Rough Cider

by Peter Lovesey

  I took her hand. She was cold, as much from shock, I decided, as exposure. I told her with gentle authority, “There’s a log fire in the pub. I’m taking you in there to dry out.”

  It was near closing time and the barmaid was clearing the empties, but she seemed genuinely pleased to see us. I don’t think she was run off her feet. The clientele consisted of two motionless old men perched on stools at opposite ends of the bar. Without consulting Alice I ordered two double brandies and carried them to the fireplace. The barmaid-did I mention that she was a pretty, dark-haired woman in her thirties? — followed me over, fussed sympathetically about our sodden clothes, and set to work with the poker to coax more activity from the fire. She wanted to know if we’d found the farm and I thanked her. If she was expecting some gossip about the Lockwoods, she was disappointed. Instead I asked if we could borrow a towel for Alice’s hair.

  There’s a lot to be said for real flames and the smell of charred wood. It was a wide, stone-built fireplace with an iron pot-crane, a pair of dusty bellows, and a paved hearth. We flopped gratefully into a well-scuffed leather settee already occupied by two black-and-white cats. Alice removed her glasses, uncoiled her plait, and leaned forward, letting the damp hair get the benefit of the heat.

  The barmaid returned and handed the towel to me with a wink and a firm instruction not to handle the young lady too roughly. It would have been churlish after that to pass the towel to Alice, so without discussing it I applied myself to die task and gradually restored some of the softness to her hair.

  Presently she took out a comb and worked silently on the job of easing out the tangles. I sat back, sipping the brandy, and spoke the words of reason I’d been rehearsing as I used the towel. “Don’t you think you’re getting sidetracked? Does it really matter a tinker’s cuss about Harry? He’s unimportant.”

  She stopped the combing and lowered her eyelids in a way that made me wish I’d phrased it more sensitively. I was treating her like one of my second-year students who’d messed up an essay on the feudal system. Without her glasses and with her hair unfastened like this-you’re right, girls, I’m a dyed-in-the-wool chauvinist-she was an extremely appealing woman.

  I made another stab. “Alice, I can see you’re going to suffer until you make sense of what we’ve heard. I’m not pressing, but if it would help to talk it over…”

  She lifted her face and said, “Please, Theo.”

  You can put it down to the firelight, or the brandy, or the clear blue trust in her eyes, but if there was a moment in our association when it promised to become a relationship, this, for me, was it. I wanted her.

  There was a short hiatus before I marshaled my thoughts sufficiently to say, “All right. Let’s compare notes on Harry the GI and your stepfather. See if we’re talking about the same guy. Harry must have been slightly older than Duke, say about twenty-five in 1943. He’d put in a few more years of service and made a sergeant’s rank, then lost his stripes over some disciplinary thing.”

  “The age is spot on,” Alice confirmed. “Henry was twenty-nine when he married Mom.”

  “Short-say five-five-thickset with sandy-colored, crinkly hair?”

  “Mm.” She frowned, concentrating hard. “Stubby, nicotine-stained fingers with small, pinched-in nails that looked ingrowing?”

  “Snap.” I’d watched Harry use those repulsive little hands to pick leaves and pieces of twig from Sally’s hair. “Do we need to go on?”

  Alice shook her head. “I don’t need any more convincing. I can see how it happened. Harry is my daddy’s buddy. When he gets back to the States after the war, he calls on Mom to pay his respects, offer her some words of comfort. She’s feeling really low, a widow at twenty-two with a baby to bring up. She can’t even say her man died with honor. She can’t meet with other war widows, and she doesn’t qualify for a pension. Is it any wonder she grabbed the chance of marrying Harry?”

  “Is it any wonder that it didn’t work out?”

  She stared fixedly into the flames. “I don’t care if he was my daddy’s buddy. He was a schmuck.”

  After an interval I said, “When did Harry abandon her?”

  “I was eight years old. 1952.”

  “I think you told me he came to England and married a second time.”

  She swung around to face me with wide, astonished eyes.

  “He must have come over here to look for Sally, his wartime romance. Theo, is that what happened, do you think?”

  “Let’s find out if we can.” I turned and looked towards the bar. One of the old men had gone.

  “Last orders, my love?” called the barmaid.

  Neither of us had finished the brandy. “No, thanks, but you may be able to help us. Some people called Shoesmith had this pub in the war.”

  The barmaid nodded. “Right up to the fifties, I believe. What year was the Coronation?”

  “Did you know them?”

  “Everyone knew the Shoesmiths. They were a village family. Been here for generations.”

  “Gone now?”

  She crossed herself and said, “Gathered, my love. The parents, I mean. Sally the daughter is still going, after a fashion.”

  “What does that mean?”

  The barmaid looked away. “Gossip, my love, just gossip. She got married and lives in Bath.”

  “So we heard. To an American.”

  She was obviously glad to move on to someone else. “A real live wire, he is. And saucy with it. Comes in here regular and takes all sorts of liberties. Wandering hands, you know? He’s in the antique business and does very nicely out of it, thank you, a white Mercedes and a house in the Royal Crescent, so he can afford to buy me a martini when I take offense, which I do, naturally.”

  I smiled back. “Any idea which year he married Sally?”

  “The same year the family gave up the pub. That was a summer for parties. We had the Coronation and the wedding reception and the farewell do.”

  “1953,” the old man unexpectedly contributed.

  I looked at Alice.

  She’d replaced her glasses. She studied me through them as if making up her mind. “Theo?”

  “Yes?”

  “I don’t believe I can face Harry alone.”

  “Do you need to?”

  A sigh. “It’s essential. He must know all the answers.”

  “You want me to take you to Bath?”

  On the way out I thanked the barmaid and bought her a martini. The old man perked up and said his was a pint of Usher’s, probably the easiest he’d earned since Coronation year.

  THIRTEEN

  As a medievalist, I don’t mind telling you that Bath’s much-vaunted Georgian architecture leaves me cold. I find it crushingly dull. In my two years as a Ph.D. student at Bristol I visited Bath (a twenty-minute train ride) not more than three times, and then only for the secondhand bookshops.

  Yet this October evening, driving towards the city at dusk with Alice beside me, I saw it from the height of the downs on the south side and was captivated. I stopped the car, and we got out for a better view. A shaft of orange sunlight had penetrated the purple cloud and picked out the intricate levels of buildings with dazzling clarity. From the shadows of the surrounding hills, beady rows of street lamps converged on the floodlit Abbey.

  I was standing close to Alice. She hadn’t bothered to fix her plait since we left the pub, and a few stray hairs stirred and brushed my cheek. I slid my hand around hers and locked fingers with her. As she turned to speak, I lowered my face to kiss her.

  She backed away as if I had the plague.

  This was the girl who the previous night had stripped and waited in my bed for me.

  “What’s up?” I asked her.

  “I don’t want to.” She took another step back.

  I smiled and made light of it. “I don’t mind playing kiss and run, but not to these rules.”

  She reddened. “What do you mean?”

  “Just take it easy.”

 
; She tugged severely at her hair and explained, “I hate to be a drag, but I can’t relax while there’s so much on my mind.”

  So we got back in the car and drove down the hill into Bath. I don’t force myself on women, and I don’t beg, either. Dismiss it, I thought. Yet it bothered me.

  There wasn’t time to speculate. We were in the Circus, approaching the Royal Crescent, and we hadn’t yet made any ground rules for the meeting with the Ashenfelters. I didn’t expect them to come at us with a shotgun, but I could foresee mayhem if Alice started laying into Harry for abandoning her mom. I took an extra turn around the Circus before we moved into Brock Street.

  “About these people,” I said. “Let’s remember that they haven’t seen either of us since we were kids. Why don’t you keep in the background to start with?”

  “You mean, not say who I am?”

  “You don’t need to volunteer the information. It might get us off on the wrong tack.”

  She said dubiously, “It seems kind of devious. I like to be straight with people.”

  “Like you were when you brought your tray to my table in Ernestine’s Restaurant?”

  She protested with a harsh intake of breath. “I told you my name.”

  “And how much else?”

  “I needed to get to know you first.”

  “Get my confidence.”

  “Well, yes, but…” Her voice trailed away.

  I laid it out for her. “What it comes down to, Alice, is what you want to get out of this meeting-assuming they agree to talk to us at all. If you want a family reunion, that’s up to you, but if you’re hoping for some insights into Duke’s behavior in 1943, I suggest you play it my way.”

  After a pause for thought she murmured, “Okay.”

  I’ve already pulled the plug on Bath, so to speak, so I won’t knock the Crescent. For anyone who hasn’t been there, it’s built on high ground with a view of the city across open parkland. A single block of thirty three-story houses in an elliptical curve, with a facade of 114 Ionic columns and a roof-level balustrade. Enough said?

  We bumped over the cobbled roadway and parked under a street lamp on the far side. Alice confirmed that there was a light behind Harry’s blinds.

  Harry himself came down to answer the bell.

  I apologized for disturbing him, explained that we’d driven over from Christian Gifford and that I was the boy evacuee he and Duke had befriended in 1943.

  It wasn’t the admission ticket I’d hoped it might be.

  “Is that a fact?” said Harry without a glimmer of interest. The years had creased the Cagney profile into something closer to Edward G. Robinson. Some sagging about the eyes, more weight on the jowls, less hair, and thick-rimmed bifocals. He’d never been much to look at, but the saving sense of fun had vanished. He was in leather carpet slippers, fawn trousers, and a thick brown cardigan.

  “A bloody awful time for all of us,” I said, plowing on. “I can tell you, I was more than grateful for the kindness you fellows showed me.”

  “So?”

  “So when I heard that you lived in Bath, I thought I couldn’t go by without calling on the off-chance that you were in.” I was beginning to feel, and sound, like a door-to-door salesman.

  “Who told you I was here?” asked Harry, as if he meant to throttle them.

  “The people in the pub. They said you came back to England after the war to marry Sally. How is she, by the way?”

  His stubby hand cupped his chin in a defensive gesture.

  “You know Sally?”

  “We all picked apples together, didn’t we?”

  My first question had given him a let-out. “She’s not so good, so you won’t mind if I don’t invite you in.”

  I was on the point of cutting my losses and pushing Alice forward with her guess-who-I-am speech when a woman’s voice from inside called, “Who is it, Harry?” and Sally appeared in the hall in a white housecoat and swansdown mules.

  I assumed it was Sally. She wore dark glasses, and her red hair had taken on a synthetic orangey hue. Unlike Harry, she’d shed weight since the apple-orchard days. Too much: I’d say she looked gaunt.

  Harry held on to the door and said over his shoulder, “You don’t have to come out. I can deal with it.”

  Sally, bless her, ignored him. “Anyone I know?” she asked, shuffling up behind him and resting a hand on his shoulder.

  “What did you say your name is?” Harry asked me with each word sticking in his throat.

  I told him.

  He repeated it to Sally as if she were deaf, adding, “He was the kid evacuated to the Lockwoods in the war.”

  “That little boy with the fringe and the front teeth missing?” Sally laughed. “Well, what a funny old world this is. And he’s brought his young lady to meet us. What are you doing, keeping them on the doorstep, Harry? Let them in, for God’s sake, and let’s all have a drink.”

  Harry decided not to make an issue of it. He shrugged and stepped back, allowing Sally to shake our hands. I introduced Alice, using just her forename. I’m certain that Harry didn’t recognize her. She was a small girl of eight when he’d last seen her.

  I’d expected grandfather clocks and rosewood tables, but the drawing room we were shown into was furnished in steel, glass, and white leather. Only the marble fireplace and molded ceiling were antique. Sally, obviously used to people gaping, explained, “Everyone thinks we’re puggoo-headed, filling a room like this with modern furniture, but Harry likes to get away from his business.” Puggoo-headed. I was glad to hear a bit of Somerset. Once I would have filed it away in my memory for Duke, with “Or I, then?”

  “You have a shop in Bath?” I asked.

  “Nope,” said Harry, making me wish I hadn’t inquired.

  Sally explained. “He has three warehouses. Two in Bristol, one in London.”

  “What do you drink?” Harry asked me.

  He’d ignored Alice, so I turned to include her in the offer.

  She gave me a twitchy smile. She was extremely nervous.

  “Fruit juice would be fine, if you have one.”

  “Gallons,” said Harry, as if it were someone’s fault. “And yours?”

  “A Scotch and soda.”

  He started to leave the room. Sally called. “Get me a vodka and…” She didn’t finish because he’d ignored her. She waved us into chairs and offered us cigarettes, taking one herself and standing by the fireplace with a length of unstockinged leg protruding from the housecoat. “Harry’s a big wheel in the antique world,” she told us. “You’re lucky to find him at home. He travels all over. Buys up the contents of houses and exports most of it to the States.” Her eyes traveled to my shoes. “So you’ve had a day in the country.”

  I’d noticed the white carpet as we entered but failed to remember the state of our footwear. There were tracks to my chair.

  Alice saw that I was literally wrong-footed and responded for me. “Yes, we went to see the farm where Theo stayed.”

  “You’re American!” said Sally. “Harry will be delighted.”

  I couldn’t imagine it. I pitched in again, taking the lead from Alice. “Yes, the farm hasn’t changed much.”

  “Except for the orchards,” commented Sally, drawing on her cigarette. “They grubbed out all the trees.”

  “Understandably,” I said. “Frankly, I was surprised to find the Lockwoods still in occupation.”

  “Them? They’re hard people,” said Sally, “Did you speak to them?”

  “Only Bernard, the son.”

  “He farms it all now, the main farm as well as Lower Gifford. The old couple look after the vegetables behind the house, and that’s all.”

  “Do you keep up with them?”

  She shook her head. “Barbara was a real pal, rest her soul, and her mother has been here for a coffee, but I’ve no time for the men.”

  “You visit the village sometimes?”

  “Whenever I can. I know so many people there. Harry picks
up a certain amount of business through the pub. He’s never off duty.” She fidgeted with the lapel of her housecoat.

  “I miss the old days.”

  “Like picking the apples?”

  “Mm. The fun we had.”

  “Telling fortunes with apple pips.”

  She smiled at me. “Do you remember that?”

  “Vividly. Barbara sliced the apple and got three pips. Tinker, tailor, soldier.”

  Sally’s face changed. “And she split the soldier pip with the knife, poor love. She was terribly upset, being pregnant and everything.”

  “Did you know she was pregnant?”

  “We had no secrets from each other. They were going to be married.”

  I said gently, “I’m afraid he already had a wife and child.”

  Sally shook her head. “That can’t be true.”

  “Back in America.”

  There was an agonizing silence, ended by a creak of floorboards as Harry approached.

  Sally snapped out in a small shocked voice, “You’ve got it all wrong.” With an abrupt change of manner she turned, raised her voice, and addressed the open door. “We had a regular downpour here this afternoon, didn’t we, Harry?”

  He gave no answer. He seemed to ignore her most of the time.

  I was in no shape to pick up the conversation. Sally’s last comment had left me reeling. I wanted to ask more, but judging from her reaction to Harry, this wasn’t the moment.

  We were handed our drinks. Sally looked at hers and said, “What’s this?”

  “Grapefruit juice,” said Harry without looking at her.

  “The ladies are drinking fruit juice.”

  “You’re kidding!” said Sally, starting towards the door.

  “With vodka, maybe.”

  He grabbed her wrist in a surprisingly agile reflex and said, “Without.”

  She glared at him and said, “Prick.” Then she tugged herself free and ran from the room.

  Harry smugly called after her, “I locked it.” He explained to us superfluously, “She isn’t allowed alcohol.”

  An awkward silence ensued. The onus was on him to start a new line of conversation, and I didn’t feel like helping.

  It paid off. He said, “So you remember Duke?”