Buried Treasure

Buried Treasure

By Anne Smith,

from Ruyton-XI-Towns

There was no doubt about it, Lilian Lockerbie was a wonderful woman. Slim and elegant despite her almost sixty years, always immaculately dressed and made up, her cloud of silvery hair framing a face which still retained much

of its former beauty, she had charmed her way into a great many hearts in the two years since she and her husband Harold had come to live in the village.

One glance from those brilliantly blue eyes, one smile revealing those, still perfect teeth, and people were instantly enchanted. And it hadn't taken long to discover that good looks were not her only asset.

In no time at all she was singing in the church choir , producing wonderful floral arrangements for the harvest festival, performing with the local dramatic society, and breathing new life into the WI where her talent for public

speaking and the lightness of her Victoria Sponge earned her the Presidency at the end of her first year.

Oh yes, she was a wonderful woman. Everyone thought so, Well almost everyone. Despite my admiration for her obvious abilities, I had never felt that Lilian Lockerbie and I were soul mates.

My friend Bunny Bradshaw couldn't stand her.

"That woman is so devious!" exploded Bunny wrathfully as we sat in my kitchen drinking coffee after particularly fraught committee meeting about the forthcoming Christmas Fair.

"So absolutely determined to have her own way - and she gets it every time! Other people have got perfectly good

suggestions, but she shoots them down with a charming smile and a few well chosen words. We might as well disband the committee and let her get on with it!"

"Oh, come on Bun," I pushed a biscuit tin across the cluttered red table."You've got to be fair. She's a brilliant organiser and she does get things done."

"Yes - her way! And she may be a brilliant organiser but she's only been here five minutes and she's taking charge of everything. Only it's all so subtle that no one seems to notice. Not even you.

"I mean, you didn't want to run the White Elephant stall, did you? No, I thought not. And while we're at

it - you -always did the altar flowers and now she's doing them. Why's that?"

"Because she's much better at it than me, and I've got more than enough to do as it is. I'm just grateful for all the help I can get."

"Oh for heaven's sake, Jenny!" Bunny screwed her biscuit wrapping into a tight little ball and flipped it at me.

"Just because you're the Vicar's wife doesn't mean you have to be so damn charitable all the time! Admit it

now - you don't like our Lilian any more than I do."

It was true. I didn't. Her cool, unruffled elegance and competence made me feel untidy and more than usually aware of my organisational shortcomings as I struggled to fulfil my obligations to my children, a sprawling rural

parish and a husband who was overworked and underpaid.

I did feel sorry for her, because she and Harold had no family, and difficult though our three kids could be at times, I couldn't begin to imagine life without them. My husband Tom reckoned that all her activity was a way of filling the

grandchildren gap, and he was probably right, but there were times when I couldn't help wishing she was filling it somewhere else.

Brooding darkly on these things the next morning, and fiddling with the controls of our ancient washing machine which seemed to have sprung a leak, I was startled and not best pleased when the lady herself, immaculate as ever, appeared on the kitchen doorstep.

'Jenny, my dear," her eyes flickered over the unwashed breakfast dishes piled in the sink and the spreading puddle on the floor. "I can see you're busy, so I shan't stop. Just brought you a few White Elephants!"

She laughed merrily and thrust a large cardboard carton into my arms.

"I know the Fair's not for a week or two yet, but there's nothing like being organised well in advance. Oh, and by the way - I thought the meeting went very well last night, but I'm not sure that the Brownies should be in charge of the sideshows. Perhaps we ought to think again about that?,"

"The Brownies have always looked after the sideshows, Lilian!" Our youngest daughter was a Brownie, and the Christmas Fair was one of the highlights of her year.

"They would be desperately disappointed if they couldn't do it."

"Well of course we don't want to disappoint them - it's just that I thought they got a tiny bit overexcited last year. But perhaps a discreet word in Brown Owl's ear...? Well, I must fly. Meals on Wheels and then some shopping. No rest for the wicked as they say!"

A brilliant smile, a flutter of pink-tipped nails and she was gone. I ground my teeth and went out to hurl the White Elephants into our already cluttered garage, just as Tom came through the gate from the churchyard.

"Don't even ask!" I said savagely.

I was full of thoroughly uncharitable thoughts for the rest of the day, but I paid the price for them just before supper. Tom was wrestling with his sermon when the telephone rang, and he answered it in the study. A few

moments later he appeared in the kitchen looking rather shaken.

"Bad news, my love," he said. "Lilian Lockerbie's dead."

The church was packed for the funeral. I sat at the back with Bunny, and looked at Lilian's coffin, and still couldn't quite believe what had happened.

One minute she'd been there in my kitchen, threatening to spoil Brown Owl's day, and the next she was dead of a heart attack in Tesco's, surrounded by shopping trolleys and gaping people with plastic bags.

Harold Lockerbie looked as if he couldn't believe it either. There he sat, still and sad in the front pew, and I realised that I hardly knew him at all. For me, as for everyone else, he had always just been "Lilian's husband", an unremarkable little man of few words who spent most of his time pottering in his garden. What would he do now?

You need a family at a time like this, Ithought, and all Harold appeared to have was a grim-faced elderly sister who

didn't look as if she could be a comfort to anyone. And if Lilian had organised Harold as thoroughly as she had organised everyone else, how would he manage on his own?

As we made our way out of the church to the graveside I resolved to invite him to supper at the earliest opportunity. Apart from all other considerations it would make up for my uncharitable thoughts on the day Lilian had died. I still felt ashamed about that - and yet, when we turned away from the grave and someone said to me "She was a lovely lady - a real treasure!" I knew that, in all honesty, I couldn't agree with her.

Later that afternoon, looking out of our bedroom window which overlooked the churchyard, I saw a solitary figure in a long skirt and a hooded anorak standing by Lilian's grave. It was only a momentary glimpse before she turned and moved swiftly towards the lych gate and was lost in the gathering dusk.

Not one of the locals I was pretty sure, though I hadn't seen her face. Then three days later, as I made my way over to the church to resume my duty with the altar flowers, there she was again, hands deep in pockets, staring at the browning sheaf of lilies on the grave.

She turned as I scrunched across the gravel path towards her, and gave me a tentative smile.

"Hello" I said, "I'm Jenny Morgan, the Vicar's wife."

She nodded, and turned back to her contemplation of the lilies.

"Was Lilian a friend?" I asked gently.

"No." She looked at me again and her brown eyes were full of grief and hurt and anger. "No, she wasn't a friend. She was my mother."

Half an hour later, her hands clamped round a coffee mug, Margaret Lockerbie told me the tale.

"I was a desperate disappointment to my mother right from the start" she said ³She was beautiful and accomplished and I was plain and shy like Dad, and not very good at anything. When I was little, I was so desperate to please her, but she was a perfectionist, and I couldn't ever it right.

"Everything had to be done her way and I wasn't clever enough or confident enough to meet her standards. The harder I tried, the more impatient and dismissive she became so in the end I stopped trying and that made things

even worse. She didn't like the way I dressed, she didn't approve of my friends.- and then when I was seventeen I got pregnant and she threw me out."

"Oh Margaret!" I was horrified. "Whatever did you, do?"

"I managed. And don't think l that I regretted having Louise - She's the best thing that ever happened to me. Because of her I got a grip, and, when she was old enough, a nursing qualification. I've recently come to work in

a hospital quite near here When I left home, my parents lived in London, I had no idea they were so close until I read about the death in the local paper."

"And what now?" I asked.

"I want to see Dad again. Life with my mother must have been as difficult for him as it was for me, only I was too young to understand that at the time. And he ought to meet his granddaughter. But I'm not sure he'll want to

see me."

"Oh Margaret, of course he will!" I jumped up and seized her hand. "Come on, I'll show you the way!"

"And they all lived happily ever after. Very Mills and Boon!" said Bunny, when I told her.

"Oh, stop it, Bun. It's wonderful for Harold, and Margaret's a lovely person. Not a bit like Lilian."

"I do hope not - for all our sakes." said my friend.

Bt her fears appeared to be unfounded. Over the next eighteen months Margaret visited her father regularly, and although at first there was inevitable speculation in the village about the long lost daughter, and the granddaughter, whom we had yet to meet because of an extended gap year abroad, the details were never made public and it was soon forgotten.

Harold got a new lease of life, and was often to be seen laughing and joking on the bowling green or in the pub. Hitherto unrecognised talent emerged and flourished in the dramatic society and the WI, and our son James and Bunny's daughter Alison became 'an item', with the wholehearted approval of both families.

And then came the day of the annual Vicarage garden party. I was standing on the lawn in the sunshine, talking to James and Alison and old Mrs Jones from the Post Office when Harold and Margaret arrived with stranger in tow.

"Jenny," Harold was beaming from car to car "Look who's here! My long lost granddaughter, home at last! Louise - let me introduce you to our Vicar's wife."

A tall, slender, beautiful girl held out her hand with a charming smile, and I looked into a pair of brilliant blue eyes.

"How lovely to meet you at last" I said, but my mouth had gone suddenly dry.

"Lovely to be here. "The blue gaze flickered briefly over Alison, -and settled on James who was gazing at her with open admiration, "And I think I might stay for a while."

"Great!" said my son.

And old Mrs Jones laid a kindly hand on Louise's arm and said 'I knew your grandmother, dear. She was a wonderful woman."

See also:

• The winning poem

• The winning article