Muddy Boots and Silk Stockings (10 page)

‘Should she not be?’ he asked. He looked confused. Almost hurt. ‘I ask her for permission to draw her. Just her head, you see, not…’ he met Alice’s eyes carefully. ‘Not from the life,’ he said. ‘Not nude.’

‘No!’ said Alice and found herself flushing slightly at the suggestion that she had misjudged his intentions towards Annie. ‘Of course not! And of course she may. Pose for you, I mean. If she chooses to.’

‘Chooses?’ he asked.

‘If she wants to. But…’

‘But?’ he echoed. Alice paused and tried to simplify her words to him. To avoid hurting or confusing him.

‘You see, Andreis, it is difficult for me. I am responsible for these girls. Some of them are very young. Annie – Hannah-Maria – is barely eighteen. They are beyond the supervision of their parents so I must be…’ She was going to say careful but Andreis interrupted.

‘Their
Mutta
… Their mother, I mean to say. Yes, I understand. So, if I were to ask your permission to make a painting of your “daughter”, of Hannah-Maria, would you permit this? If she chooses? She has, you see, the perfect face of the Jewess. The shape of her eyes and of her head, the line of her jaw, the flare of her nostrils. The long neck. I wish to use this Jewishness. When my painting is complete you will understand why. Will you allow me?’

Alice gave her permission and afterwards defended her decision to Margery Brewster and Roger Bayliss, both of whom accepted her judgement without much enthusiasm.

‘It’s not our business to chaperone them during their free time,’ Roger Bayliss said, looking at Alice’s dark blonde hair and fine, grey eyes and feeling that she would have been his choice were he to wish to commit to canvas any of the women at Lower Post Stone Farm.

‘As long as she’s in by ten,’ had been Margery’s only comment, delivered with an indifferent shrug as she gave Alice several more balls of leftover wool for Mabel’s scarf.

So Annie spent her Saturday afternoons sitting on a bale of straw in the small loft. On the first occasion the intensity of Andreis’s scrutiny embarrassed her and she attempted to keep up a flow of light conversation with him, feeling that silence was somehow impolite. But soon she came to understand that he liked the silences that formed between them, stretching sometimes into whole hours in which she became aware of herself not as herself but as an object, the lines and contours of which were necessary to Andreis’s work, to the small, meticulous drawings which were later to become part of a larger, intricate composition. It was an entire race, he explained, that was to be depicted in his new work and shown to be threatened, scattered, shackled and herded into railway wagons. For this much Andreis knew, though not the horror of the destination of these involuntary travellers. Bad enough that they were forced from their homes and separated from their families and from the lives they had, until the Nazi invasion, been blamelessly living.

After an hour he would suddenly apologise for keeping Annie so long without a break. If she was cold he would invite her to come close to the stove on which his kettle simmered. He made tea for her and they sat, smiling, while Annie eased her stiff shoulders and Andreis wrapped cold fingers round his enamel mug. Not until the light failed did he let her go and then he thanked her, taking her hand, bowing formally over it and kissing it lightly.

On the second occasion Annie had run quickly through the dusk, across the yard and into the noisy, warm farmhouse. Tonight there was a hop in a neighbouring village. Fred was going to drive the girls over and collect them at eleven o’clock which, on this occasion, was to be curfew hour. Before his arrival there would be the usual fight for hot water for baths and hair-washing. All the girls except Hester were going to the dance. She sat on her bed watching Annie slide a printed rayon frock over her head, carefully leaving undisturbed the curlers in her hair.

‘You should come, Hes!’ But Hester shook her head as though refusing the apple from the serpent. ‘Ain’t no harm in it!’ Annie persisted. ‘Just a bunch of local lads barely out of short pants most likely!’

‘Marion said there’d be soldiers,’ said Hester nervously. ‘American GIs and that.’

‘So what? They won’t eat you! You can borrow one of my frocks if you want. The blue one’d suit you. C’mon! Dare you! You don’t have to dance. You’d make a lovely wallflower!’ But Hester had resisted temptation and, after the girls had clattered through the cross-passage and out into the cold night in response to Fred’s blast on the truck horn, she had wandered into the kitchen where Edward-John seized upon her as a suitable opponent in a game of Snap.

‘But it’s cards!’ Hester said in alarm and it took Alice half an hour to convince her of the innocence of the game. Edward-John taught her the rules and soon she was shouting
‘Snap!’ and triumphantly seizing her matchstick winnings, her pale face flushed with excitement while Alice, using the flat-iron, smoothed her son’s school shirt, ready for Monday.

Hester’s parents and most of her immediate relations were, the girls had discovered, members of a small, religious sect which was an offshoot of the better known Plymouth Brethren. Hester and her brother Ezekial had been reared to unquestioningly obey their father whose role as head of the East Cornish Church of the Pentecostal Brothers, as they called themselves, had encouraged a tendency in him to bully and dictate. Their mother, too, unquestioningly obeyed him. According to his lights, women and daughters were no more than chattels whose inclination to sin must at all times be curbed, while sons, until they had proved themselves worthy, required discipline and protection from corruption in a wicked world. His daughter’s compulsory contribution to the war effort had been limited, not only by her short and hardly heeded education but by her timid personality, to a choice between ammunition factory and Land Army. Her father had considered that the second occupation would put his daughter in less jeopardy than the first. Soon after he had made this decision on her behalf he learnt that land girls had a mixed reputation and that, despite the discipline imposed by hostel wardens, many were straying from the path of righteousness. He cautioned his daughter and stressed the power of temptation and how, for the sake of her immortal soul, she must keep herself separate from these
women who, if not quite fallen, were heading in the general direction of damnation and would almost certainly try to drag Hester with them. Consequently, when she first arrived at Lower Post Stone Farm, Hester had regarded everyone with deep suspicion, avoiding eye contact and restricting communication, whenever possible, to a simple yes or no. Of Mrs Brewster she was plainly terrified. She kept so effectively out of Roger Bayliss’s way that he was barely conscious of her existence. She avoided Ferdie Vallance’s randy eye and treated Alice with the deference with which she had faced her school teachers, saying ‘Yes, miss,’ or ‘No, miss,’ whenever she was directly addressed.

Although some of the girls ignored Hester and others were not above throwing the odd spiteful remark at her, several, including Annie, her room-mate, were kind, drawing her into their conversation, encouraging her to experiment with her appearance and inviting her to join them on various outings. This she stoutly resisted but on the evening of the hop, after Edward-John had been sent to bed and she had filled her hot-water bottle and climbed the stairs to the upper floor where the doors stood open to empty bedrooms chaotic with perfumed preparation for the girls’ night out, she felt isolated and abandoned. She lit the lamp in the room she shared with Annie and sat down on her bed. The wardrobe was open and the frock Annie had offered to lend her was on its hanger, lamp-light illuminating its soft, blue folds. Hester had never, in all her short life,
worn any colour but grey, black or dull brown. She looked at the photograph of her father, his hard face flanked by her brother Zeke on one side and their timorous mother on the other. Perhaps because she had spent the evening in the easy company of Edward-John and Alice, because she had laughed and shouted with excitement over the game of Snap, or because the obvious influence of the girls was, for once, not pressuring her, she felt calm and faintly inquisitive. What, she wondered, would she look like in blue? With her hair loose around her shoulders instead of hauled back into a bun? With lipstick on her mouth and mascara on her lashes? It didn’t mean that she would ever dress in blue, or paint her face, or loosen her hair but should she not be allowed at least to experience and identify the sins she was resisting? She undressed, pulling her grey jumper up over her head and stepping out of the long black skirt which her mother had sewn by hand. Then, instead of putting on her nightdress, she slid her arms into the sleeves of Annie’s blue frock. She felt the silky texture of it slide down, settling round her waist and ending at her knees. She pulled the net from her bun and shook out her hair, reached for Annie’s lipstick and, spreading it on her mouth, worked her lips together as she had watched Annie do it. Then she turned to the long mirror which was set into the door of the shared wardrobe. A stranger faced her. Transfixed by the image in the looking glass, she failed to hear either the arrival of the truck or the sound of the girls who, later than they should have been,
stealthily re-entered the farmhouse, slipping off their
high-heeled
shoes and coming silently up the stairs.

‘Hey!’ said Annie, taking in at a glance Hester’s willowy figure, her narrow waist nipped in by the wide belt, her small breasts rounding out the silky bodice, her mass of auburn hair, rouged mouth and gently accentuated eyes. ‘Hey, Hester!’ But the eyes, Annie saw at once, were brimming. Tears were washing the mascara down Hester’s white cheeks. She was looking at the photograph of her father as though half hypnotised.

‘I shouldn’t have!’ she gulped reaching for cotton wool and scrubbing the colour from her mouth, her eyes still on her father’s. ‘I’ll go to hell, I will!’

Annie soothed and calmed, pleaded and cajoled but Hester’s distress continued until she had stripped off her borrowed finery, pulled her flannelette nightdress over her head, plunged under the covers of her bed and buried her head in her pillow. ‘He’s looking!’ she moaned. ‘He can see!’

‘If you wasn’t so bloomin’ pathetic, Hester Tucker, it’d be funny!’ Annie said. ‘But as it is, you make me sick!’ Hester, tear-streaked, sat up and stared at Annie. ‘You tried on me frock, that’s all! You put on lipstick and brushed out your hair! What if he did see? It’s not a crime!’ But Hester’s eyes kept straying back to the photograph. ‘If it’s him that’s bothering you he’s easily dealt with!’ Annie said and she picked up the photograph and shut it firmly into a drawer in the dressing table. Then, because she’d had several
shandies at the hop and because Hester’s face, now that her father’s image had vanished from sight, was such a picture of confused relief, Annie started to laugh and, once started, couldn’t stop. The thud of Marion’s fist on the partition added to her amusement and Hester, her delicate nerves stretched and sensitised by various emotions, found her weeping dissolving into a slightly hysterical giggling. The more Marion beat upon the wall the funnier it all seemed and both Annie and Hester were soon speechless and choking with laughter. It was Alice, coming to check that all the girls were accounted for and that the outer doors were locked for the night, who finally quietened them.

That night began an accelerating change in Hester. Instead of the lowered head and evasive eyes, the girls encountered shy smiles and open curiosity on womanly matters. If Hester had been previously equipped with the facts of life by her mother and the elders of her church, they were different facts and a different life from those with which the rest of the girls at Lower Post Stone Farm were familiar.

‘I don’t reckon she knows which hole is which or what for!’ Winnie had sniggered after one frank and open discussion. Little by little Hester’s horizons widened. One Saturday afternoon she went with Annie into Exeter and returned without her bun. The soft, reddish hair, released from restriction, floated round her face like a pale gold cloud.

‘It weren’t meant to go like this!’ she beamed helplessly at Alice. ‘It did it by its own self, soon as it were cut! D’you like it, miss?’ Alice said she did and it was true. Hester, despite the changes to her appearance, for a while at least, retained the sweet timidity that set her slightly apart from the coarseness of Marion and Winnie, the hardness of Gwennan and even the assured self-satisfaction of Georgina’s
well-groomed
attractiveness and the dark intensity of Annie’s Jewish beauty. But she still would not go out with the girls, blushed when they teased her and trailed round the kitchen while Alice, alone while Rose had her day off, cleared Saturdays’s high tea from the kitchen table.

‘I’ll wash the dishes, Missus Todd… I’ll help peel the tatties for Sunday dinner…’ In return for this assistance Alice found herself endlessly plied with questions.

‘Do you go to church, miss?’

‘Sometimes.’

‘There’s some as say ’tis a sin not to go regular.’

‘You must learn to live and let live. It says so in the Bible.’

‘Do it? I never heard Father say that.’

Early each Sunday morning a group of Pentecostal Brothers collected Hester in a horse-drawn wagon and bore her off with them for several hours of prayer and
hymn-singing
in the barn of a local dairyman who embraced their particular faith. On the Sunday after her visit to the barber’s Hester had managed to confine her hair under her church hat but, back at the farm at dinnertime, told Alice and the
girls that the wind had caught the hat and carried it off, bowling it down the lane and how the brethren had stared at her as she retrieved it and stuffed her hair back out of sight.

‘Bugger them!’ Marion suggested.

‘But they could see as it’s cut!’ Hester wailed, passing a hand ineffectively over her drifting halo.

‘So?’ said Annie, her mouth full.

‘So I might be damned!’

‘Damned?’

‘Cutting hair is a sin!’ Hester whimpered. The girls groaned unsympathetically and the conversation moved on.