‘Is something the matter, Winnie?’
‘She’s got a pain, Mrs Todd! It’s her monthlies! She should be allowed to stay in bed!’
‘It’s not an illness, Marion,’ Alice told her, adding, ‘There’s aspirin on the dresser if you need it, Winnie.’
‘And if you’re still poorly when you get home lunchtime,’ Rose interjected sweetly, ‘it being Saturday, you can put your feet up all afternoon, can’t you!’
‘What?’ Winnie whined. ‘Spend me half-day in bed?’
‘’Twouldn’t be the first time, I daresay…’ Rose muttered. Alice glanced at her but Rose had assumed a convincing air of innocence.
Edward-John, dressing gown over pyjamas, joined them and pleaded to be allowed to go with the girls to the Bayliss farm that morning. Initially Alice refused to give him permission but, as it was half-day and Annie promised to keep an eye on him, she allowed herself to be persuaded, encouraged him to finish his porridge and sent him off to dress quickly and warmly, cautioning him not to get mud over the tops of his boots and to stay within earshot of Annie until the lorry arrived at midday to bring them all back to Lower Post Stone.
‘There was someone I haven’t seen before in the yard last evening, Rose,’ Alice said, as they sat over their breakfast, after the girls and Edward-John had left. ‘A youngish man, slightly stooped and wearing black.’
‘That’d be Andreis,’ Rose said. ‘He come at the start of the war. From Amsterdam or some such place.’
‘He’s Dutch?’
‘Yes…Jewish. A relative of Mr Bayliss. Or perhaps ’twas his wife’s. I don’t know as I would ’ave allowed it meself – foreigners around the place with a war on. But he’s a law unto himself is Mr Bayliss!’
‘The authorities know about it, presumably?’ Alice asked.
‘Oh yes. ’Tis all above board. He’s got some sort of permit or other and Mr Bayliss is responsible for him. Feedin’ ’im and that. The idea was that he should work on the farm but it seems he’s an artist, see, and Mr Bayliss says as he can do as he pleases, in the way of labourin’ – which isn’t that much, according to Ferdie Vallance!’ Rose refilled their cups with tea that was by now tepid and too strong for Alice. ‘He lives in the loft at the end of the long barn.’
‘In the barn? This weather?’
‘’Tis where the shepherds lived in the old days,’ Rose said defensively, ‘during the lambing season that is. There be a stove in it. Quite snug it is. Andreis is doing paintings, Ferdie says. I ’aven’t seen ’em meself but that ’Anna-Maria Sorokova ’as!’
‘Annie?’
‘Oh yes!’ said Rose. ‘Saw her and him talking in the yard. Last Saturday afternoon it were. And then she went with him, into the barn!’ Rose smiled at Alice’s expression, enjoying the fact that she appeared both surprised and uneasy. ‘Girls will be girls, dear,’ Rose murmured, stirring Alice’s concern. ‘And a pair of trousies is a pair of trousies these days! Dutch refugee or whatever else he be!’ She paused, adding casually that she thought bread pudding might be a good idea for ‘afters’ that night.
Later, when Alice had collected the eggs, she wandered on, across the yard and into the long barn. Since the dairy herd was now housed at the Bayliss farm the milking stalls at Lower Post Stone were unoccupied and the space was now used to store hay and straw bales. Alice could hear the creak of the boards above her head as someone moved about the loft. As her eyes grew accustomed to the semi-darkness she saw that a ladder ran up the wall ahead of her. She cleared her throat, raised her voice and asked if anyone was about. There was a short pause and then Andreis’s head appeared at the top of the ladder.
He looked pale in the half-light and his lank hair fell forward. A look of concern left his face as he recognised her.
‘You are the Mrs Todd?’ he asked. ‘The warden of the girls?’ The accent was thick and although his command of English was fluent the phraseology was, Alice noticed at once, charmingly odd. ‘Pleased to come up into my loft if you wish it,’ he said.
The loft was lighter than Alice had supposed. Three glazed windows had been let into the northern slope of its roof, presumably when the space had been used to accommodate the shepherds. This, with Andreis’s canvases and easel, immediately suggested the studio into which he had turned it. He wiped paint from his right hand and extended it to Alice.
‘I am Andreis Van Der Loos,’ he said, smiling shyly. His hand felt cold. Alice had transferred three hen’s eggs from her basket into her pocket. She took them carefully out and put them into his hand. He smiled.
‘They lay in the old stalls at the far end of the barn,’ Alice said. ‘I’m sure Mr Bayliss would like you to help yourself to them whenever…’ She paused, wondering whether he had already discovered this source of food.
‘I have heard the hens,’ he said. ‘But I wait for Mr Bayliss to send supplies, which he does often and with much generosity to me.’
Alice looked round. There was a table, a chair and a narrow bed piled with blankets and an eiderdown, which presumably had also been provided by her employer. On a pot-bellied stove an iron saucepan was simmering. Andreis was following the course of Alice’s eyes as she examined his quarters. A shotgun stood against an angle of the walls and from a nail a rabbit hung, beads of blood congealing in its nostrils.
‘I shoot it,’ the man said. ‘Two of them this morning I get. Perhaps you hear the shots?’ Alice said she had not. ‘One in the pot with potatoes and swede for my meal tonight. And one for tomorrow.’ He smiled briefly and then his narrow face fell back into the blank pallor which had been Alice’s first impression of him.
‘You must be…’ She stopped. Something in his face warned her to choose her words carefully. ‘Lonely?’ she finished and his expression held a suggestion of relief. He shook his head and paused before answering her.
‘If it was simply loneliness that I feel I should be fortunate. I thought this was what I should do, you see. Come here, I mean to say. My family and my friends said I must come. Some of them, too, came in time away from Amsterdam before the Germans invaded us. Others, for various reasons or refusing to believe the worst, waited until it was too late.’ His eyes held Alice’s and searched her face anxiously. ‘Now I paint them, you see.’ He indicated the canvases on which there appeared to be a succession of portraits. Men, women and children. ‘Friends,’ he said. ‘And family. Painted from my recollection of them. As a memorial. For some of them are no longer alive. And for others I have a great fear.’
‘I’m so sorry,’ Alice said inadequately.
‘But I have no longer any canvases left,’ he went on, as though he had not heard her. ‘So I have begun to work onto the panels, you see?’
At one end of the space was a partition of wide boards which appeared to divide it from the larger part of the loft beyond it. This Andreis had already prepared with a coat of white paint on which he was beginning to lay-in a vast composition. ‘It is to be the story of this war as I experience it,’ he said. ‘It will show what happened to my people,’ he paused, searching her face. ‘It is all I can do, you see.’ Alice stared at the charcoal marks on the white panelling and then at Andreis, feeling his desolation and his sense of helplessness.
‘Oh, Andreis,’ she said. ‘This is so sad!’
He shook his head. ‘No,’ he said. ‘It will make me happy I think.’
She smiled back as encouragingly as she could and then said she must go. She had, she told him, eight girls to look after and to cook for. As she turned towards the hole in the floor and was about to reach for the top rung of the ladder she caught sight of a sketch which was lying on Andreis’s table. It was a charcoal drawing on a piece of brown paper. The lines were flowing and free and the face which was its subject was unmistakably Annie’s. The artist had captured and perhaps exaggerated the girl’s Jewishness. Now he followed the direction of Alice’s eyes and saw her attention focus and sharpen as she recognised her charge. ‘It is Hannah-Maria, of course,’ he said.
‘You see the likeness?’
‘Yes I do,’ said Alice. ‘She…she was up here? Posing for you?’ She sounded, in her own ears, both suspicious and prudish.
‘Should she not be?’ he asked. He looked confused. Almost hurt. ‘I ask her for permission to draw her. Just her head, you see, not…’ he met Alice’s eyes carefully. ‘Not from the life,’ he said. ‘Not nude.’
‘No!’ said Alice and found herself flushing slightly at the suggestion that she had misjudged his intentions towards Annie. ‘Of course not! And of course she may. Pose for you, I mean. If she chooses to.’
‘Chooses?’ he asked.
‘If she wants to. But…’
‘But?’ he echoed. Alice paused and tried to simplify her words to him. To avoid hurting or confusing him.
‘You see, Andreis, it is difficult for me. I am responsible for these girls. Some of them are very young. Annie – Hannah-Maria – is barely eighteen. They are beyond the supervision of their parents so I must be…’ She was going to say careful but Andreis interrupted.
‘Their Mutta… Their mother, I mean to say. Yes, I understand. So, if I were to ask your permission to make a painting of your “daughter”, of Hannah-Maria, would you permit this? If she chooses? She has, you see, the perfect face of the Jewess. The shape of her eyes and of her head, the line of her jaw, the flare of her nostrils. The long neck. I wish to use this Jewishness. When my painting is complete you will understand why. Will you allow me?’
Alice gave her permission and afterwards defended her decision to Margery Brewster and Roger Bayliss, both of whom accepted her judgement without much enthusiasm.
‘It’s not our business to chaperone them during their free time,’ Roger Bayliss said, looking at Alice’s dark blonde hair and fine, grey eyes and feeling that she would have been his choice were he to wish to commit to canvas any of the women at Lower Post Stone Farm.
‘As long as she’s in by ten,’ had been Margery’s only comment, delivered with an indifferent shrug as she gave Alice several more balls of leftover wool for Mabel’s scarf.
So Annie spent her Saturday afternoons sitting on a bale of straw in the small loft. On the first occasion the intensity of Andreis’s scrutiny embarrassed her and she attempted to keep up a flow of light conversation with him, feeling that silence was somehow impolite. But soon she came to understand that he liked the silences that formed between them, stretching sometimes into whole hours in which she became aware of herself not as herself but as an object, the lines and contours of which were necessary to Andreis’s work, to the small, meticulous drawings which were later to become part of a larger, intricate composition. It was an entire race, he explained, that was to be depicted in his new work and shown to be threatened, scattered, shackled and herded into railway wagons. For this much Andreis knew, though not the horror of the destination of these involuntary travellers. Bad enough that they were forced from their homes and separated from their families and from the lives they had, until the Nazi invasion, been blamelessly living.
After an hour he would suddenly apologise for keeping Annie so long without a break. If she was cold he would invite her to come close to the stove on which his kettle simmered. He made tea for her and they sat, smiling, while Annie eased her stiff shoulders and Andreis wrapped cold fingers round his enamel mug. Not until the light failed did he let her go and then he thanked her, taking her hand, bowing formally over it and kissing it lightly.
On the second occasion Annie had run quickly through the dusk, across the yard and into the noisy, warm farmhouse. Tonight there was a hop in a neighbouring village. Fred was going to drive the girls over and collect them at eleven o’clock which, on this occasion, was to be curfew hour. Before his arrival there would be the usual fight for hot water for baths and hair-washing. All the girls except Hester were going to the dance. She sat on her bed watching Annie slide a printed rayon frock over her head, carefully leaving undisturbed the curlers in her hair.
‘You should come, Hes!’ But Hester shook her head as though refusing the apple from the serpent. ‘Ain’t no harm in it!’ Annie persisted. ‘Just a bunch of local lads barely out of short pants most likely!’
‘Marion said there’d be soldiers,’ said Hester nervously. ‘American GIs and that.’
‘So what? They won’t eat you! You can borrow one of my frocks if you want. The blue one’d suit you. C’mon! Dare you! You don’t have to dance. You’d make a lovely wallflower!’ But Hester had resisted temptation and, after the girls had clattered through the cross-passage and out into the cold night in response to Fred’s blast on the truck horn, she had wandered into the kitchen where Edward-John seized upon her as a suitable opponent in a game of Snap.
‘But it’s cards!’ Hester said in alarm and it took Alice half an hour to convince her of the innocence of the game. Edward-John taught her the rules and soon she was shouting ‘Snap!’ and triumphantly seizing her matchstick winnings, her pale face flushed with excitement while Alice, using the flat-iron, smoothed her son’s school shirt, ready for Monday.
Hester’s parents and most of her immediate relations were, the girls had discovered, members of a small, religious sect which was an offshoot of the better known Plymouth Brethren. Hester and her brother Ezekial had been reared to unquestioningly obey their father whose role as head of the East Cornish Church of the Pentecostal Brothers, as they called themselves, had encouraged a tendency in him to bully and dictate. Their mother, too, unquestioningly obeyed him. According to his lights, women and daughters were no more than chattels whose inclination to sin must at all times be curbed, while sons, until they had proved themselves worthy, required discipline and protection from corruption in a wicked world. His daughter’s compulsory contribution to the war effort had been limited, not only by her short and hardly heeded education but by her timid personality, to a choice between ammunition factory and Land Army. Her father had considered that the second occupation would put his daughter in less jeopardy than the first. Soon after he had made this decision on her behalf he learnt that land girls had a mixed reputation and that, despite the discipline imposed by hostel wardens, many were straying from the path of righteousness. He cautioned his daughter and stressed the power of temptation and how, for the sake of her immortal soul, she must keep herself separate from these women who, if not quite fallen, were heading in the general direction of damnation and would almost certainly try to drag Hester with them. Consequently, when she first arrived at Lower Post Stone Farm, Hester had regarded everyone with deep suspicion, avoiding eye contact and restricting communication, whenever possible, to a simple yes or no. Of Mrs Brewster she was plainly terrified. She kept so effectively out of Roger Bayliss’s way that he was barely conscious of her existence. She avoided Ferdie Vallance’s randy eye and treated Alice with the deference with which she had faced her school teachers, saying ‘Yes, miss,’ or ‘No, miss,’ whenever she was directly addressed.
Although some of the girls ignored Hester and others were not above throwing the odd spiteful remark at her, several, including Annie, her room-mate, were kind, drawing her into their conversation, encouraging her to experiment with her appearance and inviting her to join them on various outings. This she stoutly resisted but on the evening of the hop, after Edward-John had been sent to bed and she had filled her hot-water bottle and climbed the stairs to the upper floor where the doors stood open to empty bedrooms chaotic with perfumed preparation for the girls’ night out, she felt isolated and abandoned. She lit the lamp in the room she shared with Annie and sat down on her bed. The wardrobe was open and the frock Annie had offered to lend her was on its hanger, lamp-light illuminating its soft, blue folds. Hester had never, in all her short life, worn any colour but grey, black or dull brown. She looked at the photograph of her father, his hard face flanked by her brother Zeke on one side and their timorous mother on the other. Perhaps because she had spent the evening in the easy company of Edward-John and Alice, because she had laughed and shouted wi
th excitement over the game of Snap, or because the obvious influence of the girls was, for once, not pressuring her, she felt calm and faintly inquisitive. What, she wondered, would she look like in blue? With her hair loose around her shoulders instead of hauled back into a bun? With lipstick on her mouth and mascara on her lashes? It didn’t mean that she would ever dress in blue, or paint her face, or loosen her hair but should she not be allowed at least to experience and identify the sins she was resisting? She undressed, pulling her grey jumper up over her head and stepping out of the long black skirt which her mother had sewn by hand. Then, instead of putting on her nightdress, she slid her arms into the sleeves of Annie’s blue frock. She felt the silky texture of it slide down, settling round her waist and ending at her knees. She pulled the net from her bun and shook out her hair, reached for Annie’s lipstick and, spreading it on her mouth, worked her lips together as she had watched Annie do it. Then she turned to the long mirror which was set into the door of the shared wardrobe. A stranger faced her. Transfixed by the image in the looking glass, she failed to hear either the arrival of the truck or the sound of the girls who, later than they should have been, stealthily re-entered the farmhouse, slipping off their high-heeled shoes and coming silently up the stairs.
‘Hey!’ said Annie, taking in at a glance Hester’s willowy figure, her narrow waist nipped in by the wide belt, her small breasts rounding out the silky bodice, her mass of auburn hair, rouged mouth and gently accentuated eyes. ‘Hey, Hester!’ But the eyes, Annie saw at once, were brimming. Tears were washing the mascara down Hester’s white cheeks. She was looking at the photograph of her father as though half hypnotised.
Muddy Boots and Silk Stockings Page 9
