—

Musk Cottage, Denmead Road, Hambledon, Hants.

Dear Jack,

We hope you don’t mind us calling you by your first name, but Arnold never had hardly any friends. When he was on leave he told us about you and we started to think about you as being Jack as that is what he always called you, excepting when he called you Lofty, and he was always on about you. It meant a lot to him having a friend, something he never had before. By rights he shouldn’t have been in the army. Going about his work here with me and my husband to tell him how to go on he was always all right. There was things that he could do better than anybody because of his patience, as you will know from being with him. He was as honest as the day is long and loyal to a fault. He was not our own as I expect he said, but he was as dear as if he had been our own. More so than some, because we never had none of our own.

In a way I had already made up my mind to it that once they said he was fit for the army that he wouldn’t never come back. We never saw how he could. His father would never let him have a shotgun nor anything like that. We knew what he was like. It was never right to take a boy like that.

We shall pray for you to be returned whole to your family. If there was ever a day when you was this way and felt that you could drop in we should be most grateful.

Yours truly,

Mr and Mrs Herbert Pearce

Queen Alexandra’s in London. Although not far away, he had not been permitted to rest in his own home; the War Office had received too many reports of men nursed at home being delayed in their return to fitness for active service by late nights and roistering.

In many ways Queen Alexandra’s suited Jack. To have been at home with Ess who was still not herself, and his father, towards whom he still felt antagonism, would have been a strain. As it was he was allowed to receive visitors for bearable periods of time. It was only when he saw Kitt that he realized how much he had missed him.

Once, Esther had taken Kitt and Baby to stand with Nancy and wave at a distance. Baby was no longer a baby, and Kitt was a small, solemn schoolboy. To Jack, those changes were a measure of how much of his life had been wasted. Months and long months in a battle over a mile or two of cratered land. Who wanted it? And why? Young men on two sides of no man’s land knew – the British sang it to the tune of ‘Auld Lang Syne’.

We’re here because we’re here because we’re here because we’re here.

We’re here because we’re here because we’re here because we’re here.

Esther herself, pinch-mouthed, thin and aged by years, said that she was almost well and was thinking of going to Mere with Nancy and the children. Jack had thought it a good sign, especially as his antipathy to owning the property was retreating.

Otis seemed to be in fragrant full bloom, her step springy and her shining hair bouncing as, with her arms filled with flowers, she strode through the ward. She had been full of having her status upgraded and of an opportunity to teach in a senior school that she might be getting. ‘I am torn, Jack. I know that the Head is a client of my pa’s and I should not like to get the position because of that. But I can’t tell you how much I want it. I should be the first female on the staff and I so much want to work towards my Master’s degree.’ He had thought she looked almost hungry to bite into that experience. The more unattainable she became, the more he wanted her. But if there was one thing that he had inherited from George Moth, it was a masculine pride that found rejection hard. Gently done though it was, he had already been rejected once, by Victoria.

Victoria visited him. Like Otis, full of life and purpose, she hurried up stairs and strode down long corridors, male eyes following her. The visit which might have been awkward was not. The war which had brought him here, injured and nerve-shattered, was not mentioned until the visiting time was almost over. She told him of her work with the League for Peace, and of some vague ideas about travelling in foreign countries. ‘I don’t know where, but I have a great desire to see as much of the world as I can – Africa, India, South America – there is so much, and I am already almost thirty.’ She had wagged her head and laughed at herself, but he saw that she was serious.

And he saw more clearly now than when he had believed that he was in love with her that she was not a woman made for domesticity. ‘You were made to be an explorer or a revolutionary, weren’t you?’

Smiling, she had looked far off. ‘Ah, if only you knew how many women are. I think that the best would be to explore science. If I had been fortunate enough to study at one of the great universities, that is what I should have done. To discover some new element, a new treatment for disease. My grandmother learned of the discovery of contamination through contact, directly from Semmelweis – it was he, you know, who discovered the link between unclean hands and childbed fever. How wonderful to know that you have done something so worthwhile. Oh Jack, why are we given so little time? What a niggardly creator to stop us at three score years and ten. How mean to create us, give us minds and vision to form ideals, and then to chop us down before we have time to…’ Suddenly she clasped both his hands and said earnestly, ‘Don’t go back there, Jack. The world cannot afford to throw away its human talent.’

She had fixed him with her intense gaze. ‘When I was twenty, I saw the shocking sight of a man shot in the head and his actual brain matter going into the plough furrows. And I was not so much shocked at the sight of the injury as at the thought of the waste. I saw all his experience, all his schooling, his farming knowledge, everything he might have passed on to his children, running away. And I thought to myself, supposing he was about to make a discovery that would double a crop yield or clean an infested field. Hasn’t something like that occurred to you?’ She kissed him passionately, but on the cheek. ‘Don’t go back. You have so much better things to do for people than to help turn them into nourishment for Flanders’ beet crops.’

His father had visited, but not alone. He had come with one of Jack’s colleagues in the law practice. A desk-bound officer. The two young men had found little to say to one another. But at least a few more straws had been put in place in the repairing of the bridge between Jack and his father.

It might have been the constant stream of visitors bringing back some sense of normality to Jack, or that rest and decent food was healing him mentally and physically. Whatever it was that did it, Jack’s memory began to return. At first only the name that he had been searching for during his weeks at Lys.

Cully!

And then the letter had arrived.

He had turned the letter over and over, then inspected the envelope for some revelation. Pearce? Arnold Pearce? He picked at the protecting scab. He looked up Hambledon in an atlas and was no wiser when he found that it was ten miles or so north of Southsea. He fidgeted to know why Arnold Pearce should not have been in the army and why his father had not allowed him to have guns. The letter, obviously written by someone unused to writing, and full of sincerity and pathos, was touching. The kind of thing that could, these days, bring him to the verge of tears. Damned tears! Damned, damned tears, like the blue hospital uniforms, were a constant reminder that he had ceased to be John Clermont Moth.

Then the memory of another letter, the form that men in the front line could fill in when it was impossible to write home. Jack had filled one in for Cully. Cully was not much good at writing. He had remembered signing it ‘Arnie’ and addressing it to… yes, Pearce.

It was almost with joy that he told his new MO that a piece of information had revealed itself.

Now, as he sat on the train and watched the town-scape of back-to-back terraces of Clapham become the semidetached rows of Woking, then the landscape with country houses Liss, and then the downland farms where the engine got up steam and speed, Jack Moth almost wished the blessed black hole that had been in his memory would return, and wondered again what he could possibly say to the Pearces that could be of comfort. Yet he had to see them, not only because he owed them at least that, but he needed to see them so that he could face himself. He had failed Cully.

The last three weeks had been devastating. Beginning with Cully’s name and ending on this train journey to Hambledon. No, not ending here: the Cully episode would never end. The best that Jack could hope for for himself was that he would be able to learn to live with the knowledge of Cully’s death. For the first week after his memory returned, his physical condition had deteriorated from attacks of fever and terrorizing nightmares. It was worse than those nights in the early days of being in the front fine, when he had been shocked and sickened at his first sight of eviscerated torsos, white splintered bone, and gouting arteries of men still living.

He had not been responsible for those horrors.

But Cully? He was responsible for Cully, all right. I should have fought for his discharge. He needed a lawyer to put his case. He needed somebody to speak up for him. Face the brass hats and prove that a mistake was made when Cully was certified fit.

Jack’s conscience was a mad rat gnawing at the weak trap in which it was kept all day.

This was the first time that he had worn uniform since the holed and blood-soaked one had been removed from him by a nurse in a temporary hospital in France. It felt as stiff and uncomfortable as the one with which he had been issued on his first day in the army. When he had boarded a First Class carriage, the guard had said, Second and Third further along, and had been nonplussed when Jack ignored him and had taken a seat with a white linen head-cloth.

As the train sped past fields of ripening corn, the field-poppies inevitably send his mind back to the cratered fields across the Channel. Taff and Farmer Giles and some others were still there. Taff had written, the censorship lax so that Jack got a pretty fair picture of them. He had assumed that Jack’s lung wound would be a ‘cushy’ one and that he would not be returning, but the doctor at Queen Alexandra’s had said that in another few weeks he would be fighting fit. At least, according to Taff, they were having a quiet summer. Paris leave had been stopped and they were on the march. He described views between wooded banks of the Somme, their billets in some picturesque village, and the qualities of some good French beer. A natural story-teller, Taff. Jack missed the comradeship of that close group more than he had missed his own family.

Throughout his convalescence, he had given no thought to the future, his mind being so often preoccupied with the dark hole in his memory. Now that it had been filled, he allowed himself to wonder what his future held. Not his immediate future, but that which it was bad luck to think about, the future in peacetime.

He left the train at Havant in the hope that there would be some kind of transport or something to hire to get him to Hambledon village, as he did not relish such a long walk. He found the concern of the porters and then the station-master embarrassing. They called him ‘mate’ and asked him about the war. There was nothing going Hambledon way, but they fixed him up with a ride on a strawberry-grower’s cart.

At the pace of the old horse, Jack, sitting with the carter above hedge-height, was ambled along towards the Pearces’. The carter, glad of a bit of company, filled up on news that would be welcome in the Cricketer’s Arms. ‘You a relation of the Pearces then?’

Curbing his cultured voice as he had learned to do in the army, Jack said, ‘No, but I served with their son.’

The carter wagged his head sadly. ‘Bad thing. Floored Bert and Fanny it has.’

Non-committally, ‘I dare say it has.’

‘It was a carkin’ crime taking him into the army. The whole village was up in arms. Well, Chrissy! I asts you, if things, is so bad the army’s got to take dafties like Young Arnie, then they must be bad. I mean, the lad was decent enough, but he couldn’t help hisself when he got worked up.’

Most villagers in rural Hampshire are cagey with strangers – some will hardly give a townie the time of day, but there are the gabby ones, and not only was the carter gabby, he had had a good wet of Gale’s ale quite early in the day. Using his court training, Jack nodded encouragingly and gently prompted him. He was thankful for this unexpected insight into the civilian Cully.

‘The vicar wrote, you know. He told them that the boy hadn’t never been normal and that he waddn’t fit to be called up. But they never took no notice. The trouble with Young Arnie was that he looked pretty normal, he waddn’t mongol or anything. And you know how he was, willing and eager. Everybody liked him round here. I know he waddn’t all there, but he was a nice enough lad, loved the cricket. But he never should a been a conscript.’

‘You’re right.’

‘He wasn’t never normal right from a baby.’

‘Is that so?’

‘You know how the Pearces came by him?’ The carter was obviously relishing the chance to tell him.

‘No, I’ve no idea. He never said, and I didn’t ask.’

‘I doubt he even thought of it. He never had the brain to spekalate. Some said it was a judgement of God, but if you ask me it was being shoved down a rabbit-hole.’ He turned to Jack, satisfied that he had created an impression.

Jack raised his eyebrows encouragingly. ‘Really?’

‘His mother was summonsed and put in prison for it. Dilys Cullington – Dilly – sort of woman who’d stand up for any man for fourpence and lay down for a bob. I suppose she couldn’t help it, she was left with half a dozen kids to bring up… Mind you, I’m not saying but what she wasn’t a bit that way inclined… well, you know, some women are, an’t they? Anyhow, she stood up for some bloke who left her with twins in her. For months she tried to say she waddn’t, but she’d summit wrong with her guts – but you know how ’tis in a village, you can’t keep nothing like that quiet, ’specially twins.’

‘And Cully – Arnie – was one of the twins?’

‘Ah. She went out on her own, birthed the babies herself and left them in the warren with all dirt and leaves covering them up. I suppose she hoped a fox’d come, she said in court she thought they was both dead inside her because they hadn’t moved for a week. One was, but not Arnie.’

‘What a terrible story.’

‘Well, if it’s true she thought they was dead, you got to ast yourself why she went out there to birth them. But, there’s worst things than that have happened in this here village.’ He tapped the side of his nose.

‘How was Arnie saved?’

‘By old Bert Pearce. Out rabbiting with his dog, hears this cry, dog scrabbles the leaves and there was this here baby.’

‘Good Lord, sounds like the Queen of Egypt finding Moses.’

The carter laughed. ‘Ah. You don’t know Bert Pearce?’

‘No.’

‘Well, old Bert an’t no Queen of Egypt, as you’ll see. Fanny’s all right, though.’ He nodded knowingly.

‘And they kept him?’

‘Ah. Bert and Fanny, been married five year, never had chick ner child. You wouldn’t get away with it these days, but twenty year ago, nobody asked no questions, he’d a been a charge on the Parish. The vicar christened him and gave him back to Fanny and he was theirs. Vicar said he should keep his proper name, though if you asts me that waddn’t a very Christian thing to do, seeing as how his mother was in prison for trying to kill him.’

They had now reached long neat fields planted with strawberries where lines of pickers were bending their backs and moving steadily along. An inn, a few straggling cottages, and a signpost to say that this was Hambledon, then more closely-built cottages.

‘Here y’are then, lad. This is as far as I go. Bert Pearce’s an’t no more than a quarter of a mile.’

‘I’m really grateful for you bringing me. What do I owe you?’

‘Normally, I would of said a bob, but not to a serving man, nor to a chap that made friends with poor young Arnie.’

Jack was surprised to discover that Musk Cottage had one window converted to a shop window over which was a sign reading ‘H. Pearce & Son. High Class Saddlers – Boots Repaired.’ The door stood wide and he went in. Bert Pearce was indeed no Queen of Egypt. He was old, probably approaching sixty, brown and thin, and with skin as leather-looking and as tooled with lines as the finished saddles hanging from the low ceiling. He had a good face with large, well-lashed eyes that the girls had probably found attractive a few years back. Jack could only stand upright where there were no beams and no saddles. The man looked up over his half-glasses and then started.

‘I’m sorry. I made you jump,’ Jack said.

‘No, only that I expected it was a customer.’ He put down the pad and polish with which he had been burnishing the brass rings of a bridle. ‘You’re Jack aren’t you? Jack Moth?’

Jack nodded.

‘From your height. Arnie said that you was tall, they called you Lofty, an’t that right?’ He held out a thin brown hand, blued and powdery from the metal polish.

‘I’m pleased to meet you, Mr Pearce.’

He looked down at his hand. ‘I shall be in trouble with Mother, shaking your hand like that.’

His way of speaking, slow and ponderous, was exactly like Cully’s. He had a nice smile and his own teeth.

‘Mother!’ He called into the passage. ‘Come round the counter, lad.’ He lifted the flap and, as Jack emerged, Fanny Pearce poked her head round the passageway door.

‘What you want, Bert? I was just putting out the whites in the sun.’

‘This is Jack, Mother.’

She clapped two small, plumpish hands over her mouth. ‘Oh dear Lord, what a greeting.’ She put up her arms and pulled Jack down so that she could kiss him and hug him. ‘I can’t tell you how much it means to me and Bert, you coming here.’

‘I wanted to… very much.’

She squeezed his hand, her emotions on the verge of spilling over. Probably in her forties, she was as pink and soft as Bert was brown and leathery. ‘Fancy him not bringing you through the proper way through the front door.’ She wagged her head, but from the way she said, ‘You men!’ it was obvious that genial chiding was part of her regular housewifely duties to keep the man of the house from back-sliding – and to show that she knew her own manners.

‘Come through anyhow, if you don’t mind,’

Ducking through doorways and under beams Jack followed her and Bert followed Jack.

The kitchen, where she sat Jack in the coolest spot beside the open door, was what one would expect from a pink housewife wearing a white apron. Whatever he had imagined Cully’s parents to be, it was not the ill-assorted Pearces.

‘I dare say you could do with a wet of summit.’ Without waiting, Bert descended cellar stairs with a jug.

‘You’ll stop and eat with us?’

Jack nodded.

‘A great lad like you wants feeding. If you don’t mind me saying, your uniform’s hanging on you. Are you sure you’re better enough to be coming all the way out here?’

‘I had a nice ride. A carter from the strawberry farms.’

‘Dick Hanway. Hm. I’ll bet there an’t nothing you don’t know about Hambledon now. Jack got a ride off Dick Hanway, Bert.’

‘We wasn’t expecting you or I’d have collected you.’ Bert poured three mugs of golden beer.

‘Home brew.’ Bert drank his like a man used to quaffing well.

‘It’s very good,’ Jack said.

Fanny said, ‘I feel terrible not having anything special in.’

They were all skating around the reason for Jack’s visit. But they all knew, so Jack left it to them to say what they wanted to when they were ready. Fanny laid out plentiful dishes of ham, cheese and pie and a cottage loaf on a board, and for the first time in weeks, Jack salivated at the smell and thought of food. Without ceremony, Fanny filled their plates.

‘Mmm. This ham is so succulent.’

‘Juicy?’

‘Yes, yes, and beautifully smoked.’

‘It was Arnold’s favourite,’ Bert Pearce said. ‘He would have ate it at every meal if you’d have let him. Iddn’t that a fact, Fan?’

Fanny Pearce nodded. ‘Only my own cured though. Our own pig. Arnold could tell at once if it was somebody else’s. He was cute like that, wasn’t he, Bert?’

And so they gently put their toes into the quicksand of Cully’s death.

‘A course, Jack’d see a different side of Arnie from what we saw. Lads is always different when they’re away from their mum and dad,’ Bert said. ‘I dare say your dad don’t know the half you get up to, Jack, do he?’

‘He gives me a long rope.’

‘Best thing,’ Fanny said. ‘A course, we couldn’t always do that with Arnold.’

‘Of course not.’

‘Apart from the fits though, he was pretty good,’ Bert said.

‘No he wasn’t, Bert. We couldn’t never have let him go like Mr Moth can let Jack go.’ Explaining to Jack, ‘It wasn’t just the fits, he was never going to grow up to be a man.’

‘He did go,’ Bert said, with a fringe of anger around his words. ‘He never had no choice.’

Fanny Pearce sighed, the white hills of her bosom heaving beneath her crossed hands. ‘Yes, yes. It was like putting a boy of twelve into uniform.’

‘Some people got a lot to answer for,’ Bert said.

‘But they’ll not answer for it, Mr Pearce. The sort of people responsible for conscripting Cully don’t ever get their just deserts, they are too remote from the harm they have caused. I say, do you mind if I call him Cully, it was his name in the army.’

‘Oh no, we’d like it if you did. That’s the side we never could see. It was terrible for us wondering how he was going to manage.’

‘Actually, he managed very well. There were some things that he was extremely good at.’

‘That’s Bert’s training.’ A lone tear trickled from her eye; absently she took it on her forefinger and massaged it with her thumb. ‘He always said he’d make something of him, didn’t you, Bert?’

‘I’d a made a saddler of him. Wait a minute, I’ll show you.’ Stopping in the act of refilling their mugs, he went through into the shop and came back with a small, gleaming saddle. ‘Pony saddle. Made every stitch hisself.’

Jack took the object, ran his hands over the glossy leather and fingered the gleaming brass fittings. ‘It’s absolutely beautiful workmanship. I had no idea.’ He felt the tooled ornate monogram and read out ‘“A.H.P.”?’

‘He wanted us to get his name changed to Pearce.’ Fanny hunched her shoulders. ‘We always put it off. You do, don’t you? You always think there’s time. He made that about five year ago, there seemed to be all the time in the world.’

‘I envy Cully his boyhood, being able to do something like this, living here.’

‘You? With your looks and brains. ’Sides, you aren’t going to tell me that you aren’t used to better than this,’ Fanny said. ‘When you’re not thinking about it you give yourself away in the way you speaks. You got a posh accent behind it all.’

‘I envy the happy life he must have led with you. I was boarded.’

Fanny nodded at Bert. ‘He was happy, wasn’t he, Bert?’

‘It was in his nature. He couldn’t help hisself. He couldn’t learn nothing much in the way of reading and writing, but he could do things. And it didn’t matter much if he didn’t know his letters. He’d a made a damn good saddler.’

The shop doorbell jangled and Bert rose at once. ‘You don’t have to go back tonight do you, lad? We’d like you to stop over. Fanny’s got to take stuff to Pompey tomorrow, so she could give you a ride down.’

Jack wanted to stay. Somehow, Cully, who was the source of his nightmares, had a presence here that might put them to rest.

Fanny said, ‘He don’t think – you men don’t. You brought nothing with you, but there’s all Arnold’s stuff if you had a mind to spend the night.’

‘I’d be pleased to. I really didn’t know anything much about Cully and I should like to. He’d talk about his mum and dad, and the cricket team, but mostly he seemed to like to hear about what the rest of us did. And he liked to always be doing things: domestic things, like brewing up or making porridge.’

‘Did he? That pleases me to hear that. I taught him that sort of thing. We was always worried about the day when he wouldn’t have me and Bert, so we saw to it that he could manage on his own. And he mostly could. But he wasn’t never fit to be in no army.’

‘You are right, he was too young.’

The afternoon was restful. Jack wandered off around the village, plunging into woodlands and tramping around fields. Early in the evening he went to the local inn with Bert who said he wanted to introduce Jack as Young Arnie’s friend. He played shove-ha’penny and table skittles and drank the local Gale’s ale. They went to bed country hours, early so as to be up and about at dawn, Jack sleeping in Cully’s room and in one of Cully’s nightshirts. His scar, which had been mending, was painful, and his mind was afire with dark memories. Outside the open window nightjars called and nightingales piped, the scent of musk-roses and warm pig wafted in through the open window.

Still nobody had mentioned Cully’s actual death. He puzzled about that. Fanny and Bert Pearce did not appear to show anything other than normal grief at Cully’s death. Coming here, he had been apprehensive, not knowing what their reaction might be – anger, bitterness, shame even – certainly not this dignified coping with their loss. He began to wonder how much they knew.

Next morning they breakfasted on more of the ham, fried with eggs and thick bread. ‘I’ve got to feed the animals before I load up. Do you want to come, or shall you bide there a bit, Jack?’

‘Let me come.’

Leaning on the pig-sty fence, watching Fanny scratch the animal’s back with a stick, Jack asked, ‘Did you get a letter from the officer?’

She hesitated. ‘No. You couldn’t expect them to do that when there was so many getting killed. All we got was a form that said he was dead. Just his name and number filled in and the date and that he was dead. The same as thousands of families has been getting.’

No, Jack thought, not the same. Not many died as Cully had died.

‘Nothing else?’

‘Only a printed letter about his pay – he was getting it sent home. It’s indoors there, still in his savings box. We shall have to do something with it, give it to the children’s home perhaps. We don’t hold with stone memorials or nothing like that. Let’s just stop talking about it, shall we?’

‘I’m sorry.’

‘No, no. I didn’t mean it like that. I don’t particularly want to talk about the forms they sent and that.’

‘You are a surprising lady, Fanny.’

‘Why’s that then?’

‘Partly, I suppose, because I had a picture of you in my mind. Cully always referred to you as “my old mum”. I never expected such a pretty lady.’

She smiled. ‘And he called you “old Lofty”, though I can’t say there’s much he didn’t tell us about you. He thought the world of you. On his leaves he never stopped talking about you, I suppose because he couldn’t write, he remembered every little detail to tell us. He never talked much about the fighting. What was he like? Bert can’t stand to know about that side of it, but I want to know.’

‘I don’t think he realized the danger we were sometimes in.’

‘That’s what I thought. I once said to Bert that he’d either end up dead or with the VC. He was always the same. The kids would tease him into some dare that could a killed him, and he’d do it. Is that how he got killed?’

Now Jack was convinced that the Pearces did not know the circumstances of Cully’s death. He had come here with some idea that he must provide them with an account that they could live with, but it was proving unnecessary. If anything, Fanny Pearce was the comforter.

He decided to lie to her.

‘No. It could easily have been any of us. I was the reckless one. And got away with it. It doesn’t seem just, does it?’

‘If you’re going to look for justice in this world, you’ll need a strong magnifying glass.’

Musk Cottage garden was long and seemingly without a boundary. She took him to a small orchard, a row of bee skeps, a vegetable plot, from each of which she gathered produce and packed it into wicker baskets. She milked two goats, put the milk into long pans, and packed some cheeses into a hamper. ‘It’s the posh London shops that buy it. People round here don’t eat goats’ cheese. It fetches decent money. We tried to see to it that our bit of land was all put down to stuff that Arnold could manage and make a living by later on. Everything here’s for feeding ourselves or selling.’

‘Even the flowers?’

‘Makes a few shillings in Havant.

Jack shook his head and smiled at the practicality of it all, thinking of Mere and its acres and acres of grass and flower borders, of the fish in the lake that were not for eating, and the decorative crab-apples, cherry and plum trees that were grown for spring effect – unlike Musk Cottage’s pruned and fruiting varieties, which were already becoming heavy with their commercial crops.

He helped her load up and said goodbye to Bert Pearce.

‘Try to come again, lad. It’s been balm to our hearts talking about Arnie.’

‘I have to return to my unit quite soon. But when my next leave comes…’

‘We want you to have this.’

By its shape and size Jack knew that this was Cully’s apprentice-piece of saddlery. The easily-sprung tears that had made him feel so shamed and womanish at Lys House and Queen Alexandra’s, seemed not unmanly here. Even so, he dashed his knuckles at his damp eyes. ‘I’m sorry…’

‘Nothing wrong with men’s tears, Jack,’ Fanny said. “’Tis a pity we didn’t see a few more sometimes.’

He had expected the ride into Portsmouth to be by horse and cart, but Fanny drove a pointed-nosed little green van skilfully along the winding country roads. For the first three or four miles they were each within their own minds, then Fanny said, ‘You’re a bit tall for my little van.’

‘I find it very comfortable.’

Taking her eyes from the road to look directly at him, she said, ‘I’m glad. I love being in here, ’specially with the windows up and the engine off. Sometimes I stops along the lane just for the pleasure of being in here. I used to sing a lot on my way to Pompey, even talk to myself, have a good curse at things, say things I wouldn’t want nobody else to hear. I cried my tears for Arnold in here.’

Jack looked around the little tin box on wheels. ‘It is rather like the secret dens one had in childhood.’

‘Can we pretend that’s what it is? Exchange a few secrets… tell the truth a bit?’

‘A confessional instead of a den?’

‘Perhaps so. So, if it’s not too impertinent, would you mind telling me how it is you’re hiding yourself in private’s uniform – by rights you should be an officer, shouldn’t you?’

‘No.’

‘Tell me to mind my own business.’

‘I’m not, as they say, officer material.’

‘But you’re officer class all right.’

‘Some of my relations are inclined to be.’

‘But not Jack.’

‘That’s right, not Lance-Corporal Moth.’

‘Is it to do them down then? Or is it your dad?’

‘My father? He’s not concerned whether I’m a private or a general.’

‘You’re wrong. He minds all right. All fathers need their sons to shine. That’s part of the reason why Bert wanted to give you the saddle. I doubt if he realizes it, but he wants somebody he respects to see that he had a son who could do something that not many could do.’

Fanny halted the van and put the engine in neutral gear whilst a slow herd of cows flopped and jostled its way along a narrow lane, rubbing their rough hides against the van, rolling their eyes at the windows. Jack hated the thought that the good done to him by these last cathartic twenty-four hours with the Pearces might be undone by a wrong word. Yet, not to be honest about himself was less than shrewd and intelligent Fanny deserved. Twice she had alluded to his accent or class. She knew that he hid behind his adopted accent, and rough table-manners. But then, why stop there, why not be honest with her about Cully’s death also?

Compromising, he said, ‘In civilian life, I am a lawyer. My father is a Scotland Yard detective, and my mother, who was a lady, is dead.’

‘Ah,’ Fanny said. ‘I’m sorry about that.’

‘It’s six years since it happened.’

‘And you want to blame your father?’

‘Blame him? Of course not.’

‘All right, have it your way.’

They sat silently for long moments, then Jack said, ‘She had my little brother Kitt late in life, and she died giving birth.’

‘And you don’t blame your father?’

His gaze was withdrawn.

‘Dear lad, ’twould be a very natural thing if you did. When our closest love dies, we all want to blame somebody for it. What we really want is to blame the person who has gone and died and took their love away from us, but we can’t do that, can we? So sometimes we blames God, oftentimes we blames ourselves. I reckon you like to blame your father. The way you mentioned him over this last twenty-four hours, you had a strange sound of hate and love both in your voice.’

Jack felt uneasy and wished that they could drive on. Here he was pinned down for her scrutiny and comment.

She continued, ‘I was that way with my mother. She was a drudge and I hated her for being it: yet the reason why she was a drudge was because she loved us and wanted to make life better for us. So I loved her too.’

‘My father is a man of… I’m sorry, I don’t know how else to say it…’

‘This isn’t the outside world remember?’ She smiled. ‘There’s only the cheeses and the rhubarb in the back.’

‘He’s a man who can’t keep away from women.’

‘Truly?’

‘I’ve known for years that he keeps a mistress.’

‘And you don’t have women?’

‘I wouldn’t if I had a wife and children.’

‘Well then, I wish you a wife who will satisfy you.’

He flushed warmly, aware of her womanly presence, as he had been since he first laid eyes upon her, feeling both bold and shy; in nature wanting to confess himself to her, in nurture trained not to do so.

‘My mother was almost forty, and my father older.’

‘And I wish you his same good fortune. Do you think that it is only young ones who has a licence to satisfy their bodies? Or that body-love is something that wears thin? Or that women grows cold with the years? Because if you do, you’re in for a surprise. Instead of feeling bitter towards your father for his normal appetites, you should thank the Lord that you’re his son and hope to take after him.’

Some long moments of silence.

‘Was your mother happy about her condition?’

‘Very.’

‘Then thank the Lord double. Forty’s no age at all in my eyes.’

A cowman slapped his hand on the van and shouted ‘Right-o’ as a signal that his herd had passed, making Jack jump and laugh nervously. He smiled at Fanny rather sheepishly. ‘I thought it was the voice of God chiding me for talking to you like this.’

‘Perhaps it is I talking to you He don’t like. I’m afraid I do and say a good many things He an’t too happy about.’

The cows were now well down the lane, but Fanny did not put the engine into driving gear, she gently patted Jack’s hand with her fingers. ‘Now I’ll tell you something then. I’m forty-four years old, and I’m in the family way. Nobody knows excepting a woman I went to see in Portsmouth.’

‘Doesn’t Bert know?’

‘No, you’re the only one. I wanted to make sure. It would have been too cruel if I’d made a mistake, but sure enough, I’m four months gone with this child.’ She settled her hands protectively over her convex abdomen in the way that his mother had done over Kitt.

‘I used not to be able to bear seeing my mother do that. But with you it seems… well, a beautiful thing to do.’

‘’Tis not me, lad, ’tis maturity in you. You wasn’t much more than a youth then, and town people are different about these things than we are. Arnold wouldn’t have been shy of me.’

‘He would have been a good nursemaid. Once, in Flanders, he took a dog under his wing. He was so gentle with that poor terrified creature.’

She gazed absently at where the cows were turning into a field. ‘There’s probably a lot you know about Arnold that I don’t.’

It was one of those moments that had come and gone on other occasions over the last six years, a moment when he longed most desperately to have his mother back again, and for the first time he wondered how it must be for his father.

‘I promised Bert that I would come to Hambledon again, and I shall. Certainly I shall come to see the new baby.’

‘We ought to get going if you are to get back to London.’ Opening the door, she unhooked the starting-handle.

Jack jumped out of the van and tried to take it from her, but she tried to hold on to it. ‘Don’t you ever do that again whilst you are carrying that child,’ he said.

‘Rubbish, I’m as strong as an ox. Anyway, who’s going to do it if not me?’

He wrested the handle from her and engaged it, turned it. The engine fired and the handle kicked back. Rubbing his wrist, he said, ‘You see? Think what could happen.’ He held her firmly by her shoulders and looked down sternly into her pretty face. ‘Fanny, I want you to promise me that you will never use this thing again. Get a horse and trap if you must do your own transporting, or better still get a carter to do it for you for the next months. Please, promise me.’

Drawing him to her she put her arms about his neck and kissed him warmly. ‘You are the nicest, nicest of people, Jack, ’tis no wonder Arnold thought you was so grand. I am only sorry that your ma didn’t live to see you a grown man. Very well then, I’ll promise to get Dick Hanway to cart my stuff.’

The van started and they were soon going down the steep incline into Portsmouth, where Jack insisted upon getting a later train so that he could unload the van. On the station forecourt, he shook her hand warmly. She held on to it. ‘I still have something else to say, Jack.’ Her brow was drawn into the vee between her eyes. ‘I know about Arnold, I wasn’t going to say anything, but I’ve felt so close to you that I couldn’t let you go without saying the truth. I know he wasn’t killed through the war, and I believe he got himself into trouble.’

Jack felt the muscles of his stomach contract with apprehension. ‘Oh God… no, Fanny.’

‘I could tell from the form they sent that it wasn’t the usual notice. Then I had a letter from a sergeant.’

‘Trigg?’

‘That’s right, saying to the effect that although Arnold had not died in action, and that there had been a miscarriage of justice, that he had been a brave soldier. He asked me not to mention that he had written. It was a kindly letter from a nice man, so I burnt it.’

Jack clutched her hand between his two. Sergeant Trigg, Cully’s other friend in the cells.

‘Bert doesn’t know?’

‘About the letter? No. He was so cut up seeing the form, that he never read it properly – he thinks it was a normal notice about being killed in action.’

Jack opened his mouth to say something, but she put her fingers over it. ‘No! I don’t want to know anything else. I’ve had Sergeant Trigg’s letter, and I’ve had this day with you. If two nice people took trouble over our Arnold, then that’s all I want to know about it.’

Boldly he laid his hand briefly at the swelling from her waist. ‘This is a very fortunate child.’

‘Come for the christening.’

‘If I make it back again.’

She kissed him. ‘If you was my son, Jack Moth, I’d hide you in the attic and not let you go back to France at any price – which is what I should have done with Arnie.’