by Mavis Cheek
Wanda said kindly, 'But it is a little late in the season. Why not have mine?' And she handed her the swathes of plants from her basket. Angela was touched. And said so.
Then Wanda the Craft looked up at the milky early November sun. Ts that the time?' she said quickly. ‘I must run.' She put a finger to her lips. 'Tell no one, or they lose their strength.'
'Thank you’ said Angela. 'Oh, thank you
Lucy Elliott sat on the end of her bed and fiddled with the zip of her black leather trousers. They were empty black leather trousers because she had not worn them since she was single. Then she could sit at a piano in them all night and not have trouble breathing once. In attempting to fit into them just now, she had broken the zip twice...
Her fiddling hands went hazy and swam before her eyes. The new au pair had black leather shorts ... In winter. Shorts. Came from Finland, so she probably never felt the cold. Wouldn't feel it here either if Craig's eyes were anything to go by. He may have taken his sights off the Fytton woman, but they were now somewhere far worse. Under his own roof. He didn't even go up to town any more. Oh, why had he suddenly taken it into his head to take charge of their domestic arrangements, when he had never, ever been remotely interested before? One day he just said, 'I'm going up to town tomorrow and I'm bringing back a new girl.'
And he did. And what a girl. She would like to meet whoever gave him the idea of meddling in domestic affairs and strangle them.
She, Lucy, had to do something. She had to ... Giving the girl a little drop of anthrax came to mind. Or sending her back to the birchy bogs, or whatever they had. But Craig wouldn't hear of her going - of course. Craig said - and he could be interpreted as being the caring husband - Craig said that she was too good, coped too well, and how clever he was to find her. He did not mention that it was the Fytton woman's suggestion that he should take charge, or that the new au pair was a discard from a north London writer whose wise wife had taken one look at her and said she could cope on her own after all.
'Lucy’ he informed her, 'my darling Lucy, you need the break.'
That was also the trouble. Apart from the leather shorts and the big everything she was efficient. Even the children liked her. Is there anything more depressing, thought Lucy Elliott, than a beautiful, leggy young woman who is well meaning and efficient and living in your house? She looked at the broken zip again. There was only one thing for it.
The Rudges' man from Bristol was working away in their garden and smarting from the telephone message that had summoned him down. Unlike their usual cool selves, the Rudges had left a message that was terse to the point of rudeness. Why had he not come down during the week and cleared away the leaves?
He had. He left a message on their answerphone accordingly.
They replied on his. 'Oh, now, come, come. I put it to you But he had. He really had. The lawn had been cleared and spotless. It wasn't his fault that there was something in the ruddy countryside called autumn...
They left another message, in which they were - metaphorically - wringing their hands in despair. The amount of leaves you had to deal with in the country was beyond belief. They had, they said, decided that the only thing to do was to get him to fell the last of the trees. Two copper beeches that hung over their land, a silver birch (which was really annoying, leaving piles of dead matter that looked just like cornflakes), an ash and a couple of old May trees that did not really shed too badly but might as well go anyway. Besides, when the swimming pool went in, the last thing they wanted was leaves in the filter system.
Sammy watched the man working from the top of the hill. The Rudges had marked a white cross on the condemned trees, appropriate symbols of their passing. Every slice and cut felt as if it were slicing and cutting into him. One of the May trees had been pollarded to buggery, preparatory to being cut right down. And then it was lunchtime and the man turned off the machine and strolled away towards the Black Smock.
Cool for a murderer, thought the watcher on the hill, as the Rudges' man downed tools as if nothing were ill in the world. Sammy felt pollarded to buggery himself. The heart in him died a little more. If Gwen Perry had still been down there she'd have had something to say. Especially about the copper beeches, which blazed like beacons when the season turned. She wouldn't have let them go without a fight.
And then he saw something else. He saw the Fytton woman passing the Rudges' wall. He saw her peer over it. He saw her stop and peer some more. He then saw her go running faster than Wellington boots might allow up to the church. And a few minutes later both she and Daphne Blunt -who was carrying a very large implement - came flying from the church, up the lane and through the Rudges' gate and with the very large implement begin beating the machine so that its ringing sound echoed throughout Staithe. But it did not, apparently, penetrate the doors and windows of Ye Olde Black Smock, where the man who owned the machine was eating his ploughman's. Sammy smiled as he saw Daphne Blunt beat at it and beat at it like a female thunder god. Whatever the machine had once been capable of, Sam thought, sighing happily, it was no more.
The vicar begged that he might be excused baptizing the Dorkin girl until after Christmas. Now, late in November, he had much to do, he told Mrs Dorothea Tichborne. Much to do.
'What in particular?' asked that lady.
'From St Andrew's Day.'
'Yes?'
'Advent, Mrs Tichborne. Advent.'
‘I know that, vicar,' she said. 'But you must have a little time left over for the girl.'
The vicar closed his eyes. 'Very busy with planning the services,' he said faintly.
Mrs Tichborne closed her eyes. 'Not much planning, vicar. The services are straightforward, as in the Act for the Uniformity of Common Prayer.'
He ducked the issue of the New English version and just wished she would not put such linguistic emphasis on the Act.
'Choosing the hymns,' he said, even more faintly.
Mrs Tichborne opened her eyes. ‘I hope there will be nothing modern about Advent, vicar?'
'Well, I had intended to teach some of the younger ones some simple tunes on the guitar...'
Mrs Tichborne closed those windows of the soul again. She tapped her chest so that her crucifix rattled and she warbled:
'Behold the Bridegroom cometh in the middle of the night, And blest is he whose loins are girt, whose lamp is bright
The vicar made a strange little noise. So did her husband, sitting silent at her side.
'Horologian,' she said with satisfaction. 'Eighth century. Translated by Moultrie. We will keep the traditions. Start with that, vicar - and go on through the Hymnal. A little Luther perhaps?'
The vicar made another strange noise.
Dr Tichborne leaned forward. 'Loins are girt,' he repeated. 'Lamp is bright.' His own eyes could not have been more lamp-like in the November gloom. He touched the vicar's arm. The vicar jumped.
The vicar said to his esteemed benefactress, 'After Epiphany perhaps?'
She nodded.
Old Dr Tichborne also nodded. He said, 'After Epiphany will do, Crispin.' And he too warbled in the young man's ear:
'What star is this, with beams so bright, More lovely than the noonday light?'
He gave the Reverend Crispin Archer a look of extraordinary yearning. 'Epiphany...'
'Yes, thank you,' said the vicar, breathing a little more easy. 'After Epiphany. Some time after Epiphany will do for the Dorkin girl.'
'You have given her the prayer book to study?'
The vicar nodded. Truth was he had hurled it through the letter box of the Dorkin cott and run for dear life.
'Good. Then soon she will be another new-cleansed soul shining bright in the heavens,' said Dorothea Tichborne with satisfaction. 'Oh, to be there myself, one day...'
'Don't let me keep you,' said her husband. But when she looked at him he was definitely looking at the vicar. Who immediately rose and left.
And once outside the Tichborne house, it was only the severity of the day tha
t dissuaded the Reverend Crispin Archer from falling headlong into the burbling, freezing stream, with all its horrible, hell-like eels.
In her home the Dorkin girl sat with a prayer book in front of the telly, trying to make sense of the words of her coming baptism.
Dearly Beloved, forasmuch as all men are conceived and born in sin...
She closed the book with a snap. Blokes only, she thought. And turned up the volume on Blind Date. And dreamed.
20
December
More frequently, the records obscure the work of wives. When the Grocers' Company paid a widow 18s 4d owed to her husband for miscellaneous work, including the provision of three garlands and nine dozen nosegays, we can infer that the making of garlands and nosegays was actually her own work.
sara mendelsohn and patricia crawford,
Women in Early Modern England
Bad beer is often made in families where there is no sparing of materials, for the want of management and economy. Attention should be paid to the utensils used, and all necessary preparations made the day before the brewing is commenced. When all cleaning and preparation is done, fill your copper and let the water be heated the day before, that it may be well cleansed.
Daphne held up the cleaned rush-light holder approvingly. It needs mending but generally it's in pretty good condition because it was wrapped in oiled sacking. Maybe your Maria Brydges made her beeswax candles for when there were guests, but they were far too expensive to buy for everyday use. Otherwise she made these. Or a servant did. I should think the local museum would be interested.'
'Not yet,' said Angela. 'It belongs here.'
Daphne nodded and looked pleased. As if Angela had at last understood something.
Angela basked in the approval. 'Have you ever dug up anything really interesting? I rather liked Mortimer Wheeler,' she added, dimly remembering a man with a dashing moustache, spotted bow-tie and teeth clamped on a pipe as he leaned enthusiastically across some old bones on black and white TV.
'Really?' said Daphne, as if Angela had said she thought Goering was quite a jolly pilot. 'All pyrotechnics,' she said dismissively. 'Missed about a million points out of a million and two. As for Mortimer Wheeler's ladies - pah! They did all the technical bits and organized, but never, really, got any of the glory. Or rather they did, as in, "Tessa was such a help in the sorting and the cataloguing. Real brick of a girl..."'
'But he got ordinary people interested.'
'Ordinary people are always interested. Mostly we're digging up their lives. No, Wheeler was a reactionary old fart,' said Daphne. 'And women - well, my dear, women just did not signify. For instance, when they found one of those bog men and analysed his last meal, the technically minded boffins decided to reproduce the ingredients and cook it up and serve it. Two kinds of barley and bread, largely, made into a kind of gruel, and some herbs. The invited archaeology celebs tasted it and were deeply unimpressed. Mortimer Wheeler said it was so horrible he thought the man had died because he couldn't stand his wife's cooking.'
Angela tried not to laugh.
Daphne smiled too. 'Hil-bloody-larious. The Wheelers and the Carters and the Evanses of this world wanted winners' history. Big guns. A hoard of silver like Sutton Hoo. A tomb as fine as Tutankhamun's. A galleon as rich as the Mary Rose. And, of course, when it was rethought years later, they realized that the bog man's gruel wasn't some daft wife's poor culinary skills. It was bitter because it contained something to dull the pain of the bog man's death. Hanging, garotting, stabbing and having his head bashed in being a fairly painful experience.' She gave Angela an amused look. 'There are similar precedents for gentling ritual death throughout the ages. When heretics were burned, for example, the executioner would often be kind, or be bribed, usually by women - mothers, wives, sisters - and give the victim a bag of gunpowder to hold. And Greek and Roman matrons whose kin were to do the honourable thing and take hemlock persuaded the authorities to add opium to it. Otherwise the death went on for days... like Socrates. Poor old sod’
Angela was still wondering which particular piece of violence killed the bog person. 'They - er - certainly wanted the bog person dead, didn't they?' she said.
'Ritual overkill,' said Daphne. 'And just the sort of knowledge that women needed protecting from. How could soft, sweet feminine ladies have any idea about garotting or stov-ing in a skull or slicing through the jugular while stringing the victim up? No wonder we write such good murder mysteries. We've had centuries of having the dark side of our natures suppressed. It's taken us years to be allowed to participate, even in history. Try digging in corsets, long skirts, several petticoats and the Egyptian sun. And if you did they wouldn't let you be present when a mummy was opened. You might see an ancient mummified cock ...' She laughed. 'Or be staring at female parts while in the company of men.'
Angela felt rather protective and did not tell her that in Maria Brydges's section on the arrangement of a household, she suggested very firmly that books by gentlemen should be placed on one set of shelves, books by ladies on another.
'So if Mortimer Wheeler had found my rush light...'
'It would be discarded as domestic and minor.'
'But there must have been women archaeologists?'
'Not unless they were rich and prepared to be considered mad. Until this century history used, largely, to be about Big Things. You see a woman stirring a cooking pot or feeding a baby or planting a garden every day of the week... The little daily rituals. The ways of being. Never valued until now. And, of course, the assumption that everything was orientated towards the male. I've looked at some of those cave paintings all supposedly done by men and I've never seen a signature saying Bloke.'
Angela picked up the rush-light holder and thought how perfect for its job it was - even though a rivet was missing -and what a pleasing object. It was beautiful even if it wasn't Roman.
Daphne took it from her and stared at it. 'I went to the Roman palace at Fishbourne to study their almost perfectly preserved mosaic floors. Which are very grand, very impressive, if a little clumsily patterned in places. Pyrotechnic stuff all right. Oohs and aahs from the walkways as the visitors toured around. And then, as I was leaving, the curator came up to me and we talked about the floors. I had seen him earlier, with a blind boy, and he was guiding his hands over a case of objects. So I asked him what they were and he showed me. And when he did, that was the moment.'
'What were they?'
'Guess.'
'Swords? Helmets?' Daphne shook her head. 'Jewels? Tools?'
'Nope. Cooking pots, cups, tiles ... He wanted the boy to get the feel of the different surfaces. And it was the cooking pot that did it for me. Rough outside, burnt black by the fire, and inside smooth, still with the maker's fingermarks in the smoothing. And as I held that item I was there with the woman who had once used it, cleaned it, stored it, used it again. I mean, don't get me wrong, I love the big impressive things - the Parthenon marbles and the Mildenhalls - and I could gaze for hours at the Delphi charioteer, of course I could. But a cooking pot is my direct line to the past. The link.'
'Like the rush light?'
'Like the rush light. Even this century the Mortimer Wheelers and the Evanses dug up a very peculiar one-sided view of the world... And historians wrote down only half the story. You imagine, in a thousand years' time, a Mortimer Wheeler coming along and unearthing a fifties football stadium in, say, Sunderland. What would he interpret the finds to mean?'
Angela thought. She thought about her one and only visit to
a football match, when she was sixteen and had stood with a boyfriend for one and a half hours, apart from the break, when they bought lukewarm dishwater from a van and drank it as coffee. And she thought how, as she stood there for one and a half hours watching twenty-two men kick a ball about, she could only think to herself, What the fuck is going on?
Angela Fytton, sometime wife to Ian, mother to Andrew, shrugged. 'What?'
'He would interpret th
e finds to mean that it was a male ritual, from which women were barred. And he would be right. And he would also be wrong. Not only would women de facto be excluded, but women would not want to be there in the first place. See? Not forced out, but making the choice.'
'You mean women in the fifties just weren't interested?'
'Exactly . . . One side of the story only. Think of poor Margery Kempe-'
Angela tried to look as if she did little else.
'Well-to-do, highly articulate, but in the fifteenth century she had to dictate her memoirs. And who knows how much her scribe tidied up on the way. No matter how well-to-do you were, as a woman you were seldom taught to read and write. Therefore who wrote the past down? Who observed what was important to record and what was not? Court records, church records, private family records ... Men, not women. So you have to look at the history of women against the grain. Not necessarily what is put in, but what is left out. Not necessarily, for instance, that women were suddenly forbidden from practising doctoring and midwifery, but that they had been accepted practitioners up until that time ... In order to forbid something there is usually a precedent.'
