The Swallow and the Hummingbird (41 page)

Faye wished that George had got back in time for the funeral. She took her place at the front with Alice, Geoffrey and her grandchildren. She settled her eyes on the coffin and imagined Trees inside it, dressed in his brown trousers, blue shirt and cap. She had resisted placing his boots on his feet; somehow it didn’t seem appropriate to meet the Lord in muddy boots. She had picked the walnuts herself from the Romanian walnut tree he had planted just after they had married. Now it was at least fifty feet tall with purple leaves, and had been his favourite. After his death she had been tempted to fell the lot of them, but there was no point holding a grudge against the tree that had killed him for, out of all the possible ways to go, he would have chosen that one himself.

She knelt on the hassock and buried her face in prayer. Contrary to Mrs Megalith’s philosophy, Faye felt closer to God in His house. She had said countless prayers at home but she had more confidence He’d hear her in the quiet serenity of church. She thanked Him for Trees’ life and for his love but she asked with more fervour that He forgive her for her adultery, crying tears that only Rita, Hannah and Maddie suspected were shed out of guilt.

Max could smell violets. No one but Rita smelled so sweet. He watched her from the pew behind, took in the small black hat and uncombed hair that tumbled down her back. She still wore George’s engagement ring, but on the third finger of her right hand. He couldn’t believe that a woman could hold onto the memory of a man for so long. She was as stubborn as she was misguided. He knew George was moving back to Lower Farm with his wife and children. Surely when she saw him she would realize that her pining was for nothing. She would have to let him go. Didn’t she realize how much
he
loved her?

Max was not only producing radio shows but television programmes as well. He had an acute talent for predicting what would be successful and a sharp eye for judging people. He was rising faster than one of Hannah’s walnut cakes and making more money than he could possibly spend. None of it, however, was for him. It was all for Ruth and Rita, the two most important women in his life. One day Rita would love him. One day he would take her to Vienna and show her the Imperial Theatre his father had built for his mother. They would go backstage and he would bring to life the stories he had told her down on the beach, of the one-legged whore who had seduced the Shah of Persia and the chorus girls who took turns to embrace him against their scantily clad breasts.

While Max ached with longing, Rita thought of George. She watched Faye and couldn’t help but feel personally deceived by her adultery. Trees lay innocent and unaware in a wooden box while his wife shed crocodile tears like a dutiful widow. But her anger was overshadowed by apprehension, for George was on his way back from Argentina, with his wife and children, the family he should have had with her. She felt the hate simmering at the bottom of her heart and was ashamed that she could give in to such ill feeling in God’s house, on the occasion of a funeral. She glanced down at the diamond solitaire ring that twinkled on her finger, oblivious of its own lack of purpose, and saw in its unfailing sparkle a small ray of hope. ‘
Every time you look at it I want you to remember how much I love you
.’

During the address Mrs Megalith closed her eyes and sensed the discreet presence of Trees. He was standing by the altar with his arms crossed, talking to his father. Mrs Megalith didn’t blame him. Reverend Hammond was painfully self-regarding and sanctimonious. What amused her most, however, was the speed and eloquence with which Trees spoke. She couldn’t hear what he was saying, she just knew he was chatting, and in her mind’s eye she saw the animation in his expression. In life he had never been so articulate, not even when he talked about his walnut trees.
Making up for lost time, I suspect
, she said to herself, then wiped away a tear. When Max slipped his hand around hers she flinched, embarrassed to be caught in a moment of weakness, but she opened her eyes and gazed on him with tenderness and gratitude. He smiled back discreetly and felt, as he had done that first night when she had bent down and kissed him, the unconditional love of a mother.

Maddie had always been selfish. She watched the glassy-eyed congregation with detachment. She had been fond enough of Trees but he hadn’t been a man to whom one could get close. Rita had more reason to be sad for she had worked with him and had almost become his daughter-in-law but, for Maddie, he had been something of an unremarkable presence. A man who had once been best friends with her father, until George had ruined it all. Not that she got involved in family feuds. She had her own family to think about now. As much as she had sympathized with her sister, seventeen years had gone by. Maddie had lost patience. If her sister wanted to wallow in self-pity so be it, but she wasn’t going to let it dominate her life like it dominated her mother’s. Men had come and gone, disappointed that their advances had been so swiftly rejected. Only Max had remained a loyal friend. He called Rita often, visited when he could and shared her past and, Maddie was sure, all her secrets too. Why she didn’t marry him, Maddie couldn’t understand. He was rich and successful and more handsome now than he had ever been. Time had beaten him about a little at the edges and rugged lines had appeared as if from nowhere, etched into his youthful skin by the hand of experience. His eyes seemed more intense, darker, less ingenuous, and his hair had begun to recede. If Rita didn’t grab the opportunity he would fall in love and marry someone else. She wished she’d get rid of that dismal engagement ring George had given her. It was tragic to hold onto something that was so obviously over. She hoped that when George returned Rita would see the impossibility of her fantasies and throw that pathetically small diamond into the sea.

Faye sat sculpting in her studio to the sound of Thadeus’ favourite
Alpine Symphony
and felt very alone. Without Trees the house echoed with an unbearable silence. Even when they hadn’t been in the same room she had felt his presence. His company had been warm and thick like a blanket. Now he was gone she realized how much she had loved him. Not the passionate love she felt for Thadeus, but he had been kind and dependable. She wished she had tried a little harder to understand him. In the end, she had let him drift further and further into his trees; perhaps if she had made more of an effort he might not have drifted so far.

It would be harder to see Thadeus now. She was a widow, and mourning seemed a more essential duty after death than fidelity had been before. She couldn’t risk being seen with another man while her own husband was still warm in his grave. She wished she could turn the clock back to the summer before George went to Argentina, when he was happy with Rita and when Trees and Mildred were as much part of Lower Farm as the walnut trees.

Chapter 27

When Susan, George and the children arrived at the quaint Devon station they could see little more than thick, grey fog. Having left the Argentine in springtime they now arrived in England in the middle of autumn. A bitter wind swept in from the coast and only the most intrepid gulls ventured out to glide upon it. Charlie and Ava pulled their coats around them and looked on their new world with disappointment. Soggy leaves lay in drifts all over the train tracks and swirled around a lamppost whose light glowed feebly through the mist. They were tired from their journey and disenchanted by the cold reality of their situation. It was only four in the afternoon and yet it was already getting dark. The rain penetrated their bones and dampened any optimism.

Faye and Alice were there to meet them. George’s heart stumbled when he saw how much his mother had aged. She looked smaller and more fragile, like a sapling suddenly exposed to the light when the tree that had protected her was gone. Her eyes brimmed with happiness as she embraced him and he was reminded of the day he had returned from the war. She smelt the same and the skin on her face was soft and familiar against his. They didn’t need to speak. Leaving her son’s embrace, Faye greeted Susan and the children warmly, marvelling at how much Charlie and Ava had grown up, then George introduced them to his sister. They all squeezed into the estate car that Trees had bought not long before he died and drove the short distance to Lower Farm.

‘What a shame to arrive on a day like this. It’s been foggy all week,’ said Faye, sensing the children’s gloom. ‘You’ll warm up once we get you home.’

‘I wanted them to see the countryside from the train but all we could see was cloud,’ said George, who sat in the front with his mother. He glanced back and smiled at Ava who sat on Susan’s lap. Fortunately the child was small for her ten years otherwise they would never have all fitted into the back seat.

‘They’re just weary,’ said Susan, kissing her daughter’s head. ‘It’s been a long journey.’

‘I think the novelty of the plane has worn off for Charlie,’ George added, hoping to bring a grin to his son’s face, but Charlie just stared in front of him with unfocused eyes. ‘How are Johnnie and Jane?’ he asked, changing the subject.

‘Johnnie’s at Exeter University and Jane’s just finished school,’ Alice replied. ‘She’s hoping to go to Bristol.’

‘How time flies!’ George marvelled, ‘It seems like only yesterday they were children.’

‘You’ve been away a long time, George,’ his sister said, without resentment.

‘I hope the place hasn’t changed,’ he said hopefully.

Faye smiled and shook her head, pleased that he cared so much. ‘Lower Farm and Frognal Point are exactly as you left them,’ she said. ‘Perhaps a couple more houses here and there and a few new faces but all the things you loved as a child remain unchanged. We made sure of that, didn’t we Alice?’

When they arrived at Lower Farm, Faye made them all tea with cake, sandwiches and biscuits, which they ate in front of the fire in the sitting room. George took one bite of the cake and remembered his wartime homecoming, eighteen years before. There was no way his mother had cooked this cake herself! The children devoured it, savouring the novelty, and began to talk to each other in quiet voices. Susan was immediately enchanted by the house. It was so English in a cosy, chaotic way. She noticed the stack of sheet music on top of the piano and the books scattered carelessly on tables and on the floor against the wall. Seeing Faye in her home enabled Susan to understand her more fully. Even she, who had never really known Trees, could hear the hollow echo his absence caused and, as much as Faye tried to dissemble, Susan could sense that she felt desperately incomplete without him.

However, once classical music resounded through the house and they were warm and their hunger satisfied, their spirits began to lift with the fog.

George asked about his father. Faye’s face flooded with colour and she lowered her eyes. He wanted to know all the details. Faye’s teacup began to tremble slightly as she relived the day of the storm and, when she confessed that she hadn’t been with him when he died, she had to put it down, it was rattling so much in its saucer.

‘Where were you?’ George asked. His tone wasn’t reproachful but Faye was immediately on the defensive.

‘I was in the village, visiting a friend,’ she replied cagily.

George wouldn’t have been suspicious had it not been for the inner flame that burned through her cheeks. Suddenly he was reminded of an image, long forgotten, of his mother riding her bicycle out of the farm in the middle of the night. He had never asked her where she had gone and why now, after all this time, this image chose to surface, he didn’t know.

‘When I returned he was nowhere to be found,’ she continued. ‘I searched everywhere. I just knew that something was wrong. When I found him, he was already dead. He had been knocked down by a falling branch, bashing his head on Mildred’s gravestone.’

‘And the funeral?’ George asked, devastated to have missed it.

‘Just a simple service for friends and family,’ his mother replied. Her face reverted to its natural pallor.

‘Don’t feel bad that you didn’t make it, George,’ said Alice kindly. ‘He would have understood.’

‘I know. I just wish I had said goodbye.’ He sighed and smiled crookedly in resignation.

‘We all do,’ Faye added in a small voice.

‘I’ll visit the grave tomorrow morning.’ He took Susan’s hand in his, grateful for her presence. ‘Hopefully the fog will have lifted and I can show you and the children Frognal Point.’

‘We’d love that,’ she replied, squeezing his hand reassuringly.

‘I want to see some crabs,’ interjected Ava, cheering up now that she had eaten.

‘Even if the weather’s bad we’ll go and have a picnic lunch on the beach. I’ll show you rock pools full of crabs and urchins and make you a treasure trail in the sand.’ The children grinned excitedly, remembering all the stories their father had told them of his childhood.

‘I’ve heard so much about sand-filled sandwiches, I’m really looking forward to trying one,’ said Susan, happy that her children were no longer looking miserable.

‘Oh, yes,’ enthused Faye. ‘They’re part of Frognal Point. You can’t have a picnic on the beach without them.’

After dinner, when the children had gone to bed, George and Susan sat outside on the terrace beneath a navy sky that glittered with stars. It was cold and they huddled together in thick coats, while George smoked as he had done as a young man, when he had struggled to come to terms with life after war. The flagstones were wet and slippery and strewn with dead leaves and small twigs. The low twit-twoo of an owl rang out from a treetop somewhere close, its haunting whistle rising above the wind. George was consumed with nostalgia. The smell of rotting foliage and farm animals reminded him so much of his childhood. Even the sound of that old owl was the same as it had been when he was a boy. Home was unchanged, except for his father’s absence. He looked out into the garden, as far as he could see, until the lights from the house faded and the fields beyond were shrouded in blackness, and wondered whether his father’s spirit was among the trees he had so loved. Maybe he was there on the terrace, watching them with amusement now that he was so blissfully detached from the world. Maybe Mildred was with him. Maybe Mrs Megalith was wrong and there was no afterlife. He held Susan close and they sat in silence watching and listening, Susan to the place that would now be her home and George to the echoes and images of his past.