Brensham Village (18 page)

‘Perhaps ours is the only house in the whole world which has kingcups growing in the back-garden.'

We came to the Moat, where a rare and lovely fern called Osmunda grew upon the bank and gave to Lord Orris his only fame; for if you look up ‘Brensham' in the guidebook you will find under Orris Manor this single sentence:

‘Seat of Lord Orris and notable for a remarkable growth of the rare fern
Osmunda regalis
on the banks of the Moat.'

But now even the Osmunda seemed to be sharing in the general decay; the flood had washed the soil from its roots, and only a few fronds were sprouting among the withered brown ones.

‘Botanists used to come hundreds of miles to see it,' said Jane regretfully. ‘Father used to run away from them: he thought they were duns.'

We crossed the Moat by a shaky wooden bridge from which several planks were missing. The stagnant water was green and smelly, and upon it lived a single Muscovy duck in mournful solitude. He was the last of a collection of Ornamental Waterfowl which Lord Orris had prodigally purchased in more prosperous days. (‘We ate all the others,' said Jane.) His wings had been clipped so that he could not fly; this indignity, or perhaps his lack of a mate, or perhaps merely an innate and incurable melancholy like Jacques', caused him to wear an appearance of utter dejection. He croaked without ceasing a plaintive and self-pitying soliloquy. Jane said:

‘He must be very old. I invented a rhyme about him when I was a child:

‘The Muscovy duck
Goes cluck, cluck, cluck?

He was still going cluck this morning, railing dismally against the world. The scum lay thick on the surface of the water and as he swam it piled up in front of his breast like dirty cream. He had much to complain of. Cluck, cluck, cluck, he said. It was his protest against scum, against exile, against solitude, against everything.

We went down the mossy unrutted drive, scarred only by the half-moons of Rosinante's shoes, and suddenly the Home Orchard lay before us, clothed in such surpassing beauty
that it astonished me, for I had thought it shared the ruin which seemed to be the common lot of all the Mad Lord's possessions. I had seen it in late autumn, when the old trees were sooty-black with pale streaks of lichen like horrible sores, gibbous like ancient crones, their backs bent with the burden of the years, boughs like skeleton arms, twigs like crooked fingers pointed earthwards in despair or to the sky in supplication. Some were split in two, cleft by frost or lightning, some leaned drunkenly, some, half-uprooted, were locked together by their leprous branches in a macabre embrace. Their few yellowing leaves fluttered with a sort of nihilistic impatience as if they begged the winds, Take me and do your will.

But now! - the graveyard had blossomed, it was Resurrection Morning, the white and the green and the shell-pink so smothered the trees that you could scarcely see the sooty trunks. And all the birds in Brensham, surely, were singing among the young crisp leaves.

‘Now I'll show you my chaffinch nest,' said Jane. ‘But first: isn't it unbelievably lovely? I have a silly fancy about it. I'll tell you. It happens to be the only piece left which Father hasn't borrowed money on. It's still ours: all of it, trees and grass and earth, So I says to myself, That's why, of course! The Syndicate hasn't got its dirty fingers on it!'

She laughed. ‘Once, years ago,' she went on, ‘we sold the fruit in it for four hundred and fifty. Perhaps we shall again. That would save us for another year.'

‘I hope so,' I said. ‘My dear, I hope so/

‘Well, you never know. She looked suddenly serious. ‘It's Nathan's ewe-lamb, anyhow. It's Naboth's vineyard. It's all we've got.'

It was then about the middle of April. The improbable weather continued without a break. Blue days alternated with dappled ones; and whenever the springing grass grew thirsty a dove-grey cloud would sprinkle a blessing upon it and then swiftly pass as if it were aware that it intruded. Surely there had never before been such a spring! Never before a cobalt mist of bluebells in Orris' coverts before the cuckoos came; never before in the Summer Leasow a carpet of buttercups to welcome the swallow. The prodigal and reckless season had its effect upon us all, so that Mimi Trentfield came out in the most ridiculous hats and Meg fell hopelessly in love with a photograph of Clark Gable. The Colonel sold his motor-cycle and bought an old car, which he drove even more dangerously. Mr Chorlton and Briggs worked harder than ever to put the cricket-pitch in order for the first match, and argued more fiercely so that the inhabitants of Magpie Lane, hearing their shouts, often feared lest they should come to blows. Mr Mountjoy was seen to go fishing in his biretta, scandalizing his churchwardens, and even Dai Roberts' puritanism melted before the warm wantonness of Nature and he confessed to me when I met him one day that he was engaged upon a poem of forty pennillion and that for the first time in his career as a poet the subject was Profane.

‘And what is it?' I asked.

Dai blushed.

‘It iss my wife Mary,' he said.

The admission, it seemed, embarrassed him; for he climbed up on his bone-shaking bicycle and began to ride away. He was as thin as a rake, and indeed had been nicknamed by Mr Chorlton Praisegod Barebones. His wife, in
contrast, had a soft and pleasing plumpness; and the recollection of this, or perhaps some stray lines of his new poem still buzzing in his head, must have prompted the remark which he made to me over his shoulder as he went down the lane.

‘Rough and steep iss the road,' he said, ‘and hard and lumpy is the saddle, and I have less flesh on my bones than I used to. I wish,' he added with earnest regret — ‘I often wish that I had the bottom of Mary!'

Something worse than a mere spring-fever had affected Mrs Doan's daughter, young Sally. She moped and she drooped like those primroses on the hill whose brief season was already done: ‘a malady most incident to maids'. What I had guessed at the Woody Bourton cricket-match I now knew for sure, and if I needed confirmation I had it from Billy Butcher himself. He had endured for many weeks a spell of haggard sobriety. We knew it could not last and sure enough he went off to Elmbury one market day and I found him in the Swan at ten o'clock in the evening, sitting alone and helpless in a corner of the bar, having missed the last train and the last bus and even that later bus, the Colonel's old car, which often brought late revellers back from Elmbury to Brensham. He was in a bad way, having achieved the painful condition of tottering and tearful drunkenness which we knew as his Poetic Stage. So I took him home, and had to listen to one of those curious outpourings which seemed to flow straight from his subconscious when the whisky broke down the dams.

‘What,' he demanded, ‘is the use of a man who is a mere bottle? A pint, a magnum, a demijohn, a jeroboam full of
undigested poetry? A flask, a flagon, a fiasco - my God, yes - a fiasco indeed! A pitcher broken at the cistern - a calabash, an old leaky calabash like they had in West Africa where I lived with a dusky lady. Did I ever tell you that? Where she lives it's dark and shady. Put my money on Sally Brown. Ha, ha! Put my money on Sally Doan!'

He laughed and fell silent. Then he said suddenly:

‘What would you say if I married her?'

I didn't know what to say. I improvised:

‘I'd think she'd taken on a bit of a handful, Billy.'

'How right you are! Come live with me and be my love, And we will all the pleasures prove of living with a drink-sodden half-demented battered broken sot who stinks of stale whisky. No! A thousand times no! I put her out of my mind. I dismiss the thought. Sally is gone that was so kindly, Sally is gone from Hannaker Mill.'

He coughed, and muttered something else which I could not hear; and a moment later when I glanced at him I noticed that he was asleep. In the dim light of the dashboard lamp his lean tormented face looked very like a satyr's; and yet, I thought, this time it was the nymph who pursued and the satyr who ran away. I hoped devoutly, for his own sake and Sally's, that he'd keep on running.

May came in with sunshine as hot as June's, and Alfie sent his old ladders to be mended, for he'd need “all he had at picking-time if the crop was as good as it promised to be. The fruit had set already and the petals had blown away; on every small twig you could count a score of the small green berry-like plums.

The great apple tree which stood beside the Horse
Narrow was already showering its petals on the front doorstep, and its leafy branches in front of the windows made a cool green shade inside the bar. A positive choir of birds seemed to have their homes in it, so that as you drank your beer you were serenaded by a perpetual twittering and chirruping and merry fluting. Mr Chorlton was reminded of a favourite quotation from Euripides: ‘The apple tree, the singing and the gold.' ‘You've got the first two,' he said to Joe, ‘and you'll have the gold when you sell all those Blenheims at five bob a pot.'

But on May the third, though the sky remained blue, there was a slight and subtle change in the weather. It was still hot enough to make you sweat if you dug in your garden or climbed the hill; but the breeze was cooler and the air felt curiously dry. We had a cricket-practice in the evening and the Colonel came down to watch us. He'd been shooting magpies and carrion-crows, his favourite pastime at this season when there were very few other creatures which might lawfully be killed, and he still carried his gun under his arm: ‘Thought I'd wait under the willows to see if I could get a pigeon,' he said. Pigeons also were fair game in May.

I waited with him for half an hour, and then he took me down to the Summer Leasow to see his heron's nest. The nearest heronry was up-river, twelve miles away; but this spring a single pair had come to the Summer Leasow and built their nest in one of the tall elms. Nothing could have given the Colonel greater pleasure; and he from whose sharp old eyes and deadly gun no bird of the air was safe now declared fiercely that he would shoot anybody he caught interfering with his herons. I think he felt they had done him a signal honour by coming to nest on his land; they had put themselves under his protection. ‘They might have gone to old Orris,' he said, ‘or to the Syndicate, whose keepers would have polished ‘em off in no time. How marvellous
that they should come to
me
! I swear I'll pepper the first bird's nesting brat who so much as glances up at those elms! What an
annus mirabilis
this is! It's my seventieth, and it looks like being the best fruit year I've ever known—' He broke off abruptly, paused, and sniffed the air like a dog. Suddenly he said:

‘It's going to freeze.'

‘What, in May? Can you smell it?'

‘I don't know if I smell it or simply feel it in my bones,' he said, ‘but it's going to freeze smartish and I'm frightened for the plums.'

The Colonel always felt the weather in his bones. I never knew what he meant by this phrase, but I think it had nothing to do with the aches and pains and sharp twinges by which old people are apt to prognosticate the rain or the cold. It was something more profound than that; he meant that he was aware of coming changes as the trees in their sap feel them, as the grass at its tangled roots or the chrysalis deep in the ground feels them, as the very earth feels them, for he was nearer to these things than other men, there was something Protean about him.

When I passed through the village on my way home I glanced at the gilded weathercock on top of the church spire; and sure enough it was beginning to swing through west to the northward, the wind had started to veer. I called on Alfie and had a look at his hygrometer. The column from the dry bulb had climbed high above the wet one showing that the air was exceptionally dry. The barometer was rising too, said Alfie. He didn't much like the look of it; but the chances of a really damaging frost so late in the season weren't very high and he said with a grin:

‘If old Jack Frost takes one fruit in five, he can have ‘em and welcome. They'll do with a bit of thinning. They'll bust the trees else.'

The frost was sharpish but although it whitened the lawns and laid a smear of cat-ice on the ponds and even made the flowers droop their heads for a few hours after dawn, it did small harm to the well-formed fruit. The morning broke blue and the sun soon warmed the chilly ground. Then, in the early afternoon, the wind rose and a long black cloud with ragged edges appeared in the sky. A sudden brief hailstorm swept along the vale. It lasted only ten minutes, but just before dusk there came another, which lashed the leafy boughs of the trees and passed with a high shrill wind that knew nothing of summer. The three months' chicanery, the borrowing from Peter to pay Paul, had come to an end at last. That night brought the reckoning.

Measured in degrees Fahrenheit, on Alfie's thermometer, the reckoning was sixteen degrees; sixteen degrees of black blighting blistering frost.

He told me afterwards that although he went out into his orchards soon after dawn, and walked between the rows of trees for nearly an hour, he did not at first realize the extent of the calamity. It took a hefty clout to break the ice on the duck-pond, but there was no hoar frost on the grass or the hedges, and as the sun rose in the pale sky Alfie examined the small green glistening plums (they were about the size of hawthorn berries), and tried to persuade himself that they had come to no harm.

‘I went home and had my breakfast and the Missus said, “ Alfie, the redcurrants are done, and the lettuces are black, and the hollyhocks are cut down as if someone had slashed them with a stick. There's nothing left in the garden at all.'”

So Alfie went back to his orchards and now that the sun
had warmed the trees and made the sap run again the huge catastrophe was suddenly apparent. Alfie could see the bunches of little plums hanging black and blasted upon the twigs; here and there were a few green ones, but when he pulled off a sample dozen and opened them with his fingernail he discovered that every one was going black inside. Even the young leaves at the twig-ends drooped, brown and withered already as if a pack of mischievous children had run from tree to tree tweaking them.