Authors: Susanna Johnston
Hugh waved the unlikely cortège away with a courageous smile and returned to Melanie who was percolating coffee in the well-appointed kitchen.
‘This knife sharpener was a good buy, Melanie.’ He sat and delighted in his comfort and new purchases.
He had been practising riding a bicycle without using the handlebars so as to be able to play the flageolet as he peddled up the village street. It was a small, flute-like, instrument with four finger holes on top and two thumb holes below. He had found it in the attic at Bradstow Manor. Muriel had seen no reason why he shouldn’t take that along with the near-Bronzino and various other musical instruments, including sheet music. Mostly glees and madrigals.
As he and Melanie set knives aside before embarking on the adventure of turning the handle and achieving sparkling results, he suggested, ‘I think we ought to get around to organising our madrigal evening. It’s going to take careful planning. Christening of the music room. Local talent.’
‘It’s up to you, Hugh dear. I wonder who we’ll ask.’
He kissed her with a long look and slightly swollen lips that had suffered from his bicycle rides, as he guided the wheels partly with his knees and partly with the pressure of his weight, with the flageolet in his mouth.
They had put finishing touches to the thatched music room. There was a platform set up with music stands and many uncomfortable chairs waited for an audience.
‘We might kick off with “Dainty Fine Bird”. Something like that.’
‘I love the one about the swan, Hugh. You sing that so tunefully.’ He smiled and stood up straight at the foot of the table, just beyond the knife sharpener and sang, ‘The Dying Swan when Leeving had Noo Nooote.’
‘Oh Hugh. I hope we can find some voices as lovely as yours. Of course, in London, I knew professionals – but here …’
Melanie’s London friends had not attempted to bother her and she was without a circle. She ran round in them, though, gleeful at all she had gained.
Delilah, it turned out, had a strong voice, if sharp, and put herself forward as part of a quartet. The other two voices were also recruited locally and were a
husband-and
-wife team with some experience.
It rained on the day of the party although it had been planned for mid-June. Guests were allowed to leave
umbrellas in the half-timbered porch and took to their uncomfortable seats in squelching shoes.
Dawson on his own (Delilah was performing and thus waiting excitedly behind the scenes), Muriel and Peter. The judge and Phyllis, Tommy with a child on each knee, even Dulcie, as well as many others, sat there as Hugh, on tiptoe and eyes turned to heaven, gave short explanations before each ‘piece’.
Melanie acted wanly as a modest but knowing hostess wearing a bemused and self-deprecating smile as she mumbled, ‘Very local, I’m afraid. Not like a London “do” at all, but very touching.’
Marco and Flavia were not there. With the newfound freedom made possible by Tommy Tiddler, they spent little time in their barn, escaping to London where they had the full use of Muriel’s house. Thanks to the good Bronzino copy, Hugh had no further need for the rent.
Muriel wallowed in the comparative peace and Delilah pronounced the whole set-up as ‘modern but, aren’t we all God’s creatures?’
Marco and Flavia were in the West Indies. Roger had managed to wangle a freebie for them from some newspaper, hoping that he might at some stage get Moggan to spill the beans if a royal connection could be made. Peter suggested to Muriel that they ask Hugh and Melanie to lunch.
She rang their number and Melanie answered, saying, ‘What a nice gesture.’
Muriel was counting the stitches of her knitting when they arrived. She was working a pullover for Peter in cable stitch. The texture of the surface was planned so that he would finger and feel the work and know how she had striven to perfect it. It was a complicated pattern and involved safety pins. She had become addicted to knitting. It soothed her and it reminded Peter of his early experiences with twigs and string. Whatever the
drawbacks
of daily life, whatever the unwelcome interruptions, knitting grew and went forward – however slowly. Something to return to. A target, a row to be finished – an achievement. It was maddening to be stalled.
Muriel had become more and more observant
– studying the skill in order to describe all she saw to Peter.
Melanie was tall and thin and wore very gloomy, expensive, dark brown and grey clothes. Funny little flat shoes and no jewellery. The overall effect was, Muriel considered, extremely turgid. The accent was on pure wool and raw silk. She looked both pure and raw as she spoke very softly with her head bent downwards.
‘You must be the first to know. Hugh and I are planning to commit matrimony.’
Hugh looked quite pleased with himself as she went on. ‘I think I can boast that I’ve tamed him somewhat. It must be said that he has tamed me too. I used to live a very different life in London.’
She looked to the floor before starting again. ‘Mostly showbiz people and writers of course. I haven’t invited them here yet. I don’t feel the good life would suit them. They are loyal, though, and several have sent kind messages in reply to our change of address card.’
The telephone rang and Muriel answered it in some irritation. It was Mambles who rushed straight in, ‘Mummy wants to know if we can visit. She’s been depressed – the young ones are stealing all the thunder and that frightful fancy footman is giving her too many Martinis – making her fractious.’
‘Yes. Soon. I’m busy now, Mambles, but I’ll ring you this evening.’
‘Why are you always busy? Who have you got with you? Tell them it’s me.’
‘I’m sorry but I can’t talk now.’
‘Mummy says she hopes we don’t have to see that wan widow, if that’s what she is, who’s taken up with your former.’
Princess Matilda never, ever used the word ‘husband’.
On she went – coming near to pleading with Muriel to hear of Cunty’s need for a pacemaker and Moggan’s prostate operation but Muriel gabbled and rang off as Peter offered the guests something to drink and as Hugh said, ‘Melanie doesn’t but I’m ready for refreshment.’
At lunch Muriel encouraged Melanie to do the talking. It helped to sidestep plaintive remarks from Hugh and amused Peter.
She said, ‘That Tommy Tiddler is straight from heaven. I don’t allow him to smoke under my roof so the children spend most of their time at the School House where he gives them cooking demonstrations. He calls them the little darlings and wears a chef’s hat with a Peter Pan motif pinned on it.’
Hugh looked around for a sign of Monopoly who sulked upstairs.
Melanie, part confident, part unsure, tried to reach a degree of affinity with Muriel as the brothers talked of music.
She spoke with exasperating softness, watery and rhetorical. ‘Delilah is a character, isn’t she? Kitty is sweet, isn’t she? Tommy’s a card, isn’t he?’
Was she being deferential? Proving she knew as much if not more? Was Muriel not allowed to imagine that she was a hop ahead? She was mystified. Baffled by the spurious bid for intimacy.
‘Funny. You and me, Muriel. Married to brothers – sisters-in-law in a way.’ Funny way, Muriel thought. I’m not married to Peter and was married to Hugh until a few months ago – until I parted with enough money to allow him to set up house with you.
Melanie went on and on. ‘I know Hugh played you up but, as I said, we have tamed each other.’
As they left she said, ‘Of course I do miss my showbiz friends. I wish I could ask them here but, unless of course you had royalty staying – royals combine well with them, don’t you think? Keep me and Hugh posted. We may be a respectable married couple by then.’
Muriel didn’t know what to think. She’d had her fill of politicians and was weary of Queens and Princesses. ‘Gosh, yes. Not for a bit, I hope.’
She yearned to get back to her forty-fourth row and worried that she was getting short of wool – planning to write and order more as soon as Hugh and Melanie left. As they did so a nasty glint came into Melanie’s eye. A
touch of malice showed even though her voice was soft and timid. ‘It’s easy for you to entertain in style here. You’re very fortunate. I’ll get Tommy to do us some starters but it would be a help to have good advance warning.’
Mambles had wangled another visit with Mummy in the spring. In the past the two had travelled together to the north of Scotland but, with ever increasing shadows of anility crossing each face, long journeys had become a thing of the past.
‘Just for two nights,’ Mambles had pleaded, ‘we’ll bring Cunty and Farty, and Moggan is free to drive us.’
Everything fell into place. Same rooms, same accessories provided and, with a few variations, the same conversations.
Muriel invited Hugh and Melanie to lunch although Mambles had no wish to see him in the company of his wan new companion.
Melanie curtseyed before the Queen Mother and
half-whispered
, ‘Normally, as a new bride, I enter the room first but today I am honoured to take second place when we proceed to the dining room.’
The old lady said that she had once been a bride herself – at Westminster Abbey.
Hugh, although still smarting after the donkey debacle
since, on that day, he had assumed the role of group leader, suggested that, after lunch, he take Her Majesty to look at the garden which was alive with spring flowers.
They set off gingerly. Hugh held her by one of her arms. Her free hand clasped a stick with an ivory handle that had some sort of royal crest engraved on it. Cunty followed.
He saw to his consternation that a crow-trap had been set up in grass that had just begun to shoot up high. It was a large netted contraption with a bar across it from which a dead rabbit swung – held up by two rotting legs. Inside the trap three crows, jammed together, fluttered and twisted – frantic to be free. At his charge’s insistence Hugh told her what he saw – playing down the extent of the horror of the bird’s suffering. ‘That,’ she replied, ‘will be a Larsen trap. We have them on the grouse moor at my castle in Scotland. We hang up their carcasses to keep the raptors at bay. They are, as you must know,
short-distance
migrants and very territorial.’
Muriel, faintly anxious, joined them and as she looked at Hugh in his near-awkwardness clinging to the buoyant old lady’s arm, she remembered how handsome he had been and how he had fooled her. Confident. Go-ahead. It had not hit her then that he was merely conceited. She wondered if, even in the early days, he had suspected her of having ‘connections’.
After the little party set out she had worried that Hugh in his defiantly worn clothes might test his masculinity even on a nonagenarian. The expression ‘anything in a skirt’ came to her and this particular nonagenarian was presumably wearing a skirt under a tight-fitting black coat. Muriel was shaken by the sight of the Larsen trap. Her mother had often told her that she would never be a proper country person. Her constantly puzzled mind shook about with images of mediaeval tortures. Punishment in stocks. She hoped it was just a dark patch that she passed through. She was trying to knit a doll for Cleopatra but had no idea where to buy the right ingredients to stuff it with.
With heaving and sighing, Dulcie was beside them. ‘That’s where some of your bloody visitors should be. Fighting for their lives in a cage.’
Summer came and went and the gap on the wall – left by the Bronzino in the front hall – had been camouflaged by skilled re-hanging of pictures.
Hugh, having moved in with Melanie, had left the squash court empty and Flavia decided to start a business there. She called it Stretchable Chic and busied herself collecting together as many elasticated garments as were traceable. Boob tubes, girdles, tights, saucy garters, and every sort of tensile knicker. She had written to Ann Summers asking her to come to Lincolnshire to open the affair in a stretch limo but had not, by autumn, had a reply.
Muriel tidied most of Flavia’s risqué merchandise away onto the gallery where the futon had lived during Hugh’s occupation of the squash court and planned to pull her weight in the neighbourhood. After discussions with Delilah it was decided that a musical evening in aid of the church tower was to be the answer. Hugh’s had not been for the church but simply a social affair and those he considered humble villagers had been excluded.
He was pained, though, by Muriel’s decision and told Melanie, woefully, that she had never had ideas of her own – always been guided by him. Nonetheless he was prepared to contribute to the success of her evening.
An upright piano from the loft was moved across the yard and Peter was made to promise to play for performers when the day came.
Hugh asked if he might play some unaccompanied Bach on the flute. Perhaps Debussy too.
Sonia, who warbled, wished to be allowed to sing ‘All I want is a Room Somewhere’ and ‘The Song of the Kerrie Dancers’ provided that she be given many hours of practice – with Peter at the piano beforehand. Eric, deserting his crossness always displayed in the garden, suggested he should play on his piano accordion ‘Knees up Mother Brown and Speed Bonnie Boat’.
The head teacher planned to read from the children’s homework and Tommy Tiddler wrote to say that he was preparing to do his imitation of the Queen Mother unless she was to be there in person in which case he was happy to alter the programme and impersonate Mrs Thatcher.
Judge Jack sent a special messenger in the shape of Phyllis, who now drove him everywhere in his old Mercedes, to deliver a letter. ‘Hail to my neighbour! You may not know what talent I hide under my bushel. I am
more than happy to help you with your musical evening – anything to support the church. In times gone by, in Sandra’s day when the boys were young, I used to do my own rendering of ‘Danny Boy’ after the Queen’s speech on Christmas Day. Phyllis (what a treasured find, dear lady) will be at the wheel in case I take a little something for Dutch courage before taking to the stage.’
Marco volunteered to be master of ceremonies and Lizzie invited herself to stay: ‘I’ll be a tremendous help. Hand sandwiches round and make conversation. I hope that awful judge won’t be there with that ex-housekeeper of yours.’