After they had left the bounds of Markham, it was obvious that something big was about to happen.
Among the trees that bounded pasture and meadows, along the hedged margins of potato and cornfields, in stands of timber, in orchards, spinneys, forests and woodlands and every piece of land large enough to take a cookhouse or tent, soldiers were encamped.
The British nation had been waiting for D-Day for months. The Americans – who had received a warm reception when they had eventually come into the war, now took second place in British affections to the Russians. Uncle Joe Stalin and his suffering people had revived the War Effort which had become tedious in its endlessness. But it was GI Joe who was encamped in southern England. Thousands of young Americans, many of them black, were a curiosity to children – and their source of undreamt-of sweetness in the form of Hershey bars. Newly arrived, these soldiers had had no time to meet the locals in the way that the first-comers had met the Partridges. The closest to the local population these encamped Americans got was to offer gum or Lucky Strikes to passers-by. Few had much idea of where they had been dumped. Hamp-shier? As in Noo Hampshire, well, wadda ya know!
They had a better idea of why they were there. The Big Push, the Second Front, D-Day.
As the two women, the girl and the old man rode out into the countryside, they passed long lines of trucks, jeeps and tanks tended by girl-hungry GIs who whistled with appreciation at the display of legs. Say, will ya just get that neat ass! Hey, Doll. Over here, Honey.
‘Just wave, Leonora,’ Georgia said. ‘But for God’s sake don’t fall off or there’s no knowing what might happen to you in those shorts.’
Leonora flushed with pleasure at being included in the intimacy of such adult suggestiveness.
She and Mrs Kennedy had laughingly raced on past the other two and were now leaning against a gate waiting for them.
‘Mrs Kennedy?’
‘Georgia.’
‘Oh, I keep forgetting. Georgia, your friend looks different.’
‘That’s what living in London does for you.’
‘I like her better than before. She looks more… sort of grown-up.’
Georgia laughed. ‘That’s what she said about you.’
Leonora flushed again. ‘Did she really… that I look grown-up? Really? I didn’t think she took much notice of me.’
‘Bloody hell, Lena, with a face and figure like yours at fifteen, there’s never going to be many people who don’t notice you when you’re a woman.’
Leonora turned and leaned on the gate, knowing that the tingling in her breasts she was feeling at Georgia’s compliment would show through her thin white blouse and she still didn’t know how to deal with those signals except to fold her arms across them. She was fascinated with what was happening to her body and she and her small group of friends spent a lot of time comparing the phenomena of their womanliness.
From the top of the hill they watched Eve, Mont and the dog making their way at the pace of Yap and the old man. As they passed a small encampment, soldiers came out and played with the dog. Eve accepted a cigarette and then a whole pack. Even from this distance, it was easy to see that Eve was being charming and vivacious. Leonora observed how it was done. Georgia sat on the step of the stile and Leonora on the grass beside her.
‘I wish that this day would last for ever, Georgia.’
‘Goodness. There’ll be better days than this.’
‘Not when I’ll feel happier than I do now.’
‘There will be. The occasional day that’s going to have some bit of ecstasy.’
‘You mean falling in love?’
‘Not necessarily, it can be…’
Leonora waited, watching her idol, her ideal, as her mind drifted to thoughts that made her eyes soften and her mouth lift, almost talking to herself as though Leonora was not there.
‘…it can be fulfilment. Discovering something about yourself that you never suspected.’
‘Like what?’
‘Lena Wiltshire, your mother would have fits if she knew the sort of conversations you lead me into.’
‘That’s why it’s so super being with you. Mum thinks that if she keeps my hair in a pigtail and my legs in lisle stockings and my chest under a gymslip, she can keep me as a child and I’ll not get into “trouble”. But she can never bring herself to say what the trouble is. I know – she means losing my virginity.’
‘You can’t blame her. Because she knows that it would be more than only losing your virginity… I mean, do you even know what a Durex is? A girl of fifteen who looks like you do… I dare say all she sees is trouble. I imagine when she sees your legs growing long enough to reach your bottom and a profile that’s about perfect, she imagines your Dad coming home and finding a pram in the hallway.’
‘Fat lot she knows about me then.’
‘Your Mum’s an attractive woman – she knows what it’s all about. She knows how it feels to think about love and sex. She knows how easy it is to go overboard if the opportunity presents itself at the right time – or rather the wrong time.’
Leonora opened her mouth to exclaim, but Eve and the old man came cycling up. Her mother? Mam, in her funny jumpers made from two or three unravelled old ones, in her ‘turned’ coat and mended stockings, attractive? Thinking about love and sex? And Dad… even when he had joined up he had been old. Could a man like Dad be attractive to a woman other than Mam?
He had been gone for years. A prisoner-of-war in Germany. It was as though he had disappeared from her and Roy’s life. Until recently, when for the first time German POWs had come to Markham and changed her ideas, if she thought of her Dad at all it was as an anonymous man in thick, dark-brown battledress with a huge yellow circle in the middle of the back, an uninteresting, featureless man like any one of the hundreds of Italian POWs who had lived for years in a camp behind a barbed-wire fence on the Winchester road. Scruffy Eyeties who Leonora did not associate with the idea of love and sex. But the German POWs were different from the Eyeties who slouched on the roadsides and smiled. The Germans looked sullen and angry and attractive. Dad would be like them, angry at being imprisoned in Germany.
Perhaps her Mam and Dad were attractive. That was the thing about being with Georgia, she often made one see things in a different light.
As Eve had said, Mont Iremonger proved to be the perfect companion to appreciate the countryside on such a day. He and Georgia had met a few times since she and Eve had become close friends, but he could never feel at ease with her in the way he did with Eve. It no longer seemed strange to him that Eve would let herself into his kitchen and drop into an armchair as easily and familiar as you like.
He sat in flannel shirt, serge trousers with braces and belt, and a well-worn cap, as large and solid as an outcrop of rock on the soft downland. ‘There! Only water-colour sketches, but I reckon I’ve caught the likenesses.’
His subjects exclaimed their delight at the little portraits which were as simple and moving as a Manet sketch. The two women he had done in profile, heads arranged so that seen as a pair they either faced or turned from one another, whilst Leonora he had painted full-length, propped up on her elbows watching skylarks ascending. It was months before she realized that the answer to her thoughts about her ‘old’ father was contained in what the old postman had seen – a girl in the pose of a voluptuous woman. A picture that would have disturbed Mary Wiltshire had she ever seen it.
Georgia and Leonora saw to the food and the boiling of the picnic kettle. Eve, who was edgy at the prospect of starting at the Oaklands Centre, went off with Mont to get firewood. They were easy in one another’s company.
He knew that she never saw her father these days, or went to The Cedars, even though she still had a lot of her things at the old house: her white car on its bricks, her gramophone and jazz records, books and clothes. Mont never talked about all that unless she asked. And coming up the hill she had asked.
‘Is the Councillor still coining it in?’ She no longer called Freddy Hardy, Pa or, my father.
‘So they say, but there, you know Markham for gossiping on about what they don’t know about.’
‘It’s probably true, they don’t miss much in Markham.’
‘They say since he got the contract for supplying all the bread and cakes for the NAAFIs, he’s rich as Croesus.’
‘And the women?’
‘Well… I wouldn’t know about that. The house looks a mess though. He does a lot of partying. He and Vern Greenaway had an up and a downer at a Council meeting apparently.’
‘What about?’
Ever since he had heard the rumour about the affair, Mont had known that it would come to her ears. Best if it came from him. It wasn’t easy.
‘Vern accused him of malpractice or something in front of the whole Finance Committee.’
‘Connie said he fiddled everything, and did not have a straight bone in his body. But she says a lot of bitter things about him.’
‘From all accounts, it’s a bit more than fiddling extra petrol coupons.’ He stopped to throw a stick for Yap. ‘You don’t want to hear all this. It’s probably all a tale… a nine-day-wonder… you know how it is in this place.’
‘Even if it is, I shall feel less of a fool knowing what is being said.’ Ever since she knew that she was to come back to Markham, Eve had made up her mind to clear up the clutter of her life and do some of the things that she should have done ages ago. ‘I intend going up to The Cedars to sort out my stuff, so it’s better if I know.’
‘Well, there’s apparently some sort of investigation going on. He’s supposed to have set up a lot of little companies without declaring his connection with them and giving himself a whole load of valuable contracts. There’s some plans for new housing estates after the war and he’s bought up the land.’
‘And Mr Greenaway found out?’
‘I suppose so… I don’t know that the rest of the Council was bothered – Councillor Hardy always kept them sweet, they knew they’d be sure to get their cut without putting their heads on the block. But you know Vern Greenaway, straight as a die and not afraid to open his mouth. I don’t know if it’s true, but people are saying that there won’t be no hushing it up, it’s being taken to the County and they reckon the Ministry is asking questions.’
‘Thanks for telling me, Monty.’
‘It’s a shame to spoil such a lovely day.’
‘I’m a big grown-up girl now, Monty.’
‘I can still see the little gel in a pink dress and white socks running down the drive for the letters.’
‘I was always so impressed with your uniform – the only uniforms I’d ever seen then was yours and the doorman at the Picture House. Oh dear, Monty, what a family you got yourself mixed up with. I’m surprised that you want to associate with any of us. There’ll be a scandal about this affair… mud sticks and I’m a Hardy.’
‘Don’t put yourself down, my dear. You are the best thing that has happened to Mont Iremonger in forty years or more. Lord love you, what other pensioner gets to take out the three beauties of Markham.’ Fondling and playing with the little dog to cover his embarrassment. ‘An’t that right, little Yap? You and me has a good time together.’