‘Do not lecture me, Kitty.’ Alec did up his tie, and the knotting of it seemed like a murder. ‘My hands are tied.’ He hesitated, but he said it. ‘You can’t pretend you didn’t know from the start how it would be.’
‘Oh, there we are, there’s the nub of it. I know the rules so I can’t expect anything. Well I do bloody expect something because there are new rules now. Do you love me, Alec?’
It was a simple question. The daring of it knocked the breath out of her. And made Alec quiver.
‘This is hardly the time—’ he said.
‘Jesus Christ!’ bawled Kitty. Her hands, nailed to her hips, dropped. There was a weapon she hadn’t used because she wanted all to be natural and organic between them. Because she wanted love to drive them. But he was an idiot and needs must and so she looked levelly at him and said, ‘That’s it, Alec.’
‘No, that’s not it.’ Alec was spluttering. ‘Be careful, don’t say things you can’t take back.’
‘I can’t lecture you, but you can lecture me?’
‘Kitty, come on!’
She folded her arms. She thought again. She decided. She pushed the button. ‘It had to come to this, and now here we are. Alec, it’s her or me.’
Alec stood up. ‘No, no, don’t, Kitty.’ He held his hands out in front of him as if she advanced on him with a blade. ‘Think, darling, don’t do this.’
‘Did you think we’d never reach this moment?’ Kitty neighed like a horse at his lunacy. ‘Have you never read a book or watched a film? Choose, for the love of God. Be a man.’
She flew at him and he let her. She hit him on his broad chest with the flat of her hands as if he was a door she was trying to get through. ‘Choose! Her or me! Who? Who do you choose? Pamela or me?’
Kitty gave him one last insolent shove. She turned away, and leaned on the sideboard, panting.
And Alec? He left.
* * *
His feet took him directly to The Bull. Alec had no say in the matter.
As sweet a sanctuary as Notre Dame cathedral, as male an environment as tobacco and spit could make it. Apparently, the other men of Ambridge felt the same; there was a lock-in under way.
‘Don’t tell the War Ag!’ Bob winked and held up another tankard for Dan. ‘Jimmy, lad, feel your way over to the window corner with a chaser for Walter, and clear his table.’ Bob watched his son negotiate the maze of low tables and tipsily leaning stools. ‘Getting good at it,’ he said, and there were nods all round.
‘Bloody shower, they are,’ Dan was saying as Alec arrived. He leaned back, loquacious, in the snug. ‘Don’t know how my Doris puts up with them. Labourers? Don’t make me laugh. One day of dealing with ’em has me spitting nails. Don’t know one end of a scythe from the other. Dangerous, they are. Downright dangerous.’
Alec turned his squat glass of whisky round and round in his hands. Crouching over it, he stared at but didn’t see its marmalade depths. ‘Dangerous,’ he repeated encouragingly, not listening. He didn’t know who or what was dangerous and he couldn’t muster up the oomph to care.
The door swung open. It hit Denholm, who was nodding off behind it, arms crossed, head back and mouth agape like a walrus.
‘Blackout!’ yelled Dan, then, ‘Son? What are you doing home?’
The war meant that people popped up and disappeared at odd hours and in the wrong place, like toys thrown about by children. Jack was out of breath, his pug-nosed face bright pink. Words spewed out of him.
‘I got him! The letters! The bloke! I got him!’
Men stood and wiped their mouths with the backs of their hands.
Dan slammed down his drink. ‘The poison pen?’
‘He got away from me at St Stephen’s, he was too fast, Dad.’ Jack was flattened as drinkers pushed past him, out to The Green.
Jack ran with the posse towards the church, panting out his story as he went. ‘He was sticking something up on the church door. He wriggled away from me in the dark but I recognized his coat. That old regimental overcoat. It was Stan Horrobin.’
‘No note ’ere,’ growled Walter when they reached the church’s dim porch. ‘Maybe it got blown away.’
‘You look for it, Walter.’ Dan had sobered up. ‘Alec, search inside St Stephen’s, and you others come with me and we’ll see if Stan’s hiding among the graves.’
Once the door banged shut behind Alec, he could have been the only man alive in Ambridge.
St Stephen’s at night was a different beast to the church on Sunday. The stained glass was dead. Arches faded to shadow. There, in the centre of the aisle, Alec saw a grotesque man, bent and gaunt.
The heavy crucifix was shocking in its size and its realism. Retrieved from an ante room where it had spent the last fifty years, the sculpted body had been taken down and propped up against a pew while the vicar decided on its fate. He didn’t fit in at St Stephen’s, this dying Jesus with his eyes cast down, his skin grey, and paint peeling on his skeletal knees.
Alec approached him. The cheekbones were sharp enough to cut. He laid a hand over one of the Lord’s. Palm to palm. Pushed at the nail that went through the plaster flesh. It was real and jagged.
Alec squeezed.
He sagged against the cross, and pressed harder. He closed his eyes. Blood dripped on the tessellated floor.
‘Alec?’ Dan ran up the aisle, oblivious. ‘We can’t find him. We should get over to Broom Corner before he burns that bloody coat.’
‘Yes, yes.’ Alec straightened up.
Dan pointed at the Rorschach blot of blood. He hesitated. ‘Is that yours?’
‘Dan, have you always been faithful to Doris?’
Dan’s face was a perfect illustration of bemusement. He looked from the blood to Alec’s face. ‘Of course.’ He laughed, a quick snort, the kind he made reading the funnies in the Echo. ‘What a question. Where’d we be if we carried on like continentals? There’s nobody like Doris and I know what side my bread’s buttered, thank you very much.’
Not laughing, not matching Dan’s tone, Alec was fierce. ‘But what if your bread isn’t buttered? What if you’re unhappy? Does that matter? Or are we all just tiny tiles in a huge mosaic, condemned to stay in place so we don’t spoil the damn pattern?’
‘Alec, I’m at sea here.’ Dan was still trying to laugh but his face wouldn’t co-operate. ‘Do you need something for your hand?’
Time to make light of it. To pretend it was tomfoolery. ‘Your expression, old boy!’ Years of training by nannies and public school and the army and his wife meant Alec could snap back into shape double-quick.
‘I thought you’d gone doolally tap. This war, it makes us all a bit…’ Dan circled a finger at his temple. ‘This air battle. The RAF boys. It’s getting to us.’ He punched Alec gently on the arm.
Alec sensed Dan was trying to communicate, to understand, while keeping it all carefully manful. ‘It does,’ he said, and then, all movement, ‘Let’s go get Stan Horrobin.’
* * *
This heat, thought Doris. It was too hot. It wasn’t right nor proper.
It had been too late to visit Connie when she got back to Ambridge the night before. Much had happened since then, ugly scenes at the Horrobin place. But visit she must, despite all that.
Ahead on the road, she saw Stan. His Vic was beside him, like a smaller version designed as a spare. Their faces were black with bad humour. Doris didn’t offer a hello. She stood and waited for them to reach her.
‘We’ve had enough of the Archers round here,’ said the father. The son sliced the air with a switch. ‘You’re sweatin’, missus,’ he jeered as she hurried on. She put a neurotic hand to the back of her head, where the hair was growing scanty, and hoped they couldn’t see.
The house was empty. Doris found Connie in the wash house, kneeling at a tin bath full of sopping clothes. She came slowly out into the sun, her legs no more than threads hanging from the hem of her skirt. ‘What do you want? We told that husband of yours last night. My
Stan never done it. Silly kiddies’ games, writing foolish letters, why would he? Stan lost that coat last winter. Some bugger nicked it. It’s not always the Horrobins when something bad happens, no matter what those stuck-up Pargetters and the cuckoo Gilpin sisters think.’ She lowered her chin and pointed, all malevolence. ‘It’s one of you good upright churchy folk what’s writing the letters.’
Doris held up a hand to stem the flow. ‘That’s not why I’m here.’ She’d heard all about it from Dan. How Connie had flown at him, nails out. How the language from her would take the rust off a bucket. He’d bathed his bloodied face, and said, ‘She’s a demon, love.’ He’d been disappointed, rebuked. Without the coat, they’d had to leave Broom Corner with the mystery still intact.
No letter had been found. There was a stay of execution for the next victim. It lay somewhere underfoot. Maybe too mangled to read. And maybe not.
Doris smiled, aware it was probably only a ghastly attempt. ‘Connie, I’m not here about all that business. I went to see Cliff yesterday, like I promised.’
Connie changed utterly, from Medusa to mouse, her mouth a hen’s bum. ‘Best come inside.’
Indoors, amid the clutter and a new smell, warm and redolent of the insides of living things, Doris performed her piece. Edited, concise, washed clean of strong emotion. ‘You should see the hospital, Connie, it’s a palace.’
The turrets and towers had been a surprise. Cliff was a pet of all the nurses, Doris said. ‘Lovely girls, so brave, and all sweet on him. It wears him out to write, so he was very particular that I tell you you’re not to fret if you don’t hear from him, the poor lamb.’
Avid, greedy, Connie asked many questions but not the ones Doris feared. Was he eating, she asked. Did he have books, was he missing home? Nothing about his injuries, a peculiar oversight Doris was grateful for. She didn’t know how to describe walking through the rows of iron beds in the aggressively clean, high-ceilinged ward to find Cliff at the very end.
His hands on the coverlet were raw from grenade burns. Inside out, they seemed. A nurse in a bell-shaped apron was obscenely healthy beside him. Cliff’s dull eyes stared out from bandages, and, beneath them, Doris saw an evident lack of face where face should be. No jaw should look like that. Cliff’s face didn’t hang together behind the dressings, which had begun to spoil and turn a marbled grey and pink. The boy was wonky, and seemed different, lesser, because of it.
He had left his face in France.
Leaning over him, Doris had mopped up his tears. She held onto her own; plenty of time for that later and Cliff didn’t need her pity. He needed company and news, and that’s what she had given him.
Hard to know with the unknowable Connie whether she was leaving out certain questions because she didn’t want the answers. Her ‘Thank you, Doris’ was clumsy; gratitude was rarely called for in that house. ‘All I want now is to have him home.’
‘It might be a while yet. And, Connie, well, he might be a bit different.’
‘He’ll be fine when he’s home.’ Regal in her rags, Connie dismissed Doris. ‘Won’t he, Stacey?’
The dog didn’t offer an opinion.
* * *
When Doris saw the trio gathered outside The Bull, she made a diversion, hurrying towards them like a worker bee ferrying honey to the hive. She would shake off the miasma of Connie and her sorrow with application of some mundane and healing chatter.
‘You back again, Peggy?’ she said.
‘Me mum made me come.’ Peggy seemed to have aged a decade in the months since her last visit. She was groomed, sure of herself, a grown-up in grown-up’s clothing. ‘She doesn’t understand how tricky it is hoofing out to the sticks with the trains the way they are.’
‘We’re hardly the sticks, Miss Perkins.’ Jane was mildly insulted on behalf of her cosmopolitan Ambridge brethren.
‘Oh, we are.’ Dottie nudged Jane hard enough to send her flying. ‘Love your hat, Peg.’
A twirl was executed, to show off said hat. It was swanky, bought with Peggy’s first week’s wages at the shoe shop. She told them how her mother suffered bad dreams about Billy and John. How she feared lice and rickets and beatings. ‘I only come here to stop her going on about it.’
‘You’re a good girl,’ said Doris, meaning it but glad all the same that Jack was otherwise engaged back at Brookfield. There was something of the minx about Peggy; she could ruin a boy’s life. Especially if that boy didn’t have the sense he was born with.
‘You ain’t going down no lane in those shoes.’ Dottie was in awe of the strappy cream sandals. ‘Hang on. I’ll nip into the pub and get you a lift.’
‘Bad business last night,’ said Jane, her waxy, barely there face criss-crossed with worry lines. ‘No news of the letter, Doris? Nobody’s handed it in? We don’t know, erm, who it might be about?’
‘No, no news.’ Doris saw Dottie emerge with Jez, who spat energetically into the tub of begonias that was Bob’s pride and joy.
‘I’ve dragged this one away from his pint!’ said Dottie.
Doris was quick. ‘Are you in the truck, Jez? How come?’
Jez was unruffled. ‘Ask your husband. He sent me for a lend of a subsoiler.’ He turned to Peggy. ‘You the damsel in distress?’
‘I’m never that.’ Peggy looked him up and down, clearly and rudely dubious about what she saw.
So, it’s not just me, thought Doris. She admired Peggy’s acumen; Doris would have accepted a lift from Beelzebub at her age.
‘’Scuse me, I need a wee!’ Dottie, not noticing Jane’s fluttered eyelids at such candour, bent double and scooted back into The Bull, almost colliding with Jack, who was tugging on his jacket as he barrelled out.
‘I’ll take her, you’re busy, Jez mate.’ Jack smiled at Peggy who didn’t smile back. ‘I don’t have wheels but I can walk you there. If it gets muddy just hop on my back.’
‘Sir Galahad.’ Peggy pursed her lips. Made him wait. ‘Go on, then,’ she said.
‘You are good, Jack,’ said Jane, as Doris tried and failed to catch her son’s eye.
Bob was out of his pub; this was a rare sighting of him out in the open. He was agitated. Bouncing on his toes. ‘Ladies! Your little friend! She’s creating in the lavatory!’
Shrieks filled the pub. Female cries that had the clientele a-twitter.
‘Can’t be the baby,’ muttered Doris, hurrying through The Bull and out to the yard, to listen at the raw wooden toilet door. ‘She’s not due.’
Jane held back, tentative in this male stronghold. ‘Is it the baby?’ she asked across the cobbles, mouthing the words as if swearing.
‘It’s the baby!’ screamed Dottie as she burst out of the lavatory.
Men scattered. Doris, whose only thought was I do not have time for this, took charge. She flung orders as she held up Dottie and steered her into the snug. ‘Bob, I’ll want all your towels. Fellas, out, the lot of you! Jane, I need you.’
‘But Doris, I’m of no use.’ Jane was quaking. She had never seen another woman’s parts; she’d never really studied her own.
‘Will I do?’ Peggy appeared. She cleared a table with a swipe of her foream. Tankards, glasses, ashtray all hit the floor. ‘Up you hop, Dottie, and stop screaming, for gawd’s sake.’
Dottie was panting with fear. ‘Is it now? Really? I don’t want to do it.’ She clung on to Doris, who had to prise off her fingers. ‘Please, Doris, I can’t.’
‘Be brave, now, love. We’ll look after you.’
‘I can’t look,’ called Jane from the door.
‘Get yourself home, dear,’ said Doris. ‘Now,’ she said when Jane lingered. ‘And you, you horror!’ She flapped a hand at a whiskered old man peering through the window like a theatre goer in the cheap seats. ‘Forgive me, Dottie,’ she said, and felt inside the woman’s underwear.
She’s near. Doris had presided over the delivery of countless lambs and calves. This couldn’t be that different; we’re never more animal than we are giving bi
rth.
Interrogation revealed that Dottie’s waters had broken hours before.
Events took them over. The baby, like the war, didn’t give a fig for Doris’s timetable. Time stopped, in fact. They could have been labouring for hours, or maybe it was all done in minutes. Sealed up tight, the three women were in it together. Dottie and Doris and Peggy, all doused with gore and sweating like boxers.
In another way, Dottie was on her own.
‘Good girl, good girl, you’re doing well.’ Doris mopped and held and encouraged.
‘Crikey, men have it easy,’ said Peggy, running in with a cold spoon to lay on Dottie’s forehead. She had left Bob cowering by the sink. ‘I’m never having a baby, Mrs Archer.’
‘I can’t do it,’ said Dottie. She was crying again. The words were just gasps. ‘Help me. Stop it.’
The doctor had, as they say, been sent for, but Nance, whey-faced, had dashed in to explain he was over Edgeley way, standing in for their GP. A boy had been sent but…
‘No, Dottie, don’t push. I know you want to, love, but don’t.’ Doris tethered Dottie to the table with instructions and commentary. The woman was writhing and full up, yet seemed liable to float away, such was her longing to be free of the pain.
It rushed at Dottie, this pain, then shrank away. She was its toy.
‘The head!’ yelped Peggy. Her hand went to her mouth.
‘Turn her over.’ Like other things Doris just knew – if an egg was fresh, how many teaspoons of cornflour to add to icing, when not to bother Dan – she knew that Dottie needed to be on all fours.
‘What, like a dog?’ said Peggy. She disapproved.
‘Like a woman giving birth.’ Doris had brought her own children into the world like this.
‘Oh, God. Oh, God, help me.’ Dottie was enormous, a planet. She pulsed with pain. The blood had stopped mattering.
‘Now you push, girlie! Now! Do it for me!’
Dottie strained. The room grew and shrank. A baby came out of her and landed in Doris’s waiting arms.
The Archers Page 20