Coming Home (148 page)

Judith said, ‘Don't go.’

Loveday looked a bit taken aback. ‘I have to.’

‘Five minutes. I have something to tell you.’

‘What?’

‘You promise you'll listen, and not interrupt, and hear me out?’

‘All right.’ Loveday hitched herself up onto the table, and sat there, shoulders hunched and trousered legs dangling. ‘Fire away.’

‘It's about Gus.’

Loveday froze. In the draughty, slate-floored scullery, the only sound was the humming of the refrigerator and the slow dripping of one of the brass taps. Drip. Drip. The beads of water fell into the clay sink.

‘What about Gus?’

Judith told her.

‘…so then he said it was time he went back to the hospital ship, and we got a taxi for him and said goodbye. And he went. End of story.’

Loveday had kept her word. Had made no comment and asked no questions. She simply sat there, motionless as a statue, and listened. Now, she still said nothing.

‘I…I wrote to him on the troop-ship and posted it in Gib. But he's not replied.’

Loveday said, ‘Is he all right?’

‘I don't know. He looked amazing, considering all he'd gone through. Thin, but then he was never very fat. And a bit worn.’

‘Why didn't he let us
know
…?’

‘I've explained. He couldn't. There was only one letter and that was to his parents. They knew nothing about you, and Diana, and the Colonel. Even if they'd got the letter, they wouldn't have known to pass on the news.’

‘I was so certain he was dead.’

‘I know, Loveday.’

‘It was like being certain with every bone of my body. A sort of emptiness. A void.’

‘You mustn't blame yourself.’

‘What will happen to him?’

‘He'll be all right. Scottish regiments are notoriously clanny. Like family. All his friends will rally around.’

Loveday said, ‘I don't want him to come here.’

‘I can understand that. To be truthful, I don't think Gus would be very keen on the idea either.’

‘Did he believe that I would wait for him?’

‘Yes.’ There wasn't any other answer.

‘Oh, God.’ Sitting under the cold overhead light of the scullery, Loveday's face was shadowed and pinched, her violet eyes empty of expression.

‘I'm sorry, Loveday.’

‘Not your fault. All my fault. Everything.’

‘I hated telling you.’

‘He's alive. I should be rejoicing. Not sitting here looking like a wet weekend.’

‘I didn't much like telling Gus, either. That you were married.’

‘That's different. That was the end of something. For Gus it's the beginning of the rest of his life. At least he's not broke, and possessionless. There's
something
for him to go back to.’

‘And you?’

‘Oh, I've got it all. Husband, son, the farm. Nancherrow. Mummy and Pops. Mary. Everything unchanged. Everything I always wanted.’ She fell silent for a moment, and then said, ‘Do Mummy and Pops know about Gus?’

‘No. I wanted to tell you first. If you like, I'll go and tell them now.’

‘No. I will. When you and Jess have gone. Before I go back to Lidgey. It's better that way.’ Once more she looked at her watch. ‘And then I simply must go home.’ She slipped off the table. ‘Walter will be champing for his tea.’

‘You're all right?’

‘Yes.’ Loveday thought about this, and then grinned, and the wicked, fearless, stubborn little girl she had once been was suddenly there again. ‘Yes. I'm fine.’

The next morning, Diana came to The Dower House.

A Monday. After breakfast, the little household had dispersed. Anna first, trudging down the hill to the Rosemullion Primary School, her satchel on her back, and a biscuit, for elevenses, in her pocket. Then Biddy had departed, because it was her day in Penzance, for the Red Cross. Jess, who had discovered the Hut in the course of some private explorations and fallen in love with its charm, its privacy and its smallness, had been supplied with brooms and dusters, and, in high excitement, had gone running down the garden to do a bit of cleaning.

Now, eleven o'clock and she still had not returned. Phyllis was pegging out the weekly lines of washing, and Judith, in the kitchen, made soup. The carcass of yesterday's chicken had been boiled up for stock, and she was at the sink engaged in scraping vegetables, and peeling leeks and onions; she had always found making soup immensely therapeutic (a bit like building a compost heap), and the fragrance, as it cooked, spiced with herbs from the garden, was as comforting as the smell of newly baked bread, or the hot scent of warm gingerbread.

Chopping carrots, she heard the car come up the hill, through the open gate, and draw up outside the front of the house. Expecting nobody in particular, she looked out of the window and saw Diana getting out of the battered little fishmonger's van, which had been bought, to conserve petrol, at the beginning of the war, and done yeoman service ever since.

Judith went through the scullery and out of the open back door. Diana was talking to Phyllis over the escallonia hedge that bordered the washing-green. She wore a narrow tweed skirt and a loose jacket, and carried a large, old-fashioned marketing basket on her arm.

‘Diana.’

Diana turned. ‘Oh, darling, not interrupting, am I? I've brought you some Nancherrow vegetables and fresh eggs.’ She came, in her elegant, polished shoes, across the gravel. ‘Thought you could use them, and I wanted to have a word.’

‘I'm in the kitchen. Come on in, and I'll make you a cup of coffee.’

She led the way through the back door. In the kitchen, Diana put the basket on the table, pulled out a chair and sat down. Judith took the kettle and went to fill it, and then set it down on the range.

‘Heavenly smell, darling.’

‘Soup. Do you mind if I go on chopping?’

‘Not a bit.’ She put up her hands to loosen the knot of the silk scarf, draped, so elegantly, about her slender throat. She said, ‘Loveday told us about Gus.’

‘Yes. She said she was going to.’

‘Was she upset when you told her?’

‘I think she was fairly shattered. But no tears.’

‘Darling, tears are for the dead, not the living.’

‘She said as much herself.’

‘It's a bit of a mess, isn't it?’

‘No. I don't think it's a mess. It's sad that she was so adamant that Gus had died, and it's sad that she didn't have the faith to wait for him to come home. But it's not a mess. It's just that they're not together. They can never be together. Loveday's made
her
life, and Gus will have to make a life of his own.’

‘From what Loveday told me, it sounds as though he's going to need a little help.’

‘He's going to be difficult to help, if he won't answer letters, and won't keep in touch.’

‘But he was such a friend of Edward's. For that reason alone, I feel we should all rally round. And he wrote such a dear letter when Edward was killed. And sent that sketch he'd done of Edward. It's Edgar's most precious possession. So much more telling than any photograph. It stands on Edgar's desk, so he looks at it every day of his life.’

‘I know. But it's not easy to rally round when Gus's home is at the other end of the country.’

‘He could come and stay. Do you think I could write and ask him to come and stay at Nancherrow?’

‘No. I don't think that would be a good idea at all. Later, perhaps. But not now.’

‘Because of Loveday?’

‘She doesn't want him here. And even if you asked him, I don't think he'd come. For the same reason.’

‘So what are we to
do
?’

‘I'll write again, in a little while, if only to get some sort of a response out of him. If I could get a reaction, we'd at least know where we stood. How he was faring. How he was settling down again.’

‘We were so fond of him, Edgar and I. I know he was with us for just a little time, but we became so fond of him…’ Her voice trailed away. She sighed.

‘Diana, don't brood over might-have-beens. It doesn't do any good, looking back, and saying
if only.
’

‘Do you blame me?’

‘Blame
you
?’

‘For letting her marry Walter?’

‘You could scarcely stop her. She was having Nathaniel.’

‘Nathaniel didn't matter. Nathaniel could have been born and lived at Nancherrow with us all quite happily. And if people talked, so what? I've never cared what people said.’

The kettle boiled. Judith spooned coffee into the jug and filled it, and set it, for a moment, on the back of the range.

‘But she wanted to marry Walter.’

‘Yes. And we didn't just
let
her; in a way, we encouraged her. Our baby. Edward was gone, and I couldn't face losing Loveday as well. Marrying Walter meant she stayed near us. And we'd always liked him, despite his lack of polish and rough ways. Edgar liked him because he was so good with the horses, and because he'd always been so caring of Loveday, keeping an eye on her on hunting days, and helping her when she started working on the farm. He was her friend. I've always thought that the most important thing, when you get married, is to marry a friend. Passionate love cools down after a time, but friendship lasts forever. I really believed they were right for each other.’

‘Is there any reason to suppose that they're not?’

Diana sighed. ‘No. Not really, I suppose. But she was only nineteen. Perhaps we should have been a little more firm, told her to wait…’

‘Diana, if you'd argued, she'd have just become more and more determined to get her own way…that's the way she's made. I tried to argue, that day in London, when she told me she was engaged, and I got my head bitten off for my pains.’

The coffee was ready. Judith poured two mugs and set one down in front of Diana. From upstairs there commenced a droning roar, a bit like an aeroplane coming in to land. Phyllis, having dealt with her laundry, was now engaged in Hoovering the landing.

Diana said, ‘I really thought it would work. It worked for me.’

‘I don't understand.’

‘Edgar was never my love, but he was always my friend. I knew him always, right through from when I was a little girl. He was a friend of my parents. I thought he was middle-aged. Ancient. He used to take me to the park, and we'd feed the ducks. And then the war started…the First War. And I was sixteen, and wildly in love with a young man I'd met at the Fourth of June, at Eton. He was in the Coldstream Guards, and he went off to France. And then he came home on leave. But of course he had to go back to France, and he was killed in the trenches. By now, I was seventeen. And I was pregnant.’

Diana's voice never changed. She said all these things, evoking God knew what memories, and continued to sound as inconsequential as though she were describing a new and ravishing hat.

‘Pregnant?’

‘Yes. Too careless, darling, but we weren't very streetwise in those days.’

‘What happened?’

‘Edgar happened. I couldn't tell my parents, so I told Edgar. And Edgar said that he was going to marry me, and that he would be the father of my little baby, and that I would never, ever, have to be worried or troubled for the rest of my life.’ Diana laughed. ‘And
that's
what happened.’