Whisper on the Wind (76 page)

‘Well, I must say you’ve got a point there.’

Home-reared, home-cured bacon. Lots of it, in sizzling, spitting bacon-fat, and fried bread …

‘Jonty said I was to think about it, and if I want to I can have two or three from Home Farm’s next litter – for a Christmas present, sort of. But d’you know what I’d really like? I’ve got a fancy for a good breeding sow.’

‘
Breeding
? Good grief, Roz – think of the trouble there’d be when farrowing time came. You know sows can be one heck of a nuisance.’ She’d been a landgirl for a year; Kath Allen knew about such things. ‘A breeding sow needs a lot of attention. How could you manage on your own?’

‘Manage?’ Roz frowned. ‘I’d be all right. Jonty would help me. Jonty would be there.’

Jonty would be there. Jonty would always be there, Kath brooded, staring into the fire. He’d be there when she needed him just as he’d always been from the time she was a little thing, not three years old. Still loving her and waiting for the time she would want him …

‘Sorry,’ Kath murmured. ‘What was that you said?’

‘I said you were miles away. And before that I was trying to tell you there are six bottles of champagne in the cellar – didn’t I show you them – all dusty and cobwebby?’

‘You did not. What about them?’

‘Gran put them there for my twenty-first birthday – or my wedding, whichever was first. But what say we open one for New Year’s Eve? Let’s have
two
? And let’s ask Mat and Grace and Polly and Arnie and Jonty over. We’ll blow a couple of corks for 1943! Shall we, Kath? Shall we be devils?’

‘Why not!’ Why not drink to a new year and a new beginning? All right – so the war could go on and on and on – who knew when it would end? But we’d turned the corner, hadn’t we? We were going to win! ‘And we’ll drink to absent ones, won’t we?’

‘We will,’ Roz said softly. To Marco, whom Kath would marry one day. And to Gran, who’d have been pleased about Ridings doing so well and glad about the curse being lifted. And silently, with love, to Paul. ‘And Kath – I wonder where we’ll all be – all of us, I mean, fifty years from now?’

‘Good gracious – whatever put that idea into your head?’

‘Oh – Paul, I suppose. But it’s a thought, isn’t it?’

Fifty years from now – a
thought
? Yes, Kath was forced to admit, she reckoned it was. Quite a thought.

Roz laid down her pen, pushed aside the list she was making and gazed at the desk-top photographs. She would rather look at her children than make lists. Come to think of it, she would rather look at her children, think about her children and talk about her children than almost anything else.

She settled her chin comfortably on her hand, smiling up at four of them. Four in six years there had been, and goodness, what an upset! Six years of morning sickness, nappy washing, floor walking and potty training; no sooner one lot of front teeth through than another baby on the way. Young Jon, Martin, Kate, then Lizzie. Grace and Polly in a tizzy of delight over each pregnancy, willing always to pram-push or babysit. Her children were all long-married, now; all but Meggy.

She turned to the little sofa-table and Meggy, who smiled back at her from a silver frame. Red-haired, green-eyed Meggy who came as an afterthought in their middle age. Such a shock – or had it been? Everyone saying how risky it could be at her age; and all the tests and scans and goodness only knew what else; things they’d never even heard about all those years ago when she was pregnant with Young Jon. That child of their middle years had been born perfect and utterly beautiful. She had cradled that soft, sweet creature to her and smiled as the midwife said, ‘Well, now. A little redhead this one’s going to be. Just like her mother!’

Meggy hadn’t had any hair; just a haze of red-gold down where her hair should have been, and she’d stared at her mother with eyes so fiercely blue that Roz knew before so very much longer they would turn to green.

‘And what are we to call her?’ asked the midwife.

‘Megan,’ Roz had whispered. There had been no hesitation, though people in Alderby St Mary had wondered a bit about the Welsh name and remarked that they’d thought it might have been Grace or Hester, or even Janet, God rest them all.

It was Meggy who was causing all the upset now, as Meggy always had. Roz just didn’t know where everyone was going to sleep, and Meggy wasn’t helping in any way at all. She hadn’t realized, Roz supposed, that there were so many of them. Five children, four spouses and eleven grandchildren. Jonty’s grandchildren. Jonty who had aged so incredibly well; still slim-hipped and broad-shouldered, with a shock of steel-grey hair he even yet ran his fingers through when he was troubled. His eyes had changed with the passing of the years so that now he didn’t need glasses – except for reading – which made him handsomer than ever.

Smiling, she gave her full attention again to the desk top; to Jonathan – Young Jon – her firstborn, farming Home Farm as his father and grandfather had done; to Martin, London gynaecologist, with a brood of his own; to dear, gentle Kate, wife of an inner-city parson; and to Lizzie, who painted portraits quite famously.

And then, when they’d thought they could sit back smugly and look forward to four weddings, there had been the joy of another Roz – or so a bemused Jonty had declared. Quick-tempered, easily upset, painfully direct Megan.

‘I just don’t know,’ Roz said, peering over the tops of her reading-glasses to address her husband’s newspaper, ‘where everyone is going to sleep. There are so many of us.’

‘I know,’ said her husband affably. ‘You shouldn’t have had so many children.’

‘Then you shouldn’t have given me so many!’

‘Now don’t get upset, love. We’ll manage.’ He set aside his paper and gave her his full attention. And it was very easy to give her his full attention. To him she was still the beautiful, volatile girl he had married. Even five pregnancies had hardly thickened her waist. ‘After all, they won’t all be sleeping here. Young Jon can take five of them over at Home Farm, and surely we can squeeze the rest into three spare rooms and the big attic? It’s only for a couple of nights, and Lizzie’s two could sleep out, in the ruins. Next time you ring her, ask her to bring a couple of sleeping-bags and that small tent of theirs when they come.’

‘You don’t think it’ll be too cold for camping out in April?’

‘Roz! Lizzie’s lads have camped out in the Lake District in February before now!’

‘Mm.’ She picked up her pen again, it’s Meggy, you know, who’s really putting everything out of gear.’

‘Megan,’ he smiled fondly, ‘always did. Right from the moment we realized it was another pregnancy and not the menopause. What on earth were we about?’

‘Being careless, darling, as usual. But Meggy was really
your
fault. It was your forty-ninth birthday. In your fiftieth year now, you said, and you looked so very sad about it that I wanted so much to love you. I think it was that night we got Meggy.’

‘And did you mind?’

‘Now you ask! But actually, I didn’t; not once I was over the sickness, though she did cause a bit of an upset at the time.’

‘And still does.’ He smiled. ‘Sweetheart – does it
really
matter that she and Richard aren’t married? I thought you’d got used to the idea of them living together.’

‘Living together in London is one thing; sharing a double bed in
my
house is altogether another.’

‘I see. It’s all right for other people’s children, but not yours?’

‘As I said, not under
my
roof; not at Ridings. Gran would turn in her grave.’

‘Yes, and talking about – well –
that.
You’re not going to have the churchyard gates padlocked again, are you? Don’t you think it’s time to put an end to it?’

‘The gates were locked in Gran’s time on Mark’s Eve, and even though it’s fifty years since she died they’ll go on being locked. When you and I are dead and gone, I hope Young Jon will make sure they still are. It’s up to us to keep the old customs going and to see that things don’t change too much here at Ridings.’

‘So now we’re back to Megan again, and her – her –’

‘Her lover,’ Roz supplied matter-of-factly. ‘I do try to be broad-minded about it and I know they’re all doing it these days, but I simply can’t – well, not here …’

‘All right, love.’ He walked to the desk beside the window and laid his hands on her shoulders. ‘How about if we put Richard upstairs in the dressing-room on a single, and Meggy down here on the sofa-bed, and –’

‘
And?
’

‘And remind the pair of them that the fifth stair from the top creaks.’

‘But of course! Why didn’t I think of that!’

‘Fine. Then the sleeping arrangements are settled, can we take it?’

‘All settled.’ She lifted her face for his kiss. ‘I can manage now, thanks, though who thought up this stupid shindig I’d dearly like to know.’

‘If I remember rightly,’ Jonty settled himself in his chair again, ‘it was your idea entirely. “Into my seventieth year,” you said. “No age at all! Let’s push the boat out! Let’s have all the family!”’

‘Then I must have been quite mad. Such a houseful,
and
Kath and Marco. Hasn’t it gone quickly? Forty-five years married, I mean, and me getting on for seventy and you –’

‘Seventy-four,’ he supplied, comfortably.

Seventy-four. And Kath and Marco around the same age. Pity those two never had a family. They’d have made such beautiful children together, Roz sighed. But they’d been godparents to Young Jon and had claimed a share in all the others. Anyway, Kath always said they’d been so incredibly happy she couldn’t expect to have it all ways.

‘We’ll be inviting Arnie, of course.’ She added Mr and Mrs A. W. Bagley to the list. ‘To the dinner, I mean.’

‘Darling.’ Jonty lowered his paper. ‘Don’t you think you should try to call him by his proper name? After all, the manager of one of the biggest banks in North Yorkshire isn’t an
Arnie.
By the way, he’ll be retiring next year, he told me.’

Arnie retiring? Oh my goodness, Roz fretted silently. And Mat and Grace and Polly all with Gran, and the Fairchilds gone for all time. They were the Ramsdens of Ridings now. Roz had not kept up the Fairchild name; had not wanted it to be added to Jonty’s, when they married. She hadn’t even added it as an extra Christian name for either of the boys. The Fairchilds had left Ridings and the curse with them, if curse there’d been. Home Farm and Ridings made up one big estate now, the farm men and their families living in the gate lodges and Ridings a happy old ruin, so very much blessed.

Jonty raised his paper again, thinking about that long-ago evacuee and how quickly forty-five years of being with Roz had passed. He thought about all the lonely years of loving her and wanting her; five years of watching every word he said; every glance. Being careful not to touch her or love her with his eyes, even. Five years of waiting until the day the tension inside him snapped and he’d taken her into his arms and kissed her; kissed her very thoroughly. She had stiffened, briefly, then relaxed against him and the explosion of anger he expected hadn’t come.

‘Sorry,’ he’d said, tight-lipped, but she’d smiled very gently and said, ‘Don’t be.’ Said it softly as if she were as bemused as he was at the start of their loving. Five years after Paul, that had been.

He folded the paper with a crackle and laid it aside, ran his fingers through his hair before he said, ‘Do you still remember him – Paul, I mean? Do you ever think about him, Roz?’

Paul. Her first love. She took off her glasses and laid them on the desk, and her pen beside them. She did it slowly, to give herself time to think, very carefully, about what her answer would be. Then, because she was Roz who was still frank and told the truth without fear or favour, she said, ‘Yes. I still think about him.’ She pushed back her chair and walked to where he sat. Then, dropping to her knees in front of him, taking his hands in hers, she whispered, ‘And I care for him, still. When something from the past jogs my memory; when someone talks about the old days and the way it used to be, I remember him, and I’m nineteen again.’

Times when I wander through the watermeadows or walk beneath Micklegate Bar and see the bed-and-breakfast house, I hear his voice. It comes to me still, a whisper on the wind. And it’s a gentle wind, like a summer breeze. It touches my face briefly, then it’s gone
…

‘And you wouldn’t have it any other way, Jonty, because if I had loved you wildly and without reason and for a little time I’d carried your child, would you have wanted me to forget
you
?’

‘So a woman can love twice, Roz?’ There was pain in his eyes as he asked it. ‘Are you saying you loved me wildly and without reason when we made our children?’

‘No, love, I’m not.’ She thought a while, then murmured, ‘Do you know that when I was expecting Martin I used to wonder if I could ever love him as much as I loved Young Jon. It worried me, till he was born, and then I found I loved him every bit as much, but differently. All five of them were the same. And none of them planned.’ She lifted his hand and placed a kiss in its upturned palm. ‘They all just came – two sons and three daughters, all made with
our
love. And remember that you and I have always had a tomorrow. Paul and I didn’t.’