Hartsend (2 page)

The same could be said of the shop. Harriet's Saturdays here had begun as part of her Social Action from school, but when June asked if she would keep going, alternate Saturdays, mornings and afternoons, she'd said yes. It made her feel virtuous and, besides, gave her a valid reason for being unavailable for the hockey team. June had put her in sole charge of books and videos. (‘‘Harriet here can read a whole book in just a couple of days,'' she had once informed a customer, adding, ‘‘and her brother's at the Oxford University,'' as if those two facts somehow raised the status of the shop.) Mrs Robertson said she wished she had more time to read. Asked what her favourite book was, Harriet said
The Lord of the Rings
. Mrs Robertson had heard of it, but not read it. But surely she'd seen the film? No. It wasn't about real things, was it? She and Mr Robertson didn't like films unless they were about real things.

‘‘Have you got anything else in black?''

It was their one customer, a stout plain-faced woman with straggling dark hair. Mrs Robertson said she would see if there was anything in the most recent donations in the back shop. ‘‘Though it might be needing cleaned, you know,'' she said.

Harriet watched the woman go to the door. She spoke to a man outside, who reluctantly came back in with her. She began showing him some shirts on the rail. He didn't seem interested. When he turned away, Harriet saw he was just a boy, not much older than herself. His hair was long and dark at the back but dyed blond at the front. A long black raincoat and sharp pointed shoes completed the look.

Disconcerted when he returned her stare, Harriet drew several x's with excessive neatness on the border of the label sheet. That done, she gathered the pile of cellophane-wrapped cards, tapped them into an authoritative stack, and went to the rack beside the door. He had moved to stand beside the till. June, Letty, (still singing) and Mrs Robertson were all in the back shop. His mother, if she was his mother, was examining the inside of a handbag.

He met her eye, gave her a slow smile, leaned over the counter and lifted one of the good brooches from the glass cabinet beneath. He slipped it into his coat pocket. Just did it. Knowing that she saw.

The house is a hundred years old, and much of the furniture in the back room is of the same vintage, having been installed by the deceased's mother and inherited from
her
family. The mourners speak in whispers or are silent, like visitors to a museum. All that is missing is a heavy scarlet rope to keep them from touching the objects. A cream, cordless phone on the sideboard looks out of place, as if a careless curator has left it by mistake.

Facing the stiff rows of chairs (the dining table has evidently been moved elsewhere) is a small gas fire and, above it, a Victorian oak mantel with multiple wreaths of plenty, shelves and small drawers. Somewhere else, given space, it might have been beautiful, but in this small room it is too large. Moreover it is stuffed with train and bus timetables, bills, bundles of recipes cut from magazines, oddments of wool, safety pins and spools of thread, and seems ready to burst out on the room at any moment, scattering its contents over all those reflected in its mirrors.

Not wanting to be first, Walter and Ruby Robertson watched from behind their curtains until they saw some others going in. At the door Ruby found herself hugging Lesley, only child of the deceased. Later she will wonder what came over her. Walter will say that Lesley was probably on Valium and wouldn't remember. They nod to those people they recognise, and slide into the second front row, since they are only neighbours, not relations.

The Robertsons are incomers. They have lived in the street all their married life, but having moved here from the city, they will always be incomers. For almost thirty years they have lived next door to Lesley and her mother, thirty years without a voice raised or an unkind word spoken. Without many words spoken, if the truth be told, although perhaps the hedges are to blame. The high boundary of mixed beech, holly and privet provides sparrows with excellent nesting space but makes casual human conversation rather difficult.

Behind them and ill at ease, never having been to a Protestant funeral before, sits Mrs Mary Flaherty. She felt she had to come, having cleaned and polished for Lesley and her mother for the past three years. She too has moved into the village, but only from a neighbouring village, and more importantly, her grandfather and some of her uncles worked in the local pit before it closed, which makes her almost a local. Beside her sits a pale, sullen young girl in a nurse's uniform and navy anorak, a representative from the Hospice. She speaks to no-one. Doesn't know anyone. She barely knew the deceased. She remembers once cleaning her false teeth, but that's all.

The most important resident of the village has come; widow of the Captain, a smart, sprightly woman, wonderful for her age. Her sandy-haired son and the bereaved daughter, (like him an only child) were friends at primary school. Unable to grow a full beard like his father's, he settled years ago for a moustache, which never suited him and has now turned completely white. He is not near his mother today, he is standing at the back, but it's all right, her thumb will stretch that far.

Precisely at one thirty, the eulogy begins. The minister is a compassionate man. He didn't know the deceased well, having been called to the parish less than a year ago, but he speaks much of Baking Skills, and Visiting the Sick, of Intelligence and Strength Of Mind. He does not speak an unkind word, and at last, to everyone's relief it ends. Stiffly they rise from the hard dining chairs, and move, the women murmuring, the men mostly in silence, to the door and out into the damp December afternoon. They gather round the cars, watching the dirty yellow sky for rain, knowing the interment is still to be got through. And to their eternal credit, not one of them says ‘‘Wasn't it just like the old bitch to time her death to ruin Christmas Eve?''

It was very late but Lesley didn't feel ready to go to bed. The temperature had fallen, and the rain had turned to snow, small flakes lightly falling, floating, just visible in the light of the street lamps. If it kept on, the whole village would be a work of art by morning. Everything covered in white: pavements, buildings, the football field, the weeds round the recycling bins. It was all a lie. A white lie. The bad stuff was there underneath.

‘‘This is my house. I am alone in it.'' She said the words aloud. She had anticipated this moment, touching it lightly now and then over the final months, like someone fingering a birthday gift through tissue paper, afraid to guess what it might be. But now, the funeral over, there wasn't much difference. No relief, no bitterness, no guilt, nothing as identifiable as any of those. Perhaps, she thought, perhaps it was too soon to feel anything.

Did I wish her dead?

She had wanted the waiting for death to end. Not the same thing.

I am glad she's dead?

How strange it was to watch the snow sift down from nowhere, and have no-one calling from the other room,
what are you doing, Lesley?
Just as strange as it had been at tea-time to find the fridge full. Gifts of soup and casseroles and cake had been brought by neighbours. She remembered the smell of the hospital food waiting in the stainless steel trolley in the corridor when visiting was over. A peculiar mix of something fried and something metallic. The nurses said goodnight to her by name, towards the end, grown used to her visits.

What to eat? Or indeed, whether to eat? All her life she'd accepted what was put in front of her when she came home: soup and main course and pudding. She was the shape and size she was because her mother was a good cook. No, she thought, playing with the words, because her mother cooked good food. Goodness as a moral quality was surely something different altogether.
You were a good daughter to her, Lesley
. More than one funeral guest had said it, but how could they possibly know?

If I was a good person, I would feel something definite, something definable. Wouldn't I at least be frightened by this lack of feeling?

She remembered something she'd read once in the
Reader's Digest
about people trapped in snow, how you had to decide which way was up before you began to dig. The way to do this was to spit. You gathered lots of saliva and spat. If the spit ran up your nose, then you were upside down. She had smiled at the idea, but it struck her now that she was that lost individual.

Her descent into the crevasse had been slow, a gradual daily slide. Hard to tell when it began. At birth? Or on that day when she told her mother she wanted to move out, to share a flat with two of the other girls from the college?

If you leave this house, you will never enter it again.

When she was a child, she played the old game, would you rather freeze or boil to death? Of course the answer was, she didn't want to do either, but in the game she had to choose. The problem with freezing, she saw now, was that you didn't disappear. Had she become an embarrassment to those who were still warm? Her friends had all married or moved away, preoccupied with husbands and children. They still sent Christmas cards, but not so many, and some day, she supposed, even this would stop. Even this shivering hypothermia would stop.

You'll be preserved
, she told herself,
like the Ice-man in the Alps, like the bodies on Everest, with the ink stain on your blouse, the shred of cold chicken between your back teeth. You'll stay here in this house until the planet falls into the sun.

When the evening news came on, Ruby went through to the kitchen and filled the Creda water heater with exactly the amount needed to make two mugs of tea. (The mugs were earthenware. The good bone-china cups were never used, merely washed on Wednesdays and replaced in the cabinet.) When the water bubbled, the machine would emit a piercing sound like a factory hooter.

The room felt cold tonight, and she shivered a little. If only they'd kept the Rayburn, she thought, not for the first time. Lifting a discreet corner of the curtain, she looked across the hedge to Lesley's kitchen window. No light on. She had probably gone to bed.

Maybe the weather would improve, despite the forecast. Still, the cupboards were well stocked, and the freezer was full of neatly labelled packages. Make one, freeze one was a good rule. Taking milk from the fridge, she smiled with satisfaction at the big pot of home-made lentil soup. She had learned early in their marriage that Walter needed something to eat the minute he arrived home, and soup had been the answer, summer or winter. She ate hers in the kitchen, putting the finishing touches to the main course.

As she waited for the water to boil, Ruby felt a little soreness starting at the back of her throat, and offered a prayer to no-one in particular that this would not be the start of anything serious. It had been bitter on Christmas Eve at the graveside. She'd felt the cold seeping through the seams of her coat. She had said so to Walter at the time, looking with envy at the Captain's widow in her fur. Beaver, she thought it was.

‘‘I'd love a fur coat,'' she whispered to Walter as they drank their tea at the function room in the Village Hall afterwards.

‘‘When would you wear a fur coat?''

‘‘Things like this. And weddings.''

‘‘Who do we know that's getting married?'' he said.

‘‘Do you think she'll sell the house?'' she asked a moment later.

‘‘What?''

‘‘Lesley next door. Do you think she'll move?

Walter considered the salmon sandwich he had bitten into, as if it might hold the answer.

‘‘Nothing much we can do about it.'' He lifted one edge of the bread and looked at the filling before carefully extracting a thin slice of cucumber and putting it on his plate.

‘‘I wouldn't like new neighbours, not at our age,'' she said.

‘‘We might move ourselves. Once I retire.''

Ruby stared at her husband of thirty years. He pulled a handkerchief out of his trouser pocket and wiped his nose.

‘‘I've always fancied living near a sea loch. I could fish off a boat.''

‘‘But you don't fish, Walter.''

‘‘I could learn,'' he said, putting the rest of the sandwich into his mouth.

The hooter began to sound, and quickly Ruby flicked the switch. Her throat was really quite sore. Perhaps she ought to gargle with salt before bed. She poured some boiling water into a mug so that it would be cool by the time supper was over.

She'd always hated interments. The crematorium was so much nicer, as long as you knew when not to look. She filled the teapot, mopped up a few drips of water on the sink and draining board, added two custard creams to the tray, and took it through to Walter in the sitting room just as the news ended. This ritual, performed every night of their life together, ensured that there was no knowledge of the outside world in her head that had not been there when she left home.

Mary Flaherty waited in the Chemist's for her prescription to be filled. Feeling hot and cold by turns, she wondered if she'd caught this cold standing at the graveside. A miserable day that had been, and no mistake. She'd felt peculiar the whole time: all those folk there she didn't know, on the chairs she'd polished herself, and her sitting next to them afterwards eating sandwiches so small they had only two bites in them.

Would she be needed now the old woman was dead? The house was full of clutter, but it wasn't hard to clean, because no-one wanted her to move the clutter. She was fond of the old fashioned ornaments. She liked polishing the brass, and waxing the old furniture, and ironing the old lady's linen pillowcases. In the last few months polycotton sheets had replaced the linen ones, for reasons, Lesley said, of hygiene (meaning that they needed frequent changing) but the linen pillowcases were kept in use. They stayed cool, she learned from Lesley, and were more pleasant against your face. She felt guilty now, remembering how in the last few weeks she'd enjoyed having the house to herself, dusting, hoovering and polishing without the old witch hovering over her. That bath still annoyed her though. She didn't know how they could bear the rusty stain under the cold tap. If it had been up to her, she would have had it out and a nice new white one put in.