Goodbye Piccadilly

by Goodbye Piccadilly (retail) (epub)

  But her mind wandered. Not for the first time she wondered whether it was as easy as it appeared for a woman like Annie who did not complicate her life with men, but had a preference for her own sex.

  When I wanted Jack, he wanted Victoria and was not interested in me, and now that he says that he loves me, the tables are turned. George Moth treats me cheaply, and it arouses me… yet I could not sustain a real kiss with Jack.

  Was Annie’s appetite stimulated by the forbidden fruits? Or was it not as simple as that? Certainly Otis had never felt any desire for a feminine lover. But Danny Turner attracted her.

  There was an aura of danger about Danny. Not quite bravado, but bravery. He pitted himself against the George Moths and the Special Branch of the police, and came out winning. At least, he had done so far.

  Without realizing what was happening, she had become enmeshed in the fabric of the Moth family. Too much had passed between herself and George Moth; too many complications attached to herself and Jack; she loved Esther like a sister and felt herself partly responsible for her welfare, and she had introduced Nancy into their household. It would be better to retreat from them, but there was too much that bound her to them to do that. And in any case she liked them.

  And now she was committed to seeing Jack again. Not only that, he had said that he loved her. Undoubtedly he needed her just now. It would be too devastating to reject him outright.

  It had already been arranged that next Saturday she was to go to York with Danny, accompanying him on one of his ‘errands’.

  He was involved in all sorts of covert activities to do with getting documents for men who were on the run from the military police. She knew that this ‘errand’ was by way of a test of the depth of her willingness to become involved in the ‘Underground’ system.

  She would find a gentle excuse for not visiting Jack.

  —

  Musk Cottage, Denmead Road, Hambledon, Hants.

  Dear Jack,

  We hope you don’t mind us calling you by your first name, but Arnold never had hardly any friends. When he was on leave he told us about you and we started to think about you as being Jack as that is what he always called you, excepting when he called you Lofty, and he was always on about you. It meant a lot to him having a friend, something he never had before. By rights he shouldn’t have been in the army. Going about his work here with me and my husband to tell him how to go on he was always all right. There was things that he could do better than anybody because of his patience, as you will know from being with him. He was as honest as the day is long and loyal to a fault. He was not our own as I expect he said, but he was as dear as if he had been our own. More so than some, because we never had none of our own.

  In a way I had already made up my mind to it that once they said he was fit for the army that he wouldn’t never come back. We never saw how he could. His father would never let him have a shotgun nor anything like that. We knew what he was like. It was never right to take a boy like that.

  We shall pray for you to be returned whole to your family. If there was ever a day when you was this way and felt that you could drop in we should be most grateful.

  Yours truly,

  Mr and Mrs Herbert Pearce

  Queen Alexandra’s in London. Although not far away, he had not been permitted to rest in his own home; the War Office had received too many reports of men nursed at home being delayed in their return to fitness for active service by late nights and roistering.

  In many ways Queen Alexandra’s suited Jack. To have been at home with Ess who was still not herself, and his father, towards whom he still felt antagonism, would have been a strain. As it was he was allowed to receive visitors for bearable periods of time. It was only when he saw Kitt that he realized how much he had missed him.

  Once, Esther had taken Kitt and Baby to stand with Nancy and wave at a distance. Baby was no longer a baby, and Kitt was a small, solemn schoolboy. To Jack, those changes were a measure of how much of his life had been wasted. Months and long months in a battle over a mile or two of cratered land. Who wanted it? And why? Young men on two sides of no man’s land knew – the British sang it to the tune of ‘Auld Lang Syne’.

  We’re here because we’re here because we’re here because we’re here.

  We’re here because we’re here because we’re here because we’re here.

  Esther herself, pinch-mouthed, thin and aged by years, said that she was almost well and was thinking of going to Mere with Nancy and the children. Jack had thought it a good sign, especially as his antipathy to owning the property was retreating.

  Otis seemed to be in fragrant full bloom, her step springy and her shining hair bouncing as, with her arms filled with flowers, she strode through the ward. She had been full of having her status upgraded and of an opportunity to teach in a senior school that she might be getting. ‘I am torn, Jack. I know that the Head is a client of my pa’s and I should not like to get the position because of that. But I can’t tell you how much I want it. I should be the first female on the staff and I so much want to work towards my Master’s degree.’ He had thought she looked almost hungry to bite into that experience. The more unattainable she became, the more he wanted her. But if there was one thing that he had inherited from George Moth, it was a masculine pride that found rejection hard. Gently done though it was, he had already been rejected once, by Victoria.

  Victoria visited him. Like Otis, full of life and purpose, she hurried up stairs and strode down long corridors, male eyes following her. The visit which might have been awkward was not. The war which had brought him here, injured and nerve-shattered, was not mentioned until the visiting time was almost over. She told him of her work with the League for Peace, and of some vague ideas about travelling in foreign countries. ‘I don’t know where, but I have a great desire to see as much of the world as I can – Africa, India, South America – there is so much, and I am already almost thirty.’ She had wagged her head and laughed at herself, but he saw that she was serious.

  And he saw more clearly now than when he had believed that he was in love with her that she was not a woman made for domesticity. ‘You were made to be an explorer or a revolutionary, weren’t you?’

  Smiling, she had looked far off. ‘Ah, if only you knew how many women are. I think that the best would be to explore science. If I had been fortunate enough to study at one of the great universities, that is what I should have done. To discover some new element, a new treatment for disease. My grandmother learned of the discovery of contamination through contact, directly from Semmelweis – it was he, you know, who discovered the link between unclean hands and childbed fever. How wonderful to know that you have done something so worthwhile. Oh Jack, why are we given so little time? What a niggardly creator to stop us at three score years and ten. How mean to create us, give us minds and vision to form ideals, and then to chop us down before we have time to…’ Suddenly she clasped both his hands and said earnestly, ‘Don’t go back there, Jack. The world cannot afford to throw away its human talent.’

  She had fixed him with her intense gaze. ‘When I was twenty, I saw the shocking sight of a man shot in the head and his actual brain matter going into the plough furrows. And I was not so much shocked at the sight of the injury as at the thought of the waste. I saw all his experience, all his schooling, his farming knowledge, everything he might have passed on to his children, running away. And I thought to myself, supposing he was about to make a discovery that would double a crop yield or clean an infested field. Hasn’t something like that occurred to you?’ She kissed him passionately, but on the cheek. ‘Don’t go back. You have so much better things to do for people than to help turn them into nourishment for Flanders’ beet crops.’

  His father had visited, but not alone. He had come with one of Jack’s colleagues in the law practice. A desk-bound officer. The two young men had found little to say to one another. But at least a few more straws had been put in place in the repairing of the b
ridge between Jack and his father.

  It might have been the constant stream of visitors bringing back some sense of normality to Jack, or that rest and decent food was healing him mentally and physically. Whatever it was that did it, Jack’s memory began to return. At first only the name that he had been searching for during his weeks at Lys.

  Cully!

  And then the letter had arrived.

  He had turned the letter over and over, then inspected the envelope for some revelation. Pearce? Arnold Pearce? He picked at the protecting scab. He looked up Hambledon in an atlas and was no wiser when he found that it was ten miles or so north of Southsea. He fidgeted to know why Arnold Pearce should not have been in the army and why his father had not allowed him to have guns. The letter, obviously written by someone unused to writing, and full of sincerity and pathos, was touching. The kind of thing that could, these days, bring him to the verge of tears. Damned tears! Damned, damned tears, like the blue hospital uniforms, were a constant reminder that he had ceased to be John Clermont Moth.

  Then the memory of another letter, the form that men in the front line could fill in when it was impossible to write home. Jack had filled one in for Cully. Cully was not much good at writing. He had remembered signing it ‘Arnie’ and addressing it to… yes, Pearce.

  It was almost with joy that he told his new MO that a piece of information had revealed itself.

  Now, as he sat on the train and watched the town-scape of back-to-back terraces of Clapham become the semidetached rows of Woking, then the landscape with country houses Liss, and then the downland farms where the engine got up steam and speed, Jack Moth almost wished the blessed black hole that had been in his memory would return, and wondered again what he could possibly say to the Pearces that could be of comfort. Yet he had to see them, not only because he owed them at least that, but he needed to see them so that he could face himself. He had failed Cully.

  The last three weeks had been devastating. Beginning with Cully’s name and ending on this train journey to Hambledon. No, not ending here: the Cully episode would never end. The best that Jack could hope for for himself was that he would be able to learn to live with the knowledge of Cully’s death. For the first week after his memory returned, his physical condition had deteriorated from attacks of fever and terrorizing nightmares. It was worse than those nights in the early days of being in the front fine, when he had been shocked and sickened at his first sight of eviscerated torsos, white splintered bone, and gouting arteries of men still living.

  He had not been responsible for those horrors.

  But Cully? He was responsible for Cully, all right. I should have fought for his discharge. He needed a lawyer to put his case. He needed somebody to speak up for him. Face the brass hats and prove that a mistake was made when Cully was certified fit.

  Jack’s conscience was a mad rat gnawing at the weak trap in which it was kept all day.

  This was the first time that he had worn uniform since the holed and blood-soaked one had been removed from him by a nurse in a temporary hospital in France. It felt as stiff and uncomfortable as the one with which he had been issued on his first day in the army. When he had boarded a First Class carriage, the guard had said, Second and Third further along, and had been nonplussed when Jack ignored him and had taken a seat with a white linen head-cloth.

  As the train sped past fields of ripening corn, the field-poppies inevitably send his mind back to the cratered fields across the Channel. Taff and Farmer Giles and some others were still there. Taff had written, the censorship lax so that Jack got a pretty fair picture of them. He had assumed that Jack’s lung wound would be a ‘cushy’ one and that he would not be returning, but the doctor at Queen Alexandra’s had said that in another few weeks he would be fighting fit. At least, according to Taff, they were having a quiet summer. Paris leave had been stopped and they were on the march. He described views between wooded banks of the Somme, their billets in some picturesque village, and the qualities of some good French beer. A natural story-teller, Taff. Jack missed the comradeship of that close group more than he had missed his own family.

  Throughout his convalescence, he had given no thought to the future, his mind being so often preoccupied with the dark hole in his memory. Now that it had been filled, he allowed himself to wonder what his future held. Not his immediate future, but that which it was bad luck to think about, the future in peacetime.

  He left the train at Havant in the hope that there would be some kind of transport or something to hire to get him to Hambledon village, as he did not relish such a long walk. He found the concern of the porters and then the station-master embarrassing. They called him ‘mate’ and asked him about the war. There was nothing going Hambledon way, but they fixed him up with a ride on a strawberry-grower’s cart.

  At the pace of the old horse, Jack, sitting with the carter above hedge-height, was ambled along towards the Pearces’. The carter, glad of a bit of company, filled up on news that would be welcome in the Cricketer’s Arms. ‘You a relation of the Pearces then?’

  Curbing his cultured voice as he had learned to do in the army, Jack said, ‘No, but I served with their son.’

  The carter wagged his head sadly. ‘Bad thing. Floored Bert and Fanny it has.’

  Non-committally, ‘I dare say it has.’

  ‘It was a carkin’ crime taking him into the army. The whole village was up in arms. Well, Chrissy! I asts you, if things, is so bad the army’s got to take dafties like Young Arnie, then they must be bad. I mean, the lad was decent enough, but he couldn’t help hisself when he got worked up.’

  Most villagers in rural Hampshire are cagey with strangers – some will hardly give a townie the time of day, but there are the gabby ones, and not only was the carter gabby, he had had a good wet of Gale’s ale quite early in the day. Using his court training, Jack nodded encouragingly and gently prompted him. He was thankful for this unexpected insight into the civilian Cully.

  ‘The vicar wrote, you know. He told them that the boy hadn’t never been normal and that he waddn’t fit to be called up. But they never took no notice. The trouble with Young Arnie was that he looked pretty normal, he waddn’t mongol or anything. And you know how he was, willing and eager. Everybody liked him round here. I know he waddn’t all there, but he was a nice enough lad, loved the cricket. But he never should a been a conscript.’

  ‘You’re right.’

  ‘He wasn’t never normal right from a baby.’

  ‘Is that so?’

  ‘You know how the Pearces came by him?’ The carter was obviously relishing the chance to tell him.

  ‘No, I’ve no idea. He never said, and I didn’t ask.’

  ‘I doubt he even thought of it. He never had the brain to spekalate. Some said it was a judgement of God, but if you ask me it was being shoved down a rabbit-hole.’ He turned to Jack, satisfied that he had created an impression.

  Jack raised his eyebrows encouragingly. ‘Really?’

  ‘His mother was summonsed and put in prison for it. Dilys Cullington – Dilly – sort of woman who’d stand up for any man for fourpence and lay down for a bob. I suppose she couldn’t help it, she was left with half a dozen kids to bring up… Mind you, I’m not saying but what she wasn’t a bit that way inclined… well, you know, some women are, an’t they? Anyhow, she stood up for some bloke who left her with twins in her. For months she tried to say she waddn’t, but she’d summit wrong with her guts – but you know how ’tis in a village, you can’t keep nothing like that quiet, ’specially twins.’

  ‘And Cully – Arnie – was one of the twins?’

  ‘Ah. She went out on her own, birthed the babies herself and left them in the warren with all dirt and leaves covering them up. I suppose she hoped a fox’d come, she said in court she thought they was both dead inside her because they hadn’t moved for a week. One was, but not Arnie.’

  ‘What a terrible story.’

  ‘Well, if it’s true she thought they
was dead, you got to ast yourself why she went out there to birth them. But, there’s worst things than that have happened in this here village.’ He tapped the side of his nose.

  ‘How was Arnie saved?’

  ‘By old Bert Pearce. Out rabbiting with his dog, hears this cry, dog scrabbles the leaves and there was this here baby.’

  ‘Good Lord, sounds like the Queen of Egypt finding Moses.’

  The carter laughed. ‘Ah. You don’t know Bert Pearce?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Well, old Bert an’t no Queen of Egypt, as you’ll see. Fanny’s all right, though.’ He nodded knowingly.

  ‘And they kept him?’

  ‘Ah. Bert and Fanny, been married five year, never had chick ner child. You wouldn’t get away with it these days, but twenty year ago, nobody asked no questions, he’d a been a charge on the Parish. The vicar christened him and gave him back to Fanny and he was theirs. Vicar said he should keep his proper name, though if you asts me that waddn’t a very Christian thing to do, seeing as how his mother was in prison for trying to kill him.’

  They had now reached long neat fields planted with strawberries where lines of pickers were bending their backs and moving steadily along. An inn, a few straggling cottages, and a signpost to say that this was Hambledon, then more closely-built cottages.

  ‘Here y’are then, lad. This is as far as I go. Bert Pearce’s an’t no more than a quarter of a mile.’

  ‘I’m really grateful for you bringing me. What do I owe you?’

  ‘Normally, I would of said a bob, but not to a serving man, nor to a chap that made friends with poor young Arnie.’

  Jack was surprised to discover that Musk Cottage had one window converted to a shop window over which was a sign reading ‘H. Pearce & Son. High Class Saddlers – Boots Repaired.’ The door stood wide and he went in. Bert Pearce was indeed no Queen of Egypt. He was old, probably approaching sixty, brown and thin, and with skin as leather-looking and as tooled with lines as the finished saddles hanging from the low ceiling. He had a good face with large, well-lashed eyes that the girls had probably found attractive a few years back. Jack could only stand upright where there were no beams and no saddles. The man looked up over his half-glasses and then started.