Читать книгу Mr Doubler Begins Again - Seni Glaister - Страница 11

Chapter 5

Overnight, the thick cloak of disquiet Doubler felt after Sunday lunch with his family wrapped itself firmly round the seed of anxiety already generated by the three Manila envelopes lurking in the drawer. The envelopes hadn’t been clamouring for his attention, but Doubler was painfully familiar with the impact of leaving one mouldy potato among a sack of sound potatoes and he feared the contents of the envelopes may well be festering and could perhaps become more volatile through lack of attention.

The weekends were always long, but he now only had a number of hours before Mrs Millwood returned to Mirth Farm. Doubler steeled himself, determined to pluck up the courage to ask for Mrs Millwood’s assistance. There was nobody else in the world better equipped to help Doubler find the right solution and he knew that his first instinct, to ignore the threat altogether, was undoubtedly the most dangerous.

Despite his resolve, Doubler chose not to open the third envelope immediately. There would be time to read it, but there was an order to his day that needed to be adhered to. Leaving the envelopes in the dark drawer, their potency in abeyance for a little longer, Doubler prepared his tea.

Doubler warmed the pot while measuring out a big scoop of his specially blended tea leaves. He drained the pot, added the leaves and then poured in boiling water, taking the pot to the still-boiling kettle and filling it at the Aga to ensure minimal loss of heat. Doubler believed the leaves should be allowed to mix freely with the boiling water to fully release the flavour so he didn’t use any strainer inside the pot, choosing instead to strain the tea as he poured it. Part of his Sunday evening ritual was to mix enough of his blend to keep him going for a full week, preferring to leave the bulk packs of black tea in a cool, dark corner of the pantry and enjoying an inordinate sense of accomplishment when he had judged the week’s requirement perfectly. His blend (equal quantities of Keemun, Assam and Ceylon leaves) provided him the versatility he needed from a tea: something light in colour with a smooth and mild taste whose well-rounded character suited both a morning and an afternoon cup.

His teapot, cup, saucer and milk jug set out before him, Doubler sat at the kitchen table and spread out all three envelopes, examining the contents in the order they had arrived. The substance remained consistent. Mr Peele wanted to buy his farm.

The first letter had arrived, conventionally, by post, and once he’d digested it, Doubler had paid it scant attention, tidying it away in the dresser drawer without too much further thought.

The second letter, however, was markedly different in both tone and manner of delivery. It had been hand-delivered, which meant that somebody had been to Mirth Farm in person.

It was this intrusion that had rung the alarm bells in Doubler’s head and he swiftly responded with a proportionate stepping-up of his security. Doubler was fortunate that, while ostensibly a man with no friends, he had many people indebted to him and it was very easy to call in a favour, particularly as he leveraged this influence so rarely. Those beholden to him were eager to be of use and within two days of a brusque phone call, two men in a white van had arrived to install the security camera on the corner of Doubler’s yard. This was the camera whose vigilant sweep now kept a watchful lookout for Mirth Farm trespassers.

Doubler worked meticulously through each letter, making careful notes in his journal of the most salient points, though these were sometimes difficult to extract from the ornate vernacular that intensified with Peele’s mounting irritation. What struck Doubler was the very great haste with which Peele had crescendoed from a generous cash offer to an outright demand, but nothing had prepared him for the unveiled threats of the latest letter. Peele was clearly very used to getting his own way and, perhaps an impatient man, had been quickly affronted by Doubler’s lack of response.

Should Doubler have responded to the first or second letter, even just to say a polite no? This was a question for Mrs Millwood. Mrs Millwood might not have a clue about property negotiation, but she had a very good instinct for people and she would certainly have an opinion.

The cash offer in the first letter was very good; Doubler had recognized this immediately. Even given the tiny sum for which he had originally purchased Mirth Farm and allowing for his lack of attention to rising property prices, he knew it was unarguably generous. In fact, it was hard to imagine that anyone should want to part with such a very large sum of money in exchange for his home. It was evident, Doubler deduced, that Peele was not trying to steal Doubler’s farm or trick him in any way. But the size of the offer demonstrated to Doubler how very badly Peele wanted to own Doubler’s property and he had made his determination abundantly clear by coming to Doubler with a proposal that was intended to be irresistible. And when Doubler had not even acknowledged receipt of the offer, Peele had accelerated the urgency by pointing out the reasons that Doubler might regret his lack of pliability.

The second letter swiftly introduced some legalese. The letter began with the words ‘Without Prejudice’, which in themselves were intended to be perceived as a threat. Doubler had already confirmed the definition with Mrs Millwood and so he knew that these words meant the letter could not be used in a court of law against the originator, but Doubler was not entirely sure why he and Peele might end up locked in a legal battle. Could Doubler be sued for not responding to the first letter? Was it an offence not to enter into a negotiation that you wanted no part of? Doubler didn’t believe, logically, that this could be the case, but the very words ‘Without Prejudice’ were troublesome to him.

In his second letter, Peele used the language of courtrooms to forcibly suggest that Doubler must accept his generous offer within fourteen days or the offer would be withdrawn and Peele would thereafter be forced to pay fair market value. Doubler knew, logically, that this threat was nonsensical because he didn’t want to sell his home at any price.

Doubler referred back to the earlier letter and glanced ahead to the third. They had not only accelerated in urgency, they’d accelerated in impenetrable speech. The first letter contained no ‘notwithstanding’s, the second contained two, and the third was riddled with them.

The gist of the third letter was one of unbridled intimidation, and Peele was very specific about the nature his threats would take. Peele insisted that he fully intended to increase his use of pesticides and warned that his liberal use of genetically modified crops might negatively impact on Doubler’s own organic status and, therefore, his bottom line. This was a cause for grave concern to Doubler and he underlined the observation in his notebook. Doubler wasn’t worried so much about his organic certification from an economic point of view: while his farming methods were indeed organic (he had begun his farming life not knowing any other way and he had failed to pay attention to progress so had failed to adopt more productive methods subsequently), his farming income did not depend on his organic certification.

But Peele was not to know that this threat was alarming for other reasons. Peele’s land completely surrounded Doubler’s and there was nothing to stop the insects that landed on Peele’s fields stopping to inspect Doubler’s. There was a very real concern that the purity of Doubler’s potato experimentation could be compromised and that the data he had thus far gathered could be greatly undermined. What if the Institute of Potato Research and Development in northern India, the very body of excellence with whom Doubler was now in correspondence, got wind of this potential breach? Doubler was certain that he had allowed adequate set-aside at the margins of each field to pass the scrutiny of the organic inspectors, but would the country of India be so easily satisfied? Doubler’s research, thus far, had relied on the absolute genetic integrity of each generation of potatoes, and now Peele was threatening forty years of work.

This was very vexing indeed.

And as if Doubler didn’t have enough doubt and worry plaguing him, Peele went on to list yet another threat (as though he had an endless supply on which to rely upon in a purely non-prejudicial way). He had, apparently, ‘excellent connections and relationships with influencers, government officials and local councillors’ and these people might well force Doubler to sell his land under compulsory purchase order owing to proposed plans for the new high-speed rail link that was threatening to carve the chalky hills in two. Peele made it very clear that his own strategic alliances would put him in a strong position to deal with whatever was thrown his way but that Doubler, acting on his own, would find battling with the monsters of Westminster a very lonely and futile job.

Doubler sighed loudly and wondered whether Peele’s apparent commercial success was because he dealt his blows in threes. The generous cash offer could be ignored in isolation. After all, what on earth would Doubler do with so much money other than find the ideal place to live and work, and this he already had at Mirth Farm? But dealing with an unsolicited offer from government officials was as vexing as the genetically-modified-pollen-carrying insects that Doubler now saw as little plagues of rogue militants dispatched in clouds by Peele’s own men to undermine Doubler’s life’s work.

There was no denying it: Peele’s threats had dealt greater blows than the perpetrator could have dared hope. The threat to Doubler’s organic status paled into insignificance in comparison to the threat to his groundbreaking potato research. And the suggestion that officials might be invited to discuss the path of a new train and then accidentally stumble across the potato grower’s business concerns was much more alarming to Doubler, who alone knew the true depths of his underground activity. Were the government to get wind of this other enterprise while routinely investigating resistance to a compulsory purchase order, then who knew what trouble lay ahead.

Doubler looked at his notes, the page divided into three columns representing each distinct threat, and reeled at the sheer enormity of the attack. He had wondered, at the arrival of the third envelope, whether stepping up his security might be a disproportionate response, but now, when the words were distilled into a gradient of menace, he knew that war had indeed been declared. Yes, there was no doubt: he needed Mrs Millwood.

Doubler always looked forward to his housekeeper’s arrival, but with such a clear agenda for their talk ahead, he was more restless than ever before. Ten minutes before she was due, he began pacing up and down by the window, looking constantly at the spot at the end of the drive and raising the binoculars to his eyes at every imagined disturbance.

As it was, he was fetching his notebook at the moment she came through the gate, but to ensure he was consistent with his diligent recordings, he noted the approximate time of her arrival as he watched the car pull forward on the drive. Scarcely able to contain his nervous energy, he wandered through the house awaiting her symphony of entrance, so it was a couple of minutes before he registered something different about the quality of sound of the engine on the drive. Mrs Millwood had a distinctive driving style. She kept the engine revs at a constant speed, taking the bends at a slow and steady pace that seemed to allow her to coast her way to the top. Although he had been absolutely certain that it had been her car he observed a couple of minutes previously, he was now not so sure. The car was revving up on the incline and then slowing to a crawl to navigate each turn, making the car sound strained and hesitant as it made its approach. Doubler stopped and held his breath to hear the small aural nuances of her arrival, listening carefully to the thud of the car door as she eventually reached the yard.

He stood stock-still, his ears trained on the kitchen door. When instead of it opening, the front doorbell rang, its noise echoing thunderously around the house, his heart leapt at the intrusion. There was no reason for Mrs Millwood to arrive at the front door – she never had done so before – so it was with great trepidation that Doubler made his way nervously down the hallway to see what Trojan interloper could possibly have made it as far as his doorstep. He eyed the doormat suspiciously, half expecting another one of the Manila envelopes to slide through the letterbox in front of his eyes, but the doorbell rang again, and unable to ignore it, he carefully undid the chain and turned the stiff key in the lock, his heart beating loudly in his ears.

As he opened the door hesitantly, a woman poked her head into the narrow space he had created. She was wearing a brightly coloured knitted bobble hat pulled down over her ears and some sort of duffle coat over jeans and wellington boots. He narrowed his eyes as he tried to process the threat.

‘Doubler?’

‘I am,’ he tried, though he wasn’t certain of anything at that moment.

‘Hello! I’m Gracie’s daughter.’

‘Gracie,’ he said, feeling even more nervous now she claimed to be somebody’s daughter. He didn’t know any Gracies.

‘Gracie,’ he said again, unsure whether he should yet betray the fact he knew nobody by that name.

‘Yes. Can I come in?’

He didn’t seem to have much say in the matter because she was already pushing on the door to enter his house. Her admission was almost forced, but Doubler was disarmed by her eyes, which were sparkling and bright, and there was a lightness in her look that he recognized and responded to. He stood back as she entered and walked ahead of him as if she knew the house.

‘Shall I put the kettle on?’ she asked as she made her way towards the kitchen. Her ease, her certainty became familiar. Gracie. Gracie must be the name of Mrs Millwood and this must certainly be her daughter. He shut the front door and hurried after her.

‘By all means put the kettle on,’ he said, perplexed, but by the time he had caught up with her, she was already filling the kettle at the sink as if she had performed this task a thousand times.

He sat at the kitchen table and allowed events to happen to him. He allowed this woman to feel her way around his kitchen as she assembled cups and saucers, and warmed the teapot, reaching for the tin of tea leaves as if it were second nature. He watched her and marvelled at the million little ways that identified her as her mother’s daughter.

‘Were you expecting me?’

‘Not at all. I was expecting your mother.’

‘Just as I thought. She was supposed to tell you, but she must have chickened out.’

‘Tell me what?’

‘Mum’s poorly.’

She made this last announcement just as she sat down opposite him. She pushed a teacup towards him.

‘Drink this.’

He tried to lift the hot drink to his lips but found himself quite unable to grasp the cup with enough force to raise it. He looked at Gracie’s daughter.

‘Poorly. What sort of poorly?’

‘Oh, the worst you can imagine, I’m afraid.’ She reached forward and spooned some sugar into his tea, stirring it, and then she sipped at her own. She smiled a small, sorrowful smile, one that, irrationally in Doubler’s eyes, carried a trace of sadness for him as well as a multitude of sadnesses of her own. ‘She’s had it before, of course, but I’m afraid it’s back again with sharper teeth.’

Doubler found himself unable to swallow, as if the disease’s sharp teeth had sunk themselves into his own fleshy neck.

‘When? When did she have it before?’ he asked, once he had found his voice. This was all news to him. The first toothless episode and then the second, fanged one.

‘A good while back. She was younger then, much more able to deal with it and she’s been well for such a long time now, we really thought she’d beaten it.’

Doubler imagined Mrs Millwood beating a sharp-toothed thing with a stick. Or a mop. Or a broom. Surely it wouldn’t stand a chance. And he remembered, now, her absence. She had taken some time off and he had resented it enormously through a cloud of other resentments, and the combined force of his upset and all the other upsets had somehow obscured the reason for her absence. He had been at the lowest point of his life. He had settled into the routine of life without Marie, but nothing had made much sense to him still. He tried to remember how long Mrs Millwood had been absent for.

‘How long?’ he said. Using two hands, he lifted the cup unsteadily to his lips.

A sharp pain flashed across the face of Gracie’s daughter and Doubler realized what she might think he was asking.

‘Until she’s back here, I mean. Back at work, until she’s not poorly again.’ The word ‘poorly’ stuck in his mouth like fluff, getting tangled there and drying his tongue and lips until he thought they might never work again. It had been the daughter’s language, the daughter’s choice of words. But of course it wasn’t a big enough word to describe this thing with savage teeth.

Gracie reached across the table and took his hand in hers. ‘Mum’s really sick this time. We’re taking it one day at a time. She is going to fight it, and the doctors are going to throw everything at it. But the treatment’s going to be awful, so she’ll feel a lot worse before she feels better. If she feels better at all.’

Doubler was horrified by his own selfish thoughts and yet all he could think of was the absence he would be left with. Not the threat of the ultimate absence (this, he hadn’t even begun to process as a possibility) but the absence of the next few days and weeks. Without her visits giving his day some structure and purpose, he wasn’t sure he would cope. He felt his stomach cave in.

‘Will you cope, do you think?’ Gracie’s daughter asked, kindly.

Doubler was taken aback, completely, as if she had seen into his soul. He stumbled to find the words to express how utterly bereft he felt not to be sitting down for lunch with Mrs Millwood today, let alone the terror he felt when he tried to contemplate the bleakness of the horizon ahead of him.

‘There’s the day-to-day cleaning, I suppose. It’ll probably be easy enough to find somebody to help you keep on top of that,’ Gracie’s daughter said, looking around her at the kitchen. ‘I’m amazed she didn’t want to talk this through with you herself. She may be poorly but she has you on her mind, you know.’

Doubler swallowed back his thoughts. To cope with the housework didn’t even touch the surface of the loss he was feeling. And yet, somehow, a conversation seemed to be happening to him, around him, and Gracie’s daughter was covering both sides.

‘I tell you what. How about I find somebody to fill her shoes in the short term? I’d be happy to place some ads and do the first round of interviews if that would help. Shall I?’

Doubler nodded slowly, not entirely sure what he was agreeing to. He didn’t want somebody to fill Mrs Millwood’s shoes. Not in the short term, not in the longer term. He wanted her own outdoor shoes left under the bench by the kitchen door, and he wanted her own stockinged feet to slip into her indoor shoes, which she wore to dart around the house. The point of Mrs Millwood was that she barely wore shoes. She simply floated from room to room just above the surface. She only became substantial, a human form that might need shoes, when she sat down at lunchtime, and then they talked and talked. Nobody would fill those shoes; the footwear wasn’t the point.

‘I won’t hire anybody until you’ve met them, of course. I’ll just do the preliminary interviews and you can make the final decision. How does that sound? I think it will make Mum happy to know that somebody is taking care of things here. She worries a bit, you see, and I don’t want her distracted. I want her mind firmly focused on getting better. She’s strong in that she’s vital and vigorous, but there’s so little of her she’s going to have to use every ounce of her physical strength to deal with the chemo.’

There. She’d said it. Doubler had known that the language of Mrs Millwood’s poorliness would need to be upgraded to incorporate the technicalities of the practical. ‘Poorliness’ was too vague a word to describe her symptoms, and ‘treatment’ was too vague a word to tackle the solution. And here it was in black and white, a word that conjured up body-wracking drugs, tubes, needles, poison and pain. It didn’t sound like a treatment; it sounded like a penance.

Gracie’s daughter noticed Doubler wince and wondered, for the first time since she had arrived, whether Doubler was taking the news of her mother quite badly. She had assumed until now that his silence was born out of a taciturn nature, so she reached for his hand once more.

‘We’re all going to help each other through this. I need to make sure Mum has all the peace and quiet she needs to get better, so I’m going to shoulder her responsibilities. That means I’m here for you. You will do your bit, I’m sure, and it’s just that none of us can know what that might mean yet. I don’t, you don’t, and Mum certainly doesn’t. But I suspect you’ll be there to support her if you’re needed. Is that right?’

Doubler felt hope through the possibility of purpose. ‘Of course. Anything. I don’t really leave the house much. Certainly not since . . . not since Marie went. But, yes, I’ll do what is asked of me. Tell her that, will you?’ He closed his eyes briefly and allowed himself to imagine climbing into the car to leave the farm for the first time in years. ‘Tell her I’ll visit. She might be bored. She might like a bit of company.’

‘Well, that’s a very sweet offer, but I can’t imagine she’ll feel up to much – as it is, I’ll be fighting to keep her friends away. Golly, my mum’s amassed a few of those along the way! There’s the church lot, her knitting circle, the animal-shelter lot. Not to mention that gaggle of buddies she’s known all her life. They’re a good bunch, her school chums. They’re always there for each other, but they’re getting to an age where they have to offer this sort of support to one another all the time. They’re a marvel, though, really, quite an inspiration actually. But still, that’s a very nice thought and I will make sure she knows you offered. She’ll be most touched.’

Doubler recoiled. He knew about the knitting circle. He knew she went to church. He knew she volunteered at an animal rescue centre. But he had assumed when she talked about these different pockets of interest that they were mere pastimes, mere distractions to avoid having to stare intense loneliness in the face the way he had to every single time he looked in the mirror. A gaggle of buddies? He scrolled back through countless lunchtime conversations. Jean? Her name had come up often. Dot? Was she part of a gaggle? Mabel?

‘Jean? Dot? Mabel?’ he ventured.

‘Oh, Mum’s told you about them, has she? Mum does like to talk.’

‘She listens, too. She’s an extremely good listener.’

‘Hmm,’ said Gracie’s daughter, trying to imagine her mother listening, not talking.

‘I mean really. She really is an exceptionally good listener. She’s the type of listener who actually stops thinking while she listens to you. That’s rare in my experience. Most people in conversation are too busy thinking about what they’re going to say next to truly listen well.’

‘That’s a very nice thing to hear about my mother. I’m you sure you must be right, and perhaps that explains why she’s got such a wide circle of friends.’

A ‘wide circle’. Doubler contemplated the phrase. A circle was a complete thing, with no breaks, no gaps. No room for another. How ludicrous that he had considered himself a friend of hers. On the other hand, she was clearly his friend. Perhaps his only friend. Doubler imagined himself a small bubble on the outside of her wide circle. Was it possible for those two certainties to exist in his mind and for both of them to be truthful? That she was a friend to him but that he was not a friend to her?

Gracie’s daughter stood and began clearing away the teacups, taking them to the sink. As she rinsed them, she continued talking to Doubler, her back to him. ‘She’s got a week of intensive chemo, so we think she’ll be in hospital for the duration and then, if all goes according to plan, she’ll be treated as an outpatient thereafter. I’ll keep you up to date with what is going on, how she’s responding. And in the meantime, let’s keep focused on some of the practical issues. I’ll see if I can find somebody to give you a hand around here and I’ll let you know how I get on. Anything particular you’re after? Cooking as well as cleaning? Running errands? Shopping?’

‘Not cooking. I cook,’ said Doubler with a sharp bite of vehemence that surprised them both. ‘Just the other things.’ He went quiet for a moment, wondering how he could articulate his need for somebody who would sit with him and ask him just the right number of questions about his experiments. Somebody who cared almost as much as he did. Somebody who knew better than he did how to run his life but who never interfered, just trusted him to deal with it. Somebody who knew both his pre-Marie and post-Marie personas. Somebody who knew how far he’d fallen and how slow the climb up again had been.

‘Just cleaning,’ Doubler said, and he stood to dry the cups.