‘They haven’t the land,’ Mr Frye pointed out, for he himself farmed eighty acres of what had once been the Challacombe estate.
‘It couldn’t never be the same,’ Joe added.
Plates of turkey and ham were passed from hand to hand until everyone present was attended to. My mother said that people must take vegetables and start, else the food would get cold. A more lively chatter about the new people at Challacombe broke out as the cider was consumed. Two of the Gregary daughters were married and living in some other part of the country, a third one was at a university. The son was the apple of his parents’ eye. The father owned a grey Daimler.
The old range which had been in our kitchen all during my childhood had only the week before been replaced by a cream-coloured Aga. The acquisition of an Aga had been my mother’s dream for almost as long as I could remember. I think she’d grown to hate the range, lighting it every morning with sticks and paper, the struggles she’d had with it during the war, trying to burn wood instead of coal. But I’d been sorry to see it go. I tried to stop myself being like that about things, but I couldn’t help it.
‘To the birthday girl,’ my stepfather said, raising his glass of cider. ‘Many happy returns, my best.’
It was that that I didn’t care for in him: I wasn’t his best, my mother was. Yet he’d say it casually, wanting to pay a compliment but overdoing it so that you didn’t believe him, so that you distrusted him.
‘Matilda,’ other people said, holding up their glasses also. ‘To Matilda.’
‘Oh, my love!’ my mother cried out, getting up and running round the table to kiss me. ‘Oh, little Matilda!’ I could feel the warm dampness of tears as her cheek came into contact with mine, and the touch of her mouth, reminding me of childhood. It was a long time since my mother had kissed me.
Everyone made a fuss then, even Martin Draper and Joe and Arthur. I can still see the sunburnt face of Colin Gregg, and his pale smooth hair, his eyes seeming to laugh at me as he wished me many happy returns. For a split second he reminded me of my father.
Betty said the turkey was delicious because she could see I was embarrassed by all the attention. Belle Frye said the next thing after a twenty-first was getting married. She reminded us that she’d been married herself within a fortnight of becoming twenty-one. She giggled and Martin Draper went red because everyone knew they’d got married in a hurry. She’d been terrified at the time of what her father would say, but to her surprise he’d taken the whole thing calmly, pointing out that there were worse than Martin Draper, reminding her that he’d just inherited the Bennett’s Cross mill. It was Mrs Frye who’d been upset, unable to find consolation in her son-in-law’s inheritance of a mill. Belle deserved better, she’d said.
‘There’s that chap on the haberdashery counter,’ my stepfather said, winking his good eye all round the table, resting it for a moment on Roger Laze in order to stir up rivalry. ‘Keen as mustard, that chap is.’
I knew he’d say that. As soon as Belle Frye had mentioned that the next thing after a twenty-first was a wedding I knew he’d refer to the chap on the haberdashery counter, a pimpled youth with no roof to his mouth. It was typical of my stepfather that he’d notice a counter-hand’s interest in me. He’d repeatedly mentioned it before. It was typical that he’d mention it now, in public, assuming I’d be pleased that everyone should know I had an admirer, not thinking to himself that no girl would want even remotely to be associated with an unattractive shop-boy. It wasn’t teasing, even though he winked: it was an attempt to be kind. My father would just have teased. He’d have made me blush and I’d have been angry and would have complained to my mother afterwards. It seemed silly now that I’d ever minded.
‘Delicious, this stuffing is,’ Betty said. ‘Eat every scrap of your ham,’ she warned one of her children, with a threat in her voice.
‘Tip-top ham,’ my stepfather said.
‘I’ll always remember the day Matilda was born,’ Joe said. ‘I nearly got sacked for letting a heifer wander.’
‘A beautiful autumn,’ Miss Pritchard said quietly, ‘1930.’
I was six weeks early, my mother said, a fact she’d told me before. She’d been over to Bennett’s Cross in the trap and had had to pull hard on the reins when the pony had taken fright at a piece of newspaper on the road. It was that that had brought me on.
‘Old Ashburton’s funeral the day before,’ Arthur said.
‘I never knew that.’ I looked at him, interested at last in the conversation, for it wasn’t important that I’d been six weeks early or that the autumn had been beautiful. But it did seem strange that in all my conversations with Mrs Ashburton it had never become established that the man she talked so much about had been buried the day before my birth.
‘Big old funeral,’ Arthur said.
Miss Pritchard nodded and I could see the memory of it in her face. She wouldn’t of course have attended it because the Ashburtons and she wouldn’t have been on any kind of terms, there being nothing to connect them. She’d told me that when I’d asked her once; she’d explained that to people like the Ashburtons she’d been just a schoolteacher, adding that she’d only been invited to Mrs Ashburton’s tennis party because everyone else had. But she’d have drawn the blinds of the school-house and would have waited in the gloom until the funeral had gone by.
I watched her as she ate her turkey and ham. I watched her thinking and remembering, not taking part in the conversations around her. She was slight and fragile-looking, wearing a brown suit with a necklace of beads falling on to a brown jersey. She’d retired about eighteen months ago; it was impossible to believe that we’d ever considered her unfair.
‘You’re looking lovely, dear,’ Mrs Laze whispered across the table at me, leaning and poking her head out so that no one else would hear, for she was a woman who rarely spoke. The story was still told that she’d shot off Roger’s foot during the war so that he wouldn’t be called up, but now that the war was over it was increasingly difficult to visualize the scene and I began to think the rumour wasn’t true. They both still said that an accident had happened when he was setting out to shoot rabbits.
‘Thank you, Mrs Laze.’
I wasn’t looking lovely, just ordinary in a lavender-coloured dress, my hair straight and reddish, freckles everywhere. Betty and Belle Frye were far prettier than I was, as they’d always been. And Betty’s girls were prettier than I’d been at their age. My face was uninteresting, not quite plain, but too round, too lacking in special characteristics. I greatly disliked my hair and always had.
‘D’you remember the day you kept us all in, Miss Pritchard?’ Colin Gregg said, laughing. ‘The entire top class?’
‘Long fields of barley and of rye,’ Martin Draper said, laughing also. ‘An abbot on an ambling pad’
Miss Pritchard laughed herself. She’d taught Joe and Arthur too. Roger Laze had been a favourite of hers, she’d never liked Belle Frye. She used to shout at Martin Draper because he couldn’t understand things.
‘Who’s else for ham?’ my stepfather cried out, on his feet again, waving a carving knife about. ‘Ham? Turkey? Orders taken now, please. Pass up the plates, young Martin.’
‘The builders moved in today,’ I heard Roger Laze saying in his quiet voice, answering a question Miss Pritchard had asked him. He was referring to Challacombe Manor, and I imagined the builders shaking their heads over the place, over the broken windows and the leaking roof and the floorboards that gave way when you walked on them. ‘D’you remember that day?’ Belle Frye shouted down the table at me, and I smiled at her and said yes, knowing she meant the day we’d climbed in through a window.