Still fingering the invitation, Jane said, ‘It’s all so out of the blue.’
‘Not to me.’ Blanche let that ripple travel round the room.
‘Don’t fib, Blanche dear.’ Jane found she had ripped the invitation. It was so hard not to wonder how the invitations to her own wedding might have looked. This non-event was real and solid in Jane’s mind; she planned it, rethought it, sat and considered the merits of trimming her good blue suit with white fur or splurging all her vouchers on a new frock. Denholm would have insisted on thick, heavy card for the invitation, this she knew. Nothing but the best, he would have said. In the loneliness of her narrow room beneath the eaves, Denholm had been reinstated to dashing hero status. It had been simple, an old habit resurrected. She had long since designed their monogram, a J and a D entwined, crowned by rosebuds. Or foxgloves. No, rosebuds.
‘I’m not fibbing,’ said Blanche. ‘I may rarely leave this room but I know more about the ways of the world than most people.’
Agnes made a noise that could have been a sneeze, but was more probably derision.
‘Whatcha mean, Blanche?’ said Dottie. She was milking and sugaring and doling out china cups.
‘Those Sunday drives. Nance doesn’t give up her day of rest for me. I brought Morgan and Nance together.’
‘A regular cupid,’ said Agnes as she left the room.
‘That’s right, Agnes!’ Mrs Endicott was not at home to nuance; she thought everyone as straightforward as herself. ‘What a lovely way to put it.’
‘She’s a treasure,’ said Jane, as the door closed behind Agnes. ‘What we’d do without her I don’t know, the dear plain little thing.’
Agnes, whose ears had evolved to hear through doors, stuck out her tongue. She assumed Jane had deftly forgotten how she’d shrieked at her treasure that morning because the milk had turned. None of the ladies around the bed would recognize that Jane Gilpin.
‘I can’t help fretting,’ said Mrs Endicott, ‘that our poison-pen writer will find some way to spoil the wedding.’
‘Ooh, what a thought.’ Dottie moved to sit on the side of the bed, with a wince that came naturally to her in her second trimester. ‘D’you mind me perching, Blanche, only you know how it is.’ She pointed to the dune asserting itself through her dress.
‘I don’t know how it is, actually. That boon was stolen by my disease, but do go ahead and make yourself comfortable, Dottie.’
‘Ta. It’s like this letter writer has cameras in all our houses, innit? Watching. Listening to our private thoughts. Especially the bad ones.’
‘Those are the only sort I have,’ said Blanche. ‘Don’t let him get to you. Or her. Or it. Dear old Whitey and I certainly don’t. We say fie to the poison pen!’
Jane sank over her teacup. She had hoped to keep this secret. She disagreed vehemently with the restoration of the postman, and earlier that day had tried to make her point to Blanche, but her sister was a cliff face of indifference. Jane had stomped downstairs full of bottled anger, only to find the milk had gone off. She would buy Agnes something nice to make up for the regrettable scene that followed. A little something from Frank Brown’s limited doodah selection.
‘I’m safe from the letter writer, now,’ said Blanche. ‘I’ve been done, as it were.’
More feet on the stairs. A weak knock, and Jimmy Little came in, to a cloud of coos and some clucking. The women allowed him to grope his way to the bed, knowing better than to try and help.
Dottie mimed smacking his bottom as he passed.
Mrs Endicott let out a loud Tsk! and there was synchronized shaking of heads. Jimmy’s tragedy, an echo of his grandmother’s, was a fundamental chapter of Ambridge folklore.
‘My dad sent me to say,’ said Jimmy, his cap in his hand, ‘about the wedding, you’re not to worry, Miss Blanche, he’ll come next door and personally carry you downstairs and get you to the church and the do afterwards.’
‘Bob’s a diamond,’ said Dottie.
‘Oh, and Dr Seed sent this for you.’ Jimmy took an orange out of his pocket.
It shone, that orange. It emitted light. Possibly it had its own soundtrack; certainly nobody present would have been surprised to hear a harp.
‘An orange,’ said Jane, in a strange voice. She hadn’t seen one since last year.
‘It’s full of, um, vitamin C, or vitamin something,’ said Jimmy. ‘The doctor told me to tell you it’s good for people who’ve got what you’ve got.’
‘Polio,’ said Blanche. ‘Poliomyelitis.’ Her long nails tore into the skin. Juice spritzed the eiderdown.
Her guests leaned in. Lust lay heavy in the air. They watched as she slowly separated each segment and dropped it between tiny teeth that curved inwards, like a shark’s.
Jane knew they were waiting for Blanche to offer them some; she knew better than to wait. She daydreamed instead; if she did it intensely enough it was almost as if her daydream was real.
She imagined herself in a new costume; hang the imaginary expense. A two-piece. Soft bouclé. Her bust was a little larger in this daydream. Denholm wore a well-cut suit in pearly grey. He was a little less portly in this daydream. He kissed her. She took off her blouse. Denholm was struck dumb by her beauty. They came together, their bodies, well, wriggling.
It always grew vague at this point.
‘Yum,’ said Blanche, and tossed the peel. Her lips were sticky.
* * *
If her plan worked, Kitty told herself, he’d come that night. But if night tipped over into tomorrow, then that was that. She had overplayed her hand by writing to Alec and she would never see him again. A superstitious creature, this all made perfect sense to her.
Just as she had once chosen to believe in the baby Jesus, she chose to believe that her letter would work its magic. She believed it as she tucked in Caroline, and put the kitchen to rights, and chivvied the dejected cushions on the couch. She believed, and that would get her through the evening; if it didn’t work, well, she put off the mourning until tomorrow.
Tomorrow could take care of itself.
She missed roofs. When she looked out of her window back home – and Dublin was home, however long she ended up staying in England – Kitty saw the city unfold in grey slates. So many people. So much brute personality. ‘Here, it’s just you and me and a whole load of nature,’ she whispered to Bella, who was curving her tail around the gatepost like a question mark.
Kitty didn’t give up. Not then. Not yet. She had scheduled when to give up and she would stick to her timetable. At midnight she would cry and fantasize about drowning herself. For now, she’d sew.
All of Caroline’s knickers needed to be patched, with big rectangles of contrasting stuff across the back. She’d saved scraps – scraps of scraps; life was all scraps – and she was hunting out a needle and thread, about to go upstairs in search of them, when she heard something. A disturbance in the quiet outside. Slight, not a shout. Something only neurotic ears would hear.
It had worked.
Alec materialized in her hallway. Hero sat, as instructed, on the step. Alec held out her note. ‘You do like to test a fellow,’ he said.
She stepped towards him. Took it from him. His hand was so big. She knew how his fingertips felt on her skin. ‘I had confidence you’d be up to the task.’ She turned over the piece of paper and read aloud what she’d written on the back. ‘Love is a possible strength…’
Kitty backed away, up one step of the stairs. Hands behind her back. Her head tilted in a way she knew worked on him. ‘Can you finish the quote?’
From the door he said, ‘In an actual weakness.’
‘You’re a good student.’ She took another step, backwards, her feet sure as a goat’s. ‘Hardy knows we’re all equal when it comes to love,’ she said. Another step back. Another. ‘All equally afraid.’ She was above him now, forcing him to throw back his head, as if worshipping.
Alec didn’t move. He preserved the space between them. To Kitty, it see
med to glitter.
‘Are we in love, Alec?’
‘I can’t afford love.’ His face was in shadow. ‘I have responsibilities instead.’
It was time to be bold; this is easier when you have nothing to lose. ‘Yes, you do have responsibilities, and I’m one of them now.’
Alec’s face was still a blank in the shadow. He had bucked against this, tried to withstand the pull of her, but he had had to come, despite Pamela’s declaration that she knew all about Kitty. Or because of it? He wondered if he was that much of a swine.
Kitty turned. She walked slowly up the remaining stairs. She was still alone as she pushed at the bedroom door.
Then he ran. Two steps at a time.
‘D’you remember?’ Kitty, sinking onto the bed, shrugging her shoulders out of her cardigan, pointed at the wardrobe. A big ugly old thing, some Dibden-Rawles aunt had given it to them; she’d been a big ugly old thing, too. ‘That game of Sardines?’
He remembered, of course.
A raucous party – the only sort Noel knew how to throw – in this very house. Some idiot suggested Sardines. Some idiot always did.
Never one of life’s game players, Alec feigned enthusiasm and hid in the wardrobe, wondering if Pamela would be amenable to going home before things got out of hand around the punch bowl. The parties they threw at Lower Loxley were discreetly luxe affairs, with ice-cold cocktails and impeccable frocks; Alec was alarmed by the high jinks at Noel’s.
Guests stormed up and down the stairs, and across the landing. There were shrieks and bumps until the wardrobe door burst open and Kitty jumped in beside him.
A fur coat was between them. There was no greeting. He had an urge to grab her pale hand and pull her to him against the coat’s slithery pelt. Had Alec ever noticed before that he noticed her? As the whites of her eyes flared in the darkness, he confessed all to himself. Neither knew who kissed the other; they both knew it was the first time they had kissed somebody other than their spouse.
Her little tongue crept into his mouth.
The door had opened again.
Morgan had no idea what he’d interrupted, what he’d averted. Luckily he was both drunk and unsuspecting. ‘Room for a little ’un!’ he cried, and pushed aside the fur.
The coat was sold long ago, for less than it was worth. It had translated into shoes for Caroline and new pipes in the toilet and whitewash for the cottage’s mouldy back wall.
Their embrace had not been repeated until after Noel’s death.
Now, as he wavered on the threshold of the bedroom, and the threshold of something else altogether, Alec said, ‘Stop.’ Then, more gently, ‘Stop, darling, please.’
Kitty dropped her fingers from the second pearl button on her blouse. ‘Something’s happened. You’re different. You disappeared. What? What happened?’
‘Nothing.’
‘But you stayed gone and now you’re peculiar with me.’
‘I can’t always get away.’ Alec was brusque. ‘It’s not easy. This isn’t easy.’
‘I know, darling. I hate being your problem. I wish I could live in your pocket, all snug. And you’d reach in and feel me there and know I’m for you. It is easy, if you break it down. I just want you to be my man and I want to be your woman. Because what are we doing here if we don’t both want that?’
Now that she could see Alec’s face she didn’t much like it. It was unhappy. Tortured. Maybe the wind had changed and the Old Wives were right; he was stuck like that. ‘Let me hold you, darling.’
Alec let her dash to him and press herself against him. He didn’t speak. Or he couldn’t. That would mean admitting he didn’t know what to do.
The Alecs of this world always know what to do.
Her head on his chest, the shiny chestnut mess of it, touched him. He couldn’t tell her any of the various truths that boiled in his head. He could no more tell her that Pamela knew about them than he could tell her that Gerald had seen them together. He was hammered into the sloping floorboards with indecision and lust and another fizzing element that the fool of a man didn’t recognize. ‘Kitty,’ he said, ‘must we name this?’
‘Yes.’ Kitty could feel his heart jitterbug. She pulled away and glared up at him. ‘Otherwise I’m just a hobby. You’re passing time with me like I’m a Bridge game, or some poor game bird you’re taking a potshot at.’
‘Do you know what I really want to do right now?’
Sullen, Kitty said, ‘I can bloody guess.’ Her hand went back to the button.
Alec stopped her fingers. ‘I want to watch you cook bacon and eggs and then I want to eat them with you.’
She laughed. She made the decision to laugh. She elected to let him pull her out of her funk. Even though all he had really done was distract her. ‘We can do that. Except I don’t have any bacon. And I don’t have any eggs.’
* * *
Meanwhile, if you trudged away from Noon Cottage, crossed a bosomy dip and went through Brookfield’s gate, you would find Christine standing stoic on the kitchen table as her mother, pins in her mouth, worked her way round the hem of her dress.
It was Doris’s wedding dress, dyed a muted blue, and about to be taken in and taken up to ballerina length so it could live a second life as a bridesmaid’s dress. After that was done, Doris would take in and take up the wedding dress worn by Nance’s mother.
All in all, Doris would have pins in her mouth for some time to come.
They didn’t stop her talking. ‘According to Dottie,’ she told Dan, ‘Blanche never offered one of them so much as half a segment of the orange, and she licked the juice off her fingers right in front of them. She can be a right Queen Bee, can Blanche.’
In the corner of the kitchen her mother dozed on the rocking chair. Phil was upstairs, doing boy things; they kept him very busy and involved apple cores, string, a rusting penknife. Glen was by the range. Mother Cat was by Glen. The livestock were in their niches. Doris surveyed the dress’s hem.
‘Well, blast it to hell,’ she said gently, and prepared to creep round again, rectifying the asymmetry.
From the skirting boards, the mice mocked her. They ran and scratched, they thrived; Doris hadn’t time to wet corks and sprinkle them with pepper and ram them into the holes they nibbled in the farmhouse’s mealy wooden structure. It was her mother’s tip, and it had always worked.
‘Is your mum invited to the wedding?’ Dan was at the table in his vest. Below the neck, he looked uncivilized; above it the trimmed moustache and the smarmed-down hair was worthy of a bank manager.
‘Mmm.’ Doris nodded, with a warning nod at Christine. If they’d spoken French she would have said Pas devant les enfants but Doris would no more speak French than she would pluck her eyebrows. ‘Should be fine if we don’t stay long, so Mum doesn’t get worn out.’
‘Isn’t it time we told people about—’
A sharp shake of Doris’s head cut Dan off at the pass. He did try, but his wife bested him each time. It was never the right moment to say, again, that mightn’t it be better to tell their friends about Lisa’s forgetfulness. Mood swings. Oddness. There was no catch-all term for the fog of old age which rubbed smooth Lisa’s edges. No easy way for them to discuss it.
This gully between them displeased Dan. Only when their amity failed did he realize how much he relied on it to feel, well, himself.
‘We’ll pop into the reception,’ said Doris. ‘Just have a little something to eat, then slip away.’ She was decisive, brooking no argument. This tone was a trump card she played rarely; Dan was well aware that their family was a matriarchy, that Doris was the power behind the mucky throne of Brookfield, but she generally let him pretend he was in charge.
‘But we have to stay for the dancing!’ Christine was stricken. She rarely tuned into her parents but when she did there was often talk of something not happening, something being ‘too much’, something classified as ‘not for the likes of us’. ‘And I’ll be in my new dress, Mum!’
; ‘You won’t go at all, my girl, if you don’t behave. Now, stand still, Chrissie, or we’ll never get this finished.’ Doris felt Dan’s mild surprise and heard Christine’s hot harrumph at the injustice. She folded the newly blue satin between her fingers. The waist of the dress would not fit over her thigh these days. All that farm butter. She was and was not the same person who had married Dan two decades ago.
A perceptive teacher had once made Doris write out lines for some schoolyard misdeed. Thirty times, in tall capitals, she’d copied out Pride goeth before a fall. She’d been puzzled at the time, but sometimes she glimpsed the truth the teacher had been trying to show her.
She didn’t bend, Doris. She stood tall. Sometimes she stooped, but that was to help others, something she did unthinkingly and generously. That wasn’t the problem. The problem was with accepting help. She studied it, couldn’t believe it came with no strings attached. Looked for the hidden cost, which was, generally speaking, pity.
The change of atmosphere in the warm kitchen was all her doing. Doris set about mending it, the way she mended their shirts and underthings.
‘Here, Dan, you and Alec have any inspiration about the letter writer?’ People looked to both men to do something.
‘Not a clue, love. We just have to sit and wait for number three. We’re keeping our eyes peeled, mind you, and looking out for irregularities.’
Doris was too loyal to laugh at such talk. ‘Very good,’ she said.
‘I came across Alec on my way home. Almost stopped and had a chat about it all but I was too hungry.’ He held up the sandwich she had made him. It was, possibly, the best sandwich he had ever eaten. But then, Dan felt that way about every sandwich his wife made. ‘He was out with Hero. He loves that dog, always walking it.’
The back door shook. The knob rattled.
‘Are we locked in?’ laughed Dan.
‘It’ll be Jez. Just see what he wants.’ Doris stabbed her thumb with a silver pin. ‘Don’t bring him in!’ she hissed, knowing her amiable husband would welcome Jack the Ripper if he came knocking.
The Archers Page 10
