Land Girls (35 page)

Ag murmured agreement. She was concentrating on arranging her Christmas card on the chair by the bed. She found a position which allowed her, from her pillow, to see Desmond’s signature. When the lights were out she secretly kissed the card, just as Stella used to kiss her photograph of Philip. That, Ag noticed, had been moved to the chest of drawers.

On New Year’s Eve, Robert arrived promptly at seven for supper. Just a year older than Joe, he looked like a man of thirty who had suffered illness all his life. He was small, thin, cowered over a concave chest. There were bluish shadows under deep eyes, and his skin had a pale, skimmed look that made it hard to believe he spent most of his life in the open.

The girls, curious about Joe’s friend, arrived in sparkling line to shake his bony hand in turn. Prue had insisted on being the last. She wore her new dress, had curled her eyelashes into spikes of unbelievable length.

‘I’ll give you a kiss, too, Robert,’ she said, ‘seeing as it’s New Year’s Eve,’ and his arms went round her in automatic response.

Later, she told the others, she fell for Robert as soon as her mouth touched his deathly cheek. The attraction was mutual. Prue concentrated her full attention on him during supper, fluttering the absurd lashes, her dimples and pouts working overtime. Too preoccupied to offer any help, she smiled, duchess-like, as Stella and Ag acted as waitresses. Supper over, she and Robert left at once for the Red Cross dance.

‘So that’s worked,’ said Joe, smiling at Ag. ‘I thought it might. No more Barry. Hope Robert enjoys himself.’

‘
Really
, Joe,’ said Mrs Lawrence, a note of wistfulness beneath her stern look. ‘It’s a very unlikely match. What could a girl like Prue give Robert?’

‘Fun,’ said Joe. ‘Nothing wrong in that, for a time.’ He felt the strength of one to whom the emptiness of mere fun, nothing else, is a thing long past.

Stella and Ag sat with the Lawrences listening to the wireless, waiting for Big Ben to strike twelve. They raised their glasses to each other, conveyed polite formal wishes – but were not the sort of people to seal those wishes with random kisses. This was a relief to Joe. The proximity of Stella this evening – beautiful, a little subdued – was both an ecstasy and a torment. His own, private wish for the New Year, as he raised his glass briefly in the direction of the girl who had ungrounded his life, was for strength.

P
rue, alone in the cowshed, no one around to complain, was taking her chance to sing.

She was doing her best to whitewash the battered walls. Bloody awful job, but at least better than carting loads of mangolds down to the cows, like Ag. Or harnessing the stubborn Noble, like Stella.
They
would have rain gushing down their necks, sodden hair, soaking wool gloves. It had been raining hard for the first week of the New Year – Prue had collected enough buckets of rainwater for a month’s hair-washing. Also, it was freezing. Bloody freezing. Prue was the only one of the girls still awaiting a greatcoat. Shortage of cloth for land girls’ coats had still not been overcome: there was no saying when hers would arrive. Mrs Lawrence had made several enquiries to the district commissioner, who held out no hope of a coat in the near future. So Prue had to make do with three jerseys under one of Joe’s old macs, and still the cold cut through her bones.

But Prue had learned as a child that hardship is a challenge. She remembered her mother’s advice: when the going gets tough, remember Winston Churchill. Remember everything you can that he says. He’s an inspiring man. Prue’s mother was given to muttering
Now is our finest hour
as she strove to overcome the shortage of solution for permanent waves. Now is my finest hour, said Prue to herself, sloshing whitewash over a daunting new area of dirty brick wall. Her arm ached so badly she wanted to cry. But there was no use in crying, or stopping. Mr Lawrence expected the wall to be finished by midday.

Besides, there were thoughts to dwell on that made up for everything: Robert. She and Robert had made a swift start on New Year’s Eve. Half an hour at the Red Cross dance was enough to convince them that his cottage would be a better place in which to celebrate the New Year. Robert had lit the fire and shaken out the rag rug in front of it. He had heated up a tin of soup, and found half a bottle of wine. Thus the setting for her third seduction as a land girl, while not perfect, was both slightly warmer and more comfortable than either the barn or the woods.

Prue found herself much taken by Robert’s shyness. She liked the way he averted his huge, moth-like eyes when, halfway through the revolting soup, she considered it time to stop dilly-dallying, and remove the velvet dress. She laid it on top of the rug, pushing the fur neck into a kind of fairy bolster. For some moments Robert looked so charmingly embarrassed Prue felt herself inclining towards him in a way that immediately alerted her to its inconvenience. Just in time, she remembered that to go falling in love with an anaemic young farmer, penniless to boot, would not fit in with her ultimate calculations. She quickly placed his chilly hand (in all her experience she had never known such icy flesh) on the silken thigh beneath her slip, and was rewarded by an electric reaction.

‘It’s the bombs urge a girl on,’ she said, fluttering lashes winged by three layers of mascara. ‘I’m not forward by nature, but when it comes to a race against the bloody bombs I want to win.’

‘Quite,’ said Robert.

He hastened out of his own clothes while Prue languorously released her stockings from their suspenders, an art she had learned from close study of many film stars. She smiled at the sight of her new lover-to-be’s feet – the smallest, most delicate men’s feet she had ever had the pleasure of observing. Blue-white skin stretched over fine bleached bones. The miniature toes wriggled in the folds of red velvet –
crustacean
(a word she had recently learned from Ag), somehow, and making Prue giggle. She looked up to see Robert naked but for his watch.

‘Five to twelve,’ he said.

‘And Big Ben ready to strike, I see.’

Prue collapsed into further giggles as Robert lowered himself beside her. As on many previous occasions, she was oblivious of the precise moment of the passing of the old year, but was able to rejoice, very early in the new one, at the presence of a new lover.

Now – the tiresome thought returned to her in the cold of the cowshed – the only thing that had to be
tidied up
was Barry. She thought of their last meeting – December the tenth. Quite a day for loss, as a matter of fact: Singapore, according to Mr Lawrence, who was a keen listener to the news, and her interest in Barry. She said nothing at the time, just promised she’d be in touch. This new turn of events meant she’d failed to keep her word. Perhaps she would write to him tonight. It wasn’t fair to keep a man mooning about in hope. Hard to know what to say, though.

Nah! Soppy, that last bit. She wouldn’t put that.
Love and good wishes
at the end, though: she didn’t want him to think he’d been nothing more than a bloody good shag.

In the past week, there had been much meal-time talk about the end of the war. Now that America had joined the fighting, Mr Lawrence seemed to think there was some hope it wouldn’t drag on too long. Prue herself thought such speculation pointless. She agreed with Ratty, who declared much worse was to come before victory. She had no wish to think about the future. She was happy – despite the cheerless rain and cold – with each day as it came: tough work, long hours, plenty of good hot food, and odd moments of reward in Robert’s dingy bed. He was something of a mystery, Robert, Prue had often thought in the past week: no matter how passionately they made love his skin never warmed up. Quite a challenge, that. One day she’d like to be responsible for replacing his corpse-like temperature with a warm pink glow (Prue giggled to herself at the thought). She liked his company, too: dry little phrases, their academic references usually way over her head, shy little compliments, quaint little jokes. And the way he stroked the bridge of her nose when he was being very serious about the war or something. He said the bridge of the nose was an erogenous zone. Perhaps it was among academics, she had replied, but she could think of more erogenous places in the opinion of ordinary folk. All the same, she didn’t try to stop him – tickle tickle tickle with his cold little finger.

‘You’ve done well, Prue,’ said Mr Lawrence.

Prue turned to see him at the door of the cowshed, appraising her work. Rain ran thickly down the raw-coloured runnels of his face. Swift as balls of mercury they slid down the creases of his neck. ‘Not
exactly
my finest hour, Mr Lawrence,’ she said, pleased, ‘but I’m getting on.’

At times like this, it occurred to her, there was a darn sight more reward in being a land girl than there was in hairdressing. In fact – it had crossed her mind several times – when the war was over it might be worth trying to find her millionaire somewhere in the country, rather than in Manchester.

‘You’re not half as daffy as you look,’ said the soaked Mr Lawrence, smiling.

Joe was avoiding her. This Stella noticed within a few days of their evening at the pub. At first she thought it was her imagination, and he was avoiding everyone. Certainly he seemed less forthcoming – the others had observed and remarked on that, too. Perhaps two days of the beautiful Janet’s company had caused his despair, suggested Prue. Ag’s view was that no end to the war in sight depressed everyone. But Stella knew it was neither of those things. It was something to do with her. She had inadvertently acted in some way to offend or annoy him, but could not imagine what it was she had done.

In the cold and gloomy days of early January, Stella puzzled over Joe’s behaviour. It was definitely her he singled out for the cold shoulder (she noticed a hundred small occasions) and the worry of her unknown misdemeanour was beginning to blight the days. She would have liked to confront Joe: ask him what had happened, clear the air. But he was not an easy man to confront. He had become more and more elusive, always the one willing to undertake jobs far from the farm that could be done alone. Stella watched for her chance. But, as the dreary days dragged by, it did not come.

On the afternoon that Prue was assigned the unenviable but dry task of whitewashing the cowshed, Mr Lawrence asked Stella to take the milk churns to the village. Usually, this was a task he undertook himself. But the persistent heavy rain had taken its toll on the old roofs. There was a leak in the laundry room: water had poured down on to a basket of Faith’s ironing. Repairing the tiles was urgent. Mr Lawrence apologized to Stella, said if he caught sight of Joe he would ask him to give a hand.

Stella, setting off for the field to catch Noble, leaned against the heavy slant of the rain. A dour mass of dark cloud was low in the sky, releasing no chinks of light to play among reflections. And yet the puddles in the lane dappled with inky blues and muddy pinks as Stella splashed through them. In the leafless hedges dishevelled sparrows cowered, unsinging. The thrumming of the rain would sometimes switch into an
adagio
passage, giving hope it would soon be stopping altogether. Then, like a tease who knows not when to stop, it would fall
prestissimo
again, defying all such silly hopes. The persistence of such weather had affected Stella’s spirits.

Noble sheltered under a tree, darkened by the rain. He came at once when Stella called. She removed her sodden glove and gave him half a carrot, snorts of warm breath agreeable on her cold hand. In the next field she could see the drenched figure of Ag; sou’wester falling over her eyes, throwing mangolds from the trailer behind the tractor on to the ground. The cows were hustled round her in a selfish crowd, a black and white puzzle whose individual pieces, at this distance, were indistinguishable.

Ag waved. Stella waved back. Ag had been much more cheerful since Desmond’s Christmas card. Strange how thin a hope the human soul can survive on, Stella thought, gripping the soaking rope of Noble’s halter. She and the horse sloshed their way through the long grass back to the gate. If Ag ever did secure this almost non-existent love, surely the stuff of fantasy, Stella would remind her of this rainy afternoon, January 1942, when she, Stella, had been quite convinced nothing would ever happen with Desmond. And with Philip? In his last letter, he had said that when he went to London he was going to buy her a ring. Then they would be engaged. Then they would be married. Then they would live together ever after. Wartime bride and groom. Romantic stuff. But happily? Stella supposed so, in some ways.

She tethered Noble to a post in the barn, made several journeys to and from the tack-room lugging the heavy harness. Her hands, wet and cold, worked inefficiently. She struggled to do up the hard old straps. She tugged at the stubborn leather, determined not to be beaten and have to call for help. As finally she led Noble towards the shafts, a thought came blindingly to her. It came with such terrible clarity that for a moment she was forced to lean against Noble’s damp withers, bury her head in her arms so that she could be submerged in blackness. The suspicion that had been nudging her for some weeks, that she had kept at bay, had suddenly stormed her fragile defences. It was Philip, not the weather, that caused her dejection. The sprightly love she had felt for him when she came to the farm, which had protected her in the many bleak moments that manual labour produces in all those who would rather be engaged in some more intellectually creative activity, was gone. Absolutely gone. She was fond of him, respected him … she would marry him:
but she was not in love with him
. And, as she had so often said to Prue and Ag, what is the point of life if you are not in love?