Authors: Anne Berry
I took it on a walk with Henry, and we sat on a hillside bench, contemplating it reverently. It was still early, the sun just cresting the distant inky crowns of woods. Lola charged about overdosing on the piquant icy aromas. The frost-rimed slope looked as if barrels of diamonds had been emptied over it. I swung my booted feet and shuttered my eyes.
‘What did she look like on her wedding day, Henry? Did my mother, Bethan, wear white or cream?’ I whispered.
‘Did her betrothed know that another man had gone before him?’ Henry interjected. My eyes sprang open. ‘Had he been told there was a baby, that a German prisoner-of-war had fathered a child with his young wife?’ My husband looked so forlorn that I hugged him, then we held hands like a teenage couple.
‘Was she happy? Was she in love when she said, “I do”? Or was this a marriage of another kind? Was she forced into it to give a semblance of virtue?’
Henry shook his head. ‘So many questions.’
‘So few answers,’ I finished for him. I was temporarily blinded by the scintillating spiked frozen grass. Gradually, as my vision adjusted, I carried on scanning the certificate. ‘After the banns were read, the marriage was solemnised on the thirteenth of May, nineteen fifty, in the parish of Nevern, county of Pembroke. In the Pritchard household in London I would have been two years old, standing in my cot shaking the bars.’ I breathed in the frosty air, a memory tickling my nose, inhaling the astringent odours of cleaning products, polish, disinfectant, vinegar and lemon juice, while my mother clattered about. ‘Did no one speak up for me? The first, the second, the third and final time of asking, did no parishioner climb to their feet, raise an arm, clear their throat and say, but what about baby you had, Bethan? What of Lucilla?’
Again Henry reminded me that it took two to make a baby. ‘I wonder if the real father was told Bethan was getting married?’
‘I shouldn’t think so. If anyone knew, I expect their lips were gummed together,’ I said, soberly. ‘So it went ahead and Bethan married Leslie David Sterry, an agricultural contractor.’ I tapped the paper with a finger. ‘Look, there’s even an address. Carwyn Farm, Hebron, Cardigan. Though I can’t imagine she’s still there.’ The father of the groom was a farmer too, I saw. ‘It seems that I come from agricultural stock.’ The registration district was recorded as Haverfordwest. I gasped. In the tragedy of Lucilla Pritchard, this impacted on me as forcefully as Oedipus discovering that despite his every effort to escape his fate he had, after all, married his mother. ‘Haverfordwest. My adoptive mother died in a hospital in Haverfordwest. Henry, do you realise they might have been living a
cricket
pitch from one another? They might have bumped into each other in the streets? They might have rubbed shoulders at the same market stall.’
‘Well, I never, your adoptive mother and your real mother winding up in the same place. And nothing whatsoever in common, bar the baby handed over in nineteen forty-eight. Bar you!’
When my adoptive father retired, he returned to his childhood home. He and my adoptive mother moved to a pretty cottage in Pembrokeshire. I did not attend his funeral. I elected not to bow to convention and stand in a Welsh graveyard as his coffin was lowered into the earth. And when my adoptive mother rang me and asked if I would like to have his piano, I politely declined. The music died in me long ago.
I tucked the marriage certificate back in its envelope and into my coat pocket. The sun’s rays could now be felt, and the frosty gems were melting and condensing into low-lying mist. We stood and set off ambling down the hill, listening appreciatively to the crunch of our boots on the still starched grass. Lola, tail wagging, lifted her head and loped after me. The air was delicious enough to eat. But my appetite was marred when Cousin Frank intruded on my reminiscing. I tallied the phone calls that I had taken from him over the years, his patronising visits, his hubris at the power he wielded when it came to his Aunt Harriet, the way in which he ingratiated himself with her. I also bookmarked with some satisfaction, juvenile though it might be, the arrival of Mr Whatmore, Alfred Whatmore. An allegory surely? My widowed mother met Mr Whatmore at her bridge club.
‘Dropped in last weekend and that damned fellow was over again,’ Frank repined down the line, unable to see me smiling through my responses.
‘Is it such a bad thing, Frank? She’s an elderly woman who’d benefit from a bit of company. You can’t be there all the time.’
‘You haven’t met him, Lucilla. Tall, debonair, a slimy operator if you take my meaning. I’m telling you I know his type. A con man.’ Takes one to know one, I thought acerbically as he continued. ‘I don’t like the way he goes about fingering her knick-knacks and curios.’
I yelped with laughter. ‘There’s a sentence loaded with innuendo if ever I heard one.’
‘I’m being serious, Lucilla. This is not a matter to joke about. I suspect– Look, I don’t want to alarm you but I suspect him.’
‘You suspect him of what?’ I asked. Would my adoptive mother be murdered in her bed by a suave bridge player? The ideal set-up for an Agatha Christie whodunnit. I’d heard it was a serious game, but I had no notion it was that deadly.
‘She’s been talking about selling the house. Scaling down, that’s what she called it. She said that Alfred advised it was the sensible thing to do now that she’s on her own. She says she’s rattling around in the cottage.’
‘Well, perhaps she is. Perhaps it would be an intelligent move. She might be more at home in a smaller place. A new beginning for her.’
‘Lucilla, she’s in her seventies. It’s too late for new beginnings.’
‘I don’t know …’ I returned, playing the advocate for Mr Satan, and enjoying it immensely.
‘God, you don’t think that she’s going to marry him?’ he erupted down the line.
‘What if she did?’ I said, continuing in the same vein.
‘Don’t you get it? He’s a gold-digger. He’s after her money. You might as well know that I’m executor and trustee of her will. She did consider you, but … but when it came down to it she wanted a man at the helm.’
‘I know. Mother told me,’ I returned frigidly, thinking that even when we were children I had disliked Frank. He was born of an age when male heirs were the height of fashion, de rigueur. He had been
blown
up like a bullfrog with self-importance as far back as I could remember.
‘It’s my responsibility to keep an eye on her estate. For her beneficiaries.’ This discussion was becoming tiresome. Avarice has that effect on me. We live in a materialistic age. Frank was, and continues to be, the worst kind of glutton, estimating the worth of his aunt while she was still breathing. ‘Whatmore took her to see some dismal terraced box on the Pembroke Dock Road. I shall do all I can to dissuade her, of course. But I’d be grateful if you’d have a timely word to reinforce my message,’ Frank continued, his cadence doom laden.
‘Frank, you of all people ought to know my opinion carries no weight with my mother.’
‘Well, it can’t hurt,’ Frank nipped peevishly.
‘Very well,’ I sighed.
But as I had foretold my mother ignored my counsel. To Frank’s chagrin she sold the cottage, and did indeed buy the poky terrace on the Pembroke Dock Road.
‘God Almighty, she opens her front door onto the road, no less. Massive articulated lorries thundering past all hours of the day and the night. The noise and the stink! She says she doesn’t mind, but I don’t know how she puts up with it. That damn Alfred is still sniffing around her money. I’m doing what I can but she’s putty with him, I tell you, putty.’ It was hard to conceive of my adoptive mother as putty, light and malleable. I received this update of my cousin’s with detachment. I did not care unduly about the money, or money in general. I am not mercenary, and truthfully am bewildered by an age where people’s entire lives are spent in pursuit of the next best thing. Enough,
enough
matters to me. Food, shelter, walking my dog on a winter’s morning and making love with Henry while Miles Davis plays jazz on the radio. It is an elegant sufficient, as my grandmother used to say. I wallowed
for
a second in the vision of Frank being deposed by the opportunist, the wily Alfred Whatmore.
At the bottom of the hill now, I leaned on a gate and asked Henry to go on ahead, said that I’d catch him up. He obliged without demur, sensing I needed a moment alone. I let my eyes lap up the wonder of the bright winter’s morning. In her declining years, my adoptive mother’s phone calls and letters became ever more pathetic. The last time my parents came to visit me was gruesome. They stayed for a few days. My mother cast disparaging eyes about Pear Tree Cottage. She pounced on cobwebs, on dusty windowsills, on grease spots on the hob, on corners where a few dog hairs gathered with a grain or two of soil.
‘Your light bulbs need a wash,’ she observed, with gimlet eyes. ‘They’re coated in dust.’ It was October and the late afternoons had an autumnal bluish edge to them.
‘Do they?’ I said, tension tying itself in a constrictor knot around my stomach. I had been in a frenzy trying to knock our shabby homely cottage into shape, to make it fit for her inspection. I had failed and I didn’t give a damn. In fact, I felt like whistling through the rooms like a tornado, restoring their lackadaisical air of dishevelled harmony. My father kept a low profile, making a fuss of Merlin, perhaps recalling Scamp, and the night of fireworks when he injured his paw. Did he want to atone for what he had done? But the responsibility of absolving him from blame was too much for me. I settled for suppression.
After their departure, I took six dinner plates out into the small cobbled courtyard. One by one I raised them high above my head and slammed them down. I watched them smash to smithereens, my scalp tingling with frustration. Staring at the shards among the cobblestones, the last thing I felt was remorse. Henry’s whiskery visage swam into view at our kitchen window. ‘I’ll buy some more,’ I placated when he came out with the dustpan and brush.
He shrugged. ‘Not overly fond of the design anyway. Prefer to eat off plates without patterns all over them. Gives me indigestion.’ I smiled and thought that some loves are like an onion, each year peeling back another pearly layer for you to gloat over.
In April 1992 my mother wrote us a letter in her shaky spidery hand. It was not very coherent because her thoughts were shaky and spidery as well, like dropped stitches.
Dear Lucilla and Henry
,
I expect you are wondering what I am writing for. I will be 80 in
– here a date that was illegible was scratched out –
I would like you and Henry to celebrate with me. Frank is coming. Not Rachel though. Please excuse my writing. I am sorry but I can’t walk without my frame. Book to Pembrock, not Pembrock Dock. Hoping to see you both. Travel by coach
.
I had to put dear old Pip to sleep. I have got a toffee-coloured poodle now. Dandy. He is dear. I have meals on wheels and home help. My home help will be at the party. She will be washing up. I have asked her and she is quite willing. She reminds me of Barbara. You remember Barbara
.
Love to you all
.
Mother
P.S. Go to Pembrock. Ask the driver and he will put you down at the bus stop
.
My mother was lonely, growing steadily more confused in her isolation. The loan of her daughter had come to an end with interest owing. Her husband had died. Her previous dog, a black Scottie, had been put to sleep. Even Alfred Whatmore had deserted her, his wallet fatter. Nowadays, no one cared how clean her house was. There was no one to join her for her meals on wheels. And it didn’t really matter
if
the van was five or ten or fifteen minutes late. Her teeth were rotten, so she could no longer abandon herself to the lethal crunch of slab toffee. I was sorry for her, but we did not go. She rang me quite a few times in the handful of years she had left.
‘Why don’t you come and stay,’ she mumbled, her voice sounding gritty through lack of use. ‘Be my good girl and come.’ But I wasn’t her good girl.
‘Why don’t you sell up and move closer,’ I suggested. ‘If you were nearby I could help.’
‘Yes, yes, I’ll do that. I’ll put the house on the market. I’ll wait for the spring and then I’ll get in touch with an estate agent.’ But we both knew it wasn’t to be. It was the poodle that was her downfall in the end. One morning, descending the stairs, she tripped up on it. She fell heavily and fractured her hip. No amount of rest improved her condition. She reported that walking had become unbearable. ‘It’s badly swollen and very tender,’ she informed me tightly. The day after this exchange her doctor rang me and told me that she had been admitted to a nursing home to recuperate. A neighbour, who had coveted the mischievous Dandy, took the culprit in. I was going to do my duty and visit, but then I had another call. She had been transferred to a hospital in Haverfordwest. I should go there, her doctor said, in the sepulchral tones I guessed he reserved for life and death situations. A day later and I stood by her bed. I plumped up pillows and assisted her when she felt up to sipping a cup of tea. I brushed the crumbs from her lips as she tried to nibble on a biscuit.
‘You are a good girl after all,’ she muttered looking into the middle distance with her dead eyes. The nurse came and whispered in my ear that the consultant wanted to see me. I filed out of the ward after her, past other elderly women, who fixed me with rheumy vacant eyes, their jaws working on the cud of their yesterdays. I was ushered into a small room, where a trim middle-aged man
who
looked disconcertingly healthy and spry, shook my hand energetically. He introduced himself as Doctor Weddel.
‘I’m sorry to be the bearer of bad news, but your mother has very little time to live. She has cancer of the pancreas you see,’ he said without preamble, clearly having missed the training on acquiring a sympathetic bedside manner.
There was no desk in the room, only two easy chairs, the seats and backs upholstered in a synthetic lilac fabric. We both sat down. They were set ludicrously far apart at either end of the rectangular space. There were no windows, and it was unbearably hot and stuffy in there. I kept coughing and having to clear my throat. ‘But she only tripped over the dog?’ I said finally, disconcerted.