Evie (16 page)

‘I wouldn’t say that, Hes. Father was pretty rough on you when you disobeyed him and married that Reuben and had to come back ’ere, on your own and pregnant. Jeez, that couldn’t of bin much fun!’

‘No, it weren’t,’ Hester agreed. ‘But I was carryin’ Thurza be then. And in a sort of way I had Dave, too … But after you got out the army it were back ’ere for you, with Father gettin’ sicker by the day and Mother … Well, Mother …’ As she spoke Zeke turned the steering wheel, pulling the van off the road and up the uneven track towards the Tucker cottage.

The widow was sitting on a wooden bench beside the
front door. She had obviously been there for some time because the mist had beaded her unkempt hair and the nap of the tweed coat that hung shapelessly from her crouched shoulders. She watched as her daughter climbed out of the van, and with Thurza on her hip, approached, stooped and kissed her cold cheek. With her free hand, Hester took her mother’s elbow and drew her to her feet.

‘Come on, Mother. Let’s get you inside.’

‘Zeke found the money!’ she told Hester.

‘Yes, Mother. Come inside. Come on now …’

‘’Twas your father’s!’ her mother went on, more or less unheeded. ‘’Twas all earned and saved, mind! Every penny he could put aside over a lifetime of toiling and strivin’. He promised the Lord Jesus, see?’

‘Yes, Mother. Come on. Out of the rain …’

Hester led their mother into the kitchen, and while Zeke fed the fire in the range, took off her damp coat, towelled and then brushed the tangled hair.

‘’E promised to build a new chapel to the glory of God, see! On the headland, ’twas gonna be. Overlookin’ the bay! Promised the Lord, he did.’

‘Yes, Mother … Hold still while I dry your ’air.’

Hester hardly took in her mother’s words. The widow’s cold, confused condition concerned her and her attention was on the immediate task of getting her warm and dry.

‘A granite chapel for the Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost, it was to be! Amen, Hester, amen!’

‘Yes, Mother. Your shoes are wet. Where’s your slippers to?’

‘But ’e failed, see. ’E got sick and even though it weren’t
’is fault, the Lord punished ’im for failin’ ’im! Punished, my Jonas were – punished for getting sick! And who let ’im get sick, eh? That’s what I wants to know!’

‘Yes, Mother … Now the other foot. That’s it …’ Before long, soothed by the warmth and the ministrations of her children, the widow quietened and her eyelids drooped. Thurza too, was half asleep. Hester laid her in the little crib she had used when she had stayed, briefly, at the time of Jonas Tucker’s death. Leaving the door ajar, the siblings went quietly up the stairs and into their parents’ bedroom.

Here there was some evidence of Zeke’s progress. All signs of the small fire caused by the broken paraffin lamp were gone and a new square of carpet replaced the threadbare, scorched one. The bed was stripped and the blankets folded neatly on the stained ticking-covered mattress. The smell of sickness still hung in the stale air. But it was an open suitcase and what it contained that was the focus of attention for the brother and sister as they entered the room.

Neither Zeke nor Hester had been aware of the existence of the suitcase. In fact, Jonas had bought it in Bideford market specifically for the purpose for which it had been used for over twenty years. After the death, Zeke had pulled it out from under the bed and found it locked. On his father’s watch chain there had always been a key. Neither Zeke nor Hester had ever known what it was for, nor had either of them dared to ask. Now they knew. Zeke had tried the key in the lock on the suitcase. Now it stood open, the familiar key protruding from the unfamiliar lock. Zeke watched his sister react to the sight of its contents. After a moment, her voice
barely above a whisper, she asked him if he had counted it.

‘On’y them notes there,’ he told her, pointing to a small, string-tied bundle. ‘And there be more’n two ’undred pounds there! And look ’ow many bundles like that there be! Must be ’undreds, Hes! Where’d ’e get it? Where could our father ’ave got ’old of money like that?’ Hester was on her knees, staring into the suitcase.

‘You say Mother knew it was there?’ she asked. Zeke nodded.

‘When I first found ’un, she were in the kitchen and I ran down and asked her. She must of expected it, sooner or later. She must of known I’d find it … And what I’d ask her.’

‘And what did she say?’

‘She said it was Father’s! That he’d been savin’ it, all ’is life, for to build his chapel!’

‘His chapel?’

‘That’s what Mother said. ’Twas to be to the glory of the Lord God. On the headland. You knows the place, Hes, where our land runs up to the cliff edge. And look,’ Zeke reached under the bundles of notes and lifted from the suitcase scrolls of paper on which were sketched various ground plans and elevations of a small, Gothic-style building, its single bell housed in a modest cupola. ‘See the dates on ’em drawin’s, Hes? This ’un says 1925! And this ’un’s 1930! We was barely born be then! All that time we was growin’ up he were hoardin’ this money!’

‘And our mother was goin’ short on food and clothes for all of us! ’Ow many times did you go to school with cardboard in the soles of your boots, Zeke? And I were dressed so odd
that me classmates poked fun at me in me cut-down this and me darned that!’

‘And us froze to the bone all winter ’cos he wouldn’t buy no coal for the fire,’ Zeke said, bitterly.

‘And you with your chest,’ his sister added. ‘Coughed and wheezed yourself ’alf to death, you did!’

‘And this place! Fallin’ down round us it be, and leakin’! And where was the money for repairs? And for our dinner? And for seed and livestock for the holding? And for fodder for the few beasts we did ’ave, eh? And corn for to keep the ’ens layin’, and proper fencin’ for to keep the foxes off ’em? In that suitcase, Hes! That’s where!’

‘Just lyin’ there. Locked up.’ Hester’s voice was flat and cold. ‘Under their bed, while year after year us went without!’

For a long while the two of them sat, side by side on the iron bedstead, contemplating the enormity of their parents’ treatment of them. Then they heard a tremulous voice from the kitchen.

‘Ezekiel?’ it whimpered, ‘Hester? Where you be to?’

Alice, returning from another brief stint of work in London, this time designing the kitchens of a refurbished West End hotel, the details of which were still on the drawing board, relaxed in her first-class seat on the Great Western Railway train as it lumbered down the line towards Penzance, its destination. She felt, as she always felt on these occasions, a pleasing sense of fulfilment. Her design work had developed directly from the skilful, and at the time slightly desperate, way in which she had reorganised the hostel kitchen, making it possible for Rose and herself to deal as efficiently as possible with the task of cooking, within the limits of wartime food shortages, for the ten hungry land girls in her charge. This had resulted in requests for her to apply what soon became known as her ‘expertise’ to several other local hostels, a nursing home near Tiverton and an extension to the kitchen of a nearby Fleet Air Arm base. The idea of expanding this talent into a post-war career had been encouraged by Ruth, an old
school friend of Alice’s, whose work brought her into contact with leading firms of London-based architects, one of whom had become the first to hire her.

Alice had been a contented, unambitious housewife until the outbreak of war gradually destroyed her world, much as it changed the lives of many of her contemporaries. First her home was wrecked by bomb damage. The rented rooms in Exeter to which her husband evacuated her proved to have been a bad choice, since that city was soon to be pointlessly and spitefully blitzed. James had never found the ‘safer place’ he was searching for, where Alice and Edward John could live until the war was over. Instead he ended his twelve-year marriage and asked Alice to divorce him so that he would be free to marry his already pregnant girlfriend, adding that he had very little money for any of them.

Alice was a modest woman. She took little personal credit for what she had achieved since the February day in 1943, when she had first entered a damp, cold building known as Lower Post Stone farmhouse. Sometimes, on the return journey from her London work, she let her mind wander over the past years and was more than satisfied with the place to which they had delivered her. Edward John was happily working his way through his adolescence, and the feelings of admiration and deep affection she felt for Roger were a source of complete happiness to her. She had Georgina for a daughter-in-law, Christopher as a stepson and the people of the Post Stone valley seemed to her almost to be part of an extended family. She relaxed as the train rocked onwards and the twilight reduced the countryside that slid past the
window to a familiar blur of trees and distant hills. Roger would meet her at Ledburton Halt. Eileen would have prepared a casserole which would be waiting in the oven. Edward John would be home for the weekend tomorrow and, soon, Evie Clark would be safely on her way to a new life with her Giorgio. Alice dozed, waking an hour later to find the train approaching Taunton.

Later, when they had eaten their meal and caught up with one another’s news, Roger expanded on his. With wartime conditions behind him he was faced with the significant changes it had wrought on the farming industry. Many discharged servicemen had picked up trades and developed skills and ambitions which, before the wartime experience, would not have seemed accessible to them. Like many of Alice’s girls, the courses of their lives had been altered. It was as well, for Roger, that half his pre-war workforce, for one reason or another, failed to return to the Post Stone farms. Had they done so, he, with his increasing use of mechanisation, would not have had work for them. Of those that did return two had, in the meantime, grown from boys into men. Men with wives and, as in Ferdie Vallance’s case, children. What was needed now was better accommodation for them. Roger had considered converting the lower farmhouse into two cottages but Alice had sensed in him an underlying lack of enthusiasm for this plan.

‘You’re hoping Christo and Georgie will come home and settle there, aren’t you?’ she asked him, gently. ‘Me too. But we shouldn’t count on it, should we?’ Roger had shaken his head.

‘No. But while I’m not “counting on it”, as you put it, it seems foolish to spend money on turning the farmhouse
into two dwellings when it may well be required as one. So, in view of this, I’ve been investigating the cost of converting the barn. We haven’t used it since the fire, and even before that it was basically surplus to our requirements now that the dairy side of things is serviced by the new milking sheds up here at the higher farm. Two extra labourers’ cottages would, I believe, be a good investment.’

The barn fire, unnerving and spectacular as it had been, was the result of a workman having carelessly failed to properly extinguish some smouldering wood shavings, putting at risk several ponies which were temporarily stabled there and had been led to safety by Edward John and his stepfather. The blaze, which was swiftly extinguished, had been confined to a loft which was reached by two wall-mounted ladders, one at each end of the building and, midway along its length, by a flight of stone steps. At the time of the fire the loft was housing a quantity of dried hay which had produced huge amounts of choking smoke but inflicted very little damage on the heavy planks of the wooden floor or the beams and rafters above them. Although the timbers were, in one or two places, smoke-blackened and slightly scorched, they were basically sound. It was at the far end of the loft, where a wide opening, used for hauling up bales of hay and nets of mangels, gave access to it, that the fire damage was most evident. This aperture had acted as a chimney, through which the flames and smoke had been drawn. As a result, its timber lintel, framing and sill, were charred and crumbling. An ancient iron ladder which ran down the outside of the building was, in consequence, no longer solidly attached to
the wall and was shunned by the farm workers who, since and because of the fire, considered it unsafe.

‘Tread carefully,’ Roger advised his wife when, on the following morning she went with him into the Lower Post Stone barn, through its shadowy interior, up the stone steps and into the loft. ‘Don’t touch anything,’ he warned her. ‘It’s still sooty up here.’

At the undamaged end of the barn, an area of the slated roof had at some time been glazed. Through the cobwebby panes the winter sun spilt in, illuminating a small section of the floorboards.

Before Alice’s arrival at the farm, a partition had been erected, enclosing this area of the loft, which had been given over to Andreis Van de Loos, a Dutch refugee to whom Roger had offered shelter at the start of the war. Alice looked around the deserted space.

The bedstead on which Andreis had slept was gone, as was the table, always strewn with tubes of oil paint, palettes daubed with colour, jars of brushes and drifts of scrap paper on which he experimented, in charcoal, with the composition of the sprawling painting which was the only way he knew of expressing the torment he felt at the horrors the German occupation was inflicting on his native Holland.

‘I came up a few times when Andreis was living here,’ Alice said quietly. ‘He made hundreds of sketches of Annie for his painting.’

‘She being the classic Jewess, of course,’ Roger added, quietly.

‘Yes,’ Alice said. ‘She was exquisite, wasn’t she.’

‘Wonderful eyes,’ Roger mused.

‘I became concerned that she was spending a lot of time alone up here with him,’ Alice said. ‘I need not have been.’

They stood looking at the empty space on the end wall where, on a huge wooden panel, Andreis’s painting had been completed in the summer of 1943.

‘Poor fellow.’ Roger said. ‘Wish I could have done more for him.’

‘But you were wonderful to him, darling. You helped get him out of Amsterdam and you set him up here, with somewhere to work. We fed him and he was—’

‘He was still unhappy enough to shoot himself,’ Roger cut in, flatly, feeling the same sense of failure he had experienced when Andreis, tormented by guilt caused by what he perceived as his desertion of his family and friends when the Germans overran Holland, found himself, even when he had completed his surreal and poignant painting, unable to return, fight and almost certainly die, in his homeland. One morning he had taken the gun he used to shoot rabbits into the lower orchard, held it to his chest, misjudged the direction of the bullet and bled to death, alone, under the cider apple trees. ‘He wanted, so much, to be brave enough to go and fight,’ Roger said, gently. ‘But the poor bastard simply didn’t have the guts.’

‘There are different sorts of guts, don’t you think?’ Alice said.

Andreis’s painting, thanks to Annie and later to Hector Conway, the arts graduate who was to become her husband, was now on permanent display in Amsterdam.

‘Two cottages it’s gonna be!’ Hester, flushed with ambition, told her husband as he wolfed his dinner that night. ‘With two bedrooms each and real, upstairs bathrooms with proper pull-and-let-go lavvies! None of your wash house and privvy out the back, like we got!’ Dave was reading the football results in the local paper. ‘Thing is, Dave,’ Hester continued, conspiratorially, ‘I want one! … Did you hear me, Dave?’ He gave her his attention at last. ‘I want us to ’ave one of them new cottages! You, me and our Thurza!’

‘Why?’ he asked, puzzled. ‘Us ’as already got a cottage!’

‘But the new ones’ll be heaps better nor this, Dave! If you was to ask Mr Bayliss, he’d let us ’ave one, wouldn’t he? ’Stead of lettin’ ’em out to strangers? Don’t you reckon?’

‘Well, he might, I s’pose,’ Dave said, lowering the newspaper. ‘But why would we want one?’ His eyes moved slowly round the small space in which his dinner had been prepared and where he had eaten it and now sat, still in his work clothes, sipping the first of his after-supper cups of tea.

A kitchen was a kitchen in Dave’s opinion and this one was his, just as it had been his parents’ in their day and their parents’ before them. And theirs before that, most likely. A privvy was a privvy, wasn’t it? Whether it be out in the backyard or not – and as long as you had a sink to wash your dishes in, an oven to cook your dinner in, a copper and a mangle in the scullery and a warm, dry bed at the top of your stairs, what more did you need? He pushed his empty cup across the surface of the kitchen table, towards the teapot. ‘This be known as Crocker’s Cottage, Hes,’ he told his wife. ‘Alus ’as bin. Alus will be,
s’far as I’m concerned!’ Hester, hands on hips, turned to face him. Dave avoided her eyes and poured his second cup of tea himself.

Evie sat on her bed in Rose Crocker’s spare bedroom. Spread out on the dressing table were all the documents necessary for her emigration. Her brand-new, unused passport had yet to be lodged with the New Zealand High Commission where it would be held until the terms of her two-year contract with the emigration department had been fulfilled. Her smallpox vaccination certificate, her education record, her birth certificate, a copy of the results of her medical examinations, confirmation of her competence in the Womens’ Land Army and her National Health Service registration card, together with character references from both Roger Bayliss, as her ex-employer and Alice Todd as her then hostel warden, were all arranged neatly and were being checked and rechecked on a daily basis as the date of her embarkation approached.

Even at this point, with no sightings or news of her husband, Evie was haunted by the thought that at any moment, he might appear. Several nightmare scenarios had already occurred to her and woken her, leaving her distressed and sweating, in the long autumn nights. These incidents became increasingly alarming so that, rather than sleep, she often sat for hours, shivering, at the bedroom window, staring out into the deserted village street. Did that shadow move? Was that the shape of a man? There? In the alley opposite? But he did not come. And as day succeeded day she urged herself to be calm. To think of Giorgio. To conjure his face and his sweet smile. And to sleep,
with Rose Crocker’s second-best blankets pulled up, over her head, excluding the innocent sounds of the sleeping village. The rattle of a loose latch, the distant whistle of the mail train as it rocked through Ledburton Halt, a night wind, whining round Rose Crocker’s chimney. She tried to focus her mind on the moment when the ship on which she was to travel would draw away from the quay, and the void between her and the grey silhouette of London became wide, then wider, then huge. Only then would the threat of Norman’s sudden appearance be over.

Hester tucked Thurza into her pushchair and wheeled her up the steep lane to the higher farm. She was experiencing, that morning, a difficult mixture of guilt and determination. Her history, harsh and strange as much of it had been, had left her, at this point, in a well-balanced state. Despite the gruesome details of her father’s death and the difficult moral issues raised by the discovery of his hoard of money, Hester’s life was more serene and secure than it had ever been. It might have been expected that she would relish that serenity and that security, but the same instinct for survival that had delivered her to this point had made her ambitious. What she had achieved was good and pleasing. But there was more. More for her. For Thurza and for Dave, although, being set in his ways, he was not aware of it. It was not simply because she loved him that she would not allow herself to push him into things, it was because she understood that pushing him would not achieve the result she intended. If she wanted to succeed she would have to be cleverer and more subtle than that. Initially she
would consult Roger Bayliss. As her husband’s boss and their landlord, he was, without doubt, the most powerful influence on their lives, and regarded by the valley people as master of his farms and the hundreds of acres that surrounded them. The walk up the steep lane took the edge off her tension, made her reduce her stride, breathe more deeply and think more calmly. By the time she reached the kitchen of the higher farm, put her head round the half-open door and called out to see if Eileen was about, she was her normal, smiling, bonny self.