I always nodded, although I didn’t really understand. And then she’d go on about the estate as it had been, and then about her husband and the conversations they used to have. Sometimes she didn’t address me directly. She smiled and just talked, always returning to the men who had been killed and how lucky she was that her husband had at least come back. She’d prayed, she said, that he’d come back, and every time another man from the estate or from the neighbourhood had been reported dead she’d felt that there was a better chance that her husband wouldn’t die also. ‘By the law of averages,’ she explained, ‘some had to come back. Some men have always come back from wars, you convince yourself.’
At this point I would always nod again, and Mrs Ashburton would say that looking back on it now she felt ashamed that she had ever applied the law of averages to the survival or death of men. Doing so was as horrible as war itself: the women who were left at home became cruel in their fear and their selfishness. Cruelty was natural in war, Mrs Ashburton said.
At the time she’d hated the Germans and she was ashamed of that too, because the Germans were just people like other people. But when she talked about them the remains of the hatred were still in her voice, and I imagined the Germans from what she told me about them: people who ate black bread and didn’t laugh much, who ate raw bacon, who were dour, grey and steely. She described the helmets they wore in wartime. She told me what a bayonet was, and I used to feel sick when I thought of one going into a man’s stomach and being twisted in there to make sure the man would die. She told me about poison gas, and the trenches, and soldiers being buried alive. The way she spoke I knew she was repeating, word for word, the things her husband had told her, things that had maybe been the cause of his affected mind. Even her voice sounded unusual when she talked about the war, as though she was trying to imitate her husband’s voice, and the terror that had been in it. He used to cry, she said, as he walked about the gardens, unable to stop the tears once they’d begun.
Dick didn’t say anything while we rode the two miles over to Challacombe Manor that Saturday. He didn’t even say anything when he suddenly dismounted and leaned his bicycle against a black gate, and climbed over the gate to have a smoke behind the hedge. If my father had come by he’d have known what was happening because he would have seen Betty and myself waiting in the lane, surrounded by the cloud of smoke that Dick always managed to make with his Woodbine. Our job was to warn him if we saw my father coming, but my father didn’t come that afternoon and when Dick had finished we continued on our way.
We’d often been to tea at Challacombe Manor before. Mrs Ashburton said we were the only visitors she had because most of her friends were dead, which was something that happened, she explained, if you were eighty-one. We always had tea in the kitchen, a huge room that smelt of oil, with armchairs in it and a wireless, and an oil-stove on which Mrs Ashburton cooked, not wishing to have to keep the range going. There were oatcakes for tea, and buttered white and brown bread, and pots of jam that Mrs Ashburton bought in the town, and a cake she bought also, usually a fruitcake. Afterwards we’d walk through the house with her, while she pointed out the places where the roof had given way, and the dry rot, and windows that were broken. She hadn’t lived in most of the house since the war, and had lived in even less of it since her husband had died in 1929. We knew these details by heart because she’d told us so many times. In one of the outhouses there was an old motor-car with flattyres, and the gardens were now all overgrown with grass and weeds. Rhododendrons were choked, and buddleia and kerria and hydrangeas.
The house was grey and square with two small wings, a stone Georgian house with wide stone steps leading to a front door that had pillars on either side of it and a fanlight above it. The gravel expanse in front of it was grassy now, and slippery in wet weather because of moss that had accumulated. French windows opened on to it on either side of the hall door, from the rooms that had been the drawing-room and the dining-room. Lawns stretched around the house, with grass like a meadow on them now. The tennis court, which we’d never known about until Mrs Ashburton mentioned it, was hidden away, beyond the jungle of shrubbery.
‘You see?’ she said. ‘You see, Dick?’ She was wearing a long, old-fashioned dress and a wide-brimmed white hat, and sunglasses because the afternoon was fiercely bright.
The grass on the tennis court was a yard high, as high as the rusty iron posts that were there to support the net. ‘Look,’ Mrs Ashburton said.
She led us to the stable-yard, past the outhouse where the motor-car was, and into a smaller outhouse. There was a lawn-mower there, as rusty as the tennis posts, and a marker in the same condition, and an iron roller. Tucked into the beams above our heads was a rolled-up tennis net. ‘He adored tennis,’ she said. He really loved it.’
She turned and we followed her across the stable-yard, into the kitchen by the back door. She talked about her husband while she made tea.
We ate the bought fruitcake, listening to her. We’d heard it all before, but we always considered it was worth it because of the cake and the biscuits and the buttered bread and the pots of jam. And always before we left she gave us ginger beer and pieces of chocolate broken upon a saucer. She told us about the child which might have been born to her husband and herself, six months after the old queen died, but which had miscarried. ‘Everything went wrong,’ she said. She told us about the parties there’d been at Challacombe Manor. Champagne and strawberries and cream, and parties with games that she described, and fancy dress.
‘No reason at all,’ she said, ‘why we shouldn’t have a tennis party.’
Dick made a sighing sound, a soft, slight noise that Mrs Ashburton didn’t hear.
‘Tennis party?’ Betty murmured.
‘No reason, dear.’
That morning Dick and Betty had had an argument. Betty had said that of course he must go to tea with Mrs Ashburton, since he’d always gone in the past. And Dick had said that Mrs Ashburton had been cunning: all these years, he said, she’d been inviting us to tea so that when the time was ripe she could get us to clean up her old tennis court. ‘Oh, don’t be silly!’ Betty had cried, and then had said that it would be the cruellest thing that Dick had ever done if he didn’t go to tea with an old woman just because she’d mentioned her tennis court. I’d been cross with Dick myself, and none of us felt very happy because the matter of the tennis court had unattractively brought into the open the motive behind our putting up with Mrs Ashburton. I didn’t like it when she called me her Matilda and put her arms around me, and said she was sure her child would have been a little girl, and that she was almost as sure that she’d have called her Matilda. I didn’t like it when she went on and on about the war and her husband coming back a wreck, or about the champagne and the strawberries and cream. ‘Poor Mrs Ashburton!’ we’d always said, but it wasn’t because she was poor Mrs Ashburton that we’d filled the emptiness of Saturday afternoons by cycling over to Challacombe Manor.
‘Shall we go and have another look at it?’ she said when we’d eaten all the food that was on the table. She smiled in her frail, almost beautiful way, and for a moment I wondered if Dick wasn’t perhaps right about her cunning. She led the way back to the overgrown tennis court and we all four stood looking at it.