I managed a smile. ‘I don’t suppose it matters.’
We finished her list and walked together to the front door. Suddenly she chuckled. ‘Did you know there’s a discotheque this Saturday at the Stour Hotel?’
‘A discotheque!’
‘Mm. I was thinking of going.’
‘Who would partner you?’
‘That’s the beauty of discotheque dancing. You do it on your own.’ The wires on her teeth shone in the unlit hallway. ‘It’s made for us widows, really. You should come with me.’
We both started hooting gently, at the idea. Tears were leaking into my eyes, perhaps hers. I opened the door and the gale forced its way in, blew in our faces.
‘Ellen, do go and see George. Lucy’s worried about him. An injury like that is cruelty to a man who only ever sits down in church.’
A long mental sigh swept through me. ‘Of course I will.’
‘Oh, and get me some of Lucy’s angel pudding, if you please. It sounds wizard.’
23
GEORGE WAS IRRITABLE, shifting his plastered leg over the waxed cloth of the couch. Though he said the sound leg bothered him more. ‘This one –’ indicating the poor limb ‘– he’s content to lay. But this one –’ slapping the undamaged leg ‘– he wants to be up and doing. He’s getting cramped, stuck here on this settee.’
‘That’s why you need to exercise it.’ I picked up the crumpled leaflet supplied by the hospital. It featured line drawings of an impossibly muscled man lifting his brawny thigh at varying degrees from his torso. ‘Gosh. He’s a fit fellow. Not very encouraging, somehow.’
George sighed. ‘I know it.’
I glanced at his injured leg. Someone, to my mild amazement, had sketched a sailing boat on his knee in biro. The boat was sandwiched between pinched little wavelets and bulbous clouds, all slightly bumpy from the plaster. Underneath was a signature, PL, and the exhortation Get well soon Mr Horne. ‘Who did this, George?’
‘Girl from the school. They been up to read.’
‘Oh, I’m glad.’
‘It made a nice change. I might try those exercises.’
‘I’ll help you.’ I stood above him, holding out my hand. He lifted his good leg about forty-five degrees until his heel touched my fingers. The heel was warm, dry and small. The sock was clean. I could probably pick this man up.
The rain had not stopped at all in the three days since I’d gone over to see Lady Brock. People in Upton were openly talking about the possibility of a flood, which was sensible, of course, but sat ill with me. I never liked to tempt the river gods.
Outside, a barrow clattered to a halt. Lucy, heavily hooded, looked in through the window, gave me a grin of welcome. Then the outer door banged open and there was a stamp of boots, and in she breezed, bringing a gust of damp autumn air. ‘This bloomin rain puts me so behind. I’ve only just finished strawin the hot bitches.’ She coughed. ‘I’ll put the kettle on in a sec, Ellen dear.’
‘Lovely. Now,’ I said to George, ‘it says to repeat ten times. Can you manage that today, or shall you just do five?’ Because his face was shining with the effort, and had become the colour of standing cream.
Lucy took off her working anorak and shook it out, tutting. ‘He’s neglected them. Because he says the man on the bit of paper looks like a circus performer. Ain’t that right, Dad?’ She put a special emphasis on the words ‘circus performer’, by which we were meant to understand that George thought the man in the diagram was homosexual.
‘Oh, really, George,’ I cried, as he raised his leg again.
I followed Lucy into their new kitchenette, their pride, a galley with a shining fridge and Baby Belling stove. ‘I put your jars of apple under your porch, Lucy, on my way up. Lady Brock said you were waiting for them.’
‘Oh yes.’ She looked sheepish.
‘I’m terribly sorry I forgot. I can’t think how. But you could have reminded me, dear.’
She filled the kettle and set it on the large ring of the Baby Belling. ‘Oh, I kept forgettin too. It’s this weather. The river’s bank high, you know.’
‘I do know.’
‘Course you do. With the mill channel and all.’
There was a pause. I cleared my throat.
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘It’s hard to remember that lovely warm day when William came back. When was it? Two, nearly three weeks ago. Seems like a different world now.’
She was tearing open a packet of small rectangular chocolate-flavoured biscuits, the kind she and her father relished. To me the chocolate-cream filling was cloying, chalky. ‘Do you want a Bourbon, Ell?’
‘Perhaps later. You were talking about how my life could have been different if I hadn’t married Selwyn. If I’d married Bob Coward instead.’
Her graceful little hands moved over a pink plate, arranging the biscuits. ‘When was this, again?’
‘The day we were peeling the apples.’
The kettle came to a boil. Lucy spooned tea into the pot. ‘Oh. When Bill came back …’ She turned to stare at me. ‘You marry Bob Coward? Did I say that?’
‘Mm.’
‘Why would you want to do that?’
‘I’ve got no idea. It was you that suggested it.’
‘Well, I haven’t the foggiest.’ She shook her head. ‘You know what I’m like, Ell. The things I come out with. Will you take those biscuits, dear?’
I picked up the plate. The biscuits were laid in a pretty pattern, pointing inward like the dark rays of a pink central sun.
George pushed himself upright on the couch and I passed him a cup of tea. There was a book lying open, spine uppermost, on the windowsill. I made out the faded gilt words, A History of the Waterford Hounds. ‘Is this what the schoolgirl read to you? May I?’ I turned it over. The yellowing pages were spotted by flies. ‘He showed tremendous sport,’ I read, adopting a squeaky, cut-glass tone, ‘but I must say that when I took over the hounds …’
George grinned, his teeth reminding me of Lucy’s before she had her dentures fitted. He’d never been shy of them, so the black gap in his broad grin was familiar to all. ‘Don’t make fun,’ he said. ‘The child don’t sound like that. She’s got a nice clear little voice.’
‘She does,’ Lucy agreed. ‘Scruffy little bint, though.’
There. Why should I take any notice of what Lucy said? Words blew off her like a dustbin lid in a gale – you got struck, or not, at random. I was only bothered because her remark to me had been about Selwyn. And that was ridiculous, because like most of the hundred and one flippancies Lucy uttered in the course of a week, it meant so little to her that she’d forgotten it altogether. Absent-mindedly I took a Bourbon, washing it down with a cup of brick-red tea. The biscuit was as horrible as ever but the combination was bracing.
A sudden muffled cry startled me from my thoughts. I looked up to see William Kennet at the window, his face stretched in a rictus of panic. A moment later he reappeared in the doorway and Lucy leaped to her feet as the cause of his distress became clear. Clasped in his stringy arms and covered over with a piece of sacking, a television. ‘Gordon Bennett! Why didn’t you come and fetch me out, Bill? I could have got the trolley!’
William panted a reply. ‘She’s a deceptive creature. The weight settles after you pick her up. And a damned awkward shape.’ His bad hand was flattened against one side, his good hand clamped like a bracket around a bottom corner between two of its pig-like legs.
I gasped. ‘It’s enormous!’
‘Not at all.’ William bore it across the room and placed it with a metallic boom on the top of the filing cabinet. ‘There are many far larger.’ He pulled the sacking away. ‘This was given to Mrs Dennis and her aunt Miss Wyatt. They never view, you know. They agreed we should put this one into service. I said I knew just the chap who would benefit.’