The Swallow and the Hummingbird (7 page)

‘There you’re quite mistaken, my dear. They obviously sense that you don’t like them.’

Mrs Megalith was wrong for Rita loved all animals, even antisocial cats but she knew better than to contradict her grandmother. Biting her tongue, she followed her outside again and took a seat at the table on the terrace. The garden looked splendid, full of colour and the scent of spring.

‘You know a damned fox had a go at my Aylesburies last night. The wind blew the lamp out. What a wind there was last night! I found feathers all over the place. Fortunately my ducks escaped with little more than a fright. One’s missing but I suspect she’s sitting on her eggs. So Rita,’ she said, fixing her granddaughter with an intense stare. ‘How are you?’

‘I’m happy, Grandma,’ she replied, averting her eyes, sure that her grandmother could see her innermost thoughts.

‘You look well, if slightly apprehensive. What’s on your mind?’

‘Nothing. I’m just happy to have George back.’

‘And how is he?’ she asked. Rita wondered where her questions were leading.

‘Happy too. He wanted to come and see you with me,’ she lied, cringing as the colour in her cheeks exposed her.

‘Good gracious, there’s plenty of time for that. I wanted to see you on your own. I feel turmoil and uncertainty.’

Rita shook her head. Mrs Megalith’s eyes darkened. They often changed colour, which unnerved those who didn’t know her.

‘Not at all. I’m very certain about George.’

‘No dear. Not you. In George.’

Rita frowned and lowered her eyes. She wished she hadn’t come. ‘George and I are going to be married. We love each other.’

‘I know. You always have. But George will need you to love him more than ever.’

‘What do you mean?’ Rita was very confused and a little frightened. She looked up to see a large black cat, almost the size of Mildred, staring at her from the roof.

‘He will need you to listen to him, Rita. He’s lived through a terrible war. He will need to talk about it. He’s suffered, my dear. He’s seen his friends killed and faced death himself. It will all seem like a horrible dream that he can’t communicate to anyone because they won’t understand. You have to try to understand him. I know, because my Denzil was never quite the same after the Great War, all that mustard gas and mud, a terrible business. The greatest casualty of war, my dear, is marriage and young people like you who are ripped apart by it. Give him time, but then talk to him. Don’t forget that the only relationship he has been able to rely on in the last five years is the one between him and his Spitfire. He has to learn to trust human beings all over again. Don’t let him become estranged to you.’

Rita listened carefully to her grandmother. She might be an old witch but what she was saying made sense.

‘I want to understand him, Grandma, and I want to make him happy.’

‘And you will.’ Mrs Megalith smiled and her moonstone eyes softened to a gentle grey. ‘Now where did I put my cards?’

While her grandmother limped into the drawing room Rita noticed a swallow dancing on the warm evening air. The sunlight was behind her and catching the tips of her wings as she flew. The bird was so light and buoyant she seemed to reflect Rita’s sense of optimism. She remembered how she used to watch them with George. ‘One day I’ll fly like a swallow,’ he had said and she had believed him. She recalled that the swallows returned to Elvestree every year to build their nest, and hatch their young in the top corner of the drawing room. Mrs Megalith enjoyed them so much she didn’t mind the mess they made and curiously they seemed to have grown accustomed to the cats and weren’t bothered by them. Rita raised her eyes to see that the scary black cat had slipped off the roof and disappeared. There was something eerie about Megagran’s cats.

Mrs Megalith emerged from the dark drawing room just as the swallow flew in. She was shuffling the twenty-one cards of the Major Arcana. She only required her granddaughter to pick three for she had a specific question in mind. She sat down and settled her glasses on the bridge of her nose. Then she handed the pack to Rita, looking at her over her lenses.

‘Shuffle these for a while. Did you see the swallow?’ Rita nodded. ‘What a delight they are and what a privilege it is to offer them a home, year in year out.’ Rita shuffled the cards. ‘When you’re ready, think of George and pick three, giving them to me as you choose them.’

Rita did as she was told. She visualized George’s face and remembered how cross he had been that their afternoon had been interrupted. Then she chose three cards from different parts of the pack. Mrs Megalith took them in her jewelled fingers, placed them on the table and turned them over one by one. The cards were brightly painted with elaborate pictures and Megagran always referred to them as ‘tools for spirit communication’. ‘They’re not magic in themselves,’ she would explain to a new sitter. ‘Spirit will lead you to pick the cards that will answer your question and guide you. My job is simply to interpret them and for that I follow my intuition for it is never wrong.’

She stared at the cards for a long while then tapped the first one with her finger. ‘Temperance. My dear, this card is about you, at this present time. It is a card of emotional indecision. You see a woman in a virginal white dress, with a red cloak that represents the base vibration and a blue one – that represents a higher vibration – pouring water from one golden goblet into another. This represents a battle between sexuality and virtue. I don’t need the cards to tell me that, it’s written all over your face. My dear Rita, let it go and enjoy him. There is nothing wrong with making love as long as it is with love.’

Before Rita had time to blush her grandmother tapped the next card. ‘The Fool,’ she stated, then sniffed knowingly. The card depicted a man at a crossroads, looking backwards with a grave face. ‘This is the card that reveals the circumstances that surround you.’ Rita looked at it. She wondered whether the white cliffs and the sea were representative of Devon, but Mrs Megalith continued stridently. ‘You will have a choice to make. It will not be an easy one. In fact, it will be life changing. You will not want to let go of the past for the past is your security. But trust your instincts and follow them for they never lie. I sense that the sea is literal; one path leads to it and to the horizon beyond. That is the road that I feel you should take. You see the dog who accompanies this man?’ Rita nodded and thought of Mildred. ‘You won’t be alone. George will look after you.’ Rita didn’t think George would appreciate being the dog in the picture. He was a small white dog with short hair, not a big shaggy one like Mildred.

‘Ah, The Moon.’ Mrs Megalith picked up the third card and nodded knowingly. ‘A man gazing to the moon with his back to a woman who sits on the step looking up at him sadly. My dear, this is the card of illusion. The man is chasing the moon, which he will never attain. Don’t let George leave you behind, holding the cup of love like this poor girl.’

‘Thank you, Grandma,’ said Rita, relieved that it was over and nothing dire revealed. The only part that she remembered was the fight between her sexuality and her virtue. Her mother would be appalled to know that her own mother was encouraging sex outside marriage although she had heard it said that Megagran had enjoyed quite a colourful past before Denzil had made an honest woman out of her. Rita looked at her watch and wondered whether it would be rude to leave. After all, she had to prepare herself for the party.

Mrs Megalith was aware that her granddaughter hadn’t paid much attention. She had watched her eyes glaze over for the second and third card. Unfortunately, the first card had diverted her attention from the two other more important ones. She took off her glasses and stood up. ‘I suppose you need to slip into your glad rags for the party,’ she said with an impatient sniff.

Rita nodded. ‘I’d love to stay, but it’s getting late.’

‘Yes, yes. Quack quack jabber jabber and all that. Well, if you must. But don’t disregard the cards, Rita, or you’ll make a grave mistake.’ Mrs Megalith wondered why she bothered with such an unenthusiastic sitter. ‘If you ignore my advice, my girl, it will be at your peril.’

‘I won’t. Look there’s the swallow again.’ Megagran was suitably distracted so that they talked about the swallows all the way round to the front of the house where Rita had left her bicycle.

‘I’ll see you tonight,’ she said, waving at her grandmother, pedalling as fast as she could up the drive and out of sight.

Trees wandered into the house at the same moment as his wife alighted at the foot of the stairs in a pretty blue dress printed with cornflowers. His hands were dirty from handling the sticky leaves of his precious walnut trees. One of his favourites was the large Juglans Negra that had been planted beside the house about three hundred years before with the intention of catching the summer flies in the leaves before they flew inside. It was tall and majestic and produced the sweetest nuts in the autumn. He had planted forty-seven varieties in the last thirty years and, although most took at least twenty-five years to produce fruit, he was excited at the recent discovery in France of a variety that produced fruit in only three years. Sadly, the war had thwarted his plans to investigate further.

‘Our guests will be here very soon and you haven’t even bathed,’ said Faye. She looked at the chaos in the hall and was glad the party was in the barn. The hall table was covered with papers, books and the laundry she had intended to take up to her bedroom before she got distracted by Johnnie standing on a chair removing all her scores of music and photograph frames from the lid of her piano. Trees nodded at her and rubbed his hands together purposefully. ‘Is everything ready in the barn?’ she asked.

‘Yes, I’ll go and change.’

‘The barbecue lit?’ she added as he passed her. He nodded again. ‘Good. It’s not much, only twenty or thirty people at the most. I’ve asked the village and who knows, maybe some of George’s old friends will turn up. It’s just a gesture to welcome him home. I want him to feel appreciated. We can all raise our glasses, there’s plenty of cider.’

It was a windy evening. The sun had disappeared behind heavy clouds and it looked as if it might rain. Faye raised her eyes to the sky and hoped that it would at least stay dry for the party. Her attention was drawn to a flock of starlings that flew across it like a waft of black smoke, diving and dancing their aerial evolutions, and she thought of George in his Spitfire. She walked over to the barn, which stood on the periphery of the farm nestled among a cluster of apple trees. It was used for storing hay at harvest time. When George and Alice were little they used to climb the stacks like mountains, hiding from their parents at bedtime. How innocent life had been back then, she reflected.

It was warm and sheltered out of the wind and smelt of cut grass and smoke from the barbecue. She had set up two long tables that they had improvised with logs and planks, made a tablecloth out of sheets, and borrowed cutlery, plates and glasses from Mrs Megalith who had enough for a banquet. She had offered the use of her garden, which would undoubtedly have been a prettier setting, but Faye had declined. It was George’s homecoming party and nowhere else would do but home. She lit a candle and proceeded to light all the hurricane lamps on the tables. It felt surreal that he was home, that the war had ended. She tried not to think about the dangers he had been through. He was still her little boy and she couldn’t bear to imagine how much he had suffered. She lit the lamps and silently said a prayer of thanks and another one for the future. She sensed he might need it.

As the sun waned people began to arrive armed with food and drink to contribute to the party. Reverend Elwyn Hammond strode in with his wife and two grandchildren carrying bags of bread buns; old June Hogmier, who ran the village shop, brought potatoes for baking which she had scrounged from the chuck basket, being too mean to bring fresh ones; and Cyril and his sweet wife, Beryl, brought vegetables and baked apples for pudding. The farm labourers came with chickens, and a boisterous group of George’s old friends, the few who had survived the war, carried bottles of beer. George mingled beneath the large banners that the children had painted with Alice that spelt ‘Welcome Home George’. He was touched by the effort his parents had gone to, if a little self-conscious. He didn’t feel he deserved so much attention. He was unable to shake off the feeling of guilt that had gnawed at him ever since he had come home. So many men hadn’t lived to see victory.

He was talking to Reverend Hammond when Rita arrived with her family. He excused himself politely and made his way through the people to greet her.

‘How was Megagran?’ he asked, putting his hand in the small of her back and pulling her against him so that he could kiss her.

‘She didn’t tell me anything I didn’t already know,’ she replied.

‘Losing her touch, is she?’

‘No, I’m just improving mine. She’s coming tonight.’

‘On her broomstick or will she be jumping out of a cake?’

‘I hope neither. I don’t think your mother is up to making a cake that size.’ They both laughed.

‘Hello, Eddie. How’s my favourite girl?’ He grinned down at her and ruffled her hair.

‘Don’t lie. I’m not your favourite. Rita is.’

‘My second favourite then.’

Eddie sighed melodramatically. ‘One day I’ll be someone’s number one!’ And she strode off into the crowd with Harvey the bat clinging to her sleeve.

When Mrs Megalith arrived the crowd seemed to part like the sea before a big liner. No one dared stand in the way of the Elvestree Witch. She had stuck peacock feathers into her hair and draped herself in her favourite purple dress over which she had thrown the green tasselled shawl her late husband had bought her in India. She wore the heavy moonstone around her neck on a black cord and her fingers were laden with crystals.

‘Hello George, remember me?’ she said, tapping him firmly on his shoulder. He swivelled around.

‘Mrs Megalith, how nice of you to come.’ He ran his eyes up and down her eccentric costume. ‘You look glorious!’

‘One mustn’t disappoint. These good people expect me to dress like a witch,’ she said with a wink.