The Heart of the Country Page 7

  ‘Nor would we offer it to you if you didn’t,’ said Mary Alice, sharply. She belongs underground in a cold, dark hole, and she knows it: she must, or else why does she go potholing?

  ‘Of course’, went on Mary Alice, ‘there can be no question of the State subsidizing you yet. Your husband may turn up within the next week or so. I pass Dunbarton on my way to work in the morning. One of the more pleasant new bungalows around here. It must be worth quite a lot. Mortgaged?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  And do you know, Natalie didn’t. ‘My husband looks, looked after things like that,’ she added, since Mary Alice looked so surprised, not even knowing it was a classic line, not even uttering a deprecatory little laugh at her own folly. Yes, really and truly, here she was at thirty-four and her husband had looked after all that. Or hadn’t. Natalie had always thought the house moves had been from choice, not necessity. She had simply not understood her husband’s nature. (And if you don’t think this is likely consider all those women who live with bigamists, rapists, child molesters and such and never even guess.)

  ‘Then you’d better find out before making any application to us. Of course, if you genuinely can’t cope we will do the coping for you.’

  ‘I just want to know my entitlements.’

  ‘The Children’s Officer will be up to see how the children are, that goes without saying.’

  ‘The children? The children are fine.’

  ‘I’m sure you think they are, but you must have had a shock, and may not be the person best fitted to tell. And, of course, as I say, your husband may be back.’

  ‘I’m not sure I want him back,’ said Natalie.

  ‘If he can provide for you, the State won’t have to. There might not be quite as much picking and choosing as you suppose.’

  Down, down the hole, Mary Alice: into the black depths and may you get wedged, stuck tight, with your head in a cleft about to flood at any moment, and someone pulling at your legs and you just not budging. Down, into the icy torrent of your clients’ despair.

  ‘If I lose my home, will I be re-housed?’ asked Natalie next. ‘Will I get a council house?’

  ‘It’s not as easy as that. Too many women round here seem to think they only have to ask and it will be given. They even come in from outside the area, thinking they fancy a free view of the Tor and expecting us to play nanny. Are the children healthy?’

  ‘Perfectly.’

  ‘That’s bad,’ said Mary Alice. ‘Or you might be able to notch up a housing point or two. Of course, we do have bed-and-breakfast accommodation for people who’re evicted for no fault of their own, but there usually is fault. And there’s an emergency hostel – but that’s hardly for your class of person. You’d have to ask at Housing. But they’re shut on Thursdays. They’re in Shepton Mallet.’

  ‘I don’t think it will come to that,’ said Natalie.

  ‘You’d be surprised what things come to,’ said Mary Alice. ‘And, by the way, dogs are not allowed in these offices.’

  Natalie went next to a solicitor, Alec Southey, and I’m not saying much about him, I’m sorry, because he was the one I, Sonia, went to about a parking ticket, whom I had an affair with, who wouldn’t leave his wife, but on account of whom Stephen left me. He failed to tell Natalie about how she could have a stop put on the sale of the house: perhaps he just forgot but perhaps he was a friend of a) the Inland Revenue, b) the bank manager, c) Arthur, d) Angus; any of them or all of them would do. Alec was currently having an affair with the wife of a man away in Saudi Arabia a lot of the time, so not likely to burst in. I think Stephen bursting in on Alec and me made quite an impression – though, as it happens (I believe it often happens) it wasn’t Alec Stephen hit and hated, it was me. Amazing how men stick together, even in these circumstances. Alec’s tall, thin and dark. So are a lot of men. I keep thinking it’s him I see across the street, and my heart stops, but it isn’t him, after all. Can this be love? Anyway, now I’m inside this place there are no streets to see him across any more, only wards, and I don’t seem to see him so often. Can this be sanity? Alec said to Natalie that dogs gave him asthma, and this at least I know to be true. Cough, cough, wheeze and gasp. Good!

  Natalie then went off to see the police inspector, Jack Took, because Alec Southey said the police might well help her trace Harry, and she was shown into his office.

  ‘I expect it’s all a mistake,’ said Natalie. ‘I expect he’ll turn up any minute. I expect he’s lost his memory through stress. These things do happen.’

  Jack Took, a kindly, twinkly fellow of the old school, said he expected that Harry Harris was at that very moment living it up on the Costa del Criminal with Miss Eddon Gurney 1978, using his credit cards to advantage, and possibly other people’s as well. Had Natalie no idea of the kind of person she was married to?

  ‘Apparently not,’ said Natalie.

  The police inspector talked about possible criminal proceedings against Harry; conduct which led to the closure of a factory and the throwing out of work of at least sixteen people, still with wages owing, was not just misrepresentation but downright fraud.

  ‘I get the feeling you don’t like my husband very much,’ said Natalie, at which Jack Took threw back his head and laughed and laughed, so much and for so long he quite forgot to ask for a cup of tea for Natalie when his was brought in, but at least he didn’t complain about the dog. He said he’d be in touch if anything transpired.

  Love Your Enemy

  Natalie went up and sat in the Abbey grounds. Now the Abbey, if you ask me, is a very masculine kind of place. If women have any place beneath the avenue of elegant ancient trees, it’s scurrying here and there with dead hens to be plucked and fish to be gutted. The Abbots of Glastonbury were men of temporal power. They ruled the lands around, collected tithes, sold pardons, drained the Levels, grew rich and prosperous and excommunicated anyone who disagreed with them. Which last would cause about as much distress, I suppose, as depriving someone of their colour TV today. William the Conqueror lined abbots and monks up against a wall, killed the lot (by way of bow and arrow, I presume) and replaced them with their Norman equivalents. Later, Henry VIII did much the same: chopped off the Abbot’s head on top of the Tor and replaced him. Later still Cromwell evicted the lot and hacked down much of the fabric of the Cathedral. I am not surprised that Natalie felt no sense of comfort or support emanating from the site of the high altar, or indeed from the bleak oblong of Arthur’s grave.

  ‘All day long the noise of battle rolled’ writes the poet of these sacred places. Fight, bash, hack, pierce, behead, crush – all in the service of God – what a record these religious folk have that we’re expected to take so seriously! Natalie would have felt healthier vibes in the local supermarket. Or indeed down in the dry-cleaners where I, Sonia, used to spend quite a lot of my days in Glastonbury – waiting for the school bell to ring and my duties as unpaid childminder for the State to resume. I like the dry-cleaners. I like the sense of refreshment and renewal. I like the way dirty old torn clothes are dumped, to be returned clean and wholesome in their slippery transparent cases. Better than confession any day. Here there is a true sense of rebirth, redemption, salvation. What was old and horrid will do you for a day or so more, my dear, now Westaways the cleaners have blessed it! I would try to tell all this to Jeanette, the high priestess who ran the dry-cleaners, but it made her embarrassed. She thought I talked too much, and she was right. But there is always so much to be said, and so seldom anyone to tell it to. I made a fool of myself down in the dry-cleaners, I suppose: showing need. You have to be careful in this life: you shouldn’t show need, or you’ll be despised. Look what happened when I begged and pleaded with Stephen to stay with me and the children.

  ‘I love you,’ I said. ‘I need you. Please don’t abandon us.’

  ‘Love!’ he sneered. ‘You don’t even know the meaning of the word. I expect you used it often enough to Alec – and took him in for a time.’

 
‘You can’t just throw away a marriage like this!’

  ‘It’s you who’ve thrown it away.’ And how could I deny it? I had spoiled everything good and valuable between us. ‘But this is our home – you can’t sell it!’

  The marital home (as it came to be known) was a farmhouse; warm, untidy, cosy. I’d made the garden beautiful. I hadn’t had time to do much to the interior.

  ‘I can do what I like,’ he said. ‘And will. As for calling it a home – it’s a mess. You’re a slut as well as a whore.’

  Well, he was angry, and very upset, and right to be. I had done wrong.

  ‘I have three children under five and it’s exhausting,’ I defended myself.

  ‘Not so exhausting you can’t sneak out to your lover,’ he said. ‘You’re filthy: like an animal! I wonder how many of those children are mine?’

  There seemed no explaining to him how weak the sexual charge was between me and Alec: how that was not what it was about at all. An affair that went on three long summer months – and we only went to bed (well, not bed, actually in the back of the car) four times, and then it seemed accidental, even rather embarrassing, what did that amount to? We preferred holding hands and sighing; he wanted to know what was going on in my head, and that seemed to me totally entrancing: and he no doubt just enjoyed the romantic intensity of it all. Life is so short, isn’t it? I didn’t register my behaviour as infidelity at the time; though in retrospect I can see how I hurt and humiliated Stephen. Anyway, the more I wept and pleaded and cut my wrists, the more determined he was to leave.

  Of course, it did later transpire (after the divorce, after the selling of the home, after he somehow managed to be living very comfortably at the other end of the country, and with one of my girlfriends, what’s more – and I was stuck up at 19 Wendover, Boxover, living with the kids on social security – he having argued in court that they weren’t his) that he’d been having affairs throughout the course of the marriage. He’d decided, long before the arrival of Alec, that he wanted out, and had waited for the excuse to come along whereby we could be divorced, and I would take the moral blame. And of course I took it; I lapped it up. Ever heard a man say ‘It was my fault the marriage broke up’? No. Those are women’s lines. They’ll stare at you with their black eyes and broken noses and say, ‘My fault! I provoked him.’ Sometimes I despair. And I’m no better than anyone. Looking back over these pages, I see I’ve been apologizing for having hurt and humiliated a man who pretended love, felt none, and did me a great deal of damage.

  I wonder if my shrink (sorry, psychiatrist) was a woman not a man I’d be in a better or a worse state, after three months in this place? Probably better, but I wouldn’t be having so nervy and enjoyable a time, would I?

  I pleaded insane at my trial, though I didn’t think at the time that I actually was. Now I’m not so sure. Perhaps the first step to sanity is knowing you’re insane? Round and round we go, though the monsters do seem to have taken up positions quite far back inside my head. They still stare with baleful eyes, but at least they’re not clawing or rending. Enough.

  Now where did we leave Natalie? Ah yes. Sitting on the bench in the grounds of the ruined Glastonbury Abbey, having joined the ranks of the supplicants and dispossessed, and wearing quite the wrong shoes for it: they had peep-toes and high heels, as worn by those who think life is for the enjoying, not the mere getting through. Jax sat at her side; but he twitched rather, and looked haunted, as if he too were wondering where his next meal was coming from.

  Now two people came walking towards her. One was the groundsman, Peter Ferris by name, the other a Japanese tourist who was engaging him in conversation. Peter had a beard and Jesus-eyes, and was referred to by the local children as a hippie. But then they’d call anyone a hippie who, if a woman, wore skirts longer than mid-calf, and, if a man, wore an earring. Peter Ferris was explaining to the Japanese tourist, a small, elegant man in a smart grey suit, who looked as if he believed the world was real, not an illusion, about the Glastonbury Thorn. How Jesus had come to Glastonbury in the year AD 11 with his uncle Joseph of Aramathea, a tin trader. Glastonbury at that time was an island. Jesus had blessed the thorn tree, which had bloomed on Christmas Day ever since.

  ‘You’ve seen it bloom on Christmas Day?’

  ‘I have,’ said Peter, failing to add that this particular type of thorn is winter flowering, that is to say between November and January, a sad, battered bloom or so appears. If you ask me, Jesus didn’t bless it at all, he cursed it as he did the fig tree (I have felt protective towards that fig tree, poor barren thing, ever since I was sterilized). Christianity really is a man’s religion: there’s not much in it for women except docility, obedience, who-sweeps-a-room-as-for-thy-cause, downcast eyes and death in childbirth. For the men it’s better: all power and money and fine robes, the burning of heretics – fun, fun, fun! – and the Inquisition fulminating from the pulpit.

  The Japanese tourist went away to explore the Monks’ Kitchen and Peter the groundsman sat down next to Natalie and Jax. He carried a pointed stick, the better to spear and dispose of the litter the tourists left.

  ‘You know you’re not supposed to have dogs up here?’ he asked.

  She hadn’t known. He said he didn’t suppose it mattered much.

  ‘Fine beast,’ he said.

  ‘He’s upset,’ she said.

  ‘Why’s that?’

  ‘His master’s gone away.’

  ‘Bad luck,’ said Peter.

  ‘What is more,’ she said, ‘he’s hungry.’

  ‘Then feed him.’

  ‘I haven’t any money.’

  ‘Then give him away,’ said Peter, grandly, as if amiable recipients of large dogs littered every corner of his grounds. And so of course they did, in essence. Prick, with Peter’s pointed stick at a piece of rubbish: pick it up and prick again, and lo, all is tidiness and order, and there’s another canine housed, and the can of dog food whirring happily round in an electric can-opener, and the hungry looking up, and being fed. All things are possible.

  ‘How? Where?’ she asked. These were the questions she had been asking all day, but no one seemed to answer. ‘Why?’ she was leaving till later.

  ‘Go where the food is,’ he said, and stood up – or unfolded, for he was remarkably tall and thin – and smiled. ‘The general rule is, if you have to live off crumbs, make sure they fall from a rich man’s table. They’re more plentiful.’ And of course he was right: the poor man in Frankfurt is better off than the poor man in Addis Ababa. The problem is finding the air fare from one place to another.

  Where the food is, at least locally, was of course The Tessen, the delicatessen where Gerard gloomed and Pauline tried to cheer him up.

  ‘Cash flow,’ Gerard mourned, putting out trays of preservative-free sausages – always a problem. After three days they smelt high and the customers started complaining, and after four days those unsold simply had to be thrown out. ‘You could live a whole life in the old days and never ever hear about cash flow. We used to call it bloody debt. We should never have been conned into starting this mad enterprise. It goes against every principle I ever had. But you insisted, and now look!’

  ‘It takes time for new businesses to break even,’ said Pauline. Four whole years, they said, at the New Business Studies Course she attended, and she could see it might well be true, if Gerard insisted on buying and throwing out preservative-free sausages. She knew of a new brand of excellent, reasonably priced, spicy sausages which the customers would appreciate, containing only the least harmful of available preservatives, with a high profit margin and a good shelf life, but Gerard would not hear of it. He would do things the hard and honourable way, and the shop would stay half empty, and such customers as there were would feel nervous at spending their money on luxuries, as Gerard sliced the salmon with socialist reluctance. (Don’t get me wrong, Sonia is a socialist through and through. It’s just some socialists are on the dour side when it comes to spending money.)


  ‘I suppose you learned that in adult education.’ Gerard had declined to attend the course. He said business was a matter of common sense.

  ‘I did.’

  ‘Small businesses!’ he mourned. This is a shop, not a small business. This Government is trying to turn us into a Far Eastern nation, with everyone living off everyone else’s scraps.’

  Sonia knows that, Pauline knows that, everyone knows that; why does Gerard have to go on about it all the time? You may have got the notion that Sonia doesn’t much care for Gerard. Too right she doesn’t. Poncey little creep. But the shrink doesn’t like to hear that kind of talk. For poncey little creep read modern-day Samuel Smiles. Gerard had been going on all morning about the way Pauline had failed to collect a cheque from Natalie, and Pauline, after the manner of wives, instead of telling him to go fuck himself, was saying, sorry, sorry, sorry.

  ‘Talk of the devil,’ he said, and there was Natalie looking in the window of The Tessen, hesitant. Jax, on a lead, was with her.

  ‘She’d better not bring that dog in here,’ said Gerard. ‘We try to keep this place hygienic.’

  ‘She might be coming in with a cheque,’ offered Pauline, but she didn’t really think so. Tales of the collapse of Harrix and the Harris’ marriage had come to her from all sides. She hadn’t liked to pass the news on to Gerard or no doubt he’d be crosser than ever about the way she, Pauline, had let Natalie ran up the account. Natalie pushed open the door and came in with Jax. Pauline thought she’d better get in before Gerard did.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ she said, ‘no dogs in the shop.’

  But Jax was already in, staring up at Gerard as he cut chunks of Brie and caper, pre-wrapped to meet the rush (what rush?) and all cut at 6 ounces, that is to say, too small for the generously minded, and too large for the economical. Just wrong. Gerard stopped wrapping and stared back at Jax. It was love at first sight. These things happen. Jax, not to put too fine a point on it, smiled back. Some dogs can, and do.