The Care and Management of Lies (12 page)

Chapter 8

Religion and politics are topics of conversation which should always be avoided. They are subjects upon which difference of opinion is very rife, and may often lead to heated arguments which are as tiresome and unpleasant as they are ill-bred.

—
THE WOMAN’S BOOK

Dear Sis . . .

Tom could not bring himself to write “Thea,” though he often felt that he had lost Dorrit anyway. It no longer mattered that she had changed her name, because the girl he had once run across the fields with, had followed to the top of the big climbing tree, limb by limb, and who had been his close confidante, felt lost to him. Calling her “Sis” brought her back, reminding him—and her, he hoped—that they were once as thick with each other as siblings could be, like twins, until he had chosen Kezia, and she had chosen him back.

He had decided to tell Thea himself. Kezia had offered to write the letter, and had then left the idea hanging, so that he might choose to set pen to paper. That’s what he loved about Kezia—she made him do what was right, but left it up to him to know what right was. He didn’t think she even knew she had this quality, and sometimes suspected that being the daughter of a man of the cloth had imbued her with a certain knowing that eluded him, and others. Perhaps being brought up with righteousness was a gift, after all. And it was usually when he caught himself with fanciful thoughts that Kezia altered his viewpoint, and there was always something special on those days—the discovery of a posy of dog roses next to his plate, as if to garnish the table while he ate. But it was clear that Kezia believed it should be Tom who wrote to Thea to announce and explain his intentions.

“But don’t ask her to come back to the farm, Tom. I can manage—with Bert and Danny and anyone else I can get, I can manage. Thea won’t want to come home, Tom, so don’t expect it of her.”

Tom took Kezia’s words to heart, and set to writing again.

Dear Sis,

This is your brother writing to you.

Tom always began a letter in this way, as if Thea would not be able to tell the solid hand, with the stream of lettering divided in places where he had pressed hard with the nib, which had separated so two lines of ink ran apart, then together, then apart. He had not written a letter to Thea for some time, usually choosing a postcard to reply to her, with quickly scratched news from the farm, and always an invitation.
Come back soon, Sis.

Dear Sis,

This is your brother writing to you. I will come to the point, because neither of us likes dithering, and we’ve always been straight as arrows with each other, even when we didn’t like what the other was saying.

He could imagine Thea in his mind’s eye, reading that sentence, and thinking of the letter he’d sent—when was it? Two years ago?
There’s no need beating around the bush. I want you to know that I have fallen in love with Kezia, and intend to make her my wife.

He looked down at his page, and continued.

. . . even when we didn’t like what the other was saying. I don’t think you’ll like this, Sis, but I have decided to put myself up for the army. I’ve seen men of my age and with not so much about them, going off to enlist to fight for our country, and I reckon I should do my bit with them. According to the papers, the war won’t last that long, so I would say that by the time I’m trained up, then it’ll be close to finished and I’ll be home again. Bert knows what needs to be done here, and Danny is as good as any of the men, though he would never get into the army on account of his leg. Kezia has been a dream girl, a real farmer’s wife. I went out to the field to check on Danny yesterday and found her out there with Ted and Mabel, and Dan showing her how to drive them on with the plough. Her line was fair straight as well, though I reckon the horses felt it, because I saw Mabel look around just to see who had a hold of her.

Tom dipped the pen again. He had hated the pen since schooldays, hated dipping it into the black ink, hated the knob of skin on his middle finger, where it touched the nib and an ink-stained ridge would remain for a day or two afterwards. He didn’t mind the earth in his nails and ingrained in his hands, but ink stains across his fingers reminded him of school, then college.

There’s no need for you to come home. Don’t you think that we would want to change your London life for a minute, because Kezia has told me how much you set by living there and being a teacher, so we don’t want you to do that, though I would say that we would love to see you if you come for a Saturday and Sunday. Kezzie would collect you from the station in the gig. And I daresay she’ll come up to London to see you soon anyway. She likes to do things like that, on her own.

I will sign off now. I plan to enlist as soon as all the harvesting is finished. The hop pickers have nearly all gone home, so once I’ve left, Bert needs only to concern himself with getting everything done through the winter so we’re ready for spring. I reckon him and Dan can do most of it, and there are young lads in the village looking for a bit of man’s work. A few of them, not yet four and ten, tried to enlist and were sent home with a clip round the ear for their trouble. So now they think they’re men Bert can put them to work when he needs them. The farm will be in good hands, so don’t worry—Kezia has taken up the books and made a much better job of it all.

Your loving brother,
Tom

Tom looked up from his letter writing, setting the pen in its cradle. Kezia had moved the desk to a place by the window, so she could look out over the garden while she was doing the farm accounts and preparing the wage packets. He could see Kezia now in what she called “my kitchen garden,” and realized he hadn’t lingered to watch her for a while. He saw her every day, indeed, still flush with new marriage, he felt his heart move whenever she came into a room, or when he sat at the table to talk while she cooked at the stove, pushing hair from her eyes as she put her finger on a line of instructions in her recipe book. Now he watched as she moved around the garden, and wondered about her. She was different. He could never before have put his finger on the why of it, just that each day she did or said something that he had never heard his mother or Thea or one of the women in the village say or do. Two days earlier she had gone through his father’s old clothes and come out with a pair of corduroy trousers that had been small on the old man by the time he’d expanded to a fair size around the girth. She’d used a hot knitting needle to add holes to a leather belt, and worn those trousers into the garden, tucked into a pair of gum boots that must have been several sizes too big for her, but she maintained that gum boots kept everything out that shouldn’t be in. He would buy her a better pair before he left, a pair that would fit so she didn’t trip and trudge.

Now she moved along the runner-bean row, her basket on her hip, leaning forward to clip each bean from the vine with her forefinger and thumb. She’d planted herbs in the garden, first nurturing seedlings in the greenhouse—a greenhouse hardly used until she’d taken it into her head to clean it out and set up trays with rows of eggshells. Into each half-shell—she got through a lot of eggs, trying to perfect her cake baking—she had placed some soil and a seed, so as each green shoot struggled to break through the earth, it seemed as if a chick might one day appear instead of a plant. It occurred to Tom that he should have told her it was the wrong season for starting the growing of herbs, but he kept quiet. In any case, he thought that the time and attention she lavished upon her young would cause them to flourish in a desert. Then his concerns caught up with him, and he sighed a long-winded breath of worry. He wondered how she would manage. She seemed confident enough. Kezia had not wept, had not pleaded with him to stay. She had simply told him that he must do what he thought best, and she would do what had to be done for the farm while he was gone. She said she would be at the gate every day waiting for his letters, and would be there still when he came home.

The clock struck the hour, and Tom sighed again, such was the weight upon his heart. It was strange, he thought as he watched Kezia from the quiet of the parlor, with only passing time for company. It was said that marriage settled both man and woman. He considered what it meant to be settled, because there was something in Kezia, something he’d felt since their marriage, and even more since his decision to join the regiment. She seemed like a young branch that had passed the time when it could be bent this way or that, a limb becoming stronger with maturity. He watched as she picked up her basket and walked to the gate, stopping to talk to Bert, who was leading Ted and Mabel out to the paddock. She lingered to give them treats from her pocket, then rubbed each horse with a firm hand swept down the neck. Tom felt tears in his eyes as she laughed with Bert and walked towards the house, closer to the window, so he took up the letter, folded it, and inserted it into the envelope, which he addressed to Miss T. Brissenden. And at once he felt the wash of fear again, and he realized that it was not so much a worry that Kezia could not do without him as the realization that she and the farm might do quite well together.

F
ROM
K
EZIA
B
RISSENDEN’S
E
XPERIMENTAL
R
ECIPE
B
OOK

Pork, diced; Onion, chopped; Thyme, chopped. Salt and Pepper (check oversalting)

For Pudding—Baked Apples

Four large apples, Butter, Dried fruit, Cob nuts

At some point in each day there came a moment when Kezia itched to be among different people, when she missed the days before she gave up the classroom and her life in Tunbridge Wells. But at the same time, she found there was something in the rhythm of the farm and what she now considered to be her work that warmed her heart, giving her a sense of the rightness of her place. It was as if the farm had lungs and she were caught in its breath, swept inward, at one with its life force. She tried not to think about Tom going to war, because every time she read a newspaper or heard people talking about what was happening in Belgium or France, she felt as if war itself were alive too, breathing in and out, breathing fire towards her. She wanted to write to her father about her feelings, and about the dreams that came; dreams that she was running from a fire, with the flames coming ever closer. But something had changed—she didn’t want to have him quote a reading from the Bible, or the work of a scholar who might explain her nighttime fears. Instead she sought solace in the kitchen, which cocooned her, brought her into its rhythm. Outside it was another warm day, but the dampers were open and the fire was blazing to heat the oven and the hot plate above, and she was preparing another meal to present to Tom, who would surely tell her it was the best meat that had ever passed his lips, with the most succulent vegetables—minted and peppered, but no salt, not today—and the baked apples would be the sweetest yet.

Kezia was about to throw the potato peelings onto a newspaper to take out to the compost heap when a snippet of print caught her eye. She read the news whenever she could, but always found something she’d missed when about to use the paper for something else—perhaps to step across a just-mopped floor, or to line a tray for the greenhouse. There it was again—the casualty list. The never-ending rows of names, of boys and men lost to battle. She drew her eyes away, then to another snippet that had eluded her attention at an earlier reading.

SUFFRAGETTES ARRESTED IN PACIFIST MARCH

It wasn’t the headline that caught her eye, but the sudden feeling that she’d seen something familiar, something that resonated in her memory. There was an element of the story she recognized. Her eyes scanned the column of text, which told of women who had been taken into custody, then into Holloway Prison, on account of a disturbance in Regent’s Park. The charge of sedition was suggested, and though Kezia held her breath, looking for Thea’s name, she could not find it. But a woman named Avril had been one of those arrested, and Kezia remembered that Thea had a friend named Avril—a new, close friend, a friend she would have gone to Austria with, had it not been for the war. Avril was the friend who had usurped her in Thea’s affections. She wondered whether Thea might be in trouble too.

Kezia felt dread wash across her skin as if it were a wave shimmying up a sandy beach, and wondered how she might find out more without annoying Thea, who seemed so prickly of late. Letters had gone unanswered; now, when Kezia thought of Thea, she saw in her mind’s eye a person alone in her room, the curtains half closed as if she were intent upon shutting out all society. And she felt in her heart a yearning to go to her friend, to pull those curtains wide open, allowing sunshine and warmth to flood in. Perhaps Thea had wandered close to an abyss and needed to be helped back with a hand held out. But would she accept the proffered hand? Kezia shivered, folded the peelings into the newspaper, and put them by the back door. She returned to her cooking, and was struck by the idea that perhaps she would change things around, just to see what happened. Why would she cook baked apple for pudding when apple went very well with pork anyway? Why not combine the two and see how it might turn out? Immersing herself in the creation of a new dish, she felt relief as she moved away from thoughts of Thea and the dark chasm she saw in her mind’s eye when she worried about her.

Kezia cut the pork into small pieces, frying them to a golden brown, then she added the meat to a bowl containing the filling of honeyed sultanas and chopped cob nuts she’d originally prepared for the apples. She mixed the sugary-savory blend then filled each of the cored apples, finishing the recipe by setting the tops on the apples. She covered the dish and placed it in the oven, closing the dampers a little to control the heat. There. Meat and sweet together, opposites blended, like her and Tom. She imagined him coming back, holding his head still, his nose raised a little as he tried to distinguish elements of the aroma. He would tell her how much he liked this new recipe. He would come up behind her and snuggle his nose into her neck. Then, later, she would tell him,
I must write to Thea. I miss her so.