‘He could,’ said Ag. ‘What about Janet? I told you you should think about Janet.’
‘Enough of your lectures, Ag.
He
didn’t mention Janet.’
‘What did you feel about her?’ Ag heard the disapproval in her voice, sharp as it had been on the Sunday walk.
‘Can’t say I gave her a thought. None of my business. Think that’s very wicked, do you?’ Prue turned to Stella.
‘I think,’ Stella said, thinking fast, ‘you should stick very carefully to your philosophy of not upsetting apple carts. You don’t want to be thrown out by the Lawrences, and cause difficulties between Janet and Joe.’
Prue shrugged. ‘It’s not as if they’re
very
engaged, is my way of seeing it. Besides, all’s fair in love and war, like I
keep
saying. What Janet doesn’t know won’t hurt.’
‘That’s not entirely the point,’ said Ag. ‘What if you got pregnant?’
‘Don’t be daft. I know how to take care of all that. Haven’t been caught out yet, have I?’ Prue hailed the waitress, asked for another round of orangeades. ‘Anyway, now we’re over the serious bit, d’you want to know what it was like?’ She looked from Ag, who blushed deeply, to Stella, who could not quite disguise a look of interest. ‘It all happened easy as pie. According to plan. My plan. His too, if I know anything about randy farmers’ sons. And I have to tell you—’ she drew herself up, squashed the bow with an emphatic hand – ‘Joe Lawrence is quite a man. If you’re ever feeling like it, he’d be a good start. Set a high standard to go by in the future, know what I mean?’
‘Prue! You’re dreadful!’ Ag felt sweat on her forehead.
‘You’re wicked!’ added Stella, laughing. ‘Go on.’
‘Well, he’s no miniature, that’s for sure. More like a bloody great stallion.’
Prue put out her hands, measuring a width to match the side of the table. Her huge, green, mascara-spiked eyes opened wide, her tiny, manicured hands were held up in
angels-bending-near-to-God
position. For a second she looked more like something by Fra Angelico than an over-sexed land girl, and Ag, despite herself, began to laugh. Stella joined in. Prue, looking from one to the other, seeing they were not mocking but enjoying her account, was fired to further revelations.
‘Mind you, he sounded like a bloody tractor, and cor blimey am I
crushed
this morning! But it was all good fun. Wouldn’t mind a bit more any time …’
‘You’re completely incorrigible,’ said Ag, still laughing.
For some reason Ag’s heart had lightened: must be something to do with the fact that, whatever had gone on between Joe and Prue, she couldn’t believe it was serious.
Prue was about to ask what incorrigible meant, but her attention was snatched by a young man in RAF uniform who came through the door. He had very short, gleaming fair hair and a shaven neck, features that were enhanced by the severity of his cap. Assaulted by Prue’s admiring stare, he hesitated, but then made his way to a table in the window – as far as possible from the girls – and ordered a cup of tea and a scone.
‘How about that?’ asked Prue. ‘Quite promising, I’d say.’
‘Stop staring,’ whispered Stella.
‘Your manners, Prue!’ Ag heard herself being prissy again, even in laughter. She also felt reckless. In a strange way she wanted to urge Prue on, see if she would live up to her boasting. ‘So what are you going to
do
?’
‘Look friendly, that’s all,’ said Prue. She turned her head in the airman’s direction, fluttered her huge lashes.
‘You’re shocking,’ said Stella, smiling, aware of a certain admiration in her admonishment. ‘Last night you seduce Joe; how could you even contemplate someone else not twenty-four hours later?’
‘It pays to notch them up.’ Prue slowed down the fanning of her lashes, gave a dimpled smile at the airman. ‘’Specially in a war.’ She picked up her bag, searched for her purse. Ag, alarmed at the thought of Prue taking the next logical step, and moving to his table, asked for the bill.
‘We ought to be getting back,’ she said. ‘We don’t want to miss the last bus.’
‘I wouldn’t mind.’ Prue dreamily counted her share of coins. ‘By the way, did either of you see Joe this morning? I did the milking with Mr Lawrence. Didn’t like to ask him where Joe was.’
‘Mrs Lawrence said he had an asthma attack,’ said Ag. ‘He was in his room.’
The thought seemed to amuse Prue. ‘Must have been the hay,’ she said. ‘We’ll have to find somewhere he’s not allergic to. His bed, perhaps.’
‘Are you completely off your head?’ Stella stood. She took Prue’s arm. ‘Come on, we’re going. Fast.’
Dragged by the firm Stella, Prue, unable to linger at the door, cast the airman a final, signalling glance.
‘Spoilsports!’ she complained once they were outside.
But the complaint had no depth and once more the three of them were joined in laughter. They hurried along the streets through the sharp evening air, arms linked, drunk on orangeade and an afternoon’s freedom from toiling on the land. Stella and Ag refused to let Prue pause by unlit shop windows awaiting their blackout.
‘I’ll come on my own next time,’ she protested, ‘buy some new ribbon, find my way to the RAF camp … Why do you think, after all Mr Lawrence’s threats, there was no dagging this morning after all?’
‘He was probably too busy, with Joe off,’ said Stella. ‘Probably be tomorrow.’
‘I’m going to be the best bloody dagger in Dorset,’ sang Prue. ‘You’ll see.’
And then all thoughts of dagging were blasted from her mind: in the bus shelter was a poster announcing a dance at a nearby RAF camp, in aid of the Merchant Navy Fund.
‘Stone the crows, girls, do you see this?’ she gasped. ‘We’re in luck! Here’s something to look forward to, isn’t it? Here’s a chance for the diamante, or would diamonds in Dorset be too much?’
The others bundled her up the steps of the bus and into a seat on her own. But there was no escaping her bubbling anticipation. She twisted round, lay her chin on the back of the seat that divided them, restless hand running through her curls, plucking at the wilting bow.
‘What’s the betting we run into Romeo of the tea-room, eh? Come on, you two fuddy duddies … Imagine …’
The bus started with a reluctant growl, moved out of the town and into dark lanes. Over the hedges and shaven fields a gun-metal sky glowed behind a grid of green-black clouds. The first evening star – the ‘slippered Hesper’ in Ag’s mind – was bright. A dance in an RAF camp was the last thing she wanted to imagine: nothing would persuade her to go. She would have liked to have been alone in the bus, watching the darkness gather, then walking silently back from Hinton to the farmhouse. She was suddenly tired. For the first time since she had left home, she ached for the silent privacy of her own room, a quiet evening with her father. Until now, she had been too busy to think of him often. Now, imagining his domestic struggle without her, a disquieting anxiety caused her a private tear beneath closed eyes.
Stella, too, sat with head tilted back, only half listening to Prue’s daft expectations. Fragments of Prue’s description of Joe came back to her:
stallion
, indeed. Such a crude word for a man. Stella gave a small shiver, knowing it to be inappropriate for Philip. Philip was no stallion, thank God, was he? What
was
Philip, in fact? Did she know? And where was he this very minute, and why, again, hadn’t he written?
‘I’ll lay a sixpenny bet with the two of you,’ Prue was saying, head still bobbing over the seat, ‘that at the RAF dance I’ll have tracked him down in the first half-hour, and we’ll have made it by midnight.’
‘Do pipe down, Prue.’ Stella wanted to be at peace with her own fantasies: Philip on boiler-cleaning leave, weekend in a hotel, a double bed, a bottle of wine …
‘I mean the funny thing is,’ Prue went on, ‘this war does at least offer a lot of opportunities, especially for a girl like me who can’t resist a uniform. I mean we have to do our bit for our country: plough the land, entertain the troops, make them feel wanted, so we’re entitled to some fun in between – don’t you agree, Stella? Oh crikey: you’re not asleep, too? What a couple … Old before your time.’
W
hen Prue returned from her second visit to the barn, at three in the morning, she bumped into a piece of furniture while stumbling to find her bed.
Her yelp of pain woke Ag, who said nothing. The next sound to be heard was the unscrewing of a jar. Even in complete darkness, it seemed, Prue was determined to take off her mascara.
Rigid in her bed, Ag lay fighting against pictures of Prue’s night. Details were blurred in her mind. She was too shy – too prissy, she thought with scorn – to ask even herself how they did it in the hay. But the general imagining of their flailing joy, combined with feelings of shameful envy, sickened. She hated Prue for so easily achieving what she herself might never have with Desmond. She despised Prue’s silliness, her vanity, her preoccupation with material things. More confusingly, she admired her, too: the rough wit, outspokenness, warmth, energy, sense of fun. Ag would willingly sacrifice all her literary knowledge for an ounce or two of Prue’s sex appeal, she thought. Silent tears, for her own inadequacy, dampened the pillow.
Unable to go back to sleep, she got up at four and dressed in the dark. There were lights on downstairs. Ag was surprised. She crept along the passage to the kitchen door. It was slightly ajar. Peering through, she saw Mrs Lawrence at the stove pouring boiling water into a teapot.
Ag went in. Then she saw Joe sitting at the table, which was bare of everything but the jug of flowers. There was a muddied silence – the kind of silence in which angry words had been spoken and had run out, or remained unspoken between them. Joe was pale, unshaven. He wheezed slightly with every breath.
‘You’re early,’ said Mrs Lawrence.
‘I’m sorry. Shall I—?’
‘Get yourself a mug.’
Ag put three mugs, milk, sugar and spoons on the checked oilcloth. Thus furnished, it seemed more familiar. But the customary warm ease of the kitchen was missing. With the blackout still in place, there was a night-time feel to the room. Ag had no idea whether her presence was a relief, or made matters between Joe and his mother more difficult.
The three of them sat at one end of the table. They listened to the rhythmic hiss of Joe’s breath. They stirred their tea quietly.
‘Are you better today?’ Ag turned, after a while, to Joe.
‘Thanks.’ Joe nodded. ‘Dagging this morning,’ he added.
It was no time to smile. Ag concentrated on her tea. She saw that Mrs Lawrence stirred hers with a hand that slightly trembled – round and round, far longer than was necessary, eyes cast down at the small milky whirlpool she made with her spoon.
‘I doubt Prudence will be up to dagging,’ she said. There was more silence. Joe did not respond to the challenge of her look.
‘I’ll take down the blackout, Ma,’ Joe said then.
‘You do that, son.’
Joe got up from the table and pulled the stuff down from the window. There was a flat grey sky outside, and a transparent sliver of moon. The two collies, half alert on the rag rug, tapped their tails as Joe passed. He left the room.
‘It’s his asthma,’ said Mrs Lawrence, when he had gone. She looked hard at Ag with her tired eyes. ‘Sometimes he goes for weeks on end all right, then he has two bad nights.’ Her voice defied Ag not to believe this.
There is justification in lying if it’s to protect those you love, thought Ag. She was moved by Mrs Lawrence’s fierce dignity, what sounded like the truth of her conviction. Conviction? Perhaps she really did think Joe’s two sleepless nights had been caused by asthma. Was it maligning Mrs Lawrence to suppose that she knew what Joe had been up to? Or was it granting the strength of her instinct?
‘Rotten for him,’ said Ag, quietly.
‘Still, he’s better today than yesterday.’
Mr Lawrence, Stella and Prue arrived. There were black smudges under Prue’s eyes. Despite her rouge, she looked pale. It was the first morning she had not bothered with her make-up though perhaps, thought Ag, this was from carelessness rather than lack of spirit.
‘So it’s dagging, this morning, is it?’ Prue asked Mr Lawrence, helping herself to a thick slice of home-made bread.
‘That’s it.’ Mr Lawrence gave a small smile. ‘Your time’s come.’
Mrs Lawrence brought a new pot of tea to the table. The sky was paling beyond the barn. A few yellow leaves blew across the window.
‘You’re going to be as surprised by my dagging as you were by my ploughing,’ grinned Prue.
‘We’re not, actually,’ said Mrs Lawrence. She stood at the end of the table, fingers of both hands stiffly digging into the oilcloth, denting its surface. ‘Because you, Prue, are going to do the pig this morning.’
The grin left Prue’s face. A whiplash glance was exchanged between the Lawrences. It was evident Mrs Lawrence’s decision had been made on the spur of the moment, and her husband knew better than to query it. In the long silence, Prue decided to conceal her disappointment.
‘Very well,’ she said. ‘I don’t mind.’
‘And then you can do some muck-spreading,’ Mrs Lawrence added, ‘and this afternoon, the cowsheds need a good scrub down and a limewash.’
Prue looked at Mr Lawrence: his nod meant he concurred with his wife’s plan.
‘Anything you say.’ She gave a small shrug. Her back and legs were aching. The inside of her lips were swollen. She could taste tiny specks of salt blood.
‘Ag and Stella will do the morning milk, then Joe’ll supervise the dagging,’ Mrs Lawrence went on. ‘John will show you what to do with the pig, Prue: I’ll be busy all morning with the laundry.’
This was the first morning Mrs Lawrence had been the one to initiate plans and she listed them with unusual ferocity.
Prue pushed away an unfinished slice of bread on her plate.
‘I’m sure the pig and I will get on very well, any road,’ she said, plumping up the yellow bow in her hair.
No one responded.
When the three girls and two men had hurried away from the uneasy gathering, Mrs Lawrence remained at the table, still stirring her tea, jaw muscles working. She watched the gathering light seep across the oilcloth, ignite the sides of the old mugs and teapot with small pale flames. After the last door had banged, and there was complete silence except for the dogs’ faint snoring, she pressed her head into the darkness of her hands and said a quick prayer. Then she rose to begin her morning’s work.