Hens Dancing (2 page)

February 24th

Pancake Day starts badly. I have forgotten to purchase extra milk, lemons and so forth. Much smoke and slopped batter on the Aga results in truly inadequate trio of splodgy pancakes.

‘You're meant to have lemon and sugar with them, Mummy.' Felix glares at his plate as I trickle golden syrup over it.

‘I know. I'm sorry. I'll go shopping today and you can
have proper pancakes when you get back from school.'

The Beauty is still in her pyjamas for the school run, and a new tooth is causing much misery. She moans sadly as we head towards the supermarket after dropping the boys, and falls asleep within a hundred yards of its car park. Asleep, she is transformed to cherub, the rosy cheeks caused by teeth giving her a Renoir complexion and her lashes a dark sweep beneath porcelain-blue eyelids. Cannot face waking her, so drive once round the car park to give myself the sense of having been there, then swoop on towards home. Will have to purchase everything from the village shop and any roadside stalls I pass. Remember this as the way of life when The Beauty was brand-new. Could never be bothered to get out of my car; it was too much effort to wake the sleeping Beauty. Shops became impossible unless I could leave her in the car outside and still see her from inside. This ruled out all supermarkets, and most high street shops. Bought everything on account and had it sent, even Giles and Felix's uniforms. Food was either literally home-grown or from side of the road home-grown stalls. Very good way of life, with no boring twilight time in supermarkets. Much cheaper too.

Leeks, marmalade and a pot of crocuses are the stall haul today, no good for pancakes, so I leave The Beauty in the car outside the village shop and purchase the rest. Hope these pancakes are more successful than the last.

March 1st

The wind of the past week is unabated; a pink plastic bucket has just bowled past the window and two cockerels have hopped onto the sill for shelter and are staring in at me. Their wives huddle in the flowerbed below, having scratched out a couple of really nice little hen-sized hollows with scant regard for my plants and bulbs. Hens spell death to a garden, and my bantams were carefully selected for their prettiness and also for their small talons. They are all called Mustard, Custard and Flustered for ease of identification. They make a big effort to keep things trim with beak and claw in the borders, and have clipped back the wallflowers to stumps, so I don't think they will manage to flower this year. It doesn't matter; the wallflower display was pretty paltry anyway. I am planning something more splendid for next year, and have ordered six packets of wine-dark
Cheiranthus
Ruby Gem accordingly.

I used to buy ready-grown wallflower plants in late autumn from an old man who sold them from a trestle-table on the roadside in front of his cottage. He always wore a collar and tie for gardening, and even in high
summer he kept his jacket buttoned up and belted with binder twine for double security. Last year he gave me three ornamental cabbages to go with the wallflowers, and we were on excellent terms. His garden was a delight all year round, and he was like a benign Mr McGregor in it. He painted his terracotta flowerpots pale blue and had a compost heap as brown and square as an Oxo cube.

But when I drove by after Christmas there was a ‘For sale' sign on his cottage. It went a few weeks later, and now the shaggy hedge has been clipped, the rose bushes shorn and a smart red estate car is parked where once there was a stamp-sized lawn. A silver climbing frame gleams on the vegetable patch, and the cottage has been repointed and tidied like any other. All traces of the old man have been hurled into a skip and driven away to a dump. I hope he died quietly in his sleep, or keeled over into oblivion in the garden during a double-digging session. It is unbearable to think of him now in some grim old folks' home in Cromer, tethered to a chair and staring into the sea.

March 5th

The Hallidays, wonderful glamorous Rose, godmother to The Beauty, and her husband, Tristan, are coming to stay
and I want everything to be perfect. In preparation I sally into the garden in the manner of Vita S-W to pluck some appropriate offerings for their bedroom. The air is dry and bitter, the friendly barn owl swoops past, his feathers ivory and cream against a white sky. He flits over the hedge and continues to search for afternoon tea in the water-meadows, flying low and following the contours of the ground like a miniature warhead. The garden is a disgrace. Everything small and delicate in front of the house is mud-splattered, and otherwise there are only daffodils, but none of the wild, ragged double ones, just those that remind me of children's plastic windmills in their chrome-yellow neatness of trumpet and petal. I toss one or two of these into my basket and march on, sighing and squelching in new ankle-length red wellingtons. Felix ambushes me to discuss his pocket money.

‘I need to buy some Warhammers on Saturday, how much money will I have when you give me all the pocket money you owe me? I've got seventeen so far.'

‘Seventeen what?' I am wondering whether the red wellingtons were a mistake, but have no concrete evidence against them. Felix digs into his pocket and shows me a few pennies.

‘Seventeen of these,' he says. Not enough for so much as a Warhammer arm. Weakly, wrongly, considering that I have just rejected them for lack of beauty, I agree to pay him fifty pence if he picks a vast quantity of daffodils. He
hurtles off to oblige, and I am tempted to give up my search for a decent bunch for the Hallidays' bedroom. A few anemones are gasping and lying flat on the ground in the manner of fish out of water, but mainly the garden is twiggy in anticipation of buds. I drag a lot of sticks into the house and plonk them in vases. They almost look Japanese. Felix's daffodils do not.

March 7th

The Hallidays arrive bearing armfuls of exotica. A black hellebore, a jar of lobster bisque,
confit de canard,
organic sun-ripened-on-the-vine tomatoes and the books that the children have been longing for but which I have been too mean to buy. We are all wildly overexcited at seeing one another and I realise just how feeble my twig displays are when Rose produces a peerless posy of gold-lace polyanthus. Immediately consume half a walnut cake and three pots of tea with Rose. Due to my excitement at seeing her, my brain cannot register the fact that she does not want milk in her tea. The table becomes covered with unwanted cups of pale tea as I solicitously pour yet more milk for Rose. Meanwhile, Master Halliday, who is one and a half, is conducting a top-secret excavation in the food cupboard. He emerges, beaming, at his mother's side
and she and I scream. He is smothered in blood. Mercifully we see the bottle in his hands.

‘Oh, God, it's cochineal,' says Rose, then she blanches. ‘Look at the floor.'

The beautiful, warm, expensive, sweet-chestnut floor is splashed with crimson. He seems to have toured every corner and we have not noticed. I laugh like an idiot; Rose leaps into action, dons rubber gloves, finds a scrubbing brush and some detergent and becomes immersed in pink foam. The next half-hour is a scene from a
Carry On
horror film. Rose and I scrub, wipe, sigh with relief and sit down, only to jump up shrieking again as more bloody blobs appear. Cochineal is on our shoes, under our nails, over the table and most of all on Master Halliday, now known as Vampire Baby. Rose is far more concerned about the floor, but I want to see if we can turn him back into the perfect specimen he was, or if he is going to stay gruesomely pink for ever. An hour later he is slumbering sweetly, and, thank God,
not
pinkly, and Rose and I collapse onto the drawing-room sofa as wrung out as a couple of old dishcloths. We are now supposed to sparkle, pre-dinner, and be vivacious. A drink is called for. And another.

March 10th

The evenings are slowly becoming lighter, but the air still breathes a chill through the yard when I go out to lock up the hens. The wind is high tonight, pulling at branches and wrapping around the roof, but it is mild, and, on ground level, quite still, so I decide to take the rotund terrier Rags down the lane a few yards to stretch her legs before bed. Moonlight illuminates the way, then is eclipsed by gusting cloud. I kick at an old black bag, a darker shadow in a dark corner by the hedge, and scream as it rises and lurches past me. Rags comes to the rescue with a flourish, yapping and growling at the swaying, ink-dark form. Cloud blows off the moon, and in the half-light I make out the bony shape of a calf's back humping away down towards the road. Two others hurtle past me to join their leader. Heart still racing, I return home to telephone the farmer. Should really herd them in myself, as I know where they belong, but it is nine-thirty, and I will miss vital classic serial on the radio if I do. It is
War and Peace,
in twenty parts. Blissful and agonising, and essential as bathtime entertainment for me, being a million miles from childcare and domestic toil.

March 14th

The Women's Institute market supplies instant satisfaction in the form of trays of gaudy primulas for me to dot around the house and plant in the garden. Much needed, as we have reached the most squalid phase of the year now, when weeds are revving up to choke the borders and no plants have yet emerged from beneath the ground. The house is just as bad, filth exposed by the harsh glare of March sunshine. Fingerprints like a tide along every door, and most furniture creaking and shedding infinitesimal quantities of sawdust every day, like a tree's deciduum at dusk. Only notice this when hoovering, as one sweep beneath a chair leaves a very obvious path between kerbs of dust. Must don a mob cap and do some work avoidance. Spurred on to housework by the arrival of three different brochures in need of copy. My job is to write it. This week I must sift sense from pages of computer-speak to make an interesting and readable booklet for Belhaven Conference Halls, for Tremendous, a new outsized clothing catalogue, and for Heavenly Petting's new mail-order funeral service. Can hardly contain my excitement and yearn to get down to it. But first, the cupboard under the sink has become a hotel for slugs and snails. It needs my attention.

March 16th

The Beauty and I are in west London preparing for a meeting with an intimidating and groovy magazine editor. As I try to wipe traces of The Beauty's breakfast off my only decent shirt, I rack my brains for things I can say I want to write about. A human biology poster on my host's bathroom wall offers inspiration, and I plan an article: ‘We are all obsessed with the value of our houses, but do we realise how much our internal organs are worth?' It could be illustrated with a picture of Kate Moss with arrows and prices pointing to different valuable bits of her insides. Downstairs, the house we are staying in, which belongs to my friend Lila, is enveloped in incense and weird fluting and groaning noises are issuing from the CD player, creating an ambient atmosphere for her private yoga class. I tiptoe down and out with The Beauty, and catch a glimpse of Alaric, the hirsute Californian teacher, hitching up his Y-fronts so the waistband shows above that of his trousers as he prepares himself for a new position.

The Beauty enjoys the magazine meeting very much, and destroys three copies of the latest issue while grinding her teeth and cackling. The editor disarms me by being friendly and approachable where I expected hauteur and disdain, and by being dressed in a delicious skippy skirt which I covet. I am delighted with the whole occasion and
sweep out feeling it has all gone superbly, until I catch sight of myself in a mirror as I pass a beauty salon. My cheeks are puce, as if I have been drinking port since crack of dawn, or have reached the hot flush stage of life.

Can't help contrasting my appearance with The Beauty's majestic loveliness today. She is stuffed, for the last time, because it really is too small, into an emerald-green Indian dress with mirrored and embroidered bodice. Setting off the outfit is a small mauve horse she has pinched from Lila's spoilt daughter Calypso. She has not let go of this horse since breakfast, believing that possession is nine-tenths of the law, and this is now her horse. I am on her side. I shouldn't think Calypso will notice, but if she did, she would not
dream
of giving one of her sackloads of toys to The Beauty or anyone else.

On the way home we strike a blow for helpless femininity in the multi-storey car park. No amount of jerking forwards and backwards on my part can extract my car from its space. The iceberg-dark walls begin to close in and panic also, and I imagine spending the night in this morgue with only a few rice cakes as sustenance. Salvation appears, in a dark suit with a mobile phone and briefcase. He has just parked his own sleek car without any trouble. I rush to accost him before he vanishes onto the street.

‘I can't get my car out of this car park. Please can you do it?' I beg, and he beams happily, as men do when faced
with female frailty, and obliges. I am profoundly relieved that he is not a New Man, and head for Norfolk in a cheerful and grateful frame of mind.