A Half Forgotten Song (50 page)

“I think . . . I think I need somebody to explain all this to me slowly and clearly,” he said, shaking his head in amazement.

D
imity sang “Bobby Shaftoe,” over and over.
He’ll come back and marry me, bonny Bobby Shaftoe.
The song became a chant, a tuneless, repetitive mantra, beating to the rhythm of her questing feet as she walked, and watched, and waited. Valentina heard her, and tried to beat the idea out of her.
He’s gone, don’t you get it? He’s not coming back.
But Dimity insisted that he would. That Charles would not leave her in Blacknowle. Forgotten about, cast aside. And slowly the words of the song trickled deeper and deeper into her mind and became the truth.
He’ll come back and marry me . . .
It became the truth; it became what lay in store for her, because the alternative was unbearable. The alternative was that crushing span of lonely time she had suddenly glimpsed, standing on the cliff top with Celeste. She knew she would not survive it, so she kept on singing, and believing.

But the next person to come looking for her, as the first frosts bit the air and the last apples were packed away in barrels, was not Charles Aubrey. It was a tall, elegant woman with chestnut hair combed into an immaculate twist at the back of her head. She wore a green twill coat and white kidskin gloves; her mouth a slick of scarlet lipstick. A taxi was parked behind her, its engine idling, and she stood on the doorstep of The Watch with a stern, unhappy expression on her face. When Dimity opened the door, she felt gray eyes sweep her from feet to face in quick appraisal.

“You’re Mitzy Hatcher?”

“I am. Who are you?” She studied the woman, and tried to guess. She was perhaps forty years old, not beautiful but handsome. Her face had the smooth, sculpted look of a statue.

“Celia Lucas. I was told in the village to come and talk to you . . . Delphine Aubrey has run away from school again. She’s been gone a week already, and they’re getting worried. I was told you were most likely to have seen her, if anyone had. If she’d come back this way, that is.” The woman looked around her, from the cliffs to the woods and the cottage, as if she couldn’t understand why anybody would. She spoke with cut-glass vowels.

“I have not seen her,” Dimity replied. She tried to take a deep breath, but her lungs felt like they’d shrunk. She tried again, and her head began to spin. “Where’s Charles? Why didn’t he come to look for her himself?” Celia’s gaze sharpened at once, and she stared into Dimity’s eyes for a moment.

“Don’t tell me you’re another one of his?” Her mouth pursed bitterly. Defiantly, Dimity nodded. “Well, well. They get younger all the time.” She spoke casually, but Dimity saw the way her hands gripped each other, so tightly that they shook. “And to answer your question, Charles didn’t come to look for her because the damn fool of a man has joined the army and gone off to fight in France. What do you make of that?” She arched her eyebrows, and beneath her sangfroid was the panic of a trapped animal. Dimity recognized it; she felt it, too.

“Gone off to fight?” she echoed breathlessly.

“Yes, quite my reaction, too. A lifetime of pacifism and high rhetoric about the evils of war, and at the first sign of a painful situation, off he trots.”

“To the war?” said Dimity. Celia frowned at her, and seemed to wonder how much more to say.

“Yes, dear, to the war. So whatever plans you thought he might have for you, I’m afraid you’re on your own,” she said blandly. “And I, it seems, must chase around the country looking for one of his bastard offspring. Poor child, indeed, but if the mother couldn’t be bothered to look after her, I find it somewhat hard that I should be expected to.” She pulled the lapels of her coat tighter together, her breath steaming damply in the frigid air.

“Are you . . . Delphine’s teacher?” Dimity asked, after a pause. She was fighting to understand, struggling to make sense of what she’d been told. The woman’s face registered irritation, impatience.

“No, child, I am Charles’s
wife
. So help me.” She looked out to sea, squinting at the horizon. “For how much longer I shall remain his wife, however, who can say?” Dimity stared at her. Her words were nonsense. The calm inside her head grew so profound that nothing could disturb it. The cut-glass vowels slid away from her like snowmelt. “Look, if you do see Delphine, call me and let me know, would you? Here’s my card. I’ll . . . I’ll write down Charles’s regiment and company on the back, so you can . . . look out for news of him. Or write to him, if you like. Odd that he didn’t let you know. But then, Charles is very odd these days. When I last saw him he could hardly string a sentence together.” She pressed her lips crisply, took out a pen, and wrote something on an oblong of card before putting it into Dimity’s limp hand. “Good luck to you. And try to forget about him. Difficult, I know, but for the best.” She turned and walked back to the waiting taxicab.

L
ater on, a song Dimity had known from childhood burst into her head and went around and around, like a caged thing, echoing in the empty spaces there.
I heard a fair maid making loud lamentation, singing Jimmy will be slain in the wars I be feared . . . Jimmy will be slain in the wars, I be feared
. The line rolled over and over, like wavelets breaking ashore. Charles had gone off to war. He was a hero now, a brave soldier, and she the poor wife left at home to worry. Neatly, seamlessly, Dimity wrote herself into this narrative. She was so tired that she took to her bed at four in the afternoon, and could neither sleep nor rise. She lay, and she hummed the words of that old song, and when Valentina came up to find out why there was no dinner, she found the smart, embossed card on the nightstand by the bed.
Celia Lucas Aubrey
.

“Who’s this then? Where’s this come from?” she demanded, sitting down on the edge of the bed. Dimity ignored her, watching the way the light from the bulb overhead made her fingertips glow. Valentina gave her a shake. “What’s the matter with you? Is this who came to the door earlier? Some relative of his?” She frowned at the card. It bore his name, or at least part of it. “Not . . . his wife?” she ventured. Dimity stopped singing and glared at her. Something scratched at the back of her eyes, at the back of her mind. Something with sharp little claws, which left stinging scratches. A rat? She sat up abruptly, checked the corners of the room. There were rats on the floor, twisting and writhing and bent backwards in pain. With a loud shriek Dimity clapped her hands over her eyes.

“No!” she shouted, and Valentina tipped back her head to laugh.

“His bloody wife came looking for him, didn’t she?”

“No!”

“Will you forget it now, eh? He’s not coming back, and even if he did, he’s married. He’s not going to marry you.” For a second, as Valentina looked at her daughter, something almost like kindness softened her face. “Let it go, Mitz. There’ll be others. No point turning yourself inside out over it.”

“He’ll come back for me. He’s coming back for me!” Dimity insisted.

“Have it your way, then.” Valentina stood abruptly. “You’re a bloody fool.”

D
imity waited out the winter; she waited out the spring. She fled the house when Valentina tried to introduce her to a gray-haired man, shifty and thin, who looked at her with such naked hunger in his eyes that his gaze felt bruising. She stayed out for two days and two nights that time, hardly eating, hardly sleeping. She sang her songs, she emptied her mind. She told herself over and over that Charles would come back to her. And so, eventually, he did.

It was close to summer before he made it. As dusk fell, Dimity stood on the rise above Littlecombe; stood for so long that her legs were tingling with pins and needles and her feet were aching from it. She stared for so long that she forgot why she was staring. By then, it was taking a long time for things to penetrate her calm—the things her mother said, the people she saw in the village; Wilf Coulson, who talked to her in a staccato rattle of sound that made no sense and irritated her ears, so that she turned and drifted away whenever she saw him. And so it was only after half an hour, rooted to the spot, that she realized what she was looking at. A light, gleaming out of an upstairs window at Littlecombe. A light that spoke of every wish coming true, and every prayer being answered. Dimity walked steadily down to the house. She did not need to rush. This time, he would stay. This time, he would not leave her, and they had all the time in the world. She let herself into the house, climbed the stairs, and pushed open the bedroom door. And there was Charles Aubrey, waiting for her, just as she’d known he would be.

The smell of him was everywhere. As she entered the room, this smell rose to greet her even though Charles did not. He was sitting in a small chair by the bed, his chin drooping to his chest, his hands clasped in his lap, his feet side by side like a schoolboy’s. His clothes were ruined, filthy and misshapen. A duffel jacket that was far too big; corduroy trousers torn at the knees; cracked boots with no laces. Underneath them he was thinner, more angular. His bones were sharp at shoulder and elbow, knee and jaw. His hair was matted with dirt, his cheeks covered by straggling whiskers. There was a cut along his right cheekbone, the blood from it still black and caked on the skin below. It looked deep, and angry—Dimity thought she saw the ghastly gray of bone showing through.
Comfrey,
she thought at once. Salt water to clean it and then comfrey to soothe it, once it was stitched. She went to him, knelt down, and laid her head in his lap. The smell was of shit and piss, of sweat and infection, of fear and death. Dimity didn’t care. She felt the press of his thigh bone through his trousers, and everything was perfect.

“I got away,” he said, after this long, suspended moment. Dimity looked up at him, and touched her fingertips to his ravaged face. Her whole heart was his, and beat only for him. She wanted to gather him up, never let him go. There was a strange, flat light in his eyes; a gleam she had never seen before. He looked as though he had seen things that he could never unsee. He didn’t say her name, or seem surprised to see her. “I got away,” he said again. Dimity nodded and bit back a storm of quick, happy sobs. He was free then, finally.

“You did, my love. And I am going to look after you now . . . I need to go back to The Watch to get some things for that cut on your face. I need a needle and thread, and salt to clean it . . .” He snatched at her wrist as she began to stand. As quick as a snake.

“Nobody must know! I can’t go back . . . I can’t go back, do you hear?” His voice was ragged with fear.

“Well, they can’t make you, can they?”

“They can . . . they can send me back. And they will! I can’t go!” His fingers were bruising her arm, the grip like an animal bite, hard and instinctive. She didn’t try to pull away, but only soothed him, stroking his hair and murmuring to him until he was calm again.

“I’ll hide you, my love. Nobody will know that you’re here, with me. I will keep you safe, I promise.” Gradually his grip loosened and then fell away, and he stared at the floor again, blank as a new canvas.

“You will come back, won’t you?” he said as she went at last to the door. Dimity felt stronger than she ever had; more certain, more complete. As softly and easily as snowfall, everything fell into its right place around her. She smiled.

“Of course, Charles. I’m only going to find a coat to warm you, and cover you as we go down to The Watch.”

W
ell, he can’t stay here, can he?” said Valentina, pinching her nose shut, eyes narrowed against the smell. Dimity ushered her mother out of her room, where Charles was lying down on the narrow bed, and shut the door softly behind her.

“He is staying here. He is my man, and I will look after him.” She stared at her mother, and Valentina stared back. Dimity took a short breath and let her arms hang loosely at her sides, sleeves pushed up, ready for battle. Her heart thumped, slow and deep.

“He’s not staying here. Got it? Harboring a deserter? People round here would jump at the chance to cause trouble for us. Don’t you get that? How long do you think you can keep him hidden, eh? People know everything around here. Someone’ll see him . . .”

“The only visitors we have are yours,” Dimity muttered.

“And don’t I bloody know it, girl! And let’s not go forgetting that it’s those visitors that keep this roof over our heads and food on the table, and scarce enough for two let alone with a useless man to feed as well.”

“They keep cider in your blood perhaps, but the food I’ll take some credit for!” Dimity was ready for the slap. She caught her mother’s hand before it could land and held it in midair, both of their arms shaking with the tension. Valentina curled her lip.

“So, I’ve finally found something you’ll fight for. That wreck in there?
Really?
The one that stinks of his own shit and jumps at the sound of a footstep? That’s what you’ll fight me for, after all these years?”

“Yes!” Dimity didn’t hesitate.

“You love him, or you think you do. I can see that. More fool you, when you’ve never even lain with the man—and there’s scant enough of novelty there, believe me. But I’ll tell you this so you’d better listen—this is my house, not yours, and there’s no place for a man in it. Least of all one who can’t earn and will get us all arrested. You hear me? He’s
not
staying here.”

“He is.”

“He’s not and you’d better get that through your thick head! Take yourself off to Littlecombe with him, if you want. You’ll be no great loss around here.”

“We can’t live there . . . people would notice for sure. The rent would have to be paid, people in the village would see the lights on . . .”

“Well, I don’t count that among my problems. God knows I have enough, but that man is not one of them. Do what you want with him, but he has to go.”

“Ma,
please . . .”
Dimity felt the words half strangling her. She knew how futile it was to beg, and only desperation made her try it now. Her insides curled. She hated it. She tried to grasp her mother’s hands, tried to make her see.
“Please—”
But Valentina snatched her hands away, raised an index finger in warning. The stained nail looked like a curse.