Lost in the Flames (3 page)

‘You can’t marry her,’ said Bainbridge’s mother, ‘in circumstances such as these. She’ll stay at home and bring the child up there.’

‘But I must marry her,’ he said. ‘For the sake of our child.’

But John Bainbridge wavered and his mother’s wishes prevailed.

‘Don’t worry, Mary, our child will be fine,’ he promised, ‘and one day we’ll all be together.’

But the temporary life they created set too hard in its mould and there was no breaking it. Mary’s father passed away within two years from pneumonia and a sense of disgrace, and shortly after they had buried him Mary left for Newcastle.

‘Newcastle?’ said John Bainbridge. ‘You must be mad.’

‘Perhaps,’ she said, but she was gone and she married a ship-builder and gave Norman two half-brothers he rarely saw. Norman’s upbringing was left to his grandmother, John Bainbridge visiting weekly and providing sufficient funds to see to Norman’s well-being and training him on his farm for when he would take it on for himself.

‘That’s my lad over there,’ he would say to anyone who would listen. ‘Dead proud of him, I am. Dead proud.’

But then, when Norman was thirteen, John Bainbridge was late for an appointment of little consequence and he slipped beneath a bus as he ran to jump on. Gone at thirty-five, too young or too careless to have made a formal will, and with him went Norman’s only hope of a comfortable life, Black Hill Farm ending up in the hands of a Bainbridge cousin. Norman worked Black Hill Farm for another dozen years until he woke up one day and declared that he was off down south to make a new life for himself, away from the bastard taunts and the injustice.

He arrived in North Oxfordshire and met Mr Brailes at the Banbury cattle market. Brailes liked the look of the strong young northerner and discerned within minutes that Norman knew his sheep from his goats, his animal husbandry from his labourer’s tasks.

‘You’ll do for me,’ bellowed Brailes. ‘A fair wage, free food and lodging, and a cracking little farm, out by Chipping Norton.’

‘Right, then,’ said Norman.

‘The contract’s dawn till dusk,’ added Brailes, a little more quietly. ‘Three hundred and sixty-four days a year. Christmas Day’s a holiday.’

‘You’ll have to take my dogs as well.’

‘Working dogs?’

‘Border collies. I’ve trained them well.’

‘No wife?’

‘No.’

‘Don’t worry. We’ll find you one soon enough.’

‘Right, then,’ said Norman, and he followed Brailes over to a pen to assess the merits of an Aberdeen Angus.

From the top-floor dormer window Jacob could see Brailes’ van trawling out of the farm gate and up the snow-covered lane past the railway bridge before it passed out of sight along the Churchill Road and then into view again down the hill towards the Arbuckles’ house, Mill View Cottage, three storeys of pale Cotswold stone. Brailes pulled the van over by the low stone wall that kept Alfred’s pigs penned inside the orchard. Jacob heard Alfred calling the men over and watched him lean over the wall and whack the roof of the sty with a hoe, then the pigs emerging, rooting around beneath the trees. Jacob hurried down the stairs, grabbing Vera’s hand and hauling her down after him.

‘You can come too, William,’ he said. ‘If you want.’

The three of them gathered in the porch, three heads poking around the doorframe, listening to the men discussing their business.

‘What do you reckon, Norman?’ Brailes was saying.

Norman had got into the pen and was sizing up the animals.

‘You want a male, right? That looks a good ’un. He’ll do the job.’

‘Disraeli it is, then,’ said Alfred.

Norman cast him a quizzical look.

‘Names them all after prime ministers,’ said Brailes.

‘Bloody healthy set of bollocks on him, that’s for sure,’ said Norman. ‘Disraeli will give you a whole Cabinet of little politicians.’

Then he turned and met the eyes of Vera.

‘Apologies,’ Norman said, touching his cap, ‘for my rudimentary use of language just now. I had no idea a lady was present.’

Jacob and William stood giggling behind their sister.

‘Don’t worry,’ said Vera. ‘I’ve heard far worse than that. Father’s always cursing about something or other,’ and she took the enamel bowl that she was holding into the garden and began scrubbing furiously with a brush. Norman watched for a moment as her hand sped back and forth in a frozen blur, the skin mottling orange and blue in the cold.

‘You’ll be needing some gloves,’ said Norman.

Vera smiled and took this coincidence as a happy omen.

‘Come see my birds, mister?’ said Jacob.

‘Happy to,’ said Norman, and he followed the boy round to the out-house door.

‘Eric and Penelope,’ Jacob said. ‘My lovely birds.’

‘Very nice,’ said Norman. ‘They’d make a lovely pie.’

Jacob glared at him. ‘I thought you were a nice man.’

‘I am, but you’ve got to eat.’

‘Well you can’t eat Eric and Penelope.’

‘I was just pulling your leg, son.’

‘That’s all right, then. I only just got them back, you know. Bloody

William set them out of the cage, said they’d gone forever, up into the blue, he said. But they came back. Didn’t you, my dears?’ He cooed at them. ‘They were in the elm and I left the cage door open all night and in the morning they were back home. Isn’t that a miracle, mister, a little miracle?’

‘I’ll say it is,’ said Norman, smiling at the boy. ‘They must like you.’

‘Oh, they do, mister, they do.’

When they got back to the farm, Norman and Brailes and Webster set off to do the hedging, taking the long walk down past the copse to the bottom field where the brook ran beneath the abandoned mill-house, inhabited now by rats and bats and owls. They stopped in mid-morning to drink the sweet milky tea that Mrs Brailes had prepared for them in the thermos, the hot liquid slipping down their gullets as vapour spilled from their mouths in the icy air. Brailes went back to the farm, leaving Norman and Webster to hack at the hawthorn until the sun was setting over Kingham and the first flakes of snow drifted in on an easterly wind. They had cut the hedge back by three feet, opening up the ditch and laying bare the runs in the adjacent bank.

Norman prodded Webster in the ribs and nodded towards the runs.

‘We’ll be back for those later,’ he winked.

‘For what?’ said Webster.

‘Hares, lad. Hares.’

They loaded the branches onto the wagon and Norman slapped the horse and took the reins and led it back up the hill towards the farm as blasts from the Bliss Mill chimney echoed around the valley to signal the end of the tweed-workers’ day.

That night Webster persuaded Norman up the hill into town and into the nearest pub. They sat side by side on a pine settle, worn to a grubby patina by centuries of use, and felt the fire warm their feet through the soles of their boots. It was just a week until Christmas and
little bursts of seasonal music started up, a violin and an accordion, and Norman recognised Alfred Arbuckle as he ran his bow across the strings. An argument flared up in another room, voices in strident discord about a motor car, but they subsided almost as soon as they had started and peace and music broke out again. Norman went to the bar and positioned himself next to Alfred.

‘What can I get you, sir?’ Norman asked.

‘I’ve had a skinful already,’ said Alfred. ‘But if you insist.’

Norman paid for the drinks and Alfred sat down next to Webster on the settle.

‘You lads not from round here, then?’ he asked.

‘No, sir,’ said Webster, looking into his pint.

Norman shook his head.

‘Family?’ asked Alfred.

‘Nothing to speak of,’ said Norman. ‘Him neither.’

He looked at Webster. Webster shook his head in glum confirmation.

‘Right, you’d both best come to ours for Christmas lunch, then. I’ve two sons of my own and I wouldn’t want them alone on Christmas Day either. Brailes won’t mind. Be at the house at noon.’

Alfred drained his glass, slapped each of them on the back as if banging out a rhythm on a favourite pair of drums, picked up his violin – a gift from a tramp who had called by for soup once a week and left the thing on the doorstep when he took himself off to die – and stumbled out into a street that was thickening again with snow.

At dusk on Christmas Eve, Norman took Webster down to the newly-cut hedge by the brook in the bottom field and showed him how to lay out the hare traps and the valley bottom rang with the piercing shrieks of trapped creatures in the night. Norman rose early to knock on Webster’s door and they set off with the dogs across the snowy fields to the brook where the hares had scuffed up the ground as they struggled to be free. Norman snapped their necks and held them up for Webster.

‘One for Brailes, one for the Arbuckles,’ said Norman. ‘We can hardly go empty-handed.’

Back at the cottage, Norman bathed and dressed himself with unusual care, knotting and re-knotting his tie and ordering his hair with a brush instead of his hand, then polishing and re-polishing his boots. He looked at himself in the dark speckled glass of the hall mirror, adjusted his cap, called the dogs, and shut the door behind him. Webster was already waiting outside.

‘Bloody hell, Webster, you can’t go like that,’ said Norman. ‘Look at your boots. They’re bloody filthy. They’ll think we’re a couple of tramps.’

They went back into Norman’s cottage.

‘Here, give those to me. And fill this up with eggs. Brailes won’t mind.’

Webster took the pail across to the chicken sheds in his socks while Norman brushed away the mud from his boots and daubed on the polish and brushed them until they shone like his own. Webster came back with the eggs and put on the dry socks that Norman offered him, then his shiny boots, and attempted to knot the tie that Norman gave him.

‘No, not like that, lad. Didn’t your mother teach you anything?’

Norman knotted Webster’s tie, then wrapped a dozen eggs in
newspaper and picked up the gifts he had prepared for Vera and her brothers at dawn. They left half a pail of eggs and a large hare on Brailes’ doorstep with a Christmas note, then set off up the lane through the snow with the dogs. Long icicles hung from the gutters of Mill View Cottage as Alfred welcomed Norman and Webster into the house and they all stood around in front of the fire sipping sherry from Edwardian glasses etched with leaves. Webster fidgeted as he spoke. Norman spoke little and of serious things – agricultural matters – while Alfred held forth on developments at the tweed mill, the state of his pigs and chickens, and the relative quality of the beers produced by the Hitchman and Hook Norton breweries, the latter subject accompanied by multiple tastings of several of the local brews. Vera sipped her sherry and listened to the men while Jacob and William sneaked into the kitchen to fill their thimble-sized glasses from various bottles of ale until their mother brought this sport to a sudden end and set them instead upon the vegetables with knives.

At the table in the dining room Vera found herself next to Norman and occasionally their elbows brushed against each other as they ate and she noticed the large protruding knuckles of his giant hands as he cut the food on his plate. She listened to the sound of him chewing like a ruminating goat, then drinking down his beer, then a clearing of his throat and the burr of his voice as he spoke to Jacob sitting opposite about the essentials of tractor maintenance, the correct dosage of worm pills for sheep (four) and lambs (two), and about Roker Park in Sunderland and the derby games against Newcastle United and how the Mackems had stuffed the Magpies 5-0 in 1930. Webster listened mostly in silence, occasionally laughing nervously at a minor joke that someone had made.

‘Webster,’ said Elizabeth, after she had been studying him for a while. ‘Haven’t you a given name?’

‘Yes, but everyone just calls me Webster, always have. Always will, I expect.’

‘Even your family? Your mother and father?’

Webster nodded and turned his attention again to the potato that he had been hacking at ineffectually with his knife before he had been interrupted.

‘How odd some people are,’ concluded Elizabeth.

Vera cast her mother a reproachful glance.

‘I like the name Webster,’ said Vera. ‘It has a certain dignity about it.’

Webster straightened his back slightly in his chair.

‘Go on, Webster,’ urged Jacob, struggling to get his words past a mouthful of food that was on its way in as his words were on their way out. ‘Tell us your name.’

Webster’s pale cheeks flushed pink and he squirmed again in his seat.

‘Jacob, don’t talk with your mouth full!’ said Vera. ‘You’re not a pig, are you?’

‘Go on, Webster, please …’ said William.

‘He won’t tell you,’ said Norman firmly. ‘I asked him once. Once is enough. Remember that, lads.’

‘Yes, Norman’s right. Leave him alone,’ said Vera, quietly proud of Norman’s decisive intervention and the instant effect it had had on her brothers. ‘His name’s Webster and that’s all there is to it.’

‘How old are you, Webster?’ asked Elizabeth after a moment’s pause.

‘Mother!’ protested Vera, and she looked across at Norman to indicate to him her disapproval of her mother’s continuing inquisition.

‘Nineteen,’ said Webster. ‘And a half.’

‘The same as Vera, then,’ said Elizabeth.

Vera glared at her mother again.

‘Mother, surely you know that a lady’s age must never be mentioned in public?’

‘And you, Norman?’ asked Elizabeth, ignoring her daughter’s interjection.

‘Old as the hills, I’m afraid.’

Elizabeth’s stare indicated that she would not accept such an ambiguous answer.

‘Twenty-five,’ he confessed.

Satisfied that she had extracted sufficient information for the time-being, Elizabeth served the pudding and then they retired to the sitting room where the family cat sat in a polka-dot chair by the warmth of the fire.

‘Thank you for the hare and the eggs, you two,’ said Alfred. ‘They’ll make a cracking dinner!’

‘I can bring you more any time you like,’ said Norman.

Vera felt a little flutter in her breast and her pulse quickened. ‘I’m sure father would like that. He absolutely adores jugged hare, don’t you, father?’

‘Absolutely,’ agreed Alfred quickly, noting the slight urgency of Vera’s delivery.

Jacob came hurtling down the staircase with a pair of parcels, tripping over the last step and sprawling across the kitchen floor in his haste. William looked at him with brotherly condescension, accustomed to Jacob’s frequent tumbles and secretly wishing he might burst into tears. But Jacob burst into embarrassed laughter instead.

‘No wonder you’ve so many scars on your chin, Jacob,’ said Vera, ‘rushing around like an absolute lunatic all the time.’

He passed the presents to Vera as she rubbed his chin casually with her thumb, like a billiards player chalking a cue in preparation for the next impact.

‘Get off,’ he said. ‘It doesn’t bloody hurt, you know.’

‘Mind your language, boy!’ said Alfred, and Jacob glared at him and went out into the porch to console himself by petting Norman’s dogs and imagining they were his own.

‘This is for you, Webster,’ said Vera.

Webster opened the present and something welled up in his eyes as he wrapped the bright red scarf around his neck.

‘Webster, you look a picture,’ said Elizabeth.

Webster was beaming from ear to ear.

‘And these are for you,’ said Vera to Norman. ‘I do hope they fit.’

He pulled off the paper and burst out laughing.

‘Don’t you like them?’ frowned Vera. ‘I made them myself. They took ages.’

‘They’re perfect,’ he said, pulling them on. ‘Just perfect. And these are for you. But I didn’t make them myself, I’m afraid.’

Vera pulled off the wrapping and burst into laughter too.

‘Oh, they’re lovely,’ she said as she admired the black leather gloves, and she held Norman’s gaze for longer than could be explained by mere gratitude.

Through January and February the hares in the bottom field learnt additional caution as their numbers diminished week by week, Norman taking them away two by two to the ark he was building for himself up the hill, a vessel to keep himself afloat in now, walking once a week
after dinner to Mill View Cottage with his offering of hare. He sat at the kitchen table with Alfred and Elizabeth, and Vera would come and join them and Jacob and William would sneak out of bed and appear on the galley stairs in their pyjamas and listen to the adults and Elizabeth would let them perch there for a while, pretending not to see, and then scold them back up the stairs to bed, Jacob calling out ‘Good night, Norman!’ as he went, and Jacob would refuse to settle until Norman and Vera had gone upstairs to tuck him into bed and Norman had told him a story about life up north or something that had occurred that day with the animals on the farm. And as Norman told the story, he watched Jacob breathing and the eyelids start to flicker as the boy slipped into dreams, and he wished that when he was young he could have been a boy just like Jacob, not an unwanted parcel that had been lost in life’s post and left at an address where they had no use for him.

Then one night Alfred and Elizabeth left the kitchen on a nonspecific pretence and Norman and Vera found themselves alone together and conversation came easily as the minutes slipped by and Norman felt the frost inside him thaw a little more. Then they heard a hint-heavy cough from the top of the stairs. Norman looked at his watch.

‘Perhaps I should be going. I’ve got an early start tomorrow. But it’s been a very pleasant evening, I’ve enjoyed our conversations.’

‘Yes, Norman, it’s been lovely,’ said Vera. ‘You’ve been lovely.’

He did not know what to say. She accompanied him to the door and without intending to he suddenly heard himself saying what he had been thinking, his voice soft now beneath the decorative canopy of the porch.

‘Vera,’ he whispered. ‘Will you come out with me sometime?’

She stared at him.

‘The cinema, perhaps?’ he continued. ‘A matinee, I mean, in the afternoon.’

She had replied before he could finish.

‘This Saturday, then?’ he said.

She touched his gloved hand and felt him squeeze her fingers gently and then he turned and walked up the lane with his dogs either side of him and a single question in his mind. How on earth was he going to persuade Brailes to give him the day off?

The following day began and ended in a downpour.

‘Norman, there’s something I have to tell you,’ said Webster as they were fixing the gears of the tractor in the barn. ‘I’m thinking of going back home. I wrote a letter, you see, and they said they’d have me back. I think I really should go home, you know.’

Norman patted Webster’s shoulder.

‘I’ll miss you, Webster. You’re a good sort.’

‘I’ll miss you too, Norman. You’re like my big brother, you are.’

‘When are you planning on going?’

‘Whenever Brailes will let me.’

‘I’ll speak to him for you.’

That night, Norman and Webster walked up to the pub and stayed until closing time. As they staggered home, Norman finally asked the question.

‘So then, Webster, what
is
your Christian name? You can tell me now, you’re off home soon.’

‘I’d rather not.’

‘Come on, you’re my mate. You can tell me.’

‘All right, but don’t mock me. It’s … Verdun.’

‘What?’

‘Verdun. Like the battlefield. 1916 and all that.’

‘Yes, I know.’

‘So what do you think?’

‘Well, it’s a bloody original name.’

‘My dad chose it. He was gassed there in the war. He said it would remind me not to trust too much in human nature.’

‘Well, Webster,’ laughed Norman, ‘Maybe you should just stick to the surname.’

And he gave Webster a bear hug and they staggered on in the dark towards the farm.

Webster left for home on the early bus and when he had gone Brailes and Norman went out to check if the sheep had started to lamb.

‘Mr Brailes, there’s something I need to ask you,’ said Norman. ‘I know it’s not part of my contract, but I’d like to take Saturday afternoon off. There’s something I have to do. Just this once, mind.’

‘Whatever can be so important, Norman?’ asked Brailes.

‘It’s Alfred Arbuckle’s girl, Vera’ said Norman. ‘You see, we …
well, I’ve asked her out, just for the afternoon, like. I can check on the sheep in the evening …’

‘That’s fine, the sheep can wait a few hours, a woman can’t. And Norman, now Webster has left, we’ll be needing more help, so I’ve been thinking. You do the work of two men, I want to give you more responsibility, a sort of promotion, I mean. There’ll be more money in it for you.’

‘Thank you, Mr Brailes.’

‘And a week’s holiday once a year.’

‘I’d certainly appreciate that.’

That Saturday, Norman and Vera walked awkwardly into town and sat through a George Formby film barely following the plot, then stopped for steak and kidney pie at the café on the top side of the market square, and as they walked back home Vera slipped her arm through his.

The following week, Vera took Jacob along to Elm Tree Farm as a chaperone, her little brother eager to follow Norman about the farm as he worked. They hiked over the fields with the dogs, from sheep to sheep, and Jacob watched as Norman checked each ewe’s nether regions, fumbling about it seemed with his great big ruddy hands. That night Norman was out again in the snow and he was up half the night with the new-born lambs, warming them in front of the fire and feeding them from a baby’s bottle.