A Few Green Leaves (24 page)

Tom picked up the telephone and heard the excited tones of an elderly man. He did not at first realise that it was Dr G. speaking, for he and the doctor did not often communicate by telephone.

‘I thought you ought to know’, the voice said, ‘that Miss Vereker has been found wandering in the woods.’

Wandering in the woods … how beautiful that sounded, with its Anglo-Saxon alliteration. But who was ‘Miss Vereker’ and why should her wanderings concern him, be something that he ‘ought’ to know about?

‘Miss Lilian Vereker,’ Dr G. repeated, ‘found wandering in the woods.’

‘Yes, so you said.’ Tom was racking his brains. ‘Should one be…?’

‘I thought you ought to be informed, as rector – though of course it was before your time. Miss Vereker was the governess at the manor, you remember….’

‘Ah yes!’ Miss Vereker taught the girls, those legendary figures, the bright young things, as they afterwards became….

‘Martin Shrubsole is coping – he and Avice will know the best thing to do.’

‘Anything I can do?’ Tom felt bound to ask. He wondered if Miss Vereker had expressed a wish to see the rector, demanded the services of a priest.

‘Well, it seems rather more in our line than yours,’ Dr G. said. ‘Martin feels that Miss Vereker may be in need of psychiatric help – you know that’s the first thing these young men think of now – but she seems perfectly
compos mentis
to me. Just a touch of bronchitis, in my opinion. Apparently she got off the train and began to walk from the station through the woods. No harm in that – if only more people would walk! Apparently Miss Ho wick was there too and went for her car – she and Avice had been walking together – a lucky thing – when they came upon Miss Vereker.

All these people walking in the woods! Dr G. was right – we should all do more of it. He brushed aside a confused memory of his evening walk with Emma and his own wanderings in search of the remains of the D.M.V. ‘I’d better come along,’ he said.

When he arrived at the Shrubsoles’ house Tom found that tea had been made and that the doctor’s mother-in-law was cutting a large iced cake.

‘Miss Vereker was found wandering in the woods,’ Avice said, as if Tom might not have heard.

‘You were taking a walk?’ Tom asked politely.

‘Exactly! “Wandering” gives quite the wrong idea, doesn’t it. I was taking what I remembered as a short cut to the village from the station and strayed off the path.’ Miss Vereker, sitting upright in a chair by the fire, gave a short laugh. ‘So perhaps in that sense I
was
wandering.’

Tom found himself thinking of ‘Lead Kindly Light’, but Newman, he recalled, had been on a boat becalmed in the straits of Bonifacio when he wrote the poem that became the hymn, not lost in an English wood.

‘I saw this pile of stones, quite large ones,’ Miss Vereker went on, ‘so I decided to sit down and rest on one of them.’

‘The woods are full of stones,’ said Avice, forestalling any possible questioning from Tom about the exact location and nature of these particular stones. It would be just like him to be more interested in his wretched deserted medieval village than the problems of an elderly person in trouble. ‘I think Miss Vereker should rest now,’ she said firmly, ‘after all this excitement,’ so of course Tom could not in all decency pursue the question of the stones.

That same evening there was a power cut which lasted from 6.30 to 9, disrupting the lives and television viewing of most people in the village. Luckily most of them had already done their cooking for their unfashionably early evening meals.

Emma had not started to cook when the power failed, and her supper consisted of gin and tonic and boiled eggs and toast done on the fire. What could be better? she asked herself, settling down contentedly. She almost rang Tom to find out if he was managing but, remembering her recent experience with Graham, decided against any precipitate action.

Tom had also had recourse to drink – the remains of a last Christmas bottle of whisky from Dr G. came in handy and he found some bread and cheese, proud of himself for such resourcefulness. Also, investigating the cupboard in the sideboard with a torch, he came upon a bottle of apricot brandy, unbroached – where had that come from? – and it occurred to him that it might be a suitable present or bribe for the organist, perhaps even induce him to play at Evensong in the winter months. He would lay it quietly at his door one day – no need to mention it at the parochial church council meeting. By candlelight he took out the diary he had been attempting to keep since Daphne went, noting the events of the day – and it had been quite a day! – and adding one or two observations of his own. He was not consciously setting out to emulate Woodforde or Kilvert, but it would be a pity if the clergy of today were too taken up with social work to record the daily trivia that might be of interest to the historian of the twenty-first century. He was still writing and had just reached his speculations about the possible location of the D.M.V., linked with the finding of Miss Vereker, when the lights came on again.

Miss Lee and Miss Grundy were only temporarily disconcerted when the lights failed and the television screen went dark. The excitement of the day had been almost too much for Miss Lee, with the promise of seeing Miss Vereker again in the morning, and she and

Miss Grundy had an early light meal before watching
Crossroads
. But they soon settled themselves resignedly by the fire, fingers busy with knitting and crochet. The old coped better than the young in these circumstances. It was not outside the bounds of possibility to boil a kettle on the fire or even to cook on a paraffin stove. There were always candles in the house and you could listen to the wireless if your thoughts didn’t supply enough entertainment.

Adam Prince was perhaps the only person who might have been seriously inconvenienced, for he was preparing a rather special dinner for the priest of the Roman Catholic church he attended. But he had already made the salmon mousse, and the
boeuf en daube
and the jacket potatoes (good English-French tradition food) had been cooking slowly for two hours when the power went off, and would continue to simmer in the oven for some time. As for the cheeses -specially bought in the market in Oxford that morning – they would come to no harm, and there was always plenty to drink. Indeed, just as the coffee stage was reached the power came on again.

‘The light has been restored, thank God!’ said Father Byrne in his rich Abbey Theatre tones, giving the announcement an almost religious significance. ‘And no harm done.’

In the next-door cottage Miss Lickerish had not bothered to put on the light at the normal time. She boiled a kettle on the fire and then sat in her chair with a cup of tea at her side and a cat on her knees. But some time during those dark hours the cat left her and sought the warmth of his basket, Miss Lickerish’s lap having become strangely chilled.

Miss Vereker lay in a hard, child’s bed in a strange room in Dr Shrubsole’s house. It had been kind of them to put her up, but she would have preferred to stay with Miss Lee. One of the children here had been obliged to turn out of her room and sleep in the sitting-room, the house being really too small to accommodate an extra person. In the old days, of course, this had been only a cottage where one of the gardeners had lived and now, even with that rather ugly ‘extension’ stuck on at the side, it still wasn’t big enough for the Shrubsole family. There was something curiously wrong about the way houses were arranged now – small ones crammed with people and large ones, like the manor, almost empty or occupied only at weekends, or, even worse, turned into flats. And now this power cut – adding insult to injury, you might say, though of course Mrs Shrubsole was most efficient and had provided an excellent supper. It had been suggested that she should visit the manor, but she was not sure that she wanted that, with all the changes now and her memories. But she was sure of one thing – tomorrow she would pay a visit to the mausoleum. That was always the same.

With Miss Lickerish’s death, Tom felt that he came into his own. If he had been conscious of inadequacy in the matter of Miss Vereker, it was now obvious that there were some situations that only the clergy could manage properly. The doctors had done their part and it was now over to Tom. He reflected that had Miss Vereker been found dead, instead of merely resting on a stone, the doctors would have left him to it, with Miss Vereker beyond the need even of psychiatric help.

‘Miss Lickerish’s gone!’ There was the familiar triumphant note in Mrs Dyer’s tone as she announced the death in the post office. Emma, who had been buying stamps, recognised it as the same note that had been in her voice when she had informed Emma and her mother that they wouldn’t find many blackberries where they had chosen to pick. Emma had already noticed Mrs Dyer’s son Jason hovering near Miss Lickerish’s cottage, like some vulture, with his lank shoulder-length hair and spindly jean-clad legs. Presumably he was waiting hopefully to pounce on whatever ‘effects’ the old woman had left, practically everything being saleable and ‘collectable’ now.

‘Had Miss Lickerish any relatives here?’ Emma asked in her innocent way, which produced another triumphant snort from Mrs Dyer. Apparently the village was full of them – Miss Lickerish had several nephews and nieces living on the new estate. ‘Catch
them
coming to see their old auntie!’

Emma hoped that it would be in order for her to attend the funeral – essential for her village ‘research’, after all. And when she had found out that she might even be expected to attend – as a mark of she was not quite sure what – the question of flowers worried her. Would it be the done thing to send some, a bunch or spray of whatever happened to be in season? Miss Lickerish’s relatives were unlikely to specify ‘garden flowers only’ – which would hardly have been practicable in November – or request donations to a charity, though something to do with animals would have been appropriate for Miss Lickerish. Country people in general probably didn’t regard animals on a level with human beings – was that perhaps an upper-class concept?

On the morning of the funeral Emma’ saw that people were going down to Miss Lickerish’s cottage with flowers, so she took her own bunch of florist’s-shop carnations and followed what seemed to be the approved pattern.

When she got there she found that two smartly dressed young women, whom she took to be the nieces, were sitting in the front room, a rather formal type of parlour, barred to the cats and hedgehogs, preparing to receive the flowers. The nieces wore bright colours – nobody went in for mourning these days, Emma knew – and one of them was surreptitiously smoking a cigarette, holding it down concealed in her fingers.

Emma’s flowers were graciously received and she was invited to inspect the other tributes. The nieces seemed especially pleased with a wreath of white and yellow chrysanthemums, brought by the agent on behalf of the manor, and there was another wreath, of mauve everlastings and white carnations, from Dr and Mrs G. Adam Prince had sent a large sheaf of pink and white carnations wrapped in polythene.

In the church Emma was able to pick out a group of what were presumably relatives in the front pews, rather crowded together considering the amount of space there was in the rest of the building. Miss Vereker, who had known Miss Lickerish when she had worked at the manor, had stayed on for a few days with Miss Lee and Miss Grundy in order to attend the funeral. She appeared to have completely recovered from her ordeal and was looking around her with a proprietory air. Emma had placed herself towards the back of the church but with a good view of everything that was going on. When Tom entered with the coffin she experienced a feeling almost of emotion, but perhaps it was only the beautiful words of the burial service that moved her and how well Tom looked and spoke them.

The singing was hearty. The relatives’ ideas for suitable hymns had been conventional, but Tom had dissuaded them from choosing ‘Thy Way, not mine, O Lord’, as its wormlike submission was totally unsuited to Miss Lickerish’s personality (‘Choose Thou for me my friends’ – the very idea of it!). He had allowed ‘Brief life is here our portion’ – nobody could dispute that – and had included ‘The God of Love my Shepherd is’, in George Herbert’s version.

Emma followed the mourners into the churchyard where the grave had been prepared and stood with the little group watching the earth falling on to the coffin. She was glad that it would not slide away into the flames, as at a cremation. All those flowers – the wreaths, the bunches, the sheafs – would be left to moulder away, to grow sodden with rain and decay as those of earlier burials had done, until they were finally thrown away into the wire basket where the dead church flowers were disposed of. Flowers from a funeral were perhaps not sent to patients in hospital or residents in old people’s homes, as flowers from a wedding sometimes were? This might be an interesting variation of custom, Emma felt, something for noting in her paper ‘Funeral Customs in a Rural Community’.

Afterwards, as everybody knew, the natural grief and tension of the occasion would be relaxed in the universal comfort of cups of tea, leading on to the more powerful solace of alcohol. Those who did not expect to join with the mourners in this extension of the funeral rites had grouped themselves’ near the mausoleum and Emma saw that Miss Vereker went inside it. She herself walked slowly home, noticing the progress made on the new bungalows opposite the church (a home for Tom?) and the old shrouded motorcars in the orchard, now more clearly visible through the leafless trees.

Yet another extension of the funeral obsequies was to be observed in church on the Sunday after the funeral, when one of the front pews was occupied by a group of Miss Lickerish’s relatives. They sat stiffly in a row, rather more squashed together than was usual among more regular churchgoers, leaning forward in the prayers rather than kneeling, hands shading their eyes. Apparently, as Emma learned afterwards from Tom, it was customary for the mourners to be present in church on the Sunday after the funeral. These particular people would not be seen at a service again until the next funeral, marriage or christening. When Emma expressed indignation, Tom, in his kinder and more tolerant way, pointed out that it gave a kind of continuity to village life, like the seasons – the cutting and harvesting of the crops, then the new sowing and the springing up again.