On the morning of their leaving Jack hands over the key to the estate agent, and sits in the passenger seat of his Triumph Herald. He looks resolutely forward, at nothing. He is too choked to drive or to speak. He refuses to be unmanned by weeping, and he feels a portion of himself shutting off. Jessie starts the engine and squeezes his hand comfortingly before she puts the car into gear. ‘It’s a sad day, isn’t it, Dad?’ she says, and he does not reply. She has taken lots of photographs of the old house, and plans to frame some of the best ones for the walls of the new one. She combines a sort of pre-emptive nostalgia with a contradictory sense of bright new beginnings. She is optimistic but she feels tears prickling in the corners of her eyes. ‘Goodbye, old home,’ she says, and then starts the car off down Malthouse Lane. They pass the hedging and ditching man, who is examining a freshly excavated workman’s boot. They pass the house where the General used to live, and which is now fitfully occupied at weekends by a couple from London who have already complained about the noise of chickens from over the road, and the crack of shotguns in the Hurst. They want horses banned from parts of the common because they chew up the footpaths, and they want to stop the teenage boys roaring around the tracks on old motorbikes. They want a fence round the village pond so that their child won’t fall in.
‘Goodbye, Notwithstanding,’ calls Jessie, waving to the trees on Busses Common. ‘We still love you. Goodbye, you good old place.’ She wipes her eyes on her sleeve, and drives on.
Two months later Mrs Griffiths is mightily surprised to find Jack Oak standing at his usual post in the village shop, having bought his customary pack of cigarette papers. He hawks up phlegm, and remembers to swallow it.
‘Artnoon,’ says Jack, as usual. ‘Turned out nice again. Looks like rain, though.’
‘Mr Oak!’ cries Mrs Griffiths. ‘Why, I thought I must have seen a ghost! What brings you back to these parts?’
‘Jus’ visitin’,’ says Jack. ‘Jus’ visitin’.’
Mrs Griffiths says, ‘I thought I saw your car outside.’ She has improved in recent months. She has become sociable and talkative, has joined the Conservative Association, and collects money for the RSPCA and the donkey refuge. She has tried going to church but is horrified by how undignified and informal the services have become during her many decades of absenteeism, and so she has given up again. She has finally got round to writing a true-life romance, and it has been published by Mills & Boon under the name of Sophia D’Arcy de Vere. She is bursting with pleasure and pride, but can’t think of anyone she’d dare tell, in case they should read it and come across the steamy scenes.
‘How long are you staying?’ she asks.
‘Back tonight,’ replies Jack. ‘Got nowhere to stay round here no more.’
‘How do you like your new house?’ enquires Mrs Griffiths.
‘It’s all right,’ says Jack, with a shrug.
‘It’s nice, is it?’
‘’S’all right.’
‘Nice people? Have you made friends yet?’
‘Ain’t got round to it,’ says Jack.
‘Nice village?’
‘Nice enough, if you like it.’
Mrs Griffiths tries a new tack. ‘Have you met the people in your old house? They’re terribly nice. Not here much, though. They’ve made some terrific improvements already.’
‘Weren’t nothing wrong with it in the first place,’ says Jack, with an edge of bitterness in his voice. ‘Can’t see what they want to go changing it for. They ain’t got the right.’
Mrs Griffiths and the lady behind the counter exchange significant glances. They are both thinking ‘Poor old Jack’. Mrs Griffiths notices that Jack is much thinner and greyer than he was. He is still stinking and filthy, but his health is clearly worse, and he has a forlorn and vanquished air.
Over the next few weeks Mrs Griffiths encounters Jack more frequently. When he has finished in the shop he walks straight across the middle of the cricket pitch, and stands outside his old house with his hands in his pockets, just looking at it. One day the new owners see him and assume that he is a vagabond up to no good. The young man comes out, and Mrs Griffiths arrives just in time to set him right, to prevent him from calling the police, and to prevent Jack from telling him to bugger off. The young man is nonetheless afraid that Jack Oak might frighten the children, and he glowers at him every time he sees him standing immobile outside, like the trunk of a ruined apple tree, with his hands in his pockets, just looking and looking and looking at his old house.
The situation becomes steadily sadder and more absurd and Mrs Griffiths thinks about calling the social services. Instead she manages to trace Jessie in the West Country, and Jessie says she’s tried to stop him, to talk him out of it, but she can’t. Jessie says that she’s at her wits’ end, but he always comes back and maybe he’ll stop eventually.
On one occasion Mrs Griffiths comes to the village shop early and realises that Jack must have been there all night, finding him asleep in his Triumph Herald with nothing but a rug to cover him, and one day in January she calls round at his old cottage in order to collect for the donkey refuge and to ask if the new owners are intending to vote Conservative. There is a hoar frost, the twigs are thick with glistening rime, she is well wrapped up, and she walks carefully so as not to wintle on the rimy Bargate stones of the path. She feels fresh and renewed on freezing mornings like this.
As she goes up the path something snags the corner of her vision, and she turns her head quickly. There is a small garden shed on the left-hand side, up against the front hedge, and from the threshold protrudes a pair of old muddy brown boots with much-mended laces. She runs over, sure that she recognises them, and she puts her hand to her mouth in horror. ‘Oh Jack!’ she cries. ‘Jack!’ even though she has never addressed him by his first name during the sixty years of their entire acquaintance. She goes down on her knees and pulls back the crisp and stiffened rug from his face, ‘Oh Jack, oh Jack,’ she wails, and puts her hands to her cheeks and weeps in high-pitched little sobs. His hair is sparkling white and rigid with hoar frost, and his face is open-mouthed and grey. His teeth are like tombstones, his sightless eyes are round like dinner plates, but he has an arresting and horrible beauty.
They arrange for Obadiah Oak, known to everyone as Jack, to be buried in St Peter’s churchyard instead of the one in his parish in the west. Jessie tells everyone at the funeral that she will never forgive herself, but people reassure her that she really did think she was acting for the best. The coroner establishes that it was misadventure, that he died specifically of hypothermia. Mrs Griffiths and the residents of longer standing, however, know perfectly well what it was that killed him.
THE DEATH OF MISS AGATHA FEAKES
MISS AGATHA FEAKES summons her menagerie of animals. ‘Chuffy chuffy chuffy chuffy!’ she calls. It is her last day on this earth, but she does not know it yet, and the morning starts in its usual fashion. No one knows why she calls ‘Chuffy chuffy chuffy chuffy’ rather than the actual names of her dogs and cats, but the village has grown accustomed to it, and only the little children, whose minds have not got used to anything, wonder about it any more. Her voice is like the call of the cuckoo, mellow and tuneful, with a touch both of mournfulness and optimism. Like the cuckoo, her call carries for miles across the fields and coppices, and there is indeed a real cuckoo that roosts in the Hurst, who cranes his neck in curiosity and surprise whenever Miss Agatha Feakes calls her animals at seven o’clock in the morning.