Miss Feakes returns from Scats. She passes the hedging and ditching man, who is examining the rusty remains of a shovel that he lost there ten years before. Once home she unloads the sacks of feed herself, heaving them into the shed and depositing them among the tatty collection of rakes and forks and faghooks. Miss Feakes always leaves the door of the shed open in summer so that the same family of swallows can breed in the top left-hand corner, and today she goes up on tiptoe to see inside, because the chicks are chirping, but she feels a little dizzy and decides to go in for a cup of tea, well deserved. Outside the kitchen her ancient car creaks as it cools down, and one of her cats wrests the last warmth from the engine by perching on the bonnet.
Miss Feakes is fortified by her tea and digestives, and in the company of her Labradors goes out into the Hurst. She has established that if she collects one fallen branch every week, and saws it up, she will accrue enough logs to see her through the winter. She has no other source of heating and would not have been able to afford the fuel even if she had. The oaks and beeches are kind to her, and she seldom has to wander far, but she likes birch logs best because they split so well. Miss Feakes likes to watch the flames of her fire because sometimes one sees a turquoise flame of unearthly beauty, so one can even look forward to winter.
On the way to the Hurst she meets a neighbour. ‘Hello, Aggy, how are you?’ asks Joan, and Miss Feakes replies, ‘Orfy ell,’ because she had not expected to meet anyone and has not inserted her teeth. Her favourite qualifier is ‘awfully’ and so Joan knows that Agatha is awfully well. ‘Lovely day,’ says Joan, and Agatha agrees, ‘Orfy ice.’
Now Agatha is in the Hurst, the twigs breaking beneath her feet, and the pigeons calling. Her dogs put up an iridescent cock pheasant, who cries petulantly and whirrs away across the field. From the distance come the sounds of tennis, the hollow clonk of croquet balls. A boy called Peter is shooting a tin can with an air rifle, and the pellets zip as the can skips and clatters along a gravel path. Overhead the whoosh of a hot-air balloon from the club in Godalming sets her dogs barking, and Fred, the hippy-haired mechanic from Alfold Crossways, putters towards Hascombe in his home-made motorised hang-glider, which one day he will fly illegally to Ireland, where he will fall in love, never to return.
Miss Feakes finds a newly fallen limb of beech, but it is caught up in brambles, and she hacks at its twigs to disentangle it. She has a billhook that she uses for this, which she also uses to split kindling. In the 1960s she used to imagine that the kindling was Harold Wilson, who was an ‘awfully horrid little man’. In this village only one person votes Labour, and only one person votes Liberal. The Liberal is considered a madman, and the Labourite a potential traitor. He owns the pub, however, and therefore has to be endured. Miss Feakes has voted Conservative ever since 1945, out of gratitude and respect for Winston Churchill.
Miss Feakes huffs and puffs as she drags the limb home. The dogs prance and growl, darting at the other end of it with their jaws, tugging at it, indulging some heroic doggy fantasy comprehensible only to their own simple imagination. The wood scrapes and bounces on the stones of the track, and Miss Feakes feels an unaccustomed weariness. It is as if her legs are becoming churlish. ‘Come on, old girl,’ she thinks to herself. She believes that old people live longer if they make no concessions to age, and in any case she thinks of herself no differently now than when she was eighteen, and strong and striking.
At the gate Agatha hears the telephone ringing, drops the branch and runs for the back door. Without taking her muddy wellingtons off, she pushes the door open, darts into the kitchen to fetch her teeth and dashes into the hall. Agatha is terribly excited, because nobody telephones her in the normal run of things. She is pleased that somebody wants to talk with her, she wonders who it is, she feels her heart jump with anticipation, and then she realises that the telephone wasn’t ringing. ‘Oh fire and fiddlesticks,’ she says, ‘it’s that bird again,’ for there is a starling in the village that has learned to imitate the telephone, and it flies from oak to oak along with its flock, causing young girls to think that at last he’s phoned, causing widows to think that a child has called, causing the Rector to dread that it might be the rural Dean.
Agatha plonks herself down on the second step of the stair. She feels disappointed, and a little sick from all the rushing and hoping. She thinks that, since she’s got her teeth in, she might as well phone someone herself. She tries to invent pretexts that she hasn’t used before, and then she rings Joan. ‘Oh hello, Joan,’ she says, her voice full of cheeriness, ‘awfully nice to see you this morning. I just wanted to tell you that I saw some awfully cheap spades in Scats, and I thought, “I must tell Joan.” Didn’t Peter break yours? If I remember rightly … Oh, you got another one … well, never mind. Why don’t you pop round later and we’ll have tea? I’ve got some lovely digestives. It would be awfully nice.’
In the house next door, Joan’s heart sinks into her shoes. She is making fudge for the Women’s Institute, she is trying to listen to a soap opera on the radio, and she remembers all too vividly that Agatha’s tea tastes of tomcat’s water. She is sweating and uncomfortable, unsure whether or not it’s because of the menopause or because of the effort of stirring the huge saucepan of boiling goo. ‘Oh Aggy,’ she says, ‘you must come round here, I’m sure it’s my turn. About five o’clock?’ Joan is fond of Agatha, and even secretly admires her magnificent disregard for housework. Joan suspects that if she were to be widowed and live to a solitary old age, then she would end up just like Agatha too. Joan thinks it remarkable that Agatha’s abundant halo of snowy hair is usually immaculate.
Agatha is thrilled to be popping next door later, and it is with renewed verve that she fetches two chairs from the kitchen and uses them to help her saw the log. Her new blade cuts sweetly, and she ensures that the sawdust falls on to newspaper so that she can use it as litter for the hamster. Waste not, want not. Thinking of the hamster inspires her to fetch it from its cage and let it run around her body, up one arm, across the backs of her shoulders and down the other arm. She puts it in the pocket of her cardigan and it falls asleep. Agatha fetches a deckchair and decides to have a doze in the garden, so that she will be feeling as fresh as possible at teatime.
She catches the delicious pre-war smell of Joan’s roses wafting in from the garden next door, and is lulled by the rattle and whine of a lawnmower in the middle distance. Her jackdaw flops out of the drawing-room window, and waddles portentously out into the middle of the lawn. It croaks from time to time, talking to itself about nothing in particular, peering between the blades of grass in the hope of interesting snacks, and then it menaces one of the cats, who regards it with aristocratic disdain and coolly parades away into the rhododendrons. A huge heron flaps slowly overhead, its belly laden with expensive goldfish from the big new pond constructed by the nouveau riche couple who moved in recently because it was so convenient for London. A light aircraft crosses the sun, casting a fleeting shadow upon Agatha and her house, and she is suddenly reminded of when the beautiful young men used to do victory rolls directly above, not a hundred feet in the air, teasing the tips of the oaks, and she could see them clearly in their cockpits, with their white silk scarves, and goggles, and leather headgear. She used to jump up and down, and wave, and they would smile and wave with one hand as their wondrous and romantic machines swept them back to Dunsfold aerodrome after another successful defence of country and king, the exhaust at the sides of their engine nacelles spitting bravado and orange flame. And that was how she got to know some of the handsome airmen, because they all turned up one summer evening in a three-tonner, and, with the aid of a ukelele, serenaded her from the gate, and then vaulted over it and invited themselves to tea, saying that they simply couldn’t resist coming to visit the beautiful girl who always waved to them when they were flying home from seeing off the Hun. One day, on her birthday, two of them flew overhead in a Gypsy Moth and dropped roses and then landed in the field behind, so that the cows panicked, and they came in and invited her to a dance at the mess. Agatha smiles in her sleep, remembering that she spent three days bullying the Rector’s daughter into teaching her how to waltz.