Jubilee (14 page)

Noi’s terror was replaced with laughter. She made one fist into a snake’s head and pretended to bite her other hand. Then she stopped laughing and said something in Thai that
sounded more serious, even in the melodious sing-song tones that Siamese women use to speak their language. I knew she was telling me to be more careful where I put my hands.

Matthew and I had the eggs for our supper. It is wonderful how even a small amount of protein makes you feel stronger again. I used to like my eggs scrambled with butter, all yellow and
creamy. Here they are plain boiled, eaten with salt if we can get it.

I wonder if young Noi will be able to find us more food. Or medicines.

Evie
September 1945

Into Evie’s dream moved a dried-out husk the size of a tree. But the husk had a face. Evie woke. She caught sight of a face at her door then it was gone.

She rolled over on her side and pulled the sheet over her shoulders, closing her eyes and willing sleep to return. But the face was on her mind. She probably had imagined it but just in case she
was going to close the door. She rose and walked towards it, her hand reaching for the handle, when a shadow passed across it.

Evie opened her mouth to cry out but found herself speechless. The figure must be a ghost. It looked like Robert Winter, but it was thin, its face lined like an older man’s. Under her
pillow Evie kept the photo of Robert in his uniform, taken at the rose-trailed farmhouse door the day before he left to go to war. This apparition in the doorway with its skeletal face and lined
skin was a pastiche of that man.

Perspiration beaded her forehead. She heard her breath coming fast.

‘Hello, Evie.’

‘It is you.’ She could speak again but her voice sounded as if it belonged to someone else. She rubbed her eyes. But he still stood in front of her with his gaunt face and huge eyes.
He didn’t look like the boy whose picture she’d kept in her mind for all those years. He didn’t look like the handsome hero she’d imagined who’d return to fall in love
with her as soon as she was old enough to be worthy of this privilege. For the last year, since her mother had died in one of the final bombing raids, anticipation of Robert’s return had kept
Evie going through long schooldays and evenings spent helping with the milking or trying to rustle up meals for Charlie and Mr Edwards.

‘Back again. At long last.’

She forced her lips to work. ‘I missed you so much.’ She’d rehearsed these words a thousand times. ‘And Charlie did too.’

‘Did you?’

‘We wrote to you. Did you get the letters?’ She had to keep on talking, nervous of what the silences might expose.

He shook his head. ‘We had nothing. In the end all I had was that letter you wrote me before I left the farm. Do you remember, Evie?’

‘Yes.’ She took a few steps backwards until she reached her bed, where she sat. Her fingers picked at a loose thread on the eiderdown.

‘Most of it disintegrated but I could still read the important bits.’

What exactly had she said? She could remember writing the letter but not the words she’d used.

‘It really kept me going, knowing that there was someone back here rooting for me. Got me through some bad times, I can tell you.’

‘I’m glad.’

‘I wrote to you, too, Evie.’

‘Did you? We never had the letters.’

‘I lost some of them in Singapore. But I kept on writing even though they’d never have let me send them. So I hid them. In all kinds of places. Matthew kept them safe for
me.’

‘I’d like to have read them.’ But she knew she wouldn’t have been able to bear it.

‘Did you hear about what the Japs did to us, Evie?’ He came into the room and sat on her bed. She willed herself not to flinch from him as he passed her. Even the smell of him was
different: metallic and dry, like a road in hot sun. He’d once smelled of new grass and warm cotton. ‘Did Matthew tell you? Perhaps he thought a young girl like you oughtn’t to
know those things.’

‘He hasn’t come back here yet. He’s still in hospital.’

‘They told me that they’d had to amputate part of his foot. It rotted.’

She heard the rasp of her drawn breath.

‘He had a skin abscess and it went down to the bone. No penicillin out there to treat infections. And the heat and humidity made it worse. You could smell it from yards away.’

‘Poor Matthew.’

‘He had beriberi, too. And we all had dysentery and malaria. But the foot was the worst thing.’

‘It must have been dreadful.’ She sounded like a stuffed doll, mouthing tired old phrases.

‘My health wasn’t bad until towards the end when they . . .’ He swallowed hard. ‘But Matthew’ll come back here.’ He didn’t seem able to speak for a
moment. ‘We’ll look after him, you and I. He can have our milk to drink: best thing for him.’

‘We kept the herd going,’ she said. ‘Only lost two in all the years you were away. One had milk fever and the vet couldn’t work out what was wrong with the other. But no
TB.’

‘You did so well, Evie. I’m so proud of you. I always said you’d make a farmer.’ If she closed her eyes and just listened to his voice it might have been the old Robert
talking to her.

‘And you should see the pigs. We’ve chosen the one to slaughter. He’s a beauty.’

‘So we’ll have pork chops this autumn.’ His voice was warm. ‘It’s going to be just like it was before I went away, Evie, just like you wrote in your letter. And
I’ll forget everything. It’ll be just as though it never happened.’ He sounded dreamy now. ‘Perhaps we just imagined the whole thing.’

She wondered if he ever saw his own reflection in the mirror. Surely that would tell him that his imprisonment had been no bad dream? All round the village there’d been talk of the
atrocities, the hunger.

He ran a finger over the ridges on her candlewick bedspread. ‘I was worried you and Charlie might have gone back to London by now.’

‘Our house was bombed last year. Mum died. We’re still waiting for our dad to be demobbed but he won’t have a home for us.’ Evie could list these events almost without
feeling them now. Her mother was becoming just a memory. She’d seen her father briefly when he’d visited the farm for a few days in 1943. It had been like receiving a visit from a
favourite uncle.

‘So it looks like you two’ll be here a while longer.’ He got up. ‘That’s just as it should be. I should get to bed now. Night, Evie.’ For a second as he
wished her goodnight it was as though she’d flipped back three or four years; there was a glimpse of the boy she remembered with his ready smile. Then the haggard man reappeared, moving
stiffly towards the door. Evie waited until he’d crossed the landing to his own room and jumped up to lock her bedroom. She’d never locked the door before. When they’d turned
twelve Charlie had moved to the little box room next to this one at the suggestion of Mrs Winter in one of her rare lucid periods.

‘Making yourselves very comfortable,’ Martha had said, observing them moving clothes and books.

Back then Evie had taken this as reassuring evidence that they were both to stay in the farmhouse and of her own increased maturity and stature. Now she wished her brother was still sleeping in
the bed beside her. But this was Robert she was worrying about: Robert Winter, who’d given her the best raspberries to eat and shown her where the farm cat kept her kittens. Robert, her
knight.

During the day Robert was absent. He seemed to do little on the farm, but that was all right because there were still Mr Edwards, Martha and the two land girls, who’d
been joined eighteen months earlier by an Italian POW, who came up to the farm from a small nearby camp every day. Mr Edwards had moved into Matthew’s bedroom and had his meals with the
children. A nurse had been employed to come in twice a day to look after Mrs Winter. Occasionally Evie’s form teacher would express uncertainty as to the propriety of these arrangements.
‘You live with an incapacitated elderly lady and a man you barely know?’ She frowned and the spectacles on her nose made her eyes look like blue pebbles.

‘The land girls often come in for meals.’

‘They’ll be going home soon.’ She paused. ‘And in my experience, many of those young women are very far from setting a good example to girls of your age.’

‘Mr Edwards is very kind.’ Evie cast desperately about in her mind. ‘He helps with homework. He can cook, too. And he plays Scrabble and Monopoly with us.’ And
didn’t even mind that Charlie always won.

‘I’m sure he’s respectable. But I’ll be relieved when the Winter brothers are back home again. This arrangement doesn’t seem proper for a young girl.’

‘There’s Martha, too. She lives up the lane but she comes in every day.’

For the first time Evie felt grateful to have Martha around.

And now here was Robert Winter, back to take care of them. Only he wasn’t the same Robert he’d been before he’d left. Gone was the quick smile. Gone was the gentleness with
animals. Evie had seen him slap Fly on the head when he failed to respond quickly enough to a command.

The smell of spirits on his breath was becoming harder to ignore. Where Robert acquired the spirits, heavily rationed, was anyone’s guess. Mr Edwards, coming in from the cowshed to scrub
up under the kitchen taps, wrinkled his nose. Robert saw the expression on his face. ‘You got something stuck up your arse?’ The toffee-coloured eyes were hard like dirty
windowpanes.

Evie stared hard at the history homework laid out on the kitchen table.

‘Sorry, old chap.’ Mr Edwards shrugged. ‘Just seemed a little . . . early.’

When he wasn’t drinking Robert Winter retired to the barn with an old Norton motorbike he’d bought from one of the regulars in the Packhorse, taking it to bits and
cleaning and oiling each part before reassembling it. Evie hoped the new interest might wean him from the bottle. Martha came down to the farm one evening, wearing a dress Evie didn’t
recognize. She must have been saving it for the homecoming.

‘I could cook for you, Robert.’ She leant against the range. ‘Like old times. What do you fancy?’

‘What if he says he wants lobster?’ Charlie asked. She ignored him.

‘Hens are still laying well. I could make a soufflé. I’ve got some cheddar. Bet it’s years since you had one of those.’

He gave a non-committal smile.

‘And all those blackberries would make a good crumble.’

‘Evie wants them,’ he muttered. ‘For jam.’

‘Oh, Evie wants them, does she?’ Martha tapped her long fingers on the edge of the range. ‘Hope she won’t waste them: jam’s a tricky thing. Well, have a
think.’ She stood straight. ‘Or perhaps you’d fancy a stroll up the hill to look at the sheep?’

‘I went out earlier. They’re all fine.’

Martha pursed her lips. ‘I’ll be off then.’ Still she hovered. ‘If you’re sure there’s nothing I can do for you.’

He shook his head. ‘Thanks for coming down, Martha.’ As she left the kitchen Fly cowered against the wall, even though it was years since Martha had kicked him.

Robert spent hours with Carlo, the Italian prisoner of war, talking and smoking with him, sometimes consulting him about the motorbike. Perhaps he felt a particular bond with
Carlo on account of their both having been prisoners in a foreign land. Robert even gave the Italian some of his clothes, saying that they didn’t fit him any more. One afternoon Evie brought
them out their mugs of tea to find Robert handing over a pair of boots to the Italian. ‘Even my damn feet shrank in that place.’

‘Grazie,
signor.’ Carlo’s dark eyes shone. ‘They are nearly as good as Italian leather.’

‘According to you everything in Italy’s better than everything here,’ Robert said. Evie looked at him quickly to see whether he was about to grow angry but his expression was
relaxed.

‘Not everything. Not politics.’ Carlo grinned. ‘And your girls are good. Take the land girls. Or Miss Evie, nobody better than her between Sicily and the Dolomites.’

‘Couldn’t agree with you more.’ Robert’s smile had a flintiness to it. ‘But don’t mention Evie in the same breath as the land girls, old man.’

Carlo glanced from one of them to the other.
‘Scusi.’

‘Our Evie’s special, Carlo.’

‘Yes/

‘What about Martha?’ Evie asked cautiously. ‘Would you say that she was beautiful?’ Surely men would be impressed by that thick dark hair and that willowy shape.

The sudden tension felt like it did in church when the organist played a wrong note.

‘Unusual eyes,’ Carlo said, in a buoyant tone she didn’t recognize. ‘And she have good figure.’

Robert said nothing but narrowed his eyes and stared across the farmyard. Evie cursed herself as a fool and cast around for a distraction. ‘You’ll be repatriated soon enough,’
she told Carlo.

‘Not sure I want to go back there, anyway. Italy is a very poor country, even more so because of the war.’

‘But you’re always saying you don’t like England and the damp and you can’t wait to leave,’ she said.

‘Perhaps I go to America. Sometimes people get to Ireland and go on from there. So I hear.’

‘By people I assume you mean POWs who escape,’ Robert said.

Carlo made what Evie could only describe as a Latin gesture, shrugging with his palms turned upwards.

‘You could probably do it if you really wanted. Plenty of places you could hide out in.’ Robert shuddered. ‘Someone in the Packhorse was talking about German spies hiding in
the Sarsens up at Wayland’s Smithy on the Ridgeway.’

‘Do you think they did?’ Evie asked.

‘Good luck to them, if they did. Place is supposed to be haunted. No way you’d get me squeezing myself into a small space in the dark like that. When I was a lad I might have done it
for a lark but not now, not since . . .’ He broke off. ‘If I escape I’ll find a nice woman to hide me.’ Carlo’s eyes twinkled.

The pig was ready for slaughtering. Evie helped Mr Edwards pull the measuring tape round the animal. He nodded. ‘Nice job, Evie, he’s fattened up well.’ They
walked back to the house.

‘I can send for someone to do it,’ Mr Edwards said over breakfast. During the war they’d used a slaughterman from the village who came up with his sharpened blades wrapped up
in a canvas pouch. Evie’d watched once or twice but preferred to absent herself when it was an animal she knew well.