by Annie Murray
George would have liked to sit down but amid this standing company, did not feel he could. Guesses hopped in his mind like frogs. Alan? Or was this something to do with Lady Byngh? Or some imagined slight that he had given one of them?
He looked at Vera. Her eyes met his, waiting for him to prompt her.
‘Well – you’d better let me have it,’ he said. ‘What’s happened?’
As the others stood round, Vera held out the newspaper in her hand, folded to a particular page. It was the local paper, he saw, the Mercury. She handed it to him, pointed to one of the small announcements. ‘Here – look.’
‘Mrs Edna Cook of St John’s Road Wallingford would like to announce the engagement of her daughter, Sylvia Ann Newsome, to George Oswald Baxter of Chalk Hill House, Greenbury . . .’
He read no further. Not that he was not surprised. Sylvia hadn’t wasted any time. And seeing it there like that was a shock. She hadn’t said anything to him about announcing it in the paper. The reality of it came to him with an unpleasant twist in his guts. But he knew he was going to have to marry Sylvia now he had promised. It seemed the only thing to do. He still could not see what the trouble was. His not telling them?
‘Yes, well . . .’ He looked at Vera. ‘Sylvia’s obviously rather excited about it all. But we did tell you . . .’
‘I knew it!’ Vera said, emphasizing this certainty by hurling the newspaper away onto the seat of a chair. She seemed energized. ‘That’s just the thing, Mr B. As soon as I saw her the other day, I knew there was something not right. I couldn’t sort out in my mind what it was at the time, but I knew that I knew her from somewhere . . .’
‘The thing is, George,’ Rosemary Abbott blurted, puce-faced, ‘you can’t marry the woman. She’s duped you. She’s an imposter and according to Vera, she’s a gold-digger – and a marriage-wrecker!’
‘Now wait a minute,’ George said, steamed up by Rosemary’s bossy accusations. ‘What on earth d’you think you’re doing, coming in here and—?’
Vera held up a hand to stop him, with such command he could only obey and admire.
‘For heaven’s sake, Rosemary, let Vera tell him,’ Pat Nesbitt hissed in the background. She held her hands clasped in front of her as if at a prayer meeting. Eunice MacLean was doing much the same.
Vera spoke gently, but firmly, almost as if the others were not there.
‘I went home,’ she went on, ‘and I kept saying to Alan, I know her from somewhere. That person who Mr Baxter says he’s going to marry. And Alan kept telling me I’d got it all wrong of course and that I should mind my own business. But it was nagging at me. But when I saw this in the paper, I knew immediately who she was. I went to school with her, in Didcot. Her name’s not Sylvia at all – well it wasn’t then. It was Cook. Lillian Cook – that’s who she was.’
‘She’s a marriage-breaker!’ Rosemary asserted again.
‘That’s another thing, you see.’ Vera looked down, speaking sorrowfully. He was touched to see that this conversation was truly painful to her. ‘I didn’t know Lillian really. One reason I remember her is because she was always a looker. But she was two or three forms above me.’
‘Above you?’ George said.
‘Yes,’ Vera said with an injured air. ‘Above me. I suppose she told you she’s twenty-one? That’d be like her, by all accounts. Anyway, I lost track of her after school but I do remember, later, hearing about David Newsome. He was one of the town solicitors and she was his secretary. He was a married man with children. She lured him away from his wife. Caused havoc, she did. I mean I didn’t even live in the same town but I heard about it. He was besotted with her. But the wife had a breakdown and all sorts. Lil was after his money, no doubt about it. She led him a hell of a dance once they were married. His children turned against him. Poor man died of a heart attack in the end.’
This last detail at least tallied with what Sylvia had told him, George thought. He sank into the nearest chair.
‘She really doesn’t sound very nice,’ Pat Nesbitt suggested with a hint of a nervous laugh. ‘Though I’m sure she can be very charming.’
‘Insidious more like,’ Rosemary Abbott declared. ‘A snake.’
‘We really are very sorry to bring such tidings,’ Eunice MacLean said. ‘But we felt it was courageous of Vera to want to tell you. And surely better to be in the picture.’
‘Yes,’ George agreed. He lowered his head. ‘Yes, quite.’
His heart was pounding. He laid a hand over his chest. For a second he thought about David Newsome and his heart attack and took a deep breath. He did not know what he felt, not yet, other than infinitely foolish.
‘Of course,’ Vera said, trying to soften things. George looked up again. ‘It’s not up to us to say whether you should marry her. I know it’s lonely for you and everything. But at least if you do, you’ll know what you’re taking on. And maybe she’s changed . . .’
‘Oh don’t be absurd – he can’t possibly marry her!’ Rosemary Abbott interjected.
Vera turned on her a look of command that must have astonished everyone in the room and appeared to be about to speak, but she held back. Rosemary Abbott’s face turned a high colour. She opened her mouth then closed it again and looked away.
‘I think it’s time we left,’ Eunice MacLean suggested. ‘Vera, we three will go, but perhaps you might stay for a little while?’
George raised his head. Things were falling into place in his mind, a shower of emotions – relief, uncomfortable insight, grief at what he would now not have; anger at the way Sylvia had gone about taking him in, shame at the way he had allowed her to . . . Yet, in the face of this truth – for he could see it was the truth – he felt suddenly strong.
‘Ladies – I need to take all this in.’ He gave a wry smile and got to his feet. ‘What a fool – and there’s certainly no fool like an old fool, is there? I am grateful to you – I truly am.’
Pat Nesbitt stepped forward in her girlish way and to his astonishment he saw that she had tears in her eyes.
‘It’s just that . . .’ She extended her hand, then withdrew it. ‘We do so care about you, George.’
The others murmured agreement, nodding – even Rosemary Abbott. George lowered his head, so touched that he had no idea what to say.
‘Well, that’s, er . . . That’s . . . Thank you . . . I, er . . .’ He looked up at them all again. ‘It looks very much as if I shall have to call it all off, doesn’t it?’
When Vera had shown the Cronies out, she came back to him, looking emotional. There was a round pink patch on each of her cheeks.
‘I’m ever so sorry, Mr B. But I do think you’re better off out of it. You can do a lot better than that, a lovely gent like you.’ She put her head on one side. ‘What will you do?’
‘Do?’ He imagined confronting Sylvia. No. ‘I’ll write to her. First of all, anyway.’
Vera met his eyes. She nodded. They stood in silence for a moment.
‘Would you like me to cook you some tea before I go?’
‘Oh no – I’m perfectly all right, thanks, Vera. I’ve got some nice sausages.’
She gave a pitying smile. ‘You’ll look like a sausage soon.’
‘It’s OK – you go on home to Alan.’
‘All right. Well – see you tomorrow,’ she said.
He followed her to the door.
‘Don’t fret too much, will you?’ she said. ‘She won’t, I’ll bet you that. She was always a bit of a cow, Lillian was, to be honest.’
‘Thanks, Vera,’ he said gently, as she left.
He went to the back to let Monty out for a few moments before pouring himself a tankard of homebrew and taking it into the sitting room. He sat for a long time, as the light faded, stroking the dog’s ears as he sat beside him.
August
Fourteen
1.
Late-afternoon sunlight slanted across the downs, peach-gold and mellow.
George stood at the highest poin
t of the track, his back to Greenbury’s Iron Age fort, looking south over the fields. He could feel the warmth like a hand on his right cheek. Monty snuffled about in the grass in front of him, the tip of his tail like a white flag above the green.
There was a whiff of smoke in the air from stubble burning some fields away, the atmosphere tinged with blue. Even though it was a beautiful evening, it seemed to him there was a doomy, threatening feel to the sunlight. The month was drawing to a close, the days turning their face from this long, golden summer, each one’s passing edging the season downwards into cold demise of the year.
He was still in his shirtsleeves though and cotton trousers, hands pushed into his pockets as he stared across the as yet unburned stubble close by, each stalk clearly defined by its own tiny shadow in the low-angled light. He saw the midnight blue of a crow, its back end swinging from side to side as it picked its way between the stalks.
He had not been up here since February, since his unholy dash from the funeral.
Yesterday, after shutting up shop, he had walked to the cemetery at the edge of the village, to visit Win’s grave. It was not quite the first time, but he was not given to loitering at gravesides. He only had a dim idea of where his mother was buried. But these last weeks had brought him back to himself and lowered him into a mood of remembrance, of sadness and of awareness of growing old. This, he knew, was a reaction to his folly, his crazed wish for youth and for more – more of everything. He owed it to Win and to his past to take her flowers, at least from time to time. In his stupid excitement he had neglected her. He had clipped a few remaining blooms of Albertine, her favourite pink roses, and gathered rosemary and bay to mix with them, enjoying the sweet and pungent scents together.
In loving memory, Winifred Baxter:
28.9.1917 – 17.2.1964
‘My wife.’ He had whispered it, with a sense of wonder, of affection. She was my wife all that time. And most likely my only wife now, he thought.
‘You know, old girl,’ he told her, still under his breath, ‘I’ve made a proper fool of myself.’
The grave offered neither reproach nor advice. Even so, he had turned away with a sense of vague comfort. He felt that Win might have laughed, somehow, despite it all. This was the way of things, he thought: gain–loss, up–down, beginning–end.
Standing now, looking at the bronze-tinted land about him, he remembered the snow and the bereft silence of that February afternoon. It had ended with his sudden vision of a life enlarged, of newness, hope, family.
A sour, bereft feeling filled him. According to Vera’s reckoning, ‘Sylvia Newsome’ must be in her late forties. Knocking on rather, to produce a child. Not that, he saw now, she had ever mentioned any intention of doing so. Nor had he ever asked her age outright. She had dropped hints: he had assumed. More fool him.
Monty ambled back and sat looking vacantly at him, shifting on his huge front paws like a seal. Grasping eventually that no one was moving anywhere, he settled in the grass with a grunt and lay panting, pink tongue lolling to one side.
George had not hesitated after Vera’s disclosures. All his doubts about Sylvia – her brash materialism, the tedium of her conversation, the ghastly pink Vespa and the way she had overfed his dog and steam-rollered him towards marriage – all came into hard-edged focus and shoved him out of self-delusion.
In the small hours of Saturday morning, in a night with no sleep during which he had both wept and raged, he had written a letter, typing it in his office to make it formal and official. By dawn he was setting out in the car, a shred of crescent moon still over the fields, to deliver the letter stealthily by hand. On the way home, as the sun came up, lapwings wandered in the fields and the sweet expectant smells of morning streamed through the window. He experienced a new, champagne feeling of wellbeing and found himself singing.
‘Bloody Mary pom pom pom . . .’ Once again he was startled and bemused by himself.
Dear Sylvia, [he resisted the temptation to add ‘or whatever your name is’]
I’m sorry to say that I have decided . . .
After typing this he sat for a full ten minutes, wondering if – and what – he had in fact decided. Keep it brief, he thought. Brief and to the point. Feeling stronger, he continued,
. . . to break off our engagement. I do not feel it is right. Things have moved too fast and I am not ready to remarry. I do not see this changing in the near future. I think it best that we do not see each other again.
My sincere apologies and good wishes for your future,
George Baxter
He wondered about asking her to return the several guineas’ worth of engagement ring for which he had forked out, but decided against it. It seemed small-minded.
He was on edge all that day, thinking Sylvia might turn up at the house. That evening, to be on the safe side, he took himself off to the Barley Mow. This did not turn out to be especially soothing to his nerves. On his way in he met John Wylde coming out. There were exchanges of ‘How do?’ and ‘Evening, John!’ which seemed to satisfy the demands of social engagement on that front. But a fearsome sight met him behind the bar: not only Glowering Brenda, but beside her, wearing a genetically similar scowl, stood Sharon. Even more startling, Sharon was wearing a straight purple frock, which as well as fitting tightly as skin over her considerable frontage, was low cut and sleeveless, revealing her candle-white arms and cleavage in startling quantities.
‘Oh, er, hello Sharon.’ He nodded in the mother’s direction and continued breezily, ‘Didn’t know you had a job here as well.’
Before Sharon could get a word out, George found himself assailed from along the bar.
‘Eve’nin, Mr Baxter! Come for a noice point, have you?’
On a stool at the end of the bar from where he could ogle Sharon with doggy devotion, was Kevin. Sharon cast him a look both withering and glum as she pulled George’s pint. Kevin brightened even further.
Having returned Kevin’s salutations and paid for his pint, George retreated, grateful that Bill and Roy, his drinking mates, were there to regale him with dilemmas involving engine batteries and the storage of onions. Hot news was that someone had stolen Graham Turner’s car. He never seemed to have much luck, it was concluded.
George sank into the comforting pond of pub talk, amid the smells of bitter and cigarettes, the bursts of sudden laughter.
He went several nights in a row, just in case. And then a letter arrived from Sylvia. George found himself feeling gratified that she had had to fork out for a stamp. It contained, in a looping hand, two sides of invective: ‘ . . . heartbroken . . . Such humiliation . . . never been treated . . . not the person I thought you . . . gentleman . . . in reality . . . scheming bastard . . . devastated . . . mother . . . shock . . . endangered her health . . .’ That was just the first page. He stopped reading. He noticed there was no mention of the ring. He felt sad and also soiled. He tore the letter into the tiniest pieces and scattered it on the compost heap.
Gazing out now over the fields, he moved to the lip of the path, from where the land sloped down and away, and lowered himself to sit on the grassy edge. Monty half raised himself to shuffle closer and sit beside him, looking philosophical, or vacant, it was hard to tell, but probably the latter. George sat, sensing that his own expression was probably similar. He heard a vehicle labouring up the road over the downs, a bee’s vibration on the pale head of a scabious flower to his left.
The dying beauty all about him only increased the melancholy which had settled in him all this month, however much he kept busy and tried to appear cheerful in front of Vera and the others. They were full of kindness, asking if he was doing all right. He felt sad and ashamed. As a result of trying not to appear as if he felt sad and ashamed, he was being ridiculously cheerful.
Once more he considered flight; just taking off on his own. Last time he had sat on this hillside, though, his outlook had been one of panoramic glory, of him bestriding a backlit, blossoming world where all th
at he had never had might at last be possible. This time, he visualized himself a lonesome old gent in a squashed trilby, all hope spent, stepping out from some cabbagewater-smelling lodging house, hunched under a doomy sky as he stared over the beating, lead-coloured sea. This not altogether optimistic vision almost brought him to tears.
At least at home I’ve got plenty to keep me busy, he thought: the business, the garden. But as for women . . . He was filled with a despondency even greater than the one he’d felt at his seaside cabbagewater imaginings.
‘Well, Monty . . .’ He flapped the dog’s ear that was closest to him back and forth in his hand. ‘I don’t think I’m much of a goer with women, do you? I was aiming a bit high. No – all that’s not for me, old boy. It’s just going to be you and me from now on. You and me and a few good solid Chippendale chairs. You can always rely on them. What d’you think of that?’
Monty eyed him for a second, looked away with a dispassionate air and continued panting.
September
Fifteen
1.
The languorous late summer waned. There would not be many days left for trips along the river in Barchetta, lounging in the reeds with beer and sandwiches. The garden was full of down-facing rose heads. His crop of potatoes and onions was in sacks in the garage, beans and courgettes, blackcurrants and raspberries all gathered in and apples hanging on the trees. The Virginia creeper leaves splayed across the house and barn were tinged with red.
It was time, George decided, after this month of lugubrious mourning, to Pull Himself Together. Enough ‘poor me’. There were things to catch up with.
Rosamund Parker’s boxes of stuff, for a start, which had been in the storeroom at the back of the barn for several weeks now. George had despatched Clarence to Mrs Parker’s house with the van to pick up ‘Mummy’s’ legacy of items. Curious, he had awaited Clarence’s return.
