by Jean Chapman
‘Life’s never going to be dull,’ she promised, and he rested the weight of his head on her forehead, laughing.
‘That’s for sure,’ he agreed.
By the time she had dressed they were already under way. She made a cursory attempt at housewifery - only the trap defeated her. She pushed it first into the small cupboard, but it was such an awkward thing and part of the metal jaws knocked at the door as they bumped along, finally bursting it open. A link of chain poked precociously, then a whole length spewed like a metal belch out on to the floor. She pounced on it, pulled it up and held it by its recalcitrant chain. Looking round, she finally decided to rid herself of it permanently, and going to the back door of the van pushed it open. They were alongside one of the many dykes in the flat countryside. A perfect opportunity. She swung the trap on its chain, revolving it faster and faster. When she finally let it go, it flew high and wide over to the left, over a bank, into the water beyond.
To her alarm she heard a man’s voice call out. She leaned out and pulled at the door to close it, but not quickly enough to hide from an irate man who scrambled up the bank holding a fishing-rod. He shook a fist, ‘What’yer playing at? You’ll bloody kill somebody, throwing things like that!’
‘Sorry! Didn’t see you!’ she called, and without thought of danger jumped from the back door of the van, ran up to the engine and skipped on to the footplate beside Cato, before he was aware of what she was doing.
‘Belle! If you’d slipped!’ He caught her quickly, roughly, in his anxiety, one hand grabbing at her waist as he held the steering wheel with the other. ‘I’d have thought after falling at the market… .’ He shook his head at her, disturbed and stern. ‘Is that why that man shouted?’
She slipped an arm about his waist, knowing that if she confessed to having thrown the trap out, he was likely to go back and retrieve it. It was the sort of masculine logic her father would have shown - but she just wanted rid of it. ‘Isn’t it lovely up here, going along,’ she said, giving him an extra squeeze. ‘You can see over all the hedges, just like being on horseback.’
‘But next time, you wait until the engine has stopped before getting on or off,’ he said, and when she did not respond, gave her a little shake, adding, ‘Yes?’
She looked up at him and grinned, but nodded, and was not entirely unimpressed by his masterfulness. She leaned against him, the warmth from the firebox and her contentment making her feel almost sleepy again. She took a deep breath. Fresh air, and hot oil, and smoke, and coal, all made a fragrant, tangy mixture, she thought - and the noise, that was very satisfactory too - the powerful chug-chugging, grinding down the pebbles, crunching them up. King of the road! They approached a field where two young shire horses grazed. Their heads went up as the noise of the engine reached them, then they bucked and ran, as much expending their energy as showing fear. Belle, delighted with their frisky extravagance, reached for the engine’s whistle and gave it a pull to prolong the performance. The horses both whinnied as if in answer to their toot-toot. Cato and she both laughed, and had difficulty in taking their eyes off each other.
‘Will your father send the police, or come himself?’ he asked suddenly, and when she frowned disapprovingly, he added, ‘We have to face facts. I can’t imagine your father doing anything less than charging me with kidnapping.’
‘I wouldn’t let him do that!’ She stared belligerently ahead. ‘I should tell him the truth - and that he’d better not try to stand in my way.’
Cato raised his eyebrows. ‘You and your father are very much alike’ When she tried to protest, he shook his head and said, ‘You see the way you want things to be. You don’t see your way through life, like. ..’ - he paused to throw an expressive hand towards the broad flat countryside - ‘travelling through a landscape - you and your father see your ways ahead through your own private telescopes.’
‘Is that bad? We know where we want to go.’
‘Neither of you take the wide view or think how your actions affect other people,’ he patiently explained.
‘I don’t think that’s true. I was thinking of you when I ran away.’
Cato looked down at her and laughed, seemed about to expound further, then gave her a look of comical despair. ‘That’s my Belle,’ he said.
‘No. I don’t want to draw boundary lines around myself, like my father does with his wretched path. “No one crosses - this and all it encircles, is mine!” ‘ she mimicked. ‘He’s a hoarder. I hadn’t thought of that before. He can’t bear to part with anything.’ Her voice dropped low, and she felt a sudden, real despair as she added, ‘He’s never really parted with my brother, Harry, and he’s dead, so… .’
‘So.’ Cato took up her word decisively, needing immediately to banish the sudden bleakness from her face. ‘We snatch as much time as we can now - time to think and make plans. Our next coal and watering stop is in the village we moved from - just after my mother’s old home - and you’ll see that around this next bend.’ He pushed the engine on at its full eight miles an hour, and behind a small spinney of tall dark pines and elegant, ground-sweeping blue firs, they could see Oakholm Manor.
Belle looked solemnly at the house, impressed, and wondered how the disparate couple had met.
‘My father went to help rehang a set of wrought-iron gates at the manor while he was apprenticed to the local blacksmith,’ Cato said, as if he had read her thoughts. ‘It was apparently love at first sight - but not a reckless runaway affair.’ He paused to grin at her. She frowned back, but pushed a hand under his as he held the steering wheel, and turned to view the brick and cobble-faced mansion with its tall pointed gables and high chimneys, Gothic windows with shapely brick surrounds and interstices, and Doric-pillared entrance - a mixture of styles, but a confirmation of wealth. Belle was curious and begged Cato to go on.
‘I’ve always felt it was a bit of a mystery, but they were married at the village church here. The squire gave his daughter away, but after that apparently they rarely saw him. When he died he left all his money and property to a nephew. My mother’s brother was killed very early in the war.’
The tall church tower, in the same cobble-faced style as the manor, rose above a cluster of stone cottages. Their stop for coal and water was in the wharf next to the tiny, immaculate railway station, whose flowerbeds were still ablaze with well-tended roses, yellow and bronze shaggy chrysanthemums.
‘Everyone recognises the engine,’ Belle commented as they slowly chugged to a halt near the water hydrant, and yet another man hailed Cato from the station platform.
‘We haven’t been left long,’ he answered. ‘And certainly no one’s been here looking for us yet - there’s always someone eager to pass on bad news.’
Belle felt the slightest flicker of apprehension when she thought of someone from home actually catching up with them. ‘Shall I buy something from the shop, something we can eat going along?’ she asked urgently.
The shop was smaller even than their own village store at Loncote. The beamed ceiling was hung with several sides of bacon and a couple of cured hams lay over the counter. Strings of onions obscured the window, and across the rest of the ceiling was a wide selection of hurricane lamps, watering-cans, heads of various kinds of hoes, and brushes of all materials, from softest hair to coarsest bristle.
Belle was just turning up her nose at the overwhelming smell of dust and bacon, when a voice startled her.
‘Yes, miss?’ She made out the black overall and black striped shirt-sleeves of the man behind the counter, tall and gaunt, his face seeming to hover ethereally between the hams and sides of bacon.
Something for a picnic, please. A loaf, and butter, and… .’
‘We’m some tasty homemade potted beef just ready,’ he suggested.
She agreed and asked for tomatoes, cheese and a bottle of mineral water. She watched as he carefully took a first serving from a basin topped with white, waxy tat, the aroma of the meat spread making her mouth water.
/> ‘You with Cato Abbott?’ he asked, stopping to look directly at her as he placed the first item before her. She nodded, prepared to tell him to mind his own business if his face so much as changed expression, or he began to ask questions. Instead, he turned and walked along the counter to the room leading from the far end. He returned carrying a walking-stick. ‘I hear as how Meg Silver’s followed on to where the Abbotts have gone. This here’s her mother’s stick. The old woman collapsed in here, ’fraid I forgot it for a bit - but I know our old wise woman set great store by it.’ Now the man’s skeletal face did break into a kind of leer. ‘Sort of her pedigree, they all’us said round here.’
‘Did they?’ Belle felt her facial muscles had frozen. Was Meg Silver always going to crop up wherever she went? ‘And why?’ she asked abruptly.
‘Ah well now, reckon you should ask Joe Abbott about that, or maybe his wife.’ The man’s voice rose a little on the last word, as if his lip curled.
‘What harm did Mrs Abbott ever do you? she questioned, determined to find out as much as she could.
‘Huh! Not her, but… .’ He paused as if to find the right words to explain to a stranger, and having found them, went quickly on, ‘I tell you this much, old Hepzibah Silver paid a damn sight more regular than them up at the big house ‘ The same derision lifted his voice again. ‘I’d a bin out o’ business years since, left to such as them paying when they thought they would.’ He finished folding and neatly cornering the wrapping for the wedge of cheese he had cut from one of the big cheeses on the end of his counter, and piled her purchases together. Ah, well, now all that’s nothing to do with a young lady like you. Just give the stick to Cato Abbott for me, if you would.’
To Belle’s annoyance Cato seemed quite fascinated by the cane, amazed that it was made of ebony with an ivory handle and silver band. ‘I always thought it was just a dirty old stick cut from the hedgerow,’ he said.
‘Really!’ she feigned disinterest. ‘And all the time it was a bit off her daughter’s family tree.’ But to his sharp look modified with, ‘Well, it’s what the shopkeeper said.’
‘It’s a man’s cane, of course.’ Cato balanced the stick on his hand, then laughed and added, ‘It lays one ghost. I always wondered why my father helped the old wise woman, and her daughter. As long as I can remember, there was always things put by for old Hepzibah, or Meg.’ He snook his head in a curve of remembered resentments. ‘I wondered why it was always the Silvers we helped, and as I grew older, wondered if my Grandfather Abbott had… well, strayed… but one thing’s for certain, my grandfather never sported a cane like that! So it must just have been a question of helping those worse off than yourself.’
Or of pacifying the local witch or your cows died,’ Belle put in. She would have liked to have abandoned the stick - but Cato insisted it must be taken and handed over to Meg the next time they saw her.
Belle felt she had at least put that day off a little, for us they left the village, she looked back along the road. An elderly woman emerged from the cottage where Belle remembered a large enamel blue and cream sign announced ‘You May Telephone From Here’. The woman waved a piece of paper urgently, her voice lost in the noise of the engine. Belle replied with a casual, dismissive goodbye, and just had time to see the woman register astonishment and her arm drop to her side, as the engine turned the first corner beyond the village street.
The incident was not so easily dismissed from her mind, and she half expected someone on a bicycle, or even in a motorcar, to catch up with them and deliver some order for them to return home immediately. The nearer they travelled towards the coast, the more Belle felt their escape was limited and realised that sooner rather than later the effects of her actions were going to catch up with her. She noticed, in a sober way, how even the trees had been caught, stunted and bent in permanent submission to the winds that swept coldly from the North Sea. As the sun lowered, the goldenness of the early evening had an autumnal chill. It reached even the footplate of the engine as they steadily steamed along the final flat, straight stretch of road towards the sea, and the town of Great Yarmouth.
She sheltered behind Cato as the wind grew keener, putting her arms around his waist, remembering how she had thought he looked like a sea captain on his bridge the day he had first driven this very engine into the village. Now she was with him. She pressed her cheek hard against his back. The roughness of his jacket and the vibration of metal wheels on hard road made the contact quite harsh, but she did not care. No one, she thought, would ever separate them again — she would rather die.
‘If no one comes from home to interfere,’ Cato began, his thoughts echoing her own, ‘and Mr Long will let us, we could travel with him for the next few weeks, at least until they go in for Christmas.’
‘I don’t know what you’re talking about,’ she said, slipping round and up under his elbow so she could see his face. ‘Who is Mr Long? Travel where, and go in where or what for Christmas?’
‘Mr Long’s the chinaman,’ he explained, his eyes straight ahead, ‘and we should sec him and his wagons anytime… .’
Belle strained her eyes into the growing dusk. ‘I can see the sea!’ she cried, the same excitement overtaking her as the other three times she had been to the coast. ‘Look! Look! That is the sea, isn’t it? I’ve smelt it for ages.’ She pointed to the line of bright light on the horizon, a line still catching the last rays of the falling sun.
‘Yes,’ Cato agreed, ‘and there’s the man I’m looking for.’ He pointed northwards to where a line of low marram-grass topped dunes made a curving barrier between land and sea. Shading her eyes. Belle could see what looked from a distance like some Western wagon train. She could make out canvas covers arched high over three wagons, with two living caravans behind them, and at the far end a large steam-engine.
Belle watched with eager fascination as the noise of their approach brought quite an assembly of men, women and children out of the vans. The strip of sea grew larger and reflected shades of gold, copper and pink from the sunset. She expected gay coloured clothes to be worn by the Chinese family she was soon to meet, but as they drew nearer she was disappointed to realise that it looked as if they had adopted English dress. The two women had on mid-calf length skirts, the two men wore black suits with white muffers, the children faded cotton dresses with cardigans. ‘They don’t look very Chinese,’ she commented, as they drew near enough to be waved at. All called greetings to Cato, and looked with open curiosity at Belle, who in turn looked as hard at them. ‘They’re as English as us,’ she accused Cato. He pointed to the sides of the three covered wagons, where she looked and read: ‘Long’s China Shop. The Largest China Shop in the World on Wheels. Every Piece Perfect.’
‘Mr Long the chinaman,’ she said in mock disgust. ‘You clown!’ He grinned down at her and winked.
Greetings over, Cato was taken to look at Mr Long’s stricken Fowler steam-engine, and Belle followed. She could already see the questions forming on the lips of the two Mrs Longs, mother and daughter-in-law. The older woman was robust and muscled, the younger taller, with a wiry-looking strength — businesslike women whose nomad life had taught them to take their pleasures, comforts and interests as and where they found them. The inquisition was about to begin, Belle sensed, just as Cato and the two Mr Longs turned back.
‘Well, reckon you’ve slogged her for twenty-five years and done nothing to her. Now it’s a major refit job. You’ve got thin boiler plates, your firebox is nearly burnt through and she needs retubing.’
‘Ah, it was young Zack here, he dropped the plug and she’s never been right since,’ the older man accused his son.
‘I should say he did you a favour, for the last few months you’ve been sitting on top of a bomb. It only wanted someone to screw down a valve a shade too tight, or refill the plug with something less fusible than lead, and up you’d have gone, you and all your china.’
She kept close to Cato to establish her right to be there, and she w
as grateful as he put an arm around her shoulder and introduced her, adding, ‘We are going to be married.’
The little group did not move, and Belle realised that some greater explanation was needed. ‘My father doesn’t approve, so I ran away from home yesterday to be with Cato.’
The younger couple’s mouths dropped open at the blatant admission, but the older woman said, ‘Well, from what I know of Cato Abbott, you’ve got more good taste than your father.’
‘Good taste’, Belle soon realised, was the criterion Mrs Long senior applied to most things, be it people or china.
Over that evening’s meal in the senior Longs’ living van, and for some time after, Mr Long and Cato bargained for the hire of the Abbott engine for the next three months. Belle thought they sounded like the worst possible enemies as they argued about the monthly amount for the hiring, whether this should include a driver’s wages, whether the driver should be Cato, or someone else Mr Long might find at a cheaper rate; whether, if they had another driver, any damage or repairs would be at the hirer’s expense; whether the Abbotts should provide the fuel, oil and lights by night; and whether the Abbotts should be given the job of major overhaul of the Fowler engine, which would mean towing it all the way back to Glebe Farm.
The wrangling suddenly ceased as the two men slapped and shook hands, Mr Long spitting on his palm first. Then all was joviality. The women, who had sat quietly until then, brought out quart bottles of stout and earthenware mugs (with quaint handles in the form of greyhounds and lurchers). The son fetched out an old squeczebox, which he handled with much skill, producing from the tiny concertina an astonishing range of tone and feeling, and the evening became one of music and song. Belle leaned on Cato’s shoulder as she listened, and sang the old songs and the new, the traditional and the popular.
The boisterous songs of the music hall - Harry Lauder’s ‘Roamin’ in the Gloamin”, and the beloved and so recently departed Marie Lloyd’s ‘One of the Ruins that Cromwell Knocked About a Bit’ - gave way to softer airs, ‘Nellie Dean’ and ‘Oh Danny Boy’. The lamps burnt soft and low, and the children went willingly, finally admitting their tiredness, to their beds in the other van. Mr Long senior insisted that now was the time for all their party pieces. He himself gave a spirited rendition of ‘Trumpeter what are you sounding now? It is the call that sets us free.’ Belle had trouble not to giggle as the high notes wavered to a shaky tremolo. The two wives combined with ‘Sweet and Low’, bending their heads close together as they harmonised each chorus.