‘We know,’ Daisy said excitedly, ‘because we know all about James. Me and Charlie are Madge’s great-granddaughters.’
‘You know Madge?’
‘Well, yes. Do you?’
‘Well, not personally.’ He hesitated. ‘But I know all about her. How my great-uncle adored her, wanted to marry her and live here.’ He nodded in the direction of the farm’s battered wooden front door.
‘Madge has just had a stroke.’
‘She’s still alive? Goodness, I had no idea. She must be in her nineties?’
‘Ninety-four.’
‘Uncle James assumed she died years ago.’
I glanced across at Daisy, who was taking it all in. ‘James is alive?’
‘Yes.’
‘So, he didn’t die? In his plane, I mean?’
‘No, the War Office had never had any confirmation that he’d died. They just said missing, presumed dead. He was badly injured but turned up in some hospital in Germany and then saw the war out in several prisoner-of-war camps. Sorry, so you’re Charlie and you’re Daisy?’
‘Other way round.’
‘Look, I’m staying over tonight; I’m booked into the Jolly Sailor in Westenbury.’
‘Like before?’
‘Before?’
‘I saw you standing at the back of the upstairs function room a couple of months ago. The night of the speed dating?’ I blushed at the very thought, embarrassed that I’d taken part in the whole ridiculous shebang.
‘Ah,’ he smiled.
‘We can’t keep calling you Badger Man,’ Daisy laughed.
‘Oh, sorry, Corey Mackenzie.’ He held out a hand and smiled. ‘Do you fancy joining me to eat tonight and we can exchange stories?’
‘I can’t,’ Daisy said, ‘but Charlie here can.’ She dug me in the ribs.
‘OK, yes, that would be good. Thank you.’ I gave Daisy a big sister look. Why the hell was she digging me in the ribs like that? ‘I need to go and see Madge in hospital first. Tell her James is still alive.’ I felt really excited.
‘But she knows,’ Corey frowned. ‘Madge has always known.’
*
‘Madge, you’ll never guess what…’ Daisy and I raced onto the acute stroke unit where Madge had been monitored since arriving in A and E late on Christmas Day.
Madge, looking every bit her age, turned her head slightly on the mound of white starched pillows, her blue eyes, now faded to the hue of washed-out denim, fluttering open at my voice. The stroke, apparently, had been in the left side of her brain resulting in a paralysis of her arm on the right as well as some problems with speech and, we’d been warned, probably some memory loss. Madge was still undergoing full assessments of both her physical and cognitive functions and her attempt at a smile, as she realised it was Daisy and me standing at her bedside, was pitiable and made me want to cry.
‘You’re looking much better, Granny Madge.’ Daisy, always the optimist, gave me a warning nudge and I attempted a smile myself. ‘We’ll soon have you out of here and back at the bungalow.’
‘Madge,’ I said. ‘Do you remember Badger Man? You know, we told you about him on Christmas Eve.’
‘I think you’re going to confuse her.’ Daisy turned away from Madge, her voice a whisper. ‘Remember, the nurse said short-term memory is more likely to have gone than her long term.’
‘I’m just going to talk to you, Madge. Some of what I’m saying you might not grasp, but you’re not to worry. You’ll get better and remember more and more things every day. So, we – Daisy and I – met someone at Christmas. We’ve just met him again and you’ll never guess. He’s James’s – your James’s – great-nephew.’
Madge stared, her good hand constantly pleating and releasing the stark white coverlet on her bed.
‘Girls, you’re not to excite her.’ Tara, the nurse in charge of the ward, had arrived to check the IV drip that was putting tPA through Madge’s arm in order to improve blood flow to her brain. ‘What are you telling her?’
‘We’ve come across a relative of an old friend of hers. We were just telling her about him.’
‘Well, be careful. You’ll just end up confusing her. Far better to talk to Madge about the weather and what day it is or just let her know you’re here for her and then let her sleep. Sleep is vital for her recovery, you know that. I’ve already had to ask your Granny – Nancy, is it? – to leave because she was constantly talking at her. It really isn’t on, this constant battering her with information.’ She turned back to Madge. ‘We’re going to have to watch this leg of yours as well, lovey. We need to keep it moving so it doesn’t stiffen up.’ Tara looked at the small watch pinned to her chest. ‘Come on, girls, it’s not visiting time anyway. Come back tomorrow at the proper time.’
*
‘Why didn’t she tell us James was still alive?’ Daisy and I made our way along the sludge-coloured corridor to the main exit. ‘God, I hate hospitals. I remember Madge saying if she ended up back in hospital with her leg, she’d never get out a second time. She never thought she’d be back in with a stroke. And, even if she does recover from this, there’s no way she’ll be able to look after herself at the bungalow. She’d hate to be back in Almast Haven, knowing it was going to be permanent this time. She’ll just give up.’
‘Granny Nancy isn’t helping. Has she gone back to Harrogate?’ The glass doors of the main hospital entrance whooshed open at our approach and a blast of freezing January air had us hurrying to the car.
‘Jesus, it’s cold. Yes, Mum texted me to say she’d gone back, but she’s visiting every day. Which is something.’
‘Oh, I don’t know. I think she really upsets Madge.’
‘Hmm. I’m not sure her visits are totally altruistic. I think Nancy’s trying to find out more about what went on years ago – and I don’t blame her – and what’s happening to the cottage. I bet she never thought Madge would go behind her back and give it to us. Mum says we’re a bit persona non grata at the moment: Nancy thinks we talked Madge into it.’
‘That is so not true.’ Daisy was indignant. ‘And awful of Granny Nancy to be more worried about her inheritance than how ill Madge is. Do you think she’ll get well, Charlie?’
‘I really don’t know. I wouldn’t have thought the chances good, you know, having a stroke at the age of ninety-four.’
Once in the car we drove in silence for a minute and then Daisy turned to me. ‘So, what did you think of Badger Man? Rather gorgeous, isn’t he?’
‘Is he? I can’t say I noticed.’ I shrugged and concentrated on the road ahead.
‘Your nose is getting longer by the minute, Pinocchio.’
I laughed at that. ‘OK, yes, bloody gorgeous. But, if you hadn’t noticed, he was wearing a wedding ring. It’s the first thing I check out now. After Dominic, I mean.’
‘Oh, bugger.’ Daisy sat back in her seat. ‘He wasn’t, was he? If I didn’t fancy Matis, I’d be going after him myself.’
‘You stick to the short, dark hairy ones,’ I laughed. They’re much more your type.’
27
Madge needed to speak. Needed to tell these two girls more about James, but her damned mouth wouldn’t work. She knew the words but she couldn’t form them. What on earth was wrong with her? There’d been some problem with her leg but surely that wouldn’t have affected her ability to speak? Did they say they’d just met James? Or somebody to do with James? Something to do with badgers? But she couldn’t remember James having anything to do with badgers. Her beloved James.
She knew the girls: hell, what were their names? She loved them, she knew that. Loved them so much. And the older one – she had a boy’s name – she had James’s brown eyes. The moment she’d held that baby in her arms, there’d been a connection. Where was James? Madge closed her eyes against the whiteness. White walls, white screens, white pillows, white coverlet. Even her hands, apart from the sunken blue veins and brown old-lady spots, were white. She wanted colours and pictures: pictures of
James, not this interminable white sterility.
Here was a picture of the farm: Holly Close Farm. How she’d hated him when Arthur told her he’d bought it. Bought it for her because he knew she loved it so much and wanted to live there. Arthur had got it all wrong: it was James who’d loved it, not her. To her, on that hot afternoon when they’d made love in the cottage, it was just another ramshackle old farm. And although she’d grown to love the place, she’d hated living there without James. If it hadn’t been for Harry, living in the cottage, Harry who became her best friend and confidant, she thought she might have gone mad. But she had Nancy, James’s daughter. Nancy, who looked nothing like James, but everything like Lord George Montgomery-West, her paternal grandfather. The milkman’s daughter. Wasn’t that what he’d always called her?
How had Arthur found the money to buy the farm? Madge opened her eyes but the surrounding whiteness brought her back to a present she couldn’t understand and she felt them close again, bringing myriad pictures of a past that she could. Arthur’s mother, that was it. Madge had always quite liked her although she was a bit of a soppy one, never standing up to that sod of a husband of hers. What was his name? He’d died, hadn’t he? Not long after she’d joined up. So he never knew that Arthur’s mum had saved every single penny Arthur had religiously sent home to her during his three years in the RAF. Never knew that she’d given the whole lot back to Arthur so that he could buy the farm that no one else wanted.
And Harry. Darling Harry. What had happened to her best friend, afterwards?
It was he who’d brought her the letter. He’d taken his own post from the postman and carried on up to the farmhouse to bring her and Arthur’s mail and have a cup of coffee with her, as he often did while Nancy was at school and Arthur ‘out on business.’ He’d brought her the letter.
*
‘Letter for you, Madge.’ Harry wiped his boots on the doormat and followed her through into the kitchen.
‘For me?’ Madge turned, in surprise. She didn’t often receive mail.
‘Got your name on it.’ Harry laughed. ‘You need to get out more, Madge. Live a little. Go into town, go into Leeds or take the train to Manchester. Arthur buys you all those beautiful dresses and costumes and jewellery and you rarely wear them.’
‘Get out like you, you mean?’ Madge said drily as she opened the envelope with Arthur’s letter opener.
‘I’m a poet. Why would I want to be anywhere but here in this glorious Yorkshire countryside in July? I’m like Wordsworth.’ Harry laughed. ‘I just wish I’d got in there first with the damned daffodils. They were totally divine this year.’
‘There’s the yellow roses around your cottage that you could write about.’ Madge laughed. ‘What rhymes with roses? Hoses? Noses? There you go, I’ll start you off: “I chose a yellow rose, smelled it with my nose…”’
‘“And tucked it in my hose”?’ Harry arched an eyebrow. He was so good-looking, was Harry. Medium height, dark, almost continental looks. Arthur, Madge knew, hadn’t wanted to let out the cottage to anyone, never mind a good-looking, Cambridge-educated, ex-diplomat, who’d deigned to eschew his former life in London and New York and retreat to the North in order to write. But, before his various business ventures had taken off (Madge had little idea what these might be and, to be honest, she really didn’t take that much interest) Arthur had been strapped for cash and agreed to Madge’s idea that they should rent out the cottage. Very wary of Harry to begin with, once Arthur realised their tenant was not interested in women, but was ‘a queer, Madge, you know, a poofter’, he relaxed.
‘You don’t miss London or New York, Harry? All the hustle and bustle of the city? I know I do sometimes. Goodness…’ Madge stood stock-still as she read the contents of the letter.
‘What is it?’ Harry went to take the kettle from the range, looking round for the tea caddy as he did so.
‘Goodness. Heavens… It’s from Beryl, one of the WAAFs I shared a room with at the Met training school on Oxford Street during the war. I wonder how she got this address’ Madge frowned, scanning the contents. ‘She’s arranging a ten-year reunion of the WAAFs who worked together as cooks there.’
‘You must go, darling. Get out your glad rags and furs, and head for the bright lights once more.’
Madge laughed. ‘Furs in July? No, Harry, there’s no way I’m going to any reunion. I don’t want to go.’
‘Oh, but you must. If only to give that heavenly little ivory costume an outing.’
‘I’m not sure I want to be reminded of that time.’ Madge felt tears threaten. ‘It was the most wonderful… and the most terrible time of my life.’
‘And this isn’t?’ Harry took her hand. ‘Madge, I know you’re not happy at the moment. I know Arthur isn’t the love of your life.’
‘Arthur saved me.’
‘From what? Doom? Destruction? Yourself? Madge, this is 1953, for heaven’s sake, and I worry about you. You’re too young and too lovely to spend your life holed up here with Arthur. He never lets you out of his sight except when he’s off “doing business”. What exactly does he do, anyway?’ Harry frowned. ‘He never gives you a moment to yourself.’ He took the letter, quickly scanning the ten or so lines written there. ‘It’s a lunch, Madge. One little lunch at The Ritz. I’ll drop you off at the station; it’s only a couple of hours now by train. If Arthur won’t pick Nancy up from school, then I will.’
When Nancy was just seven, Arthur had insisted the local village school wasn’t good enough for any daughter of his and, without consulting Madge, had put her name down for a little private school five miles away. Madge had been furious at the time and, encouraged by her sister, Lydia, who had become a staunch Labour Party activist after Churchill’s Conservative Government had returned to power in 1951, refused to go into Midhope to buy the necessary fancy uniform, equally insistent that Nancy should stay where she was. It was Nancy herself, taken by Arthur to have a look at the new school, declaring she wanted to go in the car every day with Daddy to a school just for girls and not rough boys, who won the day, and she’d been going there ever since, loving every minute of it.
‘Well, I’m telling you now, Arthur won’t let me go off to London by myself for the day.’
‘Yes, too frightened you won’t come back.’ Harry drained his cup. ‘Stand up for yourself, Madge. Lydia tells me you were always pretty feisty until you got married. Now you seem to have buried yourself out here in the countryside. You’re going to London if I have to walk you all the way there myself.’
*
‘I’m meeting Beryl Andrews’ party. Actually, I’m not sure that she still is Andrews. She has a table booked…’ Madge hesitated as the maître d’ welcomed her.
‘Madge. Over here. My goodness, you look wonderful.’ Beryl, with whom she’d shared a room on Oxford Street, came running over, an enormous grin on her carefully made-up face. Dressed in a sky-blue dress with huge black buttons, cinched tightly at the waist with matching black belt, she was the height of fashion. A blue hat was pinned securely on the back of her now very blond hair and, despite the warmth of a London summer, black cotton gloves covered her hands so that Madge was unable to see if she was wearing a wedding ring.
‘So do you.’ Madge suddenly felt terribly shy and unsure of herself. Apart from parties and trips to the theatre with some new friends of Arthur’s whom she wasn’t convinced she liked anyway, finding them brash and vulgar at times, Madge knew that over the years since the war she hadn’t been the most sociable of women. She had a whole wardrobe of the most beautiful clothes for which Arthur took her into Manchester shopping, a drawer full of silk and satin lingerie that he insisted on buying for her, and a jewellery box containing more pieces than she could ever wear at any one time.
‘Now,’ Beryl smiled, taking her arm and leading her into the dining room, ‘there’s probably quite a few girls here you won’t know – they were posted to Oxford Street after you went back north. And you never kept in touch,’
she added accusingly. ‘It’s a good job Fran knew how to find you.’
‘Fran?’ Madge felt her pulse race. She’d consciously not kept in touch with Fran once she’d moved back to Midhope, cutting off anyone with a connection to James. James was dead and Arthur had taken her and Nancy on, so she’d felt she owed her new husband her best shot at making the marriage work. Reliving with his cousin memories of James and how much she’d loved him would have only prolonged the agony; there had never been any correspondence between the two and that was how Madge had wanted it.
‘Yes, come on, she’s already here. And there’s Mary and Nora, too.’
‘Oh, my goodness, Marjorie Gregory. You look just like Grace Kelly.’ Mary stood up in welcome from the table of eight women who all turned as one at her words. ‘Did you see her in High Noon with Gary Cooper? I just love Gary Cooper, don’t you?’ Mary’s strong Birmingham accent hadn’t changed a bit and Madge felt herself relax, smiling both at her voice and her enthusiasm. Mary had always been a Hollywood fan and she and Madge, when they could afford it, had spent many a happy evening down in Leicester Square in the company of Tyrone Power, Humphrey Bogart, Bing Crosby and the like.
‘Hello, darling,’ Fran stood, pulling out the chair next to her. ‘Come and sit next to me.’ Her voice, with its cut-glass vowels, was the gravely rasp of the heavy smoker. As Madge went to take the seat, Fran ground out her cigarette in the ashtray and immediately fitted another into the long black holder it had vacated.
Fran kissed her cheek and Madge was almost overpowered by expensive perfume fighting the reek of cigarettes. She stroked Madge’s jacket, appreciating the cut of the expensive fabric. ‘Dior, if I’m not mistaken, darling; and it fits you like a glove. You’ve obviously done well for yourself.’
‘How are you, Fran? Are you well? You look it.’
Coming Home To Holly Close Farm Page 25