To be established, for a week now, in a freshly scrubbed cottage, to be in possession of paying work, and to have found congenial acquaintances while being under no one’s direction seemed to Beatrice fortunate indeed. Even when school began, she thought, there would be both the satisfaction of noble vocation and evenings free for reading and writing. And today she was a real writer. Her book was on its way to Mr. Caraway, her father’s publisher, and she rode out of town with all the confidence that comes to a writer from having wrapped a finished work in several sheets of stout brown paper, secured it with strong twine and red sealing wax, and handed it in to the man in the Post Office.
On such a fair day, the summer bank holiday, Beatrice was inclined to be generous even towards the dark shadow of Mrs. Turber. That very morning, there had been a purse-lipped negotiation over the beef sandwich now in Beatrice’s bicycle basket. It was Mrs. Turber’s routine, and apparently much praised by the prior lodger, to provide a substantial noontime dinner and a cold supper at night. Evening dinner was offered only on Saturday nights and a glass of wine provided along with the best china. It was hardly decent, she said, to expect her to provide portable cold lunches, nor would a lady of Mrs. Turber’s standing be caught eating such a lunch alone along a public road somewhere. Beatrice had pleaded summer weather and asked for a simple plate of dinner to be reheated and served on a tray in the evenings. Mrs. Turber had grudgingly called for Abigail to make the sandwich, but she’d continued to sniff her disapproval, and only a gleam in the eye betrayed a possible satisfaction that a widow could be forgiven for pocketing some small savings from this arrangement. Breathing the fresh air of the fields and basking in the sun, Beatrice laughed aloud and vowed to treat the widow with such resolute and kindly respect that her landlady’s crusty air of suffering must eventually give way.
She followed the ribbons of country lanes across vast fields of corn and rye, through coppiced woods, and down the brief streets of thatch-roofed hamlets. She lost track of time, and the sun was over her shoulder before she thought to take stock of her location. Coasting to a stop at a crossroads, she looked about to fix her direction. Without the clatter of her wheels, the world seemed to fall into silence. It was so still, she could hear the slight rustle of dry corn in the field and the lumbering buzz of a fat bee somewhere on the far side of a thorny hedge. No voice or sound of human occupation broke across the sleeping fields. She had traveled further than she had meant, but climbing onto the lower rungs of a five-bar gate, she looked across the marsh and was pleased to see the very top of Rye’s hill, just the church tower and a couple of rooftops, peeking above the plain. The coast lay to her south, and the curving bluff of the Sussex Downs formed a continuous wall to the north. Above her head the sky was clear of clouds and seemed to enclose the marsh in a protective blue bowl. There was, she reasoned, no way to be lost. She would eat her picnic and then just meander home, keeping always to the west, until she found herself on familiar pathways.
As she ate, and drank from a glass bottle of water that was still cold to the touch, Beatrice reflected that Mrs. Turber’s fare might be meager but that, like all food, it was greatly improved by being eaten outdoors. Fleeting images of other picnics asked to be remembered, and she held them in trembling stillness, waiting for the sudden stab, like that of a toothache, which too often came from remembering her father. No clutch of pain came, and so she allowed, tentatively, the memory of freshly caught fish cooked on an apparatus of sticks by a large bonfire on a California beach; her father and two other professors, poking the fish with their knives and telling stories as if they were rough backwoodsmen rather than soft-handed academics with gracious front porches on a leafy campus, and tenure. Their wives unpacked pies from towel-lined baskets and passed cold flagons of birch beer and lemonade, and she, next to her father, her back tucked against a warm boulder, was free to listen and to turn her face alternately from the warmth of the fire to the dark, eternal crashing of the ocean surf.
A smaller picnic came to her—just the two of them and a slow walk away from the musk of the sickroom, up a grassy avenue of giant elms, like a green cathedral, to a stile looking over a valley of neat hedged fields. She had asked the kitchen for two soft bread rolls and hot chicken soup, in one of Lord Marbely’s newfangled Thermos flasks, and had slipped into his study to fill her father’s hip flask with brandy. She remembered a childlike urge to get her father out of the house, away from the dour private nurse. The walk had been painfully slow, her father’s breathing labored and her own urgency becoming a frustration. She remembered a sudden feeling of anger towards him, as if it were his fault that the sun and breeze did not restore him, and a swift shame in the recognition of her own selfish desire not to have to endure his decline.
They settled on the step of the stile, and her father sipped soup, laced with brandy, from a metal cup held in shaky hands. He pronounced it nectar though he could not drink more than half a cup, and she finished it while he looked at the vale below with the unblinking stare of a statue. She grew frightened and laid a hand on his to call him back to her.
“Father?” He responded with a wavering smile and lifted his arm with difficulty to wave at the view as he quoted,
Happy the man, whose wish and care
A few paternal acres bound,
Content to breathe his native air,
In his own ground.
It had been their game and a favorite parlor trick since her early childhood for him to startle her with lines of poetry and demand citation. She could remember many social evenings where she had been suddenly called upon and much fussed over by ladies who thought her a clever little monkey.
“Alexander Pope, ‘Ode to Solitude,’?” she said quietly. She knew they were both seeing the poem in their heads. Neither of them quoted from the final stanza: “Thus unlamented let me die…”
“Of course he quite borrowed the thought from old Horace,” her father said, and it was then that she sank to her knees and hid her tearful face in his lap.
Had her father been Catholic, she was quite sure he would have critiqued the priest during the last rites. He had left with his solicitors a list of hymns and readings for his funeral. However, the list was simply obscure lines from each, and there was a note to “ask Beatrice.” She smiled to remember Aunt Marbely’s growing apoplexy as the selections, each piece more unsuitable than the last, were slowly revealed. She stood up and shook out her napkin, determined not to spoil such a lovely day with angry tears. As she collected her bicycle, the thought came, unbidden, that she might entertain Agatha and her nephews with this story of her father’s last instructions. That Beatrice Nash should have new friends with which to share such amusing anecdotes was such a novel idea that she laughed aloud and startled a rabbit from the hedge.