Текст книги "The Boy with No Boots"

Автор книги: Sheila Jeffries

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Текущая страница: 13 (всего у книги 16 страниц)

‘I can’t – go out,’ she whispered, and put her hands over her face to catch the tears which broke through the layers of shell she had inhabited over the years. At first she could only rock to and fro and say, ‘’Tis terrible – terrible. Nobody knows, only my Freddie.’ She risked a glance at Joan, surprised to see how caringly and closely the woman was listening.

‘What happens when you go out?’ Joan asked gently.

‘I’m all right in the garden, but soon as I go outside that gate – I don’t know why, but I’m so giddy, and I’m frightened of falling. I’m a big woman, I fall heavy. Oh ’tis terrible, the pavement goes all wavy like water, and the buildings look like they’re falling down on me. I panic, see. And the panic is the worst thing. My heart races and I shake and I can’t get my breath. I think I’m going to die. And – and . . .’ Annie glanced up at Joan. ‘You don’t want to be listening to this.’

‘Yes I do. I’ve plenty of time,’ said Joan firmly. ‘You tell me everything, and I mean – everything.’

Annie nodded. Her greatest fear waited at the end of her talking, like a boulder, wobbling, waiting to fall.

‘I can only go out if my Freddie is with me. He’s wonderful. Ever since he was little he’s looked after me, he holds my hands and talks me through it. Many times he’s got me home – and – and Levi never knew. I’m so ashamed of myself, Joan, so ashamed. I’m afraid I’ll make a fool of myself, see? So now I don’t even try to go out. God knows what would happen if I had to.’ Annie looked at Joan again, noticing the confident warmth in her eyes that made the painful silences bearable, and then she finally let go of the boulder. ‘And I shouldn’t be telling you all this – I know your husband is a doctor and I’m so frightened they’ll think I’m a mad woman and put me in the asylum.’

‘My husband wouldn’t,’ Joan assured her, ‘he’s a really understanding doctor. I shan’t tell him, Annie. But – let me think about this – it may be that I can help you.’

‘You already have,’ said Annie gratefully. ‘I’ve got it off my chest.’

‘But,’ Joan wagged her finger, ‘I can only help you if you really want to get over this.’

‘I do.’

The two women smiled at each other and Joan raised a clenched fist, her eyes twinkling. ‘Courage to change,’ she said. ‘That’s what we need.’

When she had gone Annie felt better, more light-hearted. She even sang while she was making Freddie’s meal. She looked at the clock. He should be home by now.

Annie sat in the window to watch for his motorbike coming up the street. For two hours she sat there through the sunset and into the twilight. She watched the lamplighter work his way along the street, and saw people hurrying home, bent against the North wind. She heard the six o’clock train puffing into the station.

But still Freddie didn’t return.

By nine o’clock Annie was distraught. Wrapped in a shawl she paced round and round the cottage, up and down the stairs, looking out of different windows, opening them and listening, watching the distant hills for a moving cone of light that might be a motorbike. All night she paced and she prayed and in the deathly hush of early morning she fell exhausted into the rocking chair and slept, clutching Levi’s dressing gown up to her chin.

At first light she was awoken by a thunderous knocking on the door. Terrified, she heaved herself up and struggled across the flagstone floor. She opened the door just a crack and peered out.

George stood there in a heavy winter coat, his face unshaven, his hair wild, and a grim expression on his face.

‘’Tis bad news,’ he said. ‘I had a telephone call, from a hospital up in Gloucester.’

Chapter Eighteen

FLOATING

Freddie had never been so comfortable in his life. He was floating on a cushion of deliciously warm air and the light streaming over him was intensely yellow like marsh marigolds. He looked down at his body lying in the hospital bed, its face deathly white, its blistered hands limp on the grey blanket, its knees and feet making orderly bumps in the tightly tucked bed covers. He didn’t want to go back into that body which was filled with pain and struggling to breathe.

Each time he looked down, his mind opened up a cavern of nightmares. Ian Tillerman’s voice echoed in there, his eyes gleamed avariciously, he smelled of beer and horse manure and the stench engulfed Freddie like smoke from a wood fire, he had to breathe it and it stung and choked his lungs. Or he would see his motorbike sinking into the deep canal, bits of it shining and bubbling, the handlebars and the headlight were the last to be submerged as the iron grey water closed over that particular pain. A bloody lout, Ian Tillerman had called him. A bloody lout.

For hours he had lain there on the bank of the canal, face down in the mud, the cold earth and the cold sky clamping him like the jaws of winter. Then the floating had started, floating on a cloud made of ice, watching, unable to speak, as his body was dumped on a khaki-coloured stretcher and pushed into the back of an ambulance.

The voices of nurses and doctors had burbled like a distant stream, and he’d felt hands peeling off his muddy clothes. Through half-open eyelids, he glimpsed Herbie’s leather jacket being dropped into a basket, and the pain of thinking he would have to buy him another one sent Freddie deeper into a comatose state, and with the sleep came a profound feeling of surrender as he let go and drifted into the shadows.

Over three days, the darkness of his floating place transmuted into deep colours, ultramarine and crimson, and in the crimson phase he became aware of smells. He lifted his arm and sniffed his skin, vaguely hoping for a reassuring whiff of oil and stone dust, but it reeked of Sunlight soap and Dettol. A pungent tang of camphor hovered around him, and a mild ointmenty smell from the chilblains on his fingers. The space beyond his bed swished and clanked, and squeaked with footsteps, and the alarming rhythmic groans from the man in the next bed. Even more alarming was the shrill rasp of his own breath cutting into his ribs like a bread knife.

Freddie was not reassured by the amorphous shape of a doctor in a white coat sitting uncomfortably close to him, and the starched apron of a nurse bending over him. Freddie had never been in a hospital and he was terrified. He struggled to see the nurse’s face, and she was frowning like a bulldog. She had his arm in a vicelike grip.

‘Keep still or this will hurt,’ she said sharply and a stinging pain drove into his bicep. He heard a man’s voice saying ‘This will make you sleepy, Mr Barcussy.’

Blissfully it faded and he returned to the floating place, so warm and soft now that he no longer wanted to look down at his body lying there. He wanted to go with the man in a cream robe who smelled of meadow hay and boot polish, a shining man who was leading him down an avenue of lime trees. At the end of the avenue was an archway in a high wall with golden flowers hanging over the top of it. Freddie could see a familiar figure standing here, waiting for him. Levi!

He paused, then walked up to his father and looked deeply into the translucence of his eyes, old familiar eyes but different now. The weariness and the gloom, the frustration and the rage had gone, leaving a mysterious contentment. Freddie felt they were both weightless, suspended like feathers on the wind, and he sensed himself absorbing the essence of that sparkle in Levi’s eyes.

‘Now I’ll tell you something,’ Levi said in his normal voice. He put his hand on Freddie’s left shoulder, its comforting warmth radiant like the heat from a flame. ‘That Ian Tillerman. Don’t you let ’im take your life. He’s lying. He’s lying, Freddie.’

Freddie stared into his luminous eyes and felt a change moving over him. Coral-coloured, it wound itself around his shoulders like the hug Levi was giving him now.

‘I’m sorry, son. Don’t you ever be like me.’

‘I’ve forgiven you, Dad,’ said Freddie, and Levi beamed, the smile magically bringing them closer than they had ever been.

Levi stood back and Freddie gazed beyond him into the archway, curiously observing a garden where trees glittered like jewellery and everything danced with colours. Across it was a lattice of brilliant gold.

‘No,’ said Levi firmly. ‘You gotta go back, Freddie. Go on. Go back.’

Freddie nodded. He turned and floated back, still light as air, the man in the cream robe drifting beside him. He looked back once and saw Levi watching him, waving, then melting into the webs of light. The tingle of his feet reconnecting with the earth made him stronger, but still he couldn’t hear his footsteps. What he could hear, louder and louder, was a rushing sound in his ears, a voice speaking his name.

‘Mr Barcussy. Come on. Open your eyes.’

He came back with a jolt into the body lying on the bed. The pain had eased and his skin felt cool and soft, his body relaxed on comfortable pillows. Gradually the nurse’s face came into focus. She was smiling now, a slim glass thermometer in her hand.

‘Welcome back,’ she said. ‘We nearly lost you.’

Freddie was ill for many weeks. After George had driven his lorry all the way to Gloucester and fetched him home, he lay in bed watching and listening.

His hearing was super sensitive and so attuned to the land beyond the town that he could hear the quack of herons passing overhead at dawn, and the unearthly sharp yelping of foxes, and in the mornings the squeak of ice being broken and crisp leaves being crunched underfoot. At nine forty-five he listened for the cattle train passing through, and the distressed cries of sheep and cows crowded together, terrified, their faces pressed to the slatted openings, their noses sniffing the fresh turfy fields where they had grazed. He felt their desperation.

Annie lumbered up and down stairs with trays of home-baked meals. She brought him a new drawing book and a pencil, but he didn’t want to draw. He just wanted to stare out at the winter sky. The clouds created curling images of faces and ferry boats, lions and angels. Strangely, the illness was a gift of time to Freddie’s artistic soul, each change of the light adding to his storehouse of ideas waiting to be carved in stone. He dreamed of carving in marble or alabaster, his fingers coaxing a smooth translucence from the rough blocks.

At night he kept the curtains open to the starlight, watching and learning to read the night sky. His room faced west and he lay on his side and watched for the planet Venus, as Granny Barcussy had taught him in his childhood. ‘Venus follows the sun,’ she’d said, and her eyes had sparkled. ‘And – it’s the planet of love.’

So Freddie stared at it, and wondered if Kate was seeing it too. He’d shown it to her once, at Hilbegut Farm in the twilight when the western sky flushed pink, then duck-egg green smoothly blending into indigo, and they’d gazed at the big bright star together.

Thinking of Kate was too painful most of the time, but he had to do it. He had to plod his way through the pain until he had overcome it with his own strength. There was a molecule of hope in Levi’s words, ‘He’s lying,’ but Freddie didn’t cling to it. Kate had stopped writing to him, she was far away making a new life, and, worse, she had cut her hair. That news in her last letter, had upset Freddie. He couldn’t imagine Kate with short hair, yet she’d said it made her feel liberated. Liberated from what? Was being beautiful such a burden? Supposing he had carved a stone angel with short hair? It bothered Freddie in an inexplicably sensitive part of his soul, and when he dreamed of Kate it was always with the sensual memory of her hair twined in his fingers. At least, he thought, Ian Tillerman wasn’t going to have that particular delight.

One morning just before Christmas, on the day of the winter solstice, Freddie sensed a change. At first light he got out of bed and stood at the window, watching the sunrise reflected in the windows across the street. The weather was mild and spring-like. He opened the window and breathed deeply, smelling the steam trains and the flooded Levels beyond. A song thrush was singing with its whole being, like an opera singer filling the awakening town with exuberant music. ‘The first bird to sing at the turn of the year,’ thought Freddie, his eyes searching until he saw the slim shape of the thrush high on the apex of a roof, the sun gilding its speckled breast, its beak lifted to the sky. It filled him with longing to carve a singing bird. But how would he put the song inside the stone?

Though his legs were weak, Freddie climbed into his clothes and dragged himself downstairs and out into the yard. There was his stone angel, illuminated by the sunrise, and it startled him to see it. Had he done that? He stood in front of it, filled with an overpowering sadness as he looked at Kate’s beautiful face, captured in the stone, forever frozen, no longer laughing, no longer turning her big eyes to gaze into his face.

A maelstrom of negative feelings gusted through him. Bitterness, vengeful thoughts towards Ian Tillerman, a slow burning fury that made him want to raise an axe high in the air and smash the stone angel into hundreds of pieces. He let the thoughts pass through like a crowd of people stampeding to some event that didn’t interest Freddie. He could turn his back and walk away. Those thoughts did not belong to him.

Blessed with the gift of peace, he stood thinking, his eyes exploring the blocks of stone waiting to be carved, and the red roof of his lorry still parked outside the garden wall, waiting for him. ‘I gotta get on with it,’ he thought. ‘With or without Kate.’

And as he thought those words he was suddenly remembering another pair of eyes. Ethie’s eyes. They were pale, pale blue with a cluster of yellow in the centre of the iris, yellow like the eyes of a sparrow hawk. Her eyes were focused on him, compelling him to interpret some silent message coded within that ring of yellowness.

Since his visions were usually of spirit people, Freddie was surprised to see Ethie in such a way. He frowned, concentrating on the deeper meaning, and saw that Ethie was lying on her back, looking at him, trying to ask him some question that smouldered on her mind. She was floating, and the river glistened as it carried her away, her face glaring at the sky.

‘Freddie!’ Annie cried out in surprise. ‘You’re up and dressed. At last.’

He turned to see his mother emerge from the bakery, drying her hands on a towel.

‘Don’t you get cold now,’ she tried to hustle him inside.

‘I’m all right,’ he said. ‘I gotta get on with it now. Earn some money.’

Annie looked tired out, he thought, sitting with her to share a breakfast of lardy cake and cocoa at the scullery table.

‘It’s been hard for you,’ he said, ‘having me laid up.’

Annie nodded. ‘But worth it to see you better. I had enough disasters in the past so I can deal with this one. We shall get over it.’

‘Thanks.’ Freddie looked at her eyes and detected a subtle change, a shimmer of hope which hadn’t been there before. ‘Are you managing all right?’ he asked.

‘Joan’s been helping me,’ Annie said, speaking faster than usual, almost bubbling with some secret. Then she shut her mouth, brushed the crumbs from her apron, and looked at Freddie expectantly. ‘You still want to do the stone carving, don’t you?’

‘Yes.’

‘Well – Joan made such a fuss over your stone angel, and she dragged the vicar down here to see it. Can’t say I like the man, but there – he’s a vicar. And he came in and sat down with me at this table and he ate a huge piece of lardy cake, got crumbs all over his whiskers. I’ve never seen a man make such a mess! He left me this letter to give you.’ Annie went to the dresser and rummaged in the drawer. ‘Here ’tis.’ She handed him the white envelope, her eyes twinkling like they did on his birthday, watching him unwrap her hand-knitted present.

‘The VICAR wrote me a letter? What the hell does he want?’

Freddie took a knife and slit the envelope, unfolded the letter and sat back sceptically against the chair to read it, his eyes getting rounder and rounder. Momentarily speechless he stared out the window at the stone angel.

‘Did you know about this?’ he asked.

Annie nodded and she had tears on the rims of her eyes.

‘I got a commission,’ said Freddie, incredulous, ‘to carve a statue of St Peter. And they are going to PAY me – how about this, Mother? Twenty pounds!’

Annie gasped. They sat together smiling like two children.

‘Can you do it?’ she asked.

‘I can do that standing on me head,’ said Freddie, and the joy came in a huge dollop. He threw the letter up in the air and laughed out loud. ‘I got a commission. Yippee!’

‘You should say yes, Kate,’ said Sally forcefully. ‘Have some sense, girl.’

Kate sighed. She squared her shoulders and looked back at her mother with good-humoured assertiveness. ‘I’m not going to marry for money. I shall marry for love.’

‘You might never get such a chance again,’ warned Sally. ‘Ian Tillerman is a real catch. You’ll want for nothing. And think of your children.’

‘My children, when I have them, will be loved,’ said Kate, ‘and that’s more important than being rich.’

‘Well, you know what they say. When poverty comes in the door, love flies out of the window.’

‘It’s never flown out of our window,’ said Bertie who privately thought that Kate was right. He didn’t like the way Sally was pushing her to accept Ian Tillerman’s proposal. In his opinion his beloved daughter had lost her sparkle since she’d been working at the racing stables. ‘Leave her alone, Sally.’

‘I only want what’s best for her, and for Ethie,’ said Sally, raising her voice a little. ‘And it’s madness to turn down an offer like that.’

‘Better than that lorry driver,’ hissed Ethie. ‘Anyway Kate is too young to get married. I should get married first.’

‘Who to? You’re not exactly encouraging anyone, are you?’ said Sally sharply. ‘What is the matter with you, Ethie?’

‘Nothing.’

‘Then why is it you can’t open your mouth without upsetting someone?’

It was Kate who saw the pain in Ethie’s pale eyes, and she intervened before it turned to spite.

‘I’m not going to marry anyone yet,’ she said lightly. ‘I want to be a nurse, you know that. This job is only for a bit of money, and I’m enjoying it. I love Little Foxy, not Ian.’

Ethie tutted. ‘Horses!’

Kate grinned at her mischievously. ‘You’re just as bad, Ethie – only it’s fish. You’re always down at the river. You can’t marry a fish.’

‘And you can’t marry a horse.’

Kate giggled. ‘If I did, it wouldn’t be to one of Ian’s racehorses. It would be – Daisy.’ Her voice trembled, she met Sally’s eyes and then looked down at the table. The shoreline between coping with living at Asan Farm and homesickness for Hilbegut was fragile, always shifting like the estuary sand. ‘When are Polly and Daisy being sent up here?’ she asked. ‘They’d be useful here, wouldn’t they?’

Sally and Bertie looked at each other.

‘You should tell her, Bertie. Go on, just come out with it,’ said Sally rather fiercely.

Bertie shook his head. ‘I can’t.’

‘I can,’ said Ethie. ‘It’s time she knew.’

‘She doesn’t need to hear it from you, Ethie.’

Bewildered, Kate looked from one to the other, aware that some bitter truth was being withheld from her.

Ethie digested Sally’s sharp comment huffily. ‘Oh, so my words aren’t good enough for precious little sister. Why has she always got to be cosseted? It’s not fair.’

‘Kate doesn’t go around with a face as long as a yard of pump water,’ said Sally, and immediately regretted it when she saw the dreaded flush of anger on Ethie’s cheeks.

‘I can’t help my face,’ stormed Ethie. ‘We’re not all born flawless like little Miss Perfect here. I didn’t choose to look like I do. Do you think I like it? Do you think I enjoy having pimples?’

‘That’s not the point, Ethie. Stop taking it out on Kate. It’s nothing to do with what your face is like. A smiling face is a lovely face. If you smiled instead of going round scowling at everyone, you . . .’

‘DON’T keep telling me to smile,’ shouted Ethie. ‘That’s all you ever say to me, isn’t it? Do this, Ethie. Do that, Ethie. Do all the dirty work, Ethie. And smile. I don’t want to smile; I’m not going to smile. Why should I smile? I’ll smile if I want to, not when you tell me to.’

‘Pull yourself together, girl,’ said Sally desperately. ‘It’s hard enough for us here.’

‘None of you know what it’s like to be me,’ raged Ethie. She dragged a chair out and slumped down on it, put her hands over her burning face and drew a savage breath into her lungs.

‘Ethie, stop it,’ pleaded Kate, putting her arm round her sister and rubbing her back gently.

But the kindness seemed to trigger Ethie into a final explosion, like a boil bursting. She clenched her fists and pounded the table with them. ‘You don’t UNDERSTAND,’ she wailed, then jumped to her feet and slammed out of the room, returning seconds later with another slam. ‘I’m going to feed the chickens. At least the chickens don’t care whether I smile or not.’

Kate and her parents looked at each other.

‘She’s getting worse,’ said Sally.

‘No she isn’t, Mummy, she’s always been like it. We can’t make her any different,’ said Kate. ‘We just have to look on the bright side.’

‘What bright side? She hasn’t got one.’

‘She has,’ said Kate. ‘She works so hard. And she does laugh with me sometimes, when she hasn’t got her nose in a book.’

‘Some gloomy book, I don’t doubt. What do you think, Bertie?’ Sally looked at her husband who had sat looking uncomfortable.

‘I don’t get involved in women’s disputes,’ he said calmly.

‘So what was it you were going to tell me?’ asked Kate. ‘About Polly and Daisy. I’d rather know.’

Bertie nodded, his eyes sad. ‘We’re sorry, dear, but Polly and Daisy had to be sold. We couldn’t afford to bring them up here.’

Kate stared at him wordlessly. She thought about the gentle Shire horse she’d loved. She and Daisy had a special bond. The big horse had always been so careful and kind around Kate when she was little, standing like a statue, afraid to move her huge feet in case she trod on the little girl who loved her.

Kate noticed her parents’ doleful expressions.

‘Oh, I expect it’s for the best,’ she said, ‘don’t worry about me. I’ve got plenty to be happy about. Now I must be off to work or I’ll be late. I’ll take the toast with me.’

Bertie was looking at her with a perplexed expression in his eyes. He got up and followed his daughter’s straight back out into the morning light. ‘Wait a minute, Kate. I’ll walk to the gate with you.’

She turned and gave him a smile that turned his heart over. ‘Come on then, Daddy.’ She linked her arm into his and they set off on the half-mile walk to the racing stables, Kate carrying Little Foxy’s bridle which she’d been cleaning.

‘I want to give you some advice, Kate,’ said Bertie. ‘If I can get a word in edgeways.’

‘Of course,’ she laughed.

‘This is serious, Kate. I love you dearly, and you don’t fool me. I know how upset you must be over those two horses. I admire the way you keep so cheerful, it’s a wonderful gift you have, Kate – and – and don’t waste it.’

‘How could I waste it?’ she asked, surprised.

‘Don’t waste it on someone you don’t love. It’s your life, Kate. I don’t want you to suffer because you want to please us. You be true to yourself. Do you understand me?’

They stopped in a gateway, and Kate looked thoughtfully at her father. He always knew exactly what was in her heart.

‘I never want to leave you, Daddy. You’ve been like a guardian angel,’ she said. ‘But yes, you’re right, I’ve got some thinking to do.’

‘You may have to leave me one day. But we’ll always be close, Kate – even when I’m gone. I want to see you happy – truly deeply happy, dear, not just putting a pretty face on it. I’ve watched you, Kate, and I know – I know there’s some deep-down thing bothering you. You’ve lost your sparkle.’

‘Have I?’

‘You don’t have to tell me, Kate. But please – think about your life and your future. Don’t let me, or anyone, hold you back, girl. You do what you’ve got to do.’ Bertie was looking at her intensely and his words were full of passion as they stood in the gateway overlooking the estuary. ‘If you love someone, you let them go, let them be free. You are a blessed gift to this world, Kate, you spread your wings and fly free.’

Kate’s eyes stared past him, across the shining water to the distant hills, then back to the brimming flood of love and caring in her father’s gaze.

‘You’re not responsible for Ethie, or me, or your mother.’ Bertie gave her a little pat. ‘You spread your wings and fly free.’

He wagged a finger and looked at her under his brows, a fixed stare that put a seal on his words.

‘Thank you, Daddy. I’m glad you care so much.’ Kate kissed him on his pale cheek and walked on by herself, swinging the bridle. She looked down at her legs in the long boots and riding breeches, and thought how lovely it would be to wear a swishy red skirt again and feel like a woman. She found herself slowing down, dawdling a little, listening to the hum of bees in the blackthorn blossom, and suddenly she remembered Freddie telling her the Innisfree poem, explaining to her about the ‘bee-loud glade’. It had been a magic time.

‘That’s what I’m missing from my life,’ Kate thought suddenly. ‘The magic. The magic is missing.’

She remembered Freddie’s story of how he had saved up and bought the lorry at sixteen. It inspired her. Surely if Freddie could do that, then she could ‘spread her wings’ and take charge of her own life, couldn’t she?