The Elderbrook Brothers (34 page)

‘Aren't you going to help with the milking? People aren't all blind.'

‘Who isn't blind?'

She shrugged her shoulders. Her eyes were sulky and her mouth mutinous.

‘That Caidster's been hanging round again,' she said, after a silence.

‘What, here?'

‘Yes, here. Poking his nose in my dairy. He's been prying and prowling, by his own account.'

‘What's he want?' Matthew asked, knowing too well.

‘More than he's going to get,' said Hilda. ‘But you'll have to mind out.'

‘I don't understand,' said Matthew. But he was beginning to understand.

‘Seems to know more than he ought. That's how it is.'

‘What does he know?'

‘A lot. Or thinks he does.'

‘Oh,' said Matthew. He saw Ann, wanly smiling at him from her chair. He saw a shadow creeping towards her. ‘D'you mean he … saw something? He can't have.'

‘His kind don't have to see much,' said Hilda grimly.

Matthew stared at the ground, trying to think. Presently he nodded, forced a smile, and began moving on his way.

‘You don't need to worry, Hilda,' he said. ‘We'll soon send him packing.'

But already he knew that his new-found tranquillity was at an end. Life was like that. Nothing for nothing. Everything good had to be paid” for.

IT became painfully clear to Matthew that Caidster meant mischief. Caidster himself left the matter in no doubt. He was an odd and not quite human apparition. He had the habit of being suddenly there, like an evil embodied thought. He had also, more acceptably, the habit of going away without warning, vanishing from the neighbourhood; and what became of him then no one knew or cared. He was like an erratic, occasional pain, now here, now gone, which one tries, by ignoring it, to be permanently rid of. And even when he was visibly present he had the knack of making himself insignificant, or otherwise, at his pleasure. Often his presence in or about the village went unremarked, until by some antic he chose to call attention to himself. And he did not always so choose.

This time, turning up after a long absence, he was wearing new clothes: not clothes newly made, not by a long way, but clothes different from the dingy raggedness of his earlier visits from nowhere. Some gentleman's wardrobe was the poorer for the loss of an outfit in vociferous sporting checks. In their
pristine beauty this jacket and these knickerbockers must have made a very loud noise indeed; but now, perhaps mercifully, dirt and the ministrations of sunshine had softened their seductions, and the man who wore them, the lean sharp-featured animal disguised in them, seemed to Matthew no more than the kind of sorry tramp that one doesn't look twice at, unless to see that he has no stolen property on him. So it angered him, slow to anger though he was, it angered Matthew to be buttonholed by this fellow after church one Sunday morning. His anger was compounded with a fear which he would not squarely face. Not to look twice at the creature would have been natural and proper enough. To be compelled to look twice, to give audience, to pay attention, this was gall to the pride of a man who had farmed his own land, and his father's before him, through many troubled years, and was conscious without arrogance of his neighbours' liking and respect. To be held in conversation by this wastrel!—what would folk think, or guess? Yet the wastrel himself, it seemed, had a modicum of discretion; for he did take the trouble to shadow his quarry for some distance from the field side of a hedge, and accosted him, headed him off, by emerging suddenly into the road when no one else was in sight.

Matthew did not go regularly to church; but he went sometimes, for it seemed right and proper to do so, and he would not have it said that he had broken with the tradition of his fathers. Moreover, it was a pleasant and vaguely comforting occasion, pleasant to nod and say How-do to the neighbours, to Jack Stevens the village tailor, his twin-brother George who sang in the choir and filtered his booming bass through a copious white moustache, old Mrs Merritt and Jimmy her undergraduate grandson who was the apple of her eye, the Vicar himself, and the butcher and the baker, and the village lads and girls stiff and strange (yet still familiar) in their Sunday best. Obscurely buried in Matthew's mind was the dumb thought that whatever one believed or didn't believe, a question it would have puzzled him indeed to resolve, it was right to keep up the churchgoing
custom and so set an example to the children. For in that part of him whence came his deepest feelings he blindly assumed the existence of the children who had never been born, never conceived, and now never would be.

‘Nice bright morning, mister.'

A lean fellow was this Caidster, lean and sandy. His eyebrows were fair to the point of invisibility: which gave his face an odious baldness, like that of a bird of prey. He was all eyes and nose: the eyes small, the nose at once sharp and fleshy. The eyes were dark and piercing, too close together, and not quite straight in their regard. It was something far less than a squint, a more subtle and suggestive crookedness. So close were they together, those eyes, that they gave the nightmare impression of two lost spirits seeking union (and almost achieving it) across the top of the dominating putty-coloured nose.

‘Nice morning, Mr Elderbrook.'

Matthew, briefly assenting, was for moving on; but the jaunty figure planted itself in his path.

‘You and me'll have a little talk,' said Caidster.

It was a statement, flat and confident, asking no consent and brooking no denial.

‘What do you want?' said Matthew sharply.

The man smiled, almost pleasantly. ‘P'raps you know, mister. P'raps you don't. Work's what I want, and a free run. A little job about the place. And a free run. No harm in that, is there?'

‘I've told you,' said Matthew, ‘more than once. There's no job for you on my farm. Try somewhere else. No one's stopping you.'

‘Ah, but,' said Caidster, with an air of sagacious reproof, ‘I wouldn't be hasty if I was you, mister. I know I don't look so much. I'd never get a job on me looks. But I know quite a bit, one way and another. I know more than what you might think.'

Matthew found nothing to say. He gripped his stick tighter, waiting for what was to come.

‘Not only about pigs neither,' said Caidster, as if making casual conversation, ‘though I could handle your pigs for you a treat if it comes to that. But I know more than that. I know gentlemen and their little ways, and what they do when there's a neat bit of skirt about the house, and the wife away. I'm a treasure, I am, mister. I'd be worth standard wages as pig-man, and all friends together.'

With a specious air of finality Matthew said: ‘I'm not in need of a pig-man, thanks. They look after themselves very well.'

‘With the girl's help they do, I don't doubt,' said Caidster quickly. ‘Useful wench that. But I could help
her
, don't you see? And I will, mister. Believe me. Teach her a thing or two that some gentlemen don't know, eh? She'll be a good learner, I lay, with a figure like that. Summick a smart man can get hold of there and no error. See here, I'm not blind, mister, and I'm not dumb, and what I know there's others can know bloody quick. Poor suffering ladies and all. But I'm not a man to pick quarrels, see? Friendly's my way, and do as you'd be done by. See?'

Matthew managed a laugh: a harsh, unconvincing performance.

‘I don't know what you're talking about, Caidster, but perhaps the police will. You're going the right way to get yourself locked up.'

‘Now that's silly talk,' said Caidster sorrowfully, as though he had expected better things of Matthew. ‘You think I'm bluffing. But I'm not. Not me.'

‘If you take my advice,' said Matthew in a loud voice, ‘you'll clear out of this district while you still can. And now get out of my way.'

‘Just a minute,' said Caidster softly. ‘A word in your majesty's ear. If you wanted to keep your bit of fun and fancy to yourself you oughterov felled that tree first.'

‘Tree?'

But he knew very well what the man meant. He meant the old beech that grew within ten yards of Hilda's window.

‘Very pretty view a man can get from up that tree,' said Caidster, smacking his lips with relish, ‘and I was always a lad for climbing. So long, Mr Elderbrook, sir. I'll be along first thing in the morning, to see to them pigs.'

BEFORE going in to his midday meal Matthew sauntered round to the back of the house and had a look at that tree. He had known it all his life, climbed it as a boy a hundred times. But it had been a comparatively young tree then: now it was large and venerable. He noted its height and position, its distance from Hilda's attic window. He judged that Caidster must have been lying in what he had salaciously hinted, but dared not trust that judgment far.

The tree had a history. It was the eleventh tree. One day in the early eighteen sixties little Joe Elderbrook had shot a couple of wood pigeons, and in the crop of one of them had found eleven beech nuts. To please Joe's mother, Joe's father had planted these seeds, disposing them at intervals round three sides of the house. But the eleventh was somehow mislaid. It eluded all search for a day or two, and when it unexpectedly turned up, in a fold of Mrs Elderbrook's apron, they decided to plant it at the back, and so did. There, unaccountably, it developed a vigour and a character of its own, made better growth than its fellows, and was now a taller tree, and nearer the house. Too near the house.

Matthew stood staring at it for some minutes; then turned away and went thoughtfully indoors.

His imagination was not naturally quick, but it was capable of being quickened. The sluggish flow could become a raging torrent. Since Hilda's first hints of danger an obscure process had been going on in the depths of his being, a process that threw up from time to time, not thoughts, but intimations of a formless terror. Now, in its simplest outline, it emerged as a fear of
being found out; but that was only a hundredth part of the truth of it. And with the gradual, the imperceptible emergence of this fear his attitude to himself and his behaviour, his view of the brief (impulsively begun and hastily ended) amour with Hilda, insensibly changed. If he looked straight, with a normal mind, at what he had done, he saw it not as sinful or hateful, but as something exciting, pleasant, and altogether good. He was conscious of a goodness in it beyond sensual delight. But now, with the threat of exposure hanging over him, he saw himself through other eyes than his own: the evil eyes of Caidster, the grief-stricken eyes of Ann. He saw lust furtively indulged and trust shamefully betrayed. He could not hold this vision steady in his mind. It flashed and faded. When he looked at it squarely it seemed silly and melodramatic. But though he shook off this new sense of guilt again and again, it came back. As often as he thought of Ann, and Ann's knowing, it came back. In those moments he hated himself. All roads in his thinking, his now almost feverish thinking, led back to Ann. He was not much afraid of scandal. Little as he relished it he was not afraid of that, except as it affected Ann. He was not the first married man to take his pleasure with a servant-girl, and he would not be the last. Many a man had done worse, and been found out, and not died of it. Such things were common gossip in this not conspicuously ungodly rural area; and though respectable people shook their heads over it and said it was disgraceful they also shrugged their shoulders and few, very few, seemed to think much the worse of the sinners. So far as loss of reputation went, Matthew had little or nothing to fear. But for Ann, and for himself through Ann, he had a fear intolerable. Ann's Matthew, the conception she had of him, was the Matthew he wanted to be and in part believed himself to be: to see himself sometimes through her loving but not blindly loving eyes was a refreshment to his spirit, a ministry to his diffident self-esteem. Ann's knowing what he had done, the shattering of her childlike faith in him, would be agony for them both such as he dared not contemplate. Her life,
he thought (knowing her dependence on him), would be desolated; and he himself would suffer a double desolation, hers and his own, hers and the destruction of her image of him. Ann's life would be broken. Ann's Matthew would be dead. To avert that double catastrophe there was nothing that he would not do.

Whatever happens, Ann mustn't know. Whatever happens …

But what could happen? The man Caidster, true to his promise, arrived next morning and with no word said began busying himself about the place almost as though it belonged to him. Conceivably he felt that it did, or that it would in due time. Meanwhile he exhibited, surprisingly, a certain tact; did not obtrude himself upon his victim; offered no show of offence or aggression; was almost, in effect, self-effacing. But if for some purpose of his own he tried to make it easy for Matthew not to notice his presence, he did not succeed. For the first two or three days Matthew was conscious of almost nothing else. Of Caidster and the problem of Caidster he thought continually, his thoughts going round and round in a circle like birds of prey oddly reluctant to swoop. Swoop they must, sooner or later. A decision must be come to. Angry and ashamed he asked himself again and again, during that first week, whether when pay-day came he would sink so low in the scale of moral courage as to give this rat, this prickworm, this creeping conscience, a wage. That would be the last humiliation, the crowning irony. The last? By no means the last. There were plenty more to come. And what was the good of ranting? What option was there but to pay at the week's end for services he had less than no use for? Wasn't it in fact simpler and wiser, wasn't it in the end better strategy, to pay the fellow and ignore him, pay him and ignore him, for so long as he remained content to be ignored?

Weeks went by before Caidster showed his hand again. He had adopted, it seemed, a policy of ingratiation. But in spite of the absence of incident they were weeks of nagging anxiety
for Matthew, anxiety that flared up and died down, was never quite the same for two days running, was not studiously ignored, now in a frenzy cosseted and re-kindled between cupped hands, so that sleeping or waking it scattered and consumed his peace. He relied on Hilda to bring him news of the enemy's approaches; but the reliance was unspoken, for while private talk with the girl had never been easy to contrive since Ann's homecoming, nor indeed had he wished for it, it was now doubly difficult, with Caidster shadowing the house. She had already, in this short time, lost her allure for him. He did not stop to ask why or how, because he was only briefly aware of the loss. Both she and he were preoccupied, and not with each other. He knew, it was obvious, that she was worried. Her eyes, once so candidly benign, were now misted, heavy, ringed with darkness. It was as if that blithe buxomness of hers had been the first casualty in the Caidster war. What else was to be sacrificed in it?