A Few Green Leaves (2 page)

After the walk Emma went back to Robin Cottage, so named by a former owner because the bird had once appeared when he was digging his vegetable patch and perched on the spade. The cottage now belonged to Emma’s mother Beatrix, who was a tutor in English Literature at a women’s college, specialising in the eighteenth-and nineteenth-century novel. This may have accounted for Emma’s christian name, for it had seemed to Beatrix unfair to call her daughter Emily, a name associated with her grandmother’s servants rather than the author of
Wuthering Heights
, so Emma had been chosen, perhaps with the hope that some of the qualities possessed by the heroine of the novel might be perpetuated. Emma had so far failed to come up to her mother’s expectations but had become – goodness only knew how – an anthropologist. Nor had she married or formed any other kind of attachment. Beatrix would have liked her to marry – it seemed suitable – though she did not herself set all that much store by the status. Her own husband – Emma’s father – had been killed in the war, and having, as it were, fulfilled herself as a woman Beatrix had been able to return to her academic studies with a clear conscience.

Emma, if she thought about her name at all, was reminded not of Jane Austen’s heroine but rather of Thomas Hardy’s first wife – a person with something unsatisfactory about her. Now she made herself a cup of tea, feeling that she might have asked the rector and his sister back to share it with her. But then she realised that she had no cake, only the remains of a rather stale loaf, and anyway
he
would have Evensong. She knew the times of the services and had been to church once but did not intend to become a regular churchgoer yet. All in good time, when she had had a chance to study the village, to ‘evaluate’ whatever material she was able to collect. For the moment she would go on writing up the notes she had completed before coming to the village – something to do with attitudes towards almost everything you could think of in one of the new towns. Here, in this almost idyllic setting of softly undulating landscape, mysterious woods and ancient stone buildings, she would be able to detach herself from the harsh realities of her field notes and perhaps even find inspiration for a new and different study.

Too soon, for she had done no work, Emma began to think about supper. What did people in the village eat? she wondered. Sunday evening supper would of course be lighter than the normal weekday meal, with husbands coming back from work. The shepherd’s pie, concocted from the remains of the Sunday joint, would turn up as a kind of moussaka at the rectory, she felt, given Daphne’s passionate interest in Greece. Others would be taking out ready-prepared meals or even joints of meat from their freezers, or would have bought supper dishes at the supermarket with tempting titles and bright attractive pictures on the cover.

Sometimes there might even be fish, for a man called round occasionally with fresh fish in the back of his van, suggesting a nobler time when fish had been eaten on Fridays by at least a respectable number of people in the larger houses. Had there even once been Roman Catholics in the village? Then there were people living alone, like herself, who would make do with a bit of cheese or open a small tin of something.

It would have to be an omelette, the kind of thing that every woman is supposed to be able to turn her hand to, but something was wrong with Emma’s omelette this evening – the eggs not enough beaten, the tablespoon of water omitted, something not quite as it should be. But she was hungry and did not care enough to analyse what her mistake could have been. It was better not to be too fussy, especially if one lived alone, not like Adam Prince opposite, who travelled round doing his job as an ‘inspector’ for a gourmet food magazine, spending his days eating – tasting, sampling, criticising (especially criticising), weighing in the balance and all too often finding wanting. Emma’s mother had told her that before his present job he had been an Anglican priest who had ‘gone over to Rome’, but she had not enlarged on this bald statement. He was away now, for Emma had noticed meticulous instructions to the milkman to that effect on the complicated plastic contraption outside his door which told exactly how much milk he did or did not want.

With her omelette Emma poured out a glass of red wine from a bottle already started, which had been warming by the side of the storage heater all the weekend. She was sure that Adam Prince would not have approved of
that
, but she felt relaxed and at peace as she ate and drank. It was a moment to turn on the television, to watch idly whatever happened to be going on.

It seemed to be a discussion – two men and a woman were confronting a politician from one of the new African republics, a Sandhurst-trained brigadier, his black face glowering. The argument became heated as the participants shifted uneasily on the too-low chairs and reached down to the even lower table to refresh themselves with some kind of liquid – perhaps only water –from heavy-based dark tumblers. The chairs appeared to be covered in a kind of furry material which Emma, not having a colour set, imagined to be like the pelt of a seal or an otter. She was fascinated by this and hypnotised by the complexities of the discussion which, having switched on in the middle, she was having difficulty in following. The chairman, a mild man who seemed to be in awe of the sharp-tongued woman participant, was doing his best to see that each of the men got a fair crack of the whip, as he might have put it. It was not until Emma heard him address one of them as ‘Dr Pettifer’ that she realised that this was Graham Pettifer, a man with whom she had once had a brief love affair. To say that he had been her ‘lover’ was altogether too grand a way to describe what their association had been; perhaps even ‘love affair’ was not strictly accurate, for there had not been all that much love about it, no more than proximity and a mild affection. But, anyway, it would have been true enough to say that she had once known Graham Pettifer ‘quite well’, though she had not seen him for many years. He had gone out to one of the African universities to teach something called ‘social studies’ and had now, presumably, come back, perhaps even to take up an appointment in this country?

He must be getting on for forty now, she calculated, and he had improved in looks, filled out or something. She drained her glass, meditating on this. Then, seeing that there was still some left in the bottle, finished it. The wine was decidedly warm, rather over-chambre, Adam Prince would have said, but it gave her comfort and boldness. Hardly realising what she was doing, or marking the distinction between fact and fiction, she put a sheet of paper into her typewriter and began to compose a letter.

‘Dear Graham,’ it said, ‘I’ve just seen you in a TV discussion! What a great bringer-together of people who haven’t met for ages the medium must be! I’m living here (temporarily) in my mother’s cottage, so if you’ – she paused, unable to remember his wife’s christian name – ‘are anywhere in this direction, do come and see me.’ The ‘you’ could very well cover a wife and any number of children, she thought, picturing a large estate car driving up one day, filled with Graham Pettifer and his family. She hadn’t said anything about enjoying the discussion, she realised, but surely it was enough to say that she had recognised
him
?

In bed later that night she remembered that of course his wife’s name had been Claudia – she would be able to bring that out when the occasion arose. If it ever did.

Monday was always a busy day at the surgery, a rather stark new building next to the village hall. ‘They’ – the patients – had not on the whole been to church the previous day, but they atoned for this by a devout attendance at the place where they expected not so much to worship, though this did come into it for a few, as to receive advice and consolation. You might
talk
to the rector, some would admit doubtfully, but he couldn’t give you a prescription. There was nothing in churchgoing to equal that triumphant moment when you came out of the surgery clutching the ritual scrap of paper.

Martin Shrubsole hurried through the waiting-room, head bent, as if he expected to receive a blow. He did not want to recognise any of the patients waiting there, preferring to be taken by surprise, but he noticed two he didn’t particularly want to see – the rector’s sister, and Miss Lickerish, an elderly village eccentric. Possibly they were waiting to see Dr Gellibrand, but Martin had not heard him arrive yet so it might be that he would have to see them both.

He went into the surgery, sat down, arranged himself in a receptive, consoling attitude and prepared to interview the patients. Miss Lickerish’s file lay on top of the desk so it looked as if she was to be first. He pressed the buzzer and she came in.

‘Good morning, Miss Lickerish.’ He addressed the small bent woman in her knitted cap and ancient smelly tweed coat.

‘Good morning,
doctor
….’ It seemed as if she could hardly allow him his right to the title, but although he was not much over thirty he was as fully qualified as Dr G. and much more up to date in the treatments and drugs he prescribed.

‘And how are you today?’ he asked tentatively, for, after all, she must be over eighty and there was something about her that did not fit in with the neat rows of meek old people in the hospital where he had developed his interest in geriatrics. Still, everyone knew that people in villages were different. Those bright beady eyes had plenty of life in them and it was perfectly sensible to ask how she did.

‘It’s these fleas,’ she said, ‘and that stops me sleeping. I’d like some of those sleeping pills.’

‘Well now, we must do something about that,’ he said briskly. No point in telling her that he didn’t just dish out sleeping tablets to anyone who asked for them. No good explaining that if you
would
take hedgehogs into your house you’d get fleas. It wasn’t really the kind of problem he expected to have to face on a Monday morning when the patients were more apt to imagine themselves to be suffering from ailments they’d read about in the Sunday papers, but Martin was equal to the challenge. ‘Let’s get rid of those fleas first, shall we?’ he said. Health visitor, district nurse, social worker, ordinary village do-gooder, even his own wife

Avice – all these could be called in to help, and a note authorising the purchase of a suitable insect powder might do the trick. ‘Next, please,’ he said to himself, pleased at having disposed of Miss Lickerish.

The next three patients were perfectly ordinary and, as it were, satisfactory – a youth with acne, a young married woman with a contraceptive problem, an older man needing to have his blood pressure checked. The fourth person to enter the room, smiling apologetically as if she knew in advance that she was going to waste his time, was the rector’s sister Daphne.

‘Good morning, Miss Dagnall,’ he adopted his most cheerful manner, ‘and how’s the world treating you?’ A silly thing to say, as he immediately realised, trotting out that old cliche. ‘Sit down and let’s have a chat,’ he went on. The doctor needed to relax as much as the patient, even with the consciousness of a full load still slumped in the waiting-room.

Daphne was not exactly sure what, if anything,
was
the matter with her. She was depressed (or ‘in a depressed situation’), she longed to get away from the village, from the damp spring of West Oxfordshire, to live in a whitewashed cottage on the shores of the Aegean.

‘Do they have cottages there, as we know them?’ Martin asked, playing for time. Why on earth didn’t she go to Dr G.? he wondered. She must have been his patient long before he (Martin) came into the practice. He could not know that Daphne had deliberately chosen him because she knew only too well what Dr G. would say to her. (‘We’re all getting on a bit – it’s been a long winter – very natural to feel a bit under the weather – go and buy yourself a new hat, my dear’ – his panacea for most feminine ills, when women hadn’t worn hats for years. Such old-fashioned advice and he wouldn’t even prescribe suitable tablets.) She hoped for better things from Martin Shrubsole.

‘Of course I can’t leave my brother,’ she said. ‘I suppose that’s the trouble, in a way.’

‘You don’t like living at the rectory?’ If this were so it was ironical, for the beautiful old grey stone rectory was the one house in the village that he and his wife coveted. ‘
That's
the house I want,’ Avice had said.

‘It’s so big and rambling,’ Daphne went on hopelessly. ‘You’ve no idea how difficult it is to heat.’

Avice had pointed out that they hadn’t even got night-storage heaters, Martin remembered, just a few paraffin stoves and rather inefficient ones at that. Would they be eligible for some additional heating allowance? he wondered. Probably not, as they were neither of them pensioners yet. Did Miss Dagnall wear warm enough clothes? Was her blouse adequate for this chilly spring day? ‘Of course I could recommend woollen underwear,’ he said jokingly, hoping to jolly her out of her depression.

‘Don’t talk to me about wool,’ she said. ‘You know my brother’s obsession with local history – now he’s discovered that in sixteen-eighty something people had to be buried in wool.’

‘You’ve always lived with your brother?’ Martin asked.

‘Oh no – only since his wife died, though that’s some time ago now. I made a home for him – it seemed the only thing to do, the least I could do, people said.’

‘What did you do before that?’

‘I had a little sort of job, nothing much, a sort of dogsbody in a travel agency. I shared a flat with a woman friend.’

Perhaps she was a frustrated lesbian, Martin thought, his mind moving on somewhat conventional modern lines. Women living together in these days might suggest that, but Daphne was, of course, older. He shot a quick glance at her weatherbeaten face and untidy mane of white hair. Perhaps a new hair-do might help her – Martin was that much more up-to-date than Dr G. and his new hat – but obviously he couldn’t suggest it.

‘Let’s take your B.P., shall we?’ he said, falling back on a more conventional treatment. Her arm was thin and dried up, either from Greek sun or approaching age. ‘You probably ought to put on a bit of weight,’ he said. ‘How’s your appetite?’