by Mavis Cheek
Angela took up the challenge regarding the Bread of Idleness wholeheartedly and commenced digging. Bread of Idleness, she thought scathingly, just about summed up those decadent, privileged women back in London with their cut-price Filipino skivvies and their trips to the hairdresser's. Bread of Idleness was certainly not for her.
She donned an old pair of Andrew's shorts and an even older ‘I-shirt and told the mirror that the raggedy-looking creature with scratches on her arms (from the brambles) and red patches all over her legs (from the nettles) and a nose that looked as if it had been at the port (from being at the port) was indeed a Goodwife. She shoved her feet into Perry Wellingtons, found a few grips for her hair and took up her spade and her fork. Looking around at the bright October day, she felt a rush of self-satisfaction. Who knew what treasures she might unearth as she cut into this ancient soil? If there were Roman tesserae, there might be Roman coins. If not Alfred's crown, then perhaps a helmet or a sword. If there were shards of medieval pottery, then might there not be silver plate?
She set to with a will, imagining it would all be done by sundown. Sammy, when she suggested this to him, shook his head. Just dig, he told her. So dig she did.
Thinking about it again, later, and up to her elbows in dry clods and nettle stings, Angela Fytton had a sudden urge to partake of the Bread of Idleness rather strongly. She was also less inclined to think that paying Filipinos to do anything in the way of alleviating the domestic burden was reprehensible. Indeed, at one particularly warm moment of soil-turning, had a passing Filipino tottered by her holly hedge she would have hurled herself across their path and clutched their bloody ankles and begged them to take a turn with the spade -aye, offering well above the minimum wage and a free cut and blow-dry at a salon of their choice too ... But it was an urge that passed - possibly because a Filipino did not.
She fought back. And it was the strangest thing. After all those years of keeping her brain in several different compartments, of having her mind on one thing while aware of an impending six others, where lists were required and strategic planning was a must, where managing the early years of having very little money gave way to swimming lessons and dinner parties and stocking the freezer and seeing the teachers and remembering to kiss away a hurt (including Ian's), or what required an apology, to have the right change for the bus on a Monday, to get Ian's train tickets for Tuesday, to have a six-page document translated into Japanese by Wednesday, to check catalogue copy and buy birthday cards on Thursday, to talk entertainingly through dinner to a junk mail expert from Stockholm on Friday, attend school sports and buy a new fax machine on Saturday, to listen to piano practice and go to the BMX track on Sunday... Then tip into bed early and read a bit of a Booker winner. Fall asleep after establishing that they were not going to have sex. Fall asleep quite often during sex, if they were. And begin the whole thing again the next day... doing it all out of fear that if she let one ball fall, one juggled plate crash to the ground, the whole works
would fall apart - which, she now found, it did not. Ian had fallen. Not her.
Digging, concentrating only on digging, with every justification for doing digging and only digging, was wonderful. The masculine focus, she thought, the envy of every woman born of woman. That focus, the security that what you are doing is entirely valid, full of worth, and that you may do it to the point of excellence. Your job, your role, your thrust. This, she felt, was Digging for Victory in the modern sense. Though she was still not entirely convinced that if a passing Filipino...
Occasionally she stopped to draw breath and lift her eyes up to the hills, whence, so the Good Book advised, cometh her strength. And it did. What she saw made her happy. The glistening pig huts winking beneath a cloudless blue sky, the flicker and swoop of a confused late butterfly as its wings caught the light, all the beauty she beheld as she let her eyes sweep downwards to the flatness falling away to the west. The church with its Perpendicular tower and its soughing ilex, the manse beyond, the other houses ringed round about in this tight little community ... How lucky she was to have come among such good people.
Sweet Auburn! Yes indeed.
She hoped that postcard would choke them.
Few items of interest emerged from the digging as the day progressed, not even more Roman teeth. The bits and pieces that she unearthed, Angela put to one side for Daphne to have a look at when she called. Despite this disappointment, at the end of the day, standing with a cracked cup (she did not have the energy to find a whole one) of elderflower tea (dried and sold by Wanda) in her hand and surveying the completely dug-over soil of her new herb beds - her day's achievement - she raised the cup. To liberation, she said. She felt great.
Next morning, of course, she was not quite so sure. Her back would hardly allow her to get out of bed. And then Sammy came along and tested the soil and said she would need to turn it all over again before she could even contemplate digging in the compost. She laughed and nudged him, thinking it was a joke. He pulled on his chin until she stopped laughing. Liberation did not seem quite so joyous. Neither did the masculine focus.
Another day of digging ensued, and Sammy was quite right. More lumps and clods appeared in what she could have sworn was soil made smooth as flour the day before. Dig, dig, dig. It was as if someone had slipped them in during the night. She worked until dusk, when Sammy came by. He nodded, rubbed a bit of the soil through his fingers, nodded again. One more, he said. And went on his way.
Barely able to make it to the kitchen table with her shop-bought gin and shop-bought tonic and refrigerator ice and foreign lemon, held in hands that looked as if they were taking part in a tribal-marking contest while attempting to grow an early crop of potatoes in the fingernails, she opened Maria Brydges's book and found the herbal section. Too late now, of course. She should have made it up beforehand. Next year she would be able to create it all from her own garden. Even the juniper hung down from the church hedge and it was already full of ripening berries. Meanwhile, she would take the recipe to Wanda and see if she would make it up for her. Friendly-like.
RUB FORBACKACHE
10 drops lavender oil
10 drops thyme oil
5 drops juniper oil
10 drops pine oil
18 drachms infused St John's Wort oil
A drachm, so the Lexicon explained, was three scruples, which was excellent news. How simple, after all, those London recipes where the initial list of ingredients was complicated and exotic enough to cause a minor safari and at which she always felt it was so vital to succeed.
URBAN HORS-D'OEUVRE
Take three pounds of purple-flowering asafoetida, gathered from the foothills of the Himalayas
a pinch of Winnipeg mace
four ground mandarin roots
half a dozen mackerel eggs
coconut vinegar to blend
Cook for fourteen hours in a Savoy runnel-pan and spread on thin slices of toast brangee.
Serves 96
No more of that, she thought, pleased.
Tomorrow the cider apples would be collected and the last of the honey would go. And then the days would lie fallow until spring. Or so she hoped. To everything there is a season, she reminded herself. Winter is the dead, dark months. She was quite glad about that. Maybe her back would recover by spring.
And then, half walking, half crawling, and clutching her tube of Ibuleve, she betook herself up the creaking staircase to the avocado bathroom, the colour and style of which, she realized, she could not have cared less about. Nor the velvet curtaining. Nor later, the white pique bed cover. Because every muscle in her body hurt. Except, miraculously, her heart.
A tumbrel of well-rotted pig muck was delivered, very silently, after she had crawled off to her bed. It was there in the morning, refusing to go away, in full view of her bedroom window when she limped and gasped her way over to pull the curtains. The hens were eyeing her cheerily from the dug-over soil, as if to say that this was more like it. Pinching all t
he worms, little buggers. 'Shoo’ she called from her window. 'Put them back.' Apart from anything else, she did not really like the idea that her beautiful brown shiny eggs would be entirely created out of horrible pink-grey wriggly worms. There were some matters of a country nature upon which she would prefer not to dwell. Sheep's and cows' bottoms, for example, when you had crawled behind them on your bicycle for a mile or two, were inclined to give you a rather jaundiced view of your own gynaecological mortality.
The Ibuleve practically winked at her: 'Hi, baby, see you later ...' But as the misty morning gave up its vapour to the warmth of the autumn sun, she got into the rhythm of it. What had once been just a large, irregular patch of scrubby lawn and nettles and rotting newspapers and boxes of this and that, now began to look like a rich Christmas pudding of a mixture, just ready and raring for plant life. Sammy was right. You could see that it was now as well fed as any rosy infant, as fertile as any teeming womb. And like any well-fed, rosy infant, she thought, remembering her own two, a little frost would do it no harm. So Sammy said. The real planting would begin next spring. She looked upon it with great satisfaction. It looked fine. Beautifully dug over and neat. A perfect pair of circles, she had made. With the aid of string, wooden pegs and Sammy Lee's patience.
Sammy nodded in approval. 'Now let the rain come,' he said. 'Weather's been too hot and dry. It's turning for autumn now. You'll get your last sunny day tomorrow. Go in and have your tea.' He looked about him. 'I'd say you've earned it.'
She was sipping tea and looking through Maria Brydges's household recipes for a way to use up the excess beeswax. Although she offered it to Wanda, Wanda declined the gift. It was as if she thought that by accepting it, she would be required to give Angela something back. Like information. Angela screwed up her eyes, half amused, half irritated. The woman was certainly keeping her wisdoms, and her teapot, to herself...
The best blacking for preserving boots and shoes, and which makes them perfectly watertight, is the following:
take of yellow wax one ounce and a half, of mutton suet, three ounces and a half horse turpentine, half an ounce ivory black, three ounces
Melt first the wax, to which add the suet, and afterwards the horse turpentine and ivory black. When the whole is melted remove from the fire. Use cold, rubbed on to a warmed brush.
It made her think, irresistibly, of gleaming black boots on a well-turned pair of calves. She thought again of Craig Elliott and the warmth of the pressure of his hand and, in a confused way, wondered what his calves might be like in well-polished boots. Before she could move from that to ringlets and ripped bodices, she shook her head free of the picture. Ian had been away far too long. She hastily turned the page. And there it was. The recipe for church ale, copied out in Maria Brydges's neatly perfect hand. With a postscript at the end:
This last was writ by Doll Caxton, whose brew was once known and which I set down in the hope it will not be misconstrued.
When hops are purchased, let them not be packed too loose in the sacks, for that does them no good. Gather what wild hops you have room to dry, for these will add a lightness of flavour, a freshness and bitterness that will do the ale well.
In the choosing of a malt it should be of a pale colour and broken into a coarse meal, not ground too fine. Good malt is known by a simple test, namely, by chewing it. If well made it will be nearly as sweet as sugar, delightful to the smell, mellow-tongued, of a round body and a thin skin. In short, it should have all the properties desirable to a woman.
Angela immediately rang the vicar and told him that she would be very happy to re-establish the old institution of church ale and that the profits would go to St Hilary's. He was suitably grateful and she felt full of love for the world.
Until she remembered that tomorrow was Ian and La Bin-bag's wedding anniversary. And despite herself she could not help wondering how they were marking their event. Marking hers with the herb beds had seemed so propitious; now it seemed like just another emptiness beside the idea of having him lying there in a real bed beside her. Well, she wanted both. That was it. Both, Herb bed and marriage bed. Why not?
She stared up at her ceiling with glittering eyes. The last time she talked to Claire on the phone, she heard Tristan cooing away in the background, banging something, and she could imagine the something clutched in a chubby little fist and being held out to delight his father as he walked through the door. Snapshots of other people's domestic lives hold too much poignancy, she said to the sloping ancient walls and her shadow that drooped there. 'Make it their last anniversary, please.' And the misery of it caused a pain that hurt considerably more than all her shrieking muscles put together. No amount of scruples could rub that one away. She telephoned Rosa.
'Domestic homily number 346’ she said, across the crackling wires to Buenos Aires, still reading from the memorandum book. '"If you grate a nutmeg at the stalk end it will prove hollow throughout." According to Maria Brydges.'
'Who?' said Rosa. 'I can't hear you properly.'
'"Whereas the same nutmeg, had it been grated from the other end, would have proved sound and solid to the last.'"
'What?'
'"Therefore, always check your potential husband for his stalk and grasp him from the other end.'" 'It's a bad line,' Rosa said.
‘I said, Next time I get hold of Ian, I won't hold on so tightly to the stalk.'
There was a pause. 'Angela, I think you should come out here for Christmas'
'Rosa, it's only just October.'
'Come.'
She agreed.
Dr Tichborne said, 'My love, I think our vicar is right, you know.'
Mrs Dorothea Tichborne said, 'If old Mr Lee can come three times a week and not mind the cold, then I think the youth of the parish can be asked to do the same. And if they want a club, what's wrong with Sunday school?'
The vicar said quickly, 'It was extremely kind of you to pay for the hinges and the fixing of the church gate. Here is the bill.'
Mrs Dorothea Tichborne picked it up and looked at it through her spectacles. The flesh around her lips puckered as she checked the calculation silently.
Dr Tichborne longed to leap across the table, take the paper, tear it up and throw it in her face and then turn to Crispin, eager-eyed, respectful, cursed with a patron of nun-like disposition and a purse of steel, and say, 'Have anything. Take it all. And take me too.' Instead he said, 'More tea, vicar?'
Oh, the perils of marrying for money. He should have known that the reason most people have money is because they keep it. He held the teapot, stared at Crispin's adorable curls and waited.
Dorothea said, 'Seventy-eight pounds seems a great deal.'
The vicar said, 'The hinges had to be made.'
Dorothea pursed her lips, said that it was, after all, to the Glory of God not to let the sheep into the churchyard and signed the cheque. 'And now,' she said, 'my father's memorial...' She rang the little bell.
The Dorkin girl arrived. She was wearing a raspberry-pink angora jumper.
The vicar's hand shook, rattling his cup in its saucer. Dr Tichborne reached over and patted the offending hand lightly (O soft, white skin) and gave him a look as if to say, 'Together we will win through.'
The leather case containing the mason's drawings was requested. The leather case containing the mason's drawings was brought.
'Do you feel the cold, Sandra?' asked Dorothea Tichborne.
Sandra ran her floury hands lightly over her pink-clad body. 'Oh no,' she said, and leaned over and rubbed the same hand of Dr Tichborne's that had so lately patted the vicar's. 'See?'
Dr Tichborne did. So did the vicar. They saw both the hand, and the way Mrs Tichborne's mind was working.
'Well, there you are,' said Dorothea, watching the Dorkin girl sashay from the room. 'No need for heating, now, is there?'
‘I would not,' said Dr Tichborne with distaste, 'say that our servant girl is normal. She always seems to be overheated.'
The vicar bit quic
kly into his seed cake lest the words 'Hot stuff, hot stuff, hot stuff fell from his mouth.
'Vicar?'
He gave a little nervous bow. 'Mrs Fytton has suggested making and selling church ale. For our funds. Specifically to be used to heat the church.'
'Then let her,' said the last remaining Devereux dismissively.
'Ah, the widow's mite’ said the doctor.
'Might what?' asked Dorothea, already poring over the drawing of the marble catafalque.
'Be lonely’ said Dr Tichborne happily, yearningly and quick as a flash. 'Do you get lonely, Crispin?' And before he could stop himself he leaned forward, looked into those sweet, sweet eyes, and said, 'We could play chess.'
