Evie, page 21
‘But the Princess Elizabeth drives,’ Hester continued, inspired by photographs she had seen in Picture Post. ‘She drove great army lorries for the war effort. I seen the pictures. And she’s a girl, in’t she? So. What d’you think Dave, eh?’
‘I dunno what I think, Hester. All this about new cottages and bathrooms and that. And now drivin’. Its just one bloomin’ thing after another with you lately.’ Hester leant towards him and stroked his firm thigh.
‘Yeah,’ she whispered, sympathetically. ‘But that’s life, i’n’t it Dave – one bloomin’ thing after another.’
‘Just like a picture postcard!’ the passengers exclaimed to one another, leaning on the rail of the SS Orontes as she altered course and the expanding vista of the Bay of Naples was slowly revealed to them.
The ship had rolled its way uncomfortably across the Mediterranean through wintery headwinds but today was still, the sea like blue silk under a cloudless sky. Evie lifted her face to the Italian sun which, even in mid December, felt pleasantly warm on her skin. The bay was alive with shipping, from small fishing craft to cargo boats, all moving at various speeds and in different directions, some heading out to sea, others homing in on the port itself where cranes, wharfs and warehouses were beginning to become discernible as the Orontes made her measured approach.
Across the bay Mount Vesuvius shimmered, lavender blue against the sky, its iconic shape recognised even by those who had never seen it before.
A stout, ageing man, immaculate in a white suit and a panama hat, who had boarded the ship in Tilbury, had this morning ventured down from the fist-class decks to mingle with the hoi polloi. Doffing his hat to Evie he smiled, his white teeth contrasting strongly with the neatly waxed moustache. ‘Vedi Napoli e poi muori!’ he said. Evie looked blank, so he tried again in excellent English with an Italian accent. ‘See Napoli and die! Mm? You have heard these words?’
‘Yes,’ Evie told him.
‘And you understand what they means? Mm?’ Evie smiled vaguely. ‘No? Well then I shall tell you. Some people attribute the phrase to the Bourbons. Mm? Others say it came from the great Goethe himself. But …’ he shrugged, ‘who knows! To those of us who love this place it has an altogether simpler meaning. You wish to hear that?’ Evie nodded. ‘Napoli is most beautiful, as you see.’ He waved his arms to encompass the panorama before them. ‘So beautiful, in fact, that once you have seen it, your pleasure in life is complete! Capice? Ah! I see that you understand! Arrivederci, my dear young lady … Arrivederci!’ He lifted his hat again, gave a little bow and bounced on his tiny feet in their highly polished shoes. Then he was gone, swallowed up in the crowd of passengers who were massing along the rail, excited by the prospect of setting foot in a foreign country. Gibraltar, their first port of call, being a British colony, hadn’t quite qualified as ‘foreign’.
Two tugboats had the Orontes now and were edging her slowly closer to the wharf, which was already alive with taxis, cars and lorries bringing the provisions which would be loaded aboard during the few hours the ship would remain alongside.
Evie scanned the hundreds of upturned faces. How would she identify Giorgio in such a crowd? How would he distinguish her from the dozens of passengers jostling along the rail above him?
Giorgio squinted up into the low morning sun, the pink ship towering over him as it edged closer to the dockside.
Was that her, in a hat? Or there, with a scarf tied under her chin? Was she somewhere amidships? Towards the bow? Or way back on the stern deck? Was she there at all? Or had she not been brave enough or sufficiently in love with him to leave her native country?
Her eyes raked the crowd below her and with every passing second her anxiety increased. Why wasn’t he there? Had the ship arrived too early or too late? Had he been persuaded by his family not to leave them? Had he met some local girl who had loved him all her life and was now claiming him? What would she do if he wasn’t there? Leave the ship and search for him? Or sail on to New Zealand alone? One of the women with whom she shared a cabin, and to whom she had confided her situation, pushed through the crowd of passengers and joined her at the rail.
‘Spotted your fella yet?’ she asked, and at that moment one of the faces on the wharf became Giorgio’s face. He had already seen Evie and was waving both his arms to attract her attention. Beside him was his brother, Salvo, with one of his children on his shoulders and the other in the arms of his wife.
‘Yes!’ Evie said, tears blurring her eyes. ‘Yes, he’s there! You see? You see?’ She stood, blowing kisses with both hands while the mooring lines were attached, the gangways lowered and the passengers began to spill down them onto the quay. Then, Evie’s arms were round Giorgio’s neck, his lips were on hers and he had lifted her feet from the ground, and while Salvo and his family cheered, swung her round and round. ‘Ah! Bravo, Giorgio! Bravo, Eva!’
It was raining in the Post Stone valley. Not a soft, mild, westerly drizzle but steady, cold and from the north-east. Edward John had saddled up Tosca, borrowed his stepfather’s full-length, waterproof hunting coat, found a wide-brimmed felt hat in the tackle room and was riding down, through the fields, to Lower Post Stone. But he was not Edward John Todd. He was Randolph Scott in The Desperadoes, Gary Cooper in The Westerner. Or possibly Henry Fonda or Dana Andrews in The Ox-bow Incident. Tempted to say ‘Howdee, pardner’ when he encountered Ferdie Vallance in the yard of the lower farm, he was glad he hadn’t when Ferdie asked him why he was dressed up like a scarecrow.
Edward John, being an only child until, aged nine, he had been forced to share his mother with ten, almost fully grown young women, had learnt to amuse himself, using his well-stimulated imagination to provide him with the scenarios of adventures, plots, plans and theories which made him independent of other children. Although he was sociable enough and mixed well with his peers, he was undaunted when left to his own devices.
While he was satisfied by the news that Evie was safely aboard the ship which would, any day now, unite her with Giorgio, he had found himself repeatedly drawn to the mystery of Norman Clark’s disappearance.
On the first and second occasions of Clark’s attempts to repossess his wife, his departures from the valley had been witnessed. The first, by Roger Bayliss himself, who had put the unhappy couple on a train at Ledburton Halt and the second, after Clark’s assault on Ferdie Vallance, by the stationmaster who had seen him board a train travelling north. But any evidence of his third departure ended abruptly, when he had been ordered off Edwin Lucas’s land and had slouched, despondently away, into the rainy landscape. Alice Todd’s description of his state of mind suggested to Edward John that the man might have been sufficiently deranged to be suicidal. But no body had been discovered swinging from a tree, floating face down in the river Exe or mutilated on a railway line.
Edward John slid from Tosca’s saddle and tethered her to a hitching post in the yard of the lower farm. Timber, for the conversion of the barn into two cottages, had already been delivered and stacked out of the weather. Having inspected this he made his way round to the rear of the barn where Dave Crocker and Ferdie Vallance were demolishing a redundant pigpen.
‘Any news of young Evie?’ Ferdie wanted to know. Edward John confirmed that the ship was due in Naples any day now but that it would be some time before the couple were reunited.
‘That’s Egypt, innit?’ Dave asked. ‘All camels and that!’
‘Yes,’ Edward John said, vaguely. ‘All camels and that.’ He was squinting up at the damaged sill of the aperture in the end wall of the barn, his eye caught by the marks where the iron nails and bolts that had attached the ladder had pulled away from the rotten wood and further down the wall, from the crumbling mortar.
‘It’s hard to see how a gale could have caused that,’ he said. Dave and Ferdie exchanged glances. ‘It looks to me as if someone, who didn’t know about the fire damage, had tried to use the ladder.’ Ferdie, loading a barrow with stones from the pigpen, took its weight and trundled out of sight. Edward John stood, waiting for Dave to answer him.
‘Could of,’ Dave said, shrugging. ‘Ferdie and I was working round t’other side of the barn that day. Loadin’ mangels, we was. Like I told Mr Bayliss, the next mornin’ us found the ladder down on the ground.’ This partially accurate account of things so nearly matched the truth that Dave almost believed it himself. Edward John pulled a face which implied his scepticism. Ferdie rejoined them and began loading the empty barrow.
‘But what sort of gale blows an iron ladder off a wall?’ Edward John persisted.
‘Reckon the rain ’ad softened the charred sill and the ladder worked loose,’ Dave said firmly. Edward John nodded.
‘And what do you reckon, Ferdie?’ he asked. Ferdie, taken aback and off guard, mumbled something Edward John couldn’t hear. ‘What?’ he persisted.
‘I reckon that those who asks no questions gets told no lies!’ Ferdie repeated. Then he stood, head lowered, fixing Edward John with a harsh, defensive stare, his hands flexing and unflexing on the shaft of the pickaxe he was using to break up the stones. Then he dropped his eyes, swung the pick and dislodged a hefty piece of slate. Edward John glanced at Dave who was smiling indulgently.
‘Reckon our Ferdie got out of his bed on the wrong side this mornin!’ he said, his grin so broad that Edward John found himself smiling too. Then both the men bent their backs over the pile of masonry, heaving the blocks onto the barrow. Edward John watched them for a few moments and then left them. When he was out of their sight, Dave straightened and turned furiously on Ferdie.
‘What in the name of flamin’ heck did you have to go and say that for, you brainless bugger!’
‘All I said was “them that—”’
‘“Asks no questions gets told no lies.” Yeah, I heard what you said, alright! You’m a nit-brain, Ferdie Vallance! A nit-brain! Edward John may on’y be a kid but ’e’s a smart one! When that lad puts two and two together, ’e makes four! Sure as eggs is eggs, ’e’ll reckon some’at’s gone on and it’ll not take long for ’im to work out what!’ Ferdie sulkily considered this.
‘P’raps us should tell ’im,’ he suggested.
‘Tell ’im? Tell Edward John? Not likely! Least people know ’bout this the better!’
‘Lots know already, though. What with my Mabel and your Hester and your Mum!’
‘But all of them knows better than to let it go no further!’ Dave insisted. ‘Edward John would tell his ma, most likely, and she’d tell the boss and the boss be a magistrate now! We’d have the law down on us in no time!’
Dave sat down heavily on the low wall, rested his forearms on his knees, his big hands hanging loosely between them.
‘That’s where us got it wrong, though, Ferdie. Us should of called the law instead of chuckin’ ’im in the slurry. We ’adn’t done nothing wrong ’til then. What happened with the ladder were an accident, pure and simple. There was plenty of witnesses to the GBH what Clark ’ad done to Evie. Then the Eyetie. Then you. And Mrs Bayliss. Then the pair of us. ’E’d ’ve gone down for all that, for sure, and we’d of bin in the clear!’ He looked up at the damaged wall and then at the buckled metal of the ladder. Ferdie was doubtfully shaking his head.
‘You reckon the law would ’ave believed us? They got a nasty way of twistin’ things, that lot, Dave. Imagine what the newspapers would say!’ Dave acknowledged the truth of this with a sigh.
‘Yeah …’ he said. ‘You can just see the ’eadlines, can’t you. “Locals murder returned soldier over two-timin’ land girl”.’
‘But it weren’t murder,’ Ferdie said. ‘It were an accident.’
‘Try provin’ that, when the bastard’s body be under six foot of sludge and weighted down be ’alf an ’arrow.’
They were right about Edward John. He had put two and two together and although he had not made four, he was closer to it than he was to three, or even five.
His first theory was that Norman Clark had found his way down from the Lucas farm to Lower Post Stone where he still hoped to find Evie. Instead he had been discovered by Dave and Ferdie who set on him in an attempt to run him off the property. The ensuing fight, which had resulted in the bruises and cuts which both Dave and Ferdie later claimed to have been caused by the storm, could have been both violent and protracted, ending in Clark making his escape, as he had after the earlier incident, across the fields. This hypothesis raised the question of how, given that the local constabulary had been, by then, alerted to Clark’s presence in the area and were actively searching for him, no one had seen any sign of him. And, more inexplicably, why, if Clark had arrived at the lower farm, neither Dave, Ferdie or even Hester, had not immediately contacted the police? Edward John at that point knew nothing of the disconnected telephone or how Dave had subsequently replaced the damaged wiring.
As each of his theories raised more questions than it answered Edward John allowed himself to be distracted by the complex question of his own future. He would be leaving his prep school at the end of the next summer term. In line with tradition and in common with all the boys in his year, he had recently spent half an hour with his headmaster, discussing his ambitions.
Geoffrey Turbot, known affectionately if not respectfully as ‘Fishy’, offered Edward John a ginger biscuit from the tin on his desk and then continued his scrutiny of his pupil’s end-of-term report. It was obvious to Edward John that the biscuit was intended to put him at his ease, but as he already knew his report was a good one and consequently was not at all ill at ease, he simply sat enjoying the biscuit and watching Fishy’s spectacles slide down his long, bony nose.
‘Well, young man?’ Turbot asked, removing the spectacles, closing the report and clasping his hands on the inky blotter in front of him. ‘What’s it to be? Agriculture or medicine?’ Geoffrey Turbot was familiar with Edward John’s history, his parents’ broken marriage, his charming and resourceful mother and his warm relationship with his recently acquired stepfather.
‘Farming, probably,’ Edward John told him and then, reacting to his headmaster’s slightly quizzical expression, added, ‘There’s a lot to it, you know, and my stepfather is very good at it. I like the Post Stone valley. And the people. And the animals. So I’ll probably try for Seale Hayne and then …’ Edward John was picking up the distinct impression that Fishy was not entirely happy with his answer. The headmaster helped himself to a biscuit and pushed the tin towards Edward John.
‘You used the word “probably” twice, young man.’
‘Did I?’ Edward John said.
The discussion that followed was not an unfamiliar one to the headmaster. Boys leaving prep school were almost always in a vulnerable state when it came to making decisions about their ambitions. Some evaded the issue altogether, leaving it, in the short term at any rate, to their teachers to suggest the subjects best suited to equip them for modest success in a respectable profession, or for the long term, to parental ambition which often resulted in disappointment. In Turbot’s experience, only a very few boys at twelve years plus a few months felt confident enough to resist outside pressures from whichever direction they came. Often this led to false starts or, more sadly, to whole lives being blighted by wistful reflection. ‘What I always wanted to do.’ ‘Who I always wanted to be’ …
The headmaster watched his pupil eat the second biscuit. On the boy’s face was a slight frown, his eyes were fixed on some distant prospect. Or perhaps on nothing at all. He swallowed the last of the biscuit, and after a moment, almost apologetically engaged the headmaster’s eyes.
‘Sorry, sir,’ he said. ‘I was just thinking …’
‘You go ahead,’ Turbot said, groping amongst the clutter on his desk for pipe, tobacco pouch and matches. ‘Have a good think. No hurry. No hurry at all.’ He thumbed golden shreds of Barney’s Full Strength down into the bowl of his pipe, drew the match flame into it and had been pulling and puffing gently for some time before Edward John spoke.
‘I had thought,’ he said, ‘at one time, that I might like to be a vet, but …’
‘But what?’ Turbot said, through teeth clamped round the stem of his pipe.
‘But … it takes such ages to qualify. It’s a massive subject. All the different species, you see. Not like being an ordinary doctor and only having to study humans.’
‘And that seemed a bit daunting, did it?’ Turbot asked.
‘A bit. And then I thought about being a brain surgeon or something. A haematologist, perhaps. They study—’
‘The blood. Yes. That sounds quite challenging. Your results for science, biology and physics indicate that you have capabilities in that direction. You’d need to keep up your Latin, of course, and your maths but—’
‘But then I rather went off medicine,’ Edward John said, apologetically, adding, ‘Because I really would hate to have to live in a city, you see, and brain surgeons and haematologists more or less have to because it’s where the big hospitals are and where the groundbreaking research goes on.’
‘Mmm,’ Turbot said. ‘Groundbreaking research, eh. Well, yes, I suppose it does. It’s a dilemma, isn’t it.’
‘Yes, it is a bit.’ Edward John watched Turbot knock the ashes from the bowl of his pipe.
‘The thing is, old chap,’ the headmaster said, ‘that you really don’t have to make any big decisions at this stage of things.’
‘Don’t I?’ Edward John asked. ‘I sort of thought I did. Don’t I have to tell my housemaster at Wellington which subjects I’m going to study for School Cert. and Matric. and everything?’
‘True. You do. But the clever thing is to cover all your bases. Concentrate on subjects that not only interest you but have a link to any of the careers you are considering and just give the others a bit of a nod from time to time, to keep everyone happy. See what I mean?’ Edward John clearly did see and said so. ‘Now scram,’ Turbot said. ‘Poor old Harrison Minor has been kicking his heels outside my door for far too long. Tell him to come in, will you?’
