Apple Blossom Time (33 page)

Tom was very acid. ‘So you’re bringing your spiv to see us, are you, Kate? Showing him how the country bumpkins live? Decent of you. I suppose he’ll come, if only to check on what the house is worth. He’d buy and sell you like a shot.’

‘Daddy … it isn’t like that…’ Kate began and then looked away because she couldn’t stop her lips from trembling. I could see how much he’d hurt her. Why couldn’t Tom?

‘Well, what am I to think when my daughter comes home flaunting her new clothes and her makeup and her flashy jewellery? Like a rich man’s whore. But no ring, I see. He’s not decent enough to give you a ring.’

‘That’s not fair, Tom,’ I said quietly, but I hoped he would take warning.

‘Isn’t it?’ He turned on me with a sudden ferocity that made me realize that Kate and I had both better just walk out the room, quickly and quietly. Sometimes – more and more often – Tom was impossible. He could scarcely get the words out. They tripped over each other on the way past his tongue. Little stalactites of spittle gummed his lips together. ‘Go on, then. Take her side, as usual. The little trollop. After all, what do I matter? I’m only her father!’ He shouted again as I closed the door: ‘—only her father…’

*   *   *

I couldn’t have been more wrong about Geoffrey Paxton. I was right about the black market petrol, though. How else could anyone drive a Daimler, black, sedate, positively regal? And from it stepped a quiet man, soberly dressed in a pin-striped suit, immaculately tailored. His shirt was white. His tie looked as though it ought to be regimental. His hands were white and smooth, with finely manicured nails, shell pink. What a surprise. He could have been a judge or a banker or, with those hands, a gynaecologist. Not a spiv.

Not unless you looked at his eyes. They were bright blue, scarcely faded at all, snappingly shrewd, and they saw much farther than most people. As I said, he and Grandmother were two of a kind. They looked at each other, summed each other up, and respected what they saw.

And when he spoke, his voice was pure Wiltshire, rolling and rich. What a surprise. He could have come from any of the villages for miles around, or from Ansty Parva itself, for all its voice told us. I liked it. It made him seem more human, somehow, made Kate’s choice less inexplicable.

Grandmother whisked Geoffrey off on a tour of the mouldy old generals and their medals. She pattered along, chatting easily, as though to an old friend. Beside him, she looked so much more suitable than Kate, so much more appropriate, in age and style. They made what Vee might have called a lovely couple. Kate hung back, uncharacteristically silent, her hands behind her back like a gauche schoolgirl. I gave her a little squeeze, meant to be encouraging.

‘He looks nice,’ I whispered, and he did. ‘Where-ever did you meet?’

‘It’s not such a coincidence as all that. I was touring Swindon on a Battleship Week drive – they always try to get a glamorous Wren on those tours, helps no end, especially if she’s a local girl – and Geoffrey is on the Wiltshire committee for just about everything.’

‘I’m sure he’s a darling. He’ll have us all eating out of his hand in two shakes – you’ll see.’

We had tea in the garden, as far away as we could from the pig pens and the hen runs, but that meant inconveniently far from the kitchen, too. Grandmother had insisted on what she called a proper tea, at last. So the bread was cut thin enough to see the pattern of the plate through the slices, even though there was only margarine and carrot jam to spread on it. There were sandwiches with ghostly slivers of cucumber in wafers of crustless bread. The fatless, sugarless, eggless – practically flourless – cake sat on a comport of Limoges china, gold-rimmed, ornamented with poppies. You
could
make meringues with powdered egg and, if you were rash enough to risk it, the result would be like the soggy objects sitting on the wire cooling tray. I decided to call them drop scones instead.

And then – at the last possible moment – there
was
butter and enough sugar for everyone and China tea, pale and fragrant, just as Grandmother liked it, all produced with utmost tact by Geoffrey.

‘Offended? Oh, Geoffrey…’ Grandmother had given the little, tinkling laugh she always used when she had a man in her thrall. ‘Nonsense. You’re the soul of diplomacy—’

I balanced the tray against my hip and staggered across the grass, trying to avoid the tussocky bits, cursing the pride that had made us place the table and chairs so far from the house. From here you could almost – almost – forget the sycamores sprouting in the gutters and the broken window in the attic where the bats flew in and out and the mould spreading behind each downpipe.

Grandmother and Geoffrey were chatting – or rather Grandmother was telling some frightfully complicated tale and Geoffrey was nodding. Kate sat to one side. She was gnawing the quick around one scarlet nail. Mother seemed to be dozing in the sun, taking a chance to rest.

It’s funny how you can see someone every day and only now and then really notice them.

Tom looked ill. His red-brown, countryman’s complexion had become yellow. There were broken thread veins in his nose and cheeks that gave the appearance of rosy good health, but it was an illusion. As I came closer, I saw that his head and hands trembled, very slightly, but constantly. It was a vibration rather than a shake, like a just un-moulded jelly.

‘Of course, I’m only a local lad, really,’ Geoffrey was saying, with a smile that didn’t match the modesty of his words. ‘I’ve been lucky – couldn’t settle to anything after the Great War – spotted a few opportunities – bought here, sold there – you know how it is—’

I was amazed that Grandmother didn’t bristle at his assumption that she shared his background, but she just smiled and nodded.

‘I didn’t sit on my backside – not like some – thinking that my country owed me a living, just because I’d been in the trenches. I bought a batch of worn-out lorries from the War Office and turned them into charabancs,’ he went on. ‘People were going to want bright lights and holidays after the war, I thought – and well, there you are. You won’t travel a road in Britain today without spotting Pegasus coaches. And then I bought a few aeroplanes—’ He looked over at Tom, who, with skinny legs stuck out, was admiring the shine on his shoes. ‘I’m being boring. You don’t want to hear this, I’m sure.’

‘Nonsense, Geoffrey,’ said Grandmother, briskly. ‘Pay no attention to Tom. He’s very naughty, sometimes.’

I put the tray in front of Grandmother and passed round bread and butter while she poured the tea. There was a vacant chair for me on her other side. When we were all served, Geoffrey leaned across Grandmother and said to me, in his rich, surprising voice, ‘I’ve been looking forward to meeting you, my dear. I knew your father very well.’

No-one screamed or fainted or dropped a teacup. We all behaved very well. But then, we always did.

*   *   *

‘Tell me,’ I demanded.

‘I shouldn’t think I could tell you anything you don’t know.’

‘But I don’t know
anything.
’

Geoffrey looked rather startled. I could almost hear what he was thinking. He was wondering how he’d allowed himself to be separated from the after-dinner coffee drinking and walked off into the night by a determined young woman who wasn’t going to let him go again until he’d satisfied her!

‘It’s a long time ago…’

I took his arm and steered him towards the seats we’d left out after tea. The sky had clouded over. The night was dark and starless. A fringe of brightness around a cloud showed where the moon ought to be. I knew the way, but Geoffrey stumbled as he tried to keep up with me.

‘Tell me everything,’ I insisted.

‘Your father and I were in the same regiment – you know that, don’t you – Princess Augusta’s Own – it’s amalgamated now, I think, like so many old regiments – 8th battalion. The same company, too. He was a newly joined subaltern and was promoted as dead men’s shoes became empty. I was a sergeant and later company sergeant major. I kept an eye on the young officers. It was part of my job. They needed someone to keep them straight, to tell them what was what. I remember your stepfather, too. He doesn’t seem to remember me, though. Still, it’s not up to me to remind him. As I say – it was a long time ago…’

‘What was he like – my father?’

Geoffrey stopped and thought. He gave my question careful consideration. ‘A fine young man,’ he said, slowly. ‘Good. Now, don’t mistake me, I don’t mean goody-goody. He had a temper and no excuses. But he was cheerful – most of the time: thoughtful, kind, he cared about his men.’

‘Did you know him well?’

‘Pretty well. As well as an NCO can know an officer. At the start of the war, that would have meant not at all, but life in the trenches broke down all sorts of barriers in the end. You can’t squat in the mud with a man for weeks on end and not talk to him. First you share the lice and then you share other things, too. Cigarettes. Gripes. Jokes. Pretty soon, you know each other’s families as well as your own. It’s funny, you know. I look at you and remember things I haven’t given a thought to in years. I can see your father in his rain cape and gumboots, squelching along the trench, checking that the lads had all got a hot drink and a splash of rum to go with it, when he could’ve been having his own tea, snug in the dugout. He was like that, always made sure they were all right first.’

I sat quietly, waiting for Geoffrey to remember more. He opened a plain gold cigarette case, offered me one and, when I shook my head, took one for himself and lit it. In the brief flare of the match his face looked younger, tenser.

‘Clear as clear.’ He made a little noise that was half laugh, half grunt. ‘The smell’s the last thing you forget. Khaki serge that’s been worn so long it could stand up on its own. Gumboots. Chloride of lime. Tobacco. Lyddite. Dead men … You had to smoke, the stronger the better. And drink, whenever you got the chance. We all drank too much and who’s to blame us. But some didn’t stop when it was over.’

Everyone else seemed to be going to bed. I could hear Tom and Mother on the gravel path to the cottage. Tom’s voice was high and querulous. I couldn’t hear the words, only the tone, and Mother’s soothing answer. I wondered why Tom didn’t seem to remember his own company sergeant major. A long time ago, yes, but CSM was an important appointment. They’d have had regular contact, talked to each other, discussed problems. Why didn’t Tom remember?

‘I don’t know why you want to be burdened with my memories,’ said Geoffrey. ‘I’d’ve thought you young people’d have plenty of your own by now.’

‘They’re different.’

‘I was there when your father won his MC. Took out a Jerry machine-gun post all on his own, when we were pinned down and taking heavy casualties. You wouldn’t think it to look at him – long, skinny lad – but he was a terror when he got going. Fair mad, he was. Over the top and through the wire like greased lightning. The rest of us were pushed to keep up with him. He used to say, the faster he went, the less likely he was to catch a bullet. Who’d’ve thought…’

‘What happened?’

‘Every man has his breaking point. Sometimes brave men get there sooner. Courage is like a bank account. The more often you go to the bank, the quicker you’re broke.’

‘Geoffrey – what
happened?
’

‘I don’t know, my dear. I wasn’t there.’

Oh, the disappointment. I couldn’t bear it. I could have screamed. I’d thought – I’d really thought that this was the time when I’d find out at last.

‘We were back in that bloody Flesquières salient again. I’d stopped one in the leg – a nice Blighty one – and it gave me six weeks at home. When I came back, it was all over. Your father was – I’m sorry, my dear, I don’t like to have to say it to you – your father was dead. It was all such a muddle. No-one in the sergeants’ mess could make head or tail of it. There were lots of rumours, of course, about who’d done what and when. They said that young Mr Roding—’ He stopped and cleared his throat. ‘I’m sorry, Laura. You don’t want to hear this.’

‘I do. I must.’

‘I never listened to rumours. The only facts were that your father had been found guilty by field general court martial of “misbehaving before the enemy in such manner as to show cowardice” – that’s how the Army Act puts it, I seem to remember. The sentence was death and it was confirmed by the C-in-C. But who’d’ve thought…’

He sat quietly, thinking his own thoughts, for a long time. I thought he’d finished.

‘I’ll tell you this, though,’ he began again. ‘Our lads didn’t shoot him. Now, usually, executions were carried out within the unit. The firing party – poor sods – would be detailed by the RSM and the rest of the battalion formed up to watch. A parade, you see, to make sure the lesson sank home. But that didn’t happen. I don’t suppose they could find a single man who’d lift a weapon to your father, not for fear nor favour. Anyway, in the morning – the morning it was due to happen – he was taken off somewhere else, so that he could be shot by strangers. And only two months or so of the war left. A crying shame, that was.’

‘Thank you, Geoffrey. That’s such a relief.’

He looked at me with curiosity. A relief? To be told about her father’s death?

‘You’ll think this sounds so stupid. I was beginning to think that there never was such a person. That – that Edwin Ansty was fiction.’

He laughed softly. ‘No need to worry about that. You’re the very image of him.’

We walked slowly back to the house. There was one lamp left burning on the hall table to light Geoffrey to bed. The shadows clustered closely around it.

‘Goodnight,’ I said, ‘and I’m so glad you’ve met Kate.’

He turned back at the foot of the stairs. The lamplight wasn’t kind to him. ‘I think the world of her. I’ll be good to her, you know.’

‘I know you will.’

*   *   *

‘Perfect. Absolutely perfect,’ declared Grandmother after Geoffrey had left, taking Kate back to a life of luxury and sin. Lucky Kate! She had been going to stay at home for a few days, but, as Geoffrey drove off, she’d pulled open the car door and hopped in beside him.

‘Tell Daddy I can’t stand his grousing a moment longer,’ she’d yelled out the window at me. ‘Or on second thoughts – don’t!’