‘I’m sorry, Mother. Don’t take too much notice of me. I’ll be less sour in a day or two.’
Walking down into the town he experienced a feeling of well-being so all-suffusing that the pain of his wound almost gave him pleasure. He felt pure and clean and not-of-this-world. Yet his mood was supremely physical, too: the scent of chrysanthemums in people’s gardens; the sight of the chestnut trees turning a fiery red-and-yellow; the sound of the great cathedral clock striking as he crossed the close and turned down beside the river: he apprehended all these things in every particle of his body.
And when, drinking a pint of Chepsworth ale in the bar of The Swan, where four farm labourers sat with the landlord and the talk was of turnips and winter wheat, he smiled to himself and listened greedily to every word, till one old man drew him into an argument about the virtues of home-baked bread.
At King’s Hill House, his mother, worrying, hoped the war would soon be over. It seemed to be giving Michael a taste for low company.
The orchard at Cobbs was at its best, the apples so thick that many branches were borne down low, and Betony, walking among the trees, often had to bend her head. She had never known such a year for apples. She kept touching them with the tips of her fingers: the big green quilters, the rusty red pippins, and the crimson winesaps much loved by wasps. She was choosing a pippin for herself when she saw Michael coming towards her from the house.
‘I met your brother William,’ he said. ‘He told me where to find you.’
‘Was he polite to you?’ Betony asked.
‘Perfectly. Why do you ask?’
‘He’s in a sullen mood lately. Anti-military. Anti-war.’
‘Then his feelings run with mine exactly.’
‘I think he feels guilty at not enlisting.’
‘It’ll all be decided for him soon, when conscription comes in.’
‘Poor William,’ she said. ‘He so loves his home and his family, and the work he does in the carpenter’s shop. He so loves everything to be neat and tidy. He’ll hate all the mess and confusion and waste …’ She looked at Michael. ‘Where will it all end?’ she asked. ‘And when, oh, when?’
Michael shrugged. He knew he ought to say comforting things: that the Germans were beaten and it was only a question of finishing them off. Such was the spirit promulgated by the commanders. But his own feeling was that the war might last for ever and ever. He could see no solution; no victory on either side; no other outcome except complete annihilation. Perhaps it was just that he was so tired. Once he was perfectly fit again, his old optimism was bound to return.
‘It’s got to end somewhere, sometime,’ he said. ‘But don’t ask me when. I’m no strategist, God knows. I just obey orders ‒ with my eyes shut mostly ‒ and do my best to stay alive.’
They were walking slowly through the orchard and he noticed how, whenever she stooped beneath a low branch, her skirts went out in a billowing flare, sweeping the grass. The dress she wore was a very dark red with black threads running through it in waves, and, watching the way the skirts flared out at every curtsey, he knew he would see the pattern they made whenever he thought of her in future.
‘You said you’d show me round the workshop.’
‘It’s shut up on Sundays. Great-grumpa Tewke is strict on that score.’
But she took him and showed him the workshop buildings ‒ stables, once, when Cobbs had been a farmhouse, long years before ‒ and the yard where oak and elm planking lay criss-crossed in piles, with laths between to let the air blow through and dry them. She showed him the sawpit and the timber-crabs and the store-yard full of ladders, field-gates, cribs and troughs. And she told him all she knew of the business, founded by Great-grumpa William Tewke in the year 1850, when he was a boy of nineteen and had scarcely enough money about him to buy his first tools. Now the workshop employed twelve men. Or would do, she said, if two had not gone into the Army.
They walked and talked until dusk was falling, when her father came in search of them, saying supper was on the table and would the captain care to stay?
In the big kitchen, under the low black beams and rafters, they sat down to eat at a long table covered over with a stiff white cloth. There were nine in the household. A clan indeed. Ten, he was told, if they counted Janie, but she was married to Martin Holt and lived at the neighbouring farm of Anster. Michael himself, an only child, was glad to be sitting with this family. He wished he belonged there, sharing the strength their unity gave them. He had often been lonely in his own home.
At the head of the table sat William Tewke, quick of eye and ear although he was turned eighty-four, and next on his left sat Kate Tewke, his dead son’s widow, vague and short-sighted, known to the younger ones as Granna. At the foot of the table, Beth, Kate’s daughter, fresh-faced and comely, her corn-coloured hair in a braid round her head, looked on them all with a calm blue gaze and saw to it they had what they wanted. Next to her, her husband, Jesse, was just as yellow-haired as she, so that it was no wonder the two of them together had produced children of such harvest fairness.
But there was an odd-man-out among them: the boy named Tom Maddox: black-haired and brown-eyed, with the hollow cheeks and smooth dark skin of a gipsy, and the same slender build. He was very quiet, with an almost unnatural stillness about him, and although he was one of the family, he was yet apart from all the rest, watchful, intent, aware of everything that passed yet speaking, it seemed, only when someone spoke to him. He was an oddity indeed; an orphan brought into the family and raised with them from the age of nine; standing out from all the rest like a blackbird in a sheaf of corn.
‘You can see he ent one of us, can’t you?’ said young Dicky, showing off to Michael. ‘Mother’s never been able to scrub him clean.’
‘Tom is courting,’ Roger said. ‘Did you know that, Dad? It’s Tilly Preston at The Rose and Crown.’
‘Is that really so, Tom?’ Jesse asked, assuming a father’s gravity. ‘And if it is, shouldn’t you be asking my advice?’
‘No,’ Tom said, ‘it ent true.’
‘Well, Till Preston is sweet on him. She drew him a pint of ale for nothing when we was there on Friday night.’
‘That’s another bloody lie!’
‘Now, then, Tom, mind your language in front of strangers.’
‘Hah!’ said Great-grumpa. ‘I daresay the captain’s heard worse’n that.’
‘Yes, indeed,’ Michael said. ‘It’s a true saying, “to swear like a trooper”.’
‘But you’re not a trooper,’ Dicky said. ‘What are you, exactly, since you ent in uniform for us to see?’
‘Infantry,’ Michael said. ‘Second Battalion, the Three Counties Regiment.’
‘Then you’ve seen some action, probably?’
‘Oh, there’s plenty of action out in France at present, yes.’
‘Them French!’ said Granna, suddenly, adjusting her glasses to glare at Michael. ‘You give them what-for and teach them a lesson!’
‘What’re you on about?’ asked Great-Grumpa. ‘The French are our allies, same as the Belgians.’
‘Allies?’ said Granna. ‘I thought they was meant to be on our side!’
‘Let’s not talk about the war ‒ Michael gets enough of that,’ said Betony.
‘Don’t he like talking about it? ‒ He’s different from most, then,’ William said.
‘Let’s talk about the chickens and whether they’re laying well lately.’
‘Chickens?’ said Dicky. ‘Why talk about chickens for heaven’s sake?’
‘It’s as good a subject as any other.’
And, across the table, Betony exchanged a smile with Michael.
He was often at Cobbs after that. It became for him a place apart. And the family accepted him, even William.
Having done his duty by his mother, going with her to luncheon parties, allowing her to show him off in his new uniform, he would then change into comfortable clothes and escape on long walks into the country, where h
e ate bread and cheese in quiet pubs, and drank beer. He could not have enough of days like these and often at the end he would come to Huntlip; to the old house at Cobbs; to Betony, whose day’s work ended at six o’clock.
One evening they walked in Millery wood, half a mile away, on the north bank of the Derrent brook. It was just about dusk and as they climbed the steep path they passed a figure standing perfectly still in the shadows.
The man’s stillness was uncanny, and immediately Michael was back in France, creeping at night along derelict trenches, where at every turn an enemy guard might loom up darkly. His flesh crept. He almost sprang at the man and struck him. But Betony’s voice said, ‘Tom? Is that you?’ and her foster-brother stepped out to the pathway. Michael’s breathing became normal. The sweat cooled on his lip and forehead.
‘Yes, it’s me,’ Tom muttered, and slouched past them, hands in pockets, down the path towards the Derrent.
‘Extraordinary fellow!’ Michael said. ‘What does he mean by it, skulking about in the dark like that?’
‘It’s nothing unusual for Tom. He’s always been a night-creature.’
‘Was he spying on us by any chance?’
‘Goodness, no!’ she said, laughing. ‘Badgers, perhaps. Foxes, even. Or he may have been lying in wait for a pheasant. But he’d never bother to spy on people. They don’t interest him enough for that.’
‘Perhaps he had an assignation. That girl your brother Roger mentioned.’
‘I hope not,’ Betony said. ‘Tilly Preston is a slut’
She was rather protective where Tom was concerned. Michael had noticed it often before. And he wondered that she should concern herself with a youth whose manner towards her was always surly and indifferent. He had learnt a little of the boy’s history: Tom was illegitimate; Granna had spoken of bad blood.
‘Bad blood! What rubbish!’ Betony said. ‘I don’t believe in all that. Tom’s father had a terrible temper. He killed Tom’s mother in a drunken quarrel and afterwards he hanged himself. Tom was a baby of twelve months or so, neglected until he was skin and bone. Then he was raised by my Grannie Izzard, well-looked-after but allowed to run wild. Those are the things that have made him strange. It’s nothing to do with bad blood.’
‘You’re certainly a loyal champion.’
‘I was cruel to him at first,’ she said. ‘When Grannie Izzard died and Tom came to us, I made his life a misery.’
‘How did you?’
‘Oh, tormenting him about his parents … making him feel he wasn’t wanted …’
‘Did your brothers do it too?’
‘No. Only me. I was horribly spiteful.’
‘That explains why you leap to defend him. You’re trying to pay off a debt of guilt.’
‘I suppose I am, though there’s nothing Tom ever wants from me, and the silly thing is, he bears me no grudge.’
‘Are you sure of that? He’s very churlish.’
‘He still doesn’t trust me,’ Betony said, ‘and I can’t really blame him.’
Coming out of the wood, onto high ground, they were met by a big full golden moon shining on the skyline, and Betony’s face, when he turned towards her, had the moonlight bright upon it.
She looked serene. Her glance, meeting his, had a smile in it. But when he put out a hand to touch her, intending to hold her back a while, just as she was, with the moonlight on her, she walked quickly past and swung along the ridgeway path.
‘I can hear the trains at Stickingbridge … that generally means we’ll get a shower …’
The orchard at Cobbs presented a different picture now. The apples had been picked and the boughs, relieved of their heavy burden, had sprung back to their proper place. The forked supports had been removed; Martin Holt’s sheep had been put in to graze; and now the leaves were falling fast, a luminous yellow in the long lush grass.
Michael was aware that the days were slipping through his fingers. His month’s leave was almost over. He wished he could choose a specific moment and call for time to stand still. This moment, for instance, with Betony laughing in the sun, standing on tiptoe under a plum tree, trying to reach a globule of gum that hung on the branch like a bead of amber.
Yet what was the use of asking time to stand and deliver? All living creatures must take what they could. There was no fulfilment otherwise. Betony, with her arms upraised, the shape of her breasts inviting his touch ‒ surely she was aware of herself, aware of the sun going round the sky, faster and faster every day?
Feeling him near her, she turned quickly, letting her arms fall to her sides. She was laughing and breathless and flushed with exertion, but as she looked at him and read the sick appeal in his eyes, her laughter faded away to nothing. His hands touched her face, her throat, her hair, and she stepped back a little, pushing him away. Her eyes remained steady. She tried to think of something to say. But it was Michael who spoke first.
‘I want you to marry me. Soon. Straight away. I thought I’d get a special licence.’
‘No, Michael. It’s too soon. I don’t really know if it’s what I want.’
‘I know my own feelings. I’ve no doubts whatever.’
‘How can that be? It’s impossible. We’ve known each other eighteen days! Afterwards, perhaps, when the war is over ‒’
‘There may not be any afterwards for me.’
‘You mustn’t say that! It isn’t fair to say such things.’
‘It’s true all the same. Do you know what the chances of survival are over there? I’m already living on borrowed time.’
‘So you’d marry me quickly just to go off and leave me a widow?’
‘No! That’s just it! I know it’s silly, but somehow I feel if I had your love, it would keep me safe from everything. I’d damn well make sure I got through safely!’
He knew he was playing on her feelings, but when he saw the pity in her face, he became ashamed.
‘This is what it does to us! ‒ Turns us into abject beings, preying on people, demanding their love. I’m sorry, Betony. Don’t judge me too harshly. Let’s forget about it and try to be as we were before.’
He took her hand and drew it into the crook of his arm, and they walked together towards the house, talking quietly of ordinary things. But all the time he wondered about her; tried to guess how she felt towards him; for he had pinned his faith on her and looked to her as his protection.
In the cobbled fold at the back of the house, Jesse Izzard was pumping water, filling two old wooden buckets. He saw Betony walking with Michael through the garden but pretended he had something in his eye. When they had passed, he picked up his buckets and went into the dairy, where his wife was busy bottling honey.
‘The captain seems smutten on our Betony. Think it’ll come to anything, do you?’
‘Maybe. Maybe not.’ Beth for once had no sure opinion. ‘But Betony’s a girl who will find it hard to give herself heart and soul to someone.’
Chapter Two
Often when Tom was in The Rose and Crown, someone would bring him a chunk of wood and ask him to carve a bird or a fish or an animal, and today Tilly Preston, the landlord’s daughter, had brought out an old maplewood beer-mug, for him to carve her likeness on it.
It took him perhaps half an hour, using only a pocket-knife, but the face on the mug was Tilly’s exactly: the wide-set eyes under fine brows; the small straight nose with flared nostrils; the pretty lips parted a little, showing teeth with spaces between them; and the wisps of hair curling down over her forehead.
Tom, as he worked, was shut away from the noise around him, and Roger, watching his clever fingers, wished he had half Tom’s skill in carving.
‘Why, you’ve made me look flat!’ Tilly complained, when she held the finished mug in her hands. ‘Still, I reckon you’ve earnt your pint of Chepsworth.’
She filled the mug brimfull, and Tom drank it down in one long draught.
‘That’s the idea, Tom,’ said Oliver Rye. ‘Up with her until she’s empty!’
‘Is that all he gets?’ asked Billy Ratchet. ‘Don’t he get a kiss and a bit of a huggle?’
‘Go on, young Tom. Tilly’s agreeable, I’ll be bound.’
‘Perhaps he’s frightened,’ said Henry Tupper.
‘Perhaps he don’t rightly know the motions?’
‘D’you want a few pointers, Tom, lad, from one of us old hands that’ve had some experience?’
Tom said nothing. He wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. His dark face was flushed, and he couldn’t look at Tilly Preston. But Tilly herself was leaning towards him, and when Billy Ratchet pushed Tom forward, she put her arms up round his neck. Her small round breasts rested against him, and her face came slowly closer to his, her lips parting as they touched very softly against his own.
The little gathering sent up a cheer. Glasses were thumped upon the tables. Then, abruptly, there was silence. The girl sprang away from the boy’s arms and turned to her father who stood scowling in the open doorway.
Emery Preston was a well-built man. His chest was like one of his own barrels. And, going up to the slim-built Tom Maddox, he looked like a bulldog approaching a whippet.
‘If I catch you touching my daughter again, I’ll make you sorry you was ever born!’
‘Father!’ said Tilly, pulling at his arm. ‘You mustn’t speak to my friends like that.’
‘No lip from you or you’ll get my belt across your bottom! You’re supposed to be courting Harry Yelland. I won’t have you meddling with this chap Maddox.’
‘Why, what’s wrong with Tom?’ Roger demanded, hot in defence of his foster-brother.
‘I knew his father!’ Emery said. ‘He was the nastiest-tempered brute in Huntlip and he once hit my mother across the mouth because she refused him drink on the slate.’
‘When was that? In the year dot? It warnt our Tom that done it anyway!’
‘Like father, like son, so I’m taking no chances,’ Emery said. ‘Just mind and keep him away from my daughter!’
‘Don’t worry!’ Roger said. ‘We’ll keep away from you and your daughter and be damned to both of you good and all!’ And, taking Tom’s arm, he led him to the door. ‘Come on, Tom, we’ll drink elsewhere. There’s plenty of places better’n this one.’
The Sorrowing Wind (The Apple Tree Saga Book 3) Page 2
