‘Shouldn’t you tell the bee-keeper?’ George asked. ‘He won’t want to lose them.’
‘No, no, plenty of time for that. We’ll leave that to Hodges.’
She seemed agitated and George let it drop. He went back to telling her how he had followed the fox cubs and seen both den and vixen, but instead of asking him about it, she placed her hands in her lap and said, ‘And how are the family? And Kitty?’
George, taken off guard, said, ‘Actually, I don’t think she’s speaking to me at the moment.’
‘Is it a lovers’ tiff?’ Violet said.
George felt his heart lurch at the thought of the sudden kiss. He said, ‘Well …’ and then fell silent in confusion.
‘I’m sure she’ll come round again soon,’ Violet said lightly before George could say anything more. She looked down at her hands, one clasped over the other as if holding on tight. ‘And the family? Is all well at home?’
Taken off balance, George scrabbled to explain, ‘Well, Lillie is still being difficult … but that’s not the point, Kitty and I aren’t walking out, as such—’
‘You see, the thing is, George,’ she stopped him, ‘I don’t think that meeting like this is helping either of us.’
George felt a chill start at the back of his neck as dread began to spread through him.
Violet sat looking straight ahead, her chin lifted and her arms straight now, hands gripping the seat of the bench as if what she really wanted to do was to take flight.
She said, ‘I know that you find talking about Edmund difficult.’
‘I don’t mind,’ George said quickly.
‘I’m finding it very hard to recover from losing Edmund, as you know, and … and dragging it all up each week is making it worse.’ Violet kept her eyes fixed in front of her and spoke the words into the air.
‘But you said it helped to talk about him …’ George said. ‘And I want to help, to be useful to you in any way I can.’
‘I’m not being fair to you, George. It would be better if you didn’t have this dead weight hanging round your neck.’
‘We don’t have to talk about the bad things,’ George said miserably. ‘We could just walk, like we used to, like we did before all this …’
Violet turned towards him then. They looked at each other, recognising the chasm that had opened between now and then, between the people they had been and who they had become. Violet took a deep breath. ‘I’m sorry, George, but I’m no good to you; I’m no good to anyone and I don’t think you’re the best person to help me.’
George was silenced, unable to argue with this, as surely he was, in fact, the worst person, the root cause of all her pain. He saw again Edmund’s face as he shouted ‘Cover!’; he heard the whine of the approaching shell, felt the fear that froze him to the spot for the fatal split second that was all that it took to turn the world upside down.
Violet pressed her advantage. ‘I’m going away, George, to stay with Edmund’s family. I’m sorry.’
‘Then I’ll visit when you get back.’
‘No.’
The word fell like a sheet of glass between them. George could still see Violet, her high cheekbones, her beautiful mouth, her stubborn, pointed chin, but he couldn’t understand her, couldn’t gauge her feelings or read her eyes. She had closed herself off from him so that she could hurt him. He knew that he should walk away and yet he sat there with his head hanging. Even as he spoke, he knew that it was useless, ‘But I need to … I want to be able to look after you … let me do that at least. Please don’t send me away.’
She clenched her jaw as though gathering herself; then she said quickly, ‘I have nothing for you and you have nothing for me. I shall talk with Elizabeth about Edmund; I’ll be better able to talk to another woman.’
George stood up. He waited for her to look at him but she would not. George walked away and neither of them said goodbye.
Violet looked after him as he made his way towards the door in the garden wall, his hands in his pockets, shoulders hunched. What had she done? It was unbearable to see him so beaten down! She had to look away. Her conscience told her that she had done the right thing, the decent thing, however painful, but she wished that she had not had to be cruel. It broke her heart to have to end like this, with him thinking her unkind.
She would miss him so: the way his face lit up with enthusiasm when he told her in his slow, considered way about things he’d seen on his walks, their talks about nature and beauty and art, his stories about Lillie and Ted, even just turning to each other to share a thought. What would be the point of walking without him?
She heard the sound of the door closing; now she really was alone. There would be no one to walk with, no one to talk with, no one who knew about her and Edmund and the bright glimpse of the life they could have had together, the hope that was now extinguished. There would never be anyone else but Edmund for her. Without that small relief – of keeping him with her through talking of her memories – how could she go on? What purpose did she have? She told herself that in sacrificing George’s friendship at least one of them would be saved. George was young; he would find somebody to love; his life could begin again. She at least had that to feel glad for.
She sat on, blankly, watching the bees come and go in their endless labour, following their flight paths between flowers and hive, leg pouches brimming yellow, spending their short lives gathering and storing in a useless frenzy of activity, soon over, soon to start again.
The colony hanging from the branch gleamed as the bodies of the bees moved over one another, their wings glistening. Clusters fell from it like heavy drops of syrup, only to reattach themselves and crawl upwards again. Violet found the close-packed insects strangely mesmerising, their drive for life – survival, reproduction – the same drive that was in all creatures. She thought, without Edmund I am barren. I will be without issue, there will be no heir for the house, the land, all this. Then, bitterly, Father will have a second disappointment: first a girl child and then a spinster.
When George got back to the town, instead of going home before the start of his shift he headed straight for the taproom of the Pack Horse. Some old boys were sitting in the window seat playing dominoes and among them sat two younger men, a pair of crutches leant against the wall beside them. The lad nearest to him, who had one empty sleeve pinned across his chest, raised his glass to George in greeting, welcoming him over as one of them. George touched his forehead in a brief salute of camaraderie but didn’t join them. He ordered a pint of beer and downed it at the bar; then he bought another and took it to a corner table where he sat in a high-backed settle, out of view, where he could be alone and think.
She had sent him away. She didn’t want to see him, didn’t think his presence helped, so … he had failed her. He had tried so hard to make some kind of amends, to be what she needed: a confidant, helping her to keep Edmund alive in her mind, a comforter distracting her from her grief, a listener, a friend. He went over their conversations in his mind, trying to think of anything he might have said that was crass or insensitive.
Perhaps it was having to look at his face each week, his mask a constant reminder of injury – of the war that had taken away her sweetheart. No, he was being unfair to her. She had never shown any sign of revulsion.
He drank deeply, hoping for a release of the tension in his shoulders and the aching in his heart. He should never have given her the brooch. He had overstepped a line and made her feel uncomfortable.
When he had seen it in Miller’s window, on a glass shelf marked ‘costume jewellery’, it had been lit from above and the colours had caught his eye, colours that seemed to be absent from Violet’s life. The dances and soirées, the gowns and trinkets she’d once enjoyed, that her beauty was made for, all shrunk to muddy walks and a drab overcoat. He had counted the days until his pay packet and bought it, feeling sure that it would bring her pleasure. He saw now that his desire to see her smile once again had been his downfall.
She hadn’t smiled. Maybe she’d seen it as an impropriety; he remembered how she had immediately put it away. Perhaps she had thought it cheap and tacky and been reminded of the difference in their stations. George looked around him at the bare plank floor, the scuffed, mismatched stools and tables, the curling strip of oilcloth on the bar. This was his world. Perhaps she had felt embarrassed for him, the country clown who hadn’t the sense not to presume an intimacy with his betters. No, he should never have bought the brooch.
How definite she had been when she forbade him to visit. He felt sure that she had decided in advance what she would tell him. She was going to stay with Elizabeth. She wanted to be with her own kind and he must accept it, but it was so hard. He wouldn’t even know how she was, would have no means of finding out if she was all right. How was he to make amends now for what he’d done? All he had wanted was to see her and have a chance to comfort and look after her, to do what he owed to her and to Edmund. What was he to do with this pressing weight of guilt? He would have to carry it like a great stone block, unable even to chip away at its edges by small actions of care for Violet. It would be like bearing Edmund’s tombstone on his back. He would never be able to put any of it right. He remembered Violet saying how she missed Edmund, and that ‘never’ was the cruellest word in the language. This is my punishment, he thought.
The long-case clock beside the door struck six, and George realised with a jolt that he should have been at work half an hour ago to check the arc lamps and clean the projectors before the start of the evening performance. He drank down the last of his pint, hurried out and moved on through the emptying streets, past shopkeepers pulling down their blinds and women with baskets straggling home.
Mr Mounsey was in the foyer as he slunk in. George apologised for his lateness but he fixed him with a sharp look. ‘I’m disappointed in you, Farrell,’ he said.
‘I’m truly sorry, sir.’ George was mortified to have failed to live up to Mr Mounsey’s hopes of him. ‘It won’t happen again.’
‘Don’t let me ever catch you with beer on your breath again,’ he said. ‘A moment’s inattention with those lights and the whole place could go up in smoke, remember?’ He looked at him keenly; then he nodded and let him go.
22
CASTLERIGG
April slipped into May and the draggled flags around the town that had faded and frayed in the winter weather were taken down and renewed with fresh red, white and blue as guesthouses and businesses vied for tourist custom through their shows of patriotism. As more men were lost at the Front, a rash of new recruitment posters appeared. George had the strange fancy that the town appeared, at a glance, to be preparing for some fair or circus – until you looked closer. Beneath the parade, the strain on the workings of the town was beginning to show. Bicycles and handcarts were pressed into service for deliveries as horses became more and more scarce. Girls that George had known at school served in the shops, daughters filling in for absent sons; many seemed not to recognise him – or pretended not to, paying close attention to packing his purchases or counting out his change, looking anywhere but directly at his face. Patriotic fervour drove shopkeepers with Germanic names away, leaving vacant shops with windows whitened in swirling patterns. The papers printed ever-longer casualty lists and obituaries bloomed faster than spring flowers.
As the tourist season began, the little cinema filled with visitors as well as locals. Mr Mounsey put on extra shows to meet the demand, and although he was careful never to complain, the hot, stuffy booth became even more of a trial for George.
The newsreels, with their dry, grassy battlefields, clean, well-turned-out soldiers, and tales of derring-do by ambulance men and chaplains, filled him with anger and frustration. The way the film cut from shells falling left and right to men in spotless bandages, smiling and sharing cigarettes, made him want to pull the film in handfuls from the reel.
The features were no better: grown men and women mooning and swooning over one another, the villains with sharp moustaches and too much hair oil stealing away heroines who seemed wilfully blind to their obvious ill intent, the rescues by handsome heroes against all the odds. None of it seemed, to George, to bear any relation to real life, with its mess, its random ills and its unresolvable hurts.
He went every week to chapel, to try to speak to Kitty, but she surrounded herself with female friends. If he forced the issue, she spoke to him as if he was some distant acquaintance, and when he suggested that they meet elsewhere, she trotted out a ready excuse and turned away. It hurt. He thought that she must be regretting the closeness that they had shared for a while. It was as if she didn’t want to be seen with him in public: the man with the broken face. He had thought better of her. He missed her.
In a desperate attempt at self-protection, as his spirits sank lower, he stopped going. He still missed her. Staying away solved nothing. The long, sweltering shifts, closeted away from daylight, added to the malaise that his mother called his ‘black study’.
Outside, the fells greened over as the bracken grew, its tight-furled stems unrolling as they reached for air and light. Like a green tide breaking on the hills it hid the sheep paths and badger trods, smoothing the contours of the slopes and ending in the soft greys and mauves of rock and heather. George’s longing to get out and walk was like a thirst.
He had heard nothing of Violet; indeed, he had no means to get news of her and the difference in their positions meant that they wouldn’t meet by chance. Their lives had touched for a while but now she had gone back to her own circle – it might as well be to another country.
Sometimes, when Ted was out and he had the room to himself, he would take out the tin box from his kitbag, which he kept tucked away under the bed. He would pick up each object in turn and conjure her before him; then he’d return them and put on the lid, feeling a deep sadness. Trying to make amends to Violet had given him a purpose, and a means, however inadequate, to assuage his feelings of guilt; now that he couldn’t see her, there was nowhere he could channel those feelings and no one he could talk to for relief. He had to shut them away inside him, as if his heart were a box that could never be opened.
At the end of a shift at the cinema, in which he had felt that the heat and his troubled thoughts were beating in his head, he waited as usual at the top of the back stairs, willing the audience to go. He couldn’t bear the sidelong glances and whispered comments as he passed so he stood listening until all was quiet and he could venture down. At last, they dispersed and he passed through the foyer and out into the dusky evening. The crowds thinned out once the cinema and the tea gardens had closed; older holidaymakers repaired to drink in the hotel bars or to play parlour games in the guesthouses. The streets were left to groups of young people and wandering couples, absorbed in each other, and George could fade into the shady side of the street and slip quietly through the town without notice.
He made his way across the scented park, where blossom breathed its perfume into the warm evening air; then he regained the road and walked until he came to Brundholme Wood. The shade beneath the trees glimmered with pale bluebell flowers that seemed to hang above the green mops of their leaves and the first shoots of tangled briars covering the ground. He followed the path called Lovers’ Lane that led deeper into the wood.
Here and there, the silvery boles of the trees were carved with clumsy, angular writing, the bark scratched through to the wood beneath. George stopped, now and then, to examine them. There were sets of initials and pairs of names: J W loves P L, Bertie and Alice, Alfred and Ruby. Mixed among them were love tokens, linked rings or hearts pierced by arrows. Some carvings were new, the wood a pale tan, the edges of bark ragged or peeling away; others, time had smoothed and weathered to silvery lines, partly obscured by lichen. He wondered how many of the couples had courted and wed and how many had found that their feelings cooled: the ardour that had moved them recorded only in a wooden inscription. A memento mori for love.
The p
hrase made him recall Haycock’s letter and the service they had held for Rooke. He pictured them standing in two lines, as if around an imaginary grave, an empty six-foot plot. He thought of Percy: his surprised expression, his sleight of hand at cards and his ready humour, the speed with which he could disappear into the background, his usually unerring instinct that had let him down so badly in the end. Percy had been so young, really just a boy. He would never know a girl; he had no one to record his passing. Unknown. Unremembered.
He stood in the middle of the path, beneath branches that laced overhead, listening to the sounds of the wood: the soughing of the breeze through the leaves, a wood pigeon calling in the distance. Taking out his penknife, he looked for a tree right by the path and chose a mature beech that was thickly covered with inscriptions. He made his first mark, among the hearts and initials, digging in the point and peeling back the silvery bark. In large, clear strips, he carved out PERCY ROOKE; then he stopped and pondered, unable to record the date of his birth. Instead, he added BOY SOLDIER and then stopped again.
There had been crosses behind the battle lines, thin wooden markers with tin plates that bore the legend ‘Known unto God’. He no longer believed that was true. He thought of engraving R. I. P., but that too was a lie. Surprised by a bullet, he was sunk in mud, his flesh dissolved, his bones disinterred as shells pocked and battered the same thin strip of ground until they floated like driftwood in a sea of earth. George carved the only thing he knew was true. DIED NOVEMBER 1914. It stood out, fresh and raw among the paler traceries of love.
Frederick and Maggie were worried about their son. Each night, in bed, they talked about what could be done. In the first couple of months after returning home from the hospital, they had thought that he was making a recovery, albeit a gradual and painful process: the job, walking out with Kitty, allowing himself to be persuaded back to chapel. Maggie called it ‘returning to his world’ and said that it was like a spiral that started with family, then widened to include friends, and then, once confidence had grown, acquaintances. He wasn’t there yet, but eventually he would feel safe and accepted within his own circle and that would give him strength to meet strangers with equanimity, and withstand their slights and the cruelties born of ignorance. Something had stopped this gradual process and whirled him back to the centre where he ventured no social engagement beyond the family and spent a great deal of time alone.
The Moon Field Page 31