by Jane Bailey
Something brushed my shoulders and I looked round. There was nothing there. My hair seemed caught on something, and I swept it aside. I felt uneasy. There was a presence somewhere near.
Suddenly my hair was caught up in a hand and lifted on to the top of my head. I gasped.
‘You have remarkably beautiful shoulders.’ I looked up to where the voice was coming from and saw James lolling from a branch. ‘I’ve never looked at you from this angle before.’
‘You scared me half to death.’
I made to climb up as well. He reached out an arm and pulled me up. As soon as I was beside him he looked at me intently, and stroked the side of my face.
‘There’s someone in the cottage‚’ I said awkwardly.
‘I know.’
He lay back on the branch and fiddled with a twig.
‘Who?’
‘Gracie and Howard.’
I let out a disbelieving snort before catching his eye and seeing that he wasn’t joking.
He looked out towards the cottage and said, ‘They’ve been doing it up for years. Always planned to live there when I came back.’
I stared at him, but his eyes were still fixed on the horizon. I gave an embarrassed little laugh. ‘I think Gracie would’ve told me.’
Now he turned and looked directly at me. ‘Perhaps you just didn’t notice. Perhaps she didn’t want you to know.’
I felt a quiver of shock and disbelief. But his face was serious.
‘Why not?’
He frowned a little. ‘An instinctive thing, maybe.’
I was beginning to panic. There had been a plan, and everyone had known about it. Even James, thousands of miles away. But I had been left out.
‘Well, from what Dad said in his letters, you hadn’t really picked up on it, and she didn’t want to seem happier than you were. She couldn’t bear to see you sad. She wanted to wait for your happiness before she announced her own.’
My throat was beginning to swell.
‘How long …?’ I whispered. ‘How long has it been going on?’
‘Since they first set eyes on each other, I think.’ He smiled at me and continued to fiddle with the twig.
I closed my eyes at what I had caused: all the love I had stifled.
‘I would’ve been so happy for them! I can’t believe they’ve held back because of me.’
He reached out and took my hand. ‘I don’t think they held back that much‚’ he winked.
‘Are you sure?’
‘Pretty sure. You mustn’t worry about it. She wanted you to be happy. The important thing is that you are loved. She did it out of love.’
Somehow I felt the thought of it like a burden, another wrong I was responsible for. My face ached, every feature straining against an expression of pain.
Tigger bounded into the tree and James glanced skyward to the thick mesh of branches. ‘Look at that. We’re so busy watching the leaves falling off we don’t see these buds – they’re already starting – look. Growing already.’ I looked up, but all I could make out were a few dogged yellow leaves hanging on by a thread. ‘You know, for the last few years, I’ve been horrified by what people can do to each other. On the boat on the way back there were a load of children picked up from a Japanese camp.’ His voice faltered a little. ‘You’ve never seen anything like it. They were so thin, so alone.’ He reached a hand up and tapped an overhanging branch. ‘And I’ve been dwelling on that: a human being’s capacity for cruelty. It’s terrifying. It really is terrifying.’
His eyes were glistening with tears and I was beginning to feel panic-stricken again. Just when I’d hoped for some solace, it seemed he was heading for the abyss and he would take me with him.
‘But then I’ve been sitting here and thinking.’ He propped himself up on an elbow suddenly and looked out across at the cottage again. ‘I’ve been thinking about a human being’s capacity for love. Look at it. It’s even more amazing, isn’t it?’
I knew he meant Gracie. I knew he meant that I didn’t know how lucky I was, and he was trying to make me see it. And it was quite true: I had been so wrapped up in what one woman seemed not to have felt for me, that I had failed to enjoy all the love I had. I knew this was right, I knew I was ungrateful and I knew my perspective was all wrong, but that one thing kept pulling me under like a giant weight attached to my ankle.
‘I know I have so much to be grateful for.’ Tears sprang from nowhere and dribbled down my cheeks. ‘I just feel so … trapped. Not by you. Not by anyone. Just by thoughts in my head that won’t go away.’
He pulled me towards him and the branch swayed a little as I lay down on his chest.
‘Well, I think that’s my job, isn’t it; getting you out of traps?’
‘I don’t think there’s a way out of this one.’
‘Look at me.’ He lifted my chin gently, and I repositioned my head. His green eyes were gazing so deep into mine that I felt like one of his hypnotized rabbits. ‘Don’t forget the gypsy soul in me.’
He continued to gaze at me.
‘You know, when animals are trapped, you sometimes have to mesmerize them before you can set them free. Otherwise they get frightened and pull away so hard they can take a leg off.’
He ran his hand down between my shoulder blades to the small of my back, and rested it there. He was very quiet and still, but did not take his eyes off me. After some time like this he said, ‘Come with me to the house.’
I felt a rush of longing for him. He slipped down from the tree and let me slide down into his arms, and every part of me wanted him. But he was wrong if he thought this would solve things. It was a lovely idea, very animal, very instinctive, it appealed to the feral girl inside me. Even so I knew then that no amount of lovemaking would rid me of this demon. The cat, black and white like his mother, bounded on ahead of us.
‘I may be wrong,’ he said, as if he read my mind, ‘but I don’t think so. I’m going with my instincts on this one.’ He slipped his hand around my waist and hung it on my hip as we walked. ‘Do you trust me?’
I nodded, feeling suddenly heavy with desire. I longed so much to believe in the magic he had conjured up that I let myself believe, I let myself follow him like someone under a spell.
When we entered the hallway he looked about furtively.
‘Wait here.’
He disappeared into the kitchen and I heard him say something to Mrs Bubb.
‘Come on‚’ he said, when he reappeared, and he led me up the stairs.
On the first landing he stopped and faced me, taking my waist in his two large hands, as if it were a child’s.
‘Be still, and let things come to you.’ He took a stray strand of my hair and pushed it gently behind my ear. ‘Try to trust me on this.’ Then he led me further up the stairs and said, ‘There’s someone I want you to meet.’
I followed him up to the next landing, torn between disappointment and intrigue. He pushed open Jill’s bedroom door, and I heard a low murmuring. The cat went in ahead of us.
There, slumped on the bed, was a man in his early thirties. Jill’s arms were draped about his neck, and Andrew lay curled on his chest. He stopped singing ‘For the moon shines bright on Charlie Chap …’ and looked at me, his tiny head cocked to one side, and he gave a shy, apologetic smile. Both children were fast asleep.
65
And then the birds came. The starlings had been singing softly to themselves in hedges all winter through but I hadn’t noticed them. It was the mistle thrush I noticed first, its short garbled verses ringing out on a bright morning that January. Then the tsee tsee of the robins, the high-pitched bluetits, the explosive, jubilant little wrens, a dunnock or two and a song thrush, could all be heard limbering up for the spring if you only listened. In February and March they were joined by tree-creepers, nuthatches and woodpeckers, and a few keen blackbirds joined the swelling chorus of impending spring. By April, great arrows of summer visitors arrived, until in May there was a flood of song
: a kee-kee-kee, su-su-su, tyu tyu, tuk-tuk-tuk, teee-ip teee-ip, tyup tyup tyup, tissik tissik, chee-chee-chee-chee-chee, tooey tooey, liddle-iddle-iddle-iddle, dzwee dzwee, hoo-ee hoo-ee hoo-ee, choodle-oodle-oodle-oop, chip-chip-chipper-chip, haw … haw … haw, chook-chook-chook as every bird alive joined ranks and heralded the sunshine with such urgent, boundless rapture that you couldn’t help but be carried along in their joy.
Everything started to grow again. By the spring of 1946 our family had doubled in size like the hedgerows: the children had a father, a new uncle and two old Wallock sheep pets. Were they happy? Their childhood had been spliced by the war. Half of it without a father, half of it with one. Half with their mother’s sadness, half with her joy. How did we fare, then, as parents? What phantoms or pleasures dance through their memories? Only they can tell you that.
And what of us? Young people say that our generation had it easy with love: we had to stay together, so it’s no wonder we celebrate the anniversaries they will never reach. But when we got to the bottom of that curve, we clung on to the moments of joy, and we just kept on going until we came up again. Love hangs constantly in the air between us, gentle and warm as cow’s breath. We cannot disappoint each other. We know too much. Although sometimes, when the moon has risen and the stars multiply softly on a balmy summer night, we can still surprise each other.
Out now in Robinson paperback
Tommy Glover’s Sketch of Heaven
by Jane Bailey
In 1944 eight-year-old Kitty is placed as an evacuee in a Gloucestershire village with a cold, unhappy couple, Joyce and Jack Shepherd, who seem to find her cockney chirpiness and comic observations repugnant. Neither of them approves of Kitty’s friendship with Tommy Glover – an older child from the boys’ home – and even seem to nurse a mysterious hatred of him.
Kitty’s relentless curiosity slowly transforms the strangely troubled marriage of Joyce and Jack, and when she exposes a terrible secret, the lives of nearly everyone in the village are changed forever.
£6.99
About the Author
JANE BAILEY is the author of Promising, An Angel in Waiting and Tommy Glover’s Sketch of Heaven. Her first novel was shortlisted for the Dillons Prize and she received a Royal Literary Fund award. She was born and brought up in Gloucestershire where she now lives with her two daughters.
Also by Jane Bailey
Promising
An Angel in Waiting
Tommy Glover’s Sketch of Heaven
Copyright
Constable & Robinson Ltd
3 The Lanchesters
162 Fulham Palace Road
London W6 9ER
www.constablerobinson.com
First published in the UK by Robinson, an imprint of Constable & Robinson Ltd 2006
Copyright © Jane Bailey McNeir 2006
The right of Jane Bailey McNeir to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988.
All rights reserved. This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out or otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.
A copy of the British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data is available from the British Library
ISBN: 978–1–78033–238–3