The Land Girl: An unforgettable historical novel of love and hope. Allie Burns
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Название: The Land Girl: An unforgettable historical novel of love and hope
Автор: Allie Burns
Издательство: HarperCollins
Жанр: Историческая литература
isbn: 9780008262730
isbn:
‘They imprisoned him there and then.’
Emily gripped the kitchen table. First John, and now Cecil, gone within a matter of weeks.
Mother asked Edna for a glass of something stiff. Edna lifted her hands from the butler sink in the scullery, dried them on her apron and took a bottle of cooking sherry out of the cupboard. She set down a thin-waisted glass, but Mother leant over her and took a whisky tumbler down instead.
‘Fill her up, please.’
Mother knocked it back and flung open the scullery door, Emily chasing behind her.
Emily was too late to catch her. She was already down at the vegetable garden kicking up the earth.
‘Mother! Please! Don’t do that. It’s John’s …’
‘It isn’t. It has nothing to do with your poor brother. He didn’t ever show an interest in farming and crops in all his twenty-four years. It’s just another of your ideas.’
Tears pricked at Emily’s eyes. Without a grave to tend, Mother might have found comfort in nurturing this garden and seeing it yield crops. Instead, Mother knocked it all up. Soil and tender shoots flew everywhere.
‘And what will Lady Radford say? Her titled relatives are losing sons like a flower surrenders its seeds to the wind. And I suppose you’ve heard about Lady Clara?’
Emily shook her head.
‘She’s gone to France to set up a hospital in an abbey near Paris with the French Red Cross. She’s taken her car to use as an ambulance.’
That stung Emily. Still Mother refused to see that Emily could and should be doing her bit too.
‘Meanwhile, Cecil has been dragged off to prison.’ Mother slowed down now. ‘I couldn’t go on if I was on my own, I really couldn’t.’ For a moment, she actually stopped and her steel-blue gaze settled on Emily’s face, her eyes searching. She steadied her hands on Emily’s shoulders and then her body collapsed as she gave into a sob. Emily filled with warmth and reached out to embrace Mother.
‘I need a lie-down,’ Mother said, straightening up and dusting down her skirt.
‘What is going to happen about the house?’ Emily blurted out. They couldn’t go on not communicating with one another if it was just the two of them. She had to do as John had asked and ensure they pulled together.
But the moment was gone. Mother returned to the house and closed the door behind her.
*
She dug up the seed potatoes herself, and dismantled the frames for the runner beans that had survived Mother’s rampage.
Pieter and Stefan, the Belgian refugees, came to help her plant the new rose bushes. The poor Belgians, who had come to England with nothing, were grateful that John had given them a safe home for the war. They would call it John’s Rose Garden.
All the while, Mother was in bed. Absent from life in all but body.
The rose bushes were already mature and within a week were budding up. As the green seams of the buds receded, crimson red pushed through.
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