The day was warm, and this far from the front the countryside was pleasant, not so different from the fields and woods I’d been desperate to leave behind in Uckfield. I took my time on the way back, towards the front lines.
I heard an elderly woman shouting, the sound coming from the ruins of a farmhouse a hundred feet up the road. I didn’t understand French, but I understood she was angry. None of my business, I thought, as I neared the house. The shouting got louder. There was a pistol shot, muffled, fired in the confines of an enclosed space, the sound dampened by thick stone walls. The shouting stopped. I stopped walking.
Another voice started up, an elderly man, remonstrating. Another shot. Then a third.
I stood in the road, exposed, planning my response if a rogue German came running from the farmhouse. But it wasn’t a rogue German. It was an English officer, dapper in his spotless green breeches and puttees, and his ironed white shirt. He strolled out of the farmhouse holding a painting under his arm. He was whistling.
He noticed me, and his smiled slipped, just for a second.
‘Don’t you know you’re meant to salute an officer,’ he said.
I looked from him to the farmhouse, and then back to his face. He was watching me closely, putting two and two together. He knew what I’d heard.
I raised my hand and snapped a salute, clicking my heels for good measure. I kept my eyes locked on his, wondering what it would take to wipe away the smirk.
‘What’s your name, private?’ he asked.
‘John Cook,’ I said. ‘Eleventh Battalion, Royal Sussex.’
I paused, counted to three silently. One. Two. Three.
‘Sir.’
*
When I came to Maresfield, with the road to Uckfield laid out in front of me, I took a right turn instead, past the watchful sentries at the army camp, through the lanes to Isfield, to Margaret.
Isfield Park was dark. The staff had been reduced to bare bones, and they all lived in the village. How much longer did these old houses have? Relics of a different age that wouldn’t be missed by many.
The kitchen door was unlocked. Nothing worth stealing, Margaret had told me when I’d suggested she raise her level of security. She’d said it with such a level of challenge I’d known better than to press the issue.
The house was silent, and I was loath to disturb it. I didn’t belong here. The house knew it as well as I did. I passed through room after room, all empty of furniture, stripped of anything of value over the years. One room was lined with empty shelves, and I lingered, imagining the great library that must have once been housed there.
The stairs creaked as I made my way up to the first floor. I was still new enough here that I hadn’t worked out which steps to avoid, or where to tread. I waited for Margaret to call out. Perhaps she was asleep.
Margaret’s rooms were at the far end of the long corridor. She’d dragged every scrap of furniture she could find into a suite of rooms and made the best of it. The first time she showed me, I asked why she didn’t choose rooms nearer the stairs, to minimise the walk. She’d chosen the old nursery, she said, because that was where she’d stayed when she’d visited her aunt as a child.
The bedroom was empty.
I sat in a sagging armchair in a dark corner of the bedroom, my back to the wall, facing the door, listening to the creaks of the empty house as the wind picked up outside. Margaret was probably at the pub. It was after hours but who was counting. Easy enough for the landlord to lock the door and have a quiet drink with a few of his regulars until they ran through their pay packet. The chair was damp. Everything in this house felt damp; the humid summer combined with centuries of cold leaching out of the stone walls.
I must have dozed off. Voices intruded on my half-sleep. Murmuring. Urgent. I was in a dugout, at the Somme. Huddled in a greatcoat passed down from a German lad who wouldn’t need it any more, pressed into the damp earth, hoping it would absorb me. Feeling the thump of shells and smelling the soil that would claim me. The soil of the farm I’d turned my back on, only to find again on the other side of the Channel. Earth to earth.
I felt Margaret’s hand on mine. Her hair smelt of cigarette smoke.
We undressed quickly, fumbling in the dark, silent in the empty house.
We tunnelled under the covers that felt as damp as everything else in the house. I pulled her to me, my arm around her waist, tracing the curve of her lower back. I met her urgent kiss, her tongue flicking mine, sending a bolt of lightning through every nerve in my body.
She pushed me back, and climbed on top of me, her hair falling down onto my face, a curtain between us even in the darkness. She groaned as I slid into her and she flattened her body against mine. She was a life raft holding me up to the surface of a dark sea, keeping me from dreams of earth and greatcoats and the concussion of shells creeping ever nearer.
‘You’re a good man, John Cook,’ she whispered to me, her head resting on my shoulder. She was lying, of course, and we both knew it, but I was glad she thought enough of me to say the words.
12
I left Margaret at dawn, praying I had enough petrol left to get me home. The personal use ration had shrunk to almost nothing. I’d have to top up at the farm, but that would mean using the dyed petrol that was meant to be reserved for agricultural use. The police were cracking down, rightfully so, but it was a chance I’d have to take.
Bill Taylor, my farm manager, was pacing in the yard.
