“Why don’t we have a sit inside?”
Sarah was still looking at her with an uncertain smile on her face. “Are you all right, Maggie?”
“I’m fine, Sarah. It’s just I heard you calling. Just now. For Tom.”
“Yes. I can’t find him. I don’t know where he’s got to.”
“I know. That’s why I’ve come up. Let’s go inside, is it?”
At first, when Maggie told Sarah what she thought might have happened to their husbands, Sarah refused to credit the idea at all. But then she thought of the bed, Tom’s outline, cold like it never was except maybe right in the depth of lambing when he’d been out all night. And she thought of his boots, both pairs missing. Of his silences this past week, deeper than usual. But there was still so much Maggie hadn’t explained. All she’d said was she thought this was to do with the invasion. That there would have been plans. Plans maybe they wouldn’t have known about. That Tom, William, and the others were some of the only men left. If something had to be set up, if something had to be organised, they’d be the ones to help with it. After all, who else knew this area as well as they did?
“But why didn’t they tell us then?” Sarah had asked, feeling like that girl once more, tugging at the sleeve of her father, asking him to explain.
Maggie didn’t know. In fact she didn’t know anything, she admitted. Nothing certain. She just knew. They’d all heard the wireless reports, hadn’t they? All of them had listened to the announcements from the BBC. Britain was being invaded. A massive counterattack is what the newsreader called it, speaking as calmly as if he were reporting that day’s business news. Britain was being invaded and the Germans were coming. Reinforcements flooding in from the victories on the collapsed Eastern Front. The Allies’ attempted invasion had been a disaster and now the Germans were staging their own. Chasing the ravaged Allied armies back across the Channel.
They should have nothing to worry about here, though, that’s what Reverend Davies had told them. And the Home Guard officer who’d come round handing out the leaflets a week ago. “Disable all vehicles so only you can use them. Hide food stores and essential supplies. Offer no resistance but offer no help either.” He’d said these sentences in a flat tone, their intonations worn thin through repetition. But then he’d given Maggie a quick smile and briefly found his own voice again. “I wouldn’t worry too much, though, Mrs. Jones. Really. There’s no way Churchill’ll let them past the beaches. And even if he did, well, to be honest, I doubt you’d see a Jerry up a valley like this.”
And now Tom and William were gone. And some of the others too, she’d bet. “So it has to be something to do with what’s happened, doesn’t it?” Maggie said, looking hard into Sarah’s eyes. She was looking for the start of that fall, the connection of possibility and reality, the gear change from doubt to concern. They’d known each other ever since Sarah came into the valley four years ago. Maggie was Sarah’s nearest neighbour. They’d soon become friends, although always along the axis of their ages. Always Maggie leading, playing the role of the mother, the aunt.
Sarah looked down at the old wooden table, traced the swirls and eddies of the knots in the wood. “Like fingerprints,” her mother would have said. “Fingerprints in the wood from those gone before.”
She shook her head slowly. “No, Maggie, Tom wouldn’t go anywhere without telling me first. He just wouldn’t.”
Maggie sighed. She wouldn’t fall. God bless her, she wouldn’t fall.
“Let’s go an’ call on Mary,” she said, ignoring Sarah’s refusal to address the idea. “And then we’ll see if Jack’s down at The Firs.”
Sarah looked up at Maggie as if she were speaking another language and for a moment it made Maggie feel foolish. Was she jumping ahead? Was the girl right?
“It’s best we check,” she said at last, “and then we’ll know, won’t we?”
They’d found Mary Griffiths feeding her chickens at the back of the farmhouse. She’d sent her daughter, Bethan, out on the pony to look for her husband, Hywel. She wasn’t back yet. Mary had noticed Hywel’s winter coats weren’t hanging in the spare bedroom where they usually were. Both Bethan and her mother had overslept that morning and hadn’t been awake for long.
Mary had two sons in the war, one of them in Intelligence, as she often told people. She was proud, but their absence these past four years had eroded her previously pretty face, leaving it worn with missing and marked with a perpetual frown. Sarah recognised Maggie’s deference to Mary’s fragility. She said nothing of the fears she’d expressed to Sarah. Just that William and Tom had gone off somewhere and they’d wondered if Hywel had seen them. No doubt he’d be back soon. If he had, could she send Bethan over and let them know?
So they’d left Mary throwing handfuls of seed to her chickens, their urgent beaks drilling around her feet, the cockerel standing tall to stretch his wings and shake his blood red wattle and comb.
They’d walked down the slope from Mary’s farm, through a lower field, and across the river, fording it where Jack Probert had thrown in a number of large rocks to create a pattern of makeshift stepping-stones. Then they’d climbed back up the slope, through the trees where a few early mushrooms were showing brilliant white and stubby in the grass, and up onto the track that cut into the side of the valley. As they walked along it towards The Firs, they spoke of other things than what had brought them out on this morning walk. The Home Service’s morning announcement, the withdrawal from Eastbourne, the wandering tomcat that had left Maggie with a litter of kittens to deal with. Anything other than where their husbands might be at that moment.
At The Firs, Menna Probert was busy with her two young children, three-year-old Tudor, whom she held balanced on one hip as she answered the door, and one-year-old Emma, who lay crying somewhere in the darkened farmhouse behind her. Maggie and Sarah didn’t go in. They didn’t have to. Menna answered the door talking, her voice rising up the hallway towards them.
“About time too. Where’ve you been? Your tea’s cold now and I’ve put the cake back in.…” She opened the door. “Oh. Sorry. I thought you were Jack,” she said, shifting Tudor another notch higher on her hip. “Has his hands full sometimes. Can’t get to the handle.”
Back in the house Emma filled her lungs behind her mother and launched into another rising scale of cries. Menna winced and frowned over her shoulder into the hallway. Again Maggie said nothing more than ask if she’d seen William or Tom about. No? Well, not to worry, she said, stroking and pinching at Tudor the same way she might pet a dog or one of her horses. If she saw Jack she’d tell him his tea was cold. And she’d bring some of those old toys of her boys round for Tudor. She’d been meaning to for ages. No, of course she would, no trouble. She didn’t really want them around the house anyway.