Mrs Fytton's Country Life

by Mavis Cheek

  She remained in the parlour, surrounded by half-empty boxes, wholly absorbed in Maria Brydges's wisdom. The household journal represented everything inherent in the Goodwife - her memoranda, recipe book, blessed herbal, book of housekeeping, gardening, goodwifery, neighbourliness, mothering, nursing and virtually the curing of souls -and it seemed to Angela, at the honourable age of forty or so, that it held information much more useful to her now, woman to woman, than her raised-awareness meetings in the seventies. At this ripe old age she dared to say that she was much more interested in learning how to bone a chicken than in finding out what her own untrussed innards looked like.

  She was overcome by a sudden desire for jams and jellies and preserves to inspect and brandy papers to change and the delight of tasks which should be entrusted, guiltlessly, to no one but herself. She wanted, suddenly, to be allowed to be supreme in one thing. To say, like Maria, 'My world - this is my world.' How refreshing after those designer wives and hopeless nannies and halfway house-husbands with this season's designer accompaniment of a baby on their backs, wittering on about weaning. Show me one house-husband, she thought, who rinses out milk bottles or makes tea in a pot or does any of those thousand and one small, light tasks that drive you nuts, like cleaning the rubbish bin, boiling the flannels, wiping sticky door handles, which no one ever notices unless you stop doing them. And I'll show you a hundred others blessed with brilliantly incompetent sparsity.

  'Urn - darling... Um, how do I separate an egg?'

  Not on the floor, usually.

  'Um - darling... How do I iron silk?'

  Not at a temperature likely to melt steel, usually.

  And quite right too. If they were looking after the baby, they were looking after the baby. And that was what they were doing. Looking after the baby did not mean wiping down door handles or rinsing out milk bottles. It was all about focus. Women now had lost theirs. Maria Brydges had focus. She could, and she did, decide what was important -and what was not. And she never underestimated the importance of anything that she felt was important to her...

  Wrote Maria:

  I never did love my dear husband more than when I see him carve so handsomely... He is cool and collected and assists the portions he has carved with as much grace as he displayed in the carving of the fowl... Whereas Mr Porter, my sister's husband, becomes suffused with blushes and perspiration and persists in hacking and mangling the fowl while liberally be-spotting the linen with good gravy...

  That was love all right. High-born or low-born, if you found yourself looking sentimentally upon your man's carving technique, then there was no doubt - as the Queen of Scots said of Bothwell - you would follow him around the world in your shift too. Probably even troubled Mary must have occasionally forgotten the True Faith and the Catholic Crown and sighed as she watched her warlike border lord cutting so capably at the capon. Just like the humble Mrs Maria Brydges after her. Maria, it seemed, knew nothing of political correctness but she was quite unblushing about what would now be a seriously mockable but increasingly fashionable offence... Celebrating the maleness of the male.

  For there was something very comforting even for Angela about the memory of Ian sitting in front of the turkey on Christmas Day and taking charge of the brute. After all, she had eyeballed its bleary eyeballs in a shop, taken it home, investigated its entrails more closely than any woman should have to investigate anything's entrails, given how many of her own were just waiting to drop. She had then restuffed the gaping wounds with two kinds of stuffing, the chestnuts of which alone had driven her practically demented in the peeling thereof, and stumbled out of bed at some fucking unearthly hour on Christmas morning when even the children were still asleep, so that she could shove the horrible thing into the oven. It was hardly surprising, then, that she felt a joyous pride when some other bugger had the jolly task of cutting the thing up. Maria, I'm with you, she thought.

  She was all for Women's Liberation, always had been, always would be, but let some ardent feminist come up to her in the supermarket and suggest that she should abrogate responsibility for the turkey a little earlier in the proceedings and she might, just, spit in her eye. Separate an egg? Iron silk? Buy, cook and present a Christmas turkey? What planet were they living on? Putting the finished turkey in front of your spouse while you finally abrogated responsibility for it did not seem a particularly reactionary or treacherous thing to do. Maria Brydges had a point. And yes, she did like to watch the family, all expectant, while the elegant thin slices were handed around ... If she'd had a Mr Porter spraying the gravy everywhere and throwing mangled lumps on to plates after all her care and attention, she'd have been just as critical as Maria. She dared to say it now. Indeed she would.

  As she turned the pages she was aware of looking for a Big Truth in all this. Aware that this was the end of the millennium and aware that, unlike her counterparts at its beginning, at its end she had no spiritual focus. She wanted one. It was as simple as that. She turned another page and read, entranced, 'Be sure to look well every morning to your pickled pork and hams.' She sighed to have such things.

  Nature's Prozac. Country life...

  12

  September

  One cannot help wondering how medicinal herbs came to be selected from those with no healing properties, and it can only be surmised that in those far-off days in the childhood of the world, when man's guiding interest was his never-ending quest for food, every plant was tested by a method of trial and error... Florence ranson, British Herbs

  [When woman's guiding interest was her never-ending quest for food, very possibly, too]

  If Mrs Fytton the First ever thought about that manipulated group of residents in far-off Wimbledon, it was only with a fleeting twinge of guilt and a lasting sense of celebration. She just wished she had done all this a great deal sooner. In particular, before Extraordinary Little Mouth was born. There was something about the existence of him that took away some of her pleasure. Not because it threatened her, but because he was born and he was innocent. As much as those wicked little chubby dimpled things could be said to be innocent.

  On the other hand, despite having almost no contact with them, and therefore no real confirmation, Angela Fytton could feel in her bones that Ian and his beloved Binnie were beginning to feel embattled. Andrew let slip, though Claire never would, that Ian had shortened a long business trip because Binnie was stroppy about it. Andrew let it slip because he wanted to go surfing in Cornwall and his father had told him to stay put and care for his brother and stepmother.

  ‘I ask you’ said Andrew.

  'What about you, Claire?' asked Angela. But Claire refused to say anything of a disloyal nature. Being female, she knew the power of psychological warfare. Thank God I have a son too, thought Angela.

  Ian was due to leave at the end of this month. Now the fish will begin to fry, she thought. Now she will see what it is really like.

  Good, she said to her half-scrubbed still room. Good. Good. Good.

  Meanwhile, life at Church Ale House was settling into place quite nicely. The mulberry tapping on her window scarcely invaded her slumber, the rustling in the eaves was but nature's way. She could go to bed at night (which she did) and wake the following morning (which she also did) and decide her future by the hour, by the day, by the month or by its eternity. She could take her early morning tea and sit in the shade of the garden (which she did) and let the day and her mind happen as they would. Or she could wander the lane, stretching her arms to the golden morning, and saying hello to any of the assorted neighbours she might meet. No one seemed to take any notice of whatever she was doing, except in the most glancing of ways. They were all just good folk going about their business. And she was a good woman going about hers. Which was to grow, garner, bottle, infuse, ferment, dry, preserve and even claim kinship with Demeter in her pursuit of country matters. The honey flowed, the Perry vegetables were ripening, the Perry fruit canes were bearing fruit, the mulberries dark and swelling an
d the apples firm on the bough. Even the quinces were the size of a baby's fist now. What more could a good woman want? Except, perhaps, a husband, of course. Sometimes she forgot to even think that.

  One September morning, the sun warming her soil, the hives silent, the hens content and her car gathering cobwebs in the outhouse, Mrs Angela Fytton, late of London and now of Church Ale House in the county of Somerset, sat on her Celtic well making decisions both great and small, in between sips of tea. She could no longer sit beneath the mulberry tree since the fruit was inclined to drop and cover her with ruby wounds. She ought, she knew, to gather the crop and begin the wine. It was time, according to Maria's instructions, and the recipe was very clear, but something - she was not sure what - held her back. She patted the tree's buttocks now and again, but that was as far as she got. There was just something about that sawn-off stump round the other side that she found unamusing and unpleasant to behold.

  On this September morning (which also happened to be the date of her wedding anniversary, though no one had marked it, except her, and why should they?) she held her ever-ready notebook on her lap and a pen in her hand. It was a particular day, she said to herself, and therefore she would mark it with something special, even if no one else did. How many people carry silent anniversaries at which they may no longer legitimately make merry? Well, bugger that, she decided, it was still her wedding anniversary and she would. And she wondered what there was that she could add, like past owners before, to the fabric of Church Ale House to mark the occasion. Maria Brydges had added the front addition. Angela Fytton would do something likewise. Nothing so grand, of course. But something. She chewed her pen end. What? And where?

  She threw out the little wicked voice that popped into her head saying, 'Build a bloody swimming pool, of course . ..' She could imagine Daphne Blunt's face if she announced that. But there had to be something. And she took a deep breath full of the aroma of sun on soil. She breathed in again - taking in the scent of roses, the rich, sun-warmed smell of orange blossom, the pulse of sweet William. But something was missing. And she suddenly realized what the something was: thyme, sage, parsley, bay, sweet cicely, mint, savory, tarragon, marjoram . . . She had no herb bed. Apart from the bushes of lavender and an enormous, straggling bush of rosemary by the front door, there was nothing. Gwen Perry kept her few herbs in pots by the door and these had gone to grace their sun-trap patio. A herb bed she would have.

  There must once have been a herb garden, because Maria Brydges recorded moving it in the memorandum book, along with the sketch of her new design, which was round and segmented, like an orange.

  My sister Cressy and I did dig the round and I have let the new herbal bed be nearer to the house so that the kitchen girl can gather them fresh and still be seen. Otherwise she will run from her work and linger all the time, and encourage the sexton's boy ... I have moved the what-not up to the top, where it always was kept, and away from the well too.

  Later, when she told Sammy, he came out with the longest sentence he had so far uttered in her presence. 'The midden,' he said. 'That'll be why the nettles grow well up there. Time was we had nettle beer, nettle tea, nettle tops with our dinners, and even fed them to the cows. Nettles mean good, rich earth.' He wandered up to the top and kicked at the soil with his heel. 'A good place,' he nodded.

  'How big?' she said, for this was not clear from Maria's drawing.

  'Big one here. Small one here.'

  'Why two?'

  'Main bed all laid out nice and pretty, and small bed out of the way where the roots can be dug up and let grow again without spoiling the looks of the other. Otherwise it gets knocked about by all that digging over.'

  He approved of siting it up towards the hives. 'Means that even on dull, windy days, the bees can reach good nectar and pollen. You have thyme, marjoram, lavender, rosemary, chervil and plenty of bergamot - bee's balm - and you'll get golden-yellow honey full of sweet flavour.' He paused.

  Angela waited.

  'Be a lot of digging’ he said doubtfully. 'I'm strong’ said Angela.

  He nodded. 'Maybe’ he said. He gave her a look that did not altogether fit in with the look of a garden adviser. It had a touch of kindness about it. But only a touch. 'And you'll be wanting love-ache and heart's-ease, then’ he said.

  'Not necessarily’ she said, returning the look.

  He nodded. 'As you like.'

  'I wouldn't want much lovage’ she said firmly. 'It's too strong.'

  That look from him again. But he was impressed.

  Plant only a little lovage (loveache). It will go a very long way and is very strong and can be most unpleasant.

  Presumably Maria needed no such cure for love's pain with that elegantly carving husband of hers.

  'If you want medicinals, you've got to make a place for comfrey, betony, aconitum, poppy, belladonna...'

  'Thank you’ she said shortly, desperately trying to untangle his dialect and keep up with jotting the names in her little notebook.

  'You've got woody nightshade already, in the hedge there...'

  'The belladonna?'

  'No. Different.' He smiled. 'Woody nightshade. Felonwort. Draws poison. Other name's bittersweet or the comforter. Suck the stalks.'

  She made a note of this and wondered if there was anything in the memorandum book to explain further. He looked at her again. Just as if he knew everything.

  ‘I'd get the love-ache and heart's-ease in first’ he said.

  The nettles and the dock, and all the other growing stuff that she could not name, eyed her beadily. It was their domain. To begin all over again would be quite an undertaking, but since none of the women who lived here before her would have thought twice about it neither would she. And once the herb beds were established she could gather them and dry them, or make decoctions, just as Maria Brydges had done before her. She would ask Dave the Bread to ask his wife if she could have lessons.

  She watched a globally warmed, unseasonal white butterfly settle on a nettle head. She knew she was supposed to kill it because it was after her cabbages, but she had not got to that murderous stage yet.

  Sammy had said it would only take one cabbage eaten through and she'd be convinced. 'Same with foxes,' he said contemptuously. 'Nice little beggars till you've seen a henhouse when they been visiting. If you're doing herbals you want great Valerie round the coop. That'll stop him.'

  She said demurely, 'Thank you. I'll make a note of that,' putting the extraordinary picture of some tank-like female parading round the henhouse to one side. She saw him dart a quick, amused look at her notebook and the segmented diagram she had copied from Maria Brydges.

  'Stinks like death underfoot,' he added, and waited for her to write that down too. She did. 'Not red-spurred Valerie,' he said. She wrote. Sammy was playing the country sage to the letter. 'Likes wet feet.' She did not write that bit down. He'd be suggesting Wellingtons next.

  'When my herb beds are finished,' she said, ‘I hope they'll be as good a working arrangement as Wanda's. That's my goal.'

  'Wouldn't be hard,' he said wryly. 'You do it your way. Let her do it hers.'

  ‘I might ask her for advice.'

  'Ask me.'

  She closed the notebook. Enough was enough. 'Tea?' she said. 'And one of my fruit biscuits?'

  To the pulp of any kind of fruit, put the same weight of sugar, beat them both well together for two hours, then make them into forms, or put them in paper cases, and dry them in a cool oven; turn them the next day, and let them remain until quite dry, then put them in boxes.

  True, she had cheated on the beating time - by about an hour and fifty minutes - but they looked good to her. He took one bite and asked if she had any of Dave the Bread's Old Somerset butter biscuits.

  Back in the garden, offended about the biscuits, she said, 'Did you know that once upon a time women did most of the medicine and curing. It was part of their job. And then you men came along and took it away ... Or called it witchcraft.' She looked u
p at the Mump. 'There were probably a few of them strung up there.' She could not resist copying Mrs Perry's knowing words.

  'Really now?' he said. 'No. I didn't know that at all.'

  Their eyes met. Somebody was laughing at somebody.

  'You better tell the bees first,' he said. "Fore you go digging. Always tell them everything. Then they won't be offended and they'll stay.'

  That bit was probably true. She watched him walk off, an old man, slightly stooped and slow. What did he know of love-ache?

  She went up to the hives, hoping the bees liked herbs. She was still very cautious with them. Mrs Perry told her they stung you only for a reason, unlike wasps, which will sting you regardless. This was encouraging until she realized that 'a reason' could well be incompetence. However, she persevered, with Sammy's help, and began to like their black faces and yellow and black stripes and the extraordinary noise of their industry when she put her ear to the hive. Sylvia Plath called it their 'furious Latin'. But she never went so far as Sylvia in saying aloud, 'They can die, I need feed them nothing, I am the owner...' It was not to the bees, but to the miscreant husband and selfish children that she should be suggesting - metaphorically, of course - that they could die and she would feed them nothing. No more bits of her. Well, not for the time being anyway.