Land Girls (28 page)

She put a tray of tea beside Mrs Lawrence, who was sleeping, then went downstairs to sit at the kitchen table. Clasping cold hands round a mug of tea on the bare stretch of oilcloth, she listened to the muggy silence of mid-afternoon. Suddenly the quietness was split by the screech of a plane overhead. Within seconds the alarming sound had withered back to nothing, and Ag could hear the dripping of a tap again, and the beating of her own heart. She looked up to see Joe, in gumboots – not allowed in the kitchen when his mother was there – standing at the door.

‘Hasn’t been one like that for a long time,’ he said.

‘Come to shake us out of our complacency, perhaps. Pearl Harbor—’

‘I know, I heard. How’s Ma?’

‘Asleep. I took her some tea.’

‘How are you managing?’

‘Fine I think.’

‘I’ve got to walk down to River Meadow, look at a sheep. Like to come?’

Joe poured himself a mug of tea from the pot. Ag took her time, weighing things up.

‘There’s the bread to come out, the rest of the ironing.’

‘I said would you
like
to come.’

‘Yes.’

Ag smiled. She carried the tea things to the sink, moving with the kind of languor that assails those who have been indoors for many hours and now face the prospect of a walk in the cold.

‘I’ll get my boots,’ she said.

The fronds of a plan, so indeterminate she could not be sure of its meaning, began to pulse in her mind. She felt suddenly courageous. Or was it reckless? As she followed Joe through the back door, Ag could not be sure: nor did she care.

‘The wicked, wicked woman,’ Ratty muttered to himself. He stomped down the lane, slashing at the verges with his stick. Sometimes he spat ahead of himself, a hard ball of sputum that sizzled out and died by the time he strode past it. His anguish was twofold: Pearl Harbor, poor buggers, and himself: deprived of a single scone by a wife who also – with no scrap of evidence – accused him … of what? And how was it she managed to undermine his innocence? What made her suspect there was more respect in his heart for the land girls – yes, even the floozie, a gallant little worker for all her silliness – than there had ever been for her?

The winter sky was heavy on Ratty’s head. His temples throbbed, his arthritic hip ached. He needed shade, shelter from the cruel glare of the heavens. He turned into Long Wood that ran half a mile beside fields, then straggled on up the hill. In the path between the trees he found some relief. The purplish light that clings to winter branches, and the myriad shadows scattered finely as broken glass, confused his eyes in an agreeable way. He was in no mood to see things clearly. The muffling of his own footsteps was a blessing, too. Here, the only sound was an occasional soft snapping of twigs, mushy from rain, breaking underfoot. No birds sang.

Then the aeroplane, from nowhere. Ripped from the bowels of silence, it screamed invisibly overhead. Interrupted in their winter husbandry, birds rattled out of the undergrowth calling in alarm, and fled to high branches that trembled in the wake of the monster. Ratty peered up. Was it ours? Theirs? It had gone too fast for him to see. Knees trembling, he moved off again more slowly. After a while the wood returned to its old quiet and he came to a clearing, a junction of paths.

Ratty had intended to walk to the top of the hill – thus keep safely out of the house for a couple of hours. But, shaken by the plane and the mess of anxieties in his head, he took the wrong path. He progressed some fifty yards before realizing this, but decided to carry on. Then, rounding a bend, he saw the distant figures of Joe and Ag coming towards him. A thumping and boiling of blood in his temples told him this was the last straw … Joe and the holy one … Such anger scorched his being he came to a halt, stood helpless in the path. They waved,
waved
: the cheek of it, thinking they could deceive him, no doubt. They smiled,
smiled
: how dare they! Ratty stood glowering back at them, his look signalling their time had come. By the time they were just a few yards from him, Ratty had made up his mind. Pity he hadn’t got his pitchfork, but his stick was solid enough. He would thrash the life out of Joe: teach him to stop mucking about with the feelings of innocent girls.

With a gesture that might have been less fierce than he intended, Ratty raised his stick in the air, shook it threateningly. Even as he did so, he felt his free hand automatically touch his cap.

‘Ratty!’ The bugger Joe was smiling. The girl, too, happy as a lark. ‘About to show Ag a nice bit of foot rot,’ Joe said. ‘We must keep on before the light goes.’

‘’Bye, Ratty,’ said the holy one.

They passed each side of him like a tide that divides effortlessly round a rock in its path. If only he’d been quicker, silly old fool. Now he’d missed his chance – and Joe would have his way with the holy one, like he had with all the rest. Though in truth, and here Ratty began to potter on, even more slowly, Joe did
seem
bent on his mission with a sheep. Didn’t look as if he was up to any funny business, but you never could tell. The art of deceiving, as Ratty well knew, is to wear a look of innocence with such ease that suspicion is never ignited, never has reason to flame.

The sheep were gathered together in the far corner of the field – probably suffering from shock of the plane, Joe said. Sheep panicked more easily than cows, he explained: nervous, silly creatures – but, all the same, he would be sorry to see them go, next spring, after lambing.

‘But, like everyone else, we have to turn most of our acreage over to plough,’ he said to Ag. ‘Price of living in a country that produces a third of its food. Come a war and animals must be sacrificed. We’ll probably have to reduce the cows, too: just keep one or two for house milk.’ His eyes travelled over distant fields. ‘It’s odd to think that in 1939 there were eighteen million acres of grassland, twelve million of plough. The rate things are going, in a couple of years that’ll be reversed. But I don’t suppose we’ll be here to see the complete changeover at Hallows. We may have to move to Yorkshire.’

‘Yorkshire?’

In the fast-fading light, they walked slowly towards the flock.

‘My uncle, Dad’s brother, isn’t going to recover. His farm’s the Lawrence family home. My aunt and cousin can’t manage it on their own. They’re struggling, even with the help of two land girls. When Jack dies, Dad’ll have to take over. He’d rather be here than there, but he hasn’t much choice. He feels he can’t sell a place that’s belonged to the family for a couple of hundred years. Rotten time to try to sell Hallows, middle of a war. And after all he’s put into this place. But it can’t be helped.’

‘I didn’t know any of that,’ said Ag quietly.

‘I’d be grateful if you didn’t tell the others. I probably shouldn’t have said anything.’

‘Of course.’

‘There’s the one I’m after.’

Joe pointed to a dejected-looking ewe. When the rest of the flock swerved away and began to run, she hobbled so badly she was soon left behind.

Ag held the animal’s shoulders while Joe examined the rotten hoof. The great black head worried about, bleating pathetically. Ag spoke soothing words, trying to calm her, but not succeeding.

‘Treatment first thing in the morning,’ said Joe at last, lowering the painful hoof to the ground. ‘Off you go, old girl.’

They watched the ewe limp to join the rest of the sheep, who showed no recognition of her plight.

‘You can become fond of them, somehow,’ said Joe, eyes anxiously following the animal’s progress, ‘especially if you’ve known them from birth. I never forget the circumstances of a single birth, don’t know why. Maybe you’ll see what I mean, come the spring. We’d better hurry back, or you’ll not have tea on the table in time.’ He smiled.

‘I don’t much want to hurry,’ said Ag.

For twenty-four years Ratty had been walking the woods on Mr Lawrence’s land. He could find his way about them on the darkest night, learned – folly of a distant youth – by snaring the odd rabbit or pheasant, when he and Edith had found it hard to make ends meet. But today, in the gathering dusk, at the end of so disagreeable a day, he was confused. He turned down a small path that he thought would eventually lead back to the lane. He then realized he was again mistaken, and knew it would take him deeper into the wood. Ah well, he thought, he’d keep ambling aimlessly about: anything better than going home.

By now it was almost dark. It was hard to see where grass and brambles met roots of trees. The millions of individual bare branches had turned into solid, dense shapes. A tawny owl cried. Then there was the sound of a human cry, followed by laughter.

Ratty paused, listening intently. The laughter came again, from behind a holly bush. Ratty knew the holly well. Years ago, there had been a badger sett beneath it. He had taken Joe there, one night, to see the badgers play. Joe, at seven or eight, was a real one for wildlife. Ratty had often thought he might become a naturalist …

There it was again – the human cry clashing with the lugubrious note of the owl. Ratty took small side steps closer to the bush. He peered round. He saw a pile of something on the ground – a collapsed tent, perhaps. Trespassers? Poachers? Maybe, worst of all,
picnickers
?

He narrowed his eyes, forcing them to focus through the gloom, and saw that it was no tent but a pile of clothes. He could just make out the bluish jacket of an RAF uniform, forage cap tucked neatly into the pocket. Then he saw, slightly to one side of the general pile, a pair of corduroy breeches. He caught his breath, edged closer still to the place from which wild shouts and laughter were now coming.

What Ratty focused upon then caused him for a moment to think that he was hallucinating: two spectral melons rising and falling with beautiful rhythm in the darkness. As he watched, entranced, the ghostly fruits turned into the human flesh of buttocks. These buttocks, pale as moonstone, flew up and down so fast that Ratty, following them with incredulous eyes, soon found himself dizzy. He dug his stick deeper into the ground for support. A small hand had slithered up on to the buttocks, and was frenzying about in excited patterns, the fingers fluttering, fast. The air was suddenly filled with cries of abandon that, like the plane, frightened hidden birds. They flew up into the darkness, wings stirring the air near Ratty’s face.

He could bear no more. He stepped backwards. Blindly, he moved down the path, tapping the roots of trees. The noises grew fainter behind him. An early moon, he saw through a gap in the trees, had just slit the sky, forcing a strand of light down through the branches that enabled Ratty to see he had arrived back at the main clearing.

There, he sat down on an old tree stump, a place where for many years he had paused in his walks. He could hear no more sound from the lovers …
lovers doing it on the earth, rutting like rabbits under the trees
– a dream so deeply secreted away that only the sight could have brought it back. The floozie and her airman: God forbid, the floozie and her airman were experiencing something he, through decades in the marital bed, had never known, would now never know. Oh Lord, he envied them.

For their pleasure, and for so many things he himself had never known, Ratty wept in the darkness.

‘Can we go round the long way?’ asked Ag. ‘It’ll be dark in the woods.’

With matching long strides, they moved across the field to the path by the hedge that divided the grassland from the wood. They walked in easy silence for fifty yards, then Joe came to a halt.

‘Listen,’ he said.

From somewhere distant in the trees came a thin trill of laughter, familiar in its running cadences.

Ag smiled. ‘Wood spirits,’ she said. ‘They must be terribly cold.’

‘Hope one of the spirits remembered to sterilize the bottles this time,’ said Joe, with good humour. ‘On Monday she was in such a hurry she forgot. I had my work cut out trying to cover for her.’

They began to walk again.

If Ratty comes upon them,’ said Ag, ‘he’ll have a seizure.’

‘Poor old Ratty. He’s ageing fast. Gets pretty confused these days – waving his stick at us like that, as if we were poachers.’

‘Prue says he unnerves her, his silence. Stella and I are his fans.’

‘How was Stella’s weekend in Plymouth?’ asked Joe after a while. ‘I never heard.’

Ag took some time before answering. ‘I suspect something happened,’ she said at last, ‘but I’m not sure what. She said it was all wonderful and she’s pleased to be actually engaged. But I don’t know. I privately think there was some kind of … disappointment.’

‘She’s not quite her old exuberant self. She seems to have come down from the clouds.’

‘She does. That’s just it. She concentrates more on the matter in hand now. Her dreamy look is gone. She talks in practical terms about marriage, houses, children, life after the war. It’s almost as if spurred by just three meetings with Philip, before she came here, her imagination superseded the reality. She’s always saying she has to be in love, Stella. She can’t live without being in love. So there she was, in love with this almost imaginary figure, goes off to meet him and, well … But I’m only guessing.’

They had reached the gate that led to the lane. Joe leaned on its top bar. He seemed in no hurry to open it, or climb it. Ag imitated him, fingers of one hand drumming the damp wood. By now a dew was falling. The darkness, characteristic of a late winter afternoon, seemed to cascade inefficiently over what was left of the daylight, so that the struggle between impending night and departing day was visible. In an hour or so, the transparent quality of the ensuing gloom would have thickened, become dense. A skeletal moon was stamped on the sky, the most fragile of seals, which gave no light.

Joe turned to Ag. ‘And you, Ag,’ he said, ‘do you have a secret, imaginary love, too?’

‘As I think I told you, there was this research graduate at Cambridge.’