by Ruth Sutton
Look after yourself. I’ve left some more food coupons for Nellie in the kitchen drawer.
All my love
A
CHAPTER 21
ON HER WAY TO THE CAMP, Jessie read the first paragraph of the letter from Andrew that had just arrived. She held it on her lap, glancing round the bus to make sure that no one could see either the letter or her reaction to it. She knew that she shouldn’t keep writing to him, but she kept on doing so. ‘Stringing him along’ her mother would have called it. She craved the surge of excitement when the Canadian stamp caught her eye. Now that he was far away again, the contact felt safe. She’d told him about leaving the schoolhouse, and was unprepared for his response.
The worst thing about the whole business, he wrote in the barely decipherable scrawl that his writing had become, is that you’re going to move in with that woman. You may not have seen the signs but I’ve always known what she’s up to. Maybe it takes a man to recognise it. She wants you, Jessie, in her bed, not just in her house. I saw what she was up to years ago, and I wasn’t the only one. No one can hate men as much as she does without a reason. She was jealous of you and me. Remember how she went at you when she found out about us? ‘Disgusted’ that’s what she said, you told me yourself. It’s taken a long time but now she’s got you where she wants you. That job of hers in London won’t last much longer and then she can come back to you, so the two of you can live happily ever after. Makes me sick to think about it. Get out of there, Jessie. I can send you the money. You could have a lovely summer passage over here, bit of sightseeing in Montreal or New York, and whatever you want after that. There’s no one else here for me, never has been.
Jessie was shocked. She read it again. Andrew had never liked Agnes, and Agnes’s attitude towards him had made it worse, but this? He sounded jealous, but of what? She and Agnes were friends, no more. How could he think such a thing? Agnes would be mortified. Jessie folded the letter up carefully and determined to destroy it when she got home. For the time being, she tucked it down deep into her bag and took extra care with the bag as she got off the bus.
For the first few weeks of her assignment at the camp, she’d been surprised at the different aptitudes for learning a new language among her small group of students. About twenty men had started off, but now the numbers had reduced to eight or nine, as one by one they gave up, defeated and depressed by the complexities of the English language. It didn’t help that the language they heard around them didn’t seem to follow any patterns of grammar or pronunciation that she could teach them. To start with, she tried to teach them ‘proper’ English, but gradually changed direction towards the essentials of making themselves understood and recognising what was said to them. Piotr’s existing grasp made him more of a fellow-teacher than a student, and her admiration for him had grown since that first encounter in the snow. Now before every lesson she met with him to explain what she was aiming to do, and to take his advice about how to present it. He translated for her too, using Russian as well as Polish to connect with the other men.
Piotr was waiting for her that day as she stepped down from the bus. He offered to carry her bag but she did not let go of it.
‘The men will be late today,’ he said. ‘Truck not working. Mr Andrews say to use his office, make tea and wait.’
It was warm in the little office.
‘A very nice day,’ he said. ‘We walk to the beach. Good idea?’
It was indeed a good idea. They walked down the path from the camp, over the rise in the dunes and looked out over the wide stretch of pebbles and sand. Behind them Black Combe lay like a sleeping animal, and to the north the hint of hills, the westerly edge of the high fells. Late spring sun warmed their faces.
‘You stayed in camp again today?’ she said. He nodded, without explanation. Piotr’s health had improved slowly since the end of winter, but there were still days when he was not well enough for the hard work on the farm. Philip Andrews had told her that one of the farmers had singled Piotr out for particularly callous treatment and it was often easier not to send him out there. The other men understood and didn’t resent the time he spent in camp, so long as he played the piano for them.
Jessie and Piotr sat side by side at the foot of the dunes, looking out at the retreating tide. A flock of curlews swept low above their heads and turnstones skittered along the shore, where the channel winked at the edge of the sloping beach. The song of the curlews reached them on the warm southerly breeze.
‘I walk out there,’ he said, pointing out to sea. ‘When the water is low I walk out. There are hills in the sand. Sometimes no see this place. Why is that?’
Jessie looked at the shape of the beach, and thought about it, picturing the map in her mind’s eye. She pointed down the beach to the south. ‘Just down there, the river reaches the sea. This is where the river and the sea mix together,’ she made a circling motion with her hand, ‘and the water makes deep channels.’ Piotr listened and nodded. ‘When the water – or tide – is very low, you can walk out there and into those channels, like you did.’
‘I see,’ he said.
‘Do you think you might go home soon?’ she asked.
There was no response and she looked across at him. His black hair had grown long, falling across his face, and he hadn’t shaved for several days. He picked up a small stone and aimed it at a large piece of driftwood on the tide line. It missed. He threw another, and another, and then a handful of sand that caught the wind and blew away.
‘No go home. No home,’ he said.
‘What about your family?’ she asked, remembering what Father O’Toole had told her weeks before.
‘No letter. Maybe dead,’ he said.
There was nothing she could say. He was right. His family could have died with a million others. A longer silence. ‘Could you stay here?’ she asked.
‘Here is not my home,’ he said.
‘Have you talked to Father O’Toole about it?’ Jessie knew the respect the men had for the priest.
‘Good man, but he cannot help. No one can help.’
She thought quickly. ‘Maybe we could find you a job here. I have friends in London, they might –’
‘No,’ he said, shaking his head. ‘We go back now.’ He got up and turned towards the path. They walked back to the camp in silence.
* * *
The end of Jessie’s many years at the school came in a rush and took her by surprise. The final days passed in a blur of farewells from the children and some of the parents, those who hadn’t followed Mrs Crompton’s lead in blaming Jessie for the housing crisis. Jessie knew that after twenty years she must accept the ceremonials of departure, but some of them were hard to take, especially when Gideon Barker was part of it. The mutual irritation must be obvious, thought Jessie, but she shook his hand anyway, just to get the whole business over with. She had been packing up her things at the schoolhouse for a number of weeks, giving some away, having others carried up the hill to Applegarth. Now she had just one more week before Easter to finish the job and hand over the keys.
Working weekends at the camp had made the final weeks at school more bearable. They gave her a purpose and focus outside the school, away from the village. It was a short bus ride south from Newton, but the camp might have been on another planet, and the men she worked with were as different from her Newton pupils as it was possible to be. In some ways they reminded her of the evacuee children who had crowded into school during the war, whose Geordie accents were almost as impenetrable as the Hungarian and Polish she heard around her in a corner of the big room. ‘The evacuee children were a handful, no mistake,’ she said, explaining this thought to Mr Andrews in his office one day. ‘And their mothers were worse! Even so, I missed them when they left. It was a challenge, like this one.’
This was an opportunity for Mr Andrews to thank her, yet again, and he duly did so. I think he likes me, said Jessie to herself, and the thought pleased her. The teaching space quickly becam
e a permanent fixture, with its circle of chairs and tables, the blackboard on an easel and the shelf of unused books that Jessie had brought from home. At the camp she could count on the respect she used to enjoy at the school.
There was another regular visitor to the camp on Saturday afternoons. As the weather improved, Father O’Toole arrived towards the end of Jessie’s class, changed out of his cassock into an old shirt and enormous pair of grey shorts and organised the men into teams for a game of football on the sandy grass that passed for a recreation area beyond the huts. When the Saturday games first started he appointed himself the referee, but very soon he had cajoled someone else to take this role, allowing him to join in without restraint, crashing around the pitch like an overgrown schoolboy. Instead of catching the first bus back to Newton when her work was done, Jessie stayed on to watch, cheering and shouting encouragement with any other spectators, or just by herself.
When Father O’Toole stopped his car one evening to offer her a lift home, she accepted with pleasure.
‘Hop in, Miss Whelan,’ he said, leaning over to open the passenger door of the old black Austin. ‘I’m away to a meeting in Whitehaven. I could drop you right at the schoolhouse door.’
‘I’m not living there any more,’ she said, ‘not since the end of last term.’
‘Should I congratulate you or commiserate?’ said the priest, looking over at her as he pulled away.
‘For a while I wasn’t sure about that, father. But I’m trying to see it as the right thing to do. With decent housing so short it was hard to justify just one person at the schoolhouse, and one of the returned servicemen wanted my job and the house so badly, that I decided to take the opportunity.’
‘That’s remarkably generous, Miss Whelan,’ he said.
‘Jessie, please,’ she said. ‘Miss Whelan still sounds like the schoolmistress.’
The afternoon light gleamed off the sea and fields still flooded since the thaw.
‘The farmers have had a terrible year,’ she said. ‘First the winter and the snow, then the floods. Half the sheep are gone, I hear. One of our neighbours couldn’t recover. His son found him hanged in the barn. Terrible business.’
‘The poor soul. We can only imagine what depths he must have reached,’ said the priest. ‘And so hard for the family. So much guilt.’
They drove in silence for a while.
‘You have somewhere to live, I trust,’ he said, mindful of what Jessie had said about leaving the school. ‘I have time to take you to your door, wherever that is.’
‘Thank you, father,’ said Jessie. ‘I’m living at Applegarth now, Miss Plane’s house, just up the hill from the school. She and I have been friends ever since I came here, and I’ve been looking after her lovely house while she’s been working in London. Plenty of room for both of us. I’m very fortunate.’
‘Of course, Miss Plane. Her father was the dean in Carlisle, was he not? So what is she doing in London?’
‘It was war work, with the Ministry of Supply, and it’s just carried on. Sometimes it feels as if the war has never ended, don’t you think? And Agnes is still needed, so there she stays. The past few weeks and months have been dreadful, and worse in the south. At least when you don’t have electricity you don’t miss it when it fails.’
The priest laughed. ‘You can’t miss what you’ve never had, that’s for sure,’ he said.
Jessie was letting herself in at Applegarth when she heard the telephone ringing. Unexpected calls always worried her, and she picked up the receiver wondering who it could be. Most people knew that Agnes was away, but only a few that Jessie was now living there.
‘Is that you Jessie?’ said Caroline Leadbetter. ‘I got your postcard saying that you had something to talk to me about, and rang just on the off chance. Agnes told me you were at the camp quite a lot. Is it all going well?’
Jessie was taken aback. She had written to Caroline weeks before, after her conversation with Agnes about John, and had regretted it ever since. As the weeks had passed she hoped that Caroline would forget what she’d said, but obviously not.
‘I’m sorry it’s taken so long to reach you, dear,’ said Caroline. ‘Lionel keeps me very busy these days. He would love to see you, and now you’re a lady of leisure …’
‘It hasn’t really sunk in yet, about the job,’ said Jessie. ‘While I was working I had no idea how I would spend my time when it stopped, but the days slip by and I seem to be still on the go.’
‘Do you still want to come up? You could stay overnight; it’s too far to trek here and back in a day, and we’ll have a lot of catching up to do.’
* * *
Catching up, thought Jessie as she sat on the train a few days later. She had still not decided how to tell Caroline about John. After all these years, it felt like a dreadful risk. But she knew it was time. She was sure that her friendship with the Leadbetters would survive the initial shock. Eventually she would have to tell Matthew – maybe this was a way to check his possible reaction, a rehearsal.
The Leadbetters’ house in Cockermouth was as comfortable as Applegarth, with a view of hills and trees south towards Lorton and Loweswater. Caroline took Lionel his lunch on a tray and then sat with her friend at a sunny table. It would have been so easy to pass the afternoon in undemanding conversation, as they had done so many times before. But Jessie had made up her mind, and now had her script ready.
‘There’s something I need to talk to you about,’ she said, hoping that Caroline would pay attention and listen.
‘Oh, my dear,’ said Caroline, squeezing Jessie’s hand. ‘I’ve been hoping it would all work out. Tell me all about it. Lionel will be so delighted.’
Jessie stared at her. What could Caroline be so excited about?
‘We saw him only last week,’ Caroline went on, ‘looking pleased with himself, but he didn’t say anything. When did he ask you?’
‘Who?’ said Jessie. ‘Ask me what?’
‘Now don’t be coy, dear,’ said Caroline, smiling. ‘Matthew, of course. I guessed that something would happen soon, but when did he ask you?’
‘Matthew hasn’t asked me anything,’ said Jessie. ‘That’s not what I wanted to tell you.’
‘Oh dear, do forgive me, Jessie. Silly me. But he will you know, it’s just a matter of time. He’s smitten with you, we’ve all noticed it.’
Jessie hesitated, taking in the implications of her friend’s assumptions. ‘It’s nothing to do with Matthew. He hasn’t asked me to marry him, if that’s what you mean.’
‘Oh.’ Caroline looked puzzled. ‘So what do you want to tell me?’ Jessie thought about abandoning her plan, but she was determined to do it and pushed on. She took a deep breath and looked down at her hands. Caroline’s interested gaze was too much to deal with.
‘It’s about something that happened many years ago,’ said Jessie. ‘Long before I moved to Newton, when I was just a girl really.’
‘Yes,’ said Caroline.
‘I – I was engaged to a wonderful young man and we – I made a mistake. I fell pregnant.’
Jessie looked at Caroline, whose smile seemed to have stuck.
‘These things happen, I know,’ said Caroline after a slight pause. ‘So you were married before we knew you. What happened?’
‘No, that’s not it,’ said Jessie, her prepared script unravelling. ‘He died. My fiancé died in an accident.’ She expected Caroline to say something, but there was silence. ‘I had the baby, and people took it.’
‘People took it?’ Caroline looked incredulous.
‘Friends of my mother. They wanted a child and couldn’t have one, and they took mine. I gave him away.’
‘Oh, my dear, how awful for you,’ said Caroline, struggling to envisage how this could have happened, not to some wretched girl but to her well-educated friend, a schoolteacher.
Jessie ploughed on. ‘They brought him up, but they never told him about me, not until the very end, when the boy was twenty or so.
When his parents, his adopted parents, died, he set off to find me, and he did.’
‘When was this?’ said Caroline. She had poured tea for them both, but it sat cooling and untouched on the table. A blackbird sang in the blossoming cherry tree outside the open window.
‘Ten years ago,’ said Jessie. ‘He found me. I guessed who he was before he knew himself. He looked so like his father.’
‘So you have a son, Jessie.’ Caroline thought for a moment. ‘Does Agnes know about this?’ Jessie nodded.
‘Ah,’ said Caroline, as if she understood, ‘I knew there was something, but this … well …’
Well what, thought Jessie. She persevered. ‘I have a son. When he found me, I knew that I could lose my job, and the house, so I asked him not to say anything. He suggested that I tell people he is my nephew, my sister’s child.’
Caroline’s eyes widened. ‘Do you mean John? John Pharaoh is your son?’
Jessie nodded again. A flush of shame crept up her neck. ‘Yes,’ she whispered. ‘John’s my son. It’s been a secret long enough. I wanted you to know.’
Caroline got up from the table and paced up and down, her hands clasped tightly in front of her.
‘Oh, dear,’ she said. ‘I had no idea … Who else knows about this?’
‘A few people,’ said Jessie miserably. It all sounded so tawdry. ‘John has a friend, in Whitehaven. I think he’s told her. And Agnes of course, she’s known from the beginning.’
‘Does Matthew Dawson know?’
‘Of course not, no.’
‘Well he mustn’t know. And of course we can’t say anything to Lionel, not now,’ said Caroline, with unexpected firmness. Jessie looked up at her. ‘He’s not well – it could kill him.’
‘Surely not?’ said Jessie.
‘Let me be the judge of that,’ said Caroline, sharply. ‘He must not know, not until he’s feeling better. It’s just the shock. Of course we cannot judge you, and I can understand what you … but it’s best not mentioned.’