Busman's Holiday, page 6
He glanced down in amusement at his elegant, dark, professional suit and floral tie. ‘Frankly, Nicky, this psychedelic little number isn’t my taste, but my infants go for a bit of colour and much enjoy trying to strangle the doctor clutching it whilst he’s listening to their chests. Sleep well, Miss Allendale? Good!’ He helped us carry in the equipment. ‘I hope some of this clutter’ll be useful.’
‘Invaluable!’ Aunt Joey beamed on brooms, mops, buckets, dustpans, vacuum cleaner, soap and detergents. ‘Have you left your Mrs. Wallis any means of attending to your own house?’
‘My Mrs. Wallis says she’ll do nicely with what she’s got ‒ and my Mrs. Wallis is never wrong! Excuse me ‒ remembered something else she said ‒’ he vanished, then returned with a loaded tea-tray. ‘My Mrs. Wallis says there’s nothing like a good cuppa for starting the day and having looked after two decades of Arumchester medics, she’s long been convinced the medical and nursing professions can’t function without repeated transfusions of strong tea. When we watched you arrive just now,’ he glanced at me, ‘my potted biographies on you all included Frances’s coming from the same teaching hospital as Sue. As my ‒ my Sister Children is one of Mrs. Wallis’s pin-ups, that’s good enough for my kind-hearted Mrs. Wallis ‒ so don’t be surprised if more tea appears this morning. Forgive me if I now rush, or I’ll be late for my clinic.’
Aunt Joey saw him out. ‘I hope you don’t have to work too hard ‒ and on your holiday.’
He said in an odd voice, ‘To be honest, Miss Allendale, I’m glad I’m working today. I like my work. But don’t you work too hard! See you, anon.’
We divided the chores. Nicky loathed scrubbing floors, and though it was not my favourite occupation, as we refused to consider it for Aunt Joey, I was quite glad to get down to it. If for different reasons, I was as relieved as David to be really busy today. It was another glorious day after a surprisingly, to us, wild night. At breakfast, our hotel manager had explained gales were frequent occurrences in Arumchester. ‘The sea’s a goodish way off east and south, but there’s not one hill between us and the whole coastline. Nothing stops the east wind till it hits old Arumchester, but the gales seldom last long. Come in and go out with the tide.’
I was scrubbing the kitchen when Psmith’s bark announced a stranger just before the front door bell rang. I answered it as the others were working upstairs. ‘Good ‒’ my eyes widened, ‘morning?’
The Viking on the doorstep was as tall as David, but twice as broad. His longish flaxen hair and beard, and tanned forehead would have looked perfect under a horned helmet, had his grey eyes not been so shy. He was dressed in a clean but aged bush jacket, faded yellow cords and a massive haversack. ‘Excuse me ‒ er ‒ does ‒ er ‒ Miss Josephine Allendale now ‒ er ‒ live here?’
‘It’s Charles!’ Nicky charged downstairs, flung herself at the Viking and shook him by the arms. ‘What do you think you’re doing here? Why aren’t you in Finland chopping down trees?’ For all the effect she was having she might have been a Jack Russell puppy trying to ruffle an ultra-placid adult St. Bernard. ‘Oh, well, as you’re here ‒’ she turned to Aunt Joey who had joined us, decorously. ‘Aunt Joey, this ‒ this is one of my friends from college, Charles Elseworth. Fran ‒ Charles.’
Aunt Joey welcomed him politely. ‘Just back from Finland.’
Nicky’s glower grew darker as he admitted landing in Newcastle a few days ago. ‘I’m on my way home to Devon. I was just ‒ er ‒ passing through Arumchester, so I thought I’d look up Nicky to say hello.’
Aunt Joey said that seemed a very nice idea and refrained from mentioning Arumchester lay roughly one hundred miles off the direct route from Newcastle to Devon.
Nicky was less restrained. ‘What do you mean, passing through? How’d you get here, anyway?’
‘Walked.’ He saw our expressions and added, apologetically, ‘Been good walking weather.’
‘Couldn’t you hitch?’ demanded Nicky. Briefly, he altered from a huge, shy boy to a very resolute young man.
‘No. Didn’t try.’
‘Oh, baby, I forgot!’ Nicky rolled her eyes. ‘Aunt Joey, Charles is so anti-hitching, he lectures me worse than Dad if I dare suggest it! He’d be doing that now, if you weren’t here to protect me.’
Charles turned puce, but Aunt Joey smiled approvingly. ‘Charles, I so agree with you on this! Do come in and take that load off your back. Where are you staying?’
More nervously than ever, Charles explained he hoped to take up the open invitation he had been given by some married school friend now living in Arumchester who possessed a spare room. ‘I thought I’d best check with Nicky ‒ I mean ‒ find out you had arrived, first. I ‒ er ‒’ he gazed at Nicky, ‘can still push straight to Devon.’
‘Fran, dear, was there any tea left? So much nicer to chat over tea.’
Aunt Joey and I vanished to the kitchen leaving Nicky scolding: ‘You shouldn’t have come! You should’ve stayed in Finland! I’m not changing my mind! I’m not marrying you or anyone till I’m thirty ‒’
‘I haven’t changed my mind, Nicky, so stop beefing! I’ve said I’m happy to wait, and I am!’
Charles’s firmness made Aunt Joey and I exchange smiles as she closed the kitchen door. We smiled again when Nicky burst in to say the van had arrived and Charles wanted to stay and help with the furniture. ‘If that’s all right with you, Aunt Joey?’
‘Perfectly, dear. How kind of Charles. I’m sure he’ll be very useful.’
He was, particularly after the removal men left. Aunt Joey had mentally planned where the furniture would go, but as No. 7 was much smaller and differently proportioned to her former home, more often than not her arrangement looked wrong in the new setting. ‘That alcove for this wardrobe?’ Charles picked up Nicky like a doll, set her out of his way and then moved the heavy wardrobe as easily. ‘How’s that, Miss Allendale?’
The removal men were still squeezing the sofa through the sitting-room door when Psmith’s ‘strangers!’ bark took me into the hall. Perforce, the men had left the front door wide open and on the doorstep was a plump, motherly lady in a crisp blue nylon overall, carrying another loaded tea-tray.
‘I reckoned you’d not have time to see to your own elevenses, dear ‒ there! If the other tray’s done with, I’ll just fetch it back to the Doctor’s.’
‘You must be Mrs. Wallis!’ I thanked her for the first tray. ‘We so enjoyed it!’
‘You’re welcome, dear ‒ and you’ll be the young lady from Sister Frampton’s old hospital! Lovely Sister, she is! What she and the Doctor done for my Mabel’s Linda when she had the gastroenteritis, the poor mite ‒ never left her cot, the Sister didn’t, and the Doctor was up the three nights she was that poorly and I should know seeing I didn’t have to do more than put his quilt back on his bed ‒ but this’ll not get his dinner cooked! Other tray in the kitchen? Can’t I fetch it myself, seeing you’ve your hands full? I’ll find the way! All go, isn’t it?’
Aunt Joey had met Mrs. Wallis in the kitchen. ‘Such practical kindness! I’m so glad Davie has her to look after him. Though young men are now much handier about the house than they used to be ‒ dear Grandpa could never even boil an egg, bless him ‒ but Davie’s work’ll leave him so little time for his domestic affairs.’
I agreed David was very lucky to have Mrs. Wallis’s daily help, and mentally rated him double lucky. One of these fine days, very clearly, Sue Frampton was going to make him a very good wife.
It was early afternoon before the removal men had gone. Aunt Joey, Nicky and I flopped into armchairs in the front room and Psmith sprawled at our feet. I said, ‘What we need is food ‒ but first I must do some shopping as the larder’s empty.’ I was pushing myself to my feet, when Psmith sat up and thumped his tail. ‘Scenting a friend, Psmith?’
Then we heard Charles’s voice in the hall.
‘Yes, sure. I’ll explain ‒ thanks a lot ‒ er ‒ oh ‒ how do you do? I’m Charles Elseworth ‒ er ‒ friend of Nicky’s ‒ thanks, again!’
Nicky leapt over to the window-seat and hung out of the leaded bay window. ‘David! Why aren’t you working?’
His face appeared over the sill. ‘Delivering the fish-and-chips. Hope there’ll be enough for four, but I didn’t know your chum Charles had shown up. Sorry ‒ can’t stop ‒’ he waved at Aunt Joey and vanished.
Nicky yelled after him. ‘Just what I feel like! David, you’re a doll and I adore you!’
‘Oh no, you don’t!’ His laughing voice replied. ‘Not now I’ve met your chum Charles! He’s bigger than I am.’
I heard his car start up, but refused to look out of the window. As he would say, we all had our problems ‒ and I wasn’t adding to mine.
Sharing out the packets of hot crisp fish-and-chips was no problem as he had bought such generous helpings there was more than enough for four.
‘How sensible and kind! A hot meal is just what we need! And how good it tastes!’ Aunt Joey smiled at her share. ‘I haven’t eaten it like this since I was a girl. I’d forgotten what I’d been missing.’
I glanced at her neat greying hair and the delicate lines middle-age had etched on her thin, but still pretty face. Suddenly, I wondered if she ever realised how many other things she had missed ‒ things so many other women her age regarded as not only their rights, but as cause for grumbles. I had heard some of my married aunts, some of my friends’ mothers, bemoaning the facts that their husbands expected a hot meal at least twice a day, or that meeting a school bus broke irrevocably into their afternoon’s arrangements.
Aunt Joey had neither husband nor children, and she so loved children. Never, until today, had she really been mistress in her own house. She had run Grandpa’s house, but until the day he died last year, he had held the reins firmly in his Edwardian hands, showing his daughter every consideration ‒ as daughter of the house. Being a leased house, from his death she had known she must not plan her future there as the lease would expire. Yet I had never heard her grumble, or behave as if she had any cause for complaint for devoting her youth and prime to her elderly parents. My father and three uncles had all left home as young men, married, lived their own full lives. Being boys of their generation, that had been as taken for granted as the fact that Joey, the elder and only sister, could not leave Gran and Grandpa alone. Now they all had their wives and families and she was alone. If necessary, they would all have offered her a room in their homes, but thanks to Grandpa’s kind old bachelor friend, at last Aunt Joey had her own home. Her pleasure in it was an absolute joy. She was as thrilled as any bride with every cupboard, light-fitting, window-sill. ‘Don’t you think the gardening clothes in here? That switch ‒ just right ‒ for the sewing lamp! Won’t the pelagoniums look perfect on that landing window-sill?’
Inevitably, after the double move and long journey south, the furniture was dusty, the china and glass needed washing, the rugs shaking, the linen and blankets airing. By four, hours of work remained ahead, but Aunt Joey was white and Nicky openly wilting with fatigue. I suggested an hour’s break. ‘I’ll get tidy and do some shopping before the shops shut. We need food for supper and being more used to physical work, I’m not at all tired.’
‘Fran, you’re an angel! I’m going to collapse on a rug in the back garden. Coming, Charles?’ Nicky queried unnecessarily to her outsize shadow.
Aunt Joey allowed she was ready for a little rest. ‘But you need one too, Fran. The larder can stay empty for tonight. I’m going to treat us all to supper out ‒ and perhaps Davie may care to join us?’
I said it was a sweet idea, but I expected he would be working late and anyway she had spent more than enough on our hotel bill. I hustled her down and onto the sofa in the front room. ‘I truly feel like a walk and after a snooze you’ll be a new woman.’
She smiled up at me. ‘Though a trifle weary, I feel that already! Having so much cheerful, willing, young help, transforms the most mundane chore into a delightfully gay occasion.’ She put a hand on my arm. ‘Honest little Nicky told me it was your idea you should both give up your holiday plans to help me move. Nicky said, “I wished I’d thought of it, Aunty, but I just forgot”. Thank you for not forgetting, dear.’
‘Thank you, as we’re having so much fun!’ I kissed her cheek and went up to get tidy. When I got down again she was dropping off. Psmith, on the rug beside her, opened one eye. I mouthed ‘Walkies?’ He wagged a sleepy tail to show no offence was intended by his rejection and closed his eye.
The green leaves torn off by last night’s gale were still scattered over the pavement and the grass patch. The sun was gloriously warm. A young mother pushing a sleeping baby in a pram smiled, ‘Do with more of this!’
‘Can’t we just!’ I admired her baby, then asked the quickest way to the shops. She advised the footpath running past the hospital garden, then kindly waited to make sure I did not miss the turning before pushing on.
I took that turning reluctantly and very swiftly until I was beyond the door in the wall. I didn’t want to run into David. For Aunt Joey’s sake, I was delighted he lived and worked so near her new home, as soon Nicky and I would have to leave her. I was due back on-duty at three on Monday afternoon. Nicky had to return to her university by Tuesday evening for a special vacation course in medieval history. From the very little I had seen of Arumchester, it looked delightful, but I had no idea whether or not it was a friendly place. Certainly, as Grandpa used to say: the way to make friends is to be friendly. But whilst Aunt Joey could always make friends with the young, or anyone needing her help, shyness so often crippled her when first meeting socially her own contemporaries. David could, and I suspected would, give her the help she needed to break the social ice.
If anything, my confusion over him was increasing. Fairness forced me to accept that much about him was very likeable, and his attitude to his work was admirable. Perhaps, had I not met Bart, I might have been able to shrug off the main foundation for my disliking David as old-fashioned ‒ way-out in progressive 1970. So what if he was as good as engaged to one girl and apparently willing to make a pass at another? Did it really matter? Yes, I thought, it does, to me, because having known Bart I know that can end up with two, and possibly three, people being badly hurt. Not again, for this girl!
The wall ran the length of the right side of the path. On the left were the walls and hedges of private back-gardens. I had glanced unseeingly at the well-stocked rows of vegetables as I strolled by gates, but the next gate stopped my feet and my thoughts.
The waist-high gate opened into a large back garden brilliant with the most wonderful dahlias I had ever seen. They were exquisitely grouped in broad beds arranged round a paved quadrangle set with an ancient sundial. A few feet from the gate in the shadow of a tall ash growing out of the hedge, an elderly gardener crouched with his back to me as he carefully replaced and retied bamboo stakes to the dahlias’ stems.
I did not mean to stand and stare, but the glorious combination of scarlet, yellow and crimson was a sheer delight and the elderly gardener’s professionally slow, methodical movements were so soothing to watch. As I looked at his white-grey head, I caught myself thinking foolishly: he’d know how to grow a lotus in England.
I blushed with self-fury. Why remind myself I’d decided on sight David was an idle layabout because he said he enjoyed lotus eating? As always when roused, I lifted my chin ‒ and that was how I saw the heavy ash branch overhanging the gardener’s head tremble momentarily, before the damage it had suffered in the night brought it down.
‘Gardener, move!’ But he did not seem to hear. I raced in, grabbed his shoulders and hauled him away as the branch fell, flattening dahlias, bamboo stakes, scissors and string.
Our double momentum had us both sprawling on the paving. I leapt to help him up. ‘Have I hurt you? I’m terribly sorry ‒ you didn’t hear my shout.’
‘I am unharmed and exceedingly obliged. Thank you.’ His dry, clipped voice was a little breathless as he allowed me to help him to his feet. ‘Are you hurt? That is the important question!’
‘Not at all, thanks!’ I smiled as I studied him more closely. He did not sound like a professional gardener, despite the rolled-up sleeves of his faded blue shirt, the aged grey flannels tucked into rubber boots, or the streaks of soil on his bare arms and hands. All that I merely noticed absently. I was much more concerned by the lack of colour in his lined, rather leathery and once very good looking face. Though not old, he was far from young and I had given him a nasty shock. ‘Forgive me, but I think you should sit down for a few minutes.’ I glanced round. ‘Can I get you a chair from indoors?’
His heavy black brows drew closer over very deep-set hazel eyes. ‘That might be wise. Would you oblige me still further by overturning that wheelbarrow?’
Not being gardening-minded, it hadn’t occurred to me an upturned wheelbarrow made an excellent seat until I did as he asked. ‘Can you manage?’
‘I believe so, thank you.’ A brief and really charming smile transformed his stern face. ‘You were quite right. I required a little breather, and this is my favourite seat on such occasions.’ He considered the broken branch and then the tree, very thoughtfully. ‘I am much in your debt, young lady. If that branch had chanced to hit the back of my uncovered head ‒ as well it might ‒ the consequences could have been decidedly unpleasant, if not fatal, at my age. How did you come to observe it?’
I told the truth, if not all of it.
‘Appreciate dahlias, eh? H’m. So do I ‒ patently. Called out? No ‒ I disremember hearing you, though I’m happy to say I’ve excellent hearing. But having long been accustomed to applying total concentration to any job in hand, in my retirement I continue to apply that even when the job consists of repairing a damaged flower. On this occasion, that could have proved disastrous, but on many another,’ his charming smile reappeared, ‘I find it exceedingly convenient to be oblivious to matters of no interest to me.’
