‘Oh, I’m sorry,’ I whispered back at him apologetically, feeling I should have noticed that no one was attending to people’s glasses.
‘No matter,’ he said.
I don’t know what I wanted then. I don’t know what birthday present I’d have awarded myself if I’d been able to, October 2nd, 1951. When I’d left the Grammar School it seemed natural to work on the farm, and I preferred it to the other occupations people suggested to me. My stepfather said he could get me into Blow’s and my mother wanted me to try for a position in the accounting department of the Electricity Board because she said I was good at figures, which I wasn’t. She used also to say it might be nice to be a receptionist in the Hogarth Arms Hotel. Miss Pritchard said I should become a teacher.
But I liked our farm. I liked it all the year round, the cold dairy on icy mornings, the clatter of cans and churns, driving in the cattle on a warm afternoon, working the sheepdogs. I didn’t mind when the yard was thick with muck. I didn’t object to the smell of silage. I even liked the hens.
Joe did all the rough work, clearing drains and the hedging and muck-spreading. My mother helped, especially at hay-making. Everyone helped then, even my stepfather; Colin Gregg and Betty came over, and the Fryes and the Lazes. More than anything else, hay-making reminded me of the past. Belle Frye and I used to run about when we were children, trying to be useful but really being a nuisance. I remembered dinnertimes, pasties and meat sandwiches in the fields, and cider and tea. My father used to eye the sky, but it always seemed to be fine then, for just long enough. ‘We can laugh at it now,’ he used to say when rain came and the hay was safely in.
On my twenty-first birthday I kept thinking of my mother and my stepfather becoming older in the farmhouse, my stepfather retiring from Blow’s and being around all during the day. It was the same resentment I’d had of him when I was a child, before he married my mother, but of course it wasn’t so intense now and it wasn’t so violent. Yet it felt all wrong when I contemplated remaining with them in the farmhouse. It felt as if I’d married him too.
I opened my presents when we’d had our trifle, and I felt that everyone had been generous. Miss Pritchard had given me a cameo brooch which she used to wear herself and which I’d often admired. There were even things from Betty’s children. My mother and stepfather had bought me a sewing-machine and Betty a clock for beside my bed, and Belle Frye a framed photograph of Trevor Howard, which was a joke really and typical of Belle Frye. Joe and Maudie had brought honeycombs and Mrs Laze and Roger a set of make-up and scent. There was another parcel, wrapped in red tissue paper and tied with a bow. It contained an eggcup and a matching saucer, and my stepfather said they came from the youth in Blow’s. I didn’t believe they did. I believed my stepfather had wrapped up the eggcup and saucer, thinking I’d be pleased if he pretended the boy had sent them. I felt awkward and embarrassed; I’d no idea what to say.
We played games with Betty’s children afterwards, Snap and Snakes and Ladders. Roger Laze sat next to me, too shy to say a word; I often wondered if he was in pain from his foot. At a quarter past nine Betty and Colin Gregg had to go because it was long past their children’s bedtime, and Joe and Maudie said they must be getting along also.
‘So must I,’ Miss Pritchard said.
She refused a lift with Colin and Betty and I said I’d like to walk with her because the night was beautiful, glaring with moonlight. I could see my mother thought I was silly to want to walk a mile and a half with an old schoolteacher who was being silly herself not to accept a lift when a lift was going. It was typical of me, my mother was thinking, like not having a more suitable twenty-first birthday party. Yet that walk through the moonlit lanes was the happiest part of it.
‘Well, Matilda?’ Miss Pritchard asked.
I knew what she was talking about. I said I didn’t know; just stay on at the farm, I supposed.
‘You’d be quite good with children, you know.’
‘No.’
‘Oh, well, perhaps you’ll become a farmer’s wife. You could do worse, I suppose.’
‘I don’t want to marry anyone.’ The square face of Roger Laze came into my mind, and the face of the youth in Blow’s. ‘I really don’t.’
‘People often don’t until someone comes along. Mr Right he’s called.’ Miss Pritchard laughed, and then we talked about other things; in particular about the new people at Challacombe Manor and what a difference it would make having that big old house occupied again.
Mr Gregary was a stout man and his wife was exceedingly thin. Their son was much older than I’d thought he’d be, thirty-seven as it turned out. They called him Ralphie. His brown hair was balding, and as if to make up for that he had a moustache. It was extensive but orderly, like a trimmed brown hedge in the pinkness of his face. He was broad and quite tall, rather clumsy in his movements.
All three of them came over to the farm one morning. They’d driven down from London to see how the builders were getting on and they came over to introduce themselves. Neither my mother nor I liked them.
‘Cooee!’ Mrs Gregary called out in our yard, standing there in unsuitable shoes and clothes. Her husband and her son were poking about the outhouses, pointing things out to one another as if they owned the place. They were dressed in tweed suits which you could see had been put on specially for the occasion; Mr Gregary carried a shooting-stick.
‘Forgive the intrusion!’ Mrs Gregary shouted at me when I came out of the byre. Her voice was shrill, like a bird’s. A smile broke her bony face in half. Her hair was very smart; her lipstick matched the maroon of the suit she was wearing.
‘We’re the Gregarys,’ her husband said. ‘Challacombe Manor.’
‘This was the home-farm, wasn’t it?’ his son asked, more modestly than his parents might have, less casually.
I said it had been and brought them into the kitchen, not knowing what on earth else to do with them. I was wearing fawn corduroy trousers and a fawn jersey that was darned and dirty. My mother was covered in flour, making a cake at the kitchen table. She became as flustered as I’d ever seen her when I walked in with the three Gregarys.
They were totally unlike their predecessor at Challacombe Manor, seeming a different species from her. As my mother cleared away her cake-making stuff I kept imagining Mrs Ashburton frowning over the Gregarys, bewildered by them and their conversation. In a humble way that annoyed me my mother apologized because the
