Meatloaf in Manhattan (13 page)

‘Henry, are you still there?' asked Muriel from the other end of the phone.

‘Yes, of course, just had a thought, sorry.'

‘What's up, Henry?'

‘Nothing … nothing. Just a bit stressed with work. It happens sometimes.'

‘Okay, but you take it easy. I can tell in your voice. Do you still love me?'

‘Of course, of course. It's nothing to do with that,' said Henry, distracted, distanced. Not the man, nor the voice she thought she was coming to know.

‘So?' asked Muriel.

‘So what?'

‘Do you still love me?'

‘Yes, yes, of course, of course. Why do have to ask me? I love you to death.'

‘Good.'

‘So come this weekend. As well as meeting the mayor, it'll be a chance for you to talk to the headmaster about the vacancy,' said Henry, his voice lighter, more engaged.

‘Have you spoken to him, already?'

‘For sure I have. He'd expect me to. For the good of the village. The kids. What school wouldn't want a great teacher like you on their staff. I told him you were big on the classics. He likes the idea of you. A young person who's a bit old-fashioned in that way. He's a huge Dickens fan. So I told him, that like Barkiss … remember, from
David Copperfield?
… that like Barkis, you were “willing”.'

‘So what did he say next?' asked Muriel.

‘Well … I told him all about you. That you were wonderful, of course, and you'd be great for the job. He'd love to meet you. To have an informal chat. You're to call the school and arrange an appointment with Mr Head.'

‘Mr Head?'

‘That's him!'

‘Mr Head, the Headmaster. That really is his name?' said Muriel incredulous. ‘You're not joking?'

‘No, promise. Stranger than fiction, eh?'

‘Barkiss is willing,' she laughed.

‘Then you'll come on Saturday.'

‘Yes, on Saturday. I'll be there.'

Uncle Daniel had no trouble enjoying his long lazy afternoons of retirement. Decades of dedication to schooling the young had left him contented with his life's work. Now it was to be time for himself. A time for indulgence and quiet reflection. He always enjoyed Muriel's company and when she suggested a late afternoon tea he consulted his blissfully empty diary and said he'd be delighted.

‘He's making you a pair of shoes,' said Uncle Daniel, as he sat with Muriel in the Dalton's Café and Tearooms across the park from the school.

‘Yes, isn't it just lovely,' enthused Muriel.

‘Very romantic, very gallant,' smiled the old man, nibbling on a slice of Madeira cake. ‘I've got a really strong feeling about this,' he added with a wink.

‘So do I,' said Muriel, with an exaggerated wink of her own. ‘And there's the chance of a job at Little Appleton School. Deputy Head of English.'

‘Look how it's all coming together,' said Uncle Daniel, ‘as if the gods and the stars are all aligned. Love and the country idyll, my dear Muriel. You both deserve it.'

Muriel sipped her tea, flushed with love, hardly able to believe what was unfolding before her.

Everything had happened so quickly. The two seemed such an ideal match and both felt the same intensity. So it was no real surprise, that after a couple of months of exquisite passion and complicity, that they had started talking about moving in together. As a trial; an experiment that they would monitor. On that they both agreed. And then the very next week came news of a job in the village school. Dawn Chapple, the English and Humanities teacher, was heading off to Australia at the end of term.

‘What timing. What synchronicity,' said Henry as they lay in bed together in Muriel's small flat off Clapham Common in South London.

‘We can play at Lark Rise to Candleford,' she said.

‘And nothing nasty in the woodshed.'

‘Promise?' she asked, snuggling into his shoulder, kissing him gently on the neck.

‘Nothing nasty in any shed,' said Henry, ‘nothing.'

Henry's sister, Lillian, arrived at his cottage three days before the Mayor's party. She'd phoned the previous night then come on the bus from Cambridge, changing at St Neots. She stood on the porch not sure if she wanted to ring the bell or not. She pushed the door. It opened. When Henry looked up from the kitchen table at the far end of the passageway, there she was standing in the door frame. He sighed. ‘Come in Sis, come in.'

She stayed where she stood. Her hair was unwashed and lank. In each hand she held a grey plastic bag, sagging with the few possessions she carried from place to place.

They looked at each other. She standing in the hallway, on the verge of tears. He at the kitchen table, stitching the leather sole to the upper of Muriel's bespoke shoe. Henry put down the shoe, stood up and then walked the short distance to where his sister waited. He wrapped his arms around her painfully thin body and held her close. One at a time she dropped the plastic bags to the floor, sank into his embrace and then let out a deep sob followed by a flood of tears.

Lillian was Henry's only sibling, five years younger than him. By the age of sixteen she'd self-medicated her depression with heroin, by eighteen she was one of the youngest in Cambridge on a methadone script. At twenty years of age she was diagnosed as bipolar and had spent the next two decades being shunted from doctor to doctor. She'd lived in a range of sheltered accommodation, but in recent months had gone walkabout, sleeping rough and sometimes rougher. Henry had not yet mentioned a word of Lillian to Muriel. At first he wanted to keep everything simple and light, with no foreboding, nothing to hang a cloud over their blossoming love affair.

‘I'll tell her on the weekend. After the party. After I give her the shoes,' whispered Henry to his reflection in the bathroom mirror as he lathered his chin to shave.

The rain that had drenched the village all Saturday afternoon ceased as suddenly as it had appeared. The sun came out and the trees and hedges shimmered and glistened in the bright summer light. In the community hall the preparations were well under way. Crisp white clothes were thrown over trestle tables. Morning fresh flowers from sundry village gardens were lovingly arranged in vases. In the kitchen the Nicholson sisters, Pru and Grace, were mixing salads and baking lasagna. Atop the big stepladder Alderman Adams and Councillor Greaves were hanging balloons and bunting from the rafters.

Muriel decides to drive the long way. No motorway. A long thoughtful meander through country lanes. The longer way, almost as if she's fearful of the arrival. No short cuts to this destination. She drives and observes the countryside passing by. The long vistas of trees and hedges and fields. The beauty of the early evening summer sky. The skeins of cloud, the pale blue light, the sounds and sights of birds returning. Her mind wanders back to the year before last. Her last love. How she'd loved too much. Too hard. You asked for too much, he'd said, more than anyone can give. Expected much more than was on offer. How she'd cooked and cleaned and hoped. The months had passed by. Had she still hoped for too much? Expected too much? Not this time. Careful of what you dream for. Passion, complicity, even for a child of her own (so said the quietest, gentlest voice in her head). A flock of Canada Geese scythe though the evening sky. She stretches her neck to see them through the windscreen. High above her now, disappearing as she steers the car around a bend and down a hill. She feels a tightness in her chest as she remembers that first night in Henry's cottage. She'd left him sleeping, then crept silently down the stairs to cry alone and confused in the kitchen. They had just made love. He'd stroked her feet and said they were beautiful. Such intimacy. Standing in the cold of the kitchen, naked and shivering, she tried to stifle the tears for fear he might hear. Then he'd know how exquisite it was for her, how terrifying, how amazing; how vulnerable she'd felt.

She slows down at the crossroads. The sun, dropping behind the escarpment, dazzles her with its refection in the rear-view mirror. She reads the signpost to Little Appleton and flicks on her indicator to turn left, even though there's not a single car anywhere in sight. Then, on an impulse she turns the ignition key. The engine purrs to silence. Through the open window she can hear the sound of the skylarks returning to roost. There's a soothing breeze and the smell of cut grass. She needs some time to think. To collect herself.

Mr Head, the headmaster of Little Appleton School, stands by the four-poster bed in the main bedroom of his sandstone house that sits proudly by the village green. He resolves to heal. With great effort he turns his wife in her sleep, to save her from pressure sores and the cracking of paper-thin skin. She barely makes a sound. A huff of breath from a lung. He sits on the stool by the dressing table, where for years, before her illness, his wife had sat and laughed and put on makeup before the guests arrived for the dinner party. In the reflection, behind him, he sees her shape in the bed: her prison, her home for these last long years. He pulls open the drawer, the place she keeps her hairbrushes. He rereads the letter from Dawn Chapple, his lover, the woman he'd turned to for comfort, for solace, for longing. It breaks his heart to read again that soon she will be gone. To the other side of the world, to a new life, one for herself. Away from the village. Away from the school. Away from him. He places the letter back in the drawer, takes out one of the brushes. He walks across the room, sits by her bedside and brushes the long grey hair of his one and only wife.

Lillian has nowhere left to go. ‘I'll cause no trouble, but please don't make me leave. Please, Henry, you're all I have. Nothing else, nothing for me.' He looks at her from the top of the stairs, looks away, then goes back down to the passageway below. She sits on the floor of the attic bedroom, hanging on to the leg of a chair. The voices in her head will not let her be. ‘Hang yourself' says one. It pops up amidst the others. She looks up to the rafters. There's a spider up there. ‘Where's the tuffet to sit on?' she thinks. The ‘hanging' voice keeps up its whisper. Lillian bangs her fist on the bare floorboards. To drown it out, drown it out. Banging on the floor to quieten the voice.

Henry doesn't usually wear a tie. Not these days. He rummages through his sock drawer and there it is: his favourite, the one with dark and light blue stripes. Holding it up against the white shirt he wears, he's happy with his choice. Wrapping it around his neck, adjusting the lengths of the ends, Henry is distracted by a sharp thud from upstairs. Then a scraping sound as if something is being pulled across the floor. He focuses on his reflection in the mirror, the tying of a knot. He'll explain all about Lillian later. Like Mrs Rochester to Jane Eyre: or was she left to find out for herself? In any event, it'll tell him all the more of Muriel. Of her love. How much she's prepared to take on. It remains to be seen. He ties his tie and walks over to the table. Lovingly, carefully, he places the two pairs of shoes in their boxes, nestling each in the black tissue paper that awaits them. Something about the shoes. Something pure and timeless brings a tear to his eye. He wants to cry, tears from deep down. But he swallows hard.

Mayor Amanda Stephenson has a weakness. A guilty secret. She tunes the radio to her favourite classical music station and pours herself a glass of dry sherry. Then she settles on the sofa and opens up the leather-bound album she keeps locked away in the bureau in her study. It contains four decades of press clippings that chronicle her political history, her public service: the fete openings, the election night triumphs, the mayorial chain. There, on the opening page, is the yellowing newspaper cutting that describes her first day as a councillor. She was the youngest woman in the county ever to be elected and the photo shows a twenty-two-year-old in a summer frock arriving at the town hall on her Raleigh bicycle. She flips the pages to an article from last year. There she is again, riding happily towards the photographer on her newest bike: ‘The Mayoress on Wheels' as the caption has it. She can still hear the voice of her long dead father chastising her. ‘Vanity, vanity. All is vanity and a striving after wind.' The one vice he abhorred above others. She looks back to the first photo and sees her young self in the red polka-dot dress that she knows still hangs in the old oak wardrobe in the bedroom upstairs. She drinks the rest of the sherry in her glass and smiles at the idea taking form in her mind. One final photo.

The dusk is setting in. Muriel is unsure as to how long she's been sitting quietly in the car. But the sun is almost down and the air is colder. She looks at her reflection in the rear-view mirror and is happy with what she sees: a young woman, as assured in love as any can be. She straightens her hair and then turns on the engine. The indicator comes on as if it had never gone away. Muriel drives the car forward then turns left. After a short distance she takes the right fork to Shepherd's Lane that leads to the old stone bridge and the village beyond. She switches on the radio and sings along to the hymn being played ‘… and give us we pray, our life everlasting Lord at the break of the day.'

It's then, as she reaches the crest of the bridge, with the brook bubbling beneath, that she sees the fox in the middle of the road. It stands still, transfixed, staring straight at her. The last rays of the sun illuminate it as if it were on a stage, highlighting the red of its fur. She swerves the car to the left to avoid the fox and suddenly there's a thud and a clattering of metal. Muriel slams on the brakes and stalls the car, acutely aware of how heavy and sharp her breathing has become; her eyes wide open in shock. She opens the door to look back. There, half on the grass verge, half on the road, is the dead still body of a middle-aged woman, her red polka-dot dress stained with the deeper red of her blood. By her side is the twisted wreck of her bike, its front wheel still turning, then coming to a halt. Looking back up the road to the community hall Muriel sees the doors fly open and people running down the short driveway to see what has happened. The fox is nowhere in sight. The figures get closer. A greeting party. Behind them, back at the hall she fancies she sees Henry silhouetted in the doorway. He stays where he is, motionless. As the crowd approaches the scene of the accident individuals gasp at the sight of Amanda Stephenson: lifeless and bloodied. One lets out a muffled scream. Another stares accusingly at Muriel who slumps against the side of her car.