On the other hand, they agreed that to drop everything and go up to Pengarth, with the relationship between Hester and Matthew so new and perhaps delicate, would not be fair.
‘Leave it a month or two,’ Mrs Burroughes urged. ‘Let them settle; there are plenty of little jobs here which are well within your means. They’ll be wanting girls to pick daffodils any day now; go down to Cuthbert’s place and say you’ll work in the flower fields. He can always do with another pair of hands.’
‘And go down to the gaff and tell Fred Gulliver you understand and bear no grudge,’ Dr Burroughes advised. ‘They were good to you and your mother for years; don’t let a little thing like their need of Jack’s living wagon estrange you.’
Nell was happy to take their advice, and Cuthbert said she could take her place in the flower field and willing. ‘Girls work better wi’ flowers than the fellers,’ he said gruffly. ‘You’ve got a bike, I daresay?’
Nell, who had borrowed Mrs Burroughes’s old bone-shaker to reach the farm, nodded. ‘Yes, I’m all right for getting here. What time do you want me tomorrow?’
He named an early hour and Nell agreed. The money was quite good, and she was sure the work would prove congenial since it was out of doors. Dr and Mrs Burroughes, with their usual easy hospitality, said she could stay with them as long as she liked.
‘I’ll take a couple of bob and not a penny more. Don’t forget, you and your mother are friends,’ Mrs Burroughes insisted, when Nell tried to pay half her new salary for her keep. ‘After all, it’s only until you decide you can go back to Wales and Hester. Now go down to Gullivers, there’s a good girl, and make your peace with them. They’ll be gone in a day or so and then it’ll be too late.’
So, having worked hard at picking daffodils all week, on Saturday morning, before it was light, Nell took herself down to the gaff, where the chaps were already lining the stuff up for departure. She went straight to the Gullivers’ big living wagon and made her peace with them all.
‘Fred was right, your Jack would have wanted you to have the trailer,’ she said, giving fat Mrs Gulliver a hug. ‘I’m sorry if I stormed off in a bit of a huff but it was a shock; I couldn’t think what I’d do for a minute.’
‘Eh, we felt bad, lass,’ Mrs Gulliver admitted. ‘Tekin’ Phillips off you an’ all, but fambly comes first, your mam would feel the same. Now sit down a minute and tell us what you’re a-doin’, then, to keep body an’ soul together? Workin’ in one of them factories?’
‘No, I’m flower picking,’ Nell said promptly. ‘And staying with Dr and Mrs Burroughes. And I’m happy, really I am.’
‘Good. Now keep in touch, understand? Oh, by the way, a letter come for you a day or so back. Ivy, chuck us that letter.’
Ivy, a strapping wench with a high colour and black hair curly as a lamb’s fleece, brought the letter over. ‘Ere y’are, Nell,’ she said shyly. ‘I’m that sorry about Phillips
an’ all, but we get along fine, him an’ me. I’ve allus been fond o’ beasts, and he’s a nice crittur. Any time you like to visit …’
‘Thanks Ivy; I know you’ll take good care of the old fellow,’ Nell said gruffly. ‘I’ll come in and see you when you over-winter next year, if I’m still in Lynn, that is.’
‘Have a cuppa whiles you’re here,’ Mrs Gulliver suggested. ‘Read your letter in the warm. We shan’t leave for another hour or two, plenty of time for a cuppa.’
But this Nell would not do, knowing that everyone was longing to get on the road. ‘I’ve got to get back,’ she said, standing up. ‘I’ll read my letter over breakfast. Good luck, everyone, see you next back-end.’
Walking back to the Burroughes’s house, she glanced at the letter again. She did not recognise the writing, but then Snip had been unable to write for himself for a while. She looked again; it was very odd writing, it rambled and spiked and slid sideways. Perhaps it
was
Snip’s hand, though almost unrecognisable. She was glad but couldn’t help wondering how he would make out since the friend who had written to her, telling her about Snip’s accident, had admitted that Snip’s condition had been serious.
Still, he seemed to have addressed the letter himself, awful though the writing was. So different from Daniel’s elegant, dashing hand …
‘Ah, you’re back, Nell,’ Mrs Burroughes said rather unnecessarily as she slipped in through the back door. ‘Sit down, it’s only porridge, tea and some toast but it’ll keep the wolf from the door until lunchtime. How did it go?’
‘Very well, thanks,’ Nell said. She slipped her coat off and hung it on the back of the door, then sat down and took the proffered cup of tea gratefully. ‘The doctor was right, though, they were almost ready for the off. Still, we parted friends.’
‘Good.’ Mrs Burroughes put the porridge plate down
in front of her, then ladled creamy porridge into it. ‘I waited for you, but the doctor went hours ago. He’s gone fishing with Alfie Brett. What a way to spend a day off, out there in that cold wind and up to his knees, like as not, in some stream! Still, it’s relaxation, or so he says. Ah, you’ve got a letter, is it from your mother?’
‘No-oo. Remember Snip Morris, Mrs B? Well, I don’t know that you ever met, but I told you about him.’
‘Oh yes, the submariner.’ Mrs Burroughes leaned forward inquisitively to look at the envelope Nell had tossed down on the cloth. ‘That’s an English postmark.’
‘Yes, I noticed. He must be home now, unless he got someone else to post it for him.’
‘Well, open it, girl,’ Mrs Burroughes said, twinkling. ‘I’m curious, even if you aren’t.’
‘All right.’ Nell finished her porridge, took a long drink of her tea, and tugged the envelope open. There was one page and that contained only a dozen or so lines. ‘Yes, he’s home. Staying with a mate, he says, in Southampton. Oh crumbs!’
‘What?’
‘Well, he’s been very poorly, he says, and now he’s obviously got into a muddle and forgotten that spring is move-on time for travellers, since he is assuming that I’m still in King’s Lynn with the fair and won’t be moving out for a week or so. He wants to come up to see me, or if there isn’t time – which there certainly wouldn’t be if I were still with the fair – he asks if I could go down to Southampton. He doesn’t know where his father is and doesn’t want to go back to their fair anyway. He’s not sure what he does want to do, apparently. I suppose he wants me to make up his mind for him.’
‘He’s confused; a bit like you were,’ Mrs Burroughes said placidly. ‘Well, if the poor lad’s had a bad time he needs a friend. Why don’t you go?’
‘And lose my job? Mrs B, you wouldn’t want me to do that.’
‘You’re paid for what you do, you aren’t what you might call regular,’ Mrs Burroughes pointed out. ‘Besides, if you go next weekend you could be down and back in no time. Go on, drop him a line and say you’ll go. If you get it in the post in half an hour, it’ll be with him by Monday morning. Poor lad, what a homecoming, eh? No job, no place to go … nip down there, dear, it would be a kindness.’
‘It’ll give him ideas if I go,’ Nell said gloomily. ‘He used to be sweet on me.’
‘If you don’t, you aren’t the girl I thought you,’ Mrs Burroughes said roundly. ‘Now just you write and tell him you’ll be there as soon as possible and I’ll pop down and post it for you – I’ve a penny stamp in my purse.’
‘You’re bullying me,’ Nell grumbled, reaching for the toast. ‘I have a feeling in my bones that if I go I’ll regret it.’
Mrs Burroughes slid another slice of toast from under the grill and turned the gas tap off.
‘I wouldn’t want to influence you, my dear,’ she said, suddenly serious. ‘If you don’t want to go, it’s all right by me. No doubt the young man will find things aren’t as bad as they seem.’
Spreading margarine thinly on her toast, Nell had a sudden vision of Snip. The square, ugly face which had always been cheerful, the rough hair, the pugnacious set of his mouth. Only now the mouth would be drooping, the eyes anxious. How could she even pretend that she would not go to his help? She might not be in love with him – well, she was
not
in love with him – but she certainly loved that skinny, neglected lad who had been so kind and so patient with a lost little girl all those years ago.
She smiled across at Mrs Burroughes. ‘It’s all right,
Mrs B, I wouldn’t let Snip down for the world, I was just having a good old grumble. I’ll write immediately and buy my ticket on Monday.’
Snip awoke. His head was thumping and his mouth tasted indescribably nasty. He looked round him, at a whitewashed ceiling only a foot from his nose, at another bed almost as close, then listened. Bovver’s heavy, ale-induced snores, the faraway hum of traffic and the drip, drip of water coming through the window. Drat! He had sneaked out of bed in the night and opened the window, unable to bear being shut in any longer, and look what had happened! He sat up, the better to look, and immediately, as well as acknowledging guiltily the huge rainwater puddle on the cracked lino, he felt the fusty closeness of the small attic room clutch at his throat like a strangling hand.
I’ve got to get out!
The thought came simultaneously with his scramble from beneath the thin, patched blanket. He swung his legs out of bed and his right foot hit the puddle immediately, making him wince with the coldness of it. But then he was up and over to the window in a stride, pulling back the tatty little curtain, leaning out, breathing the freshness of the chilly, rain-washed air blowing across from the docks.
Phew! He leaned farther out, over the cloud-reflecting slates of the roof, and tried to steady his racing heart by counting his blessings. He was on dry land – well, three storeys above it – and safe from asphyxiation, drowning, enemy action. He was not in hospital, so no one was liable to come along to change his dressing – both his hands, the real and the imaginary, clenched into fists at the remembered pain – or give him an injection or tell him to prepare for an examination by a strange doctor and a number of students. He was in Bovver Bancroft’s Mum’s house, paying her an exorbitant sum each week
to share his horrible little cupboard until he heard from Nell.
He didn’t allow himself to think what he would do then, if she said ‘Come up to such-and-such and I’ll be waiting,’ because he would have to hitch-hike. He didn’t think he could face a train – not yet, not by himself at any rate. With a travelling companion it might be different, but he couldn’t think about being shut up in a railway carriage without the fear beginning to build.
When had it come over him, this inability to bear small spaces? After five years in submarines you’d have thought that any tendency to claustrophobia would have come out or been well and truly slain. Instead, it had waited until he had left the Navy before making itself felt. In hospital he found he sweated with fear every time they drew the curtains around his bed. Then he couldn’t lock the lavatory door, then he found he was happier not closing it. He had tried laughing at himself, testing himself by going into the linen cupboard and shutting the door, seeing how long he could stick it, but instead of getting longer and longer, the time he could bear to be shut away got shorter and shorter. He had spoken to one of the doctors who was seeing him about his stump – no point in pretending it was an arm since he’d got some sort of infection despite their care and a second amputation had been necessary, so now he didn’t even have an elbow to bend – and the man had been dismissive of his fear.
‘It’s just the hospital,’ he had said breezily. ‘You’ll find it goes off once you can get out, move around a bit. I feel like that myself after an eight-day spell on the wards.’
It had not gone, of course. It had got so bad that even walking into a shop had been an effort, and once or twice he had simply run out, desperate to get out of a building which seemed to be shrinking in on him.
But he fought it. He had to fight it or go under,
admit he was mentally unstable. He had seen men go to pieces, both in the sub and at the hospital, and it frightened him more than anything. To lose control of your mind: to shake and whimper like a frightened dog when thunder rolled or a child screamed; to jump when someone addressed you or cower in a corner, crying like a baby when anyone came near. He would rather die, far rather. But it had not come to that, not yet. He had been in Southampton for three weeks, practising using his left hand, trying to write legibly, before daring to contact Nell, but he had done it at last and he only had to think of her calm eyes, the touch of her hand, and his fears receded, became managable. If he was with Nell there would be two of them against the vast, terrifying world, someone else to understand, someone to help him, do that suddenly impossible task – pull himself together.
Mrs Bancroft had said that to him, not realising the impossibility. ‘You oughter pull yourself together an’ git a job,’ she had advised him, not unkindly. ‘Your money won’t last for ever, young feller.’
It was that, really, which had made him put pen to paper and write to Nell. Time was passing, his dear love would be twenty in April, and she had not set eyes on him for over three years. Suppose she had met someone else? The mere thought was enough to give him the shakes. And Mrs Bancroft was right; his money would be gone if he didn’t get a hold on himself. He hadn’t saved all those years to spend it on board and lodging while he tried to come to terms with the loss, not only of his right hand and forearm but of his sturdy, fear-nothing approach to life.
So now he waited for her reply. It had occurred to him after the letter was in the post that the fair might have moved on, but even if it had she would get his letter eventually; the fair folk always left forwarding addresses. But of course it would take much longer, a fact which
plunged him into deep depression as soon as the thought had occurred.
Still, it was Monday morning, raining steadily, and he’d not had a bad night’s sleep. Not that he slept properly any more. He remembered, with nostalgia, nights before the war when he had just rolled into his sleeping bag and slept deeply and dreamlessly until something woke him – daylight, usually. Even in the submarine – the shiver, the cold sweat on the spine whenever he so much as thought of HMS
Hesperides
– he had slept pretty well most of the time. But that didn’t happen now, not any more. He slept lightly, jerkily, waking for a few moments every ten minutes or so, tossing and turning, the pain from his missing arm gnawing at him, the fear of the bedroom walls closing in stealing any small chance of peace.