Читать книгу Aphrodite’s Hat - Salley Vickers - Страница 9

Every Easter, Elspeth and Ewan stayed in a cottage loaned them by Mrs Stroud, who had been a school friend of Ewan’s Aunt Val. Not that the two old ladies ever saw much of each other in their latter days. Still, it was recognisably Edie Stroud in Aunt Val’s photo album – the girl with the almost coal-black hair, very bobbed – unless that was Mary Squires, after all, who died of tuberculosis after her fiancé shot himself. When Mrs Stroud herself died, the cottage passed to her nephew who worked in Amsterdam – something to do with diamonds, someone had said, though that might have been wishful thinking. He was glad enough to let it without trouble to a couple who did not mind that there was a greenish fungus around the window frames and that you had to hang the bedding before the fire to air each night before you went to sleep. Indeed, they would have missed the nightly ritual, Elspeth and Ewan, if Mrs Stroud’s nephew had done what his aunt had always been saying she would do and have a proper damp course laid down.

Luckily, Mrs Stroud herself was now laid down instead and the fingers of moisture were allowed to settle inside the glass of the windows unhindered and make little feathery rivulets down the pane and emanate out into the general air of the place.

Elspeth and Ewan had never had any children. In the early days when they went to ‘Brow’ they had gone with the plan of serious lovemaking. But as anyone who has ever tried it knows ‘serious’ lovemaking is not the most successful kind. When it became clear that for one reason or another (they never tried too hard to discover which) they were not going to have children they tacitly dropped such plans. This did not mean that they were not affectionate with each other. People often said of them that they were an exceptionally warm couple – really, it did you good to be with them. In bed at night they held each other close even years after the lovemaking had been dropped altogether, except for birthdays and Christmas. But it was Easter when they always went to ‘Brow’ which seemed not quite to qualify …

This Easter was particularly cold, though Elspeth said that all Easters were cold these days and it must be to do with climate change. She believed that something had happened to the calendar since they were young. Not at all, Ewan said. The Met Office had produced statistics which demonstrated that the weather had been much the same, give or take the odd fluctuation, for the past two hundred years. That was just like men, Elspeth had retorted, to dismiss everything the scientists tell us if it didn’t suit their prejudices. They were driving, as usual, down the M3 and off the A303 past Stonehenge and into the heart of Somerset, if such a promiscuous county could be said to have a ‘heart’.

The cottage was called ‘Brow’ because it stood on the brow of a low hill – hardly a hill at all, really, more a kind of hump. It stood alone at the end of a lane, which fortunately had never been surfaced and therefore discouraged picnickers.

Elspeth unpacked the box of groceries she had brought from London to save having to go too often to Brack, the nearest village, or to Wells for decent wine. Ewan went at once to inspect the woodshed. Yes, plenty of sawn logs stacked – so Tim, the young man who seemed always to be smoking joints but who for all that kept the hedges neatly clipped, had done his stuff. And there were enough candles too for when the electricity tripped off. All in order, then. And it never took long to heat up the tank for a bath.

It was still cold the next day when they went for one of the walks which over the years they had taken possession of – behind the hill and along the track through the plantation, towards Wells. You could just see the twin honey-coloured cathedral towers in the distance below them. ‘Shall we go to Wells tomorrow?’ Elspeth asked. ‘Tomorrow’ was Good Friday. But in the end they decided not – it wasn’t a big thing with them, church at Easter – just that Elspeth liked the pageantry.

‘It’s going to snow,’ Ewan remarked as he opened the wine for supper. They were to have boeuf en daube, brought all the way from Highgate in a casserole. Years ago Elspeth had learned the recipe from reading To the Lighthouse but these days she never imagined herself as Mrs Ramsey.

‘“Nudity banned until this appears in hedges” – eight letters?’ Ewan asked later by the fire. Although Elspeth had quite a different cast of mind, and never got crossword clues, for twenty years he had persevered in asking her advice.

‘Hawthorn,’ she said, proving that it is right never to stop trying.

‘Why so?’

‘“Ne’er cast a clout till may be out.” People think it’s the month, but in fact it’s the may flower. Don’t you remember? I’ve told you that millions of times!’ But a mind that grasps crosswords will usually be too reasonable for rhymes or folklore.

Perhaps it was the extreme temperature but by Saturday Ewan had contracted a cold. They ate toasted hot-cross buns by the fire and he went to bed early. Elspeth wished they had packed whisky and Ewan wished she wouldn’t fuss.