Georgina Parfitt

Georgina Parfitt

After Church

A landscape.

*

The wind across the roof.

*

After church, Lady Rush sitting on the bench in the graveyard, wishing for snow.

The last Lady. The last of her line.

*

A line of blackbirds nibbling the shorn field.

*

All these fields are hers still, technically. They were her father’s, and now they are hers. But there are corners of them that even she hasn’t been to, and if a pair of animals were going at it, out there, breeding in her woods, rutting their warm skins together, she wouldn’t see them or hear them.

She likes this feeling.

She is beginning, she thinks, to become separate from the world of things. Not a final separation, but much like a balloon released by a busy hand. She is beginning to lose her place.

*

Lady Rush sits on the bench in the graveyard, praying for snow.

Snow, she prays.

Let it snow. Just this once.

She keeps her hands on her knees, but inside, they are rattling. She’s wearing trousers. Like Darling. Oh, dear. Dear Darling. All of a sudden, again, there is no one here that she knows. The teenagers have gone down the edge of the graveyard; the children belong to other adults; even the elderly seem to have come from other villages. She doesn’t recognize the patterns of their faces.

Then Dana appears again in the periphery and the world reassembles. Dana and Richard, her godchildren. They are watching her for signs of imminent death. It’s not a subtle experience. Dana stands by Darling’s grave and points.

“Looks nice,” she’s saying. “Ah, doesn’t it look nice?”

Someone—not her—has put an arrangement of burgundy flowers around the stone. They remind her of Paris in the seventies. Like flowers held captive in a basement café. Dear Darling and the Sleazy Flowers.

Dana is gesturing to the car now.

Lady Rush smiles, feels her lips stretch. She tastes the sweet tang of her old mouse-pink lipstick knowing that death is not here at all. Dear Darling is not here at all. He’s always with you, they told her, again and again, but no. A tiny suggestion of snow whips along the gravel, and Darling is long gone.

“We’ll bring the car round, Alice,” Dana shouts into the air.

*

But where is this panic coming from then?

Panic, like a dropped glass, a missed step. The blackbirds rise and settle again on the field. The line is reformed. Lady Rush pinches up her trouser knees and lays them down again, but underneath is a deep discomfort. She had forgotten what it felt like, to want to reproduce herself. For a long time, her line had been the lay of the land, the way the fields sustained, the scores of black and cream-yellow seeds feeding the furrows, the following of lunch after breakfast. Now, her fingers itch. She pinches along the last line of trapped fat below her ribs and wishes she could pull out a wet, purple-red piece of herself and lay it on the bench beside her. Let it get found by one of the teenagers. In their brightness, they could fertilize it somehow. Let them keep it going between them like a fire. She wants to live on.

*

Lady Rush sits on a bench in the graveyard, wishing for a baby. She should have a baby.

*

As advent began, Daddy made a fire in the sitting room. His big hands shuffled like birds in the empty iron grate. Messing with newspaper, tucking each feather-light ball around the kindling, saying:

“John Murray,” or “William Ewing.”

He conjured boys by their names. The house had grown quieter, and the issue of another child, a sibling for her, seemed to have been decided by something in the air, the same thing that rolled over the crops and decided them. So there would be no boy in their family. No one said the words male heir, but they crackled secretly behind everything.

This was the moment when her life was up for discussion. She was very young, just past childhood. Daddy was depressed for a while; then, as Alice grew out of her child body, he began to show signs of happiness. He sighed; he smoked his pipe on the front step; he became more interested in the life of the village. Once, she was sent by her mother to fetch him from the public house and found him leaning back on a chair, tipping a golden pint to his laughing lips. She had never seen him looking so alive. On the way home, he held her arm to keep from falling, and she tried to make herself strong for him.

He said: “I confide in you, Alice. The idea of your future life has become quite interesting to me.”

She wasn’t Lady Rush then. Just Alice.

Then, as he crossed the ditch to cut back onto their land: “I have a new vision.”

The field came to life under the moon. Bare and warm. Their inheritance. Alice stomped, but as she lifted her boots, her toes were pointing. Debutante.

Daddy made fires through the advent season, babying the balls of newspaper, nesting them in the grate, and once he’d got the fire going, he kept his hands in there, among the flames, for what seemed like too long. Alice watched with panic in her chest. When they hosted a Christmas party for the village, opening the old barn and scraping it dry, Daddy gathered Alice to his side and held her there like so many pitchforks, looking her up and down before scanning the room and fixing delightedly on the next tall, well-built young man.

*

A row of trees.

*

A motorbike.

*

Hark!

The herald angels sing.

Glorious.

Lady Rush sits on a bench in the graveyard, wishing for snow.

How God starts out one thing, and becomes another. Starts off big and cold, then turns small. God is the hymn itself. She’d write that down, in the memoir, how one should look to the hymn for divinity. The hymn sung in that shaky way. The woman in the quilted jacket pruning to death the flowers on the church porch. Her devotion, quiet, sexless, the cars parked along the gravel church-road, music coming from one of them. Some child singing about love.

Voices. Hot as lit strings. The terror and silliness of people.

*

Dana seems to have disappeared.

The road from church to farm is empty.

Panic like an unsent letter. Too late.

She should have a baby.

*

Lady Rush sits on the bench in the graveyard, wishing for snow.

*

She tries again. Praying.

Her hands are out on the knees of her trousers. She knows that. She can’t make them come together at the moment. The bones are rattling too much.

*

Up in bed, as a girl, her hands found one another over and over again.

She prayed for love, prayed for love, prayed for love. Below, in the kitchen, Christmas morning went on and the ducks arrived for their annual porridge. Alice was too old to giggle now. The ducks were just more murmuring women, one by one stamping up the slope from the edge of the pond to retrieve the bits of porridge as if they were precious things that had been lost years earlier. Alice was too old for giggling, yet at the same time, she mourned the loss of this pleasure. She could feel her mother standing downstairs, watching the ducks alone. Something was over. But the next thing hadn’t arrived yet.

A system failure.

*

“Alice?”

*

The sky full of white. White gulls.

Someone’s wing gripping her around the back and lifting.

*

“Up we get.”

*

In the big house, they guarded the Christmas tree like soldiers. The cousins filled the rooms; she was the eldest now, the rest just children.

It was a real tree, brought in sideways wrapped in Granny’s old blanket, and it came in from outside. Though its trunk was freshly sawn, it came with the spirit of every other tree they had ever known. Righteous and holy and unchanging. Even as Daddy and Roger huffed and spat into its bark trying to stand it up straight.

Alice held her hands out to stop the children messing with it. They stayed back behind the invisible line her hands made.

She snuck her fingers between the boughs of the tree. Bones between the weavings of needles. Wet, green, dark. She imagined being dead.

*

“Alice?”

*

Someone told her about death while she was on her back. It was her first boyfriend, though she never allowed herself the word boyfriend, because he was a man from the village, a man who already had a wife and a farm and rough old skin and came to their Christmas parties and talked to Daddy about crop rotation with his mouth full of mince pie. He was not a boy, or a friend. When she was laying down in one of the spare rooms, in all her clothes, he got on top of her and brought her hand up to his lips, first kissing, then swallowing her index finger to the knuckle, firm and shameless as a baby, suckling. When he released her, he said: “So young. Can I, please?”

Please.

That please had God in it.

Didn’t occur to her to say or do anything in return. So the man—Dennis—pulled this big, pink—what she knew to be a penis—out from his trousers, and didn’t place it inside her, as she’d expected, but instead pulled it gently toward her again and again, until he huffed and spat and purple, and lifted her dress as the head of the penis overfilled like the nib of a bad pen onto her never-touched skin.

Afterward, he couldn’t stop laughing, saying: “I could be the next Lord Rush.” He pulled a handkerchief from his pocket and wiped her down. “Your lot’s dying out anyway. Once your dad’s in the ground, you could be anyone.”

When she found her mother on the field after, the skin beneath her dress was stiff with shine. The wind blew, assembling the farm. Her mother handed her a pick for digging out potatoes.

*

A howling.

*

A tightening, in the mind.

*

“You could be anyone.”

*

“Alice?”

*

Someone’s hair in her face.

Winter trees, through someone’s brown hair.

*

Lady Rush sits on the bench in the graveyard, drooling.

*

Water was the only thing she feared on the farm. It wouldn’t keep in its tracks; it was dark and moved like love, doubling, changing the lay of the land, blurring, muddying the boundaries.

*

Rain on her face, not snow.

*

Panic, like a dropped match.

Hurry up.

By the time she met Darling, she was thirty-two, and hungry as a pig. There had been three men who had taken her to bed, but each time they doubled over on top of her, they dammed and channeled themselves. She watched the stuff tip greedily back onto them. It wasn’t a baby she longed for. It was to break through and choose, pull herself to joining with something she wanted.

Dear Darling. Standing too far away at the county show.

She couldn’t get to him quick enough. Told him all about herself in five minutes flat, all about Daddy and the farm and the village and ballet lessons. One thing led to another. He held her hand firmly, urging:

“Slow down, girlie. You’ll get me in trouble.”

But she couldn’t slow down. As soon as she knew Darling was interested, she steered them both forward. Time flickered to right and left of them; she ate moments like sweets out of Christingle oranges. They were married in the church, with brambles on the windowsills. After, every face she’d ever known, the relatives and the villagers, lined up to coo at them, tenets and blessings from mouths that smelled like the fields.

*

Soft hover of someone’s voice beside her nose. Brown hair.

*

Lady Rush sits on a bench in the graveyard, drooling.

The siren stops and a pair of children in forest green step down from the vehicle.

The villagers stop like birds.

But it’s Christmas Eve, and soon they resume their private gatherings, picking their way along the verge, finding the right car.

*

No one knows who she is. Why should they?

*

“Alice, is it? Alice?”

*

In bed with Darling, Alice feels suddenly cold. The long line of his body is calm and kind. It reminds her of the creamy porcelain figure of the wise man, Melchior, on the dresser. He is nothing like the other men she’s known in this way. He enters her and she thinks of Mary—duty, the beginning of a long journey—and she feels afraid, but resolved. Over Darling’s shoulder, the bedroom window shows her the farm, a clear stretch of it, changing with the sunset. She closes her eyes, but still she sees the land as if it’s part of her. She imagines herself in one of the hideaway unseen places, deep in a gap between acres. She is a rabbit, one of those dirty, wild ones, or a vole, or a vicious deer. This helps, but Darling is so kind, the way he loves her so soft and reverential that she opens her eyes again and becomes a queen under his gaze. Resolutely human. Cold, stiff as velvet.

She doesn’t want a child like this.

*

Panic, running down her leg.

*

Sheep running through the broken gate. Freedom like panic.

*

That first Christmas—so cold—Alice goes through the house thinking she’s made a giant mistake.

*

Her mother is still Lady Rush, but she’s nicer now that Alice is married; makes the farmhouse warm for them, furnishes it, hands down paintings. Alice inherits nearly everything. Chests and trunks with dust in their dovetails. centuries old. She keeps inheriting. She and Darling move into the big house and her parents move into the small house, like clock figures on rails.

Round and round.

*

Then, one night:

Change comes quickly and suddenly, after all. Angels, tidings. New species. They start hosting dinner parties and the new pub landlady, Sally Shepherd, wanders in out of the cold, making herself at home on Alice’s new-old furniture. Pours herself a brandy with ice. Talks about sex and how young they all are still, and how once upon a time, the village was nothing more than sex, people in the dark, getting warm together.

Darling starts taking Alice outside to the barn, or coming up behind her in the quad bike. Rushes her through the brambles. Lays her down, smiling, on the floor of the copse. Can say with no doubt this is her happiest time, being laid down and holding Darling’s tough jacket and thinking of Sally.

Nobody knows where she is. She is nowhere. She could be anyone.

*

A lone duck beats its heartbreak over the field.

*

Time flies.

*

Georgina Parfitt

273

Alice and Darling spend theirs like change in a fountain. They travel. They see Rome and India. Sometimes Sally and her husband are there, sometimes not. Little faces of children, strange as foreign coins. Alice holds her hands out. They look up at her like they know something she doesn’t. She’s nothing here. Cruise ships. Younger women in red sequins.

*

She has only just learned how to live; she has only just arrived on the earth. The thought of having a child makes her skin itch. She takes long rambles across the farm, into the forgotten acres, just when the sun is setting so she’ll have to find her way back in the dark. The thrill of it.

*

But she is forty now. Fifty.

Bright water draining from a trough—

*

People die. Her father: quick, she forgets how. Her mother: slow, bitter, in a pair of flannel pajamas. Most of all, Sally Shepherd, in a road accident, leaving a husband and daughter behind. A sort of hole in the village, a sort of gaping, between the church and the pub where they used to find her walking.

*

Panic like love.

*

That’s when she starts roaming the village.

She takes tracks she’s never taken before, looking right and left. For what? She doesn’t know. Only that if she stays inside, at home, she will die.

*

There is Sally’s daughter, Sheila, a young woman with strawberry-blonde hair and Sally’s mouth. Lady Rush—she has now finally inherited her birthright name, her mother’s name—clings to the young woman. Finds herself wandering off after tea, into the village, to the pub, just to watch the girl serving. She orders a sherry. It’s comfortable in the pub’s front room with all those carpeted chairs. Feels settled. The sun sets right across it like the deck of a ship. Sheila laughs to herself as she wipes Lady Rush’s table down. As if she’s got this rich inner life. They look nothing alike, of course, but in mind—yes—in mind.

This could be it, she thinks.

She sneaks objects into Sheila’s house and pockets, disinheriting herself.

*

Lady Rush sits on a bench in the graveyard with Darling. Taking in the landscape that is all hers, feeling the sweet panic running down her leg.

*

Looks at the village and wants to gather it up in her rattling hands. But before she can even get her cardigan on, sort herself out, Darling is ill, and she’s up all night, shivering with worry. Brings cold flannels and a plastic bucket for being sick in. Talks to him like a child. Somehow knows exactly how to do that. Silent night, peaceful night, his gray hair all sweaty.

*

God, please don’t. Please.

*

A quick recitation. The child in the church spoke quickly and urgently. But Mary had no time to wait, for she was great with child.

Like when Dear Darling died, the quick nurse saying: “OK, honey. We’ve got you. I know.”

*

Too quick.

*

Lady Rush covering him with her body at the last moment, as if somehow—

*

Lady Rush sits on a bench in the graveyard.

The hands are trying to break her bones and bury her, saying:

“Alice? Alice?”

That was all right for Darling, but don’t bury me, she thinks. Let me be out in the open—I might make something of myself yet.

*

She can feel it. Whoever was holding her string has dropped it, and now she can see everything.

*

A line of blackbirds nibbling the shorn field. Lifting—the line broken —and settling again.

The field’s edges, the unploughable meadow, white with flowers, the trees hiding a ditch, the woman ambling down the hill, the pub sign. She tries to take it all in before she disappears, but she finds that in order to take it all in, she has to let go. So she lets go. The bus stop with its ivy, the road, the bungalows, the new seeds, the wind bringing sparrows to the hedgerow, the wind across the roof of the farmhouse, the white clouds, the smell of snow.