On this occasion Lady Mary and Jasmine had turned up while everyone but Howard was asleep. Only Melanie had got up promptly, intrigued by the pawing and huffing of the two large hunters which had been hitched to the tree under her window. She’d arrived sleepily in the kitchen in the T-shirt and knickers she always slept in and, peering from the kitchen window, seeing Howard in corduroys and wellingtons approaching the house with two strange women in riding clothes, had taken fright and run out. Annie, coming down, met her on the stairs and told her there was nothing to worry about. Melanie came back into the kitchen later, well brushed and polished, to hear the invitation to lunch that day being accepted by Annie.
Howard refused to come, saying that Juliet was working for an exhibition of her paintings in London and he had to help her repair some picture frames.
At Durham House apple pie and cream were being brought round. Amanda Head shook her head furiously. Her pin-thin mother caught the look and shook her head. ‘The diet,’ she said in an amused tone. ‘Melanie will eat yours.’
Melanie shook her head also. ‘I’ve got to lose a stone,’ she said. ‘I’m fed up with being laughed at at school.’
Amanda shot Melanie a sympathetic glance but Vanessa asked indignantly, ‘Who’s laughing at you?’
‘They all are,’ Melanie told her. ‘They say I’m overweight through living on chip butties and I talk funny and wear funny clothes and I’m a Northern git.’ She added, ‘I knew they’d be like that when I went there. Half of them are black and I said I was more English than them, which is true, so they hit me and then they told Miss I’m a racist and she told me off and said I’d be in detention if I carried on like that.’
‘Why didn’t you tell me or Annie?’ asked Vanessa.
‘No point, is there?’ Melanie said gloomily.
Amanda seemed more sympathetic. ‘Which school do you go to?’ she asked.
‘Jasper Rayburn Comprehensive, in Kenton,’ Melanie told her, adding rather grandly, ‘It’s only temporary.’
‘I suppose that’s a state school,’ Amanda remarked. ‘I’m at Hatley Hall. We have ponies there. I’ve got my own room.’
‘Lucky you,’ remarked Melanie ambiguously.
‘It’s in lovely surroundings,’ Amanda told her.
At the head of the table Nigel Fellows had broken into a landlord’s diatribe designed partly, Annie suspected, to make it plain that her sister had changed her views now she was his wife. Jasmine gazed at him as he told Annie loudly, ‘I’m never, to be perfectly honest, absolutely sure exactly what stage these people would like to make the land revert to. Would it be the eighteenth century, with little ragged boys scaring crows from the corn at sixpence a day? Or a medieval system, with all the beasts destroyed each winter to cut down on winter fodder? Or are we supposed to let the land go back to thick forests, full of wolves? I’m curious. I’d like someone to tell me. I don’t mind the attacks, the wrecked hunting, my fences being broken down by proles with out-of-date maps showing my land belongs to them. I don’t even mind my pheasant chicks being let out to be eaten by foxes which, of course, we mustn’t kill – I’d just like a clear explanation of what it’s all about, where, according to these people, we’re supposed to be going. Can you tell me, perhaps, Annie?’ he asked, leaning forward.
‘I haven’t made a study of the subject,’ she said.
‘I doubt if you’d like people bursting into your snack bar and throwing away the South African fruit or the bread because it isn’t macrobiotic or whatever notion they have at the moment.’
‘We’re going more health conscious,’ announced Vanessa, trying to divert Nigel’s attention.
‘I’m pleased to hear it. But that wasn’t the point I was making,’ he said rudely.
‘Nigel—’ Lady Mary said in her clear voice.
‘It’s all very well,’ he went on. ‘But I’d like to see what a pig’s ear these people would make of the land if they got their hands on it. Christ!’ he broke off as Adam Cranley came in with a tall man in his thirties wearing navy blue corduroy trousers, an old brown jersey and what was evidently the jacket of a suit. He was thin, with a slight stoop, which seemed to indicate diffidence. A lock of black hair fell over his long face. Nigel smiled. ‘Tom! Adam thought you were some damn fool animal righter, popped in to poison the lake – come and sit down.’
As he stood up to get a chair Jasmine said, ‘Tom – where did you spring from? I thought you were in Turkey with that man—’
‘Didn’t work,’ said Tom Pointon, Annie and Jasmine’s first cousin and Annie’s first lover. He sat down and turned to Lady Mary. ‘Adam told me you thought I was a prowler. I should have phoned.’ He was squeezed in between Jasmine and Nigel. He craned forward and said to Annie, ‘Juliet said you were here. I thought I’d look in just in case I missed you. I was planning to hang about until after lunch but Adam spotted me.’
‘What happened in Turkey?’ Annie asked.
‘I went out for a few months theoretically to be with a man who was writing a travel book. I didn’t specially want to go by that time but it was a longstanding arrangement. To my surprise, as soon as we got to the less exploited area around the Black Sea he started buying up land for resorts and holiday developments. I was helping him, in a friendly way, but then I began to wonder if the people so eagerly selling up their family farms ought to have been doing so. I sabotaged one of his deals with an old couple I felt sorry for and obviously he wasn’t very pleased …’
‘I imagine they wanted to sell,’ remarked Nigel.
‘I thought they oughtn’t to, that’s all. Perhaps I shouldn’t have interfered. Anyway, here I am.’
Nigel was about to comment when Lady Mary asked, ‘Weren’t your parents going to settle down in Italy? Have they gone yet?’
‘Oh, yes. Last year,’ Tom said. ‘They’re near Pisa – lovely weather, a very nice couple looking after them, my mother’s got a garden going, Dad’s peacefully going to seed … It’s ideal.’
‘I don’t think anyone could persuade my father to go peacefully to seed in Italy, or anywhere else,’ Nigel said.
‘I don’t suppose so,’ Tom agreed. ‘But Dad’s never been an energetic man. Granny used to say even as a boy he used to sit about for months, limp as a lettuce leaf, with nothing going on in his head at all. She got a doctor to look at him once but he only said he had a slow metabolism, whatever that means. If anything. Your father’s a different matter, Nigel.’ He was rapidly eating apple pie. It occurred to Annie that Juliet must have told him Julian had left her.
At the bottom of the table Amanda hissed to Melanie, ‘Dishy.’ Her mother, who could not have heard, gave her a hard look. ‘He is, though,’ she whispered.
Melanie contemplated Tom Pointon covertly. ‘Not bad,’ she muttered, her head pointing at her plate. ‘Scruffy. He must be poor.’
Lady Mary suggested visiting the stables to see the vixen and her cubs. Melanie and Amanda, delighted to leave the table, jumped up, and were joined by Annie. Tom also rose.
The vixen was in an empty stall. A piece of wiring was secured in front of her. As they crept up she looked at them, with sharp intelligent eyes, flattening her cubs behind her in the corner. The cubs gave little yaps and sniffles, one escaped and came up to the wire. Melanie knelt down. ‘Don’t put your fingers through,’ warned Lady Mary. ‘They can nip.’
Melanie gazed into the sharp points of the cub’s eyes. Amanda said, in a deliberate way, ‘Oh – I should love to have one.’
‘They belong to their mother,’ Lady Mary told her. ‘She hurt her leg and when she was found she was expecting the cubs. She and the cubs would probably have died if she hadn’t been rescued. But when the time comes she and they will have to be released.’
‘Will you hunt her then, and the cubs?’ enquired Melanie, who had taken in a lot of Howard’s comments and was on his side.
‘Perhaps,’ said Lady Mary. ‘But you may not have seen what foxes do to other creatures when they
catch them. If you look in the far corner you can probably see what she and the cubs made of a freshly killed rabbit this morning.’
Against the wall of the stable Tom and Annie murmured in the dim light. ‘Are you all right, Annie?’ he asked. ‘Juliet told me—’
‘I thought she might. It’s all right.’ There was a pause. ‘He met someone else,’ she explained. ‘Cleaned me out, too – and the living-room sofa. Just don’t say, I told you so.’
Six years ago, when the news of her plan to marry Julian Vane came to him, Tom had arrived unexpectedly at the flat in King’s Cross she had been sharing with a friend while researching at the British Library for her thesis.
She’d made him a cup of tea on a hot August afternoon – the wedding was booked for early September. ‘Don’t do it, Annie,’ he’d said. ‘You don’t know what people like that are like.’
‘I know what Julian’s like. What are you talking about?’
‘Bad faith, Annie – that’s what they specialise in,’ he’d said.
‘I don’t know what that means. And I can’t accept that you’re an expert. You were the person who disappeared to France without a word. For months I believed you were at the London College of Printing, on a course. I thought you’d get in touch when you felt like it. Finally, I rang Aunt Betty and she said you were in Paris – well, had been – by then you were in Grenoble. She didn’t know the address. All you’d sent was a postcard. She was terribly embarrassed, too. Lectures on bad faith aren’t very convincing, coming from your lips, Tom.’
‘I was wrong to do that – I know,’ he said. ‘But, please, just think. Julian seems to be a very different sort of person from you. Howard and Juliet give the impression that they’re worried …’
‘Did they say that? Did they send you—?’ she exclaimed angrily.
‘No, of course not,’ he said.
‘Did they say they didn’t like Julian?’ she insisted.
He stared at her. ‘Defensive, Annie?’
‘Tom! This is intolerable – what are they playing at?’
‘Sorry. They didn’t criticise Julian in any way, Annie, I assure you.’
‘You received an unspoken message, though. I know,’ she said. ‘The slight hesitancy – the look that suggests they suspect a dead mouse somewhere but don’t want to mention it. They try to hide their feelings, but they’re not very good at it. Julian noticed. And frankly, that wasn’t the welcome I’d received at his parents’ house.’ She stood up and crossed the room, looking out on to the traffic in the main road below. ‘I’m shocked at you, Tom. You disappear for years, then turn up to warn me about marrying a man you’ve never met.’ Tom was silent.
‘If you’ve got a sensible thing to say, then say it, Tom,’ Annie went on. ‘Otherwise, I’d like as a wedding present one of those woodcuts you did for that Christmas book by Sue Sloman. Have you still got the originals?’
‘An American bought them,’ he said uneasily. ‘I’ll do you one.’ He fidgeted. ‘Look – this man has a graphics firm. You’re giving up an academic career to work there. Is this what you really want?’
‘Yes,’ she said.
‘And all that involves?’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Oh, hell – you know what I mean …’
‘I do not.’
‘I think you do.’
‘No,’ she said, although she did.
‘You love him?’
‘Of course I do.’
Then there came a terrible traffic crash from the street. They both went quickly to the window to see, below them, at the crossing, a taxi rammed by a white car with a woman now slumped at the wheel. As they stared a speeding builder’s van failed to pull up soon enough and rammed the white car from the back, jolting the sagging figure at the wheel of the car. Annie ran to the phone and called an ambulance and Tom hurried downstairs to see if he could help. The angry taxi-driver, self-exonerating van driver, unconscious woman and later the police and the ambulancemen ended their argument. As the ambulance drew away Tom said awkwardly to Annie, ‘Sorry, Annie – perhaps I shouldn’t have come.’
‘I expect you meant well,’ Annie had said, shrugging.
‘Best of luck, darling,’ he’d said, and walked off. She’d watched his tall, ungainly figure moving through the people on the hot pavement. She felt irritable and sad and knew he was feeling almost precisely the same. Before the wedding he sent her a woodcut he’d made. It showed two figures on a city pavement, leaning towards each other from the shoulders, but keeping a distance between them. A sun burned above them in a wooden sky. She left the woodcut in her room at Froggett’s before the wedding.
Now, leaning against the barn wall, Tom said, ‘It must be awful, Annie. What are you doing? Any plans?’
‘I seem to be running a snack bar with Vanessa – assisted by young Melanie, there,’ she said, nodding towards the preoccupied Melanie, who was snuffling at the cubs, all out from behind their mother and staring at her curiously. ‘It’s in Foxwell Market. It’s temporary, probably. I’ll have to get a proper job soon, to keep me.’
Melanie said, ‘It doesn’t seem right to save them and then hunt after them, after. Can’t we take them away with us? Just one?’
Annie stepped forward. ‘Not to Foxwell,’ she said. ‘You can’t keep foxes like dogs, Melanie. They need their freedom. Here’s the only place they can be.’
‘They could live on scraps from the café. It wouldn’t cost any money.’
‘In a cage? Or they’d be run over.’
‘Watch me,’ Tom muttered to Melanie. ‘Lady Mary,’ he said. ‘I’ve just installed myself in the cottage at the bottom of what used to be my parents’ garden. They sold the house but they kept the cottage. I’m borrowing it and using the outbuilding for my work. I’m suffering from the loneliness of the old artisan in a primitive cottage on the edge of a wood. A pet,’ he told her, with a smile which did not conceal his motive, to persuade and seduce, ‘would be the answer.’ He looked down at the cage.
‘They don’t stay with you as you perfectly well know, Tom,’ Lady Mary said disapprovingly. ‘And they are a pest…’
‘Please,’ he said.
‘All right,’ she said, smiling. ‘Arrange it with Adam. But don’t expect him to approve. Come on, girls,’ she said. ‘It’s getting dark in here. Let’s go and look at the pigs before teatime.’ She turned to Tom. ‘One of the sows farrowed. Can I write you down for a couple of piglets?’
Tom laughed. He looked at Melanie who was staring at him excitedly and he winked. He and Annie walked back to the house together and she told him more about the café. ‘Are you sure this isn’t the kind of crazy thing women do when there’s a divorce?’ he asked.
‘I don’t know,’ Annie told him. ‘I like it, though. What else can I do – train for merchant banking, teach or just sit in a chair and sigh all day?’
He put his arm round her shoulders and gave her a squeeze.
7
A Visit from David Pickering
It was Friday afternoon. The market was full of people, mostly women with plastic bags and wheeled shoppers, getting in the weekend shopping under a grey sky. In the steamy heat of George’s Café Mrs Patel sat in a macintosh and red trousers, drinking tea. Two women were having Coke and cakes and a boy and a girl, who had probably left Rayburn Comprehensive after afternoon roll call, were drinking coffee with an eye on the pavement outside.
The café had now been under new management for a month. One half of the partnership, Annie, had devised new plans. The other half, Vanessa, was thinking them over as she slowly washed some cups. Starting on a huge pile of cutlery she changed gear, washing them in one sink, rinsing in the other, stacking them on a huge plate rack. A washing-up machine was a priority, Annie’d said, and she’d drink to that, in dirty washing-up water if need be. But, and it was a big but, it was all right for Annie to be smart, do figures and make plans. Vanessa had two children, she was hesitant about branching out, she nee
ded security and was nervous about the extra workload. They couldn’t afford more staff and she was finding it hard enough to manage already. Alec was at a child-minder’s two days a week and in the café with her, if Melanie was at school, for the other three days. Vanessa was not keen on the minder. Nor was Alec. It was not easy. Then there was the housework, washing, ironing and sometimes she was so tired, so numbly hurt that she snapped at the children and upset Alec more. At Joanne, too, who was showing her upset by getting aggressive at school and being naughty. There was probably nothing wrong with Annie’s plans, thought Vanessa, except that they would mean more work, more thinking and more risk.
She thought bitterly of Geoff, who had seen his children twice since Christmas. He’d taken them out for two hours one Sunday afternoon, and brought them back sooner than he’d said because, she thought, it was raining and he didn’t want their muddy feet climbing in and out of his new car. He’d whisked them off to the cinema another day. It was likely Cindy wasn’t too keen on his seeing his children. It might be better if he didn’t anyway, she considered, for afterwards on both occasions, Joanne, white and pent up, had actually attacked her, Vanessa, kicking and screaming about some trifle, while Alec had simply withdrawn into blankness, staring at her as if she weren’t there, seeming to lose most of his power of speech, saying only, ‘Drink’ or ‘toilet’ like a much younger child. Next day she’d still had to drag him to the minder, although she knew she ought to spend the day with him. There was no one to help her now – not Geoff, of course, nor her sister, busy with her own life and afraid of Vanessa somehow as if she thought divorce was catching, not her mother, enjoying a life free of the commitments she’d always resented, Vanessa now realised. Anita used to complain about the restrictions imposed on mothers of children, the noise, the mess, the housework, as if Vanessa and Cherry had been foisted on her by a bureaucratic government and she must bring them up or go to gaol. And if Cherry thought divorce was catching, or hereditary, and so wanted to distance herself as much as possible from her sister, then her mother thought it was caused by something a wife did or didn’t do and the wife was therefore to blame for it. ‘There must have been something,’ she’d insisted. ‘Didn’t you notice anything, Ness? I can’t believe it came as a bombshell, like you say. Women always know, really, when the marriage is going wrong.’
In Search of Love, Money & Revenge Page 11
