LITMIR.BIZ

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patted my shoulder as he slipped out past me towards the gate. I heard the breathless urgency in his voice as he said that he would fetch better help. I barely looked at him. My eyes were all for that semi-conscious old man and the awful graze on his temple, and the flies that clustered everywhere.

      It was about three minutes later when I caught again the renewed ringing of that solitary mark of human companionableness – the still distant telephone – that it dawned on me how strangely the man had made his exit. I also realised just how brutally silent everything else was. The telephone wasn’t close by; there were no telegraph wires reaching across this disordered triangle of five or so dwellings, but that persistent drone was near enough to prove the point. Clearly, wherever the other man had gone, he certainly hadn’t gone to call the doctor.

      Suddenly it felt utterly exposed to be crouching over the old man like this. We were enclosed in a cocoon of greenery where anyone might be watching us and yet we might not see them. It was a very raw means of lurching into the sudden twist of considering what had really happened here. My search of those blazing shadows was stilled between telephone rings when the rattle of a car engine rose like a skylark on the air.

      The busy traffic of London was unknown here. This single car claimed the entire valley as its audience. I’d thought at first it was departing; that it showed that the man was making his departure even more final. But the thread of sound became more defined, pausing only for the brief mumble as it met a gate across the lane, before continuing its ascent once more from the valley bottom. Now it was running along the ridgetop just above the village. I had the awfulness of waiting here with the sudden sense of my uselessness if it should turn out that this car was carrying the man back to us. I didn’t know what it would mean for me if he should return in an entirely different spirit to the sort that brought assistance. Because I had no doubt at all that if no one had been near enough to answer that telephone, certainly no one would hear any shout of mine.

      The car didn’t veer harmlessly away to leave me with nothing but a sense of my stupidity for cringing here while better help passed us by. I waited, braced amongst the bees to do Lord knows what, while the whining engine turned off the lane at the plain stone barn and dropped into the village triangle.

      It stopped. A voice spoke to another inside the neat little burgundy runabout and then a man and his small white dog got out.

      He wasn’t the man who had left me here on this path. This man was tanned and fair-haired, or at least had ordinary hair made fair by the sun, and he was of that age, about thirty, where these days you could be reasonably certain he’d encountered harder scenes than this during his war service. He certainly reacted quickly now. Quicker than I did. I shot to my feet and he’d passed me with a hand to my arm to set me to one side before I’d even spoken. Somehow I’d anticipated more discussion first. So I staggered there and dithered while he dropped to one knee by the old man’s side, and felt I ought to be barring his path or helping or something; and discovered instead that he was harmless and I wasn’t needed, and found time to notice the ugly streak down my wrist and to reel from it and feel a little sick.

      A voice demanded my attention. It was the driver of the car. He’d climbed out and now he was standing in the gateway and saying, ‘You must be Miss Sutton, I presume? What’s happened to Mr Winstone here, do you know?’

      It was a relief to be recalled to the gate by the car driver’s questions. It was like stepping out into a summer’s day. Behind me, the invalid was still befuddled and his crooked old hand was bloodier than ever where it had touched his head. The small cottage that loomed over him was made of crumbling stone, and so were its neighbours on this narrow terrace. I was rubbing heat back into my skin, a gesture of general uncertainty about my role here and whether it really was right that I was surrendering responsibility for Mr Winstone’s welfare to the kneeling man like this, and I had to shudder as I discovered what lay under my grip for a second time.

      The man I met at the gate prompted me into speech. He ducked his head to meet my eye – his eyes were brown and alert and he was very tall. This was a deliberate attempt to establish control. He wouldn’t have known it but the technique was familiar. It was amiable enough but it wasn’t far removed from the methods the air-raid wardens had used to instil calm in panicked slum dwellers after they had abruptly discovered a void where the house next door had been.

      I imagine the technique had been well used in the London Blitz, but it certainly didn’t work on me now. This man woke me to the disquiet that lurked within and I forgot the stain on my arm and said with a voice made sharp by suspicion, ‘What do you mean ‘presume’? How do you know who I am? And who is he?’

      Along the path, I saw that Mr Winstone had managed to sit up and was feeling his head and talking, or possibly cursing, to the younger man, who was resting on one knee beside him amongst the spilling geraniums. Old Mr Winstone spoke in the elongated vowels of the West Country. The younger man had a tanned hand lying easily across the point of his other knee with a finger hooked into the collar of his enthusiastic dog. His manner was intense and restrained to gentleness all at the same time. His accent was softer than the old man’s. He looked and sounded like a working man; rough clothes over strong limbs.

      In quite a different tone, the taller man by my side told me calmly, ‘He’s Danny Hannis. Bertie Winstone’s son.’

      Briefly, very briefly, my gaze flickered from its watch on the path to this man’s face. His mouth formed a benign acknowledgement of the difference in names. He amended, ‘Stepson. Danny was in town to pick up a part for the tractor, so it made sense to come home with me. He knows I take my car on a Wednesday. I know who you are because we don’t get many visitors to these parts and, besides, I’m a friend of your cousin. She didn’t tell me directly that you were coming, but word gets about. I’m Matthew Croft, by the way. How did you find him like this?’

      There, amongst the patient answers to my questions, was the real question of his own.

      I stopped trying to goad myself into a distress of helplessness and looked straight at him for the first time. He was older than his friend by a few years in a way that made him too old for me but probably very suitable for my cousin. Since my mind was still clearly struggling to let down its guard and determined to record every detail it could now, I also happened to notice that his hair was fair, his eyes were very dark in this violet sunset, and his clothes and general demeanour made it seem more likely that he was on his way home from a day in the office rather than a day in the fields.

      When my mind finally decided after all this that it was time to answer his question before he had to repeat it a third time, I found myself saying on a note of disbelief, ‘There was a man. He went that way.’ I pointed my hand towards the corner of the lane, with a vague bias for the direction it took along the ridgetop past that barn towards the gated section and downhill, perhaps, to the valley bottom. ‘He had a pale jacket …’

      I caught Matthew Croft’s expression. It broke through my seriousness and left a rueful smile in its place. I was not, it seemed, destined to be a very valuable witness.

      Danny Hannis must have lately arrived at pretty much the same conclusion about his stepfather. Mr Winstone didn’t seem to know who had left him on the floor either. Danny’s swift glance along the path towards his friend was like a brief release of concealed impatience. It came in a blast and then his gaze moved on to me. At this range his eyes looked blue or perhaps green and very clear indeed. And rather too sharp. He saw the blood on me. His look began as a question but it was a shock to see my own suspicion reflected there upon his face.

      I heard myself saying quite automatically, ‘You know, since that fellow is presumably not coming back again to pick up Mr Winstone after all, shall we have a go at patching him up ourselves?’

      It was for once the right thing to say. Suspicion evaporated for all of us. I saw Matthew Croft’s nod. He beckoned and I heard the creak behind as a youth scrambled out of the car and we all bustled Mr Winstone into the house. Inside, this place was no bigger than the average worker’s terrace in a London slum and if Danny Hannis lived here with his stepfather, it amazed me that there should have been enough space for him. The old man himself was settled into the dipped seat of an armchair and

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