Whisper on the Wind (59 page)

His hands closed over hers on the handlebars and briefly she let them rest there. Then smiling she fell into step beside him.

‘So how will Roz manage? Two terrible shocks in one week. You must be kind to her – we must all be kind to her and not leave her too much alone. One day, she will accept it.’

‘Yes – but when, Marco? She loved Paul deeply; she’s too young to have to cope with all this. Not so long ago, when the war started, she was little more than a child – now she’s – she’s …’ She stopped, remembering. ‘Now she’s had to grow up in the space of a week.’

And accept the responsibility of Ridings, learn to live without Paul and see her baby safely born without him. Poor Roz. Poor lonely, frightened Roz.

‘But we will help her, Kat. One day she will be happy again.’

They had reached Ridings now, and he leaned the bicycle against the wall and set the carrier on the ground. Then taking her hands in his he kissed each fingertip slowly, sensuously. His lips sent need tearing through her and she closed her eyes, tilting her chin, wanting to be kissed.

His kiss was gentle, without passion, and his smile, when she blinked open her eyes, was soft as his lips.

‘And you, my Kat – how is your world?’

‘Fine,’ she whispered, her eyes on his. ‘Just fine.’

‘Then that is good. Off you go and look after Roz. I see you soon, hey?’

‘Soon …’

Kath dumped her parcels on the kitchen table. ‘Marco sends his love. I told him you might be back at work tomorrow. Did I do right?’

‘Yes. It’s got to be faced, I suppose.’

‘And you’ll be careful? A farm’s no place for a pregnant woman. But won’t you tell Jonty? It might be better if you did, especially if you want to keep working on the farm.’

‘I know. Lord, what a mess.’

Why wasn’t Paul here to make it come right; to hold her close and rest his cheek on her hair, tell her that nothing in the world mattered as much as Sprog.

Sprog. That was what Paul had called Skip’s baby; Skip’s little girl, born yesterday.

A wave of pain sliced through her, blocking her throat in a hard, tight ball. She wasn’t going to be able to cope. If it hadn’t been for the baby, she’d have –

‘What was that?’ Kath was speaking; cutting into her thoughts.

‘I said it was a mess, but we’ll manage. We’ll have to. There’s Sprog, now.’

And Kath was right. They would muddle through. No more morbid thoughts. The baby had a name, now. Sprog was her reason for living and holding her head high. ‘But I won’t tell Jonty. Not yet. I’ve hurt him enough lately.’

‘Nor Polly? She’s your guardian, now. Don’t you think you ought to?’

‘Maybe I should, but she’ll take it badly. She’s like Gran – straitlaced. But I’ll tell her, just as soon as the time is right.’

‘Good girl. I’ll just nip upstairs and put these things away. Guess what? They’re having apple pie at Peacock tonight and cook gave me some for our supper. She said it was for you, with her love. You’ll try to eat some, won’t you – for Sprog?’

‘For Sprog.’ Roz smiled.

It was a small, fleeting smile, but Kath saw it and was glad.

Roz sat on the staircase seat, her coat hugged to her. The sky was clear, but touched with the metallic brightness that told of rain to come.

Rain. It would do no harm, she supposed. The hay was safely in, now. Haytime. Now she would remember, every year, that at haytime Paul had died, and Gran. Hear of one death, hear of three, Polly always said. Gran, Peggy and Paul.

She shivered. She should, she supposed, walk down to the churchyard to see if Gran’s flowers were all right, but she was too tired, too drained; drained of all feeling and she couldn’t cope with a grave tonight.

She felt cold. She didn’t know why she was sitting out here. Maybe because Kath had switched on the wireless for the news bulletin and she didn’t want to listen any longer. There was heavy fighting in North Africa, the announcer had said. The British were in retreat and Barney was in a hospital bed near Cairo.

But she didn’t want to hear, nor hear about last night’s raids over Germany, nor about civilians at home who had died in air-raids during June. Three hundred of them. It was then she had come outside, because Gran had been one of that three hundred, and it hurt.

She hoped the bombers wouldn’t be operational, tonight. Tonight she didn’t want to see one nor hear one. But they’d been flying last night. Raids on Bremen and the Ruhr and on Emden. Which of those places had Paul been going to? And was it only last night it had happened?

But Peddlesbury’s aircrews would be stood down tonight and away already to York or Helpsley or even deciding to give the Friday-night dance a whirl.

She looked down at her watch. Was it really only a day ago? Could twenty-four hours seem this long and would every day to come be the same? Yet it was good to sit here in the ruins; to accept that these walls had stood for more than four hundred years. It made her wonder what they had been witness to, who had lived and died within them.

Her child would be born here; her child and Paul’s. A January babe, born to snow and ice in the drear of winter and Paul would never see it nor hold it nor love it.

She drew her coat more closely around her and looked up again at the rooks that flew cawing homeward. They nested in the tall trees behind the kitchen garden and if they should leave, if ever they forsook their rookery, it would foretell the loss of Ridings, Polly always said. And Polly said you must always tell things to the rooks. You should stand beneath their trees, she said, and tell them of a death in the family, or a birth.

‘Never mind about telling it to the bees,’ she insisted. ‘’Tis better far to tell it to the rooks …’

Roz wondered if Polly had told them that Gran had died, and knew instinctively that she had. Polly believed in such things; believed in the graveyard watch, too, and would expect her to see that the gates of St Mary’s were chained and locked on St Mark’s Eve, just as they had been when Gran was alive. Things must go on, she would say.

And they will go on, because Paul and I have a child
…

‘Roz?’

She turned sharply, fretful at the intrusion into her dreaming.

‘Jonty. Sit down.’ She patted the seat beside her.

‘Kath said you were here. Are you all right? Shouldn’t you be in bed?’

‘Yes, I’m fine and no, I shouldn’t be in bed. You’re a worse fusspot than Kath.’

‘She said you aren’t eating enough; said I was to talk to you about it.’

‘But I had some of the soup your mother sent, and it was good. Will you tell her so and thank her for it? And, Jonty, I’ll be back at Home Farm tomorrow. Mat has been good but I’ve felt guilty about having time off when you were so busy with the hay. Kath and I will be back to normal in the morning.’

‘Sure you’re up to it? You look shattered. Sure you’re all right?’

‘I’m fine. And did you know that Kath is living out, now? Or is it living in? Anyway, she’s at Ridings, for good.’

‘She told me. There’s a suitcase to be collected from Peacock. Next time I’m passing with the trailer I’ll pick it up for her. And I’m glad you won’t be on your own, Roz. Mum worries about you.’

‘So she sent you over to check up on me?’

‘I came because I wanted to. I’m worried about you, too. The Roz I thought I knew wouldn’t have taken things this calmly. It’s wrong to bottle things up.’ He made to reach out for her. He wanted to hold her close; tell her that one day the pain would ease. But he knew he mustn’t touch her and he pulled back his arm, laid it instead on the back of the seat. She was still Paul’s. And there was a brittleness about her that he recognized. It had always been there, even when she was very young; a clipped calm that one wrong word, one false move, could ignite into a blaze of outrage and tears. ‘But if you’re quite sure you don’t want anything …’ He rose to his feet.

‘No, Jonty. Don’t go.’ She shivered again. ‘Think I’ll go in, now. Walk back with me?’

She felt strange, walking beside him, her back so straight, arms stiffly at her sides. Once, she would have linked her arm in his and walked intimately close because he hadn’t been in love with her, then. Not since Peg’s funeral, brought together by a shared grief, had they touched. But Paul stood between them now, and a grief too enormous to be shared.

At the yard gate she paused, then turned and offered him her hand. It felt childlike in his own and he held it tightly for a moment. Then he said, ‘Goodnight, Roz. Try to get some sleep.’

She whispered that she would and that she’d see him tomorrow then stood unmoving as he walked away.

Tomorrow, and all the tomorrows. A lifetime of lonely, near-unbearable tomorrows.

‘Goodnight, Paul,’ she whispered. ‘I’m glad about our child.’

Sprog. Her reason for living.

Wednesday. The first day of July, a day for saying ‘white rabbits’ and making a wish; the day, twenty-four years ago, on which she had been born. And married, Kath thought with a lifting of her shoulders. Three years since she stood with Barney before the Registrar promising love and devotion for the rest of her life.

But her marriage was cold and only half alive. The birthday she had looked forward to would pass unnoticed because there had been two terrible tragedies and no one, yet, could think about anything else. Even trying to forget was hard, because always there was Roz who seemed to have grown paler and smaller, to remind them. Roz, with her grief locked inside her with her secret. So lonely and afraid of what was to come; of the scandalized sideways glances and sly innuendoes, for not even a Fairchild could conceive a child out of wedlock and escape the rough justice of a small village like Alderby.

‘At least,’ some would say, ‘her grandmother was spared the shame, poor lady,’ whilst others – those with daughters of their own, perhaps – would shake their heads and say nothing, because if it could happen to a Fairchild it could happen to anyone. With a war on, with men and women torn apart and no one knowing what the next day would bring, folk could understand a lass getting herself into trouble, even if they couldn’t condone it.

Kath pushed open the schoolyard gate and set down the crate of small bottles. Twenty-five of them. A lot of children for so small a village, but most of them evacuees, like Arnie.

She glanced back to make sure that Roz carried no more than a milk bottle in each hand. Nothing heavy, now; no lifting crates or churns – it said so in the book she had bought in Helpsley without so much as a blush because it was all right for a woman who wore a wedding ring to buy a book about pregnancy. Only the unmarried ones – the careless ones, the wantons – were expected to hide their shame. If they were lucky, they married hastily and discreetly, but never in white. White was for purity – pregnant brides knew it and kept to the unwritten rules. Those who were not so lucky might go away to some other place; to relations who would grudgingly take them in, hide them until it was over and their baby sent away for adoption. Only then could they come home, heads defiantly high, and everyone knowing about it yet saying nothing, except with their eyes.

And there were some – the desperate ones – who safety-pinned a note to a shawl.
Kathleen. Born 1st July.
Born just before the end of the war – the
last
war – the one they called the Great War.

She pushed the crate of empty bottles to the back of the trap then clicked her tongue to Daisy who knew exactly where to go and where to stop. Just the school house, now, and the Black Horse, then back by way of the gate lodges. Daisy knew.

Kath bent to pick up an apple, hard and green, with the marks of small teeth in it; stolen from an orchard, thrown away after one bitter bite. She held it on the flat of her hand and the pony took it gently.

She wondered if Aunt Min would remember her birthday, or Barney. But Barney didn’t go in for sentimentality; there would be no greeting from North Africa. Today would pass without notice and that, she supposed, was how it should be, because three weeks ago Paul had died on the day they buried Mrs Fairchild. Set beside that, a forgotten birthday was nothing at all.

‘I’m going to wash my hair tonight, Roz. Be a love, and pincurl it for me?’

‘Sure.’ Roz flinched as a bomber flew low overhead. Circuits and bumps, this morning. Test flights, which meant that tonight the squadron would be operational. Tonight could have been Sugar’s thirtieth operation. Could have been; should have been. ‘I’ll probably wash my own, too. And I’ll have to go through Gran’s desk soon. Will you be there, Kath, when I do?’

She would need help. Mr Dunston had taken the legal papers, but the little things left there were the ones which would matter. Gran’s diaries, ages-old letters and photographs; precious, sentimental things a woman keeps and hopes someone will deal with gently when she is gone.

‘You know I will, but there’s no hurry, is there?’

‘None at all. Just thought I’d mention it.’ She waved to Polly hanging sheets on the clothes line and pulled her mouth into the shape of a smile. She was getting good at it. Soon, she might even find a way of laughing without laughter because she was beginning to learn she could do anything she wanted if she tried hard enough. She could even go on living.