The Village: Warm Hearth, Warm Hearts
by Anne Hanley
Copyright 2011
Smashwords Edition
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The Village: Warm Hearth, Warm Hearts
PART ONE
1
Thursday
Will looked up as the big log rolled off the embers and turned glowing-side up at the front of the grate. The flames that had been licking up from behind died abruptly. He looked across to his mother.
“More wood?” he asked. He pushed the log back into place and blew on to the embers to rekindle the flame.
“You feel like going?” she said. Will glanced at the basket beside the fireplace. It was empty.
“Bed time I guess,” he laughed, and pulled his chair closer to the little blaze.
At the other side of the fireplace, his mother sat cross-legged on a fat cushion, the low table in front of her strewn with paper. In the middle of it, a kerosene lamp was spluttering. She cranked up the glass shell and adjusted the wick.
“The oil’s almost gone anyway,” she said, and looked across at Will. “What are you working on? You’ve been very industrious.”
With one foot Will pushed his sketch pad and pencils around to the far side of his chair.
“Nothing much.” He poked the fire a little and blew on it again. “I was just thinking about that sewing machine.”
His mother smiled to herself and began gathering her sketches, examining and frowning and clipping pages together with paperclips taken from a tin box on the big wooden dresser behind her.
“Who’s that for?” Will asked. Slowly his mother stood up and stretched. She banged one foot noisily on the stone flags, grimacing as the blood began flowing again.
“I didn’t even notice it had gone to sleep,” she said. “Those people who’re coming back to the big house. Part of the family was here years ago, you know. They disappeared. And now someone’s coming back.”
She opened a drawer in the dresser and took out a frayed manilla folder, adding her bundles of sketches to the ones already in there. She put the folder on the table as she bent down to rub life into her calf muscle. Will turned the folder and read the scrawl on the cover. Corless.
“They’re odd folk, not like the others at all. Cold types I’d say from their letters. And the house. You’d love it. All mod cons. Very mod. Lots of cons,” she said, raising one eyebrow towards her son. “They’ve asked me to take a look and see what can be done.”
She put the file back in its drawer and squatted down to poke the fire.
“Though I don’t know why.”
“Shall I take the bottles up?” said Will.
His mother took two oven gloves and picked the metal cases out of the embers. Gingerly Will took them from her and disappeared through the thick curtain covering the door.
His mother collected the mugs from the mantelpiece and walked into the next room. “Mod,” she muttered as she walked around the kitchen table to the sink, and “cons” , then drew a sharp breath and shivered as she turned on the tap and rinsed the cups. “Mod.”
“Cold?” said Will, bouncing through the curtain into the kitchen and pulling it shut behind him.
“Icy,” she said as she wiped her hands on the back of her trousers and thrust them under her armpits. “Cold?”
“Up there? No, the bedrooms are toasty. I hung your nightshirt up by the flue for you.”
She smiled again to herself as reached two tiny terracotta oil lamps from a shelf and placed them on top of the stove. She shook the match box which had been sitting on the shelf with the lamps. It was empty. With a square of felt, she opened a door in the front of the stove, and recoiled from the heat. She lit a taper in the embers, and applied it to the oil lamps. A warm light illuminated that dark end of the kitchen. With the felt, she lifted a lid off the top of the cooker.
“There’s still enough hot water for tea. Want some?” she asked. Will shook his head. One lamp in hand, he went back into the living room and took up his place by the fire. His mother scooped out a mugful of water from the metal container sunk into the cooker top and sat a tea strainer on the mug. From a cupboard, she took a glass jar of leaves and flowers and sprinkled a little into the strainer, watching as they bobbed and sank.
“That sewing machine has really intrigued you, hasn’t it?” she called to her son, who had pulled his low armchair even closer to the dying embers. He reached out and took the kerosene lamp, raised the chimney and blew out the flame. As he lay back in his chair, his face was a barely visible glow.
“Well, if your grandmother thought it was normal for her mother to use one. I mean, your grandmother wasn’t all that long ago, was she?”
“But if you’ve never even seen a treadle,” his mother said softly as she joined him by the fire. “You’re wonderful and inventive and I have every faith in you, of course. But.”
Will reached down into his sketch book and pulled out a loose leaf.
“Look what I found.” His mother placed her lamp on the mantel, and peered at the sketch. “It was in the library. I found a book with a picture of a sewing machine with a treadle. I made a copy.” His mother took the sketch and looked closely, then looked at Will questioningly. “All right, it wasn’t a technical drawing exactly. But I kind of got the picture.”
His mother nodded and handed the sketch back, and smiled her private smile again. “You know that I’m all right sewing by hand.” She sipped her tea. “And if it’s something I really can’t do, then we can plug the machine in for a bit.” She looked at Will and reached out to ruffle his hair. He drew his head away sharply. She dropped her hand, smiled ruefully and stared into her mug. The silence was broken only by a crackling as the last brief flames burst feebly from the red, ashy log. “Though of course if it did have a treadle…” she said, and picked up her oil lamp. “Anyway, I’m off to bed.”
She reached out again and this time Will moved his head towards her as she stroked it.
“Beth,” he whispered. “When’ll Joe be back?”. Her hand stopped moving and she breathed in sharply. Then she bent down and kissed his tousled hair.
“I’m off to bed,” she repeated, taking her lamp from the mantlepiece and walking slowly towards the stairs. “You must be tired too. Good night love.”
2
Friday
Miss Adams was drawing France on the blackboard as Will slid round the door. At least Will thought it was France. The shape was sketchy, but a blob in the middle was labelled “Paris”.
“Again, Bramble?” said Miss Adams archly without turning around.
“Only three minutes,” said Will. “And I…”
“I’m sure your excuse is plausible as ever. So please spare us.” There were titters from the heads bent over desks, concentrating on reproducing France in geography exercise books. Each of the old-fashioned wooden flip-top desks sat two students. The desks were arranged in neat rows, facing the large windows to exploit the sunlight to the full. A jumble of bags strewn in aisles and over chair-backs disturbed the symmetry, as did the long sprawling legs of Will’s best friend George, in the back row. George’s map of France bore a remarkable resemblance to the back of the head – shiny hairclips and all – of pretty, pouting Heather Brown in the row in front. “For heaven’s sake George, grow up,” whispered his desk-mate Lily. George shot her a withering look.
“Perhaps you’d be so kind as to step over here,” said Miss Adams to Will, turning and proffering the chalk, “and mark some channel ports on my work of art here?”
“Naturellement,” he said, and dropped his rucksack and jacket on his desk in the front row. He grabbed the duster and erased Miss Adams’ north coast, replacing it deftly and accurately.
“William,” said his teacher sharply. “Did I ask you to improve my oeuvre?”
William smiled sheepishly. “Oh, I see. It’s France,” muttered a voice at the back of the room. “Oooh, there was I thinking it was a puddle of porridge,” said another. Miss Adams fought back a smile.
“And for your next trick, Mr Bramble, maybe you could mark the channel ports, s’il te plait.”
Will carefully placed a dot and said “Dieppe”.
“Label it please William,” said his teacher, and watched him scrawl the name. “Now, how anyone with writing like that could presume to criticise my drawing,” she mused, looking ceiling-wards.
“Drupe?” shouted a voice as the class dissolved into laughter. “Upee?” “Prepi?” “Doipe?”
“Oh ha ha,” said Will over the din, carefully marking Le Havre. “At least I know where they are. You all wait,” he shouted. “One day when you need directions and it’s a matter of life and death, don’t come to me for help. You, my friends,” he yelled, swinging round to face the classroom door as it opened unexpectedly, “are so, so perdus.”
Silence had fallen on the room. In the doorway stood a thin blond girl whose elegant, shop-bought clothes marked her out as not from the Village. She stepped forward and shut the door briskly behind her, then turned to the teacher’s desk.
“Miss Adams, I am Hannah Corless,” she announced. She looked innocently enough at the teacher with her striking green eyes, but her words sounded like a challenge.
“Yes?” said Miss Adams, staring. Tall and wiry, and an uncanny noticer of everything that happened in her classroom, Miss Adams had a stare that was a powerful weapon, apt to terrify anyone unfamiliar with her sardonic sense of humour. The class made low noises of amusement and sympathy.
“Well,” Hannah faltered. “Don’t you know?”
Miss Adams smiled quizzically. “No.”
“I have been assigned to your class.”
“You are most welcome, Miss Corless,” said the teacher graciously as she looked Hannah up and down. Hannah straightened her skirt nervously under this scrutiny, and shifted her bag from one shoulder to the other. “But it appears you are classified material. Top secret. So secret in fact that no one chose to warn me of your arrival. Take a seat. That place there next to Mr Calligraphy is free,” she said, pointing at the empty place at Will’s desk. “We are attempting to decipher his French channel ports. Any help you can give us will no doubt be most useful. William?”
Will had added Calais and Boulogne to his map, and was labelling them in pain-stakingly drawn capitals. Miss Adams silenced splutters with a stern look.
“Voilà. They’re the biggies,” he said and placed the chalk on the teacher’s desk. Hannah’s hand shot up.
“Er. Yes Hannah?” said Miss Adams.
“But what about Dunkerque? There’s a fishing fleet, and there are big tankers in the harbour too. Then there’s the yacht marina of course. We moored there last summer.”
Strangled sounds arose from the back of the class. Miss Adams peered hard in the direction of Will’s friend.
“George? You seem to be having some difficulty breathing?” asked Miss Adams. Around the room, students were clutching hands to their faces, attempting to stifle laughter.
“No, no, I’ll be right,” George coughed out, lurching forward as his neighbour seized the opportunity to thump him, hard, on the back. “If Lily doesn’t rupture anything that is,” he gasped.
“Dear Miss Corless,” said Miss Adams in her most aggravatingly patient tones, “we were limiting ourselves to those ports with ferry connections with England. To be quite honest with you, I doubt whether any of us will be fortunate enough to avail ourselves in the near future of those rare aforementioned public luxuries. I shan’t embarrass the class now by asking those with yachts to raise their hands. As for the fishing fleet, if you would all be so kind as to turn to page seventy two where we’ll begin our study of France’s industry and agriculture. George will now read to us. If he’s in a fit state.”
George hunched forward over his desk, moving as close as he could to Heather’s auburn ringlets. He cleared his throat and in his deepest voice – the one he considered his most seductive – he began to read slowly. “The great forests which covered large surface areas in France’s northern regions suffered massively early in The Crisis as a result of unmanaged felling and panic hoarding. Silly, impetuous français.” Miss Adams gave a threatening cough. “As a result, the area is now subject to creeping desertification, attracting sailors seeking camel rides to the Dunkerque area.”
“George, that will…” Miss Adams erupted, banging sharply on her desk with her hand. Her sentence, like the gales of laughter from all over the room, was cut off by a loud electronic wailing, which persisted for some seconds before Hannah smiled sheepishly, reached down into her bag, scrabbled about in the bottom of it and pulled out a mobile phone. She flipped it open with an apologetic shrug in the general direction of the teacher’s desk.
“Hello? Oh, yes, Aunt Pam. Sorry, I got here.” The class stared in open-mouthed disbelief. “Look, this is really rude. I’m in class. I’ve got to go. Yes. Bye.”
Miss Adams appeared to shake herself a little and took a deep breath before thundering “you will switch that thing off. Immediately.” She shook herself again and muttered, under her breath, “ghosts of things past.”
“I have no idea why or how you own one of those devices,” she continued severely. “Neither do I want to know. You will ensure from now on that it does not ring in my class.” The class continued to stare at the object in Hannah’s hand, transfixed. Miss Adams surveyed the room. “Although I must say, it has had the remarkable effect of bringing my class to order. Will, your eyes are going to pop out of your head. Don’t,” she snapped as his hand reached out to pick the object up from where it was now lying on the desk, “you dare. Miss Corless. Away.”
Hannah pressed the ‘off’ button and was replacing the handset in her bag as the bell rang. “You may get up now,” said the teacher in resigned tones to her students, who were already on their feet, struggling into jackets and heading to the door for break. In the corridor, a sea of shocked faces whispered to each other as Hannah slowly left her desk and headed towards them. Bracing herself, she left the room.
3
Heather smiled her sweetest and most vacant smile as she skipped towards the new student. “Hannah, Hannah,” she lisped. Most of her class mates rolled their eyes ceiling-wards. George looked on adoringly. “What was it?”
Lily looked at her in disgust. “Heather, how can you be so unutterably thick? Don’t you recognise a cellphone?”
That this quiet, mousy girl from the ramshackle cottage at the edge of the woods should be the person to deliver this line was the last thing that most of the class expected. That she should do it with such vehemence left them open-mouthed. “It’s no big deal you know,” she continued. “Until ten years ago, everybody had one. Or two. Or three.”
“Can I take a look?” Will said, a note of reverence in his voice, as the group moved slowly along the corridor towards the front door, clustered around Hannah and the object which she was now fishing out of the bottom of her bag again.
“Is your name really William Calligraphy?” asked Hannah. Will looked nonplussed. “I mean, that’s what that teacher called you. Mr Calligraphy.”
George guffawed. Will looked taken aback. He was uncertain whether this unknown quantity of a girl was being serious or teasing him. “Er. It was irony,” he explained. Hannah looked puzzled. “If you’re going to be in our class, you’d better get used to it. If you don’t, Miss Adams will have you for breakfast.”
“But Hannah, Hannah, can you really talk to people on it? Or were you just pretending?” Heather’s breathy query elicited moans of despair. Taking Hannah by the arm and walking close by her side, Heather seemed oblivious to it all. She gazed admiringly at her new friend. George followed close behind.
“They’re iniquitous things,” said Lily with the same unusual vehemence as before. “It’s right that they’re not allowed. My mother says parents used to be able to track their children everywhere they went with those things. It was like no one trusted you.”
Will gingerly took the handset that Hannah was holding out to him. He pressed the ‘on’ button as she told him to. He turned it over as the welcome note sounded, and looked expectantly at Hannah when the screen asked him for the PIN.
“And now?” he asked.
“Just write 4, 3, 2, 1. That’s it. Press the buttons in like that. Then, well, er, I don’t know.” For a moment Hannah looked like she didn’t know what to suggest. “You could call my aunt,” she suggested eventually.
“Why. On. Earth. You see. My point exactly,” said Lily and walked away from the group, to eat her sandwich alone on a bench in the weak sunshine on the far side of the school yard. From there she observed the deferential scrum around the newcomer and her toy. Hannah was showing Will how to play the games, accompanied by screams of laughter from the others who clamoured for a go. Next, Hannah ordered them all to stand in a group against the paling fence that surrounded the grassy schoolyard, and took their photo. As the bell rang, Lily got up and sauntered back towards the group; so fascinated were they by the tiny photo, they didn’t appear to have heard.
“Um. Class?” she said as she passed.
“You know, that dress would be rather pretty if it weren’t in such outlandish material,” said Hannah, not unkindly. Lily stopped and looked her up and down. Lily’s mother, a seamstress, made her clothes which were the envy of her class. Though much of the Village got cranky Elly to sew for them, none of the clothes she made ever seemed to hang so well or fit so perfectly as they did on her own quiet daughter.
“You think it’s outlandish?” she said, coming to a halt and fixing Hannah with her calm gaze. She smoothed her skirt down, and pulled at the peter pan collar so that it stood up inside the collar of her down-padded jacket. “It was the living room curtains before, but they were getting so frayed that even my mother thought it was time for a change.” The class shifted about in embarrassed silence. In the Village, no one alluded to hardship. “You know, your dress would be rather pretty if the material weren’t quite so dull,” she said and resumed her saunter. Reminding Hannah to switch her phone off, Lily’s stunned classmates followed her back into class.
4
Will galloped up the road towards his evening chores and easily overtook Lily as she ambled, examining the scant winter verges, towards Nonna’s house. Snow had fallen a couple of nights before, and there were still pitted patches in sheltered hollows. Of everyone in their class, Will had been the only one not surprised by Lily’s unexpected wisdom about electronic gadgetry. Her inexplicable expertise – well-concealed as it generally was – was one of the things that made them such firm friends. Fourteen years playing in each other’s gardens was another: Lily’s mother Elly was an irascible character, ready to round on just about anyone except her own adored daughter. Will’s mother was one of the few Villagers she called a friend.
“So?” demanded Will as he caught up with Lily. “Explanation?”
Lily looked blank.
“Why the anger? Why the attack?” he asked.
“I wasn’t angry,” said Lily, bending to pick a green rosette of dandelion leaves out from under the hedge. “And I certainly didn’t attack. I don’t attack. You know me.”
“Oh rubbish,” Will laughed, shaking his head. “I’ve never seen you be so mean to anyone. What came over you?”
Lily was picking more dandelion rosettes, stuffing them into a net shopping bag that she had pulled out of her school rucksack. “Do you think Nonna will like these? They’re ever so good steamed.”
“You’re changing the subject,” said Will. “You were vicious.”
Lily stood up and thought, slinging the net bag across her wrist. “There was something funny about her. I don’t know. She just. She rubbed me up the wrong way. It was her attitude. Or something. That thing about the yacht.” Will grinned as he remembered the scene. “Was she for real?” He shrugged. “She didn’t even sound like she was showing off, but she must have been. Is she such a good actress? Very suspicious.”
Will shrugged again and stopped at a lop-sided gate into a garden one side of which was filled with a carefully tended kitchen garden. Tall cabbages and sprouting broccoli plants filled two beds. A cold frame sat propped open to allow the weak sun inside. On the other side of the garden path, battered cane garden furniture was strewn about a lawn.
“Funny thing is,” mused Will as he surveyed the garden, “you look just like her.”
Lily shot him a furious glance. “Now you really are being stupid.”
“All right, all right, maybe I was kidding,” Will retracted. “Anyway, I’ve got to see what Jack’s been up to. He doesn’t seem to have done too much damage,” he added, peering at the brassicas.
“It’s looking good,” Lily said in her usual calm tones, then turned and resumed walking slowly. She peered inside her net bag and shook the leaves. There were enough for an old lady’s dinner. “See you later,” she said, and walked on without turning round. “See you tomorrow.”
The rutted lane continued round a bend, and sloped up slightly towards the outskirts of the the Village. In a break in the hedge, there were straggling lumps of sheep’s wool caught up in barbed wire. Lily disentangled them carefully and shoved them into the front pocket of her rucksack. Two small boys hurtled past on noisy battered bicycles as she turned to open a neat gate and enter a similarly neat garden.
“Hi Lil,” said one.
“Shouldn’t you be…” she began but gave up trying to make herself heard as they sped off. “That Jeb Brown,” she thought. “He’s such a rat. Almost as bad as his sister is pathetic.”
Half-way up the path, Lily stopped and pulled at the trap doors of an old coal bunker. This was Nonna’s underground firewood store: it was more than half full. At the front door, an elderly woman waved and called.
“Luce! Ciao!”
“Shall I bring you some wood?” said Lily, waving back.
“No thanks carissima. There’s plenty here. In you come,” the woman said.
At the front door, Lily hugged Nonna and gave her a kiss and looked around to see what needed to be done. It was pointless, she knew. Not a thing was out of place in the perfectly scrubbed kitchen, and something that smelled very good indeed was humming comfortingly in a covered pot on the stove.
“Look what I brought you,” she said, waving the net bag towards the old lady.
“Mmmmm, tarasacco. You are a kind girl. You know there’s nothing to do this evening,” she said, and put her arm around Lily’s shoulder, directing her to a deep chair in front of the fire.
“Come on, let me take a look at the garden. There must be something,” said Lily, wriggling free and heading for the window overlooking the back garden. It was, as always, immaculate. “You know, you’re not a very satisfactory person to be assigned,” Lily teased. “You’re better than me at everything!”
Nonna brought out a pile of books from a cupboard in the kitchen. “But that gives us more time,” she said.
Lily sat down again in her fireside chair, shrugging in resignation. “Well all right, but tomorrow I’m going outside.”
“Tomorrow is George’s turn,” said Nonna.
“Ha. Ha. Ha,” Lily answered, looking at the old lady for some sign of irony. “You don’t honestly believe…”
Nonna sat down beside her, a cup of strong-smelling herb tea in each hand. “George is a good boy, underneath,” she said. “One day he’ll surprise you all.”
“Underneath,” scoffed Lily, and yelped as she scorched her lip on the hot liquid. “One day indeed. He’s a royal pain in the…”
“Luce!” said Nonna, pulling her up short. Lily smiled. “One day, you will see.”
Lily blew into her mug as she opened the book on her lap.
5
Lily watched from the lane as Elly emerged from the big barn into the dusk and snapped the two padlocks shut, then tugged them hard to make sure they held. She skirted the lingering patches of snow along the path back to the cottage which lay in darkness in the shadow of the woods. At the lean-to by the back door, she opened a hatch and began fishing out logs which she put into a big basket on wheels.
Lily clattered through the front door and yelled “Mum! It’s so dark in here! And it’s really cold. Can we crank up this fire?”
Elly entered the kitchen, pulling her basket of logs behind her. The door in the front of the wood-burning stove was open, emitting a faint light from the two thin logs smouldering there. “Here we go sweetie, chuck another one on,” she said as she crossed the room to the dresser and took down the hurricane lamp. “Time to turn this on I guess.”
Lily stoked the fire in the stove and warmed her hands in front of it. “No need yet. I don’t have any homework. Well, I did, but I did it at Nonna’s.” She grabbed her bulging rucksack which was sitting on top of scraps of materials of all descriptions on the kitchen table, and pulled out something wrapped in a striped tea towel. “Look what she sent.” It was a loaf. “It’s still warm.”
“You shouldn’t let her do that,” said Elly, frowning.
“Oh yeah, like, you manage to say no when she’s pressing things on you!” Lily looked at her mother indulgently. “Oh look, I forgot. That was sitting by the gate.” She motioned to a jerry can on the floor just inside the front door. “There was no note or anything.”
Elly picked up the can and sniffed. “Kerosene. I wonder who left that?” Lily shrugged. “Jim owed me for that shirt I made. Could’ve been him I guess.”
“Oh, that reminds me,” said Lily. “I bumped into Mrs Brown. She said she wanted to talk to you about some new shirts for her moronic children.”
“Lily!”
“Well they are,” her daughter exclaimed. “You should have seen Heather with the new girl today. Simper simper simper. Enough to make you throw.”
“New girl? Are the Corlesses here?” said Elly.
Lily looked at her mother in amazement. “Er… Mum, how come you know about them?”
“People talk,” said Elly, beginning to clear her sewing to one end of the tiled kitchen table.
“Yes dear Mama. But you generally make a point of not listening to them.”
Elly took a handful of potatoes from a basket under the sink and tore two onions off one of the plaits hanging from hooks on the wall. She lay them on the table and fetched a chopping board, then slowly peeled the onions. “So, what’s she like?” she asked, as she began to slice the onions.
“Insufferable. Utterly awful.” Lily recounted the story of the yacht, and told her mother about Hannah’s comment on her dress. He mother sliced the onions thoughtfully, then began peeling the potatoes. “I don’t know, there’s something odd about her. She doesn’t seem nasty exactly. Or even thick. It’s just like. I don’t know. Like she says things without any idea of what effect she’s going to have on people. It’s like she doesn’t think they’re going to have any reaction. I mean, she’s weird.”
“You should invite her for tea.” Elly continued peeling, without looking up. Again, Lily stared at her mother in amazement.
“Er, sorry?” she spluttered. “First up, I just said I didn’t like her.”
“Maybe you will. When you get to know her,” Elly commented absent-mindedly.
“And secondly, what do you mean, bring her for tea? When have you ever told me to bring someone here? You’re usually ordering me not to bring people home. So what’s with the hospitality, eh? Why on earth should I invite that prig?”
“One afternoon next week maybe?” suggested Elly.
“Hang on, I don’t think I’m getting this,” said Lily, beginning to get annoyed. “I mean, I know it’s dark in here, but that shouldn’t stop you hearing me, should it?”
“Monday maybe. What time’s school tomorrow?” Elly asked, finally looking up from her chopping board where she had diced the potatoes into small cubes.
“Tomorrow’s Saturday. Actually. The weekend. No school. Okay?”
“Well then, yes, Monday,” mused Elly to herself as Lily seethed. “You out at 1.30 like this week?” she asked.
“No, two. Apparently the days are getting longer, though I hadn’t noticed. But if you think I’m bringing…”
“Monday,” said Elly again calmly. “Yes, that would be nice. After chores. For tea.” Lily shook her head in frustration, stomped to the door and slammed through it, into the freezing living room and up the stairs.
“What,” she fumed to herself as she flung her schoolbag into the corner of the bedroom she shared with her mother, “has come over the woman?” Lily breathed hard through her mouth and a great cloud of steam came out. Shivering, she walked across to the flue and felt it. It was barely warm. The fire in the stove downstairs had been lit very recently. She pressed her gloves up against the stainless steel tube, trying to extract a little warmth from it, then grabbed another scarf from the back of a chair and wrapped it tight around her neck, pulling the collar of her padded jacket right up around her ears inside. Had her mother really been home all day working without even lighting a fire in this perishing weather, she wondered. She shook her head and sighed. “Even so,” she muttered out loud. “if she thinks I’m bringing that stuck-up little madam back here, she has another thing coming. She’s not coming to tea, that’s for sure.”
6
Saturday
Will stood at Lily’s front gate and hollered. “Lil, you there?” Once, three years ago, Will had made the mistake of blundering up the Blackburn’s front path early in the morning, before Elly had put her glasses on. He had found himself nose-to-barrel with Elly’s famous shotgun, which lay across brackets above the front door. Will had the impression that Elly had grown more irascible, and possibly more trigger-happy, since then. “Lily, you up?”
The bedroom window upstairs flew open and Lily’s head appeared, swathed in a red felt bonnet. “For heaven’s sake Will. It’s the crack of dawn.”
The kitchen door opened and Elly appeared. “Come on Will, breakfast’s ready,” she called. “Sleeping Beauty up there is just coming down. Better feed her quick, before she goes ratty on us.”
The kitchen was warm and steamy, but had a strong farmyard smell. “Does it stink in here?” asked Elly.
“It’s kind of… sheepy,” Will admitted. He didn’t mind the smell, which was emanating from a big cauldron sitting on the cooker top. It mixed badly, though, with the porridge that was bubbling next to it in a smaller saucepan.
“Phew, that’s foul,” said Lily, bursting through the door swathed in shawls and scarves. “But at least it’s warm in here. Breakfast ready?” Will and Lily heaped porridge into bowls and poured runny medlar jam over the top. “What’re you doing with the wool?” Lily asked between mouthfuls.
“I thought I’d fill kind of thin mattresses with it, to lay over the ones we have. Don’t you feel cold coming up from beneath the bed at night? I think we need more insulation.”
Lily nodded agreement. “Great idea. It’s not going to stink like a sheep, though, is it? I think I’d settle for the cold.”
Elly smiled and turned to Will. “So, go on, tell me what she’s like. I didn’t get anything much out of Lily.”
“Sorry?” said Will, looking confused.
“The new girl. What’s she like?”
“Mum,” Lily blurted out. “I can’t believe we’re going over this again!”
“Will?”
Will looked from mother to daughter. It was obviously a sore point and he was caught at the sharp end of it. Lily looked red-faced and peeved. Elly, however, was staring at him with unusual curiosity and animation. He looked back and forth from one to the other.
“I’m feeling a trifle, er, under pressure here,” he said sheepishly. “I’m not sure what I’m meant to say.”
“Oh for heaven’s sake Will,” snapped Lily, “just tell her. She’s obsessed. It’s weird.”
Elly shot her daughter a cross look. She turned back to Will expectantly. Lily dropped dishes into the sink and proceeded to crash them together as she washed them up.
“She seems a bit, like, on another planet,” he said, and stopped for a moment, searching for anything else to describe. “She’s, um, she’s.” He stopped and thought again. “She’s got a mobile phone!” He looked triumphant. “It rang, right in the middle of class, and she talked to her aunt. Miss Adams looked like she’d seen a ghost.”
Elly stopped stirring the boiling pot of wool and stared at Will. “A cellphone?” she said, her eyebrows shooting up. “A functioning one? My god, they have got her on a short leash.”
“Sorry?” said Will.
“Lily,” she said, turning to her daughter, “just one thing. Very very important. When you bring her here to tea, she’s to leave that thing far away. Not just switch it off. Stick it in a hedge somewhere, and pick it up after, you understand?”
Lily gave her mother a withering look. “I’ll tell her to leave her damned mobile phone far away,” she yelled. “And I’ll tell her she can stay right there in the hedge with it. I’m not inviting her here. Do you get it?” she shouted, and slammed the front door behind her as she stormed into the garden. “Not, not, not, not, not,” floated back from outside.
Elly gripped the bar around the edge of the stove-top, her knuckles white. Will looked shaken. “I think,” he stammered, “I think I’d better go and, er, talk to her?” Elly said nothing as he crept outside.
In the garden, Will dawdled, going across to the raised beds and inspecting what was left of the winter crops. Staring along the neat lines of broccoli, he wondered just how much of the stuff two women on their own could consume. Briefly, he found the few cabbages comforting. Then he remembered his mission. Lily wasn’t in the toolshed, the door of which was half-blocked by drifted snow. And he was pretty sure she hadn’t crept back into the house by the back door which, he presumed, would be firmly locked: Elly had a thing about the possibility of being crept up on. He walked down to the fence of the little property and peered into the neighbouring woods: a lump of damp snow slushed off a branch and fell at his feet. Nothing else was moving there. Then he laughed at himself briefly and headed for the place where he’d known all along that he would find her.
When he wiggled through the loose boards into the back of the barn, Lily was sitting on one of the tarpaulins which covered the pile of cans which had been part of their secret meeting place for years. She looked at him accusingly.
“So, what did you tell her?”
Will just stared. “Lil, what the hell was that about?” There was a long silence. Lily coughed and shuffled her feet. “I mean, I’ve never seen you argue with your mother. Everyone else fights. Lily and Elly are weird: they don’t. Everyone knows that. What was going on back there?”
Lily didn’t reply, just scowled and pulled her scarlet bonnet further down over her ears and eyebrows.
“She’s obsessed,” she muttered. “It’s all she’s interested in. She’s never been interested in anyone, ever. Now she doesn’t even seem to hear me.”
Will climbed up beside her on the shrouded pile. “Come on Lily. It’s winter. It’s cold. It’s dark. It’s boring. Maybe she just wants to hear about something new. Maybe something’s worrying her. You know, our mothers…”
Will and Lily knew that what made Beth and Elly firm friends were their missing husbands. They were both ‘away’: no one seemed to know where, or for how long. They went during The Crisis, and talking about them was taboo.
“Hmph,” said Lily, and wrapped her gloved hands over her bent head. “Well she could just tell me, instead of…” She was silent for a while. “She didn’t even light the stove until I came home yesterday.”
“You see?” said Will. He hopped down and started poking around under the tarp. He hauled out one of the heavy metal boxes and shook it, then replaced it beneath its cover. It had always been an unspoken rule in this off-limits shed that Lily and Will left the contents where they found them. Occasionally, they found the boxes had been moved, and commented on it. Mostly, they just sat on the tarpaulins and enjoyed their invisibility.
“There’s a crap swap tomorrow,” Will said. Lily groaned. “No, I want to go. I need something. I need to find something I can use as a treadle.”
“A what?”
“A treadle. Sewing machines. When they were first invented, they didn’t need electricity. They had treadles. You pushed them back and forwards with your feet and that made the needle go up and down,” Will explained. “There were kind of big rubber bands from the treadle to the machine, they made it go round.”
“With no power?” said Lily. “That’s what Elly needs.” Every household was entitled to a tiny amount of electricity each week, depending on how much its photovoltaic panels had produced for the grid. Elly’s panels had been old when they were put up, and had long ago fallen to pieces. There was a charge for that power too; Will had heard Beth saying that Elly couldn’t have afforded it even if she had been entitled.
“She’s getting big holes in her fingers from all that sewing,” Lily went on.
“Has she got a machine?” asked Will.
Lily looked crestfallen. “Well, no.” She began climbing down from her pile. “She sold it when she realised we’d never be able to pay for the power. It seemed kind of… logical.”
The friends stood examining the contents of the barn. “I wonder why she’s never thought of crap-swapping this pile,” said Will. “I’m sure someone would want all this stuff.”
“We could ask her,” said Lily. They were silent for a moment. They never mentioned their hide-out in the barn to Elly. It was another unwritten rule of the place. “I mean, I don’t think there’s any harm trying, is there?”
They scrambled through the loose boards and out into the cold morning.
Will walked to the front door and reached out to open it. “Be nice,” he said, and pushed Lily through into the steamy kitchen. Lily walked up behind Elly who was sitting by the window sewing, and draped her arms around her, planting a kiss on the top of her head. Elly said nothing, but spread her dented fingers around Lily’s left forearm. Lily bent down and leant her chin on Elly’s head. They stood there for a while in silence. Through the half-open door, Will saw Elly smile.
“Mum?” said Lily, standing up and walking around to sit on a cushion at her mother’s feet. “You know there’s a crap swap tomorrow?”
“ A sidewalk swap you mean? Yes, I know, sweetie.”
“Well, all that stuff in the barn,” said Lily. Elly shot her an alarmed look. “We could kind of off-load it. I mean, it’s no use there is it?”
Elly stared hard at her daughter then said, through clenched teeth, “what ‘stuff’? What barn?”
“The barn. The stuff in the barn. Come off it Mum, you know.”
Will peeked around to see the look on Elly’s face. It was somewhere between panic and fury. “You mean, you’ve been in that barn?”
“Oh come on Mum, you know we’ve been in there. We’ve been playing in there for years. What do you mean, have I been in there?” said Lily.
Her mother took a deep, angry breath. Lily jumped backwards.
“I have told you, time and time again, not to go into that barn,” she hissed.
“No, actually Elly, I can’t remember the subject ever coming up,” replied Lily, bewildered.
Elly appeared to be trying to calm herself down. Her sewing had fallen to the floor, and she was gripping the arms of her chair tightly. She grimaced and turned to her daughter.
“And the padlocks? Weren’t they a sign that I didn’t want anyone in there? Have you ever seen anyone in there? Have you ever seen anyone near there?” Elly’s voice was rising to a hysterical pitch which scared her daughter and Will, who had moved around out of sight, pressed against the outside wall of the house.
“But Mum,” Lily cried. “You never said anything. We’ve always played in there. I thought you knew. How can you not have known?” Lily was almost sobbing by now. “And anyway, it’s just full of tin cans. So what’s the problem. We never even touched them. I don’t know what the problem is.”
Elly glared at her and struggled to get her wild breathing under control. “What the problem is? What the problem is? I’ll tell you what the problem is. I think those ‘cans’” – she spat the word out with venom – “killed your father. That’s what the problem is. They’re his cans. Now I’ve got them and I haven’t got him.” She breathed deeply again and resumed, in hushed, threatening tones. “And you, young lady, will never go near them again.”
Lily stood, paralyzed, for several seconds, then burst into tears. As her mother leapt up to grab hold of her she pushed past and ran out the door. She shoved Will roughly out of the way as he tried to approach, and kept running. More damp snow came tumbling from high branches as she disappeared over the fence and into the woods.
Will took two steps towards the woods, then thought better of it. Taking care not to be seen from inside the house, he headed for home.
7
When Beth came home, Will was cleaning out the chicken shed.
“Oh you good boy,” she said, almost tripping over a squawking bird. “Eggs?”
“Three.”
“Great. That’s lunch,” said Beth, and leaned on the shed door to watch her son work. “I’ve met your new friend.”
Will looked up from his task. “Well, that’s a bit of an exaggeration.”
“She seems sweet.”
“What, you too?” Beth shot him a puzzled look. Briefly Will thought of his strange morning at the Blackburn’s. He needed more time to mull it over, he decided, and gave his mother the short version. “Elly seems really interested in her too,” he explained.
“Elly?” Beth scoffed and changed the subject. “I bet you’ll never in a million years be able to guess what they’ve put up behind the house.”
Will thought about this carefully. It was one of those challenges that Beth threw down for him occasionally: it sounded like a casual question, but she expected him to come up with more than a casual answer. She watched him, genuinely intrigued. “If you guess, I’ll. I don’t know what I’ll do,” she laughed. “But I’ll be mightily impressed.”
He considered it a moment longer, leaning his chin on the handle of his broom. “I think I’ll guess… transmitter,” he said slowly.
“Will!” his mother shrieked. “You cheated! You’ve been there. There is no way you could have guessed that! Come on, own up. You’ve been round there and peeked.”
He shook his head, laughing and denying everything. “It had to be that,” he said. “I mean, there’s not one for miles around. And that Hannah girl has a cellphone.” Beth looked at him admiringly. “If they don’t have their own transmitter-receiver thingy..”
“Transceiver,” Beth corrected him gently.
“Then how on earth could it work?” Will smirked at his mother. “I mean, if you think about it, it’s obvious, isn’t it? Got any hard questions for me?”
She laughed and grabbed the eggs from the windowsill of the shed. “Right, omelette for lunch, Mr Smart Alec,” she said over her shoulder as she walked to the row of lettuces planted under a tunnel made of discarded panes in the bed outside the front door. “And salad, of course, thanks to your tunnel. Don’t be long.”
Will put his chin back on the end of the broom handle, and ignored the chickens that were pecking at the stirred-up grain around his feet. Again and again he passed this morning’s events through his mind, trying to remember each detail. “I’m going to have to tell her something,” he thought to himself. “But how much does she need to know?” He resumed sweeping, gathered together the debris, then spread fresh straw around the floor of the shed and filled the grain hoppers. “She’ll get things out of me anyway,” he told himself. “It’s useless trying to hide everything.” Outside on the grass, he herded the remaining chickens back towards their home.
“In you go, you stupid animals,” he said. “It’s cold out here. What would you want to stay outside for, eh?” The important thing, he thought, was to give her enough information for her lateral thinking powers to kick in: that way she’d help him to get to the bottom of this. “But I’m not going to get to the bottom,” he told himself, “until I get back into that barn. I have to take a look at those tins.”