Perfect Gallows Read online

  The day was hot and still, with the first reaper-binders clattering round the fields, fighters and fighter-bombers going over a few at a time but all the time. Though the rush of the invasion still crammed the main roads, along the lanes it might almost have been peace again, only without motor-cars and signposts at the road-junctions. He was in no hurry, so walked the steeper hills.

  Then everything changed. It was at the crossroads in the woods, where the big ammo-dump had been established under the trees. Each time he had passed it on his week-end trips the seemingly endless ridges of stacked shells had been there, looking as though they were part of the landscape—in a couple of months the leaves would fall and cover them and begin to rot, and in a few more winters they would have become ancient earthworks, there for ever.

  The first two ridges were gone.

  On his way out that morning he had noticed the lorries turning in to the site but, with his mind on the nightmare ahead, had not been struck by them. Now … It was the speed of the work which appalled him. Lorries were backed up to the third ridge every few yards, with a gang of soldiers at each tossing the shells up and stacking them away. Hundreds of thousands of shells. Shells, anti-tank.

  Andrew had little idea what an-anti-tank shell looked like, but in a blink of terror he saw another forest, pines this time, and the uniforms of the soldiers grey, but the shells were the same, hundreds of thousands of them. Many would never be fired. Most that were would miss, but that still left thousands and thousands doing what they were made for … twenty-twenty vision and you’ll be finding out how the gun works … in its steel shell, its trap, trundling between French hedgerows … and out in the orchard somewhere another gun-crew, grey uniforms, the sights lining up …

  He did not remember crossing the main road. He found himself fifty yards up the lane beyond it, standing on the pedals, slogging frenziedly at the slope. He dismounted, wheeled the bike in among the trees and tried to vomit his terror up. Nothing came.

  Back on the road he walked on, pushing the bike. When he had first freewheeled into the shade ten minutes ago he had enjoyed its coolness, but now he felt deadly chill, and even when he trudged up into the open again the sun seemed not to penetrate beyond his shirt into the ice inside him … thrilling region of the thick-ribbed ice … cold obstruction … sweet sister, let me live.

  He felt utterly deserted, naked, helpless. Adrian had gone. Adrian had never existed, of course, had never been anything more than a child’s imaginary playmate. There was nobody, nothing.

  “I thought you were never coming.”

  Leaning forward on the handlebars, hypnotized by the front tyre’s monotonous reel towards the chalky tarmac, he only knew she’d been there when she spoke—been there all along, sitting on the road-bank with her bike beside her watching him since he’d trudged out from under the trees. She rose, brown and carefree. She was wearing her Land Army uniform, breeches and open-necked shirt.

  “Why aren’t you milking?”

  “I swapped Saturday with Dolly. The binder broke, so she can do it.”

  Without giving him time to get rid of his bike she put her arms round him. The slope of the road made her inches taller than him.

  “Come to mother, then,” she said.

  With the cross-bar against their hips the pose was uncomfortable. She broke off, laughing.

  “Cheer up. You’re supposed to be glad to see me. Was it foul?”

  “Not really. Everyone’s got to do it, I suppose. Only …”

  “That’s never any help. Let’s find somewhere a bit private.”

  She picked her bike up and walked beside him over the crest of the hill. Twenty yards down a track led off through a broken gate. There was a lark, invisible but singing, high over the thistly rabbit-nibbled pasture, and they could see thirty miles north over a landscape blue and still with summer. The track ended in a chalk-pit with a shepherd’s hut on wheels, unused at this season, parked on one side and on the other some rusting farm machinery tangled with briars, but in the middle bare white chalk, too barren for growth. They leaned their bikes against the hut and kissed again. She made herself small for him, holding him tight but pliant to his movements. Her face softened, her eyes became misty. Since that first evening in the eyrie above the dovecote they hadn’t kissed seriously in broad daylight—it had always been at least dusk before the Cousins were in bed and he could climb out and steal up the drive to the lodge. Now he was suddenly aware how she had changed in those weeks—no, not changed, but unfolded, opened, at least for him, letting him discover what had been there all along, far more than his original picture of mere childish freshness and romantic sop. She had her own taste, her own odours, which he was the first to explore.

  “Keep your mind on the job,” she said, pulling her head away with a joke frown. “It’s me doing all the work.”

  “I was thinking about you.”

  “You think too much.”

  Their lips locked again. Her fingers clutched and nuzzled, felt their way in and up under his shirt. There was someone on the rim of the chalk-pit, looking down, benignly amused. Only Adrian, come back. Her right hand slid round between them and felt for her belt-buckle.

  “No good,” he whispered. “I haven’t brought anything. Didn’t expect …”

  “Bother.”

  The hand had a will of its own. She counted days.

  “Let’s risk it,” she said. “Just this once.”

  “Well, now we’re quits.”

  “Uh?”

  She looked past his head to the shaggy rim of grass above the white walls of the pit. They lay naked, belly to belly on the narrow strip of their clothes they had spread to protect them from the rubbly floor. The sun baked down. Even in the shade of the hut it was very warm.

  “It’s a sort of amphitheatre,” she said. “Like the one at The Mimms, only steeper. Glad there wasn’t an audience. Do you know …”

  “What?”

  “I was thinking. All that stuff about being certainly a maid and so on, and how vital that is …”

  “Prospero needs it to make his magic work. It’s sort of in the rules.”

  “But I used to feel so stupid saying it—I mean when it was true—and now it isn’t I shan’t turn a hair. I’ll rather enjoy it, I think. Isn’t that funny?”

  “Told you so. What did you mean, quits?”

  “Did I look like anyone?”

  “When?”

  “Just now. Come on, guess. At the flicks. We argued about her all the way home.”

  Dorothy Lamour? Nothing like, and anyway they hadn’t. The week before? Somewhere I’ll Find You—can glamour compensate for ham acting? Discuss.

  “Oh, her … I could have told you apart in the street.”

  “Don’t be clever. I want to know. Did I?”

  “Give or take a freckle, I suppose so. A bit.”

  “I was trying to. For you. It was a present.”

  “Thank you very much. Is there anyone you would like in exchange?”

  “You’ve given them all already, except one. I know I can’t have him.”

  “Who?”

  “Andrew Wragge.”

  Before he could answer she rolled him on to his back and pinned him down. He was off the clothes and the gravelly chalk hit into his shoulders. Her green eyes looked down into his.

  “The invisible man,” she said. “I was thinking about us, waiting. I came out because I knew you needed me. I felt it last night. You were so frightened. The real you, the person inside. Poor darling, I thought, I’ll bike out and meet him and cheer him up. And then you didn’t come and you didn’t come and I started to think. About us. I’ve always sort of supposed you’d go into the army and do your bit and then the war would be over and you’d come back and we’d get married and that would be that, like it is in the flicks, but then, sitting there waiting,
I suddenly understood it wasn’t like that. This is part of the war. It’ll all be different when it’s over. We’ll be different too.”

  Four planes, Beaufighters, drummed north above, going back from whatever they’d crossed the Channel to do.

  “It was like when somebody switches on a light in a dark room and you suddenly understand the shape of the furniture you’ve been bumping into,” she said. “I wonder if you love me at all.”

  “I love you.”

  “Yes, but who’s saying that? I know what it’s like to love somebody because I love you. I know how much it hurts. I don’t think you do. I don’t think you can. You’ve sort of arranged yourself so that nothing can hurt you. You can’t risk really being in love. You’ll always have to act.”

  “So does everyone. Lovers have to act being in love, just like Hamlet has to act being Hamlet. That’s what the play’s about.”

  “It isn’t a play. That’s what you’re never going to understand. You’re a magician. You think your magic’s real. I suppose it is. You wanted to see if you could use it to seduce me, didn’t you? And it worked. You didn’t cheat. You kept telling me you were only acting, only I was too stupid to understand. But just now it was the other way round. I was acting Lana Turner for you just now, on purpose, thinking about it, the way you do. And you weren’t, not this time. You needed me, didn’t you? Not just wanted, really needed. That’s what I meant about being quits.”

  He lay inert. Their faces were inches apart. Her breath was moist and sweet, like one of her cow’s. Her soft weight pressed on his chest, forcing the sharpness of the pit floor into his back. The joint heat of their bodies made the sweat stream down his cheeks. He had no strength in any of his muscles to throw her off. But Adrian was back, close now, hovering above them.

  “If you’re a magician then I’m a witch,” she said. “I’m going to put a curse on you. It goes like this. One day somebody else is going to understand you, and love you in spite of understanding you, like I do. And you won’t know what to do.”

  He summoned his selves together and bent his mouth into a smile.

  “Was it a good-bye present?” he said.

  She lowered her head and licked the tip of his nose, a long stroke like a cat grooming its kitten, then rolled away.

  “Just a present,” she said. “But don’t you forget—from now on I know your secret, Mr Magician.”

  TWO

  Stooking looked idyllic, from a distance. Now that the harvest had started Andrew worked at the farm most days. It was expected of him, not just by Mrs Althorp, greedy for unpaid labour, and Cousin Brown with her strong sense of duty, but by everybody, himself included. You were free, so you gave a hand with the harvest. As well as the usual farm people there were often four or five others working in the golden fields, a couple of Italian POWs, an off-duty bobby, the vicar’s son, home from Lancing, Jack to manage the horses—there was a war on, wasn’t there?

  Around nine o’clock—no point in starting till the dew had begun to evaporate—the horse-drawn reaper clattered round the edge of the field, leaving a swathe of mown oats laid flat. Two workers followed, raking them into bundles; behind them two more, each of whom picked up a dozen stalks, twisted them and used them as a cord to tie the loose bundle into a sheaf. It was a knack. Dolly did it without thinking, without even watching what her hands were up to. Being no good at it Andrew took one of the rakes. There was a knack here too, in nudging the mown stalks into a gatherable bundle, which even Brian managed better than Andrew. All this in the quiet of the morning, with the dew-smells, and the cow-smells from beyond the hedge, Dolly humming at her work, the whirr of disturbed partridges fighting away, the coo of pigeons, the last bombers going home.

  By about the time Jean came down after the milking there was a cleared lane all round the field, with the hand-tied sheaves laid under the hedge. Now the tractor could start, and the feel of the morning changed. The drub of its motor and the clatter of the reaper-binder, ten times louder than the simple horse-drawn bar, became the main noises of the day. Dave drove the tractor. Jean sat on the pierced metal seat at the back of the binder, controlling the height of the cutter-bar and lifting it for the turns. She had a cord that led to Dave’s elbow which she could tug for him to stop before things went disastrously wrong behind him. The binder was old, much-mended, and broke down every third circuit, but Dave understood its moods. He would climb down, mumbling slurred obscenities, tug some tangle out, adjust something with a spanner, oil something else and start again.

  Meanwhile the stookers, working in teams of two, picked up a sheaf under each arm, faced their partners as if setting for square-dance and plonked the four sheaves on their bases with the seed-heads leaning together. If they got it right the sheaves stood and eight more could then be stacked against them to make a stook, in line from the last and the right distance from the next line so that in a week a wagon could drive between them and the now-dried sheaves (if the weather held) be pitched easily up to the loaders. Stooking was not difficult work, nothing like as heavy as mucking-out, but after a couple of hours you became very weary, weary of the monotony, of the glare of the noon sun off pale stubble, of the strange refusal of particular sheaves to stand. Your arms rubbed raw along the inside. Patches of most fields were infested with thistles, so that each sheaf tortured the tender skin. Seed heads (barley was even worse than oats, everyone said) worked their way into your clothing to scratch at each move. Harvest mites chose your softest places—under your belt, your arm-pits, crotch, the crook of knees and elbows—producing at first a pleasant mild itch which you soon learnt would be a furious irritation by midnight.

  Worst of all, the work gave you time to think. There was nothing else to do with your mind while the slow hours passed and the island of uncut stalks dwindled and dwindled. Other times of the day you could read, or help Cousin Brown with the play (Andrew, in addition to being principal actor, had also the jobs of assistant stage manager, box-office clerk, messenger and wardrobe hand); nights, there was Jean, up in her room at the Lodge, or if it was warm enough wandering out under the stars and finding somewhere. But harvesting you couldn’t help thinking, thinking and feeling, your days of hope closing and closing, your chances of escape becoming ever fainter.

  Most fields were small enough to mow in one day. Dolly drove the tractor for the last few circuits while Dave and Mrs Althorp waited with shot-guns at opposite corners of the now cam-shaped island of stalks. The stookers stopped work and stood clear, some gripping staves. Out of the last unreaped yards the trapped rabbits bolted for the hedgerows. Guns banged. Stave-holders yelled, chased, thwacked. It was meat to add to the rations, a flare of fun after the dusty day. Everyone looked forward to it.

  Three evenings after his medical Andrew was sitting on a fallen tree at the top of the Five-acre, watching the rabbit-drive. Jean had gone off for the evening milking. The late afternoon sun shining through the dust of harvest hazed the whole scene brown-gold. He made a rectangular frame with thumbs and forefingers and looked through it, choosing shots for an imaginary film. When he had the prestige he would insist on directing his own films. One day … If …

  A twig cracked in the copse behind him. He twisted and saw Sergeant Stephens push his way out between a couple of elder bushes and raise a hand in greeting. Yes, of course; this was where he came to leave Cousin Blue’s butter for Samuel to fetch, and later came down to collect his payment. He didn’t seem at all put out to find himself observed, but climbed by the protruding roots up on to the bole of the tree and walked out along the trunk, stepping easily over the couple of strands of barbed wire which the men who’d fenced the camp had thought enough at this point. Owing to the tighter security since the invasion Andrew hadn’t seen him for several weeks.

  “Hello, sergeant,” he said.

  “Hi. Thought I’d come take a couple of snapshots, send to the folks back home. You don’t see this kinda farm
ing around there these days. We cut a mile at a time, combines, four of ’em in a row. This looks like something out of a picture book.”

  “Are you a farmer?”

  “My dad was, only he went bust in the depression and we moved to the city.”

  He lifted his camera and looked through the viewfinder.

  “Too far off,” he said. “OK if we move down a little? Where’s your girl?”

  “Milking. Please don’t mention she’s mine if you get talking. Mrs Althorp doesn’t like it.”

  “Sure, no problem.”

  They walked down, the stubble crackling under the sergeant’s enormous boots. He took several pictures, of the binder, the stooks, Mrs Althorp in the act of firing.

  “That dame can handle a gun,” he said. “Better than a lot of our guys out in Normandy, way things are going.”

  “It seems to be taking ages.”

  “The Krauts can fight. Best army in the world. We’re taking one in ten casualties already, and the closer we come to Germany the tougher it’s gonna get. The Russkies won’t have it any easier, even if they are going great guns right now. Once they’re on German soil …”

  “We’ve got to win in the end.”

  “Sure.”

  “When, do you think?”

  “Winter of forty-five, maybe. That’s the Krauts. After that it’ll be the Japs. You ever think what it’s going to be like taking the Jap mainland? One in ten casualties will be nothing.”

  “I’ve had my medical for call-up.”

  “You’ll be in time, kid. You’re not going to miss a thing.”

  “I’m more interested in things missing me,” Andrew heard Adrian saying, while he shrivelled inside.

  “Have those lawyers finished messing with the old man’s will?” asked the sergeant.