Land of the Living

by Georgina Harding

  No, Claire, he had wanted to say, you’re thinking of a quite different place. Burma is vast. You don’t think that when you just look at it on a map. And was he ever in Burma? And how long did he spend in Burma? There was no way of telling where the border was and Burma began. No name to any where. There was only jungle and mountain, and bare slashed mountain and jungle again, and the rivers ran wild in the gorges and you could see across but you could not cross them except where the people had swung their cat’s-cradle bridges of vines, which you walked like a dancer, one foot delicate and light before the other.

  He had collected the letters at the post office, walked the steep road back up to the bungalow with the bundle unopened in his hand, a burning weight it seemed though it was only paper. He had flicked through the envelopes even as they were tied, and recognised her writing, and his mother’s, and saw there were even one or two from Uncle Ralph. He pictured them in England, writing and licking those envelopes and directing them into nothingness. He took the bundle and put it before him on the table on the veranda. He untied the string and took up the paper knife and sliced the softened paper. He read them in the order in which they were piled, which was pretty much backwards in time. If he had read them chronologically it might have been different. As it was, the first letters struck him with their brittleness of tone. The words in them seemed false and unreal. And that unreality then ran through, back to the ones which had been written first, when the writers would have had him as a living presence in their minds and written in the confidence that he was alive.

  He knew that he must write back. He held the pen in his hand and looked out from where he was writing, from the veranda of this hilltop bungalow, with its familiar details and clipped privet and rose beds, and a view of hills of a height and distance and blueness that he could not begin to convey to someone in England. Would he address the writers of those first letters which he had read last, or the ones who thought him dead? Dear, Darling, Mother, Claire. He wrote openings and no more. Easier perhaps to write to Ralph. Ralph alone might have known how to read what he had written, to read what was behind and could not be said. Ralph knew what one did not say, man to man or man to boy. When he was a boy and his father died, Ralph had crouched before him and put a big slow hand on his shoulder, and that had been better than any words. But he could not write to Ralph without first writing to his mother, that would have upset her if she got to know of it, that he had written to her brother-in-law first instead of her – and his mother needed words. Dearest Mother, I’m fine. Was lost for a while but some tribespeople took me in. Sorry, you must have had a scare there. I’ll be on my way home soon. But she would have wanted more than that. She would know all of that already. Hussey had sent a telegram, and there would have been communications from the Army. There was really no need now for letters, he thought. He could thank them for theirs in a simple telegram. That was all the word he would send for now. Better, besides, for putting their minds at rest. Telegrams travelled so much faster. ALL WELL STOP SEE YOU SOON

  The telegram could have said more. Was ill. Am better. Could have left sooner. Am in no hurry to leave. Can’t tell you why.

  In Calcutta he began again. My darling Claire, I’m on my way at last. At a desk in the foyer of a great hotel that reminded him of Piccadilly he started his letter. Perhaps it would be easier to write now that he was halfway. Now he had a sheet of fine formal English headed paper beneath his fingers. My dearest Claire, There’s so much to say, I don’t know where to begin. There was a clatter from the dining room that was entirely British, a sound of Piccadilly and white china and linen tablecloths and heavy silver-plated cutlery bearing the crest of the hotel, which also appeared on the headed paper. The letter wasn’t likely to get home much sooner than he did, but he went on writing, trying to find the voice in which he spoke to her, whatever voice it was he had at home. It’s so strange, to think that I’m coming home and will see you in only a matter of weeks. I hope you’ll find me not too much changed. A bit thinner, of course, but I’ve got rid of the beard so you should recognise me at least. Had a haircut too. Not sure you’d be too impressed with the Indian barber, but there’s a bit of time for it to grow before we meet. And he imagined then some meeting like a meeting in a film, he disembarking, looking for her in the crowd, and now he could not picture her face. Memory could be so precise on some things, so vague on others. He thought that one of the Englishwomen in the hotel had a look of her, in the way her dark hair curled to her neck, the way she moved, a slim waist on which he might put his hand; but then he thought that in some way all of the young Englishwomen here seemed to look the same. Perhaps it was an effect of the cotton dresses they wore, and the hats and the lipstick; or perhaps it was something that India did to them, making them generic, and at home they would become more distinctly themselves. Would that be so? If she came to the docks to meet him, would he be able to tell her apart from the rest?

  This time too he would settle for a telegram. There was a telegraph counter with clocks on the wall above it: the time in Cairo, Paris, London, New York. He wrote just a few words standing at the counter: EMBARKING CAL FOURTH MAY STOP TELL ALL WHEN I SEE YOU STOP LOVE CHARLIE. When he turned from the telegraph desk he found himself face to face with one of those women.

  Charlie, isn’t it? We met at Dickie Wilton’s. It’s Julia, Julia Esmond. Funny to see you here, well, marvellous actually. I suppose you’re surprised to see me too, but the war does that, doesn’t it, makes strange meetings? What are you doing in Cal?

  He saw her lipsticked mouth babbling gaudy words, her blue eyes so sure of him, of that sociable amusing Charlie she thought she recognised.

  I’m sorry, he said, I don’t think I know you.

  In that moment it was true. Even if some part of him did remember her, that made no difference.

  The ship went through Suez. Ashore at Port Said he bought her a present. It was what men did, going home. They went to the bazaar in the last exotic place they visited and rifled through trinkets and silks and jewels because they understood almost too late that they must take back to those who loved them some sign that they had been remembered so far away. That was what Port Said was for, surely, a place for Europeans to pretend, a desert city built only to serve their shining canal. He saw others like himself walking in khaki or in linens through oriental hubbub, lying to themselves that they had seen and known other than they had seen, thinking that they must bring back some evidence of what they were supposed to have seen to those at home who had not seen and who had missed them. The necklace caught his eye. It had a particular beauty, nothing of the trinket about it. He took it up and liked the unexpected weight of it in his fingers, bought it for a sum of money that he negotiated with no notion of its provenance or worth, whether it had been newly made and antiqued in some back street there in the city or was a hundred years old and had come a thousand miles on a camel. He took the necklace away in his pocket in a little bag of red and gold silk, and went back to the ship, and once he was down in his cabin he laid it on the bed and unstrung the bag and looked again. It looked alien now that he saw it outside the bazaar. And wrong. The only jewellery he could picture her wearing was pearls. Wasn’t that what Julia Esmond and those other women he had so recently seen who were like her liked to wear? But the necklace was what it was, and the ship was about to embark; he could hear the hum of the engines through the cabin floor.

  He gave it to her in the garden. The lawn was freshly mown. He was aware of the scent of grass and the stripes.

  It’s lovely, she said. Rather savage.

  She held the necklace before her. She had smooth skin, fine collarbones, dark eyes. If she were to wear it, it might suit her better than pearls.

  Thank you, darling.

  Her voice set her apart from him in a way that the touch and the smell of her did not. Her words rang in some bright space within him and made him feel in that moment that he was hollow.

  Did it come from India?

 
; I got it in Port Said. We stopped there en route.

  A gust of wind blowing her veil, stepping out into the unexpected. Yet it should have been expected. None of it was so surprising, really.

  But you don’t know the country, he had said when they first talked about marriage. You’ve never lived in the country.

  They had been walking in Green Park. It was the greenest place they had been in all the time they had known each other, the London planes above their heads and the grass beneath their feet.

  I did. In my last years at school. They sent us away to a school in Wiltshire because of the Blitz.

  That’s not the same as living there.

  And I picked potatoes. They sent us out potato picking in our games lessons instead of playing hockey. So I’ve even done some farming, you see. Thought I might be a Land Girl, but when I got back to London I joined the ATS instead.

  Lucky you did that.

  Why?

  We’d never have met, would we, if you’d been a Land Girl, stuck out on some farm somewhere?

  They lay on the grass and kissed, but chastely, because of where they were. His uniform was rough to her hands.

  Some silly idea she had then of the life she would lead, knowing Charlie, knowing about his family and the house – the big house that was sold and the farmhouse that Uncle Ralph had kept on with the land, which was meant for Charlie to inherit. Charlie said that it was a lovely old house though it was only the home farm, much easier to live in than the big house, with a couple of formal rooms at the front and views out in all directions over the fields. The family had been there for generations. Their name appeared on memorials in the church. She would take that name, become a part of all that. One day – but not now, not yet, not until she had lived there some time and was rather older – she pictured herself walking to the church, on a Friday it might be, or a Saturday afternoon, with armfuls of flowers, and arranging them there, daffodils or lilac or roses, or autumn leaves and berries, before the pulpit or about the font. She pictured herself more of a country lady than a farmer’s wife. She would do whatever country ladies did, walk a dog, have a garden, grow those flowers.

  They were in the cottage at first. Temporarily. It had been easy to be temporary, as if they were only playing at their life together. The cottage was halfway down the drive. It had small rooms, small windows, and it was chilly, with a fireplace that smoked, so they turned in early and warmed themselves in a creaking bed that must she thought have been built in the room. She could not imagine how anyone could have brought such a big bed up the stairs.

  When Ralph died they moved to the farmhouse but it was still Ralph’s house to her. She felt no more permanent than she had in the cottage. Morning after morning she walked downstairs like a guest when Charlie was already up and out, keeping what poor Ralph had used to call ‘London hours’. She thought to hear Ralph’s voice as she walked in her pink dressing gown down the stairs past sporting prints in their dark wood frames, hunting scenes, hounds and men on horses, running foxes, horses jumping hedges.

  Charlie worked long days in those first months. She had had to do the move without him. Not that they had so many things to move but only their clothes and bedding from the cottage, and the wedding presents, many of which were still in their original packing, glasses and china and cutlery and two toasters, and a silver cigarette box, but Ralph had had almost all of those things. It had been more a question of moving his things out, or moving them around, than moving theirs in. Her mother came to visit to help. It was a sombre move, into a dead man’s house, yet the two of them went about it with hope. They opened the windows all round, the sash windows at the front pushed right the way down, and the house breathed in the summer air and the sound of the pigeons came from the trees. They cleaned first. They had Mrs Tuckwell, who had done the housekeeping for Ralph, for two full days, and her daughter Elsie who was on her holiday from school. They began in the kitchen. It seemed important to begin there. Sometime soon it would have to be modernised, an electric cooker put in, the butler’s sink replaced, the pipework redone that ran to it exposed across the window; the flagstone floor that was so cold, so unforgiving when you dropped a plate, covered perhaps with lino. They spoke of the modern kitchens they had seen in magazines as they cleared and scrubbed and relined drawers and shelves, and threw out old spices and handle-less saucepans and cracked bowls.

  When they had done the kitchen the four women moved on about the house, taking separate rooms. She left Ralph’s study to Mrs T and Elsie. Just pile the papers, she said. Neatly so that they can be gone over later. Don’t throw anything away for now. The important thing is just to get the desk clear. What about the drawers? Mrs T asked. The desk was a big one with a worn leather top and drawers all the way down on each side. Yes, let’s do those, Claire said, fired up with the activity, and she knelt and pulled open one drawer after another, papers and letters and pens, and Ralph’s old spectacles, and a broken pipe with a smell of tobacco that seemed like the smell of him. I’ll give you a box to put everything in. Then she saw that Mrs T was crying, in her floral apron leaning with her knuckles on the desk. No, no, I’m sorry. Leave the drawers for now. Let’s leave the drawers. And leave all that mess on the shelves around the gun rack, Charlie can sort all that out. Let’s just do the surfaces. Elsie, maybe you can start with the papers? We’ll need some boxes anyway, I’ll go and get some. And she went to the corridor at the back of the house where they had put the empty boxes in which the wedding presents had come, and found that she was weeping too.

  Ralph’s presence in the sitting room was less obvious. It looked like the room of anybody of that type and class.

  This could be a lovely room, her mother said, standing before the open windows. Her mother had met Ralph only once, at the wedding. It’s so light and airy, south-facing, it only needs a lick of paint. And some new curtains, she went on, fingering the sage-coloured damask where the threads had worn through in the sunlight.

  She looked at her mother standing there with the motes of dust about her. Ralph’s dust, she thought. She heard the pigeons outside. It did not rain all of that August after they moved in and there was the scent of the harvest and the constant sound of the pigeons, and she was envious of Charlie who spent all of these days outside.

  And chair covers, perhaps, she said, pulling herself in.

  Yes, chair covers, of course. Let’s go shopping when you come up to London, see what we can find.

  She didn’t know how much she dared dislodge. There were china figurines on the mantelpiece, Marie-Antoinette shepherdesses whose backs were reflected in the wide gilt mirror, a carriage clock set between them, Ralph’s watercolours on the walls. I like the watercolours, she had said, Ralph collected those. Those must stay. Perhaps we should paint the walls a pale shade to set them off, what do you think?

  You should move the pictures out of the sun if they’re good. Or keep the curtains drawn. They get too much sun in here.

  Her mother was right, of course. It would be some time before they did anything with the room. Even the shepherdesses had not moved except to be dusted, and when Mrs T had done the room and gone, Claire would rearrange them, placing them so that they might regard their reflections sidelong, slightly differently, each week. But she had listened to her mother’s advice and left the curtains drawn to protect the pictures when they weren’t using the room, though that made it a gloomy room to enter.

  All of the house was gloomy on a November morning. Again, she was keeping London hours. She had heard Charlie moving when she was half-asleep. She might have gone downstairs and made breakfast but she could not face the half-light. She did not get up until she had heard the tractor start. She dressed, quickly because the room was cold. Though she could see the steps perfectly clearly, she put on the lights as she went downstairs, on the landing and on the stairs and in the hall, because she needed lights where Charlie when he had gone down had not. With the lights on, colour began to live, that didn’t exist with o
nly the grey of the outside that came through the windows, the touches of colour that she had introduced to the house, a pretty bowl or a set of cushions, bright new tea towels in the kitchen, those tiny changes she had made that marked her presence here.

  Let her keep her London hours. He had known she was awake but he had crept out all the same. This had been a bachelor house. In this house there was the habit of a man getting up alone, filling the stove, making breakfast for himself. Not that it was that early. The days were short now. It was getting on for eight by the time he had the tractor out. There were three fields at the end of the farm that Ralph had always ploughed first. The soil was heavier there than elsewhere. If you didn’t get on to them before Christmas, Ralph had said, you might not be on to them until late in the spring. There had been rain the previous week but the weekend had been dry. He hoped that the ground would be crisp enough to work despite the lack of wind.

  It was still slimy on the track. He knew before he got there that it would be too wet. He persisted as if the noise of the tractor and the judder of it beneath him were purpose alone, the exhaust chimney above the engine puffing blue smoke into the grey. He cut a first slow line into the field where he had left off before the rain. It was a waste of time. As Ralph would no doubt have told him. Patience, boy. Ralph touching his sleeve. Ralph who taught him how to ride and shoot, and whatever he knew about how to farm. Take your time. Everything has its time. Don’t push things. Take a good look at the land first.