Still Waters (49 page)

‘I don’t think so,’ Tess had said, and turned the talk in other directions. But it had made her think. She was very fond of Andy, but could she abandon her home, her way of life, her friends, and go away with him? Sun, sea and sky were all very well, but she knew that, for her, it wouldn’t be enough. She would pine for England, cold and wet though it might be.

‘What does the boy Andy
do
?’ Ruby asked inquisitively now, and then, without waiting for an answer: ‘Hey he proposed yet? Hev Ashley, come to that? My George, he think you’re quite pretty.’ She guffawed, nudging Tess with a sharp elbow. ‘Dessay Bernie – he’s the Yank – might agree, do I ever give him the chance to meet you.’

Tess blinked. ‘It’s kind of George to say that,’ she said mildly. ‘As a matter of fact, Ashley proposes quite regularly, but I don’t suppose he means it. He, and Andy, who is in the army, incidentally, are rather busy fighting a war right now.’

‘Don’t stop folk marryin’,’ Ruby said complacently. ‘Me and George did, for a start-off. Fellers want to marry when they’re in danger. So they say. My Yank, now . . .’

She began to tell Tess intimate details about Colour Sergeant Bernie Nicolayvitch and Tess stopped listening. Ruby, she realised, would run on quite happily for hours without more than a murmur of confirmation from her companion. Instead of hearing about Bernie, therefore, Tess let her mind go back to Andy’s last leave, which was some months ago. It had been on that leave that she had first begun to realise that you could be fond of someone – very fond – without necessarily wanting to spend the rest of your life with them alone. She still hadn’t made up her mind that she
wouldn’t
marry Andy one of these days, but a seed of doubt had undoubtedly been sown when he had declared his intention of living in Greece. Making a new life sounded wonderful until you actually took a long, hard look at it, and then it just sounded . . . lonely.

And since then, Tess remembered, jogging along in the bus with Ruby chattering endlessly about her Yank, she had seen Andy precisely twice. On the first occasion it had been a rush visit – he had had a forty-eight – in which they had discussed her work as a landgirl and whether, having seen that both Marianne and Cherie were settled, she might consider applying, once more, for the WAAF.

‘You’d enjoy the WAAF, but I like to find you at home when I come back,’ Andy said with his usual straightforwardness. ‘You are such a comfort, old Tess.’

It wasn’t exactly lover’s talk, but Tess didn’t mind that. ‘But I want to help with the war effort, too,’ she had protested. ‘Marianne can manage without me now, I’m sure she can. Have you met Maurice?’

‘No. Who’s he? You don’t mean Chevalier, I suppose?’

The two of them had been sitting in her boat on the Broad one mild day last autumn, having taken to the water to escape Cherie, who had a mountain-sized crush on Andy, and Frenchy, Lady Salter’s little mongrel, who insisted that Andy’s one aim in life should be to throw sticks for him to retrieve. Not that Frenchy retrieved such sticks, oh dear me no! In the little dog’s extremely mixed ancestry there lurked no sensible labradors or intelligent gun-dogs. To Frenchy’s tiny mind, anything vaguely bone-shaped – and that included sticks – was clearly meant to be devoured. So Andy would throw a stick and Frenchy would eat it. Simple.

Tess giggled and leaned over to thump Andy good-naturedly on the shoulder. ‘Chevalier! I should think not! No, Maurice Louviers. He’s one of the Free French, working under de Gaulle.’

Andy sniffed. ‘I don’t know what those fellows do, but it doesn’t seem to be much. Why?’

‘He’s Marianne’s admirer, to put it no stronger. He’s done her the world of good, honestly. She was actually ashamed of liking him, at first, because I found her in floods of tears one night, thinking she was being disloyal to Daddy. Only as I said, Daddy would be the first to tell her to live her life with zest. So Maurice is the reason I’m considering going a bit further than Willow Tree Farm. Marianne’s capable again, truly she is. Much more independent. And if I did leave – when I leave – she won’t have to live there all by herself. Well, she’d have Cherie of course, but you know what I mean. She could have Maurice on a – a much more permanent basis.’

‘I see. So if Maurice is your stepmother’s admirer, who is yours? Apart from my humble self, of course?’

‘If you mean am I still seeing Ashley, yes I am,’ Tess said with spirit. ‘Why shouldn’t I? You’re both my friends, and Ashley’s huge ego needs boosting from time to time. Flying is terribly hard on the nerves. Besides, to be frank, he’s around and most of the time you aren’t.’

She had waited expectantly to see if Andy would say his nerves needed help and his ego needed boosting and why didn’t she save herself for him? He could even have explained that he would like to be around more but simply could not manage it just at present. Tess found herself hoping that Andy would suggest that they might cement their relationship in some way, but Andy never did what you expected. He just said he supposed she was right and changed the subject.

The second time she had seen him she had been talking seriously to Marianne on the subject of her hoard, because far from getting less and less, thanks to Maurice the hoard actually seemed to be growing. When the war had started, Marianne had taken over the big walk-in wardrobe in the spare room for every bit of storable food she could acquire. You couldn’t accuse her of meanness, either, she did use the hoard, yet it never seemed to get any less.

‘Buying on the black market isn’t fair, Marianne, on the people who won’t cheat and just have their proper rations. And it’s not fair on others, either – those who can’t afford to buy on the black market,’ Tess had explained. ‘You’re such a good manager and a marvellous cook, surely you could manage on what we’re allowed?’

But Marianne had just shrugged.

‘Why should we go short, if we can afford these things and they are offered?’ she asked reasonably. ‘Before the war, people such as the Throwers did not buy fresh salmon; they couldn’t afford it. We, on the other hand, did. Was this wrong? If it was not wrong, why is it wrong now?’

And in the middle of her garbled attempts to make Marianne see that hoarding did not help the war effort and really wasn’t fair, there had been a quick tattoo on the back door and before either woman could go and answer it, the door had opened, and there was Andy.

As usual, he had turned up without any song and dance, wearing the uniform of a lieutenant this time – such a new and shiny uniform, however, that she was almost certain it was only worn for his leaves – and inviting her to have lunch with him in the city and then catch a bus out to Blofield.

‘I fancy a stroll round the village, and perhaps a drink at the King’s Head,’ he said airily. ‘What’s more, there’s a wonderful old church there, with some remarkable brasses, and old stained glass. I’d like to take a look. Will you come with me, Tess?’

Tess didn’t have to be back at the farm until next day so she agreed to go with him. She then added, rather meanly, that she had been trying to persuade Marianne not to buy on the black market, but if she expected embarrassment or contrition from her stepmother she was to be disappointed.

‘I am French, and Frenchwomen know the importance of feeding their families,’ Marianne had said with great aplomb. ‘Go off then, the two of you, and if you’ll come to dinner with us tonight, Andy, we will have a wonderful beef stew, followed by my famous crêpes with lemon and sugar.’

‘If you had a conscience, you’d have told her you wouldn’t eat them,’ Tess grumbled later, as she and Andy climbed aboard the bus for the city. ‘That room is crammed, Andy, simply crammed. I don’t think we could eat it all if we started now and guzzled for ten years.’

‘Oh, well,’ Andy said. ‘We’ll have a really mingy lunch. Will that satisfy your urge to be patriotic?’

It had made her laugh, and the trip to Blofield, even the sandwiches and weak lemonade which they ate sitting companionably on the churchyard wall, had been a bright spot at a time when such spots were rather rare. And they had found her real father’s grave, or at least they assumed they had. A long and exhaustive search had left them scratching their heads – no gravestone had the right name or dates. And then they had spotted the old man. He might have been a verger, or a gravedigger, or just an old man who enjoyed pottering in the churchyard, but Andy went up to him and after the usual politenesses (what a cold summer it had been so far, how the war was going, whether it would end in the next couple of years) Andy had asked, ‘We’re trying to find a particular grave, but it doesn’t seem to be marked. I wonder if you could tell us if a young man called Freeman, Ziggy Freeman, is buried here?’

The old man had led them straight to a small, undistinguished mound, with a cross at the head of it.

‘There y’are; that’s poor Ziggy,’ he said. ‘The Freemans din’t have much money, an’ they’re a big fam’ly so they never got round to a stone. Ziggy was the youngest of seven, you know. A real limb, an’ all. Grand lad, though, grand lad.’ He heaved a sigh. ‘Turble thing, bein’ killed like that. Damned motor bikes, oughtn’t to be allowed.’

‘I wonder if you could tell us when he died and how old he was?’ Tess put in gently. ‘He was a great friend of my mother’s, she – she often spoke of him.’

‘Oh aye? Well, let me think. He were a year older’n his sister Betty, an’ she must be forty-two or three. Unless he were a year younger?’ He looked from one to the other of them, his eyes bright with curiosity. ‘That in’t much use, I s’pose, but there’ll be someone in the village who’ll ’member better’n me. He’s a sister livin’ nearby . . . name of Yallop, as I recall. Why not ask her? She live down the Alley.’

‘We’ll do that next time we’re in the village,’ Andy said. ‘We’ve both got to catch the next bus, though, or we’ll be in trouble.’

They had to run to make it to the bus, but leapt aboard just as the conductor was about to ting the bell, and as they subsided breathlessly into a front seat, Andy said that on his very next leave he would come over to Barton and collect her and they would have a chat to Mrs Yallop.

So now, sitting in the bus beside Ruby and not listening to a word the older girl was saying, she thought again about Andy. When would he turn up next? The truth was that neither he nor she had the foggiest notion, and she was getting a bit tired of it. He was her dear friend, but he didn’t seem to want to be anything more, and time was passing. She was twenty-three years old, Ashley still thought he owned her, and she had no idea whether Andy felt anything for her, apart from friendliness. Come to that, she didn’t really know what she felt for him – what a problem! Yet here was Ruby, pleasing herself, not worrying about anyone else . . . I almost wish I could be like that, Tess thought, and then smiled to herself. She could be like that if she wanted, the truth was she didn’t want, not yet, anyway.

And she would be seeing Ashley at the weekend if he wasn’t flying, and they might go out somewhere, because he and several friends at the station shared his small sports car, using it sparingly but finding it more convenient than the buses. Ashley always wanted her to go back to Blofield with him, to have a meal with his parents, play tennis on their tennis lawn, go the village flicks, but she usually put him off. It was too definite, too serious. And if she didn’t intend to marry him, and she really didn’t think she would, then she shouldn’t do things which gave him hope.

‘So he say to me he say, “Are you sure you don’t mind?” and of course I said I didn’t, because I din’t know what he were goin’ to do, did I? And next thing, there was his hand down my blouse, an’ me wrigglin’ like a bleedin’ eel, an’ him grabbin’ an’ squeezin’ . . .’

Tess stopped listening again. Ruby’s anecdote surely could not still be about Bernie the Yank, not if it included hands down blouses, anyway! Perhaps, since Tess had tuned in, she had reverted to George and their pre-war honeymoon?

So instead of listening to Ruby, Tess thought about her mother and the small, sad little hump of Ziggy Freeman’s grave. And about Andy, who knew her mother’s strange history and understood how she felt about it. Because though no doubt, in this enlightened age, people would tell her it was of no consequence that she was illegitimate, that she had no claim to the man who called himself her father and thus to his family, she thought it did matter. She felt she had been sailing under false colours for most of her life – what would they have thought at school if they had known, or at work? Andy’s parents and Lady Salter would probably be appalled, but she didn’t think Andy minded. At any rate, he was interested in finding out more about Ziggy, more about her past, and on the only occasion when she had admitted her shame, he had told her bracingly not to be such an idiot.

‘You are what you are, not what you’re born,’ he had said. ‘So kindly don’t feel sorry for yourself, because your father – and Peter
was
your father, even if he wasn’t actually related to you by blood – loved you very much. That’s what matters, after all.’

Ashley was pretty unaffected by it, too. He knew that Leonora had been pregnant when Peter had married her – indeed, he had told Tess so – but he still spent as much time in her company as he could. Although he had teased her and upset her often in the course of their friendship, it was never in connection with her dubious birth. Indeed, Tess honestly believed that Ashley had forgotten every word about it, and thinking it over she realised how Ashley had matured these past two or three years. He was much more sensible, hardly ever teased her in the rather cruel, thoughtless way of old, and took life altogether more seriously.

He didn’t even look like the old Ashley; his hair was the same, although he darkened it by constant applications of Brylcreem, but his eyes weren’t. They couldn’t hold your gaze for long, they were restless, flitting from place to place, unable to settle. And his face was all planes and no curves, his mouth was held too tight so that lines ran from the corners of his lips to the outer curve of his nostrils. It sounded silly, too obvious, to say he had been a boy and was now a man, but that, Tess thought, was the truth of it.