by Marie Joseph
The whole dark landscape was open, wild and bare. The air stung her nostrils with the force of ice-picks. Going inside, Polly shot the heavy bolt and went back to the fire.
But the time for dreaming was past. Somewhere out there a man crouched and waited, a man who walked soft-footed even when the ground rang hard. Jack Thomson had learnt well the art of survival out in Flanders Fields in the last war, and Polly knew he would show no mercy to anyone who refused to give him shelter.
The full horror of what he had done and what he would still do, given the chance, dawned on her. Until he was caught, they must all tread a tightrope of caution. Moving slowly from one task to another, Polly began her nightly ritual of preparation for the following day.
Gatty must be sent out of harm’s way. Already it seemed as if her fear of Jack was obsessive. There must be no more lonely walking up the hill in the darkness for Gatty, at least until Jack was caught. Polly started to lay the table for the next morning’s breakfast, laid a place absent-mindedly for Harry, then snatched it quickly away.
Unwilling to go upstairs to bed, she leaned against the high fireguard, staring into the dying fire. Yes, Gatty could stay with Winnie. It was what she wanted to do anyway.
The candlelight flickered on the cream-washed walls as she climbed the steep and narrow stairs at last. As she had been used to doing ever since they were tiny, Polly opened first Martin’s bedroom door then Gatty’s.
Martin was sleeping buried beneath the blankets, with just a tuft of fair hair showing on his pillow. He was snoring rhythmically as usual and Polly wondered briefly yet again about his tonsils and adenoids.
It was unbelievable that Gatty hadn’t heard Bella shouting downstairs, and yet her face was turned towards the wall, her breathing deep and even. Polly hesitated. There was time enough in the morning to get her things together and tell her that her wish to stay with Winnie had been granted. Polly smiled, pulling the door softly to behind her. She wouldn’t put it past Gatty denying that she had ever wanted to do any such thing, but she’d have to go. It was right and wise, under the circumstances.
In her own room Polly put the candlestick down on the high table by her bed. For once she was going to bed unwashed, but she’d make up for it in the morning. Tomorrow was another day.
When she snuffed out the candle the acrid smell lingered in the air. Polly squeezed her eyes tight shut, then giving into an unbearable temptation, opened them wide. Nothing. Praise be to God, nothing up there but darkness. No wavering light warning of worse to come. For a brief moment Polly’s down-to-earth commonsense asserted itself.
‘Pull yourself together, Polly,’ she whispered. ‘You accepted that it’s your own thoughts that conjure the flamin’ thing up.’
She crossed her arms and settled herself for a sleep that would not come. Wide awake half an hour later, she took herself in hand once again.
‘Now then, Polly Pilgrim. Less of it! That way lies madness,’ she muttered. ‘Ghostly lights, witches, a crazed man running for his life out there in the hills. Bella straining her ears for the sound of him stumbling to her door. Gatty wanting to leave home at fifteen. Martin with his tonsils rotting in his throat. Harry miles away, telling you nothing, wiping out seventeen years of marriage with his damn fool reticence. Money running out, and your own tiddling job in jeopardy.’ She sighed heavily. ‘An’ you dreaming of another man’s touch.’
‘Stop it!’ Turning over on to her side, she stretched out an arm across the empty side of the big double bed.
‘Harry . . .’ she murmured, but the face she saw behind closed eyelids was the face of a man with the palest eyes she had ever seen. A man with silver streaks in his thick dark hair.
— Eight —
SNOW HAD FALLEN in the south of England, had landed gently on London pavements, then disappeared overnight, leaving the air sparkling clear with a high bright sky of vivid blue.
When Yvonne Frobisher called for Harry she was in a happy mood. She was wearing a fur-trimmed costume, the three-quarter jacket and calf-length skirt in tweed of a heathery shade. A small matching hat fitted close to her small head and she had pulled dark wings of shining hair forward over her cheeks. She was happy because meeting Harry had been what she called a ‘novelty’, and her life at the moment was without the excitement she constantly craved. It amused her to think how much she was looking forward to meeting him again.
He was ill at ease at first, sitting beside her in the car with his black hair straggling over the collar of his shabby, leather-patched jacket, but as they left the quiet Sunday morning streets behind them and drove west, he relaxed enough to tell her it was the first time he’d been in a car driven by a woman.
‘And you’re not sure you like it?’
She glanced sideways at him, her eyes teasing. ‘Northern men are like that, am I right? A woman’s place is in the kitchen, slaving over a hot stove. Isn’t that what they say?’ Her smile was warm and friendly. ‘Is that your opinion of the status of women, Mr Pilgrim?’
Harry considered for a moment. ‘Nay, I wouldn’t say that. There’s room for all sorts of women, I reckon. There’s the kind what’s quite happy fetching up their children and stopping at home, and slaving over a hot stove as you say.’ He suddenly felt very daring. ‘Then there’s your sort, Miss Craven . . . I’m sorry, Mrs Frobisher, who would burn a pot of tea if they had to mek it themself.’
Her laugh was infectious, a deep-throated chuckle that set him off laughing with her.
‘Have I said something funny?’ he asked with mock seriousness.
She shook her head. ‘Would it surprise you to know that I once went with Charles, my ex-husband, on safari, and cooked broth and dumplings in the wilds of Africa on a grotty primus stove, in a pith helmet with sweat running down my nose?’
‘I thought ladies perspired gently, never sweated,’ he said. ‘Broth an’ dumplings, did you say? You’re having me on.’
‘Cross my heart, darling. Charles fancied dumplings in his bloody stew, and what Charles fancied he usually got.’ She turned to smile at him. ‘But now I only cook when forced to or the mood takes me. My flat is round the corner from Harrods, and I have been known to send out to their marvellous Food Hall for a complete meal, or even, on one of my slimming semi-starvation days, a salad sandwich.’
‘You’ve no need to go starving yourself,’ he said without thinking. ‘You’re nobbut the size of twopen-north of copper.’
He looked down and bit his lip, embarrassed at having been so personal, but she didn’t seem to mind. For a while she drove without speaking, and he sat there beside her, conscious of her presence, her poise, the scent of violets coming from her, and an indefinite something about her that made him feel elated and more witty with every mile. It was breeding, he told himself, something a woman was born with and could never acquire. Good schools, the right foods, knowing when she was doing the right thing, and not caring overmuch when she didn’t. It was a quality her brother had possessed, even as he lay unshaven and gaunt in his narrow attic bed. Nothing to do with money or possessions. Taste, he decided. Yes, that was it. Good taste. In everything.
Well out in the suburbs now, she put her foot down hard and the little car gathered speed. When they reached fairly open country, she took off her hat, tossing it behind her on to the back seat. Driving nonchalantly with one hand, she fumbled in the glove compartment and handed him a cigarette case and a gold lighter.
‘Light one for me, please, darling, and take one for yourself.’ She was peeling off her gloves, revealing long slender fingers topped with nails polished a deep plum shade toning exactly, he noticed, with her silk blouse.
‘I don’t smoke meself,’ he told her, overwhelmed by the intimacy of her accepting a cigarette from his own lips. ‘Not since the war.’
She immediately wound down the window, fanning the smoke away from him with her right hand. ‘Oh, that awful, terrible war. It was the war that set Roger on his road to ruin. He went straight in as a ca
ptain, leading his men over the top. A case of the blind leading the blind. He was mentioned twice in dispatches, then instead of going into the firm on his demob, well, he began drinking heavily, then took to the road.’ She threw the unsmoked cigarette through the window. ‘It was Roger’s way of escaping from a life he couldn’t cope with, I suppose.’ Her voice was so low he had to strain to hear what she was saying. ‘He was such a gentle young man before he went to France. He was a classics scholar.’ She turned a corner on what Harry was sure was two wheels. ‘Imagine a man like that pushed into living in a hole in the ground! He cared for his men, you see, and when most of them got killed and he survived, he never stopped asking himself why.’ She turned and smiled brilliantly. ‘The moral being, Mr Pilgrim, never ask yourself why. Do what you want to do when you want to do it. There’s no such thing as retribution. Roger wouldn’t have trodden on the proverbial fly, and look where that got him.’
‘I loved your brother.’
Once again Harry surprised himself by his lack of reticence. It was being shut inside the car with her, he told himself. It was the easy way she had of talking as if they were lifelong friends, and not as different as chalk from cheese.
‘Then that makes us friends,’ she said. ‘So may I call you Harry, and you must call me Yvonne. I hate the Frobisher bit, anyway.’
They drove down a long, winding road edged by tall trees, their bare winter branches making a pattern of black lace against the blue sky. ‘You’re not looking after yourself properly, Harry. What is your wife thinking of, letting you live down here in that frightful doss-house? Does the job you’re doing make it worth while?’
Suddenly Polly’s face was there before him, a tired and apprehensive face, as she’d packed for him on that cold dark morning in the cottage. Her eyes had been ringed with deep shadows, but she’d waved him off with a smile.
‘There is no job.’ He scowled, drooping his head forward and twisting his cap round and round in his hands. ‘I had a job at Kew, but I lost it, an’ I’m having to accept that there’s not much scope for jobbing gardeners, not at this time of the year.’
‘Then go home, Harry.’ She drove without looking at him, down a long steep lane hung over by beech trees, with glimpses of big detached houses set well back from the road.
‘No!’ Harry’s voice was louder than he intended. ‘Not till I have to crawl back, an’ I’m not ready to crawl yet!’
A recent letter from Polly was tucked into his threadbare leather wallet, and he touched his pocket briefly. It was a letter like all the others, filled with optimism, telling him of the better days she was sure were just round the corner. It showed him that she was managing very well, that with her wages from the raincoat factory the money was lasting out. He scowled. Practical Polly. Always an answer for everything. Polly with never a grumble when a smile would do instead. Capable of carrying on without him. Not needing him, if you wanted to spell it out.
A fierce indignation took possession of him, as he tortured the cap on his knee out of shape. Suddenly, surprising him, Yvonne took a hand from the wheel and snatched the cap from him, throwing it on to the back seat.
‘You look frightfully cross. And very serious. And of course you mustn’t go home, not if you don’t want to.’ Suddenly she wound the window right down so that the wind caught her hair and lifted it away from her expressive face. ‘Cheer up, Harry. It may never happen!’
‘Leafy Bucks,’ she said. ‘Now you see why. In the summer the beech trees are glorious.’ She pointed to some bedraggled hikers plodding along the grass verge, haversacks on their backs, bare knees below their shorts blue with cold. ‘Silly creatures,’ she said, ‘especially the women. Female bottoms are better hidden. Preferably in a flurry of pleats, wouldn’t you say, Harry?’
And Harry, who had never given the matter much thought, agreed at once.
‘That’s better.’ She smiled at him. ‘I like you better when you look happy. And you are happy, aren’t you?’
‘Do you know, I believe I am,’ he said, so seriously that she burst out laughing, and as they drove down a steep hill, with a view of spreading fields in the distance, their laughter mingled like the laughter of old friends.
To Harry, the next part of their journey was like stepping back in time. The houses and shops on either side of the wide road were either half-timbered Tudor or early eighteenth century, and just before they passed the ancient town hall he saw an archway bearing the date 1624. He sat up eagerly, trying to see both sides at once, taking in the beauty of a bow-fronted inn, twisting round again to see a wooden bell turret and clock, weathered by time.
‘Another five minutes or so and we’re there.’ Yvonne tapped his knee lightly. ‘The parents might be a bit upset when you talk about Roger at first, but they have to know. It was all those years not knowing that almost broke them up.’
Nervously Harry adjusted the knot of his tie and tried to pull his sleeves down to cover the frayed shabbiness of his shirt cuffs. When they turned into a drive wide enough to take the width of two cars, his nervousness increased.
The house, of mellowed brick, was long and low, surrounded by beechwoods stretching as far as the eye could see. As if they had been just waiting for the sound of tyres on the gravel path, the big front door opened and Roger Craven’s parents came out to greet them.
As Harry took the hand of the grey-haired, smiling woman in his own and looked into her eyes as gentle, wise and alive as Roger’s had been, his nervousness disappeared.
‘Thank you for coming, Mr Pilgrim,’ she said.
‘I’m glad I was able to,’ Harry said, following her up the three wide steps into a large panelled hall, with bowls of flowers reflected in oval gilt-framed mirrors, and a faint but definite smell of roasting meat coming from the back of the house.
‘I hope you’re hungry, Mr Pilgrim,’ Roger’s mother whispered. ‘Cook’s doing beef and Yorkshire pudding, just for you.’
‘Harry comes from Lancashire, not Yorkshire, Mummy.’ Yvonne winked at her father. ‘Yorkshire’s the wrong side of the Pennines, didn’t you know?’
‘Oh dear.’ Mrs Craven touched her husband’s arm. ‘I was sure you told me Yorkshire, dear.’
‘Lancashire, Yorkshire . . . what does it matter?’ Harry spoke quickly to reassure the small woman with the faded blue eyes. ‘Anyroad, the Wars of the Roses was over a long time ago. I won’t feel like a traitor eating Yorkshire pudding, I promise.’
He sat down in the chair indicated to him and stared round the room with frank interest. Education and money, he was thinking, without the slightest trace of envy. What a difference they made. The soft muted colours of browns and cream gave the long room an air of serenity. He noticed the mop-head chrysanthemums in crystal vases, disbudded he reckoned at just the right time to bring them to such perfection, and the pots of cyclamen, under-watered as was right and proper for the time of the year. His fingers itched to check their soil for moisture.
‘You’ve got greenhouses out at the back, Mr Craven?’ Harry spoke as one gardener to another, knowing he was right when the old man’s eyes lit up with enthusiasm.
‘The span-roofed type. Plenty of working room. I’m having a spot of trouble with the ventilators.’ He nodded at an enormous display of chrysanthemums. ‘I’m pleased with those, but the tomatoes let me down this year.’
‘Uneven heating maybe.’ Harry coughed and apologized. ‘I’m sorry. It’s just that in my job I see a flower not as a flower but how it’s been grown. But then my job is,’ he corrected himself, ‘was, never merely a job. More of a way of living, I reckon.’
‘Harry’s out of work at the moment.’ Yvonne perched herself on the arm of her mother’s chair, swinging a silken leg. ‘You don’t know anyone round here who needs a full-time gardener, do you, Daddy?’
Mr Craven turned from the drinks cupboard, a cut-glass decanter in his hand. ‘Experience?’
‘Since I was fourteen. Apart from the war. Up to the slump, I was workin
g three houses at once. Lawns, flower-beds, vegetable gardens, hot-house cultivation.’ Harry spread his hands wide. ‘All gone. It’s rough up north, Mr Craven. When mills close down the women cling on to their house servants, but the gardener is the first to go. I suppose it’s only natural.’
‘But not fair,’ Mrs Craven smiled at Harry. ‘You boys who came back from the war should have had everything you wanted.’ Accepting a glass of sherry from her husband, she set it down on the little table in front of her. ‘It’s all wrong that a man who fought for his country in France during those dreadful years should be begging for work.’
‘An’ begging’s the right word,’ Harry said, smiling back at her. He sat back in his winged chair, feeling that in some strange way the aura of natural good manners, the total lack of snobbishness, had spread itself to include him. Inarticulate at the best of times, their kindness had set him completely at ease. This was how he could have been, he told himself, given the chance. It was the months of enforced idleness, the shame of being out of work that had ground him down. It was Roger’s sister, this beautiful young woman, who had given him back his confidence. Maybe only temporarily, but, by God, he was enjoying himself. If he never saw her again he would remember this day as a turning point in his fortunes. The feeling was as strong as if its message had been spoken out loud. When he was handed a drink, he sat there at ease, a thin shabby man, holding the stem of his glass in his rough gardener’s hand.
‘We can never thank you enough for what you did for our son.’ Roger’s mother spoke softly, her eyes dimming with tears. ‘But for you he would have died all alone.’ Her grey head drooped. ‘Seeing to his funeral and everything. That was a kind thing to do, a sensitive and wonderful thing to do.’