Thrush Green Page 5

  The gurgle of water from the bathroom pipes brought Mrs. Bailey back to her duties. She looked again at her shopping list. Should she add liver, and make a casserole of liver and tomatoes for the doctor's lunch? It would be particularly nourishing, and she could put baked potatoes into the oven, which he loved. And while the oven was on she might as well make an egg custard, and perhaps she would put in a plum crumble top to go with it. In which case, Mrs. Bailey told herself, it would be sensible to make a really large amount of shortbread mixture so that she could make two tins ready for teatime.

  At this point in her housewifely maneuvers Mrs. Bailey caught sight of a wood pigeon on the lawn, its opal feathers glinting in the sunshine and its coral feet wet with the dew. All Mrs. Bailey's good intentions dropped from her.

  She would go out into this glorious morning. To salve her conscience she would walk down to Lulling and take her frock to the cleaner's, and she would buy some ham and tongue and salad for lunch. It was far too wonderful a morning to spend in a hot kitchen, and against all natural laws on the first of May.

  Despite her sixty-odd years, she ran upstairs with the agility of a girl, singing as she went:

  "Very, very warm for May,

  Eighty in the shade, they say,

  Tra la la..."

  And to the doctor, drying himself in the bathroom, she sounded as youthful and happy as when they had first heard that light-hearted ditty so long ago.

  Across the green, in the infants' room, Miss Fogerty was trying to teach the words of "There Is a Green Hill Far Away" to an inattentive class.

  "But why hadn't it got a sitting wall?" persisted Bobby Anderson, his youthful brow crisscrossed with perplexity.

  Above the noise of scuffling feet and the scraping of diminutive wooden armchairs Miss Fogerty attempted to explain that "without" here meant "outside," but before she could make herself heard, another child tugged at her arm and whispered urgently in her ear.

  "But had all the other green hills got sitting walls? And why had all the other green hills got sitting walls?" clamored Bobby Anderson vociferously.

  Miss Fogerty clapped her hands for silence, the urgent child was dispatched hurriedly across the playground, the clock on the wall said nine-thirty and Miss Fogerty took her noisy rabble to the door in readiness for a physical-training session.

  And thus it was that Bobby Anderson was doomed to go through life with the hazy impression that the green hills of the Holy Land have, in the main, walls built around them—walls, moreover, not of the usual standing variety, but of a mysterious type called "sitting."

  Old Mr. Piggott leaned over the iron railings of St. Andrew's and surveyed the activity of the fair with a morose countenance.

  "Goin' to keep fine?" inquired a brawny man, wielding an oily rag over the traction engine. He jerked a massive black thumb at the shimmering view behind him.

  Mr. Piggott was not to be wooed by honeyed words. He didn't hold with the fair and he didn't care who knew it.

  "Can pour down for all I cares," grunted old Piggott sourly. "Might drown some o' your durned racket later on!"

  "'Ere, 'ere! 'Oo's 'urtin' you!" began the oily man truculently. He doubled his great fists, stepped down from the wheel of the engine and advanced threateningly toward Piggott.

  Mr. Piggott stepped farther back from the railings, out of arm's reach, but he did it in a carefully casual manner to show that he was not intimidated. From a safe distance he replied.

  "Two churchings at six-thirty," he grumbled, "and all that blaring racket goin' on outside. 'Tisn't reverent, I tell 'ee!"

  And spitting forcefully into the laurel bushes, making a swift, flashing arc over the remains of one Ann Talbot, Virtuous Wife, Devoted Mother and Esteemed Friend, he retired toward the protection of the church while the going was good.

  5. Dr. Lovell's Patients

  YOUNG DR. LOVELL was interviewing his last patient in the surgery, and finding it heavy going.

  Ella Bembridge was a formidably hearty spinster of fifty-five who had lived, with a wilting friend of much the same age, in a small cottage on the Lulling corner of Thrush Green, for the past ten years. It was generally agreed that Ella ruled the roost and that "poor Miss Dean" had a pretty thin time of it.

  Deborah Dean had been nicknamed Dimity, so long ago that the reason for the diminutive had been lost in the mists of time. Now, at the age of fifty-odd, the name was pathetically incongruous, calling up as it did someone fresh, compact and sparkling, with an air of crisp, but old-world, domesticity. Dimity nowadays resembled a washed-out length of gray chiffon, for she was a drooping attenuated figure with lank mouse-gray looks and a habit of dressing in shapeless frocks, incorporating unpressed pleats and draped bodices, in depressingly drab shades. Dr. Lovell, who knew both women slightly, suspected that she was browbeaten by the dominating Ella now before him, and would have liked to try the effects of an iron tonic on Dimity's languid pallor.

  He was beginning to wonder just how quickly he could bring Miss Bembridge's monologue to a close. She had come to consult him about a skin complaint affecting her hands and arms.

  "I said to Dimity, 'Looks like shingles to me. Better go and see the medico, I suppose, for all the good that'll do!'" Here Miss Bembridge laughed roguishly and Dr. Lovell felt positive that she would have dug him painfully in the ribs had not the large desk providentially stood between them. He gave a faint smile in acknowledgment of this witticism, and glanced across the shimmering summer glory of Thrush Green to the Bassetts' house.

  Miss Bembridge followed his gaze.

  "I thought I might have picked up something from young Paul. Dim and I were there to tea a day or two ago and then the little horror came out in some repulsive rash or other. Not that I'm saying a word against Ruth! Heaven knows she's had enough to put up with, and naturally her mind is full of things other than a child's rash, but I do think it was just the teeniest bit careless to invite us there when the child was infectious."

  Dr. Lovell rose impatiently. His lean young face still wore a polite professional smile, but it was a little strained.

  "Paul's rash," he said steadily, "did not appear until after your tea party. I was called in as soon as it was found." He felt his dislike of this tough ungainly woman growing minute by minute. She had sat there for almost a quarter of an hour, her massive legs planted squarely apart to display the sturdiest pair of knickers it had ever been Dr. Lovell's misfortune to observe. In shape and durability they had reminded the young man of his father's Norfolk breeches used in the early days of cycling, and the silk shirt and Liberty tie added to the masculine impression.

  It was an odd thing, mused Dr. Lovell, that it was Ella who was the artistic one of the pair. Dimity ran the house, it appeared, and it was her slender arms that bore in the coal scuttles, the heavy shopping baskets and the laden trays, while Ella's powerful hands designed wood blocks, mixed paint and stamped the lengths of materials which draped their little cottage.

  Occasionally Ella took the train to town with a portfolio of hand-blocked patterns, and usually she returned, blown but jubilant, with a few orders from firms who appreciated her strong shapes of olive green, dull beetroot and dirty yellow madly ensnared in black mesh. It was the paint, Dr. Lovell had surmised, which was causing the present rash on his patient's hands, and he had given her a prescription for a curative lotion and recommended the use of rubber gloves for a few days, while handling her artistic materials. She had clutched the prescription in a pink spotty hand and had continued to sit stolidly in the chair. Poor Dr. Lovell, who was not yet completely versed in getting rid of lingering patients, resigned himself to another few minutes of Miss Bembridge's comments, delivered in a booming voice that would have been an asset in a shipwreck. He had heard all about Miss Dean's fancied ailments after he had listened to the more pressing ones of Miss Bembridge, and he felt more and more like the unfortunate Wedding Guest who encountered the Ancient Mariner.

  From outside came the sweet scent of th
e old-fashioned pheasant's-eye narcissuses which Mrs. Bailey massed against the wall beneath the surgery window, and the thump of Ben Curdle's mallet as he rammed home stake after stake. Dr. Lovell longed to be out in the freshness of Thrush Green's morning, but Miss Bembridge continued remorselessly.

  "I tell her a good blow is what she needs. Get rid of the cobwebs. But no, every afternoon she says she must have a rest on her bed! Unhealthy, I tell her. But then, dear old Dimity always was a one for imagining she'd every ill under the sun. This backache now, she complains of—" Dr. Lovell cut her short.

  "Too much lifting, I expect. You'll have to see she gets help with the heavy work. And tell her to call one morning. I'll have a look at her."

  Miss Bembridge looked startled.

  "Oh, there's nothing really wrong! That's what I'm trying to tell you. Sheer imagination! Now, my hands are quite a different kettle of fish—"

  He had let her run on for one more minute exactly, his eye on the round silver clock which had been Mrs. Bailey's mother's. It was then that Ella Bembridge had begun the sly comments about Ruth Bassett's shortcomings as an aunt which had made Dr. Lovell realize, with sudden passion, that he could not bear to remain in this wretched woman's presence for one split second more.

  The cries of the junior class as they emerged into the stony playground, there to bound breathlessly about as galloping horses, reminded the doctor that it must now be Miss Watson's physical-training session and therefore almost ten-thirty. He strode resolutely to the surgery door and held it open.

  "I mustn't keep you," he said firmly, and watched Miss Bembridge heave her bulk from the armchair, cross the threshold and depart, still booming and not a whit perturbed, down the flagged path.

  Dr. Lovell returned to the surgery to tidy his papers, shut drawers and files, and collect his bag.

  He closed the surgery door behind him and stood for one minute savoring the fragrance of the May morning. The air was cool and sweet. A spiral of blue smoke curled from Mrs. Curdle's gaily painted caravan, the children laughed and called from the schoolyard, and on the highest point of Dr. Bailey's roof a fat thrush poured out a stream of shrill-sweet trills, his speckled breast throbbing with the ardor of spring.

  No less enchanted, young Dr. Lovell went through the gate, his eyes upon the house where Ruth and Paul were to be found, and, crossing the shining grass of Thrush Green, prepared to make the first visit of the day.

  Paul was standing on his head on the pillow of his bed. His pajama-clad legs rested comfortably against the wall, and apart from a slight discomfort of the neck, Paul was feeling very pleased with himself.

  He had remained poised in this upside-down position for a full minute and this was easily the longest time he had managed so far. The room, he observed, really looked much more attractive this way, and the colors were definitely brighter. This fact so interested him that he lowered his legs with a satisfying bounce and looked again at his surroundings the right way up. They certainly looked duller. He adopted his former topsy-turvy position and gazed with fresh rapture at his transfigured world.

  An early fly hovered around the central light and Paul wondered how it must feel, swooping aimlessly here and there. Surely the ceiling would seem like the floor to the fly, and he would think it the most ordinary thing in the world to have chairs and dressing tables and wardrobes hanging from the ceiling. Paul pondered about this until the crick in his neck caused him to drop his legs, climb off the bed and wander to the window.

  The school playground was empty and he wondered what his friends were doing under the red-tiled roof of the village school. A pigeon rattled out from the chestnut tree nearby and flew across to the school, its coral claws gripping the ridge of tiles as it landed. Paul caught his breath with envy. To be able to fly—just like that! Could anything be more wonderful than flying from roof to roof, from wood to wood, over fields and rivers, looking down upon Thrush Green and the whole of Lulling's chimney pots? Why, if that pigeon peeped through a crack by his curling claws he might see all the children at their lessons!

  It was a pleasant thought, and Paul turned it about in his mind as busily as his fingers were now twisting and untwisting the bone acorn which hung at the end of the window blind's cord.

  He would like to be a giant bird, decided Paul, as he watched the pigeon. He would be so strong that he could lift the roofs right off all the houses in Lulling and then fly over the town and see everything that was happening inside. Aunt Ruth had read him the story of "The Princess and the Swineherd" and he remembered the magic saucepan which allowed the princess to know just what was cooking in every house in the kingdom. Paul thought his idea was a better one. Much better to see than to smell, decided Paul, twirling the blind cord. He would lift the school roof, first.

  Down below him he would see the round heads of his friends, black and brown and yellow, with here and there a bright hair ribbon. He would see the long wooden desk lids and the plaited wicker circle which was the top of the wastepaper basket, and Miss Watson, curiously foreshortened, standing by the blackboard. It must be past ten o'clock Paul reckoned, so that she would be taking a geography lesson on this particular morning. The map would be hanging over the easel, giving out that faint oily smell which always emanated from it as soon as it rolled, released, from its bright pink tapes. From his lofty vantage point he would listen to the far-off classroom sounds—the scuffling of fidgeting feet, an occasional cough, the lilt of Miss Watson's voice and the tap-tap of her pointer against the map. He would replace the roof, silently, magically, as easily as slipping the lid back onto a box, and fly over to St. Andrew's Church.

  What would he find there, Paul wondered, gazing through the bedroom window to the building which loomed large behind the clustering caravans, against the dazzle of the morning sky. Probably only Mr. Piggott would be in the church at this time. How small he would look from such a high roof! Paul could see him, in his mind's eye, shuffling slowly up and down the long nave with the pews stretching in neat lines on each side, like rulings on the two pages of an exercise book, one each side of the central fold, with hassocks like little blobs of red ink here and there. He would be no bigger than a black beetle, and so far away that his grumblings and snufflings would be lost in mid-air long before they reached the vast heights where the lone Paul-bird hovered unseen.

  He would swoop next, down and down, to lift Mrs. Curdle's painted roof. Paul thrilled at the thought of it. He would touch it very gently, he told himself, for it was as old as it was beautiful, and as awe-inspiring as it was gay. Molly had told him all about Mrs. Curdle and gypsies' ways. She would be standing by her glittering stove cooking hedgehogs, Paul had no doubt. He had once, fearfully, climbed the three steps to Mrs. Curdle's caravan and had gazed, fascinated, at the glory within; the half-door had been shut, but by standing on tiptoe he had seen the shelves, the tiny drawers, the cupboards, the gleaming brass and copper and the rows of vivid painted plates as breath-takingly lovely to the child as the bright birds which he had seen the week before at the zoo, sitting motionless upon their perches, in a splendor of tropical plumage.

  No one had been in the caravan. Only a clock ticked and a saucepan sizzled, now and then, upon the diminutive stove. Molly had stood beside him and had pointed out one particularly small drawer close by the door. It had a curious brass handle, embossed with leaves and fruit.

  "She puts the money in there," had whispered Molly, in the child's ear.

  "What money?" Paul had asked.

  "The fortune-telling money. See, she leans over this door and reads your palm and you pays her a bit of silver, sixpence say, or a shilling, and she pops it in this little drawer just beside her. Real handy, isn't it, Paul?"

  He had nodded, openmouthed, and would have liked to have stayed longer, just gazing at the beauties, but Molly had hurried him away.

  "And would we have seen a sixpence or a shilling if we'd opened that little drawer?" he had asked her later, as she bathed him.

  Moll
y's eyes had grown as round as an owl's.

  "It would have been stuffed tight with silver. And gold sovereigns too, most like. And too heavy to move, ten to one."

  Paul had been most impressed, so that now, on his astral travels, he looked at the interior of Mrs. Curdle's caravan with the eye of reverence. There would be so many things to see that it would be hard to distinguish separate objects. It would be like looking into his own toy kaleidoscope, a glory of shifting color, winking lights, shimmering reflections and endless enchanting patterns.

  Would Mrs. Curdle be there at nearly ten-thirty in the morning? Paul shivered at the thought of seeing her, even if he himself could remain invisible, for Molly had told him that gypsies could cast spells, just as witches did.

  She might, thought Paul, pleasurably apprehensive, be making a little clay doll to stick with pins, so that the real person it was meant to be would suffer pains. Supposing she knew he was watching without having to look up? Supposing the doll was meant to be Paul Young?

  The crick in his neck came back unaccountably and Paul threw away his idea of being a giant bird. It wasn't as good as he'd first thought.

  He ran to the door and opened it, suddenly in need of company.

  The smell of coffee brewing floated from downstairs and the sound of Aunt Ruth singing happily to herself as she clack-clacked across the stone-flagged kitchen in her high-heeled sandals.

  "Aunt Ruth, Aunt Ruth!" he called urgently. "Come and watch me stand on my head!"

  The sense of mercies received, to which Ruth had awakened that morning, remained with her as she worked about the house. She was astonished at this new inner peace, bewildered but grateful for the strength which had ebbed back to her. It was as though some throbbing wound had miraculously healed overnight and the scab which had formed over it could be touched without dread. For the first time Ruth found that she could recall the whole tragic affair dispassionately.