A Month in the Country (6 page)

‘And when will there be something for us to see?' she asked.

I told her that it would be like a jigsaw – a face, a hand, a shoe, here a bit and there a bit. And then, imperceptibly, it would come together. ‘At least that's how it ought to happen. But you don't need to be told what might have disappeared in five hundred years. I can't believe someone else hasn't had a go before me and that I'll find patches of bare plaster.'

‘Oh,' she said, ‘but isn't that the exciting part of it? Not knowing what's round the corner. It must be like opening a parcel at Christmas. Well, I shan't forget the rug and then you'll have to let me see how the jigsaw's fitting together, won't you. You mustn't mind if I haunt you a little … Mr Birkin?' And she laughed, an enchantingly gay sound like … well, like a bell.

Then she turned away towards the gate and I turned too and went back onto my platform. And I wondered about Keach and his wife and how the oddest people meet and then live together year after year, look at each other across hundreds of meals, watch each other dress and undress, whisper in the darkness, cry aloud in the marvellous agony of sexual release.

‘You had the lovely Alice to see you,' Moon said when we met that evening. ‘I saw her in the yard. You seemed to have a lot to say to each other. Now, didn't you find her a bit of a stunner? Fancy that gem of purest ray serene hidden away in Oxgodby's unfathomable caves! Well, come on, admit it.'

‘She's a beauty alright,' I said. ‘Quite extraordinary, in fact. Though maybe she doesn't know it.'

‘Rubbish!' he exclaimed. ‘Every woman knows it. But Keach catching
her! It's an outrage. Almost as big an outrage as society arranging that from the moment he got her to sign on the sanctified line, other men could go as far as that line and no further. It's a devil.'

‘Perhaps he's all she wants,' I said.

‘Oh come on!' he said. ‘You've seen him. Worse, you've heard him. Let's go up to the Shepherd and sink a jar to lost beauty.'

Well, perhaps he was right. Frankly, if Keach really was as awful as he seemed, living with him didn't bear thinking about. But mercifully it wasn't Baghdad, so he couldn't drape her in a yashmak and other men could still cast an admiring eye on his doe-eyed bride. And, as we sauntered back down the road, first smelling, then seeing the swathes of hay lying in the dusk, I thought that just looking at Alice Keach was wonder enough, so that I hoped that she would keep her word and call often to see how I was getting on.

I mean to say – the pride of the Uffizi walking abroad in, God help us, Oxgodby!

The work went well. My picture was so well preserved that I became more and more convinced that, even before it was forty or fifty years old, it had been hidden beneath a lime wash. Why? The priest found fault with its iconography? The local magnates took umbrage at some fancied resemblance? A literate churchwarden thought it old-fashioned for a forward-looking parish? Take your choice. Every week that passes, you can bet your life that, somewhere in this land, there's a first-class row bubbling up about what someone wants in and someone else wants out of a village church.

And then, over the centuries, after each fifty years or so of taper and candle smoke, paraffin lamps, the painting had taken on another layer of cover-up. And, of course, in latter days, the good old Bankdam-Crowther had done its bit, doubtlessly, on a single mad morning's fling, throwing up as much muck as a medieval decade. So, once I got the hang of it, the job followed a steady pattern, cleaning down the years to the painting itself. Well, perhaps I'm making it sound too easy. It wasn't – but I got better at it as the days passed.

Really it boiled down to a game of patience. My first move had been
to grid the likely area of colour into chalked square feet and then, as you might say, to inch along, only straying from one square to the next to follow a hand or a face. Because, although Joe Watterson had been too canny to put it into as many words, it simply isn't possible to return a five-hundred-year-old wall-painting to its original state. At best, I aimed at approximation, uniformity, something that
looked
right.

And so (jumping ahead for a moment) it went on, day following day up there on the scaffolding, shuffling sideways and backwards, on my knees, up on my haunches and, when I was too idle to use a step-ladder, stretching my toes. It was like a window in a filthy wall which, every day or two, opened a square foot or so wider. You know how it is when a tricky job is going well because you're doing things the way they should be done, when you're working in rhythm and feel a reassuring confidence that everything's unravelling naturally and all will be right in the end. That's about it: I knew what I was doing – it's really what being professional means.

Bringing back that long-dead man's apocalyptic picture into daylight obsessed me. That great pyramid of folk split by the arch! Because it wasn't long before I'd made a foray up, down and across it and had a fair idea of the whole – the judge and his bailiff; below them, the three Lords of Luke 16, clad first in finery, then only in furnace glare, and, finally, the multitudes trooping smugly right to Paradise or being tossed screaming over the left-hand fiery brim.

Even when I wasn't on the job I found myself dwelling on that immense spread of colour. Particularly during those first two or three weeks when only Moon interrupted me. But then, inevitably, as happens to most of us, first through Saturday umpiring, later Sunday chapel, I was drawn into the changing picture of Oxgodby itself. But, oddly, what happened
outside
was like a dream. It was inside the still church, before its reappearing picture, that was
real
. I drifted across the rest. As I have said – like a dream. For a time.

One day Kathy Ellerbeck brought an invitation to lunch. ‘Mam says she wants you to come and have your Sunday dinner,' she yelled up the ladder. ‘She says it's our turn for the preacher and it's that Mr Jagger
from Northallerton and he's a bit above our heads, but she says the two of you will get on like a house afire. Unless you want to, you needn't stop overlong because, as soon as he's had his dinner, he'll be shunted off into the front-room for a doze before his tea-time. But, if you like, you can come with us to Sunday-school – with Edgar and me.'

‘I'm a bit old, surely,' I called back. ‘For Sunday-school I mean? Not that I couldn't do with some I suppose.'

‘Well, you could wait outside; there's a seat on the grass verge. Or you can give Mr Dowthwaite a hand: he'd let you look after some of the dafties. Then, if you did that, you could come back and have your tea as well as your dinner and follow on where you and Mr Jagger left off. And that would save you getting your own tea ready, as well as some money. Mam says you're over-much on your own and traipse around like a man in a dream and need to be got into company. Don't put your coat on unless it's raining.'

She was a very organizing girl and had it all cut and dried so, on Sunday, I made an unusual effort to look respectable so as not to let her down, turned up at the bidden hour and, almost immediately, we sat down round the starched tablecloth. Mr Ellerbeck then launched into a grace of impressive length. I found it impossible to believe that, normally, his fellow diners would have permitted him to elaborate in such closely argued detail on the Lord's bountifulness and his own servile gratitude at being singled out as a favoured recipient, so doubtless he was showing his paces to a fellow professional, Mr Jagger.

Often since that long-ago Sunday, I have wondered why it is that men with large moustaches have this facility of declamatory prayer. For the stationmaster plainly had a fine relationship with his Maker (who he addressed as an old and valued friend): he also had a splendid, free-ranging moustache. Whereas Mr Jagger's teatime grace was more propitiatory, uneasily terser: I seem to recall that his moustache was closely clipped.

The Yorkshire puddings, thick ones in onion gravy, were set before us, and Mr Ellerbeck signalled a start by tucking a very large starched napkin into his stiff collar and, this seemingly being the custom of the country, I followed suit. It was an exceedingly hot day and we all sweated freely.

Conversation did not flow easily around the Ellerbeck table. The business to hand was the relishing of victuals and its only accompaniment was some vigorous plate-scraping by Edgar and an occasional suck or half-suppressed belch. The prelude to the main and, as I discovered, the final course was a flashy virtuoso recital by Mr E. on his long knife and steel before carving a very fine joint of sirloin. He carried off his performance with élan and, like any true artist, was not unaware of its effect on a fascinated audience for, cocking an eye, he murmured modestly, ‘My father was a butcher, Mr Birkin.'

But Mr Jagger, too, was no mean performer, quite able to keep pace with our advance across very large platefuls, whilst delivering a lecture on the excellence of the works of Mr Thomas Hardy, most of whose moral tales he claimed to have perused several times. He was so assured and self-appreciatory a talker that really there was no need to do more than demonstrate wakefulness by an occasional nod, so that I was able to look around and take stock of the room's crowded décor.

Basically, this amounted to the square squat table at which we now were seated, our chairs utterly blocking a narrow gangway around which the Ellerbecks edged daily, a standard black-leaded fire-cum-boiler-cum-oven and a varnished dresser. There was a wall clock regulated by a pendulum, a grocer's calendar depicting an elderly lady seated amidst her treasures in a strikingly similar room, and two unusually large pictures elaborately framed, one portraying the besieged garrison at Lucknow in various attitudes of distress and (unlike the beholder) unaware that succour was just round the corner, and the other demonstrating manifold disasters brought on by drink. Both were crammed with enough detail to provide several years of speculative study.

The room's chiefest glory was an oil-lamp suspended from the middle of the ceiling by four brass chains. Reluctantly, I had to concede that its magnificence ran my Bankdam-Crowther pretty close. It had two knobs and a cut-off designed to immediately extinguish flames if it got to flaring, a beautiful pink cut-glass paraffin reservoir, a standard plain glass lantern and an encircling opaque globe to diffuse a benign glow over the Ellerbeck household. ‘My Aunt Rose left it to me in her will, Mr Birkin,' the stationmaster slipped into an unwonted interval of Mr Jagger's denunciation of Angel Clare's dishonourable dealings with Tess Durbeyfield. ‘It
was her particular wish that I should have it. You couldn't buy its like nowadays: cast-brass, even down to the chains.'

I would like to have risen and examined it more closely. Mechanically, it was a much simpler machine than the church stove but, aesthetically, greatly surpassed it. And, observing my quickening interest and not unreasonably considering his other guest had enjoyed a long enough innings, Mr E. went on to invite me to visit his platform lamp-room which lately had received a certificate of Special Commendation from the directors of the North-Eastern Railway when, on their biennial inspection, they had paused at Oxgodby. ‘On a week-day, of course,' he added. ‘Your visit I mean.'

‘The District Passenger Manager told Dad he could have eaten his dinner from the lamp-room floor,' Kathy said.

This evocation of those grand persons from York, starched napkins stuffed in high collars, feasting (with silver-plated cutlery borrowed from some First Class refreshment room) amongst Mr E.'s lamps and paraffin pleasantly diverted my attention from the hanging heirloom. And Mr Jagger, taking immediate advantage of our congratulatory reverie, drove a literary wedge between our alliance, hurrying doomladen Tess gallow-wards before he, in turn, was deservedly imprisoned for the afternoon in the front-room.

I then went off dutifully to Sunday-school where, as I feared, its Superintendent, Mr Dowthwaite (the village smith) hived off three big lads needing (as he said) ‘particular attention'. When he had gone off to his own corner and, finding a study of S.Paul's letter to some near-Eastern city or other kindled no flame in the breasts of my conscripts, I allowed one to teach me how to crimp wheatstraw into buttonholes, whilst another enquired earnestly into the exact nature of the perils he had been warned would beset him if ever he set foot in London. I must have given satisfaction because the blacksmith recruited me for the remaining Sundays of my sojourn.

It was even hotter when we traipsed off down the road towards the railway station. ‘Let's call and see Emily Clough; she's dying of consumption,' Kathy said. ‘We can give her the cornflowers Edgar's picked for Mam.'

Her brother had learnt that both pleas and resistance were vain, so
he only looked hopeful that the spectacle of Emily dying would be worth this confiscation. We sauntered on below orchard branches spreading over a hedge until we came to a brick cottage, its front to the dusty road, the other sides looking on to fruit trees and three or four horse-boxes.

The door was wide open and a staircase immediately before it. ‘We've come to bring Emily a bunch of flowers Edgar's picked for her, Mrs Clough,' Kathy called, and a voice from deeper inside the house bade us go up. ‘We fancied somebody would call on their way back from chapel. On your way out you can have a jam tart.'

‘I've brought your star-card, Emily,' Kathy said. ‘Mr Dowthwaite stamped it “S” for Sick. S's count the same as stars.' She ran her fingers along the square. ‘You only need six more stars for a prize,' she said. ‘Or S's,' Edgar added encouragingly.

‘I've been thinking what book I'd like,' Emily said. ‘I liked
The Forgotten Garden
. Maybe you'll take word to Mr Dowthwaite to look out for one by the same author when he goes to York to buy the prizes. What are you having?'