by Mavis Cheek
All modern amenities were to hand for the newer inhabitants. Beyond the church was the post office and stores so it made convincingly practical sense that the housing developments grew up close to that (sweets, cigarettes, local eggs, milk and bread, newspapers – mostly the Mail, Express and Telegraph) and the playground and the new, rather brutal (post-Lasdun but with none of his spirituality about it), village hall, erected (thrown up, some preferred) in 1966. Some who lived beyond the curve at the top end of the village occasionally ventured down the street and into the Old Holly Bush, but most were content to drink and meet together in the social club attached to the Lasdunlite village hall.
To the men of the village the Gnome with his monstrous appendage was not a sight to be encouraged, being somewhat alienating to the masculine mind. And disturbing to the female one. Once up the street and beyond the church the Hill was quite hidden. Happily the primary school was three miles away in the larger village of Bonwell from where the Gnome, in all his terrible glory, could also not be seen.
Thus it was strange to hear bootsteps ringing out, and Nigel was brought to the upstairs window of Beautiful Bygones where he was polishing the lock escutcheons and little brass handles of a small George II sideboard, an enjoyably rewarding job in an otherwise unprepossessing sea of meaningless meniality. He went to the window, loving one woman, and returned in love with another. He stood there transfixed, spellbound by the vision as it bounced and swayed along the street. She, this creature in her pink and leather, with her shining red hair (totally and wonderfully artificial in its hue) was everything he had ever wanted. Suddenly. His eyes followed her as she passed and continued to follow her as she made her ringing way down the street. Above her – outlined on the Hill – sat the Gnome. It was as if she were walking defiantly towards him in acknowledgement. Nigel felt a twinge of something very profound which had nothing to do with the pleasures of polishing brass. Julie Barnsley at the pub was no more. This was it. No, no – this really was it.
The Gnome seemed to wink his approval as the girl in the boots (Russell and Bromley, vintage, £22 in Sue Ryder) made her way to the little iron gate fronting Miles’s front garden. Now that the figure was well past the shop, getting smaller and smaller, Nigel saw how she swung that skirt and swung that red bag and swung – well – swung everything – and he was certain. Whoever you are, he vowed, whoever you are – it is you I have waited for. But Miles? She knew Miles? Now that was very odd and highly unlikely. Were Miles to be receiving a visit from a young lady, Nigel Fellows would have expected her to be wearing something that covered her knees and did not move in the slightest as she walked, in quiet and demure fashion, up to his gate. Miles? Miles? Nigel must find out who the, what the, why the – and quickly. He returned to his rubbing with tremendous brio – as if showing the girl how committed to anything he chose to do he could be.
In The Orchard House Winifred Porlock sighed. Donald Porlock did not respond. There was an utterly entertaining article in the Lancet about DNA and testing for racial/ethnic identity, which backed up all he had ever thought about commercial meddling with such information. Winifred sighed again.
He put the magazine down slowly and gazed at her sternly.
‘Winnie?’
‘Yes, Donald.’
‘Why are you sighing?’
‘Am I, Donald?’
‘I think you know you are.’
‘Ah well.’
‘And when you add an Ah well, you know very well that you are.’
‘Well, perhaps I am.’
‘No perhaps about it. If you got any more wind up and out of yourself you’d be cooling my tea from over there.’
‘Well, I am sighing.’
‘That much we have established. Now we want to establish why.’
The strange thing about doctors, thought Winifred, was that in their surgeries they were the very essence of charming interest. If a woman sat down and sighed they would not rattle their medical magazine at her and put on a sardonic voice, no, they would lean forward and ask in a low, warm, enquiring tone, ‘Now, what’s the problem?’ Or, if you were Donald, lean forward, use a warm, enquiring tone, and have already made up your mind. Between the ages of 15 and 25 and female – hormones. If male 15–25 it would be sex. 25–40 both sexes, it would be the need of iron and more sleep (children) – with, possibly, the odd pick-me-up in pill form. After that – if female – it would be hormones. If male it would be blood pressure and lay off the fried foods.
Donald’s once enquiring mind had been replaced over the years with something more dictatorial and his patients were, in the main, rather a nuisance. Partly, Winifred told herself, this was the natural consequence of spending so many years in a profession, and partly it was the seduction of status. Least said soonest mended, was the proper working spirit, according to Donald. Nowadays if anyone came to him with anything of an emotional nature and became strident about it (women) or determined (men), he would class it as Mental – and pass it on to his partner, a woman. Oddly, most of those he saw went away from Donald’s surgery feeling better than when they went in. Perhaps because his diagnosis and remedies were so simple, so comforting; if a little confusing occasionally. Like the time Mrs Webb went into the surgery and put her hand on her bosom and said she had severe pain and Donald prescribed a little muscle relaxant called Valium. Mrs Webb, who also had housemaid’s knee, had been fearful that an operation might be necessary (the offending joint had never been right since she tripped over her fishing gnome on the front path) but once she got home and took a pill, all such fear vanished. The knee still hurt but she cared not one jot. Nor did she again until the bottle was empty.
All so very different, sighed Winifred, if the doctor was your husband and you were sitting in the breakfast room of a large old house in a small village in the heart of the South-West. She loved The Orchard House, she loved the landscape – she was just not sure if she loved Donald. Or, indeed, if he loved her. If she asked him he’d probably say he had wax in his ear and leave the room rapidly. Sighing again she remembered how, when they first met, he was radical, fired up with notions of medicine helping the dispossessed and out to change the world. She was thrilled by this. Feminist principles and the making of documentaries for the BBC were set aside for the greater good. But where would they go? Why, they would go anywhere. And then, of course, the newly wedded Winifred became pregnant. Never mind. Honourable activity was still possible. Doctors of conscience were needed everywhere, even in England. Rural poverty was the keynote now, Winifred counselled her husband, only too happy that he seemed to accept her pregnancy with good grace; even – she thought – with something that looked like, but could not be, relief.
And so they came to Lufferton Boney where they arrived full of the thrill of having made the move from sophisticated town (London) to very rural country and dared to do it when she was pregnant with their first child, the sweet and docile Charlotte. And she herself was sweet and docile, with Donald taking charge. How sweetly she became a mother and a doctor’s wife – with two more children arriving it was all so perfect. How she forgot her years as a maker of documentaries – a rare profession for a woman in the mid-seventies – though its reminders were all around her since the filming for her last piece – Ancient Landscapes – had taken place in the surrounding countryside near Lufferton Boney.
She fell for the place then, knew enough about the hard times experienced by those who lived on the land to consider it a good place for Donald’s practice, and so it was. But Donald had drifted. Donald found the honour in which the doctor was still held in rural society to be to his taste and succumbed. Winifred, getting on with the domestic side of things, failed to see it grow and extinguish his social conscience. Now he was too old, too set in his ways. Why he could not even, as he proudly told anyone who would listen, boil an egg. It was too late. And Winifred had let it happen. She had fallen for the place and she had loved living here. Now it seemed to admonish her. You loved me once, it seem
ed to say, why not now? She did not know. Doctors cannot be everything to everyone (as Donald said to her waspishly and increasingly often), which was true. She soldiered on. Donald was a good man. But she sometimes found herself staring up at the Gnome with a tender ache that she couldn’t, quite, describe. Now that Donald had taken on a brand new surgery with other doctors in Bonwell, she saw him even less. And she had no idea, absolutely none, if this was a good or a bad thing.
She looked back at the immaculately laid breakfast table and had an overwhelming urge to break things. The young woman who became so proud of her nice china, nice tablecloths, nice vases of flowers, nice children, nice husband, had given way to the middle-aged woman who was stick thin, energetic, never wore make-up and wished she had thought more about life and less about china, napery and the arrangement of blooms. A Winifred who was now as far removed from the woman whom Donald first met as Lufferton Boney was from tribal Africa. Glancing over the middlebrow perfection of her table setting, she thought of the last programme she’d made. It was almost the perfect ending to the series. They were filming Iron Age burial sites in the surrounding hillsides which had yielded up serious jewellery. You learned on the hoof in those days. At the end of the assignment words such as torque and fibula tripped off her tongue as if she were born to them. It took her breath away, as it did the breath of the audience. It was a good moment to leave the stage.
The jewellery was now safely in the British Museum and, on occasion, when Winifred went up to London for dentistry or to visit her sister, she would pop in and have a look at it. Among the golden ornaments and swan-necked clothes pins were some black, polished beads – made from shale, also called cannel coal, usually cracked or damaged with holes bored into them – and she always felt she was like these broken beads – plain, unadorned, overshadowed – and ultimately mysterious even to herself. What were they? Who was she? The beads were brought from the coast, the archaeologist had said, and valued despite the state of them. He rather thought that this part of the world was included in the Mesolithic Causeway, the great road that was used for thousands of years before the Romans arrived. Ritual sites existed on every bit of the landscape around Lufferton Boney, except, it seemed, on Pound Hill. So far the Hill had shown no traces of ritual sites, except of course the Gnome. Perhaps that was why. Whatever the date of the figure it was enough for anybody who wanted to recognise a message. No one knew for certain what that message was, of course, beyond the obvious one of fertility. Winifred felt it was all a mockery, that Gnome: suggestive of promise, yielding nothing. Just like life.
Well, Charlotte was now well over thirty, of a pierced mien, with her pale hair done in dreadlocks, very strong opinions and given to wearing stout boots when she came to visit. She’d been the last one of the three to leave and was the least conventional. Her mother harboured a warm admiration for her of which she did not speak to Charlotte’s father. Donald could barely manage a ‘hallo’ before the phone was passed to ‘your mother’. Winifred saw in her firstborn something of the girl she once was. Where did she go?
The desire to break things subsided. Winifred surveyed the room. The little carriage clock on the mantelpiece tick-tocked away, the slightly tilted gilded mirror hanging above it reflecting the two of them, both with rather more grey in their hair than brown, both with decent garments on, even for breakfast. There was the Spode set on the table, as usual; there was the silver toast rack and the butter dish; there was the little silver stand for the marmalade pot lest one drip should dirty the pretty Belgian tablecloth. Wedding presents, all. Nothing out of order, all very tasteful, all as familiar as the rings on her hand. She sighed once more, quite involuntarily. Barefoot in the kitchen, she murmured. Or rather, comfortable in Marks and Spencers slippers in the kitchen – which only made it worse. Out loud she said, ‘I am very, very bored, Donald. Very. Bored.’
‘Yes. So you keep saying. So you keep sighing.’ He laughed, amused at his wit. His wife mimicked his little laugh. She looked at the teapot and then quickly looked away.
‘Not amusing, my love. Not amusing at all.’
‘So why get the feeling of boredom again all of a sudden?’
‘Well, I can’t be a country lady – I can’t sew, knit, cook, garden or find a flair for paint colours – and I’m past childbearing – and I seem to be past my sell-by date in the bedroom nowadays …’ She paused and tapped her finger against her teeth as if sunk in thought. ‘In fact I really can’t remember—’
‘Yes, yes,’ said Donald Porlock quickly and sharply. ‘But none of that is new.’
‘No,’ she said, taking up a piece of dark toast and nibbling around the edges. ‘It is not new and it is like a pulled thread on a woolly jumper – it keeps unravelling. Eventually I shall not exist at all.’
‘Rubbish,’ said her husband. ‘Absolute rubbish.’
‘I was once one of the leading young BBC film-makers, or in line to be. I am now your wife, mother to three grown and confident children, all of whom have left home, member of the WI where I have seen, at first hand, my chocolate brownies being fed to the ducks, and was also – until recently – the clearer up of extensive dog’s mess due to our elderly Jack Russell’s kidney and bowel malfunction. When it came to it, you administered a shot of something into that same elderly Jack Russell, and that was that. I wonder, Donald, would you do the same for me?’
Donald, who had returned to his DNA by now, only heard the half of it and assumed that his wife was asking if he would do it again to a dog, if they obtained another one. ‘Like a shot,’ he said. ‘Without a blink of hesitation. Best way to go.’ He might have retracted those words had he seen the light that appeared in the eyes of his wife. But he read on until the fascinating DNA article took on an oddly opaque quality as that same wife stood over him and gently poured the contents of the teapot over his head. Fortunately, since it had been made over an hour ago, it was scarcely warm.
Julie Barnsley sidestepped the calling card left by the passing chestnut with distaste, paused on the steps of the Old Holly Bush and turned to watch the last flick of the pink skirt as it disappeared through the door of Hill View House opposite. The girl in the pink skirt had stood for a moment, looking up at Pound Hill, as if mesmerised. That in itself, thought Julie Barnsley, was not strange – many a visitor was mesmerised, if not downright shaken by the view up the Hill – but this girl had given a definite laugh. She just put her head back and gave a very throaty chuckle. It was the kind of throaty chuckle that Julie Barnsley would like to cultivate for herself. Not the usual response from someone new to the Gnome and his protuberance. And to be visiting Miles was also unusual. Miles was not one to receive visitors – especially not young women of high – or perhaps odd would describe it better – fashion with a bounce in their step. Odd, thought Julie, very odd, in every department.
She walked on towards the pub entrance. But something, or someone, made her turn and look in the direction of Beautiful Bygones and raise her eyes to the first floor, where she saw, just before he swiftly hid from her gaze, the owl-like stare of her beloved (secretly) betrothed. His expression, seen and noted before he vanished, was that of a starving man offered meat. Julie Barnsley did not like it at all, that expression, on his usually bovine features. He looked lively. He looked like he’d woken up to something. He looked, in fact, just the way he had looked at her, Julie Barnsley, not so long ago when she took him up Pound Hill and made a man of him … But she did not think the look was directed at her. She waited but Nigel’s face did not reappear. Eventually she pushed open the door of the Old Holly Bush and stomped in. That was not part of the plan – not at all. Nigel was supposed to be enraptured by her. Fortunately – she slammed the door behind her and made the ancient walls shake – fortunately a young woman who looked like that was unlikely to be hanging around for very long. But it did not bode well, not at all. Things must be hurried along before Nigel managed to stray.
Peter Hanker, the young man who owned the Old Holly Bush
, gave her a cheerful grin. ‘Something got your goat this morning?’ he asked. ‘I’ve got a cure for that.’ But he knew that she would show no interest. Once it had been different, but Julie, it seemed, had different aspirations.
On the ground floor of Beautiful Bygones and not dodging out of sight of anyone, stood Dryden Fellows, duster in hand, staring at the now closed Hill View door. He shook his head as if in disbelief and turned away – catching sight, as he did so, of the still pausing Julie further down the street. His face, not usually very kindly, took on a darker hue than usual. Julie smiled, pouted, put up two fingers (she reserved one finger for exceptional circumstances) and then opened the pub door.
Dryden Fellows shook his head, and his duster, for the second time that day. Julie Barnsley would not insinuate herself into the Fellows’ family. She might think she was being clever but she was not as clever as Dryden. If he must leave the business to his son and heir, and also fulfil his dead wife’s wishes, then his son and heir (he winced, as usual, at the prospect) must marry good stock. Very good stock. If silly. Dryden felt this combination would not be too hard to accomplish. His son must continue the upward haul towards good connections – and secure fortune. Then Dryden could treat Beautiful Bygones as a hobby and relax into his old age, knowing that he had a place in society and that the trials and tribulations of only managing to produce one son and heir, and a not very bright one at that, would not matter. In fact, in the light of Dryden’s marital ambition for his son, not being very bright could be seen as an advantage. He hoped for a bride from the social top drawer, someone who would bring respect to the House of Fellows. And he had his eye on just such a one. If he achieved this then surely, surely Lottie would show herself no more?