by Angela Huth
‘Oh yes, please,’ she said eventually, and decided to return one old-fashioned courtesy with another. ‘I would be most grateful.’ The man took her list.
Any lack of customers in the linen department that afternoon was made up for by Rachel’s purchases. The obliging York-shireman at her side, sifting easily through prices, sizes and textures, inspired her to buy extravagantly. The whole process, having magically turned from a chore to a mad kind of pleasure, she prolonged for as much time as possible. In two hours she had completely restocked her cupboard not only with sheets, but with a dozen towels and a dozen blankets besides. Her eyes grew accustomed to the flat lighting: she began to understand the structure of the place, the order among the stock, and the secure pleasure in maintaining that order that her helper must feel. She began to comprehend the anticipation he must feel each morning, returning to his flocks of linens, being in charge. She envied him the purpose of his life, the usefulness.
‘It will all be delivered tomorrow,’ he assured her, when finally the large bill was paid. The tower blocks of stuff she had bought stood impressively on the counter, nicely balanced. Rachel, who had never experienced the adrenalin brought about by shopping, familiar to many women, stood looking at her purchases with a strange new excitement.
‘Would you mind,’ she asked, ‘if I took just a few of them home with me now, in a couple of bags?’
The man did not hesitate. As if he silently understood her need for proof of her acquisitions, he quickly put a few pairs of sheets into strong bags.
‘Not too heavy?’
‘Not at all, thank you.’ There was no possible reason to stay longer.
‘Then I’ll see to these others right away. They’ll be on the delivery van tomorrow. You can rely on me, Madam.’
‘Oh, I can.’ Rachel realised she was smiling. She hoped she did not sound frivolous, insincere. ‘Thank you again.’
With great reluctance she left the store and made her way back to the bus stop. By now the sky had darkened, congealed. The wind was fierce and icy, sharpened with occasional blades of rain. She took her place at the back of a long queue, shivered. The bags were sudden dead weights. She wondered how long she could bear standing there. A fragment of dialogue splattered in her mind.
‘I went to a linen sale at John Lewis this afternoon.’
‘Did you?’
‘Completely restocked everything.’
‘Marvellous.’
‘I was lucky enough to find a very helpful man.’
‘Good, good. Now, what about a drink?’
It was a dialogue that would never take place because, being the mere introduction, it was pointless. The nub of the matter, were she ever able to explain it, would be of no interest to Thomas. She had learned long ago not to ruffle his evenings by accounts of her own mundane day. As the wind slashed her cheeks and bit into her breastbone – with both hands occupied with bags there was no hope of adjusting her scarf – she felt hot ribbons of tears fleeing from her eyes, mingling with the rain.
The bus came at last. Somehow she survived the journey, complications of reaching purse and money, wedging the bags of linen between tottery feet, tears obscuring her eyes. Millions of women, with much bleaker lives than mine, have to survive such experiences every day, she told herself. But they don’t cry. Why am I crying?
It was then the enticing thought of bed came to her. Sleep. The privacy of her room. Refuge.
Later, she realised that this strange vision had given her strength to walk the short distance from the bus stop to the house, hunched against the wind, shaking, crying. Once through the front door, she dropped coat, bags, gloves and scarf randomly on the floor, ran up the stairs as if pursued. Reaching the bedroom, she slammed the door behind her, drew the curtains across the vile sky, and threw herself on the bed. Immediately the cover was dampened with her tears. She had no idea for how long she sobbed, but eventually she fell asleep.
When Rachel awoke, some three hours later, she felt refreshed, calm. She lay for a while, looking round the dull room – walls, once cream, now the colour of old teeth, herbaceous curtains with flowers the unreal colours of illustrations on seed packets; kidney-shaped dressing-table, from her childhood bedroom, with a limp skirt of indeterminate green. The thought came to her that, having replenished the linen cupboard, her next job would be the bedroom. The ideas for its transformation began to dance in her mind.
An hour later, face carefully repaired, she put the matter to Thomas over their dinner of oxtail stew.
‘Why ever not?’ he said, after a few moments of the kind of huffing and puffing which indicated co-operative thought. (At times of disagreement, he answered swiftly.) ‘In fact, while you’re about it, why not do something to the whole house? It hasn’t been touched since we moved, has it? Could do with a lick of paint, I should say.’
Rachel followed his look towards the lugubrious walls of the dining room, paper stained and cracked in the corners, damask curtains bleached by years of sun at their edges, symbols of uncared-for middle age. Never having been interested in interior decoration, she had organised the refurbishments, when they bought the house, without enthusiasm. A friend had brought to her notice wallpaper that looked like drag paint, ubiquitously popular in the mid-1960s. Rachel had used it in many different colours. She had noticed at first that this paper gave the rooms a stiff, prim air, but familiarity soon dulled the impact. Elsewhere she resorted to cream or white paint – hopelessly impractical with young children – while for curtains and sofas she chose fabrics of a sub William Morris design. Subsequently she discovered her liking for this material was shared by an unusual number of doctors and dentists, in whose waiting rooms she spent many hours. But the idea of change did not occur to her. Rather, she was pleased to observe that so many others shared her taste.
While Thomas’s reaction to doing up the bedroom was pleasing, his suggestion about the rest of the house alarmed. Rachel knew her interest and energy would never extend that far, but murmured her agreement – this was not the time to convey her fears. Instead, a budget for the bedroom was discussed. Thomas suggested a figure far in excess of anything Rachel had imagined. He was not mean when it came to material things.
For the next month, wholly preoccupied by the confusion of choosing things for the room, Rachel did not cry again. The Afternoon of the Linen Sale was a dream she did not dwell upon. The only proof it had ever happened were the new sheets, wool blankets and luxurious towels that now occupied the shelves. She spent recklessly, for the first time in her life enjoying the unnerving exhilaration that comes from parting with large sums of money on things that are not strictly necessary. Thomas did not seem to mind, and was pleased with the end result.
‘Meant to be an aphrodisiac, what?’ he joked, tugging at the curtains of the four-poster, the first night it was ready for use.
He fell asleep as usual, conceding it was money well spent, and Rachel fell in love with the bed, the room. The next morning she began her new ritual: the return to bed after Thomas’s departure. That afternoon she was compelled to go up to the room again, gaze in pleasure at the ruffled chintz wild with hollyhocks, the dressing-table transformed to look like a debutante in a lace balldress, the walls demurely pink as old roses. She found herself pulling back the quilted bedcover, returning to the linen sheets, scarcely creased by a single night, and sleeping.
Thereafter, the pattern was established. Bed in the morning, bed for a couple of hours every afternoon. She became a secret sleeper, addicted to her room. At moments of stress, or melancholy, the thought of the silent private life in that room gave her strength. No matter how surly Thomas appeared before his morning departure, by the time Rachel had had her afternoon sleep, she felt the better able to face him again with cheerful countenance.
She spoke to no one of her habit. It was a secret closer than any lover. Thomas never enquired how she had spent her day, so there was no need to lie. But she found, as she knew she would, all passion was spent
on the bedroom – the rest of the house remained as it had always been. She was grateful to Thomas for not chiding her: one day she would do something about it, but her time was now pleasantly structured. There was no need to look for further occupation.
On the afternoon of the day Thomas bought the picture in Nottingham, Rachel slept as usual, having read a Chekhov short story to speed the heaviness of her eyes. She was woken prematurely by the telephone – some amorphous feeling of guilt determined she should not switch it off. What if she was needed in an emergency? (What emergency, for heaven’s sake, she had asked herself impatiently.) It was Thomas’s secretary, and certainly not an emergency. Simply, she said, he was on his way back and would be home for dinner after all.
Rachel forced herself from the warm nest of her pillows, reluctant and annoyed. She had planned her own supper of poached eggs; now she would have to search for something in the deep freeze, peel carrots, arrange cheese on a plate with several kinds of biscuit. But, restored by her sleep, her ill humour did not last long. She set about preparing dinner, listening to the radio as she chopped things for salad, quite happy. She did not wonder what sort of plans had changed in Thomas’s day. As she had never been able to envisage his life at the office or the brewery, she had never bothered to find out precisely the nature of his working days.
Thomas arrived home at seven, the wrapped picture under his arm. He aimed a perfunctory kiss at Rachel’s cheek. She turned her head at the same moment, so that it landed, a damp click, on the lobe of her ear.
‘I was in luck. Missed the worst of the traffic.’
‘That was lucky.
‘Couple of French chappies in. But the evening meeting was cut, thank God.’
‘Bought another picture?’
‘Good one. Norfolk man I was telling you about. Makes the paint billow, somehow, rather like Turner.’ He was pouring himself a drink, awkwardly, the picture still under his arm, impatience to study it again making him clumsy. ‘When’s dinner?’
‘An hour.’
‘I’m famished.’
‘Less, if you like.’
‘I’ll be down.’
Thomas hurried out and upstairs, as he did every evening, moments after his return home, to his studio at the top of the house. There, with shaking fingers, he tore the paper from the picture and put it on an easel.
The studio was originally an attic bedroom. A large window had been inset into the sloping roof, giving good light. If Thomas looked up through it, with half-shut eyes, he could pretend he was under a naked sky, clouds scudding about his head. From the ordinary casement window, the only view was of treetops. Their leaves were a searing green, this May evening – the colour peculiar to the foliage of early summer, a green so intense that it burns itself out in a couple of weeks: darkens, loses its initial shine. The treetops were very familiar to Thomas, by now: gossipy, restless, city trees, anxious in wind, prematurely wizened by sun and fumes, pathetic – in a way that country trees never are – in their winter nakedness. Thomas was quite fond of them, despite the longing they caused him for an eventual life in Herefordshire, county of his birth. One day, not too far off now when the children were grown-up, he planned to move to some remote hill there, keep a few cows, convert a barn into a decent studio. . . . But to achieve this dream would mean many a dreary confrontation with Rachel. He had little heart for such events at the moment. At some point he would have to take the bull by the horns (heavens, was he still afflicted with Gillian’s dreadful expressions?) and broach the subject. He hoped there would be no need to threaten: but she was such a stubborn old thing, sometimes, Rachel.
Thomas swerved his eyes from the chortling leaves of the trees outside to the calm spaces of sky and sea in his new picture. He sipped at the icy gin and tonic, hearing gulls somewhere in the back of his mind, feeling the cold hardness of slatted sand beneath his feet, smelling the shell scent of sea. ... As a small boy, he had asked his mother (blistered shoulders, sand in her eyebrows) to catch the smell and trap it in a box so he could take it home. She had pretended to do just that, snapping shut an empty chocolate box. Home, he had opened it to find nothing but the papery smell of the extinct soft centres. Thomas had raged at his mother, and registered her first betrayal.
This R. Cotterman fellow brought it all back, God how he brought it back. How could he, Thomas, ever hope to paint a picture that would ever bring anything back to anyone? Wearily, he looked at some of his own efforts, propped randomly against the walls: stiff, dry little landscapes, heartless husks of paintings, the product of so many talentless hours, the cause of his most profound grieving.
‘Thomas, you wanted it early!’ The voice came up from the kitchen as it did most evenings, martyred, accusing, hard-done-by. ‘It’s ready. Or shall I put it back?’
On his depressed journey downstairs, Thomas decided not to talk about the picture. When he had had his private fill, he would hang it in the drawing room: Rachel’s comments could be postponed till that far-off time, What, then, should they talk about tonight? As it had not been one of her days in court, there would be no case to discuss. But, ah, inspiration, the party: the Farthingoes’ party. She would like to speculate on that. Pleased with himself for remembering something his wife would find an irresistible topic of conversation, he helped himself to the delicious veal stew. When they were both sitting down, passing each other salt and pepper, pouring Sancerre into glasses, Thomas took the plunge.
‘Tell you what I was thinking,’ he said, ‘it probably would be a good idea to get my dinner jacket cleaned sooner rather than later. I mean, there may be occasions it’s needed before the Farthingoes. And what sort of thing is it, exactly, that they’re lashing out on this time?’
He was rewarded by Rachel’s incredulous smile. But even as he studied the familiar pattern of her greying teeth, and prepared to take an interest in her answer, a vision of a young girl filled his eyes. She had long amber hair, and white knuckles small as bone thimbles, and skeletal fingers that tied knots of string faster than anything he’d ever seen.
* * *
A wind from the sea had battered the east coast all night. Rain had fallen heavily, waking Eric Yacksley, renowned postman and churchwarden of these parts for thirty years, well before dawn. He had rolled quickly from the bed and kissed his sleeping wife (she would scold him later for not waking her to get his tea) taking care to avoid the mass of curling pins that covered her head like a hedgehog’s prickles. After a quick breakfast he had pushed his heavy scarlet bicycle out to face the dark and wind-torn sky. Now, hours later, he pushed the bicycle – much heavier, with its sackload of letters – along the lane by the marsh.
Puddles, glinting from verge to verge, would make riding too perilous. For it was all a matter of balance, in Mr Yacksley’s experience, when it came to a heavily laden bike. There could be no question of taking risks when responsible for a valuable cargo of Her Majesty’s mail. So, walking it was, this morning, which meant deliveries would be on the late side. And occasional late deliveries, caused by the weather, were not a good enough reason (people round here being of an understanding nature) to give in and accept that the time had come for a van. It wasn’t that offers had not been made, more times than Mr Yacksley would remember. But, despite the tiresome pressure from head office, he had continued to refuse one. He and his bicycle had been in happy partnership for his entire working life, and he was determined it should remain that way until the day he retired. (In just two years’ time, God forbid.)
The division of opinion between head office and himself, Mr Yacksley realised, was insurmountable. And, as far as he was concerned, there was no point in wasting time trying to make them see sense. While they thought his arguments for sticking to his bike quite daft, he considered them very reasonable. Thus it would remain.
‘I like to be out in the open air,’ he had patiently explained to head office.
‘What, these days?’
Head office was a catarrhal young man who worked in a
sealed office in King’s Lynn. Radiators blasted their stuffy air so thickly that Mr Yacksley, choking, realised his good reasons emerged less convincingly than he had intended. Head office had smiled in a pitying sort of way, didn’t so much as offer a glass of water, and said the situation would be kept under review.
Head office would never understand. No hope of that. How could so shrimpish a chitling of a man ever comprehend the width of sky, the cut of wind, rain on the face, the snarl of sea? How could head office be expected to experience the inexplicable difference of every single day, outdoors? Or the blessing of pure air? How could head office ever understand why any sane man, given the choice, would not wish to spend a morning like this exposed to the elements rather than enclosed at the wheel of a van?
Mr Yacksley stopped, and looked over the marsh. The wind had quietened, but still bent the reeds. Beyond them a dun beach reached to invisible sea. A single, distant figure stood small as a peg in the landscape. Mr Yacksley could just see a flash of yellow oilskin, no larger than a goldfinch’s wing. An arm was stretched out towards something the discerning postman supposed to be an easel. He smiled. There was another one head office would no doubt consider daft. He lifted his nose into the sky, breathing deeply, feeling the chill of ozone gush through his lungs. A kestrel hovered high above him, hustled by the wind, struggling to maintain its normal stillness. Then it swooped to earth, swift as a robber’s knife. A marsh mouse for breakfast, no doubt. One day Mr Yacksley would like to take head office by the scruff of its pathetic little neck, bring it out here on a round. Force it to see life. Feel it. Smell it. Mr Yacksley smiled again, at the unlikely thought.
With a swish of heavy tyres through puddles, he set off on his way once more, turning left up the inland lane. His destination was the grey stone rectory, long abandoned by any vicar. Beside it was a matching church, long abandoned by any congregation. The two buildings, half-a-mile away, stood blackly against the sky at the top of a mild hill – the highest point for miles in these flat lands. From here, they looked in good order. Nearer, you could see the fine church tower was crumbling. Not many years from now, it would be a complete ruin. Pity, thought Mr Yacksley, each morning. He had climbed that tower every Sunday of his remembered childhood. Terrible pity. But as far as he could see, there was nothing to be done. The Lutchins shared his distress, but the Lutchins could never afford to repair the tower on their own.
