Eviction From Quarry Cottages:
a late twentieth century tale
Sam Smith
Published by Sam Smith at SmashWords
copyright Sam Smith 2010
Other Sam Smith titles available from SmashWords include The Care Vortex, The End of Science Fiction, John John, Marks, Porlock Counterpoint, Sick Ape: an everyday tale of terrorist folk, and Two Bridgwater Days.
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*****
Eviction From Quarry Cottages:
a late twentieth century tale
Sam Smith
Chapter One
The green vale floor is walled by sets of hills, also green. Some of these enclosing hills are the sides of plateaux, steps up to other levels. Some of the hills are long spines, like screens, dividing one section of the vale from another. While other of the hills are mere knolls.
A broad motorway snails through this section of the vale floor. On either side of the grey motorway, among a geometry of fields, streams and rivers wind towards and away from bridges. Where rivers and streams themselves cannot be seen their courses are marked by rounded alders and tall poplars, crack willows and the occasional oak.
Major and minor roads go over the river bridges; and on over those other bridges that are angled across the black stitching of paired railway tracks. The railway tracks pass through two towns. Between and beyond the brown-white speckling of the towns are ribbon-clusters of villages, with — here and there — single houses in their own gardens, and the grey roof acreage of working farms.
This section of the vale floor is not wholly level. Small dips and rises grant or obscure vistas. On one partially wooded hillock, near the southern hills, is a pair of cottages eye-magnet white. In front of the white cottages are long sloping gardens. The backs of the cottages are dark with algae and moss. Letterboxes are set into the thin back doors, cold to the touch. Directly across the much repaired road a bank of black-green ivy and flat-leafed ferns rise up to leaning over boughs of ash and spindly hazel. Just visible at the top of the bank is the barbed wire of the field beyond. This time of the year the trees over and around the two cottages still have their leaves, although yellow-edged. The fields are cropped pale.
A narrow road rises up out of the surrounding vale fields and goes up under the woods behind the cottages.
Along this road, between box-clipped hedges, comes a mud-splashed landrover. It stops in the pull-in at the sloping rear of the two cottages. The driver takes his time getting out.
He is a large man, purple face, white hair, legs seeming short under his belly. He looks over the back of both cottages. Being in under the woods, getting little direct light, the white walls of the cottages and even the windows are spotted with black mould.
In the man’s stance is indecision.
A movement in the cottage to his right has him go to the back door and tap.
A thin woman, late thirties — white blouse, straight skirt — saw him coming, has quickly answered his tap. Their low-voiced conversation is accompanied by frowns. She puts a hand to her mouth. He partly raises both hands in a gesture of helplessness. She, lips tightened, nods.
In his turning away from her, there is an unwillingness. He goes towards next door as if walking against a wind.
Mrs Bryant, the thin woman, leans out from her doorway to watch. Mr Parsons winces at the sharp clack-clack of the brass dolphin knocker on this second door.
The woman who opens this door is younger and rounder than Mrs Bryant. Her name is Bridget. Mr Parsons calls her Bridget. Behind her in the kitchen is the tinny sound of a radio talking.
Her polite smile of greeting at Mr Parsons becomes fixed in her initial glance over him.
John, her husband, has joked about this businessman farmer’s perpetually clean wellingtons and boilersuit, a working uniform which in winter is accompanied by a tweed jacket and a flat cap. Today the jacket and boilersuit are coated in mud, the thickest smears still dark wet, the thinnest drying pink.
This normally puffed up man, stands there meek today in his farmer’s reek of diesel. John manages the farm shop, comes home bearing the taint of carrots, pepper scent of dried soil. Parsons, reluctant this day in this volunteered for role of bringer-of-bad-tidings, seems to be hiding inside himself.
"There's been an awful accident," he says.
Chapter Two
Bridget was helping Sarah with her homework — a project on the environment. The school has a wild garden, pond and birdtable; runs a wastepaper collection service once a month, proceeds going to the school funds. Sarah is skinny, black-haired and ten.
She is picked by a sleeve from the living room floor, is told by her mother — the words flying down about her — that she is to go next door to Mrs Bryant while she goes to the hospital with Mr Parsons to see her father.
"Can't I come with you?"
"No. He's only got the landrover."
"I'll sit in your lap."
"No. Take your homework with you."
Sarah finds herself stepping over next door's threshold, Mrs Bryant closing the door behind her and looking down with a kind face. Mrs Bryant's face is usually drawn and sharp. She is either silent or she shouts at her sons. Or she laughs loudly at them. Public laughter. Laughter meant to be heard, all behaviour acceptable so long as it is in an advert somewhere. Both sons are taller than her.
Sarah stands in the gleaming kitchen. This is different from her kitchen. Here is white strip light. Next door is a yellow bulb; and pans hung from hooks, brown clay pots with dried flowers in them; strings of onions knock against the back door. In her house washing machine and fridge don't match, and the fridge has magnetic letters stuck all over it. Here everything is in the barefaced cupboards. Worktops are clean.
"Come into the living room Sarah." Mrs Bryant practises saying her name.
Her own name is Maureen. She wears synthetic materials, skirts and blouses flat and pressed, hair permed and curled. Bridget ties Sarah’s frizzy hair back, wears bulky clothes in dull colours, cotton pleats and folds.
This living room has a fitted fawn carpet, matching black velour three piece suite. Next door they have shined floorboards — patterns of yellow new among brown old — and rugs like islands; an old settee covered with a blanket of knitted squares, two odd chairs and a red beanbag. Here Ben sits in an armchair, legs stuck out before him, watching a soap. Next door soaps are disapproved of.
Ben is seventeen, drives and polishes his own yellow car, takes it to pieces, revs the engine, plays the stereo loud.
"Sarah’s come in with us for a minute," Mrs Bryant tells him. "Till her mother gets back from the hospital."
Ben glances over to Sarah, lifts his chin. He is doing a mechanic’s course at the college, has hands ingrained with oil.
Having lifted his chin, in lowering it, Ben nods slowly, without smiling. He does that in his car — looks at people and, without expression, nods.
Embarrassed now by his silence, by his not asking what has happened, though she won't tell him in front of Sarah, Mrs Bryant asks Sarah if she has eaten.
"I had some tea thank you." Sarah remembers her manners.
A clump-clump above is followed by a banging on the stairs, mirror-placed to her house. She recognises the sound from next door — but louder here — knows now that it is Simon. (Alone in the cottage it can sound like someone on her stairs.)
Simon is a year younger than Ben, has a new motorbike. He opens his eyes wide to Sarah whenever he sees her. He used to have a mountain bike, now does show-off wiggles on his motorbike.
Wheeling off the stairs he nearly bumps into her.
"Clumsy git," Ben says as Simon steps around her.
"Least I don't," Simon whisks his hand across the top of Ben's gelled hair, "reverse into six foot walls."
Ben ducks aside and snarls, "Least I don't run out of petrol."
"Now you two," Mrs Bryant, as is her custom, says.
Mrs Bryant is also making eye signals over Sarah's head to Simon. He's trying to read her message, gives up. Sarah feels small and in the way in this house.
"What you doing here?" Simon asks her.
Sarah has never before been spoken directly to by either of the sons. Simon’s voice is softer than she can remember hearing it before.
"There’s been an accident." She uses her precise school voice, "My father’s in hospital."
"Why don't you help Sarah with her homework?" Mrs Bryant makes more faces at Simon.
"I've nearly finished it. Thank you." Sarah lies. Her mother is of the opinion that their neighbours — with their motorbikes and cars, and their trips to Cash’n Carry — are not environmentally friendly. Her mother has a bicycle with a basket.
"Sit you down now.” Whatever Simon says he says in a different accent. “Take the weight off those feet. Watch the telly." That was one of the voices Sarah has heard him use before.
Still holding her books Sarah sits on the sofa. She obediently looks at the telly. Ben hasn't moved. Simon and Mrs Bryant go whispering into the kitchen.
This side of the house has a different smell too. Sarah can't put a name to it. New?
Through the window the view of the darkening vale — single orange streetlights, clusters further off — is the same as from next door. The curtains are different. Straighter. And this window does not have a stained glass mobile turning before it, nor a rainbow sticker bottom right. Dusk condensing into night is as other evenings.
Chapter Three
Parsons is not a man Bridget is used to talking to. She has said too much about him, as employer and landlord, to be at ease in his company. Prior to this they have exchanged only pleasantries in passing. Not that she is now given a chance to talk.
On getting into the landrover she was told to do up her seat-belt.
For the first mile, feeling fat and incompetent, being bounced along in the closed space of the cab, she can't find the buckle under her.
"Have you got it yet? Got it?" Even when he’s not saying anything Bridget can sense the disapproval emanating, along with the damp earth and sweat smell, from the bulk of Parsons. He, although blue is still in the dark sky, is intent on dipping and flicking his lights on every dusky bend.
Time she has the seat-belt buckled Parsons is concentrating on the junction into the main road. Once through the evening queue, however, and out into the stream, up through the gears, he has to talk.
"What happened?" Bridget’s voice is loud in the whining cab.
Parsons stays hunched over the steering wheel and his belly.
"John," he says, pauses breathless, "came out to help us with the swedes."
John often leaves the yard shop to help out on the farm. Mrs Parsons or the girl in the office will answer the shop bell. In the holidays Sarah helps in the shop. Often though John simply shuts up shop and goes, says he enjoys the change.
Parsons’ profile is silhouetted turn by turn by the passing cars. Bridget notes the ‘help us’: Parsons would not have been doing anything other than watching.
"A rotor arm broke. One in a million chance." Under cover of a space of dark she feels him glance towards her. He fixes his eyes back on the road. "One in a million."
"How is he?"
They come under the first orange slipping-by shadows of the streetlights. The hospital is this side of town.
"End of the rotor arm hit him. Caught him here." He takes his hand from the steering wheel to point to his chest. Puts his thick-fingered hand back on the steering wheel. "One in a million chance."
He pauses for the roundabout. No traffic. Goes on.
"John got knocked off, went under the cropper. Time Pete saw it, time Pete could stop, John was in a bad way. Has taken the ambulance crew — fire brigade were called out too — had to lay down planks so they could jack the cropper up... Took the ambulance crew two hours to get him out. Then I came straight up.... straight up to get you."
Parsons dithers over where he is allowed to park in the hospital grounds. The day staff having left there are many empty spaces.
"Here," Bridget tells him.
Parsons is about to object — the space has a blue-on-white sign saying reserved — but the urgency of Bridget's command overcomes his respect for things official.
He is slower than her getting out of the cab, seems to be having difficulty remembering which key locks the door.
"I'll go on." Bridget starts towards the double-doored entrance.
"Wait!" He quickly locks the door. "They said they'd meet us here."
"Who?" They walk together.
"Ambulance crew."
Nervous, Parsons takes charge going through the double doors, bends to the glass panel of the receptionist.
"I've brought Mrs Cox in," he quietly tells her.
Having just looked up from a screen the receptionist takes a moment recognising the name.
"I'll fetch a nurse," she says. Bridget’s mother is a casualty receptionist in a London hospital. This receptionist is younger and slimmer.
"How is he?" Bridget asks Parsons. The broad back is turned from her,
"Ah. Here they come."
The ambulanceman and woman still have mud on their tunic trousers, smears and spots on their shirts.
The small nurse is clean in blue and white check.
"This way Mrs Cox," she says.
Bridget is not led, as her feet expected, to the cubicles behind reception, but along a corridor beside them. On a ward, she thinks. They turn into another corridor. The nurse, in flat black shoes, is walking quickly. Parsons has on flapping wellingtons. Bridget is wearing trainers, catches up with the nurse.
"How is he?"
The nurse, small and dark-haired, frowns up at her, glances back to Parsons who, seeing the look coming, has puffing lowered his white head. In memory’s eye Bridget sees, among the last batch of signs pointing this way, one saying Morgue.
"He’s dead," she says, hears herself say it.
The three professionals, steady-eyed, watch her, wait to gauge her responses. Parsons, in leaning one-armed against a corridor wall to catch his breath, avoids meeting her eye. As he had avoided looking at her on the way over, as he had avoided telling her. From the ambulanceman’s one glance his way he had been expecting Parsons to have told her.
In that bright hospital corridor, listening to her own breath coming hard and fast from the hurrying, she is angry at Parsons’ duplicity, at his cowardly fear of telling her, at his shameful pity for her now. She sees too the professional pity of the little nurse and the ambulance crew; and in that moment she decides that she doesn’t want their pity, that she will not allow them to pity her.
Chapter Four
The nurse reaches out a set of clean pink fingernails towards Bridget’s forearm. The ambulancewoman is coming up beside her. Bridget steps away from them, onward.
"How long has he been dead?" Facts now are what matter to her. The ambulanceman catches up,
"We had a pulse right up," he skips a pace to keep step with her, "right up until we got him in the ambulance."
Bridget was then helping Sarah with her homework: "He was unconscious?"
Bridget is setting the speed now, leading the way, watches visiting others look at the mud caked on Parsons and on the ambulance crew, watches them politely/furtively look away.
"Can't say for certain," the ambulanceman is choosing his words, "but I’d say he was unconscious before he hit the ground." He is being kind.
A policeman and a policewoman — a world of professional pairs, Bridget thinks — are waiting outside the door that says Morgue. (Hospitals have labels for all human conditions and body parts.) The policeman is standing. The policewoman is sitting on the edge of a plastic armchair, starts to rise on their approach. A vase of dried flowers here, on a low table.
The policeman asks Bridget her name; and it is they who accompany her, with the nurse, into the morgue.
The body — and it is already a body, breathless under a white sheet — is on a trolley to one side of the room.
"Would you like to see him?" the nurse asks, head to one side.
Bridget knows that they want her to see the body in order that she identify it. A dead person cannot fill in forms, answer questions. Bridget cannot say this, nods. The nurse lifts the sheet back, a bedmaker’s movements, fingers and thumbs.
She folds the sheet back only as far as the shoulders. Globs of mud have flattened the curly hair. The thin face — John’s/not John’s — is empty of life, of John’s animation. Gone the spring of John’s energy. She has seen him asleep many times — snoring, drunk, ill, in fevered dreaming — had known that he would awake. This will never awake.
"It’s John," she says.
"John Cox?" the policeman, pedant of necessity, says. The policewoman’s expression hardens. The nurse, Bridget feels, wants something more from her. A tear? Angry outburst?
All the professionals are watching her again. She looks over the sheeted length of the body. The fatal damage must be all around the chest area. She can see cuts and rips in the check shirt, part of its collar blood-soaked.
"John Cox," she says. The words provoke no response in herself, unstop no tears, spark no anger.
"We'll clean him up later," the nurse says. Bridget lets herself be guided back into the corridor, other people passing incurious.
Chapter Five
Ben shouts at something on the sports news. Sarah, still sat on the edge of the black sofa, knows that the jeering is aimed at Simon. Simon however doesn’t respond to Ben; instead looks along the sofa and pulls a silly face at Sarah.
Mrs Bryant looks in from the kitchen and says to Ben, "No need for all that noise."
"She’s heard our fucking noise before."
"Language young man."
Ben growls a sneer.
Sarah is frightened now.
Simon, waiting until his mother is busy again in the kitchen, goes crouching silently across the floor, puts his head over the back of Ben’s chair and whispers, "Language young man."
"Fuck off!" Ben swings his fist back but Simon has returned bouncing to the sofa.
"You two!" Mrs Bryant shouts from the kitchen.
Sarah knows that Ben doesn’t like her being in his house: that he doesn’t like her, probably because his Mum and Dad don’t like her Mum and Dad, and she knows that if she’s seen to side with Simon he will like her even less.
To shut them both out she concentrates on a chocolate advert. On a breakfast cereal ad.
Ben stands: "I'm off." He stretches, steps around the chair, looks at neither Sarah nor Simon. Taking his car keys jingling from his pocket he opens, then slams, the back door.
"Ben!" his mother complains.
"Got no style." Simon grins at Sarah and, scuttling across the fawn carpet, he slips into the chair that Ben has just left.
Ben’s car goes screeching off up the lane. Simon grunts, changes channels, changes again, comes back to where he started.
The back door opens. (The back doors of both cottages face the dark lane. Both cottages only use their front doors for going into their gardens.) Mr Bryant looks through the kitchen to Sarah on the living room sofa. Like Ben Mr Bryant never changes his expression.
The front of his blue boilersuit has had mud over it. Must of it has been brushed off. His dark eyes look briefly into Sarah’s as he steps across the kitchen to shut the door between.
Sarah listens to Mrs Bryant’s higher note questions, Mr Bryant’s deep rumbling replies. Simon goes out to the kitchen, is told — in signals unseen to Sarah — to close the door. Simon’s voice asks a question. Mrs Bryant, whispering, replies. She has started crying. Mr Bryant rumbles. The door opens. Mrs Bryant is saying, "...keep Sarah company."
Simon smiles down on Sarah, lifts his eyebrows. He drops into Ben’s chair in front of the telly.
"Your Mum should be here soon," he smiles around at her. Nods and smiles.
"Yes," Sarah says.
Chapter Six
Outside the brick-fronted hospital Bridget slides onto the back seat of the police car. When the WPC slides in beside her she puts her hand over Bridget’s knuckles on the seat. An act of seeming compassion from the smaller slighter woman: but, with this evening’s clarity, Bridget knows it to be a professional used to entering the personal space of another. In a police manual somewhere it says, '....the comfort of physical contact....'
On the pretext of asking the driver if he knows the way Bridget, leaning forward, removes her hand.
"Might need some help when we get closer," the driver says into his mirror. Two internal mirrors in the police car.
"Did you see where it happened?" Bridget turns to ask the WPC.
"’Fraid not. The team there had to go on to something else. In a field wasn’t it?"
The WPC has put on a bright sympathetic face: mirrors have told her that she is pretty. Bridget consciously restrains her tongue from asking where else they’d have been harvesting swedes. They are leaving the hospital by the back entrance. Less traffic now: rush hour over.
"What was your husband? Tractor driver?"
Bridget isn’t going to be treated like some hick.
"Ran the farm shop, helped out on the farm when needed. Will there be an inquest?"
"Yes."
"Post mortem?"
"Didn't they say in the hospital?" the driver asks into his mirror.
"May have done."
The doctor was in a hurry, spoke quickly. Her husband is dead forever: that living man had no time. She signed the statement identifying John, was led out to these two police offers by the talking doctor. Bridget dips into the line of his patter: "Yes...."
John’s body will be cut open, a Y from the shoulders to the crotch, stomach contents examined, arteries dissected.... (Bridget had started her nurse training when she fell pregnant.) The top of John’s head will be removed, brain examined for embolisms.... That is no longer John.
"Cases like this they usually do an autopsy," the WPC says. "Have to be certain of the exact cause of death. Could have been a heart attack, for instance, which caused him to fall off."
This pretty WPC had known that John hadn’t been a tractor driver, had just been trying to make conversation.
And this is how they begin to wriggle out, Bridget tells herself, this is how they begin to shift the blame onto the victim, make it John’s fault for having been killed.
The WPC comes, in the dark back of the police car, to represent all those who will seek not to take responsibility for John’s death. This policewoman who wasn't there and Parsons who was.
"John was healthy in every way. Never seen a man so energetic. Doesn’t drink. Doesn’t smoke." In the middle of speaking Bridget felt her voice almost catch on tears, hardened it by the end. "Left here," she tells the driver.
Her half of the cottage is grey and lightless.
The WPC has hurried around to her side of the car, is holding the door open. Bridget had difficulty with the seat-belt buckle, doesn’t need her help now.
"Do you want us to come in with you?"
"Better if I tell my daughter on my own. You two’d frighten her."
"You sure?"
Bridget knows that she is wrong to despise this pretty WPC for wanting to be helpful.
"Thank for your kindness."
"Wish we didn’t have to." The WPC's fingertips touch Bridget’s forearm. Bridget looks down on the fingers, feels nothing.
"We’ve called your GP," the driver, deepvoiced, tells Bridget. "He said he’d be round to see you and your daughter. Just in case you need him."
In the eight years she has lived here Bridget has hardly seen her doctor. When she has it has been mostly for Sarah’s childhood illnesses and inoculations; and then, being a big country practise, she more often saw a locum or a nurse than her registered GP.
"Fine." She accepts it: they all have their protocols.
As the police car reverses back to turn in the side lane — white lights among the red — Bridget walks forward to face the Bryants. Now that she is to be the bringer of bad tidings she too is slow like Parsons.
* * * * *
Both Byants are in the kitchen. Pete has been eating.
"I'm so sorry," Maureen puts forward her hand, fingers outstretched.
"Where's Sarah?"
"Mummy?" Sarah opens the door from the living room. "What’s happened?" She looks pale up at Bridget.
“Your father's been killed."
In the cottage, sound of the telly ignored, Simon turns in his armchair to look.
In that moment’s stillness Sarah’s eyes seem to grow larger. Then she lets loose a moan, which ends in a wail, and she dives into the maroon folds of her mother’s embroidered top.
Sarah sobs. Bridget’s arms are around her, one hand stroking the back of the dark head.
“He fell under a machine," Bridget, murmuring, tells her. Her daughter is allowed to show emotion, to weep: in her new state she is not. "A part of it broke, knocked him off. Simple as that. One in a million chance Mr Parsons said."
Pete, turning away, mumbles, "More like two."
"Oh dear. Oh dear." Maureen is sniffing. "What’re you going to do?"
"Cope," Bridget tells her.
"Did he hurt?" Sarah asks from underneath. "Did Daddy hurt?"
"Did he Pete?" Bridget asks.
"No." Pete shakes his head, closes his eyes. "No. He was out when he hit the ground."
Parsons said that Pete hadn’t seen John fall and that’s why John had gone under the cropper. Pete is lying now to be kind to Sarah. Or to himself. There has to be an inquest.
"Doubt if your dad knew what happened," Pete is speaking to Sarah. "One second he was there, next he was gone."
Bridget is looking in surprise at this man’s kindness. He is, she tells herself, after all a father and a husband much like any father and husband. Is his roles. No, she corrects herself, Pete is not like John. John was a wiry energetic man, had ideas, dreams, laughter. Pete will carry on bouncing along glum-faced in his tractor cab, sour belly in his lap.
Sarah is sobbing anew.
"Come on love," Bridget coaxes her. "Let's go home."
Chapter Seven
Walking the few steps through the dark Bridget is made awkward by Sarah clinging to her. Reaching in she has to twist her arm back upon itself to reach the light switch.
In the yellow light the kitchen’s bare wood floor, after the tiles and carpets of next door, makes the house seem more desolate than solely the idea of John’s not coming there anymore.
"Put your homework away."
Detaching herself from Sarah, Bridget switches on the living room light. Now the clutter of her house — rugs, plants, motley furniture, pictures of the walls — is welcoming after the showpiece sterility of next door.
She listens to Sarah carrying her homework up the stairs and into her room. The house feels empty. To make noise she gushing fills the kettle, click-switches it on, consciously takes only the one mug off its hook, china scraping on metal.
Looking down on the tea-bag in the mug she tells herself to be wary of false sentiment. John regularly worked late, worked most weekends: it is often just Sarah and herself in the house. The two of them already have their own life organised.
Sarah has come back downstairs, is stood looking at John’s jackets hung on the wall behind the back door. The sleeves are shaped to the bend of his arms.
At ten Sarah is her parents. They are her experience. Her own self, her own life, is viewed through them. The pain, physical, is right down her middle. An internal amputation. Half of her is gone.
Her parents are her home. The jackets behind the door don’t make sense being there without her father fitting himself into them. She wants to cry out her pain again and again. It escapes her thoughts in a groan.
A snot-smudged trickle of tears is running down Sarah’s blotched cheeks. Bridget shuts down the irritation rising within her: Sarah isn’t being false. Bridget knows, if she didn’t have so much to think about, she too would probably be weeping.
Sarah has noticed that she isn’t: "Aren't you upset? Why aren’t you crying?" She wails as she comes clinging onto her again.
Bridget wraps her in her arms, lays her cheek atop her silky black crown, soothes and smoothes her. Then, murmuring Darling Darling, she gently holds her away, looks into the red puffed eyes: "I've got to take charge now." Bridget brings her hand edgeways up in front of her face. "It’s just us two and I’ve got to make the right decisions. And there’s a lot of decisions for me to make."
The kettle has boiled. Bridget detaches herself from Sarah.
"I've got to phone Granny and Grandad Cox, tell them. I expect Granny Cox will want to come down tomorrow. They’ll both be upset. Will you stay off school and help look after them?"
Sarah nods, her eyes going distant, thinking of school, her changed status there. Her difference. A future going on.
"I'll need to sort out some clean sheets for them." Granny and Grandad Cox will have Bridget’s bed: she will sleep on the sofa. "Help me clean and tidy through tonight. But let me phone first."
Still Bridget puts off picking up the phone, goes to tell Sarah where to find the bedding; returns, wanting to be distracted, to the phone, hating herself in this role of bringer of bad tidings. Good news is her speciality — "Guess what?... John’s this, Sarah’s that..."
She begins this phone call with the rehearsed, "I've got some terrible news..." John’s mother calls John’s father, there follows distant crying, questions, more tears, more questions.... Arrangements are made there and then for them to leave in the morning; John’s father, like Bridget, making plans to stop himself thinking.
Her own mother and father too, instinctively, want to come. She tells them not, that John’s parents will be here and that the house will be too crowded, best if they come down for the funeral, stay on for a few days afterwards...
Bridget doesn’t want her mother and father here watching her. With John’s parents she can be the carer, buffer them: her parents though will be fussing about her; and it will be all too easy then for her to give in to weeping. She doesn’t want to consider herself, to examine her own feelings, as her father is now leading her to think of herself even on the phone. Nor does Bridget want to sound as if she pushing her father away.
The doctor’s coming gets her off the phone.
The doctor is normally a round jolly man, in the surgery calls both Sarah and her Now Young Woman.... Tonight he’s solemn. Bridget watches his clean hand reach out to squeeze her round forearm: "I'm so very very sorry...."
He has only been to the cottage once before, when Sarah had a persistent fever and Bridget was afraid that she might fit. He had seemed impatient then, annoyed at having been called out. Now he sits on their blanket-rucked sofa and gives the impression of having all the time in the world. He asks Bridget what happened, listens to the story with a sad shake of the head, with a sigh offers her some sedatives — should she need them.... "...and there are numerous counselling services, self-help groups...." From his square briefcase he takes some pamphlets, lays them by the big spiky succulent on the round table.
"I need my mind clear." Bridget holds up her hand to the sedatives.
He nods, in solemn mode; and, done with Bridget, turns to Sarah who is rubbing at her red eyes.
"And you Young Woman." His arm goes around her shoulders, pulls her thin little body towards his bulk, "At a time like this it's the most natural thing in the world to want to cry and to keep on crying."
Rigidly uncomfortable as she is under his unaccustomed arm the mere mention of crying has Sarah instantly blubbing again.
"There'll be no other man as important in your life as your father. Not in the same way. Go on, just you let it all out."
The phone, on the shelf by the kitchen door, bottom of the stairs, rings. Bridget answers it. John’s brother. He begins by saying that he can be with her in four hours. He lives in North Wales. She tells him there’s no need.
The doctor signals that he’s leaving, points to the pamphlets, presses a foil strip of two tablets into her hand. "Should you need them," he stage-whispers.
Bridget flicks him a quick smile, nods her understanding.
"Sorry?" she says to John's brother. "The doctor was just leaving."
Sarah stares across at her mother from the sofa, tries to work out who she’s talking to. Sarah has only met her Uncle Grant once.
"No need," Bridget tells him. "Sarah and I will manage...."
Chapter Eight
Bridget sits on the arm of the sofa by the window. She has on baggy combat trousers and a big blue jumper. On the windowsill is a mug of tea.
Although called cottages, and all that the word in estate-agent-speak connotes, these two are not of ancient construction. A post-war manpower and housing shortage had these two built on this spare bit of unproductive land — a small quarry from where stone had been taken for the once-farmhouse (ancient) below. Construction of the two cottages had been quick and cheap, walls a concrete block thick, window frames of buckling iron, sills of cold red tiles often condensation puddled. Not this morning.
Here on the sofa arm is where Bridget finds herself perched most mornings — John left for work, Sarah not yet risen. John hasn't left today. No teapot still warm, no smell of toast.
Bridget keeps trying to surprise herself into tears. She knows that inside is a whole tank of grief. She cannot though, fingers numb, find the releasing valve. She wept readily enough before — at movies, over books, in huge anger. But over John’s death, over this absolute ending, she can feel nothing.
Sighing at her inadequacy she looks down the long strip of hillside garden — lawn and flowers this end, a silver birch, its yellow-edged leaves moving only slightly this morning; then the rows and squares of the vegetable patch, ending in the night-shined mesh of the chicken run and the one-eyed shed.
A single blue tit arrives on the birdtable, inspects the empty nut basket. Goes. John made the birdtable their first winter here, got excited by every new bird coming to it. Every winter since it has been blown over, bears the scar of its every repair. Who will make and mend now? She will.
Bridget cannot bring herself to tears.
The vale fades into grey English mistiness, dark green cut-outs of trees receding in clumps and lines into the greyness.
Bridget looks into the wakefulness of all last night. Twice she got up and held the foil strip of pills in her hand; the second time she put them in the bedside drawer. And every time that she got out of bed — bits of her aching — she crept across to check on Sarah — asleep each time. She feels again the same awesome responsibility for this other life that she felt in the first days after Sarah’s birth. She is now all that Sarah has.
Last night, back in bed, the thoughts and aches turned again. In that wakeful dark was primarily disbelief — despite the memory of John’s body on that trolley, despite the space beside her in the bed. Sheer weight of normalcy, of years together, overrode them. Her life knew that he would be back: how then to believe that this has happened to her life? Death was not a planned-for consideration. One far off day perhaps, an old man, an old woman, they would have taken turns to die. After everyone else was dead. Not here. Not now. Not in the middle of this their life together.
At some time towards dawn — she remembers it getting grey — she must have fallen briefly asleep — to awake coldly alone, bed empty beside her, no sound of John downstairs. Usually, before he left, John brought her up a cup of tea; and then she woke Sarah, sat here with a second mug of tea while Sarah got herself dressed.
Sarah now comes sleepily down the stairs.
Sarah is quiet this morning. Bridget gets up from the arm of the sofa, says little, doesn’t want to provoke her to tears again.
"Soon as you’ve finished that," a bowl of muesli, "get yourself dressed. Grandad and Granny Cox will be here soon."
"Why do they always have to leave so early?" Most family conversations are catechisms — known question, known response, comfort of the familiar.
"It’s illogical. He says because of the traffic. But the traffic is all going into London when he’s coming out. And it's just as illogical going back — he leaves here early and gets caught up in the rush hour going in."
Grandad Cox is as thin as John and Sarah. Sarah, spoon-sliding milk patterns round her bowl, holds Bridget’s words in her mind.
"I'll need a hand to get the place clean," Bridget breaks in. "Can you feed Buster and the hens?"
Sarah, breath still shallow from sleep, slowly nods.
"Soon as you can."
* * * * *
The four hens cluck the news of Sarah’s approach.
Wellies slap-slap against her bare calves. Buster, a black and white rabbit, is sat up, back and ears straight, watching her.
"Won't be a minute," Sarah tells him.
The bolt on the shed door is cold and wet. The shed, as always, smells of corn dust and engine oil. Sarah dips a beaker of bran out of one metal bin. They had rats two winters ago, ate through the plastic bins. History.
Buster comes hopping to the bowl under the open top. Her Dad made a movable run for the lawn and Buster goes up there weekends and holidays: nights he has to stay down here in the fox-proof pen.
This morning Buster doesn’t pay any heed to the fresh bran in his china bowl, sniffs through the wire at Sarah’s wet wellies. Sarah picks him out, stroking holds him.
"Daddy’s dead," she softly dares the words, feels the tears coming. She doesn't want to cry again: her throat aches from last night.
The hens are pacing the netting along the side of the run, bumping into and stepping over one another.
Sarah lets Buster down into his pen, goes back to the shed and gets a jug of mixed corn. She throws a handful of the corn over to the far corner. When the hens go — necks forward — running after it, Sarah steps quickly into the pen and pours the rest of the corn into the galvanised feeder. They have enough water.
A car comes up the hill, stops, whining reverses. Hearing Granny Cox's voice, a car door slamming, Sarah’s legs take her running up the garden. Remembering her father is dead, she stops, and walks around the side of the cottage.
"Here’s Sarah." Granny Cox shouts London loud. "Oh you poor little sod," she wails. "What a thing to happen." And Sarah is weeping again and holding on to her grandmother.
* * * * *
Bridget sees the car shine past the kitchen window. Letting out a breath she watches it reverse, hears Granny Cox’s hard London voice. Going out Bridget finds Sarah and Granny Cox clasped together.
"Who’d have thought it?" Granny Cox looks across the car roof at Bridget, "Who’d ever have thought it?" Cheeks puckered Granny Cox, John’s mother, lays her head sobbing atop Sarah, John’s daughter.
John’s father, spick and span, steps forward to clasp Bridget by the arm, hold her, fingers digging in. He is hurting her. Is he blaming her, she wonders.
He releases her: "I simply can't believe this has happened." He is thin and small like John, today looks confused and lost. Bending slightly she gives him an awkward hug, "Neither can I." She wrapped John to her, flesh to flesh: will she ever know that with a man again?
"It’ll take a while." He pats the arm he hurt. "Poor little Sarah."
"Come on in," Bridget says turning. "Kettle’s on."
* * * * *
Sat around the living room — Bob standing, turning about, pacing, standing — the story of John’s dying is told again.
Sarah, sat on the sofa next to her Gran, sniffles and listens.
"Anything we can do. That’s what we’ve come for." Bob paces forward and back, a shake of his head. "Anything at all."
"Actually, yes. You can hold the fort here while I pop up to the school."
"I'll drive you."
"If it’s all the same to you Bob, I’d rather go on my own." Bridget lowers her voice, "On the way back I want to have a look in the field where it happened. To see for myself. And I’d rather do that on my own."
The idea of going to the field had only that moment popped into her head. Any excuse for not being alone with Bob, with him snapping questions and conclusions at her. John called it his Brigadier mode. Family legend had it that he had a South London accent until he made himself Managing Director of one of his companies. Marketing he called it then. Now he has a cleaning company. His wife, Eileen, consistently refuses to work with him, has kept her job in a chemists, where she wears a white overall, her hair scraped back.
Caught off-balance by the obduracy of Bridget’s refusal Bob says, as if embarrassed,
"Oh. Of course."
“Yea. You go off my dear." Eileen tells her from the sofa. "We’ll take care of everything here. Won’t we?" she nudges Sarah.
Sarah has complained after previous visits that Granny Cox treats her as if she is two years younger than she is. Now Sarah is looking at her mother, "What’re you going to tell her?" Sarah means her teacher.
"Only what has happened."
* * * * *
The school is of gabled brick, with two prefab classrooms at the top of the sloping games field.
Miss Valder becomes tearful at sight of Bridget. Thin fingers reach out to touch Bridget’s round forearm.
"It’s naturally going to be difficult for Sarah this week," Bridget says. "Probably be better if she doesn’t come to school."
"Naturally." The Head is away on a course all this week. "Not too long off though. Make it all the harder for her to come back."
Both mother and teacher know that Sarah doesn’t like school. Sarah enjoys the schoolwork, but not being at school. She has no friends here.
"I’ll call a special assembly, tell all the children today. That’ll give them a whole week to get it out of their systems before Sarah comes back. I’m sure Sarah will cope though. She’s a sensible girl."
"It all goes in."
"Yes. Surprising what they pick up on."
* * * * *
Bridget has ridden her bike, basket on the front, back and forth along these high-hedged lanes for the past five years, her mind often elsewhere. Today she has watched herself do it — fingers near the brakes, feet on the pedals — and she has wondered at the reality of her being here, the tension of the muscles in her thighs driving the pedals around.
The swede field is not on her normal route to and from the school. Listening now to herself say to Bob that she wanted to see where it happened, she wonders if it was just an excuse not to be alone with him, or if she truly does want to see the field. To make it real? Make it ordinary? Lesser?
The field is big and flat and almost square, has a low round-topped stone wall along this side of it. The majority of Parsons’ fields were once part of other farms, old boundary walls now incorporated into his holdings. The main road is on the other side of a thorn hedge.
The red harvester has orange roadworks tape staked around it. A white van is parked, doors open like insect wingcases, part way into the fresh earth of the field. The green-topped untouched swedes are beyond the harvester.
Pete’s yellow and green tractor is coming towards the gate. Bridget is astride her bike, one foot on the gravel drift in the gateway. Pete, up in his cab, doesn't look pleased to see her. Or is his habitual look of hauteur endowed solely by the height of the tractor cab?
He opens the cab door. Light wobbles on the perspex.
"What they doing here?" Bridget asks him. He mis-hears: "Come to pick up the tractor. We need..."
"No. Them. Who are they?"
"From the coroner’s office, they said. Come to measure up and that."
Both look over to the two men in white boilersuits and green wellingtons, standing together beside the grounded harvester. Bridget can see the place where John must have fallen. Yes, she supposes, going under all that metal he would have been killed. The harvester doesn’t look obviously broken.
"Gotta go!" Pete shouts down to her, revs the engine, sends up a puff of black smoke.
Pushing with one foot Bridget moves out of the way. Pete, door slammed, drives past her. Bridget turns and starts to cycle back home.
* * * * *
"A Mr Davis rang, said he’d call back." John’s father — his usual efficient self — delivers the message the moment Bridget steps through the door. And no sooner delivered than the phone rings.
"Mrs Cox?" asked in the expected professionally anodyne tones.
Watched by Granny Cox and Sarah on the sofa, Bob by the round table, Bridget listens. Mr Davis introduces himself as a funeral director, says that he’s sorry to learn of the terrible accident, tells her that he has been informed by the coroner’s office that the body will be released for burial next week, can he come to see her and discuss arrangements? Bridget gives him directions to reach the cottage.
"You know," Bob says, "you haven’t got to take the first one that comes along? I'll ring round if you like, get prices. Remember," he says to his wife, "when Mum died? Difference between top and bottom estimates? Five hundred. ‘Course, London this aint, but I bet I can get it cheaper."
"He seems to know what's going on," Bridget signifies the phone. "I'd rather just deal with him. Get it over and done with."
"That's what they bank on," Bob points at her. "People being too upset. Don't let ‘em get away with it."
Bridget feels herself being pushed. Bob pushes all his family. John and Eileen usually let him think he’s getting his own way. Grant pushes back. Bridget, not before directly subject to this pressure, doesn’t now want to argue. But nor does she want, by giving in to Bob, the fuss of more phone calls.
"Really I’d rather just pay. Even if it’s a bit over the odds. Get it out of the way."
"You’re going to need every penny...."
"Bob!" Eileen cuts in. "Let Bridget do it the way she wants."
Bob physically falters, his whole body — arms and legs jerking — undecided about its next action.
"Right." He turns around, steps away. "OK." At the window he doesn’t appear to know where to go. "He was my son too you know," he says to the world beyond the window.
Granny Cox with Sarah on the sofa, Bridget in the doorway by the phone, watch him trying to hold down his agitation. Granny Cox glances to Bridget.
"Bob," Bridget says, "can you be with me when he comes? I can’t think at the moment. I’d appreciate that."
"Course I will my dear." He comes striding over to her, grips her forearm, red eyes averted, "Course I will."
* * * * *
Mrs Parsons stops her red Volvo estate in the road. Bridget, cursing, goes to the back door, opens it as Mrs Parsons approaches.
Mrs Parsons is wearing a tweed skirt, tailored jacket, silver brooch. "Oh my dear...." She reaches towards the forearm, "I am so terribly terribly sorry."
Bridget pulls a face intended to convey sad resignation, stands aside, "Come in."
Mrs Parsons, seeming too big for the cottage, goes around the living room sympathising with everyone, oohing over poor Sarah. Mrs Parsons used to be a Social Worker, gave it up when Mr Parsons became successful. Now she helps out in a charity shop, is on the Parish Council. First and foremost though she is the wife of a businessman.
In amongst all the ...Anything you want ...Anything I can do... Just ask... she lets Bridget know that she needn't worry about having to leave, that she and Sarah can stay in the cottage for as long as it takes.
"I’m not leaving here. Not yet. Certainly not yet. What about the inquest? Sarah and I aren’t leaving..."
"No of course not my dear. Of course not."
A car beeps outside. Bridget guesses Mrs Parsons deliberately blocked the road so that sooner or later she would have an excuse to leave. Indeed as she gets into her red Volvo Mrs Parsons waves, almost with gratitude, to the driver of the other car.
Kitchen door closed Bob says to Bridget, "Decent of her."
"Bitch." Bridget goes into the living room. Mrs Parsons scent still fills it.
"Eh?" Bob follows.
"Are we going to have to leave?" Sarah has come over to Bridget, is looking up with worried eyes.
"See!" Bridget says to Bob. "Bitch!"
"Yea but... Cottage goes with the job. You must’ve known you’d have to get out?"
"Know..? John went to work yesterday morning. He hasn’t come home yet. I don’t.... I can’t take it in. That bitch comes here today to let me know I’ve got to get out."
"Wasn't quite like that." Bob says.
"Wasn't it?"
Bridget looks down to Sarah, giving her permission to speak.
"Have we got to leave? What about Buster and Spud?" Spud is the brown and black cat.
"We only leave here," Bridget smoothes the dome of Sarah’s head, "when we’ve got somewhere to go where we both want to go."
"I don't suppose the two of you put anything by for this contingency?"
"There was nothing to put by Bob."
"Bob." Granny Cox makes a warning face.
"What about when you retired?"
"We thought of offering to buy this place. At some time."
"And that's it?"
"No. That’s not it." Bridget now feels that she has to speak up for John, "Not it at all. We don’t owe them a thing. Not a thing. Not even a thank you."
Chapter Nine
Bridget doesn't know how to explain her resentment of Parsons so that Bob will understand. Yesterday, with John alive, she’d had a place in the present, a plan for the future. Today, with John dead, she has been told that she has neither. The past must needs be explained first.
"Look," Bridget says, "John only got this job because none of the locals would work for the wages on offer. Or rather they would. But then Parsons got only what he paid for. In John he got a damn good retail manager cheap, house thrown in. We’re not leaving here."
Bridget knows that she hasn’t come close to telling of John’s importance to this place; why Parsons now owes her and Sarah more than just a few weeks grace. What she can’t tell Bob, thinking he won't understand because it isn’t in business terms, is the impact John has had on the Parsons themselves. And already Bridget has seen Bob stop listening, suspecting that she was getting at him because he too employs cheap workers. How to tell him that she knows that both the Parsons’ identities are built on what John did here.
Before John came Parsons was the agri-businessman, big flash car and expensive suits, green wellies in the boot. He dealt with bank managers and officials, came by grants and loans. Then, when John got the shop going and brought in outside produce, it was John— fed up with telling doubting customers that this was produce from another of their farms — who talked Parsons into planting a few token crops, like the swedes, in the fields along the main road between the two towns.
The ploy worked. Most consumers don't look beyond the packaging. And it was then, for the benefit of the customers parked in the yard, that Parsons started to play The Farmer. With Mrs Parsons playing Lady Bountiful. Before that she'd been all legs and sports car.
* * * * *
"All very well," Bob says, "but you’ve got to have something in black-and-white. In the meantime you’re dependant on their good natures."
"No. Oh no." Bridget waves her hand, palm outward, in front of her face, "Don’t you tell me I've got to be grateful to those two bastards. This is our home. They’ve taken John’s life. We’re staying here until we, until Sarah and I, decide to leave. Right?"
Bob looks away, nods, goes to the kitchen. There are few places to escape to in this cottage. He is still of the same mind.
Bridget goes to the window, looks out over the hedge-striated vale, takes a deep slow breath. Yesterday, she hears herself saying earlier, yesterday John left for work. He hasn’t come home yet. The words don’t loosen anything inside her.
Chapter Ten
"Come on. Let’s get out from under your mother’s feet’" Bob says to Sarah.
Sarah tries to think what she might have done to be a nuisance. Or omitted to do. She can’t think of anything. Grandad Cox though often says things that are meaningless to her.
The inside of Grandad Cox’s car, like the outside, is clean. Her Dad laughs at Grandad Cox washing and polishing his car every week. Their own car is muddy outside, untidy with wrappers and coats inside. Grandad Cox has a special little hoover for his car, brings it with him. It is her size, but he won’t let her use it.
Whenever they come to stay Grandad Cox goes each morning to collect a newspaper. He usually brings Sarah back a small bar of chocolate. This morning he asks at the junction, "You got any photographs of your Dad?"
"There’s a big box of our photos in the cupboard. In the living room."
They turn left onto the main road between the two towns.
"Can you keep a secret?" He gives her his clever crafty look, like when he’s arguing with her mother and he’s just thought of something new to say.
Her mother and father have told her not to keep secrets. No matter who asks.
"I don't know."
Thinking she might be afraid he’s about to tell her something about her father that she’ll have to keep from her mother, Bob says quickly, "Not a big secret. What I want is to get hold of some photos of your Dad, get them enlarged, put ‘em in a proper frame. And then give one as a present to your Mum, and one to your Granny Cox. One for you too if you want. You pick out your favourite photo. But it’s got to be a surprise. OK?"
Sarah nods.