Notwithstanding: Stories From an English Village

by Louis de Bernières

  The young man was taking a long cut into town in the spirit of exploration, since he was relatively new to the area, having recently taken up a post as assistant music teacher in a local public school. It was the kind of public school that one might have described as being in the top rank of the second-raters. He was not on duty this day, having been spared the embarrassment of refereeing any football games or supervising any detentions. Thus far he was not relishing his job particularly. The boys’ attitude to music was more robust and jocular than musical, confining itself mainly to bawling out filthy rugby songs in the communal showers. Moreover, since he was accommodated in a spartan bachelor flat provided by the school, he had not experienced the customary welcome of newcomers to the village, which consisted in solidly constructed, inquisitive middle-aged women turning up with pots of home-made marmalade and general offers of assistance and advice. His flat was in a large house in a remote corner of the school grounds, and the other flats were occupied by the school chaplain, a sports teacher who thought that classical music was for ‘queers’ and a fey and unhappy young English teacher who almost certainly was one.

  The music teacher was quite poor, and had no prospect of ever being otherwise. He drove a Morris Minor saloon which he had bought for fifty pounds at the age of seventeen. He and his father had dismantled and rebuilt it in the garden. The car was admittedly and visibly hand-painted, but it had already proved a faithful servant, and it worked well even when technically ill. He was fully reconciled to a long future with this car, even though his rowdier friends in better-paid jobs were roaring about in souped-up white Ford Escorts with red stripes down the sides and huge holes cut out of the bonnet in order to accommodate oversized Weber carburettors.

  He had passed the hedging and ditching man, who was contemplating an old whisky bottle that he had just excavated from the mud. He was somewhere in the vicinity of the Glebe House when he came across a car that was stopped on the verge, unwisely near to a bend in the road. He felt reluctant to overtake it, in case a car should be coming round the bend the other way. Most of all, though, he stopped because the stationary car was also a Morris Minor.

  Going round to the front, he met with a woman, standing and facing him with an expression that had something about it of embarrassment and shame. Her hands were behind her back, as if she were concealing something. She was about thirty years old, a little plump, pleasant in the face without being pretty, dressed practically rather than for elegance or for effect.

  ‘Ummm, hello,’ said the music teacher diffidently. ‘I’m so sorry to bother you, but I wondered if … if you were in need of assistance. I mean, I thought you might have broken down, and, as it were, I drive a Morris Minor myself, and I always stop for Morris Minors if they’re broken down. Usually I can get them going, you see. I’ve got a toolbox and some spares in the car. Solidarity and all that.’ He looked at her, feeling foolish.

  ‘Actually, I haven’t broken down, so I’m not a damsel in distress, but thank you all the same. It was very kind of you to stop.’ She smiled at him. It was the smile of someone who wishes that you would go away.

  ‘The thing is, you’re parked near a bend, so I thought …’

  ‘Yes,’ she agreed, ‘it’s a silly place to stop, but …’

  ‘Yes?’ It was then that he saw, behind her head, a pheasant. ‘Gracious,’ he said, ‘poor little bugger.’

  It had clearly been struck by a car while flying across the road and had hurtled into the side of the thorn hedge, near the top, where it had become stuck upside down, and died. The brown rump of the pheasant, as it protruded from the hedge, looked both comical and pathetic.

  ‘Yes, poor little bugger,’ she agreed. ‘So many of them get splatted at this time of the year. God knows why.’

  ‘It’s the mating season perhaps? That’s when all the animals get silly.’ A thought occurred to the young man. ‘You weren’t … are you, er, if you don’t mind me asking, planning to eat it? I mean, did you stop to get it out?’

  She looked horrified, but also guilty. ‘Gosh, no. They’re so bruised when they’re hit that the flesh goes all black and has a horrible texture. My dad ran one over once, and it wasn’t at all nice when we tried to eat it. It’s the kind of thing that everyone tries once. Not recommended.’

  The young man scrutinised the bird. He was always fascinated by the intricate and beautiful patterns on pheasants’ feathers. ‘I wonder what happened to the tail,’ he said. ‘This pheasant doesn’t seem to have one. The feathers can’t have been knocked out by the car, surely?’

  ‘Well, actually, I’ve got them,’ she admitted, taking her hands from behind her back, and holding out the long, barred feathers. ‘In fact, that’s why I stopped.’

  ‘What, for a hat or something?’

  ‘Me? Can you see me in a hat with pheasant feathers in it? My granny, maybe.’

  ‘Well, I suppose they’re very pretty in their own right. I can understand why anyone would want one. Or even a handful.’

  ‘It’s not because they’re pretty. It’s because I play the oboe.’

  ‘The oboe?’ he said, trying to make the conceptual leap that might connect oboes with pheasant tails, and failing.

  ‘An oboe,’ she repeated. ‘It’s a wind instrument, and it has a conical bore that’s very tight at the top. A pheasant feather is just ideal for cleaning it when you’ve finished playing. You could say it’s traditional.’

  ‘To get the spit out?’

  She smiled wryly. ‘I call it condensation.’

  ‘So you play the oboe?’

  ‘I just started again. You know, kids at school, husband at work, a bit of time on my hands. I got the itch again. It’s not going very well, though. If you haven’t got anyone to play with, you can’t improve, and anyway my mouth seems to have lost the knack.’

  ‘Trouble with the embouchure,’ he said.

  ‘You know about embouchure?’ she asked eagerly, her enthusiasm triggered by the code word.

  ‘Kindred spirit,’ he replied. ‘I play clarinet. I know what happens when you stop for a while. It always comes back eventually, if that’s any comfort.’ He said, ‘I teach music actually, and I’ve been trying to find someone to play with.’ They looked at each other for a long and portentous moment.

  ‘Well …’ She eyed him suspiciously. ‘Perhaps you’d like to come round and meet my husband. We could try something out.’ She placed a particular weight upon the word ‘husband’, a weight that was not lost on him.

  ‘Delighted to. Perhaps you’d like to give me your number, and I can ring you later.’

  ‘OK,’ she said, and she took the old receipt from Timothy White’s that he produced from his wallet. She wrote ‘Jenny Farhoumand (oboe) 2380’ on it, and handed it back to him.

  ‘Farhoumand? What an intriguing name. Where does it come from?’

  ‘I’ve no idea. I keep telling my husband that he ought to find out, but he’s not very interested. He mainly likes mowing the lawn.’

  ‘It looks French. Do you like Cimarosa’s oboe concerto?’ he asked.

  ‘Love it. I played in it once.’

  ‘I love it too,’ he said.

  As he was going back to his car, he turned and said, ‘If you come across any dead cats on the side of the road, can you stop and cut off the tails? The clarinet has quite a big bore, and cats’ tails are ideal. You could say it’s traditional. You have to wait till rigor mortis sets in, though, or they’re too floppy.’

  She was only fooled for a moment, but she never forgot the thrill of horror that ran through her for the split second when he was driving away, and she thought he was being serious.

  MRS MAC

  MRS MAC’S COTTAGE found itself down an unmetalled rutty lane that had been so frequently resurfaced over the centuries that, merely by remaining where they were, the ditch on one side and the cottage on the other seemed to have sunk far into the earth. The ditch became seven feet deep, and in summer it grew rank with briars, net
tles and docks. Dogs that plunged into it re-emerged caked in stinking black slime, much to their own delight and their owners’ horror. Local children tortured their friends and enemies alike by pitching them into the mire, where wellington boots would be sucked away to an ignominious end. Many a child howled with panic having answered a dare to go in, only to find that there was no way out.

  Every autumn the hedging and ditching man would clear the banks with the aid of a billhook mounted on a two-yard pole, and then, protected by waders, he would descend into the abyss and heave the black mud up on to the banks so that the waters could flow unhindered in the winter. For some reason he never removed the mud altogether, so that it lay glistening and reeking on the edge of the track, gradually being washed back into the ditch by the rains.

  The hedging and ditching man was an unexplained person. He was at that time in his sixties, very slim and fit. He wore braces and a flat cap, and worked in shirtsleeves even in the winter. He had laid hedges and cleared ditches since he was a youth, but nobody knew who employed him or paid him, or where he lived. Parents told their gullible children that he was a supernatural being appointed by nature, who turned into a birch tree at night, and ate leaf mould in his sandwiches. The generally credited rumour was that he was the wealthy scion of an aristocratic family, who hedged and ditched in order to escape the fathomless tedium of an idle life filled with scones and trivial conversation. Housewives took him mugs of tea when he was at work outside their houses, in order to hear him speak, and were convinced that his rich Surrey accent was indeed a thin disguise. They differed as to whether or not he might be Lord Dunsfold, or Lord Munstead, or Lord Chiddingfold, but all agreed that, without him, the village of Notwithstanding would long ago have disappeared beneath a canopy of hawthorn and a viscous sea of clay.

  At the bottom end of Mrs Mac’s lane lived a man who owned a large and gracious house surrounded by a high laurel hedge, and who was widely known to have been a spy. There was confusion as to whether Mr Hadgecock had worked for MI5 or MI6, as indeed there is still confusion as to which is which, but nobody liked to ask him, since his being a spy was supposed to be a secret. This was a very conservative area, and it would have seemed unpatriotic to ask him directly. It was also a very considerate area, and no one wanted to hurt his pride by revealing to him that his years of absolute discretion had been a failure. Mr Hadgecock lived his secret life, innocently unaware that the secret of his secret was secret only to himself, and he wasted his weekends dutifully, making damp bonfires in the hope of seeming to be like every other paterfamilias in the village of Notwithstanding.

  Mrs Mac’s cottage was at the other end of the track. When Mac and Mrs Mac were younger, the house had been smart, albeit very small, and the tiny garden had yielded eglantine, wallflowers and neat rows of diminutive cabbages. Now the conservatory glass was dirty and mossy, the paving had cracked and heaved, and in the wooden garage Mac’s beloved black A35 rusted on deflated and perished tyres, unused for ten years. Mrs Mac kept the beds weeded, but nothing was grown in them any more, so that even in the spring and summer the place had the air of waiting for the resurrection.

  Mac and Mrs Mac had three elderly cats who had done their duty in this life, and now they meditated all day in their appointed places, one on the roof of the shed, one by the scraper at the back door and one upon the gatepost. They seemed simultaneously to be a kind of garden statuary, and a variety of bearskin, as though three foot soldiers of some Ruritanian regiment of palace guards had capriciously disposed of their headgear in this greenest and most English part of southern England. The cat on the gatepost hissed at those who tried to caress it, but it did not budge or lash out, as if it were anticipating worthier opponents, and was merely keeping its bad temper up to scratch.

  Inside, Mac, Mrs Mac and Mrs Mac’s sister existed in two small rooms downstairs and two small rooms upstairs.

  Mac was grey, watery and insubstantial, sitting silent and still at the bare wooden table, but Mrs Mac was lively even though she had been bent double by the thinning and warping of her bones. Her sister was fatter and more upright than she, but her brain was not as sharp, and her function in the house was more to flesh it out than to contribute to its life. Mrs Mac’s sister would seem to have had no name, since she was known by everyone simply as ‘Mrs Mac’s sister’, and Mrs Mac herself simply addressed her as ‘dear’. She would nod happily, unoffended, when introduced to others as ‘Mrs Mac’s sister’, as if anonymity were a natural and ultimately preferable state.

  Mac and Mrs Mac had been known as such for so long that it occurred to almost nobody that their real name must have been something other than that. Occasionally somebody was struck by the idea that they must really have been ‘MacDonald’, or ‘MacGuire’ or ‘MacCrae’ or ‘MacEwan’, and this somebody would resolve to ask Mrs Mac about it one of these days, but would then forget to do so; this was in any case a village where almost everyone had a nickname such as ‘Buzz’ or ‘Totty’, or was known simply as ‘So-and-so’s Owner’.

  Mac had always lived in Notwithstanding, but Mrs Mac was an interloper from Abbot’s Notwithstanding, a mile to the south. They had married after the Great War, when she was a bonny laughing girl of eighteen, and he had already been reduced to semi-silence by the infernal din and carnage of Ypres and Passchendaele. They were of a generation, more than any other that has ever lived, that had been cauterised by history, and come through it all with the conviction that there is no higher aim in life than to live with common decency. Children felt safe with them, because they had been so intimately touched by death.

  In those early years of their marriage when sleep evaded Mac at night, and fits of trembling seized him, Mrs Mac had been the Ariadne who had spun back together the threads of his sanity, binding up the wounds of his experience with equability and tranquillity. He found hard and cathartic work on the de Mandevilles’ farm, where he was to remain for the rest of his working life, and, although he and Mrs Mac were never to have offspring, they built a world between them that was all the more particular for being impenetrable to others.

  Mac, Mrs Mac and Mrs Mac’s sister were spiritualists, and had been ever since Mrs Mac discovered her abilities in 1922. She awoke one morning in the summer, on the same day that Field Marshal Sir Henry Wilson was assassinated by Irish terrorists, and asked Mac, ‘Who’s Robert?’

  ‘Robert?’ repeated Mac.

  ‘Robert,’ said Mrs Mac, ‘with sandy hair, blue eyes and one of those sheepskin flying jackets. He says he wants you to know that he’s all right. Then he said “Toodle-oo” and disappeared.’

  Mac sat up in bed and looked at her, his mouth hanging open, and a cold shiver travelling the length of his spine. ‘I knew a Robert,’ he said, ‘and he always used to say “Toodle-oo”. Got burned in a Bristol Fighter.’

  ‘He’s dead, then, is he?’ asked Mrs Mac, realising all at once the significance of her dream, and Mac nodded. He was recalling the best friend of his youth, who had managed to become an officer, and campaigned so vigorously to be seconded from his regiment into the Royal Flying Corps, only to be killed accidentally, three weeks after winning his wings, on the second-to-last day of the war.

  In the aftermath of that war these islands were in tears, and never before had there come about such a rending of the veil between this world and the next. Mediums sprung up like cuckoo pint in the spring, among them the fraudulent, the genuinely gifted, the innocent but deluded, the disingenuous, and those who could be both spectacularly right and wrong within the space of a single sentence.

  Mrs Mac sought neither money nor notoriety, but gathered around her a small group of people from all walks of life, who crammed themselves into the tiny room, sat holding hands around the wooden table, and received messages from those they had loved, as well as some from complete strangers, as if the dead were as promiscuous as the living in their need to speak across the abyss, and as desperate for reassurance.

  Mrs Mac began her meetings with a
short prayer, calling upon the Lord to bless their undertaking, and to protect those gathered together from the mischief of the uncouth spirits that inhabited the lower ether, and then the lights were quenched, with the exception of a single candle in the middle of the table, upon whose flame Mrs Mac would focus until her vision blurred and the dead would appear before her inner eyes, queuing up behind each other as it well behoved the British dead.

  As the decades passed, Mrs Mac’s circle of spiritualists passed on, one by one, until those who had once sat expectantly in the chairs became the very visitors who stepped out of the candle’s yellow flame to bring their cryptic messages and declarations from the other side. Increasingly, Mrs Mac dwelt not in this corporeal sphere, but in the next, until the two elided and coincided, and any distinction between them became redundant. It was as if Mrs Mac had died while remaining alive, or as if she had taken to living among the dead. She subsisted without terror, fearing only the pain and inconvenience of transferring from one condition to another when her own moment of death arrived, and looking forward to the better state of health whose enjoyment she envisaged on the far shore. Many in the village considered her mad, or at least half-baked, but she was sweet-natured, kindly and fascinating, and therefore those who did not believe in her phantoms simply humoured her. ‘She’s harmless,’ people would say, shrugging their shoulders, ‘and, you never know, there might be something in it.’

  One day Joan called in on Mrs Mac, saying, ‘I’m just going up to the church to do the flowers, and I wondered if you’d like to come.’ Joan took village responsibilities seriously and ran a kind of localised social services organisation that was entirely of her own devising. She was a devout conservative, perceiving that if all the world were made up of communities such as this one, and if every such community had people like herself and her friends to help anyone at any time, then there would be no conceivable need for socialism. The trouble with socialism, thought Joan, was either that it told you to do what you were going to do anyway, and therefore made you not want to do it, or else it took things out of your hands and did them worse than you would have done, but at far greater expense.