R. Delderfield & R. F. Delderfield (11 page)

In the morning, the moment the shops were open, he went out to buy her a birthday gift and ended by buying three, an early nineteenth-century print of Conway Castle, a small bottle of perfume and a great bunch of narcissi, daffodils and tulips, taking them down to the pierhead where they met by appointment, not caring whether she thought him naïve. She was overwhelmed, and when his parcels had been opened, and the bouquet laid aside, she threw her arms round his neck and kissed him, exclaiming, 'You know just how to impress, don't you, David? I believe you've had hundreds of girls and years of experience,' but he said, shaking his head, 'I've had far less experience than you – or rather, you couldn't have had less. I wanted to pay you back for that wonderful day we had yesterday. Where would you like to go today?'

'Somewhere less expensive,' she said, laughing. 'A walk up to Blackberry mountain, where you can't spend any more money.'

'Oh, to blazes with that. I haven't touched my gratuity yet, and there's absolutely no way of spending money at school. The nearest real shop is at Challacombe, miles away. Why don't we book a round trip and explore all
the castles? Unless you're fed up with conducted tours, that is. I've never seen Harlech and Beaumaris, although I've been to Caernarvon, and along the Straits as far as Telford's bridge.'

'I'll go if you let me pay my share. That all-day tour is ten-and-six.'

'I don't care if it's ten guineas. I came up here to enjoy myself and I don't fancy doing it alone any more. When are you due back at the hospital?'

'Sunday,' she said. 'What an awful thought. You've got a month, haven't you?'

'Not really,' he said. 'I've got to put in the last fortnight swotting for a degree. I should have done it last year but there was so much to learn about the job and, anyway, I wasn't really fit then.'

'You are now, though?'

'Never felt better in my life. Partly Exmoor air but mostly you.'

It surprised him that he could talk to a girl this way, easily and naturally, as he was learning to communicate with the Sixth, and some of his favourites, like Boyer and Briarley. But then, he supposed, she was easy to get to know, having none of the artfulness his memory associated with girls that the newspapers were beginning to call 'Flappers' for some curious reason. She laughed easily, said the first thing that came into her head, and flattered him a little by listening very carefully to everything he had to say about the castles, the men who built them, and the men who garrisoned them before they were made obsolete by gun powder.

'My stars!' she exclaimed, when he told her about the Roman invasion of Mona, and the last stand of the Druids in Anglesey, 'where on earth do you
put
it all, David? I mean, you don't have to look it up! You hardly glanced at that guide we bought,' and he replied, chuckling, 'You'd be astonished how much I have to mug up when I'm taking the Upper School in a period I'm not familiar with. It never does to let them see you at it, of course. They have to be bluffed. Like you.'

'But you must have read a tremendous amount, in spite of all those years in the war when reading couldn't have been easy. Don't you ever want to write?'

Unconsciously she had touched on an ambition dormant in him since he was a child, something unfulfilled in his personal awareness that had surfaced from time to time in the years leading up to the summer of 1914, and again, but infrequently, in rest periods behind the lines, when he was looking for an escape from ennui.

'It's odd you should ask me that. No one else ever has. It's something I've often felt I could do, within limits.'

'What kind of limits?'

'I don't think I could write fiction or verse. Maybe I could have, if things had been different, but any creative impulses I might have had were shelled out of me long ago.'

'But soldiers did write poems, didn't they? I remember one of our staff-nurses was engaged to a boy who sent poems to her. Poems about the war, I mean.'

'Yes, some of them did, and marvellous poems they were too. Sassoon and Owen and Rosenberg were three, and I've already introduced their work to the seniors. But they were articulate. With me it was always as if I was experiencing it secondhand. Maybe that's why I survived. Owen and Rosenberg didn't.'

She must have noticed the change in his tone and expression for she said, quickly, 'I'm sorry, David. I didn't mean to make you remember,' but he said, taking her hand, 'I don't mind talking about it to you. In a way it helps. It's not good, keeping it bottled up, the way I have to with the boys. They always seem so terribly young to me. Babies almost.'

'But I don't?'

'No, and that's curious too, for you're only a year older than Simmonds, our head boy. Can you explain that?'

'The job, maybe. A nurse, even a pro', is always in charge. She's mobile and her patients aren't. It makes us seem bossy.'

She would be a wonderful person to have around in the common room at Bamfylde, he thought, poised to puncture all those balloons of complacency and pomposity. He said, thankfully, 'No man in his senses would mind being bossed by you, Elizabeth,' and kissed the top of her head, but she was not to be dismissed in this way and said, 'Save that, Davy, and go on with what you were saying. If you did write
what
would you write? Would it be plays?'

'Good Lord, no. Plays require a very special technique, and most playwrights serve an apprenticeship as actors. I'd write historical biography, but in a different way from academics. Most studies of the past are written by professional scholars, and dry as dust unless you've done your homework on the background. The ordinary reader has got to see historical characters as flesh and blood.'

'But how would you discover human touches after all this time?'

'I suppose by putting two and two together. Fashions and attitudes change every generation but people don't.'

She seemed to ponder this. Finally she said, 'I think you'd do it splendidly, David. Who would you like to write
about
?'

For possibly the first time in his life he gave his potential subject matter serious consideration. 'Well, now that you raise the question, the royal tigress for one.'

'Who on earth was she? Boadicea?'

'Someone much nearer our own time. Margaret of Anjou, the French wife of Henry VI.'

'Never heard of her. Tell me about her.'

He gave her a potted history of Margaret of Anjou, as the charabanc bounced along the road from Caernarvon to Menai Bridge, then round the tortuous coast road to Beaumaris. She listened attentively and it reminded him that he was becoming as didactic as old Judy Cordwainer and he broke off, saying, 'Look here, that's enough of that. I'm beginning to talk like a schoolmaster off duty and that's a sobering thought.'

'Why? After all, you are one.'

'I don't care to be recognised as one wherever I go. You'd see what I mean if you met some of the codgers in our common room,' and that, he thought dolefully, was unlikely.

But was it? For a moment his imagination conjured with the wholly delightful prospect of absorbing her into the Bamfylde scene, so that he saw her, fleetingly, as someone always on hand to encourage and sustain him. But then common sense caught up with him as he thought, 'What the hell have I got to offer a girl like her? Two hundred a year, Mam to help out, and a life removed from everyone but boys and old trouts, who would tut-tut at the powder she dabs on her nose!' and he recalled the opinion expressed by Howarth under the fives court on Armistice Night, concerning the unwisdom of trying to combine marriage with a job requiring so much dedication and monastic seclusion.

The fancy remained, however, and unconsciously she kept it glowing, particularly when they said good night after tea and bread and cheese at her brother-in-law's. She came out with him into the backway that ran behind the shop and it seemed to him that she was just as reluctant as he to bring another gloriously fulfilled day to a close. When he kissed her, as gently as he had the previous night, she said, with her delightful lack of inhibition, 'Here, let me show you! I won't break, Davy!' and threw her arms round his neck, kissing him in a way he had never been kissed and leaving him breathless with gratification but also
a trifle dismayed at such irrefutable evidence of a far wider experience than he possessed. He said, still holding her close, 'Have you had lots of boyfriends? You must have, a girl as pretty as you.'

'I've had my share,' she admitted gaily, 'but never one the least like you, Davy.'

'How am I supposed to regard that?'

'As a compliment, of course. No, I
mean
that! Most men don't need much encouragement, I can tell you.'

'But I do?'

'Yes, but you don't have to apologise for it. All the boys I've known would have taken full advantage of the way I threw myself at you and I can't say as I'd blame them. By now I would have been fighting them off.'

'I'd back you to take care of yourself, Elizabeth. You seem to me to be pretty well equipped to stand on your own feet in all kinds of ways.'

'Not that way always.' She was silent a moment. Then she went on, 'Two or three of the boys who took me out the first year I was nursing tried it on, and made me feel a bit of a prude for holding out. There was always the chance of the war going on indefinitely, and them being sucked back into it. I don't think it was squeamishness on my part. It was a thought, in the back of my mind, of bringing a poor little beggar into the world whom nobody wanted, who would probably end up in an orphanage. So there you are, Davy. I'm still a virgin. Like you.'

Her perception diminished him a little and she was quick to sense as much. 'What's wrong with that? You're not the kind of person who would go looking for a prostitute. You're too fastidious for one thing. I daresay that's what kept you clear of the brothels out there.'

'Good God! You know about that kind of thing?'

'David,' she said, chuckling, 'use your head, lad. I've been nursing for two years!'

'But not servicemen.'

'What do you think nurses talk about in their free time? Crocheting?'

He laughed. 'You're a very surprising person, Elizabeth. What old Algy Herries, my headmaster, would call “A bit of a card". Same time tomorrow?'

'Yes,
please!'

He kissed her again, but as the week sped by he began to be aware of a sense of desperation that was not moderated by her promise to write once a week, 'no matter how rushed we are'. Her train to Chester, where she was catching
her connection to Swansea, left at midday on Sunday, and his spirits were at low ebb as he accompanied her to the station. It was no good telling himself he was exaggerating the terrible need he had for her gaiety and warmth, that something positive might develop from their correspondence, that they had made tentative arrangements to meet in London where her parents lived when she took her paid holiday next September. September was a long way off, and all kinds of things could happen before then. She might get bored writing. She might meet someone far more eligible in that hospital, probably crammed with young men with gratuities to spend, and four years' lost youth to make up.

They hung about waiting for the whistle to blow and when it did the blast hit him in the belly like the signal for an attack. The train began to move and he watched it slide away with a terrible finality, carrying with it all his hopes and certainties. It had moved about ten yards when he responded to an irresistible urge to stop it and sprinted along the platform until he was level with her compartment where she stood framed in the window. 'Stand away!' he shouted, clutching the brass handle, 'Coming with you!' and at that the guard, lower down the platform, roared his disapproval. A second later the heavy door was swinging free and he was inside the carriage on his hands and knees, and she had reached over him and slammed it and they were alone, Elizabeth looking at him with a stunned expression as he scrambled up, dusting himself.

'What on earth – Davy – you've no luggage…' and then she threw back her head and laughed and he caught her in his arms, so that they lost their balance and collapsed as the train gathered speed.

'To hell with luggage,' he said, 'I'll catch a train back from Chester, pick up my stuff and go on home to Bamfylde. It won't be any fun here without you. Besides, there's something I've got to know, and it can't wait on letters. Will you marry me, Beth? I'm very much in love with you, and if you wouldn't mind being the only wife under forty at a school miles from anywhere…'

He got no further. She caught his arm, pressing his hand fervently against her breast, crying, 'Why, of course I'll marry you! Just as soon as you like. And as for living on the moors in Devon, with all those boys and funny characters you've told me about, I can't think of anything nicer! Ill tell you something else too. I'm jolly glad you didn't propose to me solemnly, by letter. This is much more romantic, the first really romantic thing that's ever happened to me. There!' and she kissed him, first on the ear, then on both cheeks and finally on the mouth, so enthusiastically that a smudge of dust, gathered in his headlong fall into the compartment, transferred itself from his forehead to hers.

3

They had planned to be married in August, a week or so after the school broke up, and he had had a chance to make the half-ruinous cottage in Stonecross Bottom habitable after sub-leasing it from Farmer Brewer, the taciturn tenant, for fifty pounds a year. 'A typical peasant-robbery,' old Howarth called it, especially as neither landlord nor chief tenant was prepared to contribute a penny-piece towards rethatching, reflooring and generally renovating the place. It was not the outlay of capital that bothered him, however, but the shortage of skilled labour during that first, brilliant summer of the peace, when the sun shone from early morning until late evening, as though trying to make amends for the unremitting drizzle of successive Flanders summers.

Nobody recalled a summer as hot and dry as this, not even the long period of unbroken sunshine that preceded the outbreak of the war in 1914. The streams went dry and the grass withered. Cow-parsley, heavy with white dust, drooped in the hedges, and a special meeting of the Governors had to be called to do something about the drainage system. Everyone turned as brown as a longshoreman and the cricket pitches were bumpy and sun-slippery. 'A damned menace to batsmen,' Carter, himself an enthusiastic cricketer, declared after Simmonds, the head boy, had returned to the pavilion with a bump over his eye that would not have disgraced a prize-fighter. But for all the drought, and the euphoria the long sunny days produced in class, Bamfylde revelled in the heat, and Sports Day, the first dry Sports Day since 1914, according to Herries, was a tremendous success. So many of the parents seemed to have acquired expensive-looking motors that the sports field looked like Lords, as scores of fashionably dressed mothers and pretty sisters nibbled their ices, and God alone knew how many war profiteers sat around smoking cigars and practising refined vowel sounds. All this from the sardonic Howarth, who stood throughout the afternoon at the finishing line, with stop-watch in his hand, and inevitable Gold Flake in his mouth. There were plenty of Old Boys, too, some of them, including Cooper and Fosdyke, in khaki, and a few others on crutches.