The Dearest and the Best Page 5

  ‘There undoubtedly were,’ admitted Robert Lovatt solemnly. ‘Stirring stuff. All true. Every word authentic. Since nothing much is happening in this war, the Great War has taken on a new interest.’

  James said casually: ‘I liked that escaped prisoner story. Do you remember, Harry? What was it?’

  They were like boys again, holding their grins. Harry pantomimed enthusiasm across the table. ‘I’ll say,’ he agreed. ‘What was it – “Four Years Under a Frenchwoman’s Bed”?’

  Robert Lovatt blinked disapproval. ‘Nearly right, old chap,’ he admonished. ‘Actually it’s “My Four Years in a Frenchwoman’s Cupboard”. Cupboard, not bed.’

  Elizabeth and Millie returned. ‘Let’s go down to the pub,’ suggested Harry. ‘En masse, just as we used to do.’

  ‘We can’t use the car,’ his father pointed out. ‘People don’t like it. It’s unpatriotic to use petrol like that.’

  ‘We can use Horace,’ said Millie before hesitating. ‘But the trap will only take four at the most. Too much cargo and Horace just refuses anyway. He just stands there looking hurt.’

  Elizabeth said firmly: ‘The boys can go by bike. The bikes are still in the garden shed and I imagine the wheels still go round.’

  ‘Bikes?’ echoed James. He looked down at his uniform and then across at his sub-lieutenant brother. ‘Bikes?’

  ‘Well, if you want to appear more military, perhaps you could march,’ said their mother. ‘Nobody is going to see you in the dark.’

  ‘I wonder where the clips are?’ said Harry regarding his sharply-creased trousers.

  ‘They’re looped around the handlebars, where you left them,’ said Elizabeth.

  ‘Last one there buys first round,’ said Harry suddenly. He turned and rushed for the garden. James ran after him out into the darkness and through the tree shadows. Harry was pulling the old bolts on the garden shed door; laughing like a schoolboy, he flung it open. Both young men squeezed through the door at once. James put the light on and they heard his father bellow for it to be extinguished. ‘Don’t you know there’s a black-out?’ They turned it off but it had given them time to see the two bicycles. Throwing aside accumulated family debris, they tugged the machines clear, charged them through the door, Harry just in the lead, and mounted them at a run. As they pedalled from the drive, the wheels and chains squeaking hideously, they heard their father shout again from his seat in the trap, and the women laughing as the pony began to trot.

  The brothers rode noisily, bumping along the woodland paths, ducking below trees, bounding into holes and sending stones flying around sharp bends. They reached the main road far ahead of the pony and trap, and turned, only a few yards separating them, laughing and abusing each other. ‘You silly bugger, Harry!’ ‘You daft old fart, James!’

  Bert Brice, the policeman, shouted to them as they bumped through the dark, but they did not hear him. They came to a sharp bend in the road and sped around it. Lying on the tarmac were three sleepy cows. Harry could not stop. He collided with them, flying over the handlebars with a howl, landing between the second cow and the third, who, bellowing in fright, clattered to their feet, depositing him on the road. One of the animals put its hoof through the front wheel spokes of the bicycle and trying in fright to clear it, caught its horn in the wheel and charged off towards the village with the bicycle hung like a garland from its head. James avoided the collision only by swerving from the road, over some stony grass and then dipping down to a wide but shallow stream. He shouted as the bicycle bounced across the pebbled bed, sending up a bow-wave before crashing furiously against the far bank. James was flung into the gorse and grass and lay there, all the breath knocked from him. ‘James!’ he heard his brother call. ‘James, where have you gone, for Christ’s sake? I’m up to my ears in cowshit.’

  They staggered towards each other in the night, laughing so much they could hardly speak. Weakly they embraced and sat down on the grass at the side, two brothers again. Two boys.

  Three

  TOM PURKISS, WHO had lost his fingers in Norway, was playing darts in the four-ale bar at the Old Crown, Binford, throwing with his left hand. His right was still bandaged. The others watched him with deference. Sid Turner, the forester, Harold Clark, a farmhand, and Hob Hobson, who kept the general stores in the village, were, with the nature of rural men, loath to make a wrong comment or ask an indiscreet question. Their faces, like their reserve and their voices, were set and slow. They had said nothing, so far, about the missing fingers. Nor had Tom mentioned it. He threw three darts.

  ‘Don’t seem to have stopped you hitting the board,’ the most forward of the men, Hob, pointed out eventually. His companions looked at him sharply but with some admiration. ‘Throwing with the wrong hand,’ he added self-consciously.

  Tom completed his throw and going to the chalk and blackboard at the side wrote up his score, again using his left hand. ‘Cows don’t like it,’ he replied at length, returning to the end of the throwing mat. The men’s forest faces were chaffed, reddened, apart from Hob who was a heavy, pale man. They had simple horizons and it was difficult for them to imagine frostbite.

  ‘They know, I ’spect,’ ventured Sid.

  ‘Oh, cows know all right,’ put in Harold, the farm labourer. ‘You can’t fool a cow, no matter what else. Mine, they know if I’ve been ’axing too much the night before. They buggers know I got a ’angover and they shove and push something terrible. They know.’

  Hob frowned at him. Now he had broached the subject of the absent fingers he wanted to hear more from Tom Purkiss. It was Hob’s turn to throw, but, having awkwardly taken the darts from Tom, he waited.

  ‘They just think it’s somebody else, I suppose,’ said Tom, still talking about the cows. ‘They’re looking fine though.’

  ‘That London kid with spots been looking to them,’ said Hob.

  ‘Oh aye, he ain’t a bad boy that, ’spite all ’is face. And the cows is quite happy as long as the grass is growing. They don’t care about no Hitler nor anybody.’

  Hob threw his darts painstakingly, like he weighed his groceries, and they muttered as they added his scores. He went to the blackboard, parts of it thin and cracked with years of chalking. Harold said to Tom: ‘All we ’eard was just rumours, like, old Ma Fox ’ere reckoned you’d been shot. We thought you was dead.’ He looked around for confirmation. They nodded support. ‘Then she said that you’d got no legs or no arms. You know what she’s like.’ He nodded heavily in the direction of the bar.

  Tom grinned not at them, but almost to himself, his long-broken teeth projecting from his mouth like tattered flags.

  ‘Bet you was disappointed then, wasn’t you,’ he said, and added thoughtfully, ‘Can’t think of me with no arms and legs.’ He slowed.

  Ma Fox, the huddled mother of Charlie Fox, the landlord, had appeared from the saloon bar next door. She was wiping the bar, but they guessed she had only come to tell them something. She left a puddle of beer on the wood, missing it with her cloth. ‘Two Lovatt boys are in,’ she whispered like someone first with a secret. ‘Don’t half look nice in their uniforms.’

  Tom went to the bar, the handles of the pewter mugs held in the loop of his finger and thumb. ‘One was in Norway,’ he said. ‘The older boy.’

  ‘So they say. Did you bump into him there?’ She pulled the ale handle.

  The scarred door of the threadbare bar opened. A tall young gypsy came in and shyly asked for some pipe tobacco. Ma Fox sniffed and turned to get it. The gypsy half turned and nodded to the darts players. Hob Hobson ignored him but the others returned the nods. Sometimes he helped with pulling the potatoes and swedes and Harold Clark had once been private night-fishing for salmon with him, something of which few people were aware, and Harold chose to forget. The gypsy’s name was Liberty Cooper, a member of a whole tribe of Coopers who lived in the forest, under strange igloos formed by the bowed branches of trees. It was called living ‘under the benders’. The Coopers ate a lot of
venison, wandering pork and the occasional donkey.

  Ma Fox held out a surly hand for the sixpence before she parted with the tobacco. ‘Like one of them Indians in the cowboy flicks,’ she sniffed when the gypsy had gone out. ‘Ought to be in the army, his age. Remember that old woman, Hob? You remember, Sid, don’t you?’

  One of the Coopers, an old thieving grandmother, had once purloined a smouldering log from the winter fire in the bar and, putting it below her woollen pullover, had gone up the street smouldering like a funeral pyre. They all knew the story but Ma Fox told it again and laughed outrageously at it while the men smiled impatiently.

  Two of the inshore fishermen from Binford Haven, brothers, with Donald Petrie, a coastguard, came into the bar, walked through and looked into the saloon and then returned. ‘Too crowded,’ muttered one of the fishermen. He went to the bar and got three beers.

  ‘Not going out tonight, Lennie?’ said Ma Fox. ‘Not your time to come in, is it? I know your time.’

  The other brother, Peter Dove, paused while the dart players began to throw a new game. ‘Can’t get out,’ he said eventually speaking to them all. ‘Something’s going on. They reckon some of they Jerry Stukas was about just before dark. Looking for something to bomb.’

  ‘Just off the Island,’ said Lennie, meaning the Isle of Wight.

  ‘There’s certainly something up,’ confirmed Petrie. ‘We’ve had a coast alert since seven o’clock. Probably just the usual scare about nothing.’

  ‘Don’t reckon so,’ argued Lennie. ‘Too much flying about for that. Never heard so many. Anyway, we got ordered not to clutter up the Channel. So we don’t go to work tonight. No fish tomorrow. No money neither.’

  Petrie, the coastguard, was a short, wide-necked, firm-faced man with yellow hair. He was one of few strangers in the region; people still largely lived in one place and travelled little. He, however, had come down from the north-east of England, the ancient Viking coast. The people at Binford and The Haven had now, after two years, grown used to his remote accent.

  The four-ale bar was beginning to fill. There were varnished benches around the whitewashed wall, two heavy tables and chairs, and no decoration but a stopped clock and the fixture list of the darts league.

  Ben Bowley arrived from the station having ushered the last train of the day away on its evening journey to Lyndhurst, eight miles distant. John Purkiss, son of the organist of the village church, George Lavington, and Jeremiah Buck from The Haven, with the old man called Sonny who sometimes fished with the Dove brothers, came in to nods and small jokes. Henry Hadfield, the cricket captain from Radfield Compton, a village on the remote side of Ringwood, arrived to make arrangements for the annual match and was greeted as an alien with enthusiastic chaff from the Binford men. Their names went back for generations, sometimes centuries. Both the men called Purkiss, although not now directly related, knew that it was a forester of that name who had carried the body of King William Rufus from the trees after an arrow had struck him in the eye while hunting. That was on 2 August, AD 1100.

  Two young Royal Air Force men came through the low door and its black-out curtain and, having taken their pints, sat on the cross bench along the wall. Petrie and the fishermen recognized the RAF men as members of the crew of the Air Sea Rescue launch stationed at Lymington, waiting to pluck shot-down pilots from the sea. Only once so far had they been called into action and that was for a Bristol Beaufighter which had come down because of engine failure. The pilot, smothered by his own parachute, had drowned before they reached him. Petrie caught the eye of one of the airmen, a fiercely red-haired youth with freckles. ‘Off duty then?’ he said.

  ‘Been a buzz on all day,’ said the young man. ‘But it’s off now. All clear twenty minutes ago.’

  Petrie turned to the Dove brothers. ‘You could get out then.’

  By now they would have rather stayed in the bar. But it was their living. ‘Better do,’ said Lennie reluctantly. ‘Won’t earn a wage like this.’

  ‘I’ll just make sure,’ decided his brother, low-voiced so the RAF men would not hear. ‘I’ll go around and phone.’ He went towards the door to the saloon bar. ‘We’ve got time for another before we go, though,’ he said over his shoulder.

  His brother nodded and took the glasses to Ma Fox at the bar. ‘Want a night out?’ he said to Sonny, the old man who sometimes sailed with them.

  ‘Aye, all right,’ muttered Sonny, lifting back his beer. ‘I’ll go and get my bits.’ He nodded around and went out.

  Lennie Dove returned from the saloon bar. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘’Tis all right. Buzz is off.’ He looked at his brother and picked up his pint, then glanced around. ‘We’re taking the old man?’ he said.

  ‘Yes,’ grinned Peter. ‘He’s gone to get his gun.’

  The saloon bar of the Old Crown had chintz curtains on the inside of its black-out blinds. On the bentwood chairs were matching cushions. One of the great, but scarcely spoken, British class distinctions was here – the comfort and warmth of this room and the rude sanctuary of the public, or four-ale, bar. Each Binford inhabitant knew his place, with the prices a few pennies lower in the public bar. Some people, like Petrie the coastguard, and the Dove brothers, could acceptably cross the frontier, but not many. Charlie Fox was proud of both his little kingdoms. He provided the chalk and the blackboard for the public bar and had recently installed, in the saloon bar, a silvery, wind-up gramophone, which required no trumpet as a loudspeaker. The music issued from holes in the lid.

  Above the bar the landlord had also had fitted some of the new tube fluorescent lighting, of which he was proud. If a stranger entered Charlie would turn it off and on again just to draw attention to it. It did, however, darken his blue-hued chin, enlarge the pits of his eyes and give his pale face an even deadlier pallor.

  There was a stag’s head just within the door. It had been killed thirty years before, cornered by hounds in the courtyard of the inn. Customers entering the bar patted it on the forehead and hung hats on its antlers. Over the years the hair had worn away to buckskin and one of the lower branches of the horns had become detached and had to be glued on again by Tom Bower, The Haven shipwright. In the winter a fire sat in the grate and in summer a jug of fresh flowers replaced it. The lamps around the room had red shades to compensate for the gauche light of the tube flooding the bar like a stage. There was no dart board on the wall here, but a notice board detailing village events, the Saturday cricket fixtures, the riding-school fees, the church services at St Michael and All Angels, and miscellaneous pieces of paper, appeals, advertisements and notices; the Young Farmers’ Whitsun Supper, the Footballs for Refugees Appeal, Mrs Gloria Arbuthnot, Clairvoyant and Forecaster.

  James looked about him. He could scarcely believe that he was there, safe, home in the village pub. People he had known all his life sat in their appointed, unofficial places, much as they did in church. His private anger rumbled within him again. They knew nothing, he thought, and cared nothing about the dangers, the death. They really believed no evil could harm their world. Millie and his mother occupied one of the cushioned window-seats with Joan Lampard. His father, Harry and John Lampard stood by his side at the bar. Twenty other familiar faces were in the room.

  ‘He’s not a bad lad, young Cubbins,’ John Lampard was saying. ‘Very willing and he can saw straight.’

  Charlie Fox leaned over the bar towards James. ‘Tom Purkiss is in the other bar, Mr Lovatt. Just back from Norway like you. Lost some fingers with frostbite.’

  James experienced an odd relief. ‘Purkiss from Harrington’s Farm?’ he asked.

  ‘That’s the chap,’ confirmed Charlie. ‘He’s in there now, playing darts.’

  James looked with almost a challenge at the others, as if he were about to interrupt some game they were playing. ‘Excuse me,’ he said, ‘I think I’ll just go in and have a word with him.’ He moved away and Millie looked after him with a troubled expression which she converted to a smile when she turne
d back to the other two women. ‘He’s very serious about it,’ she said as if needing to explain.

  ‘I expect he’s been through it,’ interpolated Charlie from across the bar. ‘We don’t know what it’s like, do we?’

  James ducked through the doorway into the four-ale bar. His presence brought a brief reaction in there, as if he had stepped unexpectedly into a barrack room. Charlie followed him around the bar, beyond the partition, edging his mother away to her annoyance. ‘Go in the other bar,’ he prompted under his breath.

  ‘I’m going, I’m going,’ she protested. She moved to the other side of the wall, her face transforming as she did so, like a disgruntled actress walking into the lights of a stage with a smile. She hummed a snatch from ‘Underneath the Spreading Chestnut Tree’.

  In the other bar James waited and watched the darts players. He saw Tom’s diminished hand. ‘How is it?’ he asked eventually when the darts were thrown and the score chalked. ‘How’s the war wound?’

  Tom looked surprised, almost shocked, that he should know. As if it might have come from some official source. ‘Oh, well, Mr Lovatt,’ he stumbled, ‘it ain’t. If you see what I mean.’

  James smiled and nodded. ‘I see,’ he said. ‘Can I buy you a pint, Tom? Or something else?’

  ‘We’re finished now,’ said Hob Hobson, although they hadn’t. The players moved away towards their beer mugs.

  ‘I’ve got mine, thank you, Mr Lovatt,’ said Tom. The others, glancing regretfully, had theirs too, having only sipped at them through the darts game.

  ‘I’ll have a pint, Charlie, please,’ said James. He put two half-a-crowns on the bar. ‘And one in the kitty for these gentlemen.’ They smiled acknowledgement. James said to Tom, ‘Where did you get to in Norway, then?’

  Tom said: ‘Narvik, Mr Lovatt. I came back on HMS Swordfish with you. I saw you get off and go ashore.’

  ‘You did? What a pity I didn’t see you.’