The Greatcoat (15 page)

‘But what about the baby?’

‘You may ask. She never went back to Stainthorpe, not even for the funeral. They were buried together, her husband and the child, although when I say “buried” – it’s a question what there was to bury. And there was the girl who lived with them and helped with the little one. She was only sixteen,’ said the grocer’s wife, lingeringly.

‘Was it a girl, or a boy – the baby?’

‘A boy. A lovely little boy by all accounts. I never saw him. She never brought him into town. Her husband’s brother got the land and he built hisself a new house, the far end of the land from where the old one stood. They don’t have anything to do with her, the family. It was them as set the stone for the husband and the babby and she’s never gone within a mile of the grave. It’s a queer house you’re lodging in.’

Isabel found she was holding on to the counter edge, to steady herself. The stool wobbled.

‘You do look poorly,’ said the grocer’s wife. ‘Shall I get you a glass of water?’

‘No,’ said Isabel. She drew in her breath slowly, filling her lungs. There was sweat under her arms and in the small of her back. She must recover herself. She must not betray herself. ‘I’d like the bacon medium-cut,’ she said coolly, ‘and please put in half a pound of digestives.’

‘Plain or chocolate?’ said the grocer’s wife, offended.

‘Plain, please.’

They were all killed
. That was what the landlady had said. All the crew killed, and the baby, the landlady’s husband and the girl who looked after the baby. That was what Isabel had heard and seen, as she waited by the perimeter fence.

She walked home slowly, carrying her basket. She ought to have let the grocer’s boy bring it later. She felt very ill. The grocer’s wife had been offended, but she’d been curious too. She’d looked Isabel up and down. That was the trouble when you came to a new place as a stranger. You didn’t know anything about the past. You didn’t know what had made people as they were.

The noise of her own blood in her ears was like the landlady’s footsteps, going faster and faster.

‘Isabel!’ said Philip, jumping from his chair and putting his arm around her.

‘I’m all right.’

‘You don’t look all right. Sit down.’

‘I walked too fast, that’s all – and the shopping’s heavy.’

‘How many times have I told you not to go lugging that basket back? They’ve got a boy to deliver.’

‘I know. I was only going for a few things.’

She leaned back and closed her eyes.

‘Why do you rush at things? Why can’t you look after yourself?’ he exclaimed angrily. Isabel said nothing. She was silenced by this view of herself. Was this what he’d always thought? At last he said, more quietly, ‘I’ve been worried about you. I was thinking – should I ask Dr Ingoldby to examine you?’

‘Dr Ingoldby!’

‘He’s very good.’

‘I’m sure he is.’

‘I was wondering … if there was any possibility …’

Her eyelids snapped open. He looked shy, not like a doctor at all. Her Philip. Oh God, she thought, he thinks I might be pregnant.

I might be pregnant
. She thought of the hut, and Alec. With a huge effort, she collected herself and smiled up at her husband. ‘It’s far too soon to be sure,’ she said, hating herself as his face lit up. He knelt by the chair and she felt the beating of his heart as he pulled her against him, clumsy with love and hope. He stroked back her hair. She thought: This is what he has been working for. This is everything that he wants. I can’t—

The Lancaster crashed. They were all killed. He
won’t
ever come back. It was the landlady who did it, it was all her doing. She made me find that greatcoat. She made it all happen. If she couldn’t have him herself then she was going to have him through me. No wonder she was walking overhead. She knew what she wanted. She hated him for what happened but she never stopped wanting him. She was going to get him back any way she could.

It was always between the twenty-sixth and twenty-seventh ops, every time I saw him. He’d got through so much, why shouldn’t he start believing he was going to get through it all?

He’s dead and gone, she told herself. The war has been over for years. I’m going to have Philip’s child.

‘We can’t stay here,’ Philip was saying. ‘I’ll go and see the bank manager tomorrow.’

‘It may be nothing,’ Isabel warned, but it made no impression.

‘Whatever happens, it’s time we had a home of our own,’ he said.

She loved the look on his face, but she feared it too. All that purpose and protection was folding around her, but it could turn against her too. She had only to open her mouth and he would hate her. She was afraid that some force stronger than herself, some demon of self-destruction, would put words into her mouth and make her speak out. Philip wasn’t the
kind
of man who would be able to forgive her. Where he trusted, he did so implicitly; he could not forgive betrayal. But I’ve done nothing, she told herself. It’s not real, none of it is real. It’s the landlady. The war has been over for years, but she’s still obsessed with it. She won’t let go.

Isabel took Philip’s hand, turned it over and folded her own into it. ‘Sometimes I’m afraid we’ll be here for ever,’ she said, ‘with Mrs Atkinson walking to and fro all night, until we’re old and grey.’

‘That won’t happen. I’ll make enquiries. The bank manager’s wife is a patient of Dr Ingoldby’s. If people like us can’t get a mortgage …’

Isabel sat at the dressing table, creaming her face before bed. She could hear Philip whistling as he riddled the kitchen stove. In the mirror she saw the greatcoat, lying on her side of the bed. Had she put it there? She didn’t think so. She got up, folded the greatcoat and took it into the living room. She would put it back in the cupboard, where it belonged. No. That wasn’t enough. It must be got out of the flat entirely, but for tonight the cupboard would have to do. Isabel fetched a chair, clambered up, opened the cupboard wide and shoved the coat as far back as it would go.

‘What on earth are you doing?’ asked Philip. She turned and there he was in the doorway, watching her.

‘Putting the coat away. I don’t need it now that we’ve got the eiderdown.’

‘You shouldn’t climb like that.’ He held out his hands to her. She took them, and he jumped her down lightly, taking her weight.

In the night, she woke. The weight was on her again, pushing her down. She put out her hand and felt the thick woollen cloth. Terror crawled over her skin, and she lay dead still, not daring to reach out or speak to Philip. Stiff, staring into the dark, she lay until sleep swallowed her again. In the morning Philip said, ‘I thought we were getting rid of that thing. Don’t tell me you got up in the middle of the night and dug it out of that cupboard again.’

‘I’m going to wrap it up and put it in the dustbin.’

‘You can’t do that, Isabel. It’s not ours.’

‘I don’t care. If she wants it that much, she ought to come and take it.’

‘Who?’

‘The landlady, of course. It’s hers.’

‘I daresay the old girl’s forgotten all about it.’

‘Take it to the surgery, Phil. I don’t want it in the flat.’

‘Wouldn’t it be simpler just to take it upstairs to her?’

Tears sprang to her eyes.

‘All right, all right,’ he said, ‘I’ll do it. Don’t get in such a state.’

‘Put it in the boot now.’

‘For heaven’s sake, Is, I’m still in my dressing gown, in case you hadn’t noticed.’

‘I’ll do it, then.’

Philip never locked the boot. She flew down the steps, holding the greatcoat out as if it were burning, turned the handle and thrust the thing inside.

She walked slowly up the steps. The cold went through her, sharp, piercing, alive. It was over. The coat was gone and soon they would leave the flat behind, and the landlady, and never see her again. She knew that she could sleep now. There would be no tap on the window, or drone of heavy bombers circling for altitude. It was over.

She heard the landlady’s words again:
Don’t bother waiting up, he won’t come back
.

No, he won’t come back, Isabel thought. For a moment she felt him again, against her, entering her as the sound of the planes entered her ears. She smelled oil and sweat and the faint tang of his oxygen mask on his breath. His fingers tasted of nicotine and they trembled and then steadied as they touched
her
, tentatively at first and then stroking her skin with infinite gentleness, as if he hadn’t believed he would ever touch a woman’s face again.

FOR WEEKS THE
sun had shone. Everyone expected the weather to break, but each morning the sun burned off the early mist and by eight o’clock it was warm enough for Isabel to take her first cup of tea outside. The berries on the rowan were turning red. Everything was ripening early this year.

Michael woke at five, with the birds. The days were long, and Isabel lived them mostly outdoors. They hadn’t tamed the garden yet. The borders had been ghosts of themselves, sunk in weeds, the lawn a field, and the orchard, where one day they planned to keep hens, was still a mass of briar and bramble. The old woman who had owned the house lived there alone for years, retreating until she occupied only a single downstairs room. She had no bathroom, and only a single cold-water tap in the kitchen. The range hadn’t
been
used for a decade; old Mrs Gawthorpe had lived to ninety-four on bread, cheese and raw onions. There were no relations apart from a nephew in Canada, who was almost seventy himself and only wanted the place sold. It was Dr Ingoldby who told Philip about the house before it was auctioned.

They borrowed from Isabel’s aunt, and from the bank. The house was everything that Philip had ever wanted. The work it needed could all be done in time.

‘I want the children to grow up here,’ he said.

He said ‘the children’, as if there were already a houseful of them. Isabel was pregnant with Michael then. She was booked into the maternity hospital for the birth, but she never got there. The baby took them by surprise, for he was two or three weeks early, according to Philip’s calculations. He was a big, fair infant, weighing eight and a half pounds, and his eyes were blue. All newborns had eyes of that colour, Philip said. Later, they would darken.

‘He’s very fair,’ said Isabel’s aunt when she came to visit.

‘Yes,’ said Isabel.

‘Of course, Richard was blond when he was a little boy.’ She said ‘Richard’, not ‘your father’, as if she and Isabel were equals now. ‘I used to be so jealous. People thought blond curls were absolutely marvellous, in those days. But Richard’s didn’t last.’

‘I expect Michael will go darker too.’

She felt so sure of herself when she was holding the baby that she didn’t care what anyone said. He was an easy baby, everybody said so. Janet Ingoldby declared that Michael was a fluke, and Isabel would get a shock when the next one came along. Michael fed hungrily and seldom cried. He had a way of looking at Isabel when she was buttoning her blouse after a feed, as if they were in perfect agreement:
We’re in this together. You look after me, and everything will be all right
.

‘He likes it here,’ Isabel said, stroking Michael’s cheek, still not quite believing that this peaceful child could be her own.

‘Of course he does,’ said Philip.

‘He likes the garden. When I put his pram under the rowan tree, even if he’s not asleep, he’ll watch the leaves for hours.’

Each weekend, Philip mowed the rough, bumpy lawn and dug the vegetable garden. While Michael slept, Isabel cleared borders and planted lavender and rosemary; strong things that would thrive. She scattered marigold seed and love-in-a-mist. Every so often she would pause to listen out for the baby, but he rarely cried.

A woman came up from the village to scrub the place once a week. Janet Ingoldby was horrified that Isabel didn’t have more help.

‘It’s fine. I can manage,’ said Isabel.

‘My dear, you’re so brave. But it’s been hopeless since the war. They all go off and get jobs in town.’

Michael filled Isabel’s mind, and soothed it. She lived outdoors in cotton dresses, her arms and legs brown. She brought his playpen out onto the grass and gave him his toys one by one while he lay kicking in the shade. Later, he would sit up with a perfectly straight back, examining a rag book or a giraffe that squeaked. He was nine months old now, and could pull himself up to stand at the railings of his playpen. Day after day the sun shone, the grass tanned, the leaves turned a darker, duskier green.

The village was two miles away, but Isabel never wished it closer. Out here, there was no one to watch her. She was doing what was expected of her, and so she was left alone: she was the doctor’s wife, with her baby and her garden. The delivery van from the village shop found Isabel up a ladder with a paintbrush in her hand, as often as not. Or she would be digging, with her hair tied up in a kerchief, and the baby on his blanket nearby. The vicar called, and Isabel didn’t say that Philip was an atheist; instead, she made tea and talked about the long hours Philip worked. The vicar sat back in his chair in the cool, dark kitchen and rested his eyes on Isabel as she moved about, filling the kettle, bringing cream from the larder for his scones.

‘Your husband is a lucky man,’ he said. She looked at him, startled, and he added quickly, ‘These scones are light as a feather. Take it from me, I’m a connoisseur.’

‘You must be,’ she replied, and her hair swung forward over her face, hiding it.

He kept seeing that swing of hair, loose and shining and also cool somehow, as he drove back to the village in the glare of the afternoon. A nice young family, he would say to his wife.

The more Isabel listened, the more she heard. A tractor far away, and the scream of gulls that came inland to feed from the furrows. The high, invisible skirling of larks in the summer sky when she lay on her back in the meadow that belonged to the house, although it was leased to a farmer who mowed it for hay. The drip of the kitchen tap, the buzz of a bumblebee in the depths of a foxglove flower, and Michael’s crooning as he settled himself to sleep. There were a thousand sounds.