Jaen

by Betty Burton

  Clergymen have been able to wander and study because tenants like Baxter paid rent and tithes. Because men like Luke and Dan grew more than their own requirements of food and timber. Because women like Annie and Vinnie and Jaen tended beasts, made dairy products, and gave birth to the next generation who would continue to provide for clergymen. Thus the clergymen will continue to be the recipients of acclaim for observing what is under their noses, and for turning nodding flowers, iridescent beetles, and chalk-hill butterflies into printed words.

  In their letters to one another and their notebooks, vicars and friars have written their findings, presumably because they had greater faith in the durability of ink over voice — or perhaps they simply did not know that people other than clergymen had the means of handing on lore and knowledge. Accurate knowledge too, for not the lowliest rural worker would have said that swallows over-wintered beneath pond-mud, they would observe migration as surely as they observed bud-burst. Not understand, but observe and tell the next generation.

  All the years when she was growing up as Jaen Nugent, she had been an observer. She had wandered over the hills around Cantle knowing where white violets grew . . . puzzled about why one plant should be white, watching bees dancing when they returned to the hive . . . wondered why, saw how each month had a predominance of one colour of flower, the white month, the blue, the yellow, gold, red.

  Now that she was Jaen Hazelhurst it was distressing to her that she was no longer free to go wandering out on to the hills, so she grabbed at any chance to work outdoors. The repairs to the cottage at Ham Ford were still not complete, but she did have a sty there and had begun clearing the neglected land around the cottage. It gave her a good reason to be away from Up Teg for hours at a stretch.

  Ham Ford Cottage and its little plot, like Up Teg and the rest of the Hazelhurst cottages, belonged to the Church. Around and about that part of Newton Clare village, Baxter now rented Keeper's, a similar sized plot and cottage in which France and Annie lived at the bottom of Keeper's Hill. Westcott, where Richard and Elizabeth were, adjoined Luke and Martha's One Acre.

  The Up Teg house was on the far side of the shallow River Hammet, and shared Th'ammet, both as a boundary and as a source of good trout, with the Norris Land — which did not belong to the Church. It belonged to young Jim Norris, who it seemed had also been incorporated into Up Teg as surely as his land.

  As soon as Jaen cleared a strip of ground, she planted it, bit by bit, and to find a haze of green where she had sown carrot-seed, or to pull back straw from a head of chard was her most absorbing pleasure. Her feelings for Hanna had not changed, though she had got used to feeding and having the baby with her constantly, but there was always a moment of hesitation whenever it was necessary for her to do anything for the baby.

  The guilt that she felt because of it made her life a misery.

  Yet there was Vinnie, always looking on the bright side of things, but not so bouncy as she had been a year ago and no longer a girl. Vinnie had become a woman who, no matter what trouble came to her, was still able to think 'you poor thing' about another person, and mentally put her arms out to comfort.

  'An't it a pity I never had no milk come in, Jaen. I reckon I should a liked to wet-nurse.' Often when there was an hour between the regular farm work, Vinnie would go down to the place at Ham Ford to help Jaen with clearing the ground. There she would pick up Hanna and walk about talking to her.

  'Your mother's very busy growing stuff for you, so you a just have to do with me giving you a bit of a cuddle up.'

  'She's better with you than me, Vin.'

  'A course she an't. It's just that babes likes summit different to look at. Don't you, little Goldy-girl? See Jaen, she's laughing at her Aunt Vinnie's funny face. An't that right, Goldy-girl? I'm summit funny and different.'

  And so Vinnie would take Hanna close to her and the baby would respond to arms that were less tense and a voice with no fear.

  Occasionally during that spring and summer, Jaen got almost to the point of telling Vinnie how she felt about Hanna, but how could she say to another girl of her own age, almost a sister, 'Vin, I can't take to Hanna. There's something wrong with me that makes me not want to be her mother. There's times when I would do almost anything if she wasn't here.' How could she even hint at such a deviant side to her nature, to such warping, worrying frigidity towards her own child? how . . . to Vinnie of all women? who had wanted Norry so much yet had . . .

  Had . . .

  The knowledge that Jaen and Annie had about Norry's quiet death was now buried so deep that it no longer even flickered behind tell-tale eyes if his name came up, or somebody mentioned 'last Christmas.'

  It was just the same with Annie. Perhaps worse. At least Vinnie did not have the spectre of 'barren woman' hovering about her. Nor could Jaen talk to her mother — of all women, Bella Nugent was the last that Jaen could open her heart to . . . no, not the last person, Nance Hazelhurst was she.

  Ju. She could have talked to Ju. The only one in the world she could have talked to about the terrible thing that was wrong.

  If they were still at home — real home, sleeping close, arms flung about one another in the close little chamber over the kitchen, or curled up together in the apple-sweet roof space, there Ju might have helped unwind her sister's hard and tangled knot of emotions. Ju, who could run rings round anyone for knowingness, brightness and understanding, was not often free to visit Up Teg. When Ju and their mother did come on visits, it was with a kind of formality almost the reverse of servant girls visiting home on high days and holy days.

  There was no question of Jaen going over to Cantle. Dan had said 'no'. No arguing. No! First grandchild be blowed. If Mother Nugent wanted to look at her grandchild, she had a good pair of feet and a donkey. Jaen's emotional fatigue was just too great these days to even begin to argue with Dan.

  19

  It was late September when The Boys finally finished work on the Ham Ford Cottage, and Jaen and Dan moved into it soon after. The day that she lit a fire on her own hearth Jaen felt happier than for many a long month.

  Seeing her pleased look, Dan said, as he had when she had sat with him behind the swaying oxen on their wedding day, that they should be all right when they got going on their own.

  Jaen still had to make her contribution to work at the main farm, which was a ten-minute walk directly across the fields — twice that distance when the land was wet and she had to take the pathway. There was, too, the extra washing now that their clothes were not done as part of Kath and Myrtle's chores. And, although they took some of their meals at the main farm if they were working near, Jaen's was the only pair of hands at Ham Ford to do the cooking and cleaning, the only shoulders to carry water pails, the only arms to carry bavins for the oven, and cordwood to the hearth.

  But. There were such advantages. Less of Nance to tuck up her lip with dissatisfaction thus making Jaen all fingers and thumbs, less of Baxter pushing at his food suspiciously if he was in a bad mood, less of the sudden flare up of tempers.

  There was space.

  Only three people drawing breath under one roof was a luxury Jaen had taken for granted when she lived at Croud Cantle, and had found most hard to adapt to in the ménage at Up Teg.

  There was quiet.

  Even Dan was less prone to give voice to his opinions and denigration of other farmers, when there was only Jaen across the table from him.

  There was for Jaen a partial return of her dignity.

  Something of the kind of privacy she had been brought up to accept as normal, and only later realized was peculiar to the female environment of Croud Cantle.

  There were no people sleeping only inches away behind a lath and plaster partition.

  On the first night in the little room under the tarred beams, Jaen smiled up at the mice and birds settling into the thatch for winter, as Dan reached the climax of his right to satisfaction.

  They would be all right.

  If she held on to
that belief . . .

  If she could keep Hanna at the breast for another year . . .

  She and Hanna had never settled down to the business of feeding — not like Martha who carried little Rachael about almost as an extension of her own body, or like Elizabeth had been with Nicholas, easy as cats with kittens — but Jaen knew that whilst she was still feeding Hanna, she was safe, and would not have to face having another child who would rebuke her a dozen times a day for her unnaturalness.

  Given enough time with space and quiet and being on their own, Jaen thought that they would be all right.

  And so it was, on their first night in the little cottage, that she could smile up at the mice in the roof.

  And so it was that Jaen Hazelhurst learned that to believe something is not enough.

  By All Saints' Day, she suspected that she was carrying another child.

  By St Andrew's Day, she was sure.

  When she realized it, she fell into a well of despair, but eighteen years of training by a straight-backed mother who despised weakness and any kind of behaviour that smacked of 'making a peep-show of yourself' had veneered Jaen's behaviour with pleasantness and her countenance with cheerfulness.

  Only Vinnie and Hanna sensed the sham.

  Hanna began again the bouts of grizzling and whining that became worse now than they had ever been.

  Vinnie thought that Jaen was trying to hide physical troubles, fatigue perhaps from all the extra work she had now they had the cottage.

  'You look tired out. I'll see to my Goldy-girl for an hour, I haven't got nothing to do till supper. You put your feet up and have a bit of a rest.'

  Jaen held back her automatic response: 'Oh, there an't nothing wrong with me.' Vinnie probably had plenty to do, but Jaen was in such need to be on her own that she let Vinnie sling Hanna in a shawl and take her off.

  She does not put her feet up, but goes out of the cottage and follows the path beside the Hammet and closes her mind.

  The Hammet runs shallow, filtered to a brilliant clarity by chalk-hills. Although oak leaves still hang on tenaciously, rustling, falling singly, rocking as they go, the rest of the trees and hedges have given up most of their foliage. The air is as clear as the water.

  It is a year and a half that she has been Mistress Hazelhurst, and there have been very few hours when there have not been people, people, people, coming and going, upstairs, downstairs, all about the yard, down in the meads and fields and in every room at Up Teg, walking, talking, clattering, arguing, banging and clanging. People.

  Sometimes, in the dairy, there was an hour with only Vinnie there, but that was not outside. Now like now. She could cry with the relief of being alone.

  She does not know why she has always had such need to walk away from dwelling-places and people. No reasonable person walks the raikes and paths over such rolling great hills as Tradden or Beacon unless they have a necessary journey. The gentry will sometimes ride out for pleasure or to hunt, but it can be nothing but eccentricity that sent a hardworking farm girl wandering out, looking closely at every live thing that has its place on the chalk downlands of the Cantle Valley. And when Ju was old enough, Jaen had taken her too.

  Bella Nugent's girls is queer, and no mistake.

  Jaen listens to the crisp underfoot sound of Ju and herself going along Tradden Raike. A flash of dull red.

  Look Ju! See him — it's that woodpecker.

  The day is mild for November, but the sky in the west is becoming as clear as Th'ammet. Blue and icy. The moist spongy compost gives up the scent of fern, an aroma of decaying vegetation that smells much like the smell given off by new spring shoots.

  Dead leaves smell lovely, don't they Ju? Why do our flesh smell so bad when 'tis rotten?

  Jaen smiles, vaguely, momentarily aware that she is closing her mind to what is back there, waiting for her return. The cob-walls, limed . . . white. Shaggy thatch, unmatched reeds . . . the newfound, soon-lost quiet.

  See, Ju? The alders and hazels got their catkins showing like they always do, even before all the other leaves are down.

  The warmth is going from the day. In Th'ammet, with a ripple of its filmy tail, a sleek trout gives itself away to Jaen's observant eyes. She bends to sit on a rotten tree stump, slow careful movement, but it sees her and vanishes.

  Don't be impatient, Ju, he'll come back. It's a good trout place, just where the water swirls away like that.

  Her eye is caught by bunched buttons on graceful stems, sulphur-coloured toadstools growing from the decaying log.

  Her closed mind does not inhibit knowledge gathered like grains of wheat since she was a child. Among the gleanings of seventeen years, some bits of knowledge, tagged red.

  Laburnum. Nightshade. Yew. Arum. Death-cap. Hebona. She knows the rules. Don't never put one near your mouth. Don't never touch. They a kill you stone dead.

  The colour is vivid and magnetic. Jaen reaches to break off one of the caps. The sun is low and clear and frost is not many hours away. Tomorrow the sulphur caps will be black slime. She holds the brilliant cap and sees tomorrow . . . white, smooth, pure. The miserable muddle of her life obliterated, like a midden beneath a heavy fall of snow. The nightshade thought. The death-cap idea.

  Ju!

  Foetid. Rank. Rot and putrefaction rise from the pale gills of the fungus, and for a second time the trout that had returned to its place, darts away as Jaen retches violently, again and again. She expels nothing in her convulsions — except the infected notion of escape that the beautiful sulphur offered her.

  It's time I got home. Vinnie will be back with the baby. Dan won't be late, he knows I set a rabbit stew over the fire.

  She retraces her steps alongside Th'ammet.

  An isolated clump of hog-weed rattles and its few remaining seeds fall into the stream that flows south. As she walks, she sees their journey behind her eyes. She follows them bobbing and swirling, floating in still water then being blown on until one seed beaches high and dry and begins to grow into another isolated clump, where the Dunnock Brook flows past Croud Cantle — home.

  Ju will be seeing to the goats and donkeys.

  Mother will be . . .? In Jaen's vision, Bella Nugent is always stumping away from the deep well with heavy pails hanging from a yoke, straining against the weight to keep her back poker-straight.

  Jaen reads the message in Bella's clenched jaw and frown-lines.

  You made your bed, my girl, so you must lie in it.

  Back at the cottage, Vinnie has not yet returned with Hanna. Jaen puts the bellows to the glowing logs, stirs the rabbit broth and lights a few tapers.

  20

  More and more, Hanna's grizzling frayed Jaen's nerves till she would put her hands over her ears and shout, 'Stop it — stop it — stop it!' making matters worse and the cries louder; then she would hear a note of distress in the cries and try to pacify the baby by rocking and patting.

  Sometimes it was as much as she could do not to pick her up and shake some sense into her. Then, when the child fell asleep with a tear glistening on her golden lashes, Jaen would almost collapse with remorse.

  'I don't mean it. It's just . . . it's just . . .'

  Then Hanna started getting teeth and with them the wretchedness of the red-gum; she seemed to cry for half the day and most of the night. Nights were the worst. Jaen began to dread the child's first whimper after Dan had gone to sleep. He would turn furiously and pull the covers over his ears. Hanna, half asleep, would begin to make miserable distressed sounds. Moving gently so as not to disturb Dan further, Jaen would dip a finger into a salve Nance had made up, and rub the hot little gums. In spite of Nance's assurance that it had worked on every babe she'd had to do with, it never worked with Hanna, and every muscle in Jaen's body seemed to stiffen as, fretful from tiredness and in pain, the baby awoke fully and began to cry again.

  'God and damnation! Why don't you stop her?'

  'I tried everything. She don't never seem tostop.'

  'Why don'
t you give her some of Mother's stuff?'

  'I did. I don't know what to do. Perhaps there's something bad wrong with her.'

  Many times recently, Jaen suspected that any day they would discover that Hanna had some defect that nobody had noticed, deafness, blindness, or that she would devleop the neck growth and brain fever that caused madness. Always deep within her the feeling that she would be paid out by God for the day when she had hoped the baby would be dead. Now she had added to His black list those thoughts when she had contemplated the poisonous toadstools.

  God never let you get away with sins like that. Little Laurence had died, then Norry — she sometimes wondered if that wasn't the way God was punishing her, showing her what her sinfulness meant, letting her see Martha's and Vinnie's sadness over babies they had never, for a single second, wanted to be dead.

  'Well, I can't stand it no longer. You had better do summit about it, I got a day's work ahead of me, I needs my sleep.'

  Jaen would wrap herself and Hanna in a shawl and go down and sit in the inglenook rocking and dozing.

  December, and getting on to three months into her pregnancy, she steeled herself to tell Dan, choosing a time when they had all had a night of undisturbed sleep and he was just. leaving for Up Teg.

  'You can tell them up there I shall be a mother again come June time.'

  He held the door ajar for a second, his thumbnail white he gripped the latch so tightly. Then he slammed off out.

  And Jaen watched him go off with long-legged long strides. Watched his large body, his broad shoulders, strong arms which she had thought, when she had first met and loved him, would buttress and protect her for ever. Now, seeing him thumping his boots into the frozen ground, Jaen knew that he had never spoken truer words than the ones that still seemed to be hanging about the porch.