by Betty Burton
'I love you, Jaen — there an't no oddsing that.'
She sees that his love is not unfleshly.
She experiences again the relief she felt that first time when she had reached out to Dan, but this time pure and unphysical.
'Then we both be sinners, France.'
Jaen's next son does not stir when she returns his kiss and so breaks her promise to the spirit of Brack.
6
OYSTERS AND STOUT ALE
For the first year or two, life for Annie and Betrisse was harder than it had ever been at Up Teg. The main work to be had in Emworthy was that which surrounded the fishing fleet of cutters, smacks and flatties, and the importation of French wines. The importation business was not one that a newcomer would be aware of or would be employed in, it being carried on unobtrusively and with look-outs posted. However, those who were engaged in that business were proud of their reputation as handling only the finest wines from the best vineyards of France, and guarded it jealously.
Therefore, Annie had no option but to take whatever work she could get from the oyster people. Menial jobs, heavy humping of baskets, sharp shells, salt water. Annie was used to hard labour in all weathers, but now she became familiar with working in lashing winds and freezing sea-spray.
In the early days, she was often given work because of Betrisse: those who employed her got four hands for the price of two. The only pence a ten-year-old might earn was from petty jobs, but her labour added to Annie's made better economics because they were able to get more work. At first Betrisse was indignant that nobody would give her separate work.
'I an't a child. I used to do proper work back There. They'm just getting me for nothing. It an't fair!'
'Nothing an't fair, Bet, which means you got to use your noddle. If you can't beat them, you got to join up with them — and then beat them at their game. Don't worry, it'll come.'
Although Betrisse did not know just what Annie meant, she had complete confidence in her. Ever since that day after the christening party, when Annie had stood up to Luke, when she had looked like a lunatic, or a wild animal, or an avenging angel, according to how you saw her; ever since the day when she threatened to slice Luke with the sickle she held over him if he did not stop the strapping; ever since the night when Annie had broken into the hen-house, where Luke had left his audacious daughter to learn her lesson on docility, subjection and filial obedience, and Betrisse and Annie had begun their long walk to the coast — ever since then, Betrisse never questioned Annie's faith in their future.
When they got to Emworthy, they had only enough money left from working their way down country to provide lodgings for a few days, but they never wanted for a bite to eat or a roof over their heads. Often it was of the very basic, but sufficient to keep them going.
Most of the work came in with the tide. Annie would wait about, looking for somebody wanting a pair of hands.
'I'm strong and I'll do anything — and you gets the girl for nothing. You an't got nothing to lose giving us a try.'
They had come there on a whim, on a fancy and upon the image that Annie had kept in her mind and then shared with Betrisse. Sometimes when the sky was bruised, steel-grey with aproaching snow, smudged with mustard-yellow and with that same yellow on the horizon, when the sea was flat and icy, Annie would take a moment from her work and look, then smiling broadly say, 'Still like living by the glitterish sea, Bet?'
Betrisse would return the smile. 'Better'n they old turnip fields back There.'
And for them, it was.
They kept their promise to one another and never complained of their situation. When they were reduced to the meanest shelter they would nullify any discomfort by talking about and planning for better times. They were great planners, great talkers about what they were going to do. If on some January night they were chilled to the marrow, they would sleep in every garment they possessed and take warmth from one another, Annie wrapping her arms about the girl, talking low until they were warm enough to sleep. Annie never talked down to Betrisse, but asked her opinion, and took notice of what the girl said.
'Well, think about it. Don't say yes just because I thinks we ought to — 'tis your life as well. You got to learn to stand up for yourself.'
Of course they did complain and grumble, but their expressions of discontent were only over things like being taken advantage of in their work, or the fleas in the lodging-house; for the rest they were happy together.
Neither of them ever forgot what had brought them to the coast.
After their initiation into the shellfish business by the way of drudge, they graduated to other work, no more congenial when the winds cut their cheeks and salt-water stung the hundreds of small shell-cuts on their fingers, but better paid.
When the fleet returned, some of the vessels tied up in an area known as The Slipper, close to where Annie and Betrisse lodged. The catch would be landed, and the sorters would start on it. It was at this work that Annie and Betrisse were best. They became skilful and fast at sorting scallops from oysters. And Betrisse became particularly fast and good at judging which of the oysters were ready to be laid in the ponds for marketing, and which needed to be sent down-harbour for fattening.
As well as the better pay, the smacksmen always had fish that had been dredged up with the shellfish, to give away. They lived simply but well. Fish seven days out of seven, hardly ever two days the same — frizzled on a hot griddle, speared over glowing wood, stewed in a dish of cider and, their favourite, a suet pudding containing a pool of steaming oysters at its heart.
Although they had come to this busy little village on a fancy, they could scarcely have discovered a more suitable place as a refuge. Because of Emworthy's second, illicit, industry, once she was known and seen not to have any business with the Excise men, Annie was accepted. Nobody wanted to know where she was from or why she had come there. Annie Saint John and her girl were good workers who kept their noses out of other people's affairs, and abided by the established rules of the community. If a cutter brought in net bags that held a catch of bottles as well as shellfish, Annie ignored both origin and destination.
Here, they were as safe from discovery as they would be anywhere. If strangers came, the word went round and those who wished to could dissolve into the background until it was known who the newcomers were, or they left. No one who was the least threat to Mistress Saint John and her girl ever came. And had they done so, after a year or two only a close member of the Up Teg family might have recognized Annie.
It seemed that the only feature that she retained of her Mistress Hazelhurst identity was her short stature and her upright carriage, but even there she had lost her stiff-necked and haughty stamp. She walked freely with long strides, swinging her arms. She had come to terms with her maternal longings — she was not free of them and would ask to hold any baby — but she had Betrisse. In spite of all her long hours of hard work, Annie's silhouette became fuller and more rounded.
'Lor, a diet of fish and stout ale must suit me. I begins to look like a loaf.'
Loaf or not, there were men who looked twice and thrice at Annie Saint John, and in her mid-thirties, an age when women were often staid matrons with as much gum as tooth, Annie looked ten years younger than they. And if a man should pay her a rough, smacksman's compliment — a bottle of French wine perhaps, or what remained of the specially baked sea-bread, or a share of his bed, she would turn down the last good-naturedly but accept the two former in the friendly spirit offered.
People liked Annie Saint John.
And if, by the time that they had truly exchanged husbandry for fishwife skills, Annie was scarcely recognizable as her former self, the child Betrisse no longer existed at all.
Betrisse Saint John, by the age of twelve, was a head taller than Annie. By the age of fourteen head and shoulders taller. She had developed into a woman with a small high bosom and round hips. Between one winter and the next, she had grown so that she and Annie were no longer able to
share a pair of boots or pattens.
'Lord, you'm getting to be a Hazelhurst, Bet.'
That name had never been said aloud more than could be counted on the fingers of one hand in the years since they left Newton Clare.
'Annie! Don't you never say that.'
'No. I wasn't thinking. But look at it like this, that if you was going to inherit anything from them, it might as well be their looks.'
'And have to bend down to get into a room?'
'Think about it as being able to look down on ordinary folk.'
Betrisse pulled herself up to her full height and patted Annie's head playfully. 'Do you remember Vinnie's wedding?'
'I can guess what you'm going to say,' Annie said.
'Go on then.'
'About you standing on the trestle?'
Betrisse laughed. 'Was it that plain to see?'
'The old man lifted you up and told you to say something, and that look you sometimes get came on you.'
'What look?'
'Your "No! I an't going to" look. With your little lips pinched in defiance.'
'I had gone to him to tell him what a beautiful wedding it was, and he wanted me to stand up and tell everybody and I wasn't going to. Then I looked around and saw everything like it must have been for Them — looking down from their great heighth.'
'And you started to make a display of yourself.'
'Oh Lord yes — I dare say I did.' Betrisse went quiet for a few moments.
From time to time, they had made little moves towards talking of the past, but Annie had always felt it better to change the subject because of the agitation the child always began to display. Now the time seemed right to talk.
Last winter they had moved out of lodgings and now rented a narrow half of a narrow house close by The Slipper — a room which was virtually a scullery with a hearth and a row of hooks in the open beams. There was a small room above, reached by a climb of rickety steps.
The house belonged to a smacksman, Edward Scantlebury, whose aged father, and Scantlebury himself when ashore, lived in the front kitchen. The arrangement suited them all well, for the smacksman was more often than not at sea and let them have the rooms for a small rent in return for providing the old father with a meal, and keeping an eye out for him.
Four walls that they could call their own, were what Annie and Betrisse needed to allow them to feel that they now truly belonged to the village and the community of shellfishers. That a smacksman, who might have business to keep from the knowledge of the Excise men, accepted Annie and her girl as tenants, put a seal of approval upon them.
Now it was summer when they could usually take their food and eat it by The Slipper, where there was always something going on. Their new home was not far from their old lodgings, where they had long ago ceased to cause comment upon their habit of eating by the sea whenever the weather was fair enough.
It was probably because of their new-found security in the rented rooms, and because they had an established routine of work and leisure, that they felt safe enough to venture into the past. Or perhaps it was that they lived like sisters — true, twenty years between them, but certainly equals.
'Do you know, Annie, since this last spring, I've found myself thinking about standing on the trestle more than once. I suppose it might be because I've shot up tall all of a sudden, and I remember that feeling of looking down. There's plenty of men I'm on level eye with now. You don't think it's possible for a woman to grow as big as . . .' she faltered, 'Annie, I'm not like my father, am I?'
'We'm all a bit like our fathers, Bet, and it's foolish to say we an't.'
'I couldn't abear to be like him.'
'He wasn't bad. Nobody is.'
'When I was little I used to . . .' She found difficulty putting into words her store of formless memories and emotions. '. . . He used to be nice. It was Him who always made so much of me. More than Her. I could get things out of Him. If I showed off, he used to laugh often as not — sometimes when She clouted me, He would tell her that it was just high spirits. I shan't never understand how He could . . .'
Annie too could not understand how he could bring himself to beat the tender child so much with hard leather, but she did not want the girl to grow up with a ghoul locked inside her — as the lascivious-featured ghoul of her own father was locked in her own memory, jumping out upon her from time to time. She had often thought that he would not have had power to terrorize her half so much if she could have told somebody what she had seen her father do to that girl.
'Perhaps Luke was afraid.'
'Afraid!'
'Oh, I an't defending him, 'twadden ordinary chastisement, there was a beast in him that day. But he must a felt shamed. There he was at the Christening supper, in front of the whole pack of them, and you had shouted at the old man, and you wouldn't take no notice of your mother, then Luke told you to stop and you wouldn't take no notice of him. And then when you ran off and nobody could find you. I dare say I wasn't the only one who was frightened to death that night at the thought we might a found you drowned in Th'ammet.'
She closed her eyes and shook her head at the memory.
'It don't excuse what he did to you, but I do reckon he might a been afeard of what you might grow up to be.'
The sun, sinking into Portsmouth Harbour, glittered on the little triangular waves where the sea was riffled up by the breeze. That same breeze which carried from the dunes a heavy scent of evening primrose. Betrisse, watching a chaos of gulls she had tempted into riot with a morsel of bread, seeing inwards. Almost dispassionately now, she could retrieve the scene in which the small Betrisse's hiding-place had been discovered next day.
'It's the coldest I ever was that night.'
'Luke was beside himself when they couldn't find you.'
'So he beat me black and blue.'
'Like I said, when people gets afraid, they do some things they regrets after. I dare say he leaped ahead in his mind and saw you when you was twenty standing up to them, saying "shan't!" Men like Luke has a great fear of women.'
'Ha!'
'Tis true. Dan's the same, and the old man. It's a like they'm not sure of theirselves.'
Betrisse raised her eyebrows in exaggerated disbelief.
'Oh, I know all about they being domineering and that, and I wonder whether that an't just the trouble. If you watches men with a herd of beasts, they'm all shout and stick, making panic where there wasn't none, but women a get pigs penned or cows into a barn in half the time by just telling them "girrup, girrup". If a herd runs off when a girl's in charge of moving them, it don't make much matter to her, but if it's a lad, he a lose face and told he an't no better than a wench.'
'I don't see what that got to do with it.'
'I don't hardly know how to explain, but right from when they'm little, boys gets showed how they got to be top dog as you might say, they gets a stick put in their hand as soon as they'm big enough.'
'So did I.'
'Ah, but you wasn't told you was King o' the Castle. And I reckon it's because they'm told that, and that women is lesser creatures because they can't provide for theirselves . . .'
'Like you and me.' Betrisse got an answering wry smile from her aunt.
'Ah . . . but you got to see how it all goes together. Even though they sees every day of their lives that there an't much they can do as we can't, they been given the responsibility for us.'
'And that's why . . . my . . .why Luke leathered me like that.'
'I think it's bid fair it could be. There was a little bit of a thing like you — a girl — his daughter — defying him before everybody, and he was supposed to be King o' the Castle.'
'And you reckon he beat me because he was afraid?' Disbelief in Betrisse's tone.
'I don't know, but I've found myself doing it before now. I once near broke the back of a dog what turned on me — a yard dog who'd always been a docile old thing, then one day he bared his teeth at me and I turned on him. I turned on him because I wa
s afraid of what might happen. I never thought about it at the time, but remembering how I felt, it was because I thought a lesser creature was out of my control — and I panicked with fear.'
7
AT HAM FORD COTTAGE
When things began to go wrong, Jaen knew that she had only herself to blame. She thought she might return to Brack and try to regain the sense of being protected, but time and again she heard her mother's words: 'You made your own bed, so you must lay on it.'
And she said to herself that it was true.
It had been in her own hands to have said no to Dan; he didn't take her by force, did he? She had wanted him. Same with France, she hadn't done anything to stop him when he said that he loved her. At the time, all that she could think about was the pleasure of that moment. After . . .? Afterwards she had to lie on her bed of guilt and anger at herself, bed of regret and misery at her own weakness. Why was she so weak? She dipped herself in a pool of guilt about Ju, Dan, the Child . . . France.
Then, over a period of time it began to occur to her that there must be a flaw in her, something born in her.
That must be it, a thing in her nature that she could not control. When she thought of it, it frightened her in the way that dark, lonely places are frightening, where an unimaginable creature lurks, waiting to leap.
Perhaps that was why their mother was so stiff and tight, always having to keep a hold of herself, never daring to let herself go. Was it something they was born with, like their red hair? Was that it?
She began to think about Ju, and the times when they had both done things for no reason than that they wanted to, on the spur of the moment, not thinking of the consequences — just because they wanted to.
They had always been wandering off together, suddenly deciding to go to the old ruins on Winchester Hill, or somewhere like that, wherever their capricious thoughts led them, and they would stay in their fantasy world forgetting time and work until reality returned and made their hearts leap. Then they would race back home, and work twice as fast and hard to put things right.