Somehow she has already sensed that in the eyes of this awkward tribe she is, as they would put it, not their sort.
“All right then? You’ll know where to get in touch. What? Oh, I don’t know, we’re not there yet. We’ll be picked up any moment now, I should think. I’ve hired a car from a local firm. I’ve been out and about looking for the man bringing it and . . . I just thought that as we were waiting . . . you know . . . I might as well . . . what? Oh, sorry. Well, mustn’t keep you then. Bye now.” Tucking away the phone, he turns to his wife, “Well, that’s that taken care of.”
His wife offers no audible response. She does not inquire — as would Joan — why the office needs the phone number to the cottage when they no doubt have the number of his cell phone, should they feel the urge to hear his supercilious drone.
A good, pliable woman, reflects Joan, does not indulge in sarcasm.
The enthusiastic fly buzzes for dear life. There is no other sound. Joan half expects the fool to commence lecturing his flock about something or other. The buzzing of flies, the architecture of small railway stations, the flora and fauna of Northern England. The perfect angle of a gentleman’s hat. He strikes her as the kind of father who whips out flash cards in front of defenseless offspring, demanding they live up to his expectations by showing instant proof of prodigiousness.
Joan relishes her sarcasm.
No lecture is forthcoming. The man does not open his mouth. Sitting straight and tense he contains only pent-up energy waiting to be put to use.
The eldest girl stops fiddling with the tennis rackets. The middle girl slumps and wiggles her left foot in a half-hearted manner. The youngest kicks her legs in the air for a bit. Once or twice she holds the doll’s face up to her ear, concentrating hard on what the doll has to say. She nods attentively at the confidence imparted before lowering the doll back onto her lap with a raucous clatter of beads. There it lies sprawled, a gaudy, grinning twenty-inch rebel.
The wife sits so still she might have moved on to a happier place.
Eventually the fly starts banging itself against the window. The atmosphere feels increasingly heavy, the room about to sink deep into a hundred-year sleep. The sun disappears behind a cloud, the day grows darker. Soon this forgotten little building will disappear under a tangle of ivy and roses and . . .
“I wonder if I ought to give Martin a call?” The fool’s thinking out loud breaks the spell. The old man twitches awake behind his counter. A pen drops to the floor. The fly falls down dead. The sun reappears. Roses and ivy halt their advance.
“Can’t it wait?” It’s the wife. She is still alive. Hers is a soft voice, not expecting to be heard.
“Better call now.” Once again he dials, but this time there is no reply. Reluctantly he slides the gadget back into his pocket.
A minute later he consults his watch, restless, cranes his neck for a while and then lets out another honk. “Well, what do you know, the bloody driver has finally seen fit to show up with the rental car. Ought to have a word about his tardiness.”
“Please, Derek, don’t make a fuss,” mumbles the wife. “We’re on holiday.”
He does not reply as they rise in another choppy wave and head for the door like a row of wind-up toys. The wife follows a few steps behind her husband with her tail of small girls.
As the wife passes by her, Joan looks up, offering a glance of solidarity, the strength of the sisterhood. Feeling sympathy — having nothing better to do — she decides to bestow support and understanding. The poor woman looks like she could use a boost.
It’s a keen look, and the woman turns her head as though Joan has called out her name. She throws Joan a glance that, while vaguely alarmed, lets it be known that she has no use for whatever Joan has to offer, she can manage, thank you very much.
Out she marches, head held high, upper lip in a state of rigor mortis. The eldest child follows close behind, tennis rackets drooping. In her footsteps trudges the middle daughter dragging her skipping rope. With their pale freckled skin and dark blond curls they both resemble their mother. Neither gives Joan a glance.
Trailing them by several feet is the youngest girl with her doll. She is in no hurry. As she passes Joan she stops and stares with unabashed curiosity, head cocked like an alert bird, one mahogany pigtail falling over her shoulder, the other resting against her neck. She does not look a day over five and bears no resemblance to either of her parents. Her lips are soft, trembling slightly, as if a secret is trying to break free from between them. Her large green eyes give the impression of wanting to take the strange woman into her confidence.
“Have a nice holiday.” Joan feels she ought to say something. Her voice has the false cheer grown-ups resort to when addressing small children, assuming that lacking in years and stature they are far too dim to perceive blatant insincerity.
The girl gazes at Joan for several seconds, earnestly, solemnly, never blinking, before asking, “How do you know we’re on our holiday?”
“I could tell by your daddy’s hat.”
Briefly it looks as if the child might crack a smile, but in the end she does not. Perhaps she does not know how.
At that moment a piercing voice drills through the door. “Hermioneee! Don’t dawdle!”
The girl sighs. “Lizzie doesn’t like holidays,” she whispers. She has a slight lisp.
“Who’s Lizzie?”
“Lizzie’s my doll.” She holds it up for a quick introduction. Before Joan gets a chance to inquire about Lizzie’s anti-vacation stance, the little girl has scuttled out, clasping the doll in a tight grip, preventing any sudden escape.
The door slams shut. Outside Hermione’s father is having a word with a short skinny man leaning bored against the open door of a red Ford Escort. After a while the skinny man shakes his head with scorn and the twit disappears around the station building. He returns dragging two large suitcases. The skinny man opens the trunk of the car and points. Looks amused as the know-it-all, red-faced, heaves the cases in one by one. When skinny has slammed the trunk shut, he hands over the car keys and saunters off, leaving the fuming customer to order his brood into the car.
Two minutes later Abigail storms into the waiting room in her usual whirlwind fashion, hair uncombed, a thorough lack of stiffness in her upper lip.
“Shit, Joan, I’m so sorry! It’s that goddamn piece of crap of a jeep!” she hollers, sounding the same as ever. “God, I’ve been dying to see you!” Five years on British soil has not robbed Abigail of her tendency to speak in sentences followed by at least one exclamation mark. “Forgive me!” She throws her arms around Joan and waltzes her around the waiting room, shouting “Hello Sidney!” to the delighted looking man behind the counter.
And Joan hugs Abigail and all her careless faults, stumbling and stepping on her toes as she follows her sister’s twirling. Crown attorney Deacon was never much of a dancer.
The Burkes country home is exactly as Abigail has described it: a perennial mess scattered over threadbare oriental rugs. The floor slants in different directions. Exposed oak beams draw lines in the low ceiling in the living room. In this house, with its thick stone walls, every room remains cool throughout the summer.
The upstairs guestroom window faces the side of the house where the kitchen garden has exploded into profusion. Tomatoes hang heavy on the vines, monster zucchinis nestle like large green billy clubs on their hills. Lettuces, spinach, carrots, radishes, beets, green beans, yellow beans, cucumbers, broccoli, cauliflower, peppers, you name it, everything is swelling with obscene fecundity. At one far end rows of cabbages sit like fat gluttons too lazy to battle the horde of raspberry bushes about to usurp their turf. Lining the other end a united force of hollyhocks, like those of T.S. Eliot’s, are aiming too high. And in between and all around, in random splatters of red, yellow, blue and white, wildflowers flourish uninvited. Birds sing in harmony in the willows on the other side of the wall. Two rabbits hop about in the field beyond.
It�
��s all a bit much.
In the days to come Joan will look out this window onto this dewy dream and know why her sister sings in the morning as she toasts her uneven slices of homemade bread. Yet wondering how the hell Abigail can stand it.
Two days later Joan is strolling along the town’s meandering high street, when around a bend who should coming marching towards her but the fool and his troop. The man has switched to the role of pukka sahib, suitably kitted out in knee-length khakis, crisp and new. The walking stick in his right hand is tapping time on the sidewalk at a steady clip. They are approaching in their usual formation, anti-holiday Lizzie reluctantly bringing up the rear with Hermione.
The first four pay Joan no mind. Perhaps they fail to connect the woman from the train station with the stylish lady dressed in a Calvin Klein beige linen dress and Italian sling-backs, sporting two diamond rings of an in-your-face size. The fool is staring straight ahead as if hypnotized by some vision up the street. His wife and two older daughters are still wearing plain cotton dresses, though different from the ones they were wearing when Joan saw them last. All three have discovered things of intense interest on the pavement by their feet. Hermione is the only one aware of the world around her. She immediately recognizes Joan and slows down. Lizzie, gaudy in full synthetic vulgarity, hangs limp in her arms.
Joan stops. “Hello there, Hermione.”
“How do you know my name?” Like she did at the train station, the girl cocks her head, birdlike, peering up at the tall woman. A ponytail has replaced her pigtails. Unlike her sisters, she is dressed in denim overalls.
“I heard the tw . . . your father call you at the station the other day, remember?”
“Did you?”
“I did.”
“Oh yes. I think I remember that.”
“Are you having a nice holiday?”
The girl offers no reply, but her deep sigh is answer enough. After a moment, having pondered whether to bring up the sensitive subject, Hermione lisps, “Are you really a silly old spinster?”
Joan, taken aback, could tell the child that silliness is not the characteristic she is known for. Also, she is not that old, thank you very much, and she is certainly not a spinster. She is married and has three grown sons and two grandchildren. She could also educate this outspoken child on the subject of language, inform her that the word “spinster” is, in this day and age, an obsolete term that holds meaning only in prissy Jane Austen novels. But why confuse the poor thing?
“Why, yes,” she replies. “How on earth did you know?”
“Daddy told me.”
“He did, did he?”
“Yes. He says all spinsters are silly. That’s why nobody wants to marry them. And that’s why they have to travel places all by themselves, you see. He says if I don’t behave, I’ll grow up and be a spinster too.”
“Why that’s . . . ”
“Hermioneee! Don’t dawdle!” The fool has turned around and is waving his walking stick. He might be waving it in a hurry up sort of gesture, or he might be brandishing it at Joan. Both he and his wife are throwing her fearful glances, as if spinsters are not only silly, but armed and dangerous.
“Good-bye, silly old spinster.”
“Good-bye, Hermione. Good-bye, Lizzie.”
Hermione puts the doll’s face up to her ear and listens with a surprised look on her face. “Do you know what? Lizzie doesn’t think you’re silly.” She discloses the news while lowering the doll with the usual rattling of beads. “She thinks your dress is too posh for a silly person.”
“That’s very observant of her.”
“Hermioneeee!”
The girl sighs and trudges off. Over her shoulder, Lizzie grins with wicked red, red lips at Joan.
Before Joan enters the cheese shop to get “a nice piece of Stilton and a chunk of red Leicester,” as per Abigail’s orders, she gazes down the street after Hermione. The girl has stopped and turned around. She is holding up Lizzie’s right arm, helping the doll wave to the posh lady by the cheese shop.
Behind her, her father is shaking his stick like a mad peasant keeping the devil at bay.
Joan waves back, regally, to both of them, sunlight reflecting in her diamonds.
It’s two days later when she again spots the troop marching steadfastly down the opposite sidewalk licking ice cream cones in unison. All except Hermione.
She is lagging behind, preoccupied, trying to feed Lizzie her ice cream. Lizzie with her usual contrariness is averting her head. With Hermione’s help the doll lifts an arm and points first to the ice cream, then to Hermione, indicating that she should eat it all. Necklaces dangle around the doll’s limp body, carmine lips smile at the folly of mankind.
If it’s observing Hermione offering her doll ice cream that triggers it, or if there is another cause, from that day on Joan takes to roaming the village and surrounding countryside in search of the fool and his flock. She is aware that it’s a meaningless, dimwitted pursuit, and a bit perverse, yet she is helpless against the urge. It’s not very often she becomes obsessive to such a degree, but when she does she finds it imperative to follow through her investigation. It turns into a case, and a case is always a challenge. Every stone must be turned in search of evidence.
(“There goes Joan playing detective again,” her husband would have sighed, had he seen her. He would not have been amused. He would have rolled his eyes, thinking of divorce, not for the first time.)
“I’m going for a walk,” she repeats to Abigail and Ian every day after lunch. “I need to be alone to think for a bit. There’s this case that’s bothering me. Hope you don’t mind.”
Before she takes off, she turns into a silly old spinster. To look the part, she has begun to dress in as dowdy a manner as she can. If Abigail wonders about her sister’s transformation, she never comments, never shakes her head, never grimaces, though she has an expressive way of performing all three. Nor does she remind Joan that she has come to Bendlesfield to spend time with her. She never reveals the slightest annoyance when Joan heads for the kitchen entrance to put on the muddy wellies Ian wears when working in the garden. The rubber boots are the perfect accessory to the old cardigan with the baggy pockets she discovered on a hook in the closet of the guestroom. (It once belonged to Ian’s grandmother and has several suitable runs in it.) For full effect Joan ties an old paisley scarf of Abigail’s around her head, hiding her pricey haircut. She’s thrilled with her disguise.
“I can’t believe the way she’s dressing all of a sudden,” says Abigail to Ian one day as they watch Joan shuffle down the road in the green rubber boots. “She’s always been such a snob. Even as a kid she was picky. Everything had to be a perfect match. Fussy, fussy, fussy, that is Joanie. Seeing her like this is so refreshing, I don’t dare say boo.”
“I could have used my wellies today, mind you. Planned to do a bit of gardening,” Ian grumbles, but doesn’t take his complaint any further. Nor does he says anything about how his poor gran would have turned over in her grave had she known that her old cardie was being paraded up and down the village high street.
Joan relishes the invisibility her new role brings with it; it gives her a feeling of freedom. As a badly dressed spinster she has nothing to live up to, nobody to outperform. There is nothing she has to get done before the day is out, no meetings, no decisions to make.
Other dowdy people bestow friendly nods upon her as they pass in the lanes and public footpaths. “Lovely day,” they chirp, their faces wholesome and ruddy. “Simply lovely,” twitters Joan in her best English accent.
Twice she observes the fool’s column at a distance. The first time they have just turned onto the footpath down by the river. It’s a narrow path, walled in on both sides by an impenetrable jungle of blackberry bushes and muddier than usual after an early morning downpour. The column marches ever forward through the muck, shunning the ripe bounty lining the path. Only Hermione stops to sample the berries, encouraged by the observant Lizzie who point
s suggestively, first to the berries, juicy and plump, then to Hermione, tired and thirsty.
During the second sighting, the wife and the girls are taking turns climbing a stile leading into yet another field full of yet more grazing sheep. Pukka sahib is standing on the other side holding out a helping hand, administering advice. “No, not like that, dear, you put the entire foot down, heel and all. Better balance that way. Come on, Blanche, your turn. Don’t dawdle. That’s the ticket! Okay, Beatrice, you’re next. Up you go, there’s a good girl. Hermioneee! Wake up!”
Hermione clambers up the stile only to linger on the top step, turning left and right to admire the scenery. Approving of what she sees, she lifts up Lizzie so she, too, can enjoy the pastoral idyll. Lizzie takes her time gazing about with round eyes. Feels a sudden need to impart another reflection into Hermione’s ear. Listening and nodding, Hermione refuses her father’s impatient hand.
“Lizzie and I can do it ourselves!” Slow and stubborn, she climbs knock-kneed down the stile, her doll in a tight grip. By the time she is safely on the other side, her father has already charged halfway across the field, scattering sheep in his wake. Watching his back and the obedient tail that is the rest of her family, Hermione sits down on a stone, chin in hand, Lizzie gossiping in her ear.
Something about the scene bothers Joan, but she can’t for the life of her figure out what it is. Shrugging off a sense of unease, she continues in the opposite direction, not wanting to be seen.
After that episode the troop eludes her for several days. Joan wonders if they have left. It’s late on a Wednesday morning when she unexpectedly stands face to face with Hermione again. The encounter takes place at the end of the short lane leading to the high street from the car park. A horde of little old ladies have poured out of a large tour bus and are tottering frenziedly towards the single public toilet at the entrance.
Leaving Berlin Page 21
