There were two pubs: the Holly Bush, which was used by people from the council houses and boasted a successful darts team, and the Olde House at Home, Wistley, which had been opened in 1973 and boasted many darkened beams – some of them even made from real wood – faded prints, a good menu of bar food, and three different types of beer. Andrew Miles, a connoisseur of public houses, had been thrown out of the Olde House at Home, Wistley, on Christmas Eve, 1989, for caressing the landlord’s wife’s bottom, and remained permanently banned.
Louise, who was planning to make a chicken casserole for herself and Miriam which could go in the Rayburn now and need no attention until they were ready to eat, bought chicken pieces at the butcher’s, and onions, potatoes, red peppers and tomatoes at the greengrocer’s. On her way back to her car she was stopped by Captain Frome of Wistley Manor.
As an unobservant newcomer to the village, Louise had no idea that Wistley Manor was, in reality, a new house, with a snob name. She always felt herself to be in the presence of a genuine squire of the manor when Captain Frome spoke to her. She had attended a sherry party at his house, shortly after moving in to the cottage, and had felt herself simultaneously insulted and flattered by his weighty paternalist flirting. She believed that he was born and bred in Wistley Manor and heir to a long tradition of rural squires. She felt he was the sort of man who would know what gamekeepers did during the day. She had no idea that he knew even less about the countryside than she did.
‘See you’ve got that old rogue parked on your patch!’ Captain Frome said, lifting his hat to her, and then taking the carrier bags easily out of her hands.
‘There’s no need,’ Louise protested. ‘I can manage perfectly well.’
He smiled. Louise’s objections were to him the usual flutterings of a damned pretty woman. ‘Don’t know why you encourage her!’
‘I don’t encourage her!’ Louise said, stung. She fumbled in her handbag for her car keys. ‘She just arrived without permission. I’m trying to move her on.’
‘Outrageous really.’ He waited by the car door while Louise opened it. ‘And once you get one coming, they’ll all be here. Gypsies, tinkers, hippies. We can’t afford it in a little place like this. All sorts of difficulties it causes.’
‘She moves on in June,’ Louise offered, taking the bags from him and stowing them on the passenger seat.
‘Nearly a fortnight! I’m surprised you don’t have her moved on. She’ll be burning your fence for firewood and chopping down your trees next.’
‘Her van needs repairing, Mr Miles is doing it for her. Then she’s moving on. I can’t really get rid of her before then.’
‘Police’d move her on PDQ. Pretty damn quick,’ he translated.
‘I don’t think I want to call the police in,’ Louise said firmly. ‘She’s just an old lady.’
He gave a short sceptical laugh. ‘I hope you feel the same when all her family arrive! Half a dozen vans all in your orchard. One old lady is no problem. A small camp is something different.’
‘A camp?’
‘She’s probably a scout for the whole family.’ He raised his hat to her. ‘I could mention it at the Parish Council meeting, they could find a proper site for her.’
Louise was still reeling at the thought of a small camp in her orchard. ‘Yes,’ she said vaguely. ‘If you think it would help. But she did say she was moving on.’
‘Give an inch, they take a yard, these people,’ he said. ‘Good day.’
Miriam arrived as Louise was clearing up the kitchen.
‘I’m glad to be here,’ she announced. ‘It’s been a B of a week.’
Louise poured her a glass of wine from the open bottle. ‘Why so bad?’
Miriam shrugged. ‘Oh, I don’t know,’ she said. ‘Perhaps I’m getting too old for it. Or perhaps it really is getting worse. When I started working at the centre I genuinely believed we could make a difference. But all I do is sustain the problem. For every woman I can get rehoused there are six I have to send back to their husbands to get beaten again. There’s less and less money available and more and more people needing help, and I can’t get the staff. I used to have more volunteers from the university than I could handle. But I went up and gave a talk the other day and a girl asked me what she would get out of it? I ask you! What she would get out of working in a women’s refuge!’
‘What did you say?’
‘I flannelled on about sharing your privileges, and a sense of duty to the community, and she looked at me as if I was speaking Chinese. Then I said it would look good on her CV for a future employer and her eyes lit up at last. That’s all she was interested in.’
‘So will you take her?’
Miriam made a face. ‘Fat chance. She won’t volunteer until she’s done her finals so that she gets the entry on her CV but doesn’t have to waste her precious time. She asked me how much I earn and when I told her she made a little face and said she didn’t think she could manage on that and that she couldn’t consider community work as a career.’
‘Surely it’s always been tough,’ Louise said. ‘From the very start.’
‘Yes. But at the start in the ’80s there was a genuine feeling that poverty and abuse of women could be solved. Since then, post-Thatcher, there’s a sense that poverty and cruelty is natural. There’s nothing anyone can do about it. The job for police or for social workers is to make sure that it doesn’t spill into the posh areas. It’s happening everywhere. The charities working with the homeless have to stop people sleeping in boxes where rich people might fall over them. My job is about containing violence in people’s homes, not curing it. I get enough money to rehouse women who might be murdered. The ones that get knocked about have to go back.’ Miriam sighed. ‘Anyway.’ She changed the subject. ‘I saw the van. You still have your old lady?’
‘She’s due to leave, as soon as Mr Miles fixes the gear box,’ Louise said. ‘I’m actually becoming accustomed to her being there. I had a bad dream in the night and I woke up and saw her light at the bottom of the orchard and it was comforting.’
‘What facilities does she have?’
Louise shrugged. ‘How should I know? I’ve never been in. I give her a jug of fresh water now and then.’
Miriam looked rather severe. ‘You mean, there’s an old woman living in a broken-down van in your orchard and you haven’t even checked if she has the facilities to cook and clean? What about her toilet? What about washing?’
‘I don’t want to know about her toilet,’ Louise said, irritated. ‘I expect she is managing how she has always managed. She appears to be a seasonal event around here. My aunt apparently knew her and let her stay. Now I’ve inherited her along with the cottage. At least Mr Miles says she can stay on his fields. Next year I’ll make sure I have the fence up by May, and that gate bolted.’
‘But what if she were to be ill? Or have a fall?’
‘She doesn’t look like the sort of old lady who has falls,’ Louise said unkindly. ‘She looks like the sort of old lady who would have to be pushed.’
‘Oh really, Louise!’
Louise scowled. ‘I can’t be responsible for her, Miriam. I really can’t.’
‘Well, someone ought to be,’ Miriam said. ‘Would you mind if I went and had a word with her? There are permanent sites in the county, I checked before I came out. I brought a leaflet with a map, just in case she didn’t know.’
Louise hesitated, wondering whether the old lady would speak of Toby. She shrugged. It would be Toby’s own fault for getting so intimate with her. ‘If you must. I was just about to serve supper.’
‘I’ll only be a sec,’ Miriam promised and slipped out of the kitchen door.
The sun was low on the horizon, casting a pale yellow light across the garden and greenish shadows. Small bats circled and dipped in the air, moving almost too fast to be seen. The night-scented flowers made the garden sweet and dreamy. Miriam walked slowly across the grass where the daisies had already closed their pink
-tipped faces against the dusk. Her anxieties and irritations with the imperfect world drained away from her. She breathed in. The air was clean and sweet, still warm, and with the promise of warmth for tomorrow, and for four months of tomorrows.
The summer had always been Miriam’s favourite time of year. No-one who had ever seen her sprawled in the grass outside the library with a book over her sleeping face could doubt the natural order of things which made the sun always shine on her. Punctual and reliable in autumn and winter with essays well-written and cogently argued, her work went to pieces in spring and disappeared completely during the summer term. Her midsummer essays were always late and always crumpled and dusty as if they had been written in a garden under a tree, resting on the grass messy with fertile pollen. Her hair, tidily brushed in the dark months, took on glints from the sun, and grew wild and curly around her face which became first flushed and then freckled and then brown.
In the long summer vacations Miriam would always go abroad. She and Louise hitch-hiked or travelled by train to the south of France, Spain, or Italy in long idyllic holidays only marred by the delay of drafts of money from home, or by the occasional wet day when Miriam would droop and exclaim at the impossibility of the Mediterranean being cold.
Abstemious for the rest of the year, Miriam was a glutton and a drunkard in summer. She would eat a pound of peaches in one sitting. She would drink lager in pint glasses. And in summer, Miriam was joyfully wanton.
It was no accident that she had found her radical feminist conscience in the darkening autumn of her last year at university and that in her final summer she had been too harassed by exams to respond to the weather. Then she had taken the job in the women’s refuge and all her subsequent summers had then been marked by the stuffiness of the cramped office and the rancid smell of her sweating clients. For three weeks every year Miriam and Toby went cycling in France and once again Miriam would lie in the sun and melt into Toby’s kisses. But these were holidays from reality. Miriam’s adult self was wintry and serious.
The old lady was sitting on her steps, watching the sun go slowly down. The windscreen twinkled with the yellow light as if it were clean. Her lined face was golden in the light, she looked like some wise old priestess at a shrine where anyone in need could go for assistance. She smiled as she saw Miriam approaching as if she knew all about her.
‘Hello,’ Miriam said pleasantly. ‘I’m Miriam Carpenter, a friend of Louise’s. I work with homeless women in Brighton. I just popped out to see if there was anything I could do to help you.’
The old lady smiled at her, her face crazing into a thousand wrinkles. ‘What help could you possibly give me?’ she asked.
Miriam, more accustomed to needy clients, failed to hear the arrogant emphasis. ‘I could help you get on a housing list,’ she said eagerly. ‘Or get this van on to a permanent site where you could have running water, and showers and toilets. That’d be something, wouldn’t it? They have electricity at the sites. You could have a television.’
The old lady chuckled. ‘I don’t want any of that.’
Miriam felt checked. ‘Medical care?’
The old woman grew suddenly grave. ‘I won’t be needing that,’ she said. ‘Nature will take its course.’
‘You might have a fall,’ Miriam suggested. In Miriam’s world women over sixty were always falling and needing replacement hips, just as women of forty were always getting hot and needing hormone replacement therapy. The female body was in continual need of attention and assistance.
The old lady put her hand out to Miriam. Miriam stepped forward and clasped it. The touch of the old lady’s hand was warm and dry as a snakeskin. ‘I’ve not got long to live,’ she said gently. ‘Just a month at the most. So I don’t need anything, but it was kind of you to offer. I just want to be left in peace.’
There was a short stunned silence. ‘You’re dying?’ Miriam asked incredulously.
The old lady nodded, her eyes on Miriam’s face. ‘That’s why I wanted to be here,’ she said gently. ‘In this orchard. I was born here and I’ve been here every May for the last thirty years. I had a fancy to die here. Die here and have my van burned with my body.’
‘You’re a Romany,’ Miriam said, her voice very gentle with respect.
The old woman smiled at her. ‘I like the old ways. I want to die here, where I was born. Do you think she’ll let me?’
‘What about a hospice?’ Miriam asked.
‘A hospital? No, I don’t like hospitals.’
‘No, no, a hospice. A special place, like a rest home. People go there when they are very sick, going to die, and the staff are specially trained to understand and to be with you, to control the pain and help you.’
The old lady looked slightly alarmed. ‘That doesn’t sound much fun. I wouldn’t like one of them at all.’ She pressed Miriam’s hand gently between her own. ‘It’s hard for someone like you to understand, I know,’ she said. ‘But really, I just want to go quietly, in my own bed, in the place I was born. I want to be on my own,’ she insisted. ‘No-one fussing around me, and someone to burn my things when I’m dead.’
Miriam, who had counselled a thousand women distressed by less, felt her throat tightening. ‘You’re very brave.’
The old woman smiled. ‘Will you help me – to stay here and die as I’ve lived? As I want to die?’
Miriam blinked rapidly. ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Of course. I’ll settle it with Louise and if you change your mind I’ll see if I can book a place in the hospice if you need extra help. Do you have enough to eat? Fresh water?’
‘I’ll thank you for a jug of fresh water,’ the old woman said meekly. ‘I’ve been thirsty, but I didn’t like to go to the back door in case I was intruding.’
Miriam took the jug without comment and hurried to the kitchen door. The kitchen was filled with rich-smelling steam. Louise had taken the casserole from the oven and was adding a generous glass of wine to the gravy.
‘She needs water,’ Miriam said with emphasis, filling the jug at the kitchen sink.
‘She always does,’ Louise replied, stirring and tasting with relish. ‘She must drink a gallon a day.’
Miriam said nothing but took the jug out to the van again.
‘Don’t say nothing to her about me dying,’ the old woman said to Miriam. ‘I don’t want to worry her. I don’t want to make a fuss. If you can get her to let me stay, that’s all I want. Can you do that?’
Miriam had been strictly trained in client confidence. ‘I won’t tell anyone until you say I may,’ she agreed. ‘Can I book a place in the hospice in case you need it?’
The old woman smiled as if she were giving Miriam a concession. ‘If it would make you feel better,’ she said. ‘But I shan’t go anywhere else. I want to die here.’
‘You shall do it as you want!’ Miriam promised. ‘I have to go in now. Do you have everything you need? Do you have enough food?’
‘I’ve had trouble lighting my stove today. I’ll just eat some cheese and biscuits tonight. I don’t need much. I’ll have a hot meal tomorrow or the next day.’
‘I’ll bring you out some of what we’re having,’ Miriam promised. ‘We’re having chicken casserole. Would you like some?’
‘Thank you,’ the old woman said with dignity. ‘That would be very nice.’
Miriam smiled and was about to go back to the house.
‘And do you teach at the university too?’ the old woman asked.
‘No. I work at a refuge for women who have been beaten by their partners. And I work with women alcoholics and with women who have been abused.’
The old woman looked shocked. ‘A young thing like you!’ she exclaimed.
Miriam smiled. ‘I’m not so very young. I’m thirty.’
‘Thirty,’ the old woman said thoughtfully. ‘But how long have you been doing this?’
‘Since I left university. Nearly nine years now.’
The old woman looked at Miriam with a strange expression
. Miriam stared back, trying to read the face. She looked as if she were pitying Miriam. This was a sensation so strange that Miriam felt almost offended. For the past nine years Miriam had been in a position to pity others. The reversal of the roles made her feel disorientated and uneasy.
‘’Bout time you did something for yourself then,’ the old woman remarked. ‘Nine years on other people’s troubles is much too long.’
‘I enjoy my work,’ Miriam said, steadfastly smiling.
The old woman snorted. ‘Lady Bountiful,’ she said spitefully. ‘You should look to what’s going on in your own backyard. It’s not very long, my dear, before you’re dead and buried and all you’ll have done is worry about other people’s troubles.’
Miriam shook her head, trying to keep the smile on her face. ‘I do make a difference,’ she said. ‘I get women rehoused, I help to change their lives.’
‘Pot calling the kettle black,’ the old woman said churlishly. ‘You should be rehousing yourself, my girl. Change your own life.’
Miriam began to understand why Louise did not want this woman in her orchard. ‘I’d better go,’ she said. ‘I’ll bring you your dinner in a moment.’
The old woman smiled, her good humour undisturbed. ‘You run along. Find someone else to worry about. I’m all right.’
Louise was reluctant to let Miriam out of the door with a plate of chicken casserole, fearing that she would set a precedent and the old woman would arrive for breakfast, lunch and dinner thereafter. But no-one could ever stop Miriam from doing what she knew to be right. Louise let her go.
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