The Boy With No Boots Part 13

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 pa.s.sengers 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 Sat.u.r.day, 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 friends.h.i.+p. 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 sn.o.b. 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 gra.s.s verges sloping steeply down to deep rhynes. Freddie concentrated on keeping the lorry on the narrow, uneven track. One wheel on the gra.s.s 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 acc.u.mulated ma.s.s 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 s.h.i.+ny case. The cab of the lorry was s.h.i.+elding him, the hailstones battering at the gla.s.s, 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 rus.h.i.+ng 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 gra.s.s was long and unkempt, and a thousand jackdaws sat on the roof, beaks to the western sky, the bra.s.sy 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 p.r.i.c.kly-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: 'TRESPa.s.sERS 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 b.u.t.t. Even the sparrows seemed to have gone, and only a robin sang in the abandoned garden, the ground covered in lingering cl.u.s.ters 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 s.h.i.+ning 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 b.u.t.ter, 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 trespa.s.sers 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.

Chapter Fifteen.

THE WATER IS WIDE.

'How much is this map?'

'Ninepence,' said the postmistress, peering at Freddie through the iron grille of her domain. 'And they're good ones. You won't find better. It's got all the roads, and the railways and even the hills and valleys in Great Britain.'

'What about the rivers?' Freddie asked.

'And the rivers. They're shown in blue squiggly lines,' she said, hanging on to the tightly folded map.

'I'll take it, please.' Freddie delved into his pocket and produced a sixpence and three pennies. He wasn't used to shopping, and it had taken him about ten minutes to decide to buy the map which he wasn't allowed to look at first. Ninepence seemed expensive for a bit of paper.

'Going travelling, are you?' The postmistress raised her eyebrows, teasing him as she took the money and slid the map over the counter. 'Now, is there anything else? We've got a long queue behind you.'

Freddie hesitated.

'Well a box of writing paper and envelopes please and a book of stamps.'

'Ah!' she grinned knowingly. 'Got a young lady to write to, have we?'

Freddie could hear some girls giggling in the queue behind him, and he felt his neck going red as he stood there, his trousers too short and covered in dust and oil.

'That'll be another s.h.i.+lling.'

He had a s.h.i.+lling but chose to rummage in his pockets again, the postmistress rolling her eyes as he slowly counted out twelve pennies. Then he paused to put the map into his inner jacket pocket, and turned to pad thoughtfully out of the post office, his eyes staring at a kestrel hovering in the sky outside. He didn't want to look at anyone. The pain of losing Kate stung in his throat and he wanted to go home, spread the map out on the scullery table, and see where she had gone to live.

'h.e.l.lo, Freddie!' Joan Jarvis was at the back of the queue, dressed up in her fox furs, a brand new willow basket squeaking on her arm.

'Oh h.e.l.lo, Mrs Jarvis,' said Freddie, respectfully. He looked down at the hand she had put on his arm and saw long red painted nails. Bird's claws, he thought with a shudder.

'Joan,' she insisted. 'How's business?'

'Pretty good. Busy.'

'I hear you'll be getting a second lorry soon,' said Joan brightly. 'You are doing well.'

Freddie knew that Joan liked and admired him. She'd often stopped to talk to him in her encouraging way, but right now he didn't feel like talking, especially as her voice carried all over the shop and out into the street.

'You remember Susan, my daughter.'

Freddie glanced at the slim girl with bobbed blonde hair who looked as if she didn't want to be there.

'This is Freddie Barcussy, Susan. You know he used to help you over the bridge. Oh, you were silly.'

'h.e.l.lo.' Freddie looked briefly at Susan. She didn't interest him, but he remembered the frightened little girl she had been, and thought she still looked frightened, of her mother, he guessed. 'I won't shake hands,' he said, 'I'm covered in stone dust.'

'Stone dust? What have you been doing?' asked Joan.

'I'm having a go at a bit of stone carving,' said Freddie.

Joan looked at him with keen interest, and to Freddie's relief the queue moved forward. 'I shall come and see what you've made one day.' Joan looked back at him perkily like a bird on the lawn. 'Bye now.'

'Bye.'

He walked home without looking at anyone, carrying the box of writing paper. The bakery was busy with customers, Annie in the shop and Gladys making scones in the back. Freddie escaped upstairs and spread the map on the table in his bedroom window. He found Monterose, and followed the road with his pencil stub, along the ridge of the Poldens where he and Kate had picnicked, on through Glas...o...b..ry and Wells, then over the Mendips. Kate had vividly described the River Severn to him, but when he found Aust Ferry and saw how wide it was, Freddie's heart sank. He'd visualised an ordinary river, a bit wider than the Cary or the Brue, not such an expanse of water coloured blue like the sea. He took his ruler, looked at the scale of the map, and measured, once, then again in disbelief. The Severn was a mile wide at Aust Ferry. Freddie had never even seen the sea, and he couldn't imagine a mile of water. All that s.p.a.ce, hills and valleys and a wide, wide river separating him from Kate.

Kate's letter was in his inner pocket next to his heart. Extracting it from the silky lining of his jacket he read it again.

Dear Freddie, I will always treasure the time I have spent with you, such a happy time, and I thank you for sharing it with me.

Sadly, I must tell you that we are leaving Hilbegut. The Squire has died, and his family from Canada are ruthlessly reclaiming his estate, and we were given two weeks' notice to leave. I didn't want to go, of course, but I must support our family, Mother and Dad and Ethie. We are all broken-hearted, but we must make the best of it. Luckily we have somewhere to go. We shall be living with Dad's brother, Uncle Don, at Asan Farm on the banks of the Severn River. He's said we can live in the gatehouse cottage. It's derelict but we can make it nice and we shall all help with the farm. Polly and Daisy are still in Hilbegut, on the next-door farm, and they are being looked after there until we can find a way to transport them to Gloucesters.h.i.+re.

I still want to be a nurse, and perhaps one day I can, but for now I must stay and help the family.

I'll never, ever forget you Freddie, and I hope with all my heart that we will one day meet again.

All my love, Kate xx PS. Write to me!

A small sepia photograph on a square of cream cardboard was enclosed. It was a portrait of Kate's face, a serious image of a young woman with bright caring eyes. Freddie placed it on the map, in Gloucesters.h.i.+re, and was suddenly overwhelmed by the enormity of the s.p.a.ce between them. His heart was no longer in his haulage business. He felt unsettled and disconnected from everyone; he needed time alone to think about his life, and how to disentangle himself from his present commitments. The biggest of these was his bond with his mother. He loved her, yet she drained his energy and his time. Since Levi's death he'd felt sorry for her, and her agoraphobia had intensified. She was totally dependent on Freddie, and on Gladys who she now employed for a few hours a day.

When he had finished his haulage job, Freddie felt an old familiar feeling he couldn't stay at home. He filled the lorry with petrol and headed for the Polden Hills in the balmy afternoon, driving past orchards where the trees were laden to the ground with ripening apples and the hawthorns heavy with berries. He drove slowly along the hilltop until he reached the gap in the hedge where Kate had taken him for the picnic. He parked the lorry tight against the hedge and walked up to the ridge of hill, aware that the gra.s.sland around him was now bobbing with seed heads, the orchids had died, the thyme had turned brown, and the trefoil was covered in tiny black pods of seed. Summer was over. And so was his life, Freddie thought gloomily.

He sat down in the spot where they'd had the picnic, and touched the earth where Kate had been sitting. It was warm and crisp like fresh bread, but there was an emptiness, a hollow place in his soul where Kate should have been. His eyes roamed the landscape, scanning that empty strip of silver sky between the Mendips and the Quantocks. Far away he could see the islands of the Bristol Channel floating in some s.h.i.+mmering misty place, and beyond was a whisper of an outline of high and distant hills. Was he seeing over that mile-wide estuary into Gloucesters.h.i.+re where Kate was now? It comforted Freddie to think that he could come up here and gaze directly towards her.

Surely it was possible to send his thoughts whizzing over there on some ethereal network. He remembered the vision he'd had at his father's funeral. Sitting on the steps at the back of the church he'd seen a beam of gold deep down in the earth and stretching for miles and miles, following the curve of the earth. Granny Barcussy knew some amazing things, and once she'd told him about the Aborigines who lived in Australia, and how they communicated with distant tribes by using the song lines. It wasn't logical, but in his prophetic soul, Freddie understood it. He wished he had a drum to beat out a message that would carry across the water to that distant sh.o.r.e. All he had was his voice. He looked around, checking that he was alone on the ridge, and he was.

He started to sing, huskily at first, furtively, then confidently as he remembered some of the songs Kate liked. 'Danny Boy' he could sing that and the words mirrored his feelings exactly, so he sang that first. Then he remembered 'The water is wide, I cannot cross over'. He sang until the tears started trickling down his cheeks and drying on his skin in the afternoon sun. Then he strolled along the ridge, whistling the nostalgic tunes, and the sadness began to disperse as if the music was sweeping it away. It was a time for courage, he thought, for making the best of it, as Kate had said. He must focus on building his business, making enough money to afford a home fit for Kate. And there was no reason why he shouldn't go to Gloucesters.h.i.+re and see her, he thought, especially if he had a motorbike.

Kate sat on the top bar of the high wooden gate, her arms round the neck of a sleek chestnut horse. The feel of its warm silky coat, the softness of its muzzle and the kindly dark eyes were cheering her up. There were other horses in the field, but this one, a thoroughbred, had made a beeline for Kate as if it knew she needed a friend.

Bertie knew his daughter very well, and he had deliberately sent Kate out on her own, 'to check the sheep' he'd said, knowing that the route to the sheep pastures would take Kate past the racing stables, and she would be sure to find a horse to cuddle. So while Ethie and Sally organised the new cheese-making enterprise, Kate had gone off by herself, dressed in her farming gear of breeches, long boots and a red s.h.i.+rt. She'd enjoyed the walk through the sheep fields on the wide flat banks of the Severn Estuary, the fresh salty air and the light on the water, the surge of the incoming tide as it covered the expanses of sand and spilled into mirror-like pools where thousands of seabirds bobbed and fished, their cream heads and silvery feathers s.h.i.+ning in the morning sun. This landscape was so different from Hilbegut. The tidal river was dominant and powerful, eating away at the sheep fields, making low turfy cliffs and inlets. In the distance were the high wooded hills of the Forest of Dean.

Kate had walked a mile along the green banks, carefully looking at the grazing sheep and the fat summer lambs, seeing no signs of illness or trouble. She had sat on the turfy cliff edge, swinging her boots and enjoying the fresh wind on her cheeks, and watched a line of barges chugging up the river. Laden with ma.s.sive mahogany logs from the rainforest, they turned into the ca.n.a.l entrance to wait at the lock gates and then unload their cargo at the timber mill.

Parallel to the sheep pastures, on slightly higher ground, was the land belonging to the racing stables, a circuit of it expensively fenced with post and rails to make a 'gallop'. Kate hadn't had much experience of racehorses and she was eager to see them. The horse she was petting suddenly raised its head and whinnied loudly. Along the lane came a man riding an elegant dappled grey racehorse and leading a second one, a glossy bay with a black mane and tail.

'h.e.l.lo there.' He paused, surprised to see the dark-haired, dark-eyed girl sitting on the gate. Kate flashed a smile at him, and he smiled back. He had very white teeth and black merry eyes.

'h.e.l.lo.' Kate jumped down from the gate and went to stroke the two tall horses who arched their necks graciously and blew in her hair. 'Are they racehorses?'

'Yes both, in training for Cheltenham.'

'They're so beautiful,' breathed Kate. 'Are they yours?'

'Yes. Bred them both, I did,' he said proudly, smoothing the neck of the grey horse who stood staring thoughtfully into the distance. 'I'm Ian Tillerman. And you are?'

'Kate Loxley.'