Mad Joy (11 page)

The following day I rose early and rinsed some clothes in the copper, for I was leaving in the afternoon on the four o’clock train. There was a ferocious wind which would dry them quickly, and if I boiled my rags there would be plenty of time to dry them over the range. All the colour seemed to have drained from Woodside and I felt numb. When I pegged things out I saw what a state the back garden had grown into, and promised Gracie I would sort it out before I went back.

‘Don’t waste time on that, sweetheart – I’d rather spend time with you.’

‘I’ll only be a moment!’

‘But it’s so precious this time.’

‘I’ll be five minutes.’

‘You’ll get filthy – spoil your nice shoes an’ all.’

I stuck on some old hobnail boots of her father’s and his old coat from under the stairs, and I clumped out the back to sort things out.

The sheep on the hillside were ragged and grey. Heads down against the wind, round-bellied and slow-moving, they dreamed of being penned in for lambing in the months ahead.

I breathed smoke. My bare legs were bloodless with cold. The leaves we hadn’t raked up in the autumn had formed a brown
mulch between the vegetable patches, and most of the cabbages had been eaten to shreds. I squelched along the rows, collecting dead vegetables and throwing them on the compost heap. Some had great gooey brown roots that slopped against my clothes and legs. The wind flattened my hair on to my face. I thought about the day before and replayed the scene outside the pub in as many different ways as I could. But even if Robert hadn’t kissed me, even if no rude words had been exchanged, even if I hadn’t been anywhere near the incident, even then, even then James Buckleigh would still have been with that fur woman. Not that I cared in the slightest, except that it completely denied the slim hope I had entertained that he might just be different from that whole blinkered, self-absorbed, self-perpetuating (I threw cabbages with each adjective, as if they were rolling heads) set of posh, selfish, patronizing … not that it was a hope even – he had claimed to be different. And if he hadn’t pretended to be different I would’ve gone to the party that time and I would’ve seen what they were all like and I would’ve forgotten him completely instead of having to remember being carried through the streets on a summer’s night with no words spoken and his wretched, wretched, wretched –

‘Joy! Joy! Someone to see you

Gracie’s face at the back door spelt alarm. I clumped inside, wiped my hobnails on the mat, and went into the parlour, my skirt full of root vegetables and a sulphurous-smelling cabbage and exposing my cold pink legs to the thighs, my hair over my eyes and sticking out like a ragdoll, my fingernails clotted with mud. I don’t know why I was surprised it was him: I was dressed for the part.

‘Hello,’ said James Buckleigh, with a slight smile. ‘I apologize for the intrusion…’ He held out his hand, and I let the vegetables down clumsily and held out a cold earthy hand. To his credit, he took it. ‘I’m so sorry, I … I wanted to see Robert, actually. I have to see him urgently. Only I didn’t know where he lived.’

‘Robert? He’s next door. I don’t know if he’ll want to see you, though.’

‘I know. That’s why I’ve brought Bee – Beatrice. She’s in the car. To show him I’m not on an aggressive mission. You see—’

Gracie, who had been biting her nails, suddenly piped up: ‘Oooh! You’re not leaving your young lady up in the car, are you? Bring her in for goodness’ sake – it’s freezing out there.’ And before either of us could say anything she was out of the front door cajoling the unwilling fur lady into our parlour.

‘Come and warm yourself by the fire,’ she was saying, and Beatrice took in our parlour with a strange look on her face.

‘Isn’t it … sweet!’ she exclaimed. Then she looked around like a child who has seen snow for the first time at the exact moment that a dog relieves himself on it. Her eyes lifted up to the bar above the range, and my five muslin rags hanging over it. Despite boiling they still had faint menstrual stains on them. Seeing her look of repugnance I hurled myself at them and pulled them down, wiping my grimy hands on them.

‘For gardening!’ I panted. ‘Thank heavens for my gardening rags!’ Although I was angry because I would have no time to wash and dry them again before I left, I was also strangely relieved because it seemed there could be no worse depths to my humiliation, and it must at last be over. Perhaps, like Mr Mustoe with the rabbit, she would now fetch a large stone and club me over the head with it. I was unsavable.

‘Would you like me to take you round to Robert?’ I asked.

‘I was hoping you might.’

I clumped past them both in my hobnails, pulled Granddad Burrows’ coat more tightly around me, and stepped out of our front door into the chill wind.

Mr Mustoe was squawking away at the battered old cello he’d procured for Christmas. George and Eileen, their youngest,
were playing marbles in front of the fire. Mrs Mustoe and Tilly were in the back kitchen cooking, Mo was ironing her blouse for the journey, and Robert, hungover, was reading a
Dandy
. They barely looked up when I went in, except Robert who admired the boots. Then there was pandemonium as they spotted the visitors behind me. The girls rushed about trying to tidy things (a vain hope in the Mustoe house), the children gaped, Robert sprang to his feet and Mr Mustoe practically saluted, standing proudly next to his instrument.

‘I’m so sorry to intrude,’ said James Buckleigh again, ‘but I wanted to apologize for my behaviour yesterday—’

‘Oh, that’s no bother!’ blurted Robert, entirely forgetting he had started it.

‘—and I wondered if I might have a word with you – and perhaps Joy … in private, perhaps?’

Robert automatically led the way to the only other room in the house – the back kitchen – and he, James and I found ourselves alone and surrounded by steaming vegetables and an overpowering smell of onion and carbolic soap.

‘The thing is … what you said yesterday … doesn’t concern me in the slightest. It’s just that Celia … well, Celia would be devastated if she thought people were talking like that. I wouldn’t bother to mention it, it’s just that she’s not at all well at the moment, and this could just be the last straw.’

Robert nodded as if he were old mates with James Buckleigh, but I was shocked. ‘Celia? What’s wrong? I didn’t know.’

‘Well, it’s confidential. She’s … depressed. She’s being treated for it. I trust that stays between us?’

‘Of course.’ I looked at Robert.

‘Of course!’ he said.

I had barely seen Celia since that fateful date. I knew I had avoided her but I assumed she had been avoiding me too.

‘I wish I had time to visit her.’

‘Perhaps next time you’re home – she’d like that.’

And those few little words (‘she’d like that’) were a stay of execution. I could feel my cheeks boiling along with the carrots after the cold garden.

He looked at Robert. ‘And you won’t repeat what you said yesterday – to anyone?’

‘’Course not!’ Course not! I was drunk as a lord.’ He put his hand to his head. ‘I shan’t be doing that again in a hurry.’

‘Thank you.’

James held out his hand to Robert, and shook it earnestly. Then he turned to me and held out his hand. I put my palm to his and felt his skin against mine. I could hardly believe he’d seized me up in his arms once, and I felt that all my clothes had dropped away, one by one, and that his had too, and that we were both naked as the day we were born, standing there, skin to skin. Then Robert slapped his arm around my shoulder and pulled me towards him.

‘We won’t breathe a word, will we, Joy? You can count on us!’

It was torture.

James simply nodded and made his way back to the parlour, leaving us standing there like a married couple. I wriggled free and followed him, intending to find out more about Celia, only to see that Beatrice had removed her gloves to warm her hands by the fire, and revealed in the process a ring as big as a threepenny bit. The Mustoe women were in thrall.

‘Oooh!’

‘Is it a diamond?’

‘Oooh! Look at that!’

‘Oooh!’

Beatrice tried to look imperious, but she couldn’t help lapping it up. ‘It’s a twenty-two carat diamond set with emeralds.’

‘When’s the wedding?’

‘July – with any luck the war will be over by then.’

‘Where will it be, then?’

‘In my local church – near Cirencester.’

‘What’s the dress like?’

‘Well, it’s all frightfully vague at the moment. But it’ll be white shot silk, with a princess waist and gathered seams and a ten-yard veil of silk chiffon.’

‘Oooh!’

‘Lovely!’

‘Oooh!’

Mrs Mustoe, Mo and Tilly didn’t even stop their fawning when they saw me.

Then something even more dreadful happened.

James suddenly put out his hand and grabbed me by the elbow, pulling me back quite roughly. Then he moved in towards the fire, placing himself between me and Beatrice. Everyone saw it, everyone was aghast, and within a split second everyone decided to pretend it hadn’t happened.

I was breathless with shock, and with the effort of trying not to show it. I could make no sense of it at all. It was as if he had tried to stop me getting close to Beatrice – as if I had been making my way towards her to punch her lights out. The enforced cheeriness of the others clawed at my heart. My pride, like the rabbit, was not worth saving. Beatrice turned her face to look at me and, at last, with a spectacular thlunk, the slab came down on my miserable skull.

After another period of training I became a Mechanized
Transport
Driver. The rest of my uniform turned up at last: a lovely barathea top – much smoother than the ATS one – with the albatross badge, grey-blue lisle stockings, pink suspenders (to go with the navy knickers), cotton bra, navy fabric shoulder bag and black shoes. Because I was in MT I also got a greatcoat, which was lucky, because that winter was freezing, and lots of the other trades didn’t get them. I learned to drive trucks and small lorries. I transported crews to and from airfields, I chauffeured officers, I serviced vehicles and mended faults. Sometimes I would catch myself in a dark window and see a very competent woman carrying a spanner, and I was surprised to find that I admired her. She seemed vital and assured, and I would think of her when I opened a car door for an officer, changed gears proficiently or leaned a casual elbow on a wound-down window.

The girls who spoke like Celia baffled me. They thought nothing of undressing in front of everyone (no doubt because they had done so at boarding school) and didn’t care how much was showing. The rest of us, the likes of Dot, Reeny, Betty and me, got used to this communal undressing eventually, but we remained modest in the where and when of it all. It wasn’t that
we were reluctant about our bodies and they were confident. It wasn’t that at all. It was as if they
had
no bodies. As if they weren’t remotely aware of their sexuality. They stomped about with bare buttocks, jiggling breasts, and the shock of their dark, secret triangles, as if there were no femininity attached to them. And the way they dragged on their stockings, joshing and strutting and speaking like newscasters, it was as if they had had the woman bred out of them. One of them, Gwendolen, said I was ashamed of my body. But I wasn’t. I was
aware
of my body, and proud of it. I didn’t want to be like them. But they were loud and compelling, and it continued to perplex me that I may have got it all wrong.

Still, I was no longer a girl with a question mark over my head, a waif who had walked out of a wood, a young woman dependent on a village spinster. I thought I knew who I was. I had friends who told me I was fun – Dot, Reeny and Betty – and dances to go to and a sense of belonging. And I had a nickname, ‘Haps’, which was short for happy, because I was and because I was called Joy. I felt more alive than I had ever done, and more than ever I felt I had a right to be alive. Even so, this new independence couldn’t help recalling that old, shadowy self, wandering alone in the woods, and the coldness and severity of the camp brought on nightmares which skirted around other memories I had hoped were left behind.

I remembered nothing of my earliest years, and I
remembered
everything. I had successfully blocked it all out, and I was happy. I even had a nickname which said I was. You can see something, or you can choose not to see it. But I didn’t realize then that, even if you squeeze your eyes tight shut for ever, it is still there.

For the time being, it was more immediate memories which concerned me. I still thought of James, and although I had never
worked out his odd behaviour – or forgiven him for my humiliation – and although I had plenty of suitors to occupy myself with, it was always his face I conjured up in vulnerable moments of longing, when lights went out at ten thirty and all the daily events had been ruminated over and put aside. I would recall the labyrinthine smell of him, weaving from tart to sweet into balm and musk. I would see that solemn set to his jaw as he carried me through the streets, see his long hands on the steering wheel of the car as we watched the sun set, his eyes on me as he took my hand in the Mustoes’ kitchen.

I remembered Celia, too. And although I wanted to go nowhere near Buckleigh House again, I resolved to check on her next time I was on leave. When I did, however, Mrs Bubb told me she had gone to Cirencester to stay with friends for a few months.

I had made my way up past the church. A stink of fox in the trees, and the dangerous Mrs Emery’s. How tame Mrs Emery’s house seemed now. In comparison, even the way Buckleigh House stood sideways to the road seemed tricky. It was as though it were indifferent, or turning away coyly, or sulking, or smirking at your expense. Anything but turn and face you. Even the house seemed to be playing games.

Just standing in the porch I felt entangled in the emotional chaos that house seemed to harbour. I was glad there was no sign of James or anyone else, and there was no sound except for Mr Rollins’ mower and a lone sparrow twittering from the eaves. When I asked how Celia was Mrs Bubb said she was ‘making progress’. Perhaps I should have been more concerned, but I felt I could do no more. I crunched my way back down the gravel path as if I were treading on hot coals, relieved to hear the familiar squeal of the iron gate as I shut it behind me.