‘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.