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.
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 shilling.’
He had a shilling 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.
‘Hello, 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 – hello, 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.