Free A Month in the Country by J.L. Carr

some washing waited to be ironed, a clothes-horse stood before an empty grate. ‘Look!’ Mrs Keach exclaimed pointing to the window: fig leaves like immense hands pressed against it. ‘Alice has her fancies,’ her husband murmured.
    That flat iron and the washing made a deep impression on me. In this wilderness of a house, they huddled together for the comfort of eachother’s company. Neither cares to be left alone in the awful place, I thought. But outside, they’re quite different people.
    Keach pointed to the ceiling. ‘Attics!’ he said, adding ironically, ‘And there’s a complete suite of cellars too.’
    We tramped downstairs where I was offered a cup of coffee, but I said that I really must go. Frankly, I was eager to get outside again; that house seemed to gather around one like a shadow. They shouldn’t have been made to live in it. And yet both seemed able to throw it off like a cloak. Alice Keach – inside, nervy, obsessive; outside, charming, well within herself. As for her husband, until we met again, I felt quite sorry for him.
    She walked out into the clearing with me and paused by a bush of roses rampaging on to the gravel. ‘Sara van Fleet,’ she said. It was a pink rose, a single. ‘It’s an old variety. Mind! It has sharp thorns. And it keeps on blooming. You’ll see – there’ll be some right into autumn.’ She smiled. ‘Even if you don’t visit us again, you’ll know – I usually wear one in my hat … Here, take one.’
    Later in the day, when I had to turn down Moon’s suggestion that we go up to the pub, I remembered why I’d visited the vicarage. But Mossop turned up next day with an envelope containing an instalment – a couple of crumpled pound notes and a receipt for me to sign.
    That rose, Sara van Fleet … I still have it. Pressed in a book. My
Bannister-Fletcher
, as a matter of fact. Someday, after a sale, a stranger will find it there and wonder why.
    There was so much time that marvellous summer. Day after day, mist rose from the meadow as the sky lightened and hedges, barns and woods took shape until, at last, the long curving back of the hills lifted away from the Plain. It was a sort of stage-magic – ‘Now you don’t see; indeed, there is nothing to see. Now look!’ Day after day it was like that and each morning I leaned on the yard gate dragging at my first fag and (I’d like to think) marvelling at this splendid backcloth. But it can’t have been so; I’m not the marvelling kind. Or was I then? But one thing is sure – I had a feeling of immense content and, if I thought at all, it was that I’d like this to go on and on, no-one going, no-one coming, autumnand winter always loitering around the corner, summer’s ripeness lasting for ever, nothing disturbing the even tenor of my way (as I think someone may have said before me).
    Each day still began much alike. I brewed up, fried a couple of rashers and a round of bread and emptied my slops from the window into a nettle patch. Then I climbed down to go behind the lilac bushes (one wary eye on the scythe) and, afterwards, using Elijah Fletcher’s tomb as my wash-stand, shaved. By this time Moon was stirring and waiting for me to go across and have a mug of tea – we’d made it a rule not to make a start on the work until the first flat clang of the elementary school’s bell.
    Once we got on the job we worked hard enough – but for a shortish mid-day break – until six or seven in the evening. Up on my platform I used to warily circle my quarry (if that isn’t too dramatic a way of putting it) in my mind’s eye trying first this and then that for, in my job, there can’t be a second shot. In fact, usually for several minutes, I’d sit cross-legged like a Hottentot and
think
my way through the day’s work.
    Anyway, a couple of days after