Mr Doubler Begins Again
‘Oh, don’t be like that – he can’t be all that bad.’
‘Well, that’s just it. He called to offer to help me and I can’t remember when he last called at all, let alone to be so considerate. Normally it is Camilla who makes the arrangements when the family descends on me for lunch, but I very rarely hear from Julian from one visit to the next.’
‘Well, that’s progress, then. You should be happy. Take those little acts of kindness as a sign of his potential, perhaps? People do mellow with old age, I find.’
‘Yes, yes, I suppose I must take it as a step forward.’
‘What was he offering help with?’
‘My car. He said he’d take it off my hands and swap it for a little runaround that I’d find a bit more reliable in the winter. I’m not remotely tempted. I’m very happy with my Land Rover, but at the same time, you’re right. I shouldn’t disregard an act of kindness, so perhaps I shall agree just so as not to be difficult. I don’t want him to think I’m stubborn or impossible to please.’
There was nothing but silence on the end of the phone.
‘Mrs Millwood? Are you still there?’
‘Yes, Mr Doubler. I’m still here. Just thinking. Your Land Rover, you say. How old is it now?’
‘Well, goodness, I must have bought it the second or third winter after I bought the farm and I’ve run it ever since. It’s ancient, I’m afraid. Forty years old, perhaps?’
‘That’s lovely, Mr Doubler, just lovely that your son is thinking about your needs. But don’t agree just yet. I am sure he’ll let you have a little time to think about what’s best as a replacement, won’t he?’
‘Well, he seemed quite keen to get the ball rolling, but I can’t imagine anything will happen in a hurry.’
‘Good. Let me do a little research for you. My husband was a very keen mechanic; he knew an awful lot about cars, so we all picked up a bit of knowledge along the way. Let me have a chat with one or two people. You know how I like to research things properly to, you know, prevent mistakes made in haste. I’ll do a little digging. It will help you reach the right decision.’
‘Well, that’s extremely kind, Mrs Millwood.’ Doubler readjusted himself against the hall table and let out a small yelp of pain as his leg briefly gave way under him.
‘Are you all right, Mr Doubler?’
‘Oh fine, quite fine, thank you. Just getting into a comfy position. This might well be the longest conversation I’ve had on the phone and I’ve never thought to put a chair in the hallway.’
‘You poor old thing. I had somehow imagined you in the kitchen or in the sitting room tucked up in front of the fire. It’s draughty in that hall, too. Go and get yourself warm. I should probably stop my call now anyway. I’m getting slightly disapproving looks.’
‘Very well, then, Mrs Millwood. Thanks for calling.’
‘I’ll call the same time tomorrow, see how you’re doing, shall I?’
‘Super!’ said Doubler, any sadness at the approach of the end of the call vanishing at the thought of a guaranteed call the very next day. ‘Cheerio.’
Doubler replaced the receiver and went to the kitchen, where he sat very quietly while replaying the conversation in his head, smiling as he did so. He concentrated furiously, recalling it as accurately as he could because it suddenly felt extremely important to him that he held on to each and every word.
Chapter 9
Later that afternoon, Doubler sat and watched the bottom of the drive with his binoculars. Sometimes his seat at the top of the hill made him feel invincible, but on other days he felt exposed up at Mirth Farm. The binoculars had become a vital part of his armoury and he liked the advantage they gave him.
Midge was unlikely to visit again until Thursday at the very earliest. If he was lucky. She had said she couldn’t pick up his groceries indefinitely, but that implied she would pick them up again, at least this once. Which meant he had a visit to look forward to this week and next, he reasoned.
Even though he had chosen to shut himself off from the outside world, he had never really tested the theory of being an actual recluse. He had regular visitors; he only had to pick up the phone and any number of local suppliers and tradesmen would drop what they were doing to tend to his needs at Mirth Farm. Oil arrived; sewage left; wood was delivered to the wood pile; even the doctor, who had only ever been called out in Marie’s time, ensured he paid Doubler a routine visit twice a year. These visits were, on the whole, brief and businesslike – the well-practised exchange of services that had played out comfortably for a long time – and though they offered little in the way of intellectual stimulation, Doubler felt no lack. Mrs Millwood had seen to that.
For five days a week the two of them had sat down and talked. And each day after she left, it wasn’t long before he found himself having imaginary conversations with her in his head. This discourse was not in the same league as the advice he sought from Mr Clarke, the substance of which was rooted in the technical conundrums that their shared passion presented. From Mr Clarke, he sought inspiration of a very specific nature. The little observations he would store away for sharing with Mrs Millwood encompassed everything else that Doubler was capable of feeling, and even if this represented a narrow slice of an adult’s emotional capacity, Mrs Millwood herself had a very developed range of responses from which to draw.
But what did he actually know about her? He now knew a bit more, that she had a wide circle of friends, but before that time, what had he known? That she knitted, yes. That she found great comfort in family and friends. There – friends again! That her husband had died, but not suddenly. He had lugged an oxygen tank around with him for several years. He had got thinner and thinner, more and more uncomfortable, before eventually dying of a massive asthma attack. It had been a blessing. Well, that had been a big difference between Mrs Millwood and Doubler. She had grown used to her husband gradually disappearing in front of her eyes. Whereas for Doubler, Marie had been there one day and not the next. No warning, no preparation. And there had been a choice there for Marie – that’s what he couldn’t forgive her for. Everything she had done, and how she had done it, was a choice she had made. And nowhere in that process had she thought once of him or the impact it would have on him.
Doubler looked around the room and imagined Marie there now. Would she be interested in his potatoes? Would she be proud of him? Would she even care? Perhaps Julian would be whispering in her ear suggesting early retirement and an easy life in a central-heated condo. That is almost certainly what she would have wanted. It was impossible to know now, but when he looked around the room, with his eyes narrowed, he couldn’t imagine her sitting comfortably in any of the chairs. She’d be just getting back from somewhere, or just on her way out with a shopping bag slung over her shoulder and the hood of her anorak already pulled up to protect her from the elements. But she wouldn’t be there, sitting still and talking. Or listening.
Doubler closed his eyes and remembered, as best as he could, Mrs Millwood telling him about the death of her husband, Bert. After a few moments of fierce concentration, her words came back to him and it was as if she were sitting in the room.
‘It was a terrible thing to watch, the man you love dying in front of your eyes. There was so much pain and so much inconvenience. That was the unexpected thing. He was cross with himself and me. I was cross with him, too. It was impossible to live together: it was me and him and that blessed tank. But we talked about it; we talked to death. I was able to talk about why I was angry, and he was able to tell me how very furious he was that he had this terrible debilitation. But, my God, the sound of his breathing was heartbreaking. When he went, it was a relief.’
‘Do you think you were better off knowing? I mean, if he had gone suddenly without any warning, that would have been worse?’ Doubler had asked.
‘Well, yes, I suppose so. But I’d have liked to have spared him the pain. That was bad. Watching him suffer was very tough. But we got to plan a bit for the future and we had no regrets. We’d said everything enough times. And even if he had suddenly dropped dead when I’d just told him I was sick to death of not being able to sleep at night because of the awful noise he made, then I’d still have no regrets because we’d have recently talked about our love for one another. We’d probably have talked about how we first met, or the arrival of our daughter. About how madly I wanted him and how madly he wanted me and how badly behaved we were when we first fell in love. We loved that, you know, recounting the really good bits. I’d never really tire of talking about that. Because, I suppose, all the bad bits towards the end could never really unstitch all the good bits from the beginning.
‘I like to imagine our marriage was a little like a hand-knitted blanket. It was a glorious thing to behold, full of intricate pattern and a multitude of colours and so very beautiful to examine in detail. Towards the top, there were a few dropped stitches and a few holes, and maybe the colours weren’t quite so bright, and maybe the needlecraft was a bit patchy, but it never unravelled. It still worked as a blanket. It was a lovely thing to look at, and it kept us warm, held us together. And it’s so much better to look at the beginning bits and stroke the colours and talk about the love and the joy that went into creating it rather than to focus on the last few rows.’
‘My blanket unravelled,’ Doubler had said, tears pricking at his eyelids.
‘I know. Our stories are not the same, Mr Doubler. Sometimes when you drop a stitch, you can’t really patch it up – it just undoes. It’s awful. It feels like a waste of time, doesn’t it, to end up with a pile of loose wool where before you had something useful.’ Mrs Millwood had looked thoughtful.
‘But afterwards, when the pain stops, you can tidy things up a bit. You can’t ever make that blanket again, not out of that wool, but what you can do is wind the wool up into a really neat ball – and that in itself takes time and patience and a degree of love and generosity – and then you can store the ball of wool away somewhere safe. And maybe just look at it from time to time.’
‘I am so far from that time, Mrs Millwood. It is still just a knotted mess at my feet. It trips me up; it catches me out. I couldn’t even find an end if I tried.’
‘So don’t. Do what you’re doing. Walk around it, step over it. Ignore it. Sweep it into a dark corner if watching it is causing you too much pain. But one day, you’ll have the strength and the resolve to look for an end and then slowly, slowly you can tidy it away neatly. You’ll feel some peace then.’
Doubler had carefully stored the image away in his memory and then asked, ‘And the anger you felt when your husband was dying – did it go when he died?’
‘In my case, yes. Because we’d said all our hurts and we’d said all our “sorry”s and I was just so glad he didn’t have to suffer again and I was so, so relieved to sleep through the night. For the first week or so I just slept and slept. My daughter thought my doctor had medicated me, but, no, I was just catching up on the sleep that you can’t have when you’re caring night and day.’
‘Ours are very different stories, Mrs Millwood.’
‘They are chalk and cheese, aren’t they? I bet when you’re tripping over that mess of tangled wool, you can’t imagine it ever made a blanket in the first place. But it probably did – the pain is just hard to see past. It can blind you, that kind of sadness.’
‘I had no warning, no inkling. And yet she knew! She could have spared me the shock, couldn’t she? She can’t have loved me much if she didn’t even think I needed a bit of gentle letting-down.’
‘Love, Mr Doubler. It’s a funny thing. True love doesn’t go away, but the pressures of life can do things to people. Who knows why some people react so differently? Sometimes it’s just an ageing thing. Like wine. Some wines are best drunk right away, as soon as the wine is made. And then no amount of keeping it and nurturing it will make it any better. Others aren’t that great first of all, but they get better and better. But the really good wines, Mr Doubler, they’re good when you first drink them and there’s still room for improvement.’ She had looked at him, puzzled then. ‘Why “chalk and cheese”, do you think, Mr Doubler?’
‘Well . . .’
Doubler blinked his eyes open and looked around the room, expecting to see Mrs Millwood bustling into the kitchen to put the kettle on. Had he told her where the expression ‘chalk and cheese’ had come from? Almost certainly – it was the kind of information he enjoyed being able to furnish. And she would have logged it carefully to relate to her friends at the knitting circle or, perhaps, the animal shelter.
There were people who knew Mrs Millwood at the animal shelter, people who perhaps missed her as much as he did. And surely there were animals, too, animals that might even be suffering as a result of her sudden departure. He had something in common with all of them, if only his sadness.
Doubler thought about the copy of the Yellow Pages he had tidied away in the cupboard and wondered from where Mrs Millwood drew her strength. She had been blessed with so much courage while he had so little. She certainly had enough for the two of them, but if he were to borrow some of hers, what on earth could he give her in return?
He looked at his strong and weathered hands. Mirth Farm soil was so ingrained in them that the fine lines formed dark contours and he wondered if he studied them for long enough, he’d find, drawn there, the topography of Mirth Farm itself. His hands were generously calloused, and Doubler was grateful for these hardened areas that gave him protection from the tools he handled daily. He ran the rough tip of his right thumb over the armour of his left hand, thinking how clever those skin cells were to form here where they were most needed, as if they had learnt lessons from every knock, every blister, every small wound. His heart, though, had taken some hard knocks of its own but had failed, he now realized, to similarly protect itself from future injury. If anything, it was more vulnerable to hurt now than ever before.
Perhaps, he wondered further, his heart had not hardened because that was not the place he suffered most when Marie went. It had been his head, not his heart, that had borne the brunt of the pain. His brain had ached with the inspection of her action and the replaying of the last months, weeks, days, looking for a clue, looking for a moment at which he might have changed their future. It was his brain that hurt from the constant examination and recrimination, and it was his brain that eventually stopped coping and had almost shut down altogether while he’d descended into the post-Marie chasm to escape the constant thinking. But the impact Mrs Millwood’s absence had on him was a very different thing. It hurt deeply in his ill-prepared heart.
He thought of her in her hospital bed and wondered whether she was strong enough in all the right places to recover. She seemed to be so much more resilient than he would ever be. Here he was, physically as strong as an ox, being propped up by Mrs Millwood, an invalid no less. Somehow, he would need to find some courage. He headed out to the potatoes to think.
Chapter 10
Having had no answer when she rang the doorbell, Midge rounded the farmhouse and crossed the yard, heading for the kitchen door, a bag full of groceries under each arm. Today, it was calm at the top of the hill, where normally the wind gusted, making it difficult sometimes to appreciate the silence that her mum so often talked about. She took a moment to inhale a lungful of hillside air and looked around her as she walked, observing her surroundings properly for the first time since she’d started to visit Doubler.
She popped the bags down in the yard, leaning them against a deteriorating stone wall. The yard was quartered by the back of the farmhouse itself, a locked garage and the first of some huge barns, which felt ominous in their stillness. The yard, nothing more than a turning circle really, was surfaced in gravel, and the bare fields she had driven through crept right up to each of the buildings so that, other than a briar-filled narrow flowerbed that circled the farmhouse itself, the grounds were devoid of anything that might be considered a garden. At the front of the house, to the right of the approach, there were a number of fruit trees – apple, she thought, and some others that might be part of an ancient fruit orchard – but their skeletal forms at this time of year lent little relief from the stark surroundings.
The roadside hill at the front of the farmhouse was quite steep for farmland but was furrowed in meticulous rows running the width of the fields. At the rear of the house, the field rolled more gently in all directions before dropping away to the boundary with that other big potato farmer Peele. Midge knew that the fields for as far as she could see were Doubler’s, and these in every direction were a deep, rich brown. The hedges that separated them were largely bare at this time of year, and the occasional coppice or small stretch of woodland boasted little that was evergreen. Midge had noticed Peele’s land as she drove past it on the way to visit Doubler and had acknowledged a discrepancy that she now realized she must enquire about.
As she stood looking, her sweeping gaze taking in the furthest reaches of the horizon as well as the immediate scenery, Doubler appeared from a narrow gap beside the first of the huge barns. Seeing Midge, he deviated from his planned circuit, hurrying across the yard towards her, waving cheerfully while briefly enjoying the thought that this warm interaction would be caught on film.
‘Have you never thought of putting in a vegetable patch, Doubler? Seems such a shame that with all of this land you’re having to buy in your vegetables.’
Doubler grinned in recognition. This trait of launching into a conversation as if he had been party to the preceding, unspoken thoughts in her brain was definitely a characteristic he recognized from Midge’s mother.
‘I agree it is a shame, but my potatoes occupy my day quite fully. I’m not sure I could give anything else my full attention.’
‘But isn’t it monotonous? The bare soil and stone? All those potatoes! I think I might go mad up here.’
‘Here? Monotonous? Heavens, no. Barely two days are the same.’
‘What you need here, Doubler, as I’ve told you before, are some nice hens pecking at the yard’ – she nodded at the empty space around them – ‘and there, perhaps, in the lee of that barn, a veggie patch. That’s a great spot. It would be nicely sheltered.’ She pointed at a corner of the nearest field that ran right up to the garage.
‘I’m sure you’re right. I have been meaning to be a bit more adventurous. But the day job keeps getting in the way. Perhaps in my retirement, eh?’ he joked.
Midge picked up the groceries and they entered the house together.
Doubler nodded at the bags. ‘I do OK, though, all things considered. These are probably grown locally, and I get by with the help of my friends.’
‘Your friends?’ Midge asked with an eyebrow raised and a hint of cynicism in her voice. The man in the farm shop had handed over the groceries without a word of greeting. Midge would have expected some sort of message of good wishes to pass on, particularly if Doubler hadn’t been to the shop in person for a few weeks.
Doubler chose not to answer and busied himself putting away the groceries.
When he returned from the pantry, Midge was already putting the kettle on.
‘Right, you. Mum is pushing for a progress report.’
‘From me? Well, nothing much to report and I spoke to her just yesterday.’
‘Nothing to report? That’s what we both feared. Have you arranged a time to visit Grove Farm yet? That’s what she really wants to know.’
Doubler looked at his feet and wondered how best to reply.
Midge looked serious, her hands now on her hips. ‘Have you even called them?’
Doubler shook his head apologetically, still unable to look Midge in the eye. ‘I’m afraid not. I lost my nerve.’
‘Oh, Doubler, that’s such a shame! If you don’t want to volunteer, I completely understand, but you need to tell Mum you’ve chickened out or you’ll just be letting her down. She really was hoping you’d get involved and help them out. Help her out. Besides, they’re expecting your call, so it will seem very rude.’
Doubler was appalled but unsure what he could do to right the situation, as recently he’d felt further away from making that call than ever before. ‘I’ve been very busy up here – there’s the normal workload to contend with, and I’ve taken on my domestic duties, too. There are already a great number of commitments to deal with. I’m quite stretched.’
Midge looked around at the immaculate kitchen. ‘I’m sure you’re doing a wonderful job keeping on top of it all, but I really don’t think it’s very healthy hiding up here all the time.’
Doubler protested, ‘I’m outside most of the day and I provide well for myself. It’s a healthy lifestyle – your mum would vouch for that.’
‘I’m quite sure you are healthy physically. That’s not what I’m concerned about. It’s your mental health that worries me. You must go days without seeing somebody up here.’
Doubler bit his lip and looked embarrassed.
‘Are you involved in any social activities? Golf? Bridge? A book club?’
Doubler shook his head and sat down heavily, resting his elbows on the table and putting his chin in his hands.
‘And what about friends? Do you get many visitors to Mirth Farm?’
Doubler shrugged.
‘When did you last go to dinner at a friend’s house?’ Midge still had her hands on her hips. She felt as combative as she sounded.
‘Gosh, I can’t remember. We used to go out a lot, Marie and I. She was very sociable. Drove me nuts, to tell you the truth. But after she went, I didn’t really feel up to much, so the invitations soon tailed off. Not their fault. I probably said “no” one too many times, so they eventually stopped asking.’
Midge, incredulous, came and sat down next to Doubler. ‘But that was more than two decades ago! You’re not telling me you’ve not eaten at a friend’s house for all that time?’
Doubler immediately pushed his chair back to stand up, continuing with the tea-making process that Midge had abandoned in her shock.
‘I suppose I haven’t. Amazing how time flies, really. But it’s not surprising. I’ve had my head down with my work, and your mum was always there to keep me company Monday to Friday. I never felt lonely.’
‘But, Doubler, that is not good enough! What about trips to the town? To the shops? How many times a week do you actually leave this place?’
Again Doubler fell silent. He had deliberately kept his isolation a secret from his children, but he didn’t think Midge would be so easy to fob off with a convenient version intended to pacify her. And besides, Mrs Millwood knew the extent of his solitary confinement, so there was little to gain by hiding it from her daughter. Still he hesitated, acknowledging his failure at life as if for the very first time.
She was insistent. ‘Doubler, how many visits to town do you make a week?’
Doubler poured tea for them both, took a sip and concentrated furiously on the lip of his cup.
‘A month?’ Midge tried.
Doubler finally raised his eyes to meet hers. ‘To tell you the truth, I don’t leave here.’
‘What, never?’
‘No. Not since Marie went. I have an arrangement that covers me for groceries and it’s quite satisfactory. Anything else I need is delivered to me here. I only have to pick up the phone. It lets me get on with the work I need to do. My potatoes are actually very demanding and even in the winter there is so much to do. I have very little help, you know – just a few extra pairs of hands for harvest. Most of it I do myself and I just wouldn’t manage if I was always popping into town.’