The Complete Uncle Silas Stories (12 page)

‘Look slippy and bring us a bottle o' cowslip,' he said. ‘And don't talk so much.'

But she was outside the door, without a word and not heeding him, before he had finished speaking. He lay back on the sofa, gloomily. ‘Won't even let me wet me whistle,' he said.

He lay silent for a moment or two, his eyes watery, his chest heaving a little.' I puff like an old frog,' he said. I did not answer, and until he regained his breath and his calmness I could not look at him again, and I let my eyes wander over the room instead, over the fol-di-dols he hated so much, the accumulated knick-knacks of nearly a hundred years, the little milky glass vases, rose-painted cups, mahogany tea-caddies, ruby wine-glasses, all the dear pretty things that he despised and never used. To find him there among them was a tragedy itself. He loved living things; and the only living things in that room were ourselves and the afternoon sunlight yellowing the closed window.

‘Sit down,' he said at last. His voice so weary that I hardly recognised it. ‘Can you find a seat? All the damn chairs in this room are bum-slippy!'

I sat down on one of the black American leather chairs that matched his couch.

‘Well,' I said. ‘What's the matter with you?'

He shook his head. ‘I ain't worth a hatful o' crabs.'

I could hardly bear the words. To hear that he didn't know what he was doing, to see a jay on his pea-rows, to find that he mustn't drink or talk or tire himself and now to hear him say, ‘I ain't worth a hatful o' crabs.' My heart sank. It seemed to mean that his spirit was already dead. And no sooner had I thought it than he half-cocked his eye at me with a faint flicker of the old cunning.

‘See that jay on the pea-rows?' he said.

‘Yes.'

‘Ah. I'll jay him.'

And then, with a sudden satanic flash of his bloodshot eye that surprised and delighted me, he whispered:

‘Mouthful o' wine?'

I sat astonished. ‘I thought they wouldn't let you drink?' I said.

He winked. ‘In the medicine bottles,' he said. ‘Elderberry in
the dark and cowslip in the light. Pour out. Mouthful o' cowslip for me.'

Smiling, I poured out the wine and he lay smiling back at me with all his old subtlety and wickedness. As I gave him the glass he whispered: ‘I fill 'em o' nights when she's a-bed.'

We drank in silence.

‘What's the doctor say?' I asked.

‘Says another drop o' wine will kill me.'

He finished his wine and wiped out the glass on the horse-blanket before putting it back on the table. The wine twinkled in his eyes and had already flushed away the dead yellow colour of his skin. And suddenly he shot up in bed, craning his tough thick neck to look out of the window:

‘That jay again! God damn it, go and get my gun.'

I knew he meant it and I rose at once and went to the door. But he had raised his voice, and the housekeeper had heard him. She was in the room almost before I had moved, with the old despairing cry:

‘Oh! he'll wear me out!'

She seized him sternly, forcing him back on the pillows while he shouted at her:

‘You interferin' old tit! I'll shoot that jay if I have to shoot you first!'

‘He don't know what he's saying or doin',' she said to me. And then to him, as she straightened his blankets inexorably:

‘You'll take your medicine now, jay or no jay, and then get some sleep.'

As she took up the dark medicine bottle and poured out his measure into the wine-glass he kept lolling out his tongue, sick-fashion, and rolling his eyes and complaining, ‘It's like drinking harness oil and vinegar, oh! it's like drinking harness oil and vinegar. Ach!'

‘Drink it!' She forced the glass into his hands and he crooked his elbow on the pillow, lolling his tongue in and out.

She turned away to draw down the blinds. No sooner was
her back turned than he lifted his glass and gave me a swift marvellous look of the wickedest triumph, licking his thick red lips and half-closing his bloodshot eye. The glass was empty and he was lying back on the pillows, smacking his mouth sourly, before she turned her head again.

‘I'll come and see you,' I said, with my hand on the door-latch.

‘Ah, do. I s'll have the taters out next week and the wheat down. Come and give us a hand.' The faint shadow of that wicked and triumphant smile flickered across his face. ‘So long, me boyo.'

Outside, in the garden, I asked the housekeeper what was the matter with him.

‘It's senile decay,' she said. ‘He's losing the use of his legs and half the time he don't know what he's doing. It's just the medicine that keeps him going.' I had no doubt it was.

But one morning, a week later, I heard that he was dying; and in the afternoon I went over to the house. A gentle rain had been falling all morning, a quiet whispering September rain, and the air, very still and sultry, was saturated with the fragrance of wet pines. Crossing the paddock, I noticed that the wheat had been mown and half-banded and that the elderberries had gone from the garden-hedge. In the garden itself there was an intense rain-heavy stillness, unbroken except for the fretful twitter of swallows gathering on the house thatch. Looking across the rank thicket of dahlias and sunflowers beyond the apple trees I caught a glimpse of a dead blue jay strung on a hazel-stick among the pea-rows, its bright feathers dimmed with rain.

The housekeeper came to meet me at the door, her finger uplifted and her lips pursed tight to silence me.

‘How is it with him?' I whispered.

‘Bad,' she said. ‘Very bad. He won't see to-morrow.'

‘Can I see him?'

‘He won't know you. He's very strange.'

Yes, he was very strange. He had begun to turn day into night, she told me: he would doze all day and then, in the dead of night, while she was asleep, he would wake and ferret in the cellar or mow his wheat and dig his potatoes and gather his elderberries for wine. She had suspected nothing until, awakened early one morning by a gun-shot, she had hurried into the garden to find him stringing up a dead jay in his pea-rows. It seemed that sometimes, too, he would drink his medicine in one swig, by the bottleful. He was so far gone as that.

When she had finished speaking I went into the house to look at him: he lay there, as before, on the leather couch, among the fol-di-dols, the green horse-rug over him and his brown hands lying listlessly outside it. He seemed to be asleep: yet there was something half-alert about the expression of his closed eyes, as though he were listening to me or perhaps to the rain. I stood for a moment watching him. And suddenly his eyes half-opened and a gaze that had in it some of the old strength and wickedness rested on me darkly. In a moment his lips moved too.

‘What's the weather?' he said.

‘It rains,' I said.

‘Let it,' he whispered.

It was a flash of the old spirit. In a moment it was gone and his lips closed without another sound, and his eyelids lowered with a sharp flicker that was like a last wink at me.

I never heard him speak again. When we went in to him again, in the evening, he had turned day into night for the last time. The rain had ceased. The sun had broken through and was shining on the empty medicine bottles and his dead hands.

A little more than a year after my Uncle Silas died and was laid under the sycamores in the churchyard overlooking the river, I walked through the fields one afternoon to look for the last time at the little house by the pine spinney where he had lived for seventy years. It was soft autumn weather; the sunlight as mellow and still as Silas's cowslip wine.

As I went up the lane to the house I looked for the old sign of things: smoke rising from the chimney; the old summer bird-scares, age-green hats on sticks and inside-out umbrellas and twirling shuttlecocks; scarecrows made up of odd legs of Silas's pants and bell-bottomed trousers and the housekeeper's ancient hat and chemises; the ladder in the late apple trees; the bonfire filling the garden and the spinney and the fields with smoke that hung in sweet-smelling clouds under the pines and the golden cherry leaves. I listened for the cluck of Silas's hens and the grunting and rooting of the solitary sow he had always kept in the black sty under the elderberries at the garden end.

But it was very quiet, oddly silent everywhere. I could hear nothing. And then, coming to the garden gate, I saw that the gate and the fence, rain-green and patterned with prints of orange fungus for as long as I could remember, had been neatly repaired and painted white. The effect was curiously sepulchral. But it did not trouble me. It was only when I saw, beyond the fence, the stump of a sawn-down apple tree, and then another, and then another of a cherry tree, and beyond that a wide empty space where the gooseberry trees had been, and beyond that another white fence in place of the old wild elderberry hedge, that I began to grow perturbed and finally angry. And for some minutes I stood there on the grass outside, helpless, staring at the white fences, the empty garden, the sawn-off tree-trunks, the newly white-painted windows until suddenly I could bear
it no longer. It was the trees which finished me: lovely summer apple trees and the black-heart cherry trees and the yellow plums. Sawn down! Scrapped! God Almighty!

I opened the gate and slammed it shut again and walked up the path to the front door. It was shut—and painted white! The saintly effect of that repeated whiteness was too much. I hammered the door with my stick. I was pretty well worked up, ready for anything, with enough scorching irony ready on my lips to have burnt the paint off that door.

And then, waiting there, furious, I saw something else. The old sweet pink-and-white double roses that had grown on either side of the door for countless years had been sawn down too. The anger went out of me at once. I went listless. And there I stood; feeling pretty idiotic and as dumb as a brick, the irony evaporated with the anger, my whole spirit flat.

Then the door opened. And instantly my anger rose up again; but not bitterly. It was a sweet, nice anger—precise, juicy. My mouth was watering as though after a sour-sweet apple.

A young woman had opened the door. She too was dressed in white. She seemed to me like a paling out of the white fence; straight up and straight down, straight and white whichever way I looked at her. Her face was white, too: a pasty, town white. She was knitting. She carried the white wool and the white bone needles in her hands. She looked newly married. And, seeing me standing there, angry-faced, with the stick, she looked frightened.

‘Good afternoon,' I said. I spoke nicely, sweetly: as though I wanted to sell her an insurance policy or a sewing machine.

‘Good afternoon.' Her voice was prim: a white blameless-life kind of voice, decently distant, half afraid.

‘I was wondering,' I said, ‘if you would allow me to take some notes about the house and garden. They have—historic associations.'

She looked more scared than ever. I could see at once that
she thought I was a liar and a trickster. Her white-knuckled hand was tight on the door, ready to slam it in my face. Her prim eyes were full of the fear that I was about to burst in and take the spoons and seduce her and help myself to the food in the pantry.

Then I said: ‘I am a reporter. I represent
The Nenweald Telegraph.'

The change in her was wonderful. She softened at once. She put the white knitting in the pocket of her white overall. But still a little of her fear remained.

‘My husband isn't in,' she said.

‘I have three children,' I told her.

The remark finished it all. For one moment she seemed to waver, in doubt, and then I said:

‘It would make a nice little article. We might want a picture to go with it.'

I was saved again. She could see herself in the paper; the highest of all honours.

‘I'm afraid I can't tell you much,' she said. ‘We have only just come to live here. We are only just married.'

‘Just so.'

I took out an old envelope and scribbled on it: ‘White bridal veil.'

‘When did you first occupy the house, Mrs——?'

‘Mrs Wade-Brown. Early this summer.'

‘Who lived here before that?'

‘An awful old man. I didn't know him, but the place was in an awful state. Seeds hung up in paper bags all over the bedroom ceilings. Rotten apples on the bedroom floors. And there was no bathroom. We had to have a bathroom put in.'

‘You had to have a bathroom put in,' I said, and I wrote on the envelope: ‘White bath.'

‘He was a terrible old man who lived here,' she said.

‘I know,' I said.

‘Did you know him?' she said.

‘Everybody knew him. He was famous—notorious.'

‘We found hundreds of empty bottles in the cellar,' she said. ‘He must have done nothing else but drink.'

‘He didn't,' I said. ‘He drank himself to death.'

She was speechless.

‘It was the cellar I wanted to see,' I said. ‘It is the cellar which is historic.'

She hesitated.

‘In what way historic?' she asked. ‘I was a school-teacher before I was married. I never heard of it.'

‘A man hid there,' I said. ‘A sort of conspirator. A long time ago.' I was not lying now: it was true. My Great-uncle Silas had hidden there, with the police of half the county looking for him, though that is another story.

I began to wipe my boots on the doormat, scribbling with mock deference on the old envelope all the time.

And, finally, she led me into the house. Stepping over the threshold, I breathed in at once, instinctively, to catch the smells of old tea and earth and wine and geraniums, all the warm rich odours of my Uncle Silas's long existence there. But the air was dead: stale with the odours of new French-polished furniture and wool rugs and oilcloth. And one look at the room was enough: the prim, black-framed verses on the clear walls, new fire-grate in place of the old faggot-oven, the wedding presents all arranged on the piano and the sideboard with the correctitude of a showroom in a furniture shop. There was something ice-cold about its parsimonious respectability.