Jaen

by Betty Burton

  'Don't you ever feel guilty, France?'

  'What about?' He knows. He smiles. She asks him frequently.

  'You know what I mean. If we should be discovered together. Every time I come here, I thinks to myself, "Luck can't go on for ever. This is going to be the time when Dan a be watching us and will burst out of the bushes."'

  'Don't that add pleasure?'

  'No!'

  As they come near to the edge of Cuckoo Bushes, he runs his hands over the shape of her bosom, as he always does on parting, and then feels her lips with the ball of his thumb.

  'You bewitched me, Sister.' He gives her a teasing little tug towards the path that he will take to get back to his flock on the downs. 'Come. Walk up the track with me. And let's keep walking and talking till we have left them all.'

  'And live in the hedge-bottoms?'

  'It'd be more like living than it is now.'

  'Not for a woman.'

  She means not for a woman with bad legs, and with things gone wrong with her body that a man's body will never experience, though he has contributed to their cause. But as the woman who ties on a red scarf, and is so desirable that she bewitched her husband's brother into a sin against his Church, she stops short of the truth.

  Although he often sleeps without a roof over him, it is she who understands the reality of hedge-bottoms. She has often wondered how and where Annie and Betrisse live. Especially more recently when she has seen the starveling families who daily pass her window as they trudge along Ham Lane in their search for some work to alleviate their dire poverty.

  In her imagination she has seen them among the agricultural workers who trail throughout the country looking for work — and there is none. When they lose their hiring, they lose the crumbling walls and broken thatch that has been their shelter. They know the hedge-bottoms.

  Times are hard.

  And when have times not been, for the people who eat their bread with earth on their hands? Jaen does not have to dig far into her memory for the fact of thin childhood meals, turnip stew and little else for weeks on end.

  Lately, times are harder than ever.

  Even protected women like Jaen can see that.

  Along Ham Lane flows the growing stream of dispossessed cottagers, of uneconomic estate workers, of paupers who until recently were cowherds or dairymaids.

  Men who have prided themselves on a straight furrow, or a well-laid hedge. Women who were mistresses of ten fine skills and could make a rabbit stretch to feed a dozen. Hard-working families, holding about them their last shreds of decency, before they become infected by the widespread rumour that they are feckless and work-shy. Then, when the infection catches and saps them, then they hide in hedges and leap upon a person with whom they have no real quarrel, except possession of a coin that will buy some bread or wheat gleanings.

  Are they more alive because occasionally they indulge their passion in the hedge-bottoms? True, France is never so aroused as when he meets her in damp mists or chill frosts.

  Jaen's fantasy though, of the gentle flock-master who says he is bewitched by her, does not include walking away and sleeping in hedge-bottoms.

  'The Hazelhursts have never gone short of much; even when times is hard they always seem to do all right. There's always that to think of . . .'

  France can see that she is beginning to withdraw from reality as she does sometimes.

  This is when he loves her the most. His passion that was first aroused by her pretty femaleness and her fecundity when compared with his barren wife, became spiced with the idea that that very passion was against the Church and God. But now the passion was changed to love — gentle, compassionate love that he had not known to exist until he was a man in his middle years.

  She does not blink, and though she walks surely she looks to the side and sees something about eighteen inches from her and chews the inside of her mouth.

  'Ju's learning village children to read, back home. She's got a room in the village and sits them on benches.'

  He wants to take her with him to the top of Brack where nothing can harm her.

  She returns to the present and looks at France. 'I should a give anything to a done that.'

  'Read?'

  'I could do numbers in my head right from when I was little. Mother showed me how to count up to a hundred. At first she used to put eggs in rows ready for the market and tell me 'one,' or 'two,' 'three,' and by the time Ju was born I had found out how to go on after a hundred.'

  Her gaze is upon events and people France cannot see.

  'People on Blackbrook market used to get me to cast up numbers of things. They'd say things such as "if I had seven hens and they lay every day for a month, how many eggs?" and I could tell them straight off almost without thinking.' She smiles at the distant child. 'And they'd say, be that June or February? and I should tell them that February hens don't lay well and take away a number from the June total. And they'd tell Mother that I was a little marvel.'

  She sees the unfathomable expression of Bella and interprets as she did at the time — dissaproval of a child getting above herself.

  'Eggs was always easy — I could picture them, in rows.'

  She watches Jaen the child who stands with her mother, Bella Nugent, selling the produce of Croud Cantle, and receiving a tit-bit from a housewife or a trader as a reward for demonstrating her skill at casting up rows of imagined eggs.

  'I should a loved to learn how to write down numbers.'

  France sees her drifting away again to whatever world inside her mind she returns to.

  'Ju said he wasn't no good as a farmer. That was the worst she could a said to him. That's what made him say she wasn't never to come again. She said he was a fool to talk of putting every foot of land down to one crop.'

  'So he is. But you can't tell Dan. Nobody can.'

  'Ju did.'

  She picks up the bundle of firewood he had made ready for her.

  'I don't know what the Child's going to do.'

  'She a survive.'

  'I don't know what I shall do.'

  'Talk to the girl. Like she was your sister.'

  Walking back to his flock he thinks about the red-gold heads that have come in from Cantle, disturbing him. First the one, then the proud striding sister, the third is still not a woman but he can imagine what she will become.

  Nell Gritt's shelter is not much better than a hedge-bottom. He goes to her after dark when her hair could be any colour he likes to imagine it.

  17

  From that Christmas, there was no contact between Jaen and Hanna and Croud Cantle — the place they both still thought of as home.

  Whenever a packman called at the Ham Ford cottage, or a journeyman was engaged to do something at Up Teg, Jaen always asked if they had been through Cantle recently. Had they done so, then she would feed greedily upon the morsels of information. It was a travelling butcher, Gilly Gilson, who had been 'doing' the pigs at Croud Cantle ever since Jaen was a girl, who told her about the deterioration of her mother.

  'Ah now, miz Jaen, you mu'nt upset yourself; we all has to get old.'

  Mother old? Yes. How strange that Mother should be old.

  Realizing that Hanna held a headful of memories of life at home since she had left, Jaen tried to get solace from trying to make her tell about them. At first Hanna gave short, factual answers, but gradually she began to gain comfort in talking about her years there.

  As Hanna grew out of childhood, she grew into a relationship with her mother. It had never occurred to the daughter, before Jaen began relating stories of her childhood years, that the life that Hanna had led on the Croud Cantle smallholding was in many ways a repeat of that of her mother's.

  'Did you used to go to Harvest Home up at the Estate?'

  'You mean in that big barn at Manor Farm?'

  'Where there's a cock-pit outside?'

  'I never liked cock-fighting. Grandmother likes it, but I never.'

  'Nor I. If they chose to
fight in the barnyard, that's their affair, but to put them together where they haven't got a chance of honest retreat, then I thinks that an't fair.'

  'And did you dance the maypole on Cantle Green?'

  Oh bride, oh bride come visit this cott,

  The door stands wide, come stay,

  And bring to us your fair-maid's wish . . .

  'I was May Queen once. It must of been about the year of 'seventy-five. It seem a hundred years since. Ju was little and wanted a crown as well, so I made her one and she was cross because it still had some prickles on it.'

  Hanna picks up her small brother, George, who has been absorbed in rolling small logs across the floor, and waits patiently for her mother's gaze to return.

  Oh neighbour, neighbour a token I ask

  And I'll make a wish for thee.

  But if I leave with empty hands,

  Thou'll get no good luck from me,

  O-oh no good luck from me.

  They talked only when Dan, and those of her brothers old enough, had gone out into the fields or up to the main farm. Hanna now did most of the work that village girls had in the past been hired to do, so that for hours at a stretch, there was often only Gregory and George in the cottage with her and Jaen.

  Hanna adored George. Although he was a real Hazelhurst in every other respect, he had hair like his great-grandfather's — always one in every generation they said — like France too, the tight crimp and curls which Hanna loved to twist about her finger as she played with him.

  When he was born Hanna had been at her most miserable, then at the moment when she happened to be alone with Jaen and she had seen the baby slide easily into the world, the icy lump of resentment against Jaen began to melt. Hanna felt unique. Only she in the entire world had seen George appear. She laid claim to him. As she wrapped him in a cloth, Hanna felt such a surge of emotion that the tears which she had witheld for months fell upon him.

  Of all Jaen's children, he was the one most petted. As Jude had once carried Hanna about in a shawl slung round her, so Hanna carried George. Young Dan'l, who was becoming aware of his responsibilities as future head of the family, did a fair job of making a rocking-crib for George and so took a bit more interest than he had in the others, and would sometimes work the rocker.

  As well as being the most petted, this baby was the most content. Jaen was more at ease with hi n than with the other six, he was not wet-nursed or pushed aside by a new sibling. In part this was due to Nance Hazelhurst.

  'Look, Gel,' she said. 'Six sons is about all any man can expect. And you got a girl too, which is more than I had. If you wants to keep your health and strength, you can't keep on having all these little'ns so quick one after the other.'

  'I don't get myself that way.' A rare flash of spirit for Jaen.

  'Nor don't you seem to do much about it.'

  Jaen did not reply at first.

  'Didn't your mother tell you nothing about oils and herbs, or is she one to wait till it happens then jump off the table and hope for the best?'

  Nance thought, 'I don't know why I'm bothering to ask — Bella Nugent don't look like she even knows what causes big bellies.'

  Jaen had felt ill at ease with Nance Hazelhurst from the day she arrived at Up Teg. Bella Nugent was no easy woman to have for a mother but at least Jaen knew where she was with her. But with Nance, Jaen was never quite sure how to respond. If Bella Nugent was straight-backed and forbidding, at least she was always like that. Nance Hazelhurst, however, could at different times be prim or coarse, harsh or maudlin, and her darting, newt-like way of coming and going, Jaen found disconcerting.

  'No. But Vinnie

  'Vinnie's mother was reckoned to be a spell-maker, so you don't want to put too much faith in what Vinnie tells you.'

  'I don't think Dan would . . .'

  'What our Dan likes nor don't like an't the question . . . Anyway, don't you worry about that. I a deal with our Dan. I tell'd him before that you looked like you had thin blood. Now you got legs. I a tell our Dan, don't you worry about that. If you has any more babes, you'm going to end up with green-water and before he knows what happened, you'm going to be six feet under the churchyard.'

  Once, long, long ago it seemed, breathing mulled fumes on Jaen's wedding day, Nance Hazelhurst had put her dry, brown arms around Jaen. This time, unfortified, she did not feel sentimental and was aware of her son's wife's many faults, so she simply laid a hand on Jaen's knee.

  'Baxter don't say much, but he've changed his mind about you. He a go to his final resting place easier in his heart that there's all them little boys to carry the Hazelhurst name. You been a good girl, but you don't have to keep on. Don't try none of Vinnie's potions, a inch of fleece off a newborn lamb soaked with goose-grease or good oil will gid you a good chance of being all right.'

  She passed on to Jaen a technique of protection that has served women longer than bronze has served the men. Then she patted Jaen's hand and darted off, leaving Jaen feeling foolish that after all these years of being a married woman, with her own place and children, Nance had spoken to her as though she were a girl. Nevertheless, she took heed of Nance so that George remained her last baby.

  'Child, I'm going to tell you something your grandmother ought to a told me, and what all girls of your age ought to know so we can do summit to look after ourselves. And I expects you to tell any daughters you gets one day.'

  Hanna listened, nodding gravely — as she listened to whatever fact or fancy Jaen offered.

  18

  CHANGES

  Scantlebury's

  Within a year Betrisse Saint John's accent was not, as Captain Jetsam had vowed, fit for society, for she still retained her country vowels, but as well as giving her a wider vocabulary, he made her aware of her grammar, word endings and clarity. He would take her out and make her speak against blustery winds. 'Use the lips!' 'Open the mouth!' 'You are mumbling, mumbling like a peasant. Cast your voice out . . . out.'

  Betrisse, facing onshore winds, opened her mouth against them. She cast her voice out, out over the waves and noisily shifting shingle, and gained a voice in the world. A voice that might have been born with a note of authority in it.

  Annie said that she began to sound like a lady, but Ted Scantlebury said, no, she sounded better than that, for ladies spoke in such an affected way that nobody took them serious.

  'You can't say that about Betrisse.'

  And certainly you could not.

  When the Saint John/Scantlebury partnership sat down to work out how they were going to describe Scantlebury's on the handbill, they looked at first for ways in which they might in a small way compare with the established health resorts where sulphured water or warm springs were a gift of nature; but they realized very quickly that if they were going to make something of Betrisse's idea, then it could not be by competing with places that already existed.

  When again they were considering the detail of the expansion of Scantlebury's, and the addition of the 'Sea-water immersions', Annie still had reservations about taking money for nothing; and it was her observation that, 'There really an't nothing here' that sparked off Betrisse's train of thought and became the basis of 'A week at Scantlebury's for rest and restoration,' or 'A few days at Emworthy to prepare for the social round.'

  'That is what we must sell, and what they need. To have nothing for a week.'

  'Oh I'm sure that will sell like hot pies,' Annie said.

  'It will,' said Betrisse. 'Young people like Snows-greatly can buy anything. Theatres, balls, house-parties.

  'You remember when Snows-greatly left?' Betrisse mimicked the voice. ' "Tippie, tell them that I shall mention this place to others. The peace of it, Tippie . . . oh, the tranquillity . . . the little white rooms. It is quite like a retreat to a nunnery I am sure. It has made me quite refreshed."

  'Oh Annie, think what a novelty it might be to them to come to a place where they go early to bed, sleep in simple rooms, where the women may leave off bones and
lacings and the men their wigs.'

  'I shouldn't pay you for it,' Ted Scantlebury said.

  'That is because you have it already. People with nothing to do except do as they please might think it a great thing to deprive themselves for a few days. And they might truly feel better for plenty of rest and some plain food.'

  'It's a fact that the young Countess did get a glow on her, whilst she was here,' Annie said.

  It took two years before 'A Week at Scantlebury's Spa' had a place in the rounds of some of the young, rich and idle. Betrisse was proved right. People would pay to be deprived. Young ladies especially took the immersion in the sea seriously, and found that by allowing the breezes of the southern coast to touch them, they acquired a pretty pinkness to their complexion. The gentlemen, living on a diet of well-cooked fish and simply-cooked vegetables and taking only cider, found that their digestions began to improve.

  The mud-baths scheme from which the new venture had originally sprung was abandoned when it was discovered that Emworthy mud was not easy to filter. The smell even a few bucketsful produced would not have persuaded even the most scourge-seeking persons to immerse themselves.

  Few stopped longer than a week, and eventually the young went on to other novelties, but by then the benefits of 'A Week at Scantlebury's' or 'A Few Days at Emworthy,' were established among their elders, and Emworthy settled down to providing a few wooden seats and cobbled paths and small shops selling bits and pieces made by net-makers, carvers and makers of model smacks.

  'It don't hardly seem right, Ann, the way some neighbours is taking good money from our visitors for a few shells and pebbles put up in a box.'

  'Oh, I reckon you'm wrong, Ted. 'Tis doing the visitors a favour, making them notice things they'd tread underfoot and not see.'

  Ted tucked up his lip and considered. 'It's still selling boxes of bits that an't worth nothing.'