The Wards came to visit John during his first week away, as he had known they would.
‘They’ll check up on me,’ he said, ‘to make sure everything is proper. And then they will leave me alone.’
John was staying, as arranged, at The Royde Inn in Nortonstall, which he had described to his parents as tolerably comfortable. He made a wry face when telling Ella and Beth about it and, when pressed, he confessed that he found it hard to sleep, his rooms being above the bar, which was noisy until late in the evening. The food, still subject to rationing, was less than good, despite the possibilities that the countryside offered in the way of wild and foraged food.
‘Then you must come and stay with us,’ Beth declared. ‘There’s no sense in you being billeted all the way down the hill, staying somewhere that you don’t like, when we are supposed to be looking after you and we have plenty of room here.’
At the time, they were sitting in the parlour of Sarah’s cottage, beside a fire specially lit for the occasion to drive away the chilly March breeze. When they had first arrived there, Ella and Beth had been taken aback by the state of Lane End Cottage.
‘What need do I have for this house now, with you all gone?’ Sarah had demanded. Beth and Ella looked at each other. This querulous tone wasn’t something that they had heard from Sarah before.
‘My bedroom and the kitchen suit my purposes,’ Sarah went on. ‘I’ve shut up the other rooms.’
This meant that the rest of the house felt damp, dusty and very much unloved. During the first week of their visit, when they weren’t keeping John company, Beth and Ella spent as much time as possible restoring order at home. Sarah had grumbled at the unnecessary use of fuel to light a fire and this turned out to be but a symptom of the wider economies that she had been making in their absence. They found very little in the way of food in the house, not even any of the preserves that she had been in the habit of making every autumn for as long as Ella could remember. The furnishings were grubby and Sarah’s clothes were becoming threadbare.
‘It would serve no purpose,’ she said, when they asked her why she hadn’t replaced the worn-out towels, or bought a new coat instead of wearing the one that had seen service since well before the war.
‘What need do I have of new things? There’s no one to see them, and no one comes to visit. I’ll soon be gone, anyway.’
It was said in a matter-of-fact way, with no rancour or accusation directed at them. Nonetheless, Ella and Beth felt cut to the core by what they perceived as their neglect of Sarah and set about putting things to rights as best they could.
It was relatively easy to banish dust and dirt, replacing it with the scent of beeswax polish and freshly laundered linen. Windows that were cleaned until they sparkled and let in the spring light exposed cobwebs lurking in the dimmest corners, which were quickly whisked away. Primroses picked from the hedge bottoms brought a touch of freshness to every room. Yet Sarah’s spirits remained low. It seemed as though she had decided that sixty-two years was to be her allotted lifespan.
‘Do you think she is actually ill?’ Beth asked Ella anxiously, as she perched on the end of her bed.
‘I don’t think so,’ Ella replied. ‘She’s been poorly in the past but there’s no physical illness that I can see now. She’s a bit slower getting around than she used to be, I grant you, but I don’t think it’s that.’ She turned back the covers and prepared to climb into bed.
‘I think she’s lonely and has probably been so for a while. She’s given up on enjoying life, and that attitude has become a habit. She has isolated herself on purpose: she even seems to have given up supplying remedies, too. We’ll have to see what we can do to change this while we’re here.’
Privately, Ella had resolved that Sarah couldn’t be left like this and that it was her duty to return and care for her. With Beattie and Annie both married and living in Leeds with their young families to bring up, Thomas gone and Beth with her whole life ahead of her, she could see no other option. She would return to Grange House at the end of their time here and hand in her notice.
A little reassured, Beth settled down to sleep, leaving her thoughts free to roam down the valley to Nortonstall, to climb the stairs to John’s room in The Royde Inn and to slip into his room to watch over him while he slept, to keep the nightmares at bay.
In the end, it was John who provided a solution to their problem. Ella had been alarmed at Beth’s suggestion that John should come to stay. Not only was she aware of the potential impropriety of the situation, but John was used to the space and luxurious surroundings of Grange House and would undoubtedly find the simplicity of Lane End Cottage not to his taste. She feared an invitation to stay would be an embarrassment to John and an imposition on Sarah.
‘Nonsense!’ Beth stoutly counteracted all her arguments. ‘John can come as a boarder. That should silence any village gossip if it worries you. As for luxury, well I hardly think The Royde Inn provides that, do you?’
So within the week John was installed in the room that had once belonged to Thomas and seemed to find the simplicity of his surroundings very much to his liking. Above all, it was the peace that he found most appealing. By day, the only disturbances were the passage of the occasional farm vehicle or a barking dog. At night, the hoot of the owl was the only sound to pierce the velvety blackness until the sky lifted to grey streaked with orange and the dawn chorus heralded the arrival of another morning.
At first Sarah was reserved around John, keeping her distance and seemingly a little in awe of his social class and status. She started to take an interest in cooking again, though, and when John thanked her enthusiastically for the rabbit stew that she dished up early in his stay, Ella noticed her colour faintly with pleasure.
By the end of his third week, John had written home to let his family know that he felt the stay in the country was doing him good and to beg leave to keep Ella and Beth with him for a further two weeks. When Ella learnt that he had also notified them of his change of temporary address she felt sure that the Wards would summon Beth, or both of them, back to York. However, John’s letter must have been very persuasive, for an answer came back by return, giving them all permission to stay on.
John and Sarah took to staying up late together, in companionable silence in front of the dying embers of the fire. Beth and Ella would exchange looks, then bid the pair of them goodnight and head for the stairs. When they were safely in their room, preparing for bed, Ella would hear the murmur of voices start up from the room below. She could distinguish nothing of what was said, but the tone of the voices seemed to imply that Sarah was asking questions and John was responding, sometimes at length.
After the third such evening, while they were preparing breakfast, Ella plucked up courage to casually ask Sarah what their late-night chats were about.
‘Oh, just the war.’ Sarah was brief.
‘The war?’ Ella was startled.
‘Yes, his experiences at the Front.’ Sarah hesitated. ‘I thought it might help me understand. About Thomas,’ she added when Ella looked at her questioningly. Then, as if to discourage further discussion she bustled about, setting dishes on the table and calling up to the younger folk that breakfast was ready. Beth was going to find it hard to reacquaint herself with the routine and rigours of the Grange House day when she returned, Ella reflected ruefully.
She shared the information about the chats with Beth later, when they walked out to see whether they could spy John returning from one of his lengthy solitary walks.
‘I think I feel even worse about it now,’ Ella confessed. ‘It should have been obvious to me how Ma would grieve over Thomas. And we left her here all alone, until her grief hardened in her heart. That’s why she could see no point in going on.’
Both women walked on in silence, each deep in thought. Ella was reflecting that, for her mother, the death of her only son, Thomas, after the loss of Alice, her first-born, must have been a hard cross to bear. She bitterly regretted not going back to spend more time with her mother after Thomas’s death. It now seemed to Ella that her own grief had somehow been blunted by the sheer number of casualties and bereavements, both amongst people connected with the Ward family and nationwide. Those times had been so strange. For Sarah, up here in Northwaite, it must have been overwhelmingly difficult, shutting herself away, alone with her grief. Ella could see it all so much more clearly now. When she was in York, Northwaite had seemed like a distant dream; now she was here this was reversed and it was York that seemed unreal.
Beth’s reflections were more pragmatic in nature. If John’s presence was useful to Sarah, was there a way of prolonging this? It tied in with something she had been thinking about, and hardly dared to dream but really, was it such an outlandish idea? Could she and John live here permanently, close to her mother?