Remembrance Day. Brian Aldiss
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parlour and a smaller dining-room. When newly installed in the cottage, soon after Ray had lost his Birmingham job and they were still optimistic, the Tebbutts had removed a rusty solid-fuel stove and knocked the two rooms into one. The stove they sold for five pounds to a scrap dealer from Swaffham.
‘Cup of tea, love?’ Ruby asked, continuing without awaiting an answer, since she knew what it would be. ‘You look a bit tired.’
Ray sank down on one of the two chairs they had managed to cram in the kitchen beside the small table where most of their meals were eaten. He was a small wiry man in his early fifties. What remained of his hair was dyed black. His bullet-head gave him an aggressive aspect, though the expression on his red-tanned face was amiable. His large feet were crammed into boots which he now proceeded to remove, sighing heavily as he did so. He dropped them on the matting on the floor, paused, then arranged them under the table.
‘That bugger Greg made me dig the upper field all afternoon,’ he said. ‘He’ll never grow anything on it when it’s dug. It’s far too dry under the shade of that line of poplars.’
‘He should get a thingy on it.’ She was four years younger than her husband, but occasionally forgot the names of objects. ‘A mechanical digger.’
‘It’s full of couch-grass. You can’t make any progress.’
Tut-tutting in agreement, she passed him his mug of tea. As he thanked her, she nodded and pointed with elaborate pantomime in the direction of the front room, while silently mouthing the word ‘Mother’.
Tebbutt nodded and smiled and mouthed the words ‘I’m going’ in return. After a noisy sip at his tea, the mug of which carried a picture of a sheep wearing spectacles and the legend ‘I’ve been fleeced’, he rose to his stockinged feet and padded dutifully into the front room.
His mother-in-law sat in a big wicker chair, her chin resting on her chest. A wisp of scanty white hair had fallen over her face. She was a small frail woman in her seventy-fifth year, retaining her position in the chair only by dint of four large colourful cushions which, like sandbags round a beleaguered building, served to bolster her morale.
Although Agnes Silcock gave every appearance of being asleep, she spoke distinctly as Tebbutt approached. ‘Early tonight then, are we?’
‘Excuse my stinking feet, Ma. It’s gone seven. Usual time, thereabouts.’
‘So it is. I must have been wool-gathering.’ She raised her head to observe the clock with the loud tick, an old wind-up relic from better days standing on the mantelpiece, and then let it fall again.
He told her the events of his day, while Ruby stood behind him, listening, in the doorway.
Tebbutt knew that both Agnes and her daughter had a passion for small detail; Agnes had been a jigsaw addict before her eyes had failed her: the accretion of the small pieces, each to be accommodated in one place only in the whole picture, had greatly satisfied her. Ruby had shared this hobby.
But for Tebbutt it was precisely the small accretion of incident which pained him. His day, like all days now, had been passed in manual labour at Yarker’s garden centre. Though he liked to please his mother-in-law, it was with no great pleasure that he recalled its details for her. But to see her listening thirstily to the details of the outer world was rewarding. And it pleased Ruby.
His boss, Greg Yarker, had driven to Hunstanton to collect a consignment of plants, leaving Ray in charge of the centre until noon. Yes, he’d been quite busy. Despite the hot weather and the recession, people were still buying plants. He had sold four nice tamarisks to a woman who said she was from South Creake. Never seen her before. Some people still had money to spend.
‘Don’t know where it comes from,’ Agnes said, with a cackle.
Pauline Yarker had issued forth from her caravan and brought him a coffee at about noon. He had chatted with her for a while.
‘Awful woman,’ Ruby said.
Then he’d shifted bags of peat. Yarker had returned with the plants. He had done a deal over some furniture with some people in Hunstanton who were having to sell up. Yarker was more interested in furniture than plants; he would sell up the centre if anyone would buy. He had brought Tebbutt a pasty for lunch from a new bakery in Hunstanton. So Tebbutt had saved Ruby’s sandwiches and brought them home again. She could fry them up for his supper and that would save the rest of the ham for tomorrow.
‘Raspberries and cream for seconds,’ Ruby promised.
He plodded on with an account of his banal day. The old woman was now fairly lively, her wrinkled face turned to Tebbutt’s. Ruby, smiling, polished her spectacles and adjusted Agnes’s cushions.
‘I need a new pair of corsets,’ Agnes announced, before Tebbutt’s account was done. ‘Can you buy me a pair in Sweeting’s next time you’re over there?’
‘You don’t need corsets, Ma,’ Ruby said from behind the wicker chair. ‘Besides, you’ve only had that pair you’ve got on six months. We can’t afford another pair when it isn’t necessary.’
‘Corsets help my poor old back,’ Agnes said. ‘Ray knows, don’t you, Ray?’
Tebbutt laughed. ‘Corsets aren’t my speciality, Ma. Excuse me, I’m going to get my slippers on and milk the goat. Then it’ll be supper and your bedtime.’
The goat, Tess, was tethered in the back garden in her own enclosure. She had not been the money-saver the Tebbutts had hoped when they had bought her on their arrival at No. 2 Clamp Lane. She needed supplementary feeding over the winter. But it was reassuring not to have to buy milk from a supermarket, and they were fond of the animal. Tebbutt talked soothingly to her as he milked her into a bowl, his capable hands moving gently on her teats.
Ruby Tebbutt never wasted a drop of Tess’s milk. If the milk ever went sour, she would make cheese of it and serve litle round pats of the cheese, grilled, on toast with a sprig of parsley. It was one of her husband’s favourite dishes.
Any surplus milk Ruby took to Fakenham market to sell. Having bought the cottage when house prices were high, even in a relatively cheap region like Norfolk, they now put aside every penny they could to restore their fortunes.
After supper, when Ray had eaten his fried sandwiches, followed by raspberries from the garden, and drunk a mug of tea, Ruby got her mother upstairs to bed. The old lady had all but lost the use of her legs. Fortunately, she was light and amenable, ready to be tucked up between the clean sheets. As yet, she was not incontinent every night. Ray went up in his socks and kissed her goodnight. It was nine o’clock and almost dark in her little room with its sloping roof. By her bedside she had a photograph in a silver frame of her dead husband and her two daughters when they were small.
Downstairs, Ruby and Ray sat together on the sofa, holding hands a little and watching an hour of television. They could not afford a daily newspaper. Wine was one of their luxuries, and they sipped half a tumbler each while watching some news and the weather forecast. At ten, they switched off to prepare for bed. Tebbutt had to rise at six in the morning. Matters had been rather different before he lost his job as a printer. In the mid-eighties, many people were losing their jobs, as he often said, consoling himself.
‘Perhaps we could get Ma a medical corset on the National Health,’ Ruby said, as they were washing up their supper dishes.
‘We’ll ask Dr Fowler on Monday. I’ll see if Bolivar wants to come in.’
Ray looked about the garden, but the cat was nowhere to be seen. The animal could always sleep in the garage.
The stairs were shut off from the living-room, cottage-style, by a door with a latch. Ruby and Ray were about to go upstairs when the phone rang. Ruby’s foot was on the lowest step. She withdrew it, hastily closing the stair door so that her mother would not be roused by the ringing.
‘Who can it be at this time of night?’ she asked.
‘Fuck knows,’ Ray said.
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