Consequences (8 page)

The farmer’s wife had given her an old chicken coop and some pullets which, in the fullness of time, began to lay. Now, they had a few eggs. There was a daily hunt in the hedge, which the hens preferred as a nest site. They had their own vegetables, too, in season. Lorna found all of this intensely satisfying.

“Before, I had never in my life done anything useful,” she told Matt. “Now there is a point to everything.”

“Spring at last,” wrote Lucas. “I suppose you have primroses and lambs and all that. Here, we have our urban version, but it’s hard to feel uplifted, isn’t it, with all the papers all gloom and doom. I heard Herr Hitler on the wireless, last September, ranting. A beastly sound—it keeps coming back to me now. And we thought we were spared. Oh, well—one feels oddly resigned, this time around. On a happier note, sales of
Lamb’s Tales
continue on their steady way. And I hear the gallery is just about sold out of engravings now. I saw the Curwen Press book, and I have to admit—through gritted teeth—that it is pretty nice. I was much taken with the new Spiderweb print, Matt. Marvellous. One of a series, you say—nature studies. Basis of a new exhibition, maybe, in a year or two? If the world holds still.”

“If there’s a war,” Matt said. “I shall have to go.”

“I know.”

“You couldn’t stay here alone.”

“I could,” she said. “If I have to. And I’m not alone. There’s Molly.”

“Your parents…or mine.”

“
No.
Don’t talk about it. Not till we have to.
If
we have to.”

On Molly’s third birthday, they cycled down to the coast, the little girl in the pillion seat that Matt had made. On the beach, she pottered among the rock pools while they sat and watched. She came to them with small trophies—a ribbon of seaweed, a brightly banded pebble. She was intent, serious, busy—bustling to and fro, wearing cotton knickers and a sunbonnet.

“I want to know what she will be like when she’s twenty,” said Matt. “I want a sudden quick glimpse into the future.”

“I don’t.”

“Why not?”

“It would be appalling to know the future. You couldn’t live, knowing the future.”

“I don’t want the entire narrative. Just a few interesting snapshots. Molly in some other incarnation. What will she be? What will she do?”

“We’ll find out, won’t we? We’ll be watching.”

“Middle-aged fogies,” said Matt. “Making noises of disapproval, just like our own parents.”

“Only if she wants to live in Kensington, and play bridge. Which she won’t.”

“Perhaps that will be her form of rebellion. Each generation kicks out at the one before. Artists always do that. It’s obligatory.”

“Do you?”

“Engravers are a law unto themselves. We all think we’re innovators. Doing it differently.”

The tide was out. The sea seemed to be retreating to the distant coast of Wales, leaving a great expanse of glittering Bristol Channel muddy sand, fingered by long slicks of water. Behind them, the cliffs were veined with pink and gray; rock falls had brought down chunks of the alabaster. Matt picked up a large pink piece. “This is going to be a Henry Moore maquette—one of those earth mother figures.”

Lorna had brought a cake, and three candles. They found a flat rock at the foot of the cliff, and she set out the birthday tea. The candles guttered in the breeze, and had to be relit before at last Molly blew them out. Then she became intent once more upon beachcombing, while Matt and Lorna sat looking out at the far-off sea, at the white glimmer of the Welsh coast, at a skittering dog, at a row of gulls lining the rock pools. There were scarves of cirrus cloud against a clear blue sky; the late afternoon sun was warm on their faces.

“Actually,” said Lorna, “I am not remotely interested in the future at this moment. I want to stay here, like this, as we are, forever. I want it to be now, always.”

Molly comes staggering over the pebbles toward them, holding a shell. “More cake?” she inquires. “Blow the candles again?”

Marjorie Sanders, from Roadwater, leaned her bike against the wall of the cottage, and stepped inside. “Thank you, Lorna—cup of tea would be nice, after the hill. In fact, I’m not me today, I’m the billeting officer. Ever so important, I am. Power of life and death. If I say so, you get an East End mother and four children. In your case, I doubt it. Now, you’ve got just the two rooms up and this—is that right? And you’ve not got running water or electric? I’m going to be putting you on the reserve list. We know how many billets we’ve got to find, for Williton rural district, and we won’t need to scrape the barrel, far as I can see. I’m not being rude, you’ve made this place a nice home, but you’d be hard put to it to squeeze any extra in. So I’ll just tick you off, and be on my way, when that kettle’s boiled. Heaven knows how they’re going to settle in, when they come. If they come. I mean, town people are different, aren’t they?”

“It’s going to happen, isn’t it?” said Lorna. “The war.”

“I suppose so.”

They were in the shed. Matt was taking the first print from a newly engraved block. He eased the back of a spoon to and fro over the paper, back and forth, across and across, picked the paper off and there was the proof print: an intimate scrutiny of dandelion clocks, which made them into something startling, unique.

He stared at the print: “It makes me wonder what the hell I’m doing, fossicking away.”

“Don’t,” she said. “Don’t wonder. You wouldn’t have, before. It’s just that everything’s gone wrong. Look—I found the first ripe blackberries.”

When it came, it came in the form of tea urns, the train, and crying children. They cycled down to Roadwater, alerted to the need for helpers at the village hall, leaving Molly with the farmer’s wife. Eight hundred women and children from London were anticipated at Washford, who would have been waiting, and traveling, for many hours, all of whom must be allocated billets before nightfall. Matt joined those helping to escort and identify the evacuees; Lorna was put onto the distribution of tea and sandwiches. First, there was the bustle of expectation, instructions, queries, the assembling of trestle tables, chairs—an almost festive atmosphere. Then suddenly they were here, and the place was full, lines of people spilling out into the road, ranks of drab, tired women clutching babies, toddlers. The hall became hot, smoky, ripe with the smell of sweat, and children. Lorna gave tea to a richly pregnant girl, and found her a chair. The voices all around were those of strangers, alien, not the soft Somerset voices to which she had grown accustomed; these people came from a London that she never knew existed. “I’m a Londoner too,” she said, trying to make contact, and the women stared at her with skepticism. There were so many of them, and the rumor was that there would be more trainloads tomorrow and Monday. Suddenly, the cruel black print of newspapers, from which you shied away, was turned into an awful reality, in which the certainties of the world that you knew were swept aside; it was like being plunged into the irrationalities of dream, of nightmare. This bemused mass of women and children, who should not be here, who did not want to be here. What was it that was expected? What annihilation? What Armageddon?

There were many blackberries that year, wortleberries up on the hill, mushrooms, hazelnuts. The hedges glowed with hips and haws. The sunshine reached far into October, the leaves turned, the first frosts came, and an autumn gale or two. The oak tree beside the cottage rattled acorns onto the roof and shed a small branch.

Everything had happened, but also nothing. London was not burning; nor Liverpool, nor Birmingham, nor Manchester. Things went on as they had before, except that they were different. You must obey remote, draconian regulations: comply with the blackout requirements, stick sheets of cardboard over the cottage windows, eat what you were told to eat, go to Williton to register for a ration book. People grumbled and complied, laughed and negotiated. In a trickle, then a stream, the London women got on the trains and went back; they were homesick, they couldn’t be doing with the food, the quiet, this foreign land.

You stood at the gate and watched for the postman, holding Molly’s hand. What did he have in his bag today? He had taken on a new significance, and he knew it—now he was half apologetic, half portentous. “Just a letter for you—nothing for him. Young Ted Moult had his papers, though. They’re taking the boys first. They always do that, don’t they? Your husband’ll be in the clear for a while. Maybe they won’t want him at all, the way things are going.”

When the winter arrived, it bit sharp. On New Year’s day the frost was deep into the ground, the ploughlands ice hard, the trees stiffly white. The tap had to be unwrapped from a cocoon of sacking each morning before they could get water. The privy was a test of endurance. It was February when at last the thaw came, and then the spring was one of tranquil beauty; days as warm as summer, everything rushing into growth, birds nesting in March.

At first, this time seemed simply like an extension of life before, though infected by all the dictates of the day—the restrictions, the regulations. Matt bought a wireless; it crouched on the kitchen dresser, an alien presence that became insistent each night, as they turned on the nine o’clock news and that clipped voice filled the room. And Matt himself began to change; he was often silent, he found it hard to work, his state of unrest was grimly apparent. When March came, he offered himself to the farmer, and helped out with lambing and other jobs. “I have to be up and about,” he told Lorna. “If I sit here, working, I feel…pent up.” Many of the local young men were now gone, those not in reserved occupations, and Lorna knew what was in his mind, though they did not talk of it—that he would volunteer before his call-up papers came.

When at last Germany moved, and the wireless talked every night of Norway, she knew that it was only a matter of time. In the event, his papers came on the day that German forces invaded Belgium, and she realized when she saw him holding the brown envelope that he was relieved.

He said, “Well, this is it. I’m to go for a soldier.”

“Right away?”

“Yes.”

“Oh…”

“We knew.” He put his arms around her. “It’ll be all right. It’s you I’m worried for. It’ll be hard here. I think you should…”

“
No,
” she said. “I’m staying. If it’s too hard—well, I’ll think of something.”

It was high spring. The hedges and woods were full of warblers; there were creamy rivers of may blossom. That night, he made love to her with a kind of desperate passion.

“We are being broken in,” Matt wrote. “It is a tedious process. Much marching about and being shouted at. I hold a gun, for the first time in my life, and believe I understand how the thing works. Then we march about some more, and do physical jerks, and different men shout at us. Initially, we are culled. I had not realized that there are so many people in this country unable to read or write. An illiterate soldier is no good to the army. They whipped them out and took them away; apparently they will come back in due course, miraculously enlightened. I am told that I should apply to be an officer. I don’t see myself as a leader of men, but they say the food is better.

“Oh, my darling—if I could tell you how I miss you. It has been forty-seven days, and it feels like a thousand years.”

Every night, she listened to the news, alone, Molly upstairs asleep, and the catalog of distress and disaster was spelled out in those crisp tones—unemphatic, unemotional. She found herself going more and more into the village, to sit on a bench in the recreation ground, while Molly played with other children, and to be with other women whose men had gone. In early June, two boys who had been at Dunkirk came home to the village on leave, and their stories ran like wildfire from mouth to mouth. She saw that what you heard each night, that measured account, bleached of everything except facts and figures, was a hollow mockery of what was really happening. Once, she went with the farmer’s wife to Minehead and saw a newsreel: long lines of exhausted, unshaven men, some with bandaged limbs or heads. “And you can be sure they’re not showing us the half of it,” said her companion.

In August, she watched the skies, as did everyone. From time to time, planes went over, high above, anonymous, and people wondered if they were theirs or ours. But the daily fights of which they heard each night, this terrible maelstrom up above, were far away, over Hampshire and Sussex and the Channel. Except, she thought, that that is not so very far away, not far away at all. And then, in September, everything changed again, and now it was London of which they heard, night after night. The London women and children were back, hundreds of them, scattered all over the landscape, their voices always startling in shops, or on buses, or in school playgrounds.

Lorna puts the leaflet on the dresser, behind the cherished Victorian teapot from a Bring and Buy sale.
STAY WHERE YOU ARE,
it says. The government is instructing her what to do in the event of invasion. She must not take flight, as people had done in France, Holland, and Belgium, thus preventing soldiers from getting at the enemy, and inviting use as a human shield. If she does this, the enemy may machine-gun her from the air. Her and Molly. She looks out into the lane and sees it filled with people from the village, from the farms around, people she knows, carrying suitcases, pulling carts with mattresses and blankets, and from somewhere above Croydon Hill, the enemy planes are coming, swooping down across the fields, their guns primed.

So she must stay put. She must stay where she is. And anyway, where would I go? she wonders. They will ring the church bells if the invasion comes. People are quite brisk and matter-of-fact about it; the Invasion Committees have everything in hand, they say. There is a deal of defiant talk. But she suspects that there are others who have that knot of fear in the stomach.

She walked the lanes and the fields in the late summer heat. Everything seemed sharper than ever before, more arresting, as though she saw with heightened vision. The hedgerows hinted at autumn: there were tawny hips and haws, red and green blackberries. But there was growth still: the sharp green of young ferns springing up in the wake of the hedge trimmer, canary-yellow flights of toadflax, and the pink flush of young oak leaves—reminders of spring, as though time now and time to come coincided, coexisted, as though the future were subsumed into the present.