A Few Green Leaves (21 page)

‘Sir Miles Brambleton’s agent,’ came a loud confident voice. ‘And what are
you
doing here? This cottage is supposed to be locked.’

‘Exactly!’ said Emma, revealing herself at the top of the stairs. ‘And the lock is broken. It ought to have been seen to long ago. It’s a wonder vandals haven’t been in, now that Dr Pettifer’s gone.’

‘Oh, it’s Miss Howick – I’m sorry….’ Emma wondered at the change in the agent’s tone. He sounded respectful now and she realised that it was because of her own approach, boldly tackling him about the broken lock so that she appeared in the role of a bossy caring woman, concerned about the prospect of Sir Miles’s property being vandalised.

‘That’s all right,’ said Emma graciously, ‘but I do think that lock ought to be seen to. One of the estate carpenters, perhaps….’

‘You have to be joking!’ was his less respectful reply. ‘It’s not like the old days now.’

‘No, I suppose not. Was this cottage lived in by one of the keepers then?’

‘Yes, and I believe it was a favourite walk for the young ladies and their governess.’

‘Ah yes, the girls and Miss Vereker. I can imagine them coming here….’

‘Will Dr Pettifer be returning?’ the agent asked on a more practical note.

He will never return, she thought, but just said aloud that she didn’t know and that the lock really ought to be seen to.

‘Can I offer you a lift back to the village?’ Mr Swaine indicated his Land Rover parked outside.

‘No thank you, it will do me good to walk.’ And to spend the rest of the day getting on with my ‘work’, Emma thought, and even, since Graham had gone and the summer was over, to contemplate the future. What was she to do now? The only practical thing that occurred to her was to do something that had been on her conscience for some time, to ask Tom to supper. But this evening, a simple family meal indeed, on the spur of the moment. After all, they were two lonely people now, and as such should get together.

She gave Tom the remains of a joint of cold lamb and potatoes in their jackets, with homemade apple chutney from Miss Lee’s bring-and-buy sale. To follow there was tinned rice pudding (though Emma did not reveal that it was tinned) with some of her bramble jelly. The meal was washed down with a bottle of the same wine she had been drinking when she had seen Graham on the television programme all those months ago. At the last minute Emma had produced a small piece of cheese, but it looked so unattractive that neither of them attempted it.

Tom wanted to say that he was glad she hadn’t made any special effort with the meal, and indeed it had been just the kind of thing he liked, but was afraid of seeming ungracious.

‘So your friend has gone,’ he said, over coffee. ‘Dr Pettifer has departed,’ he emended stiffly, wondering if that was a better way of putting it.

‘Oh yes – he’s back in London now.’

‘He borrowed a book from me.’

‘There was a book left behind – a collection of seventeenth-century verse – was that it?’

‘Yes. He was here one day and wanted to check something, so I lent it to him.’

This seemed unlikely, given the kind of book Graham was writing; almost as unlikely as Graham being at the rectory. He had never mentioned it.

‘He’d had a letter from his wife,’ Tom explained. ‘I suppose she may have quoted something.’

Remembering Claudia in the Greek restaurant, Emma wondered, but nothing was impossible in a marriage. She found herself blundering in unknown territory, with the trite reflection that communication between Graham and Claudia had not only been about the curtains for his study. And the poem probably hadn’t been the one about the two green apricots, either.

‘Laura was fond of that book,’ Tom was saying. ‘She liked the metaphysicals.’

It was the first time he had ever spoken of his wife and Emma was not quite sure how to react. It wasn’t as if he was a man only lately bereaved; there could be no danger of intruding upon a recent grief. Laura had died more than ten years ago, or so it was said, and he had not married again. So perhaps she had been his first and only love?

‘I expect you still miss her,’ Emma said, feeling that, although it was an inadequate comment, honesty was less awkward than polite social murmurings. She was rewarded by Tom’s simple matter-of-fact reply.

‘I suppose I do, in a way,’ he said. ‘But after all, one gets used even to the state of missing somebody, and as a person she seems remote now. Sometimes I can hardly remember her.’

‘What was she like?’

Tom hesitated. Perhaps he was less capable of describing what Laura had been like than of giving an account of the village in the late seventeenth century, but Emma gathered that she had been a contemporary of Tom’s at Oxford, clever, amusing, ‘good’ socially in a way Tom never could be. It was difficult to gain any impression of her as a person or to speculate on whether one would have liked her. Perhaps she was not as nice as Tom – a sharp, clever woman married to a good man? What had she died of? What
did
people die of nowadays? Not consumption or a Victorian illness like typhoid or scarlet fever – but cancer and various kinds of heart disease were always with us, so probably it was one of those.

‘She developed leukaemia,’ Tom said, ‘and in those days there was nothing to be done. Perhaps it might have been different now.’

And there might have been a formidable wife at the rectory, Emma thought.

‘You didn’t – in time, of course – think of marrying again?’ she said.

‘Well, Daphne came, as you know.’

Emma felt she couldn’t bear another conversation about Daphne and her dog, but to her relief Tom went on talking about the time after Laura had died, and even seemed to be making excuses for not having married again.

‘I didn’t seem to have the chance, or meet anyone suitable….’ He must have been aware how feeble he sounded. As if a man, especially one connected with the church, couldn’t meet women if he had a mind to, however much hemmed in by a sister!

‘But people in your parish – in London and here – there must have been….’ Emma protested.

‘Oh, there were, of course. Every church has plenty of women, even eligible women, but somehow…. Well,
you
haven’t married either, have you?’ Tom turned to Emma as if attacking her. ‘Was it Dr Pettifer? Was he the one?’

Emma laughed. ‘I did think so at one time, when we first met. But it didn’t come to anything and then he married somebody else. I didn’t see him for years until I saw him on the telly one evening and wrote to him. People go on about the harmful effect of television on children, but what about the dangers for the older viewer?’

‘So that was it – your first love reappearing.’

‘Well, in a way I suppose it was.’

‘He must have been interesting when you first knew him.’

‘How do you mean?’

‘He always seemed to me rather a dull dog – on the few occasions we met.’

The idea of Graham being any sort of dog made Emma laugh again. Altogether it was turning into a rather successful evening after the unpromising start to the day. She and Tom finished the bottle of wine and the conversation turned away from Graham to more comfortable matters, one of which, rather surprisingly, concerned the mausoleum and Tom’s ‘worry’ about it. Miss Lee had been on at him to get in touch with the people who were supposed to be looking after it. It needed to be ‘serviced’, just like a car, and nobody had been down to see to it for some time.

‘Whatever would Miss Vereker say if she could see it now,’ they both agreed.

When Terry Skate’s little van did eventually turn up at the mausoleum it was obvious that he was in some kind of ‘mood’. Tom feared that he probably wanted more money or was about to announce a strike or withdrawal of his labour in some way. That was the usual pattern these days. Possibly he was intending to ‘work to rule’, whatever that might involve in the tending of the mausoleum. But in the end it was none of these. It was a simple but essentially fundamental matter. The truth was that Terry Skate was disinclined to carry on the mausoleum work because he had lost his faith.

Tom was so surprised, even stunned, by the news that his first reaction was one of nervous laughter, but of course it was no laughing matter. It was obviously his duty to go into the matter more fully, even to attempt to restore what had been lost. When pressed Terry admitted that there were certain aspects of the faith that he hadn’t been happy about for some time.

‘Ah, you’ve been reading a book that’s worried you?’ Tom suggested. There had certainly been a number of books lately, he recalled, that might have had an impact equal to that of
Honest to God
in the early sixties, though it seemed a little unlikely that Terry would have read them.

‘Oh, it’s not
books
,” Terry said. ‘It’s those talks on the telly.’

They were standing inside the mausoleum, surrounded by the chilly marble effigies uncomfortably appropriate for such a discussion.

‘I mean, university professors and that, and one of them was the reverend somebody or other. But he was wearing a green turtle-neck jumper – I
ask
you!’

The green turtle-neck jumper rather than the clerical collar seemed to have made a deep and lasting impression on Terry, who went on to complain about ‘people like that’ coming into your lounge through the media, throwing doubt on what you’d been taught to believe.

Tom, who had neither television-set nor lounge, was at a loss to know what to say next. Then he remembered that having doubts was no new phenomenon. We all had them at times. Adam Prince had doubted the validity of Anglican Orders, though a discussion of that question would not help Terry now. He did his best to console him, to assure him that this period of uncertainty would soon pass and that his faith would return, stronger than ever. ‘After all,’ he pointed out, ‘much greater men than either you or I have been assailed by doubts and overcome them.’

‘Oh, but that was in the old days, wasn’t it? Darwin and those old Victorians.’ Terry laughed, dismissing them.

There had probably been a play on the telly about that, Tom thought, coming to the conclusion that Terry wasn’t really all that worried about his doubts. He was accepting them – men speaking on the box had swept away his childhood faith and he was not prepared to be reassured by Tom. There was really something in what Emma had said about the dangerous influence of television on the older viewer. The point Terry had been wanting to make was that he was no longer able to look after the mausoleum – that, rather than the question of his doubts, was what he was trying to make clear to Tom.

‘Of course that doesn’t mean to say that we wouldn’t be happy to assist if you were having another flower festival or anything like that,’ Terry added. ‘And we do weddings, as you know. Cheerio then, rector.’

Tom watched Terry drive off and returned to the church, where Miss Lee was doing what she called ‘her’ brasses and Miss Grundy attending to the flowers on the altar.

‘I thought it was about time that young man put in an appearance,’ said Miss Lee in a censorious tone. She was wearing old black cotton gloves, presumably to protect her hands from the metal polish, and her gestures with these gave her a sinister air.

‘He probably won’t be coming any more,’ Tom found himself saying, though he had not intended to confide in Miss Lee.

‘Oh, they’re all the same now. Nobody wants to
work
,” she said fiercely.

The brasses had never looked more brilliant than now, in the November gloom, Tom thought, and he knew that it was hard rubbing that did it. But he felt disinclined to go into the subject of work with a retired gentlewoman as much out of touch as he was with the present industrial situation. So much of his life as rector of a country parish seemed to be wasted in profitless discussions of this kind.

‘I expect there’ll be no difficulty in getting somebody else to do it,’ he said lightly, but with a confidence he did not really feel. A competent agnostic with some knowledge of horticulture – was that all that was needed? Believer not objected to? Like a
Church Times
advertisement of the old days?

‘Miss Vereker always took such a pride,’ Miss Lee began, but Tom did not encourage her to go on. Instead, he found himself speculating on whether Miss Lee had ever had ‘doubts’; if, when rubbing up the brass head of the eagle lectern, she had ever wondered whether the whole business wasn’t an elaborate fiction and asked herself what she was doing here, Sunday after Sunday and even some weekdays, subscribing to something she wasn’t sure about. Could he possibly ask her? he wondered, his eyes roving round the church and finding proof of her industry wherever he looked.

But it was while he was doing this that his glance fell on the lectern, the brazen bird of his imaginings, and he suddenly realised that it was not made of brass at all but of wood. It was an oak lectern made, according to an inaccurate local legend, from a tree on the de Tankerville estate. He must have been remembering some other lectern, probably the one in the church of his childhood. How could he have been so forgetful and unobservant! So now the question he put to Miss Lee was nothing to do with faith or lack of it but something much simpler. ‘Do you ever wish we had a brass lectern?’ he asked. ‘As they have in some other churches?’

‘Oh no, rector,’ she answered. ‘I
love
that old wooden bird, and I
love
polishing it. A brass one may look more brilliant, but wood can be very rewarding, you know, and I think I can flatter myself that nobody can get a better polish on it than I do.’

Tom turned aside, humbled by her words. It was almost an idea for a sermon, what she had said about brass looking more brilliant but wood being very rewarding. Of course Miss Lee never had doubts! And if she ever had, she was much too well-bred ever to dream of troubling the rector with such a thing.

He made his way towards the altar where Miss Grundy was putting the finishing touches to an arrangement of roses.

‘Roses in November, that’s really something!’ he said with forced heartiness, but he always felt obscurely guilty about Miss Grundy and so tended to behave unnaturally towards her. She was one of the people one ought to ‘do’ something about, though it was difficult to think what, added to which he was uncomfortably aware that the kind of services he conducted were not really to her liking.