Jimmy ignored the hand and leaned into Alec’s chest. It took a second, but then Alec’s arms folded over the younger man. He held him tight. Then let him go.
The daisies shut their eyes, one by one.
* * *
The moment shimmers, and above the ordinary roofs of the ordinary people, the sky pulls out all the stops and presents them with a dawn of deep cherry reds and juicy peach and a spectrum of blues that would exhaust Thomas Hardy’s pen.
Frank doesn’t look upwards. He’s intent on rubbing out the swastika on his door. The whitewash is still wet; it’s coming off. Frank scrubs harder. He didn’t hear a thing, no footfall, no giggling. Like the letters, the swastika landed from thin air and could be the work of any neighbour, any friend. As if he has such a thing anymore. Frank doesn’t know where the shame stops and the fear starts.
The sky is invisible to Kitty. She has no idea of the time in her dark bedroom. It’s very late, or maybe very early. She’s not sure when the crossover happens from late night to early morning, but since she had Caroline she’s been in that territory often. She lies with the little one in a tumbled bed. She tolerates the small dirty foot laid across her face. She thinks not of words but of numbers. Is zero a number? Noel’s life insurance has run out. Like Noel, it has gone. Like Noel, it didn’t do much for her even when she had it. She wishes she missed him; it might add meaning to losing him.
Mornings, evenings, what do they matter? Dottie has torn up her diary. Little Chaz is in charge now, and like all tyrants, the baby doesn’t consider his servant’s needs. She kisses his knee. She presses her cheek against his. She likes to regard him in the mirror, his face close to hers. Her pale skin, his dark brown face. Her thin hair, his tight black curls. He is, and Dottie knows this and doesn’t need any input thank you very much, the most beautiful little baby God ever put together.
The tube station is carpeted with people. Peggy doesn’t like the early hours; introspection visits, and she hates its insinuations. She’s doing the right thing not telling the boys that Dad’s missing. They’re too young, too far away, they’d be upset. Before they were evacuated, Peggy thought of her brothers – when she thought of them at all – as nothing more than a portable block of monkey business that got under her feet. Now that Mum has lost the plot, Peggy is in charge of Billy and John’s wellbeing. And that’s fine, she’s up to the job, she really is, and anyway she can have a secret little cry while the old bat along the platform hacks up last night’s rations.
The sink has been scoured. Glen has been let out and then let in again. The jars in the scullery are lined up, their labels in perfect order. Capital letters spelling out ‘RHUBARB CONSERVE’ and ‘GOOSEBERRY JELLY’ and ‘POTTED BEEF’. Doris wipes the kitchen table again. She keeps away from the back door. It’s a lure, a shining exit. She wants to nip out of it, and run and run until she is a dot on the horizon, like a hare fleeing the hounds. But the hounds always catch up.
The dark stained glass comes alive in St Stephen’s. Red and gold stripes flay Jane’s back as she kneels. ‘Forgive me, Father,’ she says, staring up at the refurbished Christ. ‘Forgive me for my many sins. Forgive me, forgive me, for resenting poor Blanche, for praying the ship she came home on would sink. Forgive me for the things it makes me do.’
AUTUMN 1940
‘O I am tired of waiting,’ she said,
‘Night, morn, noon, afternoon;
So cold it is in my lonely bed,
And I thought you would join me soon!’
THOMAS HARDY
Something Tapped
OCTOBER
The purr grew louder. As if a gigantic cat stalked the twilit back roads.
The purr became a growl, a throaty ‘R’ endlessly rolled. The avenue of bare trees, silver in the dying light, stood to attention as the motorbike sprinted past.
No headlights, not in wartime. Just apocalyptic noise.
The riders bent into the corner. A skid, then the bike corrected itself. The shriek gave the game away; the passenger riding pillion was a woman.
It was Kitty.
The motorbike stopped. Kitty had been bounced and jiggled for a couple of miles, and she was sore. The heavy goggles bit into the bridge of her nose.
‘What’s the verdict?’ Alec twisted on the seat. ‘D’you like her?’
Kitty was breathless. She gave him a senseless smile, one that didn’t happen often. She had been lifted out of Ambridge by the hand of God and swung like a child. ‘Again, please!’ She wondered how she looked with the goggles pushed back and dirt drying on her face.
‘Christ, you’re something else, old girl.’ It was awkward for Alec to kiss her from his position, but kiss her he did. ‘I’ll let her have her head this time.’
The BSA M20, a skinny dun-coloured thing, lived in a lean-to distant from the main house. Pamela knew nothing about it; Alec took care to change back into wool and tweed after visiting this new paramour. He wiped his face of oil with a handkerchief and pegged down his smile. Pamela would lecture about misuse of petrol, about safety, about the folly of trying to recapture his youth. But Kitty had simply cocked her leg over it, wrapped her arms around his waist and urged him onwards.
He let the bike go. Together, Alec and Kitty covered ground. But only in circles.
The deception about the motorbike was an extra layer of skin grown over their affair. They lived in a negative image of love, comprised of what they could get away with. While it grew bigger, it also grew smaller, yet they kept building.
Recently Kitty had stopped holding her breath. It happened behind her own back, this relaxation of her fears. When Alec had ignored her ultimatum it had felt like an ending, but now, if she squinted, she could pretend her passiveness had been a clever tactic.
Because Alec was putting the hours in. When she woke up alone she knew he still wanted her; that he was wanting her from a distance, and that he would want her tomorrow.
Each day was progress. They crept nearer the date, as unknown to her as the date of her death, but surely as inevitable, when they would pull the negative image inside out and voilà! She and Alec would be the couple, the sanctified pairing, and Pamela… We’ll take care of her. Kitty made this vow to her rival.
‘Faster!’ Kitty thumped Alec on the back.
‘Yahoo!’ Alec screamed.
‘Stop!’ Another thump from Kitty. ‘Alec, stop. What’s that up ahead?’
The bike skidded, stopped. Kitty fell, turning it into an awkward jump.
Quick, fairy-like, the wraith hopped off the road and into the trees. The dark ate it up.
He’d seen it, too. ‘Was it a trick of the light?’ Alec walked to the trees, swinging at the sparse late grasses with a leather gauntlet. ‘There!’ He pointed, then sprang back. It was quiet now the bike was still. A wispy somebody blundered on dry twigs.
‘Come back, I don’t like it,’ said Kitty. October was a death mask of a month. She wanted to be roaring along on the bike again, thumbing her nose at the night.
‘Could be a German flier.’ Alec winced at how unlikely that was; he’d heard stories but saying it out loud smacked of children’s tales.
Half a mile away, Billy and John were enjoying Connie’s benign neglect.
Their mother’s neurotic parenting would never have seen them plunging about a graveyard after dark. Their fear of the place was minutely calibrated to the fascination it held for them.
Less keen than Billy, John nonetheless kept up with his big brother. It was unthinkable to be left behind among the tombstones.
‘Listen!’ Billy stood stock still. His Aran, far too big, glowed in the gloom.
‘What’s making that noise?’ John was filled with woe, as if a tap had been turned on.
Something groaned. Then came a hectic scream, like souls being torn out of chests.
They crouched behind an Endicott tomb.
They were very unhappy. John closed his eyes but couldn’t bear that. Opening them was as bad. He heard t
he demon make a circuit of the churchyard on heavy feet or paws or claws.
‘Let’s make a run for it,’ hissed Billy.
John couldn’t. He shook his head.
Over at Brookfield a truck pulled out, slitted covers over its headlights. Doris was at the wheel and she drove as if pursed by the thing in the graveyard.
A bicycle followed, then took the opposite direction along the back lanes too narrow for the truck. Dan dinged the bell as he disappeared.
He’d call the police from Lower Loxley, but realistically, thought Doris, what could the police do? The village would help. Dan would mobilize all the able-bodied men and women. They’ll find Mum.
They had to. It was freezing tonight. And Lisa was getting so thin. Her mother’s bone-white arms, skinny and poor, flashed into Doris’s mind.
No prayer would form in Doris’s mouth. It was a forgotten dialect, put away, and dead. Instead she was prey to imaginings. Her mother as just another mammal in the vicious night. A shrew. A mole. She’d seen them all, curled up in death. Why would one life matter to a warrior god who snuffed out so many each day?
Up that way. Down the lane. Across the crossroads. Doris drove recklessly. Neighbours appeared at gates. She saw Bob poke the bushes opposite The Bull. The blacked-out streets were alive with volunteers.
Everybody knows about poor Mum’s sickness now.
Nobody checked out St Stephen’s, where Billy and John were face to face with a monster. It had proved amiable, and when Billy reached out to rub its snout it tolerated him.
They had never been so close to a pig. It was dense. And not as pink as storybooks had led them to believe. More of a dull beige. Its ears were raggedy.
‘Is it a ghost of a pig?’ asked John, who didn’t rub its snout, and wouldn’t have done so for a hundred pounds.
‘Nah! He’s just a pig and he’s ours.’ Billy took a piece of twine out of his pocket. He’d known when he filched it from Stan’s pocket that it would come in handy. ‘Finders keepers, innit?’
As they persuaded the pig out of the back gate of the churchyard, half a mile away Alec was stepping out in front of the truck.
Braking like a racing driver, and feeling the big old vehicle revolt at such treatment, Doris slumped with relief. Her mother stood with Alec, his arm around her and his jacket over her shoulders.
AMBRIDGE WINTER PAGEANT COMMITTEE MEETING MINUTES
Date: 19 October 1940
At: Woodbine Cottage
Chairwoman: Pamela Pargetter
Present: Frances Bissett, Margaret Furneaux, Emmaline Endicott, Doris Archer, Dorothy Cook, Kathleen Dibden-Rawles, Jane Gilpin
1. Pamela said she was grateful to Jane for hosting once more at Woodbine Cottage, and she was grateful to Doris for attending at a time when she had so much to attend to at home with Doris’s mother being senile. Pamela said there was nothing like that in her family. Jane said that having an invalid in the family traps one. Dottie said that Lisa was a poor old girl but it was always a laugh when her own nan said something silly and we all need a laugh nowadays. Magsy said Doris didn’t need to hear all this, she only has to know we are there to help. Everybody said they would help. (Note to self: ask Henry to have a word with Doris.)
2. Pamela said could we get on please. Jane said could Pamela kindly ask Magsy if she had finished the dried flower wreath for Elizabeth I’s head. Pamela said ‘Why can’t you ask her yourself when she is sitting right there’. Jane said that Magsy knew why. Magsy said that Jane has got it into her head that Magsy is the letter writer. Jane said the handwriting looks like Magsy’s and Magsy has never liked Blanche. Kitty said ‘Oh for God’s sake’. I, myself, Frances requested that she not take the Lord’s name in vain even though we are all aware Roman Catholics like to do so. Pamela said ‘Ladies you are behaving like a bag of cats’. Dottie laughed until baby Charles woke up in his basket and began to cry.
3. Pamela said could we get on please. She had to step outside because of an altercation happening outside the window. Walter Gabriel shouted at Stan Horrobin ‘You was supposed to take care of it but you let the silly so and so get out, and we have lost a lot of money’. Pamela told them to be off.
4. Pamela said really could we please get on. Blanche called from upstairs that she needed a foot massage and an extra hot water bottle. Jane began to cry which set baby Charles off again.
5. Pamela declared the meeting over.
Macintosh viciously belted, Doris was off to do her duty.
It was no Dunkirk, but the stakes were high all the same; every available individual had been whistled up to help with the last big push before the pageant.
Halloween approached, and the hedgerows were shutting up shop for what promised to be a hard, wet winter. Cattle were back in barns, potatoes were out of the ground, wrens were hunkering down in the bushes.
Like the other committee members, Doris supported the pretence that everything was fine, that holding the pageant in October instead of high summer was just the ticket. But the days slithered to darkness early, and The Green was a bog and nobody was in the mood for outdoor fun and games.
The Battle of Britain dribbled on, seemingly endless despite the RAF’s heroic resurgence. Every day there were tallies of planes lost, and planes safely home. Doris worried about whether the pilots were eating properly; how could they defeat the Hun on watery pie? Chucked up into the sky like pigeons, the pilots were boys, and they were her sons. Jack himself was still in training, still blithe, still untested. The open skin on Doris’s soul made even ordinary days a challenge; today, putting together a makeshift Elizabethan tableau, she was running on fumes.
Squaring her shoulders, Doris made her way into the oil heater fug of the village hall. Umbrellas lolled in puddles of their own making. Somebody was singing; somebody who really shouldn’t. Mavis the Pekinese was underfoot, dragging her behind across the lino. Doris put a finger to her nose; Mavis had a powerful signature scent.
‘Dress rehearsal, everyone!’ shouted Kitty. She clapped her hands and then laughed at herself. ‘Sorry, I’m not very good at being bossy.’
As a Lady of the Court, Doris wore a ruff made out of curtain tape. She put it on. It drooped.
Like everything else.
Dan popped his head in at lunchtime, regretted it, and scarpered. Doris had listened to his list of all he had to do that day. She could top it, she could always top it, but she had remained silent as he huffed and puffed. ‘To cap it all,’ he’d said, pulling on his coat, ‘I have to placate Brampton Green’s pig club. They’re demanding compensation for one of their pigs, the one that got stolen. I reckon it got out and somebody nabbed it. Honestly, Doris, people think the government’s made of money.’
Money. Doris never thought about it. On the treadmill of the farm, they planted, they fed, they slaughtered, they sold, and the house was kept warm and the roof was made sound and the children were shod. Money, surely, had become less relevant in the war. The only things that mattered were things you could use, solid things. Machinery. Bread.
‘You look like you stepped out of a history book,’ said Kitty, picking up a fold of Doris’s skirt and holding it out like a bridesmaid.
‘Do I? It’s only Christine’s old nursery curtains.’ Doris had put them up when she was pregnant. A hundred years ago and quite a different Doris.
‘Pamela found me some old velvet.’ Kitty ran her palm over the nap of her amber costume. ‘I couldn’t do it justice, though. I can’t really sew. Is the hem all lumpy?’
A triptych of pock-marked mirrors stood in a corner. Kitty turned to frown at the back view of the dress in the glass.
Three Kittys stared back, alongside three Dorises. Then three Pamelas joined them, pulling at the fur-trimmed neckline of her costume.
I’m so stout! It shouldn’t have been a surprise. Doris looked down at her solid body every day. The comparison was stark. Beside the heft of Doris, Pamela was a few brushstrokes and Kitty was both voluptuous and petite, qui
te the trick to pull off.
Sucking in her belly, Doris stared at herself. She had her father’s soft eyes, and his unreasonable hair. She stroked the slalom of her hip the way she stroked the sateen quilt on the bed at home. Doris was all of a piece with her habitat; she imagined a rangy, chic cow in a Brookfield barn and had to smile.
I’ll do.
Frances leaned over her shoulder. A shortage of men, or of men willing to step into hose, meant the vicar’s wife was William Shakespeare. Her moustache was, Dottie had whispered, not a prop. ‘I assume, Doris, it’s looking after poor dear Lisa that keeps you from church on Sundays?’
Doris fussed with her ruff.
The vicar’s wife hesitated, then said, ‘And Philip? You said he had a cold, and of course he couldn’t come to Sunday School with a runny nose, but I bumped into him yesterday and he seems… better.’
More fussing – a tad brusquely – with the ruff.
‘You know I’m happy to babysit your mother if it means you can attend service.’
Babysit! Doris had left Lisa in her younger son’s care. Yes, it was too much responsibility for a twelve-year-old but you grew up fast on a farm. Phil hadn’t complained; still reeling from Doris agreeing with him that, yes, Sunday School was a waste of time. He hated looking after Lisa, particularly on a bad day. That morning, he’d looked on, wide-eyed and clueless as his grandmother cried for Janet. Ransacking the rooms. Begging Doris to call the police and report Janet missing. ‘That’s quite all right, Frances. We’re managing just fine.’
And I don’t want to come to church!
The road to hell was paved with thoughts such as those. But Doris had them anyway.
‘This ched tastes lovely. What’s that, dear? I said the ched is lovely.’ Oh, fiddlesticks, what’s the boy’s name? ‘The ched, dear. I’m talking about this, my piece of ched and butter.’ Why can’t he understand me, I’m being perfectly clear. ‘Bread, yes, why, what did I say? Ched? I never.’ He’s a joker, this one, oh, look at him, he loves a laugh!
The Archers Page 22
