Â鶹ԼÅÄ

Rebecca Archer

Betty Back-Hall treated the readers of the Fantasy Archers topic on The Archers to this well-observed Daphne du Maurier parody:

Last night I dreamt I went to Brookfield again. It seemed to me that I stood by the iron gate leading to the drive, and for a while I could not enter. I called in my dream to the resident of the bungalow, and had no answer, and peering closer through the rusted spokes of the gate I saw that the bungalow was uninhabited.

Then like all dreamers I was possessed of supernatural powers and passed like a spirit through the barrier before me. The farm track wound away in front of me as it had always done, but a change had come upon it. Nature had come into her own again, and little by little had encroached upon the drive. The fields, once so neat with crops in the serried ranks decreed by the tractors, were now a tangled jungle, with the weeds choking the rows unrestricted by the touch of sprays and herbicides. The track was a ribbon now, choked with weeds and moss. On and on it wound. I had not thought the way so long. Surely the miles had multiplied, and this path led not to the house at all. I came upon it suddenly, and stood, my heart thumping in my breast, the strange prick of tears behind my eyes.

There was Brookfield, our Brookfield, secretive and silent as it always had been, its timber framing black in the moonlight of my dream. The yard sloped to the milking shed, and turning I could see the dark shadow of the bulk tank casting its malevolent shadow against the barn wall. I turned again to the house, and though it stood untouched, as if we ourselves had left yesterday, I saw the garden had obeyed the jungle law, even as the fields had done. Nettles were everywhere, the vanguard of the army. They choked the roses and blocked the gate which showed the way to the pigsty in the orchard. I left the yard and went into the garden, for the nettles were no barrier to me, a dreamer.

Moonlight can play odd tricks upon the fancy. As I stood there hushed and still, I could swear that the house was not an empty shell but lived and breathed as it had lived before. Light came from the windows, and there in the kitchen the Aga would stand half open as we had left it. The room would bear witness to our presence. The little heap of rented videos marked ready to return, and the discarded copies of Farming Today. The childrenÂ’s toys scattered across the furniture and floor. Unwashed plates untouched in the sink, traces of the microwaved dinner still upon them. The microwave itself still caked with the splashes from countless ready meals.

A cloud, hitherto unseen, came upon the moon. The illusion went with it, and the lights in the window were extinguished. I looked upon a desolate shell, soulless at last, unhaunted, with no whisper of the past about its staring walls.

***

He wanted to show me Brookfield. . . And suddenly I realised that it all would happen, I would be his wife, we would walk in the garden together, and stroll up to Lakey Hill.

We came to Brookfield in early May, arriving with the first swallows and the bluebells. The farm track twisted and turned until the length of it began to get on my nerves. Suddenly I saw a gap in the hedge ahead where the track broadened into the farmyard. There it was, the Brookfield I had expected. A working farm, grubby and cluttered, more messy than I had ever dreamed, the ground churned up where the cows came down for milking. As we stopped before the door I saw that there were two people in the kitchen, and I heard David swear under his breath. "YouÂ’ll have to face it now," he said; "Mrs Fry has gathered the Hands together to welcome us." I hid my surprise; surely a farm as large as this one should employ more than two people?

The weather was cold and wet as it can be in Borsetshire in early summer. We worked the farm in the rain and brought the mud into the kitchen with us at the end of the day. Much of the house remained unexplored as I fell exhausted into bed each night. I did not see much of Mrs Fry. She kept herself very much to herself, coming in every morning to sweep and clean, as I supposed she must have done for years.

***

David had to go up to Birmingham at the end of June to some farming exhibition he had become involved with. While he was away I took advantage of a quiet evening to discover those parts of the house I had not yet looked at. Up on the top floor, where the eaves gave the ceiling a tent-shape, I came to a small room with a tiny dormer window which gave a wonderful view across the fields to Lakey Hill. In spite of myself I gasped at the beauty of the setting sun dipping behind the ridge of the hill, casting a golden glow across the ripening crops. Suddenly a noise behind me made me jump, and I spun around to see Mrs Fry standing in the doorway.

"Oh, Mrs Fry! I thought youÂ’d gone!"
"I was just off, Madam. IÂ’ve done the dishes and put everything out for your breakfast. I know you donÂ’t have time to get yourself anything to eat before you go out, what with the early milking to do."
"Thank you, Mrs Fry. ThatÂ’s very thoughtful of you."
She hesitated in the doorway, running her hand along the edge of a little bookcase that stood just inside the room.
"I always come up here before I leave for the night," she said. "This was her room. Beautiful isnÂ’t it? A real ladyÂ’s room. No handling the cows for her."

Mrs Fry walked slowly into the room towards me. Taking my arm in a vice-like grip she spoke.

"Now you are here let me show you everything," she said. "This was her desk. Such a dainty ladylike desk. Here she would sit and decide which recipes she was going to use the next day. Look, there are all the cookery books in the bookcase here. Oh, she was such a cook. Cakes, scones, pies; roasts and stews; soups and casseroles. There was nothing she couldn’t turn her hand to. Her soufflés were lighter than air. They just melted in the mouth. It was a pleasure to help her in the kitchen. It wasn’t a chore to clean and wash up for her.

"And here is her easel. She would spend whole days up here painting sometimes. She loved the view from that window. Look, she was painting the snow on the fields when she died. ItÂ’s here on the easel as she left it. And her brushes and pallet still here just as she left them. IÂ’ve left everything here just as she had it. ThereÂ’s only me that comes here now." The grip on my arm tightened as she turned back towards the window and looked out across the farm.

"It was terrible the night she died. It had been snowing all day, and the wind was getting up. I could see that there was going to be a gale. I begged her not to go out. ‘You’ll catch your death of cold’ I told her, but she just laughed. ‘Don’t be silly, Fryer,’ she laughed; that was her pet name for me, ‘Fryer.’ ‘I’ve been out in the snow hundreds of times. I’m just going to walk across to the foot of Lakey Hill. I’ve been sitting up here painting all day, and I need to feel the wind in my hair. I’ll be back in time for supper. Now don’t you forget to put hat steak and mushroom pie in the top oven for me.’ And off she went.

"They searched for her, of course. There were more Hands here in those days, and they all turned out, walking the fields with sticks, beating the snowdrifts and calling out her name. But they never found her. It was only when the thaw came that the body was found, under a snowdrift. She was frozen solid and pinned beneath a fallen branch, poor thing. She was totally unrecognisable. The branch had hit her across the face, and the frost had done the rest. Mr Archer identified her from her Barbour, and her Hunter Wellingtons. She never went out in anything else if the weather was bad.

"Can you feel her? SheÂ’s here in the room with us, isnÂ’t she?"
I swallowed. I dug my nails into my hands.
"I donÂ’t know" I said. My voice sounded high-pitched and unnatural. I shook myself free of her grasp and stumbled out into the corridor, not looking where I was going.

Part Two