Cut and Come Again (18 page)

‘He told me that,' I said.

‘That farm has been in his family for years. It's such a pity. Nowadays there is no money in corn and the grass so poor on those hills. It's so difficult to know what to do. He never has any luck. He needs fresh capital. A farm can simply eat money and show nothing for it.'

For an instant she ceased speaking, gave a half-sad, half-smiling glance at the house, and then confided in me:

‘We must have patience and wait, that's all.'

I nodded in understanding and she went on talking in a voice that seemed to become more excited and girlish the longer she talked, and before I left her and went into the house to a bath and supper she had told me all about herself and Skinner and the farm. The only time her voice faltered and became embarrassed again was when she said:

‘You see – well – I've known, we've known each other – we've been engaged a long time.' To make it easier she half lifted her left hand and showed me the ring on it that I in my stupidity had never noticed until that moment.

During all this I did not speak, but once or twice I smiled and nodded, as though to tell her I understood.

‘Supper will be at half-past seven,' she reminded me as I went down the steps of the terrace.

When I went downstairs to the dining-room the old man was sitting in his place at the table, again huddled up, crumbling his bread into crumbs like white suds on the dark table. He did not look up. Angela hearing my footsteps and obviously thinking Skinner was arriving, ran into the dining-room, her face radiant. Then, disappointed because he had not come, she began to shake the old man, excitedly impatient.

‘No, no, you mustn't. You mustn't crumble your bread. Why don't you wait till we are ready? No, no!' She swept the breadcrumbs off the table with one hand into the other. ‘Now sit still.'

She hurried out. When she had gone the old man raised his eyes and looked at me, pathetically, his eyes imploring in their very vacancy.

A moment later there was a knock at the front door, and then a voice:

‘May I come in?'

It was so unlike the voice of Skinner, the Skinner of that morning, that I was startled by Angela's voice at the dining-room door, saying:

‘This is Mr. Skinner.' She was very excited, folding and unfolding her hands and picking with absurd trembling hands at her dress. ‘But of course, I forgot, you have met each other.'

‘Good evening,' said Skinner.

We shook hands, and then Skinner shook hands with the old man, who half-faltered to his feet and said, in a low, penitential kind of voice ‘Good morning'.

‘Good morning,' said Skinner. ‘Nice morning!'

His voice and manner were extraordinary. He talked with a kind of clerical affability, half-sunny, half-jovial. He had dressed himself up in a suit of decent dark grey, with a gold watch-chain, a starched
collar with butterfly-tips and white-spotted black tie pinned to his stiff shirt front with a gold horseshoe pin. He had shaved, brushed back and oiled his hair so that it was sleekly black, and when Angela finally came in with a cold roast fowl on a large silver server and asked him to carve, he took out a black spectacle-case from his inside breast-pocket and put on a pair of pince-nez before proceeding to slice up the fowl-breast into delicate white wafers. Peering over the spectacles at the fowl he looked somewhere between a nonconformist deacon and an auctioneer's clerk who drank on the quiet. All the time he behaved with a sort of respectable, restrained, Sunday-conscious cheerfulness. He carved beautifully. Once or twice he made little gestures or jokes, always beyond reproach, which made Angela titter. Finally, when we were all served he took off his spectacles, laid them in the black case, tucked his serviette in his jacket and began to eat. He had carved himself a single slice off the breast.

Presently the old man stirred himself, seemed to shake off the idiot-apathy again, and reaching for the water-pitcher, said to me as on the previous evening:

‘Let me give you a little wine?'

‘Thank you.'

‘And you, Angela?'

Trembling, he filled our glasses.

‘And you?' he said to Skinner.

Skinner held out his glass. He was quite grave. Remembering the morning, I looked at him and he returned my look with unflickering serenity, without a wink. He drank the water in little sips, tasting it on his tongue, as though it were actually wine, giving a long ‘A-a-a-h!' of heavenly satisfaction as he set down his glass.

Angela sat radiant and transfixed. Throughout the
whole meal her eyes never left his face and never lost that look of abandoned adoration. Her naive intensity was almost absurd. It was pathetic. She looked at him with the eyes of a girl, with an adolescent earnestness and joy that had something melancholy in it. She would have burst out crying at a word and although she must have been nearly forty she tittered sometimes like a schoolgirl into her handkerchief, biting her lips and pressing the handkerchief hard against her mouth to keep back the spilling laughter.

After supper, when she had cleared the table and had gone out into the kitchen the old man tottered to his feet, went to the cabinet in the corner and brought out the dominoes and the peg-board and spilled the dominoes on the table.

The clatter of them on the bare mahogany brought her running from the kitchen.

‘No, no!' she cried. She gathered up the dominoes with exasperated hands. ‘No! Not on Sunday. I won't have it.' She put the peg-board with the dominoes back into the cabinet. ‘As soon as my back is turned! – really you are a little tiresome!'

Skinner, who had been rubbing his hands expectantly before her entry, intervened: ‘It's all right. Just a bit of a friendly, my love.'

‘No, no,' she repeated. ‘I won't have it. And you know why. Let's go into the drawing-room.'

There was a piano in the drawing-room, an upright grand of flower inlaid walnut, and after a time she sat down at it and began playing, with her foot on the soft pedal,
Love divine, all loves excelling
. She played it through twice, swinging her shoulders backwards and forwards rhythmically to the tune, revelling in it. After she had finished she found a hymn-book in the piano-stool and played Bunyan's hymn
He who would
valiant be
and then
Oh, Love that will not let me go
. Here and there she hummed a line and when she began to play
Oh, Love that will not let me go
she broke into actual singing in a quavering soprano, but without articulating the words, singing only an exquisitely dreamy ‘Ah' all the time, as though she were afraid of the words. And to my astonishment Skinner began to hum the tune, with closed lips and half-closed eyes, and all through the remaining verses they sang a kind of broken duet without words, half the time out of tune, Skinner lying back in his chair with his eyes on the ceiling and she with her eyes no longer troubling about the keys or the hymn-book but fixed on him with a dreamy, passionate, foolish intensity of adoration. From that hymn they went on to others and finally I slipped out of the room as they were singing. As I went unnoticed out of the door I saw the old man staring at them with a sort of blank ferocity. It was as though he half-understood that they were waiting for him to die and hated them both for it.

When I came back again they were still singing, I did not go into the drawing-room, and upstairs in my room I could still hear their voices, but gradually there were longer pauses between the hymns, and at last silence.

I had asked to be called at six o'clock and the tap at my door woke me from a dream in which Skinner was sitting on his kitchen table, with a whisky bottle in one hand and a hymn-book in the other, singing with drunken sanctimoniousness while Angela played the piano in the front room of the farmhouse:

Oh, Love that will not let me go

In a donkey cart
,

I rest my weary soul in thee
.

Breakfast was laid for me in the garden, up on the terrace. At the edges of the pale-blue morning sky the dark orange rim of heat-mist was thinning and lifting: it was going to be hot. The scent of the evening flowers was still heavily sweet in the garden. The red and white tobacco-plant was still wide open and bright.

Angela, in the pink summer frock that I liked, came up the terrace with my breakfast on a silver tray. I wanted to apologise for having left them alone without saying Goodnight, but I did not know how to begin. She apologised to me instead. Her voice had taken on the old embarrassed tone.

She was sorry about last night – was sorry that they had been so carried away by the hymns and – she hoped I could understand how it was.

I understood, I told her.

She was so relieved.

It was nothing, I said.

When two people were – when they got carried away by something, by each other, it was so difficult to remember – to do what – to be polite.

She broke off, there was an embarrassed silence between us, and I poured out my coffee.

So I was really leaving them? she said at last.

Yes, but it had been charming, staying with them. And I hoped she would be happy.

She smiled at me in reply without a word.

And she wouldn't mind it, up there, all alone, at the farm?

She shook her head with smiling vehemence. The lonelier the better. Then they would be able to sing duets as long as they liked without fear of disturbing anybody.

We laughed together at the joke. Her laughter was full and rich with happiness.

It was a little after seven o'clock when I said ‘Goodbye' to her. As she stood at the gate and shook hands with me and wished me a good journey she looked at me for one moment with shining eyes, with a radiant triumph that seemed almost too perfect. Did she know, after all, all about Skinner, and still pretend not to know? I never decided. She only waved her hand and kept smiling and waving as she watched me out of sight.

I walked through the village and up the road I had taken the previous day, skirting by the farm and taking the left-hand road to the hills. Under the trees the shadows were still wet with dew and in the sunlight the harebells glistened as though with rain. A binder stood in a half-reaped wheatfield still covered with its green tarpaulin. The farm was deserted. All across the hills there was a hush of summer and a pure brilliance of morning light.

We were sitting under the cart-hovel one winter afternoon, my grandfather and I, listening to the cold rain swirling at the bramble-roof and watching it sweep in smoky gusts and toss the stray seagulls across the bare land, when the Spriv walked into the stackyard, as usual, to borrow the gun. He was a large florid, purplish-faced man, with the arrogant strut of a cock pheasant and a big straw-chewing mouth that never opened except to lie and boast of his own doings with the gun and the trombone or to sneer at the littleness of other people. He was notorious in a score of parishes round us as a belcher, a lazy boozer, a man who poached all the week and played in the chapel band on Sundays and sponged all the year round on his old aunt, playing her periodic solos from hymns and operas on his trombone in the expectation of a legacy. He swaggered into the stackyard once or twice a week with his hands stuck in his belt and his cap defiantly over his right ear, spitting every ten yards or so with a sort of boastful ferocity, our miserable stables and carts and pigs and stacks and the hen that ducked out of his path filling him with majestic scorn.

He swaggered across the yard that afternoon in the cold sweeping rain without haste, as though he were too big to be rained upon.

‘Goin' to lend us th' old pop-gun for five minutes?' he said to my grandfather.

‘You're never goin' shootin' in this?' my grandfather said.

‘What d'ye think I'm made on?' the Spriv said. ‘Sugar?'

‘You'll never see,' my grandfather said.

‘See? I could stand under this hovel o' yourn and hit all the weathercocks on Lowick church, all the thirteen on 'em,' he boasted.

And before my grandfather had time to speak again the Spriv had walked from under the hovel and across the yard to the tool-barn where the gun always hung. He returned a moment or two later, handling the gun as though it were no more than a stick of sugar-rock that he'd won at a fair.

‘It's loaded,' said my grandfather.

‘It's never anything else,' sneered the Spriv. ‘You daren't let the damn thing off. Give us a mossel o' bacca.'

My grandfather meekly took out his pouch and the Spriv helped himself to a pinch of tobacco and rolled it into a chewing-quid.

‘Hitch up, boy,' he said to me.

I moved along the box, and the Spriv, belching deeply and holding the gun carelessly across his knees, sat down beside me, reeking like a public-house on a market day, all stale beer and tobacco and horseflesh. We sat there for a moment or two watching the rain sweeping across the fields and washing away the droppings and footprints of the hens in the muddy yard, the Spriv chewing reflectively, as though trying to think of some boastful tale to tell us, until all at once we were disturbed by an unexpected voice calling over the stackyard gate:

‘Ye haven't a mite o' dry shelter for a fellow, have ye?'

It was a quick high-pitched voice, with a strange accent. The Spriv mocked it with contempt: ‘A mite o' dry shelter,' he mouthed. ‘Who the hell?' He stood upright and then took a step forward into the rain,
the gun arrogantly under his arm, as though he owned it and were lord over the land and us too.

‘It's a tramp,' he said, ‘or a gypo. He's so big he can't see over the gate.'

We heard the click of the gate-hook and a moment later the stranger was coming towards us across the yard. He was not much more than a midget of a man and we could see by the way he came towards us, with quick perky steps, that he was as cheeky as a sparrow. He was wearing a turn-down faded green trilby and a blue seaman's jersey under his brass-buttoned jacket. His legs were slightly bowed and his face, sharp and pinched from the cold rain, had in it all the cocky mischief of a bird.