Rustication (7 page)

After dinner I found Effie alone and asked her what she had been doing on the Battlefield. She was very indignant. When at last she deigned to give me an answer, she insisted that I must have been mistaken because she had been home at that time. I persisted and she said:
Are you saying you followed me?

No, of course not
, I said.

If you doubt me, ask Mother. Don’t you spy on me and I won’t ask any questions about what you got up to in Cambridge
.

I said I had no idea what she meant.

Just at that moment Mother came back into the room and Effie said:
Mother, Richard has the absurd idea that he saw me out on the Battlefield at about 6 o’clock but you can confirm that I arrived home before 5, can’t you?

Mother looked from one to the other of us and then said:
You shouldn’t accuse your sister of things, Richard
.

I said:
I wasn’t accusing her of anything. I merely said that I had seen her there. But if you tell me she was at home at that time, then I can say no more
.

Mother nodded without looking at me and sat down and pulled her work-basket towards her.

I cannot understand why Mother lied—and over such a trivial matter. I couldn’t let it go. After a few minutes I said:
Mother, are you suggesting that I was wrong to be concerned?

Her hands scrabbled nervously at her work.
You have no right to spy on your sister
.

Euphemia smiled at me in triumph. She said:
Richard is bored and he’s just trying to amuse himself by provoking me
. She turned to me:
You appear to be restless without the contents of your trunk. What is it that you are so habituated to?

Mother said:
That’s an odd word to use
.

I said:
I am very attached to my books, if that’s what you mean
. I walked out.

How does she know so much?

· · ·

All evening that bitterly cold wind from the north-east buffeted the old house so that it shook as if it were being shelled. It has at least blown away the mist and Mother said it will bring frost and snow. Yes, and my lovely trunk!

½ past 9 o’clock.

Just before I came up I ran into the girl in the passage to the stairs.
Are you cold?
I asked and put my hand on her waist. She did not flinch. I ran my hand gently around her waist lower down over the top of her thigh and then over her belly. I said:
You don’t feel cold
. She stared at me boldly with a half-smile. I said:
Your arms
.
They’re warm, too
. Her arms were bare to above the elbow and I touched them. I leant forward to kiss her but she ducked her head with a laugh and scurried out of the room.

When I got up here I found that she had already filled the bath and the water was tepid by now. I got into it anyway and the air was so cold it seemed to burn my skin.

· · ·

How thin she was and poorly-clad. I could feel her ribs.

· · ·

I can see how Mother lives through Euphemia. All her pleasures are experienced vicariously. She looks at her as a miser gazes at his gold.

· · ·

So far I’ve avoided a direct lie to Mother about Cambridge—though I’ve certainly allowed her to draw the wrong conclusions. Effie is harder to put off—but I feel less compunction about deceiving her.

½ past 5 o’clock.

No sound but the scratching of my pen.

Earlier this evening: Sitting all three of us in the parlour reading, knitting, and fretting restlessly through some sheet-music (respectively) when some demon of tactlessness prompted me to muse aloud:
Just think
, I said,
how different things were six months ago. We’d be in the drawing-room at Prebendary Street waiting for Father to come home
.

They both stopped but didn’t look at me. I’m sure we were all remembering how intently we would listen for the way Father came up the steps trying to divine if he was himself or, as Mother used to say, “out of sorts”. If he stumbled on the steps we would brace ourselves.

6 o’clock in the morning.

I’m trapped in this house and in this body. I long to float away, to hover above the fields. I haven’t slept a wink since I woke up two hours ago. It’s the pain I get when I haven’t . . . So cold. It has frozen hard in the last few hours. My hands are numb as I write this. But at least the lanes will be iron-hard so perhaps that damned carter will decide to risk his axles. I’m sitting here wrapped up as warmly as I can with nothing to heat me but this candle, dreaming of that trunk coming towards me.

Once Edmund and I tried to stop and we lasted just two days. This has been five. Tonight it has been worse than ever. Every bone aches and I feel on the point of vomiting. The thought of food nauseates me.

Wednesday 16
^th
of December, 7 o’clock in the evening.

A
t last, at last. As I write I have it in front of me. The crack in the prison-wall of reality through which I can escape to the superreality of the Imagination! I can only hold back by an exercise of will. Tonight, when the house is asleep I will cast off the shackles of corporality and float free.

· · ·

When I awoke the light was fainter than usual and I found that there was ice on the inside of the window-panes and the glazing-bars, and it had formed thick teardrops. My first thought was that the carter will certainly bring the trunk now.

Then began a restless, fretting morning. At last I could bear it no longer and hurried out of the house and up the lane and then along the path to the Battlefield.

Strange incident. I came over the summit of a slope and saw a young labourer with a faded red neckcloth loosely wrapped around his neck. He was deep in conversation with a tall individual who looked like a gentleman though he had a raffish air and was shabbily clad. As I drew near, the latter strode away in the opposite direction so that I did not see his face. Was it the man I had seen in the half-dusk yesterday? I could not be sure.

I was so curious that I accosted the younger man and asked him the way to Brankston Hill.

He had a scowling brow and a great jutting jaw that made it seem he was gritting his teeth in irritation. His eyes were wide as if in outrage at an unspoken accusation and his gaze did not meet mine. At my question he merely pointed and turned away.

· · ·

At 3 we all set off for the tea-party with Mrs Paytress. As we were passing through Stratton Peverel I saw the Quance girls coming towards us. The younger was chattering away while Enid marched ahead sweetly silent and pensive. What a really beautiful creature she is. Her eyes swept briefly over me and I think I saw a slight flush in her cheek. I could not resist turning round a few yards further on. The younger girl was looking back at us. Not Enid.

As we were welcomed into Mrs Paytress’s warm house, Effie and I made the introductions and we seated ourselves.

We talked of the frost and when I mentioned that it made it easier for my sister to walk to Lady Terrewest’s house, Mrs Paytress said:
I have heard of that lady as a relative of the Earl of Thurchester. Is she an old friend of yours?

Mother replied in some embarrassment:
In fact, she is related to me
.

(Strange that she has never told me that.)

Conversation turned to Mother’s widowed status and Mrs Paytress said:
I can sympathise. A woman without a husband has much to endure
.

She turned her attention to the teapot and I saw my mother glance significantly at Effie. She said cautiously:
I understand you have lived in Salisbury?
When Mrs Paytress nodded with a smile, Mother said:
It’s a charming city. It must have been hard to leave
.

It was
, Mrs Paytress said.
I came here for the sake of someone who is very dear to me. I have made sacrifices for him as one does for someone one loves
.

Mother flushed and looked down and hardly spoke again. After a few minutes she stood up saying:
We should be going
.

I think we were all surprised at the abruptness of this. We had been in the house less than an hour.

As we shook hands at the door I said:
We’ve forgotten to bring the umbrella that we borrowed
.

It’s of no importance
, Mrs Paytress protested. But Mother said stiffly that she would send me back with it very soon.

We had only gone a few paces when Mother announced:
Our acquaintance with that lady is at an end
.

Effie and I began to protest but she said indignantly:
You heard her. “I came here for the sake of someone who is very dear to me.” She even called herself “a woman without a husband”
.

Effie was about to speak but Mother held up her hand:
I’m thinking only of you, Euphemia. As an unmarried girl, you cannot be associated with anyone touched by scandal
.

We walked on in a smouldering silence. As we were approaching the fork that leads to our house, we heard the sound of a horn and a few minutes later the rattle and clatter of a cart. It came up from our lane and it was, as I had hoped, the carrier who had brought me and my trunk to Whitminster. He pulled up and when we had drawn level with him he told us he had just left my trunk at the house. He said:
A devil of a job it was on that narrow track
. Then he added as Mother was handing him the money:
And that woman, good riddance to her
.

I had forgotten about the cook.

I was anxious to get home and take possession of the trunk but as the vehicle moved off Mother said:
Richard, I am inviting Miss Bittlestone to tea tomorrow. I want you to go and ask her if she is free
.

I suppose the invitation is to be an overture of peace towards the Quance camp. Now that we’ve rejected the friendship of the only person in the district who is worth knowing, we have to woo her persecutors!

I set off but I was soon lost. I stopped to ask an old countryman in gaiters and smock with a crushed and battered stovepipe hat on his head. He had the most magnificent side-whiskers I’ve seen for a long time: white as snow and curling out from either side of his face like a great cloudy ruff that had risen from around his neck. With his unlighted pipe held in front of him and his ancient blue eyes, he seemed to have been hewn from the living rock and to have been waiting there for me from the beginning of recorded time. He told me what I wanted to know and as I was about to walk on, he said:
You’re a strange face. Are you from the family that’s living in the old Herriard house?

I said I was.

A dreary old place it is, and no mistake
, he said.
You know the story they tell about it?

That a man was murdered there after eloping with a girl?
The old man looked at me with a smile.
He was killed by her brothers
, I added.

Aye
, he said.
By them damned Burgoynes
.

Is that true?
I asked in surprise.

That’s the tale right enough, but you don’t know about the babby?

I shook my head.

The wench had just birthed a child when her brothers came to the house. After killing her man, they threw the babby into the fire and dragged her home
.

I grimaced in horror and thanked him for his ghastly information.

I found Miss Bittlestone’s cottage at last. It’s a tiny little hovel of a building constructed of lime-washed cobb with a thatched roof.

I tapped on the knockerless door and when I heard a frightened squawk of surprise I entered. There is just a single room with a rickety stair up to the one above. It was very cold. The only heat came from a tiny fire in the single hearth and the tenant of the cottage was standing before it holding a toasting-fork on the end of which was an unappealing lump of bacon.

Oh, Mr Shenstone, what a surprise, I wasn’t expecting anyone and you least of all!
she exclaimed.

I delivered my mother’s invitation. A summons from the Queen could not have brought more pleasure.

She pressed me to seat myself in a battered but once-handsome old chair.

She simpered and said:
Mrs Quance sits in that chair when she honours me with a visit. It’s one of the few pieces I managed to bring with me from Cheltenham
.

She confided that with such impressment that I had an involuntary image of her fleeing from a burning city with the chair strapped to her back like Aeneas in flight from Troy with his father on his shoulders.

She suddenly exclaimed:
Don’t worry, Tiddles. You’ll get your share
.

She was addressing a skinny black cat and now took the piece of meat off the end of the fork and held it out to the animal which gobbled it down. I suspect the creature eats better than its foolish owner.

· · ·

When I entered the house I almost tripped over the trunk. My glorious bountiful treasured trunk! It was too heavy to carry up here so I removed what I most wanted and concealed it in my room. Then I unpacked the rest and conveyed the items up here.

While I was kneeling at the trunk a deep voice suddenly spoke:
You’ll be young Master Richard
.

I turned. It was Mrs Yass, the cook. She is a large woman of about Mother’s age. She has a big doughy face with tiny black eyes like currants in an unbaked white bun and folds of flesh hanging down like uncooked pastry over the edge of a pie-dish. Mother said she’s a plain cook but she is plainer than I had expected.

I asked her where she had been in service before and she named a number of places. Seems never to have stayed long. A mixture of boldness and evasiveness in her replies. I asked her what she most liked to cook. She stared at me from that paperwhite round face and eventually said:
Paritch
. Well, even I can cook porridge!