Summer Pudding, page 4
Maggie raised her head from her knitting. She saw Janet’s bent, scuttling figure crossing the field. An understanding smile twisted her bps; there had been times in her life when she had run to a bit of cover to have a good cry. There were times now when she would be glad to break down a bit. She was never going to tell the girls how queer she sometimes felt, especially in the night, a feeling as if she were being smothered, and falling through the bed. Of course it was just fancifulness, but it scared her all the same. The girls would laugh if they knew how many nights she sat up with the light on, just too scared of the smothered feeling to lie down. Work was the thing, of course; with plenty to do she would teach herself not to be so foolish. Her eyes rested on Janet just entering the copse. What a relief it would be to tell her, to be hugged and told not to be a silly old woman; but she mustn’t say anything, mustn’t let Janet know how the mere thought of living alone, as she had said she would do, brought her out in a cold sweat. Fancy having one of her silly night attacks, knowing there was no one to cry out to. Of course in the day hours it was easy to call yourself a fanciful fool, imagining you were going to die, when all that was wrong was a touch of indigestion; but in the night hours it was not so simple. There was something about the night, it sapped your courage.
In the copse Janet pushed her way through the undergrowth. Young bracken was popping up amongst last winter’s dead leaves, it was bent and curled like a baby’s fingers. She lay down amongst it, pressing her face into it, and sobbed as she had scarcely done since childhood. Between her sobs she moaned out broken, disjointed sentences: “It isn’t fair . . .” “I did so want to do war work.” “I don’t mind being the plain one, I don’t mind being pitied for having so lovely a sister, but I do want to live my own life my own way.” “I know I’ve got to give in, but I do feel miserable.”
“I beg your pardon, but is anything the matter?”
Janet raised a patchy, blotched face. A bit of moss had stuck to her chin. Then she sat up. A man was standing beside her. He was tall and slight, but gave the impression of wiry, muscular strength. He had a thatch of untidy brown hair, and honest brown eyes. He was wearing an old tweed coat and leggings and breeches. He had a gun under his arm. No woman likes any man, even a husband, to see her at her worst, and this was a stranger. Janet was furious, and her fury killed her wish to cry. Her voice still wobbled a bit, but it was as much with anger as tears. “Nothing is the matter. Why should it be?”
The man’s lips twitched.
“You’ve got a bit of moss on your chin.”
Janet’s hand flew to her face, then as she found the straggling piece of moss she saw how silly the whole scene was. His question if anything was wrong, when it so palpably was, her proud reply, and then her appearance as the bearded lady. She began to laugh, and he joined in, and for a moment they rocked helplessly.
“I must look an idiot,” she said at last, “but there’s nothing wrong really; I was indulging in a nice basinful of self-pity.” The man took out his cigarette-case and offered it to her. “Try my cure.”
“Have you got enough to spare one?”
He nodded, and lit hers and his own.
“How did you come here?”
She smiled.
“I’m not a parachutist, if that’s what you mean. I just walked. Why wouldn’t I come here? Is it private?”
“Yes.”
“How did you, if it comes to that? Are you a poacher?”
“I’ve done a bit of that when I was younger. As a matter of fact this is my land.”
“You’re not Mr. Sheldon?”
“Yes.”
“I’m Janet Brain. My mother’s a tenant of yours.”
“Are you? Now I remember my housekeeper said you were expected. Well then, we aren’t strangers, almost old acquaintances by proxy.”
“What on earth does he mean?” she thought. Out loud she said:
“I’m sorry I’m trespassing, but I was very careful crossing the field; I came by what seemed to be a bit where things weren’t growing.”
“I’m sure you did. I gave your family leave to go anywhere provided they were careful, and shut the gates and all that. Your sister’s a bit uncertain about which is crops and which is grass, still luckily she’s light as a feather, and she’s learning. She’s going to teach my child, you know.”
Janet was not one to let a thing slide to save herself trouble.
“I’m afraid she isn’t. She never could teach anybody.” She watched a stubborn look settle on his face. “As a matter of fact that’s what I was howling about. Mother thinks Sheila ought to go away and get a real job. And that means that I”—stating her new plans as a fait accompli gave her a stab, her voice faltered—“I’ve got to stay here.” His face softened, his voice was sympathetic.
“Is that so hard?”
“Yes. I’ve earned my living since I left school. I’ve had an independent life outside my home. I’ve been stuck in an office so far, but it’s been bombed, and now I’m free I’d promised myself I’d join the W.R.N.S.”
“I can sympathize. Drives me mad to be stuck here, hard-worked, of course, but living pretty well. When I read of what the civilians, even the women, do in the towns, and we’ve never heard a bomb. Of course I’m Home Guard, but if I had my way I’d have joined the Navy.”
“I suppose as a farmer your place is here.”
“Of course.” There was silence. In it Janet heard the twittering of innumerable birds chatting as they settled down for the night. Some rooks cawed overhead. The baa of a sheep came from a distant field. London had been so noisy, with its crashes at night, and blastings and hammerings at smashed buildings by day, that the quiet and peace fell on her spirit like a cold hand on a sprained ankle. “If you’re stopping at the cottage instead of your sister, couldn’t you take on teaching Iris?” She moved and he hurried on. “She’s a nice kid, though I say it myself. Her mother died two years ago. I can’t give her much time. I’ve a housekeeper, but she’s got her hands full. I don’t want to send Iris to the village school because she’s delicate. If I can’t get her taught here it means a boarding school. Besides . . .”
Janet’s eyes were on his face. She saw the stubborn, dogged look come back.
“Besides,” she broke in, “Sheila promised.”
“Well, a bargain’s a bargain.”
“And nobody’s ever got the better of you over one,” she thought. To him she said:
“It’s a new idea. I don’t know how it will fit in with everything else. I don’t want my mother doing so much, and the only way to stop her is to be there to do it for her.”
“I don’t care a bit about Iris being forced on, it’s more companionship she needs. You could take her along to the cottage with you.”
She did not want to answer until she had time to think. She looked at her watch.
“I must go or they’ll imagine I’m lost. I’ll let you know tomorrow if I may. Will I find you at the farm?”
“I’ll be about, one of my men will tell you.”
He watched her go, and as he turned away he began to whistle ‘The Poacher’s Song’, a gay, carefree whistling.
His shepherd was passing up the lane on the far side of the copse. “That’s master,” he thought. “Haven’t heard him so jovial since missus went.”
Janet, hurrying across the field, felt in her pockets and took out her powder-puff. “Gosh!” she murmured, seeing her face. “He must think we run to extremes in our family. Must tidy up; don’t want to come in looking like a wet Sunday.” Then a thought came to her which startled her. She paused, her powder-puff halfway to her nose. “How queer! How very queer! I don’t’ mind the idea of stopping half as much as I did. I suppose I’ve cried it out of me!”
The Brains sat round the supper-table. Janet had cleaned and powdered her face, and had managed to get most of the signs of tears away. Maggie beamed as she carried in three boiled eggs.
“I wouldn’t do anything to them, dear,” she told Janet, “except boil them. A nice fresh egg will be a treat to you.”
Janet took a piece of bread.
“I met your farmer while I was out.”
Sheila flushed and her eyes slid round to Janet.
“What did he say?”
Both Maggie and Janet were surprised by a note of truculence in her voice. Janet looked at her squarely.
“He said you’d definitely promised to teach his kid, Iris. Did you?”
“No, I told you I didn’t. He was kind when we moved, and I was sorry for him, and . . .”
“I expect you more or less did,” Janet said resignedly, “but you don’t mean to, do you?”
“Well, I would if I could, but I don’t like children and—”
“Come on, do you mean to, or don’t you?”
Sheila jabbed at her egg with her spoon.
“I wish you wouldn’t bully. What’s it got to do with you, anyway!”
“Only that if you’re not going to take on the job, I am.”
Maggie’s teacup clattered into its saucer. There was a ring of happiness in her voice which warmed Janet’s heart.
“You’re not, Jan!”
Janet nodded at her mother.
“Yes, I am. I told you that you were too thin, you bad old woman. I’m looking for some job near here where I can keep an eye on you. Well, Sheila, do you mean to take the job or don’t you?”
Sheila wriggled.
“I’m not sure. I can’t be rushed.”
“Don’t talk nonsense about being rushed,” said Maggie. “You had the job offered you last autumn, and now it’s June.”
“Well, I haven’t been strong enough.”
Janet’s voice was quietly determined.
“Now you are strong enough, do you want the job or don’t you? You were offered it first. I’m not butting in if you’re going to take it.”
Sheila looked stubbornly in front of her, and then with a cry which had a real ring of suffering in it, she put her head in her hands and burst into tears.
“Goodness!” thought Janet. “We are a lot of cry babies in this house. We’re like Jo and Beth in Little Women. Whatever’s come over us!” Unwillingly she found herself pitying Sheila.
“Come on. Don’t cry. What’s the matter?”
“It isn’t fair!” Sheila wailed. “I ought not to be shut up in a little village being expected to be a governess. The best years of my life are passing and no . . . nobody cares.”
Maggie laughed.
“Don’t be a little goose. You’ve got plenty of best years left at nineteen. It was you who chose Worsingfold, you know.”
“But I didn’t know how things would turn out. I thought it would all be so different.”
Janet stared at Sheila’s heaving shoulders.
“What on earth did you hope would happen here?”
“Never you mind. But I did. And here I am with nobody to see me except a lot of cows.”
Maggie and Janet, though realizing Sheila’s grief to be real, could not help laughing. Maggie patted Sheila’s curls.
“Cheer up, child, and eat your supper. As a matter of fact you and I have been thinking exactly the same thing. It’s time you got away and took a job, you . . .”
Sheila’s head shot up.
“Now! Why should I? I’ve put up with this dead and alive hole for months; it would be idiotic to go now.” Maggie placidly sipped her tea.
“Why, dear? Do you mean because it’s summer time? But wars don’t wait because it’s summer. I think you ought to go into one of the services.”
“Me!”
Janet lost her temper.
“Yes, you! Why not? You sound as if there was something special about you which kept you from working like an ordinary person.”
Sheila turned on her.
“So there is. You’d know it fast enough if I’d gone on the pictures, and was as famous as Vivien Leigh.”
Anger died in Janet, to be replaced, as it had so often been before, by a feeling of helplessness. You couldn’t treat Sheila as an ordinary person, she was wrapped round in an armour-plated sheath of belief in herself, in her beauty and charm, and it cut her off from common everyday people as if she were actually of different clay. She finished her egg before she spoke, and then used a quiet, reasoning voice.
“You don’t want to stay here doing nothing, do you?”
“Where, as you say, nobody but the cows see you,” Maggie added.
Sheila looked from Janet to her mother with a hunted expression.
“Of course I don’t. But it won’t go on. I mean the war might finish, or—or anything.”
“Even if it did, which at the moment doesn’t seem very likely, I shouldn’t think Worsingfold would be a riot of gaiety.”
“The quickest way to finish the war is for everybody to get down to working,” Maggie pointed out.
Sheila looked more hunted than ever.
“Of course, if you’re going to drive me out.”
Maggie laid aside her egg-cup, and helped herself to some jam.
“Don’t talk nonsense, dear. You always understood that you had to work for your living.”
“Only for six months, and then I was going into pictures.”
“Yes, if there hadn’t been a war,” Maggie agreed.
“If you hadn’t made that idiotic fuss and made me learn to type, I’d have been in pictures before the war started.”
“Don’t let’s have all that again,” Maggie pleaded. “The point is the war did come. I don’t know what the position of actresses is, but I feel sure only the very high-ups are allowed to go on working; the rest, together with all you other girls, will sooner or later be called up like the men, and only fair too, if you ask me.”
“Then Jan will have to go too. She won’t be able to stop round in the country teaching one kid.”
Janet, her eyes on Sheila’s resentful face, struggled to get at what was at the back of Sheila’s mind. “I’m sure she wants to stop here for some reason,” she thought. “A reason with Sheila is a man. It can’t be Mr. Sheldon or, of course, she’d have taken on teaching Iris. I wonder what other men there are round here. I must ask Mum.”
“Janet won’t mind,” said Maggie. “If it’s her duty.”
Sheila gave Janet a malicious look.
“She pretended she was going to join up. She told Old Tom she was going in the W.R.N.S. Swankpot. You won’t half look a fool in Worsingfold when they find that all you’ve done is to take on the job I didn’t want.”
“The W.R.N.S.!” Maggie looked at Janet. “It’s the first I’d heard of that.”
Janet bent her head to hide a flush.
“It was only an idea.”
“We’ll have a talk later on.” Maggie turned back to Sheila. “I think you should give yourself a week to make up your mind, dear, then you must register at a Labour Exchange.”
“Labour Exchange! Me!”
Janet sighed.
“Yes, even you.”
Sheila was scratching a pattern on the cloth with her nail.
“I like the way Janet plans to live in the cottage and turn me out. Who got the cottage, anyway?”
“You did,” Janet agreed. “And if you like to take on the job of teaching Iris you can stop in it. Or how about the Land Army? I expect you could get a job somewhere round here when you’re trained.”
Maggie chuckled.
“I’d get a real laugh at Sheila in the Land Army!”
Sheila had to smile.
“So’d I. That’s one thing I’ll never do.”
Maggie took Janet’s cup to refill it.
“I should go and have a talk with the Labour Exchange people. They’ll have a lot to tell you about jobs, but I should think, being a shorthand-typist, you’ll do something in that line.”
Sheila held out her cup for more tea. Her eyes were lowered so her mother could not get an idea of her thoughts.
“I’ll see. If you turn me out, it’s my business what I do.” Maggie and Janet washed up and cleared away. Sheila lit a cigarette and strolled off into the garden, and Janet said nothing. There had been enough argument for one night. For quite a time there was silence in the kitchen, both Maggie and Janet turning over in their heads the scene at the table. Maggie was trying not to feel wretched. Sheila was her baby, and what she would have liked to have done was to run out and give her a hug, and tell her that of course she was only to do just what she wanted, that Mother wasn’t really hard and unkind. In fact she wanted to take back not only what she had just said, but what she had been working herself up for weeks to say. Instead she wiped the dishes, and made herself stay where she was. She knew she had done the right thing, and only the foolish side of her mother-love was saying she had been cruel. All very well if you were rich, and if there wasn’t a war, to give in to a lovely, idle little creature, but this was not a world of fairy-tales but of exceedingly cold reality.
