‘The Quantocks,’ said Kate. ‘And Exmoor beyond. Then you can nearly see the sea at Burnham, the Bristol Channel and sometimes you can see into WALES and see the MOUNTAINS.’
Freddie kept quiet. He’d never seen the sea, or a mountain. Kate knew a lot more than he did about their own land. Did it matter? No, he reasoned. He loved Kate, and he hoped that one day she would love him, but while that love was growing he felt he had to be quiet and respectful. He’d heard other men boasting and laughing about what they had done with girls. It sickened Freddie, and so did the girls he saw wearing lipstick and strutting around in silly clothes, or dressing up in breeches and boots, riding motorbikes, smoking fags. Kate was like a secret jewel he had discovered, he was going to keep her close to his heart, and under wraps.
It occurred to him that he hadn’t given her a compliment yet, so he opted for a safe one. ‘That’s a beautiful dress you’re wearing.’
‘I’m glad you like it. I made it myself,’ explained Kate, sitting down on the soft grass and leaning back on both arms. She looked at him expectantly. ‘Now – I want to hear that poem.’
‘Do you? What do you want to hear that for?’
‘Please,’ she pleaded.
So Freddie recited ‘The Lake Isle of Innisfree’, his quiet voice shaking a little with emotion, especially when he came to the last verse.
‘I can see it means a lot to you,’ said Kate. ‘I’m not very good at poetry so can you explain it to me?’
‘Well – I’ll try to.’ Freddie stared out across the Levels, gathering words from corners of his childhood, the beechnuts, the gleaned barley grains, the broken china. ‘When I was a boy I never had time to play. We were poor. I had to walk a mile to school and a mile home in a pair of wooden clogs, and when I got home I had to run errands for my mother – she couldn’t go out, see? And I was always hungry, I used to live on beechnuts and hazelnuts, like a squirrel I was.’
Kate’s eyes were wide and solemn, her mouth open as she listened to his story, so different from her own.
‘Then, when the war ended, Dad bought the bakery in Monterose. He wanted me to be a baker, see? He thought that would be a fine life for me. But – I didn’t want it, and I had to do it, Kate. Can you understand that?’ He paused, reassured by the way she was listening so attentively. ‘Then for the rest of my life I had to get up at five in the morning, every morning, help make the bread, then load it into the bike and do the delivery round, all that before school – oh and I used to go down the station to carry luggage – so that poem, where it says “I shall have some peace there,” and “live alone in the bee-loud glade”, it used to give me peace, just saying it, or thinking it. When we moved to Monterose, I missed the countryside, but no one ever knew that. I never told anyone. But that last verse, about “standing on the pavements grey” and “feeling it in the deep earth’s core” – I understood that feeling so well . . .’
‘Oh Freddie.’ Kate reached out and touched the back of his wrist, looking into his face with compassion. ‘Go on.’
‘’Tis a miserable story,’ Freddie said, suddenly afraid that he had caused a cloud to drift over their summer picnic. ‘You don’t want to hear all that.’
‘I do,’ said Kate, and her eyes never left his face.
‘Well – I’m coming to a better bit now.’ Freddie remembered the storytelling tradition in his family, the exaggerations, the silences, and the laughter. He wanted to do that for Kate, turn his miserable tale into something entertaining and positive. ‘I’ll tell you how I got that lorry. Well, one frosty night in the middle of February – hard as diamonds the frost was – I gets up, quiet as a mouse . . .’
Kate sat spellbound, not moving a muscle as she listened to his story, holding her breath in the silences. She let go of Freddie’s wrist so that he could gesticulate with his long fingers, his eyes beginning to twinkle, his voice still slow and quiet. Then he came to the part where he had escaped down the steep dark street on his bike.
‘The bike had no brakes, see? So I went whizzing down there, in the pitch dark, with my legs stuck out straight and sparks flying from my boots . . .’
He was rewarded with a scream of laughter. Kate doubled over, clutching her stomach with one hand and wiping her eyes with the other. She laughed and laughed as if she would never stop, and Freddie managed to stay po-faced.
‘Well ’tis true,’ he said, and that set her off again. Secretly pleased, he continued his story, restraining himself from smiles as he related how he had paid his money into the bank.
‘As soon as the doors opened, I went in with my flour sack, dragging it along the floor. Then I stood at the counter taking out the old socks full of money and some of them blue and mouldy, and the hankies, all dusty they were and bursting with coins. And the bank clerk, he didn’t like it. He looked me up and down as if I was a tramp, and he said, “You can’t bring that dirty old stuff in here.” So I looked him in the eye and said – quite politely – “Excuse me Sir, but I can, I’m sixteen and this is legal tender,” and he didn’t like it, but he had to count it all. Took him three quarters of an hour jingling and cussing, and there was a queue behind me right out the door, and they were all grumbling. But I had the last laugh. I came out of there with my money in crisp new bank notes, then I went flying down to the motor yard on me bread bike, and I had that Scammell lorry.’
He paused to take a breath, and saw that Kate was wanting to say something.
‘What a WONDERFUL story, Freddie,’ she said passionately, ‘so funny, and inspiring. Tell me again. I loved it.’
‘Well ’tis true. True as I’m sitting here,’ said Freddie, and his smile stretched right to the edges of his face.
‘I love to see you smile,’ said Kate and she kissed him impulsively on his smiling cheek.
Startled and moved by her response, Freddie slipped his arm around her shoulders, feeling the silky dress and her warmth underneath, and she put her hand on his shoulder. For a moment they were both still, feeling each other’s heartbeat, and Freddie buried his chin in the soft lustre of her dark hair. The moment filled with light and stretched into infinity as if it had registered in some ethereal archive.
He held her in a shell-like hug, afraid of his own strength and of the sudden rush of energy through his body. His pulse wanted to race like a wild horse, yet his mind stayed calm, his inner voice telling him to slow down and savour the intoxicating feel of her satin dress, the way her dark curls were hot from the sunshine as they slipped over his bare arm.
‘This is only the beginning,’ he heard himself whisper, but he held back from speaking the words that echoed in his heart, words that Granny Barcussy had fed into his soul. ‘When you love, you must love wisely and slowly.’ Nothing in his life had felt so exquisitely precious as the warm bright silk of Kate in his arms.
A flock of small birds came bobbing and bouncing out of the woods, their voices tinkling like bells, and the grass around them came alive with fluttering wings.
‘Goldfinches,’ whispered Freddie.
But Kate was listening to something else.
‘I can hear your tummy rumbling,’ she said, laughing, and sat up. The goldfinches vanished with a burr of wings. ‘I think it’s time for our DELICIOUS picnic.’
Chapter Fourteen
THE STONE GATEPOST
Freddie stood in the stonemason’s yard, staring in disbelief at a load of stone which had appeared there. It wasn’t stacked neatly as Herbie would have liked, but tipped in a jumble of old saddle stones, and blocks of golden sandstone, some still joined together with mortar. The stones gave Freddie a strange feeling, as if they had voices and stories to tell, stories locked into the grains of sand and crystal. He looked at the wheel marks in the mud and saw the large hoof prints of a Shire horse, as if the heavy load had been delivered by horse and cart, probably early in the morning before it got too hot. Seeing the hoof prints increased his inexplicable sense of doom.