Alice's Girls (11 page)

‘Sure! Me too! And she’s got a sharp tongue and a quick temper when she feels like it! I seen that too. But it’s a tough old world out there, Taff, and Marion’s had to fight her way through it. Don’t reckon things have been that easy for her, one way and another.’ He paused. ‘But is she unkind?’ he persisted. ‘Is she dishonest? Have you ever known her hurt anyone?’ He paused again and fumbled for something in his breast pocket. ‘Mind if I smoke?’ he said. She shook her head and watched him light the stub of a cigar and in the silence she heard, in her head, the faint thud of the envelope containing his letter to Marion, dropping down behind the dresser, almost twelve months ago, and she felt her own unkindness and her own dishonesty break over her like a wave. He was observing her keenly, screwing up his eyes against his cigar smoke. ‘Reckon you should get back to your bed,’ he said, almost gently. ‘Reckon you’re real sick.’ There was, he saw now, a sort of desperation
about her. He got to his feet. ‘I guess what you said just now was kindly meant, ma’am. Your intentions were good, and I sure’preciate your concern, I really do. It was kind of you to worry on my account, even if I don’t deserve it, and I thank you for that. I reckon you’re a good person, you know that? Now, you get upstairs and I hope you get well real soon, OK?’

Gwennan nodded dumbly and stood stock-still in the recreation room while the little sergeant clicked his heels and inclined his head in a gesture suggesting respect. Then he left her, his boots loud on the slates of the cross-passage, through the porch, along the cobbled path and out through the gate. She heard the jeep’s engine rattle into life and then fade to silence, the sound quickly absorbed by the dense foliage of the lane. She realised suddenly that tears were sliding down her face.

‘But I’m not!’ she whimpered. ‘I’m not kind and I’m not a good person.’ And then she thought, ‘But perhaps I am, though.’ She stood in the empty room, considering the circumstances. Perhaps it had been the shock of discovering her illness that had made her hide the sergeant’s letter all those months ago. Not unkindness at all. And not dishonesty. It had been the fear of being ill and dying unloved that had made her commit a stupid, jealous, spiteful act. And warning the sergeant that Marion’s no good … Perhaps he was right and she did mean that for the best. She began to feel slightly light-headed and almost virtuous. Perhaps that was all it had been, after
all. A silly, thoughtless act and an attempt, however well meant, to interfere between two people who were best left to make their own decisions. And now it was over and done with. Kinsky, after all this time, had found his way back to Marion. He might even marry her. Which meant that she, Gwennan Iris Pringle, was innocent! She might even be, as Sergeant Kinsky had suggested, ‘a good person’ with worthy motives, not cruel, vengeful ones. She climbed the stairs to her room and lay, comforted, dozing in her narrow bed.

After a while Rose returned from the strawberry field. Later, Gwennan heard her boss’s car deliver the warden back to the farmhouse. She heard the chickens in the yard and the geese and the ducks on the pond and the house martins under the eaves. She may be going to die, painfully and slowly like her sister Olwyn had and her Aunt Rhiannon before her, but she would bear it bravely. She knew the other land girls disliked her, and that neither the warden or the village registrar had much time for her, but Sergeant Kinski understood her. He had valued her intentions and believed in her goodness. There was a tap on her bedroom door. The warden had brought her a cup of tea. She flushed with pleasure, raised herself on one elbow, smiled as she took the cup and said ‘much better, thanks’ when Alice asked her how she was feeling.

‘Reckon I’ll get up now,’ she added. ‘Grab the bathroom before the others get home, right?’ Alice smiled. It was typical of Gwennan to take advantage of
her indisposition to snatch a hot bath from under the noses of the rest of the girls, who had been working all day.

Dear Georgina,
Alice wrote and then sat, tapping her fountain pen against her teeth, trying to decide how to say what she needed to say.

Alice thought this sounded very formal and slightly pompous but she was finding Georgina’s behaviour increasingly irritating, and after some thought she wrote on in the same vein.

She gave her letter to Jack who, the next morning, took it with him, up into the forest where he found Christopher and Georgina working in a plantation of young hardwoods.

In the afternoon of that day the pair of them arrived at Lower Post Stone, contrite and apologetic. Alice made a pot of tea and led them through to her room.

‘Alice, we’re so sorry!’ Georgina began. ‘We should have thought! Well, we did think, but mostly about ourselves!’ Christopher, carrying the tray of tea things, followed the two women and set the tray down on Alice’s low table. ‘At first we had to wait until Chris’s appointment was confirmed,’ Georgina explained, ‘then we didn’t know exactly when they want him to start work for them, and
then there was all the emigration palaver … And we still hadn’t told my folks … and …’

‘And have you told them now?’

‘Well, most of it.’

‘Most of it?’ Alice echoed, starting to pour the tea. ‘And which bits haven’t you told them?’

‘We haven’t told them exactly why we’re going,’ Christopher said. ‘I mean the part about my problem with my father.’ Alice passed his cup of tea to him and indicated that he should help himself to milk and sugar if he wanted them.

‘They must find it hard to understand why you would even think of turning your back on the Post Stone farms, Christopher. On your inheritance, in fact. Everything your father and all the generations of the Bayliss family before him have built up and cherished. And to a great extent, on Georgina’s future too. And that of any children you may have.’

‘They do,’ Christopher told her. ‘They find it incomprehensible.’ He was trying, unsuccessfully, to make it sound like a joke. ‘They think their daughter is marrying a lunatic!’ He glanced at Alice, who was clearly not amused.

‘Would they understand if you told them the real reason?’ she asked him.

‘They would,’ Georgina said. She had accepted her tea from Alice, carried it to the window and was standing, staring out across the lane and into the cider apple orchard.
‘They would understand but Chris won’t tell them because he hasn’t told his father yet. He says it would be unfair on his father, for them to know while his father still didn’t.’ There was a pause before Alice spoke and when she did it surprised both Georgina and Christopher.

‘I think you’re absolutely right, Christopher,’ she said. ‘It would be outrageous.’ She resisted going on to emphasise that he owed it to his father to tell him what his plans for the future were and why he had decided on them. That he needed to be courageous enough to face his father with the way he had made him feel about his breakdown and that he needed to do it soon. Instead she controlled the temptation to give direct advice and confined herself to asking, rather sharply, what he intended to do. ‘Are you proposing to simply tell your father that you and Georgina are getting married, Christopher? And then add, “Oh and by the way, we’re emigrating to New Zealand so I won’t be around anymore and no, I don’t give a damn what happens to you or the Post Stone farms, now or ever”?’

Georgina stared at Alice and was slightly affronted that the warden seemed to be viewing the situation more from Roger Bayliss’s perspective than from Christopher’s, who appeared to consider what Alice had said, but after a moment, shook his head and sat down heavily on the window seat.

‘I don’t think that telling Pa the main reason for wanting to go would work, Mrs Todd,’ he said. ‘He’s always been impossible to talk to on those sorts of subjects. Personal
stuff … you know … it’s hopeless. Believe me, I have tried. If I told him I found his obvious disappointment in me intolerable, that I simply can’t face his obvious contempt on a daily basis for the rest of my life, he’d think I was behaving like a sulky kid. He wouldn’t say so, of course, but that’s what he’d think.’

This, Alice realised, was almost what she herself was thinking and the realisation made her aware of how defensive of Roger she had become. She stared at her teacup and let the silence lengthen. A moment later the sonorous mechanism of the clock in the recreation room began to wheeze its way towards the striking of five o’clock. Alice got to her feet.

‘I have things to do in the kitchen,’ she said, quietly. ‘Bring the tray through when you’ve finished your tea, will you, Georgie …?’ They were both regarding her, their expressions like admonished children. She sighed. ‘I can’t advise you, my dears,’ she said. ‘You’re grown-up people now and you have to make your own decisions. But do try not to lose sight of the effect those decisions have on other people.’ From the doorway she turned to face them, put the tips of the fingers of both her hands to her lips and blew two kisses across the room to them.

Dave Crocker’s demobilisation happened sooner than anyone anticipated and he arrived back at the Crocker cottage wearing the ‘civvies’ with which he had been issued by the Ministry of Defence. The trousers fitted reasonably
well, but the jacket was tight across his robust chest and its sleeves were too short by at least an inch, exposing thick wrists and strong hands, confirming, if confirmation was needed, that here was a man designed more for corduroy, for overalls, oilskin waterproofs and rubber boots than for the double-breasted suits, lace-up brogues and trilby hats of Civvy Street. He transferred his gratuity to his post office account and was reabsorbed into the Bayliss workforce, relieving the ageing Jack and Fred of the excess workload they had been shouldering during his absence. Plans for several projects, shelved by the war years, were put into action. The dairy herd was to be increased, a larger poultry house would be constructed, the pigsties refurbished and a new breeding programme instigated. Dave shouldered these new challenges with an assurance he had not possessed when, an immature boy, he had left the farm three years previously. Now he confidently undertook his new responsibilities and was paid accordingly.

With Dave’s wage coming into the Crocker home and the number of land girls at the hostel now reduced, Rose was free to develop her plan to open a café in the village. She had reached what she called ‘an accommodation’ with Roger Bayliss, who proposed leasing the old bakery,
rent-free
, to her, on the understanding that she, with her son’s help, would undertake the interior decoration necessary to convert it. Planning permission for the café was sought and granted and if, after twelve months, the project was viable, a modest rent would be agreed upon.

Rose purchased a bolt of blue and white checked gingham at a fire sale and, using her treadle sewing machine, soon had a pile of tablecloths hemmed and folded ready for use. Yellow crockery proved to be much more expensive than the plain white she settled for, and to begin with she would have to make do with two small tables and two long trestles. Six chairs, cast-offs from a local hotel, were hers, free of charge, provided she arranged collection, and she purchased two benches at an auction in Exeter for half a crown each. She used the remains of the gingham to make cushions for the benches and curtains for the windows.

There was already a trickle of holidaymakers in the area, tentatively returning to pre-war habits, wandering round the village, buying postcards, their kids playing with bats and balls on the green or sailing their boats on the pond while the parents enjoyed a quiet pint at the Maltster’s. Yet Rose hesitated before officially opening her café for business. She still had her obligations to Alice, while Dave, returning home, famished, each evening, needed a proper dinner.

‘What are you waiting for, Mrs Crocker?’ Annie asked her.

‘It looks smashing, your little caff!’ Winnie added.

‘Tell you what,’ Marion announced firmly, ‘you open up Sat’dy afternoon and us girls’ll all come down for a cream tea! We will, won’t we?’ The girls agreed enthusiastically. ‘And we’ll pay! One and six each! Right?’

Rose, glowing with pleasure, was touched by their support.

‘Ah …’ she said, regarding them with more affection than was usual. ‘But I couldn’t take your money off of you … Tell you what … a bob each for as much as you can eat! How does that sound?’

On the following Saturday, dressed in their ‘going out’ clothes, the girls, Edward John and Alice arrived at the café, took their places at one of the trestle tables, spread the strawberry jam on the warm scones, topped them with cream and bit into them, sighing with pleasure and, with their mouths full, assuring Rose of their total approval. More scones appeared, more bowls of cream and more cups of tea were poured. Suddenly a silence fell, the girls stopped spreading and chewing and sipping and stared. A group of people had come in through the open door of the tea shop. Two women, a man and a little girl. Strangers. Holidaymakers. Trippers. Customers! Rose stood transfixed. The land girls continued to stare. It was Edward John who spoke.