by Wendy Holden
The suggestion, by extension, was that you should enjoy life while it lasted. Nell felt her inner screw of discontent take another twist. She would love to enjoy life, except that life seemed bent on being as unenjoyable as possible. She was hemmed in by the actions of others, unable to do anything for herself. How had that happened? Since when had she lost control?
She entered the church and breathed in the musty-cold smell of age, wood and hymn books. The door swung shut behind her and the sound boomed through the dark interior.
It was a perfect English country church, with everything where it should be. Tudor tombs in the chancel, Georgian memorials on the walls and Victorian colour and carving round the altar. Drawings of some cataclysmic biblical event by the children of the local school were pinned to a padded board by the font. Every pew had tapestried kneelers; there were ones with tractors on, as well as animals and birds. Quite a few had the by-now-familiar Pemberton coat of arms.
Nell sat down and found herself closing her eyes, clasping her hands, dipping her head and silently asking for help in straightening the tangled threads of her life.
Feeling vaguely soothed, she retraced her steps along the aisle and back out into the porch. The churchyard, which had been empty, now had one other person in it. An old man, crouching before a grave just opposite the porch, was setting out garden tools, clearly preparing to do some work there.
For all his evident advanced age, there was something very proud, clean and tidy about him. His thick white hair was ploughed neatly with comb-lines and the sleeves of his pressed white shirt were rolled up very precisely at the elbows. He wore brown trousers with braces, and a fawn-coloured cardigan was folded up beside his gardening tool bag.
He had brought some small flowering plants in pots to add to the grave which was, Nell now saw, a garden in miniature. Tiny early roses flowered in pink and red profusion but not so high as to obscure what was spelt out neatly in black capitals on the weathered grey granite of the simple arched headstone: EDWINA MARGARET HARRINGTON FARLEY 1926–2004. BELOVED WIFE OF GEORGE ERNEST FARLEY.
His wife’s, Nell thought. Meaning that the man before her was George Ernest Farley. She was about to step out of the porch when she heard a low, steady voice. Mr Farley, she realised, was talking.
‘Well, Edwina, love,’ he was saying. ‘I’m sorry it’s been a while since I came.’
Nell, who had not been intending to listen, was struck by his strong northern accent. It sounded unexpected for what was presumably the husband of the magnificent-sounding Edwina Margaret Harrington Farley. Had they married across the classes, back in the 1940s or whenever it was?
‘But I do have a bit of good news for you,’ Mr Farley continued. ‘Those rotten people next door have finally gone. You can imagine how relieved I am. You know I don’t drink these days – not since the pub went all posh, like. But I did wish I could nip down the Edenville as it used to be and celebrate with a few pints.’
Nell absorbed this glimpse of village politics. So the gentrification of the Edenville Arms had not been without its consequences.
‘Now you know I don’t like to moan owermuch in case you worry about me,’ Mr Farley continued. He spoke to Edwina as if she were really lying there, listening.
‘But next door, they really were pretty dreadful and I doubt that even you, who could find the good in anyone, could have found any in them.’
Should she show herself? Nell wondered. This was all so intimate that eavesdropping seemed wrong. On the other hand, if she suddenly appeared, the old man might be embarrassed. Or shocked. Better to stay where she was.
‘The noise, Edwina!’ Mr Farley was exclaiming. ‘Now, I’m used to noise, as you know. The racket in a night-flying Lancaster isn’t something you forget in a hurry! Especially after you open fire. But there was a good reason for that. And there was no excuse for that screaming, shrieking child next door.’
Mr Farley paused and pressed the earth round the base of one of the new little plants. Then he sat back on his heels again. ‘At first, as you know, I tried to put up with it. Then I asked them to tone it down. I was never asking for complete silence, of course. That would be unrealistic, and even unfair. But a bit of consideration would have been nice. We were living very close to each other, after all.’
He was bedding in another plant now, pressing the soil down with the tines of his fork. ‘But then the mother turns up! So aggressive, Edwina, you wouldn’t have believed it. Flouncing round, bristling with fury. Swearing. Asking me who the beeping beep I thought I was. Telling me that this was a free country.’ The old man sighed. ‘Well, I knew that of course. None better. Hadn’t I helped to make it that way?’
From the porch, Nell watched the old man taking his trowel and scooping a hole for another little plant. ‘And after that, Edwina, she started playing this terrible music really loudly in her garden. Booming, pounding row, it was. Like the fall of distant bombs. I couldn’t bear it, so I went round again and saw the husband. Or partner or whatever they call them these days. He was useless. Puny, weaselly little creature, who wouldn’t look me in the eye.’
Mr Farley had turned to tackle another part of the grave and was now directly facing Nell. She pressed herself against the porch wall where the shadow fell, hoping that he wouldn’t look up and see her. It felt very wrong to be listening, but it was also terribly touching. The old man had clearly adored Edwina, who must have been his wife for many years. And equally obviously he missed her terribly.
He was still talking; about the noisy child, Nell gathered. ‘I’d even find her in the house!’ he was exclaiming. ‘She’d come wandering in while I was out in the back garden. Through that hole I told you about, that one she hacked in the hedge. I’d find her raiding my blooming biscuit tin!’
An agitated cough now shook the elderly frame. Then the old man continued.
‘I’d ask her to go away, and she’d say she’d go where she beeping well liked. It was her human right. When I said that I had rights as well, including not having people wandering into my house and helping themselves to my things, she said go on then, sue me.’
Nell was listening indignantly. What appalling people, to treat this decent old man like that!
‘I ask you, Edwina love. How does a child that age know about suing? How has life got so . . . degraded? What was that war we fought all for?’
Nell bit her lip.
‘I don’t know, love. Everything’s gone. It’s all different. That world we lived in together has nothing in common with this one, where I’m on my own.’
Nell felt her throat tighten. Her eyes pricked and tears brimmed over her lashes. ‘Oh Edwina,’ the old man was saying as, tenderly, he pressed the earth back down around the roses. ‘I miss you so much, my love. I miss you every minute of every day.’
CHAPTER 30
The human resources office of the Pemberton estate was a palatial establishment. It was housed in a gracious Georgian house in the estate park and entered via a shining black front door with a white-painted fanlight and brass fittings. Inside was a double-height stone-floored hall whose terracotta walls were hung with large paintings of oversized cows and colourful game birds.
A panelled corridor with a herringbone wooden floor led off this hall. It was punctuated by broad mahogany doors. A sign on one of these read: ‘Angela Highwater. Director’.
Angela sat within, staring at her computer screen. She was reading the e-mailed CV sent through by Nell Simpson, the woman she was to interview later that day. As late as humanly possible, after Angela’s appointments at the beauty salon, after she had ordered her groceries online. Of all today’s priorities, Nell Simpson was Angela’s last and lowest.
‘This isn’t a CV,’ Angela snapped at her timid assistant, Gail. ‘It’s just a paragraph about her catalogue work. What about her exam results, the schools she went to?’ Angela fel
t she had a right to know these things. Where someone had grown up, what their background was. She vehemently disagreed with the latest school of HR thought: that personal information such as addresses and exam results encouraged preconceived ideas about applicants. Preconceived ideas were the whole point.
‘It doesn’t even have an address on,’ she complained.
‘It doesn’t have to,’ ventured Gail. ‘If someone’s of no fixed abode and has to say so on their application it might prejudice people against them.’
‘Exactly! Save us wasting our time.’
‘But it’s not always their own fault that people are homeless,’ pointed out Gail, whose timidity concealed an ineradicable sense of fairness.
‘Of course it bloody is.’
Gail hesitated, but realised there was no point arguing with Angela. She had clearly had a difficult weekend and intended to take it out on whoever came to hand. Her boss had had a lot of difficult weekends recently; her moods, always unpredictable, were now predictably black.
Gail guessed that, underneath all the bluster and spite, Angela was simply lonely. She knew from the estate tom-tom about the failure of Angela’s recent efforts to establish a relationship with Dan Parker. Gail felt sorry for her boss. Her high-handed, bullying ways made her as unpopular as her outlandish appearance made her the subject of mockery. But Gail, unlike most other staff, could remember a different Angela. Years ago, when Gail had first come to work with her, Angela had been funny and clever. That humour and insight had now sharpened into something mean and aggressive, and yet Gail felt sure the original Angela remained somewhere within.
‘She’s obviously completely unsuitable,’ the Director of Human Resources grumbled now, re-reading Nell’s summary of her experience.
Gail disagreed. ‘She’s done a lot of commercial writing,’ she ventured, ‘which is a large part of this job.’
Angela glared at her assistant. Gail’s own job, as Assistant Director of Human Resources, was to make Angela’s coffee and answer Angela’s phone. Not to have opinions about the suitability – or otherwise – of applicants.
‘I thought the Earl told you to give it to her anyway,’ Gail added, knowing she was pushing her luck, but unable to resist.
Angela thumped the top of her desk. A photograph fell over.
‘Whether she gets the job is up to me. And I don’t mind telling you that, as things stand, she won’t.’
Gail propped the picture back up – it was one of His Lordship with Angela – and tried not to look as surprised as she felt. That Angela thought herself more powerful than the Earl was a new development. She had, up until now, always seemed to have a grasp of realpolitik.
‘She’s never worked on a big estate, for a start,’ Angela added.
Neither had Ros Downer, thought Gail. Ros had been a freelance, although freelance what was anyone’s guess.
‘She’s also gay, of course,’ Angela continued. Jason had not had the heart to disabuse her of this illusion.
Gail wondered what on earth that had to do with anything. Surely it was Nell’s business.
Angela could always tell when her assistant was thinking subversive thoughts. ‘Go and get me a bloody coffee!’ she yelled. ‘I’ll get rid of Nell Simpson somehow,’ she vowed, as Gail scurried out. ‘There’s no way she’s coming to work here.’
Nell, still killing time, lunched in the same café in which she had met the Earl. But there was no sign of him today. It ebbed and flowed with tourists instead; a low, cheerful buzz of chatter accompanied Nell’s thoughtful chewing of her salmon sandwich. Her thoughts kept returning to Mr Farley tending his wife’s grave. Nell felt a strange affinity with the lonely old man. She wondered who would move in next door to replace his nasty neighbours. In other circumstances, she would rather have liked to herself. Then she could have kept an eye on him. They could have become friends.
It was now afternoon, but some hours yet from four. Nell had wandered into the gardens of Pemberton Hall. The day had remained sunnily cheerful. The trees were burgeoning with new summer growth and the warm grass glittered and shone.
The great sweep of green was full of people enjoying themselves. Dogs bounded towards her, pursued by their owners. Groups of older walkers strode along purposefully under broad-brimmed white cotton hats.
It was all, Nell thought, so active, so positive. So why couldn’t she feel positive too? Yet the feeling of being neither here nor there persisted. Edenville. London. She didn’t want to stay here, she didn’t want to return there. She didn’t want to be interviewed for a new job but nor did she want to carry on with her old one. As a plane roared overhead, dragging the noise through the sky behind, Nell wished she were on it.
Her mobile rang. It was not, as she had expected, Rachel. So who was this Unknown Caller? Her heart jumped painfully. Not Joey. Anyone but him.
But the accents of the young man on the other end were unfamiliar. He sounded anxious and upset. ‘You don’t know me,’ he gasped, ‘but my name is Ben and me and my wife Dora are trying to buy your flat.’
‘Oh.’ Nell was disconcerted. The newlyweds.
‘We had our hearts set on it,’ Ben continued. ‘Dora’s pregnant. We thought we’d be moving in to Gardiner Road in the next few weeks, but Carrington’s have just rung us and said that you’ve taken it off the market.’
‘Yes,’ Nell said slowly. ‘I have.’
‘I don’t know your reasons,’ the young man continued. ‘And I’m sure you have good ones. But if there was any possibility at all that you could still sell the flat to us we’d be grateful for ever. We’d looked all over London and we’d given up hope until we saw 19a. We loved it as soon as we walked in.’
Nell remembered how much she had come to dislike the place, how confining it had come to seem. Clearly, one man’s prison was another man’s paradise.
‘That garden,’ Ben continued with what sounded like genuine longing. ‘It had such potential.’
‘It certainly had that,’ Nell conceded. Until Rachel had turned up, that was pretty much all it had. She could imagine how much Rachel would appreciate help with the digging. And how much Juno would enjoy a new baby downstairs.
‘Do you think you might change your mind?’ Ben sounded quite desperate. ‘It’s just that I don’t know how Dora will cope, in her state, if we have to start looking again.’
Nell hesitated. Deciding to take the flat off the market had seemed so easy. Less so now she could see the potentially devastating consequences. There was a parallel between this situation and what Joey had done to her on their wedding day. She knew what it was like to be dealt a bolt from the blue. To lose something precious and feel betrayed.
She felt herself crumbling, and tried to rally. ‘It’s just that, well, my circumstances changed. I was moving somewhere else, but it fell through.’
The young man on the other end sighed. ‘Well, I can’t argue with that,’ he said resignedly. ‘That’s fair enough. I just wanted to talk to you, see if there was anything that could be done. But I absolutely understand.’
To Nell’s guilty ear Ben’s polite acceptance seemed so much worse than any amount of angry ranting would have. Was it really fair for her to place such a great obstacle in the way of this sweet couple and their baby? Did they deserve it, when they had offered for her flat in good faith? She had broken a promise, just as Joey had. By denying them the flat, she was perpetuating Joey’s legacy of misery. Would it not be better just to sell Gardiner Road and find somewhere else?
‘These things happen,’ Ben was saying cheerfully, trying to mask his obvious disappointment. ‘It was good to speak, anyway. Thanks for talking to me.’
‘Yeah, thanks,’ Nell was about to say, when she stopped. ‘Hang on,’ she gasped. ‘I don’t think I was thinking straight before. I’ll get on to the estate agents and see if we can get t
hings started again.’
CHAPTER 31
It was five past four and Nell was waiting in the lobby of the human resources office.
‘Miss Simpson?’ A woman had appeared: short, brown-haired and dark-suited. Nell recognised the soft voice she had spoken to on the phone. ‘Ms Highwater won’t be a moment. She’s just tied up with something.’
Gail’s voice was shaking. Angela had been in the foulest of moods all day. At the moment, what she was tied up with was flicking through Hello! magazine.
Gail was struck by how friendly and pretty Nell looked. She hated to think of what would happen. Angela, with her ruthless cunning, would tease out personal revelations which she would twist into reasons against employment.
Gail had seen it happen many times to good-looking women applying for jobs at Pemberton. And these were women Angela hadn’t even been told to employ. Nell’s attractiveness, plus the directive from the Earl, could only end one way.
‘Perhaps you’d like to look at these.’ Gail presented Nell with a sheaf of estate promotional literature. She felt she wanted to give this candidate every chance.
Nell thanked her and took it, even though she’d already looked through it all in detail. There had been plenty of time after ringing Carrington’s and instructing them to re-activate the selling process with Ben and Dora. It had been a slightly embarrassing business but no more embarrassing than anything else that had happened recently. And Nell had rung off with the uplifting conviction of being firmly back on the moral high ground.
This, in turn, made her decide to take the interview more seriously and approach it more positively. For reasons of personal dignity, if nothing else. And so she had gone into the various estate shops and cafés and gathered up every Pemberton-related brochure she could find. In the dank, shady corner of a garden grotto she had squinted at the website on her smartphone. There was no getting away from the fact – especially given her new, positive frame of mind – that there was a real job to do here, and it was right up her street. She had exactly the right skills to make a wonderful success of it.
