by Jean Chapman
Ben blustered and denied it, but his father knew him too well. Levi cleared his throat and, as if with diffidence, added the final blow. ‘Not in my place to say, Miss Belle, but the men’ll work for you and keep their mouths shut — but, my apologies, Mr Langton.’ He touched his forehead to Ben’s father, ‘’Fraid they don’t like young Mr Ben’s manner much. ‘Twould be a right hard job to make ’em keep still tongues, particular, like now t’old chap who walked into yon trap is likely to lose his leg, bound to be more enquiries …’
‘Yes.’ Belle interrupted the monologue, afraid Levi was going to let his tongue wag too extravagantly, but added, ‘The police asked enough questions before …’
Her aunt, uncle and cousin left for Derbyshire the following day. She sensed impatience in her uncle to have his son home and deal with him ‘properly’, but he made time to walk the farm and sec his niece knew the work that should be progressing. ‘Nothing will fall into arrears, gaffer, I’ll see to that,’ Levi promised, and Ambrose Smith, the cowman, showed himself quite capable of handling all the milk records.
‘But you’ll have to get the doctor in to your father,’ her aunt Lucy began, agitated by the revelation of her son’s crass stupidity and wanting to protect him, yet appalled by the loss of her sister, and of leaving her niece to cope alone.
‘I think he will be better when there are just the two of us … the peace, time to come to terms with …’ Belle began, and her aunt wrapped her in her arms, clinging to the wan-looking girl. But Horace put his hand on his wife’s shoulder.
‘Come on, old girl, it’s time to go - and Belle can always send for you again if she needs to. We’re only a day’s journey away.’
Belle reassured her aunt, and realised that in spite of the monsters they had produced in the way of sons, there was a deep affection between the fussy woman and her disparate hulk of a husband.
Their departure left Belle once more with tears in her eyes, and finding her father sitting in what had become his habitual place on the sofa during the last few days, she felt she must have a few moments alone before taking on her new role as mistress of the house and farm. Without conscious decision she went into her parents’ bedroom and knelt by her mother’s side of the bed. She leant her forehead on the quilt her mother had stitched before she was married for her bottom drawer.
‘Mum,’ she breathed, ‘I’m sorry for all I’ve done wrong. I never meant to be a bad girl.’ So many things flooded into her mind it was impossible to put them all into coherent speech. Her tears were more eloquent. ‘Perhaps,’ she said at last, ‘a girl only really grows up when she loses her mother.’ She thought about that for some time, but then wondered, ‘But what happens to a husband when he loses his wife?’ She thought of her father sitting silent, unmoving. ‘What happens?’ she repeated. Rising, she walked to the window, opened it, then began to straighten the bed. ‘I’ve sent for the Rodborough doctor,’ she said, ‘I think he’s the best …’
Cato came that evening; the collie that waited patiently at Sam’s feet announcing that there was someone about, but not leaving his master, as if his contract of service was to the man, not the property. Belle went to the window, saw Cato and ran out into the yard to him. She would have flown into his arms, but his face was serious and he took her arm, kissed her check, then walked her solemnly to the central tree on their front lawn, from where he had watched her taking her own measurements.
‘What is it?’ she asked, dreading some new calamity. He leaned back on the oak tree, from which curled brown leaves, like lost pieces of a jigsaw, fell in ones or twos to join those already piled deep on the lawn.
‘I have to go back to Norfolk for a time.’ She shook her head in urgent denial, but he went on, ‘The trouble is Meg Silver has gone, afraid of what she might have done to you, and Mordichi and his sons have gone too. There was a letter at the old cottage addressed to my father. They’ve gone because Mordichi still wants Meg to treat him - he has faith in the woman … says he thinks his leg is knitting and is not infected.’
‘So Meg Silver didn’t abandon her patient.’
‘Ah, the man’s a fool,’ Cato added with exasperation.
‘No,’ Belle said, ‘I don’t think so. I think Meg is a real old-fashioned wise woman, she really knows her cures. If I’d done as she told me …’
‘The doctor said he would have to report what happened -you could have been killed. You will have to make a statement to the police.’
‘No, I won’t.’ She was quite adamant. ‘What happened was my fault.’
‘The doctor said there was some ill-intent …’
‘The doctor said if I had taken the doses properly, I would have had a good stomach-ache - and they might even have done what I wanted them to.’
‘Got rid of my child,’ Cato put in. ‘Made sure you had no further …’
‘Don’t say that - no - I didn’t want to.’ It was Belle’s turn to falter now. The fact that she had not wanted to be like Tweeny Alsopp now seemed so trivial, but she could not escape it and went on quietly. ‘I caused my mother’s death because I didn’t want to be like Tweeny Alsopp. How do I live with that, Cato?’
‘If I had not made love to you, you wouldn’t have had that worry,’ Cato reasoned, ‘and …’
‘And?’
‘And if your father hadn’t ploughed up the bridle-path perhaps your mother’s horse would not have fallen.’
‘My father … ploughed up … no, don’t be silly, Cato. It’s no time for jokes, sick, awful jokes.’ Belle thought she had never felt so angry in her life before. How dare he suggest her father had any part of the blame. ‘You haven’t seen him — how he is — devastated!’
‘I’ve seen the path,’ he answered. ‘I carried your mother along it.’
No, this she could not take. She turned away. She closed her mind to such a morbid idea, yet looking again at Cato, she knew he was telling the truth. She felt her anger harden to hate, a hate that had to find expression. ‘Go away, Cato. Please just go away.’ She watched as Cato straightened from the tree, puzzled and part angry in turn, questioning. ‘I mean, if you have to go to Norfolk, just go.’ Her hands shot out in exasperated emphasis of her words.
‘The work has to go on,’ he answered. ‘And I’m telling the truth.’
‘I know, I know … I need …’
‘You had to be told. I kept it from you as long as I could.’
‘Cato —just leave me.’
‘I’m not leaving you until I know you are all right. My mother said she would come while I’m away, every day if you want her to. She has had experience of bereavement and helped many people in the past.’
‘No!’ Belle’s emphasis bordered on rudeness. ‘My father and I understand each other. We have to deal with this our own way. If I need help I’ll come to her. Thank you.’ The words of gratitude were a formal afterthought.
‘Belle.’ He made a last appeal to her, but she shook her head, quite distracted by the news of the path.
‘I just need you to go,’ she said. ‘Please.’
He was still, studying her, questions on his lips, but she shook her head at him, turned and ran towards the back of the house. Reaching the yard, she realised that Levi too must have known about the path, but all the stable doors were closed - he had gone home for the night. Better that way perhaps, she thought. She would waste none of her passion on him.
She burst into the kitchen and closed the door - for a second she could have believed it was the door that trembled beneath her, instead of herself that quaked. She pushed herself upright, and the dog, showing the whites of its eyes as it looked balefully up at her, suddenly got up and bellied under the sofa beneath its master’s feet, watching her from there.
‘You ploughed the path?’ She came forward to the table, resting her hands on it, unconsciously moving them over the scored ridges her father had made with his gun, it seemed several cons ago. ‘Yes,’ she decided, ‘you ploughed the path. You did it, didn’t
you, Father? Oh, yes! I can imagine you doing it. Did you laugh and shout as you did it? Did it give you pleasure?’ Her voice broke as she shouted at him. ‘But what did you think you were destroying? Anger and feuding isn’t enough for you, is it? No, we have to have total devastation, total destruction. Well’ - she threw her arms wide and span round encompassing their whole world - ‘you’ve achieved it. You’ve really achieved it!’
She turned away, pacing the kitchen, then suddenly turned on the still figure again as if with fresh inspiration. ‘No! We achieved it, you and I, together! What stroke of luck, I wonder, made you destroy the path, just at the same time I was creating my own private chaos? No, it wasn’t luck - what am I talking about? It was genius, Father, that’s what it was. Genius …’
‘Belle, stop it!’ She started, and swung round at Cato, who had come into the kitchen quite unheard.
‘Will you get out of here, go to Norfolk, and stay there!’ she shouted at him, appalled that he should have heard but unable to retract a word of it.
‘This isn’t helping,’ he reasoned, and when she became loud and expansive in her demands for him to go, he caught her arm and drew her close to him, whispering fiercely at her, and repeating the same message twice, so it penetrated her distraught, careless anger. ‘Are you trying to drive him to suicide, to shoot himself …? Will that help you, or him? Think, for God’s sake, Belle. Think what you’re doing -then look at him properly.’ She struggled against him, and he answered her fight with words. ‘Yes, it’s your battle, you go to it, but look at the man, look at your father, before you twist the knife further.’ He released her then, and she saw in his face a judgment that chilled her. She felt it was indeed a battle, and not just for her father. She had, it seemed, offended too much. But when her passion cooled and she would have pleaded that her love for him could excuse anything, Cato had long gone.
She stood alone, shivering as the wind carried to her the first touch of ice, foreboding winter. She returned to the kitchen, closed the door, leaned back on it and thought what Cato had said. She studied her father’s bent head, his dark hair hardly touched with grey as yet - utter defeat was how she would describe his appearance. She wondered if she could begin to imagine how he felt. But what if Cato never came back - as her mother could never come back?
‘Yes,’ she said softly, ‘love is more killing than hate, Father — with hate you can go on hitting and hitting. But with love the tears are your own.’
19
As the evening closed in around the farm, Belle began to wish her aunt had prevailed over her, and stayed. She felt unsure what she should do next and, wondering what her mother might have done, fetched beer, a loaf and cheese - her father’s usual late supper, often left on the table for him to eat after she and her mother had gone upstairs.
The loaf was the last one in the stone bread pippin. Her hands trembled as she lifted its crusty roundness - the last loaf her mother had made, would ever make … and she had brewed the beer, made and pressed the cheese. Belle felt overwhelmed by the weight and variety of the tasks she had been so eager to take on alone.
She sat down, but found it impossible to call her father to the supper table; his unresponsive presence drained her of energy. She felt she would have to fight to stop her mind being drawn into the limbo her father had retreated to. She remembered Cato’s words about suicide, and wondered if she should hide her father’s shotgun - was it wise to reach it down while her father sat there, or wait until he had gone to bed, if she could get him to go to bed? She started as the dog suddenly clawed its way from beneath the sofa, listened and went to stand by the door. Then she too heard the familiar footsteps.
‘Levi?’ she queried, as the old man stood on the threshold, a bag in his hand.
‘Aye.’ He looked past her to the sofa. ‘You didn’t think I’d leave you on your own all night. In any case, your young man came to make sure I didn’t.’ Levi moved across the kitchen. ‘Come on, gaffer,’ he said with pre-emptive authority, ‘time to make a move upstairs.’ Belle bit her lip doubtfully, but her father seemed reassured by the closeness of a familiar face, and the two went upstairs together.
Belle quickly reached down the gun, looked urgently around the kitchen, then ran to the grandfather clock and pushed it out of sight inside the case.
Levi came back downstairs in a very short time, shaking his head in some astonishment. ‘Can hardly believe that. He just lay down, closed his eyes, and I’m sure he’s fast asleep. I doubt he’ll move much before morning, so you get off to bed. There’ll be work enough tomorrow.’
Belle indicated the beer, bread and cheese, and the old man nodded his thanks, but she did not move. ‘I need to talk to you,’ she said.
‘Aye, well, would hardly be you if you didn’t,’ he said resignedly, and sat at the table as she poured him beer and cut him a crust and a big wedge of cheese.
‘What is my father going to do?’
Levi had taken a large clasp knife from his pocket and was cutting his bread and cheese with it in the same way as if he was taking his meal out in the fields. ‘He’ll do what he came to Hall Farm in the first place to do.’ When she looked at him, puzzled, he added, ‘To work, of course — work on the land, like I do.’ He put down his knife and displayed his calloused hands. ‘He came to this farm as a farmhand, and if he had stayed what he should’ve been, and your mother had stayed what she should’ve been, none of this would’ve happened.’ He picked up his knife again and wagged it at her. ‘More your mother’s fault than his.’
‘I don’t understand… .’
‘No more you’re likely - should think I’m the only one left as might know now. I saw your father grow from a peaky lad from nowhere to a right ’andsome young man. Left alone, might’ve married a girl in his own class - there was a barmaid down Loncote Conservative Working Men’s Club that threw her cap at him, a right spirited little piece, done him a treat she would.’
‘I don’t think you should talk like this.’
‘Ah, well, they’m tried to make you a young lady, with your city-school ways. I think it’s just the time for a talk like this, so as you can know your father as well as he knows you.’
‘So you don’t think he should have married my mother?’
Levi shook his head, his lips pursed in disapproval. ‘Never! She was… too strait-laced, she’d make a joke, but really… .’
‘She was a prude.’ Belle’s remark was spontaneous, and Levi nodded the correctness of the judgement before going on.
‘When Sam finally got the idea she was after him - and that took long enough, with his writing and reading lessons - he did try courting her.’ He paused, his eyes mellow with memories as he told how he had seen her father bring flowers, attempt a kiss, trying, it seemed, to bring a little romance into what had become a ‘satisfactory arrangement’. Mabel’s father, with his elder daughter married, wanted to see his younger daughter settled too, and had promised to split his assets on his death so that Hall Farm should come to Sam and Mabel jointly when he passed on. ‘You couldn’t expect a chap who’d had nothing to turn down an offer like that.’
‘No,’ Belle agreed, but another thought occurred. ‘So Aunt Lucy had her share from my grandfather’s estate?’
‘How d’you think they bought their sheep farm?’ Levi gestured with some anger. ‘O’course they had their share!’
They sat silently for a time, then Levi added, as he finished his meal, ‘The only time your father comes to life these days is on the back of a horse — the more spirited, the harder to handle, the better.’ He paused. ‘Funny it was his black mare, on that path…’
Long after she had gone to her bed Belle pondered all Levi had said, sifting her own memories too. She could recall mad-cap romps with her father, Levi and Harry: hide-and-seek around the hay or corn in the stackyard, throwing herself down on top of her father, or Levi, or poor old Harry, and the laughter that rang in her mind was her father’s. She could see him standing, arms akim
bo, suntanned from the harvest field, pleasuring in the feel of sun and breeze on his skin - until her mother brought sandwiches, cold tea in bottles, and her supervisory manner, into the afternoon.
Belle pushed her memory back as far as she could, but her mother always seemed to be in the kitchen, cooking, mending; comforting and bandaging when she or Harry had taken a fall, of course; but with something of a shock she realised that she could never remember being given a special cuddle by her mother, never ‘a kiss to make it better’, as Levi’s wife had so often given. Caring, but never a cuddle - love, but not passion. She found her heart going out to her father in a new way as she remembered her nights with Cato. Precious memories swamped all other recollections, and her need for Cato was such she could no longer lie in bed. She went to the window and, looking out, remembered how her father had appeared as he watched Meg Silver’s exhibition of hair-combing at the old cottage in the osier beds. Now she had stopped making judgments, she began to understand. Perhaps in the display she should have also seen Meg’s need to be loved… .
She understood far better, too, Cato’s silent judgment of her outburst, and resolved she would stay with her father until he was restored to interest in life, in his farm, his horses. The decision gave her some peace of mind, she went back to her bed in a more relaxed state, and eventually slept.
Belle was awoken by an urgent knocking on her bedroom door, and Levi’s voice. ‘Miss Belle! Miss Belle!’ She stumbled to the door. ‘He’s gone. Your father, gone! I never heard a sound, shouldn’t even have suspected, but the backdoor was ajar.’ He hesitated as she struggled to full wakefulness. ‘The dog… and the gun have gone.’