A Few Green Leaves Page 4

  ‘Perhaps you shouldn’t have attempted so much this morning,’ Tom said. ‘Going to the doctor and now spring-cleaning.’ If only women wouldn’t work so hard, would spare themselves a little! ‘Bread and cheese will suit me,’ he murmured. He wondered if the Barracloughs would have shared theirs with him, but he knew better than to call on his parishioners at mealtimes.

  He returned to his study and was soon absorbed in Anthony a Wood, so much so that when Daphne called him twenty minutes later he did not hear her, and that added to her irritation.

  6

  Not a particularly successful meeting, Emma thought, as she watched Graham Pettifer’s car drive away, though he had enjoyed his lunch. On leaving he had moved towards her as if to kiss her goodbye, then apparently thought better of it and retreated. But at least it had given him the opportunity to confide in her, a sympathetic female listener, and perhaps that was to their mutual benefit.

  It might have been better if I’d been a novelist, Emma thought, busily washing up the lunch. There might even have been material in his story that she could use, but a sociological survey of modern marriage, under whatever title you gave it, would find the whole affair very commonplace and predictable – the kind of thing that was happening all the time. She wondered idly whether she would ever see him again. He was not going to Africa this year so would be around in the academic world, working on this book he had mentioned. Plenty of opportunity to appear on television again, either in discussions or as an ‘expert’ on some aspect of the news. But this time she would not write….

  After a cup of tea she went back to her desk. There was already a page in the typewriter but she felt disinclined to go on with her work. Sitting looking out of the window, she could see people going about their business in the village and she began to wish that she had chosen a rural setting for her fieldwork rather than the arid new town with its too obvious problems and difficulties. She removed the half-finished page from the typewriter and put a new one in. ‘Some Observations on the Social Patterns of a West Oxfordshire Village,’ she typed. Wouldn’t something on those lines be acceptable and certainly more interesting? But ‘village’ was wrong, somehow, too cosy – the jargon word ‘community’ would be more appropriate. Or, again she typed, ‘The Role of Women in a West Oxfordshire Community.’ Couldn’t she work out something like that? Inspired by the idea, she began to consider all the inhabitants of the village, as she knew them so far, and to make notes on them.

  Obviously one began with the church. The rector – the Rev. Thomas Dagnall. Poor Tom. ‘Tom’s a-cold’ – King Lear, wasn’t it? Now why should something like that come into her mind when she thought of the rector? Perhaps because he was a widower and lived with his sister? House probably much too big and cold. Sister (Daphne), eager spinster, goes on Greek holidays with woman friend.

  After the church, medicine. Dr Luke Gellibrand (Dr G.) ‘The old doctor’ – ‘beloved’ in the village, but not very efficient. Reluctant to prescribe new drugs, or indeed any drugs at all – prefers homely remedies. Lives in large beautiful old house, on a par with the rectory, but unlike the rectory adequately heated and furnished. Everything in the best of taste – formidable wife (Christabel) –coffee mornings, select sherry parties and elaborate flower arrangements in the church (they say) – almost like a lady of the manor. Expert on freezing produce – large freezer ih garage. Grownup family living away from home.

  Then the other doctor – Martin Shrubsole and wife Avice. Nice young man, not particularly bright, but well-meaning, kind and up-to-date – fashionable interest in ‘geriatrics’. Lives in tarted-up seventeenth-century cottage with modern additions, rather too small for them (three children and Mrs S.’s mother recently come to live with them). Wife Avice former social worker, rather pushing and do-gooding, probably hankers for larger more prestigious house (possibly even the rectory).

  That disposed of the doctors, but who came next – possibly Adam Prince, the good-food inspector and former C. of E. clergyman? Prettiest cottage in the village (though Emma had not as yet been inside, she imagined carefully chosen antiques, coffee-table books and a model kitchen).

  Robbie and Tamsin Barraclough. Live in old, rather ramshackle cottage near Adam Prince – neglected garden. Both academics –often in pub. Robbie B. – tall, quite nice-looking, Scots accent. Tamsin B. – rather hippy-looking. Still just young enough to wear Laura Ashley dresses and jumble sale clothes (the kind of things Emma was just too old to wear).

  Miss Lee (Olive). Lives in Yew Tree Cottage. Solid, elderly, well-established village resident of type which is said to be ‘the backbone of England’. Rather well-dressed, usually wears hat. Churchgoer, does brasses and flowers but on lower scale than Christabel G. Interested in local history – helps the rector with copying parish registers etc. Member of W.I. Nice cottage with pretty garden. Probably critical of newcomers to the village? Lives with friend, Miss Grundy.

  Miss Flavia Grundy. Rumoured (Emma’s mother had told her) that Miss G. had once written a romantic historical novel, but it was never spoken of. A rather sad character. London high-church goer dumped in the country, pining for incense(?). Bossed by Miss Lee.

  Geoffrey Poore, church organist. Lives next door to Miss Lee and Miss Grundy. Emma knew nothing about the organist except that he was a school-master, wore his hair in a long bob and was often seen in the pub.

  She began to consider the village people in general. Most of the original inhabitants now lived in the council estate on the outskirts of the village and one didn’t have much contact with them. There was the pub (The Bell) and its landlord whose name Emma did not know, but she had heard that he sometimes cut the grass in the churchyard. And of course there was Mrs Dyer, who did cleaning at the rectory and one or two other houses – a sharp-tongued, not very agreeable sort of woman, who might gossip maliciously and notice ‘goings on’, if there were any. She had several grownup children, notably a son Jason, who had started what passed for an ‘antique’ shop and who had pushed a card through Emma’s door bearing the ghoulish information ‘Deceased Effects Cleared.’ The main point of interest about Jason Dyer was that he wore a gold earring in one ear in the form of a small crucifix.

  Miss Lickerish. Emma started a new paragraph to describe Miss Lickerish, the sort of person who was difficult to classify. She had probably been in ‘good service’ in her youth. Now lived in cottage, tumbledown, inhabited by livestock, heated by ancient paraffin stove (with dangerously flaring yellow flame, Daphne had told Emma – ‘I’ve tried to tell her that the flame should be blue, and the wick cleaned sometimes…’). Tended to be outspoken. A real ‘character’, perhaps, was that how she should be described?

  The idea that Miss Lickerish might once have been in good service reminded Emma that she had made no mention of the gentry –the people who lived at the manor. Strictly speaking, she ought to have put them first, but who or what were the gentry now? She had never seen Sir Miles or any of his family, and barely glimpsed his agent, Mr Swaine, on the walk after Easter. Further research needed was the kind of note one appended to something that didn’t seem to be leading anywhere. The history of the manor lay in the past, in the wall tablets and monuments in the church and in the mausoleum which had been erected in memory of the de Tankerville family some time in the last century. It shouldn’t be too difficult to find out something there….

  Emma took the page out of the typewriter and laid it aside. This hardly counted as ‘work’, she felt, this idle speculating on the people in the village. Further research seemed to be needed in a good many directions, and who knew what might come of it?

  7

  Every morning now, especially with the prospect of summer, Daphne woke up thinking of how she would one day get away from the village. She, the rector’s sister, would throw up everything and go to live on a Greek island or in Delphi or even in one of those towers in the Mani. Ridiculous, of course, especially the idea of living in a tower, but on this kind of an English summer da
y, with the promise of spring forgotten and the sun hidden in grey clouds, it helped her to get through her chores.

  Today she was receiving things for a jumble sale which was to be held on the following Saturday. People had been invited to leave their bundles in one of the rectory outhouses but some preferred to come up to the house, almost as if, instead of a natural feeling of shame, they wanted their contributions to be known and acknowledged.

  Tamsin Barraclough was the first to arrive, bringing some old broken box-files, a collection of paperbacks and two discarded dresses. She put them inside the porch and crept away like somebody propitiating a heathen god. Daphne just caught sight of her hurrying away down the drive, her long cotton skirt dragging on the gravel, her frizzy hair misted with fine rain.

  Adam Prince came next. It was not regarded as a man’s province to fetch or carry jumble, unless it was a particularly heavy object or something that needed to be collected in a car, but he didn’t count as an ordinary man who went out to work or did a ‘proper’ job, as you might say. This morning he was bringing a discarded suit of such good quality that he felt attention should be drawn to it, perhaps by hanging it on a rail as was done with the better garments, and he wanted to make quite sure that the rector’s sister realised this. Concealed in an anonymous bundle of old curtains and a faded plush tablecloth, there was also a pair of jeans, too tight and too youthful, definitely a ‘bad buy’ as the fashion writers might say. He did not want attention drawn to these and took care to place the bundle underneath another one when Daphne wasn’t looking.

  ‘So very kind,’ she murmured, admiring the suit. ‘We get very little in the way of men’s clothing.’

  Adam smiled at the word ‘clothing’, feeling that perhaps she had not intended to use it but had found herself slipping into the jumble sale jargon or vernacular, where the things one wore were known as clothing or garments rather than just clothes.

  ‘Here’s the doctor’s wife,’ said Adam on the doorstep. ‘She seems to be bringing a substantial contribution.’

  Avice Shrubsole was wheeling a shopping basket full of children’s clothes and a few of her own, with a discarded tweed jacket of her husband’s on the top. A garment belonging to the doctor might be thought to possess certain magical properties, as if a touch could heal, and Daphne was suitably grateful. But she knew that Avice had really come to take another look at the rectory, to emphasise how much too big it must be for the rector and his sister, and to contrive in some way to go upstairs and even into the bedrooms, which she had never yet managed to achieve.

  ‘Do you mind if I go to the loo?’ Avice asked bluntly, preparing to mount the staircase,

  ‘Oh, there’s a cloakroom on the left of the front door,’ said Daphne, preparing to thwart her. ‘No need to go upstairs.’

  Avice retired at the same moment as Mrs Dyer came into the room. It was her morning for doing something but she spent a good twenty minutes examining and disparaging the jumble, trying to guess who had sent what. Adam Prince’s jeans evoked a shout of raucous laughter and all the children’s clothes were criticised for some fault in the washing – woollens shrunken or felted, or the colours faded, obviously the wrong washing-powder used, insufficient attention paid to the television commercials – Daphne had heard it all before and made no comment, letting Mrs Dyer drone on until she finally exhausted the subject. Daphne then took some of the boxes of jumble into the drawing-room, a noble, shabbily furnished room, hardly suitable for the sorting of jumble, one might have thought, but nothing in the rectory was above parish work. There might be a good tweed skirt from Mrs G. and Daphne would not be ashamed to give 30p. for this and to wear it in the autumn. It would not occur to Mrs G. that the rector’s sister might one day be seen wearing her discarded clothes, they would look so different. Christabel G. might occasionally notice that Daphne was wearing a rather better skirt than usual, might even remember that she had once had a skirt in a tweed very much like that, but no further connection would be established.

  The clothes in the first box were a disappointing lot – mini, Courtelle, Acrilan and other man-made fibres, nothing ample, long or of pure wool or cotton. Daphne turned to a box of oddments – chipped cups and odd saucers suitable for cat dishes, plastic earrings, an old string of pearls with the pearliness peeling off, a tattered paperback novel whose cover portrayed the bare shoulders of a couple in bed, a bundle of knitting needles, a plastic butter-dish split at one corner, an old prayer-book with no cover and pages missing, a rusty nutmeg grater, a wrist-watch not in working order, a china animal of indeterminate sex lacking an ear, a glass ditto lacking one leg, a cracked handbag mirror, a small transistor radio, a photo-frame with a faded photograph of a person on a beach, a brooch without a pin saying ‘MOTHER’, an empty tin of hair lacquer, a dried-up pot of foundation cream, a red collar for a small dog or even a cat, a fork with the prongs bent, an old soap dish…. Nothing much here, the kind of things that nobody would buy except possibly a child with a few pence to spend, taking a fancy to some unlikely object. Then Daphne’s attention was caught by a picture framed in passe-partout, lying at the bottom of the box. It was a coloured print of a Scottie dog, looking up appealingly at its invisible master and bearing the legend ‘Thy Servant a Dog.’

  Holding the picture in her hands, Daphne stood up and moved over to the window. She was back forty years to the time of her confirmation, when her friend Heather had given her a replica of this very picture. For two girls of fifteen who loved animals it had seemed to them entirely suitable as a present for the occasion, and their headmistress had wisely made no comment. Why had she no dog now? Daphne wondered, staring bitterly out into the rain. Tom would not have objected to a dog – wouldn’t even notice – the country was obviously suitable for one. She would get a dog – why not? She would take it for walks – why had she never thought of it before? When Tom’s wife died, she had come running to his aid with no thought for herself. All these years without a dog! ‘Thy Servant a Dog,’ she murmured softly to herself, not like cats, with their cool, appraising, insolent stares. ‘Passionately fond of animals,’ was how Daphne might have described herself, if anyone had asked her, and how she now began to think of herself. Animals were better than people any day. But if she did get a dog and become devoted to it, as she undoubtedly would, what would happen to it when she went to live in Greece, would she be allowed to take it with her? What were the quarantine regulations? That might be a complication – better perhaps to wait and see how her plans developed….

  Should she just go up to the door and ring? Emma wondered. Or would it be all right to tap on the window, since the rector’s sister was standing there looking out with a faraway expression in her eyes? Had she seen her? Was she conscious that Emma was coming round to the front door with a carrier bag full of jumble?

  At that moment Daphne did see her. She put ‘Thy Servant a Dog’ back into the jumble box and came round to open the door.

  ‘Ah, you’re bringing jumble,’ she said formally, ‘won’t you come in?’

  Emma had not been into the rectory before, so although she had meant just to leave her bundle she could not resist the opportunity of a look inside the house.

  ‘I was just sorting these things….’ Daphne was glad to be interrupted and always enjoyed the company of another woman, aware that there was a comfortable feeling about it that the company of men did not provide, or at least the company of the kind of men she came into contact with, mostly her brother Tom and neighbouring clergy. Perhaps it was too narrow a sample to generalise about….

  The two women – fifties and thirties – regarded each other warily. They had met once or twice before and chatted on the field walk, though Daphne felt that Emma was too young and too different – wasn’t she some kind of scientist? – ever to become a close friend; but on this dreary morning she welcomed her.

  ‘This is just a few things,’ Emma said, revealing the contents of her carrier bag. It was embarrassing to have to display a w
orn skirt and a shrunken cardigan and one’s old underwear, even though clean. ‘I fear nobody will want to buy them,’ she said apologetically.

  ‘No,’ Daphne agreed. ‘The village women have such marvellous things now. They wouldn’t look at cast-offs – it’s we who buy them. Of course it’s all to the good,’ she added, feeling that she ought to say something on these lines. ‘There isn’t the poverty there used to be.’

  Emma hoped they might get on to another subject and cast about in her mind for something else to say. She could see that the room they were in, although disfigured by the bundles of jumble and the trestle table on which Daphne was sorting them, was a beautiful one with fine mouldings on the ceiling.

  This is your drawing-room?’ she asked. ‘It’s a lovely room.’

  ‘Well, we don’t have a drawing-room as such, but this would be it if we did. And if there’s a parish function that doesn’t take place in the hall we have it here. We might even have a jumble sale here.’ She laughed.

  There they were back at jumble again. ‘What a miserable day,’ Emma said, looking out at the dripping trees in the rectory drive.

  ‘Yes, isn’t it. It was so lovely when the daffodils were out and it really seemed as if…. I know what – how about a glass of sherry? I know Tom’s got a bottle somewhere.’

  This pathetic revelation of the state of the rector’s drink supplies caused Emma to hesitate. Tom’s ‘bottle somewhere’ might be sadly depleted when he next came to look for it. But Daphne insisted and Emma was bound to admit that it might improve the day. The last time she had sipped sherry with somebody sitting opposite her had been when Graham Pettifer had called to see her, she reflected, wondering why she was remembering it now in these very different circumstances. She was obviously not going to see him again and there was nothing memorable about the occasion. It was only the position of a table and two chairs and two people drinking sherry that had brought it into her mind again….