The Hiding Places

by Katherine Webb

  ‘Nothing.’ Mrs Tanner waved one hand to dismiss the suggestion. ‘Take it with my good will, since you didn’t get what you came for. Perhaps you got something better, mind you.’

  The thought of leaving Weavern Farm had never occurred to Clemmie before. It occurred to her now, as they walked back home. Rose took her daughter’s hand and held it tightly, and didn’t speak. The Tanners might have her and Eli and the baby after they’d wed, and Clemmie tried to picture that – living there with all the listless children and frightened women, all the angry men and boys; in the unnatural darkness, surrounded by barren ground. The thought of it was like a weight, steadily crushing her. Shaking off her mother’s hand, she darted into the trees, away down the hill towards the river.

  ‘Clemmie! Come back!’ she heard Rose shout after her, but she carried on. Nettles stung her ankles, brambles scratched her skin; the green smell of crushed leaves and the dusty tickle of pollen rose up all around her; flies and cobwebs and watchful, darting birds in the branches overhead. The ground was steep, and she careered from tree to tree to catch her momentum until she was at the riverbank, where she sat, putting her stinging feet into the water and letting the cold numb them. To live there, in the shadow of Isaac Tanner, would be to shut out the sun. To shut out air. Clemmie closed her eyes and tried to believe that it would be enough to be with Eli, to be his wife and have his child. But however much she told it to herself, she couldn’t convince herself. She knew how Eli was when his father was around – so angry at the world that even the blood in his veins seemed to harden. She thought of the trampled mud around the cottage, the scarcity of food, the scarcity of joy. She thought of waking every morning and feeling, first of all, dread. And she knew she couldn’t do it.

  When she’d calmed down she told herself that living at Thatch Cottage would not be Eli’s plan. It could not be. He despised his father more than anybody, and certainly wouldn’t tolerate him laying a hand on Clemmie, as he was bound to sooner or later – nobody under his roof escaped his violence for long. It could end in murder; it could end in Eli swinging from a rope at Cornhill Prison, down in Shepton Mallet, where those other Tanners who’d killed had gone before him. That could not be his plan. She pictured them living out, as he had been, under hedges, in hollow trees; gone wild since they were both half wild already. But that would not do for the baby; not through the winter. Never before had she looked and seen, so clearly, that Weavern Farm was a place of safety and bounty. Constancy and warmth and food, especially in the winter months; even since Walter had died and part of her father had gone with him. Thinking of leaving was like thinking of cutting out some vital part of her, and doing without it. As she walked back to the farm at the end of the day, with sore feet and her throat aching from crying, Clemmie finally felt afraid.

  Most of the household had already gone to bed, and only Mary was still up, sitting by the stove with her feet up on a stool, mending one of their father’s shirts. The air smelt sweetly of hay from the chamomile flowers she liked to brew into tea. She looked up as Clemmie came in, but kept on with her work.

  ‘They had one hell of a set-to,’ she said, as Clemmie sat down opposite her. ‘Josie went off in floods of tears to hear them. Soft as a kitten that one – even softer than you, I think.’ And will he let me stay? And my baby? Clemmie asked, without a word. Mary sighed. ‘I don’t know, Clem. He went as red as a berry – I never saw the like of it. I thought he might go into a fit. I thought the blood might curdle in him. Mum said putting you out was just the same as killing you, and the littl’un too, and she laid it all on his head. That turned him quiet a while.’ She stabbed her finger with the needle and tutted, sucking at the bead of red. ‘That’s it,’ she said, putting the mending aside. ‘That’s the fifth prick I’ve given myself in half an hour. Time for bed. Come on, dawdler.’ She stood, stretching her shoulders back, and picked up the lamp. Above their heads came a creaking, and muffled, rhythmic sounds, almost-words. Mary listened for a while, then flashed a quick, rude grin at her sister. ‘She’s working hard on your behalf, Clem,’ she said, and Clemmie nodded that she knew. They went up the stone stairs as softly as they could, and Clemmie crossed her fingers tight.

  William was already in the kitchen when Clemmie came down, early in the morning. She moved towards him cautiously. He looked tired but there was something softer about his face, some little sadness in his eyes that was sweet and sorry but not blank, not shut off as it had been for so long. Still, Clemmie didn’t quite trust it, and when he came towards her and put up his hands, she flinched. William saw it, and she saw how it hurt him. How he accused himself. He put his hands on her shoulders and gripped them hard, gazing down at her for a while. She felt the warmth and weight of his hands through the thin cambric of her blouse, and smelled his familiar smells of grease and linen and cow. She saw how they had become all but strangers to each other, and how ill that sat with the love that remained, as fixed as the bones in their bodies. Then William cupped his hand around her cheek – rough, stained fingers; the skin gone leathery hard.

  ‘Stay on here, then, girl,’ he said. ‘But I won’t see hide nor hair of the louse that’s done this and not come forward to marry you. Mark me, now. If he comes sniffing again I’ll have his guts, and no mistake.’ He turned from her then, and went out without another word. Clemmie watched the door after he’d gone, feeling her flash of joy curdle.

  She worked in the sun all day, not leaving the farm’s own fields, letting her head ache and the skin across her shoulders sting as it turned pink. She felt too tied to the farm to roam that day; too afraid to stray in case she wouldn’t be allowed to return, or wasn’t able to. She tried not to picture the future – where she would end up, and the baby, and Eli. She was tormented by the impossibility of ever reconciling her family to Eli when she hadn’t the words to explain; by the unlikelihood of Eli ever being free of Isaac Tanner. He had such hold over his son – had made him what he was with the things he’d made him do. She had no answers, and the task of finding them was so huge that she hardly dared to look straight at it. She watched the cows graze, though they had no need of minding, listening to the tearing of the grass between their teeth, the wet curl of tongues and swish of thready tails. From where she was, in Weavern’s highest field on the Biddestone side of the valley, the farmhouse and barns were hidden. The land rolled so steeply that it hid the buildings in its folds, and only the river was visible, looping away to the south. Her home was a nook in the green ground, as secret as a warren. Her home was a hidden place, separate from the rest. It was easy to imagine that nothing bad could ever come there. That Isaac Tanner would never find them, and couldn’t touch them. She wished, passionately, that Isaac Tanner would quit Slaughterford for good.

  In the afternoon, with the sun low and blinding in her eyes, Eli came and found Clemmie. She looked around hastily as he approached, but none of her family were about. There was a lightness in Eli’s step, a new urgency, and he smelled of sweat and hot skin as he held her tight.

  ‘I’ve got our plan, Clem!’ he said, smiling, and she realised then that she had a plan of her own. She took his hands, meshed their fingers together, willed him to see it, and understand. But he was too excited, too defiant. ‘If our families don’t want us, then why should we linger here?’ he said, keenly. ‘I can wave a jolly fare-thee-well to my dad for good, God curse him! I’ve a cousin in Swindon that works in a foundry there, in the engine sheds – building trains, Clemmie! Imagine that. He reckons there’s a job for me, just waiting. Low paid, but a job, and they’d ’prentice me up for it. We can lodge with him and his missus a while, for a few pennies, until we find our feet and get a room for ourselves. I’ve been to Swindon and it’s nice, Clem. A good place, busy, you know? And plenty of fine folk there. Do you know it?’ He took a breath then carried on describing it, because of course she couldn’t say that she had never heard of it, that she didn’t know where it was, that she didn’t want to go, that her family did want them. Or at
least, they wanted her, and she planned to make them take him too. At last, Eli noticed her unease, and he frowned. ‘This is our chance, Clemmie. Our chance to be together and start a new life, and our very own family. A chance for me to start over, where my name ain’t so well known, and I’m not suspected of something by every man I meet. A clean slate. This is the chance of it.’ She looked away and he caught her chin, turning her to meet his eyes. The happiness in his face was dying, the spring in him waning. ‘You do still want to come away with me, don’t you, Clem?’ he asked, intently. ‘You do still want to be mine?’

  * * *

  Hilarius and Irene didn’t speak as he drove her, in the Stanhope, the handful of miles to Corsham station. Irene sat stiffly beside him, hoping Pudding hadn’t told him what she’d said about him. The darkness about him remained; an overwrought phrase she’d read in a book kept coming to mind, however hard she tried to dismiss it: the stain of death. The old groom wore his battered long coat in spite of the season; it smelled of wax and animals, and there was mud and straw in the floor of the cart. Irene found herself glancing repeatedly at his gnarled hands on the reins, wondering if they still had the strength to inflict such injuries as Alistair had been given. Corsham was a small town of crooked, old stone buildings and cobbled streets, not much bigger than a village, but even so, the Manor Farm gig looked deeply bucolic in that setting. Irene shrank inwardly to think what her mother would make of having to ride in it, back through the narrow dusty lanes to Slaughterford. She’d tried to persuade Isadora Dalby to alight in Chippenham, since it wasn’t such a one-horse town, but her mother had demurred, since Corsham was closer to Slaughterford and you know how I hate to be in a carriage in the summer, with all the insects, she’d written in her note.

  Isadora’s visit had come in response to Irene’s hasty letter, sent soon after Alistair’s death, asking to return to her parents in London as soon as possible. When an answer hadn’t come directly she’d known that she would not get her wish, but that hadn’t brought about a crushing disappointment – more of a neutral, disconnected kind of feeling that made her wonder if it was still her wish in any case. And now the thought of her mother being at Manor Farm was causing a steadily growing unease; the thought of her there, and of her meeting Nancy, was too odd, too unsettling. The two belonged in separate worlds, and it somehow seemed to Irene that their meeting couldn’t help but bring about a cataclysm of some kind. And there was so much she would not be able to talk about – Alistair’s murder, Donny, Tanner, her odd feelings, and how she was trying to help Pudding. It left her without much of an idea of what to say at all.

  ‘I’ll go down and collect her, if you’d like to wait here?’ she suggested to Hilarius, as they arrived outside the small station with its cream-painted clapboard building and green picket fence. Hilarius nodded once and Irene climbed down. Deep within her, something shook at the thought of seeing her mother again. She couldn’t tell if it were fear or excitement, hope or dread.

  Isadora Marianne Dalby was taller than her daughter, without spare flesh but well-built. She had broader shoulders and hips than she’d ever liked, and a broader face across the jaw and forehead, so that she looked stately rather than elegant, and only ever wore shoes that she thought made her feet look smaller, even if they gave her corns. Still, she was handsome, and drew glances from the men on the stone wharf as they used winches, pulleys and sweat to load newly quarried Bath stone onto flat-bed wagons. She was wearing a calf-length fawn silk dress with a dropped waist, white kid shoes and a white sleeveless jacket with pearl buttons. Her hair was younger than she was – it was fair, not showing any grey, and she’d cut it short and set it in a permanent wave, after the fashion. Irene realised, seeing her from afar, that she herself hadn’t seen a hairdresser since she’d arrived in Slaughterford the best part of three months before. Her hair grew slowly but she put up a hand and felt it resting on her collar. At least her mother couldn’t criticise her outfit. Mourning was mourning, after all.

  ‘Hello, Mother,’ she said, holding out her hands. Isadora took them carefully, with her fingers only, and kissed her daughter on both cheeks. Irene caught her familiar scent – face powder, violets, the starchy smell of her clothing. London smells; smells from a previous time and place that sent Irene right back there, into echoes of her lonely childhood, her lonely adolescence, her lonely coming of age. She swallowed, and tried to smile. Isadora’s expression was inscrutable, with something hard in the eyes. But then, that had always been there. ‘Thank you for coming to see me.’

  ‘Well,’ said Isadora, with a minute shrug, and then hesitated. ‘Perhaps it was about time,’ she added, without conceding a thing.

  ‘Hilarius has the Stanhope just up here. Where are your cases?’

  ‘Oh, I’m not staying – did I not say? I’m sure I said.’

  ‘You didn’t say.’

  ‘Well. Your father and I decided it would be best if I didn’t impose on a household in mourning. And we’ve to go to the Duncan-Hoopers tomorrow, for their anniversary ball.’

  ‘Perhaps the Duncan-Hoopers might have celebrated just as well with two fewer guests, and spared you,’ Irene murmured, but her mother gave her a hard look.

  ‘Their invitation was accepted a good while before yours arrived, Irene.’

  ‘Well, I hadn’t planned on my husband dying. Nor on you coming here – I’d planned to come home.’

  ‘Let’s not quarrel,’ said Isadora, closing the subject and looking away with a tight smile as though to appease imaginary onlookers.

  She took one look at the little cart, and at Hilarius, with dust bedded into the creases of his face, and suggested that they remain in Corsham instead. There was a pretty high street to walk along, and a park, though in the end Isadora declined to leave paved ground for grass, for fear of ruining her shoes. ‘One forgets, living in London, that such tiny places carry on and thrive, all unobserved,’ she said, looking vaguely dispirited.

  ‘Well, they do,’ said Irene, thinking that after so many weeks in Slaughterford, Corsham seemed quite lively, in fact, with its schoolchildren, butchers, and cobblers; unemployed men with tired eyes, smoking idly on corners; busy women running errands.

  ‘What on earth do you do to entertain yourselves out here?’

  ‘Mother, how can you ask such a thing, when I have written to you time and again of how unhappy I am here, and how much I would prefer to come back to town?’

  ‘Well, pardon me, Irene. I was only attempting to be civil, when you’ve given us so much to talk about that is uncivil. I daresay you would prefer to come back to us. But don’t let’s make believe that you are being unfairly kept away, or unfairly made unhappy – you brought this on yourself, after all.’

  ‘I married Alistair, just as you said I should. I came all the way down here, away from everything, just as you said I should.’

  ‘You can hardly blame me for your current situation, dear. And I know that you continued to write to that man – oh yes, word of it got about. Serena has done her best to make sure your name raises a chuckle wherever it’s mentioned – and ours, by extension.’ Irene felt her face and neck grow hot, and her throat tightened at this latest betrayal – that Fin had not managed to keep her letters secret, that he had let her humiliation continue. ‘Well might you blush, Irene,’ said her mother. ‘But your poor father’s digestion torments him.’

  ‘Father’s digestion has always tormented him.’

  ‘Well, he has always borne life’s stresses and strains on our behalf, Irene. And you have always given him plenty,’ Isadora snapped.

  ‘Not always,’ Irene demurred, but quietly.

  They went for coffee and cake at the Methuen Arms, a large coaching inn, and Irene considered her mother’s words about unhappiness, and fairness. She recalled something Pudding had said whilst they’d been out riding, two days before – just an observation; something Pudding had gathered from listening to Irene talk, but it had struck Irene. Once they’d let the su
bject of the identity of Alistair’s murderer rest for a while, Pudding had asked a stream of breathless questions about Fin and London and love. It had been a relief, for both of them, to dwell for a while on far-off things. By now, Irene was relatively at ease hacking out on Robin, at a walk, with Pudding riding alongside on Bally Girl, one hand on her own reins and the other on Robin’s lead rein. They’d gone at that sedate pace out of Slaughterford and up the valley towards Ford and Castle Combe, pursued by a cloud of dust and flies that couldn’t spoil the late summer glory of the countryside.

  When she had been Pudding’s age, all of Irene’s thoughts had run to marriage. It had been the same for all her friends as well, though Irene’s goal had been as much about getting away from her parents as it had been about getting close to anyone else. There was the agony, during the war, of fiancés being lost and killed, of hearts being broken; and for the unattached, the subtler distress, as news of the losses rolled in year after year, of realising that there would not be enough young men left for them to marry. Pudding Cartwright didn’t dream of marriage, though. She dreamed of love. She dreamed of it as an abstract marvel, like a person might dream of flying; as though romantic love were something beyond the realms of her reality, and marriage therefore pointless to dream about.

  ‘But when you fell in love with Fin, and you knew he loved you … did it make you happy?’ she’d asked keenly, and not for the first time, as though the answer were of vital importance.

  ‘Yes,’ Irene had said, sensing that Pudding needed this answer. And the truth was that it had, for the brief times they were alone together. The brief times when she could pretend that other people, and the rest of the world, did not exist. It had been a feeling of safety and well-being. Otherwise, their love had brought a kind of hungry, desperate fear to everything she did. Pudding had frowned, perhaps sensing that Irene was holding back. She had, by then, extracted tales of night clubs and dinners and dances from Irene; the gossipy social whirl of London; the thrills and perils of fashion; mornings spent sleeping off the drink and despair of the night before; and she always asked for more details, more words to describe how that life had actually felt, and what it was actually like. Irene knew she needed an escape from herself, an escape from the situation, and she tried to provide it. But then, as they’d ridden back down the hill in Slaughterford, Pudding, sounding flat, had said: ‘I always thought London would mean all the fun and excitement a person could wish for. But it doesn’t sound as though you were very much happier there than you have been here. I hope you don’t mind my saying?’