A Few Green Leaves (13 page)

‘A ghost?’ Emma suggested. ‘Or something like Miss Moberly and Miss Jourdain at Versailles?’

‘We’d better go to her,’ said Tom, ‘see if there’s anything we can do.’

They found Miss Grundy in a small anteroom, sitting on a folding chair, surrounded by a group of sympathetic but puzzled fellow tourists. A white-haired woman, wearing a flowered nylon overall, was standing over her holding a cup of tea.

‘One of the housekeepers,’ Magdalen whispered, ‘she’s been so kind.’

Would tea be the most appropriate drink in the circumstances? Emma wondered. But it was what everybody would think of, what would spring to mind.

‘What did she see?’ Tom asked of whoever was prepared to answer, for Miss Grundy seemed incapable of speech but sat staring in front of her.

‘A young man with long hair, wearing a brightly coloured coat – rather in an Oriental style, she said, when she told us – she was a bit confused, of course, and now she doesn’t seem to want to say any more,’ said Magdalen. ‘Perhaps Avice would know what to do – but she’s gone on ahead.’

‘ There’s no need to bother your daughter,’ said Miss Lee, irritated by the fuss. ‘It was probably a modern young man she saw –you know how young people dress now and how long they wear their hair. Come along, Flavia,’ she said firmly, ‘we’re going to have
our
tea now.’

‘Yes, tea would obviously be a solution,’ said Tom to Emma.

The little episode had created a bond of sympathy between them and both seemed conscious of it. Tom reflected on the difficulties of living with a person with whom one did not always see eye to eye. Emma had the same kind of thoughts and then found herself wondering about Tom and Daphne and speculating on why he hadn’t managed to achieve a more congenial living arrangement or ‘life style’. Surely he, an attractive and intelligent man, could have contrived to marry again?

Some members of the party had already established themselves under a tree on the lawn, not in the dank woods they had seen on entering the park. Emma observed that Mrs Dyer and her companions were sitting at a little distance away from Tom and the history ladies who were crowding round him, but she was sure it was none of Tom’s doing. No doubt he would strenuously attempt to maintain equality however uncomfortable it might be – it would be Mrs Dyer who would separate herself and then blame him for it.

Adam Prince lowered himself carefully on to the ground – his new jeans were still a little stiff.

‘I hope you won’t judge our efforts by the standards you expect in your restaurants,’ said Miss Lee, handing him tea in a green plastic cup but not caring in the least what his opinion was. Adam Prince’s ‘work’ was a joke in the village – it seemed hardly credible that people could be paid money to go around eating meals at expensive restaurants.

‘I’m sure the tea will be up to your usual standard,’ said Adam, now the smooth-tongued clergyman rather than the restaurant inspector; after all, he had a long experience of the more humble side of catering.

‘Can we picnic in the grounds of our own stately home?’ Emma asked. ‘The manor, I mean.’

‘We’ve never tried,’ said Tom. ‘Somehow the question has never arisen. I think we should feel there was something inappropriate about it – too near home, perhaps.’

‘In the old days’, said Miss Lee, ‘the school-children were given a tea in the manor grounds in August.’

‘That kind of thing’s not necessary now,’ said Avice. ‘People can stand on their own feet without patronage of that kind.’

Of course – Mother’s Pride and Heinz baked beans (thanks, Mum), Emma thought. There was no need for the Lord of the Manor to entertain the children of his tenants in these days.

‘But can people stand on their own feet?’ Adam was asking. ‘People seem less capable now – they seem to need more help rather than less.’

‘Oh well, there are the supportive services, certainly,’ Avice agreed, ‘and that’s just as it should be. But all that patronage and paternalism or whatever you like to call it has been swept away, and a good thing too.’

‘Perhaps the people have been swept away too,’ said her mother.

‘Yes – I certainly miss the manor and all it stood for – we haven’t got any kind of centre to the village now,’ said Miss Lee.

‘I suppose the clergy and the doctors have taken the place of the gentry,’ Emma said.

Avice was prepared to acknowledge this, though she thought the doctors should have been placed first. Tom merely smiled; he was thinking of the encounter with Dr G. in the mausoleum and how we all came to the same thing in the end – dust and/or ashes, however you liked to think of it.

‘Do you ever hear anything of Miss Vereker?’ Tom asked Miss Lee. He had been reminded of ‘the last governess’ and how she had liked to visit the mausoleum.

‘Yes, we keep in touch. I had a card at Christmas, a charity card, of course – was it the National Trust or the Gardeners’ Benevolent Fund? I can’t remember, something to do with Nature. She wrote a few words on the back.’

‘I find most people tend to do that, now that the postage is all the same,’ said Magdalen.

‘Miss Vereker is giving up her flat and going to live with her nephew and his wife,’ said Miss Grundy, speaking for the first time since her ‘experience’.

‘She would miss her flat,’ said Magdalen. ‘It’s always rather sad to give up one’s independence.’

‘Oh Mummy, what a way to talk! You certainly haven’t done that,’ said Avice. ‘I don’t know what we should do without you – all your little jobs in the house and your baby-sitting – nobody could say
you
weren’t independent.’

‘I’m going to have a cigarette to keep the midges off,’ said Magdalen suddenly.

‘Now you know what Martin thinks about smoking,’ said Avice on a warning note.

‘Yes, it is agreeable to smoke out of doors sometimes,’ said Adam, offering his old-fashioned silver cigarette case. ‘Try one of mine, Mrs Raven.’

‘Does the governess – Miss Vereker – come back here sometimes?’ Tom asked. He had never heard that she did but it occurred to him that it might be possible to pick her brains, even take a tape-recording of her memories of life at the manor.

‘She hasn’t been lately,’ said Miss Lee. ‘The fare would be rather a drain on her resources, even with a Senior Citizen’s rail-card.’

There was a brief silence of embarrassment. Tom wondered if the P.C.C. might do something, rector’s discretion fund sort of thing, but he didn’t like to suggest it.

‘Better for her to stay where she is, in London,’ said Miss Grundy, who was thinking of the choice of churches even in West Kensington where, she believed, the nephew and his wife lived.

‘You’ll be glad to have Daphne back, won’t you?’ said Miss Lee. She felt that Tom got somehow out of control – though she could hardly have specified in what way – when his sister was on holiday.

‘She talks of getting a dog,’ Tom said, imagining the animal bounding all over the place, upsetting everything.

In another bus on an equally hot day Daphne rested her eyes on the grey-green of the olive groves, “miles and miles, kilometres and kilometres of them, stretching as far as one could see. She let the sound from the driver’s transistor radio pour over her, loud blaring music, songs with an Oriental strain. She closed her eyes, basking in noise and heat. Now she was hearing again the croaking of the frogs as they had walked last night in the town, and in a side street catching sight of whole animals – lambs, she supposed – roasting on spits. Then, earlier, dazzled by the ugly white cube-like buildings of a village baking in the mid-day sun, such a contrast to the dull damp greyness of her home. She did not consciously compare them, living entirely in the present with no memory of any kind of past. She remembered seeing animals crowded together in a kind of shelter in a field, and for some extraordinary reason this reminded her of Tom’s history ladies, but only for a moment. She did not dwell on the memory but pushed it away from her.

The Sunday after the history society excursion, Emma went to Evensong. She found the ill-attended service more restful, even more ‘meaningful’ than the morning ‘family’ service with its crying children. She did not gain much from the sermon, for she was inattentive, but she had the impression that it was not one of Tom’s better ones, an unsuccessful mingling of past and present. Afterwards she hurried away, not waiting to say goodnight in the porch.

Opposite the church there was a cottage which always interested her because its garden was crowded with derelict motorcars. The owner seemed just to deposit his old car when he bought a new one, like a snake shedding its skin. The process reminded her of old animals, or even old people, being sheltered in a kind of rest-home. There was something peculiarly charming, even beautiful, about the sight of the cars, one still shrouded in the grey plastic cover which had protected it from the rain of the nineteen fifties, and Emma stood for a while looking over the broken-down wall into an orchard where through the trees she caught sight of something that looked like a bull-nosed Morris, surely a vehicle of historic importance? She wondered if Tom knew about it, but then of course his historical interests lay farther back and he probably regarded the abandoned motorcars merely as an eyesore, as some of the villagers did. Yet it was all a sort of history and was there not something significant and appropriate about this particular kind of graveyard being opposite the church – a kind of mingling of two religious faiths, the ancient and the modern? ‘A Note on the Significance of the Abandoned MotorCar in a West Oxfordshire Village’ might pin it down, she felt.

Once home she sat with her notes and forgot what she had just seen. Later she took out Graham’s letter again and pondered over it. There may be an unlimited number of things that can happen to the ordinary person, but there are only a few twists to the man-woman story. For instance, it would be more satisfactory if Graham could expand on the bare information contained in his letter – if he could indicate something of his feelings, even. That might help her to clarify her own, for she was not sure whether she wanted him or not. There is such a thing as the telephone, she thought, glancing at the silent instrument. Its fashionable shade of grey suggested peace and repose, (unless one thought of grey as the colour of desolation, which it might also be).

When the telephone did ring she was not surprised to hear Graham’s voice and to learn that the cottage he was renting
was
the cottage in the woods, ‘the ruined cottage’, as it was called. Apparently, however, it was habitable, but did the milkman deliver there? Perhaps Emma could find out? And bread, potatoes and a few basic groceries – he was sure Emma could arrange that?

Tom did not go away for a summer holiday that year, even when Daphne returned from Greece. He was relieved that she did not yet show any sign of getting a dog – perhaps the prolonged heat-wave was not the most suitable time. As for himself, the quick journey back into the seventeenth century by time machine, which was the sort of holiday Tom would have liked most, was still to be invented. He did not fancy Spain, where Mrs Dyer and her son and daughter-in-law were going, or Miss Lee’s Christian guest-house (‘The Anchorage’) in the West Country, or even Miss Grundy’s few days in London, visiting congenial churches. The middle summer months were not the best for festivals and Tom felt he had long since grown out of that particular kind of self-indulgent churchgoing. The Shrubsoles were to take a cottage in Cornwall, where Avice’s mother would be available to spend long days on the beach with the children, while Adam Prince took his ruby-red Renault over to the Dordogne and wandered round in search of truffles and Mombazilliac, the most refined sort of busman’s holiday. Dr G. and Christabel went to Scotland and stayed with old friends in a castle. Tom was glad that

Dr G.’s clergyman brother was not coming to caretake in the house this year, for on one occasion he had been rather too eager to help out with church services and it had been embarrassing having to admit that they never had incense and possessed neither thurible nor thurifer. Robbie and Tamsin Barraclough were the most adventurous of the village holiday makers, travelling overland to the East – Afghanistan, some said, or was it India? – somewhere in that direction.

Emma was expecting her mother and Isobel to come to the cottage some time during the summer, though they planned to stay in Isobel’s cottage in the Lake District in August. Why was it so eminently suitable that a headmistress should have a cottage in the Lake District? Emma wondered. Obviously something to do with Wordsworth and the Victorian love of mountains, for the cottage had belonged to Isobel’s grandfather.

The week before Graham was due to arrive at the cottage he was renting, Emma had an old school-friend, Ianthe Potts, to stay with her. She always felt guilty about Ianthe, who had doggedly kept up with her since school days when Emma would have let their acquaintance drop. Ianthe worked in a museum and had for some time cherished an unrequited passion for a fellow worker. Because of this, and also because Ianthe lived in a rather dreary flat on the wrong side of Kilburn High Road, Emma felt bound to invite her for a weekend now that she was living in the country and the weather was so good.

Emma noticed that the hopelessness of her situation had now inclined Ianthe to concentrate more on her health and on preserving herself for whatever the rest of life might have in store for her. She was more

impressed by there being two doctors in the village than by the tranquil charm of the honey-coloured stone buildings or the spectacular display of summer flowers in the cottage gardens. They went for several walks, including one past the cottage where Graham was soon to live. Ianthe commented on the romantic setting, though she feared it might be damp with so many trees round it.

‘You once had an affair with him, didn’t you?’ she said, in such a way as to put whatever there had been between Graham and Emma very firmly into the past with no prospect of any future. Emma found this irritating, for although she had no strong feelings for Graham – indeed, hardly knew how she felt about him – it was not for Ianthe to imply that there was nothing between them. But she decided to let it pass. Instead she began to ask Ianthe about her own affairs; was it still Ian, was he still the one?