The Blood-Dimmed Tide jm-2

by Rennie Airth

  ‘What, ho, Eddie!’

  The surge of happiness he’d experienced at that instant had come from another time – from the very worst days of the war – when Sam’s bent nose had seemed like a symbol of its owner’s pugnacity, his refusal to surrender to whatever life might throw at him, and in the mud-choked horror which had become their daily existence, his spirit, like some ancient tribal magic, had cast its spell on all around him.

  ‘What, ho, Eddie!’

  Everything that had happened since their chance encounter – his move to Coyne’s Farm and the kindness he’d received at the hands of the Ramsay household – seemed to Eddie like an extension of this marvellous power his old pal possessed, and his own spirits had risen in response, giving him fresh heart. Once more he’d resumed his long struggle to escape from what he saw as the dead hand of the past, a mysterious force that threatened always to drag him down.

  For years he had suffered from a sense of inertia, a lack of will that had prevented him not only from living his life to the full, but also from making proper provision for the future. Unaware that the malady was one he shared with other survivors of the trenches, men in their thousands, Eddie had attributed it instead to a particular event: he believed it stemmed from the moment when he’d received the near-fatal wound that had ended his military career.

  He could still recall the impact of the sniper’s bullet when it struck him like an iron fist, piercing his ribcage and sending splinters of bone into one of his lungs. Clear, too, in his memory were the minutes that followed. With the voices of the men around him growing faint in his ears, he had lain staring up at the darkening sky, waiting for oblivion. Knowing he was scuppered.

  And even though the conviction had proved false, the memory of it had returned like a ghostly echo when he regained consciousness a few days later in a hospital ward and discovered what had happened to him in the intervening period.

  ‘You’re the bloke who came back from the dead,’ the doctor in attendance had told him with a grin. ‘They’d already loaded you onto the meat wagon when one of the graves party noticed your eyelid twitching. Good thing he did, or by now you’d be pushing up daisies.’

  During his slow recovery – for weeks he had lain in a dreamlike state, indifferent to his future, unmoved even by the knowledge that he would not be returning to the front – a mood of fatalism had settled on him that had changed little with the passing years, and which sprung from the belief, already rooted in his mind, that he was living on borrowed time.

  Having reached the crest of the ridge, Eddie quickened his pace. The long twilights of summer were a thing of the past and darkness fell swiftly at this time of year. But the sky had cleared after a spell of rainy weather and a new moon had risen in the past few days that would light his way to Oak Green later.

  Shy at first of accepting the invitation that had been extended to him, he had come to delight in the hours he spent in the Ramsays’ kitchen, where the warmth of his welcome seemed like a reproach to the melancholia that so often afflicted him.

  He even felt in a strange way that he had become a member of the family, part of the household at least, his presence at the kitchen table in the evenings so accepted that when Mrs Ramsay looked in, as she always did, for a few words with him, she would sit down – checking his movement to rise to his feet – and begin talking at once about whatever was in her mind, just as though a conversation they had been having earlier had been interrupted, wasting no time on formalities, but plunging straight into some topic.

  Often she would ask his advice, her smile and the open friendliness of her manner putting Eddie so much at ease that he would find himself holding forth on all kinds of subjects, some of them things he knew very little about. Not that it seemed to matter.

  ‘What a good idea, Mr Noyes. I think I’ll take your advice.’

  Then she would turn to Bess and ask her what she thought and the Ramsays’ cook, who obviously knew her mistress’s ways well, would offer a forthright opinion, meanwhile trying to catch Eddie’s eye, so that they could share a conspiratorial wink.

  What Sam had said jokingly was true – Bess did seem to have a soft spot for him – but thus far it had manifested itself only by the blushes with which she greeted his arrival each evening, her broad face lighting up like a lantern the moment he popped his head through the doorway. Not knowing quite how to handle this display of affection – the peculiar circumstances of Eddie’s life had left him with little experience of women – he’d resorted to treating her as he might a pal, which seemed to content her.

  What concerned Mrs Ramsay at present – she had raised the subject yet again only last evening – was whether she ought to continue to allow her daughter to return home from school on her own.

  The shortening hours of daylight were one reason why she was thinking of putting an end to the practice, that plus the fact that now that the autumn was almost over and winter approaching, the path Nell took to Oak Green from the bus stop was increasingly deserted.

  ‘I know it only takes her ten minutes, but it’s getting so lonely. I really think I ought to put a stop to it – at least until the spring – but Nell won’t hear of it. She’s at the age when she doesn’t want to be treated like a child any longer, and she’s managed to get her father to take her part. What do you think, Mr Noyes?’

  Though Eddie secretly agreed with Mrs Ramsay – most days he didn’t see a living soul on the path when he walked back to the barn after work – he was reluctant to say so. From the start of their acquaintance, Nell had behaved to him as though they had known each other for years, confiding in him with a candour that would have made any word spoken behind her back seem like a betrayal of friendship.

  And while he recognized that her openness was most likely an unconscious copy of her mother’s manner, he found it hard to resist, as he did her gift for living in the moment, a blessing denied him, and perhaps all adults, but one which Nell displayed still with an artlessness that won over all whom she encountered.

  Some weeks earlier, when he’d still been shy of accepting the invitation extended to him – he had been to the house only twice, allowing a gap of several days to elapse between each visit – she had walked down the road from the bus stop on her way back from school in order to press him again on her mother’s behalf to call on them.

  Her message delivered, Nell had lingered to watch the men at work – they were tarring a stretch of road when she arrived – questioning them in her unaffected way, taking it for granted they would welcome her curiosity, which they had, to the point where even old Harrigan had shed the beetle-browed scowl with which he had first greeted the sight of her slim figure darting among the busy men and taken it on himself to initiate her into the mysteries of macadamized roads.

  Thereafter the men had watched for her every afternoon, looking up from their work when the bus from Midhurst went by to wave to the smiling face in the window.

  ‘Look, there’s Nell,’ they would call out. ‘Hullo, Nell!’

  Earlier that day, when she’d passed by, Pat McCarthy had doffed his hat and bowed deeply, whereupon Nell, giggling, had responded to his salute with a royal wave, making the whole gang roar with laughter.

  Chuckling now at the memory, Eddie quickened his pace still further. He was impatient to get over to Oak Green. A fortnight earlier, Mr Ramsay had mentioned that among his clients was a large stationery company headquartered in Chichester, with customers in a number of south coast towns, and that if Eddie wished he could inquire discreetly when the opportunity arose as to the possibility of them employing him as a salesman.

  He had since been informed by Mrs Ramsay that her husband was even now engaged in auditing this same company’s books and hoped to have some news for him by week’s end.

  Glancing down at himself as he strode along the path, Eddie’s grin grew ever wider. Anything less like a salesman than the figure he cut would be hard to imagine. Filthy from a day’s labouring and dressed in his oldes
t and most threadbare garments, he looked more like a tramp.

  But before going over to Oak Green he would stop at the barn to wash and change his clothes. It was something he took pride in now, making himself presentable. He saw it as symbolic of his new-found determination to reforge his life: to free himself from the shadow that had hung over him since the war.

  Lately he had begun to wonder if the depression from which he suffered might not be an actual illness, a condition over which he had no control, but for which there might be a cure; thoughts which came to him most often at the end of the day, when, having returned from the warm kitchen at Oak Green, he would ready himself for sleep, first lighting the brazier Sam had given him, then laying his bedclothes on the mattress of hay they’d prepared.

  Lying in the cool, scented darkness, in a silence broken only by the stir of roosting pigeons and the scratching of mice in the straw, he would marvel at the transformation that had taken place in him already: at the spirit of resistance which Sam had helped to spark in him, and the world of small pleasures to which his eyes had been opened since.

  With his awareness of both had come a flowering of fresh hope.

  Slipping through the gap in the hedge, Eddie hopped over the ditch on the other side and then walked through the orchard where the sweet smell of fallen apples, unpicked since the farm’s abandonment, hung heavy in the still air.

  The walled kitchen garden was only a few paces further on, and having let himself in through the wooden gate he crossed the weed-filled expanse of old beds by a gravelled path whose borders he could barely make out in the fading light, but which he knew by heart.

  Another gate on the opposite side of the rectangular plot gave access to the yard and there Eddie paused for a moment, his eye caught by the sight of the moon, rising like a golden sickle over the looming outline of the barn. The light it cast was still faint, but once darkness had fallen – and that would not be long now – it would offer ample illumination for his walk across the fields.

  He went on and had covered perhaps half the length of the yard when it struck him that there was something strange about the barn doors. The gathering gloom, neither night nor day, made it difficult to see clearly, but presently he realized what it was he had noticed. Although the doors were shut, as they should be, the gap between them was marked by a thin thread of light coming from the inside.

  Eddie stopped. His first thought was that Sam had dropped in to pay him a visit, but he dismissed the notion at once. Today was a Friday – not one of the days he regularly called at Coyne’s Farm, which were Tuesday and Thursday – and besides there’d been no sign of his van in the parking area by the road.

  Then he remembered something else. Only a few days before Sam had told him about a near encounter he’d had with a man he’d caught snooping about in the yard. He’d tried to hail him, Eddie recalled now, but the bloke had made himself scarce.

  ‘He was about my size and dressed like a toff.’ Sam had scowled as he recounted the incident. It was plain something about it had upset him. ‘I didn’t like the look of him, or the way he behaved, so if you see anyone like that hanging about the place, tell him to shove off.’

  Alert now, Eddie strode across the yard, his boot heels ringing on the cobbles. When he reached the barn he saw that the bolt on the doors had been drawn and the padlock, which somehow had been opened, hung loose from it.

  He pulled the doors open and looked inside. There was a light burning at the far end of the barn, but he couldn’t see where it was coming from.

  ‘Who’s there?’ he called out loudly.

  Silence greeted his words.

  ‘Come on out. I know you’re there.’

  Again there was no response. Eddie strained his ears, trying to pick up any sound from inside, but heard nothing. The silence was unbroken.

  Delaying no longer, he stepped inside and strode down the broad corridor formed by the hurdles, which were stacked up on either side of him above head height. At the end of this artificial passageway, the rest of the barn’s contents – canvas-draped pieces of furniture and odd bits of farm equipment – had been stored haphazardly, turning the area, cloaked in shadow now, into an obstacle course through which he had to pick his way to the back of the building.

  There a further surprise awaited him. The source of the light proved to be one of the oil lamps he used himself. It was hanging from a nail in the wood above the corner where he slept, somewhere he would never have placed it himself. He and Sam had agreed that both lamps and brazier should be kept well away from the straw bedding for fear of starting a fire.

  Of the intruder himself there was no sign. With the whole of the rear of the barn illuminated, Eddie could see that it was deserted. But if his visitor had made himself scarce, it was plain he had not been idle.

  The mound of hay which served him as a mattress had been enlarged to more than double its size and filled the corner. He spied a pitchfork that must have been used for the purpose lying on the floor beside it, the prongs upturned as though it had been dropped in haste.

  Eddie scratched his head. At first glance it looked as though whoever had broken in had been seeking a place to spend the night. But that didn’t make sense. Or rather, it hardly fitted in with the picture Sam had drawn of the supposed intruder. A toff, he’d called him.

  He shrugged. There was no point in racking his brains about it. Clearly the fellow had run off. The riddle would remain unanswered. All he could do was tell Sam what he’d found and leave it up to him to decide what to do next.

  Meantime, he thought he’d better check on his own belongings to make sure they were safe. Tidy by nature, he had put his toilet articles in the small cupboard beneath the washstand Sam had provided him with, while his bedroll and spare clothes were stowed away in a tall mahogany wardrobe, stripped of its canvas shroud, that stood handily nearby.

  He went to the washstand first, but as he bent to open the cupboard doors he had a flash of intuition that made the hairs on the back of his neck stand up. The sensation was eerie, but not unfamiliar. The selfsame feeling had come to him during the war in the few seconds before he was shot, when he had known instinctively, but too late, that a sniper’s eyes were upon him.

  He whirled round.

  The figure of a man had appeared behind him, as if from nowhere. Half hidden in the shadows, he stood at the edge of the circle of light cast by the lamp, in one of the narrow alleys that led into the piles of stored furniture.

  ‘So there you are!’ Angry at being given such a fright, Eddie let his feelings show. ‘Didn’t you hear me call out?’

  The man made no reply. Well dressed, he was wearing a tweed coat with a soft hat of the same material pulled down low over his forehead.

  ‘What’s the matter with you?’ Eddie’s tone sharpened still further. ‘Are you deaf?’

  This time he provoked a response, though not the one he was expecting. The man moved, coming forward into the light, giving Eddie a clearer picture of his face, which was pale beneath his hat brim and without expression.

  ‘What are you doing here, anyway?’

  Eddie scowled. There was something here he didn’t understand. It was obvious the fellow had been hiding in the shadows for the past few minutes, not wanting to be discovered. He could easily have slipped away during that time, crept out of the barn and escaped, but instead he had chosen to show himself.

  ‘Don’t you know this is private property?’ he demanded.

  Thus far the man had shown no reaction to the words addressed to him. It was as though he had not been listening. But his eyes, sharp behind gold-rimmed spectacles, were busy. He was studying Eddie closely, examining him from head to toe, and now he spoke:

  ‘Who are you?’ he asked. His voice was low and rasping, the accent guttural and foreign-sounding.

  ‘Never mind who I am.’ Eddie fairly bristled with anger. The unblinking stare to which he was being subjected had made him conscious of his own appearance: of his torn cloth
es and unwashed body. It was quite possible the fellow had taken him for a tramp, which would explain his apparent lack of concern at being discovered trespassing. ‘You’re the one breaking the law. I’ve a good mind to set the police on you.’

  At the word ‘police’, the man’s manner changed. He seemed to stiffen, and as their eyes met for the first time Eddie felt a tingle of alarm. Up till then he’d simply thought the fellow’s behaviour peculiar. Now, looking into the slightly sunken eyes, which reflected the lamplight in yellow glints, he sensed something else, something he couldn’t put a name to which made the hairs on the back of his neck prickle once more.

  He barely had time to take note of his reaction when the man moved again, edging to his right and turning so that the lamp was behind him. To Eddie, the manoeuvre seemed hostile: the light was shining in his eyes now. But he’d faced scenes like this before, a long chain of confrontations starting in his school playground and continuing after he had joined the army, when he’d had to assert himself in the rough society of the barracks. Because he was small, some people thought they could push him around, and he’d learned early on that the only way to take care of yourself was to stand up to them.

  ‘Look, I’ve had just about enough of you, whoever you are,’ he declared roundly. What was a foreigner doing messing about in someone else’s barn? ‘This is your last warning. Either hop it now, or you’ll get what’s coming to you.’

  Suiting words to action, he stepped forward, reducing the distance between them, staring the intruder straight in the eye. Although the fellow hadn’t offered him any violence – he’d been standing all this time with his hands thrust into his coat pockets – his attitude had implied a challenge, and Eddie was pleased to see that change now.