‘Nothing’s wrong.’ Evelyn came forward to take the small suitcase. ‘But just come through here a minute.’ She guided Maggie by the elbow, leading her back into the hallway and through to the parlour at the front of the house.
‘You’re making me nervous. Has someone died?’ The words spilled out. Her father’s shotgun, used to kill badgers and foxes, burst unaccountably into her mind.
‘No one’s died.’ Her mother remained as calm and controlled as usual.
‘Then what?’
‘Sit down for a moment, Margaret.’ Her mother gestured to a mahogany dining chair and, ramrod-straight, lowered herself into a second.
Margaret. She must know, of course she knew. So Alice had seen them. Her deepest fear erupted into life. All week, she had ricocheted between the hope that she had imagined that rustle, and the cold, hard certainty that they had been spotted and would be exposed. She had slept badly, fretting about what might be said, what might occur, when she got back to the farmhouse, agonising as she had tried to hold herself tight in the stark bedroom at Aunt Edith’s home.
And yet her mother seemed nervous rather than angry, her fingers twisting her wedding band round and round as if she dreaded speaking to her daughter. Maggie found that she was shaking, her heart battering against her chest so loudly she feared her mother would hear.
Time stretched. The grandfather clock in the corner of the room marked out the seconds between them, demarcating the silence, and she found that she was willing her mother to speak.
Eventually, Evelyn gave a small cough. ‘Will has gone to work at another farm the other side of Bodmin. It will give him experience at a much larger dairy farm. Alice is understandably distressed, but it’s an excellent apprenticeship: a wonderful opportunity for any young man.’
The words swirled around her: Will … apprenticeship … Bodmin.
‘Which farm? And why’s he gone already?’ Her voice, small and incredulous, grew into a near wail as the immediate tragedy struck her. ‘But I haven’t even said goodbye!’
‘Well.’ Her mother looked discomfited. ‘He went quickly because they needed someone as soon as possible. Your father took him on Wednesday. As to which farm it is, we think it’s for the best that you don’t know.’
Evelyn looked at her, grey eyes grave and unflinching. Maggie looked back, hating her mother at that moment.
‘I don’t know why you’d think that,’ she said, her voice unnaturally prim, and strangled.
‘Oh,’ said her mother. ‘I think you do.’
She waited for Evelyn to ask how long it had gone on – or how involved they had been. Anything that would let her gauge how much Alice had seen. But her mother was silent. Maggie looked down at her hands; the nails usually kept blunt and neat, but this week bitten down to the quick.
Her mother hadn’t quite finished though.
‘I was young once, you know,’ she said, and her voice softened and was suddenly tinged with sadness. ‘And I, too, fell in love.’
‘With Father?’
‘Not with your father, no.’ She batted the idea away like a fly. ‘With his younger brother, Isaac. We were very young, but we were going to be married. Then he was killed. August the third, 1918. The second battle of the Marne.
‘Your father is a good man. The elder brother, saved from being called up because of the farm. He took care of me. Married me so that I wasn’t left a spinster. And I will always be grateful to him for that.’
She paused, and Maggie waited, unsettled by the news of this dead love and the fact that her mother might have loved someone apart from her father; wondering at her mother’s hesitation. The implicit ‘but’.
‘Do you still think of him?’ she ventured, after a while.
But Evelyn wouldn’t be drawn and shook her head. ‘Let’s just say that your first love will always be special. Will always seem romantic. Perhaps even more so if it’s cut short, as mine was.’
‘Then why?’ Maggie couldn’t begin to express her sense of injustice. Why would her mother do this – stop her experiencing this intense, first, true love – if she understood how she might feel?
‘Because first love doesn’t last. It isn’t real,’ Evelyn said, emphatic. ‘It changes, wanes – just like the passing of the summer. It’s impermanent. Fragile. And so I won’t let you throw away all the opportunities you have, that I never had, because of it.
‘Besides which, there’s Edward.’ Her voice hardened and became more pragmatic. ‘You’re supposed to have an understanding with him. And he’s a good man. Bright and with fine prospects. What would happen if he heard that you had affections for someone else, while he was away?’
‘I don’t think that’s very likely. He’s somewhere in North Africa.’ It was hard not to sound sullen. She glanced at her mother. Would she write and tell him, or inform his father, her cousin? That would be vindictive and would hardly reflect well on Evelyn if it was known her daughter had behaved in this way.
The thought must have occurred to her mother.
‘Well, I suppose it would hardly help his morale,’ she sniffed. ‘We’ll say no more about it. But you are absolutely forbidden to try to contact Will in any way.’
She put her hands on either side of her daughter’s upper arms and looked her straight in the eye: pinioning her, so that she was sure that she listened. Their moment of confidence was finished. She was back to being authoritarian, even severe.
‘We’ve nipped this in the bud and we’ll say no more about it. Or about this romantic … nonsense.’ She gave an emphatic sniff. ‘You’ve been a very lucky girl,’ she added, with a nod of dismissal. ‘A very lucky girl indeed.’
Maggie felt her insides flip; a sharp twist of the gut. Lucky? Luck? What was the woman going on about? She stared at her, wondering how she could think – let alone say – such a thing. He was her world, her golden boy. As much a part of Skylark as James or Joanna. Or so she had thought. And though she had feared that they had been discovered, still she had clung to the certainty that she would see him this weekend. That she would taste him, touch him. Excitement at the prospect had jostled with fear and emerged triumphant: bright and optimistic and clear.
Her breath began to come out in short, light gasps, fluttering from her lips, tasting of panic; and the parlour seemed to press upon her: the smell of the woodsmoke, the dark of the furniture, the low-slung ceiling with its heavy oak beams. She ran into the gloom of the hall, the tears coming as she trod on each cool flagstone, and raced up the shallow, worn stairs to her bed.
The anger came properly the next morning. Long after the shuddering sobs that made her retch, then collapse, exhausted. After a fitful, fractious sleep.
At first, she felt hollowed out. Her eyes were tender from all the crying, her skin dehydrated. I cannot cry any more, she thought, looking at her blotched nose and the raw, puffy redness. I do not have the energy.
She curled up at the window and watched Arthur chain harrowing in the closest field, his legs criss-crossing the stubble, up and down, back and forth, and imagined Will doing it, as he had last year. The September sun would light the copper in his hair, and the curve of his cheekbones, and his whole body would move as he gave himself up to the rhythm of the harrowing. If man could be at one with nature – as the Romantic poets kept suggesting he should be – then Will had managed it.
She opened her eyes. The mirage dissolved. Of course he wasn’t there – and never would be. And yet the farm would carry on just the same. Through wind, rain, sleet and high summer, the farming year would spin – the only variation which crop was sown in which field and when. The milking would continue twice a day, and the breeding. The animals would be born, and the crops grow in an endless cycle of creation and renewal. And yet nothing would ever be the same.
‘He’s gone,’ she wanted to rail, at Arthur, her father and her mother. ‘He’s gone: and nothing else matters. How can you carry on as usual? How can you just get on with things?’
But of
course she didn’t. She gnawed away at a cuticle, ripping it from the side of her nail and tasting blood, salty and sweet. Less than a week ago, she had felt such happiness and excitement. And now she knew she would never be happy again. Self-righteousness segued into a white-hot anger. Her mother was wrong. This wasn’t a fragile, impermanent love. It was hard and durable: a pure, deep love her mother couldn’t begin to understand.
The knock was tentative. Alice popped her head round the doorway.
‘Go away.’ Maggie turned back to the window, wanting to be left alone.
‘I wondered if you wanted a cup of tea? You didn’t come down to breakfast.’
Alice was carrying a tray with a cup and saucer, and a vase with three sprigs of lavender in it.
‘I’m not thirsty.’
Still she hovered.
‘I’ll just leave it on your chest of drawers,’ she said.
Maggie watched as she traipsed across the room. Her hand trembled as she transferred the cup and saucer and she slopped a bit of tea.
‘I’ll mop it up.’ Head bowed, she dabbed at it with her hankie.
Her meekness niggled. Why couldn’t she just leave her alone? She watched her, fussing and bowing, and all the thoughts she had tried to suppress as unfeeling and unreasonable, suddenly tumbled out of her in one great torrent of hate.
‘Why did you do it, Alice?’
‘Do what?’ She half-jumped.
‘Tell my mother about me and Will?’
‘It wasn’t like that,’ Alice blurted. ‘Really, it wasn’t. I didn’t mean to. Honest.’
‘So you did tell her!’ Maggie was triumphant at having winkled out a confession. ‘How petty. How spiteful!’
It was Alice who had caused Will to be sent away – and she could take all the blame.
‘Why didn’t you come to talk to us? Ask us what was going on? We would have told you. We love each other, you see!’ Her voice broke a little here, for Will had never said that, had he? ‘It was love. Nothing to be ashamed of. And now you’ve gone and ruined everything!’
‘I didn’t say anything …’ The younger girl was crying now: great sobs that racked her body. ‘I didn’t mean to … and I didn’t say what I’d seen in the barn … what you were doing.’
‘You saw us?’
‘Just a little bit.’ She reddened. ‘I didn’t mean to spy: I came looking for you. I wouldn’t tell anyone about that. I wouldn’t know what to say!’
‘You must have said something.’
‘Auntie Evelyn asked why I was upset and I said … I said …’ Alice’s sobs were so loud she was incoherent. ‘She tricked me … I didn’t mean to say anything … but she asked and I said I’d seen you kissing …’
‘Just kissing?’
Alice sniffed and nodded, emphatic.
Maggie looked at her coldly, not entirely sure she could trust what she’d said.
‘Well, you did enough damage.’
The words struck Alice as if they were drops of acid.
‘I didn’t mean …’
‘I don’t care what you meant! Get out!’ she shouted. ‘I don’t want to see you and I don’t want to listen to your apologies. Will has gone and you caused it! Do you hear?’
The girl stood there, wiping the tears away with the back of her sleeve, snivelling loudly. And yet there was still something she wanted to say.
‘What is it?’ Maggie’s words were strung out like stones, cold and hard.
‘It’s not just you!’ Alice was suddenly defiant. ‘He’s my brother and I miss him too!’
Twenty-four
Then: 28 October 1943, Cornwall
Late October and the farm basked in the glow of an Indian summer. The blackberries wizened in the hedgerows, but the land still clung to its warmth.
The ewes were being tupped for spring lambs. Those that had been covered were branded with the mustard-coloured dye dipped on the ram’s stomach. As the week went on, more and more fleeces became discoloured until they matched the gorse fringing the cliff path: a sea of cream with mustard spots. After lambing, these blotches would change to signal the number of lambs. The ewes were marked whatever they did, so that her father knew exactly how fertile they were and exactly when they had been covered. There was nothing private in the life of a ewe.
Maggie, watching the sheep, wondered if her own secrets would soon be made this public. For something was happening inside her body, she was almost sure. A baby was growing there, beneath her ribs. There was no evidence yet – her stomach didn’t dome, her breasts weren’t full – but she had missed two periods, and she felt nauseous the whole time, as she had when she’d gone out fishing. A new life seemed to be growing: future – unwelcome – proof of the fecundity of the farm.
She didn’t know for sure, of course she didn’t. There was no one to ask and no way of checking. Perhaps if she limited the amount she ate, it wouldn’t show for a while. At school, she could keep her blazer on at all times and, on the farm, wear overalls over a thick jumper to hide any change. But her mother was no fool. Come the spring, and the lambing, her belly would be tight as a ball, and it would be impossible to hide.
She felt sick at the very thought. If she were growing a baby, what would she do with it? What happened to babies with no fathers, or girls with no husbands? Wicked girls, sinful girls. They were sent away to ‘relatives’ for two or three months; or to the mother and baby home, Rosemundy House, down at St Agnes, where they could be squirrelled away until they gave up their baby for adoption. She only knew this from Joanna. Eileen Brooke was being sent there, she said, because of what she’d done with one of the Polish pilots up at Davidstow. Maggie had thought her absolutely wicked, but it seemed she was no different from her at all.
She wouldn’t be like Eileen, though: she wouldn’t be sent to the home – however well-meaning the ladies of the Cornwall Social and Moral Welfare Association. However determined her mother. She would have her child here, and present it to her parents as a grandchild. Faced with such a sweet offering – for the baby would be beautiful, she decided, a prettier version of herself, and she had looked angelic as an infant – then, surely, they wouldn’t force her to give it away?
She thought of what happened to unwanted animals. The kittens from the last litter, drowned in a sack: no mercy shown, with a pack of cats already. The deformed lambs, or the cows, like Clover, who broke their bones. Then there were the pests: the rabbits, the badgers, the magpies. The gun, the water butt, or the snare – all dealt with the sick, the vulnerable, the pestilent and the surplus. There was no room for sentimentality on the farm.
Perhaps she could find Will, on this unknown farm the other side of Bodmin. But, even if she could somehow discover it, how could he help? He was, she saw it now, as much of a child as her. A farm boy. Seventeen, eighteen in June. Expected to do the work of a man, but not paid the wage of one. Her beautiful boy, with the body of a man, and all of the passion, but with none of the power.
She saw him now: his eyes darkening as he pulled her to him then softening as he traced her cheek with his finger. The way he had gripped her as he moved inside her; his mouth skimming her skin, planting deep hot kisses on her mouth, her neck, her breasts.
He had never told her that he loved her. The thought stung, though she knew – when he’d caught her in the cave, when he had held her in the barn – that he had felt something. But what did he feel now? Without their daily contact, the oxygen of sight and touch, had his feelings died away? Perhaps his was a fragile, impermanent love of the type her mother had talked of. He must have known that she wouldn’t be told where he was, that she couldn’t contact him if she wanted to, but why hadn’t he written? For, if he’d wanted to send her a message, had wanted to reassure her, then he could find a way to do so, surely?
She had lost him, as simple as that. Perhaps this new farmer had a daughter, or some hearty, enthusiastic Land Girl, with far more experience and fabulous breasts.
He was only twenty odd miles
away, but she had lost him as clearly as if he were in North Africa fighting alongside Edward.
But she could not bear to lose his baby.
Twenty-five
Now: 3 August 2014, Cornwall
Judith has started on the baking: hands coated in flour, cheeks turning pink as she rounds the dough, rolls it, then gently presses the cutters down.
Lucy watches a moment, trying to imagine her pain at her husband’s death and then when her daughter stayed away, only flitting back rarely. Did it feel like a double rejection? Thank God Tom – more clear-sighted and perceptive – had been there for her.
Eventually, her mother looks up.
‘Are you all right, my love?’ She wipes her hands on her apron.
Lucy nods and takes one floury hand in hers.
‘Things will work out in the end,’ says her mother, her forehead creasing at her daughter’s evident distress. ‘Whatever happens with Matt or your work, in a couple of years you’ll look back at this period and you won’t feel the pain you’re experiencing at the moment: or, at least, you’ll remember just a shadow of it. I promise it will stop hurting quite so much.’
Lucy smiles. Her throat constricts and she can feel tears forming, not at the thought of the failure of her marriage and career, but at her failure as a daughter. Judith knows what she is talking about. Her eyes prick, hot and wet.
‘I’m sorry, Mum. For not understanding – and for not being here for you.’
‘What are you talking about?’ Judith is bemused – and then a rush of blood floods up her neck.
‘About Dad. Not knowing that he’d killed himself.’ Her mother flinches. ‘Tom told me earlier. I should have guessed the truth. I might have done – if I’d come and attended the inquest. If I hadn’t tried to bury my head in the sand and been so self-absorbed.’
The words tumble out now as she tries to make sense of her behaviour. ‘I believed the coroner’s verdict because I wanted to – but I should have realised. Especially as it never quite added up to me. I feel such a child: carrying on believing what I wanted to believe while you and Tom knew the truth and felt you couldn’t share it. I was so protected while you had so much to bear: not just his suicide but the practical responsibility for the farm and all this debt.’
The Farm at the Edge of the World : A Novel (2016) Page 16