Unhallowed Ground (21 page)

It was good, it was warm enough to open the top of the stable door and they sat in the kitchen together using Stephen’s scarred pine table with the morning sun streaming in. Georgie felt she could be in an advert with a packet of Cornflakes on the table.

She had spent five long days cleaning. Not your ordinary sort of cleaning, it was scrubbing on hands and knees and on ladders, buckets of detergent slopping all over the floors. She scraped the grime off the windows with a pallet knife before she could see through them properly. She had washed all the blankets, chair and cushion covers by hand. Naturally there was no washing machine, and nowhere to plumb one in. No room in the kitchen anyway. But the sink was deep, made out of stone and back-breakingly low. The two huge draining boards were ample for dumping piles of wet washing. She had even made an attempt at turning over some ground for vegetables, but the ground was so heavy her hands got blistered before she could make much impression. Since Isla had left she had kept herself on the go every minute of the day, and she had dropped into bed at night exhausted. Her behaviour was obsessive, she hadn’t wanted to stop, even for a second. Sometimes Georgie caught Lola staring at her with a worried expression on her soft, wrinkled face.

She was safe to slow down and relax a little now that Mark had arrived, and they spent his first day out in the orchard with him building the hen house and Georgie trying to assemble some sort of run. She asked him brightly, ‘D’you think that tomorrow, after we’ve been for the hens, you could help me clear out the woodshed?’

Mark wandered over to have a look. ‘Bit of a waste of time, surely, as it’s half full of logs.’

‘I know.’ She picked abstractedly at the blistered skin on her fingers. ‘But I’d like to get it more organized, cleared out and whitewashed, perhaps.’

‘Well, yes, if you feel that’s important. One of your priorities.’ He looked doubtfully at the logs again. Typically, he had brought a clean set of overalls with him, he dusted them down where he’d vaguely marked them. ‘It’ll be one hell of a job. Wouldn’t it be better to wait till the summer when the wood’s mostly gone?’

‘I’d like to get it done now, Mark. You know I can’t stand clutter.’ She went back to wrestling with her sheets of netting. She could always wheedle him round to her way of thinking, he would do the job without argument, and yet she could be so unkind to him, so short with him, even rude. Why should poor Mark sweat and groan and wear himself out over her woodshed, just because of a whim? She didn’t know why. But she knew he would do it.

That evening that old sex question put itself in his eyes again. They brightened in a familiar way after the sun went down and Georgie’s irritation grew as she wrenched the cork from the wine bottle and stirred the beef Bourguignonne. It was not a question of whether she’d let him, she knew that she would to save friction, it was the worry over the how and where. And the why, she supposed, she had to be honest. He had asked if she would rather go out for a meal, but she couldn’t be bothered to get tidied up, they’d be working again first thing in the morning. No doubt he’d be up at the crack of dawn, pottering, or at the farm.

Remarkably insensitive, it never occurred to him that he, or his advances, might be unwelcome. In his day Mark was known to have gatecrashed the most delicate dinner parties and get away with it. Everyone liked him, that was the trouble, he was so well-meaning and naive. To be unkind to Mark was the same as being beastly to a child.

But Georgie was unkind to him.

In the past they had never talked much about Angie Hopkins because Mark was not really the type you could talk to in any deep sort of way. But every so often he had brought Georgie flowers, and he’d taken to phoning her up every evening to see how she was coping. This forced her into a different mode, she had longed to shriek out the truth, to tell him how hellish it all was, but you couldn’t with Mark, so she’d found herself talking about inconsequential, small talk, nothing important. She used to sigh and sag unkindly when she realized it was only Mark on the phone, Oh no, not him again. But he had always let her know he was there and she knew he would not let her down. Mark was reliable, but then so are most chair legs.

They went to admire the finished hen house as the sun dipped over the hills. There was a night dew. The earth breathed out deeply. Georgie went barefoot and Mark held her hand. It should have been romantic but it wasn’t. He showed Georgie the ramp he had made, with struts to stop the hens from slipping. He slid open the little trap door and showed her the perches inside.

‘Oh, that’s wonderful, Mark,’ Georgie exclaimed, as if to a child home from school with a painting. And Mark’s smile was childlike, he beamed because he had pleased her, and she wanted to slap him, she didn’t know why. He gave her the piece of wood which he called the front door lock, she fiddled with it, she obliged him. But she wanted to scream and race to the hills.

‘Don’t be so rough with it, do it more carefully, it’s quite delicate and you don’t want to smash it,’ he said.

The forthcoming intimacy filled her with gloom. She wondered if she should offer herself here on the ground where they stood, among the tall grasses, and if they might do it standing still, like hens did. Georgie’s jeans were filthy, her hair tied back with a bit of frayed scarf, but Mark looked impeccable, not one of his sandy hairs was out of place. He had even changed for dinner. He had met the challenge of Stephen’s shower. His checked Viyella shirt was new, Georgie suspected, specially bought for a country weekend. His moleskin trousers were perfectly creased, even his belt was on the right hole—not a spare ounce of flesh on Mark, he made sure of that; he played squash too regularly.

So they went back inside, Georgie with that hollow of sadness inside her and Mark feeling it but not knowing why. His dry hand caressed hers. They ate their perfect dinner, profiteroles for pudding, with whipped cream and a chocolate sauce, and they drank their mellow red wine, they listened to some music. She decided to let him do it on the rug before the fire, with Lola locked in the kitchen so she didn’t try to join in the fun with licks and wagging tail. He made raucous love to her while she tried desperately to use her imagination. They had it all, didn’t they? The firelight, the dim lamps, the beams, soft music, Stilton and biscuits, there were even spring flowers on the table. And Mark was tall and ganglingly handsome in a harmless sort of way. He smelled nice, less of the peppermint than usual, more of his favourite herbal tea.

‘I love you, Snuffles.’ Ah, yes. So he had drunk sufficient wine.

She played her part with kindness, self-control and patience. She made no complaint at all.

They had coffee watching the news. They shared a packet of chocolate finger biscuits that left Georgie feeling slightly sick.

Afterwards she listened when, flushed and happy, he climbed into the studio bed in his Paisley pyjamas. Georgie sat on her own bed, the three-quarter double, and watched the darkness out of the window until it must have been very late, because a soft white light silvered the horizon and she could hear the Buckpits’ cockerel as she slipped under her cover.

The morning brought companionship once again, the sun removed those hopeless yearnings. The sun shone, the stream gurgled, birds sang, and mercifully Mark’s eyes were quite clear. They fetched the hens and the materials Georgie would need, they bought the Sunday papers for reading later, after a proper Sunday lunch, because Mark always insisted on that, and began work on the woodshed. It all began to feel rather homely, and the clucking sounds of the plump brown hens were rurally enthralling. How Isla would adore all this. Georgie wouldn’t mind whitewashing the woodshed alone, that job was one she looked forward to. She just needed someone to clear it out for her first.
Completely.
Particularly the corner where that macabre doll had been. She hung around outside, watching Mark, feeling guilty for all sorts of reasons and making frequent cups of coffee.

‘There’s been a fire in here at some point,’ Mark called, his voice hollow where it came from the darkness now that the shed was half empty. He backed out to let her in. ‘Look, you can see where the smoke has marked the wall.’

Georgie pretended to look. By now Mark’s overalls were satisfactorily dirty and there was quite a pile of rubbish outside, alongside the logs. Georgie lugged the rubbish round to the front in the wheelbarrow, ready for the dustmen to collect on their fortnightly visit to the hamlet. A worn-out broom head, the mop bucket with the hole in the bottom, half an iron leg from a missing mangle, a rusty piece of galvanized iron, a set of broken snow chains, an old metal suitcase, badly battered, ‘and then there’s this,’ said Mark, backing out, a line of sweat on his brow and, to Georgie’s distress,
a child’s make-up case in his hand
.

The sort of cheap and cheerful thing you might buy from Woolworths. Pink plastic with a silvery sheen running through; there was a mirror inlaid in the lid, and various compartments for tubes and jars. Any little girl would adore it. The tiny baby-doll lipstick was tight in its flap, and a powder compact fitted beside it. Mark held it up to Georgie with a baffled frown. ‘Rather an odd thing to find underneath all this junk. And used, up until lately, I’d say.’ He squeezed a half-empty tube and a blob of brown make-up oozed out. ‘Good as new.’

The smell of roasting lamb reached the woodshed. This was an ordinary Sunday morning. Washing hung on the line in the sun. There was mint sauce in a jug in the kitchen and white wine cooling in the fridge. This was no time to play the neurotic. But Georgie stared, distraught. There was something inexplicably horrible about this latest find, but was that because Georgie knew about the doll? Was that what made her shudder so? Mark was not particularly interested in the unlikely article, he merely put it to one side and went back to his task, good-natured and uncomplaining so long as Georgie was around to bestow some praise every now and then.

But Georgie was repelled by the thing. The plastic was warm when she picked it up to balance on top of her barrow. The heat went out of the sun and she shivered when she asked herself the obvious question, ‘Why would this be here? What would Stephen be doing with something like this?’

She had spoken out loud, but Mark was too busy to hear her. He thought she was asking if he wanted a drink and he called out, ‘Yes, something long and cool.’ So she left the make-up case where it was and went into the kitchen, where she poured him a large glass of lime juice. She filled the glass with ice. She moved unthinkingly, unseeingly, yet angry to be so badly affected by so innocent a find. Up until then she’d been feeling strong. She was not dreading more time on her own until the next visitors arrived. Not this time. Georgie had decided how she would fill her time. There was plenty for her to do, and now she had the materials at last she could make a proper start.

She wandered back outside and gave Mark his drink. She watched his overlarge Adam’s apple bob up and down and wondered weakly if this was the reason she could never feel right about him. She tried to ignore the make-up case as she wheeled the barrow round to the front. She stuffed it deep into the dustbin, trying to avoid handling it too much. She picked it up between finger and thumb and dropped the thing inside, then covered it with the rest of the rubbish and rammed the lid down hard.

That night, Mark’s last night, she let him sleep in her bed because she felt so lonely.

‘Perhaps we should get married, Snuffles.’

‘Yes, Brillo, perhaps we should.’

‘We could have a conservatory,’ he murmured as he went off to sleep.

It was an uncomfortable night, as well as undignified, and sleepless for Georgie because of his snores and his long dangling legs. She wriggled her feet from under him. Perhaps she ought to have woken him up and told him to turn over, perhaps she should have said something like, ‘Are neither of us capable of any serious emotion? Now listen, if you want a relationship with me, a real relationship, then we must be prepared to be honest. We must learn to talk about all sorts of difficult things, like bodies, like hearts. At the moment we are empty together, and I am very frightened by something I can’t understand.’

But she didn’t say that. What was the point? And Mark would be appalled. She just lay there, feeling like a dead thing beside him, and knowing, suddenly, that a real relationship was the very last thing she or Mark wanted. And Georgie also knew that this was exactly how Stephen had felt when he lay in this same bed. Alone and frightened, craving safety. But Stephen had gone, for love, into the arms of a green bottle of sickly smelling liquid, while Georgie, the
whore, searched for the same thing in the arms of a man she could not love.

And they must both have known, as they nuzzled in the darkness for comfort like blind, soily-nosed moles, that they were slowly destroying themselves.

S
HE WOULD NEVER FORGET
that hectic summer. She had never experienced another one like it.

The natural tan suited Georgie, that particular labourer’s brown as opposed to the forced tan of the sunbedder. She was brown and sinewy as a navvy, with hard, shiny hands. She kept her hair short and it went very curly. She was lean and weathered. She went round in jeans cut off at the knee.

Of course there was a drought, every day the sun shone, hardly a shower of rain. Mrs Buckpit reported dourly that there was drought here every summer, no matter what the weather did, and Georgie saw the Buckpit brothers labouring away, filling the water troughs in the fields from a tank on the link box. She asked her scowling neighbour, ‘But surely there’s something that could be done if you suffer like this every summer? Because of the farm I would think a good water supply is essential.’

What a know-all she sounded. Not at all what she meant.

The Buckpit woman gave a hard stare. ‘We are only tenants, you know, Mrs Jefferson. It’s not up to us.’

So Georgie suggested sensibly, she thought, that they should put pressure on the Duchy, but Mrs Buckpit’s mouth gave a tweak and she stalked away stiffly. It was a surprise to hear that the Buckpits were tenant farmers, Georgie had imagined Wooton Farm to be family owned. The rent they charged Chad Cramer would probably be passed on, or perhaps the Buckpits were entitled to let the cottage as part of the deal.