‘Lucky for you she was, Ellen. My word, what a piece of good fortune you had there. A husband. A house. Clean sheets and a roaring fire. All on account of Bill and his rare cuttins, and Evie Norris.’
‘Give me some credit.’ I laughed. ‘I worked jolly hard. Anyway I’m not sure it’s as simple as that. I met Selwyn by chance, after all. We bumped into each other in Waltham Square. I was looking at a seagull flying down Castle Road.’ The gull making its way down the street below the tops of the buildings, white wings flashing in and out of sun and shadow. Catapulting me into the arms of a tall man whose skull banged against mine as we kneeled to retrieve my library books. And we had spoken of Neanderthals. Brow ridges. Brain size.
Lucy tossed neat chunks of apple into the tub. ‘Just think. You might be there now, if it weren’t for that gull. Typin away at the town hall.’
‘I wouldn’t have minded. I was extremely happy, with my warm room and my independence.’
‘Or you might have married that boy who was sweet on you. Tom Coward—’
‘Bob Coward.’
‘— Bob Coward, and got the full bowl.’
‘Bob Coward? Not in a thousand years.’ I wiped my hand on my apron. ‘I saw him at Waltham Show last year, strolling with his lady wife. A beer-belly leading the way, and not a hair on his head. What do you mean, anyway, getting the full bowl?’
‘The full bowl of cherries. You know, what life is meant to be.’
‘Actually the saying is, life is not a bowl of cherries. Or even a bowl of apples—’
A familiar engine roared at the top of the lane. It was my Land Rover. Lucy jumped to her feet. ‘Bill’s back!’ She rushed away, knife in hand, and disappeared round the back of the house to the mill yard.
I sat looking at the cut apples swirling in the glinting water. I wanted to follow Lucy but I couldn’t. Something was stopping me from gathering myself together. I gazed up at the unending sky, blue vault opening upward into blue vault. My heart gave a series of strong thumps, as if demanding to be let out.
After a moment, I levered myself to my feet.
William was drawing into the yard, his tyres dusty.
He hopped down in a semi-crouch and unbent cautiously. ‘That journey was too long for my old back.’ But he was smiling. He was wearing sunglasses, which gave him a rakish look. Now there was someone who’d never gone grey. He’d simply bleached, from wheat to white.
‘Oh, Bill.’ Lucy, for the first and probably the last time, hugged him.
He patted her small narrow shoulder with his good hand. ‘Steady on.’ He put out his other hand to me and I clasped it. It had been a great trip, arduous and long-planned, to the cemeteries and battlefields of Belgium and France.
‘Welcome back, William.’
Lucy released him. ‘I’ll put the kettle on.’
We followed her into my house where he sat down at the kitchen table, took off his sunglasses, nodded towards the open back door. ‘You girls have been at your apples, I see.’
I brought in the plastic tub and drained it. ‘It’s a bumper crop.’ I put a jam pan on the stove and tipped the apples into it.
Lucy set the kettle on the other hotplate. ‘So what about those graveyards, then, Bill?’
‘I visited all the Upton lads, then the rest of my old pals. Then I scarpered.’ William rubbed his fingers, easing each knuckle in turn. ‘I couldn’t abide the numbers.’
There were seven men from our parish who had fallen in the Great War. Frederick Broad; Ralph Corey, brother to Dan’s father Harvey; Ernest Horne, brother to George; William Rail; Henry and Victor Parr, cousins to Selwyn, offspring of old Mr Parr; and George Yarnold. All of them absent and grievously incorrect on the memorial for Upton and Barrow End. From time to time I wondered about those boys: who would have stayed on the farms, who would have made money in town. Who would have stolen a pig and run away. And their children and grandchildren, who could not be imagined.
‘I’m glad you didn’t linger.’ Lucy shook her head. ‘I didn’t want you traipsing for hours around all those headstones, not on your own.’
‘No. If I’d felt like viewing all the cemeteries, Lucy, I’d have gone with a pack of old codgers on a bus tour. But with Ellen’s vehicle I was my own master. I went back to Plugstreet Wood, found some bunkers in the young trees. Looked at the mine craters at St Eloi and round about Messines. Sat in a field a while, near Dammstrasse.’
I tried to imagine him there, chewing a grass blade, remembering the squall of shells. Was it in that field that he had wounded his hand? He was as quiet as if he’d just recounted a fishing trip. I stirred the apples and then sat down at the table, wishing I had one ounce of his boundless calm.
‘And what were the craters like?’ I asked.
‘Full of still water, like great big dewponds.’ He blinked. ‘How’s George, Lucy?’
‘Frettin. I don’t know what to do with him.’
The night William left for France, Lucy’s father had broken his leg. He had caught his foot in a root high on the embankment above the disused railway track, falling and fracturing his thigh. He was now installed in the office at the kennels, on a couch, preferring this to isolation in his own bed at the Hornes’ cottage.
‘He’ll be glad to see you, Bill,’ Lucy continued. ‘The days are ever so long, and he’s gone off the wireless.’
‘I know he’s bored with me,’ I said.
Lucy brought the teapot to the table. ‘He never is, Ellen; he’s always glad to see your face.’
‘And my back, a short interval later.’ I was laughing. George and I could never have offended each other.
William raised a finger. ‘What about the pupils? Always volunteering about the place, those girls. A couple of them could run up to the kennels and read to him.’
The apples puffed and sighed on the stove. I got up to stir them again. ‘There’s an idea, Lucy.’
Lucy cackled. ‘He’ll only want the racin pages, Bill. Upton Hall girls, readin out “Golden Boy, two forty-five at Kempton Park” to my dad. That would be a flabbergastin sight.’
I laughed. ‘Why shouldn’t they? It can’t be all Wordsworth.’
After tea my friends climbed into the Land Rover and I took the wheel. We went first to Lucy’s cottage, dropped her off, then to Upton Hall. On the drive I spun the wheel from long habit: the potholes moved, but they moved slowly. We reached the main building: it was still the Hall of my childhood, but these days it nestled greyly between two red-brick wings, faced down by the glittering science block opposite.
William was watching me with a particular look, one I’d come to know well. A sort of tender glare.
‘Thank you, Ellen, for the loan of your vehicle. I’m a lucky man to have such friends.’
‘Oh, honestly.’ I put my hand over his scarred one, laughing gently. ‘We’re lucky to have you.’
I made my way back, faster, less careful of the potholes. The Land Rover pitched and rolled. Althea Brock used to say it was like the mine craters at St Eloi, but of course it wasn’t. I thought suddenly of General Lord Plumer. Not the man who had caused the mines to be set at Messines, but the croquet ball Selwyn’s father had turned into a doorstop. I remembered the little girl who had transformed General Plumer into a doll, or the head of a doll. Hauling it onto her tiny lap and wrapping a tea towel round it.
What had she been saying? Some little phrase, some game about going shopping. She’d been very small then. At the beginning of the war.