Turf or Stone (13 page)

Two of the oldest cottages in the district were situated in Goose’s Hollow, a long, patchily cultivated piece of ground intervening between them and the thick holly hedge which had been hacked by the lunatic.

The land lay very low, rising somewhat steeply on either side. It was, in fact, a typical example of what in Herefordshire are known as ‘bottoms’. To one side of the cottages there was a melancholy-looking pond under a curtain of willows and brambles. The water, which seemed to be trying to burst its way out everywhere, here triumphed in a strong spring which never dried up; and the surrounding ground was also perpetually moist so that the inhabitants had contrived numerous narrow channels as a drainage system, bridged here and there by single planks or stone slabs.

Water flowers, rank grasses, rushes and peppermint flourished. There were a few cleared squares where runner beans, cabbages, onions and potatoes were grown, approximately half pertaining to each cottage. They were wrangling, quarrelsome, slapdash folk who were always fighting over the garden. The property was Matt’s; he put up a wooden fence one year, told them off to keep to their own half, and hoped for the best… at least, the fence proved useful for drying clothes.

The cottages themselves turned their backs on each other with a dignified reserve which the occupants lacked. They were brick, timbered, with overhanging thatched roofs under which the small windows peered out suspiciously. Between the back walls there was a space of
about three feet which appeared to the tenants to be a marvellous dumping ground for tins and bottles, until Matt roused himself to put a stop to that. They were the sort of people whose activities must be curbed. Four years previously they had marched upon him in a body: four tough men and two attractive women.

‘Well?’

‘Build us sheds; we have nowhere to put our bicycles and our tools.’

‘Our potatoes; our wood and washing.’

Matt put up a large weathertight, lean-to shed to each cottage.

The tenants thanked him, cleared out the dilapidated
pigsties
and took to rearing swine. On Christmas Day, by way of recompense, each family bestowed on him a nisquill. Matt knew enough about pigs and tenants to laugh.

In one cottage lived a family named Evans: they were strong, black-browed men, three brothers and one wife (it was said) among the lot of them. She had a dark son who resembled them, but the little girl, fair-skinned and
sandy-haired
, was trained to call her ‘auntie’, and once remarked abstractedly: ‘That aren’t my auntie, that’s my mammie.’

It was probable.

These people Evans were sly as the devil, up to any knavery and full of cunning calculations. Tales of their prowess were common currency, even among those who had been done down by it. It was said that the single, middle-aged lady who owned Emma once publicly complained of there being a great quantity of thistles in her paddock. Thereupon an Evans presented himself, claiming to know of a cure.

‘What is it?’ the lady fires off bang-bang into the Evans’ restless face.

‘Donkey,’ answers the Evans.

‘Well, have you a donkey?’

‘Yes, miss, that I have.’

‘Well, bring it.’

Some weeks later the lady encounters the Evans and remarks that the thistles have in no way abated.

‘Your donkey doesn’t seem to like thistles, Evans.’

‘Oh, miss, give ’un a chance! ’E aren’t ate all the grass yet.’

The other cottage was occupied by a childless married couple by the name of Queary.

Tom Queary resembled a drunken, dissipated Punchinello. His red nose, thin grotesque face, puckered eyes and broken teeth, his long, shambling, ungainly figure, and neckerchief and flannel waistcoat made a figure at once amusing and sinister. He leered as a merry death’s head might… a kind of smouldering ferocity lurked in his glance, and tangible horror in his starting bones and raking cough. The chest beneath that flannel waistcoat was nought but a bent cage for the wildest heart in the parish. And that was wild indeed. His wife Emily was Easter’s field woman.

The Evanses and the Quearys all worked for Matt’s tenant farmer: the men were farm hands, the women house drudges.

On this same night, Emily Queary was up plucking a fowl in the shed. She sat on a settle which had yielded up its
back to the burning the winter before, a hurricane lamp at her side throwing its whitish light in a broken circle over her limp figure, and repeating the same strange cubistic curves more palely among the slender beams which supported the roof.

She wore a white apron over her ordinary muddled dress, and held the fowl on her lap while she carefully stowed the feathers in a sack at her feet. The bits of red and green paste in her hair comb shone like glow-worms, her small hands were the same colour as the dead bird’s stiff feet.

The shed stank – the hot, dusty, feather stink that gets to the throat. On the threshold it was met and vanquished by fresh peppermint exhaling on the wet air. Rain drops fell softly on the roof. It was past midnight, and Emily worked desultorily, yawning and blinking.

The door behind her opened and Easter inserted his face, a grim face distorted by a grin neither pretty nor pleasant, a ferocious smile below a corrosive brow. He was holding on to the latch inside the door, leaning his chin on his hand while he observed her. However, he was in no mood for continued passive contemplation: ‘Emily!’ he exclaimed abruptly, though in a low voice.

She started and clasped her hands.

‘My Lord, how you frightened me!’

‘Dost know it’s nearly one o’clock?’

‘Yes… more.’

‘You ought to have been in your bed hours ago. Nothing’s wrong now, though; if you miss the saints’ hours you must carry on through the devil’s. Since you’re not asleep, here’s summat for you to look at. See!’

‘What bist?’ She trembled, staring into his drawn face.

‘What
bist
? Well, it
baint
in my eyes, young woman. It’s under my arm.’

She saw that he had something under his arm, wrapped in a sack.

‘You’ve been doing summat, Easter, you’ve never been poaching?’

‘Never, Emily.’

‘What is it, then, that you’re ’iding?’

He had a flow of words behind his tongue that seemed to burst from him. It was incomprehensible to her.

‘Tonight’s my night… to take my pleasure. To have at them, to hurt them on their sores… that damned bastard, Kilminster! Emily, Datty won’t go snarling at your heels any more. She’s quieted. It’s an old way to get even with a man through his animals. It’s a gypsy’s way. Look!’

He unrolled the corpse of Datty, old Collins’ beloved bitch. She would not drink from her master’s pint again.

Easter laid her on the settle. Her tongue lolled over her jaw, there was foam on it; her blue-glazed eyes were starting sharply from the sockets.

‘It’s a mean, sneaking, low-down hedge way,’ Emily retorted, shrill enough to burst his eardrums, her eyes shooting light.

‘Shut it! I said so.’

‘Ah, poor little thing!’

‘Rubbish, ’tis no worse than chucking a sackful of cats over the bridge.’

Emily began to burn.

‘What if us
do
drown a cat now and then? It’s got to be.’

He closed the door, picked Datty up by the hind legs and pitched her into the corner.

‘She bit me,’ he said, and seated himself beside Emily. Bending, he seized her apron to wipe his face. She dragged it from him, her fingers touched him. She went on with her plucking.

‘Easter, it’s late; you’d best go home. There won’t be nothing tonight.’

He broke out savagely and suddenly: ‘I told you I wasn’t poaching! You dirty whore; a man can’t look at you but you think he’s out to get hold of you.’

‘
You
never looked at me for no other reason…’

In some obscure way this man was again betrayed. He bounded to his feet and reached the door in one vital exhaustless spring. The pallid drawn look left his face. Those indefinable surgings which he sometimes experienced towards a sort of higher development invariably left their mark on him: a sign of suffering was a sign of grace. At his most animal he was magnificently unimpaired. That moment he radiated a physical joy fearfully brilliant to behold.

He rammed the bolt.

Emily, pushing away the fowl, gave a longing sigh. He enclosed her, kicking the lamp to the ground. It continued to burn on its side. He would have left it; at such a moment stars, moon, and noonday light were all one to him. But she was furtive and would not be still until he put it out.

Afterwards he lay face downwards on the ground, hiding his head in his arms. She heard how he had killed Datty, something of what had happened at The Dog. He spoke languidly, as if he were asleep.

‘I crawled to the kennel… she barked… she was on a chain. Old Collins thought a fox was after the ducks… he
fired a shot from the window. I throttled her.’

‘What’re you going to do with ’er?’

‘Heave her in the pond.’

‘No, ’er’ll rise.’

‘I’ll weight her, then,’ he said drowsily.

‘Get up; you can’t sleep ’ere.’

They stood up in the dark. Easter relit the lantern. He prodded the half-plucked fowl.

‘That there hen’s a knowing old bird now.’

‘Go on! Us couldn’t teach ’er.’

‘Goodnight.’

Emily went to bed without undressing. In the morning she went to work at the farm all crumpled and creased. She was criticised for wearing a torn apron.

‘That cock’ril’s creels done it when I were twisting ’is neck.’

Miss Williams looked at the naked carcass on the enamel dish.

‘It’s a hen.’

‘’Twere a cock’ril as done it,’ retorted Emily finally.

Easter returned home. He found the door open, a lamp burning on the table, and coals in the grate. Wet clothes were spread on a horse and hung across a line in the kitchen. He found Mary asleep in an odd attitude, or rather dozing, half-dressed on the bed. She was lying stretched on her side, her head lifted, her cheek on her hand. On a chair beside the bed stood a lighted candle and a large bronze bell.

As he entered she started up, uttering a single sharp groan. Her face, convulsed with pain and tense, stared up at him; her eyes were distended. She said something had happened to her earlier in the night when she was rinsing the clothes which he had ruined, and then she had suffered two awful attacks of pain. Then she spoke no more but, reaching out her arms, caught the iron edge of the bed under the mattress in a petrified grip.

Easter fled for help.

The same copy of the
Salus Times
which announced that Samuel Collins had lost a tan terrier bitch answering to the name of Datty, proclaimed also the birth of a son to Easter Probert and his wife Mary, prematurely.

For the first two days after its birth it was thought that the child would not live. The mother might. Matt paid for better aid than the parish afforded, and they both survived, although for nearly a week the boy did not open his eyes. He was kept alive on drops of brandy; in the night the vicar came to baptise him; it was done from a silver loving-cup belonging to Phoebe. They called him Shannon. He was amazingly small and still.

Six weeks in bed passed for Mary in a weak flow of night and day. Two events she remembered always: a night when she was still desperately ill and Easter came to her door, drunk, bawling and shouting that the child was not his.

‘A bastard, and the son of a bastard.’

The parish nurse was sitting with her. She pushed him away, and when she came in, with her heart visibly heaving in her skinny bosom, she said to Mary.

‘Remember that, I will.’

And her old friend Margaret Tressan lying across her bed, weeping: ‘Mary, Mary… come back to me when you like, and you shall both live with me.’

Easter made up a bed for himself in the harness room. Every day now Dorothy urged her husband to give him notice. The topic was eternal, it nearly drove them all mad during July. Every single person in the house was affected by it. The sound of quarrelling travelled down the corridors; the opening of doors released shrill, abusive voices.

lt was queer weather, with sharp showers, hot sunshine or whole days of grey stuffiness. Phoebe found a soothing occupation. She used to pump up soft water until her arms ached, or hide herself away to learn poetry. She learned the whole of the Rubaiyat. She loved it, but it depressed her, and for relief she kept a sort of diary, or rather a record of her vague, unhappy thoughts. Thus: ‘Suppose there were no wine in Omar’s jug – no companion in the wilderness?

‘Your words are beautiful and I love you for that, but your philosophy, your creed is useless to console, harder than the Stoics! Hope of the
future
is everything for those who have nothing. You wrote for the happy. Today – the today you preached so exquisitely – is nothing.

‘But the sheer music in that work of selfishness! Perfect as the Sermon on the Mount. Well, Phoebe, take your choice.’

She added that same night: ‘My heart acknowledges Christ.’

The next day: ‘There is much to do. Why do I stop to write? The house resounds with the awful clatter of dustpans – how I hate it! I feel rather like a cold potato, heavy and solid. I wish I knew what to do. There is a ton weight on me.’

One entry concerned Easter: ‘I’m haunted…’

‘There is a glorious moon in a streaky sky, so calm that I said my prayers looking at it for I felt God’s very face might be behind it, so unutterably peaceful it is…’

‘Yes, I’m haunted. Else why should strangers look at me with Easter’s eyes?

‘I do feel strange when he looks at me, so that I have to shut my eyes and feel my heart beating.

‘When I came up to bed I found a bowl of yellow pansies. Mrs Wood had sent them in for me and they smell so sweet and pure and young as if they belonged to God. So what are they doing in my room?’

For some reason she felt violently ashamed when she had written these last words. She quickly tore out the page, put it in the grate and burnt it to ashes. The next day she destroyed the whole book.