Muddy Boots and Silk Stockings (22 page)

The document in Georgina’s hands was notification of the discharge from the RAF of Flight Lieutenant Christopher Alexander Bayliss. In the column giving the reason for the discharge, the letters LMF were printed in ink.

‘What does LMF mean?’ Georgina asked at last.

‘It stands for “lacking moral fibre”, Georgie.’ He saw her expression twist suddenly into an incredulous mix of anger and anguish. She stepped back, almost as though what she had heard had knocked her off balance. He took her by the shoulders and steadied her.

‘Hey,’ he said gently. ‘It couldn’t matter less. It really couldn’t.’

She pulled away from him.

‘Of course it matters! Your father brought you this…? How could he? Who wrote it?’ She shook the paper at Christopher. ‘How dare they?’

‘It’s what happens, Georgie. Nothing personal.’ She knew it was true. It was the form war took, the style of it. It had
always claimed the young and courageous and killed them, or seen them destroyed, and when they were of no further use as fighting men, discarded them. But these were facts with which Georgina was familiar and her anger dissipated until it began to refocus on Roger Bayliss himself. He had failed, for months, to visit Christopher and then when, finally, he had arrived at Axmount he had entered through the locked gates, made his way past the nurses, the orderlies and their blanched and damaged patients, found his son and put into his hands a piece of paper which accused him of cowardice.

‘But your father… How could…?’

Christopher, still smiling, shook his head.

‘Poor old Pa,’ he said amiably. ‘I’m a bit of a disappointment to him, you see. Perfectly understandable when you think about it.’ Georgina stared, incredulous. But an attack on his father was, she sensed, not what he wanted from her. ‘Anyway,’ he said easily, ‘it’s sorted now. I’ll tell you all about it. Let’s walk.’ They moved off, side by side, along a slippery pathway and he began to unfold to her his plans.

Christopher’s recollections of the late spring and the summer of 1943 were hazy and confused. He retained little more than fragmented memories of his last weeks of flying or of the sequence of events that followed the day when his nerves went to pieces and he ran. No one would ever know the details of the five weeks that elapsed between
that day and the moment Georgina entered the byre and when, despite his shattered physical condition and the vivid hallucinations that possessed his mind, he had recognised her. There were people who might have recalled the sight of a bedraggled man sheltering in a cart shed or loping along a lane in the half-light but they would have been unaware that a few weeks previously that same man had been way above their heads, attacking a Junkers Eighty-Eight, shooting down a Dornier, fighting for his life – and for theirs. In the days following his capture he was questioned by a psychiatrist and put through a series of physical examinations. When left alone he slept, sedated and only vaguely aware that his skin, hair, the pyjamas he was wearing and the blankets that covered him, were clean and that his hunger and his thirst were quenched.

His attraction to Georgina, which began when, even before he acknowledged it, he was starting to buckle under the extreme pressure he was under had, from the moment he set eyes on her, been profound. It was as though, on every level, he had recognised her as a significant and abiding presence in his life. Her appearance pleased him. The level grey eyes, the way her hair fell, dark and sleek when so many of her contemporaries wore theirs in frizzy curls. The general impression she created was that she was striking, rather than beautiful. She was straight and strong, moving easily and with an unselfconscious elegance. He liked her fiery spirit and the way she had the grace to
apologise when a flare of temper put her in the wrong. Even in the small number of hours which she and he had spent together the impression of her was burnt into him so that as he slid into and moved through his breakdown he had retained the image of her. When all other sensations and emotions had been stripped from him he had held onto Georgina, using her, as he had subsequently confessed to her, to form a shield between him and his demons. Then she had become the personification of his gradual recovery. She was his talisman. She, he now believed, had been right to denounce war as futile and destructive.

At Axmount, under the care of his doctors, he was slowly being restored. He had been weaned off his medications, fed, rested and slowly brought back to life. He had accepted the news of his discharge from the RAF with an ironic gratitude because it relieved his future plans of the complication of having to refuse to take any further part in the war. He would tell Georgina about his conversion to pacifism and his plans for a future which he hoped, even expected, that she would want to share.

‘You were right,’ he announced.

‘I’m glad to hear it! About what?’

‘About war being an inappropriate way of dealing with aggression. About how it damages the very people it is supposed to protect, turns innocent men into killers and encourages psychopaths!’ Georgina had stopped in her
tracks. ‘What?’ Christopher demanded, half smiling into her astonished and bewildered face. ‘It’s what you said, Georgie! It’s exactly what you said!’

‘It was awful, Mrs Todd!’ Georgina wailed to Alice that night. ‘He was so disappointed in me! I explained why I feel like I do! But you can understand how he feels! He’d listened to me. Thought about what I’d said about war and it had made sense to him! But I’d listened to him, too! And I understood what he had meant about war and then… then when he himself became a victim of it…’ She paused, remembering Christopher’s disintegration. ‘I suppose I expected him to be pleased with me for wanting to fight – or if not actually fight at least to help defeat the Germans. But he behaved as if I had betrayed him – and in a way, I had, hadn’t I!’ She paused. Alice remained silent. ‘He’s planning to live in a building which was used by his father’s woodsmen before the war. He says it’s a ruin but he’s going to repair it and when it’s habitable he wants me to join him there! And be his wife!’

‘And you don’t want to?’ Alice asked.

‘No!’

‘I thought you loved him!’

Georgina sat in silence for a while. When she spoke it was quietly. Almost reluctantly.

‘I don’t think I do, Mrs Todd. I’m fond of him. But I don’t love him. At least…not the way he seems to love me.
He makes me feel protective. I want to defend him. But defending and protecting are not…not…’ She stumbled into silence and then began again. ‘When I first met him and he was so arrogant and self-opinionated… He was…sort of…challenging. I know it must seem peculiar to you but although I almost hated him, he was more attractive then. More than now, I mean. Now that he’s…’ She searched for the right word, shook her head and said, ‘broken,’ adding, ‘I’m not making any sense, am I!’

Although Alice had not had any personal experience of Georgina’s situation, she was aware of the sexual pull of men whose fascination lies in the fact that they are dangerous and possibly damaging. She had, like many women of her generation, watched
Gone With the Wind
and been more attracted to the wild, wilful and unprincipled Rhett Butler than to the gentler, sensitive and altogether more admirable Ashley Wilkes. So she nodded sympathetically and told Georgina that she thought she was making perfect sense and asked what had happened next.

‘We should have been able to agree to differ but of course we didn’t. Or couldn’t. So we argued. And pretty soon it was almost like when we first met. Toe to toe. Eyeball to eyeball. He said I had misled him into thinking I was in love with him. Why else would I have visited him in hospital and been so angry over his discharge? I said it wasn’t my fault if he’d misread me and that I’d been angry
on his behalf and then I said something I should never have said. I said I had been sorry for him.’

‘Oh dear,’ Alice murmured. ‘And how did he react to that?’

‘He just stood there. Then he said he had an appointment with one of his doctors – he calls them his “keepers”. He excused himself, very politely, and left me. I had half an hour to wait before Lionel collected me from the main gate. And it was raining.’ Alice suppressed a smile.

‘Poor Georgie!’ she said.

‘I ’eard from Mrs Fred,’ Rose confided to Alice, several days later, ‘that young Christopher ‘as bin discharged from that Axmount place.’ Alice said she was glad to hear it. ‘But ’e’s not come home, Alice! Leastways ’e did, but o’ny for as long as it took ’im to load up the old truck – the one Mr Bayliss don’t use no more – with stuff. All sorts there was, Mrs Fred says. Bedding and pots and pans. Books an’ that. The old table and chairs from what used to be the servants’ parlour in the old days. Piled it all in the back of the truck ’e did and drove off!’

‘Where’s he gone?’ Even as she asked, Alice thought she knew the answer to this and Rose confirmed her guess.

‘First off no one knew!’ Rose said. ‘Then Ferdie says as Master Christopher ’as took the woodsmen’s axes and saws and ropes an’ stuff with him. So us put two and two, Alice, and come up with the woodsmen’s cottage. ’Cos ’e used to
like it up there, Christopher, I mean, workin’ the timber, when ’e were a lad. But ’tis years since it were lived in!’

Historically, there had always been a building on the site of what became known in the twentieth century as the woodsmen’s hut. Its origins were lost in time but its four stone walls, chimney stack, slated roof and cobbled floor had, from time to time, been maintained and when, a century ago, the forest began to be managed and men needed shelter when they worked there, a couple of windows had been put in and a door to keep out the worst of the weather. There was a fireplace inside, in which a huge and now rusted wood burner had been installed. Outside was a well with a pump beside it, a lean-to, a couple of small, derelict stone outbuildings and that was all.

The first thing Christopher did when he arrived at the cottage that late November afternoon was to light a fire. The neglected forest was littered with fallen branches and he had soon collected enough dry wood to keep the wood burner going for several days. Then he swept the accumulated leaves from the floor and removed the cobwebs from the two low windows, working fast as the short winter afternoon passed and the light faded. He moved his furniture inside as a drizzle of rain began, lit two of the three oil lamps he had brought with him, carried in the boxes and the bedding and assembled the camp bed.

Outside the darkness was complete. The wind had risen and was roaring through the tops of the trees. His father’s
housekeeper had prepared a stew for him. He had set the huge cast-iron pot on the top of the wood burner which, with its doors closed and a strong draught making the flames roar, was filling the cottage with a moist and musty warmth.

Since Roger Bayliss had been widowed and Eileen had taken on the role of housekeeper at Higher Post Stone Farm, she had considered herself responsible for Christopher’s
well-being
. He was a small child when he had lost his mother and it had been Eileen who prepared his clothes for boarding school and nursed him through his childhood ailments. It had been she, more than his father had appeared to, who saw the first signs of the impending breakdown and was shocked by the news of his capture, arrest for desertion and incarceration in what, to her, was nothing short of bedlam. She had baked cakes and sent them through the post to Axmount. Whether or not he received them she did not know and thought it best not to enquire. She had hoped, when he recovered enough to come home, to nurse him back to health and strength. But he had gone, within hours, to the forest, to live in what she remembered as little more than a pigsty, five miles away, halfway up the moor and in the middle of a wood. So she had prepared a hamper for him and, just before he left the farm, heaved it out to the truck.

‘There’s a few bits and pieces,’ she said breathlessly, and went on to list the pies, cakes, tins of ham, fish and rice pudding, pots of jams, side of cured bacon, home-made loaves and boxes of hens’ eggs which she had filched from
the farm pantry. Christopher, having forgotten to include supplies in his immediate plans for departure, was both touched and grateful. He hugged her as he had always hugged her, enjoying the softness of her bosom and the faint, familiar smell of her perspiration.

‘And you’ll need this,’ she told him, releasing herself and tucking his ration book into a pocket. ‘You’ll get nothing down the grocer’s without it!’

Eileen’s mutton stew was huge and would provide his main meal for at least two days. She had cooked it gently until the meat was ready to fall off the bones and the carrots, turnips, pearl barley and potatoes had all softened together into an aromatic blend of concentrated goodness. As it warmed in its cast-iron pot, the smell of it filled the small space and gave Christopher a misleading sense of
well-being
. The place was like a cave filled with warmth in the soft light from the oil lamps. He felt safe under the arch of wind that swept over his roof. Occasional gusts threw a spatter of raindrops hard against his window panes. He cut thick wedges of Eileen’s bread, dipped them into the stew and let them soak up the gravy. Without knife or fork he ate with his fingers, lifting out lumps of the meat and pieces of carrot. He found a bent spoon on the floor, cleaned it and used it to scoop up the softened vegetables and more of the rich, fatty gravy. When he was done he made up his fire, closing the damper as he had seen the woodsmen do when they wanted to slow the fire’s consumption of logs and keep
it burning through the night. He rolled himself up in his blankets and lay down on the narrow camp bed.

His priority next day was to fill the lean-to with dry wood. The rain, during the previous night, had been light and the mass of fallen timber in the acres immediately surrounding the cottage was not yet affected by the penetrating dampness of autumn. He drove a short distance down the track, sawed fallen timber into six-foot lengths and heaved them onto the truck, drove back to the cottage and stacked them under the lean-to. Five times he made this journey. By the time the light went the lean-to was filled to its rafters and Christopher was exhausted.