by Betty Burton
For hours they leaned against one another and took fitful dozes. It was four o’clock in the morning when the thin note of the all clear sounded and they could walk on to Half Moon Street.
‘You like if we sleep together, wife?’
‘I like very much if we sleep together.’
Eve had worried that Duke Barney might come between them. He didn’t. The familiarity of Dimitri’s body, his smell, his voice kept Duke well out of the bed.
In the morning she took off her wedding ring and held out her hand for his. ‘You get this back at the church.’
‘No, I keep them. Don’t worry, I keep them safe. We will use them again in the spring. Captain Faludi, he says that it can be April.’
21
The small branch-line train steams along at top speed, swaying and rattling. The interiors of the compartments have gritty floors scattered with cigarette stubs, worn upholstery, ashtrays overflowing. The light bulbs either do not work or are missing; the windows are brown inside from tobacco smoke and grey outside from the steam and smoke of the engine. Most travellers hardly notice, and, in any case, ‘Don’t you know there’s a war on?’ is used to shame moaners. Most people in Britain have better things to worry them than neglected railway coaches. Many of the travellers are in uniform. Some look only inwards, some doze; others, on their way home or to embark, talk heartily and make jokes. None of them wants to look at the passing scene.
But Eve does. The last time she travelled on this line was in 1937. Then, the Southern had plenty of coach cleaners. With her forefinger she rubs a little clearing on the window and peers through. The sight of the very Englishness – Hampshireness – brings a lump to her throat. She loves her own county, always has, yet she could hardly wait to leave it when she was barely twenty years old.
She is anxious to see her family, and the place called Roman’s Fields where they all now live together. Over the years that she has been away there have been times when she has missed them, but not much. She knows she couldn’t last a week living within such peaceful domesticity.
She hopes that they take to Dimitri.
When she looks away from the rolling green countryside, she isn’t surprised to find Dimitri’s eyes upon her. He winks. With his military-style haircut and his major’s uniform, he looks so much like the man she met in Spain. Again her heart is wrenched a little. Will this ploy of naturalisation by marriage be enough? She still can’t believe that the GPU will not somehow get hold of him. The only hope is that Russia might come into the war on the British side.
She smiles at him warmly. She has made him a British subject, but never in a hundred years could he become British. Like her, he can put on another personality like a coat, but like her too, nature runs deep.
‘We’re almost there.’
He too rubs a bit of window. ‘Is still farmlands.’
‘Is now station.’
Eve’s uncle, Ted Wilmott, has only one good arm, but he puts twice the strength in it to hug her. Then, moving back a pace to look at her, he says, ‘Lord help us, Lu, you got splendid all right. I shouldn’t never have recognised you. And this is your intended. I’m pleased to meet you, sir.’
‘Dimitri, Ted. You call me Dimitri. This major stuff is all jacket and hats.’
Ted gives Eve a look of approval. ‘Come on then, Lu. Let’s get you home.’
She is always going to be Lu to everybody living on Roman’s Fields land, Wilmotts and Barneys alike. She is glad that they have decided that here Dimitri should not be Lec. Lu and Lec? How many faces do they have?
* * *
Roman’s Fields in Wickham has been owned by Ted and May Wilmott since May’s father died. Theirs is a fertile corner of the county, close to where the landscape starts to swell and rise gently until it reaches its highest point at Beacon Hill where it swoops down again into yet more fertile chalklands and the decaying village of Cantle, and then up again to ancient hill forts.
The big, old house is alive with women’s warm voices. The men are out and about – Ray at his work as signalman, Eli Barney picking on the smallholding. Ken went somewhere yesterday. He’s cagey about it.
Ray Wilmott, Eve’s brother, brings a good pay packet to Roman’s every Friday. His wife, Bar, sister to Duke, also brings in a wage. She has gone back to work on the estate as head groom. Now that so many of the young men have joined up, Bar has brought in two of her young brothers to help her.
When this happened, Gunner, the estate agent, went to Lady Stanton-Lewis to complain: ‘It’s bad enough having a gyppo running the stables, but she’s bringing in a whole lot more.’
But her ladyship would have none of it. ‘They are good with horses. That is the only consideration.’
‘Give them an inch and they will take a mile, madam. I know gyppos. The old man takes game birds.’
‘We can spare him a few. Our woods are full of them.’
‘He sells them. And so he does the snowdrops and the holly and mistletoe. He takes birch for making pegs and our willows for his wife’s baskets. He practically lives off our estate.’
‘His lordship’s estate, Gunner.’
‘And I want to protect it for him from the likes of the Barney clan.’
‘Why do you have such a down on them, Gunner? There was a time before it was enclosed, many years ago, when everybody in this area was free to live off the land. His lordship’s family took it, quite legally of course, but people like Barney don’t see it like that – and I can’t say that I blame them. Be tolerant with them, Gunner. Young Mrs Wilmott is doing such good work with the horses and with Megan.’
Megan was the only child of the Stanton-Lewises, and going through a stage where horses were central to her life.
‘Yes, well, there’s that too. That girl spends a deal too much time in their company.’
‘So you want to give me advice on how to bring up my daughter as well? Megan’s boarding school has closed, and until we find another, I am glad that Mrs Wilmott doesn’t mind her hanging around the stables. I am contemplating sending her to the village school, so that I can have her close, now that his lordship has rejoined his regiment.’
Gunner was shocked. The country was going to the dogs. One thing he admired about Hitler was that he had got rid of the gyppos.
‘Let the Barneys be, Gunner. We owe them more than they owe us.’
‘Your ladyship, that can’t be.’
‘Why do you have such a down on the family?’
‘Because they’re gyppos, your ladyship. They aren’t like us. They’re scroungers.’
‘Don’t be ridiculous, man. Who around here works harder than the Barney family?’
Gunner left with rage in his heart. What could anybody do about people like that who married into the aristocracy? A woman who went around saying she was proud that her grandmother had gone to prison to get votes for women.
When Gunner had rage in his heart every past wrong boiled up. The Barney girl took days off and went out to do witchetty things. She went to the circle of stones, and the yew circle on Butser Hill. He suspected she did evil things there. When he’d told her she couldn’t be spared, she’d brought in her two brothers. She’d said, ‘You got your holy days and bank holidays, and I got mine.’
He was a good estate agent. Half the work he did should rightly have been done by a gamekeeper. His house was tied to the job, and he had the same fear as every man whose home was given as part of his wages. No chance to save and, in the end, no job, no home. He never complained because he wasn’t a young man and he had an injured leg. Only in the safety of his four walls did he speak of his fears to Mrs Gunner.
‘If my leg gets any worse, that gyppo girl will have the job from under me. She put a spell on her ladyship and Miss Megan. With my own two ears I heard her ladyship call her “Mrs Wilmott”.’
‘That’s who she is.’
‘She’s a damned gyppo. Don’t tell me you’re taken in by her.’
‘I don’t see there�
�s anything to be taken in over. A more open and nice girl I’ve yet to meet.’
Gunner rejected vehemently his wife’s suggestion that he make her his ally instead of his opponent.
‘So you won’t be going to the wedding party over at Roman’s on Saturday?’ Mrs Gunner asked.
‘No I won’t be going to no wedding party, and no more will you. If Ted Wilmott don’t mind having truck with the Barneys, I do. You’ve only got to see what happened to Ann Carter, a decent village girl until Eli Barney got a hold of her.’
‘He never got a hold of her. She wanted him.’
‘Not wed in church.’
‘But wed in the olden way. If it suits Ann Carter, then it’s no business of anybody else’s.’
All of which was listened to by their son, Maurice, who heard everything but said very little. Maurice wasn’t ‘all there’. Damaged at birth, he was still, at the age of twenty, his mother’s child. But to Gunner, Maurice was yet another daily reason for anger and torture: retribution handed out by his hard-hearted God for a sin he had committed before Maurice was born.
Maurice spoke. ‘Miz Carter… she’s a nice lady. Miz Carter talks nice to Maurice. I goin’ to Miz Carter’s party.’
Gunner thumped his fist on the draining board. ‘You’ve been letting the boy wander again.’
‘He needs to wander.’
‘Not to no Barney camp, he don’t.’
‘It’s not a camp, and you know it. They live in a decent enough place on their own bit of land. The Barneys are no different to you and me – except that they’ve got a bit of land and we’re in a tied cottage.’
That hit where it hurt most. Mrs Gunner wasn’t normally as argumentative as this. Anything for a quiet life. But she was beginning to come to the end of her tether, coping with a husband who was becoming stranger by the day in his obsession with gypsies, a grown-up son with a child’s mind, and not many years to having to give up the cottage.
‘Whilst we are on the subject, I let Maurice go over to Ann Carter because she is better than you or me at getting Maurice to do normal things.’
‘Normal things! Normal? What normal things is that?’
‘She’s been showing him how to make strawberry chips. May Wilmott said she would give him something for them when he’s learned. Maurice, show your dad.’
Maurice would never understand why his dad had put the chip basket into the cooking range. Only broken chips went for firewood.
Gunner would never understand how his wife came to side with Ann Carter and her queer brood got on her by Eli Barney. Even his lordship hadn’t seen any danger in taking on the Barney girl for the stables. Like everybody, he had been won over by the way this bit of a girl had with his hunters.
Gunner had always been a regular churchgoer, a sides-man, a parish councillor. An upright man, as he could truthfully say. And now his wife had gone against him, siding with the godless tribe because one of them was coming back to get wed. He thumped his fist on the arm of the chair in which his wife had been seated before she went out, saying in that reasonable voice she always used when Maurice was around, ‘James, if you don’t put a curb on your unreasonableness with our nearest neighbours, then I shall take Maurice and go down and stop with my sister in the village. You don’t never stop talking about the Barneys. To my mind, we’d all be a lot better off if you’d take as much notice of your own son as you do of them.’
‘All right then, if that’s what you want, clear off and take that shameful thing with you!’
Alice Gunner was stunned. The burning of Maurice’s chip basket had been cruel enough, but to turn on the boy who had had no hand in his own making…
Maurice couldn’t know that it was he who was the ‘shameful thing’, but he did feel his mother’s hand tighten, sensed the fear that shivered through her, and wanted to be out of the house away from his father.
He couldn’t know that most mothers and fathers sleep in the same bed. He couldn’t know of the silent dementia that can take over a reasonable man when every night he is reminded of the sins of the flesh that had created Maurice.
Gunner craved that sin. Every night he remembered when it was not a sin, but God-given in the marriage vows. For the procreation of children. But James Gunner had bad seed. Turned bad by a single coupling with a loose woman.
He shouted after Alice and Maurice, ‘Church wedding! It’s a sin if any of the Barneys enter a church!’
As agent for the estate, he needed a whole row of shotguns. He selected one, filled his pockets with cartridges, and walked off into the shafts of sunlight that filtered through the trees that surrounded Keeper’s Lodge in which he had spent his entire life.
Let Eli Barney cross my path, and I’ll have him, he thought.
* * *
Ted Wilmott opened the heavy farm gate. Eve noticed how he had aged, how the effort the act cost him showed in the bend of his back.
Dimitri got out to shut it after Ted had driven the van into the yard.
‘Eve, your home is beautiful house, big. Looks maybe a hundred years or maybe more?’
‘Three hundred.’
‘So important. Piece of history. I like this very much, Eve. There is sense of forever…? Unchanging?’
‘Continuity?’
‘Yes. Maybe I now know better how it is that you can be Eve and Lu. You have two worlds in which to live. I think it is hard for you, yes?’ He gave her a light peck on the back of her neck. ‘Look, these must be your people coming out of house.’
Eve’s spirits rose, then sank. They had come to meet Lu, but she had stayed behind in Spain with Duke.
Eve moved into May’s arms and was enveloped in the warm smells of country clothes, soap-washed hair, boiled-white aprons to which the smell of baking clung.
Dimitri was introduced, openly appraised, welcomed. Walking through the yard to the kitchen door, Eve felt her senses were hit by everything that had been forgotten – the yard dust kicking up, the steaming muck heap, the low contented grunts from the pigsty, a cock and more hens than when she was last here. The smell of sun on old brick and thatch, hay, cut grass, faint whiff of the septic tank, hard soap, disinfectant, country wine, yeasty beer, stewed apples, warm pasty – not individually, but as a recognisable whole, the smell of Roman’s Fields greeting her.
It ought to have felt like coming home. Instead Eve was being treated a bit like a visitor. Dimitri, with his praise and endless questions, charmed them all into warm informality as only he could.
They moved into the kitchen where May had put on a bit of a spread. ‘Now come on in and sit you down. Leave your bags. They’ll wait, but the food won’t.’
‘Oh, Ray! It’s so lovely to see you. Where’s Bar? Are these two yours? Dimitri, come and meet Ray.’
Ray shook hands formally. ‘Nice to meet you. And I suppose congratulations are in order, seeing as how you and Lu will be getting wed.’
‘Thank you, Ray.’
Ray nodded. ‘This is Bonnie, and this here is our Anthony.’
Dimitri, squatting to Bonnie’s level, held his finger out for Anthony to clutch. ‘Is nice baby. Hey, you, Anthony, you a nice baby. You see, Lu, he likes me.’
Bonnie said, ‘That’s not a smile, it’s wind.’
May was watching Lu’s ‘intended’ like a hawk, liking what she saw.
But, if she could have seen what was going on beneath the surface, she would have wondered at Dimitri’s distress.
* * *
From the moment Eve had emerged from the revolving door into the foyer of the hotel in Half Moon Street, Dimitri had experienced pain and pleasure in everything they did together. Except for the lovemaking, everything was for the first time as well as for the last time. First and last time dancing together; first and last time seated together watching a show. The shutters were coming down on their relationship. This was a marriage of convenience, nothing more – something Eve had agreed to to save him from extradition. Later, they would be divorced. The conditions
had always been clear.
It was breaking his heart.
When, in Australia, she had miscarried a baby, he had told himself that there would be others. She would carry his children. But, as it turned out, she didn’t love him. Not that she had ever pretended that she did, nor that she wanted to be married – to himself or to anyone – but in his mind there had never appeared to be anything that would separate them. Almost as though there must be a steady progression into their future. Russian literature was full of tragic love, wasted lives, ironic situations. He would try not to waste his own life, but, without her, there would always be something lacking.
The irony was that they were married, and would be confirming their union with a big family wedding. Eve had explained that she was doing the village wedding to please Ted and May, especially May. Yet Dimitri could not help hoping that a church wedding before all her family was so much more than a registry office marriage, and that she would come to see it as the tightening of their knot and not want the agreed-upon divorce.
* * *
In the kitchen at Roman’s Fields, Ann Carter, Ephraim, Harry and Young Gabe – the boys looking like young editions of Duke – all stared and nodded.
Ann said, ‘Bar’s still over at the stables. Not much help now so many lads has joined up.’
It was Young Gabe who said what his brothers must have been thinking. ‘If you’re a Russian, why haven’t you got long boots, like in Ma’s ’cyclopaedia?’
‘Is only Cossack who can have these things.’
‘By law?’
‘Yes, by law.’ Boys understood that. ‘But I do have a winter hat made from white fox. Is very warm when there is snow.’
‘Is it deep snow?’
‘Very, very deep.’
‘Caw, I wish I could go to Russia. We don’t have hardly any here.’
In only minutes, Dimitri appeared to be more at the heart of her family than Eve herself.
‘Sit yourselves down then. Go on, Lu, don’t wait to be asked.’