Ulverton (28 page)

Let us remain with that group of men huddled upon the high hills of chalky England in the late summer of 1914: let us try to imagine their position, and feel their discomfort: let us equate it with our own moments in life, when someone has done something that reflects a light back upon us, in which we are uncomfortably exposed to our conscience, and to the imagined grievances of others. Then in the penultimate week of August the bell tolled a death-knell; and slow and dull and remorseless it sounded across the downs. Each man cocked an ear, paused in his delicate work. A far shout from a stubbled field, and a cart rocking with its corn-load stopped. Two great whirring reapers in a field below us plodded on, their magnificent harnessed teams oblivious to human misfortunes – but the drivers turned in their seats to look down at the village, and the women paused by their stooks, lifting
their
bonnets to gaze. Tiny figures were to be seen hurtling up various tracks, childish shrills sounded, the harvesters in the fields came together in knots and dispersed, and soon enough Sidney Bint, the baker’s small boy, came panting up the side of the mound, and the name of Jimmy Tuck resounded shrilly over our little scooped world. A pale lad with a stutter who had done me some service by mending the stone outhouse roof at the bottom of my garden – making of it a study wherein I sit now, in the scent of buddleia, just as I did then through those golden evenings – Jimmy Tuck died at Maubeuge on August 21st, blown apart by an artillery shell.

We all turned to the Squire as the lad stood there, panting, apparently exhilarated by the effect his words had had. Another boy popped up beside him, swore softly at being beaten to it, put his hand on his friend’s shoulder, and looked down at us with equal anticipation. I felt for a moment as though I was on a stage, in an ancient theatre, where ritual grief sounded after ritual murder. We were looking to the Squire as if he were the salvatory King, as if he might raise his arms, and open his throat, and wail for all of us. Instead, he reached into his waistcoat pocket and took out two pennies, flicked them to the boys (who scampered off down Louzy Hill, shrieking at their good fortune), scratched his forehead, and indicated with his trowel that we should continue – and nothing more was said for the rest of the day, bar the odd ‘poor bugger’ murmured into the chalk. I felt now as if I were at a tea-party where a guest had loudly broken wind; where some rule had been broken and custom breached by the unforeseen – and no one was quite sure what to do about it.

So it was not unexpected when Marlers stood up at the end of a day’s excavation and announced that this was to be his last week. His leggings were white with chalk; his face was streaked like a clown’s. He said that Jimmy Tuck’s mother looked at him funny, that the nips looked at him funny, that the whole universe, in effect, was looking at ‘awld Marlers funny’. I had indeed looked at him, I must say, with a wry internal grin since our first encounter, when he had come to advise on the contents of my greenhouse, and I had displayed the newcomer’s unerring ability to try too hard. ‘Ah, good morning Mr Marlow, come in,’ said I. ‘My name en’t Marlow,’ came the lugubrious reply, ‘it be Trevick.’ Why ‘Marlers’ I have not been able to discover. Not that it matters
now:
how many bright appendages are lost, how many quirks and tics that make up the human sum of personality slip beneath the earth, when faceless Death strikes!

Back on the barrow, the Squire blanched a little at this news. ‘It’s your decision,’ he said. He could have said little else, in the circumstances. Ernest, whom he was consulting at that minute, sucked on a pencil.

‘Duty,’ said Marlers, glancing at the others, who were wiping their trowels on the soft tussocks. ‘You talked of duty at the meetin’, so we understand. That’s why all our young lads have gone. You an’ your sword from Waterloo, sir.’

‘Yes,’ said the Squire, looking down. ‘Of course. Duty.’

Ernest began to flick through his drawings. Urns, shards, an iron hair-pin, yesterday’s broken beaker impressed with a comb in crude diamond-shaped patterns. Nothing of significance or value.

‘Yes. Of course. Duty.’

Marlers, Allun the chauffeur, Terence Brinn, and wheezy but no doubt formidable Tom Sedgwick – all left at the end of the week. Ernest stayed, of course – as well as Dart, nostrils quivering like a horse, content with his stupidity. The Squire was devastated, and consoled himself by shooting pigeons for a week in Bailey’s Wood – while the barrow was left under canvas wraps. A month of disappointing finds had taken its toll, and now war had interrupted his long-held ambition (this is how I now interpreted it) to take possession of an ancient treasure.

Sometime during this week of idleness, Ernest called round and (in between taking sips of tea with his tongue-tip protruded, like a cat at its milk) explained to me the various stages through which the barrow had passed before resting content with tussocks and butterflies and the odd rustic rump for four thousand or so years. His enthusiasm was tempered by the possibility that our Chief had lost interest. This was, he claimed, a sign of the amateur.

‘Though, of course, I cannot, um, blame him. Of course.’

I nodded. His moustache was wiped free of tea and malt biscuit and he spread out a diagram on the table between us.

‘Here,’ he said, pointing to a large oblong ringing the welter of circles and crosses; ‘here is the latest burial-phase. A ditch dug around the mound in which, um, we have found evidence of
burial
by cremation. The discoloration of the soil is probably due to the rotting of wooden stakes surrounding the most recent, um, mound phase.’

He paused. I was impressed.

‘From previous expeditions which I have been party to I predict that, um, an earlier phase will yield something much more exciting.’

‘Why should it?’

He smiled.

‘The initial justification for such a sizeable mound,’ he replied, in a triumphant tone befitting the Assistant Secretary of our county’s Archaeological Society. His moustache quivered at my quizzical look. ‘Our finds up to now, um, these recent finds – they were simply additions. And cremation is, I believe, associated with later centuries. If we continue, I confidently predict that, um, we will uncover a rich burial, uncremated, with grave-goods to match. It might take many weeks, but I am sure it will be, um, worth it.’

I sat back and pondered his assertions while he lapped his tea. In actual fact, I was hardly bothered one way or another. With such recent memories of my wife’s last illness, I was growing averse to finding anything at all, if it meant uncovering something so manifestly morbid. To reveal the dead is not to release them.

‘I see. But with whom? Dart? He’s more a liability than a help. He still believes the trowel is his hammer and the chalk the anvil, if I’m not mistaken. He would smash the skull before we saw it. I say we should enlist some female support, but the Chief is dead agin it, needless to say.’

Ernest laughed – giggled would be a better description. The Chief’s misogyny was the best known fact about him – the oft-given explanation of his bachelor state, accompanied with an apparent unconcern at the inevitable withering of the Norcoat-Wells tree.

‘Yes, there’s the problem. Um, I’ve often wondered why the under-gardener hasn’t joined us. He’s, um, very strong.’

‘Percy Cullurne?’

‘Yes.’

I sighed. ‘That man has strong opinions of his own. As you saw – or rather, would have seen, at the meeting.’

‘I heard, yes,’ he said, flushing a little at this somewhat oblique
reproval.
‘But what are these opinions? Concerning the excavation, I mean.’ He coughed and blew his nose, in case I had forgotten about his weakly constitution. ‘He never,’ he added, ‘says very much.’

‘That’s partly because the Squire has forbidden him to do so. Button your lip, he was told, apparently. Too much talk of treasure. So that is what Cullurne has done,
in toto
. I have had several most fruitful discussions with him on ornithological and botanical matters, as well as other more general concerns, such as the survival of the soul after death. Now it is exceedingly difficult to extract the shortest of sentences from him, unless you are talking of the weather, or the crops, or such like. And that in an almost impenetrable dialect, which was not the case before.’

‘Ah,’ Ernest nodded, and wiped his moustache with the corner of his handkerchief. ‘Then we will have to work slowly. Or recruit others. Older men. A pity, a pity. Um, yourself excused, of course. The new chauffeur looks very, um, frail. And the harvest is at its height. Pray for a fine autumn.’

After the Battle of the Marne, which raged through the first and second week of September, and in which our county regiment was not involved, the Germans dug in at the Aisne and trench warfare began. It was around then that my depressions returned. That week of enforced inaction though a spell of unusually hot weather, joined with a certain emptiness about the village heart, and the sight of a small girl outside the village shop weeping for her father ‘as goed off to fight on my birthday, an’ med never come back!’ – these played on my nerves, already as much frayed as my skin was by the many years of tropical sun. A colonial servant is instantly recognisable by his bleached and desiccated hair, his prematurely lined face, the hand-shake from repeated bouts of fever, and frequently (not, I am happy to add, in my case) the redolence of alcoholic addiction. His wife will be a mirror image, if wispier throughout, and with eyes dazed by monsoon-boredom and the company of dolts. Dark moods are an occupational hazard, even more so when these husks return to their mother-country, and find her erring on the side of dampness rather than coolness, as well as changed for the worse – always changed for the worse. The great wheels of the Empire, though in my opinion faltering now, grind her servants as effectively as they do her coffee-beans, but with far less substance to the end
product.
They are somehow emptied of anything but a kind of bitter regret, as if true happiness had only just eluded them in the middle of blinding squares or on the netted verandahs. How much happier that man who remains in his birthplace, and does not take the horizon as his gate to contentment!

My dreams around this time were all of skeletons, turning their heads in the chalk and grinning at me with my wife’s face; not the face I married and loved but the late phantasmagoric countenance of advanced dysentery. When the excavations resumed in the middle of the month with Dart, Ernest, the Squire, the new chauffeur Dick Lock, a white-stubbled handyman named Davey Purdue who was almost my age, and Robert Rose – an unpleasantly supercilious young northerner, who had been a footman up at Ulverton House until the loss of the last Chalmers-Lavery in the Titanic disaster – I had half a mind to give the whole thing up. But I persisted, partly for the sake of the exercise and the fresh air, and partly, curious as it may sound, for the sake of our Chief, whose pale complexion now bore small vein-marks of anxiety across the cheeks, but whom Ernest had persuaded nevertheless to continue with the enterprise. My weakness and my strength had always been an abiding sense of loyalty – even to those whom I could otherwise condemn. And as each scrape of the trowel rang off the flints and was taken by the breeze, a new sense of excitement hovered, despite my nostalgia for Marlers’s quiet quips, and Tom’s wheeze, and Terence Brinn’s silly laugh, and Allun’s nonchalant handling of the Squire’s moods. Stumpy Dick Lock was amiable enough, but Rose’s affected superiority and coarse humour cast a blight on those days, so that the golden presence of the Ineffable rarely stirred and rustled.

About a week after harvest I was walking that same back-path that comes out behind the brick wall of the Manor estate and its effulgent dog-rose, when I glimpsed Cullurne pouring feed into a tin trough. The sheep – an unusual spiral-horned breed the Squire was keen on promulgating – were running towards him and pressed quite happily about his knees as he shook the sack out. The dust hazed him in a copper-coloured aureole as the autumn sun levelled itself through the leaves of the small wood behind. He saw me, and raised his hand in greeting. I thought how clear and simple that life was, how like the ancient shepherds on the slopes of Attica he must look! I walked to the gate, and he came over and
leaned
on the iron. Flecks of bran nestled in his hair and in his stubble; his jacket was buttonless. He rested a boot on the lower cross-piece. His repose was one of energy held in check, his big arms the calmer for the exertion they were used to.

‘Middlin’ weather,’ he said. He sucked on a tooth with a most impressive squeal.

‘Very decent weather, I thought,’ said I, putting his caution down to the usual tendency of rural folk to underplay good fortune.

‘Drought,’ he replied, without a hint of superciliousness. ‘Ben’t be goin’ to rain agin till November, by my finger.’

‘Ah, drought,’ said I, feeling once more the unbridgeable gulf between myself and my surroundings on anything other than aesthetic terms. ‘Of course. Drought.’

‘Put the harvest in your pipe an’ smoke her. Malt-rashed. Atermath ben’t hardly wuth gallin the herse-collar vor. Put her in your pipe too. Cheaper nor twist.’

This being a particularly opaque piece of information, I merely nodded my head, and vowed to join the English Dialect Society forthwith – as I usually vowed when talking to the recently uncompromising Percy Cullurne, or any other provincially-immured inhabitant. Then I remembered a local saying taught me by Marlers, and tried it out, feeling the proverbial coals-to-Newcastle effect, but not willing to let such an extraordinarily suitable slot go unfilled – even though the phrase had struck me as odd, having all the riddling quality of so many rural saws.

‘Yes indeed,’ I ventured. ‘Ahem. What be bad for the hay be good for the termites.’

The effect was unexpected. Cullurne paused a moment, then burst into most uncharacteristic fits of laughter; tears poured from his eyes, and made admirable inroads through the dust and dirt on his cheeks. He slapped the gate, then his knees, and shook his head as the attack subsided, much as he had shaken water from his face in the square. Far from being mortified, I too was affected, and snorted into my fist, my chest heaving in a manner I had not known for months, even years. Eventually I managed to ask him what had been so amiss in my use of local wisdom. Another peal, several repetitions of the saying, each followed by further peals, then a wiping of eyes, a blowing of nose into a
greasy
rag, a shaking of his head, a brief apology, then the illumination: