Flowers in the Rain & Other Stories (27 page)

“You should have a proper breakfast in weather like this. Are you sure you eat enough? You’re dreadfully thin…”

“That’s just London life. You mustn’t start making noises like a mother.” She opened the fridge for milk, and it was queer having no light go on. “Where is everybody?”

“Mrs. Hawkins is snowed up. She rang me up about an hour ago. She can’t even get her bike out of the shed. I told her not to bother to come, because without any power, there’s not a lot she can do.”

“And Pa?”

“He walked over to the farm to get some milk and eggs. He had to walk, because the gale we had yesterday blew down one of the Dixons’ beech trees, and the lane’s blocked. Was it windy in London?”

“Yes, but somehow in London it’s different. Just piercingly cold, and rubbish and stuff flying around. You don’t think about trees blowing down.” She sat at the table and watched her mother, busy at work with deft fingers. Soft-grey and brown feathers drifted into the air. “Why are you plucking pheasants? I thought Pa always did that for you.”

“Yes, he does, and we’re having them for dinner tonight, but after he’d gone and I’d washed up the breakfast dishes I simply couldn’t think what to do next. Without electricity, I mean. In the end I decided it was either plucking pheasants or cleaning silver, and I hate cleaning silver so much, I plumped for the pheasants.”

Antonia set down her mug and reached for the cock pheasant. “I’ll help you.” Its body was cold and solid, the feathers on its well-fed breast thick and downy, but those at its neck blue as peacock eyes, bright as jewels.

She held the bird, spreading its wing like a fan. “I always feel guilty pulling such a beautiful creature to pieces.”

“I know. I do too. That’s why your father always does them for me. And yet there’s something comfortingly timeless about plucking birds. You think of generations of country women—doing just this thing, sitting in their kitchens, and talking to their daughters. Probably saving all the down feathers for stuffing pillows and quilts. Anyway, we mustn’t be sentimental. The poor birds are already dead, and just think of delicious roast pheasant for dinner. I’ve asked the Dixons and Tom to come and eat them with us.” She reached down for a large plastic dustbin bag and bundled the first of the feathers into it. “I thought,” she went on with elaborate casualness, “that David might have been here too.”

David. Mrs. Ramsay was a perceptive woman, and Antonia knew that this gentle probing was a tentative invitation for confidences. But somehow, Antonia could not talk about David. She had come this weekend because she was lonely and desperately unhappy, but she could not bring herself to talk about it.

*   *   *

The reason that his name had come so easily into the conversation was because David and Tom Dixon were brothers, and the family were friends and neighbours of a lifetime to the Ramsays. Mr. Dixon ran his farm, and Mr. Ramsay ran the local bank, but when they could they played golf together, and sometimes escaped for a week’s fishing. Mrs. Ramsay and Mrs. Dixon were equally close, stalwart supporters of the local Women’s Rural and members of the same little bridge club. Tom … the older brother … worked now with his father. He had always seemed to Antonia very adult and remote, a responsible sort of person, useful at mending bikes and building rafts, but never a close friend. Not like David. David and Antonia, only a couple of years apart in age, were inseparable.

Like brother and sister, everybody said, but it had been more than that. There had never been anybody but David. Going away to school, to college, their ways separating and their lives widening, it was natural to expect that their fondness for each other would mature into simple friendship, but somehow the very opposite happened. Being apart only served to fan the flame of their affection, so that each reunion, each coming together, was more satisfying and exciting than the time before. For Antonia there were other boys, and then other men, but none of them ever stood a chance, because in comparison to David they seemed dull, or plain, or so demanding that she was sickened by them.

David was her yardstick. He made her laugh. With David, she could talk about anything, because everything important in her life she had shared with him, and if she hadn’t, then he knew all about it anyway.

As well, he was the best-looking man she knew … had grown from a handsome boy to an attractive adult without any of the usual uncomfortable stages in between. Everything was easy for David. Making friends, playing games, passing exams, getting to University, finding a job.

“I’m coming to London,” he told her.

Antonia had already been there for a year, working for the owner of a bookshop in Walton Street, and sharing a flat with an old school friend.

“David, that’s marvellous.”

“Got a job with Sandberg Harpers.”

She had been terrified that he would go abroad, or to the north of Scotland or somewhere remote where she would never see him. Now, they could do things together. She imagined little dinners in Italian restaurants, trips down the river, the Tate Gallery on bright cold winter afternoons. “Have you got somewhere to live?”

“I’m going to move in with Nigel Crawston; he’s living in his mother’s house in Pelham Crescent. He says I can have the attics.”

Antonia had never met Nigel Crawston, but when she went to the house in Pelham Crescent, she knew the first stirrings of unease. Because Nigel was a young man of much sophistication, and the house was beautiful, quite beyond the style of Antonia’s little flat. It was a proper grown-up house, filled with lovely things, and David’s attics proved to be a self-contained flat, with a bathroom that looked like an advertisement for high-quality plumbing.

As if all this were not enough, Nigel, as well, had a sister. She was called Samantha, and she used the house as a sort of pied-à-terre in between sorties to ski in Switzerland, or to join friends on some yacht in the Mediterranean. The Crawstons were those sort of people. Sometimes, when she was in London, she would take some undemanding job, just to fill in time, but there seemed no question of having to earn a living. As well, she was almost unbearably glamorous, thin as a rail and with long, straight fair hair that never looked anything but immaculate.

Antonia did her best, but she found the Crawstons heavy going. Once, they all went out to dinner together, to a restaurant so expensive that she could scarcely bear to watch David forking out his half of the bill.

Afterwards, she said, “You can’t take me to places like that. You must have spent at least a week’s salary on just one meal.”

He was annoyed. “What’s it got to do with you?”

He had never spoken that way to her before, and Antonia felt as if she had been slapped in the face. “It’s just … well, it’s just a waste.”

“A waste of what?”

“Well … money.”

“How I spend my money is my own concern. Your opinion doesn’t interest me.”

“But—”

“Don’t ever interfere again.”

It was their first-ever real quarrel. That night, she cried herself to sleep, hating herself for having been so stupid. The next morning, she rang at his office to apologize, but the girl on the switchboard said that he wasn’t available, and after that Antonia lost her nerve, and it was nearly five days before David called her.

They made it up, and Antonia told herself that everything was the way it had always been, but in her heart of hearts, she knew that it wasn’t. At Christmas, they drove back to Gloucestershire together, in David’s car, with the back seat piled with presents for their assorted families. But even Christmas provided its own problems. The holiday, traditionally, is a time for engagements, and, for the first time, Antonia felt that friends and family expected some sort of an announcement. One or two coy ladies, the vicar’s wife and Mrs. Trumper from The Hall, even went so far as to make an arch reference or two, heavily veiled, but unmistakable. Ultra-sensitive, Antonia was certain that their beady eyes wandered to her left hand, as though expecting to spy some enormous diamond ring.

It was horrible. In the old days, she would have confided in David, and they could have laughed about it together, but somehow now that was impossible.

From this situation she was rescued, oddly enough, by none other than Tom. Tom, uncharacteristically, all at once elected to throw a party in his barn. It was on Boxing Night, and he hired a disco and asked everybody in the neighborhood under the age of twenty-five. The dancing and merriment went on until five in the morning and caused such a stir that people stopped speculating about Antonia and David and discussed the party instead. With the pressure off, things were easier, and at the end of the holiday she and David returned to London together.

Nothing had changed; nothing was settled; nothing had even been discussed, but she wanted it no other way. She wanted, simply, not to lose him. He had been part of her life for so long that losing him would be like losing part of herself, and the prospect filled her with such desolation that it didn’t bear imagining. Shamingly, she pretended to herself that it would never happen.

But David was stronger than she. One evening, soon after Christmas, he called and suggested coming round to her flat for a meal. Antonia’s flat-mate tactfully took herself off, and Antonia made a spaghetti bolognese and went around the corner to the off-licence for an affordable bottle of wine. When the doorbell sounded, she ran down the stairs to let him in, but as soon as she saw the expression on his handsome face, all self-deception and reasonless hope seeped away and she knew that he was going to tell her something terrible.

*   *   *

David.

I thought that David might have been here too.

Antonia began to tear at the breast feathers of the cock pheasant.

“No … he’s staying in London this weekend.”

“Oh, well,” said her mother calmly. “There probably wouldn’t have been enough for us all anyway.” She smiled. “You know,” she went on, “being like this, without electricity, and forced onto our own resources, reminds me so much of when I was little. I’ve been sitting here wallowing in memories, and all of them so vivid and clear.”

Mrs. Ramsay had been brought up, one of five children, in a remote area of Wales. Her mother, Antonia’s grandmother, lived there yet, independent and wiry, keeping hens, preserving fruit, digging in her vegetable garden, and, when forced by darkness or inclement weather to retreat indoors, knitting large knobbly sweaters for all her grandchildren. Going to stay with her had always been a treat and something of an adventure. You never knew what was going to happen next, and the old lady had passed on much of her enthusiasm and energy for life to her daughter.

“Tell me,” said Antonia, partly because she wanted to hear, but mostly because she hoped to get off the subject of David.

Mrs. Ramsay shook her head. “Oh, I don’t know. Just being without any appliances or labour-saving devices. The smell of a coal-fire, and the iciness of bedrooms. We had a range in the kitchen, and that heated the bath-water, but all the washing had to be done, once a week, in a huge boiler in the scullery. We all used to help, pegging out lines of sheets, and then, when they were dry, turning the handle of the old mangle. And in winter it was so cold that we all used to dress ourselves in the airing cupboard, because that was the only spot that was remotely warm.”

“But Granny has electricity now.”

“Yes, but it was a long time coming to the village. The main street was lit by lamps, but once you’d passed the last house, that was it. I had a great friend, the vicar’s daughter, and if I had tea with her, I always had to walk home by myself. Most times I didn’t mind, but sometimes it was dark and windy and wet, and then I used to imagine every sort of spook, and by the time I reached home I’d be running as though there were monsters at my heels. Mother knew that I was frightened, but she said I must learn to be self-reliant. And when I complained about the spooks and monsters she said the thing to do was to walk slowly, looking up at the trees and the infinity of the sky. Then, she said, I would realize how infinitesimal I was, how pointless and puny my tiny fears. And the funny thing was, it really worked.”

As she spoke, she had concentrated on the task in hand, but now she looked up and across the littered, feathery table, and her eyes met Antonia’s. She said, “I still do it. If I’m miserable or worried. I take myself out and go somewhere peaceful and quiet and look up at the trees and the sky. And after a bit, things do get better. I suppose it’s a question of getting your values straight. Keeping a sense of proportion.”

A sense of proportion. Antonia knew then that her mother knew that there was something horribly wrong between herself and David. She knew, and was offering no form of comfort. Simply advice. Face up to the spooks of loneliness, the monsters of jealousy and hurt. Be self-reliant. And don’t run away.

*   *   *

By afternoon, the electric power still had not come on. When the lunch dishes were tidied away, Antonia pulled on boots and a sheepskin coat and persuaded her father’s old spaniel to come out for a walk. The dog, having already been exercised, was reluctant to leave the fire, but once out of doors, forgot his misgivings and behaved like a puppy, bounding through the snow and chasing interesting rabbit smells.

The snow was deep, the sky low and grey as ever; the air still, the countryside blanketed and soundless. Antonia followed the track that climbed the hill behind the house. Every now and then there came the clatter of wings in the still air as a pheasant, disturbed, shouted warning, got up and sailed away through the trees. As she climbed, she stopped feeling cold, and by the time she reached the top of the hill was warm enough to clear the snow from a tree-stump and sit there, looking at the great spread of the familiar view.

The valley wound away into the hills. She saw the white fields, the stark trees, the silver river. Far below, the village, darkened by the power cut, lay clustered around the single street; smoke from chimneys rose straight into the motionless air. The silence was immense, broken only now and then by the whine of the chain-saw slicing the crystal quiet, and she guessed that Tom Dixon and one of the farm workers were still dealing with the fallen beech.