Where the Wild Cherries Grow

by Laura Madeleine

  ‘Don’t you have folk waiting for you?’

  Stephanie. I promised to call, I realize, but I haven’t thought about her for days. She seems as distant as a memory.

  ‘My girlfriend. She won’t like any of this.’

  ‘Bill,’ Jem says gently, ‘I hate to say it, but I think Emeline’s family are right. She’s gone. In all likelihood, she died somewhere fifty years ago. You can’t save her.’

  ‘But I can try to find her.’ I sound like a child, insisting on the impossible. ‘At least I can do that.’

  Jem just sighs, pours out another measure.

  ‘Bill Perch,’ she tells me, and leans down to clink her glass with mine, ‘you’re either a very good solicitor or a very, very bad one.’

  February 1919

  Through the open doorway, I watched the first light of dawn break across a provincial town. A new day: my first one alone. That thought should have been enough to terrify me. But it wasn’t.

  ‘Are we near the end of the line?’ I asked, as the train pulled out of the station, taking me further from myself.

  The boy who called himself Puce snorted a laugh. ‘Not by a long shot. Why? This far enough from Paris for you?’

  ‘Not by a long shot.’ I smiled and he laughed again.

  He called me only ‘Mam’selle’, though I looked less like a respectable lady than ever. Still, I made do. He did not ask me the why or how of my situation and I showed him the same courtesy.

  Only when darkness fell and he dragged the door closed on yet another nameless railway siding did he turn to me in the gloom. His face was serious.

  ‘We’ll be in Nîmes by midnight. End of the line. You know where that is?’

  I was concentrating on rewrapping the bandages about my hands, but shook my head. My knowledge of France was rudimentary at best. Certain place names had been etched into my memory by four years of newspaper reports and bulletins from the Front, two in particular by those ever-feared telegrams: Verdun, Épehy. All I knew was that wherever we were, it was a long, long way from Hallerton.

  ‘Thought not.’ I heard the smile in his voice as he stepped closer. ‘Nîmes is a city in the south, Mam’selle, between the wild Cévennes and the sea. The sun shines bright there, even in winter, and they grow violets and mimosa and oranges, though in Paris it’s cold enough to freeze your nose.’

  I couldn’t help but smile at his description. In the chill of a freight compartment, it seemed another world. ‘You sound like an advertisement,’ I said.

  He shrugged. ‘South’s where I would go, were I not a railwayman. But for me, home’s wherever I make it.’ His smile had a rueful edge. ‘Depot of the Gare d’Austerlitz more often than not.’

  ‘Is that where you’re from? Paris?’

  ‘Belleville, born and raised. You?’

  ‘Norfolk,’ I told him after a pause; ‘any further east and you fall off the edge of England.’

  He made to reply, but I pulled the bandage I was winding around my hand too tight, the fabric cutting into my palm. I winced. The cuts were still raw and angry.

  ‘Those need cleaning,’ Puce said, stepping closer.

  I blinked up at him through watering eyes.

  ‘Do you have anything that will help?’

  He raised an eyebrow before striding off into the shadows of the compartment. I heard the sharp crack of a lid being forced open. When he reappeared it was with a bottle, sawdust clinging to the glass.

  ‘Only a ten-year vintage, I’m afraid.’ He sniffed, pulling out the cork. Brandy. It looked expensive.

  ‘Is that really all you have?’

  ‘Beggars can’t be choosers, Mam’selle,’ he said, rummaging through the sack by the stove. He pulled out a cloth, squinted at it in the light, pulled out another. ‘I suggest you sample some. For medicinal purposes.’

  Hesitantly, I raised the bottle to my lips. Fiery alcohol flooded my throat. I swallowed, gasped and drank again.

  ‘Will it do?’ came his mischievous question.

  The brandy served to clean the scabbing cuts, though I had to grit my teeth against the sting.

  ‘I remember that feeling,’ Puce told me, as he retied one of the bandages. ‘Used to hiss like an alley cat when I had cuts cleaned as a lad.’

  ‘Thank you,’ I told him, testing the new bandage.

  He took another swig of the brandy. His face was flushed beneath its dirt. I wondered if we were truly the same age. He seemed an old hand at the world already.

  ‘How old are you, Puce?’ I asked. My voice sounded strange, speaking familiar words to a stranger in a foreign tongue.

  ‘Never known.’ The boy cleared his throat after another swig. ‘About nineteen, I reckon.’

  ‘I’m twenty,’ I said, holding out my swaddled hand for the bottle. ‘That means I win. Your turn. You get one question.’

  He added a few more coals to the stove, rattled the orange heat about before he spoke.

  ‘What’s your name?’

  The words hung in the air before us. I’d forgotten about the noise of the wheels on the track but now I heard their every syllable. I wanted to drop everything I once was out of the door, let it fall behind me, piece by piece.

  ‘Emeline,’ I whispered bitterly. ‘Emeline Clara Vane.’

  The boy took it in. Did not repeat it, only nodded.

  ‘You can find another name, you know.’ He leaned his elbows on his knees, face sombre. ‘If you can’t live with the one you’ve got, the world has ways of giving you another.’

  ‘Like “Puce”?’ I tried to make it a joke, but my voice was thick with emotion. ‘“Flea”?’

  ‘Never said it would be a good name.’ He took another drink from the rapidly diminishing brandy. ‘But Puce is mine. I’ve worn it comfortable now.’

  ‘What was it before?’

  He pointed a finger at me, eyes bright from the alcohol.

  ‘You got to promise not to laugh.’ He grimaced. ‘It was Gosse, Jean-Baptiste. After Molière.’ He smirked at my astonishment. ‘My mother were an actress before she were a whore.’

  It must have been the alcohol, for I let out a laugh. It built into an irrepressible giggle until my eyes were streaming and I was wheezing for breath. Puce was laughing too, wiping his eyes on the comforter he wore around his neck.

  ‘Come on,’ he said, hauling me to my feet. Still gasping with laughter, I obeyed.

  ‘What are we doing?’ I asked as we staggered across the compartment, towards the door.

  ‘Brace yourself on that,’ he told me, indicating the wall, ‘and give me your arm.’

  ‘Puce?’

  His face was alive.

  ‘We’re getting rid of these old names.’ He hooked his arm firmly through mine and reached for the handle. ‘Ready?’

  Before I could answer he had grasped the door and hurled it open. Cold air and night flooded in, the din of the wheels clacking and the bellow of the train as it pushed itself across the dark landscape. The wind whipped the moisture from my eyes, tore at my breath. It was terrifying. It was electrifying.

  As we plunged into a tunnel, I felt Puce take a deep breath beside me. Then he was yelling, a wild, joyous shout that was grabbed away by the rushing blackness, and I was yelling with him, pouring out my uncertainty, shredding the restraints I had kept in place for so long. I yelled until my lungs were squeezed dry of breath, until the noise faded to a croak.

  Puce let go of me to close the door. My whole body shivered, like the bubbles in a glass of champagne.

  ‘There,’ Puce said, ‘it’s gone. Now you can go anywhere, be anyone.’

  Emeline Vane, gone. Something within me stirred, something that whispered words of liberty.

  ‘So where will it be, Mam’selle?’

  I closed my eyes, tried to imagine this train, hurtling across the country like fire across tinder, towards another land, another life.

  ‘South,’ I whispered with a smile. ‘I think I’ll go south.’

 
June 1969

  I watch as the village green, The World’s End, the rows of cottages cram themselves into the tiny rectangle of Jem’s rear-view mirror. No warm farewells from Saltedge, just a ‘Mind how you go, bor’ from landlord Stan and a sniffy look from Betty.

  At Sheringham a train is waiting to take me back to London. The gulf between the city and the quiet, cloud-strewn marshes seems infinite, separated by time and memory as well as plain geography. I remember hearing a story somewhere about a village that only appears once every hundred years. I have the dreadful feeling that if I leave Saltedge and Hallerton, I’ll never be able to come back.

  ‘It’ll still be here,’ Jem says when I tell her. ‘Though I know what you mean. I don’t like to leave too often, either. My dad lives in Nottingham, and my sister and her family, but …’ She trails off. ‘It’s like Narnia.’ She smiles eventually, glancing at me from the steering wheel. ‘Did you ever read those books?’

  I turn to reply when a gateway flashes past, an opening in the hedge. Through the tops of the trees, a crumbling chimneystack is just visible, the edge of a blue slate roof. I have a train to catch, but I can’t help craning around, trying to make this final glimpse last. In six months, less, it might all be gone.

  The car begins to slow. I look over in surprise.

  ‘Two minutes,’ Jem says with a wry smile, putting the car into reverse.

  The old gravel drive is green and cool as ever. It smells of vegetation after yesterday’s rain. The house looms up to greet us. It seems smaller somehow, and sad, as though it is tired of being alone and wants us to stay, to wait with it in its slow decline.

  ‘Dicky might send you back here,’ Jem says quietly, ‘to collect more evidence?’

  I smile, but I know the highly unlikely when I hear it. No doubt a deal is being hammered out between Mrs Mallory and the developer as we speak.

  ‘Maybe.’

  The afternoon washes around us. I can’t bear the thought that the days will pass here without me, that summer will tip over the precipice into autumn; that the plants will droop and the birds will flee as trucks move in, and the green silence is destroyed, replaced by machinery and rubble.

  ‘Wait here, will you? I’ll only be a minute.’

  ‘Where are you going —’

  But I’m already hurrying around the side of the house towards the terrace. Emeline’s diary has given me an idea, a way that part of me can stay here no matter what happens, even after I’ve gone back to London. Like a tin figure, watching with painted eyes.

  I search through my pockets. Change, bits of wrapper, and there, my house keys, on the plastic ring my aunt brought back from Margate. Brightly coloured, yellow and orange. It’ll have to do.

  Jem calls me, saying that I’ll miss the train. The breeze bends the leaves and I try to breathe it all in, the smell of salt and mud, damp stone drying in the sun, the sweetness of rot and wildflowers.

  The colourful key ring clatters on to the steps of the terrace. As I walk away I hear a flurry of wings, the scraping of claws on stone, but I don’t look back.

  March 1919

  The dark countryside receded behind me. I did not know where I was going, or what I would find when I got there. I only knew that I had to keep moving, that I would keep running until the road turned to dust under my feet.

  Puce had smuggled me on to this train, sneaking me through the midnight bustle of the station at Nîmes. It would take me south, he said, south, towards the sun and the mountains at the very end of France. He had taken my bandaged hands in his, and I had tried to thank him as a shrill whistle blew. He wished me luck, made me promise to write to him at the depot, and then he was gone, sprinting away into the darkness, towards the train that would take him back to Paris.

  For a long time I studied the passing tracks, watching them turn silver in the pre-dawn light. I didn’t dare sleep. Puce said that by morning, the train would have reached the south. When I finally looked up again, I did not know if he was right, or if I was dreaming.

  Mountains, there were mountains rising out of lilac shadows, capped with snow. I leaped to my feet on the narrow metal platform, and ran to the far railing. The wind blew the hair back from my face as we hurtled into that magnificent landscape, and I laughed because even as I watched, the sun was rising. A glow struck the peaks and turned them iridescent gold, raising the rest of the landscape out of obscurity.

  I saw whitewashed houses shuttered against the night. I saw terraces of vines, sloping up into the foothills. Reeds grew along the track, clusters of purple and yellow irises. It was as though we had crossed through a portal and left behind the cold, grey world for one that was soaked in brilliance.

  Even the air smelled different. I breathed deeply and took in sun-baked dust, night-cold leaves and salt; a marine promise entirely different to the icy North Sea. On the opposite side of the train, the hills dropped away and the sight of waves rushed up to meet me. The sun dazzled upon the surface of the water and sea birds called to each other, their voices high and thin, before we were swallowed up by the darkness of a tunnel.

  A tunnel meant one thing: civilization. The train was slowing and I knew that we were reaching the very end of the line. I would have to try my luck in this unknown place. Cautiously, I peered ahead. A peeling sign with the name of the station was coming into view.

  Cerbère.

  In the distance, I could make out a mass of people waiting at a platform. If I did not move soon, I would be seen. Puce had warned me not to get caught; the train company did not look kindly on stowaways and would likely hand me over to the authorities. I shifted forward, took a breath, and jumped.

  My muscles were stiff and I hit the ground awkwardly, grazing my elbows. I crouched out of sight at the end of the platform and watched the train come to a stop. The people swarmed forward, flinging open the freight compartment doors, their barrows and carts at the ready. I heard voices, women’s voices, talking and laughing together in a language that was not French. Where was I?

  Beyond the station building I could see a road, a rough dirt track. If I could reach it, I could escape unseen. The women nearest to me had their backs turned …

  I got my feet under me and ran. Over the rails I scrambled, over uneven stones and unfamiliar weeds, the breath catching in my lungs. Too late I heard the men’s voices, too late I saw three figures walk around the corner of the building, heading straight for me. Instinctively, I ducked down behind a cart that stood, waiting to be unloaded.

  The men came closer. Two of them were middle-aged, and had the signs of a hard life about them, their skin brown and shrivelled as winter onions. But the third … he looked like a different creature. He was young and strong, black hair glistening with water, pushed back from his forehead, eyes of such light blue they looked almost silver. He passed the cart, barely a pace away, and I must have moved or made some noise, for the next thing I knew, those eyes were looking straight into mine.

  Crushed down in my hiding place, there was nothing I could do but stare back, hoping beyond hope that he had not seen me after all. He frowned, looking at the train, then back to me and I saw him fathom everything.

  I heard grunts of conversation, footsteps crunching around the side of the cart. I squeezed my eyes closed, waiting for the inevitable hand on my shoulder, for the three men to drag me off to the stationmaster’s office. But nothing happened. I made myself look up. The young man was standing over me, a puzzled look on his face. There was no sign of the others.

  Slowly, I felt my limbs unknot. He did not look angry, nor was he wearing a railway uniform, only a heavy blue jumper and a faded neckerchief. Perhaps he would not stop me from leaving the station after all … With as much dignity as I could muster, I stood, brushed myself off, and started to stride past him.

  Not fast enough. He caught my shoulder, pulled me back. For an instant, I found myself separated from him by only a few inches. His lips were a little chapped, I saw, before I remembered myself and shrugge
d off his hold.

  ‘Well?’ I asked.

  He stared at my mouth, and his own lips moved silently, as if trying to fathom my words. Why wasn’t he shouting for the railway officials, for the stationmaster to come and take me away? After a while, he glanced at the rooftops of the town below and seemed to come to a decision. He reached for my arm again.

  I jerked away, only for my foot to slip on the loose stones. Unthinkingly, I grabbed for the edge of the cart. The rough wood dug into my palm and I heard myself cry out in pain. Perhaps it was shock, or exhaustion, but I couldn’t find my balance again, couldn’t let go without my knees buckling.

  Everything was clouding in, like snow at night. There was a strong hand on my elbow, another around my waist and the last thing I noticed was a scent: cotton dried in sunlight, the sea on a winter’s day.

  June 1969

  ‘Bill, I’m talking to you.’

  Stephanie is staring. Behind her, people are jostling at the sticky bar; the sunlight is streaming in, making everything hotter. All I can smell is stale beer and cigarette ash. I try to loosen my sweat-damp collar.

  ‘What?’

  ‘You’re doing it again!’

  She looks annoyed. Obviously she expects an answer. On the radio, Nancy and Frank are crooning about saying something stupid. I know the feeling.

  ‘Sorry, Steph.’ I reach for the glass of shandy. It’s still almost full, growing warmer by the second. ‘You know I came straight off the train. I’m knackered.’

  I swallow down a sip. The beers I drank with Jem on the terrace tasted ten times better. All I want to do is get home and close my door, where I can be alone, where I can think about Hallerton.

  ‘You never even called me.’ She finishes her snowball, careful with her lipstick. ‘Four whole days. You going to tell me they don’t have telephones in Norfolk?’

  ‘Only in the pub. And I did mean to, but this thing with Emeline, it took up all of my time.’

  ‘Emeline?’ Is that hostility in Steph’s voice? I can’t tell. She’s looking down, false lashes screening her eyes. ‘Who’s Emeline?’