So she had decided that this summer, she would find someone and do it. So far, absolutely no one had materialised, and the way she saw it, she had only three weeks left to meet anyone before the term started, and her intacta state became an embarrassment.
‘Oh bugger it!’ She slammed her book shut. ‘I’m not giving up. There’s got to be a way…’ And because she always thought more clearly about her family and how best to deal with them when she got away from them, she decided to take her elderly and rather fat pony, Bumble, out for a ride.
The downstairs cloakroom was full of old wellies, battered waterproofs, broken umbrellas, unwanted walking sticks, hats, scarves and gloves of every description. The Tuckers never ever threw anything away on the grounds that ‘you never know when it might come in useful’. Being the only member of the family to have a tidy disposition, apart from Gran, by the time Alison had retrieved her hat and boots, she had managed to work her ill-humour into a satisfying state of fury against her whole family.
In the kitchen, chopping pounds of unwanted green tomatoes, Jenny sighed when she heard Alison thrashing and banging about in the cloakroom. Her youngest child reminded her of the nursery rhyme that went: ‘When she was good, she was very, very, good, And when she was bad, she was horrid.’
Alison in a mood, she found very difficult to deal with, and tended to tiptoe round her in a placatory manner, which made Alison worse and infuriated her sons. ‘If only she could have been a bit more like Stephen,’ Jenny thought to herself wistfully. ‘He was always such a sweet-tempered child.’ Jenny adored her two boys, but when she had become unexpectedly pregnant again, she had longed for a girl; a girl she could dress in pretty clothes, with long fair curls and big blue eyes; a dainty little dancer who would enchant everybody who saw her; who would radiate sunshine and happiness wherever she went.
The door crashed open, and a hissing, spitting, black-browed ball of fury erupted from the hall, scarcely stopping in its tracks to flash a look of contempt at Jenny’s mild enquiry, ‘Oh, are you off out, dear?’ before it disappeared into the yard, slamming the kitchen door behind it with such force the drawing pin fastening a bunch of dust-encrusted invoices to a noticeboard gave way, sending the bills skittering all over the floor.
Jenny picked them up, sighed again, and resumed her chopping. ‘Poor Ali,’ she thought to herself. ‘Life can’t be much fun for her at the moment. Having to do all that schoolwork; I don’t know where she gets her brains from, but I don’t see as it’s much of a blessing. She should be out with her mates, having a laugh, flirting with boys…that’s what she should be doing.’ And Jenny dreamed on, remembering the time when she was seventeen, living with her sister, Lizzie, and her parents, in Weston-super-Mare.
By seventeen, she had already left school and found work as an assistant in a wool shop in the centre of the town. She loved her job: she loved knitting, had always loved knitting; she loved stroking the different wools, loved the colours, and loved discussing patterns with her customers. When she finished work on Saturday afternoon, she and Lizzie would gulp down their tea and then get ready for a night on the pier with their girlfriends. Lizzie was two years younger, but they shared a bedroom, shared their lipsticks, shared their clothes and shared their friends. All that had come to an end when she met Jim Tucker.
‘Jim.’ Jenny smiled to herself and climbing on a wobbly chair, went to lift down a large, heavy pickling pan from a shelf above the Rayburn. The whole shelf and everything on it had acquired a thick patina of black, rather oily-looking dust. Jenny drew her finger through it with dismay. ‘Bugger that filthy old stove,’ she muttered. ‘Luckily Elsie can’t reach up here; I haven’t got time to clean it now. Never mind, what the eye don’t see…’ and she climbed down with the pan, gave it a cursory rinse. Pouring into it the chopped onions, green tomatoes and a large quantity of malt vinegar, her mind drifted back over the well-worn memories of the time she had first met Jim. She was only just seventeen; younger than Alison.
It was an outing of his local Young Farmers Club. There were about fifteen of them, identically dressed in cords and checked shirts. With nudges and giggles, she and her mates had watched them approach down the pier. They were less cocky and less lippy than the usual gangs of boys the girls traded comments with, sticking together in a tight formation and gazing around like a group of foreign tourists. They were also a bit older than the types who usually looked for entertainment on the pier on a Saturday night. Jenny and her friends, accomplished man-trackers as they were, had kept them in their sights, grouping and re-grouping in the Wimpy, the arcade, the funfair, and on the promenade, until finally, back at the dodgems, the tall, dark, curly-haired one she had picked out for herself climbed into the seat next to her, before Lizzie had had time to take her place, and said softly ‘Are you followin’ I?’
‘Are you followin’ I?’ she softly repeated aloud, carrying the heavy pan and its contents over to the stove. She had loved the sound of his voice, and missed it, even now. Stephen sounded most like him. Until he had grown his whiskers, Charlie had been the one who most looked like him, but Stephen had his father’s temperament, which Jenny, quite irrationally, attributed to the fact that he was the only one of her children to have been planned.
A blissful year had followed that first meeting, courting on the sands when the weather permitted, or huddled in the coffee bar at the end of the pier when it didn’t. Then she had turned eighteen and heavy petting gave way to the real thing, which, in Jenny’s private opinion, was less enjoyable.
Their time together was limited, as she only had Sundays free and he had to get back for the milking by teatime. A couple of times he had persuaded her to visit his father’s farm and then run her back home after supper. She had found the formality of these occasions unnerving; she was terrified of Jim’s mother, who had a lacerating tongue and x-ray vision; and although his father seemed kindly enough, he rarely spoke. The farm she found alien and uncomfortable, not at all as she had imagined. It was at the end of one of these visits that he had asked her to marry him. She had hung back, loving him, but also loving her own home, her life in Weston, and her job in the wool shop. In the event, becoming pregnant with Charlie had settled the matter and she had moved in, barely nineteen, to live with her new husband on the top floor of the farmhouse.
Her daydreams of past times ended abruptly with the sound of screeching brakes and a car door being opened and slammed. Jenny didn’t need to look out of the window; she knew who it was, and braced herself to deal with whatever prickles her mother-in-law would throw at her when she came into the kitchen. Seconds later, the front door of the farmhouse was opened and shut with such force, the whole wall shook. A calendar of West Country Scenes, courtesy of Express Dairy, detached itself from its nail on the wall and slid down behind a chest of drawers. Retrieving the calendar (she liked the pictures, but more importantly, it had been marked with deadlines by which certain bills had to be paid) and pinning it back onto the wall, she wondered what could have put Elsie in such a mood. Normally she would use the back door from the farmyard into the kitchen, like everyone else. Her use of the old front door was significant and ominous.
The hall door suddenly opened and her mother-in-law poked her head round, clearly irritated, ‘What is that awful smell, Jenny? It’s everywhere! I hope that’s not our supper you’re cooking?’
‘No, no, Elsie, of course not. I’m making tomato chutney, that’s all. I’m sorry about the smell; I expect it’s the malt vinegar. Perhaps it shouldn’t boil like that…’
‘My God, woman, are you ever going to learn to cook? One day you’ll end up poisoning the lot of us!’ And the door slammed shut, sending the calendar on its downward path again. Jenny pulled a face at the closed door. ‘Poison – what a good idea!’ She muttered, and went to retrieve the calendar, once more.
Jenny’s relationship with her mother-in-law had not improved over the years. She knew Elsie regar
ded her with contempt, and Jenny, in spite of the fact that she was now fifty-one, still felt awkward and stupid in Elsie’s presence. If Alison hadn’t been just seven when Jim died, and the boys still so immature and needing her, she would have left Marsh Farm as soon as it was decently possible after the funeral, and gone back to Weston-Super-Mare. ‘But now, more’s the pity,’ she reflected mournfully, ‘that chance seems even less likely than ever.’
The money they had collected from Jim’s insurance had all been spent, and even the money she had been saving for a rainy day had gone. ‘Every day seems to be a rainy day,’ she sighed, and took off her flowery pinafore, mopping her hot sticky face with it, and smoothing back the wisps of hair that had escaped from her bun (Jim had loved her long blond hair and she had never had it cut short, but the colour was fading now and years of cheap shampoo had destroyed its silky texture). She looked around the kitchen with another rueful sigh.
Every year Jenny had vowed to clear and clean the kitchen, but there was always something else to do. She was not an efficient housewife, she knew that, and there were moments, as now, when she felt the extreme untidiness of the kitchen. But Jenny was not introspective and her gloomy state did not last for long. Anyway, she comforted herself, it was too hot for housework. She turned instead to a pile of knitting on the kitchen table. The soothing click of the needles and the feel of the wool through her fingers worked its magic and, for a while, she knitted and dreamed of her escape to Weston-Super-Mare, in the company of Jeff Babbington, the local vet and Jim’s best friend.
In the gloomy hall, lined with oak-stained wainscoting, Elsie mounted the staircase. It was wide and wooden, and creaked even under her slight weight. The stair runner was so worn that only faint traces of the original pattern could be detected clinging to the bare thread. Each step of the staircase contained its own pile of clothing, shoes, or magazines, discarded either on the way up or on the way down. A faded blue blind was pulled down against the sunlight on a large landing window at the back of the house, giving a faintly luminous glow to the gloom.
Elsie, still grumbling about the smell, paused for a moment outside her granddaughter’s room. Having witnessed her grandson’s humiliation in court, her blood was up, and she was ready to challenge Alison about her late-night activities. But the door was firmly shut, there was no answer to her knock and the absence of the discordant music that Alison loved suggested that she was out, so Elsie went on up the stairs to her own quarters on the top floor, a comfortable haven in the shabby, old farmhouse.
She had been about the same age as Jenny, in her early fifties, when Thomas, her husband had died. Immediately, she had announced that Jenny was now the farmer’s wife and should run the house and domestic livestock. She had abdicated all responsibility for any further cooking and cleaning, and in return for giving them the house, Elsie expected her son and his wife to provide her with board and lodging. Her son was delighted with the arrangement and thought it entirely reasonable, but Elsie knew that the life of a farmer’s wife could be thankless, certainly was hard, and that she had handed Jenny a maggoty apple.
The smell of the boiling malt vinegar followed Elsie into her bathroom. ‘It’s not enough that Jenny is a useless cook,’ she thought savagely, ‘but her incompetence is catching – look at Charlie, look at Stephen; feeble, the pair of them! Wretched woman – she doesn’t belong here, she should go back to Weston-Super-Mare…’
Elsie didn’t care that she was being unfair to Jenny, or that she, Elsie, having a totally independent income of her own, had the wherewithal to help her family, if she was so inclined. Her father had left her, his only child, a number of substantial properties in Bath, but she had never told any of them quite how well off she was. It concerned her that if they knew just how much she was worth, they would be constantly applying to her for help, and ‘not stand on their own two feet’, and that the nest egg she felt she needed for her old age would be gobbled up. Her favourite maxim was ‘Do not ask, as a refusal often offends,’ and this had been so dinned into her family that they didn’t ask, although when times got really tight, there was a lot of muttered, under-the-breath, resentment.
She turned on the fan to try to disperse the smell of the vinegar, and glared into the mirror. There was nothing cosy, soft, or grannyish about the face that glared back, with glinting eyes and a challenging set to the chin.
She didn’t see herself as mean, though, and on occasion, she could be generous, although her gifts were often hedged with cautious thrift, just in case they got the wrong idea… Jenny had longed for an Aga to replace the old kitchen stove, and Elsie brought her a secondhand Rayburn; at ten, Alison had longed for a pony and Elsie had bought her Bumble, retired from the local riding stables, small, fat and elderly; at seventeen, Charlie had longed for his first motorbike and, through the small ads page in the local paper, Elsie bought him a moped; and when Stephen passed his driving test and longed for a neat little saloon to take his Mum out on days off, his Gran bought him an elderly Reliant, at a bargain price, from a friend who could no longer see to drive.
She went into her bedroom. The smell had even permeated here. Exasperated, Elsie drew back the bright floral curtains and threw open her window. Carefully she drew out the long hat pin that held her straw boater firmly in place and removed her hat, patting the iron-grey bun of hair back in place. She then took from her bag a slim, dark green box, embossed with ‘The Dressing Room’ in fine gold writing.
Elsie’s attire was unexceptional. She always wore the same sort of clothes, with a waistcoat for warmth, whatever the weather. She eschewed all ornamentation, apart from a silk scarf worn loosely knotted around her scrawny neck. What nobody knew, or could guess, was that Elsie had a passion for silk underwear.
If the girl in the lingerie shop felt any surprise at Elsie’s quarterly visits and self-indulgent purchases, she was too well bred to show it, and she had guided Elsie, over the years, through the changing fashions in corsetry. Today she had persuaded Elsie to try her first under-wired bra. Although her breasts were withered and small, Elsie had always been proud of her trim figure and she was secretly pleased when Jenny lost her slim shape and had become round and plump.
‘She wouldn’t be able to get into this bra, 32AA, certainly not!’ Elsie thought triumphantly, as she lovingly touched the delicate lace trim. She pulled off her jumper and blouse, unhooked the creamy silk garment that had been her favoured choice that morning, and slipped on the new bra, critically examining, in the mirror, the effect of the under-wiring, and stroking the pale blue silk and lace concoction. She loved it; it made her feel good. Slowly, the black mood that had descended upon her in the magistrates’ court, lifted.
‘But it’s time to act,’ she said aloud, with decision. ‘I’ve let them muddle along for too long. The magistrate was right: it’s time Charlie grew up; and Stephen, too, for that matter. And as for Alison – she’s not going to mess about any longer, if I’ve got anything to do with it!’
It was time, she decided, for some clear thinking, and the best way to achieve this, in her opinion, was to occupy her hands doing something else. On her way home she had noticed the first flush of blackberries in the hedgerow. She would go out and pick berries, not for jam or jelly, pies or crumbles, but for the highly potent fruit cordials she conferred on a favoured few at Christmas.
3
Blimey! I wouldn’t mind that little bugger, myself. I wonder what her top speed would be. Ain’t she a beaut, Lenny?’
It was late afternoon and very hot; the air seemed to shimmer with dust and the hedgerows drooped, dusty and silent, dark sanctuaries for the small mammals and birds that had survived the combine’s blades. A good two thirds of the barley field was now stubble, and Charlie and Lenny were taking a quick break from harvesting, when a sleek, black Lamborghini drove slowly past.
Lenny was not so impressed: ‘I’d rather have her worth in bikes, meself. Never been one for thos
e fancy Italian jobs. Now if I’d that sort of money to blow, I’d get a Yamaha; a YZ 150. Yer wouldn’t see me fer dust…’
‘Nice, I grant you, but me, I’d go the whole hog, get a 250…’ It was their favourite topic of conversation – what motocross bikes they would buy if money were no object and they didn’t have farms and families to hold them back.
‘Hey, look Boss, there she goes again…’
The car had turned, and was driving back down the lane, more slowly this time. Its smoked glass windows made it impossible for the two men to see who was driving.
Charlie scratched his head. ‘I wonder what they’re after…Weasel Lane’s a dead end.’
‘Mebbe they’re lost.’
‘Mebbe…’ But Charlie, answering his mobile, quickly lost interest in the cruising car. ‘Oh, hi Sarah, how are…sorry, love, I meant to call but…no it was okay – got off with a small fine, nothing much to worry about… No, I’m sorry I didn’t…you were? Well you shouldn’t have been – you know me…water off a duck’s back… What? …Tonight?… I dunno, me and Lenny are really busy… We’ve started the harvest, and I’ve no idea what time we’ll finish…Okay, I’ll try. I’ll give you a call.’ He switched his mobile off with a sigh.
Lenny grinned. ‘Trouble?’
A Tangled Summer Page 3
