Evie (4 page)

And then the summer holidays had been over and Pamela left for her boarding school, returning only for the odd weekend.

Edward John had continued his rides, rehearsing imaginary conversations with the absent girl, practising being knowledgeable, fascinating and, more importantly, witty. He assiduously cultivated this apparently necessary skill until he felt confident enough to experiment with it on his classmates, and even, if he was feeling especially sharp, on some of the younger members of his school’s teaching staff.

Roger Bayliss, who was genuinely fond of his stepson, encouraged serious conversation at the dinner table at Higher Post Stone.

‘He has an enquiring mind, that boy,’ he told Alice approvingly, one evening after dinner, when Edward John, having been particularly erudite, had excused himself to
check on an injured heifer and his mother and stepfather were taking a turn round their garden in the late summer half-light.

‘An enquiring mind, has he?’ Alice had said, vaguely, watching swifts swooping under the house eaves.

Roger was thinking of university courses and possible professions. ‘A mind like that could take him a long way,’ he said.

‘I’m not sure he would want to go “a long way”,’ Alice murmured, her eyes on the rolling countryside below them. ‘No further, in fact than this valley.’

‘Unlike my Christopher,’ Roger sighed, thinking of the son who, after his bad experience in the RAF, had opted for a two-year contract with the New Zealand Forestry Commission. ‘Never had much time for the farm, Christopher.’

‘Nonsense,’ Alice said, gently. ‘He loves the valley, and like you, he has farming in his blood. It wasn’t indifference that made the New Zealand job appealing.’

‘No.’ Roger sighed. ‘It was me. It was me. I know it was me.’ They were referring, as indirectly as possible, to the situation which, as Christopher matured, had resulted in an estrangement between father and son that had been painfully exacerbated by what the RAF had referred to as Christopher’s ‘crack-up’.

Because of a similar experience of his own, a deeply buried trauma from the First World War, Roger had found himself unable to respond sympathetically to his son’s condition. It had been his developing relationship with Alice Todd that had eventually enabled him to confront the situation and
release the deeply suppressed feelings which had haunted him most of his adult life. This eventually made it possible for him to respond not only to Alice but, to a limited extent, to his son. However the reconciliation, such as it was, had come too late to alter the newly-weds’ plans to emigrate.

‘It was both of you, darling,’ Alice said, slipping her arm through his. ‘You and Christo. Anyway, it’s all over now.’

‘Well, nearly,’ Roger said, smiling at her.

‘Yes. Very nearly.’ Alice stopped to pick a dead head from a rose bush. ‘Georgina’s mother telephoned today. She’s had a letter from her. The first one since they disembarked in Wellington.’

‘Oh? Alright are they?’ Roger asked. ‘Madly in love with New Zealand, I suppose?’

‘Not sure. She says Christopher was sent off almost immediately on some survey or other, leaving her alone in desperately dreary government lodgings with absolutely nothing to do but wait for him to come back in ten days’ time.’

‘So the “travelling hopefully” was more fun than the arriving, was it?’

‘Much more fun, apparently! Poor old Georgie! She’s not a girl who would take kindly to be left behind, twiddling her thumbs!’ Alice shivered and pulled her cardigan more closely around herself. ‘Let’s go indoors. The wind is a bit sharp this evening.’

With the war in Europe ended, Evie had been anticipating news of her husband. None had come and as the weeks passed she and Giorgio had continued their clandestine evening meetings, observed only by cattle pulling at the lush
grass in the valley, a stealthy fox or two and a flock of sheep who would lift their heads, stop chewing the wiry grass on the high ground and stare at the two figures walking, hand in hand, through the summer twilight. Once, when a rainstorm rolled down from the moor, the lovers had sheltered in the small byre on The Tops, lying together in the fresh straw, piled ready for the lambing season. As weeks became months with still no sign of Corporal Norman Clark, Evie and Giorgio dared to begin to hope.

‘P’raps ’e got killed,’ Evie would whisper, ‘and they forgot to tell us.’

‘No.’ Giorgio, shook his shaggy head. ‘When a soldier die they send
un telegramma. Sempre
.’

‘Well maybe he decided he didn’t want me no more. He had no time for me, Giorgio, not after they told him that part of me insides is missing.’ They had discussed the fact that Evie was no longer able to bear children. In the context of their present situation it seemed almost irrelevant. At other times Evie was less optimistic. ‘He’ll come for me, Giorgio! I just know he will! Mum’ll tell ’im where I am and ’e’ll come and fetch me home and no one can stop ’im!’

‘We make plan,’ Giorgio soothed her. ‘We make plan for if he come!’

‘What plan?’

‘I not know yet,’ he confessed. ‘But soon I know. Soon I will have good plan!’ Then, suddenly, it was too late.

‘Where Evie?’ Giorgio had shouted to one of the land girls as she freewheeled down the lane after evening milking was finished.

‘Gone!’ the girl had called over her shoulder, her front wheel bucking dangerously amongst the potholes. ‘Her bloke come las’ night and fetched ’er ’ome!’

Edwin Lucas, whose farmland, adjacent to Roger Bayliss’s, ran west, from the crest above Higher Post Stone, down into the next valley, had been impressed by one in particular of the Italians who, under the supervision of an armed guard, had worked on his farm. Over the years of Giorgio Zingaretti’s internment, Edwin Lucas had come to appreciate the young prisoner’s equable temperament, his physical strength and his willingness to deliver a hard day’s labour. He knew Giorgio’s tragic history and had suggested that if the idea appealed to him, it might be possible, when peace was finally declared, to obtain permission for him to remain in England as part of the Lucas workforce. Giorgio had accepted Edwin’s offer and on the day the makeshift internment camp had finally closed and with the necessary paperwork in place, dumped his kitbag on the mud floor of a near-derelict, tied cottage that stood to one side of the Lucas farmyard.

The small building, which consisted of two rooms, one above the other, connected by a narrow flight of stone steps, was built of limestone, its interior, many years previously, coated with whitewash which was now mildewed and peeling. Its condition was considered unfit for Edwin’s current labourers.

Clarissa, Edwin’s wife, was to provide Giorgio with a meal each night and with sandwiches for his lunch. He soon got the measure of the rusted iron range in his dank quarters, and when
he finished work, would light a fire. With the small windows open to the summer evenings, he drove the damp from the abandoned building. With Clarissa Lucas’s ample food inside him and the warmth from his fire relaxing him, Giorgio began to visualise a future. He would hose the little place, whitewash its walls, replace the panes that were missing from its windows and the worm-eaten boards on the floor of the upstairs room. He would repair the pipe that had once delivered water to the granite sink. When sleep overtook him he dreamt a scene in which Evie would arrive at his door with the news that her husband was dead, a casualty of war. When he asked her to marry him she would say, ‘
Si
, Giorgio.
Ti amo molto.’

While Evie was telling her story, Roger Bayliss had been deciding what was to be done with her in both the long and short term. He was not unsympathetic towards her but the situation, should it involve him, was complicated by the fact that he had recently been invited to become a Justice of the Peace, a voluntary position consisting of occasional duties at local magistrates courts. He, as he had explained to Alice, apparently met all the criteria needed to fit the Lord Chancellor’s requirements. He was an upright, educated and well-respected man, his family and his antecedents were very much part of the area’s history. He understood the rural economy, employed local labourers and had a reputation for treating them fairly. There had been the unfortunate incident when his son, a Fighter Command pilot, had been dismissed from the RAF. But the boy had been ill, hospitalised in fact, when, after being deployed to breaking point, his nerves failed him.

Roger’s concern, as Evie reached the point in her story which had resulted in her tearful presence, here, in his dining room, was that should the situation between her and her husband escalate into more serious areas, such as assault or abduction, he himself would be disadvantaged by having any connection with it.

Alice had been surprised when Roger got to his feet and announced that Evie, for the time being at any rate, must now be returned to Rose Crocker’s care. As she and Roger drove back to Higher Post Stone, having promised to arrange a meeting between Evie and Giorgio, Alice queried his decision.

‘I realise that we can’t expect Rose to house her indefinitely,’ she said, as her husband nosed the car through the lanes. ‘So why don’t we take her in? It won’t be forever. She could help Eileen with the housework and she’d be safer with us than anywhere if the husband turns up.’

‘It’s not as simple as that,’ Roger told her and explained his concerns about the legal complications of his own involvement.

‘So.What do we do?’ Alice wanted to know.

‘The fact is that I can’t pay Rose for Evie’s keep,’ Roger told her, ‘because that could legally be seen as an involvement on my part, but—’

‘Is this all about the magistrate thing?’ Alice demanded, ‘Because if it means you’re not allowed help out one of our land girls when she needs us, I’m not sure I approve of it!’

‘But there are ways round it, my dear one,’ Roger said, changing gear as he negotiated the narrow bridge from which point the lane rose steeply towards the higher farmhouse.
‘Rose’s tea shop needs an outside lavatory – something to do with the new planning regulations. As the building is part of the Post Stone estate the cost of any building work on it is met by the maintenance funds, not personally by me. D’you see what I’m getting at?’

‘So Rose gains a new lavatory and you keep your flawless reputation! Very neat!’

‘And Evie is safely taken care of, for the time being at any rate.’

Roger’s next move had been to put the entire situation into the hands of the police. Statements were taken regarding Norman Clark’s conduct since he had almost forcibly removed his wife from the Land Army. Hester and Dave Crocker verified her injuries when they had discovered her hiding in the empty hostel. Annie and Hector had been asked to present themselves at their local police station in order to sign statements regarding Evie’s imprisonment in her mother’s attic in Coventry, where the police already had witnesses to his attack on a man who was yet to be identified as Giorgio.

Some days later the police arrived at Rose’s door to break the news to Evie that her mother’s body had been found by a Norman Clark, who claimed to be her son-in-law. The cause of death had been confirmed by a coroner as heart failure following double pneumonia. They did not tell Evie that the death had taken place approximately two weeks previously, or that the body was already decomposing in the horribly soiled bed in which it had been discovered.

On the following day, Evie and Giorgio were briefly
reunited. Alice and Roger drove her to the Lucas farm and watched her approach the door of the cottage where Giorgio was waiting for her.

‘Better keep an eye on things,’ Roger said. A light rain was falling, so he and Alice stood in the shelter of the farmhouse porch from which Giorgio’s cottage was visible. Clarissa withdrew into her kitchen and while she brewed a pot of tea and decided whether or not to use her best china, her husband, ignoring the rain, sat on a low wall, and with one eye on the door to Giorgio’s cottage, began to fill his pipe.

Inside the cottage the lovers embraced, then, holding her at arm’s length, Giorgio reacted to the sight of her bruised face and forearms, cursing himself in his native language for leaving her to face her husband’s violence. Even without translation Evie understood his words.

‘But stayin’ would of done no good, Giorgio! He would of killed you! And if the coppers had come they would of jailed you for breaking your parole! You were brave, Giorgio! Brave! And you made me brave! I never would of had the guts to get away from him but for knowing you was ’ere, waiting for me!’

In the porch Roger and Alice sipped their tea. The rain had stopped and the farm chickens strutted and scratched, a cat stalked silently along a wall. There was no sound from within the cottage. Alice and Roger replaced their cups in the saucers of Clarissa Lucas’s porcelain tea set.

‘I wonder what they said to one another,’ Alice murmured, almost to herself, as, having returned Evie to Rose’s care, they drove back to the higher farm.

Whatever it was that had passed between the lovers during the half-hour they had been alone together, it seemed to have had a positive effect on both of them. Evie, getting into the back seat of Roger’s car, had been calmly composed. She sat, her eyes on Giorgio as he stood at the doorway of his cottage, looking steadily across the yard at her.

‘What happens next?’ Alice asked her husband.

‘With any luck the police will arrest Corporal Clark and charge him with GBH. That’s grievous bodily—’

‘Harm,’ Alice finished for him. ‘Yes, I do know what GBH is, darling!’

‘Forgive me,’ Roger said, ‘I’m still not used to living with an educated woman!’

‘Poor Roger!’ she teased him. ‘I keep forgetting it’s been milkmaids and cowman’s wives since you were widowed, hasn’t it!’ They exchanged wry smiles. ‘So you think Norman will be arrested?’ Alice asked, more seriously.

‘I’m sure of it. It can only be a matter of time before they find him. There were witnesses to his attack on Giorgio in Coventry and plenty of evidence of Evie’s injuries, plus the mystery of the mother’s death.’