by Lorna Gray
Three cheerful faces greeted me before trotting eagerly over the rough cobbled floor of their house to perform a little boisterous tap-dance about my feet as I tipped out their feed. Laughing, I swept up the small amount of mess they had made and then fetched a milk pail while they ate. Myrtle was a good goat and very docile, and she did not even pause in her steady chewing as I relieved her of her burden of milk. If I had time, I would make butter later.
There was just one animal in my collection that did not inspire quite the same degree of affection and this was the cockerel. He, being a very brave sort of creature, had a habit of feigning indifference until the very moment that my back was turned only to then, with a flurry of feathers, make a wild dive for my ankles. It was always a remarkable coincidence how as soon as I turned back again, he would be intently pecking at the dirt as if nothing had happened. Today, however, he must have wisely read that confrontation would rapidly lead to a close encounter with a cooking pot and as I carefully carried the precious milk back to the chilly gloom of the dairy, he chose to simply fix his beady eye upon me in a disdainful glare before losing all of his sophistication and joining the girls in a frenzied pecking of the kitchen scraps from their feeder.
Freddy was up and making a pot of tea when I reappeared in the kitchen, kicking the snow off my boots and trying to breathe some warmth back into my hands. He looked sleepy but nothing compared to how shattered I felt.
“Eggs for breakfast?” I asked only to smile as he nodded enthusiastically. Clearly there was no need to worry that the upset of the previous day’s events would have affected his appetite. “All right then, what sort? Fried, poached, scrambled or boiled? We’ve got a bit of bread left from yesterday for toast.”
Freddy thought for a moment. “Scrambled, I think.”
“Right, scrambled it is.” I cheerfully returned his grin and it almost seemed for a moment that we could forget the other silent presence in my home. My memories of the past day seemed so unlikely now that it felt as if I had simply experienced an exceptionally bad night with an exceptionally bad dream, and had it not been for the long absent figure from my past currently deeply asleep on my settee, I would not have been able to convince myself that any of it had really happened at all.
Freddy set the table and poured the tea while I juggled eggs and toast, which respectively tried to weld themselves to the pan or spontaneously combust. Finally, however, we were able to sit down and eat and, despite a certain hint of carbon, it was delicious. It was a relief to feel little warming tendrils of energy begin at long last to make their return to my weary limbs.
“Do you think I could have some of that?”
A faint voice from the fireside made us both jump. Feeling strangely guilty again, I looked over to see that Matthew had managed to shuffle himself up to be sitting propped against the arm of the settee. His face was deathly pale and with his dishevelled hair and the scruffs and scrapes on his skin he could still have convincingly passed as a vagrant, and not, as he actually was, a reasonably well-to-do local man. But although his cheeks were sunken and he looked very fragile under the scruffy fuzz of growth on his jaw, the eyes that were cautiously smiling at me from beneath the mask of pain and weariness were calm and disconcertingly familiar, and it was hard to believe now that he was the same person that had been found stumbling about in that blind manner across my land.
He gave me a warmer smile as I abandoned my breakfast to pour him a cup of tea, putting several spoonfuls of sugar in it to help him regain his strength. I was feeling an odd sensation that could best be described as cheerful uncertainty as I approached to hand him the cup and I was relieved to find that I was able to greet him quite easily after all; only to ruin the effect by flinching stupidly as his fingers accidentally pressed over mine. He blinked in surprise, but said nothing.
“What do you want to eat?” I asked, more sharply than I intended.
“Toast?” he said hopefully.
His quick grin was so easy and relaxed that the momentary tension evaporated abruptly, and I couldn’t help breaking into a smile myself as I dragged a table over to him and set a plate down by his side. It was a relief to have him so swiftly establish the tenor of our renewed acquaintance, and still more of a relief to see him reach eagerly for the toast. I had feared that his wounds allied with the extreme exhaustion would have brought on a fever but he seemed well enough, or at least not in any great danger.
He managed to eat most of the plain breakfast before grimacing suddenly and thrusting the plate rather quickly back onto the table. In an attempt to suppress the urge to fuss, I had been trying to concentrate on the remains of my own meal but I heard his pained sigh as he settled back against the arm once more, and I could not help watching as he tucked the blankets up under his chin to cover his bandaged chest in what was a very telling mark of vulnerability.
He unexpectedly looked up to catch me staring and I felt myself jump again, flushing as I quickly looked away. It was impossible to know what to say, particularly when I had to wrestle with an overwhelming impulse to gabble idiotic nothings at him, but he must have misunderstood my meaning because I heard him draw a little breath before saying rather hurriedly, “I’m sorry to put upon you like this. It’s very good of you to have taken me in.”
I did look up at him then, shyness instantly being replaced by a sort of offended irritation as I wondered exactly what else he would have expected me to do. My mouth curled into a brief impression of a smile.
“What actually has happened to you?”
It came out like an accusation and even I was appalled by my own lack of grace. My thoughts might well have been occupied by very little else for the past day but even so, I had still intended to start by asking him how he was feeling or by making one of the many other commonplace social niceties that might have done in the present situation. I certainly had never meant to fling his experience at him quite like this.
Equally certainly, he hadn’t been expecting it either. He glanced quickly from me to Freddy and the gentle grin that had appeared in response to mine darkened abruptly to that same unspeakable tension that was so unlike him.
“I … er …” he began and then stopped. I waited but he didn’t continue.
“Look, you don’t need to tell me anything if you don’t want to,” I said hastily as my embarrassment increased. “It doesn’t matter, but it might help if I understand a little of what’s been happening. Just a very little…?”
“Eleanor … I … I don’t think that I should…You…” He faltered.
My intense shame clouded to puzzlement then. The contractions of his mouth had already betrayed the pattern of his emotions from surprise through to discomfort and onwards, not entirely unreasonably, to impatience. But in this last awkward hesitation, I thought I saw another expression flicker briefly across his face. It was so swiftly suppressed that it barely registered, but just for a moment, only a brief fleeting instant, I thought I saw guilt.
I watched him run a hand over his face and it shook a little. He tried again, “It’s difficult. You’re…”
Then his eyes flicked up to catch mine, crucially, before dropping quickly away again.
“Oh,” I said with that odd note of sharpness back in my voice. It could not have been made plainer if he had tried. “Of course. You can’t tell me.”
He didn’t contradict me.
“Right,” I said in a strangled croak and ignored the pathetically appeasing smile he attempted.
It was a shock to be so emphatically rebuffed. I know that I had been half expecting something like this but somehow the wise thoughts of three o’clock in the morning were no consolation now that it was daylight and he very clearly had not lost his mind.
I turned abruptly away to crash the breakfast things into the sink, setting about scrubbing the dishes as if the boiling water from the pan on the stove could cleanse me of the strain of his unwelcome presence. After all the worry I had expended in the night on his behalf, I had thoug
ht that, at the very least, he would owe me a little basic honesty. But instead it appeared that I was to be roughly abandoned to the thin logic of my imagination, understanding nothing except the very bitter sting of his rejection. And knowing all the while that it ought to have been for me to shun him.
Apparently, however, this last little truth was not allowed to matter. Instead, infuriatingly trapped within a straitjacket of compassion, I could do little else but maintain an icy silence while the day passed into a blur of keeping him fed, keeping him warm, making him tea; providing, in fact, any one of the many little things that were essential to his ongoing comfort and recovery. He didn’t even seem to register the insult contained within his unthinking acceptance of my continued care.
It might have been a little easier if I could have continued my chores in some other room. Unfortunately, however, there were no fires laid in any other part of the house and while I could still remember a time when there had been a wall between kitchen and living room, my father had removed it years ago so that my mother could have one of the new Calor gas stoves that were suddenly all the rage. Her lively presence and divine cooking had left us for higher things in my early teens but the gas oven still lived on and the only boundary that could separate me now from the presence on my settee was the thin join between the red-tinted tiles in the kitchen and the fraying carpet of the living room floor.
For his part, Matthew, in his brief moments of full wakefulness seemed fixed upon giving me glimpses of that same bright meaningless smile which had irritated me before. This was apparently an attempt to conceal the darker moments of being caught looking broodingly thoughtful and intensely fierce but the improbability of a civilised man such as him even bearing such an expression was unsettling enough.
Added to his continued silence, this obvious secrecy was actually making my own show of frosty distance seem absurdly irrelevant and with the acknowledged flaw in my living arrangements to deal with as well, I was forced in the end to spend the rest of the day attempting to take myself as far away from him as possible. In weather such as ours, however, there was only so long that I could bear it and by about eight o’clock I was shattered, slumping defeated in the armchair by the fire, unable to pretend any longer that I was anything but utterly wearied of this act. I would have dearly liked to have abandoned it, but the only thing I could think of was to scream at Matthew to explain what had happened to him. But he had already made it clear that he had no intention of letting me understand anything about his business and so I held my tongue, and kept my stare fixed upon the crackling flames.
“Eleanor?”
“Um?” I responded sleepily, blinking myself out of my stupor.
“You didn’t get a doctor, did you? Last night I mean.” Matthew had turned slightly awkwardly against the arm of his settee to look back at me.
“Er…?” My brain was struggling to get into gear.
“These bandages,” he gestured to his chest, “did you fetch someone to do them?”
I glowered at him, “No, Matthew, I didn’t. It was snowing in case you’ve forgotten and we’re cut off again for the moment; I did them with my own fair hands. I’m sorry if they’re not up to scratch.”
“No, no,” he corrected hastily, “they’re very good.” He paused, “So no one knows I’m here?”
“No, Matthew, no one knows you’re here,” I said tiredly, concealing the shiver as I realised that his fears had not just been a symptom of his confused ramblings in the night.
I climbed stiffly to my feet without looking at him, concentrating instead on straightening the cushions of my chair; “Do you want anything else? Only I’m going to bed now.”
“No, nothing, thank you,” he said, but then, as I opened the door to the stairs, added; “Eleanor?”
“Yes?” I demanded curtly.
“Just …” A pause. “Thank you,” he finished gently.
As if to compound my exhausted frustration, the handle to my bedroom door decided this was the ideal moment to come off in my hand. Crossly, I slapped it down on the dresser and as I bent to wedge the door shut with a small pile of books, I had to wonder whether the house had it in for me too.
Very wearily, I peeled off the five or so layers of clothing that were my defence against winter. My fingers were stiff as I fumbled with the buttons and then, as I gave in and drew the shirt off over my head, I suddenly realised that my wrists were aching with far more than just tiredness.
I looked down and it was with a kind of fascinated horror that I observed dark marks encircling each one. They were ugly and tender and I had to spend some minutes just sitting on the edge of my bed. Somehow in the preoccupation of being offended by his determined silence, the whole shocking truth of my discovery out in the snow had faded in my memory to become nothing more than a product of my uneasy imagination. But the bruises were indisputable and, allied with his refusal to make any kind of explanation, I found that as I finally slipped into bed, I was actually trembling.
Chapter 4
His late night comments on my altered appearance had been right; I was slimmer now. I had been a softly rounded teen but the subsequent years of hard physical work made worse by the deprivations of the war had stripped my body down to lean muscle that I suspected was rather boyish, and sadly no amount of dreaming would allow me to pretend that I had magically transformed my baby fat into a model-like elegance. I supposed that I still had hips somewhere, but they were so well hidden by handmade trousers and the loose folds of my thick winter jumpers that I would have been hard pushed to prove it.
Reassuringly, the bruises appeared less substantial in the light of day and as I quietly slipped down the stairs to the familiar sounds of a windswept world dawning to thick snow, I noticed that, like the marks, the concerns which had haunted my night had since faded to become a more reasonable judgement with the morning. So much so in fact, that upon opening the living room door to the predictable discovery that I still had a houseguest, I believe I simply felt a vague sense of relief that the telltale smudges were harmlessly out of sight. They were well concealed by the thick rolls of excess wool at my wrists – this was one of the better results of wearing hand-me-down clothing – and at least now I could be sure that not only would Freddy not see the marks and upset himself, but, almost as importantly, I would avoid the unhappy experience of provoking belated attention from him.
Not that there was presently very much danger of anybody being provoked into anything, whether admissions or otherwise. Matthew was asleep.
He was still lying on my settee, his feet hanging off the end in sleeping disarray, and as I drifted silently past the back of his chair, it was impossible not to give in to the daring burst of curiosity that prompted me to pause and examine him.
His mouth was hanging slightly open as he breathed steadily and his relaxed features had softened through sleep to a gentle harmlessness that was a world away from the waking man who showed the taut pallor of exhaustion and a stark tension in every gesture. His expressive face, although currently drawn and rather grey, held a defined structure and pleasing jaw that were undeniably engaging and beneath the disguise of stubble and vagrancy, he still possessed something of his old appeal. Infuriatingly, he did not seem to have had the good grace to prove that my youthful attraction had been nothing more than a figment of my romantic imagination and for a moment I found that, where his short sandy hair was ruffled by vulnerable sleep, I actually had to resist the urge to stroke it back into place.
He moved, only a brief dreaming shift of his cheek on its cushion, but it sharply reawakened me to an unpleasant fluttering of doubts and apprehension as he settled once more, perfectly unaware of my interested scrutiny.
He was thinner than he should have been, much thinner than a few days of this unexplained drama could justify and it both worried and frustrated me that I knew nothing about what might have happened to make him become like this. The shock of his injuries might well serve as a justification for his present loss
of charm – not that his charm could still have any effect on me anyway – but even so it didn’t seem sufficient to explain how he had altered in the years since we had last met to become tougher and far more remote than even I would have expected. What had changed in him; what wartime tragedy had turned the gentle young man of my teens into this…this lean stranger?
I sighed inwardly and moved to step away but as I turned, something stirred in the folds of the blanket. Transfixed, I watched as a dark shape moved languorously and separated itself from the shadows.
Meow it said, before lithely leaping over the back of the settee and dashing across the kitchen floor into the small dairy and its shadowy corners beyond. My hand went to my throat in a classic pose of shock and I felt a powerful wave of hysterical laughter rise within me. A cat! Of all the things I had imagined being somehow associated with the turmoil in my mind, one of the half-wild farm cats was not what I had expected. It had obviously sneaked in to seek warmth in the night and I wondered if I was going a little strange myself, given my determination to live like a character from a horror story.
Shaking my head and silently berating myself, I lit the stove and put the kettle on. There was a great pile of washed crockery on the drainer and I tried to put it away quietly so that it wouldn’t wake the sleeping man. I would, I knew, have to re-dress his wounds today – it really ought to have been done yesterday – and so a certain level of interaction was inescapable, but if I could just manage to get breakfast out of the way without having to speak to him, I would be a very happy woman.
“Good morning.”
I gave a startled squeak and nearly dropped the cups and sugar bowl onto the sideboard. Hastily collecting them together again and feeling strangely like I had been caught in the middle of a guilty act, I took a deep breath, and turned.