Ashenden (39 page)

Pray God, thought Alison, that Izzie will get the grades, go to university, and leave Stuart behind. She could not imagine that there would be Stuarts at university. Universities would not let in Stuarts.

“You won’t forget to call next door and pick up Mrs. Drummond’s cake, will you? The entries have to be in by a quarter to eleven.”

“No, Mother,” said Izzie. “I won’t forget.”

“Don’t. She’s hoping to win again this year.”

“Of course she’ll win,” said Izzie. “They fix it. She’d win even if she didn’t enter. Where’s Dad?”

“Up at the Park. He’s helping them set up. I’ll see you later, shall I?” she said to the slamming door. Then she went to open it and let the air back in.

*  *  *

Izzie, heading to the churchyard with the marigolds, peered at her reflection in the butcher’s window and straightened the khaki bandanna she had tied round her head. She definitely looked like a militant. When she got to university—unlike her mother, she’d no doubt
she’d get the grades and believed her teachers when they told her so—she’d decided to join one of the far-left organizations, perhaps the Socialist Workers Party, or the Workers Revolutionary Party or the International Marxist Group. A socialist worker of some kind sold papers outside the record shop where she had a Saturday job, and she’d bought one once, intrigued by the headline “Scum.” The paper was full of savage rage, calls to action, and exclamation marks, which appealed to her very much. For the past six months she’d been vegetarian, which had made her mother, who didn’t believe that meat was murder, worry about the number of eggs she ate and what it was doing to her bowels and cholesterol levels. Unlike her vegetarianism, which couldn’t be disguised, she was keeping her political conversion to herself for now. Once she was at Sussex, she had visions of her parents turning on the television one evening after supper and seeing her with a placard at the head of a demonstration, or raising a clenched fist and spitting in the face of a policeman. Although her father was a naturalized British citizen, his German birth allowed her to entertain ideas of being distantly related to Karl Marx or perhaps one of the members of the Baader-Meinhof Group.

She lifted the latch of the lych-gate. The ancient graves near the church had slanted tombstones covered in gray-green lichen, the lettering old-fashioned and blurred. Her grandmother shared a plot with her grandfather at the far end, where the newer graves were. Ever since she had been a little girl, Izzie had had a favorite, a small stone inscribed “Grace Lyell, born 12 March 1952, died 14 March 1952.” This child gone before spoke to the child she was then, before she had known who Grace was, before everything she learned about the Lyells had kissed her life with glamour. As she passed the grave, which was always well tended, she laid a marigold on the ground and told Grace that it was for her. Over the years, she had left similar offerings: handfuls of daisies picked from the long churchyard grass; once, a small plastic cowboy for reasons she could no longer remember.

There wasn’t a breath of air. Sweat ran down her forehead and into the khaki bandanna. Her grandparents’ memorial tablet was
mottled brown granite with a high shine and deep black letters. The ground was cracked, bone dry. “Hello, Grandma,” said Izzie, crossing herself with the solemnity of those who aren’t religious. “These are from your garden.” When she remembered her grandmother, she was always in her garden, staking things, deadheading roses, teaching her names of plants. Lady’s mantle was one of them, with its tiny lime-green stars and crinkled leaf-fans whose furry hairs turned raindrops into crystal beads. She bent down and picked up the grave vase, catching, as she did so, a hint of her reflection in the polished stone. Then she tossed her mother’s flowers onto a neighboring plot and went to fill the vase at the tap. Only a trickle of water emerged.

Izzie believed the dead liked to hear news. Back in the churchyard, as she sat inserting the marigolds into the holes in the aluminium liner of the grave vase, she talked about the bring-and-buy stall at the fête she’d be running—“for the first time ever, isn’t that good of me?”—what the weather had done to her skin and hair—“I’m so tanned you wouldn’t believe it and my hair is almost pure white”—and how irritating, incompetent, and ridiculous her mother was and all the ways she had been irritating, incompetent, and ridiculous lately. “Well, good-bye, Grandma,” she said, crossing herself again. “I’ll be back soon to tell you how it went.” She got up, thought about leaving her mother’s flowers where she had discarded them, then gathered them up and gave them to Grace on the way out.

*  *  *

In the stable block the judges were having a discussion. Down the length of a trestle table the entries for the flower, fruit, and vegetable prizes were spaced at intervals, like shopping at a supermarket checkout. Although the village gardeners had done their best, the weather had taken its toll. This year the potatoes and onions were puny, the peas were pellets, and the floral entries were down by a third. The exception was a display towards the door: two enormous marrows presented in the class C “size and weight” category.

“He says he’s been siphoning his bathwater,” said Mr. Southcliffe.

“My eye,” said Mrs. Cottingham. “Mrs. Simmons sees him every
night out there with his hosepipe. Watering freely. Those are her precise words.
Watering freely
.”

Petra Curtis, who had been examining a scabrous carrot with a nose, which was entered in the class F “amusing vegetables” category, said that the rules made no mention of watering methods.

“We simply cannot let him get away with it,” said Mrs. Cottingham, putting much vehemence into “simply,” as she did into all of her adverbs. “Watering in secret during a hosepipe ban sets such a bad example.”

“You can’t do anything in secret if you live next door to Mrs. Simmons,” said Petra. “It seems perfectly straightforward to me. These marrows are obviously the best in class. We’ve no choice but to give them first prize. Although I do agree that a quiet word with Ted might not go amiss.”

“He’s a decent sort, all in all,” said Mr. Southcliffe, glancing from woman to woman and giving the change in his pockets a sharp, decisive jingle. “You have to remember he’s not been well.”

Mrs. Cottingham folded her arms. “Well, I for one shall be bringing this up with the committee at the earliest opportunity.”

The door opened and Izzie Beckmann came in. “Am I too late?”

Mrs. Cottingham checked her watch. “Five past eleven, I make it. The rules clearly state—”

“Is that Mrs. Drummond’s cake?” said Petra. “I did wonder where it had got to.”

“I was visiting my grandmother’s grave and lost track of time,” said Izzie, who knew how to look innocent and angelic when she wanted to.

“Put it over there, dear,” said Petra, pointing to the end of a trestle table on the opposite side of the stables, where the jams, chutneys, and cakes were displayed. “You’ll see her entry card.”

Izzie smiled, set down the cake, and left.

“Lovely girl,” said Mr. Southcliffe, shaking his head. “Lovely girl. She’ll break a few hearts in her time, I expect.”

“All the girls look like boys these days,” said Mrs. Cottingham. “And vice versa.”

“My dear late wife was wearing trousers when I met her,” said Mr. Southcliffe. “Practical garments in wartime. Fetching on the right person.”

*  *  *

Izzie had met Stuart one Saturday when he’d come into the record shop with a few of his friends. They’d crammed into one of the booths at the back, sharing the headphones to listen to the latest Judas Priest album, and then left without buying it. Afterwards the booth reeked of patchouli and cigarettes.

At the record shop Izzie sold Herb Alpert and James Last and songs of humpback whales. Fourteen-year-old boys would come in to snigger over the naked women on the cover of
Electric Lady-land
or to ask for a James Brown record so they could say “sex” out loud. “That song I hear on the radio all the time” was another request they often had. Depending on how bored or busy she was, she would either suggest whatever was number one that week or ask the person to sing the tune, which was always good for a laugh. Iris, the manageress, had psoriasis and a crush on Al Pacino.

The week after he’d listened to Judas Priest in the booth with his friends, Stuart had come into the shop on his own and spent an hour flicking through the empty record sleeves in the alien and despised territory of folk, which happened to be the rack closest to the counter where Izzie was serving. The next week he’d done the same. “Here’s love’s young dream back again,” said Gregory, raising an eyebrow and nursing his cup of instant coffee. Gregory was in charge of the classical music section upstairs and a devotee of Sibelius, Steeleye Span, and Hollywood musicals.

The following Saturday Stuart asked her out and they went to a pub after she finished work. The trees were budding, Elton John was on the jukebox, and they kissed right there in the public bar after she finished her rum and black. In the upper fourth there had been a girl who believed you could get pregnant from kissing, she remembered halfway through the snog, which wasn’t to say she wasn’t paying attention to the thrilling twang of her nerve endings or the heat deep
in her loins. She’d had boyfriends before and was familiar with the way that sweaty hands inched along the backs of cinema seats or landed on you as if they had unexpectedly dropped off the ends of arms up in the circle. Stuart, however, knew what he was about— “experienced” she told herself as his tongue went in her mouth—and had long sideboards, which made him seem older. He shared a maroon Ford Anglia with his brother. She fancied him like mad.

That spring, they spent a lot of time in pubs or in the car, parked in side streets or down country lanes, steaming up the windows. Afterwards she would come home flushed and confused, her body saying one thing and her head another. One night, a month or so before they moved to the village, her father had given her an awkward speech in the kitchen of their old house, where he was sitting waiting up for her, pretending to work on his accounts.

“You have your whole life in front of you,” he’d said, his accent pronounced, as it always was at times of stress or emotion. “I’m sure that this Stuart is a nice boy, but there is no need to be serious about one person at your age. What is that on your neck, Izzie?”

“Nothing, Dad.” She tugged her hair across the love bite; this was before the haircut.

“Have a glass of water before you go to bed.” He ran the tap and poured it for her.

“Have you Done It yet?” they giggled at school. (Doing It was always capitalized in the sixth-form common room.) No, was the answer she kept to herself, while trying to imply otherwise. Lust tugged at her when she was with him, particularly in the car, and walking hand in hand or going to meet his friends in some pub or other gave her a warm sense of importance and necessity, as if she were a prize that had been won. Trevor, who had a beard and wore blue eyeliner, used to pretend her school scarf was a telephone, putting one end to his ear and talking into the other. Other friends paid tribute: “Like the new haircut,” said Mick. “Suits her, don’t you think?” said Stuart, running his hand over her shorn head. “Shows her lovely little ears.” Yet at other times something like boredom would ambush her, she would stop fancying him, and he would become
as insignificant as someone she would pass in the street. Even his name would become unattractive. He went away to London after Easter to hang about with different friends (he had already left school) and wrote her poems that were like bad pop lyrics. She hid them from herself at the bottom of her underwear drawer, where she wouldn’t be tempted to read them and remind herself how awful they were and how childishly they were spelled and punctuated. Aside from the poetry, however, she found that she did miss him, which was all very confusing.

During the exam season, she wasn’t allowed to go out much and she became a young girl again, fed by her mother, tested by her father, crossing off the revision chart in her bedroom with a black Magic Marker. Now the exams were over, lust and boredom were back warring with each other, and her mother was frenzied with disapproval, convinced that Stuart was going to ruin her future; that his general lack of ambition was going to rub off on her; that she would get pregnant and end up living on the dole. Izzie knew that there was no place for Stuart in her future. The question was whether it would be better to sleep with him and lose her virginity before she went to university, or wait until she got there and had met someone else who wouldn’t bore her quite as much. As it wasn’t an exam question, and virginity was not like impacted wisdom teeth, which she was due to have extracted later in the month, she didn’t know the answer to it.

*  *  *

When Izzie told her grandmother that she was running the bring-and-buy stall, it wasn’t strictly true. What was true was that she had agreed to help out behind the stall later in the afternoon for an hour or so. During the weeks before the fête, her mother had been the one to collect the donations from the houses in the village and the postwar council estate that adjoined it, quietly dispose of what was pure rubbish—the much-worn pair of plimsolls, for example, or the carrier bag filled with stained tea towels—and ticket the rest with white stickers on which she wrote the prices.

“Is twenty pee too much, do you think?” she had asked Walter one evening earlier in the week, holding up a pewter platter with “God Bless Our Daily Bread” stamped on it in Gothic letters.

“I’d pay twenty pee never to see it again. But I wouldn’t mind this.” He picked up an old wooden plane.

“Yours for fifty pee,” she said.

“Oh, come on, Allie. The blade is rusty.”

“You’ll sort that out in no time. Besides, it’s all in a good cause.”

He ran his fingers over the plane. A certain distance descended on him from time to time, and over the years she had learned, the hard way, not to say, “What is it?” or “Anything the matter?” or, worse, “Out with it.”

She got on with her stickers. The clock ticked.