A Day in the Life of a Smiling Woman Page 17

  Oh dear, thought Elsa Palmer to herself. What a shame. She wanted him to stop, to go away at once. But what right had she to stop him? He must belong to the Mill House, he was clearly fulfilling his horticultural obligations to his absentee employers.

  Slowly, as she sat and watched him, the full extent of the disaster began to sink in. Not only was her solitude invaded, not only had she been observed asleep by a total stranger, but this total stranger was even now in the act of cutting back the very foliage, the very grasses that had so pleased her. She watched him at work. He scythed and sawed. He raked and bundled. Could he see her watching him? It made her feel uncomfortable, to watch this old man at work, in the afternoon, on a hot day, as she sat idling with Margery Allingham on a rug. She would have to get up and go. Her paddock was ruined, at least for this afternoon. Furtively she assembled her possessions and began to creep away back to the house. But he spotted her. From the corner of the triangle, a hundred yards and more away, he spotted her. He saluted her with an axe and called to her. ‘Nice day,’ he called. ‘Not disturbing you, am I?’

  ‘No, no, of course not,’ she called back, faintly, edging away, edging back towards the little wooden bridge. Stealthily she retreated. He had managed to hack only a few square yards; it was heavy going, it would take him days, weeks to finish off the whole plot …

  Days, weeks. That evening, trapped in her front garden, on her forecourt, she saw him cross her bridge, within yards of her, several times, with his implements, with his wheelbarrows full of rubbish. She had not dared to pour herself a gin and tonic; it did not seem right. Appalled, she watched him, resisting her impulse to hide inside her own house. On his final journey, he paused with his barrow. ‘Hot work,’ he said, mopping his brow. He was a terrible old man, gnarled, brown, toothless, with wild white hair. ‘Yes, hot work,’ she faintly agreed. What was she meant to do? Offer him a drink? Ask him in? Make him a pot of tea? He stood, resting on his barrow, staring at her.

  ‘Not in your way, am I?’ he asked.

  She shook her head.

  ‘On your own, are you?’ he asked. She nodded, then shook her head. ‘A peaceful spot,’ he said.

  ‘Yes,’ she said.

  ‘I’ll be back in the morning,’ he said. But, for the moment, did not move. Elsa stood, transfixed. They stared at one another. Then he sighed, bent down to tweak out a weed from the gravel, and moved slowly, menacingly on.

  Elsa was shattered. She retired into her house and poured herself a drink, more for medicine than pleasure. Could she trust him to have gone? What if he had forgotten something? She lurked indoors for twenty minutes, miserably. Then, timidly, ventured out. She crept back across the bridge to inspect the damage he had done at the far end of the paddock. Well, he was a good workman. He had made an impression on nature; he had hacked and tidied to much effect. Cut wood glared white, severed roots in the river bank bled, great swathes of grass and flowers and sedge lay piled in a heap. He had made a devastation. And at this rate, it would take him a week, a fortnight, to work his way round. To level the lot. If that was his intention, which it must be. I’ll be back in the morning, he had said. Distractedly plucking at sedges, she tried to comfort herself. She could go for walks, she could amuse herself further afield, she could lie firmly in her deckchair on the little front lawn. She had a right. She had paid. It was her holiday.

  Pond sedge. Carex acutiformis. Or great pond sedge, Carex riparia? She gazed at the flower book, as night fell. It did not seem to matter much what kind of sedge it was. Carnation sedge, pale sedge, drooping sedge. As Philip would have said, who cared? Elsa drooped. She drooped with disappointment.

  Over the next week the disappointment intensified. Her worst fears were fulfilled. Day by day, the terrible old man returned with his implements, to hack and spoil and chop. She had to take herself out, in order not to see the ruination of her little kingdom. She went for long walks, along white chalky ridges, through orchid-spotted shadows, through scrubby little woods, past fields of pigs, up Roman camps, along the banks of other rivers, as her own river was steadily and relentlessly stripped and denuded. Every evening she crept out to inspect the damage. The growing green diminished, retreated, shrank. She dreaded the sight of the old man with the scythe. She dreaded the intensity of her own dread. Her peace of mind was utterly destroyed. She cried, in the evenings, and wished she had a television set to keep her company. At night she dreamed of Philip. In her dreams he was always angry, he shouted at her and mocked her, he was annoyed beyond the grave.

  I am going mad, she told herself, as the second week began, as she watched the old man once more cross the little bridge, after the respite of Sunday. I must have been mad already, to let so small a thing unbalance me. And I thought I was recovering. I thought I could soon be free. But I shall never be free, when so small a thing can destroy me.

  She felt cut to the root. The sap bled out. She would be left a dry low stalk.

  I might as well die, she said to herself, as she tried to make herself look again at her flower book, at her Pevsner, at her old companions. No others would she ever have, and these had now failed her.

  Worst of all were the old man’s attempts at conversation. He liked to engage her, despite her obvious reluctance, and she, as though mesmerized, could not bring herself to avoid him. It was the banality of these conversational gambits that delayed her recognition of his identity, his identification. They misled her. For he was an old bore, ready to comment on the weather, the lateness of the bus, the cricket. Elsa Palmer had no interest in cricket, did not wish to waste time conversing with an old man about cricket, but found herself doing so nevertheless. For ten minutes at a time she would listen to him as he rambled on about names that meant nothing to her, about matches of yesteryear. Why was she so servile, so subdued? What was this extremity of fear that gripped her as she listened?

  He was hacking away her own life, this man with a scythe. Bundling it up, drying it out for the everlasting bonfire. But she did not let herself think this. Not yet.

  It was on the last evening of his hacking and mowing that Elsa Palmer defeated the old man. She had been anticipating his departure with mixed feelings, for when he had finished the paddock would be flat and he would be victorious. He would have triumphed over Nature, he would depart triumphant, this old man of the river bank.

  She saw him collect his implements for the last time, saw him pause with his wheelbarrow for the last time. Finished, now, for the year, he said. A good job done. Feebly, she complimented him, thinking of the poor shaven discoloured pale grass, the amputated stumps of the hedgerow. For the last time they discussed the weather and the cricket. He bade her goodbye, wished her a pleasant holiday. She watched him trundle his barrow through the gate, and across the road, and on, up the hillside, to the farm. He receded. He had gone.

  And I, thought Elsa, am still alive.

  She leaned on the gate and breathed deeply. She gathered her courage. She summoned all her strength.

  I am still alive, thought Elsa Palmer. Philip is dead, but I, I have survived the Grim Reaper.

  And it came to her as she stood there in the early evening light that the old man was not Death, as she had feared, but Time. Old Father Time. He is the one with the scythe. She had feared that the old man was Death calling for her, as he had called for Philip, but no, he was only Time, Time friendly, Time continuing, Time healing. What had he said, of the paddock? ‘Finished for the year,’ he had said. But already, even now at this instant, it was beginning to grow again, and next June it would be as dense, as tangled, as profuse as ever, awaiting his timely, friendly scythe. Not Death, but Time. Similar, but not identical. She had named him, she had identified him, she had recognized him, and he had gone harmlessly away, leaving her in possession of herself, of her place, of her life. She breathed deeply. The sap began to flow. She felt it flow in her veins. The frozen water began to flow again under the bridge. The trout darted upstream. Yes, Old Father Time, he is the one with the
scythe. Death is that other one. Death is the skeleton. Already, the grass was beginning to grow, the forget-me-nots and green alkanets were recovering.

  Rejoicing, she went indoors, to her flower book. It glowed in the lamplight, it lived again. She settled down, began to turn the pages. Yes, there they were, forget-me-not, green alkanet – and what about brooklime? Was it a borage or a speedwell? She gazed at the colour plates, reprieved, entranced. Widespread and common in wet places. She turned the pages of her book, naming names. Time had spared her, Time had trundled his scythe away. Philip had been quite wrong, wrong all along. Elsa smiled to herself in satisfaction. Philip was dead because he had failed to recognize his adversary. Death had taken him by surprise, death unnamed, unrecognized, unlabelled. Lack of recognition had killed Philip. Whereas I, said Elsa, I have conversed with and been spared by the Grim Reaper.

  She turned the pages, lovingly. Carex acutiformis, Carex riparia. Tomorrow she would get to grips with the sedges. There were still plenty left, at the far end of the paddock, in the difficult corner by the overhanging alder. Tomorrow she would go and pick some specimens. And maybe, when she went back to Cambridge, she would enrol for that autumn course on Italian Renaissance Art and Architecture. She didn’t really know much about iconography, but she could see that it had its interest. Well, so did everything, of course. Everything was interesting.

  She began to wish she had not been so mean, so unfriendly. She really ought to have offered that old man a cup of tea.

  (1989)

  11

  The Dower House at Kellynch: A Somerset Romance

  It is not always easy to distinguish attachment to person from attachment to property. I know it is widely held that Elizabeth was joking when she declared that she fell in love with Darcy when first she saw Pemberley. I used to think so myself. Now I am not so sure. Let me tell you my story, and you may make your own judgement. I have yet to make mine.

  They call it the Dower House, but really it is nothing of the sort. It once fulfilled the function of a dower house, some time in the last century, the period at which the façade looking down over the pleasure gardens had been refurbished. One of the always more or less unfortunate Lady Elliots (or had it been a Lady Bridgewater?) was said to have been secluded there, and the improvements had been made for her benefit. The terrace with its Gothic alcoves, the urns and the sundial, the rounded finials on the roof had been added at this time, but it was no more a dower house than nearby Uppercross Cottage was a cottage. Both were renovated farmhouses. Uppercross Cottage, incidentally, is now known as The Elms, after the unfortunate whim of an early twentieth-century owner who decided the word cottage was inappropriate for so substantial a residence. The elms are all dead, of Dutch elm disease, but the name remains. It is a happy house and well maintained. It belongs to an architect from Taunton. His children and grandchildren play table tennis on the verandah in the summer evenings.

  The Dower House is neither happy nor well maintained. But it is beautiful.

  I fell in love with it at first sight. I was taken there by my friend Rose with whom I was staying at her farm on Exmoor. I did not know Somerset well, and we had spent a pleasant few days, walking, swimming in the icy River Barle, looking at churches and country houses. Rose was working on the illustrations for a book of European pond and river plants, and we collected specimens. On the whole we kept our own company, talking over our own affairs – I was still giddy with relief at having not long left my cad of a husband, she was involved with a philandering philosopher – but one evening she arranged for us to go over to Kellynch for dinner.

  As we left the chalky uplands and descended into the red deeps, driving through increasingly narrow, high-banked purple-flowering lanes of foxglove and rosebay, Rose told me its history. Ever since some early Elliot had been obliged to let the Hall, at the beginning of the last century, the property had been hedged with difficulties. There had been a scandalous liaison round the time of Waterloo, which had scattered illegitimate children through the country, followed – or perhaps accompanied – by a marriage which had promised well, the bride being a Bridgewater and wealthy. But it had ended in long drawn out disaster. The Bridgewaters figured well in Debretts but not in other organs of record. They were, not to beat about the bush, said Rose, barmy. The duties and dignities of a resident landowner had appealed neither to Elliots nor to Bridgewaters. But they had hung on there, as the estate fell to pieces. During the Second World War Kellynch Hall had been requisitioned as an Officers Training Centre and it had never recovered. It was now a Field Study Centre. She herself occasionally taught a course of botanical drawing there.

  Yes, she said, slowing to avoid a pheasant, accelerating to overtake a tractor, there had been dramas. There had been suicides and incarcerations. The men drank and the women wept. The cold blood of the Elliots had mingled disastrously with the black blood of the Bridgewaters. One bride had thrown herself from an upper storey of Kellynch Hall on her wedding night: she had been caught in the arms of the great magnolia tree and had lingered on, an invalid. A daughter had taken her brother’s shotgun and blown out her brains on Dunkery Beacon. A son had drowned himself in the pond. When the pond was drained, in the 1920s, said Rose, it was found to contain a deposit of bottles of claret both empty and full: old Squire William, the one who had sold off Parsonage Farm and the woods beyond Barton, had been in the habit of wandering down there of an evening, sometimes drunk, sometimes in a frenzy of remorse. In either state he had thrown bottles. The tench had thrived on them: never had such vast fish been seen. There was one stuffed on show in the Hall.

  With such legends she entertained me as we drove westward. The present owner of the estate, Bill Elliot, with whom we were to dine, was now in his late thirties. His father, Thomas Elliot, had been a military man and had fought in the desert with Montgomery of Alamein, but the peace had disagreed with him and he had come home to drink himself to death, dying of cirrhosis of the liver in his sixties. Bill had inherited a property that was mortgaged, entailed and ill starred. Oppressed by this legacy, he had made a brief stay of execution by hiring the house, parkland and pleasure gardens to a film company for a costume movie. This venture had turned out well, for his dowerless sister Henrietta had insisted on appearing as an extra in the hunting sequence, had taken a nasty fall and had been wooed on her sickbed in Taunton Hospital by one of the film’s more portly and substantial stars, who had married her. Did I know Binkie? Maybe I had seen him as a bishop in the latest Trollope series? He was really rather good.

  But one cannot live off one windfall. And so Kellynch Hall had been let to the Field Study Centre on a 99-Year Maintaining and Repairing Lease. The Elliots had washed their hands of it. Bill was now camping out in the Dower House. I would like him, she hoped.

  I wondered. As I struggled with the heavy metal latch of a broken-down five-barred gate – for it seemed we were to drive down a cart track to Kellynch – I struggled also with my feelings about the English land and its owners. I come, though I trust you cannot detect this, from the lower middle classes, to whom property is important – but by property we mean the freehold of a suburban house with a garden where you can hang out the washing, not farms and tenancies and arable acres. The Elliots of old would not have acknowledged the existence of my category of person. To them we did not signify. And now it was they who hung on by a thread. Kellynch Lodge, which had once belonged to the Russells, was owned by an absentee Canadian newspaper proprietor, and the Vicarage by a designer of computer software. Trade and the middle classes had triumphed.

  Even Rose, who had done her best to declassify herself, sometimes annoyed me. She worked for her living, after a somewhat haphazard manner, but she carried with her the assumptions of a gentlewoman. She assumed I knew things I did not know, people I did not know. She lives in a world which I know largely through literature. I am the second-hand person, the ventriloquist. She is the real thing.

  I relatched the gate with difficulty, got back into
the car, and we edged carefully down what I now realized was not a cart track but an avenue of oaks leading towards Kellynch Hall. This had been the grand approach, and the trees, though some were stag-crested, were grand still: but they had returned so much to nature that the formality of their planting, ordained by some Elliot four centuries ago, was not at once apparent. They had been reabsorbed into the landscape, as had the great sweet chestnuts of the park boundary. Soft lumps of honey fungus sprouted from the old wood. The gold of a field of barley rose to our right. There was a hint of autumn fullness in the August air.

  We descended, past the Big House, down the curved drive, through what had been the stable courtyard, to the Dower House. The melancholy deepened and tears stood in my eyes. I had never seen anywhere so beautiful in my life. Pink peeling walls, grey-yellow lichen-encrusted stone, single white roses, white doves. It had reached the moment before decay that is perfection.

  Bill Elliot, too, was in his own way perfect. Decay had hardly touched him, though perhaps his hair was very slightly receding. He was extremely good looking – the Elliots are famed for their good looks. He was of no more than middle height, with the blue eyes, fair tanned skin, fine blond hair, regular features and open yet quizzical look of the beleaguered late twentieth-century English country gentleman. He was wearing a pair of moss-stained trousers rolled up to the knee and a limp blue shirt lacking most of its buttons. He put himself out to charm me, and I was charmed. I felt that it was a privilege to meet him. It was fortunate for me that he was not my type, I told myself.

  It was a memorable evening. Bill’s estranged wife Penny, who now lived with a trout farmer at Winthrop, had come over to join us. She had not brought the trout farmer. There was one other couple, a doctor who worked in Bristol and her husband, an ornamental blacksmith. Bill did the cooking, on an old-fashioned temperamental solid-fuel kitchen range which I was to get to know all too well. He made us a risotto, with a mixture of field mushrooms and slices of sulphurous yellow growth called Chicken-of-the-Woods. He said he would show me where it grew. It was delicious. We ate Somerset cheese, and salad, and blackberries and cream.