A Presumption of Death (21 page)

Bunter said, ‘May I respectfully suggest, my lady, that the children should watch from the other side of the lane?’

‘Good idea,’ said Mr Maggs. ‘When the wheel rolls it can be hard to steer it straight. Don’t want no accidents.’

Puzzled, but learning, Harriet led Charlie and Polly across the lane, and picked up Bredon to carry him. On the other side of the lane was a little brook, which widened to a small pond opposite the forge door. The milkman left a bottle of milk standing in a clay pipe there each morning, so that the trickle of water kept it cool, and the section of footpath with a hand-rail ran behind the pond, to give dry footing when the pond brimmed over in winter and covered the road. On this path Harriet lined up her little band of spectators. Through the open door of the forge they could see the bright girder being dragged out of the fire first white, and then red, and then on the anvil fading to a web of orange under a grey skin with a pewter-coloured sheen as it cooled and lengthened under the blows.

Charlie was in ecstasy, and Polly was watching with concentration; Bredon resisted being put down, but held on hard to his mother with his thumb in his mouth. Suddenly everything was ready. Mr Maggs and Mr Puffett thrust a rod through the wheel hub to make a temporary axle. They trundled the wheel up to the anvil, and Mr Maggs brought an end of the sullenly glowing iron bar to rest on the rim of the wheel. He struck a single long nail through buttery metal into wood. Smoke rose from the point of contact, and a scorched smell drifted across the lane. Then the two men seized the axle rod and wheeled the wheel away. As they did it picked up the metal and wrapped it round itself. When it overlapped, a very small overlap Maggs swung his hammer, and hammered the join flat, and all the while the wheel was moving slowly, smoking, across the road. Mr Maggs pulled out the temporary axle, and used it like the stick with a child’s hoop to drive the wheel onwards. It toppled, rolled, shed sparks, toppled, and rolled into the pond where it sank in an explosion of steam and hissing.

‘Oh, smashing!’ said Charlie joyfully. ‘Oh, gosh!’ Then he added, conversationally, ‘Mr Maggs, will one nail be enough to hold it on?’

Mr Maggs was leaning on his makeshift axle, breathing hard. The pond had settled, and the wheel was visible, lying on the gravel in a foot of running water.

‘More than enough,’ he said, answering Charlie’s question. ‘The iron shrinks in the water, young man, it shrinks on to the wheel, and bites on hard. Doesn’t need a nail. That’ll be on that wheel until the wheel’s broke or the iron’s wore through.’

Charlie heaved a satisfied sigh. ‘Can I help you, next time?’ he asked.

‘When you can lift my anvil you can help me,’ said Mr Maggs.

‘That won’t be just yet, Charlie,’ said Harriet, smiling.

‘Look a-here, Puffett,’ said Mr Maggs, ‘there isn’t much depth of water in the pond. We’d better leave that wheel in the wet a minute or two longer.’

‘Where does this stream come from, then, Mr Maggs?’ asked Bunter.

‘Down from that wood of yours. Yours in a manner of speaking, I mean, since the owner is your employer, Mr Bunter. There’s a spring right by the old pig-pens up there. Then round behind the row of cottages in Simpkins Street, and through a culvert into the Pag below the bridge,’ said Mr Maggs.

‘Most of us as were boys here can remember that running right down the middle of the High Street, open to the air,’ said Mr Puffett. ‘We uster catch tiddlers in that when we were boys, and the landlord of the Crown uster put his glasses in baskets down in it to have the brook wash them out for him. Then they wanted the street wider, so they put it in a pipe.’

‘So where would the firemen get water from, if there were a house on fire in the High Street?’ asked Harriet.

‘Couple of manhole covers in the middle of the road,’ said Mr Puffett. ‘Local knowledge, m’lady, is what you need for fires.’

‘Now if you’d stand back a bit, Mr Bunter, Maggs and I will fetch that wheel up out of the drink for you, and you can put it on the cart as good as new. Just don’t nobody touch it for an hour or two – that’ll take a while to cool right off.’

‘Thank you, Mr Maggs,’ said Bunter. ‘I think we’ll play safe and walk the children home. I’ll return to fetch the cart tomorrow.’

As they walked back up the High Street, Harriet spotted Susan Hodge, buying fish from the back of the Grimsby van, which parked by the horse trough every Tuesday. She walked across to speak to her. ‘I was wondering, Miss Hodge, if your cottage would shortly be available? We are very crowded at Talboys, and we would be glad to rent it from you.’

‘Sorry, my lady,’ said Susan Hodge, ‘but I’ve just now taken the down payment for the next month. Otherwise you’d have been welcome. I was surprised that he took it again, to be honest, but he’s a good tenant. Keeps himself to himself, and everything spotless. Couldn’t ask for better.’

‘Well, would you let me know when it becomes free?’ said Harriet. ‘We might still be glad to take it in four weeks.’

‘I will indeed. Rather you than the billeting officer and a crowd of kids what wet their beds and have head-lice,’ said Miss Hodge.

It was a bright, still, April evening. Harriet paced about her room, finding things to do. She could hear the children still awake in the nursery, Polly’s voice, Charlie reading to her, Bredon who had just learned to count going up to twelve and getting stuck again and again. Sometimes he hit seven, sometimes he skipped it. Harriet was humming tunelessly. Baby Paul was fast asleep in his cot in the corner of her room, his tousled blond hair and flushed plump cheeks reminding her of Mabel Lucie Attwell postcards from before the war. The sweet light of the lingering dusk persuaded Harriet to put her coat on and go for a late walk. It seemed lighter out of doors than it had through the windows, as though the darkness filled the houses first, and left the open air for later. Harriet walked through the old farmyard, past all the barns, noticing the refurbished cart standing ready for use. Had Bunter wheeled it up the hill himself?

She badly needed the walk, to throw off her deeply apprehensive mood. It was easy to read between the lines and discern an unfolding disaster in Norway. The Germans had easily taken the centres of population, and the allies were steadily retreating northwards into the snows. The wireless news tonight had made much of the cost to German shipping of the naval battles off the Norwegian coast. Hitler would find it hard to assemble ships for another sea-borne invasion. Harriet thought that sounded uncomfortably like whistling in the dark.

She went between the Talboys barns and Bateson’s barns, and up the track to the wood. Slowly above her head the stars became visible, very softly, and with them a sliver of moon. The edge of the wood was infiltrated already with the blackness of night, and when she reached the top of the swelling field she was not tempted to go further. Instead she turned and looked at Paggleham below her. In peace-time this view would be twinkling with lights in cottage windows, and the church clock would be lit up. A line of lamp-posts would prick out the track of the High Street. Now it was all in rapidly darkening shadow. Someone opened a door in the street below her, and she saw the oblong of light appear, to be swiftly closed off again. The news from abroad was very bad, and it was hard not to see the darkness as a metaphor.

And yet there was enough residual light for her to see her way by. And as she drew nearer home she could hear voices rising towards her. A conversation in the street was audible, although she could not make out what was being said. She heard a rumble and a thud that puzzled her until she remembered the pig-killing set-up. The fate of another poor pig promised another lovely pork dinner. Sam had said it was quick and silent. She could hear the land-girls singing in their barn as she passed their doors; it sounded very jolly:

The barnyard was now very dark. Harriet nearly collided with the cart, having forgotten it was standing there. That cartwheel! She thought she recalled reading of iron rims on the Celtic chariots in which the chieftains rode to battle who had defeated the tribes who made the carvings in the chalk in the Paggleham Cave. The thing had been done that way, no doubt, since centuries before Julius Caesar scrambled up the shingle on the Channel shore. In the deep past the beloved island had been conquered again and again, and always absorbed its conquerors. But at the moment, Harriet thought, quietly lifting the latch of the back door, and going in to her peaceful household, that was not an entirely comforting thought.

Bunter was sitting at the kitchen table in his shirtsleeves, reading a book. She had the feeling at once that he had been waiting for her.

‘A pleasant walk, my lady?’ he said, rising as she came in.

‘Yes thank you, Bunter.’

‘May I lock up now?’

‘Of course. Goodnight.’

And in her bedroom she found hot water waiting in an enamel jug. A little bunch of wild flowers on the dressing-table. The bed turned down and ready. Everything the heart could desire – except her husband.

The bad news was getting steadily worse. Someone called Quisling – may his name be cursed for centuries – had appointed himself head of the Norwegian state and ordered resistance to cease. It hadn’t ceased; presumably Britain would retaliate, but you didn’t need to be much of a strategist to see how bad this looked. You didn’t even have to have a husband out there somewhere, and in danger. You only had to know that Germany needed the iron ore that was shipped out of Narvik.

Bunter had set up a map over the kitchen mantelpiece on which little rows of pins marked German and allied positions. Watching him, Harriet saw him moving the pins to mark yet another retreat.

‘Bunter, what can happen?’ she asked him.

‘We don’t want to frighten the horses, my lady,’ he said, and she realised that Charlie and Polly had entered the kitchen.

‘Later,’ she said. But she didn’t need Bunter to tell her that it looked as if the Germans were irresistible. Everything they attacked went down like ninepins.

What Bunter thought was even plainer when she found him engaged in a curious operation in the old hay-loft. There was an upper door there that had been used to raise the hay and swing it into the loft. Harriet, finding the house empty, had gone in search of everyone, and found them all, with the usual addition of Sam Bateson, watching Bunter. Sadie and Mrs Trapp between them were hanging on to the tiny children, well out of the way of Bunter’s activity. He had an old iron preserving pan suspended from the beam above his head, a garden sieve at his feet, and a barrel of water on the ground below him. Using a pair of tongs he was gingerly tipping the pan, and something molten was falling through the sieve to land in hissing droplets in the water.

‘Whatever is Bunter doing?’ Harriet asked Mrs Trapp.

‘He’s making bullets!’ cried Charlie.

‘Out of gutter pipe. I didn’t know you could do that,’ said Sam.

‘Neither did I,’ said Harriet tersely.

‘Ammunition for shotguns,’ Bunter told her, when she challenged him later. ‘Lead shot; well, I didn’t have enough height to get nice round shot. It would be more truthful to say they were pellets.’

‘But, Bunter . . .’

‘We have nine shotguns available to the Local Defence Volunteers, my lady, but nothing like enough shot. I was hoping to mitigate the deficiency.’

‘But, Bunter, aren’t lead bullets against the Geneva Convention?’

‘Dum-dum bullets are, my lady, yes.’

‘Explain the difference to me.’

‘Lead shot is very small, my lady. It penetrates without spreading enough on impact to make a really nasty exit wound.’

‘Your home-made pellets wouldn’t spread?’

‘We are not facing a sporting contest, my lady.’

The freezing winter, and the sense of crisis that had accompanied the move to Talboys had shifted the heart of the house permanently. Now that early spring made it possible to sit with open windows, and the sunlight made the sitting-room comfortable even with no fire in the grate, Harriet was not quite sure why the adults and children alike gravitated to the long scrubbed deal table in the kitchen, and an ingrained habit of getting under Mrs Trapp’s feet. But so it seemed. Mrs Trapp was often exercised about the menus of the day. And Mrs Ruddle was very often to be found ‘dropping in’ for a chat, a cup of tea, a scrounge for something, and, to do her justice, the offer of a hand with this or that.

‘It will be a sight different next time there’s one of them there air-raids,’ Harriet heard her telling Bunter one morning. ‘For the Methodists, that is. My Bert has fixed up the cave something lovely. Snug as bugs in rugs, that’s what we’ll be.’

‘You said it, Mrs Ruddle,’ observed Bunter.

‘Unless you can shoot me a rabbit or two, Mr Bunter,’ said Mrs Trapp unhappily, ‘we shall have to make do tonight with cheese and potatoes.’

‘That will be very nice, Mrs Trapp,’ said Harriet. ‘We aren’t going hungry so far. But cheer us up – we have a prospect of pork don’t we? I was going to ask you what cut we would get this time.’

‘Who’s getting pork?’ cried Mrs Ruddle. ‘No one as far as I know! And if I don’t know, I’d like to know who does!’

‘Calm down, Martha,’ said Mrs Trapp. ‘Nobody has offered us a pork share. Her ladyship is mistaken, that’s all.’

‘Very likely,’ said Harriet. ‘I thought I heard that thingummy in the shed come rumbling down, but I must have been mistaken.’

‘When?’ cried Mrs Ruddle. ‘When was that?’

‘Two nights ago – or three. When I went out for a moonlight walk.’

‘Lawks!’ cried Mrs Ruddle. ‘Someone has stolen one of our pigs! One of them will be found gorn, and nothing to be done! Oh, blimey, I’m going to get Bert to have a looksee.’