Muddy Boots and Silk Stockings (26 page)

‘How splendid, Oliver,’ she said. ‘You’ll be going home! Diana must be—’

‘Diana isn’t there, Alice. Hasn’t been for months. As you know the marriage has been wobbling for a while. Now it’s over. She wrote last week. She’s been posted to a US airbase in Norfolk. There’s a Canadian wing commander there. Someone she’s known for a while. She’s had a few flings, old Di, but this one is serious apparently and she says she wants to be free – presumably to marry him. So you see, we’re in the same boat, Alice, you and I. You’ll be divorced in a few months’ time and I…’ He smiled a warm, uncertain smile and waited. After a moment Alice felt compelled to ask, although she had already guessed the answer.

‘You…what, Oliver?’

‘Would very much like some sort of commitment from you. An indication, perhaps, that sometime soon, you and
I… That you might join me in Greenock.’

Alice had only been proposed to once before and on that occasion had not considered the possibility of it ever happening again. She had loved James in a fervent, youthful and uncomplicated way. The failure of the marriage had both shocked and scarred her. She remained bruised by it and only if she had fallen heavily in love with Oliver, or indeed, with anyone, which she had not, would the damage caused by James have been overridden by the blinding optimism of a new relationship. She shook her head and told him gently that she was sorry but it was too soon after the breakdown of her marriage for her to consider what he was suggesting. She had half expected him to protest and was slightly surprised by how easily he accepted her refusal. It suddenly occurred to her that she might not have been the only woman with whom Oliver had shared his off-duty hours since his driver had knocked her off her bicycle almost nine months previously. The war had separated thousands of couples and put hundreds of marriages into jeopardy, creating countless lonely people amongst whom there lurked a percentage of unscrupulous and predatory ones. Not that Oliver fell into either of these categories but it was nevertheless feasible that he had assembled a list of possible partners and Alice wondered, if this was so, where she would feature on that list. Would she be at the top of it? Halfway down it? Or at the bottom? She found herself smiling.

‘So you find it amusing?’ Oliver asked tightly. ‘Encouraging 
people to declare their feelings for you and then rejecting them?’

Alice explained, as inoffensively as possible, what it was that had made her smile, realising almost at once that Oliver was unlikely to share the joke. She felt suddenly relieved that Oliver’s posting to Greenock was to take effect almost immediately and glad when a diversion, which was taking place in the recreation room, ended their conversation.

‘Mrs Todd! Come here, quick,’ Annie laughed, taking Alice by the hand and towing her into the crowded recreation room.

Hester and Reuben were at the centre of a throng of beaming faces. She was displaying her left hand. On its third finger was a modest ruby, set in gold and circled by small diamonds.

‘It was ’is grandma’s!’ Hester announced, transfixed with joy. ‘A legacy! ’E sent for it! All the way from North Dakota, it’s come! We’re getting married, Reuben an’ me!’

After this news had been properly celebrated it took Oliver Maynard very little time to wind up the festivities. Within ten minutes the kitchen was cleared and his men were saying their goodnights to the land girls, trooping down the path and climbing aboard the Bren-gun carrier. Roger, having thanked Alice for her hospitality, had reached his tractor but decided to wait until the carrier, being the larger vehicle, was clear of the confined space outside the farmhouse gate before making his own departure. He stood
watching as the last of the soldiers left the porch, saluting or shaking Alice’s hand as they went. Oliver Maynard brought up the rear. He took Alice’s hand. She saw him glance across to where Roger Bayliss was hesitating beside the tractor. With his eyes still on Roger, Oliver raised Alice’s hand to his lips and very deliberately kissed it. This gesture was not lost on Alice or on Roger, who turned away, climbed onto the tractor, switched on the ignition and sat staring ahead while he waited for Oliver to reach the Bren-gun carrier. As its engine revved and the massive tracks turned, hauling it, together with its trailer and its load of men, away along the narrow lane, Roger began to ease the tractor forward, its huge tyres biting into the ice. Alice, watching from the porch, raised her hand to wave, half expecting Roger to look back. He did not. He felt embarrassed that he had allowed himself to be outmanoeuvred by Maynard and annoyed with himself for being irritated, even disconcerted, by the fact that the warden found the man attractive.

‘Well, ’e can’t sleep here!’ Rose had announced firmly, fixing Reuben with her beady Devonian eyes.

‘You reckon he should walk back to Salisbury Plain, do you? You evil old—’ Gwennan stopped in mid-sentence as Alice entered the kitchen.

‘It’s Reuben, Mrs Todd.’ Hester fixed Alice with her wide eyes. ‘We thought p’raps he could kip in the recreation room but Mrs Crocker—’

‘Mrs Crocker said no!’ Rose confirmed emphatically,
daring Alice to flout the number-one rule of the hostel. ‘And I’m sure Mrs Todd will agree!’ Alice did agree but, after some discussion and much to Dave’s annoyance, it was decided that Reuben should sleep on the kitchen floor of Rose’s cottage. Blankets and pillows were piled into his arms and after kissing his fiancée goodnight he followed Rose across the snowy yard. Dave, bringing up the rear, was heard muttering, with more feeling than originality, about GIs being ‘oversexed, overpaid and over here’.

‘Don’t say I didn’t warn you, boy!’ his mother hissed back at him. ‘Told you she was spoke for!’

They told their parents at breakfast. Georgina’s news did not surprise them. The ‘de Havilland godfather’ had in fact, and unknown to Georgina, warned them of it. Lionel’s case was different and both his mother and his father accused him, a charge he hotly denied, of being too easily influenced by his sister. Eventually he agreed to postpone his enlistment at least until his father, who had come to depend heavily on his strength and expertise on the farm, could find some way of replacing him. Georgina had joined her parents in persuading Lionel to make this compromise and he had reluctantly agreed to it.

Although both parents were disappointed that Georgina had rejected a philosophy in which they passionately believed, they were wise enough to accept her decision, possibly because they knew their daughter too well to
expect, at this stage, to influence her. Their focus now must be on Lionel. With an allied invasion of occupied France looming, they were well aware that were he to enlist in whatever service, he would be in greater danger than his sister would soon be facing. Although this aspect of the problem should not have been the primary one, they were honest enough to accept that it was and that the longer they could delay Lionel’s enlistment the more likely they were to reach the end of the war with their family, if not their principles, intact.

The morning passed awkwardly. By noon the wind had backed to the south-west and the temperature began to rise. Icicles dripped and then fell, the outline of yesterday’s snowman was already softening and the carrot that formed his nose had slipped sideways. Christmas in the Webster house seemed to be over and Georgina, feeling responsible for this, decided to return to Lower Post Stone. After an early lunch she climbed onto the pillion seat of her brother’s motorbike, waved as happily as she could to her parents and was borne away.

They had covered half their journey when Lionel turned off the main road and headed west, towards the moor. Georgina dug him in the ribs and, shouting through the slipstream and the wind, demanded to know where he thought he was going.

‘Small detour,’ he yelled back.

As they climbed onto higher ground the snow was still
thick and Lionel was forced to reduce speed. Georgina had already guessed where he was heading. She didn’t know the exact location of the woodsmen’s cottage but she was familiar enough with the land around the Post Stone farms to be sure that her brother’s detour was going to involve Christopher Bayliss and she protested vigorously.

‘This is stupid, Li! He doesn’t want to see me and I don’t want to encourage him to think—’

‘Think what?’ Lionel shouted. ‘That you’re too wrapped up in yourself to pay a friend a Christmas visit?’

The steepening lane had become little more than a track and their progress was reduced to a slithering crawl that demanded all of Lionel’s skill and attention. ‘Now, shut up, Georgie and hold tight!’

At Lower Post Stone, Marion, Winnie and Gwennan had dozed their way through their hangovers. Reuben, promised a lift from the nearby camp back to his unit, had said his farewells to Hester. They planned to visit her parents at the next available opportunity in order to formalise their engagement and if possible arrange for the marriage to be celebrated by her father at his church. Both Reuben and Hester understood the unlikelihood of achieving this and, if her parents obstructed the wedding, were prepared to be married at the barracks and by the regimental chaplain.

Ferdie had slithered down from Higher Post Stone on a toboggan that dated from Christopher Bayliss’s childhood. Watched by Alice, he and Mabel had shown Edward-John
how to negotiate the lower slopes of one of the pastures that rose from behind the farmhouse where, having become quickly proficient, he was soon flying downhill with Mabel’s ‘little brother’ safely wedged between his knees and squealing with delight.

‘You take care, Edward-John!’ Mabel called anxiously. ‘He’s on’y a baby and any’ow, Annie wants a go now, don’t you Annie!’

Rose’s Dave produced from somewhere a sledge that, twenty years previously, his father had built for him. Sections of it were rotten but after some hammering it was serviceable and he persuaded Hester, whose engagement ring was glittering very satisfactorily in the sunlight, to trudge up the hill with him and ride precariously down again.

Fred arrived with a load of firewood and a churn of milk. Roger Bayliss, who had declined an invitation to drinks at the vicarage on the grounds that he needed to check on his land girls, rode down to Lower Post Stone on his mare. He doffed his hard hat to Alice, who, beginning to feel the cold, invited him into the farmhouse.

They sat on either side of the recreation room fireplace relishing the heat of the flames that were roaring extravagantly up the chimney. He had brought with him a cocktail shaker that contained what he described as a stirrup cup. She fetched glasses and they toasted the New Year.

‘It’s an old family recipe,’ he told her, watching her sip.
‘What d’you make of it?’ She tasted it carefully.

‘My goodness!’ she said, blinking at the strength of the liquor. ‘Well… It’s too appley for brandy… Calvados?’ She looked at him and had never seen him smile so unreservedly. ‘But that’s not all…’ she went on, concentrating on her analysis. ‘There’s something nutty… And a sweetness there, too… Armagnac?’ Yes! Armagnac!’ Roger Bayliss was delighted with her.

‘Well done, Mrs Todd!’ he said. ‘Very well done!’ They laughed and sipped.

‘We’ve known each other for almost a year. Won’t you use my Christian name?’ Alice asked. Then, having agreed that she, in turn, though possibly not in front of the girls, would call him Roger, he refilled her glass and they talked about the success of the previous day.

‘Very good of Major Maynard,’ Roger said. ‘Christmas wouldn’t have been nearly so much fun for your girls – or indeed, for you – without his company and that of his men.’

Alice agreed, adding, almost without thinking that, yes, she would miss Oliver. There was a slight pause before Roger spoke.

‘Off somewhere, is he?’ He had managed to keep his tone as casual as possible but he was watching Alice carefully as he waited for her reply.

With the onset of the cold weather, Christopher’s fire had been consuming fuel faster than he was adding to his
store of dry wood and the pile of split logs he had stacked undercover was dwindling alarmingly. On the morning of Boxing Day he was wielding his axe, bringing it down hard, making the logs crack satisfactorily apart. He had already wheeled three heaped barrow-loads into the lean-to. The exercise had made him sweat and he had soon discarded his scarf, his jacket and his pullover. He felt fit. The concentration necessary to achieve the maximum result from each stroke of the axe pleased him, focusing his attention, his muscles and his brain perfectly synchronised.

It had been two months now since he had retreated, alone and broken, to the forest. Since then, the life he had chosen had rested his mind and exercised his body. Both had responded. Although unaware of it, the months in the forest had physically and emotionally changed him. His bearing was altered. He stood erect now, not stooped and tense, as though braced against catastrophe as he had been when, ‘scrambled’ into mission after mission, his plane had flung him skywards and into the path of the bullets and the shrapnel that were intended to end his life or leave him maimed. His face was no longer the gaunt mask it had become before – and had remained during his breakdown. His eyes were clear, his uncut hair shoulder length and glossy. As a result of the good food, consistent exercise and lack of stress he had gained weight. Still perspiring, he dragged his flannelette shirt off over his head and had just brought the axe down hard on a resistant log when he
caught the sound of the motorbike and turned, axe in hand, to face it.

At first Christopher saw only Lionel, who was a stranger to him. When he recognised the well-wrapped figure perched behind him, he laughed. It was a delighted and delightful sound of jubilation which echoed through the bare trees surrounding them. Lionel watched his sister and Christopher Bayliss stand smiling at one another. After a moment he felt it necessary to introduce himself.

‘Brought you a late Christmas present!’ he added after Christopher had shaken him by the hand. Neither Georgina nor Christopher appeared to hear him. She watched as Christopher pulled his shirt back on, his smile reappearing, charmingly, through the open neck. ‘I knew you’d come,’ he said and when she started to speak he silenced her. ‘No, no. No need for any explanations! You must be frozen! Come inside.’