He stroked her nipple, then lowered his head and began to suck. She shifted against him and a wave of shivers ran across her breasts. His breath was hot and fast now, the kisses more furious. She was getting hot – unbearably hot – and, to her embarrassment, there was wetness between her legs. His hand, which had been circling her inner thigh, dipped between them. She gasped, and kissed his neck savagely, mortified at what he must think of her. He touched her again, and she shoved his hand away.
‘Sorry.’ He looked crestfallen.
‘No. I just …’ How to explain that she was scared of the intensity of her feelings? That she sensed she was teetering: behind her, the safety of a cornfield; beyond, the exhilaration – and danger – of the cliffs.
He resumed kissing her neck, lips closed and penitent.
‘It’s all right.’ She pulled him close, feeling the heft of him. One hand clutched his shoulders, the other stroked his thick, sea-scented hair. Her body pulsed, strange sensations running up through her stomach and down the length of her legs.
‘Kiss me.’ His voice was fierce as he looked at her and pulled her towards him, his tongue slipping over hers, his mouth hard and urgent.
But it was no good. Shame and confusion were pressing in.
‘We can’t. We need to stop. We’ve been too long. Alice.’ She broke away.
‘She’ll be all right.’
‘No. Really. We have to stop now.’ She sounded shrill. It felt terribly wrong, them deceiving his sister. And she ran from the cave.
The beach was empty. The rock pools untended: no figure bent over them, peering through the fronds of seaweed to their sand-strewn depths. She knew something was wrong even as the tide began to lick her toes and she saw that it had risen to knee-height, at the foot of the cliffs leading to the second cave: the one that had to be reached by clambering up to it. The one she should never have mentioned to Alice.
‘Alice.’ She tried to keep calm as she ran towards the pools, in the hope that she was hidden behind a rock, that she hadn’t seen her. But panic rapidly crept in. ‘Alice? Alice!’ Her voice escalated, veering from a question to a cry, as she ran towards the tide. Above her, the pale of the sky was seeping away. It was half eight, she reckoned; they had an hour and a half before dusk switched to darkness. They needed to find her before night fell properly.
She began wading through the water, still calling, her voice increasingly desperate.
‘What is it? Where’s she gone?’ Will, flushed and bewildered, emerged from the cave.
‘She’s not at the pools. She’s gone missing. Unless she’s hiding?’
She had a sudden inkling that Alice might be looking down on her, observing – enjoying, even – her panic. She remembered those eyes, wide, open, appraising her; the sense that Alice was less naïve than she had assumed and might have guessed that something was going on between them. Was this her idea of a joke, or a means of punishing them? Perhaps she was lying behind a hillock of grass, watching now? Keep calm, don’t act perturbed. And yet she couldn’t help but scan the cliffs looking for a flash of a patterned skirt or an Arran jumper, a nut-brown face, a shock of mousey hair.
‘Alice,’ she called up. ‘Please. Please, if you’re hiding, come out. We won’t be cross but it’s not funny.’
Nothing.
A guillemot, whistling shrilly, drifted overhead.
The beach was eerie in its emptiness: the trawlers out, no pilots above them. A pale crescent of moon, thin as a fingernail paring, peeped through the blue; a warning that dusk was near.
There was nothing for it. She began to wade out properly, the water lapping her knees now, so that she had to tuck her skirt up into her knickers. She pushed forwards, focusing on the rocks below the second cave.
‘Do you think she’s really there?’ Will had joined her, surging through the water to catch up. His face, so blissfully relaxed, so loving just a few moments ago, was tense.
‘I don’t know. I don’t know.’ Her agitation segued into a near-whimper. If Alice were lost, or worse, it was her fault. Her parents would never forgive her. She stumbled as she tried to run against the now choppy water, and the chill clarified her thinking. ‘That’s where I’d have gone,’ she said.
The sea had reached her waist by the time they came to the cliff leading to the second cave. A wave picked her up and toppled her against the rocks so that her shin was grazed by the granite and bled crimson red. She clambered up, graze stinging, feet pricking on the barnacles as she tried to avoid the slippery, mossy seaweed that could send you crashing down. Keep low, keep dry, she told herself as she bent almost double, and yet she had to keep looking upwards. ‘Alice … Alice?’ Her voice quavered, almost breaking, and she realised she no longer expected a reply.
And then, she heard it. A definite wail, filled with distress and a desperation to be heard.
‘She’s here!’ Will bounded in front of her to reach the ledge at the lip of the cave.
‘Is she hurt?’ Her heart banged against her ribs as she clambered, unconcerned about the stabbing barnacles: just desperate to put everything right.
‘Just frightened, I think.’ He crouched down and the whimper increased to a heartfelt cry of relief, clotted with sobbing. ‘I thought you’d never find me,’ Alice seemed to be trying to say.
Maggie made it to the cave’s entrance and peered down. Alice was resting on a shelf at the entrance to the cave, clinging to her brother.
‘I couldn’t get down,’ she cried, her face a pale, grime-streaked oval. ‘I couldn’t work out which bits to stand on – and then I couldn’t see how to get back down again. Then the tide came in.’ She gulped back another sob. ‘I thought I’d be safe if I just stayed here, but then the sea got choppier – and then I thought you’d forgotten me.’
‘We weren’t that long.’ Now that Alice had been found, safe, Maggie felt she had to defend herself.
‘Yes, you were. You were ages. Much longer than you said you’d be.’ Her eyes bored into her, accusatory.
‘We weren’t long. Honest.’ Will looked at his sister directly. ‘Five minutes at most – then we came to look for you. You must have been pretty determined to get here.’
Her snivels began to subside and she started to calm down as he put his arms round her, stroking her hair and soothing her, as his mother must have once done to him. He was tender: his manner as gentle as when he rescued abandoned chicks and put them in the warming drawer of the Aga, or bottle-fed lambs disowned by their mothers. As loving as when he’d stroked her cheek.
I love him, thought Maggie. The realisation surged through her, filling her entirely, for there had never been any doubt of it. I love you, Will, she wanted to say. He caught her eye, but the smile he gave was devoid of complicity or sexual intent – and filled purely with relief at having found his sister. Then he looked at the water, now smashing against the rocks, beneath.
The waves were waist high now, or higher. They must head back or risk scrambling up the cliff towards the coast path, trusting that Alice wouldn’t panic when told to stretch just a little further to a foothold, however precarious it seemed.
The younger girl was still quivering, her face flushed and beaded with sweat, her breath fluttering – and Maggie realised the climb wasn’t worth risking.
Will seemed to have read her mind.
‘If we head back now, you can swim on my back for the first bit and then I can carry you,’ he promised his sister.
‘But the waves!’
‘It’s that or the cliffs.’
Alice looked up and her face darkened as she took in the slivers of slate that had fallen like scree.
‘The sea?’
She looked into its dark green-grey waters, then nodded, mutely.
Her brother took her hand and they inched their way down, her eyes flitting to the sea then darting back to the rocks, as if she feared they would shift and splinter beneath her feet.
Maggie followed, painfully aware that, though they had
found Alice just in time to return home safely, their relief might be short-lived. The flash of resentment on Alice’s face – eyes bugging, unblinking – and the explanation they would have to give her mother hinted at further troubles ahead.
Twenty-one
Then: 28 August 1943, Cornwall
Maggie looked around the heaving kitchen table, circled by everyone who was most important to her, and felt happiness flood her bones.
She was going back to Bodmin for her final school year tomorrow, and she wanted to catch hold of this memory: to remember it when life at Aunt Edith’s was tedious, when her schoolwork was tricky, or when she felt a sharp pang of homesickness.
She watched her parents, now. Her mother, contented for once, quietly proud that she had put on such a good feast for her family and household; her father at his most jocular, relief that it had been such a good harvest evident in every gesture – from his back-slapping Arthur to his generous servings of food.
There had been little scolding when she and Will had brought back a subdued Alice from their cave expedition, ten days ago. Their mother had been preoccupied with news that a neighbour’s son had died, out in Sicily. Mrs Tippett had been sobbing in their kitchen when they’d slipped back, and her anguish meant that their childish escapade went relatively unnoticed. ‘How did you get quite so wet?’ Evelyn had asked, distracted, the next morning. ‘I slipped when we were paddling,’ Alice had said, ‘and Will grabbed me.’ Maggie had felt her breath ease out in a rush.
Alice smiled at her now, as she passed her the potatoes. The younger girl had been distinctly cool for a few days after their adventure, but in the last week had thawed towards her. It must have helped that she and Will had barely spoken since that night. He hadn’t come close, and she hadn’t sought him out. She knew that, if they touched, her joy would play across her face and their secret would be out in the open. It was as if they had an unspoken pact: we got away with it, then, but we can’t chance it, now.
Oh, but it was so hard not even to look at him, when she could feel his eyes on her; sense him diagonally opposite. She smiled at Arthur and, when he winked, focused on this celebratory harvest meal, instead. Though the cream, like the butter, was rationed, everything else spoke of plenty: the two roast chickens, freshly killed this morning; the tureens of runner beans and carrots; the piles of new potatoes, flecked with parsley and a scraping of butter to make them gleam. There was raised rabbit pie, the jelly glistening under the crust; soda bread; and, to wash it down, Cornish mead and home-made spruce – lemonade with added ginger. Beside her, Alice slurped at the sweet harvest drink.
For pudding there was blackberry and apple crumble, figgy duff, apple tart, or fat slabs of parkin. She and Alice had worked hard alongside Evelyn and Joanna, who now came in three times a week. They would have a feast, her mother said; and Maggie was touched that some of this was not just because there had been a good harvest but because it was her last supper. We wanted to give you a good sending-off, Evelyn had said, with an uncharacteristic peck on the cheek. She had looked at her proudly, and Maggie had felt the burden of expectation being placed on her this year.
She looked up to say something to her father, but caught Will’s eye and turned away abruptly. She couldn’t bear it. The thought of leaving without touching him one last time. His gaze burned into her as she passed the salt, served the veg, chatted to Alice, and all she could think of was tasting his lips, his tongue, his mouth; the saltiness of his neck after a day working in the sun.
‘Maggie?’ She couldn’t ignore him when he addressed her. ‘Please could I have the water?’
Her cheeks flushed as she passed the jug, and she wondered if he could read her mind.
She risked a tentative smile back, and his face broke into a beam, eyes lightening so that she realised he might be taking the lead from her and have wanted to approach her, all along. She smiled more broadly, hoping he might guess at the complex jumble of emotions swirling inside her: guilt, sorrow, hope, desire.
This time tomorrow, she would be back at Aunt Edith’s: safely out of touch or sight. Their glorious summer was fading: within a month, the air would be scented with woodsmoke, the mornings damp with mist. But like a bee sucking nectar from a flower, she wanted to eke out one last loving moment from this summer. And then she would bow to the inevitable and try not to think of him.
She didn’t know how she got through the meal. And then, after she and her mother had doled out more cups of tea, and cake for James’s wife, Ada, there was the washing-up and clearing away. Her father had got out his violin, and her mother – letting herself relax for once, for there was nothing to worry about now: the harvest was gathered in; her family had been well fed; her daughter was ready for school and was about to be off out of her hands – was persuaded to sit down at the piano and play with him. ‘I can’t remember anything. I haven’t played for months,’ she fussed, lifting the lid, and fumbling her way into a piece, fingers sliding over the keys and almost caressing them as she tried to remember. But, within a few minutes, she found her way in and, to Maggie’s surprise, began accompanying her father, the violin soaring, the piano rippling, as they played ‘A Nightingale Sang in Berkeley Square’.
Arthur and Will went off to check on the animals, and shortly afterwards, she wondered if she had left her cardigan in the barn. Her mother, distracted by a request from Ada and a compliment from her husband, only registered as she was leaving. ‘Will you just check you’ve secured the hens properly?’ she said.
Maggie nodded and slipped away from the music, the warmth, her parents at their best – everything she had known before now – and towards something more exciting and unsettling.
The barn was packed high with sheaves, and quiet except for scratchings in the corner. The moon was bright: within a week it would be as big and golden as a pumpkin. A real Harvest Moon.
She leaned against the straw and wondered if she was being presumptuous. Perhaps he wouldn’t guess that she would find a way to follow him, and his fear of being thrown off the farm would override everything else?
And then, there he was: the moon casting the lower half of his face in shadow, hiding his smile as he moved towards her.
‘All right?’ he asked her.
She didn’t answer, just drew him into an embrace. His lips were as firm and as soft as she’d remembered, his mouth just as sweet. She pulled him closer, desperate to feel the length of his body against hers; those arms tight around her, pulling her to him.
‘Come here.’ His voice was throaty and his eyes had darkened as he led her towards the back of the barn, the furthest corner. The straw rustled as they ran, almost stumbling in their haste.
She swallowed down a giggle.
‘Better be quiet.’
‘I know.’
‘Oh … I’ve missed you.’ It was all she ever seemed to say to him.
He pulled away, his eyes filled with a sudden tenderness that softened the passion. ‘Me too,’ he said.
And then his mouth was snaking down her neck, sending tiny ripples through her body, and one hand was caressing her breast. She leaned against him, feeling the heat of his body and the tautness of his muscles, as the shivers pulsed through her, light at first but gloriously there.
She ran a hand down his back and into the dip between his buttocks, and pulled him closer.
‘I love you,’ she whispered, as he kissed his way over her collarbone, peeling her blouse from her shoulders, struggling over a button before she helped him, smoothing away his embarrassment. Then he bent his head, took her nipple into his mouth, and sucked and teased.
They were grappling with each another now: him reaching up beneath her skirt and pulling her close, his fingers grabbing her bottom; her tugging his shirt up out of his trousers, feeling the leanness of his stomach, the definition of his muscles, the dip of his waist.
She stroked his chest: the tanned triangle and then the lily whiteness where he had been covered by a shirt for most of the s
ummer. She could feel herself pushing against him, as his fingers slipped beneath her knickers and stroked the most intimate part of her, and she felt quite shameless, wanting them to fit together like pieces of a jigsaw, even though she knew that this was what wicked girls did.
It didn’t matter, though, as he stroked the velvet skin at the top of her thighs then dipped his fingers between her legs. The war was jittering everything up, she told herself, as his fingers went deeper and she began to move against him. She gave a deep, grateful shiver as the ripples grew stronger, forcing all other thoughts away.
She buried her head in his neck, breathing him in, wanting to meld herself with him entirely. The ripples were rhythmic, regular, increasing in intensity. He kissed her nipple again, pulling it upwards with a light bite, and she was catching a wave of excitement that carried her higher and higher, the sensation almost unbearable, thrill mingling with fear.
Dangerous. That’s what he’d said it was. A delicious danger. Eyes closed, she reached down and let her fingers brush against the hardness at the front of his trousers. It strained against her and she heard his sharp intake of breath.
‘Look at me.’ His eyes were bright and questioning. ‘Is this all right?’ He was nudging against her now, emphatic and unapologetic, and she realised, with a shock, that he wanted to slip inside her.
She nodded and pulled him towards her, trying to convey that yes, of course it was. For how could it not be?
He paused, his face troubled. He looked so nervous. ‘I don’t want it to hurt you,’ he said.
‘Kiss me,’ she said. And as he traced a line of kisses from her breasts to her lips, his mouth light and tender, then heavy and hot, and as the kisses became increasingly passionate, she opened up to him.
She didn’t hear it until the very end; until after she had felt Will spasm inside her and she stood holding him. His body was soft and heavy, the force of the last minutes gone. He took her face in his hands and started to kiss her again, lazily, tenderly, softly, not hearing what she had and not seeming to care. But she moved away, alert as a cornered rabbit – and quivering like one.
The Farm at the Edge of the World : A Novel (2016) Page 14