Apple Blossom Time (18 page)

‘No, thank you. I don’t seem to care much for sugar any more.’

‘So much better for the figure, dear, I always think. Mr Buckland always used to like me a bit on the plump side, if you know what I mean, but I’m not sure he was right. I feel much better for losing a pound or two. Girls nowadays all look so fit – such strapping young Amazons. Rationing is a blessing in disguise, in some ways.’ There was a sound of a key turning in a lock. ‘Oh, there you are at last, Martin. Not before time. Why don’t you sit down and have a nice cup of tea with us.’

‘Hello, Laura,’ he said softly. His voice crept under my defences and touched me in a place that was still sore. Don’t, Martin, don’t let me start feeling sorry for myself. Please.

In that pretty room full of fripperies, he looked like an animal in a cage. He stood with his shoulders slightly stooped, his head bowed beneath sloping beams. He had lost his desert tan, but he was still as thin as he had been when I last saw him, that long ago evening in Alexandria, when I still had confetti in my shoes and a married lifetime ahead of me. Out of uniform – that bulky, scratchy, unflattering battledress – he ought to have reminded me of the Martin I used to know. He didn’t. He was thin and tense and taut and utterly desirable. There were freckles of something purple across the front of his shirt – paint, perhaps, or dye or the chemicals he worked with. When I looked at him, I couldn’t look away again.

‘Well, if you won’t sit down, why don’t you show Laura your darkroom, or my scullery, I
should
say. Mind you, he takes a lovely photo, though it’s not for me to say it…’

‘I’d like that,’ I said, standing up quickly, to make it difficult for him to refuse.

The little room faced north, but with the blackout blinds carefully fixed and the windows closed it was stifling, with a smell that made my nostrils twitch, like the chemistry lab at school. There were trays full of liquid on an enamel kitchen table and one still in the sink. The tap dripped into it, slowly and irregularly. Martin had changed the single ceiling bulb for a red one. Clothes-pegged to a string around the walls hung half a dozen damp prints.

‘There’s not much to see,’ he said apologetically. ‘It’s just a room.’

I nodded, not certain what to say. The pictures round the walls were a black-and-white blur. I stepped closer and saw that they were beautiful.

Here was Ansty Parva, preserved for ever. I saw the bold sweep, ridge and furrow, that followed Alfred Thurlow’s plough, the squabbling gulls that trailed him across land his sons never now would farm. Enlarged and enlarged again, the chalky soil took on an enduring pattern that marched for miles across the downs of England, across land that had never been under the plough until now. I saw Dick Kimber splitting hazel rods, his clumsy fingers handling the cleaver with delicate sureness, for the half-finished sheep hurdle propped behind him. Stan Rudge, in ancient leather knee protectors like a horse’s travelling boots, was halfway up a ladder with a bundle of long straw over his shoulder. There was Josie Shellard, transformed into a beauty because she smiled at her children, black and white, and Frank Horrell spreading a few tins and packets across the length of his empty shelves, making do.

It was as though Martin had been hurrying to capture all this while it was still there. I could sense the urgency that had pushed him on. The war had touched Ansty Parva. Tomorrow, next week, next year – the war would be over and we both knew that we would never go back to 1939 again.

There was the Green Dragon, the old men in collarless shirts and shapeless hats playing dominoes and paying no attention to the GIs clustering round the bar. There was Martin’s mother, hanging washing in the garden and taking not a bit of notice of the convoy of tanks on the other side of the hedge. She was bracing herself to hoist the washing line into the wind with the clothes prop. A sheet was blowing back across her face and she was laughing.

I wanted to say how splendid they all were, the people I had known for as long as I could remember, but I didn’t know any words that wouldn’t sound patronizing.

Martin began to take down the blackout. His hands were brown and long-fingered, their backs dusted over with silky, black hairs. He pushed open the scullery window and the spicy scent of mignonette wafted in and clashed with the chemicals. There wasn’t anywhere I wanted to be more than that drab little room.

Mrs Buckland popped her head round the door. ‘I don’t know what you two are finding to look at in there,’ she said, with unsuitable coyness. ‘It’s only a room, after all. I’m off, anyway, down to the vicarage. We’re rolling bandages. You’ll find there’s plenty of tea still in the pot.’ She disappeared and then was back again, as though she was playing peek-a-boo with us. ‘If you’ve got nothing better to do, Martin, why don’t you show Laura your pictures from Egypt. She’d like that, probably, knowing it so well and all.’

‘I don’t think so,’ said Martin, firmly.

‘No, really, I…’ I began, but she took me by the hand with a surprisingly determined grip and led me back into the sitting room.

‘Now you just sit there,’ she said, steering me to the sofa. She took down a portfolio from the bookshelves and laid it on my lap. ‘There! I’m sure you’ll find it interesting.’

And then, finally, she went off, carrying a basket of sheets, worn beyond repairing, to tear up for bandages.

Martin looked embarrassed. ‘I’m sorry. She’s not normally so … so…’ I sensed that he really wanted to snatch the portfolio back out of my hands.

‘It doesn’t matter.’

I flipped over a few leaves. Pictures leaped out at me, startling and immediate.

A column of soldiers, in solar topis and Bombay bloomers, on one of those terrible acclimatization marches, trudged along a dusty road and a column of camels swayed along in the opposite direction. Not one of the soldiers looked even vaguely interested.

A desert patrol brewed tea in a Benghazi cooker – a mess tin full of sand doused in petrol. Their faces were almost flayed by wind and sand, every crease filled with grit, noses, eyebrows, eyelashes; you knew that the tea would scald their cracked lips.

How strange that these black-and-white images were nearer to the truth than colour could ever be. They had a sharpness, a purity, that drew the eye and focused it on what was important, instead of letting it wander around a pretty coloured world. They had line and form and texture. I couldn’t stop looking.

A column of tanks ran along the line between sand and sky, barely ahead of the sandstorm that you knew would catch them.

An ambulance was hopelessly bogged down, axle deep, while its crew sweated with spades and matting and its patients bled into the sand.

A dune was sculpted by wind, rippled like a beach, with a fringe of sand like foam scudding off the top. At the bottom lay all the detritus of war, inland beachcombings – barbed wire, shell cases, a spade, corned-beef tins, a helmet. A still life, meticulous, crisply shadowed, almost Dutch. Look again. There’s a head inside the helmet.

Martin had left me. I could hear him tidying up his darkroom. I felt I ought to say something, but his view of war kept me silent and awed. I remembered the
taverna
in Alexandria and how Martin had scorned the set-up photograph. I had thought he was arrogant and now I knew that he was right.

‘You don’t have to do that,’ Martin called through. ‘Stop when you’re bored. I won’t mind.’

A disabled tank, its tracks blown off. A soldier knelt on the turret and pulled one of the crew through the hatch. You knew he was dead. Dead is different from unconscious. Dead is empty. A soldier knelt on the turret and pulled an empty shell through the hatch. He put his hands under the dead man’s armpits and strained to lift him. The body lay across his knees, arms outspread, a modern
pietà.

The tenderness of the gesture transfixed me. The pity of it tore me. I closed my eyes and saw it still. The image was seared on my brain. Perhaps it always would be.

‘Laura, are you all right?’ Martin was talking to me and I couldn’t answer. ‘Laura? Laura…?’

I couldn’t breathe. My chest hurt. It was as though I had been squeezed dry. I began to shiver.

Martin took the portfolio from my fingers, closed it and put it back on the shelf. ‘I’m sorry. I should have thought.’

I shook my head. ‘It doesn’t matter,’ I said and the words came out more brusquely than I meant. ‘I wish everyone would stop trying to protect me. I’m not the only woman in England to have lost her husband. Just … just let me deal with it in my own way.’

‘All right. I won’t say any more. Is that what you want?’ I nodded and he went on. ‘Then come for a walk with me. I need to get the smell of hypo out of my nostrils.’

We climbed up on to the downs, up the zigzaggy path to the White Horse, faster and faster, Martin’s long legs making nothing of the steep slope and my shorter ones going double time to keep up with him. Chalk powdered my shoes and dimmed the bright petals of poppies and knapweed.

There’s a special kind of silence up there, a silence that isn’t quiet. The wind that always blows across the top rustles the dried stems of grass, making them rattle. Up there, you can see the wind. It shimmers across the grass, flattening it like the pile of velvet when you sit on it. It turns up the undersides of leaves and flips them back again, a green and white flicker.

From the top, the White Horse stretched long, out-of-proportion legs back down the slope. He was tufted with neglect, shaggy with grass, needing a good clip, like an old horse in winter turned out in a field without a rug. His beady eye grew long, green tears.

We sat by his ears, on rabbit-nibbled grass that was starred with tiny flowers, sainfoin and bugloss, scabious and fairy flax, magical names. I tucked my knees against my chest and cradled my arms around them. If I looked towards the village, from here it hadn’t changed at all.

Black and white walls, catslide roofs, thatch green with moss on the sunless slopes; redbrick school in black asphalt playground; church and vicarage rather aloof, making villagers come to God, rather than going to meet them; Ansty House looking the other way, as usual. From here, I couldn’t see the struts that buttressed the corner of the Pocknells’ cottage. A chunk had been knocked off by a tank that didn’t quite make the bend. Old Mrs Pocknell had taken her stick to the driver when he called to apologize.

But if I looked beyond the village, the changes were plainer. The lanes had been widened to take the extra weight of tracked vehicles, the verges had been stolen to make passing places and the new concrete edgings were very obvious, very brash. The hedges were gone between Upper Horseleaze and Lower Horseleaze and between Great Croft and Little Croft, I suppose to make the fields easier to work with tractors. Lambpit Copse, that circle of elms in the middle of a field, had gone altogether. Where would the rooks build their nests now? And if I looked the other way, the Nissen huts of the American camp scarred the land irrevocably.

‘I love it here,’ Martin said, quietly. ‘I love the space, the silence, the changing shapes of the clouds, the shadows running across the vale. This is the only place I want to be, when it’s all over.’

‘When it’s all over…’ The words sounded impossibly good. ‘I can’t think that far ahead.’

A flight of C-47s, Dakotas, droned only a little above our eyeline, practising hedgehopping to avoid enemy spotters. I could see the first paratrooper balanced ready in the open door. Even bulked in all his equipment, he looked very vulnerable, waiting for the red light to turn to green. The plane would rise to dropping height over the practice DZ and the jump master would shout ‘Go, go, go’, pushing a man out into the rushing air with every shrieked word, whether he wanted to go or not. I imagined the buffeting slipstream, the jerk of harness that swung men like dolls, the bone-jarring impact. This was Wiltshire on a sunny day. What would it be like jumping into darkness, into occupied territory?

The spiralling lark was silenced by the roar of engines.

‘Not long now,’ said Martin.

‘They’ll be dropping on the Plain, I suppose.’

‘No, I mean, not long until they go. The training and the waiting will soon be over.’ He looked at my face and gave a quick smile. ‘Don’t look so shocked. I know your work is hush-hush, but the invasion’s not that much of a secret. Everyone knows it’s coming. If I had a long-range weather report and a tide table, I could work out the exact day for you. Think about it. What else is there to do?’

I could have told him the reason for my shocked expression. I had suddenly realized that he would be going, too. I had seen his pictures and I knew that he’d be there, whenever, wherever the landing might be, as far forward as he could get. And I didn’t want him to go. Not Martin, too.

Don’t go, I wanted to say, please don’t go. But I didn’t. No-one ever said that. It wasn’t – it wasn’t
done.
So I shut my mind to my fears and smiled back.

‘I’m secretive by instinct. Close as a clam. It’s second nature. Once in Intelligence, always in Intelligence, they say. The trouble is that Germans have weather reports and tide tables, too.’

‘Probably.’ We were sitting so close, I could feel the warmth of his body seep into mine. ‘Laura, I wanted to say … I wanted to tell you … I’m sorry about your husband.’

I looked away and nodded.

‘I should have written … I meant to write, but … but I thought about you. I’m sorry.’

‘It’s all right.’

‘He looked a fine young man.’

‘He was. He was a very…’ I could feel my voice beginning to break up, like a fading wireless signal. I took a deep breath. ‘… a very fine young man.’

‘You must be very proud of him.’

‘Yes.’ More deep breaths. I must be calm. I must … ‘Martin – that night in Alexandria – it was … it was all we had. It was…’ He put his arm around me. It was all bone and sinew, but warm, strong, living. ‘Oh, God, Martin, I didn’t love him enough. We only had one night and I didn’t make him happy and then he died. Oh God, oh God, he deserved to be loved…’

‘Sssh. Sssh. It’s all right.’ His other arm came round me, sheltering, safe. ‘There. It’s all right, my love. Cry if you want to.’