A Few Green Leaves (17 page)

‘Nothing more for me, thank you,’ said Emma. It was disconcerting that Claudia appeared more interested in what pudding she was going to eat than in Emma’s possible relationship with her husband.

‘What
is
the baklava?’ Claudia asked the hovering waiter.

‘Very nice,’ he said unhelpfully.

Claudia peered around her to see if anyone else was having it. In the end she decided to give it a try but when it was brought she began to regret it. ‘It looks exactly like the moussaka,’ she complained. ‘Don’t you think so? It probably is the moussaka, with a different filling. This has been
rather
a mistake,’ she said, in a jolly all-girls-together sort of way.’ How wise you were not to have anything else!
Are
you wise –generally, I mean?’

Emma had the feeling that Claudia wouldn’t wait for her answer even if she was prepared to give it – she was only making conversation, hardly interested in whether Emma was ‘wise’ or not. After a pause Emma said, ‘I haven’t married, so you can draw your own conclusions,’ but Claudia wasn’t really interested in Emma’s unmarried state either and immediately turned the conversation to fit her own experience. ‘I sometimes think
I
married too young,’ she said. ‘It would have been better to have started off on a career and
then
married…. I suppose it’s easier to go shares,’ she added, studying the bill. ‘After all, we did have the same.’

You had the baklava and I didn’t, Emma .felt like saying, but of course they ended up by a scrupulous division of the bill and the working out of an appropriate tip.

It was still raining when they stood in the doorway with their umbrellas. It appeared that they were going in opposite directions, so they separated with polite mutual murmurings. It had been ‘so nice’, this unexpected meeting. Emma realised that she had done Claudia a good turn in helping her to avoid somebody she didn’t want to see, but she herself had gained very little from the encounter. But had she really imagined that they would be able to have a serious talk about Graham?

It was not until she had gone too far along the street to turn back that Emma realised that, possibly in the stress of some obscure emotion, she must have taken Claudia’s umbrella in mistake for her own. And it was an umbrella of inferior quality. She wondered what the possible significance of that could be.

‘Hunger lunch, did you say?’ Martin Shrubsole was addressing his mother-in-law. ‘Today, is it?’

‘Yes, at Miss Lee’s house, where I went for that coffee morning,’ said Magdalen. ‘I’m looking forward to the lunch – she always does things so nicely.’

‘Well, I hope not
too
nicely today,’ said Martin in a pleasant, even tone, only very slightly reproachful. ‘After all, it
is
supposed to be in aid of the starving people of the Third World, isn’t it?’

‘Yes, of course, but it will be just homemade bread and cheese, fruit and coffee – a very simple meal.’

‘One of my favourite lunches,’ said Martin smoothly. ‘A good deal more than they’ll be having in some parts of Africa or India.’

‘Oh Martin, we’ve got to eat
something
,’ said Avice, who was also going to the lunch. Martin did not always feel so strongly about the Third World and was obviously going on like this for her mother’s benefit. ‘And we do pay for it.’

‘Yes, we put money in a bowl,’ Magdalen explained. ‘Miss Lee has to take her expenses out of it – that’s only fair.’

‘You really ought to have a mush of beans or rice and drink water,’ Martin went on boringly, but Avice pointed out that you probably wouldn’t be able to get the right sort of beans.

When they got to Miss Lee’s cottage, however, the lunch was not quite as delicious as usual. For some unspecified reason she had been unable to bake her own bread and a shop-bought white sliced loaf was provided, certainly unlike anything that would have been eaten by the starving peoples of the Third World, yet the nastiness of its soft, moist, cotton-wool-textured slices was in some way curiously appropriate.

The bread was taken without comment, and then somebody asked if there was any news of Daphne – had she settled down well in her new house with her friend?

‘We must hope so,’ said Miss Lee. ‘I suppose we shouldn’t know if she hadn’t.

‘Miss Blenkinsop is rather bossy, isn’t she?’ said Avice. ‘She’d want to have things her own way.’

‘But Daphne is the kind of person who’d give in to her,’ said Miss Grundy, obviously speaking from personal experience of a similar situation. ‘It makes life so much easier.’

‘But at least she’ll be able to stand on her own feet,’ said Avice. ‘She did need to be independent, get away from the rectory.’

‘Living with the rector in that big house – it might not have been all she’d hoped for from life,’ said Magdalen, feeling that as a newcomer she was justified in offering a general comment on the position. ‘Of course, I don’t really know the circumstances – but what will he
do
, the rector, now that she’s gone?’

‘Well, he’s coming here to this lunch, so that’s one meal settled,’ said Miss Lee. ‘Only a hunger lunch, I know, but that’s one less for him to think about.’

‘That letter in the parish magazine,’ said Magdalen. ‘I wonder if anyone….’

At this moment Tom entered the room, followed by Emma and ‘that man living in the cottage in the woods’.

Two men,’ Avice murmured to her mother. ‘We could have persuaded Martin to come if we’d known. Good heavens,’ she exclaimed, for now Dr G. and his wife Christabel came in, turning what had promised to be the usual gathering of village women into something of a social occasion. The senior doctor, the rector, the academic stranger….

‘Martin not here?’ Dr G. asked Avice.

‘No. He has his ante-natal clinic this afternoon and I always feel he needs a good lunch before that, so I’ve left him a casserole in the oven.’

‘Christabel thought it would do me no harm to have a hunger lunch,’ Dr G. said. ‘How are you managing without your sister?’ he asked Tom.

‘Quite well, thank you,’ said Tom. ‘People have been so kind,’ he added mechanically, feeling that he ought to say this even if they hadn’t been. There had not as yet been any response to his plea in the parish magazine.

‘I suppose it’s not really so different for
you
to eat this kind of thing,’ said Dr G. conversationally, ‘bread and cheese for lunch. We pay for it, don’t we?’ he asked, rather too loudly. ‘Put something in the kitty?’

‘There’s a bowl by the door,’ said Miss Lee in a lower tone. ‘We usually make a charge of twenty-five pence which covers expenses and leaves something over for the good cause.’

‘Twenty-five pence?’ said the old doctor. ‘That would be five bob in proper money, wouldn’t it? That seems a bit steep for a slice of pappy bread and a sliver of mousetrap.’

‘It’s not supposed to be a proper meal,’ Christabel said sharply. ‘And you’ll be having your dinner tonight,’ she added, as if speaking to a child.

‘Do you have to join in all these village activities?’ Graham asked Emma. They were standing a little apart and took the opportunity to move out from the open doorway into the garden, where others were already standing or sitting with their sliced bread and mug of weak coffee.

‘I don’t have to,’ said Emma, ‘but I quite often do.’ She was surprised that Graham had agreed to join her until she realised that he wanted to ‘show himself’ in the village, to make it clear to everyone that there was nothing hole-and-corner about his living in the woods or about his association with Emma. By the same token there had been no repetition of what Emma thought of as the ‘amorous dalliance on the grass’. She found this irritating rather than upsetting – he need not be quite so circumspect – and she was also irritated by his attitude towards her meeting with Claudia and their lunch together. He had been more interested to know what they had eaten – he rather liked Greek food – than to know what they had said about him or the situation existing between the three of them. As for the umbrella incident, he seriously suggested that Emma might like him to make a special journey to Islington, taking Claudia’s umbrella and bringing Emma’s back with him.

‘Is one allowed to have another slice of bread?’ Dr G.’s voice was heard demanding querulously. ‘I’m
hungry
. I notice Adam Prince hasn’t put in an appearance.’

‘No, Mr Prince is
working
,’ said Miss Lee sternly. ‘He said how very sorry he was not to be able to come. He has to go round some restaurants in the Peak District – such a long journey for him.’

Tom came up to Emma and Graham. ‘Are you quite comfortable in that cottage?’ he asked. ‘I believe it hadn’t been lived in for some time.’

‘Miss Vereker had always wanted to live in it,’ said Miss Lee. ‘She often used to say how she wished she could – she loved those woods.’

‘And now she’s living with her nephew and his wife in London,’ said Miss Grundy. ‘It doesn’t seem the same, does it….’

‘Like Daphne living in Birmingham when she’d always dreamed of something in Greece,’ said Tom.

‘Well, we can’t expect to get everything we want,’ said Miss Lee vigorously. ‘We know that life isn’t like that.’

They all looked instinctively towards Tom, as if expecting his confirmation of Miss Lee’s pronouncement, but he said nothing. Why should the clergy always be expected to have some pious bromide at the ready? he thought. It was an outmoded concept.

‘I should like another slice of bread,’ said Dr G. plaintively. ‘We never had these hunger lunches in the old days. Weren’t the natives hungry then?’

Now they all turned towards Graham who had, after all, been in Africa. He should know the answer to that one.

‘We looked after our own people out there in those days,’ said Miss Lee. ‘That’s the answer to Dr G.’s question. Things aren’t the same now.’

‘No, they are not,’ said Dr G., ‘and do you realise that in the old days, when I first came here, it was nothing unusual for patients to
walk
to the surgery from the outlying villages – there’s no exercise like walking. Now they all come in their motorcars, or if not in their own motorcars, somebody else’s. People expect to be conveyed everywhere now – even the children don’t walk to school –lolling about in charabancs you see them, when a two-mile walk would do them all the good in the world.

‘I suppose it might be dangerous for children to walk, with all the traffic there is on the roads now,’ said Emma mildly.

‘And have you noticed’, Dr G. went on, ‘how every car has some slogan on it these days? Support the Teachers – Rethink Motorways – Protect Wildlife – Don’t Waste Water – I could think of plenty more to the point than those.’

‘I wonder what the legendary Miss Vereker would have had on her car?’ Emma asked in a low voice.

Tom was the only one to hear her. ‘Women didn’t drive about in cars in those days,’ he said. ‘Sir Giles was the first to have a car here, I believe.’

‘Sir Giles de Tankerville?’ Emma asked.

‘A friend of King Edward the Seventh,’ said Miss Lee. ‘Of course I never knew him personally, nor King Edward,’ she added with a laugh.

‘I wonder if Miss Lickerish remembers that first motorcar,’ said Tom thoughtfully. ‘It might be worth investigating, though her memories don’t seem to go back all that far.’ Her collection of photographs, which she had once displayed for him, was also a disappointment, the highlight being a picture of a goose sitting up at the tea-table, of little historical interest.

Now people began to drift away, with little prospect of more stimulating conversation and nothing more to eat. Emma noticed the same homemade pottery bowl placed to receive money as at the coffee morning. She wondered if Graham would put 25p. in for her but he seemed unwilling to compromise himself even to that extent. Would it create gossip in the village if he had been seen to pay for her hunger lunch?

Tom, seeing them go off together, with much loud talk of ‘getting back to work’, went quietly back to the rectory feeling depressed. It was his afternoon to visit the hospital, not his favourite occupation or one in which he felt he did much good to anyone, but it was expected of him and you never knew – something might come of it. All the same, he was conscious of feeling hungry, which was just as it should be, and envious of Martin Shrubsole, who had been provided with a casserole lunch before his ante-natal clinic.

Emma and her mother were picking blackberries along a lane a little way out of the village, trying to avoid Mrs Dyer who had been seen approaching in the distance. Emma braced herself to meet Mrs Dyer’s comments in her raucous, almost triumphant, tones, ‘You won’t find many
there
, Miss Howick – I’ve just been along that bit.’

Emma felt like pretending that she wasn’t really out blackberrying at all, just taking a walk, but there was no getting away from the fact that both she and her mother were carrying various receptacles and that they must have been seen in the act of picking.

‘Couldn’t you imagine a Wordsworthian encounter here?’ said Beatrix when Mrs Dyer had passed with her full basket. ‘Meeting some interesting old person or an idiot boy or even the rector, poor Tom, or your friend Graham Pettifer?’

‘Men don’t go blackberrying,’ said Emma. ‘Children and boys, perhaps, but not grown men.’

‘And Graham is busy working, no doubt.’

‘Yes, he does work hard.’

There was silence as they went on searching for the blackberries, picking what Mrs Dyer had left. Beatrix had been expecting more than Emma’s bare comment on Graham now that he was living in the village.

‘Has Claudia been down?’ she asked.

‘Been down?’ Emma asked in surprise. ‘Not that I know of.’ The cottage in the woods was not exactly the kind of place one would have ‘been down’ to from a house in Islington.

‘You ran into her in London, you told me.’

‘Yes, at Esther Clovis’s memorial service. It was a terribly wet day. We had lunch together at some Greek place and I got Claudia’s umbrella by mistake – one of those ludicrous things that happen sometimes, reducing everything to the level of farce.’

‘Did you talk about Graham?’