Land Girls (34 page)

‘Is there anyone here with a real voice?’ he asked.

General laughter.

‘Stella?’ whispered Joe.

Stella shook her head.

‘If there was, I’d be much obliged,’ said Mr Wadley. ‘All this shouting you lot call singing can damage a man’s ears.’

‘Go on,’ urged Joe.

Stella hesitated, tempted. Her cheeks were warm from the wine. Happy in the crowd of strangers, she was filled with an unexpected longing to sing.

‘You know what I’d like to hear?’ Ratty bent towards her. ‘I’d like to hear “They Can’t Black Out the Moon”.’

‘All right, Ratty, just for you.’

Stella was on her feet, elated by her spontaneous decision. She moved towards the piano. The drinkers – mostly men – made way for her, eyes curious. Regulars at The Bells were not used to such a sight. They disguised their stares with cheers of encouragement.

Bending over Mr Wadley, Stella hummed the first line of Ratty’s song. Mr Wadley, overcome by the response to his request, was bowed over the stained keys in a position of great reverence for the instrument, as if his concentration would magically clean their ivory.

‘Anything you like, dear. G major do you?’

Stella nodded. The noise died away. A moment’s silence was chipped only by the soft shuffling of logs among flames. Stella clasped her hands, let them hang against the skirt of her red dress. She looked up at the smoke-grained ceiling, felt twenty pairs of eyes upon her.

She began. Quietly, for a few lines. Then, encouraged by smiles, she increased the melancholy power.

When the song came to an end, there was another moment’s silence before rough applause and shouts for more. Stella, blushing and bowing her head, could see that the only two people who sat unsmiling, and not clapping, were Joe and Ratty. Confusion: what had she done wrong? They had been the ones to encourage her – how had she let them down? Anxiety flooded her enjoyment. She moved to the piano, leaned on the cracked maplewood of its top.

‘You know what that pose reminds me of?’ Mr Wadley laughed. He played a few notes. More shouting as Stella smiled. It was the introduction to one of her favourite songs. She would sing it, she thought, then go. Find out what she had done to cause Joe’s thunderous look. She glanced over at him, caught his eyes.

‘
Falling in love again
,’ she began. Her pure, husky, sweet voice curled through the smoke, the warmth, the nostalgic faces of men and women reminded of their own love stories that had begun before the war.

While she sang, Joe stared.

Ratty, watching Joe, saw before him a man transfixed: a man within whom some life-shattering process was taking place. With his keen eye for a rat’s trail, Ratty could not fail to observe what was happening to Joe: something he thought Joe could never mention, a secret he, Ratty, would take to his grave. Whatever the nameless experience was, Ratty felt he understood it long before Joe himself. It was not often a spectator had the privilege of witnessing any such private rite of passage: it was as rare as coming across the mating of a wild animal, the hatching of a bird’s egg, the closing of a daisy’s petals at dusk. Ratty wiped an eye, moved, suddenly very tired.

Stella was coming back to the table, cocooned in more applause. She was smiling, sparkling, one hand on the white skin visible above the low white Peter Pan collar of her red dress.

Dear God, Joe said to himself,
here she was
: how could it have happened that she’d been under his nose all this time and he’d never thought twice about her? From time to time he had reflected on the flirtatiousness of Prue, the gentle melancholy of Ag, the kindness of Stella – but it had not occurred to him that any of them was destined for him. Unlike Robert, he had never tried to envisage the perfect girl. He didn’t believe she existed, he used to say. Or if she did, well – he’d recognize her when she appeared.

He recognized her now.

He stood up.

‘Was I all right? You didn’t mind, Joe, did you?’

‘You were very good. They loved you.’

He sat down again, not daring to put out a hand, not daring to touch her. He did not even dare to smile, lest he should give himself away.

Someone handed Stella a glass of wine with the landlord’s compliments. As Joe sat watching her modestly accepting congratulations, revelling in her success, he tried to fathom what it was that gripped him with such physical force it was all he could do to breathe normally. Time, that night, was a smashed globe too complicated to reconstruct. But at some point an explanation of his feelings came to him, blindingly:
certainty
. Ag’s words, he remembered.
I felt such certainty, such conviction, that here was my other half, or whatever the silly phrase is, that in some strange way my life changed absolutely from that day on
… She was a wise old thing, Ag. He hadn’t understood at the time. He did now. This was
certainty
, all right. This was certainty as he had never known it. This was iron conviction, this was light from heaven, this was something so utterly devastating that, on return to the real world, it would take all his strength to hide.

‘Is there anything the matter, Joe?’ The sweetness of Stella’s voice … why had it not reached him before? He cursed the lack of poetry in his soul, longing for words he knew did not exist. Like a man bemused, he kept on looking at her, unable to answer.

‘I’m just a farmer,’ he said at last.

Stella laughed. ‘Farmer Joe! You’ve had several glasses of wine, Farmer Joe. I think it’s time we were going home.’

He could not blame her for thinking him intoxicated. On the walk home, under the arc of freezing stars, he kept his distance. Had not the extraordinary thing happened to him in The Bells, and had he still felt about Stella as he had only an hour ago, he would have taken her arm in polite, friendly fashion. Now, fear of the slightest physical contact was too great. In the silent night he tried to deflect his thoughts by imagining a ghostly gas balloon in their path: their entering it and soaring up to the heavens to the music of its flames … Christ, Stella was right about the wine. Perhaps he
was
suffering merely an alcoholic fantasy. All the same, having opened the back door, he moved quickly away for Stella to pass, making sure even their coats should not brush.

‘That was such fun,’ she said in the hall. ‘I haven’t sung for months. Thank you for taking me.’

So young, so careless, she sounded. Sometimes, at the end of a long day’s work, Joe now remembered, Stella was subdued as well as dreamy. She ran up the stairs. In the wake of her smile he thought she looked happier than she had for some weeks. But then, completely sober, he remembered that a mind diseased – whether by good or evil – plays tricks. And the possessed lover – what he now felt himself to be – sees what he most desires to see, and foolishly sets store upon it.

Joe gave up all hope of sleep that night. He sat in his room, cold, battered, perplexed, entranced. He put his favourite Brahms clarinet quintet on the gramophone to calm himself. But when the first side of the record was finished, he found himself too preoccupied to turn it over and wind the machine. So he sat in his chair in silence, cogitating upon unconsciously stored pictures of the girl who had blasted his senses: Stella the dreamy one, Stella crying in the orchard over her boyfriend’s letter, Stella surprising them all with her extraordinary dancing, Stella the modest, helpful, quietly cheering one, so kind to Janet … then Stella this evening, casting a spell over a crowd of strangers with those two wistful songs. Why had her perfection not come to him before? The Lord is devious in his revelations, he thought. He keeps a man in the darkness of no expectation, then sends light blindingly. Joe had never expected what he had always regarded as impossible – the force of certain love so great that it changes all perceptions. If he had believed such a thing existed, beyond the poets’ imaginations, he would never have committed the treacherous deed of proposing to the wretched Janet. That was the most unaccountable act of his life, he now reflected, lethargically committed in a moment of misplaced desire to please his parents. And now what could he do?

Nothing. There was nothing to be done. Go ahead and marry the unlovable Janet. Carry on as if nothing had happened. Keep his word. And yet, knowing what he now knew, would that be humanly possible?

Joe pulled back the blackout to watch the first silvery snail-tracks of light trail across the sky. He’d read his Byron: he knew the necessity of keeping a hopeless love secret. His priority must be not to burden Stella with the knowledge of his feelings. She was in love with Philip … wasn’t she? Her feelings for Joe were of friendship, nothing more. To make any indication of the chaotic sentiments within him would be unfair, unwanted. All he could do would be to try to come to terms with the agony caused by such mistiming, to attempt to quell fears and desires. After the war, or whenever Stella and the others left the farm, he would have to try to forget.
Forget
…
?
He fumbled among a pile of clothes for his working things. How could it be possible to forget an event as important in its mystery as birth, as death? Joe began to hurry. He wanted to get the cows in before Stella came down. He wanted her to find them all in the shed when she arrived, to surprise. He wanted his first act for her in his new state to be as soon as possible. He smiled grimly to himself, thinking it was hardly a romantic notion, herding the cows. But there was no alternative. Surely she would be as pleased with waiting cows as with red roses …

Soon after four o’clock Joe crept downstairs.

The magic of change in ordinary things, brought about by the existence of another human being, acted with a power, that day, that Joe found as moving as it was remarkable. As the extraordinary hours shifted in their new form he realized, in wonder, what he had been missing until now, and was humbled. The change, he observed, touched everything. It was a
heightening
of the world that the poets and writers of loves songs are inspired to convey – whether through genius or trite skills – in coded words only understandable to those in a state of love. Nowhere was too lowly for its reach. The kitchen – the kitchen he had known all his life – was almost unrecognizable because at any moment Stella was about to appear. He had found the cowshed, the fields, the farmyard, all equally unfamiliar. He sensed a kind of static in the air, a trembling of solid things, a feeling of glorious hallucination. And the exhilaration of the new feelings, he quickly realized, was an illness both of body and mind. He trembled as he planned how to cross Stella’s path many times during the day without arousing her suspicions.

Suddenly, he could not bear to continue his wait in the kitchen. He was not yet ready to deal with the proximity its size would force upon them. He hurried out to the cowshed, forced himself to concentrate on work. He had already started to milk Nancy, the oldest of the herd, when Stella came in.

‘Joe! You beat me to it. You shouldn’t have – my treat was yesterday.’

Joe kept his head against Nancy’s flanks, not looking at her. He felt her hand, for an infinitesimal moment, on his shoulder.

‘I woke early. Thought I might as well get going.’

‘Well, thanks. I’ll start the other end.’

Joe allowed himself a glance at her retreating boots. His fingers shook against Nancy’s teats.
I’m a crazed man
… It was far from an unpleasant feeling.

As he listened to the whine of milk shooting into the bucket, and struggled once more for calm, he became aware of a certain sense of objectivity. By the time he rose, the bucket full of warm froth, and glanced down the cowshed for a glimpse of Stella’s head leaning against the infinitely fortunate Belinda, he realized there were now two look-out posts within him: one with which to observe Stella at every possible moment; the other to study his own peculiar behaviour.

That evening Prue and Ag returned. For different reasons they were both in high spirits. After supper there was a merry reunion in the attic, a chance for private news.

‘Nice, quiet Christmas with my father,’ said Ag, ‘
but
… this. Waiting for me.’

She held out a Christmas card for the others to examine. It was an ink drawing of Trinity College under snow. Inside, under the printed wishes, was the signature
Desmond
.

‘I couldn’t believe it,’ smiled Ag. ‘I still can’t. In the train I kept taking it out of my bag and looking at it. It must mean, surely, he hasn’t quite forgotten me, don’t you think? It must mean something.’

‘Well,’ said Prue, her attention not entirely on Ag, ‘look what
I
got!’ She rustled among tissue paper in her case, pulled out a dress of ruby velvet with a white fur collar.

‘My mum found this old curtain material in a market, ran it up for me. Isn’t it just heavenly? She swears the fur is rabbit: I say it’s ermine. It’s the most beautiful dress I ever saw …’ She held it up in front of herself, danced about the room glancing in various small looking-glasses as she passed. ‘When can I wear it? That’s the only problem.’

‘New Year’s Eve,’ said Stella. ‘Joe’s asked his friend Robert to supper. There’s the Red Cross dance you could go to.’

Prue’s face relighted. ‘Gosh! How about that? I’ve been thinking … Barry’s time is up. Maybe this Robert … What about you, Stella? How was it having the beautiful Janet in my bed?’

‘We had a quiet time. Nothing much happened. I enjoyed it. I sang in The Bells one night.’

‘You didn’t!’ Prue laughed. She curled up on her bed, hugging her dress, rubbing the fur against her cheek, childlike. ‘It was so strange going home, you know. Did you find that, Ag? So small. Noisy, our street, too: funny how I’d never noticed that before. Lovely being with Mum, of course. She said, Prue, what on earth’s happened to your hands? I said, you try mucking out Sly and keeping your hands in good shape, Mum. I rather missed Sly, actually, though I didn’t tell her that. Anyway, she gave me a shampoo and set. Very odd, with a proper basin and dryer and everything again. Took some getting used to. Funny thing is, I’m quite glad to be back. What about you, Ag?’