Turf or Stone (3 page)

Dallett sat a while longer, gradually regaining his composure. Mary found his company soothing. Her eyes dwelt on his face, on his large features, his hanging brow as rich in colour as his brown and scarlet cheeks. His own eyes were cast down but when he raised them they did not waver. She wondered why she should feel so grateful for his compassion. His empty sleeve terminated in a pathetic hook. At last he stood up to go: she was sorry.

‘See here,’ said he, extending his one hand, ‘this might be useful to you.’

He was offering her a thin metal ring of strange dull colour.

‘What is that?’

‘It’s made of gun-metal. I brought it home from the War. Take it; you needn’t be ashamed to wear it. I took your fags.’

‘I’m not ashamed! I’ll wear it. Thank you… gun-metal!’

Thoughtfully she put it on her marriage finger. When she looked up, the carter was about to leave the shop. As he went out the waitress called after him pertly: ‘You haven’t paid for the doughnuts.’

He felt very small.

Easter’s master, Matt Kilminster, led an increasingly blank existence. He was sometimes tortured by the vacancy of everything. Lately he had taken to drinking….

‘As an example to others,’ he declared. He drew a fairly large income from Welsh breweries.

People noticed the depression which was beginning to grow upon him. His body seemed inert, and his gloomy eyes seldom followed anything beyond the direct frontal line of vision. He had pleasant manners verging on indifference.

He was the only son of a well-to-do north Herefordshire gentleman, who had married his housekeeper late in life. The blood was running thin from its antique source, and in this case was but erratically strengthened. Matt was queer – shiftless, easy going, vehement. He ran away from school twice, he refused point-blank to go to the
University. When he was twenty-four his father died, a doting old man who was, with difficulty, prevailed upon to leave his property to his wife and son, instead of bequeathing it on maudlin conditions to a widow in the village who used to send him flowers from her garden.

Mrs Kilminster, relieved, threw the last futile withering bunch on the bonfire. Eighteen months later she died. Matt was married to a Cardiff doctor’s daughter. He sold the house and the two farms, and came down to live in south Herefordshire.

His house was five miles out of Salus in Brelshope parish, a red brick Georgian building which looked out of place amid the surrounding fields until on approaching its dilapidations became more apparent. With it he possessed three hundred acres of land which he let to a tenant farmer, who was his nearest neighbour.

It was known by a peculiar name standing near a crossroads, where there had been a gibbet; it was called The Gallustree, and it was said that a portion of the cross beam had been worked into the porch. Built on high ground which rose sharply from the river valley and the water meadows, it could be seen for a considerable distance, a graceful construction with a rank walled garden. Seen thus it looked well, but a nearer view exposed its painful demission. Money was freely spent on clumsy unskilful repairs: the paint on windows and door was new, thick, white; the most beautiful thing about it, a wall in the form of a cupid’s bow, four feet high, which separated the narrow front garden from a strip of greensward beside the road, had collapsed in one place, and been mended with rough stone blocks projecting far
beyond the original curve; an old urn, missing from among its fellows on the high garden wall, had been replaced by a modern monstrosity almost orange in hue; an atrocious, a terrible excrescence of pale green glass and white painted wood adhering to one side completely destroyed its delicately calculated proportions. Inside, moulded ceilings had been tampered with and valuable fireplaces mauled. The house, decorated throughout in vile standard taste, testified to the plebeian strain in the inhabitants. People, gentle and simple, who had lived in Brelshope for generations, mourned over the time when it had been an unadorned farmhouse, falling to ruin perhaps, but accomplishing that with mellow grace: they looked askance at its owners.

The house was overshadowed by a group of fine elms which grew on a grassy mound on the opposite side of the road. It was supposed that Danes were buried there. A path, no more than a few yards in length, traversed the front garden from gate to doorsteps. Cars were obliged to draw up outside. Dorothy Kilminster considered the possibility of constructing a glass passage to save her visitors’ hats on a wet day. The visitors, however, did not appear in great numbers, and the idea collapsed. Yellow crocuses, old lavender bushes, and a monkey tree grew in the front. The stables and outbuildings were at the back, divided from the house by a sloping lawn and a thick, low, laurel hedge. A young sycamore tree sprang from the centre of the lawn girdled around with a circular iron seat; in fine summer weather, Dorothy Kilminster spent much time beneath its boughs reading and doing her embroidery. Even in winter she was sometimes to be seen
sitting well wrapped up in her fur coat, a scarf over her blonde head, her hands folded in her lap, gazing over the hedge. Easter hated this practice; he fancied she spied upon him. Her eyes followed him as he worked.

Matt refused to run a car – he disliked them. He kept only one hunter, a hack, and two ponies for the children, so that Easter filled in time doing odd jobs. At present the title ‘groom’ as applied to him was in sober reality more ambitious than true. Easter looked after the horses; he also drove the children to the station and back – they went to school by train – milked the two jersey cows, and even worked in the garden.

At one time Matt had a pack of otter hounds kennelled in his empty stables, but Mrs Kilminster objected to the noise, and the smell made her sick. He very reluctantly gave them up. Since then the yard seemed very empty. Easter and his master shared a secret grievance; they had both loved the hounds and missed the wild floating cries which had awakened them in the early mornings.

Easter brooded on the coming night.

He sat in the harness room before a little red fire cleaning some mouldy harness which Matt would not sell. His stained hands flew; visions violent or poignantly gentle filled his imagination. The door was open; he constantly turned his head to see if Mary were coming into the yard. It was dark. Matt Kilminster was walking about on the lawn. He had nothing else to do and he found his wife tedious. There was raw fog in the air.

He watched Easter through the open harness room door, rubbing the leather across his knees. The firelight exposed his high arrogant features, his broad working shoulders. Matt had given him a holiday.

‘Strange… he was married today. What made him come back to work?’ the watcher thought. He smoked cigarette after cigarette, consumed by ennui. His mouth was dried up. The dinner gong roused him; yawning, he turned towards the house and as he did so Easter emerged, locking the saddle-room door behind him.

‘Goodnight,’ Matt called. He liked Easter, and paused for a moment to question him, but he walked away rapidly, striding rakish and assured across the yard.

‘Goodnight, sir,’ he answered carelessly.

Matt saw him mount the wooden steps to the two rooms above the old brewing house, which he had inhabited since he came to work at The Gallustree, three years before. No lights showed. Matt wondered.

The gong again rang. He threw away the end of his cigarette, and returned to his house, which harboured its own peculiarities.

Easter shut and bolted his door. He wished Mary to entreat that he should open it and let her into the bed where she had lain in his arms the whole of one autumn night. His neck swelled. He laughed, took off his boots in the dark, and sat for several minutes thinking about it, while his teeth tore at a ragged fingernail; but he was ravenously hungry, he craved for food.

He felt about on the table for the lamp which he always left ready to be lighted. He could not find it so he struck a match, and his eyes flitted over the room suspiciously.

On the table, bare and unscrubbed, with dark rings on the wood, like a dirty pub’s, were the remains of a baked fish, a vinegar bottle, and several broken crusts of brown bread; there were also an enamel teapot, half full of cold tea, and a cup without saucer or handle. Nothing had been touched since the meal he had had in the morning.

The match expired… Easter crammed the crusts into his mouth and went into the next room. The full moon, newly arisen, was shining through the window on the bed, a muffled light, dimmed by the raw vapour outside. He was able to make out a woman’s shape beneath the bed clothes. His wife had come home, sneaked in secretly. All blanched, she lay there huddled, her knees drawn up, her hands clasped under her chin, as though she were cold, or afraid, or perhaps, in pain. The light imparted a rigidity, a sculptured rhythm to her outline, but the sheet over her breast moved mysteriously. He bent down to look closely at the face on the indented pillow.

She was dead asleep, too weary to feel his breath on her neck and her naked shoulder – the bare, blooming flesh shone with pearly lustre against the harsh white sheet. He saw a narrow satin ribbon.

She was wearing a chemise, and the rest of her clothes were folded up on a chair beside her; her coat was spread over her feet.

He whispered close to her face: ‘Mary, do you hear me?’

She did not; at first he thought he would wake her, then he stood up straight and considered. No hurry.

Slowly, very quietly, he examined the clothes, holding them in the light, feeling the silk with his hard, dirty
fingers, which reeked of harness cream and stale leather. He remembered his mother washing clothes like this and hanging them out to dry… in that instant he recollected her lean figure strained up to the line, the clothes prop with dried bark peeling off the wood, and even the scrubby grass, the little daisies under her feet. He used to carry the empty basket back to the kitchen along a path between blackcurrant bushes. He heard the twigs brushing against that withy basket – twenty-five years ago.

He rolled the clothes up and threw them behind the chest of drawers. All the pockets in the coat were empty. The belt of moonlight across the room lengthened, began to creep up the door.

He went and sat down in a dark corner where he could watch Mary without being seen, if she should awaken, planning how he would wake her, and leap out and clasp her, so that she could not breathe. Spite and desire, which could not bear delay, contended within him. He held his chin in his hands. Practically invisible, he sat smiling away in his corner.

She awoke before he was ready, and turned over on her back. For a moment she felt peaceful, comfortable and warm; a lamb’s thin shuddering cry, a horse moving, were all the sounds that she heard. Then Easter sprang from the darkness, his hand and arm barred the window, his silver ring glittered. He closed the shutters.

The shock almost deprived Mary of her senses; half erect in the bed, she let her head fall on her supporting arm, and put out her hand defensively as he came towards her in the utter darkness. Her fingers encountered his hot mouth, he shut his lips over them so that she could feel
the point of his teeth pressing lightly on her skin. He murmured indistinctly, the wordless mutters of extremity, and his hands touched her bosom. Instantly her passionless limbs kindled to his as though she were a joyful woman welcoming a beloved man. In disgust at herself she leapt away from him, out of the bed, and once more opening the shutters wide, stood revealed, trembling and half naked. Easter looked at her bare thighs, her straight, slender legs, and he changed his mind as he had that morning when she resisted him. He wanted her tenderness, he wanted to be soothed, he longed for her to caress him, to weep, and to be his entirely, as if his own spirit animated her.

‘Mary,’ he said, ‘Mary, Mary, Mary…’ He moved his hands jerkily. She slowly turned her head towards him and looked at him. He jumped to his feet.

‘No,’ she said inflexibly. She flung her head back, holding him off with rigid arms. Fuming and thwarted he thrust his fingers into her long hair, and tugged at it until the tears ran out of her eyes; she seized his wrist and her whole frame stiffened in the effort to tear away his hand. Suddenly he let her go. He did not want her. He gave a deep sigh, walked out of the room, and locked her in.

For two hours he wandered about the fields, keeping close under the hedges – the wind was still bitter. At ten o’clock he returned angry, and ready to be vicious. She was sitting wrapped in blankets at the foot of the bed. He threw off his clothes, lifted her bodily to him, and lying down beside her put his arms around her. The contact betrayed her into a renewal of love, but all night she moaned and her face was wet with tears. He tasted them
on her mouth, salt and biting, he felt them on his own face, his neck, his breast…. They slept. The moon set, the day broke. As soon as it grew light enough to see, Easter got up and began to dress. His expression was lifeless, the yellow tinge in his face had deepened. Mary could not bear to look at him. A terrible longing after happiness took possession of her.

He raged unsatisfied.

In the house one other person was awake. The eyes of anyone passing might have lifted to an upper window where a young girl was sitting, her arms crossed on the sill, her solemn gaze on the grey east.

She wore a white nightgown with long, loose sleeves; her shoulders were covered with an eiderdown. Her lips moved, for she was saying her prayers.

After a few minutes she drew back, closed the window, and disappeared. There was a poor light in the room, such as might be given by a single candle.

This serious girl was Matt Kilminster’s elder daughter. He had at this time three children, two girls and a boy. His elder daughter, Phoebe, was just fifteen, the younger Rosamund, ten. Philip was nearly six.

Phoebe suffered agonies from a nervous temperament which she rigidly controlled. She was a girl of serious, even pious, disposition, and very grave demeanour, altogether an astonishing contrast to her family, who beneath their inconsequent disorderliness and turbulent self-assertion, were remarkably well balanced and self-centred. From
blows that would have prostrated less elastic souls they sprang erect, with the exception of Matt himself, whom Phoebe resembled in many ways. She was gifted, not alone among them, but particularly. She saw far and truly; she was growing very fast and her quick perceptions often made her very gloomy. There was much which tended to develop this side of her character; Matt, like a great many of his neighbours, frequently drank himself sick and stupid. His wife wept and reviled him at the top of her voice as they lay in bed, rising and running about the room, sometimes throwing her brushes and scent bottles at his head, or stamping her feet while she called the children to look at their father. She would tell all her friends that it was impossible to go on – they must separate. No woman should be called upon to live with a drunkard. She confided everywhere. Then a day or two later, perhaps sooner, they would become reconciled, for they were really quite attached to each other, and everything went on in just the same old slapdash, slovenly manner. Phoebe’s natural reverence for her parents suffered severely.