The Town House

by Norah Lofts

  ‘What sort of sailor are you? Could you take a ship from Bywater to Calais, or Amsterdam?’

  ‘If she was sound I could sail a ship to Constantinople and back.’

  ‘The one I have my eye on is old, but she’s sound. How d’you know that you could?’

  ‘It weren’t my head that clumsy barber-surgeon cut off, you know,’ Peg-Leg said in an offended voice. I’d done eleven years with the best sailing man ever breathed, devil in seaboots though he was. And what you’ve learned at the rope’s end you tend to remember.’

  ‘If I buy this ship, with all I’ve got tied up there,’ he nodded towards the wool shed, ‘I couldn’t, straightaway, offer a hired captain enough to keep him honest. I’ve been over, I’ve seen all their tricks. Good wool marketed at half price, cash in their pockets and written off washed over-board or some such. One deal like that, just now, could be ruin. But a couple of honest trips, Peg-Leg, would see me clear, and after that you should have a share, a good share, one in forty of the whole cargo.’

  ‘You mean me be Captain?’

  ‘What d’you think I’m talking about?’

  ‘Mother of God, I’d do it for nothing. I’d pay you to let me – if I had the wherewithal. I trudged, soon’s I got this wooden leg fixed, I trudged from Bywater to Hull … Dunwich, Lowestoft, Yarmouth, Lynn, all the way to Hull. I begged for any job, just to be at sea again. Always the same answer – we can get plenty chaps with two sound legs.’

  If Martin remembered the time when he had been in a similar case he gave no sign.

  ‘It’ d mean staying sober.’

  ‘I’m sober afloat. Sailors ashore … well, they make up for lost time. And beached like I was, in my prime. What other comfort was there? Look at old Agnes.’

  ‘Agnes?’

  ‘Yes. Rolling drunk every time she had the money. Can’t you remember? She steadied up as soon as she had a kitchen. I could steady up if I had a ship. You say you got your eye on one. How’s she named?’

  ‘Mermaid.’

  Peg-Leg rubbed his nose. ‘I knew one by that name once. but that’s a common name. Where do she lay?’

  ‘Down at Bywater.’

  ‘Then s’pose we went down there … is she manned?’

  ‘More or less. The man that owned her, was master; he’s sick, he wants to sell, but the crew is ready to sign on with whoever buys her.’

  ‘They would be, ready and anxious. Them s’pose we go and go aboard and you tell me where you want to steer for and I’ll land you there.

  ‘Yes,’ Martin said, ‘I think you will, Peg-Leg.’

  ‘I got a name,’ Peg-Leg said. ‘And it’s Bowyer. Jacob Bowyer.’ He turned away to prop the pitch-fork he had been holding against the stable wall. ‘Captain Bowyer,’ he said softly to himself, ‘Captain Bowyer of the Mermaid.’

  The next sudden promotion from common yard hand to a post of responsibility was made when Richard was six years old, and concerned the unfrocked priest who had joined Martin’s gang of workmen when the house was being built and the land cleared, and who had stayed on and had lately been working as a pack-whacker. He had a hut in the new Squatters Row behind the stables; it was set a little apart from the others, and he lived alone, aloof of manner, surly of temper.

  One evening Martin surprised him by inviting him into the house and taking him into his own room, where upon the table a piece of virgin parchment, two newly cut quills and an inkhorn were laid out.

  ‘I take it you can write, Peter,’ Martin said.

  ‘It’s not a thing one forgets entirely.’

  ‘Sit down then.’ Peter did so and picked up one quill, rejected it, took the other and said,

  ‘Who cut this? He was no scribe!’

  ‘Cut it to suit yourself,’ said Martin, handing him a knife. Although he had cut the quills himself the criticism pleased him.

  ‘What do you want me to write?’

  ‘This. This is a deed of grant, made to one Martin and the heirs of his body, in perpetuity, of all the property and messuage known as …’ He paused and the pen caught up with him. Peter Priest looked up and asked, ‘What is this? A forgery?’

  Still unoffended, Martin said,

  ‘No. A test.’

  He rose and went to the heavy chest that stood beside his bed and took out another parchment, one with a dangling seal. He took Peter’s writing, and scowling heavily, compared the two.

  ‘There is a fault,’ he said a last. ‘You have spelt my name with an “e”.’

  ‘E or I, both are correct. It is a matter of opinion, not a fault,’ Peter Priest remarked coldly.

  ‘Otherwise it is well done. How is your reckoning?’

  ‘By tally or mentally?’

  ‘In your head, the answer then written down.’

  ‘In Roman figuring or Arabic?’

  ‘Both!’

  ‘Try me.’

  Martin went to his bed and from there dictated four problems in arithmetic, laying out, behind the priest’s back, the answers as he made them by tally.

  ‘Read me your makings.’

  All but one of the answers fitted, and in that one, when they reworked it, the error was Martin’s.

  By this time the possible purpose of the test had occurred to Peter Priest; the accounts and records of the business had outrun Martin’s ability to deal with them; so he, Peter Priest, was to be taken off the road and installed as clerk. The prospect was pleasing; how infinitely preferable to sit indoors, plying his real craft once more, instead of being on the roads in all weathers, handling greasy bales of wools, urging – sometimes having to pull for sheer force – pack ponies through the mire.

  ‘You see,’ Martin said, ‘my way is slow and cumbersome, and can be wrong. That is why …’

  He came round the table and sat down, facing Peter.

  Why, Peter wondered, is he so cursed slow stating his business?

  Martin was slow, partly because any but the briefest speech now came hard to him, partly because speaking of Richard brought the child to mind, and roused, as his actual presence did, many conflicting emotions. He delighted in the boy and loved him dearly, but he was an ever-present reminder, not of Magda, but of the two other little boys, especially Stephen. To be troubled by this, not to enjoy his fatherhood to the full, was, he knew, absurd, but he had felt from the beginning, from the day when he had come home and found the baby there, that in some way Richard was a usurper. For a long time even to watch the child being fed, and then later, feeding himself, had been both a pleasure and a pain. Stephen, his first born, had lived on water gruel, on stale bread thinly smeared with fat, and had spent his days on the stinking wool floor, and finally died because his father was trying to save the miserable hut which was all the home he had. Richard fed on the fat of the land, enjoyed old Agnes’s whole doting attention. Stephen had been a very good, quiet little boy; Richard was naughty and wilful. The whole thing was in such sharp contrast that comparisons forced themselves upon Martin many times every day.

  At the same time, simply because he felt this way, he also felt guilt. It wasn’t Richard’s fault that he had been born after the tide of luck had turned. So, each time that the affection which should have streamed out, full and free, towards the new child, suffered the inevitable check and recession, Martin would, by some act of indulgence, endeavour to make up to the boy. He could deny him nothing; he could never punish him lest into the punishment should go some of his unjust resentment because Richard was Richard, not Stephen.

  It had all mattered less, been more easily smoothed over, while old Agnes lived. Doubtless, in her time, Richard had been naughty, ungovernable, wild, but she had never complained; she had acted as a buffer, explaining, excusing, saying, ‘He is very young. He will learn’, saying, ‘For myself I like a lad to show a bit of spirit.’ Once, jerked out of silence by her ridiculous attempt to defend some particularly prankish behaviour, Martin had snapped out,

  ‘Stephen was never like that.’

 
; And Agnes had made – for Martin – the most terrible answer possible.

  ‘Ah, there’s the difference between the colt fed corn and the cold fed grass. You can’t expect them to act the same.’

  Agnes had died when Richard was four and within a week Dummy’s Mary was crying and saying she couldn’t manage the housework and Richard; he didn’t come when she called him and when she picked him up he kicked her. The answer to that had been a strong, active young woman named Nancy, whose sole duty was to see to the child. She had had one of her own, illegitimate, which had died at the age of two. Martin, engaging her, had cherished the secret hope that her heart might share, with his, the defence of memory, that she might be a little less doting and lenient than Old Agnes who had never had a child of her own. If Nancy arrived thus armed, she was disarmed almost immediately. Richard was a remarkably handsome little boy, so charming when allowed his way, so disagreeable when crossed, that anyone crossing him was almost bound to feel that the change of mood was in some way his or her fault, not the child’s. In a very short time Nancy, too, was enslaved. And so had happened the stupid, inexcusable incident with the bear.

  Richard was almost six, and ever since he could toddle he had seen Uncle Tom go to the shed where Owd Muscovy lived, open the door and place food within the bear’s reach. The muzzle, no longer needed, hung on a peg in the wall, and the chain, attached to the bear’s collar at one end, was hooked at the other over a strong nail driven slantwise into the wall of the shed.

  Pert Tom, after that one summer on the road during Magda’s brief rule as mistress of Old Vine, had grown slack and old. Dummy’s Joan’s leaving him had, as Agnes expected, been a turning point in his life. It, or rather the difficulty he had found in replacing the young hussy, had loosened his mainspring. But he had kept his bear. And when Richard was five, at Christmas time, he had actually brought Owd Muscovy out on to the wool floor and put him through his tricks.

  Richard watched entranced.

  ‘Uncle Tom, let me blow the whistle and make the bear dance.’

  ‘He wouldn’t do it for you,’ said Pert Tom, who was the only person who ever treated Richard as an ordinary human being, an equal.

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘You ain’t his master.’

  ‘Let me try.’

  ‘Get outa the way,’ said Tom.

  Shortly after that Christmas Richard began asking Martin for a whistle, and Martin remembered another little boy who had never asked for anything, had his pang of guilt, and provided the whistle.

  The thing in itself was enough for Richard for a long time. He blew and a shrill level noise emerged. By accident he put a finger over one of the holes and a different noise resulted. Bit by bit, untaught, by a process of trial and error he learned to play a tune, one of those sung in the woolshed at Christmas, ‘The Holly and the Ivy’. Once he could do that he plagued Uncle Tom to teach him his tunes. Tom said, ‘One day’ and ‘Some time’ and ‘Don’t bother me now’, but in the end he succumbed and after an hour or two with the child, said to Martin,

  ‘He’ve got a true ear, and come to the point he’s teachable. He’d got Gathering Pescods and Granny’s Bonnet in nearly no time at all. If I’d had him on the road, with Owd Muscovy, I’d have made a fortune.’

  The two tunes were all Richard wanted to learn. He played them over and over until he was sure and when he was he set out to test them on Owd Muscovy.

  The shed was never locked for the simple reason that no one except Pert Tom was ever likely to open it. Except for that one Christmas outing the door had never opened save when the bear was fed or the shed cleaned, and when Richard opened it the bear ambled forward, expecting to be fed. Richard pushed past and went to where the extreme end of the chain was hooked over the slanting nail. Even on tip-toe he could not reach it, so he turned back, and exerting all his strength, pressed the hook which held the other end of the chain to a ring in the bear’s collar. The chain fell free, into the soiled straw on the floor, and Richard realized that now he had no means of leading the animal up to the kitchen door as he intended, to cry, ‘Come and watch, Uncle Tom,’ and demonstrate his disproof of the old man’s statement, ‘He wouldn’t do it for you.’ But he was undismayed; so long as the bear stayed on all fours – which he would do until the whistle sounded – his collar was within reach of Richard’s hand; he could be hauled along by the collar.

  Owd Muscovy had never before, since his remote forgotten cub days been free of both chain and muzzle at the same time. Without them he felt, not liberated, but strangely vulnerable. Children he knew and hated, they tweaked and pinched and poked. Against them Pert Tom was his defence, and now here he was, stripped of his appurtenances, at close quarters with a child, and no Pert Tom in sight. When Richard attempted to take his collar, he backed away nervously but with a warning growl and when Richard hung on, tugging determinedly, it was nervousness rather than vice that made him bite. His teeth closed on the child’s forearm and through the sound woollen stuff of his sleeve, inflicted only two incised wounds. But the blood sprang and the yell which Richard let out was a yell of pain as well as wrath. He loosed his hold on the bear’s collar and ran to find Nancy. Owd Muscovy made no move to pursue him, nor, though the door stood open, did he immediately leave the shed, he emerged a little later, just as one of the pack teams was coming into the yard. The ponies, though weary, were capable of being thrown into a stampede, one of the pack-whackers was caught between a frightened pony and a wall and had his ribs crushed and added his cries to the general pandemonium. Dummy’s eldest boy was in the loft, pushing hay over the edge of it into the mangers, ready for the incoming team; he heard the shouts and the cries. The Bear! The Bear’s on the rampage’ and with a heroism never given its rightful due, jumped into the manger, fork in hand, jumped from the manger to the stable floor and ran out into the yard, where Owd Muscovy, by this time in a state of panic had risen on to his hind legs and was doing his dance in an attempt to placate. Dummy’s Jack charged and drove the pitchfork home into the hairy chest thus exposed; one prong must have penetrated to the heart, for within a few minutes Owd Muscovy was dead.

  If Richard could have controlled his temper and his tongue he would have emerged blameless, a victim of the escaped bear, like the clawed pack pony and the man with the crushed ribs; but, his wound smeared tar and his pain deadened by a dose of laudanum, he was furious to hear that Owd Muscovy was dead.

  ‘Now he’ll never dance for me. And me going to all the trouble to learn the right tunes.’

  Pert Tom, inconsolable at the loss of his bear, which he had hated, exploited, cherished and loved, all at once, said,

  ‘You! Thass it. You let him out, you little hellion!’

  Martin said, ‘Tom. Mind your tongue!’

  ‘Bugger my tongue! You let him out, didn’t you? You opened the shed door.’

  ‘Bugger my tongue,’ said Richard, enjoying the sound of a new, attractive phrase. ‘I wanted him to dance for me, but he bit me instead.’

  ‘There you are,’ said Pert Tom. ‘Straight from his own mouth. He opened that door. So Owd Muscovy, the one thing I ever owned is dead, just a lump of stinking carrion. Go on, sit there making your Goddamn faces at me. Look what you’ve got, a great flourishing business, ships on the sea and who knows what. Where’d it all come from? Something so dark and dishonest you never could say where. Had to pretend it was my savings. My bitch had to be bedded here and there, out on the hard ground mostly, yours gets a wedding and is called Mistress, and finely she served you. But you get this.…’ He flung his hand in Richard’s direction, ‘and he go and let out my bear. So he’s dead, my Owd Muscovy.’

  ‘Nancy, take Richard to bed,’ Martin said.

  ‘I don’t want to go to bed.’

  ‘You see,’ said Pert Tom. ‘Thass like the Bible say – If these things be done in the green leaf, what shall be done in the dry? You see how he hev the upper hand of everybody here. You mind what his mother was. You’re making a fin
e rod for your own back and I only hope I live to see it beat you.’

  And so, in the end, Martin had realized that Richard must be tamed. And so, here he was, having put Peter Priest through his paces, saying,

  ‘What I want is for you to teach my boy.’

  Peter Priest’s vision of a quiet, clerkly life vanished, leaving behind it a sense of loss so sharp that it hurt.

  He said sourly, ‘I couldn’t teach him. Nobody could. To teach a child you must be his master.’

  ‘That’, said Martin, ‘is what you would be.’

  ‘And the first time I punished, or even chided him, he would run to you, wailing, and you would turn yourself inside out to make things right for him.’ He rose from his seat, ‘Thank you, no! Three hundred days a year in this part of the country the wind blows from the east, but I would rather walk into the teeth of it, running the ponies who can be beaten if needs be.’

  ‘Richard can be beaten – if needs be, but not over the head.’

  ‘Beaten! The young master of the Old Vine?’

  ‘How else could he learn?’

  ‘How else indeed? Well, well. Even you, in the end, come to the end of your indulgence and hand over! What do you wish him to learn?’

  ‘To read what is written and write what can be read. To reckon, as you now did, in his head, and write down his reckonings in figures Roman or Arabic.’ Without intending it his voice, as he said those words, took on a sardonic note.

  ‘You see,’ said Peter Priest, ‘already you are against me. And what the parent is against how shall the children learn? The figuring, Roman or Arabic, are not terms of mockery, as you in your ignorance make them sound. I can slave out my guts teaching him, and you, with a few mocking words over the supper dish can undo all I have taught him. I will stick to the ponies. You send him to school. From school he can’t come running to cry and show his stripes.’

  Martin said, with a black look,

  ‘Sit down. Stick to the ponies, you say. Whose? Not mine. I can go to the town gates tomorrow morning and find a dozen pack-whackers. And, maybe not tomorrow morning, but some morning, not so far away I can find Richard a teacher. You have your choice, teach him, or take your foot in your hand and leave the Old Vine. If you teach him, I promise that so long as you do not hit him over the head, what you do will be right with me.’