Consider the Lily (5 page)

‘Hey,’ said Madge Eager, her friend, ‘did I tell you about Alf’s—’

Holding a full pan of ginger beer, Ellen turned and caught her foot on the iron bar that anchored the table to the wall. She staggered and overbalanced. With a whoosh the liquid cascaded onto the floor. The pan dropped from her hands and fell heavily on her knee.

‘Hey...’ Madge repeated.

Ellen sat in a mess of sodden cotton and sticky ginger beer. Pain thrummed behind her kneecap and sprouted up and down her leg. ‘Sweet Fanny Adams,’ she said, and bit her lip.

‘Here.’ Madge threw down her spoon and helped Ellen to the bench. ‘Clumsy coot.’

‘It’s my knee.’ Ellen leant against the wall, dislodging a spray of whitewash over her head, temporarily deprived of speech.

Madge yanked up the wet overall and placed a hand on Ellen’s already swelling knee. In an effort to gain control, Ellen rocked and clamped her mouth shut. She wanted to cry in great, noisy bursts, as much for the pain as for the dangerous feelings at the back of her mind, for the pity of all who were lost and hurt, and for the things that she was powerless to do or undo.

Madge wrung out a cloth in cold water and wrapped it round the injured leg. ‘It’s the best I can do, Ellen love,’ she said. ‘It’ll help the swelling.’

Ellen extracted a handkerchief from her pocket and blew her nose. ‘That was bloody cack-handed,’ she said. ‘I wasn’t concentrating.’

‘Never mind.’ Madge brushed at Ellen’s headsquare and wiped away the moisture under her friend’s eyes with the flat of her thumb.

By the end of the afternoon, the pain had receded into an ache, but the knee was difficult to bend. Ellen moved warily and did less work than normal.

‘Ladies, please.’

She was knotting a fresh compress when Mr Barnard junior entered and gave his customary bleat for attention, an anxious-looking man who conveyed the impression that his business was an insupportable burden. Perhaps it was. The brewery was one of the chief employers for the village and its produce, which included the ginger beer, lemonade and a little cherry cider, was well known in the area. Indeed, Mr Barnard was fond of boasting that their fame had reached Winchester, but Ellen never believed him.

Over the years, he had developed tricks to counterbalance his lack of natural authority, and he climbed on a chair to address the workers. His starched collar required attention and he seemed washed-out by the June warmth. One hand, with bitten fingernails, pulled at the pinchbeck watchchain draped across his waistcoat to check the time – a gesture designed to avoid having to look at the audience.

‘Listen, please, ladies,’ he addressed the upturned faces, ‘listen’, and the power he held over them gave him the spur he needed. ‘Things are not going so well at the moment, and it is necessary to lay off some... a few... of you.’

There was a profound silence in the shed, and several minds looped the loop for reasons why it should not be them. Barnard had been clever, of course: survival came before unity.

‘In the circumstances, it can’t be helped.’ Disconcerted by the hush that had fallen, stony and hostile, over the floor, Barnard trailed to a finish, ashamed of his poor performance.

‘That’s what the bloke said when he couldn’t bleedin’ get it up,’ Madge muttered to Ellen.

Ellen did not manage a smile.

‘It’s the times,’ Barnard said. ‘Things aren’t going well.’

His listeners knew he was speaking the truth. Last week, Dr Lofts had relayed the news that a blanket factory in Winchester had let go forty men, and Bob Prosser came back from visiting his brother in Southampton with news of worsening hardship in the docks. You couldn’t dispute facts. You could only hope that with Ramsay MacDonald back in government he would do what he said and reduce unemployment.

‘I only need four of you to go for the present.’ Barnard shifted from foot to foot on his perch. ‘You can’t say I’m not being fair if I say I’m going to choose four whose men are still in work.’

The joke of it, thought Ellen, was that Barnard’s suggestion
was
fair. You had to hand it to him. What was not so funny-ha-ha was that she was in the firing line. Beside her, Madge stared down at the floor and refused to look at her friend. Alf, the daft bugger, had been gassed on the Somme and hadn’t done a day’s work since he was carried, wheezing and bubbling, back home. Out of sight, Madge’s fingernails dug into the fluff that lined her pockets.

Ellen flexed her leg: the kneecap felt like a badly fitting lid. ‘Well, that’s me gone,’ she said quietly.

Madge did not look up but said, ‘It could be worse, love.’

After she had collected her wages, Ellen began a painful progress home. Every so often she was forced to stop and rest. She had been paid off, all right. Barnard had even pressed an extra ten shillings into her hand, which, after two seconds’ reflection, she had accepted on the principle that if Barnard wanted to buy himself a washed-clean conscience she was not going to quibble. Outside Pilgrim’s Cottage she stopped to take a look at the knee and what she saw frightened her a little. The skin had puffed up into a flecked purple ruff like a plum tart at harvest. Ah well, she thought, at fifty-four nobody cared about her knees any more. She let the skirt of her frock drop.

At the end of Croft Lane she stopped and looked up towards the ridge where the Roman villa was said to have been. The sky was lashed with azure and cream, and Hinton Dysart gleamed in the sun.

June was a funny month: full of milestones and pointers. Her mother had died in June – just given up, Ellen always considered, tired of hard work. That was before the Great War. She and Ned had married in June and produced Betty who had been coaxed into the world just before midnight on the 30th. Exactly seventeen years later Betty left to marry Sam Ellis who ran a grocer’s shop in Winchester, leaving behind a space; an uncomfortable space, that neither she nor Ned referred to much.

Clifton Cottage stood by itself in the field to the south of Hinton Dysart. Up on the ridge behind it was the old Harroway where Ellen and Ned had often walked when he was trying to make up his mind whether to marry her or not, to touch her or not.

He was a careful man, her husband.

Caution routed by need, Ned
had
eventually pulled Ellen to him. She had pressed her face into his shirt which smelled of soil and strawberries, and allowed him to kiss her hand and then her mouth.

Ellen was in the outhouse, pushing the washing through the mangle when she heard Ned walk up the garden path. Glad of the excuse to stop, she stacked the clothes into the basket and went through to the kitchen.

‘Ellen.’ Ned sat down in the chair by the fireplace to unpick his laces. ‘Where are you, girl? I’m hungry.’ A boot fell to the floor, and he kicked it into the niche beside the range. Ellen watched him from the doorway.

‘You get more like your father every day,’ she said rather sharply. ‘Worse.’

Ned gave his wife one of his slow stares. ‘And you,’ he said, ‘are a terrible woman.’

‘Do you want me to light the copper for a bath?’

‘No need.’ Ned watched Ellen limp across the room. ‘What on earth have you done?’

Her reply was muffled by the oven door, and Ellen explained as she was dishing up. ‘It was carelessness,’ she said and, as so often happens when recollecting an injury, wished she could have a good cry. Instead, she spread dripping on a piece of bread.

‘Bad luck.’ Ned bit into the pie and soaked a piece of bread in the gravy. Unwilling to spoil his meal, she waited until he had finished before telling him her news. He took it well, only tamping down the tobacco in his pipe with extra emphasis. She poured two mugs of tea out of the brown pot with Littlehampton-on-Sea written on it and shoved one across to him.

Ned’s fingers, thickened now with work and incipient arthritis, curled around the mug and steam wisped upwards. ‘Don’t worry,’ he said. ‘We’ll manage.’ In that moment, Ellen knew that Ned had never really liked her working. The discovery was surprising – one of the small but significant milestones that flashed into her married life and required thinking over. Ellen sat down in her chair and pulled her workbasket towards her. She waited to see if Ned was going to make any further comment about the money.

‘I’ve tied in the raspberries.’

‘You’ll be pleased, then.’

‘Not as pleased as I might be if I’d more help.’

‘So you’ve said many times.’

Ellen undid the slide that kept her hair in place, refastened it and peered at the needle and thread that had failed to connect. ‘At least they have you.’

Ned drew in a lungful of after-supper smoke and observed the Rhymer apple tree through the window. ‘It’s a darn pity,’ he said with the I-can’t-do-anything-about-it look that irritated Ellen.

She had heard it many times and she smiled tartly as she pulled the needle through the shirt. Money, its availability or, more, its lack, pulled them together in a curious kinship: her and Ned, careful with every last blessed brass farthing, and the Dysarts, who could not afford to paint their house, nor to employ enough gardeners.

‘You must have been hot,’ she said. ‘I’ve brought you back some lemonade for tomorrow.’

Later, before they went to bed, Ellen and Ned walked round the garden which was not very big, for Ned did not have much spare time, but extremely productive. Its disorder bothered Ellen sometimes – she wanted to look at rows of obedient chrysanthemums or begonias – but Ned insisted that it stayed as it was, a cheerful mixture of flowers and vegetables that perked him up, he said.

As they moved from plant to plant, the dusk deepened over the fields. Every now and again, Ned snipped at some particularly exuberant growth. Ellen pointed to the butterfly shape of a white iris and Ned bent down to examine it. The pricks and rubs of the day faded, and she felt at peace.

Ned took her arm and Ellen, bothered by her knee, leant against her husband. If there were any confidences to be made between the two, it tended to be now.

‘Never mind, girl,’ said Ned. ‘We’ll ask at the house if they have work. You did your best.’

He squeezed her arm, and Ellen knew it was as much as she was going to get of comfort. But it was all she needed.

‘Do you know, Ned, the old goat bought me off with ten shillings...’

Dr Robin Lofts was not tall, in fact far from it, but he was still too tall to stand upright in many of the cottages he found himself visiting at all hours of the day and night. The patients who had accepted the new doctor teased him about it.

‘Part of the job, Doctor. Stiff neck an’ all.’

‘Goes with your stiff upper lip, does it?’ Rolly Harris, Robin’s brother-in-law of six months, was a joker, whose currency occasionally wore thin. This gibe, with the implication that Robin was scrabbling faster than was decent up the social ladder, had been done to death but since Rolly appeared, God knew how, to infuse Ada, his sister, with a radiance that was positively blinding, Robin forgave him.

Rolly’s blacksmithing business was situated in the Borough between Top Taylor’s and the stores. Well trodden, well frequented, piled with bits of harness, scarred leather and old horseshoes, Rolly’s yard was, as usual, full of people who had stopped to talk. School had just finished and some of the boys were passing the time before their tea.

‘Take her over there.’ Working on a carriage horse, Rolly straightened up from a hind leg, and shouted at an Eastbridge House groom leading in a chestnut first-timer. ‘Tie her to the post.’

Confused and disorientated, her sides rippling with fussy, panting breaths, the filly shook her tail and sent a whinny over the yard.

‘Pass us that file,’ Rolly asked Robin, who obliged. Rolly tossed the carriage horse’s shoe onto the heap for scrap iron, and pared the exposed hoof. A chunk of horn dropped and bounced off Rolly’s pitted leather apron.

‘Give us some help,’ he asked, measuring the hoof for the new shoe. ‘The filly hasn’t been shod before and will take a bit of coaxing.’

Robin was tired, but Rolly did not often ask favours, only gave them. That was why, until he organized his house and surgery, Robin was living rent-free with Rolly who already housed two other brothers and a sister.

‘All right.’ Robin took off his jacket and rolled up his sleeves.

Rolly whipped the tongs out of the forge, tapped the glowing shoe with a hammer and plunged it into the water tank. Then he fitted the shoe. A smell of singeing hoof joined the horse smells, rotting rubber and dust. ‘You can paint the hoofs, when I’ve finished,’ he said.

Robin did as he was told. The horse’s flanks shuddered with heat, the flies circled and dived, sweat filmed his hand, and the horn disappeared under a black slick. ‘There you are,’ he muttered. ‘Smart as paint.’

Rolly walked across the yard. ‘I hear Jack Batts got to hospital all right,’ he said, inspecting Robin’s handiwork.

‘Yes. I was pleased about that, but the Huggins family wouldn’t let me over the doorstep. Said they wanted the old doctor back and they didn’t think a stranger should poke his nose into their affairs.’

‘Aye, I see their point.’

Rolly let the hoof drop and Robin added, ‘I wouldn’t mind so much if it was true. When I pointed out to Granny Huggins that I’d been here for six months and my sister was married to you she said she didn’t care who was married to whom, she still didn’t want strange buggers ferreting around in her chest.’

Rolly laughed. ‘Go carefully with that Vera Huggins. She’s daft and she’s mean.’

Rolly went round to the horse’s head and ran his finger down the black nose. ‘Not long, lad,’ he said gently. He waited until the horse stood quite still, and then gripped the bridle and coaxed him with little whispered sounds back into the shafts of the trap.

Neither of the men noticed Flora Dysart dismount by the gate. Not that Flora wished anyone to take any notice of her: still suffering from post-wedding lassitude, she had nothing particular to do and she was happy to stand and watch. She stripped off her gloves, stuffed them into her pockets and pulled Guinevere’s reins over her head.

Johnny Daniel and Sammy Prosser stood over by the gate and Sammy whipped off his cap. ‘Can I lead her through?’ he asked.