Lost in the Flames

by Chris Jory

  ***

  A fortnight later a letter arrived for Norman, the address scrawled in a hand unaccustomed to significant use of a pen.

  ‘It’s Webster,’ he said. ‘He wants to come back.’

  He passed the letter to Vera.

  ‘Rose!’ she said. ‘I knew she had her eye on him.’

  ‘Should he come?’

  ‘If he’s coming for the job, then yes. If it’s for Rose, then I wouldn’t advise it.’

  ‘But he doesn’t have anywhere else to go. I’ll go and speak to Brailes.’

  Webster was back within a week and he moved into the cottage again next to Norman and Vera.

  ‘You’ll have to share it with Pete the pig-man now, I’m afraid,’ said Norman.

  ‘Pete the pig-man?’ said Webster.

  ‘We took him on two weeks ago but I’ve told Brailes to get rid. He’s good for nothing, lazy as a toad. You’ll meet him soon enough.’

  ‘So this is your room now?’ said Pete that evening, standing with Webster in the box-room at the back. ‘Looks like you’ve messed it up already, clothes all over the place.’

  ‘They’re my clothes,’ said Webster. ‘I can put them where I want, can’t I?’

  ‘Yes, but I like my cottage to look nice,’ said Pete. ‘I prefer it that way.’

  ‘Is that right?’ said Webster.

  ‘I do hope you’ll like it here, Webster.’

  ‘Don’t worry, I will, I’ve been here before.’

  ‘So why did you leave, then? It’s a right cushy number, this. That fool Norman does all the work and Brailes doesn’t give a sod any more, he’s right over the hill and coming down the other side. I reckon the land-owner’s going to be after a change of manager soon, someone a bit more youthful. Reckon I could be in there if I play my cards right, know what I mean?’

  He winked at Webster, a clumsy movement of the eye.

  ‘Know what I mean?’

  Another wink.

  ‘Got something in your eye, Pete?’

  A pause.

  ‘Why do they call you Pete the pig-man anyway?’

  ‘Because I look like a bloody pig, don’t I? Not my fault.’

  ‘Very true,’ said Webster. ‘And no, I suppose it’s not your fault.’

  The following day Norman and Webster left Pete the pig-man to muck out the cow-sheds while they went to set traps for the pheasants in the top wood with Jacob trailing along behind, asking endless questions and hanging on Norman’s every word, tipping the small gems of knowledge around in his head as he walked, counting the facts he had learned that day, repeating them internally, silently imitating Norman’s verbal mannerisms so that the boy’s lips moved as he walked.

  ‘Talking to yourself again, are you, Jacob?’ said Webster.

  ‘No, Webster. I’m just thinking,’ he said. ‘You should try it some time.’

  And Norman laughed and Jacob smiled at the man and felt the sunlight on his face and the warm glow of having made Norman happy again and it occurred to him that he probably loved Norman, like a brother, or a father, or something in between. Whatever it was, it did not matter, it was there, that was all.

  When they came back at lunchtime they found Vera speechless in tears in Brailes’ sitting room. The pig-man and Brailes were in the kitchen, poised on opposite chairs.

  ‘What’s going on here, then?’ said Norman.

  ‘This bloody bugger’s been bothering Vera,’ said Brailes in the quiet steady voice of fury. ‘Put his foot in the door and wasn’t taking no for an answer until she whacked him in the bollocks with a rolling pin.’

  ‘Outside,’ said Norman and he felt something lurch up in his chest, then a heavy rush through his arms and a noise in his head, the kind of thing you might hear in a barn.

  The pig-man followed Norman out as he marched across the yard. Jacob hurried after them and caught up with Norman and said his name, a tug on the sleeve, a distraction. But Norman could not see the boy who shadowed him now – this would be man’s business, no room for boys, no room for kindness now. He stopped by the stone trough in the centre of the yard and turned and looked at the pig-man, this shape that had threatened the only thing that had ever been his own, and he saw the pig-man at the end of a long tunnel now, his mouth somehow moving without making a sound, and Norman realised that the words were consumed by a roaring in his head. He thrust out his massive hands and seized the pig-man by the neck and rammed his head down into the water so hard that the top of the man’s skull struck the stone base of the trough and Norman held it there for several seconds as the water tinged red, then he hauled it up and out and down again and the water became redder, then up and out and down again, another smack of red against the stone, and then Norman heard a noise to one side, a bellow from Brailes who was pulling at his arm, and the roar in his head suddenly snapped away into silence and the noise that Norman himself was making hammered around in his skull and he finally let go and the pig-man fell to his knees and flung back his head and coughed up the water and muck that had entered his lungs.

  ‘Are you trying to flippin’ kill me?’ he screamed as the blood streamed down his face.

  ‘Clear your things out of the cottage and sod off,’ said Norman quietly, suddenly tired of the noise. ‘If you’re still in there in fifteen minutes, I’m coming in after you.’

  Then he turned and saw Vera beside him now, tugging at his arm, and the look on her face, something like horror, something like fear, and he whispered an apology and was about to say ‘I did it for you,’ but he thought better of it and he knew deep down he had done it for someone else, for the lost little boy that he had once been, strapped to a plough, cast out in the fields, the lost little boy that Vera had saved.

  Ten minutes later, the pig-man was half-way up the lane, the few things he owned in the bag in his hand, and Norman’s lost little boy stepped back inside himself, hid himself away again inside the man he had become.

  That night Webster moved back into his old room and Vera stripped the bed in rubber gloves and laid out fresh clean sheets for him to lie on, perhaps Rose too.

  ***

  Rose passed Vera a cup of tea and a cracker topped with a wedge of hard ewe’s cheese. The cheese crumbled as she bit into it and the dog snapped up the unintended offering as it touched the ground.

  ‘Oh, Dickie, do learn some manners,’ said Rose, toeing away the little terrier with the tip of her shoe. The dog sat on its haunches and quivered. Rose sat on the bench next to Vera and they looked down the slope of the garden and across the valley to the Worcester Road. Across the lane to their right they could hear Alfred sorting out the pigs, considering which of his prime ministers would be next for the out-house beam.

  ‘So then, Rose, what’s the story with Webster?’ asked Vera.

  ‘Webster?’ said Rose.

  ‘Yes,’ said Vera, raising an eyebrow. ‘Don’t you want to tell me?’

  ‘It sounds like you know already.’

  ‘Not the juicy details.’

  ‘Well, he’s quite nice, isn’t he?’

  ‘I think so. Norman thinks so too.’

  ‘Yes, very sweet. But …’

  ‘But what? Won’t you see him again?’ asked Vera.

  ‘Maybe.’

  ‘I think you might.’

  ‘Meaning?’

  ‘He’s back at the farm.’

  ‘What?!’ Rose bit sharply into her cracker and the dog scavenged about again at her feet. ‘Oh Dickie, you little beast!’

  ‘Yes, really. Won’t you see him?’

  ‘Yes, but it’s complicated. Alan’s keen as well.’

  ‘Alan? Who’s Alan? I didn’t know about him.’

  ‘Recent news. Hadn’t had a chance to tell you.’

  ‘Oh dear.’

  ‘What a pickle. What should I do?’

  ‘Come by and see him. Why not this Sunday? I’ll make lunch for the four of us.’

  ‘I’ll think about it.’

  ‘He wants t
o see you.’

  ‘I bet he does. He didn’t come back just for me, did he?’

  ‘I think you’ve probably been in his thoughts.’

  Sunday lunch was served in the kitchen at Norman and Vera’s. Rose talked continually, her back to the fire, warming her up, and Webster watched the orange glow intensify around her darkening silhouette as the autumn dusk crept across the fields and the room slipped into darkness. Norman lit a candle and they finished the meal with an apple apiece, and then it was time for Rose to go home.

  ‘I’d better get out and check the sheep,’ said Norman.

  ‘I’ll do the dishes,’ said Vera.

  ‘I guess you’d better walk me home, then, Webster,’ said Rose.

  ‘I can’t invite you in,’ she said at the top of her road. ‘My grandmother’s a liberal type, but she has her limits.’

  She left him at the gate with a kiss on the cheek.

  ‘See you soon,’ she said, and Webster went back home and slept until Norman shook him awake for work at dawn.

  ‘She won’t be any good for you,’ Norman finally said after ruminating on the thought for most of the morning. ‘Rose, that is.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘She’s not the constant type. It won’t last, it won’t do you any good.’

  ‘Let’s wait and see.’

  ‘You can’t change her, Webster, no one will. She’s set in her ways like that. It won’t come to any good, no good at all.’

  ‘She’s still better than anything I’ve had before.’

  ‘She’ll take your heart and split it in two, that’s all. I’ve seen her do it before. She’s a nice enough lass, but one fella’s never enough. You’ll go in one end and come out the other, like wheat through a shredder, and someone else will have to put you together again.’

  ‘I’m in pieces already, Norman. I’m starting right down at the bottom anyway.’

  ‘But you’ve got this place,’ said Norman.

  He swung his arm around in a panoramic arc before the fields in front of him where the cows stood with their noses to the sweet green grass and a pheasant rang out its staccato call from somewhere down in the copse by the pond and an automobile rumbled along the top road towards Kingham.

  ‘And you’ve got me,’ he said. ‘I’ll see you right, Webster, don’t you worry about that. Old Brailes will be retiring soon and he’s got me lined up to take this place over. The landowner’s agreed, it’s just a matter of time, Vera and me will be in the farmhouse and you can take over cottage number one, no problem at all, you’ll be my main man.’

  Webster nodded. ‘That sounds too good to be true, Norman. I might just take you up on that.’

  They ate their lunch out in the fields, cheese sandwiches in wedges so thick they could barely get their lips around them, and when they reached the yard again at the end of the day Rose and Vera were chatting either side of the cottage door.

  ‘Look who it is,’ said Rose, smiling at Webster. ‘Been out milking the sheep?’

  ‘Don’t be daft,’ said Webster. ‘You can help me milk the cows tomorrow though, if you like.’

  The next morning Webster squatted on a three-legged stool, squirting milk in thin streams into the galvanized metal pail between his knees. He sensed Rose behind him before he saw her. She squatted down beside him.

  ‘Let’s have a go,’ she said.

  She pushed and pulled the teat and the milk squirted into the pail and then Webster took over again and Rose followed him from cow to cow and when the last one was done she took Webster’s hand in hers and raised it to her face and breathed in the rich scent of warm milk and cows’ udders that he wore like an invisible farmer’s glove. She kissed his hand and squeezed it in hers and then pulled him towards her and kissed him hard on the mouth, a long lingering kiss as the cattle steamed in the cold air around them.

  ‘Let’s go up to the barn, Webster.’

  ‘I can’t, Rose. Norman will be looking for me soon. The work’s never done and he never stops and I can’t leave him to do it on his own.’

  ‘Brailes will help him.’

  ‘Brailes is old. He can’t do much heavy work now.’

  ‘Come on Webster. I won’t keep you all day …’

  ‘Really, I can’t.’

  ‘Tonight then?’

  ‘I’ll come and get you. You can’t walk here in the dark.’

  ‘Meet me at the top of my road at seven.’

  ‘Yes, Rose. Yes,’ he said, and she was gone, out of sight between the steaming cows.

  That night, they walked down to Pool Meadow and the water was still and dark and cold and the coots called to each other in the night, and Rose and Webster talked until the cold drove them back into town and suddenly it was too late to continue on down to Elm Tree Farm and instead they stood and spoke in whispers at her gate until she saw the light in the front room go off and she kissed him goodnight and slipped inside before her grandmother retired for the night.

  The next time they met they went straight to Elm Tree Farm and beneath the heavy quilt in Webster’s room they reacquainted each other with their bodies, this time without a veil of alcohol to deaden their memories, and when Webster lay alone in bed later that night his thoughts returned to Norman’s words and he knew that it was already too late, that he had stepped off the cliff and was falling and the only thing that lay between him and the valley bottom was the very thing that had compelled him to hurl himself off the cliff in the first place, and he no longer knew if she was still up on top or waiting to catch him down below, and he would not find out for sure until he hit the ground or his fall was arrested by gravity turning against itself and holding him in the air forever.

  But gravity can only be what gravity is, and Webster’s fall could not be slowed and the ground suddenly rushed up to meet him, as the ground rushes up in the end at those falling beneath parachutes spun only of hope, falling from planes struck up high in an exploding sky. And when Webster struck the ground all went black.

  ‘I’m sorry, Webster. That’s just the way it is. I told you from the start, that’s the way I am. Wild Rose. I told you, remember, I can’t be tamed. I told you, didn’t I?’

  ‘Yes, you told me.’

  ‘I was honest with you, Webster. You’re not the one and you never will be.’

  ‘Yes, Rose. You were honest with me. I know.’

  Within a month, Webster was gone.

  ‘What will you do?’ Norman had asked him.

  ‘I’m joining the Army.’

  ‘What the bloody hell for?’

  ‘It’ll keep me out of trouble, and there’ll be plenty to do. There’s going to be a war again soon, isn’t there? It’s obvious, he’s not going to stop is he, that Hitler bloke?’

  ‘For God’s sake, Webster, you don’t have to do that. It’s because of Rose, isn’t it?’

  ‘That’s a part of it.’

  ‘That’s all of it.’

  ‘Don’t blame her, Norman, it’s not her fault. She’s a good girl, really. Really she is.’

  By Easter, Brailes had gone too, retired to a new semi-detached house along the Burford Road where he spent his days watching the sparrows clustering in the forsythia at the end of his small garden and wondering where the last fifty years had gone.

  Norman and Vera moved into the farmhouse and Norman recruited a pair of keen young farmhands to help around the place and they occupied cottages numbers one and two, and Jacob came down regularly to spend time with Norman, and spring turned to summer and summer turned to autumn, life slipping by on rails just like it had before.

  SEPTEMBER 1939

  The brakes gripped the wheels, the train lurched and stopped, the doors crashed open as dark thunderclouds rumbled overhead, and the hum of several hundred voices floated over the station roof and the up the hill to where Alfred Arbuckle was munching swiftly through an apple he had plucked from a tree in his orchard.

  ‘They’ve arrived,’ he yelled through the open door
, and Elizabeth stuck her head out of the dormer window high above.

  ‘Gosh, it’s the longest train I’ve ever seen,’ she said. ‘There must be a whole army of them.’

  ‘Yes, more than yesterday, more than a thousand they say,’ replied Alfred.

  ‘Poor little blighters. I wonder what ours will be like.’

  ‘He’ll be fine. He’ll love it out here in the countryside, away from that filthy city.’ Alfred had been to London only once and had hastened back, swearing never to return. ‘I bet he’s never even seen a pig before.’

  Down at the station, in the shadow of the tweed mill, children squabbled about on the platform, others stood in tight solemn little sibling groups, and the Red Cross nurses moved among them like big-bosomed galleons in a restless sea. The evacuees were led up the hill into town clutching their gas masks in small cardboard boxes, and at the cinema they were passed through the bureaucratic machine that sent them away in little groups behind a nurse with a bar of chocolate in their pocket and a bundle of food under their arm. Billy Bampton hurried along in the wake of his brother and sisters as they were led out of town along West Street.

  ‘Come on Billy, you little tosser!’ called his brother Bobby. ‘Catch up, will you?’

  ‘Sod off Bobby!’ yelled Billy and he thrust his hands in his pockets and scowled at the passersby.

  ‘Yes, sod off Bobby,’ said their older sister, Helen. ‘You’re always picking on him.’

  Their other sister, Sarah, hurried back, grabbed Billy by the arm and pulled him along as he glowered at her.

  ‘I’m only trying to help you, you little bleeder,’ she muttered under her breath as they caught up with the others.

  Alfred and Elizabeth heard the little group of evacuees before they saw them, squabbling and bickering their way down the dirt track towards the house.