‘Nevertheless I think I’ll bring one along.’
‘What?’
‘A blindfold. Scarf, or something. Got some marvellous Glenmorangie too that my brother-in-law gave me last Christmas; pretty sure Simon will like that. I’ll bring that too. Toodle-pip!’ And off he scurried, thrilled to bits, an entire screenplay playing out in his head, his Border terrier on a tartan lead trotting along beside him.
Later that morning, as I left the house to collect Clemmie from school, old Frank Warner, who’d been sitting outside the Rose and Crown across the road having a pint with Odd Bob, put his glass down on the bench and shuffled towards me.
‘Hello, Poppy.’
‘Hello, Frank.’
‘Um, Poppy, I gather there’s a bit of a book-club thingy occurring at Peggy’s place these days. Wondered if I could join?’ Frank was late sixties, an ex-squadron leader, widowed, vast moustache, excessive dandruff. He spent a lot of time outside the Rose and Crown sinking pint after pint with Odd Bob, who never said much but nodded sagely as Frank held forth about Harrier Jets. Bob, slower in every respect, had now joined us, it having taken him that much longer to circumnavigate the pond.
‘Bob would like to join too,’ Frank assured me firmly, as Bob nodded mutely. Bob was the closest thing we had to a village idiot. He was a tenant farmer who lived in the filthiest farmhouse imaginable on the road out of the village. If, perchance, as a favour to Angie, one ever popped the parish magazine through his door, such a cacophony of dog barking and howling would start you’d hear it all the way home, and then the geese would start honking and the whole village would turn and look accusingly at you when you returned.
‘Um, right. Well, I’m not quite sure, to be honest.’ I scratched my leg nervously. ‘Can I get back to you? Only – I’m not really organizing it. I’ll have to ask the others.’
Frank smoothed his luxuriant moustache in an alarmingly Terry Thomas manner. ‘If you would, my dear. And put in a good word for us, hm?’
‘Of course.’
He gave me a huge wink. ‘Ding dong,’ he murmured.
I hastened off up the hill with my buggy.
I told Jennie about it when I got back. She was weeding her front garden and leaned on her fork to listen.
‘Oh God, that’s nothing,’ she told me. ‘When I was in the shop just now, Dickie Frowbisher sidled up to me and said he’d read a lot of John Grisham and did that count?’
‘Oh dear God. What have we started?’
‘A book club,’ she said firmly. ‘With an exclusive, restricted membership. No new members unless they’ve been thoroughly vetted and agreed on by all existing members; and, as of next week, we get down to the serious business of talking books. Angus should drop them off today and then we can get reading.’
‘Exactly.’ I agreed. My eyes roved down. ‘What’s wrong with Leila?’ The usually irrepressible Irish terrier was lying at Jennie’s feet looking morose, a huge plastic collar, about a foot wide, like a halo around her neck. ‘Why has she got that on?’
Jennie regarded her hound speciously. ‘She self-harms,’ she told me gloomily.
‘No!’
‘Well, no, OK, she scratches herself. So she has to wear that stupid collar. D’you think I should blame myself? For her mental-health issues?’
‘Oh, shut up, Jennie. How long has she got to wear it for?’
‘Till she stops scratching, I suppose.’ She sighed. ‘Anyway, she’s in therapy now.’
‘Leila?’
‘Well, not me – yet. There’s a girl in the next village offering free dog-therapy sessions because she’s just starting.’ She made a face. ‘After Leila, she might be just stopping.’
I giggled.
‘Anyway,’ she grinned, ‘on, on.’ She stuck her fork in the ground and started digging. Humming too, quite merrily for her. And she hated gardening. As I went up my path, the window above her porch flew open. Dan appeared half dressed, hair askew.
‘Can’t find any ruddy socks!’ he roared.
Jennie put down her fork. ‘Coming, darling,’ she said, in an unusually mild voice. I watched her walk inside, in astonishment. Such a statement would normally be met with a sharp rebuke to bloody well find them himself and even Dan blinked down at me in surprise, ocean wave flopping. He grinned.
‘Hi, Poppy. Enjoy your evening last night?’
‘Yes, thanks, Dan, it was fun.’
‘Good. Well, I must say I’m all for it. It’s done wonders for Jennie’s humour; can’t think what’s come over her. She really ought to get out more. Well done you for organizing it.’
‘Oh, er, it wasn’t really me. It was Peggy,’ I said uneasily, shifting the blame.
‘Well, good for Peggy. You girls need some stimulation in your lives. Can’t be running round after your bloody husbands and children all the time, can you? And think of all the books you’ll read. Great stuff!’
And with that he popped his head back in to greet his brand-new wife, who, perhaps not enjoying entirely the stimulation Dan had in mind, and with a different sort of fantasy fiction evolving in her head, was at least less susceptible to the irritations he provided.
Was that such a bad thing, I wondered as I went inside, lifting Archie from his buggy and refusing Clemmie’s demand for a biscuit before lunch. I took their cottage pie from the oven and let it cool a moment on the side. If living in one’s own head made one more amenable to others, more accepting of the real world and the people one lived with, so what? Surely that was OK? Up to a point, I decided, as I scooped out a bit of pie for Archie and broke it up with a fork to let the steam pour out. The problem came when one lived more in one’s head than in the real world. It had always been a safe place for me to go, both as a child when Mum had died and later on as my marriage failed. But if we all moved around in our private worlds, we ended up living with strangers.
I sat a moment, gazing out of the window, remembering Dad and me in the early days after Mum’s death; being so careful, so polite to each other.
‘I thought we’d give her clothes away to one of those charity shops,’ he’d said one day, coming in from the fields. ‘You know, Save the Children or something. Too many memories.’
‘Sure. Whatever you think, Daddy.’ And he’d gone off back to the yard. Meanwhile my head had screamed: ‘You mean, someone else gets to smell my mother on the collar of her suede jacket? The one I sneak out of her wardrobe and inhale daily?’
And then later with Phil:
‘Cycling in Majorca in August,’ he’d say, closing the guide book decisively. ‘We’ll leave the children with your father.’
‘No. No. Cornwall. Rock pools, with the children,’ my head had raged, too tired to fight. All fought out. I’d heard Phil’s arguments before, every year.
‘When they’re older, Poppy, of course we will,’ he’d say patiently. ‘But sand and nappies don’t really mix, do they? Be reasonable.’
We had gone to Cornwall once and he’d hated it. ‘I don’t get it, Poppy. I’m sorry, I just don’t. A ham roll on a freezing rock with a flapping Telegraph?’
I’d seen only my baby in the sand, little Clemmie, gazing in rapture as a minute sand crab shifted sideways down the beach at speed. Later, building a small castle; building poignant memories too. Mind you, I also remember my husband’s skinny white legs protruding from a towel and his clenched expression. It was the look of a man controlling himself in impossible circumstances. So off we’d gone to Majorca the following year, and Phil had been happy and I’d once more retired to my head. So much so that once, in a restaurant in Palma, when Phil asked me what I wanted, I said I’d have a pasty.
I’d have to keep my eye on Jennie.
12
The next day, I went to see Dad. There wasn’t any real need to ring, he was always there, doing what he always did, and was always pleased to see me, but I gave him a call anyway before I pitched up. He was there. And he was pleased too.
I found him lunging a yearl
ing in the field behind his cottage: a nervous young filly trotting round him in circles on the end of a long piece of rope. My father’s face was a picture of rapt concentration, the only time it looked like that, aside from when he was pricking out seedlings in what passed for his greenhouse. Yes, young things: fillies, seedlings, children. I’d been lucky. And only my gran had known that when Mum died. Most people had looked at one another in horror: Peter Mortimer, with a child of eleven! A little girl! But Gran had known about his nurturing heart and had no truck with people who’d told her she should step in and take over. She lived reasonably close by and had popped in regularly – Mum’s mum, this is – and if she’d ever been appalled at the chaos, the confusion, the endless saddles and bridles slung over chairs, the hastily opened tins of beans for tea, she never said. Might have quietly cleaned up, but, looking out of the window as she washed up, would have seen me perched in front of Dad in the saddle of some huge hunter, or with him in the barn filling hay nets or water buckets, which could easily descend into a water fight in the yard, both of us running in drenched. I was always pretty grubby and oddly dressed, but I was always with him: beside him in the rattling old horse lorry off to the sales – never a seat belt and probably never a tax disc either. Dad wasn’t dishonest, but if he was up against it money-wise, which he always was, he sailed fairly close to the wind. And Gran would have left us to it. Stayed for tea – more beans – and gone away knowing I’d probably be awake until Dad went to bed. Knowing too that I didn’t always make it to school if we’d been up all night with a mare foaling, that I drove around the farm alone in a horse box with hardly any brakes, but also that I appeared to be thriving. That I was getting a different sort of nourishment.
Calling it a farm was pitching it high, I thought with a small smile as I stood at the edge of the flat, windy field, watching the filly, who, nostrils flaring, all her instincts telling her this was not right and she shouldn’t be on the end of this rope, was nonetheless falling for the patience and kindness of the man on the other end. The field was one of six, all patchy and overgrazed, which together totalled thirty acres. A smallholding, really, with a cottage, a few tumbledown outhouses and a barn, which Dad had personally divided into stalls. All the stalls were crib-bitten and crisis-managed, held together with bits of plywood and binder twine, but they were scrupulously clean and the occupants looked happy enough. Glossy, healthy and relaxed, rather as, years ago, the young occupant of the cottage had been: thriving on benign neglect.
‘What d’you think?’ Dad called softly. He’d slackened the rope and was walking towards her, stealthily winding the rope in loops around his elbow as he went until he was beside her.
‘Lovely,’ I said quietly, walking across. I reached out a cautious hand, making sure she’d seen it first, to stroke a silky chestnut neck. ‘Is that the first time you’ve lunged her?’
‘Second. Might put a blanket on her tomorrow.’
I smiled. Received horsey wisdom suggested one might not do this until the age of three, but Dad had his own method of breaking horses, which involved treating them like adults from an early age. He’d adopted the same policy with me. He’d never turned a hair at teenage indulgences, never joined the clucking mothers who endlessly dissected their children’s love – or rather sex – lives; indeed he had no problem with my sexuality at all. What he did mind very much, though, was whose car I got into.
‘How long have you been driving?’ he’d quiz some surprised seventeen-year-old boy, probably Ben, as he came to pick me up.
‘Um, about three weeks, Mr Mortimer.’
‘Shift across and let Poppy drive, would you?’
‘OK,’ the boy would say, stunned. And he’d shift, because of course I’d been driving untaxed cars since I was twelve.
There again, as many of the mothers muttered, it was all very well. He was lucky with me. I hadn’t rebelled. I hadn’t had sex at thirteen, didn’t get pissed on a regular basis and I hated smoking. Now if Peter Mortimer had had our Chloe, for instance, they’d say, rolling their eyes … and Dad would smile, incline his head and agree. Privately, though, he’d wonder whether, if our Chloe had been around enough whisky and overflowing ashtrays in her formative years, had sipped Famous Grouse straight from the bottle and been sick, taken a puff of Capstan Full Strength and been sick again, and not had the rules and regulations about such things almost planted in her shoulder bag, she would have been in so much of a hurry. Would it have been such a thrill?
Jennie’s mother, Barbara, hadn’t been like that: quietly tutting and waiting in the wings for Peter and Poppy to come a cropper. Barbara, like Gran, had been discreetly helpful, taking me and Jennie to Boots and letting us fill a basket each: a bit of make-up, shampoo. ‘You’ll want some conditioner now, Poppy.’ Quietly popping in some STs – ‘For your drawer, by your bed,’ she’d explained. Things Dad really wouldn’t have a clue about.
So yes, we’d had a bit of a support network. But so subtle and considerate you’d hardly know it was there, like a cobweb. When some busybody in the village had suggested Social Services look at the state of our bathroom, which at that point not only had a whisky optic on the wall so Dad could top up his glass in the bath, but also some guppies of mine living in the tub, Barbara and Gran had pointed out, metaphorically rolling up their sleeves, that it was summer, and Peter and Poppy swam in the river every day, so what was the problem? The busybody backed off and the fish stayed a couple more weeks until Dad, half-cut, accidentally pulled the plug out. I remember being distraught and Dad couldn’t have been more sorry; but then, he was always sorry after he’d been drinking heavily. I make the distinction heavily, because Dad always drank, it was just that sometimes he drank a bit more than usual. If truth be told, he was probably always faintly sloshed after midday, but so amiable and jolly no one really minded. He never got to the abusive or slurring, embarrassing stage, because when he got too tight he simply fell asleep wherever he happened to be. He’d wake up flat on his back in the garden, or on a sofa, or beside one of his mares in a stable. Then he’d blink a bit, look faintly surprised at his surroundings and say, ‘Right. Must crack on.’
These days I doubt I’d have been allowed to stay with him, I thought, as we walked the filly back to her stable. Yet would Dad have parked me with Gran while he went cycling in Majorca? Or, OK, hunting in Ireland? No, he would not. If he went to Ireland I went too, whilst the lad down the road did the horses. The one and only time I didn’t accompany him was when someone tipped the school off that I was about to have my annual day’s holiday at the Newmarket sales. Dad, rebuked by my teacher, had sheepishly gone alone. He’d been very late picking me up. I remember waiting on the school steps, getting nervous. Then panicky. Dusk had gathered. No mobile, of course, and my mouth had lost all its moisture. I had him dead in a ditch. I started to cry, which turned into hysterics. By the time Dad arrived, I was shaking with sobs, and even though he was beside me, holding me, I couldn’t stop. Wave after wave broke over me, all to do with a terrible sense of loss. Because despite Dad being so brilliant, and despite the fantastic support of Gran and Barbara, I’d lost my mother. And I didn’t have siblings. It would be too convenient to hope I’d come out of that unscathed. I was left with an impenetrable fear of being alone.
The only time I felt like that again, that terrible rising panic, just the tip of it even, was when I put down the phone to Ben on the stairs in Clapham. When he told me he’d met someone in New York. I’d recognized the signs. Felt them bubbling within me, as, with a trembling hand, I’d put the brush back in my nail varnish. And it had scared the living daylights out of me. I’d acted fast.
Gran was long dead now, though, and the support network had dwindled with her. Now it was my father who was very much alone. Not that it bothered him. Left to his own devices he went his own sweet, shambolic way. I tried not to show my despair as we left the filly in her immaculate stable, crossed the yard and went through the peeling back door, which Dad had to shoulder-ba
rge twice, and into the kitchen. Raddled blue lino curled on the floor, bare in patches, and the Formica surfaces – what you could see of them for empty tins, cartons of cigarettes and plastic milk bottles – were chipped and pitted. Plates on the side by the sink looked suspiciously clean but then Dad put them down to be licked by the dogs, picked them up later, and later still – I swear this is true though he pooh-poohs it – absent-mindedly put them away thinking they were clean. Even if things were washed, pans and oven trays were always black and crusty. All with what my dad – who, incidentally, barely had a day’s illness in his life – would call an acceptable level of filth.
Upstairs the place smelled of ripe bachelor; downstairs of stale smoke, dogs and saddle soap. The sitting room – I poked my nose in – was, as ever, a homage to the Racing Times and Sporting Life, pagodas of which tottered in every corner. I sighed and shut the door. It was probably no more chaotic than usual, but what had seemed normal when I was growing up looked abnormal the more time I spent away from it. I went to the loo, which I won’t tell you about, but then, to be fair, it got a lot of use. When Dad realized pulling the chain in the upstairs bathroom caused plaster to cascade into the sitting room, he’d done the only sensible thing and put it out of action. Three years ago. I came back and put the kettle on, quietly pleased I’d put my cleaning things in the back of the car. Dad reached for his whisky.
‘You look better, love,’ he remarked, eyeing me narrowly. ‘Much improved. I’m relieved.’ He moved Horse and Hound from a chair and sat down, rolling a cigarette on his knee. Mitch, his Jack Russell, jumped up on his other one, whilst Blanche the beagle scavenged under the table. Elvis crooned softly in the background.
‘I am better. Completely.’
Dad raised his eyebrows.
‘Well, no, OK,’ I conceded. ‘Maybe not. It’s not that simple, is it? I’m still a widow and I’ve still got fatherless children. But that terrible feeling of blundering around in a fog has gone.’ I sat down opposite him, still in my coat for warmth. ‘I didn’t think I’d ever see my way out of that and I panicked. Then later, I think I just gave up. Like people do in the snow eventually.’ I wrinkled my brow. ‘It’s weird, Dad, but when he died, I felt pretty abandoned, I can tell you, even though we didn’t have the happiest of marriages. Even though I didn’t really love him. I’d even got to the furious how-dare-he-leave-me stage; quite normal, according to my doctor. But when I heard about his bird’ – Dad knew all the sordid details now – ‘it was like a double whammy. Like he’d left me twice. There I was, thinking at least I was coping, plodding on, when all of a sudden I was back at the starting line again. Miles behind it, in fact.’
A Rural Affair Page 14