Blood on the Wood (8 page)

When they reached the gateway at the back of the dairy yard he held it open for her. She glanced up at him and walked through, eyes on the ground. We murmured good morning to her, uneasy. By firelight with her swaying body and her flaring red hair she'd looked as exotic as a tropical moth. Now she looked as sad as that same moth pinned out in a collector's cabinet. Her face was the blue-white of skimmed milk, lips pale, her hair, partially tamed into a thick and untidy pigtail, the glowing red of a wire held in a bunsen flame. Sticking out from the cuffs of a cream flannel blouse her wrists were as thin as a child's. The ankles were probably just as thin, but they were hidden in clumsy laced boots that looked like hand-me-downs, much too large for her. In spite of that, there was a kind of dignity about the way she stood, eyes down but body upright, arms clasped to her chest over her violin.

Daniel said, ‘I want you all to look after Daisy.'

He'd come to stand beside her. One of our party said, ‘Of course we will.'

That broke the spell at least. A bench was brought out for them to sit on, two mugs of tea produced, all with the unnecessary bustle of people wanting something to do to hide their embarrassment. Daisy sat on the bench with the violin beside her and drank, clasping both pale hands round the mug the way old men do. Daniel accepted the tea but remained standing.

‘Daisy slept under the hedge last night. I rigged up a tarpaulin for her. I slept outside it to keep watch on her.'

It was absurd and perhaps touching in its way – but absurd mostly. Here he was in an open field, carefully preserving the middle-class conventions and Daisy's reputation. Or perhaps in his own eyes, a knight from the Middle Ages with drawn sword laid in the bed between him and his beloved. Still, it seemed to go down well. Our party relaxed a little. Yes, of course they'd look after Daisy. She might enjoy the class on the history of the trade union movement for new members, then in the evening more music and dancing. At the mention of music Daisy looked up at last and gave a fleeting smile. Her teeth were gappy and uncared for. While all this was going on, I'd kept carefully to the back of the group, avoiding Daniel's eye. Considering what I knew, my presence must be an embarrassment to him. Now he looked my way.

‘Miss Bray, do you think we might have a word?'

With several pairs of eyes on us, we went out of the gate and on to the farm track.

*   *   *

‘Miss Bray, I hope … I mean I'd take it as a favour if you wouldn't…' He was as nervous as a nice boy caught apple scrumping.

‘Tell Miss Smith about Miss Foster, you mean?'

He nodded.

‘They're both going to have to know sooner or later, aren't they? Or are you contemplating bigamy?'

He winced, but I'd meant it to hurt. ‘I've got to go up to the house and explain to Felicia. Uncle Oily and Adam too, come to that.'

‘I'd advise starting with Felicia.'

‘Yes. I know it must look from the outside as if I'm behaving pretty badly to her.'

‘That will be the general impression, yes.'

He ran a hand through his curly hair and looked miserable. If he expected comfort from me he'd come to the wrong shop.

‘The thing is,' he said, ‘if I can get Felicia on her own and explain to her, I think she'd understand. She's a nice reasonable girl in a lot of ways.'

‘Explain to her what exactly? That you got carried away by dancing and bottled beer and announced your engagement to a girl who looks hardly old enough to be away from home? She'll have to be more than nice and reasonable. She'll have to be downright saintly.'

‘What I want her to understand is that Daisy needs me a lot more than she does. Felicia can marry practically anybody she likes, any time she wants to. She's got friends and she'll inherit quite a lot of money of her own. Daisy's got nothing. I'm her only hope.'

‘For getting married? I don't suppose any woman's that desperate, particularly one as young as Daisy. She can't be much more than sixteen.'

‘Seventeen. And I don't mean I'm her only hope of getting married. I mean only hope of … well, of surviving.'

I stared at him. ‘Surviving what?'

He turned red and looked at me pleadingly, as if I were deliberately making things more difficult for him.

‘You can't believe the … the beastliness out there. Oh look, do you mind if we walk? I honestly find it hard to think about it, let alone talk.'

His problems were the last thing I wanted, but there was no escaping. We turned and walked along the track and the thing came out disjointedly, sometimes in a torrent, sometimes with long gaps between the words.

‘I'd been wandering around the Berkshire Downs and bits of Wiltshire, collecting folk-songs. There's a treasury of them. It's the one hope for British music, tapping into this tradition that's been neglected for centuries and there's so little time left. Most of it's just hanging on in the heads of old men and women who won't be here in a year or two…'

‘Yes, I've heard about it. Can we come back to Daisy Smith?'

‘It's about Daisy Smith. I'm trying to explain how this started. I'd picked up a rumour that there was a singing pub just over the Wiltshire border on the Marlborough Downs. So I decided to drop everything and get over there before some other collector got wind of it. They can be a competitive lot, folk-song collectors. Would you believe Percy Grainger actually hid under an old woman's bed to get a tune she was singing to her granddaughter? She wouldn't…'

‘Can we keep to your story?'

‘Look, it
is
the story. I'm just trying to make you understand. Anyway, I found the pub, rough place in a village of about ten houses, and it was a goldmine. Two completely uncollected songs and three variants of known songs just in the first evening. So there I was, buying beer and tobacco as fast as I could get the money out of my pocket to keep them singing. There was one man in particular, rough farming type in his thirties, leading the singing. That was something in itself. Usually it'll be some old gaffer in his seventies or eighties. Luke Fardel, the man's name was. Trouble was, he sank so much of my beer he got fighting drunk and the landlord slung him out. I was sure there were more songs in him if only I could get at them, so I stayed the night in the pub. Next evening, there he was again but by now he's done some thinking and realises his songs may be worth money. He says he's got his old dad bedridden back home with a head full of songs – forgotten everything else but remembered the songs. So he suggested I should come home with him, which I did.'

Daniel took a deep breath that turned into a long sigh.

‘And that's how I met Daisy. Tell me, have you ever seen poverty?'

‘Yes, of course I have.'

‘I don't mean just threadbare clothes and not much food on the table. I mean real, foul-smelling, pig-like poverty.'

‘Yes.'

‘Well, I hadn't. Oh, I thought I knew about it. I'd read the books and the newspaper articles, heard the speeches, even made the speeches sometimes. But this was the first time it had really hit me. This … this hovel of a place with the thatch falling off, a midden up against the wall, flies everywhere and the smell … and so many children, all ages, dressed in rags with their backsides hanging out and a scrawny woman with her dress open and a baby sucking at … oh God, I shouldn't be saying this to you.'

‘Don't worry, I know.'

‘It was like a foreign country. And in the middle of it all, this toothless yellow-skinned old man on a bed, the father I was supposed to be getting the folk-songs from, only he couldn't remember them and Fardel, his son, got impatient with the old man and … and, actually hit him in the face, hit his own father to try and make him remember. Now, I'm as keen on collecting as the next man but I couldn't have this so I told the brute to stop. Well, he sulked for a bit then he said his niece knew a lot of the old tunes from her grandad and he'd get her to play them for me on her fiddle. So he yelled outside, and in came Daisy looking as scared as if he was going to hit her too. Anyway, he told her to go and get her fiddle and play the tunes and as soon as I heard her I knew this was the biggest thing I'd ever hit on in the collecting line. It wasn't just the tunes. She knew the dances that went with them – all from the old grandad. She played and played, and any time she looked like stopping Fardel told her to go on, play for the gentleman and she looked like … like something in a trap. So I felt ashamed of myself and said she was tired and I'd come back tomorrow. So I did, and the next day. And gradually I got her to trust me and start talking to me when we were on our own and … I'm not even sure I can tell you the next bit.'

‘Go on.'

‘He was brutal to her, I'd guessed that. She showed me the bruises on her arms where he'd grabbed her and shaken her when she wouldn't do what he wanted. But the worst of it is – what he wanted. Her own uncle, and he wanted her to … you know.'

‘Yes.'

‘You can't believe the simple way she said it, as if it was only to be expected, what all uncles did with all nieces. She … she even thought she was being wrong and disobedient in not wanting to. I swear to you, when I think about it I get so angry I could go back there and…'

‘So what did you do?'

‘Went to him and told him it had to stop.'

Which showed nerve, at least. Daniel was a lightweight and didn't look as if he'd trained as a fighter.

‘Did he knock you down?'

‘No, he did something worse.'

‘What?'

‘Offered to sell her to me. He thought I was … interested in her in
that
way. So he said I could have her for twenty pounds.'

‘You didn't accept, did you?'

‘If I'd had twenty pounds in my pocket I'd have done it just to get her away from him and be blowed to the consequences. But after all that beer and tobacco I'd had to buy I didn't even have twenty shillings. So Fardel laughed and said he'd keep the goods until I came back with the money. That's what he called her – the goods. So what could I do? What would any decent man have done?'

‘You ran away with her?'

‘Yes.'

‘And what did you intend to do with her?'

‘At first all I could think of was getting her here and asking Carol and Felicia to look after her. Then I started wondering – what happens after that? She can't go back where she came from and anyhow I've compromised her. Even though I haven't … you know … everybody will think I have, so her reputation's gone and nobody else will marry her and she'll end up on … oh God, I can't even bear to think about what would happen to her. So it came to me last night, the only solution is to marry her myself.'

I didn't know whether to laugh or cry. So much desperate gallantry and even more desperate stupidity – but then perhaps they always go together.

‘Even though you're engaged to be married to Felicia Foster?'

‘Yes. I suppose there'll be a terrible row.'

‘Quite likely.'

‘I've got to go up to the house and tell them all now. Will you do something for me?'

‘All right, I promise not to tell Daisy about Felicia – although I think you'll have to tell her yourself sooner or later.'

‘I mean, something else. Would you explain to Felicia for me?'

‘What!'

‘It might come better from another woman and there are things I'd be embarrassed to say to her, like the uncle and so on. If you can get her to…'

‘Mr Venn.' He was rushing on but the tone of my voice pulled him up short. ‘Mr Venn, there are things a man has to do for himself and breaking off an engagement is one of them.'

‘I mean afterwards. I suppose when I tell her it's off she'll cry or get angry or faint or something and that's when she'll need another woman there.'

‘What about your sister-in-law?'

He looked even more ill at ease. ‘Carol will be furious with me too, but I've got a feeling that she and Felicia don't always see eye to eye. It might come better from somebody outside the family.'

‘But I hardly know her.'

‘It would be better than nothing. And I can't say all this to her – really can't. Please.'

He was a young man used to getting his own way. That look, from under a sweep of black eyelashes, must have melted a succession of nursemaids' hearts. He was too old for nursemaids. What he needed now was a keeper.

‘I've got other things to do.'

‘I know, the picture. Look, let's make a bargain. If I promise to do anything I can think of to see you get your picture, will you do this for me?'

He couldn't have guessed it, but even without that bargain I'd already decided to do what he wanted. The whole thing was a mess, but it was only partly his fault and I felt sorry for both women. After an explosion like this threatened to be, somebody had to pick up the casualties.

‘All right. I'll do what I can.'

‘Thank you. I think we should go straight up to the house now before…'

‘Oh no. You're going up there on your own and you're telling Felicia and your uncle on your own. I'll come up later.'

‘How much later?'

‘An hour or so. Let some of the wreckage settle first.'

He looked terrified. I think the implications of what he'd done were only now rushing in on him. In the end I had to take him firmly by the shoulders, spin him round and give him a little push up the field towards the house. No spring-heeled Jack now. He went like a man in lead boots.

*   *   *

I gave him three hours' start. Around midday I went the way he'd gone, up the field and through a little gate in a hedge into the Venns' garden. It was at the back of the house, and must have been a pretty place once, gravel paths bordered with herbs, arches of roses and honeysuckle, a south-facing wall in Cotswold stone with espaliered fruit trees and the thatch of what was probably a summerhouse in the angle where the wall met a yew hedge. But it looked as if it had been neglected all summer or probably longer. The paths were overgrown with weeds, half blocked by untrimmed lavender and rosemary, the arches sagging from a weight of sprawling foliage, the fruit trees pulling away from their nails, the yew hedge shaggy as an old dog. The half-wild effect was attractive in its way, but so unlike the neatness and order inside the house that I wondered if the Venns had quarrelled with their gardener. When I negotiated the arch nearest the house there was Daniel's anxious face looking out of one of the studio windows. He opened the door to let me in.