Mad Joy (17 page)

I still had my coat on, and little pins and needles of sweat were spiking me under the thick wool of it.

‘James Buckleigh isn’t Howard’s real son.’

‘I know.’

‘But he’s a gypsy.’

‘He’s
adopted
.
James told me about it.’

‘He’s told you? Then … Why are you marrying him?’

I pulled a face. ‘Surely you don’t think I should refuse him because of that? Gracie … you can’t possibly hold that against him.’

‘Of course not. I was just thinking … When you first came to me – you might remember this – Howard came to see me. He said this gypsy woman he’d looked after, she’d asked him to keep a lookout for her girl. And I swear, Joy, it sounded just like you –
just
like you – in fact, I’m certain it
was
you. Only, of course I denied it. I knew they could look after you much better up at the house and I wouldn’t have a leg to stand on so I said … well, you know what I said.’

‘It
was
me. I
was
the girl Alice meant.’

She looked at me, newly aghast. ‘But Howard adopted a gypsy boy – I reckon he was hers too. That makes you James’s sister!’

I let out a relieved burst of breath and rescued her quickly, and she was so grateful for the deliverance that she ate one of her own cakes. When I mentioned Mrs Buckleigh’s
estrangement
from her husband she ate another one.

‘James wants me to go up to the house later.’ I said.

‘I could come with you … if you like,’ suggested Gracie, ‘if that would help …’

There was something of an appeal in her suggestion, and I caught an unguarded girlishness in her as she touched her hair.

So, after much preparation, we decided to go to Buckleigh House. Just before we left I grabbed one of her cakes.

‘You’ll have to clean your teeth now,’ she said, nervously putting on lipstick in the hall mirror. ‘But they’re so burned – I’m sorry they’re dreadful.’

‘They’re lovely.’ I glanced at her disbelieving face as she adjusted her hat for the umpteenth time. ‘They may not be perfect, but they’re warm. That’s what matters.’

She smiled, and glanced in the mirror again. ‘Oh, what
do
I look like?’ And she changed her hat twice more before we set off.

As long as I live I shall remember that moment when Gracie and Howard locked eyes in the entrance hall of Buckleigh House. He popped his head out coyly from behind a pillar. James and I exchanged eager smiles, because it had been almost four hours since we’d touched, and there was a magic all over again. Because we were diagonally opposite, as were Howard and Gracie, our looks formed a cross, a giant kiss in the air between us in the hallway.

Gracie had turned completely pink, and giggled like a child when the grandfather clock chimed loudly next to her. Howard, who looked like a man in a desert who’d seen water, seized on the opportunity to laugh as well. He promptly forgot how to
speak English. ‘Well … er … this is a surp … let me … um …’ He backed into a large room. ‘Do come this way … I …’ and he tripped over a huge potted plant stationed by the door. He fell, got up again, and dusted himself down. There was something flamingo-like about him as he stood with one long leg bent and his head hung low. ‘Potted plants … seem to move around all over the place!’

James whisked me away to another part of the house, and I felt so excited for them both that I wasn’t prepared to be left alone with Philip.

‘I was just off to see the vicar,’ said James. ‘The banns have to be read a few weeks before we get married.’

It was thrilling to see him so resolute about marrying me, but I couldn’t for the life of me see what the hurry was all about. ‘Do you have to do it right now?’

‘Yes, I do. I know I shouldn’t have been so irresponsible with you, Joy, but the thing is … the thing is … you could be … you know … with child.’

‘I suppose …’

‘And if you are, I don’t want you or any child of mine being left without a penny.’

‘But you can marry me any time, can’t you?’

James had a way of putting his elbow up over his forehead and scratching the back of his neck. I noticed he tended to do this when he was nervous, or didn’t know what to say. He did it now, and the penny suddenly dropped. Until then I had simply seen it as a mild neurosis on my own part: a woman thing. These foolish women who will worry so about their men, when they simply should remain stoical and cheer them on in battle. But wait:
he
was worried too. So worried he thought he might not survive the next few weeks. He finished scratching, and I threw myself at him pathetically. He held me very close and said, ‘I want you to be Mrs Buckleigh, sooner rather than later, that’s all.’

He showed me into a sunny room at the back of the house where Philip was reading a newspaper, and then he disappeared to make his visit to the vicar. Philip looked up and smiled: the first genuine smile I had seen on him. He was very different. He was able to stand up – which he did, to greet me – and walk around. There was a half-finished game of backgammon on a small table, which I guessed he’d been playing with Howard.

‘I’m really glad you’ve come.’ It seemed he could hardly stop smiling, and I sank down in a chair opposite him with some relief.

‘You seem much better,’ I said. ‘Really – so much better.’

‘Yes. They’re putting me on a desk job next week. I’m quite looking forward to it actually. Although …’

‘What?’

He chewed the inside of his cheek and indicated the
newspaper
he’d cast aside. ‘It seems like a terrible cop-out,
somehow
. All these pilots going down.’

‘Which pilots?’

He looked at me questioningly. ‘Haven’t you …?’

‘I’ve been on leave for a few days – what’s happened?’

‘Just … all starting to happen. I ought to be up there with them.’

I didn’t want him to start feeling guilty again, so I said, ‘Flying isn’t the
only
way to help win the war. They could do with people like you on the ground – who know what it’s like up there.’

He smiled again. ‘I hear congratulations are in order.’

The wedding was a low key affair and took place on the first Thursday of August. Mr Mustoe gave me away. I wore the same silk dress I had worn on my first date, and Howard had paid for some cream shoes to go with it. There were no official guests, apart from Gracie and Mrs Mustoe, but in the event Mo got some leave to attend, and George came with Emily (the baby Mustoe grown up), Spit Palmer thought it would be too romantic to miss, Miss Wallock offered to play the organ, Mrs Rollins thought she might just pop in and see the dress and Mrs Bubb was a sucker for weddings. Mrs Emery said you couldn’t miss a toff’s wedding, and Mrs Tribbit said she would keep her company, and Miss Prosser thought it would be discourteous not to go, and soon there was a ragbag of assorted Woodsiders filling every available pew.

The only photograph which remains shows us looking surprised more than anything. There I am in my lovingly made silk dress, and he in his uniform. We might almost have just walked home from the cinema that evening long ago, only to find that we were, to our astonishment, man and wife.

August and September were a living hell at the airfield. Planes went missing almost every day, friends died, people’s lives shattered overnight, and in late summer German planes started attacking the air bases. Up until then I’d always believed that life was like a path, and you were either happy, or sad, or on an even keel. I didn’t imagine you could be so very happy in love, whilst another strand of your life was such a nightmare. I didn’t think you could feel sick and tearful and shocked all through the day, but filled with delight and anticipation all through the night. And also, up until then, I had always thought of happiness as some sort of joyous rapture, whereas in fact, for most of the time, happiness was just preserving what you had; it was stasis, a solid base, security. Happiness was no change.

The truck of men I drove in late August didn’t contain a single pilot I’d driven in June. Some were on leave, but most had simply flown south or east and not come back. In a direct hit to our airfield in September we lost four Hurricanes, the laundry and Betty (who was collecting our newly washed shirts).

The confident women in my barracks that I had found so alien began to cry like mere mortals, and I found I loved them just as I loved Dot and Reeny. Ken, whose death had seemed a monumental tragedy in the early summer, was now just a speck in an ocean of brave men and women with their lives unlived.

I hadn’t realized until then how close we were all becoming. I never in my life felt such a strong sense of belonging. It was terrible and it was wonderful. There were things in that war I never want to witness again, but I wouldn’t have missed it for the world.

In late September Dot lost her little sister, Pat, in an air raid on the Midlands. She broke down saying Pat was fourteen and she’d only just started her periods. There were eight of us
red-eyed
around Dot, and no one had any supper that night although we were all as hungry as dogs.

I felt very sick: sicker than usual. I actually threw up in the
lav. Not long after that I was discharged under paragraph eleven for being three months pregnant. I was devastated.

I resented being pushed out of the war. That may seem ungrateful, when so many people were being killed, but the alternative, waiting and knitting, felt so utterly pointless.

I was cajoled into joining the WVS, and bottled jam and knitted and rescued old clothes. I sent packages of jumpers with heavily darned elbows, worn shoes and grey underwear to people who had lost their entire families under rubble.
Sometimes
we sent them jam. I often wondered what it felt like to be torn about by grief, and to open a parcel containing Woodside WVS damson preserve and a couple of old off-white vests and pants.

In my frustration – though heavily pregnant – I decided to set up a farm. The house had an orchard and a field (which the Ministry of Agriculture already had its eye on). I bought farming manuals, enlisted the help of Mr Rollins and, later, a couple of officers who were billeted with us, and soon we had twenty chickens, a cow shed with one cow and half a field turned into a huge Victory Garden. We bought a horse for the other half: Howard resurrected an old cart and soon we had it up and running to save on petrol. If it hadn’t been so cold and damp it might’ve been quite romantic.

In the meantime I had a baby boy in the April of 1941, and a girl in 1943. Both events filled me with what I can only describe as wild, unassailable joy. Holding each of them for the first time I felt an
explosion
of joy. I was a volcano firing off in all directions, an eruption of euphoria, and passion, and tenderness.

Andrew and Jill spent their early years without their father, but the house was anything but empty. Like many in wartime, we were a cock-eyed sort of household. Mrs Bubb had her little
grandson, Johnny, from Coventry staying, and later we had two evacuees from London: a brother and sister, Donald and Maggie. There were often a couple of soldiers billeted with us. Howard encouraged Gracie to hold the WI meetings there sometimes; the Mustoes were frequent visitors, and Mr Mustoe brought what was left of the brass band to play after church every other Sunday; Mo and Tilly visited whenever they were home on leave, and they knew me so well it was like being back with the girls on the airfield.

I knew I was happy, and yet I felt a growing uneasiness. I used to think it was James being away. He had been posted further afield to the South of England, to ‘relieve’ pilots on constant missions. I knew this meant to ‘replace’, because the
newspapers
were full of pilots who hadn’t come back. Later, after Jill was conceived, he was posted to India, doing flight tests and flying reassembled planes to the front line in Burma. All our young men had gone to risk their lives in places with silly names: Sidi Birani, the Kithera Straits, Oesterbeck, Nijmegen. I used to find myself singing, ‘… before we send him to the Dardanelles’, one of my favourites as a child. The odds were stacked against us. I used to imagine what it would be like to be a widow, in order to prepare myself. I pictured the children growing up in that old house, the evacuees gone, Mrs Bubb retired and Gracie and Howard married perhaps, and living in her house, or passed away. I thought of our night in the woods under the stars, and though I thanked God we had had this, James and I, I wondered if that was all there was: our allocation of happiness.

Despite the hardships, things went pretty smoothly for a while. Picturing the worst from time to time did nothing to prepare me for what would happen in the spring of 1944. I could not possibly have imagined such a turn of events.

Jill was barely a year old and at her most difficult. She could walk a few paces, but wanted to crawl everywhere. She could reach all sorts of dangers she hadn’t been able to reach before, and which hadn’t been around when Andrew was a toddler. Cigarette lighters, for instance, left constantly around on
tabletops
by our two latest billeted officers, Anthony and Douglas.

Douglas was a quiet young man, given to mooching around the grounds and gazing at sunsets, reading and rereading letters from his fiancée. When he wasn’t outside he was in the room at the top of the house he shared with Anthony. Anthony was always teasing me about being Farmer One-Cow, and often his teasing was so persistent it was tantamount to flirting. With my arms full of Jill or my Wellingtons ankle-deep in dung, I found it hard to believe anyone would want to flirt with me. It was perhaps for this reason that he got away with it for so long. It was weeks after his arrival that Mrs Bubb warned me to ‘watch out for that one’. Still, I couldn’t imagine any harm coming from Anthony. They were involved in some intelligence work
somewhere in Gloucestershire, and couldn’t tell us what they did after they left in the morning and before they came home at teatime.

In any case, whatever Mrs Bubb said, Anthony was attentive to Andrew and Jill and the evacuees. Even if he left his lighter all over the place, he did make the children laugh, and often played games with Jill on his knee in which he told her very solemnly to sit still and then opened his legs so that she fell through. He was an extra pair of hands about the place, and he and Douglas mucked in at haymaking or whenever there were tasks that required a bit of muscle.

Having established his niche in our household, Anthony began to take small liberties. He would make me cups of tea and prop my feet up by the fire, or he would adjust my headscarf to contain a stray piece of hair. Sometimes he would be up before Mrs Bubb and I would come down to breakfast to find a little wild flower beside my plate in an old meat-paste jar.

‘You’re going to have to speak to him,’ Mrs Bubb told me one day. I could tell from her tone that she might well have done so herself. ‘He’ll’ve left a few mementos in this war, I shouldn’t wonder. Seen his sort before. Give him an inch and he’ll take a yard, you mark my words. Oh yes!’ She closed her eyes as if remembering. ‘I’ve seen
his
sort!’ Mrs Bubb had always been an ally and I was afraid of her disapproval. She had often told me how good it was to have me around, how much happier the house felt with me and the children in it, how much easier I was to work for than either Celia or her mother. And she had always been respectful towards me. So this advice felt like a spike in my side. I was behaving improperly, or at least, I was not responding appropriately to improper
behaviour
. Whatever would she think of me when James came back? If I acted now, it would not be too late. Even so, I wished she had acknowledged the one thing that had prevented me from acting until now: it had been a long, long war, and my
youth was floating past in pig-shit and raking and child-rearing and waiting and waiting. It was so exciting to be flirted with, so thrilling to be the focus of someone’s attention for reasons other than feeding.

Reminding him that I was married seemed almost like a flirtation in itself, but anyway I did it one morning after a particularly daring attempt of his to touch my waist.

‘I know,’ he said, cocking his head at an angle, ‘but what does “married” mean these days?’

I was astonished. I went to pull on my wellingtons in the back porch. I was so indignant at his easy dismissal of my marriage vows that it took me a moment to gather myself. ‘I love my husband. That’s what it means.’

He folded his arms and leant against the porch wall,
surrounded
by ancient outdoor coats on hooks and the fusty smell of discarded boots.

‘He’s in India, isn’t he?’

I straightened myself and gave a level, determined look by way of reply.

He raised his eyebrows. ‘And you must know what happens out there!’

I took my woollen work coat off its hook and started stuffing my arms into it.

‘Come on, Joy. Don’t be naïve. You know they provide women by the score. And I’ll tell you what,’ he lowered his voice as if he were offering top military intelligence, ‘what those girls can’t do, no one can!’ He chuckled, and it seemed like a sneer.

I was foolishly hurt by what he said. I felt wounded and raw, and his enjoyment of my discomfort left me feeling stupid. ‘I don’t quite know why you’re telling me this.’

He took my shoulder as I turned to go out, and said in a low but confident voice, so close I could smell the tea on his breath: ‘Oh, I think you do.’

I pushed past him and into the bright morning. I wanted this man out of our house. I felt cheapened by him. But I had no power to move him, and I knew then he would be there every morning and every night, confident of wearing me down, of getting what he wanted, one way or another.