‘Too intense, d’you mean?’ Alice asked, trying to remember whether, when she and her husband were courting, he had ever been too intense. She didn’t think he had been. Perhaps he had saved his intensity for Penny Fisher…
Hester appeared silently in the kitchen doorway where she hesitated, smiling uncertainly, conscious of having interrupted them.
‘Hello, Georgie,’ she said, and then, turning to Alice, ‘Please can I have a stamp for Reuben’s letter, Mrs Todd?’
Margery Brewster’s contribution to the war effort had been to accept the role of village registrar for the Women’s Land Army and in this voluntary capacity to oversee the hostels in the Ledburton area. She took this task, as she took all her work for the Ministry of Agriculture, very seriously and called, each month, on all nine of the hostels for which she was responsible. She had meetings with the wardens and, when necessary, interviewed one or another of the inmates. Being a committed and diligent woman, she made it her business to know at least a little of each land girl’s history and was often instrumental in sorting out various personal problems.
She was sitting, some days after Georgina’s visit, across the kitchen table, watching Alice assemble the large apple pie which, that evening and hot from the oven, would be sliced, doused in custard and fed to the land girls after the stew that was already simmering and filling the kitchen with an appetising smell.
Although Margery had not, on this occasion, added a nip of gin to the cup of tea the warden had made for her, there was, Alice had noticed, a telltale hint of peppermint on her visitor’s breath, which, together with the slight flush about her face, suggested that at some point that day, Margery had had what she coyly referred to as a ‘snifter’.
She sat now, her coat loosened, in the warm kitchen, her scarf and gloves beside her on the scrubbed surface of the table and her folder, containing notes on each of the Lower Post Stone girls, in front of her. But her attention, as her eyes followed the fork which Alice was working round the edge of the pie, was elsewhere.
‘I often think,’ she murmured vaguely, ‘that when we’re young and we make the huge decisions which will affect us all our lives…that we are not quite up to it.’
‘Up to what?’ Alice asked absent-mindedly, brushing egg yolk across the pie crust.
‘To making the big decisions. Like who we should marry. Or whether we should marry at all!’
Surprised, Alice glanced at the registrar, whose grey eyes were wide and slightly unfocused.
‘I mean,’ Margery continued, almost to herself, ‘that I sometimes wonder if we sort of drift into things when we are young and make decisions based on what we believe is expected of us rather than what we really want. Don’t you think?’
Alice understood that for the second time that week, her opinion was being sought on a serious matter and that a considered response was expected. But before she could produce one Margery pursued her train of thought aloud and with increasing vigour.
‘When my Higher School Certificate results were better than expected one of my teachers urged me to persuade my parents to send me to a university. She said I had a sharp brain and that my organising skills were well above average. She felt I had a bright future before me, possibly in the world of commerce or the Civil Service.’ Alice, satisfied with her work on the pie, moved it to one side of the table and gave her full attention to the registrar. ‘But did I heed her advice? No, I did not! I was expected to marry Gordon, you see. We’d known each other almost all our lives and it was just assumed that when the time came…’ Margery paused, gazing into space. ‘He was quite attractive then, Gordon. Robust and responsible. Played rugby. Rode to hounds. Had what they called “sound prospects”. He was considered a good catch and I felt flattered when he proposed.’ She glanced at the small but tasteful diamond ring beside her wedding band. ‘Everyone was getting married. It hardly occurred to me not to.’ Alice was concerned.
‘But you don’t regret it, do you? Not seriously, I mean?’ Margery pondered, swallowed the last of her tea and set her cup neatly back on its saucer.
‘I used not to. My life was very full in those early years. Raising my daughters, running my household and so on. It was after the girls left home and had husbands and families of their own that I…I simply did not know what to do with myself! Gordon had his work, his professional cronies and his golf and I had nothing and no one! I think I would have gone potty if war hadn’t been declared and Lady Denham hadn’t seized on my offer to help with the Land Army! It was as though I was suddenly alive again! At first I was a bit daunted by all the paperwork and the responsibilities but, to be honest with you, Alice – and I say this in all modesty – it came naturally to me. I found I could delegate and organise and supervise and I love it! I love being in charge and having to make decisions and the awful thing is that I cannot bear the thought of the war ending and everything stopping and having to go back to being plain Mrs Gordon Brewster! I know it’s dreadful not to want the war to be over but I’m dreading it, Alice! Absolutely dreading it!’ The warden was shocked. Not so much by Margery’s outburst but by the intensity and desperation behind her words.
‘But when it’s over you must find something else to do!’ she insisted. ‘You have valuable skills and there are always people needing help in various ways! Surely—’ But Margery interrupted her.
‘No,’ she sighed. ‘Not in this neck of the woods, Alice dear. Helping with the flowers in the church or raising money for the organ fund is about all that’s on offer around here.’ Margery drew a deep breath, smiled bravely, straightened her shoulders and patted her notes into a neat pile. ‘Rat-catchers,’ she announced suddenly, and when Alice reacted in surprise, added, ‘They visit once a year and are slightly overdue. They’ll be billeted here for three or four weeks while they deal with all the farms in this area. Should arrive sometime within the month. I’ll give you as much notice as I can and there’ll be extra rations, of course.’ Margery had resumed her usual efficient and sometimes slightly brusque manner. She got to her feet, settled her scarf round her neck, thanked Alice for the tea and left. From the kitchen, Alice heard the clash of gears as the registrar reversed her car in the narrow lane.
It was four-thirty and the light, on that overcast February afternoon, was already fading. The girls would return to the hostel in an hour’s time, bursting into the old building, filling it with sound, keen to get out of their damp dungarees, fighting over the bathroom, clustering round the fire in the recreation room and relishing the cooking smells that would be reaching them from the warm kitchen.
Alice glanced at the clock, fetched a cabbage from the pantry and began slicing it, her mind occupied by what Margery Brewster had revealed about herself. Here was yet another effect of the war. This time on a middle-class, middle-aged woman who, on the positive side, had realised her potential because of it but, negatively, was almost certainly permanently unsettled by it. Perhaps, Alice deduced, Margery’s depression at the prospect of having to resume her pre-war existence was the reason she was resorting, rather more often than she should, to the gin bottle.
Later that night, Ferdie Vallance, blowing on his mittened fingers, had braved the icy, moonless cold and was checking his snares when he heard a sound in the thicket that fringed the four-acre wood. The footfall was too heavy for a rabbit or even a fox. He saw the slight movement, no more than a blurred shape, dark against dark, just as the shot rang out and the flash from a gun barrel was briefly visible in the darkness. This was immediately followed by the heavy sound of human feet trampling through undergrowth.
‘Varmints!’ Ferdie yelled into the darkness. ‘Thievin’, trespassin’ varmints!’
The shape on the edge of the woodland had dropped to the ground and was motionless but the shooters – at least two, though in the retelling of the incident Ferdie was to increase their number by one hundred per cent – made off, crashing through the saplings, away from Ferdie. Brandishing the stout stick with which he despatched any
rabbit that survived his snares, Ferdie continued to hurl righteous abuse in the direction of the retreating poachers, despite the fact that he was, in effect, as guilty as any one of them. ‘Murderin’, trespassin’ varmints! ’Ave the law on you, I will, once I get my ’ands on you!’
The young roe deer lay where it had been felled by the single shot which, Ferdie discovered, had entered its skull below the left eye socket and exited through shattered bones in the base of its neck. It sprawled, quite dead, limp in the long wet grass, a hint of steam rising from its warm pelt.
Ferdie Vallance considered his options. Venison was something he and Mabel had yet to experience in their Saturday night gastronomic indulgences. To forgo the opportunity on moral grounds or because of a degree of squeamishness on Ferdie’s part, when it came to the practicalities of butchering the carcass, would be, it seemed to him, a sign of weakness, which he must resist for his own sake as well as Mabel’s.
It was the creature’s haunches that Ferdie required for his pot. So, gritting his teeth, mustering his strength and with the aid of his hunting knife, he set about the animal, and after a brief and gory struggle, the extent of which, because of the darkness, he was only half aware, he left the remains to marauding foxes, lashed the haunches together and hauled them homewards.
By the time Mabel arrived on the following Saturday his kitchen was already rich with an aroma of roasting flesh that was subtly unfamiliar to her. Ferdie, basting the meat, turned to greet her and saw her small, bright eyes widen in wonderment.
‘’Tis venison!’ he announced, salivating proudly. It had been difficult keeping his secret from her during the days between the killing and this week’s feast. ‘What do ee think of that, then?’
‘But venison is what posh folk eat!’ she gasped. He basked briefly in her approbation until he saw her face cloud. ‘You ain’t never bin poaching deer, ’ave you, Ferdie Vallance?’ Her voice was anxious, for this was dangerous territory and they both knew it. The taking of deer from the herd of the life peer whose land bordered Roger Bayliss’s would have been a hazardous departure on Ferdie’s part from the small-time poaching he usually indulged in. He shook his head.
‘’T was poachers what done for ’im, my lover, not I! I caught ’em at it and drove ’em off! But by then t’were too late for this fella,’ he indicated the oven door. ‘What I reckoned was that, as the damage were done, it seemed a shame to let ’im go to waste. So ’ere ’e be, Mabel my lover! Less than half an hour from our dinner plates!’
They devoured the meat, knifing thick slices from the delicate bones and washing them down with Ferdie’s cloudy, home-brewed cider.
When they were done he stood before her, took her greasy, hard-worked hands in his and licked the gravy from her fingers. Then his hands moved down, past the slight indentation of her waist and on, to the parts of Mabel, or indeed of any girl, that Ferdie knew existed but had never before explored. She smiled. Her amiable arms went round his neck and she delivered to Ferdie, for what it was worth to him, a body for which neither she nor anyone else had ever had much respect. Then they lay down on his kitchen floor and relished each other as thoroughly as any pair of lovers in history or out of it. And it was on that night, the first of many joyful, warm and lustful occasions, that Mabel Hodges conceived the child that was to be her second and Ferdie’s first.
Over the months that Alice had been working as warden and without her being aware of it, her employer had made it his business to discover all he could of her personal history, while she, lacking his curiosity, still knew very little of his.
The divorce that would end her marriage to James Todd was pending. Roger knew of this and understood that Alice did not expect James to contest it or to waste any time before remarrying. His co-respondent, Penny Fisher, who had been his secretary at the Air Ministry, was, Alice knew, already pregnant with his child.
Roger also observed that one of Alice’s concerns was that, following the divorce, Edward John might become estranged from his father and that she was anxious to prevent this.
‘I’d like them to have some form of contact,’ she confided in Roger over a lunchtime drink where, because the publican produced his own butter and cheese and his wife her own chutneys, a ploughman’s lunch was not only possible but equalled pre-war standards. ‘I know it’ll be difficult for him where his stepmother is concerned but he’s almost eleven years old now and I feel he needs to address the situation sooner rather than later.’ She bit into a crisp, pickled shallot. ‘The longer he leaves it the more complicated it will become. Don’t you think?’
Roger Bayliss considered the situation. He liked Alice’s son, finding the boy observant, intelligent and polite. Beyond this he had not given him a great deal of thought.
‘How does Edward John feel about it?’ he asked Alice, and she described to him how, after being predictably disturbed by the upheaval of moving from London to Exeter and then to the farm and making the adjustments to weekly boarding school, her son had settled into the new routine and its contrasting environments with surprising speed and apparent ease.
‘He doesn’t talk much about his father,’ she elaborated. ‘He understands the situation with Penny, of course.’ Alice paused and sipped the nutty, bitter beer that was brewed on the premises. Roger, watching her, wondered how it was possible for James Todd to prefer any woman to the charming one who was sitting opposite to him across the worn surface of the pub table. ‘He was defensive and angry to begin with, but now…’ Alice continued. Then she shrugged and smiled. ‘He’s more interested in your farm than anything else. Says he wants to be a vet when he grows up.’
‘Really?’ Roger said and sat half smiling, as though the idea pleased him. Then he said he thought it a pity that his own son had failed to show any interest in the land. ‘I had Christopher’s name down for Seale-Hayne,’ he said, and when Alice looked blank, explained that this was the name of a prestigious local agricultural college. ‘But with him it was a fireman first and then a train driver! When I bought our first tractor he got Jack to teach him how to drive it – he was still in short trousers – and at twelve I caught him hauling a loaded timber wagon out of the woodland. Soon afterwards he saw his first aeroplane and that was it!’
‘I wonder how he would have reacted if you had remarried and perhaps had a second family.’ Alice asked and saw Roger’s expression change. The slightly wary look, with which she had been familiar during the early months of their acquaintance, once again replaced the more relaxed expression that, as time had passed, she had become used to.
‘I never thought about it,’ he said quietly.
‘Which hadn’t you thought about?’ Alice persisted. ‘Remarrying? Or whether Christopher would have approved?’
‘Neither, actually,’ Roger smiled.
‘You don’t talk to each other very much, the pair of you, do you,’ she said, making statements of her questions. ‘About the serious things, I mean.’
‘Serious things?’
‘About how you feel.’
‘Feel about what, exactly?’ He was both mystified and amused but there was also a trace of defensiveness about him which Alice, at that moment, or possibly deliberately, missed.
‘About everything!’ she plunged on. ‘His breakdown! Your reaction to it! His future! Surely you don’t want him to spend the rest of his life alone in your woodsman’s hut?’ She stopped, knowing she had gone too far but disappointed to discover that despite the development of what she still perceived as nothing more that a warm, working relationship between the two of them, Roger was continuing to keep her very much at arm’s length, particularly where his relationship with his son was concerned. ‘Sorry,’ she smiled, cutting into her cheese. ‘I shouldn’t have pried. None of my business.’
‘No, no,’ he said, quietly surprised by her words. ‘Don’t apologise. Please don’t apologise. You are very sweet. Very sweet.’ He swallowed the last of his beer. ‘Better crack on, though. When you’re ready, of course
… Paperwork piles up a bit at this time of the year.’
As they drove back towards the farms Roger confirmed the imminent arrival of the rat-catchers.
‘They’ve been working in Lincolnshire,’ he told her. ‘Strange pair. This’ll be their third visit to our area. Should arrive around midday tomorrow. They have a terrible little van with their suitcases in the back, along with all their various traps and poisons.’
‘Ugh!’ Alice shuddered.
‘Yes, it is a bit grisly.’ He slowed the car, carefully negotiating the approach to a narrow, hump-backed bridge. ‘Jack usually digs a pit for the corpses. You’ll be amazed at how many there will be.’
‘Oh, please!’ Alice was repulsed and Roger smiled at her discomfort.
‘Has to be done, Alice. Has to be done!’
The rat-catchers, Pat and Connie, worked for the Pest Destruction Division of the Women’s Land Army, a speciality that entitled them to a slightly higher wage than the regular land girls earned. They arrived the following day, just as Rose and Alice were about to eat their lunchtime sandwiches. Rose, unimpressed by their timing, found it difficult to produce something to put between the ‘couple of slices of bread and marge’ which the two girls insisted would ‘do them fine’. But she was not one to be found wanting and she located a slice or two of beetroot and a sliver of cheese, set two plates down rather heavily on the kitchen table and did not smile when the rat-catchers reacted enthusiastically to the food and the cups of tea that followed.
They were large, untidy girls with shiny faces and tangled hair. They had driven down from Lincolnshire in their work clothes. Their fingernails, Alice noticed, were dirty. She suppressed the thought that they may not have washed since handling their latest harvest of dead rodents. In Rose’s opinion they looked as though the pair of them could do with a good scrubbing and she resented the whiteness and crispness of the sheets and pillowcases on the twin beds she had made up that morning in the spare double room upstairs. The phrase ‘pearls before swine’ came suddenly into her uncompromising Devonian mind.
The Girl at the Farmhouse Gate Page 5
