Authors: Rennie Airth
Soon Bess was back, bustling in with their coats.
‘It’s time I was off. I’m heading out towards Devil’s Lane, but I can give you a lift as far as the crossroads.’
‘Will we see you out to the Grange?’ Mary asked a few minutes later when they had both mounted on to the sprung seat of the trap and Bess was unhitching the reins.
‘Yes, but not for an hour at least. I’ve all this Christmas post to deliver first.’ She nodded at the pile of packages in the trap behind her, smiling as she did so. ‘There’s something for you. I was keeping it as a surprise. It’s a parcel from Canada.’
‘Oh, Bess …’ Mary was delighted by the news. She screwed round on the seat and peered down at the heap of parcels. ‘It must be from my cousin Jenny. They live in Toronto. I was starting to think she’d forgotten us this year.’
Bess clicked her tongue and the trap gave a lurch as Pickles set off.
‘It’s right at the bottom,’ she said. ‘Dig around and you’ll find it.’
Mary did as she was told, and having delved among the packages found the one she was looking for. She lifted the canvas-sewn bundle up by its stout binding, but quickly set it down again.
‘Goodness, it’s heavy. She always sends us jam and marmalade. And a big tin of biscuits. They’re just what I need for Christmas.’
‘You can take it with you now if you feel strong enough.’
‘Oh, no, that would never do. Freddie loves the ritual of you arriving and then the excitement of seeing whether you’ve got anything for us. This will be a red-letter day. There’s nothing he likes better than opening parcels from overseas. There’s nearly always a bar of chocolate in them.’
Mary turned and faced the front, her cheeks flushed by the cold air as they rattled along at the brisk trot Pickles had settled into.
‘I’m so glad we had this talk. Now all I have to worry about is Peter. I had a letter from him a few days ago – but of course you know that. He said it’s absolutely foul in Italy. Cold and wet and miserable. He never mentions the fighting. All he hoped was that our Christmas would be better than his, and I’m determined to make it so, especially for Freddie. It’s lovely that you’re coming to us, Bess. It’ll make all the difference to the day.’
She chattered on.
‘Did I tell you we’ve got a turkey? I’ve been on tenterhooks about it. At first the MacGregors weren’t sure they would have one for me; it seems they’d all been spoken for months ago. But then one of their customers dropped out. I went over to the farm yesterday to inspect it. I couldn’t resist the temptation. It’s a splendid-looking bird.’
‘But one not long for this world, alas.’ Bess sighed windily and Mary laughed.
‘I knew you’d say that. And I did feel awful for a moment, watching it gobbling down its food and thinking: yes, go on, keep eating, the fatter you get the better. Thank goodness Annie will take care of the slaughtering and the plucking. At least I won’t recognize it when I put it in the oven.’
She looked up at the sky. The clouds had been piling up for days; thickening, or so it seemed to her; growing dense and heavy with the burden they bore.
‘Oh, I wish it would snow,’ she said. ‘Freddie’s longing for a white Christmas and so am I.’
Mary shook the blanket she was holding vigorously and then paused to look up at the sky through the tall sash window. The clouds seemed a trifle lower and still heavy with promise. She wondered where Freddie and Evie had got to. The house had been empty when she’d returned, cheeks flushed red from her walk, but forsaking the warmth of the kitchen where the old iron range was kept burning day and night, she had gone upstairs where it was always colder, to start preparing the room that would be Bess’s when she came to them for Christmas.
The house wasn’t an easy one to manage. Old and rambling, it was an uneasy mix between the farm it had started out as and the country villa it had become thanks to additions made in the last century. These Victorian touches had given it a somewhat gloomy aspect seen from the front, where high eaves overlooked an elaborate garden now run wild. At the rear, however, the less formal surroundings of the stable yard and the stalls behind it made for a more cheerful picture, particularly now that it had become Freddie’s playground, and Mary never tired of watching her small son as he scampered about the cobbles.
Discovering on their arrival that the house was without a central heating system – the uncle from whom she had inherited it had spent his winters in the south of France – Mary had decided at the onset of the cold weather to restrict their living quarters to as few rooms as possible. Apart from the kitchen, where an oak table with matching chairs provided ample space for family meals, and where by far the greater part of her time was spent, the only room she had made use of downstairs was a small sitting-room reached via a passage that ran the length of the house, where she and Evie would sit together in the evening listening to the wireless while they read or sewed. She had abandoned the spacious drawing-room beyond it completely, finding it cold even in late summer; likewise the dining-room that lay on the other side of the kitchen at the far end of the passage.
Upstairs there were six bedrooms, two of which were occupied by Mary and Evie, while Freddie was accommodated in what must have been a dressing-room adjoining his nanny’s living quarters. Luckily the single bathroom still supplied hot water, thanks to a wood-burning furnace in the basement whose mysteries Hodge had explained to Mary once he was assured that her unexpected arrival at the Grange held no threat to himself.
Again it was Bess who had come to her aid when Mary found her initial advances to the elderly couple rebuffed. Employed by her uncle during his lifetime, they had been left to take care of the house after his death.
‘Old Hodge is afraid you’ll put a spanner in his works,’ she had explained with a chuckle. ‘Don’t forget, he’s been lord of the manor for the past few years. Monarch of all he surveys. He keeps two cows in the stalls there, as you’ve probably noticed, besides his dray horse, and raises porkers in the pigsties. What’s more he and Mrs H have taken over the old kitchen garden. They do a thriving business at the village market and he’s wondering if they’ll be allowed to continue.’
‘Well, he needn’t,’ Mary had protested. ‘I’m perfectly happy for things to go on as they are.’
‘I should tell him that then, and also offer to buy milk and cheese off him and a side of bacon next time he slaughters one of his pigs. Chances are he’ll offer them to you for nothing, which strictly speaking he ought to, seeing they’re your facilities he’s using. The important thing is to make the gesture.’
Mary had wasted no time in following this advice, with the result that her relations with the couple had improved to the point where Mrs H now came in three mornings a week to help with the housework while her gnarled husband, unasked, delivered fresh milk and butter, as well as vegetables from the garden, to their doorstep, assuring Mary meantime that he was ready to help with any problems that might arise.
Chief among these was the amount of wood needed to keep them warm, and here Hodge had proved his value, supplying them with logs gleaned from the woodland that was part of the twenty or so acres that went with the house. Mary herself had become adept at chopping up these large pieces into smaller sections for use in the stove, though not nearly as skilful as Bess, who wielded an axe and saw with all the aplomb of a lumberjack and who apparently liked nothing better than to round off her working days with half an hour of brisk exercise by the woodpile in the yard.
She had seemed happy, too, to join with Mary in picking out a few acceptable items of furniture from among the mass of heavy, ornate pieces with which the house was stuffed. Together they had rummaged through the cold, empty rooms and the attic above, accompanied always by Freddie, who had enjoyed these expeditions. A man of some means – and as far as Mary could remember, one little inclined towards work of any kind – the uncle who had left her the house, and whom she had barely known, had spent much of his life abroad. Not an explorer exactly, rather a wanderer, he had accumulated a bizarre collection of souvenirs from his travels: tiger-skins and hookahs from India; puppets from the Indonesian archipelago; Maori carvings and other totems that hailed from the South Sea islands. Some they had discovered hanging on the walls, others relegated to the attic or the basement. A Red Indian headdress found hanging on a hook in what had once been the gun-room had been appropriated by Freddie and now decorated the wall above his bed. His attempt to take possession of a Zulu shield and assegai that came to light in the attic, however, had been blocked by Mary and his pleas had moved her only so far as to agree to allow the objects to be mounted on the wall in the sittingroom well out of reach of his eager hands.
Having shaken out the bedclothes, she left the bed stripped to air and went downstairs to the warm kitchen, where a stew made of scrag ends, the only meat available in the butcher’s that week, had been simmering on the iron range all morning, and where Hodge’s wife – known to all as Mrs H – was busy peeling potatoes and chopping up carrots and parsnips to add to the pot. A cheerful woman with a face as red as a lobster, she’d become a great favourite of Freddie’s once he’d discovered she had a glass eye.
‘There’ll be snow before the day’s out,’ she remarked to Mary. ‘You’ll see. And once it starts it’ll go on. That’s what they say.’
The topic had been much discussed between them, Mary’s romantic wish for a white-clad countryside countered by Mrs H’s countrywoman’s dislike of the stuff because of the disruption it brought to everyday life, a dislike tempered now by her realization of how much it would mean to Freddie. She had had two sons herself, she had told Mary, both killed in the last war, and within only a few weeks of one another, a tear rolling down her cheek from one eye as she spoke, while the other had remained fixed and staring.
Having lingered for a moment longer to inspect her stew and give it a stir and a cupful of water, Mary went to the other end of the room, where the latest proof of Ezra Hodge’s now well-established benevolence towards her household was on display in the shape of a Christmas tree. A week earlier the old boy had knocked on the kitchen door and presented her with the object, which he had dragged from his cart.
‘Spotted it in Foley’s Copse a month ago,’ he had said, referring to a small wood at the edge of the property, his weathered countenance split by a toothless grin. ‘Been keeping an eye on it.’
Together he and Mary had filled a wooden tub unearthed from a pile of junk in the barn with soil and set up the tree in a corner of the kitchen. Later that same afternoon, when Freddie had returned from a walk with Evie to the neighbouring MacGregor farm, he had found his mother down on her knees stringing fairy lights on the pliant branches and had watched open-mouthed as she crawled behind the tree to plug the set in and then sat back on her heels with a sigh.
‘I noticed these in a box when we were going through the attic,’ she told them both. ‘I’ve no idea if they still work.’ (A small fib; she had already tested the circuit.) ‘Freddie, why don’t you switch them on and we’ll find out.’
Holding his breath, eyes popping with suppressed excitement, her son had found his way under the branches to the switch and a moment later, like magic, the score of brightly coloured bulbs had come alight. Red, blue and gold, they had twinkled amidst the branches while the little boy gazed in wonder at the sight.
Further embellishments had since been added to the tree, thanks to Bess, who had produced several yards of silver string to drape on the green branches and an angel with hands folded in prayer to perch on top. But although Mary loved seeing it lit up, she was conscious of the need to save electricity and only turned on the switch after dark.
Pausing for a moment to set the angel straight, she went to a door beside the tree which gave access to the cellar beneath the kitchen. Steep steps led down into darkness, but there was a light at the top, and, having switched it on, she descended to the dank depths and, before pursuing the mission that had brought her there, attended first to a task that by now was almost second nature: checking the woodfired furnace that occupied a corner of the basement to see if it needed feeding. Maintaining a supply of hot water for the house was one of her principal worries: both the furnace and the water tank above it were relics of an earlier age and Mary lived in dread that one or the other, or perhaps both, would fail, leaving the household deprived of this basic amenity.
Relieved, as always, to find all well, and having added some logs to the fiery mass within, she turned to scan the cellar’s varied contents, which included old wine racks, discarded pieces of furniture and crates of books too mouldy to put in shelves but which Mary hadn’t had the heart to throw out. She had not found the item she was searching for when she noticed that the door which gave access to the yard had been left unlocked yet again. The culprit was undoubtedly her son, who, though he’d been told countless times not to play down there, persisted in exploring the stored rubbish whenever he got the chance, safe in the knowledge that a swift escape was always possible should his presence be detected.
Having rebolted the door for the umpteenth time – and reminding herself to speak to Freddie yet again – Mary resumed her search and almost at once spotted what she was looking for: a full-length mirror that was standing propped against the wall beside an empty wine rack. Grasping hold of the glass on either side, she retraced her steps and ascended to the kitchen, pausing at the top to switch out the light and delaying a few seconds more when she saw her own reflection close up: her brown eyes (which Mary secretly had always thought of as her best feature) now showing the first faint creases at the corners that one day – one day all too soon – would turn into crow’s feet; her cheeks still unmarked by age but grown thinner and browner these past months, a development she ascribed to the healthy outdoor life she’d been living, and last of all her hair, which she hardly dared look at. Deprived of the services of a beauty salon – the nearest one was in Petersfield – she’d been forced to rely on the combined efforts of Bess and Evie to keep her thick brown hair trimmed and manageable, and though they had done their best (she was sure) the results had not been happy, and for several days after each barbering session Mary had gone around feeling like a shorn sheep. She wondered what Peter would say if he saw her: she wondered what he would feel when they met again after so long. (It was more than two years now since he’d been posted abroad with his regiment.) Would they have to get to know each other again? Would something have been lost between them? Shuddering at the horrid thought, she thrust it from her mind.