Unhallowed Ground (20 page)

But not this time. Not now.

She had gone too far. This was it.

And if Georgie had secretly hoped that Mark would save her from her own stupidity and persuade her to stay in London, she was, once again, sadly mistaken.

‘You must do what you need to do,’ had been his first feeble reaction to the news of her departure. ‘And I will support you. You know that.’

Why was he always so damn reasonable?

‘But how do you feel about it? I will be away for a year.’

‘Disappointed, naturally. But I assume you won’t be in purdah. I will be able to visit.’

She wanted to kick him under the table. Shake his shoulders till he wobbled. They were dining at the Old Orleans; they always went there because Mark liked jazz, his reaction to jazz was the only emotion that really lit up his face and made it extraordinary. He enjoyed the informal atmosphere, the sawdusty floor and the jugs of ale, nothing romantic here unless you were into Western culture and the sight of a couple of guns turned you on. Why the hell did she bother with Mark? Why did she bother with anyone when all she felt, when she got home, was that hollow feeling of loss?

‘You choose. We will go wherever you want, you know that,’ Mark would say when he saw that look of distress cross her face. But Georgie didn’t know where she honestly wanted to go. It wasn’t the restaurant that distressed her, it was something much deeper than that, a yearning for something so beautiful, so agonizing, so lost to her that she couldn’t express it to this pleasant-faced sandy-haired man with the depth of a character from Agatha Christie, who made love to her when she wanted him to, spent the night when she told him he could, smiled when she smiled and listened when she talked. Small talk. Nothing talk.

If he was a plant he would be a rubber plant. Tall, cheerful, stoical but dusty. So what would Georgie be? A sharp little heather with dry roots.

And sex with Mark was embarrassing, far from the familiar, practised gropings and peaceful, experienced murmurings of Toby. Almost foaming at the mouth, Mark went at it like a horse, with arched neck and flaring nostrils, buttocks pumping and veins throbbing in his forehead. She could feel all the bones in his back. Smell his medicated soap. Heaven knows it was hard not to laugh when he gave one of his piercing whinnies during his violent, muscular orgasm. She used to soak in a perfumed bath, she made herself smell very sweet to compensate for her sourness of mind.

When she was younger, so long ago she had been a small child, a child so used to repressing emotions, it was hard for outsiders to see she had any. There were times, then, when she’d held out her arms, in love with the world all around her. There’d been moments of pure ecstasy, so pure she’d been wading through it, and these intimations of infinity filled her inside so there was no room for anything else. There had been this secret place where she went, full of buttercups, where the sky was blue and the wind was warm. And when she breathed in she drank the whole world, her own small griefs sublimating into understanding and compassion. She had held out her small arms and cried when she realized she could not keep this mental intoxication, this intensification of life. Perhaps that was something you never found once you grew up and knew too much, once you had seen something of the world. Perhaps you just lost it. And some forgot it completely.

Sometimes Georgie felt she had spent her whole life searching for that experience, ever since. When Toby died she gave up hope. She felt she would never find it.

Yes, she was more lonely when she pleased Isla and went out with one of her ‘hangers on’ than if she spent the evening alone with a book and her feet up. Unbearably lonely.

Everyone thought Mark was ‘lovely’. She called him Brillo, he referred to her as Snuffles. Educated, charming when he chose to be, he was interesting, too, in a mild kind of way. He worked at the British Museum, was an expert on the ancient Greeks. His wit and his humour, his hair and his lips, everything about him was desert dry.

And she did like Mark. He was a decent man. The injustice of her own feelings troubled her, she was taken aback by her own malice because she was using him, pretending, giving nothing of herself, she, who had trained herself in compassion for others.

‘I’ll move in with you,’ was his immediate and generous response when she had felt so threatened by violence in London, when she was so lost and afraid to be left alone in her flat. ‘You shouldn’t be on your own.’

But she couldn’t explain the truth to him, couldn’t tell him that sharing the flat with him would have afforded little protection, how could she say that in some odd way she would have found it more threatening to wake up every morning beside him and his big bare feet, to smell his peppermint, listen to him cleaning his teeth for hours like he did, and that damn gargling, to have to watch him hanging his clothes on the chair with such infernal neatness, just as he had been taught at school, so organized, so maddeningly sensible, even worse than she was. But it would be so easy to slip into this to answer a need for love.

‘I love you, Snuffles,’ Mark would sometimes whisper in her ear, mostly when he had drunk too much wine, marring an otherwise happy evening.

‘I really do. I love you.’

And Georgie would try to reply in kind, try to soothe him, and try not to weep.

‘You have been on your own too long,’ scolded Isla. ‘You’re a dried up old walnut and you’ll end up cracking, that’s if you haven’t already. Far too choosy. Too selfish. You want too much. Mark adores you, he would do anything for you. He would be a dog at your feet if you’d let him, if you weren’t so bloody awkward.’

Sadly this was true.

‘You need someone to help you fold your sheets,’ Isla said. ‘Everyone does. And someone to whip the cream when your arm aches, and support you in your dotage, if you play your cards right.’

So Isla had been gratified to hear that Mark was arriving in five days’ time. She had that silly gleam in her eye and Georgie turned away in disgust.

I
T WAS PAINFUL TO
admit this, thought Georgie, even to herself, as she stared at the pendant Mark had given her for Christmas, as she fingered the greenish stone of archaeological interest, but Mark was an older, leaner version of Toby, safe as Toby, unthreatening as Toby. Yes, that is why she had married Toby, out of a need to be safe.

She had married Toby for two reasons, first because she loved him, and second because she was terrified that anyone else might see through her. How she detested her own vulnerability. If she had had children she might have been different, less afraid for herself, and more concerned about them from the moment they rose from crawling position to sway on their tiny feet. She probably would have been overprotective, far too worried to endure the fear that some monster might hurt them—a teacher giving a thoughtless report, a team leader picking them last, a friend forgetting their birthday. Her vulnerability made her inadequate, as inadequate as her ‘clients’, who, in the words of her mother, ‘ought to be compulsorily sterilized’.

Mark was a person everyone talked to because he did not. Because he mostly stood around staring with one raised, interested eyebrow, more interested in abstract matters.

Perhaps that’s why women slept with him, too.

It was Mark who built her that neat little hen house, and Georgie was glad he was with her when they went to fetch the hens because of the unpleasant business of pushing them into those dirty sacks. Their warm female bodies bundled in jute.
Bump
bump
bump they went, their silence made a forlorn entreaty. ‘Oh, they’ll be fine,’ the farmer assured them, ‘they favour the dark, do chickens.’ But the journey back felt endless and Georgie could hardly wait to get them home and tip them into the bright daylight of her orchard.

Mark wandered off to watch the milking at Wooton Farm on his first morning in Wooton-Coney. Funny how men can do things like that without being thought pushy. He brought her an early morning cuppa. Georgie peered at the clock to see to her horror that it was half-past six, but he said perkily, clapping his hands, ‘It’s a glorious morning, too good to be wasted, so I’m off to explore.’

So Blytonesque. So Julian.

He had arrived well equipped for the country with his new green wellies and his three-quarter-length Barbour. Georgie was already being nasty, she couldn’t help herself around Mark, she regularly had these unkind thoughts and it didn’t make her feel any better about herself.

There was a fishing rod in the back of his car, an old MG, a collector’s item, not too comfortable for the passenger, not when you’re dressed for a night on the town.

But Georgie had been relieved to see him after her five days alone, when she’d found herself doing worrying things like pacing the floor, glancing at her watch and speculating that he might not find her because Mark was not the most practical of men when it came to making his way about, or making love either. He never quite managed to hit the spot, there was so much fussing with maps and lists… He would find himself somewhere else. Somebody else would take him home.

But she had no right to be so vindictive because it was with Mark that she went to the merchants and picked the items she would need to make a start on her cottage. And Mark’s advice was good. Practical in some small ways, why should he be practical in all? Georgie demanded too much of Mark, she too readily lost patience, she rarely bothered to be civil, but he invariably came back for more with his damn tail-wagging.

She dithered for days over whether she should put him in the spare room, Stephen’s old studio, or if she should make it clear from the start that he could sleep in her bed? It wasn’t even a double, it was that strange size in between, which meant that sheets never fitted properly and double duvets touched the ground. So, if Mark was to sleep with Georgie they would be close, extremely close. He would not get up when he had finished, he would fall straight to sleep with his mouth wide open and she would be squashed against the wall.

Oh no. Oh no.

In the end, after much contemplation, on that first night she made sure they finished their lovemaking downstairs, uncomfortable though it was. He would not have the strength or the inclination to perform a second time, and he hated to miss
Newsnight
. When the programme had finished she noticed some relief on his face when she showed him to Stephen’s studio.

‘It smells in here,’ was all he said, wrinkling his freckled nose and dumping his Gladstone bag on the bed with such a thud that the bedsprings twanged. He had brought his Paisley pyjamas with him, he already wore his brown leather slippers. He had made love in his brown leather slippers.

He put her in mind of Prince Charles. Damaged by privilege. ‘It’s the damp,’ she said encouragingly. ‘You get used to it.’

Why did she let him? She never bothered to tart herself up, in fact, if anything, she dressed in her shabbiest, most-washed clothes in order to turn him off. For his arrival Georgie had worn torn jeans and a dirty old shirt, huge, like a smock. There were bits of old cobweb in her hair and she hadn’t bothered to wash it. Quite a statement, one might imagine. But with Mark, sex was like saying hello. He arrived with the lovemaking question in his eyes, like a worry. You had to get the ritual over before you progressed to anything else. In bed, Mark was the theme tune to
Neighbours
as opposed to the
Planet Symphony
. Oh why, oh why did Mark Bamber-Jones force her to thoughts mean and unkind? Behaviour quite unworthy of her because Mark was a good friend of Georgie’s and she never intended to hurt him.

She was downstairs cooking breakfast when Mark returned from the milking. He liked his meals at precise intervals, and his sleeping times to be regular. Routine was all important. ‘They’re a bit queer to put it mildly.’

‘Queer?’

‘Rustics, of the old-fashioned kind. Peasants, really, damn tricky to fathom out what they say.’

‘Oh? So they actually spoke to you then?’ Surprised, she turned round to study his face while her hands cracked an egg into the fat. It sizzled and spat, like Georgie’s own resentment at the easy way Mark seemed to manage to slot himself into every situation. ‘You’ve made more progress than I have. I went to order more milk when I arrived and got the same miserable reaction as the first time. I only see the men when they’re passing by on the tractor, or high on the hills with the sheep.’

‘Lot and Silas. The sons. The old man’s long dead.’

‘Really?’

‘Quite horrid,’ said Mark with a bit of a shudder and a nervous laugh. ‘There’s a filthy jar on a shelf, mixed up with capsules, detergent, syringes, rags and an old bacon sandwich. When I asked, they said it was the old boy’s ashes. Apparently he asked for his urn to be put on the parlour shelf. They told me he died twenty years back. They didn’t introduce themselves. I heard them calling each other. I wasn’t addressed directly at all.’

Georgie was horrified. ‘Jesus. How grotesque,’ she said, wide-eyed. ‘They must have been kidding you. Twenty-year-old ashes on the shelf? But they let you stay and watch the milking?’

‘Naturally. They could see I was interested, and I kept well out of the way. Both somewhere in their thirties, I’d guess. You’d never imagine they were brothers, one a burly oaf and the other a nervy type with a wicked twitch in his eye. Both thick as shit, that’s obvious.’

‘I bet that mother gives them both hell. She’s a foul-tempered cow. And they didn’t even ask who you were?’

‘Didn’t seem bothered. Too busy. Both the silent, macho type. Can’t put more than two words together. Probably both illiterate.’

‘Of course they’ll already know who you are. They might be thick but they don’t miss a trick. Always staring. Whenever they drive by here they peer in, and if I’m out walking they’ll turn their heads a hundred and eighty degrees. They’ve never been told it’s rude to stare.’

‘Well, you get all types down here, products of incest, sheep-shagging and God knows what else.’ And happily Mark tucked into his breakfast. ‘I’d rather do without the milk. They piss in the parlour along with the cows and I’m not sure that’s all they do. There should be some law against it.’