Shadow on the Land (9 page)

Emily laughed, as much at Jane’s face as at Johann’s English, but she felt her heart lift as she recognised that Jane had found the man she wanted and whatever the difficulties, she would master them. The language problem might well be one of the easiest.

Indeed, after that unexpected gift of four weeks under the same roof, it had not been easy. Johann was moved to a camp at Dungannon, some fifty miles away, a slow bus journey up through County Armagh and into Tyrone with a long walk to the camp at the other end. It had taken weeks of negotiation between the Red Cross and the Camp Commandant to get permission for a monthly visit. Their letters were limited to one a week and had to pass through the censor.

What had been a delight to Emily was to see how happy her daughter was and how the obvious difficulties of the situation seemed to melt before her. Jane’s letters were often brief and hasty, but she told her how she was contacting anyone she thought might be able to help Johann. It was no surprise to her at all when late in the summer Jane reported that an elderly solicitor had taken on the task of
considering a plea of ‘political asylum’ for Johann and had said he would be pleased to explore the situation for his own interest and would therefore not be requiring the customary fee.

Johann had played his part. His command of English had proceeded by leaps and bounds and he was now able to help other prisoners as well as the staff with whom he got on very well. As his leg healed and he was able to join the work parties, he made friends with local people and discovered great pleasure in the work of creating a new park, planting trees and shrubs, which one day in the future would be complemented by herbaceous borders. The spaces for flower beds had been laid out, their curving shapes a part of the whole plan, though for the present they were filled with vegetables.

‘Well that’s a matter of opinion, isn’t it? As far as I’m concerned, the enemy is the enemy, and that’s that. There’s no such thing as a good German.’

Emily heard the sharp edge to her tone, which Lizzie made no attempt to conceal. Her heart sank, for she knew that tone of old and it always meant the same thing, that Lizzie had made up her mind and would not be persuaded to change it.

It was the bitterness that upset Emily most. She just couldn’t understand what had changed in Lizzie, so that the facts of the case had no bearing at all upon her response, when she had been the one who
was always so coolly logical. Lizzie wasn’t listening to a word of what her father was telling her about Johann. Or perhaps she
was
, but refusing to give them any weight.

Alex pointed out that Jane’s transfer to Musgrave Park had been mentioned on the day of her birthday, though possibly she’d had not been able to tell them till after Lizzie left. Jane hadn’t known then whether it would happen or not.

Besides, no one that day had any idea what would happen to the young airman. If he hadn’t had a broken leg, he would almost certainly have been sent straight to a Prisoner-of-War camp, so there was no question of Jane planning a move to Musgrave to be with him. As for his being a spy, common sense suggested he’d hardly have been picked for the job if he couldn’t do better than run out of petrol and risk killing himself in a crash landing.

If that wasn’t enough evidence for her, what about the grillings he’d had from Army Intelligence? Surely, if they were satisfied after their rigorous interrogations that should be enough for her.

But there was no talking to her. She had found out from a friend at Musgrave that Jane and Johann had spent every possible moment together while he was there and that she was still running up and down to Dungannon to see him. He had her on a string and God knows what information he was getting out of her.

Tears of weary frustration rolled down Emily’s cheeks as she and Alex got ready for bed.

‘I’m sorry, love, I’m not making much of a job of this,’ she said, as she threw back the bed clothes on her own side and lay down, exhausted.

He put his arm round her and drew her close.

‘We’ve done our best for
all
of them,’ he said patiently. ‘If something goes wrong in
their
life and they don’t face up to it and don’t want to share it with us, there is
nothing we can do
. At least she’s still alive. Not like Ritchie. She may come back to us when she sorts it out, whatever it is. We can only live in hope, as the saying is.’

Lizzie left with Alex on Monday morning so she could have a lift to the station and Emily began baking as soon as she’d gone. It wasn’t that she was behind with her schedule for the visits and picnics, she just badly needed to keep busy.

When she was agitated, she couldn’t possibly settle to read, or sew and ironing or housework gave her too much time to think. Only the more vigorous or more demanding activity of gardening or baking, would serve.

The thought of the garden, bleak and chill under a grey sky was too much for her, though there were still pea rows to clear out and compost that needed turning, so she took out the baking tins and worked her way steadily through her now practised routine.

Together with her four friends, they turned out large quantities of fruit bread, cake and a variety of small cakes, including brownies, each week. All the ingredients were supplied by deliveries from the camp and at Chris’s insistence, each woman kept at least one item for her own family’s Sunday tea.

When no reward had been expected or asked for, they had all appreciated the kind thought. What they certainly had not expected, but received most gratefully when they suddenly arrived, were the food parcels delivered to each woman in turn. Packed by American supporters in Vermont, even Chris didn’t know what might turn up in a box, or what women in Vermont might think most useful to their counterparts in wartime Britain.

Mary Cook had received a bottle of perfume in among the more obvious offerings of cigarettes, coffee and chocolate. Dolly Love and Freda Wilson had found silk stockings, now almost unobtainable, in one of theirs. Emily had been surprised by a box of paper tissues, something she’d never seen before. She’d smiled at the perky little cartoon figure on the cardboard box and wondered if they were intended for use as handkerchiefs. If they were, how did you carry them round with you?

Her most recent parcel had contained knitting wool and crystallized fruit. Apples and pears and greengages packed in pink tissue and silver paper. She’d never seen a greengage before and she and
Alex shared one by the fire one wet, cold evening out of pure curiosity. It didn’t taste of much except sugar, but they thought of ripening fruit and some kind person far away and agreed she’d put the rest away for the young people at Christmas.

The wool was a delight. ‘Delphinium Blue’ it said on the label. Perfect for blue-eyed Jane, or Johnny. Alex helped her to wind it into balls, so she could work out how much wool there was in the huge American skeins. She didn’t think it would stretch to a jumper each but she might manage two of these new v-necked sleeveless pullovers that were so popular.

By four o’clock the house was full of the comforting, warm smell of the morning’s baking and the kitchen had been returned to its clean and well-ordered state. When the phone rang in the hall, the short winter day had already ended, though she hadn’t yet taken time to go round and draw the curtains and check the blackout.

Reluctant to switch on a light, she groped her way in darkness to the invisible source of sound, felt its cold shape and picked up the receiver.

‘Hi, Ma, it’s John.’

‘Hello love. How lovely to hear you. We got your letter. When are you arriving?’

‘That’s why I’m ringing, Ma. I’m afraid leave’s cancelled. We’ve all got three minutes to phone home, but I won’t be able to write for a while.’

‘You mean you’ve been posted?’

‘Oh yes.’

‘But when? Where?’

‘This morning, Ma. We had our shots?’

‘What shots?’ she asked, totally bewildered.

‘Inoculations,’ he said, lowering his voice, as noise in the background made it even harder to hear.

‘Ma, I must go before the pips or I’ll get cut off,’ he said urgently. ‘Give my love to Da and the girls. And lots for you. Don’t worry, it may never happen, as the saying ….’

She heard the pips and the phone went dead.

That, at least, she could understand. If the whole squadron had to phone their parents, of course it had to be brief. She thought of the six minutes they’d had when Ritchie died and found she was shivering with cold and shock.

She went back into the kitchen, the only warm place in the house, pressed her icy hands against the oven door and found that it was already stone cold.

She knew she was going to cry, there was no point pretending she wasn’t, so she pulled out a chair from under the kitchen table, put her head in her hands and let the tears come.

‘Middle East, I’d say,’ Alex commented crisply, when she’d told him about the phone call.

‘What makes you think that?’ she asked, startled.

Alex smiled wryly.

‘He said ‘inoculations’. He was trying to tell you
they were going overseas. Could be Egypt. Certainly, North Africa. With the Germans in retreat, the Eighth Army will need all the air support they can get to keep them on the run.’

‘It never occurred to me we wouldn’t see him before he went.’

‘It’s something we have to get used to. Remember the day you thought Chris had gone.’

She smiled, remembering how upset she had been and how grateful she was when Alex told her he was staying. Then she remembered the call that same evening to tell them about Ritchie.

‘What’s wrong, love?’ he said looking at her closely.

‘Sorry. My mind moved on. I thought about Ritchie.’

‘And why wouldn’t you? I’d be telling you a lie if I pretended I didn’t think about Ritchie at some time, most days. Usually when I’m thinking about Johnny.’

She put her arms round him, hugged him briefly, and laughed.

‘Don’t take it personally, but something smells awful,’ she said stepping backwards.

To her great delight, he laughed. A small laugh, but a real one.

‘Clean ones tomorrow?’ he asked, looking down at the smears of oil.

‘Definitely.’

‘Poor old, Jane,’ Emily said, as she decorated the small tree they dug up from the garden every year.

‘Why so?’ he asked, looking up from
The Leader
.

‘Well, she’ll be all on her own. Just you and me. Not even any of her friends from school we could ask over for tea.’

‘It won’t bother Jane,’ he replied easily. ‘Not many families will be able to get together this year. Even if they’re free to meet, there’s no petrol,’ he went on. ‘I can barely manage the job on what I’m allowed even adding in my so-called ‘personal’ allowance.’

‘I wonder what it’ll be like in Egypt.’

‘Warmer, I would think,’ he replied absently, folding up the paper. ‘Do you want me to put up the fairy on the top?’

‘Yes, please.’

As she unwrapped the tissue and took out the blonde doll, its satin dress trimmed with tinsel, its hair crowned with glass jewels, she heard the phone in the hall.

‘I’m nearly afraid to answer that,’ she said honestly.

‘I’ll go.’

She sat down, smoothed out the blonde hair and straightened the wand that got bent every year, no matter how carefully she packed it.

She seemed to be waiting for a long time, though Alex’s distant voice sounded perfectly steady and there were no horribly long pauses.

‘Jane,’ he said, striding into the room. ‘She’s fine,’ he said quickly even before she could ask. ‘She’s been given an extra pass for Christmas week to see Johann, but her own leave is cancelled. They’ve opened two new wards and are bringing over seriously wounded from the south of England. She’ll get an afternoon to go and see Johann but that’s the height of it. I told her you wouldn’t mind at all. Was that all right?’

Emily laughed.

‘Yes. You were
quite
right. I’m so glad about the pass.’

‘There’ll be other Christmases,’ said Alex reassuringly.

‘Yes, there will. But we mustn’t waste this one.’

‘No, we’ll not do that. There’s maybe someone on their own that we don’t know about. You could ask Mary Cook. She’d know,’ he added wryly, for Mary Cook knew everything.

‘Good idea. That’s just what we’ll do,’ she said nodding, as she handed him the Christmas fairy, newly smoothed and straightened.

If there was any sun at all, as there was this bright February morning, the lawn still white with frosted spikes, but the sky a perfect blue, then the warmest place in the whole house was the conservatory, the glass-roofed extension to the kitchen, the joy of every woman Emily had ever known live in Rathdrum.

Even without lighting the tiny oil burning bowl-fire which Alex had made to keep the temperature just above freezing point on very cold nights, it was often warm enough on a sunny winter morning to sit with a rug round one’s knees and write letters, provided you got up and kept busy in between.

This morning, the last Monday of the short month, Emily collected up her materials from the bureau in the dim, shadowy sitting-room, walked back through the bright, cold kitchen and stepped gratefully into the scent of geranium leaves lying on the sun-warmed air.

All around her, their vibrant blooms stretched up
and above the canopy of their rich green leaves. She smiled as she wound the rug round her knees, sat down, and immediately thought of the day, years and years ago, when Rose Hamilton had brought her in from the kitchen, presented her with a sharp knife and shown her how to take cuttings, so that a favourite plant would never grow old and die.

Looking round, she was sure some of these plants were descendants of those very cuttings. The bright red and the purple most certainly were, for it was those colours she herself had first carried away to tend on a windowsill in the kitchen of her uncle’s farm at the foot of the hill.

Rose would be pleased to see how prolific these plants were and delighted by the new shades and varieties she herself had added over the years. There was now a tradition that Rathdrum had to have its collection maintained and developed. Alex had no skill whatever as a gardener, but even he had once brought a carefully-wrapped addition back from a machine-buying visit to Manchester. He’d seen it in a flower shop, noted its variegated leaf, and bought it because he was sure there wasn’t one like it at Rathdrum.

Sarah Hadleigh had come to gardening late and always insisted she had no talent for it, till she was left alone in the house after Hugh died and discovered the comfort growing things could bring. Whenever she’d visited before the war, she’d always
brought a cutting or two. Not many conservatories could boast blooms whose originals came from Paris, Berlin or Leningrad.

Emily sighed and looked around again, reluctant to begin. At least there
was
some good news. The Germans had finally surrendered at Stalingrad and Chris Hicks had told them there had been big American victories at sea in the South Pacific. Of course, it mattered terribly. Without battles on land and sea and bombing raids to knock out German industry, the war could not be won, but sitting here on a quiet Monday morning faced with the letters she needed to write, she found no help in any of these world-changing events.

‘Come on, Emily. There’s no use putting it off,’ she said aloud.

She inscribed the address, added the date, 22nd, February, 1943 and began.

She re-read the letter, added her signature with hugs and kisses and thought of her daughter in a gloomy bed-sitter backing on to the railway line out of Euston.

No wonder she was feeling depressed and lonely. But there wasn’t much one could do to help. The trouble was that the more down you were and the less you felt like making an effort, the more that was precisely what you needed to do.

Cathy was not lazy, but she did expect things to go right for her, while in the same situation Lizzie would be busy working out exactly what she was going to do and Jane would already be setting off, following her intuitions, which almost always led her in the right direction.

She wondered what she would say about Johnny if she were adding him to that perspective on his sisters. Over the last months, he had surprised her so many times. Even over Ritchie’s death he had not reacted as she might have expected.

It wasn’t that he was unmoved. On his one brief visit home mid-way through training, he’d said he never expected to have a friend again that would be so close and so utterly reliable. But he had also said that Ritchie ‘knew the score’. They had both known
that the accident rate in pilot training was very high and that neither of them might actually make it to the frontline. But that was just the way it was.

Emily tried to think how she’d felt about death when she was eighteen, but nothing of any value came to her. Even though her mother had been in her thirties when she’d died and her father not much older when he was drowned, their deaths had still seemed to her utterly remote, something she could make no real relationship to at eighteen.

The most vigorous job she could think off was brushing the stair carpet with a stiff brush to raise the pile, clearing up the mess with a dustpan and a soft brush as she descended and wiping the parts of the treads not covered by the carpet with a damp duster. The vacuum cleaner Alex had bought for them just before the war did a good job lifting crumbs and fluff on the sitting-room and bedroom carpets and the rugs on the woodblock floor in the hall, but it was useless on stairs and it did nothing for trampled pile. Sometimes the old-fashioned methods did work rather better however uncomfortable they might be.

She was half-way down the stairs and was just beginning to cough because of the dust and fluff, when she heard the Austin sweep down the avenue and round to the back door.

‘Any chance of a pot of tea?’ Alex enquired brightly.

Rather too brightly, she thought, as she reached for the electric kettle, her pleasure at seeing him offset by her immediate feeling that all was not well.

‘Have you had your sandwiches?’

‘No, not yet,’ he replied, producing his lunch box from under his arm, ‘I thought you might be having one yourself.’

‘Hadn’t got to it yet, but I can make mine while the kettle boils.’

She broke off.

‘Alex, what’s wrong?’ she asked abruptly. ‘I can see you’re all right and that helps, but
something
is wrong.’

He nodded. Tight-lipped.

‘Could be worse,’ he admitted, as he watched her add slivers of cheese to buttered bread, press the slices together and cut the result into neat triangles.

He stepped into the conservatory, sniffed the air, and lit the paraffin stove kept there for heating the hall when the house began to feel damp as well as chill.

‘You haven’t been down for the milk, have you?’ he asked quietly, as they sat down together.

‘No, but I’ve got plenty of milk from yesterday if you’d like some.’

‘Tea’s fine. I just wanted to be sure you hadn’t been talking to Mary Cook.’

She put down the sandwich she’d just picked up and looked at him sharply.

‘Alex, will you just
tell me
what’s wrong before we go any further.’

‘There were a series of bombs at Millbrook,’ he began. ‘One went off in the engine house and caused a fire. Two were placed in the main work areas. Two more were placed under the main staircases and timed to go off five minutes after the others when people were trying to get out. No amateur job like Ballievy.’

‘Alex,’ she exclaimed. ‘What happened? Were many hurt? Don’t tell me anyone was killed.’

‘We were lucky,’ he said reassuringly. ‘We could have lost quite a few, including Robert Anderson, if he hadn’t been so sharp. He went into the engine house on a routine check and saw something on the floor. It was only a tiny, wee scrap of paper, but it shouldn’t have been there. He was sure that floor was spotless at the end of maintenance last evening and none of the night watchmen would have dropped anything on their inspections. When he listened he could hear something too. He ran over to my office and we phoned the police and the army bomb disposal. But the engine-house went up while we were phoning.

‘Oh Alex,’ she gasped, catching a hand to her mouth. ‘What did you do then?’

‘Got everybody out of the mill. That went very well. Broke our own best record,’ he added with a little smile. ‘Everybody thought it was the usual fire-drill till they got outside and smelt the smoke and
heard our fire-engine coming round from the back. Then the police and army arrived and went all over the building.’

‘But they could have been killed too,’ she protested.

‘They could, but that’s their job and they did seem to know what they were looking for and where to look. They found all four
devices
, as they call them, and made them safe. In fact, there is some good news. They think they know who’s behind it. But that is absolutely confidential,’ he warned, raising his eyebrows. ‘Apparently, if you’re an expert in this sort of thing you can tell by the way a device is made who actually made it. They even questioned Robert in detail about that wee bit of paper and said he’d been a great help.’

‘Is Robert all right?’

‘Right as rain, as the saying is.’

‘Maybe it hasn’t hit him yet,’ she said thoughtfully. ‘If he’d gone in there a bit later he’d have been killed and you might not have known it was a bomb, so you wouldn’t have cleared the mill …’

‘Now, Emily, don’t think what
might
have happened,’ he said, pausing to demolish a sandwich. ‘Just be grateful for good people like Robert,’ he went on, reaching for his mug of tea. ‘He deserves a medal and I’ll certainly be putting it to the other Directors that he’s saved more than a few lives and weeks of production.’

‘But what about the engine house?’

‘That’s not as big a problem as structural damage to the mill would have been, given our American friends up the road. Don’t forget we have the auxiliaries we’ve been using when we run three shifts in twenty-four hours, but we might be able to use electricity from the grid instead of generating our own for the time being. I’ll be asking Chris what he thinks when I see him,’ he continued as he mopped up the last sandwich. ‘I’ve spoken to him on the phone, but we can do nothing till the police and the army finish their work. I’m heartily glad security is not my job, for there’ll have to be changes at all the mills after this. We just have to find out why, when the mill was working and there were two night watchmen with dogs outside, it wasn’t enough.

‘Have to go, love,’ he said finishing his tea in a long swallow and standing up, the familiar lines of concentration now marked upon his face after the brief respite. ‘Let me know tonight what version you get from Mary Cook when you go down for the milk.’

‘Thanks for coming up, Alex,’ she said, walking out to the car with him. ‘I try not to worry, but you know I do. Do you think all women are the same?’

‘Can’t say. Never paid any attention to any of them bar you and the girls,’ he replied, his face breaking into a great, beaming smile.

There was another cup of tea in the pot and she was glad to sit down again and drink it as she went over again all Alex had told her. She thought of Robert Anderson’s wife and their three young children and of all the wives and mothers working on the spinning floors.

Given there was so much to give thanks for, why did the grim possibilities come to her so easily? Why did she always see the potential for loss and despair?