Authors: Gillian White
There was still no sign of Cramer giving up the tenancy, as required, or moving out.
The fierce Mrs Buckpit and Georgie enjoyed these cryptic exchanges when Georgie went to pay for the milk. She knew the farmer’s widow would have preferred her to leave the money on the step in a bottle, to save her the bother of conversation, of cracking her face, of polite interaction, but Georgie resolutely refused to behave in this unsociable manner. She was buoyed up in her bravery by her amused guests. She wondered if she’d be quite so careless about confronting the gorgon every week after they had gone. There was something about her quietness that was almost malignant… Mrs Buckpit could probably stand still for hours, watching, waiting, ill-wishing.
Communication on any level with the sons, Lot and Silas, was out of the question. Mark kept trying, he even helped bring in the hay in a posh pair of padded dungarees that could well have come from Harrods and quite unsuitable open-toed Jesus sandals. He was obviously unhappy when he was forced to replace these with boots. He took to wandering about with a straw between his teeth and leaning, arms crossed, against gates. He stayed with Georgie on four occasions that summer, and shamefully she slept with him every time. Lot and Silas, that moronic couple, were preoccupied with their work and with their strange, silent, bovinelike watching, while they drew on their bent cigarettes or scratched their heads beneath their caps. When Suzie came to visit she considered them mentally retarded, but Georgie could not agree. There was a depravity about them which had nothing to do with natural affliction.
She lived like a lord, with long periods of forgetfulness and almost well-being. Her fear was hidden behind the full and fresh young green of the orchard trees, and from some of them wisteria hung in garlands like stars of rose, the globes of the trees were overspread with the pink and white of may. Wine every night, rich home-baked fruit cakes, Marks & Spencer chickens and complicated frozen concoctions that visitors felt they owed in exchange for their free vacation. The rent from her flat arrived regularly, but money was not a problem because Isla had managed to sell two of Stephen’s paintings to a gallery in Kensington. ‘And they’ll take more,’ she told Georgie, handing over the cheque, thrilled with her achievement. ‘The owner’s a friend of David’s, they went to school together, or something equally odd, and now they have lunch every week. When you need more dosh just tell me.’ She twiddled her specs round her finger with pleasure, and the tortoiseshell rims flashed with success.
So that was a nice secure feeling. It took some of the rank taste away.
And Georgie had the most extraordinary communication from Tom Selby, that old Einstein lookalike. Incredibly, another offer had arrived, almost double the first one. Georgie couldn’t believe her eyes and nor, it would seem, could Selby. ‘You have to accept this offer, Georgina,’ he told her sternly when she hurried to Bovey to see him.
‘But I’m here now. I can’t just pack up and go.’
‘Of course you can,’ he crackled, the ancient body agitating in rheumatic excitement in a jerky, wavery way. He had made no concessions to summer, like opening the windows or changing his suit, and the smell of cheese and beer in the office was now mixed with pickled onions. ‘You intend to sell in the end anyway. What difference would a few months make?’
She peered through the dimness to read the letter. The summer made his office more dusty. Every stick of furniture, every file, every cabinet was faded. ‘Who on earth has made this offer? Are we sure they’re the same people who made the original one?’
Mr Selby’s face crumpled like that of a frustrated child’s. ‘I don’t know. They won’t say. But the offer has come through the same firm, still incognito.’
‘If it is the same people they’ll still be interested six months from now. They can make me another offer then, when the work on Furze Pen is completed.’
He made strangled movements with his head. ‘We certainly cannot rely on that.’
But Georgie remained firm. Apart from any other reasons, she and her cottage were fully booked until the end of September. She did not want to let anyone down.
Most of her visitors camped in the garden because of the lack of space in the cottage, and often the nights were balmy enough to allow them to abandon their tents and sleep out under the stars. Often she joined them and they talked for hours around camp-fires, sang to beginners’ guitars, laughed and played silly games while the hens laid their beautiful eggs and some of her straggly, weedy vegetables—mostly lettuce and spring onions—managed to poke their heads above ground and were large enough to include in salads, almost large enough to be seen.
She felt a glow as she bent over the beds, back aching, sweat dripping, a glow akin to the one that comes when a deep ache is stilled. There was pleasure in the feel of powdery, dry soil in her hands, in the touch of the breeze on her damp brow, and in the sense of tingling health in her limbs and in her breathing. The smell of the turned earth was good, and of the bonfire crackling away in the corner, which she could poke and regulate and enlarge for hours. It was good to tread like a country woman on loose soil in heavy boots, and at the end of the day to scrape the caked earth from their soles.
The burned doll and the make-up case began to assume insignificance, after all, all sorts of peculiar things find their way into people’s sheds. Georgie was far too busy to be wallowing about in melancholy, nor did she have much time for thought. This physical, active life was obviously the answer to her paranoia, and the tragedy of Angie’s death filtered more gently into her mind, the sort of sorrow that came and went, the kind of sadness that could be dealt with.
Wooton-Coney and its inhabitants remained a jumble of scattered impressions. Georgie lived in a shell, she peeped in and out at whim like a cockle. With her friends gathered safely around her she could remain aloof. The Buckpits were up first for the milking, clanking and banging, and the soft-footed cows passed by her window, the dungy smell of them wafting up. Then she would hear the tortured sound of Cramer’s Land Rover engine; he would be setting off for God knows where, towing a badly packed, dangerous trailer behind him. Sometimes Donna went with him, but on the days she did not she started to wander across to Furze Pen and join in whatever they happened to be doing. Georgie grew used to her company, she hung around like a lost puppy. Georgie would wave when she saw her coming, but Donna would give a shy little smile as if there was some secret between them. Strange, a little uncomfortable, but then Donna was odd. Donna was needy. Her moods were erratic, sometimes she could be irritatingly rude to Georgie’s visitors, at others she couldn’t do enough to please them.
Georgie told Suzie that if anyone round here was mentally questionable it must surely be Donna, not Lot or Silas, because of the faraway look in her eye and the way she never followed conversations. But Suzie said she was far from daft, she was clever and manipulative. She had wormed her way into Georgie’s affections using a simple sympathy ploy and Georgie had fallen for it. ‘She wants more from you than you think,’ Suzie warned. ‘She’s a taker. And she’s wound you round her little finger. Watch it, Georgie. That girl is very disturbed and I think you’re getting in too deep.’
Poor Donna. She would mentally slip away from all of them, following some unconnected thought of her own. She looked much fitter than the first time Georgie had met her. The warmth must agree with her. But her nose was always a sore red and she could never stop sniffing.
‘I am definitely going to leave him,’ Donna would creep into the kitchen and confide to Georgie in the middle of some chaotic meal, or after some childish accident which required bandages. These important consultations never came at a good time.
‘Well, Donna, that’s up to you, of course.’ Georgie would try to give her attention while she worked frantically round her.
‘It’s just that I am obsessed with Chad and I can’t seem to break free.’
‘You have to think of yourself, Donna,’ Georgie told her sensibly. ‘And your future. And the way Chad treats you doesn’t do much for your self-esteem, does it?’
‘I’ve never thought much of myself,’ Donna would moan, listlessly, floating around in her latest foamy arrangement of second-hand scarves. She smelled strongly of dope and Chad’s railway carriage. ‘I just wish I could be a more positive person, more determined, more like you.’
Like me? If the silly girl only knew. ‘Oh, Donna, you’re great as you are. You don’t need to change. Just like yourself more. It’s a pity there aren’t any self-assertion courses for women anywhere around here.’
‘But you can help me, can’t you?’ Once she started Donna just wouldn’t stop. She would follow Georgie to the loo and carry on behind the door. ‘I can’t do it without you, Georgie. I’ve never known anyone like you before. I’d give anything to be more like you, important, intelligent, cultured like.’
Cultured? My God, Mark would snigger at that one.
But Donna always returned obediently to the derelict cottage over the ford before Chad came home. ‘He’d be flaming if he knew how much time I spent over here. He knows how much I like you. You like me, too, don’t you, Georgie?’
The conversation was getting tricky. ‘Well, I’m fond of you, Donna, of course I am. You know that.’
‘We’re friends, you and me.’ She cast down her eyes, embarrassed. For a while they were both silent. Donna stared up under her lashes. ‘Chad’s jealous, see, and still smarting over that bleeding furniture deal. He hates to be seen off like that and he’s the sort of sod who never forgets.’
Georgie thought hard before she asked her, ‘But he wouldn’t do anything violent, for some kind of misguided revenge?’
‘What sort of violence?’
‘Oh, I don’t know. I just wondered if he might try to frighten me, perhaps by playing some tasteless joke.’
‘No. I don’t think he’d bleeding bother. But if there was ever a chance he’d screw you up he would. He’s like that, you see. And I know exactly what a sod he is, and yet I can’t break away from him.’
Sometimes Georgie saw Nancy Horsefield pottering madly in her garden, planting the latest sack of roses she’d sent for by mail order. Georgie would see her staring across into the orchard, and if she could she would go over and talk, because Nancy was mentally imprisoned on her own land. Horace informed her mournfully that his wife had not been out for years. But whenever Georgie put down her spade or removed her gardening gloves to go over it felt like a waste of time, because all Nancy would say, with her little head bobbing over the wall was, ‘Wait there, don’t move, I’m off to fetch you a nice cup of tea, or would you prefer a cold drink, and I’ve got some scones fresh out of the oven. Wait right there and I’ll bring them out. I’m a drudge to my kitchen, truly I am…’
What the loss of a child can do…
And Georgie would try to deter her. ‘Please don’t bother, Nancy. I’ve just had a drink and something to eat. I only came across for a chat, to see how you are on this lovely day.’
But it was hopeless. Excited and overwrought, Nancy had already gone in. So Georgie would have to wait as instructed, sometimes for longer than twenty minutes, before Nancy returned with a tray all neatly arranged with a cloth, laden with unwanted food. Horace would eye Nancy ruefully from under the shade of his Panama hat. The man worked stolidly behind his wife, his rolled-up sleeves exposing his massive forearms, huge as the hocks of a cow, finishing off the various jobs Nancy had started but would not finish. They were forever digging up old things and replacing them with new, or a hammock would arrive by special delivery and have to be assembled, or a set of pine tables and chairs, or a new garden umbrella, or a complicated lawn-watering system. At the end of the summer they took delivery of hundreds of pastel patio slabs and Georgie watched while poor Horace carted them off the road, over his little private bridge and round into his back garden. No wonder their house was perfect, they were constantly working on it, and clearly, to the Horsefields, money was no object. Happily Horace could afford to pander to Nancy’s manic whims.
And Nancy was harmless, wasn’t she? There was no malign side to her illness?
But gradually, so gradually it was almost unnoticeable, Georgie’s many visitors retreated to their tents and pulled up their zips at night. Campfires began to feature as more of an event and folk started gathering indoors in the evenings. They began lighting fires inside the cottage again, and Georgie had time to marvel at how much they had already accomplished. Furze Pen was almost unrecognizable. Fresh and clean, neat and tidy, even the spartan shower room began to look almost tempting. They’d fitted a new lavatory so that people felt they could sit on the seat and spend some time there without getting wet or being watched by the lurking hairy brown spiders that used to fill every nook and cranny.
The staunch, sensible fence at the end of the orchard kept out the Buckpits’ sheep. The stream had been cleared and now ran freely without slurping over onto the grass. The apple trees had been pruned and sprayed and the docks had been dug out of the grass. The brambles and nettles were all gone. The chickens had broken out of their run and now they roamed about freely. Between them they had managed to decorate the cottage both inside and out, the rotten woodwork had been replaced and most of the electrics had been rewired. The old plumbing had been replaced by new plastic piping, and when Georgie saw the rusty tangle of stuff that came out she wondered why Stephen had not been poisoned earlier.
‘There’ll just be you and me soon,’ said Donna in her soft, fierce voice.
One morning as Georgie walked out she smelled autumn. She also smelled a rank decay. It came on sharp little breezes, it came with the most minute turning of colour and a slight squelchiness of the ground. The domes of the horse chestnuts were crimson and amber and green, like the cheeks of ripened apples, and their nuts littered the grass beneath them. The tangled hedges were bright with the scarlet berries of dog rose and thorn and the blue-black fruit of bramble. As ever it brought a sadness with it, and a yearning, for Georgie, as it always did. With a cold shiver she realized that she had not settled into this small community at all, she had merely rubbed shoulders with it. She had watched it go round her for the last six months, from the safety of a familiar world which she had deliberately created. And what is more, it had watched her. It had never ceased its abominable watching. It was there, a silent presence over the laughter, over the music, over the sun. This valley was dark. This valley was accursed. Once the last of her visitors had left it would encroach upon her and there would be no way she could draw herself in tight enough for protection from it.