Percy is in the uniform of a private in the Norfolk Regiment. Presumably, he could have chosen to take the cap off, but he kept it on, perhaps because it made him look taller. I wish he’d taken it off. I try to imagine what he was feeling. He was a cocky farm boy who’d experienced the crushing brutality of military training. He has a possessive hand on the girl he’d pursued since childhood. He is wearing the king’s uniform and no doubt feels himself to be part of an important historic project. He is almost certainly scared, because, daft as he was, he knew that death is the soldier’s trade. He would have practiced bayoneting, stabbing sandbags hung from gallows. The peak of the cap shadows his eyes. Like Win, he is expressionless. The pair of them stare into the muzzle of Signor Delmonico’s camera, like people trying to maintain good manners in the face of some obscene species of horror.
I’m reading all this into the picture, obviously. Maybe they didn’t feel anything like that at all. There’s sentimentality for you.
On the other hand, there’s the fact that Percy is part of me. He’s woven into my DNA. We share cellular structure. He might be responsible for the shape of my nose, my dislike of cats, the color of my hair. He might have some genetic say in the kind of people I’m attracted to and the people who were attracted to me. And therefore he might be to blame for my failed marriage. Likewise, I might owe him my success, such as it is.
Win, too, of course. Her thorny string of cells is just as much a part of me. But I knew her; I never knew Percy. And, like Win, I am angry with him for marching off into oblivion. I deal with my anger by making up stories about him. By imagining him. By bringing him up a lost country lane between two vast peaceable horses, his hands between their bridles and their hot flat cheeks, to where my young grandmother leans on a gate.
I stole the photograph from my parents’ house in 1978, after Win’s funeral. It took them three months to notice it was gone.
WIN BROUGHT HER daughter up closely. In Bratton Morley, this was not difficult. The place consisted of nine cottages, nine families knitted together by intermarriage and employment by the Mortimers. Threads of connection reached out to the other clusters of dwellings on the estate; nevertheless, at the time of her marriage, Win could have written on a single sheet of paper the names of everyone she had ever met.
Edmund Mortimer was a kindly employer. He did not stop a man’s pay when he was off sick. When his pigs were slaughtered, the lesser cuts — trotters, half-heads for sausage, thin end of belly for streaky bacon — were distributed among his people. His windfall apples were there for the taking. At potato-lifting times, women walked home from the fields with bulging aprons.
Mortimer’s instinctive kindness toward his employees had been intensified by a deep sadness. The Great War had shocked and depressed him. He had listened to the patriotic bombast with intense unease, had read the triumphalist reports in the Times with utter dismay. Of the twenty-three of his men who had gone off to fight for the king — the kaiser’s cousin — only ten had returned, some of them maimed. He had walked to greet them home and shake their hands, if they still had them. He wrote notes to bereft mothers and young widows on black-edged paper.
After the war, it took him eight years to get his farm back to full strength, eight years during which many of his fields lay fallow and women and awkward boys did the work of experienced men who had died. The landscape itself seemed to grieve. In the untilled fields, poppies proliferated like a million droplets of blood. Doggedly, he’d got things back to something like normal. He had not paid much attention to the Sparlings. He’d fixed the rent on their cottage at a guinea — twenty-one shillings — a year, payable on Lady Day, March 25. Win or her mother had queued to pay it, in hoarded coin, to Mr. Hedge, Mortimer’s moonfaced young steward. Hedge marked it down in a ledger using a pen dipped in black ink, counting the money into a metal cash box with an ironical flourish, because most of the money had come from Mortimer in the first place.
Win and her mother were glad of Edmund Mortimer’s casual generosity, or neglect. Without a man’s wage coming in, they were poor. (Shortsighted and slow-moving Stanley had moved into a room above the baker’s. Walking to Borstead from Bratton at five in the morning to knead bread dough had proved beyond him. His rent and board more or less canceled out his wages.) The two women lived off their garden produce, the eggs from their dozen hens, and seasonal fieldwork.
To Win’s satisfaction, Ruth was plain. She attracted no particular attention. She was a quiet, almost solemn, child. The only problem was her hair, which was ember-red and rather beautiful. Win recognized the danger of it and kept it cropped into a short bob. Win’s sentimental mother protested, weakly, but Win cited head lice and other horrors and snipped away with the kitchen scissors.
When Ruth was five, she went to school. For the first week, Win walked her there. Then, astonishingly, she announced that she had found herself a job at the new Borstead Steam Laundry. Win was made of sterner stuff than Stanley; she set off for Borstead at six thirty the following Monday with her head lowered into an early autumn drizzle.
Win made that walk twice a day, six days a week, for the next three years. In all that time, she missed only four days of work, when deep snow made the road impassable. (Those days were deducted from her wages, of course, so she returned to work as soon as the snow turned to icy slush. In old age, when walking became a burning agony to her, she loudly regretted it.)
Then, in 1926, her mode of travel to work changed, and this change echoed down Ruth’s life. In that year, the laundry acquired two electrically powered delivery vans that resembled the milk floats that had recently appeared in Norwich. The drivers’ cabins were blunt, open-sided wedges with a single seat. Steering was by means of a handle like a boat’s tiller. Behind the cabins, the floors of the vans were just large enough to carry ten large laundry hampers and six small ones. The tin sides of the vehicles were painted a smart maroon with the legend BORSTEAD MODERN STEAM LAUNDRY painted in curly yellow lettering. It took very little skill to operate these machines, so one of the driving jobs went to the weirdly cheerful Willy Page, who happened to live in Bratton Morley. He was some sort of cousin to Win and was gormlessly in love with her. At the end of his working day, Willy was allowed to drive his van home. So it made sense for him to hang around, smoking hand-rolled cigarettes, until Win finished her shift, then let her hop into the back. Equally, it made sense to drive her to work in the mornings and take Ruth to school at the same time. Mother and daughter sat in the back of the slow, jolting van, trying to ignore Willy’s chatter, watching the road and sky unfurl their seasons.
All of which meant that Ruth arrived at school before the other pupils. It was not the same school that Win had attended. Saint Nicholas’s Elementary School was the converted chapter house of Saint Nicholas’s Priory on the outskirts of the town, on the road to Yarmouth. It had a door for boys and a door for girls and a contested outdoor lavatory. The teacher was no longer the angry and mustachioed Miss Draper. She had been replaced by Miss Selcott, a sensitive and somewhat despairing young woman from the Home Counties. Ruth had no idea where or what the Home Counties were. She pictured a distant place bathed in warm light and populated by happy families. A place from which Miss Selcott had been tragically exiled, perhaps by Romance. So, out of kindness, during the hour or so before the other pupils arrived, Ruth formed a bond with Miss Selcott. While Ruth moved silently among the desks, distributing exercise books and filling the ink pots, she listened to Miss Selcott reciting the verses of Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Thomas Hardy. At the ends of the days, between the departure of the other children and the soft whine of Willy’s van, she would do likewise. In this way, Ruth acquired something of her teacher’s voice and learned that love was a form of distress.
Arithmetic, however, was neat and unambiguous and had nothing to do with love. Ruth developed a talent for it. When Miss Selcott filled the left-hand side of the blackboard with chalk numerals and, with a challenging flourish, drew the equals
sign, Ruth’s mind ticked like a cooling tractor. Miss Selcott surveyed her gawping pupils with a tragic patience. Eventually, inevitably, she would say, “Ruth?” And Ruth would stand up and walk between the desks to the blackboard while the boys hissed and sniggered at her. Then she would write the answer in white on the mysterious space at the right of the blackboard. Blushing and costly moments of triumph.
When Ruth left school, it was Miss Selcott who found her a position — junior bookkeeper — with Cubitt and Lark, Corn Merchants and Agricultural Auctioneers. The firm’s offices were the upper two floors of a sober-faced Georgian building that kept watch over Borstead’s marketplace. Ruth worked at a high desk in a back room with a view over the churchyard. Old Mr. Cubitt flirted with her; young Mr. Lark sought to find fault with her work. Neither had any success. After three years, the word junior disappeared from her job title, and her wages went up to fifteen shillings and sixpence a week. She spent her half-hour lunchtimes with Stanley. In the winter, she’d walk the short distance to the bakery and share a pie with him in his tidy, monastic little room above the shop. He’d fuss over the spilled crumbs. On warmer days, he’d bring the pie to the churchyard, and they’d eat on a bench with a congregation of sparrows at their feet.
Ruth Little became a tall, athletic young woman. In passive defiance of her mother’s wishes, she let her hair grow long; it fell in soft red billows onto her shoulders. In bright light her brown eyes held flecks of bottle-green.
She began to accompany Mr. Lark to livestock auctions, sitting at the small portable table behind and below his lectern, recording the sale of animals. The men gathered around the sale ring looked at her as if assessing her breeding potential. But few ever approached. Once she heard a man say to another, “Cawd, no, boy. You wunt get nowhere with that mawther. Thas Win Little’s gal, that is. She anythun like her mother, she’d hev yer nuts for mince.”
Mrs. Sparling — Ruth’s grandmother — died in 1935. Congestion of the heart, Dr. McVicar scrawled, messily and meaninglessly, on the death certificate. And now Ruth had something she’d never previously experienced: short periods of solitude. They came in the mornings. At the window, cupping her hands around her tea mug, she watched Win hoist herself into Willy’s van and disappear backwards, holding on to her lacquered black straw hat as if walking pace were a reckless speed.
Ruth had an hour. She locked the doors.
She went to her bedroom and reached for the shoe box hidden at the back of the top shelf of the wardrobe. She carried it to the dressing table and took out the things she’d bought, fearfully, from Griffin’s, the chemist’s. Lipstick, face powder in a gold-effect compact, mascara. A bottle of scent called 4711. A chocolate-colored eyeshadow called Temptation. She made up her face, not really knowing how. She looked, thrilled, at the clumsy tart in the mirror. She kissed a dark invisible Gypsy lover with her ruby lips.
She stripped to her ribbed vest and knickers. The silk stockings felt lovely, sliding them on.
The only way she could see all of herself in the mirror was to stand in the bedroom doorway. She posed in its frame.
Were her legs too heavy-looking? Would her breasts get bigger? Did breasts stop growing at the age of eighteen? She lifted a shoulder and flicked her long hair behind it. She pouted. She imagined Mr. Lark licking his lips, his trembling fingers reaching for her. And now she imagined — oh, God, it made you weak at the knees, and it was like aching for a wee but different — that she was undressed like this and swanning around the sale ring with all the men looking at her and burning for her and yelling out mad amounts of money and then —
And then the downstairs clock chimed the three-quarter hour, and Ruth hastened to clean her face and dress in the pleated skirt and white blouse and lace her brown shoes. Tied her hair back out of the way. Wheeled her heavy bicycle out of the shed and pedaled toward her ledgers.
Win was no fool. She’d found the box, had nosed the Babylonian wickedness within. But she was undisturbed. She had filled her daughter with the fear of men, and there was no cosmetic that could cover that. Or that’s what she thought until George bloody Ackroyd came along.
THE HARVEST HOLIDAY went back a long way. Centuries. When wheat and oats and barley plumped and hung their heads, schools and businesses closed. Weavers and wives and itinerants and children flocked to the fields. Pale clerks and awkward teachers went to blister their hands on pitchforks, to gather in and glean. At harvesttime, Edmund Mortimer delighted in the presence of half-forgotten members of his community in his fields. The coarse lunches and murmured courtships in the purple shade of his hedges. The tang of horse sweat, the swirls of chaff against the reddening sky.
He could not summon enough people to the harvest of 1942, so he telephoned the army camp at Northrepps. By luck, the captain he spoke to was himself from a farming family. The following day, a three-ton army lorry jolted down the track to the first of Mortimer’s nine fields of barley. The ten volunteers in it were under the command of a sergeant of the Royal Engineers, who was awaiting a posting. His name was Ackroyd. Hedge, the steward, greeted them skeptically.
The soldiers were all townies and clueless. But they were also cheerful and cocky and excited by this relief from routine. Within an hour, they were loudly competing at the work, pushing one another aside to lift sheaves from the binders. Their language was a horror, but their daft energy lifted the day. By noon the hazy cloud had dissipated, and Ackroyd’s men, ignorant of country niceties, had stripped to their waists, and the local girls were rolling their eyes at one another. When Hedge blew his whistle to signal the lunch break, Ackroyd and another man went to the truck and lifted out a crate of India Pale Ale. They went between the narrow shades of carts and trees, insistently distributing bottles. A sweaty young clown from the Royal Fusiliers tried to pour beer into the horses’ mouths.
Late in the afternoon, when the teams of horses were being changed, George Ackroyd went to relieve his bladder behind the three-tonner and lingered in its shade to smoke a cigarette. He looked up into the huge and faultless sky in which crescent-winged birds circled and swooped. He blinked away memories of other birds, in another country, picking human meat from the husks of burned machines.
A black car, a long Riley saloon, pulled up alongside the gateway to his left. Three people got out. The driver was a somber man with thinning hair who, despite the heat, wore a brown suit and a stiff collar and a striped tie. He opened the rear door and held it while a smiling older man in a blue collarless shirt emerged. The other passenger was a young woman who was wearing a belted floral-print dress. George observed the fullness of her figure and her long flame-red hair. He parked his cigarette in the corner of his mouth and sauntered after them into the field, watching the shift of her hips as she carefully placed her feet in the rutted earth.
Hedge bustled toward them, saying heartily, “Mr. Mortimer!”
“Herbert,” the older man said. “How goes the day?”
“Very good, sir. Very good.” Hedge turned to the somber man. “We’re expectun a good yield, Mr. Lark, all things considered.”
Lark sniffed, nodding.
Mortimer surveyed the glowing field. The cut portion of it was stitched with stooks of grain aligned with military precision.
“And how are our gallant volunteers getting on, Herbert?”
Hedge looked blank. George trod his smoke out and stepped forward.
“The lads’ve enjoyed themselves, sir. They’re not trained for this sort of thing, but I hope they’ve made themselves useful.”
Mortimer smiled at him. “So you’d be Sergeant Ackroyd, I presume?”
“Sir,” George said, and made as if to salute, but Mortimer stuck out his hand, and after a tiny hesitation, George shook it.
Ruth, standing a pace or two from the men, studied Sergeant Ackroyd in stolen sideways glances. His braces hung loose at his sides, and his pale khaki shirt was unbuttoned. She had not seen a man’s torso since a bank holiday trip to the seaside in 1938. Ackro
yd’s was lean; you could see how the muscles worked. His face was narrow, unusually symmetrical, and, like his throat and forearms, deeply tanned by something fiercer than an English sun. His black hair was cut short at the sides but fell in a sweaty tumble onto his right eyebrow. Ruth had heard north-country accents only on the wireless: comedians doing jokes and songs that made her mother scowl. Perhaps for this reason, she thought there was cheek in the way Ackroyd spoke. Mockery. He had a narrow mustache, like a movie star. She wondered for the first time what it would be like to be kissed on the mouth by a man with a mustache. As she was thinking about it, Ackroyd looked directly at her and winked. Winked! Ruth looked away, feeling her whole body blush.
Two days later, Ruth left the office at five fifteen, and there he was, right outside, sitting on a brown-painted motorcycle, smoking. She was shocked to a standstill. He was wearing the same light fatigues, but this time, thank God, his shirt was buttoned. She could see that he’d come from Mortimer’s fields; there were sweat stains at his armpits and chaff on his boots.
“Ayup, lass,” he said. “Fancy a ride home?”
He’d bundled a jacket or something into a rough cushion and strapped it to the metal pillion.
Ruth’s eyes skittered around the square. People were looking. Of course they bloody were!
“Dunt be so soft,” she managed at last to say. “I ent gettun on that thing. Anyhow, I’re got my bike round the corner.”
Ackroyd regarded her, considering.
“Suit yourself,” he said, and flicked his cigarette away. He eased the motorcycle backwards off its prop and kicked it into life.
She turned left at Black Cat corner onto the lane to Bratton Morley. After a minute, he drew level with her, throttling the engine back until its beat matched the chug of her heart.