The Beloveds

by Maureen Lindley

  “Oh, Betty, you are so right,” Gloria gushed. “Better to give the money to charity. Perhaps we should do the same.”

  * * *

  CHRISTMAS PASSED. I PLEADED a headache as I had planned to do, and added a sore throat for good measure.

  “Come anyway,” Gloria begged when I telephoned to give my apologies. “It’s Christmas Day. We’ll look after you.”

  There was no way I was going to bow to her demands. I refuse to put on a cheerful face and play the grateful divorced sister. There is something particularly masochistic about watching others make a show of happiness when you are in despair yourself.

  Late in the day, Henry came knocking on the door at Alice’s mean little house, with leftovers from Christmas lunch packed in a series of Tupperware boxes. They were stacked in a basket with a shiny red Christmas cracker tied to the handle. Gloria had slipped in a net of walnuts and a box of sugared almonds, some tiny tangerines with their leaves still on. There was a note saying she would call that evening.

  “Just needs warming through,” Henry said cheerfully. “Anything else you need?”

  He was wearing a hand-knitted sweater with the image of a Christmas pudding in the center of it. He looked ridiculous.

  “A present from Fi.” He grimaced.

  “I won’t ask you in,” I said. “Don’t want you to catch whatever this damn bug is.”

  “Have to get back, anyway. I’m chief washer-up.”

  I watch him stride down the path and get into his car. Despite the liver transplant, Henry still strides, his hair is still golden, his frame still that of a young man. I needn’t have taken the trouble to plan or to study homicidal fungi with such keen attention.

  Pipits is less than a five-minute walk away, but I suppose Henry is in a hurry, hence the car. He hardly bothers these days to disguise the fact that he is uncomfortable being in my presence. Well, the feeling is mutual.

  I take the Tupperware boxes to the kitchen and empty their contents into the waste bin. I cannot eat that sort of food; meat and gravy sickens me. I mostly survive on toast these days, but I will have a couple of the nuts later, after a sleep and before my outing to the river.

  At the river I will be able to think clearly; my mind works better there. Surely, the law of averages means it will be my time soon, my time for fairness, for things to go my way. There is no question that I have paid my dues to life in bad luck, not to mention the wrecking of my plans, the lost crusades, one following the other. Whatever it takes, I am determined to be the cause of, and a witness to, my sister’s ruin.

  * * *

  ALICE’S HOUSE DOESN’T HAVE a voice. It never speaks to me. No chorus of joy, no babble of discontent, nothing. To break its dreary silence, I must keep the radio on all through the night. Pipits has always been company enough. It needs no such embellishments, no voice other than its own.

  This house witnesses my rages, my despair, but has no capacity to comfort. It has no grace. Things are always going wrong with it; fuses pop when the kettle and the toaster go on at the same time, cracks appear in the bedroom ceiling, strange smells leak from the drains.

  A stray dog has begun to visit Alice’s garden. It is a he, easy enough to tell. He comes each morning at the same early hour and sits on the path a few feet from the front door. He is a big hoary-haired thing, wet nose, begging eyes. I have asked around, but no one seems to have seen him or know who he belongs to.

  Yesterday he followed me to the village shop, and I had to shoo him away. He was reluctant to leave until I shouted at him. One of the young mums on her way in gave me a questioning look. These days you are not allowed to shout at children or animals. Anger in all its forms is frowned on; life must float safely above the Plimsoll line, sail on calm seas. But although people talk of passion all the time—he is passionate about gardening, she is passionate about her job—they have castrated the word, watered it down so that it has no danger, or power. They wouldn’t recognize real passion if it up and knocked them off their safe, spread-out feet. My sister uses this newspeak all the time. She is a true daughter of this ridiculous century.

  I am beginning to feel stalked by the damn dog. I don’t like the way he looks at me, all begging and sorry for himself. I make myself stare back at him until he looks away. That’s what you’re meant to do, isn’t it? Show them who is pack leader, top dog?

  I mention the stray to Henry, and he says that the poor thing is probably lonely. Why don’t I adopt him, he suggests.

  “You haven’t seen him,” I say. “He is the ugliest thing.”

  “Still, he would keep you company,” he says patronizingly.

  If the unlucky creature doesn’t give up, I’ll be forced to use Mother’s old trick and go looking for some toadflax plants to fix him a nice warm bowl of milk. I don’t want him following me to Pipits’ garden at night. It is hard enough as it is to be discreet on that little journey, to go stealthily, unnoticed, without some hulk of a thing following. I cannot take the risk of Henry catching sight of me, wondering why I am in the garden at night. Questioning and disapproving of my being there while he sleeps. He will never understand my need to be near Pipits. Oh, Henry, you are a man of such little imagination.

  It would be too obvious to simply walk up the drive and skirt around the house into the garden, as I do in the daytime. Sooner or later I would be seen. So I have to hurry down the side lanes and cut through our woods to the meadow, hem around its perimeter, and enter the grounds through the orchard. Quite ridiculous! Look, Mother, look at the fallout from your will. Look how Henry and Gloria are lording it over me.

  I don’t stay in the garden long on these cold winter nights, even well wrapped up. The cold eventually enters my bones and forces me off. There have been some hard frosts, a few flurries of snow, plenty of rain. The land in this season resembles a photograph, flat, all surface, as though—like me—it is waiting for life to resume, to burst into color.

  I rarely go into the house on my night vigils now, since I narrowly missed being discovered by Henry a few weeks ago as he unexpectedly came downstairs to get something from the kitchen. If it hadn’t been for the creak on the landing, a warning from Pipits, and just in time, he would have found me out.

  * * *

  THE DOG KEEPS COMING. It’s not as if I encourage the shaggy-haired thing, with its man eyes and blunt wet nose; quite the opposite. He simply will not take the hint to be gone.

  And he has an unsettling knack of knowing where I am. I was shocked the other evening, as I sat in my car by my reach of the river, to see him come trotting across the little bridge. He stopped right at the point where I had disposed of the builder’s tools and sat staring at me as though he was expecting something: hoping, perhaps, that I would open the car door and invite him in. If he’s waiting for me to adopt him, he’s dumber than I thought.

  I observed him for quite a while without blinking. I think my stare embarrassed him, because he went down on all fours and put his head between his paws.

  There is something familiar about the beast, something more human than dog. He reminds me of those illustrations you see in children’s books, of wizards with long beards and straggly hair.

  I opened my car window and snapped at him to clear off, and he backed up and disappeared. It was a bit unnerving seeing him there in my special place. The bridge is less than a mile from the village, but still it felt as though I were being tracked.

  Now, of all the stupid things, I have to go to court. I was stopped the other day on my way out of Cold-Upton, by a police officer whose car I hadn’t noticed parked in front of a van in the pull-in by the pub. According to him, a man so heavy that he wouldn’t stand a chance chasing even the most unfit of criminals, I was driving erratically and above the speed limit.

  I wondered aloud if he might be mistaken. It is hard to go above the speed limit on that road; you have to drive carefully to avoid the parked cars while constantly slowing down for oncoming traffic.

  I could tell he
didn’t like me questioning him. He raised his eyebrows, walked around the front of the car and got into my passenger seat.

  “I should warn you,” he said, “that I have you on film. The speed limit is twenty on this road. You were driving at almost double that.”

  I didn’t answer. For one thing I didn’t care for his tone, and for another, I wasn’t going to play the little woman game, all fluttery eyes and apologies. That is just the sort of thing that Gloria would have done. If I had, I suppose he would have let me off, but I don’t hold with that sort of trickery. It is demeaning.

  He must have noticed my flask on the dashboard, because although I was perfectly in my senses, he asked me to step out of the car and be Breathalyzed. I was over the limit, well over, it seems. So now I have to appear in court to defend myself.

  This limit thing seems quite foolish to me. Of course alcohol affects some people more than others, but I can honestly say I have never been drunk, not really drunk. The police are trained to observe things, aren’t they? You would have thought he could see that I was in complete control of myself.

  I’m sure that bloody dog’s plaguing presence is adding to my bad luck. I am going through troubled times, all due to other people’s nonsense, and now, out of nowhere, this court thing.

  Noah has just passed his first birthday, and next it will be Gloria’s. She’s a March girl, late March, the bit that “goes out like a lamb.” I couldn’t be bothered to drive the five miles into Bath, so I picked up a card for her while I was in the village shop. It was a choice between a horse with its foal or the usual boring flowers in a vase. I chose the flowers. My mind must have been elsewhere, as it so often is these days, because I was followed out of the shop by its owner, Agneta. Such a silly name, after Saint Agneta, she boasts. She was in a fluster, calling after me in her put-on posh voice.

  “I’m so sorry. Mrs., um, Miss Stash, but you forgot to pay for the card.”

  Of course I gave her the money right away. She was more embarrassed than me, making a big deal of how she was sure it was just an oversight.

  “We are all so busy these days, aren’t we?” she said. “It’s hard to keep our minds on things.”

  Honestly, what a fuss about small change. She could just as easily have taken the money from me on my next visit.

  Nothing, it seems, discourages my shaggy intruder, so I have picked the toadflax, chopped it up, and boiled it with milk. It smelled bad, so I put a big handful of sugar in it to sweeten the bitterness, and a vanilla pod to disguise the smell. I added melted butter, which gave it the silky appearance of a rice pudding.

  I seem to remember that Mother used both the flower heads and the stems in her concoctions, but it is too early in the year for the blooms. I’m pretty sure, though, that if I use enough of the dieback stems I found by the compost heap, my brew will be just as effective as Mother’s.

  I came down early this morning, my bare feet dusty from the bathroom floor, and put a nice big bowl of it on the path just outside Alice’s front door. It looks tempting, a lovely creamy farewell of a dish. The hound’s bound to go for it.

  The dust that my feet picked up in the bathroom is everywhere inside. I guess it must be time to clean. I hardly have the heart for it. Cleaning this house seems pointless; no matter how I tart it up, it will always be ugly. I must make the effort, though. I do not want Gloria commenting.

  As usual, the house was mute. I heard no morning hum from the stairs, no greeting of any kind. Another crack appeared overnight on the bedroom ceiling; a long thin one running west to east. I wonder sometimes if the whole building will come tumbling down and I will end my days in Alice’s bed, under a pile of rubble.

  I made a cup of tea and half a slice of toast and looked longingly at the gin bottle. I avoided the temptation and congratulated myself. It is good to be disciplined. The tea helped the painkillers down, although they stuck in my throat long enough for me to experience a chemical sort of prickle. Then I went back upstairs and took my shower.

  The infernal dog is there at his usual time, sitting on the path, my offering untouched. I catch his eyes, willing him to slurp it up, but he just stares at me reproachfully. It is as though he knows what I have done, knows the milky brew is not given out of bounty. He is craftier than I thought.

  The dish is still full when the postman comes with the usual junk mail, circulars and catalogs. More often than not, they’re addressed to Alice.

  “Ah, that’s kind,” he says, indicating the bowl. “Fond of cats, are you?”

  “Hedgehogs,” I say brightly.

  I leave the bowl out. Shaggy might lap it up later, or it might see off a cat or two.

  * * *

  APART FROM PIPITS, THERE are only two places that I care to be lately: alone by the river or in Bath, among people who don’t know me. It’s a relief to me that just a few miles from my village, I can be anonymous in the city crowds. Although I have twice had to duck into a shop to avoid Bygone friends.

  The other day as I was leaving a department store on Milsom Street, a woman spoke to me, and then apologized.

  “Oh, sorry,” she said. “I thought that you were talking to me.”

  I had been caught out talking to myself. I must be more careful. People will begin to take notice of me, the very thing I come to the city to avoid.

  Our local GP has remarked that I don’t seem my old self. How on earth would he know who my old self was? I didn’t choose to visit him. I was called in for a prescription review and had to go. If I hadn’t, he would have stopped the painkillers, and the sleeping pills I am hoarding. I like to have a cache of them; you never know when they will come in useful. The headaches are not so bad lately, still there, but low on the dimmer. I can buy over-the-counter pills for those, anyway.

  “You seem on edge,” he said. “Are you sleeping all right?”

  “Only when I take the pills,” I told him. “Without them, I simply lay awake for hours.”

  He would like to stop prescribing them, but I’m more than a match for him, know what he is up to.

  “You still need the pills to sleep, then?”

  “Oh yes, it would be terrible without them. I doubt I would sleep at all.”

  “Something worrying you? Things on your mind?”

  Well, I said, although it had been a while, I was still grieving for Mother.

  “Such a lovely lady,” he said.

  “Mmm.”

  It would be nearer the truth to say that I am somewhat bruised by how easily Bert has moved on, that the ridiculous upcoming court case over my driving under the influence and my simpering sister and her formerly dying, now recovered husband, are the things on my mind. Why should I indulge his prying, give anything of myself away to him?

  “Would you like to see a counselor?” he offered. “Someone to talk things over with?”

  I had to stop myself from laughing. I can only imagine what a local counselor would be like: some well-meaning housewife, with a nosy nature and too much time on her hands. Probably someone who has taken a two-week course and thinks she knows it all. Gloria trained for three years, and look at her! She’s hardly Freud.

  “Sometime, maybe,” I said. “I’ll be in touch.”

  * * *

  DESPITE MY EFFORTS TO impress the officials at court, they have deemed me unfit to drive. They have taken my license from me. Two years before I will be allowed to get behind the wheel again. Well, they say two years, but how will they know if I do or I don’t obey their dictate?

  I haven’t mentioned either the case or the ban to Gloria and Henry. I don’t want them to know. Why should they be allowed an opinion on what happens in my life? I will still be driving to the river at night, and anywhere else I want to go. The police won’t be hard to outwit. No speeding, obviously, check that my lights are working, give them no reason to pull me over. That’s only sensible.

  Fortunately, there is a big fraud case going on in the Bath courts that is sure to distract them. It’s taking up
news time and column space in the local media. A well-known Bath businessman with contacts in high places has been found out and is heading for disgrace. In a frenzy of gluttony, the journalists are after his blood. How they love it when the mighty fall. Pictures of him, of his wife and children, even of his mother, are daily splashed across the local rags and flashed up on television screens. As far as I know, my minor misdemeanor was not reported anywhere.

  My first trip to the river after the court ruling against me did not yield what I hoped for: peace and quiet and a clear head. I was surprised to find myself a bit nervous about the possibility of being caught, so I made a detour that avoided the pull-in by the pub, in case a police car was hiding there again. I don’t go along with the common belief that lightning never strikes twice in the same place.

  The dog was at the riverbank before me, sitting where I usually park, looking insolent. I accelerated toward him, and he shot off, running past me in the direction of the village. I looked in my rear mirror, but he had already disappeared from sight.

  “Next time,” I said out loud. “I’ll get you next time.”

  * * *

  WE ARE WELL INTO March, so there is plenty to do in the garden. But I feel lethargic, strangely disenchanted with the work. I’m exhausted by being on my guard, bored with watching what I say. And I’m convinced that, while Gloria has House, I will never sleep again. Still I will force myself to it, refuse to allow things to get out of hand. The weeds would turn the garden into a wasteland if I let them.

  I must trim back the Hypericum, which I should have gotten to a month ago, pot up the annuals, deadhead the hydrangeas of their old brown blooms. Mother taught me that trick. Left on through the winter, the spent blooms act like overcoats to keep the frosts from the new buds.