A Rival Creation

by Marika Cobbold

  Back home, Liberty paused on the doorstep. ‘Thank you for everything.’ She went inside and turned, about to close the door, when Oscar said, ‘Can I come in?’

  She nodded and held the door for him. In the hall he stopped and stood for a moment looking down at her, smiling. She looked back up at him uneasily, feeling sick to the stomach with nerves and excitement. It would be wrong to speak now, that much she knew.

  He took a step towards her and, bending down, he cradled her face with his hands, tilting her chin upwards, then he kissed her, a long kiss. He took her by the hand and led her upstairs into her bedroom and gently pushed her down on the bed. He knelt over her, straddling her waist and as he began to unbutton her blouse she closed her eyes: hear no evil, see no evil, say nothing. But I love him, she thought, how can it be evil when I love him? She looked up at him, smiling, and lifted her hands to his face, taking off his glasses. Oscar smiled back lazily as her fingers travelled down his shirt, undoing buttons as they went. He lowered himself gently down on to her, taking his weight on his palms for long enough to kiss her, then he pressed down on her whispering, half laughing half sobbing, ‘Oh God, Liberty, at last.’

  Village Diary

  Tollymead: As the date of the Christmas Bazaar approaches, all seems set for a record fund-raising success. The vicar is thrilled with the pictures he’s received for the exhibition so far, and we seem set to have more stalls than ever before. Mrs Sanderson and Mrs Smedley still need more clothes for the Dressed Dolls Stall.

  Phyllida Medley, popping in for a cup of camomile tea (made from the flower rather than the leaf, it’s much nicer that way) mentioned that several residents had asked her about resurrecting the carol singing in Tollymead this Christmas. We both agreed we missed hearing the sound of familiar carols coming towards us in the winter night, and Phyllida admitted to keeping a bottle of Stone’s ginger wine in a cupboard for years, just in case. You don’t need to be a brilliant singer to take part, although we all hope, of course, that Miss Hester Scott, OBE, described once by a critic as Britain’s answer to Ethel Merman, will join us. So anyone interested should be outside the church this coming Sunday at 7 p.m. Ask the vicar for song sheets. The money raised will go towards providing a minibus service into Fairfield for those of our residents without cars.

  And finally, Oliver Bliss and Laura Brown have set a date, the Saturday after Christmas, for their wedding. As Oliver said, ‘Getting to know each other first is for cissies.’

  Maybe he’s got a point. How is it that while the number of couples living together before marriage is going up, so is the divorce rate?

  Twenty-two

  Ted brain could not make it out. Yet again he had opened the back door to find a painting in the porch. He picked up the latest offering, a ghastly-looking thing in purple and black, and brought it inside. Turning it this way and that, Ted could not make out if it was a high-rise building or a triffid. Then he saw written on a card at the back: ‘Winter 2, by George Tennant, Greensleeves, Well Road, Tollymead.’ Shaking his head, Ted put it with the other four pictures in the hall.

  ‘It was another one of these pictures!’ he called up to Veena. ‘I haven’t got a clue what this is all about.’

  ‘Let me look.’ Veena came running barefoot down the stairs. She dreamed of going to art school, she had confided to Ted, and spent a lot of her time sketching with some materials he had bought her in Fairfield.

  ‘It’s awful.’ Veena burst out into that throaty laughter that sent a little shiver of excitement through Ted. ‘And look at you, you should see your face. You look really sweet.’

  Ted glanced at himself in the small hall mirror and then he laughed, too.

  ‘Anyway, what is this all about?’ she asked. ‘Why are all your parishioners leaving bad pictures on your doorstep?’

  Ted shook his head, but his eyes were on the girl’s face. He knew it was irresponsible of him to allow her to stay on like this. It was almost two months now since she had first arrived. He knew he should have moved her on. He even had a couple of addresses of safe places for her to go. But each time he had suggested she move on, the girl had wept and clung to him and begged to stay. What could he do? He loved her.

  Nancy was meeting Neville Pyke outside the vicarage at three. She was glad to have a project on her hands. Back home, lately, she had felt as if she was walking across a frozen lake, at every moment risking the ice breaking and sending her down into the freezing water. Sanderson’s Seeds was close to collapse and Andrew blamed everyone and everything but himself for the firm’s trouble. Most of all, he blamed Evelyn Brooke. He blamed her even more than he blamed the government and the recession. Day after day Nancy watched as every one of his faults became as pronounced as if they had been read out in court by a disapproving judge. He seemed to have lost his strength too, that forcefulness she had so admired in the past. Now he whinged and whined as the layers of worry and frustration descended on him with every bit of bad news from work.

  ‘We’re losing Tim now,’ he had said the night before. ‘He cancelled his last order. Says he can’t pay. His business still suffers from all the bad publicity over that damn oak. And then there was that ridiculous piece on television the other day, about those children with birth defects. Nothing to do with us here, but it really put the wind up Tim. He says he’s going organic. Who can blame him, eh? All the supermarkets are clamouring for the stuff.’ For once he was not shouting and he had a confused look in his eyes. He kept rubbing the back of his neck with his broad hand that was covered in red hair. A paw like a werewolf at full moon, Nancy used to say in the days when it had wandered over her sturdy body at night.

  ‘Surely there is no question of legal pesticides causing the damage to those babies?’ Nancy had asked. ‘Not any of the kind we supply?’

  Andrew had not answered. He just clenched his teeth and looked away.

  ‘Oh what can we do?’ she had whispered.

  ‘I don’t know, I really don’t know. We lost another big export order this week. If we lose our local business as well…’

  Nancy’s fingers tightened around the wheel of the car. Andrew would never cope with the loss of his father’s business. She spotted Neville in the vicarage drive and gave him a little wave. Concentrate on the project in hand, that was the thing. If Tollymead won the Most Caring Village Competition, a little more business could come Sanderson’s Seeds’ way, especially if Andrew’s wife had been prominent in winning the award. Her spirits lifted. Maybe Sanderson’s Seeds could sponsor some community project? She smiled to herself. It was not a bad idea. She had always wanted to be more involved in the business but Andrew had always resented any attempts she made at getting involved, reminding her of a child refusing to share a toy, ‘No, it’s mine.’ Maybe now he would realize he needed her.

  Neville waved back at her, the vicarage keys in his hand. They had roped Ned Smedley, who was church-warden, into their plan, and he had told them when Ted Brain was out of the parish for the day and lent them his set of keys.

  ‘We’ll have it all measured up and ordered so that when we tell the vicar, he can’t argue,’ Neville said delightedly to Nancy as he let them in through the front door.

  ‘Now look at that dreary paper,’ he pointed a stubby finger at the wall, ‘and great big chunks of it coming off the…’ he stopped in mid-sentence. ‘What was that?’ He cocked his head to one side, placing his hand behind his ear. ‘I thought I heard someone upstairs.’

  Nancy, who had been leafing through the stack of paintings that leant against the wall by the stairs, listened, but she could hear nothing. ‘Most probably a mouse,’ she said. ‘The vicarage has always had a problem with mice. Now, Honeysuckle White in here, I think, to make the place seem larger.’

  ‘Maybe the vicar didn’t go out after all,’ Neville said.

  ‘Ted! Ted are you up there?’ Nancy called. There was no answer, no sound at all. ‘Mice,’ she said again. ‘Now, the sitting-room.’ She strode off.

/>   ‘I don’t think the man has any taste at all, good or bad.’ She looked around as she hauled a notebook up from the pocket of her voluminous navy blue skirt. Always when Nancy had been there before, the small rectangular room had been brimming with people obscuring the waiting-room meanness of the place. Brown upholstered chairs and a sofa with its moss green cover torn like fashionable jeans, lined the grey-painted walls; the floor was covered in a patterned carpet of rust and brown. Then, surprisingly, on the small teak veneer table under the window stood a crystal vase with a single yellow rose.

  Neville hauled out a tape measure from the pocket of his anorak. Nancy made notes as he called out the measurements.

  ‘He does have some rather unpleasant pictures, doesn’t he?’ Nancy said, looking at the charcoal drawings above the small gas fire.

  Neville paused from his measuring and glanced at the trees whose gnarled branches caught at the flowing hair of the woman passer-by like greedy hands and at the second picture where a giant dove rode the back of the same girl, naked now between the bird’s claws. ‘He told me they’re mostly by a friend of his,’ Neville said. ‘They’re very skilfully drawn I must say, very skilfully drawn.’

  ‘Well that one is a very poor copy of Dalí’s Leda and the Swan,’ Nancy said, pointing at the leering dove.

  ‘Oh really, you don’t say,’ Neville blinked.

  ‘No I’d say the pictures in here are as bad as any of the ones stacked in the hall. I suppose, heaven help us, that they’re destined for the Christmas Baazar.’ She wandered through the room, making notes of the colours of the room and when she looked at her watch, it was almost three o’clock. ‘When did the vicar say he was expected back?’

  ‘Oh not until four. I’m all done here. Shall we have a peek at the kitchen?’ Neville’s voice trailed off as the first-floor boards creaked overhead.

  ‘You’re right, there definitely is something up there,’ Nancy said.

  Neville scratched his ear, his pale blue eyes fixed to the ceiling. ‘You don’t think the vicar is hiding from us?’

  ‘Of course not, don’t be an idiot, Neville. I’m going upstairs.’ She walked as quietly as she could back into the hall and up the stairs with Neville following behind, his breath noisy like wind coming through a window crack. Other than that, there was no sound but Neville’s and Nancy’s feet on the thin stair carpet. It was most probably mice, Nancy thought as she reached the landing. She stepped firmly across to the first door which opened to reveal nothing more exciting than Ted Brain’s bedroom that was so bare it could have belonged to a monk. Neville peered in across her shoulder and with an irritated shrug Nancy hurried across the landing to the next door. She began to feel ridiculous as she flung open the door to an empty bathroom and then the door next to that. ‘Well what did I—’ She paused in the doorway.

  ‘Good God!’ She took a step back as she saw the reflection in the mirror on the wall by the unmade bed.

  ‘Come out of there, do you hear, come out at once!’

  A boy and girl stepped out from their hiding place behind the wardrobe. Nancy had not seen either of them before.

  ‘Why are you hiding like this? Are you friends of the vicar?’

  The girl, slight and dark-skinned nodded, her eyes huge and frightened.

  ‘We startled them.’ Neville had squeezed in between Nancy and the door. ‘Did you think we were burglars maybe?’

  ‘Using a key and speaking of a new colour scheme for the sitting-room? Hardly, Neville,’ Nancy snapped.

  ‘Anita lives here,’ the boy mumbled, his blond head turned away.

  ‘You live here? Well…’ Nancy said, ‘that certainly explains a lot of things.’

  Neville had been staring, goggle-eyed at the girl and now his face brightened. ‘I know where I’ve seen you. You’re the young lady that went missing a couple of months ago. Your picture was all over the Tribune.’

  Nancy turned to Neville. ‘This is the missing Fairfield teenager? I don’t believe it.’ She looked hard at the girl. ‘Are you saying that all this time you’ve been here, at the vicarage?’

  The girl nodded.

  ‘The vicar allowed this, knowing what your parents must be going through?’

  The girl lifted her head. ‘No, he didn’t know who I was. I pretended to be someone else.’ The last was said in a voice no louder than a whisper.

  ‘Who?’

  ‘I told him I was looking for asylum.’

  ‘Asylum!’ Nancy snorted. ‘I always thought he was a fool, but this… !’

  ‘Don’t talk about him like that,’ the girl narrowed her eyes at Nancy. ‘He’s a very brave man. He really thought he was hiding a helpless refugee.’

  Nancy took no notice of the protest. ‘But two months… what sort of a community is this when our own vicar can have a young woman living with him for two months and no-one even noticing? I never did like this new vicarage, stuck half-way up a field.’ She looked hard at the girl. ‘I’ll give you, you look quite different from your picture, but still… I find it very difficult to believe that the vicar hasn’t recognized you.’

  ‘He doesn’t take the local paper!’ the girl shouted.

  Nancy raised her eyebrows. ‘Well we can’t stand around here. Now you come with me downstairs. We must call your poor parents before we do anything else.’

  The girl hurried forward and grabbed Nancy by the arm. ‘Don’t interfere. You shouldn’t be here anyway. Ted didn’t say you could come bursting in to his house like this.’

  ‘I beg your pardon young lady, we were not bursting anywhere.’

  ‘It was meant to be a surprise,’ Neville looking unhappy, tried to explain, annoying Nancy by retreating from the room with apologetic little phrases. ‘A caring gesture towards our vicar.’

  ‘Hello, what’s going on up there?’ Nancy turned round as Ted’s voice reached them from downstairs. ‘Veena, are you all right?’ They heard Ted’s feet running up the narrow staircase.

  ‘Mrs Sanderson, Neville, what are you doing here? What’s going on? Veena, who is this boy?’

  Twenty-three

  Ted Brain knelt in front of the altar in Tollymead church, his chest and arms resting on the red velvet railings, his head hanging like a broken-necked bird’s.

  ‘It was my pride, wasn’t it, Lord?’ he whispered. ‘My sinful pride and my lack of love for the people here?’ He stifled a sob. Light footsteps against the stone floor made him straighten up and turn round. ‘Oh, it’s you.’ He heaved himself up from the floor.

  Anita stopped a little distance away, not quite looking at him. ‘I don’t know what to say other than I’m sorry.’

  Ted sank back down on to the altar steps, hugging his knees with his arms. ‘All of it, the whole charade just so you could be with this, this young lout you believe you’re in love with.’

  ‘You sound like my parents.’

  ‘Oh, I don’t feel like your father I can assure you.’ Ted buried his face in his arms. The girl said nothing and after a while he looked up at her. ‘How could you do it to me? I loved you.’

  ‘Why did you make it so easy for me?’ All accent had gone from her voice. ‘Why were you so ready to believe my ridiculous story? I never really thought you would. It was all done on a whim. I had to get away for a while, to think and to see Paul without my parents breathing down my neck. You see,’ she paused, ‘I’m pregnant.’

  Ted gave a choked snuffle and a tear, then another one rolled down his pink cheek.

  ‘Oh Ted please,’ Anita put her hand out to him but he turned away, shaking his head like a child.

  ‘I saw this article in the paper about clergy running safe houses for asylum seekers threatened with deportation.’ She looked down at her feet. ‘It started off as a bit of a joke really. Paul lives over at the new estate.’ She gave him a small smile. ‘You didn’t know, but he’s one of your parishioners. He said you were just the sort of person who would be involved in that kind of thing. “That’s our vicar all
right,” he said. “He’s one of those trendy types, always going on about some cause or another with about as much of an idea of what’s really going on as you could fit on a gnat’s—”’ She hesitated.

  ‘Gnat’s?’

  ‘Arse,’ the girl mumbled.

  Ted groaned, his face hidden once more in his arms.

  Anita took a step towards him, putting her hand out, then letting it fall back to her side. ‘One night I just couldn’t take it any more, all of them going on and on at me, arguing with each other, wanting to decide for us. “You have to get married. Don’t get married. Go and live with your aunt. Stay and finish school. Have the baby adopted. Let us look after it.” On and on. I thought I was going to faint. All I could see was their mouths opening and closing, opening and closing.’ Her voice shook. ‘I just couldn’t take it, so I grabbed some things and ran out of the house. But I couldn’t stay at Paul’s place. His parents don’t approve of me any more than mine do of him. We’re still at school. We have no money. None of our friends’ parents would put me up. I couldn’t live on the streets, not with a baby to think of. That’s when Paul said, “Go on. Go across to the vicarage. Tell him you’re a refugee or something. He’ll believe you. He’ll get you somewhere to stay, some nice cosy vicarage.” It was almost like a joke.’ She took a step closer. ‘Please Ted. Forgive me. It just all sort of happened. I never thought you’d believe me. Then when you did, it was all so easy, so restful. I just floated along, no school, no hassles, no-one telling me what to do. I could even see Paul. Ted please, can’t you try to understand?’

  Ted pressed his face harder against the sleeves of his jumper.

  ‘You believed everything I said because of my colour.’ The girl sounded suddenly cross. ‘In your own way you’re just as prejudiced as the people you fight against. And in case you should ask, I didn’t think my parents were going to force me into an arranged marriage, nor are they planning to stone me. They just don’t like Paul because he’s got a record. And I know they’d just take over. I had to have time to think, to decide what I wanted. I didn’t even know if I wanted to keep the baby.’