Alice's Girls (18 page)

‘But why can’t I come home as usual?’ he protested,
referring, as he always did now, to Lower Post Stone Farm as ‘home’.

‘Because you can’t stay here with the girls, if I’m away,’ Alice explained.

‘But Rose will be here,’ he argued, sulkily.

‘No,’ Alice told him, ‘Rose will be across the yard in her cottage. You would be alone, here, with the girls and that would be …’ she hesitated, ‘inappropriate.’ Her son stared uncomprehendingly at her but could see from her expression that she was not to be persuaded.

‘Well, couldn’t I stay with Mr Bayliss at Higher Post Stone, then? Jack always collects me from Ledburton on Friday evenings and Mr Bayliss often takes me to the bus on Sunday nights, and he’s promised to show me how he keeps the farm records of the crop yields and the livestock and the milk gallonage and everything, so we could do that while you’re away.’

Alice approached Roger regarding the leave she needed. They had barely spoken since the wedding. The date of the departure of Georgina and Christopher was approaching but she saw no point in raising the subject of Christopher’s continuing ignorance of facts which, Alice was certain, would radically change his view of his father.

‘This trip to London is in connection with your consultancy career, I take it?’ he asked her. She nodded.

‘My work here is almost done, Roger. We both know that. I have to think of the future. Mine and Edward John’s.’

‘Will he like London, do you think?’ Roger asked. Alice, unwilling to debate that subject, did not reply and after a moment he continued, quietly, ‘As to the future, you have one here, if you want it, Alice. With me. As my wife. You know that. I am, perhaps, not quite the man you would like me to be but I am, I promise you, absolutely devoted to you and to a certain extent to Edward John. Not only because he is your son, which is an advantage, of course, both to him and to me, but because he is such an exceptionally nice child. Why are you smiling?’

‘Because you are so adorable!’

‘And yet you cannot accept me! I know why, of course. It is because you feel that a relationship that has failed so catastrophically as the one between me and my son bodes badly for one between me and you and your son. That’s it, isn’t it?’

Alice was too honest to deny it. She took his hand in hers and they sat in silence for a while.

‘Let’s not discuss it anymore now,’ she suggested at last. ‘I owe it to Ruth to explore my prospects in London. Chris and Georgie don’t sail for another month or so. There’s still time. I don’t mean time to stop them going, I think it’s too late for that now, but …’ She paused. ‘You know what I mean, my dear.’ She patted his hand and then withdrew hers, which subtly changed the mood of their conversation. ‘And now,’ she said, ‘I have a request. Not my own, actually, but Edward John’s.’

‘Oh?’

‘He would very much like to spend the weekend I’m in London, with you. I promised I’d ask you but you mustn’t feel in any way pressured or obliged …’

Roger’s pleasure was obvious, and to Edward John’s delight, arrangements were put in place, and on the following Friday, three days after his mother’s departure on the London train, Jack, who had, as usual, met the Exeter bus in Ledburton, dropped the land girls off at Lower Post Stone before delivering Edward John to the higher farm, where Eileen produced her best chocolate pudding for his supper, saying that having a hungry boy in the house reminded her of the old days when Master Christopher had been a growing lad.

‘I have something I need to deliver,’ Roger announced over breakfast on the Sunday morning. ‘D’you fancy a trip up into the forest?’

‘In the truck?’ Edward John asked. ‘Can I drive it?’

‘No! You most certainly cannot!’

Edward John watched Roger carry a mahogany box out to the truck and stow it carefully in the cab. The box was approximately eighteen inches wide and a foot deep. The initials T.G.M.B. were engraved on a brass plate which was set into its lid.

‘Who is T.G.M.B.?’ Edward John wanted to know.

‘My father,’ Roger told him. ‘Theophilus Glover Martin Bayliss.’

‘Wow! What’s it got in it? Is it a wedding present for
Christopher?’ For a moment Roger seemed fazed by the question. Then his face relaxed into something close to a smile.

‘Yes,’ he said, ‘I suppose, in a way, it is.’

‘Can I see?’ Edward John tried and failed to lift the lid of the box.

‘No,’ Roger said. ‘You can’t. It’s for Christopher.’

‘Is it a surprise?’ Edward John wanted to know. Roger had forgotten how inquisitive children were. Then, as quickly as the boy’s attention had been captured by the box and its contents, it turned to the more interesting prospects of the journey in the truck.

‘Well, if I can’t drive the truck, can I change gear?’ he asked, climbing up into the cab, catching Roger’s eye and smiling beguilingly.

Roger had already shown Edward John the basic principles of gear changing, and after they had turned off the lane and begun to climb the track that wound uphill through the trees, he reminded him of the various positions of the gear lever and, with his own hand poised to resume control should Edward John lose it, allowed the boy to grasp the knob. Biting his lip with concentration, he waited until Roger gave the word and then neatly moved the lever, grinning triumphantly as he felt the engine respond.

‘Excellent!’ Roger said. ‘Very well done indeed! Now we are in second gear. Up ahead, where the track levels off, we’ll change up, into top. If you listen to the engine it will tell you when we need to do this, but don’t do
anything until we both agree that the time is right. OK?’

‘OK,’ Edward John agreed.

Georgina and Christopher had heard the approach of the truck. They were sorting through Christopher’s books, preparing to put them into the tea chests which stood ready to receive them, when Edward John came bounding into the cottage, followed more slowly by Roger, the mahogany box in his arms.

‘It’s a surprise!’ Edward John announced to Christopher. ‘Can he open it, Pa?’

‘Pa?’ Georgina echoed in surprise. ‘Mr Bayliss isn’t your Pa!’

‘I know that!’ Edward John laughed. ‘He’s Christopher’s Pa. Well? Can he open the box?’

‘Not now,’ Roger said, dropping a key, which was attached to a brass chain, into Christopher’s palm. ‘It is the sort of surprise that needs to be opened in private.’

‘A private surprise?’ Edward John said, mystified.

‘I’ve got some of Eileen’s currant buns somewhere,’ Georgina announced, locating a cake tin and neatly diverting Edward John’s attention. ‘D’you want one?’

Edward John helped himself to a bun and Roger heard Georgina asking him where his mother was and him telling her she was in London visiting his Aunt Ruth.

‘Only she’s not my aunt,’ he said with his mouth full. ‘She’s my godmother. She won’t be back ’til Friday. My mother, I mean, not Aunt Ruth. She wants my mother and me to go and live in London.’

‘And would you like that?’ Christopher asked, conversationally, easing a pile of his books onto the table.

‘No!’ Edward John said. ‘I’d hate it! I want us to stay at Lower Post Stone for ever!’ His words and the passion with which he delivered them created a silence in which the three adults watched him polish off his bun. ‘What?’ he enquired, looking from one face to another. ‘What?’ he repeated, puzzled by their reaction.

‘I think I’ll leave you to it,’ Georgina announced after Roger and Edward John had left for home. ‘Mama wants me to have lunch with her and some neighbours who were a bit miffed at not being asked to the wedding! Such a fuss! I’ll be back by teatime. What about taking the bike over the moor this evening? To sort of say goodbye to it. Hmm?’ Christopher took her in his arms and searched her face.

‘Does that sound a bit … well … regretful, Georgie?’

‘No! Not regretful at all!’ she corrected herself quickly.

‘What, then?’

‘It’s just that I love it up there when the light starts to go and I want to fix it in my mind’s eye.’

Christopher let the sound of the Brough’s noisy engine dissolve into silence before sliding the key into the lock of the mahogany box.

Inside was a sheaf of documents, a large, buff envelope with the words ‘If undelivered return to H.M. Ministry of Defence, Whitehall, London,’ stamped across it. On top of this was a tightly rolled school photograph. Christopher
unrolled it and weighted each end. He knew his father had been a pupil at St James’s College, a minor public school in Dorset. The long narrow photograph was dated July 1915 and showed the two hundred and fifty-odd pupils and, centre front, the gowned staff, grouped round a venerable headmaster. Christopher searched in vain for his father but could not identify him among the rows of boys all wearing identical uniforms and with similar haircuts and respectful expressions. On the reverse of the photograph someone, whose handwriting he did not recognise, had written in pencil ‘Rob and Roger. Third row’. Given this clue one face emerged. ‘Pa!’ Christopher breathed, scanning the features that had become, suddenly, unmistakably familiar. He looked at the two boys, one on the left, the other on the right of his father, and wondered which of them was the ‘Rob’ referred to. After a while he removed the weights and the photograph reverted to the tight cylindrical shape it had held since being placed in the box.

Under the envelope were dozens of newspaper clippings. They were yellowed and fragile. All bore dates of the early years of the First World War. Beneath these was a school exercise book in which, on page after page, were columns of names. ‘Beresford, James.’ Christopher read. ‘Johnson, Patrick, killed in action. Howard, Rupert, missing. Richardson, Norman (Prefect). Samuels, Ronald (Head of House), missing, presumed killed in action.’ Christopher realised that what he was looking at was a list of the boys at his father’s school who had died or been
reported missing, which, it transpired, amounted to the same thing, in the trenches of Mons, Ypres, Marne and Neuve Chapelle. Some of the clippings were of the faded images of incredibly young men, all wearing the uniforms of officers and staring blankly, as though into their own particular infinity, at the lens of the camera.

The buff envelope was unsealed. Inside were approximately fifty letters, a sheaf of the reports of some sort of official military enquiry featuring the name of Medical Orderly Roger Glover Bayliss and an assortment of medical certificates and character references. On top of this was an envelope addressed, in Roger’s hand, to Christopher.

The letter went on to describe the sequence of events which led to the two schoolboys, obsessed with the situation
in France, enlisting, despite being under age, as medical orderlies and becoming so traumatised by the horrors they witnessed in the trenches that, exhausted and terrified, they deserted their posts and fled away from the lines where they had been sent to retrieve the injured and the dead. As they ran, Roger’s account continued, his companion was shot dead, while he, court-martialled, convicted of desertion and about to face a firing squad, was discovered to be under age, pronounced of unsound mind and repatriated.

‘What’s all this?’ Georgina asked, arriving back to find Christopher sitting at the table on which was spread the contents of his father’s box. ‘Chris?’ she asked again, more seriously, catching his expression as he turned to face her.

He took her through the contents of the box to the point where the shell-shocked and traumatised boy was returned to his home and sworn, by his embarrassed parents, to secrecy.

‘That’s outrageous!’ she breathed. ‘How could they do that?’ Her reaction was, she realised, similar to what she had felt when Roger himself had responded so coldly to Christopher’s breakdown two years previously. ‘Your poor father! To go through that … And then be told to shut up about it! And he must have felt so guilty! About his friend, I mean! My God, Chris! No wonder he …’ She paused, staring at the blurred, monochrome photographs of the young officers whose names were undoubtedly listed in the wavering columns in Roger’s exercise book. ‘Alice
was right!’ she announced. ‘She was always sure there had to be a reason for your father’s treatment of you when you cracked up! And this is it! It explains everything! We must tell Alice!’