The Archers

by Catherine Miller

  Turning down a narrow lane overhung with trees, Alec put an arm around Kitty. With a glance to the left and the right.

  ‘The letter writer can’t see us here,’ said Alec.

  ‘And you know that how?’ Kitty leaned in. ‘I’ve been to purgatory this afternoon, Alec. Pamela’s so kind to me. If only she’d punch me in the gob.’

  ‘Not her style.’

  Does he think this is funny? Kitty’s feet hurt in the Sunday shoes she’d worn to meet Pamela. Together, the Pargetters were formidable, a pair of thoroughbreds in harness. There was a rightness to their coupling; their marriage obeyed all the unwritten rules of British society.

  But Kitty felt she had an advantage; Pamela didn’t know about her, had no idea they were locked in a fight to the death. I don’t want to fight, but I must play the hand life’s dealt me. And fight she would.

  She snatched the reins and the pony stopped, bending her head to the sweet young grasses. Kitty jumped down and pulled on Alec’s arm until he had no option but to follow suit. She hooked his waist. ‘I want you now, here,’ she said.

  ‘Good God, woman.’ Alec pulled away, stepping back until his handmade shoes were safe on the dirt track. ‘Stop it, Kitty.’ He beat her off like a virginal maidservant in a melodrama.

  With one of those hairpin mood changes that scared him (and gave his downstairs a certain lift, it had to be admitted), Kitty snapped, ‘Why’d you have to be married to somebody like Pamela? She’s so good and so proper. And her clothes. She always says the right thing. I want her to like me, Alec! And I think she does. Pamela likes me. Which eats me up.’

  ‘Kitty…’ Alec glanced up the road, down the road. A Horrobin could pop out of the undergrowth. A stout village woman could turn the bend. ‘Not here.’

  ‘That’s my Irishness, of course.’ Kitty paced and turned. ‘Us colonial servants, we’re doomed to need our overlords’ approval.’

  ‘Look here.’ Alec took Kitty by the shoulders. ‘You might not eulogize Pamela so much if you had to live with her.’

  ‘No!’ Kitty put up a forefinger. ‘You’re not to do that. Don’t badmouth her to me.’

  ‘What a strange little thing you are.’ Alec looked down at her. The moment was a metronome poised to swing.

  ‘That’s why you love me.’ The moment stretched. ‘Oh, say it, Alec, you big fool!’ Kitty pushed him, deftly, against a tree. ‘It’s obvious. You love me. You do. You love me. You should be telling me but here I am telling you!’ She pushed her hand all over his face, as if squashing a sandcastle.

  Alec’s nose bent sideways and his lips flattened against his teeth. He laughed and laughed and a bird beat its way out of the hazel bushes.

  She put her hand somewhere else. ‘And that’s why you can leave her, Alec. Because you love me and that matters.’

  The roving little hand sobered Alec. He took it in his own and held it up, as if arresting her. Love as something more than a word to be used was novel to him.

  Pulling her hand away and nursing her wrist, Kitty stepped back. ‘Pamela’s so sophisticated, and I’m just a peasant.’

  ‘Please,’ said Alec. He was appalled by this push-me-pull-you. Yet he wasn’t bored, when so much bored him. Alec had been bored all through school. Dammit, he’d been bored at war. But not with this girl. ‘Look, darling, Pamela’s only sophisticated to the likes of Doris Archer. In London she’s a nobody. It suits her to be the glossiest fish in Ambridge’s pond.’

  Another about-turn. ‘Be nice about her. I mean it.’ And then another about-turn, of a different nature. Kitty flattened herself against a tree, her arms reaching backwards around it, as if cuffed. ‘Let’s do it. Come on. I want to feel the bark against my bum.’

  Alec plunged into her like a man with no responsibilities, like a man who wasn’t concerned that a neighbour might turn the corner and see his bare behind. ‘You’ll be the death of me, Kitty,’ he snarled into her curls.

  ‘I’ll be the making of you, you eejit.’

  When she came Kitty yowled and a fox answered from two fields over.

  MAY

  The warm, filthy smell of May shocked young Eugene.

  Doris stifled her amusement. Did the young genius expect muck-spreading to smell of roses? He was insulted by farm life, and she imagined callouses forming on his soul just as they did on his soft hands. He was only a boy; he was feeling his way, like the rest of the nation. Being at war was, the politicians said, inevitable, but it felt unnatural to a woman brought up among pasture and ponds and the gentle sounds of cows talking to each other.

  Jane Gilpin’s unstoppable tears at the pageant committee had unsettled everyone else, but they’d calmed Doris. Weren’t sobs the only sane response to war? If they weren’t going to cry as they waved off cheerful young fella-me-lads to be shot, when were they to cry?

  Doris saw Jane as courageous; I could never break down in front of others like that. But she wanted to. She wanted to heave the war off her back and lie in the dirt and press her face into the ground and cry.

  But for now, there was work to be done. The men – her men – trooped in from washing up at the pump outside, big chapped hands in cruelly cold water.

  Jez sat first. Mother Cat decamped. He glared at his plate. ‘Do you really expect us to work all day on bread and dripping sandwiches, missus?’

  ‘Blame the government, not me,’ said Doris. ‘I can’t stretch the rations any further. You have a go, Jez, as you know better, and we’ll see how you manage.’

  The speed and ferocity of the answer took the men aback; they weren’t to know of the morning Doris had had, of how long the day seemed to her. Eugene said, ‘He doesn’t mean anything by it, Mrs Archer.’

  Doris put a hand on his shoulder as she passed. Felt how spare he was. Eugene was not designed to toil. She poured him tea, lots of it, in the biggest cup.

  Love might not be everything to Doris, but it was everywhere. She loved the kitchen. She loved that it beat like a big healthy heart at the centre of the farm, of Ambridge, and therefore, surely, the world.

  But lately the walls played tricks on her. They moved imperceptibly inwards overnight. The kitchen, once so expansive, had become a vice.

  All those blessed pamphlets with their mock goose and their mock cream; they needed to eat real food, and lots of it. They had a war to win.

  A cough from the parlour. Doris’s ears pricked the way Glen’s did when he heard a badger. ‘You all right in there, Mum?’

  ‘What, love? Yes. Just something in my throat.’

  The parlour, hallowed and unused, home to the proper furniture and the one piece of silver and the family photographs in heavy frames, had been opened up and aired. Lisa held court there. A lonely court, but a safe one.

  Family visits were promised, but Doris took her brothers’ promises with a pinch of salt; caring for Mum was a family game of musical chairs and it stood to reason that the sole daughter would be left standing when the music stopped.

  ‘Remember, Mrs Archer,’ said Eugene, through a mouthful of bread Doris had baked that morning, ‘I’m off to see the doc later. My asthma.’

  ‘But you’re the only one that can milk!’ Doris flared up, as if another Doris, a Latina version, had been dormant inside her all these years. ‘I can’t do that on my own as well! I only have one pair of hands.’ Doris bit down on the anger that stood primed and ready to fly. She didn’t much care for this Latin Doris.

  ‘Whoa there!’ Jez pretended to be frightened of her. ‘Why not rope in your sainted old man to help? He knows everything about everything. Although, I hear he’s the ARP warden now, as well as doing his War Ag rounds.’ Jez wiped the plate with a crust and sighed sympathetically. ‘Sounds like he’d do anything not to be at home.’

  ‘It’s called doing your bit,’ said Doris. She took away Jez’s plate while he was still wiping. ‘I’ll have to show you how to milk, Jez.’ She’d avoided it up to now. Didn’t want him near her girls. The cows could be trouble if
they weren’t treated with respect.

  She knew how they felt.

  * * *

  A pinprick of indulgence in the dour cloth of austerity, The Bull was full of men. Labouring men. Besuited men. Drunk men and men who could stop at just the one pint.

  Dan was one of the latter, but this was his second pint. The landlord, Bob, had unsettled him.

  ‘As a War Ag official,’ Bob had said, ‘you should be clamping down on these letters, Dan. People are unhappy. Things are bad enough with this blinkin’ war without having a fifth columnist of our own.’

  The War Ag wasn’t the Secret Service, Dan had told him mildly. ‘I’m a small cog in a large machine, Bob.’ That suited Dan. He liked slotting into place, turning diligently, and feeling the great machine whirr around him. There had to be boundaries; he couldn’t be responsible for farming, blackouts and petty crime. Now he said, ‘You have to hand it to this letter writer, he’s a cunning sod. Seems to be everywhere at once.’

  ‘You make him sound like a will o’ the wisp.’ Bob wiped down the counter; it was a thankless task, it would soon be awash with slops again. Maybe that’s why Bob used a dirty cloth, to underline the hopeless nature of his chore. The Bull was a haven of filth for the customers, lacking what they called a woman’s touch, and a place where you could spill ash and sneeze without apology. A veritable wonderland of male behaviours. ‘You mark my words, the letter writer’s not a “he”, Dan. This is a woman’s doing. They have eyes everywhere, them ladies. My late wife, God rest her soul, knew what I was doing even if I was down in the cellar and she was over in Felpersham.’

  ‘I’ll try and step things up,’ said Dan, with no notion of what stepping things up might entail. He was more tired than he’d ever been. His hair was tired.

  Alec stooped at the low door.

  ‘Hail Caesar!’ shouted Dan. The second pint was having its effect. ‘Did you call Ronald?’ Alec brought with him news of the war and an excuse for a third beer.

  ‘Yes. Just a half, please, Bob, and whatever Dan here wants.’ Alec’s friend, Ronald Furneaux, sister to Magsy and Morgan’s brother-in-law, was member of parliament for Bristol West. Hard to get hold of, but a fount of back-channel information whenever Alec pinned him down. These titbits were hoarded; not everyone could be exposed to the unexpurgated facts of war. The ladies, for example, would be plunged into gloom. ‘We’ve been caught on the hop,’ said Alec, that ‘we’ meaning the Allies. ‘We’re rushing troops to west Belgium.’

  ‘But the Nazis were supposed to invade via central Belgium.’ Dan was sure of this for some reason.

  ‘We got that wrong, I’m afraid.’

  Dan put down his pipe and took up his glass. ‘I’m not sure what I make of Churchill as PM. He’s rash.’

  ‘I like the man. Ronald was telling me there’s been a slew of German officers bailing out over Devon. An Unteroffizier and an Oberleutnant were paraded through London. One can’t shoot them once they land, they’re prisoners of war, but there was talk of shooting them as they parachuted down. Churchill put his foot down. No, he said, it’s like drowning a sailor. One has to have some rules, even now. If we lose our sense of honour, where will we end up? No, I trust Winston.’ Alec would have liked to loosen his tie. But, well, standards ‘Where’s your Jack these days?’

  ‘Chatham, still. Bored stiff, poor lad.’

  ‘You know they’re saving him for the big push?’ It would be hard, when it came, on the likes of Jack Archer.

  ‘Doris keeps saying how she’s glad he’ll be protected by his tank.’

  Alec opened his mouth but didn’t speak. Why bother saying it out loud when both men knew that Jack would be driving a bomb across the battlefield. ‘He’s a good lad,’ he said eventually. Pathetic, yes, but he had nothing more.

  The street door flew open with a thud. Jimmy rushed in. His speed made him clumsy, even in this room he knew so well, and he ricocheted off the coat stand, knocking into Denholm’s shoulder. No apology. Jimmy stormed up the stairs.

  ‘There’s no excuse,’ said Denholm, mopping ale from a tie that was already patterned with stains, ‘for rudeness, even if the boy is blind.’

  Bob agreed, apologized on Jimmy’s behalf, said he’d have a word, and added a muttered, ‘You mardy old get,’ as Denholm lumbered to a stool.

  * * *

  Jez smelled of cigarettes, sweat and something else besides, something warm and sharp, like vinegar. He was slightly too close to Doris as she cajoled a wide, slow, red and white cow along the concrete aisle of the cow shed. She put up with his closeness; to point out his presumption would open up a conversation she didn’t feel able to have.

  She needed Jez and Eugene. No land girl had materialized. It was just her and her two miscast men against the world.

  ‘See, here, how we get her up onto the raised part, and just gently slip the chain round her neck.’ Dan had relaid the floor over the winter. It was pleasingly hygienic. He’d also made the wooden partitions that bookended the shed. They were raw. Doris had become adept at persuading out splinters with an open safety pin. ‘She’s new to this, so go gentle with her. There you are, my lovely,’ she said to the cow, who had found the hay set out for her. ‘You have a nibble and don’t mind us.’ The animal chewed unhurriedly. Her dark eyes were beautiful, Doris thought. Why weren’t there any poems about cows’ eyes?

  ‘Sit yourself on that little stool and dampen that cloth,’ she said, ‘and give her udder a good wipe.’ She took care to sound conversational; Jez resented any form of instruction. Doris could feel his breath. It wasn’t sweet and summery like the cow’s. It was coarse and hot, like him. ‘If we wipe her, then no bits of dust get in the milk.’ The milk was ordinary and precious. Like the eggs. Like the wheat. Like Glen who sat in the barn doorway watching them with the air of a headmaster. Firm but fair.

  Jez wiped the cow’s teats with warm water, and Doris sensed rather than heard his micro-chuckle. That, she realized, was why she didn’t want to milk with him.

  It was easy, if you had a dirty mind, to be lewd about milking. And Jez had a dirty mind. Life on a farm brought you up hard against the basics. Birth. Sex. Death. If you were given to sniggering at anatomy or fluids you’d be ho-ho-ho-ing all day. None of it was funny to Doris. It was necessary, could be hard work, and it was relentless. Not funny, though. Not when it was your life.

  ‘That’s right, take a teat and don’t pull, just tease out the milk.’ Doris put her hands over his and soldiered on with the double entendres. She made sure not to look at his face. She couldn’t have borne the smirk. ‘Like this. Squeeze the base with your thumb and index finger, like I’m doing, then kind of squeeze right along the teat with the rest of your fingers until, see, the milk squirts out.’

  Doris stood back. ‘You’re doing well, make sure it goes into the bucket. Into the bucket.’ She was glad of an opportunity to snap at him. ‘Hey, go easy! The cow’s new to this as well!’

  When the small galvanized bucket was full, Doris lugged it to the bigger bucket and dumped the creamy milk. The smell of it was powerful, like paint coating the walls. It was warm, cloying, perilously near to unpleasant.

  Doris chained up another cow, her favourite, one with strawberry roan markings that made her think of fruit fool. Squatting on her little three-legged stool, she heard regular squirting from Jez’s cubicle. She heard nothing but unruffled snorts from his charge. He was good at it, she had to admit. ‘You’re a natural,’ she said.

  ‘She loves it,’ said Jez. ‘Don’t you, girl? She loves me getting my hands on her.’

  Doris leaned into the cow’s warm flank and wet it with tears.

  * * *

  ‘Bananas?’ asked Magsy, with drooping, hopeless intonation.

  She knew Frank Brown wouldn’t have bananas in stock. He never did. They were rare now; she missed their yellow silliness.

  ‘Sorry.’ Frank was balding, but he lovingly curated the stripe of grey hair left to him. Empathetic eyes looked out
from a weather-beaten face; he was slight, knocked back. A take-no-notice-of-me man, the ideal shopkeeper. ‘But I do have any amount of beetroot, and Morgan loves a bit of that.’

  ‘Not as much,’ said Magsy sorrowfully, ‘as he loves a banana. Still, as they say, I’d rather take pot luck with Churchill than eat humble pie with Hitler.’

  Waiting his turn, trying to be philosophical about the long list in Magsy’s hand, Alec said, ‘You spoil Morgan.’

  ‘No, no, Alec, I look after him.’

  Frank was chipper. ‘That’ll soon be my Nance’s job. I’ll pass that on to her, that Morgan favours a banana.’

  Mrs Endicott had to chip in. ‘Do not ask my digestion to cope with beetroot. A beetroot could end me once and for all.’ She clicked her fingers. ‘Like that!’

  Magsy decided to take a couple of large beetroots and bake them. Like most of her thoughts, she shared it. ‘When I bring Morgan’s dinner over to Homeleigh I might whisk round the rooms with a broom. The house is in a sorry state. Bachelors, you know. They don’t see dust.’

  Hearing her cue, Mrs Endicott said, ‘It was immaculate when you lived there, my dear. One could eat one’s dinner off the floor.’

  Why, wondered Alec, would you want to do that?

  Magsy tried to look modest. ‘Men need looking after,’ she said, as she left with her jewel-red spoils in a string bag.

  ‘Being looked after by Magsy,’ said Alec, ‘could kill a man.’

  Even Mrs Endicott, who was known to disapprove of what she called clever-clever comments, laughed at the truth of that. ‘But we shouldn’t tease. She did bring those two boys up, and then to lose poor Anthony so early in the war…’

  A moment of reverence, no, a moment of pain, was bestowed on Anthony. He was just a memory now; he would do nothing new. He was neat and ironed, and dead.

  ‘A young fellow from Hollerton, navy chap, drowned up at Scapa Flow,’ said Alec. ‘Bad business.’