LADY ANN'S FOLLY: Chapter Six - Part Ten

Ann stood for the longest time looking down the train tracks toward the south, hoping in desperation that somehow the railway train the Mavis and Richard had left in would reverse its motion and work its way back to Griply. She knew it couldn’t happen but she ached for it still because she did not have any other hope in her life.

But time contorts hope into reality and false hope into finality. Mavis was not coming back; not today; not for days at least and possibly not for weeks.

“Heh.” She gave off a brief and cynical chuckle. Because that wasn’t true now, was it. “She’s Lady Ann now. I’m Mavis. Mavis is staying here where she belongs.”

The acknowledgement of that both deepened her despair and somehow lightened it, as despite everything, a rosy sense of peace spread up from the back of her head. Perhaps that was what she needed to do – the only sane option available to her: to accept who she was now, just as the original Lady Ann had done – to embrace her new lower position on the social scale.

More than anything she just wanted to feel and secure. Only a month earlier she had been a simple stablehand whose only real problem was his unrequited love of his mistress. Since then she had become a cultured woman, gone to London and Brighton, learned to become part of the gentry, fallen into and out of love and then been thrust back into the lower class. It was bewildering and frightening. With so little stability, she just wanted somewhere to curl up inside and feel at home.

She turned first her body and then her head until she was facing the Dog & Pony. The pub was open but still mostly empty. The darkened windows reflected the cool afternoon light.

Ann looked down her body for the hundredth time, raising her arms; curling in her grubby fingers and palms. She gripped her tatty skirt, pinching a pocket of it up from her legs. She looked again at the pub and sighed. She really did only fit inside there now.

“There ain’t no two ways about it...” she said quietly. “I’m Mavis Gibbs.” And as she said those words she got the same calming sense of peace. The corners of her mouth turned up. Then her eyes widened and her mouth fell open. She covered her lips with her hand.

“Oh lawd, no. Of course.” She remembered how it had been in London now, when she had repeated that she was Lady Ann over and over again and it had reinforced it somehow, made it more true. Surely the same thing was happening here. She was making herself more like Mavis every time she said it.

Ann pressed her palms against her crown and bowed her head. “Oh Christ. I have to stop. I have to resist it.”

But she knew how difficult that was going to be. She knew how quickly she had fell into Lady Ann’s ways and mode of speech in London. Her grandmamma’s tuition had helped but she feared now that it was more the magic’s doing all along.

She screwed her eyes shut and stood back upright, swaying a little. Then she opened them.

The Dog & Pony was still standing before her as inevitably as her fate. She took a hesitant step toward it and then another. It grew slowly larger in her perception and she closed on the decrepit timbre-framed building with increasing dismay.

This is where I belong now, she thought to herself, not noticing the light buzzing that accompanied that thought, the only place I can really feel at home.

She walked up to the door, looking at Mavis’s sorrowful face looking back at her from the little square panes of glass. She tried to gather enough breath for a sigh but couldn’t find it in her tightened throat. Then she turned the handle and pushed open the door; loitered; then stepped in and closed it behind her.

It was dim and quiet inside with only two punters drinking in the far corner: two old men. The one almost facing her gave her a nod and a wink. “Eh up Mavis. Are ye’ right?” He grinned, raising his pint.

Ann’s heart sank to hear and see the recognition in a stranger’s face then fell further as the man with him turned and said, “A’right our Mavis. Ye’re lookin right nice this afternoon.”

She didn’t know what to say to them. She just hurried to the door into the back, feeling the tears come to her eyes that had been threatening to return for some time.

She shut the door on the bar and leaned back against it, wishing she wasn’t stuck like this with no other option than to live in this dismal dirty place. But she didn’t have any other choice – she really didn’t – especially with the threats levied on her by the butler of Griply Hall if she ever went back up there. She couldn’t even seek solace in Burt’s arms.

“Mavis!? Is that you?”

Ann jerked in fear at the sound of the nasty voice coming from the rear of the building. She didn’t respond. She was afraid to.

“Mavis!?” A man strode round the corner at the end of the back corridor and stood glaring at her and it took Ann several moments to recognise him from her muddled and distant Burt memories. He was the landlord, Mavis’s father. “It is you. Where the ‘ell ave you been? I needed you tendin’ bar last night?”

Ann gaped back at him, flummoxed.

“Well?” he demanded. “Speak up you daft cow. Where was ye last night? Off shaggin that great idiot from the ‘all I’ll bet, when you was supposed to be workin.”

“Uh, yeah,” said Ann, frightened that he might strike her at any moment. “I’m sorry. I should have... I should have been ere.”

“Damn right you should’ve!” He glared at her, his fists on his hips, then said, “Well get yerself sorted now then you little skank. I’ll not ave you wastin time when there’s work needing doin. Is that clear?”

“Yes,” she whimpered. “I’m sorry.”

He grabbed her by a clench of fabric at her shoulder and pushed her toward the kitchen. “Get the mop and bucket and start swabbing the floor in the bar. We’ll start getting the punters in soon enough and you’ll ave ye work cut out for ye.”

Ann lurched toward the back of the pub, the tears flowing freely down her cheeks now.

This was her new life and unlike when the original Ann had traded places with Burt, she knew there was no hope of ever getting away from it.

She was a working class peasant barmaid and she would be until the day she died.