Mrs Fytton's Country Life (26 page)

The next morning Angela went off to post a card of the Glastonbury Thorn to Claire and Andrew. It was a survivor like herself, she thought. She also thought that a postcard would mean Ian and Binnie would see it. She made it as joyful and celebratory as she could.

I am so enjoying living down here. Everything is working really well and I want you to come and try my Fytton honey, and see my herb bed, and eat my vegetables and preserves and pickles and make a breakfast of my eggs [she added 'hens' to the eggs, imagining some coarse wit if she did not]. So please come and visit me or stay with me soon, before the winter sets in. Or come then. I really want you to meet everyone, especially Sammy, who is wonderful. No more now. Too tired from digging. Love Mum.

Coming back from the pillar box she met Rika in the lane.

'Ja, ja
’
beamed the scarlet-cheeked au pair over the heads of the three screaming Elliott children, and then kissed them, one, two, three, so that they screamed even louder. They were wielding little nets, looking as picturesque as a field of poppies, Angela thought. Coming closer, however, she saw that they were beating each other over the head with them.

'No, no,' said the kindly Dutch girl as the children turned their attention to her own prominent bottom. And she gave each one in turn a pat on the head that nearly flattened them.

Whereupon they burst into tears and she hugged them to her substantial chest and made them cry even louder.

It was hard to know if she was several petals short of a tulip or highly intelligent, but whatever she was she was remarkably impervious to the tyrannies of children.

'Time to go home,' she said.

Angela walked with her. 'And are you enjoying it here?' she asked.

'No,' said the girl.
‘I
mean - time to go
home
...
I miss my parents. I miss my friends. I miss my
beer
...'
She rolled her eyes. 'Oh, the
English
beer. So weak, and it needs salt
...'
She shrugged. 'So, I go home. Mr Craig has bought me a ticket already.'

From an upstairs window, Craig Elliott looked down, crinkled his eyes and waved. He looked a much happier man. Did Angela imagine it or did he kiss his fingertips to her? She imagined it, of course. He was surely kissing his fingertips to his screaming children.

She went a little further on, and looked over the wall of the Rudges' garden, where nothing was stirring, not even a bird. And she was tempted - oh, wasn't she? - to ask their gardener, who came from miles away and drove a very shiny car, if she could borrow the petrol Rotovator before she began digging her herb beds. Cutting and slashing and clearing the nettles and other growing things had been tiring enough, without the thought of taking a fork and shovel to the ground as well. A Rotovator would relieve the pain of the effort quite nicely.

There again, it would also churn up and destroy anything in its path. But she was tempted, very tempted. Nevertheless, as she leaned there, looking down on the perfect, silent garden where not a leaf lay out of place, not a chewed petal drooped or an aphid glowed its green among the leaves, she was overcome with a desire to dig her own soil with her own two hands. Another line of Plath's floated into her head:

Perfection is terrible. It cannot have children. Cold as snow breath, it tamps the womb.

No, no. If Daphne could do what she did with her own bare hands, then so could
she. She had promised herself to
go slow, with time, with the seasons - and so she would. Anyway, she might find something really interesting. A jewel from King Alfred's crown, perhaps. She smiled at the memory. A girl could dream
...

She heard the latch of the Rudges' side gate. Someone was about to come out. She gave the Rotovator one last, yearning look before picking up her skirts and running back along the lane before her courage failed her.

She stopped by Sammy Lee's gate. How lonely he must be, she thought, looking at his silent, dark-paned cottage. And how sad never to have loved even once. Or maybe how sensible. He stood in the sun, leaning against his porch, a cup in his hand, a thin cigarette between his lips, and she supposed that was contentment. She looked at his cabbages and felt an odd sensation which she realized was envy. He had set jam jars of beer in among the rows of vegetables and they were full of bloated creatures who'd died smiling and ready to face that eternal hangover in the sky. She had not believed him and was at her wits' end, practically hearing the munching from her garden every morning. A beery demise, though, was fitting. It seemed an appropriate death to deliver as the owner of Church Ale House. 'So it does work,' she said.

'If you use the right stuff,' he agreed. 'No use putting Kestrel lager down for them. Even a slug knows what it likes.'

'Maybe I
should
make my own,' she said, pointing. But if she thought he would laugh she was wrong.

'See those,' he said, pointing to trails of greenery running through his hedge. 'Wild hops.'

She went back home. But she was definitely,
definitely
thoughtful.

'Keep busy
’
continued the theme in her head. Along with 'Wild hops, wild hops, wild hops'.

15

October

The Original Witch will pick up the switch and turn off the lights in the steeple's sight. She will laugh, Ha Ha She will lau
gh, Ho Ho And the walls will go
just like in Jericho.

maighread medbh

According to a Brydges ancestor, who had borrowed the text from the Puritan lobby, there was but one way for a good woman to conduct her life.

The Goodwife is like a merchant's ship, for she bringeth her food and her nourishings for the heart, soul, and temporal body from afar
...
Thro her Wisdom and Diligence great things come by her; she Brings in with her Hands, for she putteth her hands to the Wheel.
..
She overseeth the ways of her household
...
and eateth not the Bread of Idleness.

Angela took up the challenge regarding the Bread of Idleness wholeheartedly and commenced digging. Bread of Idleness, she thought scathingly, just about summed up those decadent, privileged women back in London with their cut-price Filipino skivvies and their trips to the hairdresser's. Bread of Idleness was certainly not for
her.

She donned an old pair of Andrew's shorts and an even older
‘I
-shirt and told the mirror that the raggedy-looking creature with scratches on her arms (from the brambles) and red patches all over her legs (from the nettles) and a nose that looked as if it had been at the port (from being at the port) was indeed a Goodwife. She shoved her feet into Perry Wellingtons, found a few grips for her hair and took up her spade and her fork. Looking around at the bright October day, she felt a rush of self-satisfaction. Who knew what treasures she might unearth as she cut into this ancient soil? If there were Roman tesserae, there might be Roman coins. If not Alfred's crown, then perhaps a helmet or a sword. If there were shards of medieval pottery, then might there not be silver plate?

She set to with a will, imagining it would all be done by sundown. Sammy, when she suggested this to him, shook his head. Just dig, he told her. So dig she did.

Thinking about it again, later, and up to her elbows in dry clods and nettle stings, Angela Fytton had a sudden urge to partake of the Bread of Idleness rather strongly. She was also less inclined to think that paying Filipinos to do
anything
in the way of alleviating the domestic burden was reprehensible. Indeed, at one particularly warm moment of soil-turning, had a passing Filipino tottered by her holly hedge she would have hurled herself across their path and clutched their bloody ankles and
begged
them to take a turn with the spade -aye, offering well
above
the minimum wage and a free cut and blow-dry at a salon of their choice too
...
But it was an urge that passed - possibly because a Filipino did not.

She fought back. And it was the strangest thing. After all those years of keeping her brain in several different compartments, of having her mind on one thing while aware of an impending six others, where lists were required and strategic planning was a must, where managing the early years of having very little money gave way to swimming lessons and dinner parties and stocking the freezer and seeing the teachers and remembering to kiss away a hurt (including Ian's), or what required an apology, to have the right change for the bus on a Monday, to get Ian's train tickets for Tuesday, to have a six-page document translated into Japanese by Wednesday, to check catalogue copy and buy birthday cards on Thursday, to talk entertainingly through dinner to a junk mail expert from Stockholm on Friday, attend school sports and buy a new fax machine on Saturday, to listen to piano practice and go to the BMX track on Sunday
...
Then tip into bed early and read a bit of a Booker winner. Fall asleep after establishing that they were not going to have sex. Fall asleep quite often during sex, if they were. And begin the whole thing again the next day
...
doing it all out of fear that if she let one ball fall, one juggled plate crash to the ground, the whole works

would fall apart - which,
she now found, it did not. Ian had fallen. Not her.

Digging, concentrating only on digging, with every justification for doing digging and
only
digging, was wonderful. The masculine focus, she thought, the envy of every woman born of woman. That focus, the security that what you are doing is entirely valid, full of worth, and that you may do it to the point of excellence. Your job, your role, your thrust. This, she felt, was Digging for Victory in the modern sense. Though she was still not entirely convinced that if a passing Filipino
...

Occasionally she stopped to draw breath and lift her eyes up to the hills, whence, so the Good Book advised, cometh her strength. And it did. What she saw made her happy. The glistening pig huts winking beneath a cloudless blue sky, the flicker and swoop of a confused late butterfly as its wings caught the light, all the beauty she beheld as she let her eyes sweep downwards to the flatness falling away to the west. The church with its Perpendicular tower and its soughing ilex, the manse beyond, the other houses ringed round about in this tight little community
...
How lucky she was to have come among such good people.

Sweet Auburn! Yes indeed.

She hoped that postcard would choke them.

Few items of interest emerged from the digging as the day progressed, not even more Roman teeth. The bits and pieces that she unearthed, Angela put to one side for Daphne to have a look at when she called. Despite this disappointment, at the end of the day, standing with a cracked cup (she did not have the energy to find a whole one) of elderflower tea (dried and sold by Wanda) in her hand and surveying the completely dug-over soil of her new herb beds - her day's achievement - she raised the cup. To liberation, she said. She
felt great.

Next morning, of course, she was not quite so sure. Her back would hardly allow her to get out of bed. And then Sammy came along and tested the soil and said she would need to turn it all over again before she could even contemplate digging in the compost. She laughed and nudged him, thinking it was a joke. He pulled on his chin until she stopped laughing. Liberation did not seem quite so joyous. Neither did the masculine focus.

Another day of digging ensued, and Sammy was quite right. More lumps and clods appeared in what she could have sworn was soil made smooth as flour the day before. Dig, dig, dig. It was as if someone had slipped them in during the night. She worked until dusk, when Sammy came by. He nodded, rubbed a bit of the soil through his fingers, nodded again. One more, he said. And went on his way.

Barely able to make it to the kitchen table with her shop-bought gin and shop-bought tonic and refrigerator ice and foreign lemon, held in hands that looked as if they were taking part in a tribal-marking contest while attempting to grow an early crop of potatoes in th
e fingernails, she opened Maria
Brydges's book and found the herbal section. Too late now, of course. She should have made it up beforehand. Next year she would be able to create it all from her own garden. Even the juniper hung down from the church hedge and it was already full of ripening berries. Meanwhile, she would take the recipe to Wanda and see if she would make it up for her. Friendly-like.