Spilt Milk Page 18

  Against the far wall were piles of newspapers, almanacs and journals. The linoleum floor had recently been mopped, and a soft tideline of dirt bordered the boots and the newspapers. On the sink was a bottle of Rinso floor cleaner with its lid off. Charles had cleaned the place, perhaps for their arrival. She replaced the lid on the Rinso bottle and took a glass from a shelf. It was dusty inside and she rinsed it.

  Birdie let the water run for a while and put her wrists under the tap, small rivers of dirt running down her arms. When she filled the glass and drank, the water tasted cold and earthy. She helped herself to another glassful and tried to imagine her mother and aunt here as young women. The cottage and how it must have been.

  Birdie walked out into the orchard and admired the plum trees heavy with fruit. She made her way to the railway wagon at the end of the orchard. Charles had told her he’d lived in it when he first bought the farmland, before he knocked down the remaining walls of the old cottage and built his farmhouse. It was almost completely covered in a climbing vine and honeysuckle. Bees buzzed in and out of the flowers.

  She sat on its step and leaned her head against the door, fanning her face with her straw hat. Poor or not, her mother and her aunt must have had a happy life out here. She stood up and walked down to the river, imagining her mother swimming in it as a child. A tall, lanky girl with long plaits, wading into the river, arms outstretched, welcoming the water. Aunt Vivian would have been small and doll-like, standing on the bank, watching her fearless sister, her skirts billowing in the breeze. Birdie envied the sisters their simple, old-fashioned childhoods. This place must have been a kind of paradise for them, far from the pressures of modern life.

  Matilda was chasing chickens around the yard the next morning. Charles caught two in the shade of the elder tree by the farmhouse front door, and Christopher, one of the farm workers, was helping Birdie catch a hen too. Christopher Thomas was a tall, healthy-looking man. He had five brothers and sisters. He was the youngest.

  The rest of the family still lived locally, he said. He caught a red chicken and picked it up. ‘The Thomases don’t move far,’ he went on. ‘How about you?’

  Birdie told him how her mother had grown up here, in a cottage on the site of the new farmhouse.

  ‘Ah,’ Christopher said, handing her the chicken. ‘So then you’re already a local.’

  Charles watched them together. He could see why Birdie liked Christopher. He was one of those men who made everything look easy. The sort women fell in love with.

  At least like this, with Birdie so deep in conversation, Charles could watch her without her noticing. She was suntanned and freckles covered her face and her arms too, where her shirtsleeves were rolled back. When she smiled, he found he was smiling too.

  He wondered what had happened to him. Where had this kind of softness come from? This weakness in him that had him checking his hair was lying flat, his collar straight? But he knew full well where it came from. Since he first saw her last summer, he hadn’t been able to stop thinking of Birdie. He wanted to show her things that he had never shown anybody. The dawn rising over the river. Grey mists on a beet field in winter. He supposed this was love, finally come to him. Though what he could do about it, he didn’t know. He was courting Matilda, and though the subject had not been raised by him, it was clear she thought he would be asking her to marry him at some time or other in the near future. He had believed it himself until he met Birdie.

  The farm dogs ran and barked and jumped around them. By the time they had caught enough chickens, Christopher and Matilda were red-faced and weak from laughter and the dogs had gone to drink noisily from the big metal water troughs.

  Charles held a hen in the brown dirt. He took a twig and pressed it against the hen’s beak. He drew a short line in the ground with the twig. Slowly he took his hands off the hen. She didn’t move. He took another hen and did the same thing.

  Birdie squatted on her heels and held her chicken with one hand and did the same. Her chicken stared at the ground. It was as though somebody had glued it there.

  ‘Now what?’

  ‘Now nothing. You just have to watch.’

  The farm dogs paused, ears cocked, puzzling over the stillness. The sunlight beat down, rough and insistent. Matilda was bent over, hands on her knees, watching the hens. Christopher stood beside Birdie. Charles came and stood the other side of her. He was close enough to her that he could feel the warmth of her arm next to his. Charles stepped away. He lifted his hands and clapped. Christopher and Matilda yelled and did a rain dance together. Birdie joined in, laughing. The chickens came out of their trance and ran away, squawking as if in disgust at being used as entertainment. The dogs barked. The day tripped forwards like a man stumbling out of his dreams.

  Birdie washed her hair in the kitchen sink, going outside to dry it in the hot breeze. She did her make-up standing with a small compact mirror down by the poplar trees near the river. Red lipstick. Mascara. After the baby she had got skinny, and she still looked fragile, though the sun had tanned her and her nose and cheeks were covered in brown freckles.

  She had brought one dress with her, a pale green cotton day dress with a pattern of hollyhocks rising from its hemline. She had on her wedge-heeled sandals with ankle straps and was bare-legged. She had rubbed her legs smooth and hairless with a pumice stone and then used the last of her cold cream on them. It was good to make an effort. To try and forget for a short while the emptiness she felt.

  ‘There’s not much to dress up for out here, I’m afraid,’ said Charles, walking towards her. ‘I warn you, a dance at the Parish Rooms is not going to rival London.’

  Birdie said she didn’t mind. She liked it here. As she spoke, she realized she was pleased to have this moment with him alone. But Charles Bell was Matilda’s fiancé. He was a good ten years older than her, and a farmer. She’d been brought up in a working-class pub in London. They had nothing in common. Nothing at all. And yet, every time he stood beside her, she felt he made something right. He had a way of listening when she spoke, as if he was thinking very carefully about what she said. She saw how animals liked him. How the cows were not afraid of him and the farm dogs followed him loyally. He had a goodness that she half hoped might lend itself to her.

  ‘I’m looking forward to it,’ she said, as they walked up the grassy path towards the house. ‘It’s been a long time since I last danced. If you set up a gramophone out here, I’d dance on the riverbank.’

  ‘Ah, well, we’ll have to try that one day,’ said Charles.

  ‘Come on, Birdie!’ yelled Matilda, standing beside her bicycle, waving at them both over the hedge up by the farm track.

  ‘You have unusual eyes,’ Charles said.

  She almost didn’t hear him, his voice was so quiet.

  She looked back at him. ‘They’re plain, I think. Plain grey.’

  ‘They remind me of stone. Granite. Or children’s marbles. I’m not doing a very good job at complimenting you, but I mean to say they’re lovely. I’ve never seen anybody with eyes like yours.’

  ‘My aunt has the exact same colour eyes.’

  Now he reddened, shoving his hands in his pockets and tipping his head on one side. ‘Does she? I must admit I have never noticed.’

  They stood, considering each other.

  ‘Hurry up!’ yelled Matilda, and they both walked briskly towards her.

  Outside the village hall, children played in the gravel. They had skipping ropes and a group of boys played jacks, kneeling in the dust. Inside the hall was a long row of chairs against the wall where old men and women sat motionless in their black Sunday best clothes and felt hats, their hands in their laps. She wondered if some of them might have known her mother and her aunt. She could not imagine either woman sitting with these immobile old people.

  There was a flurry of hopeful-looking bunting hung over trestle tables where sandwiches and tea were being served. Raffle tickets were being sold. There were prizes of eggs, butter an
d jam, and a bowl of bright-skinned oranges that was being admired by a group of children. Women outnumbered the men in the hall. A few soldiers played darts, and a group of local men in corduroy trousers and hobnail boots stood staring at the soldiers with a look of open mistrust.

  Birdie remembered the dance halls she used to go to, the familiar smell of hair oil and sweat and the edge of urgency, the heavy smoke-filled atmosphere, men and women pressed together, their bodies filled with the beat of jazz. She imagined Joan here, peeking in the door, sneering at the quaintness of this place and suggesting they make a run for it while they could still escape.

  Birdie, Matilda, Charles and Christopher stood by the bar. One of the farm lads, a boy called Jeremy, was discussing what he’d like to do with Hitler if he ever got his hands on him. Everybody talked like that. Thinking up new tortures. She had got tired, when the soldiers were billeted at her aunt’s house, of hearing how many times Hitler was going to get his backside kicked. Jeremy, who was seventeen and a skinny lad who could have passed for younger, recommended drowning him in a sack down a well. ‘Like my gran does with kittens,’ he said triumphantly.

  ‘You’d have to get him into the sack first, you little runt,’ said Christopher, pushing him in the ribs. Christopher was going into the RAF after the harvest was finished. He was enjoying swanking it over the other men, discussing his training and where he might be posted.

  ‘And you, Charles,’ said Matilda, ‘will you go and fight?’

  ‘Farmers get to stay home,’ said Christopher.

  ‘Home Guard,’ Charles said, putting down his glass. ‘I’m in a reserved occupation.’

  The band started up, an old-fashioned waltz, and Birdie realized she longed to dance. Several women danced together, slowly, carefully, as if a strict dance teacher was calling the steps to them.

  ‘Birdie,’ said Christopher. He held out his hand to her and they joined the dancers. He had a decent sense of rhythm and managed not to tread on her toes.

  ‘There’s a girl over there,’ said Birdie. ‘The one with a blue dress. She’s staring at us.’

  ‘Ah,’ said Christopher. ‘That’s Connie, Jeremy’s sister. We’ve known each other for ever. We used to collect snails together in the playground. I asked her to marry me when I was seven and she was six. She said she would if I gave her my catapult.’

  Birdie laughed. She could imagine him as a child.

  ‘And did you?’

  ‘I told her I didn’t love her that much. She has never forgotten it.’

  ‘I suppose you’ve hypnotized chickens with her?’

  ‘Oh, chickens, snakes, you name it. And she’s staring at me, actually.’ He moved away from her slightly as they danced. ‘She forgave me the catapult in the end. We’re getting married. Connie has a dream of a particular wedding dress, and she’s saving up coupons to get enough fabric. I was hoping we’d marry before I go away, but she is adamant that once she has the dress, we’ll fix a date.’

  Birdie smiled at the girl, who frowned back at her. Of course she didn’t like to see another girl dancing with her boyfriend. Why should she? Birdie was a stranger in this small village. Charles and Matilda stood together, looking like a married couple already. When the song ended, Birdie sat down on a chair beside the old people. She longed to see Joan. To be home, in the city, where she understood the rules and the way of doing things. She watched Christopher talking with Connie. Matilda was dragging Charles onto the dance floor.

  When Charles came over and asked her to dance, Birdie knew he was just being gallant. Matilda smiled at her. They both saw how lonely she was. Matilda had probably begged him to ask her poor wallflower friend to dance with him.

  ‘Oh, I’m quite tired,’ Birdie said, getting up. ‘I think I’ll cycle back to the farm.’

  Joking, managing to smile, she walked out of the open doors into the moonlight.

  Moths danced in front of her wheels as she cycled, fluttering white moths that moved in the odd, random way snowflakes could move. The insects were lifted back and forth by the warm air, she supposed, as snowflakes could be whipped back and forth by east winds. She felt a moth brush her face and wished she had stayed to cycle back with Charles and Matilda. The touch of the insect frightened her, though it could do no harm except to itself, leaving its wing powders on her cheek.

  At the farm she walked along the riverbank, but again she felt frightened. The water at night looked dangerous. It glistened and there were small sounds everywhere, a horrid rustling in the reeds, small hiccuping noises that could have been frogs or, in her vivid imagination, dangerous animals. The trees swayed and creaked. Earlier she had stood here with Charles and felt perfectly safe. Now she was like a silly child, afraid of the dark, conjuring up ghosts in every small ripple of movement she heard in the black waters. ‘Charles,’ she said out loud, as if his name could protect her from her fears.

  The weather broke the next day and summer rain fell. Birdie and Matilda had volunteered to whitewash the dairy walls before they left. They had buckets and wide paintbrushes and were wearing hessian sacks tied with string around their waists to keep their clothes clean. Small flecks of straw kept landing on the brushes and sticking to the walls.

  ‘I think he’s going to ask me to marry him,’ said Matilda.

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Who? Honestly, Birdie, who do you think?’

  Birdie stopped painting.

  ‘Charles,’ said Matilda. ‘This morning I was telling him how I liked the rabbits he’s got in that pen out the back of the house. He asked if I had ever thought of being a farmer’s wife. I said yes. I thought it would be very nice.’

  ‘And what did he say?’

  ‘He said he thought I’d make a good farmer’s wife.’

  Matilda splashed whitewash onto the walls.

  ‘And you think that was a marriage proposal?’

  ‘Well, yes. Don’t you?’

  Birdie pulled off her hessian-sack apron.

  ‘What about Colin?’

  ‘He’s a soldier. You know what they’re like. They promise you everything and then ship out the next day. I’ve got my future to think of. I’m not getting any younger. You’re young, Birdie. I’m nearly thirty. It’s now or never for me.’

  Birdie looked out of the dairy doors to the fields beyond. Charles was walking towards the yard with a couple of dogs at his heels. He lifted his hand and waved. She pretended she hadn’t seen him. She was glad this had happened. It made up her mind for her. She had to get on with her own life. She would go back to the city.

  Seventeen

  Joan had cut her hair short and small curls rose up around the curved nape of her long neck. She was wearing a black beret and a wide-shouldered jacket that hung off her tall, skinny frame. She had a confident way about her that Birdie didn’t remember.

  ‘You’re going to love the bedsit,’ Joan said as they pushed their way through the crowds. ‘I have a wireless set. A kettle, a single bed, a sagging sofa, a red rug I got from a junk shop and an armchair that was already in the room when I moved in. I also have a job in a typing pool, a thriving community of cockroaches in my flat, too many to give names to, actually. And,’ she lowered her voice, ‘a married lover.’

  They stopped outside a dirty brick house with black railings. Joan gave Birdie a grin and searched in her bag for a key. ‘You’re shocked, aren’t you? I knew you would be.’

  They descended mossy steps, Joan pushing bottles and rubbish out of the way with the toe of her shoe. She let them into the basement flat, closed and locked the door, pulled the blackout curtains shut, pegged them in place and lit a gas lamp.

  ‘Home, sweet home,’ Joan said, and offered Birdie a place to sit on the narrow single bed. They had a cup of tea and a few slices of bread and butter. Birdie kicked off her shoes. The city had taken her back, and nobody would ever know why she had left it in the first place.

  Vivian thought she should really replace the satin counterpane on her bed. The carpet
s were threadbare too. The cats had scratched everything over the years. Perhaps a new rug might help. A tabby cat sat on the bed, purring. It lifted its head to her and slowly closed its green eyes, a blissful expression on its face as she stroked it behind the ear. He had been the one who liked Birdie best. Now she had gone, the cat had come back to Vivian.

  She slipped off the bed and opened her cupboards, looking at the rows of clothes. She was going to have a clear-out and take some of her clothes to the charity centre in town. She and a group of women were cutting up old clothes to make new nighties and pinafores and shorts for evacuee children. She pulled out a few cotton dresses and laid them on the bed. Her fur coat and the shoes and hats in boxes would stay. And there, hanging in a paper covering, was her wedding dress.

  Poor Bernard Harding. He had been so angry when she had refused his proposition. She’d known he had something on his mind when he suggested they skip the bridge game organized by his sister and walk together on the beach front. Bernard surely didn’t want to take off his shoes and socks, roll up his trouser legs and walk on the sands with her just for the fun of it?

  Finally he had asked her to marry him, and she had said yes. At least she had not been wrong to think he would propose marriage one day. They had walked in silence along the beach, seagulls crying, the wind roaring in their ears, so wonderfully bracing and salt-edged. A fawn-haired child ran backwards, flying a small red paper kite that danced and skipped along the beach, touching the sands, lifting again, tugging against its line. Vivian had held her face up to the sky and breathed deeply, watching the kite’s sudden swoop into the air high above them.

  The desire to be married again had carried her along for years. It had been a project and she realized she needed projects, pilgrimages, acts of faith, whatever she wanted to call these private ambitions that gave meaning to her life. Waiting for Bernard Harding had been an act of faith.