A Few Green Leaves (7 page)

Emma saw that Mrs Dyer was in attendance, hovering with plates of crisps and small ‘cocktail savouries’. As if to mark her appearance in a slightly different role, she had modified her dress for the occasion and was wearing a bright blue nylon overall and a smarter hat than usual, a maroon felt with a paste ornament in the form of an anchor. ‘Fierce was the wild billow, dark was the night,’ Emma thought, remembering a hymn from school days. ‘Oars laboured heavily, foam glimmered white….’

Mrs Dyer thrust a plate towards her but Emma was loth to start eating before she had a glass in her hand and drink had not yet been offered to her. Standing uneasily – for no glass at all is even more awkward at a party than an empty glass – she suffered only a moment’s embarrassment, for the rector, ‘poor Tom’, as she now found herself thinking of him, was at her side and offering her sherry.

‘Dr G. has his hands full,’ he explained, ‘and Mrs Dyer doesn’t really understand the first necessity at a party.’

Emma was grateful but the feeling wore off when he began to ask her about her ‘work’ and she was forced to explain about the urban study she had completed, and that led on to him asking her whether she intended to make a study of the village, the sort of question, half joking, that always followed when people knew what she did.

‘I suppose I could study the village,’ she said, ‘but first of all I’d want to know what sort of a party this is – I believe there are various categories.’

Tom was a little taken aback by her frank way of speaking and hardly knew what to say. He did not like to tell Emma that the party on this occasion was not so much to welcome newcomers – though it was that in a sense – as to sort out in a social way sheep from goats and pick out various likely people to ‘do’ things in the village, above all to assist in the flower festival which Christabel was organising in the church. He could see her now, tall, thin and somehow menacing in her expensive flowered silk dress, peering about her like a bird about to swoop. He tried to melt into the background as Christabel bore down on Emma.

‘Let me see now,’ her voice rang out authoritatively, ‘you were at Somerville, weren’t you?’

‘No,’ said Emma. She hardly liked to say that she had taken her degree at the London School of Economics but did add that she was an anthropologist.

‘Oh.’ Christabel brushed aside anthropology and all its possible implications. ‘Can you arrange flowers?’ she asked.

‘I suppose so….’

‘Surely
all
ladies can arrange flowers,’ said Adam Prince, sidling up to the little group.

‘I’m thinking of the flower festival, of course,’ said Christabel.

She had ‘good bones’, Emma thought, and had obviously once been beautiful – the worm in the bud, though that wasn’t the kind of thought one could put into words at a sherry party. No doubt the mention of flowers had suggested the bud and the worm in it….

‘So often in a cottage,’ Adam Prince went on, ‘one sees a simple bunch of wild flowers stuck into a jam jar.’

‘Oh, Mr Prince, we shall want rather more than that,’ said Christabel in a jovial tone. ‘Dr Shrubsole’s mother-in-law is going to help – she seems
very
keen. A nice little person – we must try to bring her into things now that she’s come to live among us.’

‘Yes, indeed,’ said Tom, feeling that this was directed at him. He did not reveal that he was hoping to enlist Mrs Raven as a helper in some of his local history researches. A meek woman of retirement age could be of inestimable value, and he was glad to see that she was now deep in conversation with Miss Lee and Miss Grundy. They might even be discussing one of the ‘projects’ on which Mrs Raven might work.

‘I’ll
always
remember that Sunday morning,’ Magdalen Raven was saying. ‘Mr Chamberlain was to speak on the wireless – as we called it in those days – and my husband – of course he was alive then – kept saying that appeasement would
never
work. He always said Hitler wasn’t to be trusted and of course he was quite right.’

‘And the evacuees,’ Miss Grundy broke in eagerly, ‘do you remember the evacuees, and that mother who just sat up in bed smoking!’

‘People smoked a lot in those days,’ said Magdalen, almost with regret. ‘Such funny cigarettes we had – do you remember Tenners, in a blue packet?’ Smoking was, of course, another pleasure forbidden by her son-in-law. There were no ash-trays in the house.

‘They used to say Hitler couldn’t stand a long war,’ said Miss Lee, ‘but it seemed to go on
such
a long time, with that school in the manor and none of the family here in the village.’

‘The family?’ Magdalen asked.

‘Yes, the girls and Miss Vereker, their governess, still trying to keep the mausoleum in order.

‘The mausoleum?’ And the governess keeping it in order?

‘Yes, by the church, you must have seen it, where some of the family are buried.’

‘Oh, I must go there some time,’ said Magdalen in a social way. Miss Lee seemed to be overcome by her memories and she tried to guide the conversation on to the days after the war when things weren’t much better even though the fighting was over. ‘Do you remember the meat ration going down to eightpence and that ewe mutton or whatever it was called?’

‘Miss Vereker had a way with ewe mutton,’ said Miss Lee, still on her memories. ‘She was an imaginative cook.

‘I see you’ve been initiating Mrs Raven into our little group,’ said Tom, coming up to them.

‘Yes, we’ve been talking about the past,’ said Miss Lee, ‘something we all remember.’ But her tone was slightly defiant and Tom knew that by ‘the past’ she did not mean quite what he did. Still, it was a beginning.

He looked around him to say something to Miss Howick – Emma, as he was beginning to think of her –but she had gone. He prepared to spend an evening with his sister, who had not been at the party, and to tell her ‘all about it’.

One morning Tom went into the church, as he often did, to spend half an hour or so, not exactly to meditate or pray but to wander in a random fashion round the aisles, letting his thoughts dwell on various people in the village. This was in its way a kind of prayer, like bringing them into the church which so few of them actually visited, or never darkened its doors, as a more dramatic phrase had it. He studied the monuments and wall tablets, noticing repairs that were needed, brass that was tarnished (whose turn had it been last week?), and sometimes regretting Victorian additions to what had originally been a simple building.

The family at the manor had the largest and most interesting memorials, with florid inscriptions that taxed the memory of one’s Latin. It was perhaps a pity that we no longer commemorated our dead in such terms, Tom felt, remembering the barer records of the twentieth century. Now a memorial more often took the form of an extension to the communion rails – a godsend indeed to old stiff knees – or a very plain tablet in chillingly good taste. We were more embarrassed nowadays or less insincere, he would not have liked to say which, for ‘sincerity’ was disproportionately valued today. It would be impossible, for example, to imagine anything like the de Tankerville mausoleum being erected now. It had been put up outside the church in the early nineteenth century and later members of the family had been buried in it. Now, when they no longer lived at the manor, it seemed an awkward anachronism in such a small and humble parish.

Tom was thinking along these lines when he heard a movement at the back of the church. Somebody had come in, though whether visitor, parishioner or brass-cleaning lady he was unable to see. The ‘person’ – and in these days of sex equality and uniform dress and hairstyle the visitor could surely be so described – had moved into the de Tankerville chapel, as it was called, and appeared to be examining the monument of the recumbent crusader. As he came nearer, Tom saw that it was a young man with golden bobbed hair, dressed in the usual T-shirt and jeans and wearing pink rubber gloves, an unusual and slightly disturbing note.

Can I help you? Tom thought, without in fact uttering the words, for it seemed at once too trivial and too profound an enquiry. An offer to ‘help’ might “be taken literally when all that Tom felt himself capable of offering on this occasion was a brief history of the church and village with perhaps more detailed comments on some of the monuments, and he was about to start on his usual account when the young man forestalled him by speaking first.

‘You must be the rector,’ he said, rather too effusively, almost as if he were congratulating Tom on having got the job. ‘I’m Terry Skate – I’ve come to see your mausoleum. I thought I’d just nip into the church first, to put me in the picture – if you see what I mean – get to know the general set-up, what was involved and all that.’

The two of them were standing looking down at the effigy of Sir Hubert de Tankerville. Tom felt that it might almost have been his fault, as if Mr Skate might blame him in some way, that the head of one of the little dogs reposing at the crusader’s feet was broken off. Contemplating the headless animal, he thought of the Puritans and the Civil War, but again the visitor got in first with a comment about vandalism, ‘even in olden times’.

‘You haven’t been here before?’ Tom said, trying to remember the others who had come periodically to ‘see to’ the mausoleum, mostly grey elderly men, certainly nobody like Terry Skate.

‘No, it’s my first visit, the first of
many
, I hope. My friend and I have taken over this florist’s, you see – of course we have lots of regular orders for floral displays, not to mention weddings and funerals, you name it, we do it – but we’ve never done a mausoleum before.’

‘What exactly are you going to do?’

‘Oh, just tidy it up – it’s more a job for a garden centre, really – supply new plants and bulbs for the outside, daffs at Easter and that kind of thing. Being a church person myself I got the job, my friend being agnostic.’

‘I see. Then you are….’ Tom had been going to say ‘one of us’ until he realised the possible ambiguity of the phrase. Besides, it was most unlikely that Terry Skate’s churchgoing would have anything in common with the simple village service which was all that Tom’s parishioners would tolerate.

‘Goodness, yes! Choirboy, server, M.C. even – you name it…. You’d have to be a believer, wouldn’t you, to do a mausoleum?’

Tom saw that this must be so and proceeded to give a brief history of the mausoleum – how it had been put up in 1810 to commemorate a de Tankerville killed in the Peninsular War, and how later members of the family had been buried there and monuments erected to them.

‘Could we have a peep inside?’ Terry asked enthusiastically. ‘I’m just longing to see.’

They went out of the church, unlocked the gate of the mausoleum and folded back the grille leading to the interior. A heavy red velvet curtain had to be drawn aside to reveal the box-like tombs and monuments. Although it was a warm day outside, the icy white of the marble and the cold blind faces of the classical sculptures struck very chill, and Tom shivered. He did not often go into the mausoleum and was unable to match Terry’s enthusiastic comments, disliking the whole concept and finding the marble representations pretentious and unsympathetic.

Terry agreed that it was cold inside. ‘You’d think you could put a storage heater or even a paraffin stove in here,’ he suggested.

‘Oh, I don’t think that would be suitable,’ said Tom. ‘Anyway, nobody really goes inside now – nobody spends much time here,’ he added, aware that he was saying something slightly comic. ‘There’s nobody left of the family to take any interest.’ This was sad, of course, though more from the historical than the human point of view. There were documents lost for ever to the local historian. If only he could have been here in the thirties when the de Tankervilles left the manor!

‘Has the family died out?’ Terry asked.

Tom explained its history, the last surviving male killed in the Great War with no dependants, the sisters selling the house not long after that, the present owner a man who took no interest in the village…. The chill of the mausoleum was beginning to get into his bones. Should he ask Terry Skate back to the rectory for a cup of coffee?

They went outside and into the little garden surrounding the edifice where there were some gravestones with spaces for vases of flowers or pot plants.

‘I suppose it was done at Whit and somebody’s taken away the dead flowers.’

‘Yes, one of the flower ladies usually does that.’

‘Which is more than she did in the church, if I may make so bold,’ said Terry with a laugh.

‘Yes, something does seem to have been neglected there,’ Tom agreed. ‘And of course mid-week is a bad time for flowers.’

‘Dead flowers left in the water make such a stink.’

‘Lilies that fester smell far worse than weeds,’ Tom suggested.

‘These weren’t lilies – larkspurs, I should think. I might get some pelargoniums for the graves here,’ Terry went on. ‘A splash of colour – that’s what’s needed.’

‘I’m sure that will be admirable,’ Tom said.

‘I’ve got some plants in the van. Meanwhile, is there a café or teashop in the village?’

Tom was dismayed, for of course there was nothing of the kind and it was too early for the pub. It would have to be the rectory after all. He apologised for the lack and extended his invitation.

‘Oh, that
is
kind – I was hoping you’d say that. I almost prayed there wouldn’t be a café in the village and that I’d have a chance to see inside your beautiful old rectory.’

‘There’s not much to see,’ said Tom, again apologetic, ‘though of course it is an old house.’

‘Monks lived there, perhaps?’ Terry suggested.

‘Well, no – I don’t think there is any evidence of that….’

‘But it’s what I’d like to think. There’s a definitely monastic feeling here,’ said Terry, glancing critically round the hall and taking in its shabbiness.

The hall was sparsely furnished, certainly, but the appearance of Daphne and Mrs Dyer struck an unmonastic note.

‘What about some coffee?’ Tom asked.

‘We’ve had ours,’ said Mrs Dyer firmly. ‘We’re turning out the dining-room today.’