in a dangerous area – would knock on the door and, when there was no answer, press their faces to the downstairs windows, sheltering their eyes with both hands. Vera Brindle would watch the intruders from upstairs, hidden behind a curtain. On the rare occasions she gave in and opened the door, they would put to her the suggestion of a ‘little chat over a cup of tea’. Vera, who disliked both tea and chats, would wave them into the kitchen and enjoy watching their incredulous faces as they looked around the room, making their assessments. She would make no move to put on the kettle. As for the ‘chat’ they were hoping for – that, too, they quickly discovered, was to be denied them.
Only last week a new young girl had been sent to try out her persuasive powers to make Vera Brindle ‘see sense’, as they put it. This particular representative of those who know best wore an anxious-about-deprived-people expression which, the old lady knew very well, would be switched off when she went home at five-thirty She could just imagine the girl hurrying to the kind of party where the boasts of the caring professions meant instant admiration. The girl’s narrow little face was contorted with the sort of professional sympathy that made Vera Brindle determine to be unhelpful.
‘You must be Ms Vera Brindle,’ said this unwelcome creature, when the door was opened a few inches. She was dressed in ugly clothes that signalled there was no frivolity in her do-gooding soul, and hideous, earnest shoes of yellowish leather.
‘No, I’m Miss Brindle. I’ve been Miss Brindle all my life, so there’s no supposing, my young girl, I’m going to change to some fashionable title now. And who may you be?’
‘I’m Lee Barker. Social Services. But do call me Lee.’
‘Certainly shan’t do any such thing. I don’t know you.’ Vera Brindle edged the door open a little wider. She noted the intruder’s bony nostrils rear up as various smells began their assault. ‘I shall call you Miss Barker, unless you tell me you are a Mrs.’ She sniffed. ‘Which I very much doubt. Come in, Miss Barker.’
‘I don’t want us to get off on the wrong foot,’ Lee Barker said, once they were in the kitchen. ‘I wouldn’t want that at all.’ Her eyes carried on scouring every crevice of the kitchen. Perhaps she had been warned there was no use asking for a cup of tea, for they did not pause on the kettle. Vera Brindle, enjoying the young woman’s unease, kept her silence. She listened to the scrabblings of the squirrels in the roof. Drat the squirrels, she thought. They were usually quiet at this time of day. If this cheeky young do-gooder heard them she’d start writing all sorts of exaggerated reports in her notebook, threaten to send along the pest control man.
‘I have news for you, Vera,’ Lee Barker said at last. There’s a nice council flat come up, just a mile or so from Exeter. One of those sheltered housing arrangements. A lovely warden, should you need anything. All mod cons.’
Vera Brindle snorted, furious at the persistent attempt at intimacy, and enraged by the suggestion. But it was useless, she knew, trying to explain that mod cons held no allure. While she could scornfully understand they were part of contemporary utopia, they did not feature on her own list of essentials to a happy life.
‘I’m not Vera to you,’ she said.
‘Sorry. Miss Brindle.’ Lee Barker gave a patronising smile, which exposed a flash of brown teeth edging a long expanse of gum. Her breath smelt vile. ‘Now, have you taken in what I’m saying?’
‘I have and I’m not interested. I don’t know why you bother yourselves, waste your time, keep coming here. Give the flat to someone who needs it. I’m all right. I’m not moving.’
Vera Brindle put a hand on the table to steady herself. She was not used to speaking at such length. So many words dizzied her. She felt exhausted, but knew she must gather her strength to tell this young woman to go.
‘So you can be off now,’ she said. The squirrels were scrabbling harder.
‘Miss Brindle,’ Lee Barker sneered, ‘there’s no use pussyfooting around any more. My colleagues and I have done our best to make you see sense. The time has come for plain speaking. This—’ she looked up at the dark ceiling—‘your home, is generally considered unfit for human habitation. We fear for your own safety, Miss Brindle, if you choose to stay Why, you’re not even on the telephone. What if—?’
Miss Brindle licked her lips with the point of a small green tongue. They tasted of salt. Beneath the tight caul of their skin she could feel a prickling, a singing, in their blood. She knew that if she uttered another word her mouth would explode. Teeth, lips, tongue still attached to the messy glob of its roots, would blast off from her face and splatter across the room. So she said nothing, nodded towards the door.
Lee Barker, whose anger prowled up and down her face in mauve coils, responded to the utter negativeness of the stubborn old cow, as this Brindle witch was known in the office, by pushing her nose into a handkerchief. The offensive implications of this gesture Vera Brindle chose to ignore.
‘Very well, I shall go for now. But be warned.’ Lee Barker’s eyes, even in the poor light, were bright with indignation.
‘You’d better be warned, too.’ Vera Brindle was determined to have the last word, though unsure of her exact meaning.
Lee Barker swung out, tossed her nasty little trousered hips from side to side as she hurried down the path, trailing her hand along the top of the dead lavender bushes. Vera Brindle waited until she was out of sight, then sat down at the kitchen table. She pulled towards her the white plastic weighing-machine that stood like a single symbol of modernity among the debris all around it. A little weighing, she thought, would calm her down. She reached for a slab of very old cake, broke off the hard end, placed it on the plastic dish. One and a half ounces, the clock said. Vera Brindle loved that moment, when the thin red hand raced so confidently to the exact weight. She added a few crumbs. The hand wavered. Miss Brindle smiled. The weighing-machine was the best toy she had ever had. It kept her occupied for much of the day. The interest of guessing what things might weigh, only to discover how right or wrong she was, almost obsessed her. The fluctuating of weight, as bits were added or taken away to the tray, gave her a strange thrill – the same kind of thrill as sudden icicles on a winter morning, or the drone of bees busy among the apple-blossom. Finished with the cake, Miss Brindle took a handful of nuts from the bag of squirrel food. Two ounces, she reckoned. Perhaps just over. She was happy again. Lee Barker and her threats had vanished from her mind.
Vera Brindle had lived in her cottage, a mile from a small village on Exmoor, all her life. Her father had been head gamekeeper on the Bancrofts’ estate. Her mother, a housemaid in the big house, had died when Vera was twelve. All she had left was a very large and cumbersome old bicycle, which Vera still rode into the village once a week to collect her provisions. (She could get an astonishing amount into the copious wicker basket that rested, squeaking, on the front mudguard.) Not long after Mrs Brindle’s death, her husband’s employer had sold the estate and moved abroad. The sale did not include the cottage. With his usual generosity to those who worked for him, Lord Bancroft gave the cottage – only worth a few hundred pounds – to Sam Brindle, in recognition of many years of service. This noble gesture gave a new life to Miss Brindle’s father, who for some time had been cast in the immovable gloom of a widower. Now a proud house-owner himself, he set about repairs and with a friend rethatched the roof. This was the happiest time Miss Brindle could remember. Once she had left the village school, she stayed at home, with no urge to explore a wider world, looking after her father and the cottage. In those days, there was fresh paint, new carpet, uncracked windows and an up-to-date calen
dar on the wall each year.
But this idyllic period did not last for long. Her father, too rigorously stoking the boiler, suffered a heart attack and died two days before his daughter’s twenty-first birthday. She broke up the iced cake she and her father were to have shared, and put it out for the birds. It was then she first began to take note of the squirrels, whose grabbing of the food was so much more sly than the birds’. It was then she took up a pencil and paper for the first time since she had left school, and began to make quick sketches. The results, she was in no doubt, were quite pleasing, if not perfect. She began to pin these drawings on the walls. She became aware of a faint sense of achievement.
Once her father was buried, Miss Brindle made some effort to take part in village life. There were those who feared for her loneliness, lack of company – her safety, even. She tried hard to convince them she enjoyed her solitary life and politely turned down most invitations. After a harvest supper, in her twenty-fifth year, a local farmer proposed marriage behind the barn. But Miss Brindle saw this was inspired by nothing more than quantities of beer and the hope of a more instant accomplishment than marriage itself. She took the precaution of not only turning him down, but of giving him so little hope that he thought it not worth the journey to her cottage when he sobered up.
For some years – her squirrel drawings acting as a qualification – Miss Brindle taught painting in the village school. She gave this up during the War to help out in the local hospital. Surrounded by so much death, she became alarmed by the shortness of life. Except for her weekly shopping expedition and an occasional bus journey to the dentist, she spent the best part of the next fifty years in the cottage or its small garden, feeding and drawing the squirrels, birdsong her only music when the old wireless finally broke down in 1951. Always a good needlewoman, she earned just enough money by taking in alterations and mending. To the amazement of those left in the almost deserted village, Vera Brindle seemed happy to lead this uneventful existence. She was never ill, never wanted for anything. A weird old bird, she became; a witchy threat to children. ‘Vera Brindle will get you,’ mothers would say. ‘Vera Brindle lives with the squirrels and casts her spells.’
On the evening of Lee Barker’s visit, such an agreeable plan came to Vera Brindle’s mind that the social worker’s unpleasant behaviour was almost forgotten. She would order a bigger weighing-machine. Fond though she was of the present one, Miss Brindle knew there was a limit to what it could accommodate. And by now she was well acquainted with the weight of most things around her: a slice of cheese, a single slipper, a bag of nuts, two pencils and a rubber. It would be exciting to try out some larger objects, things that would not cause the red hand to dash right out of sight where it hid, alarmed by so much weight, in the bowels of the machine. It would be exciting to weigh the kettle – with and without water – her boots, her big wooden paint-box. With such plans in mind, Miss Brindle began to look forward to the postman’s next visit, when he would bring the new mail order catalogue in which weighing-machines of all shapes and sizes were advertised. She would send off for one at once. Fill in the form with capital letters; by then she would surely have found her old biro. She would pay by postal order. Then wait impatiently for the parcel – new things to be weighed all lined up and waiting. Already she could see herself unpacking the machine, making a space for it on the table. The sweetness of anticipation began to seep through her. She had learnt, in her solitude, that the occasional arranging of treats for yourself is the way to divide up time, cause a ripple in the otherwise smooth surface. She had discovered that anticipation of small pleasures, to those who live alone, is a necessity. A rhythm must be created in which there are times of exceptional happiness to counteract the occasions of amorphous melancholy
So engrossed was Vera Brindle in the thought of her new machine, that at first she did not hear the thunder. She thought the rumbling was the squirrels again. They always danced more loudly at night.
But when, soon after nine, she went to draw the pitiful curtain across the kitchen window, she felt a stab of cold wind pressing through the space between long-dead putty and old glass. As she grabbed the material in her hand, lightning turned the small panes to the colour of watered milk, and she could see they were splattered with hard rain. Vera Brindle shivered, and longed for bed. On her way upstairs, she realised that more crashing above her was indeed thunder. Feeling the bones of the wooden stairs creak beneath her, she clung to the oak rail until the trumpeting outside had stopped. Storms held no fear for her. She had faith in the protection of the cottage, though in the hurricane of 1987 she remembered the cottage walls trembled as trees in the nearby woods fell to the ground with high-pitched, splintered screams.
Vera Brindle turned on the dim light by her bed. She saw that a piece of ceiling had fallen on to the floor. She kicked at the mound of crumbled plaster, automatically wondering what it might weigh. She decided not to sweep it up till morning and glanced up at the black hole it had left. The ceiling all around it was as cracked as an old cup. If the social workers had seen it, they would have gone potty. But it didn’t worry Vera Brindle. She was used to it. For so many years, lying in bed, trying to sleep, her eyes would journey over the familiar pathways of lines, the patches that bulged, the baubles of paintwork that reminded her of withered balloons at the end of a children’s Christmas party in the Church Hall . . . Long ago, it had occurred to her to have the room re-plastered. But then the thought of the invasion – builders, ladders, wireless, tea – was too awful to contemplate, and the moment passed. As time went by and the ceiling deteriorated, but never collapsed, Vera Brindle’s faith in it continued. It would see her out, she thought. Once she was dead, if the whole place crashed to the ground, so long as the squirrels were not hurt, she did not care.
For a moment, unnerved by the whiteness of the plaster on her bruised and threadbare carpet, Miss Brindle considered moving to her parents’ room. But no, that was inconceivable. No one had ever slept in there since they died. Their high brass bed was still tightly made up with clean cotton sheets. The piece of carbolic soap, still in the dish on the wash-stand, had been used by old Mrs Barley when she came to lay out Sam Brindle. His daughter could not bear to disturb the room. Besides, her own was quite safe. What on earth had come over her, such a thought?
Avoiding the spread of white dust, she took off her skirt but kept on the rest of her clothes against the cold night. The thunder seemed to be lumbering off elsewhere; just the odd rumble now. But the squirrels were disturbed. They charged back and forth, scrambled about in the darkness of the roof, a mysterious place which Vera Brindle could never quite imagine. Their scurrying footsteps brought to mind different things: most vigorously, the noise of waves on a grey shale beach she had once visited with her mother. That was the day Mrs Brindle had given up her own long wool scarf to her daughter, as they stood pondering the winter sea, saying ‘You take it, child – your weak chest. Never do to catch a chill.’ While all the time, as Miss Brindle later learned, it was her mother who had the weak chest, who was to die of pneumonia. So often, in the subterranean part of her soul, she had wondered . . . if only she had not taken the scarf, her mother might not have died. Just as clearly, the squirrels revived another sound: the kidney-shaped beans made of glass. They were kept in a jar on the high shelf above the kitchen range, only brought down as a treat on Sunday. Vera would be allowed to tip them out of the jar on to the scrubbed table. They would tumble out with a rush, fast as a small shoal of sparkling fish they came, crimson and sapphire and emerald, sparkling with lights. She would cup her hands around the mound they made, terrified lest one should escape and fall to the floor. Mrs Brindle would carefully choose a few of the beans to make flower patterns. Such imaginative leaves, she made with the green ones. ‘How do you do it, Ma?’ the child Vera would cry. Her own attempts at flowers were nothing like as good. ‘Easy’ Mrs Brindle would say, and shuffle her bent white fingers through the pile of glass, pouncing on exactly the rig
ht one needed for her next petal. Vera, despairing at her own lack of talent in this favourite game, would simply run the beans through her fingers, loving the tinkle they made on her palm that was quite different from the scurrying noise they made as they jostled on to the table . . . That jar of glass beans, where was it now? Vera Brindle had never thrown it out. Perhaps it was still at the back of a cupboard somewhere. Might be worth looking for. She would like to weigh the beans, should she find them, on her new machine . . .
Some time much later in the night – no streak of moonlight or dawn paling the curtainless window – Vera Brindle was woken by a thump on her bed. She switched on the light. Edward, the shyest of all the squirrels, was poised, terrified, on the blankets over her feet, claws dug deep into the wool stuff. He stared ahead, not looking at her, jowls twitching almost too fast to see, tail raised high, ready to bolt.
Miss Brindle did not move, but looked up at the ceiling to see the hole was bigger; there was more powdered plaster on the carpet. Poor Edward, what a trauma, falling through the ceiling, she thought. On the other hand, she could not resist a feeling of great pleasure. For so long she had been trying to tame Edward, but he had always eluded her. His father Ernest, a huge animal with reddish eyebrows, spent more time in the kitchen than he did outdoors, while his wife, the lovely but greedy Rose, was a menace among the shelves. Edward’s many brothers and sisters, cousins, uncles and aunts had all established that Vera Brindle’s cottage was a perfect refuge, both as a place of hibernation and a source of food. They all had their names: the year each one was born was clear in Miss Brindle’s memory. And, despite her failing sight, she could identify which junior members of the clan swung and squealed high in the trees. They were her family. She knew and loved them all. In return for her hospitality, they would keep her company just when she most needed it, perching on her chair, or shoulder, or sometimes on her head.