A Mersey Mile (30 page)

He’d painted over the patterned glass. Why? Did he have the ability to sense a watching presence in the alley below? As for the incident with the key, that had almost given her a heart
attack. Had he known she was there? Did he think a few bolts would suffice? He didn’t realize what he’d taken on, did he? She was a lawyer, she was clever, she was beautiful,
indomitable, a winner. And according to a certain chap in Oxford, she suffered from narcissism among other personality problems. Narcissistic? She was merely pragmatic, unafraid of the truth,
accepting of her own physical self, even celebrating it.

‘But all the same, I’m not sure I’m normal,’ she said aloud. No one normal should be sitting in a car while the man she desired was a hundred yards away and in bed with
another woman. Had the dimwit psych doctor been right after all? Did she have a fault the size of the San Andreas running through her? No, she’d been a gifted and industrious student, and she
was now a talented lawyer. The facade must be made stronger so that no one else would catch a glimpse of traits that might be termed weaknesses. They were not weaknesses; they were merely the
eccentricities of the kind displayed by many with great brains.

Mum didn’t know the full story to this day. The breakdown in Oxford had been kept from her; it was intensely personal and almost dehumanizing. Obsessive, the doctor had said. He’d
visited her and remarked on the neatness of her temporary home. ‘Do you feel compelled to be organized and tidy?’ the man had asked after looking at a pristine kitchen, a well-scrubbed
bathroom and her newly painted bed-sitting room. What was wrong with a place for everything and everything in its place? He’d noticed the three mirrors, too. Did she spend much time looking
at her reflection? Stupid questions.

It was now almost two in the morning, and her mother would be wide awake and worrying. Her mother mattered, yet Frank Charleson loomed large in Elaine’s list of priorities. She needed him.
These were hunger pains, though they were not in her stomach. It was lust and it was a new feeling.

Anyway, what was so bad about having things in rows? What was amiss when a person stacked older items at the front, newer at the back of kitchen cupboards? She was methodical, that was all.
Clothes in the wardrobes were divided by colour, then subdivided by type and length. A second wardrobe held work clothes, suits at one end, blouses at the other. She had never in her adult life
worked at a cluttered desk. Her tack at the stables had always been the best kept, her pony the best groomed. She was scrupulously clean and always well turned out, and there was nothing wrong with
any of that.

Obsessive? Perhaps this business was a little extreme, hanging about just to be near someone who had rejected her. The difficulties in Oxford had started in the same way when a lecturer she
admired greatly had downgraded one of her assignments to an A minus. She’d hauled him over the coals, he’d described her to her face as arrogant, and she’d finished up having
psychological counselling. ‘Am I mad?’

Was she mad? Was she going to get worse with age? Or could she keep whatever it was under wraps and well out of view? She’d been judged to have a personality disorder, which term could, in
her view, be applied to anything from ill temper to schizophrenia. Well, she heard no voices unless they were real and attached to humans. ‘Am I mad?’ she repeated. There was no one
here to offer an answer, of course. ‘I think I’d better go home.’ She went home.

Brendan Hall, commonly known as Don, loved his little caravan. It was comfortable and it was his alone. Gladys Acton was good to him. She changed his sheets two or three times
a week, made his meals and brought a mug of cocoa across at nine o’clock every night. Both needed to be early to bed. She was often up in the night seeing to her father’s
ever-increasing needs, while Don was out and about before dawn, since he was now the main farmer. Local farmhands respected and trusted him, since there was very little he didn’t know about
the land or husbandry.

He met the ailing father, even sitting with him on Sundays and reading to him from the works of Dickens, an author favoured by both men. Gladys Acton was immeasurably grateful, as was her
father. Matt Mason had few new visitors. A nurse climbed the stairs daily, the doctor once a week, his daughter several times a day. The aged man’s intellect remained sound, and he loved the
newcomer’s accent. ‘Thank you,’ he said each time a portion of
Great Expectations
had been read to him.

They discussed politics and religion, though for the most part they concentrated on farming. Don told Matt about potato blights in Ireland, the history of his country’s farmers, his
continuing faith in crop rotation. ‘I come from an old-fashioned country and I remain an old-fashioned farmer. I worked the peat bogs, had a job in stables from the age of seven, learned to
milk at the same age and got a kick on the leg for my trouble on the first day. Farm work seems to be born in the bone, even when the bone gets damaged by a cow.’

Matt agreed. Privately, he advised his daughter to keep hold of the new man. ‘He’ll work harder than your fellow ever did. He’s worth his weight in gold. Make sure you feed him
well and give him a decent wage.’

Several times, Don carried the old man downstairs, wrapped him up well, placed him in the wheelchair and pushed him up and down the least rugged of the lanes. ‘Perhaps bees next year, Mr
Mason, a few trays of bedding plants, some tomatoes . . . we’ll sell stuff from the gate on the road if your daughter agrees.’ He was happy. This was the life he should have chosen in
his youth, but Mammy had been so proud to have a son in the seminary.

Gradually, Gladys began to trust the new man. She told him the truth. ‘My husband always had an eye for loose women, Don. He’s got at least two kids, and I’m infertile, so
neither of them’s mine. There’s one in Beresford’s Green, another in Lowton, and he’s run off now with a thirty-year-old from Beresford’s Drift. It was a Beresford
that owned the whole estate way back in the whenever, so that’s why we have the Drift, the Green, and the Ring – there are standing stones in the Ring, but not as big as
Stonehenge.’

Don tutted in the right places, nodded or shook his head as appropriate. She seldom left room for replies, but he was happy enough to provide punctuation. Gladys Acton was easy company.

‘My husband was always a fool,’ she said.

‘So it would seem, Gladys.’

‘When Dad dies, the farm comes to me. If I died, it would go to Eric Acton, or so he thought. Then I told him he was disinherited in favour of my cousin, showed him a copy of my new will,
and off he buggered. I waited till after I’d altered it before telling him, because he might even have killed me and Dad for the farm.’

Don loved listening to her. She wittered on endlessly, but was seldom boring. After a few weeks he realized that she reminded him of Mammy except for the accent. There was something soothing
about a female witterer. He was delighted when she invited him into the house. ‘Not yet, while the weather’s all right. But in winter, you can have a spare room. You’ll be warmer
in there. It’ll be one that has its own log-burning stove.’

He remembered the words of Paul Cropper – ‘You’ll be out of that caravan in quick sticks . . .’

Gladys liked Don. He asked intelligent questions, made rough maps of the acreage, labelled areas R for root crops, T for top vegetable or fruit crops, and G for grazing. B and C were barley and
corn, while a reversed R represented rape seed. He wanted to keep bees in the farmhouse gardens, and was preparing to clean out a greenhouse for tomatoes and bedding plants. ‘We could get
someone to sell them from the bottom gate next year if you agree,’ he explained. ‘Honey, tomatoes, flowers, spuds, carrots, cabbages – there’s always passing trade from
people having a day out in the countryside.’

She was thrilled to bits with him. If she’d married somebody like this, she’d have had a lot less trouble and a couple of adopted children. Don loved the land; he was made for it. He
would never have left her; he would never have called her an ugly old bag. ‘I’m glad you came here,’ she said.

‘So am I. I’m getting a bit old for the nomadic life. This is the first time I’ve wanted to stay in the one place.’ It was also the first time he’d enjoyed life;
gradually, he began to understand fully that he’d been in the wrong job. Had he stayed away from the priesthood, things would have worked out better for him. The need to go back to Liverpool
was diminishing. It wasn’t worth it just for an old photo and a watch, or just to walk about among those people without being recognized.

‘Well, I feel glad that you ended up at Drovers. This is a very old farm, one of the ones sectioned off in the sixteenth century. It’s got a proud history, and it needs a man in
charge. There was a man in charge, but he’s upstairs in the oldest part of the house on his deathbed. Thank you for spending time with him. My dad was the last real man here. Then you
came.’ She picked up their cocoa-stained mugs. ‘Thank you for picking Drovers, Don. You’re my right-hand man, and don’t you forget it. See you in the morning, love.’
She left.

Love. She’d called him love. Not since Mammy had anyone spoken to him with so much affection and gentleness. In a few weeks, he would be inside the house. According to Paul Cropper, all
workers ate at the scrubbed table in the kitchen during winter, though family used the small breakfast room. It was a warren of a house with bits added on over the centuries: sloping floors, creaky
boards, heavy doors, beamed ceilings, and a huge flag-paved kitchen with a bread oven in one of the walls. As long as Gladys Acton lived, Don Hall would have a fine, comfortable home and a job he
enjoyed.

It wasn’t difficult to imagine someone like Henry VIII in the larger of the two dining rooms, dogs at his feet, lords and ladies laughing while the king threw scraps for the hounds. It was
a valuable farm, though it could never be Brendan Hall’s, because Brendan Hall didn’t exist. Oh, and he might as well change it to Brendon, since Don seemed to suit him.

He lay in his narrow bed and wondered how it would be to share with a woman. And she might get a divorce. Would she expect him to marry her? He couldn’t marry anyone if he didn’t
have papers. It might be necessary to develop a wife in some faraway place, one he couldn’t divorce due to Catholicism.

Life was complicated. He left it behind by falling asleep. A dead man didn’t dream.

Smoke filled the hallway and floated out to greet the couple at the door. ‘He’s set the bloody place on fire again,’ Frank said. ‘And here we are,
invited to celebrate our engagement while he causes a conflagration. Maniac.’ He spoke to his closest friend when the door opened fully. ‘What a smell, Chris. What were you cooking? A
dead cat? Did you forget to skin it?’

The man in the doorway pretended to snarl. ‘Sarcasm again.’ He winked at Polly. ‘Lowest form of wit,’ he pronounced.

Polly, who had never before seen a priest in a flowered and frilled apron, stifled a chuckle. Father Foley’s chin had a smut on it, while his hair stood on end like the spines on a
hedgehog. He smiled ruefully. ‘What a lovely evening this is in spite of everything.’

‘Sorry,’ Frank said. ‘I thought this was St Columba’s presbytery, but I can see I’ve skipped the funeral and come straight to the crematorium.’

‘Don’t start.’ Chris wagged a finger at his friend. ‘The fire’s out, and your supper’s in the backyard. Hello, Polly. Come away in, the both of you. We need
to pray for manna from heaven, for there’s not a bite to eat in the whole house. We could go to the Salvation Army, I suppose.’

Frank held out a hand. ‘Cough up,’ he ordered. ‘I’m passing the collecting plate for a change. Fish, chips and peas three times, right?’

‘Right.’ Chris handed over a ten-shilling note. ‘I want my change.’

‘And don’t set fire to my fiancée, she’s hot enough already. Who did you cremate anyway, Chris? Anyone we know?’

‘A close friend who used to be a chicken.’

‘Sad.’ Frank kissed his girl and went off to buy supper.

Polly was led into the living room where the table was set with a cloth that wasn’t quite straight, an ill-assorted collection of cutlery, and three plates. ‘You should have got my
brother to cook for you, Father.’

‘I’m Chris to my friends and to my enemies, of which number your Frank is currently one. He says I cheat at cards. As for your brother, how’s he doing?’

‘Very well, thank you. He walks up and down outside the cafe every day on his crutches. I’m insisting that we have a double wedding.’

‘Oh, I’ll have to charge twice for that.’ He rubbed his hands together like a ham actor playing Shylock. ‘You’re to marry at St Anthony’s, but with me as the
one in the frock at the front.’

Polly grinned. ‘There could be three of us in frocks: me, Linda and you. So don’t wear your best, or you might outdo the brides.’ She looked him up and down. ‘Your face
is dirty, and your hair’s standing to attention, Father Chris. I don’t know what that is on your apron, but it’s a funny colour. Have you been paddling in the Alt? It’s a
mucky river, that one.’

He looked down. ‘No, it’s just a bit of good Irish butter and a few drips off bacon. I covered the chicken in bacon to keep it moist. Then the chicken gave up its ghost a second time
while I was out ministering to a very sick old man. When I got back, the house was all but on fire. In my job, we get the odd emergency. Emergencies breed, you know. One begets another, which goes
on to . . .’ Still chattering away to himself, he went off to clean his face, tame his hair and change his clothes.

Polly looked round the living area, which was typically masculine: no flowers, no colour, no imagination. The furniture was old but good, while a floor-to-ceiling library on two walls
demonstrated this man’s eclectic taste when it came to literature. He had three volumes on the birth of the Church of England, a shelf covered in Communism, a large tome on Haiti where voodoo
and Catholicism rubbed shoulders, and several Bibles, plus volumes on Islam, Buddhism and Judaism. He clearly liked to know the opposition, then. Frank had described Father Foley not only as his
best friend ever, but also as a man of huge intellect. ‘He struggles with his faith, Polly. Even priests do that, so don’t blame me for my battle with it.’