I thought Mrs Myburn might provide a cup of coffee before we started, but no. Mr Myburn stood ready wearing his rubber boots and a yellow construction worker's safety helmet which he'd presumably borrowed, Mrs Myburn peered apprehensively from the shelter of the bungalow doorway, and work was obviously expected to start right away.
With Mr Myburn's help I threaded the ladder from the top of the bank up through the intricacies of the first tree, climbed it, tied the top of it to a hefty branch for safety, fetched up the saw, primed the oil button and began cutting. Most of the branches dropped neatly into the field or over the hedge on the orchard slope. It was when I secured a long rope to a branch that overhung the shed, cut partly through it, got down and asked Mr Myburn to help me pull it sideways that Mrs Myburn sprang into action. 'No, darling! No!' she shrieked, rushing forward as if I'd suggested he jump off the Matterhorn. 'You mustn't! It's dangerous!'
When I pointed out that with two of us pulling on a thirty-foot rope, both feet on the ground and standing way beyond the range of the length of the branch, it was perfectly safe, but that I couldn't pull it on my own and if I cut right through the branch instead and just let it drop it would land on the shed, she capitulated. Hands clasped in prayer, she stood by as we pulled the branch sideways and Mr Myburn held it there while I shinned up the ladder and severed it completely. 'Oh, Leslie, you are brave,' she cooed while I climbed down and prepared to move the ladder.
We got all four trees down like that – first the branches, then the trunks – until a large pile of timber lay on the ground in the Myburns' field and their shed was out of danger. I hadn't the strength to cut the wood into logs for them, and I wasn't lending Mr Myburn my saw. One thing you have to do with an electric saw – which he didn't know, never having used one – is to press the oil button at very frequent intervals, otherwise the chain will dry out and the motor overheat. He'd questioned my pumping it as often as I did – they didn't do that with petrol ones, he said, his tone conveying that, as a woman, I didn't understand these things. Maybe not, but engine-powered saws work on a different oiling system, and I had no intention of having my electric one ruined. It was essential for the cottage wood supply for the winter. So I made the excuse that I had work to do with it later, trailed back down to the cottage with the equipment, took the notice off the cat-run door, telling them 'I'm back, chaps. We're all right for a while yet – I did it', and tottered indoors to have some bread and cheese before collapsing into an armchair. All afternoon I could hear Mr Myburn up at the top of the hill, industriously cutting logs with a saw borrowed elsewhere. Every now and then it stopped and, from the stuttering noises, proved difficult to start again. I hoped he understood the mechanism of that one.
One thing it did bring home to me was that as a widow I was indeed a social outcast as far as some people were concerned. Immediately after Charles's death many people had called offering sympathy, going out of their way to be friendly. 'It doesn't last,' I was told by other women who'd gone through the experience before me. 'People don't really want you when you're on your own. They soon start to drop you.'
How true that had turned out to be. In the old days, if Charles and I had been taking down those trees together, we'd have been asked in for coffee before we started. It would have been a friendly get-together. Now I was fended off as if I had the plague, or might expect further help with something.
The Myburns weren't the only ones, either. One couple, Rhona and Paul, with whom Charles and I had been very friendly – we played cards together regularly – actually told me, when we met by accident some weeks after his death, that they'd seen me one day in the supermarket in Cheddar but had kept out of my way. 'We thought you wouldn't want to talk to anybody,' they said.
What they meant was that they hadn't wanted to talk to me, and were only telling me now in case I'd happened to see them. The only time we met again after that was when Rhona's mother, herself a widow, came to stay with them. I was invited over to tea, and to go and see a place they were thinking of buying. It seemed they had the idea of starting up a boarding cattery and kennels and had found an old house with large grounds and an attached barn that could, they said, be turned into a granny flat. Several granny flats from the size of it. If they could get planning permission Rhona's mother, parked docilely side by side in the back of their car with me as if we were already in our wheelchairs, was going to sell her own house in Essex, put the money towards the capital they needed, and have a flat with them. Did they hope I might consider doing the same? I wondered. I preserved an unimpressed silence, countered Paul's remark as I left that evening that the car I was driving – bought six weeks before Charles's sudden death – was too big for me with the reply that I needed it to pull our caravan, which I intended to go on using, and never heard from them again.
There was likewise a man who lived at the other end of the village but was grazing some goats in a field further past the cottage. He always used to stop and chat to Charles, but after his death would pass by, when I was in the garden, looking straight ahead and pretending not to see me – until the day when, after a tremendous gale during the night, I was standing on top of one of the big flat cottage gateposts, chainsaw in hand, preparing to deal with a branch of the damson tree that had split off from the main bough and was hanging like a vast, leafy curtain across the front gate.
The goat man, trudging past on his usual morning visit, stopped and looked across at me. Oh good, I thought. He was going to offer to hold the branch while I sawed. Like heck he was. Would I be going out that afternoon? he asked, and when I said I wouldn't he said he and his wife would be away for the rest of the day and one of the goats was due to kid. Would I keep an eye on her and phone the vet if necessary? I said that I would and he went on his way, apparently without noticing that I was arched on the gatepost like Nelson on his column, preparing to saw off an awkward branch, and might have appreciated assistance.
That was why I put up with Mrs Binney's visits as patiently as I did instead of, as Father Adams and Fred Ferry continually advised me, 'giving she a kick in the pants'. They meant it, metaphorically, of course. Father Adams, who'd been at school with her, always referred to her as Old Mod (her name was Maude). Old Mod, he said, had been a misery for as long as he could remember. She was a widow too, though. Always referring to the fact. Always talking to me of 'people in our position' or 'people of our age' – which at times made me feel like taking Father Adams's advice since she was, I knew, a good twenty years older than I was.
But she was obviously lonely. Probably felt as bereft of people who cared about her as I did at times – which was why my mouth fell open and stayed that way when she told me one day that there was somebody in the village who was keen on her.
'Spicy bit of news then?' enquired Father Adams, happening to pass by as usual at the crucial moment.