A Few Green Leaves Page 5

  ‘The new doctor, as we call him still,’ Daphne was saying, ‘Martin Shrubsole’ – she lingered almost lovingly on the name – ‘not Dr G.’

  ‘Oh, I think I should go to Dr G.,’ Emma said. ‘It seems the obvious thing and my mother’s always said how nice he is. One does have confidence in an older man, somehow – luckily I’m never ill, though.’

  ‘I find Dr Shrubsole so sympathetic,’ Daphne said. ‘He knew just what my trouble was. I do think it’s so important in a village to have a good doctor you have confidence in – the doctor’s really the most important person, isn’t he?’

  Emma expressed surprise. If there was no active Lord of the Manor, surely the rector was the most important person rather than the doctor?

  ‘Well, the rector’s my brother, so I suppose you can’t expect me to see it that way, being an older sister. There was a rhyme we used to say when we were children, when we were playing games, and I can’t help remembering that,

  Each a peach, a pear, a plum,

  Out goes old Tom….’

  ‘Oh, a kind of eeny, meeny, miney, mo,’ said Emma. ‘I don’t know that one.’ She repeated it to herself, smiling. ‘Out goes old Tom….’

  ‘His wife died, you know,’ Daphne said, as if explaining something. ‘Oh, it was very sad – he never got over Laura’s death, in a way. And of course I’ve had to cope, given up everything, really. I’ve always wanted to have a dog.’

  Emma looked at her, again surprised. ‘But surely you could have a dog? Living in the country, no problem about exercising it and all that, no pathetic face at the window of the flat when you went out to work….’

  It was Daphne’s turn to look surprised, her imagination unable to keep pace with Emma’s. ‘It wouldn’t have to be shut up,’ she explained. ‘I can’t think why I’ve never had one – I’m fifty-six next birthday….’

  Looking at her Emma could see that the sherry, besides loosening her tongue to reveal these intimacies, had made her rather red in the face. Presumably older women shouldn’t drink, she thought, or women of a certain age. But what might that age be?

  ‘I think I shall get a dog,’ Daphne said, when Tom came back to lunch.

  ‘A dog? Whatever for?’

  ‘Oh, you know I’ve always wanted a dog,’ she burst out.

  ‘Have you? You’ve never said so.’

  ‘Oh Tom, you know how passionately fond of animals I am – always have been.

  Tom considered this statement in silence, his memories going back to the pets of their childhood, rabbits and guinea pigs and, yes, there had been a dog once. But a child thrusting lettuce leaves through the bars of a rabbit hutch, passionately fond of animals…? He wondered about that. And all these years, if he was to believe her, Daphne had been deprived – in his selfishness he had prevented her from fulfilling her heart’s desire!

  Wandering into the drawing-room, where they sometimes had coffee after their meal, he came upon the box of jumble with ‘Thy Servant a Dog’ lying on top of it. Again his thoughts went back to childhood with some obscure memory of Daphne’s confirmation, though he could not have said why this particular object had brought it to mind. But it did make him think about the confirmation candidates of his own village and the arrangement that was to be made with the vicar of a neighbouring village to combine the two sets of classes. Tom knew in advance how it would work out – he would have to do all the work, for this particular fellow priest was skilled in the art of passing the buck. Perhaps he should ask Adam Prince’s advice – he was sure he never got landed with anything he didn’t want to do.

  Delving in the jumble box, he took up ‘Thy Servant a Dog’ and contemplated it. Hadn’t it been the title of a book by Kipling that had supplied that quotation? But Daphne wouldn’t know, so all he said to her was, ‘No reason why you shouldn’t get a dog, is there? Why don’t you do something about it?’

  8

  Martin Shrubsole was observing his mother-in-law. He sat opposite her, unconscious of the television programme that so absorbed her, yet not obviously making notes. He would not have wanted to hurt her feelings, though she was not, in his opinion, a particularly sensitive person.

  Magdalen Raven was in her late sixties, short and inclined to be overweight, though Martin had succeeded in ‘weaning’ her away from sugar in tea and coffee, so that she now carried saccharine pellets in her handbag, in a little decorative container given to her by one of her grandchildren. Martin had also forbidden her to eat butter and now a plastic tub of some polyunsaturated preparation was placed by her at meals. Avice had been instructed to provide fresh fruit instead of puddings and to discourage her mother from taking a biscuit with her elevenses. In this way Martin was fulfilling his duty as a conscientious general practitioner and prescribing for his wife’s mother just as he did for his older patients. But he did sometimes wonder whether he really wanted to preserve his mother-in-law all that much. She was a widow and Avice was her only child, and as she had now come to live with them the house was really too small for three adults and three children. At the moment it was out of the question for them to think of buying anything larger. Yet if Avice’s mother were not so well looked after and preserved, if she were allowed all the white bread, sugar, butter, cakes and puddings that her naturally depraved taste craved, if – not to mince matters or to put too fine a point on it – she were to drop down dead, the Shrubsoles would have enough money to buy a larger house. This thought, instantly stifled, had more than once occurred to Martin in the watches of the night. But, of course, after it had occurred he became even more conscientious in the preservation of his mother-in-law. He was now more than a little worried at a report in one of the Sundays that certain types of artificial sweetener (in the U.S.A. of course) had been proved to cause cancer in mice. ‘Couldn’t you try taking tea and coffee without any sweetener?’ he had suggested dutifully, but she didn’t think she would like that at all. She had been quite definite in her reply. Not even in the war had she got to like tea without sugar, as so many people had.

  Now, observing her in front of the television, wearing her new glasses, he was glad to note, her hair neatly set, her dried-up-looking hands with the short pink-varnished nails occupied with knitting for one of her grandchildren, Martin’s natural kindness came out. ‘Getting more used to those bi-focais, are you, mother?’ he asked. ‘I think you’ll find it much better, not having to keep taking your glasses off all the time when you want to read your knitting pattern.’

  Of course it was much better – everything about her son-in-law was ‘better’, Magdalen Raven knew this perfectly well. Good, better, best – and the best thing of all was that Martin had agreed that she should come and live with them now that the lease of her flat had run out – ‘share their home’, was the way people put it. She was lucky to have such a kind son-in-law, even if he wouldn’t let her eat anything she really liked – everyone was agreed on that. And if some considered that her daughter made use of her as an unpaid nanny and baby-sitter, well, she loved the grandchildren, didn’t she? What more could any woman want than to help to look after her grandchildren, her own flesh and blood after all. How many widows were so lucky? And tonight she wasn’t even having to baby-sit, because there was going to be a sherry party – a ‘drinks party’, Avice called it. Christabel Gellibrand, the wife of the old doctor, had invited Magdalen Raven, without Avice and Martin, to introduce her to a few people in the village.

  ‘Apparently she’s asked that anthropologist woman – Emma Howick – remember, we saw her in her garden and you asked who she was?’

  ‘Yes, what was she doing in the garden? I’ve forgotten.’

  ‘Well, she wasn’t doing anything,’ said Avice impatiently. ‘Just standing or picking something – it doesn’t matter. But she’s a newcomer to the village too, so it’ll be nice for you to meet her.’

  ‘And other people too, of course,’ said Martin, noticing his mother-in-law’s air of doubt. ‘The rector and his sister, I should t
hink –oh, and some ladies interested in local history. You remember we thought you might like to join up with them,’ he added hopefully, for he and Avice had the idea that her mother might be usefully occupied in copying parish registers or something of that nature which, it was thought, might help to keep her brain in good trim, ticking over, as it were, rather than endlessly knitting and watching television. Very important that, Martin felt; he always made a point of advising his older patients to cultivate some intellectual interest.

  ‘Well, that’ll be nice,’ said Magdalen, examining her nails.’ I think I’ll just re-do these – what do you think?’ She spread out her fingers.

  ‘They look fine to me,’ said Martin in a hearty tone. ‘Not chipped at all.’

  ‘Mummy, there’s no time to do your nails,’ said Avice. ‘Martin, you’ll take Mummy in the car, won’t you?’

  Martin agreed that he would, but ‘Mummy’ applied to Magdalen Raven did not come easily to him and he never used it. Nor could he bring himself to call her ‘Magdalen’, as she would have preferred. When he addressed her by name, other than just saying ‘you’, he called her ‘mother’, but that didn’t seem quite right either, for she was not and never could be ‘mother’ to him.

  It was surely better, Emma felt, not to know how one’s doctor lived, not to tread on fine Persian rugs or to glimpse delicate porcelain and exquisite glass in an antique corner cupboard. But entering the graciously furnished hall of the Gellibrands’ house –‘residence’, one might almost say – Emma was surprised to detect underneath the scent of the lavender furniture polish a faint odour of torn cat – faint, certainly, but unmistakable. Then she remembered having seen a large black and white cat emerging from a shrubbery, head held high, a bird in his mouth. Presumably an unneutered torn, which would account for the smell. And hadn’t Daphne said something about the old doctor only being interested in young people and babies and the general burgeoning of life? So he might well be against any interfering with Nature….

  And now, it seemed, having come into the house the guests were directed to go out again through the drawing-room french windows on to a lawn, and forced or driven rather than encouraged to march along by an herbaceous border, commenting, admiring, enquiring. At the end of the border the garden turned into a kind of cultivated wilderness (bulbs in the spring, now over, of course, and later bluebells, the remains of which could be still seen). Some of the guests, who had put on their best shoes in honour of the party, seemed unwilling to progress beyond the lawn into the wild garden but they were driven on by their hostess and even down a rocky path to a pool where a water-lily, showing its first bud, demanded to be admired.

  Emma, finding herself unable to comment adequately on this phenomenon, was glad to be diverted by a commotion behind her. Miss Grundy had stumbled and nearly fallen on the rocky path. She, the author of a romantic novel, had found herself in the kind of situation that might have provided a fruitful plot; but it was not the son of the house who came to her assistance or a handsome stranger but Emma, the anthropologist and observer of human behaviour. Ah, the sadness of life, she thought.

  ‘Oh, Miss Grundy, are you all right? I was afraid you were going to fall.’

  ‘It’s these shoes – if I’d realised….’

  Louis heels, they used to be called, Emma believed, as she helped Miss Grundy back up the path where Christabel G. was waiting at the top.

  ‘I told you not to wear those shoes,’ said Miss Lee to Miss Grundy, and Emma remembered how she had noticed Miss Lee’s bossiness on other occasions. She supposed that when two people lived together one must always dominate or boss – Miss Lee over Miss Grundy, Daphne over Tom, perhaps Christabel G. over Dr G. She wasn’t sure about the Shrubsoles or the Barracloughs; perhaps they had managed to achieve an equal partnership, though she suspected that Avice might boss her husband.

  There was a general air of relief to be safely back indoors, for the party to begin ‘properly’. A quick glance round the room told Emma that it was not a very interesting gathering, or at least it did not look to be, for most of the people standing round, clutching glasses of sherry or hoping to be offered one, were elderly and did not betray the fact that they might have led distinguished lives. She had heard that Mrs G. liked to give several parties each year and to divide her guests into suitable categories. She was not at all sure, even with her anthropological training, how this one should be classified. It might be that it was to serve as a warning to younger newcomers like herself and the Barracloughs – Emma had just seen Robbie and Tamsin enter the room – to remind them that they would be expected to keep their place, without attempting to make any changes or meddle with the traditions of village life as established by people like Mrs G. Or it could be just a gesture of welcome to newcomers, for she had noticed the young doctor’s mother-in-law among the guests.

  Emma saw that Mrs Dyer was in attendance, hovering with plates of crisps and small ‘cocktail savouries’. As if to mark her appearance in a slightly different role, she had modified her dress for the occasion and was wearing a bright blue nylon overall and a smarter hat than usual, a maroon felt with a paste ornament in the form of an anchor. ‘Fierce was the wild billow, dark was the night,’ Emma thought, remembering a hymn from school days. ‘Oars laboured heavily, foam glimmered white….’

  Mrs Dyer thrust a plate towards her but Emma was loth to start eating before she had a glass in her hand and drink had not yet been offered to her. Standing uneasily – for no glass at all is even more awkward at a party than an empty glass – she suffered only a moment’s embarrassment, for the rector, ‘poor Tom’, as she now found herself thinking of him, was at her side and offering her sherry.

  ‘Dr G. has his hands full,’ he explained, ‘and Mrs Dyer doesn’t really understand the first necessity at a party.’

  Emma was grateful but the feeling wore off when he began to ask her about her ‘work’ and she was forced to explain about the urban study she had completed, and that led on to him asking her whether she intended to make a study of the village, the sort of question, half joking, that always followed when people knew what she did.

  ‘I suppose I could study the village,’ she said, ‘but first of all I’d want to know what sort of a party this is – I believe there are various categories.’

  Tom was a little taken aback by her frank way of speaking and hardly knew what to say. He did not like to tell Emma that the party on this occasion was not so much to welcome newcomers – though it was that in a sense – as to sort out in a social way sheep from goats and pick out various likely people to ‘do’ things in the village, above all to assist in the flower festival which Christabel was organising in the church. He could see her now, tall, thin and somehow menacing in her expensive flowered silk dress, peering about her like a bird about to swoop. He tried to melt into the background as Christabel bore down on Emma.

  ‘Let me see now,’ her voice rang out authoritatively, ‘you were at Somerville, weren’t you?’

  ‘No,’ said Emma. She hardly liked to say that she had taken her degree at the London School of Economics but did add that she was an anthropologist.

  ‘Oh.’ Christabel brushed aside anthropology and all its possible implications. ‘Can you arrange flowers?’ she asked.

  ‘I suppose so….’

  ‘Surely all ladies can arrange flowers,’ said Adam Prince, sidling up to the little group.

  ‘I’m thinking of the flower festival, of course,’ said Christabel.

  She had ‘good bones’, Emma thought, and had obviously once been beautiful – the worm in the bud, though that wasn’t the kind of thought one could put into words at a sherry party. No doubt the mention of flowers had suggested the bud and the worm in it….

  ‘So often in a cottage,’ Adam Prince went on, ‘one sees a simple bunch of wild flowers stuck into a jam jar.’

  ‘Oh, Mr Prince, we shall want rather more than that,’ said Christabel in a jovial tone. ‘Dr Shrubsole’s mother-in-
law is going to help – she seems very keen. A nice little person – we must try to bring her into things now that she’s come to live among us.’

  ‘Yes, indeed,’ said Tom, feeling that this was directed at him. He did not reveal that he was hoping to enlist Mrs Raven as a helper in some of his local history researches. A meek woman of retirement age could be of inestimable value, and he was glad to see that she was now deep in conversation with Miss Lee and Miss Grundy. They might even be discussing one of the ‘projects’ on which Mrs Raven might work.

  ‘I’ll always remember that Sunday morning,’ Magdalen Raven was saying. ‘Mr Chamberlain was to speak on the wireless – as we called it in those days – and my husband – of course he was alive then – kept saying that appeasement would never work. He always said Hitler wasn’t to be trusted and of course he was quite right.’

  ‘And the evacuees,’ Miss Grundy broke in eagerly, ‘do you remember the evacuees, and that mother who just sat up in bed smoking!’

  ‘People smoked a lot in those days,’ said Magdalen, almost with regret. ‘Such funny cigarettes we had – do you remember Tenners, in a blue packet?’ Smoking was, of course, another pleasure forbidden by her son-in-law. There were no ash-trays in the house.

  ‘They used to say Hitler couldn’t stand a long war,’ said Miss Lee, ‘but it seemed to go on such a long time, with that school in the manor and none of the family here in the village.’

  ‘The family?’ Magdalen asked.

  ‘Yes, the girls and Miss Vereker, their governess, still trying to keep the mausoleum in order.