Eva Moves the Furniture (6 page)

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Authors: Margot Livesey

BOOK: Eva Moves the Furniture
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“A job?” David was placing the apples next to a sheaf of corn. “That's not a bad idea. Maybe something in an office. Look at Mr. Cameron's beautiful carrots.”
We left the church and walked past the copper beech tree. The leaves were nearly all fallen. As I tidied the grave, David recounted a dream he'd had, something about the Hanscombes, but I was too excited to listen. I was picturing myself in a suit, taking dictation, perhaps even speaking on the telephone.
When he was satisfied, he nodded farewell. “She was a lovely woman, Mrs. Hanscombe,” he said at the gate. “I would never have married Barbara without her help.”
“How do you mean?” I said, paying attention at last. “You fell in love at the optician's.”
“I did, but Barbara took a little longer. Mrs. Hanscombe gave us a chance to get acquainted by asking us to tea every Sunday. Speaking of tea, wasn't there something Lily wanted?”
We halted, each struggling to recall Lily's request. Then I remembered: a packet of digestive biscuits.
We were both quiet on the walk to the Co-op. Perhaps David was preoccupied with his dream. As for me, I was glimpsing that the
stories I'd been hearing all my life had been changed in the telling, made into fairy tales for a little girl. Now I have some understanding of why one might want to protect a child, but at the time it gave me an unsettled feeling. Were the facts I had taken for granted going to start shifting like the furniture? Yes, of course—the whole world was shifting—and that unsettled feeling lasted, on and off, for years, until I saw an olive-complexioned man exclaim over an operation and waltz a sister around the ward.
 
 
A few days later, at supper, David announced that he had arranged for me to train as a secretary with Mr. Laing, one of the two solicitors in town. “Lily will be able to give you lots of advice,” he said when I finished embracing him. “She was a first-rate secretary before she came to take care of us.”
Suddenly nervous, I looked across the table at Lily. “What will the hours be?” she asked, pulling her napkin out of its ring.
“Eight-thirty to five, but no Saturdays,” David said.
“Well”—she smoothed the napkin over her lap—“I suppose it won't be so different from school.”
For the rest of supper she reminisced about her own office experiences: how clients had asked for her specially; how Mr. Bonner, her employer, said she had the fastest fingers in Scotland. The following week we went to Glasgow and I used Mrs. Nicholson's money to buy a skirt, two blouses, and a cardigan; I had never had so many new clothes at one time before.
David had told me Mr. Laing was a nice man and at my brief interview this seemed to be true, but I soon discovered that he seldom emerged from his inner room, the entrance to which was guarded
by Miss Nora Blythe. Miss Blythe had run the office for twenty years and looked as if she had spent most of that time squeezed between two ledgers. Immensely upright and efficient, she bullied me to within a blink of tears. I turned out to have the slowest fingers in Scotland. Only Angus, the messenger boy, saved me from misery.
I had been at the office for three weeks when one morning the door swung open and Mr. Wright appeared in his farm clothes. He strode across the room, leaving a tang of manure in his wake, and, before Miss Blythe could prevent him, disappeared into the inner office. “Mr. Laing, this is an outrage.” Further remarks were obliterated by the hailstorm of Miss Blythe's typing. Slowly I tapped: “As stated in my letter of the 12th inst.”
Half an hour later, when Mr. Laing showed Mr. Wright out, whisky mingled with the manure. “Happy to be of service,” Mr. Laing said, and, in a very different tone, “A word, Miss Blythe.”
When she emerged, I tried to keep typing, until I heard the unmistakable summons.
“Do you recognise this?” She held out a sheet of paper.
It was the letter I had typed to Mr. Creighton the previous week about the dispute he and Mr. Wright were having over a field by the river.
“You sent this to Mr. Wright, and presumably his letter went to Mr. Creighton.”
Beneath Miss Blythe's sardonic gaze, my cheeks glowed. “I'm sorry,” I said at last. “I don't know how I could have.”
“I imagine you were chattering to Angus. This may cost the firm hundreds of pounds.”
“I'm sorry,” I repeated. “I'll talk to Mr. Wright on my way home. I'm sure he'll understand.”
“You'll do no such thing. You've already caused enough trouble. Just be more careful.”
That evening I met the girl loitering outside the forge. “I hear you're in hot water,” she said. She was sucking a piece of grass between her teeth.
I remembered her shoving me into a ditch, throwing the stone at Catherine. “You didn't have anything to do with the muddled letters, did you?”
“Of course not, silly.” She spat out the grass and disappeared behind the hedge.
In spite of my best efforts, mishaps continued—papers I had filed could not be found, a client was billed for the wrong amount. Once or twice I set traps, made a note of where a document was filed or showed a letter to Angus; naturally nothing happened. As I cycled to and from the office, I argued with the companions in my head. Why would they first help me to get a job and then ruin it? It made no sense. But why should they make sense? Joan's voices, too, had finally betrayed her.
On the last Friday of the month, Mr. Laing called me into his inner sanctum to announce he would have to let me go. Outside, Miss Blythe was waiting. “I'm sorry, Eva. I've always said I could train anyone, but you're just not suited to office life.”
Not until I was pedalling home did I take in what had happened: I had been fired. At the bottom of the lane I jumped off my bike. “How could you?” I demanded of the dry grass, the sagging fence, the potholes, the leafless trees.
But the air remained empty. They would not appear to answer my charges. This was their prerogative, to come and go in my life as they pleased, meddling or helping, while I was left to cope with the consequences. I wheeled my bicycle the rest of the way to Ballintyre.
Working in the operating theatre was part of every nurse's training and I had duly put in my time there before I met Samuel, but I never did grow comfortable with this aspect of nursing; my job was to tend the body and I hated to watch someone take a knife to the flesh I had bathed and bandaged and fed. Samuel's feelings, however, were the exact opposite. Ordinary doctoring struck him as vague, almost mystical. The patient has a pain; the doctor makes an informed guess and prescribes medicine which may or may not help. But in surgery you could see the problem—a tumour, a broken bone, a malfunctioning joint or organ—and, hopefully, you could fix it.
“I'm like doubting Thomas,” he said. “I want to touch the wounds. I know it's a limitation, Eva. When I was training I met certain doctors, nurses too, who had a real gift for diagnosis. But my gift is in my hands; I'm more of an engineer than a doctor.”
He underestimated himself—he was unusually generous in talking to his patients—still, when I saw him at work at the operating table, making jokes, pausing to figure out the next cut, deciding just which piece of skin or bone to graft, I recognised that he was in his element. And that no amount of skillful nursing could give a man a new jaw or remove the keloid scars which paralysed his hands.
 
 
When I broke the news about Mr. Laing, David laughed and said, Never mind, we can't all be good at office work. Lily was the one who took umbrage. How could they treat me like that? They were meant to be training me. The next day, though, she remarked how glad she was to have my help again. I nodded grimly. I won't be here for long, I wanted to say, but I had no idea what to do next. Working in a shop was out of the question, and no one I knew in Troon needed a nanny.
A week after my dismissal, a letter came from Shona Pyper. In September she and Flo, still inseparable, had gone to Edinburgh to study nursing.
We have all kinds of high jinks in the hostel. The other girls are grand. Mind you, it's not all fun and games. The sisters are terribly strict, and there are classes from eight until one every day.
Looking at Shona's neat handwriting, I remembered those long afternoons at Miss MacGregor's, making
A
s and
B
s and
C
s. And now here she was fifty miles away, living the life of Riley.
“What does Shona have to say for herself?” Lily was checking the cupboards, making the shopping list.
I told her. “It sounds smashing.”
Lily squinted into the flour bin. “If I were Mrs. Pyper, I wouldn't let a girl Shona's age go off to Edinburgh alone.”
“She's not alone. She's with Flo, in a hostel.”
“A hostel. She's what—eighteen, nineteen?”
“You went to Glasgow, and you had your own rooms.”
“I was thirty-one. Besides, there was a war on.”
Watching her purse her lips and add another item to the list, I realised that as far as Lily was concerned we could all three go on living at Ballintyre happily ever after. When she announced she was ready to leave, I said I would stay home. “Are you feeling poorly?” she asked solicitously, code for my monthly visitor.
“No, I'm fine. There's just no need for the two of us when you're not doing a big shop.” I seized the newspaper from the table, as if reading it were suddenly a matter of urgency.
“Oh, well, Miss Contrary, keep an eye on the fire.”
A few months later my new friend, Daphne, and I would laugh over my tiny rebellion, but at the time I could hardly contain myself. I paced, I put away the breakfast dishes, I filled the coal scuttle. I owe Lily everything, I thought, yet I cannot bear to live this way. When I heard her steps on the path I rushed to the door. “Let me take those,” I said, reaching for the groceries.
Usually after a trip into town Lily was full of gossip; today she put away the baking powder and sugar without a word.
“Sit down,” I said. “I'll clean the tatties. Have some tea.”
Lily sat. She sipped her tea. Silence hung between us like a wet sheet.
“Who did you see in town?” I asked at last.
“I was at the post office.” She studied the ivy pattern on her saucer. “Mrs. Hogg told me she'd seen you at the forge.”
“Yes, I stopped to say hello to Ian on my way back from the library.” The postmistress's arrival to pick up a poker had reminded me I was late for lunch, and I had hurried away. Perhaps she'd thought me rude?
I started to explain but Lily interrupted. “Mrs. Hogg's neither here nor there. The point is, Eva, you're nearly nineteen, too old to run around like a little girl. I asked for a dozen stamps, and Mrs. Hogg said she'd heard Ian had good prospects. In front of the whole queue. I nearly died.”
In an instant I understood. “I can't stop talking to my friends because of some old busybody. Ian and I were—”
Lily raised a hand. “I know there's nothing in it, but you're not to go to the forge. Do you hear?”
I bit my lip and nodded.
In bed that night I thought about people linking my name with Ian's. The idea plunged me into a tumult, of pleasure or distress I couldn't tell. The previous week I had run into my first deskmate, Jessie, at the Co-op. Married, with two children already, she asked if I had a beau. I shook my head. “Och, you will soon enough,” said Jessie, looking me up and down. “You've turned out bonnier than I expected. What a scrawny wee thing you were at Miss MacGregor's.”
Now I gazed at the ceiling, wondering if Jessie was right. David would occasionally remark that I was the image of Barbara, but I had no sense of likeness to the misty woman in the picture over my bed. When I looked in the mirror, I saw only my own face: the dark eyebrows, the straight nose. My hair was the plain brown of beech mast, although Samuel claimed the colour was the same as that of
Mary, Queen of Scots. As for Lily, she sometimes praised my teeth. “Thank goodness they came in straight,” she would say. But who besides Lily cared about teeth?
For the rest of the week it rained solidly. On Saturday when I woke to find the sky clear, staying indoors seemed impossible. As soon as breakfast was over I set out for the river. I had intended to take my usual path through the woods. Instead, I crossed the humpbacked bridge and turned down into the fields. Since Lily's scolding I had been gloomy but now, watching the orange-legged oyster-catchers peck the sodden grass, my mood lightened. Then I saw a figure coming towards me with such steady purpose it was as if we had an assignation.
“Eva,” Ian called. Within a minute we were face-to-face. “It's a grand day.”
He was freshly shaven and his eyes, often bloodshot from the furnace, were clear. We began to walk downstream in the direction of my willow tree. Ian talked about his brother Ted, newly enlisted in the Black Watch. “I told him he's daft, but he says we'll all be there soon enough so why not get a head start?”
He could have discussed carburettors or cauliflowers, and I would have been content. Opposite the tree was a gravel spit. Ian picked up a stone and skipped it over the water. It bounced four times. My own effort sank immediately. “I'm hopeless at throwing,” I said.
“You just don't know how.” He found a flat stone and demonstrated. Then he handed it to me and guided my wrist through the movements. My first throw was no better; the next bounced twice. “There,” said Ian. “All you needed was a lesson.” We walked on.
I arrived home, flushed and breathless, glad to find David already back from his office. As Lily ladled out the scotch broth, he asked whether she'd gone into town that morning.
“No, I took Mrs. Fisher some soup. Her lumbago's so bad with all the rain she can't even tie her shoes, poor thing.”
Mrs. Fisher lived in a cottage across the river. To visit her Lily had followed in my footsteps—from the bridge the gravel spit was in full view. I stared down at the barley floating in my broth, waiting for reproaches, but when she spoke again it was only to ask for the salt. After lunch I did the dishes as quickly as possible and escaped to visit Isobel; we had arranged to hem our winter skirts that afternoon. On the doorstep, however, she greeted me with a change of plan. It was criminal to stay indoors on such a day. How about a round of golf?
She played first, blowing back her fringe and swinging her club hard.
“Good shot,” I said.
“No.” She grimaced. “It's going in the bunker.” Then she turned to me, eyes gleaming. “Can you keep a secret?”
“Of course.”
“Gordon and I are engaged.”
“Gordon?” I echoed. “Engaged?”
From beneath her blouse she produced a length of wool holding a ring. I praised the small circle of amethysts and asked why it was a secret. Everything about her announcement struck me as romantic except the object. I had met Gordon when Isobel's brother brought him home from university and had not warmed to his damp handshake or his Latin jokes.
“You know Dad,” she said. “He'd blow a gasket if I told him I was
marrying a student.” Being Isobel, though, she was undaunted. She had found an advertisment in the
Ladies' Home Journal
for a nanny in Edinburgh. Last Thursday she had gone for an interview and been hired on the spot. “I'm not mad about children, but these two seemed okay.”
“You mean you're leaving?”
“In a fortnight. Why don't you come? There are plenty of jobs, and you even have experience.”
Why didn't I? Isobel made it sound so simple. Briefly I pictured a life filled with new people, independence, fun. “Aunt Lily,” I muttered, and bent to set my ball on the tee. Isobel strolled off down the fairway. I gripped my club, made a couple of practise swings. Soon I would be all alone, living with David and Lily until I was an old maid, older than Barbara, older than the woman, older than—
“Come on,” Isobel called. “After all the shilly-shallying, this had better be a hole in one.”
 
 
But even as I railed the tide had turned. On Sunday, after church, Lily and David sat me down and asked whether I might want to consider nursing, like Shona and Flo. By next weekend I had filled out an application for Glasgow Infirmary.
“So what made them change their tune?” asked Isobel.
“I think Lily saw me with Ian Hunter.”
“Ian,” whooped Isobel. “You sly minx.”
I could not tell her my real guess, that the companions had engineered the whole thing: Shona's letter, my meeting with Ian, Lily's witnessing thereof. Although I was delighted at the results, their intervention troubled me. After Mr. Laing's, I no longer trusted
them. Then one afternoon when Lily and I were sewing name tags on my probationer's uniform and she was talking about the botanical gardens in Glasgow, it suddenly came to me: At long last, I would be rid of the companions. There I would be, smelling the beautiful flowers, going to the cinema, and they would be stuck here, moping around as usual.
“And the orchid house,” said Lily. “You feel like you're in Spain.”
“Grand,” I exclaimed, plying my needle so exuberantly that Lily had to remind me I was not making a fishing net.
 
 
After the initial hullabaloo died down, I found ways to keep meeting with Ian but I did not mention Glasgow to him. When I passed the forge, he would often walk a few hundred yards with me. He even attended Saint Cuthbert's and, three pews behind us, belted out the hymns. At the end of the service he came over to say how do you do. David asked whether he'd shoed Mr. Wright's horses this year; Lily asked after his mother. As for me, later Ian claimed I was red as a pillar box.
By early December I was bold enough to agree to a rendezvous by the river. Dusk was falling as I cycled to the bridge, and I could barely make out Ian waiting at the same spot where, years before, Barbara had glimpsed Agnes, the dairymaid who drowned. “Shall we go for a wee stroll?” he said, taking my arm.
At the river's edge he spread a blanket on the grass. We sat down side by side. “Look,” I said, “the evening star.”
“Venus.” He put his arms around me. “Come on. Give me a kiss.”
At first Ian's kisses were not so different from those I had been giving and receiving all my life. Then, as he pressed closer, I felt a
strange tingling. “No,” I said, even as my arms tightened around him.
“Sweetheart,” he murmured.
I closed my eyes in a drift of pleasure. When I opened them, a face was watching us over his shoulder. The gypsies, I thought. I pushed Ian away and jumped to my feet. Out of the reeds rose the girl. Her mouth opened, soundlessly, before she turned and ran into the darkness.
“Eva,” said Ian, “I'm sorry. Sit down. I'll be good.”

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