by Jean Chapman
‘Going to bed early? I was just going to tell your mother about our new neighbours.’
‘New neighbours?’ Mabel exclaimed. ‘What’s this, then?’
Belle gave a swift non-committal smile and made her escape, kicking her bedroom door open in retaliation for the reminder from her father that her part in the first meeting of the Greenaughs and the Abbotts was still very much in his mind.
Even so, the following morning found Belle in a fever of impatience and anticipation. She fell back on a succession of imaginative games and tasks to both occupy her mind and speed the time until she could slip away.
‘Supposing,’ she whispered to herself as she eased her hand into the warm straw under a mildly protesting hen, ‘supposing I collect thirty-five eggs, then that will mean at five minutes to three I shall see him again!’ then, as she peeled some of their giant green Bramleys, she calculated: If I peel one apple without breaking the peel, he might hold my hand; if two, he will hold my arm; if three …’ her excitement mounted as she saw an arm about her waist. Her hands, the apple and the peeler were motionless on the wooden draining-board. ‘If four …’ Her eyelids half closed. ‘If five …’ The stimulus was more intimate. ‘If six …’
Her eyes were suddenly wide again as her mind triggered a picture of her father’s bull being put to a cow. She had seen the way of it many times, even as quite a young girl, through shift of hiding in the hay-loft and peeping out into the yard. She couldn’t imagine herself taking part in the human equivalent of that activity, and yet — she cocked her head, considering the matter — there was some sort of inevitability about it all, that once started … six soon became seven, eight, nine, ten, as far as she could judge.
But then there followed the trauma of giving birth. She had watched most kinds of farm animals at one time or another, and this particular inevitability seemed both bloody and painful. She reflected how this had been something that worried her brother: the pain animals could suffer giving birth; the mother love of animal for offspring; later the separating, and the pitiful calling of young for their parents, or parents for their young, as one or other went for slaughter for the table. The squealing of pigs as their throats were cut and the animals bled to death was part of their lives, and had meant little more to Belle than that Harry would probably have a new bladder to blow up and kick about.
She remembered that just once she and Harry had made pets of two black lambs. Harry had named them Chimney and Flue, and when these two had gone the old ewe, bleating pitifully, had followed the children around everytime they put foot in the fields. Harry had solemnly led his little sister by the hand and gone to talk to Levi about it. She remembered quite clearly what the old man had said: ‘Aye, well, boy, that’s farming, and has been for thousands of years.’ They never made a pet of any farm animal again.
Sunday dinner was taken at twelve on the farm, and by helping to do both the washing and drying up, Belle was able to speed the process along. By a quarter past one the last saucepan lid was hung back on the wall, the last willow-patterned plate standing back on the dresser, and for once she did not even grumble about the lack of a living-in domestic.
‘Where’re you going?’ her father asked as she went to the door.
‘Just a stroll, walk my dinner down. It’s stifling indoors,’ she answered. ‘I’ll take Gyp.’
‘Leave the dog where she is.’
The ominous lack of expression, of any rise or fall in his voice, sent a flicker of alarm through Belle. ‘If you want to walk you can come with me later,’ Sam added, ‘when it’s cooler. There’s no cause for you to go traipsing off on your own.’
‘Since when have you wanted company when you go walking?’ Mabel asked. ‘This is something new.’
‘We’ve new neighbours, remember! Neighbours who apparently employ a gang of threshers and sawers who all sleep rough and drink heavy, by the look of them. Until we know more about them we’ll just beware.’
All sweetness and light, Belle thought, seeing even her mother won round by the reasonableness of what he said, although she must know that there had rarely ever been anything more serious than a little poaching, or a few potatoes or a mangold taken from the fields to make a meal. She felt scornful of them both, but finding her mother scrutinising her, she changed the expression of superiority to one of unconcern about it all. She shrugged, then for want of something to pass the moment, turned to the sink and rinsed the tea-towels. I’ll go and hang these out,’ she said, calculating that if she lingered in the kitchen it might, after her father’s remark, become difficult to slip away.
She hung the cloths on the line, then meandered watchfully around the kitchen garden. Pulling at a high stem of balm, she paused as if to savour its strong lemon scent. No one appeared at the house windows or back door. She moved out from the garden into the orchard, where the remains of the early Beauty of Bath apples lay red in the grass. She kicked at them, disturbing intoxicated wasps, half watching their stumbling flight, half watching the house. She moved past trees where Coxes were turning russet, and at the far end the Bramleys weighed down the branches almost to the grass.
For a few moments she sat on the stile between orchard and fields, then with a swift twist of her hips and high fling of her legs, as much like laughter as movement could be, she was away, running up towards the bridle-path. She calculated that there were lots of places on the farm she could say she had spent the afternoon: reading in the hay-loft; searching for where she thought one of the hens might be laying away from home — lots of things she could invent, that was no problem, and that was not for ages, not until the end of the afternoon.
She was a little aghast to see quite how much of the bridlepath had been devastated, with sloe and hazel bushes crushed and broken. Her father’s hedge was left looking very thin now the infilling growth had gone. She could understand his anger but, typical of him, he had retaliated with immediate action - she saw that the new hedge stakes were already in place, and a section of the hedge had been neatly layered.
She was disappointed, for the heat of the afternoon sweltered silently around her, too hot it seemed even for insects or birds, or for men to work … Cato Abbott had said they would be working on the path the next day, but it seemed he had been wrong. She plucked a stick from a broken bush and thrashed at the grasses and undergrowth. Then another idea came to her. She wouldn’t waste this visit to the path, she’d walk it, as she had already said she had done. She’d walk the length of it, from there to the village. But she was defeated by a mass of briars and bushes before she had gone many paces.
‘So …’ she said aloud,’I’ll do what I told Levi.’ She saw a slight gap by an elm, and thought perhaps she could just slip through there and walk the glebe land until the path was passable further on. She struggled as twigs poked her sides and caught her hair, cross that this Sunday afternoon was becoming more intolerable every second.
‘You sound like a tank coming through no man’s land.’ The deep voice close at her elbow made her start back, hand to mouth. Then she was thrilled to see that it was Cato Abbott, leaning on one of the great oaks that swept up into a thick triangular spinney of oaks and ash on the upper reaches of the glebe land.
‘Why are you hiding?’ she asked, tossing back her hair and shaking her skirt into order. ‘And what are you doing?’
‘Well, I’ve been warned off once by your man Levi Adams, so I thought I’d better make sure who was crashing through our hedge, and be ready to attack them before they started on me.’ Laughter ran under his words like a current. ‘As to what I was doing …’ He leaned forward to place between her hands a posy of golden hawkweed and white meadowsweet. The stems were bound with round grasses, the work as neat and unbroken as the thread of a screw,
‘That’s beautiful,’ she said, holding the flowers cupped in her hands, and knew the moment’s importance. She prolonged it, gazing down at the flowers, feeling the whole world turned around them. Here, she thought, was a moment of
unspoilt perfection. Their meeting, so new, was untarnished, and she was a little afraid. Unbidden, there came to her mind a procession of things she had attempted, then torn and shredded to pieces - drawings, watercolours, embroidery, crochet, tapestry - all spoilt because she was impatient for results, tolerant of nothing short of perfection. She looked up at him, assessing his tolerance, and saw her glance stir him.
‘Can you come for a walk?’ he asked, pushing himself upright from where he leaned. She nodded. Then, thinking of Levi possibly still nosing around, she suggested, ‘Let’s go over towards the old osier beds. We shouldn’t meet anyone there —’ she hesitated, then added, ‘I mean, they don’t belong to either your family or mine.’
‘We’ve not made a very good start,’ Cato said. ‘We got on very well with everyone back in Norfolk …’
Belle led the way along the path until they came to a stile leading towards a spinney of willows, explaining how her father had fought to buy part of the glebe land.
‘He should have waited until we were here. It’s not the land we’re interested in so much as space for all our engines and equipment,’ Cato said, climbing the stile and talking very matter-of-factly, as if making verbal blindfold to conceal the way he swing her effortlessly down from the top bar of the stile by hand-spanning her waist.
‘I don’t think I’ll tell him that!’ She pulled a comic face, but felt rather breathless from the strong warmth of his hands, and thought he might have made some comment about the neatness of her eighteen-inch waist. Perhaps, though, this man, this relationship, was too strange, too new, too tentative, to risk bruising with so quick a familiarity. She contented herself with talk of local families, the quickest way into town, farming and subsidies, until she thought she would explode with frustration. She wanted him to look at her, not muse over economics and the future of the world.
Her opportunity came as they reached the osier beds proper. Here, formerly pollarded willows sprang tall from their squat round heads, and white willows grew taller still at the far side. She stopped and put her hand high above her head and touched the first white willow they came to. She looked up at him under the arch of her arm. ‘My mother’s great-great-grandfather made yokes from this tree the first year the Halls came to live here. We still use the yokes, and lots of baskets made from the other willows are around the farm. People still come and fetch odd lots of willows for repairing baskets and wattle fencing.’
While she was speaking his eyes never wavered from her face, and she racked her mind to find something else to tell him about the place. ‘Of course,’ she went on, ‘the osier beds were really spoilt when the navvies came and dug out the cutting for the railway line some thirty years ago, in the eighteen-nineties. The gravel base of the track drained most of the water away …’ She stopped as she saw the smile on his face and his nod of pretended engrossment. He knew her artifice, but she saw his willingness to watch her every gesture - and more - she thought, with a thrill of satisfaction.
‘I’ll show you the railway line if you like!’ she added pertly, as if offended by the smile.
‘I believe you,’ he said, but there seemed to be a sudden darkening of his eyes, an intensity she could not deal with. She wasn’t sure what it spoke of, so she must slip out from under it, away, away — she wanted always to be happy. ‘Yes, yes, I will,’ she insisted. ‘I’ll race you there!’
She set off, her whole body seeming to twitch with the excitement of this new game as she skipped between the trees, catching the boles of first one tree with her left hand, then the branch of another with her right, swinging herself in and out. She heard him call, and with a convulsion of excitement, she laughed her challenge aloud and ran on, beyond the shade, across the far meadows.
Then a doubt flickered into her mind. She was behaving like a child, playing tag, running—just when she had wanted to appear adult and really mature … She became aware, too, that the swishing of her own feet through the long seeding grasses was all she could hear. She stopped, swung round and saw only a circle of fields, trees and the brassy blue heat of the sky.
The stillness and the heat seemed to fall over her like a glass dome. Sometimes when, like this, her plans went wrong and there was no audience for her moods, she felt she did not exist. At other times, when her imagination portrayed the might-be, or the- might-have-been, she was well content to daydream alone, but not now. She began slowly to retrace her steps, cross with herself for such a childish action, and with this Cato Abbott who was, it seemed, not so intrigued with Belle Greenaugh that he wanted to run after her.
He was standing just in the shadow of the willows, erect, still, so she felt he might as well be a tree, making no display at her return, just waiting. ‘I called to you,’ he said.
‘I didn’t hear …’
‘I hate railway lines.’
She looked up at him. He was standing in the shadow, while she, a step away, was still in the full glare of the sun. She thought his face looked older, sadder. ‘Why?’ she asked.
He seemed to assess her and was silent. ‘I would like to understand,’ she added. He shrugged, then still a little reluctantly began to explain.
‘Towards the end of the war they became desperate for anyone who could drive a train. Men had to be taken up to the front line … and the wounded brought back. Sometimes’ – he paused, and his voice was bleak when he went on — ‘sometimes, I was sure we brought more wounded back than there could possibly be men at the front. They said that the medical officer in Chartres one day received a telegram saying “Prepare for forty thousand wounded.” I believed it. It wasn’t so much those that died en route, or the times the train was shelled, it was those who suffered agony with every sway and bump. Their cries reached me even on the footplate. God!’ he breathed, shaking his head as if in disbelief of his own story. ‘Some days I wanted to make the train go faster to get it all over with, and others I wanted to nurse it along inch by inch.’ He paused, swallowing hard, and Belle knew a rare emotion, tears for someone other than herself stinging her sunburned cheeks. He gave a brief ironic laugh, and added, ‘When I came back to England I walked and hitched-hiked from the south coast to Norfolk, sooner than go on a train.’
‘Oh, Cato!’ She stepped into the shadow by his side and took his hand, as any woman might comfort any man. ‘And now you have to drive steam-engines again.’
‘They don’t run on lines, thank God,’ he smiled, and with an effort pushed back the dark tide of memories that haunted so many of those who had returned. Then his hand possessed hers, making sudden claim from her instinctive gesture of comfort.
Belle’s lips parted and her heart skipped at this first questioning handclasp, and with the tears of sympathy still wet on her cheeks, she gave a quick impulsive squeeze to his hands, then pulled hers away. He laughed again, but there was such a happy release, such a lightening of his mood, in the sound this time that her heart lifted with it, and she stood totally enraptured with him.
The moment of quiet intimacy was rudely broken by the sound of other laughter. Coarse, cruel bursts of amusement coming from deeper in the wilderness of the osier beds — laughter and other noises, and animal noises.
It sounded like some kind of uproarious hunt, with the pursuers vociferously augmenting the cries of the pursued animal as it grunted and squealed in terror, coming rapidly nearer to where they stood. With a sudden shout of laughter and triumph someone fell through the bushes nearby, but seeing them, scrambled to his feet, hastily shoving behind his back the creature he had obviously just somersaulted to catch.
‘Mr Cato,’ he acknowledged with a tug at his forelock. Belle felt an immediate antipathy to the youth, who must have been in his twenties. He was quickly joined by two others, obviously of the same ilk, who crashed through the bushes. Then an older man with a long grey beard, whom Belle recognised as Mordichi Evans, appeared. All four were rangy men. Their trousers were pulled tight by an assortment of old bits of rope around their waists, their shirts w
ere without collars and the sleeves had all been roughly cut or torn off at varying lengths above the elbows. However, Mordichi’s collar-band did boast a front stud and he wore a waistcoat, which hung unbuttoned and ample around his skinny frame. The father was taller than any of his sons, but all had the same lean and hungry look. The look of predators, or backwoodsmen, Belle remembered the Americans called them. The name suited this quartet. She was sure they would be able to live off the poorest land, in the meanest hovels, and would be tongue-tied and prone to stupid laughter in the company of decent girls. But their eyes moved hungrily - and their hunting expeditions, she would wager, were not always for animals. She felt the hairs rise on the back of her neck as two of the brothers laughed again and shuffled their feet awkwardly, as some kind of grunting protest came from behind the first one’s back.
‘What y’got, Abe?’ Cato asked.
Mordichi turned sharply, and Abe bent away as if to avoid a blow, but his father snatched at what his son held behind his back. Belle saw it was a hedgehog, its belly slashed so it could not roll into its protective prickly ball. She gave a cry of disgust, which ended in a gasp as with one savage movement Mordichi swung its head against a tree trunk.
‘Can we invite you both to share our supper?’ he asked, the quiet voice somehow more obscene to Belle than the violence.
‘I don’t eat gipsy food,’ she snapped at him, wanting to return violence with violence. She would have liked to kick Mordichi Evans hard and repeatedly on the shin.
‘You don’t know what’s good, then,’ Abe sniggered, wiping a fleck of spittle from his lips as he anticipated his evening meal.
‘Found anywhere to stay?’ Cato asked sharply.
‘Aye, reckon we’ll be fine, Mr Cato,’ Mordichi answered. ‘You need have no worries on that score.’
Cato nodded a perfunctory goodbye to the men and gestured for Belle to lead the way along the path. Belle felt angry and censored by their presence. They were already roaming the countryside, already taking their food, and now following their employer’s son with sounds of their uncouth sniggerings. She felt she hated them with the same fierceness as her father hated interference with anything that touched his life.