Midsummer Night in the Workhouse Read online

  They disentangled themselves, Enid got out and Guy betrayed himself shaken by staying where he was, starting the engine again and trying to back the car without first seeing what damage had been done. A grinding sound and a shudder were all he got.

  ‘I can’t see properly,’ called Enid, ‘but one of the head- lights is out and there’s glass all over the road and I should think your bumper and your right wing are sort of wrapped round that wheel.’

  Guy swore, edged out of the passenger’s seat, put his hand on her shoulder and said he was sorry.

  ‘I should hope you are, we’re lucky not to be dead. What do we do now? How far from home are we?’

  ‘Three miles by the road. Only about three-quarters if we cut across country – oh, your shoes and things.’

  ‘Isn’t there somewhere nearer where we can telephone the garage?’

  ‘Only Longmeadow, and I’m not going to knock Croft up.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Perfectly bloody man.’

  Enid remembered talk of a feud developing: of a new- comer who last winter had lured Guy’s pheasants into his own coverts, had drained a field in such a way as to turn part of one of Guy’s meadows into a bog, had encouraged (‘I saw him with my own eyes!’) his heifers to break out into Guy’s oats, had shot at Lavender’s corgi when he found it on his land. The other side of the story she had not heard, but Guy was a friendly man on his own ground, and she was prepared to believe that Mr Croft was mad.

  They stood there in the lane, the car still ticking gently in the right-hand bank, a nightingale chuckling in the depths of the wood which shadowed them on the left.

  ‘If we go through that wood,’ said Guy, ‘we’d only have his sixteen-acre field between us and Croft’s house. We could go through his yard and then there’s the cart-track running down the hill that comes out on our road – you know, by the big walnut tree. Look, the best thing will be for you to get back into the car and I’ll go through Croft’s and telephone Beckett to send his breakdown van. Then I’ll come and fetch you in the truck.’

  ‘No,’ said Enid. ‘I’ll come with you.’

  ‘You’ll muck up your shoes.’

  ‘Never mind, they’re quite old and the heels aren’t high, I can’t wear high heels any more.’

  ‘You’re sure?’

  ‘Yes, of course. Let’s go.’

  She did not particularly want to walk, but Guy’s assump- tion that she would be awkward in the country always annoyed her, brought up as she had been as deep in it as he was. Deeper, indeed, for he was sent away to school earlier, and for much longer. Also she did not like the prospect of sitting alone in that dark lane, for the trees overhung it, the moon- light was only able to make darkness more profound and disturbingly mobile round the edges.

  ‘A pity it’s not still the Harpers up at Longmeadow,’ she said, taking the cigarette Guy offered her. She was surprised that her hand was shaking. She was feeling rather bold and free, the mood after a near thing in which people make jokes in loud voices.

  ‘Yes. Do you remember old Pincher harrying their pigs?’

  answered Guy, and they both laughed.

  They walked back down the lane some twenty yards to where there was a gate into a ride. It was padlocked and had a defensive bristle of brushwood wired to its top rail. ‘The silly ass,’ said Guy. ‘Just the sort of thing he would do – and a gap here beside the post anyone could get through. Careful. I’ll hold this back – keep your head down and watch out for brambles.’

  ‘Lord!’ said Enid. ‘It’s a long time since I did anything like this. Thirty years or more, it must be.’ She clutched her full skirt to her stomach, bent almost double and pushed through the gap, twigs pulling at her hair and drops scatter- ing. ‘It’s not too wet,’ she said once through. ‘Not boggy.’

  ‘You wait,’ said Guy.

  They began to walk through the wood, speaking little and in hushed voices. Among the trees the night became positive, not an absence of day but a world to which Enid was a native returning after long absence. The nightingale sang louder at their approach and she remembered that they did it to warn off enemies. She remembered that, and she remembered the small sounds that come out of a wood at night, the sense of creatures moving back into shadow to watch intruders. It startled her to find the strangeness so familiar.

  Guy had fallen into his countryman’s long, slow stride. When she could distinguish the set of his head and shoulders she saw that he was withdrawn and alert, automatically the hunter. As a boy he had boasted that he could find his way about any wood in the neighbourhood as easily in darkness as by day, and it had been true.

  ‘Do you still go out at nights?’ she asked; and he, remem- bering the times to which she was referring, said, ‘Of course not – though I sometimes wish I did. One grows soft.’

  Soon they came to the wet patches he had foretold and their feet sucked: Enid felt water running in under her instep, then her right foot went deep, came up shoeless and was groping, only to sink bare in soft mud.

  ‘Oh bugger!’ she exclaimed and Guy laughed.

  ‘Hold on,’ he said. ‘Don’t move, or we’ll lose it. I’ll light a match.’ She stood with her stockinged foot in the mud and felt relaxed: once really wet, why worry?

  ‘I’m terribly sorry, E,’ said Guy. ‘I warned you, you should have stayed in the car.’

  ‘I think I’m rather enjoying this,’ she said, watching his grey head in the light of the match as he stooped to pick up the shoe.

  The gate out of the wood on Croft’s side was not locked. They came into a big field under grass, sloping up to where the trees and roofs of the farm made a dark outline. It seemed very light after the wood, dangerously exposed.

  ‘Which was worse in the war?’ asked Enid. ‘On night patrols, I mean. Being in the open when they could see you easily but so could you see them, or being in thick cover so that you might stumble on them at any minute?’

  ‘The open, every time,’ he answered. ‘It wasn’t logical, I suppose, there was just as much danger in a wood or among buildings, but you wanted to feel hidden, like an animal. I wouldn’t fancy coming out here into the moonlight if there were a lot of Jerries in the orchard up there, or behind us.’

  ‘Did you do it often?’ she asked in a subdued voice, glancing back at the wood in which men could so easily be lying on their bellies, perhaps shifting a little to avoid uncom- fortable roots, one of them reaching out to hold down a branch in the hedge (she could feel the lichened bark against her fingers) the better to watch her and Guy.

  ‘Pretty often, at one time,’ he said gruffly.

  She noticed that as he walked he had begun to turn his head slowly from side to side and she found herself doing it too, watching for movement.

  ‘We’ll go round these bullocks,’ he murmured. ‘We don’t want them careering about and bringing someone to see what’s wrong.’ Enid, for all her peering, had not seen that the patches of deeper shadow ahead were cattle, lying down.

  They circled the animals quietly and came to the fence between the field and Mr Croft’s orchard.

  ‘We follow this fence,’ said Guy, ‘and then we have to go through the yard, right under the back windows of the house. Keep behind me. I want to make sure there’s no one about.’

  ‘Is there a dog?’ she whispered.

  ‘Yes, but I think he keeps it indoors at night.’

  ‘It wouldn’t really matter if he caught us. He couldn’t do anything.’

  ‘He’s not going to catch us.’

  Guy was back on night patrol, she realised, and enjoying himself. How could he enjoy it when he had gone through gates like that and known that Germans really might be lying in wait? Enid knew that she could never do it if it were real, she simply could not. She was smiling at the thought, but the back of h
er neck prickled and the palms of her hands were damp.

  When they were still some yards from the gate, ‘Wait!’ muttered Guy, and stopped so abruptly that she bumped him. He reached back, clutched her arm and dug in his fingers so hard that it hurt. She froze. At first she could only hear a little owl, back in the wood, then she heard voices. Footsteps were coming across the yard, two men were talking, the yellow light of a hurricane lantern was bobbing.

  ‘Guinea, we’d better call out,’ she whispered, but she could not have moved. The steps came nearer, the chain on the gate rattled, and ‘Get down!’ snapped Guy.

  ‘Oh nonsense,’ she was going to say, but she had done it. She was lying in wet grass beside him, her lace frock and her best coat huddled under her, a thistle brushing her cheek. ‘Now we’re trapped – now we can’t be caught,’ she thought, panic-struck – for how to explain such a posture on the part of two formally dressed middle-aged people in the dead of night, on someone else’s premises? It could not be done.

  The men had stopped on the other side of the gate. Very cautiously Guy moved until his head was near Enid’s. ‘Cow calving, I expect,’ he whispered.

  ‘Lunatic!’ she whispered back, and felt him shake with laughter, then catch his breath as the chain rattled again. One of the men must have had his hand on it.

  ‘She’ll do till morning,’ an old man’s voice was saying.

  ‘I don’t like the looks of that discharge,’ said the other voice. ‘Still, she’s in good condition, if she gets rid of it tonight she’ll come to no harm. You’d better get along home now – and don’t forget, I want George to take the tractor down to Beckett’s tomorrow, so tell him to come and see me first thing.’

  ‘He can bring back them iron rails while he’s about it,’ said the first voice. Then: ‘Good night, don’t wake the missus.’

  ‘Good night.’

  One set of footsteps started off across the yard, the gate was opened by the other man.

  ‘Guinea . . .’ breathed Enid.

  ‘Sh . . . keep your face down,’ and Guy, who was farthest from the hedge, wriggled closer so that they were both well inside the deepest shadow. The gate creaked shut, a man coughed and spat, then walked away obliquely across the field. Guy raised his head to watch him go.

  ‘All clear,’ he said when the man had vanished, getting to his feet. He helped Enid up and tweaked at her coat, the skirt of which had caught up on one side. ‘Well, old E,’ he said, ‘what would your London friends have thought if they’d seen you just now?’

  ‘God knows,’ she answered, giggling. ‘For goodness’ sake let’s get out of this.’

  ‘Just a minute.’ Guy moved away a couple of steps, turned towards the hedge and in a moment she could hear that he was urinating. ‘As though we were still children,’ she thought, then suddenly wondered: ‘Why on earth did we never go back to see if the chestnuts were still there?’

  When Guy was eight, about to go to school for the first time – preparatory school, to be followed by public school, to be followed by Sandhurst, to be followed by the army: the last time she was with him, really – he had managed to come out with German measles on the day term began. It gave them a reprieve of almost two autumn weeks. They had never collected so many horse-chestnuts before. They buried them in a rotten tree stump, clawing out handfuls of cottony wood to make damp, nestlike places into which they stuffed the nuts. ‘The soft wood will make them keep,’ Guinea had told her as they packed it back. ‘We must make it look as if there was nothing here so that no one will find them.’ They had stored away their treasure, sure that when he came back from school they would find the chestnuts still glossy, still theirs. She remembered it as a secret occasion, sad, full of the physical ache of the nostalgia which, in the days before they had lost anything, they could induce at will. Once, when they were away from home, Guy had said: ‘When I hear a cuckoo I think terribly of the water meadow,’ and she had listened to the cuckoo and seen what he meant. ‘Cuckoo, cuckoo, cuck . . .’ and her heart would turn over with longing. After that they could both bring tears into their own eyes by listening to the cuckoo in the right way, and they had buried the chestnuts on a day when that feeling was about.

  They had taken him away to school soon afterwards. ‘Did I miss him?’ she wondered now, following him silently through Mr Croft’s yard, under the house in which one upstairs window showed a light. A horse stamped behind a stable door. She could remember nothing of her feelings but she must have missed him, she supposed. Had they not lived entirely together? ‘Squirrels, moles?’ she thought suddenly. Scurrying secretly among the branches or the roots of the adult life going on about them. They had slept in the same room, washed in the same bath water, stolen the same fruit, shared the telling of the same stories, loved the same dog, plotted death for a French governess with the same hatred. She had known his terror of wolves; he, her horror of dark- ness. Equally inquisitive, they had explored old machinery in barns, examined each other’s genitals in a loft. They both knew that water was the loveliest thing, that red was a colour you wanted to eat. Not even with Harry, she thought, not even in her long deep love, such intimacy. . . . Before they took him away Guy was sick – she remembered that. Before he was properly in the car he had to get out of it again to be sick, but they drove him off. All of the family had known that he was never anything but desperate with unhappiness at school, but no one had questioned that he must be there. And what had she felt about it? When he had returned for the holidays, misery had already begun to make him a different person, and she had been busy with cousins.

  Walking down the cart-track to the road they returned to good sense.

  ‘I don’t think I’ll bother to ring Beckett’s until the morn- ing,’ said Guy. ‘They won’t answer at this hour. Will you mind going to the station in the truck? I can order a car if you like.’

  ‘Don’t be silly, of course I won’t mind. But that’s the last time I’ll drive with you unless Lavender is there. I can feel a bruise coming up on my elbow and my coat’s stiff with mud.’

  ‘It’ll brush off.’

  He had written a poem when he was at his prep school, she remembered. She had come across it much later, when she was about fourteen, and he, then sixteen, had laughed it off. It was a long poem about being at home. She knew its last lines:

  The blackbird bounced so that the leaves shook.

  There was a rabbit under every wheat stook.

  I told Pincher to catch a rabbit

  But he had a bad habit

  Of barking loudly to give them warning.

  Then I woke up and it was a winter night

  But I had thought it was a dewy morning.

  ‘We deserve a whisky,’ said Guy as they let themselves into the house, and they drank one in the dining-room, talking comfortably enough until he said: ‘Give Harry our love when he gets back. What’s he up to now? Encouraging a lot of wretched niggers to stick their necks out?’

  Enid told him coldly, and for the second time, the purpose of Harry’s conference, then went upstairs. Her beautiful blue hair, she found, was sticking out like a mad wig, and her dress was torn in two places.

  An hour later she dreamt that she was running across grass, Guy with her, then he was gone. She turned to see what had become of him and there were two men in uniform crouching over something stretched on the ground. Curious and happy, she ran back saying, ‘What have you got there?’– and it was Guy. One of the men half rose and turned towards her, eyes staring, but the other crouched lower over Guy, one hand on his throat, the other clamped over his mouth. When she saw what they were doing the scream of horror jolted out of her, waking her. She lay there, hearing her own voice as it moaned, ‘Poor little boy. Oh poor, poor little boy.’

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