Notwithstanding (2 page)

When Archie was about two years old he came in with a blackbird, but we paid no attention. The bird was dead, and we thought that he must have found it somewhere. But then the next day he came in with a song thrush and a starling, and we became suspicious.

In our village strange things happen from time to time. To this day we still talk about the time when Mrs Mac’s sister went round telling us she’d heard on the radio that from now on the rain was going to fall upward, and sure enough it did. We sat watching it out of our windows, and it looked to us as if the drops in the puddles were actually little bursts of water heading skyward. We became anxious about the village pond emptying out, but it never did, and eventually Mrs Mac’s sister confessed that she’d heard the radio item on 1 April. Even so, most of us were convinced by lengthy observation that in fact the rain had been falling upward, and we had some good arguments about it, for and against, until Sir Edward explained that it was a perceptual illusion caused by the well-known effects of intellectual confusion upon the eyesight under conditions of simple Galilean relativity, whatever that is. After that, the rain fell downward once more, and normality was restored.

Anyway, after Archie had brought in a pigeon, a linnet, a greenfinch, and a woodcock, we began to realise that his retrieving had gone too far, and it wasn’t
until
I took to sitting in the living room after lunch that I discovered the cause of his success in retrieving dead birds that no one had shot. I was reading the
Sporting Times
one afternoon, when there was a fierce thump on the window. I looked up, startled, to see a robin sliding down it, leaving a thick trail of blood behind on the glass. A few minutes later Archie brought the little bird in, and, as usual, because it would be a shame to see it go to waste, I put it in Sooty’s bowl. Two more birds committed suicide by crashing into the window that very same evening.

My mother and I discussed the possibility that the local birds were suffering from depression. We knew that sometimes in the human population a kind of self-destructive hysteria can sweep through – the last time it happened in Notwithstanding was in the eighteenth century when the calendar was adjusted and everyone thought they’d been deprived of several days of life. Somehow this didn’t make sense with respect to birds, so we were forced to conclude that it must be a spontaneous collective amnesia about windows.

That’s why I stuck birdseed to the glass, to teach them all about windows again, and, though I say it myself, it did work wonderfully. We had dozens of birds of all kinds flapping against the window, picking off the seeds, and the sparrows and tits learned to hover like hummingbirds while they pecked. My
mother
and I were quite chuffed to have contributed to bird evolution, especially when they also realised by experience to keep out of Sooty’s reach. She only got two or three before they learned.

Nonetheless, it drove us barmy to see Sooty trying to get at the birds, leaping up and down with a mad expression on her face as though she were on an invisible and uncontrollable pogo stick. On top of that, the repeated sound of her claws dragging down the windows was worse than the scritch of a teacher’s fingernail on the blackboard, so we moved the television into the other room, and Archie went back to fetching everything except birds.

OBADIAH OAK, MRS GRIFFITHS AND THE CAROL SINGERS

MRS GRIFFITHS GOES
to the shop and stands next to Obadiah Oak, her nose wrinkled in distaste. Obadiah, known to all as Jack, lives with his daughter by the cricket green, in a cottage that has been handed down in his family for seven generations. Jack is the village’s last peasant, and he and his house smell of two hundred years of peasant life; he exudes the aromas of wet leather and horse manure, costive dogs, turnips, rainwater and cabbage water, sausages, verdigris, woollen socks, Leicester cheese, fish guts, fraying curtains, mice under the stairs, mud on the carpet and woodlice behind the pipes, but most of all he reeks of six decades of neglected hygiene. Jack is considered a ‘character’, with his teeth like tombstones, his stubble like a filecard, his lips like kippers, his rolling Surrey accent and his eyes as round as plates, but newcomers
avoid
him if they can. They moved here in search of picture-postcard England, and are uncomfortable with a real countryman who knows how to wring the neck of a chicken and has no compunction about drowning kittens in a bucket. Jack is an anachronism, but he does not know it, and he is standing in the village shop because he has nothing to do, and not many to talk with. Every day he comes in and buys cigarette papers, so that by now he must have a roomful of them, and he engages the shop assistant in a dilatory conversation about the weather, punctuating his remarks with hawking. He used to spit it out, but nowadays he swallows it, having been roundly told off one afternoon by the squirrel-shooting Polly Wantage.

‘Artnoon,’ he says to Mrs Griffiths. ‘Turned out nice again. Looks like rain though.’

‘Getting chilly,’ replies Mrs Griffiths crisply, hoping to avoid a prolonged conversation.

‘Time o’ year,’ says Jack, ‘what wi’ Christmas on the doorstep. Going away?’

‘Staying at home. I usually do.’

‘Come and eat wi’ us?’ says Jack, knowing that she will refuse, because everyone always does. He does not in truth want to have Mrs Griffiths round for Christmas dinner, but he has always been the kind of man who tries to do his bit, the sort of fellow who will offer his sturdy back to a child who wants to climb a tree to fetch down conkers.

‘Oh, I couldn’t possibly,’ says Mrs Griffiths shortly, without even thanking him. But Jack is not offended; he has a sense of his place in the world, and a sensible man expects snooty people to be snooty.

‘Happy Christmas, then,’ he says, and he touches the rim of his sagging hat. He leaves the shop and strolls home, directly across the middle of the cricket pitch. He has been asked not to, but cannot see the point of being tender in the winter about a pitch that is mangled every weekend of the summer.

Mrs Griffiths exchanges resigned glances with Mrs Davidson, whose turn it is to man the shop. It makes no profit any more; no one would buy it from the previous owner, and now it is run on a cooperative and voluntary basis by those ladies who have time on their hands.

‘I don’t know why someone doesn’t tell that man to wash,’ says Mrs Griffiths, crossly. ‘It’s a disgrace.’

‘Oh, I know,’ says Mrs Davidson. ‘Polly Wantage told him once, you know, after she stopped him from spitting, and what he said to her was unrepeatable.’

Mrs Griffiths’ eyes widen with a kind of horrified delight. Strong language is so far outside her world that when she overhears it, it is as exotic as Bengal tigers.

Mrs Griffiths buys a big box of Christmas cards because she wants Mrs Davidson to think that she has lots of friends and relations. She will send a card to the
vicar
and the doctor, and she will drop one through the letter boxes of the more respectable people in the village, so that they will send one back, and then, should anyone call round and glance at her cards, it will be clear that she is well connected and respected. She also buys mincemeat and ready-made frozen shortcrust pastry, because tonight she is going to make mince pies for the carol singers.

Mrs Griffiths has always hated the carol singers, even though they are the children of the better families. They arrive with their guitars and their recorders, and every year they sing the same two songs, ‘Silent Night’ and ‘O Come All Ye Faithful’. They collect for the NSPCC, and Mrs Griffiths would really rather give money to the RSPCA; at least animals cannot be blamed for anything, and do not grow up to be thieves and yobs. Mrs Griffiths secretly resents the way in which the carol singers are so young and bright-eyed, so full of high laughter, so full of the future, and previously she has always turned out the lights when she heard them coming, so that she does not have to go out and listen to them, or give them money, or make mince pies and hot punch as everyone else does. The carol singers have always sung to her closed door and doused lights, and have then departed.

But things have changed. Mrs Griffiths lost her husband in the spring, and is slowly realising that at last the time has come when she has to make an effort
to
get on with people. She did not love her husband, he was boring and inconsequential, and she had not even loved him when they married. After he died, she felt merely a sense of relief, conjoined with the bitterness of a freedom that has come too late. Sometimes she wonders whether she has ever loved anyone at all, and certainly she has never loved anyone as they do on the television late at night, with all those heaving backsides. But, even though her husband was a cipher, nowadays Mrs Griffiths feels a certain emptiness, a certain need to reach out, a certain need to be reborn. Tonight she will make mince pies and punch, she will leave the lights on, she will come out and listen, and she will tell the children that their music is wonderful. She will ignore the fact that they know only one verse of ‘Silent Night’, their guitars are out of tune and their recorders too shrill, and she will wish them a happy Christmas even though they are beautiful and still have a chance in life.

Mrs Griffiths covers herself and her kitchen in dusting sugar, she deals with the frustration of pastry that sticks to the table and the rolling pin, she conquers the meanness that nearly prevents her from pouring a whole bottle of red wine into the punch, and then she waits, sitting on the wooden chair in the kitchen, warmed by the rich smells of baking pastry and hot wine, and lemon, and rum. ‘After they’ve been,’ she thinks, ‘I will write all my cards, and then I’ll draw
a
hot bath and read.’ Since her husband died, Mrs Griffiths has taken to reading true-life romances that one can order six at a time from a special club. She has read so many that she thinks she could probably write one herself.

It grows very dark, and three hours pass. Mrs Griffiths goes often to her door, and opens it, to see if she can hear the carol singers coming. The night is very cold; there is a frosty wind, but she does not think that it is going to rain. They will be here before long.

Mrs Griffiths sits in her wooden chair and thinks about what she should say to the children; does ‘Merry Christmas’ sound better than ‘Happy Christmas’? Does ‘Thank you so much for coming’ sound too formal? The young are not very formal these days. During the time when everyone was going on about the Beatles, the youngsters kept saying ‘groovy’, but that was probably not very ‘with it’ any more. She is not even sure if ‘with it’ is ‘with it’ these days. She experiments with ‘Groovy Christmas’, but decides against it.

Mrs Griffiths hears ‘Silent Night’ in the distance. The children are singing to the gypsies in their scrapyard, causing the Alsatians to howl. Now they are singing to the Davidsons, and now they are singing to the baroque musicologist, and now they are singing to smelly Jack Oak. Mrs Griffiths listens very hard
for
the squeak of her garden gate and the experimental chords of the guitarists. She knows that, in between the houses, the children bray out songs from pop groups with silly names and working-class accents.

The children arrive at the garden gate, and the tall, lanky one says, ‘What about this one?’

‘Not worth it,’ says the other guitarist, who is proud of the fact that he is going to get a shaving kit for Christmas. He strokes his invisible moustache with a nail-bitten forefinger.

‘She’s an old skinflint,’ says the blonde girl who will be beautiful when she loses her puppy fat.

‘Her husband died,’ says the dark, sensitive girl with the brown eyes.

‘It won’t do any harm, will it?’ asks the blonde girl.

‘There’s no point,’ says the lanky boy, ‘she just turns off the lights as soon as she hears us coming. Every year it’s the same, don’t you remember? She’s an old ratbag.’

‘Mum told us not to leave her out,’ says the blonde.

‘Who’s going to tell Mum?’ demands her brother. ‘Let’s go and do the Armstrongs.’

Mrs Griffiths sits on her wooden chair and hears ‘Silent Night’ coming from next door. At first she feels a livid pang of anger, and one or two of those vehement forbidden words spring to her mind, but not to her lips. She is indignant, and thinks, ‘How
dare
they miss me out. They always come here. Why am I the one to miss out?’ She looks at her inviting heap of mince pies and her steaming bowl of punch, and thinks, ‘I did all this for them.’ She wants to go outside and shout insults at them, but she cannot think of anything that would not sound ridiculous and undignified.

Alongside her anger and frustration, Mrs Griffiths abruptly feels more tired and forlorn than she has ever felt in her life, and she begins to cry for the first time since she was a child. She is surprised by large tears that well up in her eyes and slide down the sides of her nose, rolling down her hands and wrists, and into her sleeves. She had not remembered that tears could be so warm. She tastes one, in order to be reminded of their saltiness, and finds it comforting. She thinks, ‘Perhaps I should get a cat,’ and fetches some kitchen roll so that she can blow her nose.