Before All Else Read online

  “Yes, I think so.” Cecily reaches the floor and, by the smallest degrees, stands upright, a vertebrae at a time. “Oooh, no, I’m not so good. Rotten head. What about you?”

  “Punishing.”

  A timpani of drawer- and door-slamming filters through from the kitchen. “Ouch.”

  “Eeuuughhww.”

  “Are you going to be sick?”

  “No, don’t think so.”

  “Who’s that in the kitchen?” Cecily whispers loudly.

  “That’s Velda. My ex.”

  “Oh my goodness. I’m so sorry. Have I interrupted…?” What is Cecily imagining? Swingers? A troika? Voyeurism? Revenge attack bunny boiler? Unrequited reconciliation?

  “No. No. Nothing like that. She arrived yesterday. Had no idea she was coming.”

  “And I certainly wouldn’t have bothered if I’d known what I was going to find,” comes Velda’s strident voice from the kitchen.

  Cecily, on all fours, apparently searching for something, snorts loudly.

  “You are going to be sick.”

  “No.”

  Marcus checks Cecily’s condition. Clearly some vague post-matrimonial protocol has been seriously breached here even if technically he is at liberty to invite whomsoever he likes into his bed. If Cecily, however, were to be sick, then this would certainly take top billing in Velda’s Dead Weight, Look What Depths/Company He Keeps, Glad I Got Out When I Did Ex-Husband scenario.

  “Are you sure?” he asks with concern, for Cecily’s shoulders are rocking and heaving. She is clearly challenged by something.

  She snorts again, alarmingly.

  “What’s the matter?”

  “Nothing,” she gulps, rocking back on her heels. Tears are pouring down her cheeks. “Sorry, think I’m still a bit drunk.” She collapses against the wardrobe with a resonant thud. “This is all just a bit…bizarre.”

  Marcus recalls the times that he’d been in close quarters with Cecily – in the pub, in her kitchen, passing on the pavement. She’d always been pleasant, polite but apart, unwilling to keep herself anything other than contained, defined, irreproachable. Not one of those types who fill any social vacuum with themselves, selves, selves. So, the inescapable and hilarious fact that she is recumbent on his bedroom floor, with the wardrobe door creaking against her weight, snorting hilariously while his ex-wife is in the kitchen oozing disapproval suddenly hits him.

  “Ha. Ha. Yes, I get it.”

  As he starts laughing, discreetly, he feels that yes, he does get it! Here he is, in the most absurd situation, not entirely sure how it had come about – that is for later – and it is just plain funny. For which he is enormously grateful. And buoyed up. And lifted. And just…oh, what the hell. It doesn’t matter he can’t find the right words to describe the irrepressible, tickling bubble rising up inside him right now. He hasn’t laughed like this – with such abandon and joy – ever.

  “Here. Let me help you up.”

  “I’m alright. I can manage.” She staggers to her feet, upper torso rotating precariously.

  “You sure?”

  “Yup.”

  “Think Velda said something about a cup of tea.”

  “Really, no, don’t bother. Must go.”

  “Let me see you out.”

  “No. Stay where you are. I’m alright.”

  Marcus lays his head back on the pillow. Through one part-raised eyelid he watches as Cecily ragdolls out of the bedroom. He can hear the brief conversation that takes place in the kitchen next door.

  “Velda.”

  “Cecily.”

  “I’m sure you know your own way out.”

  He hears her unsteady footsteps down the stairs and the front door slam. Now, Velda permitting, he can go back to wallowing in his hangover. If he is lucky, the old girl might bring him a fresh brew. He stretches out his legs in the bed. What is that? Reaching under the disordered bedclothes he pulls out Cecily’s sandal. Good lord, that woman really does have big feet.

  Cecily

  Oh fucking shitting bastard botheration. This is not good. This is so not good. Waking up in Marcus’s bed with a sour-faced ex-wife staring down at the pair of them and no real idea how she’d got there in the first place. With any luck Amelia would still be in bed and so would not witness her ignominious return home. She’ll go back for her shoe another time.

  Luckily the front door key is in the geranium pot; she must have had the presence of mind to leave it there before she escorted Marcus back to his flat. She’d discovered him, or at least Trueman had, curled up under the camellia bush in the front garden somewhere around midnight. It would appear that ‘the lads’ had left him outside his place but he’d given his key to his Best Little Dumpling, now revealed by her presence in his flat to mean Velda. He must have wandered over the street to her house.

  “Hello. Good boy. Are you hungry?” Trueman turns circles, his claws clattering on the tiled floor of the hallway. “Ssssh. You’ll wake Amelia.”

  “I’m awake already. Where have you been?” Amelia stands at the top of the stairs looking down. “And where’s your shoe?”

  “Don’t ask.”

  “Of course I’m asking.”

  In a reversal of the last couple of days, Amelia gently guides Cecily to the kitchen table and fills the kettle.

  “Can you manage, Cecily? I was just on my way to have a shower.”

  Cecily sits quietly on a wooden chair and watches steam from the whistling kettle billow against the window.

  Yesterday had been a crazy, crazy day. She’d been a bit piqued that Amelia hadn’t come to help set up the cake stall. However, by two o’clock, everything was set. The cake makers, biscuit bakers and cupcake queens had excelled themselves. No flavours or regions were left unrepresented. Even usually abstemious Amelia had a wide-eyed, hungry look about her when she finally turned up. All around them were bric-a-brac stalls, a coconut shy, face painting, wet sponge stocks, guess the weight of the jar and the name of the piglet, donkey rides, raffles, home crafts, jewellery. Goal posts were set up. Plant sales, a sweet stall, candy floss. The smell of frying onions moved listlessly in the heavy air.

  “Seems there’s a bit of a mash-up at the gates,” Tilly observed, a few minutes before two o’clock and the official opening.

  “Carnage, more like,” offered Cecily.

  At the locked gates a melee of majorettes, the brass band (tooting loud enough to drown out the out-of-tune bugler), the vintage cars and the May Queen thronged colourfully, circulating like tropical fish in a whirlpool.

  “Where’s Major Welding? Thought he was supposed to be making a speech, declaring the fair open, cutting the ribbon, that sort of thing?”

  “Last saw him a few hours ago driving off at high speed with his little pipsqueak chasing after him,” Madge piped up. “Don’t think he’ll be back. Not good for his precious public image to be seen anywhere near any scuffles involving the police, an unwashed band of druids and a lady vicar with all and sundry clicking away on their phones.”

  “Let’s just open the gates and get on with it then.”

  Ned pulled back the gates and the players and punters piled in, randomly, joyously, haphazardly, all except for the May Queen abandoned ingloriously on the trailer, her attendants having left to march with the trombone and the flugelhorn.

  As the afternoon wore on, she had spotted Marcus and the vicar standing by the chapel, handing out leaflets to visitors, both talking rapturously about the new find. The brass band had finished their set with Joseph Haydn’s ‘Trumpet Concerto’, her favourite piece. Scores of people stood around the beer tent or sat at café tables or on bales of straw. Painted children ran carefree, winding between the legs of the eight-foot juggling stilt man. The headmaster of St Anthony’s was getting a soaking in the stocks. The jazz band was playing all the standards. />
  Everything was held fast in the warm summer air. Undoubtedly everyone was loaded with e numbers, sugar and a false sense of arcadia, but it didn’t matter. It was about as perfect as it could get.

  Until Amelia rowed with Enzo and kicked over the table and the sheep escaped and half the neighbourhood dogs had vomited on coconut, cream, jam, cherries, pastry, chocolate, cake, marzipan, icing.

  But it had all righted itself. No harm done.

  Amelia’s row with Enzo on the phone had cleared the air. Tilly’s daughter, Lizzie, appeared at the stall holding a helium balloon and some fuzzy candyfloss in one hand and a lead in the other. “Hi, Mum. I’m just going to enter Fly in the dog agility. Can I have some more cake?”

  “Hang on, I’ll come with you.” Amelia peeled off her apron and, arm round her niece’s shoulder, they walked off in a mock three-legged fashion.

  “They both look so much happier.”

  Tilly agreed. “But they’ve both eaten half our cake stall! Never seen the girl eat so much.”

  “They take after each other I think. Neither of them misery eaters. Carb me happy!”

  It had been a crazy, crazy day yesterday. All these lives, all this activity, all this effort had come together to create a near perfect afternoon. And now – what? A quiet, familiar gloom settles around Cecily’s shoulders.

  Marcus

  When he wakes again to find the duvet and eiderdown has been straightened, he has a vague memory of a disappearing dream. A TV crew in his bedroom. He had been wearing women’s shoes. A train carriage load of people sang ‘For He’s a Jolly Good Fellow’. Then it had gone.

  Outside has the quietness of Sunday afternoon about it.

  His mouth is parched and his teeth do not feel like his own, but at least the cleaver has been removed from his head. Thinking of which, is Velda still around, or has she melted away too like his dream?

  He tries to call out for her but his voice cracks like a branch struck by lightning. He’d better get up anyway. Urgent call of nature.

  Supported by the furniture, he makes his way into the living room. There she is. She’d nodded off in the armchair, head back, chin high. He tries to tiptoe past. “Afternoon, Marcus. You’re up, I see.” He nods, fearing to speak lest his vocal chords twang their last. He points downstairs from which she gets his meaning. “I’ll put the kettle on.” He nods again, slowly but gratefully. On his way through the kitchen, he spots Cecily’s cup of tea from the morning, undrunk and pointedly left with a teaspoon and bowl of sugar cubes. This is not going to be easy.

  After splashing water on his face and climbing hand over hand up the stairs again, he drops himself onto the sofa. “You’ll be alright by four o’clock, Paul always says.” Mercy. There are still two hours to go.

  She takes to fettling in the kitchen. What is she doing in there? Living on his own, he’d grown unaccustomed to the domestic sounds of someone else going about their business in his living space. She chatters away to him, leaning backwards from the worktop to check if he is still listening. “Yes. Uh-huh. Mmm.” He’d not lost the knack of proactively zoning out.

  “Here you are. I’ve made you some sandwiches.”

  “Thank you.”

  “I suppose it’s alright to eat them in here as you don’t seem to have a dining room.” His mouth is full of liver sausage. He can’t reply. Velda sits back in the armchair, to which she now appears to have some sort of proprietorial claim, and watches him while he eats. He half expects her to get out her knitting or pick up her crossword book. “I could only find a black banana in the fruit bowl. Don’t think that would be too good for you right now.”

  “Righto, dear.”

  The sandwich is like cotton wool in his mouth but the tea is superb – hot, steamy, just the right colour and it sluices his desiccated insides better than anything imaginable. He leans back and sighs with emerging contentment. He is beginning to feel better. Miraculously.

  “Well then, Marcus.” He turns a raised eyebrow in her direction. Might she want to have one of her little chats? “How are things?”

  “Good. Good.”

  “Cecily?”

  “Oh no, no, no. No, no.” Is he rather overdoing the denial? “Actually, I’ve been thinking.” He stops. A small smile comes to her lips. “I’ve made some decisions.”

  “Right.” Her face is open, her eyes twinkling. She shuffles slightly in her seat as if at the start of an exciting bedtime story.

  “I’m going to buy a house. I’m going to settle here. You might think it’s a bit of a backwater around here but it suits me.” He isn’t looking to her for approval but he cannot help noticing that, while her mouth is still wide, her eyes look shadowed, disappointed. “I’ve some ideas of what I’d like to do. There’s a wealth of stories and history and fable in this part of the world. Thought I might blog. Blatt’s Blog. Possibly.”

  She lowers her head and puts down her metaphorical knitting; her hands remain folded in her lap as he tells her how he’s signed up for a digital media course at the college. It is going to be interesting. He knows he is only an enthusiastic amateur but putting things on the Web would help focus his interest. She could follow him, if she wants. Velda raises her head sharply. “On the Web, I mean.”

  “Well, that’s all very nice, Marcus. I’m glad for you. Anyway, must be getting off.” The brief, and borrowed, sense of community vanishes with Velda’s expressed desire to leave.

  “Good to see you and all that.”

  “You too.”

  In no time at all, she is out of the building and driving down the road. On the draining board sits the garishly green and yellow plaster doll, her pleated skirts swirling in a joyful movement, her head stuck back on.

  He has the feeling that he won’t be seeing very much of Velda any more.

  Autumn

  Epigraph

  Important to treasure the rarities that the earth throws back up. The grey-green encrusted silverware of Mildenhall, Neptune with dolphins in his hair, pulled from the dark brown earth that is long-decayed oaks. The erotic charge of Bacchanalian revelry; the dishabille of Hercules in his cups, the perpetual energy of the unashamedly stunningly naked Saturnalian dance chased out in precious metal.

  As if so much energy wheeled it out of the ground rather than being lifted out of the ground at the point of a plough share. Two children born a millennium and a half ago, Pascentia and Papittedo. Vivas! Long may they live, and so they did, both, for longer and forever in ways that the silversmith and their new parents could never envisage.

  So how did life become a mean and grovelling thing through which we must shuffle as best we can?

  Three hundred years flowering for the priory before the manifest sin, vicious, carnal and abominable living is daily used and committed among the little and small abbeys. Black-clothed Augustinians are made to move on.

  M. Blatt

  18

  Cecily

  She hasn’t seen them since the fair a month and a half ago. Amelia had surprised her by saying that she would be going back with Tilly and Lizzie for a short while.

  “Oh, why?”

  “Don’t look so hurt.”

  “I’m not.”

  “Look. Tilly’s invited me to come back with her. Why not? I’ll get out from under your feet…”

  “But you’re not under my feet. This is your home.”

  “I know. But I just need a break. What with Enzo and everything.”

  Cecily wondered what Enzo had to do with Amelia’s decision to go and stay with Tilly but bit back any further comments, knowing that to protest would be futile and would risk exposing her as needy. Two into three just doesn’t go; there is always one left feeling spare

  “Yes. Of course. I’ll see you, won’t I, before you go back? If you go back.”

  “No decisions made just yet. But sure, only g
oing for a few days.”

  A few days have turned into six weeks. Half a season has rolled by. Early leaves are crisping and falling in their ones and twos. Dawn comes later and dusk a little bit earlier. Sounds are different as the air cools and thins slightly. The swifts and swallows have gone. The year is beginning its long, slow backwards exit.

  One curious effect of waking up next to Marcus has been to awaken certain memories. Of Henry. Of course of Henry. Who else?

  She had been grateful when Marcus discreetly wrapped her sandal in a carrier bag and placed it behind the geraniums at the front door. So far they have managed to avoid any embarrassing encounters with each other, largely by staying on opposite sides of the street. Does he hold her in his gaze just that bit longer than necessary when their paths do cross? She isn’t sure, but mercifully Marcus does not seem inclined to repeat the encounter.

  Yet for all their mutual discomfort, Cecily does occasionally allow herself to imagine what it might have been like had they been more intimate. After all, Marcus is not bad-looking. Tall, a little too weedy and inclined towards the old-fashioned in his dress sense but he has a strong face. There is depth of focus in his eyes. His hands are rugged, and he pauses considerately before speaking.

  She draws herself back from taking her imagination too far. This is partly out of loyalty to Henry. But she recognises it is partly out of fear too. The last time her imagination broke its bounds was eighteen months after Henry had died. A sorry little episode, in which to comfort the human was to insult the divine.

  She’d met the stranger in the supermarket, of all the stupid, mundane, careworn, workaday places. His shopping had got mixed up with hers on the conveyor belt. After he paid for his goods, he stayed chatting to her while she packed her few meagre provisions. Perfectly obvious she was a woman on her own. Just one sorry mouth to feed.

  “Fancy a coffee?” He pointed to the coffee bar behind them. Was he a checkout prowler? Was this his usual pickup technique mid-afternoon on a wet Wednesday? She’d glanced at the assistant but she gave no clue.