Muddy Boots and Silk Stockings (19 page)

‘So what did you do, you and Fred? Did you cut him into pieces there and then?’

‘Lord no! Us stuck ’un under some sacks in the tractor! And us dropped ’im off, after dark, in Fred’s shed! No one seed us! Didn’t do much of a job with the butcherin’,’ he said, eyeing the jagged bone and gory flesh, ‘but you can’t have everything, can you!’

‘Where’s the rest of him, Ferdie?’

‘Fred’s missus ’as got the other leg and one of the
shoulders. The rest we give to ’er cousin Doris over at Stoke Cannon. Three kids she got and her bloke’s at sea so us takes ’er a bit of this and a bit of that from time to time.’ This act of charity seemed to have absolved Ferdie of any sense of guilt regarding the procurement of the lamb.

They rubbed the ungainly lump of flesh with salt and pepper and laid it in a wide pan loaded with onions, potatoes and some of the young turnips which were just coming into season in the Bayliss fields. While the cottage slowly filled with the intoxicating smell of roasting meat, Mabel made a suet pudding that, garnished with golden syrup and Devonshire cream, would round off their feast. By the time the onions had collapsed into soft mounds, the potatoes turned golden-brown, the fatty skin of the lamb was blistering crisply and the pan was running with meaty juices, Ferdie and Mabel could barely control their appetites. Hacking off thick slices of the tender meat and piling their plates with vegetables, they ate noisily, if wordlessly, for an impressive length of time, exchanging, now and then, greasy smiles of mutual satisfaction.

Like Marion and Winnie, returning to the hostel at curfew-time that night, Mabel had been confronted with the bleak news of Andreis’s death.

On the morning after Christopher’s arrest Georgina watched until she saw his father make his way as usual to the farm
office and enter it. She crossed the yard and knocked on his door. ‘Come,’ he said.

He was already at work, checking through a sheaf of invoices and delivery notes. He glanced at her.

‘Ah, Miss Webster. What can I do for you?’ He still held some of the sheets of papers in his hands, implying that, as Georgina was interrupting his work, she had better have a good reason for doing so.

‘I just wanted to say,’ she began and then hesitated. This didn’t look like a man in the throes of a domestic crisis. A man whose son, after being missing for five weeks, had been arrested for desertion and despite being in a state of mental and physical collapse was being held, pending an investigation, in a military prison. He was looking at her. The resemblance between father and son, which had previously eluded Georgina, struck her now and added to her confusion. ‘I just wanted to say how sorry I am… How sorry all of us at the hostel are…about Christopher.’

There was a pause. Roger Bayliss regarded Georgina steadily. ‘Yes,’ he said, eventually. ‘Well, these things happen.’ There was another pause. Georgina was unable to tell whether he had so much to say that he couldn’t begin to speak, or whether, and this seemed to her to be more likely, he had nothing at all that he wanted to say. ‘But it is most kind of you…you and the other girls…to express your…your concern.’ These words, Georgina realised, were intended to conclude the interview. She was, she understood,
being dismissed. But she remained, standing straight and motionless in front of him.

‘How is he?’ she asked and when he didn’t immediately reply, repeated, ‘Christopher. How is he?’ A flicker of what Georgina perceived as irritation crossed Roger’s face.

‘As well as can be expected, they tell me,’ he said at last.

‘Are you going to visit him?’ Georgina’s heart was racing. Colour flooded her face. While she was becoming heated, Roger Bayliss seemed so cool. There was no hint now of the polite smile with which he had greeted her. His face was expressionless. She was prepared for his eyes to be hard and intimidating when she steeled herself to engage them and was faintly surprised when he avoided hers.

‘I have no immediate plans to do so,’ he said, flatly.

‘Then I shall go,’ Georgina said. ‘Tell me where he is and I—’

‘All I can tell you,’ he interrupted, ‘is that he is shortly to be moved from…from where he is now, to an appropriate hospital.’ He would, he said, let Georgina know when and where that would be. It was, he repeated, most kind of her to take such an interest but now she would have to excuse him as he had work to attend to. But at this point Georgina, having already gone too far, found it impossible not to go even further.

‘Are you ashamed of him?’ she heard herself demand and was surprised by how harsh she sounded. Whatever
feelings her question created in Roger Bayliss failed to reveal themselves in his expression.

‘That’s enough,’ he said in the restrained tone of voice that her own father had used when she was young and he was teaching her how to behave. She apologised without meeting Roger Bayliss’s eyes and let herself out of the office.

‘I shouldn’t have said it,’ she confessed to Alice when, after supper, the two of them took a turn round the cider orchard behind the farmhouse. ‘It was what my father would have called “out of order”. I don’t suppose he is ashamed of Christopher, do you? I mean how could he possibly be…? But to keep quiet about him going AWOL and now say he’s not even going to see him! How can he do that?’

‘It does seem odd,’ Alice murmured. ‘There has to be a reason for it. Shock perhaps? Refusing to admit that anything was wrong with Christopher until it was too late to help him? Guilt affects people in different ways, Georgie. No one understands what goes on between family members – or why.’

Above them, cider apples, still green, clustered tightly. The light, under the trees, was thickening into dusk and the toes of their shoes were already picking up moisture from the grass. They walked in silence for a while and then Georgina said that as soon as she knew where Christopher was to be hospitalised she would visit him.

Weeks passed. Alice, intending to relay any news about Christopher to Georgina, asked Roger more than once
how his son was. He told her that as far as he knew, he was improving but he did not volunteer any details regarding Christopher’s whereabouts and Alice sensed that he did not wish to be drawn on the subject. It was Oliver Maynard who, on one of their evening excursions to a local inn, told Alice that while visiting one of his own charges who was experiencing a breakdown, he had seen Christopher in the grounds of Axmount House, a country estate which had been commandeered by the Ministry of Defence for use as a psychiatric hospital. A phone call confirmed that Christopher was a patient there and on the following Sunday Lionel rode over on his motorbike, collected his sister and transported her the ten miles to Axmount, leaving her at the manned gate and arranging to collect her an hour later.

She saw Christopher with his back to her, sitting near the tennis court, watching a group of players. Not wishing to startle him she approached him slowly and stood in front of him. He still looked gaunt. But his hair had been cut and was short and trim, as it had been when she first met him. The tangled beard was gone. His hands, hanging loosely between his thighs, were clean, the nails scrubbed. He looked at her for a long time and then got to his feet. Then he clicked his heels and saluted. A perfect RAF salute. He gave a little bow, said, ‘Good afternoon, Miss Webster!’ then sat heavily down again on the seat, dropped his head into his hands and cursed. When he stopped swearing he sat
in silence with his head turned away from her.

‘I don’t want you here, Georgie. Really. I don’t. It’s sweet of you to come but I don’t want you to see me like this. With the shakes and everything. And blubbing. I can’t stop! It’s pathetic! I’m so ashamed!’

She sat beside him with her thigh just touching his.

‘Were you ashamed when your hands were burnt?’ she asked him. ‘Would you be ashamed if you had been hit by shrapnel? Or crash landed? Or bailed out?’ He smiled and shook his head.

‘Bless you, Georgie,’ he said quietly. ‘But I’ve thought of all that. And the shrink here says the same thing to me every day.’

‘Because it’s true!’

‘No it isn’t, you see.’ He had turned and was facing her, looking hard into her eyes. ‘Those things are out there!’ He held out his hands, palms up. The scars from the burns were still visible. ‘This…other stuff,’ he said, placing both hands against his temples, ‘this is in here. In my bloody head!’

‘But it’s the same thing, Chris! It’s damage! It’s a wound! Caused by fighting! Caused by the war! Not by something you have done or haven’t done! You were pushed too far! Anyone could see that.’

‘Everyone in the squadron was pushed, Georgie. They didn’t all crack up.’

‘You don’t know what they did! There are unexplained
crashes, ditchings, mid-air collisions. Pilots crack up in different ways!’

While Georgina was only vaguely aware of these facts, Christopher knew them to be accurate. He had known men so exhausted and so consistently overexposed to danger that their basic instincts of self-preservation had become
non-existent
. He had seen them climb into fighter planes and fly like lunatics. Some had survived – so far. Many had not. He got to his feet.

‘Let’s walk,’ he said.

The once beautiful gardens of Axmount House, having been deprived of the team of gardeners who, until the outbreak of the war, had tended them, were rank after three years of neglect. The lawns were tussocky. Shrubs needed pruning and the herbaceous borders and the rose gardens looked almost surreal, draped and choked by rampant convolvulus. Hollyhocks and delphiniums lay flattened by the last gale while the autumn flowers, the marguerite daisies, dahlias and chrysanthemums, struggled through a tangle of brambles. An ornamental pool, embellished by its neo-Gothic bridge and its clustering mass of waterlilies, looked much as it had done in peacetime although the wild Dartmouth daisies, pushing through cracks in the paved terraces, would not have been tolerated by the men who were now in various uniforms and serving their country.

‘It’s supposed to be soothing, all this,’ Christopher
said, staring across the pool and into the trees and green spaces of the parkland beyond it.

‘It’s probably doing you more good than you think,’ Georgina said. ‘You will get well, Chris. You know that, don’t you.’ But he had suddenly stopped. He took her by her shoulders, turned her to face him.

‘Let me look at you!’ he said, holding her. ‘Let me just have one long look at you!’ Her eyes, wide and steady, were inches from his. ‘I get these dreams, you see. The medics give me stuff to stop them. But it doesn’t stop them and they seem to come in the day as well as at night. They are the worst dreams, Georgie! You have no idea how awful! All the most horrific things that have happened since I’ve been flying. Over and over. And what I do, you see… What I do when the dreams start…is this!’ He was looking intently into her face, his eyes moving from feature to feature. ‘I conjure you! I put your face together. The shape of it. Eyes. Nose. Mouth. Until you are complete! And I hold you there, like I’m holding you now! So that you are between me and the dream! Between me and a cockpit full of flames in a plummeting plane. Between me and the flier I’m pulling out of an airstrip pile-up with his body coming apart in my hands and his eyes seared…’ To silence him she put her fingers briefly against his mouth. Then he continued more quietly. ‘Blocking it out… D’you see?’

Neither he nor Georgina had been aware of the approach of the white-coated male nurse.

‘It’s me, sir,’ the man said steadily, aware of his patient’s outburst. ‘John, sir. I’ve brought your medication.’ He held out the pill and watched as Christopher washed it down with a sip of water from the tumbler the man was holding out to him. ‘And it’s time for your afternoon nap, sir.’ John turned to Georgina. ‘Best come again another day, miss,’ he said evenly. ‘We’re a bit tired now.’

She repeated her visit after a fortnight. He seemed more rested and had regained some of the weight he had lost during the frantic weeks when he had been on the run. He told her about the day when he’d been scrambled and had been unable to move from the mess table where he had been sitting over an uneaten lunch. It hadn’t been that he had consciously refused the orders that were being shouted at him. He had simply found himself incapable of carrying them out.

‘I remember a medic being called,’ he told Georgina. ‘My pulse and blood pressure were checked and a torch beam was shone into my eyes. I just knew I had to get away. Anywhere so long as it was away. The next thing I remember was being amongst trees. I slept a lot and then I was hungry and then I was cold. I only had a few quid on me and by then I was in such shit order I couldn’t go into pubs or shops. I got chased a few times by the MPs. I found my way back home. God knows how. I got into the house at night and I stole food but I knew if I kept doing it I’d get caught. So I went up onto The Tops. There were mushrooms after the rain. I ate those.
I walked about at night to stop the dreams. Then I couldn’t walk any more and I lay down in the straw in the byre. I was ready to die. The dreams took over. And then you were there. And that other land girl, Annie, was it? And the MPs of course. That’s all I can remember.’

They were sitting on a garden seat, the afternoon sun on their backs and shining full on the graceful face of Axmount House. ‘This place seems to be some sort of hospital. Did you bring me here?’ She told him she hadn’t and she realised that he had no recollection of what had happened to him since his arrest. Almost three months of his life had been obliterated, initially by the trauma and now, probably, by the drugs which were designed to stabilise him.

‘They tell me that my father will be coming to see me soon. He may have come before but I don’t remember. Have you come before? I think you have, haven’t you. I suppose I talked lot of gibberish. Sorry.’

She told him she had been to see him and that it hadn’t been gibberish. They entered what had been an orangery and sat down at a small table covered by a gingham cloth. An orderly brought them tea. Christopher held his cup in both hands. A woman from the local WVS went from table to table, offering a plate of scones and little cakes which she had obviously baked herself. When Georgina thanked her, the woman looked past her, smiled at Christopher and said it was the least she could do.