Apple Blossom Time (21 page)

Tucked up in my own narrow little bed under the eaves, with an extra pillow and a hot-water bottle, I thought even shingles would be worth while, since it had got me home. I slept and slept.

*   *   *

The trouble with chickenpox is that you’re not actually ill for very long. You may have a face like a steamed pudding – and how long it had been since we’d tasted one of those, thick with sultanas, swimming in custard, the stuff of dreams – but you’re not ill, just itchy and irritable.

On the first day, I lay in bed and was pampered by Mother. She ran herself ragged for me and got very little gratitude for it. On the second day, I got up after breakfast in bed and loafed around, getting in everyone’s way and being thoroughly unpleasant. On the third day, Vee walked in the door.

‘Well, you look like a wet washing day, and no mistake,’ she greeted me.

She looked sleek as a pussycat, round in all the right places, her wild hair tamed under a pert hat. She wore an elegant, summer-weight tailormade, coral-pink, that must have cost whole barrowloads of coupons. Like many plump girls, she had beautiful ankles and they were set off by peep-toed wedges and nylons – real nylons. It was enough to make a girl’s mouth water!

It was so wonderful to see her. I burst into tears.

‘Dry up,’ she said, putting her arms around me. ‘I don’t look that bad, do I?’

‘Terrific.’ I blew my nose loudly. ‘You look simply terrific. Where on earth did you spring from?’

‘From your gran’s. She’s a card, isn’t she? I’m a married woman now, you know.’ She held out her left hand. Her wedding ring was broad enough to fill the gap between the knuckles. Her nails were filed and beautifully painted. ‘My Carlton was posted down here – the GI camp on the hill, you know – before D-Day and I thought, I’d better make the most of him before he goes, in case he doesn’t come back again. Then I remembered what you told me about your gran taking in lodgers, so here I am.’

‘I’m so pleased to see you,’ I said and my eyes began to water again. ‘Oh dear, what a drip I am. Sorry, I’m not usually like this.’

‘You’re tired out, I expect. Well, we all are, especially your mum, but having spots must be the last straw.’

‘And you’ll catch it too, now. Oh, dear.’

‘I’ve had it already and the sooner Jennifer gets these things over and done with, the better, I say.’

‘Jennifer?’

‘She’s down the vicarage playing with Pansy’s Jonathan. Eighteen months old and another one on the way.’ She patted her tummy. It didn’t yet have the teeniest bulge. ‘That’s what comes of making the most of Carlton before he went!’

We both giggled. It was so good to see her. I began to feel as though I might live, after all.

‘Jonathan’s a lovely little boy,’ Vee remarked. ‘And doesn’t he look the image of … just like his mum.’

I thought it had been my imagination. I had seen it only because I feared to – or wanted to – I hadn’t yet worked out which. But I knew by the way she blushed that Vee had seen the resemblance, too. Jonathan was beginning to look just like my dead husband.

I didn’t get well as quickly as I’d hoped. I wasn’t ill, but I just wasn’t getting any better, either. I couldn’t summon up the energy to do much more than sit in the sun and watch the children playing in the sandpit that Tom had made for them.

Jennifer, though younger, was bigger and more boisterous. She was a bouncy, fizzy replica of her mother, though Vee swore she was the image of Carlton. ‘She’s got his toes, bless her,’ she said, with a soppy expression on her face.

Jonathan was small and slight, but with a determined manner that meant he more often got his own way than the bigger girl. Sometimes I saw in him the young-old puckish look of Mr Millport, who had welcomed his grandson with love and understanding that was truly Christian. Sometimes he looked so like James, I couldn’t bear to watch him. I felt bitterly betrayed.

If Mrs Kenton ever knew that Jonathan existed, if she had the smallest suspicion – no matter on what slender evidence – that James had had a son, nothing would keep her away.

Did Jonathan have a right to be introduced to two more grandparents? Would they make him happier? Did Pansy really need an ersatz mother-in-law? Did I have any justification to meddle? Maybe he wasn’t James’s son, after all, and the resemblance was only the one that all healthy, brown-haired young men have to each other. Maybe I saw the resemblance because it was what I feared – or wanted. Round and round like a wasp in a bottle. What was for the best? I sat in the sun and hesitated and nursed my sense of loss.

They were so beautiful, not because they were special, but simply because they were not special. Two ordinary toddlers, with sticky mouths and sand in their hair. They made me believe that the world might return to normal, one day.

The lanes were dusty green and quiet again. The skies were dusty blue and silent. The instruments of war had moved on and left Ansty Parva as peaceful as it had been before they came. When I closed my eyes, I could almost believe that nothing had happened at all. I could believe that Pansy was untouched and James was an unknown young man, something in the City, and I wasn’t being tormented by a disturbed woman and Martin wasn’t fighting his way through Normandy with a camera instead of a gun. But then the children would yell and I’d open my eyes again.

We three sat in the sun, lazy as cats, and pretended that we were busy watching the children. Most of my scabs dried over and began to drop off, leaving red marks that would fade in time, though they were hideous at the moment. I’d tried so hard not to scratch, but I was left with a little, pitted scar just below the hairline and another above my left eyebrow.

‘Could be worse,’ said Vee. She turned my face to the sun, pushed back my hair and stared intently. ‘A blind man running for his life wouldn’t notice them.’

‘Think about all those Elizabethan ladies, slapping white lead on their faces to cover the pox holes. It killed them,’ said Pansy, comfortingly. ‘How odd to think that our children will grow up in a new Elizabethan age. Will it be another golden age, do you imagine? Will there be fine new houses to replace the bombed slums, and clean streets and fresh air and good food for everyone?’

‘Fat chance!’ laughed Vee.

‘Or do you think that in another twenty-five years Jennifer and Jonathan and all their friends will be fighting for their lives?’

Pansy’s eyes rested on her son with an avidity that was almost frightening.

‘God forbid,’ I said with a shudder.

‘Well, if they are, we will be again, too,’ Vee reminded us. ‘So we’d better make sure we finish the job properly, this time round. We might not get another chance.’

*   *   *

‘The trouble with living in the country,’ Vee announced a day or two later, ‘is that it’s too nice. I’m getting soft. There’s nothing to bite on, if you know what I mean.’

‘If you mean that it’s more fun living in London and waiting for a doodlebug to drop on your head,’ Pansy answered, ‘then I don’t believe you.’

‘Don’t be daft. I’m a lady in waiting now, don’t forget. Bumps in the night are bad for my system. But I think I’m going to look around for a little job until Carlton comes back, just a few hours a week, maybe, if there’s such a thing in the back of beyond. I’ve had enough of being Laura’s gran’s PG. I know she looks down on me—’

‘Vee, she doesn’t,’ I protested, horrified that Vee might think it, but knowing it was probably true. ‘What has she said to upset you?’

‘Nothing, nothing … it’s just that – you know – all those pictures and medals and weapons and things, they weigh you down in the end. Those whiskery old men look down from the walls and say, “Who do you think you are, parading up and down my corridors, like Lady Muck? You may pay for your keep, but you’ll never belong.” Snooty old buggers. I’m sorry, Laura, but there it is.’

‘Don’t go, Vee, please,’ pleaded Pansy, her pale eyes troubled. ‘It’s been so lovely, having you here.’

‘If Grandmother’s been rude to you, I apologize,’ I said, stiffly. ‘She doesn’t mean half what she says. It’s just her way. I’m used to it and it upsets me pretty often, too.’

‘It’s not just that. I don’t feel useful enough, that’s all. You’re going back to playing soldiers, any minute now. Pansy practically runs her dad’s parish for him, these days. Grace is driving fuel convoys in France. There’s nothing for me to do. No GIs to make coffee and doughnuts for any more. No Carlton to keep happy. I feel like a … a peapod, sitting in the sun, getting slowly bigger and bigger, until one day … pop!’

She blew her cheeks up and made a disgusting noise. She looked so funny. ‘Pop!’ shouted Jennifer and blew a volley of raspberries, even better than her mother’s. We all started to laugh.

‘If it’s a job you want, come and watch me sort out the attic,’ I suggested. ‘Grandmother’s got another bee in her bonnet since the doodlebugs began. I tell her they haven’t the fuel to get this far, but she’s determined. She thinks that all that rubbish in the roof is like living with an incendiary device on top of our heads, just waiting to go off. One spark and…! Says she read in a leaflet that only two inches of sand spread on the attic floor will save her from being fried in her bed. She seems to think that Goering’s got Ansty Parva marked on his list for the next big raid.’

‘You’ll never sort all that out on your own,’ Pansy said. ‘It’d take a regiment.’

‘I promised her I’d take a look, anyway, and tell her what I thought. I just haven’t had the energy until now. There’s no saying what’s stacked away. I haven’t been up there in years.’

*   *   *

Vee looked along the length of the house, unbroken space, dim as under water. ‘Dust of ages, spread for me…’ she warbled, in a choirboy’s treble. ‘I think I’d better tell you, straight off, that if there’s bats up here, you won’t see me for dust!’

A row of bull’s-eye windows, higher than our heads, lit the cobwebs that festooned their frames, lit the roofline and left the floor in shadow. A blocked gutter or a cracked downpipe, most likely both, had left a mildewed stain down one wall. White fungal threads crept along the floorboards, fanning out from the stain. Ivy had burrowed under the tiles and marched across the roof, sunless and bleached, a ghost tree.

We weren’t able to raise our voices above a whisper.

‘Laura – you can’t,’ said Pansy. ‘It hasn’t been touched for generations.’

‘Spread two inches of sand on these boards and it’ll end up in the cellar, quick as you like,’ Vee commented, hacking at the floor with a heel.

‘I can tell Grandmother that she’s absolutely right – if Goering sends a thousand-bomber raid this way, we’ve had it! She’ll be quite pleased, really. She always likes to be right. And if the bombers don’t get us, the dry rot will. But there’s nothing we can do about it, so let’s go. It’s stifling here under the tiles.’

‘Oh, Laura, wait. Look at this.’ Pansy stroked the mane of the rocking horse as though she’d found a real pony stabled under the roof. He was a spirited dapple grey, with a rolling brown glass eye – only one – the tip missing from his right ear and a bandage tied round one fetlock. His red leather saddle was crumbling round the edges, pitted with worm. ‘He’s so beautiful. You don’t suppose … D’you think…?’

‘You can have him and welcome. His name’s Donald. But I’m afraid he’ll probably fall apart between here and the vicarage.’

‘No, he won’t. I’ll make sure of that.’

‘I had all new for Jennifer, nothing but the best,’ Vee told us as she ran a distasteful finger over the scarred body and, coming from anyone else, the remark would have infuriated me. ‘You ought to get the Sally Ann in to clear this lot.
My
gran wouldn’t give it house room.’

Pansy looked so embarrassed at having been caught coveting someone else’s property. She seemed to class my grandfather’s old rocking horse along with her neighbour’s ox, ass, maidservant and wife.

‘That’s all very well for some,’ I remarked crisply. ‘We can’t all marry Texan millionaires. I sometimes wonder if you’ve forgotten what it’s like out here in the real world, Vee.’

But she wasn’t listening. ‘Here, just look at this,’ she exclaimed. ‘I can’t believe women were ever so tiny. She only comes up to my shoulder. Isn’t she cute?’

A dressmaker’s dummy wearing a half-finished crinoline stood in a corner, a silent watcher. The colours of the gown had faded along one side, but towards the back they still blazed, arsenic green and royal purple plaid, fit for a visit to Balmoral. A veil of cobwebs, frail as old lace, hung around her shoulders.

Vee’s interest was caught by what she had thought was a pile of dirty old jumble. She began ferreting around in a corner. ‘This is better than all those stuffy old warriors downstairs. Let’s see what else we can find.’

‘Vee, be careful,’ I warned. ‘I don’t know how safe the floor is.’

‘Nonsense, safe as houses. Give us a hand with this.’

The trunk was full of architect’s plans. ‘Look, it’s here, it’s Ansty House,’ I said, holding up a linen page to catch the poor light. The ink was dimmed to sepia, the drawings laid out with a nib no stouter than a whisker. ‘Here’s the front – the steps and the portico – and here we are, behind this row of round windows at the top.’

‘Then what’s this lump at the top?’ asked Pansy.

‘It’s some sort of dome. Isn’t it hideous? We must have run out of money before it could be built. Just as well, really.’

The plans weren’t interesting enough for Vee. She gave them a quick glance. ‘Fancy that,’ she said and then went on to something else.

There were chewed dog baskets and broken dog leads, thongless hunting crops and a hunting bowler smashed on one side – I wondered what had happened to the head inside it. There were alphabet bricks, but only nineteen of them, and headless dolls like guillotine victims. There was a cradle riddled with woodworm and a bicycle with pedals directly cranking the front wheel. There were stringless racquets and split polo sticks and handleless mallets. There were tea chests full of nameless horrors – moths, maggots, mildew, mice, shredded paper, chewed fabric. There were corpses of spiders, spindly husks. Where had all the living ones gone?