‘Evening, son,’ said Dan. As he dealt with Jez, Doris and Christine carried out a conversation with their eyes. Neither wanted Jez in the house, and neither could have articulated quite why to Dan. It was girl stuff. Knowledge carried in the bones. Or the ovaries, perhaps.
‘Right you are, Jez!’ Dan waved him off, none the wiser about his womenfolk’s relief.
The dress was pinned. A pot of tea was brewed. Mother Cat browbeat a mouse in the scullery.
Christine, in an old pyjama top of her father’s, sat on the arm of his chair as he held forth about the new people over on Garlands Farm.
‘Two whole fields lying fallow.’ Dan was close to outrage. ‘No wheat, no barley, no nothing. Blatant disregard, Doris, blatant disregard for the new regulations. Talking about breeding horses when they should be growing food to put in our mouths.’
‘My mouth,’ suggested Christine, who had a bone to pick with Hitler about rationing.
‘Exactly, love,’ said Dan. ‘Lord knows it’s a last resort, but I may have to seize the farm. After all, they don’t own it, they only lease.’
‘Only? Like us, you mean, and your parents before us?’ Doris washed some striped crockery, laid it face down on a tea towel to dry, washed a pot, wiped a jug that had somehow acquired a crack behind her back. ‘Who told you all this? That Charlie Logan? You know he’s had his eye on Garlands for years?’
‘Oh.’ Dan’s mouth made a perfect circle.
Christine, leaning against her dad, said, ‘Mum, who’s Janet?’
Doris stopped wiping. The jug froze in her hand.
‘Is she pretty? I look like her, Grandma said.’
‘She did not.’ Doris slammed down the jug so hard another crack snaked across its base. ‘Don’t you tell fibs, Christine Archer!’
Off ran the child, suddenly sobbing, and almost tripping over Glen’s outstretched paws.
‘Doris.’ Dan sat up. ‘You know our Chrissie never tells lies.’
‘She has to learn,’ said Doris. That didn’t make sense; it was just something to say while Doris got a grip on herself.
She slammed the broken jug into the basin of water. She didn’t feel like explaining herself.
Dan lowered his voice. ‘And let’s be honest, your mum does mix folk up. Who is this Janet, anyway?’
‘She’s nobody, Dan. Drop it, will you?’ The handle of the jug came off in Doris’s hand and she squeezed her eyes shut. When she opened them there was no slumbering farmyard through the window, just the empty rectangle of the blackout curtain. ‘I’ve so much to do, and this blessed wedding isn’t helping.’
In her corner, Lisa twitched; Doris stiffened. Lisa was quiet, safe, but so often she was neither. Always, always in Doris’s peripheral vision, like a spirit in an M. R. James story. ‘Sometimes, Dan, it, well, it gets a bit much.’ She leaned on her hands. The water was slightly too hot; that helped.
‘You keep going, old girl, just like you always do.’ Dan was blithe, pipe jammed back between his teeth and newspaper shield raised once more. ‘Everything’ll be fine. Hasn’t it always been?’
Doris’s knuckles were red through the suds. She hadn’t heard that name out loud in decades. Had never heard Christine say ‘Janet’ before.
No, my sweet lovely man, she thought. It hasn’t always been fine.
* * *
They got the name wrong, even though they’d lived in the village – or on its margins – for months now.
Billy called it Anbridge and John called it Hambridge.
It was all right. The fields around the house were great, and the cow Connie kept was great, and Wizbang was great; the boys had plans to smuggle the mongrel back to Mile End with them when the war was over, next week or in ten years’ time or whenever the grown-ups got fed up of it.
They liked Walter Gabriel and they loved Connie, but they stayed well out of Stan’s way. Vic, the oldest kid now that Cliff was gone, told them ghost stories. They were brilliant. Until the light went out, and then the boys wished he hadn’t been quite so eloquent about the dead people who clawed their way up out of the graves around St Stephen’s, bits of flesh hanging off and skellington faces.
All in all, being an evacuee wasn’t bad, Billy told anybody who asked. John stayed quiet; he preferred to stand just behind his brother and let Billy do the talking. John didn’t like answering questions – he could never find words, they rolled away like marbles – and he was sick of compliments about his golden hair and his cherubic face. As if, he thought, I’m a girl or something. John missed his mummy. His mum. Do. Not. Say. Mummy.
One saving grace of country life was the freedom, and it turned out that Borsetshire had just as many dangerous places to mess about in as London. They had fallen in the Am, and aimed their catapult at broken bottles out on Jiggins Field, and prodded a bull with a stick.
Then, most spectacular of all, they had found a hut.
Deep in Heydon Wood, in a clearing defined by a thick hedge that reminded John of Sleeping Beauty’s castle, the hut’s roof just about held, and the floor was brick. It was, if you squinted, a proper little house. They chased away the spiders and filched a spoon, then a cup, then a pot lid from Connie’s kitchen.
It took a whole morning to cover the roof that sloped almost to the ground with branches and moss and organic debris. The thorns kept them safe from wild animals, from Vic’s ghoulies and any German pilots that might be wandering about looking for a British kid to take hostage.
It was HQ.
John didn’t know that stood for headquarters until Billy told him.
* * *
Doris hoped this wouldn’t take too long.
While the women chatted and shook off jackets and put down handbags, she tried to get comfortable on the upright settee with spindly legs that stood in the middle of the parquet.
Getting comfarty, Dan called it when she squirmed like that at home. No getting comfarty on this antique. Its elegance rebuffed her efforts.
‘Innit lovely ’ere,’ said Dottie. She ran her hands over a blue and white vase on the mantelpiece. ‘All so posh.’
‘Is it?’ Pamela was among them suddenly. Straight-backed and motoring, tart, precise. ‘Oh dear, I do hope not.’ She clapped for no good reason and Mrs Endicott jumped. ‘Are we all here?’ She greeted each woman by name. Like a visiting president of somewhere important. ‘Magsy dear, good morning. And Jane, too good of you. Doris, as ever. Frances, you’re an angel. And a special mention for you!’ Pamela took Kitty’s hand and closed her other over it. Her engagement ring shrieked in the sunlight refracting off the chandelier. ‘We’re so glad to see you out and about and taking part, Kitty. You are very welcome.’
Kitty smiled, thanked her, or began to, then heard how stupid she sounded and shut up. If only Pamela was an ogre she could hate. Thank Jaysus you don’t know about me and your husband, she thought, as Pamela swept Caroline onto her lap.
Caroline behaved. She was meek. She knew Pamela was boss.
As did everyone else. The women listened as Pamela outlined the outline of the meeting. ‘Let’s make some basic decisions, such as date, theme, and so forth. Then we can delegate the various tasks, according to our strengths. Doris will oversee the costumes, of course, our resident workhorse, and Magsy can… well, we’ll think of something, dear. This year, I beg of you, we must take proper minutes of these meetings. Any volunteers? No? In that case, Frances, you can do it.’
The vicar’s wife looked startled. Doris, the workhorse, wondered if this was a wise move. Frances was, bless her, dry and rather literal. The minutes were likely to be long, and useless.
AMBRIDGE MIDSUMMER PAGEANT COMMITTEE MEETING MINUTES
Date: 26 April 1940
At: Lower Loxley
Chairwoman: Pamela Pargetter
Present: Frances Bissett, Emmaline Endicott, Margaret Furneaux, Doris Archer, Dorothy Cook, Kathleen Dibden-Rawles, Jane Gilpin
Note to self: Do I include little Caroline?
1
. Pamela asked for suggestions of suitable dates for the pageant. Pamela decided it would be 2 June. Jane said midsummer falls at the end of June though and this is a midsummer pageant. Pamela said that was a mere detail.
2 Pamela noted that Morgan’s wedding day is the same day as the pageant but refused to take a vote on changing the date. She said that as the wedding ceremony doesn’t take place until teatime there is ample time for both events. Magsy asked if it would be nicer to space out two such happy gatherings and Pamela said ‘Bless you’ and also ‘No’.
3. Dottie asked how many months gone did she look. She said she is five months pregnant. She showed the committee a photograph of the baby’s father. She said he was ‘a smasher’. Doris said ‘he is certainly a looker’. Magsy said he had a look of Mr Kirk Douglas. Kitty said he was more like a Viking, blond and tall with flashing blue eyes. Pamela told everyone to calm down.
4. We all agreed to pool some of our rations for Dottie as she is expecting. Dottie had a little cry. Magsy had a little cry. Jane said, ‘Oh no, don’t, you will start me off’.
5. Caroline knocked over a figurine of a lady shepherd with a lamb. Kitty scolded her. Pamela said it didn’t matter, the figurine should not have been on a low shelf and gave the dear tot her watch to play with.
6. Gerald ran in and ran out again. His language perturbed at least one of the ladies present.
7. Pamela said could we please get back to business and suggested we ask Walter Gabriel to supply this year’s maypole from the trees in the south-west patch of his smallholding.
8. Mrs Endicott said could they discuss what on Earth to give dear Morgan and Nance as a wedding present as she is fearful of appearing too showy at a time of national crisis. Dottie asked will they have a real wedding cake and she said she thinks Nance will look a knockout if she actually does her hair properly for once. Kitty said it was the most romantic thing she could think of, getting married in wartime. Pamela said weddings do not fall within the remit of pageant business.
9. Dottie asked what we all thought of Dr Seed. She mistook Magsy for Dr Seed’s housekeeper. We all had a lovely giggle at that. Dottie said she doesn’t want Morgan delivering her baby as she doesn’t trust a doctor who couldn’t cure Jimmy Little’s blindness or Blanche’s polio. Kitty said he delivered Caroline. Jane said Blanche is incurable. Doris said that poor Jimmy has Acute Angle Glaucoma (note to self: check sp) just like his granny and is beyond the help of medicine. Magsy said Dr Seed cared for Jonjo, Walter’s father, when he was ill before Christmas. Dottie said ‘Yes and now Jonjo is brown bread’.
10. Pamela said that was quite enough about Morgan and tapped Jane on the knee with a rolled-up copy of the Lady. Jane said ‘I was not asleep, I was resting my eyes’. She said she is tired because Agnes is terribly cheeky and gives her the runaround. Dottie said that Blanche cannot be easy to live with. Jane said no, no, no, her sister is a saint. Jane had another little cry and said she can’t stop thinking about the cruel letter and what must people think of Blanche. Doris said that the first letter wasn’t true so neither was this one. Something went down Kitty’s throat the wrong way and Pamela asked her if she was quite all right and fetched some water. Jane began to cry again and said she was v worried about the war and that she listens to all the news broadcasts on the wireless but she felt as if all the soldiers were somehow her boys and what she would really like is to have the prime minister in the airing cupboard so she could ask him questions once an hour about what was happening and if the Nazis really do plan to take over Ambridge.
11. Pamela said this really wouldn’t do and they must all focus. She asked for suggestions for the theme. She said the theme for the pageant is Elizabeth I.
12. Jane said she was sorry to be a nuisance but she didn’t seem to be able to stop crying and she asked don’t we ever just want to cry at the awfulness of the war and when nobody answered she just kept crying until Pamela said we may as well wrap the meeting up and reconvene when Jane is quite well.
Outside Hero zigzagged about the lawn behind his master, a man who was coming to terms with lying to both his wife and his mistress.
If he told Kitty that Pamela knew about them, she would end the affair. That was certain. The poor girl was inside the house now, all unknowing, sitting up straight in Pamela’s presence. Alec had noted how carefully Kitty had fixed her hair, how sedate her choice of dress.
Life was complicated. It never used to be. Was it the war or was it Kitty? Alec didn’t remember being dissatisfied, until Kitty came along and excited him. He had sleep-walked all the way to her bed.
The front would be easier than this. He had loathed soldiering, but he had understood it. The Alec he faced in the mirror during the Great War had been whey-coloured, terrified, but he didn’t recoil from him. That Alec hadn’t been a liar. He hadn’t even been a coward; one of the horrible facts he’d learned in 1917 was that everyone is scared.
He wondered, for a second, no longer, how Rupert had felt before the battle that killed him. The loss of Alec’s older brother had been one of countless commonplace tragedies. He had few memories of the restless, cavalier Rupert. A decade older, Rupert was a visitor to Alec’s nursery, then a figure on the edge of his school holidays. He had loved Lower Loxley, grown up expecting to inherit. And then he ‘fell’, as the euphemism had it, gargling his own blood in foreign mud.
They had never really been men together. Alec minded about that.
The call-up will come. Of that Alec had no doubt. The country was hunkering down for a long war. When it came, what would be left of him? Would he simply walk towards the bullets?
He reached the terrace. The stones were clean, bright. The pinkish things in the urns were perfect. He wasn’t very good with flower names. Everything at Lower Loxley obeyed his wife; they read her mind and pretended to themselves it was what they wanted to do. That’s why the white climbing things along the back of the house came into bloom just as her garden parties began, why the soufflés rose, why he visited her quarters at the allotted times.
A thought landed. It gave no warning, and he wondered where in his mind it had been born.
Could Pamela have written the first letter in order to shame him into giving up Kitty?
Alec realized he had no idea what Pamela was capable of. He couldn’t even say if she was a good person or a bad person. If that was even a useful way of classifying people.
Am I a bad person?
Around the corner of the house came a figure. Furtive, hunched, it was Connie Horrobin, who was always furtive and hunched. She carried a bolt of fabric that sparked silver in the sun. ‘Your missus about?’
‘She’s busy just now.’ Alec kept his distance. He sensed Connie was fearful of men. She was all spikes. An angry little hedgehog who might curl into a ball at any moment.
‘I’ll wait.’
The material under her arm, comically glamorous against Connie’s limp clothes, could only be black market. Alec looked about him; the furtiveness was catching. ‘Does my wife… do business with you, Mrs Horrobin?’
‘No business, no. I’m just doing her a little favour.’
‘The penalties for black marketeering are serious.’
‘Black what?’
‘First, a fine of five hundred pounds.’ Alec saw her jump at mention of such a sum. ‘The authorities can go further, you know, and fine you again, up to three times the value of the goods you sell. Some people end up in jail.’ Alec thought of Dan, his War Ag zeal. He half-expected him to leap out from behind an urn, take his pipe out of his mouth, and shout Gotcha!
‘I’m not going to jail.’ Connie was unperturbed.
‘Have you heard from young, err, Cliff, is it?’
‘Not a word.’ Connie turned, and her currant eyes blazed like the fabric. ‘D’you know where he might be, Mr Pargetter? He’s with the BEF, he’s labour, not regular army, he’s doing the donkey work.’ At first Connie had been reassured by Cliff’s lowly status, but latterly she’d begun to
fret that he was near the front with no idea how to use a firearm or fight off a filthy rotten Hun.
‘Don’t fret, Connie. The army’s pledged to protect their labour divisions.’ Alec hesitated. He wasn’t sure how to speak to Connie. The words he used seemed to confuse her. Sometimes he couldn’t quite catch what she said in her low, muttering local accent. ‘I’m sure you’re very proud of your son.’
‘Proud? I was proud of my Cliff long before all this started. This doesn’t make me proud. I just want him home.’ She was scornful, before changing tack, as if remembering where she was and who she was and, more importantly, who he was. ‘Thank you, Mr Pargetter.’
He was saved by the ladies. All of them appearing at once through a set of French doors. Alec was gallant; he would take them all home, he said. ‘I had one of my boys make ready the pony and trap.’
Magsy sat up front on one side of him, and Dottie the other. Magsy talked of Morgan and their dear dead boy, and Dottie talked of throwing up her guts every morning in Mrs E’s lavvy.
On an uncomfortable plank seat in the back, Jane kept her handkerchief to her nose; Alec didn’t hear how she snuffled, nor see how Kitty kept her arm about her, nor how Jane declared herself ‘utterly mortified’, and blamed her sleeping draught.
‘Sometimes I forget I’ve taken it and I take another spoonful and it does make me dreadfully woozy and those children, they were at it again last night, Kitty, sniggering in quite a nasty way, although the poor dear things are dead, so I suppose one can’t expect too much in the way of manners.’
Kitty hugged her tighter, and listened.
The hedgerow and the trees and the fields fell away and delivered them to the tighter landscape of cottages and brick and stucco. In the village nature was still abundant, but it was more polite, expressing itself demurely in gardens instead of shouting in fields.
One by one, the women were decanted from the cart, Dottie and Mrs Endicott insisting on having Caroline for a couple of hours, and Alec was left with – well, who could have foreseen it? – he was left with Kitty. The pony, a pretty grey, ambled out of Ambridge, and her passengers enjoyed the aimlessness.
The Archers Page 11
