by Barbara Vine
The tactful cough I gave made her turn round. It was a lovely smile I got, the smile that Richard gets and I get but I don't think anyone else does. She had blusher on her cheeks that she calls rouge and a little blue shadow on her eyelids but she never makes the mistake poor old Maud does of painting on a slash of crimson lipstick. Stella's lipstick is pale rose pink and I think she puts it on with a brush.
‘I was hoping you'd come, Jenny,’ she said.
I said I always did if I got the chance and I sat down beside her and we looked at the butterflies, counting ten small tortoiseshells, seven peacocks, a red admiral and another one Stella said was a comma. She's knowledgeable about things like that, nature, wildlife. She said she'd like to see a swallowtail and she's heard you only see them in Norfolk, maybe she'll see one here.
‘Before I die,’ she said. ‘Perhaps I'll see a swallowtail and die happy.’
I'd no answer to that.
‘I don't suppose I could have a cigarette, could I, Genevieve? I'd love a cigarette.’
‘Better not,’ I said. ‘You're not supposed to smoke anywhere in this building.’ The thought of it made me giggle. ‘Certainly not in here.’
‘Certainly not when you've got lung cancer. But it's rather silly, isn't it? It's too late now, the harm's done, it wouldn't matter any more. There's another red admiral. It's got such a pretty Latin name, Vanessa Atalanta…’ She turned away from the window and looked at me. ‘I want to ask you something. That is, I want you to do something for me, if you will.’
‘I will if I can,’ I said, but I had the feeling, I don't know why, that this would be no small thing.
‘You must say if you don't want to.’
‘All right.’
‘Genevieve, if I give you the key and tell you exactly where it is, will you go to my house and have a look at it and tell me – tell me what sort of state it's in?’
‘You mean that house on the Curton road?’
‘Yes, that one. It's called Molucca. I believe Captain Wainwright who owned it before Mr Rogerson was a seafaring man and had been to the East Indies.’ She smiled at me and said gently, ‘Would you do that for me? Go and look at it and tell me what you think?’
‘Yes, I suppose so,’ I said and, because that didn't sound very gracious, ‘Of course I will, Stella.’ I hesitated, I didn't know how to say this, but I had to try. ‘Stella, wouldn't it be better for Richard to do this? Couldn't you tell him about the house and ask him to go? He's so nice, he won't mind, will he? He won't be cross or upset or anything.’
She liked me saying her son was nice. She went a little pink. ‘I want you to do it, Jenny,’ she said. ‘It's best for Marianne and Richard not to know. Not yet. If this doesn't sound too melodramatic, not till after I'm dead.’ Her eyes turned away from me but not to the window, to look at a blank wall. ‘It embarrasses me,’ she said very quietly. ‘I'm sorry, but – but it's not the sort of thing one would – want one's children to know. Will you go there for me?’
‘I'll go this evening,’ I said.
‘Oh, and Genevieve? You will drive carefully, won't you?’
3
It was about seven miles away by road. Much nearer, of course, as the crow flies. Stella and I had probably looked over no more than a mile or two of countryside from that upstairs window. The road took me out of Tharby and past Thelmarsh Mill, it's absolutely straight and all the hedges have gone, a Roman road, where the thundering legion marched up the eastern side of England. I went through Newall Pomeroy and followed the sign for Breckenhall. I was almost sure I knew the precise spot and I was right. The road was narrow, straight and flat, and the houses stood well back from it, first the white one that Stella had seen dimly and I had seen clearly, then, about a hundred yards further along, her house.
The white house had a garden with a fence that separated it from a strip of field, then the road, but the fen came right up to Stella's house, up to the walls and the front door. The fen had spread itself across the field in gorse and wormwood, nettles and rose and elder, and pushed in over whatever garden there once had been, so that the house now stood in the midst of it. Along the left side had once been a track beside a ditch full of bulrushes and hemp agrimony, but this path was overgrown with thistles. Ned says the seed heads on the willowherb look like wool spun on a distaff. They were everywhere, their white fluff blowing.
It was a dull, warm evening. The sun had quite gone. I drove the car a little way up the thistly path to get it off the road. It's very silent around here when all the birds have gone to roost and even the cackling of geese has stopped. If you know our countryside you'll understand how still it can be in the evenings, how soft and hushed, almost as if it were listening for something. The fen has big trees in it but mostly it's like a forest of bushes, the water not far below the surface, and all the reeds and rushes, the hazel and the dogwood, moving very faintly, whispering and shuffling. When all else is quiet you can still hear the trickle of water.
I was very aware of all this as I approached the house. It was the only one I'd ever seen that was actually in the fen, or that the fen had taken over. A mountain ash had grown from a seedling right up against the front door, its berries the same colour as the red clay tiles on the roof. Four windows looked back at me. They were shaped like windows in a church with pointed tops, but the glass in them was clear, not stained. The front door was inside a little porch with a peaked roof and on the left-hand side was a garage made of black weatherboard. It was a flint house, the walls were of uncut flints that look like pebbles from a beach, but these pebbles came from the stony ground. My nan's mother, when she was young, used to get paid a halfpenny a basket for picking the flints out of the fields so that they wouldn't blunt and buckle the plough. The ones on the walls of Stella's house were brown and grey and white and nearly black, all mixed up but closely matched for size and arranged in neat parallel rows.
Up above the front door was a whitish plaster oval, that builders like Mike call a plaque, with ‘Molucca’ written on it, surrounded by a wreath of leaves, all done in pargeting. I had to trample down the nettles to get to the door, I didn't want to get my legs stung. Cobwebs covered the front door, one with a dead hornet caught in its threads. The key turned quite easily in the lock. I wondered – I'd never thought to ask – how long it was since anyone had been in here. Not thirty years, of course not, but twenty? Inside, the hall was papered in a silvery pattern with faded blue flowers and there was a blue runner of carpet on the dusty wood floor. It was airless but without any smell. The front door closed itself behind me smoothly, not creaking or sticking.
I was in the sort of house you'd expect from the outside, a room on either side of the front door, a passage down the middle, a kitchen and another room at the back, stairs going up along the right-hand wall. You get to know the ages of houses if you live round here and I thought this one must be about a hundred and twenty years old.
The first room I went into was a sort of sitting room. It was on the right and it was quite big and furnished like – well, how am I going to put it? Let's say the way the middle classes and the weekenders furnish their places, the way it's done by the people my nan used to call the gentry, but not by us. By that I mean that they don't have new furniture but what they think are antiques or at least old stuff, and they have their chairs covered with fabric called chintz and rugs from India and old china. Stella's was like that. It was a pretty room, like a picture in one of those magazines about houses that you look at when you have to hang about in the medical centre. I wonder what my neighbours would say if I furnished my place like that?
There were china plates up on the walls and paintings of flowers and fruit, but the largest picture was a portrait of a woman. You could tell this was a picture someone had painted in oil paints, it wasn't reproduced or photographed or made by some other process. It must have been a yard wide and two yards long. The woman had dark hair and a pale, pretty face, she was dressed in dark pink silk, low cut and with a stif
f full skirt, and there was a double strand of pearls round her neck. In her hand she held a single pink rose. The canvas had just been pinned round a wooden base and there was no frame around it or glass to cover it. I don't know what there was about it that gave me the feeling that the painter had loved the woman in the picture, had been in love with her, perhaps the tender care with which he'd done her mouth and put the light into her eyes.
The bits of silver that were standing about were dark brown with tarnish, a silver bowl had a deep blackened dent in it, and the brass had turned black. Someone had left love-in-a-mist and sweet peas in a vase, though the water had long dried up. The flowers were dead as if they'd died a score of years ago, so that you felt they'd fall to dust if you touched them. In the bookcase were a lot of books. I like books, which surprises some people. I like handling them as well as reading, so I took one out and saw that the paper was yellow and smelt sour. Dust was everywhere, blue on the wood surfaces and fluffy grey on the upholstery, puffing out of the curtains in a cloud when I tapped them with my finger.
There was just as much in the dining room. You couldn't tell what colour the table was, the dust on the surface was so thick, like a fluffy cloth that had been laid on the wood. I opened the sideboard and found it full of framed pictures. Someone had taken them off the walls and stuffed them in here. Now I knew that fact I could see the pale squares where the pictures had hung.
There were paintings of children and animals, nice enough but I didn't pay them much attention. At the bottom of the stack was a photograph of a man and a woman standing close together. It wasn't that old. I mean, it had been taken in my lifetime, maybe in the sixties. The woman's hair made me think that. It was dark hair back-combed, with two side bits curling on to her cheeks. She was the woman in the oil painting and she was wearing the same pink evening dress. That seemed strange to me, for they were obviously outdoors, the background was a cliff or rock face, but she was in a low-cut silk dress and he was in jeans and a check shirt. He was tall and thin, fair and with the sort of face that looks as if he'd always be laughing. Smiling came naturally to him and you could see the lines his smiles had left behind. The odd thing was that I felt I'd seen him somewhere, even that I knew him. And that was ridiculous because I don't meet many new people, as you can imagine. Besides, it's a sad fact that if he looked like that when I was a baby he wouldn't look like it now.
I went on upstairs where there were three bedrooms. Heat rises, they say, and it was very warm up there. The dust was even worse. Downstairs had been fully furnished but upstairs only the front bedroom had any furniture in it, a double bed, a wardrobe, a dressing table, a couple of chairs, all of it Victorian stuff. The bedcover was of patchwork, hand-stitched, I should think, in various shades of blue and red. I pulled it back in a cloud of dust and saw that the sheets were still on and the pillowcases. The summer had been warm but when I put my hand inside the bed the sheets felt damp, a chill against my palm. I'd been wondering how they heated the place, there were no radiators, only fireplaces, but in here was an oil heater, the really old-fashioned kind like a black funnel on legs.
As I've said, the other two bedrooms had no furniture in them. They had no carpeting on their floors. It was as if the people who'd lived there had said, there'll never be anyone here but us, we'll never have friends to stay, so why furnish those two rooms? The bathroom was old-fashioned and a bit grim the way the kitchen was, very much in need of a re-fit. Another oil heater, the panel kind, was pushed up against the wall. I tried one of the basin taps but of course the water had been turned off years before.
I was thinking I'd explored the whole house, and at the same time wondering what I'd explored it for, what I was supposed to find out, when I noticed another door out of the kitchen apart from the one that led out into the garden – into the fen, in fact. That door, the other one, must be to the garage. It was locked.
I opened a couple of drawers to see if I could find the key but they were empty apart from linings. This particular newspaper was The Times and the date on it was 1965. Nothing very surprising in that. It was then that I looked at my watch and saw that it was six-thirty. I was meeting Ned two miles away at seven, so I had a long while, but something happens to your sense of time when there's a treat in store for you in half an hour. You have to prepare yourself, you have to be in the right frame of mind. For me that meant being there first, enjoying the waiting, watching for his car to appear on the road. You can see so far along these roads where the legion marched, you can see for miles. It was a marvellous experience for me to sit and watch the cars coming, not many, there's not much traffic, and hope and long, be disappointed, hope again, and then at last see his car, see him.
I left the house and shut the door behind me. I don't know why I walked round the garage, perhaps because a whole half-hour was too long to get to Thelmarsh Cross and then have not ten but twenty minutes to wait. The fen was trees here as well as weeds and bushes, hazel and rowan and a maze of white willow. I had to push my way through a thicket to get round the back. There was a small window in the rear of the garage and if you see a window you have to look through it, don't you?
A car was inside. Garages are for keeping cars in and what else would you expect to see in one? Not, though, in the garages of empty abandoned houses. This car was red and a Ford Anglia, a few years older than me. I knew that because my dad once had exactly that model, with a grid like a wide downturned mouth and the rear window turning inwards in a Z-shape, only his was dark blue. This one's tyres were flat. It was thickly covered with dust. I wondered if Stella knew it was there.
I went back to my own car and drove by a roundabout route to Thelmarsh Cross, through Breckenhall and Curton and past the garage my dad used to have a part share in. Curton village street is wide but the back lanes are narrow with high hedge banks and you can't go fast. If you do more than about twenty miles an hour you can go head-on into someone coming the other way, which happened to my brother when he was seventeen. The other person wasn't hurt but he broke two ribs and his left arm. It suited me to go slowly, to while away the time.
Thelmarsh Cross was one of our regular meeting places, but as I sat there in the car I thought that maybe we shouldn't meet there any more. It was too open, the place where the two roads crossed sheltered by woodland on only one quarter, the rest exposed. I suppose we'd chosen it because there were no houses and because no one in a car would choose to pass this way going to or coming from Tharby. But you can never really bank on that sort of thing. It may be true for some people that danger adds spice to a love affair, but I don't need it, ours isn't that kind of love affair, and if danger means the chance of being found out, I'm afraid of it. I'm afraid of the consequence of that, never seeing him again.
So I sat there, watching the cars come down the long white road. There weren't many and mostly it was empty. It was silent too until someone in the distance fired a shotgun and the plovers in the field took to the air in a cloud of rustling wings. I saw a car like his, same make, same colour, come over the hill, and I felt my heart turn over. Of course it's not your heart, it's a nerve pulling at your stomach or your gut. I put my hand up to the wooden charm and held it. The car wasn't Ned's, a woman was driving it, and it was no one I knew.
When he did come, two minutes late, it wasn't from that direction at all, but along the other road and I wasn't prepared, I didn't see him until the car drew up alongside mine. We looked into each other's faces and we both smiled. In that moment, for me, there's no past and no future, just the present, the absolute here and now. He drove deeper along the track into the wood and I followed. We stopped when we knew the cars would be hidden under the trees.
At those meetings, at first, we never talked much. We put our arms round one another and held each other tight and kissed. It was always like that. Out of doors, in the warm summer air. We kissed as if it was the first time, as if it was that night all over again when I gave him the love charm, and we had our first kiss in the open air,
in the dark.
After a while he said, ‘Where are you taking me?’
‘A place in the wood,’ I said. ‘A hidden place. I found it when I was a child.’
‘No more haystack?’
‘They've taken it away to thatch Fletchers' roof.’ I took his hand. We walked along hand in hand. ‘I love you,’ I said.
‘I know,’ he said. ‘I need you to love me. If you'll only say the word, one word, I'll leave Jane and come to be with you.’
We had had this conversation before and we would have it again. ‘For ever?’
‘For ever, as far as I can tell. Yes, for ever. Why not? I'll burn every one of my boats for you, Jenny. I'll poison the wells and sack the city and come over the river and burn my boats.’
‘Then I must be careful not to say that word by accident,’ I said and I was clutching the charm till my hand hurt.
‘We'll live in the cottage and make a big scandal.’ He's got a lot of imagination. ‘Your mum will have to give up the Legion. The Bury Free Press will interview me and take pictures. But we'll be in bliss.’
