by Annie Murray
‘Monty? Where’ve you got to?’ He pulled his torch out of his pocket and clicked it on. The beam of light soon picked out Monty’s testicles swinging jauntily a few yards ahead.
‘Come on – home now,’ he called quietly. ‘Best not come this way again.’ As they strolled back he said, ‘You seem to get by without the females, old boy. Perhaps I should take a leaf out of your book.’
Three
1.
Win was never quite sure about Maggie. ‘I do wish she’d do something about her hair,’ she said once or twice. Nothing harsher. Maggie was too warm a person to invite criticism. But there was something about her that unsettled Win. George could see why. She was, he thought, what you might call ‘a natural’.
Wylde’s was mainly a dairy farm with a few fields of wheat and barley. But Maggie also kept hens and her hens ran free. She was appalled by the idea of penning them up in battery sheds like some farmers were doing now.
Win loved eggs and used to go and buy half a dozen from Maggie quite regularly. But when she was too weak and off colour, George began to go instead.
Maggie wore skirts, always, despite the chores she did around the farm. Some women were taking to wearing trousers these days, which in the main George regretted. It was the war that started it, of course. All those forces girls. Even Win sometimes wore slacks, as she called them. She had a couple of neat navy pairs, ‘for all that clambering about you make me do’. She was never too keen on the boat either.
Maggie did not clamber. Except on the hottest days of summer, she seldom wore anything on her feet but black wellington boots, whether prodding cows into the milking shed or collecting eggs. Above the boots would be the skirt and over that a thick cardigan which she often hugged around her, unwittingly emphasizing her curvaceous figure as she walked along. When it was cold, her hands would be invisible inside the sleeves. That first time they were together, the cardigan was a chunky thing the colour of marrowfat peas. And her skirt was brown. Though nothing exotic, it shimmied over her hips and buttocks in a way that gave a fulsome impression of the undulations beneath. Her thick hair, always loose, hung over her shoulders. No rollers or kirby grips – just her, loose and natural.
That time was not the first occasion when he had been to buy eggs. He had started going last autumn, after Win was taken bad again. There had been a period of grace after they took the breast off, before ‘it’ was back – in the liver. He never took Monty after the first time because his arrival sent the black and white farm dogs into a proprietorial apoplexy. They looked set to maul Monty’s ears to ribbons.
George had been in an odd state then, he could see, looking back. He did not really recognize it at the time. Win shrank into a world of her own. He could never think what to do for the best for her. He was, though he hardly knew it, lost and achingly lonely. What happened that afternoon was never his conscious intention. Even so, he was not especially surprised by it. In his experience – most of which he had never shared with a single other person – women behaved in ways that were quite different from how they were expected to or were portrayed as doing. He knew that one of the reasons he’d married Win was that she did seem to behave in the ways women were expected to.
Maggie sold the eggs from an outbuilding across the yard from the house. It had turned cold and a bitter wind was blowing, forcing the stink of cow dung into George’s nostrils as he followed her across the yard. She hugged herself loosely, as usual. He watched her haunches with appreciation. Before egg-buying became his task, he had hardly ever set eyes on Maggie Wylde, but now he found himself appreciating her pink country face, high cheekbones and wide mouth. Not a pretty woman exactly but lovely, a hint of childhood freckles still across the bridge of her nose.
‘How’s Mrs Baxter?’ she asked over her shoulder. Her hair was caught to her neck by a green knitted scarf.
‘Not so good,’ George said, recovering himself as his boots slipped, almost landing him in a dark patch of slurry.
‘Oops-a-daisy,’ Maggie said, laughter in her voice at the sight of his flailing arms. Her laugh, he noticed, was wonderful; low and gurglingly naughty.
It was good to be in the outhouse, sheltered from the wind. The papier mâché trays of eggs were stacked on a table. Beside them were the boxes with lids, ready to be filled.
‘Dozen or half?’
He asked for a dozen size twos. Holding the front edges of her cardigan with her left hand, Maggie reached for the boxes with her right and started to pop eggs into the slots, two at a time. Some were white, some a rich brown. A few were muddy and had feathers stuck to them. Watching, George noticed that Maggie bit her nails. The tip of her nose was pink with the cold. With both hands now, she closed the two boxes, put one on top of the other and slid them over to him. For the first time she raised her eyes to look at him, a slatey-blue gaze as he passed coins into her hand. She glanced down, counted the money and tipped it into a black cash box. Looking up again, she paused for a second, a questioning sympathy in her eyes and said, ‘There’s no one here but me.’
It was almost wordless, that first time. Maggie came round the table and gently jerked her head. He followed her, already overcome by a sense of surrender, out into the wind, to a barn the other side of the milking sheds.
Two sick heifers had been kept in from pasture in a pen divided off by rows of bales from the main straw stack. Maggie must have explained this to him, but afterwards he could not recall her speaking at all. What he could remember was the cool strength of her hand as she led him to the corner and the highest part of the wall of bales, her hands guiding his up under her blouse, the throaty sounds she made as they locked together. His own need rose fast, to a startling pitch. Her head tipped back, her hands gripping his arms. He could see her throat working, her chin pointing at the rafters as he rocketed up in her with what seemed unprecedented force. As they calmed, she righted her head and pulled on his arms. She pressed him close as he slid from her, glad to be able to straighten his legs. In the quiet he became aware of the young beasts’ breathing. He stroked Maggie’s thick hair. He felt mellow and released and grateful.
‘I’m here a lot of the time,’ she said, adjusting her skirt. ‘On my own, I mean.’ Into his silence she added, ‘Nothing’ll happen. I’ve got those pills.’
‘Have you?’ he said, astonished.
She moved her head and smiled up at him. ‘I’m more of a modern girl than you’d take me for.’
2.
It only ever happened twice more. It was a long time before he dared go back. He was ashamed of his own wrongdoing and afraid of facing Maggie – of what she would want, or wouldn’t. But one afternoon in the new year, feeling lonelier than ever in his life before, he did go. He had seen John Wylde drive away in his van earlier and thought perhaps today she might be alone. It was just before Win went into hospital and she had friends with her. He tried to persuade himself that they needed eggs, even though the real desperate, aching need, for comfort and reassurance, was his own.
‘John won’t be back for hours,’ she said, leading him into the kitchen, which smelt of cattle-meal and dogs. ‘He’s gone to Aylesbury.’ The three farm dogs sniffed round him suspiciously until Maggie ordered them away.
‘Not your bedroom,’ George protested as they climbed the stairs with their runner of green carpet. He felt a primitive revulsion at the idea of sharing sheets with John Wylde.
‘Don’t be silly.’ Maggie’s skirt was undulating in front of him. ‘There’s Linda’s old room.’ Of her three children only the youngest, Rick, lived at home and he was at work. ‘It’s spare now – there’s a little heater in there.’
At the top of the stairs she reached for his hand again. She looked at it for a moment and gave that low laugh in her throat, then reached up and kissed his cheek. ‘Come on.’
She took him into a room at the far end of the landing: pale green walls, a single bed and chest of drawers. It was almost bare of possessions, except for a few china animals on
the chest – elephants, a glass fish. The floor was brown lino with a bar of winter sunlight across it.
What surprised him most, in all the feverish, life-giving relief of it all, was the amount of laughter between himself and Maggie. For a start, there was her reaction to the sight of him naked. There he was, stripped down to his Adam suit, she standing before him, pink and rounded and lovely, her hair loose over her shoulders. Suddenly Maggie sank down on the bed and laughter poured out of her like spring water, gurgling across the floor to meet him.
‘What the hell’s so funny?’ he said, wounded.
‘You!’ She made attempts to recover, wiping her eyes. ‘Oh, deary me – sorry! Just you, Georgy-Porgy.’ With a grin of pure affection she opened her arms. ‘Come ’ere then.’
Lovemaking in a single bed made them feel like naughty kids. Maggie’s body was – if not a surprise, since lately he had spent much time imagining – a wonder to him. Her limbs, like her hair, had a heaviness that he found strong and reassuring, as if she was a wall he could lean into.
From the beginning there was a relaxed, nuzzling playfulness. Their eyes kept returning to each other’s gaze, seeing each other, her face amused, affectionate, aroused. At last she slipped over him, both of them rocking together until she was panting and he could not hold back from letting the stars burst and reel away from the taut universe of his body and for those moments he could forget all the helplessness and desolation of Win slipping away from him.
When they had both quietened and lay together, sweat slicking between them, then they were at their most serious. That was the day the talking began.
George leaned up on one elbow and looked down at her. He traced a wormy stretch mark across the side of her belly with his finger. Maggie patted her stomach as if it was a friend.
‘Home to three,’ she said. ‘Bit like a tent – the big top. Seems funny now – as if it never happened.’ The thread of a sigh came from her. ‘They’re all gone – nearly, anyway. And here I am – still just here.’
George stroked her thigh, saying nothing. This was outside his experience. He and Win had somehow never had children. He had never experienced the terror of getting a girl pregnant that other blokes seemed to be forever worrying about. Win had never needed those pills. Not that he blamed her in any way. For all they knew the fault might just as well lie with him. They had never checked to find out and it was a sadness that lay silent between them. But Win seemed to assume that hers was the lack and suffered in quiet, undramatic ways that he could not reach.
For a second the troublesome memory of Argentina and Inés Lester needled in his mind and he pushed it away. A woman who had confessed her barrenness to him. A long time ago, he thought. And a long way away.
Maggie raised her head and looked at him, wide-eyed as a child. ‘You’re a nice man, George. I hope you don’t think badly of me.’
It had not crossed his mind to think badly. At this precise moment he was lost in a state of worship for her. He was the villain of the piece – a man unfaithful to his sick wife. He told her so and she smiled sadly.
‘You’re not a villain. We all just need more than we’ve got most of the time.’ After a moment she rolled a little apart from him and wiped the inner bends of her elbows then rubbed her hands on her thighs. ‘Phoo – it’s hot. Shall we switch that heater off?’
George got up, stretched and ambled over to switch off the heater, which was blowing hot air into the room. He felt a festive sense of reprieve, of aliveness, naked in the warmth, the air stroking his skin. A guffaw came from the bed.
‘You’ve got a nice bottom, Georgy-Porgy.’
‘Have I?’
‘Very ample.’
He strode back to the bed. ‘And you, madam, are a very cheeky girl.’ He tickled her and she writhed and wobbled so deliciously that he felt another hoik of desire. Lying down again, an arm crooked across her, he spoke, like someone breaking out of a cell.
‘I’ll never understand women. Queer cattle, one of my army pals used to say. Very queer.’
He expected her to laugh or protest, but she drew back on the pillow a little and looked carefully at him. ‘What d’you mean?’
‘You want me to say – really?’
‘Really. I do.’
He eased round on to his back, resting his hand against her warm belly. She laid a palm on his chest as if to feel his heart.
‘The thing is . . . This is going to sound as if I’m bragging. It’s not that – it’s just, I’ve found that women have come to me in the past. Taken charge.’
Except Win, he thought. Not her. That had been another of her attractions – she waited for him to make the first move.
Maggie made that small sound of amusement in her throat. ‘You’ve got come-hitherish eyes, George.’
‘Have I?’ News indeed.
‘Oh yes. You have.’
He was still trying to take this in when she said, ‘What was your mum like?’
George lifted a leg, crossed it over the other. Such freedom: naked, talking. A slack, joyful feeling.
‘She died when I was quite young,’ he said. ‘I was five, just. They must have taken me away that day, to a house somewhere. There was a grey cat, very big with yellow eyes. I didn’t like it – it didn’t like me much either. That’s all I remember.’
‘But you remember her?’
He thought for a moment. A pink rose glimpsed through the leaded casement of a school . . . ‘She’s always just out of reach.’
Maggie lifted her head and looked down at him. ‘You poor little devil.’ Her country accent made it all the more tender. ‘What about brothers, sisters?’
‘Just me. My father was a schoolmaster. Sometime after that he managed to get a job in the college – a boarding school, so that we could live in and I’d have companions. There was no one my age to begin with, but in the end I was given some sort of scholarship there.’
‘That sounds posh,’ Maggie remarked, lying down again. ‘That’s why you talk like that.’
‘Like what?’
‘Nicely. Properly. Not like me.’
‘I like the way you talk. But yes, I had a better chance there. I was never any good though. Always better with my hands. Dad could see it and as soon as he could get me out, he sent me to Arkwright’s to learn cabinet-making and restoration.’
‘Didn’t you run away?’ She moved her head a little, her hair caressing his skin. ‘From school? I thought that’s what you do if you’re shut in one of them places.’
‘My father was there – where would I have run to?’
‘I dunno – away to sea! I would’ve done.’ After a moment she said, ‘Don’t you just want to run away from here? Go anywhere, see things? The furthest I’ve ever been’s Devon – just once.’
Devon. Win’s favourite holiday spot. ‘Why don’t we go abroad, for a change?’ he used to say in the early days. He had seen a few other parts of the world already and it had widened things for him.
‘Abroad?’ A grimace would accompany this. ‘Why ever would you want to do that when it’s so nice here? We can go to that clean little boarding house – such a pleasant couple . . .’ Year after year. He stopped asking.
‘You must’ve been places, Georgie – in the war?’
‘I was in Italy – Service Corps. And before the war I went to New York – and Buenos Aires.’
Her head shot up again. ‘Did you? Why?’
‘Oh – business.’ He wasn’t talking about that. Business!
‘New York – I’d love to go there. What was it like?’
‘It was . . . extraordinary.’
That was one word for it, he thought. A collision of disquieting feelings arose in him when he touched on these memories: New York; Argentina, the Lesters. He wasn’t going into all that now. He turned on his side again and took Maggie in his arms. She felt big and limp and warm. Now he was calmer though, and released, he could feel the cold gnaw of guilt beginning. He must leave. He shouldn’t be h
ere, should never have come.
‘So you’re a local girl?’ As if it wasn’t obvious. But he wanted to change the subject.
‘Oh yes, local,’ she said flatly. ‘Grew up in Cholsey. Married my schoolroom sweetheart. Sometimes I look back and think, why was I in such a hurry? I married him when I was eighteen. I could’ve done all sorts – taken off in a car, travelled the world. I want to see things, George.’ She began to sound almost tearful. ‘Not just cows and chickens.’
‘Maybe you will, one day.’ He kissed her forehead, feeling he ought to extricate himself from her but not wanting to hurt her feelings. ‘Tell you what – why don’t you come out with me on the river?’
‘What – at Wallingford?’ She soundly intensely unexcited by this. ‘Hardly seeing the world, is it?’
‘Well, change of scene . . .’ He smiled at her. He noticed, now, the sinking light outside. ‘I must go, my dear. Must get home.’
Maggie kissed his cheek. ‘You must.’ Their eyes met, smiling, and they held each other again before he climbed out of bed.
3.
They never did go out on the boat together. There were just those two afternoons (the first time hardly counted, he felt). The second time, only a month ago, she had passed him in the morning as he walked the dog. I’ll be on my own, she told him, without stopping.
There was that pale green room again, the two of them taking refuge in each other, with the winter afternoon going on distantly outside. It felt to him as if the real unfaithfulness lay in the talking, even though he knew that Win was really gone from him already. Even in the short periods when she was awake now, she was far, far away. She seemed more comfortable with her nurse than with him. He was deeply fond of Maggie, touched by her longing, and its clash with her loyalties. She needed to talk as much as he did, to work things out.
That second afternoon, as they lay under the covers, not having bothered with the heater, heads on the shared pillow, Maggie raised her head, looking down at him. He saw her pause for a moment, as if worried by what she was about to say.
