‘Ah …’ says Stella. ‘Well … Mmn … I see what you mean.’ Be personal, said the editor. How personal?
‘Nice view you must have out of that window,’ says the postman. ‘Seen you sitting there every morning this week. And last week. Nothing for you yesterday, but there’s a couple today. The electricity, you won’t thank me for that, but the other’s got a foreign stamp. We’re due rain this afternoon, they’re saying, and if you’re thinking of going to Minehead, don’t, the A39’s jammed solid in both directions.’
Letter from Judith to Stella
’m in Crete – a cheapo package hol. Sudden rush of blood to the head. I can’t afford it, but what the hell. I felt desperate to be somewhere sunny and ancient. Mary not too pleased – she’s tied down at work so couldn’t have come anyway (I’ve a feeling she suspects I’ve sneaked off with you). I’ve hired a scooter and spend my time nosing around Minoan sites. Everyone else sits on the beach toasting their skin cancer. How does your garden grow? That was a good afternoon we spent nattering on your lawn, by the way – sorry I was a bit glum. But you did me a power of good. You always have. Probably you’ve never realized that. Like I bet you never knew I carried a tremendous torch for you once. Years back. Post Rosie. Luckily I had more sense than to let on. And don’t worry – I got over it long ago. Hey – that sounds rather rude, now I come to think of it. But you know what I mean … The hotel is a concrete blockhouse. The company is vile. No matter – I found a couple of Minoan sherds in the car-park and I’ve wallowed in the Herakleon museum and sat in the dust under olive trees and pretended I was taking time off from a dig …
Stella considers what women have in common. She tries to see where cultural difference ends and collective experience begins.
Bodies. Having this body rather than a male body. Breasts, vagina. Being equipped for parturition.
And?
Certain tendencies, we are told. A greater capacity for empathy, for intuition.
Certain deficiencies also, in some cases. A distinct lack of mechanical skills. An inability to change a wheel.
Stella squats in the dust beside the Renault – the elderly, capricious, accursed Renault – and wrestles with the jack. Adroit changing of a wheel does not require a great degree of physical strength, she perceives, so there is no reason why she (or indeed any other woman) should not be able to do it with perfect success. But it is a matter of getting on equal terms with nuts and spanners and this blasted metal contraption which slips and wobbles and will not do what she can see it is intended to do.
And all the while Manolo watches her. Manolo is the next-door neighbour of Despina, the widow from whom Stella rents the room over the coffee shop. Manolo and Despina do not get on. Manolo is the wide boy of the Greek village, an agreeable rogue who earns a living as a Jack-of-all-trades in this place where most people are peasant farmers.
Manolo strolls across the road. ‘I will do it for you.’
Stella is now nicely wrong-footed. Her control of personal circumstances is in question and Manolo has his own agenda, as she well knows. Manolo will demand a quid pro quo by way of lifts to neighbouring villages. Stella’s is one of only three cars in the village and she has had to make a firm rule that she will only act as a taxi in cases of emergency. If her landlady, in particular, were to see Manolo in the passenger seat of the Renault, there would be considerable ill feeling. But Stella is sorely tempted to accept the offer. She has been at this for over half an hour now and she has better things to do.
She sits back to draw breath. She remembers Despina, whirring deftly at the treadle sewing machine on which she does business as the village seamstress. Stella has watched Despina with respect, knowing that she herself could not even begin to do what she does with such panache. Maybe mechanical aptitude is not entirely a matter of gender.
Manolo slides the jack under the Renault. There is a clunk and a click. He has it in place. He starts to crank it up. He suggests that maybe he should also change the oil. This is not a job for a woman, he says kindly. He will be very happy to see to the car for her. It is no trouble, no trouble at all
Stella is defeated. By Manolo’s opportunism. By the diabolical Renault. By her own technical incompetence. She glares at man and car.
Stella tries to nail the salient issues – the points at which gender defines the position of the woman ethnographer. The trouble is that she finds that frequently she is thinking simply about being a woman. The woman and the woman ethnographer keep fusing, as of course they did back then, out there. Manolo’s dark Byzantine gaze was often distinctly lubricious, she remembers. She could read in it exactly what he thought about her as a woman. Manolo, accordingly, had to be kept at arm’s length, along with others of the younger village men. Her dealings with them were tempered with more caution than her dealings with the women. With the women there is some elemental bond, despite the yawning difference in their circumstances.
She hunts for language – for a way in which to turn the pageant in her head into sober reflective professional sentences.
The red car speeds past the window again. Stella thinks briefly of Karen Hiscox. Elemental bond?
‘This one’s mine,’ said Michael.
They liked killing rabbits. She’d shouted at them out of the car window as she was going: ‘And you can do me three rabbits before I get back. Kill and skin. Got that?’
Skinning was a bind but killing they enjoyed, and they’d never let on to her that they did. If she knew they liked something, then they only got to do it when it suited her.
The way they jerk and then go limp at once if you’ve made a proper job of it. It gave them a feeling of being in control, on top of things. Same as shooting. Lining up a pigeon and seeing it drop. They’d only done that a few times, in fact. Their father hardly ever let them have a go with the gun – just once in a while if he was in a good mood or if she thought it was worth having a few pigeons to sell. Sometimes when they knew they were on their own, they’d go and handle the gun, just to get the feel of it – practise lining up the sights, looking along the barrel, imagining the bird or the animal moving about, with no idea of what was coming to it and then … wham!
Card from Richard Faraday to Stella
My phone calls fall on stony ground – I take it you must be away. This is to await your return and is merely to say that I know a garage that is both obliging and reasonable – you mentioned a problem with your car. Also, I can warmly recommend the coastal walk from Porlock to Culbone, if you have not tried it. On a more personal note, I am conscious of having been perhaps a touch ambivalent during our dinner together about Nadine’s feelings towards you. Nadine greatly admired you. Possibly this may never have been apparent – she had a way of camouflaging her responses. Nevertheless, you became something of an icon – despite the divergence of the ways. Your work. Your personality.
Perhaps we could meet up for a meal before too long. I got the impression that restaurant is not perhaps quite to your taste. There is an agreeable pub in Luxborough.
Yours,
Richard
Stella has not lost sight of the issue of gender in field-work. She is confronting it head on, indeed. She has considered a selection of particular instances where gender could be said to have muddied the waters – she will have to think of a more elegant phrase for purposes of the article. She now looks out of the window, through the contemporary veil of green summer Somerset and contemplates a scene in which her sex was indeed the driving force. This scene is a personal possession and not relevant to the article but she reviews it none the less, with complicated feelings.
‘Who did your mother’s youngest sister marry?’ she asks. She looks at him with calm neutrality, wearing an expression of professional enquiry, her pen poised.
‘Nobody,’ says Alan. ‘She was obstinate and awkward, like yourself, and she thought she knew best, even though she had the finest men in Orkney at her feet. She ended up a sour old maid in a bungalow outside Kirkwall.’
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Stella consults her notes. ‘Alan Scarth,’ she says, ‘your aunt Annie married a Rendell, had three children and is farming yet on Westray.’
‘Then why are you needing to ask me?’
‘A degree of cross-checking is advisable in field-work,’ says Stella. ‘I’ve left you till last, you know. Everyone else I’ve done – man, woman and child – except for old Richie, who’s really not up to it.’
‘I’m well aware of that,’ he says. ‘Left out, I’ve felt. Excluded. Now my uncle Ben, I can tell you about. He married an incomer. A beautiful woman with red hair she was. She came from the south one summer and he knew at once she was the one for him. And she knew it, too, though it took him a while to persuade her. Married in the autumn they were, and a grand life they had together.’
Stella looks at her notes again. ‘You don’t have any uncles, Alan.’
‘True enough,’ says he. And he gazes at her across the table, over the yellow checked oilcloth, which is cracked and worn so that the squares leach into one another. Outside the window a curlew calls, and then an oyster-catcher.
Stella sighs. She puts down her pen. ‘Alan,’ she says. ‘Why should you be the only person on the island apparently unable or unwilling to co-operate in the completion of a simple questionnaire on lineage structures?’
‘You know why,’ he says. ‘You know why very well, Miss Stella Brentwood.’
So does it all boil down to physique, thinks Stella. Bodies. The bodies of women, which are so crucially equipped. Which are emblematic. And she remembers suddenly the votive figures found at Maltese neolithic sites – crude fertility goddesses with bulbous stomachs, pendulous breasts, vast thighs and tiny faceless heads. Celebrations of reproductive power, presumably, or propitiatory offerings. Whatever they were, they were awesome, loaded still with some primeval significance. She had asked Judith what they meant and Judith had laughed. ‘Well, it’s pretty obvious, isn’t it? The sex bombs, we call them.’
Their descendants still reigned, the matriarchs who sat outside their houses, monitoring the village, the rippling flesh of their vast bodies majestically shrouded in black.
North Somerset Herald
Kingston Florey Mothers’ Union
Members met at Wisteria Cottage. Owing to the unavoidable absence of the expected speaker, a DIY meeting was held with a wide-ranging discussion on matters of common interest Mrs Walters won the raffle, and the competition for the best craft item for a bazaar was won by Mrs Selwood with a striking nude female figurine carved from Watchet Alabaster.
Minehead Ladies Bowls
Minehead sent three rinks to Wellington but on an enjoyable afternoon the home side proved too strong for the visitors. Minehead gained maximum points when they played Ilminster in the South and West Somerset League and won home and away and overall by 10 shots.
Porlock played five rinks of triples in the Exmoor Trophy League against Minehead and won by 14 shots.
Arson Suspected
Minehead Fire Brigade were called out to a barn fire at Little Mayton farm near Kingston Florey last Wednesday. Twenty bales of hay were lost before the blaze was extinguished. The police are pursuing inquiries.
Chapter Twelve
Departure from the cottage by car was always a serious undertaking. The car had to be backed out of the standing space into the lane in such a way that you did not clip the corner of the hedge. Preoccupied by this delicate manoeuvre, Stella did not hear the throb of a tractor until she was safely out and saw in her mirror that Ted Hiscox loomed above the car in his red monster, impassively waiting for her to move on. Her gesture of apology was met with a nod of acceptance. But now she had stalled the engine. And it would not re-start. Battery a bit low, maybe. She turned the key again, and again. That obstinate dying whirr each time. Damn. And now, for heaven’s sake, here was John Morgan grinding towards her from the opposite direction, so she was entirely trapped with everything soaring up around her – hedgebanks, trees and the two towering machines between which she was sandwiched.
She tried the engine again. Whirr … Ah, but it caught then – a promising little cough. The two men gazed down at her from the shuddering tractors.
Whirr … cough. Whirr … cough. She wound down her window and bawled in the direction of John Morgan, ‘Sorry – I seem to have a problem.’
Not to worry, said the wave of his hand. Take your time.
But the sense of significant labour inconveniently suspended hung in the air, increasing Stella’s embarrassment.
She turned the key again. Triumph, at last. She revved the engine, gave a thumbs up. But now John Morgan must reverse before she could continue, and did so with practised skill, roaring backwards into the nearest passing place. Stella beamed a smile of humiliation and apology.
Unnerved, she turned the wrong way on to the main road, forgetting her destination. It was several minutes before she remembered that she was going to lunch with Richard Faraday and should be heading in the opposite direction. She took a detour to loop back on to the road, thinking of this small incident in the lane. One which nicely defined her, she saw, as a passing obstruction to the real business of this place.
She had spent much time, over the years, watching people work – in the process of working herself, though no doubt it did not look like that to the objects of her interest. This odd foreign woman forever hanging around, asking questions. And the work she watched had been for the most part a communal affair, filled with human exchange. People calling to each other across fields, or from the back of a donkey. Those Orkney tractors had no excluding driver cabs – you rode exposed to the elements, and to anyone you chanced to meet. The grainy photographs in booklets about west Somerset in earlier times showed a world of collective labour – a dozen men haymaking, a whole group attending to a threshing-machine, gangs of miners by the mineral line, the crowded attendance at the village smithy.
Those you worked with were also those to whom you were related and you probably lived along the road from them, too. None of this solitude and self-sufficiency. Indeed, plunging off the main road presently into unfamiliar territory in search of Richard’s place, she noted the emptiness of the landscape and thought again of those teeming Delta fields and the old Somerset photographs.
Richard was standing at the gate.
‘I got lost. But I’m not that late.’
‘My fault – I must have neglected to send you a copy of my location map.’
‘You sent it,’ said Stella cheerfully. ‘I forgot it. Anyway, it gave me a chance to explore your patch. Very nice too.’
A scatter of colour-washed cottages in a cup of pitching fields and woodland. A stream running alongside the road, with little bridges across it. A small ancient-looking chapel of perfect simplicity perched above a hedgebank that sparkled with flowers. Sometimes it was difficult to take this landscape seriously – to remember that it had evolved from centuries of agricultural endeavour and blithe environmental disregard. At points it could look like a carefully designed scenic effect, probably for the sort of calendar pressed upon customers by local garages.
‘Well, it suits me,’ said Richard crisply. ‘The fruit of many months of careful search.’
The house was that desired combination of old and new. A former farmhouse prinked and polished. Clean. Ordered. Squashy sofa. Shining tables. Flowers in a cut-glass vase.
And Nadine. Stella had forgotten that Nadine would be there. On Richard’s desk, framed in her wedding dress. Laughing, on the mantelpiece, with a small child in her arms.
There in that patchwork cushion on the armchair. A scrap of material on which glows a cluster of scarlet cherries. Nadine’s cherry dress, for heaven’s sake …
They sail down the Broad. Nadine is wearing her cherry dress because she is in pursuit of a man and the cherry dress is her most becoming garment, with its nipped-in waist, tight bust and sweetheart neckline, all of which make the most of her nubile figure. She is also shivering, because the cherry dress is
cotton and has short sleeves. This is the beginning of what is known as the Summer Term, but May in Oxford is frequently chill. Stella is more appropriately wearing a jersey and skirt. She has been hauled out of the library because Nadine needs an accomplice for this venture. They are going to the Kemp, where the man on whom Nadine has currently set her sights will almost certainly be having coffee with a group of friends. Nadine has made herself au fait with his habits. They will drift into the Kemp, locate the target, drift past his table and, with any luck, be invited to join the party.
Nadine rubs her goose-flesh. ‘What we do for love …’
Stella has been reading about Eleanor of Aquitaine, a powerful woman who bucked the trend of her day. The role of women is not much addressed in the Oxford history syllabus of the fifties, and Stella’s consideration of Eleanor of Aquitaine has prompted various thoughts. She sees that Eleanor is clever and shrewd, which helps, but that in the last resort her principal weapon was sex. On whom would it be most expedient to bestow her body? But this visible woman has made her think also of all those women who are historically invisible. She has been thinking about gender, equally out of step with her times, for the matter is by no means a burning issue, though beginning perhaps to simmer gently. The presence of Stella, Nadine and a few hundred other women in this ancient bastion of male privilege is of course a crucial element in the simmering process, though few of them yet think of it thus.
Least of all, at the moment, Nadine. ‘I’m going to get him to take me to Magdalen Commem,’ she says. ‘Or bust.’
‘Then prepare to bust,’ says Stella. ‘Susan Lamming is after him too.’
‘I can see off Susan Lamming.’
They pause in the entrance of Blackwell’s for Nadine to whip out a mirror and check her appearance.