Apple Blossom Time (17 page)

I looked in the window. Tom was sitting on an old stool, with his back and head propped against the wall of the shed. A cigarette dangled from limp fingers, a curved tip of ash drooping from it, as though he’d forgotten it was there. His eyes were closed. His voice was a ghost, creaking, like the opening of a rusty gate.

‘“I’ve seen them, I’ve seen them,

Hanging on the old barbed wire.

I’ve seen them, I’ve seen them,

Hanging on the old barbed wire.”’

I pushed open the door, going quickly in and shutting it again so as not to release any more light, then I leaned across him to pull the old sack that did for a blackout curtain.

He opened his eyes and gave me a wobbly smile. ‘Laura – my favourite girl…’

‘What exactly are you doing here?’ I asked, curtly.

‘Just having a little rest. Tired, you know. Long way home. “There’s a long, long trail a-winding into the land of my dreams, Where the nightingale is singing and a white moon beams…”’

The atmosphere of the shed was so familiar – Jeyes fluid, compost, dust, cobwebs, stored apples and pears, the smell of childhood – but tonight it was overlaid by something sharper and sourer. Even Tom’s sweat seemed to be alcohol-tainted.

‘Have you come to take me home?’ he asked. ‘Dear girl – how kind of you.’

His smile was vague, unfocused, but piercingly sweet. He seemed simply to be fading away, like fine old linen worn to its threads. Mother had turned him sides-to-middle so many times for so many years that there was nothing left to mend. I had the feeling that if he stood in front of the light, I’d be able to see right through him.

I had come to shout at him, to snap him out of it, to bring him to his senses, do all the sensible, practical things that would make him realize that his behaviour was unacceptable, but when he smiled at me – damn him, damn him – I couldn’t do it.

‘Come along,’ I snapped, loving him, hating him. ‘It’s late.’

‘And you’ve had a long journey. How thoughtless of me. If you would just…’ He held out his hand, long bones bound together by parchment, and I hefted him up from the stool. ‘Thank you so much. Most kind.’

Slowly, we walked together down the garden path, our feet crunching in unison. Tom hummed quietly for a bit, then began to sing again, in that thin, threadlike voice. It was like listening to a phantom.

‘“There’s a long, long night of waiting, until my dreams all come true,

Till the day when I’ll be going down that long, long trail with you.”’

He put his arm around my shoulder. Tears like snail tracks glittered on his cheeks. ‘I loved your father, you know, Laura. Edwin was my best friend. I really loved him.’

*   *   *

While I was away, Ansty Parva had been turned into a military collecting area. Along with every other village in southern England within striking distance of the coast, it had been stuffed to capacity with waiting troops and vehicles. The winding lanes were being crushed beneath the weight of heavy armour. No-one spoke about it, but we all knew that they were waiting for the signal to begin the greatest invasion ever planned.

In the morning, I strolled into the village, feeling oddly naked in a cotton summer frock, utility length, skimming my knees, but the feeling of warm air on bare legs was delicious after heavy uniform stockings. My hair wasn’t tucked into a tidy, military hairstyle, but floated in the breeze, tickling my neck. It felt so good. It made me feel younger, even carefree.

There was Josie Shellard – Josie Pocknell as I remembered her – holding a toddler by the hand and pushing a pram. She waved to me across the street and I went over to see the new arrival. It was a beautiful baby, tiny and perfect, with tight black curls and skin like milky coffee.

‘What a little darling,’ I said, picking up the baby’s rattle and shaking it. The baby made a disconnected grab and missed.

‘Just like a little mommet, in’t ’e?’

‘What’s his name?’

‘Arthur,’ answered Josie, with a stubborn defensiveness, ‘after his grandad.’

‘That’s nice. And do you like having a baby brother?’ I asked the little blonde girl who held Josie’s hand with the tenacity of an octopus. The child just stared back at me with her mouth open. I never was any good at talking to children.

Miss Casemore wasn’t around any more to twitch her lace curtains and shake her stick at boys who bounced balls against her garden wall, but her brother had come out of retirement to teach again when his younger replacement had joined up. Stan Doughty was a PoW, so far as anyone knew anything about him – poor boy, somewhere in Malaya. The two Thurlow boys and Dennis Rudge would never come home.

Everything was the same and yet subtly different. The canes that had supported Mr Kimber’s prize-winning sweet peas carried runner beans now. There would be no Victoria sandwiches, with equal weights of butter, sugar, eggs and flour, at the produce show, only eggless, fatless, sugarless wonders. The women who won prizes now could really call themselves good cooks.

The traffic was much heavier. Before the war, there’d been a tractor or two, maybe a delivery van, Dr Gatehouse’s car and that was all. Now military traffic roared along the narrow lanes, forcing cyclists into the hedges. The sky was riven by the white vapour trails of aircraft.

I called into the shop. Abbie was behind the counter, trying to serve two Americans, who lounged across the scarred mahogany. Somehow, they seemed to take up more room than British soldiers. Their voices were louder, their bottoms, for some reason that I couldn’t fathom, seemed bigger and their trousers tighter. They all seemed to walk like Robert Mitchum. Fighting with the everyday shop smell of carbolic, boiling beetroot and mice, they had brought the smell of aftershave, chewing gum and Lucky Strikes, the scent of luxury.

‘Of course I haven’t got any scented soap,’ Abbie was saying, as patiently as though she spoke to a not-very-bright child, ‘and I haven’t got any hand-cream, neither. This is Ansty Parva, you know, not Hollywood. Nor the Post Exchange, neither. We don’t have that much of a call for it – there’s no beauty queens in this village!’

‘You’re surely right there, ma’am,’ replied one of the GIs.

‘Cheeky monkey!’

‘Come on, now, ma’am, have a heart,’ wheedled the shorter of the two. He leaned towards Abbie in a friendly manner. ‘How’m I supposed to impress my lady friend? All you English ladies expect a Yank boyfriend to be a cross between John Wayne and Santa Claus. Now, if you look at me, you’ll surely see that I’m no John Wayne.’

I couldn’t help giving a little, snorting giggle. Gosh, he was right there. He looked more like Edward G. Robinson! His companion turned round and gave me a long, assessing stare that finished at my ankles. His jaws were slowly moving, like a contented cow. He should have had a buttercup between his lips, not a matchstick.

‘Here I am,’ went on the little GI, ‘stuck out in the middle of nowhere – I mean a cute little village like this – livin’ in a goddam Nissen hut, no Post Exchange for miles, not even a Clubmobile or a doughnut dugout. Now, ma’am…’ His voice dropped to a confidential whisper. ‘What have you got on your shelves that’ll make a nice young English girl take pity on a lonely guy like me?’

‘Well, if I was you…’ Abbie looked carefully around the shop. ‘I’d take them something to eat. Get the mother on your side first, before you do try to get your feet under the table, if’n you knows what I mean. That’s half the battle, I always says. Now, it just so happens that I got a little spot of something nice…’ She slapped a greaseproof paper package on the counter. ‘Pork chops. Now if these don’t have ’m eating out of your hand, I don’t know what will, really I don’t. That’ll be 10/6 to you.’

I drew in my breath in horror. I’m surprised the soldiers didn’t hear me. 10/6? More than five days’ pay for a British private soldier.

The GI took a handful of change out of his pocket. ‘I don’t get the hang of your funny money yet. Take it out of that, will ya.’

Abbie whisked away most of the coins and put them, not in the till, I noticed, but in a side drawer.

‘How about it then, Duchess?’ The other American, silent until now, took the matchstick out of his mouth and winked at me. ‘How about you an’ me seeing the sights together?’

I put my hands on the counter, so that the sun highlighted my wedding ring and struck rainbows from the opal that James had given me. Unlucky, Vee had called it, and we had all laughed at her. James had said that he didn’t need to believe in omens – he had me for his good luck charm.

‘That’s very kind of you,’ I answered in my most frozen voice. ‘I’m afraid that I’m not able to accept.’

‘What hubbie don’t know, hubbie can’t grieve over,’ he laughed.

‘Now that’s quite enough of that,’ said Abbie, sharply. ‘I’ll have none of that dirty talk in my shop – and to a widow, too. Her husband died for his country when you two was still polishing your boots on the other side of the Atlantic.’

‘I get it,’ said the soldier who’d bought the chops. ‘You don’t like our company, but our money’s good enough for you.’

Even Abbie looked embarrassed and I wished myself a million miles away from the shop.

‘No offence, young man?’

‘None taken, ma’am.’

When they’d gone, Abbie came round the counter and gave me a hug. ‘You’m a breath of fresh air, you. How long you got this time?’

‘Abbie – 10/6 for chops? Off the ration? You’ll get into terrible trouble.’

‘You got no cause to stick your nose in the air, miss,’ she scolded, but I could see that she didn’t hold it against me. ‘Where d’you suppose they chops come from? If your gran chooses to kill a pig or two when the inspector’s not looking, that’s none of my business – and none of yourn, neither, if it comes to that. She’ll tell him it was struck by lightning in that storm last week.’

‘But that’s … that’s black-marketeering.’

‘Spirit of free enterprise, she calls it, says that Francis Drake was a pirate by any other name and Frank agrees and so do I. So make what you like of that. I don’t know. Such a fuss about a liddle bit of meat.’

Everything was the same and not the same. Tom’s secret drinking had come out into the open. Mother was living on her nerves and wouldn’t admit it. Grandmother seemed to have turned to racketeering, with Abbie as her eager acolyte.

Don’t be so stupid, I told myself, how could you expect things to be unchanged? Are you the same girl who went away? Why should Ansty Parva be any different from any other place in Britain? Why should you imagine that time stands still here, just because you want it to? Can you put everyone to sleep for a hundred years, just by wishing? It was a sort of arrogance to believe that, of all others, only this one, deeply loved village would come through unscathed.

But, all the same, I had thought it and it was a shock to find that I’d been wrong.

Mrs Buckland popped up as though she’d been hiding behind her hedge all day, just waiting for me to pass.

‘Laura – just the person,’ she said in her breathless little voice. ‘Come and have a cup of tea.’

‘Well … I…’ I racked my brains. There must be
something
I ought to be doing.

‘Now then, I won’t take no for an answer. We haven’t had a nice little chat for ages and the kettle’s just on. Come along.’ She swung open the gate for me. It sagged on its one hinge, scraping a groove along the path. ‘Martin’s home,’ she added, dangling the words like a carrot in front of a donkey.

Inside, her cottage was as primly neat as I remembered. The same china figures stood on the same crocheted mats in precisely the same positions on the same highly polished tables as they had when I was a child. There was the giant cup and saucer, with
We’ll tak’ a cup o’ kindness yet
written in loopy gold lustre letters round the rim. There was the little girl in nightgown and mob cap, climbing into bed. There on the mantelpiece was the spill vase, shaped like a tree trunk. Two curly china lambs crouched at its base.

Mrs Buckland might never have been away. She’d made the great journey to the city, to Winchester, hadn’t liked it and had come back again, to resume life in Ansty Parva without a skipped heartbeat. Perhaps the net curtains weren’t quite so stiffly starched – who could lay hands on starch these days? – but there were still scarlet geraniums in pots on the windowsills.

In fact, the kettle hadn’t been on. It was just simmering on the edge of the stove, where it sat all day, every day, with just a thread of steam rising from the spout. Mrs Buckland quickly pulled it on to the hotplate. ‘Martin’ll be so pleased to see you, I know,’ she confided. ‘Martin … Martin…’ She rattled with just the tips of her nails on a closed door.

‘Go away.’

‘I can’t so much as get into my own scullery when he’s at home,’ she said, with a half-apologetic, half-proud smile. ‘Martin, Laura’s here.’

‘She’ll have to wait. I can’t come out now.’

His voice was exactly right – impatient, brisk, take-me-as-I-am-or-leave-me-alone. If he had rushed out at once and made a fuss of me, like everyone else seemed determined to do, I wouldn’t have been able to cope with it. Being handled with kid gloves doesn’t ease the pain, it simply makes the wound more sensitive. I felt like screaming whenever anyone asked, in that special, sympathetic voice reserved for the bereaved, how I was feeling now. But Martin treated me as an old friend should. I began, at last, to relax.

Behind the closed door, a tap was running. I couldn’t hear anything else.

‘I don’t know – he used to be such a biddable little boy,’ sighed Martin’s mother, as though her son had only just been given his first pair of long trousers. ‘Never gave a moment’s trouble to his father and me. But when he’s working on his pictures, he puts up the blackout and locks the door and I don’t think Mr Churchill himself could get him out of there before he’s ready.’

‘I don’t mind. Really.’

Mrs Buckland laid a tea tray with a lace-edged cloth and eggshell china, patterned with tiny violets. She pottered about, fetching a matching set of teaspoons and sugar tongs in a red leather box from the sideboard drawer. I’d have been happier with one of the blue-and-white striped mugs from the kitchen, but I’d never have dreamed of saying so. There were about a half dozen lumps of sugar at the bottom of the bowl. When she offered it to me, I shook my head.