Evie (21 page)

‘We played the New Zealand part of the plan pretty close to our chests and those who did know of it—’

‘Were not exactly sworn to secrecy, though, were they?’ Alice interrupted.

‘No,’ Roger admitted, ‘because, if you remember, we decided against that on the grounds that it would have drawn unwanted attention to the situation.’

‘Mmm. But, Rose, Roger. She’s a notorious gossip!’

‘True. But she’s also canny. Secrecy is part of Rose’s currency and she’ll use it effectively. She wants a happy outcome to this and her family kept well out of things. She’ll make sure those who know, don’t tell. Evie had no police record, therefore the only official evidence of her departure is held, in confidence, by the New Zealand authorities. The proceeds of her legacy will be deposited in the bank account which I helped her set up, using this address as hers. No. I really don’t believe there are any loose ends, my love, and I
think we can assume that we have seen the last of Norman Clark hereabouts.’

‘Let’s hope so,’ Alice sighed. ‘But he was in a very strange state when I encountered him. Quite deranged, in fact. I honestly think he would have killed me if he’d managed to drag me out of the car and I refused to tell him where Evie was hidden.’

The police filed Alice’s account of the assault. Norman Clark was still on their wanted list and would be charged when apprehended.

‘It’s almost Christmas,’ Alice realised, a few days later. Apart from her first Christmas in the valley, when a snow storm had cancelled the trains and marooned the girls in the lower farmhouse, Alice and Edward John had celebrated virtually alone. On that snowy occasion a contingent of GIs had arrived at the hostel with Christmas dinner cooked in the camp and a very good time had been had by all.

This year, Winnie and Gwennan, the last of the land girls still working on the Bayliss farm, were due to leave it on Christmas Eve and Rose Crocker had suggested a party in her tea shop as a farewell to them. She, Alice and Eileen were to provide cakes and Roger’s contribution would be beer, a bottle of gin and some soft drinks.

‘It’s funny, isn’t it …’ Winnie said, with her eyebrow tweezers poised, examining her reflection in the dressing table mirror she shared with Gwennan in their noisy digs above the public bar, ‘How Evie – little, mousie Evie, who
no one hardly even noticed, goes off to live happily-ever-after with her handsome Italian lover! Just like at the pictures! Things don’t come more romantic than that, do they!’

‘I don’t reckon being married to that Norman Clark was very romantic!’ Gwennan said. ‘Draggin’ her off by the scruff of her neck like he did. Disgraceful, it was!’

‘Yeah … But Evie, Gwennan! Our funny little Evie, eh?’

With her suitcases already half packed, Gwennan had begun to realise that she might miss the company of Winnie much as she now missed the rest of the land girls who had already left the Post Stone farms. When she had first arrived at the hostel she had regarded herself as superior to the other girls but, over the years, her association with them had changed her and softened her. From being scornful of it, she now enjoyed flicking through the pages of
Women’s Own
and was increasingly interested in vanishing creams, brands of shampoo and skirt lengths. Sensing that the girls had initially disliked her critical attitude, she had worsened the situation by being waspish and even spiteful. Only slowly had she responded to the atmosphere of warmth created by the relationships of one girl to another and their respect and even affection for their warden.

‘Not long now, Gwennan!’ Alice called to her one morning across the yard of the upper farm.

‘D’you know, Mrs Todd,’ Gwennan said, forgetting to use Alice’s new name, her Welsh accent as clipped and prim as ever, ‘I’d always thought I’d be pleased when the time came for me to leave here and go home to Wales. But
now I reckon I’ll miss it! It’s the company, see, I liked the company of the girls – once I got used to them, that is. To their bad behaviour and so on.’ Alice smiled. ‘And you, Mrs … um … Bayliss. Ever so nice to me you’ve been. I reckon you done a first-class job here, you know. A really first-class job!’

‘Well, thank you, Gwennan, it’s very kind of you to say so!’ They exchanged smiles, expressing more genuine warmth than they had felt for one another over all the months since the war had first thrown them together.

Edward John arrived home for the weekend eager for details of Evie’s departure and was then consumed with curiosity and concern regarding Norman Clark’s brief reappearance in the valley. He became frustrated on hearing of the police’s apparent lack of attention to the assault on his mother, despite her assurances that it was all over now and that no real harm had been done.

‘But that’s three people he’s attacked, Mum! You, Evie and Ferdie Vallance!’

‘Four,’ Roger corrected him. ‘Evie saw him hit Giorgio over the head with a piece of lead piping when he went to look for her in Coventry.’

‘I’d forgotten that,’ Edward John said. ‘Giorgio had to keep quiet about it because he’d broken his parole, poor fellow. So Norman Clark is still on the loose after injuring four people! And the police are doing nothing?’

‘They’re watching the railway stations and the main roads and all the local bobbies are on the lookout for him,’ Alice
told him. ‘But there have been no confirmed reports of any sighting since he left the Lucas farm on the morning we drove Evie to Tilbury.’

‘But he must be somewhere!’

‘We’re hoping we can assume he is finally convinced that Evie is not here,’ Roger said but Edward John was not prepared to let the subject rest.

‘So he’s allowed to roam free, is he? A violent criminal wandering about the countryside? It’s ridiculous! I’m going to find him!’ he announced vehemently. ‘I’m going to make a citizen’s arrest!’

‘No you’re not, darling,’ his mother said. ‘You are going to leave that task to the authorities. Your school breaks up soon and after that we’ll all have a thoroughly nice Christmas!’ Her boy smiled reluctantly.

There had been a time, when Roger Bayliss was becoming first attracted and then attached to Alice Todd, that he had begun to appreciate what a thoroughly nice child her son was. He tried and found it difficult to recall his own son’s personality at the ages of ten, eleven and twelve, which had been Edward John’s ages since he began spending his weekends and school holidays at the hostel. He remembered the boy being initially reserved and very slightly hostile to him, wary of his treatment of his mother when she, damaged by the failure of her marriage, had first taken on the daunting role of hostel warden, a position which, initially, had almost overwhelmed her. Roger’s son, at that age, had probably been more affected by his own mother’s recent death than his father had appreciated at the time.

Although Frances and Roger had been a fond couple, she
was never the robust, gentleman-farmer’s wife that he had needed and even before her early death, Roger, at barely thirty, and with his own parents dead and gone, was struggling not only with the management of the two farms but also with the responsibility of raising, virtually single-handed, his only child. He had found it impossible to talk to Christopher about their loss and this distance between them had continued through Christopher’s schooling and into his training and service in the RAF. Although Roger feared for his son’s life and was concerned that he should not experience the trauma he himself had suffered as a result of his own early experience of war, it had been Alice who, to a large extent, had eventually resolved the breach between father and son.

It was possibly the fact that he had no direct responsibility for Edward John that made Roger’s relationship with him an easier one than he had experienced with Christopher. In addition to this, Edward John’s instant and enduring interest in the farms, something which his own son, at that age, had not exhibited, appealed to Roger, who soon came to value the boy’s keen powers of observation. More than once he had averted disaster by spotting a sick beast, a breached hedgerow or a blocked drain before serious harm could be done.

It seemed likely that Edward John’s interest in the farms might, if Christopher declined it, provide Roger with an heir to his acres. But the boy’s headmaster spoke highly of his intelligence and both Roger and Alice understood that his ambitions were not yet formed and might lead him in other directions, possibly into medicine or the law.

Roger was unaware that Christopher had always assumed
that he would step up to the Post Stone farms when his father felt inclined to step down. Had the war not intervened, Christopher would have progressed from public school to Seale Hayne Agricultural College before joining his father on their land. His catastrophic breakdown, after three years in the RAF, had been followed by what he regarded as his banishment to the woodman’s cottage in the Bayliss forest. Here, after slowly recovering, both physically and emotionally, he had studied arboriculture, distanced himself from his father and the Post Stone farms and finally decided on a change of direction in his damaged life. Marrying Georgina and accepting the New Zealand contract had achieved this. Now, fully occupied by his marriage and his work, he was living in the present, optimistic about his future and happier than he had ever been.

‘Dear Pa,’ he had written, recently.

Edward John, pulling the hood of his duffel coat over his head, went out into the bitter cold of an east wind. As usual at midday on a Saturday, Dave was turning the two carthorses out into the paddock where they would crop the short grass and munch the remaining windfalls of the cider crop until their work began again on Monday. He saw Edward John approaching him, grinning broadly.

‘Success!’ Edward John had shouted, brandishing a clenched fist. For a moment Dave looked baffled. ‘This time next week Evie will be in Naples! With Giorgio! So we did it! Hooray for us, Dave!’ he finished, jubilantly.

Dave’s involvement in the whole sequence of events, from the discovery of Evie hiding in the hostel, through to her concealment in the byre on The Tops, to her departure from the Post Stone valley, had been replaced in his mind by more recent events of which Edward John was unaware.

‘Yeah,’ he said. ‘Mission accomplished alright.’

‘Could have gone horribly wrong,’ Edward John said, ‘him turning up here the other day!’

‘Yeah. Could of,’ Dave agreed, heavily.

‘Pretty odd, though,’ Edward John continued, ‘the way he took off like that, after he had a go at my poor mother.’

‘He went up Lucas’s place,’ Dave said, hoping this would conclude the exchange. But the boy fell into step with him as he walked the horses on, towards the paddock gate.

‘So I hear,’ he persisted and then paused. ‘We know he went there … But where did he go after that?’ Dave shook his head and fidgeted with the leading reins in his hand. The horses, impatient for freedom, tossed their heads.

‘Reckon he buggered off,’ Dave shrugged, unlatching the gate. ‘’Cos no one’s seen ’im since.’

‘You’d think he’d have gone on looking for Evie, though, wouldn’t you?’ Edward John said thoughtfully. ‘My mother says that when she saw him he was very worked up about things and absolutely determined to find her.’

‘Reckon ’e must of ’ad enough,’ Dave said, vaguely, slipping the bridles from the horses’ heavy heads. ‘Decided to give up on ’er, I shouldn’t wonder.’ He slapped Prince’s rounded rump, murmuring, ‘Go on, git on there.’ The horses needed no encouragement and pushed through the gate, ambling off, almost coltishly relishing their liberation.

As Dave eased his car up the bumpy track to the Tucker smallholding he slowed and sat, the engine idling, Hester beside him, and stared through his windscreen. Although structurally unchanged, a coat of whitewash had transformed the face of the cottage.

‘You am’t seen nothun yet!’ Zeke proudly told them, emerging from the newly painted front door and followed closely by Polly who led them into the parlour, which was also freshly painted and refurnished with a new sofa and two armchairs. ‘Polly’s folks give ’em us,’ Zeke told them.

‘And Zeke give me this,’ Polly beamed, extending her left hand and spreading her fingers to show off the small gold and garnet ring on her wedding finger.

‘And you still am’t seen nothun yet!’ Zeke insisted.

The accommodation inside the cottage had been improved by an ambitious extension that extended into what
had been the backyard. On ground level this formed a large farmhouse kitchen, a pantry, a scullery and a laundry which incorporated the old bathroom. Leading out of this was a space furnished for Jonas Tucker’s widow, whose mental illness had, the specialists assured her children, responded well to treatment and in which she now lived.

Zeke and Hester found their mother quiet and strangely detached, treating them and Thurza almost as strangers. But she was calm. The look of anxiety which had left her narrow, furrowed face, was now replaced by a bland indifference.

‘How are you today, Mother?’ Hester asked her, kneeling in front of her and taking her empty hands in hers. After a while the widow assured them that she was quite alright. She thanked Hester for asking and gently withdrew her hands from her daughter’s. They left her sitting quietly in her room and climbed the stairs to inspect the new bedroom and bathroom.

‘Us ’as used up almost all the money we found under the bed,’ Zeke quietly told his sister. ‘Most of the stone come from the outbuildin’s we knocked down and a bit from the old quarry. Polly’s dad and one of her brothers gave us a hand with the heavy stuff and Polly done most of the inside paintin’ ’erself.’

‘We’re gettin’ wed soon as it’s finished!’ Polly told them. ‘The banns is called and I’ve got me dress and everything!’ Hester had gazed wistfully at the white porcelain fittings in the gleaming bathroom.

‘Oh, Polly! It’s just like in the magazines!’

‘I know!’ Polly agreed, happily.

‘That’s what we could have, Dave!’ Hester sighed, as they drove home across the moor, where a light snowfall was settling on the highest ground. ‘A bathroom with an indoor pull-and-let-go and a big shiny bath tub! If only you’d ask Mr Bayliss to give us one of them new cottages ’e’s buildin’.’ Dave leant forward, his concentration focused on the narrow road, watching for the wandering sheep and moorland ponies that were likely to stray, suddenly, into his headlights.

Hester pressed on, opening the next stage in what she expected would be a serious and if necessary, lengthy discussion, with the word ‘and’. ‘
And
,’ she said. ‘And … I want to learn to drive our motor.’

‘Drive? You? What for?’ Dave asked, not unpleasantly but with a slight hint of amusement in his voice. ‘I drives the motor, Hes. What would you want to drive the motor for?’

‘So’s I can take Thurzie to school and that.’

‘But she won’t be goin’ to school for four years yet!’

‘Kindergarten! She could go to kindergarten, Dave. Lots of the little ones do, nowadays … And I could go visit your mum in the week when you’re at work. She’s allus on about how she don’t see enough of Thurzie an’ me. What d’you reckon, eh?’

Dave meticulously double-declutched as he changed into first gear and began the slow, steep descent into one of the valleys on the south side of the moor.

‘I dunno … I never thought of you drivin’, Hes. I can’t imagine it.’

‘Why not? Because I’m a woman? Mrs Bayliss drives and she’s a woman!’

‘Yeah … But you’m not so much a woman as all that, Hes, are you. I mean you’m more of a girl. My girl.’ She had to smile. They crossed the narrow bridge at the bottom of the valley and began the long climb up towards higher ground.

‘But the Princess Elizabeth drives,’ Hester continued, inspired by photographs she had seen in
Picture Post
. ‘She drove great army lorries for the war effort. I seen the pictures. And she’s a girl, in’t she? So. What d’you think Dave, eh?’

‘I dunno what I think, Hester. All this about new cottages and bathrooms and that. And now drivin’. Its just one bloomin’ thing after another with you lately.’ Hester leant towards him and stroked his firm thigh.

‘Yeah,’ she whispered, sympathetically. ‘But that’s life, i’n’t it Dave – one bloomin’ thing after another.’

‘Just like a picture postcard!’ the passengers exclaimed to one another, leaning on the rail of the SS
Orontes
as she altered course and the expanding vista of the Bay of Naples was slowly revealed to them.

The ship had rolled its way uncomfortably across the Mediterranean through wintery headwinds but today was still, the sea like blue silk under a cloudless sky. Evie lifted her face to the Italian sun which, even in mid December, felt pleasantly warm on her skin. The bay was alive with shipping, from small fishing craft to cargo boats, all moving at various speeds and in different directions, some heading out to sea, others homing in on the port itself where cranes, wharfs and warehouses were beginning to become discernible as the
Orontes
made her measured approach.

Across the bay Mount Vesuvius shimmered, lavender blue against the sky, its iconic shape recognised even by those who had never seen it before.

A stout, ageing man, immaculate in a white suit and a panama hat, who had boarded the ship in Tilbury, had this morning ventured down from the fist-class decks to mingle with the hoi polloi. Doffing his hat to Evie he smiled, his white teeth contrasting strongly with the neatly waxed moustache. ‘
Vedi Napoli e poi muori
!’ he said. Evie looked blank, so he tried again in excellent English with an Italian accent. ‘See Napoli and die! Mm? You have heard these words?’

‘Yes,’ Evie told him.

‘And you understand what they means? Mm?’ Evie smiled vaguely. ‘No? Well then I shall tell you. Some people attribute the phrase to the Bourbons. Mm? Others say it came from the great Goethe himself. But …’ he shrugged, ‘who knows! To those of us who love this place it has an altogether simpler meaning. You wish to hear that?’ Evie nodded. ‘Napoli is most beautiful, as you see.’ He waved his arms to encompass the panorama before them. ‘So beautiful, in fact, that once you have seen it, your pleasure in life is complete!
Capice?
Ah! I see that you understand!
Arrivederci
, my dear young lady …
Arrivederci
!’ He lifted his hat again, gave a little bow and bounced on his tiny feet in their highly polished shoes. Then he was gone, swallowed up in the crowd of passengers who were massing along the rail, excited by the prospect of setting foot in a foreign country. Gibraltar, their first port of call, being a British colony, hadn’t quite qualified as ‘foreign’.

Two tugboats had the
Orontes
now and were edging her
slowly closer to the wharf, which was already alive with taxis, cars and lorries bringing the provisions which would be loaded aboard during the few hours the ship would remain alongside.

Evie scanned the hundreds of upturned faces. How would she identify Giorgio in such a crowd? How would he distinguish her from the dozens of passengers jostling along the rail above him?

Giorgio squinted up into the low morning sun, the pink ship towering over him as it edged closer to the dockside.

Was that her, in a hat? Or there, with a scarf tied under her chin? Was she somewhere amidships? Towards the bow? Or way back on the stern deck? Was she there at all? Or had she not been brave enough or sufficiently in love with him to leave her native country?

Her eyes raked the crowd below her and with every passing second her anxiety increased. Why wasn’t he there? Had the ship arrived too early or too late? Had he been persuaded by his family not to leave them? Had he met some local girl who had loved him all her life and was now claiming him? What would she do if he wasn’t there? Leave the ship and search for him? Or sail on to New Zealand alone? One of the women with whom she shared a cabin, and to whom she had confided her situation, pushed through the crowd of passengers and joined her at the rail.

‘Spotted your fella yet?’ she asked, and at that moment one of the faces on the wharf became Giorgio’s face. He had already seen Evie and was waving both his arms to attract her attention. Beside him was his brother, Salvo, with one
of his children on his shoulders and the other in the arms of his wife.

‘Yes!’ Evie said, tears blurring her eyes. ‘Yes, he’s there! You see? You see?’ She stood, blowing kisses with both hands while the mooring lines were attached, the gangways lowered and the passengers began to spill down them onto the quay. Then, Evie’s arms were round Giorgio’s neck, his lips were on hers and he had lifted her feet from the ground, and while Salvo and his family cheered, swung her round and round. ‘Ah!
Bravo
, Giorgio!
Bravo
, Eva!’

It was raining in the Post Stone valley. Not a soft, mild, westerly drizzle but steady, cold and from the north-east. Edward John had saddled up Tosca, borrowed his stepfather’s full-length, waterproof hunting coat, found a wide-brimmed felt hat in the tackle room and was riding down, through the fields, to Lower Post Stone. But he was not Edward John Todd. He was Randolph Scott in
The Desperadoes,
Gary Cooper in
The Westerner
. Or possibly Henry Fonda or Dana Andrews in
The Ox-bow Incident
. Tempted to say ‘Howdee, pardner’ when he encountered Ferdie Vallance in the yard of the lower farm, he was glad he hadn’t when Ferdie asked him why he was dressed up like a scarecrow.

Edward John, being an only child until, aged nine, he had been forced to share his mother with ten, almost fully grown young women, had learnt to amuse himself, using his well-stimulated imagination to provide him with the scenarios of adventures, plots, plans and theories which made him independent of other children. Although he
was sociable enough and mixed well with his peers, he was undaunted when left to his own devices.

While he was satisfied by the news that Evie was safely aboard the ship which would, any day now, unite her with Giorgio, he had found himself repeatedly drawn to the mystery of Norman Clark’s disappearance.

On the first and second occasions of Clark’s attempts to repossess his wife, his departures from the valley had been witnessed. The first, by Roger Bayliss himself, who had put the unhappy couple on a train at Ledburton Halt and the second, after Clark’s assault on Ferdie Vallance, by the stationmaster who had seen him board a train travelling north. But any evidence of his third departure ended abruptly, when he had been ordered off Edwin Lucas’s land and had slouched, despondently away, into the rainy landscape. Alice Todd’s description of his state of mind suggested to Edward John that the man might have been sufficiently deranged to be suicidal. But no body had been discovered swinging from a tree, floating face down in the river Exe or mutilated on a railway line.

Edward John slid from Tosca’s saddle and tethered her to a hitching post in the yard of the lower farm. Timber, for the conversion of the barn into two cottages, had already been delivered and stacked out of the weather. Having inspected this he made his way round to the rear of the barn where Dave Crocker and Ferdie Vallance were demolishing a redundant pigpen.

‘Any news of young Evie?’ Ferdie wanted to know. Edward John confirmed that the ship was due in Naples any day
now but that it would be some time before the couple were reunited.

‘That’s Egypt, innit?’ Dave asked. ‘All camels and that!’

‘Yes,’ Edward John said, vaguely. ‘All camels and that.’ He was squinting up at the damaged sill of the aperture in the end wall of the barn, his eye caught by the marks where the iron nails and bolts that had attached the ladder had pulled away from the rotten wood and further down the wall, from the crumbling mortar.

‘It’s hard to see how a gale could have caused that,’ he said. Dave and Ferdie exchanged glances. ‘It looks to me as if someone, who didn’t know about the fire damage, had tried to use the ladder.’ Ferdie, loading a barrow with stones from the pigpen, took its weight and trundled out of sight. Edward John stood, waiting for Dave to answer him.

‘Could of,’ Dave said, shrugging. ‘Ferdie and I was working round t’other side of the barn that day. Loadin’ mangels, we was. Like I told Mr Bayliss, the next mornin’ us found the ladder down on the ground.’ This partially accurate account of things so nearly matched the truth that Dave almost believed it himself. Edward John pulled a face which implied his scepticism. Ferdie rejoined them and began loading the empty barrow.

‘But what sort of gale blows an iron ladder off a wall?’ Edward John persisted.

‘Reckon the rain ’ad softened the charred sill and the ladder worked loose,’ Dave said firmly. Edward John nodded.

‘And what do you reckon, Ferdie?’ he asked. Ferdie, taken aback and off guard, mumbled something Edward John couldn’t hear. ‘What?’ he persisted.

‘I reckon that those who asks no questions gets told no lies!’ Ferdie repeated. Then he stood, head lowered, fixing Edward John with a harsh, defensive stare, his hands flexing and unflexing on the shaft of the pickaxe he was using to break up the stones. Then he dropped his eyes, swung the pick and dislodged a hefty piece of slate. Edward John glanced at Dave who was smiling indulgently.

‘Reckon our Ferdie got out of his bed on the wrong side this mornin!’ he said, his grin so broad that Edward John found himself smiling too. Then both the men bent their backs over the pile of masonry, heaving the blocks onto the barrow. Edward John watched them for a few moments and then left them. When he was out of their sight, Dave straightened and turned furiously on Ferdie.