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‘I see we have yet another music lover among us. Well, go on in then, boy.'

Mr Hanbury took the chair by the fireplace. He struck a match for another small cigar, waved it along to the music, taking sips of smoke. Peter felt like a lemon standing there, unexplained and awkward just inside the door. The others glanced at him but carried on as if under an urgent spell to finish the tune. He let the buzz of the cello reverberate in his chest, felt the thumps of the piano through his feet, Alice's violin bow sawing his heart into slices.

When they stopped Mr Hanbury clapped. Alice came over to her father's chair, leant down over the back and slid her arms round her father's neck. ‘You went out again.'

‘I see you rotters didn't wait for me for supper.'

‘Shall I ask Maudey, dear?'

‘No. No. In fact I ate there.'

‘And you brought Peter in to listen to our Schubert.'

‘I found him outside the door, trying to listen through the crack.'

Peter blushed.

‘Oh, it's not nice to listen outside doors, Peter,' said Mrs Hanbury mildly.

‘But you enjoyed the Schubert, didn't you, Peter?' Alice came and took his hand, led him to a chair.

He nodded hard.

‘You see,' she addressed the room. ‘Given the opportunity they
don't just want to listen to big bands and George Formby and all that kind of ephemera. It's all a question of educating minds, raising everybody up to the same level.'

‘It would certainly help if they would hurry up and find some places in the local schools for these evacuees,' said Mrs Hanbury. ‘They are saying we might have to wait until they can organise some kind of shift system to accommodate all the children. In the meantime Peter is going to be wandering around with little to do.' She shook her head.

‘Do you read books, Peter?' Alice looked at him, frowning, as if he needed adjusting properly in some way. He brushed a hand across his face in case it had a mark on it.

‘I love books, me, miss.'

‘Well, that's splendid. There are stacks of them up in my room. Would you like me to pick some out for you, Peter?'

‘Yes please.'

‘Well, I'm so glad you know how to read.'

‘I took exam for the grammar school, miss. I passed it, miss.'

‘You were attending Manchester Grammar, Peter?' said Mrs Hanbury.

‘I passed, but I weren't going to go in the end.'

‘But you should have seized the opportunity,' Alice told him. ‘Why on earth didn't you go?'

‘Ma saved money in tin, but when it were time to buy the uniform it were empty. Me dad took the money. So we couldn't buy uniform.'

From the expression on Alice's face Peter realised that he had just said something that put him even further away from her comprehension.

‘That's awful. How can people live like that? You've got to do something about it, Daddy. Can't you speak to the right people, please? Find him a place here?'

Mr Hanbury shrugged. ‘I can try, for you.'

Standing in front of the fireplace Alice launched into a small lecture.

‘You see, if we can't educate the masses upwards, then how can we have a society that can work together? I agree with Richard, the only class system now is education, and once everyone has access to that, well then.' With her high-domed forehead and finely cut chin Alice looked far too fragile to be holding so much righteous indignation.

Peter had desperately wanted to go to the grammar; he'd felt sure it was a place where secrets like Latin and Greek would open doors of happiness into a world of rare knowledge. But now, as he watched Alice's face, delicate as one of the Hanburys' china teacups, it wasn't the idea of Latin that was making his chest expand with happiness, it was the knowledge that Alice Hanbury minded about what happened to him.

Glancing around the room Peter realised that he wasn't the only one spellbound by Alice. Sitting on the window seat behind them, the dark-haired Ralph was watching Alice's fiery delivery with his full attention.

A couple of weeks later Alice and her brothers were gone from the house, the boys back to their boarding school, Alice to university. A quiet routine of helping Maudey established itself: peeling potatoes; blacking shoes and washing dishes; bringing in the coal; glad to show how he could be helpful.

It was Maudey who found out what had happened to Bill. He wasn't at Thompson's farm but further away at old Mr Garrat's, a good six-mile walk, Maudey said. ‘You'll need all day to get there and back. Perhaps on Saturday you could walk over there, eh?'

With Maudey's instructions Peter set out to find Bill at Garrat's farm. He rolled up the
Hotspur
comic and stowed it in his back pocket.

Garrat's farm was a sea of hard, grey mud. Around three edges of a muddy yard were low buildings, streaked with dust and green. Beyond, a rusting barn with a collapsed wall of hay bales. When he opened the gate a dog on a chain began to bark and hurl itself repeatedly in his direction. Peter decided to sit up on the wall away from the dog, wait and see if anyone was about. There was a sharp smell of ammonia and ripe old boots from the earth, the lane up to the gate splodged with cowpats.

It wasn't long before a herd of black cows came lumbering into view, lowing and rolling their eyes at the figure by the gate. At the back were two men in rolled shirtsleeves, one with a stick that he used to shoo away flies or tap the backside of a cow that had stopped to grab at the hedge. With a shock of recognition Peter saw that the man with the stick was Bill. He watched in awe as Bill calmly herded the cows through into the farmyard. He barely nodded at Peter's ‘All right then?' as he shut the gate. Peter jumped down from the wall and followed him across the yard.

The cows dealt with, with the briefest of calls and slaps on the behind, Bill led the way into a room that was more of a continuation of outdoors than a habitation. The walls had a cold, wet feel when you touched them. The brick floor had a sheen of slug trails and a sweat of condensation. A sink in one corner with a tap, and a bloom of green up the wall. A table with a tin and a plate, a bed in the corner with a ticking pillow case. A jumble of old blankets. Bill sat down on the edge of the bed. He took a packet of five Woodbines from his pocket, lit one and sucked at the end, holding the cigarette between his thumb and finger. His fingernails were black and the creases of his hands inked in with the same black.

‘How you been, Bill?'

A shrug for a reply. Peter got out the
Hotspur
comic and put it on the bed. Bill turned the pages. He seemed to have forgotten Peter was
there. Peter looked around at the cold room, a sickly smell coming from the walls that made you keen to leave.

‘Bill, I could ask if you could come and live where I am. Maudey there, she's a right good cook. You could do jobs. They can't get no one to help in garden, only me at weekend.'

Bill looked at Peter's smart corduroy shorts, the new jumper.

‘Don't be soft. I'll be fourteen soon. Going home in a few weeks. Got a place as apprentice at John's works.'

‘You're going home?'

‘I am that.'

‘I'll ask Maudey to make a cake. You can take it to Ma. A big one, with fruit in it and all. They get given all this food through Mr Hanbury's mates. She'll do Ma the best cake ever. D'you think Ma'll come and see us out here?'

‘Reckon when she's better, eh Peter. She's none too clever at the moment. You got a letter from her?'

‘And I wrote back.'

‘You'll be home at Christmas, see Ma then.'

Peter rubbed at his eyes.

‘Shall us go out? There's tractor out there. I got to drive it the other day.'

The right pecking order back in place, the boys left the underground cold of Bill's room and headed off in the more forgiving warmth of the air outside.

It was a few weeks later that he found Maudey and Mrs Hanbury at the kitchen table sorting through a pile of folded clothes. The clothes smelled new, dark red bands round the grey jersey and blazer. There was also a grey cap with the same red crest as the blazer pocket.

‘Peter,' Mrs Hanbury announced, ‘these are for you. We had your exam papers sent through from Manchester. Mr Hanbury had to put his foot down a little, and I don't really know how he does these things, but you'll start on Monday at Buxton Grammar school.'

He had to try the uniform on for size. When Maudey saw him she was a little bit tearful. She put her hands against her doughy cheeks and said he looked that grand.

Mrs Hanbury led him to the large mirror in the hallway. In it was a boy he didn't recognise. Gone was the usual prison cut. He had a fringe, a golden brown colour, a face sleek from good food and good air, a grey shirt and claret tie under a tailored blazer.

On the other side of the glass was the kind of boy who might, if he worked hard – worked really, really hard – grow up to become good enough to be part of Alice's world.

CHAPTER 9

Fourwinds, 1981

Sarah awoke in the dark with a gasp and threw back the sheet that had tightened round her shoulders. She waited for the dream to drain from the room. Her heart was thumping so hard she could feel the skin at the base of her throat vibrating.

She reached for the water, the shine of the moonlight on the glass. A white pill still lay beside it on the side table. She hadn't swallowed it. She hadn't wanted to be trapped in a dream with no way of waking herself out of it. She drank some of the water, tried saying Nicky's name in the darkness.

Nothing. No sound. Only the pain in her throat.

But it wasn't meant to be like this. She'd worked so hard to steer her life away into a new world, just her and Nicky.

When she first met Nicky she'd never liked red roses, sentimental songs crooned by pop stars like Englebert Humperdink. She distrusted lace and frills, hated anything labelled romantic. Holding hands, staring into each other's eyes, wasn't it all a manipulation to an end?

But Nicky had arrived one day and suddenly she wanted to believe.

At the end of the second year at university they bought InterRail tickets and travelled through Europe. They spent the summer wandering through a blur of different landscapes and medieval cities, hand in hand, eating bread and apples or whatever was cheap. They slept sometimes in hostels, mostly on trains, long nights in the clacking
rail carriages, always the same bubble of suspended sleep, waking in the dark to see various strangers who lay along the seats breathing and snoring, bringing whiffs of fried chips, hair oil, of citrus and aftershave. But sooner or later the others would be gone. The constant was the small world that they carried between them, always moving towards a new place that seemed to have been created with the moment of their arrival.

In France, after Albi and Carcassone, they headed towards Bordeaux and found work on a vineyard, pruning the unneeded shoots and leaves from the vines so the grapes would warm in the sun and swell. Nicky's hair grew longer and his freckles deepened to shades of dark honey. The plaited leather bracelets on his arm and the beads round his neck slid and danced as he worked down the vine rows, nicking the shoots off with a large curved knife, the lean muscles across his back like a country of subtle hills and hollows that Sarah could now read in the dark like Braille.

They stayed in a half-abandoned cottage by the main farmhouse with the others students and Portuguese labourers. The straw pallets smelled of summer, of hay in sunshine. Outside the open back door of the cottage was a wall of green maize where paths led to the woods.

Sarah's Indian cotton tops and T-shirts faded in the sun. Her dark hair bleached in strands of silver. Her hands so brown they looked like they belonged to a new person formed by the summer.

They travelled on, further south, swam in rivers and lakes, slept in cheap family pensions or out in fields. In Spain they hitchhiked through bone bare landscapes and stayed in white hill towns with long views. They travelled across to Valencia, and walked through a legendary town, where Nicky's dad had once lived as a boy.