In a Dry Season

by Peter Robinson

  “Why did you start it, then?”

  Blackstone laughed. “God knows. Because I’ve been there, maybe? Bit of personal therapy? Like anything, it’s probably more about me than you. Maybe I’m just jealous. Maybe I wouldn’t mind sleeping with an attractive young DS myself. Lord knows, it’s been a bloody long time. Ignore me.”

  Banks finished his pint and put the glass down slowly. “Look, I take your point, Ken, really I do, but to be honest, it’s the first time I’ve felt comfortable with a woman since Sandra left. Not comfortable, so much, that’s not the right word. Annie’s not a woman you necessarily feel comfortable with. She’s a little weird. Bit of a free spirit. Very private. Hell, though, it’s the first time I’ve really felt free enough to jump into something and say damn the consequences.”

  Blackstone laughed and shook his head slowly. “Sounds like you’ve got it bad.” He looked at his watch. “What say we hit the fleshpots of Leeds and get irredeemably pissed?”

  Banks smiled. “Most sensible thing you’ve said all night. Let’s do it.”

  “And I’ve got a fine malt tucked away at home for afters.”

  “Even better. Lead on.”

  Winter finally gave way to a slow spring, with its snowdrops in Rowan Woods, then the bluebells, crocuses and daffodils. Brad and Charlie became our regular “beaus” and we saw far less of Billy Joe, who became very sulky after he found he had lost Gloria to a pilot.

  The Americans always seemed more casual about rank, unlike the English. I suppose it is because our class system instilled it in us from birth, while Americans were all created equal, or so they say. It must be nice for them; it would probably be confusing for us. But it’s one thing for officers and enlisted men to eat, drink and billet together and quite another for a second lieutenant to steal a mere sergeant’s girl.

  I was worried that Billy Joe would start a fight, given his violent streak, but he soon found another girl and even started talking to us again when we met at dances and in pubs. He pestered Gloria on occasion to go back with him, or at least just to sleep with him again, but she was able to keep him at bay, even when she’d been drinking.

  PX, of course, remained absolutely essential, so we made sure we still cultivated him. As none of us had actually gone out with him, anyway, we had no reason to think our new relationship with Brad and Charlie would have any effect on the friendship, and it didn’t seem to. Brad didn’t like PX much, though, and you could sense tension when they were together. Especially when Gloria was around, PX would sulk and Brad would ignore him. Then, the next day, PX would make sure to catch Gloria alone and present her with some gift or other. Like a lovesick little boy, really.

  I won’t say that my affair with Charlie was a grand passion, but we became less awkward with the physical side of things as time went on, and he did become the first man I ever slept with. He was gentle, patient and sensitive, which was exactly what I needed, and I came to look forward to those times we spent in bed together at Bridge Cottage, courtesy of Gloria.

  Our relationship remained more of an intellectual one; we passed books back and forth with abandon: Forster, Proust, Dostoevsky. Charlie wasn’t dull and dry, though; he loved to dance and was a great Humphrey Bogart fan. He took me to see Casablanca and The Maltese Falcon, even though he had seen them both before. He was also far more passionate about classical music than I was, and we sometimes went to concerts. Once, I remember, we went all the way to Huddersfield to see Benjamin Britten conduct his own Hymn to St Cecilia.

  In all the excitement we were probably guilty of neglecting the people who had been good to us in the worst days after Matthew’s disappearance, especially Michael Stanhope. We redeemed ourselves with him a little when he had an exhibition in Leeds. Charlie and I made a weekend of it and went to stay at the Metropole Hotel.

  Charlie, who knew a lot more about painting than I did, praised the exhibition to the skies and I think Mr Stanhope was rather taken with him. Even Gloria went to see Mr Stanhope at his studio that summer and autumn far more often than she had before.

  I tried not to dwell on the dangers inherent in Charlie’s job, and for his part, he never seemed to want to talk about them. The war receded into the distance during those hours we spent together reading or making love, though it was difficult to ignore the rest of the time. The Americans were carrying out precision daylight bombing raids over Germany, often without fighter cover, and their casualties were appalling. Instead of listening to the drone of the planes taking off after dark, I now heard them in the mornings. The Flying Fortresses were much louder than the RAF planes that had been there before. They would warm up the engines at about five o’clock, which was the time I usually awoke anyway, and I would lie there stealing an extra few minutes of warmth and imagine Charlie checking his maps and preparing himself for another raid.

  Charlie told me that up around 20,000 feet they were flying at temperatures of between minus 30 and minus 50 degrees Fahrenheit. I couldn’t imagine anything that cold. He had to wear long woollen underwear and electrically heated flying suits under his fleece-lined leather jacket. I had to laugh when he said it would take him half an hour to get undressed and into bed with me.

  And so life went on. Books. Bed. Pictures. Dances. Concerts. Talk. Double summertime began on 2 April that year, giving us the long spring evenings to go for walks to pick wildflowers in Rowan Woods or idle down by the river. In May, when it was warmer, we would often sit on the banks of the Harksmere Reservoir and read Coleridge and Wordsworth out loud to one another. We had picnics of Spam and potted-shrimp sandwiches on the terraces just off The Edge.

  Mother liked Charlie, I could tell, though she didn’t say much. She never did. Matthew’s disappearance had taken most of the wind out of her sails. But Charlie brought her Life Savers and Hershey bars, and she thanked him and ate them all.

  After the excitement of the Normandy landing, we soon got back to reality: the summer of the doodle bugs. We only experienced one V1 rocket in Hobb’s End, one that had badly lost its way.

  I was standing on the fairy bridge chatting with Cynthia Garmen. It was a typical July day: muggy, with dark, leaden clouds and the threat of storm. We were talking about the Japanese defeat at Imphal, wishing Matthew could have been there to experience it, when we heard the awful sound in the sky like a motorcycle without a silencer. All of a sudden it spluttered to a stop. Then there was a dreadful silence. We could see it by then, a dark, pointed shape beginning the silent arc of its descent.

  Fortunately, it fell in one of the fields between Hobb’s End and Harkside without exploding, and by the time we had rushed down to see what was going on, the local ARP people already had the area cordoned off and were waiting for the UXB team to arrive.

  The advance continued and, slowly, things began to improve. The blackout was replaced by the “dim-out” in September, but most of us left the curtains up anyway and didn’t get around to taking them down until the following year. If by autumn, then, we were feeling flush with the possibility of victory, we had little idea of the grim winter to come.

  By ten o’clock that night Annie was feeling so restless that even a large glass of wine didn’t help settle her down.

  She knew what part of the problem was: Banks. When he told her he was going out boozing with a mate instead of going to dinner with her, she did feel pissed off with him. She felt disappointed that he would rather go drinking with someone else than be with her, especially at such an early and delicate stage in their relationship. True, it was she who had suggested they limit their time together to weekends, but it was also she who had broken the rule the other night. Why couldn’t he do the same tonight?

  But at least she hadn’t wasted her time that evening. The long trail that had started on Wednesday, over the telephone, was beginning to bear fruit.

  At first, she had come to the conclusion that it was easier finding a fully dressed woman in The Sunday Sport than getting information out of the American Embassy. People we
re polite—insufferably so—but she was shunted from one minion to another for the best part of an hour and came out with nothing but an earache and a growing distaste for condescending and suspicious American men who called her “ma’am.”

  By the end of the day, she had managed to discover that the personnel at Rowan Woods in late 1943 would have been members of the US 8th Air Force, and it was very unlikely that there would be any local records of who they were. One of the more helpful employees suggested that she try contacting the USAFE base in Ramstein and gave her the number.

  When she got back from the Leeds council estate, even though it was early evening, she phoned Ramstein, where she discovered that all air force personnel records were kept at the National Personnel Records Center in St Louis, Missouri. She checked the time difference and found that St Louis was six hours behind Harkside. Which meant it would be afternoon there.

  After a little more shunting around and a few abrupt “please holds” she was put through to a woman called Mattie, who just “adored” her accent. They chatted about the differences in weather—it was raining hard in St Louis—and about other things for a short while, then Annie plucked up the courage to ask for what she wanted.

  Expecting some sort of military smokescreen, she was pleasantly surprised when Mattie told her that there was no problem; the records were generally available to the public, and she would see what she could do. When Annie mentioned the initials “PX,” Mattie laughed and said that was the man who looked after the store. She also warned Annie that some of their records had been burned in a fire a few years ago, but if she still had Rowan Woods, she’d set the fax to send it out during the night. Annie should get it the next morning. Annie thanked her profusely and went home feeling absurdly pleased with herself.

  But it didn’t last.

  Sometimes when she felt irritable and restless like this, she would go for a drive, and that was exactly what she did. Without making a conscious decision, she took the road west out of Harkside, and when she reached the turn-off for Thornfield Reservoir, she turned right.

  By then she had realized that Banks wasn’t the problem; she was. She was pissed off at herself for letting him get to her. She was behaving like some sort of silly, lovestruck schoolgirl. Vulnerable. Hurt. Let’s face it, Annie, she told herself, life has been pretty simple, pretty much regimented for some time now. No real highs; no real lows. Only herself to think of. Manageable, but diminished.

  She had been hiding from life in a remote corner of Yorkshire, protecting her emotions from the harsh world she had experienced “out there.” Sometimes when you open yourself up to that life again, it can be confusing and painful, like when you open your eyes to bright light. Your emotions are tender and raw, more than usually sensitive to all its nuances, its little hurts and humiliations. So that was what was happening. Well, at least she knew that much. So much for cool, Annie, so much for detachment.

  A misshapen harvest moon hung low in the western sky, bloated and flattened into a red sausage shape by the gathering haze. Otherwise, the road was unlit, surrounded on both sides by tall, dark trees. Her headlights caught dozens of rabbits.

  She pulled into the car park and turned off the engine. Silence. As she got out and stood in the warm night air, she started to feel at peace. Her problems seemed to slip away; one way or another, she knew they would sort themselves out.

  Annie loved being alone deep in the countryside at night, where you might hear only the very distant progress of a car, the rustles of small animals, see only the dark shapes of the trees and hills, perhaps a few pinpricks of light from farmhouses on distant hillsides. She loved the sea at night even more, the relentless rhythm of the waves, the hiss and suck, and the way the reflected moonlight sways and bends with the water’s swell and catches the crests of the waves. But the sea was fifty miles away. She would have to make do with the woods for now. The appeal was still to the deep, primitive part of her.

  She took the narrow footpath towards Hobb’s End, walking carefully because of the gnarled tree roots that crossed it in places and the stones that thrust up out of the dirt. Hardly any moonlight penetrated the tree cover, but here and there she caught a slat or two of reddish silver light between branches. She could smell the loamy, earthy smell of trees and shrubs. The slightest breeze butterfly-kissed the upper leaves.

  When Annie reached the slope, she paused and looked down on the ruins of Hobb’s End. It was easy to make out the dark, skeletal shape, the spine and ribs, but somehow tonight, with the slight curve of the High Street and the dry riverbed, the ruins looked more like the decayed stubs of teeth in a sneering mouth.

  Annie skipped down the slope and walked towards the fairy bridge. From there, she looked along the river and saw the blood-red moonlight reflected in the few little puddles of water that remained on its muddy bed. She walked on past the outbuilding where Gloria’s skeleton had been found, and the ruins of Bridge Cottage next to it. The ground around had all been dug up and was now taped off for safety. The SOCOS from headquarters had brought their own crime-scene tape. She headed down what was once the High Street.

  As she went, Annie tried to visualize the scene from Michael Stanhope’s painting: children laughing and splashing in the river shallows; knots of local women gossiping outside a shop; the butcher’s boy in his bloodstained apron riding like the wind; the tall young woman arranging newspapers in a rack. Gwynneth Shackleton.

  That was who it was. Why hadn’t she realized it before? Somehow, the revelation that Stanhope had also painted Gwen Shackleton into his scene thrilled her.

  She looked at the ruins to her right and saw where once was a detached cottage with a little garden, once a row of terrace houses opening directly onto the pavement. This was where the ginnel led off to the tanner’s yard; here was the Shackletons’ newsagent’s shop, here the butcher’s, and a little farther down stood the Shoulder of Mutton, where the sign had swayed and creaked in the wind.

  So real did it all seem as she walked towards the flax mill that she began to fancy she could even hear long-silent voices whispering secrets. She passed the street that led to the old church and stood at the western end of the village, on that stretch of empty ground where the houses ended and the land rose towards the mill.

  As she stood and breathed in the air deeply, she realized how much she wanted to know what had happened here every bit as much as Banks did. Without her wishing for it, or asking for it, Hobb’s End and its history had imposed themselves on her, thrust themselves into her consciousness and become part of her life. It had happened at the same time that Banks had become part of her life, too. She knew that, whatever became of them, the two events would be united in her mind forever.

  When she had challenged him on his obsession with it the other night, she hadn’t even attempted to explain hers. It wasn’t because of the war, but because she identified with Gloria. This was a woman who had struggled and dared to be a little different in a time that didn’t tolerate such behaviour. She had lost her parents, then had either abandoned or been cast out by the father of her child, come to a remote place, taken on a hard job and fallen in love. Then she had lost her husband in the war, or so she must have believed. If Gloria were still alive when Matthew came back, then she would have had to face a stranger, most likely. Whatever else happened, someone strangled her, stabbed her nearly twenty times and buried her under an outbuilding. And nobody had tried to find out what happened to her.

  Suddenly, Annie noticed a movement and saw a figure scuttle across the fairy bridge towards the car parks. Her blood froze. At that moment, she became a little girl frightened of the dark, and she could believe that witches, demons and hobgoblins haunted Hobb’s End. She was the whole length of the village away, so what she saw was nothing more than a fleeting silhouette.

  Finding her voice, she called out. No answer came. The figure disappeared up the slope into the woods. Annie set off in pursuit. With every stride, the policewoman in her started to overcome t
he scared, superstitious girl.

  Just when she had got back up the slope and was heading for the woods, she heard a car start ahead of her. There were two small car parks, separated by a high hedge, and whoever this was must have been parked in the other one, or Annie would have seen the car earlier.

  She put on an extra burst of speed but could only get to the road in time to see the tail-lights disappearing. Even in the moonlight, all she could tell was that the car was dark in colour. She stood there leaning forward, hands resting on her knees, getting her breath back and wondering who the hell could be in such a hurry to escape discovery.

  Twelve

  “He asked me to marry him,” Gloria repeated.

  “I still don’t believe you,” I said.

  “Well, you can ask him yourself. It’s true.”

  It was early in the new year, 1945, and I had dropped by Bridge Cottage one evening to see how Gloria was coping. She had had a terrible cold over Christmas—had even missed Alice Poole’s farewell party—and the doctor said she had almost caught pneumonia. Though she was weak and pale, and she had lost some weight, she seemed to be on the mend.

  “You should have seen my nose when he asked me. It was red raw.”

  I laughed. It was good to laugh at something. Christmas that year had been a miserable affair not only because it was the coldest one I could remember, but because the advance that had seemed to be going so well earlier had bogged down in the Ardennes. It was all right for Alice. Her Eric had been wounded there and shipped home. But how long was this bloody war going to drag on? Couldn’t everyone see we had all had enough? Sometimes I felt that I had never even known life during peacetime.