Apple Blossom Time (40 page)

Both of them had loved Edwin. And when Edwin died, they had filled the void where he had been in the most natural way. But Edwin had not died, not then.

‘You’re not going down with something, are you, darling? I do hope not. There’s an awful fluey bug going round.’ Mother put her hand on my head and it was all I could do not to jerk away. ‘You’re rather hot.’

‘I’m fine,’ I lied, ungraciously. ‘Just a bit tired.’

‘Too much gadding round the country,’ Tom remarked, irritably shaking out the pages of the
Daily Telegraph
– yesterday’s – he always had Grandmother’s when she’d finished with it. She didn’t even leave him the crossword. ‘I don’t know what you think you’re doing. Bedford. Camberley. Southampton. Where next?’

‘I’m looking for work,’ I answered, as calmly as I could.

‘Work? Then I can find plenty for you. That’s the one thing we’re never short of here. I can scarcely see the leeks for groundsel. You can make a start on that whenever you like.’

‘I promised to help Pansy with the potatoes for the harvest supper.’

‘That’s right. Promise to help everyone but your own family. Your mother’s run off her feet, while you gossip with your chum.’

‘That’s hardly fair, Tom,’ Mother pointed out, mildly. ‘There are half a hundredweight of potatoes to peel, before the WI can cook them. Pansy can’t possibly do them all on her own.’

‘I won’t be late,’ I said, rising and giving my mother a quick kiss on her cheek.

I felt like a traitor. I felt as though I was letting Edwin down. But I couldn’t tell my mother that her second marriage had been bigamous.

*   *   *

‘Just like the army all over again,’ Pansy giggled, stabbing a muddy potato. We sat outside the kitchen door of the Memorial Hall, a galvanized tub of potatoes in front of us and another one full of water for the peeled ones. Pansy whipped the skin off the potato she was holding and tossed it into the water.

‘You’re a lot quicker than I am,’ I said, with admiration.

‘Practice makes perfect. Don’t forget I served my country by peeling spuds when you were in charge of the nation’s secrets.’

‘And you can see which turned out to be more useful,’ I sighed, picking up another.

The pile didn’t seem to be getting much smaller. My hands were slicked with that white scum that lies just under the skin of potatoes and that makes them so slippery. They kept jumping out of my fingers and on to the gravel. Yet it wasn’t unpleasant to be perched on a stool in the late afternoon sunshine and to have a legitimate excuse to sit and gossip. In the hall, Abbie and her Frank were moving tables. The trestle legs screeched across the lino and set my teeth on edge.

Abbie’s too, by the sound of things, because she never stopped scolding. ‘Pick it up, Frank, don’t drag it. You can manage that, can’t you, a big boy like you. How many times do I have to tell you – not there – there. Not like that. For goodness’ sake, get out of my road, can’t you.’ Poor Frank.

‘The first harvest of peace,’ said Pansy, her knife still at last. ‘Just think. Mrs Thurlow is baking one of her plaited loaves with the shiny crust for the altar. And Stan Rudge is making the straw dollies for the pew ends. And the church will smell of sunshine and earth and ripeness. And there’ll be bells. We’ve so much to be thankful for.’

‘Oh, Pansy, there you are.’ The new vicar hurried round the corner. ‘I just wanted to ask your opinion on … My goodness, look at all those spuds. Aren’t you girls marvellous.’

He was a bouncy young man, a bit like an enthusiastic Labrador, with fair hair that he tried to tame with Brylcreem to make him look more dependable (he couldn’t and it didn’t) and an engaging grin. Everyone liked him, although all they said was, ‘He’ll settle hisself down in time, like enough’ or, ‘He’s not like Mr Millport, but he’ll do well enough, I suppose.’ That was high praise indeed, from the people of Ansty Parva.

And when I saw the way Pansy smiled in response, it was clear why she’d decided that her fetching sunflower-yellow frock was suitable wear for potato peeling. Goodness, I’d been blind. I noticed for the first time that she’d started to wear her hair longer and softer and that she’d put on a little weight, making her look rather less like an undernourished twelve-year-old.

Just perfect!

*   *   *

I walked home in the twilight, still grinning to myself at the memory of Pansy and the Reverend Peter Sutton earnestly discussing parish business, while staring at each other like the starving at a feast. Pansy deserved all the happiness she could get and I wished with all my heart that she would find it with him.

There would be a real old village scandal if the vicar married an unmarried mother. But, having seen them together, I was in no doubt that it would be a tragedy for both of them if he didn’t.

It was still fairly light when I left the village hall, but I wasn’t walking fast and by the time I reached the short cut home that led through the old shrubbery, it was nearly dark. The path was so overgrown that it was overhung by straggly laurels. It smelt of cats. Or was it foxes? Anyway, horrible. Just a strip of sky showed overhead and that was losing its colour. The only possible reason for using the path was that there was a hole in the park wall just there, where children had broken in to play, so I didn’t have to walk the extra mile round to the gate. The dew was heavy and my shoulders and hair were damp as I brushed through the leathery leaves.

It would have been nice to have had a harvest moon, I thought, looking upwards at the anaemic last quarter. It would have been traditional and, somehow, I felt in need of tradition again. Perhaps we all did. We needed to stop watching the sky, except to guess if there would be rain next day. We needed to stop guarding our tongues, watching for the telegraph boy, listening to every news broadcast. It was time to get back to the quiet, sure rhythms of every day.

After the last war, people said they’d wanted excitement and music and dancing – anything to make them forget. This time it was different. I felt we’d all had quite enough excitement. I certainly had.

And then someone shot at me.

I felt the passage of the bullet almost before the sound. It whipped through the leaves and the air was somehow empty behind it. There was a noise like tearing leather and then a crack, sharp and unmistakable.

I knew what it was. I dropped to the ground. Brambles caught at my wrists and snagged in my hair. Leaf mould, inches thick, generations old, smelt of graves and decay. I lay quite still, while every instinct told me to get up and run. My skin tingled as though I’d rolled naked in stinging nettles and I could smell my own sweat. I couldn’t hear anyone, coming or going. There had been the shot and then nothing.

How absurd, to be lying under a bush in the dark, waiting for – for what, for someone to kill me? Here? I felt so stupid. My reaction had been so melodramatic. Too many nights wasted at the pictures. Too much Edward G. Robinson and George Raft. It was a car backfiring. It must have been.

But I couldn’t quite convince myself of that and I didn’t get up. I may never have been a frontline soldier, but I’d heard enough firing to recognize the sound, without a doubt.

I lay for a long time, long after reason had told me that my attacker had gone. And when I stood up at last, I thought that I was going to faint and sat down again quickly.

My mother made an awful fuss about the state I was in.

‘I tripped, that’s all. I tripped over a root and fell into the brambles. Stupid of me.’

She made me sit by the lamp while she took the prickles out with tweezers and dabbed the scratches on my hands and face with iodine. I’d look a perfect fright in the morning, not only scratched, but daubed with bright yellow.

‘You ought not to go that way in the dark. You ought to stay in the open. A woman on her own. It’s not safe.’

‘Mother – this is Ansty Parva, for heaven’s sake, not wildest Southampton. No-one’s been raped here…’

‘Don’t say that word!’

‘… since the Stone Age. Anyway, it was light when I started.’

‘Still, you never know. There are funny people around everywhere. War brings them out.’

‘Your mother’s right,’ put in Tom, who was in the kitchen washing his hands. He sounded very angry. He had reached that stage in his night’s drinking, talking with slow, clear, exaggerated diction, when a very little opposition might push him into a rage. We both knew it. I decided, for Mother’s sake, not to say any more. ‘I don’t want you out in the dark again,’ Tom commanded.

She set on me with the iodine again and made me squeal.

*   *   *

And in the morning, I couldn’t quite take it seriously. This was Ansty Parva, as I’d said to Mother, I’d lived here all my life and no-one had ever before complained of being shot at, except George Blackdown and that had been in 1916. He’d blown his own toe off. Cleaning the gun, he’d said, but everyone knew he was trying to avoid being called up.

Martin took it very seriously. He prowled through the shrubbery looking for – something.

‘Perhaps it was a poacher,’ I suggested, rather lamely.

‘Hardly. There are easier places to take pot shots at pheasants than from the middle of a laurel bush. Look, here, where everything’s trampled down. He stood there, waiting for you.’

‘Not necessarily for me,’ I said quickly, because the idea of someone lying in wait frightened me badly. ‘Maybe I just happened along.’

‘Maybe. But who else takes a short cut to your house after dark?’

‘Well … Tom does most nights after he’s been to the Green Dragon. But he was at home last night.’

‘And who would want to shoot Tom?’

‘Who would want to shoot me? I’m sure it was just a poacher and I strolled between him and his pheasant at the wrong moment.’

But Martin was poking around with his knife in the thick stem of the bush under which I’d fallen. ‘Poachers don’t use pistols,’ he said, holding out his hand. The bullet lay in his palm, rather squashed, but quite recognizable and definitely not from a poacher’s shotgun.

‘I’m not an expert, but someone will know what sort of pistol fired this.’ Martin wrapped the bullet in his handkerchief and put it in his pocket. ‘I suppose it would be silly to ask if you’re going to the police.’

‘Yes, it would. I’m certain there’s no-one here who could possibly want to hurt me. So what’s the point of stirring things up?’

‘Only that this is the second attempt and that next time he might kill you.’

‘Martin! That’s ridiculous!’

‘Is it? Do you think that the stove in your kitchen accidentally chose to release its fumes on an evening when you were alone in the house, and known to be alone? I’d swear the fire cement had been chiselled away.’

‘It was an accident. Anyone could have been at home.’

‘But no-one else was. And anyone could have been shot at last night?’

‘Yes.’ He was frightening me and it made me angry. ‘Yes. Yes. Yes. Anyone.’

‘Laura, you’ve been within moments of death – twice in a few weeks. That isn’t normal. Are you really so stupid that you can’t see what’s going on?’

‘No. I won’t believe it.’

‘And Kate. Do you think that Geoffrey Paxton’s car – a car carefully maintained – dripped brake fluid all the way to Bullington Cross by accident? They could both have been killed.’

‘Accidents happen in threes. Everyone knows that.’

‘Stop being so bloody stubborn.’

Martin took me by the shoulders. His fingers hooked into my flesh. He gave me two quick, sharp shakes. Twice my head snapped back on my shoulders. Then he pulled me close against him and kissed my hair, my eyes, my lips with short, hard, fierce kisses. I tasted blood, his or mine, salty and metallic, delicious.

‘Laura … darling…’ There were kisses between the words. He never gave me a pause to answer the kisses or the words. ‘God, you look awful … yellow warpaint … if you won’t look after … yourself … I’ll have to … do it for you.’

*   *   *

Next day, Martin showed me the bullet again. He unrolled it from his handkerchief. Somehow, it seemed diminished. It lay in his hand, not much bigger than a decent-sized pebble, and no longer looked as dangerous as when I had first seen it. But his words changed my mind.

‘I’ve had it looked at by a chum of mine,’ he said. ‘It’s from a Webley service revolver, 1914 pattern, .45 calibre. No-one fires one of those by accident.’

‘Who…?’ My mouth was too dry to finish the question.

‘There must be thousands that should have been handed over at the end of the last war. Somehow, they weren’t. They went home in trunks and kitbags and there they are, still dangerous. Every other ex-officer might have one somewhere.’

‘I mean … who would want to…?’

‘I don’t know who. But I know why and so do you.’

I nodded, suddenly certain. ‘I’m getting very close to him now. It won’t be long before we know – who and why.’

‘Laura, give up,’ Martin said suddenly.

I looked at him in amazement. ‘Give up?’ I echoed stupidly.

‘Give up before you get hurt.’

‘But – but I can’t. Not now. I’m getting so close. I can feel it. Martin, I’m almost
there.
’

‘Where? Have you thought? How much do you bloody think at all?’

I had never seen him so angry. He’d said he wanted to protect me, but he looked as though he wanted to hurt me. All the harsh, hard lines of his face were back. His nostrils were pinched and white and there was a thin, white line around his mouth. He was standing very close to me, too close. I felt as though his anger was pushing me back against a wall and I resented it. He was leaving me with only one way out and that was forward.

‘I have to know,’ I said, with dangerous stubbornness. ‘I need to know.’

‘You’re obsessed. You know that, don’t you? Obsessed. Christ, it’s not normal. The man’s dead, Laura. He’s been dead for a quarter of a century, for God’s sake. Why can’t you leave him in peace?’

‘Because someone has to care about him!’ I was shouting now, too, and our voices were matching each other. We were spitting and glaring, like two cats on a wall. I hated him then, I hated anyone who got between me and Edwin Ansty. ‘No-one else does, but I do. Someone has to love him.’