by Jane Bailey
And they ran – they both did – and Mr Fairly ran after them, leaving a bundle of a boy in the grass.
Back along the stream they went, Tommy leading, Rosemary just yards behind. And Tommy could think of only one thing as he ran, and that was the punishment he would receive for witnessing this dreadful act. Not for what he had seen – for he had seen it all before – but for allowing Rosemary, an outsider, to see it. Mr Fairly would never live it down. No one knew about his secret except people who were too terrified of him to betray it. But Rosemary Shepherd would tell her parents and Tommy would be punished for the rest of his days. He would have to run away. He would have to run, run, run …
“Run, Rosemary, RUN!” he screamed, and Rosemary ran, and the dry grass rustled, and the stingers burnt, and the mud and the cowpats were rock hard and bumpy. The air was thick with pollen and summer smells, acrid and heavy.
They put a good distance between themselves and the panting ogre, and Tommy was hopeful that he hadn’t been recognized after all. But as he made for some undergrowth he heard a scream several yards behind him. Rosemary had slipped and fallen into the stream.
If he stopped for her, he would be caught. There was no point going back. Mr Fairly would probably grovel to Rosemary, make up some excuse. He might not even see her if she lay low, for the banks were quite steep here.
But Rosemary was calling out.
“Tommy! Tommy! Help!”
Why did she have to use his name?
“Tommy! Tommy! I’m stuck!”
Was it deep enough to drown there? It could only have been a couple of feet at most. But anyway, Fairly had arrived. Tommy crouched until he heard that Rosemary would be safe.
“Mr Fairly! Help me! I can’t get out!”
He watched Mr Fairly go down to the water’s edge, and then he began to run again. He ran like a hare, and he didn’t turn round until he was a safe distance away and could hide behind a cluster of hawthorn. And there, turning back, he saw Rosemary’s face as she clutched at the side of the bank, and there, as he watched, was Mr Fairly’s boot in her face, pushing her back again. And again. And then no more.
In the stillness Mr Fairly turned and looked about, and Tommy ducked behind the hawthorn where he crouched, sobbing and shaking with terror, until dusk and the first beams of torches from villagers.
It was the next morning they found Rosemary, hooked on some low branches a mile downstream. Tommy was questioned for hours, but knew nothing. Someone had made certain of that. Mr Fairly was relieved that Joyce and Jack Shepherd cut off all links with the boy, in case he was ever tempted to blurt out the truth. But that was unlikely. Mr Fairly had ways of keeping boys’ mouths shut. He’d had plenty of practice. In fact, Mr Fairly actively encouraged the odd rumour about Tommy, both because it helped transfer suspicion and because it emphasized his own charity in keeping the boy on.
When he finishes speaking, Tommy does not look at me, but gazes up at the hazel branches. A creeping chill makes me shiver, and we wait for the tawny owl to give its wavering hoot from the heart of the dark woods.
Baby, it’s cold outside
The injustice of it all smarts like the icy cold of the night. I cling on to Tommy for warmth and to give him comfort, trying to take it all in, make all the connections, but I feel overwhelmed. I burrow into his pullover, feel his chest heaving suddenly, and I know he is crying.
His tears terrify me. Aunty Joyce I can handle, but Tommy, Tommy is my rock. This isn’t supposed to happen, and I don’t know what to do except cling on tight and hope it will pass.
At some point I notice that the shaking is no longer crying, but shivering, and I venture to speak.
“Why now? Why run away now though, Tommy? You’ll be fourteen this month, won’t you? You can go off and find work.”
He puts his hands over his face and groans. “Oh … that’s what I wuz going to do. Only when you said that about my mum an’ Fairly … Oh God! It all makes sense … see, I think I’m his son! I’m that … thing’s son … an’ I can’t bear it … I can’t –”
“No you’re not.”
“Why else would they say he had his wicked way with ’er? See, Kitty, what it means, is Fairly and my mum … it means …”
Tommy frowns at me curiously. Then he reaches into his own canvas bag, rifles around, and brings out a tube and a torch. Carefully he pulls out a little scroll of paper and unravels the photograph Lady Elmsleigh had put on the wall of the village hall.
“You stole it!”
“I ’ad to.”
The photograph is unruly, constantly springing back into its new rolled shape. We hold it open together, and he strokes her face again.
“Look,” I say, “she’s expecting a baby.”
“Me!” he sobs.
“Yes! You. And look, over here …” I point to a little collection of boys with identical trousers and jackets, “these are the Heaven House boys, aren’t they?”
“I suppose …”
“And this old man, see? He’s Mr Northwood, and that’s his wife.”
“I know.”
“Well then!”
“Well then what?”
“Tosser said Mr Fairly didn’t come until after Mr Northwood died. So if that’s you in that tummy … well … you’re already there …”
He looks at the photograph and begins to wipe his face, smiling. He looks at me and laughs. “Ha!” Then he lets out a huge sigh and hugs me.
“So … my father wuz Edwin Glover. Ha!” His breaths are tumbling over themselves with excitement. “Tell me what Tosser said about him again.”
“She told it all to you.”
“I know, but what did she say the first time? What were her exact words when she told the whole knitting group?”
“She said he was gentle and kind …” I see an opportunity to please him, and I just can’t help myself: “She said he was the kindest, bravest and most handsome man you could ever hope to meet.” Although, given the way Tommy turned out, he probably was.
He is smiling wistfully across the torchlight into the night.
“You might have cousins,” I say.
“No … her brothers died, remember?”
“Or second cousins.”
He lets go of his side of the photograph and it spins into a roll.
“Second cousins!” he breathes, and I realize what a strange and lonely place he has been living in to see such treasure in such remote kinship.
“It’s facking cold!” I say.
“Yes, it fuckin’ is.”
“Shall we go home?”
“No! We can’t do that. It’s like I said, they’ll kill me. And you must never, never tell no one what I told you. If ’ee thinks I’ve told anyone, I might as well be dead.”
I think about this. After what Tommy has told me about Mr Fairly, I don’t want him to have to be punished in any way.
“Well, okay. But can we find a farmhouse?”
“That’s how I got found last time. No. We’ve got to stay hidden.”
But after an hour or so even Tommy gives up, and we go in search of shelter. We find an old lambing barn and settle down in the hay with a couple of fat sheep. There isn’t much warmth here either and we spend a sleepless night, shivering and whispering to each other.
“You will still marry me, won’t you?” I ask.
“What?”
“If you go to sea. You’ll still come back and marry me?”
“You’re eight!”
“Nine! Anyway, when I’m sixteen you’ll be … nineteen, twenty, twenty-one! That’s all right, isn’t it?”
He chuckles.
“I will marry you, Tommy.”
He tells me to stop making so much noise, but I put my head under his pullover and lie in a cocoon with him, and he lets me.
I cannot sleep. I doze from time to time, but true sleep will not come. I keep thinking of what Tommy has told me, and the burden of secrets he has had to carry for so long. And I can’t stop thi
nking of Aunty Joyce and Uncle Jack, and how it all makes sense now, their distrust of Tommy, their inability even to smile at the boy they once loved so much they were willing to adopt him.
But one thing still does not add up at all. If I can understand their behaviour towards Tommy, I cannot make out their behaviour towards each other. I can’t imagine why Uncle Jack is so cold towards Aunty Joyce. Why would he punish her for something which wasn’t her fault, and after all these years? I know that she isn’t the Jezebel he makes her out to be. I sense that the incident with Heinrich was the first time she has betrayed him, and I’m sure he doesn’t know about it. I’ve seen the way she pushes all men away – I’ve seen it, watched it over a year – the way she punishes herself and lets him do the same.
There is some other mystery, something she is keeping to herself, but it will be a good eleven years before I discover Aunty Joyce’s secret.
Aunty Joyce’s secret
What Joyce Shepherd had told no one was what she was doing on the day Rosemary went missing.
More than seven years had passed since the birth of their daughter, Rosemary, and in all that time she and Jack had tried hard to keep their romance alive. She remembered how he had come home when they first married, bathed by the fire, eyes wide with tenderness. And she had ached each evening for his return, every part of her sprung like an arrow.
It had been such a gift when Rosemary befriended the lovely Tommy. Sweet, gentle Tommy from the boys’ home, two dreamy souls delighting in each other’s company. And they had welcomed him – oh, how they had welcomed him! How good it had looked in the church to bestow so much love on an orphan boy, and how dearly they had grown to love him like one of their own.
What a delight – that day when Tommy and Rosemary went fishing – to spend some time together, just Joyce and Jack, lovers again. It had been her idea, and that was the pity of it now. But Jack had been keen too – oh, yes – he had been very keen! He had gone upstairs while she made sandwiches, and he had fiddled breathlessly in a cupboard for a blanket.
They had set off hard on Rosemary’s heels to give themselves plenty of time, and they had chosen a spot well hidden by willow trees a mile or so downstream, knowing that the children were heading upstream. It was their own special spot, where once ten years before Jack had first told her that he loved her more than any man ever loved a woman. And in accordance with God’s holy law, they had gone forth and been fruitful, and it was those carefree days of galloping blood that Joyce hoped to recapture on that modest outing in June.
It was all there, just as they remembered it. The willows dipping their leaves into the dark water, the blue dragonflies, the soft grass reeking of pollen. They lay down and made love to the smells of a full-blown summer.
They both heard it.At first it sounded like a human scream, but they dismissed it as a bird without interrupting their kissing.Then it came again, and again: a kind of squawk, the scream of a bird or the scream of a child.
Jack had stopped. “Listen!” he’d said, and propped himself on an elbow. It came again, an angry, frightened bird-scream.
“It’s only a bird,” she had whispered huskily, and then (oh, shame!) she had rolled him in the grass and pinned him down. “A bird, Jack. No one’s coming. And you’re going nowhere!” She had planted her naked breasts on his chest and sunk her lips on to his hot face. He had succumbed.
So it had all been her doing, hers, that they went home with their Marmite sandwiches uneaten, unaware that they had listened to their only child drown and felt nothing but lust.
Slow boat to China
We are on the move at the first sound of voices, and set off across the fields.
We make our way through the sodden edges of the ploughed furrows, collecting mud on our boots and adding to the weight of our steps. We head for the road to relieve our feet, and the biting wind makes a clearing in the clouds, so that we are bathed in sunshine for a while.
The hedgerows are speckled with green now, little hawthorn buds and elder leaves pushing their way into spring. It is hard to believe that in a few weeks’ time this will be the heaving, leaf-clad world that greeted me last year.
When we can, we take cover in woods, plodding on soggy paths through drifts of snowdrops, having lost the purpose of our escape, but unable to turn back.
By mid-afternoon we seem to have been walking for ever. My feet are so sore I can barely keep up. I’m still wearing the large wellingtons I slipped on to go up to see Aunty Joyce, and they seem to stay on the ground when I lift my feet. Most of the food has gone now, and we sit down on the roadside until teatime, weary and aimless.
A horse and cart clops along, and the driver stops to give us a lift. He sets us in the back with his sheepdog.
“You local?”
“No. We’re from London,” says Tommy in his local burr. “Stayin’ with relatives.”
“I see.” The driver is chewing on something green in his mouth – a leaf, perhaps. “Where’s that, then?”
“Er … Bristol … well … near Bristol … past Stroud – you wouldn’t know it.”
The driver carries on chewing, his back to us. “You’re a fuck of a long way off, then.”
“Yes … well …”
“We got bikes,” I suggest. “Only, they got punctures.”
There is a silence. I feel uncomfortable that we can’t see his face. He makes clicking noises to his horse.
“You want me to find someone to drop you ’ome, then?”
“No! No, that’s all right. Thanks ever so much. Take us wherever you’re going. That’ll do us.”
The driver clicks to his horse again. “What about your old irons?”
“We’ll get my Aunty Agatha to pick them up tomorrow in the car,” I say, affecting a much posher accent than I did the first time I spoke.
The driver turns and looks at us, still chewing. Then he turns his back on us again.
“Right you are.”
He takes us home to his farm where his wife feeds us fried bread and eggs and makes us sit by the fire. Then she puts us to bed in an old musty room in the loft, end-to-end in a single bed.
In the morning, with the trilling of a skylark rising over a ploughed field outside, Mr Fairly comes for us.
Ain’t misbehavin’
On my return, I am not sent to my room as I expect, but wrapped in a blanket and given a mug of Ovaltine beside the range. It is an overwhelming welcome, and I’m confused. I can hear Mr Fairly talking in the front room with Uncle Jack, and I’m afraid for Tommy. Aunty Joyce watches me closely as I take each sip. When the mug is empty she takes it and, to my amazement, she kneels down on the floor in front of me and throws her arms around me.
“Oh, Lord above, we’ve been that worried! Whatever possessed you? Have we been so awful?” She buries her face in my blanket and begins to cry. “Oh, my Lord! Oh, I’m so sorry! What have we done to you?”
I sit bewildered, then lift a hand to stroke her hair. “Please don’t cry, Aunty Joyce.”
This makes her cry even louder. She lifts up a blotched face and whispers, “Am I so terrible?”
I try to wipe the tears with my own fingers. “It’s not that, honest. I thought you didn’t love me, it’s true …” (more sobs) “… but Tommy had to leave, and I love him. He had to go. He couldn’t stay, you see …”
Aunty Joyce recomposes her face. “So it is him, is it? Jack said it was all down to him, but I –”
“No! No, it’s not his fault. It’s Mr Fairly. Don’t you realize what he’s doing to them?”
“Kitty,” she sniffs, sitting back on her heels, “you mustn’t listen to Tommy. You mustn’t – ” She breaks off suddenly and clambers to her feet, smiling. Mr Fairly has come into the parlour with Uncle Jack and Tommy.
“What have you got to say for yourself, boy?” Mr Fairly pronounces the words slowly, savouring each one.
Tommy raises his eyelids tentatively and looks at Uncle Jack and Aunty Joyce in turn, remembering pe
rhaps the last time he was in this room, eating sponge cake. “I’m … sorry.I’m really sorry.”
“Go on!” he is prodded.
“I … I wuz wrong to run away an’ wrong to take Kitty with me. She’s only small an’ she might’ve got ’urt.” He looks across at me and I try to send him a little cuddle in my eyes.
“At least she’s safe,” says Aunty Joyce crisply, “and there’s no harm done.”
Uncle Jack looks at her, perhaps surprised by her easy acceptance. “Yes,” he says. “That’s the main thing. We’ve been worried sick, but at least she’s safe.”
We are all five of us standing around the parlour table, as if in reverence to a pot of tea and a jar of marmalade that are standing upon it. I feel anything but safe.
“No!” blunders Mr Fairly. “It is not all right, I’m afraid. You see, you haven’t considered, have you, whether Kitty is … well …” he assumes a gentler tone together with a look of mild disgust, “… intact?”
“What?” whisper Aunty Joyce and Uncle Jack in unison.
Mr Fairly looks pleased at this reaction, and nods sadly. “Yes, I think you know what I mean.”
“But Kitty’s only nine! For goodness’ sake!”
Mr Fairly gives a shrug of a look. “I know. Exactly. But you see, you don’t know Tommy.” He leaves a meaningful gap for them to digest this horror. “And I do.”
Uncle Jack scratches his neck. “You’re not suggesting … that Tommy has defiled our Kitty in some way? … Are you?”
It is the first time I have ever been ‘our Kitty’ before, and it gives me an odd feeling. Everything is different from usual today. Even though Uncle Jack is still trying to use his posh voice, something significant has changed since the last time Mr Fairly visited – and not just because I know what I know: it has something to do with us standing at the uncleared breakfast table, and something to do with being ‘their’ Kitty.
I notice the muscles in Tommy’s cheeks flinch, and I realize with terror what Mr Fairly is capable of and what he would be capable of if he found out that Tommy had told his secret. I have already almost broken my promise, and the five of us stand around the table oozing secrets about each other, each in the thinnest of bubbles that could burst at any moment.
