Amenable Women Page 2

  Whether he would have continued despite his wife’s imitating miscellany of information was immaterial as the silver, before any chasing, elaborate or otherwise, was all stolen from the garden shed because he talked about his new skills, and exactly where the silver was kept, over a pint in the Priory Arms. It was not insured because, while he would bang on to anyone at the bar about the quantity of silver lying around in his shed, he had not banged on to his insurance company about same. Alas – Renaissance Men in the shape of her husband were not blessed with a sense of remorse. ‘You can be very vulgar, Flora,’ he said, when she pointed out the cost of it all. She felt extremely sorry for the wives of genuine Renaissance Men. No sooner had these linkers twixt ancient and modern managed a small volume of poetry and gone back to eating and sleeping again, than they decided to go a-tilting to possible great harm, or opined in public that the sun went round the earth and accordingly had their heads chopped off. No wonder everyone sighed with relief when it was all over and Europe reached the Age of Enlightenment.

  Flora, too, just sighed with relief and continued to love her husband – if exasperatedly – for a while – despite the growing absurdities – for she could still remember the shy, curly-haired graduate from Cirencester who first fell off his bicycle at her feet and who later took her to where the silent otters slid and who could pick for her twenty different kinds of mushrooms. When they met Flora was staying with her Aunt Helen in Kent for a bit of fresh country air. She would have liked to call herself an urban chick except that she was plain, had heard herself referred to at the school where she taught in London as ‘Miss Bun Face’ and knew, by dint of having a pretty older sister who knew all there was to know about everything, called Rosie, that she could never be either fashionable or attractive. Rosie was the urban chick, Flora was the urban sparrow. She was aware of this. Edward was handsome. Not in any fashionable, attractive film-star way, but definitely good-looking in a reassuring young doctor way – tall, with that fair curly hair and serious blue eyes and a generous mouth. Quite a catch, she kept thinking without hope. Quite a catch. In those days he was shy and had yet to develop his themes of tradition and knowing your place, and the English countryside for the English.

  At the time Edward was helping with some part-time coppicing and clearing work on the riverbank and lodging with her aunt. He rode his bicycle up Aunt Helen’s path and Flora – who had just arrived from London – stepped out from behind the big bay tree – and the rest was history. He was full of apology, which gave her the upper hand for once, she decided years later.

  Flora bathed his grazes and probably looked at her cheerful best while kneeling at his feet. Girls who were plain did not have a sporting chance and needed to consolidate as soon as possible. Magazines told her so. If magazines had also explained what particular consolidations they had in mind, it would have been helpful. Presumably whatever they were they could not remove a snub nose, freckled cheeks and a wide jaw of the permanently amused. Omens for marriage were not good.

  When Edward’s day off came around, he asked Flora, most sweetly, if she were free and they agreed to go for a cycle ride together. This they did in the beautiful long summer light, stopping to take swigs of water and to eat their biscuits and apples. They laughed a little and talked a little and it became a regular event. She had never felt happier – here was the world and at last she belonged in it. She rose early and successfully studied the OS maps for their routes – an achievement driven by sheer determination. The fortunate thing in terms of their progress as a couple was that there were absolutely no other young women around of a suitable age.

  One morning, before he left the house, Edward said, ‘We can go to Hever today. I’ve been studying the map. If you think you’ll be strong enough. It’s a bit of a trek but the journey’s pretty.’

  ‘Yes,’ she said, feeling a strange sense of loss that she was no longer the one to suggest a route.

  He smiled, so nicely, a smile of encouragement and said, ‘Right then – I’ll be back around twelve.’

  When she asked her aunt what Hever was, her aunt told her about the moated castle which had once been Anne Boleyn’s home and how it later was given to Henry’s fourth Queen, Anne of Cleves. ‘A pay-off after her divorce from Henry VIII. He chopped off the head of the first Anne and couldn’t stand the sight of the second, poor woman. Got rid of her as quickly as he could. Large, plain and stupid apparently. She never married again,’ said Aunt Helen. ‘Unsurprisingly. Still – at least he didn’t cut her head off for it.’

  ‘For what?’ said Flora, only half listening. ‘For being what he called his Flanders Mare’.

  To a young woman who has been called Bun Face, this was less shocking than it might be. ‘Flanders . . .’ said Flora dreamily. Perhaps she and Edward could go to Flanders.

  ‘Yes,’ said her aunt, nodding significantly. ‘German.’ As if this explained everything.

  They stopped their bikes to look out over the Kentish countryside and down upon the little castle in the distance. Flushed with confidence, and the ride which had been hard, Flora said, ‘This is where Anne Boleyn was born – Henry VIII’s wife.’

  ‘Really,’ he said. ‘I always liked history. I’ve a head for dates.’ And she thought he looked impressed. He then cited the dates of various significant battles and the reinstatement of royalty. Flora looked equally impressed.

  ‘Gracious,’ she said.

  ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘History’s my thing.’

  ‘He cut off Anne Boleyn’s head, Henry did. And then they gave the place to Anne of Cleves. She was his fourth wife.’

  ‘That’s a lot of wives,’ he said thoughtfully, ‘called Anne.’ ‘Yes,’ she said, ‘I expect kings can do that sort of thing –chop and change –’

  He looked at her with an air of surprise – and then threw back his head and laughed.

  She suddenly realised that she had made quite a witticism. Witticisms were not her usual forte and it gave her a sudden jolt of confidence. She threw back her head and laughed, too, not caring that it was probably her least attractive condition.

  They stood there, close together, bikes resting on the old wall and Flora thought it was beautiful. The sun gleamed on the water of the moat bathing the delicate crenellations in its lemony light, and swans floated elegantly around looking at the world from superior eyes. As she watched the birds gliding on the water she was still panting a little and her cheeks were pulsating with heat. It was not, she remembered thinking, the way to look when you were out with a new boyfriend. Horses sweat, gentlemen perspire and ladies glow. She was as shiny and damp as a well exercised mare and considerably more freckly than when she first arrived in Hurcott Ducis. Nevertheless, she had made him laugh and that must be a good thing and she enjoyed the feeling of intimacy it brought. So she said a little thank-you to the Flemish Mare, whoever she was, and thought no more about her.

  Edward, still laughing, leaned his bicycle against the fence and stared at the clear blue yonder and became the very picture of a man with a serious question on his mind. He was absentmindedly caressing one of her hands. ‘I wonder if we should . . .’ he began.

  ‘Yes,’ she said, as soon as the words were out of his mouth. She startled him with her fierceness. ‘Yes,’ she said again. ‘I would like to marry you very much. And as soon as possible.’ She then kissed him very, very hard on the lips which he seemed to find pleasing and his hand was under her jumper quick as ninepence. Unchartered territory. That, she presumed, was what they meant by consolidating. She was teaching at a primary school on the other side of London and she did not see it as a career.

  After they were married and had moved to a village not far from her aunt’s and she was still commuting to London and beginning to find she rather liked the job – he told her that he had never intended to ask her to marry him that evening. What he had actually been going to say was, ‘I wonder if we should get a tandem?’

  ‘Oh, she said. ‘Well – never mind.’ And she did
n’t. Nor, it seemed, did he. Later she came to think that he probably subconsciously knew she would make a very good foil to the man he was about to become.

  The world always questioned the how and the why of her and Edward. After he joined the Heron estate and was just beginning to show signs of ambition the wives of the Estate workers looked at him with open admiration and at Flora with increasing amazement. For the Estate’s second summer party which the two of them attended, Edward wore a blazer with the Heron crest on its pocket, which pleased Sir Randolph tremendously. Flora could not believe that it was anything other than a joke. It was not a joke. After that it was only a matter of time. Edward was on his way. And Flora trailed behind, somewhat aghast but loyal, very loyal. Only in her head did she curl her lip and think sceptically about it all, which seemed prudent. She was a married woman and that counted for much. She would hold her tongue and put up with it – turn a blind eye, lie fallow, bide her time. Which she did until, suddenly, it was too late. There she was, Mrs Edward Chapman, mother of a beautiful daughter (now there’s another surprise for you), and dull and unattractive wife of the Estate’s dashing, handsome, be-blazered and adored wild card. Sadly there was little comfort in the child Hilary for the child Hilary was entirely her father’s little girl and Edward displayed her proudly as if he alone had engendered her. ‘She’s so pretty,’ he said, over and over again, as if he just could not believe it. Flora took a back seat. She could never get away now, even if she had the backbone.

  Later, much later in their marriage, and thinking it over, Flora decided that if she had waited, she would never have married Edward. She would not have been blinded by his good looks and his interest in nature and the outdoors, neither of which, to be truthful, ever contributed much to the success of a marriage. She would have waited for someone more appropriate to come along – or – perhaps – remained single. Those urgers in print of a plain woman’s consolidation had much to answer for. As did she for not having more sense. But then – had she remained single she would never have had her daughter . . . And that, she thought, as she looked again at those sobbing, grief-bent shoulders, was unthinkable. Even if Hilary had not, so far, been the most rewarding of daughters. To Hilary Edward was a wonderful father – and if confidence in the world was anything to go by they both had more than their fair share of it. You’d never catch Hilary doing a Flora and mistaking a suggestion about a double bike for a marriage proposal. Hilary was strong-minded, utterly confident and her father’s physical double. They admired each other enormously. The wholly inappropriate thought crept into Flora’s willing mind – that with Edward out of the way there just might be a little room in Hilary’s heart for her. Time would tell.

  The sudden understanding, some years ago, of what her life had become came to Flora as she wandered through John Lewis’s stationery department one day and found a greetings postcard of one woman talking to another and saying, ‘I thought I’d married Mr Right instead of which I married Mr Always Right’. She bought the card because it was relevant and amusing and when, later, forgetting all about it, she emptied her handbag on the kitchen table looking for something else entirely, and the card fell out, Edward picked it up, chuckled, and handed it back to her saying, ‘Who did you buy that for?’ Which said it all, really.

  The English cricket team, so Flora had read, were coached to look in their mirrors each day and quote a poem that told them to believe that they were their own universe, they were their own man, that they ruled the world – which – if it were to be believed – made them win the Ashes. In the same way, Edward looked in his mirror every day and saw a supreme being, loved and admired, at the centre of his own universe. If she looked in the mirror every day, not her favourite occupation and she tried to avoid it, she saw only a latterday Katharina to Edward’s Petruchio (in her pre-Edward days she was keen on Shakespeare). She knew how Edward would love her to say to any of his absurder claims, ‘. . . And be it moon, or sun, or what you please; /And if you please to call it a rush-candle/Henceforth I vow it shall be so for me . . .’ She had single-handedly proved that all it needed was for one good woman to remain silent. Since she allowed it she must accept it and so she did.

  All that tree-hugger stuff, as he came to call it, went away once he drank his port with the noble baronet and learned to nod graciously at Foot, as ever in attendance. The appointment of the somewhat under-born Edward to such a big and ancient estate was seen as a remarkable achievement though the more truthful explanation of it was that many men who might have been appointed did not choose to have their heads blown off in any strange experiments or to eat the unmentionable parts of a pig’s anatomy at the Annual Garden Party.

  Later, when Hilary was old enough, Flora taught French and needlework three full days a week in gloriously liberating London. She had hoped to teach art and needlework – and rekindle her love of paintings (Edward was not one for visiting exhibitions) – or English literature but neither was on offer. Teaching was justifiable because they needed the money, thank God, and her job became the barrier to all Edward’s excesses. Once her bottom hit the train seat and her newspaper was unfolded and the carriage pulled away from the neat little station at Hurcott Ducis, Edward’s current pursuits and her own inadequacies were put to the back of her mind. After school Hilary sat and did her homework in the Estate office, Flora was back home with supper on the table by seven. Everything worked cleanly and calmly, and privately Flora congratulated herself. Even if Edward – and in later stages, Hilary – thought she should really be at home in a pinny. Neither of them approved of her other life, probably because it excluded them. They asked her about it little and she told them even less. That was a liberation of sorts.

  But then Flora took early retirement. Very early retirement she said to anyone who asked. Charts, goals, mission statement all left her feeling weak and out of her depth. The days of turning up, teaching a subject and getting your students through an exam or two exploded into the educational version of the Spanish Inquisition: school turned into an academic dog’s breakfast of tests and skills over education and imagination and although she rather dreaded the end she was quite relieved to go when it came. Yoof was the thing and new young teaching staff came in wearing jeans and trainers – a hurt child could no longer be cuddled and somehow, though she tried to look nonchalant about it all, it was time to go. She picked up her pension and walked. That it meant a much closer proximity (Hilary was long gone to her own home and life) to her husband made her grit her teeth and – no doubt – increased the imbecility of her expression.

  ‘Early retirement,’ she reiterated to people in the village, few of whom she knew well since Hurcott Ducis had expanded remarkably over the twenty years they had lived there. A new estate was built where the old Manor once sat and it lent an almost small-town-like quality to the place but it was well enough hidden behind shrubbery and an old, stone wall. Nevertheless, gossip was gossip and her news was everybody’s. ‘Very early retirement’. Too many came up to her and said how young she looked for her age. She was only fifty-four for heaven’s sake. One thing you could say about being plain in youth was that you remained at that level, approximately, well into your middle age. Suddenly you were ahead of the frightened beauties who began to crumble since you never had anything to boast about in the first place. Or that was the theory. Mentally, she guessed, you were stronger. What you’ve never had you don’t miss. In some respects you gained because of attributes that were perhaps overlooked in younger days – in Flora’s case, a good skin with none of those lines and wrinkles that look so sad on regretful erstwhile beauties, and a decent head of hair that was still mostly brown and undamaged by either lack of hormones or too many chemical helpmates. And a cheerful face when many around her of similar age looked either haggard (from anxiety and dieting she guessed), down in the mouth and disappointed, or bland from too many surgeon’s scalpels. Her mouth would never turn down, even if she wanted it to. Small victories, her physical stabilities, but ones she
rather cherished.

  Edward, of course, was still firing on all guns – literally and metaphorically – and now that Giles’s nephew ran most of his uncle’s wine business (since the demise of the restaurant young Julian Baldwin held the reins very tightly) the two of them cooked up more hare-brained schemes than a pair of silly schoolboys. Sir Randolph had passed the point of any meaningful experimentation – meaningful anything really – and Edward was his own man on the Estate. Meanwhile Flora just felt older and older with a sense that part of her had been lost the part she owned – the private life outside the village – the part that was not long-suffering wife nor heavily criticised mother.

  Daughter Hilary made no bones about it – all that working in London when she was small was not what her mother should have been doing – she should have been in the kitchen, in that famous pinny, waiting to dish out the post-school buns and milk. The fact that Hilary loved the Estate office with its open fire in winter and its toasting fork put to good use and its big table where she could draw or write or doze – and its outdoor surroundings in warmer months where she could flop and play after her homework, was forgotten. Remembered were the few occasions, very few, when Hilary was sick, or the village school’s heating failed. Then Edward was called in, and Flora would return home to find two pairs of eyes looking at her balefully from sofa-based telly watching. Oh Maither, Maither what hae ye done. . .?