Lavinia Greenlaw - Mary George of Allnorthover

‘Carpet in the bathroom. What would Ma have thought?’ Christie stood in the doorway. He lifted Tom to his feet, took the tissue from his hand and threw it away. ‘Have a wash and come down. You’ll not know where you are yet.’

In the kitchen, Sophie was filling a kettle. She wrenched the tap on so strongly, water sprayed up over her hands. She banged the kettle down on the hob and tried to strike a match, but it snapped.

‘June off to school already?’ Christie did not meet her eye.

‘Couldn’t wait, I reckon. Good job the boys are still over at Mum’s.’ Sophie snapped two more matches. ‘He’s no better, is he?’ she continued. ‘He should’ve stayed where they know … how he is and can help him.’

Christie approached and put his hands on her shoulders. She turned abruptly in his arms, ‘We never could help him, could we?’

He looked into her broad face and saw that its softness had been exhausted. Tom appeared in the doorway. He was trying to smile. Sophie looked past her husband at his brother, the crazy twin who fluttered in and out of their lives, coming close like a moth that must be caught and put out of the window. They would try to hold him and free him but he would flap out of reach, terrified and bruised by any such contact. Then he would be back, circling them again.

Sophie gestured to a chair but Tom hovered, uncertain. Her white kitchen and bleached hair dazzled him. She put a mug of tea in front of him. ‘It’ll have to be black. The milk turned on the step.’ His electricity had once seemed like a kind of wild static that confused everything nearby. After ten years of hospitals and halfway houses, he was still jittery but his eyes were dull.

‘I’ll go up for more,’ Tom gabbled, thinking he wanted to help and that he wanted to get away. Sophie watched him through the window. She didn’t want him here and above all, she didn’t like to be reminded that it was because of Tom that she had married Christie. Sophie had met Tom first because he had been at the Grammar while she was at the High, before the two schools were amalgamated. Tom had been beautiful and clever, and she had taken his trouble for sensitivity and his agitation for great thoughts. She hadn’t had to get too close before realising that he was a very bad idea – and then there had been Christie. Tom was so away in his head that he’d barely seemed to notice that something was happening between them and then that it had changed. She’d felt such a fool.

You do not have what it takes to be in this world, she thought. You are a monster.

The bus driver, wanting to be gone from the village before Mim got loose, revved his engine but stopped again as Mrs Kettle yanked the cord above her head, ringing the bell repeatedly. ‘Edna isn’t here yet! She’s had to collect her dressings.’ A minute or two passed as Edna Lacey limped towards the bus stop. She stood there, smiling, and didn’t get on. The bus conductor, a weak-minded, yellow-haired boy whose mother was a Stroud, hesitated and looked to Mrs Kettle, who thought for a moment, then called out, ‘Are there more to come, Edna?’

Edna Lacey peered up and down the High Street. ‘Can’t say as anyone’s on the way.’ She kept looking down the road and made no move to get on.

‘Shall we be off?’ Mrs Kettle asked no one in particular and no one felt it their place to reply.

A Triumph came puttering round the bend. Edna Lacey stepped into the road and raised an arm. The car stopped and as Father Barclay got out to see what she wanted, Edna Lacey opened the passenger door and got in. There were three more villagers in the back of the car already.

Father Barclay stood for a moment between the car and the bus. He smiled and shook his head, as if rehearsing something in a mirror. He rocked on his heels, swung his arms and clapped his hands. Then he laughed his high, rapid laugh, which began as a bird call and ended as gunshot.

‘Don’t let me keep you!’ he boomed to the conductor who was standing on the platform, watching him. ‘I’ll bring up the rear!’

The only people in the village whose petrol wasn’t rationed were the two priests, the doctor and Constable Belcher. They never travelled far without being hailed for a lift.

The conductor’s face was expressionless and remained so as Mrs Kettle rang the bell three times on his behalf, the signal that they could set off. The driver waited as Father Swann glided by in his Jaguar, which was also full. He started up the engine and accelerated hard, just as Tom Hepple stepped into the road, stopped in the middle and put down the pint of milk he was carrying. Although Tom kept moving, the driver was confused by the bottle. He braked late and sharp.

The Kettles, Hepples and Strouds fell sideways against one another heavily but silently. They were too old to be startled and make a noise about it at the same time. The early workers gave hoarse grunts or sighs, perhaps the first sounds of their day. The children shrieked and then immediately began laughing at those whose books had slid from their satchels or whose apples had rolled across the floor to be kicked by whoever could reach them.

Tom had been walking slowly so as not to be back in Sophie’s kitchen too soon. And then there was the bus, the one that he had caught from up by Temple Grove, going to school each day. It was waiting. He didn’t have to return to the new road off Back Lane, Stevas Close or whatever it was called, and Christie’s hard new house. He could go home, but the milk? He could leave it here. They would come to find him and there it would be. The bus was crowded. I know everyone he thought, there is my grandmother only she’s dead. He got upstairs quickly and saw all the children, boys that were him and Christie, girls that were Sophie. He walked along the aisle as whispered explanations rippled past him. There were three girls across the front seats and the one on her own in the corner, not turning round, he knew, was her.

‘Mary George.’ He tried hard to say her name softly, but his voice caught and blurted it.

Someone laughed fast and then sucked in their breath. It was quiet for what seemed like a long time and then the conductor was tapping Tom Hepple on the shoulder. ‘There’s no standing on top, sir, come down, take a seat and we’ll be off.’

Tom ignored him. ‘If you could show me again, while the water is falling …’ Mary had shut her eyes. Julie Lacey was staring at her, not at Tom Hepple like everyone else.

Tom could see the girl was shaking, her back was hunched over and her shoulders raised. He didn’t want to frighten her; he must try to explain. ‘You were just a child, I know that, but it was your father …’ Why should she be afraid? ‘Your father could come back …’

June Hepple stood. Since the end of childhood, she had moved like someone in heavy clothes underwater, what little she said floating up in small bubbles from her uncertain mouth, and even though she still could not meet her uncle’s eye, for once June did not look to Julie Lacey for her cue. ‘I’ll take you back now, Uncle Tom. You don’t want to be going anywhere.’

June took his arm and her hand was his mother’s hand, and he felt the world settle into place. She led Tom downstairs. The conductor handed her the pint of milk. Things were ordinary and clear again and Tom could see the children were not him and Christie but what might be their children, and that the old woman looking hard at her folded hands was not his grandmother but his mother’s sister, an aged Aunt May. He tried to greet her but she did not look up. June pulled him gently towards the pavement, ‘May’s deaf sometimes, Uncle Tom. Remember?’

Five minutes silence was all Julie Lacey could manage before she began shifting from side to side, peeling her bare thighs and the damp nylon of her waitress’s uniform from the plastic trim of the seat. She tutted and puffed, and fanned herself with one hand. Mary ignored her. ‘June’ll have to watch her uncle don’t chop her up into little pieces one night! Mind you, he’s not half bad looking, for a loony I mean, if you like that sort of thing.’ She guffawed but Mary only turned her head further towards the window and those children sitting near enough to hear her gasped, not understanding that this was more or less a joke. ‘You’re going to have to be careful too, Mary George … says those Hepples never did forgive your father …’