by Angela Huth
Martin installed himself at the familiar muddle of his desk, and wrote a letter of enthusiastic congratulation. Then, the luxury of time being on his side, he did something he had been meaning to do for a week or so: he searched through a book titled African Educational Development to see if there was any reference to an early paper of his own – Schooling and Age-Earnings Profiles in Zimbabwe. There was. That was a good start to the day. The rewards of an economist are to find his published papers referred to in learned journals, discussed at conferences. Martin knew the occasional joy of such acknowledgements. They revived impetus, boosted determination to face the next quest.
He made himself a cup of coffee, stood for a few moments in the quiet untidiness of the room which may have seemed chaotic to others, but to him was a place of absolute orderliness: he could lay his hands on any paper in a moment. He returned to the desk, every object sharp with sunlight, the light coating of dust brilliant as frost. There could be few more perfect places to work than a mellowed room in an Oxford College, he thought, as he often did, and would not let himself linger on the idea of leaving one day, in accordance with Ursula’s wishes.
He flipped through some journals – World Development, Economic Development and Cultural Change, Population and Development Review, making a mental note of which articles he would return to read. His sense of excited eagerness to get going was due to the fact that yesterday he had found a paper in the Journal of Development Studies that produced some evidence of maternal and child health relationships with a sibling control. . . the outcome of his own work would depend as much as possible on studies employing that very concept. Research into this subject had meant reading almost sixty scholarly papers so far, and a long list still remained.
Martin took up his pen. Beneath the veneer of enthusiasm for the present project, other thoughts spun their delaying tactics. He was impatient to receive the print-out of the new data he had brought back from Kenya – would it confirm his hypothesis? He was fascinated by a study on age earnings profiles recently carried out in Brazil by the distinguished W. Rosenberg – the paper sat tantalisingly before him. But he was also determined nothing would deter him from his own human resources theory, and he forced himself to take up the paper that had caused him so much interest yesterday.
Seven hours later, having been so absorbed in his note making he had forgotten to break for lunch, Martin closed his books at last. He stood up and stretched stiffly. It had been a good day’s work, and there was no reason to hurry home: he could carry on till evening. But such concerted concentration had tired him just enough to make the thought of leaving now, for a quiet tea with Ursula, irresistible. Further pursuit of optimal solutions could wait till tomorrow, he decided, with the slightly guilty smugness of one who knows his day’s work has contributed a small but positive link in the vast whole. He ran a finger through the dust on the only uncluttered space of desk, thinking he could never decide which light he preferred to work by, morning or afternoon, and piled the journals in private order. He was a man well pleased.
When Ursula had washed the blood from her hands and arms (the scratches were not deep) and changed into clean clothes, she returned to the kitchen. Ralph was sitting at the table reading the newspaper. Box and cat had gone. Shopping bags and baskets had been placed in a neat row on the floor.
‘What did you do?’ she asked.
‘That’s absolutely no concern of yours.’
‘It didn’t hurt you?’
‘No. It had spent all its fury on you.’
‘Where is it?’
‘Safely in the back of my car. Look, I’ll find it a new owner in the village, a cat lover. I’m sorry I ever brought it, but it’s gone now. Don’t let’s talk about it any more.’ He was still being unusually firm.
‘Sarah will be devastated.’
‘Tell her what happened and she’ll understand. I’ll try a puppy next time.’ He smiled, got up. ‘Tea? I’ll put the kettle on.’
Ursula nodded. She watched him in silence as he efficiently made a pot of tea, chose her two favourite mugs from the dresser, familiar with everything as if the place was his.
‘You all right? How are those scratches?’
Ralph came towards her, lifted her arm. He studied the long pink marks. They were slightly swollen.
‘I’m fine.’ In truth, Ursula felt shaken. ‘It was the fright more than anything. I don’t know what I’d have done if you hadn’t come. How did you manage to appear at precisely the crucial moment?’
‘You know me. Always turning up here.’ He was stroking the scratches with a light finger.
‘You haven’t been for ages, come to think of it.’
‘Over a week. You noticed?’ He laughed slightly. ‘Still, I was thinking about you.’
‘Oh Ralph, you’re always thinking about us. Anyhow, thank you.’
Ursula found herself in his arms, deliquescent with relief, grateful for his comfort and protection. She thought guiltily of her dismissiveness to him on occasions – her unconcealed impatience and irritation. Strange how he never seemed to mind. Nothing shook his devotion and, for her part, despite her moments of wishing he would turn up less often, he remained her closest friend. She felt him back away from her. Post trauma had made her curiously sleepy – she would not quite let go. Head against his shoulder, arms loose round his neck, she was aware that her own comfortable calm was not mutual. His hand was anxious, or afraid, on her neck. His cheek, brushing against her forehead, was hot.
‘What’s the matter?’ she asked.
‘Nothing, nothing.’
They continued in their uneasy position for some moments without speaking.
Martin came quietly through the half-open door to see his wife splayed up against Ralph, and Ralph’s hand muzzling through her hair. He paused for no more than a second. Ralph, facing him, broke gently away from Ursula.
‘Seducing a man’s wife, I see?’ said Martin, in the kind of voice that believed the impossibility of any such thing. He smiled.
‘Comforting, rather,’ said Ralph. ‘I arrived to find . . .’
‘The cat, Martin,’ Ursula interrupted. She whirled round, threw herself against her husband.
Ralph watched painfully as she transferred her previous position, in his arms, to Martin’s.
‘It attacked me, the horrible thing. Look!’ She held up her arm.
‘I’m sorry, I’m sorry.’ Martin kissed her forehead, unknowingly repeating Ralph’s gesture of a few moments ago, but with a different kind of anxiety. ‘But you’re not badly hurt?’
‘Not really. And Ralph has dealt with it. It’s gone for good. Well, I couldn’t have stood it much longer anyway, our mutual animosity. I knew that in the end either the cat or I would have our revenge. . . .’
Martin ignored Ralph’s pot of cooling tea and took a bottle of wine from the fridge. The three of them sat at the table. Ursula told the story of the attack from the beginning. Safe now, she reflected on the absurdity of the event, the gallant rescue, and the assurance of the cat’s non-return. Soon the mood of her happy day was restored. Within ten minutes she was laughing. Martin suggested that Ralph should stay for supper. Ursula hesitated for an imperceptible moment before agreeing. She had so looked forward to the evening on their own, pleasing Martin with an unusual dinner. But she realised this was a selfish wish: Ralph’s great kindness and help must, of course, be rewarded. He, feeble in his protests at intruding on their evening, was easily persuaded.
Ursula, distracted by her appreciative audience, cooked the monkfish in a much simpler way than she had planned, and the three of them settled down to a lively supper. Over prolonged strawberries, the story of the wedding guest in Wiltshire emerged. Martin and Ralph, enchanted by her account, urged her for more and more detail, and it was not till long after midnight that Ralph finally left, sympathising with the bridegroom who had missed a day of the linnet’s song.
By the time he had gone, Ursula felt, it was too late to mention th
e matter of the farmhouse. . . . To win Martin’s consideration of the possibility, let alone approval, it was imperative to choose the right moment. The chance of this evening had been missed. Still, in compensation, Ursula could store the thought within her. She would ponder upon it at great length, and in the weeks to come it would occur to her how best to break the idea to Martin.
Martin insisted they left the clearing up till next morning. He had no intention of hurrying to work next day, he said, and hugged his wife, firm of purpose, as, late into the night, they went upstairs.
Ralph drove slowly home. The cat protested in its covered box on the back seat. Impervious to its complaints, he relived the long-short moments when Ursula was crushed against him. He tried not to think of the pleasure in her eyes when Martin returned, or of the evident happiness of their marriage. He tried not to think what they would be doing at this moment.
Somewhere on the road between Oxford and his cottage, Ralph resigned himself to the fact that he would never find another woman he would love as much as Ursula. As he could not bear the thought of a second-best wife, he also resigned himself to the idea that he must remain unmarried, and come to terms with his solitary life.
* * *
It was not often these days that Bill’s thoughts turned to the part of his life that had been spent running the museum in Yorkshire. Although he had enjoyed those years, they had always been backed with the idea of this, a return to the country, in old age. Now he was here, doing what he wanted in happily unadventurous retirement, he wasted little time looking back.
But on a morning in early June, the morning he was at last to begin sawing the trunk of the balsam poplar, memories of the aimlessness of the place came back to him. His first duty every morning, long before the staff had arrived, had been to go round opening a window in every gallery in the hope that the smell of central heating and strong polish would evaporate by midday. It never did, but he enjoyed the various shafts of air that blew in to shake the deposits of the night. He liked the silence at this time, too: the feeling that he was the only human being in the building. He would pad round the glass cases checking the disparate collection: flintstones, old coins, fragments of pottery, arrowheads, scraps of leather shoes, a few undistinguished remnants of the Iron Age and so on. It was a mish-mash of a collection, really, but popular because it was local. Tourists and schoolchildren from neighbouring towns seemed to enjoy the thought that the stuff came from fields and ruins nearby, proving history had touched their own territory, and putting time into perspective.
One of Bill’s innovations had been the collection of farm machinery. He was proud of the gallery in which early milk churns, ploughshares, and immensely heavy sets of harness had been displayed. On his early morning round it was always this gallery he left till last. Here, in the polished silence of every morning, he would allow himself the indulgence of imagining the plight of the farm labourers whose job it was to clean the tack or wipe down the vast scythes. He would pick up a pair of old wooden butter pats, engraved with four-leaf clovers, and try to imagine the thoughts of the raw-fingered milkmaid as she slapped gleaming pats into shape, and lined them up on the slate shelves in the buttery. Such imaginings often left him hopelessly stuck: what would a milkmaid be thinking, for heaven’s sake? But on some mornings, touching objects of daily use from the past filled him with a curious sense of knowing what life must have been like, and he regretted having given up the idea of becoming a historian when he went into the Navy.
Bill’s final stopping place, before the day’s work in his office began, was the small room (once Domestic and Farming Accounts Books: fascinating) that he had reluctantly agreed must be given over to a coffee shop. There was no doubt that the postcards and refreshments attracted far more interest than the previous old books. School parties squeezed round the formica-topped tables with their cans of fizzy drinks and bags of crisps, and the turnover in postcards (particularly those in sepia) and plastic models of a nineteenth-century horse and plough (complete with brawny-armed plastic ploughman) was remarkable. Profits were high every week. Mrs Ludd, who ran the place, did very well on her twenty per cent of the takings, and was a wizard at keeping the rowdiest children in order.
Bill would sit alone at a pristine table of duck-egg blue speckled formica, plastic beaker of coffee from the machine in his hand (later, for elevenses, Mrs Ludd made him the real stuff) considering how his life in the museum was spent. He wondered what more he could do, on very limited funds, to be competitive with ‘Stories of the Past’ which was currently the big tourist attraction. He knew the time would come when the museum would have to succumb to modern marketing if it was to survive: and knew that he would go at that time. Waxworks and light shows, ‘authentic’ smells from aerosols, and headphones which provided history in the deadly voice of a coach-tour guide were not for him. One morning in the empty coffee shop, he remembered, he took up one of Mrs Ludd’s paper napkins (bought in bulk from an economy range) and, inspired, wrote ‘red felt’. It occurred to him that if the smaller artefacts were arranged on a bright red background, instead of their sand-coloured one, they might be more appealing. Bright colours were apparently what the public liked. But later in the day the idea waned. He was not so sure an investment in red felt would be an infallible solution. . . .
As Bill lowered his buzzing saw into the trunk of the balsam poplar, he was grateful that worries of that sort were over. By the time the first disc of wood (pale as a slice of lemon) lay on the grass, all thoughts of the museum had left him.
But at lunch, briefly, they returned.
‘I was thinking,’ he said to Mary, ‘don’t know why – about that time I thought red felt would be the solution to our problems. Remember?’
Mary laughed. She gave him a second helping of cauliflower cheese. He liked hot food even on a hot day.
‘Course I do. It was one of your dafter plans.’
‘Wonder what they’ve done to the old place.’
‘Too awful to think about.’
‘Too awful indeed.’
They both kept a moment’s silence, trying not to imagine.
‘Rhubarb pie,’ said Mary eventually, going to the Aga.
‘Rhubarb pie? Darling girl. You spoil me. Listen: come and join me before tea. I want to impress you with the logs. I worked full speed ahead this morning. Quite a pile.’
‘Right. I’d love to come.’
Eager to return to his work, Bill refused a second cup of coffee. He stood and hugged his wife – a daily ritual after lunch, though not after breakfast.
When Mary stood back from him she saw that several pieces of stuff from her pink cardigan clung like burrs to the coarse Arran wool of his jersey.
‘I’m coming off on you,’ she said, picking them from his chest.
Bill smiled, and asked how she was going to spend her afternoon.
‘It’s too hot to weed,’ she said. ‘Read my book, I think, in the shade. Might even fall asleep.’
‘Good idea. You go to sleep, then come and fetch me.’
Bill strode away then, the picture of his wife’s sweet face as bright in his mind as the real thing. He thought – as he had thought a million times in their long life together – how he regretted being unable to release her from the chaff of anxieties that almost drowned her at times: he had never been able to find the right words to tell her he understood her plight. And how, also, in their mutual silence, he shared her suffering. He could only hope that she instinctively knew of his helpless sympathy, for to say anything now would be to risk intrusion and destruction. He liked to think the silence on such matters was a mutual acknowledgement, one which they would keep for the rest of their lives.
As Bill crossed the field, he plucked another piece of pink wool from his jersey and flicked it from his fingers. It sailed down to the ground hesitant as swansdown. Then he pulled off his jersey and threw it, from afar, to the trunk of the tree. He was pleased to see it land in exactly the place he had aimed for –
the schoolboy in me, he thought. He often aimed for pointless targets: pebble to a distant wave, stick (for Trust) to a particular place on the lawn.
Bill chose the thickest part of the trunk to begin working. He reckoned he could get through a yard or so by teatime. Mary would be proud of him.
He picked up the saw, switched it on. By now he had grown accustomed to its whine, sympathetic to its extra straining when the wood was particularly hard. The sun was hot on his shoulders, the smell of the few remaining balsam leaves very powerful in the heat. Bill wished he did not have to bend over so far to saw, but there was no way he could raise the trunk. It would be a back-breaking job, but not beyond him.
Before he positioned himself to make the first incision, Bill looked up to see a skylark quivering in the sky of untrammelled blue. He could not hear its song for the noise of the saw, but wondered how he must look, from up there, to the bird: old man sawing a fallen tree.
He leaned forward, felt the thrust of voracious blade against bark. Then, an almighty pain in his chest. Sweet-smelling grass, tall as a forest about him, tickled his face, and his cry, against the saw, went unheard.
Mary woke slowly from a dreamless sleep. The points of light through the straw brim of her hat, pulled down over her eyes, were no longer dazzling, indicating the lateness of the afternoon. She threw the hat off on to the ground. It lay beside Love in the Time of Cholera, which she had been reading before she fell asleep. Its pink ribbons undulated on the grass in a slight breeze.
The sun had lowered. Mary sat up, chilled. She pulled her pink cardigan round her shoulders and looked at her watch. Shocked, she saw it was just after five. She had slept, most unusually, for two hours, and was late for Bill. He must be wondering where she was, why she hadn’t come as promised. A small wing of anxiety fluttering within her: he should not work so long in the heat of the afternoon. On the other hand, he was strong, he was fit, and he was enjoying the job on the tree so much that she feared there would be a sense of anticlimax when it was finally completed.
