Judy wangled her pass and was back in Number Twenty late the same night.
She arrived after Esme and Harold had gone to bed and so she advertised her presence with a note, pushed through Harold’s letter-box.
She awoke next morning with a feeling of exhilaration that had little to do with her being on leave. She had spent a number of leave periods in the Avenue during the past two years, and had usually been glad to return to the hurly-burly of the billet and NA.A.F.I. queues. To her the Avenue now seemed sombre and almost lifeless. So many of the older people had departed and all the younger generation was away. Opposite her home was the melancholy, saw-toothed gap, where Numbers Thirteen, Fifteen and Seventeen had once stood, blocking her bedroom view of the woods.
She was sleeping now in the back room, overlooking the old Nursery, but even the Nursery had changed. It was no longer the briar-tangled wilderness that it had been but a two-acre plot of neat beds, laid out by Jack Strawbridge, her brother-in-law.
She climbed out of bed, pulled aside the curtains and looked across to the rubble heaps of Delhi Road and beyond them to where traffic could be seen passing up and down the Lower Road.
She was not used to this view, having slept throughout most of her girlhood in the front bedroom with Louise and the younger twins, Fetch and Carry. In those days Number Twenty had been a crowded household, particularly as regards sleeping space. There had been eight of them living there until Archie had married, and often seven of them up to the time that she left the Avenue and gone down to Devonshire to join Maud Somerton.
She leaned out and twisted her head towards Number Twenty-Two, remembering that Esme’s room was within almost a yard of her, and that he was sleeping there at this moment.
She pictured him, not as she knew him to be, with his dark hair receding slightly and his eyes deep-set and slightly brooding, but as the child she had known so well, restless, eager and imperious, his eyes flashing with enthusiasm as he seized her by the hand, and implored her to “go to the margin of the lake yet again, and bring me word of what e’er befalls!”
She smiled at the memory and with the smile came a rush of affection that flowed into the current of her exhilaration. Poor old Esme! He had set sail with such confidence, weighed down with a huge cargo of dreams and imaginings, and what had it all amounted to in the end? A series of bumps and bufferings ending in shipwreck and bewilderment? In the meantime, what of her own hopes and dreams, those dreams that, from earliest childhood, had been wrapped up in the boy sleeping next door? There had been that dear, familiar dream, of a white wedding in Shirley Church, the ecstatic honeymoon in Bournemouth, or Felixstowe, and the triumphant return to the semi-detached on the Wickham housing estate, with the baby in the pram on the lawn, the lawn that Esme would mow each Saturday afternoon, while she prepared his tea in the trim little kitchen.
Well, they had both had their honeymoons, and Esme had had his baby. She, at least, had a few weeks’ of unforgettable happiness with poor old Tim to look back upon, but now even Tim was just a laughing, lovable memory; Esme too, she supposed, had enjoyed his brief ecstasy with Elaine. Then the world had gone mad and everything had begun to boil around them. People they had thought of as immortal had died, and the entire Avenue community had shifted and dissolved. Now there was not much time left for either of them. The war went on and on, and Esme was a fully-trained air-gunner, due at any moment to clamber into the belly of one of those squat, sinister monsters that she had seen on the airfields, probably never to emerge again, except as a mass of contorted limbs, flying through space towards red-winking chaos below.
Suddenly her exhilaration drained away and she found herself weeping, weeping for poor drowned Tim, for poor scared Esme, for the lost semi-detached on the Wickham Estate, and for every hard-pressed soul along the curve of the Avenue.
For a few moments she let the tears run. Then, feeling better for their release, she pulled herself together, slipped on a civilian blouse and a flared skirt that had been fashionable in 1938, and hurried into the bathroom to dab her eyes with Louise’s flannel.
Louise called from the hall: “Breakfast, Judy!” Judith called back, tidied her hair, and ran downstairs, feeling, without knowing why, that those few moments spent looking out on the old Nursery marked the end of her youth.
The sun was a dull, orange ball, hanging low over the wood, when they crossed the meadow and took the familiar path to the Manor.
They had no special destination but it was the kind of morning that suggested a walk in leafless woods. The grass of the meadow was crisp and white with frost and their breath hung on the air, so that Esme, in buoyant mood, quoted his favourite ‘Morte d’ Arthur’, beginning where Sir Bedivere, a role he had so often allocated to her, strode down to the mere to dispose of Excalibur.
‘But the other swiftly strode from ridge to ridge,
Clothed with his breath, and looking, as he walked,
Larger than human on the frozen hills.…’
As he spoke the lines she gave him a shy, sidelong glance, noting for the thousandth time how the wood succeeded in transforming him from the boy next door into the intense and mysterious being he had always been when they were alone on familiar ground. She noted too how surely the stresses of the last two years had matured him. His small, regular features were now sharper, his chin firmer and the skin of his cheeks more tightly stretched, making his cheekbones appear more prominent than she remembered. His eyes, however, were just the same, alight with a kind of quiet fanaticism, as though they had never quite ceased to look about the dream world he had inhabited when they trod these same paths as children, he in grey flannel shorts and open-necked grey shirt, she in the little red and white check frocks that Louise made for her from material bought for ‘eleven-an-three-a-yard’ at Bannock’s, in the Lower Road. Dear, dear Esme, she thought, outside you’ve grown a little, but inside you haven’t really changed a bit, not the tiniest bit!
She wanted to tell him this, for today she thought it would please him, but shyness prevented her; instead she made an indirect reference to their childhood Saturdays, by saying:
“This wood hasn’t changed, Esme. Everywhere else has, almost all the roads, and allotments, the Rec’, the links, and even The Lane, but not this wood! Do you think it ever will?”
They had come now to the crumbling wall that separated the trees from the ruins of the kitchen garden. It was this very spot, she recalled, where she had overtaken him that first summer morning, only a day or two after he and his mother had come to live in the Avenue, and she had tracked him along the tangled paths. He looked around, carefully.
“I hope not,” he said, fervently, “I hope to God, not!Whatever happens, if I get the chop, I’d like to go out remembering this place as it was, always.”
“It’s always meant so much to you, hasn’t it? Why is that, Esme?”
He screwed up his eyes, a habit she had almost forgotten. “I suppose because the impressions of childhood are the only really permanent impressions,” he said. “As time goes on, and you grow up, all kinds of things register—people, places, experiences, even new smells, and patterns of sound, but the first impressions of a place like Manor Wood are different. They’re so vivid at the time that they become a kind of foundation for everything else. It’s a sort of mental book-cover, that outlasts all the pages it holds together!”
His frown of concentration relaxed and he smiled at her.
“Do you remember that day soon after we met, when we came here and you thought I ought to be called ‘David’ because he was your favourite Biblical character? Remember how I played up to you because I wanted to show I was just as good as David with a sling?”
“It was the first day we met,” she reminded him. “You made a sling out of your handkerchief and the stone went in the wrong direction, over your shoulder!”
“That’s it, and I liked you for not commenting on it,” he admitted, and as he remembered this fleeting thought, now nearly a quarter-c
entury sped, he realised what it was about Judy that had made her such a pleasant companion in those days. It was the warm and generous understanding she showed of all he found romantic, and her subtle and stimulating appreciation of his ascendancy, as male and showman of the world of dreams.
For a moment, as he contemplated the long line of her jaw, and the curling lashes of her brown eyes, the years fell away, and he saw her again as she had stood before him as a child, so eager to serve and so dazzled by his majesty, the squire, the shieldbearer, the small but perfectly adequate audience for his essays in to the story-book world of plate-armour, and hell-raked galleons. He said, almost without hearing himself:
“How did we come to drift apart, Judy?”
She said nothing, turning quickly away to climb the wall, for the tears had welled up again. They jumped, she first, into the wilderness of the kitchen garden and she pushed on ahead of him, taking advantage of the screen of the old boathouse to whip a handkerchief from her service-issue shoulder-bag, and dab her eyes.
“Dear God,” she muttered to herself, “what the hell is the matter with me this morning? Why am I so damned weepy? It can’t be Tim, for Tim never came here with me, and it can’t be Esme, either, for I must be over Esme, after twelve years!”
He seemed aware of her embarrassment, for he dawdled over by the gazebo, the same octagonal structure in which they had played Sleeping Beauty on that first morning, and she had waited for him, terrified by the brooding stillness of the Manor, while he disappeared into the reeds in order to emerge as wonder-working Prince.
He had kissed her that morning, and had never kissed her again, not unless one counted kissing at Avenue parties, or hand-kissing when she was Guinevere and he was Lancelot about to set out on a quest.
That was very strange, she thought. Hundreds and hundreds of hours spent together, as they grew from childhood to adolescence, yet never a kiss, never a single step outside the world of make-believe and along the road that she once believed would lead to Shirley Church, and the semi-detached on the Wickham Estate.
She dabbed her eyes again and moved along under the sagging wall of the boathouse.
Presently he called:
“Here’s the punt, Judy! It’s still lying where it sunk under us!”
She pulled herself together then and came slowly back across the shattered paving towards him. The air was crystal clear and the sun over the lake so bright that she had to shade her eyes to look across the flat expanse of water to the islet, the little islet that had been for them the unattainable Avalon.
“Did you ever get to that island, Esme,” she asked, “I mean, did you ever get there without me, by yourself, or with Berni and Boxer?”
“No, I never did, Judy,” he said quietly, and then shortly, “I could have gone there because, over on the other side, where the rhododendrons grow, the shore is much closer, and one year a big tree came down making a bridge. As a matter of fact it’s quite easy to get there now.”
The information surprised her. She knew, none better, how passionately he had once longed to reach that island, how he had talked of making a raft after the punt sank under them and how impatiently he had ranged the broken outhouses looking for wreckage that could be converted into a raft to carry them there. Now there was a tree bridge but he had never used it! She wondered why.
He told her, before she could ask him.
“It happened just before the war. I was mooching around one afternoon and I found the bridge. It probably came down in that bad gale we had, the one that brought down all those elms down on the edge of the links. I remember I was quite excited at the time and climbed up on the roots to cross over. Then I stopped.” He broke off and looked away from her.
“Well?”
“I don’t know, I suppose because it didn’t seem right to go there without you, Judy. You see, this place, and the feeling I have for it, is still half yours, and I didn’t want to share it with anyone else, not even Elaine, or your brothers!”
She had to wait a moment or two before she could trust herself to answer. He was still not looking at her and she was grateful for that. Finally she said:
“Let’s go there now, Esme. I’d like to!”
He looked at her sharply and saw her tears.
“All right, come on!”
“Come on!”
He had said it as it had been said so many times. “Come on! Follow me! Keep on my heels! Watch where you tread, lest the enemy pickets hear you! Lead the horses! Keep a sharp look-out for Sir Moldred’s men! If they catch you give the curlew call, and I’ll spur back.” (How, she had always wondered, when she was leading his horse?)
They circled the lake to the west and crossed the soggy patch where Edith Clegg had come to grief in search of her Christmas tree. On reaching firmer ground they moved through the rhododendrons until they were exactly opposite the Manor.
There they found the tree, a tall, leafless chestnut, its dead boughs curling up on each side of the trunk, its tip firmly embedded in the mossy bank that circled the islet on this side of the lake. It was easy to cross, for splintered boughs jutted like a handrail along the length of the tapering bole. He handed her up and then made his way to the bank.
When she had followed and had stepped down from the tree she noticed that he seemed to be very excited but this did not strike her as strange. Ever since she had known him he had wanted to cross to this islet, but for her today’s achievement was his admission that he had preferred to wait until they could share the adventure.
The knowledge warmed her through. The dead dream that had lain like a withered stalk at her feet began to quicken and shoot up, flowering as it grew. Her heart beat so violently that she felt breathless; half-way up the bank she stopped and leaned against the trunk of a squat beech, the only beech tree on the island.
He had been clambering on to the ridge that crowned the islet, but when she stopped he paused, looking over his shoulder.
“What is it, Judy? Lost a shoe?”
She shook her head and smiled. For the second time that morning she could not trust herself to speak. He came back and reached down to her.
“Take hold and I’ll pull you up! Look, we’ve never seen the old Manor from this angle! It looks so different! It looks as it must have looked when it was alive!”
She took his hand, finding it cool and firm. His touch steadied her and she struggled on to the summit, where a ring of spruce and fir crowned the knoll. Then she understood something that he must have guessed from boyhood.
Across the widest section of the lake the mansion squatted behind its forecourt, and for the first time she could appreciate its gracious symmetry. He was quite right. It no longer looked dead and blind-eyed. The edges of its crumbling walls were blurred by distance and the red sun, piercing the frosty air had turned its grey, peeling walls to a rose pink. It seemed whole and cared-for, almost as though it really was the palace of Sleeping Beauty, coming to life with the awakening of its Princess.
“It’s a kind of miracle, Esme,” she said softly.
He remained quite still, looking into the sun.
“I think I’ve been expecting a kind of miracle ever since I woke this morning, Judy,” he said, and then, taking her by the arm, “Haven’t you? Haven’t you, Judy?”
She nodded, and suddenly the mansion was forgotten, becoming again the crumbling, blind-eyed ruin it had always been, but the miracle had touched them. He seized both her hands and they looked into each other’s eyes for what seemed to her almost a minute. In that space of time they knew with certainty the purpose of the miracle and all that had led up to this moment across the years.
To Judy, the world about them seemed so still that it was as though everything in the scene had ceased to live. There was no ripple on the surface of the lake, no bird stirring in the rhododendron thicket beyond the chestnut-tree bridge, no movement, or sound, in the earth or sky under the fixed, red sun. Then the sun itself was shut out, as he threw his arms round her and
covered her face with kisses, kissing on her eyes, cheeks, and mouth, and between kisses he was murmuring over and over again “It’s you, Judy! It’s you! It’s always been you, Judy…darling Judy…it’s us…it’s always been us, Judy…!”
There was no need to confirm this by any means other than returning his kisses. There was no need to speak of the dream of long ago, of her moment of terror and fulfilment in the summerhouse, when he had broken the spell with his first kiss, and she had seen, for the first time, the vague outline of the future. She would tell him later, or perhaps she would not. Perhaps she would never speak of the long, bitter sweet process that had established in her mind the certainty of their standing together at the altar of Shirley Church, and sharing the semi-detached on the Wickham estate. It was not important now whether he knew or did not know of the dream that had seemed to die the morning she had learned of Elaine through the powder-compact he had bought at Boots, or of the dream that had seemed to replace it, conjured up by Tim Ascham on the edge of another wood, in Devon. Nothing mattered any more now that they had found each other, not the heart-aches of her girlhood, or the war, or Elaine, or even poor Tim. Nothing else in the world, past or present, was of the smallest importance; just Esme.
They remained there a long time, saying little, for there was little that needed to be said. The wonder of their discovery, and the relief it brought to each of them, precluded discussion of plans and the certainty of separation within days. For the moment they were obsessed by the magnitude of the discovery, and by its inevitability, so clear to each of them now. It was like an absurdly simple solution to a mystery that had baffled them all their lives.
The Avenue Goes to War Page 19