The Banker's Niece 14: The Chart of Food and Drink Consumed

1969

‘Half a piece of toast with butter and marmalade,’ wrote Jane in the column labelled Breakfast. ‘One cup black tea.’

    Good, that was good. She didn’t see how she could cut that down any further without her mother making a fuss. However, it wouldn’t be long before her mother noticed that there was half a piece of toast left over in the toast-rack at the end of the meal and wonder to whom it belonged.

    Jane had toyed with the idea of getting her father to eat it while her mother was in the scullery, but he only played with his own piece of toast, leaving most of it in crumbs on his plate, and anyway at breakfast he concentrated on his Times, which he folded into neat readable squares on the table next to him, and she didn’t like to interrupt.

    In the column marked Lunch she wrote ‘Nothing’.

    Perfect. No room for improvement whatsoever. Again, however, she wondered how long it would be before her absence from lunch was noticed. The prefects who headed the tables wouldn’t worry about an empty place occasionally as girls were always going missing – sobbing in the cloakrooms because of ‘boyfriend trouble’, in sickbay because they’d slipped over during Games, catching up on homework, leaving the school illegally in order to buy sweets.

    However teachers patrolled the buildings looking for stragglers and you had to have a jolly good excuse for them to leave you alone. Jane hid in the grounds, which was all right now that it was May, but would be impossible next term, as either she’d have to get outside somehow with her coat or mac, or she’d have to manage without them and reappear shivering and/or wet.

    There was a campaign led by some of the braver sixth-form girls for people to be allowed to bring packed lunches if they wanted. She doubted they’d win but, if they did, that would be the perfect solution. She could bring a packed lunch and give it away.

    Next, the column marked Supper. This was the trickiest one of all, as both her parents were present at the meal and both reasonably alert – unless her father had had too much whisky and her mother too much wine.

    Not that her father noticed what she ate and didn’t eat these days. The only time she could remember him noticing her at all was a few months ago, before she started her Chart of Food and Drink Consumed, when he suddenly looked up from his paper and said, ‘Haven’t you got nice and thin.’ She hadn’t realised it herself until then, but she had suddenly shot up in height so perhaps she’d stretched.

    ‘Cauliflower cheese, one boiled potato, salad,’ she wrote. ‘One apple. One glass water.’

   It was particularly annoying that she had to eat the potato, given that her mother never ate potatoes.
   No, the only way she improve on supper was to avoid it altogether, as she did lunch at school, but the only way she could do that was by going to a friend’s house and pretending to her mother that she would eat there and then pretending to her friend’s mother that she’d already eaten. But she only went out at weekends and in any case her mother was getting wise to the trick and trying to make Jane have some bread before she went.

    Her mother couldn’t actually force the bread down Jane’s throat, at least Jane didn’t think she could. But it was scary thought nonetheless, especially as they’d been learning about the suffragettes, and Mrs Clay, the history teacher, had shown them pictures of women tied to chairs or pinned to the floor, with food being poured down tubes stuffed up their noses. One of the girls in class had started gagging and had to leave the room.

    She slipped that week’s chart into her Biology textbook inside her school bag. It was the safest place she could think of.

Once upon a time Jane and Ollie had had their own private kingdom up in the attic. The stairs to the attic were steep and narrow and close to the ceiling and grown-ups struggled with them but she and Ollie used to scamper up on all fours and then float down holding on to the banister with their feet hardly touching the steps like in dreams. Only the airing cupboard and a secret passage separated their two bedrooms. They found the secret passage by accident. Well, Jane did.

    Both bedrooms had a cupboard under the eaves. At least grown-ups called them cupboards because they couldn’t stand up in them, but Jane and Ollie could, so they called them dens. At the far end of each den was a hatch and when they were feeling brave one or other of them would stick their head through the hatch into the darkness of the roof-space beyond.
    One day, when they were in Jane’s den, Ollie dared Jane to climb through the hatch and, because she was a year and a half older than him and enjoyed showing off to her goggling brother, she did. After a terrifying crawl across splintery rafters, through sticky cobwebs and past gurgling water-tanks, Jane found herself coming out of the hatch in Ollie’s den.

    They leapt up and down. It was exactly like in one of their favourite books, The Magician’s Nephew*. Who knew what else they might find in the roof? An entrance to another world? A mad uncle?

    What they did find, or at least what Jane found, was somewhere she could put things and be sure that neither her mother nor Mrs Greenaway would ever find them. And the main thing she put there was her Notebooks.

     She could hardly remember a time when she didn’t have Notebooks. She started them almost as soon as she could write, as soon as she realised that shouting and disagreeing with parents only got her shut away and that the angry letters she wrote them and pushed under the door of their bedroom probably weren’t even read. They never said they got them, at any rate.

    As well as copying things out from books, using her different-coloured biros, she wrote pretend angry letters. Writing these was almost better than writing real letters as she could put anything in them. She could threaten to kick people or pull their hair or scratch their faces, or even kill them. It was wonderful.

    The nearest she’d got to any of that in real life was kicking the life-size model of Father Christmas (when no one was looking) that sat in the hall every December, and having a wrestling match with Gaynor, the fiery Welsh girl at school. Unfortunately in that case, a teacher saw them from a window and told them to stop.

    Then she started using the Notebooks for writing stories about herself, in which she always got exactly what she wanted. That was exciting too, as it started her thinking about her future, about being grown-up and free. She decided that the only thing she wanted to be when she left home was naughty.

    One day other stories started to float into her mind. They weren’t about her. They weren’t even about people she knew. She didn't have to think about writing them: they wrote themselves. They gave her tingles. They were magic. They were like a secret passage in her mind.

    But two years ago when Ollie was eleven he went away to boarding school and her parents decided that she should move down to a bedroom on the first floor. With Elaine, the nanny, gone there was a spare room, even with the two rooms kept for guests and her parents taking up three rooms between them – one for sleeping and one each for their clothes.

    ‘We’ll be able to keep an eye on you down here,’ said her mother.

    ‘And we’ll save on heating,’ said her father.

So here she was sitting at her desk in Elaine's old bedroom. It wasn’t too bad. There were three rooms between her and her parents’ bedroom. She had her own bathroom. She still had a view.

    She missed Elaine. She used to sit on Elaine's rug in front of her electric fire in the evenings after Jane's bath and they had long talks together. Once on her night off Elaine took Jane on the bus with her to stay with her parents at their flat in Tunbridge Wells. Before bed they all sat round the gas fire together drinking Horlicks, and Elaine's mother smiled at Jane. She felt so happy.
    But that was a long time ago.
    She looked out of the window. The sun was setting behind the line of trees on top of the Downs. Perhaps she and Ollie could go walking up there when he came home from school in the holidays. She missed Ollie too.
    She had no time for Notebooks any more, what with homework and her chart. She didn’t even know if the Notebooks were still in the roof-space, as the attic was shut off and she had no excuse for going up there. And anyway she’d be much too big to get through the hatch now.

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* By C S Lewis. The prequel to The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe.

The Banker's Niece 13: Jane's secret

1968

Jane switched on her bedside light and checked her clock. One a.m. Her parents should be asleep by now. She would be safe.

    She climbed out of bed and knelt in front of her bedside cabinet. She’d undone the catch before she went to bed so that it wouldn’t make a noise. All she had to do now was swing the door open.

    As she did so the smell rushed out, even though she’d wrapped everything as well as she could in newspaper and then put the newspaper packages inside a giant brown-paper bag. She squashed the package and tucked it into the waistband of her pyjama trousers then wrapped herself in her dressing-gown. With any luck that would disguise both the shape and the smell and then, if her parents did catch her, all she had to do was pretend she was wandering around because she couldn’t sleep.

    Although it was February and she knew that the job would take some time, she didn’t put her slippers on. It was difficult to walk quietly in slippers. Bare feet would be much better.

    After turning out her bedside light and giving her eyes a few seconds to get used to the dark, she made her way across her bedroom and out on to the landing.

    She crept across the landing, using the furniture to help her find her way – the curved chest-of-drawers that had belonged to her mother’s mother, the velvet-covered chairs, the bookshelf, the banister around the stairwell. Every time a floorboard creaked she stopped, hoping that if her parents were awake they would think it was just the house making its usual noises.

    She inched her way downstairs, hanging on to the banister and feeling her way with her feet. She had a horrible vision of falling and crashing to the bottom and the contents of her parcel scattering and her mother shooting out and saying in her scary way, 'What on earth do you think you're doing?' 

    Downstairs, she tiptoed across the hall, trying not to slip on the rugs scattered over the wooden floor. Past the door to the dining-room, past the cloakroom and the door to the cellar, and then at last she reached the kitchen.

    Squeezing the door shut behind her, she leant against it for a few seconds, waiting for her heart to get back to normal. The kitchen was at the opposite end of the house from her parents’ room. She could probably relax now.

    As always the kitchen smelt of clean washing and apples. She could hear the tick of the little clock her mother kept on the shelf next to the fridge. She fumbled for the light switch and clicked it on, screwing her eyes up against the sudden brightness.

    The kitchen’s familiar clutter welcomed her. The basket of clothes waiting to be ironed. The plates piled on the dresser waiting to be put away. Shopping bags and her mother’s handbag hanging off the dresser’s drawer handles. Breakfast half-laid on the table.

    Apart from the attic, the kitchen was her favourite room in the house. You didn’t have to be on your best behaviour in here. You didn’t have to worry about knocking over a family heirloom or treading mud on to the pale blue carpet. You weren’t likely to meet some stranger who would eye you up like an exhibit.

    Because of the Aga it was always warm and when she was seven and the water in the cattle troughs froze solid for months and she and Ollie used to race outside every morning and slide on them, the family had more or less lived in the kitchen. They had central heating now of course. After that winter, her mother had insisted on it.

    It was a shame to have to do something so horrible in the kitchen, but at the same time the place made it better. Carefully, she hauled the parcel out of her pyjama bottoms and laid it on the floor in front of the Aga.

It wasn’t easy being younger than everyone else in her class at school as half the time she didn’t understand what the other girls were talking about, especially things about ‘boyfriends’.

    On her first day at senior school, she saw a sign in the lavatories that she didn’t understand.

     ‘Please do not put sanitary towels down the toilets,’ it said. ‘Use the bins provided.’

    ‘What are sanitary towels?’ she asked Anthea who’d been at junior school with her.

    ‘Don’t you know?’ giggled her friend.

    Why for that matter was the school using a word like ‘toilet’? Her mother would have had a fit if she'd known. It was one of those words like 'pardon' and serviette' that made her look as if the cat had been sick. It was all so confusing. Perhaps it was because her new school was a grammar school, not the private girls’ boarding school where her mother had gone and for which Jane had been ‘put down’ at birth.
    Her parents had made the decision about the school.

    ‘It’ll be so nice having you at home where we can keep an eye on you,’ said her mother.

    ‘And we’ll save so much money,’ said her father.

    Later in the year, the girls in her class were summoned in small groups to the study of the Religious Education teacher and shown diagrams of the reproductive organs of rabbits. In spite of this, things slowly started to make sense. Nevertheless, it was horrible changing for games and being the only girl not yet wearing a bra, even if she was at least as tall as all the others.

    So, when she first discovered blood on her knickers (the white ones which she wore underneath the regulation brown ones), she was thrilled. Now she too could pick at spots in the cloakroom mirrors and complain about it being ‘that time of the month’. She too could walk around clutching her stomach and avoid swimming.

    She rushed into her parents’ rooms where her mother was putting away clothes to tell her the good news. Her mother had tried to tell her the ‘facts of life’ one day but both of them had been so embarrassed that Jane had hurriedly said that she’d learnt all about them at school, even though there were lots of questions she would have liked to ask.

     Her mother said nothing, instead rummaging in a cupboard and bringing out some pieces of greying elastic with buttons on them and a packet of big white pads.

    ‘You fix your STs –’ she waved the packet - ‘to this -’ she waved the elastic contraption.

    Jane went back to her room and put them on. It was like wearing a nappy. She couldn’t walk properly and she couldn’t put her trousers on over them.

    After a while the pad became damp as if she’d peed herself. She wondered how often you changed the pads. When the blood came through the other side, she decided.

    Because of the notice at school she knew not to put the used pads – the ‘STs’ as her mother called them - down the lavatory so instead she wrapped them in newspaper and put them in the wastepaper basket in her bedroom.

    A few days later her mother beckoned her. She was holding the newspaper-wrapped packages. Some of the blood had seeped through and Jane could smell it from where she stood.

    ‘Mrs Greenaway found these when she was cleaning your room,’ she said.

    Mrs Greenaway lived in the flat above the stables with her husband the gardener. She was always going through Jane’s things and complaining about her.

    ‘It was very unpleasant for her,’ continued her mother. ‘Don’t put your STs in the wastepaper basket. Burn them in the Aga.’

As this was her second time, Jane knew more or less what to do. It had been much worse the first time as all she had to go on was her memory of what her mother did every morning when she cleared the Aga of ash and filled it with fresh ‘coke’.

    So she set to straight away. First she lifted the cover of the hot plate and propped it open against the back wall. It was heavy and she had to stand on tiptoes to reach and she was terrified of it crashing back down again on to her arm. The heat from the plate made the hair on her arms stand on end.

    Next she took the metal hook from its rack. It was longer than her arm and she struggled to manipulate it into the handle of the hefty stone bung in the centre of the hotplate. Finally it caught and she started levering out the bung. It came out with a rush, flames shot out of the hole, the Aga roared like a volcano and Jane jerked backwards, dropping both bung and metal hook. They rolled over the quarry-tiled floor with a clang that seemed never to end.

   She stopped breathing. Her palms broke out in sweat. She strained her ears for any sound of movement upstairs.

    At last the ringing stopped. No one came.

    One by one she picked the bloody packages off the floor and threw them into the flaming hole. She couldn’t wait to be rid of them but there were too many so they bulged out of the top. She’d have to let the bottom ones burn down so that she could poke the rest in properly. Then she’d have to stay and make sure they all caught fire and turned to ash. She couldn’t bear to leave any evidence for her mother to find in the morning.

    She pulled up the kitchen stool and sat down to wait.

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The Banker's Niece 12: Stonehenge

Spring 1978

It was a sunny Saturday and Jane and Rick were pootling along the A303 in the Mini Clubman. Pootling rather than speeding for a variety of reasons.  

    As far as Rick knew, the Clubman had never been beyond Bristol before so he’d spent the whole of the previous weekend in the road outside Jane’s house either underneath the vehicle or with his head in the engine in order to ‘give it a good service’.

    ‘It’s burning a lot of oil,’ he said, coming up to Jane’s room, holding an oily rag and wiping his hands on it. ‘We won’t be able to push it.’

    Pushing it was in any case optimistic as the Mini’s top speed was 55mph. Any faster and the whole contraption began to shake, or ‘judder’ as Rick put it.

    Jane had realised early on that she was going to have to be navigator in the partnership as Rick preferred to drive ‘by intuition’, usually reaching the right place eventually but taking a lot of detours en route. ‘The detours are the best bit’ he always said, but they infuriated Jane. Being a novice at the art however and inclined to car-sickness, she had to keep asking Rick to slow down or stop so that she could look at the map and check they were going the right way.

    At least that was her excuse. The truth was, she was in no hurry for them to reach their destination. 
    They’d been through a few towns – Jane had clocked Ilminster, Ilchester, Sparkford and Wincanton - but otherwise all you could see from the car was countryside.

    Gangly lambs frolicked in the fields. They’d passed one whole hillside covered in white blossom. When they paused at a couple of roundabouts Jane had been astonished by the brilliance of the new leaves peeking out of the hedges.

    It was a long time, she realised, since she’d had the chance to notice nature. Nearly six years in fact: three in London and then three in Exeter. Yet when she was a child she spent all her free time outdoors in the countryside. It was where she felt happy.

    Neither had driven from the South-west to the South-east before so they had no idea how long the journey would take. In case they couldn't stop for lunch and because it was cheaper to provide their own, Jane had made them some cheese sandwiches and a Thermos of instant coffee which she was busy passing in turn to the ever-hungry ever-thirsty Rick.

    Rick had put some of their favourite albums on to cassette for the journey and when inspired they sang along. The funny thing was that they were always inspired at the same time: they always burst out singing together. It led her to wonder whether they might have a career together.

    ‘Tell me about your parents,’ said Rick.

    He seemed almost excited about meeting them.

    ‘They’re rich,’ she said.

    She knew that wasn’t something you should say to suitors if you wanted them to love you for yourself but it was the first thing that came into her head. It was also a test. She was well aware that men had pursued her for the wrong reasons, with those disastrous results in one case (but that was behind her now; she tried not to think about it), and she wanted to see how Rick reacted.

    ‘And?’ he said, eyes fixed on the road ahead, concentration unbroken.

    ‘My father works all the time.’

    ‘Doing what?’

    ‘Stockbroker in the City. Family company.’

    Rick nodded sagely but Jane got the impression he didn’t have a clue what she was talking about. Come to think of it, she didn’t have a clue either. Her father never talked about his work. When at home he was usually to be found sitting in silence in his armchair, a glass of whisky in one hand and a cigarette in the other.

    ‘And your mother?’ asked Rick.

    ‘She’s very thin.’

    What else was there to say about her mother? Thinness ruled her mother’s life. She hadn’t eaten potatoes, beetroot, bananas and biscuits since her twenties as they were fattening. It was a woman’s job to be beautiful and to be beautiful you had to be thin.

    Jane had been thin all right in her teens, so thin in fact that her periods stopped, and that was good. She wasn’t thin any more, now that she couldn’t stop eating, and that was bad. Every time she went home she could see her mother running her eyes up and down Jane’s body scrutinising her for signs of fatness. Jane had taken to wearing baggy clothes.

              

Having been hilly and wooded, the landscape now turned flat and bare, and a side wind buffeted the Mini. Strange hummocks dotted the fields.

    ‘Hey,’ said Rick, pointing to the left. ‘Stonehenge. Shall we stop?’

    Jane’s stomach gave a small lurch. They hadn’t planned to stop. Why did Rick always have to disconcert her so? She suspected he’d had the detour in mind all along but hadn’t told her in case she panicked about time.

    He was fascinated by archaeology and in his room at the cottage he’d had a whole shelf of books on the subject and a drawer of flat maps that he’d ruled with pencil lines. Sadly, while Jane and Rick squashed together in her Exeter room, all that reference material along with Rick’s cat Cat was now with his friend Geoff.

    They turned on to a smaller road towards a row of hefty grey stones like elephants’ legs. They appeared a lot smaller and less exciting than she expected of this famous prehistoric site.

    Rick pulled on to the verge next to a gate. As they climbed out of the car, the wind caught its doors. Jane zipped up her yellow cagoule, wishing she had gloves and a scarf. Once over the gate (it was tied shut with orange baler twine, impossible to undo), they walked across a field of short grass, through some sheep which scampered off ejecting fans of black droppings.

    ‘Wow,’ said Jane as they came up close.

    The stones were much more impressive now she was standing underneath them. They were at least three times the height of a person and not in a row, she realised, but a semi-circle. Some of them were joined at the top by more slabs of stone and others lay on their backs on the ground. It looked like the end of a giants’ party.

    ‘Whatever was it for?’ she said.

    ‘Ah, now you’re asking,’ said Rick, and Jane immediately wished she hadn’t as Rick sounded as if he was about to launch into one of his technical lectures.

    It wasn’t that he was boring, it was just that he didn’t realise how many gaps there were in her education – like woodwork, metalwork, things electrical, the internal combustion engine, history (due to her own lack of interest in lists of dates and kings) and most of science. She could barely change a light bulb. His explanations seldom made sense and asking questions only led her deeper into confusion.

    Luckily he didn’t say any more. Instead, he took her hand and they sat together on one of the fallen stones. The sheep regained their confidence and ambled around them nibbling grass. Crows fluttered down and pecked at the sheep’s droppings.

    ‘These stones -’ she began.

    ‘Megaliths,’ interjected Rick.

    She could understand that, language being her thing. ‘Mega’, as in big, and ‘lith’ meaning stone like in ‘lithograph’. She saw words in her head as if on a page and once she'd imprinted them on her mind's eye she never forgot them. Rick and his colleague had started to use her as a living dictionary, ringing her from work to check spellings for their crosswords.

    ‘These megaliths,’ she said. She liked the word. It had the same thump as ‘elephant’. ‘However did they get here?’

    ‘Magic,’ said Rick.

    She laughed. ‘And all these humps and bumps in the fields. What are they?’

    ‘Barrows,’ said Rick.

    ‘Barrows?’ said Jane, thinking of wheelbarrows.

    ‘Prehistoric burial chambers.’

    ‘Golly,’ said Jane. That sounded rather spooky. Had anyone been inside these chambers and if so what had they found? ‘This must have been an important place then.’

    ‘Yes indeed,’ said Rick. ‘A confluence of leys.’

    ‘A confluence of what?’ What on earth were ‘lays’? Actually, she wasn't sure what 'confluence' meant either but she could guess.

    ‘Leys,’ he said, ‘L-E-Y-S. Straight lines between prehistoric features.’

    ‘Straight lines,’ she repeated. ‘What, like on your maps?’

    ‘Exactly,’ he said.

    ‘And what are they?

    ‘Ah, another mystery,’ said Rick

    She leant against him, feeling a rush of happiness like a laugh from deep inside her. Life with Rick might be disconcerting, but it was never ordinary. It was like one big fairy story.

    The stones sheltered them from the wind. The sun slanted down on them. All the noises from outside had died away as if they were in a separate reality.

    Rick put his arm around her and they kissed.
    She wanted never to leave this place.

  

‘I should think we’re about halfway now,’ he said as they walked back to the car.

    ‘Just about,’ she said.

    Why did he have to remind her? This visit to her parents loomed like a dark tunnel and she couldn't see how she was ever going to make it to the other end.

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Note Stonehenge was roped off either late 1977 or early 1978 (sources differ), in either case before Jane and Rick visited, and fallen stones have been righted. The above however is how I remember it (with a smattering of Avebury, another megalithic site), and anyway this is fiction so I can say what I like. For more contact English Heritage.

The Banker's Niece 11: William 2

The quad bike turns out to be nothing more threatening than a motorbike with four wheels, which is obvious when you think about it. Jane is pleased to discover that William’s version has two seats side by side, as she had uncomfortable visions of climbing up behind him and putting her arms round his waist.

    Thankfully William is looking the other way when she hoicks up her skirt in order to step in. Jasper leaps in after her and she only just manages to appropriate the seat before he does. With the stoicism of all dogs however (not that Jane's an expert), he settles with a thump on the floor between her legs.
    There’s nothing at the front or side to hold on to so she grips Jasper with her knees and wraps her fingers round the seat cushion – and not a moment too soon as the bike takes off like a greyhound.

    It roars up the track, thudding into holes and flying off bumps, reminding her of rough weather on her father’s yacht. Brother Ollie, she remembers, would be in the cockpit eating chocolate biscuits and grinning with excitement, his hair plastered to his head from spray, while she would be down below on a bunk, vomiting.

    And she wishes she hasn’t remembered that, but luckily, before memory turns to reality, the bike reaches the farmyard.

    Well, it’s a yard attached to a farm, but only one building, a new redbrick one, appears to be in use. Jane wonders if that’s where William does the milking. The rest are in varying stages of disrepair, with caved-in roofs and a surrounding litter of brown rocks and whiteish plaster. The cobbled driveway is barely visible under moss, dried mud and a forest of nettles. Again, Jane regrets her sandals and skirt.

    How can you run a farm from such a slum? Is this what farming's really like? It doesn’t look much fun. Even though she was brought up on a farm, her experience is limited as her father let the fields and worked in London running the family company. And, while the outbuildings on her family's farm were far from perfect, they were kept in a reasonable state of repair and all used for something – cars, tools, mowers.

    As soon as William switches the engine off she is struck by the silence, except that is for the birds whose trills, twitters and squeaks form a dense background, like a carpet in an empty room. A cluster of mature trees rustles gently behind some of the ruined barns. Like the barns, they appear to have escaped human interference for decades. Torn branches hang down, others are dead, others have grown into the ruins. 
    Jasper leaps off the bike, landing heavily on all four feet, and bustles through the nettles along what Jane realises with relief is a well-trampled route. She follows him towards a long white house with sash windows and an overgrowth of roses and wisteria. It shines out of the debris like the Madonna lily she once saw blooming in a dark Greek pinewood.
    This place, she thinks, could be worth a fortune – but it might need a fortune spending on it.

‘Go through,’ says William, stripping off his overalls and leaving them in a heap on the floor of what Jane’s mother would probably call a scullery and anyone else a utility room, even though there isn’t much useful about it: cracked flagstones; an original Belfast sink, stained brown; one rusty tap; a corner piled with sacks of dogfood and crates of lager.

   He could do with a clothes makeover as well as a haircut, she thinks, seeing the shapeless jeans and creased white shirt he’s wearing under the overalls.

    She loves those makeover programmes on television. She loves seeing people’s lives transformed. It’s pathetic really and not something she would ever confess to her friends – like so much else these days.

    And he’s too thin. She can see his shoulder-blades through his shirt, and his jeans are bunched into a belt as if he’s shrunk since he bought them.

    But then she’s a fine one to talk as she has, since her menopause a few years ago, lost two stone and reverted to the weight of her anorexic teens. She doesn’t think she’s anorexic again however as she eats regularly. Mostly. Sometimes she finds it hard to swallow, especially if she hasn’t had a glass of wine first to relax her muscles. It’s almost as if she has a permanent lump in her throat.

Given the contradictions of the yard, the kitchen isn’t a surprise.

    There’s a battered cream Aga, with a mound of old grey blankets beside it on to which Jasper throws himself with happy grunts. In the centre of the room there’s a beautiful pale-oak table, piled with bills and bank statements with just one chair pulled up to it at the Aga end. There’s a magnificent window half-obscured by chintz curtains, heavy but torn as if rejects from some stately home. In the shaft of sunlight next to the window there's a shapely armchair covered in the same tattered chintz. Its undercarriage rests on the floor like the stomach of an overweight cat.
    There are two anomalies: a cheap-looking chest-of-drawers with a small television perched in the dust on top of it, and some pictures. These hang in several neat rows on a far wall in semi-darkness and as Jane gets closer to them she sees that they are exquisite watercolours of British birds, simply framed in pine.

    She longs to ask about them but now doesn’t seem the moment. They look private somehow, like a locked diary or the stash of porn that adolescent boys keep hidden under their bed. Not that dear Ollie ever did as far as she knows but male friends have confessed.

William scrambles the eggs and burns the toast while Jane – with great care - makes the coffee with a cafetière she finds in a cupboard and some ready-ground William has in the freezer.

    ‘Left over from when my children were supposed to be coming to stay,’ he says.

    ‘Ah,’ she says.

    She remembers the ex-wife from her mother's telephone call, and senses a long and maybe sad story there, but again she doesn’t like to pry. She hates it when people subject her to a barrage of questions.

    William finds a second chair and pushes the papers away and they sit together at the end of the table chatting about this and that – the beautiful weather, Jane’s new job, the area, the cottage even. Not that Jane wants to get William’s hopes up at this stage. She doesn’t even know what the place costs and she needs to go to the estate agent in South Molton to find out all the boring details about services (if there are any) and surveys.

    He gives her a few funny looks but she decides to put them down to shyness rather than lust.

    Jasper hauls himself off his blankets and hoovers up the crumbs under their feet.

    It’s quite companionable really.

    ‘So you were in the army?’ she says, as they mop their plates with bread - white, out of a packet, but Jane isn’t complaining; she’s so hungry everything tastes like ambrosia.

    She can’t imagine William in the army. It seems far too brutal for him. Do they even take people with stammers?

    But then farming isn’t much better from what she’s read –  the unnatural conditions in which animals are kept, slaughterhouses, the separation of young animals and their mothers. She keeps thinking she ought to turn vegan, but she never quite manages it. She likes butter too much.

    William’s face shuts down. ‘Family t-tradition,’ he grunts.

    ‘But you got out?’

    ‘Yeah. Wanted to spend more time with my family.’

    Jane nods. ‘Of course.’

    It’s the standard answer when you don’t want to reveal the truth.

    She’s itching to ask more but William is wiping his plate assiduously with his bread and concentrating on leaving it squeaky clean.

    ‘Didn’t work though,’ he mutters unexpectedly.

    For a moment Jane doesn’t know what to say. Is he confiding in her? Does he want to say more? Is she being too reticent?

    ‘I’m sorry,’ she says, feeling inadequate.

    There’s an awkward silence. Not for the first time she wishes she were one of those fluffy women who drip emotions. Maybe she and William are too alike, she thinks. It’s not a comfortable thought.

    ‘I’d better go,’ she says, standing up. ‘Thank you so much for breakfast. It was a lifesaver. I’ll let you know about the cottage.’

    William starts throwing their dirty plates into the sink, and while he’s occupied she seizes the opportunity to question him in a casual way.   

    She points to the pictures. ‘What are these?’

    ‘What?’ asks William, his back to her.

    ‘These paintings,’ says Jane. ‘They’re lovely, but there’s no signature. Where did you get them?’

    ‘Oh, those,’ says William turning round. He’s blushing again.

    Jane doesn’t think she’s ever seen a man blush before, or certainly not as often as William does.

    ‘Actually, they’re mine. I did them,’ he says.

    ‘You did them!’ she exclaims. ‘But why aren’t you an artist? You should be doing this full time. You could easily make a living.’

    ‘It was a long time ago,’ he says. ‘Before I went into the army.’

    ‘But you could have gone to art school, done anything.’

    She can’t bear the waste of such talent. He needs shaking.

    ‘F-family wouldn’t have it,’ he mumbles.

    Family, she thinks in disgust.

For the next instalment, click here

If you're wondering about The Novel

As you may have noticed, I’ve now stopped posting extracts from my novel. This is because I know how difficult it is to follow a novel online so thank you if you’ve persevered.
    It’s been amazingly helpful for my novel-writing knowing that real people are reading the results. I'm now having trouble not slipping back into writing for agents and publishers, which I now realise makes for a much less interesting book.
    (I therefore reserve the right to change my mind about the above and to return to revealing parts of my novel in this blog if I decide to do so!)

If I don’t post again before Christmas, have a good one. Here (below) is a festive picture from the National Trust park I mentioned in the post before this one.

Willow Rudolph

And here (below) is a wintry picture I took a few days ago when out with Dog on the hill behind our house.