Текст книги "The Boy with No Boots"

Автор книги: Sheila Jeffries

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Текущая страница: 10 (всего у книги 16 страниц)

Chapter Fourteen

THE STONE GATEPOST

Freddie stood in the stonemason’s yard, staring in disbelief at a load of stone which had appeared there. It wasn’t stacked neatly as Herbie would have liked, but tipped in a jumble of old saddle stones, and blocks of golden sandstone, some still joined together with mortar. The stones gave Freddie a strange feeling, as if they had voices and stories to tell, stories locked into the grains of sand and crystal. He looked at the wheel marks in the mud and saw the large hoof prints of a Shire horse, as if the heavy load had been delivered by horse and cart, probably early in the morning before it got too hot. Seeing the hoof prints increased his inexplicable sense of doom.

Right in the middle of the heap were two round domes of stone carved with curly patterns and covered in moss and lichen. Carvings! With a terrible sense that he was going to discover some unforeseen tragedy, Freddie climbed over the blocks to investigate. Gingerly he cleared a space around one of the domes until he could see a face glaring out at him with blind stone eyes and snarling lips. Shocked, he sat down on a chunk of sandstone, reached out his hands and touched the stone lion’s curly head. It was warm from the August sunshine, but under its chin it was cold as a tomb. Silently he uncovered both the carvings and sat studying them, not wanting to believe the thought that hammered insistently at his mind.

‘Mornin’, Freddie!’ Herbie came padding into the yard in his leather apron and dust-covered overalls. ‘’Tis hot,’ he remarked, taking his cap off to let the top of his bald head dry in the sun.

‘Mornin’,’ said Freddie.

‘You’re looking uncommonly serious,’ observed Herbie. ‘Has your mother been at you again?’

‘No,’ said Freddie. He looked at Herbie’s challenging grey eyes. ‘Where did this lot come from, Herb?’

‘Hilbegut.’

Something swept over Freddie like a gust of hot air, charged with emotion. He rubbed the backs of his hands over his eyes, brushing away the tears that prickled in there.

The stone lions from Hilbegut Farm.

Something had happened to Kate.

‘Haven’t you heard?’ said Herbie. ‘The Squire of Hilbegut died weeks ago. And he didn’t have an heir. So his place is just left empty, that great big place with the turrets. And all his tenants in the farms and cottages have got to move. Tragic, ain’t it? Those poor families. Got nowhere to go.’

‘So who’s done this?’ asked Freddie. ‘These two stone lions were on the gateposts to Hilbegut Farm.’

Herbie’s prominent eyebrows drew together in a frown, and he shook his head. ‘Can’t say I know that,’ he said, ‘I only knows what I hears, see? Maybe ’tis gossip, but they say his sister and her family have come over from Canada, and they don’t care nothing about the place. They’re stripping out the carvings and the stone and anything they can sell. They just want the money, see. Then they’ll go off back to Canada and leave Hilbegut to go to rack and ruin. That’s all I know, and ’tis none of my business.’

Freddie began to shake inside. He made an instant decision. He would unload the stone he’d brought down from the quarry for Herbie, then drive out to Hilbegut and find out for himself. But first . . .

‘What about the stone lions?’ he asked.

‘Oh – I’ve not really looked at them properly yet,’ said Herbie, ‘but they’ll fetch a lot of money. Rich folks with money to burn buy that sort of stuff.’

‘I’d like to buy them,’ said Freddie.

‘You couldn’t afford them, Freddie. Come on. What d’you want ’em for anyway? Stick one on the front of your lorry!’ Herbie gave one of his wheezy laughs that went on and on until it ended in a coughing fit.

Freddie thought about his savings. He’d done well with the haulage business and was planning to buy a second lorry. To blow it all on two stone lions would be foolish.

Herbie was leaning forward, his eyes looking curiously into Freddie’s soul. ‘So tell me – why do you want them?’

‘I’m interested in carving. I’ve watched you a lot,’ said Freddie. ‘I’d like to do it myself.’

‘’Tis hard,’ said Herbie, ‘a hard, dusty old job. Makes me cough. And look at me hands. You don’t want to do that, Freddie. You stick to your lorry, if you take my advice. Anyway, I doubt whether you could do a decent stone carving; it’s not as easy as you think.’

‘I could,’ said Freddie with unexpected passion. ‘I know I could.’

‘So what do you want to carve?’

‘An angel.’

‘That’s about the hardest thing you could choose.’

‘I know I could,’ insisted Freddie, thinking of Kate’s beautiful bewitching young face. ‘I can see it in my mind exactly.’

Herbie’s eyes looked thoughtful under the bushy brows. He began moving the blocks of stone around as if searching, and heaved out a big lump of sandstone from the Hilbegut gateposts.

‘I’ll tell you what, Freddie. This here, this is Bath stone, and it’s easy to carve. If you like, I’ll give you this block, and I’ll bet you can’t carve an angel out of that ’cause I couldn’t.’

Freddie’s eyes lit up. The angel inside the stone shone out at him. He could see its curved wings, its praying hands and flowing hair, and the tranquillity of its gaze.

‘How much d’you bet then, Herbie?’

‘A pound.’

‘Right. You’re on.’

The two men shook hands, their eyes glinting at each other. Together they heaved the block of Bath stone into the back of Freddie’s lorry.

‘You got any tools?’ asked Herbie.

‘A few.’

‘Chisels?’

‘No.’

‘I’d better lend you some.’ Herbie rummaged in his workshop and came out with a wooden box full of chisels. ‘I don’t want ’em back, Freddie. I got plenty.’

‘Thanks,’ said Freddie. He itched to take the chisel out and begin to carve the angel still shining in his mind. He had another job to do, hauling timber, and then he would go to Hilbegut.

‘For goodness’ sake, Kate, stop that crying,’ said Sally briskly. She stood very upright, dressed in her best navy blue dress and hat, the breeze ruffling a few wisps of grey hair that had escaped from her tightly coiled bun. ‘We’ve got to make the best of it.’

‘I’m trying to stop,’ said Kate.

‘That’s my girl.’ Bertie gave his daughter a fatherly pat on her proud young shoulders.

‘I’m not crying,’ gloated Ethie. But she was. Inside her mind, a weather front was coiling itself into a hurricane with storm force winds and rain, just waiting to come sweeping across her new life.

Together the Loxley family stood on the jetty, watching the ferry boat chugging towards them with its load of passengers. The brown waters of the Severn Estuary swirled with fierce energy, the tide sweeping the boat sideways as it reached the middle of the river. And Bertie said what he always said when they were in the queue at Aust Ferry.

‘Fastest tide in the world, they say, except for one in South Africa,’ he said. ‘I’ll warn you girls now. Never, ever go swimming in the Severn. If the mud doesn’t get you, the tide will.’

‘Look at that boat,’ cried Ethie. ‘It’s having a real fight to get out of the current.’

‘Now it has,’ said Sally, seeing the boat turn and head for the jetty, sending a wide creamy brown wave fanning across the calmer water. ‘Come on now, Kate, you usually enjoy the trip.’

Kate nodded. Her throat felt dry and sore from unaccustomed crying. She couldn’t believe they were leaving Hilbegut. Everything there was so dear to her. The swing in the barn door, the happy chickens, the sweet-smelling haystacks and the shady elm trees. The beautiful avenue of copper beeches where she’d skipped and played on her trips to deliver milk to the Squire. The home paddock where white Aylesbury ducks, geese, sheep and chickens pottered happily under the branches of the walnut tree. Her lovely bedroom with its window peering out under a brow of thatch where swallows and sparrows nested under the eaves.

She’d been used to leaving home and going to boarding school, but home had always been there for her to come back to. Now, unexpectedly and with merciless speed, it was gone. Her father was suddenly jobless, homeless and in poor health, her mother stoically trying to hold them all together. The only person who seemed intact was Ethie. But Ethie, Kate thought, hadn’t got a boyfriend to leave behind.

Kate was breaking her heart over every single duck, chicken and cow. All had gone to auction, except for Polly and Daisy who were loaned to the farm next door until they could be transported to Gloucestershire. Bertie had insisted on the four of them travelling together in a friend’s motorcar, and Kate had been terribly sick all the way to the ferry, giving Ethie another opportunity to say scathingly, ‘For goodness’ sake, Kate, can’t you stop being sick?’ It was either ‘stop crying’ or ‘stop being sick’ or ‘stop mooning over that BOY.’

Nobody knew how Kate felt about Freddie. Since the day on the hills she’d respected the depth of his artistic soul, the determined pragmatism that had driven him to save his money and build a business, and her admiration for him had grown. She’d found herself longing to be looking into his eyes. They reminded her of the sea, so blue and sparkling, but so deep and so full of immense perception. Freddie hadn’t had an education like she’d had, yet she felt he knew so much more, and when he looked at her she felt a steadiness and a kindliness, a feeling of guardianship, as if Freddie was a harbour and she a boat coming home from a storm.

Kate was seventeen, and she loved to flirt and laugh with the local lads on the farm, but she had boundaries. Her sexuality felt to her like a secret jewel she must not wear. She made sure that no man touched her, and if they tried she would deflect them in a firm but humorous way, and she felt confident of her ability to do that. It was something Ethie didn’t understand. Ethie ragged her constantly, berating her for being a flirt and a shameless hussy. Kate rarely reacted. She felt sorry for Ethie who seemed cursed with unpleasantness both in her dour appearance and her mood.

Freddie had only held her for a few moments, but Kate had heard his deep slow heartbeat, and smelled the tweed of his jacket, and sensed the gentleness of his big hands on her back, holding her as if she were a fragile shell. She’d felt a tiny movement as his fingers explored the curls at the ends of her hair, and that had been strangely electrifying, as if her hair itself was sensitive, as if he was touching her whole being. Wary of the intensity, she had pulled away. Now she wished with all her heart that she’d kissed him.

The throbbing engine of the incoming ferry boat had a finality about it, yet on previous trips it had excited her and set her dancing around on the quay. Something else was pulling at her mind. Kate didn’t want to be a cheese-maker and a farm girl. She wanted to be a nurse. Sally had taken her one day to Yeovil Hospital to enquire about training, and the matron had liked her and said to come back when she was seventeen.

The boat was pulling in to the jetty, with much hauling of ropes and shouting.

‘Stand back. Stand back. Let ’em off,’ shouted the pier attendant, as the ramp was lowered and the first passengers disembarked. Next came the motorbikes and bicycles.

‘They say that one day they’ll build a boat that will carry motorcars,’ said Bertie, ‘think of that. A great heavy motorcar being driven onto a boat. But that’s years ahead – years ahead.’

‘You say that every time we come here, Daddy,’ Ethie said and strode ahead of them onto the boat. ‘We can get on now.’

‘Come on, Kate.’ Sally saw her daughter hanging back, white-faced, and she was sad. She’d never known Kate so uncannily silent. ‘Come on, dear,’ she encouraged. ‘We’ve got to make the best of it. You stick with your family, girl. Come on – chin up.’

‘You’ll feel better when we get settled in,’ said Bertie. ‘And it won’t be easy for Don and his family, having us lot. We’re lucky to have a place to go. Don will be waiting for us over there at Beechley, in his motorcar.’

‘At least it’s a farm,’ said Ethie, making a rare attempt to be cheerful. ‘At least we haven’t got to live in a town.’

Kate squared her shoulders and stepped onto the boat. She went to stand by herself at the back, leaning on the rail so that she could take a last gaze at the land she was leaving. And she thought about the secret letter she’d left tucked into a crack in the wall by the front door. He had to find it, he just had to. Freddie would think she had just abandoned him.

The sky was plum dark over Monterose as Freddie unloaded the last pine plank into the furniture-maker’s warehouse. Coppery lightning was playing in the distance, illuminating clouds and hilltops. It hadn’t rained for weeks, the earth was cracked, and a haze of dust hung in the air above the streets.

‘Cuppa tea, Freddie?’

‘No thanks, Bill. I’ve got to go somewhere else before dark,’ said Freddie. He took out his wallet and added the two crumpled pound notes that Bill had paid him. It was four o’clock on a Saturday, and he had a few hours of daylight left. Part of him wanted to go home and start carving the block of stone, but going to Hilbegut seemed more important. He’d been due to see Kate tomorrow, after she’d been to church and had lunch with her family, then she had a few hours before milking time. Since the picnic they’d been meeting most Sundays, spending the time strolling in the lanes around Hilbegut, or sitting by the river. Precious hours for both of them. In the busy lives they had, work came first.

Annie hadn’t met Kate yet, but Freddie had tried to tell her about their friendship. Her reaction had been ominous.

‘You’re both too young to be courting,’ she’d warned.

‘We’re not courting,’ said Freddie, annoyed.

‘Well, what do you call it then?’

‘We’re just friends.’

‘You should be helping me on a Sunday, not running round with the likes of her.’

Freddie had felt his face go hot with anger at hearing Kate described in such a way. Still haunted by the memory of Levi’s rages, he deliberately distanced himself from his mother’s inflammatory remarks with a brief silence and a calm, unruffled reply.

‘Kate is a decent girl; you’d like her. She’s from a good family, farmers they are, out at Hilbegut.’

‘Oh them. That Loxley family, is it?’

‘Yes.’

‘You don’t want to get mixed up with them. They’re POSH,’ Annie said bitterly. ‘Sent those girls to boarding school. They aren’t our kind of folk, Freddie. That Sally Loxley. I KNOW HER. Went to school with her. Sally Delby she was then. And when she was growing up, she was a flirt. Wild and shameless, that’s what she was – and when she married Bertie Loxley, then she turned into such a snob. She . . .’

‘Calm down, Mother. I’ll be back to help you later.’ Freddie had said no more, but left Annie grumbling to herself in the kitchen, and headed out resolutely to see Kate.

That was a fortnight ago. He thought about the last time he’d seen Kate. She hadn’t been any different. Or had she? He remembered a couple of times when a shadow had crept into her eyes, but when he’d asked her if anything was wrong she’d changed the subject in her cheery way.

As he set off for Hilbegut through the dark afternoon, Freddie felt increasingly anxious, and guilty too about leaving his mother alone with a thunderstorm brewing. Annie was frightened of thunder. She would be sitting under the table, Freddie thought, as he steered the lorry out across the Levels. The fields looked sombre, the cattle huddled into corners and the breeze was turning up the leaves of the silver poplars, their white undersides like shoals of fish underwater.

The roads across the Levels were dead straight with grass verges sloping steeply down to deep rhynes. Freddie concentrated on keeping the lorry on the narrow, uneven track. One wheel on the grass verge and the lorry would roll into the ditch. The lightning was distracting, and above the noise of his engine, he heard thunder. Hailstones bounced on the road in front of him and pinged on the bonnet of the lorry as he drove into the storm that had broken over Hilbegut. Blinded by the violent hail, Freddie was forced to stop in the middle of the Levels, and, fearing the engine would overheat, he turned it off and sat there in the cab next to an old crack willow which stood alone on the green Levels.

Within minutes the ground was white all over with a layer of crunchy hailstones, and lightning was dancing over the fields as if the thunderclouds had come right down to touch the earth. Freddie had never felt afraid of storms, in fact he’d rather enjoyed them, but out in the open, he knew there was a danger of being struck. If that happened, the petrol tank would explode in a fireball and he would die. All his life Annie had relentlessly instilled her fears into his young mind and he felt engulfed by the accumulated mass of terror, the sting of each hailstone was like a word she had spoken, bombarding him with ice. He felt he had to hack his way through it to get to the bright flame that was Kate.

Freddie wrapped his arms over the steering wheel and put his head down on them, the sound of the hail roaring in his ears, the lorry shuddering with each roll of thunder and the branches of the crack willow bending and tossing outside. He closed his eyes and saw himself hunched there in the storm, like a pip inside an apple, protected in a hard shiny case. The cab of the lorry was shielding him, the hailstones battering at the glass, building peaks of ice up the windscreen, but he was inside, and once he had travelled into the centre of his mind, he felt calm. An old sweet scent from long ago filled the cab, a sharp tang of boot polish, the heavy sweetness of meadow hay.

‘Start the engine.’

Freddie looked up into the eyes of his grandfather, the man he had seen under the lime tree in the wood. He was stunned. After all the years of unyielding toil he could still see spirit people. He wasn’t dead inside. And they hadn’t abandoned him.

He pulled the starter, and the engine hiccupped a few times, then fired, blowing smoke out of the exhaust. Freddie smeared the steamed-up windscreen and peered out. Now he could see the far edge of the storm like a slice of apple in the western sky. It was still hailing, but he drove forward slowly, the tyres crunching through slush. He didn’t dare turn his head but he sensed his grandfather was still beside him along the treacherous road, over the river bridge, and up onto higher ground, the hailstones melting and pouring down the lanes in twisting rivulets of brown water. The hail changed to silver bristles of rain sweeping and swerving across the landscape, and when he reached the village of Hilbegut it was awash with flood-water. People were rushing about with brooms and buckets, the water lapping at their doorsteps.

Freddie drove slowly through, making a small bow-wave, and headed uphill towards the chimneys and turrets of Hilbegut Court. He paused outside the entrance to the avenue of copper beeches, and saw that the great wrought iron gates were closed, the lawn grass was long and unkempt, and a thousand jackdaws sat on the roof, beaks to the western sky, the brassy light glistening on their black feathers.

Turning in to Hilbegut Farm brought a familiar buzz of excitement in his body. He imagined Kate opening the door to him, her big bright eyes filling his soul. She always made him feel like the most important person on earth. When he’d spent a couple of hours with her, his face actually ached from unaccustomed smiling.

He knew that Kate’s parents liked him. Sally and Bertie had made him welcome with cups of tea and scones fresh from the oven. Only Ethie had been offhand and resentful, and he’d been surprised to find Kate being so kind and understanding towards her prickly-natured sister. Today he felt sure they would welcome him and perhaps be glad of the help he and his lorry could offer if they were moving house.

The storm had slunk away towards Monterose and the late afternoon light glowed mellow on the farmhouse chimneys. But the stone lions were gone, the tall gateposts demolished, and in their place were two iron stakes and a pair of metal gates.

A dread, cold as the hailstones, entered Freddie’s heart. He parked the lorry and got out, stretched, and picked his way through puddles to open the gates. A terrible sight confronted him. Barbed wire had been wound along the tops of the gates, and a padlock on a heavy chain held them firmly closed. Inside was a white notice with black letters: ‘TRESPASSERS WILL BE PROSECUTED’.

Devastated, Freddie stood at the forbidding gates, looking in at the farmyard. Not a duck or a goose or a chicken, no sound of cows from the milking shed, no dogs barking. Only the swallows dived in and out of the barns. The swing hung, unused, in the barn doorway. And the windows of the farmhouse, which had always been bright with curtains and ornaments, had the wooden shutters closed, barred and padlocked. It made the friendly old house look blind and sad.

They couldn’t have gone far, Freddie reasoned. Kate knew he lived at the bakery in Monterose, and surely she would contact him. He walked along the boundary wall round to the back, seeking a way in. The back gate was locked and wired and he peered through, noticing that the saddle stones which had lined the path had gone. He stood on a milk churn against the wall and climbed over, using the espalier pear tree as a ladder to climb down inside. He listened, and heard the garden dripping and the gurgle of water pouring over the sides of the rain butt. Even the sparrows seemed to have gone, and only a robin sang in the abandoned garden, the ground covered in lingering clusters of hailstones and mirror-like puddles.

One of the shutters was broken, and he squinted through into the interior of the kitchen. In the dim light he was surprised to see the kitchen table and chairs still there, the mat still on the flagstone floor in front of the stove. A shining trickle of water was creeping across the floor. He watched it gathering into a pool, and no one was there to sweep it out with the brooms that stood unused against the wall. The room which had been a hub of life with Sally and her two girls bottling fruit and making butter, a room which had rung with Kate’s laughter, now looked colourless and tomb-like.

Freddie needed to think, so he sat on the swing in the barn door, feeling sure that no one was watching him, a grown man swinging like a child in a place where trespassers would be prosecuted. The words sounded dreadful to him, like ‘hung, drawn and quartered’, but he didn’t care. He moved the swing to and fro, higher and higher, and he could feel Kate there with him, her red ribbon flying as she swung out of the barn and in again. The higher he swung the more he could see over the wall, and in the golden, storm-washed sky of late afternoon a tower of black smoke was rising. Freddie got off the swing and climbed the stone steps up the side of the barn to the open archway of the hayloft. From there he could see across the Levels to Monterose, the rhynes gleaming in the sunlight, the fields glinting with water. Freddie focused on the smoke billowing from a blazing fire in the middle of the Levels. A tree. It was a tree on fire. A cold realisation crept up Freddie’s spine. The old crack willow where he had parked his lorry had been struck by lightning and was burning fiercely.

Stunned, he watched it, suddenly aware that his life had been saved. Why? he thought. Why me? Why does my life matter? The answers came as he thought of Kate, and he thought of the stone angel waiting to be carved from the block of Hilbegut stone. I’m not a lorry driver, he thought. I’m someone else, someone I haven’t discovered.

A loneliness crept over him. Cold and tired, he headed back to climb over the wall and go home. Then something made him turn, as if a hand pushed him, and he walked round to the front of the house. He stood looking at the front door under its thatched porch, and a fragment of red caught his eye. A red ribbon, hanging from a crack in the wall.

Freddie reached up and pulled it gently, and found it attached to a white sealed envelope which slid out of the crack and into his hands.