Keeping the World Away

by Margaret Forster

  They spent another strained day together, with Alan reading and watching her, and Stella staring out of the window. By the evening she was desperate. He always had a hot, milky drink to help him sleep, Ovaltine usually. She had his sleeping pills in her hand. It was absurdly easy to drop two into the mug when he turned to get the sugar – done in a flash. She was sure that he had not taken any the last two nights or he could never have been up so early, and now all she had to do was stay awake all night herself, which was not so easy, and leave just before dawn. It seemed an age before he said goodnight and went upstairs. She gave him an hour, and then crept into his room. The sight of him asleep, suddenly young and vulnerable-looking, was almost her undoing, but she forced herself to turn her back on him, go down the stairs and slip out of the door. Mounting her bicycle, she found herself trembling but managed to get it onto the track and freewheeled down the slight hill to the road. All she had to do was exchange the painting for cash.

  *

  In the train, she wept. She couldn’t stop. If this was freedom, where was the exhilaration she had looked for? All she could think of was a wounded man, alone, who needed her, and herself, alone, back in her room at home, the room she had always wanted to escape from and thought she would never return to again.

  *

  Ginny saw, straightaway, what Conrad meant. The apparent serenity, the prettiness, of the painting did not fool her for a moment. It looked peaceful, innocuous, but she thought the hand that painted it might have trembled. Effort was there, an absolute determination to remain calm. Someone’s breath was being held. And the sense of waiting, the anticipation of someone’s arrival, was painful. Conrad, charmed though he had been, could not see this. She was, he said, reading into a simple scene a variety of ridiculous complications. ‘Accept it for what it is, for heaven’s sake,’ he urged her. ‘Don’t make a drama out of a little painting.’

  But it felt like a drama to Ginny. Again and again she would look at the painting and feel puzzled. She thought perhaps that the sense of mystery about it might be due merely to how it had come to her. This man who was reputed to have found it on a junk stall in London, what was he like? And Stella herself, fleeing from him, but why? All these questions attached to the painting, giving it a significance it might not otherwise have had. But then Ginny thought maybe what bothered her was not how the painting had been come by, but the echoes she sensed every time she saw it. It reminded her, surely, of a painting she had seen, but by whom? It was a long time since she had been to any exhibitions, other than those held in Cornwall, and she was quite sure that no artist she knew had painted this. Who, then?

  She wondered if perhaps she was simply thinking of some famous painting. Vermeer, maybe, or one of the Dutch masters, though the similarity was only in the simplicity and the subject matter, nothing else. And then, after several weeks of pondering every time she looked at it, a memory came to her of the last time she’d been in Paris, in 1906, when she was twenty-six and had gone to stay with her uncle. He’d taken her to an exhibition at the Salon d’ Automne and she had seen a painting called La Mansarde (she’d had to ask her uncle what the word meant and was told ‘the attic’). It was nothing like the painting she now owned but there was some curious similarity. And she had another vague memory, of being taken on that same visit to an exhibition of Bonnard’s paintings. They were boldly coloured, unlike this one, but they too included simple interiors, she was sure.

  It frightened her a little to think that she might possess a painting of value, but then she told herself she was getting carried away. One day, when she could get to London, she would take it with her and have it looked at. Its provenance was unimportant, and so was its monetary worth. She loved it. It enriched her life. It made her feel dreamy and content, better able to put up with Conrad’s philandering and the exhaustion of looking after her two young sons.

  It even made her want to paint again.

  *

  The cottage was on the edge of the New Forest, roughly a mile from Fordingbridge. Stella would never have thought of living there, so far from the hospital with a long bus journey there and back, had it not been presented to her as a possibility by the matron, whose brother owned the cottage. It might do, the matron said (disturbed that the new nurse had nowhere to go other than the hostel and was clearly not happy there, among girls much younger than herself), until she got settled. Stella had no intention of becoming settled, but she did want somewhere of her own to live and the rent for Yew Tree Cottage was cheap. Alan would never be able to trace her. If he tried to, he would think only of her mother’s house in Tenby.

  Returning to nursing was not easy, nor was it something she had intended to do, but it meant that she immediately earned money and had some sense of direction, even if it was one in which she did not want to go. She did not go home to the cottage every night – she had volunteered for night shifts – but when she was there she was soothed by the place. It was in poor condition, and with only one fireplace for heat, but it was completely peaceful there. The garden was overgrown but had a pretty border of fir trees round it and she used the fir cones to light the fire. People did not trouble her there. The only house nearby was a large one, Fryern Court, but it was not inhabited at the moment, or so she had been told. She’d walked round the outside of it on her first day off and had been rather charmed with the whitewashed courtyard at the rear, where a beautiful fig tree grew, and what looked like well-maintained stables though no horses. The lawn had a pond in the middle, and an avenue of yew trees led away from it. It needed, Stella thought, a large family living there.

  For the first few months her main feeling was one of relief. She felt as if she had been running very hard and had only just stopped to draw breath. But then, as she relaxed into a routine governed by her hours of work, she began to recover and to become more confident that she could move on. She had escaped, she’d got out of the trap she had caught herself in, she was no longer intensely needed by anyone. She could be herself, break out from the cycle of caring and need – the care she gave now was restricted to nursing. It was enough. Outside the hospital she had no one to consider except herself. The freedom made her want to paint again. She’d been foolish to imagine that because art, or the pursuit of art, could not be her whole life she had no right to indulge herself. Pleasure might be enough. So she bought some water-colours – oils were too expensive, though she would have preferred them – and some paper and she set to, painting first the fir trees in her garden. It was something to come home for.

  When the landlord came to tell her he was putting Yew Tree Cottage up for sale, she wished so much that she could buy it, but there was not the faintest possibility of her doing so. He gave her three months’ notice, which was generous of him. It was when she was looking for somewhere else to live that Stella saw the advertisement. She was ready.

  A new beginning, thousands of miles away.

  LUCASTA

  THE DAWN LIGHT was weak, a mere leaking of a lighter grey around the rim of the horizon, but it showed that the trees were beginning to shed their leaves, which fell slowly, singly, in swirling balletic movements quite mesmerising to watch. There was a mist hugging the land but it dispersed quickly, leaving the ruts of the ploughed fields rising sharply in their rigid rows. Lucasta herself had worked the field she was crossing. Yesterday she had managed the three-furrow plough expertly. The farmer, Skelton Wood, a man not given to praise, had grudgingly acknowledged her skill. ‘Not bad,’ he’d said, ‘not bad at all.’ She was going to tackle another field today, after she’d helped milk the cows. There was plenty of work all day, every day, and not much time for thought. That was the blessing – no time to think, no chance of daydreaming, with all the tough physical work and the exhaustion that came with it.

  But she did notice the beauty. Her limbs might be aching, her eyes tight with fatigue, but she always looked about her and saw the changes in the light and the patterns in the clouds, she always felt breathless at the rise o
f a skylark and the flash of a fox racing for cover. She didn’t comment on anything to the other girls, just silently tucked such sights away, saved them to gloat over later when she was back in the farmhouse trying to sleep. She’d fall asleep immediately, they all did, worn out, but then she’d wake, around one in the morning, and remember, and that was when she needed to play the comforting images of the day in front of her eyes again. It helped. It kept memories of her parents away for a while and worries about her brothers were briefly stilled.

  Her breeches were uncomfortable. The corduroy rubbed against her thighs where they did not fit properly and they were still slightly damp from the soaking they’d had the day before. Her canvas leggings were stiff with mud she hadn’t succeeded in scraping off, and her felt hat had shrunk a little in the rain and now constricted her head, but with the wind so bitter and strong it had to be worn. What a sight she looked, they all looked. Her mother would have groaned. No velvet skirts and bohemian silk dresses for her, no gorgeous-coloured fabrics to dress in such as Ginny had worn. Her own breeches were brown, her jacket khaki, her pullovers grey – everything old and utilitarian, nothing new or pretty. She looked like one of the better-dressed scarecrows, bundled together for warmth in ugly garments tied with string (and today she did have a piece of string round her jacket, having lost the belt the day before, and needing to wrap it close to her body so that the wind would not get underneath).

  She was hungry, but what passed for breakfast wasn’t for another hour, after milking. Mrs Wood fed them as well as she could but they all knew how tough it was for her to satisfy her own family never mind six Land Girls. Bread, potatoes, turnips – these were the staples. Breakfast was porridge, usually lumpy but with good creamy milk to help it down, and a slice of bacon or a sausage, if they were lucky, and tea. It wasn’t much to get through a fourteen-hour day on, but there were sandwiches at midday (though never anything tasty in them), and in the evening soup and stews which they were almost too tired to eat. ‘You’re better off than the boys out there fighting for us,’ Mrs Wood would say, if anyone complained. They knew it was true. They were safe, or as safe as anyone in the country. Not many planes flew over them, but when they did the girls worked in pairs with one eye on the sky, so that they could warn each other if a battle began. The noise of the tractors was so loud, this was the only way to guard against such dangers.

  Two of the girls were going home today. They’d worked their six months and were entitled to a week off, with a free travel pass. Lucasta didn’t envy them, though she envied the fact that they had homes to go to. She tried not to think about having no home. Plenty of people were in the same boat, and what might at other times have been thought a tragedy was no longer one. War changed everything. In a way, she was grateful for this. She didn’t want to stand out, be an object of pity. The pottery had been demolished, literally razed to the ground, then the land sold. It turned out that it had never belonged to her father, he’d only rented it, and when he died after months in the sanatorium, Ginny couldn’t afford the rent. They’d had to move, to the cottage, just as war was declared.

  The cowshed was not warm, but with the breath of the cows and the girls it was not as cold as outside and there was a pleasantly illusory feeling of warmth as they all huddled together. Lucasta was good at milking, and liked doing it. In fact, she liked doing most things on the farm, except for rat-catching. When the sheaves were lifted, the men used sticks and forks to kill as many as possible, and Skelton Wood made the Land Girls hold the sacks and take turns to pick up the dead rats and put them inside, counting them as they went. It was a disgusting job, worse than muck-spreading or ditching, and made her feel sick. Once, she’d almost fainted but managed to conceal her distress until she recovered. It was something to write to Sam and Tom about, mocking her own distaste, though writing about any sort of killing seemed wrong. She couldn’t bear the thought of either of them dying and tried to blank out all thoughts of it. Her brothers were all she had left, even if she had never been really close to them.

  The girls next to her were talking about what they were going to do when they got home. They were both from Exeter, not so far away, and could count on their family homes not having been bombed. Hot baths and comfortable beds awaited them and they relished the idea of being spoiled. Lucasta listened, but said nothing. They knew about her circumstances, and were kind, but it didn’t stop them talking about their parents and homes, and she didn’t expect it to. Sally, the older one, had invited her home once, saying her mother would make her very welcome, but she hadn’t wanted to accept. Here, on Skelton Wood’s farm, she could hold herself together, just. She wasn’t sure she would be able to without the hard physical work.

  Sam and Tom hadn’t been able to come home for their mother’s funeral. They were too far away, Tom in Australia, Sam in the Far East. It hadn’t been much of a funeral, no church service, no funeral tea, only two other relatives, and she could have done without their so-called support. Aunt Phyllis and Aunt Barbara, whom she had not seen in years. One was Ginny’s cousin (so not an aunt at all) and the other, Barbara, her father’s sister. It was Barbara who asked if there was a will. Surprisingly, there was, made when Conrad died, though there hadn’t been much to leave. Barbara said that Conrad had always promised she could have some of the family heirlooms when he died. What heirlooms? Lucasta was baffled. She told Barbara she didn’t know what she meant. ‘The grandfather clock, Uncle John’s,’ Barbara said, ‘and the mirror, Aunt Jessie’s, and the small bureau that belonged to our grandmother.’ The clock had gone, sold, but she invited her aunt to take the mirror and bureau from the cottage, and Barbara promptly did so. Lucasta didn’t care.

  She still had the cottage. The rent was low and she earned just enough to pay it. On her days off, she went there. It wasn’t home, it never had been and never would be. She and Ginny had lived there for only two years, after Conrad’s death, and the atmosphere was grief-laden. But it was a place to go, away from the farm. It was freezing cold inside, and there was a musty, airless smell. She’d light a fire and sit in front of it, a blanket over her shoulders and a hot-water bottle under her feet, and try to banish memories of Ginny’s illness and her death. Crying about it was no good. She didn’t weep any more. Instead, she tried to cheer herself by thinking of ‘after the war’, the game they all played. Sam would return, he would, and she would move from this miserable cottage and have a different life. She’d go to art college. She’d promised Ginny she would. ‘Don’t go to pieces, darling,’ her mother had pleaded. ‘Use your gift, when all this is over.’

  Did she have ‘a gift’? How could she know? There seemed no place for art in her present life. She never even thought of lifting a pencil or a paintbrush. Her hands, rough and covered in cuts, did other things. They might have forgotten how to draw or paint. Art was just a dream, a myth; it had no importance in her world.

  *

  His mother died on 3 December, but Sam didn’t know about it until Christmas Day. The 3rd December was the day his battalion left the barracks and went to their jungle stations and pillboxes along the east coast of Singapore. They had only the guns they’d used in training. The new, far more efficient ones, were still wrapped in wax and greaseproof paper. They’d eyed them, in their boxes, as a child eyes sweets.

  The camp was built inside a rubber plantation, set in five acres. There was a barbed wire fence round the perimeter and every two hundred yards there were machine-gun posts. Sam manned one of them. It was just a hole in the ground, about five feet deep and with a radius of around ten. He worked out later that at the time his mother died he was grubbing about in the dirt checking that his hole was clear of debris, and building up his firing step, where the Thompson machine-gun would be set. Then he’d settled down for his eight-hour shift. He knew he’d thought of his mother and his sister. All the troops thought of their families, of home. He’d felt guilty, he remembered that. He’d joined up straightaway, and he hadn’t had to do so. His mother had
begged him not to, not yet, not till he was called up. She needed him, she’d said. She didn’t feel well, and it was so soon after his father’s death. Tom had already gone, but he’d been gone anyway, working in Australia when Conrad died. Sam had told his mother that Lucasta would look after her, he couldn’t wait, he had to volunteer. Yes, he’d felt like a hero in the making; his naivety astonished him now.

  Lucasta wrote every week even when she had nothing much to say, and Ginny added little drawings sometimes, nearly always of her cats. And his little sister had been so good, so unselfish, never telling him how ill their mother was, never alarming him, and always insisting that she was managing well. She’d risen to the occasion magnificently, and he’d been surprised. But then he hardly knew her. It took hours of being stuck in a hole to teach him that, hours of going over and over his childhood, sifting image after image of his growing up, overwhelmed by a nostalgia so strong it made his eyes smart. Lucasta had been such a frail child. She was only four and a half pounds at birth, and they’d had to rush her to hospital and put her in an incubator, and he had a distinct recollection that she was not expected to survive. There had been tears and hushed voices and his mother never seemed to be at home. His father retreated to his pottery, and he and Tom had been left pretty much to themselves when they were not at school. Then, when the new baby came home, they had been instructed not to touch her at first, in case she got an infection; and had peered at her, in her cradle, rather afraid of the tiny creature. That was how things had continued for the first few years, until Lucasta (and he and Tom had not liked her funny name, wanting to call her Daisy) began school, when suddenly she seemed to grow stronger. By then, it was too late to change the way they treated her. He and Tom always felt they had to be wary of her.