When, on 7 May, the Board of Trade announced that red, white and blue bunting not costing more than one and three a square yard was to be sold without coupons, Georgia had no interest in anything other than that her waters had broken and Hyacinth Jepp was awaiting the first birthing she had attended at Croud Cantle for decades.
And on 8 May, when it was announced that there were to be two days national holiday to celebrate victory, Georgia had already given birth prematurely by about three weeks. The baby was a girl named Dixie who, Hyacinth declared, was so beautiful that she hurt your eyes enough to fair make them water.
Nick, who had for a while been in and out of hospital, nursed Dixie for hours in his slowly healing arms and said that she was balm for the soul. He still had many puckered scars, his lungs were clearing, but his throat was still quite gravelly. He and John Honeycombe had taken to one another at once, and since Nick’s discharge from the Fire Service, John had taken Nick under his wing and vowed to have him back on his feet in six months.
The old farmer had taken up residence in one of the Cantle village alms-houses, but Hyacinth had stayed on, ‘Just till you’m over the birthing, Georgia’, revelling in ‘putting a bit of flesh on Pete’s little bones’ and cadging baby wool and clothing coupons for Georgia’s baby. For those months of waiting, except that Nick’s father’s health was deteriorating, life in the cottage was placid. John Honeycombe would sit on in the evening, telling Pete true and untrue tales about the old days when he was a sparky lad the same age as Pete, until Hyacinth would shoo him off home until next day when he would return to tend the animals and teach Nick the basics of running the small mixed farm.
It seemed as though as soon as Georgia had made her decision to retreat to Cantle, her condition began to be obvious. Hitherto, that state of mind in which she tried to ignore her condition had kept her flat and slim. Before she left, she had written a short note to Ursula apologizing for her sudden departure, but explaining nothing except that Nick had had an accident and that she was going to look after Pete. She felt disloyal to the women with whom she had discovered love and friendship, but she felt so desperate about her situation that she wished only to cut herself off and to start again.
She took Pete away from the Markham school, leaving his head teacher with the impression that the boy was returning to his mother in Bristol.
She arranged for the now ailing Robert Crockford to go into a residential home where he would be properly cared for. As well as making the journey back and forth to visit Nick in hospital.
And, as soon as he was released, she brought Nick to Croud Cantle Farm.
Then, having settled Pete in the village school, Nick to recuperate before the great ingle fireplace and later in the open air of the farm, Georgia began to put into action the plan about which she had told Eve. Because of all the unexpected responsibilities that had gnawed away at the substance of her plan, it was in tatters.
Her plan had been to live at the farm, employ a foreman to run it, whilst she gave herself two years in which to see whether she could write a successful book. But having admitted to herself that her aching ribs and missing Curse were not caused by lack of vitamin B but due to being pregnant, and having taken on the care of Pete and Nick, the only bit of her dream that she salvaged was to try to write the book that had been gathering like a boil on her mind. Something good came out of it though, for now that Hyacinth and Uncle John saw that the farm was safe in Honeycombe hands, they continued to tend the place as they had always done.
Within days of coming to Cantle, Georgia bought what appeared must be the only available typewriter in Hampshire, and set about writing as though time was terribly short. During odd moments of idleness in her office she had made a map of a fictional town and worked out a plot and a resolution. During her five months of waiting, that map and plan gradually became a mystery story with some love interest. A publisher’s reader reported that ‘some of the love scenes in which the detective, Miss Fern Goodlands, was involved, are perhaps somewhat “spicy” for the readership’ and that ‘an attractive woman sleuth is a somewhat avant-garde idea for such a thriller’.
The publisher, however, saw the chance of publicity in a curvaceous sleuth named Fern, and offered a contract.
The success of Georgia Kennedy’s first book led to a contract for others. By the time Dixie was ten years old, her mother was becoming famous for the sexual adventure of her female characters, her winding plots, violated corpses and dramatic endings. Dixie was not the only one to ask, ‘Why do you always write about death, Ma?’ Indeed, it is something that Georgia Kennedy herself would have liked explained to her.
Nick had to accept the fact that she would never marry him, but was content that they live together as lovers. When Georgia became pregnant with Tessa, she was not carelessly gotten as was Pete, or accidentally as was Dixie.
When her divorce became absolute, Georgia legally took back her old name – Honeycombe.
Once having settled on the farm in that Hampshire valley, she and her family never left. As Georgia’s books brought in ever-increasing royalties, she was able to buy land that had once belonged to her family and acres that had been neglected and bring it all back to the extraordinary fertility that had once made the valley part of the foodbowl of England. She bought derelict cottages and abandoned farmhouses, and restored and extended Croud Cantle where her forebears had lived for two hundred years.
From time to time, she thought about the Town Restaurant Women, she always read the Markham Clarion, saving any bits about the families she had known. When Leonora had her first success in the theatre, Georgia subscribed to a clippings service.
In 1989, fifty years after the incident that had brought the women together, Georgia Honeycombe had returned to Markham for the first time since she had left it.