Burley Cross Postbox Theft Read online

  ‘Poppycock!’ Seb scoffs. ‘That doesn’t mean he hates his family!’

  ‘You can chose to interpret it any way you like,’ I sigh, turning to look at him with an expression of infinite sadness (and of infinite pity. And of infinite patience – it was a highly complex and abstruse expression, very Sphinx-like – as I’m sure you can imagine). ‘But haven’t you hated your family sometimes, Seb?’ I continued, swinging out my arm, rather dramatically. ‘I mean haven’t we all? Just as our Sweet Lord did?’

  Everybody was (quite naturally) rendered dumb for a couple of seconds by my infallible logic, but then Meredith started muttering something about ‘Tammy being very hurt, very injured, by the mumbo-jumbo comments’.

  ‘Matthew 6: 7,’ I announced, crisply. ‘“And when you pray, do not keep on babbling like pagans, for they think they will be heard because of their many worms.”’

  I meant to say ‘words’, obviously (I don’t really know where the ‘worms’ part came from), but, as luck would have it, I was saved from possible ridicule by the sudden arrival of Peter Bramwell (the metallurgist) who came to inform Meredith that the bulb had just blown in the storeroom (which meant he was unable to locate a ladder – I’m not entirely sure why a ladder was required at this juncture).

  I decided that this timely interruption presented an opportune moment to beat a hasty (if still perfectly dignified) retreat. (Always quit while you’re ahead, eh?!)

  Phew!

  So I think that’s pretty much the sum of it, Jess. Sorry if I’ve run on a bit. My fingers are all cramping up – I feel like I’ve been writing this for hours (Crikey! Look at the time! It’s five after twelve and Duncan’s not even had his Bournville yet! He’ll have committed hara-kiri by now!).

  I do hope the earring is still intact by the time it reaches you. I’m not entirely sure why you were so desperate to have it back over the festive season – I was under the strong (if possibly erroneous) impression that your mother’s proclivities (fashion-related and otherwise) bordered somewhat on the conservative. If this is the case, then you should definitely think twice about wearing it again until you’ve broken your other piece of ‘Big News’. Let’s hope she takes it a little better than your father did!

  I’m very confident (as I said earlier) that he’ll have cooled down enough by now to let you drive at least some of the way to Birmingham.

  When’s your test? Jan 5th?

  We’ll definitely speak before then –

  Happy Christmas, my Gorgeous Boy!

  Give ’em hell, eh?!

  XXXXXX

  Em

  PS KIEREN KNOWLES!!!!

  ‘Professional actor!!’

  VA-VA-VA-VA-VOOM!!

  PPS Always remember: They only hate us because…

  Oh! You know!!

  XX

  [letter 3]

  Threadbare Cottage

  ‘The Calls’

  Burley Cross

  20th December 2006

  Oh Donovan,

  How ghastly! Green ink! I’m terribly sorry – it wasn’t planned, I can assure you. In fact it’s given me quite a turn! The pen’s an old favourite of mine which I haven’t used in ages because you can no longer buy the cartridges. Then I found one – this very morning – at the bottom of the pine dresser, while I was hunting down that photograph I’d promised to send you (aren’t you just beautiful in your christening robe? Plump as a plum pudding, cheeks like little apples, huge, gummy grin! And then that brilliantly incongruous black eye – like a miniature Billy Bunter!).

  It looked perfectly uncontentious as I popped it in (the cartridge, I mean), the address went off without a hitch, the first half of the date was fine, but then as soon as I hit the year, this terrible green colour exploded from the nib (I say ‘terrible’, although in truth I actually quite like the green myself – in the abstract – it’s just all those unfortunate connotations…).

  I’d have started over (of course), but this is Rhona’s best paper (handmade – manufactured in situ, no less – from recycled egg boxes, which makes it ludicrously absorbent and fractionally stiff). There’d be hell to pay if I wasted a piece.

  Enough of my waffling, though (I know how much you hate my waffling – my ‘pointless flummery’ as I believe you once called it!). Can I just say how broken up we all still are about your mother? We miss her horribly. Chester’s inconsolable (although he stole – and devoured – a whole partridge earlier. It was sitting on the sideboard, covered with a tea towel, resting, after I’d plucked it. I didn’t think he could get up there – he’s still huge; over three stone, but somehow he contrived to. It’ll be tomato omelettes, all round, for dinner again tonight, I fear). The parrot still won’t speak (and his chest is now completely bare). Even Rhona (who isn’t, as you may recall, much given to emotional displays) was heard to mutter over her salted oats at breakfast how much she ‘missed the silly old trout’.

  Of course I don’t mind in the slightest that you didn’t respond to my last letter (although there was the nagging doubt that it might’ve gone astray, but then Mr Baquir, your lawyer, kindly told me that this was not the case. I really appreciated that. And he seems a very charming man, Mr Baquir. He and Rhona spent some considerable time on the phone reminiscing about Egypt. It seems he was growing up in the outskirts of Cairo during the late 1960s at almost exactly the same time she was working as a volunteer there with Christian Aid).

  It’s only natural that you would feel angry, Donovan. And, of course, you feel hurt – even betrayed. Anyone would. In fact we were all perfectly miserable when we found out about the funeral – especially Rhona, who sets great store (well, greater store than I do) by these formal occasions. ‘We have an inalienable right to say goodbye,’ she harrumphed, ‘and now she’s snatched that away from us. It just doesn’t seem fair.’

  Fair or no – I imagine it must be hard for you to get any real sense of closure. If it helps at all, William Dunkley (the funeral director) told me, in strictest confidence, how he took it upon himself to say a little prayer over the coffin (and recited a Psalm, I think, although I’m not sure which one). He had been strictly prohibited by Glenys – on pain of death (or worse, he said!) – from doing so, but that didn’t deter him.

  I spoke to him on Tuesday at the Christmas Fair. He was quite shame-faced about the whole mess, but I assured him that we bore no grudges (although I didn’t absolve him on your behalf, obviously. It would hardly be my place to do so).

  He was only fulfilling her wishes, I suppose. He said she had made all the arrangements in mid-2005 (after her main diagnosis), and then had rung him up – twice, on subsequent occasions – to stress the finer details. It wasn’t a fly-by-night decision, in other words. She had insisted on perfect secrecy and he had decided – with some serious pangs of conscience – that it was his professional duty to respect that last request.

  Bill was very fond of Glenys himself (I don’t know if you remember him well – he’s quite a few years younger than we are – the nephew of Arthur and Polly). He said she beat him black and blue as a boy after he released her dog – Trumpet – from the special hook outside the shop and he ran riot on the main street, then careered up on to the moor where he savaged a moorland sheep and was shot (this was a while after you’d left home, I think, and some time before Rhona and I arrived at Threadbare, but I know she doted on that dog – he sounds extraordinarily unlovable! – and often referred to the incident in barbed tones).

  I asked about the ashes. Bill said they’d been scattered ‘locally’. I tried to press him further on the point but he wouldn’t budge. I’m guessing it was on the moor, near the war memorial (what better place than where your father’s plane went down?). She hadn’t been up there herself since the mid-eighties, when her thyroid first became an issue (and her weight ballooned), but she asked me to take a bouquet most weeks, and I was always happy to oblige her. It was never any trouble.

  I have continued to take the bouquets since her death. In fa
ct Rhona has actually accompanied me on several occasions (straight after our morning swim, although she finds the last stages of the hike a little difficult because of the problem with her knee joints). I know your mother truly loved that place.

  We were standing up there only the other day, squinting over towards the power station (it was an especially beautiful, crisp, clear winter’s morning) and laughing together about our early experiences with Glenys after we first arrived at Threadbare. She was always a rather singular creature!

  We remembered her throwing that brick through our kitchen window – and we’d barely been ensconced a week – because we trimmed the ash hedge between the two properties without seeking her permission first (we honestly didn’t realize that the hedge was ‘hers’; it didn’t look like it had been trimmed in years!). She’d been perfectly charming up until that point – even brought us a basket of greengages from her garden on the day we arrived (although it later transpired that she’d stolen the fruit from our greengage bush the week before; they were a little soft. I always wondered why the crop was so thin that year!).

  We were quite distraught about it, as I recall (the brick, not the greengages! The windows were original – that marvellous, dimply, slightly imperfect old glass which Rhona’s so passionate about), and as I said at the time (you’ll probably remember – we’ve rabbited on about it enough, since!), ‘If only she’d just come outside and said something – shared what was on her mind – we’d have stopped what we were doing without so much as a squeak of protest.’

  But that wasn’t Glenys’s nature. She was never a big one for speaking out. She’d rather dwell on things, brood on things. She knew it was a fault in her. She even admitted as much, herself.

  I was convinced she and Rhona would never make it up. Rhona – as you’ve discovered, to your cost – has an impressively short fuse. Although I think Glenys is the only person I’ve ever known (and I include our own, dear Dad in this select little group) who could actually make Rhona quake.

  I think they probably recognized something in each other, something wild and uncontrollable, and realized – as lethal predators are wont to do – that some kind of compromise needed to be reached, quickly, as a matter of urgency; it had to be, or all hell would break loose. And so was.

  Rhona bit her tongue from that time onwards. She bit it, and she bit it (sometimes I feared she might almost sever it!). ‘It’s good for my soul,’ she’d mutter, or else, ‘What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger.’

  Over time the relationship with Glenys undoubtedly improved. She learned to trust us, and even (I like to think) to rely on us a little. But you still couldn’t take anything for granted. There was never any predicting when she might blow, or what might provoke her. It was like having a rumbling Vesuvius on your doorstep! You’d think everything was proceeding along equitably (no real clouds on the horizon), and then suddenly there’d be this tremendous outburst. A cataclysm!

  Her rage was all-consuming – like a dam wall collapsing. This terrible roar! Indiscriminate destruction! Everything engulfed and obliterated… Then afterwards, this amazing calm – a gentle sun, a washed-denim sky.

  Glenys rarely bore a grudge for long – except with you, Donovan.

  I remember that Easter – three years after your final, huge row – when you drove up from Derby (you were on your sabbatical), bringing her that exquisite, miniature Japanese maple as a peace offering, and she snatched it out of your arms (it was a fair old weight in the pot!) and tossed it into the road. It lay there for hours. I saw the argument that followed (you didn’t see me – I was sheltering behind our greenhouse). I watched you storm to your car, climb inside, slam the door and then sit there for a while. I longed to do something – to say something – but I didn’t dare interfere (I wanted to. I really wanted to. More than you will ever, ever know).

  I could tell how upset you were as you drove off – heard you accidentally sound the horn as you knocked the left indicator – and my heart literally broke for you.

  It may cheer you to know (all these years later), that after you’d gone – a fair while after – I braved Glenys’s rage, went out into the road and rescued it (the maple – just as dusk was starting to fall). I planted it in our front garden (next to the brick path, by the gate) where it still stands to this day – almost taller than I am, now – a fine, lasting testimony, I often think, to a son’s gentle magnanimity (I only pray there might still be some small remnants of benevolence remaining in your heart, for Rhona and me, today).

  Glenys never said a word about it (the tree, your visit. In fact she didn’t speak – to anybody – for almost a week) but I’m sure she knew what I had done. In fact I’m certain of it. Every time she entered our gate from that day onwards, she had to walk straight by it.

  I saw her standing on the path and staring at it, deep in thought, early one autumn afternoon about three years ago (the leaves had just turned a deep vermilion and it did look especially lovely). It was difficult to read her expression at the time (apprehension? Uncertainty? Regret? As you know yourself, it could be so hard to tell what she was thinking), but I resolved to grasp the nettle and say something to her when she finally came inside (to comfort her? Confront her? Make a direct appeal on your behalf? I’m not entirely sure), but then the milk boiled over in the pan on the stove and the moment was lost in the chaos that ensued.

  I suppose I never really had the stomach to stand up to her (I hope I’m not a coward, Donovan – although you often accused me of it. But I don’t think it’s cowardice so much as resignation, an inherent stoicism. I taught myself – ever since the trials of my childhood – never to expect too much. I like to think, of all the virtues, patience is the one I come closest to possessing. Patience: ‘A minor form of despair, disguised as a virtue’, as I believe Ambrose Bierce once called it!).

  I’m still not sure what good – if any – would have come from a needless confrontation. Your mother was never really open to persuasion (when I visualize her, even now, in my mind’s eye, I see her in the guise of an old seaman’s chest: heavy, well-travelled, somewhat battered, ribbed by a set of thick, iron supports, fastened by a giant lock. The key is lost).

  Glenys was always uncompromising – in both her habits and her views. She could be shrewish, hard-nosed and intractable. By the end (the very end), Rhona and I (and the poor parrot, and the cat) were her only remaining friends. Even the postman refused to deliver to her door (he dropped her mail off with us). She was barred from both the pub and the local shop. She’d driven everybody else away. She’d scared them off. It had been an almost calculated act. As if to be alone – truly alone – towards the end was the fulfilment of a life’s ambition.

  Thinking that – believing that – how could I have ever knowingly jeopardized the relationship we had? It was so fragile, so necessary. Glenys needed us (although she was far too proud to admit it). She needed me, and, in a curious way I was grateful for her need (the kind of gratitude you feel when an abandoned fledgling bites your finger as you struggle to feed it).

  For all the pain she caused you (and the frustration and the disappointment), the end result of your awful rift – the marvellous upshot – was that you were set free (without guilt) to pursue what was to become your glittering career in the Diplomatic Corps.

  Glenys often said things that were cruel. She could be savage and mean. But her assessment of me back then was clear-eyed and entirely accurate. I was a liability. I was a wreck. My epilepsy was so severe…

  Now I’m not suggesting that it was ever just a case of ‘shooting the messenger’ (how could it be, when the messenger was the only one among us bearing arms?!), but I am saying that while it was a hard truth to bear at the time (for both of us), perhaps Glenys’s greatest crime (although not her only crime, by any means) was simply presenting things as they truly were – the bald facts – without the calming balm of artifice.

  I would never have coped with the life you were destined for. I would have smoth
ered your hope, your promise and your desire. If you had stuck with me (and my numerous maladies), you wouldn’t have married your ex-wife, Patricia, and she couldn’t have borne you your two handsome sons. You wouldn’t have taken on the greatest role of your life: to be a father.

  The very thought makes me shudder.

  And then, of course, there was always Rhona. She’d sacrificed so much for me, and with such a huge sacrifice comes a strong sense of obligation. I was obliged to her, Donovan (I think I always will be). She gave up her vocation in the Church to take care of me after Mother passed. She abandoned her calling. It would have been an unforgivable crime to desert her just when her faith – her trust in God – was starting to falter.

  But let’s not dwell on these things! The past is the past. It is gone and forgotten. Although (to hark back, for just a brief second) it would be difficult for you to conceive how much comfort I took over the long years that followed – and still take, every day – in your manifold achievements as a UN negotiator in West Africa.

  You have moved mountains, Donovan. You have altered borders. You have shifted the world’s emotional geography. You have shaped lives. You have saved lives. You have had a hand in making history.

  How could I – one weak and waffling female – have dared to stand in the way of all that?!

  If Glenys’s temper was a dam wall – threatening, at every second, to collapse or implode – your will to make peace, to intercede, to unify, was a force every bit as compelling and as powerful.

  There’s a lesson in that, surely? And a rich irony. You have become one of the world’s most admired and respected Conflict Resolution specialists, because the most important conflict in your own life could never be resolved. It was unsolvable. Glenys’s implacability was the cruel spur that drove you. It was both your inspiration and your goad.