Miss Clare Remembers and Emily Davis (30 page)

Her love for him never wavered. It was the kind of love, Dolly often thought, which one read of in old ballads, where the woman was called upon to endure all manner of humiliations and tests before her lord would acknowledge her. But in ballads, this faithful love was rewarded. Emily's was not.

The fact that Edgar's marriage was a miserable one added to her unhappiness. Her spirit was too fine to find consolation in the 'I-told-you-so' attitude of many of her neighbours. It was no comfort to Emily to know that Edgar had chosen wrongly, but only an added tragedy.

She did her best to avoid meeting him, sometimes going some distance afield to miss him at work on the farm. Never, if she could help it, would she pass the cottage. But, one day, some eight or nine years after his marriage, she met him face to face unexpectedly, and they spoke a few words. She told Dolly about this encounter many years later.

She was walking up a rough cart track which led to the top of the downs. Spindleberries grew at the edge of a little copse on the chalky lower slopes, and she was on her way to collect some for a nature study lesson next day. Suddenly, there was a crackling of twigs from the copse, and Edgar emerged, holding a gun. He drew in his breath sharply.

'I'm sorry, Emily. Hope I didn't scare you. I'm after jays.'

Emily, speechless, shook her head.

He leant his gun against the green-rimed trunk of an elder tree and came towards her. She looked steadily into his face, and what she saw there made her start to run.

He caught her arm, and looked sadly and longingly into her eyes.

'Oh, Emily,' he said, 'what a mess I've made of it!'

'Edgar, please,' protested Emily. 'This will do no good.' She struggled to get away but he held her arm firmly.

'Hear me for one minute.'

Emily stood still. She was more stirred than she could believe. That steadfast love, which had never wavered, was now mingled with pity for the unhappy man before her.

'I made the mistake of my life when I chose Eileen. Life's hell. I'm not complaining—I brought it on myself. But when the gossips tell you tit-bits about our cat-and-dog life, Em, you can multiply it by a hundred.'

'So bad?' whispered Emily, shaken.

'So bad,' repeated Edgar. He released her arm and turned away.

'I'm sorry—
truly
sorry,' said Emily. 'You deserve happiness after all you went through in the war. But, Edgar, try not to speak to me again.'

Her lips quivered, and the elder tree, and the gun, and the man were blurred by the tears which filled her eyes.

He turned towards her, and Emily saw that tears too were on his cheek.

'Please,'
cried Emily, 'because—can't you see? I just can't bear it!'

And, weeping, she stumbled back the way which she had come, leaving him there, forlorn.

Poor Emily, thought Dolly Clare. And poor Edgar, now an old, old man. How would he face the news of Emily's death? Did he still remember the girl whom he had once loved, so many years ago?

E
DGAR
Bennett sat in the September sunlight and I surveyed his gnarled old hands ruefully. The dratted joints were more swollen than ever! Fat lot of good that doctor's muck had done him!

He had once been proud of those hands, now mottled with the brown stains of old age. They had held a plough steady all day long, wielded a scythe, harnessed scores of horses, and used a cricket bat, with such skill, that at least one century from Edgar Bennett, each season, was celebrated at Beech Green in the old days.

Now they were fit for nothing but pulling on his clothes each morning, and then with pain, or peeling the confounded potatoes that Eileen put before him every day.

'No need to sit idle,' she said sharply to him. 'Just because you can't get about as you used to, it don't follow that you're helpless.'

He looked at them now, swimming about in a bowl of muddy water on the bench beside him. He sat in an old wooden armchair which had been his father's, close by the back door of the farm house.

It was a sheltered spot, and whenever the weather was fine, Edgar struggled out there with the aid of his stick and looked across the fields which he had sown and tended until ill-health had forced him to retire, two or three years ago.

His son John ran the farm now, and lived in the main part of the farm house. Edgar and Eileen had the old kitchen and two other rooms downstairs for their quarters, and the old dairy had been turned into a bathroom.

One way and another, thought Edgar, listening to the distant combine churring round the farm's largest field, they were pretty lucky. No stairs to worry about, for one thing, but no one knew how much he missed the glorious view of the downs from the window of the main bedroom. It had never failed to hearten him—in good weather or bad.

The fruit trees in the garden obscured the vista, and now Edgar's horizon was bounded by the hawthorn hedge which enclosed the farm garden. It was all pretty enough, he supposed, looking with lack-lustre eye at the dahlias and early Michaelmas daisies which John's wife Annie tended so zealously; but it was not a patch on the rolling downs, undulating as far as the eye could see, filling a man with wonder and awe.

He sighed, and fished in the bowl of water for the first potato. His right hand held an ancient steel knife with a horn handle. It had been new when he and Eileen married at the end of the First World War. Now, the blade was broken short, and it had come down to kitchen work. Edgar found it comfortable to manage with his twisted fingers.

He peeled carefully, getting the parings as thin as possible. Eileen was a stickler for wasting nothing. Even the eyes must be gouged out with the least possible waste. It was a ticklish job, thought Edgar, bending over his task in the sunlight.

And one which Eileen had always hated, he remembered. When she had given up her nursing to marry him she made it clear that cooking was a penance to her. Housework she enjoyed. Her training as a nurse made her standards of cleanliness uncommonly high—too dratted uncomfortably high, Edgar said—and the farm house gleamed from every surface capable of being polished. The place reeked of cleaning materials. If it wasn't bees-wax on the furniture, it was methylated spirits from the rag which cleaned the windows, or the breath-catching pungency of the bleaching liquid which Eileen liked to use for the sink and drains.

Now that the house was mainly in Annie's hands, it smelt less like an institution and more like a home, thought Edgar. The smell of baking pervaded the house. Vases of roses or narcissi, or wallflowers—or whatever fragrant blooms were in season in the garden—gave out their own sweetness. It did not please Eileen.

'Everlasting petals all over the place,' she grumbled to Edgar. 'Messy things, flowers. Spoil the polish.'

'I like 'em,' said Edgar mildly. 'And in any case, Annie's entitled to do what she likes in her own home. Some young women would have turned us out. In-laws don't make the best house-mates, you know.'

Eileen snorted. There was small chance of getting Edgar to take her side, as well she knew. From the very first days of marriage she had discovered that, despite his gentle ways and apparent submissiveness, there was an obstinate streak in Edgar's character. She, who loved to rule, found that there were some occasions when her husband stood fast. Her temper was fiery, her voice shrill. Neither improved with age, but Edgar had grown used to these outbursts, treating them with a stubborn silence which drove Eileen to even greater fury.

Luckily, the three children had inherited their father's nature. In some ways, it made matters even worse for Eileen,
for there was no one to answer her with equal fire. Her sharp tongue met little verbal resistance. John, the eldest, went so far as to laugh at his mother's tantrums as he grew to manhood, and his easy attitude did much to help his wife Annie to be philosophical about the old people's presence in the house.

'I'd put up with anything for the old man,' John said. 'He bears the brunt of it, poor old chap. Don't hurt us to have 'em here, if we act sensible, and I'm not seeing my mum and dad turned out of their home at their age.'

The two younger boys, equally mild-mannered, worked in Caxley and were both married. Sometimes they came out on a Sunday afternoon to see the old people, but they did not visit very often, and as neither enjoyed letter-writing, Eileen and Edgar heard little of them, despite their presence within five miles of the farm.

'All the same, children,' Eileen said tartly. 'Ungrateful lot. You brings 'em up and gets no thanks for it.'

'Didn't ask to come, did 'em?' replied Edgar. You be thankful they ain't turned out jail-birds or worse. We've got three fine boys, all doing well. What more d'you want?'

Looking back, turning the wet potato in his swollen fingers, Edgar wondered how many days of his marriage had passed without some outburst from Eileen. God, she was a nagger, if ever there was one! What madness had made him take her on in the first place?

A shadow fell across his armchair, and he looked up to see Tom More, the postman. He held out a letter.

'Shouldn't bother to open it,' he remarked. 'Looks like a bill.'

'You been through 'em all?' asked Edgar jocularly. 'Any good news?'

'No,' said Tom, settling on the bench near the bowl of potatoes. 'Got a bit of bad, though.'

'Oh? What's up?'

'Poor old Emily Davis.'

Edgar drew in his breath sharply. Tom More was too young to know what Emily meant to him, but he bent over the knife in his hand so that his face was hidden.

'She's gone,' continued Tom. 'Saw Dolly Clare half an hour back. She said they took their evening toddle up the field, had some supper and Emily was as right as rain at bed-time.

'Next morning she found her dead in bed.'

I'm sorry,' said Edgar huskily. 'Very sorry. She was at school with me.'

There was a pause. From a distance the hum of the combine continued. Close at hand, one of the farm cats came round the corner of the house, mewing plaintively.

'How's Dolly Clare taken it? She got anyone there with her?'

'Seems all right. Looks a bit pale-like. I heard she was asked to go up Annetts' place, but she said "No".'

'Home's best at times like that,' agreed Edgar. His voice was shaky, and Tom More noticed that his hands shook too. These old people never liked to hear of their generation dying. Brought it too near home, no doubt. Maybe he shouldn't have told the old boy.

He shifted uneasily, and gave a gusty sigh.

'Ah well, must be getting along. You're looking very fit, Edgar. See us all out, you will. 'Morning, now.'

He ambled off towards the gate, hoping that he had made amends with his last remarks. Must be rotten, getting old, thought Tom, turning for a final wave at the gate.

Edgar was still bent over his task. But the shaky hands were not working, and Edgar's gaze was not upon the potato he now held, but upon a vision of Emily Davis, a life-time ago, as he remembered her.

The first time that Emily had come to Edgar's notice was on the occasion of her confession at school assembly. Edgar had been standing in the back row, among the oldest boys at Beech Green school, due to leave in a few months for the waiting world of hard work.

The affair of Manny's marrow had amused them. Mr Finch's threat of keeping in the whole school did not. He was a man who kept his word, and Edgar and his school-mates had too many activities to attend to after school to welcome any restriction of their liberty.

It was with relief then, as well as amusement, that the bigger boys saw little Emily Davis step out to take her punishment.

'Got some spunk that little 'un,' one boy had commented, as they filed out.

'All them Davises have,' said another. It was something which Edgar was to find out for himself years later.

Emily Davis did not cross his path again for some time. He saw her occasionally about the village, usually in the company of Dolly Clare, but she meant nothing to him. He was busy on the farm, and his only relaxation was the cricket which he played on summer Saturday afternoons whenever the work on the farm allowed.

But one autumn evening, when the beech trees were ablaze on the road to Caxley, and the blue smoke of autumn bonfires drifted through the village, Edgar encountered Emily.

It had been a good harvest that year, and Edgar had taken a wagon laden with sacks of wheat to Caxley Station. When the wagon was empty, he had reloaded it with sacks of coal, ready for the winter, and set off on the return journey. He was pleasantly tired after the heavy work, and looking forward to an evening meal and early bed.

Perched high on the plank seat at the front of the wagon, he had a fine view of the surrounding countryside.

The fruit trees in the cottage gardens were weighed down with apples and plums. In one garden, a cottager was bent over his rows of bronze onions, turning the tops for final ripening. In another, a woman was tending a bonfire of dead pea-sticks and dried weeds. Everywhere there were the signs of the dying year, and the nutty fragrance of autumn hung in the air.