The Farm at the Edge of the World : A Novel (2016)

by Vaughan, Sarah

  The image – hazy around the edges, barely formed – shimmers, just out of her reach. A first love, cut tragically short – by the war and by her mother – will always be romanticised, after all. But, no. They loved each other with an intensity that would have carried them through the rockier parts of their marriage, she knows that. Theirs would have been a love affair that would have endured.

  She thinks of what Lucy had said. Why hadn’t he just come straight down to Cornwall to find her? Logistics? Or cautiousness? The stupidity of that decision – and its consequences – hits her in the solar plexus, hard.

  He had feared her mother: narrow-minded Evelyn, whose concern that her daughter’s options would be narrowed by an illegitimate baby, and the associated social stigma, had ensured she forced him away. And perhaps she, too, was to blame. She had written, but when she received no reply – Evelyn intercepting her letters, she later learned – she had stopped: too panicked by the pregnancy, at first, but also too proud, too unsure of his feelings. That elusive I love you is wonderful, yes, but what if he had told her in person, seventy years before?

  She turns back to the letter to reread a passage. Yes, here it is. What if she’d stumbled upon that sign he’d tried to give her? That he refers to here, in this letter, and that she must go to find now? A small heart low down on a stile. Hidden by overgrown tendrils of hedgerow, never seen, for the gate between the field and footpath has long gone and she has had no reason to clamber over stiles or inspect stile posts. And yet it has been waiting for her all these years.

  She strokes the letter again. It warms her, this knowledge of his love. Her heart pounds, stronger than it has for months, flooding her with a relief that takes her quite by surprise. The warmth extends, just a little, to Alice. Her hatred – so clear in the last few days – barely smoulders; a damp squib that will never reignite. She is grateful for what she has tried to do – even if her lie and her failure to put this right for so long still confound her. And yet, a month after the birth, she had tried to do so. She had written to Will, begging him to help find their child.

  In a few minutes, she will get up and thank her. Her visit has brought this letter. And Will’s love gleams: hard and bright and pure. Nothing can make up for the fact she will never meet her baby, but at least now she knows, for definite, that it cannot happen. There is no paper trail, no means of contact. No reason to hope.

  She has long known that her son was unlikely to find her, and the fear – intensely painful each time it struck her – was that he didn’t care. But Alice’s confession, somehow, eases that pain. He couldn’t have found her, for he had no way of knowing where to look. He might not even have known that he was adopted: that he had some different mother all along. And while that would have once made her feel utterly bleak, at least now there is some certainty, some – what would Lucy call it? Ah, yes. Some closure.

  She stands and, almost as a reflex, makes her way to the gate to look behind the farm, at the cliffs and the headland. No one walks towards the farm.

  He will not come. And if there is no way he will find her, there is no reason to keep going. She is not sure how much longer she can carry on. She doubts she will see many more winters. She has had a good innings. Eighty-eight; eighty-nine in January. By ninety, it will be time to stop, for she knows she will start to slow down. She saw it with her father, Joe, who died at ninety-one. Fine until his ninetieth birthday, and then a catalogue of problems sapped his body and his spirit. Worn out. Just like her.

  She will die not knowing if she has ever seen him, but knowing it is likely she hasn’t. For she is still sure she would recognise him, and that has never occurred.

  He might as well be dead. Perhaps he is. The thought – acknowledged many times – still chills her. And she will never know.

  Forty-three

  Now: 30 August 2014

  The house is far from prepossessing. A 1960s ex-council house, by the looks of it: bleak grey-rendered concrete, plastic windows, a stark front garden with clumps of lavender, scrubby grass, a few moss-covered stones. It stands just behind the main road leading into the town: one of four semis huddled together for comfort, braced against the wind gusting in from the Atlantic. The only houses on this thin slip of a side road. The only buildings this high for miles around.

  You wouldn’t choose to live here if you could avoid it, thinks Alice, taking in the rust bleeding from a water pipe and the satellite dishes fixed at jaunty angles. And then she turns and sees the view. The estuary gleams and, to the east, the moor glows russet-gold in the late summer sun. If you had a deep connection to this place, or were someone who had been brought up on the moor, or even if you were an outsider, someone who never felt they had belonged, who perhaps struggled with the fact they had been adopted – and her heart lifts at the thought of all these hypothetical possibilities – then perhaps you would welcome this isolation.

  She parks the car, aware of a twitching curtain, and makes her way to number 4 Corporation Terrace. The gate clicks behind her and her stomach tightens as she walks up the path. This is the fifth address belonging to a J Jose that she has visited. Her last hope before accepting he has moved out of Cornwall – for she knows she will not have the strength to search for him elsewhere. The nausea has begun, and she is tired, so very tired, now. Ready to return home tomorrow. Lucy will carry on the search, but she will have to give up if this JS Jose is not the Jeremiah she has been searching for. Is not Will and Maggie’s son.

  She waits outside the uPVC front door, listening for any evidence that someone is inside. Just for a split-second, she considers leaving: for the thought that she will be met with a blank look – or worse, a youthful Jeremiah, a Jem or a Jez or Jezza – terrifies her. Better to retain some hope. To never know. But then she sees that a television set is on in the front room. And suddenly the blur of a figure is coming towards her through the frosted glass.

  The door is wrenched open and she is disorientated for a moment. ‘Oh, it’s you!’ she says, for this face is familiar. She stares at it, befuddled.

  But something isn’t right. ‘I was looking for a Jeremiah Jose,’ she begins. ‘But I must have the wrong address.’

  ‘No one’s called me that for quite some time,’ he says; and she sees now that they are not Will’s eyes – his eyes if he had ever managed to reach seventy – but her own and those of her father, William. There is a hint of Will in his cheekbones, and of Annie in the breadth of his forehead.

  ‘Bit of a mouthful, isn’t it? Jeremiah? Only used by my late mother when I was in trouble – or now by the council when they’re wanting money. I use my middle name. Have done ever since I was old enough to make a fuss.’

  He keeps talking: a deep voice with a lovely Cornish lilt that reminds her of Uncle Joe’s. There’s a touch of Maggie’s father in him, too, in the breadth of his shoulders and the weathered tan of his skin. And a little of Will, in the thickness of his hair. Nothing distinctly of Maggie and, thankfully, no hint of Evelyn.

  She watches, piecing fragments of his relatives together, finding evidence of his parentage. Just lapping him up, drinking him in. ‘I’m sorry,’ she says, for he seems to have stopped talking and is staring back at her, a look of concern on his face.

  He smiles, and she realises that she might have been behaving in a way that was unsettling. He cannot know that the last time they met he was a newborn baby, held tightly in her arms.

  ‘I just thought you looked a little shaken, my dear. Or perhaps it was my fault, gassing on as usual. Now. How can I help?’

  Forty-four

  Now: 31 August 2014, Cornwall

  Alice looks around the neat, whitewashed bedroom to check that it is empty. It is as bare as when she arrived on 1 September, 1939, the day of their evacuation. Nearly three quarters of a century ago.

  She is all packed now: roll-along suitcase and rucksack waiting by the door for the taxi; a flask of coffee for the journey; her copy of Far from the Madding Crowd, to be given to Lucy, left
behind. It is time to go home. Coming here was such a wonderful thing to do, and though she could never describe it as easy, she knows that when she dies, it will be with a clearer conscience. No longer ravaged by painful memories. She could not have done more.

  Of course, she will always feel a twinge of guilt for confirming Evelyn’s suspicions. For a moment, she is back in the stifling scullery, with its cloying smell of wet apple, as Joanna peeled and quartered the fruit for a pie. It was the day Maggie returned to Bodmin; the evening after she had glimpsed her and Will, and she had pushed the maid to tell her the facts of life. ‘Think of the cow and the bull; or the ram and ewe tupping,’ Joanna had said, her eyes widening, her mouth a dark red cavern. ‘Well, humans are the same.’

  She had only watched them briefly in the barn, had run away almost as soon as she realised what she was seeing, feet whipping over the cobbles, heart thudding with fear. But she had seen enough. Her panic rose up in the scullery, and when Evelyn, catching her in the yard moments later, had asked what was wrong – was it something to do with Maggie? – she had nodded, in relief.

  ‘And my brother,’ she had blurted out.

  Aunt Evelyn’s forehead had creased. ‘Will? What about him?’

  Alice had shut up then, but it seemed she had said enough.

  She must not obsess about that now. Better to try and relax before her journey. She settles herself on the bench and feels the morning sun on her face.

  Here, if she looks around, she can see the parts of the farm she always loved: the beach, with its infinite rock pools; the fields, where she adopted her wild rabbit; the dunes, where, to the endless song of the skylarks, they had played hide-and-seek. She can hear them now; an antiphony, the melody picked up and flung back from one to another, as they mark their territory or – and she knows she is being fanciful – as they proclaim their joy at the extreme beauty of this place.

  And then she does what she always avoids when sitting here: she turns to look back at the moor. The weather really does change everything. It glows, today, almost luminous: as different to the bleak landscape of her memory as the becalmed estuary is to the Atlantic churned by a storm. The brilliant sunshine makes the hills benign; softens their colours. And the whole is framed by the tendrils of a hedgerow, burgeoning in late summer with unripe blackberries, rosehips and the dulled black marbles of sloes.

  She will be back in Fulham long before these berries are ripe. And that is as it should be. There is a nip to the evening air now: autumn inching nearer, the summer drawing to a close. She needs to be in London, for she was sick again this morning, and she is so very weary that even getting dressed – let alone hauling herself across the country – seems to be an effort. She needs to be near a hospital and her sons, Ian and Rob. Perhaps it is time to be honest. Time to admit that she is not so independent. That she needs them, after all.

  Maggie sits underneath the crab apple. Alice is going this morning, and she had told her to sit here, as usual. Just stay there and relax, she had said. And please; don’t get up.

  She is irritable. She has better things to do with her day than just wait on a whim of Alice’s. Does she want to be waved off? Good Lord. Perhaps she hankers after a more loving farewell than the last one she gave her. She does not want to do anything like hug. She is deeply grateful for her for bringing Will’s letter, and for wanting to make amends, she told her as much earlier, but, really, there is no need to wallow in sentiment.

  She will wait another five minutes and then she must get on. She has promised to do the baking today, so that Lucy can take delivery of the new ice cream maker and help Tom to install it. The farm is changing – diversifying – and all for the better, it seems. She looks up, watching the apples that hang heavy now, streaked with red. As a girl, she always loved autumn: season of mists and mellow fruitfulness and all that. But the end of August and beginning of September has long been tinged with the memory of Will going. She last saw him on 29 August, 1943: seventy-one years ago.

  Restless, she leans forwards and pushes herself up. As she does so, she sees a familiar figure cycling down the track towards her. A flash of Royal Mail red, and, beneath that, in his incongruous shorts, those tanned, wiry legs.

  His tyres skid to a halt, swerving on stones, kicking up dust. He looks slightly unsteady as he jumps off and rights the bike, so overladen it almost topples. Then, leaning it against the wall, he pushes open the gate.

  ‘Hello, Sam,’ she calls, surprised at the click of the latch, for the postman usually goes round to the kitchen at the back to hand over any letters. ‘That’s kind of you, but I was just getting up to start working. Really, there’s no need.’

  He is walking towards her quite deliberately, and he is smiling. A tentative smile that broadens, as he gets nearer, until it can only be described as filled with joy.

  ‘Hello,’ he says, and his voice is more diffident than usual. ‘I’ve been looking for you for a very long time.’

  Forty-five

  Then: 30 June 1944

  Will started a second sheet of paper. He couldn’t waste another piece, for this was filched from his mother, and yet the first attempt – written as soon as he had ripped open the letter from Alice – just hadn’t been right.

  He had had all night to think about it: his mind whirring with what Maggie had gone through in the last ten months – and with an endless ribbon of possibilities streaming into the future. His body ached with tiredness, though he felt clear-headed. Dawn broke, pale grey creeping under the edge of his blackout curtain, and he found he had barely slept at all.

  It was six now, and he had half an hour to write this before he had to get up for his last day of work before heading off to the training battalion. Thirty minutes in which to convince Maggie that he loved her, and that he wanted to make things right. Trouble was, he had never found writing that easy: had always been more of a practical than a wordy type. He had tried to be poetic once before. ‘Delicious danger?’ she had said with a wrinkle of her nose. So, after that, he had stuck to actions. And there could have been no doubting his feelings, or so he’d thought.

  He sucked the end of his fountain pen, barely used, but a present the first Christmas he arrived at the Retallicks’. Chosen by Evelyn, who had said everyone should have aspirations, even if they were going to leave school at fourteen.

  Her aspirations didn’t extend to him loving her daughter. He shuts out her face: those bullet eyes that bore into him when she had screamed at him. But he hadn’t done it to spite them. Loving Maggie was inevitable: as likely as a January frost or a gale-force wind ripping leaves from the trees.

  He should put all this down, shouldn’t he? For this is what he was never able to tell her, and his tongue-tied inadequacy strikes him hard. He had felt it when he had chiselled that heart, low down on the stile leading to the beach, and scratched their initials to try to mark his feelings. He had done it the day after they first kissed, and wished he had made it bigger, bolder, less apologetic now.

  He closes his eyes and suddenly he is back there, holding her in the sand dunes; listening to the sound of her breathing; smelling her sweet, soft hair crushed against his mouth. His arms are tight around her, and he can feel her breasts pushing against him, warm and firm. She looks up and smiles at him, then plants a kiss, her mouth open and inviting. A skylark chatters high up above them – a full-throated sound that eddies and whirls in one continuous, joyous loop – and he gulps down a bubble of laughter. And suddenly he knows what to write:

  London June 30th 1944

  Dear Maggie,

  Alice has written to tell me about the baby. I don’t know what to say except that I want to try to make things right, to be with you, if you will still have me and try to find our son.

  I know we are young but I am eighteen now. Old enough to fight. And, I love you. There, I have said it, the thing I couldn’t say all those times, when we kissed, or that last time in the hay barn. I think I have always done so: right from the start when you
chased me over the sand, the day after we arrived. Or, at least, from the next summer when you taught me to swim and I was such a poor sport.

  I’m embarrassed now. I’ve never written a letter like this before and I hope I’ll never have to again. But I want you to know that I didn’t forget you, or pass you over for someone else. I wrote, though I don’t suppose any of my letters got through to you. And I drew a small heart with our initials, low down on the gatepost by the stile leading from the field to the beach. You should be able to find it. I didn’t make it too big in case I embarrassed you, or if you didn’t want it, but it should be there, all right.

  I don’t know if this will reach you and I only hope that if your mother opens it she can find it in her heart to give it to you. The bombing here has made me realise that life is fragile and if people find happiness, like I know we did, they should grab it with both hands.

  I have never stopped thinking of you. Do you remember that swim when we first kissed – and how we felt? Or when we leaned against the storm, hanging out of your window? Delicious danger we said and, yes, it felt like that at the time.

  I’m starting training in Yorkshire the day after tomorrow and I’m sure real danger won’t feel like that. It doesn’t when there are doodlebugs overhead or I’m running down to the underground for shelter. Do you know what I think of then? Us – in the cornfields, in the barn, in the sand dunes – with those skylarks singing their little hearts out; celebrating us, or that’s what it felt like. That’s what I think of then.

  I must rush to get this in the post. I do not know if you will want me, after everything you have gone through, but I do hope you believe what I say.

  You can reply via the barracks at Wakefield – address below. You may never want to speak to me again, but please let me know that you’ve received this so that I can hope that you might believe me.