‘Then, you girls arrived. John and I were worried, of course. Especially, when all of you turned out to be so … well, it would have been easy for Joe to fall back into his old ways. We trusted him, naturally. He’s an honourable man, Joe. Once he’s given his word, he sticks by it. What’s happened, you coming, as you’ve probably noticed, is that he’s come out of his shell. He’s still tense, restless, full of regrets: but happier. Don’t you think? I think you must be his first women
friends
, all three of you. I have to admit I had my suspicions Prue would get her pretty little hands on him, and I dare say she tried, but she wouldn’t have succeeded. I know he enjoys
your
company so much.’ To Ag’s deep discomfort, their eyes met. ‘Intellectual equivalent. With all the farm work, he’s been denied so much of that sort of stimulus, apart from Robert. Prue amuses him – he’s amazed by her capacity for hard work, hand in hand with all her silliness. And he seems to like Stella – their mutual interest in music. Really, you’ve done him the world of good, the three of you, in your different ways.’ She paused, began to knead her knuckles.
‘You’ve also shown him … But I don’t want to be disloyal to Janet. Suffice to say that at Christmas the contrast between her and all of you … must have made him think. Besides which, Janet seems to have changed: jumpy, eager,
irritating
in her desire to be of use, to be liked, to be loved. The poor girl. She must see he doesn’t love her, she must see he’s merely trying to stick to his word.
‘We blame ourselves, John and I. We blame ourselves. We taught Joe to stick by his promises and now, in doing that, he may have a lesser life. What can we do?’
Mrs Lawrence gave Ag a look in which desperation was bound with regret. Ag, astonished by the confession of her normally reticent employer, felt unable to advise. She could give no immediate answer. To play for time, she fetched the warm plates from the stove, stirred the pan of carrot soup. Then she returned to her seat.
‘By strange irony,’ she said at last, ‘I think it’s a case where maybe the war can
save
. I mean, as it twists and breaks so much anyway, perhaps it could be used as an excuse. Perhaps both Janet and Joe will just drift apart, and blame only the war. The end of their arrangement could come about for the same reasons as it began:
pressures
of war, decisions forced by an unnatural time.’
‘You’re not accounting for his honour,’ said Mrs Lawrence.
‘I am. But even honour, distorted by the events of war, can be seen as foolishness. So if a word is broken, it may be forgiven.’
‘I hope that’s so. Perhaps events will right themselves. Now: not a word of all this, Ag, please.’
‘I promise.’
‘Take out the potatoes, if you will. I’ll call the others – only a few hours.’ She was cheerful again. ‘John’ll be back about five.’
Mrs Lawrence put on a clean pinafore for her husband’s return and her rabbit stew was appreciated by all but Ag, who could not bring herself to eat the running legs even though they were half disguised by gravy, having seen them in their naked form.
Mr Lawrence came back with the news he had expected. His brother’s illness was in remission. The prognostication was that he might now live months rather than weeks. Together they had agreed that the Lawrences would move to Yorkshire in the following new year.
He left no pause, after this fact had been announced, going on to explain his plans for Hallows Farm before their departure. He wanted as much as possible to be turned over to arable land before it was put up for sale. The cows – all but Nancy – would have to go within a few weeks. Sly likewise. At Prue’s squeal of protest he refrained from mentioning the fate that would befall her litter. But pig feed was scarcer than ever, he patiently explained to the distressed Prue, and their supply was almost finished. He spoke of detailed plans concerning which fields would be best planted with which crops.
‘I’m warning you,’ he said, ‘it’ll be the busiest spring of your lives. Harrowing, ploughing, weeding, sowing: good thing you’re all so fit. Half-diamonds well deserved, by the way. But I don’t want you to underestimate the hard work ahead. Tell me honestly: do you think we can manage, six pairs of hands and Ratty, or should I think about more help?’
‘We can manage,’ said his wife quickly, for all of them.
Next only to ratting, Ratty loved shepherd’s work. Lambing time was his favourite season, the nights away from home, the ‘dozens of bloody miracles’, as he called the births. Besides which, the night work afforded him the excuse of sleeping a few hours during the day, thus avoiding the increasingly irascible Edith.
The night Mr Lawrence returned home was a busy one for Joe and Ratty. Nine lambs, including twins, were born. It was six in the morning when he walked home – not tired, the adrenalin of wonder kept him going till the last lamb of the season was born – but hungry. There were signs of a fine day to come. Signs spring was not far away.
Ratty looked forward to an hour’s peace in the kitchen, frying himself rashers of bacon in the one pan, and a slice of bread. But to his dismay he found Edith already downstairs. She stood before a large box on the table, rummaging through deep litter of paper cut-up squares, as if searching for something in a bran tub. The squares, he noticed, had become smaller in the last week or so. Their symmetry took hours of her time.
‘Out with the girls again,’ Edith greeted him, a strange bleak look on her face.
‘I’ve been lambing with Joe. Nine since midnight, including black twins. You know I’ve been lambing. I could do with some breakfast.’
‘Breakfast!’ Edith cackled. ‘You can get your own rotten breakfast, or get one of those girls to get your breakfast.’
‘Now, look here, Edith …’ The pleasures and achievements of Ratty’s night suddenly left him. They were replaced with a cold anger, spurred by hunger and the desire for peaceful sleep. ‘You’re being unreasonable,’ he said.
‘
Unreasonable?
’ Edith snapped round. Her hands flew out of the box, scattering paper. She clutched its sides, threw its contents at Ratty. ‘That’s what I think of you, Ratty Tyler.’
The paper showered over Ratty: bright little sparks from old coloured books and postcards, dull flakes from newspapers, soft, clinging fragments of tissue. They chipped his coat, clung to his cap. Edith began to laugh.
‘Confetti! That’s it, confetti. We never had any on our wedding day, remember? You wouldn’t run to confetti. I should’ve known then …’
Ratty began to shake the paper from his clothes. He was suddenly very tired. Empty. Cold.
‘We did, didn’t we …? Surely?’
‘That we didn’t.’
Edith stomped over to the dresser and snatched up a small brass frame containing a sepia photograph. She thrust it at him.
‘Our wedding day, right?’
Ratty blinked at the faded image of the young foolish hope in his own wooden smile. Had Edith ever really been like that, smiling too?
‘No confetti.
No
confetti! See?’
‘It wouldn’t show, not in an old photograph. I’m sure we had. Pink stuff, petals.’ He was confused, dizzy.
‘I’m telling you. This is proof.’
Edith’s old indignation died down in her triumph. She stepped back, replaced the frame. ‘Well, what we didn’t have, at least the Government’s getting.’ Ratty could not see the logic of this argument, but was too weary to contradict. ‘I’ll just sweep this lot up, get going on some more.’
‘Is there a rasher?’ Ratty tried to dodge the broom she had picked up.
Edith swept the kaleidoscope of paper pieces with peculiar relish, for some moments, before she answered.
‘No,’ she said at last. ‘There’s not so much as a slice of bread, Ratty Tyler, neither.’
F
or as long as he could remember, Ratty’s small patch of garden had been home to a dynasty of blackbirds. Close guardians of their territory, year after year different generations would sing from their inherited place in the lilac tree. They left the cherry tree to the chaffinches.
At the end of February, Ratty heard the first evensong from a couple of old males. Their prime over, he knew that all they would afford him was a run-through of melodies from time past, sung only at dusk, and lacking their former vigour. But this was a sign, too, that a member of the new generation would be shortly taking over. Ratty was keen to catch his first sight of the inheritor.
After a lone breakfast – Edith, for the first time in her life, had taken to staying in bed – Ratty pottered into the garden. There on the grass he found the chap he was looking for: a handsome bird, still the dark brown of its mother, its beak also still brown. The ring round its eye was a pale hint of the gold it would become in the next few weeks.
The bird showed no fear of his presence. Ratty stood quite still, studying it for some moments, then pottered off to the end of the garden past the lilac tree. He turned, leaned against the fence, looked back at his cottage. From the branches of the unpruned tree came the first ripples of familiar song: tentative at first, then swelling in confidence, accelerating among scales, showing off. If Ratty had been a man of sentimental disposition he might have thought the bird had followed him, read his thoughts, sung especially for him. As it was, the music which annually renewed optimism that had been frayed by winter merely reminded him spring was here at last: there was much work to be done. And that this time next year life as he knew it at Hallows Farm would be over. He would be finally retired, not semi-retired like the old blackbirds. God knows, then …
Ratty retraced his steps along the path that struggled to keep its identity through neglected grass. Every yard or so he paused, let the blackbird’s song – riotous, rapturous, now – lock him into a present of nothing but pure sound. The past and the future were both places he had no wish to be.
He contemplated the back of his ramshackle cottage, not a thought in his head. The music of the bird excited the old skin of his arms into roughness beneath his sleeves. Then, it appeared. He saw ahead of him a monster. At first, he thought the horrible creature, standing there at his own back door, must be a hallucination. He had slept little of late, what with the lambing. Several times he had found himself confused, not remembering, seeing things that vanished into air. And yet he knew he was awake. The ground was firm beneath his feet. The blackbird went on singing.
The monster had one large glassy eye, oval-shaped, and the rubbery black snout of a giant pig. It stood on its hind legs, front legs folded, staring back at Ratty, no expression in the terrible eye. Then it took a few steps towards him and Ratty saw its skin – a horrible blue – was a familiar blue skirt, and its forelegs were human arms in the wrinkled sleeves of a brown cardigan.
It was Edith in her gas mask.
‘Dear God, Edith!’ Ratty cried.
So great was his relief that he had to lean on his stick to save himself from tumbling. He felt coldness gushing through the precarious joints of his knees. Sweat greased his temples. His hands shook.
‘You gave me a fright, you did. Whatever are you doing in that thing?’
Edith pulled off the mask. Her face was pale, her eyes unsteady. Sprigs of white hair, normally caught back into a bun, allowed light to pink the skin of her skull.
‘There’s lambs in the fields, bombs in the sky,’ she said quietly.
Ratty glanced up, unsteady. Two clouds moved across a stretch of silent grey-blue.
‘There’s never,’ he said.
‘The war’s come here, now, you mark my words.’
‘I’m going down to the farm.’ Ratty shook his head. He didn’t like the look of her.
‘You take a gas mask, Ratty Tyler, or you’ll regret it.’
‘I’ll never take one of those things.’
Ratty shuffled past her, eyes on the ground, heading for the lane. He was aware that Edith shrugged.
‘We’ll all be dead as cowpats, soon,’ she said.
While Ag did not share Edith’s fear of bombs in the local sky, she became increasingly aware of the war in parts of the world far from their own: fighting in Malta, the Philippines, Hitler’s
renewed
attacks on Russia, the sufferings of the Eighth Army in Egypt. So long and busy were the days, now, that there was little time to keep up with the daily bulletins, and she rarely saw a newspaper. But Ag made a point of trying to listen to the nine o’clock news every night, with the Lawrences. The acceleration of war, even from this comparatively safe corner of Dorset,
unnerved
her more than it did the others. When she wasn’t thinking of Desmond she found herself almost obsessively imagining battles, destruction, killing, corpses.
In contrast to – and perhaps because of – these dark reflections, this spring seemed of particular significance. Ag watched its slow beginnings. Mrs Lawrence had long ceased to tend the garden: priorities these days were fruit trees and the vegetable patch. But Ag, knowing her employer’s love of flowers, had bought and planted a few dozen bulbs in November. Now they began to appear, much to Mrs Lawrence’s surprise. First, snowdrops. Then the ‘rathe’ primrose (Ag had never been able to discover the meaning of Milton’s arcane word, she admitted to Joe one evening) in the orchard, where one of her tasks was thoroughly to spray every tree with lime sulphur – protection against apple scab. In beds that edged the neglected lawn, a dozen narcissi straggled through the unkempt earth. By March a few scarlet tulips randomly glittered, cold as glass among the weeds. Mrs Lawrence’s delight was touching.
‘So kind of you, Ag,’ she said. ‘The pity of it is we shan’t be here to see how they’ve spread, next year.’
Rewards for Ag’s autumn labours were beginning to be seen in the hedges, too. She and Mr Lawrence observed buds breaking on the carefully woven young hazel shoots. They found a haze of new leaf on the long, neat thorn hedge that protected two sides of Lower Pasture.