by Angela Huth
Aware of the shortness of time left to them, they climbed back up the red stairs at nine thirty. Blackout in their rooms was concealed behind thick curtains: pink lamps had been lit, the bed turned down. They heard on the news that the Allied Armies had invaded French North Africa. But their concern was the few hours left: their last chance for God knows how many months. They hurried back into the bed, leaving on the lights. They spent the kind of night that would have shaken Mrs Elliot and her prim Guest House to their foundations.
‘I knew very early on,’ said Philip the following afternoon, at the station, ‘that I loved you – or at least that I thought I loved you: you were the sort of girl I’d always had in mind. But – I don’t know how to put this: I don’t think I felt the kind of love you’re meant to feel when you ask a girl to marry you. I think what I felt was the urgency of war, the need for firm plans.’
‘I expect a lot of couples feel the same: such an unreal, unsure time.’
They sat on a bench on an empty platform. The train was due in two minutes.
‘I have to admit I’m not really sure I loved you properly even when I first proposed, the day before yesterday.’ Philip spoke rapidly, wanting to say so much before the departure. ‘But now I do. I do. Believe me?’
Stella nodded.
‘Since the nights, I suppose. That’s why I proposed twice: once, semi-sure, once absolutely sure.’
Stella smiled. Philip glanced at his watch.
‘Hope I’ve not spoiled anything, confessing. It was just terribly important you should know the truth. Will you tell me just once more? Will you tell me you’ll marry me as convincingly as you can?’
‘I will, yes.’
‘Whatever happens?’
‘Whatever happens.’
‘Thank God for that. That means the weeks apart, however long, don’t matter so much. I mean, being sure.’
‘No.’
‘I love you, I love you.’
‘I love you, too.’
They kissed. They hugged, tears in their eyes. Then the train, horribly punctual, came roaring up to stop their shorthand promises, and remind them it was now time to brace themselves, as Churchill had urged, to their duties.
* * *
Stella slept on the journey. She had never known such tiredness. She wondered how she would manage to stay awake through supper, fend off Prue’s curiosity. She dreaded the dawn rising tomorrow, milking the cows in the freezing darkness. Sleepily, it occurred to her that, for all her stories of Hallows Farm, she had not told Philip the place was beginning to feel like a second home.
At the station she found light snow. A few flakes were falling from the dark sky, but they quickly melted on the windscreen of the Wolseley.
It was very cold in the car. Mr Lawrence had brought a scarf and thick jacket for Stella to put over her coat. She was touched by his thoughtfulness.
‘All went well, I hope,’ he said, after a few miles of silence.
‘Philip asked me to marry him. I said yes.’
She could hear Mr Lawrence grinding his teeth.
‘Good,’ he said eventually. ‘If he’s the right one, you won’t regret it.’
Chapter 8
A few weeks after Stella had returned from Plymouth, Mrs Lawrence fell ill. She struggled for a couple of days with a bad cough and a temperature. Then Mr Lawrence announced one morning at breakfast he had insisted she spend the day in bed.
‘It’ll be the first time for twenty years she’s done any such thing,’ he said, ‘but I told her if she didn’t I’d call the doctor – an even worse threat, in her eyes. One of you will have to take over from her today. Which shall it be?’
Prue’s reluctance was instant. She had an assignation with Barry. She busied herself spreading plum jam on a second piece of bread to avoid meeting her employer’s eye.
Stella, since her official commitment to Philip, had discovered that she had become less indifferent to any duty that was required of her on the farm. Being engaged, it seemed, had altered the frizzy nature of love. Now, knowing she was secure, her thoughts were not, curiously, permanently with Philip. There was no longer a glazing of indifference between herself and whatever the matter in hand. She found herself better able to concentrate on the animals, the fields, and actively enjoy them. Secretly, she was missing Philip less than she imagined possible. Instead, what she now craved was music – a piano, a concert on the wireless. She wondered if there was a need for some kind of craving, at all times, in human nature, and spent many hours contemplating the subject of solace. If the thing you most want is missing, where do you turn for comfort? A line from Keats, vaguely remembered from school, came to her in answer. ‘Glut thy heart on a morning rose …’ Well, she thought, in her job as a land girl she was brutally exposed to Nature: she would try. She began to observe more accurately, find strange pleasures in the smell of earth newly turned by the hoe, the gilt-edged clouds of winter skies, the feeling of awe within a wood. She confessed these new sentiments to Ag, who had understood at once.
‘I’ll have to get you reading Wordsworth,’ Ag said. ‘No one better on the partnership between Man and Nature. He’s pretty well convinced me of the compensations of the earth. Hope he’s right, because if Desmond doesn’t come about it’ll be all I’m left with.’
She had sounded so solemn, envisaging a spinster life with Nature her only lover, Stella wanted to laugh.
‘I’d be happy to do whatever’s needed, Mr Lawrence,’ Stella now offered, ‘though I’m not much of a cook.’
She had been looking forward to a day freeing a gate from a tangle of brambles. Yesterday, she had begun the job armed with thick gloves and powerful secateurs. Surprised by her own skill in disentangling the thorny mass, she was eager to finish. Also, it was a solitary task – one of the occasions on which, without inhibition, she could sing as she worked.
‘I’d positively like a day indoors,’ volunteered Ag. ‘I’ve been watching Mrs Lawrence making bread day after day – I’d like to have a go.’
‘Ag it is, then,’ said Mr Lawrence. ‘Up you go for instructions from Faith, and we’ll be expecting lunch at the usual time, two courses.’ He smiled at her nicely.
‘At least two courses,’ giggled Prue. ‘Canary pudding and syrup, if you can manage it.’
Prue found she needed especially large lunches the days of Barry’s visits, to keep out the cold, and to give her strength for the acrobatics in their bed of leaves under the trees.
When they had all gone, and Ag had cleared and washed up after breakfast, she allowed herself a few moments by the stove, hands resting on the dogs’ heads, to accustom herself to the strangeness of staying indoors. She was by now so used to spending most of each day outside, it seemed very curious, tame, to be left to the world of the housework. But this is what it must be like every day for Mrs Lawrence, she thought: sudden silence, the looming of domestic plans, lists of tasks to be accomplished by nightfall. There was no freedom from the discipline of deadlines: food must be on the table by midday, no matter how much ironing. The pile of socks to be darned must be kept under control; the grading of eggs, in the stone-chill of the scullery, was necessary before sending them off twice a week. For the first time, Ag began to reflect on the life of a housewife, doubly hard if you were married to a farmer. She wondered how it would be, how she would like it, when her time came – if, that was, she was not left entirely to Nature.
Stirring herself with a sigh, Ag went up the dark stairs to the Lawrences’ bedroom – a side of the house she had never visited before. Mrs Lawrence called to her to come in.
Ag took a moment or so to adjust to the duskiness of the light in the bedroom, with its beamed ceiling and small windows. Then a few objects, touched by the grey sky outside, began like just-lit lamps to burn into view – a set of silver-backed brushes on the dressing-table, a framed sepia photograph of a girls’ lacrosse team, a jug of dried thistles. Mrs Lawrence lay propped up on pillows in a high bed made of dark wood.
Her hair was bound in a plait that lay over one shoulder; her face was flushed the colour of a bruise. She wore a long-sleeved calico nightdress, folded hands emerging from frilled cuffs and lying on the bedspread, stony as the hands of an effigy. The sight of her was a reminder of mortality: death from illness and old age, not just death from slaughter in the war.
There was a faint smell of cough sweets and honey. Despite a one-bar electric fire, it was very cold. Mrs Lawrence stirred.
‘Do you mind, Ag? So silly, this. But John insisted …’ Her voice was painfully hoarse. Shadows under her eyes scoured the drawn cheeks. Ag wondered whether she was seriously ill, or suffering from exhaustion, or both. What age was she? Probably early fifties, but she looked sixty. Affection for this contained woman, with her silent strengths, swept over Ag with renewed force.
‘Don’t worry,’ she said. ‘Just tell me what there is to do, then I’ll bring you a cup of tea.’
‘Sausages and mash for lunch, stewed apples and custard. Corned beef hash tonight, perhaps – whatever’s there. I’m not thinking very clearly.’
She gave a small, self-despising smile, shut her eyes. Tired eyelids upon tired eyes … Pith-white skin stretched over the deep eyeballs. Open, the lids were crinkled as aged tissue paper. Closed, an illusion of youth clung to Mrs Lawrence’s strong features.
‘I’ll have a go at making some bread,’ said Ag.
‘There’s enough left from yesterday.’
‘I’d like to try.’
‘Very well. Don’t overdo the salt. John doesn’t like much salt.’
Their quiet voices chimed, church-like, in the soft brownness of the room. Then Ag crept away, leaving her employer to sleep.
It was the strangest morning since she had been at Hallows Farm, Ag later told the others. Working in the cold and silent house, her main anxiety was that she would not have done all the normal morning tasks, besides cooking the lunch, by twelve o’clock. Where was the Hoover, the dusters? What should be polished? Was it the day to scrub the stone flags of the kitchen floor? What rewards were there in doing such things every day? Guiltily she realized, as she buffed up the bannister rails in the icy hall, rewards did not come into it: Mrs Lawrence would never think in terms of rewards. Keeping house was merely a job to be done.
In the sitting-room, a forlorn place in the daylight, Ag turned on the wireless. The jaunty tunes on Music While You Work spurred her to polish the brass fender in time to the music, trying to keep herself warm. Then she listened to the news. It was announced that the Japanese had attacked Pearl Harbor.
Ag sat back on her knees, twisting a duster – slash of yellow in the dull light – in her hands. She tried to imagine the distant carnage, the destruction, the horror, the terrible suffering and pointless loss of life. She felt impotent anger, fear. This was followed by feelings of equally impotent guilt at her own lot, which was comparatively safe. There was never a day she could take for granted her luck in being here, a place where the war scarcely touched them, but there was also never a day when she did not wonder if she should not volunteer for some less protected field of action. Should she not join the Red Cross, or drive ambulances in the Blitz, rather than milk cows and feed off Mrs Lawrence’s secure stews? Should her courage not be tested? And yet, while the men were fighting, girls to work on the land were vital: she had chosen the job, she loved it. But when news came of disasters, Ag was racked by the thought she should be helping the wounded rather than sweeping a safe yard or tending to the sheep.
She turned off the news, returned to work. Dully she set about preparing the lunch – at least the kitchen was warm. She was haunted by imaginings. Never having seen a photograph of Pearl Harbor, she had no idea of its scale. Visions came to her of gentle harbours on the East Anglian coast, crowded with pretty sailing boats. She tried to swap the familiar scenes for a more massive place, with destroyers at anchor. The paucity of mental pictures caused tears in her eyes.
When the others came in to eat they found her kneading a large lump of dough at the kitchen table. They wondered at the fierceness of her thumping, but made no comment. Ag’s first loaf, which later rose magnificently in the oven, was filled with the stupidity of mankind, the futility of war, the helplessness of one individual such as herself to enable the world to come to its senses.
Ratty, too, heard the news on the wireless. It was one of his days off from the farm – never a good time, the hours would stick to him like mud, nothing would shake them off – petty chores in the house or woodshed were useless at accelerating the long minutes. What Ratty missed, in this state of semi-retirement, was the discipline of long hours at work in the open air. Alone in the front room, tapping his pipe against the grate, the news increased his restless state.
‘Poor buggers,’ he muttered. ‘More trouble to come.’
He needed to be with someone. Anyone. Even Edith.
The kitchen was unusually welcoming: warm from baking, and filled with the sweet smell of dough. Edith, at the table, was regimenting troops of scones into neat lines on wire racks. Ratty was suddenly, piercingly, hungry.
‘Will you spare me one?’
‘That I won’t.’
Ratty shuffled a little nearer the table, watched his wife’s floury hand whisk among the crinkled edges of the beautiful scones, moving them into pure lines.
‘Japanese buggers have bombed Pearl Harbor,’ he said.
‘Ah.’
Edith, devoid of all imaginings beyond the confines of her own life, was immune to most of the horrors of the war. She could only believe in what she read in the papers – her faith in the printed word had always puzzled Ratty – and then only if there was a photograph to prove the story. Thus it was a picture of Beaverbrook waving an armful of saucepans that had fired her own wartime effort, and she conceded the Blitz took its toll because the photographs ‘said so’. Any wider understanding of the war, particularly ‘abroad’, was beyond her. Of late, Ratty had begun to wonder whether her lack of interest in the state of the world, affecting millions of lives, was some kind of disease. But then it occurred to him that solution was merely a figment of his own vivid imagination, and the real answer was that Edith’s professed ignorance was a defence against intense, private fear.
‘One thing after another. They’re for tea, then, are they?’ Again Ratty looked longingly at the scones.
‘They’re not for tea. They’re for the shop. Got to keep the customers happy. Got to make a living.’
A new tack to deny Ratty the odd luxury, he thought. Usually, her concern was to cause unhappiness among the customers in their fight for her few loaves. Ratty looked at his wife carefully. Sighed.
‘What’s for dinner, then?’
‘Thought I’d boil up a couple of parsnips.’
On such a grey day, so full of bad news, Ratty did not feel like boiled parsnips.
‘Don’t think I want any,’ he said, knowing his rejection would cause a disproportionate measure of offence.
‘Get yourself a sandwich, then. It’s not the Ritz here, you know. I’m not bothered.’
Ratty had expected worse. But Edith’s concentration on her scones, he noticed, was out of the ordinary.
He cut two slices from the loaf of hard, dark bread, and spread it thinly with shrimp paste scraped from a small ribbed jar. He knew better than to ask for butter: Edith had obviously availed herself of his carefully hoarded ration for her scones, and was in no mood to be confronted with her thieving. Yes, said Ratty savagely to himself, he would definitely call it thieving. If the point came he would, in all honesty, have to call his wife a thief.
‘Think I’ll take my dinner out,’ he said. ‘Sky’s clearing.’
‘Up to you if you catch your death,’ said Edith.
Ratty pottered about making himself strong tea which he poured into a thermos. Edith, so preoccupied, failed to notice his stirring in two forbidden spoonfuls of sugar: that was at least one triumph. He wrapped the leaden sandwich in greaseproof paper.
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‘Mind you fold it up carefully, bring it back; it can be used again,’ Edith snapped. She had been listening to the crackling of the paper, though she had not bothered to raise her eyes to check how much Ratty had taken.
‘It’s only a scrap, for Lord’s sake.’
‘Every scrap counts in a war.’ When it came to the petty necessities of war, her perverse mind worked well enough. She raised her eyes. ‘I suppose you’re going off to join those girls.’
‘That I’m not.’
‘One of them, anyway.’
‘No.’
‘That’s not what I’ve heard.’
‘What d’you mean, Edith? Whatever are you talking about?’
‘I keep my ear to the ground.’
Guilt seized Ratty’s heart. Despite his innocence, and knowing he had never uttered a word to anyone, or made any kind of untoward gesture, he wondered how his wife could have guessed at the admiration, the secret esteem in which he held the holy one. In a moment of panic, he thought that maybe he had confessed this to Edith, and amnesia had blotted out the occasion. But no, that was mad. Surely … the mere sense of wistfulness – for that is what it was – he felt about Ag, was an absolute secret between Ratty and his God, and would always remain so.
‘You’re being ridiculous, woman,’ he said. ‘You know you are. You know those girls mean nothing to me. We’re just fellow workers.’
‘Huh. And since they’ve come, your working hours are almost back to full time, aren’t they? That’s what everyone’s noticed. That’s what they’re all saying to me.’