Agatha goes to tea with Joan at five o’clock precisely and Joan notices that there is a little piece of bramble in Agatha’s hair, but she doesn’t say anything. They talk about how the village isn’t what it was. There’s no one to run the village shop, and weekenders and commuters are snapping up the houses so that local people, born and bred, can’t afford to live in their own community. The girls’ cricket team is up to full complement, but the men’s is two players short, and Agatha says that she’d play in it herself if she were younger. ‘I used to bowl an awfully good googly.
‘Did you know that Polly Wantage used to play for England?’
‘Gracious,’ says Joan, ‘did she?’ Joan is surprised that one can live in a village for so many years, and yet know others so slenderly.
‘She was quite the spin bowler,’ says Agatha. ‘Wonderful leg break.’
Joan tries to imagine Polly playing cricket but she sees Polly only as she is now, apparelled like a man, in plus fours, hairy tweed jacket and deerstalker hat, prowling the woods in unrelenting pursuit of squirrels. The children say that she eats them, but this has never been proved. Polly lives in a large house in the woods at the end of a muddy track that is almost impassable in winter. She shares it with her lifelong companion, a secretive woman who wears fine dresses and lorgnettes and is rumoured to be an artist, but hardly anyone has ever seen her. Everybody suspects that Polly and her companion might be more than friends, but nobody has said so openly. Polly once scored a century against Australia. She is the kind of character who belongs to this soil and these people, in the same manner that the bracken belongs on Busses Common, and it is unwarranted for others to pry into details.
Agatha goes home and calls her menagerie. ‘Chuffy chuffy chuffy chuffy!’ She arranges the bowls about the floor, on top of the newspaper, and decides that she will spend the evening knitting another grey cardigan. Agatha is not fat, but she has pendulous breasts and can’t be bothered with brassieres. She knits vast and shapeless grey cardigans that she mistakenly thinks will disguise their fascinating motion, and she wears each one until it disintegrates. She sits in her armchair in the living room, with the windows open so that she can hear the linnets sing, and her needles click together. ‘Shoo shoo,’ she says to the cats who come to tug at her wool.
Outside in the Hurst, Polly Wantage is shooting squirrels. The twelve-bore cracks, the dogs of the village are set to barking, and Agatha hears the little pellets pattering down through the leaves like the first drops of rain. Agatha deprecates this slaughter of innocent creatures, and she tuts about it to herself, but she pardons it because she thinks that Polly Wantage must be slightly dotty.
At eight o’clock Agatha decides to have supper, and goes to make a pot of tea. She arranges four digestive biscuits on a plate, which she will eat slowly in order to make them last.
She feels a sharp ache in her left arm, and then a blow from a sledgehammer seems to strike her from within. She gasps and falls to her knees. She has never known such bone-breaking pain in her whole life, and she is bewildered, breathless and astonished. She puts her hands to the floor and crawls a little way, but then lets herself collapse slowly sideways among the animals’ dishes. She smells newsprint, mud, Kitekat and Chappie, and closes her eyes in agony and resignation.
Peace descends upon her like a mother’s hand, and she has the feeling that she is flying away over the fields. Below is the stumpy tower of St Peter’s Church on the hill, and, twenty miles away, the sparkling angel on the summit of Guildford Cathedral flashes a scintilla of golden light. She is higher than the rooks, and finds herself in a vast and empty space. She looks about expectantly, thinking that someone is coming to meet her, but there is no one at all. Not even her father, who spent his life behind a newspaper and a pall of pipe smoke, nor even her mother, who lived her life as if it were a penance.
There is no one to meet Miss Agatha Feakes. But then she looks down and sees that there are hundreds of animals; there are cats and rabbits, goats and hens, guinea pigs and dogs. She is shocked to realise that she knows all their names, all their likes and dislikes, all their whimsies. It strikes her as wondrous that her life must have been so abundant in affection.
She is about to pick up the first rabbit that she had when she was six years old, but she becomes aware that someone is coalescing out of the light. He is tall and slim, he is dressed in RAF service dress, and he has his peaked cap under his right arm. On the left breast of his tunic he wears the purple and white diagonal stripes of the Distinguished Flying Cross, and the red and white diagonal stripes of the Air Force Cross. She is about to shake hands, but he leans forward and kisses her softly on the cheek. Surprised, she puts her hand to her cheek, and smells Sunlight Soap, brilliantine and eau de cologne. Casually he removes the morning’s brambles from her hair, and says, ‘Hello, old thing.’
‘Alec?’ she asks, incredulous. ‘Alec?’
Flight Lieutenant Alec Montrose raises a quizzical eyebrow and runs an elegant forefinger along his thin black moustache. He smiles, and Agatha’s lips tremble at the memory. ‘When I heard you’d been killed,’ she says, ‘I was most awfully upset. I cried buckets and buckets, for weeks and weeks. I wrapped the ring in tissue and I put it in my jewellery box, and every now and then I take it out and look.’
Alec bends down and places his cap rakishly on the head of a sleeping Labrador. When he straightens up he puts his right hand on her left hip, and says, ‘My dance, I think.’ Out in the ether Victor Sylvester’s band strikes up their favourite tune. He draws her close and she lays her head on his shoulder. It is as if he is taking away all the accumulated weariness of life; it empties out of her like water from a jug.
In the arms of Alec Montrose, Agatha waltzes and whirls away on lightened feet, and, far below, the village in which she was born and nourished, and into whose soil her body will melt away, prepares itself for the night.
AFTERWORD
There was a long period during which I persuaded myself into believing that my childhood was a rural idyll. Upon reflection I realised that in fact I spent the greater part of my youth at boarding schools. My public school was admittedly in beautiful countryside, and I spent much time working for a local farmer, or walking on the local estate and sunbathing naked in its bracken when I should have been doing sports. The estate had a gibbet, hung with the ragged corpses of multitudes of vermin, and this is presumably how its gamekeepers proved their worth. I did partially fail to grow up middle class because I had exclusively working-class jobs at first, but all this is not quite the same as growing up wearing smocks and clogs, surrounded by geese and dozens of siblings, fetching pails of warm milk, and eating dishes made of the green and chewy parts of wild animals.