Everything that had happened since their chance encounter – his move to Coyne’s Farm and the kindness he’d received at the hands of the Ramsay household – seemed to Eddie like an extension of this marvellous power his old pal possessed, and his own spirits had risen in response, giving him fresh heart. Once more he’d resumed his long struggle to escape from what he saw as the dead hand of the past, a mysterious force that threatened always to drag him down.
For years he had suffered from a sense of inertia, a lack of will that had prevented him not only from living his life to the full, but also from making proper provision for the future. Unaware that the malady was one he shared with other survivors of the trenches, men in their thousands, Eddie had attributed it instead to a particular event: he believed it stemmed from the moment when he’d received the near-fatal wound that had ended his military career.
He could still recall the impact of the sniper’s bullet when it struck him like an iron fist, piercing his ribcage and sending splinters of bone into one of his lungs. Clear, too, in his memory were the minutes that followed. With the voices of the men around him growing faint in his ears, he had lain staring up at the darkening sky, waiting for oblivion. Knowing he was scuppered.
And even though the conviction had proved false, the memory of it had returned like a ghostly echo when he regained consciousness a few days later in a hospital ward and discovered what had happened to him in the intervening period.
‘You’re the bloke who came back from the dead,’ the doctor in attendance had told him with a grin. ‘They’d already loaded you onto the meat wagon when one of the graves party noticed your eyelid twitching. Good thing he did, or by now you’d be pushing up daisies.’
During his slow recovery – for weeks he had lain in a dreamlike state, indifferent to his future, unmoved even by the knowledge that he would not be returning to the front – a mood of fatalism had settled on him that had changed little with the passing years, and which sprung from the belief, already rooted in his mind, that he was living on borrowed time.
Having reached the crest of the ridge, Eddie quickened his pace. The long twilights of summer were a thing of the past and darkness fell swiftly at this time of year. But the sky had cleared after a spell of rainy weather and a new moon had risen in the past few days that would light his way to Oak Green later.
Shy at first of accepting the invitation that had been extended to him, he had come to delight in the hours he spent in the Ramsays’ kitchen, where the warmth of his welcome seemed like a reproach to the melancholia that so often afflicted him.
He even felt in a strange way that he had become a member of the family, part of the household at least, his presence at the kitchen table in the evenings so accepted that when Mrs Ramsay looked in, as she always did, for a few words with him, she would sit down – checking his movement to rise to his feet – and begin talking at once about whatever was in her mind, just as though a conversation they had been having earlier had been interrupted, wasting no time on formalities, but plunging straight into some topic.
Often she would ask his advice, her smile and the open friendliness of her manner putting Eddie so much at ease that he would find himself holding forth on all kinds of subjects, some of them things he knew very little about. Not that it seemed to matter.
‘What a good idea, Mr Noyes. I think I’ll take your advice.’
Then she would turn to Bess and ask her what she thought and the Ramsays’ cook, who obviously knew her mistress’s ways well, would offer a forthright opinion, meanwhile trying to catch Eddie’s eye, so that they could share a conspiratorial wink.
What Sam had said jokingly was true – Bess did seem to have a soft spot for him – but thus far it had manifested itself only by the blushes with which she greeted his arrival each evening, her broad face lighting up like a lantern the moment he popped his head through the doorway. Not knowing quite how to handle this display of affection – the peculiar circumstances of Eddie’s life had left him with little experience of women – he’d resorted to treating her as he might a pal, which seemed to content her.
What concerned Mrs Ramsay at present – she had raised the subject yet again only last evening – was whether she ought to continue to allow her daughter to return home from school on her own.
The shortening hours of daylight were one reason why she was thinking of putting an end to the practice, that plus the fact that now that the autumn was almost over and winter approaching, the path Nell took to Oak Green from the bus stop was increasingly deserted.
‘I know it only takes her ten minutes, but it’s getting so lonely. I really think I ought to put a stop to it – at least until the spring – but Nell won’t hear of it. She’s at the age when she doesn’t want to be treated like a child any longer, and she’s managed to get her father to take her part. What do you think, Mr Noyes?’
Though Eddie secretly agreed with Mrs Ramsay – most days he didn’t see a living soul on the path when he walked back to the barn after work – he was reluctant to say so. From the start of their acquaintance, Nell had behaved to him as though they had known each other for years, confiding in him with a candour that would have made any word spoken behind her back seem like a betrayal of friendship.
And while he recognized that her openness was most likely an unconscious copy of her mother’s manner, he found it hard to resist, as he did her gift for living in the moment, a blessing denied him, and perhaps all adults, but one which Nell displayed still with an artlessness that won over all whom she encountered.
Some weeks earlier, when he’d still been shy of accepting the invitation extended to him – he had been to the house only twice, allowing a gap of several days to elapse between each visit – she had walked down the road from the bus stop on her way back from school in order to press him again on her mother’s behalf to call on them.
Her message delivered, Nell had lingered to watch the men at work – they were tarring a stretch of road when she arrived – questioning them in her unaffected way, taking it for granted they would welcome her curiosity, which they had, to the point where even old Harrigan had shed the beetle-browed scowl with which he had first greeted the sight of her slim figure darting among the busy men and taken it on himself to initiate her into the mysteries of macadamized roads.
Thereafter the men had watched for her every afternoon, looking up from their work when the bus from Midhurst went by to wave to the smiling face in the window.
‘Look, there’s Nell,’ they would call out. ‘Hullo, Nell!’
Earlier that day, when she’d passed by, Pat McCarthy had doffed his hat and bowed deeply, whereupon Nell, giggling, had responded to his salute with a royal wave, making the whole gang roar with laughter.
Chuckling now at the memory, Eddie quickened his pace still further. He was impatient to get over to Oak Green. A fortnight earlier, Mr Ramsay had mentioned that among his clients was a large stationery company headquartered in Chichester, with customers in a number of south coast towns, and that if Eddie wished he could inquire discreetly when the opportunity arose as to the possibility of them employing him as a salesman.
He had since been informed by Mrs Ramsay that her husband was even now engaged in auditing this same company’s books and hoped to have some news for him by week’s end.
Glancing down at himself as he strode along the path, Eddie’s grin grew ever wider. Anything less like a salesman than the figure he cut would be hard to imagine. Filthy from a day’s labouring and dressed in his oldest and most threadbare garments, he looked more like a tramp.
But before going over to Oak Green he would stop at the barn to wash and change his clothes. It was something he took pride in now, making himself presentable. He saw it as symbolic of his new-found determination to reforge his life: to free himself from the shadow that had hung over him since the war.
Lately he had begun to wonder if the depression from which he suffered might not be an actual illness, a condition over which he had no control, but for which there might be a cure; thoughts which came to him most often at the end of the day, when, having returned from the warm kitchen at Oak Green, he would ready himself for sleep, first lighting the brazier Sam had given him, then laying his bedclothes on the mattress of hay they’d prepared.
Lying in the cool, scented darkness, in a silence broken only by the stir of roosting pigeons and the scratching of mice in the straw, he would marvel at the transformation that had taken place in him already: at the spirit of resistance which Sam had helped to spark in him, and the world of small pleasures to which his eyes had been opened since.
With his awareness of both had come a flowering of fresh hope.
Slipping through the gap in the hedge, Eddie hopped over the ditch on the other side and then walked through the orchard where the sweet smell of fallen apples, unpicked since the farm’s abandonment, hung heavy in the still
