An Affair to Remember (31 page)

In
Memoriam
to
the
Lost
Children
of
Kimbleford
.

300
AD
–
1900 AD
.

Requiem
eiternam
dona
eis
,
Domine
:
et
lux
perpetua

Luceat
eis
.*

*Grant them eternal rest, O Lord; and let perpetual light shine on them.

The silver cup and lead casket, together with various other artefacts found in the dig, much to the annoyance of the curator of the local museum (an acrimonious correspondence on the subject helped fill the letters columns of the
Daily Telegraph
for many months) were deemed too important to remain in the area and are now in the British Museum. However, undeclared, quite a few items of lesser importance remained behind and can be seen in assorted households in that part of Suffolk. The Woodheads, for example, have several pieces of decorated Samien ware in their possession, and the contents of the Bogg family barn is so filled with artefacts as to amount to a small museum; which following Mrs Bogg’s decision a few years later to diversify into the B&B business, helps boost trade enormously and is always greatly enjoyed by her many visitors.

Ron Head and Philippa Cardew made it up, and indeed in the years to come frequently lectured together on their part in what became known as The Brown End Dig. Another of their subjects, and one extremely popular with the punters, was ‘Rooks and their role in English Folklore’. As a result of all the publicity, which ironically enough, for the first time in his life, he hadn’t sought, Sel at long last got his call from the States and appeared shortly afterwards on a television chat show in New York. His version of the legend of Brian and Tavey and the death and burial of little Marcus under Tavey’s tree excited such interest that not only offers for TV chat show appearances and lecture tours on the subject poured in, but suggestions to turn the story into anything from opera, to the whole thing being re-enacted on ice. However, sadly perhaps, nothing ever came of these suggestions, and apart from several TV documentaries on the subject on both sides of the Atlantic, and a greatly acclaimed fringe production at the Edinburgh Festival – Brian in leathers and a crash helmet and Tavey topless in jeans – the general public, with the exception of the inhabitants of Kimbleford, where their story, having survived for fifteen hundred years, would no doubt continue to do so, soon forgot about Brian and Tavey and they were, at long last, left in peace.

Clarrie Woodhead duly produced her baby – in a blaze of publicity too, and she didn’t mind a bit. Little Julia turned out to be a lovely child, somewhat on the wilful side perhaps, but who cared, and her parents doted on her. She had her mother’s good looks and imperious manner, but her eyes, especially when she wanted something, held the same mesmeric quality as those of her father’s. And if, as on certain occasions, especially in her rebellious teens, Sel found his daughter’s persuasive powers just that tiny bit irritating, he recognised them as his own, and let things be. She also, not so fortunately perhaps, inherited his nose.

Emmie and Sid Parfitt stayed on at the shop, but life was very different there under Sid’s dynamic management. Karen Warren stayed on too and to the surprise of all concerned, not least her father, found herself working harder than she’d ever done in her life, and, what’s more, enjoying it. By the time little Julia Woodhead had reached her fifth birthday, the shop was out of debt and showing a considerable profit, and the Parfitts were able not only to purchase a nearly-new Volvo and Emmie to have her own small run-around, but to take two holidays a year: Emmie’s dream of knocking them back in a bar in Torremolinos fulfilled at last.

As to Emmie, she couldn’t imagine how she’d ever come to let Sid go in the first place, and soon forgot those lonely years following his departure for Oz, and her subsequent, disastrous liaison with Sam. Although perhaps, as she frequently told herself, when having had one G&T too many she found herself dwelling on the past, if she hadn’t ‘married’ Sam, she and Sid would never be where they were now. So it all came right in the end, didn’t it?

Jack Fulton was never quite the man he had been after his disagreeable experience in the Grove. He returned to Barnsley and his wife, and managed to wangle a transfer to an area not far from home. In the fullness of time, due no doubt to his new subdued and responsible image, he was promoted to District Manager, and after that seldom strayed far from hearth and home. Just occasionally something triggered off a memory: for example, happening to glance at his wife’s copy of
Hello
magazine one evening, while waiting for her to finish titivating, he came upon a photograph of Clarrie, glorious in motherhood, dancing little Julia on her knee; and for a moment, only a moment, the memory of those wild days at Kimbleford when he’d tried and failed to juggle with two formidable ladies and came the inevitable cropper, returned with a vividness he’d no desire to re-experience and, hastily placing the magazine under a sofa cushion out of harm’s way, he hurried off to tell Evangeline that if she didn’t get a move on they’d miss the Rotary Club Dinner.

The great barn at Brown End was duly re-built, and with Ron Head acting as adviser, an authentic replica of a Roman bath house fitted out as a sauna, complete with the requisite mosaics and erotic wall paintings, was erected on the site of the rookery, proving extremely popular with the many Woodhead guests. In the years to come Daniel Mallory and Julia Woodhead too would spend many happy hours there and, as so many before them, it was here they came to learn the delights of love and all the pain and joy that discovery brings.

And the rooks? To Clarrie and Sel’s relief they never returned to Brown End: their long guardianship over, they set up a new colony in a group of young ash trees behind the Bogg farmhouse, where to this day they daily torment the Bogg family, not to mention their visitors, with their raucous, mocking cry.

THE END

If you enjoyed
An Affair to Remember
you might be interested in
Running to Paradise
by Virginia Budd, also published by Endeavour Press.

Extract from
Running to Paradise
by Virginia Budd

Prologue

Evening. Summer lightning intermittently flashed across the grey-green sky, as though some inter-galactic signaller were trying to get a message through to the misguided denizens of planet earth. Thunder rolled far away and storm clouds spiralled. It was very hot. The people in the grey village houses shut their casement windows, left open to catch the least vestige of the sultry air, anticipating the coming storm. The people on the executive housing estate at the northern end of the village reached for their digital telephones to warn their friends that evening’s barbecue was cancelled and what about a blue video session instead. The people in the council estate ignored the coming storm. They were most of them out anyway; there was nothing to do in the village on a Saturday night.

At the southern end of the village, in a small, bright, antiseptic room in St Hilda’s Home for the Elderly, Charlotte Seymour lay dying. She lay on her back in the neat bed, covered by a pale blue eiderdown, her head propped up by pillows. She no longer smelt the scent from the stocks that grew beneath her bedroom window, nor saw the spruce fir silhouetted against the flashing sky, nor indeed heard the rumble of thunder: she felt neither heat nor cold, she had already entered the anteroom to death. An elderly man sat beside the bed, his large, baggy frame fitting with difficulty into the plastic-seated chair. He snored from time to time. Death was long in coming and he had drunk heavily as was his wont, that evening.

Charlotte Seymour’s breath rattled and scraped; her eyes were closed and her hands, each finger ring-encrusted, each fingernail a vivid scarlet, were still. But her mind, the mind she had lived with for over eighty years, that mind which had so frequently served her so ill, was awake alright, wide awake, as though at last, too late, prepared to use and employ the latent power within.

A few heavy drops of rain splashed on the window sill and the man in the chair awoke, gazed owlishly round the room, as though wondering where he was, then struggled to his feet and closed the window. He yawned, scratched his chest and looked down at the woman in the bed. It would have been hard to tell by his expression whether the look was one of indifference, anticipation or dislike; it was not a look of love. Charlotte opened her eyes suddenly.

‘Go home,’ she whispered, ‘I can die without your help.’ The man, however, did not seem to hear her. He reached in his pocket for a cigarette, then saw the notice above the bed. ‘Visitors are respectfully requested not to smoke.’ He sat down again in the chair, which wobbled dangerously under his weight, and closed his eyes.

Charlotte’s eyes, too, closed: they would not open again.

Let go, Char Osborn, let go. There’s nothing left — no point in hanging on — the party’s over now. But had it been such a party? Had it...?

1

The Sunday Char died I wondered if things would ever be the same again. To feel so bereft, so disorientated for the loss of one’s ex-wife’s mother verges on the eccentric, I suppose, but I loved her; for all her manifold faults, I loved her.

The day before she died I felt both oppressed and depressed and London sweltered in a grey, sticky heat. I did a bit of shopping in the Kings Road in the morning, then squash with Jack Pemberton, from the office, in the afternoon. He asked me back to dinner afterwards, but I refused. I wanted, suddenly, to be on my own.

The storm started around seven o’clock. I sat by the sitting-room window and watched the lightning crackling over Chelsea Reach and great globules of rain slowly turn the river from slate grey to muddy yellow. I was on my third Martini when George rang.

‘Guy? I’ve been trying to get you all day. George here.’

‘Sorry, I was playing squash, but I’ve been in since six thirty.’ Somehow George always manages to put one on the defensive; it was none of his damned business where I’d been.

‘Char’s not too good.’ Was this one of his euphemisms? Was Char, in fact, dying? Why else, God help him, would he be ringing?

‘How bad?’ I asked.

‘Well, you know what these doctors are; she’s got bronchial pneumonia, her breathing’s terrible. They say there’s nothing more they can do.’

‘What about hospital? Last time—’

‘Too ill to be moved.’ Was there a note of triumph; hard to say.

‘They’ve given her the Last Rites and all that sort of thing, but of course she’s had them before, when she had that stroke two years ago — you remember.’ Yes, I remembered, and what a party that had been. Dr Weil insisted on ordering up a bottle of wine, and there we all were, George, Beth, myself and a nurse or two, sipping away like mad, allegedly helping Char into the next world and by the following morning she was sitting up in bed laughing her guts out.

‘I’ve been with her all day.’ George assumed his pathetic ‘ill-done-by’ voice, ‘but Mrs McTavish, that’s the new warden, said to go home for a kip and come back later.’

‘D’you want me to come down?’

‘Not yet. I’ll let you know.’ He sounded evasive.

‘What about Beth and the others?’ I said. ‘Have you told them?’

‘Look, could you ring Beth, then she can ring the others. I seem to have lost her phone number. Everything’s so chaotic here.’

‘I’d rather not speak to Beth, if you don’t mind. I can give you her number, if you’ve really lost it.’

‘Oh, alright, but I thought you two were back on speaking terms.’ Now he sounded huffy and put upon. Why the hell shouldn’t he tell his step-daughter her mother was dying?

‘You’ll let me know, won’t you, if...’

‘Yes,’ he said, ‘I’ll let you know.’ Odd how neither of us could mention the word death.

The storm stayed around until gone eleven. I made a bit of supper and watched some nonsense on TV, but all the time thought of Char: as I last saw her, as I first saw her, and all the time in between. I went to bed, but couldn’t get to sleep, not until the small hours, anyway, and woke to the bells of Battersea Church ringing for Holy Communion. I lay in bed listening and then the phone rang.

‘George again. Sorry to wake you, but Char died between two and three this morning. I thought you’d like to know.’

For the life of me I couldn’t think of a damned thing to say. Then at last: ‘Did she speak? Were you with her when—’

‘I was with her, but she never spoke again, not after the priest left her.’

‘I should like to see her,’ I said, ‘just once more.’

‘Well...’ He sounded doubtful. ‘They want to get the body out of the Home as soon as possible. They need the bed, you see.’ Char was just a body now.