A Few Green Leaves (23 page)

‘Come on, Bruce,’ she said, ‘let the doctor take your paw.’

The vet laughed. ‘Funny, my name’s Bruce too,’ he said.

It seemed to create a bond between them and she felt almost as if she really
had
confided her worries to him. But all she said was what a shame it was the way you were always seeing notices everywhere about dogs not being welcome in places. Bruce was so well behaved, would never do anything he ought not to. Not like a cat.

‘Oh no,’ he agreed. ‘You can’t tell a
cat
not to do anything. Did you ever have a cat?’

‘No,’ she said, ‘though I think my brother would have liked one,’ she added, a shadow crossing her face at the thought of Tom.

‘They shall wax old as doth a garment,’ Tom read.
Lanatus
– buried in wool. Wool, being an animal fibre, would decay, would it not? So there would be little or no trace of the statutory ‘woollen’ in which all were obliged to be buried according to the edict of August 1678. How long
did
wool take to decay? he wondered. He could not recall any instance of fragments of wool having been found when a grave of the period had been opened and the bones taken out. Of course one did not know personally of anyone having been buried in woollen, apart from Miss Lickerish’s hedgehog and that was hardly relevant.

Hunger gnawed at his vitals and he paused in his speculations. He believed that Mrs Dyer had left him some cold meat for his lunch, and there was a tin of soup to be heated up.
She
would know, perhaps, how long wool took to decay, and also what people were buried in nowadays, what shrouds were made of. Hadn’t she a distant relative who worked in a funeral parlour? Mrs Dyer would certainly know all about ‘man-made’ fibres. But he shrank from asking her.

Over his lunch he read the back page of the
Daily Telegraph
, the newspaper Daphne had preferred and which was still delivered at the rectory. So many people dying, he read, and none of them buried in woollen! The act had been repealed early in the nineteenth century, as far as he remembered, but there was nothing to stop a person being buried in woollen now if he so desired – a note in a will to that effect…. He ate cold lamb and bread and crunched pickled onions, his eyes moving mechanically and alphabetically down the list of deaths.
Driver, Fabian Charlesworth
, he read. ‘
Devoted husband of Constance and Jessie
…’ an odd way of putting it. Had the man had two wives still living? Tom wondered. And had they got together after the man’s death? And where would he be buried – with the first wife or the second?

There was still room in the churchyard here for his own burial, he reflected, if he should go suddenly. He was forgetting for the moment that Laura had been buried elsewhere. But supposing
he
were to marry again, as this man Driver must have done, what would be the position then?

It was colder walking in the woods than it had been sitting in the train, but it was still a bright day and the slightly uphill walk from the station was invigorating. Miss Vereker wasn’t exactly cold, it was just that the unaccustomed exertion – her West Kensington walks being mainly on the flat – had made her conscious of a sharp pain in her back and she was finding it difficult to breathe. The air this morning had seemed almost mild, but now there was a cutting wind coming at her through the trees.

She stopped for a minute to have a rest. This, surely, was the cottage where Clegg, one of the keepers, used to live; but it looked in a sad state now, the garden neglected and the curtains in the front windows obviously in need of a wash. Miss Vereker peered, in a way she would normally have thought discourteous, but it didn’t matter since the cottage was clearly uninhabited. Where did the keepers live now then? Probably in some modern bungalow or council house, the wives not caring for the isolation of the woods. A cup of tea or a glass of Mrs Clegg’s elderberry wine, which would have been offered in the old days, would be welcome now, but there was no hope of that. She must go on, ‘press on regardless’, as her nephew was fond of saying. It couldn’t be so very far to the village and she would soon get through the woods. Looking at her watch, she saw that it was half-past one – not a very suitable time to call on anybody. She was surprised to see that it was so late – she must have stopped longer by the cottage than she had realised.

She walked on with her usual determination, back upright and head held high. The path was clear enough though it was rather overgrown, more than it used to be. Still, this
was
the path, there was no doubt about that. It was only that the pain in her back was sharper and more continuous now, reminding her of that time when she had had a touch of pleurisy and the doctor had listened with his stethoscope, hearing what he described as a noise like dry leaves rubbing together, the kind of noise she was hearing now as she took a breath, or was it only the rustle of the fallen leaves on the path?

She realised that she was beginning to walk more slowly. Perhaps it was farther than she had remembered, and now she seemed to have strayed some way off the direct path on to a muddier track, much trodden down by hoof marks, either of cows or horses. The girls had sometimes come riding here and no doubt people still did. She wished she had thought of bringing a stick with her; it would have been useful, not so much to support her faltering steps, she told herself jokingly, as to push aside some of the branches and brambles that were getting in her way. It was so long since she had walked in this wood, or indeed in any wood, that she had forgotten how useful a stick could be.

And now she found herself in a kind of open clearing where there was a scattering of large stones, the kind one could sit down on for a brief rest. Not that she was really tired, it was only this annoying pain and – more important – the inadvisability of calling on Miss Lee and Miss Grundy at two o’clock in the afternoon. Miss Lee was the kind of person who had a ‘rest’ and might not welcome an unexpected visitor, even an old friend from the past.

‘Mummy always has a little sleep after lunch,’ Avice Shrubsole was saying, ‘though she swears she doesn’t. She begins by listening to
The Archers
, but before
Woman’s Hours
started she’s dropped off.’ Avice laughed. ‘I like to get out for a walk when I can so I creep out and leave her, though Martin’s always telling Mummy it would do her the world of good to get out into the woods.’

‘I’m sure he is,’ Emma murmured. Avice was the last person she had expected or wished to meet at such a time and in such circumstances and she had been unable to pretend that she was going in the opposite direction, had not thought quickly enough – for, after all, she had just been standing, mooning about, one could say – and Avice had looked at her sharply and suggested that it was a bit cold for hanging about (though a lovely bright day for November). So there they were walking briskly away from the village, Avice beating down the undergrowth on either side of the path with her stick.

‘I gather you and Martin had an encounter this morning,’ Avice said in a pleasant, friendly way, for of course one did not reveal that one knew about the visit to the surgery, and he had apparently seen Emma getting petrol at the garage.

‘Yes – and I went to the surgery about this rash on my hands,’ Emma admitted.

‘Oh really? That’s a bore for you – I suppose it’s detergents.’

‘Yes, it might be. Or some darker secret might be causing it, stress and that sort of thing – you know what is said.’

‘Of course!’

They both laughed and Avice struck a particularly fierce blow with her stick at a clump of harmless vegetation. Without revealing any secrets, for he was scrupulous about that kind of thing, Martin had said something about Emma being the kind of person who might ‘need help’ and hinted that Avice might be able to supply it. This looked like being just such an opportunity.

‘Did you wonder why I was wandering aimlessly in the woods?’ Emma asked.

Avice was taken aback at her approach. ‘I assumed you were taking exercise,’ she said.

‘But you must have guessed about Graham and me, what there was or wasn’t – you may even have heard what was
said
in the village.’

‘I don’t think anything was said, exactly….’

‘Oh well, if there wasn’t anything, that makes the whole thing even more humiliating.’

Emma seemed prepared to leave it at that, making it difficult for Avice to know how best to give the ‘help’ Martin had suggested Emma might need. But perhaps humiliation was something to latch on to — could Emma not be persuaded to enlarge on this?

‘Maybe you expected too much,’ she ventured.

‘Oh, I didn’t
expect
anything – what right had I to expect anything?’ said Emma fiercely.

This seemed an unprofitable line to pursue and Avice decided that she would tell Martin that Emma’s trouble was nothing more interesting than frustrated sex or even unrequited love for that man they had all thought rather a bore, though there was no accounting for tastes. Yet, as a woman, Avice felt that this might be over-simplifying the matter. She did not know how to proceed except by remarking that we never got all that we hoped for out of life and throwing in a hint of her own troubles. Shared confidences might lead to something.

‘Yes, of course,’ Emma agreed. ‘Even the happily married woman with a nice considerate husband and splendid children might still feel that something was lacking. If she’d given up a promising career for these domestic things – as a concert pianist or a TV personality or even a social worker.

It seemed to Avice that Emma was being deliberately mocking.

‘Well, it
is
possible to do one’s own thing, even with a husband and children,’ Avice said defiantly, and of course she did do a lot of useful voluntary work in the district. ‘But there are other problems,’ she went on. ‘Where one lives, for example. Our present house is much too small, especially now that Mummy’s living with us.’

‘Yes, I suppose it is. Let me see now’ – Emma was making an effort – ‘you can’t have more than four bedrooms in your present house.’

‘No. There’s our room, of course – the boys share at present, and Hannah has the little room in the front and Mummy is in what was the spare room.’

‘And that’s the four rooms accounted for,’ Emma agreed. ‘So you haven’t a spare room, and if anyone comes to stay.

‘Exactly! There’s just nowhere to put them.’

‘And it’s so awful sleeping in somebody’s sitting-room surrounded by stuffed armchairs and standard lamps.’

‘We do have a kind of put-u-up in the dining-room….’

‘Oh, sleeping in somebody’s dining-room would be even worse! Of course, you could turn your mother out – oh, I don’t mean literally,’ Emma suggested. ‘Would she perhaps like a small cottage in the village, if one was available, or one of those new bungalows opposite the church? That might be a solution.’

Avice smiled, remembering the conversation they had had when Tom had come to supper. ‘You know what the real solution would be?’ she said.

‘For you to get a bigger house, obviously – though you wouldn’t want to leave here, would you?’

‘There would be no need to leave here – not if we lived at the rectory.’ Avice’s stick slashed so furiously at an overhanging branch that she might have been cutting down Tom himself.

‘But how could you do that? What about the rector – where would he go? Hardly to one of the bungalows opposite the church!’

‘No, of course not.’ Avice proceeded to explain about over-large rectories and vicarages and how so many clergy now lived in smaller and more convenient houses. Now that Daphne had gone, a cottage could be found for Tom, or even a small house on the housing estate. It was a mistake to associate the clergy only with large ancient vicarages and rectories, quite against the modern trend which was all for the clergy being in closer touch with their parishioners, more like ordinary people, altogether less isolated and set apart. Why, she had even heard of one London vicar who lived in a tower block! Avice was sure Tom would be much happier out of the rectory.

‘Happier? One doesn’t somehow think of him as being
happy
,’ Emma began, but what might have been an interesting and profound conversation was broken into by Avice pointing with her stick and exclaiming, ‘Why, look! There’s an old woman lying there in that clearing – do you see?’

‘Good heavens, so there is! Is she asleep or ill? And who is she? Certainly not a tramp, to judge by her appearance.’

She was a tall woman, as far as one could judge, dressed in a long coat of some ancient fur, the kind of coat she had obviously had many years before people were sensitive about wearing the skins of animals and a musquash coat could be bought for £20. The coat was pushed back to reveal a jersey suit of a patterned blue and brown design, a good Liberty silk scarf, ribbed woollen stockings and short brown ankle boots. By her side was a handbag and a pair of gloves, both apparently ‘good’ brown leather rather than plastic. She had evidently been wearing a blue felt hat which had slipped off her head and was now lying by a stone. The face, when they were able to inspect it more closely, was of a grey-haired woman in her seventies, wearing glasses and apparently asleep. At the approach of Avice and Emma she seemed to wake up and make some attempt to tidy herself, even to rise to her feet, reaching for her hat and gloves and beginning to explain who she was, what she was doing and why she was in the woods. But she seemed confused and in some distress, obviously in need of help.

An old person for Martin Shrubsole and something for Avice to do also, Emma thought, and went to get her car.

The telephone rang in the rectory study with the startling suddenness of breaking in on a profound or irrelevant thought. Tom had been considering the gospel for the last Sunday after Trinity – ‘Stir-up Sunday’, as it was called – and wondering how Adam Prince, in his Anglican days, had dealt with the miracle of the five barley loaves and two small fishes. What sort of a sermon had he preached on that text and what sort would he preach now, with his wider culinary experience?