Mrs Perry said wryly, 'The one thing about the old days is that you had no choice in the matter. Bit of a relief in some ways. If you lived.'
‘I
want to come here to a decent, honest community where I can rebuild my life. Please.'
Mrs Perry stood up very quickly. She was embarrassed. 'I must take this dog for a walk.' The dog came rushing over to her as she reached for his lead.
Miserably Angela downed her wine. So she had lost, then?
‘I
do understand,' said Mrs Perry kindly. 'But I won't break our promise. The man has made us an offer fair and square.'
She held out her hand. 'Come again, Mrs Fytton,' she said. 'Will you do that?'
'Why?' said Angela aggressively as they walked off down the path together.
'Come in three weeks' time and the mulberry will be in leaf,' said Mrs Perry at the gate.
Angela turned. She traced the words in brass - Church Ale House - and looked back along the path to where the breeze moved through the boughs of the tree. She fancied it was waving at her. I will not go and look at the front of it until I
own
it, she thought.
She knew now that the ruddy-faced cook would have been making
mulberry
tarts, of course, while the fantasy ladies of the house wore the product of the worms in which to eat them. And what had the Roman women who lived here worn? Or eaten? And what did the Saxon matron use to make the cakes that Alfred burnt? How she wished she could be a part of that whole cycle - the timelessness of Mrs Perry's own connections, her innate happiness drawn from a sense of belonging. That was what she lacked. Now she no longer belonged anywhere. She could have belonged here, but someone with shiny shoes and insider knowledge was buying it. Nothing short of an act of God could prevent the sale, and God was unlikely to have a gap in his schedule, given the state of the world.
She watched Mrs Perry set off towards the hill where the pig man kept his pigs. Angela heard her say, 'If you chase those pigs again you'll be on the lead properly.' The dog walked soberly by her side. Even at a distance the old woman was looking very thoughtful. Angela slowed as she went past, and waved.
The woman turned. 'By the way,' she called, stopping for a moment and leaning on her stick. 'Thank you for the explanation, but I went up to Greenham Common myself, to see my daughter. She was living in our old tent.'
Angela opened and closed her mouth, but no sound came out. 'Oh,' she said eventually.
‘I
just thought
...'
'We don't all have straw in our hair, Mrs Fytton
’
said Mrs Perry, quite kindly under the circumstances.
'Well, no, I never -' began Angela, but Mrs Perry cut her short.
'And anyway, I have a bit of an apology to make to you. Carol, my daughter, was probably one of the women who banned your son. She was a stinker about all that.' Mrs Perry paused and shook her head and smiled. 'Until she had her own family. Both boys. Did I laugh when they came along
...
"There's two of the little so and sos," I said when she had them. "Now what?'"
'Into the pot?' said Angela.
Mrs Perry laughed and turned to continue her climb.
Angela leaned despondently on the steering wheel. The horn went off. Fuck, she thought, as a bird of some sort rose from its cover with a great hullabaloo and piercing, menacing look. Mrs Perry's look was not dissimilar as she tried to calm the dog.
'Like you,' Angela whispered on the air,
‘I
wish to be good. Just like you.'
Mrs Perry waved her stick and continued on up the hill. The pig pens glinted in the sun. 'Next time,' she called, 'I'll show you the bees.'
She thought of her perfect and elegant home. And she knew she was sick of that too. Two bathrooms indeed - who needed them when one avocado suite would do?
O luxury! thou curs'd by Heaven's decree, How ill exchang'd are things like these for thee!
She sobbed. Her stomach churned. She stopped the car and got out. Pigs, mulberries and the warmth of the sun made her queasy. She apologized in advance to the profusion of cow parsley - about the only country plant she knew - at the foot of that ancient hill and threw up as neatly as she could. When she was a child and had wanted something very badly, it made her literally sick with longing. As she bent double she was aware that this was serious, this was very serious indeed. She felt possessed. She threw up again. She waited, watching the hill. And she had to stop the car several times in the lane before finally driving away.
Afterwards, she thought of those medieval heretics who, when given the Host, were depicted as vomiting forth their furious little devils. She wondered if she had been given a form of Host by Mrs Perry and was finally vomiting Ian out. Rather amusing to think of him as a little, black, wriggling, yapping creature furiously waggling his forked tail as she exorcized him.
She drove slowly back along the lane and took one more yearning look at the house before setting off for home. The beauty of the day made it all the more poignant a leave-taking. She wondered, not daring to hope, if by the time she came down again there might have befallen some wondrous divine intervention. After all, it was the sort of thing you could expect from this pure and spiritual place called the Country.
6
April
For what do we live, bu
t to make sport for our neighbours, and laugh at them in our turn?
jane austen
Dave the Bread took off his cap and threw it down on the scrubbed deal table in his own kitchen. He then walked over to the rubbish bin, fighting his way past hanks of yarn and a vat of scented, liquid candle grease, and pushed several crumpled packets and papers down further into its depths. Wanda, his wife, wearing a flowing ethnic frock, was busy removing the labels from old washed jumpers she had purchased from various jumble and car-boot sales.
'It would be stark staringly obvious,' he said irritably, 'if someone came into our kitchen at this precise moment and noticed what's hanging out of our rubbish, that I have just unwrapped several out-of-date currant and honeybran loaves from their supermarket wrappings, heated them up and sold them as of my own making.'
'I doubt it,' said Wanda comfortably. 'Can't see the wood for the trees round here. Brilliant stroke, putting them into the oven for a moment or two before going out.'
'Brilliant is as maybe, but I told you to burn the wrappers
’
'Ooh, sorry
’
said Wanda, putting a coy hand to her lips and batting her eyelids like a naughty schoolgirl. 'Do I get a smack?' Wanda knew the drill. She pouted.
'Come here
’
he said, and, grabbing at her substantial buttocks through the flowing, elasticated skirt, he pressed himself through the folds.
'Ooh, let me put the scissors down first
’
she squealed, 'or I'll do you an injury.'
They heard the roar of a passing car, an unfamiliar roar, and looked out of the window. Dave the Bread removed his hands from his wife's nether regions with a regretful squeeze. Very occasionally a motorist stopped for directions and it might be taking the bucolic image a little too far to be caught
in
full
yokel
-
flagrante.
Instead he patted his wife affectionately and touched one of the misshapen, felted garments that lay over the back of her chair.
'My, my
’
he said happily, 'your weaving looks really authentic. Bloody awful and authentic. And the knitting
’
he added, as he sank his teeth into a bath bun. 'Clever girl.'
Wanda pushed her bosom back down under her Tyrolean bodice and went on with her label-removal.
On the table by her side was a spray of woad (genus
Isatis)
plucked from the garden, and next to that a vat of weak Dylon solution - cornflower blue -
into which she dunked each dela
belled woolly and then attacked it with a dolly tub. This gave every garment a suitably similar tonal quality, the unmistakable stamp of English homecraft, as if it had been dragged through mud by the local Puritan lobby to remove any relation to the colourful singing beauties of wayward nature. She sold a large number of them at country sales and car-boots. Sometimes, unbeknownst to her, and to the purchasers, she sold them back to the original owners, who wore them proudly to the Friday night ceilidh, where, between bouts of incompetent fiddling (Patrick Parsons originated from Watford and was enthusiastically self-taught) and very confusing calling (Una Parsons, once a low-pass-rate driving instructor from St Albans), they would point out the virtues of such simple, handmade garments. It was, as they said, the kind of thing that brought them down here. Back to basics. Quality of life. A handmade, hand-dyed, pure-wool sweater in any of those Bayswater shops would have cost three times as much.
Those who came to Tally-Ho Cottage walked past the woad patch toreach the front door. Ergo, if they saw a vat of blue, they assumed it was natural bounty. The spray of woad was placed on the table in case they sneezed on the path and missed the growing clump. It was the same with the lavender and rose bushes for the scented candles. She grew them right by the pathway also, and bought the oils from Boots. Sometimes she just melted down cheap scented candles from the market. By careful addition of colour, as with her weaving, she could produce candles that smelt horrible, were coloured like a baby's nappy and made everyone think they were entirely good for you. Not for nothing had Wanda Crow been an actress; she knew all about props and illusion. She had married the sparks from her last production, in which she played the back end of a goose, and given it all up. Given all what up? she sometimes asked the mirror.
She blew her husband a kiss.
'Happy?'he said.
'Never more so
’
she replied. 'My best performance yet.' They smiled contentedly. 'Thank God we left London.'
Dr Percy Tichborne pretended not to hear the tinkling little bell that was the summons for lunch. Just another moment or two, he said to himself, and readjusted the binoculars. It was only April,
April,
and yet the vicar was doing his exercises again, in a fetching little box and nothing else, because he thought he was hidden by the vicarage ilex. Well, to be fair the good doctor had told him as much. 'Totally private
’
he said. 'The trees hide everything. Even in winter.' And the vicar, being a young man of God, believed him.
'Ah, but not from up here, my beautiful young Crispin
’
breathed Dr Tichborne, and peered all the harder as those pale, stretched limbs pushed up down, up down, up
...
The dark red hair flopped and rose, flopped and rose, over that high freckled brow, and the perfect white teeth gleamed as the vicar grimaced in his striving to do press-ups worthy of God. Had the good doctor crept closer, he might have heard the muttered underbreaths of the vicar saying, apparently, 'No, no, no .
..'
to some unnamed temptation as he pushed himself to the absolute limit of endurance. No flagellant upon the road to Compostela could have given his God more in the line of keep-fit.
Somewhere to the side of his vision, Dr Tichborne was aware of a little car stopping by the wayside at the foot of the hill and a woman getting out, apparently in deep contemplation of the foliage. She appeared to be in some kind of distress as she bent double. He might have focused on her if the vicar had not suddenly appeared to get cramp and roll over on to his back, clutching his leg. He did that yesterday too. The doctor's heart skipped a beat. Perhaps he was badly injured? How he hoped so, how he
hoped.
He could be very tender with that
knee...
The little bell tinkled again. It sounded irritated. Dr Tichborne slid the binoculars back into his desk drawer. He longed, yet again, to be lying there, upon that very patch of dappled grass above which the vicar swung himself so rhythmically. To feel the heated breath, the sweep of that auburn hair upon his face, the brush of those barely contained manly bits as they bounced back and forth above him. If he could, he would, he swore, be the very turf upon which the vicar brought that virgin belly down.
It was not, said Dr Tichborne to himself as he descended the stairs, his fault. If the Anglican church saw fit to send a young single man of thirty-two to watch over St Hilary's, what could they expect? An
unmarried
young man of thirty-two, for heaven's sake. One with the body of an angel, the flaming hair of a god and the brain of an innocent young warrior. What is more, the doctor reminded himself, one who could recite the poetry of Gerard Manley Hopkins, play the guitar, kick up his heels at a ceilidh, hold the hand of a dying parishioner for half the night without once looking tired and, on top of it all, charm his wife into parting with some of her loot. What a cocktail to serve up in this vacuous hamlet. He reached the dining-room door, readjusted his expression to one of benign absent-mindedness and entered.