Turf or Stone (9 page)

There were no children. The Fitzgeralds owned a yellow caravan which they did not keep very clean. It and two others were pitched beside a stream in meadow pocked with molehills, adjacent to the pea field where they were working. During the day the pea field shrilled with noise and swarmed with pickers, but at night it looked formidable, curving up to the sky, a rounded, dark hill leaning towards the caravans.

Years before a large tree had fallen across the stream; rain, frost, and floods stripped all the bark from it and left it smooth as satin, slippery and shining. Easter sat on it, smoking, hanging his hot, sore feet in the water. He was hidden by blackberry bushes. He was tired to death and sick with passion. The sun seemed to have scorched his back to the bone, his eyes ached and swam.

Mrs Fitzgerald appeared. Easter turned his head towards her. She sprang upon the tree trunk, balanced herself, and, treading crossways on her bare feet, reached his side. Stooping, she ran hands from his shoulders to his slack elbows.

‘I know what’s amiss with you!’

‘What then?’

She laughed and held her face close to his.

‘Let me kiss you…’

The pea field was at least twenty acres, and they worked in it for nearly a week. Two men were at the scales, a gentleman with a peppery moustache who was very popular, and a fat farm labourer in corduroys, who mocked Easter for his slowness.

The pickers were paid a shilling a pot; most of them picked seven or eight pots, and several experts like Mr Fitzgerald, ten. But Easter would not earn more than four or five shillings a day. His fingers were nimble enough, only he continually looked at Mrs Fitzgerald tearing off the pods and flinging the haulm behind her while her long necklace swung as she stooped.

The babies and children shrieked and squabbled under the hedge, dressing themselves up in sacks and decking their heads with poppies. It seemed strange to Easter that he was not among them, but working with people who were picking peas when he had capered in the shade. He remembered Mrs Fitzgerald making pegs and hanging her heavy jewellery on his neck. She was very different now.

Mr Fitzgerald, too, had changed from a narrow youth to a stout, shambling man with fat thighs and a gurgling tobacco cough. He passed the evenings in Salus, leaning against the market hall or sitting, half asleep, in a cinema; during his absence his wife goaded and indulged Easter’s love for her.

One morning Mr Fitzgerald got up very early, made a fire, fried bacon, and ate a large meal. The others did the same. Then they harnessed their long-legged horses and
trundled across the field towards the gate. Easter walked after them as a matter of course.

Mr Fitzgerald turned round, flourishing his arms and coughing so much that it was nearly impossible to distinguish what he said, shouted that they had done with him. Mrs Fitzgerald suddenly started towards him, flung her arms round his neck, kissed him, caressed his head and returned to her people.

This was too much for Mr Fitzgerald, who ran at Easter, seized him, heaved him nearly shoulder high and threw him to the ground; after this he kicked him, laying open his cheek.

As Mr Fitzgerald set off once more, Easter raised himself and hurled a lump of turf after him which hit him so hard between the shoulder blades that he stumbled forward. A loud shout from the pea field startled them all; it was the man in corduroys. He came running full tilt, both hands clapped to his pendulous stomach, and broke through the hedge, sweating and blown. By that time the gypsies were in the lane.

‘Bist hurt?’ he asked Easter.

He nodded, laid his hand to his face, stared ferociously at the blood and dirt on his fingers.

So it ended, his loving.

Mrs Fitzgerald had haunted his childhood with her nakedness, and she haunted his manhood also… he lusted after women from this time onwards, but his lonely and abandoned spirit dwelt in a wilderness where as yet none had ever penetrated. None. Never.

He grew into a man without ambition, without hope, and without compunction. He risked his jobs over and
over again – and lost them. He had only one friend, but a great many enemies who pleased him much more. He disliked men, and longed in the bottom of his heart for a woman’s tenderness. But he had not the least idea how to arouse it, and invariably went wrong from the beginning. The rest of his history until he became groom at The Gallustree is soon told.

He found work with a farmer who owned a great barn of a house with several hundred acres some five miles out of Salus.

It was wartime, and the farmer cherished a peculiar aversion for land-girls; the sight of a woman in breeches provoked him to such a degree that he was unfit to speak to a soul for a day afterwards. He was jealous, fiery and obstinate, but the kindest, the most generous husband, father and master that could possibly be imagined or desired. And he had genius. Easter passed four fat years with him and learned a great deal about cows, which knowledge he later turned to good account, displaying uncommon interest in them until the end of his life.

The farmer’s son, a boy about Easter’s age,
extraordinarily
handsome, used to drive a milk float in and out of Salus, with his huge mongrel sheepdog standing with its forepaws on the wings. Everybody admired them, and Easter among the rest.

The two were very good friends, wasting half the day in each other’s company; often when they ought to have been working they would sit down in a snug, dark corner and play the concertina, which they both did abominably, and the farmer, instead of cursing or punishing them, only laughed. He came to regret this.

One day, when Easter was nearly twenty, they went out
with a high-spirited, valuable mare in the float, instead of the usual steady old cob. It was pure folly and bravado, which resulted in a bad accident. The mare ran away, attempted to leap a five-barred gate and threw them both out of the float. Easter escaped serious injury, but the other was flung upon a heap of stones, fracturing his skull. The mare had to be destroyed.

Easter was sacked. Later he heard his friend had married a carter’s daughter and set up as a pork butcher in Manchester; he had always taken a great interest in pig killing. They occasionally wrote to each other, although for years they did not meet. Neither was fortunate in his disposition, neither prospered. Easter managed to get jobs, and good ones too, but he always lost them because of his insolence, his absurdity, or his women. Then came two years when nobody wanted him. Nobody seemed to be keeping horses… he shirked ordinary farm work….

He tried being a cheapjack and a stone-breaker; and lived in a crowded, filthy room in Mary Street, which is the Salus slum and a shameful one. When he could, he worked in the fields. He learnt a little caution; when Matt Kilminster advertised in the
Salus Times
for a groom handyman, he applied politely and speedily. Matt took him on at once, found him satisfactory, a little mysterious, and liked him.

Easter was still some way from The Gallustree when it began to rain heavily; he abandoned his thoughts and took to his heels. He ran up the steps two at a time.

Mary was taking her hair down and putting the pins carefully into her apron pocket. Everything looked clean and well ordered; a check cloth was spread at one end of the table with a place laid for him. A large basin with a white cloth over it stood in the centre. It contained dried apricots which were soaking, ready to be made into jam the next day. She told him this when he lifted the cloth, peered at the apricots and shook the basin. He pulled one out to try it. He was surprised at the full flavour of the withered, fleshy fruit.

She put a chop and a baked potato on a plate and handed it to him.

‘You’d better take off your coat,’ she observed. He threw it off and began to eat. She hung it over the back of a chair.

‘Where have you been?’ she asked, her back towards him.

‘The Dog.’

He finished his meal, then swerved sideways in his chair so that he faced her as she sat with bowed head and folded hands.

‘We might as well be without tongues for all we find to talk about!’ he exclaimed.

‘There’s nothing to say.’

‘I’ve plenty to say to other people… you never thought you’d come to marry a man like me, did you?’

She neither moved nor replied.

‘This room seems little, eh?’

‘Yes, it does.’

‘Well, to me it’s all right. I haven’t lived so easy.’

‘Have you been drinking?’ 

‘No, but I do, you wait.’

He got up. ‘I’m going to bed. It’s late.’

She listened to his movements in the next room. He was soon quiet. She washed up the supper things, raked out the fire and fastened the door. When it was all done she sat down at the table, laid her head on it and thought that she could not bear her life.

‘But perhaps I shall die…’

‘Easter!’ she called.

‘Ay.’

‘Mr Kilminster – the master – gave me a message for you. He’s going otter-hunting tomorrow and you’re to go with him. He came up here this evening.’

He turned over in bed but made no reply. In the midst of misery she suddenly wanted to go to sleep. She waited a little longer. Then she rose, blew out the lamp and walked heavily into the bedroom. The window was shut. She opened it, put her face outside, murmured: ‘All be the same a hundred years hence.’

When she was lying beside her sleeping husband she found that, after all, she could not shut her eyes. A hundred years hence it would all be
different
, was bound to be. Dissecting the thought, she remained awake.

Easter did not go otter-hunting. He was expecting a cow to calve. About midday it began. The buildings, the whole yard echoed with the agonised cries. Mary turned very white. She was filled with dread. Her attention was so far withdrawn that she let the jam boil over, filling the kitchen
with a horrible burnt odour which made her so sick that she had to lift the pan off the fire and go to lie down.

Easter sent for the vet; in the end they had to drag the calf from the cow with a rope. For a while there was silence, then the vet, a big man with a handsome face and peculiarly watchful eyes, which always seemed as if they were calmly awaiting some dangerous crisis, stepped out of the cow-house with his hands on his hips and his forehead shining with sweat. Easter followed him, looking very exhausted and downcast. He was in his shirtsleeves, his hands and arms were bloodstained.

The vet, rolling in his walk, every movement expressing weariness, got into his car, nodded to Easter and drove away. Easter went to the pump.

‘We’ve lost the calf,’ he answered Mary when she inquired from the steps. He washed, rubbing his hands vigorously up and down his thin, coppery arms.

‘Bring me some soap, will you?’ he asked, without looking at her, still bowed over his hands. She brought the soap on a saucer, and a roller towel hung over her arm.

They heard a car drive up to the house; a moment later the children’s loud voices carried to them. Dorothy had taken Rosamund and Philip to Chepsford, where they had spent the afternoon in a cinema. Rosamund rushed into the yard.

‘Oh, Easter, is there a calf?’

‘It’s dead.’

‘Oh,
Easter
!’

‘Don’t get in my way now,’ he growled, and returned to the cow, carelessly flinging the towel on the wet ground.

Rosamund gave Mary a long, curious stare before she sped away with the bad news.

About seven o’clock Easter sat down and had a meal. Afterwards he pulled off his boots and leggings, filled his pipe and, stretching himself out in his chair, began absently to twist the ring on his finger, while an ironical disagreeable smile played over his mouth.

‘How’s the cow, Easter?’

‘She’s all right now.’

‘Do they suffer much?’

‘Ay, they do. As much as a woman.’

With an abrupt jerky movement he flung his head back and gazed up at her standing beside him. She was trembling and very pale. Immediately she removed her hand from the back of his chair and passed into the bedroom, where for several minutes she stood examining her haggard face in the white-painted mirror.

‘Suppose I die?’ she was thinking.

She was not afraid, but with all her soul she dreaded pain… she had never suffered.

She craved for comfort, or at least for a more exact knowledge of what lay before her. She felt so weak that she was obliged to sit down.

Presently she walked into the kitchen again.

‘Easter, is there a parish nurse here?’

He was asleep, his head hanging on his chest. His overstrained arms trembled.

‘Easter…’ she tapped him on the shoulder.

‘Eh – God damn you, let me sleep!’

‘Is there a parish nurse?’ she repeated.

‘I don’t know.’

‘Does it never occur to you that someone will have to look after me?’

‘We’ll have the vet,’ he said with his malicious smile.

She was shaken with rage and a spiteful longing to strike his face and see pain come into his mouth and his baffling eyes. He watched her as with sullen lips she set herself to tie down the jam.

The glass jars, full of dark golden fruit, were standing on a sticky newspaper. She wiped them with a damp cloth and put them on an enamel tray. Then she took a saucer of water and brushed over the glazed paper tops which she pressed down upon the jars. Her hands moved very slowly, the supple thumbs bent back. They were very beautiful.

‘Who gave you that ring?’ he demanded after some time.

She replied that it was nothing to do with him.

‘Take it off, and I will give you mine,’ he continued, suddenly troubled by the contemplation of her weak wrists.

‘You took it away once, now you can keep it.’

‘Is there arsenic in that stuff?’

‘How many more ridiculous questions?’

He stretched again and tapped his pipe against the fender.

She descended into the yard and walked about in the evening sun. The cloudy scent of lilacs drifted across the laurel hedge and the unmown lawn was speckled with daisies. The sycamore leaves were small, almost transparently fresh and green.