Evie (9 page)

‘So here you are,’ he said, trying to lighten the mood. ‘Miss Ferry Pilot 1944! ’Nother beer?’ Georgina shook her head.

‘Can’t,’ she said. ‘Got an early flight. A Mosquito to Brize Norton.’

Fitzsimmonds had walked her back to her quarters, putting an arm round her when she shivered in the easterly wind. At the door of the hut which housed the female pilots he kissed her, finding her mouth warmer and more responsive than he had dared hope.

The relationship had progressed very slowly, due not to any reluctance on either side but to the pressure of work under which the ATA operated. Fitzsimmonds’ skills as a manipulator of women were considerable. But he realised that the conquest of Georgina required careful thought. Anything flashy, shallow or hasty would be immediately perceived as precisely that. While he was considering his options it was she who took the initiative, making it clear that what she wanted was not the one night in a cheap hotel with the noise of planes landing and taking off from a nearby airstrip, which was all that seemed available to them, but a week of leave, together, at a borrowed cottage near Porlock Weir.

Everything had been arranged and then, forty-eight hours before their seven precious days were due to begin, Fitzsimmonds received a telegram.

‘Can’t make it Fitzie. Stop. Sorry. Stop. Will explain one day. Stop. It’s to do with Dresden. Stop. Chris is right. Stop. Am resigning ATA commission. Stop. Love Georgina. Stop.’

The reunion in Wellington was to be a brief one. Fitzsimmonds was flying out on the following morning. He was unable to give Georgina the job she was hoping for but it was agreed that if a vacancy occurred the company would consider her formal application.

He took her to lunch. They found a Greek taverna close to the quay, sat at a rickety table under a cloudless sky, ate dolmades, drank ouzo and reminisced about the war.

‘Great flying day,’ Fitzie said, squinting into the bright sky. Then he was on his feet, throwing some notes onto the table, taking her by the arm and hailing a cab.

They took off over the city and were soon clear of the surrounding suburbia. Fitzsimmonds banked to the north and followed the coastline. Georgina was as astonished and as delighted as he had intended her to be.

‘Okay?’ he asked her.

‘Beyond okay!’ she laughed. ‘Way beyond!’

‘You take her,’ he said, hauling himself out of the pilot’s seat as she slid into it. He watched her find her way round the unfamiliar controls and felt the little craft respond and steady in her skilled hands. For a long time neither spoke. For Georgina the experience lifted her mood, releasing her
from the feelings that had been depressing her since she and Christopher had arrived in Wellington. The physical sensation of flying again, of doing something she was good at and being valued for it, washed, disarmingly over her. She became increasingly aware of Fitzsimmonds beside her, the unconsummated familiarity of him came disconcertingly back to her. The warm arm against hers. His jawline. The way his hair grew. The remembered way he lit two cigarettes and passed one to her. All the elements of the strong attraction they had once felt for one another began to exert their various influences over both of them as the small plane slipped smoothly on, through the blue afternoon. When he leant across and kissed her she responded.

Because his hotel served ‘the best fillet steak in Wellington’ they ate there, on a roof terrace onto which his suite opened. Looking back on that day and the night which followed, Georgina realised she had been intoxicated. Not with wine, although that would have played its part, but by Fitzie himself. By the way he regarded her, amused her, appreciated her, studied her and made her feel significant. When, eventually, he led her to bed he turned her to face him as though seeking affirmation that her feelings, regarding this turn of events, matched his.

‘Unfinished business, Georgie,’ he said with a small inflection that didn’t quite turn the words into a question but made it open to that interpretation.

As they parted next morning, he into the hotel car that was to take him to the airport and she into the cab he had called for her, they both knew that it was over. That the coincidence which had reunited them was unlikely to recur by chance
and that neither of them would deliberately seek it.

‘As unfinished business goes,’ he had said, smiling sweetly, ‘that was the very best!’

‘Beyond the very best,’ Georgina had told him.

As he reached the car he turned, smiling and executed an exaggerated RAF salute to which Georgina responded in kind.

There were two letters in her pigeonhole when she arrived back at the beige apartment. One was a thick blue airmail envelope, addressed in Alice’s handwriting to Mrs Christopher Bayliss. The other was from Christopher and postmarked Dunedin. This, Georgina feared, was going to give her the news that his return to Wellington had been delayed, since he would have been unlikely to write, had he been arriving, as planned, next day. Because of this Georgina decided to read Alice’s letter first and she was halfway through a detailed account of events, exclusively relating to the ongoing complications involving Evie and Giorgio, when footsteps approached the apartment door and Christopher burst through it. She gaped at him, speechless with surprise.

Chris dumped his overnight bag on the floor, crossed the room to her, pulled her to her feet and into his arms. Nuzzling her ear, he began to pour out apologies for the way they had parted two weeks earlier.

‘I was a bastard, Georgie, an absolute bastard. I just wasn’t thinking about what it’s been like for you, stuck here, on your tod with nothing to do and no one to do it with!’ he searched her face which expressed a mix of shock, surprise and, although Christopher was unaware of it, or of its cause, guilt. ‘Anyway, anyway, anyway,’ he murmured happily,
‘everything is alright now! We’ve got our posting! No more beige! From now on we’ll be together! You’ve read the letter, of course, so you know …’ His letter lay unopened on the table. He picked it up, stared at it and then at her. The letter had arrived on the previous day but lain, since then, in the pigeonhole from which, only half an hour before, she had collected it together with today’s mail.

‘I only just this minute got it,’ she said, carefully not lying. ‘Yours and this one from Alice!’

‘Don’t read it now,’ he said, taking his letter, unopened, from her hand. ‘I’ll tell you what it says. Come on! Let’s go out and celebrate!’ With their arms around one another they dawdled through the streets. He gave her his news and the details of his posting. They were to be based on a softwood project near Milford Sound on the South Island. Their house, a wooden bungalow, overlooked a beach. There were horses, a sailing dinghy they could borrow and skiing on the Southern Alps. There was a lively community of farming and forestry people, many of whom he had already met. The posting would be his for at least twelve months.

Christopher led her to the same small Greek restaurant where she and Fitzsimmonds had eaten on the previous day. If the waiter recognised her he was too discreet to give any sign of it.

It seemed unfair to Edward John that by separating their birthdays by three years and making Pamela the older of the two of them, fate had played a cruel and fatal trick on him, placing her, for ever, just beyond his reach. He had depressing visions of Pamela and Mr Seale Hayne walking hand in hand into adulthood and then, arm in arm down the aisle of the village church or possibly Exeter Cathedral, moving side by side into the blissful future which should have been his, while he rode, alone and inconsolable, about the Post Stone valley. ‘Why?’ people would ask, when by middle age, Edward John remained a solitary bachelor. ‘Why don’t ’e wed?’ ‘’Tis ’cos ’is heart were broke when he were a young lad,’ they would reply.

It was autumn now and the days were shorter. Edward John had left the higher farm after lunch, saddled Tosca and ridden up through the rising ground onto the eastern
extremity of The Tops. Here the land levelled and formed a plateau, perfect grazing for the Bayliss sheep which ranged for miles, cropping the wiry, resilient grass. On the western side the steep lane, which climbed from the higher farm, ended in a gate. Near it stood the byre used in the lambing season and well stocked at this time of year with straw bedding ready for the ewes and their offspring.

Precisely when the area first got its name no one knew. The older inhabitants of the valley declared that their grandparents had always referred to it as The Tops and that was good enough for them. Over the generations the name had also proved good enough for many land sale documents and for various leases and legacies.

Reaching level ground, Edward John had encouraged Tosca into a canter and then a full gallop. He avoided the burrows of the rabbit warren on his far right and brought the mare round in a wide curve, eventually slowing her to a canter, then a trot, as he approached the byre.

The light was fading. He would need to let Tosca have her head in the lane so that she could safely pick her way down the stony decline. He reined her in and sat for a moment watching the valley below him dissolve into one huge, soft, familiar shadow. Suddenly Tosca’s head swung in the direction of the byre. Her ears were pricked, her nostrils flared, her attention fixed on the dark shape of the old building. It was then that Edward John caught the unmistakable redolence of chicken cooking.

He dismounted, slipped the reins over the gatepost and warily approached the byre. On its southern side there was
a wide opening, where once a pair of stout doors had hung. Through the opening Edward John became aware of the steady glow of a dim light.

Since the end of the war the number of vagrants discovered living rough in the countryside had grown significantly. Many were regular tramps and relatively guiltless. For them the nomadic existence was a chosen lifestyle. Others were demobbed soldiers; for them, five years in the armed services had resulted in an aimless detachment from civilian life and in some cases from family relationships which had not survived the war. This situation was thought to be the cause of a number of incidents involving violence and vandalism in the Ledburton neighbourhood. There had been brawls in local pubs. Gates and sheds had been demolished and the timber used to fuel campfires. Because of this Edward John’s approach to the byre was cautious.

Evie and Giorgio were sitting, side by side on a makeshift bench, balancing bowls of stewed chicken on their knees. He was wearing an ex-army greatcoat and she the Land Army overcoat she had taken from a hook in Rose Crocker’s cottage. His beard was thick and dark, her pale hair, dull and tangled. Even in that low light, her skin looked smudged and her eyes hollow. The fire on which they had cooked their meal was no more now than a scatter of glowing ashes. The flame in a rusted oil lamp was turned low.

For a long moment the three of them stared at one another and the only sound was the wind moving round the old building.

‘Don’t tell!’ Evie whispered at last. ‘Oh, please, Edward
John, don’t tell.’ She began gathering up the tin plates and enamel mugs. ‘We’ll be gone by mornin’, honest. You won’t hardly know we was ever ’ere!’

‘But where will you go?’ Edward John wanted to know and Giorgio raised his hands in a gesture of defeat and rolled his great, dark eyes.

‘Not know,’ he sighed. ‘We have nowhere. No one. But we go. We go.’

‘No!’ Edward John insisted ‘You mustn’t go!’ He spoke urgently, keeping his voice low, as though this might prevent their discovery. ‘I won’t tell a soul you’re here, I swear on my life! As long as you promise not to go! Do you promise? Do you?’ They stared at him and then nodded. ‘How long have you been here?’ Edward John asked and then, seating himself on an upturned bucket, slowly drew their story from them.

On the occasion when they had been allowed to meet for a precious half-hour in Giorgio’s cottage in the Lucas farmyard, with Roger, Alice and Edwin Lucas keeping vigil in the drizzling rain, Evie and Giorgio had wasted no time in making their plan.

Evie was already familiar with the lambing byre on The Tops and she gave Giorgio directions on how to find it. At the first sign of Norman’s reappearance in the valley they would independently make their way there. Giorgio had subsequently made several furtive trips to the byre, taking with him old blankets, cooking pots, a frying pan, tins of beans, matches, candles and an oil lamp. He discovered the piles of straw that were fresh and dry and behind the byre, a brimming cattle trough, fed by rainwater from the slate roof.

On the day that Alice had arrived at Rose’s tea shop with the news that Norman was at Lower Post Stone, Evie used Rose’s brief absence – ‘just popping out for some shin of beef ’ she had said – to grab a few last-minute things, including half a dozen of Rose’s pasties, a Land Army top coat and a pair of wellington boots that she found in Rose’s hallway. Then, leaving the little building through its backyard, she struck uphill towards The Tops to find Giorgio, who had heeded Edwin Lucas’s warning and made his own way to the byre, already waiting there for her.

The high ground on which the old building stood made it invisible from the valley below it and from either of the Post Stone farmhouses. There was always enough wind on The Tops to disperse any telltale smoke from Evie and Giorgio’s low fire.

That first night and most of the following day they did little more than relish the fact that they were, at last, together. By the second day their supply of food was gone. Cautiously, Giorgio made his way downhill towards the higher farm and into some tangled scrub where he knew that Ferdie Vallance set his rabbit traps. He heard a commotion amongst the farm hens ranging in the nearby cider orchard and saw a dog fox approaching him with a dying hen in its jaws. Moving forward he found another two birds, one dead and the other maimed, amongst a scatter of gory feathers. These, together with some mangels that had fallen off a cart and lay in a ditch, mouldering, fed the pair of them for two more days. He stole one of Ferdie’s snares and set it up near the rabbit warren. Once, at night, he ventured down to the farm and
into the henhouse where he pocketed the only three eggs that Winnie had failed to collect at the end of that day. But they had no bread and only water from the trough to drink.

They had not known, until Edward John told them, that Norman had left the valley, that nothing, since then, had been heard of him nor that the police had issued a warrant concerning his assault on Ferdie Vallance but that, so far, he had not been apprehended.

‘So he’s still somewhere,’ Evie said heavily, the weary tears that ran from her eyes making tracks through the grime on her cheeks. ‘We’ve thought and thought about what to do,’ she told Edward John, miserably. ‘Giorgio’s broke his parole so if he was to give himself up he’d be arrested and most likely sent to jail.’

It was now almost totally dark. Tosca’s whinny reminded Edward John of the long, steep decent down the potholed lane to the higher farm. He got to his feet.

‘I’ve got to go,’ he said, looking into two pairs of anxious eyes. ‘You must stay here. I swear I won’t tell anyone where you are. Cross my heart and hope to die. I’ll bring some food tomorrow, I promise!’ They watched him turn and leave the byre. Once in Tosca’s saddle he swung her head towards the entrance of the lane, loosened her reins and let her carry him safely home.

When he arrived at Higher Post Stone, Alice and Roger had given up waiting for him and had begun their dinner. He apologised as he took his place at the table and his mother spooned shepherd’s pie onto his plate.

‘We were on the point of sending out a search party!’ Roger smiled and then catching a suggestion of embarrassment on
his stepson’s face, changed the subject by waving a blue airmail envelope in the air. ‘Splendid news from the Antipodes!’ he announced ‘The lovebirds have their posting at last and are thrilled to bits with it!’

‘You can read all about it when you’ve eaten,’ Alice told him. It was obvious to her that her son was concerned about something. She recognised the small signs which had become familiar to her as he had emerged from infant into little boy and then on, to become the adolescent he was now. A slight clouding of his eyes. A faint drawing together of his brows, and an almost imperceptible compression of his lips indicated to his mother that all was not well with him. With each year it was becoming more difficult for her to read him. Soon, she realised, she would cease to know where his thoughts lay or how to soothe him. Whatever it was that was worrying him tonight did not affect his appetite. She piled a second helping onto his plate.

It was still dark when Edward John woke next morning. Since the onset of the war and possibly in response to the various tensions it created, he had developed an unexplained ability to wake whenever he wanted to. He dressed and moved silently down through the house, into the kitchen and then the pantry. Hanging behind the door was a selection of capacious canvas bags from which Eileen selected one or another to use on her weekly shopping trip into Exeter. Edward John took a loaf, four large potatoes, half a fruit cake, a tin of corned beef, two packets of biscuits and a small piece of cheese and stowed them in the bag.

Although the war was over there had been no lessening in the acute shortage of food, the distribution of which was still rigidly controlled by the use of ration books. Aware of this and the fact that Eileen’s sharp eye would detect any significant changes in her stock of foodstuffs, Edward John was careful not to take too much of anything. No more, in fact, than could be accounted for by the family’s use of the pantry during the hours since Eileen left the farm on Saturday evening and arrived back on Monday morning, Sunday being her day off.

An hour later, with the bag of groceries balanced on the pommel of his saddle, Edward John arrived at the byre just as Evie emerged from behind it. Draped in a Hessian sack, she was shivering and water was dripping from her wet hair.

‘I’ve had a wash in the trough,’ she said through chattering teeth as she rounded the byre and ran through the gap in the wall where Giorgio met her, wrapped her in the Land Army top coat and led her close to the low fire.

Edward John wished he had thought to include a bar of soap and a bath towel from the farmhouse airing cupboard but food was the first necessity, toiletries could follow. The problem was that he had to return to his boarding school that night and would not be able to bring more supplies until the following Saturday.

‘We’re going to have to tell people where you are,’ he told them.

‘But you promised,’ Evie wailed, her grey-blue eyes heavy with accusation.

‘If you do, then we must go from here,’ Giorgio said.
‘I
criminale
now for breaking my parole. If Signore Bayliss hide me on his land, then he also
criminale
!’ Edward John considered the situation. He knew not only that what Giorgio said was true but that the man showed courage and even nobility in accepting the fact and taking responsibility for it.

‘The police are still looking for Norman. Once they catch him you’ll both feel safer and your explanation of why you went missing will be accepted, Giorgio. But in the meantime you should stay hidden and I’ll get supplies to you somehow.’ Evie was shaking her head while Giorgio, with his limited knowledge of English, struggled to fully understand what Edward John was telling them.

‘But how can you? You’re away at school all week!’ Evie said. The fire was warming her. She no longer shivered and her drying hair was shining in the low lamplight.

‘Hester and Dave Crocker!’ Edward John announced suddenly. ‘They’ll help!’ Giorgio and Evie stared uncertainly. ‘You know they will! I’ll make them swear not to tell anyone! You can trust them! I’ll go and see them today. We’ll sort this out between us, I promise you! Just stay hidden. Be careful of smoke until nightfall unless the wind is blowing hard.’ He slung the empty bag over his shoulder. ‘I’ll get off home now. Don’t want to have to answer too many questions about where I’ve been or what I’m doing! Just … stay put.’ He reached the opening in the barn wall, checked no one was about, urged them to try not to worry and left them.

Half an hour later he joined his mother and his stepfather for Sunday breakfast, clattering into the dining room as though he had just got up.

‘Sleep well?’ Alice asked him.

‘Like the proverbial log,’ he told her. Well, it was half true. He had slept very heavily until, at precisely six o’clock, he had been suddenly wide awake.

It being Sunday and Dave Crocker’s day off, he and Hester had risen late. While she prepared Sunday lunch, to which, this week, her mother-in-law was invited, Dave was encouraging Thurza’s first attempts at walking.

‘I’m doin’ oxtail stew, Dave,’ Hester told him over her shoulder, as she sliced onions. ‘Shall us ’ave dumplin’s with it, or do your ma like piecrust best?’

‘Piecrust every time,’ Dave told her. She laughed at him.

‘You’m on’y sayin’ that ’cos it’s what
you
like’ she chided him. ‘Watch out Thurzie don’t bump ’er ’ead on that table leg!’