by Angela Huth
‘The only bet I’m interested in,’ she said, ‘is whether or not I get a letter from Philip tomorrow. But probably he won’t have time to write for ages.’
She wanted to begin the letter she had composed that morning. But tiredness overcame her good intentions.
By the time Prue had chosen the right pink from a row of nail polishes, and delivered her opinion about the hopelessness of men when it came to letter-writing, Stella was asleep. Ag, too, lay with her eyes shut and made no response. Pretty queer bunch, the three of them made, Prue couldn’t help thinking, as she dabbed each nail with the brush of flamingo polish and wondered if her shell earrings, for supper, would be going too far.
Contrary to her predictions, the object of Prue’s desire was far from beside himself at supper. He sat between his mother and Ag, silently eating chicken stew and mashed potatoes. He seemed not to notice the trouble Prue had taken with her appearance: spotted green bow in her hair, dazzling lipstick to match a crochet jersey, and smelling extravagantly of her Parisian scent. Mrs Lawrence, who as usual sat down at the table last, was the only one to react to all Prue’s efforts. She sniffed, grimacing.
‘Janet’s coming, Sunday lunch, Joe,’ she said. ‘She rang while you were out.’
‘Oh yes?’
‘Janet,’ Mrs Lawrence explained to the girls in general, ‘manages to get here about once a month. It’s a long journey. She’s stationed in Surrey.’
‘That’s nice, her being able to get over at all,’ said Prue. ‘Nice for you, Joe.’ A thousand calculations buzzed in her head. She gave Joe a smile he arranged not to see.
Mrs Lawrence’s news failed to open a lively conversation. The aching girls became sleepier as they ate, only half listened to talk between Joe and Mr Lawrence about problems with the tractor. Supper over, they were invited into the sitting-room to listen to the news, but all volunteered to go to bed.
As the girls went upstairs – Mrs Lawrence insisted she needed no help with the washing-up – Prue observed Joe slip out of the front door. Where was he going? If her plan was to work, she must find out about his movements. The idea excited her enough to dispel her sleepiness. When the other two were in bed, their lights quickly out, she went to the window, stared moodily down at the farmyard. She saw Joe mount his bicycle by the barn and ride out through the gate. If his beloved Janet was three counties away, who was it he was going to see? Prue remained at the window, intrigued, until eventually she heard a distant church clock strike nine. Cold by now, she went to her bed, but could not sleep for the dancing of her plans.
On the stroke of nine from the same church clock, Ratty Tyler, sitting by the range in his small kitchen, knocked out his pipe and rose to make his wife a cup of tea. Edith was ensconced at the kitchen table, a dish of newly iced buns beside her, all ready to cause distress among early customers next morning. The dim light, over-protected by a dark tin shade, was pulled down as far as its iron pulley would go. Edith’s hands, parsnip coloured in its murky beam, concentrated on the darning of a sock.
‘So?’ she said.
‘So what?’
Ratty had been waiting for this all evening. He had observed the difficulty Edith had had, holding herself in, all through their soup and bread and cheese.
‘What’re they like?’
‘What’re who like?’
‘You know what I’m saying, Ratty Tyler.’
‘That I don’t.’
Edith sighed, bit off a new length of grey wool with her dun teeth.
‘The girls.’
‘The land girls?’
‘Of course the land girls. What other girls would I be asking about?’
Ratty gave her question some thought. ‘Just girls, far as I could see,’ he offered eventually. He put a cup of tea on the table. There were more questions to come, he could see that. He must play for time. Anything for time.
‘Where’s the sugar?’
‘Same place it’s always been for the last thirty years. Your mind must be elsewhere.’
It was elsewhere, all right. It was always elsewhere when he came home.
‘I was thinking about Mrs L., so happens,’ he said. ‘Taking on the girls eases some problems, but makes a lot more work for her.’
‘Pah!’ spat Edith, disbelieving. ‘Never known you trouble yourself about Mrs L. before. It’s the girls you were thinking of, I’ve no doubt.’ Her needle, newly charged with wool, dived swift as a kingfisher towards its prey of a hole in a brownish heel. ‘You may as well tell me.’
Ratty placed the sugar bowl by the cup, returned to his chair. For peace, he thought, he may as well.
‘There’s the small one,’ he said.
‘Name?’
‘Prudence, they call her.’ He judged it not worth referring to her as Prue, as the others did. The implications of a nickname would be bound to set Edith’s fears alight.
‘Huh!’ She was easily offended by mere names. Her indignation came as no surprise. ‘What’s she like?’
What was she like? Ratty asked himself. Prudence was the one with a face like the girls photographed in newspapers on the first day of spring. Small, but frightening. He wouldn’t fancy time alone with her.
‘As I said, not large. Nothing to write home about.’
Ratty had intended to say something more definite about her, to assure his wife that the girl, young enough to be their granddaughter, was no threat of any kind. But he feared that silent cogitation, striving for the right description, might itself inspire further suspicion. He need not have worried. For some reason Edith was not interested in the idea of Prue.
‘And the others?’
‘There’s the medium one, the one I took to Hinton in the cart with the milk. Not much experience in harnessing up.’
No point in saying she’d been mighty quick to learn, that one. He’d shown her what to do his side of Noble: she copied quick as a flash on her side. And lovely manners. All polite remarks about the countryside, on their way to the village, and doing more than her fair share of unloading the churns. Nice face, too. He liked her.
‘Name?’
‘Stella.’
‘Nothing like Cousin Stella?’
Ratty shook his head. Edith’s Cousin Stella was the nearest to a witch he knew. No comparison with this girl. He smiled at the thought, knowing his wife, in her quick glance, would misunderstand his expression.
‘You lay your hands on a Stella and it would be incest,’ snapped Edith in the furious voice she used for her most illogical remarks.
‘No fear of that.’
‘And the last one?’
She was suspicious, here, Ratty could tell. How could she be suspicious? He cursed her instincts.
‘The tall one. Agatha. Ag, they call her.’
‘Much taller than you?’
‘Good foot,’ he said, permitting himself the exaggeration of an inch or so.
Edith contained a sigh of relief. ‘You’ve never liked a tall girl.’
‘No.’
Foxed her! Ag was the one he liked even more than Stella. He’d studied her for a long time from his unseen position in the barn. There was something about her kind, private face that had struck him. He had been intrigued by the way her short hair had blown apart while she was sweeping, so he had had glimpses of white scalp. Reminded him of watching a blackbird in a wind, feathers parting to show white skin of breast. If he’d met someone like Ag when he was a lad, Lord knows, he’d have done something about it.
‘Blonde?’
‘Dark.’
‘You’ve never liked dark hair, neither.’ Edith briefly touched her own white fuzz of thinning curls.
‘I haven’t, neither.’
He saw the tension in Edith’s body slacken. She held the darned sock away from her, admiring the woven patch she had accomplished with such speed and skill. It would go unacknowledged by Ratty, like all the darns she had held up over the years. It wasn’t that he lacked appreciation, but words to express it froze
before he could utter them. Hence the constant disappointment he caused her.
‘And what did they make of you?’
Ratty sucked on his empty pipe. Although he had anticipated this one, no firm answer had come to mind.
‘We chattered nineteen to the dozen, all very friendly,’ he heard himself say. Reflecting on this lie, he considered it permissible, after so much partial truth.
Edith sniffed. ‘You be careful what you say.’
‘You can trust me.’
‘You were all sweet words when you were young.’
Ratty shifted. This was the nearest to a compliment Edith had paid him in three decades. It made him uneasy. He could never confront her with the truth: how she had killed the sweet words very early in their marriage by her laughter, her scoffing. It was she who caused his prison of silence when it came to women. The banners, with all the things he wanted to say written on them, still danced in his mind, sometimes, but their benefits went unknown, locked into wordless silence. No problems with Mr Lawrence, with Joe. On occasions he could even mutter a word or two to Mrs L. But three strange new girls all up at the farm in one day … to have spoken was quite beyond him.
‘Time to turn on the news,’ said Edith, picking another sock from the basket with the curious gentleness that she employed for inanimate things.
‘So it is. I’ll do it.’
Ratty felt his bones soften with relief as he got up – land girl conversation over for tonight. He hoped it wouldn’t come up again for a while: give him time to gather his thoughts. Edith gave a small nod of her head, which was the nearest, these days, she ever got to a smile. She could never get the hang of the wireless, understand the tuning. Ratty twiddled the knob. His skill in finding the Home Service was one of the small ways in which he could oblige his wife with very little effort. Had she known the paucity of this effort, her appreciation might have been less keen. As it was, admiration for her husband’s technical ability was conveyed in a small but regular sigh that Ratty had learned to recognize. The fierceness went out of her needle.
Chapter 3
Land girls were entitled to one and a half free days a week. Mrs Lawrence suggested that this first week they took Sunday off, even though they had only been working for two days. Unused to the physical activity, they would be needing the rest, she said. The girls conceded gratefully. They offered to make sandwiches and go off somewhere for a picnic lunch, keep out of the way. But Mrs Lawrence responded by asking them to stay to lunch with the family: Janet would be coming. She’d like them to meet Janet.
At five a.m. Prue, waking suddenly, remembered she had no need to get up. About to return luxuriously to sleep, a picture came to her mind of Joe alone in the cowshed. He would have to do all the milking himself today. When did he have any time off?
In a moment, Prue was out of bed, all sleepiness gone. She dressed quickly and quietly so as not to disturb the others, and chose a yellow satin bow for her hair. What a surprise she would give him. How pleased he would be – someone to share the work on a Sunday.
Creeping downstairs, Prue heard voices in the kitchen: Joe and his mother talking. She had no wish to dull the impact of her good deed by joining them for a mug of tea, so she crept towards the front door.
As she put out her hand to turn the key, she heard a sound like the slap of a hand on the kitchen table. And, distinctly, the shouting of angry words.
‘You just take care, Joe!’
‘Mind your own business, Ma.’
Prue’s heartbeat quickened. Silly old interfering thing, Mrs Lawrence. His age, Joe could do what he bloody well liked. Quickly she opened the door.
In the cowshed the animals were chained in their stalls, restless as always before milking (how quickly she had come to learn their ways!), heads tossing, tails lashing, muted stamps of impatience. Prue fetched bucket and pail, began work on the first cow.
Joe arrived by the time the bucket was half full – she was an even faster milker by now. He must surely be aware of how quickly she’d learned. Prue felt his gaze upon her, from the doorway, but did not look up. She heard the slish and thud of his footsteps as he strode towards her. Still she made no acknowledgement of his presence, kept her head dug into Pauline’s bony side. She knew her yellow bow was badly flattened, but resisted releasing one hand to puff it into life.
‘What’re you doing here? It’s Sunday. It’s meant to be your day off.’
Joe’s voice was far from grateful. For a full minute Prue listened to the rhythmic hiss of the milk she was drawing from the cow’s abundant udder, calculating her answer.
‘I woke as usual. Thought you’d be glad of the help.’
‘You did, did you?’
She could hear Joe moving away with surly tread. Why had her kind act so annoyed him? She felt the sickness of having made a bad decision. There was nothing she could do but carry on: she managed to avoid him each time she finished a cow and had to collect an empty bucket. The two hours went by in a frenzy of speculation. What had she done wrong? How could she put matters right? Usually, she could rely on the soundness of her instincts. This morning no answer came.
When Prue finished milking the last cow she stood up and saw that Joe was no longer in the shed. Well, bugger him, she thought: he hasn’t half taken advantage of my kind offer. Leaves me most of the work, then buggers off early to breakfast.
She stomped crossly up the aisle, swinging her last full bucket. Milk splashed on to the floor, mixing with streaks of chocolate-coloured water, paling it to a horrible khaki, that warlike colour Prue so hated. Bugger everything, she thought. I’m off back to bed.
Joe was standing by the cooling machine, arms folded, blank-faced, impervious to its insinuating whine. Steam, escaping from the sterilizing machine, blurred the handsome vision. Prue, nose furiously in the air, inwardly quaked. She sensed there was to be some kind of showdown, and dreaded it.
Then through the steam she saw – she was almost positive she saw – a tremor of a smile break his lips, though his eyes were hard upon her.
‘Little minx,’ he said.
In her surprise, Prue lowered her bucket to the ground too hard. Wings of milk flew over its edges, curdling on the concrete: she didn’t care. Nothing mattered now except that she should conceal her sense of triumph.
‘And careful, for Pete’s sake,’ she heard him say.
He bent and picked up the bucket, threw the milk into the cooling machine with something of her own carelessness. He could blooming well deal with the sterilizing, Prue thought, heart a mad scattering of beats as she hurried out without speaking, pretending to ignore all messages.
In the short march from the cowshed to the kitchen – smell of frying bacon quickening the early air of the yard – Prue reflected on her good fortune. She thanked her lucky stars she had made the right decision. Joe’s earlier behaviour, she had somehow failed to understand, was merely a form of teasing. He was no longer a problem. Her path was clear, Janet or no Janet. It was now just a matter of when and how, and at what point she should tell the others how right she had been.
While Stella and Ag helped Mrs Lawrence in the kitchen, Prue spent an hour of luxurious contemplation in the empty attic room as she re-did her nails, chose combs for her hair instead of a ribbon, and finally decided to wear her red crepe dress with its saucy sweetheart neckline.
Coming downstairs – heavy skirt of the dress flicking from side to side, not without impact – she found Joe and his father in the hall, both dressed in tweed suits. Mr Lawrence carried a prayer book. Christ, one Sunday it would probably be to her advantage to go to church with them, she thought – though she hoped it would not have to come to that. She’d never exactly seen eye to eye with the church, all those boring hymns. But she didn’t half fancy Joe in his posh suit, despite the egg on his tie. She smiled. Mr Lawrence, with a look of faint distaste, hurried towards the kitchen. That left her and Joe alone in the hall. She carried on smiling.
‘Been praying?’ sh
e asked eventually.
‘None of your sauce,’ said Joe. He swung past her up the stairs, banged the door of his room.
None of your sauce … Prue went over the words carefully. He’d said them with such lightness of tone, in a voice so mock serious as to be transparent in its meaning, that for the second time that morning Prue found herself triumphant. How she enjoyed the careful analysis of that short remark! What he meant was, he wouldn’t mind a lot of sauce, but he would be grateful if she was careful. Well, she’d never been one to enjoy upsetting any apple carts. She’d play the game by his rules, if that’s what he wanted. But there was no reason not to enjoy herself until the time came.
Prue slipped into the kitchen where Mr Lawrence was polishing his shoes. The three women were all hard at work, stirring, tasting, moving in and out of clouds of steam that billowed over the stove.
‘Can I do the gravy or anything?’ Prue asked.
‘It’s all done.’ Mrs Lawrence sniffed, distaste less well disguised than her husband’s. She seemed to have some sixth sense, aware no doubt of everything that went on under her roof. Her disapproval would be terrifying to behold.
Prue left the room.
She found herself in the yard, leaping over patches of mud on to small islands of dry ground, trying not to ruin her scarlet Sunday shoes. On reaching the barn – she had grown to like the barn – she crossed her arms under her breasts, shivering. It was a cold, sunless morning. She leaned against the icy metal mudguard of the tractor, making sure she was hidden from the house. There was no time to ask herself why she was there, the tractor her only companion, because almost at once a small navy Austin Seven, beautifully polished, drew up to the front door. Rigid with curiosity, Prue watched a girl – probably about her own age – get out of the car, lock the door with a fussy gloved hand. She wore a grey coat. Her hair was rolled into a bun. She stood looking about, as if disappointed there was no sign of Joe to greet her. Then she moved to the door and rang the bell. Prue decided the girl’s prim little step, in highly polished lace-up shoes, was proprietorial.
