Mrs Fytton's Country Life (19 page)

She found a broom down near the hens, an alarmingly witch-like broom made from twigs and a knobbly stick, and she began to sweep. The hens clucked and ran around suspiciously, pecking at the lavender and looking understandably surprised when they ate a bit. She had no idea what to do with them. Mrs Perry said you put them away for the night. What she did not say was how you got them into the henhouse. She could hardly offer them mugs of cocoa and plump up their pillows. They were probably as wayward as night-time children and sulked and ran about. She swept on, building up to it. The first battle. She would probably fail.

She swept until all the bricks were clear, and she would have swept until Domesday, enjoying the sense of possession, the sense of being on her own. She had never been on her own in the whole of her life. It was oddly pleasant.

Suddenly she was aware of silence. Complete silence. She looked up at the deepening sky, around her at the darkening garden. Silence. Where, then, were the hens? She walked around the house again and back down the path towards the henhouse. Still silence. No clucking and scattering at her feet. She tried a few little clucky, clucky, clucky noises. Nope. Perhaps they had run away? And she had let them go. On her very first night. Were they like pets, then? Had they decided to leave now their owner was gone? Did they in some way
know
how incompetent she was likely to be? Her confidence waned in the silence. This, surely, all of it, was the stupidest, most irrational mistake of her life
...
She stared bleakly at the empty pathway, bent to peek under the leafy shrubs, scanned the verges beyond her gate. Nothing. She walked down the path, making sad little clucking noises. No reply. Zilch. She sighed. She stopped and peered hopelessly into the gloom of the henhouse. And, lined up, looking at her sleepily from their perches, six pairs of weary eyes met hers. The odd comfortable sound of hen-crooning floated about. Little
poulet
noises that said they had all had quite enough for the day, thank you, and could she please bugger off and let them get some sleep. She tiptoed away, clo
sing the door, slipping the bait
into place, feeling quite as emotional as if it were a nursery. If anyone who shouldn't came near her chicks, she'd
put a hex on them. Goodwif
e or not.

A bicycle stopped and a woman, fair-haired, sharp-nosed, leaned against the gate.

'I'm Daphne Blunt,' she said. 'Not going to mess this place about, are you?'

'I'm Angela Fytton,' she said, 'and no. Though I might have to do something when my husband joins me. But that won't be for a while.' She enjoyed the sound of the words 'my husband' on her lips again.

'And you know about the Alice Sapcotes?'

Angela shook her head. 'Who's she?'

'You've got eight of the best cider trees at the back. Alice Sapcotes. Very ancient.'

'Hens, bees, cider, eels
...'
Angela put her hand to her head, feeling a little dazed by it all.

'Don't worry. You just put them in sacks and someone from Burrowbridge adds them to
their
Alices. And there's not much eeling now.' She remounted her bicycle. 'But we always slip one into each of the cider barrels. Gives it body.'

The trouble with the country, thought Angela, is that you never know if they are laughing at you or not.

For safety's sake she changed the subject. 'Seems strange to be talking about cider in a place called Church Ale House
’
she said, tracing the name on the gate.

The woman began pushing off. 'Glad you're not knocking it about
’
she said. 'Sorry to disturb. See you again.'

Angela went in. The house was a shambles of her own furniture, the stuff she had not sent to the London auction rooms and the Perry's cast-offs. Somehow she had to make a fitting order out of the chaos, which was a suitable metaphor for the rest of her life. Welcome to ye olde countryside, Mrs Fytton, she said to herself, picking her way around the boxes.

That night she slept in a goosefeather bed. Exceptionally soundly.

P
artTwo

10

July

In their role as agriculturalists, women produced the bulk of the country's food supply. The entire management of the dairy, including the milking of cows and the making of butter and cheese, was in women's hands, and the women were also responsible for the growing of flax and hemp, for the milling of corn, for the care of the poultry, pigs, orchards and gardens.
ann oakley,
Housewife

Church Ale House proved to be much like a lover. From seeing and wanting and finally, rapturously, being clasped into its warm, responsive arms, it gave up its mysteries one by one. Some of which were not entirely easy to accommodate.

On the first night Angela woke in a puddle of cold fear to hear the tap, tap, tapping of evil fingers on her bedroom window. Insistent evil fingers. The old spirits, she told herself, expecting to die and thinking that if she survived, which was not very likely, she would string a bulb or two of garlic around her neck in future. She wished the image of Wuthering Heights would remove itself from behind her screwed-tight eyes, along with the creeping certainty that some Somerset Heathcliff had torn some Somerset Cathy from her coffin and left her unhappy spirit to roam the Levels. Half fainting with fear, she got out of bed and tottered to the window only to find it was the tip of a branch of the mulberry tree. A mulberry tree, no matter how romantically fashioned, can lose its charm at four in the morning. And she had not cared very much for its wine either.

The violence required in using her hip to open and close the back door made it less a rustic piece of gym equipment and more a painful imposition. She was now so sore and bruised on both hips that she could never remember which one she had bashed it with last. So much for symmetry and seductive boyish contours. If anyone did come along and catch her in her underwear, all they would think was that she'd been severely battered by a violent dwarf. And the bathroom -even in summer heat - was cool to the point of coldness, and damp. The howl of the vixens (as Sammy told her) kept her awake, and the lowing of newly bereft cows made her want to cry. The tap water had a reddish tint and left bits in the bath, and the roof rattled when the wind got up (which, despite the balmy summer, seemed a frequent occurrence after lights out -more disturbed spirits, she suppose
d). She could also hear a certai
n kind of scrabbling above her head which she was assured was nothing, but which she knew, for certain, was four-legged, came with a long tail and bred. And what with tractors and animals and grain dryers and a one-note church bell, the idea that the country
side was a quiet haven of peace
fulness was laughable
...

But yet, but yet
..
. On a brilliant, still morning, when the smell of grass and the scent of an indescribable country something was in the air, she was never happier. What was the rust-red of a little tap water when her heart had once run pure blood? She was a betrayed woman on the mend. Loitering over the green of it all, as Goldsmith would say. Pausing on every charm - the sheltered cot, the never-failing brook, the decent church that topped the neighbouring hill, the hawthorn bush with seats beneath the shade, 'For talking age and whispering lovers made'. And finding in each day's challenge some sort of happiness. Her eyes held the permanent glaze of romantic stupefaction as she surveyed her domain.

She learned that if you turn everything that happens to you - from fusing the lights to getting mown down by a passing bicycle - into a positive, then the world becomes positive. In the course of finding the fusebox she discovered a wooden crate full of old medicine bottles that would clean up beautifully. And the rampant bicycle was ridden by the charming young vicar, who, after dusting her down, said that he would be delighted to take away all the stuff she no longer wanted, for the poor of the parish. She spent so much time putting the stuffed stag's head on the jumble pile, and then removing it again, that she began to read a hint of accusation in its glassy eyes. Do you want me or not? She was tempted, but rose above. It had no place on her walls. Dorothea Tichborne purchased it as a gift for the Reverend Bertrand Stokes, so that he could look upon it and remember the days when men were men and even a stag knew its place. Thus did everything negative contain its positive.

The hens were easy. They tended not to sleep in, but they were comparatively easy. No rushing around trying to get them out of bed and on to the bus each morning. No demands for fivers. No saying Weetabix was their absolute favourite in the whole world, and then a week later asking, 'Why are you giving me this disgusting stuff, Mum?' If she tottered down at eight o'clock to make tea, they were already up, let out by Sammy, who disapproved of lying-in (unless, presumably, it was for farrowing), pattering on the path, staring through the windows, tapping their beaks hungrily at her. This, she found, was excellent therapy, since she let fly with a stream of obscenities about where they could go and what they could do when they got there, which set her up nicely and calmly for the rest of the day. I have not come down here to shed one stricture for another, she told them, and continued to totter down at eight.

But in the end, the hens won. She learned to adjust her clock accordingly. She learned that ten o'clock was not a bad time to fall into bed at night, which meant that half-past six was not a bad time to get up. Amazing. Astonishing. But not bad. Of course, she had made the mistake of telephoning friends at odd hours, like seven-thirty in the morning - forgetting that
she
might have been up for an hour but they had not. As Clancy said one Saturday morning, in that inimitable Yeat-sian way of hers, 'Ah, fuck off, will you

She excused herself to her friends. She needed, she said, time to make it work. One day she would invite everybody down here and then wouldn't they marvel at her country life? 'I could give them
coq au vin,'
she said loudly. 'Quite a lot of it
...'
The hens scarpered.

From Wimbledon there was silence. Which suited her for the while. Two could play at that game. The exam results were fine, they told her. More information than this she neither asked for nor was given. To her suggestion that they come and see the place, there was miffed refusal. She would capitulate eventually and break the disapproving silence, but just for the moment she had enough to think about. Occasionally, as she was washing floorboards or polishing windows, it did occur to her how very pleasant it would be to get a tearful phone call along the lines of, 'O mother, we are so sorry that we undervalued you all these years. How wonderful you really were. How sorry we are not to have taken your side in the divorce. How horrible Binnie is and how ill-behaved her child. Please forgive us and let us come and stay with you. And may we bring our father, who cries for you each night.' Which was about as likely in the early days of their moving to Wimbledon as any of Sammy's porkers taking a sudden and elevatory interest in aerodynamics.

It took her a while to come down from her romantic rural cloud. For the first couple of weeks each discovered egg was like a great wonder - she would feel its warmth and smoothness in her hands and gaze at its rich brown shell as if it were a mighty miracle. She also apologized individually to whichever hen she thought had laid the thing. 'Sorry,' she would say, and add helpful things like, 'But you wouldn't want all those children, now would you?' She was having just such a conversation one morning when Dave the Bread called. He obviously overheard. She bought a currant loaf by way of proving her sanity but neither of them could quite look each other in the eye for some days. She gave the loaf to the hens, who looked at her witheringly.

Dave told Wanda and Wanda said, 'Good. If she's that sort of person she'll be wanting corn dollies' - in bulk from Taiwan - 'and bog myrtle sheaves' - fashioned in Wellington by Tibetan refugees - 'to decorate her house.' She reckoned that if you were alone you probably
did
talk to things like hens. At which Dave the Bread rolled his eyes. 'What - about
birth control?'

When Dave told the vicar that he'd caught the new owner of Church Ale House talking to her hens, the vicar said, 'So did St Francis.' But when the vicar called on her and she was working in the garden and he saw her cooing, so lyrically, over a delphinium - 'Oh, you're so blue and tall and strong and strokeable, you beautiful, beautiful thing . . .'- he crept away, somewhat shaken at the passion of it all and trying not to think of the Dorkin girl.

The vegetable patch was another treasure trove: she found little fir-apple potatoes, beetroots, carrots and other hidden things. At first every dig took an age because each time an edible anything came up, she would clasp it and hold it as if she had just given birth to it herself - smiling into its little eyes and admiring it for several minutes. It took a while to get used to the idea and to fling handfuls of young parsnips and shallots about, heedless of their miraculous nature. She also, on Sammy's advice, made a rough plan of what went where. She did not know why she had to do this, and he did not yet tell her, but every time she discovered something, down it went on her grubby bit of paper. At the end of each day, when he passed her gate, she would show it to him, like a hopeful child, and he would, if he acknowledged it at all, just grunt. Not surprisingly, given his calling - though it was to be hoped he drew the line at eating potato peelings and being scratched behind the ear with a big stick. She put herself doubly on her guard against clucking. All the same, she found herself doing it from time to time. It was irresistible to see the hens stiffen and stare in complete amazement as she clucked her way past them with the broom.