Mad Joy (10 page)

‘No. Please. Leave me alone.’

‘I’m so sorry.’ He came to an abrupt halt, and so did I. We looked at each other, and then at the ground. ‘I don’t think you enjoyed this evening, did you?’ I said nothing. ‘It was my fault. I’m not very … I’m not exactly … I’m sorry.’

I remained silent, but I didn’t walk away either. I realized he might take this as some sort of expectation on my part of something more, but I was panicking in my head with the words I needed to say.

‘You don’t say much,’ he said at last.

‘That would be because I’m just a scummy old country bumpkin, I expect.’

I have to hand it to him, he looked bewildered, and he managed it quite well. But I wasn’t going to let him off the hook that easily. ‘And just so’s you know, I’ve never been so humiliated in all my life – not by
anyone
. And you can keep your posh car and your big house and your flash fancy dress …’ I didn’t know what to say next and my voice was beginning to falter. ‘I’ve never had such a
crap
evening in all my life – even for a grubby little village girl!’ And then the sobs came, and I couldn’t hold them back, and I ran full pelt to our front door and let myself in without looking back.

When I was sure he had gone, I took off the dress, slipped on my ordinary shoes and coat and crossed the road to the fountain. Then I opened the gate to the field and headed for the woods.

As soon as I felt the springy woodland floor under my feet I relaxed. When I was a child I thought the branches of trees were arms, and I climbed up now into a small beech, and lay full length on its low outstretched branch. The bark pressed into the flesh at my knees and thighs and ribs and breasts. If I spread my weight carefully it didn’t hurt, but pricked my skin gently and made me feel alive. I lay there for hours, trying not to remember. The moon cast thick shadows in the undergrowth. Drifts of wild garlic shone white in its glow. I loved the smell of it. It was the reek of early summer, the promise of things to come.

I lay in the arms of the beech tree until the moon vanished, and the first band of peach gleamed through the dark leaves. Then I went home, printed in bark.

‘I was twenty-four when I fell in love with Howard Buckleigh,’ Gracie said. ‘We were coming from opposite directions on Three Cross Lane and our bicycles collided.’

I had been lying on the bed for most of the morning, and now I turned my blotchy face to her.

‘He hadn’t done much cycling before – he wasn’t very good. And he was very young … I think he was … nineteen … yes, nineteen

She had sat down beside me, but she wasn’t looking at me. She was gazing at her knees, and out of the window, and at her knees again. ‘He hadn’t quite got the hang of the bike, you see.’ She smiled at the rug by the bed. ‘Told me he had never been in love before he met me, and that he would never be again – not with anyone else.’

‘And was he?’

Slowly and carefully, she brushed some imaginary dust from her pinny. ‘He married Rosamund Buckleigh.’

I got up on my elbow. ‘I know that. He broke his promise, then?’

Gracie raised her eyebrows speculatively at the dressing table. ‘I suppose … I …’

I sat up and reached my hand to hers. ‘Did he court you then?
Did he take you home? Were there parties? Oh, Gracie – you never said – why didn’t you ever say?’

She let out a long sigh. ‘We walked out a good few times. This first time Mum and Dad were pleased as punch – told everyone, they did. And he did take me home – just the once – and I don’t think I was approved of. They wanted someone with money, see, so’s they wouldn’t have to sell off any more land. But Howard, he didn’t care tuppence what they thought, he was going to wait till he was twenty-one and marry me anyway.’

‘So Celia’s mother came along and spoilt it all?’

‘No. That was much later. No … my father took it into his head that Howard was up to no good. You couldn’t go walking out with someone above your station in those days without a proposal in the offing. It looked bad. It looked like he was just after his wicked way and that. ’Specially as he couldn’t take me anywhere where we’d see his family or his family’s friends, so it all got more and more secret. First his father banned him from seeing me, and my father said that was that, I should stop thinking about him because it wasn’t going to happen, and I wasn’t getting any younger, and if I waited for him to come of age I’d be an old spinster of twenty-seven, and who’d want me then if old Buckleigh still said no, and I said he couldn’t stop us then, and he said he could, just you wait and see, and we did.’

‘What …?’

‘We waited. We met in secret for two and a half years. We used to go for long walks in the hills over towards
Sheepscombe
. We had picnics down by Damsel’s Cross – no one to bother us but a few cows, and the trickling of that lovely stream … Oh … and in the winter we used to go to a cottage – one that belonged to the Buckleighs years ago but the retainer had died. It was all musty and damp. But we’d light a fire – we didn’t mind – we were young … we loved each other, see, we couldn’t feel the cold!’ She chuckled.

‘It’s so romantic –
Gracie
! Go on then …’

‘I can’t. I need a cup of tea, and so do you.’

She wouldn’t say another word until we were both by the range with the kettle on, and her with her knitting safely on her lap.

‘Well, he turned twenty-one at last, and went to his father for his inheritance, so’s he could buy the ring and all. Well, his father says no, you shan’t have a penny, not if you’re going to marry some trumped-up village girl. So Howard said he would marry me anyway, money or no, and his father said he would cut him out of his will. Well, Howard, he loved that house, you know. He loved all the land around as well—’

‘So he gave in?’

‘No. No. He said to me, Gracie my darling, I shall have to go and earn some money of my own. And off he went to Africa for two years. He asked me to go with him, but I said I couldn’t leave Mother and Father, and how could I? I was all they had, and they didn’t know I was still seeing him, and what would I do in Africa? So he went, and promised he’d be back.’

‘And he came back with her?’

‘No. No, he came back six years later. Only it seemed to me at the time he never came back. After two years I lost all hope. But then, see, it was the Great War, and I heard much later he’d joined up, and then I heard nothing, till I got some letters from Africa so old they could be misleading, and one long letter from the Dardanelles saying he knew I may not get the letter but congratulations anyway. Well, I just thought someone’s told him I’m married so I wrote to him, but I never heard another thing, and I just thought he’s dead, I thought, he’s died like all the rest of them, sent headlong into it, a number chalked up and rubbed out. I was sure of it. Until the end of the war, when he was twenty-seven and I was thirty-three and his father was dead. I heard he was up there, at the house, a broken man after
the war. And I heard he was engaged to Rosamund
Longly-Howes
, some posh girl his mother had brought down from London with a nice fortune. He’d been home two months and no one told me.’

She came to the end of a row and swapped needles. I sat thoughtfully for a moment, watching the teapot and waiting for it to brew. ‘What did he think when he saw you after?’

‘He keeps himself to himself. I only saw him properly the once. I was outside the post office and he was walking past with his dog – he had a big dog then, not that little yappy one. And he just stopped, and he stared at me as if he’d seen a ghost. And I said hello, and he said Gracie, Gracie, where are you living now, and I told him, and he touched my arm and then a car-horn went and it was his wife further down the street, and he said he was sorry, and I often wonder, sorry for what?’

‘Well! That’s obvious, isn’t it?’

‘Is it? Perhaps he was just sorry he had to dash.’

‘Oh, Gracie!’ The tea was stewed. ‘I’m sorry … oh, Gracie!’

She poured the tea.

‘And there was the couple of times he came round here.’

‘It
was
him, then!’

We sat quietly some time after that, Gracie’s needles clicking, waiting for the kettle to rumble again. Digger, the cat, who had been listening from the rug, came and sat on my lap.

‘Howard the Coward, then,’ I said at last.

She slipped a stitch over and knitted two together. ‘No one who fought in that war for four years was a coward.’

‘No … A coward in love, then.’

She finished counting the stitches on her row, and raised her eyebrows as if to say ‘Maybe.’

‘His mother had been told I was already married.’

‘Who by?’

She didn’t look up. ‘My father.’

Then she put her knitting down and looked up at the empty space on the mantel where the shepherdess had once stood. ‘I only heard when you were eleven, the second time he came round.’

You might say that there were no secrets in Woodside.
Everyone
knew the tiniest details of each other’s lives – stumbling over them rather than digging them out. In our close-packed village life it was hard not to. And the secrets that remained were colossal ones, life-changing, awful secrets so deeply buried by necessity. To come across one of these was a dangerous event.

My failed date with James Buckleigh could not qualify as a major secret, and by the following morning the entire Mustoe family were sympathizing. Robert showed a particular concern, so much so that he asked me if I should like to go with him to the pictures at the weekend. I wasn’t used to being asked out, so I didn’t know how to say no. I said it was kind of him, and then felt cornered, because I knew by the way he was looking at my breasts it was not kind of him at all, but I wanted to think it was.

There then followed a series of dates, dotted throughout the autumn, at times when my resolve was weak and crumpled by his determination. I think other girls in the village were quite envious, for he had grown into a very handsome young man,
and I was even quite proud to be seen out with him, but I couldn’t help a desire to repel him any time he came too close. I wondered if I was incapable of loving a man, if something had made me like this. I tried to make myself dream of being taken by Robert, of being made love to somewhere dark and wild in the hills, but I always had to transform him into someone who wasn’t quite Robert for me to feel the lust that was beginning to overwhelm my private thoughts from time to time.

I let him kiss me because I didn’t know how to stop him without making him feel ridiculous. And when he came close his smell was strong and sweet but so utterly pitiless I felt stifled by it. It was perfume for someone but not for me. As he approached I would try to breathe in and appreciate its deep musty undertones of pine from the wood yard, but by the time his arms went around me, my breathing would be scuppered and I would go under like the
Titanic
, submerged in the ruthlessness of his scent.

One day, as I was trying to fend him off for good, he said something interesting. We were sitting on a bench outside the pub; he was sipping a pint and I had a lemonade. He said he bet James wasn’t as good a kisser as he was, and I said James hadn’t kissed me. Fuelled by this news, he went on to insult both James and Celia, and called them both bastards.

‘That’s a bit strong,’ I said.

‘But they are – didn’t you know?’

‘What?’

‘Bastards. Or at least, not exactly, but neither of ’em’s legal – Howard Buckleigh didn’t father either of ’em.’

He could see I was interested, so he went on, perhaps further than he intended, no doubt hoping the information would get him inside my petticoat. ‘Ever wondered about yourself, then?’

I frowned. ‘I’m not illegitimate.’

He gave the slightest of smiles. ‘Who
are
your parents, then?’

With complete ease, I reeled off the story Gracie had
concocted 
on our behalf, about being her second cousin’s
orphaned
child.

That little smile again. I hated him for it. I felt I was teetering on the edge of something, and held on to the bench for support.

‘But you know Gracie had a long affair with Howard Buckleigh. His wife goes off and has affairs with other men. Saddled with a wife he doesn’t love; he still loves Gracie. What would
you
do?’

‘What d’you mean?’

‘Well …’ He put his hand over mine on my knee. ‘Isn’t it obvious? I reckon you’re the rightful heir to the Buckleigh estate, old girl.’

I pulled my hand away and stood up. ‘That’s wicked! It’s rubbish. Who else thinks this? Who else’ve you told this load of tripe to?’

I marched off home on my own, with him following for a bit, but I was saved by Mr Bearpark walking down the road with his bike, and wanting to tell me about its new tyres. Robert scratched his head and went back to the pub for another pint.

I can’t say I didn’t consider what he’d said. I started thinking back to when I’d first arrived, and I remembered Howard, the gentleman who’d come to see Gracie, and seemed to think I was his to look after. But then I thought back further, beyond Nipper and beyond the woods, and the things I saw were so alien to either Gracie’s home or the Buckleigh home, that I was certain it could not be true. And as soon as these images came to me I dropped them, and they pinged away from me as if on elastic, and away from me was where I wanted them to stay.

I grew to be so resilient to Robert’s approaches that, short of committing a crime, he was forced to give up. Throughout
1938 and 1939 I saw little of him in a romantic sense, and I heard that he’d gone all the way with Spit and although Spit denied it, they were pretty much an item. I still saw him, of course, because he lived next door, and whenever he looked at me his face seemed to say that, one way or another, he would have me one day.

By the time war broke out I was nineteen and ready for a change. My dogged desire for stasis underwent a little tweak, and then another. At the pictures every week we saw girls being sung to, driven in open-topped cars, or pushed up against trees and kissed. They sipped wine, wore jewellery, screamed and cried, and slapped men’s faces. They were worldly, confident and romantic, and wonderful things happened to them. It all seemed to be part of that glorious, terrifying and breathtaking thing that looms when you are young: the future. And Mo and I couldn’t help but want a taste of it.

We both signed up for the WAAF, did our six weeks’ training, and were stationed at a nearby airbase. I was
immediately
homesick for Gracie, but the presence of Mo and the excitement of the noise of the planes, the young men in their bomber jackets, the unknown outcome of each day, acted like a magnet to draw me in. I told myself I could go at any time, go home to Gracie and resume work on the sewing machine, and that helped me to endure the freezing huts we had to live in like prisoners of war, and the food which was tasteless and always cold.

The hardest thing of all was the sleeping arrangements. Not only was there no warm mass to cup me in her lap, but there
were two rows of iron-framed camp beds: cold, institutional, they made me want to run away on my first day.

But on Saturday nights we had ‘socials’, and these made it clear we weren’t imprisoned. For soon Mo and I and the rest of the girls could hardly move for flirtatious men. We sipped beer, sometimes, like the women in the movies (although not wine), we danced (although not in sequins), and we drove (only we were at the wheel, and they were trucks). It was a huge transformation from the country shop and girls of Woodside, and what we put up with in regulations and hardships was more than made up for in the long-awaited spreading of our wings.

In 1939 we were pretty much all home for Christmas. The usual Boxing Day hunt took place, and lots of us gathered outside the pub for the mummers’ play. Mr Mustoe played St George, and Mr Rollins played the dragon, like every year since I could
remember
. Robert had taken to playing a concertina which his father had forsaken a week after purchasing it, and even George (who was thirteen by now) had a small part. Along with several other villagers they were blackened up with boot polish and wore clothes covered in tiny tags of coloured cloth.

Mo and I had travelled down together, and were a little disappointed to see so many people in full uniform: only our hats, navy knickers and skirts had arrived and the skirts had had to be sent back because of poor stitching. When we got to the pub in Woodside we weren’t able to show off our new status in the world, because we were in mufti except for our hats.

Robert spotted us immediately. He came over and I knew he was going to kiss us both and leave a black smudge on our cheeks. ‘S’good luck!’ he said as he did just that, and he said as much every year. ‘You needn’t think I’m going to salute you, just ’cause you’re wearing them caps.’

I laughed, and Mo nudged me and nodded towards a posse of hunters. There, in full RAF officer uniform, was James
Buckleigh
; on his arm was a young woman with a fur collar. I felt a sharp heat in my face and glanced away, back at Robert, who had followed my eyes.

‘Bloody show-off. You wait till I join up after Christmas. You won’t see me parading around in my uniform on leave. ’S if he hasn’t got anything else to wear …’ He was talking loudly, and I felt uncomfortable. I knew you had to wear uniform on leave. I didn’t care who James Buckleigh was with, but I certainly didn’t want him to think he was the object of our conversation. ‘I’ll get you two soldiers a drink then, shall I?’ said Robert, and disappeared into the pub doorway. I was relieved he had gone, but it was too late. James had spotted us. He left his group and came over.

‘Joy, isn’t it?’

‘Yes … hello.’

He smiled. He wafted over me: woodsmoke and woollen serge and leather, and a hint of that smell from his enchanted room all those years ago. ‘Did you have a good Christmas?’

‘Yes … thank you.’ There was an awkward silence.

‘Not hunting yourself, then?’ I asked.

‘No. I don’t hunt.’

I couldn’t look him in the eye, but I was conscious he was looking at me.

‘And this must be …’ He was smiling at Mo, and she was smiling back.

‘Oh! Mo – this is my friend Mo,’ and then (because I was flustered and angry and showing off to Mo) I added, ‘another grubby little village girl.’

Mo’s face crumpled, and she turned such a frown on me I instantly wished the phrase unsaid. But just as I was wondering how to redress things and catching a glimpse of James
Buckleigh’
s 
disconcerted eyes, Robert came up with two steaming mugs of punch.

‘There you go – ooh! I see you’re being chatted up by the lord of the manor – or should I say, the “pretender”?’ He was loud, he was awful, he had been drinking since the pub opened.

James Buckleigh looked aghast. ‘What do you mean?’

Robert was a loose cannon. ‘You know what I mean.’ He tapped the side of his nose. ‘I know there’s something dodgy about your parentage.’

I saw James Buckleigh’s cheeks harden as he clenched his jaw. He opened his nostrils like an animal smelling danger. His eyes narrowed, he turned his head very, very slowly, but just a fraction, to face Robert full on.

‘I ought to knock your block off, you bastard!’

‘Bastard, eh? I think we know who the bastard is around here, don’t we? What’s the matter?
Ashamed
of your real father, are you?’

I could feel Buckleigh’s anger come off him like a heat. He gave me a quick punishing glance and I shuddered. He spoke slowly.

‘I am very, very proud of my father.’

People from the hunting crowd looked over, and the young fur-collared woman came over and held on to his arm. ‘Come on, James, you don’t need to get involved with this lot.’

‘This lot?’ said Robert, heading for he didn’t know where. ‘I’ll ’ave you know I’ll be fighting for you, lady, after Christmas, I’ll be—’

‘Well, you’ll have to salute James, then. He’s an officer, you know. Or perhaps you hadn’t noticed.’ She brought with her a sickly cloud of sweet violet. ‘You’ll jolly well have to salute him
then
.’

As she steered Buckleigh away, he turned and said, through gritted teeth, ‘I’ll look forward to it.’ Then he caught my eye, and scowled. ‘And your face
is
grubby.’

I couldn’t breathe. It felt as though all the oxygen in all the world had been turned off. There was a rush in my head and my ears started to pound. All the noises started to swim together. Robert was very close saying something about fuckers with beery breath and I pushed him away. Mo was saying to me, ‘Well … you asked for that one!’ in a false cheery voice. Some music started up. I drank my hot drink hurriedly and scurried home.

It was quite some time later, when I undressed for bed, that I saw myself in the dressing-table mirror. Right along my left cheek was a dark black smudge of boot polish.