The Town House

by Norah Lofts

  ‘Maybe. Where’d you go?’

  ‘I should go and look after Peg-Leg.’

  ‘I always meant you to end your days by my fire, with your feet under my table, Agnes. But then I never thought …’

  ‘But for you Peg-Leg wouldn’t have a roof or a fire, so it come to much the same thing.’

  ‘In a way, I suppose. And we’d send your food across.’

  Stuff she’d have clawed over.

  ‘I’d sooner manage on my own.’

  ‘Please yourself. You can have what money you want.’

  ‘That’s kind. And any day I feel up to it, I’ll go in the shed and pick wool for a spell to help earn.…’

  He gave me a very black look and said,

  ‘If you think that’s easy!’ He swung on his heel and limped away. I thought for a moment that he had seen through my excuse for leaving and was annoyed, yet he hadn’t been earlier when I said I was going. It took me a moment or two to realize that Kate had picked wool at Webster’s, and this was no moment to remind him of her.

  Pert Tom had his excuse for getting out all ready to his hand. All these years he’d held on to his bear and been fairly regular about feeding it and putting it through its tricks. Once, when he was grumbling about what the animal cost to keep I asked him why he didn’t sell it.

  ‘Easy come, easy go,’ he said, ‘and maybe one of these days Martin’ll bite off more than he can chew. First he hev a forge, then he hev a row of stables, then he hev a wool business. Grant he’ve been lucky, but build a thing too high and it’ll topple over. If it do, then out on the road we go, Owd Muscovy and me, and no worse off than we was.’

  ‘Except that you’d have lost your savings.’ We’d been given to understand that it was Pert Tom’s money that had started the business in the first place.

  Pert Tom laughed. ‘Ah yes, them savings! Well, they wasn’t all that much, and I’ve had years of soft living. And shall do, till Martin overreach hisself.’

  ‘If you think he’s overreaching himself you should warn him. You’re supposed to be his partner.’

  ‘I hate wasting me breath,’ he said. But he had held on to the bear; and when he heard about the marriage being so near he said to Martin,

  ‘I allus promised meself one more summer on the road and if I don’t go soon I shall be too owd. And you’ll like the place to yourselves to start off with.’

  To me he said,‘I give it a month, but a month alongside her is more’n I can manage. Half the time I’m frit of her and the other half I’m itching arter her and I don’t know which is worst.’

  ‘What’ll you do if it lasts more than a month?’

  ‘It can’t. I towd you, they can’t stay in one place more’n a month without sickening. I shall be back in five-six weeks, according to the weather, and you’ll see, she’ll be gone.’

  ‘Daft talk,’ I said. ‘In five-six weeks she may be three weeks gone in another fashion. I surely hope so.’

  He didn’t even stay for the wedding, so he missed the feast Martin gave to everybody on the place. He had an ox roasted in the yard and there was all the ale we could drink and plenty over. Even Martin who’d never, in all the time I’d known him, taken a drop too much, was tipsy as soon as anyone.

  Magda, for the wedding had a dress, very costly, of crimson silk so dark it was almost black, she had shoes on her feet and her hair knotted up and fastened with a pair of silver pins. That way, she looked ordinary and decent, her skin very sallow between the dark of the dress and the dark of her hair; and she had none of a bride’s happiness. She looked so downcast that I wondered if the shoes were causing her pain.

  We put them to bed in proper style and I myself put the salt and the handful of barley at the four corners, to make sure that they would be fruitful.

  Peg-Leg was easy-going and I was comfortable enough with him, but for me everything seemed out of joint. I missed seeing Martin and seeing to him, feeling as mothers do when their sons marry and move away. I got into the habit of waiting about the yard just to catch a glimpse of him, judging from the way he looked and the way he walked, whether things were going well. One morning, not long after they were married he came out of the house and went towards the stables whistling, and I could have cried with joy. Immediately after I could have cried with rage at myself for letting such a daft fancy put me out of the house and out of his life. One day there’d be a baby there, his baby, and I should have no part in it. I was like a woman who, hungry as she may be, can’t go to her own bread crock because a spider is sitting beside it.

  Dummy’s Mary was so grateful to me for getting her the job and training her to it, that she was like a dog; she often used to come round to have a bit of a gossip and ask my advice on this and that. She told me that the mistress did nothing in the house at all, still ate only once a day and spent hours in Tom’s empty room, playing the tambourine and dancing, all by herself. Martin had put his foot down about her dancing in the town and threatened, if she disobeyed him, to take away her tambourine.

  ‘He should stop her dancing altogether,’ I said, when Mary told me this,‘rattling her insides about that fashion, how can she hope to breed?’

  Another time, a little later, Mary reported that the mistress had a cough, which she said was because she was indoors so much.

  ‘She’s not hobbled or chained,’ I said. ‘She could do a bit in the garden. The lavender isn’t even cut this year yet, and the pea haulms yellowing where they stand. And couldn’t she walk into market, like any other housewife?’

  The year moved on and it was Michaelmas. Pert Tom had been away longer than he’d planned, because, I suppose, the good weather had lasted. I looked forward to his coming home, partly because I wondered what he would do, and partly because I wanted to tease him about being so know-all about Romanys and their not being able to stay anywhere more than a month.

  October was two days old when, one afternoon, coming out of the wool shed, where I’d been picking (which is hard work and made me think of Kate who used to do it all day long and with two children to mind), I saw Tom just shoving his bear into its shed.

  ‘So you’re back,’ I said.

  ‘So I am, fancy you noticing,’ he said sourly and kicked the bear to move it over.

  ‘And she’s still there. Using your room to dance in, so I hear.’

  ‘If I want me room back I shall hev it. Remember how I got this?’ He turned his face so that the scar the burn had left on his cheek, showed up in the light.

  ‘You’d not speak of that and remind him, just when he’s begun to be happy again!’

  ‘Why not? He was the one said we was to live together the rest of our lives. He was the one said no women in the house when I wanted to bed Joan in comfort. I’ll remind him all right. I’ll remind him of a lot of things.’

  I drew a bow in the dark.

  ‘While you’re about it remind him how your old bear was burnt, too, helping with the brave rescue.’

  ‘What do you know about that?’

  ‘More than you think. A lot more than you think.’

  Where exactly I’d hit him I couldn’t see, but somewhere, for though he scowled he said,

  ‘I don’t want to go dragging up owd things. Nor I don’t want to go back on the roads. I’ve got soft and I’m too owd to lay out after Michaelmas. Where’re you living?’

  ‘With Peg-Leg – and a right tight fit it is.’

  ‘Well, I shall see what Martin hev to say. Not that I hanker to be under the same roof with her, but this is my home, arter all.’

  So off he went and that very evening, when Peg-Leg came home he told me that he and several other men had been taken off their different jobs and set to build again.

  ‘Starting tomorrow, digging holes for the posts. A rare fine big room this is to be, too; twenty feet by twenty and ten high. He talk of putting in a window, glassed.’

  ‘Just for Pert Tom?’

  ‘No. For Mistress Reed. He had a special word for it. Ah,
I got it, a solar he called it.’

  I tried to imagine such a large room and couldn’t see where it be on such a little house, not without blocking up a door or a window of what was there already. Unless he built it on the forge side.

  ‘Is he aiming to move the forge then?’

  ‘No. The other side.’

  ‘That’d block the way the ponies come in from the road to the yard.’

  ‘They’re leaving that just as it is and building across the other side of it.’

  ‘Then there’ll be two separate houses.’

  ‘No. Martin reckoned to roof over the way the ponies go in and leave that as a passage way. Then folks can get from the kitchen door to the… the solar, just stepping across the passage.’

  For the next six or seven weeks I used to go along every day and watch the work going forward. Apart from the big houses at Horringer where my father was shepherd and Ockley where my husband was game warden so of course I never was in them, only saw them from outside, I never had seen such building. Even the floor was solid oak, every plank about eighteen inches wide and laid as level as a table. And they put in a window, like Peg-Leg said, not flat in the wall, but bowed out, right over the garden I’d made, so it only just missed my lavender bush. It was all made up of little panes of glass, greenish, about as big as the palm of my hand. All that, just for a woman to dance in!

  I now had another spy inside the house, as it were. Pert Tom, who had often enough grumbled about my cooking, more to annoy me than because he had any cause, would come slouching round once or twice a week, and without actually asking, would say something smelt tasty, and complain of Mary’s cooking, and I’d give him a piece of whatever was going and he’d sit down and talk. He seemed to have lost most of his fear of Magda and to get along with her very well, ‘what little I see of her,’ he said. ‘I never hang around when she takes that tambourine in hand, because thass the only time she’s anyway tempting.’ He spoke as though, apart from her dancing and her lack of interest in the kitchen, Magda was ordinary enough and life in the house pretty smooth-running.

  Once, a little before Christmas, he spoke of her having a cough and brewing up a cure for it; it smelt terrible, he said.

  Then, even nearer Christmas, Mary came along one evening and begged me to go in and make the plum pudding.

  ‘All them costly things,’ she said. ‘If owt went wrong and they was wasted, that would be a pity. ‘T’ain’t like spoiling a pot of porridge, is it?’

  I said, craftily, ‘I’ll come and help you, if we can do it some time when the mistress isn’t about – then you can take the credit for it, you see. You wouldn’t want her to know, would you?’

  ‘She’s in the solar every afternoon now.’

  ‘All right then. Now mind this.…’ I told her that she was to scrub the table, wash the bowl, the spoon and the big iron pot, and scald the pudding cloth. ‘Never mind if they are all clean; it’s a kind of magic rule, for making plum pudding everything must be washed afresh.’

  Even if I hadn’t had this hatred of handling anything after those long thin hands had been on it, that would have been a wise order. Nothing in the kitchen was as I left it, everything was greasy and smeared and in the wrong place. I scolded Mary – not too much, for she had been brought up like a pig and only had three weeks’ training, but I scolded myself most harshly for running away on account of a fancy. I should have stayed, I told myself. I’d come back, I told myself all the time I was chopping the suet; I’d humble myself to Martin, tell him I wasn’t comfortable with Peg-Leg and beg him to take me back. I’d force myself to get over this stupid feeling; if Pert Tom could live in the house with her, so could I.

  We had the flour and the suet and the eggs and the fine fat raisins all ready.

  ‘We want a pinch of spice,’ I said to Mary. ‘Where do you keep the spice box? I always had it on the shelf here.’

  ‘I think it’s in the cupboard.’

  ‘God bless you girl, don’t you know?’ I exclaimed and glared at her as she went to the cupboard.

  Inside it was all of a jumble, in which she ferreted about like a blind woman, while I clucked my tongue, making the most of my impatience. She reached up to the top shelf and as she did so a little bunch of dried-up herbage fell out, she grabbed at it and missed it and it dropped near me. I picked it up, smelt it, and said sharply,

  ‘Mary! Leave hunting that spice box and come here. What is this?’

  And I thought – Jesus have mercy, if a poor ugly crooked girl like that can get into trouble! I kept my eye hard on her but she neither blushed nor blenched.

  ‘That? Oh, thass Mistress’s stuff for her cough?’

  ‘Her cough! But this … How often does she take it?’

  ‘I don’t rightly know. From time to time she’ll pour water on and drink it when it’s soaked.’

  ‘I see. Best put it back. Then if you look behind that crock of mouldy dripping, you’ll find your spice box.’

  She brought it to me, saying with a false little smile, like a dog in disgrace wagging its tail too fast,

  ‘You do hev good eyes, Agnes.’

  ‘Too good,’ I said.

  We went on making the pudding, but my mind was on other things; the feeling that I must come back here and set things right for Martin’s sake; the memory of that bunch of dried stuff with the faded flowers that had been pink and pale rounded leaves with their pointed ends.

  I was on my feet, the better to give the mixture the good sturdy whack that it needed, and saying,

  ‘Like this, see. Smack it about as though you were beating a bed,’ and just about to hand the spoon to Mary when the kitchen door opened and Magda walked in. First I was thankful that I was on my feet so I didn’t have to stand up to acknowledge she was mistress, and second all my determination to come back and see Martin comfortable just ran away like water down a gutter.

  She said, ‘Hullo Agnes’ as carelessly as though she’d seen me the day before. No surprise, no interest that I should be there, in her greasy untidy kitchen, making her plum pudding for Christmas. I just, gave her a nod of my head and turned to Mary.

  ‘Now to do the thing properly,’ I said, ‘we have to have a chunk of wood, borrowed from a friend, to lay on the fire to start boiling. Go along to Peg-Leg’s – there’s nobody there but you must knock on the door and say, “Can I borrow a log to cook my plum pudding?” You’ll find some logs there, choose the biggest and bring it back.’

  Mary went off. I’d made the thing up on the spur of the moment, but it fitted, I thought, Christmas being the friendly season.

  Magda was going towards Martin’s room, now their bedroom, but I stopped her.

  ‘I want to ask you something.’

  She turned back and said, ‘Yes.’ And at that moment the fright came on me. All those months ago, when Pert Tom had said she was a witch and I’d crossed my thumbs and thought that was why I didn’t want any doing with her I hadn’t been really frightened. That is true. She’d threatened the tongue that wagged about how she got in the river, yet I had told Martin. I’d never been really scared. Now, all of a sudden I was. My breath seemed to catch. Still I said it.

  ‘That stuff you take for your cough, every now and then. Do you know what that is?’

  ‘Is a wildflower. Good for the cough.’

  She’d turned back and now stood so that the table was between us and we faced each other as though we were fighting a duel or playing some gambling game.

  ‘I never heard it was good for coughs. It has another virtue.…’ Then I thought – That slipped out because you get used to speaking of the virtues of herbs, in this case it has no virtue. It’d be a virtue if she was a maid betrayed, or the downburdened mother of a huge family. … I shouldn’t have said ‘virtue’. And of course I shouldn’t, because she just said,

  ‘So? Is nice to know!’ and went sauntering into the bedroom.

  I was so angry that I couldn’t breathe. My heart came jumping up into my th
roat, beating like a hammer, bells rang in my ears and for a moment I couldn’t see except for sparks all shimmering against blackness.

  I sat down and wrestled with my breath. I would breathe, pull it in, hold it, let it out. I could hear myself making a noise like a blacksmith’s bellows.

  Then there was Mary, so quick for all she was lop-sided, back, lugging a great log.

  ‘What do we do next, Agnes?’

  And I managed to tell her, calmly, how to put the pudding into the cloth, leaving plenty of room for it to swell. And she did it. All the time there was no sound from the inner room.

  It was growing dark.

  ‘One more thing, Mary,’ I said. ‘Take the scissors and cut about an inch off the lavender bush. That has to boil in the water.’

  As soon as she had gone I took the bunch of penny royal from the cupboard and dropped it into the heart of the fire.

  III

  I thought the matter over, by night as well as by day for what remained of the time till Christmas. I felt it was my duty to tell Martin what his wife was up to, and yet I dreaded to upset him. I didn’t want to make too much of it. There again, I thought, if I’d had any pluck at all I should have been in the house, and seeing him often, able to drop a hint. However, my chance came, for the Christmas was to be a real merry one of the old-fashioned sort. Martin had a pig killed and roasted whole and we all had our Christmas dinner on the big wool floor which had been three-quarters cleared. As at the wedding there was ale for everybody, and we sang all the old Christmas songs about the Three Wise Men and the Star of Bethlehem, and about The Holly and The Ivy.

  Peg-Leg, like all sailors was handy with his knife and could whittle any shape you asked, and I’d asked him to do a baby, and a donkey and a cow about the size so that a small salt-box could be a manger for them. I put a wisp of straw in the box, laid the baby on it, put the donkey on one side and the cow on the other and set them all on a board to decorate the table at the end where Martin sat. I’d praised Peg-Leg’s whittling and left it at that, and then, on the Christmas morning, when we stood together watching the pig turning on the spit over the fire in the forge, I did another bit of flattering.