by Ann Swinfen
‘I guess so. Is Billy in bed?’
Harriet opened the door and stepped in. Martha was seated in front of her dressing-table mirror, building up her hair in a raised pompadour over a roll of net that required a great deal of strategic pinning. She looked irritated at being interrupted.
‘Yes?’
Harriet perched on the edge of Martha’s bed. When she was sixteen, Martha had insisted on having a lot of frills in her bedroom: the bedspread was frothy dotted white muslin that was a nightmare to iron, the window curtains were made of the same stuff, and so were the curtains of the half-tester and the skirt of the dressing table. There were a lot of little cushions about, several of them heart-shaped. As Martha had married and left home just two years after this decorating phase, the room had never been changed, but Harriet sometimes wondered whether it was quite the style Martha would choose nowadays, with her sophisticated tastes and her smart clothes.
She twisted her hands in her flowered apron and hesitated over how to begin.
‘I’m in a hurry, Mother. Was there something you wanted to say?’
It would have to do as an invitation to speak. Harriet plunged in, clumsily.
‘It’s about this Captain Tucker.’
‘Don’t you like him?’
‘Oh, he seems just fine,’ said Harriet hastily. ‘A very nice young man. It’s just that, well...with Will away, overseas...’
Martha said nothing. She had finished rolling up her front hair and now brushed the long back hair sleekly down over her collar. It still retained that wonderful glinting gold. Harriet could not help but be proud of it.
‘I just feel that... that Will might not be very happy, at you going out with another man while he’s away.’
Martha applied scarlet lipstick, blotted it, applied a second coat. Then she swung round on the revolving stool and faced her mother. Under the practised make-up she looked out pleadingly.
‘Oh, Mother, it’s just because he’s away that I have to go out, don’t you understand? I’m so scared. If I sit around here all the time, I start imagining things – the Nazi planes shooting at him, his plane coming down in flames. But when I go out with Brian and the others, I can laugh a little, have a bit of fun, and forget things for a while. Can’t you see?’ Her bottom lip trembled.
‘Oh, honey,’ said Harriet, crossing the room and kneeling down beside the stool. ‘I’m so sorry.’ She put her arms around her daughter. ‘I do understand. Only I think you ought to go out in a group, don’t you? We don’t want people talking.’
‘Oh, I don’t care about that,’ said Martha scornfully, disentangling herself from her mother’s embrace and standing up. ‘There’s nothing going on, I assure you. Brian is just good for a night out in Portland.’
She slipped her feet into her high-heeled shoes, blew her mother a kiss and tapped jauntily downstairs. As Harriet went into the bathroom to lift Billy out of the bath she heard the rhythmical tooting of a jeep horn coming up the farm lane.
Tirza woke suddenly. Something had shocked her out of sleep and she lay for a moment confused, wondering what time it was. Rolling over, she peered at the luminous dial of the alarm clock on her nightstand. It said twelve thirty. Then she realised what sound had woken her: a truck, rattling over the shell-covered rutted Shore Road at the back of the house. It was braking now, stopping nearby. Footsteps pounded along the side of the house and up the steps to the porch. Not running exactly, but hurrying. There was a sharp knock at the door.
She sat up in bed. The boats which fished inshore would not leave for some hours yet; a few that went further afield had left before dark. It couldn’t be news of a missing boat. Anyway, the truck had not come along the harbour front. She realised now that she had half heard it in her sleep coming down Schoolhouse Lane, from the direction of the main road. There was a creak of protesting bed springs as her father got up. Tirza heard him push up the window and lean out.
‘Who’s there? What is it?’
‘Nathan?’ It was Tobias’s voice. ‘Can you come down? I’m sorry to wake you like this, but...’
‘I’m coming.’
The window slid down again and Nathan went downstairs. Tirza heard the door open and the murmur of voices at the foot of the stairs. She crept to her door and opened it a crack. As she did so, she saw Abigail open the door of her bedroom, which was at the back of the house. Abigail joined her sons in the hallway, then all three of them moved into the kitchen.
Tirza’s heart was pounding. Something serious must have happened up at the farm to bring her uncle down to Flamboro in the truck, hours after both households were in bed. With her laced fingers pressed against her chest, she strained her ears to hear what was going on, but it was useless.
Nathan and Abigail both came back upstairs and Tirza could hear drawers opening in Abigail’s room, a shoe dropped in Nathan’s. They were back downstairs in minutes and the front door closed behind them. Running across to her open window and leaning out, Tirza was just in time to see all three of them rounding the corner of the house. The truck’s engine spluttered, coughed and started, and they were gone.
She sat down on her bed in astonishment. Then she threw off her pyjamas and pulled on her clothes, banging about in her haste. Her bicycle was kept in the boat shed. She did not bother to open the big double doors, but lifted her bicycle up the step into the back hall and wheeled it to the front door. She bumped it down the three steps from the porch to the ground, took a running start and began to pedal along the coastal path.
In all the years she had walked and biked along the path, she had never travelled along it in the middle of the night. Tonight the thick blackness was lit only by a paring of moon and a few pulsing stars between racing clouds, while out at sea an occasional wave turned and foamed under the starlight. Still, she knew the path well and could avoid the larger holes and projecting boulders. When she reached the narrow strip which ran between the Tremayne property and the cliff, she decided she ought to dismount. Walking cautiously, wheeling her bike, she felt suddenly alone. There was no sound but the faint rhythmical ticking from the bicycle wheels and the perpetual crash of the sea, which Tirza never heard, but felt beating in the pulse of her own blood. She glanced across at the Tremayne house and thought how the local children had always called it, jokingly, the Haunted House. It didn’t seem quite so much of a joke tonight, with only a thin sliver of moon, half-obscured by clouds, that glinted here and there on the glass of the darkened windows. It was as though someone was moving about those deserted rooms with a flickering candle.
Tirza tightened her grip on the handlebars and concentrated on the path. It would widen out soon, and she would be able to ride again. A sudden movement ahead of her and a rustling in the leatherwood bushes crowded against the stone boundary wall made her jump. Some nocturnal creature, as startled as she was herself, had fled for shelter. Before the path was quite wide enough to be safe, she mounted again and began to pedal hard, down the swoop of ground edging Tobias’s bottom field where the rows of young corn whispered, down to the place where a break in the rocks allowed an easy descent to the beach, and then turned to the right on to the main farm track.
The bicycle wheel twisted suddenly, pitching her off on to the stony ground. She struck her chin on something, and she could feel the salty taste of blood where her teeth had cut into her lip. She pulled herself up. The ground here was churned into a tangle of deep ruts where the jeeps had been turning. Usually the ground was bumpy here, but nothing the bike would not have sailed over. Now the path was so broken up she had to wheel it again until she was well past the junction of the two paths. She dabbed her lip on her shirt tail, mounted again, and rode on up the track to the farmyard.
Lights were blazing everywhere in the house. The pickup stood in the middle of the yard, its doors hanging open. The horses and cows were out in the pasture, away from the house, but there were distressed sounds from the chicken shed, like a disturbed hive of bees, and the pig was bumping his
shoulder anxiously against the gate of his pen. One of the half-wild farm cats slipped past, eyeing Tirza sideways. It was carrying a rat, which hung limp from its jaws, the long tail trailing in the dust. Tirza shuddered. She could hear voices from the house, and something else.
A terrible thin shrieking noise, like an animal caught in a trap, came from one of the upstairs windows. It went on and on, rising and falling with a strange primitive rhythm. It was interspersed with angry yells, which Tirza recognised as Billy in a furious temper – and perhaps afraid. She couldn’t think what could be making that inhuman screaming noise.
As she stood hesitating in the yard, holding her bicycle and wondering whether to go forward to the house or to retreat and make for home, Simon came out of the open back door and sat down on the steps, his head in his hands.
‘Simon!’ Tirza whispered urgently.
Over the noise he did not hear her.
‘Simon!’
He leapt up, peering out from the lighted doorway into the dark yard.
‘Tirza? What are you doing here?’ He sounded angry, but in the diffused light from the house his face was tear-stained and blotchy.
‘What’s going on? What’s that noise?’
Simon walked down the steps and across the yard to her. He stared at her wide-eyed in the dark and put his hands over hers on the handlebars.
‘Just after Martha got back from her date with Captain Tucker, a telegraph boy came.’
‘A telegraph?’ Tirza didn’t understand at first what he meant. Then her stomach clenched. ‘Oh, no. Not Will?’
She saw him nod, silhouetted against the lighted house.
‘He’s been shot down on a bombing raid over Germany. He’s dead.’
They stood in silence, trying to grasp this. Blackness seemed to be seeping towards them from the dark fields and woods. Will Halstead. Dead.
‘Martha didn’t say anything at first, then she just went berserk, started throwing dishes round the kitchen. Then she ran upstairs and grabbed Billy out of bed and locked him with her in her bedroom. She started screaming like that and she hasn’t stopped. Now Billy’s yelling – I guess he’s terrified. Our dads are trying to get them out.’
Simon raised one hand and ran it over his face. With the other he gripped Tirza’s hand tightly.
‘I think she’s gone crazy.’
8
Maine: Spring 1942
Afterwards, Patience was to swear her Bible oath that she had not breathed a word to anyone about events at the Libbys’ farm that night. Normally she would not have been there on a Saturday. She arrived Monday morning and worked till Friday, sleeping weekday nights on a truckle bed up in one of the attic rooms. Then on Friday evening, with her wages in her pocket, she would walk home to Flamboro. However, since Martha and Billy had arrived at the farm, she had been glad to augment her earnings with baby-sitting whenever the Libby parents could not stay at home to mind Billy. Even on the nights when Patience was sleeping at the farm anyway, Harriet insisted that Martha should pay her for baby-sitting when she was left in charge. So on the Saturday when Martha went out to Portland with Captain Tucker, and Harriet and Tobias had arranged to play bridge with the Fletts, Patience had come back to the farm at six thirty as Harriet was putting Billy to bed. She sat listening to the radio in the farm kitchen until Simon came home and had taken herself off to bed about nine.
At nine thirty, when the Libbys had walked back from Flamboro and let themselves into the house, Patience woke briefly, then fell asleep again. Later, when the screaming began, she was terrified. Uncertain whether to stay where she was or go downstairs, she clutched her pillow to her chest and hid under the quilt. Eventually, after hearing the pickup leave and return, she could no longer endure being alone. Wrapping her housecoat around her, she made her way fearfully down to the landing, where she found Harriet sitting on a chair weeping and Abigail standing grimly beside her. Wild shrieks were coming from behind Martha’s door, mingled with screams of fright from Billy. Through the open landing window she could see Tobias at the top of a ladder, steadied by Nathan at its foot. Tobias seemed to be trying to force Martha’s window open.
The eldest of six children and daughter of a trawlerman, Patience was a girl of practical sense when she realised she was confronted with a human crisis and not something out of a nightmare. She went down to the kitchen, stoked the kitchen stove and made a pot of coffee and another of tea. Later the older Libbys drifted in and out of the kitchen and were grateful to her. She saw nothing of Martha, but Harriet carried Billy down to the kitchen wrapped in a blanket. His face was red and puffy with tears and his eyes were wide with shock. Patience made him a mug of hot chocolate and took him on her knee while Harriet collapsed on a chair and cradled a third cup of tea, which she did not drink.
As dawn was lightening the east, Patience heard about the death of Will, falling out of the sky in his burning aeroplane. She cried a little herself, quietly. Will was a decent man. Not handsome, but what her mother called solid. He had always had a kind word for Patience, even when he used to come for his vacations to Todd’s Neck as a boy, when she was a little girl with pigtails.
So if it wasn’t Patience who let slip the story of that night, who was it? Whatever or whoever, within a couple of days everyone in Flamboro knew that Will Halstead was dead, that his wife Martha was crazy with grief and taking sleeping pills prescribed by the doctor, and that she had reacted to the news by locking herself in her room with her son and threatening to kill them both.
‘It’s shocking,’ said Mary Flett to Miss Catherine as she weighed out flour and raisins. ‘He was a fine young man, and he hadn’t been over there but two months. There’s Harriet’s girl a widow at twenty-six and that child fatherless. And if ever a child needed a father’s hand, that one does.’
‘I feel so sorry for Harriet and Tobias,’ said Miss Catherine. ‘And two pounds of sugar, please, Mary.’ She began to pack her purchases into her basket. ‘Will Halstead was a good husband to Martha, steadying. Now, I don’t know... There’s many a woman been widowed in this town without losing her mind as well.’
‘Women here have always known they might lose their husbands between sunrise and sunrise,’ said Mary bluntly. ‘You have to accept what the Lord sends. I’m sure Harriet raised Martha as best she could, but that girl always was different, didn’t fit in here, and I reckon being away from home so long she’s picked up fancy Washington notions.’
Mary was fond of Harriet, and she regarded Martha’s hysterical behaviour as some kind of slur on her mother.
‘Well,’ said Miss Catherine with a sigh, ‘no doubt she’ll come to terms with it in time. Molly thinks she’s been tipped over the edge by guilt – when the telegram arrived, she’d just come back from a night out in Portland with that army captain who was here at town meeting.’
This view gradually took form and hardened as the general opinion in Flamboro. Martha was pitied, but the pity was tempered with reproof. She’d been dating another man when her husband was thousands of miles away, risking his life for his country. Didn’t that somehow make her partly responsible for Will’s death? And her uncontrolled frenzy on hearing the news, her threat to kill herself and her child – no Flamboro woman had ever behaved with such lack of decency and dignity.
Discussion of Flamboro’s first war casualty was interrupted by the arrival of the gun that was to be mounted on the headland beside the burying ground. A number of townsfolk had pictured a machine-gun, like those they had seen in gangster movies, with maybe a stand and a hut for the gunners. They were therefore taken aback when three large army trucks, painted in camouflage patches of khaki, brown and green, drove down Schoolhouse Lane two days after the news of Will’s death had reached the town. The trucks turned left at the harbour front and drove up as close to the church as they could, and a party of soldiers piled out of them.
A couple of officers with theodolites directed operations. By the end of the first day, an area had been marked o
ut on the headland, a square hole dug in the topsoil and walled with boards, and concrete poured for the base. The soldiers, who had enlivened things at the Schooner Bar over lunchtime, roared off in the evening, bouncing up the lane round the shoulder of Mount Manenticus to the main Portland road, driving much too fast and killing a racoon which strayed on to the road from the woods round Gooseneck Lake.
Three days later they were back, one group setting up the gun base and mounting the gun, the other group assembling three prefabricated sheds. Simon and Wayne, who hung around the soldiers with the other boys, asking questions, wanted to know what the sheds were for.
‘These two smaller ones, for ammunition and gun spares,’ said a friendly sergeant. ‘The bigger one is for the gunners to use.’
They were allowed to look inside. There were rough bunks, one above the other, against the far wall, a table with a field telephone, and a portable kerosene stove so the men on duty could make themselves coffee. The boys established themselves on the churchyard wall, swinging their legs and watching critically.
‘Reckon I could do that,’ said Simon, chewing a piece of grass while a couple of soldiers fixed the door of the ammunition shed in place.
‘Reckon I could too,’ said Wayne. ‘Don’t look as hard work as fishin’, bein’ a soldier.’
‘I bet I can shoot as well as they can. Been potting rabbits since I was six.’ Simon threw away his piece of grass and chose another from the overgrown stems that fringed the edge of the churchyard. ‘Though I guess ‘tisn’t much fun getting shot at in a battle.’
‘Nowadays everybody rides in tanks,’ said Wayne. ‘My uncle over to Kennebunk, Ma’s brother, he fought in the last war. He says this one’s goin’ to be some different. No trenches and all that slaughter. It’ll be tanks and aeroplanes and submarines.’
‘You wouldn’t get me in a submarine.’
‘Well...’ Wayne reflected, ‘I dunno. You can sneak up on the Germans and then let go a torpedo – wham!’
