She couldn’t pick the single thread of it out of the tangle of what came next. It seemed, in her memory, that his touch had roused her from a nightmare. Pulled her out of a cage she’d built for her own protection. Four fingers on her forearm, and through the quagmire of champagne and stress she’d felt easier. A little unlocking inside. She couldn’t even remember exactly what he said. Was it, You mustn’t mind Serena, when she says things like that? Or was it, Will you dance with me one evening, Irene? Or was it, I wish I knew what you thought about all this? It didn’t matter. Of course it didn’t matter. She lay there next to Alistair as his breathing deepened towards sleep, and remembered that he’d been there that night too. Alistair Hadleigh, up from the country for a visit with some other old Etonians; old – almost forty – but still handsome. She remembered being introduced to him, then seeing him at a few parties – one might even have been at his apartment in Mayfair – and driving about in his brand new Alvis. A tall man with straight fair hair, kind eyes and a slightly weak chin. She’d danced with him, she thought, if not that first night Fin touched her then another, soon afterwards. She remembered thinking that his laughter lines made him, conversely, look a little sad. But Fin’s touch on her arm. The feeling of being woken, and shown the way out, was far stronger than the unreal sense of danger that came with it. That was easy to ignore.
* * *
Eli Tanner wanted to touch her, of that much Clemmie was certain. She wondered why he didn’t. It seemed entirely obvious to her that he loved her, and she thought it must be obvious to him that she loved him – that she was on fire for the love of him. The kind of love that came into being a full-formed thing, living and breathing, strong, and needing no more explanation than the sun or the wind. They met most days – walking through the water meadows beside the river up towards Ford, or down towards Box, as far as Widdenham Mill, which had made paper until ten years earlier but now sat still and empty. Water rushed busily over its weir, unaware of its redundancy. The summer grass was lush; the cows stood over their ankles in mud at the By Brook’s edge, pulling up greedy mouthfuls of it, swatting endlessly at the flies on their flanks. Eli and Clemmie always stopped short of civilisation; they kept to the quiet curves of the bank, and the shade of trees, and the hidden paths tucked between the high, ancient banks at field edges, where the bluebells were dying back. Climbing through squeeze-belly stiles and gaps in the hedgerows, they made sure they weren’t seen. This was agreed mutually, in silence. Clemmie didn’t know if Eli’s father’s objection would be to her specifically, or only to Eli not working. Eli taking time for himself, out from under his father’s heavy hand. She knew her own family’s objections would be to Eli, and his Tanner blood. And perhaps to the very idea of her having a suitor – she didn’t know, since it hadn’t happened before, despite her pretty face. Because she didn’t speak; because they thought her touched.
Touched. Simple. Nature’s child. All it meant was that Clemmie had been set aside and talked over all her life, and was not expected to have thoughts or plans of her own. She was expected to always stay exactly where she was. Perhaps it was this that made her appreciate all the other living things around, which many people didn’t. The birds and the vermin and the livestock – they were also speechless, also very much alive. Like them, she preferred to go her own way, unnoticed; like them, she was largely left to do so. Exempted from the expectations other people had for one another; occasionally approached by men and boys, but never considered for a wife. Never considered as a mother to somebody’s children. So Clemmie hadn’t considered herself that way, and had never needed to challenge this assumption that she was flawed.
The touching should have been simple; she couldn’t understand Eli’s hesitance. When he waited too long, Clemmie took his hands in hers, meshed their fingers together, pushed his palm against her stomach or her thigh or chest. If he wanted to touch, then she wanted him to. There was no explanation for this other than an innate trust, a feeling of complete safety and understanding. His whole body shook, and his breathing got quicker, and his eyes seemed to catch alight. The taste of him in her mouth was heaven. She didn’t seem to have enough skin on her whole body to press against his. She wanted to say his name. She wanted it so much she even practised at home, when nobody was around – using the exercises Mr Hadleigh had taught her, breaking the word into pieces, letting her mouth get used to each one before moving on to the next. Like learning the steps of a dance. She practised behind the barn, or in the dairy when everyone else was outside – tucked away amidst the churns and scrubbing brushes, the pails and pans and the wooden box of salt. The stress of it was incredible. Just a few minutes left her panting, damp with sweat, heart pounding like she’d been running. The first sound was all right. She could do it, the E. But switching from E to L made everything lock, and her brain jar against the stone wall of her tongue. It had been so long since she’d tried to speak, without Mr Hadleigh to help trick herself, that she’d forgotten the horror of it, and after fifteen minutes or so she stopped, spent. One day, she tipped her head back against the dairy wall to rest and said the one part of his name that she could, drawing out the sound:
‘Eeeeeee …’ A soft footstep made her gasp, and there was Josie in the doorway, a bundle of clean smocks in her arms, wide-eyed at hearing her sister make a sound.
‘Go on, Clem. Go on, you almost had it,’ she said, but Clemmie shook her head, scattering tears of frustration from her eyelashes.
Once she had the knack of it, if she ever had the knack of it, she would whisper it into his ear, with the animal smell of his unwashed hair in her nostrils and the impossible softness of the skin at his hairline. Eli, she would whisper, and feel the shock of it run through his body like a delicious kick. The sun catching in his eyes brought out the blue; flashes of bright colour like the kingfishers that arrowed away along the water’s surface. He was so gentle with her she couldn’t believe anything bad about him, even though she still saw the anger in him sometimes, when they were first reunited. Anger that soon ran out of him and left him almost dazed, as though the relief of being free of it made him drunk. He shut his eyes and concentrated when she put her hands through his hair, on the back of his neck, on his face. Like he was memorising how it felt to be touched in that way – with kindness.
‘We should marry, Clemmie,’ he whispered, as she lay back, as she reached for him. A bed of grass and curtains of foxgloves, cow parsley and figwort; the sound of the river nearby, and the rattle of a big green dragonfly darting back and forth, spying on them. ‘We should marry first.’ But he shut his eyes as he said it, rapturous, and his shoulders blocked out the sun above her, and she closed his mouth with kisses. If she could have spoken, she’d have said, Why wait?
* * *
On Sunday afternoon, after a deeply tedious morning service during which the vicar had droned on about constancy in the face of adversity, Dr Cartwright and Donny went fishing, and Pudding and her mother went along simply to sit on a blanket in the sunshine and eat the picnic they’d made – cheese and tomato sandwiches, small pork pies made by Ruth the day before – greasy in the heat but delicious – apples and shortbread fingers. They spread their blanket on the flat meadow upriver towards Ford, in the shade of a gnarled hawthorn, where the water was wide and deep, and moved with smooth insistence down towards the mills. The current tugged at bright green weeds along the riverbed. Pudding and Donny had swum in the same spot every summer as children; Pudding might have quite liked to swim that day, but having to appear in a bathing suit when anybody could walk past had robbed the fun from it. As he unpacked his rods and tackle, Dr Cartwright pointed.
‘Look, there! Donny, look – the fattest trout I ever saw, just waiting for us. The cheeky blighter – I swear I saw him wink,’ he said, just as he would have when his offspring were much younger.
‘Did you, Dad?’ said Donny, after a while. It took him a lot longer than it used to to get himself set up, but his first cast was smooth, effortless, and
sent the fly arcing out across the water to land softly, silently on the surface. Donny’s muscles remembered some of the things that his brain had forgotten, the doctor had explained to Pudding.
‘That’s my boy,’ he said. ‘All in the elbow, just like that.’ And then the doctor had to look away, so that the brim of his boater hid his face. Donny could fish for hours without getting bored, squinting at the shining water from underneath his cap – for even longer now than before he went off to the war. And just like then, he didn’t seem at all bothered about actually catching a fish.
Louise Cartwright sat with her legs tucked neatly to one side, and tapped Pudding’s arm to correct her when she sat cross-legged.
‘You’re not a little girl any more, Puddy,’ she said. ‘Try a smidgen more form.’
‘Sorry, Mum,’ said Pudding, too pleased to be noticed and spoken to by her mother to mind being corrected. The four of them, just then, were perfect. No hint of anything amiss. If Pudding concentrated, she could pretend that nothing was. The sun flamed down at them, so that the grass seemed to steam; swallows swooped, a pair of swans sailed by, and a robin watched them from the hawthorn, waiting for crumbs. Pudding picked a blade of grass, clamped it between her thumbs and whistled with it. Donny drew in his line and cast again, and the doctor fiddled with a tiny carp he’d hooked, ready to throw it back. Pudding watched a two-spot ladybird climb the whole length of a red campion stalk and then stop at the top, and her mind drifted back to a day before the war – a day of similar chalk sky and languid heat – when they’d caught the early train from Chippenham down to the coast at Swanage. Pudding had only been six; already sturdy and round enough to have the nickname that would never leave her. It had been the year before the war broke out; Donny had been a strapping fifteen; all long limbs and burgeoning strength. Pudding remembered his skin in the sunshine, so different from her own – darker, and freckle-free; deepening in colour the second his shirt was off. He’d caught the eye of many a young lady on the beach that day, and along the quayside where they’d gone to tea; but he’d already fallen in love with Aoife Moore by then and had hardly noticed.
Pudding watched the easy way her brother cast his line, and remembered his hands around her ribs, sliding up to her armpits, tight with the effort of lifting her. But lift her he had, again and again, lobbing her as high as he could into the waves while she shrieked and laughed so hard she got water up her nose and they had to stop. She remembered him kneeling on the sand in front of her while she coughed and spluttered and her eyes streamed, grinning, saying, You’re not supposed to drink the sea, silly Pud; you’re supposed to swim in it. The sun gave his hair a deep mahogany glow; the beginnings of whiskers just shadowed his jaw. She stayed in the sea for hours – her puppy fat kept her warm. She heard her mother calling her in, but pretended not to. Her father wore the same straw boater to keep the sun off his pate; her mother wore her blue dress with the sailor collar, and never went further into the sea than her ankles. The day had seemed endless and joyful; like the summer, like life. Try as she might, Pudding could no longer feel quite the same way, in spite of the beauty of the day, and her mother’s lucidity, and Donny’s calm contentment, and a picnic. The careless feeling of being a child had slipped beyond her reach. She felt herself at a point of fine balance between happiness and fear.
‘Can’t we eat the picnic yet?’ she said to her mother, to stave off sombre thoughts. She knew what the answer would be, and longed to hear the familiar words, spoken in her familiar voice.
‘Certainly not! Good gracious, Pudding, it’s not yet one.’
‘Well now, I think you’ve a bite, my boy,’ said the doctor. ‘Donny? Did you hear me?’
For something to say, Pudding began to tell her mother about Irene Hadleigh, and their trip to see Ma Tanner at Thatch Cottage. Pudding had hoped that it might have marked the start of a thaw in Irene Hadleigh, of her coming out and talking to Pudding a bit more, and riding, but it didn’t seem to be happening. Pudding had been alight with curiosity after Ma Tanner said that change was coming. She was desperate to know what Ma had meant, and how she could tell, and what kind of change. But when she’d said all that on the walk back up to the farm, Irene hadn’t shown the least interest. Something else the old woman had said was plaguing Pudding. She’d said that Irene wasn’t married in her heart. Pudding wondered if that could possibly be true. It seemed inconceivable to her that anyone – least of all his new wife – might not love Alistair, given the chance to. But then, Irene did seem a bit of a cold fish, as Ruth might have said. However many times she told herself that it was none of her business, Pudding couldn’t seem to leave the thought alone. She’d been quite happy when Alistair got married – happy to think he’d found someone to cherish him as they ought. The thought that he’d married someone who didn’t cherish him was just deeply wrong, in a way she couldn’t quite put her finger on. She’d also hoped, in some abstract way, that Alistair being married, and bringing a new resident to Slaughterford, might jolt the world from the rails it seemed to be on, and alter its course, because she didn’t like the way it had been going. The growing certainty that Donny was as recovered from the war as he was ever going to be. The inescapable fact that her mother only ever got a little worse, never a little better.
On Monday morning Pudding hacked out on Robin, the horse meant for Irene Hadleigh, and took a hilly route to work some weight off him. But as the lane climbed and Robin began to puff, she felt a bit guilty – he didn’t have a lot of bone, and, really, she was probably too heavy for him. Her lower legs dangled down, clear of his flanks. She sat as well as she could, as though that might somehow mitigate her inexorable growth. She’d had to ask Nancy to buy some wider stirrup irons for the ladies’ saddles, since by now her feet were far closer to man-sized. Not like Nancy’s tiny, neat feet, which even looked delicate in boots. She knew for a fact that by the autumn, when the hunting season began, she wouldn’t be able to fasten her one decent jacket over her chest any more.
When she got back to Manor Farm, Pudding saw Irene Hadleigh at one of the upstairs windows and gave her a wave, but Irene didn’t seem to see her. For some reason that, and thoughts of her hunting jacket being too small, ruined Pudding’s fragile good mood, and when the farrier’s lad turned up, asking where she was since he’d been expecting Dundee and Baron down at the forge, it took her by surprise. She would never normally forget such a thing, and had to run to bring the horses in from the field and wash the mud off their feet. Baron was outraged and refused to be caught, swinging his hindquarters at Pudding and laying back his ears, until she almost wept with frustration, and Hilarius had to come across to help her.
‘What ails thee, girl?’ he asked her, squinting shrewdly at her red face and harried expression.
‘Oh, nothing! Nothing,’ she said.
‘Can’t lie to the beasts,’ he replied, with a shrug. ‘They smell the truth on you.’ The old man caught Baron without mishap, murmuring incomprehensible things in the language he’d learnt as a child – he always did this so softly that Pudding never heard it clearly enough to have a guess at where he might have been born – then handed her the lead rope without another word.
‘Wench must be in love,’ said the farrier, aptly named Smith, as Pudding finally towed the horses into his rickety shed. He gave her a lopsided flash of his brown teeth with the perfectly round notch where the shaft of his pipe sat. He had hands thick with scars, and a limp where he’d been kicked once; he only ever called Pudding wench, but she didn’t mind. She smiled vaguely, feeling too distracted to blush.
‘Are you, then?’ said Ben, Smith’s apprentice, who was only a year older than Pudding and as awkward with his new body as she was. His face was a series of misshapen features, on the move, not yet settled where they finally would; he had spots on his cheeks and watched the world sullenly through a messy fringe of hair, but he had a way with horses that Smith called ‘the touch’ – any animal he handled immediately fell calm, and was at l
east grudgingly cooperative as its feet smoked beneath the hot metal shoes.
‘Am I what?’ said Pudding.
‘In love?’ The question had an accusatory note, as though love were an act of gross stupidity.
‘Hardly,’ said Pudding, airily, assuming she was being teased about Alistair Hadleigh. ‘Who on earth is there to fall in love with around here?’ At this Ben flushed crimson and glowered, and turned away to top the forge embers with a shovelful of slack. Smith observed the exchange and grinned again.
‘Reckon the wench ain’t the only one,’ he said, but Pudding wasn’t really listening.
At the end of the day she went to collect Donny to walk home, but he was nowhere in the grounds of Manor Farm, so she made her way down into the valley, and along to the mill. The sky had clotted by then, and the air felt thundery. Tiny black beetles appeared from nowhere to dot Pudding’s clothes and skin, and the river’s surface teemed with gnats. Donny loved the mill, and all its machinery and steam and smoke and racket. He’d understood the workings of it, apparently inherently, from the age of about ten, when to Pudding it had always been a mysterious, alarming catastrophe of a place. Not somewhere she belonged at all. She only liked the bag room, where the women stitched and glued with an air of quiet industry, and everything was spotless. On bad days she saw the mill as a cancerous blot on the beauty of the By Brook, and wished it didn’t even exist. Such intrusive modern industry was wrong in such a timeless place, and it seemed to grow all the while. Like the massive brick building and towering chimney Alistair had built just two years earlier, to house the new steam boilers and generator; a 1920 date-stone set proudly into the wall. Pudding could hardly guess what the building and all the new equipment it housed must have cost, and it stuck out like a sore thumb. But then, she couldn’t mind it too much, because it was Alistair’s. And because the mill employed men from villages all around, when many of them would be impoverished otherwise, their families along with them. Without the mill, Slaughterford wouldn’t be Slaughterford.
The Hiding Places Page 10
