by Annie Murray
‘Oh yes,’ Kevin said, shoving the remains of his supply of sandwiches into a greasy paper bag. ‘It’s good, that is. The library said I could keep renewing it. No one else ever takes it out, see.’
George chuckled. ‘Well that’s a specialist interest, all right.’
‘I like china,’ Kevin said. ‘The feel of it. The colours.’
‘Come to think of it,’ George said, ‘the place we’re going first, there might be some china for sale, as well as the shelves she wants me to look at. It’s a Mrs Mackrell, in Caversham.’
‘Mrs Mackrell?’ Kevin repeated with exuberant glee. He snorted, knees twitching up and down. ‘Something a bit fishy about her, eh?’ And he laughed until he had to wipe tears from his eyes.
The street where they parked was lined with ornate, grey-brick Victorian houses. Kevin managed to quell his amusement in time to meet Mrs Mackrell with a reasonably composed facial expression. This was just as well, as the gracious, elderly lady seemed distressed at having to part with her elegant bookshelves. They loaded them onto the Morris and in addition, came away with four Staffordshire figures, with which Kevin was only slightly impressed.
‘Not as good as the things they make in China though,’ he decreed. ‘Good name for it, China.’ He chortled a bit more, before settling down. George was already starting to feel rather weary. It would have been far more peaceful to come on his own. But he did like to instruct the boy. Somewhere in that flickering brain was a capacity to learn.
They parked again and ate their sandwiches by the towpath under Caversham Bridge, watching swans and summer boats sliding past, before they set off into Reading. The dealer at whose business ‘My Bureau’ seemed to have shipped up was owned by a cheerful, balding man called Ron King. Ron wore pale suits that always seemed at least a size too big and had an off-centre look about them, the jackets listing to one side. George liked Ron well enough and they often slipped over to the Turk’s Head for a pint together. The shop, however, while nothing like as bad as Lewis Barker’s dump of a place, occupied three floors of a tall Victorian terrace and had a cramped, dusty feel about it.
‘I’ve had the police here, George,’ Ron greeted them indignantly. ‘Uniforms in the doorway in full view. I don’t like that – it gives the place a bad name. Here – it’s at the back.’
He led them through to an inner room. ‘I bought that in good faith, I did. Auction at Watlington . . .’
The bureau bookcase stood against the back wall. Even as George moved closer, there was already something about it that did not feel right. Was it the shape of the pedestal, the texture of the wood?
‘Kevin – you come and look with me.’ It did not take more than a minute. His glances at the feet, the pedestal, inside the lower drawers told him immediately. Bending close, he examined the meeting place of the top and bottom of the piece. Kevin’s eyes met his, serious and interested. George would take him through the details in a moment; show him. But first he straightened up, feeling a surge of exaltation.
‘It’s all right, Ron – it’s clean. It’s a similar piece, but that’s not the one. They’ll have to keep looking.’
‘And I,’ he said to Kevin, once they were back in the van, ‘will have to tell Lady Byngh.’
‘Proper old tartar, that one,’ Kevin said. ‘Scares the wits out of me.’
George laughed. ‘I know what you mean. I suppose she’s had an odd sort of life. I don’t think she’s all bad underneath.’
‘Oh but I don’t think you’d want to go underneath the old girl to find out, would you?’ Kevin said, breaking into further helpless chortling at his own wit. Fortunately after that, the circuit flicked off and all was silence.
4.
Once everyone had gone home, George stepped out into the mellow evening to lock up the barn. Monty plopped down the step after him and ambled to the flowerbed.
George paused in a patch of sunlight and breathed in deeply. Monty’s muzzle nudged at his ankle.
‘Yes, all right, old boy.’ He bent to pat the tan and white drum of a body. One of the by-products of being alone was that it gave him licence to talk nonsense to the dog. ‘She’s been feeding you too many sweets, hasn’t she?’ Sylvia had got into the habit of bringing a packet of liquorice allsorts almost every time she came now, however much George tried to deter her. ‘You need some exercise. I’ll just lock up and then we’ll go for a little tootle, eh?’
As he walked back from turning the large key in the lock of the barn door, a noise arose from the road, the insect-like buzz of an engine. He would have taken no notice, except that it drew unpleasantly closer before cutting out at what sounded like the foot of his drive. In the ensuing quiet, he heard voices. Women’s voices.
He looked round for Monty. Don’t bark, he urged, mentally. Monty appeared to be in a state of deep meditation, his nose buried in the bed of snapdragons at the end of the house. Fortunately, his brain could not manage too many tasks at once.
George tiptoed over to the hedge bordering the road and crept along it towards the drive. The voices grew clearer. He shoved his head half into the hedge, trying to hear better. His heart pounded. Good heavens, it was Sylvia! It would be hard to mistake her honey-sweet tones. But how the heck had she got here? Another of the voices, deep and resonant, he also knew immediately: Eunice MacLean. He concentrated on trying to make out who was with them. The third voice rose for a moment, a hectoring air to it, and he knew then. A queasy pang of dismay passed through him – it was Rosemary Abbott.
He froze, paralysed once more by the sense that women always conspired against him, leaving him with no choice . . . He was soon overcome by the absurdity of hiding on the very threshold of his own house from the woman he was supposed to be courting – he was, wasn’t he? And what if they walked up the drive to find him with the right side of his head stuck in the hedge?
Attempting weightlessness, like someone crossing newly poured concrete, he toed it over to the front step before calling to Monty, as if he had just emerged from the front door.
‘Come on, old boy – looks as if we’ve got visitors.’
George clipped his lead on and walked down the drive with an air of surprised and expansive welcome, feeling three pairs of eyes swivel in his direction.
Eunice MacLean, wearing a long-sleeved fawn dress, looked stiff but elegant beside Rosemary Abbott in a tightly belted summer frock of a loud pink floral design. Sylvia wore navy slacks and the emerald blouse that did wonders to emphasize her contours. Her hands were grasping the handlebars of a motor scooter, which was painted blancmange pink.
‘Hello George, dear!’ she greeted him, in tones which left no ambiguity about the intimacy between them.
‘Ah, Sylvia, hello.’ He gave a little bow from the waist, a formula that he repeated, for want of any other inspiration, in the direction of each of the other women. ‘Afternoon, Miss MacLean, Miss Abbott.’
Eunice MacLean returned the greeting with a nod, her gaunt face giving nothing away. Rosemary Abbott, pink and vaporous-looking in the heat, seemed about to combust with curiosity.
‘I was just introducing myself, George,’ Sylvia enthused. ‘It’s high time I met your neighbours.’
‘Well, hardly neighbours,’ Rosemary Abbott attempted to contradict, but Sylvia ploughed on.
‘Look –’ She nodded at the blancmange-coloured Vespa. ‘D’you like it?’
‘It’s, er . . . It’s very nice,’ George said, one hand writhing in his pocket. ‘Whose is it?’
‘Oh, it’s mine, dear! I thought I’d surprise you. I bought it yesterday. I thought how nice it would be if I could come over any old time and see you.’ As she spoke, George’s mind presented him with an image of himself being sucked further and further down into treacherous sinking sands.
‘Anyway . . .’ Sylvia began to wheel the thing up the drive, ‘nice to meet you, Eunice, Rosemary . . .’
‘Goodbye,’ Eunice MacLean said with her usual grace. Rosemary Abbott opened her mo
uth but nothing discernible came out of it. George gave a vague wave in their direction, not meeting anyone’s eye. He walked behind Sylvia to the house, with a notion that the sands were now clasping tightly round his thighs.
Once they had parked the scooter and were safely enclosed in the house, Sylvia flung her arms round him. As ever, pressed against the fulsome, perfumed force of the woman, his misgivings, common sense and general ability to orientate himself deserted him. Her eyes beamed up at him.
‘It’s so lovely to be here with you, Georgie darling! The more time I spend with you, the more I can’t bear to be anywhere else.’ She stood on tiptoe and pressed her lips to his, before drawing back, solemn-eyed now. ‘Do you feel the same?’
‘Oh . . .’ He gave a demented smile. God alone knew what he felt. ‘Yes – yes, my dear!’ After all, it was a question clearly requiring a positive response.
‘Look –’ She rummaged in her bag. ‘Allsorts for Monty.’ She held the little packet up winningly and Monty started whining and wagging his tail in anticipation. ‘I want him to be my friend.’
And so it came to pass that Sylvia Newsome moved in on George’s life. Now that she had her scooter, there was scarcely a day when she did not appear, after work, once the shop was shut up. And there were other appearances – day by day more items took up their place in the house. He had said nothing to her about the silky garment hanging on the back of the bathroom door and he said nothing now.
‘I’ve never seen these before,’ Vera remarked, when a pair of size five wellington boots appeared beside his own at the back door. Or, ‘I see you’ve got some new talc,’ when a container of sandalwood talcum powder turned up on the dressing table.
Vera made the remark down in the kitchen. She turned from the kettle, which was making throaty attempts to boil water through a rime of limescale. She set out the mugs very deliberately, for herself and for all the men, then turned to George with a shrewd look in her eye.
‘So – when am I going to meet this lady friend of yours, then?’
Twelve
1.
George sat in the pub at South Stoke, his second pint of bitter in front of him. Sylvia, beside him, was a few sips into her second Babycham. While George hoped more beer would help him lapse into mellowness, he was beginning to find the atmosphere of the pub stifling to the point of claustrophobia. It had been all right on the boat, its very motion causing a movement of air in the sullen midday. But the pub was too crowded, the very air a soup of smoke, sweat, beer.
They had set out this lovely morning to the sound of church bells and by midday they and Barchetta were well on their way, another of Sylvia’s gigantic picnics on board. There were chicken legs, slices of beef with a pot of horseradish, rolls and butter, tomatoes and crisps, apples, bottles of beer and chocolate cake.
‘You certainly know how to feed me up,’ George said. He really was grateful. If there was one thing he couldn’t stand it was people being unnecessarily mean and penny-pinching about food.
‘Oh I like a good picnic,’ Sylvia said. ‘And anyway, I like feeding you. You’re always so appreciative.’
He set the outboard at a gentle speed and they droned along between the reeds and willows, the prow turning away little plumes of water. They looked out across the humid green of meadows and vacant, chewing gaze of Friesian cows. They peered, speculating, at the backs of riverside homes. As they approached Goring Lock, instead of going through, George turned the boat. Close to South Stoke they tied up by the bank and ate. By then, the heat had built to the point of oppression. Sylvia, peering out from under a floppy white straw hat, stretched her legs in a luxurious manner across the boat and basked, fanning herself with the lid of a Tupperware box.
‘It’s damned hot,’ George said, boiled even in a short-sleeved shirt and – revolutionary step – no vest. ‘Almost makes you want to jump in.’
Sylvia giggled. ‘Shall we skinny dip? Maybe not – after all that dinner.’
The very thought was a bit much for George. They soon decided on a drink. Somewhere in the shade had been the idea, but the pub was even hotter than outside.
Amid the boozy racket, Sylvia brought her lips close to his ear. ‘Let’s go and find a tree to sit under, shall we?’
On the way back to the river they found a copse, a pool of dark shade. George, feeling definitely unsteady after the accumulation of beer drinking, found himself being steered under the cover of the trees and seated with abrupt suddenness on a twiggy patch of leaves that at least had the advantage of being dry and minus thistles.
‘Here you are, lovey,’ Sylvia announced. ‘You can just lie back and put your head on my cardi – there you go – there’s room for both of us!’
She settled down to his left, rather closer than was sensible in this heat, George thought hazily. He lay on his back looking up at the sky in a floating, dream-like state, feeling as if he was only half present. Sylvia had turned on her side to face him and within moments a warm and not particularly dream-like hand crept across his chest. A finger inserted itself between the buttons of his shirt and began to stroke and tickle his skin.
He did remember it afterwards. Sort of . . . Somewhere after the tickling sensation on his chest. Normally such contact provoked him into a state of instant arousal from which he would have to make heroic efforts to disengage. Today, things were a little slower. The heat and the muffling effects of the drink made both mind and body work at half-speed like someone trying to run across a thick foam mattress. Work, nevertheless, they did . . .
So that he did remember a sluggish conversation – while the little warm finger between his shirt buttons kept up its work – about the ‘the situation’. ‘The situation’ – apparently iniquitous and foolish – was that Sylvia was still stuck living with her mother, while she and he were so completely in love and battling to spend every spare second together, which made it all so much more silly and such a waste, ‘don’t you think, Georgie?’
He also recalled Sylvia raising her left leg and laying it over his own left leg so that they lay half entwined. A hopeful scenario began to bloom in his mind in which here in this shrouded copse, one of those useful components of the English countryside, Sylvia, carried away by the bubbly jolliness of the Babycham, might take it into her head to . . .
That didn’t happen. But another conversation did happen about the fact that she was longing for him to make her his own. During this particular stage of the conversation, he became conscious of the fleshy pressure of a sizeable breast against his ribcage. And – the hand wandered about his person and hovered above the moist waistband of his trousers – would it not make sense for them to get married, so that they could share everything, and soon?
In this state, under the hot pressure of his flesh, he could only agree that to share everything seemed a very fine idea; that in fact he was very soon going to be unable to contain himself unless they did share everything. What was rather more difficult to recall, was how this conversation progressed from the notion of a vaguely good idea to a suddenly very precise discussion of dates and times during which Sylvia sat up, seeming much fresher and more sober than he felt at that moment and announced, ‘The end of August.’
‘August?’ He could not quite think what the word meant for a moment. ‘Oh, you mean next year?’ This was rather a relief – he had been about to propose June next year.
‘No, no – this August, George. We can do it by then, properly I mean. Get the banns read and everything. We’ve got six weeks at least.’
Somehow, by the time they were returned to the boat and chugging back downstream, he had agreed to a date – Sylvia possessing a remarkable facility for knowing the year’s calendar off pat – and they were to be married on Saturday, 29 August.
2.
‘I want to be seen with you, George,’ she pleaded as they drove home. She told him she had taken the next day off work because she wanted to come out buying with him. ‘I like seeing what you do and all the lovely thi
ngs.’ Her hand made its way across his thigh. ‘Oh do let me come! I haven’t had a ride in your van yet.’
‘Of course you can,’ he said. What else could he say?
‘And on the way . . .’ She gave a little laugh. ‘I mean I’ve only just thought of it, but perhaps we could go and buy a ring together?’
The weather the next day was, if anything, even more stiflingly hot. By nine o’clock, Vera reported that Lady Byngh had telephoned, outraged that the bureau he had gone to investigate had turned out not to be hers.
‘She was ever so rude,’ Vera observed, pink-faced. ‘If she was one of mine I’d’ve put her over my knee.’
George was glad to escape. He was in a state of disbelief at what he had promised yesterday. What on earth had he been thinking of? He couldn’t seem to think straight, that was the trouble. Sylvia got him into such a state of need and desire that he was in a spin, to put it mildly. Sometimes he thought, if he could just knock her senseless and have his dreadful way with her – just get it over with – then he might be able to process his thoughts in a sensible manner.
He took the car, picked Sylvia up and they drove with the air billowing through the open windows. She, in a new dress, scarlet with white spots, was effervescent with excitement.
‘This is all so nice of you, George – and so lovely of you to buy me a ring!’
This was not an intention he had personally expressed but by now it seemed to have been established as a fact.
