Mary George of Allnorthover

Temple Grove was where you went to build a den, try your first cigarette and, later, to drink cider round a fire, smoke dope and scare each other with stories about the Man in the Van and his goats, or about the day someone found a makeshift altar here, three bales of straw, a black candle and a chicken’s foot. Billy and Mary had done these things and had heard all the stories. Neither of them knew who was supposed to have found the altar but they believed it. Once, they had found a full set of women’s clothing, including bra and knickers, next to three old sofa cushions. The cushions had been ripped open and scorched.

At some recent critical point, Temple Grove had become too small to hold secrets. It lost a little more of itself each year, as the farmers pushed the fields harder against it. Children went in knowing they could be out in under a minute, that they could always be heard and could hear their friends calling from the road or the field. Ingfield Dip was full of water, the Grove was half gone, mile after mile of hedgerow was being uprooted and clusters of new houses were springing up all around, with new windows from which to be seen. Where was there to go now, not to be visible?

There were people living right next to the Grove now, too. The Strouds had sold off land for a caravan site called Temple Park that the villagers preferred to think didn’t really exist. But like the hospital, the courts or the Social Security office, most people had a connection with the place at some time or other: a friend or relative needing a cheap rent or placed there by the Council. The village was growing older as the old lived longer and the young moved away. Like the two cemeteries, the almshouses were full. A senile widower, a pregnant daughter, all those who might have been cast out or taken in, or sent to an institution, another town, another country, found themselves here. They lived quietly and came to the village as little as possible, mostly to get the prescriptions that helped them sleep, walk or breathe.

The caravans were set at odd and irregular angles, as if to suggest some spontaneous arrangement or natural development. Packed close together, they were turned away from each other as much as possible, and were painted in unobtrusive shades of pale green, beige and grey that matched the worn grass, gravel and cement that defined each plot. The caravan dwellers took on this drabness and were recognised by it. They made cramped, effortful gestures and their skin had a greenish tinge, as if they brought with them the light of their evenings squeezed close to their televisions.

When the heatwave started, they began to leave their doors open all night. Then they took to unclipping their tubular aluminium folding tables and chairs, and taking them outside. They began to have their meals outdoors, first in the evenings and then at breakfast, too. They neither disturbed nor joined each other. Couples sat down as usual to talk about the children, the bills, a holiday, an illness or the weather. They would remain, only yards apart, within the privacy of their small square of grass. The heat opened the pores of their skin; sweat made them conscious of their breasts, bellies and thighs; their clothes were tight or heavy. The secrets, confessions and ultimatums that might have surfaced got stuck. No marriages were saved or broken. By the end of June, the tables were making way each evening for mattresses, lilos and camp beds, but only after dark. At dawn, everyone crept indoors to dress with the guilt and pleasure they might have got from staying out all night unexpectedly.

Mary crept along the paved road that wound from one end of the site to the other. She passed a couple folding up their camp beds and a young mother gathering sheets, her naked baby fast asleep on a pillow beside her. If they were taken aback by Mary’s presence, she didn’t notice. She probably didn’t even see them. Mary’s glasses were the smallest, least obtrusive she could find, but still they weighed upon her heavily. There was too much, anyway, between her and the world, without those thick lenses. They corrected her vision, but she could not feel what she could see. So Mary tended to keep her head down and imagine.

Beyond Temple Park was a small breaker’s yard, the size of a meadow in which a family might keep a pony. It was just a worn-out patch of oil-stained earth, now dried and cracked and hardened by the heat. There were always a few cars dumped along the back hedge, mostly those that were too big, too small or too gimmicky, a Humber perhaps or a Robin Reliant. Some were picked away, scavenged for spare parts; others rusted and sank into the ground. The yard belonged to Fred Spence, a compact and taciturn man who lived with his wife in one of the smallest, oldest caravans in Temple Park. He kept a filthy truck parked in the yard and drove away in it, early each morning. Fred was often gone all day but rarely brought anything back. Mostly he dealt in incidental scrap – guttering, a trailer, a gate, pipes.

Fred Spence’s wife spent her days cleaning and when her home was done, she’d scrub and polish the outside of his ‘office’, a tiny outhouse with a single window. She was not allowed inside and nor were Fred’s customers. On the rare occasions that money changed hands in the yard, Fred entered his office and opened the window to receive it. Dorothy Spence was not allowed to touch the truck either.

In those long days of fierce light, Dorothy Spence could not stop thinking about glass and, in particular, windows. It had become too hot to keep cleaning her home so she worked on the outside, preferring the parts that give her a glimpse in. Mary George met her at the yard gate. She barely recognised the woman she saw on the bus into town with her line of lipstick, and bright hat and gloves. To Mary, without these accessories, Dorothy Spence had no mouth or hair or hands.

‘You’re the George girl? I thought you were your brother.’

‘I have no brother.’

‘Sometimes you look like him.’

‘Can I help you carry those?’

Dorothy Spence took a step back, ‘Thank you.’ She shook her head, scrutinising Mary, before adding ‘You need a good wash, my girl,’ and was satisfied when the child did not protest. She walked carefully away, a bucket of dusters, brushes and cleaning fluid in either hand. Mary watched her begin to polish the windscreen of a crumpled Ford Cortina.

Mary’s pale face was lit with pink across her cheeks and nose, a livid colour that looked not like sunburn but some internal heat. Her fringe fell limply into her eyes and so, to keep it off her face, she took a red scarf patterned with dark gold flowers out of her bag, tied it round her head and set out to walk the last mile home. The makeshift turban made her both majestic and menial, a boy king or a kitchen maid. Her clothes looked accidental, borrowed or found, all of them ill-fitting and far too heavy.

The Verges had ten clear yards of mown grass on either side. In the days when roads like this were a favoured route for merchants, robbers and highwaymen lurked among woods and between villages. A statute was passed, decreeing that all trees and bushes be pulled up so that they would have nowhere to hide. Now, this sudden width had a vertiginous effect on drivers who had crept out of the traffic snarl of Camptown, or had been driving under the limit through Allnorthover on a speed-trap day. The widening landscape encouraged them, and there were many accidents as the road was really quite ordinarily narrow and its corners particularly nasty, not the gentle sweeps they appeared at all, but full of odd angles that caught you off guard. The Verges curved slyly back and forth and then the road straightened, the banks disappeared and the village of Allnorthover began with clusters of small tied cottages set hard on the road. It was at this point that Mary saw the man again. She had been walking along the bank close to the trees, trying to find some shade. He was standing quite still at the point where everything narrowed again, facing in the direction of the village.

Mary could not think why he was there. The air prickled around him, as if he were at war with every muscle and bone in his body. She felt his pull and disturbance but did not want to know what it was he wanted. She crossed over the road and walked quickly past, willing him not to notice her.

Tom had almost reached the village when the road went bad on him. He felt his legs billow and contract, making contact with the road more suddenly or later than expected. He had been waiting for the ground to settle when the girl appeared in front of him. She did not look back but Tom sensed that things cleared around her. He followed her. When he could not catch up with her, he began to call. Feeling his voice raw and uncertain, he put what strength he had into making a noise that might reach her but could manage no more than a string of single sounds.

So it was that the villagers of Allnorthover saw Tom Hepple come home, walking down the middle of the High Street, looking more than ever like someone in the grip of a god, only he appeared to be fixed on Mary George, who was falling over herself in her hurry to get away. Tom was half singing, half croaking one drawn-out misshapen word after another, ‘Wait! Stop! Help! Home!’

Mary would not let herself even imagine him. Looking neither right nor left, she passed the first houses. At the Green, she broke into a run and pushed open her garden gate. Her mother was just opening the door when Mary flew past her. Stella was about to follow her up the stairs when an odd howl came from the Green. She turned back and there was Tom Hepple, just a few feet away. He still looked like the visionary, the genius she had once thought him to be, with blazing eyes and fine bones emphasised by his thinness. He did not look like someone who could have a crude, simple or mistaken thought. But Stella was ten years older than when she had last seen him, and the difficulty of those years had made her more careful. His face was burnt and lined, and his black curly hair, grey, cropped and coarse. Stella saw how his elegant fingers (‘Musician’s fingers!’ his mother Iris had called them) waved constantly and pointlessly in the air, that his hands could no longer hold or control anything, that his eyes were screwed up with the effort of keeping in focus. She remembered. He was a force, a hurricane, sweeping things up, breaking down doors, sucking people in and under. Stella knew right away what he wanted.

‘Tom, my child does not remember you.’

‘Your child?’ Tom’s fingers scrabbled and danced as if he were solving an elaborate equation. His voice grew quieter as his mind calmed, able at last to make connections. ‘I forgave … I could come back … She showed me!’ Tom, who had been staring into the sky all the time he spoke, brought his head slowly down and fixed his gaze on Stella. His voice swelled again, ‘She walked out on the water! Because I was there! To show me!’

‘The house?’ It took a moment for Stella to admit to herself that she knew what he was talking about. Then that ten-year-old winter sprang up around her like buildings cutting out the light. She remained silent, as did Tom, whom the past had never ceased to assail and confine in this way.

‘Mrs George!’ An exasperated voice was calling to Stella from the bus stop. There was a sound of old brakes being applied too fast, followed by a tentative rumble and then another long screech. A bus was juddering along the High Street, stopping every few yards.

Violet Eley emerged from the shelter. The light found nothing to play on in her pastel clothes, hard white hair and thickly powdered face. She had seen the mad Hepple brother come stumbling into the village to stop at Stella George’s garden gate. To her relief, the bus had appeared on time and she could get away from whatever scene was unfolding. But the bus had begun stopping and starting and, sure enough, there was Stella George’s dog, Mim, sitting in front of it in the road. Violet Eley’s impatience overcame her distaste. ‘Mrs George! This is really too much! I have a train to meet!’

The bus started up quickly, crept forward and Mim gave chase, barking furiously, darting in front and snapping at the tyres. The bus stopped again and the dog sidled onto the pavement. The driver climbed out of his cab and got as far as putting his hand on Mim’s collar. She did not snap or growl but set up such a grating, unbearable howl that the driver let go immediately. Seeing Stella by her gate, he approached, shaking his head.

‘Your dog … please … should be tied up …’

Stella kept her eyes on Tom Hepple who was staring past her now. ‘Bring the dog here,’ she said, knowing he couldn’t. The bus driver had noticed Tom by now and was full of confusion. ‘You know how she cries …’

‘Mrs George?’ Violet Eley pleaded.

People on the bus who were to get off in the village had wandered into the road. One or two tried to move Mim, who yelped as if she had been run over and cut in half. They recoiled, terrified in case anyone had seen them and would think they had inflicted pain on the animal. Those who knew Mim ignored her. Strangers or not, they all came across the Green to where Stella George willed Tom Hepple away from her daughter, and Tom Hepple stared through her walls and windows, and the bus driver and Violet Eley stood as if caught in their spell and miserably rooted to the spot.

‘Someone get Christie,’ Stella managed at last, and the spell was broken. The driver returned to his bus and helped Violet Eley on board. The others faded away. Then Christie Hepple was there. He was as tall as his twin brother but bearded, full-faced, not yet grey and far more solid. He stood to one side of Tom, as if he were his shadow – one that had more substance than the person who cast it. Christie put his arm round his brother, talking softly and constantly in his ear until Tom loosened and leant into him, turned and was taken away. Christie had not even glanced at Stella, who watched them out of sight. Then she walked over to Mim, picked her up in her arms and carried her home.

Tom had not been staring up at Mary’s window as he thought. Her room was at the back of the cottage, overlooking a small garden and endless fields. The old plaster walls bulged between the laths; the wooden floor tilted and creaked, its unpolished grain worn to a shine. There were no shelves, so Mary’s books were stacked in precarious towers that she frequently upset or that grew too tall and toppled over. They were mostly her father’s. Reading her way through them felt like climbing to his door.

This had been Mary’s room all her life and something remained of each of its incarnations. Her only methodical change had been to replace each panel of an alphabet frieze with a face cut from a newspaper or magazine. These were black-and-white pictures of singers, film stars, artists and writers – anyone Mary liked the look of, so long as their names matched a letter she hadn’t covered yet, and they were foreign and dead. The panel Mary had painted black ended just below the flowers her father had stencilled, rows of daisies she had insisted upon when, at four, she first went to nursery and saw other girls, and tried being like them for a while.

The sun passed easily through the orange curtains Mary had drawn across the open window, and coloured everything in the room that was so black and white. She held up her arms and examined them with pleasure, seeing her pale skin suddenly gold. She drew her hands to her mouth and breathed hard, to remember what it had felt like when she had reached out to the sleeping boy. Mary stretched and curled, feeling ease and pleasure and a lazy excitement, sensations that were all more or less new to her.

That summer, the exchanges and balances of the oil export market went awry. The countries of the Middle East, having been bent to whatever shape the West demanded, consolidated. The price of a barrel of oil changed by the hour, doubling and tripling. At one point the figures on the Stock Market board trailed a string of numbers like the tail of an ominous comet. Petrol refineries searched the world over for other sources but were still dependent on the rich fields of the Emirates. There were queues at garages, even battles. People walked sanctimoniously or furiously.

Fred Spence’s brother, Charlie, had to get up earlier each day. Once a week, the man from the company came to fill the well beneath his two petrol pumps. He received a fifth less fuel than usual and was given a price to which he painstakingly altered the plastic push-on numbers on the board on his forecourt. The company sent a letter that explained what the government said. Petrol was to be rationed.

Charlie’s bungalow sat behind the garage and he could hear the cars pulling up in a queue before he had got out of bed. As impervious to the heat as he was to the revving engines and tentative then impatient horns, he fried his year-round breakfast. Charlie took his time, stopping to clean his heavy black-framed glasses and to grease back his hair. He was fifty now and while his florid face had settled in folds and pouches, he persisted in the look he had established during a brief period of interest in such things, twenty years before. He sent off for small bottles of unlabelled black liquid by mail order, to dull the grey in his quiff. He wore indestructible synthetic shirts in garish geometric prints that stretched over his sagging breasts and belly. Charlie didn’t worry about the petrol crisis but went by the figures and instructions he was given. He felt no joy in his newfound authority either, simply telling angry customers that ‘The government says …’

When the clock reached seven thirty, he opened his front door. The fetid air of the bungalow, its trapped smells of fried food, cigarettes, sweat and aftershave, lingered on the forecourt most of the day. Charlie blinked, his only response to the sun. It was a Monday morning and the commuters were there, wanting to be gone in time for the city train. Once Charlie had filled their tanks, they relaxed and said good morning as they turned the key in their ignition. It would occur to those who worked in international banking or on the trading floor that Charlie was, of course, in the same game. They made fraternal, esoteric remarks about indices and monopolies. Charlie was polite: ‘The government says …’ He nodded as they accelerated away.

Allnorthover had two bus stops. A brick shelter with wooden seats and a tiled roof sat in a paved square on the edge of the green near Mary’s cottage. There were rarely many people in it as this was the stop for buses going only to Mortimer Tye, where you could do little more than catch a train. A hundred yards along the High Street, on the opposite side of the road, was the stop where you waited to go into Camptown, where Mary went to school. Here, the Council had recently erected a tin shelter, a single wall with a narrow roof and a plastic ledge on which to sit. It was like an open hinge, already tilting as the paving stones had begun to erupt. The pavement was squeezed between the road and the thrusting hedges of the long front gardens that kept the village’s bigger and better houses – square, butter-coloured Georgian villas – out of sight. While the older cottages and shops built on the road had long ago grown dull with dirt from the exhaust fumes of lorries, their windows permanently filmed with dust, the villas gleamed.

The fuel crisis meant that the first three morning services into Camptown were reduced to a single bus that came at eight. Pensioners who usually had to wait till nine o’clock to use their passes were now allowed to travel early and so this morning, six elderly members of Allnorthover’s First Families – Laceys, Hepples, Kettles or Strouds – headed the queue. The women wore nylon gloves and lace-knit cardigans over loose floral dresses made from the same material they used to make stretch covers for their chairs. The men dressed in suits that had been so well cared for they were worn to paper, their creases to glass. They wore caps they had had all their adult lives. Married for fifty years or more, couples like the Kettles rarely looked at or spoke to one another but once in retirement, weren’t often seen apart.

Mr Kettle squinted into the sun at this arrival, a child in old man’s clothes, a singlet and baggy flannel trousers, held up by braces and gathered in a wide leather belt. ‘That a boy or a girl?’

‘It’s the George one.’ Mrs Kettle shifted her weight from hip to hip by way of greeting. Behind the Kettles were some Hepples and Strouds. Spreading themselves just a little, they filled the shelter, taking whatever shade it could afford.

Behind them were the early workers, who usually caught the seven o’clock. They worked the first shift on the industrial estate, making the fruit juice, electrical goods and sausages for which Camptown was known. The early workers were used to being able to sit apart in a bus that arrived empty. Each took a seat by the window and set down beside them a sandwich box, flask and bag of clean overalls. They came home together, too, just before the end of the school day, with their overalls back in their bags with their stains, the bright splashes of pig’s blood and artificial orange, a whiff of something sweet and rotten or sour and citric. Only men worked in the electronics factory. They smelt of nothing and told their wives that the holes in their sleeves that had been eaten away by hydrochloric acid were cigarette burns.

The early workers stood uneasily in single file while beyond them, school children spilled onto the road. The youngest were hot and already bored of pushing each other into hedges or playing chicken with the juggernauts. Two older girls lolled against a fence. Mary tentatively joined them.

‘Says you were followed by a loony, Saturday …’ a Lacey girl began, her doll-face turning sour. She primped her blonde curls. ‘Your type?’ Her mouth, already a tight purse like her mother’s, clasped in a satisfied grin.

Mary laughed and shook her head, half-heartedly. ‘Right nutter.’

Julie Lacey looked her up and down, unconvinced. ‘Student, was he?’ Then she turned suddenly to a plump girl on her other side. ‘Says your uncle, June!’

June Hepple swung her lowered head slowly from side to side, ‘Nothing to do with me …’

Mary looked at June’s quivering cheeks, her vague brown eyes, her frizzy hair pulled back in a tight ponytail. She didn’t know whether she wanted to comfort or shake her. Mary took a book out of her bag and sat down on the kerb to read. Julie Lacey nudged her book with her toe. ‘There’s dirty … dogs and that …’

The buses were old double-deckers with an exhausted and complicated rumble that everyone living along the High Street could recognise. They rarely bothered to leave their houses to catch one until they heard it coming. Mim began barking long before the eight o’clock pulled up, already half full. The Kettles, Hepples and Strouds sat downstairs in the two long seats that had been left empty, as if reserved for them. The early workers made for the stairs but were overtaken by a swarm of children and ended up scattered miserably among them. The three girls, all wanting to smoke, went upstairs too. Julie Lacey cleared a gaggle of younger boys off the front seats with a look.

Tom Hepple had sat up all night, his legs stretched out beyond the end of the child’s bed, his face caught in the mirror on the dressing table opposite him. The quilted nylon cover crackled beneath him. He kept his gaze fixed on his reflection but at the edges of his vision, the rosebuds on the wallpaper throbbed. Above the mirror were shiny posters of musicians and footballers, all eyes and teeth. He had not let Christie turn off the light.

Tom grew tired and could guard against his body no longer. His feet jerked and the fingers of his right hand began to tap rapidly on the bedside table. He became aware of the same acrid breath going in and out of his lungs, getting smaller each time he inhaled. His hand gripped the spindly table which tipped, its contents slipping to the floor: a china shepherdess, an etched glass, a plastic snowstorm and a bowl of sequins. Tom got down on his hands and knees. Nothing was broken, but the sequins embedded themselves in the thick strands of the carpet and were too small anyway for his fingers; the shepherdess’s head came away in his hands. Tom’s chest tightened, his stomach churned and he felt the pressure of his panic and knew that any minute he would lose control. He rushed into the hall where identical doors carried flowery ceramic plaques: ‘Mum and Dad’, ‘Darren and Sean’ and ‘Bathroom’. There was one behind him, too, ‘June’. Tom crept into the bathroom. He tried not to make a mess but he was shaky and all wrong. He rubbed at the wet carpet till the tissue disintegrated and stuck to it.