Evie (11 page)

‘I get the feeling something’s bothering you, darling,’ Alice said to her son, as casually as she could. ‘If it’s anything I can help with, you would tell me, wouldn’t you?’ Edward John continued to draw the curry comb across Tosca’s haunch, putting all his weight behind each stroke. ‘Is it school? Or something here at home? Or to do with your father, perhaps?’
Edward John, relieved that she was so far from unearthing the truth, shook his head and laughed.

‘Good heavens, no!’ he said emphatically. This and the nature of his denial gave Alice the clue she needed. All his solitary rides – Pamela was away at school now and could neither feature in his expeditions or influence his mood. Then there had been his need for extra pocket money, plus the fact that for two weeks he hadn’t asked for news of the runaways, when, previously, it had been his first question when he arrived home on Friday evenings. Suddenly Alice knew.

‘It’s Evie and Giorgio,’ she said quietly. ‘You’ve found them. You know where they are.’ Edward John moved away from the mare and sat heavily on the edge of the granite drinking trough.

‘Don’t make me tell you, Ma. Please!’

‘Why not?’ his mother wanted to know. ‘All any of us wants to do is to help them!’ It took some time for Edward John to explain the reasons for his secrecy. First there was Giorgio’s fear of getting Roger Bayliss into trouble for harbouring a wanted POW who had broken the terms of his permit to remain in England, and secondly, the couple’s mutual fear, not only of their rediscovery by Evie’s violent husband but of being parted, possibly forever, by the military police.

‘So we … I mean I … have been taking food up to them. And I told them to stay hidden until the police catch Norman. I’ve been trying and trying to think of a plan but they’ve no money and no papers – not even ration books!’

Alice had joined him in the stall and now sat beside him on the edge of the trough, putting an arm round his shoulders and pulling him towards her. Suddenly he was a twelve-year-old boy who had been lying to his mother and keeping to himself a responsibility that was too much for him. He would very much have liked to cry but managed not to. His mother, sensing this, released him.

‘You don’t have to tell us where they are, Edward John, I promise, but you and I do need to tell your stepfather about this. He’ll have some good ideas. He’ll know what’s best to do.’ He turned and looked gravely at her. He had regained control of his feelings and was carefully considering his options. If he agreed to tell his stepfather what he knew it would have to be on his terms. But the thought of being able to share the responsibility he had carried alone this far was appealing and it would be a huge relief to no longer have to lie to his mother.

‘Okay,’ he said, getting to his feet. Alice watched him put away the curry comb and tip oats into Tosca’s manger. Then they went together into the farmhouse.

Being Sunday, it was Eileen’s day off. Alice, Roger and Edward John went into the kitchen where Alice whisked up a pikelet batter, dropped each one onto the hotplate of the Aga, transferred it to a plate and spread it with clotted cream and heather honey. While they sat, relishing this delicacy, Edward John underwent something of an interrogation. His story would move forward, then Roger would stop him, go back over some of the ground and ask for details, building up a solid account of the situation of the runaways, what their
chief concerns were and what was their physical condition and mental state. Edward John thought carefully before he answered this last question.

‘Evie is a bit weepy sometimes. She’s not getting enough sleep because Giorgio goes off at night to fetch the snared rabbits and she’s scared that Norman will find him and kill him. She’s fed up with being dirty and not having clean clothes, although Hester has—’ He checked himself.

‘Hester?’ Roger Bayliss said, picking up at once on this evidence of more conspirators than his stepson had so far revealed.

‘Yes,’ Edward John admitted. ‘I had to tell Dave and Hester because I couldn’t get food up to the byre during the week … But they were sworn to secrecy, so—’

‘I bet Rose knows!’ Alice said, refilling their teacups.

‘No, she doesn’t,’ Edward John assured her. ‘They promised not to tell anyone.’

‘You don’t have to “tell” Rose things, darling! She just “knows” them! But she can keep a secret better than most, as I know from personal experience. ’Nother pikelet, anyone? … Any ideas yet, Roger?’ Her husband shook his head.

‘I’ll make some enquiries in the morning,’ he told her. ‘A lot of questions need answering.’

‘Such as?’ Edward John wanted to know.

‘Such as exactly how Giorgio stands with the immigration department and the Italian military police. And how culpable I am if I knowingly conceal him.’

They continued to discuss the situation until it was time
for Alice to drive Edward John down to Ledburton to catch the bus back to Exeter.

‘Georgie had a good idea,’ he said as they parted. ‘In her letter she said Evie and Giorgio might be able to emigrate.’

The acquisition of the car gave the Crocker family a new dimension to their lives. Apart from ferrying his mother and his wife between their two cottages, Dave found himself under pressure to venture further afield. The smallholding near the North Devon coast, where Jonas Tucker had scratched a living while he raised Hester and her brother, was within Sunday-visiting distance of Post Stone valley.

Zeke occasionally cycled over the moor to visit his sister, Hester, always bringing worse news of their father’s deteriorating condition. The paralysis had tightened its grip on him and he was now confined to his bed and barely able to raise his head. He was totally dependent on his wife who cleaned him as well as she could and spooned gruel into him. When D-Day had left Hester widowed and pregnant she had been forced to leave the Land Army and had reluctantly returned to her parents. Since Thurza’s birth she had married Dave Crocker. Her parents had frowned on both her marriages, having wanted her to marry within their strict faith. Consequently she was, in their judgement, damned, together with Thurza, the child of her first husband. As a result of this, when she arrived at the smallholding and led her daughter up the stairs to her father’s sick room, the welcome they received was muted.

Neither grandparent had seen Thurza for several months,
during which time she had ceased to be a baby and become almost a little girl. Hester was shocked to see how old and gaunt her mother had become, sitting at Jonas Tucker’s bedside and, with a soiled towel, mopping the saliva that ran from the corner of his mouth.

‘Say hello to Grandma,’ Hester urged her daughter, but there was no warmth in the older woman’s face and Thurza’s smile faded. Jonas refused to look at his granddaughter or even to allow Hester herself to engage his eyes, lowering his lids slowly in their sunken sockets and allowing his head to roll to one side.

‘’E’s not forgiven me, then, Mother,’ Hester said flatly.

Below, in the chill, front room, Zeke and Dave waited for the visit to be over, Dave staring out through the window at the small but well-cultivated acreage that the Tucker family owned. Much of the space was dug over now, awaiting the cartloads of manure that would replenish the soil ready for next year’s sowings, but there was evidence of a good harvest of root vegetables. The chickens looked healthy, there were ducks and geese on the pond and half a dozen porkers, fattening in the pigsty.

‘Looks like you’m doin’ okay, Zeke,’ Dave said generously, knowing how hard it was for smallholders to make a living.

‘’Tis touch and go most of the time,’ Zeke told him. ‘And with Father so sick and Mother taken up with looking after him …’ Zeke had the demeanour of a man much older than his twenty-one years. His deprived childhood, followed by two years of war surviving in the Welsh coalfields as a ‘Bevan boy’ had left him lean and wiry. Since he had been
demobbed and had taken over the smallholding, his mood had been lifted by the presence in his life of Polly, a local girl. The progress of their courtship had stalled in the face of Zeke’s domestic problems. Despite this, and perhaps because of it, Zeke looked healthier and more robust than when Dave had last seen him.

‘Pigs look good!’ Dave said, encouragingly.

‘Yeah. Ready for market that lot. And there’s a sow, should farrow down in a week or so. But I can’t fatten ’em and turn ’em round as quick or as cheap as the big boys can. So me profit’s not that good.’

‘You still seeing that girl over Bideford?’

‘Polly. Yeah,’ Zeke said, dully.

‘Serious, is it?’ Dave asked him and saw his brother-in-law blush.

‘Yeah,’ Zeke said, eventually.

‘What you waitin’ for, then?’ Dave demanded, bluntly.

‘There’s complications.’

‘Nothun complicated about it, matey! You want her, you ask ’er! Simple as that!’

‘Just like you and Hes, eh?’ Zeke replied. ‘Took the pair of you almost a year to sort yourselves out, as I remember!’

‘Yeah,’ Dave acknowledged. ‘But us ’ad—’

‘Yeah! Complications, right?’ Zeke smiled while Dave recalled how he and Hester had both struggled through a maze of feelings for one another resulting from Hester’s sudden widowhood while she carried and gave birth to her GI husband’s child. The fact that before she had met Reuben there had been an undeclared attraction between her and
Dave Crocker had triggered an overpowering sense of guilt in her when Reuben perished. Although Rose had urged her son to pursue Hester, his instinct had been to give her time and eventually, when they both understood where she was meant to be, she had come to him, with Reuben’s daughter in her arms.

‘It bain’t that I don’t love Pol,’ Zeke said. ‘I’d ask her tomorrow if I’d got anything decent to offer her but – just look at this place!’ The Tucker home had never been more than a roof over the family’s heads, somewhere to cook their plain food, to wash, to sleep and to pray. Now, after years of struggling with poverty and with Jonas’s illness, the place was a hovel. Paint was peeling, furniture was threadbare, the curtains were frayed, the windowpanes draped with cobwebs and slates were missing from the roof. Zeke watched Dave’s eyes go round the miserable space. ‘Can’t blame Mother,’ Zeke continued. ‘For years she’d helped Father on the holding but as he got worse and could do less and less, she had to do more and more. Now she’m sick too, I reckon. Or if not sick, then worn out and tired to death. And she’s angry.’

‘Angry?’ Dave asked. ‘Why angry?’

‘With the Lord. For letting Father suffer when he were a good, God-fearing man who gave up his whole life to the Church of the Pentecostal Brethren. Preachin’ on Sundays, raisin’ money for new pews and that. Travellin’ round the countryside, evangelisin’. Our mother says she hates God now. But she knows that’s a sin she’ll burn in hell for.’ Footsteps approached down the uncarpeted stairs and Hester appeared. She put Thurza into Dave’s arms, pulled a handkerchief from
a pocket, wiped her eyes and blew her nose.

‘Poor Father!’ she said. ‘Oh, poor, poor Father!’

‘I’ll make us a cuppa tea,’ Zeke said and he went into the kitchen.

It did not seem to occur to Dave Crocker that it was strange that neither Zeke nor his sister felt anything but pity for their father. Their childhood had consisted of years of extreme poverty, much of it caused by Jonas’s religious obsessions. Hester must never wear a ribbon in her hair. Clothes that were pretty and colourful were sinful and forbidden, while for Zeke, kicking a football was sin. His friends were chosen for him and for both children Sundays were spent going, three times, to church, to sing hymns, kneel for hours in prayer and then, afterwards, come home to bread and milk for supper followed, until bedtime, by silent reading from the Bible. Had it not been for World War Two, when both children, on reaching the age of eighteen, were required by law to do some form of war work, they might never have broken free of their father’s rigid will.

Dave, sitting with his cup of tea in his hands, observing Hester’s tears and Zeke’s stoic loyalty in taking on the smallholding in order to provide for his parents was, perhaps, reminded of his own Sunday School experience. ‘Honour thy father and thy mother,’ the teacher had said. She was a pretty girl who later married the verger. ‘Honour thy father and thy mother’. And he had. And he hoped that Thurza would honour him and Hester.

On his next weekend at home, Edward John arrived, full of questions.

‘Are they still alright? Have the police caught Norman? Did someone take food up during the week?’ The answers had been ‘yes’, ‘no’ and ‘yes’. Over supper Roger Bayliss gave his stepson full details of the results of the enquiries he had made during the week. It seemed that Giorgio had only to hand himself into the authorities, and now that the backlog of prisoners of war had been cleared, could be repatriated without delay to Naples where he would receive money in lieu of earnings during the years of his internment. The police search for Norman Clark had been scaled down since he did not appear to have committed any further offences, had not been reported loitering in the Post Stone neighbourhood and was therefore deemed not to be an immediate threat to either Evie or her lover. The Coventry police suspected that he was, from time to time, returning to the house of which he had tried to claim ownership. Even had he been married to Evie’s mother he would have had no case because, in his will, Evie’s father had named his daughter as his sole beneficiary. The few hundred pounds in her mother’s post office account were also hers. More significantly, the house itself, once the probate was completed, would belong to Evie.

‘So Evie’s an heiress!’ Edward John declared gleefully.

‘Only in a very small way,’ Roger told him. ‘The house is in poor condition. It won’t fetch more than a few hundred pounds.’

‘But better than a poke in the eye with a sharp stick?’ Edward John suggested, brightly. Alice laughed. Her son’s
vocabulary was often a rich mix of schoolboy slang and the patois of Post Stone valley people, enlivened by the boisterous and vivid vernacular of the land girls amongst whom he had lived through two and a half formative years of his childhood – and was, in his mother’s opinion, all the richer for it.