Mrs Fytton's Country Life

by Mavis Cheek

  Craig and Lucy Elliott walked slowly behind their sons. For a moment Lucy Elliott forgot that she was an invalid, and as such incredibly precious to her husband, and nearly giggled at the sheer bright joy of the whole thing, and the pride of a mother seeing her children perform. But she kept up her grave pace and let Craig's arm support her as they slid into a pew and he tucked her coat very firmly around her knees. After all, she really might have died. And then what?

  Mrs Dorkin, who whipped off the green velvet curtain from her daughter's shoulders and would have consigned it, together with the cardigan, to her bag if there had been room, was glad of the candles and the braziers and the immense wall-light that cast such shadows. It left little to the imagination about what her Sandra had on under her shift. Or not. She stole a glance at old Dr Tichborne as he slid into his front pew. He certainly seemed riveted by something happening up ahead.

  The vicar, in a rather fetching shade of pink, owing to Wanda's discovery that the rosadea berry (Pinko deofloris) provided the dye for the vestments that it was once obligatory to wear on this occasion, stood with his arms outstretched to welcome his flock. Behind his golden head the light above the wall-painting made a halo all around him and the shadow of his body glimmered through the rosy garment. He looked like an exotic butterfly, or an illumination in an old manuscript. Sandra Dorkin sighed.

  Dr Tichborne was thinking, Love the pink, but he was also thinking that when all this was over, and the party endured, he could creep off to the quiet of his house again and read Trollope and put on his Chopin and admire from afar, because to admire from afar was, it seemed, the more delightful of life's options, and the simple, enduring temptation of being the grass beneath young Crispin's press-ups, so to speak. He might have another go at seducing the god-like creature. Or he might not. Oh, what a conundrum. Oscar Wilde, he now understood, had got it absolutely right when he said that the two greatest tragedies in life were not getting what you wanted and getting it. It was in this new spirit of understanding that, as a gift to himself on the decease of his good lady wife, he had purchased a set of more powerful binoculars.

  Dave had thought long and hard about what to wear before participating in the ceremonial and he decided that the church was really no place for a baseball cap. Wanda made him a little roundel of beaded felt which everyone admired, and even Sammy said he would purchase one if one were available. Since they cost tuppence to make and were quick as a wink, it was a silver lining now that the profit from the bread was reduced. The Lord taketh away and the Lord giveth, thought Dave, bowing his head in the flickering light.

  Everyone settled, silent and expectant, into their pews. The vicar played 'All Things Bright and Beautiful' and Wanda picked out the descant until Mrs Dorkin, feeling a little like the mistress of ceremonies with her daughter up the front like that, leaned over and nudged her and told her in a loud whisper that she was going wrong. Very wrong indeed. She readjusted the pink plush and sat with her back very straight, as she had seen Dorothea Tichborne do, and from behind, for more than half a century.

  It was a short while after passing back over the Clifton Suspension Bridge and taking a last look at that milk smooth silvery expanse beneath him that Ian passed a stranded four-wheel drive, this year's model, with an RAC man bent over its open bonnet and two huddled individuals sitting inside. Had they but known where the speeding car was heading, they would have thumbed a lift. Weekending in the country, thought Mr and Mrs Rudge, was proving less enchanting than it had once seemed. And the neighbours never, really, became friendly...

  Ian sped on, those turbos going like jets from a James Bond movie.

  'God's gift of good husbandry - hops, malt and barley. God's gift of good husbandry here in this ale. Here is the light in the darkness of winter. Here is the gift that will bring us to spring. All gifts are God's gifts, our hands but the making. We thank you. We thank you. God's gift and good husbandry here in this ale.'

  'Goodwifery,' muttered Angela.

  But only Daphne Blunt heard. 'Oops,' she said. 'Sorry.'

  Sammy smiled to himself as he kept the sack firm across his shoulders. He'd seen it all before, the rituals, the needs, the hopes and the dreams, all bound up in this one little building. What he wanted was the true blessing of the ale. And that was to drink it. Pub and church. Two centres of the communal universe. And if anyone had the sense, they'd make them the hubs of their universe too. Not, though, in Sammy's private opinion, anyone of the male gender wearing an earring. But that was his private prejudice. Which he kept, as one should all private prejudices, very properly to himself.

  Angela Fytton, standing in the pew at the front, felt a hand brush her arm and a warm breath in her ear. She very nearly jumped out of her skin as a familiar voice said, ‘I hoped you wouldn't mind if I came...'

  She turned and saw that it was Mrs Perry, and she thought that such a good and noble country woman completed the sense of continuity. 'No,' she said. 'No. Not at all.' And she slid along to make room for her. She saw that Sammy, looking up, was also pleased. He immediately put his hand up to cover his smile.

  If the time of the open-air baptismal proceedings was set at half-past five in the hopes that the February evening might have warmed up a little, it was a foolish hope.

  ‘I have no idea what's going to happen,' Angela told the newcomer in the pew beside her. 'None.'

  Mrs Perry looked comfortably unfazed. ‘I am a great believer in leaving everything to fate,' she said, and she cast down her eyes.

  They stood and sang:

  'Little drops of water, little grains of sand,

  Make the mighty ocean, and the beauteous land.'

  Mrs Perry smiled. What will be will be, the smile seemed to say.

  When the Blessing of the Ale was over and the candles safely snuffed, the braziers doused, the lights switched off and the Dimplex radiators unplugged, the processors made their slow way back to the Fytton garden and the Fytton well, shutting the door of the church and leaving the gift of the little warmth they had made behind them. On the wall above the paintings of the naked woman and the shunned stranger taken in, the Virgin smiled down from her elevated place among the angels. She looked like no one except herself and the devils were cowering at her feet. And if behind that smile she was puzzling why there should ever be a ceremonial for her purification after the birth of her son, since she had got it on the best authority that he came directly from God and entirely bypassed the naughty human, sinful bit, well, she was not, for another thousand years or so, prepared to say. Not until she had ironed out the question of gender with the Authority anyway.

  Angela picked up the gooseberry velvet and tucked it around the Dorkin girl's shivering shoulders. But she seemed not to notice. She was rosy-cheeked and staring very firmly at the vicar as he slung his guitar over his back and swirled off to lead his flock towards her coming redemption.

  'I'm going to be born anew,' she said delightedly, 'in the light of innocence.'

  'Ah,' said Angela.

  There was something, she thought uncomfortably, about participating in a baptism that made her think of innocent little babies (not the Dorkin girl) and how they needed, if possible, their fathers. But what of love, she asked the stars -what of me and my love? Silence.

  It ever was thus. Stars may twinkle all they like, but they have no conversation at all.

  It also occurred to her, take this event for instance, that she was doing quite well down here on her own.

  29

  Candlemas

  Brevity is the soul of lingerie.

  dorothy parker

  Past the holly hedge, through the gate, up towards the well. Yes. Here, at last, Mrs Fytton of Church Ale House in the county of Somerset felt she really belonged. Though there was no doubt that the sense of belonging held around it an outer edge of sadness and loss. She might have been doing pretty well on her own, but it was hard to contemplate it being like that all the time...

  When the procession arrived
in the garden of Church Ale House Mrs Dorkin took full command and Mrs Fytton was perfectly happy to let her do so.

  Earlier in the week Mrs Dorkin and Mrs Fytton, accompanied by the potman from the Black Smock, had visited the well to remove the cover and when this was done all three of them peered into its dark depths. Mrs Dorkin held up half a brick and dropped it. After what seemed an eternity there was a faint splash.

  'Long way down,' she said. 'You leave it all to me. I know what to do all right.'

  So Angela did.

  Now the party followed, weaving their way through her garden, past the henhouse, round the mulberry, past the hives and skirting the empty herb beds, coming to a stop by a circle of four buckets, placed around the open well, each containing water and each, rather incongruously, bearing the legend FIRE.

  Angela did not like the look of those buckets at all. Not at all. Two upturned torches were placed nearby, giving light. The Dorkin girl had the curtain wrapped around her as the vicar stepped forward to begin the ceremonials. It was then that a fundamental flaw was spotted in the proceedings. No godparents had been designated. Mrs Dorkin, hot on the physical set-up, was a little shaky on the spiritual. The vicar, having had his mind elsewhere, let slip the hour. And Mrs Dorothea Tichborne, who might have thought about that side of things, was now six feet under.

  In memory of his wife, Dr Tichborne was hastily asked to stand, and agreed because he could hardly refuse. Daphne Blunt volunteered and was accepted, since, although not at all religious in the ecumenical sense, she had a strong interest in churches. And Angela Fytton was asked and also agreed. It was, indeed, a moment of triumph. Now she, like her vegetables, had put down a root.

  'But we must have a candle’ said the vicar, 'to welcome her as a new light.'

  The Dorkin girl said 'Oh!' in nervous rapture. And Dave the Bread held on to his little beaded hat and ran the short distance back to the church to bring one.

  My bees, thought Angela happily. Mine.

  The baptism continued.

  The Reverend Crispin Archer managed to keep himself within the sight of God and never erred in his duty. The Dorkin girl attempted at every opportunity to attract his glance with her eyes, and she did this by winking first one, then the other of her own, or by crossing them in what was meant to be an expression of profound connection, or rolling them, so that the Reverend Crispin Archer was in no danger of being seduced, but in great danger of feeling sick with the visual upheaval. But then it came to the point when the water was required.

  The vicar dipped a tentative pair of fingers in one of the buckets and shivered. But Mrs Dorkin was not happy with the arrangement.

  'The complete washing away of sins’ said that good lady with absolute conviction. 'As agreed. In the name of the old mistress.'

  If anyone heard her mutter 'and on with the new', they were far too cold to consider it. She handed a bucket to the vicar and one each to the other godparents. The vicar blessed all the buckets and, putting two tentative fingers into Dr Tich-borne's bucket, swiped them over the Dorkin girl's willing forehead and felt that was more than enough.

  Not so Mrs Dorkin. She stepped forward, took hold of the velvet curtain and whipped it off her daughter as if it were a dust sheet and her daughter a settee. The Dorkin girl stood there shimmering in the moonlight in the soft white robe. A Rembrandt Bathsheba in a shift, trembling, molten and looking rapturously at the Reverend Crispin Archer. Who, it seemed, was also undergoing a touch of the trembling, molten and rapturous himself.

  Mrs Dorkin seized the moment and, taking the vicar's bucket, upturned it over her beloved daughter's head. And with a smile of invitation she encouraged old Dr Tichborne to do the same. The beloved, meanwhile, stood there, speechless and, in truth rather than metaphor, frozen to the spot. As was everyone else. Dr Tichborne, who felt that on the whole it was women who were responsible for all the sins of the world, followed suit as indicated with tremendous satisfaction, holding up his bucket like a flaming sword and slinging its contents with more force and accuracy than might have been considered seemly in his appointment as godfather.

  The word FIRE on the side of the bucket seemed even more inappropriate.

  The shivering Dorkin girl rediscovered her lungs. And gave a yell of righteousness that would not have disgraced St Catherine on her wheel. But unlike that good and pious lady, the Dorkin girl looked every bit the fantasy made flesh of any garage mechanic's dream. Fine old linen has a way with wetness in that, when soaked, it will display all its fineness of weave in a clinging transparency.

  'Raquel, eat your heart out’ Mrs Dorkin was heard to mutter, forgetting in the excitement of the visual success that discretion was the better part of mother.

  Yes, indeed. Beneath her pink plush Mrs Dorkin stared in satisfaction. At first. But the satisfaction rapidly gave way to an altogether different emotion. Possibly closer to rage. Little about the Dorkin girl's body was left to the imagination and it was a fair guess, from the way the fabric clung like a second skin to her generous contours, that she was not only a very bonny girl in her own right, but that she was a very bonny girl who had been fructiferous in her own right too. Probably around nutting time.

  The vicar stared, having lost his voice and his memory regarding where he was, who he was and what his duty. But even he knew a fructiferous female when he saw one. And a vague memory stirred - along with several other parts of his anatomy - that he had seen it all before. But how?

  Mrs Dorkin continued to stare. Old Dr Tichborne did not stare. Exclamations of horror abounded. But no one moved. Angela, in her first act of charity as godmother, picked up the curtain, threw it round the shivering girl's shoulders and led her very quickly indoors.

  Behind her a babble of voices indicated there were strong arguments for the ceremonial to conclude. Mrs Dorkin, in particular, was of the view that it should conclude with the girl actually being sent down the well and preferably with a bucket tied round her neck.

  The vicar opposed (a very relieved vicar opposed, it must be said, for even if what his memory hinted at was true, and even if miracles still happened, the beautiful curves of that belly before him were more than twenty-four hours old), saying that they would conduct a proper ceremony on the morrow, in the church, with the Dimplex radiators on, and all were welcome. 'For your daughter cannot be married in the church’ he said, 'if she has not been baptized first.'

  'But who will she marry, vicar?' asked Mrs Dorkin, all forlorn, fully aware that Old Dr Tichborne might be a bit senile but had attended enough women in an interesting condition to know what was what. The point here was, who was who? And that was that.

  The biker boys slipped away into the silence of the shadows and ran on the soft heels of their trainers all the way home. Everybody else, in need of warmth and sustenance, trooped back through the garden into the welcome of Angela Fytton's kitchen, where already the Dorkin girl was sipping a hot ale and eating a ham roll with pickled cabbage and wearing one of Wanda's more Arctic-orientated creations while seated on a chair by the Aga.

  Angela looked up and smiled a welcome as they came in. Frankly, if no one else was going to react to the shocking occurrence, she wasn't. The Dorkin girl herself seemed to have a very forgiving nature. Beside her the large candle still burned. She had grabbed it on the way, her new light of innocence, hers by right.

  'I told you I wasn't sure what was going to happen, Mrs Perry,' she said. 'But I am glad that you came.'

  And then Sammy Lee sidled over, almost shyly, and smiled at Gwen Perry, and Angela was surprised to see that he now sported teeth. He must keep them in his pocket. His voice was oddly tender too. More tender than she had ever heard him, even when addressing his pigs. 'Didn't see your other half in church,' he said to Gwen Perry, and touched her hand.

  'You don't see everything, Sam Lee,' she said. But her eyes looked very tender too, Angela observed.

  'No Archie?' said Sammy, looking all around him.

  'No Archie,' agreed Gwen Pe
rry. Her voice, with its Somerset burr, was soft as old velvet.

  Ale was poured. The dark fluid gushed and foamed into the glasses and each - no matter what their other concerns -raised their drink and gave a toast: To the ale and to the coming of spring.' Which, according to Daphne Blunt, was more or less the correct thing to say. Then Dr Tichborne looked into the vicar's eyes and the vicar looked into the Dorkin girl's eyes, and Mrs Dorkin looked into the eyes of all three of them until she nearly went giddy, hoping to instil a sense of propriety or, as she put it to herself, doing right by my Sandra.