After waving Meriel off from Victoria, Simmie ferreted in her bag for her own return ticket and hurried off across the station in search of the Lewes train. For once she’d had the forethought to wire Mrs Ashby to send Cheal with the trap for her, and it was more than her life was worth to miss the Seaford connection.
By now the rail journey down through Sussex was almost as familiar to Simmie as Sellington itself. Yet she’d never been able to complete it, not once, without recalling that distant pre-war summer with the bicycles, and Meriel in her absurd motoring cap, and Ned’s beloved chalk hills shimmering up out of the hayfields to meet them. She wiped the grimy carriage window with the back of her glove to watch the drab November landscape racketing by. MISSING, PRESUMED DEAD – MISSING, PRESUMED DEAD; wheels and rails and gusts of sooty steam. MISSING, PRESUMED DEAD – PRESUMED DEAD – DEAD – DEAD – DEAD…
Poor Ned had gone, his day was done. She found that she could face that now, because she had to. Because however she might long to yield to Gladys’ promptings to return to London, she knew that there was work for her to do in Sussex. She must be there to help Meriel to face it as well when she returned, as Simmie knew she would, empty-handed from her trip to France. She must be there to help those little boys who were so much in need of her support, with their mother away and no one to ‘Betty them’, poor lambs.
So it was that Simmie found herself in her usual place between the stolid Belgian couple at the foot of the Bury dinner table that night, after the usual struggle to settle the boys and the usual last minute scramble into evening dress. For whatever else she might concede to war, Margaret Ashby took no prisoners when it came to dressing for dinner. There were empty places at her table now where her son and grandson had once sat. Two years had passed since she’d employed a lady’s maid. Unaided, it took her the best part of an hour to do her hair and get herself into her decent black brocade. But still she insisted on doing so each evening without fail, and in forcing her family and guests to do the same. She was like the taciturn old shepherd who moved his Southdown flocks each day from the farm up to the hills and back again. They were both of a generation who never had lowered their standards, and never willingly would do so.
After a full year of residence at The Bury, Simmie was almost as much in awe of Ned’s grandmother as she had been on the day that sonorous voice first echoed through the hall at Harpur Street; and at dinner that evening she’d flinched just as she had that first time when the old lady’s penetrating blue eye alighted on her.
‘So you’ve decided to come back to us then after all,’ Mrs Ashby bellowed down the length of the dining table, ‘when we all quite thought you’d be press-ganged into carryin’ Meri’s suitcase for her halfway to the Somme. Not that I’m complainin’,’ she continued before Simmie could think of anything to say. ‘The gel’s no business to go chargin’ off like a breachy bullock when she’s needed here at home, Miss Sims. If she only had the sense to stay put a little longer…’
‘Well I don’t blame her, Grannie!’
Helen’s voice, taut, harsh and quite unlike her, took even Mrs Ashby by surprise. ‘At least she hasn’t given up on Ned yet, has she? At least she’s still thinking about her husband, when all anyone else ever thinks about round here are cows and sheep and useless crop rotations – and useless war memorials for men who’re never going to come back anyway!’
Poor, busy little Helen, who’d tied herself up so thoroughly in bandages and balaclavas at the War Hospital Supply Depôt that she’d missed her one real chance of breaking free; an old maid already at the age of thirty-two. ‘I hate it, hate the war!’ she cried recklessly. ‘It’s just about killed everything worthwhile. Well hasn’t it? Not just Ned, but every man I ever danced with, dead now or crippled; and none of us are ever going to dance again. Not me or Meriel or anyone!’
‘As I remember, Miss, you weren’t exactly famous for yer twinklin’ toes before the war,’ her grandmother remarked. ‘But listen to me, Helly – there is a future for Meriel here in this valley. A fair one too if she’s prepared to face it; an’ the same applies to all of us including you.’ The old lady pulled herself up in her chair, with more authority and conviction than Simmie had seen in her since the day she’d stepped so confidently onto the flimsy roof of the boys’ hut. ‘Gumption; that’s what we’re goin’ to need,’ she said, ‘an’ good strong boots, my gel, not dancin’ pumps. Miss Sims knows what I mean.’
And if Simmie had no more than a vague idea just then of what her hostess meant, she wouldn’t stay in ignorance for long. In the past Mrs Ashby had been more or less content to leave the daily running of the estate to Walter and Ned, and to their foreman, Shad Caldwell, except where her red Sussex cattle were involved. But the war had changed all that. With Ned’s return to the front in February, and Shad’s death six months later, the old lady had the farm cash books and ledgers brought up to her own writing desk – seeing, as she put it, that she was the only one left now who knew what they were about. Then finally, with Meriel in France and most of her employees still to be demobbed, she’d telephoned the estate trustees in Lewes to tell them that she’d oversee the farm herself. Never mind that she had only old men, women and children to call on, or that she herself was eighty-four. It was a case, she said, of marshalling resources. All hands to the pump.
The old gardener, Zacky Cheal, was needed now to drive the milk float and take the boys to school in Seaford, while the indoor staff, including a resentful Gladys, was asked to help him in the garden. Helen had been pressed into service in the stables and cow stalls, with grudging assistance from the Waedemons. At weekends, Patrick and Robbie and the Belgian boys fed pigs and poultry and collected the eggs. And from the day of her return from London, Simmie found to her surprise that she would have to do the same all through the week. As an example to them all, old Mrs Ashby herself now rose before dawn each morning, to dress with her usual deliberation in an old mackintosh of Ned’s tied with a length of binder twine around the waist. The Agricultural Committee had agreed that the Land Army girls would stay on in the milking sheds into the new year of 1919. But they needed supervision, Mrs Ashby said. So at six each morning she toddled out into the darkened yards, with a lantern in one hand and her trusty stick in the other, to see the milk churns filled and loaded for their journey to the station.
To say that she was serious about the business was like saying that fire burnt or ice was cold. It seemed to Simmie as she watched her, that she managed somehow to be always where she was most needed, waving her stick, shouting encouragements and criticisms, driving them as hard as she drove herself. Within days of the Belgian family’s eventual departure for Antwerp, Mrs Ashby had convinced the military authorities of the need to return Dan Goodworth to the farm – and in amongst it all found time still for an unexpected trip to London, her first in five years; to go over the farm books, she said, with her accountant in Chancery Lane.
‘But if you’re thinkin’ of coming with me, Helly, you can think again,’ she stated baldly. ‘For one thing you’re needed here, gel, on the farm, and for another I’m not so ancient yet I hope that I can be trusted to step out of a train into a taxi without breakin’ my damn neck!’ And although she had returned that evening ashen with exhaustion, it hadn’t stopped her rising at her usual hour next morning, to plod off into the frosty dawn with her stick and her lantern to see the milk churns loaded.
For all her admiration of the old lady’s stamina, Simmie found it difficult to share her appetite for farm work. Nobody had bothered to instruct her in the mysteries of agriculture, beyond the simple demonstrations that she needed for her tasks. In contrast to the neatly overalled Land Army girls she felt awkward in the slosh and bustle of the farm. However carefully she hoisted up her skirts or picked her way across the yards, she invariably came back muddy and reeking shamingly of pigs. Then everywhere around the place she felt the lingering sadness of Ned’s absence; a thing that Daniel Goodworth’s reappearance in the valley had done nothing to dispel. Over the years she had retained her first impression of the man as a young giant with a cheery twinkle in his eye. But the war had left its mark on Dan as well. Something of the army captain still clung to him as he moved around the farm. Four years in the trenches had removed the twinkle from his eye; and Simmie always felt a little nervous before the grave assurance of his stare.
It was not on the farm but in the nurseries that she earned her keep that autumn of ’18. Ned’s little boys, the books she read them and the games they played, were her especial joy. And the knowledge that the love she gave, helped them to keep the cruel world at bay, was in the end all the reward she needed.
The wire bringing news of Meriel’s return to Sellington, arrived soon after breakfast on the first Monday of the boys’ Christmas holiday. The boys themselves were both out in the hall with Simmie, seeing Mrs Ashby off on another of her precipitate accounting trips to London – and all of them watched anxiously as she tore open the yellow envelope.
‘Eleven-forty train this mornin’. You’ll have yer mother back in time for lunch.’ The old lady waved the telegram at her great-grandsons. ‘An’ not before time, either,’ she added gruffly as she caught the look on Patrick’s face, and turned away to thrust another hatpin through the crown of her black tricorn hat.
‘No sense in Cheal gettin’ into mischief between trains,’ she boomed down at Simmie minutes later from the trap, and without a glance at man beside her on the seat. ‘I’ll send him back for the old governess-cart, so you can take the boys to meet her. And when you do, Miss Sims, would you do me the kindness of tellin’ Meri that I’ll want to see her this afternoon the moment I get back from town. She’s not to gallivant off round the farm until we’ve spoken. Is that clear?’
Meriel stepped down from the Seaford train pale, red-nosed, bunged up with cold, but unsubdued.
‘Don’t be ridiculous, I never get colds, Simmie,’ she snapped, chivvying the boys out through the ticket gate towards the waiting cart. ‘Up you go then, Patrick and you, Robbie. Jump in, chop-chop! Thank you, Cheal, but I’ll be driving home – and in the name of goodness, just stop fussing, woman! I’m fine I tell you, never better.’
To prove it she filled the journey down through Cuckmere and up the long hill to Gibbet Cross with complaints about the railways, and an endless list of questions for the luckless Cheal on where we were with ploughing and with threshing, and on how the winter feed was holding out – talking nineteen to the dozen, plugging every gap in conversation with cries of exasperation at the horse’s plodding pace, and successfully avoiding the mute question in her son Patrick’s eyes.
It was the same through luncheon. She never drew breath, barely touched Cook’s pudding, and jumped up straight afterwards to march the boys off for a brisk walk on the downs.
‘But darling, do you think that’s wise?’
Simmie followed them out onto the porch, to find Meriel forcing Patrick into a pair of boots that were clearly far too small. ‘You know that Mrs Ashby wants to see you just as soon as she gets in; she’s absolutely set on it. So if you leave now, dear, I really can’t think that you’ll be back before she is.’
‘You bet your life we won’t. Here Puck, here boy – now where’s that old mutt got to? Go and find him will you, Robbie?’
Meriel wrenched the belt of her mackintosh a notch tighter and turned to face her friend. ‘The best thing to do when G. M. gets a bee of any kind into her bonnet, is to make yourself as scarce as possible until she simmers down.
‘And don’t think you’re getting out of this that easily yourself, Simmie,’ she added. ‘Anyone can see that you could do with a good blow. Go on then. Don’t just stand there, woman, go and get your coat!’
The wind had got up during luncheon; and Meriel’s idea of a ‘good blow’ turned out to be closer to a gale; tearing up the combe, to howl through the Bury wood and send rooks flapping off in all directions like pieces of burnt rag. Simmie had always loathed the way that high winds buffeted and tugged at you, clawed your hair out from its pins and made you look a scarecrow. But she set her teeth to go with Meriel because she asked her to – and because for all her bombast there was a desperate tension in her that scared Simmie rigid. ‘Keep back,’ it seemed to say. ‘Don’t crowd me and don’t make me talk about it – just do as I am asking, Simmie, please!’
Patrick sensed it too. You could tell it from the way he walked close in beside his mother half-enveloped in her mac, watching her intently as she spoke, bravely holding back the questions he so needed to ask about his father. But Robbie was another case entirely – so thrilled to see his mother, and so excited to be allowed out in a gale that he could think of nothing else. ‘Look at me, Mummy! Look, Simmie; I’m leaning on the wind,’ he cried. ‘It’s holding me all by itself!’
They looked and laughed, and Meriel reacted to her charmingly self-centred younger boy with a sense almost of relief. ‘If you lean back any further you’ll fall flat,’ she shouted back at him, ‘and serve you right, you ragamuffin!’
She hadn’t said where she was taking them. But Simmie thought she knew, and why. They all heard the sea before they saw it; hissing, growling, waiting for them like some gigantic spume-flecked monster in the gap between the cliffs. ‘So let’s go down to see the waves,’ suggested Meriel, ‘I’ve never seen so high a tide!’
All the urban comfort-lover in Simmie longed for the peace and safety of the Bury nursery with the children warm and dry inside beside the fire. But if it helped their mother to have her there, to watch her pit the violence that she felt inside against the force of nature, why then of course it’s where she had to be. So instead of begging Meriel to turn back to the house, she’d forced herself to scramble up behind the boys into the creaking old machine that they’d used in the past for bathing – to whoop with them as each wave broke against its sodden steps, and leave them whooping, laughing at the spray, while she caught up with Meri further down the beach.
‘Meriel, I know you’re desperately upset,’ she shouted through the wind. ‘But dear, you’ve got to stop this dangerous pretence…’ But Meriel was heedless, crunching on across the shingle, and Simmie realised that she hadn’t heard.
She tried again. ‘Darling, can you bear to tell me…? DARLING, CAN YOU HEAR ME?’
‘Well then, what is it, Simmie?’ And faced suddenly with Meri’s chalk-white, frowning face, Simmie faltered.
Before she could collect herself, the sound of a dog barking – a sudden change in the children’s voices – jerked her attention back to the old bathing machine, and to the sea!
Next moment she’d siezed Meriel’s arm, to clutch her, drag her round. Then they were running, both of them; running, tearing frenziedly back down the beach.
‘Oh no – oh God, oh no! Those precious children, in the water – out in that dreadful sea!’
Two heads; two terrified white faces lifted desperately above the waves. Fighting for their lives out in the swell beyond the capsized bathing machine.
‘God of heaven, help them! HELP THEM!’ Simmie couldn’t swim, she’d never learned – could only stand with the waves drenching, buffeting her body; to stretch her arms out helplessly across the water; while a gull above her soared, side-slipped and mocked her with its laughter.
‘Coastguard! For God’s sake, Simmie, FETCH THE COASTGUARD!’ She glimpsed Meriel briefly, stripped to her petticoat as she shot past into the surf. Then Simmie found herself running again – panting, sobbing in her anguish. ‘Don’t let them drown, please – oh please God, don’t let those little boys drown!’ The wet shingle slipped and shifted as she ran towards the cottages, delaying her and wasting precious time…
They put Patrick to bed with a hot-water bottle as soon as they could get him dry; and Simmie sat beside him on a hard nursery chair – talking to him, stroking the dark hair back from his forehead, waiting for the sedative to work.
But Meriel refused to see the doctor. All evening she paced to and fro across the windows of the dining room – watching for lanterns, for the first sign of the returning search parties. ‘They haven’t found him you see, G.M. Nobody’s found him yet – and I’ll tell you why. Because he’s still alive, that’s why! He’s out there sheltering under the cliffs somewhere. I know I’m right. You’ll see I am – they’ll find him when the tide goes down.’
But when they found him the next morning, it hadn’t been beneath the cliffs. They found him floating face-down between the anchored vessels in Newhaven harbour further down the coast. Margaret Ashby insisted on going in his mother’s place to identify Robbie’s pitiful, battered little body. And when she returned at dusk; smaller, frailer, more subdued than anyone had ever known her, it was to find Meriel back at her old post at the dining room window. Standing with her arms straight at her sides. Staring out into the December twilight.
The old lady set her face and went in to speak to her alone, closing the door behind her. Later she sent out for the doctor. But they still had to administer the bromide by subterfuge, disguised in a hot mug of cocoa.
Meriel resisted sleep for as long as she could manage it. Sleep was like death, and she wouldn’t have it. She lay listening to a clock chiming the quarters, to the stealthy whisper of Simmie’s knitting needles outside in the hall. She pressed her two thumbs to her temples, deliberately tightening the band of conscious tension behind her eyes. But in the end it was the tension itself that overwhelmed her, insidiously, by changing into a great weight to drag her down – down into the dark whirlpool of her own subconscious mind.
Then she was sliding, stumbling down a scree of shifting shingle. Black sea. Worn flints dripping with moisture, moving beneath her feet – carrying her downwards. And there before her, running hard, a hooded figure; someone she feared yet had to follow. The sloping tunnel, green with slime, closed in around them as they ran; she and the hooded figure. Then suddenly he turned in her path to fling something straight at her. It struck her on the cheek. Something small and hard. Next moment she’d passed through a door into a vast subterranean chamber, where men sat eating with their backs towards her. Then on and on – alone now, through more doors, deeper, damper, further from the surface. Until at last she came to a small lamplit room, where children perched on benches between hooded gaolers, swaying, back and forth, from side to side – and Robbie there amongst them as she’d known he would be. Pale and thin with great dark rings beneath his eyes. Ned’s eyes…
Meriel stretched out a hand to touch him. He was real; she could feel the bones beneath his skin – and then before anyone could stop her, she’d scooped him up into her arms, to run with him, back up the steep passageway. Back through the doors – door after door. Back through the cavern where the men sat eating. Up the long slope to the surface.
In the distance she could see a faint circle of daylight reflected on the walls of the entrance; and standing out against it, the thing she feared – the malevolent hooded figure who had led her down. She had to pass him. Get Robbie past him, there was no other way. And all the time the child was growing heavier in her arms. Growing to a man now – becoming Ned. And all the time the slope was getting steeper. Climbing to the entrance. Climbing to the daylight…
But he was there, the figure! He blocked her path, moving towards her, lifting up his face for her to see… a Chinese face, expressionless, the colour of old parchment; the face of the Somme!
He pointed, terrifyingly. ‘Warloy, I am Warloy,’ he cried. ‘Warloy needs him. His Country needs him – give the child to me!’
‘No, no! I need him more, a damn sight – damn sight – damn sight more!’
Meriel pushed at him, struggled to get past. But the shingle was moving, moving again beneath them – the man’s long bony fingers reached for Robbie, fastened round him, dragged him – dragged him – dragged Ned from her arms…
‘No! No! NO!’
She was sweating, weeping, struggling with all her strength to hold them. Not to wake. Not to wake, for God’s sake, and find her arms were empty!
After she’d woken, Meriel lay quite still, listening to the sound of the wind in the beeches, the chiming clock, the gurglings of the water pipes behind her bed, while the sweat dried cold upon her skin.