Дорин Тови - More Cats in the Belfry

We got all four trees down like that – first the branches, then the trunks – until a large pile of timber lay on the ground in the Myburns' field and their shed was out of danger. I hadn't the strength to cut the wood into logs for them, and I wasn't lending Mr Myburn my saw. One thing you have to do with an electric saw – which he didn't know, never having used one – is to press the oil button at very frequent intervals, otherwise the chain will dry out and the motor overheat. He'd questioned my pumping it as often as I did – they didn't do that with petrol ones, he said, his tone conveying that, as a woman, I didn't understand these things. Maybe not, but engine-powered saws work on a different oiling system, and I had no intention of having my electric one ruined. It was essential for the cottage wood supply for the winter. So I made the excuse that I had work to do with it later, trailed back down to the cottage with the equipment, took the notice off the cat-run door, telling them 'I'm back, chaps. We're all right for a while yet – I did it', and tottered indoors to have some bread and cheese before collapsing into an armchair. All afternoon I could hear Mr Myburn up at the top of the hill, industriously cutting logs with a saw borrowed elsewhere. Every now and then it stopped and, from the stuttering noises, proved difficult to start again. I hoped he understood the mechanism of that one.

One thing it did bring home to me was that as a widow I was indeed a social outcast as far as some people were concerned. Immediately after Charles's death many people had called offering sympathy, going out of their way to be friendly. 'It doesn't last,' I was told by other women who'd gone through the experience before me. 'People don't really want you when you're on your own. They soon start to drop you.'

How true that had turned out to be. In the old days, if Charles and I had been taking down those trees together, we'd have been asked in for coffee before we started. It would have been a friendly get-together. Now I was fended off as if I had the plague, or might expect further help with something.

The Myburns weren't the only ones, either. One couple, Rhona and Paul, with whom Charles and I had been very friendly – we played cards together regularly – actually told me, when we met by accident some weeks after his death, that they'd seen me one day in the supermarket in Cheddar but had kept out of my way. 'We thought you wouldn't want to talk to anybody,' they said.

What they meant was that they hadn't wanted to talk to me , and were only telling me now in case I'd happened to see them. The only time we met again after that was when Rhona's mother, herself a widow, came to stay with them. I was invited over to tea, and to go and see a place they were thinking of buying. It seemed they had the idea of starting up a boarding cattery and kennels and had found an old house with large grounds and an attached barn that could, they said, be turned into a granny flat. Several granny flats from the size of it. If they could get planning permission Rhona's mother, parked docilely side by side in the back of their car with me as if we were already in our wheelchairs, was going to sell her own house in Essex, put the money towards the capital they needed, and have a flat with them. Did they hope I might consider doing the same? I wondered. I preserved an unimpressed silence, countered Paul's remark as I left that evening that the car I was driving – bought six weeks before Charles's sudden death – was too big for me with the reply that I needed it to pull our caravan, which I intended to go on using, and never heard from them again.

There was likewise a man who lived at the other end of the village but was grazing some goats in a field further past the cottage. He always used to stop and chat to Charles, but after his death would pass by, when I was in the garden, looking straight ahead and pretending not to see me – until the day when, after a tremendous gale during the night, I was standing on top of one of the big flat cottage gateposts, chainsaw in hand, preparing to deal with a branch of the damson tree that had split off from the main bough and was hanging like a vast, leafy curtain across the front gate.

The goat man, trudging past on his usual morning visit, stopped and looked across at me. Oh good, I thought. He was going to offer to hold the branch while I sawed. Like heck he was. Would I be going out that afternoon? he asked, and when I said I wouldn't he said he and his wife would be away for the rest of the day and one of the goats was due to kid. Would I keep an eye on her and phone the vet if necessary? I said that I would and he went on his way, apparently without noticing that I was arched on the gatepost like Nelson on his column, preparing to saw off an awkward branch, and might have appreciated assistance.

That was why I put up with Mrs Binney's visits as patiently as I did instead of, as Father Adams and Fred Ferry continually advised me, 'giving she a kick in the pants'. They meant it, metaphorically, of course. Father Adams, who'd been at school with her, always referred to her as Old Mod (her name was Maude). Old Mod, he said, had been a misery for as long as he could remember. She was a widow too, though. Always referring to the fact. Always talking to me of 'people in our position' or 'people of our age' – which at times made me feel like taking Father Adams's advice since she was, I knew, a good twenty years older than I was.

But she was obviously lonely. Probably felt as bereft of people who cared about her as I did at times – which was why my mouth fell open and stayed that way when she told me one day that there was somebody in the village who was keen on her.

'Spicy bit of news then?' enquired Father Adams, happening to pass by as usual at the crucial moment.

'Oh... no...' I managed to get out, while Mrs Binney gave him a look that should have withered him on the spot. It wasn't just spicy, it was electrifying. The revelation that Mrs B., of all people, had an admirer.

THREE

That was her interpretation of events, at any rate. There was, with its headquarters over in the centre of the village so that living a mile and a half away in the valley I knew little of its goings-on except by hearsay, a Friendly Hands Social Club which catered mostly for the over-sixties but, in order to augment its numbers, welcomed widows and widowers of any age. I'd been invited to join it myself after Charles died, but I felt that life held more for me yet than the excitement of a monthly communal visit by a chiropodist from the local health centre, or annual holidays by coach to Aberdeen or Durham, where the party stayed in the unoccupied university hall of residence during the students' vacation and was shepherded on daily sightseeing tours by the enthusiastic element that inevitably emerges as leaders of such organisations, and so I made my excuses. I was fully occupied with the cottage, the cats and writing. I took my van away on holidays. I didn't go out in the evenings if I could help it – not winter evenings, anyway, since in turning in to the cottage driveway in the dark I could easily land myself and the car in the stream.

Not so Mrs Binney, who went to anything that offered tea, biscuits and the chance of a gossip, especially when it was held in the village hall, a matter of yards down the road from her house. She'd been sitting non-participantly in the front row of what Fred Ferry called the Old Trouts' Knees-up for years until fate suddenly took a hand by arranging the demise of the octogenarian who'd hitherto played the piano for the Singalong Half-hour that wound up every meeting. When nobody else volunteered for the job, Mrs Binney unexpectedly upped and offered her services as accompanist – and, to everybody's surprise, did it very well. Father Adams's wife, who belonged to the club herself and kept me up to date with what went on there, said she didn't remember Maude Binney learning the piano as a girl – maybe she'd done it while she was away in service – but she could play all right. 'Sally', 'Keep Right On to the End of the Road', 'Silver Threads among the Gold'...