Season Of Darkness (6 page)

Rather to his surprise, Clare had seemed equally pleased to see him. As naturally as if she hadn’t left, they started to spend all their free time together. He’d abandoned cricket and become adept at football. She came to all his games. He was both proud and jealous of the attention she drew from the men. If they’d set tongues wagging, they didn’t care. His own parents nagged him constantly about stepping out of his class, but he wouldn’t listen.

“She’ll break your heart. Her kind always does,” warned his mother.

And she had.

He hadn’t seen her again until a week ago. She was standing at Alice Thorne’s stall, breathing into a bunch of lavender. Her back was to him but he knew at once it was her, and he felt as if he’d taken a punch in the stomach. She was actually thinner than she’d been, and the white cotton frock hung loosely about her frame. She was hatless, her blond hair cut shorter than the prevailing fashion and touched with grey at the sides, but she was still Clare, and he didn’t know what the hell he was going to do about that.

She’d turned and saw him. Was she as shocked? He couldn’t tell. She’d smiled, but in his view it was a cool smile, the kind you’d give an old acquaintance, not a former lover.

“Hello, Tom. How nice to see you.”

“And you, Clare. What brings you here after all these years?”

“I returned to England so I could do my bit for the war effort. I have a job over at the Prees Heath internment camp. I’m acting as an interpreter.”

“Ah yes, you must be fluent in German. I’d read somewhere you were living in Switzerland.”

The lie fell from his mouth cool as a cucumber.
He’d read somewhere. Ha!
For years he’d combed every newspaper gossip column he could find for information about her. Two years after she left him, she had married a much older man, a wealthy Swiss German industrialist. She appeared to have lived the typical life of a rich socialite, dividing her time between Switzerland and Austria, where her husband had large estates. They had no children.

She smiled. “You look well, Tom. How have you been?”

“I am well, thank you. Country air, you know.”

He was aware that Alice Thorne was eyeing them curiously. She’d come to live in Whitchurch after Clare had left, but Alice was a shrewd judge of character, and as far as he was concerned his own consternation at this unexpected meeting was as loud as the air raid siren they’d installed in the square.
Danger, danger. Take cover
.

“How long have you been in the county?” he asked Clare.

“Not long. Less than a week.” She added, quickly, “I knew I’d run into you sooner or later, Tom.”

“Of course.” But he couldn’t stop the pang of disappointment.

She went on to say she was staying at Beeton Manor; yes, the summer had been wonderfully warm, hadn’t it? But they could use some rain now, couldn’t they? She hadn’t asked him any personal questions – perhaps she knew the answers.

Surely no more than five minutes had elapsed when Clare had checked her watch and said she had to leave, that she was on duty. They must get together soon and catch up. She’d walked away and he turned to meet Alice’s eyes.

“Ghosts from the past, eh Alice? They can shake you up when you’re not expecting it.”

J
IMMY
T
YLER AND
A
LICE
T
HORNE WERE SEATED AT
her kitchen table, sorting out the herbs she needed for her sachets. Jimmy wasn’t being very talkative but Alice had learned to give him time.

He picked up a bunch of greens that were in a basket. “Are these dandelion leaves?”

“Yes. I’m going to make some wine with them. The younger ones are good steamed as well. Very nourishing.”

“I should tell my mom. She’s always complaining about the dandelions in our front garden.”

“I’m taking some over to the camp. The cooks there are always keen to try new things. I promised them some onions.” She smiled. “Now, that really got them excited. I’m getting a good price.”

They worked on in silence. Alice had known Jimmy since he was a child and a pupil in her class. As a young boy he had been beautiful, with his mother’s dark eyes fringed with long, girlish eyelashes. When he first came to school, Alice had more than once been forced to intervene when other boys, considerably less beautiful, had picked on him. But she couldn’t watch them all the time and even though she had lectured the culprits, the bullying continued. Finally, she had a word with Tom. “First, get his hair cut. Those curls incense the boys. Second, teach him how to fight back. He might get a few more bruises, but it will be better than the destruction of his spirit.” Tom had looked grim, she recalled, but the next day, Jimmy had come to school, hair shorn as short as the other
boys. When they’d started to tease him about that, he’d promptly hit the chief bully on the ear and sent him off howling. Things changed after that. She was grateful that, whatever it was Tom had taught him, Jimmy didn’t misuse his own power. In fact, he became the rescuer of the downtrodden, and by the time she had left the school herself, he was securely in place as a class leader. And he kept his hair short. It was still close-cropped now, soldier style, but he couldn’t do anything about those eyelashes.

Usually their times together were comfortable, but today Jimmy was fidgety and distracted. He began to twist a sprig of rosemary in his fingers.

“I ran into Wilf’s mom, Mrs. Marshall, in town last week. She was bothered that I’d only been to see her once since I got moved up here.”

“Don’t you want to go?”

“Not really. She wants to talk about Wilf.”

“People in a state of grief get comfort from sharing their memories with people who have known their loved one,” said Alice quietly. “You and Wilf were such good pals.”

“There really isn’t anything I can say to her. I can’t bring him back.”

“What about your other friends, Bobby and Dennis? The four musketeers, you called yourselves. Have they gone to see Mrs. Marshall?”

“No, I don’t think so.” He grimaced. “Funny, isn’t it? We’ve only been at war for a year, but already I can hardly remember what peacetime is like. It seems like years ago when the four of us were getting ready to sign up.” He was quiet for a moment. “We all went for a last walk in the Acton Woods. ‘What’s on your minds about what’s to come, lads?’ asks Bobby. Well, we had a good time with that one. I said above all, I wanted to behave honourably.” Jimmy ducked his head, embarrassed.
“I particularly didn’t want to mess my trousers. Or pee down my leg or scream for my mom if I got shot. Bobby says he’s worried that he might have to kill somebody. Me, I’d want to know who they were if I did kill a German. What sort of bloke the enemy was. Dennis thought that was ridiculous. ‘They’ll kill us first if they can without a second thought.’ ”

“Maybe, maybe not,” interjected Alice.

Jimmy didn’t seem to hear her. “Later, when we were in France, we found out the Jerry had shoved some prisoners into a hut and shot them like they were rats in a trap. I hated them then. Hated the Stukka pilots who fired on those French refugees on the road. They were all women and children and old people … We found a child’s foot in the field.”

Alice kept working.

“But back there in the Acton Woods, we hadn’t experienced any of this yet, and the Krauts were still the unknown. Fellows just like us. ‘I don’t want to have no legs,’ says Wilf. ‘And I don’t want to die no lingering death all by myself in some ditch. Bullet to the head for me, promise me lads?’ ‘I don’t want to be blinded,’ says Bobby. ‘Same for me,’ I said, ‘blind or crippled, forget it.’ Then Dennis pipes up. You know what he’s like. ‘For God’s sake, I don’t care if I don’t have no legs nor arms and I’m stone blind, but promise me you’ll do me in if I get my balls shot off.’ ”

Alice laughed and Jimmy looked at her in relief. “Sorry to be a bit vulgar.”

“I’ve heard the words before, don’t worry.”

“ ‘Well,’ Wilf says, ‘you’d better stop playing with your willy in that case or it will drop off. Then you won’t have anything.’ ‘No, it won’t,’ scoffed Dennis. ‘That’s an old wives’ tale. I’m keeping mine strong by exercising it.’ ” Jimmy glanced at Alice to see if she was all right with all this bawdy talk. “ ‘That won’t do you any good if you’ve got no legs nor arms and you can’t
see,’ says Wilf. ‘You’d be surprised. I’m very versatile,’ says Dennis.”

Alice laughed again, shaking her head.

“So we all promised each other,” continued Jimmy. “We put our hands together. ‘We’ll watch out for each other. Shropshire lads. The four musketeers. All for one and one for all.’ ” He stretched his arms over his head. “Any chance of one of your teas, Mrs. Thorne?”

“I’ll put the kettle on.”

She got up from the table, and the dog who had been lying nearby looked up expectantly. He struggled to his feet. He was missing a front leg and getting up was difficult. He hopped over to the stove to see if anything would drop his way.

Jimmy watched him. “There are people who say it would have been kinder to Skip to put him down.”

Alice turned around sharply. “By people I presume you mean Ewen Morgan whose trap it was that destroyed Skip’s leg.”

“Him and others.”

The dog noticed Alice was opening the cupboard and was there in an instant, ears pricked, head up.

“He’s seems to be functioning pretty well, wouldn’t you say?” said Alice. “Dogs live in the present. He doesn’t think of himself as crippled.”

Jimmy clicked his tongue and patted his leg. Ever the opportunist, the collie hopped over to him. Jimmy scratched his head.

“He was hurt bad. How’d you know he’d recover?”

“I didn’t, but I had to give it a try. Morgan owned him then and he magnanimously came over with his shotgun and offered to put the dog down, even though it was his bloody trap that had done the damage. I told him he could stick the bullet where the sun doesn’t shine.”

Jimmy grinned at her. She didn’t usually talk like that.

She scooped up some herbs from a dish into two pottery mugs, added some hot water, and brought them back to the table.

“Let it steep.”

Skip switched his attention to her, and she ruffled his ears affectionately. “I did the amputation myself and nursed him myself. It was touch and go but he’s young. He pulled through. I wouldn’t part with him for the world.”

Jimmy grasped the mug, his hands encircling it as if he were cold. “You’ve always been a great help to me, Mrs. Thorne. I do appreciate it, but I don’t know if I can talk to even you. It’s hard to understand if you weren’t there.”

“I’ll try. We were talking about the four musketeers and why you don’t want to see Mrs. Marshall.”

Jimmy drank some of the hot tea. “I need to tell you something else first.”

“Go ahead.”

Like a swimmer jumping into icy water, Jimmy plunged into his story.

“We were trapped on the beaches at Dunkirk for four days. There was just me and Bobby Walker by now. We’d got separated from our unit—”

“Wasn’t Wilf Marshall with you? He died at Dunkirk, didn’t he?”

“No,” said Jimmy sharply. “No. We got to the beach, he didn’t.”

“Sorry, didn’t mean to interrupt. Go on.”

Jimmy leaned his head on his hands, and she thought he might stop talking, but after a minute he went on, speaking so softly she had trouble hearing him. “We had no food, almost no water, which was worse. Nobody knew what was happening. The Stukkas were dive-bombing us and there
was nothing we could do except dig into the sand. Men were being blown to pieces all around. I don’t know why I survived but I did. We both did, Bobby and me. There was one shell that landed a few feet away and I saw him thrown into the air like a rag doll. He landed on the sand and he was covered with blood. I thought he’d bought it, but he just had the wind knocked out of him. The blood was somebody else’s, a bloke who’d been sharing a tin of water with us. He was a tough Scotsman who’d also got separated from his unit. He’d taken a direct hit. I ran over to Bobby and dragged him to a burned-out staff car and we huddled underneath it. Not that it would have done us much good, but it made us feel better. Like we were kids who cover their eyes and say, ‘You can’t see me …’ ”

His eyelid was twitching and he put up his finger to stop it.

“Drink your tea, Jimmy,” said Alice. “We can go on talking at some other time if you’d rather.”

“No, I’ve got started now. I’d like to continue.”

“Why don’t we work and talk? I’ll start stripping down the herbs and we can stuff those little pockets with them.”

Alice needed to keep her hands busy. She didn’t want Jimmy to see that she was trembling.

He picked up one of the linen sachets but made no move to fill it. “The whole side of Bobby’s face was pockmarked with blood, like he had the measles. The marks were caused by tiny slivers of Jock’s bone. I had to pick them out for him. There must have been a dozen of them. We stayed under that blasted car for three or four hours. Maybe longer. A soldier came by, a sergeant. ‘Come on, you sodding useless bits of shite. Get your arses out of there.’ You wouldn’t think somebody cussing you would sound like a love call, but it did. He told us this was the last day we could be taken off the beaches. The Jerry panzers were closing in fast.”

Jimmy sniffed at a stalk of the fragrant lavender. “The destroyers weren’t able to get in close enough so the Navy had commandeered dozens of small boats, which were coming in as near as they could to the shore. There were still thousands of men left to pick up and some of them were wading out up to their waists in the sea while they waited. The naval officers had managed to bring some order to the chaos, but it was precarious. One of them was a big burly bloke, a sergeant. He looked half mad to me and he kept repeating, ‘Stay in line. Stay in line. I’ll shoot any man that breaks rank.’ He had quite a posh voice, which you didn’t expect. Bobby and me got into a line that was heading for a makeshift pier some of the engineers had formed from abandoned cars and trucks, lined up nose to tail. We were all pressed close together but we were at least moving along. But we heard the Stukkas coming in … They have a sort of high-pitched whine like a saw that needs oiling. We were strafed again. Two men in front of me were killed instantly. They just gave a little leap forward from the impact and dropped to the ground.