I should have known that the man from Blow’s would be married, that he’d have a wife who was helping in the war while he was going on about a disease. It was somehow all of a piece with Betty wanting to hit my mother, and Mrs Laze shooting off her son’s foot so that he could stay alive, and God being frightening. Facts and images rattled in my mind, senselessly jumbled, without rhyme or reason. Dick was there too, dead and unburied in his uniform, something ordinary to get used to.
I sat in the sunshine on a bank that had primroses on it. I could have returned to the farmhouse and let my mother put her arms around me, but I continued to sit there, still not crying, remembering Mrs Ashburton saying that cruelty in wartime was natural. At the time I hadn’t understood what she’d meant, but I could feel the cruelty she’d spoken of now. I could feel it in myself, in my wanting my mother to be more unhappy than I was. Dick’s death was more bearable because she could be blamed, as Betty had blamed her in speaking of a judgement.
I am writing this in the drawing-room, in fact at Mrs Ashburton’s writing-desk. I don’t think of it as a story – and certainly not as a letter, for she can never read it – but as a record of what happened in her house after the war. If she hadn’t talked to me so much when I was nine there would not be this record to keep, and I would not still feel her presence. I do not understand what has happened, but as I slowly move towards the age she was when she talked to me I slowly understand a little more. What she said has haunted me for thirty-nine years. It has made me old before my time, and for this I am glad. I feel like a woman of sixty; I’m only forty-eight.
In 1951 the house was bought by people called Gregary. ‘Filthy rich,’ my stepfather said.
My stepfather had just been made manager at Blow’s drapery in the town. He used to drive off every day in a blue pre-war baby Ford, and I was always glad to see him go. I worked on the farm with Joe and Arthur, like my father had, like my brother Dick would have if he hadn’t been killed in the desert offensive.
I thought it was typical of my stepfather to know that the Gregarys were rich. It was the kind of information he picked up in Blow’s, conversing across his counter, the gossip enlivening his chisel face. He said Mr Gregary was a businessman involved in the manufacture of motor-car components. He’d made a killing during the war: my stepfather called him a post-war tycoon.
On my twenty-first birthday my mother insisted on giving a kind of party. We had it in the farmhouse kitchen. We cooked a turkey and a ham and my mother made a great fuss about the vegetables that had been my favourites when I was small: celery and parsnips and carrots, and roast potatoes. The carrots were to be in a parsley sauce, the parsnips roasted with the potatoes. We made trifle because trifle had been a childhood favourite also, and brandy-snaps. It was impossible not to recall the preparations for Mrs Ashburton’s tennis party on the Thursday before the war, but of course I didn’t mention that. My mother believed that I didn’t want to live in the present. I often felt her looking at me and when I turned my head I could see for a moment, before she changed her expression, that she believed I dwelt far too much on times that were not our own.
Fifteen people came to my birthday party, not counting my mother and my stepfather and myself. My sister Betty, who had married Colin Gregg, came with her two children. Belle Frye had married Martin Draper, who’d inherited the mill at Bennett’s Cross: they brought the baby that had made the marriage necessary. Mr and Mrs Frye were there, and Miss Pritchard, who’d taught us all at school. Joe and Arthur, and Joe’s wife, Maudie, came; and Mrs Laze and her son Roger. The idea was, I believe, that I might one day marry Roger, but it wasn’t a prospect I relished. He limped because of his foot, and he hardly ever spoke, being shy like his mother. I didn’t dislike him, I just didn’t want to marry him.
All the time I kept wishing my mother hadn’t given this party. It made me think of my other birthdays. Not that there was any reason to avoid doing that, except that naturally the past seemed better, especially the distant past, before the war. Miss Pritchard was the only person I ever talked to about things like that. ‘Come and talk to me whenever you want to, Matilda,’ she’d said one day in 1944, and ever since I’d been visiting her in her tiny sitting- room, knowing she was lonely because she was retired now. In a way our conversations reminded me of my conversations with Mrs Ashburton, except that it was Mrs Ashburton, not I, who used to do the talking and half the time I hadn’t understood her. It was I who’d suggested that Miss Pritchard should come to my birthday party. I’d heard my mother saying to my stepfather that she couldn’t understand it: she thought it extraordinary that I didn’t want to invite lots of the boys I’d been at the Grammar School with, that I didn’t want to have a gramophone going and tables of whist. My stepfather said he didn’t think people played whist like they used to. He stood up for me, the way he always did, even though he didn’t know I was listening. He made such efforts and still I couldn’t like him.
Seventeen of us sat down at the kitchen table at half past six and my stepfather poured out cider for us, and orangeade for Betty’s children. Belle Frye’s baby was put to sleep upstairs. I couldn’t think of her as Belle Draper, and haven’t ever been able to since. Martin Draper had been a silly kind of boy at school and he still was silly now.
My stepfather carved the turkey and my mother the ham. Everyone was talking about Challacombe Manor having been sold to the people called Gregary.
‘The son’s going to run the place,’ my stepfather said. ‘Tax fiddle, I dare say.’
You could see that Miss Pritchard didn’t know what he was talking about, and you could see that she suspected he didn’t know what he was talking about himself. In his gossipy way he was always referring to tax fiddles and how people had made a fortune and what price such and such a shop in the town would fetch. The fact that he’d mentioned income tax evasion in connection with the Gregarys didn’t mean that there was any truth in the suggestion. Even so, the reference, coupled with the information that Mr Gregary was in the motor- components industry, established the Gregarys as people of a certain kind. Carving the turkey, my stepfather said that in his opinion Challacombe would be restored to its former splendour.
‘They haven’t the land,’ Mr Frye pointed out, for he himself farmed eighty acres of what had once been the Challacombe estate.
‘It couldn’t never be the same,’ Joe added.
Plates of turkey and ham were passed from hand to hand until everyone present was attended to. My mother said that people must take vegetables and start, else the food would get cold. A more lively chatter about the new people at Challacombe broke out as the cider was consumed. Two of the Gregary daughters were married and living in some other part of the country, a third one was at a university. The son was the apple of his parents’ eye. The father owned a grey Daimler.
The old range which had been in our kitchen all during my childhood had only the week before been replaced by a cream-coloured Aga. The acquisition of an Aga had been my mother’s dream for almost as long as I could remember. I think she’d grown to hate the range, lighting it every morning with sticks and paper, the struggles she’d had with it during the war, trying to burn wood instead of coal. But I’d been sorry to see it go. I tried to stop myself being like that about things, but I couldn’t help it.
‘To the birthday girl,’ my stepfather said, raising his glass of cider. ‘Many happy returns, my best.’
It was that that I didn’t care for in him: I wasn’t his best, my mother was. Yet he’d say it casually, wanting to pay a compliment but overdoing it so that you didn’t believe him, so that you distrusted him.
