Autumn Softly Fell (12 page)

Dorothea went to close the door so that Uncle Albert would not huff and puff, so that Tomlin or Bessie Downs would not be taken to task, but at the last moment, instead of pushing it to, she stepped outside to stand on the doorstep. It was a still, breathless evening, on the cusp of dusk, the memory of daylight like a faint glimmer in the air. Rain was falling, coming down thinly and softly in long straight lines. There was no sound but the sigh it made in falling, and the steady
drip-drip-drip
of a leaky gutter. Everywhere was wet, apart from the doorstep under the canopy, and an island of dry beneath the cedar tree. The wall which separated off the gardens seemed almost to glow, its red bricks stained a darker red.

The profound peace soaked into her like the rain soaking into the ground. All fear, excitement, boredom, joy, despair was rubbed out and smoothed over. Not that the world itself had changed. No. Even here she could sense it, feel it, almost hear it, coming remote from over the horizon – or was it merely memories stirring in her mind? She could hear cats howling as they fought to the death, drunks squabbling in the street, a famished child feebly grizzling. She knew without doubt that there were places – far away but all too real – where the air was not clean and washed, but rank and choking, where nameless horrors lurked in the shadows, where evil eyes peered in the dark. In slimy gutters, tattered old men sat without hope, talking to themselves. People slunk along next to sooty walls, their shoulders slumped. They climbed unlit, foetid stairs. They lay down to sleep on bare boards. Rats swarmed. Fleas bit. Misery, hunger fogged people’s eyes. And even here, even in Hayton, in this very house, there were reminders. She saw Nibs Carter’s eyes, brown
and brutal. She saw the moth plunge again and again into the
extinguishing
flame.

No, the world had not changed. These things were true; she had seen them all. But she no longer felt overwhelmed by it. It was as if she had been standing on a beach with a mountainous wave racing towards her threatening to wash her away. It had crashed in ruin, sending up mountains of spray, reaching out long feelers towards her—only to seethe and fade and dribble away across the sand. What did anything matter when set against the soft-falling rain, the still and quiet of the evening, the vast grey-dark sky? There was a feeling, a whisper, a presence – here, there, everywhere: in the rain, in the sky, in the dripping trees, in the air itself. Dorothea felt it vibrating inside her. It was like a steady smile at the back of
everything
. Was it God perhaps? Or was it something else? But maybe that was what God really was – a steady smile at the back of
everything
.

God – Mlle Lacroix’s God – would never make a world where wickedness would flourish and horror win out. Horror and
wickedness
were nothing, as flimsy as dandelion seeds on the wind, mould to be scraped easily away. The fiery furnaces could be snuffed out as easily as a candle flame. All that mattered was here and now: the doorstep, the rain, the sigh in the air and the house – the house that endured, the house with its time-honoured rites. This was not flimsy, this could never be snuffed out and one did not have to be a
goody-goody
to believe in it.

Dorothea stood on the doorstep, breathing slowly, holding on to this great discovery as the rain came down and dusk deepened into night.

DOROTHEA YAWNED, HOLDING
on to her new hat, the yellow ribbons flying in the wind. She watched Richard sleeping beside her with a rug over his knees; she watched fields, hedgerows and grassy verges spin past as the motor bowled along the road. They were on their way back to Clifton, taking what Henry called
the scenic route.
Henry was driving, Uncle Albert sitting beside him, talking in raised voices above the noise of the engine.

‘They’re simply not reliable, these machines of yours, Fitzwilliam. You can ride a hundred miles one day, and not budge an inch the next.’

‘Teething problems are only to be expected, sir, in something as new as an autocar, but improvements are being made all the time.’

‘They’re so infernally complicated!’

‘No more complicated than a bicycle.’

‘Oh, come, Fitzwilliam, I’m not having that! There are many more component parts in an autocar – so many more things to go wrong! And what do you do when you need to replace one of those parts, eh? Answer me that!’

‘Components can be something of a headache, sir, I’ll grant you. But I often find that, with a little jiggery-pokery, I can reuse what I’ve already got. And if all else fails, there’s Young, the blacksmith’s apprentice. He’s a dab hand at rustling up what I need. He’s quite taken with autocars.’

‘You youngsters, with your fads and fancies.’ Uncle Albert shook his head as if he disapproved but Dorothea knew better. After two and a half years, she felt as if she’d known him all her life. She smiled at the thought, but the smile turned into another yawn.

Although she had expressed disappointment when, after the picnic, she had discovered a puncture in her tyre, she was secretly relieved to be riding with Richard and Henry and Uncle Albert. Three miles was a long way to cycle back to Clifton, and Roderick would have wanted to race her all the way.

Uncle Albert had dubbed their trip
the Great Expedition.
They had ventured to far-flung Lawham, the furthest Dorothea had yet ridden. She, Roderick and Mlle Lacroix had cycled; Richard, Henry and Uncle Albert had gone in Bernadette. The governess went to Lawham every Sunday to attend her church, but Dorothea had never been there before. Lawham was where Nora’s brother Jem worked in a shoe factory. It was also the place where many of the tradesmen who supplied Clifton had their businesses. Once it had been a thriving place. Henry had told them all about it as they ate their picnic amongst the ruins of the old priory – how Lawham had been an important stop on a busy coaching route, how there had been more inns and taverns than you could count. There were still a few inns remaining, relics of the boom times; but the horse-drawn coaches had long since disappeared. The town had become a backwater, so old-fashioned that the railway – which had been its ruin – had only arrived barely twenty years ago.

A surprise had awaited them in town today. They had found a crowd gathered on the Market Place, waving flags and cheering. A brass band had been playing marching tunes next to the
flower-bedecked
water pump. Swinging along in perfect step, rank after rank of soldiers had passed by, heads held high, eyes to the front, uniforms spotless, boots and buttons gleaming.

‘They are home from the war,’ Mlle Lacroix had said, ‘the war in
L’Afrique du Sud.’

‘Is one of them Mrs Somersby’s son?’ Dorothea had asked.

But Roderick had scoffed. ‘Don’t be such a dunce. This is an entirely different regiment.’

Mlle Lacroix had watched the scene with a sad smile on her lips. ‘These people – so carefree, so patriotic – they forget all those who will never return.’

Because they are dead,
Dorothea had thought with a catch in her throat.
They will never return because they are dead.
She had felt, then – for a brief moment – as if a glittering surface had been scratched away. The sunshine had faded, the music seemed to falter. She had thought of Roderick’s toy soldiers squashed and mangled on the nursery floor nearly a year ago. But what did a
real
soldier look like, dead?

‘Why do they forget, mam’zelle?’

‘It is easy to forget what war is like,
ma petite,
when war is far away. But in France it is only thirty years since
les Prussiens
came.
Mon père,
he was a young man then. He lived in Paris. The city was besieged. There was much hardship.’

‘War will never come to England!’ Roderick, who hated to be left out of anything, had muscled his way into the conversation. ‘England is the most powerful country in the world, with the biggest empire. Nobody will dare to attack England!’

Mlle Lacroix had smiled at him. ‘France has her empire too, Monsieur Roderick. She has a long and glorious history. Think of
Le Roi Soleil
; think of Napoleon!’

‘Napoleon was the biggest scoundrel who ever lived.’ Roderick had dismissed France’s long and glorious history with a casual curl of his lip.

Picturing the scene as she sat on the back seat of the motor holding on to her hat, it was the feeling that the glittering surface was being scratched away that she recalled most strongly. She
shuddered
. Someone had
walked over her grave,
as Nora would have said. Did Roderick sense such things? Did he try to imagine what a dead soldier looked like? She didn’t believe that he did. How
agreeable
to be Roderick, so brazen and untroubled!

Glancing at the parcel on the seat next to her, she felt glad that she was soon to pay off her debt to him. The toy soldiers which had been destroyed on his birthday a year ago would be replaced at last on his next in a few weeks’ time, for luck had smiled on her and she had become rich. She had been given a whole half sovereign, and all because of Richard. And so the journey to Lawham had served a purpose, despite the disappointment of the punctured wheel.

‘Just a puncture, nothing to worry about,’ Uncle Albert had said. ‘I’ll mend it in a jiffy when we get back.’

‘Bernadette gets punctures too,’ Henry had consoled her. ‘I’m forever having to change her wheels.’

‘Yet another drawback to those machines of yours,’ Uncle Albert had said with a glint in his eye. This had begun the conversation which was continuing still as Henry’s motor bumped and jolted over the ruts in the Newbolt Road.

‘I’ll say this much, young Fitzwilliam – you make a good
advocate
for these horseless carriages or whatever you like to call them. Puts me in mind of a chap I met on the train the other day. He was all for these new-fangled things, too. Talked a lot of sense, as it happens. He’s designed some new type or model but he can’t get any backing for it. I’ve got his name and address here somewhere, just in case.’

‘Just in case of what?’ Henry gave Uncle Albert a wary glance. ‘I don’t want to speak out of turn, sir, and I’m all for motors as you know but there are a lot of charlatans out there who see the motor craze as a way of making easy money.’

‘I think I’d back myself to spot a charlatan, don’t you?’

‘Well, yes, now that you mention it, I would, sir. But why this sudden interest – if you don’t mind me asking? I thought you had no time for motors.’

‘I like to keep an open mind, Fitzwilliam. Move with the times. That’s how I got involved with bicycles. I might still be making watches otherwise. Flogging a dead horse. Now these machines of yours – they might be just a fad, then again they might not. Same was said about bicycles in the beginning and look how they’ve taken off! I’ve even seen some motorized bicycles at the Cycle Show in recent times. All the same, there doesn’t seem to any money in the motor trade. Companies are forever going out of business.’

‘A lot of them aren’t really companies at all, sir. They’re just fancy catalogues and grandiose schemes which come to nothing. But even the ones that do get off the ground often struggle. They’re run by engineers, you see, when a man with a head for business is what’s required. You’d have no trouble making a motor company pay, sir.’

Uncle Albert laughed. ‘I daresay. I daresay. But let’s not get ahead of ourselves.
Look before you leap,
that’s my motto.’

His words were cautious but Dorothea could tell that her uncle’s interest had been aroused. She wondered with a leap of excitement if Uncle Albert would go so far as to buy an autocar of his own. She had a great interest in autocars. Henry’s enthusiasm had rubbed off on her. It rubbed off on most people eventually – except the
die-hards
like Colonel Harding. But Uncle Albert wasn’t a stick-in-the-mud of that sort. He was careful, yes. Prudent, yes. But once he got the bit between the teeth, there was no knowing what might happen….

‘There’s Windmill Hill,’ cried Henry, pointing ahead as Bernadette negotiated a humpbacked bridge over the canal. ‘My home – Hayton Grange – is at the foot of the hill.’

Dorothea sat up, eager to see where Henry lived, but the house was invisible: tucked away in a fold of land, perhaps, or hidden by the clump of trees that Henry called Grange Holt. The hill, on the other hand, was plain to see, round and green, steep sides rising to a flattened crown. The white sails of the mill were etched against the cloudless sky.

On the other side of the road, to the left, fields sloped gently down to the shallow valley where the canal meandered, mostly out of sight. In the distance, a thin grey line of smoke spiralled up into the blue.

Dorothea watched as the hill slid away behind them. Bernadette chugged and coughed. They were climbing a slight incline and, ahead, the outlying buildings of the village came into view –
her
village, as she thought of it, Hayton. The squat tower of St Adeline’s was now in sight, but rising higher than the church, billowing into the late afternoon sky, the spiral of smoke had grown rapidly to a grey-black column which was being flattened out high above into a canopy like a great grasping claw.

For some reason, the smoke struck fear into her. ‘Uncle? What is it?’

‘I’m not sure, child. A chimney fire, maybe.’

But he did not sound convinced and even Dorothea could see that there was far too much smoke for that.

Bernadette nosed into the village. Dorothea had never approached it from this direction before, but she soon got her bearings. There was the school and the smithy and the Post Office, all grouped round the duck pond and the Jubilee Oak. Three roads met at this point: the road from Newbolt along which they had just come; Back Lane to the left; and School Street straight on. In School Street she could see a crowd of people milling around – women, children, the elderly (most of the men would still be at work at this time of day) – all pointing, gesticulating, calling to each other. Smoke was billowing over the rooftops. It was casting a shadow over the village, bringing more people at a run from near and far.

Henry reached for the break lever and brought the motor to a stop outside Brittens’ Bakery (Nora’s mother often took her Sunday joint to be roasted at the bakery; the Brittens, in some complicated way, were relatives of the Turners. Dorothea knew all this and more from listening to Nora).

‘What’s happening? Where are we?’ asked a sleepy voice. Richard had woken at last and had sensed that something was amiss.

‘Just a little blaze, I think. Nothing to worry about,’ said Uncle Albert. ‘All the same, I’ll have a quick word, see if there’s anything I can do. If you’ll take the children home, Fitzwilliam?’

‘Of course, sir. Then I’ll come straight back.’

‘Good lad, good lad. Well, off you go.’

Uncle Albert swung out of his seat, jumped down from the motor, went striding up the street. Fearless, thought Dorothea, but sensible too. He would set things to rights.

Inspired by a feeling she could not quite put her finger on, Dorothea found herself scrambling out of the motor and making a leap for the ground even as Henry was manoeuvring to turn round. She stumbled, regained her balance, hesitated. Would Uncle Albert be angry if she followed him? And what about Nibs Carter?
You’d better not come round here again, or it’ll be the worst for you!
Did his threat still hold after nearly a year? But this was the village –
her
village – and what harm could come to her with Uncle Albert at hand?

Standing tall, shrugging off the protests of Henry and Richard, she marched up the street. There were allotments on her right; on the left was a row of tiny sandstone cottages. Ahead of her, a knot of people had gathered in the middle of the street round the tall and imposing figure of Uncle Albert. Dorothea joined the edge of the group, hanging back lest her uncle see her. A beady-eyed old man was talking. Dorothea recognized him as Noah Lee, Nora’s
grandfather
, whom she’d seen last year at the wedding. She remembered that she had not liked the way he stared at her.

‘It’s one of the hayricks, Master Brannan, in Wilmot’s yard. That’s where it started. And with this breeze fanning it, it’s spread to the stables. Most of the horses are in the fields, but there’s two that are lame – they’re trying to get them out. They’ll need to hurry. The fire will take hold in no time, in this wind.’

Dorothea knew that Wilmot’s was a small farmhouse right in the centre of the village. People were pointing to a narrow entry, a gap in the row of little cottages, and she guessed that the farmhouse must be down there, set back from the street. Circling the group of people – who were all talking loudly now, eager to have their say – Dorothea moved to a position where she could look into the entry. She saw the farmyard beyond with a curtain of flame which must be the remains of the hayrick. To the right, wooden stables were smouldering; some of the timbers were actually glowing. Figures were darting back and forth across the yard, silhouetted against the blaze.

As she watched, a great cart horse suddenly appeared in the entry. A man in shirt sleeves was leading it by the mane, talking to it softly; but the horse’s eyes were rolling and it was snorting and stamping its feet, foaming. People backed away as it came cavorting into the street; but Uncle Albert stood his ground, nodding encouragement to the man leading it.