Spilt Milk (19 page)

His heart lurched at the sight of Birdie coming into the room. Her neat black dress and white collar suited her. Her red lipstick made her look like a film star playing the role of maid. Her legs were slender, and the darned stockings she wore brought out a tenderness in him. He worried she might not be right for a farmer’s wife. He tried to imagine her in the cow barns before dawn, helping milk the cows. Would she laugh at his suggestion that she give up her city life?

He had come to London on an impulse. He’d been walking his fields in icy rain, carrying hay to the sheep out on the high meadows. The rain slanted sideways and dripped down his neck. He pulled his hat down and walked on across his fields, carrying the bale of hay across his shoulders. Under an oak tree, noisy with
the shake and pelt of rain, he dropped the hay bale and leaned against the tree in the lee of the wind. The tree creaked. The sky was dark and low. The farmhouse in the distance was all but gone in the sweeping rain clouds. He remembered the summer and, as he often did, he thought of Birdie Farr, her red-gold hair catching the sun, standing in a green dress by the river, getting ready to go to the village dance.

He split the hay bale and left it for the sheep to come and find themselves.

In his kitchen, a recent letter from Vivian Stewart was on the table. Matilda had eloped with a soldier and moved to Manchester. Mrs Stewart wanted him to know how sorry she was. She hoped he would visit her again soon.

He was embarrassed by what had happened with Matilda. There had been some vague talk of marriage and he had not known how to back out of it all. He was relieved Matilda had found herself a husband.

He told Connie Smith, Christopher’s fiancée, when she called by to offer him an apple pie made from some of the apples from his orchard. She’d known Matilda wasn’t the woman for him. ‘That other one. The Londoner. The one with too much red lipstick. She liked you.’

Why hadn’t he spoken to Birdie about how he felt when he had the chance? He made tea and sat warming himself by the stove, watching the dog sleeping at his feet, its legs moving rapidly, running away from its dreams.

When he picked up a farming magazine and saw an advertisement for a public lecture in London about the use of new artificial fertilizers and the possible increase in yield for cereal crops, he had decided to go and see Birdie.

And now Charles could not take his eyes off her. She moved around the dining room, smiling politely at the other diners, and as she neared his table he straightened his tie and swallowed hard, preparing to speak.

‘Miss Farr?’ he said, and she turned to the sound of her name.

‘Charles? What on earth are you doing here?’

She had lipstick smudges on her teeth. Her face was tired-looking, her grey eyes questioning. His hand trembled a little when he held it out to her. She was such a pretty woman. If he had been a different kind of man, he would have kissed the back of her hand as she placed it in his.

‘I’m attending a farming lecture,’ he said, shaking hands with her and letting go reluctantly. ‘Not exactly the best fun, but interesting enough for me.’

‘But here? This hotel?’

‘I saw your aunt. She said you were here. I had to stay in a hotel, so I booked this one. I hope you don’t mind.’

‘No, no, I don’t mind. Of course not. I’m glad to see you. How are you?’

‘Things are all right. The government are building an airfield nearby and ruining the roads with their heavy machinery, but other than that I have no news except that Matilda is married. Not to me. To a man named Colin.’ He looked into her grey eyes. ‘I came to see you, Birdie. You left so quickly. I never got a chance to say goodbye.’

He rearranged the knife and fork on the table and smoothed the tablecloth with his broad palm.

‘I’m no good at this kind of thing, but I mean, look, I’m steady. Probably too steady. Boring, most likely. I’m trustworthy. I work too hard and I’ve two left feet when it comes to dancing. I lost my brothers in the Great War. I have very little feeling of patriotism, and I don’t think war is a good or a noble thing. I don’t want to fight for my country. If that makes me a coward, so be it. I just want to run my farm and live a quiet life and have a wife and maybe some children.

‘My mother died of cancer. My father killed himself shortly afterwards. He went under a train and everybody said it was an accident, but I don’t believe it was. I was a bank clerk, but I had
always wanted to work the land. I sold my parents’ home and bought some farmland at auction. It was a dream of mine. I’ve been on my own a long time, Birdie, and I didn’t mind that until I met you. I just want to be straight about this. I want you to know everything about me, and, well, that’s all there is to know.’

‘Miss Farr?’ The head waiter came over, crossing the room in long strides. ‘Any problems here, sir?’

‘Everything is fine,’ said Charles, trying to read the look on Birdie’s face, realizing he had talked too much. ‘I was asking the waitress if she knew the best route to the Imperial College.’

‘I can get you a map, sir. Miss Farr, I think there are other tables to serve,’ said the head waiter, and Birdie turned so abruptly, moving away to attend to other tables, that Charles did not get a chance to see what effect his words might have had.

The head waiter watched Birdie all morning. Every time she stopped work, he had another job for her to do. She put on a white apron over her black uniform, took a broom, some dusters and a pot of wax polish, and went into the dining room to clean. In the corner of the room, the head waiter was seated, a big pile of cutlery in front of him. He said he was doing a stock inventory because he was sure somebody was stealing the knives and forks.

She left him to it and swept the brown parquet floors, working from the corner nearest the door to the kitchens across to the big bay windows that looked out on the grey street. Rain hit the windows and condensation formed on them. Birdie stopped sweeping and wiped her sleeve across the glass, looking out on brick buildings and cars and buses. She was still going over what Charles had said. Still getting over the shock of seeing him again. She finished sweeping and cleared away the dust and crumbs into a dustpan. As she emptied it into the ash bucket by the chimney, the double doors to the dining room opened.

Charles stood in the doorway. His hair was wet from the rain,
and it curled and sprang up around his ears even as he pressed a hand to it, trying to make it lie flat.

Birdie looked over her shoulder. She could see the head waiter at the far end of the room. He was dozing with his legs stretched out in front of him. Charles leaned against the wall, his arms folded.

She would certainly lose her job if she stopped work to talk to him. She’d already had a warning. She decided to ignore him. She spread wax over wood and polished the furniture, her body swaying, her arm making wide arcs, rubbing back and forth. Right now the only thing that made sense was the shine coming up off the wooden tables. She moved quickly, turning chairs upside down and stacking them, dusting them as she went, thinking back to the farm, a world she often returned to in her head. She remembered the dark kitchen with the dogs sleeping under the table, a sound of creaking beams, clouds of moths dancing in the warm night air.

The tables in the dining room were glassy like mirrors; sweat was stinging her eyes. She stopped and stood, hands on hips, her breath coming in short gasps.

‘What do you want, Charles?’

He opened his arms to her.

‘I want you, Birdie.’

She didn’t think twice. She stepped into his embrace.

He felt warm, like the summer they had shared.

After they married, Charles built a raised wooden verandah around the house. He said it was a lookout for their fortress. He joked about adding a drawbridge, a moat and arrow slits to the farmhouse, and though it was just silly talk between them, it pleased Birdie to know they both felt the same. The farm was isolated, but they both yearned to live out on the very edge of the world, just the two of them. At this lonely farm, memories could not reach her. She believed she could forget the child. She walked along the river every day, hoping the numbness, the sense of panic that fluttered within her when she saw other women with their children, would fade. She had a desire to have another child, and she told Charles she wanted a big family.

They were sitting under the willow trees, watching one of the farm dogs swimming to retrieve a stick Charles had thrown in the river.

‘Big as in four or five, or big as in nine or ten?’ he’d asked, softly stroking her neck.

‘Nine or ten children. A whole rabbit litter of them.’ She felt a little silly then, embarrassed by her desires. There was something not quite decent about such greedy talk of fertility. They weren’t farm animals, after all. But Charles just carried on stroking her neck as if she had said nothing at all out of the ordinary.

When the verandah was finished, she and Charles started a habit of standing on it, watching the dawn, the sky ribboned with pink and white like the fat-marbled beef joints she roasted on Sundays, following a recipe book, trying to understand the cooking range, wishing she had paid more attention when her
aunt had taught her how to cook. ‘Do you miss the city?’ he asked, but she said she had forgotten all about it.

Most of the farmers in the area worked all the hours they could, and Birdie soon realized Charles was the same. He spent his days outside, coming in late, wanting her, smelling of the earthy scent of fields, of hay and animals, the sharp odour of motor oil on his clothes. He stood behind her as she leaned over the sink peeling potatoes, putting his arms around her, lifting her skirts, dropping to his knees as she turned and pressing his sweet nuzzling face between her legs. Some days he came in and caught her dancing to big bands on the wireless in the kitchen. She insisted he dance with her, pulling off her apron, sliding her hips against him, unbuttoning his sweat-stiffened cotton shirt. Birdie knew she was still ghostly, still a person who struggled to understand her own feelings, but her desires for Charles blocked out the emptiness. And they would have children soon. The kind of love they felt for each other was bound to bring a child into the world.

They grew every kind of arable crop through the war years. Charles borrowed a caterpillar tractor from his neighbour Norman Hubbard, over at Ark Farm. He spent a week grubbing up hedgerows to make the fields bigger. With the woody copses and hedgerows gone, the landscape looked like a vast prairie and the east wind rushed across it, stirring up small dust storms.

In return for the loan of the tractor, Charles and Birdie worked scything thistles on the Hubbards’ farm for a week. Norman Hubbard was a lawyer who ran his farm as a hobby. He had a farm manager, a rather taciturn man called Westfield. Norman’s wife, Kathleen, bred horses, but in wartime she had given that up and helped out on the farm.

Birdie thought Kathleen a perfect English countrywoman. Just like an illustration in one of the
Country Life
magazines she looked at these days. Kathleen had clear skin and high cheekbones. Her eyes were brown and almond-shaped. Her blonde
hair was tied back and fell about her shoulders in curls when she undid it. Kathleen taught Birdie how to chase rats from the hen house with the back end of a hard broom and lots of shouting.

‘Never show you are afraid of them,’ she said. ‘Always act like you are absolutely sure you are more frightening than they are. Actually, I’d recommend having this attitude for everything. Rats, husbands, bank managers and children included.’

Kathleen had an eighteen-month-old daughter called Ella, who was looked after by a nanny. Not really a nanny, but a land girl who was supposed to work in the fields but suffered from hay fever, whereas she was good with a baby. Birdie only ever saw the child from a distance, bundled up in a pram with a large white net over the pram hood, keeping the sun off her. She was curious about the child but didn’t like to ask to see her because Kathleen showed so little interest in her daughter and Birdie felt her new friend would have been surprised by the request.

When the harvest was finished, gleaners arrived on the stubble fields. Birdie watched groups of ragged women and children scratching in the dirt for grain left behind by the threshing machines. They were a strange sight, bent over, scouring the ground as if looking for things they had lost.

‘They mark the end of the summer,’ said Charles. ‘Them and the swallows leaving.’

He worried winter on the farm might be a shock to her, and in the last months of the year, the days got shorter and a gloom descended. Connie Smith’s brother Jeremy was reported missing in action, and the family had postponed Connie and Christopher’s wedding.

Birdie remembered Connie as the girl who had stared at her when she’d danced with Christopher. She cycled over to see her at her parents’ house.

A flush of pink tinted Connie’s pale cheeks. She was a dark-haired girl with blue-veined milky skin and shadows under her brown eyes. Christopher’s leave had been cancelled. They were
getting married at his next leave, which might be in several months’ time.

‘I wish I’d never waited now,’ she said. ‘We could have got married when Jeremy was still here, but I wanted to save up coupons to buy enough fabric to make my own dress. Now I don’t care what I wear. I just want us to be husband and wife.’

Birdie thought she understood what she meant. Connie feared Christopher wouldn’t come back from the war either.

The nights grew colder and the farm dogs, always lolling in the yard, hid under the kitchen table and refused to leave the house. By mid-November, watching the sunrise on the verandah required a certain bravery. It was so cold, Birdie’s cheeks felt like they’d been slapped and her fingers froze in her gloves. Her mother sent her hand-knitted socks and silk underwear, which she said was warmer than cotton.
I know what winters can be like down by the river
, she wrote.

In January, cold seemed to get under every layer of clothing Birdie wore. She’d been sure, in the honeymoon months of the summer, that she loved life in the country. Now she thought of the city again and began to miss it. At night, with the wartime blackout, the darkness in the house was total, the silence deep as a well. Sometimes Birdie woke in the early hours, eyes open, wondering where she was, dreams still turning in her mind, jumbled memories of smog and slums, noise and crowds in her uncle’s pub. Then she remembered. She had married Charles. She had what she wanted. A life on the edge of the world. And still, the dark felt so boundless and confusing, the silence so thick, Birdie pressed her fingers against her face and wondered if she might be touching another person altogether.

Day after day in her first winter on the farm, there were frost and snow, cold and rain. Her mother wrote to her often, telling her about the infamous cold of the winters in East Anglia, the Siberian winds that blew straight from the USSR. She sent more
socks she had knitted herself. Baggy things that Birdie and Charles made into glove puppets and laughed at.

All through February, the icy breath of the wind whistled under the door and called up the stairs like a nosy neighbour. Birdie tried to shut it out, stuffing newspapers against the doorsill, while the wind rattled the window frames and sneaked in under gaps in the corrugated-iron roof.

Charles said a farmer couldn’t afford to be afraid of the weather. It was like fate. You had to bend with it, not try to fight it.

‘All good things come to us slowly,’ he told her. ‘We just have to endure until they do.’

And then in February 1942, Birdie heard that Christopher had died when his plane was shot down.

Connie stood at her door wearing a pleated dress, a look of shock in her eyes, her dark brown hair wisping around her face.

‘I’m pregnant,’ she said. ‘Five months along.’

‘So what will you do?’

‘Mum says she’ll help me. Christopher’s grandmother has given me her wedding ring to wear so I can hold my head up when I visit the doctor.’

‘So you’ll keep the baby?’ Birdie felt a pang of hurt. A childish sense of unfairness.

‘Of course I will.’ Connie looked surprised for a moment. ‘It’s Christopher’s. What else would I do?’

‘Oh, it’s the war,’ said Kathleen Hubbard. The two of them were sitting in Birdie’s kitchen, smoking and drinking tea and talking about Connie being an unmarried mother. Kathleen had ridden over in the rain and put her horse in a stable on the farm.

She was wearing her riding breeches and black riding boots. Her thick blonde hair was tied back severely off her face. She sat with her legs crossed, swinging her foot. Birdie knew she would not stay long. She’d be off soon, away across the fields on her
dark grey horse, galloping along the edge of the winter wheat fields, her coat-tails flapping behind her.

‘It’s changed everything, Birdie. Even the vicar wishes Connie well. I think it’s marvellous, but my God, doesn’t it show up the hypocrisy in this world? Before the war, Connie would have been seen as a disgrace. Put a man in a uniform and let him die for his country, and suddenly the sweetheart he left behind is transformed into the Virgin Mary.’ She looked at her intently. ‘Don’t you agree?’

‘I just hope she’s going to be all right,’ Birdie said. ‘I think people should mind their own business. I’m sick of the way everybody judges each other in this country.’

Kathleen shrugged. ‘I suppose we all judge each other. Can’t be helped. When I first saw you, I thought a lot of things. It’s not often you see a woman in full make-up, red lipstick and mascara, stomping about a hay field. And then I heard you were a barmaid from the East End. Well, I’m sure you can imagine what I thought.’

‘No. What did you think?’

‘Well, that’s the thing. I was wrong, wasn’t I?’ said Kathleen. ‘You’re a good farmer’s wife.’ She stubbed out her cigarette and changed the subject to whether she should be putting her best hunting mare in foal this year or not.

Birdie crossed the farmyard, leaning into the wind, her head tipped down against the horizontal rain. It was Christmas 1942. She had settled into her life as a farmer’s wife. Connie had had her baby that summer. A little girl. She’d called her Judith and she was the sweetest thing, with dark hair like Connie’s, and Christopher’s deep-blue eyes. Connie had put Christopher’s photograph over the baby’s cot. She wanted her daughter to know who her father was. His name had recently been added to a wooden commemoration plaque in the church.
Christopher Thomas 1914–1942.
Kathleen, too, was having a baby. She hoped for a son, she said.

Charles had Italian prisoners of war working for him, out in the barn, repairing hessian sacks and helping him dress the seed barley. They were sifting the seeds for thistle heads and charlock. Birdie had prepared a meal for them all. She liked the men. They were hard-working and they carried something of another place with them. She was fascinated by their accents and their way of appreciating the food put before them. She knew people in the village treated them coldly, but she wasn’t going to go about things like that. Recently some of the men had carved small wooden toys and given them to her, smiling, nodding their approval, holding their arms in front of them, rocking imaginary babies back and forth. ‘
Bambino!
’ they whispered. Carved peacocks and horses, small birds and cats sat on the kitchen windowsill. Birdie thanked the men in Italian: ‘
Grazie tanto!
’ A phrase she had picked up in her uncle’s pub as a child.

The gale whipped her hair against her face and she spread her arms. Her hands came to rest on her rounded belly, and she swayed back and forth. Finally she felt completely happy. There was nobody to see her, but even if one of the men had stepped out of the barn at that moment, it would not have mattered. The rest of the world could go to hell. There was never going to be anything shameful about a married, pregnant woman dancing in a rainstorm.