Serious Intent

by Margaret Yorke

  ‘Mark,’ he answered. ‘Come on, Terry, let’s get going,’ and he ran off, stopping a few yards away to call back, ‘Thanks, missus.’ He’d heard Steve call a woman ‘missus’ when he’d wanted to wheedle money, allegedly for fireworks, from her. Steve had said it was respectful, and certainly the woman had paid up. Mark didn’t know what Steve had used the money for: it wasn’t for fireworks.

  Terry trailed after him. With his tears dried and the ball returned, his fear had turned to anger.

  ‘Sod them,’ he muttered, kicking at the grass as he followed Mark through the gate by the road through which the two enraged motorists had entered the park.

  ‘That’s right. Don’t let it get to you,’ Mark advised. He was feeling calm and powerful. He had taken charge of Terry and had managed to get the ball back. Thanks to that old woman, they’d escaped being blamed for something not their fault. What if the police had been called? It might have been the death of Terry’s mum, who seemed to be rather ill as she hadn’t appeared for lunch and had been given only soup and fruit.

  There was no point in telling Terry this, and besides, he was in a hurry to visit Tom.

  ‘I’m going,’ he said. ‘Thanks for lunch.’

  They parted at the corner of Grasmere Street and Mark walked down it, as if returning home, allowing time for Terry to disappear before retracing his steps to cross into Wordsworth Road.

  Terry slouched off, not looking back, but he did not go home. He remembered where the boy who had kicked the ball lived. He was called Greg Black; Justin knew him. Holding the ball under one arm, Terry walked to the square and along the High Street, turning into the more densely populated part of the old market town until he reached the street where, in a neat semi-detached house separated from the pavement by a small patch of grass and a parking spot occupied by a dark red Maestro, Greg’s sister was now upstairs, doing her homework.

  The houses on the far side of the road were terraced, and on one step stood an empty milk bottle. Terry picked it up, crossed over and flung it hard at the downstairs window, which shattered in a satisfying manner.

  On a dank Sunday, there were few people about, but one family returning from an outing saw the boy running away, still holding his football. There were shouts and yells, but Terry ran fast, disappearing down an alley before anyone could catch up with him.

  4

  Marigold Darwin pulled her tweed hat down more securely over her thick eyebrows and trudged resolutely round the circumference of the park, her spaniel, Sinbad, obedient at her heels. He was a well-trained, mature dog she had found at the Battersea Dogs’ home, after her retirement earlier in the year. Naturally, no one there knew his history, but he had not been neglected. She had been lucky to find him: deciding to acquire a dog had been part of her programme, but she had not wanted a neurotic beast, nor one given to snapping and whining. She would not have had the patience to deal with temperament.

  Walking, she reflected on the incident with the boys. Youngsters had to learn to stick up for themselves, and the bigger boys had been teasing, not bullying; there was a distinction, but where did it lie? It had always been a difficult question, and one that had affected her throughout most of her youth.

  She was plain now, and had not been an attractive child – sallow, with heavy eyebrows from a very young age. Given pretty names by her optimistic parents – her second name was Angela – she grew up with her initials spelling M.A.D., and with neither name appropriate to her looks, so that nothing would be gained by shedding the Marigold and opting for Angela.

  No man had ever loved Marigold Darwin. At the children’s parties she had reluctantly attended, boys had sometimes been dared to kiss her. Afterwards, they said ‘ugh’ and went off giggling, the forfeit paid.

  In adult life, she had compensated by achievement, doing well at school, getting a good second-class degree at Oxford. Her college, even now, did not accept men, and she had felt safe there, working hard, singing with the Bach Choir as her one recreation. She had a fine contralto voice and hoped, in Haverscot, that there might be a choir which she could join. She had climbed the civil service ladder within the Treasury, working on calculations and analyses, always with figures, undisturbed by personal problems, conflicts and alliances experienced by her colleagues. Avoidance of pain was her aim and on the whole she had been successful. She was efficient and undemanding, determined but unemotional, not a leader. No one felt threatened by Marigold Darwin, and no one needed her as a friend.

  She was the only child of her disappointed parents, who had done what they could for her in terms of education and care. Her pretty mother and reasonably good-looking father were proud of her academic prowess.

  While at the Treasury, she went home each weekend to her parents, who offered her a refuge and a reason to avoid making independent plans. Later, as they grew frail together, they in turn depended on their daughter. She shopped for them and filled their freezer, and organised help for them during the week. When they died, within three months of one another, she truly mourned them both.

  Her inheritance enabled her to move from her modest flat in Pimlico to a small house just off the Fulham Road, which, despite the recession, she had recently sold at a good price. In Haverscot, she was renting a bungalow while seeking a place to buy. For some years she had been able to afford expensive holidays with a cultural aspect, and had been to music festivals in several cities, and on art appreciation tours. Alert and interested, she kept detailed diaries of her travels, with the relevant costs, and wondered if, one day, she might turn them into a book, but she feared she lacked narrative skill. She read biographies and travel books for pleasure: never fiction. Dreaming, in her youth, had brought disillusionment; it was safer to stick to fact.

  In London, lectures and concerts had attracted her, seldom the theatre or the cinema; inspecting other people’s lives made her uncomfortable. Lectures and concerts would be available to her still, and she would continue to travel; Australia would be a goal, as she could spend more time away now, making longer tours possible. There would be plenty to do in the years ahead; she must not become a recluse, and Sinbad would help her combat such a tendency. She must find some good kennels where he would be happy; he was not to become a tie.

  She might get a car. She had driven as a girl, and during her parents’ lifetime, but had not needed to in London and was out of practice. Owning one would increase her range, and Sinbad’s, though Haverscot was well served by public transport. She would have to take lessons to ensure that she was still competent.

  She had come to Haverscot because she had once lived there. Since then, the town had expanded, with an industrial area to the east, and housing estates all round the perimeter. The centre, near the town hall and the market square, was little altered, but old shops had become parts of chains and there were parking problems. She had formed a plan to buy Merrifields, which had been her childhood home. In those days, she had wandered about on the banks of the river wondering why she had no friends, blaming her piggy eyes and ugly face. During the war, she had been despatched to boarding-school while her father was in the army and her mother worked for the Red Cross. By then she had already learned that keeping to herself was a way of avoiding persecution. Now, at sixty, she had the habit of self-preservation and enough money to cushion isolation.

  Merrifields was not for sale. A local estate agent approached the owner, saying he had a client who might be interested in buying the place, but there had been no response. She had walked past, both along the road and by the river, stepping through the meadows, looking up at it. Places known in childhood always seem small when revisited in later years, and she remembered Merrifields as a mansion; seen now, it was still large, its gables visible above the hedge, a huge willow and a beech tree in the garden. She suddenly had a memory of the gardener planting a beech tree; was this the one? There was a structure in its upper branches, bare now of leaves: a tree house, she realised. There were no willows in the garden in her day.


  Her parents had sold the house soon after the war and moved to Woking. They had lived there until they died.

  Mr Phipps, the agent, alert and keen in his sharp suit, with his mobile telephone, worked on commission. He suggested that Merrifields, even if it had been on the market, was perhaps too big for one lady, but he did not waste time showing her inappropriate properties, however desirable, on estates; she wanted a ‘residence.’ There were several old houses with beams and with cracked walls that needed repairing on his books, and he showed her some of them, but she took a practical line about the work that would have to be done, and the expense, not to mention the time that it would take, and turned them down. She did not want to pay rent longer than she must, though her capital was earning enough interest to cover the cost. Her present lease, however, ran out at the end of the year.

  Those two boys, the weepy one and his sturdier friend, must learn, as she had done, to hide emotion: to reveal neither pleasure, lest its source disappear, nor fear.

  She had felt anger when she saw them provoked by the bigger boys, and that was rare for her. Luckily, she had been able to avert injustice.

  One of the men had said he was glad she had prevented them from blaming the innocent pair.

  ‘But for your testimony, I’d have dragged them both off to the police station,’ he had declared.

  Miss Darwin knew that he had meant it.

  When she reached home, Miss Darwin wrote down a concise account of the incident. Her evidence might be needed if the men claimed from their insurance companies, and time always blunted accurate recollection. She typed it up neatly and filed it, sighing because she had none of her own furniture around her and her papers were in boxes stacked against the living-room wall. The contents of her London house were in store; she might need more furniture when she moved, because she would have larger rooms and increased space all round. Some would think her foolish proposing to expand at an age when most people wanted smaller homes, but she longed to return to her roots, to the comfort and security she had known as a child. She sought, too, to establish her status in the town as it had been defined by the level she had reached in her career.

  That evening she decided to go to church. This was not because of any religious conviction; she had long ago shed the beliefs which had carried her through adolescence in expectation of divine revelation. Disappointed by no such experience at her confirmation – and amazed by the weight of the Bishop’s hand on her head – she had continued to expect some ray of enlightenment to justify her acceptance of unkindness, because the meek were destined to be blessed, only gradually abandoning this philosophy. Now she knew that it was the tough who survived.

  She was restless. The episode in the park had troubled her but she did not understand why. It was, after all, of no great importance; no one had been hurt nor suffered injustice. Perhaps it was the boys: the intent, chubby one and his unhappy friend. She seldom spoke to children and was not used to their ways.

  Once, she had wished for children in a vague, undefined way; they looked sweet and were affectionate. She hid her mild yearning, suppressed because confessing to it, even to herself, admitted weakness, and now she had almost forgotten it. As a diversion, church would do; she had not been there since she returned to the town, and there would have been changes. She put on a long camel coat and a felt hat and set forth.

  The outside structure of the fourteenth-century church looked as if it had recently been repaired; there were patches of paler stone over some windows, discernible when you walked past in daylight, as she had done more than once in recent weeks. Inside, she found that the wooden pews had been replaced by pale oak chairs. They were more comfortable, she allowed, remembering how she had slipped and slithered on the old shiny seats. The big brass eagle lectern was the same: behind its spread wings her father had sometimes read the lesson. Closing her eyes, she could imagine his sonorous voice, reading without drama but clearly, so that every syllable was audible throughout the building. Such was not the case now, she reflected, listening to the current vicar intoning the prayers and to the man who, this evening, declaimed a section from the latest translation of the Bible. In her head, she recited the Authorised Version. The hymns, however, were traditional, and she enjoyed singing them. A middle-aged man some seats away from her seemed to do the same.

  She walked back to the bungalow past Merrifields, and saw a police car standing in the drive.

  Tom’s house was warm, almost stifling. He’d got the heating on high and his gas fire was alight.

  Steve wasn’t there. Mark was glad of that; he’d thought Steve might have dropped in on the way home. He liked being on his own with Tom, who had been pleased to see him. He’d been thinking about getting himself some supper. Now, Mark could open a tin of soup, cut bread for both of them and find the cheese.

  It was easy to pretend that Tom was his grandfather when Steve wasn’t there, but now Tom’s son had turned up and Mark didn’t want to imagine that man as his father.

  ‘He’s gone, then,’ he said. ‘Your son.’

  ‘Uh huh,’ said Tom. ‘Yes.’

  ‘How long did he stay?’

  ‘Not long.’

  ‘Where does he live?’

  ‘He’s on the move at present,’ Tom replied.

  He’d given Alan money, which was what he had come for, and he’d left at once, a great relief to Tom who, seeing the bag he carried, had feared a prolonged visit.

  ‘Is he coming back?’ asked Mark.

  ‘I don’t know. Not for a while,’ said Tom.

  Alan was on rehabilitation leave from prison. With money in his pocket, he had gone away to spend it while the authorities thought he was at an approved address.

  Mark was relieved to hear that the man would not be interrupting their evening. Neither he nor Tom had seemed pleased to see one another, which was puzzling. Why had the man come, if he didn’t like Tom? But then, sons did go to see their fathers, didn’t they? If they had fathers.

  After their supper, they played chess. Mark could sometimes beat Tom, who had taught him how to play. Both of them enjoyed their game and it was half-past eight before Tom noticed the time and told Mark he must go home.

  ‘Your mother will be getting anxious,’ he said.

  ‘She’ll think I’m with Ivy, if she’s back,’ said Mark calmly. ‘But I think she’ll still be out.’

  She was. He let himself in, had his bath – he was grubby after the park – put his dirty clothes in the machine and turned it on. Then he found clean ones for the morning – Mum had done the ironing before she left – and went to bed. He hadn’t brushed his teeth, and after a fierce struggle with his conscience – Mum might ask whether he’d done them if she came back before he went to sleep – got out of bed and scrubbed them hard. Then, clutching his squishy green Kermit, he pulled the duvet over him. He tried hard to stay awake, listening for her key, but in three minutes he was asleep.

  Tom worried about Mark, after he had gone. The boy was left alone a lot, but what was the mother to do? She was the sole provider and her job demanded that she work a shift system. In his day, mothers stayed at home, at least until the children were older than Mark was, but widows had always had problems. He remembered coming home from school to the smell of baking, tea ready, a fire lit, and a welcome. In turn, he and Dorothy, his wife, had provided a secure background for Alan.

  These days, people seemed to have babies to gratify a whim, or because other people thought they ought to reproduce. Tom wondered if they looked beyond the cot and toddler stage to the child like Mark, who needed a framework to his life. Mark, at least, did not have to share his mother with three or four children by different fathers, none of whom took responsibility for them. According to the press and television, there were men who went around scattering their seed at random. Tom thought the Bible had something to say about that sort of conduct.

  Despite their care, he and Dorothy had failed with Alan. He had not done well at school, becoming
lazy and insolent as he entered his teens and began playing truant. When he was fifteen, he had been caught stealing and since then he had been arrested several times, finally on a charge of murdering his wife. It had been too much for Dorothy. She knew that he was guilty and after he was convicted she had slowly sunk into what the doctor called a clinical depression, and, eventually, had dwindled away and died.

  That was six years ago, and Tom had been alone ever since. Most of the time he had been working as a consultant to the firm of accountants where he had been a partner until his retirement. Before his stroke he had been active and had enjoyed gardening, though with less enthusiasm because there was now no Dorothy with whom to share its results. He had been on the town council, and had become interested in local history. When it was clear that he was going to recover, he thought, wearily, ‘What for?’ but did not complain aloud.

  Alan’s visit had seriously upset Tom, who had persuaded himself that they would never meet again. He was trouble – always had been, and always would be. That poor girl, his wife: Tom had met her only once, at the wedding. She was still so young, and doomed, he had known then, but he had thought to misery, not death. Memories of Alan’s childhood flickered into Tom’s mind and would not be banished. He was glad when young Mark arrived to impose his own sturdy reality over such unwelcome images.

  Mark was independent and self-reliant – just as well, as his mother seemed to be absent more often than not. Sometimes, when he came alone, Mark talked about her, wishing she didn’t have to work so hard to keep them both. Tom had asked about his father, and Mark had said she wouldn’t talk about him, and that perhaps they had parted because of Mark.

  ‘How could that be?’ Tom was horrified.

  ‘Well, maybe he didn’t like me. Didn’t want me, maybe,’ Mark had answered, speaking nonchalantly, dealing out the cards, for they were going to play rummy.