“I got lost. I kept getting lost, but I found the gulley and then I was all right.”
“Good boy.” He gave him a little pat and then stood up. “I’ll get a coat and the chain saw…”
* * *
The descent to the farm, hand in hand with Ben Fox, and with the black and white dog bounding down the hill before them, was so simple and quick, it was hard to believe that it had taken him so long to take the outward journey. In the farmhouse they found Sarah waiting for them, looking quite tranquil and recovered by the fire, and drinking tea. She had packed a suitcase, and this stood waiting by the door.
“Oh, Ben.”
“Are you all right?”
“Yes, I had another pain. I think they’re coming every half hour.”
“We’ve time, then. I’ll go and sort out that tree, and then get you to hospital.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Don’t be sorry. Just be proud of that young brother of yours. He did well to find me.” He looked down at Oliver. “Coming with me, or staying here?”
“I’ll come with you.” Panic was forgotten, along with bleeding hands and bruised knees. “I’ll help.”
* * *
And so they worked together, Ben Fox demolishing the tangle of branches that had torn down the telephone wires, and, as they fell, Oliver hauling them aside, out of the way. It was a rough job that they did, but at last they had cleared a space between the road and the stream through which a car could conceivably make its way. When this was done, they went back to the farmhouse, collected Sarah and her suitcase, and all piled into her car.
When they reached the fallen tree, Sarah was horrified. “You’ll never get through there.”
“Well, we’ll have a good try,” said Ben, and drove straight for the narrow gap, and there were the most terrible scratching and scraping sounds as they did so, but at least they were through.
“What’s Will going to say when he sees what you’ve done to his car?”
“He’ll have better things to worry about. Like a baby.”
“They won’t be expecting me at the hospital, not for another two weeks.”
“That doesn’t matter.”
“… and Will. I ought to telephone Will.”
“I’ll get hold of Will. You just relax and hold tight, because we’re going to drive like the hounds of hell. It’s just a pity we haven’t got a police siren.”
* * *
He did not drive like the hounds of hell because of the fog, but even so they made pretty good time, and before long had driven beneath the red brick arch and into the forecourt of the little country hospital.
Ben bundled Sarah and her suitcase out of the car. Oliver wanted to go too, but was told to stay and wait.
He did not want to be left alone. “Why have I got to stay?”
“You do as you’re told,” said Sarah, and reached in to kiss him goodbye. He clung to her, and when she had gone, sat back in the seat and felt tearful. Not simply because he was very tired, and because his knees and his hands had started to hurt again, but because there was a niggling anxiety inside him, which, on inspection, proved to be concern for his sister. Did it matter that the baby was going to arrive two weeks early? Would there be anything wrong with it? He imagined a shortage of toes, a swivelling eye. The rain still fell; the morning seemed to have lasted forever. He looked at his watch, and saw, with some amazement, that it was not yet noon. He wished that Ben Fox would come back.
He appeared at last, striding across the forecourt and looking more incongruous than ever in these neat hospital surroundings. He got back in behind the driving wheel, and slammed the door shut. For a long moment he said nothing. Oliver wondered if he was about to be told that Sarah was already dead.
He swallowed the lump in his throat. “Did—did they mind her being early?” His own voice sounded strange and squeaky.
Ben ran his fingers through his thick red hair. “No. They’ve got a bed for her, and she should be in the labour room by now. All very organised.”
“Why have you been so long?”
“I had to get hold of Will. I rang Truro market. It took some time to find him, but he’s on his way.”
“Does…?” It was impossible to talk to the back of a person’s head. Oliver climbed through to the front seat. “Does it matter, the baby being two weeks early? I mean, there won’t be anything wrong with it?”
Ben turned to face Oliver, and Oliver saw that his strange eyes looked different, not flinty any longer but gentle, like the sky on a cool spring morning. He said, “You been worrying about her?”
“A bit.”
“She’ll be fine. She’s a healthy girl, and nature’s a wonderful thing.”
“I think,” Oliver said, “I think it’s frightening.”
Ben waited for him to enlarge on this, and suddenly, it was easy to confide, to say things to this man that he would have confessed to nobody, not even Will. “It’s cruel. I never lived in the country before. I never realised it. But the valley and the farm … they’re full of foxes and hawks, all killing each other, and there was a dead rabbit on the road yesterday morning. And last night the wind was so wild, and I could hear the sea, and I kept thinking of drowned sailors and wrecked ships. Why does it have to be like that? And then the tree falling down, and the baby coming early…”
“I told you. You mustn’t worry about the baby. He’s just a bit impatient, that’s all.”
Oliver remained unconvinced. “But how do you know?”
“I know,” was the quiet reply.
“Have you ever had a baby?”
The question was blurted out before he had time to think. As soon as he had said the words, he regretted them, for Ben Fox turned away from him, and Oliver could see only the sharp angle of his cheekbone, the lines about his eyes, the jut of his beard. A long silence lay between them, and it was as though the man had gone a long way away. At last Oliver could bear it no longer. “Have you?” he insisted.
“Yes,” Ben said. He turned back to Oliver. “But he was stillborn, and I lost my wife as well, because she died soon after. But you see, she had never been strong. The doctors told her she should never have a child. I wouldn’t have minded. I’d have settled for it, but she insisted on taking the risk. She said a marriage without children was only half a marriage, and I let her have her way.”
“Does Sarah know about this?”
Ben Fox shook his head. “No. Nobody down here knows. We lived in Bristol. I was a Professor of English at the University. But after my wife died, I knew I couldn’t stay. I threw up my job and sold my house and came here. I’d always worked with wood—it had been my hobby—and now I’ve made it my living. It’s a good place to be, up there on the hill, and people are kind. They leave me alone. Respect my privacy.”
Oliver said, “But wouldn’t it help to have friends? To talk to people?”
“Maybe. One day.”
“You’re talking to me.”
“We’re talking to each other.”
“I thought you were running away from something.” He decided to make a clean breast. “In fact I thought you were hiding a secret, that the police were after you, or perhaps you’d murdered somebody. You were running away.”
“Only running away from myself.”
“Have you stopped running yet?”
“Maybe,” said Ben Fox. “Maybe I have.” Suddenly, he smiled. It was the first time Oliver had ever seen him smile, and his eyes crinkled up, and his teeth were very white and straight. He put out a massive hand and rumpled Oliver’s hair. “Maybe it’s time to stop running. Just as it’s time for you to come to terms with life. It’s not easy. Just a long series of challenges, like hurdles in a race. And I suppose they keep coming until the day you die.”
“Yes,” said Oliver. “Yes, I suppose they do.”
They sat for a little longer, in a comfortable and companionable silence, and then Ben Fox looked at his watch. “What do you want to do, Oliver? Sit her
e and wait for Will, or come with me and we’ll find a place to eat?”
Food sounded a good idea. “What I’d really like would be a beefburger.”
“Me too.” He started the engine and they drove away from the hospital, under the arch, into the streets of the little town, and in search of a suitable pub.
“Besides,” Oliver pointed out, “Will won’t want us hanging around. He’ll just want to be with Sarah.”
“Spoken like a man,” said Ben Fox. “Spoken like a man.”
An Evening to Remember
Under the dryer, with her hair rolled and skewered to her head, Alison Stockman turned down the offer of magazines to read, and instead opened her handbag, took out the notepad with its attached pencil, and went through, for perhaps the fourteenth time, her List.
She was not a natural list-maker, being a fairly haphazard sort of person, and a cheerfully lighthearted housekeeper who frequently ran out of essentials like bread and butter and washing-up liquid, but still retained the ability to manage—for a day or so at any rate—by sheer improvisation, and the deep-seated conviction that it didn’t much matter anyway.
It wasn’t that she didn’t sometimes make lists, it was because she made them on the spur of the moment, using any small scrap of paper that came to hand. Backs of envelopes, cheque stubs, old bills. This added a certain mystery to life. Lampshade. How much? she would find, scrawled on a receipt for coal delivered six months previously, and would spend several engrossed moments trying to recall what on earth this missive could have meant. Which lampshade? And how much had it cost?
Ever since they had moved out of London and into the country, she had been slowly trying to furnish and decorate their new house, but there never seemed to be enough time or money to spare—two small children used up almost all of these commodities—and there were still rooms with the wrong sort of wallpaper, or no carpets, or lamps without lampshades.
This list, however, was different. This list was for tomorrow night, and so important was it that she had specially bought the little pad with pencil attached; and had written down, with the greatest concentration, every single thing that had to be bought, cooked, polished, cleaned, washed, ironed, or peeled.
Vacuum dining room, polish silver. She ticked that one off. Lay table. She ticked that as well. She had done it this morning while Larry was at playschool and Janey napping in her cot. “Won’t the glasses get dusty?” Henry had asked when she had told him her plans, but Alison assured him that they wouldn’t, and anyway the meal would be eaten by candlelight, so if the glasses were dusty Mr. and Mrs. Fairhurst probably wouldn’t be able to see far enough to notice. Besides, whoever had heard of a dusty wineglass?
Order filet of beef. That got a tick as well. Peel potatoes. Another tick; they were in a bowl of water in the larder along with a small piece of coal. Take prawns out of freezer. That was tomorrow morning. Make mayonnaise. Shred lettuce. Peel mushrooms. Make Mother’s lemon soufflé. Buy cream. She ticked off Buy cream, but the rest would have to wait until tomorrow.
She wrote, Do flowers. That meant picking the first shy daffodils that were beginning to bloom in the garden and arranging them with sprigs of flowering currant, which, hopefully, would not make the whole house smell of dirty cats.
She wrote, Wash the best coffee cups. These were a wedding present, and were kept in a corner cupboard in the sitting room. They would, without doubt, be dusty, even if the wineglasses weren’t.
She wrote, Have a bath.
This was essential, even if she had it at two o’clock tomorrow afternoon. Preferably after she had brought in the coal and filled the log basket.
She wrote, Mend chair. This was one of the dining-room chairs, six little balloon-backs which Alison had bought at an auction sale. They had green velvet seats, edged with gold braid, but Larry’s cat, called, brilliantly, Catkin, had used the chair as a useful claw-sharpener, and the braid had come unstuck and drooped, unkempt as a sagging petticoat. She would find the glue and a few tacks and put it together again. It didn’t matter if it wasn’t very well done. Just so that it didn’t show.
She put the list back in her bag and sat and thought glumly about her dining room. The fact that they even had a dining room in this day and age was astonishing, but the truth was that it was such an unattractive, north-facing little box of a room that nobody wanted it for anything else. She had suggested it as a study for Henry, but Henry said it was too damned cold, and then she had said that Larry could keep his toy farm there, but Larry preferred to play with his toy farm on the kitchen floor. It wasn’t as if they ever used it as a dining room, because they seemed to eat all their meals in the kitchen, or on the terrace in the warm weather, or even out in the garden when the summer sun was high and they could picnic, the four of them, beneath the shade of the sycamore tree.
Her thoughts, as usual, were flying off at tangents. The dining room. It was so gloomy they had decided that nothing could make it gloomier, and had papered it in dark green to match the velvet curtains that Alison’s mother had produced from her copious attic. There was a gate-leg table, and the balloon-back chairs, and a Victorian sideboard that an aunt of Henry’s had bequeathed to them. As well, there were two monstrous pictures. These were Henry’s contribution. He had gone to an auction sale to buy a brass fender, only to find himself the possessor, as well, of these depressing paintings. One depicted a fox consuming a dead duck; the other a Highland cow standing in a pouring rainstorm.
“They’ll fill the walls,” Henry had said, and hung them in the dining room. “They’ll do till I can afford to buy you an original Hockney, or a Renoir, or a Picasso, or whatever it is you happen to want.”
He came down from the top of the ladder and kissed his wife. He was in his shirt sleeves and there was a cobweb in his hair.
“I don’t want those sort of things,” Alison told him.
“You should.” He kissed her again. “I do.”
And he did. Not for himself, but for his wife and his children. For them he was ambitious. They had sold the flat in London, and bought this little house, because he wanted the children to live in the country and to know about cows and crops and trees and the seasons; and because of the mortgage they had vowed to do all the necessary painting and decorating themselves. This endless ploy took up all their weekends, and at first it had gone quite well because it was wintertime. But then the days lengthened, and the summer came, and they abandoned the inside of the house and moved out of doors to try to create some semblance of order in the overgrown and neglected garden.
In London, they had had time to spend together; to get a baby-sitter for the children and go out for dinner; to sit and listen to music on the stereo, while Henry read the paper and Alison did her gros point. But now Henry left home at seven-thirty every morning and did not get back until nearly twelve hours later.
“Is it really worth it?” she asked him sometimes, but Henry was never discouraged.
“It won’t be like this for always,” he promised her. “You’ll see.”
His job was with Fairhurst & Hanbury, an electrical engineering business, which, since Henry had first joined as a junior executive, had grown and modestly prospered, and now had a number of interesting irons in the fire, not the least of which was the manufacture of commercial computers. Slowly, Henry had ascended the ladder of promotion, and now was possibly in line, or being considered for, the post of Export Director, the man who at present held this job having decided to retire early, move to Devonshire, and take up poultry farming.
In bed, which seemed to be nowadays the only place where they could find the peace and privacy to talk, Henry had assessed, for Alison, the possibilities of his getting this job. They did not seem to be very hopeful. He was, for one thing, the youngest of the candidates. His qualifications, although sound, were not brilliant, and the others were all more experienced.
“But what would you have to do?” Alison wanted to know.
“Well, that’s it. I’d ha
ve to travel. Go to New York, Hong Kong, Japan. Rustle up new markets. I’d be away a lot. You’d be on your own even more than you are now. And then we’d have to reciprocate. I mean, if foreign buyers came to see us, we’d have to look after them, entertain … you know the sort of thing.”
She thought about this, lying warmly in his arms, in the dark, with the window open and the cool country air blowing in on her face. She said, “I wouldn’t like you being away a lot, but I could bear it. I wouldn’t be lonely, because of having the children. And I’d know that you’d always come back to me.”
He kissed her. He said, “Did I ever tell you I loved you?”
“Once or twice.”
He said, “I want that job. I could do it. And I want to get this mortgage off our backs, and take the children to Brittany for their summer holidays, and maybe pay some man to dig that ruddy garden for us.”
“Don’t say such things.” Alison laid her fingers against Henry’s mouth. “Don’t talk about them. We mustn’t count chickens.”
This nocturnal conversation had taken place a month or so before, and they hadn’t talked about Henry’s possible promotion again. But a week ago, Mr. Fairhurst, who was Henry’s chairman, had taken Henry out to lunch at his club. Henry found it hard to believe that Mr. Fairhurst was standing him this excellent meal simply for the pleasure of Henry’s company, but they were eating delicious blue-veined Stilton and drinking a glass of port before Mr. Fairhurst finally came to the point. He asked after Alison and the children. Henry told him they were very well.
“Good for children, living in the country. Does Alison like it there?”
“Yes. She’s made a lot of friends in the village.”
“That’s good. That’s very good.” Thoughtfully, the older man helped himself to more Stilton. “Never really met Alison.” He sounded as though he was ruminating to himself, not addressing any particular remark to Henry. “Seen her, of course, at the office dance, but that scarcely counts. Like to see your new house…”
His voice trailed off. He looked up. Henry, across the starched tablecloth and gleaming silverware, met his eyes. He realised that Mr. Fairhurst was angling for … indeed, expected—a social invitation.
The Blue Bedroom: & Other Stories Page 21