‘Like a tramp he looked! Some old coat, he had on, Lord knows where he got it… Filthy it was and his trousies—’
‘That boy,’ Rose interrupted, ‘used to look the bee’s knees in his uniform!’
‘Stiff with dirt, ’is clothes was!’ Annie went on, her voice low. ‘And his hair all mussed and matted and his face looked…well, not like himself at all! Not like Christopher Bayliss looked!’ She glanced at Georgina, hoping that she would join in the telling of the story. But Georgina did not respond and didn’t appear to hear Rose when she said – quite gently for her – ‘Eat up your supper, Georgina, dear.’
‘Did he make a run for it then?’ asked Marion with her mouth full.
‘Dunno,’ Annie said. ‘I couldn’t see. The MPs wouldn’t let me go inside the byre.’
‘I saw,’ Georgina said. The girls turned and looked at her. ‘He didn’t run. He could barely stand. They hauled him onto his feet and they spun him round and shoved him against the wall and then they handcuffed him!’ Georgina’s chair scraped back across the slate floor and she stood up. ‘And this was a fighter pilot who’d done more ops than he should have done…and been burnt…and seen his friends blown apart…and…’ She stood gulping. ‘If you’d seen him! If you’d heard him!’ Then she turned suddenly and faced Alice, almost accusingly, ‘And where was his father?’ she demanded, shouting now. Alice went towards her but Georgina lifted a hand as though to hold her off. ‘He must have known Christopher had gone AWOL, Mrs Todd! He’s been on the run for five weeks! Five weeks!’
‘Hang on!’ Mabel said suddenly, a forkful of pie halfway to her mouth. ‘That was about when the MPs turned up at the Bayliss farm! You lot was all off turnin’ ’ay and Ferdie and I was doin’ the milkin.’ Two of them there was and Mr B took ’em into his office. When they comes out they ’as a quick gander round the yard and then they gets in their truck and goes. They must of bin lookin’ for Christopher then! And ’is farver never said nuffink to no one! Blimey!’
‘He was quite lucid, Mrs Todd. He knew who I was. He just kept saying he couldn’t go on. Couldn’t do it any more. I suppose he meant he couldn’t go on running and hiding. He had no strength left. I think he’d been made to be too strong for too long and it was more than he… More than anyone…’
Alice had invited Georgina into her sitting room and, without consulting her, had poured a tot of brandy and was now watching her as she sipped it. The night was warm and the windows at each end of the room were open, the curtains just stirring in a breeze that carried with it the humid scents of the summer countryside.
‘Aren’t you having one, Mrs Todd? I don’t like drinking alone.’ There was, in Georgina’s voice, a thin hint of her humour. Alice smiled, poured a finger of the brandy into a second unsuitable tumbler and sipped, wincing slightly at the sharp taste. The twilight colours outside the window were fading into monochrome.
‘Do we know where they’ve taken him?’ Alice asked after a few moments of silence. Georgina said she did not know but believed that, initially at any rate, he was to be detained in a military prison.
‘The police wouldn’t talk to Annie and me. So we refused to confirm that it was Christopher Bayliss they had arrested. They made us tell them our names and which farm we were from and they wrote them down in a notebook. I told the one who was knocking Christopher about to leave him alone and he said if I didn’t keep quiet he’d arrest me as an accomplice. They said Christopher was a deserter and deserved all he got.’ Georgina swallowed the last of her brandy. ‘I’m going to see Mr Bayliss tomorrow. I’m going to ask him why he pretended not to know what was happening.’
‘Perhaps he didn’t know, Georgina.’ Alice was finding it difficult to justify Roger’s behaviour but felt obliged to question the girl’s condemnation of it.
‘Of course he knew! Where did he think Christopher had been all that time?’
‘Didn’t he tell you he’d been spending his last leave visiting relatives in Sussex?’
‘Yes he did! But that was weeks ago! Obviously he was lying!’ Georgina put down her glass. She got to her feet and from the doorway reaffirmed her intention to confront Roger Bayliss on the following day.
Upstairs, in the small room above the porch where Georgina slept alone, Annie was waiting for her, thumbing through one of the textbooks Georgina was studying for her Ministry of Agriculture exams.
‘This looks ever so hard compared with the course I’ve signed up for.’
‘By the time you get to this one you’ll be OK.’
‘I doubt it,’ Annie said. ‘I ’aven’t got the brains!’
‘’Course you have! You’ve read the first twenty pages already! Anything you didn’t understand?’
‘No!’
‘Well then!’
They smiled and a silence formed.
‘Rotten day, Georgie.’ Annie spoke quietly. Georgina nodded. ‘You mind, don’t you,’ Annie said, picking at a broken fingernail.
‘What d’you mean, “mind”?’
‘You mind about Christopher. What happens to him and that. You care about him.’
Since the evening, months ago now, when Christopher had taken her to dinner and she had driven his car when his burnt hands had hurt him, Georgina’s concern for him had been slowly pushed into the background by the everyday pressures of life at Lower Post Stone – a succession of minor but nevertheless compelling incidents, some as trivial as the arrival and then the swift departure of Eleanor, the runaway schoolgirl, and others, like the death of Andreis, sobering and provocative. Since Chrissie had been killed in Plymouth by a stray bomb and Christopher Bayliss had described to her the horrors he was witnessing on a daily basis, Georgina had found herself questioning her convictions regarding pacifism. Mostly she controlled the doubts that rose in her mind, excluding them by immersing herself in the physically exhausting work of the farm and using any energy she had left at the end of each day to swot for the looming Min. of Ag. exams she was soon to sit. But today, confronted by the tragedy of Christopher’s situation, she found herself seriously doubting the logic or the justification of turning the other cheek. Annie’s low voice brought her back to the present.
‘Go on, Georgie,’ Annie said. ‘Admit it!’ But there was nothing to admit. She wasn’t in love with Christopher. She was defensive of him. Enraged on his behalf. Even protective. But not in love. When they had first met, his arrogance had irritated her. She had agreed to have dinner with him on that chill, April evening, when his mouth, briefly against hers, had felt so cold, not because she found him attractive – although he was attractive – but out of a feeling of responsibility for the way he was. So obviously stressed and exhausted by the hours of tension spent flying in combat and by the split-second life or death decisions he was constantly forced to make. His shaking fingers and the brittle state of his nerves had not escaped Georgina, nor had the fact that he had been drawn into this situation by the pressures of a society of which she herself, like every other civilian, was part. Every man, woman and child, every father, commanding officer and politician, demanding courage, bravery and sacrifice.
The girls may not have been certain why Georgina was so determined to involve herself in their employer’s relationship with his son but they were in no doubt about her intentions. There was a certain ambiguity about their own reaction to Christopher’s situation. He was, after all, a deserter. He had run away from a war that other men were still fighting and would continue to fight until the enemy was defeated. A lot of them would die. But, as Annie pointed out to them, they hadn’t seen the state Christopher had been in when he was arrested.
‘More dead than alive, poor fellow,’ Annie had said.
‘But not shot!’ Gwennan snapped back at her, crisply self-righteous. ‘Not blown to bits and bleeding! Like my cousin who come back from Dunkirk with half his leg clean gone! I don’t see young master Bayliss missing a limb, do you?’
Mabel’s culinary involvement with Ferdie Vallance had, by
this time, become established. By mid-afternoon each Saturday she would have borrowed Alice’s bicycle and be pedalling up the lane towards Higher Post Stone Farm where Ferdie would greet her with a display of the ingredients for the meal they would cook together that evening. Sometimes it was a pair of rabbits, occasionally a pheasant, feloniously procured, or a salmon filched on a moonless night from a privately owned stretch of the Exe.
On the day of Andreis’s death, and at that point unaware of it, Mabel arrived, sweating and eager, at the door of Ferdie’s cottage, propped the bike against the wall and found her host flourishing a large lump of meat. It was a bit jagged round the edges and only just recognisable as a leg of lamb but Mabel was suitably impressed. Even at the hostel, when the village butcher was feeling generous and Rose had presented him with the correct amount of meat coupons, such a pink and splendid offering had rarely been slipped into the farmhouse oven.
‘Where d’you get it, Ferdie?’ Mabel was round-eyed with appreciation. Ferdie, squirming with pleasure, tapped the side of his nose and said she mustn’t ask him that. She glanced nervously round. ‘But did you kill ’im?’
‘No! Fred and me found ’un. Some of the flock got through a break in the fence above the quarry. This young ’un must of fallen and got hiself caught up in the brambles. Danglin’, he was, poor varmint! ’E’d choked to death when us found ’un. Still warm though…’ A lesser woman than Mabel would have shuddered.
‘So what did you do, you and Fred? Did you cut him into pieces there and then?’
‘Lord no! Us stuck ’un under some sacks in the tractor! And us dropped ’im off, after dark, in Fred’s shed! No one seed us! Didn’t do much of a job with the butcherin’,’ he said, eyeing the jagged bone and gory flesh, ‘but you can’t have everything, can you!’
‘Where’s the rest of him, Ferdie?’
‘Fred’s missus ’as got the other leg and one of the shoulders. The rest we give to ’er cousin Doris over at Stoke Cannon. Three kids she got and her bloke’s at sea so us takes ’er a bit of this and a bit of that from time to time.’ This act of charity seemed to have absolved Ferdie of any sense of guilt regarding the procurement of the lamb.
They rubbed the ungainly lump of flesh with salt and pepper and laid it in a wide pan loaded with onions, potatoes and some of the young turnips which were just coming into season in the Bayliss fields. While the cottage slowly filled with the intoxicating smell of roasting meat, Mabel made a suet pudding that, garnished with golden syrup and Devonshire cream, would round off their feast. By the time the onions had collapsed into soft mounds, the potatoes turned golden-brown, the fatty skin of the lamb was blistering crisply and the pan was running with meaty juices, Ferdie and Mabel could barely control their appetites. Hacking off thick slices of the tender meat and piling their plates with vegetables, they ate noisily, if wordlessly, for an impressive length of time, exchanging, now and then, greasy smiles of mutual satisfaction.
Like Marion and Winnie, returning to the hostel at curfew-time that night, Mabel had been confronted with the bleak news of Andreis’s death.
On the morning after Christopher’s arrest Georgina watched until she saw his father make his way as usual to the farm office and enter it. She crossed the yard and knocked on his door. ‘Come,’ he said.
He was already at work, checking through a sheaf of invoices and delivery notes. He glanced at her.
‘Ah, Miss Webster. What can I do for you?’ He still held some of the sheets of papers in his hands, implying that, as Georgina was interrupting his work, she had better have a good reason for doing so.
‘I just wanted to say,’ she began and then hesitated. This didn’t look like a man in the throes of a domestic crisis. A man whose son, after being missing for five weeks, had been arrested for desertion and despite being in a state of mental and physical collapse was being held, pending an investigation, in a military prison. He was looking at her. The resemblance between father and son, which had previously eluded Georgina, struck her now and added to her confusion. ‘I just wanted to say how sorry I am… How sorry all of us at the hostel are…about Christopher.’
There was a pause. Roger Bayliss regarded Georgina steadily. ‘Yes,’ he said, eventually. ‘Well, these things happen.’ There was another pause. Georgina was unable to tell whether he had so much to say that he couldn’t begin to speak, or whether, and this seemed to her to be more likely, he had nothing at all that he wanted to say. ‘But it is most kind of you…you and the other girls…to express your…your concern.’ These words, Georgina realised, were intended to conclude the interview. She was, she understood, being dismissed. But she remained, standing straight and motionless in front of him.
‘How is he?’ she asked and when he didn’t immediately reply, repeated, ‘Christopher. How is he?’ A flicker of what Georgina perceived as irritation crossed Roger’s face.
‘As well as can be expected, they tell me,’ he said at last.
‘Are you going to visit him?’ Georgina’s heart was racing. Colour flooded her face. While she was becoming heated, Roger Bayliss seemed so cool. There was no hint now of the polite smile with which he had greeted her. His face was expressionless. She was prepared for his eyes to be hard and intimidating when she steeled herself to engage them and was faintly surprised when he avoided hers.
‘I have no immediate plans to do so,’ he said, flatly.
‘Then I shall go,’ Georgina said. ‘Tell me where he is and I—’
‘All I can tell you,’ he interrupted, ‘is that he is shortly to be moved from…from where he is now, to an appropriate hospital.’ He would, he said, let Georgina know when and where that would be. It was, he repeated, most kind of her to take such an interest but now she would have to excuse him as he had work to attend to. But at this point Georgina, having already gone too far, found it impossible not to go even further.
‘Are you ashamed of him?’ she heard herself demand and was surprised by how harsh she sounded. Whatever feelings her question created in Roger Bayliss failed to reveal themselves in his expression.
‘That’s enough,’ he said in the restrained tone of voice that her own father had used when she was young and he was teaching her how to behave. She apologised without meeting Roger Bayliss’s eyes and let herself out of the office.
‘I shouldn’t have said it,’ she confessed to Alice when, after supper, the two of them took a turn round the cider orchard behind the farmhouse. ‘It was what my father would have called “out of order”. I don’t suppose he is ashamed of Christopher, do you? I mean how could he possibly be…? But to keep quiet about him going AWOL and now say he’s not even going to see him! How can he do that?’
‘It does seem odd,’ Alice murmured. ‘There has to be a reason for it. Shock perhaps? Refusing to admit that anything was wrong with Christopher until it was too late to help him? Guilt affects people in different ways, Georgie. No one understands what goes on between family members – or why.’
Above them, cider apples, still green, clustered tightly. The light, under the trees, was thickening into dusk and the toes of their shoes were already picking up moisture from the grass. They walked in silence for a while and then Georgina said that as soon as she knew where Christopher was to be hospitalised she would visit him.
Weeks passed. Alice, intending to relay any news about Christopher to Georgina, asked Roger more than once how his son was. He told her that as far as he knew, he was improving but he did not volunteer any details regarding Christopher’s whereabouts and Alice sensed that he did not wish to be drawn on the subject. It was Oliver Maynard who, on one of their evening excursions to a local inn, told Alice that while visiting one of his own charges who was experiencing a breakdown, he had seen Christopher in the grounds of Axmount House, a country estate which had been commandeered by the Ministry of Defence for use as a psychiatric hospital. A phone call confirmed that Christopher was a patient there and on the following Sunday Lionel rode over on his motorbike, col
lected his sister and transported her the ten miles to Axmount, leaving her at the manned gate and arranging to collect her an hour later.
She saw Christopher with his back to her, sitting near the tennis court, watching a group of players. Not wishing to startle him she approached him slowly and stood in front of him. He still looked gaunt. But his hair had been cut and was short and trim, as it had been when she first met him. The tangled beard was gone. His hands, hanging loosely between his thighs, were clean, the nails scrubbed. He looked at her for a long time and then got to his feet. Then he clicked his heels and saluted. A perfect RAF salute. He gave a little bow, said, ‘Good afternoon, Miss Webster!’ then sat heavily down again on the seat, dropped his head into his hands and cursed. When he stopped swearing he sat in silence with his head turned away from her.
‘I don’t want you here, Georgie. Really. I don’t. It’s sweet of you to come but I don’t want you to see me like this. With the shakes and everything. And blubbing. I can’t stop! It’s pathetic! I’m so ashamed!’
She sat beside him with her thigh just touching his.
‘Were you ashamed when your hands were burnt?’ she asked him. ‘Would you be ashamed if you had been hit by shrapnel? Or crash landed? Or bailed out?’ He smiled and shook his head.
‘Bless you, Georgie,’ he said quietly. ‘But I’ve thought of all that. And the shrink here says the same thing to me every day.’
‘Because it’s true!’
‘No it isn’t, you see.’ He had turned and was facing her, looking hard into her eyes. ‘Those things are out there!’ He held out his hands, palms up. The scars from the burns were still visible. ‘This…other stuff,’ he said, placing both hands against his temples, ‘this is in here. In my bloody head!’
Muddy Boots and Silk Stockings Page 17
