A Time for Courage (57 page)

Good luck, says the mechanic. The nod, the order to start up. His voice is quite clear. How strange.

The mechanic is moving the propeller, his face is strained as the clonk, clonk, clonkety clonk begins.

‘Contact, sir.’

Contact, damn it, flick ignition, push choke right back, open throttle halfway as mechanic swings the propeller hard against the compression. One jerk is enough this time. Blue smoke jets and the slipstream flattens the grass for fifty yards behind. The nutty smell is here again. All around. The lubricant is burning but that is as it should be. Nothing is wrong. Keep calm. A mechanic is holding each wing and a third is across the tail fuselage in front of the tail plane.

Chocks are away. Don’t let me go. Don’t let me go up there again, but they do and the machine is there at the cinder runway and at one-minute intervals we’re up, up into the air.

It’s cold up here, I always forget how cold it is and lighter than the ground. The line is crossed at 1500 feet, always at that height and always there are the artillery flashes. Now patches of white mist lie in hollows and steadily the light is seeping from the east. Lighting hills, dispersing the mists, blinding pilots for a moment but now there is so much soft colour either side of the grey roads, the railway winding threads, the woods which merge with ploughed fields. How strange that people still farm in this hell.

Over Ypres, looking like broken teeth. Beyond it, in the far distance gleams the white of the Dover cliffs. Let me go home. But they won’t, they won’t. It must be peaceful over there by the cliffs and in that convoy of ships. The curve of the earth is the same as it always is and we are just trivia after all.

But then the anti-aircraft shells burst and deafen, jerking the machine about in the air. Metal fragments cut the face, the machine, and now we’re in the fighter zone, behind the German lines and I can’t hear the planes because my own is so noisy. I can’t hear them, Hannah, and so I don’t know if I’m going to be shot from the sky. Can you hear my heart, Hannah, it’s so loud, my breath is slow, sweat is trickling in runnels down the whale oil, fear is foul in my mouth.

And then they’re here and I must dive, take a breath, stick forward, feeling crushed, the left hand on the throttle, the right on the stick. Two fingers slightly on the gun buttons, and now I must slow, Hannah, to eliminate vibration and let the target fill the whole Aldis screen. I must take my right hand from the stick, stretch out slowly and fire in one- or two-second bursts until I kill another man, Hannah. Another bloody man but it might have been me, you see.

And I can’t stop hearing the screams of my pupil as they took him out of the plane. He was a flamer, you see, and he didn’t jump out. I would jump. I couldn’t burn, but he burnt. He was blind and burnt and they gave him morphine and he died, thank God. But someone’s coming again. I must dive, Hannah, feel the pressure, I’m diving, diving, diving.

His screams tore into her sleep and she gripped him, held him and talked and kissed until the dawn came but she knew that she could not take the thoughts from inside his head, or the war from around his body and they both knew that Harry had been right and nothing was worth this slaughter.

In January propertied women over thirty were given the vote because they had shown their true value, it was said. Hannah drank wine with Frances and they were glad but the children had the influenza which was sweeping Europe and so had some of the women and Joe had gone and she could not forget his screams.

Only two women had died and no children and Frances said that they had been lucky and Hannah nodded because she knew it was true. In April the buds were forcing through the ground and Hannah no longer felt sick each morning but was tired and sat with Naomi and Kate to listen to their reading and Annie and Matthew wrote their words for her. And the other children too. Frances would no longer let her sit up for night duty in the wards and in May Hannah took the bus to the station with the four children because Frances said that Eliza needed help at Penbrin but Hannah knew it was because her baby was growing and she was too tired.

The spring turned to summer and there was talk of peace perhaps but Joe did not come because he could get no more leave. Hannah watched the children in the sea and the men who coughed the gas remains from their chest and laughed as they laughed, smiled as they smiled, and slept as they slept, with a measure of peace, for Joe’s screams had faded as the baby grew.

In the evening, with Eliza and Sam she talked of the school and they decided that she should buy Penhallon which was bigger and no longer spoiled by her father’s past presence. She sat in the warm evening air, breathing in the thyme, watching as Sam, so broad, so grey now, smoked his pipe and swatted at the mosquitoes and decided that she would write to Esther and take her son, because she owed that to her cousin. She felt the baby move within her and smiled. It was strong and she was well and ready for the birth which was due in two weeks, at the end of September, and tomorrow she was taking the children on the moor but not far, for she was too heavy – like a great cow, Matthew had said.

‘Are you all right, Hannah?’ Eliza asked, leaning forward and pulling at the cushion behind Hannah who smiled, for how many times had she done this for her mother but she was strong and this was Joe’s child and nothing could go wrong, not now.

The next day was cooler but still they went out on the moor with Kate and Naomi carrying the kite and Matthew the picnic. Annie held her hand and pulled at her dress which was too tight, she said.

Gulls wheeled over them and gorse flashed yellow against dark green. Primroses were pale yellow and violets vivid blue. The heather was purple and white and Kate picked some and brought it to her.

‘This is good luck, Mother.’ Her blonde hair lay in curls about her face, her wide mouth smiled as she tucked the heather into Hannah’s bodice, and as Hannah kissed her she could smell the soft sun on her skin and hoped that Kate’s mother could see her child. They ate pasties and the children ran down the hill to the brook and Hannah flew the kite, feeling the string taut around her hand as the wind snatched and pulled. She sat on her jacket and could hear the bees amongst the heather. She was tired but the air was good and clean and the children were laughing and splashing.

‘When Daddy is home he will show you how to tickle trout,’ she called, pulling in the kite, watching it flop and plummet as it dropped beneath the cushion of wind.

Was it really so long ago that Joe and she had lain on the bank, their hands growing numb as they caught trout without lines and flies? She knew that it was an eternity.

‘My oil lamp is smoking,’ Naomi said as they walked back to Penbrin when the wind grew chill and that scent of late summer seemed stronger in the air.

‘Bring it to the kitchen when we get in,’ Hannah said. ‘I’ll clean it. I quite enjoy that job for some reason.’

The men were still at the beach with their families so Hannah sat on the kitchen chair and eased her back, feeling the baby kicking, longing to see and hold it. Was it a girl or a boy? Did it look like Joe, red-gold and blue-eyed or like her, dark-haired, dark-eyed? Naomi brought the lamp and then Hannah heard the knock at the door but knew that Eliza would answer. She stood, stretching her back, her shoulders, and drained the bowl of the lamp into the tin which she always used. The smell was the same, thick and rich.

Eliza came in and Hannah looked and her face was pinched and her lips were strange, thin and pressed hard together and her hand was reaching for Hannah.

‘Sit down, my dear.’

But Hannah knew she must not for there was a telegram in her aunt’s hand, a buff telegram, the same as the one they had sent for Harry and if she sat down she would have to read it, and she would not do that because she was cleaning the lamp. It needed cleaning.

‘I must clean this lamp,’ she said but her voice was dead.

‘Hannah, you must read this.’ Her aunt was shaking now and came round the table and took Hannah’s hand.

‘I won’t read it. If I don’t read it it can’t be true.’ She took the rag which lay on the table and wiped round the bowl again and again because it must be quite clean, quite dry. Naomi would like that. She would not listen to the rustle of the paper as Eliza lifted the flap. She would not listen to the words which said in Eliza’s voice. ‘Regret to inform you that Major Joe Arness is missing, believed killed.’

No, she would not listen. She had too much to do.

‘Hannah, please stop. Please sit down.’ Her aunt was crying now but she, Mrs Joe Arness, would not, because she had not heard, would not listen.

She poured fresh oil into the bowl and put a clean white wick into the burner.

‘It should fit exactly,’ she told her aunt. ‘But must be able to move up and down easily and yet not loosely.’

She would not listen to the soft crying but to the hiss of the fire, the sound of her voice, ‘It must be soft and not too tightly plaited.’

Her fingers were shaking. How absurd. She could not ease the wick through the burner. She must not talk while she tried again. Her neck was hurting, she must get close, so that she could see the gap, not the yellow telegram.

She shrugged off her aunt’s hand. ‘Don’t you realise I must concentrate,’ she said. ‘Of course there are candles if this lamp doesn’t work.’ The shelves were full of them, wax built up on twisted wicks, the smell would be the same as that which had oozed across the table at Arthur’s party. But he was gone now, wasn’t he? There would be no more candles for Arthur, for Harry, but the wick was through now.

‘To put out the lamp it should not be turned down so far that the charred wick can fall into the bowl of the lamp. You must tell Naomi to blow out the flame, turn down the wick very low and leave the glowing end to go out of its own accord.’

Hannah stood now and turned to her aunt. ‘Tell Naomi please, Eliza. I have to go and check the apples.’

She walked past her aunt and now she took the telegram and Eliza put her hand on her arm but she walked on alone, out across the courtyard and up the stable-loft steps.

Moss had dried dull green on the wood and it was cracked and needed staining, but it was smooth and warm and the air inside the loft was full of motes caught in shafts of light and apple scent. The apples were fresh and full and firm and juice would fill her mouth, she knew that.

She picked one up, so red and green and held it to her cheek, remembering the feel of Simon’s hand, the touch of Harry’s as she had kissed it, the pale thin blue veins of her mother’s, the red glint on Arthur’s hair, and Joe, the gentle hardness of Joe who was her life.

And now she read the words, so black on the paper, and heard his screams. How could they have faded? And the tears came, not silent but loud, and howls too. The floor was hard as she dropped to it and beat her hands, harder and harder and harder until the splinters dug into her skin and she bled, red on white.

The baby was born that night, a girl, Edith, with red-gold hair and dark eyes and six weeks later the war ended on the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month and Sam went up to London and traced the remains of Joe’s squadron but they could tell him nothing.

In December Hannah received a letter from a customer of Joe’s commissioning another table. She put it with the other two which had arrived for him to read when he came home.

She told Frances, who had come down to stay, that he would come back. He had said ‘Stay with me’, and so she would. He would not leave her, would he? Would he? Would he? And she cried again and held the baby close and Frances made her cocoa and they sat by the fire and sewed puppets and lavender bags and talked of the school they would begin but it was all so empty now. During the day her thoughts were never still, at night her sleep was never sound.

Winter passed and the tears still came and there was no peace for her anywhere, though Eliza and Frances said that somehow she must find some. Edith grew well and plump and Matthew carved a rattle which Naomi, Annie and Kate rubbed down and painted. They were brown from the mild winter, the bright spring, when Hannah walked them on the moor again in May, wrapping the cloak around herself, feeling tired as they turned and waved to Frances who held Edith, white-shawled in her arms.

She did not bring the kite. There was not enough wind, she told the children, watching as it flicked the hair about their faces. The primroses were soft yellow again in the green fields which led to the moor and the violets vivid blue, the heather purple and white. The calves were out grazing and the children walked cautiously through the herd.

Hannah listened to their talk, their laughter, for they could laugh again now and that was good. She drew the cloak tighter. She wanted to reach out and hold their hands but they were running on, their heads lifted to the pale blue sky.

They ate sandwiches down by the stream and Hannah lifted her skirt and walked on the rounded pebbles, feeling the water cold and strong, tugging at her feet, rolling the stones across her toes. She felt it but not inside. Nothing touched her inside any more. She sat on the bank, and picked at the grass, holding a stem between her thumbs and blowing, the piercing whistle startling the children, making them laugh. When the sun had passed above them Hannah rose, eager to be walking, unable to stay in any one place for long because he was not here, her love, her love.

‘Let’s go home now.’

She did not turn as the children groaned but walked back the way she had come, knowing that they would follow and they did, picking primroses for Frances and Eliza and violets, which they gave to her, and she wished they had not, for it was violets she had given to Joe.

Hannah looked at the house as they walked down the sloping field; its grey stone, the Virginia creeper, the windows filled with flowers, the driveway which swept up and round the house, the white stones which lined it. The white clouds moved across the sky behind it, changing shape from swans to ships to billowing sheets on a washing-line but the house never changed and she was grateful for its certainty.