The Elderbrook Brothers (30 page)

Ann had been three months in hospital before the day came when they told Matthew that the ordeal was ended, the enemy beaten. He was astonished, not knowing that all had gone pretty much according to plan, and that this crisis, now surmounted, had been expected by the knowing ones. He was allowed to tiptoe his way along that now familiar corridor, at the heels of a dark-eyed nurse, and take one look at Ann asleep.
They told him she would probably sleep for some hours, and then, after a brief interval, would be encouraged to sleep again. He turned away from that blissful, heartrending sight, and went home. The loss of his immense burden made him feel giddy.

These months, and the months preceding them, had had for Matthew the quality of a dream: one of those feverish dreams in which you seem to go round and round after an unimagined object, or get involved in some frenzied and impossible mathematical sequence. Though to all appearance he took everything as it came, that invisible assault on Ann had been both a torment and an exasperation to him. The neighbours, even the Haslams who knew him well, thought him solid and stolid enough to meet any disaster calmly; and it was true that he did not make many thoughts about what was happening. Even in his own mind he had the habit of silence, especially about the things that went deepest. After a time his thoughts of Ann had become empty of all desire, except the desire to see her well again: her suffering, while dissociating her in his mind from all idea of sex, made a continuous demand on him. During all these months she had never been quite out of his mind: waking or sleeping he had been always in some part of him aware of her.

Aware of her, and unaware of the tension in which his own being was locked, so that now, in this sudden release, he felt lost and strange, hardly able to bear the violent change. That rigid concentration was snapped. He felt free and irresponsible and bursting with energy. The rhythm of the pony's trot, the sound of the turning wheels, added fuel to his overcharged senses.

Arrived home, he felt childishly disappointed to find no one in the yard. He must talk. He must tell someone. He began looking for Hilda. She was not in the dairy. She was not in the yard. She was not in her kitchen. Odd. What's come over the girl? Tired perhaps. Lying down. At
another time it might have occurred to him that if she was tired it would be kinder to let her rest. But no such thought impeded him now. He must tell Hilda, Hilda who had borne this burden with him, perhaps more than her share of it. Hilda's room was the attic room which Faith had occupied in the old days, and Nancy in more recent years, until her marriage. It was approached by a stair leading from the brick-floored kitchen. You opened the door of what looked like a cupboard, four feet to the left of the big open hearth, and there was the stair confronting you: a joke they had enjoyed playing on friendly visitors when he and his brothers and sisters were small children. He opened the door of this stairway and cocked an ear towards the region it uncovered to him. It was the gesture of one who suspects, without being sure, that he is not alone in the house: an unthinking gesture, because Hilda's room was beyond earshot, two flights up, the second flight a mere ladder running from the middle landing. After a moment's indecision he mounted the stairs, reached the landing, and there paused again.

‘You there, Hilda?'

At first, silence. Then a small faint sound, or confusion of sounds, as of someone moving, turning over in bed. Then silence again.

With his mouth full of news Matthew went up the ladder, opened Hilda's door by two inches, and said again: ‘You there, Hilda?'

Half sleepy, half smothered, came the answer. ‘Whaat?' Then with a quickness, a sharpness: ‘Who's that?'

‘It's only me, Hilda,' said Matthew, pushing the door wider open. The room thus revealed was strange to him, small and strange. He had not seen inside it since Faith's time, and the impress of another and simpler personality was upon it. ‘It's good news. She's better. She's pulled through.'

Hilda said, with half a yawn: ‘Coo, isn't that lovely!' Lying on the bed she propped herself up on one arm and with the knuckles of the other hand rubbed sleep from her eyes. Her
face was flushed with sleep, her hair in disorder. ‘You caught me napping. I quite lost myself. That tired I was.' The full meaning of his words reached Jher. ‘What, really
better
, Mr Elderbrook?'

He nodded. ‘She's in a lovely sleep.' The sleep of a child. All pain smoothed away.

Hilda swung her legs off the bed and sat there, staring at distance. There was no doubt of her gladness. Drowsy with sleep a moment ago, her eyes were now full of a soft sheen. Matthew felt he knew what she was thinking. It was what he was thinking himself. Their long labour was accomplished. They had worked together, he in his sphere and she in hers, looking after Ann, trying to get her well again, hoping for her, pitying her, saluting in homage her fortitude, bearing with her outbreaks of impatience, sharing with each other (no words said) the long misery of her being always ill. And now it was over.

Hilda looked up and met his glance. ‘My!' she said, ‘that
is
a good job!'

He smiled, not at the simplicity of her words, but with a sudden unprecedented pleasure in the sight of her. ‘It's that right enough,' he said.

Without conscious thought he moved a step forward. She stood up to meet him, a faint shy smile dawning in her face.

‘I'm ever so glad, Mr Elderbrook!'

‘Yes, Hilda, I know you are,' he said.

His hands touched her arms, and the contact surprised him, checked him. For an instant he was at a loss, afraid of his unformulated wish. But Hilda, resolving the doubt, with a ravishing simplicity lifted her mouth to be kissed.

Her kiss was generous, self-forgetful. Yet there was something in it that made his heart beat very fast, not with desire only, but with fear of a danger only dimly surmised. There was that in her kiss to which it was impossible that he should respond in half measure. But when it was over and he drew back to look at her, the smile she met him with was a smile
of pure happiness and he was reassured, feeling dimly that it embraced in the large ambit of its benevolence not only himself but the happiness he had brought with him. In the moment of thinking I mustn't do that again he kissed her a second time and her arms came firmly about him, constraining him to stay with her. Nor was it possible now that he should do otherwise. They were surprised into a mutual surrender by the discovery of strangeness and delight where there had been nothing but the bond of a common purpose.

With desire fulfilled they lay together at peace, saying no word. Matthew drifted away on a dreaming tide and was suddenly asleep. He fell steeply, like a shot bird, into a dark pool of satisfaction, where he was and was not.

Not for many months had he had deep sleep. Yet a stirring at his side brought him back to the surface.

‘What's the matter?'

The word ‘dreadful' had caught at his emerging consciousness.

Disengaging herself from his arm, Hilda slipped off the bed.

‘What's dreadful?' he asked drowsily.

‘Me lying here,' she said, ‘when there's work to do.'

‘Is it late? I fell asleep.'

Busy with her clothes Hilda said lightly: ‘Late enough I'll be bound.'

‘Did you?' he asked.

‘Did I what?'

‘Did you go to sleep?'

‘Oh … I dunno.' She stopped what she was going to say, with an earnest quick glance in his direction: ‘Hadn't you better see what's going on outside? Where Patchett is, and Dick?'

‘Suppose I'd better,' he said, getting up.

She stood at the window, looking out, but careful not to be seen from outside. ‘I like that tree,' she said. ‘I always have, somehow.'

‘Tree?'

‘The beech. I can hear it when I'm in bed. Like the sea it is, in a wind.'

‘Ah,' said Matthew. ‘There's a story about that tree. Tell you sometime. Not now,' he added, seeing her hesitate.

‘I'll be going down then,' said Hilda. ‘Expect you could do with a cup of tea.' She paused to say, with her fingers on the latch: ‘It's lovely about Mrs Elderbrook. Lovely it is.'

She was back in the moment of first hearing that good news. Nothing that had happened since then was to make any difference.

The long drought went on into October. In patches the swede crop, from lack of rain, was blue with blight. The pastures were browner than Matthew had ever seen them. With cotton cake to eke out the meagre grazing the cows did well enough, but their milk was dwindling. Indeed there was plenty to shake one's head over, without looking ahead for trouble. The state of the crops, the turn of the season, these were the things that should occupy a man's mind. Not illness. Not problems of the far future. Not the curve of a girl's thigh under the hand. The farm, this farm that had been his father's before him, this was the common sense of Matthew's existence, the true logic by which the days of his life were held together and given a continuing pattern; and he would have asked nothing better than that his own sons should carry it on after him. But his mind, in its infrequent moments of general reflection, jibbed at that fence. Sons he had none, nor ever would have. That knowledge, though seldom squarely faced, made the beginning of an emptiness, a disregarded void. But that was nothing, or nothing much. The main thing was that the work went on, and life went on. He was lucky in having good men to work for him. Yes, and to work with him, for he had never forgotten his father's precept, and would remain till the end a working farmer, not a looker-on.
Busy with today and tomorrow he did not pause to contemplate the strangeness of this place he had been born in, compared with what it had been in his father's day: the house that had been once so full of life had now more than half its rooms unused. Enough that Ann was mending, and would soon be back. Then everything would fall into place again.

As for the girl Hilda, she was no problem at all. He would not admit that what had happened made any difference to anything. It was good, it was done, there was an end of it. Up to a point he was right in this diagnosis. He was still weary for the return of Ann. The house wasn't the same without her, and he wanted it to be the same. Between himself and the girl everything was unspoken, and this especially: they were in nothing more at one than in the tacit assumption that nothing was altered. The perception of this fact gave him great ease, kept all danger, if danger there was, out of sight. Hilda continued to be her normal, ordinary, placid self, endlessly occupied with the affairs of house and dairy. Quite evidently it did not occur to her to be other than she had always been, or to expect from him, in the chance daily encounters, anything beyond the goodhumoured taciturn civility she had always had. There were moments when he marvelled at her utter unselfconsciousness, while gratefully approving it. It was almost possible to believe that she had forgotten an episode which he knew to have been unique in her experience. One thing was certain, he told himself next morning, and at intervals throughout the day: there's no harm done, but it mustn't happen again because … his thoughts halted there, instinctively refraining from a reason, for the reason ran deeper than thought, a dark glittering tide, and it carried him, against his half-hearted resolve, towards what itself forbad. It mustn't happen again, but how could it not happen, the bridge once crossed? Hilda did nothing to make a second approach easy, and she received it at first dumbly, unrespondingly, as if giving him time to think again, to escape, to let her escape. Her mind was hard to read: she herself could not have read it and did not try. Her
resistance was momentary, not long enough sustained to make the surrender seem important; and she surrendered with a sort of shrug, as if to point its unimportance. In the giving and receiving of love she became a new person, speechless and radiant, carried beyond time and space; but the moment gone she was at once her ordinary practical self again, homely and matter-of-fact, with a humorous edge to her tongue. Her simple cheerfulness, which seemed to take everything in its stride, reassured Matthew and made him like her the more. There was no word of love between them: such a word would have shaken him with a sense of disloyalty: and because their relationship was unspoken it did not exist. There was no ghost, no invisible third, except once when Hilda said thoughtfully: ‘Tisn't as if we was hurting anyone, is it?' Matthew curtly agreed, brushing the subject away. ‘And we're not going to,' said Hilda. ‘See?' It was both a promise and a warning, consistent with all that was left unsaid. What happened was nothing, implied no sequel. What happened had not happened, if one chose to think so.

Nothing could have suited Matthew better. He had neither time nor inclination for afterthoughts. Since harvest many loads of manure had been carted to the fields, and dumped there, ready to be spread. Dick Edgcombe and Willy Hughes were cleaning ditches and trimming hedges: they could be depended on to make a good job of it. Quite a bit of the barley had already been threshed, but though there was a lot of straw the cast was light and the grain was fetching an indifferent price. The need for rain was in everybody's mind: people were tired of talking of it, yet could scarcely speak at all without dragging it in.

‘This dry,' said Walter Patchett, once more stating the obvious, ‘he's going on too long, master.'

‘Ah,' said Matthew. ‘He is that.' Though the war was well over, and the younger men were back again, old Patchett—old in his early sixties—was still Matthew's mainstay when it came to talking things over. ‘The ground's like iron, Walter.'

‘Poor look-out for ploughing,' said Patchett, ‘let alone root crops. Swedes won't hardly be worth the pulling, by the look of ‘em.'

Matthew nodded. His glance travelled along the swede rows, but his thoughts were on his winter sowings.