*
The scrap of apple, the futile ants, the hot sun: all sucked away by low pressure bringing wind and front upon front of heavy rain. William’s weathercock was flung this way and that before settling in the west; a green, storm-tarnished old bird now, as he’d always wanted it to be, for his cousin Mottram, the steeplejack, had long since lost his head for heights. My sandals were stowed in the cupboard, my heavier coats and skirts released from their trunks and presses. I’d had good clothes for nearly thirty years now, and a fire to dry them. The lovely wholesome smell of hot cotton and dry wool; toasty-dry as Elizabeth used to say: I breathed it in time and again, the smell of safety and content. Elizabeth had long retired to a bungalow on the new estate in Barrow End, still with her scarf wound about her head, these days not quite concealing soft white hair which in turn did not quite conceal a pink scalp blotched with fawn patches reminding me of the belly of a Jack Russell terrier.
So it was October, and autumn was well under way, when I put on a full-length mackintosh and set out through the rain for Althea Brock’s house with six jars of stewed apple in my bag.
The door to the Lodge, when I knocked, swung gently open. I went in, and took a few paces down the tiled corridor. I was about to call softly, so as not to alarm her, when I drew level with the sitting-room door. Althea was on the sofa, facing a small girl in a school mackintosh and a beret out of which poked a bush of untidy hair. I stifled an exclamation. The Lodge and its surrounding shrubbery were strictly forbidden to Upton Hall girls. But Althea was speaking.
‘Bullies abound, my dear,’ she was saying. ‘Bullies abound. And the only remedy is to go back to them with your head held high. Go on. Show me now.’
The child lifted her chin. A small soldierly form, eyes burning.
‘Higher.’
The child obeyed. There was a long, singing silence, and then Althea spoke.
‘That’s the girl. Now off you go.’
The girl made a bobbing bow to Althea. ‘Thank you very much for the lime cordial, Lady Brock.’ Her voice was almost a whisper. As she turned to go she saw me, gasped and ducked past me through the doorway and back down the corridor. By the time I reached the front door she was darting away over the mud of the drive, her white-socked legs flashing up behind her.
‘Good lord, Althea.’ I was laughing – laughing, and rather moved. ‘Who was that?’
Althea hitched herself up on the sofa, one bony hand stabbing at her cushion. ‘A new girl. She arrived late, and the others are ragging her, the vixens.’
On the coffee table were two cloudy glasses half-filled with greenish liquid. I longed to bear them away to the kitchen and plunge them into hot suds but Althea’s tiny boiler was grudging. The dishes piled up beside the sink rimed in dried-on food, waiting for the rare flood. ‘What are they doing?’ I asked. ‘What kind of ragging?’ I dug in my bag for paper and pencil. All my ladies had a list prepared when I dropped by, but Althea was emphatically not one of my ladies.
Althea snorted in disgust. ‘They told her to come and walk down here in the shrubbery, that a sweet old lady would invite her in for tea. I found her cornered by Stuart. I’d like some cod,’ she added, seeing me lick my pencil.
As if he had heard his name, Stuart sent us a long growl from his tartan bed. He was a terrier of uncertain temper bequeathed by Colonel Daventry, who was now too old to take his dog for walks. I wondered privately how long this arrangement could last. Althea had recently gone from one walking stick to two. But without slackening her pace, or hardly.
‘With parsley sauce, Althea, or just plain cod?’
She stared. ‘Parsley sauce? The Mac Fisheries isn’t a restaurant.’
‘You can buy it frozen. The sauce is frozen with it.’
‘Good God above. My mother preserved it, you know. Laid it down in layers of salt.’
Her mother had done no such thing. It was understood that her mother’s cook and under-cook had performed the task. She struggled to her feet, and we made our way down the hall to the kitchen to stare together into her dark cupboards where tins gleamed.
She grunted. ‘I hate cod.’
‘Then why on earth buy it?’
‘It’s good for one. And Stuart likes the skin.’
‘I’ll get you some trimmings for Stuart. And you might try a box of the new parsley-sauced cod. You must eat it this evening. I don’t trust your icebox.’ I opened her fridge to see the tongue of a glacier, studded with peas, poking out of the plastic hatch. ‘Shall I ask Mrs Ware to pop round?’
June Ware, June Broad that was, my old schoolmate whose bust rose like dough over the cups of her brassiere, and who had gone for the typing-pool job at the town hall with me. Her bust was still good, and she had the strong, bulging calves of a woman who had never owned a car. She didn’t hold it against me that I had got that job instead of her, and she certainly didn’t need my charity. She had four grown children, all married, and they took turns to roast her a Sunday dinner.
Althea flapped her hand at the icebox. ‘Oh, if you see fit. While I think of it, Ellen …’
‘What?’
‘Lucy’s wondering whether she should collect her stewed apples, or if you’ll deliver them to the cottage.’
Slowly I started lifting the jars out of my sturdy bags. Almost a fortnight had passed since that blue September day, the last of that vanished, hot, pre-equinoctial world. I should have taken Lucy’s apples to her cottage, but I hadn’t, and I was at a loss to find the reason. Perhaps there was no reason, and I simply forgot. Althea, however, had spoken carefully, and with meaning, and she was waiting for my reply. Which meant that Lucy had made her feelings known to Althea.
‘My God, who would live in a village?’ I plonked a jar on the table. ‘One can’t make the tiniest slip … All she’s going to do is buy that blessed Angel Delight.’
Because Lucy didn’t eat her apples. She sold the lot at the Women’s Institute market and used the money to buy packets of this dessert.
Althea picked up the jar, holding it by the neck in a slightly unsteady grip, appraising the contents as one would a vintage liquor. She chuckled at my rage. ‘What’s that? It sounds literally heavenly.’
‘A powdered sweet you make up with milk. Tastes of butterscotch.’ I shook my head in bewilderment. ‘I know I should have gone to see Lucy by now. The change in the weather seems to have swept me off my feet, somehow. Time passing. And this rain …’ Curtains of it were falling outside as we spoke.
‘It’s like that, on and off.’ Althea touched my arm. ‘For the first few years. You bash around your house looking for your specs, no one to ask where they are, and then things seem to settle around you …’
‘Lucy thinks I should have married Bob Coward.’
The words leaped out like frogs from a pail of water. Well might Althea stare – they surprised me, too.
‘You should have married – whom did you say?’
‘Bob Coward. He worked at the town hall. When Selwyn tried to turn me down –’ we both smiled at the memory ‘– I went out to tea with Bob Coward and another couple. Anyway, Lucy thinks that if I’d married him I’d have got the full bowl of cherries.’
Althea frowned. ‘Surely, life is not a bowl of cherries.’
‘Yes. That’s what I told her. She got the saying wrong. She meant, a full life.’
Althea’s grin was not an altogether pleasant sight. A great deal of bridgework was on display. ‘My dear girl, are you sure? Lucy’s no great handler of words.’
‘But she said it, she said, “what life …”’
What life is meant to be. Five quick words flashed out on the blade of a paring knife, then covered by the dark roar of the Land Rover engine as William turned into the yard. But I had heard them.
‘Good lord, Ellen. Don’t tell me you’re hankering after a life with this Mr Coward. Ten to one he’s a frightful bore.’