Lorna Gray - The Antique Dealer’s Daughter

Anyway, irrespective of all that, I’d have stood a rather greater chance of receiving this cautionary experience had my cousin actually been at home when I arrived.

In fact, by her absence, my cousin is responsible for many things. Had she met me at the bus stop as she had promised, I wouldn’t have been forced to walk the two miles alone with my case to her tiny cottage at the bottom of this dusty valley. If she’d been at home when I finally arrived here, I would have had her company instead of nothing but the mile upon mile of blue sky – a novelty in itself after the smogs of London – and my only neighbour wouldn’t have been the deserted single-storey building that stood just beyond the turn of the track about a hundred yards upstream, firmly dispelling the fantasy of a simple life passed in a rustic hovel. My cousin’s company might also have eased the disorientating sense of loneliness after the important bustle of leaving London, which was only broken by the distant telephone that proceeded to ring on and off for the next three hours.

She certainly might have known who the owners were and decided to do something about it before the sun dipped below the ridgetop behind me. And if she had, when I finally gave in and took it upon myself to labour my way back up that trackway with the view of at least seeing if I could be of any use, I could have either escaped or averted this fresh proof that conflict stalked everywhere, even in peacetime. I certainly wouldn’t have found an old man lying flat out on his garden path beneath peas and feathery carrot-tops, with a wound to his head.

He wasn’t alone. I arrived at the moment that the fellow who had been trying to help him had to rapidly set him down on the crude stone slabs of the path because the old man’s weight had grown too much.

I was beside them before the old man had even stopped falling. Despite my first impression, this was not an act of war. There were no armies here, no great propaganda campaigns to tell us which nations were on the side of right. I had to make up my own mind and all I saw was a poor old man who had lately bashed his head and made it nearly to his own front step before abruptly succumbing to the shock. I remember his face vividly. There was a greyness to it. His skin was creased by age, with fine woolly hair over the top. He was wearing the coarse shirt and heavy brown trousers of the ordinary countryman. His garden path was a narrow line between overcrowded beds and he stirred a little as I reached his side. One side of his face was gritty from his fall. There was a smear of blood on his right hand that spread to my arm as he watched with that blank instinct that comes from partial consciousness while I dropped into a crouch and examined him.

I don’t remember the second man. He remains an infuriatingly formless shape in my memory of that day. The image has been subsequently enhanced by the memory of other encounters in other places at different times, but that day I only saw the way he was tugging ineffectually at the fallen man’s gardening coat in an attempt to make the old man rise and that he surrendered the invalid’s care to me just as soon as I reached his side. He did it with relief, it seemed to me. I remember the hasty instruction he gave to stay and do what I could, and the way his dirtied hand briefly 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.