A Few Green Leaves (12 page)

But in the far corner under the yew trees the sugary seventeenth-century cherubs, the newness of their faces blunted with the years, glowered at him over their tantalisingly indecipherable inscriptions. Perhaps even they had once been new and in deplorable taste? It was too late now to do anything about the churchyard, bolting the stable door and all that – the place was already spoilt. Only the older graves and the mausoleum, with its chaste granite obelisk, were likely to please the few who noticed such things.

Even though the interior of the mausoleum was not to Tom’s taste, there was something attractive about the idea of chilly marble on a hot summer day, and he pushed aside the velvet curtain and went in.

‘Ah, rector….’

Tom had not expected a greeting and was startled when he saw that Dr G. was already inside the mausoleum. Tom had sometimes wondered why Dr G. should, like himself, have a key to the mausoleum. Its inhabitants were surely beyond his help now.

There was something slightly ridiculous about the two men confronting each other in this way and in such a place, and after the doctor’s first, ‘Ah, rector…’ and Tom’s response of, ‘Well, Dr G….’ they stood smiling at each other, Tom’s hand resting, almost in blessing, on a cool marble head, and the doctor appearing to be examing the contours of a marble limb as if he were probing for signs of a fracture.

What are
you
doing here? Tom wanted to ask, and yet in a sense both had an equal right to be here, though neither could expect to end their days in the mausoleum. But it was Dr G. who put the question to Tom, turning the tables in an unexpected way. ‘What are
you
doing here?’ he asked. ‘I never expect to find anybody else in this place.’

‘Do you come here often?’ The trite social enquiry was out before Tom realised it.

‘Oh yes, I come here quite often.’ The doctor’s tone was casual.

‘There’s a young man who comes to see to things,’ Tom said. ‘I met him here one day.’

‘Yes – an arrangement was made – to see that the place was kept decently and in order. One does feel that’s how it should be kept.’

Almost as if it concerned him personally, Tom thought, irritated by the doctor’s attitude. As if he owned the place – but of course this was an absurd reaction, for why shouldn’t the doctor have as much right to enter the mausoleum as anybody else? In fact more right, because he had been so long in the village and could even remember the last survivors of the de Tankerville family.

‘Did you ever know…?’ Tom began, indicating the marble representations surrounding them.

‘Well, hardly
these
. The girls, certainly, and Miss Vereker – she was fond of coming here.’

‘Miss Vereker?’ Tom was at a loss.

‘The last governess.’

‘Of course!’ Tom’s thoughts had gone back to the seventeenth century, where he recalled no such name. ‘Miss Vereker, the last governess – how sad that sounds. She taught the girls at the manor?’

‘Yes, she was quite a young woman in those days.’

‘And she liked to come here? A strange taste in a young woman.’

‘Well, she had the interests of the family very much at heart. She used to put flowers here at Easter and other times…. I was just taking a stroll through the churchyard and thought I’d look in – funny that we should meet here,’ said the doctor, now more genial, ‘but after all, you and I are rather in the same line of business, aren’t we?’

‘Yes, I suppose we are,’ said Tom, but whereas the doctor’s surgery was full, the rector’s study was empty – never any queue there. So there was a difference. Yet there might be a means of getting together and in a rather useful and practical way, for it now occurred to Tom that he might ask Dr G. to give a talk at one of the winter meetings of the history society. ‘Death in the Olden Days’ or words to that effect? He was sure the doctor would be able to think of a suitable subject.

Of course Dr G. said he would be delighted and the two men left the mausoleum, each feeling satisfied as if it
had
been a social occasion. So his ‘Do you come here often?’ wasn’t so out of place after all, Tom thought.

Going back to what he thought of as his solitary lunch – and, indeed, with Daphne away it was a solitary meal – he happened to glance down the village street and see Emma going into her cottage, holding a letter – or it might have been a postcard – in her hand. Had she not seemed to be preoccupied with whatever news the communication contained, he might have suggested a drink at the pub. At least this was “what he imagined himself doing – in practice he would probably have said nothing and so missed his opportunity. Still, tomorrow was another day – the day of the history society’s summer excursion, and it promised to be at least a fine day. The clergy nowadays seldom included the weather in their prayers, but there were other blessings to be hoped for as well as sunshine.

Tom knew in advance that the party joining in the history society’s summer excursion would consist mainly of middle-aged and elderly women from neighbouring villages – ‘Tom’s history ladies’, as Daphne called them. Mary, Janet, Leila, Damaris, Ailsa, Myrtle and Hester – he knew them all by their Christian names, and they were undoubtedly the backbone of the society. And of course there were also a few from his own village – Miss Lee and Miss Grundy (whom he did not call ‘Olive’ and ‘Flavia’), Dr Shrubsole’s wife Avice and her mother (Magdalen?) and lastly, as he had hoped, Emma Howick, no doubt in her role as anthropologist and student of village life. One or two of the original village inhabitants also came along, not as local historians, for they cared little for such matters, but ‘for the ride’. Among these was Mrs Dyer, determined to have her share of anything that was going, and almost as if to humour the rector in his childish obsession with the old days and people being buried in wool.

The only man in the party, not counting Tom, was Adam Prince, wearing jeans (a more successful buy than the pair he had given to the jumble sale).

‘Your sister need hardly have gone all that way for sunshine,’ he said to Tom.

‘Oh, but Daphne goes to Greece for much more than that,’ said Tom. ‘And she really needs to get away.’

‘Yes, we all need to get away, perhaps women especially,’ said Adam. No doubt he was remembering women who had worked for him in the days when he was a parish priest, for he smiled mysteriously and Tom wondered if he was about to embark on one of his reminiscences of his former life. But his next remark was about the weather – they were really lucky to have such a beautiful day.

‘ I only hope we can find a shady spot for tea,’ said Mrs Dyer, ‘or we shall all get sunstroke.’

‘Unlikely, Mrs Dyer, in our temperate climate,’ Adam assured her.

Tom was less confident but he remembered that there were some fine trees in the grounds of Seedihead Park, where they were going, and hoped they could eat their tea underneath them.

Mrs Dyer went on to tell them all about a ‘mystery tour’, taken by the old people’s association of a neighbouring village (the Evergreen Oldsters), on just such a hot afternoon as this on which they were now setting out. One of the old people on the journey home had been observed to be curiously silent, not joining in the sing-song.

‘And do you know what?’ Mrs Dyer waited for an answer.

‘He was dead?’ said Emma brightly. ‘Or was it an old woman?’

‘No, it was an old gentleman.’

‘I thought as much – a woman would have more consideration than to do a thing like that, to die on an outing, with all the inconvenience.’

‘Oh come. Miss Howick – aren’t you being a bit hard on us?’ Adam protested.

‘ He was sat in his seat,’ Mrs Dyer went on, feeling that attention was being diverted from her, ‘quiet, with his mouth open – they thought he was asleep.’

‘But he was dead,’ Emma repeated.

‘They didn’t know what to do – should they stop the coach or go on?’

‘And those notices you see outside pubs – NO COACHES or COACHES WELCOME,’ said Emma, embroidering the theme. ‘Which to stop at? That must have been a problem.’

‘It would seem best in those circumstances to return home,’ said Adam. ‘Did they do that?’

Mrs Dyer seemed flustered by a direct question and began to protest that it was in another village and how should she know what they had done.

‘I expect they stopped the sing-song,’ said Adam, ‘when they saw what had happened. Or perhaps history doesn’t relate that detail.’

‘No – one wonders what we are failing to record now that future historians will blame us for,’ said Tom. ‘It’s impossible to cover everything.’ He recalled that several members of the society were going round the villages with tape-recorders in an attempt to capture the ‘immediacy’ of local happenings as they occurred, but the results so far had been curiously disappointing. They lacked the vividness of a Wood or Aubrey or Hearne, he felt. Perhaps we were all flattened out into a kind of uniform dullness these days – something to do with the welfare state and the rise of the consumer society. And then we were taken care of from the cradle to the grave, weren’t we, and that must have an effect….

The coach drew up at a handsome gateway flanked by stone animals of an indeterminate species – lions, their features blunted by age, or some mythical beast. The driver said a word to the lodge-keeper and the coach proceeded to move slowly up the drive. This was shaded on either side by thickets of trees, but the surface was broken and uneven. The owner had only recently opened his park and house to the public.

‘You’d think they’d make a better road,’ said Mrs Dyer as the coach lurched along. ‘Is this where we have our packed tea?’ She peered suspiciously into the dark woods on either side.

‘Plenty of shade here, Mrs Dyer,’ said Tom cheerfully. He stood up in the back of the coach, a feeling of liberation coming over him. He knew from experience of such occasions that not everyone would wish to accompany him on a conducted tour of the house – some would prefer to walk in the grounds or sit down under the trees. He looked forward to a congenial talk with Emma and was pleased when he saw that she was waiting to go round the house, waiting almost meekly, like a school-girl in her blue and white cotton dress.

Emma’s appearance of meekness concealed a preoccupation with the letter she had received yesterday from Graham Pettifer and the strange news it contained. He wrote of his desire to ‘get away from things’, to have a chance to ‘get down to’ the book he was working on. He didn’t say anything about wanting to see her again, yet the amazing revelation at the end of the letter did seem to indicate a desire for her company, if nothing more, for he then said quite casually, ‘I’ll be spending the rest of the summer in a cottage I’m renting in your district – thought I ought to warn you!’ The way he had put it was ambiguous, and after the flatness of the flower festival evening she was at a loss to predict what their future relationship might be. And where was this cottage he was going to rent – why had he not asked
her
to find something for him? The only cottage she could think of was the one in the woods – could it possibly be that?

‘Have you got a freezer, Miss Howick?’ The voice of Magdalen Raven broke in on Emma’s thoughts. It seemed irrelevant when they were examining the Jacobean embroidery on a pair of curtains, but no more so than Emma’s speculations about Graham Pettifer.

‘I? A freezer? No, I haven’t.’

‘Mummy, she probably wouldn’t have, living alone,’ said Avice impatiently. ‘Just that little compartment at the top of the fridge, like you had, remember? You can keep things up to three months and it’s quite useful, but no good for us, of course. We need the very biggest one, what with meat and the veg and fruit from the garden, and I always make an extra casserole, and cakes and bread….’

‘Really?’ said Emma politely. ‘Even bread?’

‘Oh yes – there’s really nothing you can’t freeze, or almost nothing. Cucumber isn’t very successful.

‘There
is
a connection with the Civil War,’ now Tom’s voice was breaking in.’ We shall be shown the room where certain of the Royalists are said to have met….

‘Are said to?’ Adam repeated. ‘Don’t they know?’

‘One hesitates to claim that kind of knowledge,’ said Tom, ‘but the tradition has been handed down – there is a room at the top of the house known as the king’s room.’

‘That does seem to indicate something,’ said Emma. ‘Could Charles himself have been here?’

The rest of the party had moved on and Emma found herself alone with Tom at the foot of a narrow staircase.

‘That person who was with you at the flower festival,’ he said suddenly, as if wanting to put the question before anyone else joined them, ‘was that a relative?’

‘A relative….’ Emma found herself wanting to laugh – ‘relative’ was the term anthropologists used in their dry accounts of ‘social organisation’. ‘You mean Graham Pettifer? I used to know him when I worked in London.’

‘Ah, London. I expect you got to know a lot of people in your work there.’

‘Yes, I did, certainly. I used to go to a centre for anthropological studies and often met colleagues there.’

‘Colleagues….’ Tom considered the word.

‘People in the same line of business – as you might meet other clergy or people interested in local history.’

Tom looked very doubtful at this but said nothing.

‘Then one often met people in libraries.’

‘Ah, libraries,’ Tom said, but his face clouded over, as if while acknowledging the use and value of libraries he was remembering his sister’s friend Heather Blenkinsop and her unnatural interest in the problems of hedge-dating.

The silence induced by the thought of libraries was broken into by Miss Lee and Magdalen Raven, obviously in a state of agitation.

‘It’s Miss Grundy – something rather upsetting – she’s had a kind of turn.

‘It must be the heat,’ said Tom. ‘I was rather afraid something like this might happen. I blame myself,’ he added. It was so much easier to take the blame, almost expected of him.

‘Oh, it’s not
that
,” said Miss Lee impatiently, ‘not
that
kind of turn – more like an
experience
– she says she’s
seen
something, some person from the past.’