He could see, too, that the wound in his chest had now healed, leaving a dark empurpled scar; that his face and body were criss-crossed all over with smaller scars; that the dressing on his foot had concealed from him the loss of two toes.
‘Seems I came off lightly,’ he said, ‘compared with most of the chaps here.’
‘You’ll be going to hospital in England soon.’
‘Ah. I know. The doctor told me.’
He could see now that Linn’s eyes and eyebrows were dark brown; that her features were small and neatly made; that, suffering as she did with the mutilated men in her care, her cheerfulness often cost her dear.
When his transfer came, he was given only an hour’s notice. He packed his few belongings quickly and hobbled off in search of Linn. He found her in the last ward, renewing the dressing on a man’s neck.
‘Seems I’m for off. Marching orders. They’re putting me on the next train.’
‘I heard there was a contingent going. I wondered if you might be among them.’
‘They don’t give much warning, do they?’ he said. ‘I’ve been running round like a scalded cat.’
‘Hoi!’ said the man whose wound she was dressing. ‘You go ahead, nurse, and say goodbye to your chap here. I shan’t hurt for a minute or two.’
‘No,’ Linn said. ‘I mustn’t leave you half done. Besides which, Sister’s watching.’
‘I’ll say goodbye, then,’ Tom said. He could see the ward sister, three rows away, frowning severely across at him. ‘Maybe I’ll see you back at Blagg.’
‘Sure to,’ she said, and turned to smile at him, looking at him in a searching way. ‘You might go to Outlands and look up my dad. Tell him I’m well and looking forward to coming home.’
She turned back to what she was doing, and her patient gave Tom a sympathetic wink.
‘I’d let you take her back to Blighty, cock, only my need is greater than yourn, I reckon.’
Tom nodded and walked away.
Chapter Seven
A month later, after treatment at the military hospital in Sawsford, he was home in Huntlip, discharged from the Army and wearing civilian clothes again.
It felt very strange, sleeping alone in a room of his own, after the crowded hospital ward, and the crowded billets. Often he lay wide awake, listening to the silence, till the small sounds of the household at rest came to him through the deafening stillness. He would look at the window and wonder at the steadiness of the sky outside: its unbroken darkness when there was mist; the constancy of moon and stars when the night was a clear one. He expected the lightning of gunflash and flare to whiten the sky and set it pulsing. It took a long time to get used to an earth so dark, so hushed, so perfectly still.
‘Why’ve you been discharged?’ Dicky asked. ‘If your eyes is all right again, why don’t they want you back in the Army?’
‘Seems I ent quite up to standard. My papers’ve got “shell-shock” on ’em.’
‘Is that all that’s wrong with you?’
‘Leave Tom alone,’ Beth said to her son. ‘Just be thankful he’s back safe.’
‘Ah, don’t ask so many questions, boy,’ said Great-grumpa. ‘Tom may’ve lost a few bits and pieces.’
‘I’ve lost the tops off two toes,’ Tom said.
‘There!’ said Granna. ‘And I was going to make you some socks.’
‘He’ll still need socks, Granna,’ Betony said, impatiently.
‘What gets me,’ Dicky said, ‘is Tom’s being hurt by a British shell.’
‘Them things happen,’ Tom said.
Dicky himself was in khaki now. He was based at Capleton and had a weekend pass every month. He had lost all desire to go to the front. Such a muddle it all seemed. He wouldn’t have minded dying a hero, but to get blown up by your own side! People said it would end soon, and he hoped they were right.
At The Rose and Crown, when Tom went in with Dicky one evening, Emery Preston was quite friendly.
‘A drink on me for you two lads. I always believe in treating soldiers.’
‘I knew you’d come back, Tom,’ Tilly said. ‘I never doubted it. Not once. Have you brought me any souvenirs?’
‘No,’ Tom said, ‘no souvenirs.’
‘Show her the scar on your chest,’ Dicky said. ‘That’s a souvenir, ent it?’
‘How long d’you think it’ll be before it’s over?’ Emery asked.
‘Not long now,’ Tom said.
One Monday morning, Tom and Jesse were up on the slopes of Lippy Hill, repairing a field-barn for Isaac Mapp. The day was a cold one, with drizzle blowing on the wind, grey and drenching. Jesse was sawing a new beam, inside the barn, where he was sheltered. He stopped work, thinking he could hear music, and went across to the door to listen.
Brass-bands on a weekday? There must be something wrong with his ears! Yet somewhere down in the greyness below there was certainly a banging, clanging noise of some kind and, as the explanation came to him, a bright sunrise dawned in his face.
‘It’s the Armistice!’ he shouted to Tom. ‘That’s what it is! It’s come at last! The war is over!’
He dropped his saw, snatched up his jacket, and went hurrying down the steep track, leaving Tom behind. He reached the road at the bottom of the hill and there, sure enough, the villagers were out from Otchetts and Peckstone and Dugwell and Blagg, and were marching on Huntlip, armed with pots and pans and biscuit-tins, ‒ anything that would make a din ‒ gathering more people as they went.
‘The war is over!’ they said to him. ‘The Armistice was signed at eleven o’clock. The Kaiser has skipped it and gone to Holland. Our boys’ll soon be coming home!’
‘Glory be!’ Jesse said. ‘I knowed what it was the very minute I heard the rumpus! I’ve got two boys of my own, you know, William and Roger. They’ll be coming home! They’ll be coming home!’
He fell in with the noisy procession and danced along with it, clapping people on the back and telling them about William and Roger.
‘My eldest boy, he’s a bombardier, and my second, well, he’s a gunner, see. But God bless my soul! To have them back again after such years!’
And, growing impatient to reach home, he took a short-cut across the fields, sending sheep and cattle in all directions.
In the kitchen at Cobbs, when he stumbled in, Beth sat at the table, a cabbage half shredded on the board before her. Great-grumpa Tewke stood at the window. Granna Tewke sat by the fire.
‘Ent you heard the news?’ Jesse demanded. ‘It’s the Armistice! The war is over! Everyone’s out in the roads, creating, and the din can be heard from here to Scarne. Ent you had word of it down here?’
‘Yes, we’ve had word of it,’ Beth said.
‘Well, you don’t seem too bucked,’ he said, laughing. ‘I thought you’d all be over the moon.’
Her stillness stopped him, brought him up short, and he saw the telegram on the table, lying open, under her hands. William and Roger had been killed in action. Sunday the tenth. Eleven a.m. Twenty-four hours before the signing of the Armistice.
Only two days before, there had been a letter, written by William: ‘We’re in the pink, Rog and me, still washing behind the ears and sticking together like you told us to do.’
They had died together, serving their gun, when an enemy shell had fallen directly into their gunpit.
The carpenter’s shop stopped work that day. The men were sent home. Dicky, coming on special leave, entered a house of terrible silence. Betony was there and broke the news. He went at once to look for his father and was shocked to hear him weeping aloud in the empty workshop. He crept away, unable to face such open grief, and returned later. His father stood hunched against the workbench.
‘Why should my sons’ve been took from me? Why? Why?’
‘You’ve still got me, Dad. You’ve still got me.’
Jesse made no answer, and Dicky went away again, hurt and baffled.
A few days later, a small package came, containing the
two dead boys’ effects: cap-badges, passbooks, letters, snapshots. Jesse was angry at sight of these things. He wanted to hurl them into the fire.
‘What use are they without the boys?’
‘No use,’ Beth said, ‘except just to remember them by.’
She put the badges up on their portrait, pinning them to the ledge of the frame. Jesse gave a groan and left the room, pushing Dicky aside in the doorway. Beth turned and saw the boy’s eyes as he looked at the portrait of his brothers.
‘You mustn’t hate them for having died.’
Dicky was ashamed. How did his mother know his feelings? His father knew nothing. He had shut them all out.
‘My dad don’t want me nowadays. I reckon he wishes me dead like them.’
‘Your father’s not hisself at present. It’s up to you to be patient with him.’
Betony, seeking to comfort Dicky, went with him to Chepsworth Park, to the special ceremony held there. A part of the grounds, about fifteen acres, had been given to the public by Mr Champley to commemorate the signing of the Armistice. A plaque was unveiled on one of the gateposts; a drinking-fountain was switched on; doves were released from the old stone dovecote. It would be known as Polygon Park and would be a place of recreation for the people of Chepsworth. The house itself, with the rest of the grounds, was already a home for disabled soldiers. Mr Champley’s only son had been killed in the battle of Polygon Wood.
‘Is it wrong for us to be gadding about?’ Dicky asked.
‘No, of course not,’ Betony said.
‘My dad seems to think so,’ Dicky said.
Huntlip itself had almost a week of celebrations, ending after dark on Saturday night with a torchlight procession through the village, up onto the open common. A straw-stuffed effigy of the Kaiser, with a realistic withered arm and wearing a genuine pickelhaube helmet, was carried up with a rope round its neck and hanged from the old gibbet. A fire was lit underneath it and fireworks secreted in the dummy’s body went off with loud bangs as the dummy burned.
Tom, alone in the outer darkness, stood watching the yellow flames leaping and the rockets fizzing towards the sky. The Kaiser had dropped from his rope now, and the gibbet itself was burning fiercely, beginning to topple into the fire. The dancers and singers were cheering its fall.
Tom felt withdrawn, a living ghost. The merrymakers were strangers to him. The night was unreal. Though the fire burnt, it could never warm him. Though the voices shouted, the words meant nothing. And although a great many people were gathered there under the moon, reaching out to one another, there were no pale arms reaching out to him. He was wrapped in a caul of darkness and aloneness.
‘Tom?’ said a voice, and Tilly Preston stood beside him. ‘I’ve been looking for you everywhere. Dicky said you was here some place. Why ent you dancing like the others? Harry Yelland’s arrived now and brought his accordion.’
‘I ent much good at dancing, Tilly. I’m none too steady on my pins. But you go ahead and dance if you want to. I’d just as soon stand by and be quiet.’
‘I don’t care about dancing neither. Great lumping louts they are here. I’d just as soon go for a walk, away from the noise, wouldn’t you?’
She slid her arm into his and leant against him, looking into his thin dark face, lit by the bonfire, now burning red. She wanted to touch him, tenderly. She wanted to kiss his poor scarred eyes.
‘What’re you thinking about, Tom?’
‘I was thinking of William and Roger,’ he said, ‘and all the other chaps that’re gone.’
‘Don’t be unhappy, Tom. Don’t look like that. They wouldn’t want you to grieve for them, would they, specially not on a night like tonight?’
‘I was only thinking, that’s all.’ And he turned his head to look at her. ‘You sure you don’t want to join in the dancing?’
Tilly was wearing a hand-crocheted cap of fluffy red wool with a pompon on it, and a long scarf to match, with a similar pompon at either end. She looked very small, in her long winter coat and buttoned boots, like a child going skating on an icy pond.
‘Don’t you want my company, Tom?’
‘I never said that.’
‘Wouldn’t you sooner go for a walk?’
‘All right,’ he said, ‘let’s go for a walk.’
She took him to a barn at New Strakes, her uncle’s farm on the edge of the common, and led him up into the hayloft. She undid her coat and was warm against him, taking his hands and guiding them slowly till they covered her breasts, as she drew him down with her into the loose-tumbled sweet-smelling hay. Her breath was quick and hot on his lips. She ached for him and knew she could easily make him love her.
The church bell at Eastery, cracked for more than thirty years, had been recast in honour of Eastery’s war dead, and on the fourth Sunday in November, when people from neighbouring villages came for the rededication service, it rang out tunefully over their heads, in celebration of the new peace.
‘When your mother and me was married here,’ Jesse said to Betony, ‘that there bell made sorry music, but now it’s something to hear, ent it?’
Old memories had unlocked his tongue. He was almost himself again.
‘That’s a wonderful thing to hear the church bells ringing out, after being stopped for so long, and to know they’re ringing all over England. Ah, and that’s a wonderful thing to know the captain is coming home, too, ent it? Are you sure you don’t want me to drive you to the station?’
‘No, father. I’d sooner go alone.’
Betony was nervous, meeting Michael after two and a half years. She felt she hardly knew him at all; hardly remembered what he looked like; and could not, however hard she tried, pin down exactly what she had felt for him before the enforced separation.
But when at last he stepped from the train, helped by his mother, and she saw his starved face, with its slow-twisting smile and burning gaze, she knew that even if he were a perfect stranger he would still have a claim upon her love. She had seen so many men like this, their faces sculpted by suffering, and she felt that love should be theirs for the asking, given freely, without meanness.
‘Betony,’ he said. ‘I thought this journey would never end. The train stopped at every station.’
‘Michael. Darling. You look so ill.’
‘I’ve had this damned ’flu. It’s left me feeling as weak as a kitten.’
When he took her in his arms, she could feel the tension thrumming in him, as though he were wound up tight like a spring.
‘Will you marry me, Betony?’
‘Yes,’ she whispered. ‘Yes. Oh, yes.’
‘Thank God for that. I have wanted you so. I think I would die if you said no now.’
‘I haven’t said no. I’ve said yes.’
‘It was the one thing that kept me going. Thinking of you. Knowing you loved me. I remembered the way you looked at me, that last time, on this very station, when you got here just as the train was leaving. Do you remember?’
‘Yes,’ she said, ‘I remember.’
‘If you hadn’t been here today,’ he said ‘looking at me in just the same way, I don’t know what I would have done.’
‘Michael. Darling. I am here.’
And she felt the tension easing a little, as he let her go and looked directly into her face.
‘Come along, both of you,’ his mother said. ‘There’s a car waiting.’
Their engagement was soon made public, and Betony was often at King’s Hill House. Mrs Andrews gave her blessing, but thought they ought to wait a while before marrying. Six months, perhaps, or even a year.
‘Don’t you think I’ve waited long enough?’ Michael said.
‘You’re a sick man. Is it fair on Betony to marry her before you’re quite well?’
‘I shan’t take that long, getting well.’
Alone together, he and Betony talked it out.
‘My mother says it’s unfair on you. Am I such a wreck?’
‘Your mother thinks we�
��re not really suited. She thinks if we have to wait a while we shall change our minds.’
‘In that case we’ll wait!’ he said grimly. ‘If only to prove how wrong she is. I don’t really mind, so long as I can see you often.’
‘I don’t mind, either. With my brothers only recently dead, it would be better not to have a wedding in the family just yet. Also, there’s so much work crying out to be done.’
Her work in the factories had come to an end. She was now at Chepsworth Park, helping at the home for sick and disabled ex-soldiers. There, under the direction of volunteer doctors, men were learning to use new artificial limbs; nervous cases were learning to talk again; husks of men with burnt-out lungs were coming to terms with the remnant of life that was left to them; and those who had nothing left at all were being nursed through their last days of pain.
Betony travelled about the three counties, raising funds, recruiting helpers, buying equipment. And often she worked with the men themselves: washing and feeding those who were helpless; giving her shoulder to a cripple hobbling on metal legs; wheeling men in bathchairs out to a sunny place in the orangery. There were men who stammered very badly and men who spoke only gibberish, and Betony would sit with them, trying to interpret their crazy, tortured utterances.
There was a boy named Johnny Clegg whose brain, it seemed, was tied in knots. He had no family or friends; received no visitors; and frightened everyone at the home by dashing at them, shouting unintelligibly at the top of his voice. He was very wild-looking and, failing to make himself understood, would hurl himself about in a frenzy.
He came to Betony one day, took hold of her arms, and shook her savagely to and fro. He dragged her towards the piano.
‘Lanno!’ he shouted. ‘Lanno! Lanno! Midder-orders-plidder-chewing!’
‘Tune?’ she said. ‘Your mother always played a tune?’
‘Assit! Assit! Plidder-chewing-obesit-obing!’
Betony went and sat at the piano and played Home Sweet Home. Johnny, beside her, stood perfectly still, listening intently to the end. Then when she turned round on the stool, he threw himself onto his knees before her, hid his face in her lap, and burst into tears.
The Sorrowing Wind (The Apple Tree Saga Book 3) Page 12
