The Black Mountains (55 page)

“Well Ted, you've really hit us for six!” James said, his voice wheezy, and Charlotte told Amy to run downstairs and put the kettle on.

“This is a fine state of affairs,” she said, wiping her eyes on one of James's large handkerchiefs. “If we'd known you were coming, we could have had something ready for you, instead of this. Why ever didn't you send a telegram or something?”

“I thought that would only frighten you,” Ted said reasonably. “You never did like to see the telegram boy coming this way. And besides, I hardly had time. One minute I was a prisoner of war in a Fritzy camp, and the next I was on the boat home. I still can't believe it myself.”

“Freeing prisoners is just about the first priority now an Armistice has been signed,” Jack put in. “You're home a lot sooner than you would have been if you hadn't been taken, Ted, because they still need a lot of soldiers to act as policemen out there, and they will do for quite a long time yet, I should think.”

Ted nodded soberly. “ It's still a hell of a mess, if you ask me. But I'm not going to worry myself about that now. I'm home. That's good enough for me. And how about the rest of you? What's up with you all?”

His words were a signal for general hubbub. The first stilted, surprised moments were over, and suddenly everyone was talking at once, half-laughing, half-crying, all contributing snippets of news that no one could properly take in. When Amy came back with the tea, she too joined in.

“Well, this is the best tonic we could have had,” Charlotte said at last, setting down her cup and looking around at her assembled family. “ We've all been pretty rough, but this is going to do us the world of good. Why, it's just like it used to be at Christmas when you were all little.”

And so it was. Jack was sitting in the window-sill, Ted and Amy had perched themselves on the edge of the bed, and Harry had clambered in between the sheets with Charlotte and James.

The mention of Christmas reminded them of food. None of them had been able to eat a thing for almost a week, and even the thought of it had made them feel sick. But after three years of living in a prison camp, Ted did not give that a thought.

“Oh, do you remember the spread we used to have!” he said. “A nice fat cockerel from the fowlman, and a ham you could slice at for days.”

“And parsnips and potatoes cooked in the oven,” Jack put in. “And Mam's mince pies.”

“And Christmas pudding and custard,” Amy added, and suddenly, miraculously, they were all ravenously hungry.

“Things aren't what they were,” Charlotte explained. “We've had food rationing here, too. There's been a shortage of some things. But we've still been able to grow our own vegetables, and there's usually a bit of a porker to be had if you keep your ears open.”

“I've got a piece of bacon in the larder now,” Amy told them. “It's salted, and I thought it would keep all right until you were all fit to eat it.”

Charlotte nodded. “Well, make sure, Amy. We don't want to be bad again. And talking of salted, there's a stone jar in the pantry full of kidney beans I put down last August. Do some of them to go with it. Do you think you can manage, or shall I get up and come down to help you?”

“No, I can manage, Mam. You stay where you are,” Amy said, and when Charlotte had finished giving her instructions, she clattered off down the stairs to make a start on preparing the meal. Jack, that much further along the road to recovery than the others, went with her to help peel potatoes.

“Well, Ted, this is a treat,” Charlotte said when the room was comparatively empty again, but Ted's face had grown serious.

“Mam, I was waiting for them to go before I ask you—have you seen anything of Becky?”

The blood seemed to leave Charlotte's body in a rush, and she felt weak and sick again. From the moment Ted had appeared in the doorway, she had known it had to come, but she had tried not to think about it, just as she had tried not to think about Fred, dead and buried in France. Ted knew about Fred, of course. She had broken the news to him in one of the scores of letters she had written while he was a prisoner of war. But she had never mentioned what had happened to Rebecca, thinking that, if he knew, he might lose the will to live, and clinging, without much hope, to the straw that by the time he returned, he might have forgotten her a little.

Now, however, seeing the anxiety and eagerness in his face, that last faint hope died. Ted still loved the girl, maybe even more than he had done when he marched away, if that were possible. And now she had to tell him Rebecca was dead. There was no escaping it any longer.

As if he had read from her expression that something was amiss, his face changed. “ Why haven't you ever mentioned her in your letters, Mam? I've asked about her often enough.”

Beside her, Charlotte felt Harry wriggle as if he had sensed the tension, but James lay back on the pillows, his eyes fixed on a point far outside the bedroom window, and she knew she could expect no help from him.

“Harry, I think it's time you went back to your own bed,” she said, and then, as he began to protest, “ No, do as you're told, there's a good boy. You can come back again when supper's ready if you're still feeling better.”

A subdued Harry obeyed. As he passed Ted he looked up at him as if expecting him to ruffle his hair again, but Ted was preoccupied now.

When the door had closed after him, Ted came closer to the bed. “There's something wrong, isn't there, Mam? That's why you didn't mention her. And why she hasn't written, either.” His voice was as even as ever, but Charlotte heard the suppressed fear that was in him, and her heart went out to him.

“Ted …” she said helplessly.

“Come on, Mam, out with it. Her father's taken her away somewhere, is that it?”

“No. Oh, Ted, it's your first day home …”

“Mam!” he said warningly.

“It's bad news, Ted.” Unexpectedly, James spoke, swivelling his rheumy blue eyes to meet his son's. “Your mother's kept it from you because it wasn't something she could write in a letter. Not as things were.”

“What do you mean, Dad?”

As Ted turned his questions to his father, Charlotte felt a glow of gratitude.

“I mean you've got to brace yourself for a shock, son,” James said quietly. “Now you know what I'm going to tell you, don't you? You've seen enough of death these last years to learn you a thing or two, and …”

“Death?” Ted had turned chalk white. “ Death? You can't mean that Becky …”

James nodded slowly, stifling a wheeze that rose in his throat, and Ted stood stunned and unbelieving like a boxer who has taken a knock-out blow, yet somehow, incredibly, is still on his feet.

“Becky—dead?” he repeated. “But how—why? I don't understand.”

“She was taken ill, Ted,” Charlotte said gently. “It was all very sudden. We never did hear the rights of it, except that it happened in the middle of the night. By the time they got the doctor to her, she was gone.”

“But when did this happen?” Ted asked, and Charlotte and James exchanged glances.

“Oh, a long time ago, Ted. It must have been—yes, it was just after you were posted as missing …” Charlotte broke off, uncertain as to how to go on. She had told him before in her letters about Rebecca's photograph that had been in the
News of the World
, and how they had thought it was proof that he was dead, and he had replied, telling them how his wallet had been stolen or mislaid that first day on the Somme, and the mutilated body on which it had been found must have belonged to whoever had pocketed it. But she had said nothing about Rebecca's visit, and she was unwilling to mention it now. Bad enough that she should be dead, without him thinking, as she did, that perhaps she had killed herself because she could not bear to live without him.

“Dear God!” His hands closed over one of the brass knobs of the bedposts squeezing them until his knuckles turned white.

“She was at home when it happened,” Charlotte told him. “They'd sold the house at Eastlands and moved out to High Compton, and her father had fetched her home.”

For a moment he looked at her, puzzled, then he brought his fist down hard on the bedpost.

“That old bugger had something to do with it, I'll bet! She was frightened to death of him. I'll go and see him and find out the truth if it's the last thing I do!”

“No, Ted,” Charlotte said. “He's gone, too. He had a stroke last spring. It was no surprise, by all accounts …”

“Well, her mother must know anyway. Is she still there?”

Charlotte shook her head. “She went funny. She's in the asylum, Ted. Now look, it's awful, I know, and it's going to take you a long while to get over it. But what's happened has happened, and there's not a thing you can do about it. They're gone, both of them, and that's the end of it.”

The words seemed to penetrate Ted's brain as nothing else had. He sagged, then straightened, and the pain in his eyes was so vivid that James and Charlotte both looked away.

Without another word he turned for the door, and neither of his parents did anything to stop him. They were wise enough to know that he must endure his grief alone.

They heard his footsteps clattering down the stairs, and the surprised voices of Jack and Amy as he went through the kitchen. Then the back door slammed, and they knew he had gone out.

Charlotte, feeling sick and old once more, sank back against the crumpled pillows. “Why did I ever have children?” she asked weakly.

James wheezed into his handkerchief. “You always wanted them, Lotty.”

She grimaced. “I must have been born silly. It's one long nightmare. Everything that goes wrong for them, you feel ten times more keenly than if it was yourself. I'd sell my soul for their happiness, but it's the one thing I can't give them.”

James looked at her with sad but mild blue eyes.

“They'm still better off than a lot,” he said prosaically, and Charlotte turned her head into his shoulder in search of a comfort that she knew, in the depths of her being, would elude her.

“I sometimes wonder what we're put in this world for,” she muttered, but the words were muffled and he did not hear her.

“He'll get over it, Lotty,” James said, smoothing her hair. “Just like the rest of us, he'll get over it.”

THE CHURCHYARD was bare and winter-brown, and the lowering December skies seemed almost to be resting on the square, turreted church tower.

Ted, still half in a dream, followed the path around the weathered old stone walls that he and Becky had taken in that long-ago summer of 1915 and passed beneath the sun-dial carved in the South Wall with the inscription that had always intrigued him.

When as a child I laughed and wept
Time crept
When as a youth I thought and talked
Time walked
When I became a full grown man
Time ran
When older still I daily grew
Time flew

Soon I shall find in passing on
Time gone.

‘Time gone'—that was it. For Becky and for him, time had gone. Those fleeting summer days, too perfect to last. Looking back now, they seemed like a dream. Yet once he had been the boy who had walked hand in hand with her and lain beside her in the long grass, listening to the sounds of summer, feeling the sun warm upon his face, smelling the fresh sweetness of new-mown hay. It seemed so long now since he had done any of those things. And he knew that for him they would always mean Becky.

Three years can be a lifetime or a day. Every gravestone he passed was so achingly familiar that it seemed hardly possible to him that it was not just last week when he had last walked this way. But the vast emptiness inside him told a different story.

He did not know how he knew which way to go. Perhaps she had once told him which plot her father had bought for the family. But whatever the reason, he followed the path without hesitating, climbing the steps and turning towards the newer part of the churchyard.

There were flowers on the graves here, bronze and yellow chrysanthemums, even a Christmas rose or two. These were the paves of those who had gone within living memory, those who still, had relatives left to care. The stones were new, the grass between the kerbs neatly trimmed.

On, on, he walked, his steps small and quick, his eyes darting about him as he went. It must be up here somewhere if they had been buried in Hillsbridge, and somehow he was sure they had been. Hillsbridge, after all, had seen the greatest of Alfred Church's achievements. Here he was known and would be remembered. People would look at his grave and say, “Oh yes, he was the secretary of the Co-op.” But where was he buried? Find Alfred, and he would find Becky …

When he saw it, a marble angel mounted on a pedestal and inscribed with her name, a sense of deep shock ran through him, making him tremble.

He left the path, his feet sinking into the soft turf between the graves, and stood reading the words on the gravestone beneath the angel's out-stretched arms.

R
EBECCA
A
NNIE
,
daughter of Alfred and Winifred Church,
died 15th August, 1916, aged 18 years.
Sleeping in the arms of Jesus.

It was true, then. She was dead, and the pain and the despair were so intense he felt he was choking. But still his numbed brain only half-believed. Becky was sweetness and life. Becky was sunshine on early morning dew, the deep sparkle of spring water over stones, the soft green coolness of moss and dock leaves. She couldn't be there in the dank, cloying earth, under a shovelful of chipped granite—not his Becky.

He thought of the body which had been soft and rounded lying there in a cold coffin and decaying, and suddenly it was more than he could bear. The pain became a silent scream, rushing through him like an angry wind, and he clutched handfuls of empty air. Becky, oh Becky, what have they done to you? I went to war, leaving you safe, as I thought. But I am back in one piece, and you …