by Angela Huth
‘Well, I’d better be going too. I like to get to the butcher before work, though even then there are queues. Queues, queues, queues everywhere, every day. And what do you get when it’s your turn? A scraggy little piece of offal if they’ve not sold out. Though last week I was offered a scrawny-looking pigeon – a pigeon! I mean, what would I have done with a pigeon, Prue?’
‘Quite.’
‘But between you and me, when I told Barry that, he said he had ways and means of getting me a decent piece of meat if I wanted it. Wasn’t that nice of him?’
‘It was, Mum.’
‘Come and see me very soon, Prue.’
‘I will. Tomorrow.’
‘Love you very much, darling.’
‘Love you too, Mum.’
Prue went over to Johnny’s flat as she had said she would and found the door ajar. He was at his desk, drawing. There were a few moments before he became aware of her presence in the doorway.
‘You all right?’ he asked at last, looking up. His anxious face told Prue he knew she had had a turbulent night and was exhausted. She nodded, said she was fine. Her concern was for him: he was red-eyed, haggard. She wondered whether he had some illness he did not want to mention. One day she would ask. But now he braced himself, managed a smile. ‘I’ve news for you,’ he said. I talked to these people who farm about ten miles from here, nothing very grand, couple of hundred acres, mixed crops, a few pigs—’
‘Pigs? Wow! I love pigs.’
‘I made a shed for them a few years back. Seems they’d be grateful for help two or three days a week. Loved the fact that you’re an experienced farm worker. I said we’d go over and meet them next week. Come on in, sit down. I’ll make you a cup of coffee.’
Prue sat in her usual chair by the window, the sun warm on her lap. She felt at ease here, in Johnny’s untidy room. She felt, again, a profound sense of gratitude, both for his intuition and his kindness. ‘Thanks so much.’ She cupped her hands round the mug. Johnny went back to the table. There was no need for Prue to think of anything to say. She was grateful that he was the sort of man who could cope with long silences, didn’t see in them anything suspicious or accusatory. Prue was grateful for that, too.
Eventually he pushed aside his papers, turned to her. ‘Also,’ he said, I thought we might drive down to Hallows Farm at the end of the week. We could start very early.’
‘That would be wonderful.’
‘I’ll wait till I see Barry’s car has gone . . . then off we’ll go.’
Prue was puzzled by the note of conspiracy but did not query it. As Barry seemed not to mind what she did while he was working – it held no interest for him – she would feel no guilt at spending a long day out with Johnny. But perhaps he was right – it would be better not to mention their plan.
‘I look forward to that, though it might be . . .’ Prue decided not to add the word ‘difficult’.
‘People say you shouldn’t go back to somewhere you loved,’ Johnny went on. ‘But it can lay to rest the memory.’ Prue gave a very small laugh. ‘I hate to see you so sad, Mrs Lawrence dying. We’ll try to have a good day.’
‘We will. Thanks, Johnny. You’re the kindest man . . .’
On the day they planned to go to Hallows Farm Barry left the house soon after six for he had to catch a train to London. As soon as he had driven off in the Daimler Prue parked the Sunbeam in the road to avoid curious glances from Bertha. It was half an hour before Johnny had said he would be ‘concealed’ by a neighbouring tree but, to Prue’s surprise, there he was already, waiting. As he got into the passenger seat she giggled at the slightly nefarious nature of their rendezvous. Her spirits lifted. ‘You’re early,’ she said.
‘I had a hunch Barry might leave earlier than usual.’
‘You’re either uncannily intuitive or very peculiar,’ said Prue.
‘I’ve been awake for ages. Rather looking forward to it all. And it means we’ve got a good start, clear roads,’ said Johnny, ‘so you can put your foot down, see what it’s like. I don’t think you’ve ever done over forty in your own car, have you?’
They drove through semi-darkness, which gradually gave way to a spread of pure, colourless light in which the rising sun spread its trails of amber. Once on the trunk road Prue accelerated obediently, and loved the speed. The long journey flashed by. When they came to the familiar country near Hinton Half Moon she slowed down, stopped. She asked Johnny to take over.
‘I just want to concentrate on looking,’ she said. They drove to the farm, parked in the lane outside the yard. ‘Best if we go and introduce ourselves to whoever,’ she said. ‘I’m sure they won’t mind if we look around, walk over the fields.’
The farmyard was now an empty place: no steaming dung heap, no rank smells, no hens running amok. The cobbles were swept, Sly’s old pigsty was empty. Not a sign of farming life.
‘Cripes,’ said Prue, frowning at the new blue paint on the window frames. ‘I’m glad the Lawrences can’t see this.’
She knocked on the back door – there had never been a bell – dreading the moment the new owner appeared.
A middle-aged woman with an angry mouth opened the door. ‘Yes?’ In the single word she managed to convey her distaste for people who dropped by uninvited.
Prue gave her a charming smile. ‘I was one of the land girls billeted here in the war,’ she said, ‘when the Lawrences owned the place. My friend and I were nearby, and wondered if you would mind if we just looked around, went for a walk . . .?’
The woman allowed pure scorn to move her face. ‘You were a land girl?’
‘I was.’
‘We all know what they got up to.’
Prue giggled. ‘We had to work extremely hard, but it was a wonderful job.’
‘I’m sure.’ The woman’s defensive stance melted a little. She didn’t go so far as to ask them in – and had she done so Prue would have refused. She did not want to see what abominations had appeared in the kitchen. With a look of extravagant condescension the woman agreed to their looking round the place. ‘Mind you shut the gates,’ she said, in case Prue had forgotten a prime rule. ‘We’ve got a lot of sheep.’
‘You didn’t keep the Friesians?’
‘We couldn’t run to cows, no. We’re not cattle people. We’re going to pull down the old milking sheds next year.’ With a tilt of her head she indicated the sheds across the yard, lest Prue had forgotten, too, their whereabouts.
‘Gosh,’ said Prue. ‘Well, sorry to have bothered you and we’ll be sure to shut the gates.’ She hoped her note of sarcasm was appreciated.
The woman backed into the kitchen. Prue saw a flash of hideous new paint and shut her eyes. Then she and Johnny made their way back across the yard.
‘The trouble with that old bat,’ said Johnny, ‘is that she missed what she thought the land girls got up to.’ They both laughed.
At Sly’s old pigsty Prue stopped, leant on the wall and looked at the bare concrete floor.
‘I suppose they’re going to pull this down, too,’ she said. ‘Can’t think why they bothered to buy a farm.’
‘Why don’t you take me on a guided tour of the land?’ Johnny asked. ‘I’d like to know some of the things that happened in some of the places.’
His interest, reckoned Prue, wasn’t just kindness: it was genuine, and she warmed to him for that. On the other hand he seemed . . . out of place: a northern poet-carpenter in thin clean trousers and a tweed jacket. Prue disliked him for not being Joe, or Barry One, or even Robert, and berated herself for such thoughts. They began to walk down the lane, stopping at gates to look into some of the fields where Prue had spent so many days ploughing, or picking up potatoes, or harvesting. They came to the huge hedge where Ag had earned her colours in Mr Lawrence’s eyes: he had nominated her the best female hedger he had ever known. Now it was shaggy, uncared-for, its high branches adrift.
‘Good work not kept up,’ said Prue. ‘Everything goes to ruin.’
At that moment a bird fluttered out of the lower branches of the hedge and rose into the sky. Prue clutched Johnny’s arm, excited. ‘Look at that! I do believe it’s a stormcock. Mr Lawrence would have loved to see it. Ag taught him its Latin name. She said he was so pleased she’d reminded him.’
‘Turdus viscivorus, isn’t it?’ said Johnny, quietly, moving his arm from Prue’s hand.
‘You know what? Ag would have liked you. She’s a real scholar, too. I remember the evening of the day they saw the Turdus-whatsit. At supper that night Mr Lawrence taught us all the other names for a stormcock. He said we should learn about birds. So I wrote all the names down and tried really hard just to show them I wasn’t a completely stupid hairdresser.’ She frowned a little, patted the red spotted bow in her hair. ‘Shrite, skite, gawthrush, mistle thrush, garthrush, jercock . . . and one more. What was it?’
She looked up at Johnny.
‘Could be syecock?’
‘That’s it! Syecock. So you know more than just about chickens.’
‘A little. I’m glad we saw the stormcock.’
Suddenly Prue did not dislike him any more, though she could not be reconciled to his trousers.
They began to walk. They walked a long way, through all the fields so familiar to Prue that past and present were an inextricable jumble in her sight. Long Meadow, Lower Pasture, the place where Ratty’s mad wife had thrown the scalding tea at the harvest gathering . . . They pushed their way through dozens of sheep, who paused from eating to look at them with their indignant yellow eyes: sheep, but not the Lawrences’ sheep. Prue used to know the habits of every animal in the flock. But not these, not one did she recognize.
They came to the field where ploughing, on a steep slope, had always been hazardous. At the top Johnny suggested they have a rest. He laid his jacket on the ground, produced a Thermos of tea from a pocket.
They sat without talking, looking down on the fields and the trees which were just beginning to turn. By now the sky was a blue very like that of her Buckingham Palace dress, thought Prue, untrammelled by cloud. The occasional bleat from a sheep or the call of a skylark were the only sounds that chipped the huge silence.
‘Think we’d better go back,’ she said, when the tea was finished. The truth was she could not be sure that she would not cry if she went on taking in all this for much longer. Memories could be dangerous, as Stella had said at one of their annual lunches, thinking of Joe. Just when you thought you were doing fine, they could suddenly flay you.
On the long walk back, the weather had one of those swift changes of mood that had often surprised Prue in the past. She would go off on the tractor on a sunny morning, only to be drenched by a downpour a couple of hours later. The blue gave way to bruised sky and dark clouds. It began to rain. Prue did not care: she liked rain, and was pleased to see that the admirably quiet Johnny did not put on his jacket again.
They passed the coppice, Prue’s constant meeting place and most loved corner of the Lawrences’ acreage. She looked up at the yellowing leaves of the elms, which guarded the dense mass of evergreens of the inner wood, with its complicated tracks among the undergrowth and mossy banks.
‘Lovely-looking wood,’ said Johnny. ‘Shall we go in? Shelter from the rain?’
‘I’d rather not,’ said Prue, and they walked on. That he did not insist earned him further high marks in her appraisal.
Back at the farmyard the owner’s car had gone and there were no lights on in the house. Prue suggested they had a quick look at the barn before returning home. By now it was raining hard. Their clothes were dark and clinging to them.
There was a grainy light in the barn. It took Prue’s eyes a few moments to adjust. She saw that here, at least, nothing had changed. Bales of hay were piled high. The old tractor – her tractor – was still in its usual place in the corner. There were sacks of meal, some leaking beige trails thin as rats’ tails, and bags of pig food Sly had not eaten before she was slaughtered. Plainly the new farmer did not consider the barn a priority and Prue was glad. She went over to the tractor, put a hand on one of its mudguards. Then she climbed up onto its seat, remembering the exact curves of the iron, so well designed – especially, she used to think – to support the shape of her bottom. Looking down on Johnny, she laughed. ‘You realize this is a great privilege, Johnny, do you? You’re seeing the Land Army’s best ever plougher actually sitting on her tractor. Cor, what I wouldn’t do to start the engine, drive off . . .’
‘In this rain?’ Johnny mimicked her light note.
‘Best in the rain, I often thought. Lovely getting into your eyes, your mouth, though it didn’t do much for these.’ She touched the sodden bow that had flopped in her wet hair, then climbed down. Johnny was looking up at the rafters, peering around. Prue imagined he was seeing just some untidy old barn. It would be impossible ever to explain to him what this place had meant to her and the others: the things that had gone on there. She had no intention of trying.
‘Is that the rafter you walked along?’ he asked.
Prue nodded. ‘It is. It’s quite high, isn’t it?’
‘It certainly is.’ He gave her a look. ‘Would you dare to try it again?’
‘What? Now?’ For an infinitesimal moment Prue contemplated the idea, then dismissed it as absurd. ‘No,’ she said. ‘That was then. Some things can’t be repeated.’
She moved towards the stack of hay bales, began to climb. It was as easy as she remembered. She sat on the highest one, looked down. Johnny had judged her feat as a challenge and was following her surprisingly fast: she had not thought of him as athletic. He sat beside her, looked up at the rafters, some six feet above their heads, then down at the lowest spread of bales.
‘Quite some way to fall.’
‘It was. Though I didn’t fall to the bottom. I—’ She stopped. What had happened next was private, nothing to do with Johnny. As it was, she felt a rising of the resentment that had come and gone all day. What was he doing here, trying to share her past?
The rain was harder now. Noisy gusts hit the roof with a sound of spilt nails. In her soaked shirt, Prue felt cold. She rather envied Johnny’s tweed jacket, which he had brought up here with him and laid over the hay. But she resisted picking it up and putting it over her shoulders.
‘That rain,’ said Johnny. ‘It sounds like barrels of rice tipped onto iron.’
Prue looked at him with utter scorn. ‘No, it doesn’t,’ she said, ‘it sounds like rain on a corrugated roof, which is what it is. But then of course you’re a poet, so I can’t squabble with your fancy ideas.’ She had no idea why she was so cross. Johnny had spent the day doing his best to be sympathetic, and all she could do was snub him.
‘You’re quite difficult, you know. Hard to please,’ he said.
‘Sorry.’
Johnny pulled the jacket towards him, took a Mars Bar from the pocket. He tore off the paper, and passed it to her.
Prue burst into tears. No wonder, she thought. This is the Lawrences’ barn and I’m here with Johnny, not Joe. I’m in the place Joe and I first made love, and he gave me a Mars Bar. And now Johnny is doing the same thing.
‘This is unbearable,’ she sobbed, shaking her head as Johnny passed her the chocolate. ‘No, I don’t want it. This whole thing is an utter mistake. We should never have come here. Why are we here?’
Johnny could scarcely understand her protest, so fraught were her sobs. ‘I don’t understand what’s happened – what’s the matter? Why’s a Mars Bar set you off?’
‘I can’t explain – I can’t ever explain.’
‘No, well, OK, but put this round you. You’re shivering.’ He fumbled to put the jacket round her shoulders.
‘I don’t want your bloody jacket. I want . . . I don’t know what I want.’
His jacket rejected, Johnny put an arm round her shoulders with a sudden firmness of purpose. He pulled her close to him and kissed her cheeks, which were awash with salt tears. Prue resisted for no more than
a moment. Exhausted, despairing, not caring, she lay back on the bale. She could feel the strange, light weight of him, and the rasping of their two sodden shirts. She heard him saying things, but couldn’t be sure what they were.
A few moments later Prue was able to sit up. She was no longer crying. She knew her cheeks were black and her lipstick was all over the place, and the rain was still drumming in her ears. Johnny was on his back beside her.
‘Oh God,’ he said. ‘I don’t know how that came about. I—’
‘Let’s not talk about it.’ On one of the nearby bales Johnny’s wet but well ironed, prissy trousers lay neatly folded. When had he had time to fold them up? It had all been so hurried. Prue felt sick. ‘We’d better be getting back,’ she said. ‘Long way to go.’
Johnny bent his long thin legs: his shoes had gone but green socks were held up by suspenders. Droopy underpants were askew round his thighs. He sat, stood, reached for the trousers. Repelled, appalled, Prue looked away.
They slid down the bales, dashed out into the bare yard cross-hatched with rain – a place that seemed unrecognizable, as things often seemed to Prue when they were touched by unusual events. They hurried to the car in the lane. Johnny got into the driver’s seat. Prue, glancing at his grim profile, could not decide whether he was full of fury or afraid of her own wrath.
Half an hour later Prue patted her wet hair. ‘Must have left my bow in the hay,’ she said. ‘When the new people come across it one day, they’ll wonder.’
After that, neither of them spoke till they reached The Larches.
Chapter 6
For three days after their visit to Hallows Farm Prue did not see Johnny. Each morning when she went to feed the chickens she looked up at his window, but there was no sign of him. On the fourth day he was at his usual place, and waved. Then he beckoned. For a moment Prue wondered whether or not to go to his flat. She was not sure what she felt. The anger that had struck her in the barn had long since disappeared. What had taken place there had not been rape, but apathy on her part. It had been a one-off, and there had been many of those. It had meant nothing to her. But she wondered, as she had constantly wondered since they had got back, what Johnny was thinking. Was he apologetic, pleased he’d had his way, ashamed? Eager to find out, Prue abandoned the thought of ignoring him, and knocked on the door of his flat.