“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.
The news came from the farmer, stopping by on his pony, his usually dour face lit up: “Telephone message for you. He’s got three days’ leave. Washford station at half-past two tomorrow.”
She rode down on the bike, Molly in the seat behind her. Standing on the platform, you could hear the train coming, minutes before, the warning whistle, then you saw a plume of steam, then at last there was the busy sound of its approach, and she thought it the most thrilling thing she had ever known, the most exquisite anticipation. And then it was there, hissing alongside the platform, and a door opened and he got out, this khaki-clad figure, infinitely familiar but now also oddly strange.
They had been apart for nearly four months. All the way back to the cottage they talked, as though each day of separation must be charted. When Molly got tired, Matt carried her on his shoulders, her legs hooked around his neck. Back home, they talked on, wandering the garden path, between the vegetable beds, while Molly ran to and fro.
Lorna said, “I can’t believe you’re here.” She had to keep touching him, looking at him.
“Nor me. I’ve lain awake at night, imagining this.”
“Before, we just took everything for granted.”
“Yes. One won’t make that mistake again.”
He had changed out of uniform into his own clothes. “That’s better,” she said. “You looked somehow—older—before. Different, anyway.”
“The army is a determined leveler. That’s what uniforms are for. Except that of course some are more level than others.”
“Is it awful?”
“Some of it. The worst is being away from you. But another side surprises me—the sense of purpose, expectation. The feeling that a great machine is grinding into action, and you are part of it.”
He was about to go on an officers’ training course. She heard this with relief. “That means you won’t be sent overseas then—not yet?”
“Not yet. Eventually, I suppose.”
The hours leaked away. Matt hauled logs from the deposit at the gate, and chopped a great mound of firewood.
“I do that now, you know,” she said. “I’ve got quite good at it.”
“Not while I’m here, you don’t.” He fixed a broken window latch, dug a trench and emptied the privy, trimmed the oil lamps.
She found him reading the STAY WHERE YOU ARE leaflet. “Christ,” he said. “They don’t believe in looking on the bright side, do they?”
Lorna said, “People make jokes about it. Mrs. Mason says she’s going to defend the Post Office with her father’s Boer War blunderbuss.” She looked at him. “Will it happen?”
“If it does, that’s why I’m in the army, me and all the other blokes.”
He read a goodnight story to Molly. “Which one do you want? Red Riding Hood? Goldilocks?”
Molly turned the pages, pointed. “That one? The Three Little Pigs?” said Matt.
Lorna went downstairs. From the kitchen she could hear his voice: “ I’ll huff and I’ll puff and I’ll blow your house down…’” She did not like that story, tried to steer Molly away from it, which was perhaps why it had been chosen.
The nights were an ecstasy, as though they were the first, as though they had never made love before. They did not want to sleep, to lose a moment of this rationed time.
Lorna said, “After the war, shall we have another baby?”
“Half a dozen, if you like.”
“We’ll have to find a bigger place.”
“That could be done. I’ll have plenty of work. People will be crying out for art, and the good things of life. Wait and see.”
“Do you miss it—work?”
“Don’t have time to, on the whole. I do some sketching, when I get a chance. Try to bank a few images. You’d be surprised what you can do to a machine gun. Let alone tanks on Salisbury Plain. A far cry from spiderwebs and chestnut leaves. My postwar exhibition will have a rather different flavor.”
They walked up the hill. There was a concrete pillbox up there now, squat and stern, staring down toward the Bristol Channel. Molly was entranced: “A little house!” She went inside, and reported empty cigarette packets and a beer bottle. Matt and Lorna sat outside it; the harvested fields were bleached golden, tractors crept to and fro, unfu
rling the red Somerset earth.
Matt said, “My parents want you to go to them, if it gets too difficult here.”
“It’s kind, but I’d rather stay.”
The Bradleys had fled Brunswick Gardens and were living in a hotel in Cheltenham. Marian had sent a card: “We are quite comfortable, but I miss my own things desperately. One can only pray the house does not get hit.” Matt had smiled: “I don’t see your parents as evacuees, but no doubt it is being done in style.”
“Actually,” said Lorna, “I sometimes imagine staying here forever.”
“That’s fine by me. Forever has a good sound to it, right now.”
Time ran out. Suddenly he was putting his uniform on again. He had been offered a lift to the station in the farm truck. They waited at the gate, Molly now bewildered: “Why does he come, and then go away again. Why doesn’t he stay here?”
And then he was gone. The truck rattled away down the lane and everything became very quiet, and still. And empty.
Lucas wrote: “Well, I am in action at last, if you can call it that. The bombers turned their attention to our patch of London last week—we have had incendiaries, several direct hits, and a couple of UXBs—unexploded bomb to you. We Wardens are rushed off our feet, and I am thankful for it. I can’t exactly look the armed forces in the eye, but at least I am doing something, and thank goodness that myopia and astigmatism don’t keep you out of the ARP. Any old crock can be a Warden, and plenty are. There’s one chap at my Post who’s only got one arm; he copped it last time around, in Flanders. The Posts are a melting pot, you meet all sorts, it’s an eye-opener, frankly. Classy girls, and old lags—all in it together. If this war does nothing else, it’s given us a good shake-up. Makes you pull out all your own stops, too. As you’ll be aware, I’m not exactly a figure of authority, but there are points when you damn well have to pull rank: put out that light! Get into that shelter! You’d be surprised at me. But by and large it’s a question of running hither and thither, and taking each crisis as it comes. A girl started to have a baby in one of my shelters last week—we got an ambulance just in time, but it was a near thing. I’m a dab hand with incendiaries now, if they’re on the ground—it’s the roofs that scare me, they can be smoldering away and you can’t see. And I don’t like land mines; they float down like great black coffins, and you can’t hear them, but you’ve got to see where they fall, and dash to get people into action. I go through bike tires like nobody’s business, and spend half my time off mending punctures.
“Has Matt finished learning how to be an officer yet? I’ve had a couple of laconic postcards—he seems to be absorbing the style. And you? It must be rough on your own, Lorna. I think of you.”
“I am still not convinced that leadership is my calling,” wrote Matt, “but I’m damn sure I can do it as well as the public school types here, and better than many. The company is not to my taste, on the whole—indeed, I think of my time in the ranks with nostalgia, at points—but I’ve found a few kindred spirits. One thing about war, it brings you face-to-face with other people in a new way. I have a hunch that this is going to do funny things to the world as we know it. I don’t think that after the war—and there’ll be an after, I’m sure of that—people will put up with the way things have been. Men aren’t going to go home, eventually, after what they’ll have been through, and knuckle down again to doing without, while others are doing nicely, thank you. I’m on the side of the masses, of course, and rubbing shoulders here with the ruling class has made me even more so, but at the same time I feel rather semi-detached—artists are a class unto themselves, I suppose, and confused about their own role. No wonder they’re a bolshie lot, by tradition.
“Rumor has it that there will be Christmas leave. And also that we’ll go back to our units, and be posted elsewhere soon after. Kiss Molly for me, many times. I love you. Take care of yourself—take care of both of you.”
At night, she heard the planes. She would lie and listen to that purposeful drone, right overhead, a throbbing sound, menacing because you had been told what it was. Once, she got up, went down and outside into the darkness, and looked up, but there was nothing to be seen, just black sky full of sound. They were heading for the Welsh coast, for Swansea and the steelworks farther east, and when they had dropped their bombs they would head back, and you would hear them again. There were local incidents: a stick of incendiaries on some farm buildings not far away, bombs that fell on the moor. Load shedding, people said, or maybe the pilot saw a light.
Christmas dinner was a pheasant, slipped to Lorna in the village shop, with a nod and a wink. Matt had forty-eight hours only. He was shortly to rejoin his regiment. After that…well, after that was anyone’s guess.
“I don’t relish the idea of the Far East. That is on the cards, they say.”
“Nor do I,” said Lorna. “I don’t relish that at all.” The map of the world hung in her head: great oceans, unthinkable distances.
“I’ve always felt untraveled. Abroad is a closed book. A couple of student sprees to Paris, and that’s about it. I’ve rather hankered after seeing more of the world. Now that it’s about to be on offer, free, courtesy of His Majesty’s Government, one feels a bit differently. All the same…”
She looked at him, across the ruins of the pheasant, the sprouts and potatoes from the vegetable patch. “All the same…You’re up for it?”
“Given that there’s no choice, one had better be.”
The next day, he left again, and the place fell silent once more, and empty. Except for Molly’s chatter, her pattering steps. Except for the postman’s knock, the sound of the farmer’s tractor, his brisk greeting, his wife’s more expansive exchanges, the women who gathered by the swings on the village recreation ground, Mrs. Mason in the Post Office, all those you met in the lanes…Oh, there were people on every side; the void was within, not without.
She bought a map of the world, and hung it against the kitchen wall. Now those great seas and spaces were a reality, as well as in her head. The wireless cited places of which she had never heard: Tobruk, Benghazi, Salonika, Rangoon. She located them on the map, and realized that she knew nothing, nothing. What were those countries? Who lived there? Why must they be fought over? Geography lessons at the Academy in Kensington had been volcanoes and deserts and icebergs: history was the six wives of Henry VIII. But Matt knew about all sorts of things. She had wondered at this, in those months when they were first together, had been amazed to realize that much of what he knew came from his school days. She saw that there is another kind of education, which had passed her by.
But she had always liked to read. At the cottage, she read: books that they found in the Minehead secondhand shop, books from the mobile library that stopped at the gate on the second Monday of each month. Even now, the library continued to come, and she scoured the shelves in search of enlightenment. She read books about art, for Matt, and history, for herself, and books about travel, and biographies of famous people. Sometimes she returned these after a cursory nibble, feeling guilty, but at least now she had heard of Cromwell, or Gladstone, or Samuel Johnson. But none of this was of any help when she confronted the enormity of the map, with its myriad names and places, its proposal of mysterious diversity. And there was England, up at the top, an insignificant little place.
In the village shop, you learned much; you heard that the evacuee family with the Sproxtons had upped and gone, that there was measles at Park farm, that there would be a delivery of corned beef on Thursday. You heard who had been fingered by the map: “Charlie Sanders has been posted overseas,” says Mrs. Mason. “He can’t say where, but his dad thinks it’s Malaya. And Bob Lake’s in the Middle East somewhere.”
The next time, the embarkation leave time, he did not manage to telephone the farm. He simply appeared. The cottage door opened, and in he walked. Lorna turned around from the sink and thought for an instant that she would faint. The whole room rocked; she gasped. Molly said, “Daddy’s come!” in an
astonished voice. And then he had his arms around her, around them both, the room steadied, he was here, truly here, and she was wild with joy. And with foreboding.
It was February. Catkins, snowdrops, the first flush of green. Later, she would reach back for that time, and it was a blur, out of which floated a few concrete moments.
She wakes to find herself tucked against his body, his breath on her neck, his hand on her breast; she lies there, at peace.
He sits at the kitchen table, his face puckered. He is drawing a picture for Molly. She wants a cat. “I can’t remember how cats go,” he says. “How many whiskers do they have?”
He is bringing in an armful of firewood. He pauses outside the door and stamps his feet to get the dirt off his boots—one, two. The latch clicks, the door opens, he pitches the wood into the basket. A sequence of sounds that she has heard for the last five years, and will hear forever: stamp, stamp; click; thump.
He says, “I’ve told the gallery to send you the money if they sell any engravings.”
He says, “If we had not met, that day, I think I would have imagined you, somehow.”
He says, “Molly has your eyes.”
He says, “I’ve got all these ideas in my head, for work. When I get back.”
He says, “Yes. We embark on Thursday.”
They went together to the station. She propped the bike against the fence alongside the platform, and they stood there until the train came.
And then she stood again as it left, holding Molly’s hand. She watched the train get smaller and smaller and then vanish, leaving only a trail of smoke. That night, when she heard the familiar whistle, the sound was different: menacing, inexorable.
In March there were gales; a branch fell and blocked the lane. Old Mr. Timms died, up at Croydon. A fox got one of the hens. Molly had whooping cough. The wireless talked of Yugoslavia now; Lorna stared at the map.