A Few Green Leaves (11 page)

‘I’m not sure that I agree with you,’ said Beatrix, and Isobel now remembered that the last time she was in the woods she
had 
noticed a scattering of stones at some point. Could Tom explain what might be the possible significance of that?

‘Somebody has evidently been scattering stones,’ said Adam. He was bored by local history and despised Tom’s researches into the subject. The short and simple annals of the poor were, in his opinion, of minimal interest – those boring and limited occupations listed in the census returns where practically everybody was an agricultural labourer.

‘I’m going to get a dog,’ Daphne said suddenly. ‘They’re so clever the way they can nose out things.’

‘Even the remains of a deserted medieval village?’ Emma asked.

‘They do train dogs to detect drugs, don’t they?’ said Daphne, on the defensive. ‘I have heard that.’

‘Yes, man’s best friend has his uses,’ Adam agreed.

‘Shall we move from the table for our coffee?’ Emma suggested. If they were going to talk about dogs it might be as well to have a change of scene, but at least the conversation had moved away from Adam’s coy references to Emma’s visitor. It was not until the guests had gone home and Emma was washing up with her mother – Isobel having gone to bed – that the subject was brought up again.

‘So Graham Pettifer was here,’ Beatrix said. The flat statement, an oblique reference rather than a direct question, was her usual way of extracting information, Emma knew. She admitted that Graham had indeed been here and added, ‘He’s been here twice, as a matter of fact.’

Beatrix pondered this without comment. She knew better than to press Emma farther. During the silence some plates were dried and put away, then Emma said, ‘He’s having trouble with Claudia – I suppose that’s why he came here.’ She was
not
going to reveal that she had written to him after seeing him on television. After all, her mother had known Claudia as a student.

‘Of course, he has been in Africa,’ said Beatrix, ‘at one of those new universities – at least they seem new to us. I can’t imagine that Claudia would much care for
that
. You never met her, did you?’ Beatrix smiled, remembering Claudia at college. ‘A pretty, frivolous young woman.’ It had been after Emma’s brief affair with Graham that he had married Claudia Jenks, such a complete contrast to Emma that it might almost have been on the rebound, except that Beatrix knew it hadn’t been that. In some ways – and here she must have been influenced by her studies of the Victorian novel – Beatrix felt that it would be more ‘satisfactory’ if Emma got married now. On the whole people tended not to marry in these days, but Emma was getting past the age for that and there was danger of her settling down into an old-fashioned spinster. Danger? Remembering other spinsters of her acquaintance –Isobel, Miss Lee and Miss Grundy, to name only three – ‘danger’ seemed perhaps not the right word. Yet Beatrix did not like to think of herself as a conventional match-making mother, and despised herself for asking Emma, ‘And where do you come in?’

Emma hesitated, remembering the night of the flower festival and the non-event it had been. She knew what her mother was driving at but did not feel inclined to tell her the full story of that afternoon and evening – Graham’s appearance in the church (perhaps she might mention that) but not the tea and the boiled eggs, especially not the boiled eggs, nor his wanting to stay the night, not because he particularly wanted to” be with her but because he had left it rather late to go back and was feeling tired.

‘I suppose he wanted someone to talk to,’ she said.

‘He stayed the night here?’

‘Yes, but we slept in separate rooms. He made no attempt at anything else – rather humiliating!’ Emma felt she had to make a joke of it.

‘And of course a night in a cottage can’t really be compared with those aristocratic Edwardian house-parties with their sophisticated arrangement of bedrooms,’ Beatrix said.

‘Hardly!’ Emma laughed. ‘And he hadn’t even brought pyjamas and toothbrush with him – ridiculous, really.’

‘Well, in a way, that’s what it is, isn’t it, the relationship between men and women.’

Beatrix’s short experience of the married state had hardly given her the right to pronounce in this way, Emma felt, nor did she believe that her mother really held this unromantic view of the relationship between the sexes – her studies of Victorian fiction would seem to indicate otherwise. It was only that she didn’t want to seem too eager for Emma to enter into a ‘meaningful relationship’ with Graham that she adopted this attitude. All the same, there was a good deal in what she said.

‘He admired the Golden Lily bedcover – I suppose that was something.’

‘Will he come again, do you think?’

‘I don’t know – he didn’t say. I suppose it depends on various things.’ Emma wasn’t even sure whether she wanted him to. ‘What did you think of
this
evening?’ she asked her mother. ‘Quite a success, wasn’t it?’

Beatrix agreed but found herself thinking that Emma could have made herself look more attractive. She was getting a little too old for the modish drabness and wispyness so fashionable today. Surely a dress of a prettier colour and some attempt at a hair style, either curled or neatly cut and set, might have made the evening even more successful? It wasn’t as if Emma had ever produced anything that could justify such high-minded dowdiness – here Beatrix considered various contemporary women of distinction – no novel or volume of poetry or collection of paintings, only a few unreadable anthropological papers. Was she not capable of better things?

In bed that night Beatrix employed her favourite remedy for sleeplessness, going over in her mind her college contemporaries and recalling their Christian names and their appearance as it had been forty years ago. Starting with Isobel – Isobel Merriman Mound – who had looked then very much as she looked now, she moved on to the more exotically named of her fellow students. Use Benedikta Roelofsen, the Dane, and Alessandra Simonetta Bianco, the Italian, were two that came to mind, pictured in a college group of the time but now difficult to recall because they never came back to the annual reunion. A detailed memory, irrelevant in the way such memories often are, came to Beatrix of Use’s hand with its red-varnished nails, surely some of the first ever seen, and Miss Birkinshaw’s look of horror at the sight. Ilse would have done it to shock, but girls in those days did take more trouble with their appearance than they seemed to now. Even she and Isobel, plain and hard-working, had been neat and tidy, with waved hair and timid attempts at make-up. And, after all, she, Beatrix, had married, as anyone could learn from the college register, ‘m. 1939, Dudley George Howick’, and ‘one d., Emma, born 1940’. Dudley had been a contemporary, also reading English, and Beatrix had known him for several years before they married in September 1939. Had it not been for the war, they might never have married, but it was the sort of thing people were doing at that time, and Beatrix had always felt that a woman should marry or at least have some kind of relationship with a man. Dudley had been killed at Dunkirk, all those years ago, and since then there had been nothing much in that direction. A young, academically inclined widow with a child, as she had been, was not immediately attractive or accessible, and then there had been her work, the Victorian fiction. Charlotte M. Yonge’s novels contained more than one attractive young widow….

But Emma was a different proposition altogether – what was to be done with
her!
Nothing, of course. One did not ‘do’ anything about daughters of Emma’s age in the nineteen seventies. This Graham Pettifer – nothing there, obviously, and the village was most unlikely to provide anybody suitable. Adam Prince, with his ‘memorable sole nantua’? One couldn’t help smiling here –
not
a marrying man. And poor Tom could hardly be described as an eligible widower…. Beatrix was becoming sleepy now, perhaps the thought of Tom had induced drowsiness. ‘Ineffectual’ was the word that sprang to mind when she thought of Tom – not even capable of locating the site of that “ridiculous deserted medieval village in the woods, the D.M.V. And not all that efficient in the running of his church, either. Beatrix found herself remembering certain lapses of detail (presumably during some temporary absence of Miss Lee) – Christmas decorations still up on the first Sunday after Epiphany, daffodils on the altar at Quinquagesima – surely incorrect? – which Tom ought to have picked up but probably hadn’t even noticed. But of course he had lost his wife, one must remember that, and was saddled with the unfortunate Daphne. Poor Tom, and poor Daphne – definitely poor Daphne…. Beatrix slept.

Tom was so much nicer than Adam Prince, Emma thought, going over the supper party in her mind as she lay waiting for sleep. He was an essentially good person. As well as preaching about heaven he had also given them a sermon about helping one’s neighbour, and she was sure that he meant it. But to get down to practical details or brass tacks, could Tom
really
help her if she asked him? Would he, for example, be capable of cleaning her top windows, which was what she really needed?

Isobel fell asleep quickly and dreamed that she was walking in a bluebell wood with Adam Prince – highly unsuitable! She woke in the middle of the night, thinking of Shelley’s poem,

I dream’d that, as I wander’d by the way,

Bare Winter suddenly was changed to Spring….

All those flowers – violets, daisies, ‘faint oxlips’, wild roses and others she couldn’t remember (no fox’s dung there!), and the gathering of a nosegay of all these and then the last line, much loved and quoted in her girlhood,

That I might there present it! Oh! to Whom?

Like Beatrix she too went back to college days, a memory of that time coming to her, but of somebody not at all like Adam Prince.

There was a good summer that year. The mud in the lanes dried into hard ruts and the fields were burnt and bleached like an Italian or Greek landscape.

Martin Shrubsole nodded his approval when he saw his mother-in-law setting out for a walk in the woods with Miss Lee and Miss Grundy. He was unaware that the main purpose of the walk was to catch a glimpse of Sir Miles and his guests at the manor – mother was taking exercise, that was the main thing. And they had been lucky – if you could call it luck – to be rewarded by a sight of Sir Miles standing on the terrace with a group of ladies in summer dresses. By concealing themselves in a thicket, the walkers had been able to watch for some minutes while others came out from the house with glasses in their hands (it was just before lunch) and food was set out on white-painted garden tables. The sound of laughter came through the trees.

‘In the old days’, Miss Lee reminded them, ‘people didn’t eat and drink out of doors like this, though there were wonderful picnics, of course. Miss Vereker was a
great
one for picnics.’

‘Miss Vereker…?’ Magdalen Raven had forgotten for the moment who Miss Vereker was.

‘The girls’ governess,’ Miss Grundy said. As if anyone could fail to know about Miss Vereker the way Olive was always going on about her!

‘Oh yes, I remember now. I suppose she didn’t live in this cottage?’

They had left the thicket and were passing the cottage in the woods which looked attractive in the hot weather, shaded by a grove of trees.

‘No, one of the keepers lived here, but now they prefer a council house.’

‘It would be such a romantic setting for a young couple, wouldn’t it?’ said Miss Grundy. ‘I suppose Sir Miles could let it.’

‘Oh yes, it’s certainly habitable,’ said Miss Lee. ‘Miss Vereker might have preferred it to West Kensington, where she now lives, but of course she didn’t have the chance.’

‘My daughter feels it ought to be offered to some homeless family,’ said Magdalen, ‘though it would hardly be suitable, one feels. Remember in the war how the evacuees hated the country?’

‘One fears the elemental forces of Nature,’ said Miss Grundy.

Her companions seemed unable to comment on this and the conversation moved into more comfortable channels. It was time to be getting back for their own lunches – perhaps a salad eaten out of doors, inspired by the example of Sir Miles and his guests. It would certainly be hot in Greece and no doubt Daphne would be eating at a taverna – wasn’t that the word? As for Tom, they had noticed him mooning about in the churchyard that morning – things did get rather out of hand when Daphne was away.

There was hay round the gravestones – the grass in the churchyard was badly in need of cutting, Tom realised. They had discussed it at the last meeting of the parochial church council. And was there no way of restraining or controlling the excesses of the village mourners? Could nothing be done to educate their execrable taste? Christabel Gellibrand had suggested at that same meeting that elaborate curb-stones, green marble chips and florid gilt lettering disfigured the general appearance of the churchyard. Some graves even had vases of artificial flowers on them, surely a disgrace in a rural area? Were there not rules that could be applied and enforced by the rector? Here several meaningful glances had been directed towards Tom, but he had just smiled, admitting that of course there were certain rules, but who was he to attempt to apply them, to act in what would undoubtedly seem a highhanded and unfeeling manner towards fellow human beings at a time of sadness, still suffering the grief of bereavement? After all, everybody couldn’t be blessed with the gift of good taste (like Christabel G.). It was difficult to answer this, unpalatable, as it was to acknowledge a common humanity with those who would cover their graves with green marble chips or even, in one instance, a sickly piece of statuary which had somehow got itself put up in the fifties (before Tom’s time as rector).