‘Amen to that,’ Polly muttered.
‘So he likes to act big. Tug your forelock a bit, like he’s cock o’ the walk, and the job’ll be yours, Eli.’
Clemmie couldn’t sleep. It was stuffy and hot in the hallway, and there was no window to open. Betsy woke up yelling almost hourly, and upstairs Mrs Shepherd coughed, and coughed, and coughed. Eli fought in his sleep, twitching and muttering, and out in the street footsteps did pass, and Clemmie’s skin crawled every time, wondering who it was and what business they could have, out in the black of night. She saw their shadows, in the gap beneath the door. She missed Mary’s soft snoring, regular as a heartbeat, and the night birds outside the farm, and the quiet murmur of the river. Night after night, it got no easier. She still got sick in the mornings sometimes, and could no longer tell if it was the baby or the dizzy fatigue of sleeplessness. When Polly took her up to meet Mrs Shepherd, she and the old woman stared at one another with similar degrees of incomprehension. Mrs Shepherd was trapped in her iron-framed bed; trapped with her feeble body and her cough; trapped in her greasy lace nightcap until her daughter came to take it off. Her misty eyes, blinking rapidly, looked out at a world that she no longer understood, and Clemmie knew exactly how she felt.
Eli was gone at first light, with Matthew, to the early shift at the engine sheds. He came back tired, aching from shovelling coal and rubbing at eyes gone red and runny from airborne grit, but serene – the peace, Matthew said, of a man who’d done a day’s work for fair pay. Matthew was an operator on one of the grinding machines, and paid slightly better than Eli, whose job it was to feed the furnaces, and to lift and move whatever needed to be lifted or moved. Polly spent her days moving, slowly and laboriously, between their rooms and the market place, the water pump, the draper’s and her neighbours’ rooms; stopping to grip her back, to wipe the sweat from her face, to catch her breath.
‘Lord save me,’ she said, again and again; a constant refrain, the voice of inner fear. Betsy tottered after her everywhere, sucking her thumb, clasping her wonky home-made doll to her ribs. Clemmie took it on herself to mind the child as much as she could – picking her up when she fell; taking foul things away from her before she could eat them; changing her drawers when she wet them – to give Polly a break. She also lifted, and poured, and fetched and carried, and helped fashion whatever meagre food Polly got from the market into a meal for the five of them come evening. Pies with greasy crusts made with lard or dripping; stews of peas and barley; nothing but bread and cheese, some nights. So far, all the money Eli had earned had gone to Matthew and Polly, for their food and lodging, but demand always seemed to outstrip supply. Midway through Clemmie’s ninth day in Swindon, Polly gripped her hand, suddenly, as they sat peeling potatoes, and smiled at her. ‘I don’t know how I got on before you came, Clem,’ she said. ‘I shan’t ever want to let you go.’
Clemmie liked Polly, and she managed to smile, but she realised that she was merely waiting. Waiting to awaken from this disturbing dream she was caught in, in which she had to live there in the mêlée of a town, with the looming buildings and thronging humanity, the crush, the inescapable smells, and so little that was calm or green. When she shut her eyes she sent herself back to Slaughterford. To the sweep of the river and hills, the mill, and Weavern Farm. She even conjured the steady calm of Alistair Hadleigh’s office – standing with her eyes shut and her back to the window, echoing his syllables as soon after him saying them as she could, a trick that sometimes seemed to help, at least with the easier sounds. She almost heard the race of the mill leat and the thud of the beaters, and smelt paper and the woollen rug from the Orient on the floor, and Alistair’s hair oil and the expensive material of his suit cloth, and felt that easing of panic that had sometimes left her almost drowsy, when a lesson had gone well. She longed to feel it now, but fear clamped down on her when she opened her eyes, smearing away who she was and what she knew, and leaving no safe places. Nobody noticed her fleeing inside herself. They didn’t know that even if she could have spoken, she would have been silent for days. She cuddled Betsy, and played games with her – giving her doll sips of tea, plaiting the few strands of wool it had for hair, and trying not to notice that it smelt of vomit. And she waited to be able to leave. She waited for Eli to say, Let’s go home.
But he didn’t say that. He worked, and he ate, and he went out to the pub in the evening with Matthew, and came back after Clemmie and Polly had put their heads down, smelling of beer and tobacco, burrowing his face into her neck and falling asleep in an instant. He no longer smelt of grass or earth or the hedgerows; he no longer smelt like a wild animal, but more like a machine. The town was putting its stamp on him. One night he saw Clemmie’s downcast face as he and Matthew turned to leave, and took her along to the pub with him. She tried to be pleased, but it was all noise and smother, and men talking too loudly, and women with red paint on their teeth. The buildings along the street seemed to rear up too far and crowd in above, worse than they did in the daytime, and Clemmie felt crushed. She stayed for half an hour, hating it, then squeezed Eli’s hand and slipped away to the bed beneath the stairs.
‘Must seem strange to you, all this,’ said Polly one day, when she caught Clemmie staring up at the narrow strip of sky above the street. ‘What with you being raised up on a farm. And Swindon’s not really a big city, you know – I went to Bristol once. By God, there’s a place. All life is there; people like … ants in a nest, down on the docks. You wouldn’t credit it till you saw it. But you can smell the sea from there – have you ever seen the sea?’ Clemmie shook her head. ‘Me neither,’ said Polly, wistfully. ‘I can’t imagine it, ’cept that it must be beautiful.’ She was silent for a while, and Clemmie struggled to picture a place more populous, more clamorous than Swindon. ‘Clemmie is such a pretty name,’ said Polly. ‘Short for Clemence, is it? Or Clemency?’ Clemmie shook her head. It wasn’t short for either of those, but she’d no way to explain what it was short for. ‘Well, it’s pretty. Maybe I’ll call one of this litter Clemency, if it comes out a girl.’ She ran her hands as far over her bump as she could reach.
On Sunday they went along to the church at the end of their street, which had a pretty square of grass with iron railings around it to the front, and flowerbeds full of pansies and busy Lizzies. They had no Sunday best and went in what they wore most days, with the addition of hats for Clemmie and Polly. The sun beat down, and they sat with strangers in the shade of a horse chestnut tree laden with unripe conkers.
‘This is the life, eh,’ said Matthew, lying back and tipping his hat over his eyes. Eli smiled slightly, but Polly ignored him. Betsy was fractious and had an itchy rash that was tormenting her, and Clemmie merely wanted to say, No. No, this is not what life should be. ‘Bet you’re not missing old Isaac, now, are you, Eli?’ Matthew went on, and Eli’s face fell at once. He sat with his knees up, his arms resting across them, and squinted away into the distance.
‘I hope never to set eyes on that man again,’ he said, at length. ‘And I might kill him if I do.’
‘Can’t say as I blame you,’ said Matthew, grunting. ‘I’ll never forget the time I saw him—’
‘Enough, Matt. I won’t have him cast his shadow here,’ said Eli, tersely, and Matthew shot him a startled glance before wisely dropping the subject. Isaac Tanner was what kept Eli out of Slaughterford, Clemmie realised. He may not have liked his own name, or the Tanner reputation, but he loved his mother, and grandmother, and several of his brothers and sisters; it was his father he couldn’t stand to be near. If Isaac had been the one arrested for what happened at the mill – or for the robbery if the two things were separate – and if he hadn’t come back, she and Eli might not have had to leave Slaughterford at all. And there was no chance of going back, she saw, whilst Isaac remained. And then, out of nowhere, she knew the answer to it. It came with a rush of nerves and hope, and at that exact moment Polly’s face paled, and she gasped.
The labour lasted right throu
gh the afternoon, and right through the night. There was no doctor; the midwife was a neighbour who’d previously brought a hundred of Swindon’s workers’ children into the world, not counting those she’d delivered straight into little coffins. Polly held Clemmie’s hand, and as the hours passed Clemmie felt her grip get weaker, her gouging fingers turning as soft and giving as fruit gone over. As she pushed, Polly was silent for so long Clemmie wondered if she’d ever breathe again. The room smelt of her sweat and urine, her dry throat and effort. By dawn there were two babies, a boy and a girl, long and skinny and crushed; the girl sucked in a breath and wailed, but the boy lay still and quiet, his skin an unearthly blue. He lived a half-hour or so then slipped away, and Polly was too spent to react. The midwife clamped Polly’s new daughter to her breast, and the child drank as her mother lay unconscious.
Clemmie was never happier for a night to be over. All blood and darkness, pain and fear, life and death had been there in the room, hand in hand. The babies had fought to remain in the womb, not like animal babies that slithered out, eagerly enough. It was the city, she thought. It was all the buildings and the dirt and the crowding, the air not right, the horizon too close, the world too strange. It wasn’t as it should be. When she came away from the bedside, exhausted, she carried on out of the front door and down the street, and might have carried on walking until she got home had Eli not run out after her, and fetched her back. I want to go home, she told him. She longed for him to hear her, and perhaps he did, a little. There was something in the way he scowled, something in the silence between them. In desperation, Clemmie took a piece of old newspaper from the privy they shared with four neighbours and drew a rudimentary map, and stick figures of herself and Eli, in between two places – a large sprawl of scribbled chaos behind them, and their faces turned towards a place with a curling river, a mill, an isolated farm.
‘We can’t go back,’ said Eli, flatly, understanding at once. ‘I can’t. I won’t be near him, Clem. You understand that, don’t you? This is our life now. This is our home. I’ve got work, and we’ve a place to live, and family. I wish I could make you feel how I feel – to be out from under him for the first time in my life. To start over … It’s a marvel. And I won’t go back to how it was. This is home now.’
But in the dark of night after the boy twin’s funeral, who Matthew and Polly named Christopher, with baby Clemency crying and waking Betsy, and Polly wincing every time she moved, and smelling of milk and exhaustion, Clemmie made up her mind. Polly’s need of help was like an extra set of ties, binding her, but if she stayed, she felt she would die. Not physically, perhaps, not straight away, but in some other, fundamental way. She thought of the soul that the vicar talked about; she thought about the spirit of things, the wants and needs and memories bred into each person by the generations that spawned them; and the land that fed them. People belonged in certain places, and not in others, and she and Eli – and the baby – belonged in Slaughterford. And if Eli would not return because of Isaac Tanner, then Clemmie knew a way to get rid of Isaac Tanner.
She knew what she had overheard; she knew the truth of it. Her mother often said that the simplest answer was usually the right one, and the simplest answer was that Isaac had planned to rob Alistair Hadleigh, and had taken his sons to the mill, and had done the deed. It would not be easy; she didn’t want to implicate Eli in any way. She needed to find a way to say the words, or draw them, or write them. She would work it out with her mother’s help – perhaps get her to ask the right questions. She might even see if she could go into Alistair’s office, and recapture the calm of it to help her, even if he weren’t there. She would find a way to say that Isaac Tanner was a guilty man, a criminal; the one who’d planned to rob the mill and the cause of all the violence. A man who had raised a generation of children too angry and terrorised to break away from him. Isaac Tanner was a shadow on the world, and she would give the police the chance they’d always looked for to take him away for good.
As if he could sense her intention, Eli lay close to Clemmie when he got home, and she could just see the glint of his eyes in the dark, and he spoke close to her ear.
‘You won’t leave me, Clem,’ he said. His voice was tight, like the grip of his hands, and she couldn’t tell if he was begging her, or commanding her. ‘You’ll not leave me.’ But he fell asleep, couldn’t help himself, and his hands slithered away from hers as his breathing deepened, and she edged away from him. At the last moment that their bodies touched, at the moment that they parted, Clemmie felt something tear inside, and her heart ached. He would not understand. He could not know her plan, and that she would make a home for them where they ought to be, at Weavern Farm. She hardened her heart as best she could, knowing that his might break when he found her gone. In the dark, and after the beer, Eli hadn’t noticed that she was dressed. Eyes straining, Clemmie went into the front room as silently as she could. Eli slept deeply, but if he found her before she’d had a chance to vanish she knew she would never leave. And she was frightened. She knew how angry pain made him – pain of all kinds. She fetched the apple and slice of bread that she’d hidden earlier, wrapped in a cloth in the vegetable crock. In the front room the glow of the streetlight leached in through the thready curtains and outlined the furniture in lifeless grey. She didn’t have any money for the bus or a train, and only a vague idea of the direction to go in – south, and west. She would walk for as long as it took, though, and try to hitch a ride. She could feel home pulling at her; she felt that this return journey would be all downhill, and easy.
Then there was movement behind her – a soft footstep, a taken breath – and Clemmie whirled around, heart jumping. Words jammed in her throat, and behind her teeth. I was only going on ahead, for you to follow. I have a plan too, Eli, you’ll see. But it was only little Betsy, glassy-eyed and half asleep in the doorway. Clemmie went quickly to kneel in front of her, to keep her quiet. Betsy yawned, and Clemmie smelt the sweetly awful smell of the child’s tooth decay.
‘Bye, Clem,’ Betsy mumbled, then yawned again and rubbed at her eyes. Clemmie gathered her in, and held her tight. She had no idea how the little girl knew she was leaving; she didn’t need to know, or to question it. She gave Betsy a kiss on her forehead, and put a finger to her lips. Betsy nodded sleepily, then turned to go. Before slipping into the darkness the child turned again, hesitated, then held out her doll to Clemmie. Clemmie couldn’t say you keep her, so she just shook her head a little, but Betsy nodded, and thrust the doll out anew. So Clemmie took it, and dropped her head to one side to say thank you. Then she crept along the hallway and out into the street, and felt the tear in her heart get wider, deeper, as she shut the door on Eli’s oblivious sleep. She knew what he would think when he woke, and it almost made her quail, and run back inside. She almost couldn’t stand it. But she couldn’t stand to stay either, and she had a plan.
* * *
Nancy’s daily visits to lay flowers on Alistair’s grave had already taken on the feel of a ritual, just like her weekly ritual of visiting her brother Alistair’s grave. The same grave, of course, beneath the same stone slab. Irene hated that thought – the newly dead lying alongside the desiccated, the eaten-away. She wondered how long it would be before the daily visit became a weekly one, and how Nancy would make that decision. Down she went after breakfast, with cut flowers from the garden to add to the still-fresh ones already on his grave, to spend time carefully clipping off any wilted leaves, any faded petals. The rose garden was running out of roses; already the only ones left were those that had begun to weep their petals onto the ground. Irene was beginning to regret having asked if she could go with Nancy one morning. She’d been pleased when Nancy said yes, but now she seemed committed to going every day, and she felt phoney, making gestures of a grief she didn’t feel. But Nancy talked to her more on the walk there and the walk back, and if Irene was going to stay at Manor Farm, at least for the time being, then she needed the entente with Nancy to continue. A return to
the spite and disdain of the early days would be excruciating.
‘Did he ever tell you about the time he got lost on his own land?’ said Nancy that morning. ‘He was only about ten, but still – old enough to know the way home, you’d have thought. I went out as teatime came and went, and found him sitting in one of the hedgerows, crying his eyes out.’ She gave a grunt, half affectionate, half incredulous. ‘But do you know, the first thing he did was apologise for making me worry and come out looking for him. Dear, soft, silly boy. I’m afraid I gave him quite an ear-bashing. And now, of course, I regret every time I ever berated him.’
‘I’m sure he knew it was well-meant,’ said Irene. ‘I hid from my parents once. It was Nanny’s half day off. I tucked myself under the bed in a spare room upstairs – I can only have been about seven, I suppose. They didn’t come to look for me. I fell asleep, and it was dark by the time I rushed downstairs, certain they’d have been worried about me.’
‘I’ve a feeling you’re going to say they hadn’t noticed you gone,’ said Nancy.
‘Just so,’ said Irene. ‘So that taught me a lesson about my own importance. I would far rather have been berated, I assure you.’ She opened the little iron gate into the churchyard and held it for Nancy.
‘I notice your mother never actually made it here, to the farm. Rather a short visit.’
‘Yes. But I found it quite long enough, in the end,’ said Irene.
‘Good for you,’ said Nancy. She sniffed. ‘Let her taste her own medicine.’ But then the silence that came over her at the graveside descended, and Irene went to sit on the bench, and had to resist the urge to tip her face to the sun, and let its warmth buoy her.
On the way back, when Nancy had turned sunken and grim, Irene sought to bring her out of herself again.
‘Has Pudding told you about this other murder that happened, years and years ago?’ As soon as she’d spoken she knew she’d said the wrong thing. Nancy’s head came up but her eyes sparkled with anger.
The Hiding Places Page 30
