Alice's Girls (22 page)

Rose’s curiosity brought Alice’s dilemma into sharper focus than she welcomed. The time was approaching when she could no longer avoid the difficult decision she was being forced to address. She had no doubts now about Roger. On every level their relationship was strengthening. Their intimacy was intensely satisfying, their trust absolute. She shared many of his opinions, and where she did not, enjoyed the way he debated, putting forward his own views and evaluating hers. She loved him. There was no doubt of that. She adored him. But she had adored James. She had fallen in love with him and married him. For years they had been happy. Or was it merely happy enough? Had she, in those early years of her marriage, felt as confident and as easy and as valued with James as she now felt with Roger? Hadn’t there always been something in her relationship with James that produced a small, cool area of uncertainty? And didn’t that uncertainty have something to do with James always being so much in charge of everything? Always controlling. Always making the decisions and managing their lives, hers, his and Edward John’s? When, in 1937, their son was four years old and she wanted another child, James had vetoed the idea on the grounds that with a war looming it would not be prudent. In 1943, when their house was bombed, Alice had been overruled when she wanted to rent somewhere safer but still close enough for James to reach his work at the Air Ministry and where the family could remain together. But James had moved his wife and nine-year-old son to Devonshire where he had
virtually abandoned them in favour of the young woman who eventually became his second wife.

This damage to Alice’s self-esteem was huge and her initial reaction had been to protect herself – by becoming independent – from ever again being exposed to a similar experience. She had achieved this, and for more than two years now had provided for herself and her son. She had discovered and developed a skill which was about to provide her with a healthy income. She already made her own decisions. She could soon have her own home and the same self-determination that many educated, intelligent, modern women wanted and were increasingly achieving. She would, in fact, be like her friend Ruth. Ruth. Smart, successful and alone. But did she want to be like Ruth? Did she want, for instance, to put her own ambitions before the happiness of her son, who dreaded the prospect of life in London? Did she want to see Roger’s face when she told him she was withdrawing from his life? That she was rejecting him and everything he was offering to share with her? Did she want to continue to be alone? If only something would happen to show her which decision was the right one. Although she was not a religious woman she went, one quiet afternoon, and knelt in Ledburton church for half an hour, asking for guidance. But she had received no sign. No shaft of light illuminating an appropriate text or drawing attention to one or another of the saints. What was she expecting? A challenging glance from the Archangel Gabriel? A knowing smile from Lucifer? A
look of mild reproach from the Virgin Mother?

She returned to the hostel where, before long, Rose’s voice demanded her attention and focused her thoughts.

‘Think you’ll enjoy life in London, do you, Alice? Wouldn’t catch me movin’ there! All them ’ouses an’ folk pushin’ and shovin’! Ferdie Vallance couldn’t get back quick enough that time ’e went up there for to fetch ’is Mabel ’ome! What a to-do that were! Still, it’s what you’m used to, I daresay. You’m used to London town and we be used to Post Stone valley!’

‘I’ve become quite used to Post Stone valley myself, Rose. And Edward John loves it here.’ For a while Rose looked at her in silence. Then she sighed.

‘Well, I daresay you could stay here if you ’as a mind to. You knows what I means, Alice, dear … but I’ll not pry no further into something as bain’t my business …’ She got to her feet and began to move towards the kitchen door. ‘And it’s time I was thinkin’ about getting my Dave’s dinner started. Such an appetite that boy’s got, you wouldn’t believe. Even though he be still pinin’ for ’is Hester.’

Alice sat for a while, staring out through the open door into the familiar yard. At the still, afternoon light and the soft shadows of late July. But she had to choose. She must make this huge decision. For Roger. For Edward John. And for herself.

Since Hester had been released from the Land Army and returned, widowed and pregnant, to the Tucker
smallholding on the north side of the moor, the state of the run-down property had, like her father’s health, continued to deteriorate. While he lay, stripped of mobility, his useless limbs wasting, his wife’s time and energy consumed by nursing him, Hester contrived to sell enough produce to feed them all. Each week, while her mother minded the eight-month-old Thurza, Hester would fill punnets with the fruit from the overgrown patch of strawberries, raspberry canes and blackcurrant bushes, hitch a ride into Bideford, and return with the few groceries that the money from the fruit had bought.

The Tuckers lived on eggs from their underfed hens, the milk of two ageing nanny goats, and stews made from the rabbits Hester trapped and simmered with stringy turnips, carrots and parsnips which had self-seeded in the neglected and stony soil. There was no chopped wood for the copper or the bath tub, so their bedlinen and their clothes were rarely laundered and their bodies seldom washed.

While Hester struggled to keep Thurza safe, clean and fed, her mind drifted over the events that had brought her to this situation. Although she mourned Reuben and was aware that, should she choose to, she could make the journey to his parents’ home in Bismarck, North Dakota, and raise his daughter there, something restrained her, preventing her from seeing this as an obvious and perhaps even happy solution. She was unable to banish from her mind her father’s harsh denunciation of her disobedience to him when he had forbidden her marriage to Reuben
and cursed her with eternal damnation for flouting the rules of his own, fanatical convictions, convincing her that tragedy and pestilence would, in consequence, strike her and all those close to her. Reuben’s subsequent death, Dave Crocker’s injury and the onset of her father’s sickness had persuaded Hester to believe in this curse.

Although the US military authorities delivered to her post office savings account the widow’s pension to which she was entitled, she had left the money untouched, regarding it as the ill-gotten evidence – in her father’s eyes – of her fall from grace.

Running parallel with this conviction, Hester also had a subconscious and unexplored sense of guilt involving Dave Crocker. There had been, she now sensed, something in her relationship with Dave that was inappropriate to a young girl engaged to marry someone else. Dave had been, she had persuaded herself at the time, more like a brother to her than a potential suitor. Yes, he had danced with her, taken her tobogganing, even admired the engagement ring Reuben had put onto her finger on the night of the Christmas party, but that had been innocent fun, hadn’t it? Or was it something more? Something which, despite enjoying it and even being curiously excited by it, she had chosen to ignore? And was it, perhaps, this sensation of possible guilt, rather than her father’s curse, that had made her unable to accept Dave when, last summer, in the cider orchard, he had proposed marriage to her, possibly too soon after Reuben’s death? She had rejected him then, not
because she found him unattractive or did not believe he would prove a good father to the child she was carrying, but because of a sense of betrayal where her dead husband was concerned. Even six months later, with Reuben’s baby safely born, when Dave had sent the child a dolly for Christmas and Hester a letter, repeating his commitment to the two of them, she could not bring herself to answer him. Now the months were passing and time, for Hester, was nothing more nor less than a succession of days spent in an unremitting and exhausting sequence of work, her only reward the smiles of the little girl who so closely resembled her.

Then, one day, not long after the war in Europe ended, a lorry hesitated at the Tuckers’ gate and someone climbed down from its cab, waved his thanks to the driver and approached the cottage.

Hester, from the distance of the strawberry patch, did not at first recognise him. He was taller and more robust than she remembered. The army greatcoat, discarded by a demobbed soldier he had met on the train from Cardiff and a size too large for him, added to the impression of grown manliness.

‘Zeke!’ she exclaimed, and Thurza, from her pram, waved her arms and shouted her own greeting to this interesting stranger.

He approached the two of them, kissed his sister, bent down to acquaint himself with the smiling baby and enquired, although he knew, ‘Who be this, then?’

‘’Tis Thurza,’ Hester told him. ‘Me daughter!’

‘That’s easy to see!’ he laughed. ‘With that ’air and those eyes she couldn’t but be yorn, Hes!’

They went into the cottage and Hester was pouring boiling water into the teapot when their mother came down the stairs from their father’s bedside. Zeke stood to kiss her cold cheek.

‘Father bain’t no better, then?’ he asked her.

‘No,’ she told him, glancing briefly at her daughter, ‘nor likely to be.’ She looked Zeke up and down. ‘Army finished with you, then, ’ave they?’

‘Yes, Ma. ’Tweren’t the army proper, though. Just coal minin’. Bevin Boys they calls us. Got demobbed early, ’cos of Father bein’ sick.’ He paused, glancing at her bleak face, before continuing. ‘So’s I could come ’ome to see what I can do to ’elp out ’ere.’

Hester looked carefully at her brother. At the familiar, bony head with eyes slightly too closely set, nose too sharp and lips too thin for him to be considered handsome. But there was something different about him now, a confidence which Hester saw her mother register and perceive as a potential threat.

‘Drink your tea, Ezekiel,’ his mother told him. ‘Then you’d best come upstairs and see your father. ’E’ll want to know about the money.’

‘What money, Ma?’

‘What you’ve earned, son. And the gratuity the army gives out to soldiers when they’m discharged. He’ll be
needin’ that, your father. For ’is church.’ She eyed her son firmly, poured tea into a chipped cup, added milk and, moving carefully, went to the stairs and up them.

Zeke sipped his tea. Hester felt the scrutiny of his narrowed eyes and became conscious of her soiled dress, scuffed shoes, broken fingernails and unwashed hair.

‘You’m lettin’ yourself go a bit, Hes, aren’t you?’ he asked her, not unkindly. ‘I never seen you like this afore, and when you was down with them land girls, you—’

‘Cut me ’air and wore coloured frocks! Yeah, I did, Zeke! An’ you come pokin’ your nose in and then went runnin’ off ’ome, tittle-tattlin’ to our father. Tellin’ ’im I’d gone to the devil!’ He dropped his eyes.

‘Yes, I did do that, Hes, and I’m truly sorry for it! In them days I did as Father said without question. But you was braver than I was. You stood up to ’im and Ma and you wed your fella.’ He searched her face and saw the shadows under her eyes and the pale skin, drawn thin over the delicate bones. He saw how much older and more careworn she had become since he had last seen her. ‘So what’s goin’ on, Hes?’ he asked her. ‘Why don’t you go to America, to your in-laws there? I thought that’s what you was gonna do. Or what about that Dave Crocker down to Post Stone as fancied you? Or don’t ’e care for ee no more?’

‘’Ow could I leave ’ere, Zeke?’ she rounded on him sharply, avoiding his question. ‘With Father that poorly he can’t so much as stand no more? And Ma worn out with
carin’ for ’im? It’s all I can do to keep us fed, without doin’ washin’ and ironin’, brushin’ me ’air and worryin’ ’bout what I looks like!’

As Hester spoke she felt a curious sensation of relief. Her brother had come home. There were two of them now. And he, who seemed to be no longer simply their father’s censorious acolyte, was regarding her with something close to affection showing in his sharp, sensitive face. Their mother was calling to them from the top of the steep stairwell.

‘Your father says as you’m to come upstairs, Ezekiel. Now this minute, he says! And you’re to bring your sister.’

Zeke had not seen his father since the first symptoms of his illness had been revealing themselves. Then, he had been stumbling, misjudging steps, dropping tools, lurching into walls. Tests were carried out. Doctors gave him a name for his disease and told him that nothing could be done to cure it. Since Zeke’s last visit Jonas’s body had given up its useless struggle to resist the relentless progress of the paralysis that had overwhelmed it, and now he lay in his bed more a carcass than a man. Both his nightshirt and his bed sheets were stained where gruel had dripped from the spoon with which his wife fed him. His hair was lank and his beard straggled from the sharp bones of his jaw. His huge, useless hands lay occasionally plucking at the soiled sheet. His skin had an odd sheen to it. An unhealthy iridescence, as though he was made of melting wax. He was,
Zeke realised, almost unrecognisable. Except for his eyes. They were as terrible now as they had always been. They had scared Zeke as an infant, threatened him as a growing lad and bullied him through his adolescence. During those years Zeke had accepted this. Both Jonas’s children had been reared to fear their father and had seen their mother constantly defer to him. They had experienced no other relationship between a father and a son, a father and a daughter or a husband and a wife. They had watched their father rant. Not only when he preached to his intimidated congregation but at the flinching subordinates who acted as officers within the hierarchy of his church. Neither Zeke nor Hester had ever witnessed any resistance to Jonas’s will. They were unaware that other fathers did not make their children cower or that the penalty, in most families, for failure to instantly obey did not result in a torrent of uncontrolled verbal and physical abuse, until submission was absolute.

As Zeke reached the foot of his father’s bed and stood, regarding the wreckage of this once powerful man and met the eyes that were locking onto his, he experienced a familiar sense of weakness which began to sap his energy. His father’s eyes, blazing in the sallow mask of his face, were once more overwhelming him. All the potency of the sick man seemed to have sited itself in these two glowering orbs, turning them into one unassailable source of energy from which Jonas would continue to dominate and terrorise. Zeke felt his mind being penetrated, dissolving
under the familiar and irresistible dominance which was being exerted over him by all that remained of the man who lay, otherwise helpless, in a bed odorous with the stench of his sickness.