The Frances Garrood Collection

by Frances Garrood

  ‘So let me get this straight. You were horrible to Kent, who didn’t deserve it, and then you went off and slept with someone else. What a brilliant move!’

  ‘Actually, he was the one who “went off”. He said he needed to be alone, and he went back to his caravan, and I was upset, and I went to see Gary. Gary and I go back a long way. We just had a few drinks, but one thing lead to another. And Ruth, I’m so, so sorry. I feel terrible.’

  ‘It’s not me you should be apologising to.’

  ‘I thought you’d — I thought you might understand. After all, isn’t that what got you into your present mess in the first place?’

  ‘Oh, no. Oh no. You’re not comparing this — what you’ve done with my situation. I am not in a mess, as you so kindly put it. I may have made a mistake, but I didn’t plan to get pregnant, and I did not let anyone down. Amos and I are — were — free agents. No-one else got hurt.’

  We sit glaring at each other, while tears trickle down Kaz’s cheeks and drip onto the checked tablecloth.

  ‘Look, let’s not fall out about this.’ I decide that one of us had better rescue the situation before it escalates further. ‘We need to decide what you’re going to do.’

  ‘I’ll have to tell Kent, won’t I?’

  ‘Will you? Won’t telling him make things worse?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ Kaz says wretchedly. ‘Oh, Ruth, what am I like?’

  ‘Well, you’re kind and funny, and — and bloody impossible!’ I can’t help smiling. ‘But if you really love Kent, I’d leave this for the moment. It might make you feel better to tell him, but it certainly won’t help the situation.’

  ‘Mm.’ Her hair is rumpled, and there are streaks of mascara down her cheeks, but she still manages to look as stunning as ever. ‘Ruth, do you think — do you think twenty years older is too old?’

  I’ve been thinking about this ever since my conversation with Kent, and I’m not sure. ‘Yes and no. I think it’s more a matter of you being mature enough to take on someone of his age. Running off and sleeping with someone else as soon as the going gets tough isn’t a mature thing to do, is it?’

  ‘I’ll never do it again. If he stays with me, I swear I’ll be faithful. I really will.’

  ‘Well in that case, if I were you I’d go home and apologise nicely for the things you said, and try to discuss the situation as calmly as you can. I’m sure he’ll listen if you can keep your cool. Then ask him to give you — you and him — a bit more time. After all, there’s no hurry, is there? No-one’s going anywhere.’

  ‘Would you have a word with him?’ Kaz pushes her plate towards me.

  ‘If I get the chance, I will,’ I promise, finishing off Kaz’s cream slice and thinking that if I go on like this, I’m going to have one very fat baby.

  The next day, I find myself alone with Kent in the orchard.

  ‘About you and Kaz,’ I begin.

  ‘Has she been telling you about her — our row?’

  ‘Her row, I think it was.’ I laugh. ‘Yes, she has. Kent, she really loves you. I know she’s young, but could you give her a chance? I don’t think Kaz has had much love in her life, and maybe someone like you is exactly what she needs.’

  ‘I just feel that I’ll be — taking advantage of her, I suppose.’

  ‘Trust me. No-one takes advantage of Kaz,’ I tell him. ‘She’s young, and she can be stupid, but she’s also pretty canny, and I reckon she’s been looking after herself most of her life. It’s love that she needs.’

  ‘Maybe. I’d love it to work out. She’s a special girl, Ruth. Not just pretty. There are lots of pretty girls around. But few as — as special as Kaz. Perhaps you’re right. Perhaps we should give it a bit more time.’

  By now, the news of Kaz and Kent has got out, and everyone seems to know (everyone, that is, except my parents, who have a blind spot where such goings-on are concerned). Silas and Eric, those most accepting of men, seem quite happy about the situation, if a bit surprised. But Blossom is furious.

  ‘Dratted girl!’ she says, sending a tsunami of soapy water across the kitchen floor. ‘Anything in trousers. Always been like that. Takes after her father.’

  From what I’ve heard, nothing could be further from the truth, but there’s no point in saying so.

  ‘Don’t you want her to be happy?’ I venture.

  ‘Happy? Humph.’ Slosh, swipe. ‘She wants to be happy, does she? I’ll give her happy!’

  She flings down her mop and slams out into the garden.

  So it seems that yet again, the focus is on other people and their problems. Just as I have got Kaz on side and excited about the baby, her attention is lost to more pressing problems. And while I am still not as excited as I probably ought to be, I quite enjoy the excitement and the attention of others. For the first time since I came to Applegarth, I feel very much alone, and if I am honest, frightened. For whatever my feelings about it, the baby is going to come out, and it’s going to hurt. That much I know. I’ve paid scant attention to the ante-natal classes, and I am ill-prepared for the rigours of childbirth. I have at least one friend who’s sworn that she’s “never going through that again”, and has stuck to her word, enjoying her daughter but flatly refusing to have any more children. I have never been particularly good with pain, and Mum, while supportive, can be squeamish. Supposing she faints? Supposing we both faint? It won’t be much of a welcome for a baby who didn’t ask to be born and wasn’t even wanted in the first place.

  I wander into the sitting room and find Eric, who is preoccupied with the problem of humming birds. For it is not only bees and other insects that need flowers, he tells me. Humming birds do, too.

  ‘But surely God wouldn’t have expected Noah to have more than just two birds, and they could have been anything. Robins are nice and easy. How about robins?’

  ‘No. The Bible says two of “every kind of bird, every kind of animal and every kind of reptile”. So you can’t get away with just robins. I’ve had to leave out a lot; it would take more than a lifetime to deal with every single species. But I’ve dealt with quite a few. Owls, eagles, ostriches — you’ve no idea, Ruth. It’s incredibly complicated.’

  I realise that the more complicated it becomes the more Eric enjoys it, but have enough sense not to say so.

  ‘So you see, we’ll have to have a garden, or even a small park, for all the creatures which can’t do without living plants. At this rate, the Isle of Wight is definitely going to be too small. Perhaps something the size of Gibraltar.’ He rubs his head. ‘How big is Gibraltar?’

  ‘I’ve no idea. Eric, you can’t have a park on a boat. The soil would rot the boards and fall through.’

  Eric sighs. ‘Ruth, you’re missing the point, like everyone else. I thought you at least understood. Of course it’s not possible. At least, not possible on an Ark. But on a structure the size of Gibraltar — whatever that is — and reinforced with concrete (I must ask someone about that) it might be possible. Or maybe I could line the foundations with plastic.’

  ‘They wouldn’t have had concrete in those days,’ I remind him. ‘Or plastic.’

  ‘I know, I know. That’s not the point, either.’ He jots down a note to himself. ‘Come to think of it, I believe there’s a cruise ship with a small golf course,’ he says thoughtfully.

  ‘Is there really?’

  ‘I believe so.’ He folds up his charts. ‘Ruth, are you all right?’ He pats my bump. ‘Not long to go now.’

  ‘So everyone keeps telling me.’

  ‘It won’t be so bad, you know.’

  ‘What? The baby? Childbirth? The — my — future?’

  ‘All of them.’ He holds out his hand, and draws me down beside him on the sofa. ‘You’ll be all right, you know. And we’ll do anything we can for you. You’ll always have a home here, if you need one.’

  ‘I know.’ I squeeze his hand, and my eyes fill with tears. ‘Kent’s so lucky.’

  ‘Why? Why is he lucky?’


  ‘To have you — you and Silas — as his father. Fathers, I mean.’

  ‘You have a good father, Ruth. And he does care, you know.’

  ‘Perhaps he does, but at the moment I want to feel that he cares.’ I look down at our linked hands. ‘I don’t think my father has so much as touched me since I was a small child.’

  ‘People have different ways of showing affection. Some just aren’t the hugging kind.’

  ‘I suppose you’re right.’ I lift Eric’s hand and hold it against my cheek. It is rough and chapped from working outside in all weathers, but the feel of it is infinitely comforting, and I realise that what I miss more than anything else at the moment is physical contact with another human being.

  ‘He’s a fortunate man, your Amos,’ Eric says, as though reading my thoughts. ‘I hope he does come and find you soon, and discover that for himself.’

  ‘Oh, so do I, Eric. So do I.’

  I gaze out of the window, where a wintry dusk is already draining away what little daylight we’ve had. Somewhere out there, perhaps not very far away, is Amos. I wonder what he’s doing at this moment; whether he’s playing his trombone, perhaps having a pint in a pub with a friend, driving somewhere in his dreadful old car, making a curry (Amos makes good curries). If I believed in telepathy, I’d send him a message. As it is, I just have to hope that one of the smattering of messages I’ve left all over the country reaches him soon.

  Chapter Forty-Two

  March comes in like the proverbial lion. A biting east wind whisks the last few brittle autumn leaves round the frozen garden and penetrates under doors and the edges of ill-fitting windows. The animals huddle in their sheds, and we huddle indoors, wrapped in as many layers as we can lay hands on. I look like a Russian doll; as though within each layer of clothing there lies another, smaller woman, similarly clad. Mum, who has never been good with the cold, suffers terribly from chilblains, and Silas, who still hasn’t regained all the weight he lost during his illness, feels the cold more than usual. He is banned from outdoor duties, although he protests that he is fine, and that the ‘fresh air will do him good’. Eric points out that it’s more likely to kill him, and fortunately the medical bible agrees, so Silas has to do as he’s told. He takes comfort from the corpse of the hare, recovered from beneath the frozen remains of Dorothy. We all hope that the stuffing of this unfortunate animal will keep him amused until the warmer weather arrives. The only people unaffected by the cold are Lazzo, who strides back and forth, often in his shirtsleeves, seeing to the animals, and Kaz and Kent. Having for the time being at least resolved their differences, they appear to have recaptured their initial glow, and this seems to be enough to keep them happy, if not exactly warm.

  The baby is late. I never expected it to arrive on time, considering that after so long in the womb, it should be allowed a little leeway. I have never understood how babies can be late. I can see that early could be a problem; even I know that premature babies are bound to be underdeveloped. But late? It seems to me more than likely that each baby comes in its own time, and that that time varies from baby to baby.

  But the midwife disagrees, and mutters about weight loss and something called ‘placental insufficiency’. I know that the reason I have lost weight is that indigestion prevents me from eating as much as I normally would, but the midwife, a busty bossy woman, doesn’t listen. I tell her it’s my body; she says what about the baby? I say it’s my baby, too; she says I’m being selfish, and threatens to have it induced. I ask whether this can be done without my consent. She reluctantly admits that it can’t. Well, then.

  I sit around and wait. Because of my size and accompanying exhaustion, I was relegated some time ago to light duties — feeding the hens, helping Mum with meals, a spot of hen house duty — but now everyone insists on treating me like an invalid, and I’m hardly allowed to do anything at all. I read and try to play the violin, but my attention span is so limited that I can’t concentrate on either. My sleep is disturbed by the activities of the baby, who appears to have no notion of day or night, and by bad dreams. I have a recurring nightmare in which the baby refuses to come out — in fact never comes out — and I get bigger and bigger as the years go by.

  ‘He’s a man now, you know,’ says the midwife, who is still apparently in attendance. ‘He’s started shaving.’

  The idea of a fully-grown man living inside me and actually shaving is so horrendous that it invariably wakes me up.

  These days, I hardly recognise Kaz. Gone is most of the ironmongery which used to adorn her face, her hair is returning to its natural colour (a pleasant shade of honey) and she’s trying to give up cigarettes (Kent hates them).

  ‘Though it’s bloody difficult,’ she tells me, as we shiver together outside the back door while she has a smoke. She’s down to seven a day, and rations them carefully so as to get the most out of them. ‘If you’ve never smoked, you don’t know how wonderful it is. That first long pull of smoke into your lungs — there’s nothing like it.’ She removes what is now a minuscule stub from between her lips, gazes at it wistfully for a moment, and then screws it carefully into the ground with her heel. ‘Let’s go in and get warm.’

  We wake the next morning to snow. When I look out of the window, the garden and the fields beyond are carpeted in white. The roofs and corners of the outbuildings are rounded and softened by snow, making them resemble gingerbread houses, and the branches of the trees are bent low under its weight. There isn’t a breath of wind.

  Perhaps there’s still something of the child in me, for I never fail to be excited by snow. The magic white light, which seems to glow on the walls even before you’ve opened the curtains; the softness of the silence; the treat of being the first to make footfalls in virgin snow. Of course, as a child, I had snowballs and snowmen to look forward to, and I think I can say I’ve grown out of those, but there is still something special about waking up to snow, especially when, as today, it is totally unexpected.

  But it would appear that I’m the only one excited by the snow, for downstairs, everyone is grumbling. Snow means more work, of course. It needs to be negotiated or shovelled away; such animals as are still allowed out during the day will have to be kept in, which means more mucking out; everything takes twice the time when you have to tramp through snow.

  ‘Blossom won’t be in,’ says Eric wearily.

  ‘Why?’

  ‘She never comes when it snows. Says the bike won’t work.’

  ‘Well, she may have a point.’

  ‘She may. But I think the real point is that she doesn’t like snow.’

  But Lazzo turns up, full of good cheer, and between us all (for once, my offers of help are accepted) we get the jobs done. By lunch-time, the snow is pock-marked by trails of footsteps, crossing and re-crossing each other, and my excitement has evaporated as quickly as it arrived. My fingers are stiff with cold, my feet are numb inside my wellingtons, and I know without looking that my cheeks have turned an unattractive shade of purple. Maybe snow isn’t so much fun after all.

  But after lunch, Mikey and Gavin turn up.

  ‘We’ve come to help you make a snowman!’ Mikey says. ‘To cheer you up.’

  ‘What a ridiculous idea.’ I’m no longer in the mood for snowmen. ‘Haven’t you got a job to go to?’

  ‘It’s Saturday.’

  ‘Oh. I’d forgotten.’

  ‘Come on, Ruth. It’s your last chance to be a kid before you’re a mother.’

  ‘You think?’

  ‘I know.’

  So we make a snowman. Kaz and Kent join in, and when it’s finished, I have to admit that it’s the best snowman I’ve ever seen. It — he — is huge (Mikey made the finishing touches with the help of a stepladder), and sports a rather fetching trilby hat and a moth-eaten dinner jacket.

  ‘There. Don’t you feel better now?’ Mikey brushes snow off his jacket and beams at me.

  ‘You know, I think I do.’

  ‘I said you would. It brin
gs out the child in you.’

  ‘That’s actually what I’m waiting for.’

  ‘So you are!’

  We all howl with laughter, while my father, who doesn’t do fun in any form, watches us pityingly from the sitting-room window and Mr. Darcy runs round and round in circles, dizzy with excitement. A lone pilgrim, waiting for someone to attend to her, watches in astonishment, and Eric and Silas applaud from the back doorway.

  Today has turned out to be a good day after all.

  Chapter Forty-Three

  Late in the evening, the wind gets up again, and before long it’s howling round the house and down the chimney.

  ‘It’s snowing again. Already drifting,’ says Kaz, letting in a blast of ice-cold air as she comes in from checking on the animals. ‘Bloody hell, it’s cold. Put the kettle on, someone. I can’t move my fingers.’

  Kent obliges, and Kaz peels off several layers and then goes to warm herself by the Aga.

  ‘I think they forecast a blizzard,’ says Eric mildly.

  ‘Now he tells us,’ mutters Kaz.

  ‘Well, what would you have done about it?’ Eric is scribbling madly at the kitchen table, making notes from a textbook. ‘D’you know what? I forgot all about the dodo!’

  ‘What about the dodo?’ Kent asks.

  ‘It would have been on the Ark.’

  ‘But it’s extinct,’ Kaz objects.

  ‘It wasn’t then, though, was it?’ I can tell from Eric’s tone that he was hoping someone would say this.

  ‘Well, no. But do you have to have it?’ I ask him. ‘After all, you’ve left out other birds, haven’t you? Why not leave out the dodo?’ I have a ridiculous mental image of a pair of dodos waddling up the gangplank into the welcoming arms of the Noah family.

  ‘Because it’s important. The fact that it’s extinct could mean it’s quite old —’

  ‘Or quite careless.’

  ‘I wish you’d take this seriously, Ruth.’

  ‘How can anyone take dodos seriously?’