Mrs Fytton's Country Life

by Mavis Cheek

  But yet, but yet.. . On a brilliant, still morning, when the smell of grass and the scent of an indescribable country something was in the air, she was never happier. What was the rust-red of a little tap water when her heart had once run pure blood? She was a betrayed woman on the mend. Loitering over the green of it all, as Goldsmith would say. Pausing on every charm - the sheltered cot, the never-failing brook, the decent church that topped the neighbouring hill, the hawthorn bush with seats beneath the shade, 'For talking age and whispering lovers made'. And finding in each day's challenge some sort of happiness. Her eyes held the permanent glaze of romantic stupefaction as she surveyed her domain.

  She learned that if you turn everything that happens to you - from fusing the lights to getting mown down by a passing bicycle - into a positive, then the world becomes positive. In the course of finding the fusebox she discovered a wooden crate full of old medicine bottles that would clean up beautifully. And the rampant bicycle was ridden by the charming young vicar, who, after dusting her down, said that he would be delighted to take away all the stuff she no longer wanted, for the poor of the parish. She spent so much time putting the stuffed stag's head on the jumble pile, and then removing it again, that she began to read a hint of accusation in its glassy eyes. Do you want me or not? She was tempted, but rose above. It had no place on her walls. Dorothea Tichborne purchased it as a gift for the Reverend Bertrand Stokes, so that he could look upon it and remember the days when men were men and even a stag knew its place. Thus did everything negative contain its positive.

  The hens were easy. They tended not to sleep in, but they were comparatively easy. No rushing around trying to get them out of bed and on to the bus each morning. No demands for fivers. No saying Weetabix was their absolute favourite in the whole world, and then a week later asking, 'Why are you giving me this disgusting stuff, Mum?' If she tottered down at eight o'clock to make tea, they were already up, let out by Sammy, who disapproved of lying-in (unless, presumably, it was for farrowing), pattering on the path, staring through the windows, tapping their beaks hungrily at her. This, she found, was excellent therapy, since she let fly with a stream of obscenities about where they could go and what they could do when they got there, which set her up nicely and calmly for the rest of the day. I have not come down here to shed one stricture for another, she told them, and continued to totter down at eight.

  But in the end, the hens won. She learned to adjust her clock accordingly. She learned that ten o'clock was not a bad time to fall into bed at night, which meant that half-past six was not a bad time to get up. Amazing. Astonishing. But not bad. Of course, she had made the mistake of telephoning friends at odd hours, like seven-thirty in the morning - forgetting that she might have been up for an hour but they had not. As Clancy said one Saturday morning, in that inimitable Yeat-sian way of hers, 'Ah, fuck off, will you

  She excused herself to her friends. She needed, she said, time to make it work. One day she would invite everybody down here and then wouldn't they marvel at her country life? 'I could give them coq au vin,' she said loudly. 'Quite a lot of it...' The hens scarpered.

  From Wimbledon there was silence. Which suited her for the while. Two could play at that game. The exam results were fine, they told her. More information than this she neither asked for nor was given. To her suggestion that they come and see the place, there was miffed refusal. She would capitulate eventually and break the disapproving silence, but just for the moment she had enough to think about. Occasionally, as she was washing floorboards or polishing windows, it did occur to her how very pleasant it would be to get a tearful phone call along the lines of, 'O mother, we are so sorry that we undervalued you all these years. How wonderful you really were. How sorry we are not to have taken your side in the divorce. How horrible Binnie is and how ill-behaved her child. Please forgive us and let us come and stay with you. And may we bring our father, who cries for you each night.' Which was about as likely in the early days of their moving to Wimbledon as any of Sammy's porkers taking a sudden and elevatory interest in aerodynamics.

  It took her a while to come down from her romantic rural cloud. For the first couple of weeks each discovered egg was like a great wonder - she would feel its warmth and smoothness in her hands and gaze at its rich brown shell as if it were a mighty miracle. She also apologized individually to whichever hen she thought had laid the thing. 'Sorry,' she would say, and add helpful things like, 'But you wouldn't want all those children, now would you?' She was having just such a conversation one morning when Dave the Bread called. He obviously overheard. She bought a currant loaf by way of proving her sanity but neither of them could quite look each other in the eye for some days. She gave the loaf to the hens, who looked at her witheringly.

  Dave told Wanda and Wanda said, 'Good. If she's that sort of person she'll be wanting corn dollies' - in bulk from Taiwan - 'and bog myrtle sheaves' - fashioned in Wellington by Tibetan refugees - 'to decorate her house.' She reckoned that if you were alone you probably did talk to things like hens. At which Dave the Bread rolled his eyes. 'What - about birth control?'

  When Dave told the vicar that he'd caught the new owner of Church Ale House talking to her hens, the vicar said, 'So did St Francis.' But when the vicar called on her and she was working in the garden and he saw her cooing, so lyrically, over a delphinium - 'Oh, you're so blue and tall and strong and strokeable, you beautiful, beautiful thing . . .'- he crept away, somewhat shaken at the passion of it all and trying not to think of the Dorkin girl.

  The vegetable patch was another treasure trove: she found little fir-apple potatoes, beetroots, carrots and other hidden things. At first every dig took an age because each time an edible anything came up, she would clasp it and hold it as if she had just given birth to it herself - smiling into its little eyes and admiring it for several minutes. It took a while to get used to the idea and to fling handfuls of young parsnips and shallots about, heedless of their miraculous nature. She also, on Sammy's advice, made a rough plan of what went where. She did not know why she had to do this, and he did not yet tell her, but every time she discovered something, down it went on her grubby bit of paper. At the end of each day, when he passed her gate, she would show it to him, like a hopeful child, and he would, if he acknowledged it at all, just grunt. Not surprisingly, given his calling - though it was to be hoped he drew the line at eating potato peelings and being scratched behind the ear with a big stick. She put herself doubly on her guard against clucking. All the same, she found herself doing it from time to time. It was irresistible to see the hens stiffen and stare in complete amazement as she clucked her way past them with the broom.

 

  Sammy had been asked to look after her and, in his unbowing way, he did. She swallowed her pride. She who had never felt challenged by anything in the domestic department, decided to be grateful for his skills. You did not, she realized, pick up the way of the rural from an overnight reading of Country Life.

  But the Fytton Enlightenment was gradual, with several embarrassing moments on the way. The most blushworthy of which occurred during these vegetable garden proceedings when she - in full view of Sam the Pig and wishing to display her at-oneness with nature's bounty - pounced on what she took to be a stalk containing baby cabbages, eulogizing about the perfection of their form and who would have thought these little brassica globes would one day be the size of footballs? To which Sammy replied laconically, 'No one. Being as how they're Brussels sprouts.' Well, she thought defensively, well . . . How would a girl from Reigate know about such things? Cabbages came from shops . . . Did he know that pineapples grew on the ground? He looked at her blankly and shook his head. Mistake, Angela, she told herself. Big mistake. Anyway, she only knew because she and Ian had once visited a plantation in Thailand owned by one of his clients. Where did that Angela Fytton go? she asked herself, not unhappily, as sweat poured from her digger's body.

  Sammy was also very helpful with the hives, though she, like Sylvia Plath
, felt mean beyond Scrooge to feed the poor things on pale sugar while stealing their own sweet gold. She would have suggested giving them something a little more exciting in return, like maple syrup perhaps, but after the incident with the sprouts she was inclined to say less, listen more.

  'Did you know,' she said, as they carried out this sugary thievery, 'that everyone thought the queen was a king until the seventeenth century? Virgil. Even Shakespeare - "So work the honey-bees... They have a king, an officer of sorts

  'Daft,' said Sammy Lee.

  Which proved you did not need much in the way of words to make an oral historical point.

  Apart from their vegetables and the hives, the Perrys left much that was desirable in among the dross which went to the vicar. The white pique bed cover, the bed itself, the curtains she had coveted, even the scrubbed (now) kitchen table remained. But one item above all else pleased and informed her. It even told her, at last, exactly what a still room was. Once she knew, she retracted her decision to turn it into Ian's office. It was wholly woman's domain. And it would wholly be hers.

  The item that pleased and informed and told her about the still room was a gift from Mrs Perry. It was, apparently, something about which she had thought long and hard before deciding it should stay with Church Ale House. She herself no longer had need of it, but it had served her well in its time. Her own daughter had shown little interest, and Mrs Perry doubted she would even remember its existence when the time came and she was laid in the earth.

  ‘I’ll leave it in the parlour on the round table you admired. Like the house, it belongs to you now. Good luck, Mrs Fytton.'

  'Why, thank you, Mrs Perry.'

  Somehow, at that moment, she felt that Church Ale House really was hers.

  11

  July

  Books succeed, And lives fail.

  elizabeth barrett browning

  She found it in the parlour, as promised. The gift, the desirable item that came with the Perry blessing, was wrapped in old brown paper and labelled with her name. A note said 'This memorandum book was started by Maria Brydges, on the occasion of her marriage and just after the front addition was added to the house, when the farm was doing well. It has the original recipe for mulberry wine. We have left you the last three bottles. I have also left you my mother's recipe collection. Good luck and God bless.'

  Gingerly she put her hand into the packet and drew out what looked like a book that had burst. Its disintegrating mottled brown and pink and black covers were tied neatly with black sateen tape to keep all the loose pages safe. And there were a lot of loose pages - some looking as if they had been written yesterday, some as if they had been written a thousand years ago. She opened it at random, very carefully, to a page of closely written script headed 'Nothing is done that has not been done well', a saying apparently given to the world by one Mother Julian of Norwich. She squinted at the small, tightly packed and perfectly formed hand that had written beneath the tag:

  All within has been prepared with great care and a proper attention to economy and accompanied by important remarks and counsel on the arrangement and well-ordering of the household. I have taken the instruction from my dear Mamma, and her Mamma before her. Take the good of the past and add to its store with the benefices of our modern world. It is your duty to be a Good Wife.

  This was dated 1807 and it was Maria Brydges's job description, a working tool, her manual. She found a section dated 1837, headed 'How we live on what we eat', scripted in Maria's hand. There was little in the tone of it to suggest the meek little woman-at-home. This is my world, it seemed to say, and you can't take my domain away from me.

  It is curious to note man gathering his sustenance all over the world, how in the search for it he fishes and hunts, rears flocks and herds, ploughs, sows, reaps, goes headlong into anxieties, rises early, lies down late and wears out and renews his strength. There is no land too stubborn for him, no sea too deep, no hill too high, no zone too burning hot or freezing cold, no bird too swift of wing, or beast too wild that he will not find it out; roots, plants, fish, flesh, he has stomach for everything. In accordance with these facts, we find men all over the world acting instinctively. Except perhaps the Englishman in India, who will change not his habits despite the anxious persuasions of his wife, and who eats too much meat for the climate, turning yellow and sickly...

  Reading this essay on good eating habits, Angela remembered how she felt when she was first up at Cambridge and she saw a re-run of the first moon walk. How, when Neil Armstrong said those famous words, 'One small step for man, one giant leap for mankind,' she had filled her mouth with chocolate creams in a valiant move to make one small love-handle for woman, one gigantic spare tyre for womankind. No women tread here, she had thought sadly, switching off the television set. And she had sighed with frustration.

  What did they think women did all day in history before consciousness-raising groups wrote them back in? Lay around mutely in caves drinking gin? And that moon walk was in the last gasp of the valiant sixties. Here at the end of the century the world still turned on an establishment upholding the feudal law of fraternal primogeniture.

  Chocolate creams were the best compensation she knew for such iniquity. Though she did feel a little squeezing of the heart arteries from time to time at the thought of what a fighter she was once, and how it all seemed to get lost beneath the canopy called Real Life.

  At least Maria Brydges had the excuse of a century and a half of gender-biased linguistics. Whereas only recently, when Angela went to register with a doctor in Taunton (kindly old Dr Tichborne was no longer practising), she found a pamphlet published on hypothermia which began with the words, 'The first thing to do for the patient is to make sure he is well wrapped up...'

  'So, no hypothermic women there, then?' she said loudly to the receptionist, who had seen it all, every kind of nut on offer, and did not react. 'Or if there were,' she added, 'you could safely leave them out in the cold.'

  So what was new?

  She played the old consciousness-raising trick on Maria Brydges's text to bring those cave-dwelling, gin-sodden mutes back into the picture. It still worked. Maria would certainly have been shocked to her stays.

  It is curious to note woman gathering her sustenance all over the world, how in the search for it she fishes and hunts, rears flocks and herds, ploughs, sows, reaps, goes headlong into anxieties, rises early, lies down late and wears out and renews her strength. There is no land too stubborn for her, no sea too deep, no hill too high, no zone too burning hot or freezing cold, no bird too swift of wing, or beast too wild that she will not find it out;

  roots, plants, fish, flesh, she has stomach for everything. In accordance with these facts, we find women all over the world acting instinctively...

  A couple of thousand years of that kind of affirmation, she thought, and we girls wouldn't be chewing our finger-ends worrying how to manage our homes and children and careers. Or beatifying the rare woman who managed it. A very good rule of thumb was that if you had to single out a woman in any argument you had already lost your case. As in Queen Elizabeth I or Margaret Thatcher. Rara avis.

  You could also use it to point out the absurdities of gender behaviour. Some texts just did not reverse.

  Except perhaps the Englishwoman in India, who will change not her habits despite the anxious persuasions of her husband, and who eats too much meat for the climate, turning yellow and sickly...

  Hardly convincing, the idea of a rigid-backed lady with a face like custard ploughing her way through the roast beef of old England while her abstemious husband nibbled a biscuit and implored her to go easy on the slices.

  Well, well, this was no time to ponder upon the mighty fist of language. She turned the pages very carefully. This was a time to concentrate upon the tasks ahead. So, what exactly was a still room? She found it described in the memorandum book. In no uncertain terms. Which was when she decided that Ian should have none of it.

  Solely the h
ousewife's domain. The apartment for your jams, jellies, preserves, chutneys, liquors should be cool, of even temperature and free from damp and draught. Keep it clean and wholesome and check the contents regularly. You are best to entrust this task to no one but yourself. If there be any sign of mould, gently boil up the contents of the jar anew. Brandy papers may be used and should be changed every six month. Keep not any of your containers up against the walls for they maybe damp.

  It would be so.