Girl With Dove

3

The Village

She lives in a village, the kind of village where nothing ever happens, exactly like a stagnant pond.

(Sleeping Murder)

In the Miss Marple stories everything begins and ends in the village. Whatever happens in the village, Miss Marple knows about it. People tell her things, often without their knowing. Somehow she’s always there, just when someone’s spilling the beans. Usually she’s sitting in the corner somewhere, like my grandmother with her coffee in the morning, enjoying a nice bit of peace and quiet. Now shoo!

Most of the time St Mary Mead is lovely and quiet. Every day is like being on holiday. There are no chores, at least not for Miss Marple. In St Mary Mead, Miss Marple wakes up to breakfast served by a girl called Mavis or Edna or Mary, which by the way is my middle name; she walks to the village shop with a wicker basket; she stops at the greengrocer’s, the baker’s, the butcher’s; then she has tea at the Copper Kettle.

This is the kind of life I dreamed of; and when I closed my eyes and dreamed this is where I would be: in St Mary Mead at the Copper Kettle, having tea and cake in the corner.

——————————

Villages are full of secrets. If I want to know something, Greta will tell me what is going on. Greta is the vicar’s wife. She loves secrets; but above all, Greta likes to gossip.

When women gossip they usually sit in circles. Gossiping is going round and round in circles until you come back to the same thing. Usually that’s someone’s husband or wife, but sometimes it’s the maid. Gossiping women are witches making spells from other people’s names, women making spells and sipping their tea. Now that I think of it, ‘Greta’ sounds just like a witch, a good witch.

Greta asks Miss Marple to tea because she hopes she can make her spill the beans. Then something might actually happen in St Mary Mead. But Greta doesn’t realise how much Miss Marple already knows, how much she can tell about Greta just by looking.

Greta Clementine was the sort of girl who relished a piece of scandal. Miss Marple took a quick glance around the room. There was Miss Wetherby jabbering away, talking loudly about the rise in prices at Dentons.

‘Two shillings for a jar of marmalade. That isn’t right, Rosemary, surely? Disgraceful. Simply disgraceful. I think we should all boycott the place.’

Miss Marple looked back at Greta’s flushed face. She’s married someone far too old for her, and now she’s stuck inside this village with nothing to do except listen to idle gossip.

Miss Marple looks carefully at Greta. The poor man couldn’t help himself. She’s a very pretty little thing, very lively, dresses nicely, nice figure. Still, it was rather selfish of him, because she’ll get bored. She’s terribly bored already. Look at her fidgeting away. Poor thing, she won’t get much from us that isn’t commonplace. And she won’t get it from her sweet vicar. He’s only interested in learning his psalms!

Greta lifted the big brown teapot and turned to Miss Marple eagerly.

‘Do you think it’s ready, Miss Marple?’

‘Oh, I should think so, dear.’

What a sweet old lady, Greta thought. She looks as though she knows everything but she just won’t say. Oh, why won’t she say? Why won’t someone tell me something interesting about someone at last?

Greta picks up her teacup and sighs. She catches Miss Marple looking at her and smiles.

——————————

Let me tell you something about Mummy, because I’d like to spill the beans.

Mummy grew up in a village called Sompting. Sompting is a place in Sussex next to Lancing and Lancing is near Worthing and Worthing is a town by the sea.

Mummy went to school in Worthing. She walked to school with her sister Di. Mummy and Di walked to school holding hands.

Mummy and Di spent all their time together. Their favourite thing to do was to draw maps. They walked around Sompting village and made a map of all the places they knew. They put a cross where the church with the tower was, and an oblong for the school, and a square for the village shop. Mummy said she learned to draw maps from reading the Milly-Molly-Mandy books. They have those in the library. I’ve read all of them now. The librarian says she can’t get me any more because the person who wrote the books has run out of ideas. Or perhaps she’s having a baby. Or perhaps she’s found a better way to spend her time, gardening. In any case, there aren’t any more Milly-Molly-Mandy books so I will have to find something else to read.

Every Milly-Molly-Mandy book begins with a map. If you follow the map you can pretend you are walking around Milly-Molly-Mandy’s village. I follow the names of the roads with my finger until I get to the Nice White Cottage with the Thatched Roof where Milly-Molly-Mandy lives; then I go next door to Billy Blunt’s house and ask him to come and play.

Billy Blunt lives with Mr Blunt and Mr Blunt owns a shop in the village. Billy gives me sweets from his dad’s shop, but I think sometimes he steals them when his dad isn’t looking. Billy Blunt’s pockets are always stuffed with sweets.

I read the Milly-Molly-Mandy books before I read Agatha Christie. Those were my very first books, after Peter and Jane, which we had to read at school, so slowly I nearly died. There are no murders in Peter and Jane and there are no murders in Milly-Molly-Mandy’s village, but there are lots of cottages with roses round the door. There’s Mr Blunt’s sweet shop which Mummy says reminds her of the sweet shop in the village where she grew up.

In Milly-Molly-Mandy’s village there is a girl called Sue; everyone calls her Sweet Sue. Sweet Sue is Milly-Molly-Mandy’s best friend from school. Sweet Sue and Milly-Molly-Mandy spend a lot of time together. They put buttercups under their chins to see which of them likes butter best. ‘A little bit of butter and a slice of white bread,’ they sing.

Milly-Molly-Mandy and Sweet Sue make daisy chains; they put them on top of their heads and then they twirl around and around. ‘Now you are the May Queen,’ says Sue to Milly-Molly-Mandy. ‘We shall go dancing upon the green. Put your plimsolls on Milly-Molly-Mandy, you don’t want to ruin your nice new white socks.’

Sue and Milly-Molly-Mandy are very happy together. Sue is now Milly-Molly-Mandy’s best friend.

Sweet Sue and Milly-Molly-Mandy are always seen around the village together. Mrs Mount at the greengrocer’s says they are inseparable. Every day Milly-Molly-Mandy and Sweet Sue walk to school holding hands. Mr Blunt watches them through the sweet-shop window. He knows they will pass every weekday morning at half past eight and that either Sue or Milly-Molly-Mandy will stop and pull up one of their socks just outside his gate. Then he will see a flash of pale rose skin beneath a white cotton hem.

At a quarter past eight every morning, Mr Blunt is ready at the window; he’s waiting for the sweet girl with dark brown plaits and her fair-haired friend. Mr Blunt knows too that every afternoon at four o’clock they will come back past his shop. They will step inside and buy either a quarter ounce of sherbet bonbons or a quarter of licorice allsorts. The fair-haired girl prefers the sherbet and the dark-haired likes licorice. He always adds an extra one or two because he wants them to come back.

Mr Blunt closes the shop at six o’clock. He pulls down the strip blinds and looks out across the green. He sees Milly-Molly-Mandy and Sue playing with a hoop and ball. He watches and he watches. Beads of sweat begin to form across his brow. The corners of his mouth twist into a smile.

——————————

People say nothing ever happens in villages. But that isn’t true. A lot goes on. Miss Marple knows this. Peculiar things happen in English villages all the time. You only need think of Poor Sue Blunt.

One day over tea at the Copper Kettle Miss Marple tells Greta, the vicar’s wife, the story of Poor Sue. Greta tries to remember it so she can tell it to someone else.

‘As a child, butter wouldn’t melt in her mouth. But she grew up into an odd woman … Poor Sue.’

Miss Marple paused and looked out the window.

‘Please do go on, Miss Marple.’ Greta looked anxious. She did so wish that Miss Marple would stop being so vague and distracted. Miss Marple turned back to Greta. The poor girl was looking worried.

‘Something went wrong with Sue. The village people blamed her husband. David Blunt was quiet as a church mouse and very serious. And of course he was far too old for Sue. Three times her age.’ Miss Marple paused again. ‘Then one day she disappeared.’

‘Disappeared?’ Greta squeaked, stirring her tea more quickly. ‘Someone can’t just disappear.’

‘Of course they can, dear, if things are managed cleverly.’

‘Well she must be somewhere … unless she’s dead!’

‘Mysterious things happen all the time, dear. You can live alongside people for years and years and not know things about them. Sometimes you are none the wiser for living in such close proximity. Husbands and wives can do the most surprising things …’

Miss Marple suddenly looked serious. ‘You can have suspicions, of course. We all have our suspicions.’

‘What are your suspicions, Miss Marple?’ asked Greta, stirring her tea furiously.

‘Sue was tangled up in religion. But it was all too emotional for her. She was a very quiet, modest sort of woman. She wasn’t suited to all of that. Sue would have done better as a mother I think.’

‘All of what, Miss Marple. All of what? Do tell!’

Later, when Greta told Miss Cram over tea at the vicarage, she was disappointed to find that Miss Cram already knew all about it.

‘Old enough to be her father. Disgusting,’ said Miss Cram. ‘It shouldn’t have been allowed, a man of over sixty marrying a girl of twenty.’ Miss Cram sniffed hard. She opened her bag and pulled out a tissue. She patted her lips.

‘And they never had children. I don’t think they could. That’s the price of unnatural relations if you ask me!’

Greta nursed her hot coffee and looked thoughtful.

‘Perhaps. More a case of too much religion and not enough fun. What she needed was more parties instead of prayers. And you know, people say, well …’ Greta lowered her head to the table and leaned across towards Miss Cram. ‘Well … that they spent all their time, you know …’

‘No, I don’t know, dear,’ said Miss Cram sternly, raising her eyebrow.

Greta leaned in further. ‘Summoning spirits … shrieking at God – whatever it is you do when you’ve gone a bit demented.’ She paused and tried to look thoughtful again.

‘You’ve heard that from Jane Marple, I suppose,’ said Miss Cram, looking quite put out. ‘She oughtn’t to be gossiping like that. Doesn’t she know it’s one of the seven deadly sins?’

4

Jane Eyre and Verity

Every story has a backstory. Backstories are stories in disguise. Sleeping Beauty has a backstory, Jane Eyre too, but I should tell you about Sleeping Beauty, because she came first.

Beauty is born to a king and queen who can never have children. For years the royal cot in the palace hallway sits empty. Finally, after ten years, the queen loses hope. She pushes the cot behind the hallway curtains and tells her staff never to touch it again.

Then out of the blue, as if by magic, the queen produces a child, a child so beautiful that anyone who sees him can’t help exclaim, ‘What a beauty! What a delight! How lucky you are! May God bless you and your child! May he grow fair and tall!’

An old fairy living on the fringes of the palace hears news of the child and she is filled with jealousy. She cannot bear that a child so beautiful and so loved should live. Her heart begins to fill with wicked thoughts.

Every day at noon the child sleeps beneath a rosebush in the garden. One day, the fairy takes a stroll to the rosebush where the child is sleeping. She bends down towards the cot and lifts the white muslin veil that protects him from the sun. Her knobbly fingers are cold and bent and the child, feeling something, stirs. His eyes open and he screams. The fairy pinches the small rosebud mouth between her fingers.

After that, there is only the sound of tweeting.

——————————

When people die before their time they turn into ghosts. Ghosts are what the people left behind have to puzzle over. When Miss Marple meets Miss Temple, the schoolteacher, she knows she must help her draw out her ghost. Luckily, ghosts can come out of hiding with the mere mention of a name.

‘We had been talking,’ said Miss Marple, ‘about a young girl called Verity.’

‘Ah, yes.’

‘I did not know her surname. Miss Temple, I think, mentioned her only as Verity.’

‘Verity Hunt disappeared years ago,’ said the Archdeacon.

‘Yes,’ said Miss Marple. ‘Miss Temple and I were talking about her. Miss Temple told me something I did not know.’

Most ghosts are familiar; you know who they are when you see them. Mum looks like a ghost when she passes down the hallway in her nightie; she’s pale all over, grey as congealed porridge. The bottom of her nightie is ripped and torn as if a wild cat has got at it. Sometimes, when the hall light is off, I don’t see her coming and I scream. Then Mum gets cross and goes back into her room and slams the door. We don’t see her for hours.

——————————

Women waft about in their nighties when things are going wrong. Clotilde Bradbury-Scott walks into Miss Marple’s room in a purple nightie in the middle of the night because she’s afraid. She’s had a bad dream about nasty secrets hidden beneath pink polygonum flowers.

‘Polygonum baldschuanicum. Very quick-growing, I think, isn’t it? Very useful really if one wants to hide any tumbledown building or anything ugly of that kind,’ says Clotilde.

‘Ah, yes, but it’s a menace if you want to grow anything else alongside it. Before you can say Jack Robinson your polygonum cover everything.’ Clotilde Bradbury-Scott takes a long look at this old woman. Clearly, she knows her plants. Before long she will be volunteering her services in the garden; she must be gone before that happens.

——————————

People prefer to cover up ghosts, but no matter what you do, ghosts will always go wandering. I met with my first real ghost when I was ten. Her name was Jane Eyre and I found her sitting on the library shelves wearing a tatty brown dress. By then I had run out of Agatha Christie and I was looking for something else. I needed a new friend.

‘Adult Fiction,’ the librarian said. ‘Jane Eyre is Adult Fiction. Does your mum know you’re here?’

‘Yes, she knows. She sent me here!’

‘Mmm. Well …’ The librarian lifted her glasses and peered down her long, thin nose.

‘She says I can’t keep reading all that murder mystery rubbish. It’s high time I took on the classics! Agatha Christie isn’t literature and no one is going to take me seriously unless I start reading something more sophisticated.’

‘Mmm. Precocious … I see. Well, she’s in Adult Fiction. Over there. Now go quietly. You’re really too young to be in there messing about.’

So I crossed the wide, squeaky floor and there, on the other side of that broad wooden stretch I found her in an old brown dress: Jane Eyre, dusty and faded around the edges. Jane Eyre, who is looking for Verity.

——————————

You won’t believe me, but one evening while I was reading something floated down from the glass panels above my head and landed on my page. Whoosh! I turned and there she was. I knew it was her immediately. Who else could it be?

I could see her from the corner of my eye, a small pale face staring right at me. She was wearing the same brown dress and a small velvet scarf around her head. Red velvet was blocking my view of the page; red velvet was speaking; red velvet was speaking the words I was reading:

Folds of scarlet drapery shut in my view to the right hand; to the left were clear panes of glass, protecting, but not separating me from the drear November day. At intervals, while turning over the leaves of my book, I studied the aspect of that winter afternoon.

I heard the words enter my brain, and they felt strange. I’d never heard words like this before. Nobody I knew uses words like this. Nobody says drapery when they mean curtains. Drapery is something you hang over something in order to disguise it. Drapery hides things – bodies and knives. Drapery is Jane Eyre behind the red curtains hiding from John Reed (her nasty cousin), who would like to kill her, because John Reed is not a good reader. He’s jealous of curious Jane, his clever cousin. John Reed has no curiosity. He can’t think of anything but his own nasty self! ‘No imagination,’ Mum says. ‘Too caught up in himself. It’ll end badly!’

Jane Eyre is a big reader. She knows that when you read, time just passes. I read and read and time passed, but when I looked up from my book, the strange little person was still there. I wondered where she’d come from. Her face said nothing at all. Her body was thin and her face pale and her hair fell over her face.

‘Slides,’ said Mum. ‘What she needs is some nice tortoiseshell slides. Clip it back, for goodness’ sake, Maze. She looks like a wild thing running about with all that hair blowing about. For goodness’ sake, get it off her face!’

I hated my slides. They pulled my hair so tight I got a headache. But I couldn’t see slides anywhere on Jane Eyre’s forehead, only tiny, furrowed lines. Jane Eyre was too focused on reading to think about her hair.

‘You’re a very serious person, Jane Eyre,’ I said out loud. ‘Maze says it’s good to keep a sense of fun. You mustn’t be too serious before your time. I don’t know how old you are, but you can’t be much older than me, and I’m eleven at the end of the summer as a matter of fact. And Maze says you can’t afford to be too serious too soon. If you’re too serious then no one will want you around. For one thing, you won’t get invited to any parties and no one will want to dance with you at the school fête and you’ll never ever be chosen as the May Queen or get a part in the school play. You’re not tall enough for that. I wasn’t chosen because I’m not as tall as Melissa Marshall and I’m not as pretty as Rachel Green, but I’ve got a good speaking voice, so Miss Bellamy chose me as the school narrator, and I don’t mind that. What about you, Jane Eyre, what will you be?’

But the little person with the pale face just blinked and turned back to her book.

——————————

She stayed for hours. I can’t tell how many. Sometimes I looked up and I saw her mouth moving. I heard her quiet whispers. But she ignored me. She didn’t want to talk. She just kept on reading. (I think I hurt her feelings about the play, but truthfully, she would never get a part.) Jane Eyre, I decided, was a serious sort of person, and serious people never quite relax.

‘Clever people can be very tiresome,’ Maze says. ‘Cousin Norman was an intellectual and he was very taxing. They just can’t switch off. Too much going on upstairs … Norman could never relax.’

But after a while I did. I relaxed right into my book and soon I forgot she was there. Hours passed. Before long it was dark and Maze was coming to bed.

And that is when things began to change. That night there were clear panes of glass running between everyone else and me and I was suddenly quite separate, stuck on a solitary rock, far out at sea.

——————————

By the time I’d finished reading Jane Eyre I knew that you can find missing people inside books. Jane Eyre, who reads a lot of books, calls these natural sympathies. Sympathies are relatives you never knew you had, the ones you always wanted. Sympathies are family ghosts and fairies, and sympathies keep you up at night.

I decided that my sympathies were Jane Eyre and Miss Marple, and once upon a time, a long time before I was born, they had been walking together through an English village looking for Verity.

‘Verity! Verity! Verity!’

But Verity disappeared years ago! Because someone loved her too much.

You can kill people you love, you know. In mysteries, this happens all the time. Miss Marple knows this, and Jane Eyre too, because like Miss Marple, Jane Eyre sees and hears everything; and like Miss Marple, she is genteel.

‘She looks like a lady,’ says Bessie Lee when she finds Jane all grown up. Bessie, who used to help her wash and dress, but not kindly; Bessie, who was too afraid of Aunt Reed to be kind.

‘Just like a lady now, Miss Jane, very proper. Look at you!’

Bessie means that Jane Eyre is small and quiet and demure, so people don’t see her coming round the corner, or across the village green with a basket in her hand. They don’t see her coming in through the back door and climbing up the stairs. Jane Eyre is quiet as a mouse. But she wanders everywhere, swifter than the moon’s sphere. And what she sees, she doesn’t tell a soul.

——————————

‘Over hill, over dale, Thorough bush, thorough brier, Over park, over pale, thorough flood, thorough fire, I do wander everywhere, Swifter than the moon’s sphere, And I serve the fairy queen, To dew her orbs upon the green.’

That’s Mum’s favourite part of Shakespeare; she says it out loud sometimes. When I first heard those lines I thought she was speaking about Jane Eyre and Mr Rochester, the master of Thornfield Hall; Mr Rochester, the man Jane loves and leaves in the lurch.

But Mum said it was Shakespeare. ‘Only Shakespeare can write lines like that.’

Mum loves her Shakespeare. I think she likes Jane Eyre too, but she knows some bits of Shakespeare off by heart. She had to learn them at school. If she got them wrong the teacher, who was very strict, rapped her on the knuckles with a ruler. Mum says school back then wasn’t exactly like Lowood School where Jane is sent by horrid Aunt Reed, but something not far off.

Now I think of it, I’m not sure Mum would like Jane Eyre. She has a nose for secrets. Jane Eyre is curious; she listens in. Mum would say she’s a nosey parker, but Jane Eyre knows that plenty of things go on behind closed doors if you listen carefully. Like Mr Rochester’s dog, Pilot, she can sniff out the sinister and strange. Beware all those who house Jane Eyre!

Mrs Fairfax stayed behind a moment to fasten the trapdoor. I, by dint of groping, found the outlet from the attic, and proceeded to descend the narrow garret staircase. I lingered in the long passage to which this led, separating the front and back rooms of the third story – narrow, low, and dim, with only one little window at the far end, and looking, with its two rows of small black doors all shut, like a corridor in some Bluebeard’s castle.

‘Mrs Fairfax!’ I called out – for now I heard her descending the great stairs. ‘Did you hear that loud laugh? Who is it?’

(Jane Eyre)

When you read a book like Jane Eyre, you start to see things, small fragments of this and that that shoot across your eyes like stars. Tiny pictures appear in between the pages as you turn them. You begin to see and hear things: a woman’s smile, a woman’s laugh, a woman with her hands held high, a woman speaking gobbledygook. And then suddenly, without warning, you are in Lancing on Sea a long time ago and you don’t know how you got there. Some strange spirit has carried you away. Jane Eyre! Jane Eyre! Whither wander you?

5