An Inventory of Heaven

by Jane Feaver

Genres: General Fiction

Synopsis

Mavis Gaunt spent time in the village of Shipleigh, as a wartime evacuee, finding it a heavenly retreat. But it is not until her twenties that she decides to head back. Frances, Tom and Robert Upcott are reclusive siblings from a local farm. When Mavis returns to the village, she and Frances strike up an unlikely friendship. But a tragic sequence of events is set to turn her heaven into a living hell. Mavis is 70 when Eve and her young son Archie turn up in the village. In revealing the truth about what happened, she is able to answer Eve’s questions about her own family and, in summoning them, Mavis can finally begin to lay her own ghosts to rest.

Release date: May 17, 2012

Publisher: Little, Brown Book Group

Print pages: 320

Sample

 

According to the several courier companies who get stuck in the lanes trying to locate it on their navigators, Shipleigh doesn’t exist. Keen walkers too will sometimes discover the anomaly, referring with excitement to their Ordnance Surveys.

‘Here,’ they’ll say, smoothing the sheet out over the bar for inspection, ‘Shepleigh.’

The staff at the Seven Stars are used to it. Yes, they’ll say patiently, it means ‘shepherd’s meadow’, of which Shipleigh, they believe, is a corruption, going back further than anyone cares to remember.

I knew the pub in its heyday, the fifties, and even now it is the thing for which the village is best known, with a long-standing reputation for its stillage and its steak and kidney pie.

‘Ask for the Seven Stars,’ visitors are told, should they get lost in the lanes.

Many of the cottages in the village still belong to the estate, tiny two up, two downs, inhabited by the last generation of Estate workers or widows of the same. All the old shops – the post office, the grocer, the forge, the cobbler – are private homes now, most lived in by members of the same few extended families. There is a converted stable, a holiday home that has been shut up for the last two years. The only other unclaimed residence is the flat attached to the pub, generally reserved for members of the staff on short-term let.

There was once a school – I was briefly at the school – but after the war, it closed for lack of numbers and was converted into an echoey village hall. These days, for every wedding at St John’s there are a dozen or more funerals. Death comes with little fanfare or surprise. In fact, at the teas afterwards – where store is set by a decent spread of sandwiches – it is not unusual to hear sanguine discussion about who might be next.

How easy it is to bury and become buried! We are ‘sleepy’, ‘hidden’, an unremarkable valley somewhere between Exmoor and Dartmoor. I imagine it is quite possible to find – as I used to – pockets of unexplored land, forgotten-about copses and bogs, unchartered loops of the river. The lanes around here are as arbitrary: deep, meandering gullies to nowhere in particular, a cottage incidentally tucked – roof shot, crumbling walls, iron grate long ago wrested from its hearth. Godforsaken, middle of nowhere, is how the van drivers put it, ringing in (if they can get a signal) for help. So naturally, when the boy and his mother turned up in the village – she’d taken work at the pub – they were met with a degree of curiosity. It was nice, apart from anything else, to see fresh faces.

The boy started at Buckleigh school after the Christmas holidays. The bus had to make a special trip in order to pick him up and drop him off. I have a view of the bus stop from my window and was able to watch out for him. In the dark afternoons it was hard to see clearly, except to note that he was a scrawny little thing, all over the place with his bits and bobs.

Usually his mother waited for him at the shelter, hugged him as he stepped down from the bus. But once or twice I watched him walk home alone – no distance – trudging up, around the back of the war memorial, and along the side of the green to the pub, and the flat’s private entrance.

A week or so later there was still an inch or two of snow on the ground. I was at the window, watching. The bus drew up, then pulled away. He was so quick, at first I thought I must have missed him; my eyes aren’t so good now. But then I began to doubt myself. Although it was bitterly cold, I felt the need to be sure; I pulled on a coat, a hat, and set out with the torch to have a look. Just in case.

The path was treacherous and I took tiny steps. The torch made a feeble circle in the snow; the grass crunched and crackled underfoot. I shone the failing light towards the railings of the memorial, enough to recognize that the gate was ajar. And then I heard him, the juddery hiccups of his breathing. I ventured closer until I could just make out his shape, hunched up in a little mound, his head buried in his knees.

‘Hello?’ I said nervously, keeping the railings between us.

His shoulders stiffened; he repositioned himself, his face turning towards me, pale as the snow.

‘Are you all right?’ I asked him. My heart was thumping.

He drew his arm tighter around his knees.

‘Are you waiting for your mother?’

He hid his face again.

‘Have you got a name?’ I asked.

I couldn’t hear what he said – something muffled – but now I was there, I didn’t feel I could walk away. I gave it another go. I said, ‘Mine’s Mavis.’

I could tell he was listening because the sniffling had stopped. He surfaced again very slowly, his face smeary. He wiped his nose against his school trousers.

‘Brrrr’, I said, ‘you must be frozen. It’s much too cold to be sitting out here.’

He looked into the light with blinking, rubbed-in eyes.

‘Lost my key,’ he said.

‘What?’ I asked. ‘Your house key?’

‘They threw it out the bus,’ he said.

‘Who?’

He pressed his lips together.

‘Didn’t you tell the driver?’ I asked.

He sucked at his lips, turning them down clownishly.

‘Is your mother at work?’

He nodded.

‘Well,’ I said, ‘never mind. Why don’t you come and warm up, wash your face.’ It was all I could think of. ‘That’s where I live,’ I said, pointing to the cottage. ‘No distance. Come on, careful you don’t slip.’

He looked unsure.

‘Come along, I won’t bite. You can’t stay out in this. You’ll catch your death.’

Reluctantly he began to shuffle along behind me. As we reached the door and I put my shoulder to it, he stood close enough for me to catch that mushroomy smell of his; I pushed hard.

‘There,’ I said as the door gave way, ‘go through.’ I turned the light on and steered him straight into the kitchen, towards the sink. I fetched a clean dishcloth from the drawer, and held it under the running tap until the water heated up. I wasn’t sure quite how to get hold of him, but without any prompting he offered up his face, his eyes squeezed shut.

I dabbed at his nose; he didn’t flinch. Then I opened the cloth against the flat of my hand and rubbed all around as if I were mopping up a spill from the table. When I removed the cloth he blinked; his face shone pink.

‘That’s better’, I said, ‘I can see you now. What time does she finish?’

‘Six,’ he said, adjusting his clean face. ‘It’s The Simpsons.’

‘Well, how about a nice hot drink?’

I sat him down in front of the fire. His name was Archie. And they’d been teasing him about it on the bus though he wouldn’t tell me what they’d said.

He was eight. I’m no expert, but he seemed small for his age. His hair under the standard lamp was a beautiful reddish chestnut; it almost touched his shoulders.

‘I never liked my name either,’ I told him. ‘It’s such a terrible old ladies’ name, don’t you think?’

He was sitting very still; hadn’t touched the Horlicks I’d brought him as if I might have put something in it. I felt his silence like a weight; it made me rattle on.

‘If you left a key with someone, you’d not get caught out. We’ll find your mother, shall we, once you’ve finished? Give her a surprise?’

I didn’t have experience with children; I spoke, I realized, as if he were a chicken or a mouse.

‘Do you know what my name means?’ I asked, trying to buck him up. ‘I’ll show you if you like – come over here. Come on.’

He got up warily and shuffled over to the sideboard where I was standing. I reached up for the glass dome, holding it high above my head for a moment like a crown, then carefully lowered it down. The top was furred with dust.

‘There it is,’ I said. ‘What do you see?’

He pulled a dubious face. And then, grudgingly, as if it was a trick, ‘A bird? With glasses on?’

‘You’re right, it’s a bird.’ I paused to give him another chance, but I could see already that he was losing interest.

‘It’s a song-thrush,’ I said hastily. ‘And can you guess what the country name for a song-thrush is?’

Again he shrugged.

‘Mavis!’ I announced. It was like pushing a rock uphill.

He peered into the glass, his face half-reflected back, and asked, ‘How’d it get in there?’

‘Taxidermy. Stuffing.’

‘How’d they make the feathers?’

‘They’re real. It’s a real bird.’

He put his fingers to the glass.

I went on, ‘It has the most lovely song. It trills and whistles . . . Can you imagine how pleased I was to discover that?’

Archie looked up at me for the first time, with unguarded eyes. Then we both stood for a while, staring at the bird, the freckles on its sandy brown chest, its sharp little beak.

‘Why’s it got glasses on?’ he asked.

‘Oh, a little joke,’ I said.

‘Is it supposed to be you?’

How quick he could be! A memory jolted like a tooth. ‘Who knows?’ I said. ‘I shall have to give it a bit of a clean one day, won’t I?’ I nudged it back on to its high shelf and turned away from him towards the safety of the armchair. With the poker, I fiddled among the embers to revive the fire, while behind me, the boy didn’t move, looking up at the case like a cat.

For eighty-six years Joyce has lived where her family always has, in one of the small row of cottages between the church and the pub. I hadn’t got halfway up her garden path before she spotted me, opened the door and ushered me in. She’d taken to using a stick around the house; her breathing was bothering her: old pipes, she said.

Alf, her husband, was sitting in his waistcoat, nodding off in the heat from the Rayburn. He moved his head very slightly as if his neck, like a baby’s, wasn’t up to it. I sat myself in the rocking chair next to his while Joyce went to put the kettle on. It was impossible to have a conversation with him these days. We watched the long-haired cat, Pickles, who’d sprung sulkily into his lap and settled there.

Joyce had an extensive collection of old photographs on the sideboard: Joyce and her two sisters in their best coats; Joyce and Alf on their wedding day; Joyce with Victor, when he was little, in his spectacles . . .

The door shushed open across the carpet and Joyce followed, easing her way through with the tray. She never let me help. She set it down on the low coffee table, removed the teapot, the mugs, the jug of milk and three tiny mats; then, without straightening up, she craned across with the corner of a tissue to dab at Alf’s mouth.

‘Better?’ she asked, dropping back into the armchair, her lumpy ankles lifting from the floor.

‘I saw the new boy, yesterday,’ I said.

‘Ready for your tea, Alfie?’ she said. ‘Oh?’

‘He was out by the memorial. Crying,’ I said. ‘They’d thrown his key out of the bus.’

‘Who’d’ve done that?’ she asked, placing Alf’s cup carefully for him on the flat wooden arm of his chair.

‘He seems small, for his age, doesn’t he?’ I said.

‘Needs feeding up’, Joyce said. ‘Little scrap.’

‘Have you seen that hair of his?’ I said, accepting the Diana mug from her. We both smiled.

‘You know who she is, don’t you?’ she asked now she could concentrate. ‘The boy’s mother?’ She leaned forward, ‘Remember Beatrice Manning? Well, she’s Beatrice’s – her daughter.’

Beatrice. I had only known one Beatrice in my life. ‘Beatrice?’ I asked, my stomach sinking. ‘What became of her?’

‘Oh, she got married. To that chap she met at the university, couple of children, they’ve had.’

Joyce spoke as if it was yesterday. Beatrice Manning had been the vicar’s daughter, years ago, remarkable in the village for her appearance, that beautiful dark hair.

‘You never told me—’ I said.

‘Didn’t I?’ Joyce cleared her throat, banged her chest. Her eyes were watering. She put her arm out towards Alf, reassuring. ‘Nothing,’ she said. ‘Just a tickle.’ She thumped again. ‘That’s it.’ She adjusted the cushions behind her.

Alf blinked and gave a sympathetic moan. Then he shut his eyes. In a little while his jaw hung slack.

‘Eve, that’s her name. Well,’ Joyce said, ‘Beatrice. She died.’ She checked on Alf as she said it, then mouthed the words to me: Breast Cancer.

I didn’t meet her eye but lifted my mug and breathed across the surface so that for a minute my spectacles steamed up.

‘Did you know we were on the hin-ter-net?’ Joyce asked, changing her tone. ‘Eve says she looked us up. There were pictures and all sorts – the pump, the village hall. She found the number there, at the pub.’ She took a sip of tea. ‘She said they didn’t visit, not when her mother was alive. “Manning?” I said to her, “As in the reverend?”. “Yes,” she said, “my grandfather.” Well, can you imagine! I told her I’d known them very well, of course.’ Joyce stretched her neck to take another sip, rested her mug again on the shelf of her bosom.

I was barely listening. ‘From London?’ I asked her.

Joyce said, ‘There’s a similarity, don’t you think? She’s got the eyes, I’d say.’

When I got home, it was already dark and I considered going straight up to bed, which I often did – it saved lighting a fire. But I knew I wouldn’t sleep. Without taking off my hat or coat, I went straight into the front room and sat in Auntie’s old chair. I hadn’t seen or heard anything of Beatrice since she’d left the village; I’d had no reason nor any inclination to find out. She’d had a child, children; she had a grandchild even (all of which, incidentally, was more than I did). She’d been a teacher, Joyce said. I tried to distract myself by imagining the life she must have led elsewhere. I pictured her with her long stick and her blackboard, her apron strings. Grey hair. But it was no good. Beatrice: she sprang up just as youthful and alluring as she’d ever been.

It is remarkably easy in such a small place to avoid someone if you put your mind to it. Although I steeled myself against seeing her in church, it turned out, to my relief, that Beatrice’s daughter was not a church-goer. I rarely went up to the pub; I could quite easily refrain from going out at school bus times – though it didn’t stop me from looking, stationed at the curtains. After a few days, I calmed down. Nothing had changed, I told myself. On Tuesday I took my usual bus into town: Oxfam, Co-op. On Thursday, it was the village hall committee meeting where, as we sat waiting for the others to turn up, Joyce told me what further information she had gleaned: Eve was sick of London, her marriage had failed, her mother had died and she felt, in coming down here, she’d had nothing to lose.

‘You’d like her, I’m sure,’ Joyce said. ‘She’s a nice girl. In a funny way, she’s not unlike you – like you were when you came back to us.’

My curiosity got the better of me. Around four o’clock the next afternoon, just before the bus was due, I went for a walk. I had only just reached the shelter when I recognized Eve, approaching from the opposite direction, around the bend in the road. She was wearing a jumper and jeans, an old padded anorak, her dark hair scraped back. I sat down on one of the new slanty seats.

She smiled as she drew up. ‘Are you waiting?’ she asked, catching her breath. She looked to be in her mid-forties, one of those women who was never outstandingly pretty in her youth, but who ages well. There was no acknowledgement of the fact we’d already met.

‘I’ve only been down as far as the cross,’ she said. ‘I shouldn’t be so out of breath.’

‘Mavis Gaunt,’ I said, introducing myself again. ‘I’m from London too, originally.’

‘Whereabouts?’ she asked, surprised.

‘West Norwood,’ I said, ‘a long time ago.’

‘Really?’ Her face lit up. ‘We were only down the road. Tulse Hill? We had a flat. So how did you end up here?’

I was knocked by her enthusiasm. ‘It was the war, I suppose. I came to stay with my aunt.’

‘Where was she?’

‘Paradise Cottage, where I am now.’ I nodded towards it.

‘Paradise?’ Eve repeated, hugging herself. ‘And is it?’ She smiled. I let the question pass.

‘How’s Archie getting on?’ I asked. I used his name, deliberately to jog her memory of the other day when I’d delivered him back home.

‘Of course, we’ve met,’ she said, placing me. ‘It was so kind of you to take him in, thanks. Again. I hate not being here to meet him,’ she said, glancing over her shoulder at the pub. ‘The shifts are awkward . . .’

What possessed me to offer to meet him and keep him with me – just till she finished work – I don’t know, but there was a silence between us that I felt compelled to fill. It took me aback when Eve agreed so readily. ‘Would you?’ she asked earnestly.

‘Of course,’ I said, though my confidence drained.

In the distance we could hear the drone of an engine, a lugubrious change of gear.

‘There he is,’ she said, lifting on to the balls of her feet.

It was like holding on to the end of a rope; I didn’t want to let go. She was no longer looking at me, straining her neck to catch the first possible glimpse of the bus.

Once Archie turned up, I left them to it. She was typical of an older mother, I thought, asking him too many questions, sorting his bag for him, holding him – I was clearly surplus to requirements. I made my excuses and wandered off, as I’d said I would, through the village, towards the churchyard. I had half a mind to visit Auntie’s plot. But instead I took the steeper path, straight up through the lych gate towards the older part of the graveyard.

Although the bulk of the snow had melted up here, there were still scraps of it, littering the grass. Just visible, on the horizon, was the bright disc of the setting sun. I paused for a moment by the church porch, looking out across the valley, the corners and ditches picked out in rosy white chalk. I didn’t intend to venture much further – perhaps just as far as the small water butt around the side of the building, where we filled the altar vases – but as I rounded the corner, how unexpected! Sheltering against the transept wall were swathes of snowdrops, dozens of them, bright as fairy lights. I stooped and picked a small bunch. And then, before I could think better of it, I moved on, upwards, towards the Eastwood tomb, skirting its bulk. I stopped for only a moment because it was a steep climb but it was just long enough; for something caught my eye, something I had never noticed before. Against the wall of that tomb there was a small figure in relief; it was a girl with a fine, girl’s face. She was pressed, cheek and shoulder to the stone, as if she were hiding, and as I came level with her, I was struck by the eyes, which shone out dark and limpid. I know you, she seemed to be saying, staring right at me.

For half a moment, I felt ashamed to have been caught with the snowdrops in my hand. I turned away, stepping out of her line of vision, determined to finish quickly what I had set out to do. But even as the path began to peter out, I couldn’t shake off the prickling feeling of being watched.

Finally I reached my spot. Backed against the north wall, the glossy granite of the tombstone I sought was water-repellent, the serifs as sharp and crisp as if they’d been newly cut.

 

I laid the flowers down so carelessly it may have looked as if they’d been put in the wrong place.

 

On the day that Tom was born, Frances was almost eight years old. The snow was thick and flaky as plaster and was never going to stop. The world was falling down. Her mother knew it too: the noise from the bedroom was full of despair, low and guttural, like a heifer held against its will. And the way their father swore, as if the snow had been sent like a plague of ash or a forest of briar. The doctor, if he ever got through, would be arriving on horseback. Robert – a year older – was sent out to clear the yard with the turnip spade.

Joyce from the village had only been working there for a year. She was sixteen and panicking because it had fallen to her to be in charge, up and down the stairs for water, for towels, praying each time the doctor would appear at the door. She told Frances again and again not to bother her, that the sooner she’d go and play somewhere else, the sooner it would all be over.

In the yard Robert was bashing a thick hide of ice from the drinking trough. Frances put her boots on and came out wrapped in a sheet – her angel costume – the wooden toy sword in her hand. She stood next to him and watched, waiting leadenly for him to look up or to speak. The cold only sharpened her resolve. She knew that he knew it too: the baby would be special because it was new, and because it was coming at Christmas. Robert was being beastly; he had more important things to do. The ice was splintering under his furious pick; it lay in crazy slabs of yellow where he’d flung it to the ground like glass from a church window.

It was Robert who made her run away, she said afterwards, though she wouldn’t tell their father what he’d said.

She disappeared from the yard, along the boundary of the house to the orchard, where she made her way under the heavy cornicing of trees through clumps of sheltered undergrowth, to the gate at the far end. The upright struts were black and eaten from years of frost, the top hinge rusted and broken. She had never been through this gate before without Robert. She pushed it and stepped out into the open field.

The sky was pearly grey. After two solid days, the snow appeared to have stopped falling. She surveyed the whiteness spread before her. The only distinguishing mark was the grey, tin line of the river, stripped bare, curling at the bottom of the valley, halfway between where she stood and the distant blurry horizon. There was no sign, anywhere, of movement (the sound of the river was no more than the blood pumping in her ears); and because nothing moved, she was no longer afraid – there was nothing to be frightened of.

She waded out in her camouflage of sheeting as if she had found her element. She was up to her knees already, the snow shelving steeply to either side of her, so comfortable and so accommodating that before long she gave herself up to it, lying lengthways like a princess in a carpet to let herself be wrapped and unrolled – the groundswell of curves turning her over and over as she made a circuit of the planet, four, five, half a dozen times – until the cup of a ditch took the wind from her sails and saved her from the full-stop of the hedge.

For a moment her several limbs appeared disconnected and scattered. One by one, she drew them back to her, the compact icy cast of her own body. She lay exactly where she was, until the light shrank around her, a crystal ball revealing everything it was important to know about snow: how close it is to dying and how close it is to heaven; how excruciating its pains and yet how abundant its rewards. She discovered the calibrations of its process: that if she could weather the piercing cramps, she would be relieved by numbness; that if she could only outstay the numbness she would be delivered by the flowering of warmth to the end of every finger and every toe.

 

The first few times Archie came round, I found myself waiting on him like a young emperor: I. . .