Notwithstanding (29 page)

Out of consideration for her father, Jessie has resisted going for the kind of house she really craves, something clean and new on a smart housing estate,
and
has found a pleasant cottage for next to nothing in the village of Herodsfoot, near Bodmin. She is sure that he could be happy there. The house is very like the one they are leaving, with a decent-sized vegetable patch and a blue front door. It has one more room, and an inside lavatory, and it doesn’t really need much decorating. She has had to take charge of everything, because Jack’s mind goes into a spin when he has to concentrate on things like deeds and contracts. He signs the documents that she places before him, and says, ‘Might be signin’ my life away, for all I knows.’

On the morning of their leaving Jack hands over the key to the estate agent, and sits in the passenger seat of his Triumph Herald. He looks resolutely forward, at nothing. He is too choked to drive or to speak. He refuses to be unmanned by weeping, and he feels a portion of himself shutting off. Jessie starts the engine and squeezes his hand comfortingly before she puts the car into gear. ‘It’s a sad day, isn’t it, Dad?’ she says, and he does not reply. She has taken lots of photographs of the old house, and plans to frame some of the best ones for the walls of the new one. She combines a sort of pre-emptive nostalgia with a contradictory sense of bright new beginnings. She is optimistic but she feels tears prickling in the corners of her eyes. ‘Goodbye, old home,’ she says, and then starts the car off down Malthouse Lane. They pass the hedging and ditching man, who is examining a
freshly
excavated workman’s boot. They pass the house where the General used to live, and which is now fitfully occupied at weekends by a couple from London who have already complained about the noise of chickens from over the road, and the crack of shotguns in the Hurst. They want horses banned from parts of the common because they chew up the footpaths, and they want to stop the teenage boys roaring around the tracks on old motorbikes. They want a fence round the village pond so that their child won’t fall in.

‘Goodbye, Notwithstanding,’ calls Jessie, waving to the trees on Busses Common. ‘We still love you. Goodbye, you good old place.’ She wipes her eyes on her sleeve, and drives on.

Two months later Mrs Griffiths is mightily surprised to find Jack Oak standing at his usual post in the village shop, having bought his customary pack of cigarette papers. He hawks up phlegm, and remembers to swallow it.

‘Artnoon,’ says Jack, as usual. ‘Turned out nice again. Looks like rain, though.’

‘Mr Oak!’ cries Mrs Griffiths. ‘Why, I thought I must have seen a ghost! What brings you back to these parts?’

‘Jus’ visitin’,’ says Jack. ‘Jus’ visitin’.’

Mrs Griffiths says, ‘I thought I saw your car outside.’ She has improved in recent months. She has
become
sociable and talkative, has joined the Conservative Association, and collects money for the RSPCA and the donkey refuge. She has tried going to church but is horrified by how undignified and informal the services have become during her many decades of absenteeism, and so she has given up again. She has finally got round to writing a true-life romance, and it has been published by Mills & Boon under the name of Sophia D’Arcy de Vere. She is bursting with pleasure and pride, but can’t think of anyone she’d dare tell, in case they should read it and come across the steamy scenes.

‘How long are you staying?’ she asks.

‘Back tonight,’ replies Jack. ‘Got nowhere to stay round here no more.’

‘How do you like your new house?’ enquires Mrs Griffiths.

‘It’s all right,’ says Jack, with a shrug.

‘It’s nice, is it?’

‘’S’all right.’

‘Nice people? Have you made friends yet?’

‘Ain’t got round to it,’ says Jack.

‘Nice village?’

‘Nice enough, if you like it.’

Mrs Griffiths tries a new tack. ‘Have you met the people in your old house? They’re terribly nice. Not here much, though. They’ve made some terrific improvements already.’

‘Weren’t nothing wrong with it in the first place,’ says Jack, with an edge of bitterness in his voice. ‘Can’t see what they want to go changing it for. They ain’t got the right.’

Mrs Griffiths and the lady behind the counter exchange significant glances. They are both thinking ‘Poor old Jack’. Mrs Griffiths notices that Jack is much thinner and greyer than he was. He is still stinking and filthy, but his health is clearly worse, and he has a forlorn and vanquished air.

Over the next few weeks Mrs Griffiths encounters Jack more frequently. When he has finished in the shop he walks straight across the middle of the cricket pitch, and stands outside his old house with his hands in his pockets, just looking at it. One day the new owners see him and assume that he is a vagabond up to no good. The young man comes out, and Mrs Griffiths arrives just in time to set him right, to prevent him from calling the police, and to prevent Jack from telling him to bugger off. The young man is nonetheless afraid that Jack Oak might frighten the children, and he glowers at him every time he sees him standing immobile outside, like the trunk of a ruined apple tree, with his hands in his pockets, just looking and looking and looking at his old house.

The situation becomes steadily sadder and more absurd and Mrs Griffiths thinks about calling the social services. Instead she manages to trace Jessie in
the
West Country, and Jessie says she’s tried to stop him, to talk him out of it, but she can’t. Jessie says that she’s at her wits’ end, but he always comes back and maybe he’ll stop eventually.

On one occasion Mrs Griffiths comes to the village shop early and realises that Jack must have been there all night, finding him asleep in his Triumph Herald with nothing but a rug to cover him, and one day in January she calls round at his old cottage in order to collect for the donkey refuge and to ask if the new owners are intending to vote Conservative. There is a hoar frost, the twigs are thick with glistening rime, she is well wrapped up, and she walks carefully so as not to wintle on the rimy Bargate stones of the path. She feels fresh and renewed on freezing mornings like this.

As she goes up the path something snags the corner of her vision, and she turns her head quickly. There is a small garden shed on the left-hand side, up against the front hedge, and from the threshold protrudes a pair of old muddy brown boots with much-mended laces. She runs over, sure that she recognises them, and she puts her hand to her mouth in horror. ‘Oh Jack!’ she cries. ‘Jack!’ even though she has never addressed him by his first name during the sixty years of their entire acquaintance. She goes down on her knees and pulls back the crisp and stiffened rug from his face, ‘Oh Jack, oh Jack,’ she wails, and
puts
her hands to her cheeks and weeps in high-pitched little sobs. His hair is sparkling white and rigid with hoar frost, and his face is open-mouthed and grey. His teeth are like tombstones, his sightless eyes are round like dinner plates, but he has an arresting and horrible beauty.

They arrange for Obadiah Oak, known to everyone as Jack, to be buried in St Peter’s churchyard instead of the one in his parish in the west. Jessie tells everyone at the funeral that she will never forgive herself, but people reassure her that she really did think she was acting for the best. The coroner establishes that it was misadventure, that he died specifically of hypothermia. Mrs Griffiths and the residents of longer standing, however, know perfectly well what it was that killed him.

THE DEATH OF
MISS AGATHA FEAKES

MISS AGATHA FEAKES
summons her menagerie of animals. ‘Chuffy chuffy chuffy chuffy!’ she calls. It is her last day on this earth, but she does not know it yet, and the morning starts in its usual fashion. No one knows why she calls ‘Chuffy chuffy chuffy chuffy’ rather than the actual names of her dogs and cats, but the village has grown accustomed to it, and only the little children, whose minds have not got used to anything, wonder about it any more. Her voice is like the call of the cuckoo, mellow and tuneful, with a touch both of mournfulness and optimism. Like the cuckoo, her call carries for miles across the fields and coppices, and there is indeed a real cuckoo that roosts in the Hurst, who cranes his neck in curiosity and surprise whenever Miss Agatha Feakes calls her animals at seven o’clock in the morning.

Unlike the cuckoo, which is shy, as if it were ashamed of its own ways and would prefer to pass itself off as a wood pigeon, Miss Feakes is outgoing and conspicuous, even though she lives without human company. She had a lodger for a while, who conducted a lurid affair with the ever-obliging postman, but now she contents herself with the companionship of rabbits, chickens, goats, cats, Labradors, West Highland terriers and a jackdaw that she rescued when it was a fledgling. She does not need an alarm clock any more because the jackdaw thinks that it can sing, and joins in with the morning chorus. She wears a brown peaked cap because the bird sometimes sits upon her head and was never house-trained.

Miss Feakes feeds them all. The small dogs yap, bouncing up and down like quaint Victorian toys, and the slavering Labradors put their front paws up on the wooden table whose surface about the edges has been scoured by claws for forty years. The cats adorn the centre of the table and the shelves where plates used to be, otherwise entwining themselves about her legs, which are wound permanently, not only with cats but also with flesh-coloured elasticated bandage, reminding the village’s old soldiers of the inexplicable puttees that they used to have to wear in the old days.

One of these old soldiers is the postman. He originally arrived as the batman to the General who used to own the house next door. He is thin, and very
fit
from cycling in all weathers. Even in winter the skin on his face and neck is golden brown, like old waxed pine, and he wears brightly polished army boots that he has maintained ever since the 1950s. He tells the children that his bicycle clips are for catching the change that falls through the holes in his pockets. He whistles when he arrives at the gate, and the dogs come to collect the biscuits with which he has befriended them, and which, for the purposes of his correspondence with the Inland Revenue, he considers to be a legitimate business expense. He leaves Miss Feakes’s house until last, because she expects to give him a cup of tea.

He hates having to drink it, but he is soft-hearted. ‘Do you think the weather’ll hold up?’ he asks her, as he surveys the grimy newspapers that serve in the place of carpets. Miss Feakes would not dream of taking a tabloid paper because the sheets are not big enough, and so she takes the
Daily Telegraph
, of whose editorial outlook she approves. In the evenings she reads about the cricket and falls asleep over the crossword.

‘The forecast’s always wrong,’ she says, as usual. ‘I know all about the weather from watching my animals.’

‘Animals can foretell earthquakes,’ says the postman, ‘so I hear tell.’

He looks at his cup of tea. There is a decade of
tannin
stain about the rim, and an oily film floating on the top. The tea tastes of cats. Some of them are not very domesticated and the whole house reeks of warm tom’s urine, of wet dogs, of decaying newspaper, of dust. The house exhales a stupefying halitosis. It is so nauseating that no one can stay in there for longer than twenty minutes, and accordingly the postman rises to leave, his cup of tea unfinished. Today he will buy Miss Feakes a present. It will be a potted hyacinth, whose powerful scent of aunts and grandmothers might improve the atmosphere of the house, and he will find Miss Feakes’s discarded body in the kitchen when he comes to give it to her in the morning. After the burial he will go to the graveyard on his own, and plant the hyacinth in her grave, so that even death might not defeat his good intentions. Nearby the yew tree that was originally planted to secure longbows for the King’s army, beneath a mother-of-pearl sky that is reeling and drunken with rooks, he will take off his cap and gaze down upon the new-turned earth, and then, like a true Briton, he will restrain his tears as he paces out his grief along the rutty track that leads to the hill. He will see the deep green of the dog’s mercury, and, above the busy noise of Mr Hamden’s tractor, he will be spooked by the cuckoo that sounds like Miss Agatha Feakes calling her dogs.