The Archers

by Catherine Miller

  ‘In, in,’ said Connie by way of hello. ‘Sit, if you’re staying.’

  Knitting needles were busy in her hands. She wasn’t knitting socks for our brave boys, Doris knew; Connie was making a flam, a net for Stan to fling over a rabbit hole. The terrified rabbit, flushed out by Stan’s evil ferrets, would rush out into it, and meet the tiny club which fitted so well into Stan’s hand.

  Two and six a rabbit, and thruppence for a skin.

  ‘Tea?’ Connie did have some teeth, but Doris couldn’t make them out in the gloom.

  It would be preferable to murder somebody than refuse tea in their kitchen. Doris nodded. She took out a Manila folder from her bag, which was large enough to house such an item and much more besides. There was string in there, and a comb, and a very old wrapped humbug. She tried not to look at the cups Connie took down from a shelf and wiped on her greasy skirt.

  ‘Carry on,’ said Connie.

  Doris opened her mouth, but before she could ask Connie the first question on her list – Are the young people in your care free from lice? – a voice came from the corner.

  Connie had not meant that Doris should carry on: a male voice, fluid and naïve, but with sympathy for the prose he carefully read out, carried on instead. Doris recognized Dickens. Her favourite of his, David Copperfield. ‘Is that you, Cliff?’

  It was. It was the changeling Horrobin, the shy one, whose mild eyes and introverted manner set him apart from his feral folks. Doris squinted and made him out. ‘God bless your eyesight, Cliff. Don’t know how you can read in that light.’

  ‘There you go.’ Connie’s tea looked surprisingly good. Strong enough to trot a mouse on. Connie looked far older than her thirty-seven years. Being a baby factory and a punchbag will do that to a woman. ‘Them boys you give me is no trouble. I just feeds ’em and turf ’em out of a morning. Not a sneeze nor a cough out of either of ’em.’ She looked over at the corner. ‘My Cliffy loves them, don’t you?’

  The shadow nodded. ‘That Billy’s a card,’ he said.

  ‘The money’s handy and all. Times is hard.’

  ‘For all of us,’ said Doris. She felt Connie bridle; bottom of the Ambridge pile, Connie didn’t want competition. ‘And Stan?’ So many questions in the two words.

  ‘Drinking less,’ lied Connie.

  ‘Does he let you keep the evacuee money?’

  ‘Tell you what, why don’t I come to your house and ask you questions about you and your old man, eh?’

  Point taken, Doris raised her hands in surrender. ‘I only want to help.’

  ‘You Archers love helpin’.’ Connie stood with her arms crossed and her legs apart, like a scrawny pirate. ‘I don’t need no help.’

  Doris lacked the bravery or the stupidity to ask if the boys had lice. She saw Connie scratch her head – a really determined scratch, like the ones Glen the sheepdog enjoyed. She decided to choose her battles, to write ‘satisfactory’ on her paperwork, or even ‘good’ as poor Connie needed a boost, and then stood up. She gulped down the tea and made noises about leaving.

  ‘Say a proper goodbye, Cliff.’ Connie encouraged the ‘good’ Horrobin out of the darkness. ‘You’ll be setting off tomorrow, and it might be a while before Doris claps eyes on you again.’

  Dipping his head, the boy emerged, reluctant. He held out his hand stiffly, not making eye contact.

  Doris didn’t take his hand immediately. The khaki took her by surprise. Cuffed trousers. Heavy boots. Pockets and flaps and a stiff collar. ‘Congratulations,’ she said. It came out feebly, hampered by the bad taste in her mouth. Battledress was the most patriotic outfit Cliff could wear, but to Doris it seemed more like a shroud. ‘Where are you off to? My Jack’s in Chatham now, bored stiff and hating it.’

  ‘I’m off to France. With the BEF. Labour division.’

  British Expeditionary Force: Doris knew that meant no training. Cliff would be put on a boat and decanted in France in no time. At his feet, his dog Stacey, a distant mongrel relative of Brookfield’s Glen, beat a tattoo with her feathery tail. She stared, rapt, at her master. Dogs were, Doris knew, reliable judges of character. ‘Your mother’ll miss you.’

  The empathy undid something in Connie. ‘Who’ll read me David Copperfield when he’s gone?’ It was desperate, nothing like the light remark it might have been.

  ‘And all the juicy murders out of the Sunday paper, Mum. Don’t forget them.’

  ‘Not one week into his apprenticeship and called up.’ Connie approved Doris’s tut. ‘How’d you like that? They think the world of him at Warnes and Killick. That printing place over Felpersham. What was it you were going to be, Cliffy?’

  ‘Die stamper, Mum. And I still will be. Don’t you worry.’

  Stacey put her head on her paws.

  * * *

  The mahogany desk at the window – nineteenth-century, leather-topped – was Pamela’s.

  Or, she used it; somebody had passed the desk down to Alec; somebody else had passed it down to that passer-on. In many ways Alex considered himself the curator of their furniture, as if it was all on loan until he passed it down to Gerald.

  Pamela preferred to feel she owned it. She had brought many antiques to the house, but none of them were legacies. They were bought and paid for with her father’s money; his inheritance from his parents had been nothing but a ferocious desire to live lives nothing like theirs.

  Pamela smoked as if paid by the cigarette. She paused now, between a thank-you and another letter to the Borchester Echo, this one about a bus route that was failing her estate workers, and she sparked a match on a mother-of-pearl matchbox cover.

  The scene beyond the window had, with pleasing predictability, updated its detail. Beyond the terrace and the lawn, the sheep were back out, fluffy polka dots on a green background.

  She thought, as she seemed to do all the bloody time these days, about her husband. Wondered if he was with his mistress. Her imagination had become pornographic. Such images were unwelcome, but when Pamela replaced them with more innocent ones – Alec and Kitty talking, Alec and Kitty handing each other a glass of something – they were infinitely more offensive.

  The cigarette glowed angry red as she pulled on it, her cheeks turning cadaverous. For the sake of understanding the wave which had overturned her marriage, she attempted to look at Alec through the girl’s eyes, as a prospective lover. Pamela saw only a husband, and a shop-soiled one at that. What does Kitty see in him? Yes, he was handsome, but so was Pamela’s horse.

  Bit of a stick insect out of his clothes. Those stiff shoulders, as if he’d left the coat hanger in his jacket. And the hair that wouldn’t lie flat, and an awful way of sneezing that could be heard all over the house. He was just another man; the world was stuffed full of men, many of them trying to kill each other for no good reason Pamela could see.

  Possibly Alec’s only distinguishing trait was the fact that he was hers. She would never whitewash their history; she was neither sentimental nor a liar. But they had built something important together.

  ‘Gerald!’ The boy was passing the door. He either skulked or sped, and this was a skulk. ‘Come here, do, darling, come on.’ Beneath the chair Mavis stirred. Very little inspired the Pekinese to activity but her profound rivalry with Gerald forced a yip out of her. ‘Quiet, Mavis. Bad girl. Gerald, darling, it’s so sunny out, why not—’

  ‘I don’t care about the sun, Mother.’

  ‘All right, well, why not invite a chum over?’

  ‘Got no friends round here.’ Gerald was hunched and beefy, a hormonal stew of resentment. Next to his leaf-slender mother he looked like a performing bear.

  ‘Somebody from school, then. I could call up their parents. It’d be fun, you could sleep up in the attic, or make a camp.’

  ‘School?’ Gerald recoiled as if from a cobra. ‘School chucked me out.’

  ‘They did not, darling. It’s just a suspension. Daddy’s sorting it out. You really must learn not to solve problems with thes
e.’ She held up her fists, laughing.

  Gerald didn’t laugh. ‘Are you stupid, Mother?’

  Even an expert like Pamela sometimes struggled with her composure. ‘Now, darling, that is not—’

  ‘You are stupid. You’re blind. As blind as Jimmy Little.’

  ‘Let’s not speak so glibly of poor Bob’s son. I see you well enough, Gerald Pargetter.’ She risked touching him; it didn’t go well, he shook her hand off his arm. ‘I see a fine young man not fulfilling his potential.’

  Gerald toed Mavis, who snapped at his shoe. He slunk out.

  Pamela shook her head and her hair didn’t move.

  In the porcelain ashtray her cigarette had burned down to a fragile ash worm. She lit another.

  * * *

  Brookfield’s back door – to all intents and purposes the front door – always made the same noise and it always reminded Dan that he really must get an oil can to its hinges. ‘Love?’ he called, scraping his feet on the mat.

  ‘She’s out.’ Lisa wore the pinny of power. She was in charge of the kitchen with all that this implied. In recent years she had shrunk somewhat, and she wore her iron-coloured hair in a severe bob that was at once geriatric and child-like. A clip held it back from her face. Lisa wasn’t given to vanity.

  ‘Where’s she gone?’ Dan was wary. He had approached a sick ewe with this expression just an hour earlier. But his mother-in-law seemed sharp. Seemed herself.

  ‘Off to the hospital in Borchester. That poor Eugene had a fall. Oh, it was awful, Dan. Fell awkward, on his bad foot, and hurt his wrist. I said to them, off you go, I’ll sort Dan’s lunch, don’t you worry. She doesn’t half look after you, my Doris. You know what they say about you in the family. Doris and Dan, never a cross word. Two peas in a pod, they say.’

  ‘They’re right.’ Dan was proud of his marriage. In a quiet way. He didn’t go around bragging, but ye gods, he was grateful for it when he saw how other couples tore chunks out of each other. ‘You raised a good ’un there, Lisa.’

  ‘My Bill, God rest his soul, used to say to me, you’re good for two things, Lisa, cooking and babies. He wasn’t wrong.’ Earlier, Lisa had roamed the house looking for Bill, weeping when she couldn’t find him. ‘Now, here we go.’ She took up a knife. ‘I know what my son-in-law likes. A nice ham sandwich, thick bread, lashings of piccalilli. Am I right?’

  ‘Spot on!’ Dan was reassured. His were broad shoulders, and he took responsibility for the farm and his family and, these days, his community. But being in charge of Lisa felt shamefully heavy. She was unpredictable; Dan liked to keep things in order. Farming had taught him that; you let things slide at your peril. A loose horseshoe this week would be a lame animal the next time you looked. With Lisa there was no plan, no forecast, just a future of being eternally on your toes. Your tired toes.

  He would bring it up again with Doris. How they needed to let people know about Lisa’s problems. To ask for help.

  He washed his hands in the cold, cold water, dried them on a chequered towel and sat at the table. He shoved Mother Cat until she had no option but to jump down. ‘I’ve been over to Robin Farm.’ He watched Lisa slice the loaf Doris had taken out of the oven that morning. Watched her spread two slices with pale butter. ‘Making sure the new tenants are on top of things.’

  ‘There you go.’ Lisa slapped down his lunch.

  No plate. Two slices of buttered bread, one with a bite taken out of it.

  ‘Where’s my ham?’

  She laughed, and he laughed with relief and because, God knows, it was funny. But he didn’t like the way she waved the big sharp knife around as she took out the ham from the coolest corner of the pantry.

  * * *

  Kitty pulled on her cardigan and went to the gate.

  Shoulders up, head down, a brisk scuttle in her thin-soled shoes.

  She stared down the road as if sheer need might make Alec appear. The hedgerow on either side, fattening up now that it was spring, showed her only a narrow empty funnel.

  It was dicey to step out so often, to allow her face to show so clearly how she suffered, when someone among them was taking notes.

  Again, she recited Alec’s last words to her, whispered against her cheek just before he delivered himself unto the jaws of Easter Sunday lunch with the vicar. She’d asked when she would see him again, and his reply had become a prayer after a week of no contact. Drilled into her like the Hail Mary.

  I’ll be there for our Saturday, if not before.

  He’d never called it that before. ‘Our Saturday,’ she murmured, like her grandmother mumbling at Mass. If she’d had rosary beads she’d have turned them over in her fingers. ‘If not before.’

  There had been no ‘before’. Usually, Kitty and Alec contrived to bump into each other most days, but all week Alec had been absent from The Green, the shop, the pub. ‘Our Saturday,’ she said again, loving the possessive, shared nature of the phrase. Saturday visits from Alec had become constant; a handhold in her craggy week. An hour or two of togetherness, of passion, of seeing herself in his eyes, and then sweetness. Oh, that sweetness, all of it bottled up inside Alec until she popped his cork and out it gushed, pure and nutritious.

  She relied on it to keep her going. ‘Our Saturday.’

  ‘Mammy!’

  Kitty trotted back to the cottage, arms tightly wound around herself. A straitjacket she recalled her mother wearing often. ‘Here I am, musha!’ She pushed at Caroline’s cowlick and bamboozled her back to bed with tickles. ‘Nighty night, hen.’ She was everything to Caroline, and the responsibility pleased her. Widowhood hadn’t changed anything; Noel was wont to ignore his daughter for days, only to cry over her with brandy breath, prattling that he loved her and she was his angel until the poor little thing burst into hot tears and had to be prised away from the man-baby.

  That’s how Kitty thought of Noel. A baby, escaped somehow from his pram, and wearing a suit. Fooling the others, but never fooling his carer, his victim. She had learned to expect less and less from Noel, until she expected nothing.

  And that’s what he gave me. In spades. One day she would get around to feeling sorry for Noel, for the waste he represented, the ruin of his own hopes, but before Kitty could indulge in such generosity she had to scale the slagheap of want he had left in his wake.

  Creditors had tipped their hat at Kitty the moment the last mourner left on the day of Noel’s funeral. He’d spent money he didn’t have on schemes that made no sense. A plot of land in Wales. Half-share in a racehorse that may or may not exist. Noel had had the fun of daydreaming about these get-rich-quick pipe dreams, but it was Kitty who was handed the bill.

  There was no help to be had from the Dibden-Rawleses. They had made that clear, in their glacially polite manner. So she begged for terms from the debt collectors and lived on a strictly managed schema which sometimes allowed some air in, but mostly didn’t.

  Poverty was nothing new; Kitty had grown up with little. It was facing it alone that demoralized her. Keeping up appearances was exhausting, and surely pointless, but pride ran through her like the stripe in a stick of rock.

  Her country life, so charmingly soft-edged and prettified by leaves and ferns and blossom, was more of a cage when closely examined. Certainty? It was nowhere to be found. Not even on Saturdays.

  Unable to settle, Kitty paced Noon Cottage. This discomfort could only be cured by the arrival of Alec, smelling of the cool outside air, Hero at his side, maybe in that awful cap she hated. A book didn’t help. A glass of gin made it worse. She went to the step again, and begged the night to hand him over.

  ‘Our Saturday,’ she whispered.

  The empty week had brought more gossip about the letters. Kitty had presented a serene mask while Dottie read out the second one; the woman had actually written down the wording and stashed it in her purse.

  The first letter – ‘the Pargetter letter’, Dottie called it; she was Ambridge’s scholar on the topic, keeper of the archive – se
emed designed to force Alec’s hand. A perfect tool to nudge him into confessing to Pamela. Would that be good for Kitty? Kitty couldn’t tell; perhaps he’d already told Pamela and that was why he was missing. Or, what did they call it in the army? AWOL. Absent without leave.

  Because something was very wrong. This was their Saturday, and she was alone and Noon Cottage was shrinking by the second.

  Out to the gate again, to the corner and back.

  Kitty let out little sighs that helped for a fraction of a second. The dismal vegetable patch, a needy plot beneath the square-paned window, was flat and wretched in the darkness. No great broad leaves or rude-coloured berries. She had no green thumb, and besides she resented the patch. It was a fig leaf placed over her Irishness and her neutrality, a way of semaphoring to the village that she was in step, and doing her bit.

  It was hard to take war regulations seriously when Kitty’s personal battle for survival was so intense. She was on a secret mission. She was in search of a harbour.

  And my boat is full of leaks. There was no way of knowing what Alec was in search of when he came to Kitty. He had no need of a harbour. Yet she wanted to save him; it was an urge as strong as her urge to rush to Caroline when she fell over.

  He might be drifting. Just passing through. Should I have refused to have sex with him? The great no-no of her religion, and the great turbine of life. She could have withheld, the feminine gambit.

  She hadn’t wanted to withhold; she was tired of scrimping and saving and eking out. She had spent herself lavishly on Alec. No questioning, no strategy. Everything was cleansed by love, she had decided, in the face of all she’d been taught.

  That she loved Alec was a fact of Kitty’s life. He didn’t even have to do much to earn it. Whether he knew about her love wasn’t clear; he was, even when naked, or perhaps especially when naked, hard to read on that subject. She had chosen an opaque man to spend her love on.