Mary George of Allnorthover

‘Carpet in the bathroom. What would Ma have thought?’ Christie stood in the doorway. He lifted Tom to his feet, took the tissue from his hand and threw it away. ‘Have a wash and come down. You’ll not know where you are yet.’

In the kitchen, Sophie was filling a kettle. She wrenched the tap on so strongly, water sprayed up over her hands. She banged the kettle down on the hob and tried to strike a match, but it snapped.

‘June off to school already?’ Christie did not meet her eye.

‘Couldn’t wait, I reckon. Good job the boys are still over at Mum’s.’ Sophie snapped two more matches. ‘He’s no better, is he?’ she continued. ‘He should’ve stayed where they know … how he is and can help him.’

Christie approached and put his hands on her shoulders. She turned abruptly in his arms, ‘We never could help him, could we?’

He looked into her broad face and saw that its softness had been exhausted. Tom appeared in the doorway. He was trying to smile. Sophie looked past her husband at his brother, the crazy twin who fluttered in and out of their lives, coming close like a moth that must be caught and put out of the window. They would try to hold him and free him but he would flap out of reach, terrified and bruised by any such contact. Then he would be back, circling them again.

Sophie gestured to a chair but Tom hovered, uncertain. Her white kitchen and bleached hair dazzled him. She put a mug of tea in front of him. ‘It’ll have to be black. The milk turned on the step.’ His electricity had once seemed like a kind of wild static that confused everything nearby. After ten years of hospitals and halfway houses, he was still jittery but his eyes were dull.

‘I’ll go up for more,’ Tom gabbled, thinking he wanted to help and that he wanted to get away. Sophie watched him through the window. She didn’t want him here and above all, she didn’t like to be reminded that it was because of Tom that she had married Christie. Sophie had met Tom first because he had been at the Grammar while she was at the High, before the two schools were amalgamated. Tom had been beautiful and clever, and she had taken his trouble for sensitivity and his agitation for great thoughts. She hadn’t had to get too close before realising that he was a very bad idea – and then there had been Christie. Tom was so away in his head that he’d barely seemed to notice that something was happening between them and then that it had changed. She’d felt such a fool.

You do not have what it takes to be in this world, she thought. You are a monster.

The bus driver, wanting to be gone from the village before Mim got loose, revved his engine but stopped again as Mrs Kettle yanked the cord above her head, ringing the bell repeatedly. ‘Edna isn’t here yet! She’s had to collect her dressings.’ A minute or two passed as Edna Lacey limped towards the bus stop. She stood there, smiling, and didn’t get on. The bus conductor, a weak-minded, yellow-haired boy whose mother was a Stroud, hesitated and looked to Mrs Kettle, who thought for a moment, then called out, ‘Are there more to come, Edna?’

Edna Lacey peered up and down the High Street. ‘Can’t say as anyone’s on the way.’ She kept looking down the road and made no move to get on.

‘Shall we be off?’ Mrs Kettle asked no one in particular and no one felt it their place to reply.

A Triumph came puttering round the bend. Edna Lacey stepped into the road and raised an arm. The car stopped and as Father Barclay got out to see what she wanted, Edna Lacey opened the passenger door and got in. There were three more villagers in the back of the car already.

Father Barclay stood for a moment between the car and the bus. He smiled and shook his head, as if rehearsing something in a mirror. He rocked on his heels, swung his arms and clapped his hands. Then he laughed his high, rapid laugh, which began as a bird call and ended as gunshot.

‘Don’t let me keep you!’ he boomed to the conductor who was standing on the platform, watching him. ‘I’ll bring up the rear!’

The only people in the village whose petrol wasn’t rationed were the two priests, the doctor and Constable Belcher. They never travelled far without being hailed for a lift.

The conductor’s face was expressionless and remained so as Mrs Kettle rang the bell three times on his behalf, the signal that they could set off. The driver waited as Father Swann glided by in his Jaguar, which was also full. He started up the engine and accelerated hard, just as Tom Hepple stepped into the road, stopped in the middle and put down the pint of milk he was carrying. Although Tom kept moving, the driver was confused by the bottle. He braked late and sharp.

The Kettles, Hepples and Strouds fell sideways against one another heavily but silently. They were too old to be startled and make a noise about it at the same time. The early workers gave hoarse grunts or sighs, perhaps the first sounds of their day. The children shrieked and then immediately began laughing at those whose books had slid from their satchels or whose apples had rolled across the floor to be kicked by whoever could reach them.

Tom had been walking slowly so as not to be back in Sophie’s kitchen too soon. And then there was the bus, the one that he had caught from up by Temple Grove, going to school each day. It was waiting. He didn’t have to return to the new road off Back Lane, Stevas Close or whatever it was called, and Christie’s hard new house. He could go home, but the milk? He could leave it here. They would come to find him and there it would be. The bus was crowded. I know everyone he thought, there is my grandmother only she’s dead. He got upstairs quickly and saw all the children, boys that were him and Christie, girls that were Sophie. He walked along the aisle as whispered explanations rippled past him. There were three girls across the front seats and the one on her own in the corner, not turning round, he knew, was her.

‘Mary George.’ He tried hard to say her name softly, but his voice caught and blurted it.

Someone laughed fast and then sucked in their breath. It was quiet for what seemed like a long time and then the conductor was tapping Tom Hepple on the shoulder. ‘There’s no standing on top, sir, come down, take a seat and we’ll be off.’

Tom ignored him. ‘If you could show me again, while the water is falling …’ Mary had shut her eyes. Julie Lacey was staring at her, not at Tom Hepple like everyone else.

Tom could see the girl was shaking, her back was hunched over and her shoulders raised. He didn’t want to frighten her; he must try to explain. ‘You were just a child, I know that, but it was your father …’ Why should she be afraid? ‘Your father could come back …’

June Hepple stood. Since the end of childhood, she had moved like someone in heavy clothes underwater, what little she said floating up in small bubbles from her uncertain mouth, and even though she still could not meet her uncle’s eye, for once June did not look to Julie Lacey for her cue. ‘I’ll take you back now, Uncle Tom. You don’t want to be going anywhere.’

June took his arm and her hand was his mother’s hand, and he felt the world settle into place. She led Tom downstairs. The conductor handed her the pint of milk. Things were ordinary and clear again and Tom could see the children were not him and Christie but what might be their children, and that the old woman looking hard at her folded hands was not his grandmother but his mother’s sister, an aged Aunt May. He tried to greet her but she did not look up. June pulled him gently towards the pavement, ‘May’s deaf sometimes, Uncle Tom. Remember?’

Five minutes silence was all Julie Lacey could manage before she began shifting from side to side, peeling her bare thighs and the damp nylon of her waitress’s uniform from the plastic trim of the seat. She tutted and puffed, and fanned herself with one hand. Mary ignored her. ‘June’ll have to watch her uncle don’t chop her up into little pieces one night! Mind you, he’s not half bad looking, for a loony I mean, if you like that sort of thing.’ She guffawed but Mary only turned her head further towards the window and those children sitting near enough to hear her gasped, not understanding that this was more or less a joke. ‘You’re going to have to be careful too, Mary George … says those Hepples never did forgive your father …’

Mary pulled a tobacco pouch and papers from her bag. She slowly teased out the tobacco, laid it on the paper, creased the edge with her nails and rolled her cigarette. She ran the tip of her tongue along the glued edge and sealed it. Her hands did not shake. Julie had noticed that the children around her were listening eagerly now. ‘Must have felt bad in the end … couldn’t face anyone in the end, could he? Face you, does he?’ Mary lit her roll-up and closed her eyes.

Julie didn’t speak again before she got off at the roundabout on the edge of town. Since leaving school a year before, she had worked at the Amber Grill, the restaurant in the Malibu Motel, built on the site of Barry Spence’s old transport café. The eldest Spence brother, Barry had made a deal so mysterious and successful that his greasy spoon with its unofficial bunkhouse was swept away overnight and replaced by a stucco-fronted restaurant with a reception area, and a string of pebble-dashed motel rooms. He had a tarmacked car park and a sign with neon palm trees at the entrance to his own sliproad. It was said that Barry’s success was due to secrets. The old Amber Café had been a traditional meeting place for those with unofficial business, who thought they would be alone among travellers and strangers. With a sharp eye and careful organisation, Barry had averted many unfortunate meetings. There were councillors, property developers, lawyers, builders and bankers, husbands and wives who were grateful to him.

Barry loved the constant stream of one-night visitors, the late-night traffic turning off the London road, bringing in people who travelled for a living and saw the world. He thought of England as a wide open space, criss-crossed by endless motorways and punctuated by places like the Malibu Motel. He thought of America. Barry mugged up on cocktails, turned the Amber Grill into an American diner and hired burly blondes like Julie Lacey to serve hamburgers topped with pineapple rings to salesmen and lorry-drivers who wanted bacon and eggs instead.

The sixth-form common room of Camptown High was the last in a row of prefabs that no one had ever pretended would be temporary. The pupils were allowed a kettle, a record player and to wear their own clothes. Smoking, although against the rules, was tolerated as long as it was unseen. For this reason, the windows were kept shut and the blinds drawn. There were a dozen low armchairs, arranged in three groups, and a row of desks that were empty and unused. The walls around each group of chairs were covered in posters: psychedelic, sporting and political. Billy was asleep, stretched across two chairs beneath a lurid album cover of chasms and goblins.

Mary walked over and parted the long hair that covered his face. ‘Where were you this morning?’

He stretched and sat up, not smiling. ‘And where were you on Saturday morning?’

Mary sighed. ‘I went home.’

‘Without me.’

‘You had already gone!’

‘I got the last train, like we’d planned to.’

‘You didn’t say goodbye.’

‘You were busy.’

Mary stood up, her fists clenched. She and Billy had gone to the party in Crouchness together. She didn’t remember seeing much of him there, or noticing when he left.

Billy fiddled with the beads round his neck. ‘I slept out last night and walked it.’

‘The state of your feet. You’re turning into a satyr!’

Billy smiled and flexed his toes. ‘Perhaps I am at that.’ He hadn’t worn shoes for weeks and carried a pair of flip-flops to put on if a teacher approached.

‘And you stink of patchouli oil, Billy.’

‘And fresh air …’

‘Not even fresh air smells of fresh air any more.’ Mary had been in the room for five minutes and its atmosphere, soupy and stagnant, was making her sleepy as well. She curled up in another chair and closed her eyes.

When Mary’s father, the architect Matthew George, decided to go into partnership with the builder Christie Hepple, undertaking local conversions, he bought the old chapel.

The Chapel had been converted from a grain store by the local Baptists. They had replaced the roof, laid a stone floor, and whitewashed the brick and beams. Then their minister, the Reverend Simon Touch, had inherited a gloomy house on the High Street and had built a new chapel in its cavernous basement, complete with an immersion pool. Mary had once gone back there after school with his daughter Hilary, who had promised that she could dip her fingers in the tank. Hilary said people fell into it backwards for God ‘so the water runs up their noses.’ The water in the murky tank looked quite solid and Mary had wondered how anyone managed to sink into it. Whose hands helped them and how did they surface again?

The Baptists had put in a window above their altar, a large triangle of plain glass flush with the roof, under which Matthew worked on a raised platform he’d built along the centre of the building. There were rough stairs at the far end. Mary had liked to creep up and tiptoe along the aisle between the shelves of books, files and papers, like a library she said, to the end where the platform broadened to the width of the Chapel, level with the foot of the window, and Matthew sat perched on his spindly, rotating stool at his slanted drawing board, pencilling in tiny elegant numerals and angles. Mary would stand behind him at the window, recording her height on each visit by breathing on the glass.

On the ground floor, Christie had kept his tools and machinery. He also had a desk, a trestle table, pushed against one of the small windows that were shuttered and set deep in the wall. Mary would walk solemnly across this space, holding herself straight but looking quickly from side to side at all the sharp edges, the twists, spirals, points and planes.

Christie let Tom go in ahead of him. ‘Don’t be troubled if it’s not right.’ Even though light pushed through the windows, the interior of the Chapel was cool. Tom set down his rucksack and considered the swept floor, bare shelves, trestle table and stool. ‘Simple,’ he smiled.

‘It is that.’ Christie bustled past him to the back where there was a sink, cupboards and a Baby Belling two-ring cooker. Matthew had installed all this. He had stayed overnight there sometimes, more so towards the end, locking the door against Stella, whom Christie had found one morning, half asleep on the grass outside.

‘Cup of tea?’ Christie was busy unpacking carrier bags and filling the cupboards with tins of soup, beans and spaghetti; packets of biscuits, sugar, custard powder, dried milk and instant mash; bottles of tomato ketchup, malt vinegar and HP Sauce. Tom had hardly eaten anything, hardly slept either, in the two weeks that he’d been back. ‘I’ll come again first thing. You’re to sort out your benefit at the Post Office and I’ll fetch some more groceries.’ He took as long as he could to put things away, watching over the kettle as it boiled and then leaving the tea to brew till it was bitter and lukewarm, and the granules of dried milk floated greasily on its surface. He waited till Tom was nearby before handing him his mug, almost without turning round.

Tom carried his mug and rucksack carefully up the open staircase to where Christie had made up a mattress under the big window. Not having any curtains that would fit, he had taped blue sugar-paper over the glass. For Tom, this marine light made the place even cooler. By laying out his clothes, books, papers, pens and shoes across the floor and along the nearest shelves, he created a rectangle the same size as the space he had lived in on the hospital ward, the same as half the room he’d later shared in the hostel – four by eight paces. June’s room had been the wrong shape.

Christie understood that Tom needed to be somewhere familiar. He couldn’t be at ease in the new house but needed to be in the village. The Chapel was ideal, almost off on its own, nearer than anywhere else to the Dip, but not within sight of the water. Since Matthew had left, Christie had worked for people who had their own offices and drew up their own plans. He hadn’t needed the Chapel for anything more than a store. It only took a morning to sort out his tools and paints, transfer them to his garden shed and clean up the outhouse.

There was a filing cabinet of paperwork Matthew had left: old contracts and invoices for barn conversions, extensions and conservatories; rejected designs in concrete and glass for Havilton New Town; the chalet design they had worked on together for the holiday camp at Crouchness. Christie had also found some of the pamphlets Matthew had designed for Stella’s business: beige card printed with droopy chocolate-brown art nouveau script and edged with flowers. She had begun dealing in Victoriana when she came to clear out her parents’ home and decided to get rid of the dark, glossy, intricate clutter she had always hated. In doing so, she had discovered a market among London dealers for lace antimacassars, cameo brooches, fur tippets, kid gloves, jet beads, fish knives and sherry glasses.

When Matthew’s great-aunt Alice Spence died in the house she’d lived in for sixty years, Stella made her sons an offer. From there, she’d gone to auctions, placed small ads in local papers and people had just got in touch. She expanded into forged ironwork that was made to order by the son of Allnorthover’s last blacksmith, as the leaflet said – weathervanes, firescreens and flower-pot stands. When the dairy in the High Street closed down, Stella leased the premises and opened her shop, Hindsight, scrubbing out the abandoned churns and standing them by the door full of corn sheaves and dried flowers. The churns were still there, and now people kept trying to buy them. These days Stella was selling jazzy Twenties ceramics, framed prints of adverts from the Thirties and Forties, and enamelware.

Tom came down, tracing the wiring that was tacked along the side of the stairs. He followed it across the wall to the fusebox and from there to the clutch of switches by the door. He went over to the kitchen and pulled each plug from its socket, for the cooker, the kettle and the toaster, and put them back in again.

‘I’ve brought you something to keep you busy.’ Christie waved an arm at a heavy old wireless. ‘You were the only person that could make that cantankerous old thing behave, so I kept it for you.’ Tom knelt beside the wireless and ran his hand over the blistered veneer and the dusty cloth that covered the speaker – tiny red and cream diamonds, like material for a dress. The dials had yellowed and their grooves were worn smooth. ‘I kept this, too,’ Christie reached into one of the carrier bags and handed Tom a battered tin box. Tom opened it and began sorting through his tools. They were intensely familiar. Either he had always remembered the exact shade of blue paint and the shapes in which it had worn off the wooden handles of his pliers and screwdrivers, or they were reminding him of their long existence. The soldering iron weighed exactly in his hand, the cold heavy handle, the hard dullness of its colour, the bitter smell. Solder, fuses, batteries, bulbs and coils of copper wire all impressed themselves upon him, giving the pleasure of something not thought about for years, and then entirely and vividly remembered.

‘How … therapeutic.’ It was the first joke Tom had made since coming home.

‘You’ll be wanting hospital food next!’ Christie laughed, encouraged now and sure that his decision to keep Tom close by, to help him set up alone, was right. He was safe in the village, where everyone knew him, and near enough to the water to have to accept it in the end. Christie had explained this to Stella. She was concerned for her daughter but the girl had just got caught up in Tom’s grieving.

Even alone in an old building he’d always known, Tom couldn’t sleep. He got up, unplugged everything, plugged it all in again, opened the back of the wireless and then, looking at its circuitry, felt tired and went to lie down. The thing had leaked memories of times when it had been his head that had buzzed and crackled, as if badly tuned, when it had picked up what appeared to be fragments of different stations: a woman singing a single verse of a song over and over; the Morse Code SOS of a sinking ship; a man repeating the same joke: ‘What did the mouse say when it saw a bat? Look, an angel!’; the thin, high endless laugh of someone who was exhausted and wanted to stop. His mother had held his head and stroked it in long lines till the noises were gone. She’d called it ‘ironing out’.

When Christie let himself into the Chapel the next morning, he found Tom lying on the mattress. He was shaking so badly, he couldn’t speak. Christie helped him down the stairs and walked him the few hundred yards along the High Street to where Dr Clough was just opening up for the Saturday morning emergency surgery. There were half a dozen people waiting already and they filed into the tiny waiting room where Betty Burgess, the old doctor’s wife who still acted as receptionist, took their names. The wooden chairs ranged around all four walls of the room were filled by those waiting. The room was so small that those opposite one another were almost knee to knee. When Dr Clough called Tom’s name first, nobody objected.

Half an hour later, the doctor appeared in the waiting room without Tom and asked Christie to step outside. ‘I don’t have his complete records yet, only a note of what he’s supposed to be taking. Why did the hostel let him go?’

‘It was up to him, wasn’t it?’

Dr Clough was an elegant figure with a cool manner and hollow good looks. He had arrived in Allnorthover a few months earlier and was already known as Dr Kill Off.

‘He just needs his pills, Doctor. He forgot to bring any back. They always did stop his shakes and help him sleep.’ Christie couldn’t have a brother of his going back into the bin, not again. ‘We can manage.’

Dr Clough’s face was expressionless. ‘He can have his pills, but you are to see that he takes them and I won’t give him enough of anything to hurt himself. He shouldn’t stay alone for the next week. I want to see him here on Monday morning to discuss further treatment. You must be glad that your brother’s home, Mr Hepple, but that doesn’t mean it’s the best place for him.’

Christie flushed, shocked at the doctor’s bluntness. Old Doctor Burgess had made every exchange seem like a chat over tea. He had asked after the family, even the dog, and had never said Tom was anything more than ‘over excited’ while suggesting pills might help as offhandedly as if they were vitamins. And he’d got Tom the best specialist help: an expert in Camptown. When Dr Burgess retired and the surgery moved from his front room to the old coach house, he had put forward Christie for the conversion. It seemed strange that such a man had recommended this new doctor but then again, once he’d retired, Dr Burgess had all but withdrawn from village life, resigning from the Parish Council, threatening not to run his bottle stall at the Fête and barely stopping to greet people in the street. Betty was working out her notice. There was talk of a new life: a boat or a caravan.

Christie followed Dr Clough back inside to wait with Tom while the doctor unlocked a cupboard in his dispensary and poured two different types of parti-coloured capsules, brown and blue, red and white, through his pill-counter. He scooped them into glass bottles and wrote detailed labels.

‘Two of these each morning and two of the others at night. It’s all written on the labels but it might help to, I don’t know, think “red and white: night” or something like that, to remember.’ Christie was taken aback. Red sky at night, thought Tom, shepherd’s delight.

The doctor continued. ‘They’ll take some days to really help and in the meantime you’ll feel pretty awful, but try to remember that what you’re feeling will pass. Go back and stay with your brother for a bit. Call me anytime.’ The doctor held out the bottles to Tom who took them and passed them to Christie, who tried to hand them back.