The frost had lain heavy on the latch when Mr Todd had made to leave the cottage with his grandson Tam, making it unusually difficult to open the planked wooden door with hands already half frozen. The weather had turned so cold that water had frozen inside the window panes, while outside Tam and his grandfather could see icicles hanging from the guttering as thick as a man’s fingers. When the door had finally been prised open the first thing the little boy saw was a big black bird dead on its back on the hard white ground, its clawed feet thrust skywards as if in one last protest. His grandfather picked the poor little corpse up, and chucked it away without ceremony into a nearby ditch.
‘The rats can have him. No good comes of seeing dead crows,’ he muttered, half burying his face in his thick grey muffler as the east wind bit into his skin. ‘Dead crow in the morning always comes with a warning.’
The little boy by his side said nothing. He knew that his grandfather was right: even the rats needed feeding in a winter as cold and hard as this one. The bitterness of the weather made him feel as though life was on the verge of stopping, that it would just get colder and colder until nothing could survive, until everything and everybody was dead, frozen stiff beneath one huge sheet of ice.
‘Don’t know what we’s bothering to come out for, Tam,’ his granddad muttered on. ‘Ground’s that frozen we’d need a pickaxe to get anything out of it. A pickaxe, or a ruddy pneumatic drill.’
The wind sharpened as they reached the end of the lane and turned into the road leading to the allotments. Mr Todd hunched his shoulders tightly together and buried his chin further in his muffler while Tam gasped out loud as the ice-cold blast seemed to hit the back of his throat.
‘Think it’ll snow now, Grandpa?’ he cried bravely, as tears of cold trickled down his cheeks. ‘Must snow soon, surely, Grandpa?’
‘Too cold for snow, Tam. Far too cold for snow.’
‘How can it be too cold to snow, Grandpa?’
‘’Cos the clouds freeze up, that’s a why, boy. And the snow can’t fall out, that’s a why.’
The two of them continued on their way in silence, as silent as the frozen countryside around them.
‘Can’t remember when I last seen the estuary froze over, and that’s true,’ Mr Todd said, gazing out to sea and suddenly flapping his arms round his body in a hopeless attempt to gain some warmth. ‘They say sea’s froze too, to a quarter a mile out.’
His grandson frowned, staring in the direction of the sea, wondering whether he dare ask to be taken to see the boats glued into the ice, the snow carpeting the boatyard. But his grandfather always liked to do the suggesting; he knew that, as so he should. His grandmother had told him often enough.
You best leave any ideas you have well alone, she’d say, ruffling his hair, which Tam hated. Your granddad’s sort of man who’ll run in the opposite direction you tell him, just for the sake of it. So you just leave any suggesting things to him.
Hardly daring to breathe in or out now, so painful did it seem to have become, Tam wished with all his heart that he was back at home with his granny, huddled over the few lumps of coke and half-dry driftwood that afforded them the only warmth available in this most bitter of winters, rather than trying to curry favour with his granddad by agreeing to accompany him to the allotments to see if there was any food that they could dig up out of the unyielding ground.
‘Don’t know why we bothered fighting damn war,’ he heard his grandfather mutter as they reached their destination.’You can bet Jerry isn’t half freezin’ to death on a diet of tinned snoek – nastiest tasting fish ever put on a plate is snoek – or trying to dig a frozen turnip out of the ice. Makes a man wonder what it was all about, it does really.’
‘What what was all about, Grandpa? An’ who’s Jerry?’
‘Never you mind, young Tam,’ Mr Todd told him, with a sudden deep sigh. ‘That’s all a dead and buried now. ’At’s all a dead and a buried now, and that’s for sure.’
As if to amplify his point, he undid the spade he had strapped to his back and started to try to prise some turnips out of ground that had seemingly turned to stone. As he did so, it began to snow. Five minutes later the two of them could barely see each other, let alone the vegetable patch, so thick was the blizzard. Finally Tam heard his grandfather throwing down his spade.
‘’Tis bloody hopeless,’ he swore. ‘Completely bloody hopeless.’
Mrs Todd glanced at the clock and, seeing it was five minutes after the time her husband had said he would be back, immediately began worrying; it was that same worrying that had driven Mr Todd half to distraction during their long marriage. But it was something she couldn’t help – born with a frown, as her own mother had frequently told her. Never seen such an anxious child. Little wonder, however, that the poor woman did worry. Born into the kind of poverty that her marriage did nothing to alleviate, she hardly had two pennies to rub together for the first few years with her new husband. Perhaps lack of money had brought on her miscarriages, for they followed each other so regularly that it seemed she would never have a living child. Finally, Rusty, her first live child, was born, followed by the two boys. Now there were only Rusty and Mickey left to her – Tom, her elder son, having been killed on a rescue mission to Dunkirk.
With a deep sigh, Mrs Todd pulled another thick knit cardigan on over her first one and knelt down at the grate to attend to the vaguely smouldering fire. She worried that her husband and young Tam would be frozen stiff by the time they returned from what she knew must be going to prove to be a fruitless quest. She stared furiously at the few remaining miserable lumps of coke that were refusing to ignite and the lumps of driftwood that were too green even to hold a spark. She had to warm the house somehow, if only for poor little Tam. She just had to warm the house.
Desperate for warmth, and even more desperate to have some sort of welcoming fire going when her husband and grandson returned, Mrs Todd started to scour the house for something dry she could burn. She was so cold that for a moment she even found herself contemplating breaking up one of the kitchen chairs and throwing it into the grate. The truth was that had they been hers to burn, and not her husband’s property, she knew she could not have resisted the temptation. Instead she pulled her wardrobe away from the wall and prised up two of the short loose planks on which it stood in one corner of their bedroom. It wasn’t the first time she had been reduced to this desperate measure, and if the freezing weather continued she imagined that it wouldn’t be the last.
Minutes later, the fire having leaped thankfully and cheerfully into life, she heard the outside latch rise and fall at long last.
‘Hang that soaking wet coat on the clothes horse, Grandpa,’ she called out to her husband as he ushered a half-frozen grandson into the room. ‘And for goodness’ sake sit you both down by the fire while I brew you some hot sweet tea.’
‘Hot maybe, sweet’ll be the day.’ Mr Todd winked at Tam who was too cold even to respond.
As tea was being prepared Mr Todd rolled himself a cigarette that was nearly all paper and precious little tobacco while Tam went to fetch their precious mound of Swan Vestas, all of which had been cut neatly down the middle, such was the shortage of matches. The little boy reached forward eagerly to light his grandfather’s cigarette.
‘Now go and put a light on, lad,’ Mr Todd suggested, once his pipe was lit. ‘I know it’s not time yet, but five minutes one way or another won’t break the law, will it? No, well, I don’t rightly reckon it will.’
Tam, a serious and dutiful expression on his young face, stood on the chair by the door, and pushed the light switch down. Just as solemnly he watched the low wattage bulb flicker into life, because he was not so old that it did not seem to be some sort of miracle how the turning of a switch could make a piece of glass light up.
‘Word is, on the wireless that is, it’s going to snow for a week or more,’ Mrs Todd said, as she put down her wooden tray, loaded with a teapot carefully covered with a cosy, and cups, their faces turned to their saucers, not to mention a precious jug of hot water, and a tiny jug of milk, on the table under the window. ‘I can’t remember a winter like it, I can’t really.’
‘How’s our Rusty?’ Mr Todd wondered, as his wife handed him a plate holding a slice of brown bread scraped lightly with margarine and a cup of steaming tea.
‘She’s lying in bed with a face as long as a wet week,’ Mrs Todd sniffed. ‘Peter’s gone to the garage, although I should imagine this weather’ll bring him home soon enough. No-one’s got any petrol coupons they want to waste in this weather, and there’ll be no mending neither, I shouldn’t have thought, so much good it’ll do him, but gets him out and away from Rusty, so that’s something.’
Mrs Todd sighed and shook her head slowly from side to side, which was enough to tell her husband what she was feeling. The Todds had been married long enough for Mr Todd to understand that the slow shaking of his wife’s head meant that their daughter was no better.
‘Mickey still in the churchyard?’
‘Can’t think why,’ Mrs Todd replied, sitting down to her own tea on the other side of the fireplace. ‘Ground’s like rock. Vicar says there’s that many funerals being delayed, but they can’t do a thing about it. Suppose they’re stockpiling them, back at the undertakers, poor souls. But it doesn’t bear thinking about. They were saying in the village, people are being found all the time, all over the country, dead in doorways, frozen stiff – tramps mostly, mind. But not just tramps, waifs and strays too – and not only waifs and strays neither. Ex-servicemen too, standing about in this weather with trays of matches for sale, and after what they’ve done for their country. Makes you think.’
‘What can you say?’ Mr Todd sighed. ‘Risk your life for King and Country and come home to die from neglect in a doorway.’
‘It simply isn’t right. It just doesn’t make sense.’
‘When did war ever make sense? That’s what I’d like to know. You tell me when a war ever made sense. I tell you, it never did.’
Tam stared from one old face to another as they sighed and grumbled, wishing with all his heart that he could read the time. He knew his father came back at six o’clock every evening. He just didn’t know when six o’clock would come; soon he hoped, silently, swinging his legs slowly under him, as his grandmother switched on the wireless, and his grandfather held out his cup for more tea. He’d just like it to be really soon.
As she lay in bed in the dark, Rusty could hear her parents’ voices floating up from down below. She had only just woken up from a sleep from which part of her wished that she had never woken, yet she knew exactly what time it was, without even having to look at the clock, because there was yellow in the white of the falling blizzard from the glow of the one dim bulb that lit teatime by the fireside downstairs. Despite the twilight falling beyond the window, however, she made no move to switch on the light by her bedside, perhaps because the coming darkness outside the window matched her feelings so precisely.
In her imagination she could feel the warmth of her newborn baby lying in her arms, imagine the softness of the face held close to hers, see herself carefully folding the shawls around it to keep it snug. But although Peter had taken the precaution of heaping her bed with extra blankets and coats before leaving to go to his garage, she knew the room to be colder than it had ever been, for her baby was dead, and Mickey was down at the churchyard with it, and she imagined there would never be a day for the rest of her life when she didn’t think of it, wondering over and over why it had been taken from her.
Even at this time of day there was still ice on the inside of her window panes. The short dark bitter days of cold, the endless nights when her mood seemed to be echoed by the winds that constantly moaned around the cottage, the shortages of every needful thing – everything conspired to make her wonder why she now faced not new life, but yet more death. Too miserable to cry and too cold to feel anything except misery she tried turning her thoughts to spring and summer; towards flowers and a warm sea running up the harbour full of brightly painted boats. But since all she could see were black leafless trees outlined against darkening skies, even the idea of warm spring weather and blue skies seemed like a hopeless fantasy, something that, like her dream of motherhood to come, would never now happen.
You’ll have another one.
To other people the baby was just a baby, whereas to her a baby was a person. You couldn’t replace people, so why did the cruel unthinking world believe you could replace a baby?
You’ll have another one.
If she heard that said one more time Rusty thought she might kill herself. Even the vicar, as he parted from her at the baby’s funeral service, pressing her hand and turning to go, had said the same.
You’ll have another child, Mrs Sykes, I feel sure of it.
Rusty had nearly shouted at him – so very nearly. She was so upset that she wanted to take hold of him and tell him – tell him that a lost baby wasn’t like a broken plate. You couldn’t just apply to the shop for another one with the same pattern. But she hadn’t. She had just looked at the ground and nodded silently, before moving away from the vicar as quickly as politeness would allow.
Now propped up on her cold pillows in the growing darkness Rusty stared numbly at the ceiling, which seemed to be growing less like part of the room and more like the dark lowering sky outside, a firmament that was reaching down, it appeared, with every intention of eventually smothering her. Hot tears trickled down her half-frozen cheeks as she rocked herself to and fro, one of her pillows cradled in her arms while darkness fell around her, enclosing the world outside her window. She heard the sounds of her husband returning, but rather than talk to him she feigned sleep when he quietly pushed open the bedroom door to check on her, a mock sleep that soon became a real one as she drifted off, only to wake again shortly afterwards when her son was brought up to bed by his grandmother. With a deep sigh she turned on to her other side, thankful that yet another long meaningless day was nearly at its end.
Pulling her bedclothes up high, almost over her head, she buried herself as deeply as she could, and found herself hoping against hope that perhaps there would be no tomorrow, or at least if there were she might not wake up to it. Much as she hated the dark, for once in her life she found herself hoping that this particular night would have no end, and day would never break; that no faint light would creep through the thin curtains, and for her there would never be another winter’s morning – no voices would murmur, no doors would open and shut, and there would be no sounds of people going about their business. That there would be no more life, in fact; no more seemingly endless bitter days or long drawn out freezing nights, no more pain, no more utter misery, no more anguish. At this moment in her young life, all Rusty wanted was for it to come to an end. Now.
* * *
Judy Tate was due to go and meet Meggie at Cucklington House, but a change in the weather had delayed her departure. To pass the time, she sat in the window of Owl Cottage watching the skies for a break in the snow with Hamish, her black Scottish terrier, sitting beside her on the window seat, seemingly as intrigued by the blizzard outside the diamond-shaped lead panes as his mistress.
‘I don’t think it’s ever going to stop, old boy, do you?’ Judy asked him, stubbing out the end of her cigarette. ‘Having been frozen stiff I now think we’re all going to be buried alive under a blanket of snow.’
Hamish leaped to his feet and started to bark at a cat streaking across the snow in front of the sitting room window. Judy was brushing some ash off her tartan skirt, reluctantly giving in to the idea of having to cancel her lunch date, when she saw the sun coming out, lighting up the snow which had stopped as suddenly as it had begun, and at once changed her mind, eager to get out of the cottage that, because of the bitter weather, had of late become something of a prison.
Five minutes later the sun was shining so brightly off the deep, crisp snow that when she opened the front door to step out she had to shade her eyes to look over the winter landscape. The beauty that greeted her raised her spirits immediately, but once outside she found it was still as bitterly cold as ever, a cold that burned into her lungs when she breathed it in, forcing her to wrap a thick red wool scarf around the lower part of her face. Holding Hamish’s lead tightly in one gloved hand, she made her way slowly and carefully, passing only a few other brave souls trying to go about their business, or keep appointments somewhere in Bexham. The trek took her twice as long as usual so it was with some relief that she finally arrived at Cucklington House, where in answer to her tug on the old iron bell rope to the side of the wood-panelled, black-painted front door Meggie Gore-Stewart arrived to greet her, wearing an old fur coat, a matching hat and sheepskin gloves.
‘No Richards?’ Judy wondered, looking around the hall and suddenly noticing some missing paintings. Judy knew better than to pass comment. She was aware that Meggie’s financial circumstances had become somewhat straitened since the war, what with overdue taxes and debts she had been obliged to pay off following the sudden death of both her parents, killed in a car accident in America the previous summer. The tragedy had left the already chaotic Gore-Stewart family affairs in a bigger mess than ever, forcing Meggie to try to raise the necessary funds from everything she had been previously bequeathed by her adored and adoring grandmother. Judging from the increasingly bare walls of Cucklington House, and the lack of any silver on the sideboard, the going was not likely to get any easier.
Meggie pulled a comically over-tragic face as Judy rephrased her question about the missing butler, wondering if he too had been hocked?
‘Richards is upstairs in his sty,’ she sighed, narrowing her eyes and taking hold of Judy by one arm. ‘Determined to keep warm with the help of a bottle of nose paint. Come on – come through to the kitchen at once. I’ve found some sardines in the larder and some biscuits for the cheese in an old tin – and best news of all, the biscuits have no weevils. Imagine? Besides, it’s almost warm in there.’
Following her friend’s example and keeping on her overcoat, Judy trod carefully down the dark flagstones into the large kitchen. The room was dominated by an old cream-coloured range to which they both immediately gravitated, as towards an open fire, putting their still gloved hands on its comfortingly warm exterior.
‘I’ve got some brandy – or would you rather a gin?’
‘Anything. Anything as long as it’s alcohol.’
Meggie poured them both large brandies, and then, still in gloves, hats and coats, with even Hamish carefully pushing his backside against the stove to warm himself, they raised their glasses to each other in a toast.
‘To hell with rationing and the Labour government and God save all here.’
Meggie sat down on one side of the old table, while Judy pulled up another chair to sit opposite her.
‘So Richards has taken to his bed, has he? What a bother. I suppose that means you have to do everything, and in this place that’s not funny. I remember even your grandmother said it was too big for her, and she had plenty of people to help her.’
‘And wasn’t Madame Gran a lucky devil, to say the least of it. Even so, Richards can stay there and rot for all I care, even if the dust gets thicker and the cobwebs heavier. When all’s said there’s no-one to see them but him and me – and he can’t see much through his eternal hangovers anyway.’
‘Have you thought of kicking him out of bed?’
‘No, but I have contemplated murdering him. Only the thought of ending up swinging on the end of a rope is stopping me. I don’t think being driven mad by your grandmother’s lunatic old butler is enough to risk being topped. Funny really, him taking to his bed now that the war is finally over – I mean, it just doesn’t seem to be in character. He was so utterly resolute when the bombs were dropping, a rock upon whom we all leaned, day and blooming night, really he was.’
‘Perhaps he’s missing all the excitement?’ Judy wondered. ‘Lots of people are missing the war. That could be the trouble. Or he could be just plumb tuckered out?’
‘I know just how he feels,’ Meggie sighed, lighting up a cigarette. As she offered Judy one, she saw the look of surprise in her friend’s eyes. ‘Don’t say you don’t miss it, Judy? Since I’ve come back from America, I don’t know why, but I seem to miss it more and more. It’s as if, having been wholly alive, I am now half asleep.’
‘I suppose that now you come to mention it, I suppose I do – a bit,’ Judy said after a moment, surprising herself with her reply. ‘I hadn’t really thought about it before. War seemed so awful, and I just thought, well – peace is going to be—’
‘Course you do,’ Meggie interrupted as she topped up both their glasses. ‘God, after all that danger and excitement, everyone pulling together – life is so dull. Don’t you find it dull, and grey, Judy? Walter must, surely?’
‘In a way I’m just glad to be still alive, Megs. I think I could take any amount of so-called austerity in return for us all still being here. Particularly Walter. Seriously – don’t you feel the same?’
‘About Walter?’
‘Seriously.’ Judy laughed. ‘I know it’s all a bit grim right now, but isn’t that the rough with the smooth thing?’
‘I suppose.’ Meggie sighed. ‘It’s just not quite how one saw it all. Not quite what one was brought up to expect. Still, long as you’ve got a bit of whoopee water in the drink cupboard, and a few friends to chew the old cud with, I suppose one must not grum. Only bugbear I have personally speaking is fighting the old ennui, as the song has it.’ She tapped the ash off her cigarette into the ashtray in the middle of the kitchen table in front of them. ‘Although must say – after the States, life here has an altogether greyer hue. Not a morning goes by but I don’t wake up and find myself missing real coffee that tastes of coffee, and fresh bread rolls and curls of cold butter … how I wish I hadn’t said that.’
‘How I wish you hadn’t.’
Judy sighed gloomily, the idea of real coffee and equally real rolls and butter filling her with inexpressible longing. She turned her thoughts away from such unimaginable luxuries, and sipped at her drink instead. At least that was real. Rather than think about the change that had obviously come over them all, she turned her mind to the present, to the shift in Meggie’s circumstances, to this new strange life her friend was being forced to lead, all alone in a large echoing house, trying to find the wherewithall to survive. To say that she was curious would be understating it.
Having finally warmed up due to the heat from the stove as well as the brandy Meggie slipped her fur coat off her shoulders and draped it over her knees. As Judy followed suit, she laughed.
‘My God, we both look like Madame Gran when she was being driven about Bexham in the old Rolls.’
They both laughed again, then fell to silence.
‘Are you all right, Megs?’ Judy enquired, reading a sudden dark expression on Meggie’s face.
‘Yes. Of course. Why shouldn’t I be?’
‘Nothing. You just suddenly – you suddenly looked a little sad, that’s all. Is it still your parents?’
‘Is what still my parents?’ Meggie asked tetchily. ‘You know I didn’t get on with them.’ She averted her eyes and lit another cigarette from the one she was just finishing.
‘You’ve never really talked about it. The accident, I mean.’ Judy shrugged. ‘I just wondered whether you wanted to talk about it.’
‘Nothing really to talk about, darling. Besides its being a bit of a bore. Having to scratch round to pay their dues. I mean they really were quite hopeless. Not just with me – with money. With their affairs. I don’t think it’s quite fair, actually. Leaving such a terrible mess behind one. For someone else to clear up. I don’t consider that to be quite the thing. So there you are – that’s it. That’s how all right I am. I’m fine, darling. Just a mite miffed.’
‘Are you having to – are you having any difficulty?’ Judy corrected herself. ‘Getting the necessary, I mean.’
‘You’re wondering about the missing paintings?’ Meggie flashed a sudden smile, much to Judy’s relief. ‘It’s all right, I haven’t flogged them – yet – although dare say I’ll have to surrender them sooner or later. At the moment they’re only up in London being cleaned – just in case. Anyway, this is boring. I hate talking about money, et cetera. Much more interesting – how’s it feel to have a husband again?’
Judy went to say something, and then stopped.
‘It feels strange,’ she said, finally and reluctantly. ‘I don’t know why, and I never thought to say it, but having Walter back after six years, after thinking he was dead – it’s a bit odd actually.’
Meggie nodded, as if she hadn’t paid much attention to this admission.
‘Does Walter talk about his war much, or is he how they were when they came back from the last war? A lot of them wouldn’t talk about it, you know. Not a word. According to my grandmother. It was as if four years in the Flanders mud had never happened. Is Walter a bit like that?’
Judy hesitated, not wanting to be disloyal to the only man she had ever loved, and at the same time longing to talk about the state of her marriage.
‘A bit,’ she admitted, finally. ‘You’d think that after all those years in Norway fighting with the Resistance he’d have a bit to say on the subject, but all he ever really says is later, Judy, later. All in good time. It’s a bit hurtful actually. At first I thought perhaps he had a mistress over there that he couldn’t tell me about – or something or other. But then I saw this look he has in his eyes and I know it couldn’t be that.’
‘Why?’
‘Because he looks so lost. He looks as if he still doesn’t quite know where he is. Maybe it’s because he had to kill people, that kind of thing.’
‘Hardly surprising, darling. There was a war on.’
‘But then you don’t talk at all about France and being in the Resistance,’ Judy continued. ‘Not even to me, so I suppose it’s hardly surprising if Walter doesn’t either.’
‘We’re probably all afraid of being war bores, darling. Better by far to put it behind us, yes? It is actually all over now, you know. Better to leave be and not become a bore about it.’
‘You could never be accused of that.’ Judy laughed, pointing accusingly at Meggie. ‘You even turned down a medal without telling me! I only found out by chance!’
‘A medal’s a medal, for all that – that’s all it is,’ Meggie replied, getting up out of her chair. ‘Now then – I don’t know about you, but I’m famished. As always. Let’s eat.’
Far from the expected sardine on stale bread with a bit of old cheese, much to Judy’s surprise and delight Meggie had performed a small culinary miracle, and from such basic ingredients as she had found made a delicious meal of sardines and anchovies – a lucky discovery apparently – served in a delicious dressing miraculously concocted out of some old white wine dregs, long ago turned to vinegar, and the last of an ancient bottle of olive oil, stuffed into two large baked potatoes, followed by slices of farmhouse cheddar served on hot toast.
‘Don’t tell me you’ve learned to bake.’ Judy stared at the loaf on the side. ‘You’ll be wearing a pinny next.’
‘Wouldn’t be caught dead. As a matter of fact I learned to bake bread when I was a child – Grandmother’s cook taught me, under Madame Gran’s insistence. Only three things a girl needs to know how to do to make her way in the world, she used to say. You’ve got to be able to make love, bread and Three No Trumps doubled and vulnerable.’
Further fortified by a bottle of claret Meggie had luckily brought up earlier from the cellar but which had only thawed out sufficiently to be drinkable after being stood on the stove for a full twenty minutes, the two young women reminisced about their times together at the start of the war, remembering those dark days now almost fondly, for all the world as if they were the good times that would never roll again.
‘Things can only get better, I suppose, Meggie,’ Judy mused as they moved back again to sit close to the stove. ‘Things always seem worse in the winter, particularly a winter as hard as this one.’
‘I don’t know about you, but I was brought up to believe that the spoils of war were what came with peace. Prosperity. Optimism. Triumph. Not shortages, queues and misery. I mean, regardez nous, would you? You’d think we’d lost rather than won the war, wouldn’t you?’
‘Perhaps we did. What an awful thought.’ Judy stared ahead of her at something she couldn’t quite name. ‘In fact, in more than one way we just might have lost, you know, and no perhaps about it. In fact, in one way, I think that we actually did lose.’
‘And what way is that, do tell.’
‘I think maybe we’ve lost our innocence.’
Ellen flicked her duster idly along the top of the desk, much more interested in what her employer’s daughter was doing than in the little bit of housework that was required that morning.
‘You’re smoking yourself to a standstill, since you and Master Max have come back from your London visit, Miss Mattie,’ she said, looking at the thin blue spiral of smoke that was rising from the sofa, and giving an extra flick of her duster as if to underline her point. ‘That’s the third cigarette you’ve had since I started doin’ in here this morning, and I think that’s too much, really I do, Miss Mattie.’
Mattie didn’t even bother to look up from her copy of The Tatler, flicking her ash inaccurately into the fireplace as she stared at a particularly foolish-looking set of young people enjoying a joke on the stairs at a dance in some particularly gloomy-looking country house.
‘You’ll find furniture gets much cleaner, Ellen, if you move the articles on top of it while you’re dusting, rather than threatening them with your duster,’ she countered, throwing Ellen a look, which was promptly greeted with a sniff and a shrug. ‘Or counting how many cigarettes I might or might not have had for that matter,’ she finally decided, as she closed her magazine. ‘Anyway, I’m only doing my duty. In case you may have forgotten, smoking is a government directive. Everyone in London’s smoking like chimneys. The Prime Minister, Mr Attlee—’
‘I know who the Prime Minister is well enough, thank you, Miss Mattie,’ Ellen interrupted. ‘Having helped to have him voted in.’
‘Mr Attlee wants us all to smoke as much as we can. Be patriotic, smoke your way through the day, that’s the maxim.’ Mattie picked up a fresh magazine. ‘By lighting up a ciggie every twenty minutes I happen to be doing my duty for God and the King.’
‘I can’t see the point of it, really I can’t, can’t see the point of smoking, Miss Mattie.’
‘I suppose the point behind their thinking, Ellen, is that the more we smoke the less we will feel the hunger pangs, that’s the point. They want us to smoke to make up for the fact that there’s no tea, no butter, no bread, no eggs, no nothing really.’
Momentarily distracted from the magazine, Mattie breathed out a beautifully shaped smoke ring and watched it drifting across the sitting room before it disappeared against the Japanese-style pre-war wallpaper.
‘Well, I wouldn’t know about that,’ Ellen muttered. ‘Not being a smoker meself. And isn’t that young Max just waking up and calling for you?’ Once more she stooped, pretending to dust a chair leg, at the same time cocking her head to the ceiling above. ‘He’s a healthy pair of lungs on him, and that’s certain.’
‘Even if I haven’t,’ you mean?’ Mattie returned, throwing her now finished cigarette on the fire. ‘Coming, Max!’ she called. ‘Mummy’s coming!’
‘We’ll go out to the village green and make a snowman,’ she promised Max a little later, as he jumped down the stairs in such a state of excitement over the snow that he could barely stand still long enough for his mother to dress him in a thick home-knitted hat, gloves and socks. Having put on her own overcoat, the much darned lining of which was a tribute to the needlewoman in her, Mattie stepped outside into the front garden and straight on to the green.
After the loss of her mother in a wartime fire, she and her father had moved from Magnolias to the Place, a light and roomy house directly overlooking Bexham village green. To their mutual surprise they found they had both settled into the new house without any sense of regret for their previous home, perhaps because, among many other advantages, the new house was considerably nearer to the Three Tuns where Lionel Eastcott liked to go for a regular drink at certain equally regular times of the day.
Out on the green Mattie and Max found that they hardly noticed the cold, so engrossed did they become in building their enormous snowman. They weren’t alone, because the green was already dotted with groups of other children similarly employed, under the vigilant eyes of their mothers.
‘Now that really is a snowman. That is going to be the best snowman of them all, Max,’ Mattie said. ‘If there was a prize for best snowman, undoubtedly you would be the winner, sweetie pie.’
Having carefully inserted the two old black coat buttons for the eyes that she’d brought out especially for the task, Mattie stood back to admire their handiwork. As she did so she noticed a figure walking nearby, a young woman carrying a large pink-blanketed bundle in her arms. As soon as she realised who the woman was, Mattie caught her breath. The last thing she’d heard about Rusty Sykes had not been good – and yet here she was out walking with a baby cradled in her arms.
For a moment Mattie stood motionless, not knowing what to do, hoping against hope that Rusty might not have seen her, or that if she had she might be just as anxious as Mattie to avoid contact. As she stood watching Rusty seemed about to pass on by, so Mattie thought her wish had been granted, until Max suddenly pointed.
‘We forgot the carrot for snowman’s nose, Mummy!’ he called back to her, already on the move. ‘We’d better go back home and get it!’
‘No! No. In a minute, Max!’ Mattie called hastily, running after the fleet little boy. ‘Let’s just finish off his chin first!’
By the time she had caught Max up and had him safely back in hand, she found herself directly in Rusty’s path. Rusty stopped when she saw Mattie, looking at her with uncertainty, before bowing her head and looking away at the ground beyond them both.
‘Hello, Rusty,’ Mattie said sparely. ‘I thought it was you.’
‘I didn’t see you,’ Rusty muttered. ‘I didn’t see you at all.’
‘We’ve been building a snowman, Max and I,’ Mattie said, not knowing what else to say. ‘Snow’s perfect for it, isn’t it, Max?’
‘Want to come and see our snowman?’ Max asked Rusty hopefully, before standing up on tiptoe. ‘Can I see your baby please?’
‘It’s all right, Max,’ Mattie said, trying tactfully to pull her son away. ‘Why don’t we go and get that carrot you were talking about?’
‘I want to see the baby, Mummy. Please can I see the baby?’
‘Max—’
‘Is it a little boy or a little girl baby?’
Max was pulling hard at his mother’s hand, straining to get a sight of the baby wrapped in the pink shawl.
‘It’s a little girl,’ Rusty said suddenly. ‘You probably wouldn’t like that. Not everyone likes little girl babies, unfortunately.’ She turned her face to Mattie and stared at her almost accusingly.
‘Not me, Rusty,’ Mattie replied, trying to smile. ‘That’s what I’m hoping for next – a little girl to make the pigeon pair.’
‘Well if you don’t get one, don’t worry, Mattie. You can always have another one.’
‘Can I see your baby, please?’ Max persisted, jumping up and down on the spot. ‘Please?’
‘My mother didn’t want a little girl, so it didn’t matter in the end,’ Rusty said, looking down at the bundle in her arms. ‘I did. I wanted a girl. Just like you, Mattie. But my mother said it didn’t matter because no-one can take the place of Tam. You can always have another one, she said. These things happen. Lose one and you can always have another. Provided it isn’t a little boy.’
Rusty leaned forward and tucked the pink blanket round the bundle in her arms.
‘Truth to tell,’ she continued. ‘I don’t think Mother can even remember what she had me christened. I think she still imagines she had me baptised Rusty to go with my hair, rather than Katherine with a K.’
‘Please can I see your baby?’ Max, like most children his age, was refusing to concede defeat. ‘Please?’
‘Later, Max,’ Mattie suggested, tightening her grip on his arm to prevent any more jumping.
‘It’s all right,’ Rusty assured her. ‘If he wants to have a look, that’s perfectly all right. Here you are – say hello to Jeannie.’
She stooped down over the little boy, turning the bundle in her arms to him so that he could see it better, holding it at the height of his own face. Max looked, then looked again, staring at the bundle then up at his mother.
‘It’s a doll,’ he said to her. ‘It’s a doll, Mummy.’
‘I know, dear,’ Mattie whispered back to him. ‘A little girl doll.’
‘A pretty little girl doll,’ Rusty said, standing back up and rocking the doll in her arms. ‘My pretty little Jeannie Katherine with a K.’
‘It’s a doll, Mummy,’ Max hissed urgently up at his mother again. ‘This lady’s carrying round her dolly.’
‘My pretty little Jeannie Katherine,’ Rusty repeated, cooingly. ‘Time to take little Jeannie home.’
‘I want to go home too, Mummy Please can we go home please?’ Max pleaded.
‘What about your snowman? We haven’t finished our snowman. We’ve got to get a carrot for his nose, remember?’
‘I want to go home now, Mummy. Now.’
Max tugged free from the hand that was holding him and began to run in the direction of his house, straight towards a gang of local lads who were busy making an arsenal of snowballs.
‘Max?’ Mattie called after him anxiously. ‘Max, wait for me! Max? Sorry, Rusty – but I can’t have him rushing off like this. Sorry.’
‘Little boys, Mattie,’ Rusty smiled, rocking the doll in her arms. ‘Little girls are so much easier.’
But Mattie was now out of earshot, running as best as she could through the snow after Max who was skipping along, unaware of the danger that lay ahead. The lads had seen him coming, but had pretended not to notice him, laughing and throwing snowballs at each other over the top of his head as he ran between them. Mattie knew exactly what they were up to, because she knew this gang. She’d run across them before with Max. They’d been trouble then. With one last shout to her son to wait for her, she tried to make up lost ground, but the snow was deep and inevitably she fell flat on her face in a drift. By the time she was back on her feet it was too late. One of the bigger boys had taken careful aim with a huge snowball and thrown it straight at Max. The force of it sent him flying onto his back, and he was howling in angry fright long before Mattie could reach him.
‘Little bastard! That’ll teach you to look where you’re going, won’t it! Cry baby bastard!’
The boys ran off laughing, leaving Mattie to comfort Max while behind her she heard Rusty yelling out furiously after them as she hurried to Mattie’s side. Max was still howling when she arrived although happily his pride appeared to be the only thing that was really hurt.
‘See what I mean about boys?’ Rusty said, looking after the gang that was disappearing into a new flurry of falling snow. ‘Little roughnecks.’
‘Don’t worry, Rusty,’ Mattie sighed. ‘We’re quite used to it.’
‘You never get used to it, not to that taunt. Tam comes home practically every day saying he’s been insulted like that at school, even though his dad and I are married now. You know who’s worst of all? The other mothers. Nice, isn’t it? Think they’d be a bit sympathetic, but not a bit of it. Can’t wait to point a finger, they can’t – even them who’ve got a little bastard of their own in tow – they’re even worse sometimes. As if by calling out loudest of all no-one’ll guess their secret.’
‘And it’s hardly the child’s fault, is it, Rusty?’ Mattie said, dusting the snow off Max’s coat. ‘It’s not as if they’ve been party to it. Come on, Maxie – let’s dry those eyes of yours and go and get that carrot we forgot for Mr Snowman’s nose.’
‘Don’t want to,’ Max grizzled. ‘I want to go home.’
‘It would be a shame not to finish Mr Snowman off, dear.’
‘I don’t want to.’ Max gave another worried glance up at Rusty, who was too busy looking at the bundle in her arms to notice. ‘I want to go home.’
‘I must go home as well,’ Rusty said, swaddling her doll even more tightly. ‘Getting too cold for Jeannie to be out – and anyway’s it’s time for her feed.’
Her eyes drifted back towards the place from where she had come, her mind seesawing with difficulty between the past and the present before settling for its present nightmare state.
The two women said their goodbyes before making their separate ways home. Mattie had only a matter of a few yards to go until she and Max reached the front door of the Place, but the short journey seemed to take for ever, time hanging the way it always does when you are anxious to close the book on an unhappy chapter, such as this short episode with the bully boys and poor half-demented Rusty and her wrapped up china doll. At last they reached the gate and then the door, which Mattie shut thankfully behind her, putting a barricade between herself and her son and the harsh reality of Rusty’s mistery.
Ellen was in the kitchen when Mattie entered in search of something hot to eat and drink for herself and Max, whom she had left with his grandfather by the fireside to get himself warm. Mattie went to fill the kettle, only to find it taken out of her hands by the housekeeper.
‘That cold out there is it?’ Ellen enquired. ‘You look half frozen to death.’
‘And half startled, too, Ellen. I just bumped into poor Rusty Sykes.’
‘Poor Rusty Sykes, yes, I know.’ Ellen sighed. ‘Still, at least she’s up and about now. Which is something.’
‘She’s up and about, Ellen, carrying round a china doll in her arms.’
The housekeeper stared at her frowning as if she could not possibly have heard aright.
‘A china doll, you say? What sort of china doll would that be, Miss Mattie?’
‘What do you think, Ellen?’ Mattie replied in exasperation. ‘A china doll. A child’s china doll. All dressed in pink and wrapped up in a pink shawl. She’s carrying it round like a baby.’
‘Like her baby?’
‘Like her baby, if you prefer. Frightened the life out of poor Max.’
‘Poor Rusty. She’s carrying round a china doll for a baby, now? Oh, the poor child. The poor unhappy thing. I had no idea she’d taken it that hard.’
‘How long since she lost the baby, Ellen? It’s not long, is it?’
‘I don’t know exactly, Miss Mattie. All I knows is when you were up in London they had the funeral for her – while you were away up in London. So it must be near two week now, I suppose. Course they couldn’t bury the poor little mite, could they – spite of having the funeral service for her. They couldn’t bury the poor little mite on account of the frozen ground. Couldn’t even dig deep enough for a grave that size. Maybe that’s what gone and turned poor Rusty’s mind a bit.’
‘It frightened the life out of Max. I have to say it spooked me a bit, too.’
‘Mind you, some is saying it were Rusty’s own fault losing her baby. You know what a tomboy Rusty’s always been. What an independent-minded lass. Mrs Minton what lives opposite said she never stopped for a moment during her time. Hardly sat down to draw breath. Always busy about the place, running here there and everywhere – doing what she shouldn’t, at any rate. So she brought it on herself, that’s what a lot of folks is saying. Might even be down to eating green potatoes. That’s what my mother always warned us against. Eating green potatoes when you’re not expectin’s bad enough, goodness knows, but if you is—’
Ellen stopped for a moment to shake her head disparagingly before continuing.
‘It’s not just Mrs Minton who’s saying she done too much. So does her mother – Rusty’s mother not Mrs Minton’s that is – she’s sure as eggs is eggs that the girl went and brought it on herself, doing too much of what she’d been told not to do. Doesn’t feel sorry for her at all, not at all, her mother doesn’t. That’s according to Mrs Minton, mind. Don’t take my word on it. But that’s what Mrs Minton is saying, and what some other folks think and all.’
For a moment Mattie thought of defending Rusty whom she had always liked and whom she now felt desperately sorry for, convinced it couldn’t be her fault, only just pure circumstance, but thought better of arguing with Ellen, since in common with most of the village Ellen always did suspect that people brought bad things on themselves, even Hitler and the war.
Even so, as she settled herself into her bed later that night, tucked up warm and cosily with two hot water bottles wrapped in sweaters against her back and feet, and her own child safely tucked up in bed in the next-door room, she found she could not get rid of the strange image of the china-faced doll, and Rusty carefully pulling the pink blanket round its head to keep out the cold. It was the saddest of sights, and it worried her no end to think that a friend’s mind might have been turned by a tragedy which was none of her fault; that it might have affected her so badly that she had become quite unable to cope with her loss. Try as she would she could not get the memory of the events of that afternoon out of her mind. It was a long, long time before Mattie finally drifted off to sleep and into a series of fitful and unhappy dreams which, when she woke from them, made her feel as though she had spent the night on the opposite side of the looking glass.
Early the following day Meggie caught sight of Judy passing her house, with Hamish trotting by her side as best he could, given the depth of the snow. As she watched, an unaccustomed wave of jealousy hit her. Judy was probably on her way back to her cottage to get ready for her husband’s return from London, while all Meggie had to look forward to was being entertained by yet another of Richards’s dreadful hungover litanies of how his life was never going to be the same again with Madame Gran gone and the blessed war over.
Unable to bear any further thought of Judy’s domestic bliss, Meggie found an old apron in the kitchen to protect her still stylish pre-war black and white coat and skirt and set about trying to light herself some sort of fire from the last of the wood Richards had managed to chop and bring into the drawing room before succumbing once again to his ever ready friend – the bottle.
As she searched on the top of the fireplace for the box of Swan Vestas she thought she had put there she found herself stopping and staring at the photograph of herself and Davey aboard the Light Heart, a snapshot taken one weekend before the war when all had still seemed safe and they had sailed down the coast as far as Lyme Regis to spend the night together making love on deck underneath a blanket of stars.
She frowned at the image of herself with both her arms tightly wrapped around one of Davey’s, imagining for a few seconds that he wasn’t really dead, that one of these days he would, like Judy’s husband, Walter Tate, turn up as if from nowhere, swinging through the front door of Cucklington House, suntanned and full of life, not to mention merry as a cricket from the hospitality at the Three Tuns. He would swing her round as he had used to do, sweeping her off her feet, and Madame Gran and Richards would be there, and they too would be waiting for him to wrap them round his little finger with his charm and his gaiety.
Holding the little silver-framed photograph in one hand and forgetting all about the fire, Meggie sank down into the old chintz-covered armchair behind her as she continued to stare at her lost and much missed love.
‘Of course you’re dead,’ she told the photo. ‘You were drowned at sea, yet another dead hero, lost and gone for ever with no tombstone to speak of your passing, or mark your life.’
Her grandmother had told her to wait until the war was over before marrying Davey. If they hurried into it Meggie might find she had made a mistake. Or Davey might discover the very same, she had warned. Once the war was over they might be different people, and she had advised Meggie to think of the consequences if they were married.
But so what? Meggie now thought. Really, so what?
So what if they had married and had made one huge colossal mistake – at least they’d have had some time together, be it only a few weeks, days or even hours. Instead, what remained of Davey lay somewhere on the bottom of the English Channel, while Meggie, who had so loved him from childhood onwards, sat alone, by an unlit fire, in a land impoverished by victory.
If she had married Davey she would not have gone to France. She would have stayed at home in Bexham, married and safe, or safely married, and very likely a mother to Davey’s children by now. If she had married Davey she would never have allowed Judy’s father-in-law, Hugh, to encourage her to join SOE; she would never have been dropped into occupied France. She would never, through a combination of loneliness and necessity, have found herself first having an affair and even falling a little in love with Heinrich Von Hantzen, the German officer who had saved her from the Gestapo at terrible risk to himself.
As the thought came to her Meggie glanced up at the chimneypiece, as if to assure herself there was no photograph of herself and her German lover there, so there could be no possible evidence of their affair. Now Heinrich too was dead, killed in action during the D-Day campaign as she had learned in a letter from his sister after the war had finished.
My God, now she came to think of it, what would they have made of such an alliance here in Bexham? What would they make of it now?
Realising it was not a thought that she had really faced up to before, in typical Meggie fashion Meggie suddenly found the whole notion quite hilarious. They would probably have shaved her head and paraded her in the streets with a billboard around her neck, and possibly they would still do the same if they should discover the truth. Certainly no-one would ever ask her to their houses again; she would be shunned by all, the lowest of the low. She would be that simply awful Meggie Gore-Stewart who all the time she was meant to be doing heroic things for her country was in fact sleeping with the enemy. Never mind that Heinrich was not a Nazi, never mind that he was a highly civilised, articulate and kind human being – the fact that Meggie had consorted with a German would banish her to Coventry for the rest of her life, at least as far as the folks of Bexham were concerned.
A strange noise woke her out of her reverie, and looking round she saw the dreadfully bedraggled but all too familiar post-binge figure of Richards in his well worn tartan dressing gown and equally well worn grey winceyette pyjamas, with a pair of faded black slippers on his slowly shuffling feet. He was staggering into the dimly lit and freezing drawing room looking like something that not even a cat would bother to bring in.
‘It is I, Miss Megs,’ he announced shakily. ‘All but arisen from the grave.’
‘Looking at you as you are now, I’m not sure I agree about the all but, Richards, really I’m not,’ Meggie replied tartly, at once getting up and replacing the photograph she was still nursing, before Richards shuffled up the drawing room towards her. ‘Why don’t you wander off and find yourself something to eat, and try to sober up for what remains of the day.’
‘I do not require anything to eat, thank you, Miss Meggie. All I require is a pen and a fresh sheet of paper – and for good reason. I wish to sign the Pledge.’
‘I could repaper this room with the number of pieces of paper you’ve signed to that effect, Richards.’
‘This time I mean it, Miss Megs. I have visited Lethe’s portals and it was not an experience I would recommend even to my worst enemy, not even to Herr Adolph Hitler should he still be alive and in rude health somewhere.’
Meggie smiled to herself as she watched Richards weave to the walnut bureau and search for pen and paper while gently but not altogether inaudibly moaning to himself yet more incantations about having visited Hades, but now having seen the Light.
‘When you’ve quite finished making your Pledge, Richards,’ she said, collecting her cigarettes and lighter and going to the door, ‘I’ll be in the kitchen, making you something a little more realistic.’
However she couldn’t help feeling sorry for her wrecked butler, so much so that she decided to raid her emergency stores on his behalf. Her underground larder was a place she had somehow managed to keep undisclosed to anyone, most of all Richards. It was here that she kept a small supply of luxury provisions collected before her return from the States, and thereafter obtained via the black market, either from smugglers who ran the provender in from France, or simply from the fairly constant stream of spivs who passed through the village, stopping to make themselves known either at the Three Tuns, or at the grocery store. The few tins of veal, pâté and ham, the Belgian coffee and bars of Swiss chocolate, were all kept in top-secret storage under a thick stone slab in the floor of the cold room. Much as she longed to share Richards’s meal of ham on hot toast washed down with a huge mug of fresh black coffee, Meggie abstained from the luxury, allowing herself only one cup of coffee, albeit with brandy added, to go with yet another appetite-stunting cigarette. Meanwhile in front of her Richards was visibly, minute by minute, pulling himself together.
‘I don’t know about you, Miss Meggie,’ he said, once he’d wiped his plate clean with the last crust of bread. ‘But you can keep this post-war life for a game of soldiers.’
‘And I think I probably agree with yous, bedad and to be sure,’ Meggie agreed in a cod Irish accent. ‘So what’ll we do? What’ll we do? What’ll we do? To be sure, to be sure, to be sure?’
‘I have heard it rumoured upon the grapevine—’ Richards eyed her now with slightly less reddened and bleary eyes. ‘I have heard that the Three Tuns might be up for sale.’
‘I dare say. With your weakness, I would say you would be just the man to buy it, Richards. Talk about the perfect job.’
‘You may mock, and I cannot complain at your mockery – but I have been reliably informed that there is no better path to sobriety than to watch others getting regularly shipwrecked. If that doesn’t stop me from drinking then we must all sure as rationed eggs give up the ghost entirely.’
‘Does this mean I shall be losing you, Richards?’
‘One could hardly say you will be losing me, since no-one could say that I have been exactly present in recent times, Miss Megs.’
‘How could I manage without you?’ Meggie asked in all seriousness. ‘You and I are joined at the hip, like it or lump it, old thing.’
‘You will manage a whole lot better without me, dear.’ Richards suddenly sighed, losing all his former decorum. ‘The way I am at the moment, I’m just one great big waste of valuable space and time, and please do not try to convince moi otherwise.’
Meggie smiled, although she did her best to hide her amusement, just the way she always did whenever Richards lapsed into what he called his theatrical.
Buying the Three Tuns might not sound the most likely of salvations, but in an odd way she realised Richards might have a point – as he so often did. Immediately after the war there had been some talk of Richards’s taking over a small restaurant on the other side of the harbour, but for one reason and another his plans had come to nothing. Now, buying a pub might indeed be a kill or cure for her grandmother’s old butler; and besides, Meggie rather relished the thought of the more than theatrical Richards behind the somewhat stuffy bar of their local hostelry. If that didn’t stir up the natives, she didn’t know what would, and for that reason alone it surely had to be a good idea.
* * *
It froze hard again that night, so hard that rumours abounded that out at sea the waves themselves were freezing, their white tops stilled into shapes resembling whipped white of egg as shipping all but ceased.
Rusty, still clothed, lay silently in her bed once more. Downstairs her mother was listening to Children’s Hour on the radio with Tam. For a second or two Rusty thought she could hear Uncle Mac’s soothing voice floating up through the floorboards, but it did nothing to settle her. She closed her eyes and wished she could pray, but she couldn’t. It was as if she had fallen into a well of unhappiness and was slowly beginning to drown, no longer strong enough to tread the waters surrounding her. She had thought her walk with Jeannie might do her some good, blow away at least some of her black thoughts, and for a while it had indeed seemed to work. When she had been with Mattie and Max everything had been fine, momentarily. Even the incident with the snowballs and the name-calling had been galvanising rather than depressing. It was only when she had returned home again that the black clouds had descended once more.
Why would her mother not allow her baby up here with her? Why did she insist that Rusty left Jeannie in the pram downstairs instead of letting Rusty have her upstairs in her bedroom so that she could cuddle her?
It might have been different – in fact everything might have been different – if she’d had her own home, the way things were when Tam was born. Just her and the baby, that had been bliss, no-one nagging and carping, no-one to tell her what to do at all times of the day and night, just her and her baby. But then the war had ended, and the people who owned the house she had rented had needed to have it back, and what with money being so short Peter had suggested the best thing – in fact the only thing open to them – was to live with her parents, just until they got back on their feet, just for a few weeks. But the weeks had turned to months, and now they had been under the same roof for over two years with the result that they had no privacy and thus really no proper marriage. Worst of all, Mother had taken little Tam over, and since to her way of thinking nothing was good enough for her grandson, nothing being good enough was very bad for little Tam.
Nor would Father hear a word said against the little boy. Everything Tam did was right and everything his parents did – particularly his mother – was wrong. Small wonder then that Peter was out all the time, seemingly caring less about his wife or what happened to her, not until the baby arrived that was. After that he was out even more. It was as if with the baby lost for ever Rusty had caught a highly infectious disease, something like tuberculosis. Peter seemed unable to come near her, apparently afraid that if he came too close he might catch her grief. So, kind man that he was, or that he used to be, he offered Rusty no shoulder for her to cry on and absolutely no moral support. As early as he could make it every morning he disappeared off to the garage where he remained working until long after his son’s bedtime and in turn that of his young wife.
Rusty had to face the fact that at the moment Peter seemed more sorry for himself than he was for her. On top of everything he never once attempted to say anything to Mother in Rusty’s defence. He never contradicted her about the cause of their baby’s death, never said the baby didn’t die because Rusty helped you hang the curtains or we didn’t lose her because Rusty ran everywhere in the early months or because she might have eaten a green potato. Never once did he say the baby – our baby – she died, Mother-in-law, because the little thing had the cord round her neck, and that was all there was to it.
Never the once.
Never once did he leap to her defence. Instead all Peter could do was rush out of the house to try to mend the motorcars that people brought to him, and spend his day fiddling about in his garage, day after day, day after day.
‘Summer’ll soon be here, Rusty,’ was about all he could think of saying to her when he found Rusty yet again lying in a darkened room, trying to come to terms with her loss. ‘Soon as summer comes you’ll be feeling better, you mark my words.’
But as she lay in her bedroom long after Peter had left for work it seemed that summer would never in fact come. All that happened was the weather worsened and with it so did Rusty’s state of mind. She would spend morning after morning lying in a ball under her covers, crying her eyes out while trying not to be heard by her mother as she went about her housework. She could just about handle the food shortages and the terrible grim and freezing weather, the lack of money and heating, the deprivations that seemed universal and wholesale, but what she couldn’t deal with was the lack of any love and compassion. She didn’t want anyone feeling sorry for her – she just wanted some love and some tenderness. Instead of which all she got was blame and half-hidden accusations of wilful carelessness. She even began to consider the possibility that it might be her own fault, that whatever lay at her door did so because she had brought it there. Until they moved in with her parents she thought she had really loved Peter, but after two years under the same roof as her mother and father, Rusty had come to fear that she had only married Peter after the war out of pity rather than for love – and because of Tam, because she thought he should have a proper name like other boys, that she should give him a proper father, and that if she did that her child would be safe from taunts and insults. And when Peter had come home such a hero, albeit a hero minus a leg, out had come the village band to greet him, bright had shone the medals on his chest, and Rusty loved a hero as much as anyone, and so they had married.
It had been so good at first, Peter proving to be as gentle and sweet as he had always been when they had all been growing up in Bexham. Neither had his wartime experiences, let alone the loss of his leg, seemed to have made him bitter. They were happy together, even when they’d moved back into the tiny house that had been her home – until they realised that with the loss of privacy came a loss of intimacy, not only physical but mental. Now this new loss, the major one, the tragic one. Rusty suspected that what she’d fallen in love with was the uniform, the heroism, rather than the man inside the uniform, because the man she now shared her life with showed no love for her, no compassion, not even a little tenderness.
It’s not that I don’t love So-and-So, it’s just that I’m not in love with him. That was what Rusty used to hear girls in the wartime factory where she worked saying time and time again. She thought that was how it must be now with Peter. She did like Peter, even though he was so hopeless at dealing with her grief. She still liked him in spite of his inability to help her. In fact – she sat up as the thought occurred to her – in fact she liked Peter so much that the one thing she knew now was that she couldn’t possibly go on living with him. It just wouldn’t be fair.
She became quite determined, now that she knew what was in her mind. Whatever happened, one way or the other, Rusty was now convinced that she had to go. Somehow she had to get out of this suffocating little cottage, get away from Mother and Father, and from a marriage which was little more than a friendship. She had to run away from home. She had to run away and leave it all behind her.
But where was she to go? And when? It was all very well making these life-changing decisions as she lay in her bed upstairs while her husband worked all the hours God gave him to put food on the table, to clothe them somehow, and help her parents keep some sort of roof over their heads, but when it came down to practicalities a feeling of utter hopelessness came over Rusty, the same feeling that she used to have when she was little and realised that being a child was like being a prisoner. You were helpless, always waiting around for someone else to feed you or clothe you, quite unable to do anything for yourself. And that was just how she was beginning to feel again now.
She was a prisoner once again, but this time she was incarcerated not by the helplessness of childhood but by her marriage vows.
She climbed out of bed as quietly as she could and carefully opened the door. The voices she could hear talking below were all coming from the kitchen, which would mean if she was very quiet – and very careful – she could get up and down the stairs without being heard.
‘Sshhh!’ Mrs Todd said suddenly, knitting needles held still in mid-air. ‘Thought I heard something.’
They all listened, Mr Todd, his wife and their son-in-law Peter, but the house was completely silent.
‘Probably just them floorboards again,’ Mr Todd said, resuming his reading of the single sheet of print that nowadays represented the local newspaper. ‘Creak as if they’ve a life of their own so they do.’
‘Could be Rusty.’
‘Don’t think so, Mother-in-law. She was fast asleep when I looked in. Out to the world.’
‘State of mind she’s in she could walk in her sleep,’ Mrs Todd said, picking up the stitch she had dropped. ‘Time she pulled herself together. Which is why I did what I did.’
‘What was that, Mother-in-law? What did you have to do?’
‘Nothing that need concern you, Peter,’ Mrs Todd replied, with a sharp look. ‘Least not unless you want that wife of yours locked away.’
She gave one last glance towards the closed door but the house had once more fallen completely silent, the only noise to be heard being the moan of the winter wind outside, the rattle of the windows.
On the other side of the door, still as a mouse, Rusty stood on the bottom stair, her eyes on the pram by the door, the little pram with the pink blanket still pulled up into place. All she had to do was wait, take a deep breath, tiptoe over to the pram, take Jeannie and tiptoe back upstairs. That’s all she had to do to be safe, and since she had got down here without anyone noticing, she surely could get back upstairs. As soon as she could, she would wrap Jeannie up in her warmest clothes, then in the thick wool blanket, dress herself as warmly as possible, take the little money she had saved away in her purse under the mattress, climb out of her bedroom window on to the roof of the outhouse, drop down into the snow and be off. Where, she didn’t yet know, nor did she care. All she knew was that once she had Jeannie in her arms and was out of the house, she was safe. She had enough money to pay for several days’ food and lodgings somewhere – anywhere, as long as it was miles from Bexham – then once she was settled in her mind again, once everything was back to normal, she would get a job. She didn’t mind what she did, just so long as they didn’t mind her bringing Jeannie, and Jeannie’d be no trouble anyway. Jeannie was a good little girl. Jeannie would just lie there and sleep without making a sound until her mother had finished her work, and could take her home again. So now all she had to do was tiptoe over to the pram, pull the blanket back, lift Jeannie up and take her away with her.
When she saw the pram was empty Rusty screamed. She couldn’t help it. She screamed as loudly as she could, she screamed at the top of her voice. Someone had stolen her baby.