Mother’s Boy, page 4
‘Show Laura the graves, Charlie,’ she told him. ‘And the wood. Our wood,’ she told Laura, ‘is something to see.’
So Charlie led her the short distance to the church and graveyard where, with a diffident sort of pride, he pointed out his various ancestors’ graves, ending with the newest, where his parents lay beneath earth that had yet to level. She picked some oxeye daisies and set them in the little pewter cup on their grave, feeling suddenly abashed, as though meeting his mother’s judgement in the flesh. It could hardly have been more different from her father’s resting place. St Thomas’s churchyard had the clatter of trains and industry all around, whereas Trusham’s church was utterly peaceful, set on the ridge above the village with fields beyond it. The only sounds apart from the occasional voice raised from one of the cottages were birdsong and the insistent, excited barking of a tethered sheepdog she had noticed as they entered the village.
‘I like Maggie,’ she told Charlie.
‘That’s lucky,’ he said with a grin, and began to lead the way away from the house and church and into the village, down a little side lane just wide enough for a barrow. Other households had also finished or were finishing lunch. They passed a man peaceably smoking a pipe in his garden while his wife scraped scraps from plates into a bucket for their pig. There were snatches of laughter, of conversation, a baby crying. They stopped to pet a ginger cat that rolled himself, saucer eyed and inviting, in their path and, as they walked on past more cottages and the inn, she wondered where the lime kiln was where his sister had been so horribly burned. She hoped he would avoid walking them past it.
But they left all buildings safely behind and climbed a stile on to a path that led them down a steep valley away from the inn and into a wood. It was still vividly sunlit in splashes.
‘Next year I’ll bring you here in bluebell season,’ he said. ‘Tis a sight would stop you in your tracks.’
‘I love how their colour seems to float,’ she said.
‘Yes,’ he agreed. ‘And the scent’s shy, like violets; you only get it in snatches. They say it affects some people.’
‘Doesn’t bother me,’ she said, thinking of her poor employer, who was sometimes confined to a darkened room by her hay fever.
‘No.’ He nudged her. ‘I meant in a good way. Makes them frisky, apparently.’
‘Charlie Causley,’ she said, because he was grinning at her from under the brim of his hat and looking so very handsome as he took it off.
And then he kissed her. It was sudden but she didn’t mind because he didn’t paw her but only cupped her face in his hands and kissed her lightly on the lips. Once, then once more. And he continued to hold her face as he looked at her a little gravely, gauging her response. And she found she wanted more. That small kisses weren’t enough, and the minute gesture she must have made to indicate that was enough to make him kiss her again, more fully, encircling with his arms both her and the sapling she leaned against.
She closed her eyes, clearing her mind of warnings and common sense, of pastry and parsley sauce, simply enjoying the taste and clean warmth of him and the protective height of him and the intensity of the birdsong in the canopies of leaf above them.
They didn’t speak of the kisses. He made no declaration of love and extracted no solemn promises, but when they broke apart and walked on down to admire the river at the valley’s bottom there was an unmistakable sense of something between them having been settled. It was reflected back at them in Maggie’s cheerful welcome and offer of tea and cake on their return. Even Dora afforded her a quick smile as she helped Laura back into the cart for their return ride to Newton Abbot.
Laura wouldn’t have said she was a nervous person but she was industrious; her mind had long been a little motor, always powering on to enumerate the next task and the one after that. As they took their seats in the third-class carriage again and an understanding look passed between them, though, she understood that motor had been stilled, and it was he who had gently stopped its motion, as you might stop a clock’s pendulum with one extended finger.
ST THOMAS WATER – 1918
People said Charles couldn’t possibly remember back that far, that what he thought was a memory was simply something his imagination had confected from things he had been told or from old photographs he had been shown. But nobody had told him this or shown him a photograph. Mother could not possibly have owned a camera. The only photographs they had were rare studio portraits, to mark significant milestones, taken, after much tutting over clothes and brushing of hair, at Hayman’s on Church Street. There was just one baby picture of him, captured once he was safely christened and reassuringly healthy, so that she could send it to Father at the front and Uncle Stanley in Canada and present copies to her siblings and Aunt Maggie.
In it Mother’s dressed in mourning black, which is how he knows it’s later than his memory, and he is old enough to hold his head upright as she holds him on her knees. Gussied up in the dazzlingly clean family christening gown brought over from Trusham, he stares with precocious curiosity, intelligence even, at the camera. Mother looks on him, meanwhile, with a hint of a smile and something like wonder. She is already rounded, the shape he will come to love and recognise in the distance, and looks immensely comfortable, irresistible to any child, a sturdy human sofa, and yet she holds him slightly apart from herself the better to gaze on him, perhaps, but also as though she is holding him for someone else and is not quite hiding her awe at the responsibility.
This memory is from before that, before he can sit up or even focus much. There is sunshine from outside, causing patterns and reflection to dance on the surfaces around him in a way that fascinates him. Close to are the wooden bars of his cot and, a little further off and directly above his face, the dark bar of an old roof beam. But even more entrancing than the dancing light are the sounds through the little open window where the draught is stirring a thin floral curtain. It’s the sounds of fast-flowing water clacking pebbles as it passes, and the shouts of children at play in it. At such an age he cannot possibly know that they are water and pebbles and children, any more than he can identify the occasional helving of a cow or the labouring and whistle of a train or a clanging bell, which enter the air above his cot to intrigue him.
As an old man famous for his sensitivity, discretion, wit and discipline, he will secretly inspect this memory at intervals and do so with professional envy. The baby in his cot may be quite passive and vulnerable to the whims of others, but he is also quite safe and will never again be so receptive; he is all ear, all eye, no judgement, no defensive irony.
LAUNDRY BLUES – 1918
There was a good reason why women disliked laundry day. The key lay in the word ‘day’. It took the best part of whichever day of the week you set aside for it, from filling the copper with water and soap and setting it to heat before breakfast, to ironing and folding dry linen at the day’s end. It took more than a day, in fact, as ideally laundry had to be sorted by type and much of it set to soak with soda the night before. And stains had to be found, identified and treated with yellow soap or ammonia before that, as there were few things so frustrating as finding a stain only at the ironing stage and having to begin the entire process afresh. Laundry took method and planning, especially if there were men and children in a household to be fed or watched at intervals. It left little space for spontaneity or the unforeseen. Accidents happened. Visitors might call who weren’t friends so couldn’t easily be put off. And many women in Launceston also worked for a living, especially now so many were filling in for men away at the war. And others simply had chaotic lives, either through poverty or mental frailty.
Laundry had never been Laura’s favourite part of her work for the Frasers, although she took a quiet satisfaction in it and knew she had the arms for scrubbing and was blessed with skin that didn’t react too badly or crack up at the strong substances involved. Cookery was her real pleasure – the seductive magic of pastry and dough, the coaxing of richness from unpromising beginnings – and Mrs Ashbridge had recognised in her the useful balance of a desire to give pleasure with an instinctive sense of economy. When she let herself enter into Charlie’s fantasy of running a seaside boarding house, she dared imagine paying another woman to rub the sheets so that she had more time to bake scones for tea and rolls for breakfast.
All that lay behind her now, no more than a sinking glow on the horizon. Just as dreamlike now were the all too brief succession of Sundays when she and Charlie were courting. From the moment, on their second walk in the woods at Trusham, when he had held her to him and kissed her and asked her to marry him, she had been wanton with time, greedy, urging the calendar on until they could be together. But of course now she realised those Sundays had been precious, as was the relative luxury of working for the Frasers and living in their pretty house, in a place where the only sounds were birdsong and the occasional clatter and clip-clop of a passing cart.
Charlie had enlisted, as Laura suspected most men had, without consulting his fiancée, for what girl in her right mind would encourage the man she loved to stand in the line of fire, whatever patriotic noises they made in public. Teignmouth was as caught up in war fever as anywhere, she imagined, with bands playing marches, entertainers singing ghastly songs like ‘Your King and Country Want You’, and young men not yet in uniform subject to mockery and worse. The doctor disapproved, as a pacifist, and not simply because he was losing his groom, but he still made the astonishing gesture of paying for Charlie and Laura to have a honeymoon weekend in one of Teignmouth’s better hotels.
So they were married the February after they met, in St Thomas’s in Launceston, with their small squadron of siblings present and Mother tearful with happiness and sorrow mixed, because Stanley was still in Canada. Charlie looked, Laura had to admit, what her sister Em called ‘a catch’, in his barely worn uniform, and she hoped she looked acceptable in the wedding dress both Em and Ellen had worn before her. Em had to let the sleeves out for her because of her muscles, and the bodice too, which convinced her she must look like a pudding in it, but the look on Charlie’s face when he turned to see her walking up the aisle to him on her brother Willie’s arm comforted her.
They had a deafening lunch, somehow squeezed into her mother’s little house on St Thomas Water, where they had only ever gathered for weddings and funerals, then were waved off to Teignmouth on an afternoon train. Their room at The Royal had a sea view. They were still rather shyly taking it all in, especially the luxury of the little bathroom, also with a sea view, when a knock on the door brought a bottle of iced champagne from the Frasers, who had unexpectedly colluded with the doctor to track them down.
Laura was quite inexperienced – he was the only man she had kissed – and neither her sisters nor her mother had given her advice in the matter, but Charlie knew what to do. She had worried that, with three unmarried and rather unworldly siblings, he might be as virginal as she, but of course he was a well-turned-out, good-looking young man and Teignmouth a busy resort. She didn’t ask him who had taught him to kiss, or to stroke her or nuzzle her in the ways and places he did, she was too busy being grateful he wasn’t a brute the way Mrs Ashbridge had ensured she knew men could be, and then being astonished at the way the things he did revealed a completely different version of herself, insistent, greedy even, unladylike, tucked inside her like the Russian doll the vicar’s wife at home had shown them once in Sunday school.
They paid another visit to Trusham on the Sunday, as newlyweds, and were solemnly handed significant gifts: a dead mother’s cameo brooch, a dead father’s pocket watch. There was talk of the war, silly talk she saw now, that it would be over by Christmas once the Boche had been taught a short, sharp lesson. And Maggie made her promise to keep in touch while Charlie was away and to visit whenever she liked. She hugged Laura in parting, as her own sisters never did, like a sister in a book.
They had one more wonderful, terrible night in which neither could bear to sleep for fear of speeding the coming day towards them. And then he was off to France in a great gang of other, fresh-faced boys, egging each other on to noisy bravado, and she packed her honeymoon clothes into the little suitcase that had been Mother’s wedding present, and caught two trains back in the other direction to make a home again in Launceston and sleep again in the lumpy bed she had once shared with her sisters.
When she took her leave of the Frasers, standing shyly at the outer rim of the breakfast room’s silk carpet while they ate their toast and kippers, and they congratulated her again on her imminent wedding, she had felt a pang at leaving their house and their calm good manners, and couldn’t resist suggesting she might continue working for them while Charlie was away at war. Miss Fraser had responded almost as though she had proposed something indecent.
‘Oh, my dear, no,’ she said. ‘He’ll be home by Christmas. Everyone says so. And besides, you’ll be a mother in no time.’
But the stupid war had gone on well beyond December, so it was a kind of mercy she had not been left pregnant by their weekend at the hotel. Officers were granted leave every three months or so – she seemed to be forever spotting one or other of the Williamses or the other local landowners’ sons peacocking in their khaki finery and basking in the attention – but the Army was far less generous to the rank and file. Initially, when the assumption was that the war would be won by Christmas, no leave was granted at all. Once Christmas and a harsh winter had arrived without the promised victory, leaves began to be granted to other ranks, but then only every year or so. Poor Charlie had been out there for fourteen months before he was given home leave of ten days. As they each longed for this in their letters, it seemed a wonderfully long time. In practice, however, it cruelly included the two and a half exhausting days of travel at either end.
He came home to her, nut brown and so tired he could barely finish a sentence. He enjoyed a badly needed bath by the fire while Mother discreetly visited Em for supper next door, then staggered up to their room where he was soon asleep on the rug because he said the bed now felt too soft. She washed and pressed his filthy uniform, burning his underthings in the range as he slept because they were crawling with lice.
Tipped off by a friend at church, whose son had come home two weeks before, she had already nipped up the hill to buy him two sets of new ones in Treleaven’s, one wool and one cotton. He had plenty of socks already – she had been knitting those for him constantly since he first wrote to her about how wet his feet were always getting. When she finally joined him upstairs after her mother had come back in and sighed over the cleaned up uniform, she was guiltily glad he remained sound asleep. She was tired from labouring over his kit after a long day of paid laundry work and cooking in expectation. All the same, she tugged the quilt off the bed to cover them both when she joined him on the chilly carpet and he stirred comfortingly as she slipped an arm about his bony chest. He drew her against him so that she could smell the soap on his neck.
He made love to her just twice on that first leave, once, very slowly and gently as they woke together on the floor in the morning, once more urgently that night, when her questions about the war brought tears to his eyes, which frightened them both. But neither time left her pregnant and when her monthlies started a hopeful three weeks after he’d left, she wept so bitterly out in the privy that her mother heard and came out to tap on the door to ask, mortifyingly, if she was all right.
His next home leave was fourteen long months later, in November. Laura counted off the months in letters, two sides of paper a week. She had not written so much since school. He wrote little back – penmanship was not his strong point – but he said he loved her letters, however mundane the details of her daily round or snippets of home news, because they were a world away from the daily horrors he was living across the Channel. She suspected he wrote a letter to Trusham in between the ones he managed to write to her.
She knew all letters home were censored, and knowing that would inhibit expression, but his letters were almost wilfully devoid of what she knew to be his lively personality. She didn’t need the things the Army worried about – where he was on the map, what he was doing next, what his commanding officer was called – she needed to hear what he was feeling and thinking, if he thought of her and, if so, what details of her he called to mind. Had he made friends in his regiment? Enemies? Instead he told her what the weather was like and what birds he spotted and described in detail the horses he had to work with and the terrible injuries the poor animals suffered. And, like every English male made to live far from home, she imagined, he told her what he was getting to eat.
The only domestic work available when she moved back in with her mother was as a maid of all work at Werrington, the big house that lay in a huge park up the hill beyond St Stephen’s, but that would have felt like demotion after her more skilful work at the Frasers’ and she did not fancy joining many of her contemporaries brought in to hold down jobs for absent men in the local factories, mill and tannery. Instead she worked with her mother as a laundress. With double the hands, the workload was lighter and they could take on more. It also let her ease her mother’s burden, freeing her to do the starching, ironing, deliveries and collections while Laura spent the days leaching out stains, scrubbing, washing and rinsing.
It was much harder work than she had faced at the Frasers’ because it was so unvaried and relentless. Her back ached permanently from lunging back and forth at the tub or heaving bundles of wet sheets out to put them through the mangle, and the hours of contact with caustic soda and soap began to leave even her skin so raw she could hardly bear the feeling of sleeves and cuffs back around them at each day’s end. But she was strong and growing stronger, and her skin soon toughened up.
