Muddy Boots and Silk Stockings (18 page)

‘Oh,’ Mabel said. ‘And are the squirrels at the nuts? And ’as the magpies gone quiet, Ferdie?’ She was wide-eyed in the face of this wisdom.

‘’Tis too early to say yet, my lover,’ Ferdie responded cleverly. ‘Ask me in a week or so and I’ll be able to tell for definite.’

In the meantime there was work to do. The harvester,
which Roger Bayliss shared with a neighbour, must be oiled and fired up. Sickles must be sharpened, carthorses shoed and wagon wheels checked. Drinking troughs, thick with the green slime that flourished in warm weather, had to be emptied and refilled with sweet water. The low, granite byre, up on the high pastures, known as The Tops, where the sheep flock spent the summer and which was used each year as a shelter at lambing time, had to be mucked out, the fouled and mouldering straw piled up outside and its earth floor swept bare, ready for the layer of fresh bedding on which next January’s lambs would be born. It was this job that, one hot afternoon, fell to Annie and Georgina.

It was noon when Georgina and Annie left the Bayliss farm. With their packed lunches stuffed into their dungaree pockets and long-handled shovels over their shoulders they set off. Ignoring the circuitous route of the track which wound its way up to The Tops, they struck directly uphill. It took almost an hour of hard climbing to reach the summit. Just below it, on the leeward side, they could see the
lichen-covered
slates which roofed the byre. Out of breath and sweating after the steep climb, they spread themselves on the wiry grass. When they had regained their breath, first Annie and then Georgina unwrapped and hungrily ate their sandwiches and drank the milky tea in Annie’s flask, saving Georgina’s for later.

‘Reckon we owe ourselves a kip,’ Annie said, settling back, closing her eyes against the sunlight and relaxing
her aching muscles. Soon her even breathing suggested to Georgina that she was already asleep.

Georgina lay on her stomach, elbows bent, chin in cupped hands, her eyes on the sweep of land dropping away to the east. To her left the foothills of Dartmoor blurred off into a blue haze. To her right there were distant glimpses of the sea.

The sheep which had lifted their heads and stared when the two girls had first arrived on The Tops, had resumed grazing, cropping their way down the slope towards the byre. Georgina, eyes narrowed against the strong light, saw one and then another of the sheep hesitate and then stand alert, heads lifted, ears focusing on some small sound that only they could hear, eyes fixed on the shadowy interior of the byre which was visible through a wide opening in the crumbling wall. Then the ewe nearest the byre turned suddenly and bolted away, followed immediately by the rest of the flock. Georgina sat up. Obviously something inside the byre had startled them. A fox perhaps. Or a sick sheep which had limped into the byre to die.

Georgina could never quite remember what it was that created the frisson of alarm that she experienced when, leaving Annie sleeping, she approached the byre. As she stood in the doorway, her eyes slowly adjusting to the dim interior, she knew for certain that something or someone was inside. There was a faint sound, a movement in the straw. Then a crouched shape solidified beside the dripping
water trough in the far corner. A lark, in the bright sunlight behind Georgina, sounded unusually loud as it began a noisy ascent. Then, for some inexplicable reason, against all logic and without any practical explanation, Georgina knew what the shape was. Who the shape was. And she spoke the name of the person she somehow knew was there. She heard herself say, ‘Christopher?’

He made a sound that was something between a sigh and a groan. Enough to confirm to her that she was right. He was there. She could see him now. He got slowly to his feet. He looked like a wild creature. His clothes were tattered and filthy. His hair was matted, tangling into his straggling beard. What was visible of his face was almost unrecognisably gaunt, the eyes sunken and huge. He stretched out a grimy hand, the nails broken and stained and he said, ‘I can’t do this any more,’ and then again, ‘I can’t do this any more!’ His knees buckled and he slid down the rough stones of the wall. She went over to him and knelt in front of him, unsure whether or not he knew who she was.

‘You’re all right now,’ she said. And then, ‘You’re all right. You don’t have to do this any more.’ She reached forward, took his hand and they sat, his one hand gripping both of hers. Then he said, ‘Georgie?… My God… It is! It’s you! Oh God, Georgie.’

That was when they heard the sound of the lorry labouring up the track from the farm. She felt his fingers tighten their grip. 

Annie, woken by the sound of the truck, was already on her feet as it came lurching over the crest of the hill. She stood, astonished, looking for Georgina. Calling her name.

There were four uniformed military policemen in the lorry. Two in the cab and the other two standing in the back, holding onto the roll-bar. They were all armed.

One of the less pleasant traits in some of Alice’s girls was the way they relished any misfortune that befell those whom they regarded as their superiors. The news that Margery Brewster’s car had broken down halfway across the ford and that she, making her way to safety, had slipped and sat down heavily in three feet of muddy river water, had kept Marion, Winnie and Gwennan amused for days and when Roger Bayliss’s hunter had stepped on his master’s foot there had been an ‘ah’ of disappointment when news arrived that no bones were broken. But that night, while, over supper, Annie gave her account of the arrest of Christopher Bayliss, the girls’ attention was more on Annie’s words than on the supper they were eating. Georgina’s plate of fish pie lay untouched and she sat staring into space as Annie described the events of the afternoon.

‘Like a tramp he looked! Some old coat, he had on, Lord knows where he got it… Filthy it was and his trousies—’

‘That boy,’ Rose interrupted, ‘used to look the bee’s knees in his uniform!’

‘Stiff with dirt, ’is clothes was!’ Annie went on, her
voice low. ‘And his hair all mussed and matted and his face looked…well, not like himself at all! Not like Christopher Bayliss looked!’ She glanced at Georgina, hoping that she would join in the telling of the story. But Georgina did not respond and didn’t appear to hear Rose when she said – quite gently for her – ‘Eat up your supper, Georgina, dear.’

‘Did he make a run for it then?’ asked Marion with her mouth full.

‘Dunno,’ Annie said. ‘I couldn’t see. The MPs wouldn’t let me go inside the byre.’

‘I saw,’ Georgina said. The girls turned and looked at her. ‘He didn’t run. He could barely stand. They hauled him onto his feet and they spun him round and shoved him against the wall and then they handcuffed him!’ Georgina’s chair scraped back across the slate floor and she stood up. ‘And this was a fighter pilot who’d done more ops than he should have done…and been burnt…and seen his friends blown apart…and…’ She stood gulping. ‘If you’d seen him! If you’d heard him!’ Then she turned suddenly and faced Alice, almost accusingly, ‘And where was his father?’ she demanded, shouting now. Alice went towards her but Georgina lifted a hand as though to hold her off. ‘He must have known Christopher had gone AWOL, Mrs Todd! He’s been on the run for five weeks! Five weeks!’

‘Hang on!’ Mabel said suddenly, a forkful of pie halfway to her mouth. ‘That was about when the MPs turned up at the Bayliss farm! You lot was all off turnin’
’ay and Ferdie and I was doin’ the milkin.’ Two of them there was and Mr B took ’em into his office. When they comes out they ’as a quick gander round the yard and then they gets in their truck and goes. They must of bin lookin’ for Christopher then! And ’is farver never said nuffink to no one! Blimey!’

‘He was quite lucid, Mrs Todd. He knew who I was. He just kept saying he couldn’t go on. Couldn’t do it any more. I suppose he meant he couldn’t go on running and hiding. He had no strength left. I think he’d been made to be too strong for too long and it was more than he… More than anyone…’

Alice had invited Georgina into her sitting room and, without consulting her, had poured a tot of brandy and was now watching her as she sipped it. The night was warm and the windows at each end of the room were open, the curtains just stirring in a breeze that carried with it the humid scents of the summer countryside.

‘Aren’t you having one, Mrs Todd? I don’t like drinking alone.’ There was, in Georgina’s voice, a thin hint of her humour. Alice smiled, poured a finger of the brandy into a second unsuitable tumbler and sipped, wincing slightly at the sharp taste. The twilight colours outside the window were fading into monochrome.

‘Do we know where they’ve taken him?’ Alice asked after a few moments of silence. Georgina said she did not know
but believed that, initially at any rate, he was to be detained in a military prison.

‘The police wouldn’t talk to Annie and me. So we refused to confirm that it was Christopher Bayliss they had arrested. They made us tell them our names and which farm we were from and they wrote them down in a notebook. I told the one who was knocking Christopher about to leave him alone and he said if I didn’t keep quiet he’d arrest me as an accomplice. They said Christopher was a deserter and deserved all he got.’ Georgina swallowed the last of her brandy. ‘I’m going to see Mr Bayliss tomorrow. I’m going to ask him why he pretended not to know what was happening.’

‘Perhaps he didn’t know, Georgina.’ Alice was finding it difficult to justify Roger’s behaviour but felt obliged to question the girl’s condemnation of it.

‘Of course he knew! Where did he think Christopher had been all that time?’

‘Didn’t he tell you he’d been spending his last leave visiting relatives in Sussex?’

‘Yes he did! But that was weeks ago! Obviously he was lying!’ Georgina put down her glass. She got to her feet and from the doorway reaffirmed her intention to confront Roger Bayliss on the following day.

Upstairs, in the small room above the porch where Georgina slept alone, Annie was waiting for her, thumbing through one of the textbooks Georgina was studying for
her Ministry of Agriculture exams.

‘This looks ever so hard compared with the course I’ve signed up for.’

‘By the time you get to this one you’ll be OK.’

‘I doubt it,’ Annie said. ‘I ’aven’t got the brains!’

‘’Course you have! You’ve read the first twenty pages already! Anything you didn’t understand?’

‘No!’

‘Well then!’

They smiled and a silence formed.

‘Rotten day, Georgie.’ Annie spoke quietly. Georgina nodded. ‘You mind, don’t you,’ Annie said, picking at a broken fingernail.

‘What d’you mean, “mind”?’

‘You mind about Christopher. What happens to him and that. You care about him.’

Since the evening, months ago now, when Christopher had taken her to dinner and she had driven his car when his burnt hands had hurt him, Georgina’s concern for him had been slowly pushed into the background by the everyday pressures of life at Lower Post Stone – a succession of minor but nevertheless compelling incidents, some as trivial as the arrival and then the swift departure of Eleanor, the runaway schoolgirl, and others, like the death of Andreis, sobering and provocative. Since Chrissie had been killed in Plymouth by a stray bomb and Christopher Bayliss had described to her the horrors he was witnessing on a daily basis, Georgina
had found herself questioning her convictions regarding pacifism. Mostly she controlled the doubts that rose in her mind, excluding them by immersing herself in the physically exhausting work of the farm and using any energy she had left at the end of each day to swot for the looming Min. of Ag. exams she was soon to sit. But today, confronted by the tragedy of Christopher’s situation, she found herself seriously doubting the logic or the justification of turning the other cheek. Annie’s low voice brought her back to the present.

‘Go on, Georgie,’ Annie said. ‘Admit it!’ But there was nothing to admit. She wasn’t in love with Christopher. She was defensive of him. Enraged on his behalf. Even protective. But not in love. When they had first met, his arrogance had irritated her. She had agreed to have dinner with him on that chill, April evening, when his mouth, briefly against hers, had felt so cold, not because she found him attractive – although he was attractive – but out of a feeling of responsibility for the way he was. So obviously stressed and exhausted by the hours of tension spent flying in combat and by the split-second life or death decisions he was constantly forced to make. His shaking fingers and the brittle state of his nerves had not escaped Georgina, nor had the fact that he had been drawn into this situation by the pressures of a society of which she herself, like every other civilian, was part. Every man, woman and child, every father, commanding officer and politician, demanding courage, bravery and sacrifice.

The girls may not have been certain why Georgina was so determined to involve herself in their employer’s relationship with his son but they were in no doubt about her intentions. There was a certain ambiguity about their own reaction to Christopher’s situation. He was, after all, a deserter. He had run away from a war that other men were still fighting and would continue to fight until the enemy was defeated. A lot of them would die. But, as Annie pointed out to them, they hadn’t seen the state Christopher had been in when he was arrested.

‘More dead than alive, poor fellow,’ Annie had said.

‘But not shot!’ Gwennan snapped back at her, crisply
self-righteous
. ‘Not blown to bits and bleeding! Like my cousin who come back from Dunkirk with half his leg clean gone! I don’t see young master Bayliss missing a limb, do you?’

Mabel’s culinary involvement with Ferdie Vallance had, by this time, become established. By mid-afternoon each Saturday she would have borrowed Alice’s bicycle and be pedalling up the lane towards Higher Post Stone Farm where Ferdie would greet her with a display of the ingredients for the meal they would cook together that evening. Sometimes it was a pair of rabbits, occasionally a pheasant, feloniously procured, or a salmon filched on a moonless night from a privately owned stretch of the Exe.

On the day of Andreis’s death, and at that point unaware of it, Mabel arrived, sweating and eager, at the door of
Ferdie’s cottage, propped the bike against the wall and found her host flourishing a large lump of meat. It was a bit jagged round the edges and only just recognisable as a leg of lamb but Mabel was suitably impressed. Even at the hostel, when the village butcher was feeling generous and Rose had presented him with the correct amount of meat coupons, such a pink and splendid offering had rarely been slipped into the farmhouse oven.

‘Where d’you get it, Ferdie?’ Mabel was round-eyed with appreciation. Ferdie, squirming with pleasure, tapped the side of his nose and said she mustn’t ask him that. She glanced nervously round. ‘But did you kill ’im?’

‘No! Fred and me found ’un. Some of the flock got through a break in the fence above the quarry. This young ’un must of fallen and got hiself caught up in the brambles. Danglin’, he was, poor varmint! ’E’d choked to death when us found ’un. Still warm though…’ A lesser woman than Mabel would have shuddered.