by Annie Murray
‘He seems a bright spark,’ she said, looking amused.
‘He certainly has his moments,’ George said, locking the front door.
‘D’you think he’s right?’
‘I somehow doubt it – but no there’s no harm in asking. Anyway – you definitely made Vera’s day.’ He helped Elizabeth out of her dark blue mac. Beneath, she wore a straight grey skirt and pearly-grey blouse. Her hair was pinned back elegantly. ‘You look lovely.’
‘Oh?’ She sounded truly surprised. ‘Well – thank you.’
‘Now, come on through – there’s someone else I want you to meet.’
‘Gracious,’ Elizabeth said. ‘That sounds ominous.’
He led her to the kitchen, lost in rapture. Here she was – in his home!
‘Now this,’ he said, opening the door, ‘is Monty.’
Monty, caught unawares, had been fast asleep on his bed. He raised his head, ears held out at an angle and face squiffy from sleep, as if to say, ‘Uhh?’ Deciding he had better rise to the occasion since there was a genuine visitor present and not just Vera, he heaved himself to his feet and staggered across the floor.
‘Oh my goodness,’ Elizabeth laughed in delight. Of course she knew he had a basset hound, but now the full bizarre, stinky reality was before her. ‘What an absolutely marvellous dog! Look at the size of those paws!’
She dropped to her knees and nuzzled against Monty’s ears, stroking him and sending him into a state of sleepy delirium. This, George decided, was definitely his woman.
2.
They drank tea and once he judged that everyone else would have gone home, he showed her round: the showroom in the house and the barn. At first she said, ‘So beautiful,’ and ‘Lovely,’ looking round at the furniture, his arrangement of it, the sheen of wood grain, the colours singing out of china and enamel, the rich upholstery. Yellow roses were still in bloom at the front of the house, but the back was draped in showers of pink and apricot, white and crimson, dripping and radiant. By then Elizabeth had gone quiet, as if in some reverie, but she gasped when they stepped out of the garden door.
‘Oh.’ She gazed in silence, taking it all in.
He knew in that moment that something had shifted. He had found a way to her, completely. They stood by the door, her blouse spotted with rain after their dash across to the barn. She turned to him, shy and serious.
‘How lovely, to know all about this, George. To work with this around you every day. And this . . .’ She looked across the garden. ‘It’s all so astonishingly beautiful, so fine.’ She turned to him again. ‘You’re fine. You’re a marvellous man, George.’
He reached for her hand.
The bedroom no longer felt like his and Win’s, but his alone. The sheets were a clean white space on which he could now write love: the utter, expanding, in-over-the-head sense of it that he felt with Elizabeth. In this new country, all roads opening before him seemed to lead somewhere adventurous and delightful.
Closing the door behind them, he stood before her and she returned his gaze, candid, giving. She looked down, shy suddenly, but with dimples appearing in her cheeks. He saw her then as she might have been as a little girl, pink-cheeked and stolid, with those challenging eyes.
‘Don’t expect too much, will you?’ she said. ‘Now I’ve got to this age, my body looks rather like a bean-bag.’
‘Elizabeth.’ He put his hands on her shoulders. ‘You’re just lovely – to me.’
‘Ah, well.’ She blushed. ‘Thank you. But that remains to be seen.’
‘Are you, er . . .’ He thought of Maggie. ‘You know, protected? Taking any of those pills or anything?’
Elizabeth looked at him in astonishment and started laughing so wholeheartedly that she had to sit on the bed.
‘And what would you know about those pills, George? No, I’m not on “those pills” – though if I needed to be it would not be difficult. I am a doctor, remember? My dear, how old exactly do you think I am?’
‘I don’t know.’ He really didn’t. He had barely considered it. She was just Elizabeth, and that seemed all that was necessary.
She stood up and laid her palms on his chest. Desire coursed through him.
‘Tell me your birthday.’
He told her.
‘Well,’ she grinned. ‘There you are – I’m two days older than you.’
‘Are you?’
‘So – over the hill,’ she said, with dignity. ‘No need to worry about pills.’
Again their eyes met. George pulled her gently into his arms. There she was, the shape of her, his woman, nestling into him. This, this loving touch, this woman, was all he needed. It was desire and tenderness and comfort; it was peace.
‘There’s no need to worry about anything, my love,’ he said.
He linked one hand with hers and they moved towards the bed.
They lay in the darkening room, rain still falling and the scent of roses stealing through the window.
After their lovemaking, so intent and generous and his discovering the wonder of her; after their solemn coming back from this, the communing of their pulses, of mixed sweat and limbs, Elizabeth lay with her face close to his and told him in a sweet, surprised tone that she loved him.
And later, as they lay together, his belly pressed against her back like a protective shell, he said, ‘You know, my darling, I’ve never had this before. Not like this.’
‘Me neither.’ There was an emphasis, almost a bitterness to her tone. ‘I’ve known men – I won’t pretend there haven’t been a few. But nothing where I’ve felt so . . .’ She searched for the word. ‘Right. Tender. Almost from the beginning.’
‘It’s a bit like an egg, isn’t it?’ he said, inspired. ‘You get the white, sometimes – or you get the yolk. But you don’t get the whole egg very often.’
He felt a giggle pass through her. She wriggled round on to her back and looked up at him with laughing eyes.
‘God, this has been quick, hasn’t it?’ She raised her head and kissed him. ‘The whole egg.’ She laughed again. ‘Yes. But . . .’ She leant up on one elbow. ‘You do realize this doesn’t mean I’m going to marry you or any of that sort of thing?’
A pang. So what did it mean then? He had a momentary kick of rejection, almost of vertigo. Didn’t this mean marriage? It did for most people. But Elizabeth was not most people.
‘Who said anything about marriage?’
‘All right.’ She lay down again with the air of someone who has made her point.
‘By the way,’ he added, serious now.
‘Umm?’
‘Just in case you wanted to know – you don’t look in the least like a bean-bag.’
3.
All the time, they were aware of this as a stolen interlude, these days until Elizabeth had to be back in her surgery in Basingstoke.
They could barely stand being apart. They did what they had to do each day – he to run his business, she to sort out Toke’s Farm. He did not feel he could desert the business in the daytime, but he promised he would come at the weekend and help her clear the barn. They saw each other every evening. Elizabeth stayed the night, driving off early. Did anyone notice, they wondered? What would people say? Did they care? Not, they decided, much.
It had not remained secret for long.
‘I thought she seemed a nice lady,’ Vera said, the day after Elizabeth’s first visit. ‘Fancy her being a doctor! She looks too feminine for that sort of thing.’
George had given what he hoped was an inscrutable smile.
‘You like her, don’t you, Mr B?’ Vera said.
‘I, er . . .’ He couldn’t quite decide where to look.
Vera walked off, laughing.
Within twenty-four hours there was a spate of visits from the Cronies, transparently hoping for a sighting. Rosemary Abbott, for the first time in months, appeared with a cake – this time an innocuous Victoria sponge – and happened to find Elizabeth at the house. She treated her with l
ofty hostility.
‘Oh, I don’t doubt she means well really,’ Elizabeth said afterwards. ‘But I’ve met many a Rosemary Abbott on the wards. They don’t believe in female doctors because they want to direct all their virgin lusts and worshipful instincts towards the male consultants. They’ll hardly so much as give you the time of day.’
George thought this was a mite harsh. The cake, of which Elizabeth had eaten a hearty share, was rather nice and had a generous seam of strawberry jam through the middle. But he supposed cake was hardly the point and decided not to argue.
Pat Nesbitt, ‘just passing’ and happening to be bearing a punnet of blackberries – ‘we’re overrun!’ – was deemed to be a good sort.
Another afternoon, Elizabeth disappeared for a bafflingly long time. She was gone for so long that although George still had the shop open and things to attend to, he began to feel anxious and petulant in the face of more of Elizabeth’s independence. The green Beetle was still outside so what was she playing at?
She walked in at half past five.
‘Where on earth have you been?’ By then he was just relieved to see her.
Elizabeth put her bag down on his office desk and looked at him with a sombre expression.
‘Actually, I was having tea with your neighbour, Miss MacLean. What an absolutely extraordinary woman.’
George acknowledged his respect for Eunice with a nod, though this still did not seem to explain what she and Elizabeth could have discussed for two whole hours.
‘Did you know her fiancé was executed by the Nazis?’
Of course, he had had no idea. Elizabeth’s eyes were round with sadness.
She told him the story as they walked Monty along the edge of the downs. Eunice, having grown up in France, was interned after the fall of France, with her parents. Her lover, who was half French, had remained in England after studying at Oxford, and was recruited by British Intelligence and captured in France.
‘He died in Buchenwald,’ Elizabeth said. ‘So they never even had a chance to marry. And she’s a marvellous person. She spends a lot of her time working for Amnesty International – d’you know it? It’s a new organization that works to free prisoners of conscience around the world.’
George didn’t know. He hadn’t known any of it and felt ashamed that he hadn’t. He wasn’t even sure that Win had known either. Eunice had evidently not seen him as someone with the sensitivity to tell such things to, whereas Elizabeth . . .
‘Now she,’ Elizabeth had said, ‘is someone I could be friends with around here.’
‘It’s ridiculous,’ Elizabeth said the next afternoon when he visited Toke’s Farm. They were looking over the fence at the renamed mule, Lottie. ‘I feel like a lovelorn teenager – like those two you’ve got working for you.’ She had witnessed the mooning about of Sharon and Kevin’s fact-laden blatherings with much amusement. ‘I’m trying to clear out that damned house and all I can think about is being with you – in bed.’
George laughed, loving her frankness. ‘I know the problem.’ He stroked Lottie’s nose, feeling as if his face was endlessly smiling these days.
Elizabeth came and put her arms round him. George held her close. He was drunk on her, his body somehow attached to hers, his bloodstream and pulse and cells at one with hers, even in her absence.
4.
Nature was tilting into red berries and gold. The garden was now full of rose heads, their petals beaten off by a few days of rain.
They spun through the countryside in the Morris.
‘Shall we take the car?’ George had asked.
‘Oh no!’ Elizabeth said. ‘I’d like a ride in that van of yours. And I can help you put things in it.’
To George’s amusement, she had helped Clarence when he made two trips over to pick up the items from the farm. George could have gone himself: sending Clarence contained an element of mischief-making.
‘Well he’s a proper old fossil, isn’t he?’ Elizabeth said afterwards. ‘You’d think there was a charge every time he opened his mouth. There’s something quite dapper about him though.’
‘Really?’ George said. He would have to take another look at Clarence, obviously.
‘Very Bohemian,’ was Clarence’s only remark when he got back to Greenbury from Toke’s Farm.
George had spent a good portion of the weekend helping Elizabeth clear the barn of her mother’s accumulated belongings. The house was so empty now that it echoed as they walked around. Clarence had taken the best pieces, a house-clearing business had most of the rest, leaving her only a bed, the kitchen table and a couple of chairs. It was much more hospitable sleeping over in Greenbury – but there was still the barn. George had taken the risk of bringing Monty over, not liking to leave him all day. After a riotous first introduction, when the spaniels leapt about him far too energetically for Monty’s comfort, they all came to a truce. The spaniels soon found the basset habit of ponderously sniffing your way about the place far too boring for their own tastes.
They had shifted – and burned – what seemed like a life-time’s collection of old papers, from theatre programmes to personal effects. There were boxes of Elizabeth’s schoolbooks, postcards, loose copies of Elizabeth’s father’s sermons.
‘Heavens,’ Elizabeth said, dismayed. ‘She really didn’t throw anything away.’ George thought he saw her wiping her eyes at the sight of some of these things, perhaps at the notion that her mother had actually cared enough to keep them, but he left her to her privacy and said nothing.
They worked their way through the dusty piles of things, finding a rough patch of land round at the back near the field to light a fire and feed all the papers into the hungry flames. Tonight when they got back, they would finish the job. There was only a bit more to go.
But now, with his girl beside him, George set out on his Monday buying circuit. The weekend spent with her had been so blissful that he could hardly believe it wasn’t a dream. They drove along the lanes. Some fields were ploughed into furrows now, others still striped with ashen stubble. It had stopped raining and the air was fresh and bright. They chatted, sang, or just sat as the mellow miles passed, in a silence that was a delirium of contentment.
George chose that day’s route with more than the prospect of deals in mind. He wanted to show this woman beside him in the yellow and blue sprigged frock again, so confident and generously made, some of the dealers, and show her to them. They had driven to Marlow first, where his china expert hummed and hawed over Kevin’s plate.
‘I’m not certain, George. This Chinese stuff – not really my field. He may have a point, but . . .’ More head-shaking. ‘I think you need to take it to London.’
‘I suppose I’ll have to send it to Sotheby’s,’ George told Elizabeth, ‘or we’ll never hear the end of it. And if it turns out to be valuable, Mrs Parker ought to have the money for it, by rights.’
He toyed with the idea of calling on Maud Roberts, since they were in the town. But no. Not today. Fond as he was of Maud he could foresee complications.
‘Hello, Maud – I’d like you to meet my . . .’ What did he call Elizabeth anyway? Not fiancée, that was for sure. Mistress? Girlfriend? Nothing seemed quite right. ‘Meet my friend . . .’
‘Eh?’
‘My . . . er . . . LADYFRIEND.’
‘Who? That’s not the girl I saw you with before – the one you said you were going to marry!’
‘No, well that was all a bit of a—’
‘EH?’
Maud would have to be dealt with another time.
So far they had looped east; Beaconsfield and Windsor, sandwiches by the river near Maidenhead, a leisurely drink in a pub before Camberley and now . . .
‘The last one,’ George told her, ‘is Twyford. I thought I’d take you somewhere so you can see how not to do it.’
As he drove, George reached out and rested a hand on Elizabeth’s thigh. She laid her hand over his for a second. The very touch of her, the warm, fleshy l
eg under her cotton dress sent a pulse of joy through him. But there was a souring, that for all his delight in her, would not leave him. She did not want him, ultimately. If she was not the marrying kind, what hope was there for him? What future? He did not want such thoughts to spoil this or any other moment, but they sat in him like an undigested meal.
‘Eyes on the road,’ she instructed.
‘Now – Lewis Barker, where we’re going . . .’ he said. ‘Dear oh dear. Place reminds me of a Victorian workhouse.’
As they stepped inside the cheerless, cobweb-decked ‘showroom’ on the edge of Twyford, Elizabeth made a comical face at him. ‘See what you mean.’
Lewis appeared, a black and tan sports jacket hanging open to reveal a shirt of broad blue and white stripes stretched over his looming belly. The usual half-burned fag tilted down from under his moustache, which in itself looked like an uneven line of tobacco stuck to his upper lip.
‘’Ullo, George!’ Lewis hailed him from quite some distance. Drawing nearer he removed the cigarette to exhale, eyes narrowing against the smoke. ‘Sniffing around after one of my best finds again, are you?’
Eyeing Elizabeth, he added, ‘Who’s this you’ve got with you then?’ He gave a theatrical bow, holding the cigarette out to one side. ‘Good afternoon, young lady.’
George could already sense Elizabeth bristling.
‘Ah, Lewis,’ he said. ‘This is my, er . . .’ Terminology defeated him again. ‘This is Dr Elizabeth Hargreaves.’
Lewis Barker held the cigarette higher and raised his chin in a faintly mocking fashion.
‘Doctor, eh? You one of those university blue-stocking types then?’
‘No.’ Elizabeth looked at him with a steady disdain. George watched with admiration. ‘I’m a medical doctor.’ She held her hand out. ‘General practice.’
Lewis shoved the cigarette back between his lips and, having little choice, shook Elizabeth’s hand. He gave a snort.
‘No – you’re having me on, aren’t you? You’re never a doctor, little slip of a girlie like you!’
