by Angela Huth
Lark looked up to see Evans standing in the doorway. From his stance she judged he might have been contemplating her silently for some moments. She was confused.
‘Oh, Evans, I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘I hope you don’t mind. I hadn’t been over for a week or so, was wondering how progress –?’
‘You look white as a ghost,’ he interrupted. ‘Anything the matter?’
‘No.’ Lark thrust back a long end of scarf over her shoulder.
‘Then how come you’re not at work?’
‘One of my attacks of indigestion. They let me home but I thought it would be better to move about than to lie down and think about it.’
‘I see.’ Evans moved into the bare room. Lark thought he looked concerned. She had no wish for him to worry about her. She wanted simply to please him by showing the kind of enthusiasm for his new house that did not come automatically to Brenda. Evans stroked one of the smooth walls.
‘We’ll be in by New Year,’ he said.
‘It’ll be lovely. I can just imagine it all.’
Evans smiled.
‘Can you really? That’s a talent, you know, being able to stand in a bare room and see it all furnished. I can’t do that, nor can Bren. Tell me then, how d’you see it?’
Lark gave a wave of her hand. She described a pine dresser and table, a cork floor, gingham curtains, yellow walls, baskets of brown eggs.
‘Really cosy, like a farmhouse kitchen,’ she added.
Evans scratched his chin.
‘But this isn’t a farmhouse. This is a bloody housing estate!’
‘’Course it is, you nit, but that doesn’t mean you have to make it look like a housing estate inside.’ Seeing his smile of agreement, she felt quite bold. ‘Besides, you’ll have the chickens at the bottom of the garden.’
‘Ah, yes, the chickens.’ Evans ran a finger round the sink unit. ‘First house, first sink,’ he said. ‘That must prove something, doesn’t it?’
‘It means you’ve come a long way, Evans Evans. Postmaster, after all. There’s not many as can claim to be the good postmaster you are – everyone says.’ She herself felt warm with the praise she dispensed with the intention of warming him. Evans smiled at her, tweaked her scarf, sighed.
‘That’s as maybe,’ he said, ‘but it’s all a long way off, isn’t it, to Postmaster-General?’
‘Is that what you really want to be?’
‘Postmaster-General no less. I’ll tell you a secret, Lark. I’ve always fancied myself on Panorama. I’ve always had this conviction that given the chance I could make sense to the people. I speak their language, don’t I?’
Lark, shaken by having been taken into his confidence, honoured with his greatest secret, could think of no immediately wise answer.
‘Oh, yes,’ she said eventually, ‘you do, Evans. I think you do. But are you quite sure you’re going about it the right way, the job of Postmaster-General, I mean, stuck out here?’
Evans frowned.
‘Now, that’s something I’ve often wondered, I have to admit. It’s the right thing, of course, to start on the shop floor and work your way up. But take this morning. Practically no business, in spite of the time of year. People complaining they can’t send Christmas cards any more. I ask you, will there ever be any Christmas trade again? Anyhow, there I sit, bored out of my mind, everything in order, everything done, staring at the bloody fog, hoping for a break. But when and how’s my break going to come, I ask myself? When are the powers that be going to wake up one morning and say to themselves, bugger it, Evans Evans is due for promotion? I ask you, Lark, when is anything going to happen to the master of a sub post office?’
Lark could not resist laughing at his expression. She felt the warmth come back to her body, colour return to her face. She felt herself reeling a little on the concrete floor, giddily, happily.
‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘I know you’re being serious, very serious – it’s all a serious matter. But oh your face! Worse than a funeral.’ She stopped to take in his smile, far nearer to him than that time he had mashed her bones. She leant up against the sink unit again, where Evans too was standing.
‘How would you like to live in a place like this?’ he asked.
Lark made herself sound full of gaiety.
‘Terrible,’ she said. ‘Wouldn’t suit me at all. No, when I find the man of my dreams we’ll live in a city attic and listen to the rain and the cats clattering on the roof. And breathe the permanent smell of cabbage from the communal hall.’
‘Sometimes, Lark, I never know whether to take you seriously.’
‘You must never take too seriously anyone who’s searching.’
‘Bet you’d fill the place up with bloody geraniums.’
‘You bet I would.’
‘All the same, it’s a good place, here, for Bren and me.’
‘It’s a lovely place you’ve got, even though it wouldn’t suit me.’
Evans looked at his watch.
‘I might suggest the yellow walls,’ he said, ‘only I’d have to be careful. Bren would know I’d never have an idea like that myself.’ He gave Lark a conspiratorial smile. ‘Well, like a drink to warm you up? I was on my way to the Star.’
As Lark turned to Evans to accept, a sudden gust of weakness blew through her, rocking her on her feet again. She gripped his arm for support. Behind him the pink of the plaster walls divided into shapes like interlocking snakes.
‘Lark, you all right?’ Evans clutched both her shoulders with his hands. She nodded.
‘The pills take away the pain and leave me a bit funny, that’s all.’ She leant against him, head on his chest, feeling the damp shiny stuff of his anorak. Shutting her eyes she craved to be a small animal who could cling to him for a while, undisturbed, letting him rub her head, as he did now, for a long time.
Then suddenly he was pushing her away from him, talking to someone over her head.
‘Hello, Bren! Surprise, surprise! I just found Lark up here.’
Lark turned to face Brenda, wondering at the insubstantial quality of the walls behind her. Through her own confusion she heard the mocking of Brenda’s voice.
‘Surprise, surprise indeed! Never thought I’d see the day when I’d catch you two at it!’
‘Now look here, Bren, Lark’s ill.’ Evans’s voice was wonderfully authoritative. He pushed Lark back to the sink unit so that she could lean there again. ‘Take a look at her face! White as a sheet, in terrible pain. Indigestion. They let her off work and she thought a walk would make it settle.’ He reached out a hand and rubbed at her hair again. Lark could feel his fingers shaking. ‘Don’t worry, love,’ he said, ‘Bren’s only joking, aren’t you Bren?’
There was silence. They all listened to the chip-chip of hammers on stone somewhere beyond the doorway. Lark’s eyes met Brenda’s. Things were no longer out of focus. Brenda’s eyes were fierce as a tiger’s, tawny in the flat light. Her thick black lashes were stuck together in clumps caused by the damp. Then quite suddenly they were no longer angry or suspicious, but worried.
‘You all right, Lark?’ she asked. ‘You look awful.’
‘I’m all right, blinking attacks. I’m off now, leave you two to a bit of deciding. A quick gin at the Star and I’ll be as right as rain. Really.’ She moved towards the door. They stretched out hands towards her. ‘No, leave me.’
‘We’ll join you for a drink in half an hour,’ said Evans.
‘Wait for us, mind,’ said Brenda.
Lark, nodding, buried her chin deeper in her scarf and set off down the road whose curbs were still merely indicated by lines of string.
When she had gone Brenda and Evans stood at opposite sides of the kitchen looking at each other.
‘She looks ghastly,’ said Brenda. ‘I’ve never heard of such indigestion.’
‘Still, if she hadn’t looked so ghastly you might not have thought I was just supporting her.’
‘You lay a finger on Lark?’ Brenda laughed
with confidence. ‘Never. Not if she was the last girl on earth. She’d kill you if you tried – she’s that loyal to me.’
‘I believe she is, too,’ said Evans.
Brenda fluttered her damp eyelashes.
‘Come on,’ she said. ‘Something I’ve always promised myself. There’s time.’
‘What for?’
‘Oh, come on, Evans Evans. You’re a slow one, sometimes. Let’s take a look at the view from the bedroom.’
She led the way upstairs. The small square room, pink plaster walls as downstairs, was floored with pale boards. It was both cold and airless. The high window was meshed with fog.
‘It’s bloody freezing,’ said Evans. ‘It’ll be bloody uncomfortable.’
But Brenda was easing him out of his anorak, throwing it on to the floor. Then she grasped his belt, the neck of his shirt. All the while she panted, as if suppressing some far greater kind of groaning, and fluttered her eyes. Evans, despite dullness inflicted upon him by the tedium of the morning, despite his sharp hunger for something to eat, and despite the dreadful cold, felt himself quicken. Decades to come passed before him in a flash – years of love in some soft bed in this room, painted and carpeted. But perhaps this would be the only chance of the particular excitement of the room as it was now, stark.
Now Brenda, on a mattress of anorak and trousers on the floor, was ripping off her clothes. With one eye Evans saw a pattern of small bubbles swoop like half a necklace across the window: with the other he saw Brenda’s breasts quiver beneath the cold as she thrust her arms above her head and called to him.
He lowered himself cautiously on to his knees, alert to splinters. The boards beneath his elbows were hard as stone. Then the whole floor, proving it cheap as it looked, began to shake and squeak.
‘Bloody lived-in, at last,’ murmured Brenda.
After three measures of neat gin Lark regained her strength. She guessed that Evans and Brenda might be detained, and decided not to wait for them. She could go for a walk, and when she was far from any habitation she would sing out loud to practise for the concert. It was only two weeks away now.
She made her way to the bluebell woods. There would be no one there at this time of year: she could feel quite free to try out her repertoire.
Patches of fog moved in an indeterminate way, bustled about by a thin cold wind. Vapours trailed from branches and trunks of trees, and hid the skeleton shapes of dead teazles, tall as Lark, until she was almost upon them, so that she shrank back as they brushed by her, for a moment scared by their anorexic appearance. Dead branches and twigs were soggy underfoot. There were none of the crackling noises of a dry winter’s day. No birds sang. The sky above the trees was flat as still water. It was impossible to imagine that spring would ever confuse ground and branches with a multitude of greens again. Or, summer, needles of sun would pick out lovers on the mossy ground. For now it was a place for ghosts, or for the old, to whom winter was an enemy and to whom, when they limped up winter Sunday afternoons to try to remember, the naked trees made mockery of a lifetime of remembered summer foliage. For to the solitary, like Lark, the sepulchral feeling of the woods was remindful of the state of complete aloneness which in winter can bring chill to the bones. She was not afraid, but devoid of any false hopes, such as can trick a single person beneath a blue sky. She knew without question that there was to be some important interruption in her life in the near future, and she waited for it with patience. She could not decipher what shape it would take, but assumed it must be some man, second best to Evans, who would love her enough to take her away from the typist’s job and her geranium room. She looked forward to the prospect with no excitement. The only thing that warmed her in this wet air was the thought of the concert.
Lark came to rest by a silver birch tree. She lifted a hand to its trunk to support herself, for the shrouded undergrowth confused her vision – the pills were playing terrible tricks on her again. She determined to take no more. Her white hand, bones like small taut strings, lay against the silver brown bark. Her scarlet nails were arranged in a fan pattern, ladybirds stripped of their spots, horribly bright in all the gloom. Lark thought that if she could be granted a wish, she would request the silver birch to be transported to the concert hall. There, on the platform, in her wispy grey dress, she would lean against it for support, as she did now, and it would give her strength. She would sing better. As it was, she would have to stand alone on the stage, arms by her sides. Arms by her sides? What did singers do with their hands? The questions, which had not occurred to her before, suddenly worried her.
She began to sing, quietly at first, then pushing out her chest so that it rubbed against the scratchy wool of her jersey, and the sound poured clear and hollow through the mists. Lark was exhilarated by the contained power of her own voice. It had the quality of an echo. It haunted. She felt herself trembling, red nails clutching harder at the silver birch. She wondered that so pure a note could come from her own frail chest, and as she took a new breath of foggy air into her lungs she felt an icy sweat on her back, and sweat, or tears, scratch at her eyes.
Since the difficult afternoon when Henry had broken the news to Rosie that he had been sacked, he had felt more than ever debilitated by her welcomes, and went to great lengths to avoid them. On that particular afternoon she had not said much, but sat by the fire, sniffing, cutting out some fine white stuff with a pair of small scissors. Altl ough he looked at her unflinchingly all the while he explained what had happened, she had not raised her eyes and met his. He had had the impression she was in an unusually untidy state: stockings wrinkled round the ankle, a smear of mud on her arm, revolting hands grazed as if by brambles. But he had lacked the energy to enquire whether any mishap had befallen her when she had run screaming from the house earlier, and, as she made no mention of the matter, he let it rest. She had not chided him for losing the job, of course: but she had not abused Mr Daly for his untoward action, either, which Henry felt would have been the loyal thing to do. No: she simply continued daily life with her usual calm, though it sometimes occurred to Henry from the pitch of her voice that cheerfulness caused her more effort than usual. She had doubled her efforts to welcome him on every homecoming, even on the occasions (and they were most occasions) she was forced to turn her head to avoid the smell of whisky on his breath, and to give an arm to support him to his chair. She constantly provided him with the kind of surprises he could not abide, and Henry knew himself to be surly in his lack of appreciation. Once he had found a lump of tissue paper on his chair. It contained a tie made of porridgy tweed, Woven by Countryfolk, it said on the label, which Henry would not have cast upon his worst enemy. She had bought it from the Boy who, in his misguided fashion, had started a small line in ties in the post office, supposing this might bring a little excitement to trade, and act as a small step in the direction of Postmaster-General. Henry had made no pretence at politeness or false gratitude, and had fallen asleep with the dreadful thing slung across his knees.
So lately it had become his habit to walk about for an hour or so after the Star closed, trying to summon the strength and the steadiness to face Rosie’s welcoming tea. Most afternoons he went to the woods, knowing quite surely there would be no one else there: Rosie, he was convinced, would never visit them again. They were his protection from her and he needed their solace as much as he needed the increasing amounts of whisky he consumed every day.
It had become his custom to sit on the uprooted tree, the damp bark soft against his thighs, and let the silence lap about him while he contemplated the winter sky. On the bitterest days he would take off his tie and undo the top buttons of his shirt, and relish the cold against his chest. This way, he felt, he would be sure to die of pneumonia quite soon, which wouldn’t be a bad death. But although he had continued this ritual for several weeks, so far he had not been assaulted by the mildest sniffle. Today’s fog, therefore, filled Henry with hope. Surely the wet vapours would scorch his innards with some wicked
disease, and he would pass away in the night. He breathed in deeply, mouth open, making a sucking noise, then spewed the air out again. He watched the small grey bulbs expand from his mouth and merge into the greater grey, which now, in the mid-afternoon light, was turning dun: and he felt the cold swipe through his lungs, stinging like smoke. His legs were no less confused by the fog than his eyes. At moments, stumbling over the soggy ground, Henry was near to falling. He decided to pause for a while, to try to consolidate the spinning greyness both within his head and all around him. He held on to the trunk of a larch tree, unsure where he was. He knew every inch of the woods but was unnerved to find his sense of direction had suddenly gone. Was he south or west? Screwing up his eyes, he peered through the trees attempting to see the brickwork chimneys on the horizon. But all was obscured. The fog seemed to be thickening. Perhaps he should not have come, but he liked to clear his head in the afternoon air. Even rainy days he enjoyed his pipe under the dripping trees, chewing at its stem, and hawking in a manner that was not permissible at home. On many an afternoon here, lately, he had found some kind of comfort among the trees: he had known the freedom to shout his sourest thoughts out loud, and to listen to them smash against the impervious silence, undisputed.
With his free hand Henry felt in his pocket for his pipe and matches. The simple job of lighting up seemed particularly confusing, but at last he had the stem between his teeth, could taste the tobacco on his tongue. He cocked his head on one side, straining for the sound of birds. Silence swirled round him for a while. It was broken by a thin piping of a clear voice, some tune Henry thought he recognised: more like a human than a bloody thrush. He moved a few paces, trying to decipher where the voice came from. Very puzzling. Who besides himself would want to be here on a day like this? The song took him back to some long forgotten childhood evening, haymaking in a Welsh valley one summer, years before the family had moved here: his mother used to sing that song as she lifted the bales, easily as a man with her strong arms.
