by Angela Huth
But Edward, strangely ungregarious, could never be won over. This was one of the great puzzles in Vera Brindle’s life. Sometimes she mentioned it when she went to the Post Office to collect her pension, but the busy woman behind the counter, with her orange lipstick, didn’t seem interested. And when she tried to tell Jack the poacher, who occasionally passed by, all he had to say was that she was a stupid old woman who should clear the vermin out of her house or the authorities would be after her. He was sensitive to the authorities, was Jack, skulking about after dark. But Vera Brindle held them in no respect. If she wanted to entertain squirrels in her house, she had every right to do so, and no one could force her to evict them.
Up until this extraordinary moment in the middle of the night, Vera Brindle had never managed to persuade Edward indoors, no matter how many saucers of bread and milk, or nuts, she tempted him with, or what olden-days songs she quietly sang – a device which always intrigued the female squirrels. The unexpectedness of his arrival caused her head to spin for a moment. What should she do to reassure him? Her instinct was to put out a hand, coo a few words, offer him a biscuit from her bedside table. But no, she thought, she must resist. Lie down with as little movement as possible, put out the light, pray to the good Lord young Edward would feel at ease at last.
In the dark, she felt a small movement over her feet. Sleepy, she imagined Edward might be sleepy, too. But in the morning he was gone. When Vera Brindle let his large gang of relations in for breakfast, he was not among them.
Later that day, she stood on a chair in her bedroom and filled the hole in her ceiling with a wadding of old rags and dishcloths. She decided not to secure it further with sticking plaster, in the small hope that Edward might fall on to her bed again. His rejection had caused a smarting in her heart that was hard to dismiss, despite the sunny day. The feeling was mixed with pity for his shocking experience, and her own pleasure at having at last come so close to him.
Vera Brindle ordered her new weighing-machine from the next catalogue and waited for its arrival with a force of impatience that made her restless. She found herself unable to concentrate on anything for very long. No sooner had she sat down in her chair to peel a potato than she darted up to look out of the window. An official-looking brown envelope was delivered one day. She took it to the door, spent a long time trying to light a match with trembling fingers, and at last set light to it. It was with considerable glee that she watched the unread threats devoured by a sudden curl of flame. They were followed by a wisp of black smoke that ventured out into the rain and was instantly extinguished. Pleased though she was by her act of conflagration, a fine wire of anxiety now threaded through the impatience; they would be after her again with their suggestions. Vera Brindle turned back so sharply into the kitchen that she alarmed the squirrels feeding from their breakfast bowl of nuts. They scampered away with unusual speed.
That October, there seemed to be interminable rain. The day the postman Alfred came with the parcel, it poured down so hard that the end of the garden was no more than a smudged outline. The guardian trees beyond were scarcely visible against the grey sky. Alfred’s waterproof cape, as he hurried up the path, produced no more than a low-watt shine, a flash of dulled yellow. He stood at the door, holding out the parcel, dripping. Much though Vera Brindle dreaded anyone in her kitchen, she felt obliged to ask him in. The poor man was wet through.
Alfred stepped through the door. Vera Brindle quickly relieved him of the parcel, laid it in the space she had cleared days ago in readiness for its arrival. Once he had gone, this huge, wet, friendly man, she would unwrap it infinitely slowly, rolling up the string, folding the paper . . . Alfred’s cape dripped on the floor. Raindrops glinted on his white moustache.
‘Sorry,’ he said.
‘That’s no matter. Would you fancy a cup of warm milk?’
Alfred, who had been hoping for the more conventional offer of tea, arranged his face into an appreciative smile of acceptance. He stood awkwardly by the sink, his cap just brushing the drooping ceiling. This was the first time in twenty-four years the Brindle witch had asked him in. He had delivered post to her in far worse weather than this. What, he wondered, did the invitation mean? Would she offer him a nut as well as the milk? There seemed to be bowls of nuts everywhere . . . as if ready for a drinkless party. Something to tell the wife, this.
The postman began to look around. In the rain-dark room, nothing was very clear. But he could make out that the walls were completely covered with old scraps of paper, all browned to some degree with age, they were, and uniformly stuck to the wall with a black drawing pin at the left-hand corner, the rest of the paper left free. Altogether, they gave a shaggy impression, a feeling that the walls were ruffled up to keep out the cold, like a bird’s breast. Very peculiar, very rum. But Alfred could see that the positioning of the scraps of paper was something of a work of art in itself. They were methodically placed, just overlapping, like a tiled roof. Very precise, very clever.
Vera Brindle handed Alfred a cup of tepid milk. He moved to peer closer at the strange wallcovering. Each one was a sketch, he could just see, sometimes a painting, of a squirrel – sometimes just part of a squirrel, a faded leg, a tail at many angles. The pictures were faded almost to extinction, only beady eyes, with minute highlights, remained distinct. For all that, Alfred – a man, he liked to think, of some artistic appreciation – could see the drawing was fine, sensitive. The Brindle witch was a talented old bird.
‘These are beautiful,’ he said. ‘Bloody marvellous. You could make a fortune, selling squirrel pictures.’
Vera Brindle, who was anxious for Alfred to drink his milk quickly and go, shrugged. The time for appreciation of her art was long past. She was not interested in anything to do with fortunes.
‘I don’t do it any more,’ she said. ‘Paints all dried up.’
‘Pity that.’
They stood without talking while Alfred gulped the sour, tepid milk. Rain clattered more heavily against the windows.
‘Mustn’t keep you from your rounds,’ said Vera Brindle at last.
‘No.’ Alfred brushed milk and rain from his moustache with the back of his hand. His huge presence in the kitchen had turned it into a strange, unrecognisable place that unnerved Miss Brindle. She wished he would hurry.
Alfred stepped out into the rain. He was glad to regain air that smelt of sodden grass and leaves. The stench in the kitchen – rotten food, mould, wet animals? he could not quite place it – had been almost overpowering. He turned to bid Vera Brindle goodbye. She was beside him, rain darkening her clothes.
‘You go back in. You’ll get a soaking.’
‘I’ll come to the end with you.’
‘I shouldn’t advise that, Miss Brindle. Look, you’re soaked already’
But she was walking up the path to the gate with determined stride.
‘As for your roof—’ The postman spoke more loudly. She was a yard ahead of him now, astonishingly fast on her slippered feet. He wanted her to hear. ‘I was thinking, coming in, you should get that seen to. Looks dangerous to me.’
Vera Brindle reached the gate before turning to face him, face shining as rain squiggled down the furrowed skin, sparse white hair sticking up in small points. Her eyes moved scornfully to the roof of the cottage. There was, indeed, a grave dip in the thatch – she had not looked at it for some years. But quickly she realised Alfred was as foolish as the social workers; the roof had been expertly thatched by her own father not sixty years ago and had never caused a moment’s trouble, apart from the odd starling caught up in the wire.
‘Look at that moss,’ she snapped. ‘That’s been there for years. That protects the thatch, moss.’
‘That moss,’ began Alfred. But he could see the point-lessness of arguing in the rain.
‘I’m not worried,’ said Vera Brindle. She gave him a brief wave and was hurrying up the path before he had time to thank her for the milk.
So engrossed in her n
ew weighing-machine was Vera Brindle that she did not notice the persistence of the rain, or its heaviness. She delighted in the hours as she weighed all manner of new things – writing her guessed weight, followed by their actual weight, with her old biro. By evening, she became aware of a smell of damp that was perhaps stronger than usual, though it was always like that on a rainy day. It meant the squirrels would want to come in earlier. She opened the window for them – a pool of rainwater on the sill flopped on to the floor – long before it was dark.
On her way to bed that night, carrying the weighing-machine under her arm, Vera Brindle felt an almost tangible sense of well-being. It could rain every day till Christmas, for all she cared; she would spend her time weighing so many things on both machines. (It was important, she thought, not to desert the old one, just because of the newcomer. Mustn’t hurt its feelings.)
In her room there was a pile of rags and dishcloths on the floor. They were mixed with more crumbled plaster. The hole in the ceiling was much bigger – funny she hadn’t heard it fall. And at the end of the bed sat Edward, reddish elbows just twitching, watching her.
Vera Brindle managed to stand quite still, wondering what to do. She put her free hand into the pocket of her cardigan, found a couple of nuts, considered throwing these towards Edward. But she quickly abandoned that idea. Nothing must be done to alarm him. So she placed the nuts in the tray of the weighing-machine and put it gently on the floor. Still Edward did not move. His eye was bright as all squirrels’ eyes; Vera Brindle suddenly remembered the tiny sable brush which she used for the white highlights in her paintings. After a while, she pulled back the blankets on her bed, slipped into it, not bothering even to remove her slippers. The most important thing in the world, having come this far, was not to scare away Edward now. In bed, awkwardly perched against the pillows, Vera Brindle studied his small body, tense as a trap, ready to pounce at the slightest sign of danger. Rain beat in angry swarms against the small windows. It was cold.
For some time, Vera Brindle lay unmoving, waiting. Then Edward suddenly jumped off the bed, with lashing tail, to the top of the pile of rags and leapt into the plastic tray of the weighing-machine. The noise of his nails, scratching the plastic, unnerved him. But in a moment he was calm enough to attend to the nuts. He clasped one of them in his paws, his jaws working with frantic speed. Vera Brindle, still very cold but dizzy with excitement, strained to see what the machine clock registered. But without her glasses it was impossible. She made a silent guess.
Then she allowed herself a contented sigh. The extraordinary sight, not a yard from her, was beyond her most unlikely dreams. The weighing of a squirrel . . . her ultimate, most secret desire. No one would ever believe her claim that the squirrel had taken it upon himself to jump on to the machine. But that was of no importance, as there was no one to tell. The shock of it all wearied her more than she could have supposed. Her clothes were still damp from the rain. She shivered. Up in the roof above her, Edward’s relations began their nightly dance, their tapping feet almost in time with the rain. Very peculiar, she thought, as she fell asleep.
Vera Brindle dreamed of dozens of squirrels lining up to be weighed and of Edward, quite tame now, visiting her every day. She dreamed of sun on her mother’s opal ring and the noise of waves breaking on the grey shale. Their crashing became so loud they briefly woke her. For a moment she saw that moonlight on the windows, shredded by rain, lit a room in turmoil: chunks of rock – was it? – on the floor. Black spaces in the ceiling. She heard more crashing, thudding, the high screams of terrified squirrels. Then she saw them raining down on her, flashes of tooth, eye, frantic tail. How kind they were, coming to comfort her. Behind them, she could see a huge slab of ceiling, shifting, unhurried as a cloud. She shut her eyes and struggled to breathe beneath a sudden new weight. Never in all her years of weighing, she thought, would she have imagined her family of squirrels to be so heavy.
Some days later, Alfred the postman returned to Vera Brindle’s cottage with another brown envelope. It still rained, and he saw that the thatched roof had fallen in, breaking up the livid green covering of moss.
The kitchen door was locked, the windows shut. Alfred called loudly, but there was no reply. He peered through the kitchen window and could see that among the chaos of things on the table a squirrel lay on its side. He could not tell if it was alive or dead. An iciness went through him, nothing to do with the weather. He hurried away, reported what he had seen.
The rain had at last begun to ease a little when Lee Barker and her colleague, both in turbid anoraks, drove to the cottage. They had brought with them a small metal ladder on the roof-rack. They carried it between them down the muddy path, elated by their feeling of smugness. This would teach the old girl not to listen to those who knew best.
‘Stupid daft witch,’ said Lee Barker, in her off-duty voice. ‘This’ll make her see sense at last. The sooner she’s sitting round the telly in an old people’s home, the better for all of us. We can’t keep putting up with all this aggravation.’
‘Quite,’ said her colleague.
Like Alfred, they received no response from knocking on the downstairs windows. With a gesture of some triumph, therefore, Lee Barker stuck her ladder into what had once been a flower bed beneath Vera Brindle’s window. Clumsily she climbed, her huge trainers hesitant on the metal rungs of the ladder.
‘Got the mobile on you, Di? Expect we’ll need an ambulance.’
‘Operation Witch Evacuation, right.’ Di, awkward on the spongy grass, tapped her mobile telephone and laughed. She watched her friend push away lumps of rotten thatch that hung over the casement window and look in, pressing her face to the small panes.
Lee Barker screwed up her professional eyes and saw that there was life in the bedroom. There were squirrels everywhere. They ran up and down over huge lumps of plaster on the bed, where Vera Brindle lay facing the window. She stared back with dull but open eyes. Sitting on the old woman’s hand was a squirrel with reddish elbows, a small tuft of her white hair between its paws.
Mistral
I don’t know why, and there is nothing I can do about it, but I have this way of irritating people. It’s a sad affliction but, as I am unable to change matters, every day is a minefield. I know that at any moment I am liable to do or say something that causes Mr Arthur or Mr Gerald such annoyance they can barely trust themselves to speak.
My name is Annie Hawker. I am housekeeper to Mr Arthur and Mr Gerald, and have held that position for eleven years. Both gentlemen are in their mid-sixties. Mr Arthur was once briefly married to a certain Lucretia. The very thought of this lady brings out the worst in him, though her name is rarely mentioned. There are two grown-up children: Deirdre and Brian. Both of them are over thirty, unmarried, and still searching their way in life. Their telephone calls to their father don’t inspire much sympathy. I hear him snarling down the telephone several times a week, though I have reason to believe he is a generous father, and sends cheques to England with some frequency. When Deirdre and Brian come for a visit – some would call it a prolonged free holiday, as I’m bound to observe to Mr Arthur – tension in the house rises. Mr Arthur gets no pleasure from their company, and the feeling is all too plainly mutual. Well, I have to say it: they aren’t very rewarding offspring: lumpen, dull minds, lazy, spoiled, purposeless.
Their visits put Mr Gerald into a bad temper, too. He stomps off most mornings, walks the hills or visits friends all day, and then is barely civil to them over dinner. Jealous, I suppose. Mr Gerald was never married, and the children remind him of Mr Arthur’s past. Or it may be that he simply finds their ungrateful presence in the house annoying. Which it is. Secretly, all three of us look forward to their departure.
I took the job two years after my husband Simon died in an industrial accident. Arm torn off in a machine in the mill, and he wasn’t even a manual worker, but an inspector. Trouble was, he was always poking his nose – in this case, his arm – too far into things, bei
ng a conscientious inspector. I knew in my bones some disaster would happen one day. So I wasn’t surprised by the amputation, or the complications that followed. Or indeed his death within the week. Nor did I waste much time grieving his departure. Our marriage had never been of a high calibre: we had just chuntered along for ten years, childless, him travelling round the North inspecting, me working for the Inland Revenue.
I had always had a secret inclination to write. But I knew there was no hope there, for all that I was good at essays at school. Everyone wants to write and thinks they can. But there was no evidence to make me believe I’d be any good, or stand a chance of publication. So I abandoned that dream in order to avoid disappointment, and funnily enough quite enjoyed my time at the Inland Revenue.
Anyhow, two years after Simon’s death the thought came to me: now’s your chance, Annie, I thought. Make a dash for it before you’re too old. Go for a complete change. Try a new life.
I started looking at advertisements for jobs abroad, and as luck would have it came upon Mr Arthur and Mr Gerald’s within days. The description of the place appealed to me – hilltop cluster of houses in the Luberon region of France. Beautiful scenery, peace, swimming pool, sun: the stuff of most people’s dreams.
They were interviewing applicants for the job in London. I went down the night before, stayed with my sister in Barnet so as not to be in a fuss on the morning. I dressed carefully in a nice navy suit and pink blouse. It occurred to me a younger type of person would probably be applying for the job, of the jeans and tee-shirt school, the kind who care more about being in the sun than what they give in return. I wanted to make a good impression, assure them of my reliability, willingness to work hard, and above all my unfailing sense of humour.