The Archers

by Catherine Miller

  Pamela was a folding deckchair; she took him, rather than the other way around. With none of Kitty’s pagan abandon, and always according to her schedule.

  The schedule! Not on this night but always on that night. And never, ever during the day, since that one exception during a honeymoon afternoon by Loch Tay. Not like this, except on his birthday when it was permitted.

  And one must never, ever mention that.

  All the while his Kitty, his Kitkat, opened out to him like an endless hall of mirrors. A blur of skin and hair and tiny white teeth like pearls.

  They never discussed the letter with one another. In fact, nobody had brought it up with Alec at all. He was at the centre of the cause célèbre, yet was never consulted. The village had fallen into line and formed a protective circle.

  At least, he assumed it was protective. He lived in fear that some busybody would scuttle up to Lower Loxley and whisper in Pamela’s ear. He and Kitty had made, he believed, a tacit decision to ride out the genteel furore. Most people didn’t believe the claim, and those who did consider him capable of infidelity didn’t know Kitty’s identity.

  They were more careful. It was only sensible. Front door quickly opened and closed. Curtains firmly drawn. The blandest of masks in public. Another man might feel it added spice, but Alec hated it.

  He hated that somebody knew. That somebody had seen through him, past the sheen of his exterior, into his real self.

  Because this Alec, the sweating animal, was the real one.

  He remembered where he was, what he was doing, and grinned up at Kitty.

  She was staring down at him, hands on his chest, the crazy hair undone and falling over them both. But she was serious, and almost unrecognizable.

  ‘What’s up, old g—’ Alec stopped himself and smacked her bottom. Only lightly. Just to see the wobble that so delighted him.

  ‘What’s the endgame here, Alec?’

  ‘We’re not playing chess.’

  Aren’t we? thought Kitty. She gave his penis a playful flick.

  It was like pressing a reliable button on a piece of equipment. He tossed her onto her back. Kitty was, to tell the truth, exhausted, but his mouth tasted clean but dirty with cigarettes and her own self mixed up in there somewhere.

  He tasted like life.

  * * *

  It was quiet in The Bull.

  Thick walls kept out the morning rain and the trundle of carts and the very occasional burp of an engine. The smell of last night’s log fire floated above the bass note of ale. Bob Little was content. All was as it should be.

  Inside and out, the pub was whitewashed. In the bar, thick beams sliced through the clotted cream of the walls, and outside black timbers criss-crossed the gable. It was a distinctive place, proud and necessary.

  The Littles were well thought of in Ambridge. He knew a lot about his customers – now, he could write a string of poison pens! – but there was no mud to be slung at his family.

  Tragedy, yes, they had that in abundance, but no shame. He polished the last of the glasses and tucked a bottle of stout into the ranks on the middle shelf. He whistled.

  When he heard dragging footsteps on the stairs he stopped.

  Jimmy wasn’t easy to be around these days. He loved his boy, Jimmy was a good boy, but he wasn’t really coping. To lose his nan, and then his sight, it was too much for Jimmy, who had never been what Bob would call tough.

  ‘There he is,’ said Bob mildly as Jimmy crept into the bar. He winced as his son knocked his knee on a table.

  ‘Damn,’ said Jimmy. He dropped heavily onto a stool.

  ‘Bit of bread? Bit of dripping?’ Bob wasn’t the housewife his wife had been, but he remembered to check now and then that Jimmy ate. ‘There’s a sausage. Somewhere.’ Bob panicked: was there a sausage?

  ‘She’s given me this.’

  Bob went over to take the large stiff studio photograph Jimmy held out. Who was this ‘she’, smiling stiffly in a formal portrait? Bob’s frown went unregistered by Jimmy. Bob had grown accustomed to his mother’s blindness. It had been an unquestioned factor of family life since he was a nipper. Jimmy’s sudden loss of sight was more like a curse, and sometimes Bob forgot his son couldn’t see.

  Inseparable: that was the only word that did for Jimmy and his nan. Jimmy had been her eyes, that was how the village put it. The boy had grown up leading her around, the two of them nattering. He’d never had to be scolded into helping her. Bob had been so proud.

  I still am, he reminded himself.

  Two days after the old lady’s funeral, Jimmy’s own personal darkness had fallen over him. He’d screamed the house down. He couldn’t see. Dr Seed had been emphatic. It was temporary, ‘hysterical’. It was a reaction to losing old Mrs Little.

  The doc had been proved right. The blindness lifted as suddenly as it struck. Jimmy could see his bed when he woke up one morning. He probably saw Bob’s tears. And then the nightmarish reversal last September.

  Jimmy’s blindness wasn’t temporary this time. Acute-angle glaucoma ran in families, Morgan Seed explained. It was incurable. For now. There was research, but…

  The ‘she’ in the photograph was Hilda, Jimmy’s newly minted fiancée. In black and white she was rather more glamorous than in the prosaic flesh; Bob recognized her only when prompted. The Land Army uniform suited her. To Jimmy, she’d scribbled just below her chin. ‘So, she joined up,’ said Bob.

  ‘She dumped me,’ said Jimmy. He stared at nothing. Well, at a tea towel hanging on the wall, but he wasn’t to know that. ‘She goes “nobody can expect me to throw away my life on a blind man”.’

  ‘Silly bitch,’ said Bob, and saw how Jimmy started. The boy’s instinct was to defend Hilda. Who had terrible buck teeth, but perhaps now wasn’t the time to mention that.

  ‘And then she gives me a photograph to remember her by.’ Jimmy’s lips worked as if trying to keep in the bile. ‘A photograph, Dad, and me blind.’

  He stumbled back upstairs.

  Bob was lost for a moment, then shouted after him, ‘You pull yourself together, Jimmy! Don’t let this set you back. You hear?’ He threw down the cloth he’d been using. ‘Bloody silly bloody girl,’ he said.

  * * *

  The tray was wide and Agnes was small and the stairs were narrow.

  She tutted as Whitey White came out of Blanche’s room and hurtled past her, making the china rattle.

  ‘Oi!’ she said.

  ‘Oi yourself,’ said Whitey White. He was big, corn-fed and cocky with it. Agnes remembered him bombing about on a bike when they were both at school; he still went everywhere by bike, delivering the mail.

  ‘Is it quite decent,’ she said, struggling into the room, ‘to be alone in your room with a married man?’

  Blanche laughed. ‘Roll up, roll up, hear all about the torrid carry-on between the postman and the lady with the withered legs! He brings me my magazines and my letters and my postcards. Whitey keeps me alive.’ Blanche slapped both palms on the sateen eiderdown. ‘He’s full of news and he’s always pleased to see me because of your lovely tea and the lovely cake you magic up despite all this deadly rationing.’

  Agnes sniffed. The crow was anyone’s for a cake-based compliment.

  ‘If it’s not a scandal for the vicar to sit with me, or Morgan, why is it improper for Whitey to lie across my bed?’ They felt sorry for her, Blanche knew. And she didn’t mind. It helped. She hoarded the pity and gloated over it. It tasted sweet in a time of shortages; if they ever stopped pitying her they might stop visiting and then she would be reduced to Jane and Agnes and nobody would wish that on her.

  Closing the door, Agnes dropped her voice to a whisper. The room grew even smaller as the delicious fog of gossip closed over their heads. ‘I found out what’s up with Jane.’

  ‘Sit. Tell.’

  ‘She’s received a proposal of marriage from Mr Kaye.’

  ‘Marriage?’ Blanche’s arch expression vanished. She tore details out of
her maid as if gutting a rabbit. ‘She said no, surely? She can’t marry him. She can’t marry anyone. Is it over? Quite over? You’re sure of that?’

  ‘Dead as a dodo.’ Agnes pursed her lips. ‘What is a dodo?’

  ‘Shut up and fetch her for me.’ Blanche raised her voice. ‘Jane! Jane!’

  Jane sprinted from the parlour below, and Agnes folded herself up even smaller, so she could stay and watch.

  ‘Blanche, dear, is anything the matter?’ Jane was startled when Blanche took her hand. ‘Oh!’ The grip was tight. It reminded her of Blanche’s return from Massachusetts, when Blanche lay on Mother’s chaise longue and grasped Jane’s fingers and wept and wept. ‘What is it, dearest, tell me, Blanche. You’re frightening me.’

  ‘I’d do anything for you, Jane.’

  Jane hated scenes. Blanche was always so self-assured; this Blanche was combustible. ‘I know that, but I need nothing from you, Blanche.’

  ‘Are you happy?’

  ‘Are you happy?’

  ‘So long as I have you, Jane. Promise me you’ll never leave me.’

  ‘Never, Blanche.’ Jane found herself crying too. There was so little visible emotion in Woodbine Cottage and now she was overwhelmed with it. She felt real; she felt alive; she felt trapped.

  ‘Never, ever?’

  Head bowed in the corner, Agnes fumed. Say you’re buggering off with Errol Flynn!

  Jane meant every word when she said, ‘I’m here for ever, dear.’

  She loved her sister, but that wasn’t why she stayed. She stayed because there was no exit sign from her responsibilities. Because the only suitor she had ever had didn’t care enough to take on those responsibilities. Jane was no fool; of course Denholm didn’t love her, not in the way she dreamed about, but she had stitched the fantasy together and it had sustained her. She would have to do without it from now on. She was needed in this stuffy house.

  ‘For ever and ever and ever.’

  MARCH

  It was too hot in the kitchen and too cold in the scullery.

  Doris trundled between both, blotting her face with a cloth, or rubbing her hands together.

  Christine, delighted with having her grandmother on tap, sat by Lisa as she rapped on the shell of a boiled egg with a teaspoon. ‘I brought you that egg,’ said Christine. ‘My favourite hen laid it. I think. I can tell by the shape. Each hen’s bottom makes a different egg and that one came from the hen with the bald patch. She’s lovely.’

  A plait was coming undone. Doris yanked it gently as she passed.

  ‘Doris, love, you shouldn’t let me sleep so late,’ said Lisa as she pulled a delighted face at the first spoonful of the bald hen’s offering. ‘It’s not right.’

  ‘You deserve it, Mum.’ Lying in was a cardinal sin for farming families. ‘But I’ll get you up tomorrow and you can give me a hand with the first breakfast.’

  Lisa wasn’t listening. She had laid her palm across Christine’s face and was staring at the child as if she’d never seen her before. ‘My Chrissie,’ she finally said, and her Chrissie smiled the very specific smile of an indulged granddaughter.

  ‘That’s me!’ she said. Chrissie could be pert; Lisa never told her off for this or any other felony.

  ‘How do, missus,’ nodded Jez, as he came in without knocking. Eugene followed, folded paperback tucked into his jacket pocket. Their noses were red.

  Jez sat without being asked; Jez seemed to own everything, everywhere, despite his shabby trousers.

  Doris smiled Eugene into his chair at the table. Time for second breakfast. The men were already worn out. It takes a while for the farm to harden you up, make you its own. They would get used to it; Doris barely even noticed her exhaustion some days until her legs sent a firm message to her brain: Sit! Now! Before you topple! They were all farm-tired, a relentless ache that never quite lets go. Like every other homestead in Borsetshire, the Brookfield men worked round the clock. Hedging and ditching and mucking out. Dan had gone out to tackle a frozen drinking trough that morning straight from his bed, not knowing whether he was coming or going.‘I’ve set aside a nice bit of ham for you, Eugene,’ she said.

  ‘Okay.’

  Eugene’s attempts to mimic Jez’s coarseness amused Doris. She knew he was too gently brought up to follow through, and allowed herself a smile when he was impelled to add, ‘Thank you’. He loved his ham, that one; Doris always knew what ‘her’ people liked to eat. She had no say in the war that bubbled in the distance like a chicken carcass boiling for stock, but she could make sure everyone at Brookfield was fed.

  ‘How’s me favourite girl?’ Jez addressed not Chrissie, but Lisa. ‘Looking lovely, as ever.’ He lifted his voice. As if talking to a child, or a cat.

  ‘Oh, you.’ Lisa simpered.

  Christine, who was not cut out to simper, said, ‘Why do you talk to Grandma like she’s a baby?’

  ‘We all end up as babies, if we live long enough.’ Jez looked at Doris as he spoke. ‘Don’t we, Doris?’

  She didn’t answer. Jez constantly sidled over Doris’s boundaries, but never in a way she could point to or complain about. She took down plates. She sliced bread. She watched the pan.

  Christine was fascinated by her mother’s new men. ‘What’s wrong with your foot?’ She had been saving this question ever since she clapped eyes on Eugene.

  ‘That’s rude, Chrissie!’ Doris hid her mortification in the steam from the pan.

  ‘She’s been dying to ask that,’ said Jez. ‘S’only natural.’

  ‘It’s called a club foot,’ said Eugene. He was condescending to the child but he was condescending to them all. With the exception of Jez. ‘Or talipes equinovarus. My foot rotates inwards at the ankle.’

  ‘Did you wear calipers?’ asked Jez, swiping a doorstep of bread as Doris put the plates down.

  ‘It’s called a foot brace,’ said Eugene. For one given to oration, that was all he said.

  His economy was noted over by the frying pan. Doris had seen the same reticence in her father and uncles when asked about the Great War. The one that had been meant to end all wars. It was so recent; men who fought back then were being called up again. Eugene, for all his milksop ways and his lily hands and his horror when called upon to shovel manure, had fought a war of his own.

  Doris supposed that they all did, before filing that away as not useful.

  He’s so posh, thought Doris, wondering at Eugene sharing the shack with Jez. Lots of long words in that young head. Only the other day she’d heard him describe his hangover as a ‘general malaise’.

  Christine wasn’t satisfied. ‘Will your foot get better? Or drop off?’

  Jez laughed.

  Eugene put his head down.

  ‘Chrissie!’ Doris was sharp.

  ‘I didn’t mean anything!’ Chrissie fled, ashamed.

  ‘Sorry,’ mumbled Eugene.

  ‘Don’t apologize. She’s precocious, that one.’

  Doris had heard rumours of a land girl. We could pal up, she thought longingly, as she dished out plain food on plain plates.

  Jez stood. Noisily; it always involved the scrape of a chair. Wiping his mouth with his forearm he said, ‘Let’s eat this on the hoof.’

  Even though Eugene clearly wanted to sit for longer by the range, he trooped out after him. Bundling up hot ham and cold tongue and a wedge of cheese in a cloth, Doris felt the insult of it.

  Her mother went for ‘a little lie-down’. Christine sulked in a distant corner of the house. Only Mother Cat kept Doris company as she cut up an old pair of trousers into neat rectangles. She made them all the same size; she had no idea why. They would come in useful.

  Doris had named the cat. Or rather, the beast had named itself, swaggering in with a teeming tummy and giving birth to her kittens under the table one wet night. ‘Is oo my best girl? You is.’

  Doris placed the grey flannel rectangles in a pile, tweaking them until they were neat. Orderly. She trimmed edges to make them all the sam
e. Turned the rectangles and snipped, trying to get them perfect.

  If they were all the right size, then… what? Doris had a superstitious feeling that she was protecting Brookfield from some calamity. Brookfield was no more nor less vulnerable than any other house. They must trust in God, Doris’s old friend. The old friend who had blighted her mother’s mind, and shaken the world like a snow globe.

  All those prayers – where did they go? Were they boxed up? Because they weren’t being answered.

  ‘Only us!’ The knock was loud but perfunctory.

  Doris jumped to her feet, as if the police were at the door, come to arrest her for blasphemy. It was only Dottie, who let herself in, teeth chattering, taking off her scarf and loosening her coat down over her arms. Mrs Endicott was at her heels, smiling, coughing. Sheepish behind them, Jane seemed keen to point out they had met in the lane, she hadn’t wanted to disturb, they could go, this was impertinent.

  ‘No, no, sit, ladies, you sit.’

  ‘I brought this.’ Dottie made herself comfortable. The baby had altered her outline, adding a curve beneath her cardigan. Her chin, never adamant, was quite gone. ‘For your old mum.’ She flourished a lap blanket of knitted squares as if it was a toreador’s cape. ‘Me and Mrs E made it from odd bits.’

  ‘When my arthritis allowed.’ Mrs E, formal in hat, bag, nice shoes, looked down at her hands. ‘If I’m spared another summer I’ll make you one for Christmas, Doris.’

  ‘It’s beautiful.’ Doris felt the weight of the blanket. It wasn’t beautiful. It was, however, soft and useful, and represented hours of feminine work. ‘Mum’ll love it.’

  ‘Wheel her out then.’ Dottie was frank; she’d come to gawp. ‘A new face here is like a night at the flicks. I’ve heard your ma’s a real lady, with loads of the old chat.’

  ‘Well, her legs,’ began Doris. She mimed something – even she didn’t know what – with her hands. ‘Best give her some peace.’ Her visitors didn’t move. ‘I’ll tell her you called,’ she said.