Winter that year was very severe. There were heavy falls of snow, followed by prolonged frosts, and Charlie had his work cut out, protecting the poultry from the cold and the danger of marauding foxes. Animal-food was in short supply and when the last of the kale was gone there was nothing left for the pigs to eat. He had to watch them in their pens, noisily sucking pebbles and stones and spitting them out, as though in reproach, into the empty feeding-troughs. And as soon as the worst weather was over, making the roads passable, there was only one course open to him: he had to call the butcher in.
‘The government keeps asking us to step up production but how are we to do that when we can’t get the food to fatten our pigs?’
‘Don’t ask me!’ the butcher said.
During the spring, at lambing-time, Charlie was out at all hours, with his ewes in the lambing-fold. Some nights he never slept at all for he had joined the Civil Defence and was on duty two nights a week patrolling up on Flaunton Heath. Every Saturday afternoon he drilled with the other volunteers on Scampton Green. He had a steel helmet and an arm-band but no uniform as yet and he drilled with a broomstick on his shoulder because there were not enough rifles to go round.
‘Drilling again!’ he said to Linn. ‘That takes me back a tidy few years! I can almost smell the barrack-square!’
Among the Civil Defence Volunteers there was a familiar scarred face. George Cressy was back from his travels. He greeted Charlie as an old friend and appeared to have sobered down a little.
‘I don’t get into fights any more. I’m saving it up for when the Jerries come. I’ll soon show them a thing or two! ’ Charlie mentioned George to Linn.
‘It seems to have done him a bit of good, knocking about the world like that. It’s knocked a few of the corners off.’
‘Don’t speak to me about that man.’
Linn at this time was unhappy and Charlie knew why. Robert had been due home on leave, but at the last minute he had written to say that he was spending it with a friend, climbing the hills in Cumberland.
‘That’s disappointing for us,’ Charlie said, ‘but I’m glad our Rob is making friends and enjoying himself while he’s got the chance.’
‘Before he’s sent abroad, you mean?’
‘No, I wasn’t thinking of that. Just getting about and seeing new places, that’s all I meant.’
‘But he will be sent out, eventually?’
‘Try not to worry too much about that. You only get yourself upset.’
‘How can I help worrying? It’s easy enough for you to talk. You’re so wrapped up in your work on the farm, you never think of anything else!’
Charlie turned away with a sigh. He could not come close to her at this time. Her disappointment was too intense.
‘Talking about the farm,’ he said, ‘the man from the War Ag is coming today so I’d better get on about my jobs so that I’m finished when he comes.’
Many farmers in the district resented the War Agricultural Executive Committee, which told them how much stock they must keep and exactly what crops they must grow in their fields. They called it the War Aggravation Committee and one farmer at Upper Royne had ordered its representative off his land with a loaded shotgun.
But Charlie, when the War Ag official called at Stant, welcomed him with open arms. He conducted the man all over the farm; watched him testing samples of soil; and gave him all the help he could. When at last it was all over and the man had written out his directives, Charlie shook him by the hand, watched him drive away down the track, and went indoors to talk to Linn.
‘We’ve got to plough forty acres!’ he said. ‘Just think of that! Four fifths of our land! Potatoes! Corn! Sugar-beet! All sorts of things we’ve got to grow and I’ve got to get my skates on if I’m to get it all done this spring!’
Charlie was in a state of excitement. He riffled through his official ‘forms’ and spread them out on the kitchen table, jabbing his finger at this one and that, and showing Linn his ‘authorities’ for obtaining fertilizers and seed and the loan of a War Ag tractor and plough.
‘He seemed a decent, sensible chap. And he knows what he’s doing, I will say that, not like the chap they had at World’s End.’
Linn put on her spectacles and bent over the printed forms.
‘I wonder he didn’t ask to see me. It does just happen to be my farm.’
‘Why didn’t you come out? You knew he was coming at two o’clock.’
‘You should have brought him in,’ she said.
‘Yes, well, maybe I should, but I didn’t think you were interested.’
‘Not interested?’ she exclaimed. ‘When the whole farm is going to be changed and pulled about around my ears?’
‘It won’t be changed that much. The sheep will have to go, of course, but we shall still keep the poultry and maybe get a few pigs again. It’s just that we’ve got to expand a bit and cultivate every inch of ground. I’ve always wanted to plough up more land ‒’
‘And now you’re happy! You’re getting your way!’
‘Look,’ Charlie said in a quiet voice. ‘The War Ag decides what we shall grow and we’ve got no choice but to do as they say. I don’t deny it pleases me. I’m about as pleased as Punch ‒ or I was until a moment ago when you started pitching into me ‒ but all that is beside the point. There happens to be a war on and we’ve got to do what we’re damned well told!’
He began to gather up the papers, drawing them into a neat pile, but Linn reached out to take them from him.
‘I haven’t read them yet,’ she said, ‘and they do concern me, after all.’
‘Read them by all means,’ Charlie said. He bundled the papers into her hands. ‘And the next time the War Ag man comes round you can damned well deal with him yourself and pass his orders on to me. Then when it’s been through the proper channels ‒ Home Office, War Office, House of Lords, ‒ maybe you’ll be satisfied and I can get on with doing the work!’
He snatched up his cap and went to the door and there he paused looking back at her.
‘I know what’s started you off like this. It’s because young Rob is not coming home. Well, I don’t blame him, not one jot! He knows how it is with you and me ‒ how we’re at odds so much of the time ‒ and I tell you straight I’m not surprised if he chooses to spend his leave elsewhere!’
He went back to his work in the fields and his anger stayed with him, hour by hour, the taste of it lingering on his tongue, its bitterness like a purge in his blood. But after a time his mood changed and he was filled with self-disgust. Why, in hitting out at her, had he chosen the cruellest of weapons? Why had he mentioned Rob at all? It would be difficult to face her now. He shrank from it and hated himself. Yet face her he must, without delay, or the quarrel would only harden between them and misunderstandings would only grow worse.
‘I’m sorry I brought Rob into it. I shouldn’t have done, I realize that. I’ve come in to try and put things right.’
‘You can’t rub it out, like words on a slate. My memory’s not so convenient as that.’
‘At least you could try to understand. If you hadn’t pitched into me about the man from the War Ag ‒’
‘Where’s the point in saying you’re sorry when all the time you think I’m to blame?’
‘I reckon maybe we’re both to blame. The things we say to each other sometimes … And it’s nothing new, either, is it? We’ve been at odds like this for years.’
‘Have we?’
‘You know we have.’
Charlie, with his hands in his trousers pockets, stood watching her lighting the fire. He tried to think of the right thing to say.
‘I made a mistake, didn’t I, stopping at home to run the farm? I should’ve done what you wanted me to do and got a job as mechanic somewhere.’
‘It’s a bit late to be saying that now.’
‘I did what I thought seemed best at the time.’
‘You did what you wanted to do,’ Linn said.
‘
That doesn’t necessarily mean it was wrong.’
‘Anyway, it’s all in the past.’
‘No, it isn’t, it’s always there. It comes between us all the time. I remember what you said to me, years ago, when we talked once before. You said you had more respect for me in the days when I went out to work and earnt good money of my own. That’s still the trouble, even now. The respect has gone, hasn’t it? I thought, by working hard on the farm, I could maybe win it back again, but it seems as though I made a mistake.’
‘Where’s the point in talking like this?’
‘I hoped it might help to clear the air. ‒ Put things right before it’s too late.’
‘Too late? What do you mean? Are you making some kind of threat?’
‘All I’m trying to say is, the way things are between us now, that’ll go from bad to worse if we don’t do something to put it right.’
Linn put more coal into the stove and pulled the kettle onto the hob.
‘I suppose you want me to pat you on the head and say it was my fault all the time and not to worry any more about it?’
‘Is that how you see me? As a small boy?’
‘How do you see yourself, I wonder?’
‘I see myself as your husband,’ he said. ‘I see us together, man and wife, working together and running the farm. But it isn’t often like that now. We don’t pull together. We’re always at odds.’
‘And whose fault is that? When that man called here today you didn’t even bother to fetch me out.’
‘I’ve already said I’m sorry for that.’
‘You’re always leaving me out of things. You seem to forget the farm is mine.’
‘Not much chance of forgetting that when you’re always throwing it up to me!’
The words slipped out against his will. His good intentions were going astray and anger was rising in him again. He made an effort to fight it down.
‘You say I keep you out of things but what about you? When you first bought the farm I used to help you with the accounts but now you keep it all to yourself.’
He looked at her sadly, appealing to her, but she was busy about the range, opening the damper to heat the oven ready for cooking the evening meal.
‘You shut me out all the time,’ he said. ‘You make me feel ‒ oh I don’t know! ‒ as though I’m nothing to you any more. Nothing much more than a hired hand.’
‘Now you’re just being silly,’ she said.
Turning away from the range, she glanced through the window, into the yard, where the two horses, Simon and Smutch, were eating the ivy on the wall.
‘You’ve left the horses out,’ she said. ‘Hadn’t you better see to them?’
He went without another word.
At least there was always plenty of work to keep him occupied at this time. No sooner had the War Ag tractor arrived than he was sitting up in its seat, ploughing the slopes of the Spring Field. Day after day, while the weather held, he was out breaking new ground, pausing only to snatch a quick meal and then rushing back to work again.
Sometimes he even worked at night; ploughing, harrowing, drilling corn; and Linn, lying alone in bed, was unable to sleep for the noise of the tractor churring out in the fields in the dark.
‘Do you have to work at night?’
‘Yes, if I’m to get done in time.’
‘Well, if you want to kill yourself ‒’
‘I’m not so easily killed as that.’
He could not rest, all through that spring, but was on the move like a man possessed, filled with a passion to get things done.
‘It suits you, this war, doesn’t it?’
‘You’ll be saying I started it next,’ he said.
As soon as the corn was safely sown, he was busy planting potatoes, and to help him he had three men from the village. Linn looked out and saw them at work in the field on the far side of the track. She heard their voices, distantly, and sometimes the sound of merriment.
‘Who are those men you’ve got working with you?’
‘Does it matter who they are?’
‘The one with his hair cropped short,’ she said. ‘It’s George Cressy, isn’t it?’ And when Charlie failed to answer: ‘That man caused my father’s death. Why do you bring him to work on my farm?’
‘I’ve got to take what men I can get.’
It was perfectly true. Labour was difficult nowadays. But to Linn it seemed as though Charlie went out of his way to do those things she hated most and she could scarcely speak to him until George Cressy, with his brutish, scarred face, had finished his work and gone from the farm.
Charlie, calling at the Hit and Miss for the first time in weeks, caught up on the local news.
‘I suppose you’ve heard Major Shaw is gone?’
‘Gone? Where to?’
‘Gone to win the war for us!’
‘Good God!’ Charlie said.
‘I hear he’s left a few bills unpaid so he’s not too popular round about.’
‘What about his wife?’
‘She’s still up at the farm,’ Billy said. ‘I thought you’d have known, being neighbours of theirs.’
‘No, I’ve been busy,’ Charlie said.
At home he talked about it to Linn.
‘I don’t know how she’s managing, stuck up at Slipfields by herself. The Major must be off his head, going and leaving her like that.’
‘Maybe you ought to call on her and see if she needs any help.’
‘Yes,’ Charlie said, ‘maybe I should.’
When he went up to Slipfields, however, he found he was not welcome there. Mrs Shaw was in the yard, carrying pails of mash for the hens, but she set them down when she saw him coming and stood with her hands on her hips, easing the stiffness in her back. Her fair-skinned face was pinched and worn and there were dark rings under her eyes. She stood without speaking as Charlie came up.
‘I heard your husband had gone,’ he said. ‘Is it true?’
‘Oh, yes, it’s perfectly true.’ She looked at him with hostile eyes. ‘I suppose you’ve come like all the rest to say he owes you money?’ she said.
‘Why, no,’ Charlie said. He was taken aback. ‘I came to see if you needed help.’
‘No, thanks, I can manage,’ she said.
‘I’m not so sure about that.’ Charlie looked round at the mess in the yard: pig-muck heaped against a wall; doors hanging askew on the sheds; scraggy chickens pecking about, even in the house itself; and the carcasses of two dead piglets lying on an ash-heap near the door. ‘It looks as though things had got on top of you here.’
‘If they have, that’s my affair.’
‘It might be mine later on.’ He pointed towards the nearest field, where thistles and docks and charlock were already growing three feet high. ‘That’ll mean extra work for me when those weeds of yours sow themselves over my land.’
‘So you’ve really come to lodge a complaint?’
‘I’ve just come as a neighbour, that’s all, to give a hand if you needed it.’
‘I’ve managed without my neighbours’ help so far and I shall continue to do so,’ she said. ‘Please go away and leave me alone.’
‘Right!’ Charlie said. ‘Whatever you say!’ He had not expected such treatment as this. ‘I’m sorry I troubled you, Mrs Shaw. I’ll bid you good day.’
He carried his indignation home.
‘I made a mistake going there. She’ll just have to get on with it. But she’ll find herself in the soup pretty soon when the War Ag man sees the state of that place.’
‘Did you warn her of that?’
‘I didn’t get the chance,’ he said. ‘All I got was a flea in my ear.’
‘She’s probably upset at her husband going off like that. Perhaps if I went up myself …’
‘Try it by all means,’ Charlie said. ‘At least you know what to expect.’
But when Linn went up to Slipfields, she found the door closed against her, and received no answer to her knock.
‘Well, no one can say we haven’t tried. If she wants to shut herself up like that ‒’
‘She’s certainly a very strange woman.’
‘What did I tell you?’ Charlie said. ‘If you’d heard the way she spoke to me! I might’ve been something the cat had brought in by the way she looked down her nose at me!’
‘She had no right to treat you like that when you were only trying to help.’
‘No, well,’ Charlie said. ‘She’ll have to manage as best she can.’
It was a long time since he and Linn had talked like this. They were drawn together, in agreement for once, by the strange behaviour of Mrs Shaw, and Linn even gave a little shocked laugh when Charlie said in a cynical way that perhaps the Major had had good cause for going off and leaving her.
‘I shouldn’t care to live up there, with chickens in and out of the house, pecking about on the kitchen table.’
‘Now you’re just making it up!’
‘Oh no I’m not. It’s true, every word. The door was open and I saw it myself.’
‘I suppose she just can’t cope with it all. Perhaps if you were to go up again, now she’s had time to think about it, she might be a bit more sensible.’
‘What, go up there a second time, just to get my head bitten off? No, not likely! That’s asking too much.’
But after a while, as Linn persisted, Charlie gave in and agreed to go. He felt he could do anything when he and Linn were at one like this; talking together so comfortably; looking at things in the same way and finding something to laugh about. He felt a new surge of confidence that their old understanding would be restored and that all the niggling grievances that had somehow grown up in the past few years would now be put away at last.
‘All right, I’ll go. But only because you ask me, mind! If the decision had been mine I’d have left her to stew in her own juice!’
Seedtime and Harvest (The Apple Tree Saga Book 5) Page 20
