‘You always tried to help her, Babs. Done your best you have. She’s made it quite clear that your help isn’t needed. You have to accept that and then you’ll stop worrying.’
‘I suppose so,’ she agreed sadly. ‘Although I still feel a failure where she’s concerned.’
‘You’re needed here,’ Graham told her time and again. ‘I need you and Kate and Hattie need you. It’s here you belong. Rosita will find someone one day and she’ll grow into a fine young woman. If she has your blood in her veins she can’t do anything else, now can she?’
Barbara fervently hoped he was right.
Chapter Nine
LUKE HEARD OF the death of his father by accident. A visitor to the Café de Jacques brought with him a Cardiff paper, wrapped around a gift for Luke and Martine, a pound of laverbread, the popular Welsh delicacy made from a type of seaweed. The visitor had found the café on his way through Calais while motoring south some years before and since then he had called every time he’d visited France, usually bringing a gift from Wales.
Luke unwrapped the gift, his mouth watering at the prospect of warming the laverbread in a little of the fat from frying bacon. A perfect breakfast. Delicious. He smoothed the paper, intending to read it later, but at once the name of his father caught his eye and he gasped with shock.
‘My father. He’s dead!’ he said to Martine.
‘So, you have lost the chance to make up your quarrel. For that I am sad, cherie.’
In three days Luke was back in Cardiff. He knew from the newspaper that he was too late to attend the funeral but hoped to visit his sister and perhaps resume normal contact with her. Surely now his father was gone there was no reason to continue with the estrangement between them? He was wrong. His sister refused to see him.
Spending a few days with Jeanie and her husband at the shop, he had an idea and, with Jeanie’s willing help, carried it out. Using her to cover his identity, he negotiated to buy the cottage on the beach from his father’s estate.
He went by train to see the place although it was not yet his. Before he left the station he looked around him, half afraid his sister would be there, see him, and guess his intentions. Apart from that fear, he felt the usual pleasure at going back and sat for a long time against the sea wall and stared across at Gull Island.
The day was stormy and wild with dead vegetation bowling along like tumbleweed in a cowboy film. The air tingled around him like an angry, tail-swishing cat. The wind gusted spasmodically and threatened to bowl him along with the dead plants. It was exciting and he felt buoyant, hopeful of a good result from his attempts to own the cottage he had always loved.
He returned to France before the transaction was complete but travelled joyfully, knowing that the next time he came home, the cottage, his cottage, would be waiting for him.
Even the knowledge that his sister would have blocked the sale, had she known it was he who had wanted it, couldn’t dampen his delight. The cottage was his, to return to whenever he wanted. He planned one day to take Martine there. Perhaps, when they were no longer fit to run Café de Jacques, they would retire there and be happy. He smiled at the thought, yet behind the smile and the image, there was another shadowy picture of himself living at the cottage, but with Barbara and Rosita, not Martine.
Barbara put down the paper she was reading, tucked the small round spectacles in her apron pocket and stared across the room to where her husband was lacing up his boots and tying string around his leg just below the knees. The yorks, as the string protection was called, were a necessary addition to his dress. Graham was going out to the barn to tackle the rats. They had been known to run up a man’s trouser legs, and, whether the stories were true or apocryphal, Graham wasn’t a man to take chances. She smiled at him as he pulled the string yorks extra tight, her slow, dreamy eyes showing a rare sparkle. He frowned, wondering idly what the reason was for her amusement, but he didn’t ask. Graham wasn’t a man to waste words.
He looked contented, she thought; a man living well within his capabilities and looking no further. Apart from periods of half-glimpsed restlessness when she felt a lack of something obscure and unrecognized, she too was far from unhappy. The grain was in, the fields ploughed, and with only root crops left in the ground, life at the farm was slowing down and slipping into the different pace of winter.
While Graham dealt with maintenance of buildings and cleaning up after the busy summer, Barbara was kept busy storing and preserving the fruits and vegetables they had grown for their own use. Apple rings were drying in the cool oven, carrots and beetroot stored in shallow boxes between layers of dry ashes or sand. Jams and pickles adorned the large pantry. Above their heads hung half sides of bacon and hams, salted and then smoked by hanging them over smouldering oak chippings in an outhouse.
Looking around her neat and orderly kitchen, she smiled. It had worked out well for her. Leaving Rosita had been hard but it had been the right thing to do. Kate and Hattie were loved by their father and – here guilt crept into her reminiscences – Rosita had to be better growing up away from him.
She looked across again at Graham as he was about to leave the room. Tall and burly, she hadn’t looked at him for a long time. Not properly. She was startled at how old he looked; this year, 1934, he would be fifty. Perhaps he would arrange to celebrate it with a party. Just the four of them, of course. His social life was no more than his market-day meeting and a drink with neighbouring farmers.
She folded her newspaper, with its worrying reports on the rapid rise of Hitler, and the danger to its neighbours from a militant Germany. A headline caught her eye and she put on her glasses.
‘This man Hitler is coming up fast,’ she said to Graham. ‘It says here that last year he became chancellor and straightaway disbanded trade unions and started arguments about withdrawing Germany from the disarmament conference. Yet he has the support and admiration of the ordinary people, who believe his promises of better things.’
‘The man’s a marvellous orator, I’ll give him that, but that’s all he is for sure. Just a bag of ol’ wind. He’ll soon fade and leave the field open for someone with more sense than to risk involving his country in another war,’ Graham replied.
Straightening her glasses, Barbara read on: ‘This report says, “He continues to entrance crowds and is the idol of everyone who is truly German. Those who have less right to call themselves Germans are less content. They foresee difficulties ahead.” What d’you think he means by that?’
Graham wasn’t listening. He was searching the drawer for the scarf that was hanging over the back of a chair in front of the fire to warm for him. Barbara lowered her glasses on her nose and pointed to it with a solitary finger then, refixing her glasses, went back to the article.
Hitler had swiftly assumed the office of head of state, it said, and there was nothing in his way. He would be Germany’s autonomous leader, its dictator, with powers wider than anyone could at that time imagine. The words made her shiver, and she thought about Luke.
Barbara didn’t normally concern herself with world events but there were constant warnings that Germany was once more posturing for a fight. The lust for power had not been killed by the 1914–18 war, only temporarily subdued. She didn’t believe Graham’s casual reassurances. Danger there was, without doubt. The reporter had written with urgent insistence. A man like Hitler, who had come up to such a position of importance in the world, would surely not be content to stop and sit on his heels? He was still young and would want more and more.
Seeing her consternation, Graham said, ‘If this Hitler bloke wants to involve his people in arguments, best we let him get on with it. We’ve got more important things to worry about.’ It was Graham’s usual comment, often repeated in different words each time she tried to persuade him to discuss the news.
As Graham closed the door behind him, Barbara’s thoughts returned to Luke. He was living in France and might be involved if Germany and France clashed into conflict again,
but she didn’t tell Graham of her fears. He never liked her talking about her past. He was unsettled by any reference to people she had once known and from whom she had been taken when she married him. The threat of her leaving him was to him very real, a constant nightmare.
He was unaware that secretly Barbara often thought about Luke; whether he was homesick for the small beach and the cottage and his boat. She knew she was! Even though life was pleasant enough, memories harked back repeatedly to the beach near Gull Island, where she had met Luke and where there had been a special sort of peace.
She searched a cupboard and found some knitting wool. She would make Graham a pair of socks for his birthday in November. Knitting only when he was out of the house would take longer but it would be fun to give him a surprise and the girls would enjoy sharing the secret.
They could make something as well. Kate was quite proficient and could make him a scarf. What about Hattie? She lacked patience and skills. Perhaps she’d better buy him some tobacco for his pipe! She found some red wool and decided that once the socks were finished, she would make scarf and gloves for Rosita and send them for her birthday on Christmas Day.
Barbara had gone to the home to visit Rosita twice during the late summer of 1934 but each time the girl had refused to see her. The matron apologized and begged Barbara to try again, but even though she had tried three times on her second visit, walking the fields between attempts, hoping for a change of heart, Rosita hadn’t appeared.
Richard was in a town thirty miles away from his home and working on a building site. He had learned the skills of bricklaying, had mastered plastering to a modest level and was surprisingly good at carpentry but it was at none of these that he earned his living. Thanks to the patience and teaching skills of Miss Bell, he had succeeded in passing exams in accountancy and also business management. He worked for a building firm dealing with various aspects of the business and was also working at other jobs in the evenings to increase his savings. He spent very little, and didn’t have a social life, concentrating solely on building a bank account that would one day give him a start in a business of his own.
He sat in a café sifting through the papers sent to him by his solicitor, who was helping him to negotiate the purchase of a small field on which he planned to build one day when he had accumulated enough money to make a start. He often thought of the beach house and the family he had left behind. He knew his mother had made a good job of building the business he had bought for them; he and his father kept in touch by letter and phone calls.
It was Rosita about whom he longed to have news, the little girl, so angry and distressed, beaten by that man Barbara had married then abandoned to live among strangers. He wondered if she was still in the home, or whether she had run away and was somewhere, alone, facing danger, with no one to help her. As soon as he was safe from police enquiries, he would find her and look after her properly.
Rosita was working but still living at the home. After being given the chance to find other, more pleasant work, and being told she was useless, the job she had been given was cleaning and Rosita hated it. Matron had told her kindly but firmly, ‘There isn’t really anything else you can do, my dear. You do make so many mistakes.’
‘I’m not stupid. People just don’t explain properly,’ Rosita insisted. ‘When I was delivering for that grocer I kept missing the signposts – them posts are so high I went straight past. And I couldn’t help knocking over that bowl of soup when I worked in the café. The spoon was sticking out and—’
‘That’s always the case, dear. You are just a bit clumsy and forgetful, that’s all. Try not to worry about it. Just do a job you can do and forget trying to better yourself. That only leads to disappointment for a girl like you.’
So the work she was given were only the simplest of tasks and that meant black-leading the grates, scrubbing endless floors and peeling endless vegetables. She flatly refused to consider farm work.
On New Year’s Eve, during the final hours of 1934, Barbara was sitting mending some of the clothes Kate and Hattie used for their work around the farm. They were old but still serviceable. It was only silly superstition, she knew that, but her mother had always insisted that any work outstanding had to be finished before the year ended, and that included repairing clothes. The mending basket had to be emptied. It was considered very bad luck to let things lie unfinished after the clock struck midnight. She glanced at the time. Only a bit of darning on one of Graham’s socks after this patch, then she could go to bed.
Graham was walking back to the house. He had left his favourite pipe behind. His clothes were white, the air full of falling snow, blocking out sounds and giving the fields an unfamiliar pattern. He knew the area so well he could have walked it blindfolded and he found the path with ease even though the edges were blurred with several inches of the dazzling white covering.
When he came to the fence above the cwm, he looked down and saw a movement, white on white and he knew immediately what it was. That damned ewe again! He had pulled her away from that spot only yesterday. Set on choosing their own birthing place, some of them. This one was determined to have her lamb on the edge of the cliff or commit suicide in the attempt! There was always one awkward one, he mused. Every year there was one who caused him extra worry over their safety. With a sigh, he climbed over the fence and began to walk towards her, his crook in his hand.
Perhaps he would stop and have a warm drink with Barbara when he collected his pipe. She was unlikely to be in bed, he thought, remembering the pile of mending she had undertaken to finish.
His footsteps were already half obliterated as he stood looking down at the ewe.
‘Now, old girl, are you going to be sensible and come back with me?’
Barbara banked up the fire. When Graham came back from the hill early in the morning, he would be glad of the warmth. It would only need a lift with the poker and he’d have a nice blaze. She moved the big kettle close to the heat and mixed cocoa and sugar and milk in the bottom of a cup ready for him to make himself a warm drink. As she was about to go upstairs there was a knock at the door. Graham must have forgotten something. But why didn’t he just push the door? It was never locked. Perhaps he was taking off his boots and coat before coming in.
She glanced around the room, wondering idly which of his needs it might be. His tobacco? His favourite pipe? Certainly not his sandwiches or his drink. She had seen to them herself as she always did.
When she opened the door it was a neighbouring farmer and he was covered with the snow that was falling fast and silently from the night sky. She was surprised to see the snow. The farm was so isolated that the special muffling effect that was so noticeable in built-up areas – the low purring sound of cars, the whirring of wheels and shouted instructions around vehicles that were stuck – didn’t disturb them here.
‘Mr Brackley? Come in. What a night! Come in quick and warm yourself by the fire. I didn’t know the snow had begun again. What can I do for you?’ She turned after closing the door behind him, wondering why he hadn’t spoken. ‘What is it? If it’s Graham you want he won’t be in till morning. Up in the fields with his flock he is.
‘Graham is … outside,’ the man said.
‘Outside? Why doesn’t he come in?’ She stared unseeing into the darkness. ‘Come back for his pipe, I bet.’ She tutted impatiently. ‘Tell him to come in before he catches his death. What is it?’ she asked, alarmed by silence of the solemn-faced man, who was clutching his hat in gnarled hands.
‘I – I found him down at the bottom of the cwm, missus. Taking a lickle short cut I was, see. He went over the fence at the top by the looks of things.’
‘What are you telling me?’
‘Missus, sorry to my heart I am to tell you, your man is dead.’ He explained how he had run for help and with the aid of his sons had brought the body home.
‘The doctor’s on his way, missus. Be here in less than an hour for sure. Now once he’s been, how about yo
u and the girls coming back with us for the night? The missus and I will be glad if you’d come. You don’t want to be on your own. Not tonight.’
Numbly Barbara shook her head. She was trembling, her arms shaking up and down. Her face had dropped, aged, and she had the look of a stranger to her daughters when they were woken and brought down to be told the news.
‘Then my missus will come and stay with you, that’ll be best,’ Mr Brackley said, his voice stronger now the news had been told. He whistled through the doorway and called his sons to fetch their mam. But Barbara protested.
‘No. Thank you, Mr Brackley, but no. I only want the girls,’ she said. ‘But tell them to come in and have a hot drink before walking back home.’ She made them drinks with hands that were still shaking, and sat wrapped in silent, disbelieving shock while they drank it and left.
The rest of that night was simply hours to be got through. Marking time, watching the journey of the clock hands, waiting until people could be told, the arrangements made. There was no thought of the future, just the present, the unbelievable present. In her numbness came bursts of anger. Graham had let them down, leaving them all alone to cope. Why hadn’t he been more careful? He had left them all alone and for the sake of a ewe and her lamb.
Kate and Hattie seemed dazed and after being told the news just sat and stared at the walls, then at each other, holding hands and saying nothing. Barbara knew the tears would come and all the questions and recriminations, but she said nothing to encourage them. She had to give herself time to get strong so she could support them fully when the time came.
Gull Island Page 18
