Faith Fox Read online

  And so, when they reached after an hour or so the easeful George Inn at Stamford, she had been trying to square its style with the miners’ roadside caffs she had expected and hearing her voice saying back home to Jilly et al., ‘I’ll say one thing: Andrew didn’t stint. It wasn’t a Happy Eater or a Little Chef, it was perfectly decent,’ and wondering like a novelist whether to substitute ‘civilised’ or even ‘marvellous’ for ‘decent.’ And then wondering if Eileen and Nina and Josie and Lizzie perhaps knew this already. She had always rather prided herself on being narrow, and not a traveller. Maybe there were things about The North that were after all known?

  They had left Surrey at six in the morning. At Stamford, pale stone sleeping in yellow sunshine, they were to stay an hour. In the coffee room of the George Inn the baby slept beside them on a sofa near the bedroom-sized fireplace and transparent sunshiny coal fire. The coffee was brought by a waitress, who set it between them and brought croissants and marmalade and a morning paper. All about the old coaching inn and then from all the town churches the clocks struck ten melodiously. Outside, down the cobbled yard, hanging baskets of autumn flowers glowed. Creepers were a polished dripping crimson over pale walls. The linings to bedroom curtains looked as rich as silk and the menus on the reception desk were expensive and delicious.

  ‘D’you know, Andrew,’ said Pammie, ‘one could stay here.’

  ‘If one had money.’

  ‘Amazing. A hundred or so miles north of London. I thought this sort of thing didn’t happen again until Scotland. I wouldn’t at all say no to a weekend here. I’ll tell Hugo.’

  They were to arrive at Faith’s new home at about one o’clock, Pammie imagined for a late lunch, if farmers had lunches. She tried to imagine a farmer’s lunch and settled for something between wedges of bread and cheese eaten under a hawthorn bush and roast beef in a pine kitchen with vets rushing in and out to examine diseased livestock outside in a barnyard. Or maybe it would be a gentleman farmer who strolled about his land every other weekend and gave the rest of life to his investments. There would be dry sherry and then a vast dining room with windows looking at a park. Cold meat and mashed potatoes, rice pudding and stewed plums and everybody pretending to like it, because it was like school. Flagged floors and dogs. ‘Ice cold, my dear, and nobody speaking. Heathcliffe not in it.’ Faith safely deposited, Pammie saw herself in tears as she said goodbye. There would be a wooden cradle on rockers, cobwebs, a family Bible and then the drive with perhaps a taciturn serf to Harrogate for the London train.

  Andrew was to stay on at his brother’s for a couple of days to see the poor child in, to see to the beginning of her life. (A little waif suddenly made its appearance to Pammie; aged eight or nine, she had strings of rain-sodden hair and was dashing across moorland.) Pammie had of course been invited to stay on at the farm too, for as long as she liked, but, ‘No, no,’ she had cried in Guildford, ‘I have commitments. October is a frightful month for me. I couldn’t possibly give the time.’

  ‘It is very good of you to do this at all,’ Andrew had said.

  ‘Nonsense. As if I could do anything else.’

  Thomasina’s presence hung in the air.

  But to the Bridge mob Pammie had said, ‘I must say it does seem rather odd that the one to take her has to be a friend of her grandmother. You’d have thought there’d be some friend of his own. I know Thomasina said Andrew was an odd fish and seemed to have no friends, though God knows if that was true, the things we now know about Thomasina. But you would think, wouldn’t you, that he could have found some friend of Holly, or another doctor? A woman, of course; babies prefer the smell of a woman. But then I suppose he wouldn’t want to turn up at his brother’s a few weeks after his wife died with a young woman in the car.’

  She didn’t say, because she didn’t have to as it was what everyone had been thinking since about five minutes after the disaster, that the sooner Andrew remarried, the better. Pammie had sung this little tune once, quietly, the day after the funeral when she had seen signs of June and Desiree and Philippa and Meg getting maudlin. She was a self-protecting woman, Pammie, and speaking out the cold-blooded thought had given her a pretty frisson. The ‘Oh Pammie, shut up, don’t say it’ always produced the nourishment needed for her essential diet of self-love.

  But how unfair. Pammie was a good woman. A healer. When she shocked or mocked, sinews were stiffened. Everyone knew that Pammie had true and deep affections. Pammie often said so herself and discussed them. And she had a huge sense of duty (likewise). She was a woman who had longed for children and they had been denied her and although she took great interest in the children of friends—a thing rare now in childless women—she had been left with a lot of passion going to waste. Many love affairs and two engagements in youth had broken down on account of the emotionally exhausted withdrawal from the field of the nervous men involved, and Pammie had been left, for years and years now, with a shadowy old husband who had once been something high up in the Coal Board and sat reading The Times all day in a pretty house on Coombe Hill. It had cedar trees and a triple garage.

  She deserved much more. She deserved a position of power, did old Pammie. Because of a particularly strained childhood and girlhood—she was always abandoning things from flashy principles, for she had been much admired by indulgent over-serious parents—she had had no real career and had developed no real character. A hundred years before she would have run a household, written papers on women’s shameful banishment from great causes. Even in her own time she might have risen high in the Civil Service if she had been more patient and less histrionic, less romantic. She had been too old to be part of the young feminism of the sixties and seventies, which she affected to despise as being déjà vu.

  She was still, for her age, deeply romantic, seriously so. She had once been in love with a patrician who had known the Queen, which gave her a dreamy and knowing look whenever anyone got talking about the monarchy. A ‘my lips are sealed’ look. It was her one sweet memory, as if she and the Queen had hobnobbed together on dark afternoons at Balmoral over a dying fire.

  Pammie was a fearful snob, keen on good taste, and the awful triple garage was the only sop she allowed her husband in this direction. She allowed it and the big Bentley and the other vehicles inside because he was a good man who had worked hard and it is nice to be rich and she felt he should be rewarded for it. The man who had been pally with the Queen had been poor.

  ‘Your father’s a schoolmaster, isn’t he, Andrew?’

  ‘Was. He retired long ago. He’s old. And sick. He’s disabled. MS.’

  ‘Oh, I’m so sorry. How dreadful. Shall I meet him?’

  ‘No, they live about fifteen miles away on the coast. I’ll be going down to them tomorrow.’

  ‘Oh, I’m so looking forward to seeing the farm,’ she said, watching the motorway flip past. ‘D’you know, I’ve never seen a farm. Just slow down and let me undo the strap a moment. I want to have a look at her. She’s so quiet.’

  ‘All right?’

  ‘Yes. Adorable. Fast asleep. Is it an arable farm?’

  ‘Pammie, I don’t believe you’ve never seen a farm.’

  ‘It’s true. How could I?’

  ‘Well, by looking out of the train windows on the way to London.’

  ‘Don’t be silly, all you see is motorway between me and Waterloo. Exactly like this. They’re all the same. There’s no view you can catch. I go by car anyway.’

  ‘More fool you, Pammie. You sound like old Queen Mary who’d never seen a field of hay.’

  ‘Ah, now Queen Mary . . . ’

  The motorway hours passed, then the hours eastward along the lanes. The Vale of York began. Andrew grew sleepy, grew bored, grew cantankerous with Pammie’s pleasantness, then with her critical nothings; became lost in the lanes. Pammie went on discussing lunch.

  She thought how good the baby was and h
ow the baby’s father did not know it. She talked more about lunch.

  She abandoned all hope of lunch.

  Faith slept on.

  And Andrew cheered up because he had found a small crossroads that led to a side road to a village that led up a steep and swerving hill and shot out on a high and spectacular moor. The moor arrived suddenly and stretched to all horizons. The horizons were broad blue-black ink lines and between them and the car was a world of stormy purple heather. Sheep stood in the heather and other sheep wandered about the road. A few were seated on the road with folded arms, moving their jaws about. They rose resentfully on black feet and ambled to one side. Pammie said, ‘They’re very skinny, Andrew. More like goats.’ (‘Dear God, Jinny, it’s pretty enough, but that baby! What is she in for?’)

  A mile or two along a road stretching along a high ridge, Andrew stopped the car and got out, leaving the door open and a clean wind blowing in on Pammie. He strode away over the grass at the roadside, jumped a ditch and was away into the heather. There he stood, with his back to the car. The sky was high and clear, autumnal light about him. For miles sun shone on heather and granite.

  ‘Andrew? Andrew? Are you all right? What is it?’ How most peculiar. He began to stride further away from her. We can’t be there yet, she thought, there’s nothing to see. ‘Hello?’ she called. ‘Andrew?’ He wandered further still. He must want a pee, she thought; I know I do.

  He turned and began to walk, lunging and jumping, slowly back.

  ‘Pammie. I was thinking. I’m not sure that we’re not being silly going on to The Priors just now. I think what we might do instead is just drive on down to the coast, to my parents, and drop her off there for the night. They’re dying to see her. I’m sorry.’

  ‘But you say it’s fifteen miles off.’

  ‘Yes. But Jack goes down to see them a lot. He could come and get Faith from them tomorrow and I’d stay with her of course. I could actually drop you off at Harrogate during this afternoon. I could leave her with the grandparents for an hour or so. I’d ring The Priors from my parents’ to say what we’re doing, what has happened.’

  ‘Happened? But what has happened? Harrogate’s miles away south. And your father’s ill and they’re not expecting us. How could they cope all night with a baby with just you and them—you can’t even make up a feed?’

  ‘My mother—’

  ‘She’s old. You said so. She’ll have quite forgotten. Don’t be so silly. And you say there’ll have been preparations made at the farm.’

  ‘Well, not big preparations. They’re not great on preparations.’ He stood frowning, pondering the pattern of sheep droppings on the road.

  ‘What you mean is,’ said Pammie, ‘you don’t want me to see your brother. For some reason. Or is it that you don’t want your brother to see me? For some reason? I see. And who are the Priors? I thought your brother was called Jack Braithwaite.’

  ‘It’s the name of the place, The Priors.’

  ‘I thought it was Ellerby Farm.’

  ‘It’s Ellerby Priors. It was a monastery till the sixteenth century. There’s farmland with it.’

  Pammie’s heart lifted. Andrew, it turned out, must be someone.

  ‘It’s mostly ruined now,’ Andrew said. ‘Jack built some of it up and added a lot of sheds and so on. They farm the land and run a God-slot.’

  ‘God-slot?’

  ‘Yes. He’s very religious. They’re God-botherers. Sort of community. Retreats and hacking mangel-wurzels. Not my style. Jack’s by way of being a Rev. Maybe a saint. And he’s old—much older than me. I was a menopausal surprise.’

  ‘So you don’t think I’m fit to be introduced to him? It’s not very bright of you, Andrew, I must say. If we—and what about Mother Clare? She’d have been so thrilled if we’d known all about this in Guildford, we’d have been much happier about Faith. Well, really! I’ve done hassocks for Guildford Cathedral. Get in and come on and don’t be so stupid.’

  Still he hung in the road.

  ‘Now that you’ve told me,’ she said, ‘let me tell you something. I am a religious woman too and all the way here I’ve been wanting to ask you if you couldn’t stop for a moment before we get there to say some prayers.’

  ‘About what?’

  ‘Oh yes I have, so don’t look so blank. About Faith, if you really want to know. You and I together, Andrew. But knowing doctors . . . Well, doctors get put off, I can see that. I should have followed my instinct. Andrew, pick up this baby and hand her over to me now. I want to see to the cot, and yes—I think I’ll change her so that she’s as she should be when she arrives. I’m very good at it. Oh—pretty girl. There. Angel-bird, lamb-child.’

  When Faith was back in the cot, squirming a bit, making talking noises and snuffling, giving the occasional squawk and hoot, Pammie said, ‘Get in, Andrew. I’m going to say a prayer now and be damned to you. And then let’s get on to your brother’s.’

  ‘A prayer?’ said Andrew. ‘What for?’

  ‘Well, for Faith. For her life.’

  ‘Bit over the top, isn’t it? I’m not into it, Pammie. And she’ll be getting plenty of it soon. And for ever.’

  He hurled himself into the car, started it up, roared away in it, peering all the time across the partridge figure of Pammie, smart in her red-brown wool suit, until there appeared at the side of the lonely road, rising black and high, a stone cross. A track led off from it down a steep hill and out of sight.

  ‘What’s this?’ Pammie was bright with excitement and words were pouring into a rehearsed narration for Coombe Hill. ‘An old cross—how fascinating! I’d no idea you were so erratic, Andrew. We all thought you were so very set and conventional. I’d no idea you were even from the far North, you know—I thought maybe somewhere like Leicester—until just before dear Holly . . . Do what you like, I shall pray by myself now as we go along. I feel I have Holly with me now, in the car beside me. I feel I can mention her name now in a Christian, croyant way, now that I know your brother’s a parson. Oh my goodness, I do feel better.

  ‘Dear Holly—so good. Didn’t your brother adore her? I feel nothing can go wrong now for little Faith. I feel it. “Ellerby Priors,” I knew it. What a good man, your brother. I must have met him at the . . . Did he take the service? No, of course he didn’t, it was the vicar, and not at his best if I may say so, but I don’t remember another dog collar. Oh, he doesn’t? Well, so few of them do now. Which one was he? I suppose he’s unmarried. The really splendid holy ones seldom are, you know, even now. I hope he has some good women there, though, for Faith. Well, you said so. Will there be deaconesses? I hope he’s not against WPs. Is it Catholic or Anglo? Andrew, you might have told us, you know. Is he ascetic? Or is it one of these love-and-kisses places? I can’t care for that, I have to say. It takes me all my time to face The Peace in church, this newfangled stuff they have, and what’s more I know that absolutely everyone feels the same as I do. You can see the whole congregation getting fidgety when it’s announced, even the parsons. I mean, in public! You should see the poor old souls at St Saviour’s. All their lives they’ve believed in keeping themselves to themselves and now they have to turn round and grin at each other and nod their heads and shake hands. And they see each other nearly every day anyhow and half of them don’t altogether get on. Sometimes, you know, there’s kissing and caressing! No one can really take that, you know, unless it’s black people. Is it going to be that sort of place, Andrew?’ She tried to imagine—she saw—negroes in a monastic ambience, in flagrante delicto, rolling in the heather. She began to edit delightedly for Coombe.

  ‘You should have told me, dear Andrew. All these hours on the road and we’ve been keeping to trivialities and worldly things, though I did like The George at Stamford. Anyway, too late now and I’m going to pray for the baby. How is she? Can you look in the—? Yes. Oh, angel darling! I’m going to pray now quietly t
o myself, so just shut up.’

  ‘Too late,’ he said. ‘We’re here. We have to undo this gate.’

  ‘I’ll undo it, my dear. My shoes don’t matter.’

  ‘No, you pray if you want to.’

  ‘Did you?’ he asked as he climbed in after shutting the gate behind them.

  He drove down the last of the track, which turned through a medieval and broken-down gatehouse and became a large, paved, unweeded court. Surrounding the court were the remains of ecclesiastical buildings, some of them with agricultural machinery bundled into them. A line of prefabricated huts had been built in the courtyard and a small block of Portacabin water closets nearby. The huts had coloured mantras stuck to the windows and different-coloured front doors. Some of the Portacabins had holy-looking posters gummed to them, too. There was a line of heavy shoes outside one of them. Drab chickens ran about and there was rather a lot of rubbish—not serious rubbish but bits of nylon rope, cardboard, blown-about paper, and metal stands for some sort of leisure equipment, and several unlikely canoes.

  ‘You can’t pray properly in sixty seconds, Andrew,’ she said, affectionately now. ‘Just look at that lovely architecture. What a wonderful east window that must have been. All empty to the air now. But how lovely.’

  From one of the huts four or five bulky Eskimo-ish people were emerging. They wandered off towards the Portacabins seeming to give promise by their incurious, in fact rather disgruntled, expressions that Ellerby Priors was not going to be a kissing-and-caressing sort of place.

  ‘By the way,’ said Andrew as a bell began to clank somewhere and another sound joined it for a brief moment, a sound as if someone were revving up some mournful trumpet. ‘By the way, Jack is married. He married not long after I did. And there’s a child, a boy. And here is his wife.’

  9

  Jocasta,’ said Andrew, ‘this is Pammie. And here is Faith.’