by Annie Murray
‘Ew! Hellew!’ the girl warbled. ‘Ew my Lord – we didn’t hear you come in!’ This was followed by the glassy chime of laughter he had heard before.
‘Can I help you, sir, madam?’ George said, with the exaggerated courtesy he often found necessary to adopt when faced by such people.
‘Ah well,’ the young man informed him, somehow managing to negotiate utterance around those teeth. ‘You see, Marina and I are engaged to be married—’ maarrd, was what he actually said, extending a soft, gripless hand. ‘Gerry, by the way. We’re in the process of furnishing our prospective home in Bourne End – we’re going to make it absolutely charming.’
‘Oh it will be!’ Marina echoed, clinging to the young man’s arm and beaming up at him with what George considered extraordinarily unwarranted adoration. ‘It’s so exciting!’
‘How fortunate,’ George said agreeably. He gave a small bow.
‘Oh petal,’ Gerry said, gazing at her. ‘We are such lucky, lucky little people, aren’t we?’
George cleared his throat. He clasped his hands behind his back. Surges of pain passed through his head.
‘Daddy says we mustn’t spend too much,’ the young woman went on. ‘But Gerry thinks – and of course I think so too – that one must buy quality, invest for the long term. Wouldn’t you agree? And of course we do want to spend our lives surrounded by beautiful things . . .’
‘How old is this?’ Gerry pointed at the sideboard.
‘George the Third,’ George said.
Gerry’s face enacted contortions which intimated that this information was somewhat lost on him.
‘About 1790,’ George told him. ‘Mahogany. Very fine.’
‘Is it the one?’ the girl asked earnestly.
‘Well . . .’ Gerry – who, George surmised, clearly had not a clue about this, nor possibly a whole range of other things – swiftly passed the baton. ‘What do you think, my petal?’
‘Oh no, darling – what do you think?’ She clung tighter to his arm, looking up at him with huge blue eyes.
‘I think it would do all right.’
‘Well whatever you think, I think. You know best, darling. You’re in charge . . .’
Dear God, George thought. This young milksop was probably already in charge – of a bank, or in charge of something anyway. Such people always were.
He was on the point of suggesting that they spend a little more time looking round, when the chesty rasping and revving of a large motor car grew louder outside, tyres crunched on the gravel and a klaxon-like hooter sounded repeatedly. Rescue – if it could be called such – was at hand.
‘Will you excuse me?’ George said. The two of them barely seemed to notice whether he was there or not.
‘Mr Baxter!’ Alan appeared from the workshop in his blue overalls. ‘It’s Lady Byngh – she’s, well, she’s here.’
‘Thanks, Alan. I heard.’ He moved outside on legs that did not feel like his normal legs at all.
In the yard, seeming to occupy most of it, was Lady Byngh’s black and red Daimler, of a vintage sometime long before the last war. Even at first glance the thing seemed to have more than the usual accumulation of scrapes and bumps along the side. One of the headlamps was smashed and the front number plate dangled, clinging on by one end. The engine wheezed into silence.
The car contained four creatures, all of them barking.
‘Baxter!’ one of them commanded. ‘Come round to the chauffeur’s window!’
Lady Byngh liked to preserve the fiction that she still had a chauffeur, even though it was at least a decade since her funds had been able to run to one and it was she in the driving seat.
As he ambled round to the other side of the car, George caught sight of Vera, who appeared in the doorway of the house, took a quick look then withdrew, closing the door with the speed that would be required to block out a cloud of poison gas.
Lady Byngh’s pugnacious face presented itself at the open window from under a crushed-looking hat of black straw. At the sight of George’s face, the two bloated Cairn terriers hurled themselves like cannonballs with teeth and moustaches against the back window. An equally paunchy golden Labrador gazed desperately at him from the passenger seat through a haze of smoke. Clearly Lady Byngh was not intending to get out of the car today so he was not to be treated to the sight of her cigarette-scorched tweeds or oddly matched stockings. He had once seen her in one brown and one orange stocking; surprisingly shapely legs pushed into ancient but elegant shoes.
‘Ah there you are, Baxter!’ Lady Byngh bawled above the yapping. Her vocal register seldom deviated from that of someone addressing the last living man high in the rigging of a storm-tossed ship. ‘Do shut up, both of you!’ she roared over her shoulder. Not that this made one iota of difference. The conversation continued at maximum volume. Smoke whorled out of her mouth with her every utterance. As George leaned closer to the window, the combined stenches of tobacco smoke, whisky and dog rasped up inside his nostrils like smelling salts.
‘My man will bring over the Hepplewhite,’ Lady Byngh announced, as if George should already have a precise idea what item of furniture this might be. Having so far evaded the pleasure of a visit to Greenburton House – Lady Byngh’s, by all accounts, scrofulous abode in Aston Parva, the next village – he had no idea to what she was referring.
‘I want it seen to.’ She took a hungry drag on the cigarette, sucking her cheeks right in. ‘Wedding present – my nevew.’
‘Ah?’ George tried to sound obliging. ‘A, er, dining table, perhaps?’
‘No, no – the bureau. Marvellous thing. Priceless. Want the boy to have it. He’s in tea, of course – Assam, you know. Wedding’s in Kent – don’t s’pose I’ll be going. Have to ship it.’ She took a last frantic suck on the waning cigarette and stubbed it out on the dashboard, dropping the stub somewhere on the mulch of the car’s floor. ‘So – you’ll fit me in.’ Not a question. ‘My man will be over.’
She started up the car and the yard was once more full of engine clatter and a pall of blue exhaust fumes. Without any further speech, or indeed acknowledgement of George’s existence, she drove off. He saw the silhouette of her hat as the car bounced out of the drive again.
The front door opened as he approached it and Vera peered out. ‘She gone?’
George indicated the empty drive. He was feeling increasingly weary and strange.
‘Gives me the heebie-jeebies, that one,’ Vera said as they went into the house. It suddenly came to his notice that Vera was wearing high heels, tottering navy ones. ‘And she always looks so . . . scruffy. You’d think, her being titled and everything . . .’
‘She chucked her cigarette stub down into the car,’ George said. ‘I thought the whole thing was going to go up in smoke.’
‘Oh no,’ Vera contradicted. ‘I bet the inside of that car’s damp as a barmaid’s armpit. Nothing’d burn in there.’
Once again left speechless by one of Vera’s observations, George went to the kitchen and thought about lunch. Defeated, he sank down at the table. Then he thought about collapsing into bed.
2.
A quiet knock at the bedroom door woke George later that afternoon. He turned over, which produced an unpleasant, thudding rearrangement inside his head. His face was burning but his feet felt cold as stones. Win’s clock said it was five thirty.
‘Yes?’ He sounded quavery to himself, like an old man.
Vera appeared round the door. ‘Brought you a cup of tea, Mr B. And a couple of aspirin.’ Her heels tick-ticked across the floorboards, to be mercifully muffled by the bedside rug. ‘Ooh dear – you look as if you got the flu.’
‘I, er . . .’ he croaked. His throat felt as if someone had been let loose on it with a circular saw. As he shifted in bed he caught a sweaty whiff from his pyjamas.
‘Dear oh dear.’ Vera smiled anxiously down at him. It seemed to him that her face was bigger than he remembered. He was very pleased to see her though. ‘Look, I’ll
get you a jug of water – here are the aspirin. And I’ll feed Monty and give him a little walk, shall I?’ She hesitated. ‘D’you need me to stay the night, Mr B? I mean I could do Alan’s tea and come back . . .’
He shook his head emphatically, which turned out to be a regrettable move. ‘I’ll be perfectly all right. I’ll let the dog out again later. I say – those two this morning . . . ?’
‘Oh yes – they bought the sideboard.’ Vera’s face twitched with amusement. ‘My goodness – what a daffy pair.’ She leaned over him. ‘Come on – let’s get some of this tea down you.’ She hustled him into a sitting position. In his limp green pyjamas, George felt both pathetic and enjoyably mothered.
‘A hot water bottle would be nice,’ he ventured. ‘If it’s not too much bother.’
‘Course I’ll get you a hottie-b!’ Vera seemed glad to be asked to do something. ‘And some Fisherman’s Friends, by the sound of it.’
Tucked up with the rubbery smell of the hot water bottle drifting to him, his body piebald with burning and freezing patches, he drifted back into the weird sleep of fever.
The clammy winceyette sheet twisted itself about his torso. He decided at some point in the evening that a barrow load of wet sand had been dumped on his legs and surmised, unreasonably, that this must be Kevin’s fault. Then he dreamed that a conveyor belt-like device made up of fat brown boxing gloves was moving closer, up and over his chest, determined to stifle him. He thought about his white ankles and how insignificant he was in the vastness of the world, before waking, panting in the dark and wringing wet.
Must let the dog out, he thought, with weird clarity.
Too hot even to think about a dressing gown or slippers, he staggered down to the kitchen. The linoleum was a sudden horror, tormentingly cold. Dear Lord, if the floor was that cold, how would the lavatory seat feel? The kitchen light was like knitting needles shooting through his eyes and into his brain.
Monty raised his head blearily.
‘Come on you old bugger. Out you go.’ He prodded the dog’s rump with his foot. The hair on Monty’s firm derrière felt warm and reassuring.
George switched off the stark kitchen light and clicked on the one outside instead. The cold night doused him in an instant and he started to shiver. Rain was falling steadily, the wind gusting. Monty did not approve of rain. He cast a gloomy eye outside, trundled down the step and peed magisterially on the grass before hurrying back in.
The door shut again, George collapsed on to a kitchen chair in the dark, his teeth chattering. He had a momentary urge to search his pockets for Monty’s liquorice allsorts and gobble some. A second later the idea sickened him. The task of climbing back up the stairs to bed felt well beyond him.
‘Oh dear . . .’ He laid his arms on the table and rested his head on them. ‘Just sit here, a minute . . .’
‘George, what on earth are you doing out of bed?’
He lifted his head again. His body seemed to be frozen solid. Was he awake? Someone was standing beside him in a long dressing gown. Without looking up, he knew that it was Win.
‘Come on now, we can’t have this. What you need is a nice hot drink and some aspirin. And back to bed!’
He wanted to tell her that Vera had already given him aspirin and that they were upstairs by the bed, but he could not seem to muster a voice.
‘Let’s get you upstairs, George dear.’ Win’s no-nonsense delivery had softened into a more motherly tone for which life had given her little practice. She took his hand and he followed her slowly up the stairs, putting both feet on each step, comforted by the sight of her, the familiar floral material and the movement of her neat rump inside it. She tucked him into bed, stroking his head until he slept.
He dreamed about a woman on horseback and he recognized her immediately: the beauty of her flowing hair and direct gaze, the perfection of the rearing horse’s bronze limbs moved him almost to tears. The exquisite bronze rested on a marble mantelpiece. I’ve found her, she’s here, he kept trying to tell them, a whole roomful of them. Early seventeenth century – look, over here . . . No one would listen.
Later he woke, hearing rain spattering hard against the window. He wanted Win still to be there. There was no one else in the bed. She must be out of sight somewhere, perhaps asleep in the chair. By the time dawn came, seeping and grey, there was no sign of her and he ached for her to come back.
3.
‘You’re not missing anything out there, I can tell you,’ Vera said the next morning. ‘The daffs don’t stand a chance in this.’
Her hair looked flattened, despite the umbrella. It dawned on George, somewhere in the depths of fever, that it looked flattened generally. Those big kinks were no longer. The front section of hair was brushed back from her face and fastened with a clip at the back, while the lower part hung loose. What was going on, he wondered vaguely. Though he felt that whatever she had done, it suited her better.
‘You don’t look too good to me,’ Vera said with worried eyes. ‘D’you want me to get Dr Bell? You might need penicillin.’
‘No,’ George whispered. ‘Don’t bother him. I’ll either get over it or I won’t.’
Vera seemed amused by this martyrdom. ‘Oh I expect you will,’ she said, ‘on balance. But don’t you worry, Mr Baxter. We’ll look after you. If you need Alan for anything more . . . you know . . . personal, you let me know, all right? I’ll keep a good eye on things downstairs.’
Apart from at night, Vera became his nursemaid. She took over the running of the shop, carried up to him jugs of water, hot water bottles, Vicks VapoRub and a potentially endless supply of cups of tea. All George could do was stew in his sickbed in a state of sweaty and shivering gratitude.
For the first two days he drifted in and out of feverish sleep, making the occasional challenging visit to the bathroom. He had to gear himself up for these events for a good half-hour before, trying to raise the energy. He held on to every piece of furniture on the way as his head lurched about inside. The lavatory seat felt as gruesome as predicted.
Sounds swam in and out of his consciousness as he lay abed – Monty barking, the sploshing crunch of a car coming into the drive, the front door opening and shutting, voices. He started to hear the tinny sound of music coming from somewhere. He thought he was hallucinating again until Vera told him she had started bringing a little transistor radio in to listen to in the kitchen – she did so love those Beatles! He didn’t mind, did he? No, he duly agreed, he didn’t.
One morning, some filly-like sounds outside resulted in a small jar of snowdrops appearing by his bed. From Pat Nesbitt, Vera told him. They were delicate and beautiful. Sometime on the second day, just as he had collapsed back into bed after one of his expeditions to the bathroom, he heard an altercation just below his window.
‘You may think that – nevertheless, I am a professional and in my opinion . . .’
Who the hell was that? The voice sounded familiar.
‘I’m sure you are,’ Vera was saying. ‘But everything’s perfectly all right. Mr Baxter has everything he needs and he said expressly’ – had he? He didn’t recall having the energy to say anything expressly – ‘that he does not want to see anyone.’
‘All the same,’ the voice pressed on, louder now, ‘I insist that you let me in to look him over. You don’t know as much about influenza as I do, and believe me, I’ve lost a number of patients to it . . .’
Rosemary Abbott! Recognition jolted through him. What if she had come up here while he was on the toilet? He grasped the top edge of the sheet in horrible suspense. Please, Vera, his mind implored, don’t for God’s sake let her in. He lay waiting for the sound of authoritative footsteps on the stairs, Rosemary in Charge of the Light Brigade mood, thermometer in hand.
Vera was saying something so quietly that he could not catch it.
‘Well,’ Rosemary sounded very huffy, ‘I think you’re being very foolish. I hope he’s seen the doctor. But really, after all my years of experien
ce I would be the best person to see to him.’
Footsteps did come up the stairs then. George turned his eyes to the door without moving his head, his nose poking out above the sheet. Vera still had her arms folded across her fluffy, broad-bean-coloured sweater, presumably part of the way she had warded off Rosemary.
‘So,’ she said. ‘Did you hear? That was Rosemary Abbott.’
George eyed her. ‘I didn’t think having half her patients dying was much of a recommendation,’ he said.
Vera laughed, releasing her arms as she bent down to tuck in the blankets at the bottom end of the bed. ‘She said she wanted to see to you.’
George moaned, faintly. Seeing Vera there, leaning over his bed, he was momentarily tempted to ask her to hop in for a cuddle. It occurred to him that he might be fractionally better.
Vera looked up, grinning. ‘It’s all right, Mr B. No one’s going to get past me.’ Pushing on the bed to help herself up again, she said, ‘How about a boiled egg?’
As she went downstairs again, he heard her singing that new song, ‘Can’t Buy Me Love’ . . . or as she was singing it, ‘lu-urve.’
The next day, as watery sunshine elbowed the grizzled clouds out of the way, he heard the sound of a large engine grinding its way into the drive. The vehicle braked right outside and a cab door opened, then slammed shut. A genial male voice called out, ‘Delivery for you!’
He heard Vera’s voice and then Clarence’s creaky utterance as well, though he couldn’t make out the words. The noises that followed – the squeaks of the wagon doors being opened; laborious shiftings, grunts, thumps and shouted instructions – all indicated the transfer of a heavy piece of furniture from one place to another.
George lay, frustrated. I can barely raise my head, he thought, let alone run my business. He felt limp and floaty and devoid of all energy.
‘That was Lady Byngh’s bookcase thing arriving,’ Vera announced, placing a cup of tea on the table beside him, oblongs of shortbread wedged into the saucer.