It occurred to him later that the word ‘evil’ was ‘live’ spelt backwards. Once again, he stared out of the hermetically sealed window. What did ‘love’ spell backwards? What did ‘love for someone else’s wife’ spell backwards? What did ‘fool’ spell backwards?
Should he phone Prue?
In Dainton, Prue knelt on the kitchen floor, like a bloody penitent, she thought, and scrubbed at the tiles decorated with the stew she had just dropped all over them.
I won’t phone him.
The pain of being married and forty-one, of saying goodbye to expectations that youth enjoys without thinking about them, knowing you are passing over a bridge and you will not return, was sharp. People Prue knew were beginning to die. Her parents had gone, and one or two friends, in particular Mary, who had died protesting that she still had so much to do. Their ghosts sometimes haunted her. Elements of Prue were also dying. Relinquishing the right to nourish intense feeling - or, worse, the ability to provoke it because cellulite, slackening skin and gravity interpose themselves between your desires and their object - was harder than she had ever supposed.
As she listened to the wind blowing rain and cool wet air through the garden, Pure grieved for her youth and listened to the voices from the past. Once, she had imagined that she could touch the furthest planet if she had wished.
So Pure scrubbed, her hands stinging from the hot water and detergent.
Max and Jane, she thought. Max and Jane.
The phone rang.
Jamie’s mother came from Scotland, he told Prue, the last in a long line of a well-bred family that had gradually lost its faith in itself and, more important, its capital. Beautiful in her way, she had Celtic black hair and white skin and not a spare ounce of flesh. She always dressed in tailored tweed suits, linen blouses, and wore diamond earrings and a double-stranded rope of pearls, the remains of the Maclndrews’ assets. She did possess one thing, however, in abundance: a strong sense of family. One of her chief amusements was to cart Jamie and Amelia, his elder sister, around the relations.
‘You should know who the family are, darlings,’ she would say when her children protested. ‘You must know where you belong.’
We should know each other, darlings, because we are responsible for each other.
Imagine, he told Prue. Picture the scene. And Prue, who wanted to suck in every detail, listened with a hunger bordering on the ravenous. Imagine.
One of his abiding memories was of being made to recite Kipling’s ‘If, dressed in too-big grey flannel shorts and a tie, in front of a panel of great-aunts who lived in a vast and gloomy flat in Edinburgh. They had been a grey, fluttering group, smelling of camphor and Indian tea. After he had finished, several pairs of hands, worn down to the bone by age and making-do, patted him and offered cups of tea and sandwiches of the kind that would have fainted at the word ‘filling’.
‘Great-aunt Dorothy’, said his mother, who was not without a certain sadistic humour, ‘would like you two to come and stay by yourselves.’ Her eyes widened with the tease, knowing they would rather die. ‘I’ve said you would love to explore Edinburgh properly . . .’ She took pity on her offspring, ‘but I think we are rather busy these holidays.’
Jamie had no time to feel relief. A bony hand in the composite mass of great-aunts across the table raised a cup of tea. ‘But, Isobel,’ said a voice, ‘we won’t be around much longer, will we?’
One by one, Great-aunts Jean, Ellen and Margery nodded like flowers in a herbaceous border on which the gardener had left the dead heads.
Yes, he remembered it so well, he said to Prue, who was at this point in the long conversation struck by the thought that it was a good thing Jamie was ringing her, else how would she explain the phone bill? The great-aunts, the lace curtains shrouding huge windows, and the silver teapot on the table. Gloom and hush. Annie the maid in black and white, oatcakes and hot scones wrapped in linen napkins. Prints of the Highlands on the wall, soft linen sheets, the old Jacobite wine glass with a spiral trapped in the stem, the agony of repeating ‘If every day after tea and utter agony of trying not to laugh when Melly (who had taken up ballet and should not have done) was ordered to do a swan dance to Tchaikovsky on the wind-up gramophone.
Great-aunt Hilda had spotted his giggles and demanded that Jamie apologize to his sister ‘Because, little boy, manners maketh man.’
Those were pieces Jamie picked out from the jigsaw of childhood which had gone.
Edward was wailing as Jamie let himself in at the front door. Violet appeared at the top of the stairs, clutching him.
‘Thank God,’ she said. ‘Where have you been?’
Further up, on the second landing, a clearly worried Emmy was hanging over the banisters.
‘He hasn’t stopped crying for an hour.’ Violet sounded frantic. ‘I don’t think I can take any more.’
‘Give him to me.’ Jamie flung down his briefcase. ‘Have you rung the doctor?’ He examined the agonized little face of his son. There was a tinge of blue around the open mouth and flared nostrils.
‘He’s on his way,’ said Emmy.
The doctor took another hour to arrive by which time Violet and Jamie were on the whisky and the baby was limp with exhaustion and pain. The doctor was clearly exhausted, too, but examined Edward carefully.
‘I think it’s colic, but it’s just possible that the gut has twisted.’ He fingered the tight little belly. ‘I’ll give you a letter and if he continues to cry after I’ve given him some Calpol, drive him to St Thomas’s. They’ll have his notes from last time.’
After she had shown the doctor out Violet sank on to the sofa. ‘Oh, my God.’
Jamie held Edward close to him. It was warm and comfortable in the drawing room. Violet’s carefully chosen paintings were on the walls, her chair covers were tasteful, the grey carpet immaculate. It seemed too insulated a place for this kind of drama.
Love for his son tightening his throat, Jamie breathed into Edward’s tiny neck, ‘Get better.’
Emmy hovered in the doorway with a tray of tea. She was white and anxious and there were dark circles under her eyes. Jamie warmed to her.
‘What about a hot-water bottle on his tummy?’ she suggested. ‘I think it would help.’
Jamie flashed her a smile of gratitude.
In conjunction with the Calpol, the hot-water bottle wrapped in a couple of tea-towels did appear to help. Jamie sat with Edward on his knee and Emmy held the bottle carefully against the baby’s stomach. Gradually, Edward quietened and the stiff little limbs began to relax. Violet sat on the opposite side of the room watching the tableau, and remained silent.
Edward’s eyelids fluttered and drooped, then fell over his wet eyes with the suddenness of a steel gate banging shut. Sweating with relief, Jamie looked up at Violet who had turned as white as the lampshade on her expensive marble lamp.
After Emmy had borne the sleeping baby upstairs and retired to a hot bath, Jamie dropped on to his knees by Violet’s chair and put his head in her lap. He could feel damp patching his shirt.
‘All right?’
‘Yes.’ Violet spoke through dry lips. As an afterthought she asked, ‘And you?’
‘Yes.’ In the darkness of Violet’s lap, he closed his eyes. ‘Thank God, there was nothing very wrong.’
He felt a hand tugging at his hair and raised his head. ‘I never want another one,’ said Violet, her mouth twisted with emotion. ‘Never.’
Jamie sat back on his heels. ‘You don’t mean it?’
‘Yes, I do,’ said Violet, avoiding Jamie’s eye. ‘It’s too ... too distracting. I mean wearing.’
‘Don’t be silly.’ Jamie climbed to his feet and eased his shirt away from his back. ‘Of course you do.’
Violet gulped whisky. She looked up and Jamie realized that she was furious.
‘Stop patronizing me, Jamie. You have no idea what I think and I’m telling you I don’t want another one.’
She put down her glass and
got to her feet. Despite her anger, her pallor made her look vulnerable . . . and, he saw with a shock, lonely. Jamie responded by pulling her to him, and kissing the silky hair and the cool, pampered skin of her cheek.
‘Don’t feel like that, Violet. Every parent must have this sort of experience. Edward’s fine now.’
‘Yes, you know all about that,’ said Violet, harshly. ‘And you keep reminding me.’
He released Violet and took a step back. ‘Jenny was five when I moved in with Lara so I don’t know everything.’
She gazed down at the carpet with a secret expression. ‘Even so, I know you think you’ve done it all before and this gives you a licence to lecture me. Poor old Violet, she doesn’t know nought from ten but I’ll teach her a thing or two.’
For a second, Jamie was completely taken aback and then his anger flared. With a little task, Violet gathered up the glasses, arranged them tidily on the tray and walked out of the room.
Jamie could hear the clink as she stacked them in the dishwasher.
Along with Scottish great-aunts, Jamie’s mother had often indulged in proverbs. He could hear her saying one of them now, in the light, amused, ironic manner she had: ‘You’ve made your bed, darling, and you have to lie on it.’
In her bleached- and limed-wood kitchen, Violet stared down at dirty china in the rack. She was profoundly exhausted and slightly nauseous from fatigue and whisky. Throughout the drama, various thoughts had sifted through a mind that had refused to work with its normal celerity, chief among them that if Edward was ill she would not be able to attend the programme meeting for which she had planned so thoroughly.
The paucity of her reaction to her son’s distress appalled even Violet.
Chapter Ten
‘Do you have a biography of Charles Dickens?’ An anorexic-looking girl dressed in black leggings and Doc Marten’s with bright green hair cut into a cockatoo crest, asked Prue the question.
Prue considered the figure. Crested anorexics and Dickens did not figure in her list of obvious combinations. ‘We have the Ackroyd in stock.’
‘I’ll take it,’ said the girl. ‘And anything you’ve got on Elizabeth Barrett Browning.’
The bookshop was crowded and Prue was forced to dodge browsers and tables piled with new publications. She stretched up to ‘A’ on the biography shelf. Where you lined up in the alphabet influenced your success as a writer. Authors whose names began with ‘A’ or ‘B’ were read by tall people. ‘LMN’ got both tall and short.
The girl paid for the books, counting out the money from a leather purse which had almost fallen apart. Prue hoped the books proved to be a fair exchange and did what they were meant to do. Entertain? Teach? Act as a doorstop?
She pressed the till button: the drawer sprang out and hit her in the stomach, as it always did, and the coins clinked into the compartments. Prue recollected that the last time she had seen a pile of coins was at the Ivy when Jamie had emptied his pockets in search of his credit cards. Then, she had remarked on how much loose change he carried.
‘Hurry up,’ said Gerald who was waiting to ring up a bill.
You see, Prue admonished herself, you’re slipping.
She drove home with the delicate scent of flowers for the church filling the car, and the week’s shopping rattling and bouncing in plastic bags. At the Dainton turn-off, she remembered that she had forgotten Jane’s favourite pizzas and cursed. As part of the strategy worked out between Max and her to help Jane, Prue had arranged that Jane bring a friend back for Friday supper, promising a special meal.
Just because you’re busy doesn’t mean you let go, she told herself fiercely, meaning, I have a conscience, and spent the remainder of the drive mentally reshifting her timetable in order to propitiate it.
She parked the car in the lane leading up to the church, threw the rug over the bags containing the dairy foods, and extracted the flowers from the back seat. The weather had altered and a warmish wind was blowing, fresh and sweet, along the valley and up towards the airstrip, and the air smelt fresh and soft. The trees’ silhouettes were blurring with new growth and the gardens had been given a fresh topcoat of green.
The wind tugged at Prue’s clothes, sweeping the moraines of dust and leaves into new patterns and covering a footstep imprinted in mud, a skid-mark- and the evidence of a long winter.
Dazzled and goaded by the onset of summer, Prue trudged up the lane and stopped by a patch of briar which had grown so thick that it impeded progress. No one had got round to cutting it back, which was nothing new. She pulled out the secateurs she always carried and hacked at the worst bits, then decided to send Max up to deal with it properly. She disentangled a blackberry cutting from her sleeve. Someone, Emmy perhaps, had told her there were only ten basic structures in nature which were repeated ad infinitum. That prompted her to think: I must call on Emmy’s mother and tell her Emmy is doing fine.
Her gaze shifted to the stump of the grand and glorious beech that had been sent crashing to the ground in the Great Storm. The tree lovers in Dainton had mourned it, and Prue was cheered to see that suckers were struggling out of the grass. What did that tell her? Rising from its base, like a glove, were black projections with their characteristic twist. Prue smiled: Dead Men’s Fingers made Jane giggle for Carey Scholfield’s elder sister had informed the girls they were phallic (‘What’s “phallic”, Mum?’).
That was to ignore their strange, almost sinister quality suggesting deformity and . . . weirdness. Prue’s expression became troubled. The deformity of living a lie when she had been used to truth - or, at least, straightforwardness? Of living on two levels where once one had been sufficient? The fungi’s ‘third’ finger had been broken off near the top, to reveal secret, creamy flesh and rows of spore sacs. What did those tell her about herself and the dark fingers that were pushing through her consciousness? Searching for the pattern, Prue touched the fungus with the toe of her shoe.
‘Prue, dear, just the person.’
Molly Greer came up behind Prue, and she whirled round. ‘Hallo, Molly.’
Molly was carrying a mass of daffodils and catkins from her garden wrapped in the local newspaper. Prue eyed them and knew immediately that her tastefully chosen, expensive offerings from a Winchester florist were destined for relegation behind the pulpit.
‘Do you mind?’ Molly shoved her hand under Prue’s arm. ‘The slope is bad on my hip.’
Prue tried not to feel rebellious, to give this gesture of support graciously, and failed. Molly was wearing her sale bargain, a tweed coat designed expressly to keep a dreadnought warm and which exuded a damp smell. Beneath it, she wore socks over thick green tights and sheepskin boots. Molly did not bother with her appearance. Waste of time, she often reiterated, an expert in making a virtue of necessity. My face is my face—which, said Max, who could be moved on occasion to rudeness but not originality, needed to be said otherwise it might be mistaken for a bus.
They deposited the flowers in the church porch, and Molly ordered Prue to fill the vases from the outside tap. Prue bit her lip. Molly Greer might be the keystone of Dainton, fifteen years older and a tireless defender of the village against the threat of motorways, supermarkets and boundary realignments, but unchecked power (particularly if unelected) provokes opposition. Grimly, Prue filled the vases and hefted them one by one into the church, fully aware that any objections to Molly’s dictates ranked with present Labour Party jeers - flailings of permanent opposition.
The thought shaped her resolve. ‘I’ll do the altar,’ she said firmly, ashamed of her past pusillanimity and, a little ashamed of her present victory, surged into the church before she could weaken.
When Prue finished she went back down the aisle to judge the effect which, she congratulated herself, was good. Purple freesias and green euphorbia were an interesting combination. To her credit Molly said approvingly, ‘Very nice, Prue.’
‘Thank you. I thought it was worth splashing out.’
‘Oh, rea
lly?’ Molly gave Prue the benefit of one of her searching looks. ‘Prue dear. You’re not getting yourself into any kind of trouble, are you?’
‘Why do you ask that?’ Prue did not turn round to look at her.
‘I’m no fool, dear.’
‘No, Molly, I never thought you were.’
Prue returned to the altar and made a small adjustment to the euphorbia. I suspect . . . she addressed silently the stained-glass window above the altar . . . Molly suspects that I am up to something. But she knew as she thought it that the possibility of Molly falling on the right conclusion was not sufficient to arrest what was happening to her.
Molly finished a huge arrangement for a window in the east wall below one of the two wall paintings, or ‘Moralities’, for which the church was famous. This one depicted St George doing away with the dragon who was about to consume a large-eyed Princess Cleodolinda. Understandably, her parents, on the battlements of the nearby castle, were watching the proceedings with anguish etched into their faces. Parents were bound to their children by a pulsing, tensile rope of feeling and obligation, whether men wore tights and women wimples, or not. Of course. And wept and broke their hearts when their children died, tiny replicas from the mould. Ever since the first caveman dragged a bison back to the cave, the affectionate family had been alive and thriving and parents had torn out their own breasts to feed their young. As Prue would do for Jane. As Max would do for his daughters. Oh, yes. She pictured him, the slumbering giant, provoked to whirling rage, aiming his Purdey at anyone who threatened them.
In this place of belief, as Prue searched the byways of her heart, she forgot that theory and practice were separate issues.
‘Can you give me a hand, Prue?’ commanded Molly.
Prue resigned herself to several journeys to the wasteheap and to washing out spare vases in the vestry.
‘How’s that stepdaughter of yours?’ Molly asked as they returned to their cars.
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