Heaven's On Hold Read online

  Annet hrumphed. ‘Is that what you think I’ve done? Achieved my career goals and moved on to the next thing?’

  ‘That’s not quite how I’d have phrased it.’

  ‘Well, however you want to say it that’s not how it was.’

  ‘You’re not saying—’ Mags’s face was a study in contained anticipation – ‘you’re surely not saying the baby was unplanned?’

  ‘No, rather the reverse – she was a long time coming.’

  ‘Oh, I see …! And just when you thought it was safe to – yes, I get you.’

  Annet thought grimly that the day Mags got her was the day she’d pack it in. She’d never taken the view that relatives had some special right to affection and this was even more true of those belonging to her husband. She’d married David, and David only. She could appreciate that the baby’s arrival had occasioned a small fraternal rite of passage between David and Tim, but she resisted the idea that a similar sisters-under-the-skin thing should take place between herself and Mags. Who was now, right on cue, enquiring about what she called ‘the nanny situation’.

  ‘I suppose you won’t really know till she’s started and you’ve seen her in action? I mean obviously not actually seen her, because by definition you won’t be there, but seen how she gets on.’

  ‘Obviously.’ Annet allowed herself a withering put-down on the assumption that Mags would interpret it as an echo of her own remark, and the assumption proved a safe one.

  ‘Who was she working for before?’

  ‘An American family in London. They gave her glowing references. But she’s a country girl at heart I gather and wanted to move out. Not to us, I hasten to add, she’s renting a maisonette in town.’

  ‘I gather,’ said Mags, ‘that the strapping Antipodean lass has taken over from the English rose as the must-have nanny.’

  ‘Really? I wouldn’t know.’

  ‘I suppose they’re more flexible, more sort of user-friendly …? After all who wants some uniformed virago telling you what you may or may not do with your own baby?’

  ‘Quite.’

  ‘What does she look like? I’m eaten up with curiosity.’

  Annet had a shrewd suspicion where this line of enquiry was heading and answered accordingly. ‘ She’s tall and attractive.’

  ‘Heavens!’ Mags giggled in a way that conveyed both dismay and delight. ‘ Is that good or bad?’

  ‘Good for her, I imagine Mags. Not that she’s likely to have that vibrant a social life in King’s Newton, but she’ll certainly set a few bucolic pulses racing round at the Anvil when she takes Freya in for a jar.’

  ‘Goodness … What exactly will she do with her time off?’

  ‘Go up to town. She’s got a Metro, on us. And there’s a perfectly good commuter line if she intends getting ratted. Provided she turns up on time and isn’t a pathological clock-watcher her social life is not my concern.’

  ‘Still, it’s a bit different to living in London.’

  Annet felt her jaw tighten with the effort of remaining polite. She was glad to see that the men had stopped and were standing and talking to let them catch up. ‘Of course, but she didn’t have to take the job. It’s a seller’s market in the nanny trade these days, they decide whether they like the look of you just as much as the other way round.’

  ‘It makes my blood run cold … What does David think of her?’

  Annet permitted herself a note of exasperation. ‘He took her for a deceitful, child-hating, alcoholic sociopath, of course, that’s why we snapped her up.’

  Mags slapped her own wrist. ‘Sorry!’

  Annet did not tell her it was all right. They caught up with the men. Freya’s eyes were now open and her face had lost the porcelain pallor of sleep.

  ‘How you doing, girls?’ asked Tim.

  ‘Fine,’ replied Annet.

  David put out his hand towards his wife but she had moved out of reach. ‘ Do you want to go on for a bit?’

  ‘Why not. As far as the line of trees.’ A row of well-spaced poplars, listing with the prevailing wind, marched across the fields about half a mile away.

  In a spontaneous act of self-regulation they regrouped, with Tim and Annet now walking briskly in front, David and Mags bringing up the rear. David liked Mags but realised that in this context she represented the short straw. He sensed that Annet had escaped and that it might be up to him to do a little making good.

  ‘How’s she looking?’ he asked, jerking a thumb over his shoulder towards Freya.

  Mags peered. ‘ Very bright and beady.’

  ‘Not winding up for a paddy?’

  ‘No, she just seems to be taking it all in.’

  ‘Good,’ he said, with feeling.

  ‘She’s an alert little thing, isn’t she?’

  ‘She must take after her mother.’

  ‘Now don’t undersell yourself,’ said Mags, patting his arm – she had a soft spot for David. ‘How are things at work, by the way?’

  ‘A little fraught, when I last looked. Hiring and firing is not something I enjoy. I had enough of that with my last outfit.’

  ‘You’re too nice,’ declared Mags. ‘You take everything too personally.’

  ‘It’s how the other person takes it that bothers me.’

  ‘That’s what I mean.’

  ‘Anyway …’ he tried to dismiss that and change tack, ‘much as I dislike the idea of going back it’ll be a relief to be sorting out the problems myself. Empty desk syndrome, you know.…’

  ‘Let’s be honest—’ Mags made a gosh-better-keep-our-voicesdown face – ‘you’ll be glad to go back for a rest!’

  He acknowledged there was some truth in this.

  ‘Give Tim a couple of days in sole charge of hearth, home and offspring and he’s a gibbering wreck.’

  ‘Yes, I shall never again underestimate the hard work involved in that. Even with one small baby there doesn’t seem a lot of time or space to spare. But it has been nice. Being together – I mean Annet and me – has been a rare treat.’

  Mags looked a shade crestfallen. ‘Yes, I can imagine, you both work so hard.’

  They trudged for a bit in silence. As the village came back into view Annet turned and cupped her hands round her mouth.

  ‘We’re going round by the church!’

  He nodded and raised an arm in acknowledgement, then asked Mags: ‘Are you happy to do that? The church is rather fun actually.’

  ‘Is it miles out of our way?’

  ‘A few hundred yards.’

  ‘And fun you say – go on, you talked me into it.’

  Neither David nor Annet were regular churchgoers, and Annet refused even to write the despised ‘C of E’ on forms, preferring a dismissive dash or an assertive ‘ None’, depending on her mood. But All Saints was acknowledged by even the ungodly as the jewel in the crown of Newton Bury, and David had been known to slip in at the back of evensong from time to time for what he thought of as broadly cultural reasons. He liked entering beneath the jerky tumble of bells, rung by a keen team of peripatetic campanologists, and once in he was profoundly susceptible to the stillness of stones which had stood on this chalky soil for five centuries. He liked the message of continuity in the repetition of local names in the plaques and memorials around the walls, particularly Fox-Herbert, that of the local landowners. The Fox-Herberts had presided over Newton Bury, more or less benignly, since the Reformation, and many of the beauties of All Saints – the elaborately carved pulpit and priest’s stall, and the stained glass in the west window for example, bore testament to centuries of discriminating pillage on the other side of the channel. Added to which the present incumbent, Maurice Martin, was a likable, literate man, a dramatomane since his Cambridge days and someone who with his garrulous wife Della was a fully paid-up member of the local social scene. Annet – stern as only a non-believer could afford to be – took a drolly censorious view of their preparedness to break bread with sinners, but had never yet refused an invita
tion.

  She and Tim were already inside when he and Mags got there. The door at the far end of the porch stood half open, and all beyond was darkness, though David knew that once they’d entered it would not seem dark at all. He held the door for Mags. Freya was beginning to make the small sounds, no more than vibrations really that he felt through his back, that would become fretting. The font, huge and rough-hewn on its white-washed pedestal, greeted them. For the first time since some prep-school sermon David remembered the significance of the font being near the door: the beginning of life’s journey. From there one went (though less frequently these days) up the aisle to the chancel steps to be married; and from there back into the churchyard for burial. For what he recognised as fanciful personal reasons he would have liked his daughter to be christened in this old, wise watchful place – but not enough to have a fight with his wife about it.

  Mags had gone to join the other two who were standing at the top of the south aisle near the lady chapel. Annet was pointing upwards, telling them about the bats which flitted and swooped inside on summer evenings. The empty building made her already resonant husky voice reverberate, and when Tim laughed the sharp sound seemed to shoot up and bang back and forth between the roof-beams of the nave.

  David went to the table near the north porch where the Book of Remembrance lay open in its glass case. The last entry in the immaculate black calligraphy of the church warden was that of someone called Robert Tertius Townsend who had died only a week earlier, aged (David quickly calculated) only sixty-two. So the church had seen a funeral only recently, and somewhere in the village a family was bereft. Or it would be comforting, in a perverse way, to think so. He hoped it hadn’t been one of those bleak, unattended rites of a poor chap who had died alone and uncared for. Because even in a small rural community like Newton Bury where such things weren’t supposed to happen, they occasionally did. And there was something doubly chilling in a death going undetected for several days in a supposedly neighbourly environment. For the same reasons that David had supported the charity for the homeless he feared the indifference evidenced by such brutal oversights. How terrible to be known, or at least recognised, and yet so friendless that one could die and not make a jot of difference in anyone’s life … A contingency that was in sharp and ironic contrast to the bats, both in the church and elsewhere, which were now fiercely protected and even a lively topic at local dinner parties among householders whose lofts had become bat-friendly and conversion-averse.

  Freya’s small grunts had become more vocal, she would soon be crying. Annet was treating her listeners to a caustic summary of the Fox-Herberts’ historic pilfering. She was one of those atheists with a kind of scornful but consuming interest in the more disobliging aspects of the church, and was pretty much of a walking guide book on All Saints. Not wanting to disrupt her set piece he wandered back in the direction of the north porch. It occurred to him that a lonely death such as the one he’d been contemplating would probably not have occasioned a copperplate mention in the Book of Remembrance. Perhaps there would be a freshly-turned grave and fond flowers in the churchyard to confirm a happy ending.

  There was a good break in the cloud, and the bright sunlight, along with the breeze, seemed to have a soothing effect on Freya. It was funny, he thought, how quickly a name became an integral part of its bearer. It was only a couple of hours since they’d made their decision, and yet now he could not have contemplated changing it. Freya was no mere appellation, it was who she was.

  As they strolled round towards the eastern buttress of All Saints, the names on the grave stones reinforced this view. Thomas Butcher … Ellen Hargreave and Samuel Hargreave, devoted husband of Ellen … Edward Mason, aged six weeks, Reclaimed by God … Louisa Chaffey, beloved wife of John, taken in childbirth … a whole rake of solid, prosperous Beechams, but only one Fox-Herbert (admittedly housed in a huge Victorian tomb flanked by appropriately chinless angels), the majority being commemorated in comfort inside the church. But almost all, David reflected, so long gone that they lived on in name only. He found the graves not morbid but companionable, standing in quiet testament to those whose names they bore.

  As they came round to the north side of the church they were out of the wind. In the sudden stillness it was quite hot, with the sun beating off the walls and glittering on the diamond-paned windows. David saw, with a little thrill of recognition, the new grave with its shining headstone and garlands – he thought of them as garlands, though of course they were wreaths – of colourful flowers. He went over to it.

  Close to, you could see the flowers had been there for two or three days – many of the petals had curling brown edges and the oasis, visible between the stems, was beginning to take on a pale and crumbly appearance. But the cards on their little plastic forks, were not yet faded. ‘To my darling Robert, I’ll see you in Heaven, yours for ever, Mary’; ‘Dearest Dad, rest in peace at last, all our love, Mandy and Sue’; ‘Dear Granddad, miss you loads, Jessica and Justin’; ‘To Bob, with grateful thanks and fond memories from all at the Cricket Club’; ‘To RT, with many happy memories, from your friends and colleagues at Micasol’; ‘To dear Mr Townsend from Pam’ … And there were more. So, far from being lonely, it appeared Robert Townsend had been blessed with a rich life full of love, friendship, rewarding work and fruitful leisure. David felt quite put in his place by the abundance and breadth of the wellwishing.

  As he turned to continue his circuit of the church he caught sight of a woman sitting on a bench beneath one of the chestnut trees which stood between the north of the churchyard and the field beyond. The trees had their roots in the field, and the woman shared their shade with a couple of somnolent horses standing end to end on the other side of the fence, their tails switching. David couldn’t make out much about her – she wore a print dress of no fixed fashion, and a floppy-brimmed cotton sunhat, but from her attitude – hands clasped on lap, head slightly averted – he formed the impression she was waiting for something.

  Of course, he thought, his cheeks suddenly hot with embarrassment, she’d come to be at the graveside. This might be Mary – or Mandy, or Sue, or Pam, or any one of dozens of others with a right to visit Robert Townsend’s last resting place, and she was waiting politely for him, a mere idle gawper, to get out of the way.

  He quickened his pace, but as he went round the end of the building he stole a last look, and she was still sitting there, in the same position, in half-profile, her face shielded by the brim of her hat.

  The minute he rounded the corner it was as though the peaceful, sunlit interlude on the other side of the church had happened in another dimension. Here it was cooler, and there was a breeze, and a long, deep shadow shot out from the church tower, making him shiver, and there were the others walking towards him, pointing and exclaiming – where had he been? they’d been looking for him! And Freya, startled, began to cry. Against this background Mags commented enthusiastically on the beauties and historic features of All Saints – ‘It’s enough to make you want to join the faithful!’

  ‘You speak for yourself,’ said Tim.

  ‘Here, I’ll take her.’ Annet went behind him and freed Freya from the papoose. He slipped the straps off his shoulders, but she said, ‘It’s OK, it’s not far, I’ll carry her.’ So he dangled it in one hand. Tim, for some reason, strode ahead and stood beneath the lychgate with his hands in his pockets, staring into the road. Mags walked alongside Annet, clucking over the baby. David brought up the rear, the papoose bumping against his leg.

  As he walked down the path towards the gate he glanced over his shoulder. He could see Robert Townsend’s colourful grave, and another couple of paces revealed the seat beneath the tree as well – but the woman had gone. He found himself hoping that their intrusive presence hadn’t driven her away.

  Against a background of Freya’s bawling, Tim became suddenly restless, worried about roads, and having time to ‘get his head together’ before work the next day. When Mags demurred abou
t leaving earlier than intended he became tetchy.

  ‘Mags, I’m sure these people have had quite enough of us.’

  ‘Not at all,’ said David stoutly. ‘A cup of tea, surely.…’

  ‘Yes, surely,’ echoed Mags.

  ‘A quick cup, then—’ he glanced at his watch – ‘time marches on.’

  ‘Don’t worry chum,’ said Annet. filling the kettle one-handed, ‘we want you out as well. And this isn’t a cake-on-the-go sort of household, though we might rise to a chocolate suggestive, take a look darl, would you?’

  ‘I’ll see to this,’ David told her. ‘You go and do whatever needs to be done.’

  Annet retreated to the sofa and the yelling ceased. Mags went into the hall to phone home and give, as she put it, ‘ an ETA in case the mice are playing’. Once again David found himself in the kitchen with his brother.

  ‘Sorry to rush things,’ said Tim.

  ‘Not at all, I’d do exactly the same in your shoes.’

  ‘You’re a pal.’ He addressed Mags as she returned from the phone. ‘How are things back on the ranch?’

  ‘No reply, the machine was on. I left a threatening message.’ She patted David’s hand as he picked up the tray. ‘You’ve got all this to come.’

  He caught Annet’s eye as he entered the drawing room, and was sure she’d heard this last remark, and equally sure that they were both grimly calculating how old they would be when ‘all this’ happened.

  Freya, disturbed, Mags suggested, by all the untoward goings-on, continued to cry after her feed, and showed not the least interest in either eating any more or going to sleep. David was beginning to recognise this as the low point of the day – this queasy shift from late afternoon into early evening. Just at the time when in the old days (he tried not to think of them as ‘good’) he and Annet would be leaving work, travelling home in pleasant anticipation of a stiff drink and supper together, the pressure was winched up. Freya was too little, as Annet’s mother kept telling them, to be into a proper routine, and anyway demand feeding militated against it. Besides, she added, six p.m. was when babies traditionally played up. This mystified and apalled David, with its implication that there was some dark, biological conspiracy among infants the world over. What hope was there if babies were immutably pre-programmed to make life hell between certain hours? He could almost have wished back Mags and Tim with their comfortable, comforting child-weariness to make it all seem less sinister.