Apple Blossom Time (31 page)

I mean that I’d had a good time. There’d been terrible moments. I’d been widowed. I’d lost a good friend. I’d seen other girls mourn parents and husbands and friends. The grief of war, the sheer waste had touched me and changed me. It had matured me, which is a kinder way of saying that it had aged me beyond my years. And like all soldiers, I’d groused over the pettiness of service life. But – but it had all been so worth while – and it had been fun …

Now? Well, what now?

*   *   *

Jonathan had grown so much. I said so to Pansy.

‘Of course he has,’ she laughed. ‘I’d be really worried if he hadn’t. But he is enormous, isn’t he? It must be all that extra government milk and rosehip syrup.’

‘Last time I saw him he was still a baby, now he’s turned into a real boy. What is he – about three?’

‘Three a month ago. Isn’t he gorgeous? I think so, anyway.’

‘Come on, Jonathan – come to Laura.’ I held out my arms to the chubby little boy. Laughing and confident, he ran to me. The feel of him was delicious. Unexpectedly solid, soft and yet firm. Defenceless yet surprisingly strong. I lifted him on to my knee. His delightful podginess made me want to squeeze him.

Pansy had been rather sentimental about cutting his hair. Toffee-brown and sun-streaked, fine as gossamer, it curled round his ears. His eyes were bright blue, startlingly direct, guileless and sweet. He was so beautiful.

I knew, of course. You only had to look at him. This was James’s son. I’d wondered before. No doubt, now. The question was – did Pansy know? Just how naive was she? Had she known all along? Had she guessed later? Had she still no idea?

The other question was – did it matter any longer?

Jonathan began to squirm. ‘My want down,’ he said. ‘Let my go now.’ He slithered on his tummy off my knee and on to the grass. He knelt down beside his mother and began to dig in the vegetable patch. Earth flew around. He tunnelled furiously, far too busy to allow me to cuddle him for long.

I looked over at Pansy. She was pricking out carrots, handling the feathery, fragile seedlings with long-fingered delicacy. The sun was merciless. It pointed out the skimpiness of her frock, how faded the pattern was, how worn under the arms. If she stretched too far, the material would never stand the strain. Pansy herself, however, looked brown and healthy, thin and fit, where my mother was thin and ill.

Pansy knelt up and put a hand to her lower back with a groan. ‘Well, that’s that. I wonder who’ll get more of them – us or the carrot flies?’

‘Mothballs. I seem to remember Tom swears by mothballs to keep away carrot fly. You sow them along the row with the carrots. Or do you put them down molehills? I wonder.’

‘And who has mothballs these days? If I had, I’d put them among the winter coats. I really don’t know how we can expect them to last another year.’ She rubbed her muddy hands on the grass and picked up her basket of tools. ‘Come in and say hello to Father. He’ll be waiting for his tea and he’ll be so glad to see you.’

Shouting ‘Grampa, Grampa, where are you?’, Jonathan ran ahead of us on sturdy legs. Pansy seemed sublimely ignorant of my suspicions. Better to keep it that way. What was there to gain?

I watched the little boy dash down the gravel path to the kitchen and couldn’t keep a fond, foolish smile off my face. His fat little knees rubbed together as he ran. All that energy, all that beauty, how marvellous.

‘Sometimes,’ I said with a laugh, not taking my eyes off Jonathan, ‘and only sometimes, mind you, I really envy you, Pansy.’

‘Do you?’ she queried, crisply. ‘I wonder.’

She saw me watching him and I saw her watching me, watching him. So – now I knew – Pansy was as aware of the identity of Jonathan’s father as I was.

Jonathan was a lovely child who’d given great joy to his mother and grandfather. Did it matter who was his father? Did I care? Why, then, did I feel as though a very small light had finally gone out?

Later, I remembered something else about the way Pansy had watched me. She looked … she looked hungry. The usual bland sweetness of her expression had looked pinched and greedy. She had her son, yet she looked as though there was something else she coveted, something I had. Or rather, something I once had. A husband? Surely not. And I wondered – God, no, it couldn’t be true – I wondered if I had wronged James’s mother, after all.

Supposing Pansy had written those anonymous letters that had pointed me towards the truth about my father. Supposing she wanted to take something away from me. She couldn’t have my husband, so she made do with depriving me of a different man. She had a possible source of knowledge – her father, who had known the young Edwin Ansty. And she had a possible motivation, however unlikely.

Simply thinking such thoughts about Pansy made me feel guilty.

*   *   *

‘What does it feel like to be a civilian again, Laura?’

‘Very odd, Mrs Buckland. A bit like a snail without its shell.’

‘You’ll settle down again in no time, I’m sure. I expect your mother’ll be so glad to have her daughter safely back in the nest again.’

‘I suppose so.’ A dutiful daughter might feel happier about that prospect. For some reason, I didn’t. So I asked the question I’d been longing to ask since I came home. ‘How’s … how’s Martin?’

‘I wish I knew, my dear.’ Mrs Buckland sighed. ‘I had a letter from him just the other day – I’ll show it to you if you pop round some time. It seems he’s still in Germany with some commission or other. He has a nice little job with
Picture Post
waiting for him to come back to, but I don’t know when. You’d think they’d send our boys home as soon as they could, wouldn’t you, not hang on to them. He signed on for the duration and, as far as I’m concerned, the duration’s over.’

*   *   *

Damn it, damn it, they were trying to put women back in their places again. And those places were in the kitchen, by the hearth, in the marriage bed and in the nursery. But definitely not in paid employment.

Give us a job to do and we’ll do it, we’d shouted in 1939. And we’d done it, willingly and ably, for five and a half years. We’d tilled the land and unloaded ships. We’d ferried aeroplanes and driven ambulances. We’d taught the children and manufactured ammunition. We’d swept chimneys and spotted fires, made vehicles and serviced engines. Some of us had been killed doing it.

Now there were men coming home who’d want those jobs back. Of course they did. And women were told that motherhood was the most glorious career open to them. Women’s magazines emphasized how important it was to help the men to readjust to their new civilian world. Never once did I see it suggested that returning servicewomen might also feel disorientated and puzzled.

Without a husband or a child, I was surplus to requirements, a spare woman, a waste of the nation’s rations. So I stayed at home – I didn’t have the heart to walk out on my mother again so soon – and applied for every possible job within range. I spent a small fortune on stamps.

And when – if – I was called to interview, old men would purse their lips. ‘Oh, ATS,’ they’d say, as though I’d mentioned something not quite feminine, not quite nice.

Perhaps it was my fault. Perhaps I expected everything to fall into my lap. Perhaps I was wrong and not the system. But I didn’t think so.

I had plenty of time to spare, a lot of energy and a burning passion to find out what had happened to my father. ‘Just ask – why not?’ Vee had said, a long time ago, but I was equally determined not to cause my mother any more pain than I had to. Now that the rage I had felt on first discovering the manner of my father’s death had mellowed – no, perhaps matured is the right word – I realized what a terrible burden my mother had been carrying for so long. She simply had to look at me to be reminded of the man she had been married to for such a short time.

Rightly or wrongly, she had tried to shield me from the distress she must have suffered. Was it right that I should add to it?

*   *   *

The first I knew of Martin’s return was when Mrs Buckland knocked at the door as we were having breakfast. She had taken off her hairnet, but hadn’t spared the time to comb out her careful pin curls. They coiled like flat grey snakes around her head, giving her the look of Medusa off duty. No-one had ever seen Mrs Buckland beyond her own gate without a hat. She was wearing fluffy pink slippers. Something was definitely wrong.

A few months earlier, the sight of Mrs Buckland looking so unkempt, at that time in the morning, would have been enough to set off an invasion scare throughout the village. Nothing less than a regiment of German paratroopers could have stirred her.

‘Mrs Buckland, how nice,’ said Mother, with the merest quiver of mirth detectable in her voice. ‘Won’t you have some tea?’

‘Well, I … no, I can’t stop.’ She’d been – almost – running. Her breath came in short puffs. ‘I just wondered if Laura was in.’

‘Where else would she be at this time in the morning?’ muttered Tom. Morning was never his best time.

‘Laura, dear, I wonder if you would…? Do you think you could possibly…?’ Her hands fluttered up to her lips to still their trembling.

‘Of course,’ I answered, rising from the table. It wasn’t an invasion. So it had to be Martin. I looked at Martin’s mother, at the slippers and the uncombed hair, and felt a sickening spasm of fear. Martin. Not Martin. Not now. Not when it was all over.

She trotted beside me as fast as she could along the lanes, taking two steps to every one of mine. I wanted to shriek at her. I wanted to run, to outdistance her plump little legs, but I didn’t have the heart to leave her behind. Her agitation was so comic and yet so serious.

‘I don’t know what to do. He won’t stop working, Laura.’

‘That doesn’t sound too terrible. Martin always works hard.’

‘Yes, but don’t you see … oh, good morning, Mrs Attwood, yes, lovely morning, isn’t it … don’t you see, he won’t stop. Ever since he came home. He won’t come out.’

‘Not ever?’

‘Well…’ She blushed. ‘Sometimes, at night, I hear him come out for the … you know … necessary. And I hear the kettle rattle … no, Ted, of course there isn’t a fire, and I’ll have less of your cheek, young man … but if I come downstairs, he locks himself in again. I can’t so much as get at my own scullery – I should have done the wash yesterday – and heaven knows what he’s eating … Laura, you’ll have to do something. Perhaps he’ll listen to you.’ Just as she had the last time I’d visited the cottage, she scratched with her fingertips on the locked door. ‘Martin, Laura’s here. Martin.’

Last time he’d told me to go away, but he hadn’t meant it and he’d come out a few moments later. This time there was no answer. I heard him moving, heard a tap slowly running, but he paid no attention to us.

‘You see? He won’t talk and he won’t come out. It’s not normal.’

‘What’s happened to him, Mrs Buckland?’

‘How should I know, when he won’t talk to me? Don’t ask silly questions, Laura.’ The answer was a measure of her distress. I’d never known Mrs Buckland to snap. ‘Oh, I’m so sorry, dear. I shouldn’t. It’s not your fault. But I just don’t know what to do.’

‘Why don’t you…’ I thought quickly. ‘Why don’t you pop upstairs for a bit, Mrs Buckland, have a rest and I’ll make you a nice cup of tea.’

‘I couldn’t, I shouldn’t…’

‘Of course you can. I’m here now. Leave everything to me.’

Reliable Laura. Worth every one of her three stripes. But it was only the sound of Martin moving beyond the door that kept me calm.

‘Oh, I don’t know…’

‘Off you go. I know where everything is kept.’

And when the tea was made, I called to Martin on the other side of the locked door. ‘Martin, there’s some fresh tea, if you want it.’ But I didn’t knock and I didn’t ask or tell him to come out. He’d always been stubborn. Tell Martin he had to do such-and-such and he’d think of a hundred reasons why he shouldn’t. Tell him he couldn’t possibly swim to the other side of the lake and he’d drown himself to prove he could. I tried to keep my tone light and unforced. I left the choice to him.

Then I took a pot of tea upstairs to Mrs Buckland along with some thin toast, laid out prettily on a tray, the way I knew she liked it. There was just a teaspoonful of marmalade left in the bottom of a jar, but I put it into a scalloped glass dish. The teapot was under a patchwork cosy.

She was sitting on the edge of her bed, dithering. ‘What you really need, what you deserve, Mrs Buckland, is a day in bed. You’ve been very brave, but I’m sure you’re tired, aren’t you.’ She nodded. ‘Look, I’ll put the tray here by the bed and pull the curtains – like that – so the sun doesn’t shine in your eyes, but you can see what you’re eating.’ I plumped up the pillows and smoothed the eiderdown to make her bed look more inviting.

‘No crusts, dear,’ she said in accusation. ‘You’ve cut off the crusts. What a waste.’

‘Ah, but I know that’s the way you really like your toast, isn’t it?’

She nodded again, with a guilty duck of her shoulders.

‘And nothing’s wasted. You can always dry them for raspings, or something. So you just enjoy your breakfast and don’t worry about a thing.’

I left her tucked up, sipping tea and reading the first episode of the new serial in
Woman’s Weekly.
Downstairs again, I took two chairs into the garden and poured myself some tea. I browsed along the two bookshelves, looking for something to read. It might be a long wait.

Every Woman’s Flower Garden
by Mary Campden. Warwick Deeping’s
Sorrell & Son.
A whole row by Ethel M. Dell and Annie S. Swan. Heavens. Mary Webb’s
Precious Bane.
That was strong meat for Mrs Buckland.

I settled down with
The Big Book of Great Short Stories.
It looked as though it would put me to sleep faster than Martin’s mother. Then I went into the garden to wait for him. I thought I saw the blackout curtains twitch over the window of Martin’s darkroom. Then nothing.

At about half-past twelve I whipped up some mushrooms on toast, with stewed plums to follow, for Mrs Buckland and took it up on a tray.

‘Oh, how lovely, you shouldn’t, dear,’ she said, with a greedy look at the plates. There wasn’t much on either, but I’d made them look attractive.