Lavinia Greenlaw - Mary George of Allnorthover

Mary could not think why he was there. The air prickled around him, as if he were at war with every muscle and bone in his body. She felt his pull and disturbance but did not want to know what it was he wanted. She crossed over the road and walked quickly past, willing him not to notice her.

Tom had almost reached the village when the road went bad on him. He felt his legs billow and contract, making contact with the road more suddenly or later than expected. He had been waiting for the ground to settle when the girl appeared in front of him. She did not look back but Tom sensed that things cleared around her. He followed her. When he could not catch up with her, he began to call. Feeling his voice raw and uncertain, he put what strength he had into making a noise that might reach her but could manage no more than a string of single sounds.

So it was that the villagers of Allnorthover saw Tom Hepple come home, walking down the middle of the High Street, looking more than ever like someone in the grip of a god, only he appeared to be fixed on Mary George, who was falling over herself in her hurry to get away. Tom was half singing, half croaking one drawn-out misshapen word after another, ‘Wait! Stop! Help! Home!’

Mary would not let herself even imagine him. Looking neither right nor left, she passed the first houses. At the Green, she broke into a run and pushed open her garden gate. Her mother was just opening the door when Mary flew past her. Stella was about to follow her up the stairs when an odd howl came from the Green. She turned back and there was Tom Hepple, just a few feet away. He still looked like the visionary, the genius she had once thought him to be, with blazing eyes and fine bones emphasised by his thinness. He did not look like someone who could have a crude, simple or mistaken thought. But Stella was ten years older than when she had last seen him, and the difficulty of those years had made her more careful. His face was burnt and lined, and his black curly hair, grey, cropped and coarse. Stella saw how his elegant fingers (‘Musician’s fingers!’ his mother Iris had called them) waved constantly and pointlessly in the air, that his hands could no longer hold or control anything, that his eyes were screwed up with the effort of keeping in focus. She remembered. He was a force, a hurricane, sweeping things up, breaking down doors, sucking people in and under. Stella knew right away what he wanted.

‘Tom, my child does not remember you.’

‘Your child?’ Tom’s fingers scrabbled and danced as if he were solving an elaborate equation. His voice grew quieter as his mind calmed, able at last to make connections. ‘I forgave … I could come back … She showed me!’ Tom, who had been staring into the sky all the time he spoke, brought his head slowly down and fixed his gaze on Stella. His voice swelled again, ‘She walked out on the water! Because I was there! To show me!’

‘The house?’ It took a moment for Stella to admit to herself that she knew what he was talking about. Then that ten-year-old winter sprang up around her like buildings cutting out the light. She remained silent, as did Tom, whom the past had never ceased to assail and confine in this way.

‘Mrs George!’ An exasperated voice was calling to Stella from the bus stop. There was a sound of old brakes being applied too fast, followed by a tentative rumble and then another long screech. A bus was juddering along the High Street, stopping every few yards.

Violet Eley emerged from the shelter. The light found nothing to play on in her pastel clothes, hard white hair and thickly powdered face. She had seen the mad Hepple brother come stumbling into the village to stop at Stella George’s garden gate. To her relief, the bus had appeared on time and she could get away from whatever scene was unfolding. But the bus had begun stopping and starting and, sure enough, there was Stella George’s dog, Mim, sitting in front of it in the road. Violet Eley’s impatience overcame her distaste. ‘Mrs George! This is really too much! I have a train to meet!’

The bus started up quickly, crept forward and Mim gave chase, barking furiously, darting in front and snapping at the tyres. The bus stopped again and the dog sidled onto the pavement. The driver climbed out of his cab and got as far as putting his hand on Mim’s collar. She did not snap or growl but set up such a grating, unbearable howl that the driver let go immediately. Seeing Stella by her gate, he approached, shaking his head.

‘Your dog … please … should be tied up …’

Stella kept her eyes on Tom Hepple who was staring past her now. ‘Bring the dog here,’ she said, knowing he couldn’t. The bus driver had noticed Tom by now and was full of confusion. ‘You know how she cries …’

‘Mrs George?’ Violet Eley pleaded.

People on the bus who were to get off in the village had wandered into the road. One or two tried to move Mim, who yelped as if she had been run over and cut in half. They recoiled, terrified in case anyone had seen them and would think they had inflicted pain on the animal. Those who knew Mim ignored her. Strangers or not, they all came across the Green to where Stella George willed Tom Hepple away from her daughter, and Tom Hepple stared through her walls and windows, and the bus driver and Violet Eley stood as if caught in their spell and miserably rooted to the spot.

‘Someone get Christie,’ Stella managed at last, and the spell was broken. The driver returned to his bus and helped Violet Eley on board. The others faded away. Then Christie Hepple was there. He was as tall as his twin brother but bearded, full-faced, not yet grey and far more solid. He stood to one side of Tom, as if he were his shadow – one that had more substance than the person who cast it. Christie put his arm round his brother, talking softly and constantly in his ear until Tom loosened and leant into him, turned and was taken away. Christie had not even glanced at Stella, who watched them out of sight. Then she walked over to Mim, picked her up in her arms and carried her home.

Tom had not been staring up at Mary’s window as he thought. Her room was at the back of the cottage, overlooking a small garden and endless fields. The old plaster walls bulged between the laths; the wooden floor tilted and creaked, its unpolished grain worn to a shine. There were no shelves, so Mary’s books were stacked in precarious towers that she frequently upset or that grew too tall and toppled over. They were mostly her father’s. Reading her way through them felt like climbing to his door.

This had been Mary’s room all her life and something remained of each of its incarnations. Her only methodical change had been to replace each panel of an alphabet frieze with a face cut from a newspaper or magazine. These were black-and-white pictures of singers, film stars, artists and writers – anyone Mary liked the look of, so long as their names matched a letter she hadn’t covered yet, and they were foreign and dead. The panel Mary had painted black ended just below the flowers her father had stencilled, rows of daisies she had insisted upon when, at four, she first went to nursery and saw other girls, and tried being like them for a while.

The sun passed easily through the orange curtains Mary had drawn across the open window, and coloured everything in the room that was so black and white. She held up her arms and examined them with pleasure, seeing her pale skin suddenly gold. She drew her hands to her mouth and breathed hard, to remember what it had felt like when she had reached out to the sleeping boy. Mary stretched and curled, feeling ease and pleasure and a lazy excitement, sensations that were all more or less new to her.

That summer, the exchanges and balances of the oil export market went awry. The countries of the Middle East, having been bent to whatever shape the West demanded, consolidated. The price of a barrel of oil changed by the hour, doubling and tripling. At one point the figures on the Stock Market board trailed a string of numbers like the tail of an ominous comet. Petrol refineries searched the world over for other sources but were still dependent on the rich fields of the Emirates. There were queues at garages, even battles. People walked sanctimoniously or furiously.