Mary George of Allnorthover

‘Couldn’t leave the blind cow on the road with god knows who, could we?’ Julie replied.

‘Bitch,’ Mary mumbled, not looking round but smiling.

‘Cow,’ retorted Julie, also smiling as she continued with her sums.

Barry Spence dropped Mary off on the Green. She hesitated by the gate as the downstairs lights were still on. She pulled out her glasses and saw Stella at the table, talking to someone who was leaving the room. Then the front door opened and Christie came down the path. He looked at Mary as if he’d never seen her before and hurried past.

Mary wanted to carry the evening unbroken to bed. Above all, she didn’t want Stella to see her kissed face. Even in the car, next to Julie who had barely glanced up from her calculations, Mary had turned away and pushed her head out of the open window. She was sure that anyone who cared to look would notice her swollen mouth, the grainy bruise on her throat, his breath in her breath, the tiny blister gathering just inside the edge of the middle of her upper lip. It’s like a flood, she thought, but fire. It comes from inside and out. A bowl of water overturning in a bowl of water.

‘Sit down, love,’ said Stella, before Mary was even in sight. The living room was almost filled by a pine table that her mother kept frighteningly bare. The dresser that ran along one wall and scraped under the beams was crammed with crockery, cutlery, paper, tools and paints, all ordered so meticulously that the room still looked spacious.

Rather than join her mother, Mary curled up in an undersized armchair by the fireplace. Stella didn’t look up. She was bent forward, her head almost on the table but just caught in her hands. Mary stared into the empty grate. There were no ornaments on the mantelpiece, not even a ticking clock. Her mother now seemed neither tall nor still. One of her feet tapped rapidly against the floor.

‘You saw Christie was here,’ Stella began and the tapping paused, as if those five words had exhausted her. ‘… About Tom.’ Mary didn’t want to hear about Tom but her mother was talking to her in such an oddly unguarded tone, that she waited.

Stella’s fair colouring, though now rather vague, was consistent. Her thick hair, her stone-grey eyes and smooth skin made such an even surface that people never asked how she was. Her features were well arranged, locked in place, and certainly not given to grotesqueness. Yet as Mary watched, her mouth twisted, just for a moment but so extremely that the effect was not only violent but comical. Mary had a sudden vision of her mother spitting out frogs like someone punished for telling lies in a fairytale.

‘I wanted to ask you, about the reservoir. All that. Just to be clear.’

Mary was shaking. ‘I didn’t do anything on purpose, Mum … I didn’t know he was there. If I had, I wouldn’t have walked …’

‘No one’s blaming you,’ Stella said, sounding like a teacher intent on a confession. ‘Tom is agitated. He thinks you …’

‘He can’t think anything!’ Mary was shaking and got up to leave but Stella rose too and closed the door.

‘To him, to all of us, you are an important part of the picture.’

‘It’s not my picture, though, is it?’ Mary had surprised herself and now felt scared.

Stella lost patience. Her head snapped back as her fist smashed down on the table. The bangles on her arm chinked – ridiculously, Mary thought, and as ever felt ashamed of her mother whose long skirts and dresses, shawls and scarves, beads, feathers, ribbons and lace looked like costumes rather than clothes. At primary school, the other children had called her mother a witch. (‘A nice witch,’ Julie had assured her and it was true that she was kind and helped anyone she could, and other children adored her.)

‘Damn it, Mary! You were not supposed to be there!’

Mary couldn’t tell if this was admonition or regret. ‘I was only walking home,’ she muttered.

‘But you were supposed to be in school!’

‘School? What do you mean?’ Mary was confused.

Stella gave a hissing sigh. ‘There’s a law in this country that says six-year-olds have to go to school.’

‘Six-year-olds? What’s that to do with me? Mum, it was Saturday morning, right? I cut across from Ingfield, round the water. I didn’t know who he was! I didn’t even know he was there!’

‘Ah.’ This time, Stella’s exhalation was hard and sharp, the sound someone might make after running into a wall.

‘Don’t be angry, Mum, please!’ Mary was clutching her cardigan to her with both hands. ‘I’m not six, I’m seventeen and all I was doing was walking home and stopping to look at the water.’

‘When was this?’

‘That Saturday he followed me home. When else?’ Stella gave a very small nod which made Mary feel, briefly, like explaining herself. ‘There’s a tree, see, with a branch stretching out over the water. I like to go along it. He saw me there. He said I was near the house.’

‘And?’

‘I walk out along this bough.’

‘You little fool, you could fall in and drown!’

‘But I don’t fall. I keep walking.’

‘And then?’

‘And what?’

Stella stood up and Mary stood up to meet her. Neither raised her voice. When Mary said nothing, Stella lowered her eyes, and asked almost timidly, ‘Did you see anything?’

Mary was about to begin but changed her mind. ‘I had my eyes shut,’ she whispered and ran up to her room.

‘What did you say?’ Stella followed so fast that she filled the doorway before Mary could shut herself in. She spoke so evenly that Mary felt sick. ‘It’s not a joke or a game. Christie’s been and Tom is very fragile. What he has been through, what we have all been through. Your father. I just want to go over it again, to get things straight.’ Mary was shaking her head. ‘I know you were only six but you do remember, don’t you?’ This wasn’t really a question and she didn’t pause for Mary to answer it. ‘That’s what I’m talking about. Not whatever went on the other day. When you walked out of school, remember? Went to look for your daddy. What you saw in the Chapel, remember?’

The village school had still been in the old building then. Mary hadn’t liked it because the tables and chairs were so low, and the windows so high. The children were divided two school years to each of the two rooms, but tended to sit where they liked. The elderly teachers, Miss Benyon and Mrs Snape, found it hard to tell the pupils apart, not least because so many were related. Mrs Snape, who was in with the younger ones, would draw a map and forget what went on it, or fall asleep halfway through a story, and while the other children welcomed these lapses, Mary felt cross. She wanted to know what went where, what happened.

Mrs Snape was fat, smiling and vicious. Anger woke her from her slowness – she became fast and precise, cracking heads together or swishing a ruler across the backs of hands or knees. She likes places with lots of small and complicated bones, thought Mary, noting that Mrs Snape looked as if she had no bones at all.

Mrs Snape was not fond of clever girls, especially those who dressed oddly and spoke well, like Mary George. You never could tell what the child was thinking. Her head was up in the clouds; she needed pulling back down. That morning, she had had enough of Mary daydreaming, doodling, singing to herself and still knowing all the answers, so she sent her out into the corridor. Mary relished this sudden out-of-placeness; it made her concentrate. Being alone was always a relief and the corridor, though chilly, wasn’t dark. The front door was hooked back onto the wall and was open all day, so Mary could see the low autumn sun, papery pale and far away but still strong enough to make the scratched varnish on the door gleam.

Mary amused herself deciphering hieroglyphics and making out treasure maps in the scratches on the door until a draught carried a dying bumble bee in over the step. She watched it stagger in circles on the tiled floor, inches from her feet. She studied its bristling stripes, the worn thread of its legs and bent antennae, and listened to its fading buzz. The other children would have pulled off its wings or taken it outside in a handkerchief to be laid tearfully and ceremoniously under the hedge. Even when it bumped into her shoes, Mary didn’t move but only wondered why it seemed to take longer crossing the red tiles than the black, and how such silly little wings could have carried so much. When confronted with something that demanded her attention, she often felt like this – as far away as the sun.

The bee crawled over to the skirting and disappeared. A shadow swung across the doorway and a crate of milk was set down, the free compulsory miniature bottles the children drank each day. The older ones took it in turn to be Milk Monitor, to puncture the foil caps with a knitting needle, push in the straws and force everyone to drink it. Even in winter the milk was warm, sweet and cheesy, turning to curd on the tongue. The children spat it out wherever they could, making the spider plants sallow, clouding the goldfish tank, and adding to the rancid stench of the gerbils’ cage.

Mary looked out across the playground, a sloping strip of tarmac that ran the length of the school. It was too narrow for any exciting games. Just as you speeded up in British Bulldog or Tag, you met the hedge on one side or the wall on the other. It was too easy, in such a confined space, to catch or be caught. It just wasn’t interesting.

Mary considered the milk and realised that if she was not in the classroom, she wouldn’t have to drink it. The playground gate stood permanently open, grown over by privet. Only the sound of Mrs Snape’s rasping voice held her back so she blocked her ears and then it was easy. She didn’t want to go along the High Street because that was the way home and somebody who knew her was sure to see her, so she slipped up Back Lane and into the fields.

It was almost October and the blackberries were at that stage when they were as plump and purple as they would ever be but still sour. Mary followed them, pulling the fruit from their fiddly clumps, trying and spitting, captivated by their colour and baffled by their taste. Eventually, she felt the tiny scratches rising on her arms and legs. She stopped and found that she had reached the end of the single field that now ran the length of the back of the village. She began to think about where she might be.

There was a stile ahead so she clambered over and found herself on the main road. She was out past the first tied cottages, further away from school and home than she could have imagined. She had lived in Allnorthover all her life and here was a part of it she didn’t know at all, at least a part she only ever passed through quickly. What if this were a different village, not her village at all but somewhere else? How could she get back into it if it wasn’t hers? A lorry rattled past, too close, its clanking undercarriage and blustering exhaust level with Mary’s eyes. The combined force of its size, speed and noise knocked her off her feet. Mary sat, tearful, on the verge. Then she realised she could see the roof of the Chapel, opposite the first cottages, and decided to find her father.

Mary pushed open the door but dared not go in. Matthew was crouched on the floor, doing something with a big piece of paper, chalk and pencils, that reminded Mary of what she ought to be doing right then at school. The piece of paper was a map, or the beginnings of one. It needed names adding and some colouring in.

‘Are you looking for me?’

‘Are you here?’ Mary was delighted when she amused her father, even though she rarely understood why.

‘And school, Miss Merry Blackberry?’ Matthew smiled as he spoke but Mary could see she’d worried him. He did things carefully and definitely, and had a strong voice that made her feel safe.

‘Mrs Snape put me out so … I thought I’d go.’

He nodded, accepting the logic of this, and rose to his feet ‘And have a feast in the fields by the look of you. Let’s get you washed up and I’ll take you back. They’ll be fretting.’

‘What country is that?’ Mary pointed at the map, stalling for time. She knelt down beside it and Matthew joined her.

‘Let’s see,’ he began. ‘There’s a big road,’ his finger traced a curving line from top to bottom. ‘Now that there, that little cross on a triangle, what does that remind you of?’

‘Church steeple?’

‘Good girl! So if that’s the church, what’s this bit of land along from it?’

Mary studied the long rectangle that began by the steeple and was split by the big road. ‘It’s a green.’

Matthew ran his finger along the row of narrow, different-sized boxes, some missing corners, some with extra corners, that lined the road. Mary caught on: ‘The High Street.’ His finger continued to the end of the row, along the road, to a bigger box, on its own. ‘It’s here! It’s us!’ Matthew lifted his hand and made to get up but Mary was enjoying her success. She leaned over and put down her forefinger where he had left off. ‘And this is where the bus goes to Camptown, out through the curvy Verges … here’s trees … it’s Temple Grove, isn’t it? And Ingfield Dip … and you’ve coloured this bit in, why blue?’

Matthew grasped her waist and swung her into the air, but too quickly, so it hurt. He put her down by the door. ‘I was seeing what it would be like if we filled the Dip with water,’ he said, his speech now careful.

‘Oh!’ Mary was thrilled. ‘You mean we’d get great big hoses and fill them up with the sea and pour it all out again here?’

‘Something like that.’

‘And then Christie and Tom and Mrs Iris could live underwater, with fish swimming past their window and we could dive in and visit them?’

Matthew propelled her down the path. ‘Something like that.’

Stella was still standing in the doorway, still talking: ‘… and when I told you about the plans for the reservoir, you already knew, didn’t you?’ Mary shook her head. ‘You’ve always been good at secrets, haven’t you? Like the hospital? No … you couldn’t quite keep that one in, could you? Oh, sweetheart, you were so little and didn’t know, and he thought he could take you about with him and you wouldn’t tell, how could you help it, poor duck?’ This was worse. Stella came and sat beside Mary and stroked her hair but, able to tell how determinedly Mary had disappeared inside herself, she stopped and moved away. ‘Just try, please, to remember what happened. It’s going to come up, you see, with Tom back and all. You remember Iris, don’t you? Remember how she was with your dad?’

What Mary couldn’t remember was what had made her say it that night, after she’d found her father drawing the map. They had been finishing supper and she had asked Matthew, ‘Is Christie’s mummy your mummy Daddy, only she’s not my gran?’

Stella had laughed but it hadn’t been a happy sound, more as if she’d dropped the plates in her hands and they were bouncing and breaking on the floor. Matthew had picked up his knife and fork again, although the dishes had been cleared. Then Stella was in the kitchen, banging things.

‘She’s a family friend, sweetheart. Iris was my mother’s friend and after my mother died, she was my friend. Now she’s sick in the hospital, I try to comfort and help her.’

‘What’s wrong with her?’ Mary remembered how this old woman, in her whiteness and softness, was like snow in winter and fleece in summer, and whose bright eyes had held all colours.

‘She has cancer.’

Mary thought cancer … canker … conker … and saw a spring cloud shrivel and darken to a hard brown shell. ‘Will she die?’

‘Yes, she will.’

‘Then how do you help her, Daddy?’

‘We talk. We tell each other stories just like you and me, Mary Fairy.’

‘And do you brush her hair, like you do mine?’

‘Her hair’s gone. The medicine … you see, her body needs all its strength to get better and hasn’t got time to be growing any more hair.’

A shell. Smooth and empty. Mary ran to her mother.

The winter that Iris Hepple lay dying was a time of locked cold, in which everything held still. Mary would be woken by Stella climbing the stairs with a paraffin heater, its liquid slopping against its sides. She would bring it into Mary’s room and turn the stiff dial that cranked up the wick. She’d strike a match and the room would fill with something warm but so dry it made Mary’s eyes sting before she’d opened them. Bundled up in her dressing gown and slippers, she would follow her mother downstairs and crouch by the fire. The coal smoked and changed colour. There would be porridge, and a trip back upstairs again to wash and dress in the damp bathroom where a single electric bar on the wall gave off a weak glow. Before and after school, it was dark. Even when the snow came and everything was white for weeks on end, it was still dark and her father never seemed to be home. All Mary thought about, though, was trying to get warm.

On Christmas Eve, Mary was woken by shouting. She crept to the top of the stairs and there were her parents in the hallway. She couldn’t tell if they were holding onto each other or pushing away. Stella was as tall as Matthew, as broad as he was, and as fair. Even though their faces were close together, they were shouting.

‘Why go tomorrow?’ Stella’s mouth stayed open after she’d finished speaking. Mary could see her teeth.

‘Because neither Christie nor Tom will.’ Matthew looked down and shook his head. Stella put her hand in the hair at the back of his head and tugged, forcing him to raise his face.

‘I know Tom can’t, he hasn’t left the house in years … but Christie? Have you really thought about why he doesn’t visit his own dying mother?’

‘Can’t face the state she’s in, I don’t know …’

‘Can’t face the disappointment when she sees it’s … not … you …’ And Mary’s gentle father had taken his wife’s head in his hands and knocked it hard back against the front door, three times, echoing her words.

There was another week without school after Christmas during which Stella went away to London. Matthew and Mary did jigsaw puzzles by the fire in the mornings and went over to the Chapel in the afternoons. Mary loved the paper on which he drew his plans, the big squares filled with smaller and fainter squares. Matthew would use a Swiss Army knife to whittle his pencil to a fine, long tip. Then he would adjust his right-angled rulers and fill a blank sheet with rooms, doors, roofs and windows. It was freezing in the Chapel, so Matthew brought the paraffin heaters from home and Mary, who was still too cold to keep still but didn’t want to bother him, would scamper between the heaters and his desk, where she would stop to consider his progress and ask to borrow a word: ‘Axonometric, axonometric …’

On the second day of Stella’s absence, Matthew put Mary in the car and drove into Camptown. For two hours, they walked up and down the High Street in the cold, going in and out of shops but not buying anything – no meat from the butcher’s, no bread from the baker’s, no buttons from the haberdasher’s, no chairs from the antique shop nor buckets from the ironmonger’s. Mary enjoyed it all but was puzzled. They walked back to the car but didn’t get in. Matthew turned to the big building next to which he had parked.

‘I must see a friend, sweetheart.’ He took her hand and they went into the building and through a number of heavy doors like the one at school only they swung open and shut so easily, sweeping the rubber floor with a rubber strip, making only the faintest noise, a suck and a sigh. They walked down a very long corridor with the quietest floor Mary had ever come across. There was another set of doors with three chairs to one side. Mary was more properly warm than she had been all winter.

‘You’d best wait here,’ said Matthew, without looking at his daughter. He was gone through the doors before she could respond.

After that, they went to the hospital every day, without bothering with the shops first. Matthew brought her colouring books, even sweets. Mary hated his smell when he tucked her up at night. It was confusing; it made her think of an attic.

One day, Mary got bored with swinging her legs in the corridor. She pushed open the doors and went in. She could see some beds and blue screens arranged like tents. She didn’t know where Matthew was but then she heard his voice coming from a small room at the end and he was singing a song she loved, ‘My very good friend the milkman says …’ Mary rushed in smiling to find him but couldn’t see him because he wasn’t there in the room, but there on the bed, curled up with a tiny old woman in his arms, his mouth against the bad egg of her head. She was as brown as a stain. She had tubes coming out of her arms and her bones stuck out everywhere. Her white nightgown was rucked up around the long bones of her thighs and a flat yellow breast lay nestled in the folds of its open bodice, beneath which Mary thought she could see her father’s hand. Machines on either side of the bed bleeped and whispered. Mary screamed.

When they got home, Stella was there. Mary was sent to bed but kept seeing faces without teeth, eyes or hair in the dark. Stella held and rocked her, and tried to tell her stories but kept stopping. Mary felt as if she were in the grip of an earthquake. She pretended to be asleep so her mother would leave. Then she sent herself away, in her head, off to a cloud or a cave, where, nonetheless, some words reached her: ‘… sick … mother-love … lover …’

Mary had never seen her mother cry, and could not have imagined the ferocity with which she did so now, remembering that winter. She was sitting on the edge of Mary’s bed, as upright as ever, staring out of Mary’s window. She didn’t look at her daughter who, even if she wasn’t sleeping, could not be reached. Stella knew Mary wouldn’t hear what she said, but she was talking for her own sake. ‘You saw … heard … things and the trouble is now you know and I don’t know, do I really? I know he took you to see her. I expect she liked you. She must have done, Matthew’s only child …’ Her body shook violently, as she sobbed but made no sound. ‘Poor Tom, now he’s come back and the trouble is he’s found you. Matthew’s gone and now that damned family want you, too … his “angel” is what Christie says he’s calling you, as if you can make everything alright for him. I told Christie, I said, That girl can’t see beyond the end of her nose! How’s she going to find a drowned house! Wasn’t it demolished, anyway?’

On this point, Stella was uncertain. She had always thought of the reservoir as a concrete bowl beneath which everything had been flattened or removed. ‘But tell me, tell me again about Daddy and Iris. You don’t have to keep their secrets now they’ve both gone and I want to … help you, don’t you miss him? Don’t you want to talk to me about that?’

Around three a.m., the time that day began again, ahead of itself with birdsong in the blue light, Mary woke from a dream of happiness. She was smiling and her face was wet, and as she opened her eyes, she felt her dream-self disappearing with whatever had happened or been said, and she waited for the dream to come back to her but wasn’t able to remember anything about it.

Less than twelve hours after Mary had written her number on Daniel’s arm, she was woken by the ringing of the phone. She flailed around for her glasses only to find them, as she often did, by almost treading on them as she got up. She could hear Stella’s voice and thought she had answered, but the phone kept ringing. Mary was about to run downstairs when she heard another voice, a man’s, and stopped herself. She was still in last night’s clothes. She tugged her t-shirt over her head but it caught on her glasses so she had to pull it back, take off her glasses and start again. She pulled off her trousers and pants, and put her glasses back on as she opened the wardrobe. Then she realised that while Stella was still talking, the phone had stopped.

There she was in the wardrobe mirror, as pale and bony as everyone said, with heavy hair that was no particular colour, and that tipped her head forward like the failed balancing act of her wide eyes and narrow chin. She took off her glasses and moved right up to the mirror to scrutinise her face: the circles beneath her eyes made darker by a grainy rim of eye-liner; open pores across her nose and cheeks as if her skin couldn’t get enough air; a ragged flush on her face and neck; her dark mouth swollen and cracked. I am so obvious, she thought, then breathed hard on her reflection and went to have a bath.