‘Fitzy.’
‘Yes. Fitzy…’ Alice stopped speaking and searched Georgina’s face. ‘Didn’t it…work out?’
‘Well…no.’
‘Was his leave cancelled?’ Alice knew that Georgina and Neil Fitzsimmonds had difficulty in getting leave at the same time and that their idea had been, as soon as it could be arranged, to make their planned visit to her parents’ cottage on the North Devon coast.
‘It wasn’t that,’ Georgina said, accepting the cup of tea Alice had poured for her. ‘He’s on leave this week, the same as I am, but we didn’t go to the cottage. I told Fitzy I couldn’t. I don’t really understand why. It’s not that I don’t like him. I do. I find him very… attractive…but…I think I enjoy his company most when we’re with a bunch of fliers. He’s great fun, he dances like Fred Astaire and he looks absolutely stunning…but…’
Alice was strongly tempted to say, ‘But he is not Christopher Bayliss?’ but decided against it at this point and bit her tongue.
‘Was he very disappointed?’ she asked instead.
‘He was a bit,’ Georgina said, sipping the hot tea.
Alice had always considered Georgina to be the best-looking of her land girls. Strands of dark hair, which had escaped from the borrowed leather helmet and goggles and had been plastered to her face by the wind and rain, were drying in the warmth of the kitchen, while her cheeks, still flushed by the rough weather, were a rosy contrast to her high, pale forehead and solemn eyes. She looked, Alice thought, more beautiful than she had ever seen her.
‘What?’ Georgina asked suddenly, and Alice, realising that she had been staring, shook her head and smiled.
‘Nothing,’ she said, ‘I was just thinking…’ Again, she was tempted to bring up the subject of Christopher Bayliss and again she checked herself. ‘I was just thinking how very pretty you are.’
‘Apart from looking wan!’ Georgina laughed.
‘Yes,’ Alice said. ‘Apart from that!’
There was a longish silence before Georgina spoke and Alice was certain, from the intensity of her eyes, that she was about to broach a subject that was important to her. But as she gathered herself to speak, the back door was flung suddenly open and Rose, with rubber boots on her feet and a dripping umbrella in her hands, burst into the kitchen.
‘Just look at it!’ she blustered, without acknowledging Georgina. ‘Rainin’ cats and dogs, almost dark and ’e’s still not back!’
‘Who isn’t?’ Alice asked, forgetting that Rose’s Dave was home on leave and had gone off somewhere on his bicycle.
‘Dave! My Dave, that’s who! Said he was popping into Ledburton for a quick pint at lunchtime, but that were hours ago! I reckon I knows where ’e’m to! Over to Hester’s folks’ place, that’s where! And d’you know what for?’ Alice and Georgina shook their heads. ‘’Cos my guess is as ’er baby will ’ave come by now! That’s what for! Why can’t he keep out of it? Why did ’e ’ave to go getting mixed up with that Pentecostal lot? Nothing but trouble, they are! Why can’t ’e find ’iself a nice sensible sort of a girl?’
‘Because he loves Hester?’ Georgina ventured.
Rose turned on her furiously.
‘But she don’t love ’im, Georgina! She was Reuben’s girl and now she’s Reuben’s widow and her baby’s Reuben’s child. And anyhow, what do you know about anything! Runnin’ round after Christopher Bayliss all that time ’e were sick and then walkin’ out on ’im!’ She peered, frowning, through the window into the deepening twilight. Then a surge of relief transformed her face. ‘Oh! The light’s just gone on in me cottage! Me son’s home! Thank the Lord!’ She had the grace to look slightly embarrassed as she made for the door, her umbrella already half open. ‘I’ll just make sure ’e’s all right and I’ll be straight back to help with supper, Alice!’ and she was gone.
Alice and Georgina sat for a while in silence. ‘I didn’t exactly walk out on Chris, did I?’ Georgina asked, without really expecting or wanting an answer.
‘Not exactly,’ Alice said.
When Dave Crocker had cycled away from Lower Post Stone Farm that morning and headed north-west across Dartmoor, the wind had been rising, dragging low cloud across the tors. Toiling, despite a tightening in his scarred leg, up the steep inclines of the moor and freewheeling gratefully downhill, he made good time and found himself, by midday, at the gate to Jonas Tucker’s near derelict five acres.
By then rain was not far off and the high ground was already obscured by cloud. On a washing line, half a dozen nappies flapped in the damp wind and as he stood wondering how he should approach the forlorn cottage which was the Tuckers’ home, Hester, carrying a wicker basket, rounded the corner of the building, hurried towards the line and began to unpeg the nappies. When Dave called her name she turned to face him and then glanced nervously at an upstairs window.
The wind had risen and was driving the rain before it. Hester stood, facing Dave, with her back to the wind while it smacked into his face.
‘You’m getting soaked,’ she murmured uneasily. ‘You shouldn’t be here.’
‘Your baby’s come, then,’ he said, taking the basket from her and holding it while she put the rest of the nappies into it. She nodded. ‘Be it a boy?’ She shook her head.
‘A girl,’ she said. ‘Three weeks old, she be now. I calls her Thurza.’ She looked up at the window again. ‘You’d best go, Dave. My father ’as took sick. If ’e sees you ’ere ’t will make ’im worse. I be the one who’s brought this on ’im, see. My wickedness is what’s made ’im ill. I must go in.’
‘This be nonsense, Hester! ’Ow could you ’ave brung it on ’im? What’s up with ’im, any’ow?’
‘He has the fallin’ down disease and can’t walk proper no more. It started when I strayed from the path of righteousness! I have brought a pestilence on my family, like I told you in the orchard that day!’
They heard the rattle of the sash window before Jonas Tucker’s voice reached them.
‘Get inside the ’ouse, daughter!’ he bellowed through the noise of wind and rain. ‘Get indoors afore some other evil do befall us!’ Jonas slammed the window down and stood with his hands, one on each side of it, pressed against the frame, his face inches from the pane. He was dressed in a striped nightshirt and his grey hair straggled to his shoulders.
‘He means Thurza!’ Hester whimpered. ‘He means she’ll be next! First Reuben killed! Then you wounded. Then Father struck down! Next it’ll be my baby or my brother, Zeke, if I don’t do proper penance for my sins!’ She pulled the basket from Dave’s hands and hurried towards the house. In the window, Jonas Tucker raised a fist and shook it at Dave before turning, lurching unsteadily away from the window and merging into the gloom of the room behind him.
‘She’s ’ad her baby, then, Reuben’s wife?’ Rose asked her son when she found him sitting, his jacket and corded trousers dark with rainwater, in front of her fire. When he did not answer her she told him he’d best get out of his wet clothes before he caught his death, took his coat from him and watched him drop the sodden trousers onto the floor and shuffle up the stairs in his long johns.
‘I never thought as I’d be pleased when Dave’s leave was over,’ Rose confided in Alice the next morning, ‘But ’e’s bin that low since ’e went over to Hester’s place!’ She sat, her jaw set and her eyes gazing hopelessly into space. ‘I can’t see no end to this, Alice! ’E won’t give up on ’er and she won’t give up on that religion of hers!’
‘What if she did, Rose? Would you be happy for Dave to take her on and be a father to Reuben’s child?’
‘It bain’t so simple as that though, be it? Hester would be a nice enough girl if she’d been brought up reg’lar, with ordinary folk for parents. But with her head full of this nonsense… Oh, I don’t know! When she was here with us she seemed normal enough, after she’d settled in, like, didn’t she! And when she and Reuben got wed and all. Nice, happy little couple, they made. But since that poor lad got killed and all this ho
cus-pocus about Hester being cursed started up… I don’t know what to think of her and I wouldn’t wish any of that on a son of mine! Would you?’
At the first opportunity, Alice discussed the situation with Margery Brewster. They sat in Alice’s sitting room, one on either side of the fire. In response to Margery’s repeated glances at the decanter, Alice poured her a small sherry.
‘From what Dave told his mother, Jonas Tucker is obviously ill,’ Alice said. ‘Physically and quite possibly mentally as well. In the circumstances, he probably can’t provide adequately for his family and his psychological state could make him dangerous, couldn’t it? I don’t think its safe for Hester or the baby to be there in that hovel, do you, Margery? Can’t the Americans ship her out to her in-laws or something? Anywhere would be safer and healthier for her and the baby than where she is now!’
‘They can’t make her to go if she doesn’t want to, Alice. And apparently she doesn’t! She won’t even draw Reuben’s pension! They sent his regimental chaplain to see her and she asked him to leave her to make her peace with her Lord or something. They can’t force her to do anything against her will.’ Margery sipped the sherry appreciatively. ‘Poor Dave is terribly upset and Rose was in tears about the whole situation. If the problem was simply with Jonas Tucker I believe Dave would be prepared to go up there and bring the silly girl back here with him. But it’s Hester herself who is determined to stay there and she seems to really believe what her father has instilled into her, about her whole family reaping the consequences of her supposed transgressions! It’s positively medieval!’ Margery smiled winsomely and held out her glass. Alice refilled it. ‘It would be amusing if it wasn’t so tragic!’ she sighed. ‘But it proves you can’t remove seventeen years of brainwashing in six months!’
‘It ain’t fair!’ Mabel protested, during one of the series of protracted discussions she and Ferdie now found unavoidable and which focused, unproductively, on the subject of their future after the arrival of the coming baby.
Ferdie had blandly accepted the fact of Mabel’s pregnancy. Like any of the other creatures with whom they shared the farm, their union was going to result in the arrival of young. The practicalities and even the responsibilities of parenthood hardly concerned Ferdie as month succeeded month and Mabel’s condition remained their secret. To those familiar with her shape, always concealed by loose and bulky clothing, her pregnancy remained, even at this late stage, surprisingly undetected by those who lived and worked with her. When Gwennan accused her of getting fatter, Mabel simply replied that she was, as her mother and grandmother had been before her, a big eater.
Nevertheless it was she, rather than Ferdie, who was most concerned about their future.
‘There’s bloomin’ Hester gettin’ money from the Yanks for her baby while us’ll get bugger-all for ours!’
‘It’s ’cos she be a widder-woman, Mabe, with no ’usband to fend for her nor her little ’un!’ Ferdie seemed to Mabel to be inclined to sentimentalise Hester’s situation, perceiving her as the young, defenceless victim, while Mabel was assumed to be tough and savvy enough to look out for herself and, presumably, for her offspring too.
‘But I’ve got no ’usband, neither, Ferdie Vallance, in case you ’adn’t noticed! And who’s gonna look out for me and my baby, eh? And then there’s little Arfur! Gran says the V2s is worse than them V1s was! At least you could hear the doodlebugs comin’! But there’s no warning with these new ones and the craters is that big you could fit a double-decker bus in ’em, Gran says!’ Ferdie hung his head.
‘I does me best, Mabe. I dunno what more a bloke can do!’ She leant across the table that was strewn with debris from their latest meal and ran a greasy finger over the stubble on Ferdie’s unwashed cheek.
‘I knows you does, lover. I knows you does.’ They smiled and soothed themselves with second helpings of spotted dick.
Somewhere in Mabel’s simple mind lurked a vague notion that when her baby arrived everything would fall into place for her and Ferdie. For one thing, pressure would be put on them to marry. The other farmhands, Jack and Fred, had wives. Women who, for decades now, had been neatly installed in two of the three labourers’ cottages, the third of which, since the death of first one, then the other of Ferdie’s parents, had been occupied solely by him. What could be more right and proper than for Mabel to become his wife and move in with him? Surely Mrs Todd, Mrs Brewster and Mr Bayliss would, between them, see to all of that? Then, the only thing necessary to make life perfect for Mabel would be the absorption into her new family of her unacknowledged son.
So it was that, doggedly and diligently, during the weeks leading up to Christmas and to the inevitable moment when her child would make its first appearance in the world of the Post Stone farms, Mabel continued to work as hard as her increasingly bulky body would allow, her back aching, her bladder leaking, her distended belly coming between her and the cow she was milking.
‘She looks just like Mrs Tiggy-Winkle!’ Edward John said, remembering a childhood favourite and watching Mabel trot, rotund and amiable, across the yard. ‘If you laid her on her side at the top of a hill, she’d roll all the way down!’
Margery Brewster planned her seasonal drinks party for the day before Christmas Eve, a day that happened to coincide with the first severe gale of the winter.
A violent west wind, carrying with it squalls of heavy rain, roared across the south-west peninsula, flooding villages, uprooting trees and marooning stock. The land girls, who had spent the afternoon driving the sheep up onto higher ground and moving the bullocks from a byre that was liable to flooding into the large barn at Lower Post Stone Farm, together with the cartload of swedes that would keep them fed until the water levels fell, returned to the hostel, soaked to their skins as the gale reached its peak and darkness began to fall.
On the heights of the forested land, within the thick walls of the woodsman’s cottage, Christopher Bayliss, sitting at a table that was strewn with books, looked up from the volume that had been absorbing his attention and listened as a particularly violent gust racked the surrounding trees. He heard a splintering crack, as, somewhere in the twilight, a heavy branch split from a tree and crashed to the ground. He pulled on his weatherproof jacket and, taking his torch, went out into the noisy twilight to inspect the damage.
The sky in the west was just light enough for him to make out the shapes of low cloud streaking across the moor, while the woodland surrounding him was in almost total darkness. The shattered branch lay harmlessly fifty yards or so from him, the torn limb a stark white in the beam of his torch. An outhouse door had broken its catch and was banging in the wind. He secured it and began making his way back towards the cottage.
It was then that he saw, wavering towards him, a headlight, its beam moving erratically up the track and through trees that glistened eerily as the light swept across their streaming trunks. He caught the unmistakable sound of an engine and realised that the approaching vehicle was a motorbike.
It was obvious to him that the rider was having trouble negotiating the treacherous surface of the track, parts of which had already been washed out by the torrential rain, leaving rocks and the roots of trees exposed.
As the bike reached the top of the incline, Christopher caught, through the uproar of the gale, the unmistakable, groaning creak that signals the imminent fall of a doomed tree.
The ancient ash, which Christopher had recently discovered to be riddled with honey-fungus and had scheduled for felling, was being overwhelmed by a wind that had forestalled his axe. He caught the succession of splintering, shattering sounds as the massive trunk twisted and juddered. Then, for a long moment, the ash appeared to freeze and to hang, motionless, as though choosing the direction in which it would fall. At the precise moment when the tree began its descent, the trunk at first almost stationary while the upper branches moved, with increasing momentum, through the arc that would deliver them violently to the ground, Christopher saw the motorbike slew
suddenly sideways off the track, the light from the blazing headlight becoming lost as it was engulfed in undergrowth.
The tree struck the ground immediately in front of Christopher and the tangle of fractured timber lay between him, the bike and its rider.
He fought his way through the smashed branches to the place where the machine lay on its side, embedded in the forest floor. The motorcyclist, protected by goggles and a leather helmet, had rolled free of the bike and was sitting on the ground beside it, apparently unhurt and extending to Christopher a heavily gloved hand.
‘What the hell d’you think you’re doing here?’ he demanded furiously, relieved not to be faced with a mutilated corpse and pulling the rider upright as he spoke. ‘Quite apart from risking your neck on a night like this, you’re trespassing!’ The motorcyclist pulled off the goggles and the leather helmet. For a moment Christopher didn’t recognise the face that was laughing up at him, or the fall of dark hair that was shining in the torchlight.
‘That was the best double take I’ve ever seen in my life!’ Georgina, shouting over a noisy gust of wind, was laughing at the look of astonishment which had replaced the anger in Christopher’s face. ‘Hello, Chris!’ she said. ‘Yes! It’s me!’
His expression, as he recovered from his surprise and took in her unexpected arrival and the manner of it, was not quite what she had anticipated. Although he was smiling down at her and was saying all the right things – about being glad to see her and relieved that she was unhurt – there was something about his eyes that was obvious to her, even in the moving torchlight. An evasiveness, almost a defensiveness, that reminded her suddenly of his father.
‘It’s my brother’s,’ she said, reaching down and struggling to pull the motorbike upright. ‘You’ve seen it before. When he brought me up here last Christmas. Don’t you remember? He’ll kill me if I’ve damaged it!’ Between them they righted the heavy machine and propped it on its stand. Georgina took the torch from Christopher, made a hurried examination of the bike, breathed a sigh of relief when her inspection confirmed that no obvious harm had been done to it and switched off the ignition. With the headlight extinguished, they were in almost total darkness.
The Girl at the Farmhouse Gate Page 20