Meadowland

by Alison Giles

  Obviously I had not been as successful as I’d hoped. ‘So Elspeth was right?’ Flora had observed later.

  Temporarily idling in a London-bound traffic jam early that evening, I recalled the comment. Phrased as a question, it was more of a statement – a bland one, giving no lead as to how I might respond.

  Ginny had dropped us off – Flora, Andrew and myself – back at Wood Edge; Andrew had chatted for only a few minutes before glancing at his watch and announcing he’d better get up to the farm and ‘heave a bale or two; show willing at least’. We’d watched him drive the Metro away, and retired into the house before Flora dropped her remark.

  I’d laughed off the suggestion that – in Elspeth’s words – I ‘had a thing’ for Andrew, and Flora let it go; but as I sat now, tapping my fingers on the steering wheel, I wasn’t sure whether I resented her perception or was glad of it. So different from Mother who only ever saw what appeared under her nose – and even that only if she wanted to. It occurred to me now – as I pushed the car into gear and inched forward – that what I’d put down to an admirably trusting nature was a symptom, rather, of a lack of awareness and understanding. I half regretted brushing aside the opportunity Flora had offered to confide my confusion.

  But only half. Some things were best tucked away and ignored. Even if I was having to reassess my image of Andrew as a proxy brother now that Ginny so undeniably had prior claim, she didn’t seem averse to sharing him. Indeed – the thought lifted my spirits – I seemed to have acquired a whole new family; even – I recalled Justin shyly reaching up to give me a kiss as I prepared to alight from the Volvo – down to the third generation.

  A thrill of anticipation flowed through me as I recalled I’d more or less committed myself to going down to Cotterly again next weekend. Not intentionally. Not even explicitly. Mention had been made over lunch – distributed round the table by the time of my return to the pub garden – of Saturday’s annual fête. Justin had been gleefully anticipating Andrew’s head in the stocks; then, when he saw the face I was pulling, reassured me I could be one of those on the throwing end of the wet sponge.

  ‘But only if you contribute a cake to Mum’s stall,’ Tom had intervened.

  ‘I can’t make cakes,’ I protested.

  ‘Right. It’s the stocks for you.’ Andrew led the hilarity.

  Caught up by it, I pretended panic: ‘Will a bought one do?’

  They’d made play of considering the matter.

  ‘Let me know if you’re coming,’ Flora had commented later as she walked me to my car. So easy, so untroubled.

  The traffic was moving now in one of its intermittent half-mile free flows before grinding to a halt again. But it didn’t pause long, and as I relaxed and my thoughts began to turn to the tasks waiting for me at work, it gradually unsnarled itself and I sailed, with scarcely a thought, past the junction where, had I been so inclined, I could have turned off to my mother’s.

  CHAPTER 13

  I did go down to Cotterly the following weekend; and the next, and the next. And as my involvement there developed a momentum of its own – Flora stopped changing the sheets between each visit and I began leaving odd items I wouldn’t need during the week in what was rapidly becoming ‘my’ room – I pushed aside any concern for my mother. I fobbed her off with excuses for still not having time to visit her: a work conference, a sick girlfriend, a christening – in the guise of Paula’s convenient twins.

  Call it rebellion. The delayed adolescent variety maybe. But I’d worried about her for too long. Now it was my turn. I had a lot of ground to make up. If she hadn’t kept me away from Cotterly all these years …

  Anger bubbled just below the surface, offering justification for the attitude I was taking; and any guilt that threatened only added to it. I stamped on the smallest hint of conscience – I wasn’t going to let Mother spoil this new-found freedom in my life. It was Father I wanted to think about; Flora and Cotterly, friendships at the Dower House I wanted to enjoy.

  And I intended to do so. Starting off with the fête where, after a few minutes’ awkwardness, I felt my inhibitions drain away. Difficult to hang on to self-consciousness when a nine-year-old – Justin – grabs your hand and drags you off to a blindfolded attempt to pin the tail on the donkey! By the end, I was lobbing the anticipated sponges with as much gusto as anyone.

  ‘I’ll get you for this,’ promised Andrew as water dripped down his face.

  ‘Catch me first,’ I chanted over my shoulder as I headed away to fish for lucky numbers.

  I was clutching a small teddy bear as, late in the afternoon, Flora and I strolled back to Wood Edge. I sat him on the kitchen table and lowered myself on to a chair to face him. I wiggled his front paws. ‘Well, little fellow,’ I said. ‘Did you have a good time today?’

  ‘Yes, thank you,’ I ventriloquised. ‘How about you?’

  ‘Me too,’ I responded solemnly; then looked across at Flora who was observing my antics with dry amusement. I swivelled away from the toy, laughing at myself. ‘Like playing with dolls, isn’t it?’

  ‘Um .. m .. m.’ Flora exaggerated her agreement, raising an eyebrow as though maybe she saw more in my remark than I did. She started unpacking her basket – a crumpled cardigan, a tin of beans she’d won at the hoop-la, an empty cake plate or two. ‘What are you going to call him?’ she asked, still delving.

  ‘Call him? I don’t know.’ I glanced back at the toy. ‘Teddy, I suppose.’ I stroked the man-made fur. It prickled my fingertips. ‘I had a teddy when I was little,’ I recalled. ‘The only male,’ I reflected, ‘among all the females.’

  ‘He must have had a high old time.’ Flora’s mouth twitched. It wasn’t the first time, I recognised, that her humour had surfaced in this way. I considered her as she moved towards a cupboard. No-one would ever call her sexy … and yet …

  ‘He didn’t get a chance,’ I came back swiftly. ‘I always took him into bed with me.’

  ‘Naturally.’ Flora was still amused. Her face straightened a touch. ‘So what happened to him?’

  ‘Oh, I don’t know. Mother threw him out, I suppose.’ A sudden lump materialised in my throat. I swallowed.

  Flora noticed, looking enquiringly at me.

  ‘Ridiculous,’ I explained, ‘to be sentimental over a child’s plaything.’

  ‘If that’s all it’s about.’

  Well, it was, wasn’t it? But Flora had this knack, with her comments, of touching something deeper. Disconcerted, I pushed the bear to one side, making a mental note to offer it to Joe Manning’s little granddaughter next time he brought her round to collect some eggs.

  Later that evening, Flora fetched out Father’s paintings again. We spread them out across the kitchen floor and took up a vantage point side by side on the chesterfield. I scooped up Columbus as he made to pad cautiously across this strange new carpeting and held him on my lap, soothing him into quietness.

  Flora, sitting there comfortably beside me, started to identify their locations: the old mill over at …; the view along the river from The Three Bells – ‘recognise it?’; ‘and this …’

  There was one I particularly admired. ‘Just over the hill,’ she said. ‘Why don’t we go up there tomorrow?’

  It was the first of several expeditions over the coming weeks, walking or driving, to those places where he’d set up his easel. I sat with Flora beside streams, on grassy hillocks, above farmyards, relishing the sounds and smells of the views he’d reproduced in washes of greens, blues, yellows; drinking it all in as she described how, lounging beside him, she would immerse herself in a book while he concentrated with his brush and his box of tints; how, in companionable silence, they would break off to share a picnic. I understood about the silence. Once Flora had painted her word picture, shared her experience with me, I too was content to sit and stare. The sense of their togetherness, neither demanding of the other yet giving freely, was almost overwhelming. Back at the house, in more pragmatic mood, she would pull a
rag from the box in which she stuffed them and hold up a holey sock, remarking ruefully, ‘He never would trim his toe nails.’ Or, in the garden, shake her head over rampaging roses: ‘I told him they needed pruning right back.’

  It was all part and parcel, as he increasingly figured, easily and naturally, in our conversations, of my building up a picture of my father; resurrecting the man I’d known as a child – warm, affectionate, full of laughter; fleshing out aspects of him I’d glimpsed but never had the opportunity to explore – well-read, intelligent, interested in everything from art to politics to the latest scientific discoveries; introducing a sensitive side I’d never recognised. So powerful was his image becoming that sometimes I would look up suddenly, half expecting him to be standing in the doorway. When Andrew appeared without warning one day – Flora and I had been engrossed in sorting through a clutter of photographs – I gave an enormous start on seeing a figure outlined in the entrance to the kitchen. Even after reality had replaced fantasy, my heart continued to thud.

  ‘Sorry,’ said Andrew, ‘I should have knocked.’ He glanced curiously at me.

  ‘What was that about?’ asked Flora after he’d gone. ‘You looked really shaken.’

  ‘It’s crazy,’ I said. ‘It was just that for an instant …’

  Flora nodded. I was glad she didn’t put out a hand to comfort me; emotion was too near the surface.

  I got up and transferred the kettle from the simmer plate to the hot one. ‘It’s no good,’ I said, realising it needed filling and doing so. ‘I really must get you an electric version.’

  ‘I don’t need one.’ Flora sounded mildly amused.

  I turned to her. ‘Yes, but I do. This slow thing –’ I gave an apologetic grimace – ‘drives me mad.’

  ‘Only because you’re used to the other. What you’ve never had, you don’t miss.’

  I doubt it was anything but a straightforward comment. She’d said much the same thing when I’d tackled her about her lack of a telephone. ‘But it would be easier for people to get in touch with you,’ I’d insisted. ‘Quite,’ she’d observed.

  It was the answer I could have expected. Even so, I’d shaken my head. One just had to take Flora as she was. In so many ways.

  Now I strummed my fingers on the Aga rail. ‘The problem arises,’ I said, ‘when you start to discover what you have missed.’ I gave the body of the kettle an experimental tap with a fingertip. ‘Ow,’ I said. I reached for mugs. ‘Can you bear instant?’ At least she didn’t eschew that particular convenience.

  ‘There are moments,’ I mused, as I waited impatiently for steam to rise, ‘when I begin to think being here, talking about Father, only make me feel worse. Everything – you, this house, the countryside in some strange way – is a constant reminder.’

  ‘I understand,’ said Flora.

  The kettle had at last come to the boil. I poured water into the mugs, watching the browned liquid frothing as the levels rose. I added milk and carried them across to the table.

  ‘It’s never easy,’ Flora observed, as I reseated myself, ‘facing up to loss of any sort.’ A curiously remote expression brushed across her face. ‘Maybe particularly to lost opportunities, the might-have-beens.’

  ‘At least when I’m in London, I can forget about it all.’ It was partially true anyway.

  ‘Yes, but ignoring it –’ Flora’s attention was fully back with me again – ‘distracting oneself, doesn’t solve anything.’

  I considered. ‘Just drives the hurt underground, you mean?’ I stared into my mug. ‘I’m not sure it wasn’t a good deal more comfortable there,’ I remarked.

  ‘Trouble is,’ said Flora reflectively, ‘a whole lot else tends to get pushed down with it.’

  ‘Like?’

  Flora picked up her coffee and took a sip.

  ‘Like the frustration I felt about it all, I suppose,’ I answered for her. ‘Festering alongside. It certainly,’ I recalled, ‘erupted when I met you.’ A thought struck me. I looked at her. ‘Was that why you were so bloody to me to start with? Were you deliberately prodding it to the surface?’

  Her eyebrows puckered a rebuttal. ‘Nothing so calculating.’

  ‘You mean,’ I said, and I laughed, ‘I was just being a pain! So self-righteous.’

  She smiled. ‘You could say so.’

  ‘I needed someone to be angry with,’ I not so much apologised as clarified.

  Flora inclined her head.

  ‘I mean … all those years of feeling so damned helpless.’ I ran my finger round the rim of my mug. ‘And then you made me feel even more inadequate. Talk about taking control.’

  ‘Did I?’

  ‘It certainly felt like it. I certainly lost mine. And then –’ I recalled the tears – ‘all the hurt bubbled up too.’

  ‘I remember.’

  ‘Still a fair old amount milling around down there, though,’ I said. ‘I guess that’s the problem. Reminders prick at it. That’s what I meant …’ I thought about it. ‘But it feels different now. Not so … sharp, not so overpowering.’

  ‘Maybe you’ve found space to let in other things – good experiences, happier ones – to help cushion it.’

  I hadn’t thought of it like that. But then, wasn’t that what was happening?

  I allowed my mind to range – past and present, around Cotterly and beyond …

  ‘Did I tell you,’ I said suddenly, homing in after a while on the occasion, ‘that I gave a dinner party last week?’ It had been part of the outfall from my frenetic pre-Elspeth activity – strange the way things work – and only the second formal one I’d ventured since moving into the flat.

  Flora nodded. ‘You mentioned your plans.’

  I launched into a cheerful account.

  By now Flora was becoming familiar with much of my life in London. Perhaps precisely because she was more inclined to listen than to talk, it had been, and continued to be, easy to chatter on. Mostly about trivialities, but at times I found myself confiding the sort of things I’d have glossed over with my mother: a friend’s unwanted pregnancy – even the abortion she’d opted for; the smoking of the occasional joint at student parties – and the odd time since, when we first came down. And somehow I found myself telling her about Mark; and, more to the point, what had led to my break up with him.

  Flora gave one of those enquiring little looks of hers when I explained.

  ‘I know, I know,’ I said. ‘With hindsight I overreacted. But in any case that was then …’

  ‘Do you regret it?’

  ‘No.’ My response was unhesitating. I thought about it. ‘Whichever way you look at it,’ I said, ‘it showed him up to be pretty insensitive. Too sure of his own judgement by half.’

  Flora made no comment. Yes, well, I supposed Mark hadn’t been the only one taking a one-sided view. After a while she said, ‘And have there been other boyfriends since?’

  I shook my head. ‘Been much too busy.’ It wasn’t too far off the truth. ‘Decided there and then that from now on I was going to concentrate firmly on my career.’

  ‘Oh, I see.’

  Did she? Did I?’

  ‘I’m ambitious,’ I explained. I pursued it: ‘Is there anything wrong with that?’

  ‘Nothing at all.’

  ‘As long as I don’t let it squeeze out everything else?’

  ‘You said it, not me.’

  I accepted it. ‘What about you?’ I asked, spotting an opening. ‘Didn’t you have ambitions when you were my age?’

  Flora answered lazily. ‘I can’t say I did. Not in the way you mean, anyway. I did start nursing training but then gave it up to look after Aunt Celia when she became ill.’ She gave a wry smile. ‘Can’t say I was sorry – starched uniforms never suited me.’

  I did my best to visualise her in an old-fashioned striped dress and stiffly perched cap. ‘No,’ I laughed. ‘I don’t imagine they would have done.’ I thought of her behind the wheel of the Citroën. ‘You’d have been more at home
on a motor-racing circuit,’ I chanced.

  ‘Very possibly,’ she agreed. There was just a hint of a twinkle in her eye. But she allowed something, deliberately or otherwise I wasn’t sure, to divert her attention then and I hadn’t pressed her.

  Nor did she attempt to draw me – as we pottered in the garden or into town or around the village, or sat companionably reading books – into talking about Andrew; not in any personal sense anyway He continued, during those July weekends, to be totally at ease in his friendliness, and I was more than happy to take my cue from that.

  Not that we saw much of him except in the evenings. Haymaking was underway and he spent a lot of time, when he wasn’t roped in for some cricket fixture, helping out at the farm. On one occasion I walked up there with Ginny. I’d only ever glimpsed the farmhouse from a distance, half hidden by trees at the far end of a long gravel drive. It was an old, low-slung building, dotted about with barns and outhouses. Straw spilled from open-sided ones and littered the ground under the wheels of tractors and a conglomeration of implements. The warm smell of fresh bales mingled with oily fumes and the racket of machinery.

  Tom and Justin came running across the yard to greet us. Philip, whom I’d only ever seen at the cricket match way back in the early summer, and at a distance at the fête, emerged from a barn. Ginny introduced me and he gave a curt nod of acknowledgement. He waved a handful of tools. ‘Bloody baler’s stuck.’ We declined a lift in the Land Rover and instead strolled up to the top field where we stood around as he and Andrew, stripped to the waist, struggled to free the workings from a tangle of twine.

  ‘Very restful watching other people work,’ teased Ginny.

  Philip gave a disgruntled, ‘Humph.’

  ‘You could always fetch us a flask of tea,’ Andrew suggested tolerantly.