June 1943, Hathaway Farm, Sussex
She lay on her bed, sipping black-market parsnip poteen from a tin cup and reading The Private Life of Helen of Troy. The room was painted white and had mould patches coming through on one wall, which the landlady treated with vinegar once a week. It never went away, that smell. There were no framed pictures up and the blankets on the beds were a scratchy wool. She had a small bedside table, the only furniture provided. Inside the top drawer were photographs of her children, which she kissed every night, and one of Bart, which she included for appearances only. She kept her cigarettes and stockings (both very desirable items) in a locked suitcase.
Bettina’s roommate Bunty had been sent home two days ago. She was a spoiled, whining eighteen-year-old, conscripted. She’d tried to get out of it, supposedly even asking her rich uncle to pull some strings, but her family were fiercely patriotic and felt she should muck in like everyone else. Having endured the little snot for three months, Bettina wondered if they’d just wanted to get rid of her for a while. On her first day Bunty was given the job of picking maggots out of the sheep’s wool, and she’d cried the whole time. Every night she threw herself on her bed like a terrible debutante, but on her first day off she went to visit the nearby village and found it full of yummy Yank soldiers. Quick as a click she cheered up, and soon adjusted to the 4.30 a.m. starts and gruelling long days of stooking and muckspreading, and a month later, when Bettina saw her picking maggots off the sheep, she was singing, ‘He Wears a Pair of Silver Wings’ in a pretty, wispy soprano.
Now she was back in her family home, in the family way. So terribly predictable.
Bettina loved having the room to herself. She no longer had to hold in her gas, escaping to the toilet or garden to let it out in long airy hisses. She could read her book without being interrupted and sneak her black-market moonshine without fear of being squealed on.
But now – a knock on the door.
‘Come in!’ said Bettina.
It was Millie the farmer’s wife, trailed by a young woman. Bettina’s eyes immediately went to the suitcase at the end of her bed, which held the bottle of parsnip liquor. Had she locked it? She wouldn’t have forgotten to lock it.
‘Ivy, meet Bettina; Bettina, meet Ivy,’ said Millie.
She smiled at the girl, who was standing just inside the room, looking around with eyes of steel. She was average build and average height. Late twenties, perhaps. Her hair was white-blonde – almost white, actually – and scraped back, hanging in a long unfashionable plait down her back. Her ears stuck out and one of them, at the top, seemed to have a point to it, a little nub. Her eyes were light blue and she was dressed in a plain navy-blue button-down dress and brown shoes of the sort a man would wear. She did not smile back.
‘Breakfast is at half past four,’ said Millie. ‘The bathhouse is downstairs next to the kitchen – you’re permitted one hot bath a week and you must book it in advance. If that doesn’t feel sufficient, and I have been told many times that it is not, well, there’s a sink’ – she pointed at the corner of the room – ‘cold water only, mind.’
Ivy nodded.
‘It goes without saying, but I shall say it anyway – no men, no lewd language, keep your squabbles to yourself, and if I ever catch you with black-market produce, that’s it for you. Dutch will assign you your jobs. Ask him after supper and you’ll find him in a good mood.’ Millie looked at Bettina. ‘You in here again on your day off?’
‘You make me sound like a hermit.’
‘Everyone else is at Shirley’s.’ Shirley’s was a café that sold, among other things, delicious leek and potato pasties.
‘Millie, I work and live with these women, and delightful as they are, I sometimes like my own company.’
‘Well, at least someone does,’ Millie said, laughing, then left.
Ivy crept further into the room.
‘She loves me really,’ said Bettina.
‘I’m sure,’ said Ivy, still not smiling, her pale eyes steadily taking in her surroundings. She was very composed, Bettina thought, possessing a self-assuredness, a staunch poise. And yet she had the air of someone about to be hanged.
She barely spoke to Ivy in the following weeks – she found her dull, humourless and difficult to engage with. Ivy was a very private person, and unlike the other girls who went around in their bras and slips at night, would insist on getting dressed and undressed under her bedclothes. She didn’t even like to eat in front of other people.
Ivy got on well with farm life, working hard and uncomplainingly, even during the week in which it rained non-stop and the swampy fields sucked boots off feet. She’d been a secretary to a lawyer’s office in Liverpool and had never married, which put paid to bed the idea that she was a grief-stricken widow. Like Bettina, she read avidly, often spending her free time at the public library in town. The only sounds in their otherwise silent bedroom were the papery fluttering of turned pages and the muted clearing of throats.
On Bettina’s thirty-ninth birthday, the girls arranged a viewing of The Mortician in the barn, which was rigged up as a temporary cinema once a month with bales of hay to sit on. Afterwards they drank watered-down cherry brandy and sang war songs. They talked about their husbands or fiancés, most of whom were abroad, fighting, and their children. Everyone at some point cried.
It was almost midnight when Bettina returned to her room. Ivy was awake in bed – Bettina had the sense she’d been waiting for her.
‘I didn’t know you were married to Bartholomew Dawes,’ she said, unravelling her plait with nimble fingers.
‘Oh? It never came up.’
‘He’s my favourite actor and The Mortician is my favourite picture. Though I much prefer the book it’s based on.’
Bettina let her dress drop to the ground and kicked it away.
‘I used to watch it with my best friend,’ said Ivy, averting her eyes. ‘It was her favourite film too. I think we watched it eight times together.’
‘I never had you down for a fan of the macabre,’ said Bettina.
‘I’m not. That’s not why I like the film, or the book.’
‘Then why? My husband?’
‘It’s the subtext I’m drawn to.’
Bettina pulled her nightdress over her head. ‘What subtext is that?’
Ivy’s fingers combed through her long wavy hair. ‘Well. I suppose … I suppose it’s about those who aren’t accepted by society. Who are punished for … I don’t know. Outsiders, in short. The book captures it better.’
Bettina put out her cigarette and climbed into bed. ‘My husband says the book has a homosexual subtext.’ She looked over at Ivy, coolly. ‘Is that what you mean?’
‘Of course not!’ Ivy turned off the lamp and Bettina smiled into the darkness.
The following week Ivy was put on the anti-vermin squad in order to temporarily replace a girl who’d inhaled cyanide through a faulty gas mask and was now being treated for respiratory problems at the hospital. Ivy claimed to have a strong stomach and Mags said, ‘Just as well, we’ve a bloody big bunch of moles to go after today.’
The team cycled to a farm six miles north. There were five of them – Bettina, Ivy, Mags and two uncouth young girls called Sadie and Joyce who had worked as maids before the war and were enjoying life much better now. They were on a winding country lane, lined with hedgerows and fat luscious oaks. Bettina liked the way the sunlight went through the trees, dappling the road ahead with hundreds of small diamonds. In moments of quiet she thought about Tabby and Monty. Last time they’d written, Monty had said he was getting ‘obsessed’ with cartoon strips, and was trying to create his own – he’d always been good at drawing. Tabby told her she was almost fluent in Welsh now, diolch yn fawr, and that she’d got so good at shearing that the farmer was paying her a liquorice strip per sheep. ‘How funny that we are both, mother and daughter, working the land. I just can’t imagine you in a pair of wellies!’
Bettina rode behind Ivy, watching how her long white plait thumped up and down on her back as she went over bumps. She was wearing the regulation blouse and her beige dungarees were belted high on the waist, making a plump upside-down love heart of her rear.
Overhead – a plane. They looked up and braked in unison and there was that terrible moment of feeling like the ground had turned to water. Friend or foe? The dot became a blob became a plane – Bettina could see the whirlpool of its propellers. Friend or foe?
‘Take cover!’ roared Mags, dropping her bike to the ground with a clatter, vaulting over the small stone wall and running for a cluster of trees – they were in a spot, thankfully, surrounded by woods. The others went off in different directions as they’d been taught. Except for Ivy – she followed Bettina. A great rat-a-tat as the plane unloaded its artillery; a brown explosion of turf appearing just to the left of Bettina, its dust coating her sweaty face – of course they were aiming at her, there were two of them, what did that silly bitch think she— Another eruption of mud to her right. The trees were close ahead – three large oaks. She sprinted, her boot catching in a dip and her ankle twisting – she didn’t feel it. Her heart was pounding, her ears were pounding, her bloody eyeballs were pounding and all that existed in the world was a tunnel of green and the god-like rush of adrenaline. She reached the first tree and dived into a sunken place at the base of the trunk. Ivy jumped in next to her. Another hail of bullets, directly overhead – small branches and twig dust and hundreds of leaves falling around them, on them. Then the slow fade as the plane retreated. Then silence.
‘Fucking hell,’ said Bettina, pulling her cigarettes from her trouser pocket and lighting up with a shuddering hand. Ivy was huddled down next to her, very still. ‘What were you thinking, coming after me like that?’ she said to her. ‘You as good as put a target sign over our heads.’
Ivy’s irises were perfect ice-blue ponds. ‘They tried to kill us,’ she said.
‘Yes, that’s what they do.’ Idiot.
‘They tried to kill us.’
‘Well. We’re alive, aren’t we?’
‘Everyone all right?’ called Mags, from a few trees over.
‘Yes!’ called Bettina, and there were three answering cries.
Bettina helped Ivy up, cigarette wedged between her lips. They came out from their trees and met on the road, looking up at the sky.
‘Bloody close one, that,’ said Mags.
Sadie’s bike had been hit and one wheel was mangled so she hopped onto Joyce’s handlebars. They all climbed a steep hill with ease, amped up as they were on residual adrenaline, and as they reached the top they saw, many miles ahead, dark, dark smoke pluming out from a just-bombed blip on the horizon – possibly the small, privately owned aircraft hangar one town over. That would make sense. And the pilot, after achieving his objective and turning around to head back over the channel, sees a few civilians plodding up a lane, and thinks, Well, why not? Got a few rounds left.
Just before the farm was a lane on the left and Mags abruptly turned into it, the others following. The lane led to a pub called the Greasy Goose. ‘Think we could all do with a shot for our nerves, what?’ said Mags, standing up in her seat and pumping up the small hill.
The pub was empty except for a trio of old farmers and a group of soldiers sharing a bowl of pork scratchings. The women ordered a shot of rum each. Then another. Ivy had never touched alcohol before and grew tipsy. She started to talk, to actually talk.
‘I thought I was going to die, I thought I was dead meat, and then I thought about what a dull life I’ve led and I remembered this time when I was ten and these other children were all planning on knocking off school to go swimming in the lake – it was a very hot day – and it all sounded so dreadfully fun, and they were saying to me, “Come on, Ivy, it’ll be a lark, don’t be a spoilsport, it’s the end of term,” but I wouldn’t go. I went to school and saw their empty seats and felt this horrid pang. And I remembered all this as I was haring for cover, and I thought, “I should’ve gone. I really should’ve gone.” What a strange thing to think about!’
Her smile was transforming.
‘Well, slap my arse and call me Rosie,’ said Sadie in her gravelly Lancashire drawl. ‘The lady speaks.’
You had to get to know shy people – that’s what everyone said – you had to wait for their wit and character to seep out in little trickles. Bettina had never had the patience to wait. Shy people were absolute bores. But Ivy! What a turnaround. There in the pub, her character did not so much trickle as spew out of her. Actually, she would not shut up. And the drink – she liked the drink.
‘My father would tan my hide if he saw me drinking spirits, but guess what? It’s bloody marvellous and I don’t care. Let’s get another.’
The other women looked at each other, amused.
‘In fact,’ continued Ivy, ‘I can’t help thinking that we’re all going to die soon, so we might as well enjoy ourselves. Does anyone have a cigarette?’
Bettina gave her one and Ivy predictably coughed her guts up.
‘What do you want to try next?’ said Sadie. She aimed a thumb at the soldiers. ‘What about them?’
‘Ooh, I like the one with the ’tache,’ said Joyce.
‘No thanks,’ said Ivy, with nude aversion.
‘You got a fella back home?’ said Sadie.
‘No. And I don’t want one either. Men are rats.’
‘Men are a darn sight harder to kill than rats,’ said Mags, laughing.
‘So have you never had a fella?’ said Sadie.
Ivy shook her head.
‘We have a virgin in our midst,’ cooed Joyce.
Bettina looked at Ivy, at the blotchy blush on her throat. A virgin in the technical sense only. Plain as day. She imagined Ivy naked, on all fours with her labia poking out like grapefruit segments, and felt a searing hot tingle down there. What would she be like? Frenzied. Animalistic. Repressed people were like that, supposedly. All prim and proper until their clothes came off, and then biting and scratching and screaming, a snarl of impulse. A locked safe exploded wide open.
Ivy retched into the toilet bowl. Bettina held her plait aloft and rubbed her shoulders.
‘There, there, get it all out.’
A groan, a horrible gulp and then more retching.
Ivy sat up, wiping her mouth with a cloth. Her face was off-white, her forehead dotted with sweat. She still looked drunk. ‘I’m not queer, you know,’ she said.
‘I didn’t say you—’
‘It’s not queer if you only ever loved the one woman.’
‘Of course not,’ said Bettina. ‘Of course not.’
‘It doesn’t make me—’ She suppressed a burp, her hand on her breastbone. ‘I’m normal. Never mind all your talk of subtext.’
Oh, she was adorable.
Bettina squeezed her arm. ‘I believe you.’