Summertime

by Charlotte Bingham

  Trilby stared at Berry. She felt selfish going on about Lewis and all that, which was after all quite old news now, whereas Berry’s sudden arrival and Molly’s sudden departure were new news, and therefore, for Berry, all too fresh pain.

  ‘What will you do?’

  Berry stared into the fire, still stroking Topsie’s head. ‘Oh, just carry on as if she was there. I mean I always did all the cooking, so that’s no trouble. Moll never cooked, it just was not her, to cook. I don’t expect any of my duchesses and debutantes will notice that I have no wife, so the daubing will go on, until eventually I go to the great studio in the sky in the hope that I will meet Titian and Ingres, to mention but a few. I have always imagined that the mansion in heaven that houses the painters will be most especially special, that they will all be busy painting Paradise, and that God will visit in the evenings and tell them how beautifully they have done, and they will be so happy, because there will be no imperfections in their work, it will all be quite, quite perfect. Here we see only tiny echoes of that perfection, don’t you think – there, perfection will be just one long reality.’

  Trilby smiled. There was nothing to add, so she changed the subject. ‘I say, Berry, I don’t know about you, but I am starving.’

  Berry was on his feet a second after she had finished speaking. ‘Imagine me, and I too am starving. I know just what I shall cook for you, Trilb, old love, I will cook that chicken pie that you always used to like so much – with the lemon pastry. My luggage is all food, you will be glad to hear, and only three pairs of jeans, like the Chinese, one on, one in the wash, and one to spare. Tallyho, and away we go.’ He rubbed his hands together, and they both started to unpack the mounds of foodstuffs on to the cold shelf in the little kitchen larder.

  Later, as she watched Berry cooking and laughing, and as they both drank wine, one of many bottles that he had thoughtfully brought up to Yorkshire, it seemed to Trilby that she was once more in safe hands. Nothing terrible could happen to her while her old childhood friend was around.

  ‘There is one other thing, Berry, though.’ She had carefully chosen to tell him the one other thing while he was equally carefully lifting his pastry onto its pie dish. ‘Hilda and Fred, the postman, have asked us to Christmas lunch with them.’

  ‘Couldn’t be better,’ was all Berry said. ‘Couldn’t be better, a real Yorkshire Christmas,’ and he prepared to cut out the little fish and stars with which he always decorated his pies. ‘I like Fred. Good sort.’

  Snow had threatened on Christmas Eve, but by the morning it became clear that in fact threaten was all that it had done, so that as Berry and Trilby climbed into Berry’s car, with Topsie, and set off towards the village it seemed to both of them that God must indeed have come down to earth as a little baby at midnight, and that He really had lain in the manger with the oxen and the ass, because everywhere the landscape sparkled and shone with that particularly pure glow that comes from winter sunshine bathing and drying an uncluttered landscape with its clear light.

  ‘God really has come down to earth this morning, Trilb,’ Berry called out to her over the sound of the car engine pulling up the ancient country roads. ‘I can feel that He truly has come down and now He is with us, bringing us hope eternal.’

  Trilby, to whom God was a reality but not a formality, nodded happily. She had always believed in a loving God, but never realised until now quite the extent to which Berry did too. It was not something either of them had ever touched on, which was strange.

  ‘You have to believe in God, because there are times, particularly when the going is hard, when you can actually feel that He believes in you, and that’s what’s keeping you going, that’s my point,’ Berry went on. They were entering the village, and he was pulling up the flying flaps on his old flying hat as if he had just landed a Spitfire and so was now able to relax a little. ‘Where now Fred and Hilda, Trilb? I am ashamed to say I’ve forgotten.’

  ‘Carry on over the old packhorse bridge ahead of us, and then you’ll see the village straight ahead and the post office to the right. They live at the back of the post office, apparently,’ Trilby read out from Fred’s precise instructions left with them the day before.

  Given the peace of all around them, the church bells that had now stopped ringing, the sun that was shining, the gifts for Fred and Hilda which were on the back seat, Trilby would have been in a happy mood anyway, but she was in a most particularly happy mood since she had, the day before, received a Christmas card from Piers. In the letter that accompanied it he described the new puppy, which had just arrived to comfort him in Topsie’s absence, as well as Charlie and Mary Louise, Harold and Mabel, the cows, the hens, the doves, and every other thing on the farm, as sending their love and missing her. Most of all him, of course. The children were coming to spend Christmas with him so he would have his hands full, but his heart would be empty without her. He loved her now, today, as much as he had yesterday and the day before, but not as much as he would tomorrow, as the French saying went. He enclosed a snap of the new puppy, Steve, himself holding it, and another of Harold and Mabel outside the milking sheds making a V for Victory sign for no reason that Piers, as he said, could imagine. It was just something that they always did every time he snapped them.

  Of course Piers would not know about Berry coming up to Yorkshire, but she knew that he would not mind, because he was well aware, from everything that Trilby had told him of Glebe Street, that Berry was like a much older brother to her.

  With her woollen muffler wrapped up round her, and her gloves and fur-lined boots keeping her warm, Trilby smiled. She could not wait to write to Piers about her change in fortunes. No longer alone, with both Topsie and Berry for company, she could last out the winter, and pretty soon Lewis would be like the melted snow on the village road, a grey memory of something now gone for ever.

  Fred and Hilda were at the door of the post office, in mufti. Well, Fred was in mufti, in other words his Sunday suit, but Hilda was in a silk frock with a flowered pinny over it. Trilby had soon realised that Fred really liked Berry, because he now handed him one of his cigarettes before he led the way back into the cottage.

  ‘That is such a favour,’ Trilby said, impressed. ‘Fred never gives anyone a roll-your-own unless he really likes them, he told me so himself, a few weeks ago. It’s from being in the war, cigarettes so precious, and all that. They used to queue for one, you know, he told me that. Just one roll-your-own.’

  Now Hilda led the way into the back parlour. It was lit with a tremendous fire which instantly brought a flush to both Trilby’s and Berry’s faces, after the cold outside. Mulled wine was on a hob in the kitchen and mugs were produced, and their flushes got deeper as they sipped at the sweet, cinnamon-flavoured concoction.

  The small house was most interesting, the most interesting in the village, Fred told them, because it was made not just from old local stone, but parts of it from an old theatre which had once played host to the great Victorian actor, Henry Irving, and many another famous thespian. Much of the wooden flooring came from the old playhouse, and they might even now be treading the boards that those famous feet had once trod.

  ‘Shall we begin the great feast with a Yorkshire pudding, do you think?’ Berry asked Trilby when, in answer to her call, Fred had hurried out to help Hilda in the kitchen.

  ‘Oh, I expect so.’ Trilby rolled her eyes. ‘Fred says they always start with Yorkshire pudding and then good old roast beef of Old England, and so on to more pudding, and so on. Keeps them well tucked up against the weather, Fred says.’

  But, perhaps in deference to the foreigners from the south they were entertaining, Fred and Hilda produced a Christmas lunch which had no Yorkshire pudding either to start or to accompany. Theirs was a Christmas lunch in the best tradition. The bread sauce had a rich, buttery, glossy, creamy taste and look to it, and the stuffing was so redolent of the herb garden that it would have been difficult to believe that the parsley and sage had not been picked
minutes before they sat down. The sausages were home-made, and the turkey grown for the table, and as for the Christmas pudding it was as delicate and special as any that either of them had ever tasted, as was the lightest of pastry that went to make up the mince pies. The mincemeat itself was so filled with currants and raisins, with spices and brandy, that these last were almost a bridge too far.

  But only almost, because as Berry said, in the dreamy voice of a man who had finally to admit defeat, ‘There is not a spare inch now, Mrs Fred, not a spare half an inch, but every mouthful will stay in my memory for ever.’

  Berry had come into his own with Hilda when he was revealed by Trilby to be a cook in a million, although Berry had naturally added quickly, ‘But not a patch on you, Mrs Fred.’

  Hilda smiled. ‘We’ll have a pastry competition one of these days, see if we won’t, Mr Berry, and soon see who’s who, won’t we?’

  ‘Hilda will win. She wins everything round here. Can’t go in for nowt now though, can you, love, not now thou’s won everything, makes for bad feeling.’

  ‘I shall play Father Christmas now,’ Berry announced, and handed out the parcels they had brought in for their hosts, parcels that revealed presents of a grandeur that was not out of keeping. A pair of Fair Isle gloves for their hostess, together with matching scarf, and a bottle of brandy and matching glasses for mine host.

  ‘How did you know these were things that they would like, that they are perfect for them?’ Trilby had asked Berry when they wrapped them the night before.

  ‘Because,’ Berry had said, a mysterious look to his eyes, ‘I know that wherever you go these are the presents that are always acceptable to both sexes, presents that everyone likes, and no-one dislikes, it is just a fact.’

  Trilby had done them both a drawing. One of Topsie, of course, for Fred, and one of Fred, of course, for Hilda. After that they talked about the village, and all the people who had lived there once. Folk like the mad vicar who had set light to himself one dark winter’s day because he thought, the theory went, that Satan had come for him, so he might as well send himself to hell as wait. The girl who was ravished by the local squire and found hanging from a branch of one of the old yew trees in the graveyard. The maid in the great house, who fell in love with a nobleman thinking he was the gardener, married him and lived happily ever after. The usual tales of haunted cottages and ghost riders in tricorn hats passing over the packhorse bridge, not to mention ladies in white dresses who passed through walls just when someone had stopped to speak to them.

  ‘That was just about the best Christmas lunch we have ever enjoyed, either of us, wouldn’t you say?’

  They had waved goodbye to their hosts and were driving back in the gathering dark with snowflakes beginning to fall. Topsie who had been feasted almost as well as themselves was snoring on the back seat, and Berry who had the flaps of his flying hat down once more was shouting as people always do when they cannot hear themselves.

  ‘Wouldn’t you say, that was just about the best, ever?’

  Trilby shouted, ‘You bet!’ while taking care not to take her eyes off the road, because Berry and Fred had shared not one but a couple of brandies, and as the snow was coming down more and more thickly she was starting to wonder if they would lose sight not just of the road, but of the cottage, so quickly, as she had discovered in the previous weeks, could the landscape change in just half an hour.

  ‘Left here, Berry, no, left!’

  Berry gave a great hoot of laughter. ‘That is not my favourite word at the minute, Trilb – left is not my favourite word, as you may well imagine!’ He gave another shout of laughter, and still speaking at top volume he went on, ‘Never hear anyone say “Do you know so-and-so’s right him”, do you? Unlucky word, left. Sinister in Latin. The place where bad news always enters from – the left.’

  ‘Berry, you are going off the road, you are nearly on the verge!’

  Gaily, if slowly, Berry continued, fecklessly and carelessly in what Trilby prayed was still the right direction, because they had long ago left the village and there are few landmarks on the moors.

  She knew that they had no spade or rug in the boot, for which she cursed herself roundly. Neither did they have a map, and there were no telephones within miles, and what with the snow piling up ahead and the snow piling up behind them, she had good reason to know that she was only being realistic when she realised that she was beginning to feel frightened.

  At last there they were, and the cottage within sight, just in time, and Berry with a rich laugh, pulling on the brake, was saying, ‘You were beginning to take fright, weren’t you, Trilb? Thought we were lost. I knew where we were, even if you didn’t.’

  Trilby, who had not drunk any brandy, did not mind anything now that she could see the comforting old stone of the welcoming frontage. She did not mind the snow piling down the back of her collar, nor the bitter little wind that had got up and was whipping round the side of the cottage, first taking care to take a bite out of her face. They were home at last, and that was all that mattered.

  ‘You were a scaredy-cat, Trilb, you were, weren’t you, go on, admit it!’ Berry opened the back door of the car and Topsie, who was now wide awake, at once jumped out and past him, her lead trailing along the ground.

  ‘Berry! Catch her lead! Quick, step on it!’

  Too late Berry cantered tipsily after the dog, but snow or no snow, Topsie was in her element. Sensing the freedom that the leap from the car had given her, she was now darting off past the little cottage, on up the now invisible road and on and on into the snowy banks against which her black coat stood out boldly, but more and more remotely.

  Berry, in hot pursuit, soon lost sight of her, leaving Trilby watching in freezing horror as she realised that, what with the snow and the growing dark, it was very likely that they had lost Topsie to the moors. If the snow continued, she would not have a hope of being found for days and days.

  ‘Oh my God, oh my God! Topsie!’

  As Trilby too started after the dog, Berry turned back and shouted, ‘No, you go back, stay by the car, I will go after her. One of us has to stay by the car, in case she makes a circle.’ Trilby could see the logic of this, and so ran quickly back to the car and waited.

  A lost dog is like any lost person to those who wait at home for it. Its whole personality, its divine characteristics revisit its owner more tenderly, more colourfully, more beautifully, so that its probable loss becomes wholly tragic, and so it was with Trilby, who had become as devoted to Topsie as her master. As she stood in the freezing snow stamping her feet and calling for her above the sound of the wind and into the growing darkness, it seemed to her that there was no dog, would never be any dog, as good or as beautiful as Topsie, and her heart ached for a sight of her.

  Berry was gone for what seemed like hours, but of course was not, although it was so dark that Trilby had at least had the sense to put the car lights on, something for which she became only too grateful when she saw both Berry and Topsie returning, Topsie’s eyes glittering greeny-yellow and sparkling in the headlights, and Berry exhausted, panting as much as the dog, the ears on his battered airman’s helmet flapping against the side of his face, making him look for all the world like a mad spaniel.

  ‘You should have gone in, you should have gone in!’ he whimpered, gasping. ‘Go in now, while I catch my breath.’ He coughed suddenly and horribly, leaning against the side of the car. ‘Oh my! What a dreadful thing to happen. We nearly lost her, supposing we had lost her?’

  In front of the fire Topsie quickly thawed out, leaving puddles around her paws, while Berry, his teeth chattering, coughed, grew flushed, drank tea, and then fell asleep.

  Outside the snow fell, and silence, that great thick silence that only snow can bestow around a small house, fell too. The fire, now blazing once more, crackled and spat in the cosy quiet. Topsie and Berry were both asleep, and so was Trilby, which was just as well. For quite soon that state of happy rest that associates itse
lf with danger now well passed was about to be shattered.

  PART THREE

  Bacterial pneumonia . . . the patient is taken suddenly ill with a headache, severe pain on one side of chest, shortness of breath, panting, dry lips . . . the patient has a high colour, lips tinged with blue, accompanied by delirium at night, temperature ranges 103–104.

  Chapter Twelve

  It was the unreality of it all that Trilby would remember, how unreal it had all felt at the time, the feeling of being in a situation in which she could do nothing, in which she was totally helpless, because by the time she realised what was happening, that it was not just a fever or influenza, it was too late to try to call help, too late to try to remember if Berry might have had something more than a cough and a bit of a high colour when he had arrived in Yorkshire, whether he might have been braving it out, pretending that he felt all right, when in reality he was already ill.

  The bald facts were that she had heard him waking in the quiet of Christmas night coughing and complaining of a pain in his side, but then he had fallen into a feverish sleep, so she had left him and gone back to her own bed, hoping against hope that he would sleep it off, whatever it was, and that she could go for a doctor in the morning. But then she was woken again, and going in to him she realised that he must actually have become delirious, because he kept calling out names of people that Trilby did not know. Realising that he must now be very ill, she flew downstairs, collected up some hand towels, and started to fill a bowl with cold water in which to soak them before putting them on his forehead and chest. This she kept on doing though the night, but with no effect. Berry remained delirious.