‘He got you out of a scrape?’
‘Yes.’
‘How very like him,’ Violet said. ‘What happened to Rooke? Did he save his bacon too?’
They’re all dead, George thought. Edmund, Percy, Hunton – all gone. Whatever kind of man each had been, they were all now part of the Ypres mud over which armies still uselessly fought. ‘Rooke was lucky on that occasion,’ George said. ‘But his luck didn’t last.’
‘Oh! Oh, I see. I’m sorry.’ Violet paused. ‘It sounds as though Edmund looked out for you though. Did he know that you knew me?’
‘No, I didn’t tell him; I didn’t like to presume.’
‘Well, I’m glad he took you under his wing.’
George winced. Soil. Sandbags. White bone in a red wound.
Violet was looking at him strangely. ‘You were fond of him, weren’t you?’ she said.
‘I … well, I certainly admired him.’
The sound of sawing began as the loggers started the work of taking off the branches. The seesaw noise grated on George, making his flesh crawl. The living wood, parted from its roots by sharp metal, would be hauled to the sawmill, stripped of its bark and then run on to a huge circular saw to split it into lengths. An industrial process, he thought. Each one the same. Uniform. Pit props. Canon fodder. Suddenly he felt angry with everyone who didn’t know what it was like out there in the line, even with Violet. ‘He had a photograph of you,’ he said. ‘He kept it by his bed in the farmhouse where he was billeted. It got bombed after.’
Violet was looking at him; her eyes filled with tears. His anger dissipated as quickly as it had come and he felt ashamed of himself and disturbed by the way he had reacted to the strain. ‘Let’s turn back,’ he said abruptly. ‘I can’t bear that noise.’ He led the way back along the narrow path to the road, with Violet following silently behind. He glanced at his watch; the horse-bus was due in five minutes and he quickened his step until he reached the road.
He didn’t want to leave on this strange note, his feelings all confused and jangled. ‘I’m sorry. I don’t know what’s the matter with me; I haven’t been any use to you at all.’
‘It’s the war,’ Violet said. ‘We’re all coping with things we have no experience of. And you are a help, George, please believe me. I sometimes feel I shall go mad if I have any more of my own company.’
‘Look, my bus is due; I’m sorry I can’t walk back with you all the way,’ he said. ‘Will you be all right? I could come again next Tuesday if you feel it would be any help.’
Violet nodded. ‘There isn’t anyone else I can talk to about Edmund. No one else knows, you see. Thank you for coming.’ She held out her hand in farewell. George took it and gently placed his other hand on top of it. She clasped tight and then broke away, walking quickly across the road without looking back.
19
CAT BELLS
All through March and April, under Thorny’s tutelage, George learnt his trade until he could time a showing almost to the second, and cranking at the right speed became second nature. Sometimes he would fall into a reverie about Violet, planning his weekly visit and thinking up new ways to distract her. One week he had taken her to see a squirrel’s dray he’d noticed in one of the Scots pines and they had watched two males chasing each other, chattering, through the branches. He had tried to persuade her to take up her photography again but she arrived every time without her camera, her hands thrust deep into the pockets of the old brown overcoat as if she were determined not to touch anything, as if the outside world was not to be trusted.
George did his best to respond when she asked about Edmund but there was so much that he had to avoid. He told and retold what he knew: his easy manner with the men, his directness in dealing with his fellow officers, his loyalty to his company. He avoided all mention of Edmund’s record in the field for fear that it might lead back to the way he died. When Violet alluded to his death he felt wary, his expression tightening and becoming closed, his whole face becoming fixed like the mask.
On his last visit, he had taken her a gift, a gilt brooch set with green and red brilliants; they were only paste but they sparkled like emeralds and rubies. The surprise had roused her from her introspection. She accepted it and said that he was very kind but when she held it against the dark fabric of her coat, it had looked all wrong. Her hand had fallen away from her lapel and, as they walked on, she had slipped the brooch into her pocket.
Nothing seemed to work; he watched her becoming more subdued and defeated as the weeks went on and the full meaning of ‘never again’ sunk in. Time was meant to heal but Violet said she felt there was too much time, aeons of it, to be endured. She said that there was nothing George could do; there was nothing anyone could do. Edmund wasn’t coming back.
After this, George came to dread the repetitive labour of cranking the film; it was sufficiently automatic to allow the mind to wander and his thoughts went round and round with the cranking handle, endless and unresolved. He found the darkness and the close air of the booth oppressive too. Whenever possible he tried to keep busy with other tasks: filling in the shipping forms or poring over the newly delivered reels, with a lamp and a magnifying glass, to check the film for dirt and the sprockets for tears. In the breaks between jobs he had to distract himself by talking to Thorny or watching the film on the screen, anything to take him beyond the cycle of his thoughts and the familiar panic, the sensation of being inside a box.
Entombed in the projectionist’s booth all week, he came to look forward with fervour to walking at the weekend. Despite the pain of pushing himself to overwork his bad leg in order to strengthen the muscle, and the day of stiffness afterwards, he longed for fresh air and open space. Kitty had been encouraging him to walk further each time they met and he had managed first the fields at the head of the lake, picking his way around the boggy places, and then added the path through a scrubby copse that led on to the second landing stage. Finally, he had won through to the beech woods and the joy of colour: spring green, slopes of orange, sandy soil leading down to grey pebbly beaches and the third landing stage. When he was outdoors, among lakes and mountains, he felt like a fish wriggling through an angler’s hands to return to the water.
On a warm Sunday in April, Kitty and George had decided to try out the lowest slopes of Cat Bells. They caught the boat across the lake and walked back from the landing stage at the foot of the fell, skirting the steepest slope, which had been chosen by two climbers with rucksacks and walking poles, to approach instead by a less vertiginous route. They reached the softer slopes of close-cropped grass and scree, where the path wound back and forth to provide a shallower ascent and took detours around outcrops of bare rock. Beyond the bulk of the fell lay the higher incline of Maiden Moor where they used to explore together, as youngsters, in summer holidays that had seemed to last forever.
Kitty pointed to a place where the path disappeared behind a grassy outcrop. ‘Do you remember where we had a picnic once, on the way back, near some boulders? Shall we aim for that and have a good rest before we come down again?’
George agreed and they set off with Kitty leading the way at a sedate pace. In places, small loose stones were strewn on the path; they moved underfoot and George found that his leg tired quickly. They stopped at the first bend, where the track looped back on itself for a new ascent, and looked back over the ground they’d travelled and the fields and woods of the valley beyond.
‘Look how small the sheep are already,’ Kitty said. Below them, sheep strayed and gathered in random knots, the ewes wandering slowly and the lambs making haphazard dashes away, only to run back moments later and butt at their mothers to make them let down their milk.
‘I wish I had their energy,’ George said, moving his weight on to his good leg.
‘Don’t worry; I’ll have you leaping up here sprightly as a mountain goat in no time. Come on, look lively.’ Kitty settled her straw hat more firmly on her head and they set off again; this time Geor
ge went in front so that he could reach out a hand to steady her over the patches of loose shale: her boots with their little square heels weren’t ideal for such terrain. As they went, they talked in a desultory way about the past week. Kitty had been upset by having to deliver telegrams to several households who had lost someone in action. She told him how the relative receiving the message would often refuse to believe it. In their shock, some would refuse to touch it and ask her to read it to them; others even claimed that they recognised the handwriting of their loved one on the telegram, even when Kitty knew that she had taken down the message herself. George, thinking that it must hit very close to home for Kitty to take such messages, said that she should get one of the post boys to do them instead. He told her that Thorny had shown him how to operate the stage curtains and the lights, and how it felt strangely powerful to hear the hush fall on the auditorium, as if you turned on the dark and it fell like snow, muffling everything to a whisper.
Mr Mounsey had been pleased to see this and had clapped him on the back, saying that he should learn as much as he could about the workings of the cinema. He had asked if he had any knowledge of accounts, and George had wondered whether his apprenticeship might be expanded and felt a rush of hope at the prospect of advancement. Kitty paused when he told her what Mr Mounsey had said, and looked up to him, her face lit up with pleasure.
‘You see! Fortune favours the brave. I knew good things would come of this.’
George was surprised by a rush of pride, a warm feeling he had almost forgotten, kindled to life by Kitty’s good opinion.
As they reached the last turn of the path before the outcrop, the gradient became steeper and he had no breath left for talking. His calf muscles were burning and he began to sweat with effort. He wiped his brow with his sleeve but could do nothing about the irritating dampness that had formed under his mask. He glanced back at Kitty. She had pushed her hat on to the back of her head and her face was red. She waved him on. ‘Nearly there,’ she said. ‘We can’t give up now.’
George paused to take off his jacket and roll up his shirtsleeves. They carried on, George slapping at a horse fly that followed him, landing on his forearm and annoyingly escaping every slap. At last, they rounded the outcrop and found the spot they had visited before, a grassy level with a few tumbled boulders. George spread out his jacket for Kitty and sat down on the grass beside her. Twenty yards away on the left, a face of rock fell away and the view was of a deep valley, patterned by dry-stone walls, and the range of hills beyond. On the right was the steep side of the fell, where the first bracken shoots were pushing through, with views over the whole of Derwentwater. They looked out over the water; the densely wooded islands had greened over and lay like a scatter of cushions on the glossy surface of the lake.
‘It’s another world up here, isn’t it?’ Kitty said as they watched the steamer, shrunk to doll’s-house size, cut a wake in a white curving line, and sailing boats drifting lazy, white and slow. The climbers who had gone up ahead of them were dots in the distance, leaving them alone on the hillside. Kitty slipped off her boots, emptied a tiny stone out of one of them and rubbed her stockinged feet.
‘Here.’ George took an apple from his pocket, cut it in two with his penknife and passed half to her. He stretched out his legs and leant back on his elbows to gaze at the blue sky and the white clouds stacking high above the hill tops.
Kitty touched his arm and pointed to the wall of rock where a stunted rowan tree grew from a crevice. The end of a branch shook as a bird alighted, black and glossy – a rook? No, as it settled its wings he realised it was too big – a raven then. They watched it hop to the end of the branch and take off, sailing out over the vast drop to the valley floor, soaring in wide circles. Suddenly its mate appeared and they looked on, spellbound, as the two birds circled together, one below the other at first, and then changing places, riding the thermals and gliding on a sliding wind. At last, their circling began to shift westwards. George and Kitty sat on silently together as the pair gradually moved out over the centre of the valley, knowing that they had witnessed something marvellous, following them until they were just black dots caught in the gyre of air.
George screwed up his eyes and ran his finger under the edge of the mask; it felt heavy and the skin beneath felt itchy and clammy.
Kitty was looking at him curiously. ‘Is it uncomfortable?’
‘A bit.’
‘Why don’t you take it off?’ she said.
George turned towards her. ‘Oh, I don’t think I should.’
‘I don’t see why not. Go on. There’s no one here to see you. Only me.’
George hesitated. He thought about how he waited for Ted to go to sleep before he took it off at night, how Lillie ran away from him. ‘Are you sure?’ he said. ‘You wouldn’t be frightened?’
Kitty scoffed, ‘I wouldn’t be frightened.’
Still on one elbow, George fiddled with the catch with the other hand. When he got it free, he turned away from her and slowly took it away from his face, blinking as the breeze blew over him, cooling the damp skin and touching his eye. Kitty leant over in a businesslike way, took the mask from his hand and put it down carefully on the jacket between them. He turned reluctantly towards her.
Kitty was looking at him with her head on one side.
He forced himself to keep his hands away from his face. ‘What does it look like to you?’
‘It looks tight and shiny … like skin that’s healed after being burnt.’
‘Horrible.’
‘No,’ Kitty said. ‘I can sort of see past it to how it was before.’
‘I don’t see how; I can’t do that myself.’
‘Oh, you know what I mean: the way that people who knew each other as children and meet when they’re grown up say, “You look the same as ever.” It’s like that with old married couples. In their heads they always keep the picture of each other when they were courting; they can sort of look at the ageing face and see the young one still there.’
George laughed. ‘Are you saying we’re like an old married couple?’
Kitty went to dig her elbow in his ribs and he caught her arm in play. He looked down into her upturned face and her expression became serious. Her eyes were hazel, grey-green irises with tiny orange flecks, not blue, as they had been as a child. Her face was like Kitty but unlike her: he had always thought of her as having blue eyes. How could he not have noticed that her eyes were hazel? And so beautiful?
She reached up and laid the flat of her hand along his cheek as though the coolness of her palm could soothe the scars. George stilled at her touch. He wanted to lean his face against her hand: to give himself up to the sensation and rest there, trusting, dropping his weary defences. She leant forward and kissed him lightly on the mouth. George was so surprised that he stayed stock-still. Her lips were warm; he found that her kiss felt strange yet familiar to him, like a traveller who has almost forgotten his way suddenly stumbling across the path home. His pulse quickened.
Before he could reach for her and hold her close, Kitty drew back and looked at him questioningly; then the blood began to rush to her face and her eyes filled with tears.
The crunch of feet on stones and the sound of voices reached them and they pulled away from each other. Kitty scrambled to her feet and retreated to sit on one of the tumbled rocks. George, searching around for his mask, which had slipped into a fold in the lining of his jacket, found himself face to face with a party of walkers who had come up, like them, by the easy route. They rounded the outcrop in a tightly formed group: young women and older men with thumb sticks and knapsacks, one of them with a rolled-up travel rug, obviously intending to picnic. When they saw that the popular spot was already taken, they rejoined the path again and filed past. George felt as though he was sitting there naked, the way they stared at him. Two of the girls giggled and when they bunched up again as the path widened, George heard another say to her companion: ‘Did you see that poor man?’ The
reply was lost in a burst of conversation.
Furious for letting himself become vulnerable, George searched for the mask, fumbled with it against his face and couldn’t get it comfortable, took it off and started again, and finally managed to feel for the hook and loop and get it done up again. He stood up and brushed down his jacket as though he was beating a carpet. Kitty said, ‘George …’ but stopped as she saw his expression.
‘I’m going back now. Are you coming?’ he said abruptly.
Kitty retrieved her boots and sat on a low slab of rock to put them on and do up the laces. George set off down the path, ignoring her calling after him to wait. ‘There’s the boat, look!’ he shouted over his shoulder as an excuse. ‘If we hurry up we’ll catch it.’ He went on as best he could on the loose stones, his leg aching, his face hot and his feelings a confused jumble of surprise, longing and shame.
He sensed Kitty following as she trailed down behind him, keeping a distance between them. He limped on, panicking about what he should say, how he should act. The strange sensation that their kiss was the most natural thing in the world, as inevitable as the earth turning to meet the sun, faded into fear and uncertainty: a disturbing feeling that it should never have happened. Kitty was a warm, generous-hearted person, he thought; she had been overcome by a momentary burst of tenderness and had kissed him out of … out of … What had that girl among the walkers said? That poor man. Pity, in other words.
By the time they reached the road, Kitty looked hurt and angry. ‘You could have waited,’ she said. The boat was just coming in, its wake frothing as it made the tight turn to dock. Walkers and day-trippers disembarked; the queue along the landing stage shuffled forwards and they hurried to join it. They stood together in an awkward silence.
On the boat, Kitty saw a girl she knew from her street, and slipped quickly into the bench seat beside her. George took the seat behind, sliding along to the side of the boat; he stared out across the water with his face turned away from the other passengers. When they arrived at the stop for the town, the boat emptied and the three of them walked along Lake Road among the Sunday-afternoon crowd, noisy with holiday spirits. They reached the point where their ways divided and paused while folk streamed past them. The girl tactfully withdrew a little way to give them a private moment and waited for Kitty, pretending an interest in the boats on the lake.
The Moon Field Page 29