As she made her way through this patch of land, silent and enveloping as a cloud, she should have felt at peace, thought Ag. It was the sort of surprising moment in nature that she loved, when a shift of weather transforms a familiar landscape so completely that the wonder of it fills the viewer with profound awe.
In fact, she was full of dread. Mr Lawrence had announced at breakfast that later this morning there was to be a rat hunt. Ag suffered an old fear of all scurrying creatures. She remembered the nights she had lain in fear listening to the sound of obscene little claws scraping against the wooden boards in the attics above her bedroom, terrified they would find a chink in the floor, hasten through it like lemmings and fall upon her. She had imagined them tearing at her with their eager paws, baring their teeth to shred her eyelids to morsels. Their overhead clatterings were at times so noisy she was positive they were rats and squirrels, though her father had assured her they were only harmless mice. She hadn’t been able to tell him of her fears. After dinner, he would sit in his leather armchair fiddling with his pipe, listening to a concert on the Third Programme. He would not have welcomed a child disturbing his habitual evening peace. Kind, he would have been reassuring, patient. But secretly scornful. Afraid of mice? What nonsense, child, he would have said. Back to bed with you, go to sleep. So Ag had never gone down, but had remained rigid in her bed. She would long for the comfort of a mother she could not remember. On many such nights she prayed tearfully to God to show her just one picture of that mother’s face. She willed her subconscious to pluck a single image from her babyhood. But none came. She would block her ears against the attic noises, and long for morning.
Ag opened the gate, its wood soft and wet under her hand. The dogs sped off to the distant huddle of sheep. She strained her eyes to observe their skills through the mist. The flock began to move. She could make out black heads jerked backwards, sensed their feeling of mass indignation at the disturbance the dogs were causing. An occasional bleat shredded the damp silence. Then they were close: a glint of yellow eye, the smell of acrid wool. The dogs crouched, swayed their tails across the dew, barked. On such a morning the sheep had no heart to resist the old routine. They spurted through the gate, muffs of dun wool puffed over skinny legs, their bleats turned to what now seemed to be pleasure at the small change of scene. Ag noted with some satisfaction the still-pristine condition of their hindquarters.
When the last sheep had skittered through, she pulled shut the gate. The dogs returned to her side, panting. Their breath rose in pale bulbs, lingered, vanished. Ag stayed where she was for a few moments, watching the sheep’s indeterminate decision to make for the west corner of the field. Soon they became again as she had first seen them, an indistinct, distant skein. Her job done, dread of the next part of the morning returned with greater force. She could feel the beating of her heart.
‘Desmond!’ she said out loud, and the dogs looked curiously up at her.
When at breakfast that morning Mr Lawrence suggested Prue help Stella load the trailer with mangolds, Prue wondered whether her new innocence was as visible as her previous guilt.
‘Bloody marvellous – no mention of muck-raking. Miracle,’ she said later to Stella.
Side by side in the murky yard, they bent, picked up a mangold from the pile, swung it into the trailer. There was a huge pile to be loaded in the hour before they were to be handed over to Ratty for instruction. They worked fast, bending and throwing with easy rhythm. Their backs and shoulders soon ached with the grainy pain that had become a familiar, everyday occurrence. Prue paused, fingers exploring the knobbled muddy skin of one of the vegetables.
‘Can’t imagine fancying one of these even if I was a hungry cow,’ she said. ‘Do you think they know, or something? The Lawrences? I mean, why am I suddenly not muck-raking this morning?’
‘Conscience,’ said Stella, ‘plays all sorts of funny tricks on the imagination. I expect there was just no more muck-raking to be done.’
‘I didn’t have a conscience.’ Prue flung a mangold with some force. ‘Well, not much of one, any road. I gave Joe some fun. He doesn’t get much of that with Janet. He’ll have something to look back on. Years and years of boredom with Janet, and he’ll have me to look back on – the land girl who rogered him to a standstill in the barn.’ She giggled, pushed damp curls out of her eyes. Stella laughed. ‘What about you and Philip?’ Prue asked, then, still resting, arms folded.
‘What d’you mean, what about me and Philip?’
‘Done it yet?’
Stella felt herself blush. ‘Get on, Prue. I’m five mangolds ahead.’
‘Go on, tell me.’
‘I’ll tell you if you do ten while I take a rest.’
‘Done!’ Prue bent at once.
‘One, two, three … very good. You’re doing well.’
Hands on hips, Stella watched Prue’s small figure bending, straightening, throwing. In the grey air, her blonde curls were alive with light from an invisible source.
‘Now come
on
, or I’ll stop,’ chided Prue. ‘I want to
know
.’
Stella bit her lip. ‘We haven’t yet, no. No opportunity.’
‘Poor old you, rotten luck,’ said Prue. ‘Still, only a matter of time. Once you get down to it you’ll not want to stop, I’m telling you.’
‘We’ll only have a night or two, when his ship gets a boiler clean.’
‘When’s that?’
‘Wish I knew.’
Stella returned to work. She hoped her voice conveyed a lightness she did not feel. The strain of waiting for a second letter was sometimes deflected by hard manual labour but, increasingly, even that antidote was often ineffective. The job of transporting cold heavy mangolds from yard to trailer on a damp and gloomy morning did nothing to raise her spirits. She wondered, as she so often did, how
so much love
, transported on air waves towards its object, was not felt and instantly returned.
‘Don’t envy
him
his job on a morning like this,’ Prue was saying.
Stella followed her look to the yard gate. The postman pushed his dulled red bike through the mud, heavy canvas bag slouched over the handlebars.
‘Silly to hope,’ said Stella.
‘You might as well,’ said Prue.
To avert his mind from the dreadful prospect ahead – the instruction of the land girls in the art of ratting – Ratty allowed himself to daydream as he applied an extra polish to his boots and gaiters. He had been listening to a discussion on the wireless about the employment crisis in munition factories. Last
September
it had been announced that an extra 1,750,000 men and 84,000 women would be needed for the three Services and the Civil Defence by the end of this year. Therein the problem: if half a million men were withdrawn from the munitions industries to fight, and the industries had to expand by one and a half million, who would work in the factories to equip the newly swollen forces? Answer: women. A million and a half of them would have to leave their children, their kitchens, their darning, jobs such as running a local post office, and go into the factories. It was here that Ratty’s dream brightened: he polished the toe of the second shoe with renewed vigour. For it might just be possible, it had occurred to him, to persuade Edith to go to work in a factory. He let a small scene, planned for the near future, run through his mind.
‘You ought to consider it, Edith. You’re a fine worker. It would be an honourable way to do your bit for your country.’
(She’d be bound to like the idea of honour.)
‘And how would I do that? Where’s the factories near here? Besides, my age
…’
‘You’re a fine strong woman upon whom the years have left no trace, my dear.’
(If he really spoke to her like that she’d clout him about the ears in disbelief. In his dream she smiled pinkly with modest pride.)
‘You could lodge with your sister Nancy: plenty of work in Southampton. You might have something of a social life. Forces’ dances, that sort of thing. It would be a much livelier war than staying here with me
…’
‘Ratty!’ Her face lighted just as it had, once or twice, as a girl.
‘I do believe you’ve hit on a good idea
…
After that, the daydream swerved into other areas of pleasure: the cottage to himself, freedom from her tyranny, the luxury of being able to think uninterrupted. Best of all, the possibility that she might never come back.
Ratty put his brushes, dusters and polish neatly back in their tin. He straightened up to see Edith in the flesh at the door. In a nasty mood, this morning, she was – sort of mood where she’d rather give her loaves to the hens than let her customers buy them.
‘What’s all this polishing for?’
She was sharp, though. Had to say that for her. Nothing escaped her.
‘Nothing special.’
‘Huh.’
The meeting of dream and reality had come a little too quickly. Ratty knew that to say anything now would be foolish. Dregs of his fantasy would blur his powers of persuasion. On the other hand, he was impatient to try. If it worked, he could be rid of her within the week.
‘They’re saying on the wireless they’re still wanting more women in the factories. Urgent,’ he added, seeing the suspicion that instantly clouded her face.
‘What’s that got to do with me, pray?’
‘It occurred to me you’d be a good woman on a factory line, all your energy, Edith. Wonderful sort of war effort. Greater sacrifice than any amount of saucepans …’ He trailed off. His eyes lumbered over the whole rigid edifice of his wife’s body, only avoiding her eyes. ‘Plenty of work near Nancy. Livelier life for you than here. I could manage fine on my own.’
Edith began to laugh, a nasty cackling sound. Ratty was filled with regret for his decision – such mistiming. Judgement distorted by disappointment, he wondered for a moment if she really was amused. He smiled in uneasy complicity. Would she stop that dreadful noise in a moment and say she agreed to the idea? Confused, Ratty put the tin of shoe-cleaning things on the table. Edith uttered a piercing scream.
‘You can’t get rid of me as easily as that, you can’t! Have to try something better than that. And take that tin off my table! How many times have I told you …?’
Over the years, Ratty had learned the advantages of appearing calm in the face of her hysteria. He let himself out of the room without a word, screams of abuse following him down the garden path. Once through the small gate, he turned to secure the latch. He was aware of Edith’s contorted face at the kitchen window. As he moved away with a polite wave, the window opened. You wouldn’t credit so small a woman with such strength of insult, such powerful lungs, thought Ratty. And then he saw an object flying through the grey air.
Ratty paused for less than a second to confirm the object, landed on the grass, was what he most feared it might be – their last saucepan. He hurried down the lane, determined not to think what kind of an evening this would mean. His knees were shaken by the scene: they always reacted first to Edith’s outbursts. But then, rounding the corner, he saw in the distance the tall figure of the one with the holy face. She waved, friendly. As they drew closer Ratty saw her hair hung lank in the damp air. There was something hesitant, unwilling, in her step.
What then occurred was the kind of thing Ratty would rate as a small miracle. She smiled at him, the girl, and it was as if all the troubles of his life with Edith ceased to exist. Instead, the only thing that engaged his mind, indeed his whole shaky body, was a deep longing to convey to this gentle creature the skills, the joys, of hunting rats.
‘Morning,’ he said, weak with a gratitude she would never know she had caused. They walked together into the yard.
‘You may sit,’ said Ratty. He stood before his audience of three in the barn. The girls sank on to piles of hay. Ratty observed Ag’s kindly look, her half-smile.
She was thinking of this time last year: the undergraduates in the lecture hall would stand as the Professor in Elizabethan Literature shuffled in, never less than ten minutes late, dropping his many notes on metaphysical poetry as he climbed the platform. He would survey them all for a very long time in silence, nodding his head as he silently counted how many had bothered to turn up. Small pieces of coloured papers covered with illegible writing sprouted from his pockets and the books he carried. It often seemed that he was so preoccupied with some erudite problem that he had forgotten his job was actually to speak. Sometimes he would leave his students standing for as much as three minutes before murmuring
You may sit
. Then, shaking himself free of all the notes, he would begin, and hold his audience spellbound for the next hour.
Now the girls were sitting down, Ratty felt more at ease. He could see over their heads to the tractor and the sacks, cast his eyes up to the familiar rafters and the mysterious darkness beyond, stirred now and then by the pale fluttering of a pigeon. It had been his idea to speak to the girls in the barn. Mr Lawrence had suggested that round the kitchen table would be most convenient – but no, Ratty had thought. That would be too close. He would like to stand while they sat. The barn was the place he had retreated to, for shelter and private thought, for so many years. It was the fit location for his first attempt at formal instruction.
He leaned on his stick, more for moral support than physical, kneaded its smooth wooden knob in his hand. One knee still shook slightly, but he doubted any of the girls would notice. With his free hand he patted his jacket pocket, checking the huge ball of his handkerchief was there: these days drips from his nose and water from his eyes would appear without warning. The pert little film star shifted, impatient. The bow in her hair was the nastiest colour he had ever seen.
‘Come on, Ratty,’ she said.
Bugger you, you little floozie, he thought. Then he lifted his chin, as he did in church before the first hymn, and began.