Ashford

by Melanie Rose Huff

  I started as I felt a hand on my shoulder. Perry was awake and looking at me with an expression of such concern that I felt worse for having caused it.

  “What happened?” he asked, “What’s wrong?”

  “I…I think the tyre's punctured,” I said, feeling sillier by the minute.

  I think he was relieved that it was no worse. It must have been hard on him, waking up to find the car stopped and the driver in tears.

  He surprised me by pulling out his rather rumpled pocket handkerchief and wiping my tears away with the edge of it.

  “Well,” he said, “there’s only one way to tell. We’ll have to get out and see how bad it is.”

  It was bad. The thing I had seen in the middle of the road proved to be a broken spring, which, no doubt, somebody else was now missing on their own car. I had swerved to avoid it, but not far enough, and it had sliced open the left front tyre of Mr. Bertram’s beloved automobile. There were a few tools in the car, sufficient for small problems, but nothing to fix something so severe.

  “I guess we’ll just have to walk somewhere for help,” Perry said, getting up from where we had both been squatting in the mud to assess the damage. He said it in his usual cheerful tone, but with my shame-heightened senses I thought I detected a hint of weariness, and felt another pang of guilt at the thought of such a homecoming for him. “Gurney Slade would be the closest town from here, but it’s still quite a distance. I think the best thing would be to find the nearest house and see if anyone has a spare tyre they would be willing to let us borrow. If we’re lucky, we’ll also be able to phone Ashford and let them know what’s happened.”

  We got the car pulled off to the side of the road and prepared for the walk. There was a small black umbrella in the back seat which Mr. Bertram always kept there for emergencies, and which kept my left side and Perry’s right, but the whole of neither of us, dry as we walked.

  If I had been less drowned in rainwater and self-pity I might have noticed the brilliant green of the sodden landscape, the ever-changing shades of grey in the dark clouds, the dramatic flashes of lightning, but it is only looking back that I see these things clearly, and remember their beauty, for at the time, in the condition of my thoughts, I saw without knowing that I saw.

  There was silence between us as we walked at the side of the road. I was lost in my own thoughts, and perhaps he was as well.

  At last we saw a glimmer of light from the window of a house a little distance from the road. It stood up firm and strong like an emblem of sanctuary against the shifting darkness of the roiling clouds with a sturdy home-look that cheered even my depressed spirits. Perry and I smiled through the raindrops at each other, then set off down a narrow lane leading toward the house.

  I became nervous again as we approached it, though for different reasons. Silly girl, I thought, can’t you ever stop? Will you always be like this, thrown into anxiety by every new experience? I suppose I had thought myself cured, because of the ease and comfort of my association with the Bertrams and the level of self-possession I had gained through the trials of living in war-rent London, but it seemed that the strength gained through one variety of trial, such as surviving a bombing raid, did not translate to knocking on a stranger’s front door to ask for shelter and spare auto parts. In an odd way this thought helped me, for at least in those past cases I had triumphed, or at least fumbled through with some degree of outward serenity.

  We had to knock five times and had almost given up when the door was opened by a skinny old man with a large nose sprouting wiry grey hairs. A diminutive old lady who reminded me of a praying mantis stood behind him and looked suspiciously out at us from behind her husband’s elbow.

  They didn’t say anything, just looked at us. It was unnerving. I began, “We, uh, had a pu…” and then cravenly left Perry to finish.

  He took up my dropped thread as smoothly as he had when he saved me in the train so long ago.

  “We were on the road from Wells on our way to Nettlebridge when we had a problem with a puncture. Could we trouble you for the use of a telephone?”

  The old man stared at us blankly and put his hand to his ear. The old woman poked him in the ribs and yelled at the side of his head, “They want to sell you an elephant. I don’t know why. Tell them to go away.”

  The man’s eyes widened until they seemed to take up his whole face, then he began waving his arms at us and yelling, “Go away, go away, no buying here, go away.”

  We were backing down the front steps and preparing to run for it and seek help elsewhere when we heard a sound from behind the old woman, inside the house, and a voice called loudly, “Stop your screaming, Father. What is this about?”

  The voice was imperious, the voice of a ruler commanding a subject, not a child speaking to a father. The noise and arm-waving stopped immediately and the old couple stood aside. Coming forward from behind them I could see a form in a wheelchair. The voice was that of a young man, though the light coming from inside the house behind him prevented me from seeing his face. He was propelling himself forward impatiently, giving no attention to the carpets bunching under the chair’s wheels or to the furniture close by on either side. I jumped as I saw an old vase on a side table tremble and almost fall as he pushed past it. The vase rocked in circles on its base like a top, and I found myself holding my breath until it slowed and eventually came to a stop.

  He came forward into the light and my relief at his coming to our rescue was marred by the expression he wore as he looked at us. It was a bold, unabashed sneer. I wondered what right he had to look at us that way, as if we were nothing, as if, should he choose to be kind to us, it would be for some whim of his own, indulged not because he cared what happened to us, two fellow creatures though we were, but because it amused him to use his power.

  He looked out at us with mocking eyes as we stood there on his doorstep, the rain still pouring down on us in sheets. Through all my years of feeling ill at ease in company, all the times I had struggled to find words, I had never felt so much at a loss as at that moment.

  “What sort of trouble would prompt a young lady and--” he looked Perry up and down in an appraising way “--an able-bodied young man, to knock at a stranger’s door on such a dreary evening?”

  He had moved nearer to the doorway, and what light there was remaining in the sky fell on him and I saw what must have once been a very handsome face before the infliction of a long scar which crossed it diagonally from the top of his forehead on the right side to the base of his ear on the left, slashing across one dark-lashed eye-lid, though the blue eye beneath remained bright and aware, accusing. I shifted my eyes to escape the fierce expression of his gaze and found myself looking at the loose fabric of his trousers where his legs ought to have been.

  My mind went blank. I felt no nausea or faintness, only a strange pain in my chest.

  “You, girl!”

  It took me a moment to realise that he was speaking to me. I had been looking at my feet, but when I recognised that I was being spoken to my head snapped up and I looked him in the eyes.

  “You may come in for a moment and use the telephone,” his voice was kinder as he spoke to me. “I have no quarrel with you. I lost my legs for people like you.” The bitterness crept back by degrees. “Little enough thanks do I get.”

  He moved his chair aside with a jerk to open a way for me to enter. As I stepped over the threshold I realised that Perry remained standing below in the rain. I did not think he had moved so much as a finger since the wheelchair first appeared. I looked down at the figure beside me in the chair and said timidly, “Couldn’t Perry come in out of the rain while I use the telephone?”

  He returned my look, and his face was set in hard lines, though they were not for me. “Day after day we crouched in pouring rain like this in the trenches, through hot and cold, and slime that was combined rain and sweat and blood. It’s only fair that one of our soft-living countrymen should undergo the same for five minutes.”


  I was no longer at a loss. I was angry. I found the telephone in the hallway. Not even thinking of what I did I phoned Ashford. I know I talked to Lilly, but I have no recollection of what I said, only that I was coherent enough for her to understand that we had had a puncture and would most likely not be returning that night. Strange that the explanation of the accident, which I had been dreading with such intensity a few minutes ago, barely troubled my thoughts.

  I came back down the hall toward the front door slowly. Neither Perry nor the man in the wheelchair had moved. Only one thing had changed. The little umbrella, which Perry had been holding over us both, now lay on the ground at his feet. Rain drenched his head and shoulders and ran in rivulets down his face and off the tip of his nose.

  I said nothing. I pushed past the chair without acknowledging its occupant, stalked down the stairs and, standing in front of Perry, looked him straight in the eye. There was nothing there that I thought ought to be, no anger, no self-pity, no defiance. I would not allow him to be humiliated any longer. I still could not speak but I took him by the arm and led him away down the lane without a backward glance.

  We were halfway out to the main road when I realised I had left the umbrella behind. I did not go back for it.

  Chapter 21

  When we stood out on the main road again I stopped and turned on Perry.

  “Why didn’t you say anything?” I demanded, nearly as angry at him as I had been at his tormenter. “You didn’t say one word to explain yourself. You could have defended yourself. You just stood there. Why?” I suddenly found myself glad of the rain, for it camouflaged the tears that I could not repress.

  “He was right.”

  “What?”

  “He was right. They go through things on the front lines that the rest of us can’t even imagine.”

  “But you couldn’t go to the front lines. You couldn’t. Violet told me. It wasn’t your choice.”

  “That doesn’t change the fact that I’m not there. I can’t experience what they do. I can never know the pain they go through, the fear. The war keeps going on and on but there is nothing I can do to stop it.”

  “You have an important job with the government, even if it’s not on the front lines.”

  “A job that could be filled just as well by any older man or cripple who is unable to serve his country in any other way.”

  He was looking out across the dripping grass of the sheep pastures with a look in his eyes that made my heart ache. Hardly knowing what I did I took his face between my hands and turned it so that he was looking straight into my eyes.

  “You do what you are able to do in the best way you can possibly do it. That’s all anyone can do. Your family depends on you. We all do. You mean more to your parents, and Violet and Tristan and your aunt and the twins and even the Beauforts and Gloria and me, than that man back there ever meant to anyone or ever will.”

  For several minutes we stood there, staring at each other, while pain and anger, amazement at my own boldness, along with something else I could not name, washed over me with the rain. The thunder growled, the lightening flashed, and the anger fell from me and splashed on the ground with the heavy drops. I lowered my eyes and moved my hands back to my sides. There was silence between us, stillness. Then Perry spoke.

  “I don’t think we’ll be getting home tonight,” he said. “We should find some shelter for the night. Then we can walk to Gurney Slade in the morning.”

  We did at last find shelter in an abandoned shepherd’s hut out in the pastures. The roof leaked in places but it kept us more or less dry, and we were tired enough from the events of the day that the uncomfortable stones of the floor could not trouble either of us much. We did not speak any more of what had taken place, but the old comfort of our association had returned, with a difference that I sometimes thought was real and sometimes imagined, a difference I felt as a pain which tied my heart and soul together.

  When I woke in the morning Perry was standing outside. The sky was clear. There were still late blackberries to be found in the hedges, and he had two little piles laid ready on the top of a nearby stile. I thought it was the best breakfast I had ever had. I remember very little of the walk to Gurney Slade, or what we did there, except that we found someone willing to sell us a spare tyre and drive us back out to where Mr. Bertram’s automobile waited forlorn at the side of the road. Yes, I remember that, and I remember the poster I saw in the grocer’s window. The rest is blank.

  The family at Ashford welcomed us back with an enormous dinner, which, after our sweet but meagre breakfast, not to mention no lunch at all, was extremely welcome. I was relieved to find that nobody seemed to see the accident as being my fault, except Mrs. Creeley, who satisfied herself with merely mumbling indistinctly under her breath and giving Mr. Bertram significant looks which that worthy man completely ignored.

  It was only when we had all finished eating and had pushed our chairs away from the table that I told them the idea which had slowly been working its way to the front of my mind.

  “I want to join the Women’s Land Army.”

  Nobody spoke for a while. They all seemed stunned with surprise. I was not the one who did these things. Such an act of zealous fervour might be expected of Gloria, with her flair and her impulsive wish to do great things. I was not Gloria, nor was I British, and thus I was not expected to have such strong feelings of nationality for a country other than that of my birth.

  I tried to catch Perry’s eye, but he was looking down at the table and frowning. I hoped that he did not disapprove. Probably he was still dwelling on the events of the night before.

  To my surprise it was Mrs. Creeley who spoke first.

  “I don’t know what all you ninnies are thinking, sitting there not saying a word,” she said. “It’s a good idea. She’ll work hard and stay out of mischief. It’s better than if she were driving around getting punctures and staying out late drinking with soldiers on leave at the pub.”

  Everyone laughed then, for they all knew that I had never been down to the local pub alone at all, and when there in company had never had more than a pint of anything stronger than water. Mrs. Creeley’s statement and everyone else’s laughter gave me courage.

  “I’ve been thinking of it for a while,” I said, “and then I saw the recruiting poster in Gurney Slade today. I’d like to be able to help somehow, and they will pay me a little so that Grandmother won’t have to send money anymore. Some of the girls work in farms and orchards, and there might even be some places nearby that would take me. I like working in the garden.”

  Jerry looked at me from across the table, and a slow smile spread across his sad-funny gnomish face. “The Beauty worked in the garden for a long time before she met the ugly Beast in the cursed castle -- and he turned into a prince.”

  Somehow that finalised it. If Jerry could make a fairy tale out of digging in the dirt, then there was nothing more to be said. I got up to clear the table and Cyryl said, “Does that mean Anna’s a grown-up now?”

  Everybody laughed, and Haline, who was the quieter twin, elbowed her brother, while Cyryl ignored her and continued to stare soberly around the table in search of an answer.

  Mr. Bertram clapped the child on the back.

  “Yes, Cyryl,” he said. “That’s exactly what it means.”

  Violet got up to help me with the clearing.

  “Anna,” she said quietly when we were in the kitchen “I’ll be seventeen next summer, and then I’ll be able to join too and help you. It’s wonderful.” She gave me her slow, shy smile, then added, “I think you should talk to Gloria though. She might find it hard.”

  I looked at her curiously. She was right of course, but…

  “You’re wondering why I care,” she said. “I know. I haven’t been able to hide from you that I don’t like her very much. But I don’t like to see people in pain, however I feel about them. And I’m selfish, too. I don’t want you to think I’m an awful, jealous person.
I don’t dislike her so much, and she is beautiful and sweet, and it’s not her fault what happened in London. I just…I think you should talk to her.”

  I knew I should. The group in the dining room was dispersing. I saw Gloria sit down at the piano and begin to play. I recognised the beginning of Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata. We all loved it, and soon everyone had gathered to listen. Outside, I heard the wind rising as the rain fell, and a strange feeling of restlessness came over me, born of the rush of the storm outside combined with the melodic notes of the piano. Suddenly I wanted nothing more than to escape from the house and join the elements, as if I could somehow mix with them and become part of the storm myself. Speaking to Gloria could wait until the next day. The first movement of the sonata ended. I knew my mind was in no state to appreciate the various intricacies of the second. I passed behind the Beauforts without attracting any attention and slipped out the door.

  I hurried through the back garden and up to the summit of the low bare hill directly behind the house. The storm was drawing near to the height of its intensity. Though I could no longer hear the music from the house, I knew that the second movement would be ending and the wild intensity of the third beginning. The melody filled my head, crashing chords matching the storm and filling me with a strange ecstatic fire which rushed through me, sending a prickly feeling down my spine.

  The thunder growled like a prowling tiger and a flash of lightening lit the sky for an instant, making the outline of the Harridge Woods stand out in striking relief against the dark roiling clouds.