Evie (14 page)

The yard dog broke into frenzied barking, his chain clanking as he plunged from one extreme of its length to the other. Probably a marauding fox, Hester guessed, pressing her head into the hard pillow. The barking ceased but the creak of the bedroom floorboards continued, while she lay, half asleep, longing for her own bed and for Dave, breathing and warm, beside her.

Suddenly she was wide awake. The noise from the bedroom had erupted into some sort of violence. The footfalls were loud, the bedsprings were audible, as though a struggle was taking place, things crashed and smashed. Crockery? A flagon of water? Something thudded to the floor in a splintering of
glass. Hester hauled herself off the truckle bed, struggled out of a tangle of sheets and blankets and ran up the steep stairs, colliding with her brother as he almost fell out of his room. Then the pair of them, the brother and sister, Jonas Tucker’s children, burst into his sickroom.

The funeral took place a week later on the western edge of the moor in a small, rank, semi-derelict chapel where the Pentecostal Brethren held their meetings. The weather was bleak. A northerly wind swept down from the moor, nipping fingertips and reddening noses.

‘Well, at least ’tis dry …’ Rose Crocker muttered, pulling at the sparse fur trim on her coat collar. She would have preferred not to have come, instead pottering in the warmth of her bakehouse. She had only herself to blame, since she could not claim that her attendance was motivated by a desire to support Hester as she mourned her father, but by the simple, unquenchable curiosity for which she was famous. Her opinion of the Pentecostal Brethren was not a high one. Who were they, these strange believers? Heathens? Pagans, even? Here was a chance for Rose to observe them at one of their rituals. Would there be incense? Incantations? The sacrifice of a live animal? A bat, perhaps, or a badger?

A leading Pentecostal preacher had arranged for the coffin to be collected from the Tucker smallholding and transported to the chapel on a farm cart. Dave drove his mother, his wife and Thurza over from Lower Post Stone and joined the small procession as it left the Tuckers’ yard. First came the cart with the coffin draped in black, followed by the two cars.
Zeke, his mother and Polly in one, and in the other, almost unrecognisable in the suit he had worn on the day he had married Hester, Dave Crocker. Next to him, in the passenger seat, sat Rose who had dressed for churchgoing, and behind them, Hester, wearing the same dowdy coat she had worn when she had arrived at the hostel almost three years ago. Thurza, already restless, squirmed on her mother’s lap as they drove slowly behind the coffin-bearing cart, through the lanes, to the chapel.

The service had been long. Hymns, a sermon, some readings from the Bible and a dozen different prayers had been intoned in low, solemn voices while the small congregation stood and sang, knelt and prayed, stood and sang again, sat and listened, then knelt and prayed, stood and sang yet again and then finally stood and listened. Thurza had howled, been taken outside and then brought back in and then taken outside again. When the service was finally over, most of the small congregation, particularly those of another or no faith, had been reduced to an almost trance-like state of desperation and found it hard to believe that they could, at last, shuffle out into the blast of the icy wind.

As the dwindled company assembled itself in the front parlour of the Tucker cottage, Polly, seeing Zeke standing, tongue-tied, nervously asked the widow if she should make everyone a nice cup of tea. Her teeth were chattering. She had not visited the Tucker home before and was dismayed by its run-down bleakness. Polly was a quiet girl with a suggestion of guiltlessness about her which was confirmed in her wide, brown eyes, smooth hair and softly rounded face and figure.
She loved Zeke and relished their weekly meetings on market day. Although patient by nature, she was becoming concerned by the slow pace of his courtship. She had found the Pentecostal Brethren funeral almost frightening in its length and intensity, and despite being dressed in the most neutral-coloured clothes she possessed and borrowing a grey felt hat from her mother, her general appearance had attracted disapproving glances from many of the attendant Brethren. At last Mrs Tucker responded to Polly’s question.

‘Not ’til us ’as prayed,’ she answered, stony-eyed. Then she dropped heavily down, her bony knees making audible contact with the stone floor, the bleak light of late afternoon deepening the lines of her gaunt face, her hands clasped and raised in a pose suggesting supplication, her lips moving silently.

The sight that had faced Hester and Zeke when they burst into their parents’ bedroom on the night Jonas Tucker’s soul left his body was to become a blur of sharp, shocking images which would remain with them for the rest of their lives.

The oil lamp had been knocked off the bedside table and lay on the floor, shards of broken glass glittering in a circle of burning paraffin. The bed was in chaos. Jonas’s gaunt limbs, motionless now, protruded from a tangle of blankets and twisted sheets. Feathers were escaping from the ripped cover of the eiderdown. On their father’s chest, astride his motionless body, their mother knelt. Her breathing was laboured. She was shaking and sweating. Hanks of her thin, greying hair hung forward, obscuring her face except for her
sharp nose, from which beads of sweat, or possibly tears, dripped as she rocked, slowly now, back and forth, back and forth, a pillow pressed down and held firm, over the lower part of Jonas’s face.

From that point their recollections became more practical. Zeke’s priority had been to control the fire which he did swiftly and effectively, dragging the old carpet over the flames, stamping them out and flinging it, smouldering, into the yard. Hester took her mother by the shoulders and eased her from the bed and lowered her into the chair in which she had sat for so long, watching as her husband’s disease destroyed him. Cradling the pillow in her arms, the widow sat, only half aware, and watched her children – Zeke sweeping up the broken glass and pulling the soiled linen from the bed, Hester, straightening her father’s limbs, folding his arms across his chest, wrapping his fingers round the small wooden cross he always carried and spreading a clean sheet over him, arranging it so that his blue feet and long, curled, yellowish toenails were hidden from view.

Later, after tucking blankets around their sleeping mother, they left her in her chair, went down to the kitchen and brewed a pot of tea.

‘Us’ll ’ave to call out the doctor,’ Zeke said as they sat, shuddering and sipping. It was the first of many decisions the couple were going to have to make over the coming days. Beyond the window the shapes of the smallholding, the pigpen, the henhouse and the leafless branches of the plum tree, slowly formed in the first grey light of the morning.

‘Yes.’ Hester murmured. She was shaking, experiencing a sudden, physical reaction to the events of the night, and then slowly reacting to a sound from the next room where Thurza had begun to shake the bars of her cot and demand attention.

The doctor came in the mid afternoon. Without lifting the sheet that covered him, his pen scratching across the paper on which it was printed, he filled out Jonas Tucker’s death certificate. He put his hand under the widow’s chin, tilted her face into the light and scanned it, placed a bottle of tablets in Hester’s hand and recommended that her mother take one, morning and evening.

‘They’ll calm her,’ he said. ‘Help her through her grief.’ He passed the death certificate to Zeke. ‘I’ll see myself out.’ Stooping and holding his head sideways, he negotiated the low beam across the staircase. They had heard him start his car and then the sound of its engine, fading as it moved down the track and onto the road.

The time had come for Giorgio to leave the valley. With his papers in order and a rail pass to Southampton Dock patted into the breast pocket of the Italian army uniform he was to wear on his journey of repatriation, he carefully stowed his few belongings into his kitbag and smiled encouragingly at Evie’s worried face. She was sitting on his bed in the Lucas’s cottage, watching him intently as though she was trying to commit to memory every detail of his appearance. The dark, glossy hair, the velvety, attentive eyes which, when they caught hers, softened like the brown sugar melting in
the fudge that Rose Crocker had taught her to make.

‘Needs more sugar,’ she’d breathe as she forced her favourite wooden spoon through the solid mixture, ‘and butter instead of marge … but it’s the best us can do these days, what with the rationing!’

‘You no worry,
bella mia
,’ Giorgio whispered, reacting to Evie’s anxious face. ‘Everything go well! I got my papers, you got yours!’

‘Well, most of ’em.’ she said. ‘Not all.’

‘Almost all,’ he said. ‘Very soon you will have all. And then your Giorgio will be waiting for you in Napoli! And you will be standing at the rail as your ship come in and you see him and you wave at him, and—’

‘But … Suppose I miss the ship! Or you’re not there! Or Norman finds out where we’ve gone!’

‘No one tell him where we gone! It all secret!’

‘Or they won’t let you go to New Zealand, after all, or—’ He silenced her with a kiss. One of his afternoon kisses. Hot, Italian and insistent.

‘Will be alright!’ he whispered. ‘Everything in such order! Mr Bayliss and Christophe Bayliss, they got it all arrived!’

‘Oh, Giorgio, you mean arranged,’ she teased him, giggling.

‘
Si
. I mean arranged! Of course, arranged … Everyone help us! You no need worry,
bella
Eva! No worry!’ His tongue was playing with her earlobe. ‘You stay here with me tonight, mm? Mrs Edwin not mind!’

‘Mrs Edwin do mind!’

‘Okay …’ he sighed. ‘Then I walk you back to Signora
Crocker’s. We go, one last time, to the hayloft in the barn by the bridge,
si
?’

‘For old time’s sake, you mean?’

‘Who this “old time” ha? He some man you like before Giorgio come?’

The death of Hester’s father had shocked Rose. Although she had always known that the Tucker family were regarded as peculiar, she had been unaware of the extent of this peculiarity until the day of Jonas Tucker’s funeral. The dead man had been well known as a preacher in the Pentecostal Brethren sect, which local people knew was a splinter group from the better known and less fanatical Plymouth Brethren. When Hester had first arrived at the hostel, she had, in the opinion of Rose and most of the land girls, exhibited this peculiarity by wearing her pretty hair in a severe bun, black stockings, lace-up boots and long, sober skirts. Her pale skin was scrubbed and, unlike the other girls’, devoid of make-up. Initially anxious to say grace before she ate her food and often shocked by the boldness of the group of young women with whom she was now forced to live and work, there had been those, Rose amongst them, who had found Hester unacceptably odd. Then, under the gentle and sometimes less than gentle, influences of hostel life, Rose Crocker and Alice Todd had watched her emerge, like a butterfly from a chrysalis, to flutter out into the world, be fallen in love with by Private Reuben Westerfeldt from North Dakota and defy her parents by marrying him. Rose too, had disapproved of the marriage but for her own reasons. She had seen her
Dave, briefly home on leave from the army catering corps, fall instantly in love with Hester and had noted her initial response to him with approval. But then she had broken Dave’s heart by choosing Reuben. It had been a long time after Reuben’s death on Omaha Beach before Hester and Dave recovered from the complications of that early mismatching, and an even longer time before Rose forgave Hester for hurting her boy.

The state of Jonas Tucker’s cottage, his bleakly bizarre funeral and the strange demeanour of his widow had the effect of giving Rose a closer understanding of what her daughter-in-law’s upbringing had been and had made her slightly ashamed of her initial hostility to this strangely raised girl. As a result of this, and in her own, reticent and grudging way, Rose had become increasingly defensive of Hester and appreciative of her excellence as mother of her granddaughter – a child who was not, in fact, her granddaughter at all, Thurza’s grandmother being a woman in North Dakota who, as the result of a German bullet, had been deprived of son, daughter-in-law and grandchild.

On the day of Giorgio’s departure, when Alice had driven him and Evie to Ledburton Halt, Rose had gone with them. She sat in the passenger seat, glancing occasionally, via the driving mirror, at the couple who sat silently, side by side and hand in hand in the back of the car. Alice tried a few cheerful words about how hard her husband was working to arrange it so that the ship on which Evie would be travelling to New Zealand, would be the one Giorgio would board at Naples and what a grand reunion that would be, with the whole
of the rest of the exciting voyage spent on board together. She listed the ports that Christopher and Georgina’s boat had called at and how much they had enjoyed Port Said and Aden and Colombo and how magnificent Sydney harbour was – but there was little response from the back seat.

The train was late and they stood on the windswept platform for long enough for Evie to start worrying about what would happen if Giorgio missed his connection and failed to reach Southampton before the sailing of the troop-carrier, which was transporting five hundred Italian POWs back to their homeland.

Then Giorgio was aboard the train, leaning out through the window and Evie was smiling into his eyes. Their adventure had begun and they would live happily ever after. They waved until the track curved, taking Giorgio’s carriage out of sight.

Evie maintained her mood of optimism as she was driven back to the village.

‘I’m not going to mope!’ she told herself, Alice and Rose. ‘I shall write everyday to Giorgio in his own language! Yes! He bought me a book called
Come Parli L’italiano
. It’s got all the words and the grammar and there are exercises you can do. “
Quanto costa la torta?
” means “how much is that cake?”’ Evie spoke the words with an authority and inflection that exactly reproduced Giorgio’s.