by Karen Powell
‘Alexander . . . ’
He rolled onto his back again. ‘The village boys reckon you’re a cold bitch.’ He frowned. ‘I suppose I should be pleased.’
Lennie was on her feet, breath ragged. ‘I’m leaving if you’re going to speak to me like that again.’
‘No, no!’ He snatched for her hand. ‘You’re not to go. I’m only teasing you.’
She felt tired. She had longed to see Alexander; now she wanted to be alone, some place that was quiet, unchanging.
She sat down, knees tucked in, angled slightly away from him.
‘I can’t quite picture you at the Hall yet,’ he said. He pulled a strand of grass from her hair. ‘I always think of you in this kind of setting.’
‘A graveyard?’ She had not yet forgiven him.
‘Outdoors. My mother said it took at least a year to feel at home at the Hall after she and Papa were married.’
Despite herself, a little thrill went through Lennie. Why would he talk about the future in such a way unless he really did love her?
‘Of course, she acts like she owns the place now,’ Alexander said. ‘I suppose she does until I kick her out.’
‘Won’t your mother stay when we . . . ?’ Lennie said. It was difficult to talk of the two of them as something solid and real, capable of affecting others, of taking up space in the world. Everything was still so delicate, a flutter of life within a translucent shell. ‘It is her home.’ Lady Richmond, cool blonde and imperious, self-possessed even at her husband’s funeral. Lennie felt small, insignificant, even thinking about it.
‘Oh, I don’t know,’ said Alexander. She had annoyed him in some way. ‘I don’t want to think about her right now. Tell me about your mother?’
‘Alexander . . . ’ She did not want to talk of such things when the sun was high in the sky, the world full of possibilities.
‘I’ve asked mother about her once or twice but she hates talking about the past.’
‘You already know. She was half-Italian—that’s why Thomas is so dark—her father had a barber’s shop . . . ’ Lennie pulled up a daisy and pushed her thumbnail through the soft hairs of the stalk.
‘No, about her dying. You won’t actually remember any of it, but your father must know,’ said Alexander. ‘I always thought it odd that she went out in that kind of weather, let alone to the river.’
‘Perhaps she didn’t like having to stay inside for days on end. With just two little children for company, I mean.’ Lennie paused while she pulled up another daisy and threaded its stalk through the first. ‘I sometimes wonder if she was on her way to the woods. Thomas says it was her favourite place, remembers going there in autumn, chasing the falling leaves with her. I’ve always thought that strange when she grew up in the middle of Leeds.’
‘It’s supposed to be a pleasant way to go when you stop fighting it.’ he said. ‘Hard to believe though. There has to be a moment when you realise that you’re not going to make it out. She must have died almost straight away in that cold.’
Lennie pulled the second daisy into place too hard, breaking the connection.
‘I do think the world places awful obligations on us to stay alive sometimes,’ said Alexander.
‘It was an accident.’ She tossed aside the failed chain. ‘I’ve told you.’
‘Sometimes I can’t work out what the point of any of it is. Keeping other people happy when we can’t be really sure we matter all that much to them.’
He was so beautiful, all sunlit and boyish in his perplexity. She gazed at him, quite sure that the past did not matter anymore: her mother was at peace now and poor Danny Masters was tucked up safely in a neat new grave. ‘Silly boy,’ she said, jumping to her feet and holding out her hand to him. ‘We are the point.’
CHAPTER 21
Danny, 1949
A day in summer. They four of them were in the graveyard—Danny, Lennie, Thomas and Alexander. He couldn’t remember why, only that they were eating mulberries straight from the tree, which was ancient, limbs lolling across the gravestones, resting where they might; propped up in places by wedges of wood. The mulberries hung in pendulous clusters, darkening from green to red to black, or lay half-broken in the long grass beneath.
Alexander was holding out a handful of the fruit to Lennie. An offering. He and Thomas were back from school for summer with some new language of their own: Latin, rugger, prep. It didn’t bother Danny, but he felt for Lennie who looked up to her brother, wanted to share in everything he did. Lennie shaking her head, adamant that she would not take a single one of the long, fragile mulberries.
And only Danny had understood.
Like clotted blood, she once said, of all the dead people in this graveyard. As if it had mixed together beneath the surface and come bubbling up, and then coagulated. Years ago that had been, when they were small, but even now she refused to eat a single one of those intensely fragrant berries that the boys guzzled so greedily, that were already crumbling to a purple mess in Alexander’s palm.
Time to go. Thomas pointed at the back of Lennie’s skirt:
‘You’ve sat in them, you idiot. You’ve got them all over you.’
‘That’s not . . . ’ said Alexander, and then he broke off, staring.
What was the matter with them, Danny wondered, Thomas so stiff and awkward all of a sudden, gazing in the opposite direction, Alexander with his hands on his hips, colour rising on his neck, as though someone had challenged him? Danny had grown up seeing his mother soaking cloths in cold water and salt each month; could not imagine what was troubling them.
‘Here,’ he said. He stood up, took off the light sweater he was wearing, and passed it to Lennie. She took it in silence, tied it around her waist. The two of them set off together, leaving Thomas and Alexander to compose themselves.
‘It’s not the first time,’ said Lennie, as the two of them walked along the lane towards Gatekeeper’s Cottage. On either side of the pathway, the Canterbury bells were bending in the lightest of breezes. ‘Only I wasn’t expecting it today.’
‘Just nature isn’t it,’ he said, as they reached the garden gate.
She handed the sweater back to him, went inside. His sweater was unmarked, yet all the way home he could feel her blood-warmth upon him.
CHAPTER 22
Venetia, 1948
She watched them sometimes, Marina and her husband walking out on the Great Lawn, lighting cigarettes while they took a break from the paperwork. They walked in silence for the most part, quite separately, yet occasionally Marina would speak, a throwaway comment by the look of it, and Angus might laugh. Seeing that quick lift of the chin brought home to Venetia how troubled he had been in recent times. Often now, she woke to an empty space beside her, found him and James huddled together in the office with the accounts spread out before them, though there rarely seemed to be any kind of activity taking place. Once she stood at the door and watched as the pair of them stared at the books in frozen misery, which only lifted once Marina arrived, almost but not quite pushing past Venetia to enter the room, smelling of train journeys; London; cigarette smoke. There were no fishnet stockings that day, but stiletto heels clicked efficiently into place as she took a seat between the two men. Both of them were visibly relieved to see her and, at the same time, surprised to spot Venetia standing at the door.
‘What are you doing here?’ Angus said, with genuine puzzlement.
A reasonable question. After all, she had been bred for nothing that could be of any use to them now. A woman like her was made for ornamentation and motherhood. Yet others with backgrounds not too dissimilar to hers had sought more in life, insisted on an education or leadership in some form or other. And now here was Marina, a girl out of context, whose education and self-confidence made men nod in agreement when she spoke. Whose ability to support herself meant she could go where she wanted, become whatev
er she chose. It was not something that Venetia coveted exactly—there was something rather bleak, modern, about such an unconnected life and Marina did not strike her as a joyful person—yet she couldn’t help admiring her nerve.
‘I’m sorry,’ she said to Angus at breakfast one morning when he’d failed to come to bed at all, saying he’d fallen asleep at his desk. Why was she apologising? It had not been her intention to start that way, but the question that was to follow was straying into perilous territory, the realm of the neurotic, unhinged woman intent on harm. She had never had been that woman, even in the bad time.
‘Is there something going on with Marina? Something we need to discuss?’
Those words. That sequence. Ridiculous lines from a third-rate film script which cheapened everything. Suddenly Venetia was angered that she had been brought to this ugliness. She should have stayed down at the stables where the horses were being fed, everything simple and the air wholesome with shifting, masticating animal contentment.
Angus held her gaze: ‘No.’
She believed him in concrete terms but it didn’t matter now. The coldness in his eyes was worse than the alternative answer. He looked at her as if some kind of alien had entered the room and he was unable, for the life of him, to comprehend its purpose, how its existence might in any way dovetail with his own. His refusal to offer her further reassurance made it clear that it was she who was at fault. Still, she continued: ‘She seems to be here all the time quite suddenly. Is there something wrong?’
‘You know there is.’ His voice was incredulous. ‘She’s helping me.’
At times she caught Marina observing her with an air of detachment, as if Venetia was part of an experiment she was conducting. Venetia stayed very still, not wanting to give anything away. Life was frangible now; moving too quickly or thoughtlessly might destroy everything. Instead she watched, listened, all her energies concentrated in her senses, in the surface of her skin.
Marina had transformed herself once. Could she do it again, reinvent herself as the next Lady of Richmond Hall, for instance? It was a ludicrous idea that would not die once Venetia had allowed it to form in her mind. Her natural logic told her it was not remotely possible that this nondescript girl had the power to bring about an alchemical change of that nature—and yet she could not help remembering what her brother Freddie had taught her: water, ice, steam. Energy could not be created or destroyed but it could shift its shape right in front of your eyes. It was sly like that.
CHAPTER 23
Danny, June 1955
Basic Training was hell, but he minded it less than most. You could keep your head down for the most part and if you didn’t let the yelling get past the surface of you, it wasn’t that bad. They did it on purpose: the brutal haircuts, the uniforms that didn’t begin to fit, the viciously-administered jabs, plates of slop that passed as food, endless square-bashing and corporals all red in the face from bellowing the impossible rules. It was to teach you who was boss and quickly. Well, that was fine by him. Six weeks had to be filled some way or another, that was the game, so let someone else work out how to pass the time, even if their notions of how to do it weren’t everyone’s idea of fun.
Lucky for him that he was already strong from lugging wood around the yard all these months. Endurance didn’t scare him either: long days helping out with the harvest or the Easter lambing had seen to that, with old Farmer Dowdy as bad as any NCO when it came to shouting and swearing at you for your pains. It was lads like Granger who had it harder. A skinny lad from the East End of London who’d been a bellboy ‘up West’ since he was fifteen and was all swagger until he was forced to run round the parade ground in the pouring rain with a rifle over his head. Dropped to his knees in a puddle. Curled up in a sobbing ball where he fell. Or Ludlow, a gentle, knock-kneed fellow who’d been a bank clerk in Coventry, and who found himself at the back of the pack on the early morning runs, his face white with the effort of unaccustomed exercise. Danny ran the way he lived during those six weeks, firmly in the middle of things, not too fast, not too slow, head down and don’t draw attention. Don’t go excelling too much in the gym either, that was setting yourself up for trouble. Just make sure you do everything that’s asked of you and no shirking. If you did that and weren’t too cocky, you could keep out of the worst trouble. It only took staff a few days to decide who really needed licking into shape, and after that you could leave it to mental cases like McLean, a Glaswegian with a dangerous look in his eye. McLean understood discipline as a concept; just not as one that applied to him. He spent half his time arguing about the degree of shine to his boots or point-blank refusing to clean the invisible speck of dirt in the barrel of his rifle, and off to jankers he’d go again.
At least it was summer, warm enough to go without lighting the billet’s pot-bellied stove, which must always be blacked and pristine at inspection. The only use for the scuttle of coal during Danny’s training period was as another form of punishment—McLean being ordered to paint each piece white after backchatting the corporal. Danny thought the lack of privacy would bother him, but he got used to that. The whole billet were jealous of Porter, a grammar school boy from Essex who’d been given the only separate room in their quarters, on account of his education and the leadership qualities that apparently came with it. But once he grew accustomed to the snoring, the odd homesick snivel in the early days, the shifting and turning bodies and night noises all around him, Danny wouldn’t have swapped places with him.
He found himself well-liked in the billet, and even the officers made comments about his steady temperament, his straight way of talking. An only child, used to only his mother for company, Danny looked forward to the late-night card games, the practical jokes, good-humoured banter with people he would never have come across in the normal way of things. There was something soothing about the molten pulse of cigarette ends in the dark, the hushed voices, about one of the lads coming home all beery-smelling and wanting to tell anyone who was still awake about their girl back home, or some less respectable adventure. Stopped you dwelling too much on other things.
Some of it was downright funny too, like the day they were instructed how to fire a Bren gun and Ludlow lost all control of his, everyone diving for cover while he flapped around like a fish on a hook, peppering the field with ammo.
‘What are you, Ludlow?’ the corporal screeched, nose to nose with him.
‘An absolute fucking disgrace, sir.’
There would be Trade Training after Basic. Everyone tested to see what they were good at and then off you’d go to some other part of the country. Some of the lads had strong views about this but Danny didn’t care much what trade he was allocated. After that you might be sent abroad. Porter said you didn’t want Germany; pretty dull with nothing much happening on the Rhine right now. The Commies were causing problems all over, or you might end up in Kenya with the Mau Mau to think about—that wasn’t going to be resolved in any sort of hurry. Danny had been schooled well enough in geography to place Kenya on a map and he was pretty sure he could pinpoint Malaya—main exports tin and rubber—too. It was hard to believe these countries actually existed though, that someone like him could end up in some hot, strange land. He’d never even been to London.
The ugliness was what he hated and that wasn’t something you could share with your new mates because they’d think you soft in the head. Danny hadn’t realised how attached he was to the roll of the fields at home, the green haze of the woods all around, until he came to this flat place where the wind cut across the drill square with barely a tree to stop it until it reached the Dales. It was still Yorkshire but there was nothing of home about this place, with its barbed wire and its guard dog, the greyness of everything—grey billets, grey food, grey city faces.
He’d not dared to bring his book of Tennyson poems with him, for fear it being found in his kit bag or beneath his mattress, but he thought of Lennie every day. There�
��d been no chance to say goodbye to her—to explain why he should want to say goodbye in the first place. Everything had happened so quickly after his call-up letter. In the end, with an hour to spare before his train to Leeds where he was to meet the other recruits and be transported onwards, he’d found the courage to set off along the river path towards Gatekeeper’s Cottage. He’d only just started out when he met Peter Fairweather coming the other way. Somehow he found the courage to ask if he might call on Lennie, mumbling something about returning a book she’d lent him. She’d taken the morning bus to Helmsley on some errands, her father said, eyeing Danny. He did offer to pass on the book in question. Danny went through some awful pantomime, pretending to search about his person for it; muttered something about having left the book at home and having to rush for his train.
There would be a weekend pass soon. Two whole days off at some point during the six weeks. The knowledge that he could soon be posted anywhere in the world, with no choice in the matter, meant Danny was determined not to waste any more time. He felt changed by these few short weeks at barracks. They said that service made you grow up. Well, Danny wasn’t sure about that when you’d been forced to make up your bed pack three times over until the sheets and blankets were at perfect angles, or been consigned to the mess on spud-bashing duty all morning, but all of them were physically stronger now—you couldn’t help it—and they’d become hardened to the bullying and deprivation. Danny pictured himself returning home with something about him, something akin to manliness or gravity which Lennie would notice. He thought about it so often that it began to take concrete form in his mind.
‘You got a girl somewhere, Masters?’ asked McLean from his bunk one night, rolling onto his back and lighting up a cigarette. Danny could smell whisky on him, and something faintly vegetal too. McLean had been chopping cabbages all day—punishment for leaving a trail of muddy footprints across the buffed lino expanse between billet door and bunk. The rule was that you could only walk on that polished floor with strips of blanket beneath your feet.