Mrs Griffiths and the lady behind the counter exchange significant glances. They are both thinking ‘Poor old Jack’. Mrs Griffiths notices that Jack is much thinner and greyer than he was. He is still stinking and filthy, but his health is clearly worse, and he has a forlorn and vanquished air.
Over the next few weeks Mrs Griffiths encounters Jack more frequently. When he has finished in the shop he walks straight across the middle of the cricket pitch, and stands outside his old house with his hands in his pockets, just looking at it. One day the new owners see him and assume that he is a vagabond up to no good. The young man comes out, and Mrs Griffiths arrives just in time to set him right, to prevent him from calling the police, and to prevent Jack from telling him to bugger off. The young man is nonetheless afraid that Jack Oak might frighten the children, and he glowers at him every time he sees him standing immobile outside, like the trunk of a ruined apple tree, with his hands in his pockets, just looking and looking and looking at his old house.
The situation becomes steadily sadder and more absurd and Mrs Griffiths thinks about calling the social services. Instead she manages to trace Jessie in the West Country, and Jessie says she’s tried to stop him, to talk him out of it, but she can’t. Jessie says that she’s at her wits’ end, but he always comes back and maybe he’ll stop eventually.
On one occasion Mrs Griffiths comes to the village shop early and realises that Jack must have been there all night, finding him asleep in his Triumph Herald with nothing but a rug to cover him, and one day in January she calls round at his old cottage in order to collect for the donkey refuge and to ask if the new owners are intending to vote Conservative. There is a hoar frost, the twigs are thick with glistening rime, she is well wrapped up, and she walks carefully so as not to wintle on the rimy Bargate stones of the path. She feels fresh and renewed on freezing mornings like this.
As she goes up the path something snags the corner of her vision, and she turns her head quickly. There is a small garden shed on the left-hand side, up against the front hedge, and from the threshold protrudes a pair of old muddy brown boots with much-mended laces. She runs over, sure that she recognises them, and she puts her hand to her mouth in horror. ‘Oh Jack!’ she cries. ‘Jack!’ even though she has never addressed him by his first name during the sixty years of their entire acquaintance. She goes down on her knees and pulls back the crisp and stiffened rug from his face, ‘Oh Jack, oh Jack,’ she wails, and puts her hands to her cheeks and weeps in high-pitched little sobs. His hair is sparkling white and rigid with hoar frost, and his face is open-mouthed and grey. His teeth are like tombstones, his sightless eyes are round like dinner plates, but he has an arresting and horrible beauty.
They arrange for Obadiah Oak, known to everyone as Jack, to be buried in St Peter’s churchyard instead of the one in his parish in the west. Jessie tells everyone at the funeral that she will never forgive herself, but people reassure her that she really did think she was acting for the best. The coroner establishes that it was misadventure, that he died specifically of hypothermia. Mrs Griffiths and the residents of longer standing, however, know perfectly well what it was that killed him.
THE DEATH OF MISS AGATHA FEAKES
MISS AGATHA FEAKES summons her menagerie of animals. ‘Chuffy chuffy chuffy chuffy!’ she calls. It is her last day on this earth, but she does not know it yet, and the morning starts in its usual fashion. No one knows why she calls ‘Chuffy chuffy chuffy chuffy’ rather than the actual names of her dogs and cats, but the village has grown accustomed to it, and only the little children, whose minds have not got used to anything, wonder about it any more. Her voice is like the call of the cuckoo, mellow and tuneful, with a touch both of mournfulness and optimism. Like the cuckoo, her call carries for miles across the fields and coppices, and there is indeed a real cuckoo that roosts in the Hurst, who cranes his neck in curiosity and surprise whenever Miss Agatha Feakes calls her animals at seven o’clock in the morning.
Unlike the cuckoo, which is shy, as if it were ashamed of its own ways and would prefer to pass itself off as a wood pigeon, Miss Feakes is outgoing and conspicuous, even though she lives without human company. She had a lodger for a while, who conducted a lurid affair with the ever-obliging postman, but now she contents herself with the companionship of rabbits, chickens, goats, cats, Labradors, West Highland terriers and a jackdaw that she rescued when it was a fledgling. She does not need an alarm clock any more because the jackdaw thinks that it can sing, and joins in with the morning chorus. She wears a brown peaked cap because the bird sometimes sits upon her head and was never house-trained.
Miss Feakes feeds them all. The small dogs yap, bouncing up and down like quaint Victorian toys, and the slavering Labradors put their front paws up on the wooden table whose surface about the edges has been scoured by claws for forty years. The cats adorn the centre of the table and the shelves where plates used to be, otherwise entwining themselves about her legs, which are wound permanently, not only with cats but also with flesh-coloured elasticated bandage, reminding the village’s old soldiers of the inexplicable puttees that they used to have to wear in the old days.
One of these old soldiers is the postman. He originally arrived as the batman to the General who used to own the house next door. He is thin, and very fit from cycling in all weathers. Even in winter the skin on his face and neck is golden brown, like old waxed pine, and he wears brightly polished army boots that he has maintained ever since the 1950s. He tells the children that his bicycle clips are for catching the change that falls through the holes in his pockets. He whistles when he arrives at the gate, and the dogs come to collect the biscuits with which he has befriended them, and which, for the purposes of his correspondence with the Inland Revenue, he considers to be a legitimate business expense. He leaves Miss Feakes’s house until last, because she expects to give him a cup of tea.
He hates having to drink it, but he is soft-hearted. ‘Do you think the weather’ll hold up?’ he asks her, as he surveys the grimy newspapers that serve in the place of carpets. Miss Feakes would not dream of taking a tabloid paper because the sheets are not big enough, and so she takes the Daily Telegraph, of whose editorial outlook she approves. In the evenings she reads about the cricket and falls asleep over the crossword.
‘The forecast’s always wrong,’ she says, as usual. ‘I know all about the weather from watching my animals.’
‘Animals can foretell earthquakes,’ says the postman, ‘so I hear tell.’
He looks at his cup of tea. There is a decade of tannin stain about the rim, and an oily film floating on the top. The tea tastes of cats. Some of them are not very domesticated and the whole house reeks of warm tom’s urine, of wet dogs, of decaying newspaper, of dust. The house exhales a stupefying halitosis. It is so nauseating that no one can stay in there for longer than twenty minutes, and accordingly the postman rises to leave, his cup of tea unfinished. Today he will buy Miss Feakes a present. It will be a potted hyacinth, whose powerful scent of aunts and grandmothers might improve the atmosphere of the house, and he will find Miss Feakes’s discarded body in the kitchen when he comes to give it to her in the morning. After the burial he will go to the graveyard on his own, and plant the hyacinth in her grave, so that even death might not defeat his good intentions. Nearby the yew tree that was originally planted to secure longbows for the King’s army, beneath a mother-of-pearl sky that is reeling and drunken with rooks, he will take off his cap and gaze down upon the new-turned earth, and then, like a true Briton, he will restrain his tears as he paces out his grief along the rutty track that leads to the hill. He will see the deep green of the dog’s mercury, and, above the busy noise of Mr Hamden’s tractor, he will be spooked by the cuckoo that sounds like Miss Agatha Feakes calling her dogs.
But Miss Feakes is not yet dead, and she conducts her day exactly as if she will live for ever. She sits in her armchair, and, one by one, she defleas her cats. They sit expectantly, according to the daily ritual, and th
ey jump, purring, into her lap. She combs the fleas from their necks, stroking against the lie of the fur, and then she does their flanks and haunches. She fluffs up the fur of the long-haired ones, and gives them whimsical hairstyles which she then pats flat again, so as not to compromise their dignity. When she does their bellies, they go wild-eyed and silly, and sometimes they embrace her wrists with their front paws, biting at her fingers from sheer pleasure. Miss Feakes extracts the fleas from between the tines of the comb and drops them into a cereal bowl that is full of scalding water. They struggle a little, and die. She likes to poke at them with a forefinger, so that they sink to the bottom and drown more quickly. Miss Feakes keeps all the fur from her combings, and puts it in carrier bags, because one day she is intending to have it spun, and then she can knit herself the softest and most personal cardigan in the history of the world. Sometimes she thinks that it might make more sense simply to use it for stuffing cushions, but really it wouldn’t be the same.
When she has finished with the cats, Miss Feakes decides to go shopping. She has the same car that she has had since before the war. It is a grey 1927 Swift four-seat open tourer, with black mudguards and running boards, and a high steering wheel. The car is lovingly maintained for free by the two teetotal brothers at the garage, but at present the hood is falling apart and she has contrived to lose the wooden dashboard, exposing all the wiring. Therefore she takes it out only when her animals have not forecast rain. With long pins she secures a hat that, like her car, was flamboyant in her youth, and heaves at the starter handle. She has been feeling a little weak and woozy recently, and between each effort she pauses for breath and leans on the car, one hand on the top of the radiator for support. After so much time with the one car she has the knack of starting it, though, and it knocks into life and settles down into a steady tick. The car has a crash gearbox, but Miss Feakes is a maestro in the art of the double declutch, and the gears grate only when she surprises it into first. At the end of her drive she honks the rubber bulb of the horn several times, so that people will know that she is coming, and she will not have to lose precious momentum by using the brakes or changing down. In the village there are forty-two reckless drivers. Forty-one of them are nuns from the convent on the hill, who have altogether too much faith in the protective power of the Blessed Virgin, and the other is Miss Agatha Feakes, who today is going to Scats Farm Shop in Godalming in order to buy worming tablets, feed for her goats and chickens, a blade for her bowsaw and a new pair of wellington boots. Miss Feakes cannot easily reach her feet any more, but she has toenails like chisels, which destroy the toes of one pair of wellington boots every six months. She reminds herself daily to ask the doctor to cut them for her, but when it comes to the crunch she prefers to forswear the indignity. It is bad enough that he unwraps and rewraps her bandages, inspecting her varicose veins that are always in danger of ulceration. Twenty years ago he suggested an operation, but she said, ‘And who is going to look after my animals? I have responsibilities, you know,’ and so he never suggested it again. Miss Feakes takes her creatures very seriously; she has agreed with the vet that he can purchase her house in advance of her death in return for free treatment during her lifetime.
Miss Feakes returns from Scats. She passes the hedging and ditching man, who is examining the rusty remains of a shovel that he lost there ten years before. Once home she unloads the sacks of feed herself, heaving them into the shed and depositing them among the tatty collection of rakes and forks and faghooks. Miss Feakes always leaves the door of the shed open in summer so that the same family of swallows can breed in the top left-hand corner, and today she goes up on tiptoe to see inside, because the chicks are chirping, but she feels a little dizzy and decides to go in for a cup of tea, well deserved. Outside the kitchen her ancient car creaks as it cools down, and one of her cats wrests the last warmth from the engine by perching on the bonnet.
Miss Feakes is fortified by her tea and digestives, and in the company of her Labradors goes out into the Hurst. She has established that if she collects one fallen branch every week, and saws it up, she will accrue enough logs to see her through the winter. She has no other source of heating and would not have been able to afford the fuel even if she had. The oaks and beeches are kind to her, and she seldom has to wander far, but she likes birch logs best because they split so well. Miss Feakes likes to watch the flames of her fire because sometimes one sees a turquoise flame of unearthly beauty, so one can even look forward to winter.
On the way to the Hurst she meets a neighbour. ‘Hello, Aggy, how are you?’ asks Joan, and Miss Feakes replies, ‘Orfy ell,’ because she had not expected to meet anyone and has not inserted her teeth. Her favourite qualifier is ‘awfully’ and so Joan knows that Agatha is awfully well. ‘Lovely day,’ says Joan, and Agatha agrees, ‘Orfy ice.’
Now Agatha is in the Hurst, the twigs breaking beneath her feet, and the pigeons calling. Her dogs put up an iridescent cock pheasant, who cries petulantly and whirrs away across the field. From the distance come the sounds of tennis, the hollow clonk of croquet balls. A boy called Peter is shooting a tin can with an air rifle, and the pellets zip as the can skips and clatters along a gravel path. Overhead the whoosh of a hot-air balloon from the club in Godalming sets her dogs barking, and Fred, the hippy-haired mechanic from Alfold Crossways, putters towards Hascombe in his home-made motorised hang-glider, which one day he will fly illegally to Ireland, where he will fall in love, never to return.
Miss Feakes finds a newly fallen limb of beech, but it is caught up in brambles, and she hacks at its twigs to disentangle it. She has a billhook that she uses for this, which she also uses to split kindling. In the 1960s she used to imagine that the kindling was Harold Wilson, who was an ‘awfully horrid little man’. In this village only one person votes Labour, and only one person votes Liberal. The Liberal is considered a madman, and the Labourite a potential traitor. He owns the pub, however, and therefore has to be endured. Miss Feakes has voted Conservative ever since 1945, out of gratitude and respect for Winston Churchill.
Miss Feakes huffs and puffs as she drags the limb home. The dogs prance and growl, darting at the other end of it with their jaws, tugging at it, indulging some heroic doggy fantasy comprehensible only to their own simple imagination. The wood scrapes and bounces on the stones of the track, and Miss Feakes feels an unaccustomed weariness. It is as if her legs are becoming churlish. ‘Come on, old girl,’ she thinks to herself. She believes that old people live longer if they make no concessions to age, and in any case she thinks of herself no differently now than when she was eighteen, and strong and striking.
At the gate Agatha hears the telephone ringing, drops the branch and runs for the back door. Without taking her muddy wellingtons off, she pushes the door open, darts into the kitchen to fetch her teeth and dashes into the hall. Agatha is terribly excited, because nobody telephones her in the normal run of things. She is pleased that somebody wants to talk with her, she wonders who it is, she feels her heart jump with anticipation, and then she realises that the telephone wasn’t ringing. ‘Oh fire and fiddlesticks,’ she says, ‘it’s that bird again,’ for there is a starling in the village that has learned to imitate the telephone, and it flies from oak to oak along with its flock, causing young girls to think that at last he’s phoned, causing widows to think that a child has called, causing the Rector to dread that it might be the rural Dean.
Agatha plonks herself down on the second step of the stair. She feels disappointed, and a little sick from all the rushing and hoping. She thinks that, since she’s got her teeth in, she might as well phone someone herself. She tries to invent pretexts that she hasn’t used before, and then she rings Joan. ‘Oh hello, Joan,’ she says, her voice full of cheeriness, ‘awfully nice to see you this morning. I just wanted to tell you that I saw some awfully cheap spades in Scats, and I thought, “I must tell Joan.” Didn’t Peter break yours? If I remember rightly … Oh, you got another one … well, never mind. Why don’t yo
u pop round later and we’ll have tea? I’ve got some lovely digestives. It would be awfully nice.’
In the house next door, Joan’s heart sinks into her shoes. She is making fudge for the Women’s Institute, she is trying to listen to a soap opera on the radio, and she remembers all too vividly that Agatha’s tea tastes of tomcat’s water. She is sweating and uncomfortable, unsure whether or not it’s because of the menopause or because of the effort of stirring the huge saucepan of boiling goo. ‘Oh Aggy,’ she says, ‘you must come round here, I’m sure it’s my turn. About five o’clock?’ Joan is fond of Agatha, and even secretly admires her magnificent disregard for housework. Joan suspects that if she were to be widowed and live to a solitary old age, then she would end up just like Agatha too. Joan thinks it remarkable that Agatha’s abundant halo of snowy hair is usually immaculate.
Agatha is thrilled to be popping next door later, and it is with renewed verve that she fetches two chairs from the kitchen and uses them to help her saw the log. Her new blade cuts sweetly, and she ensures that the sawdust falls on to newspaper so that she can use it as litter for the hamster. Waste not, want not. Thinking of the hamster inspires her to fetch it from its cage and let it run around her body, up one arm, across the backs of her shoulders and down the other arm. She puts it in the pocket of her cardigan and it falls asleep. Agatha fetches a deckchair and decides to have a doze in the garden, so that she will be feeling as fresh as possible at teatime.
She catches the delicious pre-war smell of Joan’s roses wafting in from the garden next door, and is lulled by the rattle and whine of a lawnmower in the middle distance. Her jackdaw flops out of the drawing-room window, and waddles portentously out into the middle of the lawn. It croaks from time to time, talking to itself about nothing in particular, peering between the blades of grass in the hope of interesting snacks, and then it menaces one of the cats, who regards it with aristocratic disdain and coolly parades away into the rhododendrons. A huge heron flaps slowly overhead, its belly laden with expensive goldfish from the big new pond constructed by the nouveau riche couple who moved in recently because it was so convenient for London. A light aircraft crosses the sun, casting a fleeting shadow upon Agatha and her house, and she is suddenly reminded of when the beautiful young men used to do victory rolls directly above, not a hundred feet in the air, teasing the tips of the oaks, and she could see them clearly in their cockpits, with their white silk scarves, and goggles, and leather headgear. She used to jump up and down, and wave, and they would smile and wave with one hand as their wondrous and romantic machines swept them back to Dunsfold aerodrome after another successful defence of country and king, the exhaust at the sides of their engine nacelles spitting bravado and orange flame. And that was how she got to know some of the handsome airmen, because they all turned up one summer evening in a three-tonner, and, with the aid of a ukelele, serenaded her from the gate, and then vaulted over it and invited themselves to tea, saying that they simply couldn’t resist coming to visit the beautiful girl who always waved to them when they were flying home from seeing off the Hun. One day, on her birthday, two of them flew overhead in a Gypsy Moth and dropped roses and then landed in the field behind, so that the cows panicked, and they came in and invited her to a dance at the mess. Agatha smiles in her sleep, remembering that she spent three days bullying the Rector’s daughter into teaching her how to waltz.