‘What do you want, Charles?’
He opened his arms to her.
‘I want you, Birdie.’
She didn’t think twice. She stepped into his embrace.
He felt warm, like the summer they had shared.
Eighteen
After they married, Charles built a raised wooden verandah around the house. He said it was a lookout for their fortress. He joked about adding a drawbridge, a moat and arrow slits to the farmhouse, and though it was just silly talk between them, it pleased Birdie to know they both felt the same. The farm was isolated, but they both yearned to live out on the very edge of the world, just the two of them. At this lonely farm, memories could not reach her. She believed she could forget the child. She walked along the river every day, hoping the numbness, the sense of panic that fluttered within her when she saw other women with their children, would fade. She had a desire to have another child, and she told Charles she wanted a big family.
They were sitting under the willow trees, watching one of the farm dogs swimming to retrieve a stick Charles had thrown in the river.
‘Big as in four or five, or big as in nine or ten?’ he’d asked, softly stroking her neck.
‘Nine or ten children. A whole rabbit litter of them.’ She felt a little silly then, embarrassed by her desires. There was something not quite decent about such greedy talk of fertility. They weren’t farm animals, after all. But Charles just carried on stroking her neck as if she had said nothing at all out of the ordinary.
When the verandah was finished, she and Charles started a habit of standing on it, watching the dawn, the sky ribboned with pink and white like the fat-marbled beef joints she roasted on Sundays, following a recipe book, trying to understand the cooking range, wishing she had paid more attention when her aunt had taught her how to cook. ‘Do you miss the city?’ he asked, but she said she had forgotten all about it.
Most of the farmers in the area worked all the hours they could, and Birdie soon realized Charles was the same. He spent his days outside, coming in late, wanting her, smelling of the earthy scent of fields, of hay and animals, the sharp odour of motor oil on his clothes. He stood behind her as she leaned over the sink peeling potatoes, putting his arms around her, lifting her skirts, dropping to his knees as she turned and pressing his sweet nuzzling face between her legs. Some days he came in and caught her dancing to big bands on the wireless in the kitchen. She insisted he dance with her, pulling off her apron, sliding her hips against him, unbuttoning his sweat-stiffened cotton shirt. Birdie knew she was still ghostly, still a person who struggled to understand her own feelings, but her desires for Charles blocked out the emptiness. And they would have children soon. The kind of love they felt for each other was bound to bring a child into the world.
They grew every kind of arable crop through the war years. Charles borrowed a caterpillar tractor from his neighbour Norman Hubbard, over at Ark Farm. He spent a week grubbing up hedgerows to make the fields bigger. With the woody copses and hedgerows gone, the landscape looked like a vast prairie and the east wind rushed across it, stirring up small dust storms.
In return for the loan of the tractor, Charles and Birdie worked scything thistles on the Hubbards’ farm for a week. Norman Hubbard was a lawyer who ran his farm as a hobby. He had a farm manager, a rather taciturn man called Westfield. Norman’s wife, Kathleen, bred horses, but in wartime she had given that up and helped out on the farm.
Birdie thought Kathleen a perfect English countrywoman. Just like an illustration in one of the Country Life magazines she looked at these days. Kathleen had clear skin and high cheekbones. Her eyes were brown and almond-shaped. Her blonde hair was tied back and fell about her shoulders in curls when she undid it. Kathleen taught Birdie how to chase rats from the hen house with the back end of a hard broom and lots of shouting.
‘Never show you are afraid of them,’ she said. ‘Always act like you are absolutely sure you are more frightening than they are. Actually, I’d recommend having this attitude for everything. Rats, husbands, bank managers and children included.’
Kathleen had an eighteen-month-old daughter called Ella, who was looked after by a nanny. Not really a nanny, but a land girl who was supposed to work in the fields but suffered from hay fever, whereas she was good with a baby. Birdie only ever saw the child from a distance, bundled up in a pram with a large white net over the pram hood, keeping the sun off her. She was curious about the child but didn’t like to ask to see her because Kathleen showed so little interest in her daughter and Birdie felt her new friend would have been surprised by the request.
When the harvest was finished, gleaners arrived on the stubble fields. Birdie watched groups of ragged women and children scratching in the dirt for grain left behind by the threshing machines. They were a strange sight, bent over, scouring the ground as if looking for things they had lost.
‘They mark the end of the summer,’ said Charles. ‘Them and the swallows leaving.’
He worried winter on the farm might be a shock to her, and in the last months of the year, the days got shorter and a gloom descended. Connie Smith’s brother Jeremy was reported missing in action, and the family had postponed Connie and Christopher’s wedding.
Birdie remembered Connie as the girl who had stared at her when she’d danced with Christopher. She cycled over to see her at her parents’ house.
A flush of pink tinted Connie’s pale cheeks. She was a dark-haired girl with blue-veined milky skin and shadows under her brown eyes. Christopher’s leave had been cancelled. They were getting married at his next leave, which might be in several months’ time.
‘I wish I’d never waited now,’ she said. ‘We could have got married when Jeremy was still here, but I wanted to save up coupons to buy enough fabric to make my own dress. Now I don’t care what I wear. I just want us to be husband and wife.’
Birdie thought she understood what she meant. Connie feared Christopher wouldn’t come back from the war either.
The nights grew colder and the farm dogs, always lolling in the yard, hid under the kitchen table and refused to leave the house. By mid-November, watching the sunrise on the verandah required a certain bravery. It was so cold, Birdie’s cheeks felt like they’d been slapped and her fingers froze in her gloves. Her mother sent her hand-knitted socks and silk underwear, which she said was warmer than cotton. I know what winters can be like down by the river, she wrote.
In January, cold seemed to get under every layer of clothing Birdie wore. She’d been sure, in the honeymoon months of the summer, that she loved life in the country. Now she thought of the city again and began to miss it. At night, with the wartime blackout, the darkness in the house was total, the silence deep as a well. Sometimes Birdie woke in the early hours, eyes open, wondering where she was, dreams still turning in her mind, jumbled memories of smog and slums, noise and crowds in her uncle’s pub. Then she remembered. She had married Charles. She had what she wanted. A life on the edge of the world. And still, the dark felt so boundless and confusing, the silence so thick, Birdie pressed her fingers against her face and wondered if she might be touching another person altogether.
Day after day in her first winter on the farm, there were frost and snow, cold and rain. Her mother wrote to her often, telling her about the infamous cold of the winters in East Anglia, the Siberian winds that blew straight from the USSR. She sent more socks she had knitted herself. Baggy things that Birdie and Charles made into glove puppets and laughed at.
All through February, the icy breath of the wind whistled under the door and called up the stairs like a nosy neighbour. Birdie tried to shut it out, stuffing newspapers against the doorsill, while the wind rattled the window frames and sneaked in under gaps in the corrugated-iron roof.
Charles said a farmer couldn’t afford to be afraid of the weather. It was like fate. You had to bend with it, not try to fight it.
‘All good things come to us slowly,’ he told her. ‘We just have to endure unt
il they do.’
And then in February 1942, Birdie heard that Christopher had died when his plane was shot down.
Connie stood at her door wearing a pleated dress, a look of shock in her eyes, her dark brown hair wisping around her face.
‘I’m pregnant,’ she said. ‘Five months along.’
‘So what will you do?’
‘Mum says she’ll help me. Christopher’s grandmother has given me her wedding ring to wear so I can hold my head up when I visit the doctor.’
‘So you’ll keep the baby?’ Birdie felt a pang of hurt. A childish sense of unfairness.
‘Of course I will.’ Connie looked surprised for a moment. ‘It’s Christopher’s. What else would I do?’
‘Oh, it’s the war,’ said Kathleen Hubbard. The two of them were sitting in Birdie’s kitchen, smoking and drinking tea and talking about Connie being an unmarried mother. Kathleen had ridden over in the rain and put her horse in a stable on the farm.
She was wearing her riding breeches and black riding boots. Her thick blonde hair was tied back severely off her face. She sat with her legs crossed, swinging her foot. Birdie knew she would not stay long. She’d be off soon, away across the fields on her dark grey horse, galloping along the edge of the winter wheat fields, her coat-tails flapping behind her.
‘It’s changed everything, Birdie. Even the vicar wishes Connie well. I think it’s marvellous, but my God, doesn’t it show up the hypocrisy in this world? Before the war, Connie would have been seen as a disgrace. Put a man in a uniform and let him die for his country, and suddenly the sweetheart he left behind is transformed into the Virgin Mary.’ She looked at her intently. ‘Don’t you agree?’
‘I just hope she’s going to be all right,’ Birdie said. ‘I think people should mind their own business. I’m sick of the way everybody judges each other in this country.’
Kathleen shrugged. ‘I suppose we all judge each other. Can’t be helped. When I first saw you, I thought a lot of things. It’s not often you see a woman in full make-up, red lipstick and mascara, stomping about a hay field. And then I heard you were a barmaid from the East End. Well, I’m sure you can imagine what I thought.’
‘No. What did you think?’
‘Well, that’s the thing. I was wrong, wasn’t I?’ said Kathleen. ‘You’re a good farmer’s wife.’ She stubbed out her cigarette and changed the subject to whether she should be putting her best hunting mare in foal this year or not.
Birdie crossed the farmyard, leaning into the wind, her head tipped down against the horizontal rain. It was Christmas 1942. She had settled into her life as a farmer’s wife. Connie had had her baby that summer. A little girl. She’d called her Judith and she was the sweetest thing, with dark hair like Connie’s, and Christopher’s deep-blue eyes. Connie had put Christopher’s photograph over the baby’s cot. She wanted her daughter to know who her father was. His name had recently been added to a wooden commemoration plaque in the church. Christopher Thomas 1914–1942. Kathleen, too, was having a baby. She hoped for a son, she said.
Charles had Italian prisoners of war working for him, out in the barn, repairing hessian sacks and helping him dress the seed barley. They were sifting the seeds for thistle heads and charlock. Birdie had prepared a meal for them all. She liked the men. They were hard-working and they carried something of another place with them. She was fascinated by their accents and their way of appreciating the food put before them. She knew people in the village treated them coldly, but she wasn’t going to go about things like that. Recently some of the men had carved small wooden toys and given them to her, smiling, nodding their approval, holding their arms in front of them, rocking imaginary babies back and forth. ‘Bambino!’ they whispered. Carved peacocks and horses, small birds and cats sat on the kitchen windowsill. Birdie thanked the men in Italian: ‘Grazie tanto!’ A phrase she had picked up in her uncle’s pub as a child.
The gale whipped her hair against her face and she spread her arms. Her hands came to rest on her rounded belly, and she swayed back and forth. Finally she felt completely happy. There was nobody to see her, but even if one of the men had stepped out of the barn at that moment, it would not have mattered. The rest of the world could go to hell. There was never going to be anything shameful about a married, pregnant woman dancing in a rainstorm.
Nineteen
Nellie sat in a pew at the front of the church, George one side of her and Lydia the other. It was a gloomy little building. Made of a dirty-looking stone with a dark-wood-striped alcove that she imagined the inside of a whale’s ribs might look like. She disliked churches. Hatch, match and dispatch, that’s all they were good for. And they were always cold. A smell of damp walls permeated the air. She knew the smell. Not just in church. You found it where? Ah yes, the smell of earth, of the damp earth where the nettles grew along the riverbank of her childhood.
It was comforting to think of Birdie living so near to the river. As if she had become the guardian of the past. Though she would never know it, she was the keeper of Josephine’s resting place. And now she had a baby son, he might grow up to keep watch over her river too. Nellie thought she’d like to teach the boy to swim one day.
Malcolm in his army uniform, and his new wife, Lucy, stood at the altar. Her nephew was losing his hair. He’d be bald in later life, like his father. He looked tired and anxious and was only home on leave from the army for a few days. Lucy held their baby in a long white christening gown and a little white bonnet. Nellie glanced at Lydia. She had a pained look on her face. She was probably thinking of Roger. He’d always been her favourite.
Nellie had never wanted to live near Lydia, but after they sold the pub, George had wanted to go home, back to where he had grown up. Lydia still lived in the house their parents had owned. She was sixty years old, and frail these days. She had become untidy-looking. Her skirt hems trailed. She had butter stains on her gloves. When Nellie visited her, a duty she carried out for George’s benefit, she found her sister-in-law sitting in a chair in the cluttered front room full of her late mother’s ornaments, the chink of light from the closed curtains playing patterns over her ageing face. The doctor said she had mental illness. Lydia had long ago stopped talking of the importance of truth and her own psychic talents that allowed her to have a special, clearer view of the world than anybody else. She refused to talk of the war or of her ex-husband. Roger she spoke of often, but as if he were still alive and living with her.
After the baptism was over, they traipsed back to Lydia’s house for tea and sandwiches. George and Malcolm stood in the kitchen, discussing selling the house. Lydia could not live alone any longer. George had found a private home for distressed gentlefolk. Nellie thought they might want to lower their voices. Sitting in Lydia’s front parlour with Lucy and her parents, they could all hear their earnest discussion.
‘Is this Roger’s child?’ Lydia asked, pointing at Malcolm’s baby. Nellie watched Lucy’s face cloud with upset.
‘Mother,’ Malcolm called wearily from the kitchen, ‘he is my son. Mine and Lucy’s. You know what happened to Roger.’
They managed another half-hour before Lydia ended the party.
‘Of course, my brother married his brother’s wife,’ she announced loudly. ‘Because they already had a daughter together.’
George and Malcolm stopped talking. The room fell quiet.
‘That’s enough, Mum,’ said Malcolm.
‘It’s not nearly enough. The correct behaviour for families and marriage, and what they do in private, are very different things, Malcolm,’ Lydia said, raising her voice. ‘Look at my husband, respectable and quiet as the grave, but he was carrying on with that other woman right under my nose! To think of it! I could murder him and be happy, but he’s a coward and won’t come near me. And my brother with her over there, no better. I saw them once, carrying on, thinking they were alone. The two of them on the stairs. My brother Henry’s wife and my brother George. Do you hear what I’m saying to you? Th
ey were carrying on. Is Birdie your daughter, George, or Henry’s?’
There was a silence and Lydia began dabbing at her face with a handkerchief, as if she were exhausted by her outburst. Lucy’s parents left, saying they had a train to catch, and Malcolm and Lucy left with them.
‘So, are you pleased with yourself?’ George asked his sister afterwards. ‘Why did you have to talk like that? Why’d you have to be so bloody rotten?’
Lydia began to cry. ‘Why shouldn’t I call you out for what you did? It makes my skin crawl. You’re just like my ex-husband, going behind people’s backs.’ Her voice droned on, petulant, whiny and accusing, until she fell asleep, slumped in her chair.
Nellie went outside, craving fresh air. She stood in the front garden by the low wall where yellow hollyhocks grew out of the brickwork. The wind gusted across the sea and raced inland, ruffling her clothes. Nellie could taste sea salt on her lips.
‘You all right?’ asked George.
‘I wish Birdie could know you are her father.’
‘She’s Henry’s girl. That’s what we have to stick to.’
Seagulls soared in the sky overhead, calling loudly. Time was passing in any case. Did the truth really matter? Nellie thought Lydia was pleased to have spoken out, despite her tears, but really, what had it done for her? Lydia’s son and his family hadn’t cared to hear her accusations. They had been horrified by her outspokenness, turning from her words the way they might have looked away had she undressed in front of them, her outburst as shameful as dropped underskirts, slipped buttons, undone corsets. Things nobody should witness.
At the window upstairs in the farmhouse, looking out at the flat landscape and the track to the farm, Birdie watched and waited. Any minute now, the old farm cart pulled by the grey horse would be coming into the yard, bringing her mother and Uncle George to see her son. She took a deep breath and looked in on the nursery where her baby was sleeping in his cot. He was four months old and looked like his father. Perfectly, completely like his father.
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