She lifted her chin, jutting it in the direction of the path behind me. ‘Go on,’ she said softly. ‘Go home to that babby and make the tea. I’ll get him back.’
She looked down at her lap again, and closed her eyes.
*
I’ve never been a superstitious person, never. I’m not even that religious, although my mother was, and drilled it into me. Getting married in a church was more to do with wanting it to be proper in my head than doing it in the sight of God. The War was not yet upon us, at that time, and I hadn’t been to church in years.
I believe there is a God, of course, and I’ve prayed often enough, in the bad times. But He and I don’t really have a close relationship, on account of how I always feel I am complaining about my lot and asking Him what I’ve done to deserve Elijah. I think God probably has better things to do than concern Himself with me.
My mother believed in God, and tea-leaves, and in not walking under ladders, as if it was all one and the same.
I know what people say about Travelling folk, but I also know that Travelling folk have to make a living just like anybody else and it does them no harm whatsoever to let people believe they have special powers. I always thought there was something a bit funny about Clementina but she had never tried to show off, and I knew when she did fortunes in East Cambridge it was just to
earn a bob. So I’ve no real reason to think she did anything special that day. I’m just saying what happened.
*
Elijah was home before nightfall, exhausted. There was a strange unease about him. He wouldn’t at me look me properly. I thought his hangover had kicked in good and proper and sent him up to bed. I had saved him some tea, just like Clementina told me to, but he said he didn’t want anything.
Once the children were asleep, I went in to him to check he was all right, expecting to find him lying spread-eagled on his back, fully clothed and snoring.
Instead, he had undressed himself and got into bed, but was sitting up leaning against the headboard, fully awake and staring straight ahead of him.
I had Scarlet on my shoulder. She was fretful that evening. She was still too little to sleep in the big bed with her sisters and was in a Moses basket Elijah had weaved which sat on top of the dresser in our room. I put her down into it, but she kicked her covers off and began to cry in that funny, sneezy little way she had.
‘Can I look at her?’ asked Elijah.
I turned to him, surprised. He had never taken much interest in any of the children when they were tiny. He liked them more when they could do things.
I lifted Scarlet out of the Moses basket and carried her over to him. He raised his legs so that I could lay her on them, with her head supported on his knees and her little swaddled feet pointing down. I sat on the edge of the bed so I could look at him looking at her.
Her woollen bonnet had fallen back as I laid her down. He stared at her, then said. ‘What’s wrong with the skin on her head. Why’s it all flaky?’
‘It’s cradle-cap,’ I said. ‘None of the others had it so I don’t
know why she has. She’ll grow out of it. Your mum has given me some oil to put on it at night.’
At the mention of his mother, he looked up sharply and said, ‘When did she do that?’
‘Last week.’
He looked down again at the baby. ‘She’s got a nose like yours, but eyes like mine,’ he said thoughtfully.
You’ve
actually
noticed
something
about
your
new
baby,
I thought. I wanted to say it out loud but knew he would thrust her back at me if I did. I didn’t want to break the spell.
A wave of tiredness came over me. I had been on my feet all day. It’s always a mistake to sit down at the end of the day. You never want to get up.
‘I’ve got to finish downstairs before I can come up,’ I said. ‘Do you want to keep her? I’ll be done that much quicker.’
He didn’t look up from his examination of his new daughter. ‘Aye. All right.’
*
I didn’t question him that night. I could tell it wasn’t right. But in the morning when the children had all piled off to school, he didn’t pull his boots on and leave the house as I expected him to, but sat in his armchair, sipping his tea. I went upstairs to feed Scarlet and change her, then took her out to the yard and put her in the pram, with the cat-net over her, so she could have a good bawl and get some fresh air in her lungs. Then I went back inside.
Elijah was still sitting in his armchair. I went over and took his empty mug from him, then, with this new quietness of his, felt bold enough to ask, ‘What happened, Elijah?’
He didn’t look at me, just stroked his chin. ‘I was walking down the lane. I was in open country, just striding along like.’ He paused. ‘My feet went.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘What do you think I mean?’ he snapped, a little of the old Elijah returning. ‘I mean what I say. My legs went. I fell down.’
I’m
not
surprised
with
what
you’d
drunk,
I thought to myself.
‘I lay there, then started back. Took me hours. I couldn’t walk until I got …’ He stopped there and tried a half-smile but it wasn’t at all convincing. Whatever it had been, it had frightened him half to death.
I thought of him crawling back to Sutton on his hands and knees. I confess the thought gave me no little pleasure.
He went out later, and I knew he’d gone to see his mother.
*
Like I said, I’m not a superstitious person by nature. But from that time, I felt a bit more kindly towards Clementina. I don’t know whether she got Elijah back for us or not, but I knew for certain she had tried to, and I knew that she would do it again if needs be. It was like when she’d helped deliver my two last babies. I never doubted when she pulled those babies out, that she was fighting to bring them out safe and sound.
Her conch shell still annoyed me, mind you. I still felt cross every time I looked at it.
*
From then on, Elijah seemed a bit more happy in himself. After that night when he had so nearly left us for good, then come back and sat in bed and stared at his new baby girl – well, things changed for Elijah after that, I think. It was like he had made his mind up about something, in that bit of time he spent staring at Scarlet. I think when he sat in bed and looked at her, he was realising that if he’d disppeared off to Cambridge like he was intending, he might never have seen her again, might never have even looked properly at her in his whole life. And even a man like Elijah knew the wrongness of that. Something raw happened to him, then. Scarlet was his kitten, after that, his little mouse, his
acorn. There wasn’t a word for
little
or
precious
that he didn’t lavish on that child.
He was soft on all the girls, even Mehitable. Bit tougher on the boys, mind. Overstepped the mark once or twice with them.
*
For a long time, I thought I was just no good with girls. Daniel was so easy, and Bartholomew was a little terror but of course he worshipped the ground his big brother walked on, so they were off together all the time. Mehitable was the one who clung to me, and the one I couldn’t deal with. Other women said to me, a mother always loves the boys best, so I just thought, well, maybe that’s it. Maybe I wasn’t meant to have a daughter.
Then along came Fenella and Scarlet, and I didn’t have any problem with them, and I loved them with a lightness I didn’t know existed. I remember how I would plait Fenella’s hair when she was little – she had such beautiful hair – it was a pleasure to dress it up. And I would sing to her while I did it, and think, I can’t wait until this one’s grown up so we can talk about things and I can lend her my best coat with the collar and show her how to do her powder and hitch a stocking without tearing it. All those things I had never shared with my own mother, and I was going to make up for that with Fenella. Peculiar, in a way – she was such a lovely little girl, and yet I couldn’t wait for her to be a grown woman.
And it was then that things between me and Mehitable really went downhill, for I realised it wasn’t that I couldn’t love a daughter. I just couldn’t love
her.
If I’d been that bad a mother to her, then someone would’ve spoke to me about it, wouldn’t they? Clementina or Elijah or even Dan – one of them would have said,
aren’t
you
a
bit
hard
on
our
Billy?
*
There was one day: I think I was pregnant with Fenella at the time, so Mehitable must have been about seven or eight. She
wasn’t at school that day. She had had a stomach-ache in the morning. Well, of course, as soon as the boys had gone off, her stomach-ache seemed to get better right away, so I said to her, ‘Don’t think you’re lounging around here all day while I work my fingers off,’ and gave her a list of chores.
Elijah rose late – he’d had a few the night before. He ate breakfast quickly as he said he had to get all the way over to Horseley Fen and go and see a farmer about a pony. I was complaining to him about Mehitable pretending to be poorly, just to get off school, and how I was going to give her what for if she didn’t help me that day. He went a bit quiet.
I left him to finish his mug of tea and took a load of laundry out to the line. I had washed it the previous afternoon but then rain had swept in across field and I hadn’t been able to dry it. It had sat wet all night long and needed putting out as soon as possible.
It was a cold morning, still, with damp in the air but a glimmer of pale sun coming through and I thought, as I pegged my laundry out, that if the rain would just hold off ’til lunchtime I’d be all right.
I went back inside and cleared the breakfast things. Mehitable was clunking around upstairs.
I was just in the hallway, dusting in the cold light, when Elijah came through from the kitchen. He walked past me, opened the front door and put his pack down on the step. He walked past me again to get something from the back. While he was gone, Mehitable came down and limped over to the shoe-box under the stairs. She pulled out the brown lace-ups she had just inherited from Dan, sat down on the step and began to pull them on.
‘Where do you think you’re going?’ I asked her. She hadn’t even started her chores.
She looked up at me, in that half sly, half scared way she had, her small, dark eyes giving me a glance, then looked down again and concentrated on tying her laces. She muttered something.
I couldn’t bear it when she muttered. It was a form of insolence, however much she may pretend it wasn’t.
‘Speak up, Billy, for heaven’s sake.’
‘I said, I’m going with Dad.’
‘You’re doing no such thing, my girl.’ What did she think her father did each day? Went off on a little country walk for the fun of it? Lay in the long grass and looked at the sky? ‘Your father has selling to do and you’ve to clean the upstairs before you think of going anywhere.’
‘But …’
‘I said you’re not going.’
‘She is.’ Lijah strode back into the hallway, rubbing his hands on his trousers. I looked at him in astonishment, but he strode on past me to the front door, ruffled Mehitable’s hair, then picked up his boots from where he’d left them ready and sat down on the step, next to her.
She smiled at him, and it cut me to pieces, that smile.
‘What do you mean, she’s going with you? She’s work to do, and so have you.’
Lijah ignored me. He finished his laces, rose and hefted his pack on to his back. ‘There’s our lunch on that shelf, Billy,’ he said to her. ‘Do you think you can carry that?’ He gestured to where I had put some bread and cheese and a bottle of beer into a tea-cloth and tied it all together.
‘Yes, Dad,’ she replied, and ran to get it.
‘Lijah!’ I said, as they turned to go. ‘Mehitable has her chores and you need to set out at a fair pace, you can’t just take a child with a leg like hers off gallivanting round the countryside.’ He’d never taken one of the children across the Fens with him before, not even Dan, who could have kept up with him.
Mehitable had already limped off down the lane at an impressive pace. Lijah paused on the step and looked down at the ground. He spoke quietly, almost to himself. ‘She’s off school, isn’t
she? And I’m not leaving her, not with the mood you’re in.’ He pulled his hanky from his pocket, blew his nose and stuffed the hanky back in. ‘She’ll only get mistreated.’
He was gone.
I remember standing and staring at the open doorway, at the rectangle of white light they had left behind.
T
hen came the Great War. Daniel was eighteen years old when it broke out – on the threshold of everything.
As a man, I would say he was very similar to how he was as a boy. I never heard him raise his voice to argue with anyone, despite the fact that he was big enough to knock any man or woman flat, if he’d wanted. He had a large-featured face – took after my side of the family, right enough – big ears, he had, with very long ear-lobes, wide shoulders. I suppose he was everybody’s idea of a strapping soldier lad. Elijah told me, when they went to sign up, the Recruiting Officer had looked up at Daniel and nodded with satisfaction. ‘Aye, you’ll do,’ he said.
Elijah repeated that remark to me with a flourish, as if I’d be pleased and proud.
I would hazard a guess that it was a bit more difficult for Elijah to volunteer – he was nobody’s idea of a strapping soldier lad, after all. No, he was everyone’s idea of a small, wiry hawker, and a middle-aged one at that. He lied about his age, I suppose – and
I suppose by that stage they were starting to get not too particular.
A year after Elijah and Daniel went, Bartholomew joined up as well, as soon as he could pass for old enough. I had steeled myself for it. Once his dad and big brother were in, I knew it was only a matter of time before he joined up too. He and his father both had to lie to get in, one to make himself younger, the other older. It was only my Daniel who went to do his bit legitimate.
*
After it was over and the men came back – some of them, that is – it was common for the wives and mothers to talk, when they met in the street or at market, of how changed their menfolk were. Mrs Hinkin’s husband had nightmares every night and tried to strangle her once, she told me. Mrs Mott’s son twitched all the time.
Often I felt, having known the men before, that they came back not changed, but more so. It was like the war gave them licence to be what they had always been. The loud ones became louder, the quiet ones silent. Mrs Mott’s son was always the nervy type – and Eli Hinkin had come close to murdering his wife on many an occasion, I was sure, long before the War got to him.
Alice Mott said to me, once, when we was stood in the queue at Bell’s the baker’s, ‘Has your Elijah ever talked about what they did over there?’
I shook my head. ‘He did tell me once about a charge they did to frighten the Hun. Scattered like geese, he said.’
Alice Mott was silent for a bit. We moved forward in the queue. ‘My Benjamin can’t abide dirt,’ she said quietly. ‘He won’t go out and about in the fields, or even the garden sometimes. If it’s raining, he stays indoors. I said to him, you’ve stood up to the guns of Germany my boy, you’re not telling me you’re frightened of a bit of water.’
My turn had come. ‘Three cob loaves please, Mr Bell,’ I said,
and he turned to wrap them in paper. ‘Was it muddy over there, then?’ I asked Alice Mott.
‘I think so,’ she said, thoughtfully, ‘from what he said.’
*
I don’t think the men had any idea how dreadful it was for us who were left behind. I know they had a terrible time, some of them – you could see it in their faces – but in our own way we went through things as terrible, in our imaginings, I mean. There wasn’t a minute of a single day when I didn’t think to myself: what is happening to them,
right
now.
I knew that if I ever got the news that one of them was gone, then I would cast my mind back to the day when it had happened, and I would run through that day, and I would think to myself,
as I shook out that pillowcase, was my Daniel running towards his death? As I collected the eggs, brushing straw from them as I laid them in the basket, was he lying on the ground, the life draining away from him?
Not gas, I used to think, as I went about my daily business. Please let none of them be gassed. I could not bear the thought of one of them choking.
*
It was a week before Easter that I got the telegram. Bartholomew had joined up two months previous and just been sent to the front. Elijah and Daniel had been in the thick of things for a year. I was weeding the front garden and saw him cycle up the lane, bald Mr Carter with the squinty eye. He had his head down, as if to prevent the wind from buffeting him. I felt quite calm as I watched him dismount, lean his bike against our gatepost and, head still down, walk up our path. The minute he appeared, it seemed inevitable.
Which one is it? I thought to myself as I watched him approach. He hadn’t looked up yet. He hadn’t yet composed his face into the look that he must have acquired by then, as he handed the telegram over. It was clutched in his hand.
I
don’t
need
to
read
it,
I thought. We all know the words of those
telegrams off by heart by now. I just want to know, which one of them is it?
Mr Carter made his way steadily towards me, still not looking up.
I prayed and prayed that it would be Elijah.
I am not ashamed to admit that. I knew that if he had taken our sons off to war and got one of them killed, I would never, never forgive him. It would be finished between me and him, for ever. He might as well stay in France.
And then, another thought, as clear as water,
if my Daniel is dead, I do not want to go on living myself. He is the only thing in my life that has never been spoiled by anything. The only thing that is completely pure and good.
At last, Mr Carter looked up. We were quite close by then, so he gave a small start at the sight of me standing there staring at him, waiting. I watched as he struggled to compose his face. He could not quite achieve the expression he wanted, and so settled for a meaningless grin. Without speaking, he extended the hand that was holding the telegram.
I stepped forward, over some withered tulip stems, and approached him. I think at this point we may have exchanged a few words.
I took the telegram and he handed me a small book and a pencil to sign for it. When he had retrieved them, he bid me good day and turned. He took care not to hurry back to his bike, for that would have been unseemly. He walked slowly down my path.
He righted his bicycle and mounted it, wobbling a little as he turned. Only in that action did he betray his haste, for the normal thing to do would have been to turn the bicycle before he mounted it. I watched Mr Carter cycle down the lane. He did not look back.
I stood in my front garden, holding the telegram, and I did not move. All at once, I felt as if I had all the time in the world. It was the middle of the day and the girls were out. Mehitable was at her
cleaning job at Sampson’s. Scarlet and Fenella had gone with Clementina to the Thursday market in Ely. I was quite alone and felt a strange sense of peace. It was as if everything that had happened in my life had been leading up to that moment. Once I had opened the telegram, then that would be it, the rest of my life would begin. So there was no hurry, then, not if I had the rest of my life.
I looked at the sky for a bit, then I walked back inside, closing the door gently behind me. I went into the kitchen, put the telegram on the table in front of me and sat down.
Which
one
of
them
is
it?
I opened it, to find out.
My eyes passed over the
regret
to
inform
you
and travelled quickly to the words I needed to see, the name.
Adolphus Daniel Smith. Missing presumed dead. It was my Dan.
*
I never managed to grow sundance in that front garden. We got given a nice big plant, by someone, but I stuck it in the wrong place. The problem was the beech tree, which stood by the gate. Not only did it keep the sun off, but the greedy roots sucked up all the water from the earth and the poor thing wilted from thirst, went quite green. That was why it wouldn’t ever take. Later, when we moved to Peterborough, I grew a lovely sundance in the back garden there without any difficulty.
*
A week after Easter, we got another telegram. Adolphus Smith had been found in a field hospital, where he and some other casualties had been taken in error. When he came home on leave, he showed me where some shrapnel had grazed his chest and gone through a muscle on his upper arm. He had also broken a toe.
*
They should have been demobbed together, all three of them, but there was a bit of a problem with Bartholomew. He went Absent
Without Leave towards the end of it. Then, to get himself out of trouble, he joined up again under another name. So he ended up in a different regiment from his brother and his dad.
So Elijah and Daniel came back in January and it was near March before Bartholomew made it back, and then it was under his assumed name. John Hastings, he was calling himself, and Elijah said to me how I mustn’t mention to anyone that he was back as the police might come for him.
It didn’t stop the three of them all going down The Tollhouse to get
motto,
the first night he was back. They sang as they came back down the lane, their voices ringing in the black of night, and I lay in bed listening to them and thought, for once, that it was the sweetest chorus. Three male voices, belting out some not-too-polite army song, and they all belonged to me. They were all back.
*
Within a month, however, I started to hear different voices.
The first time it happened, we were sound asleep upstairs. Our bedroom looked out over the back so I was used to field noises like foxes or owls, but that night I was suddenly awoken by the most terrible howling sound. I sat up in bed. My first thought was that the dog had got free of his kennel and was caught in one of the rabbit snares. Elijah had a series of snares all set round the vegetable patch.
I was throwing my shawl round my shoulders when the sound came again – and this time, it froze my blood, for this time I recognised it as human.
Lijah had awoken too. He caught hold of my arm. ‘Rosie …’
‘What is it?’
‘
Rosie
…’
I shook him free and went to our window, lifting the curtain gently aside with one finger.
Below our window, in the moonlight, I could see him. He was no
more than a dark shape, moving restlessly to and fro, but there was enough light for me to make out that it was Bartholomew.
‘What is he doing?’ I said. Elijah had not left the bed.
‘Leave him be,’ he replied, flatly.
‘What is he doing? He hasn’t even got a coat on.’ All I could make out was that Bartholomew was hunched over and swinging his arms back and forth, as if he was threshing. ‘We should go down to him,’ I said. ‘He might hurt himself.’
‘Leave him,’ Elijah said, and his voice was rough and insistent. I glanced back at the bed and saw that Elijah had lain down again.
I stood by the window for a long time, watching my son below, not knowing what to do. If he had not been making that strange noise, then I would have gone down and guided him back into the house. But the noise frightened me. I knew that wherever Bartholomew was, it was not in the back garden at Sutton. Perhaps Elijah was right. The best thing was to leave him.
I watched the dark shape, its restless movements. It was one of my children, down there.
How little I know of you, or what has happened to you, I thought.
*
I assumed it would get better, but in fact it got worse, much worse. I began to realise that Bartholomew had not come back.
He drank all the time. He’d always been a drinker, like his dad, but when he came back from the war, it wasn’t just in the evenings. It started from the minute he got up in morning, and it stopped only when he collapsed unconscious somewhere – in his bed, on the settee, sometimes in the yard. Elijah would not let me say a word to him, and even Daniel said I should let him be. He couldn’t work or anything as officially he was still Absent Without Leave from the army and we were all trying to work out what was to be done about that.
One night, we were seated for an early supper. It was not often
we were a group at table at that time, but Clementina had cooked a ham and brought it over. I had done the veg, and it was a strange old tea as it was like we were having Sunday lunch in the middle of the week.
It was more than a year since the war had finished. Lijah was hawking again. Daniel had gone back to his apprenticeship, which Slaker & Son had kept open for him. Mehitable had moved up to a big house outside Yaxley. She had started off as a live-in maid but was now full housekeeper. Scarlet was due to join her in a month, as a scullery girl. I didn’t like the thought of Scarlet taking her first position so far away when she was still so young, but Mehitable said the lady of the house was the kindest person she’d ever known and was paying for her to get her leg looked at by a man brought all the way from London. Fenella was turning out to be a fine seamstress – I was right proud of what she could do. She had been offered a job in a cloak and gown workshop in Peterborough, and we were discussing it.
Daniel had just said, ‘Mr Slaker has been talking of moving to Peterborough, Mum. I think it would be good, don’t you think? I could keep an eye on Fenella, then.’
Fenella shot him a look, as if to say the last thing she needed was her big brother keeping an eye.
‘You’re fifteen years old,’ I said to Fenella. ‘You’re not going.’
‘Scarlet’s going to Yaxley and she’s younger than me.’
Scarlet stuck her tongue out at Fenella, triumphantly, and I picked up a spoon and gave her a sharp rap across the knuckles.
‘That’s different,’ I said. ‘It’s live-in, and Billy will look after her. You’ll have to find lodgings.’
‘You could come to Yaxley with me instead!’ Scarlet said brightly, and the withering look from Fenella said that she saw herself as something a bit better than a scullery girl.
Good
on
you,
girl,
I thought. Although I was objecting, I had in the back of my mind that I would probably let her go to Peterborough,
if Daniel was going as well. There wasn’t much in Sutton for a girl like Fenella – and certainly no young men fit for her when she was older. They were all gone now. I didn’t want her spending the rest of her life in a village surrounded by empty fields. She deserved a chance at somewhere bigger and better.