The Moon Field
The Moon Field
Judith Allnatt
A poignant story of love and redemption, The Moon Field explores the loss of innocence through a war that destroys everything except the bonds of human hearts.No man’s land is a place in the heart: pitted, cratered and empty as the moon…Hidden in a soldier’s tin box are a painting, a pocket watch, and a dance card – keepsakes of three lives.It is 1914. George Farrell cycles through the tranquil Cumberland fells to deliver a letter, unaware that it will change his life. George has fallen for the rich and beautiful daughter at the Manor House, Miss Violet, but when she lets slip the contents of the letter George is heartbroken to find that she is already promised to another man. George escapes his heartbreak by joining the patriotic rush to war, but his past is not so easily avoided. His rite of passage into adulthood leaves him believing that no woman will be able to love the man he has become.
THE
MOON FIELD
JUDITH ALLNATT
In memory of my mother,
Isabel Gillard,
with love and admiration.
No man’s land is a place in the heart: pitted, cratered and empty as the moon.
Contents
Cover (#u52fb0914-fa1d-5543-bfc5-f41025280380)
Title Page (#u1770b81c-6323-547a-bacb-96e5ee38b838)
Dedication (#u34d23ff9-9265-56de-a550-09a625156fe2)
Epigraph (#ude953101-8de4-5cca-9785-936cec22668c)
Maps (#ud874775e-5913-59d9-9d73-7cc93cf6b8ae)
Prologue (#uba8ed27e-aeab-54e6-8e04-bfbb41060823)
Part One: First Post (#u1168d00a-8647-5b75-a27d-44100c0ca1e7)
1. Watercolour (#u859b01ad-2aa0-50c0-b432-cf1cf351f955)
2. At the Twa Dogs (#u2f671a1d-f2f2-539e-b24d-b0f6b7815caa)
3. Dance Card (#u704c9816-bc78-59de-9135-d66c0140bd92)
4. Measuring Up (#u00aa5805-e829-540a-8182-1fc4db7c5849)
5. Friar’s Crag (#u9f095b71-ce3c-5b1c-aea3-a726be61d117)
6. Feathers on the Stream (#litres_trial_promo)
7. Blue Envelope (#litres_trial_promo)
Part Two: Flanders, Autumn 1914 (#litres_trial_promo)
8. Polders (#litres_trial_promo)
9. Studio Portrait (#litres_trial_promo)
10. Home Comforts (#litres_trial_promo)
11. Playing Cards (#litres_trial_promo)
12. Earth (#litres_trial_promo)
13. The Ruined House (#litres_trial_promo)
Part Three: Blighty (#litres_trial_promo)
14. Christmas Post (#litres_trial_promo)
15. Tin (#litres_trial_promo)
16. 26 Leonard Street (#litres_trial_promo)
17. Breaking (#litres_trial_promo)
18. The Alhambra (#litres_trial_promo)
19. Cat Bells (#litres_trial_promo)
20. Paste Brooch (#litres_trial_promo)
21. The Walled Garden (#litres_trial_promo)
22. Castlerigg (#litres_trial_promo)
23. Stones (#litres_trial_promo)
24. No Man’s Land (#litres_trial_promo)
25. Walking Out (#litres_trial_promo)
Epilogue (#litres_trial_promo)
Acknowledgements (#litres_trial_promo)
A Q&A with Judith Allnatt (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Author (#litres_trial_promo)
Also by Judith Allnatt (#litres_trial_promo)
Copyright (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)
PROLOGUE (#ulink_2a427c2b-339e-59cf-b287-dc788cd77d4f)
The lid of the tin box is tight; you have to move from one corner to another, prising and pushing with your thumbs. Green paint peels from its edges as though time has been gnawing at it. Brown patches of rust have pockmarked its surface, but you can still make out the picture: a man and a woman in a rowing boat, oars shipped, he with a fishing rod, she with a red parasol, the gentle slopes of tree-lined banks, the river calm, sun-dappled. ‘Jacob and Co’s “Water” Biscuits’ reads the legend, as if the biscuits were meant only to be enjoyed when boating, conjuring lazy, sun-filled days suspended in the lap of the water, with time to drift, to float …
The lid comes loose with a faint gasp of released air. Inside are papers and objects, loosely packed. There is a bundle of letters, the expensive blue writing paper tied, oddly, with a bootlace. A pack of Lloyd’s cigarettes has a faint smell of tobacco and an even fainter trace of roses. There are photographs: stiffly posed family portraits of men and women in high collars; a girl playing tennis, one hand bundling the encumbrance of her long skirts aside as she reaches for her shot; hand-tinted postcards of lakeside views.
The heavier objects have found their way to the bottom: an amber heart, a pocket watch, a set of keys, and an ivory dance-card holder with a tiny ebony pencil. Lifted, each one fits your hand, makes a hieroglyph: the shape of the past against your palm. This was real; I was there, they say as you feel their weight and smoothness.
Beneath them, lining the tin, is the stiff paper of a watercolour painting, slightly foxed and with its edges curling a little but still with its landscape greens and blues, the texture of the paper showing through the brushstrokes of some unknown hand.
PART ONE (#ulink_f43b15af-e26e-5b3d-abd5-92e88521e8ce)
1 (#ulink_52521034-d97f-578d-ac81-dedecb6a4f8b)
WATERCOLOUR (#ulink_52521034-d97f-578d-ac81-dedecb6a4f8b)
Today would be the day. George touched the bulky package in the breast pocket of his postman’s uniform as if to check, one more time, that it was there. His best watercolour was pressed between the pages of his sketchbook to keep it flat and pristine, as a gift should be. He felt his heart beating against the board back of the book. All morning it had been beating out the seconds, the minutes and the hours between his decision and the act. Today, when he went on the last leg of his rounds, he would present Violet with the painting over which he had laboured. ‘As a token of my esteem,’ he would say, for, even to himself, he dared not use the word love.
In the sorting room at the back of the post office, he greeted the others, hung his empty bag on its hooks at the sorting table so that it sagged open, ready to be filled, and leant against the wall to take a few moments’ rest. The late-morning sun slanted down through the high windows, alive with paper dust that rose from the table: a vast horse-trough affair with shuttered sides. Kitty and her mother, Mrs Ashwell, their sleeves rolled up, picked at the choppy waves of letters, their pale arms and poised fingers moving as precisely as swans dipping to feed. Every handful of mail, white, cream and bill-brown, was shuffled quickly into the pigeonholes that covered the rear wall, each neatly labelled street by street.
‘I see Mrs Verney’s Christopher has a birthday,’ Kitty said as she pressed a handful of envelopes into ‘20–50 Helvellyn Street’.
‘He’s reached his majority,’ Mrs Ashwell said. ‘Let’s hope he’s soon home to enjoy it.’
Mr Ashwell, the postmaster, came in carrying a sack of mail over his shoulder. He nudged George and thrust the sack into his arms. ‘Dreaming again, George?’ he said. ‘You left this one by the counter right where I could trip over it.’
‘Sorry, sir,’ George said quickly.
Mr Ashwell made some show of dusting off his front and pulling his waistcoat down straight. ‘Concentration, young man,’ he said, giving George one of his straight looks. ‘Concentration is needed to make sure that work proceeds in an orderly manner.’ He stroked his moustache with his finger and thumb while continuing to fix George with his gaze. George felt his cheeks begin to burn.
Mr Ashwell said, without looking at his wife, ‘Very busy on the counter today, Mabel. Tea would be most acceptable. Arthur’s assistance sorely missed.’
Mrs Ashwell’s hands stilled amongst the letters and her back stiffened as if to brace herself against the thought of her son, so far from home. Through the doorway between the sorting room and the shop, she could see Arthur’s old position at the counter. The absence of his broad back and shoulders, of the familiar fold of skin over his tight collar and the neatly cut rectangle of brown hair at his neck struck her anew each time she let her glance stray that way. It was as though someone had punched out an Arthur-shaped piece of her existence and pasted in its place a set of scales and a view of the open post office door and the cobbled street beyond.
Sometimes, when the post office was closed and Mr Ashwell busy elsewhere, she would stand in Arthur’s old place and rest her elbows where his had rested. She would bow her head and finger through the set of rubber stamps as if they were rosary beads. At these moments, she tried not to look at the noticeboard on the side wall. Amongst the public notices of opening hours and postal rates was the sign that her husband had insisted be displayed, just as all official documents that were sent from head office must be. An innocuous buff-coloured sheet of paper that one might easily overlook, thinking it yet another piece of dull information, it read:
POST OFFICE RIFLES –
The postmaster’s permission to join must be sought.
Pay is equal to civil pay for all Established Officers plus Free Kit, Rations and Quarters.
GOD SAVE THE KING.
The detailed terms and conditions followed in smaller print below.
Mrs Ashwell thought about the boredom of the counter job on a quiet afternoon, of how Arthur’s eyes must have run over and over all the notices: ‘Foreign packages must be passed to the counter clerk.’ ‘Release is for one year’s service.’ ‘This office is closed on Sundays and official holidays.’ ‘Remuneration will be at an enhanced rate.’ She imagined the phrases repeating in his mind as he tinkered with the scales, idly building pyramids of brass weights on the pan.
‘Tea,’ she said, under her breath. Then more determinedly: ‘Tea,’ and went upstairs to their living quarters to make it.
George hefted the sack up on to the table and upended it, spilling a new landslide of mail that re-covered the chinks of oak board that had begun to show through.
‘Is that the last bag?’ Kitty asked of her father’s retreating back.
‘Better ask George if he’s left any more lying about,’ he said and closed the door behind him.
Kitty rolled her eyes at George. ‘He’s been like a bear with a sore head ever since breakfast. We got Arthur’s first letter,’ she added.
George came round to her side of the table and they sorted side by side, their heads bent companionably together, George’s fair hair ruffled where he had run his hands through it in the heat, Kitty’s springy, pale brown hair tied back neatly out of the way. George waited for her to elaborate about Arthur but Kitty bent her head to her work and pressed her lips together. After a while, when the job was almost done, George said in his slow, gentle way, ‘It must be a terrible worry for your father.’
Kitty snorted. ‘Quite to the contrary; Arthur is travelling further afield than Penrith and preparing to tackle the enemy, whereas Father is still chained to the counter like a piece of pencil on a string.’
‘Aah,’ said George, pausing to look at her more closely. ‘And how about you, Kitty? How are you bearing up?’
‘I miss him, but it makes me sad to see Mother miss him even more and it makes me cross that Father won’t let the subject rest.’ She tapped the letters in her hand smartly on their side to line them up, shoved them roughly into a pigeonhole and then, seeing her mistake, pulled them back out again.
George laid his hand on her shoulder. ‘Oh, Kit,’ he said. ‘I’m so sorry.’
She gave him a half-hearted smile. ‘Never mind. What was it we used to say at school on bad days?’
‘All manner of things shall be well,’ George said slowly.
‘Exactly.’ She looked again at the address on top of her pile of mail and placed it carefully into the correct wooden cubby-hole. ‘Here, give us your bag,’ she said. ‘I’ll fill it up.’
He held the bag open while she put in the packages of post to be delivered to the villages; then she parcelled up each street with string and dropped them in on top. She helped him on with the bag, reaching up to lift the strap over his shoulder and then settling the weight at his back.
‘Sorry it’s a heavy one,’ she said.
‘It’s cutting down the number of deliveries that’s done it. Bound to be heavy.’
She buckled the bag and gave it a pat. ‘See you later,’ she said. ‘We’ve got plum bread for tea. I’ll save you some.’
George nodded and went out through the post office, past the dour looks of Mr Ashwell and a queue of chattering customers and into the brightness of the day. The market place seemed just as busy as usual; almost impossible to believe that the country was at war: shoppers were choosing vegetables, lengths of cloth and ironmongery from the carts lined up in rows in the centre of the square, each cart tipped forward to rest on its shafts, the better to show the goods. The calls of the vendors mixed with the barking of dogs and the rumble of a motor charabanc passing along St John’s Street. The sky was a hazy white and the green flanks of the hills rose in the distance behind the tower of the Moot Hall, their lines as familiar to him as the lineaments of his own face. Taking a deep breath to clear his lungs of the indoor smell of the post office, he caught the musky odour of horse dung and the sharper tang of motor oil. He paused to adjust the strap of the postbag and loosen his tie a little; then he turned down the alley at the side of the post office to collect his bike. He wheeled it out, leaning its saddle against his thigh, and went on in this fashion, bumping over the cobbles, past the Moot Hall and into the narrow streets beyond.
The bike was a heavy, black, iron thing with a basket the size of a lobster pot and when George first got it, he’d not been able to manage it on the steep inclines. He’d needed to get off halfway up a hill and walk it up the rest, sweat darkening his fair hair and sticking it to his forehead. He had persevered though, pedalling a little further each time, thinking of his body as an engine that would benefit from work, and taking pleasure in the healthy ache of his muscles at the end of a day. His uniform jacket had needed to be let out along the back seam to allow for the growing breadth of his shoulders, and his mother, fitting the jacket on him, had called him an ‘ox of a man’ and made him smile. Now, by standing up on the pedals he could force the bike uphill, clanking and complaining, his solid frame bent over the handlebars, shoulders hunched and front wheel wobbling as he slowed for the steepest slopes. Having the bike meant that he could deliver to the farms and hamlets. His spirits lifted as soon as he got out among the fells and he happily left the younger boys to divide the rest of the town between them and deliver on foot carrying lightly loaded bags and returning more frequently to the office to refill them.
George forced himself to walk at his usual pace along the street and up and down the steps of the guesthouses. There was no point hurrying, he told himself sternly, because if he arrived at the Manor House early she would still be lunching and he would have to deliver the family’s letters to the gatehouse, and would miss his chance again. No, he had to do everything as usual and must not leave the town until the Moot Hall clock struck one. That would bring him to the grounds around two o’clock, just as she set out down the lane from the house to take her walk but before she turned off right for the fell or left for the fields and the river.
It had been at the bridge that he had first seen her. He had almost not noticed her in the dappled shadows of the alders that grew beside the river, right close against the stonework of the bridge; only the brightness of her white blouse had given her away, she was so still. She was holding a brown box in both hands and leaning against the parapet. George was struck by the way her straight brown hair was caught in a twist that sat neatly at the nape of her neck and how her posture, leaning forward to focus intently on something below, accentuated the slenderness of her waist. He slowed the bike, thinking to pass on the far side of the narrow bridge without disturbing her but the crackle of the wheels over the grit caught her ear and she turned, her hands still holding the object in front of her and looked at him as if puzzled for a moment. Her face … pale, with dark eyes, forehead slightly drawn, as if coming round from sleep, high cheekbones and full lips, which ran into upward indentations at the corners suggesting the tantalising possibility of a smile that was at odds with the serious expression of her eyes. Without even thinking, he put one foot down on the ground and stopped dead.
‘What are you doing?’ he said, blurting it out into the moment before she could turn away.
‘Preparing to take a photograph,’ she said.
He got off the bike and wheeled it over to her. His family had only one photograph, a studio portrait of his parents: his mother seated, wearing her bridal gown, veil and circlet of flowers; his father standing stiffly behind her, one hand resting on her shoulder.
She said, ‘I want to catch the way the light is reflecting off the water on to the rock,’ and pointed at the boulders that were tumbled midstream, the current divided by them into shining cords that glittered and threw up shifting patterns on their undersides.
He nodded and they stood together watching the movement and listening to the rush and trickle of the water over the bed of smaller stones.
‘Can you see a pattern in it?’ she asked.
‘Nearly …’ he said, for it seemed that there was a pattern though it was complex and hidden just beyond his ability to grasp it.
She turned to him. ‘You’re right,’ she said. ‘A nearly pattern. It’s just a little too quick for us to follow.’
She held the camera up again and looked down through the viewfinder. She sighed and passed it to him, saying, ‘What do you think? It’ll be impossible to catch the sense of motion, of course.’
The viewfinder had a greyish tint and George looked through it at a scene transformed in an instant to cooler tones. Gnats showed like grey dots above the surface of the water, their dancing as complex as the lights on the rocks beside them. Without the glare, the shifting lights were softer. He could see, on the shady side of the stones, dark bars beneath the water.
‘There are trout,’ he said, ‘lying up out of the heat.’
‘Are there? Where?’ She peered over the parapet at where he pointed. ‘Are you an angler?’ she asked.
George shrugged. ‘I fish a bit. Mostly I just look a lot and so I see things.’
She gave a little smile and he blushed as if he had said something stupid. He gave the camera back to her. ‘Will it be in colour? The picture?’ he asked, making an effort to conquer his shyness.
She nodded. ‘The new film still isn’t as close to a natural palette as one would like; it’s better than monochrome though.’
‘Except for in the snow,’ George said.
That smile again. George’s heart turned over. ‘I prefer painting,’ he blurted out; then, fearing he’d been rude: ‘I mean you can get the real colours then, all of them. I like going up on the fells in the evenings when there are greys and purples and the rust of the bracken, not just green, the slopes aren’t ever just green …’
She looked at him then. Not as if he was being dull, as his little brother, Ted did, or as if he was unhinged as Arthur had once when he spoke to him about painting, but as if she was really, truly listening. She said, ‘… and clouds aren’t ever only white any more than the water’s ever only blue. Do you go down to Derwentwater to paint?’
‘Sometimes,’ George said, ‘and out on the tops: Cat Bells, Helvellyn. But I haven’t always got paints; sometimes I sketch. It’s expensive, you know.’
‘I don’t always take the camera,’ she said, ‘sometimes I just sketch too.’ She held out her hand. ‘Violet Walter. I live back there.’ She pointed towards the trees, beyond which, George knew, lay only one house, the Manor House with its grey roofs and many chimneys, impressive even against the rising ranks of evergreens that finished like a tideline halfway up the huge bulk of Ullock Pike, which over-towered all.
‘George Farrell,’ he said, taking her pale, perfectly smooth hand in his, then letting it go quickly in fear that she would think him too familiar. ‘P-P …’ he stuttered over the word ‘postman’.
‘Painter,’ she said and smiled.
That had been in May. The first month he had looked for her often but his searching had been in vain because he had later learnt that she had been away. She told him that she had been staying with Elizabeth Lyne, an old school friend in Carlisle: describing another world of tea taken on the lawn, with white cloths under spreading elms, and dancing after twilight, music spilling like magic from the open throat of the gramophone.
He had kept looking and had eventually been rewarded. Sometimes he just glimpsed a distant figure on the hillside as he passed with his bike and bag along the road below; then she would raise her hand to him and he to her, in salutation. Sometimes she would be coming towards him from home with her camera in its leather box slung across her shoulder and he would give her the letters for the house. Almost every day, in among a sheaf of bills in brown envelopes, there would be one creamy envelope for her with a Carlisle postmark. She would shuffle through the letters until she saw it and then stow it in one pocket and put the rest in the other. He imagined that she must miss her friend badly and feel the isolation of the spot after her companionable stay in the town.
When he had passed over the letters, he would turn around so that he could walk with her a while. He would wheel the bike alongside; her camera stowed with the post in the basket so that she might have a hand free to hold her long skirt clear of the dusty road. If she had letters of her own to send, in the pale blue envelopes she favoured, they would walk first to the postbox before strolling on, out into the countryside. Sometimes, the best times, when he climbed a track to one of the lonely hill farms, he would come across her leaning on a gate looking out over the valley and he would join her to share the view. They talked of the way the clouds chased the light over the hills, and of the hawks nesting in the copse near the house, which hovered, dark specks in the heavens, giving perspective and making the piled clouds mountainous.
George learnt that she was older than he was by three years. ‘An old lady of twenty-one,’ she said. An only child, she had been educated at a boarding school in Carlisle, then a finishing school in France. She spoke of its beauty: the French countryside softer than Cumberland with hedges rather than walls, low slopes and wide plains of rich pasture and standing crops. She described the rocky coast of Brittany, its crashing waves and spume-filled air, and a Normandy beach with a wide arc of sand, which she had walked from end to end, slipping away from her school party to watch the gannets dive like black arrows into the sea. Her eyes lit up as she told him of such things and she motioned with her hands to trace the sweep of the bay or the birds’ headlong plunge. Once he told her that looking out over the lake from the top of the fells was what made him certain that he had a soul, and she had touched his arm and said, ‘Yes, yes.’
He had told her how it had been at his school. How he was different, always in trouble when the master asked him a question and he was unable to answer because he had been staring out of the window at the clouds, making dragons and faces and genies from their ever-changing shapes. He had said less and less the more he grew afraid that he would get it wrong, until the other children called him ‘moony’ and ‘idiot’ and ‘simple’.
‘You’re far from simple, George,’ she said. ‘They mistook the distraction that comes from hard thought for no thought at all, and that’s their error.’ She touched his sleeve again and he thought his heart would burst with pride because although Kitty and his mother had always said such things this was different.
When she spoke of her parents, she always had a note of worry in her voice. Her father was often abroad attending to his business interests, leaving the land and Home Farm to the estate manager, and her mother to her own resources. Mrs Walter, too much alone, suffered ‘sick-headaches’ and fatigue and often withdrew to her room. Violet once let slip that her father, even when back in London, frequently stayed at his club and George wondered what had caused the breach between her parents, but asked no further, guessing at the hurt that a daughter would feel to know that she was not enough to tempt a father home.
From her room, Mrs Walter instructed the housekeeper, Mrs Burbidge, and took her lunch on a tray. Afterwards she wrote letters, but later in the afternoon, she required Violet’s company, wanting her to sit with her and talk or read aloud. As the sun grew hotter in the afternoon, George would notice Violet glancing back at the copse within which the house was hidden or at her silver wristwatch. He would rack his brain for a question. ‘What was the town like, where your school was? What did you sketch on your picnics?’ Anything to stop her saying the words he dreaded: ‘I must go.’
George rattled the latch of a garden gate and then stood stock-still to listen, in case he had missed the Moot Hall bell. He heard nothing but nonetheless quickened his pace, the bike wheels juddering as he turned into Leonard Street where he lived. As he bumped the bike to a stop outside the house, his mother came to the door to meet him carrying a package wrapped in paper and with Lillie hanging on to her apron and sucking her thumb.
‘I thought I heard you; you made such a clatter,’ his mother said. ‘Have you got a bit behind?’ She passed him the package of sandwiches and a billycan of cold tea.
‘Carry!’ Lillie said and let go of the apron to lift her arms up to him.
‘You mustn’t get behind, George. Mr Ashwell’s a tartar for punctuality.’
‘Carry!’ Lillie said again, imperiously, and George put the food down on the step and lifted her under the armpits: a bundle of warm body and petticoats. He put her on his shoulders where she grabbed on to handfuls of his hair.
‘Ow! Lillie!’ he said and loosened her fingers, laying them flat against his head.
‘Horsy! Horsy!’ Lillie said and George held on tight to her skinny knees and jogged obligingly up and down the street.
The sound of the Moot Hall bell reached him, a single sonorous note, and he lifted Lillie down, detaching her fingers from his ear as he did so, and handed her into his mother’s arms.
‘You’d better cut along,’ she said. ‘You’d think it was a holy calling the way Mr A. goes on about duty and professionalism and “the mail must get through in all weathers …”.’ But George was already on his way, billycan rattling from the handlebars and the corner of the sandwich packet clamped between his teeth as he ran with the bike to the end of the road, threw his leg over the saddle and freewheeled down Wordsworth Street.
He pedalled along the road towards the park and left the buildings behind him, out into the elation of open space and over the bridge where the river flowed shallow and glittering and ducks and moorhens pecked at the trailing green weed. He passed the bowling greens where men in whites and straw hats were playing a tournament, while the ladies and elderly gentlemen watched from the benches, and then he took the back paths through the exotic trees, keeping out of sight of the park keeper, who would curse at him and make him get off his bike and walk. Then he was out on Brundholme Road with open fields either side, the sun hot on his back, soaking through his dark uniform jacket like warm water, the material prickling through his shirt.
By the time he had delivered the mail to the village post offices and to the scatter of farms beyond, he was starting to worry that he would arrive too late and took the last farm track down from the hill at a rate that rattled his teeth. A mile or so further on along the main road to Carlisle he reached the familiar gatehouse and turned in to the drive through the wood, his way lined by the dark glossy leaves of rhododendrons and the straight boles of Scots pines. Here and there, copper beeches made a splash of colour against the massive bulk of Dodd Fell that rose up behind, cluttered with rocks and strewn with sheep: small, pale dots on its upper slopes.
As he rounded the bend to face directly into the sun, he was dazzled momentarily; he put his hand up to his brow and squinted. A familiar figure, carrying a brown leather box, was making leisurely progress along the drive towards him. His pulse quickened. He felt a sensation run through him like a current through a wire making his grip on the handlebars tighten and his sense of the board back of his sketchbook in his pocket keener, as if it had imprinted itself on his skin. He forced himself to slow, to sit down on the saddle, to rehearse his speech in his head. He would greet her as usual, turn the bike around as usual, give her the post for the house and then, just casually, as if it were something extra he’d just remembered, take out his sketchbook, slip out the painting and say to her, ‘This is for you, as a small token of my esteem.’ She would thank him in her solemn voice to show that she took his gift seriously, and would look at it and exclaim to see that it was her favourite view – from Dodd Wood, out over the lake – and perhaps admire the workmanship. Here his stomach made a strange kind of tumble, as if he had swung so high in a swing that he thought he might fly right over the top of the bar. Perhaps she would put it carefully into her camera case and say she would treasure it … The bike jounced into a rut that nearly unseated him. He swerved and squeezed on the brakes; then he took a deep breath and got off the bike, just as she raised her free arm and waved: a wide, expansive gesture that made his heart lift. He forced himself to walk slowly towards her, concentrating on the soft shushing that the tyres made on the drive.
‘Hello there, I don’t suppose you have anything for me?’ she said with a smile as he reached her and swept the bike round in a circle to walk back with her the way he had come.
He handed her the sheaf of letters that he had saved until last. Straightaway she picked out the cream envelope and tucked the rest into her pocket. She felt the letter between her thumb and forefinger and frowned as if surprised by its thinness. She turned it over as if she were about to open it, but then turned it back and started to walk alongside him.
He glanced sideways at her but she didn’t turn to look at him and the words he had planned to say deserted him. ‘Do you have anything to send?’ he asked instead. She shook her head. ‘Nothing from the house today, and I … I’m not sure. Perhaps I should read this one first.’
‘Where are you planning to walk today?’ he asked. ‘It’s very hot once you’re out in the sun, you might find it tiring.’
‘I thought I’d go up through Dodd Wood. I can take advantage of the sun and get a view of it brightening the lake without getting overheated.’
George nodded, pleased that he could go with her for most of the way as Dodd Wood was on his route back. ‘I know a good spot where you can see the different colour of the shallows and the deeper water,’ he began, thinking to turn the conversation to lake views in general and from there to painting them and then to one painting in particular, but the thought was enough to cause him to break into a deep blush and he found himself suddenly rushing to jump ahead, ‘In fact I’ve brought something, as a token—’
‘I’m sorry, George,’ she said, fingering the letter. ‘Forgive me, but I feel that I can’t wait; I must open this. Would you mind?’
George shook his head dumbly; a sense of misgiving filled him and he knew that he would not now take out the sketchbook from his pocket; that, indeed, he felt afraid that its angular lines must show through the material, its bulky shape exposed, as if he carried his feelings like a foolish badge for all to see.
Violet took a few quick steps and then stopped; he drew to a halt a little behind her. She slit the envelope with her thumb, pulled out a single sheet of paper and bent over it, quickly scanning the page. Her hand dropped to her side.
She turned to him. ‘It’s Edmund,’ she said. ‘He’s being sent away for more training, then he’ll be posted abroad.’
‘Edmund?’ he said.
‘Edmund Lyne, Elizabeth’s brother.’ She looked at him as though he were being obtuse. ‘We were going to be engaged,’ she said flatly. ‘I was hoping to see him again when he got leave, to have one more visit to Carlisle before … before …’ She looked away, into the trees, unable to trust herself to speak.
‘I see,’ George said as he began to understand. What a fool, he thought, to have imagined all those letters were exchanges between school friends: gossip and girlish confidences. Of course – they were love letters; of course they were. The phrase ‘a token of my esteem’ floated through his mind as though his brain was working minutes behind and had finally located the words he had so carefully chosen. An engagement! He swallowed hard; he mustn’t let her even glimpse his feelings. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said; then, taking a deep breath: ‘Is there anything I can do?’
She didn’t answer but refolded the letter and then folded it again into a thin slip. Slowly, she returned it to its envelope and carried on folding, turning the letter into a small rectangle that fitted into her closed hand. ‘He writes in haste; they’re to travel to a training camp, and then be sent abroad. That’s all they’re allowed to say. He says he’ll write again.’ She nodded twice and wiped her cheeks with the back of her hand. At last she looked at him and her face was blotchy, her eyes reddened. ‘So silly of me,’ she said. ‘Perhaps I had better go back to the house.’
‘I’ll walk back with you,’ George forced himself to say although he longed to get away so he could be on his own, where no one could see him, where he could think.
‘No need, I’ll be fine,’ she said and took in a huge breath. ‘I’m sorry about all this.’ She half turned but then seemed to remember something. ‘Did you say you had something else for me?’
‘It was nothing, really,’ George said, trying to keep the misery from his voice. She was looking at him more closely now, her brows furrowed in puzzlement.
‘George?’ she said and he could see her expression change to concern as she scanned his face.
‘I told you; it was nothing!’ George said more loudly than he intended, his voice coming out hoarse and strained as he yanked the bike straight and moved past her. ‘George, I didn’t think, I’m so sorry …’ she started.
He could hold on no longer and threw himself at the bike, nearly overbalancing as the postbag swung sideways. He pushed off and stood up on the pedals to gain speed, forcing it along the rutty drive and away from her in a spatter of grit. Gasping for breath, he looked back only once as he reached the bend. She was standing looking after him, silhouetted against the light at the end of the tunnel of trees, her camera slung across her shoulder so that it bulged at her side, her shoulders drooping and her fist still closed over the letter. Then he swung away into the trees that would hide him from view.
2 (#ulink_4736a511-cdd3-5cbe-b65e-17a670dbba63)
AT THE TWA DOGS (#ulink_4736a511-cdd3-5cbe-b65e-17a670dbba63)
When George regained the road after leaving Violet, he wanted to be alone and so he turned the opposite way from home and rode out towards Carlisle. He cursed himself as a fool to have harboured affection in the first place for someone he knew to be so far above his own station, and called himself an idiot not to have guessed that she would have an admirer. He imagined how he must seem in her eyes: a callow boy, not yet a man, a lackey, someone you had to be kind to … Yet, when he thought about her tears, the feelings he had were not boyish: he felt fierce, angry with anyone or anything that could dare to hurt her. He wished, more than anything in the world, that he could wipe the tears away, and that he could comfort her and hold her in his arms. It had been weak to run away! Yet, now that he had run away, now that she must think him a cad, how was he to face her again? The thought of the way they had walked and talked together, the camaraderie they had shared and the feeling that this would never be recaptured weighed upon him; he rode on and on, seeking to blank out emotion with physical sensation, pushing his aching muscles further, seeking relief through sheer fatigue.
He rode and rode until he eventually came to the suburbs of the town, where dirty redbrick terraces crowded straight on to the roads and children dodged unnervingly in and out between the carts and cycles and motors. He turned out of the mêlée and into the haven of a leafy park where he sat on a bench for a considerable time, thinking about Violet and her sweetheart.
After a while he realised that Kitty would be wondering why he hadn’t come back for tea. Three young men were kicking a football around on the lawns and larking about. The light began to wane and he remembered that his mother would be worried, yet he sat on, idly watching them and feeling dispirited.
One of the young men, showing off, kicked the ball high into the beech tree above him, showering him with leaves and breaking his reverie. He listened to them daring each other to get the ball down and watched as they threw sticks, unsuccessfully, until eventually two of them shinned up the tree. There they jumped up and down to shake the branches and urged each other to go higher and further while the third shook his head in disbelief and sat down on the bench next to George. He introduced himself as Ernest Turland, and said to George, ‘One of the bloody fools is going to break his head. Probably Rooke,’ he added. ‘Haycock’s taller and stronger.’ The bigger chap triumphed at last by hanging from the branch where the ball had lodged, his boots appearing alarmingly in mid-air as he swung. The branch creaked ominously but the ball fell with a sound of snapping twigs and rustling leaves just as a park keeper appeared and started to lock up the tennis courts. Catching sight of them, he let out a shout. Turland scooped up the ball and had taken George’s bike by the handlebars before George had even worked out that he would cop it too if he stayed.
‘Come on!’ Turland said and George got on the bike and pushed off, standing on the pedals with Turland perched on the seat with his legs dangling and the ball held tight against his stomach. Behind them, the others clambered down, dropped to the ground and then took off running after them.
‘Go to the Twa Dogs!’ Haycock called out as he swerved between two metal bollards and along a footpath, leaving the bike to take the road.
‘Left! Go left!’ Turland said as they made it to the wrought-iron gates at the edge of the park. George glanced back and saw the park keeper standing with one hand above his eyes peering after them, dazzled by the low sun. He cut left and then followed Haycock, who had re-emerged further along the road, down a series of side roads and back alleys between the terraced houses. When they reached the pub, Turland showed him where to stow the bike behind the privy at the rear and pressed him to come in for a drink. George, carried along on a wave of bonhomie that was new to him, readily agreed. Triumphant after their escape, jostling each other, faces flushed, they all crowded inside.
Turland ordered beers and they squeezed around a table, Rooke pouncing on spare stools and drawing them over. The place was full of men in their working clothes, some sitting at tables, some standing or leaning on the bar and a group playing shove-ha’penny at a board in the corner. The only female was a young woman with a figure that was beyond buxom, who was squeezing between tables to collect up the glasses. She paused beside a swarthy, heavily built man in shirtsleeves and braces who sat alone at a corner table reading a newspaper. George heard him ask for whisky and push some coins over to her without bothering to look up from his paper. She went straight to the bar and returned with a whisky glass, before carrying on stacking spent glasses. A fug of cigarette and pipe smoke hung in the air; the smell of Capstans mixing with the fruity smell of the briar. The whitewashed walls of the room had been turned a glossy brownish-yellow by the smoke. The only decoration in the place was a handful of paper Union Jack flags in a stoneware jar on the bar and a couple of pen-and-ink caricatures in frames, their faded mounts scattered with thrips, trapped behind the glass.
Behind the bar, a balding man with a sour face was pulling pints. He nodded to a younger man who came in briefly to change a barrel and then rolled the empty one out, cursing as it stuck in the doorway and kicking it through.
‘As I said, Ernest Turland, junior reporter.’ Turland offered him a hand wet with slopped beer. ‘And this is Tom Haycock, from the gas works, and Percy Rooke …’
‘… of no fixed employment,’ Rooke cut in.
‘Currently delivery boy and general factotum at the Cumberland News but with an eye to advancement,’ Turland said, punching Rooke lightly on the arm.
George introduced himself as George Farrell and, when pressed about why he had been sitting alone and mournful in a strange town, gave a vague answer about having had a disappointment and quickly asked how they came to be friends.
‘Turland and I were in the scouts together,’ Haycock said, ‘and Rooke lives at Turland’s lodgings.’
‘Under the dragon’s eye,’ Rooke said. ‘She even counts the toast at breakfast.’
‘That’s because she knows you pocket some for your lunch,’ Turland said.
Rooke grinned and shrugged. He took a pack of dog-eared cards from his pocket and shuffled them adeptly, flipping through two piles with his thumbs, cutting and splicing them together and then spreading them out on the table like a fan flicked open and clicked shut again. They decided on pontoon and as they played George took the opportunity to observe his new companions.
Haycock and Turland looked around his own age, eighteen or nineteen, Haycock maybe a little older as he was stocky, wider in the chest and well muscled; he moved with the confidence of a man who works with his hands and knows the strength of his arm. He had fair, crinkly hair that reminded George of the wire wool he used to clean the spokes on his bicycle wheels. Turland, who studied his cards with great seriousness, was a good-looking young man with more delicate features, dark-haired and with brown eyes and an olive complexion that seemed darker than merely the tan of summer. George wondered if there was continental blood in his family.
Rooke, despite his predatory name, reminded George somehow of a mouse: he was so quick in his movements and he was small, surely no more than sixteen, if that, really still just a boy. His hair was slicked to the side, flat to his head, which didn’t flatter him as his ears stuck out rather. His eyebrows seemed always to be raised, giving him a look not so much of surprise as constant alert anxiety, as though he was ready to take off at any minute should something untoward occur.
Rooke had suggested that they play for matches and he soon had a pile of them in front of him, whereas George, who hadn’t been giving the game his full attention, had only three and Haycock, who broke off every now and then to watch the girl collecting the glasses, had not fared much better.
‘It’s Farrell’s round then,’ Rooke said, poking George’s pathetic cache of matches.
‘That’s not hospitable,’ Turland said. ‘He’s a visitor.’
‘It’s all right,’ George said quickly. ‘I got paid today.’ He took out his pay packet from his jacket pocket, slit it open with his thumb and began to pull out a note from inside. There was a lull in the conversation at the table beside them and Haycock leant over and quickly put his calloused hand over George’s, crumpling both notes and envelope back into his fist.
‘Are you daft, man? This isn’t the place to show your money about.’
George, feeling confused, stuffed the money back into his lower pocket and automatically, without thinking, patted his breast pocket where the painting still lay between the covers of his sketchbook. With a sickening jolt, he remembered the humiliation and disappointment of the afternoon and placed his hand flat upon the table as if to keep it in view and prevent it from betraying his feelings.
Haycock stood up, saying, ‘My shout. Same again all round.’ He made his way between the tight-packed tables to the press of men at the bar.
Turland scooped all of the matches back into the centre of the table. ‘You took some off Haycock again,’ he said to Rooke sadly.
Rooke grinned. ‘He’s so easy; he can’t keep his eyes off a bit of skirt.’
‘You’re incorrigible,’ Turland said with good humour.
‘What’s that mean? That another of your newspaper words?’
‘A hopeless case.’
Rooke just laughed.
When Haycock returned with the drinks, George put out of his head the Methodist teachings on the evils of drink that his parents and a lifetime of chapel meetings had dinned into him. He was surprised how easily he did it. He had never taken a drink before, and his only experience of public houses was waiting outside while tracts for the Temperance League were distributed by his mother and a group of chapel ladies. He was anxious not to let his naivety show: even Rooke seemed at home in the bar. How could he have thought that Violet might see him as a man when he lived the life of a boy? He drank fast, as if the golden liquid that he poured down his throat could fill up the empty space inside him where his hopes had once been. They played on and drank more: Rooke was sent up to the bar, grumbling, then Turland went again, refusing to let George take his turn as he was ‘a visitor’ and ‘had got him out of a jam, courtesy of the bike’.
As they played, the conversation among the men around them ebbed and flowed but returned always to the war: the horses being commandeered – what would the brewery do for the dray-carts? The barracks at the castle were filling up with new recruits; since Mons, men were flocking to the country’s aid … they said the Germans were doing unspeakable things; they said someone had heard engines over Cockermouth, Zeppelins spying out the land …
As he listened, George felt an uneasy mixture of excitement and fear. What if the Germans were to come here? It was all very well being an island but what if the navy didn’t hold? He imagined the heavy tread of marching feet through the town. An image from one of the recruitment posters came into his mind: a woman and child at a window, and suddenly the woman’s anxious face was his mother’s and the child clinging to her skirts was Lillie.
His father said it was best to stick to simple principles: ‘Thou shalt not kill’, that all should ‘beat swords into ploughshares’. George knew his own view: that he would protect Mother and the rest of his family with his life. He had heard his father preach at the Convention last year on the text of ‘turn the other cheek’. He imagined how badly such a sermon would be received in this changed world, against a backdrop of flags and posters, and men in uniform on the move, singing en route to the war. A piercing doubt about his father caught him for a moment before he turned its shaft away. Surely, if the enemy were at the door his father too would defend them all – turning the other cheek would be the same as turning your eyes away! Feeling disloyal, he comforted himself with the words he’d heard his father speak to his mother: that it would soon be over, that Europe didn’t have the gold reserves to fund a modern war, that it could only last months and that they should trust in the Almighty.
Turland, who had also obviously been listening in to the conversation of the older men, suddenly turned to Haycock and said, ‘I’ve been thinking of going.’
‘Signing up?’ Haycock stopped playing.
‘Someone’s got to do something, don’t you think?’
‘But you’ve got a good place at the paper. Not like me, poking about in machinery innards all day at the risk of losing my fingers. Now I have been thinking about having a bit of a jaunt. What on earth would you want to go for?’
‘Oh, I don’t know,’ Turland said. ‘I want to do something worthwhile, I suppose, and we’re needed: we can’t let the Germans go striding around Europe picking up countries to put in their pockets, can we?’ He rested his elbows on the table and leaned in. ‘Doesn’t seem honourable somehow to know the army’s in retreat for want of men whilst I’m swanning around covering sports days and grand-opening sales.’
Rooke, who had been quietly gathering more of Haycock’s matches, his voice a little slurred, said, ‘Well, if you’re going, I’m going. We’ll be like the heroes in Valour and Victory. Champions to the rescue!’ He put his hands up in front of his shoulder as if cocking an imaginary rifle, jerked them upwards and threw his body backwards as if taking the recoil. An older man with baggy eyes and a well-trimmed beard twisted round on his stool from the adjacent table saying, ‘Well said, young man; that’s the spirit! Give those Deutschers what for.’
Haycock looked at Rooke sceptically. ‘Harry says they measure you, how tall you are … your chest and what-all before they let you in.’
‘Who’s Harry?’ George asked.
‘His brother,’ Turland filled him in. ‘He was in the Territorials so he’s already been mobilised.’
Haycock asked Rooke, ‘How old are you anyway?’
Rooke flushed: a blush that reddened his cheeks and rose to the tips of his ears. He shot a swift glance at Turland as if to refer the question to him, which George thought very curious.
‘Leave it, Haycock,’ Turland said.
‘It’s just that you have to be eighteen to join, nineteen if you want to serve overseas …’
Rooke stared fiercely at Haycock. ‘I don’t know how old I am.’
‘Don’t be daft.’
Turland said quietly, ‘Shut up, Haycock. Now’s not the time.’ He tapped his cards on the table whilst he thought. ‘We should go up to the castle together,’ he said. ‘Rooke might have more of a chance if they see us as a job lot.’
George imagined the three of them in khaki, swinging their arms as they marched together and suddenly felt awkward sitting there in his postman’s uniform. The role he’d been so proud of was safe, civilian. He felt reduced to a mere message-taker, little better than an errand-boy, while the others would be part of something huge, a glorious endeavour, taking their places as men. He was tipsily aware that somewhere beneath the muddle of his feelings about England and honour and protecting one’s family lay the unease he felt about seeing Violet again: a troubling mixture of deadly embarrassment that he had revealed something of his feelings, and shame that he hadn’t behaved with more gallantry. He felt an unbearable awkwardness that he had no idea how to overcome. Then his mind flipped unaccountably to Lillie and the fragile feel of her small bones as he lifted her that morning, and he felt a lump form in his throat.
At the next table, the bearded man was nudging his neighbour and drawing the attention of his drinking partners so that all turned round to look. One of them, who had a kitbag slung on the back of his chair, said, ‘You shouldn’t have too much of a problem. You’ll soon shape up, even the young ’un.’
Haycock spat on his hand and held it out over the jumble of glasses and cards.
‘Are you in, Farrell?’ Turland asked.
George hesitated. The scrutiny from the table behind had spread and even the men standing at the bar had turned to see what had caused the dramatic gesture.
‘Soldiers in the making!’ the bearded man called out, and with that, Turland and Rooke spat on their palms too and the three of them joined hands, fist over fist, to a chorus of approving voices. George leant back on his stool as if to move out of the bearded man’s eyeline.
‘Three soldiers and a postman!’ the man shouted and the swell of congratulation died away into laughter as George hunched his shoulders and stared into his pint. Rooke bent beneath his downcast face and grinned up at him, saying, ‘Cheer up, mate, plenty of time to change your mind.’
George shrugged and downed the pint in huge gulps until there was nothing left. He saw that he’d fallen behind the others; there was a full glass set ready in front of him. He tried to focus on the task of stretching out to pick up the glass but his hand seemed to move independently of his will, jerking forward and nudging the full glass so that it slopped a pool of beer on to the table. He stared at the beer still frothing on the dark wood.
‘Steady,’ said Haycock, setting the glass in his hand.
‘You shouldn’t have bought him that last one,’ said Turland.
‘Needs cheering up, doesn’t he?’ Haycock said. ‘Spot of woman trouble.’ He winked at Turland and dealt the cards again. Turland and Rooke picked up their cards and another game began.
George took a sup and put his glass down very carefully but waved Haycock away when he tried to give him his hand of cards. ‘I’ll pass this one up,’ he muttered.
We must have been here a while, George thought, as the girl who had been collecting glasses reached across a table to open a window and he saw her reflection in the pane and realised that it was now fully dark outside. He hoped that there was a moon and wondered how he would make the ride home without mishap otherwise. A cool draught of air reached him. He breathed it in deeply and tried to ignore the queasy feeling in his stomach and the sensation that if he didn’t concentrate very hard on the three of spades which lay abandoned in front of him, the room started to waver slowly on the borders of his vision.
The girl reached their table and began to gather up the empties. She had coarse features, hair the colour of brass and the high colour that often goes with it. Strands of her hair had escaped her pins and stuck to her brow and neck.
Haycock said, ‘Where’s Mary tonight then?’
‘She’s ill; I’m just filling in this once,’ the girl said. She paused to roll her sleeves up, revealing plump, freckly arms. She leaned across the table to pick up the empty glasses in front of George, and Haycock tipped his stool backwards so that he could give her posterior a long, appraising look. ‘Bottoms up,’ he said and drained the dregs of his beer. George thought this uncouth. Haycock sat forward again and put his glass down but as the girl reached to take it he moved it further away. She shot him a glance as if to say ‘I know your game’ but still leant over further to take it, and when he wouldn’t let it go and looked at her with a challenge in his eyes she laughed and drew it slowly from his fingers.
George, noticing as she bent forward that her figure beneath her blouse didn’t have the corseted solidity that he usually associated with the female form, but instead a loose movement as if all below was only constrained by petticoats, dragged his eyes back to her face. Feeling the effects of the drink, he was aware of a delay between thought and action and realised that he was staring, yet was strangely fascinated by her blond eyelashes, which gave her eyes a red-rimmed, unfinished look.
‘Your friend all right?’ the girl said to Turland. ‘He’s looking a bit queer.’
‘He’s had a fair bit to drink.’
‘Maybe more than he can manage,’ Haycock said, knocking George’s arm so that his elbow slipped off the table, jolting him into action. George sat up as straight as he could.
‘I’m perfectly …’ George found that even his lips now seemed to be rebelling against him, with a numb sensation as he pressed them together and tried to form the words. ‘… fine. And it’s my round,’ he finished, fishing around in his pocket for some money. He tried to rise but had to put his hand on the table to steady himself.
‘I’ll bring them,’ the girl said. ‘You stay here.’
George subsided and she picked out some threepenny bits and pennies from the handful he held out, her wet fingers leaving the remaining coins sticky in his hand.
Haycock and Turland were talking about giving in their notice at work. Both felt that their employers wouldn’t ask them to work it out; they would be released straight away if they had their military marching orders. Rooke said that when he decided to move out he just did it, although always on a payday – no point going without what was due to you. George stared into his drink; the conversation seemed too hard to follow. He very much wanted to go to sleep. He tried to marshal his thoughts by concentrating on what was before him; the beer reminded him of the colour of a beech hedge, ‘a distillation of autumn’. He thought the phrase rather good but couldn’t trust himself to share it in case it came out all wrong. The sound of the words moved through his head in a slow, pleasing procession. Why couldn’t he just curl up somewhere warm and go to sleep?
The voices of his companions rose as they explored the heady excitement of being able to escape their normal humdrum lives so quickly. The anticipated freedom of having extra money in their pockets bred madcap plans for their return. Haycock would join forces with his brother to sell motors; Turland would move to London and try his hand at a job on a bigger paper, maybe even take up travel as a foreign correspondent somewhere glamorous, ‘Paris or New York,’ he said grandly. Rooke said he would get the best cycle money could buy and eat out like a king every night. His ambition didn’t seem to extend further than a more comfortable version of the life he knew.
The girl returned with four tankards on a tray and Haycock suggested that they ‘down them in one’ so she stayed for the empties, standing with arms folded and wearing an amused expression. Rooke put George’s tankard in his hand, folding his fingers around the handle and ribbing him a little. Haycock counted them in, ‘One, two, three …’ and they lifted their elbows as one and threw their heads back.
With the first few swallows, George knew that this was a step too far. A horrible gurgling started up in his stomach and he set his glass down and put his head in his hands, trying to still the sensation that the room had begun to spin and that his stool was at the centre of the turning and seemed to be trying to buck him off. He heard the boys thump down the tankards and burst into a cheer at the same time as he felt the girl’s hand on his back; he smelt a mixture of sweat and face powder as she bent over him.
‘Not feeling too good?’ she said in his ear. ‘You come along with me.’
George was afraid to move or even look up, convinced that he would disgrace himself by either falling over or being sick.
‘Come on now, gently does it.’ She slipped her arm under his so that his whole forearm was supported. Once on his feet, she gripped his hand and he stumbled beside her, aware of a shout of, ‘Steady, Farrell!’ and the sound of his fellow drinkers drumming their fists on the table ever louder and faster. The girl ignored them and led him to the passageway that took them to the back door.
Outside, the air felt cool: his shirt and waistcoat were chill and damp with sweat. His upper lip prickled and his legs wanted to buckle beneath him as they walked into the yard. ‘Here,’ she said, pushing him towards the privy. ‘In there.’
He went in and pulled the door shut behind him. The smell of piss rising from the hole in the wooden bench seat of the closet was the final straw. He barely had time to sink to his knees and brace himself against the plank before he threw up what felt like everything he had drunk or eaten that day. Eventually, he rested his forehead on his arm, exhausted. It was wholly dark in the privy. George couldn’t abide dark, close places. Ever since his father had taken him, as a child, on an adventure down into the mine where he worked George had feared small spaces: the suffocating sense of enclosure, the tomb-like dark and the stale air pressing in on him. The tunnels, narrowing as they had gone further into the mine, were a source of wonder and admiration to his father, but they had terrified him. Their lowering roofs made his father stoop, casting a crooked shadow that stretched and shrank on the wet rock as he shuffled along in the nodding light of his lamp. Ahead and behind, the darkness was solid, as if they were moving through black treacle that parted for a moment before them only to ooze back behind them as they passed. He had known, even at seven years old, that he could never work in such a place, exiled from the sun and rain and wind, had felt that the earth and rock around him and the weight of the mountain above were pressing on his chest and stealing away his breath.
George stayed very still, waiting to feel a little better before attempting to stand up. Outside, there was a rustling noise, a shuffling against the wall, as if someone was trying to squeeze between it and the bushes. He thought of the bike, hidden behind the laurels, and hoped it was safe, but he hadn’t the strength to do anything about it. After a while, he took out a handkerchief and wiped his mouth with a wobbling hand. He realised that he was kneeling on an earth floor. He levered himself up, steadied himself against the bench seat and tried to dust down the knees of his uniform trousers. Having got himself upright, shakily he felt for the door latch, lifted it and went outside.
The girl was leaning against the wall of the privy, her hands behind her back. George felt a sharp stab of embarrassment to think she had been there all the time. ‘You needn’t have waited,’ he said. ‘I was perfectly all right.’ Then he thought that he had sounded ungrateful and added, ‘Thanks for bringing me out.’ He stuffed the handkerchief in his pocket.
‘You still look pretty poorly,’ the girl said, peering at him. ‘You should stay in the fresh air a bit.’ She took hold of his sleeve and moved along the wall, drawing him beside her. ‘That’s right, breathe it in.’ George drew in a breath that smelt of damp leaves, the pitch on the privy roof and a faint tang of tobacco as though someone had ground out a cigarette butt nearby.
She took his hand and began to rub it between hers, at first as if to bring life back into his fingers but then she put her thumb in his palm and moved it in a circle, pressing it into the concavity of his hand. George felt a hot current run through him, a disturbing reflex reaction, as though his body recognised an urgent message that his mind was too slow to decipher. His fingers closed around her hand. In a sudden movement, she swung herself round to face him and her arms reached up to entwine his neck as she leant the whole length of her body against him. The soft, yielding feeling of her body beneath her light clothes undid him. He put his arms around her and bent to kiss her but she turned her head away, instead nuzzling her face into his neck, kissing and licking. She took his hand and guided it to her breast, slipping it between the sticky cotton of her blouse and the warm heaviness beneath which George cupped, trembling, his head spinning, his body taking over. She pressed against him, moaning softly and he felt suddenly afraid, unable to stop himself, and thought that this was what she wanted him to feel. She was taking his hand again, pulling up her skirt. Oh God, he could feel the clip of her suspender beneath her petticoat. She was moving his hand up and down over the silky material, over her thigh and up to her buttock …
Suddenly a blinding light was in his eyes, so bright that at first they both turned their heads away.
‘Well, what’s going on here then?’ a man’s voice said, dropping the torch beam a little and running it over the girl’s open buttons and the curve of her breast. George, blinking in the light, couldn’t understand why she didn’t move away, didn’t cover herself. In his shock, George had the bizarre notion that they were caught in some music-hall tableau of static nudity, where the slightest movement would bring down the force of the law. Then, as if a moment of posing for a photograph were over, she pulled away and began expertly restoring her clothes to order.
‘That’ll be five shillings,’ she said matter-of-factly.
‘I’m sorry?’ George said, not understanding.
‘Five shillings,’ she said slowly as though explaining to an idiot. ‘You’ve had your pleasure, now pay up, there’s a good boy.’
‘But I didn’t ask …’ George started. ‘You …’ The sudden change of circumstances left him floundering. He couldn’t grasp what was happening or quite believe what was being requested of him. He felt weak and pressed his head back against the wall as if its cool solidity could give his mind focus. He started to tuck his shirt in and then stopped, feeling ashamed.
‘Come on, pay up,’ said the man, and this time George raised his head as he recognised the voice of the chap who had sat in the corner with the newspaper earlier in the evening; he squinted against the light, trying to see him. In an instant the torch was thrown down – he heard it hit the gravelly ground with a crunch – and the man was on him, slamming his head back against the wall and punching his fist into his gut. George doubled over, retching, a dry acidic heaving from the depths of his empty stomach. He sank down against the wall and slid to his knees, winded, unable even to shield himself against the man’s boot as it met his ribs and tipped him on to his side. He lay groaning, his eyes scrunched up in pain. He felt, rather than saw, the girl bending over him and then, with her small fat fingers, quickly feeling into his jacket pockets, pulling all their contents out on to the ground and picking through them. He heard a heavy and a lighter tread as both of them walked away.
The side of his face was pressed against the sharp gravel and he could feel a long string of saliva dribble from his open mouth. His arms were folded across his stomach as if to hold him together and contain the burning pain in his gut and the pulsing throb of his ribs. He could think of nothing but the pain yet he knew that when it finally abated, what was beyond it would be even worse: the vague outline of thoughts that heaved at the edge of his consciousness would resolve into monstrous, shameful shapes.
He could no longer feel the weight of the sketchbook against his chest. Slowly he stretched out one hand, trying to trick the pain through moving by degrees; groping across the dirt, he felt the crumpled handkerchief, the coldness of a few scattered coins. He couldn’t find it. He slumped back with a groan.
Across the yard, he saw the back door open, throwing a quadrangle of light across the steps and releasing the sound of voices and laughter into the air. A small figure came out and hesitated, peering around as if waiting for his eyes to get accustomed to the dark. George tried to call out but all the air seemed to have left his body and only a moan came from him.
‘Farrell?’ The figure came down the steps and picked its way towards him. ‘Farrell? Are you all right?’ Then Rooke bent over him, taking his elbow, trying to lift him up. ‘What the hell happened?’ He looked about him quickly, checking that whoever had done this wasn’t still around. He managed to raise George into a sitting position. ‘I’ll get the others,’ he said.
George hung on to his arm. ‘My book. I can’t find my book.’
‘Never mind that, we need to get you out of here,’ Rooke said.
‘I need it.’ George struggled to control his voice.
Rooke squatted beside him and felt around until he found the book. He put it into George’s hands and then ran back to get the others.
The book’s smooth covers were grainy with sandy earth. George brushed his fingers over them and put the book safe in his pocket, wincing as he lifted his arm. Rooke returned with the others who lifted him and got his arms over their shoulders so that they could help him along.
‘We’d better take him back to our lodgings,’ Turland said to Rooke. ‘You get the bike.’
Rooke pulled it out from behind the bushes and wheeled it along beside them.
‘Took your money, I suppose,’ Haycock said.
George nodded.
‘Did you see who it was?’
‘No. He jumped me from behind,’ George said, already forming the lie that he would tell and retell, already feeling the hot shame creeping through him, sordid and unclean.
3 (#ulink_c20970b7-1624-5055-abe8-cab6adae0587)
DANCE CARD (#ulink_c20970b7-1624-5055-abe8-cab6adae0587)
When Violet had first arrived at the Cedars, Elizabeth’s family home, Edmund had been away and she had been so busy, in the first week, meeting the Lyne family’s cousins and friends for luncheon parties, picnics and concerts, that she had almost forgotten Elizabeth had a brother. After a morning spent boating with a group of relations who had failed to include sunshades in their preparations, Elizabeth had felt the worse for the sun and suggested that they withdraw to their rooms for the afternoon, the better to enjoy the evening’s entertainment.
Violet, however, was unable to rest. Despite closing the drapes against the intense heat of the June afternoon and taking off her shoes and lying full length on the bed, her thoughts were too full of the unwonted excitements of the last few days, her mind a whirl of gowns and opera glasses, new faces, drives in the motor, parlour games and laughter. The room was stuffy, the satin quilt beneath her sticky and clinging, and at length she gave up, slipped her shoes back on again and decided to go in search of something to read.
Downstairs, the tall double doors of the library were open and Violet went in softly, glad that she wouldn’t have to risk breaking the oppressive quiet of the afternoon by their creaking. The room was lined with books from the floor to the ornately plastered ceiling, and was furnished with library steps to reach them. Chairs, couches and occasional tables stood around for the convenience of the reader, some arranged in a group in the centre, some placed with their backs to the room giving a view from the long French windows of the sloping lawns, elms and cedars. A large desk, belonging to Elizabeth’s father, stood to one side, littered with stamps, magnifying glass and glue pot and Violet felt that she was intruding a little and thought that she would choose something quickly and go.
Her eyes travelled over the books in the lower shelves, which were large, dull, leather-bound volumes of county history, and passed up through travelogues and heavy-looking biographies until she found a set of the Waverley novels on one of the top shelves. She wheeled the library steps along and positioned them so that they were well braced against the shelves; then, picking up the skirts of her afternoon dress in one hand, she awkwardly climbed up to find one that she hadn’t yet read. The set, tightly packed together, wouldn’t yield a volume easily. Getting a finger hooked into the top of the spine of the book in the middle, she pulled hard, dislodged several, then, juggling books, steps and skirts, tried to catch them and failed so that three volumes fell with an almighty thump on the polished wood floor.
There was a muttered curse of ‘What the devil?’ from one of the couches and a man sat up and rested his elbow on its upholstered back. He blinked and passed his hand over his face and through his dark hair, staring with a bemused expression as though unsure whether he was still in a dream.
Violet, still clutching a copy of Ivanhoe,said, ‘Oh! You startled me!’ and then flushed crimson, feeling foolish, as she had undoubtedly startled him first. Momentarily lost for words, she stared back. His tie was loosened, his waistcoat was undone and his sleeves were rolled back giving him a rakish look that was at odds with his neat moustache and candid grey eyes. ‘I’m so sorry to have woken you,’ she said, reaching to put the books that had fallen flat on the shelf back into position.
‘Oh, don’t trouble yourself about that. Here, let me help,’ he said, jumping to his feet and coming to the foot of the ladder. He picked up the other volumes and passed them up to her. ‘I’m Edmund, by the way. Who are you?’
‘Violet. Violet Walter.’ In reaching down to shake his offered hand, she almost lost the books again and he steadied her elbow.
‘You’re Elizabeth’s friend, aren’t you?’ he said. He broke into a wide grin. ‘She never mentioned you were such a big reader.’
Violet smiled as she put all but one of the books back. ‘I do like to read,’ she said, ‘but for an afternoon’s idle hour even I would find the full set daunting.’
‘Well, you’re welcome to as many as you can manage,’ he said, helping her down from the steps. She turned at the foot and they came face to face. There was a moment when they both stopped and looked – a beat, barely a pause, but it seemed to Violet that something passed between them: a strange instant of recognition. Violet drew away first, suddenly aware of the impropriety of their situation: alone together – and at this proximity. She stepped to the side but before she could pass him he said, ‘Must you go? Don’t run away. Elizabeth’s only told me a little about you; do come and tell me more. Please?’ and before she knew what she was doing she found herself steered to an armchair. Edmund solicitously tucked a cushion behind her, saying cheerily, ‘None of these chairs are comfy. They’re lumpy old horsehair things but we’re all fond of them just because they’ve always been here.’
‘Thank you, I’m very comfortable,’ Violet said, and then felt confused all over again as she realised that she should really be protesting that she must go.
Edmund said, ‘I see you favour the classics. Do you read the newer works as well? Forster? H. G. Wells? I can recommend Wells; he has a knack of warning us of where our current follies may lead us.’
‘I prefer Forster,’ she said, considering. ‘Wells’s view of the future is a little too bleak for my taste.’
‘We have the latest Forster somewhere; I’ll look it out for you. Have you been enjoying your stay so far? I hope Elizabeth has been looking after you and showing you around?’ Edmund tried to make this beautiful girl with the serious face feel more at ease.
‘Oh, we’ve had the most marvellous time. We went to see La Traviata and we had a wonderful picnic by the sea at Cockermouth with your father and mother and some of Elizabeth’s friends, and the cousins of course …’
‘They’re a jolly lot, aren’t they? We usually see a fair bit of them in the summer. Are you able to stay for long?’
‘A month, I hope, as long as my mother keeps well and can spare me from home.’
‘Well, we must make the most of your stay,’ Edmund said sympathetically, remembering what Elizabeth had told him of Violet’s circumstances. ‘What do you like to do the most?’
Violet told him about her photography and he listened carefully, asking her questions about shutter speeds and coloured filters, and suggesting places of interest locally where they could picnic and she could take some photographs. The conversation moved easily along as he told her of his recent studies at Cambridge and how much he had enjoyed the Officers’ Training Corps with its outdoor life of riding, camping and shooting. He told her that he was applying for a commission and hoped that his uncle, who was in the local regiment, would be able to arrange something for him. Ideally, he said, he would have liked a cavalry commission but he would have to take what his uncle could get for him and the chances were that he would end up in the infantry. ‘Foot-slogger more likely than donkey-walloper,’ he said, making her laugh, which drew from him a broad smile in return.
As Violet began to ask him more, she heard someone approaching the room and stopped abruptly. A housemaid, holding a pile of tablecloths and napkins, stood uncertainly in the doorway looking from one of them to the other. ‘Sorry, sir,’ she said to Edmund, ‘Cook said I was to lay for afternoon tea in here, sir, so’s we could open the French windows and have the draught.’
Violet, suddenly aware of how odd this must look: a lady visitor, unchaperoned, sitting knee to knee with the young gentleman of the house, got quickly to her feet.
Edmund stood too, saying, ‘Ah, yes, of course, Dolly. Miss Walter has just stepped in to find a book and I can see that I’m going to be in your way.’ He gave the girl a winning smile and she bobbed a curtsey. He turned back to Violet with a mischievous look in his eye and said, ‘I hope you’ll enjoy Mr Scott’s Ivanhoe, Miss Walter.’
‘Thank you. I’m sure I shall,’ Violet returned with equal formality and left the room. Behind her, she heard Edmund offering to open the French doors for Dolly, saying that they were rather stiff for her to manage. He engaged her in friendly conversation, distracting her with questions about the health of all below stairs and whether there had been any changes while he had been away.
Violet retired to her room and sat at the window with the book open before her. She had to admit herself charmed. She found herself recounting every step of their unconventional meeting and a strange sensation came over her once more as she thought of him helping her down from the steps and of his touch as he tucked the cushion behind her as carefully as if she were porcelain. She was not used to such attention, such cherishing, and certainly not to the way Edmund had made it so easy and natural to talk about herself. When Elizabeth put her head around her door an hour later to tell her that tea was served, she found that she had read two chapters of Ivanhoe without taking in a single word.
Entering the library once more, now freshened by a breeze from the garden, which sweetened the room with the scent of honeysuckle and fluttered the corners of the tablecloths, she was met by the sight of Mr and Mrs Lyne, Elizabeth, Edmund and three other houseguests. The party was assembled next to tea tables laden with sandwiches, ginger cake and a pale blue and gold tea service, while Dolly attended to a large urn on a side table.
‘Ah, Violet,’ Mrs Lyne said as the gentlemen rose, ‘let me introduce my son, Edmund.’
Violet, taken by surprise, almost said, ‘Thank you but we’ve already met.’ She bit back the words as they formed in her mind and hesitated, casting around desperately for the phrase that she needed.
Edmund, now buttoned into waistcoat and jacket, stepped quickly forward, saying with a deadpan expression, ‘Miss Walter, I’m so very pleased to meet you,’ and shook her hand, while Dolly looked round sharply from the tea urn with an expression that clearly said, ‘Whatever next?’
Violet subsided gratefully into her seat and Elizabeth began to tell her that she still felt a little muzzy and wondered about bridge tonight rather than an excursion. Edmund caught her eye over Elizabeth’s head and raised his eyebrows, a small smile at the corner of his mouth. As she asked distractedly for Elizabeth to repeat herself, she couldn’t help but smile back and in the moment’s complicity, she knew that her heart was lost.
Over the following weeks, Edmund joined Violet and Elizabeth in their outings with cousins and friends, Mrs Lyne accepting their plans as long as the young people were in a large group, thereby playing chaperone to each other.
‘Mother goes on the principle of “safety in numbers”.’ Elizabeth said, drawing up yet another long list of guests to join them for a country walk and picnic. Violet had noticed that however much the list varied, one name, Titus Emory, was always included, and that Elizabeth and he would often conspire to sit next to each other when dining or to share a boat when on the river. Far from feeling abandoned by her friend, Violet rejoiced in the opportunities it gave her to talk relatively privately with Edmund. They had become easy in each other’s company at home, as the family played cards together or entertained one another at the piano in the evenings; but the conversation then was light and general and Violet longed for the more personal discussions that she and Edmund shared when they could. They had exchanged opinions on music and books, Edmund playing her Chopin’s nocturnes and lending her his well-thumbed copy of poems by Yeats, which she loved and discussed with him at length. They had moved through personal anecdotes about school and university to confidences on deeper matters. Edmund told her of his belief that the old order must change, and his interest in the law as an instrument of reform to deal with working-class poverty, before social turmoil should get out of hand. Violet confided her worry about her mother and her frustration at being powerless to use her education or to affect anything beyond her own home.
For the latest outing, Elizabeth had invited a mixed group of ten and decided that they should motor out into the countryside. Violet, hopeful of some good views, took her camera with her. After parking and walking half a mile, the men carrying the wicker hampers and the ladies the rugs, they settled on a spot under an ash tree overlooking pasture, with a small stream leading into woods and in the distance the glitter of the sea. After picnicking, some of the party wanted to walk further and some to simply loll and enjoy the view. Elizabeth and Titus stayed behind for a few minutes and then strolled down to the stream; Violet and Edmund sat on, chatting, surrounded by rumpled rugs and tablecloths strewn with spirit lamp and kettle, hard-boiled eggs and Dundee cake.
‘If you could do anything at all with your life,’ Edmund said, lying back with his hands behind his head, ‘what would you do?’
‘Anything at all? Do you mean regardless of the fact that I’m a woman?’ Violet asked dryly.
Edmund looked up into the green and blue of leaves and sky above him. ‘Anything.’
‘Travel,’ Violet said, hugging her knees and looking out at the distant line of the sea. ‘I’d explore and take wonderful pictures of Alps and ice floes and … Oh, I don’t know … temples and pyramids, desert sands … I’d like to capture it all and bring it back for others to see.’
Edmund sat up, leaning on one elbow, and looked at her with interest. ‘What would you do with all the pictures?’
‘Publish them,’ Violet said seriously. ‘Sell them to magazines like the National Geographic.’ She paused and fiddled with the fringe of the rug, waiting for Edmund to laugh. ‘I suppose you’ll think me a suffragette now,’ she made light of it. ‘Just a silly dream, I know.’
‘Not silly at all,’ Edmund said. ‘I think it’s rather admirable,’ and he leant across and took her hand. He said in a low voice, ‘I wish we could see them together,’ and lifted her hand to his lips and kissed it.
Violet, her heart quickening, looked into his eyes and saw that he was regarding her tenderly. What did he mean? Surely he couldn’t be toying with her; his expression was full of hope, as though he had spoken from the heart and now waited for her reply. The sound of voices reached them as Titus and Elizabeth made their way back, Elizabeth teasing Titus about his unending appetite for tea and cake.
‘I … I should like that,’ Violet said quickly as he relinquished her hand. Then, made bold by a heady rush of joy, she said, ‘And you, what would you do with your life if you could do anything at all?’
Elizabeth was calling to her, ‘Do we have more matches for the spirit lamp? Titus says I’ve talked at him so much I’ve made him thirsty.’ Violet held up the matches, knelt up and smoothed out the cloth and started setting out the tea things.
As the others reached them and flopped down, Edmund leant close to her and said, ‘I would take you to all of those places,’ and Violet bent her head to measure tea from the caddy into the pot, to hide her face from the others.
Elizabeth took off her hat and fanned herself with it. ‘Do you think the weather’s set fair for a few days, Titus?’ she asked.
‘Mmm, I should say so,’ Titus said, cutting himself a good wedge of fruitcake. ‘For the rest of the week at least.’
‘Then our garden party will be on Saturday,’ Elizabeth announced. ‘We can invite everybody: the cousins, our set from school, Edmund’s set of officer types.’ She lit the spirit lamp under the kettle.
‘Hold on, old girl, don’t go overboard with the numbers – in particular no need for too many officer types,’ Titus said. ‘Your mother might not want too much brouhaha.’
‘Nonsense, Mother’s a dear and you know I wouldn’t choose any other tennis partner than you.’
Titus said, ‘Ah, well, in that case …’ and looked mollified.
‘If it stays fine we can have dancing in the open air in the evening as we did last year. What do you think, Edmund?’
‘I think that would be perfectly splendid,’ Edmund said, looking straight at Violet.
On Saturday, the long sloping lawns beneath the cedars and elms were mowed and rolled. The horse pulling the contraptions had its hooves clad in leather overshoes to achieve a smooth, undented finish, although, as Edmund pointed out, the undulating nature of the ground always added an interesting dimension to ball sports, however much one rolled it. The formal gardens were tidied: hedges neatened, paths raked, the rambling roses around the arbour trimmed. Tables and chairs were brought outside and placed in groups under bright awnings and trestle tables with starched white cloths were laden with lemonade and ginger beer.
By four o’clock, the party was in full swing. Older guests, aunts and mothers chatted in the shade or strolled sedately around the grounds while children chased hoops or stood in line to climb through the great split trunk of the oldest cedar tree to jump down into the arms of obliging uncles. The young people had voted for tennis rather than croquet and the grass court on the least bumpy stretch of ground beside the shrubbery had been newly marked out and the net strung up. Despite Lucien Hilliard, a boisterous but conversationally inept young man, importuning Violet to partner him, Violet had sat out for the first few games, pleading the heat as an excuse. Edmund, as host, had held back until all the guests who wanted a game had played, but then, in the late afternoon, deftly suggested that the heat was waning and swept Violet into a game before Lucien could say anything more.
Violet and Edmund were playing Elizabeth and Titus, who were winning with panache: Titus having a powerful serve and Elizabeth a fiercely competitive streak.
‘You’re not trying hard enough, Edmund!’ she called out to her brother as the ball hit a bump in the ground and flew off at an impossible angle.
‘Oh come on, ’Lizbeth, no one could have reached that.’
Elizabeth smirked.
‘Forty-love,’ Titus said loudly, sweating and red in the face. He positioned himself to serve again and bounced the ball impatiently in front of him.
Edmund and Violet exchanged a smile. Violet settled her hat more firmly on her head and gathered her skirts in one hand, ready to return the serve. Titus threw high and hit the ball with such force that Violet had to duck. She turned to see Edmund running backwards in an effort to keep the ball in play. Swiping wildly at it, he missed his footing on the uneven ground, scrambled backwards, and finally sat down with a thump, pulling a clownish expression. Violet, overcome by laughter, subsided to her knees and the ball bounced away into the shrubbery behind them.
‘Game!’ Titus and Elizabeth shouted at the same time. Titus raised his fists in a ridiculous overplayed gesture of triumph and Elizabeth threw her racquet in the air and caught it, which made Violet turn to Edmund and laugh even more. She got up and ran to help him look for the lost ball. They pushed through the thick stand of bushes and trees and moved deeper into the gloom, Edmund sweeping away the twiggy undergrowth and last year’s fallen leaves with his racquet. Spotting the ball at the same time, they both stooped to retrieve it and bumped into one another. Edmund put out his hand to help her up and mumbled an awkward apology but as they rose, his eyes were already searching hers. Violet knew with sudden certainty that he wanted to kiss her and, even more disturbingly, that she wanted to be kissed. From the court beyond, the sound of slow hand-clapping and calls of ‘Play on!’ and ‘New game!’ reached them. Her hand trembling, she picked up the ball and gave it to Edmund.
As they turned to go back to the game, Edmund said urgently, ‘I need to be able to talk to you alone, properly. Sometime this evening do you think we could slip away?’
Violet barely had time to nod before they broke free of the bushes and out into view of the cheering audience.
As they played on, she felt aware of her body in a new way: how it moved, the strength of her muscles, her youth and vigour, and of Edmund: sensing exactly where he stood behind her, the degree of closeness as he moved forwards and back with the play, as if they were each surrounded by force fields that fizzed and sizzled as they touched. When the game finally ended, she and Edmund had made up ground and Elizabeth congratulated them on ‘a much more creditable third set’ as hands were shaken over the net. They retired to deck chairs to watch others playing. Lucien appeared at Violet’s elbow bearing a tray with elderflower jellies and lemonade so that she was obliged to listen to a long and tiresome commentary on further games until she could decently withdraw with the other ladies to rest for an hour before dressing for the evening.
‘I shan’t let you go before you promise me the first dance,’ Lucien insisted, and Violet had to agree gracefully.
Later, when Violet had rested and bathed, instead of ringing for Elizabeth’s maid, she dressed herself with great care, choosing her pale lilac, an evening frock with tiered layers of flimsy lawn. She turned back and forth in front of the cheval mirror by the window to see how it would accentuate her movements when she danced. Tonight, she wanted everything to be perfect.
As she opened the domed lid of her Noah’s Ark trunk to search for her best ivory evening comb, there was the tiniest tap on the door. Thinking it was Elizabeth, and with her head in the depths of the trunk, she called out, ‘Come in,’ but no one entered. She found the comb and put it on her dressing table; then she went to the door. There was nobody there. A row of closed doors stretched the length of the landing and the sweeping stairs at the end were deserted. From other rooms, faint noises of girlish voices, running water and clinking china suggested that others were rising but there was no sign of the person who had knocked, not even the distant footsteps of a disappearing maid in the hall below. As she stepped back to close the door, she glanced down and saw on the floor, pale against the rich reds and blues of the silk hall runner, a beautiful corsage: a perfect cream rose and two tiny buds against a wisp of maidenhair fern. Delicately, she picked it up and took it inside. Turning it in her hands, she found that there was a tiny scrap of paper behind the pin. She took it to the window to decipher the minute lettering and read:
For a glimmering girl …
She instantly recognised it as Yeats and knew it was from Edmund. She called to mind the verse from the mysterious poem:
I went to blow the fire a-flame,
But something rustled on the floor,
And some one called me by my name:
It had become a glimmering girl
With apple blossom in her hair
Who called me by my name and ran
And faded through the brightening air.
Flushing with pleasure, she hid the note in her jewellery case and pinned the flower carefully to her dress, the heady champagne of hope rising in her that Edmund meant this as a precursor to a declaration. Her heart quickened; it must be tonight. He knew that she was to stay with the family only a few days longer. He had said that he wanted to speak to her alone …
There was a brisk knock at the door and Elizabeth bustled in, resplendent in pale blue silk. ‘Are you nearly ready? Didn’t Mary come to do your hair? Shall I help you with it?’ She was fizzing with excitement. ‘Aha,’ she said, noticing Violet’s corsage, ‘I see you have an admirer.’
Violet, still half in her dream world of anticipation, visibly jumped in alarm. ‘Sorry?’
‘I see Lucien continues to pursue you at every turn,’ she said.
‘Oh, yes, Lucien,’ Violet said faintly. ‘He’s a little overwhelming, don’t you think?’ She sat obediently at the dressing table and let Elizabeth tackle her hair.
Elizabeth brushed it smartly until it became flyaway and static, talking nineteen to the dozen all the time. ‘Lucien is rather pressing, I must admit, and when it comes to dancing he’s got two left feet, but he’s clearly rather taken with you so don’t be too hard on him, poor boy. He was positively dogging your heels this afternoon, wasn’t he?’ She wound and pinned strands of Violet’s hair up into a soft arrangement of piled twists, and held it there while Violet anchored it in place with the ivory comb. ‘If he gets too much for you, Edmund or I can always rescue you,’ she said. ‘Edmund’s quite a good dancer. Well, I taught him actually, so at least he can waltz without tripping you up or standing on your dress.’ She teased out a wisp or two at Violet’s temples. ‘There, you’ll do,’ she said, picking up her gloves and handing them to her. ‘Shall we go down?’
As they passed through the hallway, thumps and male voices came from the music room where some of the young men were rolling back the carpet in case it should rain and the party be forced to come indoors. Outside, Edmund and his young cousin, Samuel, were carrying the gramophone between them. Violet, suddenly shy, hung back behind Elizabeth. The men set the machine down on a table, its brass trumpet gleaming in the hazy evening light. Immediately, the young men and women gathered round, pulling out records from leather carrying cases, peering at titles and exclaiming over their favourites. Edmund took charge, winding the handle and carefully placing the needle. The strains of ‘Dreaming’ wavered into the still air, the tenor voice lifting over the sweet sound of the strings as the music poured out and over the velvet lawns to lose itself in the trees and formal gardens beyond.
‘This is for our hostess,’ Edmund said. His mother looked pleased as his father stepped out and took her hand to lead the first dance. For the first few bars they danced alone, Mr Lyne ramrod straight with his chin held high, Mrs Lyne with a long-fringed shawl elegantly draped around her shoulders. Then others followed and the space between the great trees filled with moving figures, chattering voices and bursts of laughter as the twirling couples circled in a river of pale silks and evening suits.
Edmund was explaining the operation of the gramophone to Samuel so that he could take over. Violet hovered at the edge of the dancing crowd, beginning to despair as, one after another, friends of Elizabeth asked her to write their names on her dance card. She saw Edmund look towards her and his expression softened but then Lucien was beside her, saying, ‘I trust you wrote me in for this first one as promised?’ and whisking her into the dance.
As she danced with a succession of young men who led her rather over-enthusiastically and asked her the same set of predictable questions, to which she gave polite but less enthusiastic answers, she looked for Edmund. She feared that, as the son of the household, he might feel obliged to dance with every relative who was left sitting out a while but there was no sign of him among the dancers. He was no longer at the gramophone; neither could she see him in the groups gathered around the tables where refreshments were laid out: poached salmon and game terrine, cordials and champagne.
By the time Lucien returned and claimed his second dance, the shadows were deepening under the trees, stretching across the lawns like the fingers of long black evening gloves, and Violet felt taut with anxiety.
In the middle of the throng, Edmund suddenly appeared and tapped Lucien on the arm. He pointed over to the trees, saying, ‘Do excuse me, but as Miss Walter is interested in matters of illumination, through her photography, I think she might enjoy lighting-up time.’ Before Lucien could remonstrate, he had taken Violet in his arms and danced her away, moving lightly and swiftly with the flow of the crowd but guiding her expertly between the dancers so that as the music finished they found themselves at the edge and stepped out as if alighting from a carousel.
He placed her hand on his arm and walked her away from the milling crowd and over to the nearest cedar where Violet saw that under the spreading hands of the branches Chinese lanterns had been tied: white papery spheres, waiting to be lit, they hung like huge fruits.
‘Do you like them?’ Edmund asked. ‘I thought we’d never get them all up.’
‘They’re beautiful,’ Violet said.
‘Would you like to light them? Here, look, I have tapers.’ He picked up a long thin stick, struck a match in a splutter of flame and a smell of saltpetre and lit the end of it, which glowed a soft orange. He handed it to her and steadied her as she climbed on to the crooked roots and reached up to guide the flame carefully inside the lantern to the candle within. The flame caught and grew, filling the sphere with light that cast a pool of radiance over their upturned faces and the gnarled and shining roots below, and faded into shadows beyond them.
‘I made a wish,’ Violet said, smiling, but didn’t tell him what it was.
They moved silently between the lanterns, sometimes separating and lighting them simultaneously, sometimes steadying each other on the slippery wood and guiding each other’s hands. They went from tree to tree, cedar to elm, as the crowd danced on, oblivious. At the last tree, they stopped and looked back at their handiwork.
‘They’re like captured fireflies,’ Violet said.
‘Or little moons caught up in the branches,’ Edmund said, and it was true: in the elms, twigs and leaves laced the globes with dark patterns.
‘“The silver apples of the moon,”’ Violet said dreamily, remembering the ending of the Yeats poem.
‘Exactly,’ Edmund said. ‘Shall we walk?’ He gave her his arm. ‘I don’t think anyone will miss us from the general mêlée.’
They slipped away across the lawn behind the trees. Dew had formed and underfoot the short grass was cool and damp, scattered with the closed eyes of daisies. The sun was now a mere line of gold on the horizon, a last gash in the twilit sky. Edmund pointed out the papery disc of a full moon, slowly gaining brightness and substance, ‘As if one of our lanterns has escaped and floated away,’ he said whimsically.
They came to the walled garden with its deep borders and turned along the walk towards the arbour. Violet was aware of every small thing around her: the shapes of peonies and larkspur; the smell of sweet peas; the faint strains of music; the warm solidity of Edmund’s arm under her gloved hand. Every now and then, she felt that he glanced at her but didn’t break his silence. They reached the arbour and sat down on the stone seat beneath a wrought-iron arch weighted down with a mass of balsam and roses. In the fading light, the garden had faded to monochrome, the flowers becoming pale, their beauty transformed to form and scent rather than colour.
‘You look incredibly lovely tonight,’ Edmund said, gazing at her.
Violet, unused to compliments, looked down at the flower pinned at her bosom. ‘Thank you for the beautiful corsage,’ she said, as if her appearance lay only in the adornment of her dress. She touched the flower self-consciously and he gently took her hand.
Slowly, without letting his gaze slip for a moment from hers, he took each finger of her glove in turn, pulling until he had freed it and could twine his fingers with hers and place warm palm to warm palm. ‘Dearest,’ he said, ‘you must know how I feel about you. I realise that we can’t be together straightaway, that I need something more behind me before I can offer you the kind of future you deserve …’
Violet looked into his dear eyes, hardly daring to breathe, her heart beating like a ragtime band.
‘But only say you’ll be mine,’ Edmund said softly, bending towards her, ‘and anything will be possible, because I shall be the happiest man on earth.’
Violet, moving into Edmund’s embrace, closed her eyes and without speaking let her lips say their tender ‘Yes’.
When Violet had opened Edmund’s letter to say that he was being sent abroad she had felt all her hopes shrink, just as Edmund and the family had grown smaller as the motor had carried her away down the long drive at the end of her stay, receding to a dark dot against the stucco house. She had struggled, not entirely successfully, to compose herself in front of George but as he rode away, she felt panic at the hopelessness that threatened to engulf her.
She remained perfectly still as George rounded the bend. She felt that she should call after him but her throat was closed and tight with misery and she couldn’t speak. She tried to get a grip on herself; she must make sure she asked him tomorrow about what he’d wanted to show her; it was thoughtless of her to have disappointed him through being so overcome by her news. The sound of the bicycle wheels clattering over the ruts receded and left only the hot, heavy silence of the summer afternoon. After a few moments, she turned and began to walk away. Instead of returning to the house, however, she veered into the wood and took the path that ran alongside the beck, although she was barely aware of its trickling and gurgling or the smell of greenness and fresh water. She walked slowly amongst the huge Scots pines, sun slanting on their tawny red trunks, the canopy high above her. Shafts of light fell on glossy rhododendron leaves and the white trumpets of yellow-stamened flowers, their petals with a bruised look this late in the summer, as if thinned by heavy rain, and the vivid green moss growing thick and soft as carpet on the trunks and branches of coppiced trees.
Thank God I have an hour or so before Mother will miss me, she thought. Her mother knew nothing of all this. Violet had kept her own counsel about meeting Edmund, afraid that her mother would not react well to the news. Even though Edmund had understood that they would have to make a home for Mother with them, Violet knew that Mother would fret dreadfully at the prospect of ‘losing’ her to a marriage and she didn’t want to burden her with worry any sooner than was necessary. So she had said nothing of the talks she and Edmund had shared on country picnics, at the park, at the garden party. She had been non-committal when answering her mother’s questions about the people she’d met during her stay. Instead, she had offered descriptions of the garden, the decor and the food in minute detail, to satisfy her mother’s curiosity and take her to a place, any place, other than the house that her mother now hardly ever left.
In secret, she thought about the feel of Edmund’s hand in the small of her back as they danced, or the way his moustache tickled when they kissed. Such things were private – no, sacred moments which could not, in any case, be unwrapped in the stuffy sickroom among her mother’s bottles and potions. The very air, heavy with the knowledge of her father’s neglect, would dull and tarnish them.
She and Edmund had stored up every minute that they could snatch together, knowing that there would be time apart to follow, as Edmund would be sent away to an officers’ training camp. They had planned that once Edmund had finished the first leg, he would apply for leave and they would find some way to meet.
It’s so unfair! she thought. Now he would have to go abroad and even if the whole conflict were short-lived, as people said it would be, it would be months before he was in barracks at Carlisle again. She tried to stifle these selfish thoughts, and think instead of troubled Belgium, threatened France, honour and the King. Over the past few months, the whole country had been speculating on German expansionist policies and the likelihood of war; it should be no surprise that now it was here it was going to affect everyone’s life, even hers.
War. The word reverberated through her mind as if it were a cold gust shaking the little wood and rattling like a dry shiver through its leaves.
What if he were hurt? It had not been until she had fallen so headily in love that she had realised that it was possible to feel the same tenderness and care towards the body of another that she felt towards her own. She thought of the way the outdoor summer life had browned his forearms and tanned a V at his throat; of how she imagined the rest of his skin, pale beneath his clothes; and of the vulnerability of the body that she loved. She squeezed the letter even harder in her hand and quickened her step. She would go to the little church at the lakeside where she could be private and alone.
She reached the edge of the wood, swung open the iron gate and stepped out into the brightness. The beck ran on through the parkland, rushing and gurgling beside the path, on its way down to the wide sheet of water. Before her was an open view over the fields to the lake and hills, interrupted only by a scattering of sessile oaks and a lonely church that stood encircled by a dry-stone wall, a quiet grey against the surrounding green.
She walked towards the church. Despite the heat of the day, a stiff breeze blew from the lake, carrying the sound of sheep bleating from further fields and of the water lapping fast against the shore. She felt exposed as she walked across the empty parkland, aware of the house in the distance, angled to take in this vista. She imagined her mother at the window watching her solitary progress and wondering where she was going with her camera slung across her shoulder, when she had taken photographs a-plenty of this view in every season. She hurried across the field to the church and let herself into the churchyard. Tall blond grasses and thin purple thistles grew among gravestones with their memorial verses obliterated by the scourings of the weather.
She went into the church and pushed the heavy wooden door shut behind her. Despite the fact that the leaded window was clear rather than stained glass, it took a moment for her eyes to become accustomed to the dimness. Ahead of her, the sandstone font, at which she and generations of Walters before her had been christened, sat squat and solid. Above the arch opposite the door, a wooden plaque, muddied dark brown with age, bore the images of a lion and a unicorn facing each other in regal poses. The painted banner above them read ‘Dieu et mon Droit’.
She sat down in a pew at the back, so that the light from the window would fall over her shoulder, and slowly unfolded Edmund’s letter again. It had been softened by the moistness of her hand. She spread it out on the dark material of her skirt and read once more:
My dearest Violet,
I am so sorry, my love, to have to tell you that I have received my orders. We are to be dispatched today for further training in mapping and signalling then on to a different camp to meet up with our draft of men, and to embark for active service. My dear, I know that this is a setback to our plans, but believe me it is only that and I hope and trust that I’ll be back soon and we will be able to be together at last. Before we met, I was never done badgering my uncle to get me a commission so that I would be ready, if called upon, to serve, so I must remember now that it’s an honour to fight for my country, put aside my own desires and do my best to step up to the mark and make my family proud.
You must not worry. I am fit and well thanks to the Officer Training Corps and the boxing (not to mention all that tennis we played!). Although one shouldn’t swank, I’ve been told at rifle practice that I’m something of a crack shot too. Sam Huggins and Lofty are in the same battalion so I shall be in the best company and we will give Old Fritz something to think about.
I wish that I could have come to you to say goodbye in person – it has all been so fast. I’m writing this in a corner of the mess, which, despite the clatter of plates and knives and forks, is the least chaotic place in camp. I wonder where you are at this moment. I always somehow imagine you in a garden. Perhaps it’s because of my memory of how I came upon you once at home, with the honeysuckle spilling over the pergola and your head bent over your book and the sun painting copper lights in your hair.
In my mind’s eye, I see you reading in a garden. Your long, slender fingers reach to turn the page and I bend towards you and cover your hand with my own. How I wish that I could pluck a flower to mark your place, take your hand in mine and lead you away. I must not do this.It is hard enough already.
I have your letters, which I will keep by me at all times so that I can always hear your sweet voice in my head. I will write again as soon as I can and let you know how to address your letters so that they will find me. Please do write as often as you can. You know that you have my heart in your safekeeping.
Ever yours,
Edmund
Violet put her forearm down on the ledge of the pew, amongst the hymn books, and rested her forehead on it, breathing in the musty smell of old, damp paper. ‘Please, keep him safe; I’ll do anything; I’ll be a better person,’ she prayed. ‘I won’t be irritable with Mother when she asks me to read the interminable household articles in her women’s paper, nor leave the planning of dinner so often to Mrs Burbidge. I won’t pester Mother to let me visit Elizabeth, or long for company, or feel sorry for myself, stuck here, where there is no one younger than forty. Only let Edmund be all right and I’ll be a model daughter and a better housekeeper and I won’t even be angry at Father any more for going away and leaving us here …’
In tears all over again, Violet stopped praying as the old hurt overcame her. The hollow, empty feeling that thoughts of her father brought on began to bear down on her, black as the darkness under her eyelids where her face pressed into the crook of her arm. Why did he not write? Why did he never come home? He hadn’t been near the place since before she went away to finishing school and then he had been cold to her mother and horribly formal with her, as if she had done something terribly wrong. The litany of questions ran through her mind as it always did. If he had loved her even a little, he would have visited her at school. No, it was not merely his estrangement from her mother that kept him away; it was something about her. It was somehow her fault.
If only Edmund could be here. His smiles, his small kindnesses and consideration somehow made her real, as though she was only brought into being when someone looked, really looked at her: as if his attention were an artist’s pencil sketching her lightly on a page. She thought of him holding her and how nothing else beyond them had existed, the hurt all blotted out, his eyes on her face conjuring her from drawing to sculpture, willing her into three dimensions so that she was solid and firm and glowing like bronze under the spotlight of his gaze while, all around them, everything that was other just fell away.
She sat up and stared again at the letter. How could she stand it? How was she to bear it? Soon she would have to go back to the house. She would have to swallow all this down into herself and keep it there, carrying on as though nothing was wrong, exchanging meaningless conversation, arranging the unremitting round of domestic life: the repetitive menus, the cycle of cleaning and gardening and maintaining the grounds, forever preparing for the visit from Father that never came, moving through days whose friction was slowly, inexorably, rubbing her out.
4 (#ulink_88f08e7d-4c99-5524-a9b3-1a831a8a483f)
MEASURING UP (#ulink_88f08e7d-4c99-5524-a9b3-1a831a8a483f)
George was woken by the noise of a milk-cart in the street outside. The milkman’s whistled rendition of ‘Hearts of Oak’ went through his head like the shriek of an engine with a full head of steam. He lay very still, gritting his teeth until the clink of bottles into crates was over and the clop of hooves on cobbles faded into the distance. He found that he was lying on top of a bed rather than in it and was still in his clothes, although his jacket and his boots had been removed. Gingerly, trying not to groan at the tenderness of his rib cage, he rolled over to face into the room and found Turland, sprawled asleep in an armchair with a pillow under his head and a washed-out green quilt over him, from which his legs protruded, showing a large hole in the heel of one of his grey socks.
Recognising Turland, everything about the night before came back to him in one huge wave of misery. How was he to explain that he had lost his wages and had no board money to give to his mother? He knew how much they needed every penny and that it was all accounted for as soon as it came into the house. He remembered the lessons at chapel on ‘the demon drink’, and how his mother had always said in her milder way that it ‘led to errors of judgement’. As a child, he had thought of God’s Judgement and wondered how God could possibly make a mistake. Now, as though he could hear his mother’s voice in his head, the true implication of human frailty sank in and he recognised his own weakness. He was angry and disgusted with himself.
There was nowhere in his thoughts that he could turn for any comfort. If he thought of Violet, her gentle eyes, her quiet manner, her lovely smile, it was as though a picture of the girl from the pub stood between them. The memory of the girl’s piggy eyes with their fair lashes and the feel of her pudgy, soft hands made him feel grubby, as though to think of Violet as existing in the same universe was to besmirch her. He had sunk low. He had let himself down and behaved like an absolute beast. He thought of Kitty scolding him over some minor foolishness in the past and the way that she would eventually shake her head and say, ‘You are a lost cause, George Farrell!’ and he would know he was forgiven. He had always been able to tell Kitty everything yet the thought of this made him wonder how he could look her in the face again.
There was a tap at the door and Rooke opened it a little way and put his head round it. ‘Breakfast’s started,’ he said.
Turland woke, stretched, and scratched his head. ‘Righto, I’ll be down in a minute.’ He glanced over at George and then added, ‘Here, Percy, see if you can put your filching skills to use and get something for Farrell, will you?’
Rooke nodded and withdrew.
George said, ‘Thanks for giving me the bed – very much appreciated.’ He slowly swung his legs down, using their weight to lever himself into a sitting position, and then braced himself by leaning on his hands, pressing his palms down on the edge of the mattress and straightening his arms to release some of the pressure on his bruised ribs.
‘No trouble. Everyone was in bed so we smuggled you in without a hitch. The bike’s down behind the basement railings.’ Turland pulled on his clothes and sat down again to tie up his shoes. ‘If you want to use the lav you should be all right while everyone’s at breakfast. There’s only Mr Anstey on this floor and he always goes fishing on a Saturday so he’ll be out by now.’ He chucked George a towel and hurried off to breakfast.
George crept along the landing to the bathroom where he splashed his hair and face with water and then stripped, washed and towelled himself down briskly. He rinsed the foul taste from his mouth, dressed and tried to make himself look respectable once more. He rubbed at the grubby knees of his trousers with a dampened corner of the towel and disposed of his soiled handkerchief in the bin marked ‘Laundry’.
When he slipped back to the room, Turland and Rooke were standing back to back comparing their height.
‘Turland reckons he’s five foot five. How much smaller am I?’ Rooke asked.
George obliged by putting his hand flat on Rooke’s smooth, well-oiled head. He marked where Rooke came up to with the side of his hand against Turland’s head. ‘Well, you’re about half a head shorter.’
Turland said, ‘Come on, Percy, you have to make five foot three to get in.’
Rooke pulled himself up to stand even straighter.
‘You’re still about three inches shorter,’ George said uncertainly.
Rooke’s shoulders sagged. Turland turned round and gave him a friendly punch on the arm. ‘Buck up, Rooke. Everyone knows our lads are desperate for reinforcements. I bet they’ll take you on, even at bantamweight.’
Rooke looked pleased and straightened his tie and collar.
Turland turned to George, and eyed his height and broad shoulders. ‘How about it, Farrell? Fancy changing your mind and coming along to make up the numbers? They’d snap you up, you know.’
There was a silence. George felt pleased that Turland thought so well of him and that the lads wanted him to come along as one of them. He’d always been outside the gangs at school, just him and Kitty muddling through, never feeling part of a group, never really belonging. Not like this: friends, comrades, brothers in arms. He thought about the extra pay he’d get, a shilling a day, and how it would help him make things right at home. He thought about casting off the self that he saw as grimy, weak, despicable, and replacing it with the aspiration of glory and honour and being a man. It would be like diving into a clear lake and emerging a new person: fitter, stronger. He imagined them all returning together, victorious: bronzed and battle-hardened men. Perhaps he would be able to do something half decent so that he could hold his head high in front of Violet again. His heart beat a little faster and his spirits lifted.
‘All right,’ he said. ‘All right, I will.’
Turland nodded sagely, affecting a gravitas suitable to the occasion.
Rooke said, ‘Oh, I nearly forgot,’ and brought out from his jacket pocket a square package wrapped in a rather greasy-looking napkin. George opened it to find a round of toast with a thin piece of bacon pressed between the slices.
‘Iron rations,’ Rooke said. ‘Eat up, soldier.’
They met up with Haycock and set off for the castle where recruitment was taking place. As they approached the centre of the town, they could hear the sound of a silver band in the next street. Haycock said, ‘Eh up? What’s this all about?’ and they wandered over to the Botchergate to find out. The street, always busy with shoppers, was thronging with people who had been drawn by the music, a martial tune with a solid drumbeat and a brash melody in a major key. George craned his neck to try to see above the spread of caps and hats but the crowd was four or five deep on the pavement and he was too far back. Rooke disappeared into the press, ducking under a man’s arm, and George followed suit, slipping through behind a nursemaid who was trying to manoeuvre a baby carriage.
He reached the others at the front and saw, coming towards them, a military band in navy dress uniform, striped with red ribbon: trumpets and trombones in front, polished to a glaring brightness in the morning sun, a euphonium and the huge bass drum behind. The drummer beat the taut skin with gusto and the sound reverberated as if caught between the high buildings. The rhythm was underwritten by the sound of the marching feet of the soldiers who followed on behind, carrying placards that read: ‘Will You Answer the Call? Now Is the Time’ and ‘Take up the Sword of Justice. Enlist Today!’ A wave of cheering from the crowd followed their progress. Behind the soldiers followed a mass of ordinary men in civilian dress, looking a rag-tag group in comparison with the orderly men in khaki. Some were laughing, some waving at friends in the crowd, while others made self-conscious efforts to fall into step with the marching soldiers. Every now and then, a man or two would break from the crush on the pavement and step out to join the procession and the volume of the cheering would rise as if to carry him forward on a swell of sound.
The band drew level with George and the others. A group of young women applauded but the sound mingled with the music, drowned out as the people all around took up the cheer. Turland plucked at George’s sleeve. Haycock was watching with a broad grin on his face. Rooke took off his cap, smoothed down his hair and put his cap back on again. ‘This is it, then,’ Turland mouthed at George over the ear-splitting noise. The band passed and the rows of marching soldiers followed, four abreast. ‘Ready?’ said Turland.
George pulled at the bottom of his jacket to straighten it. As the volunteers came level with them they all stepped forward. The cheering seemed to George to echo around him. As he came forward out of the shadow of the buildings, he was intensely aware of the heat of the sun on his head and the clear blue of the strip of sky above him. Everything was shining: the glittering instruments; the plate-glass windows of the shops with their fancy goods; the boots and belts of the soldiers they were to follow. They fell into line amongst the men; someone clapped him on the back, others moved to make space for the four of them to march together. They passed on into Lowther Street. The tram wires above them seemed to vibrate with the sound of the band, men raised their hats from the steps of the Royal Temperance Hotel and everywhere people stopped what they were doing to listen to the music. A group of young women, gathered at the upstairs window of a tearoom, leant out and waved and Haycock waved back. One of them took a flower from the vase on the table and tossed it down to him and Haycock caught it.
‘Who’s that?’ George yelled at him over the din.
Haycock shrugged and turned round; walking backwards, he held out his arms to the girl and made a great show of tucking the flower into his buttonhole. He pulled a mock-woebegone face and then turned back to march on.
The band took a sharp left turn in the direction of the main road. A gap in the line of carts and motors opened for them and they joined the road and marched on towards the castle, a queue of traffic quickly forming behind them.
The castle was a huge medieval pile. Built of red sandstone, everything about it was square: the shape of the gatehouse, the lookout towers and the crenellations along the ramparts. The thickness of the walls was such that it almost seemed to have been hewn from solid rock. As they passed beneath the massive archway that led into a wide parade ground, all four young men felt a little over-awed; even Haycock’s swagger was less jaunty as he looked about him with curiosity. George thought about the soldiers who had passed through these barracks over centuries, all the feet that had drilled in this enormous, open square and marched out to do battle. He looked up at the corner towers and imagined the sentries posted there, scanning the surrounding countryside for the approach of opposing forces, preparing for a siege and determining to defend the fortress with their very lives. Wasn’t it something to be part of this history!
The band stopped playing and began to empty out their instruments. The soldiers directed the men towards the recruiting rooms on the other side of the square and the crowd began to disperse towards them. George nudged Turland to indicate to him the queue of men at an open doorway; in unspoken agreement, they all walked around the perimeter of the courtyard to reach it, suddenly shy of crossing the open space on the diagonal and drawing attention to themselves.
The men in their queue were of varied ages and occupations. Most wore the flat cap of the working man or carried their cap folded. Some had the rough-handed look of the labourer, with worsted jacket and heavy boots, whilst others had stiff collars, neat ties and an air of confidence about them.
The line of men moved along until they entered the hall. George could see that men were being called forward one by one to a row of desks, and old memories of school and the humiliation of being called in front of Mr Bevinson to explain himself returned for a moment, making him feel nervous. He moved back a little in the group so that Haycock would reach the front first.
When George’s turn came round, the corporal asked for his full name and occupation, and if he was willing to serve ‘for the duration’. He gave his details and said that he was willing. When he was asked his age, he said, ‘Eighteen years and three months.’
The corporal looked up sharply and said, ‘I’m sorry, I didn’t hear that. Did you say nineteen?’
George looked puzzled.
The corporal asked him, ‘Do you want to join the war?’
George nodded uncomprehendingly.
‘So you need to be able to take up service overseas, should the opportunity arise,’ he said patiently.
George vaguely remembered the conversation of the previous night in the taproom. ‘Sorry, nineteen and three months,’ he said quickly and the man gave him a weak smile, took down his address, asked him for a signature and then told him to stand in another line to one side. As he left the desk, he heard Rooke step up behind him and declare, as confidently as you like, that he was Percy Rooke, an apprentice baker and that he was born in 1895.
Rooke came over, wearing a non-committal expression. George knew that he must be delighted to have passed the first hurdle and marvelled at his ability not to show it. Rooke seemed always able to blend into the background; he carefully avoided attracting attention and his knack of adopting a deadpan expression made him less visible than those with more animated faces.
‘Why did you say you were a baker?’ George asked wonderingly. Rooke’s capacity for duplicity made him a mystery to George.
Rooke tapped the side of his nose. ‘Scoffum,’ he said. ‘If I can get taken on in the cookhouse I’ll always have plenty of grub.’
George wished that he had thought of that and wondered whether admitting to being a postman had been a good idea. Perhaps he would be asked to take messages. He didn’t quite like the idea of scouting around alone along the front line; he hoped he could stay with all the others.
When they reached the front of the second queue, Haycock again went in before George. He emerged a few minutes later, straightening his jacket, and gave George a broad wink. Before George had time to ask him what had happened, the sergeant, a dapper man with a neat moustache, ushered him in. He closed the door behind him, saying, ‘Take your clothes off and step on to the scales, please.’ A doctor in a white coat was finishing making some notes on a form. George stripped. It was cold in the room. He placed his clothes in a little pile on top of his boots, as there seemed to be nowhere else to put them, and stood with his hands folded over his private parts. As he stood on the scales, he glanced down at his pale body and saw, to his consternation, that a huge area of dark bruising had come out on his left side. The sergeant raised his eyebrows but said nothing, simply noting his weight, and then quickly taking his height and chest measurements.
The doctor came over to examine him. ‘Well-built lad,’ he said over his shoulder to the sergeant and then asked the question that George had been dreading. ‘How did you get this bruising?’
George didn’t know what to say. He could hardly say that he had been set upon and robbed. He felt his cheeks stinging as he thought of his humiliation, how he hadn’t even fielded a blow, much less aimed one in return. ‘It was an accident, sir,’ he blurted out.
The doctor looked at him keenly, clearly recognising a lie.
George heard the sergeant mutter, ‘Fighting, more likely. These young men have no self-discipline.’
‘Well, I don’t know,’ the doctor said mildly. ‘The recklessness of youth, though a nuisance in peacetime, can have its uses in wartime. Let the army sort him out.’ George, still smarting from being misrepresented as a roughneck, murmured a ‘Thank you, sir.’
The doctor told George to get dressed and then asked him to read some letters on a white board. George could read all bar the very last row. The doctor wrote something down on his form before asking George to show him his teeth; like a horse, George thought; then, more alarmingly: ‘I wonder if they can tell your age from your teeth?’ However, the form was duly signed and George was told that he could go. He left, feeling that the strict eye of the sergeant was still on him.
When Rooke and Turland had been through the same process, the four gathered once more.
‘I’m in,’ Rooke said, rubbing his sides. ‘I thought my ribs would bust, I took such a breath when my chest got measured.’
When a few others had joined them, they were taken into a room to swear the oath.
The adjutant who swore them in struck George as very fine. He had a strong physique and an upright bearing and his hair was cut very short and neat. His jacket was tightly fitted, and belt, boots and buttons were all polished to a high gloss. George was acutely conscious of the rip in his jacket pocket and the smear of soil on his rounded collar and longed to get out of his dirty clothes and become a proper soldier.
They stood in a row before the adjutant. He let his hand rest on a large, black Bible and stood to attention. He asked them to raise their right hand and swear to serve their King and country.
The room was very quiet afterwards. The officer let the silence linger to bring home to them the solemnity of the occasion and his eyes fell on each of them in turn, as if weighing up their character. George dared not glance around him but felt that every one of the group must feel as serious as he did. Then the adjutant relaxed his face and wished them luck. He gave them all a shilling and said that this was one day’s pay and meant that they were now deemed to be soldiers and subject to the King’s regulations. Rooke put his quickly in his pocket, as though afraid someone might realise they’d paid him three times his usual wage and take it away again. George thought that he would like to keep his as a kind of talisman but then remembered that he needed to give it to Mother.
The adjutant told them to come back on Monday morning and not to wait for their mobilisation papers because the paperwork wasn’t keeping up with the huge influx of recruits. ‘There’s a great need for men, and training must commence as soon as possible,’ he said. ‘We’ll be sending the next draft to camp on Monday so report here by eight thirty.’
They were ushered into a further room to be measured for their uniforms. Here, both men and women were working at sewing machines, treadles clattering as they sewed. Rolls of cloth stood on end, some neatly in line, some leaning at angles against the wall like a parade of tipsy soldiers. More bolts of cloth that looked like tent canvas were piled haphazardly together in a heap on the floor. George wished that he hadn’t had the thought that they were like soldiers.
One of the men got up from his machine. He had a tape measure draped around his neck. He took each man’s name and measurements and wrote them down; then he disappeared into a storeroom and returned with a pile of uniforms in a blue cloth and began to distribute them.
‘They’re the wrong colour,’ Rooke said under his breath.
‘What happened to the khaki?’ Haycock said with disappointment in his voice.
The machinist said, ‘There are too many recruits; we can’t get the supplies so we’re forced to requisition from the post office.’
‘Might as well stay as you are then, Farrell,’ Turland said cheerily.
George was relieved to be given trousers and a jacket, bundled together. Turland and Haycock only had trousers. He slipped the jacket on. It was a bit bigger than his post-office uniform and less tight across the back but the arms were a little short. He turned to find Rooke trying his and stifled his own complaint. Rooke was drowned in his jacket: the shoulders stood out well beyond his actual shoulders and the sleeves were inches too long.
The machinist tutted. ‘That’s the smallest we’ve got, I’m afraid, lad,’ he said to Rooke. ‘Get your mother to turn up the sleeves or they’ll be getting in your way.’ A woman whose needle had broken called him over and he went to attend to her machine.
Haycock said, ‘Well, it fits where it touches,’ and laughed.
Rooke scowled at him and took it off.
George took off his jacket and refolded it. They stood there, uncertain what to do next. The machinist, who had given the woman a new needle, turned and seemed surprised to see them still there.
‘That’s all,’ he said, looking amused and gesturing to a door at the far end of the room. ‘You’re free to go.’ He made a flapping movement at them with his arms and they trooped out feeling a little foolish.
In the parade ground, men were still queuing to enlist; others carrying bundles of uniform like their own were waiting around watching two horses being unharnessed from a cart and led away. The backboard of the cart was unfastened and its load of boots and shoes, of many different styles and clearly not army issue, was tipped out on to the paved ground. The quartermaster arrived and held each pair up in turn, shouting out the sizes. Men called out, ‘Me, sir! Here, sir!’ in return and he would toss each pair over, a scrum ensuing as men scrambled to get hold of them. Rooke, who took a small size for which there was no great competition, got a pair of boots fit for a farmer and said that they more than made up for the jacket, even though it was so big it stood still when he turned round. George decided that he would stick with his own boots. The legwork on his rounds had taught him the value of a pair of boots that were well ‘broken in’ and he had no desire to change.
Whilst the scrum was going on around the pile of boots, Turland waiting patiently and Haycock darting forward every now and then to make a grab, George noticed that a pair of fellows had detached themselves from the recruitment queue and were moving casually along the line to the edge of the square. Something in their manner made George immediately certain that they had changed their minds and sure enough they were making towards the gate. One of the men waiting in the queue spotted them and knocked the arm of his companion.
‘Oi!’ he shouted. ‘Where you off to?’
One of the men glanced back, and then carried on walking, his gaze fixed firmly on the ground.
A ripple of movement ran along the line as men turned in curiosity.
‘Enjoyed your march through town but had enough of the glory now, eh?’ shouted another man.
A mutter rose from the line. The man who was leading the way to the gate said something in reply that George couldn’t hear and he saw him stumble as someone shoved him. He recovered himself and for a moment squared up to his attacker, but then clearly thought better of it and stepped away from the line, beyond easy reach. There were boos and jeers from the crowd and shouts of ‘Cowards!’ and ‘Turncoats!’ The two men hurried away without looking back.
George felt his cheeks and neck burning as if he had been one of them. How horrible it would be to have everyone against you in that way. He almost hated the men for drawing down upon themselves the very thing that George dreaded most himself: that someone would see through him and realise that although he had been buoyed up by the glitter and the camaraderie, lurking close to the surface on which he floated was a current of dark, cold fear. Surely he wasn’t the only one to feel it. He looked around at the others; Turland was smiling, and Haycock laughing as Rooke hopped around absurdly trying to pull on the second of his new boots. He took a deep breath, thought of the feeling he had experienced as he stepped forward in the street and looked up at the blue sky. The moment passed.
Rooke tied the laces of his old boots together and slung them over his shoulder. They set off companionably towards the gate. Haycock said goodbye. He said he was going to drop in at the gas works to let them know not to expect him next week and then go on to visit a few friends and say cheero.
George walked back with the others to retrieve his bike from behind the basement railings. He didn’t relish the prospect of breaking the news of his enlistment to his family or the Ashwells. Nonetheless, now that he had overcome what he told himself was a fit of the ‘collywobbles’, he felt again the excitement of the great change that was to come. As he shook hands, first with Turland, who wished him a safe journey, and then Rooke, whom he joshed about his luck in squeaking into the army at all, he felt a little rebellious pride begin to grow, that he had instigated this and was being his own man. As he set off back towards the main road out of the town, the strains of the silver band reached him faintly once more and he found himself pedalling to the rhythm of imagined marching feet.
5 (#ulink_a670de4a-8c26-54bf-96d5-38e000b8173e)
FRIAR’S CRAG (#ulink_a670de4a-8c26-54bf-96d5-38e000b8173e)
Feeling hot and dusty, George came through the gate into the yard, squeezed past the privy and the shed and propped his bike against the coal bunker. He took his new uniform out of the basket and tucked it under his arm. Lillie was sitting on the back step, surrounded by cooking pans. She was singing to herself and pouring water from one pan to another, using a broken-handled cup.
‘Hello, our Lillie,’ George said and squatted down opposite her. ‘What have we here? Is it a tea party?’
Lillie offered him the cup and he started to drink from it.
‘No, no,’ Lillie said crossly. ‘P’tend!’
George pretended to take a sip and said mmm. He was rewarded by a pat and a smile. Lillie’s ‘Fums Up’ doll lay on the ground with its painted lick of baby hair and rosy cheeks, looking up with a cheeky expression from the dandelions growing in the cracks in the brick path. George picked her up, put the cup between her hinged arms so that she held it and swivelled them up as if she were drinking. Lillie started to laugh. His mother’s voice came from inside saying, ‘What’s tickled you, Lillikins?’
George put his finger to his lips and passed the doll and the cup to Lillie. ‘There you are,’ he said. ‘You feed Baby.’
He stepped round her and went into the scullery. His mother was in the kitchen beyond, standing at the table with her back to him, buttering the end of a loaf of bread. Her frowsy hair was pulled back into a plait; it hung down her back rather than being pinned in a coil in her usual manner. George noticed the dull grey hairs that were curlier than the brown and had escaped to form a soft edge to the silhouette of her head against the light from the window. Her apron strings were coming undone and the bars of her shoes were unbuttoned as if she’d slipped them on in haste. Such was George’s scrutiny as he hesitated to speak that, as if she had sensed it, she made a small sound of irritation and paused to slap at the back of her neck as though she felt a midge bite.
George steeled himself. ‘I’m back,’ he said.
His mother wheeled round. ‘Where have you been?’ Her face looked pinched; the two worry lines between her eyebrows that he knew so well were drawn tight. ‘You stayed out all night!’
George, unable to tell the truth without eliciting further questions that he didn’t want to answer, simply said, ‘I’ve joined up.’ He walked into the room and put his folded uniform down on the table.
‘Mind! Crumbs,’ she said automatically, moving it further over, away from the breadcrumbs and smudges of butter on the oilcloth. ‘What do you mean? Whatever did you want to do that for?’
‘I … I lost my wages. It was careless of me; I must have put them in my trouser pocket so they fell out when I was riding the bike. I know you always tell me to put them in my breast pocket. I’m sorry.’
‘Well, that was foolish, but never mind that, George. What do you mean you’ve joined up? Not enlisted?’ She looked again at the folded clothes on the table; then she reached out and touched the cloth as though trying to believe that it was real.
George said nothing.
‘It’s not right,’ she said. ‘We’ve taught you that since a baby.’ She looked him in the eye. ‘You know better than to get involved. Think how your father will feel about it; it’s not Christian!’
George shifted uncomfortably. ‘Well, I’ve done it,’ he said. ‘I’ve signed the papers.’ He reached into his pocket to look for the shilling.
‘But it’s dangerous!’ A plaintive note came into his mother’s voice. ‘Surely you’re too young … They won’t send you overseas, will they? How long have you signed up for?’
‘The duration.’
She sat down at the table and pushed away the breadboard, which chinked the butter dish and the muddle of plates together. ‘That’s good, better than signing up for years, that’s not so bad … it’ll be training,’ she said as if to herself. ‘It’ll all be over soon – before you’re old enough to go. Well, that’s something …’ She rested her forehead on her hand, her action belying her words of self-comfort. She looked as though she was about to cry.
George said, ‘Oh, don’t, Mother, please don’t.’ He touched her shoulder but she wouldn’t look at him. ‘I’m very sorry about the money.’ He produced the shilling, saying, ‘Here, I know we’ll still be short but I’ll get this every day so we’ll soon catch up again.’
He held it out to her but his mother just shook her head and looked away from him.
George was unsure what to do; he wished that his father were at home. Even if it meant facing his disappointment, it would be worth it to have him know what best to say to Mother.
‘Well, I suppose you must just look after it for me until I come back then.’ He put the shilling down on the table beside her elbow. He kissed the top of her head, picked up his uniform and went slowly upstairs.
It was stuffy in the bedroom with its sloping ceiling under the eaves. George changed out of his postman’s uniform and put on a clean shirt and trousers. The uniform would have to go back to Mr Ashwell but he didn’t feel that he could ask his mother to sew up the ripped pocket and he knew he would make a mess of it if he tried to do it himself. He put it on a clothes hanger, opened the window and hung it from the sash to air. He wished he had asked Mother for some of that bread.
Ted’s bed was unmade and still had the dent in the pillow where he had slept. George lay down on the smooth coverlet of his own bed, his head propped against the wooden headboard that his father had made for him when he was a child. He had been so proud to have this crude piece of carpentry from his father that he had scratched his initials in the corner. The marks were there still, though dulled by age and polish. It felt strange to look around the little room that was still so full of his childhood and know that he would be leaving it in just two days. All his things had been handed down to Ted so the shelves still held his old games: Ludo, Railway Race and Magnetic Fishing; his eye wandered over the boxes, their cardboard lids softened and dog-eared with use. Piles of Boys’ Best Story Papers and Funnybone comics, which he had reread time and time again, were stuffed higgledy-piggledy between a book on scouting and a pair of shin pads. George thought that he hadn’t taken Ted to play cricket for a long time and felt a pang of regret.
On top of the boxes was Ted’s newest acquisition, a ‘panorama’ of Captain Scott’s expedition. The little theatre had a scarlet proscenium arch decorated with gold acanthus leaves and inside was a snowy scene with tiny stand-up figures. In the foreground, Scott himself shouldered an ice pick while behind him fluttered the English flag, and men, horses and dog sleighs crossed the snow between the spread of tents and the mountains. He thought of the boldness of the expedition, how courageous it was to brave those unknown wastes. He thought of the aching cold, the labour of moving all the equipment and making camp, the fear of breaking ice. How arduous the enterprise and how glorious the attempt! He felt a shiver go through him at the romance of it all. Soon he would be starting out on an expedition of his own that was equally serious in intent, and which would demand just such manly qualities. He got up, retrieved his sketchbook from his jacket pocket and tucked it under his pillow. He closed his eyes and let all the strain, and the events of the last two days, drift into the background. He daydreamt of the time when he would return from the war. He would visit Violet, upright in his uniform, perhaps with stripes on his sleeve, and with his own tales to tell of distant countries …
Ted shook him by the shoulder to wake him to tell him that tea was ready. He groaned as the movement made his tender ribs ache. He could hear the clatter of plates and his mother’s voice telling Lillie to wash her hands at the tap.
‘Are you really going for a soldier?’ Ted said. ‘With a rifle and everything?’ He bounced down on the end of the bed.
George groaned again and said, ‘Te-ed.’ He rubbed his eyes. ‘Is Father home?’ he asked.
‘Not until around ten. I heard him tell Ma at lunchtime that he’s going on to choir practice after the meeting with the Elder. Where’s the rifle then? Go on, show us it.’
‘I haven’t got it yet and anyway it wouldn’t be safe to have it lying around in a bedroom,’ George said in an authoritative tone.
Ted, rather stung by what he saw as George acting ‘above himself’, said, ‘Huh, not much of a soldier then; you haven’t even got a proper uniform.’
George shuffled up the bed and slowly lowered each leg to the ground, wincing as he did so. He had stiffened up and his ribs felt as though someone had taken a hammer to them whilst he slept.
‘What’s the matter with you?’ Ted said grumpily. ‘When you’ve gone, I’ll be able to use your fishing rod. And your cricket bat,’ he added meanly.
George said, ‘If I show you, will you promise not to tell?’
Ted nodded.
George pulled up his shirt and Ted said, ‘Holy Mother!’ – an expletive that he didn’t fully understand but knew to be Very Bad.
George pulled his shirt back down again. ‘Not a word, now.’ He gave Ted a nudge. ‘And I don’t mind if you use my rod and my bat as long as you catch all three-pounders and only hit sixes.’
At teatime, the atmosphere was strained. Lillie was fractious after having spent too long in the sun, which had made her arms and legs pink. She scrambled up on to her mother’s lap and then down again, and wouldn’t be comforted. Ted started asking George more about how he had come to join up but soon realised from George’s frowns and his mother’s hurt silence that this was not a topic to pursue at the table. Finally, overwrought with tiredness, Lillie took to throwing herself backwards in Mother’s arms so that it was all Mother could do to hold on to her, and she decided to put her to bed early.
‘She’s about done up,’ Mother said, standing and hefting Lillie to her shoulder, ‘and I know just how she feels.’
George began to stack the tea things on to a tray. His mother turned at the door. ‘Oh, I forgot to say, George, Kitty called round while you were sleeping to see if you were all right; she’d been concerned since you didn’t drop back to the post office after your round yesterday. I told her you were home safe …’ She tailed off as though uttering the word ‘safe’ brought all her fears once more to the surface. Lillie wriggled in her arms and began banging her head rhythmically against Mother’s shoulder. ‘I told Kitty your news, and I’m sure she’ll pass it on,’ Mother said, holding Lillie tighter and stroking her hair.
George appreciated his mother’s attempt to break the news to Mr A. on his behalf; he hadn’t been relishing the prospect of telling him himself. ‘How did Kitty seem?’ he asked.
‘She looked rather stricken, to be honest. It seemed a bit of a shock to her. Well, I expect it was, Arthur having gone so recently and now they’ll be another man short.’
George felt a stab of anxiety as another uncomfortable consequence spread from his action, a ripple from the stone he had dropped into the calm pool of his own ordinary life.
‘You know you must go and see Mr Ashwell anyway, don’t you? It’s only polite,’ his mother said abruptly and, shushing Lillie, carried on upstairs.
‘Well, it’s very inconvenient,’ Mr Ashwell said. He stood with his arm resting on the mantelpiece in their best room ‘above the shop’. George was seated, along with Mrs Ashwell and Kitty, on the pretty, floral parlour chairs that Mrs Ashwell draped with antimacassars to protect the treasure of her upholstery from Mr Ashwell’s hair oil.
‘I’m sorry, Mr Ashwell,’ George said with downcast eyes.
Mrs Ashwell said in a mild tone, ‘I expect your mother and father are very proud of you – making a stand for poor Belgium and supporting the King.’ She risked a glance at her husband.
Mr Ashwell snorted. ‘It’s all very well, everyone gallivanting off, but why on earth couldn’t you go about it in the proper manner, like Arthur? You could have applied to the Post Office Rifles. We could have had time to plan!’
Mrs Ashwell opened her mouth to suggest that she make a cup of tea but Mr Ashwell held up the flat of his hand and continued: ‘As it is, I’ll now have to take the cart to the station as well as all my other responsibilities, and from tomorrow we shall have to put two of the younger boys on to your duties until we can get a replacement, that’s if we can get one at all.’
George made a great study of the rug. It was a proper woven one, not like the lumpy rag rugs they had at home but smooth and with a trellis pattern and twining, stylised roses.
The lack of an answer from him seemed to annoy Mr Ashwell even more. ‘You realise that your hot-headed decision will mean extra work in the sorting room for Mabel and for Kitty?’ he asked.
George shot a quick look at Kitty, who had her hands clasped in her lap and was looking miserable.
Mr Ashwell, feeling that he had scored a winning point, said, ‘And what if I’m ever ill? Are we to send Kitty out with the horse and cart? Whatever next?’
Mrs Ashwell felt that her husband had breached the bounds of propriety in speaking in that manner to a guest in their home. Seeing that her husband had worked himself up until his eyes were staring and his face was red, and knowing that these signs meant that she would be treated to a reiteration of these arguments until bedtime and probably beyond, she stood up. ‘Kitty,’ she said in a louder voice than she had meant, ‘perhaps you and George should take the opportunity to have a walk, as the evening is so lovely and George’s time with us so short.’
Kitty and George both rose. Mr Ashwell, still watching George with a hawkish expression, picked up his pipe from the mantel and began to tamp tobacco into it. Mrs Ashwell ushered them to the door and George turned back into the room to mutter ‘Goodnight, sir’, as they left. Mrs Ashwell nodded. ‘Give my best to your parents, George.’ She glanced back at Mr Ashwell, who had lit his pipe and was now sucking so hard on it that he was working up a fearsome glow in the bowl. She said, ‘And we wish you the best of luck in your endeavours,’ loud enough for her husband to hear. ‘Keep safe,’ she said, quietly, as she shut the door softly behind them.
‘Where would you like to go?’ George asked as they walked out into the balmy air of the warm evening.
Kitty shrugged. ‘Down to the lake, I suppose. That’s where we always seem to end up.’ They walked across the market place, where cabbage leaves and bits of torn paper were strewn from the Saturday traders’ carts earlier in the day, and then on past the shops. When they came to Abraham’s Photographic Studio, George found himself stopping and peering into the window at the pictures of climbers roped to walls of rock and postcards of lake views, fells and waterfalls. He had seen them all a million times before and yet today his feet had simply refused to pass them. It’s because of Violet, he thought, that’s why, and he pictured her with her camera over her shoulder, setting off on her walk alone, and felt that his heart would break.
‘Are you coming?’ Kitty had stopped a few yards further on and was now looking at him impatiently.
George hurried to catch her up. ‘Are you angry with me too, Kitty?’ he asked. ‘Is it because of the work, as your father said?’
Kitty made a tutting sound and gave George a look which seemed to say: ‘Don’t you understand anything?’ They turned down Paraffin Alley past the ironmonger’s shop, Kitty striding away from him until they reached Lake Road where she slowed down a little to match her pace to that of the couples and families, tourists and locals strolling down towards the lake and its surrounding circle of quiet hills.
George held out his arm to her but she didn’t take it. Instead, she said, ‘You didn’t come back for tea. We waited, but you didn’t come. I thought you’d had an accident or something.’
‘Oh, is that all!’ George said. ‘I’m sorry, by the time I remembered it was too late to get back, I was in Carlisle you see …’ Too late, he realised that he had meant to keep off that subject.
‘What took you to Carlisle, then?’ Kitty said.
‘Oh, I don’t know, I’d heard about other chaps joining up and I thought I’d just go and see. Just find out.’
‘It was a bit sudden, wasn’t it?’ Kitty said, looking at him with that look she had which seemed to go right through you. ‘You never said a word about this before.’
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Judith Allnatt
A poignant story of love and redemption, The Moon Field explores the loss of innocence through a war that destroys everything except the bonds of human hearts.No man’s land is a place in the heart: pitted, cratered and empty as the moon…Hidden in a soldier’s tin box are a painting, a pocket watch, and a dance card – keepsakes of three lives.It is 1914. George Farrell cycles through the tranquil Cumberland fells to deliver a letter, unaware that it will change his life. George has fallen for the rich and beautiful daughter at the Manor House, Miss Violet, but when she lets slip the contents of the letter George is heartbroken to find that she is already promised to another man. George escapes his heartbreak by joining the patriotic rush to war, but his past is not so easily avoided. His rite of passage into adulthood leaves him believing that no woman will be able to love the man he has become.
THE
MOON FIELD
JUDITH ALLNATT
In memory of my mother,
Isabel Gillard,
with love and admiration.
No man’s land is a place in the heart: pitted, cratered and empty as the moon.
Contents
Cover (#u52fb0914-fa1d-5543-bfc5-f41025280380)
Title Page (#u1770b81c-6323-547a-bacb-96e5ee38b838)
Dedication (#u34d23ff9-9265-56de-a550-09a625156fe2)
Epigraph (#ude953101-8de4-5cca-9785-936cec22668c)
Maps (#ud874775e-5913-59d9-9d73-7cc93cf6b8ae)
Prologue (#uba8ed27e-aeab-54e6-8e04-bfbb41060823)
Part One: First Post (#u1168d00a-8647-5b75-a27d-44100c0ca1e7)
1. Watercolour (#u859b01ad-2aa0-50c0-b432-cf1cf351f955)
2. At the Twa Dogs (#u2f671a1d-f2f2-539e-b24d-b0f6b7815caa)
3. Dance Card (#u704c9816-bc78-59de-9135-d66c0140bd92)
4. Measuring Up (#u00aa5805-e829-540a-8182-1fc4db7c5849)
5. Friar’s Crag (#u9f095b71-ce3c-5b1c-aea3-a726be61d117)
6. Feathers on the Stream (#litres_trial_promo)
7. Blue Envelope (#litres_trial_promo)
Part Two: Flanders, Autumn 1914 (#litres_trial_promo)
8. Polders (#litres_trial_promo)
9. Studio Portrait (#litres_trial_promo)
10. Home Comforts (#litres_trial_promo)
11. Playing Cards (#litres_trial_promo)
12. Earth (#litres_trial_promo)
13. The Ruined House (#litres_trial_promo)
Part Three: Blighty (#litres_trial_promo)
14. Christmas Post (#litres_trial_promo)
15. Tin (#litres_trial_promo)
16. 26 Leonard Street (#litres_trial_promo)
17. Breaking (#litres_trial_promo)
18. The Alhambra (#litres_trial_promo)
19. Cat Bells (#litres_trial_promo)
20. Paste Brooch (#litres_trial_promo)
21. The Walled Garden (#litres_trial_promo)
22. Castlerigg (#litres_trial_promo)
23. Stones (#litres_trial_promo)
24. No Man’s Land (#litres_trial_promo)
25. Walking Out (#litres_trial_promo)
Epilogue (#litres_trial_promo)
Acknowledgements (#litres_trial_promo)
A Q&A with Judith Allnatt (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Author (#litres_trial_promo)
Also by Judith Allnatt (#litres_trial_promo)
Copyright (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)
PROLOGUE (#ulink_2a427c2b-339e-59cf-b287-dc788cd77d4f)
The lid of the tin box is tight; you have to move from one corner to another, prising and pushing with your thumbs. Green paint peels from its edges as though time has been gnawing at it. Brown patches of rust have pockmarked its surface, but you can still make out the picture: a man and a woman in a rowing boat, oars shipped, he with a fishing rod, she with a red parasol, the gentle slopes of tree-lined banks, the river calm, sun-dappled. ‘Jacob and Co’s “Water” Biscuits’ reads the legend, as if the biscuits were meant only to be enjoyed when boating, conjuring lazy, sun-filled days suspended in the lap of the water, with time to drift, to float …
The lid comes loose with a faint gasp of released air. Inside are papers and objects, loosely packed. There is a bundle of letters, the expensive blue writing paper tied, oddly, with a bootlace. A pack of Lloyd’s cigarettes has a faint smell of tobacco and an even fainter trace of roses. There are photographs: stiffly posed family portraits of men and women in high collars; a girl playing tennis, one hand bundling the encumbrance of her long skirts aside as she reaches for her shot; hand-tinted postcards of lakeside views.
The heavier objects have found their way to the bottom: an amber heart, a pocket watch, a set of keys, and an ivory dance-card holder with a tiny ebony pencil. Lifted, each one fits your hand, makes a hieroglyph: the shape of the past against your palm. This was real; I was there, they say as you feel their weight and smoothness.
Beneath them, lining the tin, is the stiff paper of a watercolour painting, slightly foxed and with its edges curling a little but still with its landscape greens and blues, the texture of the paper showing through the brushstrokes of some unknown hand.
PART ONE (#ulink_f43b15af-e26e-5b3d-abd5-92e88521e8ce)
1 (#ulink_52521034-d97f-578d-ac81-dedecb6a4f8b)
WATERCOLOUR (#ulink_52521034-d97f-578d-ac81-dedecb6a4f8b)
Today would be the day. George touched the bulky package in the breast pocket of his postman’s uniform as if to check, one more time, that it was there. His best watercolour was pressed between the pages of his sketchbook to keep it flat and pristine, as a gift should be. He felt his heart beating against the board back of the book. All morning it had been beating out the seconds, the minutes and the hours between his decision and the act. Today, when he went on the last leg of his rounds, he would present Violet with the painting over which he had laboured. ‘As a token of my esteem,’ he would say, for, even to himself, he dared not use the word love.
In the sorting room at the back of the post office, he greeted the others, hung his empty bag on its hooks at the sorting table so that it sagged open, ready to be filled, and leant against the wall to take a few moments’ rest. The late-morning sun slanted down through the high windows, alive with paper dust that rose from the table: a vast horse-trough affair with shuttered sides. Kitty and her mother, Mrs Ashwell, their sleeves rolled up, picked at the choppy waves of letters, their pale arms and poised fingers moving as precisely as swans dipping to feed. Every handful of mail, white, cream and bill-brown, was shuffled quickly into the pigeonholes that covered the rear wall, each neatly labelled street by street.
‘I see Mrs Verney’s Christopher has a birthday,’ Kitty said as she pressed a handful of envelopes into ‘20–50 Helvellyn Street’.
‘He’s reached his majority,’ Mrs Ashwell said. ‘Let’s hope he’s soon home to enjoy it.’
Mr Ashwell, the postmaster, came in carrying a sack of mail over his shoulder. He nudged George and thrust the sack into his arms. ‘Dreaming again, George?’ he said. ‘You left this one by the counter right where I could trip over it.’
‘Sorry, sir,’ George said quickly.
Mr Ashwell made some show of dusting off his front and pulling his waistcoat down straight. ‘Concentration, young man,’ he said, giving George one of his straight looks. ‘Concentration is needed to make sure that work proceeds in an orderly manner.’ He stroked his moustache with his finger and thumb while continuing to fix George with his gaze. George felt his cheeks begin to burn.
Mr Ashwell said, without looking at his wife, ‘Very busy on the counter today, Mabel. Tea would be most acceptable. Arthur’s assistance sorely missed.’
Mrs Ashwell’s hands stilled amongst the letters and her back stiffened as if to brace herself against the thought of her son, so far from home. Through the doorway between the sorting room and the shop, she could see Arthur’s old position at the counter. The absence of his broad back and shoulders, of the familiar fold of skin over his tight collar and the neatly cut rectangle of brown hair at his neck struck her anew each time she let her glance stray that way. It was as though someone had punched out an Arthur-shaped piece of her existence and pasted in its place a set of scales and a view of the open post office door and the cobbled street beyond.
Sometimes, when the post office was closed and Mr Ashwell busy elsewhere, she would stand in Arthur’s old place and rest her elbows where his had rested. She would bow her head and finger through the set of rubber stamps as if they were rosary beads. At these moments, she tried not to look at the noticeboard on the side wall. Amongst the public notices of opening hours and postal rates was the sign that her husband had insisted be displayed, just as all official documents that were sent from head office must be. An innocuous buff-coloured sheet of paper that one might easily overlook, thinking it yet another piece of dull information, it read:
POST OFFICE RIFLES –
The postmaster’s permission to join must be sought.
Pay is equal to civil pay for all Established Officers plus Free Kit, Rations and Quarters.
GOD SAVE THE KING.
The detailed terms and conditions followed in smaller print below.
Mrs Ashwell thought about the boredom of the counter job on a quiet afternoon, of how Arthur’s eyes must have run over and over all the notices: ‘Foreign packages must be passed to the counter clerk.’ ‘Release is for one year’s service.’ ‘This office is closed on Sundays and official holidays.’ ‘Remuneration will be at an enhanced rate.’ She imagined the phrases repeating in his mind as he tinkered with the scales, idly building pyramids of brass weights on the pan.
‘Tea,’ she said, under her breath. Then more determinedly: ‘Tea,’ and went upstairs to their living quarters to make it.
George hefted the sack up on to the table and upended it, spilling a new landslide of mail that re-covered the chinks of oak board that had begun to show through.
‘Is that the last bag?’ Kitty asked of her father’s retreating back.
‘Better ask George if he’s left any more lying about,’ he said and closed the door behind him.
Kitty rolled her eyes at George. ‘He’s been like a bear with a sore head ever since breakfast. We got Arthur’s first letter,’ she added.
George came round to her side of the table and they sorted side by side, their heads bent companionably together, George’s fair hair ruffled where he had run his hands through it in the heat, Kitty’s springy, pale brown hair tied back neatly out of the way. George waited for her to elaborate about Arthur but Kitty bent her head to her work and pressed her lips together. After a while, when the job was almost done, George said in his slow, gentle way, ‘It must be a terrible worry for your father.’
Kitty snorted. ‘Quite to the contrary; Arthur is travelling further afield than Penrith and preparing to tackle the enemy, whereas Father is still chained to the counter like a piece of pencil on a string.’
‘Aah,’ said George, pausing to look at her more closely. ‘And how about you, Kitty? How are you bearing up?’
‘I miss him, but it makes me sad to see Mother miss him even more and it makes me cross that Father won’t let the subject rest.’ She tapped the letters in her hand smartly on their side to line them up, shoved them roughly into a pigeonhole and then, seeing her mistake, pulled them back out again.
George laid his hand on her shoulder. ‘Oh, Kit,’ he said. ‘I’m so sorry.’
She gave him a half-hearted smile. ‘Never mind. What was it we used to say at school on bad days?’
‘All manner of things shall be well,’ George said slowly.
‘Exactly.’ She looked again at the address on top of her pile of mail and placed it carefully into the correct wooden cubby-hole. ‘Here, give us your bag,’ she said. ‘I’ll fill it up.’
He held the bag open while she put in the packages of post to be delivered to the villages; then she parcelled up each street with string and dropped them in on top. She helped him on with the bag, reaching up to lift the strap over his shoulder and then settling the weight at his back.
‘Sorry it’s a heavy one,’ she said.
‘It’s cutting down the number of deliveries that’s done it. Bound to be heavy.’
She buckled the bag and gave it a pat. ‘See you later,’ she said. ‘We’ve got plum bread for tea. I’ll save you some.’
George nodded and went out through the post office, past the dour looks of Mr Ashwell and a queue of chattering customers and into the brightness of the day. The market place seemed just as busy as usual; almost impossible to believe that the country was at war: shoppers were choosing vegetables, lengths of cloth and ironmongery from the carts lined up in rows in the centre of the square, each cart tipped forward to rest on its shafts, the better to show the goods. The calls of the vendors mixed with the barking of dogs and the rumble of a motor charabanc passing along St John’s Street. The sky was a hazy white and the green flanks of the hills rose in the distance behind the tower of the Moot Hall, their lines as familiar to him as the lineaments of his own face. Taking a deep breath to clear his lungs of the indoor smell of the post office, he caught the musky odour of horse dung and the sharper tang of motor oil. He paused to adjust the strap of the postbag and loosen his tie a little; then he turned down the alley at the side of the post office to collect his bike. He wheeled it out, leaning its saddle against his thigh, and went on in this fashion, bumping over the cobbles, past the Moot Hall and into the narrow streets beyond.
The bike was a heavy, black, iron thing with a basket the size of a lobster pot and when George first got it, he’d not been able to manage it on the steep inclines. He’d needed to get off halfway up a hill and walk it up the rest, sweat darkening his fair hair and sticking it to his forehead. He had persevered though, pedalling a little further each time, thinking of his body as an engine that would benefit from work, and taking pleasure in the healthy ache of his muscles at the end of a day. His uniform jacket had needed to be let out along the back seam to allow for the growing breadth of his shoulders, and his mother, fitting the jacket on him, had called him an ‘ox of a man’ and made him smile. Now, by standing up on the pedals he could force the bike uphill, clanking and complaining, his solid frame bent over the handlebars, shoulders hunched and front wheel wobbling as he slowed for the steepest slopes. Having the bike meant that he could deliver to the farms and hamlets. His spirits lifted as soon as he got out among the fells and he happily left the younger boys to divide the rest of the town between them and deliver on foot carrying lightly loaded bags and returning more frequently to the office to refill them.
George forced himself to walk at his usual pace along the street and up and down the steps of the guesthouses. There was no point hurrying, he told himself sternly, because if he arrived at the Manor House early she would still be lunching and he would have to deliver the family’s letters to the gatehouse, and would miss his chance again. No, he had to do everything as usual and must not leave the town until the Moot Hall clock struck one. That would bring him to the grounds around two o’clock, just as she set out down the lane from the house to take her walk but before she turned off right for the fell or left for the fields and the river.
It had been at the bridge that he had first seen her. He had almost not noticed her in the dappled shadows of the alders that grew beside the river, right close against the stonework of the bridge; only the brightness of her white blouse had given her away, she was so still. She was holding a brown box in both hands and leaning against the parapet. George was struck by the way her straight brown hair was caught in a twist that sat neatly at the nape of her neck and how her posture, leaning forward to focus intently on something below, accentuated the slenderness of her waist. He slowed the bike, thinking to pass on the far side of the narrow bridge without disturbing her but the crackle of the wheels over the grit caught her ear and she turned, her hands still holding the object in front of her and looked at him as if puzzled for a moment. Her face … pale, with dark eyes, forehead slightly drawn, as if coming round from sleep, high cheekbones and full lips, which ran into upward indentations at the corners suggesting the tantalising possibility of a smile that was at odds with the serious expression of her eyes. Without even thinking, he put one foot down on the ground and stopped dead.
‘What are you doing?’ he said, blurting it out into the moment before she could turn away.
‘Preparing to take a photograph,’ she said.
He got off the bike and wheeled it over to her. His family had only one photograph, a studio portrait of his parents: his mother seated, wearing her bridal gown, veil and circlet of flowers; his father standing stiffly behind her, one hand resting on her shoulder.
She said, ‘I want to catch the way the light is reflecting off the water on to the rock,’ and pointed at the boulders that were tumbled midstream, the current divided by them into shining cords that glittered and threw up shifting patterns on their undersides.
He nodded and they stood together watching the movement and listening to the rush and trickle of the water over the bed of smaller stones.
‘Can you see a pattern in it?’ she asked.
‘Nearly …’ he said, for it seemed that there was a pattern though it was complex and hidden just beyond his ability to grasp it.
She turned to him. ‘You’re right,’ she said. ‘A nearly pattern. It’s just a little too quick for us to follow.’
She held the camera up again and looked down through the viewfinder. She sighed and passed it to him, saying, ‘What do you think? It’ll be impossible to catch the sense of motion, of course.’
The viewfinder had a greyish tint and George looked through it at a scene transformed in an instant to cooler tones. Gnats showed like grey dots above the surface of the water, their dancing as complex as the lights on the rocks beside them. Without the glare, the shifting lights were softer. He could see, on the shady side of the stones, dark bars beneath the water.
‘There are trout,’ he said, ‘lying up out of the heat.’
‘Are there? Where?’ She peered over the parapet at where he pointed. ‘Are you an angler?’ she asked.
George shrugged. ‘I fish a bit. Mostly I just look a lot and so I see things.’
She gave a little smile and he blushed as if he had said something stupid. He gave the camera back to her. ‘Will it be in colour? The picture?’ he asked, making an effort to conquer his shyness.
She nodded. ‘The new film still isn’t as close to a natural palette as one would like; it’s better than monochrome though.’
‘Except for in the snow,’ George said.
That smile again. George’s heart turned over. ‘I prefer painting,’ he blurted out; then, fearing he’d been rude: ‘I mean you can get the real colours then, all of them. I like going up on the fells in the evenings when there are greys and purples and the rust of the bracken, not just green, the slopes aren’t ever just green …’
She looked at him then. Not as if he was being dull, as his little brother, Ted did, or as if he was unhinged as Arthur had once when he spoke to him about painting, but as if she was really, truly listening. She said, ‘… and clouds aren’t ever only white any more than the water’s ever only blue. Do you go down to Derwentwater to paint?’
‘Sometimes,’ George said, ‘and out on the tops: Cat Bells, Helvellyn. But I haven’t always got paints; sometimes I sketch. It’s expensive, you know.’
‘I don’t always take the camera,’ she said, ‘sometimes I just sketch too.’ She held out her hand. ‘Violet Walter. I live back there.’ She pointed towards the trees, beyond which, George knew, lay only one house, the Manor House with its grey roofs and many chimneys, impressive even against the rising ranks of evergreens that finished like a tideline halfway up the huge bulk of Ullock Pike, which over-towered all.
‘George Farrell,’ he said, taking her pale, perfectly smooth hand in his, then letting it go quickly in fear that she would think him too familiar. ‘P-P …’ he stuttered over the word ‘postman’.
‘Painter,’ she said and smiled.
That had been in May. The first month he had looked for her often but his searching had been in vain because he had later learnt that she had been away. She told him that she had been staying with Elizabeth Lyne, an old school friend in Carlisle: describing another world of tea taken on the lawn, with white cloths under spreading elms, and dancing after twilight, music spilling like magic from the open throat of the gramophone.
He had kept looking and had eventually been rewarded. Sometimes he just glimpsed a distant figure on the hillside as he passed with his bike and bag along the road below; then she would raise her hand to him and he to her, in salutation. Sometimes she would be coming towards him from home with her camera in its leather box slung across her shoulder and he would give her the letters for the house. Almost every day, in among a sheaf of bills in brown envelopes, there would be one creamy envelope for her with a Carlisle postmark. She would shuffle through the letters until she saw it and then stow it in one pocket and put the rest in the other. He imagined that she must miss her friend badly and feel the isolation of the spot after her companionable stay in the town.
When he had passed over the letters, he would turn around so that he could walk with her a while. He would wheel the bike alongside; her camera stowed with the post in the basket so that she might have a hand free to hold her long skirt clear of the dusty road. If she had letters of her own to send, in the pale blue envelopes she favoured, they would walk first to the postbox before strolling on, out into the countryside. Sometimes, the best times, when he climbed a track to one of the lonely hill farms, he would come across her leaning on a gate looking out over the valley and he would join her to share the view. They talked of the way the clouds chased the light over the hills, and of the hawks nesting in the copse near the house, which hovered, dark specks in the heavens, giving perspective and making the piled clouds mountainous.
George learnt that she was older than he was by three years. ‘An old lady of twenty-one,’ she said. An only child, she had been educated at a boarding school in Carlisle, then a finishing school in France. She spoke of its beauty: the French countryside softer than Cumberland with hedges rather than walls, low slopes and wide plains of rich pasture and standing crops. She described the rocky coast of Brittany, its crashing waves and spume-filled air, and a Normandy beach with a wide arc of sand, which she had walked from end to end, slipping away from her school party to watch the gannets dive like black arrows into the sea. Her eyes lit up as she told him of such things and she motioned with her hands to trace the sweep of the bay or the birds’ headlong plunge. Once he told her that looking out over the lake from the top of the fells was what made him certain that he had a soul, and she had touched his arm and said, ‘Yes, yes.’
He had told her how it had been at his school. How he was different, always in trouble when the master asked him a question and he was unable to answer because he had been staring out of the window at the clouds, making dragons and faces and genies from their ever-changing shapes. He had said less and less the more he grew afraid that he would get it wrong, until the other children called him ‘moony’ and ‘idiot’ and ‘simple’.
‘You’re far from simple, George,’ she said. ‘They mistook the distraction that comes from hard thought for no thought at all, and that’s their error.’ She touched his sleeve again and he thought his heart would burst with pride because although Kitty and his mother had always said such things this was different.
When she spoke of her parents, she always had a note of worry in her voice. Her father was often abroad attending to his business interests, leaving the land and Home Farm to the estate manager, and her mother to her own resources. Mrs Walter, too much alone, suffered ‘sick-headaches’ and fatigue and often withdrew to her room. Violet once let slip that her father, even when back in London, frequently stayed at his club and George wondered what had caused the breach between her parents, but asked no further, guessing at the hurt that a daughter would feel to know that she was not enough to tempt a father home.
From her room, Mrs Walter instructed the housekeeper, Mrs Burbidge, and took her lunch on a tray. Afterwards she wrote letters, but later in the afternoon, she required Violet’s company, wanting her to sit with her and talk or read aloud. As the sun grew hotter in the afternoon, George would notice Violet glancing back at the copse within which the house was hidden or at her silver wristwatch. He would rack his brain for a question. ‘What was the town like, where your school was? What did you sketch on your picnics?’ Anything to stop her saying the words he dreaded: ‘I must go.’
George rattled the latch of a garden gate and then stood stock-still to listen, in case he had missed the Moot Hall bell. He heard nothing but nonetheless quickened his pace, the bike wheels juddering as he turned into Leonard Street where he lived. As he bumped the bike to a stop outside the house, his mother came to the door to meet him carrying a package wrapped in paper and with Lillie hanging on to her apron and sucking her thumb.
‘I thought I heard you; you made such a clatter,’ his mother said. ‘Have you got a bit behind?’ She passed him the package of sandwiches and a billycan of cold tea.
‘Carry!’ Lillie said and let go of the apron to lift her arms up to him.
‘You mustn’t get behind, George. Mr Ashwell’s a tartar for punctuality.’
‘Carry!’ Lillie said again, imperiously, and George put the food down on the step and lifted her under the armpits: a bundle of warm body and petticoats. He put her on his shoulders where she grabbed on to handfuls of his hair.
‘Ow! Lillie!’ he said and loosened her fingers, laying them flat against his head.
‘Horsy! Horsy!’ Lillie said and George held on tight to her skinny knees and jogged obligingly up and down the street.
The sound of the Moot Hall bell reached him, a single sonorous note, and he lifted Lillie down, detaching her fingers from his ear as he did so, and handed her into his mother’s arms.
‘You’d better cut along,’ she said. ‘You’d think it was a holy calling the way Mr A. goes on about duty and professionalism and “the mail must get through in all weathers …”.’ But George was already on his way, billycan rattling from the handlebars and the corner of the sandwich packet clamped between his teeth as he ran with the bike to the end of the road, threw his leg over the saddle and freewheeled down Wordsworth Street.
He pedalled along the road towards the park and left the buildings behind him, out into the elation of open space and over the bridge where the river flowed shallow and glittering and ducks and moorhens pecked at the trailing green weed. He passed the bowling greens where men in whites and straw hats were playing a tournament, while the ladies and elderly gentlemen watched from the benches, and then he took the back paths through the exotic trees, keeping out of sight of the park keeper, who would curse at him and make him get off his bike and walk. Then he was out on Brundholme Road with open fields either side, the sun hot on his back, soaking through his dark uniform jacket like warm water, the material prickling through his shirt.
By the time he had delivered the mail to the village post offices and to the scatter of farms beyond, he was starting to worry that he would arrive too late and took the last farm track down from the hill at a rate that rattled his teeth. A mile or so further on along the main road to Carlisle he reached the familiar gatehouse and turned in to the drive through the wood, his way lined by the dark glossy leaves of rhododendrons and the straight boles of Scots pines. Here and there, copper beeches made a splash of colour against the massive bulk of Dodd Fell that rose up behind, cluttered with rocks and strewn with sheep: small, pale dots on its upper slopes.
As he rounded the bend to face directly into the sun, he was dazzled momentarily; he put his hand up to his brow and squinted. A familiar figure, carrying a brown leather box, was making leisurely progress along the drive towards him. His pulse quickened. He felt a sensation run through him like a current through a wire making his grip on the handlebars tighten and his sense of the board back of his sketchbook in his pocket keener, as if it had imprinted itself on his skin. He forced himself to slow, to sit down on the saddle, to rehearse his speech in his head. He would greet her as usual, turn the bike around as usual, give her the post for the house and then, just casually, as if it were something extra he’d just remembered, take out his sketchbook, slip out the painting and say to her, ‘This is for you, as a small token of my esteem.’ She would thank him in her solemn voice to show that she took his gift seriously, and would look at it and exclaim to see that it was her favourite view – from Dodd Wood, out over the lake – and perhaps admire the workmanship. Here his stomach made a strange kind of tumble, as if he had swung so high in a swing that he thought he might fly right over the top of the bar. Perhaps she would put it carefully into her camera case and say she would treasure it … The bike jounced into a rut that nearly unseated him. He swerved and squeezed on the brakes; then he took a deep breath and got off the bike, just as she raised her free arm and waved: a wide, expansive gesture that made his heart lift. He forced himself to walk slowly towards her, concentrating on the soft shushing that the tyres made on the drive.
‘Hello there, I don’t suppose you have anything for me?’ she said with a smile as he reached her and swept the bike round in a circle to walk back with her the way he had come.
He handed her the sheaf of letters that he had saved until last. Straightaway she picked out the cream envelope and tucked the rest into her pocket. She felt the letter between her thumb and forefinger and frowned as if surprised by its thinness. She turned it over as if she were about to open it, but then turned it back and started to walk alongside him.
He glanced sideways at her but she didn’t turn to look at him and the words he had planned to say deserted him. ‘Do you have anything to send?’ he asked instead. She shook her head. ‘Nothing from the house today, and I … I’m not sure. Perhaps I should read this one first.’
‘Where are you planning to walk today?’ he asked. ‘It’s very hot once you’re out in the sun, you might find it tiring.’
‘I thought I’d go up through Dodd Wood. I can take advantage of the sun and get a view of it brightening the lake without getting overheated.’
George nodded, pleased that he could go with her for most of the way as Dodd Wood was on his route back. ‘I know a good spot where you can see the different colour of the shallows and the deeper water,’ he began, thinking to turn the conversation to lake views in general and from there to painting them and then to one painting in particular, but the thought was enough to cause him to break into a deep blush and he found himself suddenly rushing to jump ahead, ‘In fact I’ve brought something, as a token—’
‘I’m sorry, George,’ she said, fingering the letter. ‘Forgive me, but I feel that I can’t wait; I must open this. Would you mind?’
George shook his head dumbly; a sense of misgiving filled him and he knew that he would not now take out the sketchbook from his pocket; that, indeed, he felt afraid that its angular lines must show through the material, its bulky shape exposed, as if he carried his feelings like a foolish badge for all to see.
Violet took a few quick steps and then stopped; he drew to a halt a little behind her. She slit the envelope with her thumb, pulled out a single sheet of paper and bent over it, quickly scanning the page. Her hand dropped to her side.
She turned to him. ‘It’s Edmund,’ she said. ‘He’s being sent away for more training, then he’ll be posted abroad.’
‘Edmund?’ he said.
‘Edmund Lyne, Elizabeth’s brother.’ She looked at him as though he were being obtuse. ‘We were going to be engaged,’ she said flatly. ‘I was hoping to see him again when he got leave, to have one more visit to Carlisle before … before …’ She looked away, into the trees, unable to trust herself to speak.
‘I see,’ George said as he began to understand. What a fool, he thought, to have imagined all those letters were exchanges between school friends: gossip and girlish confidences. Of course – they were love letters; of course they were. The phrase ‘a token of my esteem’ floated through his mind as though his brain was working minutes behind and had finally located the words he had so carefully chosen. An engagement! He swallowed hard; he mustn’t let her even glimpse his feelings. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said; then, taking a deep breath: ‘Is there anything I can do?’
She didn’t answer but refolded the letter and then folded it again into a thin slip. Slowly, she returned it to its envelope and carried on folding, turning the letter into a small rectangle that fitted into her closed hand. ‘He writes in haste; they’re to travel to a training camp, and then be sent abroad. That’s all they’re allowed to say. He says he’ll write again.’ She nodded twice and wiped her cheeks with the back of her hand. At last she looked at him and her face was blotchy, her eyes reddened. ‘So silly of me,’ she said. ‘Perhaps I had better go back to the house.’
‘I’ll walk back with you,’ George forced himself to say although he longed to get away so he could be on his own, where no one could see him, where he could think.
‘No need, I’ll be fine,’ she said and took in a huge breath. ‘I’m sorry about all this.’ She half turned but then seemed to remember something. ‘Did you say you had something else for me?’
‘It was nothing, really,’ George said, trying to keep the misery from his voice. She was looking at him more closely now, her brows furrowed in puzzlement.
‘George?’ she said and he could see her expression change to concern as she scanned his face.
‘I told you; it was nothing!’ George said more loudly than he intended, his voice coming out hoarse and strained as he yanked the bike straight and moved past her. ‘George, I didn’t think, I’m so sorry …’ she started.
He could hold on no longer and threw himself at the bike, nearly overbalancing as the postbag swung sideways. He pushed off and stood up on the pedals to gain speed, forcing it along the rutty drive and away from her in a spatter of grit. Gasping for breath, he looked back only once as he reached the bend. She was standing looking after him, silhouetted against the light at the end of the tunnel of trees, her camera slung across her shoulder so that it bulged at her side, her shoulders drooping and her fist still closed over the letter. Then he swung away into the trees that would hide him from view.
2 (#ulink_4736a511-cdd3-5cbe-b65e-17a670dbba63)
AT THE TWA DOGS (#ulink_4736a511-cdd3-5cbe-b65e-17a670dbba63)
When George regained the road after leaving Violet, he wanted to be alone and so he turned the opposite way from home and rode out towards Carlisle. He cursed himself as a fool to have harboured affection in the first place for someone he knew to be so far above his own station, and called himself an idiot not to have guessed that she would have an admirer. He imagined how he must seem in her eyes: a callow boy, not yet a man, a lackey, someone you had to be kind to … Yet, when he thought about her tears, the feelings he had were not boyish: he felt fierce, angry with anyone or anything that could dare to hurt her. He wished, more than anything in the world, that he could wipe the tears away, and that he could comfort her and hold her in his arms. It had been weak to run away! Yet, now that he had run away, now that she must think him a cad, how was he to face her again? The thought of the way they had walked and talked together, the camaraderie they had shared and the feeling that this would never be recaptured weighed upon him; he rode on and on, seeking to blank out emotion with physical sensation, pushing his aching muscles further, seeking relief through sheer fatigue.
He rode and rode until he eventually came to the suburbs of the town, where dirty redbrick terraces crowded straight on to the roads and children dodged unnervingly in and out between the carts and cycles and motors. He turned out of the mêlée and into the haven of a leafy park where he sat on a bench for a considerable time, thinking about Violet and her sweetheart.
After a while he realised that Kitty would be wondering why he hadn’t come back for tea. Three young men were kicking a football around on the lawns and larking about. The light began to wane and he remembered that his mother would be worried, yet he sat on, idly watching them and feeling dispirited.
One of the young men, showing off, kicked the ball high into the beech tree above him, showering him with leaves and breaking his reverie. He listened to them daring each other to get the ball down and watched as they threw sticks, unsuccessfully, until eventually two of them shinned up the tree. There they jumped up and down to shake the branches and urged each other to go higher and further while the third shook his head in disbelief and sat down on the bench next to George. He introduced himself as Ernest Turland, and said to George, ‘One of the bloody fools is going to break his head. Probably Rooke,’ he added. ‘Haycock’s taller and stronger.’ The bigger chap triumphed at last by hanging from the branch where the ball had lodged, his boots appearing alarmingly in mid-air as he swung. The branch creaked ominously but the ball fell with a sound of snapping twigs and rustling leaves just as a park keeper appeared and started to lock up the tennis courts. Catching sight of them, he let out a shout. Turland scooped up the ball and had taken George’s bike by the handlebars before George had even worked out that he would cop it too if he stayed.
‘Come on!’ Turland said and George got on the bike and pushed off, standing on the pedals with Turland perched on the seat with his legs dangling and the ball held tight against his stomach. Behind them, the others clambered down, dropped to the ground and then took off running after them.
‘Go to the Twa Dogs!’ Haycock called out as he swerved between two metal bollards and along a footpath, leaving the bike to take the road.
‘Left! Go left!’ Turland said as they made it to the wrought-iron gates at the edge of the park. George glanced back and saw the park keeper standing with one hand above his eyes peering after them, dazzled by the low sun. He cut left and then followed Haycock, who had re-emerged further along the road, down a series of side roads and back alleys between the terraced houses. When they reached the pub, Turland showed him where to stow the bike behind the privy at the rear and pressed him to come in for a drink. George, carried along on a wave of bonhomie that was new to him, readily agreed. Triumphant after their escape, jostling each other, faces flushed, they all crowded inside.
Turland ordered beers and they squeezed around a table, Rooke pouncing on spare stools and drawing them over. The place was full of men in their working clothes, some sitting at tables, some standing or leaning on the bar and a group playing shove-ha’penny at a board in the corner. The only female was a young woman with a figure that was beyond buxom, who was squeezing between tables to collect up the glasses. She paused beside a swarthy, heavily built man in shirtsleeves and braces who sat alone at a corner table reading a newspaper. George heard him ask for whisky and push some coins over to her without bothering to look up from his paper. She went straight to the bar and returned with a whisky glass, before carrying on stacking spent glasses. A fug of cigarette and pipe smoke hung in the air; the smell of Capstans mixing with the fruity smell of the briar. The whitewashed walls of the room had been turned a glossy brownish-yellow by the smoke. The only decoration in the place was a handful of paper Union Jack flags in a stoneware jar on the bar and a couple of pen-and-ink caricatures in frames, their faded mounts scattered with thrips, trapped behind the glass.
Behind the bar, a balding man with a sour face was pulling pints. He nodded to a younger man who came in briefly to change a barrel and then rolled the empty one out, cursing as it stuck in the doorway and kicking it through.
‘As I said, Ernest Turland, junior reporter.’ Turland offered him a hand wet with slopped beer. ‘And this is Tom Haycock, from the gas works, and Percy Rooke …’
‘… of no fixed employment,’ Rooke cut in.
‘Currently delivery boy and general factotum at the Cumberland News but with an eye to advancement,’ Turland said, punching Rooke lightly on the arm.
George introduced himself as George Farrell and, when pressed about why he had been sitting alone and mournful in a strange town, gave a vague answer about having had a disappointment and quickly asked how they came to be friends.
‘Turland and I were in the scouts together,’ Haycock said, ‘and Rooke lives at Turland’s lodgings.’
‘Under the dragon’s eye,’ Rooke said. ‘She even counts the toast at breakfast.’
‘That’s because she knows you pocket some for your lunch,’ Turland said.
Rooke grinned and shrugged. He took a pack of dog-eared cards from his pocket and shuffled them adeptly, flipping through two piles with his thumbs, cutting and splicing them together and then spreading them out on the table like a fan flicked open and clicked shut again. They decided on pontoon and as they played George took the opportunity to observe his new companions.
Haycock and Turland looked around his own age, eighteen or nineteen, Haycock maybe a little older as he was stocky, wider in the chest and well muscled; he moved with the confidence of a man who works with his hands and knows the strength of his arm. He had fair, crinkly hair that reminded George of the wire wool he used to clean the spokes on his bicycle wheels. Turland, who studied his cards with great seriousness, was a good-looking young man with more delicate features, dark-haired and with brown eyes and an olive complexion that seemed darker than merely the tan of summer. George wondered if there was continental blood in his family.
Rooke, despite his predatory name, reminded George somehow of a mouse: he was so quick in his movements and he was small, surely no more than sixteen, if that, really still just a boy. His hair was slicked to the side, flat to his head, which didn’t flatter him as his ears stuck out rather. His eyebrows seemed always to be raised, giving him a look not so much of surprise as constant alert anxiety, as though he was ready to take off at any minute should something untoward occur.
Rooke had suggested that they play for matches and he soon had a pile of them in front of him, whereas George, who hadn’t been giving the game his full attention, had only three and Haycock, who broke off every now and then to watch the girl collecting the glasses, had not fared much better.
‘It’s Farrell’s round then,’ Rooke said, poking George’s pathetic cache of matches.
‘That’s not hospitable,’ Turland said. ‘He’s a visitor.’
‘It’s all right,’ George said quickly. ‘I got paid today.’ He took out his pay packet from his jacket pocket, slit it open with his thumb and began to pull out a note from inside. There was a lull in the conversation at the table beside them and Haycock leant over and quickly put his calloused hand over George’s, crumpling both notes and envelope back into his fist.
‘Are you daft, man? This isn’t the place to show your money about.’
George, feeling confused, stuffed the money back into his lower pocket and automatically, without thinking, patted his breast pocket where the painting still lay between the covers of his sketchbook. With a sickening jolt, he remembered the humiliation and disappointment of the afternoon and placed his hand flat upon the table as if to keep it in view and prevent it from betraying his feelings.
Haycock stood up, saying, ‘My shout. Same again all round.’ He made his way between the tight-packed tables to the press of men at the bar.
Turland scooped all of the matches back into the centre of the table. ‘You took some off Haycock again,’ he said to Rooke sadly.
Rooke grinned. ‘He’s so easy; he can’t keep his eyes off a bit of skirt.’
‘You’re incorrigible,’ Turland said with good humour.
‘What’s that mean? That another of your newspaper words?’
‘A hopeless case.’
Rooke just laughed.
When Haycock returned with the drinks, George put out of his head the Methodist teachings on the evils of drink that his parents and a lifetime of chapel meetings had dinned into him. He was surprised how easily he did it. He had never taken a drink before, and his only experience of public houses was waiting outside while tracts for the Temperance League were distributed by his mother and a group of chapel ladies. He was anxious not to let his naivety show: even Rooke seemed at home in the bar. How could he have thought that Violet might see him as a man when he lived the life of a boy? He drank fast, as if the golden liquid that he poured down his throat could fill up the empty space inside him where his hopes had once been. They played on and drank more: Rooke was sent up to the bar, grumbling, then Turland went again, refusing to let George take his turn as he was ‘a visitor’ and ‘had got him out of a jam, courtesy of the bike’.
As they played, the conversation among the men around them ebbed and flowed but returned always to the war: the horses being commandeered – what would the brewery do for the dray-carts? The barracks at the castle were filling up with new recruits; since Mons, men were flocking to the country’s aid … they said the Germans were doing unspeakable things; they said someone had heard engines over Cockermouth, Zeppelins spying out the land …
As he listened, George felt an uneasy mixture of excitement and fear. What if the Germans were to come here? It was all very well being an island but what if the navy didn’t hold? He imagined the heavy tread of marching feet through the town. An image from one of the recruitment posters came into his mind: a woman and child at a window, and suddenly the woman’s anxious face was his mother’s and the child clinging to her skirts was Lillie.
His father said it was best to stick to simple principles: ‘Thou shalt not kill’, that all should ‘beat swords into ploughshares’. George knew his own view: that he would protect Mother and the rest of his family with his life. He had heard his father preach at the Convention last year on the text of ‘turn the other cheek’. He imagined how badly such a sermon would be received in this changed world, against a backdrop of flags and posters, and men in uniform on the move, singing en route to the war. A piercing doubt about his father caught him for a moment before he turned its shaft away. Surely, if the enemy were at the door his father too would defend them all – turning the other cheek would be the same as turning your eyes away! Feeling disloyal, he comforted himself with the words he’d heard his father speak to his mother: that it would soon be over, that Europe didn’t have the gold reserves to fund a modern war, that it could only last months and that they should trust in the Almighty.
Turland, who had also obviously been listening in to the conversation of the older men, suddenly turned to Haycock and said, ‘I’ve been thinking of going.’
‘Signing up?’ Haycock stopped playing.
‘Someone’s got to do something, don’t you think?’
‘But you’ve got a good place at the paper. Not like me, poking about in machinery innards all day at the risk of losing my fingers. Now I have been thinking about having a bit of a jaunt. What on earth would you want to go for?’
‘Oh, I don’t know,’ Turland said. ‘I want to do something worthwhile, I suppose, and we’re needed: we can’t let the Germans go striding around Europe picking up countries to put in their pockets, can we?’ He rested his elbows on the table and leaned in. ‘Doesn’t seem honourable somehow to know the army’s in retreat for want of men whilst I’m swanning around covering sports days and grand-opening sales.’
Rooke, who had been quietly gathering more of Haycock’s matches, his voice a little slurred, said, ‘Well, if you’re going, I’m going. We’ll be like the heroes in Valour and Victory. Champions to the rescue!’ He put his hands up in front of his shoulder as if cocking an imaginary rifle, jerked them upwards and threw his body backwards as if taking the recoil. An older man with baggy eyes and a well-trimmed beard twisted round on his stool from the adjacent table saying, ‘Well said, young man; that’s the spirit! Give those Deutschers what for.’
Haycock looked at Rooke sceptically. ‘Harry says they measure you, how tall you are … your chest and what-all before they let you in.’
‘Who’s Harry?’ George asked.
‘His brother,’ Turland filled him in. ‘He was in the Territorials so he’s already been mobilised.’
Haycock asked Rooke, ‘How old are you anyway?’
Rooke flushed: a blush that reddened his cheeks and rose to the tips of his ears. He shot a swift glance at Turland as if to refer the question to him, which George thought very curious.
‘Leave it, Haycock,’ Turland said.
‘It’s just that you have to be eighteen to join, nineteen if you want to serve overseas …’
Rooke stared fiercely at Haycock. ‘I don’t know how old I am.’
‘Don’t be daft.’
Turland said quietly, ‘Shut up, Haycock. Now’s not the time.’ He tapped his cards on the table whilst he thought. ‘We should go up to the castle together,’ he said. ‘Rooke might have more of a chance if they see us as a job lot.’
George imagined the three of them in khaki, swinging their arms as they marched together and suddenly felt awkward sitting there in his postman’s uniform. The role he’d been so proud of was safe, civilian. He felt reduced to a mere message-taker, little better than an errand-boy, while the others would be part of something huge, a glorious endeavour, taking their places as men. He was tipsily aware that somewhere beneath the muddle of his feelings about England and honour and protecting one’s family lay the unease he felt about seeing Violet again: a troubling mixture of deadly embarrassment that he had revealed something of his feelings, and shame that he hadn’t behaved with more gallantry. He felt an unbearable awkwardness that he had no idea how to overcome. Then his mind flipped unaccountably to Lillie and the fragile feel of her small bones as he lifted her that morning, and he felt a lump form in his throat.
At the next table, the bearded man was nudging his neighbour and drawing the attention of his drinking partners so that all turned round to look. One of them, who had a kitbag slung on the back of his chair, said, ‘You shouldn’t have too much of a problem. You’ll soon shape up, even the young ’un.’
Haycock spat on his hand and held it out over the jumble of glasses and cards.
‘Are you in, Farrell?’ Turland asked.
George hesitated. The scrutiny from the table behind had spread and even the men standing at the bar had turned to see what had caused the dramatic gesture.
‘Soldiers in the making!’ the bearded man called out, and with that, Turland and Rooke spat on their palms too and the three of them joined hands, fist over fist, to a chorus of approving voices. George leant back on his stool as if to move out of the bearded man’s eyeline.
‘Three soldiers and a postman!’ the man shouted and the swell of congratulation died away into laughter as George hunched his shoulders and stared into his pint. Rooke bent beneath his downcast face and grinned up at him, saying, ‘Cheer up, mate, plenty of time to change your mind.’
George shrugged and downed the pint in huge gulps until there was nothing left. He saw that he’d fallen behind the others; there was a full glass set ready in front of him. He tried to focus on the task of stretching out to pick up the glass but his hand seemed to move independently of his will, jerking forward and nudging the full glass so that it slopped a pool of beer on to the table. He stared at the beer still frothing on the dark wood.
‘Steady,’ said Haycock, setting the glass in his hand.
‘You shouldn’t have bought him that last one,’ said Turland.
‘Needs cheering up, doesn’t he?’ Haycock said. ‘Spot of woman trouble.’ He winked at Turland and dealt the cards again. Turland and Rooke picked up their cards and another game began.
George took a sup and put his glass down very carefully but waved Haycock away when he tried to give him his hand of cards. ‘I’ll pass this one up,’ he muttered.
We must have been here a while, George thought, as the girl who had been collecting glasses reached across a table to open a window and he saw her reflection in the pane and realised that it was now fully dark outside. He hoped that there was a moon and wondered how he would make the ride home without mishap otherwise. A cool draught of air reached him. He breathed it in deeply and tried to ignore the queasy feeling in his stomach and the sensation that if he didn’t concentrate very hard on the three of spades which lay abandoned in front of him, the room started to waver slowly on the borders of his vision.
The girl reached their table and began to gather up the empties. She had coarse features, hair the colour of brass and the high colour that often goes with it. Strands of her hair had escaped her pins and stuck to her brow and neck.
Haycock said, ‘Where’s Mary tonight then?’
‘She’s ill; I’m just filling in this once,’ the girl said. She paused to roll her sleeves up, revealing plump, freckly arms. She leaned across the table to pick up the empty glasses in front of George, and Haycock tipped his stool backwards so that he could give her posterior a long, appraising look. ‘Bottoms up,’ he said and drained the dregs of his beer. George thought this uncouth. Haycock sat forward again and put his glass down but as the girl reached to take it he moved it further away. She shot him a glance as if to say ‘I know your game’ but still leant over further to take it, and when he wouldn’t let it go and looked at her with a challenge in his eyes she laughed and drew it slowly from his fingers.
George, noticing as she bent forward that her figure beneath her blouse didn’t have the corseted solidity that he usually associated with the female form, but instead a loose movement as if all below was only constrained by petticoats, dragged his eyes back to her face. Feeling the effects of the drink, he was aware of a delay between thought and action and realised that he was staring, yet was strangely fascinated by her blond eyelashes, which gave her eyes a red-rimmed, unfinished look.
‘Your friend all right?’ the girl said to Turland. ‘He’s looking a bit queer.’
‘He’s had a fair bit to drink.’
‘Maybe more than he can manage,’ Haycock said, knocking George’s arm so that his elbow slipped off the table, jolting him into action. George sat up as straight as he could.
‘I’m perfectly …’ George found that even his lips now seemed to be rebelling against him, with a numb sensation as he pressed them together and tried to form the words. ‘… fine. And it’s my round,’ he finished, fishing around in his pocket for some money. He tried to rise but had to put his hand on the table to steady himself.
‘I’ll bring them,’ the girl said. ‘You stay here.’
George subsided and she picked out some threepenny bits and pennies from the handful he held out, her wet fingers leaving the remaining coins sticky in his hand.
Haycock and Turland were talking about giving in their notice at work. Both felt that their employers wouldn’t ask them to work it out; they would be released straight away if they had their military marching orders. Rooke said that when he decided to move out he just did it, although always on a payday – no point going without what was due to you. George stared into his drink; the conversation seemed too hard to follow. He very much wanted to go to sleep. He tried to marshal his thoughts by concentrating on what was before him; the beer reminded him of the colour of a beech hedge, ‘a distillation of autumn’. He thought the phrase rather good but couldn’t trust himself to share it in case it came out all wrong. The sound of the words moved through his head in a slow, pleasing procession. Why couldn’t he just curl up somewhere warm and go to sleep?
The voices of his companions rose as they explored the heady excitement of being able to escape their normal humdrum lives so quickly. The anticipated freedom of having extra money in their pockets bred madcap plans for their return. Haycock would join forces with his brother to sell motors; Turland would move to London and try his hand at a job on a bigger paper, maybe even take up travel as a foreign correspondent somewhere glamorous, ‘Paris or New York,’ he said grandly. Rooke said he would get the best cycle money could buy and eat out like a king every night. His ambition didn’t seem to extend further than a more comfortable version of the life he knew.
The girl returned with four tankards on a tray and Haycock suggested that they ‘down them in one’ so she stayed for the empties, standing with arms folded and wearing an amused expression. Rooke put George’s tankard in his hand, folding his fingers around the handle and ribbing him a little. Haycock counted them in, ‘One, two, three …’ and they lifted their elbows as one and threw their heads back.
With the first few swallows, George knew that this was a step too far. A horrible gurgling started up in his stomach and he set his glass down and put his head in his hands, trying to still the sensation that the room had begun to spin and that his stool was at the centre of the turning and seemed to be trying to buck him off. He heard the boys thump down the tankards and burst into a cheer at the same time as he felt the girl’s hand on his back; he smelt a mixture of sweat and face powder as she bent over him.
‘Not feeling too good?’ she said in his ear. ‘You come along with me.’
George was afraid to move or even look up, convinced that he would disgrace himself by either falling over or being sick.
‘Come on now, gently does it.’ She slipped her arm under his so that his whole forearm was supported. Once on his feet, she gripped his hand and he stumbled beside her, aware of a shout of, ‘Steady, Farrell!’ and the sound of his fellow drinkers drumming their fists on the table ever louder and faster. The girl ignored them and led him to the passageway that took them to the back door.
Outside, the air felt cool: his shirt and waistcoat were chill and damp with sweat. His upper lip prickled and his legs wanted to buckle beneath him as they walked into the yard. ‘Here,’ she said, pushing him towards the privy. ‘In there.’
He went in and pulled the door shut behind him. The smell of piss rising from the hole in the wooden bench seat of the closet was the final straw. He barely had time to sink to his knees and brace himself against the plank before he threw up what felt like everything he had drunk or eaten that day. Eventually, he rested his forehead on his arm, exhausted. It was wholly dark in the privy. George couldn’t abide dark, close places. Ever since his father had taken him, as a child, on an adventure down into the mine where he worked George had feared small spaces: the suffocating sense of enclosure, the tomb-like dark and the stale air pressing in on him. The tunnels, narrowing as they had gone further into the mine, were a source of wonder and admiration to his father, but they had terrified him. Their lowering roofs made his father stoop, casting a crooked shadow that stretched and shrank on the wet rock as he shuffled along in the nodding light of his lamp. Ahead and behind, the darkness was solid, as if they were moving through black treacle that parted for a moment before them only to ooze back behind them as they passed. He had known, even at seven years old, that he could never work in such a place, exiled from the sun and rain and wind, had felt that the earth and rock around him and the weight of the mountain above were pressing on his chest and stealing away his breath.
George stayed very still, waiting to feel a little better before attempting to stand up. Outside, there was a rustling noise, a shuffling against the wall, as if someone was trying to squeeze between it and the bushes. He thought of the bike, hidden behind the laurels, and hoped it was safe, but he hadn’t the strength to do anything about it. After a while, he took out a handkerchief and wiped his mouth with a wobbling hand. He realised that he was kneeling on an earth floor. He levered himself up, steadied himself against the bench seat and tried to dust down the knees of his uniform trousers. Having got himself upright, shakily he felt for the door latch, lifted it and went outside.
The girl was leaning against the wall of the privy, her hands behind her back. George felt a sharp stab of embarrassment to think she had been there all the time. ‘You needn’t have waited,’ he said. ‘I was perfectly all right.’ Then he thought that he had sounded ungrateful and added, ‘Thanks for bringing me out.’ He stuffed the handkerchief in his pocket.
‘You still look pretty poorly,’ the girl said, peering at him. ‘You should stay in the fresh air a bit.’ She took hold of his sleeve and moved along the wall, drawing him beside her. ‘That’s right, breathe it in.’ George drew in a breath that smelt of damp leaves, the pitch on the privy roof and a faint tang of tobacco as though someone had ground out a cigarette butt nearby.
She took his hand and began to rub it between hers, at first as if to bring life back into his fingers but then she put her thumb in his palm and moved it in a circle, pressing it into the concavity of his hand. George felt a hot current run through him, a disturbing reflex reaction, as though his body recognised an urgent message that his mind was too slow to decipher. His fingers closed around her hand. In a sudden movement, she swung herself round to face him and her arms reached up to entwine his neck as she leant the whole length of her body against him. The soft, yielding feeling of her body beneath her light clothes undid him. He put his arms around her and bent to kiss her but she turned her head away, instead nuzzling her face into his neck, kissing and licking. She took his hand and guided it to her breast, slipping it between the sticky cotton of her blouse and the warm heaviness beneath which George cupped, trembling, his head spinning, his body taking over. She pressed against him, moaning softly and he felt suddenly afraid, unable to stop himself, and thought that this was what she wanted him to feel. She was taking his hand again, pulling up her skirt. Oh God, he could feel the clip of her suspender beneath her petticoat. She was moving his hand up and down over the silky material, over her thigh and up to her buttock …
Suddenly a blinding light was in his eyes, so bright that at first they both turned their heads away.
‘Well, what’s going on here then?’ a man’s voice said, dropping the torch beam a little and running it over the girl’s open buttons and the curve of her breast. George, blinking in the light, couldn’t understand why she didn’t move away, didn’t cover herself. In his shock, George had the bizarre notion that they were caught in some music-hall tableau of static nudity, where the slightest movement would bring down the force of the law. Then, as if a moment of posing for a photograph were over, she pulled away and began expertly restoring her clothes to order.
‘That’ll be five shillings,’ she said matter-of-factly.
‘I’m sorry?’ George said, not understanding.
‘Five shillings,’ she said slowly as though explaining to an idiot. ‘You’ve had your pleasure, now pay up, there’s a good boy.’
‘But I didn’t ask …’ George started. ‘You …’ The sudden change of circumstances left him floundering. He couldn’t grasp what was happening or quite believe what was being requested of him. He felt weak and pressed his head back against the wall as if its cool solidity could give his mind focus. He started to tuck his shirt in and then stopped, feeling ashamed.
‘Come on, pay up,’ said the man, and this time George raised his head as he recognised the voice of the chap who had sat in the corner with the newspaper earlier in the evening; he squinted against the light, trying to see him. In an instant the torch was thrown down – he heard it hit the gravelly ground with a crunch – and the man was on him, slamming his head back against the wall and punching his fist into his gut. George doubled over, retching, a dry acidic heaving from the depths of his empty stomach. He sank down against the wall and slid to his knees, winded, unable even to shield himself against the man’s boot as it met his ribs and tipped him on to his side. He lay groaning, his eyes scrunched up in pain. He felt, rather than saw, the girl bending over him and then, with her small fat fingers, quickly feeling into his jacket pockets, pulling all their contents out on to the ground and picking through them. He heard a heavy and a lighter tread as both of them walked away.
The side of his face was pressed against the sharp gravel and he could feel a long string of saliva dribble from his open mouth. His arms were folded across his stomach as if to hold him together and contain the burning pain in his gut and the pulsing throb of his ribs. He could think of nothing but the pain yet he knew that when it finally abated, what was beyond it would be even worse: the vague outline of thoughts that heaved at the edge of his consciousness would resolve into monstrous, shameful shapes.
He could no longer feel the weight of the sketchbook against his chest. Slowly he stretched out one hand, trying to trick the pain through moving by degrees; groping across the dirt, he felt the crumpled handkerchief, the coldness of a few scattered coins. He couldn’t find it. He slumped back with a groan.
Across the yard, he saw the back door open, throwing a quadrangle of light across the steps and releasing the sound of voices and laughter into the air. A small figure came out and hesitated, peering around as if waiting for his eyes to get accustomed to the dark. George tried to call out but all the air seemed to have left his body and only a moan came from him.
‘Farrell?’ The figure came down the steps and picked its way towards him. ‘Farrell? Are you all right?’ Then Rooke bent over him, taking his elbow, trying to lift him up. ‘What the hell happened?’ He looked about him quickly, checking that whoever had done this wasn’t still around. He managed to raise George into a sitting position. ‘I’ll get the others,’ he said.
George hung on to his arm. ‘My book. I can’t find my book.’
‘Never mind that, we need to get you out of here,’ Rooke said.
‘I need it.’ George struggled to control his voice.
Rooke squatted beside him and felt around until he found the book. He put it into George’s hands and then ran back to get the others.
The book’s smooth covers were grainy with sandy earth. George brushed his fingers over them and put the book safe in his pocket, wincing as he lifted his arm. Rooke returned with the others who lifted him and got his arms over their shoulders so that they could help him along.
‘We’d better take him back to our lodgings,’ Turland said to Rooke. ‘You get the bike.’
Rooke pulled it out from behind the bushes and wheeled it along beside them.
‘Took your money, I suppose,’ Haycock said.
George nodded.
‘Did you see who it was?’
‘No. He jumped me from behind,’ George said, already forming the lie that he would tell and retell, already feeling the hot shame creeping through him, sordid and unclean.
3 (#ulink_c20970b7-1624-5055-abe8-cab6adae0587)
DANCE CARD (#ulink_c20970b7-1624-5055-abe8-cab6adae0587)
When Violet had first arrived at the Cedars, Elizabeth’s family home, Edmund had been away and she had been so busy, in the first week, meeting the Lyne family’s cousins and friends for luncheon parties, picnics and concerts, that she had almost forgotten Elizabeth had a brother. After a morning spent boating with a group of relations who had failed to include sunshades in their preparations, Elizabeth had felt the worse for the sun and suggested that they withdraw to their rooms for the afternoon, the better to enjoy the evening’s entertainment.
Violet, however, was unable to rest. Despite closing the drapes against the intense heat of the June afternoon and taking off her shoes and lying full length on the bed, her thoughts were too full of the unwonted excitements of the last few days, her mind a whirl of gowns and opera glasses, new faces, drives in the motor, parlour games and laughter. The room was stuffy, the satin quilt beneath her sticky and clinging, and at length she gave up, slipped her shoes back on again and decided to go in search of something to read.
Downstairs, the tall double doors of the library were open and Violet went in softly, glad that she wouldn’t have to risk breaking the oppressive quiet of the afternoon by their creaking. The room was lined with books from the floor to the ornately plastered ceiling, and was furnished with library steps to reach them. Chairs, couches and occasional tables stood around for the convenience of the reader, some arranged in a group in the centre, some placed with their backs to the room giving a view from the long French windows of the sloping lawns, elms and cedars. A large desk, belonging to Elizabeth’s father, stood to one side, littered with stamps, magnifying glass and glue pot and Violet felt that she was intruding a little and thought that she would choose something quickly and go.
Her eyes travelled over the books in the lower shelves, which were large, dull, leather-bound volumes of county history, and passed up through travelogues and heavy-looking biographies until she found a set of the Waverley novels on one of the top shelves. She wheeled the library steps along and positioned them so that they were well braced against the shelves; then, picking up the skirts of her afternoon dress in one hand, she awkwardly climbed up to find one that she hadn’t yet read. The set, tightly packed together, wouldn’t yield a volume easily. Getting a finger hooked into the top of the spine of the book in the middle, she pulled hard, dislodged several, then, juggling books, steps and skirts, tried to catch them and failed so that three volumes fell with an almighty thump on the polished wood floor.
There was a muttered curse of ‘What the devil?’ from one of the couches and a man sat up and rested his elbow on its upholstered back. He blinked and passed his hand over his face and through his dark hair, staring with a bemused expression as though unsure whether he was still in a dream.
Violet, still clutching a copy of Ivanhoe,said, ‘Oh! You startled me!’ and then flushed crimson, feeling foolish, as she had undoubtedly startled him first. Momentarily lost for words, she stared back. His tie was loosened, his waistcoat was undone and his sleeves were rolled back giving him a rakish look that was at odds with his neat moustache and candid grey eyes. ‘I’m so sorry to have woken you,’ she said, reaching to put the books that had fallen flat on the shelf back into position.
‘Oh, don’t trouble yourself about that. Here, let me help,’ he said, jumping to his feet and coming to the foot of the ladder. He picked up the other volumes and passed them up to her. ‘I’m Edmund, by the way. Who are you?’
‘Violet. Violet Walter.’ In reaching down to shake his offered hand, she almost lost the books again and he steadied her elbow.
‘You’re Elizabeth’s friend, aren’t you?’ he said. He broke into a wide grin. ‘She never mentioned you were such a big reader.’
Violet smiled as she put all but one of the books back. ‘I do like to read,’ she said, ‘but for an afternoon’s idle hour even I would find the full set daunting.’
‘Well, you’re welcome to as many as you can manage,’ he said, helping her down from the steps. She turned at the foot and they came face to face. There was a moment when they both stopped and looked – a beat, barely a pause, but it seemed to Violet that something passed between them: a strange instant of recognition. Violet drew away first, suddenly aware of the impropriety of their situation: alone together – and at this proximity. She stepped to the side but before she could pass him he said, ‘Must you go? Don’t run away. Elizabeth’s only told me a little about you; do come and tell me more. Please?’ and before she knew what she was doing she found herself steered to an armchair. Edmund solicitously tucked a cushion behind her, saying cheerily, ‘None of these chairs are comfy. They’re lumpy old horsehair things but we’re all fond of them just because they’ve always been here.’
‘Thank you, I’m very comfortable,’ Violet said, and then felt confused all over again as she realised that she should really be protesting that she must go.
Edmund said, ‘I see you favour the classics. Do you read the newer works as well? Forster? H. G. Wells? I can recommend Wells; he has a knack of warning us of where our current follies may lead us.’
‘I prefer Forster,’ she said, considering. ‘Wells’s view of the future is a little too bleak for my taste.’
‘We have the latest Forster somewhere; I’ll look it out for you. Have you been enjoying your stay so far? I hope Elizabeth has been looking after you and showing you around?’ Edmund tried to make this beautiful girl with the serious face feel more at ease.
‘Oh, we’ve had the most marvellous time. We went to see La Traviata and we had a wonderful picnic by the sea at Cockermouth with your father and mother and some of Elizabeth’s friends, and the cousins of course …’
‘They’re a jolly lot, aren’t they? We usually see a fair bit of them in the summer. Are you able to stay for long?’
‘A month, I hope, as long as my mother keeps well and can spare me from home.’
‘Well, we must make the most of your stay,’ Edmund said sympathetically, remembering what Elizabeth had told him of Violet’s circumstances. ‘What do you like to do the most?’
Violet told him about her photography and he listened carefully, asking her questions about shutter speeds and coloured filters, and suggesting places of interest locally where they could picnic and she could take some photographs. The conversation moved easily along as he told her of his recent studies at Cambridge and how much he had enjoyed the Officers’ Training Corps with its outdoor life of riding, camping and shooting. He told her that he was applying for a commission and hoped that his uncle, who was in the local regiment, would be able to arrange something for him. Ideally, he said, he would have liked a cavalry commission but he would have to take what his uncle could get for him and the chances were that he would end up in the infantry. ‘Foot-slogger more likely than donkey-walloper,’ he said, making her laugh, which drew from him a broad smile in return.
As Violet began to ask him more, she heard someone approaching the room and stopped abruptly. A housemaid, holding a pile of tablecloths and napkins, stood uncertainly in the doorway looking from one of them to the other. ‘Sorry, sir,’ she said to Edmund, ‘Cook said I was to lay for afternoon tea in here, sir, so’s we could open the French windows and have the draught.’
Violet, suddenly aware of how odd this must look: a lady visitor, unchaperoned, sitting knee to knee with the young gentleman of the house, got quickly to her feet.
Edmund stood too, saying, ‘Ah, yes, of course, Dolly. Miss Walter has just stepped in to find a book and I can see that I’m going to be in your way.’ He gave the girl a winning smile and she bobbed a curtsey. He turned back to Violet with a mischievous look in his eye and said, ‘I hope you’ll enjoy Mr Scott’s Ivanhoe, Miss Walter.’
‘Thank you. I’m sure I shall,’ Violet returned with equal formality and left the room. Behind her, she heard Edmund offering to open the French doors for Dolly, saying that they were rather stiff for her to manage. He engaged her in friendly conversation, distracting her with questions about the health of all below stairs and whether there had been any changes while he had been away.
Violet retired to her room and sat at the window with the book open before her. She had to admit herself charmed. She found herself recounting every step of their unconventional meeting and a strange sensation came over her once more as she thought of him helping her down from the steps and of his touch as he tucked the cushion behind her as carefully as if she were porcelain. She was not used to such attention, such cherishing, and certainly not to the way Edmund had made it so easy and natural to talk about herself. When Elizabeth put her head around her door an hour later to tell her that tea was served, she found that she had read two chapters of Ivanhoe without taking in a single word.
Entering the library once more, now freshened by a breeze from the garden, which sweetened the room with the scent of honeysuckle and fluttered the corners of the tablecloths, she was met by the sight of Mr and Mrs Lyne, Elizabeth, Edmund and three other houseguests. The party was assembled next to tea tables laden with sandwiches, ginger cake and a pale blue and gold tea service, while Dolly attended to a large urn on a side table.
‘Ah, Violet,’ Mrs Lyne said as the gentlemen rose, ‘let me introduce my son, Edmund.’
Violet, taken by surprise, almost said, ‘Thank you but we’ve already met.’ She bit back the words as they formed in her mind and hesitated, casting around desperately for the phrase that she needed.
Edmund, now buttoned into waistcoat and jacket, stepped quickly forward, saying with a deadpan expression, ‘Miss Walter, I’m so very pleased to meet you,’ and shook her hand, while Dolly looked round sharply from the tea urn with an expression that clearly said, ‘Whatever next?’
Violet subsided gratefully into her seat and Elizabeth began to tell her that she still felt a little muzzy and wondered about bridge tonight rather than an excursion. Edmund caught her eye over Elizabeth’s head and raised his eyebrows, a small smile at the corner of his mouth. As she asked distractedly for Elizabeth to repeat herself, she couldn’t help but smile back and in the moment’s complicity, she knew that her heart was lost.
Over the following weeks, Edmund joined Violet and Elizabeth in their outings with cousins and friends, Mrs Lyne accepting their plans as long as the young people were in a large group, thereby playing chaperone to each other.
‘Mother goes on the principle of “safety in numbers”.’ Elizabeth said, drawing up yet another long list of guests to join them for a country walk and picnic. Violet had noticed that however much the list varied, one name, Titus Emory, was always included, and that Elizabeth and he would often conspire to sit next to each other when dining or to share a boat when on the river. Far from feeling abandoned by her friend, Violet rejoiced in the opportunities it gave her to talk relatively privately with Edmund. They had become easy in each other’s company at home, as the family played cards together or entertained one another at the piano in the evenings; but the conversation then was light and general and Violet longed for the more personal discussions that she and Edmund shared when they could. They had exchanged opinions on music and books, Edmund playing her Chopin’s nocturnes and lending her his well-thumbed copy of poems by Yeats, which she loved and discussed with him at length. They had moved through personal anecdotes about school and university to confidences on deeper matters. Edmund told her of his belief that the old order must change, and his interest in the law as an instrument of reform to deal with working-class poverty, before social turmoil should get out of hand. Violet confided her worry about her mother and her frustration at being powerless to use her education or to affect anything beyond her own home.
For the latest outing, Elizabeth had invited a mixed group of ten and decided that they should motor out into the countryside. Violet, hopeful of some good views, took her camera with her. After parking and walking half a mile, the men carrying the wicker hampers and the ladies the rugs, they settled on a spot under an ash tree overlooking pasture, with a small stream leading into woods and in the distance the glitter of the sea. After picnicking, some of the party wanted to walk further and some to simply loll and enjoy the view. Elizabeth and Titus stayed behind for a few minutes and then strolled down to the stream; Violet and Edmund sat on, chatting, surrounded by rumpled rugs and tablecloths strewn with spirit lamp and kettle, hard-boiled eggs and Dundee cake.
‘If you could do anything at all with your life,’ Edmund said, lying back with his hands behind his head, ‘what would you do?’
‘Anything at all? Do you mean regardless of the fact that I’m a woman?’ Violet asked dryly.
Edmund looked up into the green and blue of leaves and sky above him. ‘Anything.’
‘Travel,’ Violet said, hugging her knees and looking out at the distant line of the sea. ‘I’d explore and take wonderful pictures of Alps and ice floes and … Oh, I don’t know … temples and pyramids, desert sands … I’d like to capture it all and bring it back for others to see.’
Edmund sat up, leaning on one elbow, and looked at her with interest. ‘What would you do with all the pictures?’
‘Publish them,’ Violet said seriously. ‘Sell them to magazines like the National Geographic.’ She paused and fiddled with the fringe of the rug, waiting for Edmund to laugh. ‘I suppose you’ll think me a suffragette now,’ she made light of it. ‘Just a silly dream, I know.’
‘Not silly at all,’ Edmund said. ‘I think it’s rather admirable,’ and he leant across and took her hand. He said in a low voice, ‘I wish we could see them together,’ and lifted her hand to his lips and kissed it.
Violet, her heart quickening, looked into his eyes and saw that he was regarding her tenderly. What did he mean? Surely he couldn’t be toying with her; his expression was full of hope, as though he had spoken from the heart and now waited for her reply. The sound of voices reached them as Titus and Elizabeth made their way back, Elizabeth teasing Titus about his unending appetite for tea and cake.
‘I … I should like that,’ Violet said quickly as he relinquished her hand. Then, made bold by a heady rush of joy, she said, ‘And you, what would you do with your life if you could do anything at all?’
Elizabeth was calling to her, ‘Do we have more matches for the spirit lamp? Titus says I’ve talked at him so much I’ve made him thirsty.’ Violet held up the matches, knelt up and smoothed out the cloth and started setting out the tea things.
As the others reached them and flopped down, Edmund leant close to her and said, ‘I would take you to all of those places,’ and Violet bent her head to measure tea from the caddy into the pot, to hide her face from the others.
Elizabeth took off her hat and fanned herself with it. ‘Do you think the weather’s set fair for a few days, Titus?’ she asked.
‘Mmm, I should say so,’ Titus said, cutting himself a good wedge of fruitcake. ‘For the rest of the week at least.’
‘Then our garden party will be on Saturday,’ Elizabeth announced. ‘We can invite everybody: the cousins, our set from school, Edmund’s set of officer types.’ She lit the spirit lamp under the kettle.
‘Hold on, old girl, don’t go overboard with the numbers – in particular no need for too many officer types,’ Titus said. ‘Your mother might not want too much brouhaha.’
‘Nonsense, Mother’s a dear and you know I wouldn’t choose any other tennis partner than you.’
Titus said, ‘Ah, well, in that case …’ and looked mollified.
‘If it stays fine we can have dancing in the open air in the evening as we did last year. What do you think, Edmund?’
‘I think that would be perfectly splendid,’ Edmund said, looking straight at Violet.
On Saturday, the long sloping lawns beneath the cedars and elms were mowed and rolled. The horse pulling the contraptions had its hooves clad in leather overshoes to achieve a smooth, undented finish, although, as Edmund pointed out, the undulating nature of the ground always added an interesting dimension to ball sports, however much one rolled it. The formal gardens were tidied: hedges neatened, paths raked, the rambling roses around the arbour trimmed. Tables and chairs were brought outside and placed in groups under bright awnings and trestle tables with starched white cloths were laden with lemonade and ginger beer.
By four o’clock, the party was in full swing. Older guests, aunts and mothers chatted in the shade or strolled sedately around the grounds while children chased hoops or stood in line to climb through the great split trunk of the oldest cedar tree to jump down into the arms of obliging uncles. The young people had voted for tennis rather than croquet and the grass court on the least bumpy stretch of ground beside the shrubbery had been newly marked out and the net strung up. Despite Lucien Hilliard, a boisterous but conversationally inept young man, importuning Violet to partner him, Violet had sat out for the first few games, pleading the heat as an excuse. Edmund, as host, had held back until all the guests who wanted a game had played, but then, in the late afternoon, deftly suggested that the heat was waning and swept Violet into a game before Lucien could say anything more.
Violet and Edmund were playing Elizabeth and Titus, who were winning with panache: Titus having a powerful serve and Elizabeth a fiercely competitive streak.
‘You’re not trying hard enough, Edmund!’ she called out to her brother as the ball hit a bump in the ground and flew off at an impossible angle.
‘Oh come on, ’Lizbeth, no one could have reached that.’
Elizabeth smirked.
‘Forty-love,’ Titus said loudly, sweating and red in the face. He positioned himself to serve again and bounced the ball impatiently in front of him.
Edmund and Violet exchanged a smile. Violet settled her hat more firmly on her head and gathered her skirts in one hand, ready to return the serve. Titus threw high and hit the ball with such force that Violet had to duck. She turned to see Edmund running backwards in an effort to keep the ball in play. Swiping wildly at it, he missed his footing on the uneven ground, scrambled backwards, and finally sat down with a thump, pulling a clownish expression. Violet, overcome by laughter, subsided to her knees and the ball bounced away into the shrubbery behind them.
‘Game!’ Titus and Elizabeth shouted at the same time. Titus raised his fists in a ridiculous overplayed gesture of triumph and Elizabeth threw her racquet in the air and caught it, which made Violet turn to Edmund and laugh even more. She got up and ran to help him look for the lost ball. They pushed through the thick stand of bushes and trees and moved deeper into the gloom, Edmund sweeping away the twiggy undergrowth and last year’s fallen leaves with his racquet. Spotting the ball at the same time, they both stooped to retrieve it and bumped into one another. Edmund put out his hand to help her up and mumbled an awkward apology but as they rose, his eyes were already searching hers. Violet knew with sudden certainty that he wanted to kiss her and, even more disturbingly, that she wanted to be kissed. From the court beyond, the sound of slow hand-clapping and calls of ‘Play on!’ and ‘New game!’ reached them. Her hand trembling, she picked up the ball and gave it to Edmund.
As they turned to go back to the game, Edmund said urgently, ‘I need to be able to talk to you alone, properly. Sometime this evening do you think we could slip away?’
Violet barely had time to nod before they broke free of the bushes and out into view of the cheering audience.
As they played on, she felt aware of her body in a new way: how it moved, the strength of her muscles, her youth and vigour, and of Edmund: sensing exactly where he stood behind her, the degree of closeness as he moved forwards and back with the play, as if they were each surrounded by force fields that fizzed and sizzled as they touched. When the game finally ended, she and Edmund had made up ground and Elizabeth congratulated them on ‘a much more creditable third set’ as hands were shaken over the net. They retired to deck chairs to watch others playing. Lucien appeared at Violet’s elbow bearing a tray with elderflower jellies and lemonade so that she was obliged to listen to a long and tiresome commentary on further games until she could decently withdraw with the other ladies to rest for an hour before dressing for the evening.
‘I shan’t let you go before you promise me the first dance,’ Lucien insisted, and Violet had to agree gracefully.
Later, when Violet had rested and bathed, instead of ringing for Elizabeth’s maid, she dressed herself with great care, choosing her pale lilac, an evening frock with tiered layers of flimsy lawn. She turned back and forth in front of the cheval mirror by the window to see how it would accentuate her movements when she danced. Tonight, she wanted everything to be perfect.
As she opened the domed lid of her Noah’s Ark trunk to search for her best ivory evening comb, there was the tiniest tap on the door. Thinking it was Elizabeth, and with her head in the depths of the trunk, she called out, ‘Come in,’ but no one entered. She found the comb and put it on her dressing table; then she went to the door. There was nobody there. A row of closed doors stretched the length of the landing and the sweeping stairs at the end were deserted. From other rooms, faint noises of girlish voices, running water and clinking china suggested that others were rising but there was no sign of the person who had knocked, not even the distant footsteps of a disappearing maid in the hall below. As she stepped back to close the door, she glanced down and saw on the floor, pale against the rich reds and blues of the silk hall runner, a beautiful corsage: a perfect cream rose and two tiny buds against a wisp of maidenhair fern. Delicately, she picked it up and took it inside. Turning it in her hands, she found that there was a tiny scrap of paper behind the pin. She took it to the window to decipher the minute lettering and read:
For a glimmering girl …
She instantly recognised it as Yeats and knew it was from Edmund. She called to mind the verse from the mysterious poem:
I went to blow the fire a-flame,
But something rustled on the floor,
And some one called me by my name:
It had become a glimmering girl
With apple blossom in her hair
Who called me by my name and ran
And faded through the brightening air.
Flushing with pleasure, she hid the note in her jewellery case and pinned the flower carefully to her dress, the heady champagne of hope rising in her that Edmund meant this as a precursor to a declaration. Her heart quickened; it must be tonight. He knew that she was to stay with the family only a few days longer. He had said that he wanted to speak to her alone …
There was a brisk knock at the door and Elizabeth bustled in, resplendent in pale blue silk. ‘Are you nearly ready? Didn’t Mary come to do your hair? Shall I help you with it?’ She was fizzing with excitement. ‘Aha,’ she said, noticing Violet’s corsage, ‘I see you have an admirer.’
Violet, still half in her dream world of anticipation, visibly jumped in alarm. ‘Sorry?’
‘I see Lucien continues to pursue you at every turn,’ she said.
‘Oh, yes, Lucien,’ Violet said faintly. ‘He’s a little overwhelming, don’t you think?’ She sat obediently at the dressing table and let Elizabeth tackle her hair.
Elizabeth brushed it smartly until it became flyaway and static, talking nineteen to the dozen all the time. ‘Lucien is rather pressing, I must admit, and when it comes to dancing he’s got two left feet, but he’s clearly rather taken with you so don’t be too hard on him, poor boy. He was positively dogging your heels this afternoon, wasn’t he?’ She wound and pinned strands of Violet’s hair up into a soft arrangement of piled twists, and held it there while Violet anchored it in place with the ivory comb. ‘If he gets too much for you, Edmund or I can always rescue you,’ she said. ‘Edmund’s quite a good dancer. Well, I taught him actually, so at least he can waltz without tripping you up or standing on your dress.’ She teased out a wisp or two at Violet’s temples. ‘There, you’ll do,’ she said, picking up her gloves and handing them to her. ‘Shall we go down?’
As they passed through the hallway, thumps and male voices came from the music room where some of the young men were rolling back the carpet in case it should rain and the party be forced to come indoors. Outside, Edmund and his young cousin, Samuel, were carrying the gramophone between them. Violet, suddenly shy, hung back behind Elizabeth. The men set the machine down on a table, its brass trumpet gleaming in the hazy evening light. Immediately, the young men and women gathered round, pulling out records from leather carrying cases, peering at titles and exclaiming over their favourites. Edmund took charge, winding the handle and carefully placing the needle. The strains of ‘Dreaming’ wavered into the still air, the tenor voice lifting over the sweet sound of the strings as the music poured out and over the velvet lawns to lose itself in the trees and formal gardens beyond.
‘This is for our hostess,’ Edmund said. His mother looked pleased as his father stepped out and took her hand to lead the first dance. For the first few bars they danced alone, Mr Lyne ramrod straight with his chin held high, Mrs Lyne with a long-fringed shawl elegantly draped around her shoulders. Then others followed and the space between the great trees filled with moving figures, chattering voices and bursts of laughter as the twirling couples circled in a river of pale silks and evening suits.
Edmund was explaining the operation of the gramophone to Samuel so that he could take over. Violet hovered at the edge of the dancing crowd, beginning to despair as, one after another, friends of Elizabeth asked her to write their names on her dance card. She saw Edmund look towards her and his expression softened but then Lucien was beside her, saying, ‘I trust you wrote me in for this first one as promised?’ and whisking her into the dance.
As she danced with a succession of young men who led her rather over-enthusiastically and asked her the same set of predictable questions, to which she gave polite but less enthusiastic answers, she looked for Edmund. She feared that, as the son of the household, he might feel obliged to dance with every relative who was left sitting out a while but there was no sign of him among the dancers. He was no longer at the gramophone; neither could she see him in the groups gathered around the tables where refreshments were laid out: poached salmon and game terrine, cordials and champagne.
By the time Lucien returned and claimed his second dance, the shadows were deepening under the trees, stretching across the lawns like the fingers of long black evening gloves, and Violet felt taut with anxiety.
In the middle of the throng, Edmund suddenly appeared and tapped Lucien on the arm. He pointed over to the trees, saying, ‘Do excuse me, but as Miss Walter is interested in matters of illumination, through her photography, I think she might enjoy lighting-up time.’ Before Lucien could remonstrate, he had taken Violet in his arms and danced her away, moving lightly and swiftly with the flow of the crowd but guiding her expertly between the dancers so that as the music finished they found themselves at the edge and stepped out as if alighting from a carousel.
He placed her hand on his arm and walked her away from the milling crowd and over to the nearest cedar where Violet saw that under the spreading hands of the branches Chinese lanterns had been tied: white papery spheres, waiting to be lit, they hung like huge fruits.
‘Do you like them?’ Edmund asked. ‘I thought we’d never get them all up.’
‘They’re beautiful,’ Violet said.
‘Would you like to light them? Here, look, I have tapers.’ He picked up a long thin stick, struck a match in a splutter of flame and a smell of saltpetre and lit the end of it, which glowed a soft orange. He handed it to her and steadied her as she climbed on to the crooked roots and reached up to guide the flame carefully inside the lantern to the candle within. The flame caught and grew, filling the sphere with light that cast a pool of radiance over their upturned faces and the gnarled and shining roots below, and faded into shadows beyond them.
‘I made a wish,’ Violet said, smiling, but didn’t tell him what it was.
They moved silently between the lanterns, sometimes separating and lighting them simultaneously, sometimes steadying each other on the slippery wood and guiding each other’s hands. They went from tree to tree, cedar to elm, as the crowd danced on, oblivious. At the last tree, they stopped and looked back at their handiwork.
‘They’re like captured fireflies,’ Violet said.
‘Or little moons caught up in the branches,’ Edmund said, and it was true: in the elms, twigs and leaves laced the globes with dark patterns.
‘“The silver apples of the moon,”’ Violet said dreamily, remembering the ending of the Yeats poem.
‘Exactly,’ Edmund said. ‘Shall we walk?’ He gave her his arm. ‘I don’t think anyone will miss us from the general mêlée.’
They slipped away across the lawn behind the trees. Dew had formed and underfoot the short grass was cool and damp, scattered with the closed eyes of daisies. The sun was now a mere line of gold on the horizon, a last gash in the twilit sky. Edmund pointed out the papery disc of a full moon, slowly gaining brightness and substance, ‘As if one of our lanterns has escaped and floated away,’ he said whimsically.
They came to the walled garden with its deep borders and turned along the walk towards the arbour. Violet was aware of every small thing around her: the shapes of peonies and larkspur; the smell of sweet peas; the faint strains of music; the warm solidity of Edmund’s arm under her gloved hand. Every now and then, she felt that he glanced at her but didn’t break his silence. They reached the arbour and sat down on the stone seat beneath a wrought-iron arch weighted down with a mass of balsam and roses. In the fading light, the garden had faded to monochrome, the flowers becoming pale, their beauty transformed to form and scent rather than colour.
‘You look incredibly lovely tonight,’ Edmund said, gazing at her.
Violet, unused to compliments, looked down at the flower pinned at her bosom. ‘Thank you for the beautiful corsage,’ she said, as if her appearance lay only in the adornment of her dress. She touched the flower self-consciously and he gently took her hand.
Slowly, without letting his gaze slip for a moment from hers, he took each finger of her glove in turn, pulling until he had freed it and could twine his fingers with hers and place warm palm to warm palm. ‘Dearest,’ he said, ‘you must know how I feel about you. I realise that we can’t be together straightaway, that I need something more behind me before I can offer you the kind of future you deserve …’
Violet looked into his dear eyes, hardly daring to breathe, her heart beating like a ragtime band.
‘But only say you’ll be mine,’ Edmund said softly, bending towards her, ‘and anything will be possible, because I shall be the happiest man on earth.’
Violet, moving into Edmund’s embrace, closed her eyes and without speaking let her lips say their tender ‘Yes’.
When Violet had opened Edmund’s letter to say that he was being sent abroad she had felt all her hopes shrink, just as Edmund and the family had grown smaller as the motor had carried her away down the long drive at the end of her stay, receding to a dark dot against the stucco house. She had struggled, not entirely successfully, to compose herself in front of George but as he rode away, she felt panic at the hopelessness that threatened to engulf her.
She remained perfectly still as George rounded the bend. She felt that she should call after him but her throat was closed and tight with misery and she couldn’t speak. She tried to get a grip on herself; she must make sure she asked him tomorrow about what he’d wanted to show her; it was thoughtless of her to have disappointed him through being so overcome by her news. The sound of the bicycle wheels clattering over the ruts receded and left only the hot, heavy silence of the summer afternoon. After a few moments, she turned and began to walk away. Instead of returning to the house, however, she veered into the wood and took the path that ran alongside the beck, although she was barely aware of its trickling and gurgling or the smell of greenness and fresh water. She walked slowly amongst the huge Scots pines, sun slanting on their tawny red trunks, the canopy high above her. Shafts of light fell on glossy rhododendron leaves and the white trumpets of yellow-stamened flowers, their petals with a bruised look this late in the summer, as if thinned by heavy rain, and the vivid green moss growing thick and soft as carpet on the trunks and branches of coppiced trees.
Thank God I have an hour or so before Mother will miss me, she thought. Her mother knew nothing of all this. Violet had kept her own counsel about meeting Edmund, afraid that her mother would not react well to the news. Even though Edmund had understood that they would have to make a home for Mother with them, Violet knew that Mother would fret dreadfully at the prospect of ‘losing’ her to a marriage and she didn’t want to burden her with worry any sooner than was necessary. So she had said nothing of the talks she and Edmund had shared on country picnics, at the park, at the garden party. She had been non-committal when answering her mother’s questions about the people she’d met during her stay. Instead, she had offered descriptions of the garden, the decor and the food in minute detail, to satisfy her mother’s curiosity and take her to a place, any place, other than the house that her mother now hardly ever left.
In secret, she thought about the feel of Edmund’s hand in the small of her back as they danced, or the way his moustache tickled when they kissed. Such things were private – no, sacred moments which could not, in any case, be unwrapped in the stuffy sickroom among her mother’s bottles and potions. The very air, heavy with the knowledge of her father’s neglect, would dull and tarnish them.
She and Edmund had stored up every minute that they could snatch together, knowing that there would be time apart to follow, as Edmund would be sent away to an officers’ training camp. They had planned that once Edmund had finished the first leg, he would apply for leave and they would find some way to meet.
It’s so unfair! she thought. Now he would have to go abroad and even if the whole conflict were short-lived, as people said it would be, it would be months before he was in barracks at Carlisle again. She tried to stifle these selfish thoughts, and think instead of troubled Belgium, threatened France, honour and the King. Over the past few months, the whole country had been speculating on German expansionist policies and the likelihood of war; it should be no surprise that now it was here it was going to affect everyone’s life, even hers.
War. The word reverberated through her mind as if it were a cold gust shaking the little wood and rattling like a dry shiver through its leaves.
What if he were hurt? It had not been until she had fallen so headily in love that she had realised that it was possible to feel the same tenderness and care towards the body of another that she felt towards her own. She thought of the way the outdoor summer life had browned his forearms and tanned a V at his throat; of how she imagined the rest of his skin, pale beneath his clothes; and of the vulnerability of the body that she loved. She squeezed the letter even harder in her hand and quickened her step. She would go to the little church at the lakeside where she could be private and alone.
She reached the edge of the wood, swung open the iron gate and stepped out into the brightness. The beck ran on through the parkland, rushing and gurgling beside the path, on its way down to the wide sheet of water. Before her was an open view over the fields to the lake and hills, interrupted only by a scattering of sessile oaks and a lonely church that stood encircled by a dry-stone wall, a quiet grey against the surrounding green.
She walked towards the church. Despite the heat of the day, a stiff breeze blew from the lake, carrying the sound of sheep bleating from further fields and of the water lapping fast against the shore. She felt exposed as she walked across the empty parkland, aware of the house in the distance, angled to take in this vista. She imagined her mother at the window watching her solitary progress and wondering where she was going with her camera slung across her shoulder, when she had taken photographs a-plenty of this view in every season. She hurried across the field to the church and let herself into the churchyard. Tall blond grasses and thin purple thistles grew among gravestones with their memorial verses obliterated by the scourings of the weather.
She went into the church and pushed the heavy wooden door shut behind her. Despite the fact that the leaded window was clear rather than stained glass, it took a moment for her eyes to become accustomed to the dimness. Ahead of her, the sandstone font, at which she and generations of Walters before her had been christened, sat squat and solid. Above the arch opposite the door, a wooden plaque, muddied dark brown with age, bore the images of a lion and a unicorn facing each other in regal poses. The painted banner above them read ‘Dieu et mon Droit’.
She sat down in a pew at the back, so that the light from the window would fall over her shoulder, and slowly unfolded Edmund’s letter again. It had been softened by the moistness of her hand. She spread it out on the dark material of her skirt and read once more:
My dearest Violet,
I am so sorry, my love, to have to tell you that I have received my orders. We are to be dispatched today for further training in mapping and signalling then on to a different camp to meet up with our draft of men, and to embark for active service. My dear, I know that this is a setback to our plans, but believe me it is only that and I hope and trust that I’ll be back soon and we will be able to be together at last. Before we met, I was never done badgering my uncle to get me a commission so that I would be ready, if called upon, to serve, so I must remember now that it’s an honour to fight for my country, put aside my own desires and do my best to step up to the mark and make my family proud.
You must not worry. I am fit and well thanks to the Officer Training Corps and the boxing (not to mention all that tennis we played!). Although one shouldn’t swank, I’ve been told at rifle practice that I’m something of a crack shot too. Sam Huggins and Lofty are in the same battalion so I shall be in the best company and we will give Old Fritz something to think about.
I wish that I could have come to you to say goodbye in person – it has all been so fast. I’m writing this in a corner of the mess, which, despite the clatter of plates and knives and forks, is the least chaotic place in camp. I wonder where you are at this moment. I always somehow imagine you in a garden. Perhaps it’s because of my memory of how I came upon you once at home, with the honeysuckle spilling over the pergola and your head bent over your book and the sun painting copper lights in your hair.
In my mind’s eye, I see you reading in a garden. Your long, slender fingers reach to turn the page and I bend towards you and cover your hand with my own. How I wish that I could pluck a flower to mark your place, take your hand in mine and lead you away. I must not do this.It is hard enough already.
I have your letters, which I will keep by me at all times so that I can always hear your sweet voice in my head. I will write again as soon as I can and let you know how to address your letters so that they will find me. Please do write as often as you can. You know that you have my heart in your safekeeping.
Ever yours,
Edmund
Violet put her forearm down on the ledge of the pew, amongst the hymn books, and rested her forehead on it, breathing in the musty smell of old, damp paper. ‘Please, keep him safe; I’ll do anything; I’ll be a better person,’ she prayed. ‘I won’t be irritable with Mother when she asks me to read the interminable household articles in her women’s paper, nor leave the planning of dinner so often to Mrs Burbidge. I won’t pester Mother to let me visit Elizabeth, or long for company, or feel sorry for myself, stuck here, where there is no one younger than forty. Only let Edmund be all right and I’ll be a model daughter and a better housekeeper and I won’t even be angry at Father any more for going away and leaving us here …’
In tears all over again, Violet stopped praying as the old hurt overcame her. The hollow, empty feeling that thoughts of her father brought on began to bear down on her, black as the darkness under her eyelids where her face pressed into the crook of her arm. Why did he not write? Why did he never come home? He hadn’t been near the place since before she went away to finishing school and then he had been cold to her mother and horribly formal with her, as if she had done something terribly wrong. The litany of questions ran through her mind as it always did. If he had loved her even a little, he would have visited her at school. No, it was not merely his estrangement from her mother that kept him away; it was something about her. It was somehow her fault.
If only Edmund could be here. His smiles, his small kindnesses and consideration somehow made her real, as though she was only brought into being when someone looked, really looked at her: as if his attention were an artist’s pencil sketching her lightly on a page. She thought of him holding her and how nothing else beyond them had existed, the hurt all blotted out, his eyes on her face conjuring her from drawing to sculpture, willing her into three dimensions so that she was solid and firm and glowing like bronze under the spotlight of his gaze while, all around them, everything that was other just fell away.
She sat up and stared again at the letter. How could she stand it? How was she to bear it? Soon she would have to go back to the house. She would have to swallow all this down into herself and keep it there, carrying on as though nothing was wrong, exchanging meaningless conversation, arranging the unremitting round of domestic life: the repetitive menus, the cycle of cleaning and gardening and maintaining the grounds, forever preparing for the visit from Father that never came, moving through days whose friction was slowly, inexorably, rubbing her out.
4 (#ulink_88f08e7d-4c99-5524-a9b3-1a831a8a483f)
MEASURING UP (#ulink_88f08e7d-4c99-5524-a9b3-1a831a8a483f)
George was woken by the noise of a milk-cart in the street outside. The milkman’s whistled rendition of ‘Hearts of Oak’ went through his head like the shriek of an engine with a full head of steam. He lay very still, gritting his teeth until the clink of bottles into crates was over and the clop of hooves on cobbles faded into the distance. He found that he was lying on top of a bed rather than in it and was still in his clothes, although his jacket and his boots had been removed. Gingerly, trying not to groan at the tenderness of his rib cage, he rolled over to face into the room and found Turland, sprawled asleep in an armchair with a pillow under his head and a washed-out green quilt over him, from which his legs protruded, showing a large hole in the heel of one of his grey socks.
Recognising Turland, everything about the night before came back to him in one huge wave of misery. How was he to explain that he had lost his wages and had no board money to give to his mother? He knew how much they needed every penny and that it was all accounted for as soon as it came into the house. He remembered the lessons at chapel on ‘the demon drink’, and how his mother had always said in her milder way that it ‘led to errors of judgement’. As a child, he had thought of God’s Judgement and wondered how God could possibly make a mistake. Now, as though he could hear his mother’s voice in his head, the true implication of human frailty sank in and he recognised his own weakness. He was angry and disgusted with himself.
There was nowhere in his thoughts that he could turn for any comfort. If he thought of Violet, her gentle eyes, her quiet manner, her lovely smile, it was as though a picture of the girl from the pub stood between them. The memory of the girl’s piggy eyes with their fair lashes and the feel of her pudgy, soft hands made him feel grubby, as though to think of Violet as existing in the same universe was to besmirch her. He had sunk low. He had let himself down and behaved like an absolute beast. He thought of Kitty scolding him over some minor foolishness in the past and the way that she would eventually shake her head and say, ‘You are a lost cause, George Farrell!’ and he would know he was forgiven. He had always been able to tell Kitty everything yet the thought of this made him wonder how he could look her in the face again.
There was a tap at the door and Rooke opened it a little way and put his head round it. ‘Breakfast’s started,’ he said.
Turland woke, stretched, and scratched his head. ‘Righto, I’ll be down in a minute.’ He glanced over at George and then added, ‘Here, Percy, see if you can put your filching skills to use and get something for Farrell, will you?’
Rooke nodded and withdrew.
George said, ‘Thanks for giving me the bed – very much appreciated.’ He slowly swung his legs down, using their weight to lever himself into a sitting position, and then braced himself by leaning on his hands, pressing his palms down on the edge of the mattress and straightening his arms to release some of the pressure on his bruised ribs.
‘No trouble. Everyone was in bed so we smuggled you in without a hitch. The bike’s down behind the basement railings.’ Turland pulled on his clothes and sat down again to tie up his shoes. ‘If you want to use the lav you should be all right while everyone’s at breakfast. There’s only Mr Anstey on this floor and he always goes fishing on a Saturday so he’ll be out by now.’ He chucked George a towel and hurried off to breakfast.
George crept along the landing to the bathroom where he splashed his hair and face with water and then stripped, washed and towelled himself down briskly. He rinsed the foul taste from his mouth, dressed and tried to make himself look respectable once more. He rubbed at the grubby knees of his trousers with a dampened corner of the towel and disposed of his soiled handkerchief in the bin marked ‘Laundry’.
When he slipped back to the room, Turland and Rooke were standing back to back comparing their height.
‘Turland reckons he’s five foot five. How much smaller am I?’ Rooke asked.
George obliged by putting his hand flat on Rooke’s smooth, well-oiled head. He marked where Rooke came up to with the side of his hand against Turland’s head. ‘Well, you’re about half a head shorter.’
Turland said, ‘Come on, Percy, you have to make five foot three to get in.’
Rooke pulled himself up to stand even straighter.
‘You’re still about three inches shorter,’ George said uncertainly.
Rooke’s shoulders sagged. Turland turned round and gave him a friendly punch on the arm. ‘Buck up, Rooke. Everyone knows our lads are desperate for reinforcements. I bet they’ll take you on, even at bantamweight.’
Rooke looked pleased and straightened his tie and collar.
Turland turned to George, and eyed his height and broad shoulders. ‘How about it, Farrell? Fancy changing your mind and coming along to make up the numbers? They’d snap you up, you know.’
There was a silence. George felt pleased that Turland thought so well of him and that the lads wanted him to come along as one of them. He’d always been outside the gangs at school, just him and Kitty muddling through, never feeling part of a group, never really belonging. Not like this: friends, comrades, brothers in arms. He thought about the extra pay he’d get, a shilling a day, and how it would help him make things right at home. He thought about casting off the self that he saw as grimy, weak, despicable, and replacing it with the aspiration of glory and honour and being a man. It would be like diving into a clear lake and emerging a new person: fitter, stronger. He imagined them all returning together, victorious: bronzed and battle-hardened men. Perhaps he would be able to do something half decent so that he could hold his head high in front of Violet again. His heart beat a little faster and his spirits lifted.
‘All right,’ he said. ‘All right, I will.’
Turland nodded sagely, affecting a gravitas suitable to the occasion.
Rooke said, ‘Oh, I nearly forgot,’ and brought out from his jacket pocket a square package wrapped in a rather greasy-looking napkin. George opened it to find a round of toast with a thin piece of bacon pressed between the slices.
‘Iron rations,’ Rooke said. ‘Eat up, soldier.’
They met up with Haycock and set off for the castle where recruitment was taking place. As they approached the centre of the town, they could hear the sound of a silver band in the next street. Haycock said, ‘Eh up? What’s this all about?’ and they wandered over to the Botchergate to find out. The street, always busy with shoppers, was thronging with people who had been drawn by the music, a martial tune with a solid drumbeat and a brash melody in a major key. George craned his neck to try to see above the spread of caps and hats but the crowd was four or five deep on the pavement and he was too far back. Rooke disappeared into the press, ducking under a man’s arm, and George followed suit, slipping through behind a nursemaid who was trying to manoeuvre a baby carriage.
He reached the others at the front and saw, coming towards them, a military band in navy dress uniform, striped with red ribbon: trumpets and trombones in front, polished to a glaring brightness in the morning sun, a euphonium and the huge bass drum behind. The drummer beat the taut skin with gusto and the sound reverberated as if caught between the high buildings. The rhythm was underwritten by the sound of the marching feet of the soldiers who followed on behind, carrying placards that read: ‘Will You Answer the Call? Now Is the Time’ and ‘Take up the Sword of Justice. Enlist Today!’ A wave of cheering from the crowd followed their progress. Behind the soldiers followed a mass of ordinary men in civilian dress, looking a rag-tag group in comparison with the orderly men in khaki. Some were laughing, some waving at friends in the crowd, while others made self-conscious efforts to fall into step with the marching soldiers. Every now and then, a man or two would break from the crush on the pavement and step out to join the procession and the volume of the cheering would rise as if to carry him forward on a swell of sound.
The band drew level with George and the others. A group of young women applauded but the sound mingled with the music, drowned out as the people all around took up the cheer. Turland plucked at George’s sleeve. Haycock was watching with a broad grin on his face. Rooke took off his cap, smoothed down his hair and put his cap back on again. ‘This is it, then,’ Turland mouthed at George over the ear-splitting noise. The band passed and the rows of marching soldiers followed, four abreast. ‘Ready?’ said Turland.
George pulled at the bottom of his jacket to straighten it. As the volunteers came level with them they all stepped forward. The cheering seemed to George to echo around him. As he came forward out of the shadow of the buildings, he was intensely aware of the heat of the sun on his head and the clear blue of the strip of sky above him. Everything was shining: the glittering instruments; the plate-glass windows of the shops with their fancy goods; the boots and belts of the soldiers they were to follow. They fell into line amongst the men; someone clapped him on the back, others moved to make space for the four of them to march together. They passed on into Lowther Street. The tram wires above them seemed to vibrate with the sound of the band, men raised their hats from the steps of the Royal Temperance Hotel and everywhere people stopped what they were doing to listen to the music. A group of young women, gathered at the upstairs window of a tearoom, leant out and waved and Haycock waved back. One of them took a flower from the vase on the table and tossed it down to him and Haycock caught it.
‘Who’s that?’ George yelled at him over the din.
Haycock shrugged and turned round; walking backwards, he held out his arms to the girl and made a great show of tucking the flower into his buttonhole. He pulled a mock-woebegone face and then turned back to march on.
The band took a sharp left turn in the direction of the main road. A gap in the line of carts and motors opened for them and they joined the road and marched on towards the castle, a queue of traffic quickly forming behind them.
The castle was a huge medieval pile. Built of red sandstone, everything about it was square: the shape of the gatehouse, the lookout towers and the crenellations along the ramparts. The thickness of the walls was such that it almost seemed to have been hewn from solid rock. As they passed beneath the massive archway that led into a wide parade ground, all four young men felt a little over-awed; even Haycock’s swagger was less jaunty as he looked about him with curiosity. George thought about the soldiers who had passed through these barracks over centuries, all the feet that had drilled in this enormous, open square and marched out to do battle. He looked up at the corner towers and imagined the sentries posted there, scanning the surrounding countryside for the approach of opposing forces, preparing for a siege and determining to defend the fortress with their very lives. Wasn’t it something to be part of this history!
The band stopped playing and began to empty out their instruments. The soldiers directed the men towards the recruiting rooms on the other side of the square and the crowd began to disperse towards them. George nudged Turland to indicate to him the queue of men at an open doorway; in unspoken agreement, they all walked around the perimeter of the courtyard to reach it, suddenly shy of crossing the open space on the diagonal and drawing attention to themselves.
The men in their queue were of varied ages and occupations. Most wore the flat cap of the working man or carried their cap folded. Some had the rough-handed look of the labourer, with worsted jacket and heavy boots, whilst others had stiff collars, neat ties and an air of confidence about them.
The line of men moved along until they entered the hall. George could see that men were being called forward one by one to a row of desks, and old memories of school and the humiliation of being called in front of Mr Bevinson to explain himself returned for a moment, making him feel nervous. He moved back a little in the group so that Haycock would reach the front first.
When George’s turn came round, the corporal asked for his full name and occupation, and if he was willing to serve ‘for the duration’. He gave his details and said that he was willing. When he was asked his age, he said, ‘Eighteen years and three months.’
The corporal looked up sharply and said, ‘I’m sorry, I didn’t hear that. Did you say nineteen?’
George looked puzzled.
The corporal asked him, ‘Do you want to join the war?’
George nodded uncomprehendingly.
‘So you need to be able to take up service overseas, should the opportunity arise,’ he said patiently.
George vaguely remembered the conversation of the previous night in the taproom. ‘Sorry, nineteen and three months,’ he said quickly and the man gave him a weak smile, took down his address, asked him for a signature and then told him to stand in another line to one side. As he left the desk, he heard Rooke step up behind him and declare, as confidently as you like, that he was Percy Rooke, an apprentice baker and that he was born in 1895.
Rooke came over, wearing a non-committal expression. George knew that he must be delighted to have passed the first hurdle and marvelled at his ability not to show it. Rooke seemed always able to blend into the background; he carefully avoided attracting attention and his knack of adopting a deadpan expression made him less visible than those with more animated faces.
‘Why did you say you were a baker?’ George asked wonderingly. Rooke’s capacity for duplicity made him a mystery to George.
Rooke tapped the side of his nose. ‘Scoffum,’ he said. ‘If I can get taken on in the cookhouse I’ll always have plenty of grub.’
George wished that he had thought of that and wondered whether admitting to being a postman had been a good idea. Perhaps he would be asked to take messages. He didn’t quite like the idea of scouting around alone along the front line; he hoped he could stay with all the others.
When they reached the front of the second queue, Haycock again went in before George. He emerged a few minutes later, straightening his jacket, and gave George a broad wink. Before George had time to ask him what had happened, the sergeant, a dapper man with a neat moustache, ushered him in. He closed the door behind him, saying, ‘Take your clothes off and step on to the scales, please.’ A doctor in a white coat was finishing making some notes on a form. George stripped. It was cold in the room. He placed his clothes in a little pile on top of his boots, as there seemed to be nowhere else to put them, and stood with his hands folded over his private parts. As he stood on the scales, he glanced down at his pale body and saw, to his consternation, that a huge area of dark bruising had come out on his left side. The sergeant raised his eyebrows but said nothing, simply noting his weight, and then quickly taking his height and chest measurements.
The doctor came over to examine him. ‘Well-built lad,’ he said over his shoulder to the sergeant and then asked the question that George had been dreading. ‘How did you get this bruising?’
George didn’t know what to say. He could hardly say that he had been set upon and robbed. He felt his cheeks stinging as he thought of his humiliation, how he hadn’t even fielded a blow, much less aimed one in return. ‘It was an accident, sir,’ he blurted out.
The doctor looked at him keenly, clearly recognising a lie.
George heard the sergeant mutter, ‘Fighting, more likely. These young men have no self-discipline.’
‘Well, I don’t know,’ the doctor said mildly. ‘The recklessness of youth, though a nuisance in peacetime, can have its uses in wartime. Let the army sort him out.’ George, still smarting from being misrepresented as a roughneck, murmured a ‘Thank you, sir.’
The doctor told George to get dressed and then asked him to read some letters on a white board. George could read all bar the very last row. The doctor wrote something down on his form before asking George to show him his teeth; like a horse, George thought; then, more alarmingly: ‘I wonder if they can tell your age from your teeth?’ However, the form was duly signed and George was told that he could go. He left, feeling that the strict eye of the sergeant was still on him.
When Rooke and Turland had been through the same process, the four gathered once more.
‘I’m in,’ Rooke said, rubbing his sides. ‘I thought my ribs would bust, I took such a breath when my chest got measured.’
When a few others had joined them, they were taken into a room to swear the oath.
The adjutant who swore them in struck George as very fine. He had a strong physique and an upright bearing and his hair was cut very short and neat. His jacket was tightly fitted, and belt, boots and buttons were all polished to a high gloss. George was acutely conscious of the rip in his jacket pocket and the smear of soil on his rounded collar and longed to get out of his dirty clothes and become a proper soldier.
They stood in a row before the adjutant. He let his hand rest on a large, black Bible and stood to attention. He asked them to raise their right hand and swear to serve their King and country.
The room was very quiet afterwards. The officer let the silence linger to bring home to them the solemnity of the occasion and his eyes fell on each of them in turn, as if weighing up their character. George dared not glance around him but felt that every one of the group must feel as serious as he did. Then the adjutant relaxed his face and wished them luck. He gave them all a shilling and said that this was one day’s pay and meant that they were now deemed to be soldiers and subject to the King’s regulations. Rooke put his quickly in his pocket, as though afraid someone might realise they’d paid him three times his usual wage and take it away again. George thought that he would like to keep his as a kind of talisman but then remembered that he needed to give it to Mother.
The adjutant told them to come back on Monday morning and not to wait for their mobilisation papers because the paperwork wasn’t keeping up with the huge influx of recruits. ‘There’s a great need for men, and training must commence as soon as possible,’ he said. ‘We’ll be sending the next draft to camp on Monday so report here by eight thirty.’
They were ushered into a further room to be measured for their uniforms. Here, both men and women were working at sewing machines, treadles clattering as they sewed. Rolls of cloth stood on end, some neatly in line, some leaning at angles against the wall like a parade of tipsy soldiers. More bolts of cloth that looked like tent canvas were piled haphazardly together in a heap on the floor. George wished that he hadn’t had the thought that they were like soldiers.
One of the men got up from his machine. He had a tape measure draped around his neck. He took each man’s name and measurements and wrote them down; then he disappeared into a storeroom and returned with a pile of uniforms in a blue cloth and began to distribute them.
‘They’re the wrong colour,’ Rooke said under his breath.
‘What happened to the khaki?’ Haycock said with disappointment in his voice.
The machinist said, ‘There are too many recruits; we can’t get the supplies so we’re forced to requisition from the post office.’
‘Might as well stay as you are then, Farrell,’ Turland said cheerily.
George was relieved to be given trousers and a jacket, bundled together. Turland and Haycock only had trousers. He slipped the jacket on. It was a bit bigger than his post-office uniform and less tight across the back but the arms were a little short. He turned to find Rooke trying his and stifled his own complaint. Rooke was drowned in his jacket: the shoulders stood out well beyond his actual shoulders and the sleeves were inches too long.
The machinist tutted. ‘That’s the smallest we’ve got, I’m afraid, lad,’ he said to Rooke. ‘Get your mother to turn up the sleeves or they’ll be getting in your way.’ A woman whose needle had broken called him over and he went to attend to her machine.
Haycock said, ‘Well, it fits where it touches,’ and laughed.
Rooke scowled at him and took it off.
George took off his jacket and refolded it. They stood there, uncertain what to do next. The machinist, who had given the woman a new needle, turned and seemed surprised to see them still there.
‘That’s all,’ he said, looking amused and gesturing to a door at the far end of the room. ‘You’re free to go.’ He made a flapping movement at them with his arms and they trooped out feeling a little foolish.
In the parade ground, men were still queuing to enlist; others carrying bundles of uniform like their own were waiting around watching two horses being unharnessed from a cart and led away. The backboard of the cart was unfastened and its load of boots and shoes, of many different styles and clearly not army issue, was tipped out on to the paved ground. The quartermaster arrived and held each pair up in turn, shouting out the sizes. Men called out, ‘Me, sir! Here, sir!’ in return and he would toss each pair over, a scrum ensuing as men scrambled to get hold of them. Rooke, who took a small size for which there was no great competition, got a pair of boots fit for a farmer and said that they more than made up for the jacket, even though it was so big it stood still when he turned round. George decided that he would stick with his own boots. The legwork on his rounds had taught him the value of a pair of boots that were well ‘broken in’ and he had no desire to change.
Whilst the scrum was going on around the pile of boots, Turland waiting patiently and Haycock darting forward every now and then to make a grab, George noticed that a pair of fellows had detached themselves from the recruitment queue and were moving casually along the line to the edge of the square. Something in their manner made George immediately certain that they had changed their minds and sure enough they were making towards the gate. One of the men waiting in the queue spotted them and knocked the arm of his companion.
‘Oi!’ he shouted. ‘Where you off to?’
One of the men glanced back, and then carried on walking, his gaze fixed firmly on the ground.
A ripple of movement ran along the line as men turned in curiosity.
‘Enjoyed your march through town but had enough of the glory now, eh?’ shouted another man.
A mutter rose from the line. The man who was leading the way to the gate said something in reply that George couldn’t hear and he saw him stumble as someone shoved him. He recovered himself and for a moment squared up to his attacker, but then clearly thought better of it and stepped away from the line, beyond easy reach. There were boos and jeers from the crowd and shouts of ‘Cowards!’ and ‘Turncoats!’ The two men hurried away without looking back.
George felt his cheeks and neck burning as if he had been one of them. How horrible it would be to have everyone against you in that way. He almost hated the men for drawing down upon themselves the very thing that George dreaded most himself: that someone would see through him and realise that although he had been buoyed up by the glitter and the camaraderie, lurking close to the surface on which he floated was a current of dark, cold fear. Surely he wasn’t the only one to feel it. He looked around at the others; Turland was smiling, and Haycock laughing as Rooke hopped around absurdly trying to pull on the second of his new boots. He took a deep breath, thought of the feeling he had experienced as he stepped forward in the street and looked up at the blue sky. The moment passed.
Rooke tied the laces of his old boots together and slung them over his shoulder. They set off companionably towards the gate. Haycock said goodbye. He said he was going to drop in at the gas works to let them know not to expect him next week and then go on to visit a few friends and say cheero.
George walked back with the others to retrieve his bike from behind the basement railings. He didn’t relish the prospect of breaking the news of his enlistment to his family or the Ashwells. Nonetheless, now that he had overcome what he told himself was a fit of the ‘collywobbles’, he felt again the excitement of the great change that was to come. As he shook hands, first with Turland, who wished him a safe journey, and then Rooke, whom he joshed about his luck in squeaking into the army at all, he felt a little rebellious pride begin to grow, that he had instigated this and was being his own man. As he set off back towards the main road out of the town, the strains of the silver band reached him faintly once more and he found himself pedalling to the rhythm of imagined marching feet.
5 (#ulink_a670de4a-8c26-54bf-96d5-38e000b8173e)
FRIAR’S CRAG (#ulink_a670de4a-8c26-54bf-96d5-38e000b8173e)
Feeling hot and dusty, George came through the gate into the yard, squeezed past the privy and the shed and propped his bike against the coal bunker. He took his new uniform out of the basket and tucked it under his arm. Lillie was sitting on the back step, surrounded by cooking pans. She was singing to herself and pouring water from one pan to another, using a broken-handled cup.
‘Hello, our Lillie,’ George said and squatted down opposite her. ‘What have we here? Is it a tea party?’
Lillie offered him the cup and he started to drink from it.
‘No, no,’ Lillie said crossly. ‘P’tend!’
George pretended to take a sip and said mmm. He was rewarded by a pat and a smile. Lillie’s ‘Fums Up’ doll lay on the ground with its painted lick of baby hair and rosy cheeks, looking up with a cheeky expression from the dandelions growing in the cracks in the brick path. George picked her up, put the cup between her hinged arms so that she held it and swivelled them up as if she were drinking. Lillie started to laugh. His mother’s voice came from inside saying, ‘What’s tickled you, Lillikins?’
George put his finger to his lips and passed the doll and the cup to Lillie. ‘There you are,’ he said. ‘You feed Baby.’
He stepped round her and went into the scullery. His mother was in the kitchen beyond, standing at the table with her back to him, buttering the end of a loaf of bread. Her frowsy hair was pulled back into a plait; it hung down her back rather than being pinned in a coil in her usual manner. George noticed the dull grey hairs that were curlier than the brown and had escaped to form a soft edge to the silhouette of her head against the light from the window. Her apron strings were coming undone and the bars of her shoes were unbuttoned as if she’d slipped them on in haste. Such was George’s scrutiny as he hesitated to speak that, as if she had sensed it, she made a small sound of irritation and paused to slap at the back of her neck as though she felt a midge bite.
George steeled himself. ‘I’m back,’ he said.
His mother wheeled round. ‘Where have you been?’ Her face looked pinched; the two worry lines between her eyebrows that he knew so well were drawn tight. ‘You stayed out all night!’
George, unable to tell the truth without eliciting further questions that he didn’t want to answer, simply said, ‘I’ve joined up.’ He walked into the room and put his folded uniform down on the table.
‘Mind! Crumbs,’ she said automatically, moving it further over, away from the breadcrumbs and smudges of butter on the oilcloth. ‘What do you mean? Whatever did you want to do that for?’
‘I … I lost my wages. It was careless of me; I must have put them in my trouser pocket so they fell out when I was riding the bike. I know you always tell me to put them in my breast pocket. I’m sorry.’
‘Well, that was foolish, but never mind that, George. What do you mean you’ve joined up? Not enlisted?’ She looked again at the folded clothes on the table; then she reached out and touched the cloth as though trying to believe that it was real.
George said nothing.
‘It’s not right,’ she said. ‘We’ve taught you that since a baby.’ She looked him in the eye. ‘You know better than to get involved. Think how your father will feel about it; it’s not Christian!’
George shifted uncomfortably. ‘Well, I’ve done it,’ he said. ‘I’ve signed the papers.’ He reached into his pocket to look for the shilling.
‘But it’s dangerous!’ A plaintive note came into his mother’s voice. ‘Surely you’re too young … They won’t send you overseas, will they? How long have you signed up for?’
‘The duration.’
She sat down at the table and pushed away the breadboard, which chinked the butter dish and the muddle of plates together. ‘That’s good, better than signing up for years, that’s not so bad … it’ll be training,’ she said as if to herself. ‘It’ll all be over soon – before you’re old enough to go. Well, that’s something …’ She rested her forehead on her hand, her action belying her words of self-comfort. She looked as though she was about to cry.
George said, ‘Oh, don’t, Mother, please don’t.’ He touched her shoulder but she wouldn’t look at him. ‘I’m very sorry about the money.’ He produced the shilling, saying, ‘Here, I know we’ll still be short but I’ll get this every day so we’ll soon catch up again.’
He held it out to her but his mother just shook her head and looked away from him.
George was unsure what to do; he wished that his father were at home. Even if it meant facing his disappointment, it would be worth it to have him know what best to say to Mother.
‘Well, I suppose you must just look after it for me until I come back then.’ He put the shilling down on the table beside her elbow. He kissed the top of her head, picked up his uniform and went slowly upstairs.
It was stuffy in the bedroom with its sloping ceiling under the eaves. George changed out of his postman’s uniform and put on a clean shirt and trousers. The uniform would have to go back to Mr Ashwell but he didn’t feel that he could ask his mother to sew up the ripped pocket and he knew he would make a mess of it if he tried to do it himself. He put it on a clothes hanger, opened the window and hung it from the sash to air. He wished he had asked Mother for some of that bread.
Ted’s bed was unmade and still had the dent in the pillow where he had slept. George lay down on the smooth coverlet of his own bed, his head propped against the wooden headboard that his father had made for him when he was a child. He had been so proud to have this crude piece of carpentry from his father that he had scratched his initials in the corner. The marks were there still, though dulled by age and polish. It felt strange to look around the little room that was still so full of his childhood and know that he would be leaving it in just two days. All his things had been handed down to Ted so the shelves still held his old games: Ludo, Railway Race and Magnetic Fishing; his eye wandered over the boxes, their cardboard lids softened and dog-eared with use. Piles of Boys’ Best Story Papers and Funnybone comics, which he had reread time and time again, were stuffed higgledy-piggledy between a book on scouting and a pair of shin pads. George thought that he hadn’t taken Ted to play cricket for a long time and felt a pang of regret.
On top of the boxes was Ted’s newest acquisition, a ‘panorama’ of Captain Scott’s expedition. The little theatre had a scarlet proscenium arch decorated with gold acanthus leaves and inside was a snowy scene with tiny stand-up figures. In the foreground, Scott himself shouldered an ice pick while behind him fluttered the English flag, and men, horses and dog sleighs crossed the snow between the spread of tents and the mountains. He thought of the boldness of the expedition, how courageous it was to brave those unknown wastes. He thought of the aching cold, the labour of moving all the equipment and making camp, the fear of breaking ice. How arduous the enterprise and how glorious the attempt! He felt a shiver go through him at the romance of it all. Soon he would be starting out on an expedition of his own that was equally serious in intent, and which would demand just such manly qualities. He got up, retrieved his sketchbook from his jacket pocket and tucked it under his pillow. He closed his eyes and let all the strain, and the events of the last two days, drift into the background. He daydreamt of the time when he would return from the war. He would visit Violet, upright in his uniform, perhaps with stripes on his sleeve, and with his own tales to tell of distant countries …
Ted shook him by the shoulder to wake him to tell him that tea was ready. He groaned as the movement made his tender ribs ache. He could hear the clatter of plates and his mother’s voice telling Lillie to wash her hands at the tap.
‘Are you really going for a soldier?’ Ted said. ‘With a rifle and everything?’ He bounced down on the end of the bed.
George groaned again and said, ‘Te-ed.’ He rubbed his eyes. ‘Is Father home?’ he asked.
‘Not until around ten. I heard him tell Ma at lunchtime that he’s going on to choir practice after the meeting with the Elder. Where’s the rifle then? Go on, show us it.’
‘I haven’t got it yet and anyway it wouldn’t be safe to have it lying around in a bedroom,’ George said in an authoritative tone.
Ted, rather stung by what he saw as George acting ‘above himself’, said, ‘Huh, not much of a soldier then; you haven’t even got a proper uniform.’
George shuffled up the bed and slowly lowered each leg to the ground, wincing as he did so. He had stiffened up and his ribs felt as though someone had taken a hammer to them whilst he slept.
‘What’s the matter with you?’ Ted said grumpily. ‘When you’ve gone, I’ll be able to use your fishing rod. And your cricket bat,’ he added meanly.
George said, ‘If I show you, will you promise not to tell?’
Ted nodded.
George pulled up his shirt and Ted said, ‘Holy Mother!’ – an expletive that he didn’t fully understand but knew to be Very Bad.
George pulled his shirt back down again. ‘Not a word, now.’ He gave Ted a nudge. ‘And I don’t mind if you use my rod and my bat as long as you catch all three-pounders and only hit sixes.’
At teatime, the atmosphere was strained. Lillie was fractious after having spent too long in the sun, which had made her arms and legs pink. She scrambled up on to her mother’s lap and then down again, and wouldn’t be comforted. Ted started asking George more about how he had come to join up but soon realised from George’s frowns and his mother’s hurt silence that this was not a topic to pursue at the table. Finally, overwrought with tiredness, Lillie took to throwing herself backwards in Mother’s arms so that it was all Mother could do to hold on to her, and she decided to put her to bed early.
‘She’s about done up,’ Mother said, standing and hefting Lillie to her shoulder, ‘and I know just how she feels.’
George began to stack the tea things on to a tray. His mother turned at the door. ‘Oh, I forgot to say, George, Kitty called round while you were sleeping to see if you were all right; she’d been concerned since you didn’t drop back to the post office after your round yesterday. I told her you were home safe …’ She tailed off as though uttering the word ‘safe’ brought all her fears once more to the surface. Lillie wriggled in her arms and began banging her head rhythmically against Mother’s shoulder. ‘I told Kitty your news, and I’m sure she’ll pass it on,’ Mother said, holding Lillie tighter and stroking her hair.
George appreciated his mother’s attempt to break the news to Mr A. on his behalf; he hadn’t been relishing the prospect of telling him himself. ‘How did Kitty seem?’ he asked.
‘She looked rather stricken, to be honest. It seemed a bit of a shock to her. Well, I expect it was, Arthur having gone so recently and now they’ll be another man short.’
George felt a stab of anxiety as another uncomfortable consequence spread from his action, a ripple from the stone he had dropped into the calm pool of his own ordinary life.
‘You know you must go and see Mr Ashwell anyway, don’t you? It’s only polite,’ his mother said abruptly and, shushing Lillie, carried on upstairs.
‘Well, it’s very inconvenient,’ Mr Ashwell said. He stood with his arm resting on the mantelpiece in their best room ‘above the shop’. George was seated, along with Mrs Ashwell and Kitty, on the pretty, floral parlour chairs that Mrs Ashwell draped with antimacassars to protect the treasure of her upholstery from Mr Ashwell’s hair oil.
‘I’m sorry, Mr Ashwell,’ George said with downcast eyes.
Mrs Ashwell said in a mild tone, ‘I expect your mother and father are very proud of you – making a stand for poor Belgium and supporting the King.’ She risked a glance at her husband.
Mr Ashwell snorted. ‘It’s all very well, everyone gallivanting off, but why on earth couldn’t you go about it in the proper manner, like Arthur? You could have applied to the Post Office Rifles. We could have had time to plan!’
Mrs Ashwell opened her mouth to suggest that she make a cup of tea but Mr Ashwell held up the flat of his hand and continued: ‘As it is, I’ll now have to take the cart to the station as well as all my other responsibilities, and from tomorrow we shall have to put two of the younger boys on to your duties until we can get a replacement, that’s if we can get one at all.’
George made a great study of the rug. It was a proper woven one, not like the lumpy rag rugs they had at home but smooth and with a trellis pattern and twining, stylised roses.
The lack of an answer from him seemed to annoy Mr Ashwell even more. ‘You realise that your hot-headed decision will mean extra work in the sorting room for Mabel and for Kitty?’ he asked.
George shot a quick look at Kitty, who had her hands clasped in her lap and was looking miserable.
Mr Ashwell, feeling that he had scored a winning point, said, ‘And what if I’m ever ill? Are we to send Kitty out with the horse and cart? Whatever next?’
Mrs Ashwell felt that her husband had breached the bounds of propriety in speaking in that manner to a guest in their home. Seeing that her husband had worked himself up until his eyes were staring and his face was red, and knowing that these signs meant that she would be treated to a reiteration of these arguments until bedtime and probably beyond, she stood up. ‘Kitty,’ she said in a louder voice than she had meant, ‘perhaps you and George should take the opportunity to have a walk, as the evening is so lovely and George’s time with us so short.’
Kitty and George both rose. Mr Ashwell, still watching George with a hawkish expression, picked up his pipe from the mantel and began to tamp tobacco into it. Mrs Ashwell ushered them to the door and George turned back into the room to mutter ‘Goodnight, sir’, as they left. Mrs Ashwell nodded. ‘Give my best to your parents, George.’ She glanced back at Mr Ashwell, who had lit his pipe and was now sucking so hard on it that he was working up a fearsome glow in the bowl. She said, ‘And we wish you the best of luck in your endeavours,’ loud enough for her husband to hear. ‘Keep safe,’ she said, quietly, as she shut the door softly behind them.
‘Where would you like to go?’ George asked as they walked out into the balmy air of the warm evening.
Kitty shrugged. ‘Down to the lake, I suppose. That’s where we always seem to end up.’ They walked across the market place, where cabbage leaves and bits of torn paper were strewn from the Saturday traders’ carts earlier in the day, and then on past the shops. When they came to Abraham’s Photographic Studio, George found himself stopping and peering into the window at the pictures of climbers roped to walls of rock and postcards of lake views, fells and waterfalls. He had seen them all a million times before and yet today his feet had simply refused to pass them. It’s because of Violet, he thought, that’s why, and he pictured her with her camera over her shoulder, setting off on her walk alone, and felt that his heart would break.
‘Are you coming?’ Kitty had stopped a few yards further on and was now looking at him impatiently.
George hurried to catch her up. ‘Are you angry with me too, Kitty?’ he asked. ‘Is it because of the work, as your father said?’
Kitty made a tutting sound and gave George a look which seemed to say: ‘Don’t you understand anything?’ They turned down Paraffin Alley past the ironmonger’s shop, Kitty striding away from him until they reached Lake Road where she slowed down a little to match her pace to that of the couples and families, tourists and locals strolling down towards the lake and its surrounding circle of quiet hills.
George held out his arm to her but she didn’t take it. Instead, she said, ‘You didn’t come back for tea. We waited, but you didn’t come. I thought you’d had an accident or something.’
‘Oh, is that all!’ George said. ‘I’m sorry, by the time I remembered it was too late to get back, I was in Carlisle you see …’ Too late, he realised that he had meant to keep off that subject.
‘What took you to Carlisle, then?’ Kitty said.
‘Oh, I don’t know, I’d heard about other chaps joining up and I thought I’d just go and see. Just find out.’
‘It was a bit sudden, wasn’t it?’ Kitty said, looking at him with that look she had which seemed to go right through you. ‘You never said a word about this before.’
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Judith Allnatt
Тип: электронная книга
Жанр: Современная зарубежная литература
Язык: на английском языке
Издательство: HarperCollins
Дата публикации: 16.04.2024
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О книге: A poignant story of love and redemption, The Moon Field explores the loss of innocence through a war that destroys everything except the bonds of human hearts.No man’s land is a place in the heart: pitted, cratered and empty as the moon…Hidden in a soldier’s tin box are a painting, a pocket watch, and a dance card – keepsakes of three lives.It is 1914. George Farrell cycles through the tranquil Cumberland fells to deliver a letter, unaware that it will change his life. George has fallen for the rich and beautiful daughter at the Manor House, Miss Violet, but when she lets slip the contents of the letter George is heartbroken to find that she is already promised to another man. George escapes his heartbreak by joining the patriotic rush to war, but his past is not so easily avoided. His rite of passage into adulthood leaves him believing that no woman will be able to love the man he has become.