The small branch-line train steams along at top speed, swaying and rattling. The interiors of the compartments have gritty floors scattered with cigarette stubs, worn upholstery, ashtrays overflowing. The light bulbs either do not work or are missing; the windows are brown inside from tobacco smoke and grey outside from the steam and smoke of the engine. Most travellers hardly notice, and, in any case, ‘Don’t you know there’s a war on?’ is used to shame moaners. Most people in Britain have better things to worry them than neglected railway coaches. Many of the travellers are in uniform. Some look only inwards, some doze; others, on their way home or to embark, talk heartily and make jokes. None of them wants to look at the passing scene.
But Eve does. The last time she travelled on this line was in 1937. Then, the Southern had plenty of coach cleaners. With her forefinger she rubs a little clearing on the window and peers through. The sight of the very Englishness – Hampshireness – brings a lump to her throat. She loves her own county, always has, yet she could hardly wait to leave it when she was barely twenty years old.
She is anxious to see her family, and the place called Roman’s Fields where they all now live together. Over the years that she has been away there have been times when she has missed them, but not much. She knows she couldn’t last a week living within such peaceful domesticity.
She hopes that they take to Dimitri.
When she looks away from the rolling green countryside, she isn’t surprised to find Dimitri’s eyes upon her. He winks. With his military-style haircut and his major’s uniform, he looks so much like the man she met in Spain. Again her heart is wrenched a little. Will this ploy of naturalisation by marriage be enough? She still can’t believe that the GPU will not somehow get hold of him. The only hope is that Russia might come into the war on the British side.
She smiles at him warmly. She has made him a British subject, but never in a hundred years could he become British. Like her, he can put on another personality like a coat, but like her too, nature runs deep.
‘We’re almost there.’
He too rubs a bit of window. ‘Is still farmlands.’
‘Is now station.’
Eve’s uncle, Ted Wilmott, has only one good arm, but he puts twice the strength in it to hug her. Then, moving back a pace to look at her, he says, ‘Lord help us, Lu, you got splendid all right. I shouldn’t never have recognised you. And this is your intended. I’m pleased to meet you, sir.’
‘Dimitri, Ted. You call me Dimitri. This major stuff is all jacket and hats.’
Ted gives Eve a look of approval. ‘Come on then, Lu. Let’s get you home.’
She is always going to be Lu to everybody living on Roman’s Fields land, Wilmotts and Barneys alike. She is glad that they have decided that here Dimitri should not be Lec. Lu and Lec? How many faces do they have?
Roman’s Fields in Wickham has been owned by Ted and May Wilmott since May’s father died. Theirs is a fertile corner of the county, close to where the landscape starts to swell and rise gently until it reaches its highest point at Beacon Hill where it swoops down again into yet more fertile chalklands and the decaying village of Cantle, and then up again to ancient hill forts.
The big, old house is alive with women’s warm voices. The men are out and about – Ray at his work as signalman, Eli Barney picking on the smallholding. Ken went somewhere yesterday. He’s cagey about it.
Ray Wilmott, Eve’s brother, brings a good pay packet to Roman’s every Friday. His wife, Bar, sister to Duke, also brings in a wage. She has gone back to work on the estate as head groom. Now that so many of the young men have joined up, Bar has brought in two of her young brothers to help her.
When this happened, Gunner, the estate agent, went to Lady Stanton-Lewis to complain: ‘It’s bad enough having a gyppo running the stables, but she’s bringing in a whole lot more.’
But her ladyship would have none of it. ‘They are good with horses. That is the only consideration.’
‘Give them an inch and they will take a mile, madam. I know gyppos. The old man takes game birds.’
‘We can spare him a few. Our woods are full of them.’
‘He sells them. And so he does the snowdrops and the holly and mistletoe. He takes birch for making pegs and our willows for his wife’s baskets. He practically lives off our estate.’
‘His lordship’s estate, Gunner.’
‘And I want to protect it for him from the likes of the Barney clan.’
‘Why do you have such a down on them, Gunner? There was a time before it was enclosed, many years ago, when everybody in this area was free to live off the land. His lordship’s family took it, quite legally of course, but people like Barney don’t see it like that – and I can’t say that I blame them. Be tolerant with them, Gunner. Young Mrs Wilmott is doing such good work with the horses and with Megan.’
Megan was the only child of the Stanton-Lewises, and going through a stage where horses were central to her life.
‘Yes, well, there’s that too. That girl spends a deal too much time in their company.’
‘So you want to give me advice on how to bring up my daughter as well? Megan’s boarding school has closed, and until we find another, I am glad that Mrs Wilmott doesn’t mind her hanging around the stables. I am contemplating sending her to the village school, so that I can have her close, now that his lordship has rejoined his regiment.’
Gunner was shocked. The country was going to the dogs. One thing he admired about Hitler was that he had got rid of the gyppos.
‘Let the Barneys be, Gunner. We owe them more than they owe us.’
‘Your ladyship, that can’t be.’
‘Why do you have such a down on the family?’
‘Because they’re gyppos, your ladyship. They aren’t like us. They’re scroungers.’
‘Don’t be ridiculous, man. Who around here works harder than the Barney family?’
Gunner left with rage in his heart. What could anybody do about people like that who married into the aristocracy? A woman who went around saying she was proud that her grandmother had gone to prison to get votes for women.
When Gunner had rage in his heart every past wrong boiled up. The Barney girl took days off and went out to do witchetty things. She went to the circle of stones, and the yew circle on Butser Hill. He suspected she did evil things there. When he’d told her she couldn’t be spared, she’d brought in her two brothers. She’d said, ‘You got your holy days and bank holidays, and I got mine.’
He was a good estate agent. Half the work he did should rightly have been done by a gamekeeper. His house was tied to the job, and he had the same fear as every man whose home was given as part of his wages. No chance to save and, in the end, no job, no home. He never complained because he wasn’t a young man and he had an injured leg. Only in the safety of his four walls did he speak of his fears to Mrs Gunner.
‘If my leg gets any worse, that gyppo girl will have the job from under me. She put a spell on her ladyship and Miss Megan. With my own two ears I heard her ladyship call her “Mrs Wilmott”.’
‘That’s who she is.’
‘She’s a damned gyppo. Don’t tell me you’re taken in by her.’
‘I don’t see there’s anything to be taken in over. A more open and nice girl I’ve yet to meet.’
Gunner rejected vehemently his wife’s suggestion that he make her his ally instead of his opponent.
‘So you won’t be going to the wedding party over at Roman’s on Saturday?’ Mrs Gunner asked.
‘No I won’t be going to no wedding party, and no more will you. If Ted Wilmott don’t mind having truck with the Barneys, I do. You’ve only got to see what happened to Ann Carter, a decent village girl until Eli Barney got a hold of her.’
‘He never got a hold of her. She wanted him.’
‘Not wed in church.’
‘But wed in the olden way. If it suits Ann Carter, then it’s no business of anybody else’s.’
All of which was listened to by their son, Maurice, who heard everything but said very little. Maurice wasn’t ‘all there’. Damaged at birth, he was still, at the age of twenty, his mother’s child. But to Gunner, Maurice was yet another daily reason for anger and torture: retribution handed out by his hard-hearted God for a sin he had committed before Maurice was born.
Maurice spoke. ‘Miz Carter… she’s a nice lady. Miz Carter talks nice to Maurice. I goin’ to Miz Carter’s party.’
Gunner thumped his fist on the draining board. ‘You’ve been letting the boy wander again.’
‘He needs to wander.’
‘Not to no Barney camp, he don’t.’
‘It’s not a camp, and you know it. They live in a decent enough place on their own bit of land. The Barneys are no different to you and me – except that they’ve got a bit of land and we’re in a tied cottage.’
That hit where it hurt most. Mrs Gunner wasn’t normally as argumentative as this. Anything for a quiet life. But she was beginning to come to the end of her tether, coping with a husband who was becoming stranger by the day in his obsession with gypsies, a grown-up son with a child’s mind, and not many years to having to give up the cottage.
‘Whilst we are on the subject, I let Maurice go over to Ann Carter because she is better than you or me at getting Maurice to do normal things.’
‘Normal things! Normal? What normal things is that?’
‘She’s been showing him how to make strawberry chips. May Wilmott said she would give him something for them when he’s learned. Maurice, show your dad.’
Maurice would never understand why his dad had put the chip basket into the cooking range. Only broken chips went for firewood.
Gunner would never understand how his wife came to side with Ann Carter and her queer brood got on her by Eli Barney. Even his lordship hadn’t seen any danger in taking on the Barney girl for the stables. Like everybody, he had been won over by the way this bit of a girl had with his hunters.
Gunner had always been a regular churchgoer, a sides-man, a parish councillor. An upright man, as he could truthfully say. And now his wife had gone against him, siding with the godless tribe because one of them was coming back to get wed. He thumped his fist on the arm of the chair in which his wife had been seated before she went out, saying in that reasonable voice she always used when Maurice was around, ‘James, if you don’t put a curb on your unreasonableness with our nearest neighbours, then I shall take Maurice and go down and stop with my sister in the village. You don’t never stop talking about the Barneys. To my mind, we’d all be a lot better off if you’d take as much notice of your own son as you do of them.’
‘All right then, if that’s what you want, clear off and take that shameful thing with you!’
Alice Gunner was stunned. The burning of Maurice’s chip basket had been cruel enough, but to turn on the boy who had had no hand in his own making…
Maurice couldn’t know that it was he who was the ‘shameful thing’, but he did feel his mother’s hand tighten, sensed the fear that shivered through her, and wanted to be out of the house away from his father.
He couldn’t know that most mothers and fathers sleep in the same bed. He couldn’t know of the silent dementia that can take over a reasonable man when every night he is reminded of the sins of the flesh that had created Maurice.
Gunner craved that sin. Every night he remembered when it was not a sin, but God-given in the marriage vows. For the procreation of children. But James Gunner had bad seed. Turned bad by a single coupling with a loose woman.
He shouted after Alice and Maurice, ‘Church wedding! It’s a sin if any of the Barneys enter a church!’
As agent for the estate, he needed a whole row of shotguns. He selected one, filled his pockets with cartridges, and walked off into the shafts of sunlight that filtered through the trees that surrounded Keeper’s Lodge in which he had spent his entire life.
Let Eli Barney cross my path, and I’ll have him, he thought.
Ted Wilmott opened the heavy farm gate. Eve noticed how he had aged, how the effort the act cost him showed in the bend of his back.
Dimitri got out to shut it after Ted had driven the van into the yard.
‘Eve, your home is beautiful house, big. Looks maybe a hundred years or maybe more?’
‘Three hundred.’
‘So important. Piece of history. I like this very much, Eve. There is sense of forever…? Unchanging?’
‘Continuity?’
‘Yes. Maybe I now know better how it is that you can be Eve and Lu. You have two worlds in which to live. I think it is hard for you, yes?’ He gave her a light peck on the back of her neck. ‘Look, these must be your people coming out of house.’
Eve’s spirits rose, then sank. They had come to meet Lu, but she had stayed behind in Spain with Duke.
Eve moved into May’s arms and was enveloped in the warm smells of country clothes, soap-washed hair, boiled-white aprons to which the smell of baking clung.
Dimitri was introduced, openly appraised, welcomed. Walking through the yard to the kitchen door, Eve felt her senses were hit by everything that had been forgotten – the yard dust kicking up, the steaming muck heap, the low contented grunts from the pigsty, a cock and more hens than when she was last here. The smell of sun on old brick and thatch, hay, cut grass, faint whiff of the septic tank, hard soap, disinfectant, country wine, yeasty beer, stewed apples, warm pasty – not individually, but as a recognisable whole, the smell of Roman’s Fields greeting her.
It ought to have felt like coming home. Instead Eve was being treated a bit like a visitor. Dimitri, with his praise and endless questions, charmed them all into warm informality as only he could.
They moved into the kitchen where May had put on a bit of a spread. ‘Now come on in and sit you down. Leave your bags. They’ll wait, but the food won’t.’
‘Oh, Ray! It’s so lovely to see you. Where’s Bar? Are these two yours? Dimitri, come and meet Ray.’
Ray shook hands formally. ‘Nice to meet you. And I suppose congratulations are in order, seeing as how you and Lu will be getting wed.’
‘Thank you, Ray.’
Ray nodded. ‘This is Bonnie, and this here is our Anthony.’
Dimitri, squatting to Bonnie’s level, held his finger out for Anthony to clutch. ‘Is nice baby. Hey, you, Anthony, you a nice baby. You see, Lu, he likes me.’
Bonnie said, ‘That’s not a smile, it’s wind.’
May was watching Lu’s ‘intended’ like a hawk, liking what she saw.
But, if she could have seen what was going on beneath the surface, she would have wondered at Dimitri’s distress.
From the moment Eve had emerged from the revolving door into the foyer of the hotel in Half Moon Street, Dimitri had experienced pain and pleasure in everything they did together. Except for the lovemaking, everything was for the first time as well as for the last time. First and last time dancing together; first and last time seated together watching a show. The shutters were coming down on their relationship. This was a marriage of convenience, nothing more – something Eve had agreed to to save him from extradition. Later, they would be divorced. The conditions had always been clear.
It was breaking his heart.
When, in Australia, she had miscarried a baby, he had told himself that there would be others. She would carry his children. But, as it turned out, she didn’t love him. Not that she had ever pretended that she did, nor that she wanted to be married – to himself or to anyone – but in his mind there had never appeared to be anything that would separate them. Almost as though there must be a steady progression into their future. Russian literature was full of tragic love, wasted lives, ironic situations. He would try not to waste his own life, but, without her, there would always be something lacking.
The irony was that they were married, and would be confirming their union with a big family wedding. Eve had explained that she was doing the village wedding to please Ted and May, especially May. Yet Dimitri could not help hoping that a church wedding before all her family was so much more than a registry office marriage, and that she would come to see it as the tightening of their knot and not want the agreed-upon divorce.
In the kitchen at Roman’s Fields, Ann Carter, Ephraim, Harry and Young Gabe – the boys looking like young editions of Duke – all stared and nodded.
Ann said, ‘Bar’s still over at the stables. Not much help now so many lads has joined up.’
It was Young Gabe who said what his brothers must have been thinking. ‘If you’re a Russian, why haven’t you got long boots, like in Ma’s ’cyclopaedia?’
‘Is only Cossack who can have these things.’
‘By law?’
‘Yes, by law.’ Boys understood that. ‘But I do have a winter hat made from white fox. Is very warm when there is snow.’
‘Is it deep snow?’
‘Very, very deep.’
‘Caw, I wish I could go to Russia. We don’t have hardly any here.’
In only minutes, Dimitri appeared to be more at the heart of her family than Eve herself.
‘Sit yourselves down then. Go on, Lu, don’t wait to be asked.’
Ted, May, Ann Carter, Ephraim, Harry, Young Gabe, Ray, Bonnie, Anthony in his crib, Eve and Dimitri.
There was an eager dive for the cheese tarts by the boys, and Dimitri, and a more sedate choice from the grown-ups. There was so much talk about the deliciousness of the food that it eased any awkwardness there might have been about the passage of time since Eve had last sat at this table.
Ken had been out when they had arrived.
Suddenly he was there.
‘Oh, Ken…’
‘Hello, Lu. Nice to see you back.’ A quick tight clasp around one another’s neck. How brave he had been as an International Brigader. She had seen his injuries, wrapped his frostbitten feet, yet here he was looking fitter and healthier than she could ever have expected. It was a dangerous moment for both of them. It would be easy to break down and weep for what they had seen, and done, and how they had failed. But her return was to the whole family, who did not want to be reminded that two of them had chosen to leave.
Ken was more emotional with Dimitri. For a brief moment they buried their faces in one another’s shoulders… a very un-English gesture, but a heart-stopping moment.
‘Salud, comrade.’
Spain set the three of them apart from the rest and could have easily made them spectres at the feast had it not been for Dimitri’s adroitness. ‘You see, May, we Russians are great dramatists. I think maybe it is embarrassing for English people. We Russians do not think that a book or an opera is worth anything if it does not rend our hearts in two.’ He held his heart and rolled his eyes ridiculously, making the children laugh, and the adults warm to him even more.
The weather being fine and mild, the door to the yard was open. A clatter of hoofs sounded. ‘That’ll be her.’
Eve dashed out, calling and waving.
Bar had dismounted and was fastening the gate. Babies had thickened her figure only slightly. She pulled off her battered riding hat and the black Barney hair sprang out in its crinkly mass. The two women clasped one another cheek to cheek and searched one another’s face briefly.
‘Oh, Bar! You’re just the same as ever.’
‘I got some grey hairs and I haven’t got a waist no more. Can’t say the same to you. You lost a lot of weight. Where’s your tits gone? And I won’t say nothing about your hair – you’ll go grey soon enough. Come on, help us put Fairy in her shed.’
‘Is she yours?’
‘Yeah, except that she’s really Duke’s – Fairmile Queen. Didn’t he have her before you went off?’
There was this about Bar. She wasn’t skirting around Eve’s absence as the others had. ‘You’m beautiful an’t you, Fairy. The major says I can put her with his Darkie – he’s a beaut – but I don’t know how Duke would take to that.’
Eve took some oats and Fairmile Queen nuzzled them out of her hand. Together Eve and Bar watered and fed the dainty mare, speaking mainly to her rather than each other. Bar wasn’t the same as ever. Now that the greetings were over she held her mouth in a tight line and, except to the mare, was strained in her replies, which were as short as when she and Eve had fallen out as children – a rare thing.
‘What’s up with you, Bar?’
‘Nothin’s up with me, Lu. More to the point, what’s up with you?’
‘Nothing. Here, let me do that.’
‘Come on… what’s up with you?’
‘Nothing, Bar. Really nothing. Perhaps I’m trying too hard to get back together.’
‘Here.’ Taking Eve by the shoulders she pressed her to sit on a hay bale by the stable door. ‘Fairy can wait a minute.’ Taking Eve’s hands, Bar looked straight in her face, her brow furrowing slightly, ‘What’s up with you is that you can’t pretend with me. I can see right through you. You been seeing Duke.’
‘Duke?’
‘Yes, yes, yes, you daft thing. Look how you’re blushing, and your aura’s glowing like a blooming neon sign. I know you saw Duke. What were you doing going back to Spain?’
‘You know that I was there? What was it, spirit messages?’
‘Don’t get sarky with me, Lu, Lady Morag lets me have telephone calls there sometimes. You been to Spain again. And you met Duke. Now, Lu, are you going to tell me?’
‘I can’t tell you, Bar. OK, you know I was in Spain, but I can’t say anything about why.’
Now it was Bar who was the sarcastic one. ‘Oh, so it’s all hush-hush, like at Brownsea Island where they’re breeding germs to spread on the Germans.’ Bar laughed, running her hands through her hair in a familiar gesture. ‘That’s so hush-hush that people in pubs is talking about it.’
‘Well, I’m not people in pubs.’
Bar took a place beside Eve on the hay bale.
‘That’s for sure. You’re people in posh cocktail bars.’
‘I’m still me underneath.’
‘No. You’re a changeling. As soon as I married your Ray, I was so happy. Then, to stop me getting above myself, the “Darks” come here, and what they did, they took away my best friend, Lu, and gave back Eve so I wouldn’t get too cocky.’
‘Don’t play with me, Bar. You’re too old to be talking like that now. Neither of us is twelve any longer.’
‘More’s the pity. When we was twelve, we was pure and innocent, and only the wood spirits was around us. Duke gave you the witchetty piece I made for him. Shows how serious he is about you.’
Eve hardly knew what to say.
‘What about your chap you’re going to marry? You both in the same line of work?’
‘I don’t know what Dimitri does.’
‘He don’t make your aura glow. What you marrying him for? You said you wouldn’t never get married. I wanted to, but you never did. You always said that you wouldn’t get tied down by no man. I was pretty shocked when your auntie got your letter. It didn’t make sense, not with knowing about you and Duke.’
‘There’s nothing about me and Duke.’
‘That’s not what he thinks.’
‘He can think what he likes – there’s nothing between us.’
‘That still don’t account for you marrying this foreigner.’
‘Come and meet him. You’ll like him. They have all taken to him; he’s a nice man.’
‘You’re really going to marry a nice man then?’
‘Of course I’m going to marry him.’
‘OK.’
‘What do you mean, OK?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘Bar… don’t do this to me.’
‘Do what?’
‘I know we’re not kids any more, but what we used to say about us being two halves of one person… doesn’t it mean anything?’
‘You’re the half that went away.’
‘I know. But that’s not what’s up, is it?’
Long moments of silence fell between them whilst they both stared off into the distance.
‘No, if I’m honest, I was the first one to break us up when I married your Ray.’
‘We didn’t break, we just grew up; but that’s not to say we can’t talk to one another like we used to.’
‘Duke’s in love with you.’
‘No he’s not. Duke, he would never say such a thing.’
‘He did.’
‘He just wouldn’t.’
‘And why not?’
‘It would make him vulnerable.’
‘What d’you mean?’
‘If he said he was in love with me or anyone and they didn’t love him back, he’d be humiliated, you know he would. He could never stand being rejected. He’s just too proud.’
‘All right, he never actually said it, but I could tell. Duke and you was destined for each other.’
‘For goodness’ sake, Bar, people aren’t destined. They just happen to come across one another and sometimes they hit it off.’
‘Then how come you just happened to come across him in a place where none of you should rightly be? That’s Destiny.’
‘I gave up thinking like that ages ago. Coincidence is a common thing.’
‘You’re marrying to a foreigner you don’t love.’
‘We have been together a long time, went through thick and thin, he saved me. So, I’m going to give May the wedding she’s always wanted for a daughter she never had, and I want Ray to take me down the aisle and Ken to be best man.’
Clearly changing the subject, Bar went over to Fairy and started seeing to her stable. ‘What d’you think of Bonnie? An’t she just the picture of a little girl?’
‘She’s amazing. I’ve never come across a child so young who could hold a proper conversation.’
‘That’s due to her two grandmothers. Neither of them’s ever babied her.’
‘And what about Anthony then? He follows everybody around with those lovely eyes. I don’t know who he takes after but it will come out when he loses all that baby chubbiness. Isn’t he a perfect little sweet?’
Bar didn’t answer, except for an absent- minded, ‘Mm… oh yeah.’ The atmosphere changed again, but Eve ignored it. ‘Well, let’s hope so. If he’d been a mongol like that Maurice, I should have drowned him like a kitten in a bucket.’
‘Bar! For pity’s sake, stop talking so weird.’
Bar was forking hay and clattering water pails with a vehemence quite out of proportion to the minor tasks of bedding and watering a small horse. ‘Don’t mention nothing about Duke, Lu. It’d hurt Ma if she knew about him wantin’ you and you marrying this foreigner.’
Supper was a success, laid out in the huge kitchen where the long table was covered with plain white paper held with drawing pins. Dimitri was in his element, helping the women. How he must miss his own family, Eve thought.
May’s hand was evident in the splendid home-made dishes, and Ann Carter’s in the little jars of summer flowers and leaves, and bowls of curd cheese and sweet goat’s butter.
Mrs Gunner, whom Eve could scarcely remember except that she was the wife of the land agent and had a boy who was ‘not all there’, joined the family, bringing a jar of rare wild-bee honey, which she and Maurice had taken from the hollow trunk of a rotted tree.
May said to Maurice, ‘You give it to this lady. She’s the queen bee here.’ Eve asked herself if May was nipping at her – or was she herself sensitive after the disturbing way Bar was acting? Eve thanked the boy – nobody would ever call him a man.
‘Ma, she kissed me. D’you see that? I was kissed by her.’
‘Now, Maurice,’ Alice Gunner said, ‘don’t get so excited.’
Eve held the youth’s hand. ‘My name is Lu, if you want to call me that.’
‘I will. Yes. I will call you by your name. Lu. ’Tis a queer name. You say Lu-Lu-Lu. ’Tis like a little owl.’ Eve thought about what Bar had said about drowning a mongol like a kitten in a bucket. How could she think such a horrible thing when she must see this boy all the time, and know that he enjoyed life?
Bonnie demanded that Maurice took her to the honey tree.
He took her hand. ‘’Tis a long way, you know.’
Alice held the two hands – one flaky-skinned and red, with blunt, flat fingernails; the other like a small, pink starfish. ‘Another time, Bonnie. Me and Maurice will take you there, but only when your pa says so.’
The flaky hand and the starfish settled for playing the old cross clapping game, making Alice Gunner as pleased with her son as was Ray with his knowing little daughter.
Eve watched and thought how fortunate Maurice was to have been born to such good parents who hadn’t sent him to the asylum.
But neither Eve nor anyone else, except Maurice, and possibly May, had any idea of what went on in the Gunner house, and that Alice sometimes kept at home until the bruises went down. But James Gunner never touched Maurice. Roman’s Fields was a haven to Alice, and May, being May, always welcomed a woman less fortunate than herself. May had a pretty good idea of what went on with Jim Gunner.
‘You been all right lately, Alice?’
‘Not too bad, May, not too bad.’ Which May knew was a lie.
Bar, now out of her stable clothes and into a black skirt and top much as she had always worn as a girl, picked up Bonnie and said, ‘How’s my girl then?’ Then she made a beeline for Dimitri. ‘So you’re the one then? I’m Bar.’
Dimitri stood hastily and shook Bar’s hand, making a slight formal bow. ‘I know from how you look. You are her best friend, and wife of Ray. And mother of two beautiful children. I am so pleased to meet you.’
There was something not right. At first, Eve had intuited it; now she noticed that Bar petted Bonnie, but didn’t even look in Ray’s direction. Eve glanced at Ray, who was watching but who quickly looked away, and fussed with the blanket covering Anthony.
Ted’s wines, made from his own fruit, were easy to drink, and they drank plenty. May was constantly urging Eve to eat something: ‘I made it special because you were coming’ and ‘I dare say you’ve got used to different food these days.’ Although said cheerfully, there was some resentment in May’s tone. Eve felt guilty and ungrateful.
Dimitri kept the atmosphere light. Ted, May and Ray were eager to hear about the Ukraine and Dimitri was happy to tell tales about his boyhood, in a place nobody had ever heard of.
May told how Lu had come to them as a sick child and gone home well.
‘That’s because I took her to the Swallit Pool.’ Bar challenged Eve with a look. ‘An’t that right, Lu? I showed her how to join up with the sky and she got better.’
Ted said, ‘Maybe, maybe, Bar, but I reckon May’s father’s tonics helped build her up. And May’s cooking.’
‘Don’t look as if it lasted. She’s thin as a rake. Come on, girl, eat up. You tell her, Dimitri.’
‘I? She will never listen to me, Lu knows what she wants.’
‘Well,’ May said, ‘I hope she wants the best wedding Wickham has seen in a long time.’
Eve, knowing what May wanted, stood behind May’s chair and bent down to kiss her cheek. ‘I do want the best wedding, and I know it will be because the best aunt has made it.’
Alice and Maurice stayed on as late as could be, enjoying the normality of the Wilmott’s, until finally, Alice said quietly, ‘Could you lend us a torch, Ted? I think Maurice and me will go down to one of my people in the village.’
‘If you like, I’ll walk you down.’
‘No, Ted, I don’t want James’s wrath to fall on Roman’s.’
May said, ‘Just let him try, Alice, just let him try.’
That night, and for many more, Alice and Maurice slept in one of the small cottages along Mill Lane. It was not as spacious as Keeper’s Lodge, but safe from the man who was more mental than his son.
‘He’s a sick man,’ Alice kept explaining to her son. ‘He can’t help hisself.’
The house was chilly and still smelled of wine and tobacco smoke as Eve went silently downstairs in bare feet and a cardigan over her nightdress.
She found Ray outside, sitting on a kitchen chair, feeding baby Anthony from a boat-shaped teat-and-valve bottle which allowed the baby to feed without coming up for breath.
‘He’s a hungry one.’
Ray looked up and nodded. ‘Sleep all right?’
‘Right through till the Barneys’ cock started up.’
‘What you planning to do today?’
‘I don’t know. I’ll need to go down to the vicarage. We’ve a special licence but I have to see the vicar about the bellringers and rest of it.’
‘May’s seen to all that. Can’t have no bells.’
‘Oh?’
‘Only time church bells can ring is if there’s an invasion or peace comes.’
‘Of course… stupid of me to want bells.’ She held out her arms. ‘Can I finish feeding him?’
‘If you like. Here, put this bit of rag on your shoulder. He’s a great one for sicking up when he’s winded.’
He gave her the chair and seated himself on the high stone step. ‘You have to keep the teat end up, else he’ll take in wind.’
Enveloping the baby closely in the crook of her arm, leaning over, Eve communicated satisfaction with her eyes and the baby returned the look. She was aware of Ray watching. In answer to his unasked question, she said, ‘I’m quite a professional, aren’t I? You’re surprised. I worked in a house full of babies and children who had lost their parents.’
He gave her a short look. Not anger. Possibly resentment or pique or injured feelings. They sat in silence until she pulled the teat from Anthony’s mouth, having left only enough milk in the teat so that he did not take in air.
‘There. Come on, young Wilmott, let’s have a burp.’ When the baby obliged she looked up and smiled at the ageing face of the man who, whilst still a boy himself, had done the same for her years ago. Her instinct was to put her arms round him. But there was too much Wilmott in Ray for that. She could do it with Ken, but not Ray.
When he had fallen in love with Bar, and had got over his initial guilt of her being so much younger, he became a changed man. Ken had gone, so the three of them had shared the old home in Portsmouth, and Ray had almost stopped feeling responsible for everyone.
‘How do you and May get on – all right?’
‘Pretty good. Bar wouldn’t be able to run the stables if it wasn’t for her.’
‘I expect it suits both of them.’
‘What d’you mean?’
‘May having the children… and Bar having outside work that suits her.’
‘She don’t have to work.’
‘I know, Ray, I just meant that it’s an arrangement that suits them both. May was always mistress of Roman’s, and Bar was always a favourite.’
‘Not so much as you.’
‘But me and May living under the same roof was never anything that could happen. You all look pretty comfortable together.’
He appeared not to come halfway to reconciliation with her. She couldn’t complain. He had always put her first, but she had gone off to make a new life for herself and not returned until it suited her to.
‘How about Ann and Eli?’
‘They’re OK. It’s a bit of a funny set-up. May and Ann keeps open house to both families. Bonnie has grown up in two homes, but it’s OK. It wouldn’t be my way of going on – too much like the families in our old street, the kids belonging to everybody.’
‘But not us. We were different.’
He flicked a look at her, not sure how to take it. ‘Yes, we were. We were a cut above. It wasn’t easy keeping yourself to yourself… being respectable.’
‘I know.’
‘I wonder if you do. You have to have kids to bring up, then you know. I’ll tell you something, Lu, I’m not a natural-born countryman. I’m a townie. I know how to live down there, but not out here. It’s like I’m living in a foreign land, but I never come to live here for me, but so that Bonnie wouldn’t have to be brought up in a place like Lampeter Street.’
For Ray, that speech was an outpouring, a baring of his soul. There was nothing sensitive that Eve could say, so she turned her attention to the baby, who was nodding contentedly to the rhythm of her rocking. It was a quiet time of year for songbirds, but the aggressive twittering of sparrows carried clearly on the early-morning air. It was hard to believe that this was a country at war.
After a while, Eve said, ‘Is it any good saying I’m sorry, Ray?’
‘For what?’
‘You know what. I thought that you and Bar with the new baby and your new job…’
‘That I wouldn’t notice that you had just upped and left us?’
‘It wasn’t like that, Ray.’
‘It was from where I was standing. I’d been your father and mother, Lu, and you just took off and went where you was likely to get killed and I was worried sick.’
‘But I didn’t get killed, Ray.’
‘Might as well have, for all that’s left of your old self.’
‘And I went without ever saying what I should have said – that I was thankful for the way you had brought me up. God, I was a self-centred little bitch.’
‘You was that, Lu.’
For her, there had never been a worse moment between them.
‘You wasn’t thinking of coming back? I know May and Ted was hoping you would.’
She pointed to demonstrate what she was about to say. ‘Look at me, Ray, as posh a London lady as ever you’ll see. This is me, this is what I’ve become, this is how I intend being.’ She put a hand gently on his arm and felt him flinch. ‘Ray, try to understand. This person I’ve become is sort of built over the one with all the really decent things you taught me.
‘Dimitri bought me a wooden Russian doll. It’s actually a set of four of them, exactly the same, except smaller and smaller and they fit inside one another. He said the littlest one is Lu, the one that is inside all the others.’
Ray probably thought that Dimitri was as fanciful as herself, but it was the best that she could do.
‘So you reckon I’m giving you away to the right man?’
‘You will give me away then?’
‘Yes, of course I’m going to give you away.’ ‘Given away’ by one man to another? That was one of the things she had against church weddings. Given away and then bound by the badge of servitude – a wedding ring.
‘Of course he’s the right man. Dimitri is very special. He has ideals that are probably stronger than yours or mine. He’s not like anyone you’ll ever meet around here. You’d be better asking, am I the right woman for him.’
The morning progressed. Ray had gone off on his shift. The Barney family was about its own work and school. Bonnie was at kindergarten.
The house was quiet, work in the kitchen had been done, and May was just ready to go out to the fields, wearing the same old field-hat tied under her chin that Eve remembered from years before.
May had busied herself like always. But busied herself to the extent that she hadn’t taken a minute to sit down with Eve and talk. Perhaps that was still to come, except that Eve sensed that what she was seeing was not the reality of their lives now. It was almost as though they were acting, trying hard not to forget their lines. Dimitri was their prompt, filling in with his brand of jollity. He was good at it. The two of them hadn’t had a moment together alone. Eve wondered what he made of them and whether he saw them as she had described them so often – or as fragmented as they so clearly were.
Was it that Ted was dying, wasting away, as he so clearly was, and nobody must mention it?
Ken was seated at a corner of the kitchen table writing.
May said, to Eve, ‘Listen, love, why don’t you stroll down the lane with Baby? He likes going out in his pram. Take Ken with you.’
‘Where’s Dimitri?’
‘He’s off with Ted.’ May smiled. ‘My dear Lord, he’s no shirker. He’s gone to do a stint at the winter wood.’
‘Just his style, sleeves rolled up, swinging an axe.’
‘Ah, yes. I’ll bet he’s worth a look at when he’s working.’
‘He’ll get a handful of blisters, but that won’t daunt him. He’s a big show-off.’ Eve felt proud of the man she had brought home. If she imagined bringing David Hatton here, as at one time might have been on the cards, or the tangle and trouble that being here with Duke would have provoked, it was too awful to contemplate. Everywhere she and Dimitri had ever been, he fitted in. His enjoyment of life overflowed and warmed other people. He deserved to be loved. Fran Haddon would be perfect for him.
May said, ‘I rubbed his hands with spirits.’
‘I hope you’ve got plenty of wintergreen, or he’s going to church in a wheelbarrow.’
Ken looked up from his writing. ‘I was going to suggest a tractor and trailer for him.’
May laughed, her care-worn face transformed – the old May. ‘He is a size, all right, that broad and upright. What I call a real manly man.’
‘Ha… you should have seen him in his major’s uniform,’ Ken said, giving a mock salute.
A small thud of awkward silence. Eve and Ken exchanged brief glances.
Saying, ‘I’m glad I didn’t,’ May left the house. ‘Phew,’ Ken said, ‘that was a bit of an icy blast. She hates it that there are things that go on outside the family that she doesn’t know about. She sees herself as the matriarch.’
‘It’s what she is. Everything at Roman’s Fields revolves round her. And everybody likes it that way.’
‘Except me and you.’
‘I don’t not like it, I just don’t want to be drawn in. I can do without the comfort.’
‘Let me just finish writing this envelope, and I’ll be ready.’ He blotted the page and handed it to his sister. ‘Read it.’
‘What is it?’
‘Read it.’
The salutation stopped her in her tracks and she briefly looked up, not knowing whether she wanted to read on, but she did.
Dear Lieutenant Hatton,
Thank you for seeing me yesterday. I am pleased to confirm that I wish to apply for the training course you offer, and shall report to you in Portsmouth on Saturday, 26 April.
Yours faithfully, Kenneth Wilmott.
‘Ken!’
‘I know, surprising, isn’t it? Come on, let’s walk down to the post office – don’t say anything until we get away from the house.’
The walk into the village was both familiar and strange to Eve. The familiarity was the curves and bends in the road, lined by forest trees that had been there for generations. The strangeness was that she and Ken should be doing it at all, to say nothing of wheeling an old-fashioned perambulator.
The lane still showed signs of last year’s fall of mulberries. It was obvious that nobody had laid out sheets to catch the fruits.
‘Remember the smell of ripe mulberries? Happy memories, Ken.’
‘Ted’s wine? We never hardly knew wine existed until we came here that Christmas.’ He turned and gave her a smile. ‘Tasted a lot worse since then. God, some of that rough stuff out there… and some very nice stuff too, I have to give the Spaniards that.’
How different were their relationships now. When they all lived together in Portsmouth, Ray was the one Eve could tell anything to, Ken was always ‘off on the razzle’, interested only in having a good time. Spain had changed that.
Indicating the letter he was carrying, Eve asked, ‘How did this come about then?’
‘Out of the blue. I had been trying to sign on in one of the forces, but they wouldn’t take me on account of my frostbite. Then a letter came,’ he laughed, ‘which May’s been hinting at ever since. It was from him.’ He indicated the letter. ‘Said that he remembered meeting me, and would I be interested in seeing him to talk about how I might fit in to a new unit he was running? I was wondering if you had anything to do with it.’
‘Why would I?’
Ken raised his eyebrows and shrugged his shoulders. ‘Because you know each other. He’s your senior officer.’ Again he laughed. ‘In charge of WRNS, is he? He even knows you are getting wed tomorrow because he said I should come after the wedding. He knows it’s special licence, and it’s Major Vladim. So he knows a lot he shouldn’t if you wasn’t part of this unit that he’s running. I know what the unit does and what it’s called – SOE.’
Eve didn’t know what to say. She seemed to remember having said something about Ken to David, but not to suggest him to SOE.
‘I know him, of course I do. You first met him through me. How did he get your name?’
‘He gets passed on to him the names of any Brigaders who try to join up. I was rejected because of that frostbite damage to my feet but they mark your card if you were a Brigader.’
‘That’s a waste of good soldiers. The training out there was as good as anywhere.’
Even now the walk back showed up Ken’s limp.
‘Are your feet still much of a problem?’
‘Nah, I got patched up well in that hospital. Actually, I feel almost proud of my queer toes.’ As she was about to open the side-gate, he stopped her. ‘I’ve got a kid out there, Lu.’
‘Oh, Ken.’
‘Yeah… don’t even know if it’s a boy or a girl.’
‘What about the mother?’
‘She was one of those women you just had to admire for their ideals. She was very political… taught me a lot, taught me the language. What she was doing was pretty much the same as Dimitri – going around reminding the troops what they were fighting for.’
‘Have you talked to Dimitri?’
‘A bit. He said he couldn’t stomach any more Russian propaganda. Remember that poster that was everywhere – ‘Madrid Will Be the Tomb of Fascism’? Well, it wasn’t, was it? He said he couldn’t go back to Russia knowing what he knew was going on there. Two and two together, I take it that he’s SOE as well.’
‘Changing the subject, what’s happened to Bar? She makes me afraid.’
‘She makes everybody afraid.’
‘She was so strange with me yesterday. One minute she was talking about drowning babies like kittens, the next she’s all high spirits and acting the fool with Bonnie.’
‘I don’t know the right of it. What I know is from Ted. It seems that when she was expecting this last baby, she refused to admit it. Even when it began to show she got that abusive. Our Ray didn’t know what to do… poor bugger, he still don’t. Anyway, one morning, she goes over to her mother’s place. Next thing, Ann comes over to Roman’s and says Ray’s got a son. And that’s how it’s been. Ray’s got his son. She won’t have anything to do with the baby – nor Ray for that matter.’
‘Ray’s good with him. Lucky he’s got three willing women to help.’
‘She behaves as though the baby don’t exist.’
‘She knows he exists all right, because that’s how she started being weird about the baby not being normal and drowning kittens.’
‘I know some women never take to their babies, but this… this is extreme. Do you reckon the baby’s safe?’
‘Oh yes, there’s always somebody taking care of him. He just doesn’t exist for her.’
‘Poor old Ray,’ Eve said. ‘He brought me up because Dad good as gave up on us. Now he’s got to be mother and father to another one.’
In the years since Eve was last there, the Barneys’ ‘encampment’ had become more of a conventional home: converted outhouses with a well-cultivated cottage garden, which, in the height of summer, would be filled with rows of ferny carrots and bulb fennel, onions with their tops bent over to stop the flowering, potatoes, parsnips and other root vegetables, plus many herbs and old-fashioned flowers, for distillation into tinctures which Ann would give freely to anyone in need. Marigold, bergamot, feverfew grew, all hover fly and bee attractors.
‘Ann?’ she called.
‘I see you coming, so I made you some of your sort of tea, seeing as you never did take to my infusions.’
‘I’ve grown to like Earl Grey.’
‘Bergamot and lemon, that is, but it an’t nowhere good as mine. So I’ll pick some bergamot and you can put it in if you like.’
They sat on wooden stools at a wooden table silver with weathering and age, glistening in the April light.
When Eve had been brought to May and Ted’s, it had been Ann and Bar who had taken care of her mental and spiritual health. Although Ann’s was not a Christian spirituality.
Ann Carter rubbed rough knuckles along Eve’s jawline as she searched her face with her soft eyes. ‘You’m still the girl of summer. I told Bar two years and more ago when she was frettin’ that you was gone to the war that you would return before three years was up. And you would come for the summer solstice and your birth date which is midsummer – except you’re a bit out.’ Ann had a way of expressing herself that was like no one Eve had ever met. She was always totally aware of and focused upon whoever it was she was speaking to. She cast the runes, and read lives in hands and tea leaves. Her voice itself was confident and comforting. Ann Carter knew things that no one else knew – except perhaps Bar.
She picked up Eve’s hand and casually turned it back and forth, then looked up sharply. ‘Still the two babes. It’s time they was here, Lu.’
‘We brought two orphans out of Spain.’
‘You know better than that. Only your own babes show on your hand.’
Eve sipped the aromatic black tea in which pinched leaves of bergamot floated.
‘Only your own,’ Ann repeated, still looking closely at the place below Eve’s little finger. ‘And there’s two.’
‘I had a miscarriage… in Australia.’
‘My dear child, that’s sad. It’s why the line is so small and faint.’
Eve withdrew her hand and looked closely at where she knew children were supposed to be foretold. There was a second crease, quite clear when she clenched her fist.
‘That one’s not.’ Ann ran her split and grubby fingernail along the little fold. ‘Are you carrying?’
‘No I’m not.’
Ann made a doubting grimace. ‘How many times has women and girls said that?’
‘I can’t be.’
‘Ah, if you rely on having your “flowers” to tell you that you an’t carrying then you’re on quaggy ground.’
It was true. With the miscarriage, she had been fooled by her menstrual cycle right up to the time when Jess Lavender had held a pail under Eve to catch the small foetus.
‘Is that why you’re going to marry the big fella?’
‘No. I’m marrying him so that we’ll be husband and wife.’
‘That don’t ring true. I bet Bar don’t believe that.’
‘Well, no, as a matter of fact she doesn’t, but I can’t help what you and Bar believe. He’s asked me to marry him, and I’m going to. Why is that so hard to believe? You’ve seen him, he’s a good, lovely man.’
The older woman came to stand behind Eve, gently smoothing her hair and cheeks. ‘Don’t take no notice of us, my darling. You know what queer ideas me and her gets. ’Tis true, he is a lovely man, and he will make you happy.’ Ann grinned mischievously, and whined, ‘Buy a bit o’ luck from a gypsy, my dear. Cross the gypsy’s palm with silver.’
Eve laughed and pushed her away. ‘You’re a witch-woman, not a gypsy.’
The Barneys’ guard dog barked, disturbing Anthony, who let out a squawk. Eve pressed Ann’s loving hands closer and then got up from the stool and took the bottle of scalded milk from the pram. ‘I’m in charge of his next feed. Can you warm this?’
Ann shook drops onto her wrist. ‘It’s just right for him. Do you want to let me do it? I mostly do during the day when Ray’s not about. Sometimes May does.’
Eve watched as the baby suckled, his large eyes searching his grandmother’s face, occasionally releasing the teat for a moment and smiling up at her. Ann gave a deep sigh, tightened her lips and shook her head.
‘Is he a good baby?’
‘Oh yes. Good as gold, aren’t you, my little king?’
They sat in silence, watching the ever-absorbing picture of a baby suckling.
‘Something’s wrong, isn’t it.’ A statement, not a question.
‘What, is it you getting the gift of insight now?’
‘Ann, don’t you shut me out like the rest of them. What’s wrong between Ray and Bar? When I was with Ray this morning and he was feeding and changing Anthony, it seemed to me that he was being mother and father again, as he used to be with me, as though he had to make up to the baby for something, the way he used to make up for my father always being away. Am I right?’
‘Yes, you’re right. You can’t hide a thing like that. It’s Bar – she can’t take to this one. Right from the day he was born, she wouldn’t put him to the breast. Not like Bonnie – she kept her on for months. After that we all of us had a hand in bringing her up. Bar went back to the stables. The major put her in charge of everything, all his good horses. He told people as he’d got the best stable manager in the county. Eli says that’s right. Bar can make horses do anything she wants.’
‘She appeared… well… radiant when I saw her come in with Fairy yesterday. Then, as soon as we started speaking, she went… I don’t know… weird.’
‘Bonnie and Fairy, Fairy and Bonnie. That was her whole world. I told her first off that she was carrying. She said no. Even when she began to show, she wouldn’t have it. Then she started taking out the big hunters, galloping them cross country like she was in a steeplechase – she was trying to shake him loose.’
Anthony was now lolling over his feed. Ann jiggled the bottle and he began sucking strongly again.
‘She never wanted him, poor little soul. She’s as good with the herbs as I am – she could have took the pennyroyal if she’d wanted to – but it was as though she thought that if she denied that she was carrying, then she wasn’t carrying. Her mind was that bent. Poor Ray was half out of his mind. He wanted this baby, and she was telling him not to be so daft, because she wasn’t carrying.’
‘I can’t believe it.’
‘Oh, you can believe it, my sweetheart. She treats poor Ray as though it didn’t take two to make a baby. She won’t talk about it, but it’s my reckoning that she won’t let him near her in bed. Talking and reasoning didn’t make no difference. She just said she couldn’t take to the baby, she couldn’t help how she feels. And now if anything’s mentioned she just looks through you and gets out. She’s my only girl, and she’s breaking my heart. I cried all my tears, and I’m dried up. Crying dry is worse than anything.’
Eve sat and watched her little nephew smiling up at his grandmother, as he had smiled up at Ray. Tears gathered and she could not stop them.
‘Want to get his wind up?’
Eve shook her head. She felt chilled to the marrow. The love affair between Ray and Bar, which had bloomed so wonderfully in the old house in Lampeter Street, had died. Not merely died, it had been done to death in a barbarous manner.
Ray had made her feel guilty that she had kept her new life from them, yet here was something far more serious that they had kept from her. The traditional family supper last night had been a sham. She hadn’t given it a thought at the time, but now she recalled that Ray had fed, changed, washed the baby and then carried him upstairs already asleep in his rush crib. At the other end of the table Bar had played with Bonnie, putting little twists of flowers in her hair and feeding her little titbits from her own plate. What had appeared a united and happy little family was in two parts. No, that wasn’t quite right, Bonnie was as much Ray’s pride as she was Bar’s, but baby Anthony was not Bar’s.
‘You’re only here for another day, so I wouldn’t say nothing. It might get all right again, you never know, so I say least said, soonest mended.’
‘There’s nothing for me to say. In the morning, I’ll get up, get dressed, walk down to the church, and then catch the train to London.’
‘You brought spare nappies with you? No? It don’t matter, I keep some here.’
When Anthony was back in his pram, contentedly sucking his thumb, Eve made to leave. Giving Ann a kiss on each cheek, she said, ‘Thank you, Ann. I can’t ever remember leaving this yard without feeling that my thoughts had been given a good shake up and had settled down in better order.’
Ann laughed. ‘You always had a way of saying things like nobody I ever knew. Look, my darling,’ she took a pill box from her apron pocket, ‘you know I wouldn’t give it except in the spirit of love. It’s sun-dried pennyroyal. You know what it does. If you don’t ever want to use it, then don’t. But I for one won’t blame you for not bringing into the world a babe that isn’t wanted. It’s against the law, and Church Christians calls it a sin, but that’s their affair. They haven’t got no right to tell the rest of womankind how to live their lives. The women in the village know where to come, and I’m glad they do.’
The small chemist’s pill box containing Ann’s packet of pennyroyal rubbed gently against Eve’s leg until she reached her room, when she put it in another small box that contained the Dutch cap she had last used when she and Dimitri were married at the registry office.