by Angela Huth
Mr Yacksley stood, as he did every morning, at the Lutchins’ kitchen window. He liked it best when he saw Mrs Lutchins before she became aware of him, so that he could enjoy a moment looking at the scene as if it was a picture. It was like that this morning. Mrs Lutchins had her back to him, rolling pastry at the kitchen table. Mr Yacksley watched her pink little hands fly back and forth on the rolling pin. Behind her was a huge dresser crowded with pale jugs and plates and mugs, gathered from country markets over the years, none of them matching. It was a scene that gave Mr Yacksley daily pleasure, made the journey in all weathers worth it. Mrs Lutchins was not much older than his own wife, Nancy. They shared the same skills – cooking, knitting, gardening. They exuded the same magical air of tranquillity, joy in life. Never lacking for occupation, never seeming to dash about in the frantic modern way Mr Yacksley so abhorred. They understood the weather, the rhythms of the earth. They were his kind of women.
‘Morning, Mrs Lutchins.’
She turned. She was, as the postman had often remarked to his wife, by far the most beautiful woman on his round: white hair, eyes soft as pansies, a smile that made dimples in both cheeks. She always wore pretty jumpers covered in flowered or Fair Isle patterns, muted colours, that she knitted herself on winter evenings. And Mr Yacksley had never seen her without her pearls: three strings of pink, shell-coloured pearls that caught the meagrest sun and dappled her chin with tiny pink reflections. They looked, these pearls, as if they had come straight from the oyster. Mr Yacksley could swear they had never lain on the sterile velvet of a jeweller’s box, artificial lighting draining them of their colour. Extraordinary, their pinkness: a colour they shared, come to think of it, with many things from shore and sea.
‘Oh, Mr Yacksley. I didn’t hear you.’ Mrs Lutchins smiled. Deafness was her only concession to old age.
‘That’s a rough night we had, then.’
‘Terrible. The big balsam poplar’s down, the one my father planted. Bill’s out there now.’
‘I remember the day that tree went in.’
The postman passed a single envelope through the window.
‘Just the one, this morning.’
Mrs Lutchins took the thick envelope.
‘It seems dreadful, your coming all this way just for one letter,’ she said. ‘Time for a cup of coffee?’
‘Thank you, but I’m running late. Water across the lanes. Let’s hope that’s going to clear up later.’
The postman moved away from the window, his fine, weather-grained face crinkling into a half-smile of farewell. They waved to each other, then Mary Lutchins watched his back view till he disappeared round the corner of the drive. Upright as ever, he was a little stiff these days, she thought. She hoped that, unlike Bill, Mr Yacksley would be spared arthritis.
Her mind on the fallen balsam poplar, and the dejection it had caused her husband, she slit the pristine envelope without interest. The invitation from the Farthingoes struck her as very curious: it would be their second large party in two years. What on earth made them so keen to spend their money on such transitory events? Would Bill want to go all that way just for an arthritic little waltz? Would her old ruby velvet do? Or would . . . ? Not liking to imagine the thought of a trip to London to search for a new dress, Mary left the invitation on the window ledge, and returned to rolling her pastry.
Half-an-hour later, her husband, Bill, came in, stepping out of muddy boots at the door. He sniffed at the smell of chicken pie coming from the Aga, and took off his battered oilskin jacket. Every day he spent several hours outside, attending to his trees, partly to be out of Mary’s way, partly the better to appreciate the habitual returns at mid-morning, lunch, and tea, to the apple dumpling warmth of the kitchen.
‘Miracle how it missed falling across a couple of others,’ he said. ‘Blasted nuisance. Miserable things. Smell this.’
He held a muddy finger and thumb to his wife’s nose. A few minutes earlier, he had been pinching the leaves of the fallen tree. On warm still evenings, its scent had filled the whole garden.
Bill and Mary Lutchins sat side by side at the kitchen table drinking their coffee. Mary could read her husband’s distress in the slight shaking of his head, the nervous scratching at his ear. It was no easy matter encouraging a woodland area on this exposed coast, and in the past ten years Bill’s trees had suffered several calamities. But he continued to plant, to nurture, to learn: he intended to leave a thriving wood by the time he died so that future generations – perhaps his grandchildren – to whom places where wild plants and creatures thrive were becoming rare, would be sure of this small corner. Also, he sometimes thought, it might in part make up for the ruined church tower, a matter much on his conscience.
Mary pushed a plate of homemade shortbread towards him, deeming it a wise moment to deflect his thoughts.
‘The Farthingoes,’ she said, ‘have invited us to another ball. September.’
It took Bill a few moments to switch his mind from the picture of the sprawling tree, its thin trunk snapped to a raw point, to the merriness of a ball. But he made an effort to help his wife in her own effort to cheer him. Turning to her, he smiled. Mary rather enjoyed parties, even at her age.
‘You’d like that, wouldn’t you, darling? Let’s say yes. We’ll go to London in a month or two, get you something nice to wear. Shall we?’
‘You know I’m not very good at that sort of thing. I’ve got my old velvet.’
‘Nonsense. You wore that last time. You looked tiptop. But you’d better have something new for this.’
Mary decided to hold out against the whole project a moment longer. If he pushed her to the point of agreement, she would know he wanted to go, not just for her sake, but because he reckoned he might enjoy the evening too.
‘It’s such a long way, just for an evening,’ she said.
‘Only an hour from Ursula. We can spend the night there.’
‘Well, if you’re sure. It might be fun.’
‘You write and say yes.’ Bill finished his coffee, rose from the table and returned to his boots. ‘I’m not sure what to do with the thing. Start sawing, I suppose. No idea what sort of logs it’d make. I’ll ring around this evening. Find out.’
As he went through the door, he glanced at his watch. An ex-naval man, punctuality was the mast in his life. The measuring of time was all-important to him. Ten minutes precisely for coffee: no more, no less, despite the crisis of a fallen tree. In exactly one-and-a-half hours he would be back for lunch. Mary looked forward to that. In their old age she looked forward to his many, small returns, with as much eagerness as, in his days in the Navy, she had longed for his shore leave after months away at sea.
The Lutchins had moved to Norfolk ten years ago. Before that, when Bill left the Navy, they had lived in York, where they ran a private museum inherited from Bill’s father. The museum had been a place of some charm and considerable interest to the serious local historian. Housed in a converted warehouse, it contained an impressive collection of local artefacts, to which the Lutchins were able to add a few newly discovered treasures from time to time. They loved the place, and cared for it assiduously. Faded labels were replaced. Mary supervised copious dusting and polishing. The soft wood floors, which muted visitors’ footsteps, were polished with beeswax, whose smell permeated the whole building.
But in the early 1970s, visitors began to decline. The Lutchins’s quiet collection lost out to more vulgar productions, and they found they could not bring themselves to compete with the modern world of tourist attractions. Kindly advisors, wanting to save the museum, suggested waxworks in period costume, explanations taped soullessly on to earphones, all the tatty paraphernalia of history brought to ‘life’ for those devoid of imagination. The Lutchins abhorred the thought: they would rather sell the place, leave. So, when an offer was made by a property development company, they accepted the impressive sum immediately, and tried not to think of the ruination after their departure.
; The problem of where to live then was solved by the timely death of Mary’s sister, who had lived at the Church House, in Norfolk, since their parents had died. It was the house in which Mary and her sister had spent their childhood. Their father had been vicar of the parish. He conducted the wedding service of Mary and Bill in his church, on a temperate June day in 1935. After it was over, the newly married couple had insisted on climbing the tower for one last look at the marshes. Mary’s view had been half-obscured by her veil, blown across her face by the breeze, so that what she mostly remembered was a blurring of lace and scudding cloud. The glorious peal of bells, up on the tower, enveloped them. There was no use in trying to speak – the sea-thrash of the reverberating bells drowned all other sound. The Lutchins clutched at each other with nervous, excited hands, and looked over the edge of the tower – quite firm, then. Below them waved the wedding guests, herbaceous points of colour in their pre-War clothes. Their shouts were smothered by the vast crashes of campanological music. On the way back down the circular stairs, stone dust from the steep steps dulling the satin hem of her dress, Mary felt a single private sting of regret among the happiness: she did not want to leave this place for a rented house in Portsmouth.
So when, many years later, the house unexpectedly became available again, she and Bill returned with joy, and set about the huge task of refurbishing the place. House and garden had fallen into a state of neglect in the years Mary’s ailing sister had lived there: there was much to be done.
The Lutchins’ retirement was a lively and busy one. Once the house was renovated, they set about rescuing the garden, and Bill had the idea of planting his trees. They managed to do many of the things they had always intended to do when they had the time – read, listen to music in the evenings – they still had no television and did not want one – apply themselves to local affairs (Bill, with Mr Yacksley, was a church warden). They lived an orderly, quiet life, full of interest to themselves, though they appreciated the small scale of their activities might not seem the stuff of fulfilment to others. Once a year they went abroad, with increasing reluctance, often returning disillusioned by the unhappy change in places they had previously enjoyed. Every few months they visited their married daughter, Ursula, in Oxford: Ursula and her family came to Norfolk each summer. Occasionally they went to London, hoping to enjoy it, to see a play or exhibition – an attempt to keep slightly in touch with the world of arts they both loved. But they were increasingly disillusioned by the physical frustrations of London, the proliferation of alien crowds. Whenever they returned from one of these exhibitions, Mary’s love of Church House was renewed. She would go around opening windows, watering plants, even (stupid, she knew) touching things – dishes, walls, books, papers on her desk, to make sure of their unchanging solidity. The pleasure of being home she never took for granted. It was an active, daily thing, shared, though never discussed, with her husband.
There was a cosiness that was almost tangible, Mary often thought, in Church House. It had crept in, indiscernibly as a devious cat – taken over the hearths, the rooms. Sometimes such cosiness, such self-satisfied tranquillity (complacency, could it be called?) was frightening. It was frightening because time was running out and one day, in some unthinkable form, it would be destroyed. The greater the sense of present near-perfection, the greater the disaster of its end would be.
Mary did not relish such morbid thoughts. But, being of a practical nature, she was frequently assailed by them. The evening after the balsam poplar had been struck down, sitting by the log fire engaged in The Times crossword, Schumann’s Piano Quintet on a record, a nameless dread scuttled through her, plucking at her innards with its deadly incisors. Bill, on the other side of the fire, put down his book, The Art of the Arboretum.
‘Be all right,’ he said.
Mary sighed. Her husband’s instinctive awareness of her shifts of mood never ceased to fill her with awe. How could he have known the unwelcome turn her thoughts had taken? Sometimes, when he seemed to read her mind, she longed to explain. But she kept her silence, in the firm belief that spouses should protect each other from their amorphous feelings. The modern school of better understanding through total, exhausting revelation, so often discussed on the wireless, was a habit she could never imagine herself adopting. The nuances of communication are fragile enough, she thought. In over-taxing them, there is danger of further misunderstandings. She had seen couples – friends – drained by the practice of mutual baring of their souls. And in their hunt for explanations, they had lost the art of judgement – judgement of when best to keep silent. They had lost much of their dignity, and often their humour.
Mary smiled. ‘I think I’ll ring Ursula,’ she said.
‘But you rang her last night.’
‘I know. But she’ll have read about the gales here. She’ll want to know if the trees are all right.’
Bill smiled, then, too. The closeness of his wife and daughter always touched him. The restlessness he had sensed in Mary, all evening, would be quelled by a conversation with Ursula.
‘Tell her the storm’s quite over,’ he said, ‘and we can’t really complain – a single poplar.’
He threw a new log on the fire. The crouching flames rose instantly to attention, straight-backed, emitting new warmth to reinvigorate the old. Bill waited until Mary had left the room to telephone – a kind of marital politeness he could never quite discard – before picking up his book. There was a whole section on the balsam poplar. If that didn’t tell him all he wanted to know, he would ring Ralph Cotterman in the morning. Ralph was extraordinarily well informed on trees. Meantime, there was an hour in which to read before bed, at 10.30 p.m. precisely.
* * *
Ralph Cotterman was in love with a married woman.
At the age of forty he was still unmarried, still wishing to find a wife. But, apart from the one woman, who happened to be the wife of his oldest friend, there was no one he had encountered so far with whom he could contemplate spending the rest of his life. As a man of energy and – to some – considerable attraction, he had not been short of available women eager with suggestions of permanency. And, indeed, he had spent considerable time (though never quite a year) being faithful to some of them. Fifteen years ago, he had dallied with Frances Rudge (before she married Toby Farthingoe) who had, she declared at the time, loved him passionately. That passion, as Ralph knew in his heart, had not been fully requited. She was not wife material, in his view – though he had to admit she had succeeded in cheering up the once mournful Toby Farthingoe, mostly by the liberal use of his money, previously hoarded for lack of imagination as how to spend it. Frances was an uncomplicated girl of straight ambition, teasing eyes and good legs. She and Ralph had remained friends, despite her irritating tendency to flirt when Toby was upstairs communing with his computers. For Ralph’s part, there were no regrets concerning Frances. For her part. . . . He had a slight suspicion, which he would not allow himself often to reflect upon, that she felt differently. However, she was mostly decent enough to keep her feelings to herself. Only occasionally did she give the tiniest clue that the old passion was not quite dead, and on such occasions Ralph pretended not to notice.
Ralph had left Cambridge – where he became friends with Martin Knox, husband of the desired woman – with a good degree in science. But, after some years of working in a large, unlively firm, he had decided to abandon his career for politics. He fought and lost several Liberal seats, but worked hard for the Party. To support himself, he wrote a couple of scientific books for children which, to his surprise, sold thousands of copies. After the 1988 split of the Liberals, confused about where his loyalties lay, he abandoned politics as spontaneously as he had previously abandoned the world of science. Now, content in his work at last, he made writing scientific books his chief occupation. He was fired by an overwhelming belief that introduction to the subject at an early age was imperative. (The success of his books may have had something to do with the inclusion of joke
s and witticisms not normally part of scientific texts.) He cared very much about Britain’s technological future and liked to think that his small contribution, snaring the enthusiasm of children, might be of some value.
His friend Martin Knox, always reticent about girls, had not introduced Ralph to Ursula until a few weeks before their marriage. The meeting took place on Oxford station. They had gone together to meet her off the London train. Ralph would for ever remember his first, fatal sight of her: irrepressible pale hair and a heavenly smile, struggling with suitcase, papers, trilby hat, umbrella, and beautiful pink suede gloves, quite out of keeping with the rest of her high-spirited clothes. Ralph’s heart positively stopped for a moment, in the manner of a thousand corny love songs. The scientific part of his mind then zoomed in to wonder what it was, in human chemistry, that could make a man on first sight of a girl, who had not spoken a word, want to throw himself at her feet, declaring extraordinary love? He knew that first instant, as recognition dizzied his head and weakened his legs, that she was the only girl for him. But she was Martin’s.
She had stretched out her hand, the exquisite Ursula. Ralph briefly felt her warm fingers: this was the changing point in his life.
‘Hello. Heard so much about you,’ she said.