(12/13) The Year at Thrush Green Page 11

  Little Miss Fogerty, at the other side of the table, rallied to Alan Lester's defence. She knew how much dear Dorothy missed her position as a respected headmistress, but she saw no reason why she should find fault with her excellent successor.

  'You must admit, Dorothy, that the invitations are easier to read. And I believe that the parents raised the money for the copier. I think it is a good idea.'

  'Would you pass the marmalade?' enquired Dorothy somewhat coldly.

  There was silence for a few minutes, broken only by the crunching of toast.

  'You're quite right, dear,' said Miss Watson at last. 'I must say I am looking forward so much to our visit. Isobel asked if I would be willing to judge the children's fancy dress competition at the fête. Alan Lester had broached the subject.'

  Miss Fogerty recognized this speech as an overture of reconciliation and forbore to tell her friend that Isobel had already mentioned the matter to her in a recent telephone conversation. The two had been friends since college days, and the fact that they had been neighbours at Thrush Green had strengthened the tie.

  'I do hope you will do it,' said Miss Fogerty. 'You are quite the right person to appreciate the work and ingenuity that goes into these affairs.'

  'I don't know about that,' replied Dorothy, with unusual modesty, 'but I shall do my best, and hope that Thrush Green will forgive any shortcomings.'

  'I'm just going to have a look at some cuttings in the cold frame,' said Agnes Fogerty folding her napkin. 'I promised Isobel some slips from our shrubs, and I must say they are looking very perky.'

  'You have green fingers, Agnes,' said Dorothy kindly, propping up the invitation on the mantelpiece. 'And a much more generous nature than I have.'

  But the second comment, though strongly felt, she kept to herself.

  Willie Marchant, the postman, dropped three letters through Albert Piggott's door one sunny morning and, as usual, it was Nelly who bent to pick them up.

  Two were addressed to Albert, and looked like run-of-the-mill circulars, but the third was addressed to Nelly, in a hand she did not recognize immediately.

  It was quite heavy and bulky, and Nelly saw that the postmark bore the stamp of Leicester. She slipped it into her apron pocket, out of sight of Albert, and handed him the two which were addressed to him. He gave them scant attention.

  'More rubbish!' was his only comment.

  Nelly did not open her letter until she was safely in the office at the Fuchsia Bush. To her surprise, a cellophane bag containing a gold chain was enclosed with a letter from Mrs Butler, Charlie's landlady.

  The letter read:

  Dear Mrs Piggott,

  Charlie asked me to send you this as a little keepsake. It belonged to his mother, and it is real gold. He hoped you would like it to remind you of happy times past.

  The letter was signed with Mrs Butler's shaky scrawl, and Nelly undid the present with mixed emotions.

  The long necklace slid out of its wrapping. Nelly knew gold when she saw it, and this was certainly the real thing. It was of Victorian design, quite heavy, and well over two feet in length.

  Her first feeling was that it was too valuable for her to accept. Her second was that it was typical of Charlie's generosity, and that she was overwhelmed by it.

  Remembering her last glimpse of Charlie, shabby and almost destitute, she wondered that he had not sold such a valuable object. But it was also typical of him to have kept something of his mother's which he prized on her account.

  Nelly sat alone in the quiet office, remembering those days with Charlie. They had ended in Brighton with the deepest humiliation and hurt that she had ever suffered. Even now, the remembrance made her shudder and feel sick.

  When he had thrown her over for another woman, and Nelly had no alternative but to return to Thrush Green and the recriminations, and probably rejection of Albert, she would never forget that long miserable journey home, shaken by Charlie's treachery and fearful for what lay ahead. Although Albert was remarkably forbearing, contenting himself with a few wounding words now and again, the general disapproval of her neighbours was harder to bear. Nelly knew that in such a close-knit community her shame would never be completely forgotten. But her natural exuberance and hard work gradually overcame the censure of her neighbours, and as the years had passed, Nelly's back-slidings, if not quite forgotten, were almost quite forgiven.

  Nelly picked up the beautiful chain. Dear Charlie, she thought fondly! She still had a soft spot in her heart for the scamp, and she would treasure this generous gesture from her dead lover.

  She slipped it over her head, tucking it under her blouse so that it was hidden. It slid down between her ample breasts, cold but strangely comforting.

  News of the apprehension of the owners of the dog Bruce was annoyingly short. The local paper, which all had expected to give exciting accounts of the miscreants, had let down its avid public badly.

  Normally, any mention of Lulling or its surrounding villages and their inhabitants merited a paragraph or two. In fact, one of its endearing qualities was the ability to find some local connection, however remote.

  Harold Shoosmith always enjoyed this aspect of the local paper. Having read the obituary of a bishop one morning in The Times, he was delighted to find half a column in the local paper claiming that the bishop's younger brother had once been mayor of Lulling.

  On another occasion a famous but fickle actress, whose latest peccadilloes were making headlines in the national press, was given prominence and a photograph in the local paper because she had opened a church bazaar in Lulling some three years earlier.

  So it was even more galling to its faithful readers to find that there was next to nothing about those dreadful people who had pinched masses of money, done a bunk to Bolivia or Peru or one of those fancy places where criminals went and, worse still, had left a poor starving dog tied up in their church porch.

  Instead of a half-page of juicy reading, there was a meagre paragraph stating that the police were investigating certain allegations about the appropriation of missing funds from a number of companies in the area.

  'Never a word about Bruce and Miss Dotty,' cried Betty Bell indignantly. 'I've half a mind to give up having it, except you have to look down the deaths every week to keep upsides with things. My mum never got over meeting an old school friend in Lulling one market day and asking her, jolly-like, if her Fred still liked his pint, and the woman burst into tears and said he'd died the week before. She didn't tell my mum at the time, but he'd choked on a mouthful of rum. Since then I've always had a quick quiz at the deaths. No point in upsetting people.'

  'Quite,' agreed Harold, moving three letters he was trying to answer from the path of Betty's duster flailing round his desk.

  'Tell you what, though,' said Betty, suddenly still, 'I'm going over to my sister's at the weekend, and she has that Hampshire paper. Maybe it's got something in it as those bounders lived that way, didn't they? Time they was caught and strung up, leaving that poor animal like that.'

  Harold was then left in peace as Betty continued her duties in the hall. It seemed, he thought with some amusement, that the fugitives were already condemned before trial, and that by far the greatest of the charges they might have to face in the future was the abandonment of the dog Bruce, which was of paramount importance in the eyes of Thrush Green.

  He returned to his letter-writing, putting Betty's indignation against unsatisfactory local papers and callous dog owners out of his mind until she arrived some days later waving another local paper triumphantly.

  'Here you are! A lovely bit in it, page three, and a photo too. You can keep it, as I've had a good read of it. For two pins I'd show it to our lot so they could see how a proper paper should be.'

  Harold thanked her and put it aside to read later. Certainly some enterprising editor had sent his reporter to the place where the missing couple had lived, and the result had been most satisfactory from the readers' point of view.

 
A garrulous old lady, of formidable appearance according to the accompanying photograph, had kept the key of the missing pair's house and generally looked after affairs in their absence.

  'Mrs Ivy Potts, 74' began the account, causing Harold to wonder, yet again, why newspaper editors imagined that the ages of those mentioned in their columns were of the slightest interest to readers.

  Carrying on, after this momentary mental pause, Harold discovered that the aged Mrs Potts had been struck dumb when she found the place deserted. A note had been left on the kitchen table with a week's wages, and she had been told to carry on as usual until further notice.

  After a week with no word ('not even on the telephone') she became worried. For one thing, the milk was getting too much for reasonable consumption and it seemed a wicked waste to pour it down the sink with all those starving people in Africa you saw on the telly, and there was a stack of papers, the sort you couldn't really read, especially that pink one which was all figures, which her employers seemed to read most of all.

  But she was worried most about the dog, she told the reporter. (Thrush Green would like Mrs Potts, thought Harold, reading avidly.) Of course, they might have taken it with them. On the other hand, it might have run off and got killed. She felt she ought to tell the police, and they said she had been quite right when she went to the police station. From now on it was up to them, concluded Mrs Ivy Potts, 74.

  Harold agreed, as he folded the newspaper with satisfaction.

  Albert Piggott was normally the most unobservant of men when it came to the appearance of womenfolk. He did, however, notice the gold chain which Nelly had hung over her best blouse before going out with Mrs Jenner and Mrs Hodge, formerly Mrs Lilly, to spend an evening at bingo.

  'Where'd you get that thing?' enquired Albert suspiciously.

  'What, this?' exclaimed Nelly, with assumed casualness. 'Why, it was sent with that mail order as come last week. Free gift, you know.'

  'Trumpery stuff!' grunted Albert. 'A sprat to catch a mackerel. Just hopin' you'd spend good money buying more fal-de-lals.'

  'Well, I don't ask you to pay for 'em,' said Nelly tartly. 'So I'll wear what I like!'

  There was a knock at the door, and her two friends were outside, waiting for her to join them.

  Halfway through the evening there was a break for refreshments, and Mrs Jenner admired Nelly's chain as they drank coffee.

  Nelly repeated the tale she had told Albert, but was beginning to wonder if she should ever display Charlie's last gift in public. Until this evening she had kept it hidden under her clothes, relishing its secret comfort. Tonight she had felt a desire to wear it openly before her friends, proud of its beauty. But Albert's questioning, and now Mrs Jenner's interest, made her uneasy, and she resolved that this would be the last time she would display it.

  'They make things really marvellously these days,' commented Mrs Jenner. 'That necklace could pass for real gold anywhere, I do declare. And how,' she went on, leaving the subject, 'is poor Mrs Peters?'

  'A sad sight,' said Nelly. 'I dread what I might find every time I go in.'

  'Would she like me to pay her a visit?' asked Mrs Jenner. 'Not professionally, of course. I wouldn't want to be in the way of her proper nurse, but just a short friendly visit, say.'

  Nelly said that she was sure the invalid would enjoy a visit. They were called back to their tables, and hopes of fortune to come put the matter of Nelly's new necklace to one side.

  But later that night, after Mrs Jenner and Mrs Hodge had seen Nelly into her home and were continuing along the dark Nidden road to their own abodes, the subject of Nelly's chain cropped up again.

  'I've never had a free gift like that,' said Gladys Hodge. 'Most I've ever had was those things you find stuck on the cover of your women's magazines like a phial of scent or a nail file.'

  'It certainly looked very nice on Nelly,' said Mrs Jenner diplomatically. She was almost sure that the chain was made of gold, for she had one very like it, of Victorian design, which she had inherited from her mother.

  'Yes,' agreed Gladys, still sounding puzzled. 'It looked so real, didn't it? But where would Nelly get a valuable necklace like that if it was real?'

  Mrs Jenner, who had learnt to be discreet during her years as the local midwife, was not prepared to pursue the matter further. Her own conjectures she intended to keep to herself. However Nelly acquired the chain was her own affair, and that was that. She had no intention of starting a rumour which might upset her friend Nelly.

  The two stopped at the Hodges' gate.

  'Care to come in for a drink?' invited Gladys.

  But Mrs Jenner declined, pleading tiredness and a longing for her bed.

  'I've just thought,' said Gladys excitedly, as she was about to open her gate. 'That necklace of Nelly's might have come from Mrs Peters. They tell me she's been giving away one or two keepsakes to friends and relations, poor soul. Knows she hasn't got much longer, I hear. She'd want Nelly to have something, wouldn't she?'

  'It's a possibility,' agreed Mrs Jenner, glad that her friend had found some answer to her queries.

  'Well, goodnight then,' cried Gladys. 'See you soon.'

  She vanished up the path to the back door of the farmhouse, and Mrs Jenner, keeping her own counsel, went thankfully to her bed.

  July

  We were greatly amused by a Country Dancing

  School. They kickit and jumpit with mettle

  extraordinary, and whiskit and friskit, and toed

  it and go'd it, tattooing the floor like mad.

  John Keats

  Alan Lester, the headmaster of Thrush Green primary school, was a fair-minded man and believed in letting his staff have as much freedom as was compatible with the good running of the school.

  But during the preparations for the school's Open Day his toleration was being sorely tried by the noise from the infants' room.

  Miss Robinson, who had begun her teaching career under Miss Watson's tutelage, was an enthusiastic dancer, and encouraged her young charges to excel in bending and stretching, pointing toes, waving arms and legs, and generally pursuing all those exercises which would add grace and beauty to youthful deportment.

  She soon realized that she would have to modify her aims. Young children, particularly sturdy country ones, are apt to fall over when asked to stand on one leg with the other stretched gracefully behind. Ballet-like arm movements, in a confined space, can lead to clashes with neighbouring bodies followed by recriminations.

  Very sensibly Miss Robinson accepted that her pupils' dancing ability was limited, but she turned her attention to the type of dancing which they enjoyed and which, she hoped, would lead them to more artistic heights.

  The simpler rhythm and movement of country dancing suited her aims perfectly. The clapping, the stamping, the twirling and the whirling were greatly enjoyed by her class, and she had spent the last few weeks of the summer term rehearsing three particularly noisy and energetic examples of such dancing.

  These dances had originated in middle Europe, and poor harassed Alan Lester in a neighbouring classroom began to wonder if perennial troubles in the Balkans and the surrounding areas might not have their roots in the aggressive expression of the inhabitants' infant years. There was a ruthless militarism about the sounds which caused the classrooms' flimsy partitions to shudder under the onslaught, and Alan did his best to encourage Miss Robinson to rehearse her charges in the playground, at the end farthest from the school, whenever the weather allowed.

  The whole school looked forward to showing parents and friends the results of its yearly labours, and Alan was secretly very proud of its achievements. He knew the school was doing well under his guidance, and hoped that Miss Watson and Miss Fogerty, in the company of parents and old pupils, would approve of their school in its present form.

  This inner confidence gave Alan the ability to suffer the infants' zealous endeavours with mitigated pain.

  In any case, he told himself, it would
soon be the end of term, and he and his wife and family could relax in Wales.

  Two postmen delivered letters and packets to Thrush Green and both were called Willie. It was Willie Marchant who liked to test his own and his bicycle's strength on the steep hill from Lulling to Thrush Green. Willie Bond preferred to dismount and push his bicycle up the hill, as did most of his fellows.

  Willie Marchant liked to tack from one side to the other, puffing heavily, and causing great alarm to any traffic on the road. The screeching of brakes, the horrified faces looking through car windows, perturbed Willie Marchant not at all.

  'I bin doing it all me time,' he was wont to say. 'They knows my ways, and it's up to folks to look out for me. I ain't gettin' off for nobody. I got enough right to be on the highway as the next.'

  It was Willie Marchant who delivered an air-mail letter to Ben and Molly Curdle one bright summer morning, and they settled down to read it in their kitchen. They knew it was from Carl, and both hoped that it would give news of his arrival in time for the fête, which he hoped to attend.

  But the news was sad.

  Dear Molly and Ben,

  I am sorry to have to tell you that my mother died last week. She had a severe heart attack and was rushed to hospital, but died that night. I am badly shaken, and don't mind admitting it.

  She was delighted with your letter and photos, Molly dear. So glad she was well enough to enjoy them.

  My visit to Thrush Green must be postponed as I have a mass of my mother's affairs to attend to, but I will keep you informed about plans, and you can guess how much I look forward to seeing you both again.

  As ever,

  Carl.

  'Poor old lady,' sighed Molly, putting down the letter.

  'Poor old Carl,' commented Ben. He remembered his own devastation when his grandmother, old Mrs Curdle, had died. He sympathized deeply with Carl's grief at such a time, and wished that he and Molly could be with him.