I’d rather that, and it was easy, actually, because I was better than most of them. And so are you.’
‘Well it hasn’t worked out well in the end, has it?’
She stood from the chair, hands on hips, and winced as Margaret wiped her nose on the back of her hand.
‘That’s as it may be, but times are changing and it isn’t too late for you.’
*
No sooner had she left the dormitory entrance than Natalie collided with Miss Lott’s secretary, Mrs Lancaster.
‘Lord Lacey has heard you’re still here, you know. He’s looking for you and he’s not best pleased. You ought to think of saying the last of your goodbyes.’ She thrust Murray’s lead, the dog attached to it, into her hand and suggested that she take him down to Miss Lott at the Lodge on her way out.
Murray exhausted the ground on which to piddle or sniff within the circumference that his lead would take him and looked up at the two women with his mouth open, his tongue working like a piston.
The dog tugged. He knew the way. Without turning to bid Mrs Lancaster farewell she allowed Murray to lead her out on to the path to the Lodge.
Murray paused to lift his leg, staining the trunk of a sweet chestnut tree. As she looked anywhere but down she spotted Miss Lott unsteadily propped against the Lodge’s doorway, holding on to the frame for support.
‘Ah, there you are.’ Her smile was shaky and her words ran into one another. Her dress was so big on her, flopping off the shoulders, the belt tight but meeting no resistance. She had always been slight, but now the shape of her hip bones pushed through the floral fabric.
Inside, behind Miss Lott, a lady of similar height and hair colour removed books from the shelves and stacked them into apple crates. She looked up and nodded and then returned to the books. Natalie recognised her from the photograph, now gone from the empty side table.
Miss Lott bent herself into her chair. She moved slowly as if she’d aged twenty years since she’d clambered on to the motorcycle just last night. Her hair was limp and the grease at the roots made it a darker shade of grey.
Murray clambered on to his mistress’s lap and while she stroked him, Natalie retreated to the kitchen, her jaw and throat too tight to even raise her lips to a smile.
When she came back, Miss Lott’s sister flipped an apple crate for a seat. Natalie dunked her rich-tea biscuit into her tea and watched the tan tideline turn it dark. The soft half melted to nothing on her tongue, but the sweetness couldn’t overpower the acidic taste in her mouth.
‘Mr Lovett has agreed to keep the motorcycle in the shed…’ Miss Lott’s mouth was dry and claggy, with dried spittle at the corner of her pale pink lips ‘…until you’re ready for a lesson or two and you’re settled into your new home. I think he was a bit put out that I hadn’t left it to him.’
‘Then that’s kind of him,’ Natalie said. She pushed aside the rest of the biscuit and the tea.
‘Help yourself to a book or two, if you’d like.’
Natalie daren’t look up. She focused her attention on the spines of each book, going through each of the three columns a good few times, before sliding out the yearbooks from the years she’d both joined and graduated from the college. She piled them on the rug.
Miss Lott cleared her throat. ‘Don’t be sad. I will be in good hands.’
Her sister paused to squeeze Miss Lott’s shoulder.
‘You know over the years…’ Miss Lott’s thin voice filled the silence ‘…from time to time, I’ve asked myself if the professional life was the right choice for me. But when I tried to imagine myself in a quiet and empty home…’ she paused to catch her breath, twiddling Murray’s fur ‘…dusting the sideboard and waiting for the sound of my husband’s key in the door…’ she stopped again ‘…it’s then that I knew without doubt, that I made the right choice, that my career was the only path I could have ever taken.’
Miss Lott slumped from the exertion of her speech and closed her eyes.
‘Teaching would have been poorer without you,’ Natalie replied.
After a while the sister unfolded the tartan blanket and placed it over Miss Lott’s knees. A moment later, Miss Lott’s eyelids fluttered across her grey-blue watery eyes.
‘Now you’ve lost your job,’ her frail voice began again, ‘you’ll be thinking perhaps you should have tried harder to find a man to marry, but I like to think that if you could have had a husband, you wouldn’t have taken one anyway.’
It was meant as a consolation, but Natalie had never been given the option. She’d not had to choose between her career and a man because there was never a chap who wanted her as a wife. The war had carved out a lonely existence for her, and teaching had finished her off.
‘As you say, I’ll never know,’ Natalie said, ‘but at the moment it feels as if everything I have worked for has come to nothing.’
Miss Lott was growing too weak to continue. ‘You don’t have to follow me… Don’t feel you should… Take the scythe in hand and hack your own path,’ she said, and then her eyes closed in a long blink.
Her sister raised her hands to her tweed-covered hips and sighed.
‘Hope, you should rest now.’ She had the same sharp, jerky mannerisms as Miss Lott, the same kindly manner too. ‘We’ve a long drive to Scotland ahead of us,’ she explained to Natalie.
‘Enjoy the motorcycle, my dear,’ was the last thing Miss Lott said. The hand stroking Murray’s back came to a halt and then her chin led her head’s descent, the rise and fall of her chest almost imperceptible.
After a few moments, her sister wrote her Highland address on to a piece of paper for Natalie and then sensing that she would want to say goodbye to Miss Lott alone, she shook Natalie’s hand and clopped off up the curved staircase to the room above.
Natalie crouched down by the arm of Miss Lott’s chair. Murray twisted his neck to see what she was doing. The poor dog – he’d been just a puppy when Miss Lott first got him. He was going to miss his mistress terribly when she was gone. She stroked the white wisps of fur on his head, feeling the fragility of his skull underneath, pushing his ears down. He must know. Animals don’t need language; they sense these things. She did this for a while before she turned her attention from Murray to Miss Lott.
Her jaw slack, her face gaunt and shrunken. Her illness had tightened its grip now that she had nothing left to fight for.
Natalie rubbed her own palms together and then placed one warm hand on top of the one Miss Lott still rested on Murray’s back. She held it there for a few moments, whispering her thanks and love to her old teacher.
Once she’d lifted her hand with care, she snatched up her books and ran from the Lodge, out on to the gravel path and through the woods until she reached the riverbank, where she sank to her knees and cried and half-heard her own anguish, half-noticed as her tears darkened the dried, cracked earth.
Well she wasn’t going to become a relic after all. There was nothing left for her here now. It really is time to go.
The standing comeback
The diver jumps backwards off the board but then swoops forwards before facing down and entering the water.
‘Perhaps a break by the coast is what you need?’ Delphi asked as she topped up her glass. Natalie’s knife and fork hovered above her plate. ‘This could be your way of making it up to me after the Prunella debacle.’ They both laughed. They had reached a point where they could see the funny side of it, and it was such a relief to laugh: the glow in her belly, the lightness in her face.
She