She called a bright ‘Merry Christmas!’ at the soldier as she overtook him.
He didn’t acknowledge Jane, just plodded on, zombie-like.
* * *
‘I hear,’ said Pamela, ‘they’re serving murkey at Brookfield.’ She saw Gerald’s expression. ‘It means mock turkey, darling.’
‘Ugh,’ said Gerald.
‘Quite,’ said Pamela.
Their black market beef was magnificent. The carcass sat among trailing greenery and tall red candles; Pamela had seen the table setting in the Lady and had the housekeeper reproduce it. She loved the panelling by candlelight. The atmosphere. The air of plenty.
‘It’s so quiet,’ said Pamela. The snow depressed her. Yes, yes, it was beautiful but it insulated Lower Loxley so well that they could be on the moon. Alec hadn’t spoken since they sat down.
She reached over and swiped the paper hat from his head. ‘You look ridiculous,’ she said.
She had seen off the young pretender, but Pamela’s was a pyrrhic victory. She had her husband still, but he was changed.
Right through his bones, along with the marrow, Alec was sad.
‘What did you think of Henry’s sermon at midnight Mass?’ Pamela persevered because that was what Pamelas did. She supplied the conversation the same way she supplied the beef and the Christmas crackers and the heir, for heaven’s sake. ‘So thoughtful to mention Jimmy Little, but oh dear, Henry can be banal, can’t he? He might have been referring to a cat dying. Where is Sidi Barrani anyway? Too bad for Englishmen to die in all those hot little holes abroad.’
Gerald spoke. ‘May I please get down?’
‘Go,’ said Alec before Pamela could say the opposite.
‘Come back later, darling, for some plum pud!’ Cook’s gravy had begun to set on their plates. ‘You might be nicer, Alec. It’s Christmas Day.’
‘I know what day it is.’ Alec had given up Kitkat for this. For his seat at this table in this huge dead house. Kitty was everything; she was insubstantial but enormous. Some days he didn’t remember her face, but it didn’t matter because it would float back to him the next. He worried that he might stop mourning her; he needed the grief to feel alive.
‘Are you happy?’ asked Pamela.
Jesus Christ. ‘Yes, I am. Aren’t you? You got what you wanted, after all.’
‘So I did,’ said Pamela. ‘Lucky me.’
* * *
‘I dare you!’
John hated dares, and his big brother knew that. ‘Don’t dare me!’ he yelled. ‘That means I have to!’
‘Go on, run through the graveyard!’
White snowy humps suggested the dead bodies far beneath.
Billy took his brother’s sticky hand. ‘I’ll come too! And Stace. Come on, Stacey.’
The dog had roused itself for the first time in months. Black and white, refined, Stacey was aristocratic in the way mutts often are. Connie had suggested Stacey knew it was Christmas, and that’s why she was finally cheering up.
‘Like you two,’ she’d said, handing a plate to each of the boys as the Horrobins – incredibly – all sat around the table to eat. ‘I haven’t seen smiles like that out of you in a while.’
They were drunk on pork. The smell of it, the crunch of the crackling, the insane moreishness of the Christmas banquet in a month of stew and parsnips. It eased the pain of losing their pig.
It would be years before either John or Billy made the connection; for now they were full of pork and looking forward to even more later on a nice bit of bread.
‘I hate this place!’ John stuck to Billy through the maze of graves. The sky over their heads was a sickly white, pregnant with another bellyful of snow.
Ahead of them Stacey lifted her nose and sniffed. Really sniffed, interested in something.
A figure was lurching through the drifts, head down. The man’s pace was unhurried, consistent, as if he would keep walking whatever might stray into his path. As if he would walk to the ends of the Earth.
The dog bared her teeth. She let out a fluting growl. In her agitation she hopped stiffly backwards on all four paws.
The soldier kept coming.
Stacey turned and fled, barking and scattering the boys.
They fled with her and didn’t look back, because they knew the dead soldier would be behind them.
* * *
Doris was flabbergasted. Where had Dan found the time to make a dolls’ house, and in secret? Christine was absorbed by the tiny rooms and the tiny beds and the tiny family; it took four concerted stints of hollering up the stairs to bring her down for the murkey.
Paper chains criss-crossed the parlour ceiling. The room was thick with heat from the coals and the people in the room. It was transgressive, even at Christmas, to spoil its chilly perfection but oh, it was worth it.
Or so Doris thought, in the lull between clearing the table and embarking on the washing up. The port was out; Morgan’s gift. She was on tea, and Magsy had asked for sherry. Luckily there had been one sticky serving left in a bottle under the sink.
Everyone wore a paper hat; it was mandatory. She had fed them all. Over-fed them all. Her own, even Jack, plus the Seeds, and Frank too of course, as well as Magsy, and Eugene, and at the head of the table, Lisa. Doris knew that look; Lisa was unsure but content. No fear. The fear was the worst, and it preceded ‘acting up’. She didn’t want her mother to act up in front of company, yet she couldn’t bear to exclude her from family ritual. She would keep an eye.
‘To absent friends,’ said Dan, raising his port. He was soft-eyed; he’d be pawing her later. Doris felt tired as she anticipated finding the words to defuse him without hurting his feelings, all the while twisting away from his embrace.
She raised her glass. To Janet, she thought.
The day was Doris’s creation. She had stayed home from midnight Mass to wrap the modest pile of presents in brown paper. She had striven to emulate other Christmas Days, even though this one was different. And it had worked. The room vibrated with good cheer.
And me? Doris loathed the introspection of wartime. A loneliness of the soul that made her take her own temperature and compare her inner scenery to others’. Each of them around the table fought their own war. Paper hat or no paper hat.
‘To my dear brother.’ Magsy held up her glass.
‘To Ronald,’ echoed the others.
‘Pity he’s not here with us,’ said Nance. She knew her generosity about Morgan’s previous family went down well with her husband. It was nine-tenths genuine; the jealousy of the perfect dead wife only pricked her when she couldn’t sleep. Or perhaps she couldn’t sleep because of the jealousy.
‘Bet Ronald’s not eating murkey at the Houses of Parliament,’ said Jack.
‘Now, now,’ said Dan. ‘Your mother’s murkey was excellent.’
‘My murkey?’ said Doris. ‘I think you’ll find it was Mr Hitler’s.’ She had stuffed a joint of mutton with breadcrumbs, then laid bacon over the top and added, to Jack’s glee, parsnip legs. They had laughed at it, and sort of, kind of, enjoyed eating it. Because they had to.
‘Ronald,’ said Morgan, ‘is vegetarian.’
As others expostulated at such wanton eccentricity, Magsy’s attention wandered. She remembered how she had bugged and begged her brother to use his position to investigate the Browns’ background. It had taken less than a day, even with the great motor of war running, for Ronald to call back with news.
‘Margaret, my dear,’ he had said, ‘I do have something to report. I’m told the Browns are naturalized British citizens.’ He had details, dates, documents. ‘Now that I’ve told you, I need you to forget it. This family are now British. They deserve our discretion. Do you hear me, Margaret? I forbid you to share this information with any other individual. I shall need your promise.’
Breaking the promise she made to her brother had all been for nothing. Magsy wondered now what she had expected to happen when she wrote that letter. Yes, it had been read out
at the wedding, and the truth broadcast, but Morgan and Nance were still together, and she was still the spinster aunt who nobody really wants but who is tolerated.
It was all for nothing! thought Magsy passionately. All for nothing the self-hatred she felt the moment her horrible words hit the air. All for nothing the peek into her dingy soul. Magsy’s only gain? The revelation that her expectations of marriage to Morgan had been foolish and humiliating.
The Browns had done nothing to harm her, yet she had taken a sledgehammer to them. Penance was needed; Magsy would wear a hair shirt beneath her dowdy dresses if she could find one. All she could do was rail against the bigotry she had provoked.
And all the while she must stand witness to Morgan and Nance’s rapport, another circle she was excluded from. I am lonely, she admitted to herself (for it felt like a failing). But perhaps a woman capable of such spite deserved to be alone.
Lisa interrupted Magsy’s self-flagellation. ‘Are they married?’ she asked loudly, pointing to Nance and Morgan. ‘Or is he her father?’
Doris butted in. ‘Mum, that’s Nance and Morgan, you know them, they’re married six months.’
‘I like her,’ said Lisa. ‘But he looks a tricky bugger.’
Morgan quaked with laughter. ‘You’re quite right! I am.’
The moment teetered. Lisa’s face blackened, then just as suddenly cleared. ‘You’re a funny onion!’ she said, delighted.
They were all delighted. It became the bon mot of the day. Glen was a funny onion, and so was Christine. The murkey, they agreed, was the funniest onion of all.
Keen to join in – she was a child who grew an inch if the grown-ups laughed at her jokes – Christine said to Nance, ‘If Morgan’s a funny onion, that makes you Mrs Funny Onion!’
‘Mrs F. O. Seed!’ barked Dan.
‘That’s me,’ said Nance. She felt Morgan glance at her. He was always so careful to reassure her that her ancestry didn’t matter to him. But it does, thought Nance. In some small way it had to. She wondered what was the German for funny onion.
Across the table, her father cleared his throat. Noticing the cue, the others were quiet and looked to Frank. ‘May I say something, please, friends? I feel the need to thank you.’ He was quite red, poor Frank. The Browns did not relish the limelight. ‘You’ve stood by me and Nance through…’ He evidently hadn’t rehearsed how to describe their calamity. ‘Through all that business. Especially you, Magsy.’ He looked at her, and was tearful. ‘You’ve stood up for me in public, and I want you to know how grateful I am. A friend like you doesn’t come along very often in life.’
‘He’s right, Magsy, you’ve—’ Dan stopped, silenced by Magsy’s violent tears.
Chairs were scraped back as they all stood and gathered round her, the mad spinster aunt who cries at Christmas.
‘Charades!’ said Jack, when he felt the back rubbing and there-there-ing had gone on long enough. ‘Mother, you write the clues.’ He nudged Doris; he knew she hated acting out the charades.
She nudged him back, grateful for him, pushing away the sudden assaulting thoughts of where Jack would be this time next year. If Jack would be.
To the dresser, where, in the middle drawer, Doris would find the blue lacquered pen her father had used every day of his life. She used it rarely; she felt too much when it was in her hand. The lovely gloss. The clean nib. It was just right for a high day and a holiday.
It wasn’t there. She pushed aside a receipt for a meal and a comb and a scrap of chintz.
Doris scrabbled, fingers anxious, turning everything over twice.
Somebody had stolen up behind her. Lisa touched Doris’s arm.
She looked up at Doris, and laid her palm along her cheek. It was dry and warm. ‘I can tell,’ she whispered, ‘that you are a very special person.’
* * *
A bit pissed, but only a bit, Connie threw cabbage stalks onto the compost. Nearly had herself over. She tapped the bottom of the pail, then had to steady herself again as the little fellas and Stacey tore past her, well, through her more like, and almost knocked her down.
‘Steady on!’ she shouted. ‘Seen a ghost?’ She laughed and turned and saw the soldier.
He had stopped at the gate.
‘Hey, you,’ snapped Connie. Ready, as ever, to repel boarders. She looked again. ‘Cliff,’ she said.
She ran to him. ‘Oh, my boy, my boy, my lovely boy.’ She was crying. She was snotty. She threw her arms around his neck, had to reach up to do it, she’d forgotten how tall he was. Then she did something that she would never forgive herself for. She flinched.
The bottom left part of his face was not right, the flesh looked plastic and wet, and his lips were rolled meat, and his poor eyes were too bright to look out from such devastation.
* * *
Jane sped up when she saw the lights. It had started to snow again, fat, furry blotches. Denholm’s windows, curtains drawn back, warmth spilling out, beckoned her on.
Feet soaking, hair a slick mess, Jane felt her transformation begin. She would leave her old sorry self out here in the snow. Why was romance not for her? Why had she believed that all her life? It ended here, now. She would say some magic words to Denholm and she would be mistress of Turnpike. It was a fairytale, all the better for its deferred happy ending. She looked through the window, into the room where she had refused him.
There was quite a gang in there, all of them standing and lively, with glasses raised for a toast. There were faces she didn’t recognize, Denholm’s family perhaps. But she recognized Denholm. And she recognized Agnes, who basked at the head of the table, holding up her left hand – that scrubbed and raw little claw – so the assembly could see her emerald and diamond ring.
* * *
Hero led the way.
His paws took him to Noon Cottage and Alec didn’t quibble. He was drawn to the empty house with a pull perhaps stronger than when Kitty had waited there. Only in its emptiness could he find peace.
No, not quite that. Alec had given up on peace, the way he’d given up on being able to run the crest of Lakey Hill. A rightness, that was the best he could hope for now, and he felt more right inside the cottage than he did outside it.
‘Nearly there, boy,’ he said to the dog. Alec loved Hero. Alec hadn’t known this until latterly. He had never classified the way he felt about his dog; now he cherished Hero’s uncomplicated company. His loyalty. The way he looked at Alec as if all his options for happiness lay with his master.
Am I his master? Alec was, after all, following the dog. In order to, he might as well admit it, visit a doll. That silly doll, chosen without care, was now the only thing in Ambridge he sought out.
Emily the doll allowed him to be tender; he could hold it and imagine he held Caroline, and Caroline’s mother. There was no outlet for tenderness at Lower Loxley. His wife was one big elbow – what else could she be, given his behaviour? – and his son was a desert island glimpsed now and then on the horizon.
He knew now the pleasure of being sweet to someone. Yet he couldn’t be sweet to Pamela. He could only detest her, and know she didn’t deserve it.
Hero disappeared through the open door of the cottage. Alec stopped, confused, then ran. ‘Kitty!’ he yelled, loud enough to surprise the rook who owned the yew in the back garden.
‘Hello?’ A little man stepped out of Kitty’s parlour.
‘Who the hell are you?’ Alec’s disappointment was sour in his mouth.
‘There’s no need to take that tone.’ Glasses were taken off in consternation. ‘Who are you, sir, for that matter?’
Introductions were made, and Alec apologized to the genial creature, dandruffy and blinking, who was interested only in the job he had come to do. One of a multitude of lawyers who answered to the Dibden-Rawles family, he was making an inventory of the cottage’s contents.
‘On New Year’s Eve?’ Good God, thought Alec, the man was keen. ‘I doubt Mrs Dibden-Rawles stole anything.’
‘Of course not. There’s no implication of that nature, it’s simply procedure.’ The man had a clipboard.
Pamela had a clipboard. Alec suspected that people who owned clipboards would do just fine in the apocalypse.
‘This little lady doesn’t appear on my list!’ The solicitor pointed to the doll.
‘She’s mine,’ said Alec, snatching up Emily.
‘I see.’ A lifelong habit of not commenting on irregularities of personality came in handy for the stranger. He sighed, old-maid-like. ‘I remember Noel being born. To think the Dibden-Rawles bloodline ended with him… it’s tragic.’
This was outrageous. Alec had to leave the room. Hero followed him, nails tapping on the stone floor of the kitchen. Alec picked up a jar, still half full of jam. Jam Kitty had made.
Noel’s family was as short-sighted as his own, with their bloated pride in name and pedigree. To paint Caroline out of the picture because they sneer at Kitty!
The man followed him. Ticking. Peering. Scribbling. He talked to Alec as if talking to himself, in a murmur. ‘Stove, good. Window dressing. Sink, slightly cracked. They were so relieved when Noel survived his brush with cancer, you’ll know about that, when he was only a child.’
‘He told me about it.’ Alec kept his distance. Backed towards the big old cupboard where Kitty had kept her plates that never matched.
‘Little did they know that the illness would have such an effect on the entire family.’ When Alec frowned, the solicitor dropped his voice even further. ‘Infertility,’ he hissed.
Alec pushed his way out of the kitchen, past the silly man. Out to the hallway, where he bent double.
The child’s hair. Caroline’s hair would never lie flat. Alec straightened up and stared at himself in the pitted mirror.
Just like mine.
He looked up at the ceiling. Guessed that he was probably standing more or less beneath the old wardrobe. He remembered the smell of it, the glamorous softness of the old fur coat behind him and the warmth of Kitty against him. He closed his eyes and remembered how she smelled of Je Reviens.
The Archers Page 28
