by Jane Bailey
‘No, thank you,’ I said coldly. ‘I’m fine.’ So I could hardly get up and walk off now.
Then there was the confusion of the armrest. I don’t know at what point I noticed that both our elbows were on it, but as soon as I did all my nerves seemed to be in my elbow, at the exact point where he was touching it. And the light pressure of his arm through his dinner jacket seemed an insolence. But I would not remove my arm – could not, for it was quite comfortable there, and anyway, to remove it would suggest a giving way to him, and I would certainly not be doing that, thank you very much.
Then King Kong swept Fay Wray up in his arms. It gave me the oddest feeling, vastly overdressed for the cinema, our elbows lightly touching, watching a giant beast caressing a woman in his arms and sandwiched between two couples who were half eating each other.
When King Kong was finally killed, I managed to release my tears. I remembered a woman sobbing at this point when I had watched the film last week, and thinking that she was completely unhinged.
As the lights came on James did something that took me by surprise. He reached down and took my foot, then he gently stroked the sole to remove any grit, and placed it in my shoe. I know I should have become indignant at this, but it felt oddly natural. Before I could consider what little game he was playing now, I looked down and caught my breath in horror. There, on my unshod cream stocking was a swathe of darkness all around my toes and across my instep. In the shadows of cinema seats it took me a while to realize it was dark green dye. Almost certainly he would think it was grubbiness! I felt my eyes close. The humiliation was intolerable. Undeterred, he stroked the sole of my left foot and placed it in its dark green shoe. He sat up and considered me with a slightly anxious look. I didn’t thank him. I sniffed and stood up, and wrapping my shawl tightly around me, I waited until the girl of the gentle moan had stood up too, her lipstick halfway across her face and most of her petticoat showing, before following her between the seats to the exit.
I said nothing as we made our way back to the car.
‘I was sad that the ape died too,’ he tried. I noticed he was holding his elbow out for me to take, but I ignored it. ‘I felt especially sorry for him when he became a tourist attraction, didn’t you?’
‘Mmm.’
Nothing more was said at all, apart from ‘Mind your dress,’ as he closed the car door for me. I hadn’t expected him to be quite such a match for my silence. It just proved that he didn’t want to be with me either.
As we neared Buckleigh House, he asked, ‘Where’s home?’
‘It’s all right. I’ll walk.’
‘No, I shan’t let you walk. Where do you live?’
‘I’m all right.’
‘At least let me take you to the end of your road.’
I shook my head, and he came to a halt in the road outside his house. I got out straight away, and he followed.
‘There’s a full moon,’ I said, hoping he wouldn’t try to walk me home.
‘Nearly full.’
I took my shawl off and turned it inside out for luck. There had been enough evil forces tonight, and an old moon was a tricky one.
‘You’re limping,’ he said. He was walking beside me, and showed no signs of going away.
We walked on, saying nothing, down past Mrs Emery’s house, and the thick smell of budding lavender, through the tall beech trees towards the churchyard.
‘Listen!’ he whispered suddenly.
‘A dog fox,’ I said.
‘Yes … yes, it is!’
We walked on into the village, my head pounding with things I should say, the indignation I should show, jumbled up with the phrases I’d practised for my fantasy evening. I stopped a few houses away from my own, and sighed.
‘Goodnight,’ I said.
‘Is this where you live?’
‘No, down there.’
‘Well then, I’ll walk you.’
‘No.’
But as I turned to go home he followed me. I wheeled round.
‘No. Please. Leave me alone.’
‘I’m so sorry.’ He came to an abrupt halt, and so did I. We looked at each other, and then at the ground. ‘I don’t think you enjoyed this evening, did you?’ I said nothing. ‘It was my fault. I’m not very … I’m not exactly … I’m sorry.’
I remained silent, but I didn’t walk away either. I realized he might take this as some sort of expectation on my part of something more, but I was panicking in my head with the words I needed to say.
‘You don’t say much,’ he said at last.
‘That would be because I’m just a scummy old country bumpkin, I expect.’
I have to hand it to him, he looked bewildered, and he managed it quite well. But I wasn’t going to let him off the hook that easily. ‘And just so’s you know, I’ve never been so humiliated in all my life – not by anyone. And you can keep your posh car and your big house and your flash fancy dress …’ I didn’t know what to say next and my voice was beginning to falter. ‘I’ve never had such a crap evening in all my life – even for a grubby little village girl!’ And then the sobs came, and I couldn’t hold them back, and I ran full pelt to our front door and let myself in without looking back.
When I was sure he had gone, I took off the dress, slipped on my ordinary shoes and coat and crossed the road to the fountain. Then I opened the gate to the field and headed for the woods.
As soon as I felt the springy woodland floor under my feet I relaxed. When I was a child I thought the branches of trees were arms, and I climbed up now into a small beech, and lay full length on its low outstretched branch. The bark pressed into the flesh at my knees and thighs and ribs and breasts. If I spread my weight carefully it didn’t hurt, but pricked my skin gently and made me feel alive. I lay there for hours, trying not to remember. The moon cast thick shadows in the undergrowth. Drifts of wild garlic shone white in its glow. I loved the smell of it. It was the reek of early summer, the promise of things to come.
I lay in the arms of the beech tree until the moon vanished, and the first band of peach gleamed through the dark leaves. Then I went home, printed in bark.
24
‘I was twenty-four when I fell in love with Howard Buckleigh,’ Gracie said. ‘We were coming from opposite directions on Three Cross Lane and our bicycles collided.’
I had been lying on the bed for most of the morning, and now I turned my blotchy face to her.
‘He hadn’t done much cycling before – he wasn’t very good. And he was very young … I think he was … nineteen … yes, nineteen
She had sat down beside me, but she wasn’t looking at me. She was gazing at her knees, and out of the window, and at her knees again. ‘He hadn’t quite got the hang of the bike, you see.’ She smiled at the rug by the bed. ‘Told me he had never been in love before he met me, and that he would never be again – not with anyone else.’
‘And was he?’
Slowly and carefully, she brushed some imaginary dust from her pinny. ‘He married Rosamund Buckleigh.’
I got up on my elbow. ‘I know that. He broke his promise, then?’
Gracie raised her eyebrows speculatively at the dressing table. ‘I suppose … I …’
I sat up and reached my hand to hers. ‘Did he court you then? Did he take you home? Were there parties? Oh, Gracie – you never said – why didn’t you ever say?’
She let out a long sigh. ‘We walked out a good few times. This first time Mum and Dad were pleased as punch – told everyone, they did. And he did take me home – just the once – and I don’t think I was approved of. They wanted someone with money, see, so’s they wouldn’t have to sell off any more land. But Howard, he didn’t care tuppence what they thought, he was going to wait till he was twenty-one and marry me anyway.’
‘So Celia’s mother came along and spoilt it all?’
‘No. That was much later. No … my father took it into his head that Howard was up to no good. You couldn’t go walking out with someo
ne above your station in those days without a proposal in the offing. It looked bad. It looked like he was just after his wicked way and that. ’Specially as he couldn’t take me anywhere where we’d see his family or his family’s friends, so it all got more and more secret. First his father banned him from seeing me, and my father said that was that, I should stop thinking about him because it wasn’t going to happen, and I wasn’t getting any younger, and if I waited for him to come of age I’d be an old spinster of twenty-seven, and who’d want me then if old Buckleigh still said no, and I said he couldn’t stop us then, and he said he could, just you wait and see, and we did.’
‘What …?’
‘We waited. We met in secret for two and a half years. We used to go for long walks in the hills over towards Sheepscombe. We had picnics down by Damsel’s Cross – no one to bother us but a few cows, and the trickling of that lovely stream … Oh … and in the winter we used to go to a cottage – one that belonged to the Buckleighs years ago but the retainer had died. It was all musty and damp. But we’d light a fire – we didn’t mind – we were young … we loved each other, see, we couldn’t feel the cold!’ She chuckled.
‘It’s so romantic – Gracie! Go on then …’
‘I can’t. I need a cup of tea, and so do you.’
She wouldn’t say another word until we were both by the range with the kettle on, and her with her knitting safely on her lap.
‘Well, he turned twenty-one at last, and went to his father for his inheritance, so’s he could buy the ring and all. Well, his father says no, you shan’t have a penny, not if you’re going to marry some trumped-up village girl. So Howard said he would marry me anyway, money or no, and his father said he would cut him out of his will. Well, Howard, he loved that house, you know. He loved all the land around as well—’
‘So he gave in?’
‘No. No. He said to me, Gracie my darling, I shall have to go and earn some money of my own. And off he went to Africa for two years. He asked me to go with him, but I said I couldn’t leave Mother and Father, and how could I? I was all they had, and they didn’t know I was still seeing him, and what would I do in Africa? So he went, and promised he’d be back.’
‘And he came back with her?’
‘No. No, he came back six years later. Only it seemed to me at the time he never came back. After two years I lost all hope. But then, see, it was the Great War, and I heard much later he’d joined up, and then I heard nothing, till I got some letters from Africa so old they could be misleading, and one long letter from the Dardanelles saying he knew I may not get the letter but congratulations anyway. Well, I just thought someone’s told him I’m married so I wrote to him, but I never heard another thing, and I just thought he’s dead, I thought, he’s died like all the rest of them, sent headlong into it, a number chalked up and rubbed out. I was sure of it. Until the end of the war, when he was twenty-seven and I was thirty-three and his father was dead. I heard he was up there, at the house, a broken man after the war. And I heard he was engaged to Rosamund Longly-Howes, some posh girl his mother had brought down from London with a nice fortune. He’d been home two months and no one told me.’
She came to the end of a row and swapped needles. I sat thoughtfully for a moment, watching the teapot and waiting for it to brew. ‘What did he think when he saw you after?’
‘He keeps himself to himself. I only saw him properly the once. I was outside the post office and he was walking past with his dog – he had a big dog then, not that little yappy one. And he just stopped, and he stared at me as if he’d seen a ghost. And I said hello, and he said Gracie, Gracie, where are you living now, and I told him, and he touched my arm and then a car-horn went and it was his wife further down the street, and he said he was sorry, and I often wonder, sorry for what?’
‘Well! That’s obvious, isn’t it?’
‘Is it? Perhaps he was just sorry he had to dash.’
‘Oh, Gracie!’ The tea was stewed. ‘I’m sorry … oh, Gracie!’
She poured the tea.
‘And there was the couple of times he came round here.’
‘It was him, then!’
We sat quietly some time after that, Gracie’s needles clicking, waiting for the kettle to rumble again. Digger, the cat, who had been listening from the rug, came and sat on my lap.
‘Howard the Coward, then,’ I said at last.
She slipped a stitch over and knitted two together. ‘No one who fought in that war for four years was a coward.’
‘No … A coward in love, then.’
She finished counting the stitches on her row, and raised her eyebrows as if to say ‘Maybe.’
‘His mother had been told I was already married.’
‘Who by?’
She didn’t look up. ‘My father.’
Then she put her knitting down and looked up at the empty space on the mantel where the shepherdess had once stood. ‘I only heard when you were eleven, the second time he came round.’
25
You might say that there were no secrets in Woodside. Everyone knew the tiniest details of each other’s lives – stumbling over them rather than digging them out. In our close-packed village life it was hard not to. And the secrets that remained were colossal ones, life-changing, awful secrets so deeply buried by necessity. To come across one of these was a dangerous event.
My failed date with James Buckleigh could not qualify as a major secret, and by the following morning the entire Mustoe family were sympathizing. Robert showed a particular concern, so much so that he asked me if I should like to go with him to the pictures at the weekend. I wasn’t used to being asked out, so I didn’t know how to say no. I said it was kind of him, and then felt cornered, because I knew by the way he was looking at my breasts it was not kind of him at all, but I wanted to think it was.
There then followed a series of dates, dotted throughout the autumn, at times when my resolve was weak and crumpled by his determination. I think other girls in the village were quite envious, for he had grown into a very handsome young man, and I was even quite proud to be seen out with him, but I couldn’t help a desire to repel him any time he came too close. I wondered if I was incapable of loving a man, if something had made me like this. I tried to make myself dream of being taken by Robert, of being made love to somewhere dark and wild in the hills, but I always had to transform him into someone who wasn’t quite Robert for me to feel the lust that was beginning to overwhelm my private thoughts from time to time.
I let him kiss me because I didn’t know how to stop him without making him feel ridiculous. And when he came close his smell was strong and sweet but so utterly pitiless I felt stifled by it. It was perfume for someone but not for me. As he approached I would try to breathe in and appreciate its deep musty undertones of pine from the wood yard, but by the time his arms went around me, my breathing would be scuppered and I would go under like the Titanic, submerged in the ruthlessness of his scent.
One day, as I was trying to fend him off for good, he said something interesting. We were sitting on a bench outside the pub; he was sipping a pint and I had a lemonade. He said he bet James wasn’t as good a kisser as he was, and I said James hadn’t kissed me. Fuelled by this news, he went on to insult both James and Celia, and called them both bastards.
‘That’s a bit strong,’ I said.
‘But they are – didn’t you know?’
‘What?’
‘Bastards. Or at least, not exactly, but neither of ’em’s legal – Howard Buckleigh didn’t father either of ’em.’
He could see I was interested, so he went on, perhaps further than he intended, no doubt hoping the information would get him inside my petticoat. ‘Ever wondered about yourself, then?’
I frowned. ‘I’m not illegitimate.’
He gave the slightest of smiles. ‘Who are your parents, then?’
With complete ease, I reeled off the story Gracie had concocted on our behalf, about being her second cousin’
s orphaned child.
That little smile again. I hated him for it. I felt I was teetering on the edge of something, and held on to the bench for support.
‘But you know Gracie had a long affair with Howard Buckleigh. His wife goes off and has affairs with other men. Saddled with a wife he doesn’t love; he still loves Gracie. What would you do?’
‘What d’you mean?’
‘Well …’ He put his hand over mine on my knee. ‘Isn’t it obvious? I reckon you’re the rightful heir to the Buckleigh estate, old girl.’
I pulled my hand away and stood up. ‘That’s wicked! It’s rubbish. Who else thinks this? Who else’ve you told this load of tripe to?’
I marched off home on my own, with him following for a bit, but I was saved by Mr Bearpark walking down the road with his bike, and wanting to tell me about its new tyres. Robert scratched his head and went back to the pub for another pint.
I can’t say I didn’t consider what he’d said. I started thinking back to when I’d first arrived, and I remembered Howard, the gentleman who’d come to see Gracie, and seemed to think I was his to look after. But then I thought back further, beyond Nipper and beyond the woods, and the things I saw were so alien to either Gracie’s home or the Buckleigh home, that I was certain it could not be true. And as soon as these images came to me I dropped them, and they pinged away from me as if on elastic, and away from me was where I wanted them to stay.
I grew to be so resilient to Robert’s approaches that, short of committing a crime, he was forced to give up. Throughout 1938 and 1939 I saw little of him in a romantic sense, and I heard that he’d gone all the way with Spit and although Spit denied it, they were pretty much an item. I still saw him, of course, because he lived next door, and whenever he looked at me his face seemed to say that, one way or another, he would have me one day.