“We are at sea,” Matt wrote, “and that is about as much as I can say, or the censor will adorn this with black splodges. Apparently, we call in somewhere before long, and mail will be taken off. I have seen dolphins, and I am playing a lot of whist—an activity new to me—and there is even the chance to sketch a bit. If I were more famous and had more clout, maybe I could have been one of these war artists—now there’s a thought. As it is, I get the pad out, and am considered an eccentric, but harmless—it is rather like being back at school. You must look forward to my postwar studies of lifeboats, rope coils, and capstans.
“Write, my darling. Letters reach us eventually, and are a salvation.”
Lucas had sprained his ankle while on ARP duty: “Casualty of the blackout—my war wound, in a very small way.” Marian Bradley was finding Cheltenham a little tedious: “One does miss one’s friends, and there is nothing by way of theaters, and of course the shops so empty.” Lorna’s brothers were both in London, with desk jobs at the War Office: “Nice and safe, thank God.” The Faradays were concerned about how Lorna was managing on her own, and pressed her to come to them whenever she wanted to. Bryony was now a senior mistress at her own old school, and sent her love.
These snatches of information seemed like messages from another time. Lorna could hardly remember what her brothers looked like. Moving from day to day, from task to task, she felt as though she had never known anywhere but these familiar hills, as though this were the only reality, and everything beyond a construct of the imagination, some old fantasy of hers.
She sought out proofs of Matt’s engravings—prints not good enough for sale—and put them on the walls. She began to teach Molly to read.
In April there was a late snowstorm; she built Molly a snowman, and put Matt’s scarf around his neck. The farmer’s daughter had twins, up at Wheddon Cross. The frost got the apple blossom. Molly gashed her leg on a gatepost; the nurse did three stitches. It was all Greece now on the wireless; the Germans in Greece.
People talked of the war as though it were a condition: a chronic condition. There was before the war, that other era, and there was after the war, the promised land. And for now there was just an interminable present. The word had its own resonance, as though it had lifted clear of meaning, had become simply a sound. It infiltrated the language of children. “It is because of the war?” asked Molly, when the hens got fowl-pest.
But the primroses came and spring sunshine that flowed across the hills. Lorna planted seeds; she dug a trench for the potatoes. For her twenty-seventh birthday, her mother sent some handkerchiefs and a bottle of cologne; she wondered if Lorna would like to bring Molly to see them at Cheltenham: “We could put you up at the hotel for a few days.” In the village hall, the women gathered to make jam and to knit things for sailors. There was a searchlight battery at Luxborough; the darkness hummed and was striped with light, when the planes went over.
When Matt’s letters arrived, they were already several weeks old. Lorna read of yesterday, and wondered about today. And she, too, wrote into the future; it was as though they existed now in different dimensions of time.
In May, the ferns in the hedge banks were tongues of green flame; swallows nested in the eaves of the cottage. Lorna took Molly down to the coast to play on the fossil beach; there were concrete blocks, rolls of barbed wire, a pillbox on the cliff top. She told Molly; “We came here once for your birthday. Do you remember?” The little girl nodded: “There were pink candles. That was a long time ago.” “Yes,” said Lorna. “It was a very long time ago.”
Lucas came. He had written: “I need a breath of air. May I impose myself?” He was hours late, having missed the connection in Taunton. Trains were packed, he said—delayed, infrequent, the whole country seemed to be on the move. “And if you’re not in uniform, you get those looks. Not quite the same as a white feather, but not far off.”
“You can’t help it,” she said.
“No, but try telling that to gimlet-eyed matrons from the home counties.”
There was an awkwardness; Matt’s absence hung over them as though they both kept looking for the third person who should be there.
“When Himself comes back,” said Lucas, “will you go on living here, do you imagine?”
She shrugged. “Maybe. I can’t…look ahead.”
“He’s getting quite a name as an engraver, you know. He’s in the top flight now.”
She smiled, delighted.
“I hope he won’t get too grand for the Heron Press.”
“Don’t be an idiot, Lucas.”
Suddenly, they were at ease. Lucas told stories of his blitz experiences; he played snap with Molly, read her a story. When she had been put to bed, Lorna turned the wireless on. The news was all about Crete; German parachute landings. She looked up at the map, and then flushed.
“I didn’t know where any of these places are. I felt a fool.”
“A crash course in geography,” said Lucas. “Good idea. Do you know where he is?”
“Egypt—the last letter. He could say as much as that, apparently. Not where, exactly.”
“Well, it’s one way to see the world. Very inspirational—no doubt he’ll make good use of it.”
“Yes,” she said. “Yes, of course he will.”
In June, the start of June, she is outside the door, filling the bucket from the tap, when she hears the gate whine on its hinges. She turns, and there is the postman, so she smiles, and waves. But the postman is neither smiling nor waving. He has a new look on his face, a look she does not recognize.
The man is beyond apology; he is felled by what he has to do, made speechless. He simply holds out the telegram, avoiding Lorna’s eye. He has seen these before. He knows. And his knowledge leaps to Lorna. She knows, too, at once. She stands there in the sunshine, knowing, and takes the envelope, and the postman gives a sort of shake of the head, and turns away, and goes. A thrush sings piercingly, nearby.
The farmer’s wife came, alerted by the postman. She put her arms around Lorna, a thing unheard of, and her eyes were red. “My dear,” she kept saying. “My dear.” She was there, and then others were there, stepping diffidently into the cottage, and Molly stood wide eyed, and Lorna sat at the kitchen table, a cup of tea in front of her that someone filled and refilled, and the day seemed to go on forever, the hours stalking by, while she waited for this to have been a mistake, some monstrous error, a dream.
And then night came, and the people went, and everything was still the same. She gave Molly her supper, and put her to bed, and read her a story, and then she came down and sat in the armchair, and she began to cry. She cried in a way that she had never known, would not have thought possible, so that she was gasping; she shook; her tears were relentless; she felt that grief was scouring her, draining her empty. She sat there hour by hour, sometimes rigid, staring at the walls, at the ducks and the willows, sometimes crying, unstoppably crying. And then at last she crept up the stairs and into bed, and lay there, wide eyed, as dawn came into the room.
After a few days, a week, she did not know how long, she went to the farm, and told them she had to go. She asked to use the telephone. Then she returned to the cottage and began to dismantle it. She packed away Matt’s tools, and his blocks, and any prints and sketches that were left. She took his clothes to the village hall, and asked them to give them to the Red Cross. She packed up the china from the dresser, the teapot, the Victorian jug and basin, the patchwork bedcover, the books, Matt’s portrait of her, and her own clothes and Molly’s. Everything else she left, including an old box under some sacking in the shed, which she had not noticed, and a chunk of pink alabaster from the beach, carved into a figure, that had rolled under the bench.
She wrote to Lucas: “Matt was killed in action in Crete, perhaps on the day that you visited. I do not seem able to stay here. I am going to Matt’s parents.”
She took a brush and a tin of distemper up to the bedroom and painted over the dancing nudes. The ot
her frescos she left untouched—the ducks and the willows. On the last night, she sat gazing at these, looking and looking.
And thus they went, she and Molly, and the cottage sat empty, but filled with the legacies of their occupancy: the painted walls, and the table and chairs and bed and couch, the pots and pans, the axe, the oil lamps. The farmer’s wife came and took what she could use, as requested, and presently another family moved in, a man who worked on the farm, with his wife and children, and they made their own adjustments, left their own mark, as did others, year by year, decade by decade, passing through. The only permanence was the building itself, the cob of the walls, the slate of the roof. From time to time, some remedial work was done—a coat of limewash, a roof repair. Piped water arrived, within, and electricity. The frescos downstairs flaked and faded, but were left as they were, because people quite liked them, the place was a tenancy anyway and it was said that the farm wouldn’t want them done away with, for some reason. The shed became a depository for animal feed, fertilizer, bikes, garden tools, discarded children’s toys. The oak tree grew a few more feet, an ash sprang up from nowhere, someone planted a quince. The century moved on, taking the cottage with it.
Part 2
FOR THE FIRST YEAR in the Welsh border town Lorna did not care where she was, or what she did. The Faradays were kind, concerned, and themselves paralyzed by grief. She took a job behind the counter at a local shop in order to be able to pay her way. Molly started school; in that muted household, her bright presence was the only solace.
Eventually, Lorna began to look around her and realized that she could not stay here, like this, forever. She must make a home for Molly, somehow she must be independent, she must earn a living. Mrs. Faraday had suggested a secretarial course; Lorna took afternoons off from the shop and learned how to type and do shorthand, whose strange hieroglyphics helped with the process of anesthetization, which was all that she sought. She moved from day to day, her head full of hooks and dots, and the lettering of the keyboard, and the face of the cash register in the shop. In the evenings, she was too tired to do anything but see to Molly, eat, sleep. She had no interest in the future but saw that there had to be one, for Molly, if not for herself. If it were to be here, well and good, but she must live otherwise, find somewhere of her own, different work.
Marian Bradley had written, suggesting that Lorna join them: “Daddy and I could move out of the hotel, and rent a little house, where there would be room for you and Molly.” Lorna had known that this would never do, but was touched by the gesture; she was gently evasive.
Lucas wrote: “No news of you for quite a while. I trust things go as well as they can do. Here at the Heron Press, there is great disarray. The splendid Miss Kelly has abandoned me—retiring, if you please. I must advertize for a successor, and shrink at the thought of some supercilious young woman who will run rings around me.”
Lorna replied by return of post. She said: “Please may I apply for Miss Kelly’s job?”
The house in Fulham had three floors and a basement. The Press occupied the basement, with the office and packing room on the ground floor, alongside the kitchen. Lucas himself lived untidily on the floors above but insisted now on making over the top floor to Lorna and Molly. They would have a bedroom, a sitting room, and share the bathroom with him. He was apologetic: “You should have a place of your own, but it would be quite impossible to find anywhere.” It was 1943; London was battered, bloody, brought to its knees. There was rubble, darkness, an exhausted populace. The Faradays had been dismayed by Lorna’s decision: “There could be bombing again.” She had known only that Lucas’s letter had seemed like a beacon, that it offered a haven of some kind, an association with Matt’s world. The Press. Lucas.
The Press was far from being in full production. The paper shortage meant that Lucas had to curtail operations, and limit himself to small editions. With little money coming in, he had taken on work proofreading for various journals; he would sit hunched over the kitchen table, in his out-at-elbow sweater, muttering and exclaiming: “Oh my goodness…Look at this…Illiterate fellows…”
Lorna took Molly to school in the mornings, and after that would set about reestablishing order in the Heron Press office, which was awash with unanswered letters and unpaid invoices. By his own admission, Lucas was hopeless at paperwork; Miss Kelly had been an essential feature of the business. Initially, Lorna was daunted. Then she thought: if I can learn how to clean a chicken, and grow stuff, and trim oil lamps, and mend a puncture, then I can find out how to deal with all this. She mastered Miss Kelly’s typewriter and the filing system; she worked out what money was owed, from where and to whom. In the basement, Lucas set type; she would hear the grind and clunk as the press rolled.
Grief was muted now, a continuous dull pain, as though she had some incurable illness. She still wept; at unwary moments, the realization of what had happened would come surging up and knock everything else aside, so that she was dazed, unable to function.
But she took satisfaction in what she had achieved: a home of sorts for Molly, occupation for herself, a small income—for Lucas insisted on paying her for the office work. And from time to time she would experience a frisson of pleasure—at something Molly said or did, at the sight of a flower, new green leaves, opalescent clouds above the city.
At the cottage there had been hens that ran if you chased them, but you mustn’t, and apples in the grass, with crawly things on them, and the big black kettle that jigged about and hissed when it was getting hot. That was a long time ago; she had pictures in her head. “Do you remember?” Mummy would say, and she would fish for other pictures and sometimes nothing came.
At Grandma’s there had been a bath with feet like dogs’ feet, and a tablecloth with pink roses on it, and a box thing that played music, and Ovaltine when you went to bed. That was quite a long time ago.
Now there was Lucas’s house, which went up and up, and down and down. Right up were their rooms, and right down was the press. Sometimes Lucas let her help him with the press. She had to find letters for him: “Now find me an A. Good. Now an N. Now a D. Good. We’ll make a printer of you yet.” Lucas is a printer, he says. So will she get tall and thin, like Lucas, with a beaky nose, and glasses?
She likes finding letters for Lucas. And at school she likes reading. She can read whole words, whole lines of words, a whole page of words. “Mary runs to her mother. See Mary run. Mary runs to her father.”
Father.
When she is seven, quite soon, they are going to go to the zoo. There are no lions and tigers at the zoo now because of the war, but there are other animals, and a place where you can have tea, and there might be a ride on a camel.
There was a life now, at the tall house in Fulham; a determined, stoical, daily kind of life that defied what had happened, what was happening, in the same way that the life of the city itself ignored the gaping windows, the potholes, the sandbags, the blackout, and got on with what had to be done. It was a life without much by way of comforts or consolations: the occasional lucky strike at the butcher, and liver for supper, an extra sweet ration for Molly, a dip into the pub for a beer and a smoke for Lucas. For Lorna, there was just the knowledge that every day you moved on, you moved further from that other day, you moved toward some other time when perhaps you would be whole again, in some way. Getting through time was all that mattered.
Occasionally she felt as though Lucas were avoiding her. They would eat a meal together in the evening, the three of them, but he would quickly make some excuse and vanish up into his own room. If she suggested that he join them for a walk by the river at the weekend, he would be diffident, seem almost unwilling, but then, if he came, he was his old self—an engaging, quirky companion. She wondered if he was regretting the whole arrangement, their presence in the house, and confronted him, one day.
“Lucas, this is just for the moment, isn’t it? You mustn’t feel you’re stuck with us for ever. Sooner or later…”
�
��Sooner or later what?” He looked aghast.
“Well, sooner or later we must move on.”
“Where to?”
“I don’t know,” said Lorna. “Just…we can’t inflict ourselves on you forever.”
He looked away. He took his glasses off and began violently polishing them with a handkerchief, always a sign of agitation. “I know it’s not ideal. You should have a proper flat up at the top, with a bathroom and a kitchen, but it’s no good, one wouldn’t be able to get it done these days for love nor money.”
“Lucas,” she said. “We’re all right. It’s you I’m worried about. We’ve invaded you.”
He put the glasses back on, blinked a few times, then said rather stiffly: “It is an invasion entirely to be welcomed. My p-privilege.”
The matter was not raised again. Molly had her seventh birthday, lost a front tooth, rode a camel at the zoo. The year tipped over into the next. It was 1944; people talked now of after the war as a real possibility, not some improbable nirvana.
At Christmas Lucas’s widowed mother came, bringing a turkey. “Don’t ask me how,” she said briskly. “Someone owed me a favor, that’s all.” She was taking a short break from intensive WVS duties, back home in Portsmouth: “The blitz may be over, but we seem to be as much in demand as ever.” On Christmas evening, Molly in bed, she suggested that Lucas take Lorna out for a drink.
They walked down to a riverside pub, stumbling out of the darkness into the noise and light of the interior—the beer fumes, the cigarette haze, the rank of backs waiting at the bar. Lucas found a table, achieved drinks. “Like an eighteenth-century stew, I always think. Something out of Hogarth. Deeply reassuring, in some way—I love it.” There were paper chains and streamers hung from the ceiling, the place was raucous; they had to sit close to hear one another.
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