Homeland (27 page)

‘Go easy on the coal,’ she said. ‘I’m getting short.’

‘I’ll bring you some tomorrow. A sack or two, surplus to agricultural requirements.’

She pretended disapproval but she didn’t turn the offer down. ‘You’ll get me into trouble yet.’

‘Chance would be a fine thing.’

She rolled her eyes at the ancient joke. ‘So what’s been going on in the pub?’

‘Some tinkers brought in a couple of Polish lads and there was a bit of a ruckus.’

‘Not
your
Pole?’

‘Not likely,’ Billy declared. ‘I don’t let him near the pubs.’

‘What was it about, the fight?’

‘Who knows? But you should have heard them.’ Billy put on his yokel accent, the deep Somerset burr he had been so careful to avoid in his youth. ‘“Don’t care where
you be coming from, there ain’t no call for this ’ere foreign talk.” ’

‘They didn’t say that,’ Annie protested, stifling a laugh.

Billy put on a look of injured innocence, the honest witness unfairly challenged. ‘I swear! Then one of the Poles answered by falling down dead drunk. And then someone pipes up:
“This be a shocking sight! Us good Zomerzet folk don’t ’old with drunkenness, not in these ’ere parts.” ’

Annie laughed openly then. She had a beautiful laugh, a soft chuckle that finished on a lingering note, and a way of throwing her head back that made him imagine her in a state of ecstasy.

Having given the fire a last prod, Billy marched into the kitchen and made the tea. Following him, Annie looked surprised when she saw the tray he had prepared, complete with teapot, cups, milk
jug and sugar bowl.

‘My goodness,’ she murmured. ‘All organised then.’

He carried the tray into the sitting room and put it on a table. Leaving her to pour because that was women’s work, he sat down to one side of the fireplace. It was only the second time
he’d got to sit in this room. Usually when he dropped by, Annie kept him standing in the ice-box of a kitchen. In his more sanguine moments he liked to think it was because she didn’t
trust herself to be in a warm room with him, but in more realistic mood he knew she was sending him a message, that he would be mistaken to think she was going to be easy game. He hadn’t
minded her holding out; it had added to the anticipation. He minded now, though, because time was running out.

She put his cup down beside him and took her place on the opposite side of the hearth. Sitting there by the fire drinking tea with the rain rushing and gurgling in the gutters outside, they
might have been Darby and Joan. The absurdity of the thought made him laugh.

She raised her eyebrows questioningly.

‘Nothing,’ he said.

‘It’s never nothing with you, Billy.’

‘You wouldn’t like it if I told you.’

‘In that case, I’m not asking.’

She settled further back in her chair and crossed her legs, and he noticed that she was wearing her best nylons and high heels.

‘So who were you expecting if it wasn’t me?’ he asked lightly.

‘No one. I thought my friend must have forgotten something, that’s all.’

‘Oh? What friend was that?’

She tilted her head sideways. ‘Just a friend.’

‘Bad friend? Good friend? Old friend?’

She shook her head. Her gaze, though tolerant, contained a hint of rebuke.

He put on his actory voice, which was his guard against being taken too seriously. Rounding his eyes like a film villain, he said in deep melodramatic tones, ‘Not a gentleman caller, we
trust?’

‘You should have been on the stage, Billy.’

‘Well?’

She gave him a look of patience wearing thin.

‘I could be jealous.’

‘But you’d have no right to be, would you? Even supposing there was something to be jealous about.’

He gave a forced laugh. ‘Well, that’s put me in my place, hasn’t it? Good and proper.’

‘Come off it, Billy, you’re not staying, are you? You made that plain from the start. So there was never going to be any question of us – well, getting serious.’

‘But if I
was
staying? What would you say then?’

‘I haven’t given it any thought.’

‘Of course you have. You’ve thought about it all the time.’

She laughed in protest and disbelief. ‘Billy, this may come as a shock, but I’ve got a lot better ways of spending my time than thinking about
you
.’

‘But what we had – it’s still there,’ he insisted. ‘You can’t pretend it isn’t.’

She said in an altogether more serious tone, ‘Things are never that simple, are they?’

‘Well, it’s either there or it isn’t. And if you won’t admit it—’ Hearing the childishness in his voice, he gave a slow offhand shrug. ‘Well, watch it
– I might just stay after all. I might just stay because of you.’ The words were out before he realised it, and the part of him that feared entanglement wished them unspoken.

‘In that case, you mustn’t think of changing your mind,’ she said easily. ‘I’m no reason for you to stay, Billy.’

‘Oh? So you’re suddenly the best judge of that, are you?’

‘You said there were no opportunities for you here.’

He stared at her, momentarily silenced by her practicality.

Annie continued in the same voice of reason, ‘If a man’s disappointed in his work then no woman’s ever going to make up for it, is she? And she’d be a fool to
try.’

His anger came suddenly, with a shiver of heat. He jumped to his feet and stood over her. ‘You don’t need anyone, is that it?’

‘I didn’t say that.’

‘Well, you could have fooled me.’

‘I have a child to think of, Billy. I have to keep a roof over my head. What I need comes after, by a long way.’

Reaching down, he grasped her hands and hauled her to her feet. She was tall for a woman and in her high heels her eyes weren’t so very far below his. They shone dark and clear, and gazed
at him unwaveringly.

‘It’s still there,’ he said. ‘You bloody well know it is.’ He put his hands on her upper arms and gripped them softly.

Her mouth tasted sweet and salty. For the first second or two the kiss felt strange in a way he couldn’t define, a result of his own nervousness perhaps, but then the desire pierced him
like heat, and her body was the only body he had ever wanted.

She pushed him away with both hands. ‘No, Billy.’

‘Come on,’ he whispered.

‘No.’ She moved away into the middle of the room.

He stared at her. For a moment he wasn’t sure whether he loved or hated her.

‘Step out with me on Saturday,’ he said.

She shook her head gently, but her eyes told a very different story.

‘Come on. All or nothing.’

Despite herself, she gave a short laugh.

‘What have you got to lose?’ he pressed.

‘Did you say all or nothing?’

‘Yes.’

‘It’ll be nothing, Billy.’

‘I’ll pick you up at six.’

She led the way to the door and repeated, ‘It’ll be nothing.’

‘I’ll take the risk.’

He kissed her on the lips before she had the chance to object, and walked quickly away.

Only when he reached the gate did he realise he’d left his sou’wester on a peg in the hall. By the time he got to Crick Farm the rain had found its way inside his collar and was
trickling coldly down the back of his neck.

A
VIOLENT POUNDING
startled Wladyslaw out of sleep, and for an instant he was back in the dark verminous hut in Archangel with bad news beating at the
door.

‘Out of your pit, Johnnie!’ The door thundered and rattled. ‘Rise and shine!’

‘OK, OK.’

Wladyslaw dressed hurriedly by the light of a candle and stumbled outside, only to stop and stare at the new world that had appeared while he slept. The rain had vanished, leaving a dome of
satin that arched high overhead, sharp and clear and immense with stars. Ahead, he could make out the hard black rim of the hills on the far side of the moor, and away to the left some hills he had
never seen before, distant and attenuated, a low rippled line against the shimmer of the frosty sky; while somewhere in the darkness in between a solitary pinprick of light glimmered and faltered
like a star fallen from grace. On the moor, he fancied he could make out the dark metallic sheen of flood water, and for a while he thought he could hear it too, a body of wetness gently stirring
and trembling, a sound so faint that it seemed to come to him, when it came at all, as a faint vibration. If it were a large expanse of water, though, it was a strange one, for there were no stars
reflected in it, no haze of stardust. And now that he listened more carefully, the faint indecipherable sounds seemed to come from all around him: a settling of water deeper into the earth, a faint
popping of escaping air, an oozing and shifting and general sorting of wet from dry.

He turned his face up to the stars, which were also the stars of Poland, and, basking in their pallid gaze, lifted his arms high and murmured, ‘Thank you,’ though he couldn’t
have said quite what he was thankful for, the end of the rain or the glories of the night.

In the kitchen Billy was already pulling on his jacket. Wladyslaw knew better than to speak or keep him waiting. Forgoing his usual cup of tea, he grabbed a slice of bread and a spoonful of jam,
and followed Billy up to the shed, where by lamplight they began to load withies onto a trailer. Billy issued no instructions, merely picked up two bundles from the stacks, loaded them onto the
flatbed of the trailer, and made no comment when Wladyslaw followed suit. These silences were a feature of Billy’s mornings, as though sleep oppressed him and he needed time to regain his
equilibrium. Occasionally he showed open irritation, and then Wladyslaw could never make out if he were the cause of this exasperation or merely the target of it; sometimes it seemed to Wladyslaw
that Billy barely knew himself.

Today, however, Billy was in a different kind of mood altogether, of preoccupation. When a knot slipped and a bundle of withies unravelled in Wladyslaw’s arms, it took Billy a full five
seconds to grunt, ‘Watch what you’re doing.’ For some time afterwards he stared into the middle distance, then looked back vaguely, as though he had lost track of time. He
didn’t speak again for twenty minutes, and then it was to complain mildly, ‘No hope of you getting this lot up to the village on your own, I don’t suppose.’

The trailer was large and heavy; the idea of one man pulling it was ludicrous. Wladyslaw judged it safest not to reply.

‘Well?’

‘Give me a horse and I take them anywhere, no trouble.’

Billy looked at him as if he were mad. ‘Who said anything about a bloody
horse
? I meant when the bloody tractor arrives.’

‘A tractor? OK. You tell me what to do, Billy, and I do it.’

With a sigh of forbearance, Billy grumbled, ‘Forget it . . . By the time I explain, I might as well do it myself.’

As Wladyslaw swung away to gather another load, he caught the words: ‘Bloody useless.’

Wladyslaw paused. ‘You have problem with my work, Billy?’

‘Huh?’

‘You are not happy with my work?’

Another sigh, and Billy said grudgingly, ‘It’s all right – so far as it goes.’

‘Tell me what I do wrong.’

‘Listen, Johnnie, you can’t help being bloody useless, all right? It’d take a year to teach you the ropes, and then you wouldn’t know the half of it.’ Billy stared
unhappily at the stripping machine, gleaming silently in the lamplight. He had got the contraption to run with the sweet rattle of well-tended machinery, but it was no use without boiled and
softened withies to feed into its jaws, and the ancient boiler in the apple orchard had failed two days ago. Wladyslaw hadn’t gathered the exact nature of the defect – a crack in the
tank, he thought – but it was a problem that Billy with all his skills had been unable to fix. Now Billy was glaring at the stripping machine as though it were the embodiment of everything
that had been sent to frustrate him.

‘The boiler cannot be repaired?’ Wladyslaw asked mildly.

‘Oh, it can be repaired,’ Billy muttered. ‘But there’s not much bloody point, is there?’

Not knowing what he was talking about, knowing better than to ask, Wladyslaw returned to the loading. When the trailer could take no more, they lashed the bundles down with a long rope which
they threw lightly back and forth over the top like seasoned wagoners.

When they broke for a cigarette, Wladyslaw strolled out into the yard to look around him again. The stars had faded before the huge glow of light spreading from the east. It was the time just
before sunrise when the land is drained of colour and definition. A low mist lay tight on the moor in a grey blur that blended imperceptibly into the darker grey of the hills. Here and there its
surface was punctured by willow trees, like islets scattered over a shallow sea. By the time Wladyslaw had finished his cigarette, the first sliver of sun had crept over the eastern hills, turning
the mist a milky yellow, making golden skeletons of the trees. Everything was still, except for a flight of geese skimming low over the mist, their cries like distant trumpet calls.

The tractor arrived in a roar, driven by a man who stared at Wladyslaw and did not stop staring until the trailer was hitched and, with Billy and Wladyslaw hanging precariously to the
trailer’s sides, they started on their way. The tractor howled and belched up the lane, the exhaust pumping out hot bursts of fumes. At one point the hedgerow closed in, and brambles whipped
at Wladyslaw’s legs and reached out to claw his jacket. The tractor slowed and changed gear to lumber through a deep pothole, then just as it began to gather speed it slowed once more.
Wladyslaw couldn’t see why until he glanced back and saw a woman step clear of the hedgerow into which she had pressed herself and her bicycle to let them pass. It was Stella. His whoop was
drowned out by the engine, so he waved, a manoeuvre which involved taking one hand off the iron post that was his only support and swinging out at an angle, like a trapeze artist taking a bow.
Spotting him, Stella waved back, brightly at first, then with what he took to be disappointment. Daring to hope that she had been on her way to see him, he jumped without thinking, and certainly
without looking, and found himself dropping towards a ditch partially covered by brambles. He landed with one foot on the edge of the track, the other in the bottom of the ditch, and, allowing his
bad leg to crumple under him, fell sideways into the hedgerow, which made for a thorny but safe landing.