by Annie Murray
Clarence had climbed down from the cab of the van, as inscrutably sour-looking as ever.
‘Well, Clarence – get on all right? Nice lady, Mrs Parker, isn’t she?’
Clarence, not meeting his eye, walked round to the side of the van and emitted a sound that was somewhere between ‘Ummm’ and ‘Phwoor’, followed by prolonged throat-clearing. That was all George managed to get out of him on the subject of his visit to Rotherfield Peppard, though he couldn’t help observing that since then Clarence had been looking oddly cheerful, even had a spring in his step.
When Vera came in to work on George’s first pulled-together morning – a Wednesday as it happened and a Sharon-less day – he eyed her carefully for signs of strain or misery. Had he missed difficulties between her and Alan, in his own self-absorption? She arrived with her basket, wearing a pale green dress with white spots and white heels, her hair neat and freshly ‘done’. She seemed happy enough, he thought.
She appeared to have forgotten to bring the radio and there was a friendly silence in the kitchen as they made their first morning cuppa, Monty snoozing on his bed. Then both went to talk at once. Each stopped, laughed.
‘Ladies first,’ George said.
‘No – you’re the boss.’ Vera grinned.
How nice she was, George thought again, how cheering with those gappy teeth and nose that wrinkled when she smiled.
‘Well, all I was going to say was . . .’ He paused, fiddling with a silver teaspoon. He felt fluttery with nerves, almost as if about to ask her for a date. ‘I’ve been thinking, Vera – about the business. Bit of a fresh start after all that’s happened and so on . . .’ He looked down at his shoes, clearing his throat.
Vera listened from the other side of the table, across the mugs.
‘What I was going to propose is that we put your position here on a more formal footing. I’d like to make you manager. Properly. A pay rise and so on, of course . . .’
Vera’s reaction took him quite by surprise.
‘Oh, Mr Baxter!’ She was all blushes. She fanned her face with one hand and had come over tearful as well. She burrowed in her basket for a hanky.
‘I’m sorry,’ he said, perturbed. ‘I didn’t mean to . . . ’
‘No,’ she said, muffled, from behind a white square of cotton. ‘It’s –’ She gave her nose a forceful blow. ‘I’m . . . I’d be ever so chuffed, if only . . . I mean . . .’ Suddenly, she smiled. ‘D’you really think I could?’
‘Well yes, of course,’ he said. ‘You’re doing it anyway, aren’t you?’
Vera’s face sobered. The kettle boiled and she fetched it to fill the teapot for them and for the men in the barn. She returned the kettle to the hob and stood across the table from him again, her hand on the milk bottle.
‘All I was going to say when I came in was, I’ve seen this little bit of training I could do in book-keeping – over in Didcot. It’s not much, but it might help.’
‘Well that’s a splendid idea,’ George urged her. ‘Though you don’t really need it, Vera. You’ve got on top of things very well as it is.’
‘I’d like to.’ She poured milk into the mugs, seeming deflated. There was a silence before she looked up at him again. ‘I think we’d better leave it there for now, Mr B. Alan being the way he is. Me being sort of, you know, promoted like that, I mean – I don’t think he’d like it. It’s . . .’ She shrugged. ‘Just the way he is.’
‘I see.’ George thought he saw tears in Vera’s eyes, but she turned away, reaching for the tray. ‘Well – as you like, Vera. The offer’s there. You let me know if you change your mind, won’t you?’
On her way out with the drinks, she turned again. ‘Oh – by the way, that Dr Hargreaves’ secretary telephoned again. And Lady Byngh . . .’
‘Oh?’ George said warily, dreading the thought of another visit to Nicotine Towers.
‘She was quite chatty actually,’ Vera reported. ‘Evidently the police have found her dining chairs.’
‘Really?’ A memory of the heaped table at Greenburton House came to him, the musty, dust-coated clutter of it all. Fine dining did not seem to feature in the Byngh household. Or fine anything for that matter. ‘Well, good.’
‘She said that the old dear who lives with her has broken her wrist.’
‘Can’t say I’m surprised.’
‘And the nephew, was it . . . ?’
‘Nevew,’ he mimicked. Vera giggled.
‘He was pleased with the present, she said.’
‘Oh – good.’ He did feel pleased. It had mattered to the old girl, he could see. Not that she was that old, he corrected himself. About his own age in fact. He was relieved. Perhaps now she’d stop keeping on about her blasted . . .
‘And she said was there any sign of her Hepplewhite yet?’
George groaned.
2.
Several days passed. Vera said nothing more about her possible new job title and George, unsure of the fragile checks and balances of the Day household, did not like to raise it.
He flung himself into practical things, avoiding the whirlpools of quiet reflection that could drag him down into longing and self-pity. Dead-heading the roses was soothing. And he cleared out his office, destroying old ledgers and receipts that had sat dustily unheeded on the shelves for years. During the process, once more he came across the newspaper cutting of the trade fair in Buenos Aires. He stared at it, a surge of shameful sensations inside him. He separated it from the other sheet of paper and tore it up, adding it to the pile of waste paper. The picture of the Allodola Venus on her rearing horse he propped on his desk.
‘For old times’ sake.’ He leaned down and peered at her, remembering the visceral reaction he had experienced that time he saw her, at the extraordinary perfection of the craftsmanship, her beauty, almost as if he was in the presence of something holy.
‘Where are you?’ he whispered. ‘Where did you go?’
‘What’s that?’ Vera asked, later. He told her the story as she gazed at the grainy picture.
‘She does look lovely,’ she said, propping Venus back on the desk. ‘So – did you tell anyone? That the other one’s in Argentina?’
‘Well, no – apart from Joe and Walter Black, but they’ve both passed on now. Who would I tell?’
‘Funny really,’ she said. ‘You’re the only one who knows, then.’
‘Yes, I suppose I am,’ he agreed. ‘Although he’s still only half as good without her. They were always meant to be a pair.’
Mrs Parker’s boxes were another task facing him, but he looked over them, stacked in the store at the back of the workshop, with a sense of defeat. He couldn’t face beginning on it. One day when it was fine, he thought, he’d get Kevin to sort through them.
Overall he had a feeling of his days being at a halt, stalled, while life swirled on around him and without him.
Monty moulted copiously; Clarence announced, with aberrant glee, that he was ‘taking the old girl away’ for the weekend. It was his and Edith’s ruby anniversary.
‘I’m surprised he even knows what that is,’ Vera commented.
And one morning, as George walked round the side of the house, he interrupted two figures perched on the low wall, shrouded by the heads of pink Persian roses, deep in . . . Deep in Kevin talking. He had his back to George as he approached.
‘. . . so it all depends, see, on the firing – how hot you do it. With this one I’m on about, it’s silicon paste – that’s got clay in and white quartzose sand – and if you get it really hot it goes translucent . . .’
Sharon was half turned to face Kevin, her eyes like huge coals in her pasty face, gazing at him with every appearance of raptness, mouth hanging a little open. It was she who caught sight of George. Kevin, seeing her eyes focus behind him, turned.
‘Hello! Er, jolly good – carry on!’ George said, hurrying round to the back door.
Amazing, he thought. Kevin seemed to be in the process of learning Jacquemart’s
book off by heart. He grinned to himself.
‘Mr Baxter?’ Vera came out of the kitchen. She sounded apprehensive until she saw his expression, which made her smile as well. ‘What’s tickling you?’
‘Oh – Kevin’s out there wittering on about pots and Sharon’s lapping it all up as if it’s the most enthralling thing she’s ever heard.’
‘P’raps it is,’ Vera laughed. ‘Amazing what a girl’ll sit through though, isn’t it?’ She became serious again. ‘Can I have a quick word?’
This sounded serious. They went into the office. George sat down and turned the chair to face Vera.
‘I’ve been thinking, Mr Baxter, about what you said – me being manager and that.’
‘Yes, I see,’ George said, aiming to sound neutral. She was going to turn it down, he thought – Alan playing up, wife getting ideas above herself. He found himself disappointed.
Vera clasped her hands in front of her and spoke in a calm, considered way.
‘I haven’t said anything to Alan yet, not as such. If I said yes, just like that, I know he’d feel as if you’d put me above him in some way. It’s his pride, you see. He’s a man, and, well – you know . . . Anyway, I’ve thought of a way round it, if you were to agree.’
George waited.
‘Thing is, I think if you were to give Alan a sort of title as well, it might work all right.’
George was nonplussed. What did she have in mind? Sir Alan?
‘If you gave everyone a name for their job – say for Alan, Head Restorer, or Clarence could be Head Upholsterer and French Polisher.’
‘Oh, I see.’
At first sight this seemed to George absurd, especially as they were the only staff in the place. Head of what? But he realized Vera was far more likely to have any idea of whether this would work or not. With a faint smile, he said, ‘What about Kevin?’
‘Oh . . .’ Vera’s face relaxed. ‘We can think of something to call him. He’s apprenticed under Alan so you could call him Apprentice Furniture Restorer or something like that. Something that made him under Alan – Alan would like that, I know he would!’
George found himself laughing at her enthusiasm. ‘So – you think we might get away with it then?’
Vera beamed back. ‘I think we might.’
Within a couple of days, everyone was settled. Even Clarence, to George’s surprise, seemed honoured to have a title bestowed upon him. He stood tall.
‘Head Upholsterer and French Polisher,’ he repeated in his creaking voice, trying out the words by which he had informally described his work for decades. ‘Edith’ll like that, I reckon.’
Alan greeted the news with bashful pride, as if it was an accolade long deserved.
‘Yes,’ he said, pulling his shoulders back. ‘That’s me. That’ll do nicely, thank you.’
Kevin seemed less bothered than anyone else, since he already knew he was an apprentice.
Vera’s elevation to Manager passed almost without comment.
3.
A few days later, George slowed the van just past the end of a narrow side road and reversed into it.
‘Where the hell is this damn place?’ he muttered, swinging the vehicle back the way he had come. He had been chasing to and fro along these lanes in the Chilterns, trying to find the place for his final call that day. By now he had got to the point where he would rather have searched out a pub and a nice pint than this blasted place.
Before he’d set off in the morning for a day out, visiting other dealers in the area, Vera had come to him with another telephone message.
‘Dr Hargreaves is going to be at the farm all this week apparently – it would be a good day to call on him. It’s his mother’s place evidently – she must’ve died. Toke’s Farm, it’s called.’
Seeing the location, across the toll bridge from Pangbourne, up Whitchurch Hill and beyond, he decided to leave it until last. Now he was cursing having had to come here at all.
His spirits had sunk gradually all day, after an optimistic beginning. There had been several misty-moisty days indicating that summer was truly in its dying throes. Today, once again, the sun was shining with a benign autumn richness. If the leaves were beginning to turn, preparing, cell by cell, to shrivel and die, it was imperceptible today. There was a vivid warmth to everything, the trees and hedges a thorough green, sky blue as blue, hopping rooks a shiny ink-black, everything sharply outlined and clear.
He had driven in a country-lane loop, first to a call at Abingdon, then up to Oxford and back to Dorchester, where he knew another front-room dealer called Ernie Greaves, who was always happy to share a pint or two in the White Hart at lunchtime. Ernie was a cheerful, pink-faced man with endearingly unsteady jowls which always reminded George of Monty. Ernie, being an optimist, usually made you feel better. But today, by the time Ernie had chuntered on about his wife, his elder daughter and her husband and sons, George left Dorchester feeling dragged low by the fresh confirmation of his own aloneness. No brothers and sisters, no wife, no children. And, despite numerous women in his life, still no one to call his own.
If he were someone else who he knew, he would feel sorry for him.
After lunch he went to Henley, then Reading. He had a satisfying collection of new stock filling up the van. Rolled in protective cloths in the footwell were a couple of Empire-period ormolu and bronze candlesticks and a blue-coated Toby jug with – a rare thing – its lid. In the back were a selection of stools, a couple of bookshelves which were guaranteed to sell, some brass hunting horns and a coal scuttle and fire irons. In Oxford he found an ornately carved Armada chest, which it had taken two of them to lift onto the van. And last of all, he had loaded up a set of mahogany Chippendale chairs and a good mahogany dining table. It was easy to transport as it separated into two parts, each supported by a pedestal leg with an extending leaf which could be fixed between the two.
From a business point of view it had been an excellent day. But as he rolled along through Warborough and Nettlebed the beauty of the day seemed to mock him. The old longing was upon him: a physical ache of need to be held and comforted while at the same time feeling his own sense of unworthiness. He felt like letting out Monty-ish howls.
‘Where’s my girl?’ he wondered out loud. ‘The girl for me? Where oh where can she be?’
As he came to pay at the toll bridge, he realized he was visibly muttering. The girl in the booth looked warily at him. If only he had brought Monty with him, he thought. At least then his disconsolate mutterings would not seem so deranged.
‘For heaven’s sake,’ he lectured himself as the van climbed the hill, ‘snap out of it, you miserable old sod.’
After another few laps of the hillside lanes on the north bank of the Thames, he at last spotted a track off to the left that he had missed when driving the other way. Coming from this direction there was a visible signpost, black letters on white, though it was snarled up with ivy and brambles: TOKE’S FARM.
The van bumped along a track clogged at the sides with nettles, brambles and overgrown hawthorn hedges which scratched against the sides of the van. George wondered about his suspension and grumbled that this Dr Hargreaves or his wife or whoever was there had better have something worth selling after all this.
Farm buildings came into view. Just as he neared the gate, he saw another sign, a long varnished wooden thing like a banner to the left of the road, with black lettering stained on it:
Come unto me, all ye that labour and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest.
Oh marvellous, he thought. Bonkers as well as miles from anywhere.
He drove in through the open gate and braked at the side of a brick and timber barn and behind a bottle-green Volkswagen Beetle. Did this belong to Dr Hargreaves? It seemed an unlikely vehicle. For a moment, once he switched off the engine, there was absolute silence. As he opened the door and slid out, the barking began and three black and white springer spaniels came tearing towards him from somewhere across the yard.
‘Hey there,’ he said, not worried by them at all. They were all wagging tails and happy leaping at his legs. ‘Now, now – there’s no need to make such a racket, is there?’
Apparently satisfied by this, they all rushed off, back the way they had come. George straightened up in the easeful warmth and strolled across the yard. There was a shimmer of gnats in the air and farm smells of manure and musty barns. He could hear the dogs yapping in the distance.
The farmyard was deeply rutted, potholed and scattered with dusty, ancient-looking straw. The place needed a damn good sweep. The gabled farmhouse was to his right and around the yard were outbuildings, stables and storage rooms, all in mellow brick. A heavy-looking iron trough containing green water stood along the side of one of the barns. Everything looked ramshackle, nettles and weeds sprouting from the foot of walls. A buddleia was growing at an angle out of the farmhouse chimney stack and weeds poked out of gutters. He did not trouble himself to roll his sleeves down and look formal. This was a farm after all.
The dogs had gone quiet, but after a moment he thought he heard other sounds and a voice in the distance. He moved forward a few steps and waited.
She came round the corner of a building, from what must have been a paddock. His eyes stretched wider at the sight moving towards him. The sheer loveliness of her! She was right in every detail as she walked across the yard: long-legged, hair a sleek brown, a soft, mealy-coloured muzzle, those extended ears held at an alert angle and soulful eyes looking out with a gentle, enquiring expression. There she was. He was quite sure, in that moment, that she recognized him.
‘Lottie?’ His voice came out huskily.
‘Actually, this one’s called Minnie, though I agree, Lottie would suit her even better.’
George now took in the fact that, holding the rein of the mule’s halter was a female, who he took to be some sort of stable hand. She was tall and most generously built, he noted, with a round, open, pink-cheeked face and wide grey eyes. The eyes held a frankly mischievous expression. Her hair – long and coiled back into some chaotic wispy arrangement – was brown, but the streaks of grey in it did not escape him. She was wearing the most enormous pair of dung-coloured slacks – army surplus, he wondered? – and a khaki short-sleeved shirt with streaks of mud and grot all over it. The body round which all this was wrapped was magnificently strong-looking and well made.
