Elmet

by Mozley, Fiona

  Daddy got drunk on cider one evening on the fat grass outside our house. He said to us or to himself or to the house or to the trees or to the birds in the branches that we were all fools. He said it was all just vanity, that it was Ewart’s vanity for thinking this sort of thing could still make a difference and that it was his vanity for thinking he could protect them all, while still keeping us safe, along with our house on the hill. These were old dreams, he said, and should have been left as just that.

  The next morning, however, he got up early and made his usual rounds of the villages, to reassure people, to see if there had been any mischief, to make sure that these people knew this man was still on their side. He was gone for more than three hours but when he returned his mood was optimistic. ‘We might just be able to break bastards,’ he told us.

  Mr Royce’s mood varied as well. Sometimes when he came up to visit us or we went down to him in the village he wore a glum demeanour, a deeply stifled terror. But usually he was hopeful about the operation and spoke at length about the positive responses he had had, and about how all the signs were, for the moment, positive.

  News came that Gerald Castor had already raised the men’s wages. Mr Royce had gone along with the labourers to the pick-up point in the morning and argued the case with the foreman himself. Gerald Castor had come down from the farm to speak with them. ‘My arguments got better of him, dindt they?’ Mr Royce said. ‘He were unprepared and he got spooked when I started talking about law. That’s thing. You just have to seem official, seem like you know what you’re talking about – well I, as a matter of fact, I do know what I’m talking about, but unfortunately seeming like you do is often just as important – and, yes, then they don’t know what to do with themselves. That’s how it were. Castor were taken off-guard and said that if men come next day they’ll be paid what we agreed – what all landowners should be paying their workforce. These farmers and landlords have clubbed together, led by Price, but without him and each other they’re nothing. That’s what we must remember.’

  We congratulated Mr Royce and had some of the men round to ours for a drink. It was a kind of celebration but it was also to make sure they connected this victory in their minds with our house, and the words that had been spoken here at the bonfire weeks before. It would be no use if they went back to work but forgot to remember the other people they were fighting with and the other people they were fighting against. Mr Price was the real enemy, Daddy always said, but perhaps that only really applied to us.

  He did tell Cathy and me one evening that though he cared deeply about everyone else involved in this, he could not help but fixate exclusively on my and Cathy’s house. That’s how he sometimes referred to it, as Cathy’s and mine, like he did not truly inhabit it. It was like he forgot to say that it was ours, as a family, or like he forgot he could live in a home, like he forgot about his need to settle and live comfortably and be looked after by my sister and me.

  He told us that was why he was really in on all of this. To protect us, to get our house for us, and to keep our lives within it safe forever. He said that this was very bad, and that we were not to let anyone know, but if it came down to it he would do anything to see us right. ‘The others be damned,’ he said once, very quietly.

  The good news continued. A few days after the incident with Gerald Castor, Mr Royce came up to see us with news that another farmer had accepted their demands, Jeremy Higgins. And then a couple of days after that, there was another.

  For that first couple of weeks it seemed too easy. The men were all asking each other why they had not done anything like this before. They had assumed their work was worth nothing. Many were just out of prison or else serially unemployed. They thought rough labour out on a farm for cursory, under-the-table payment was all they could get. And possibly they were right. But still the landlords needed them. It was not like they were doing these men a favour. Yet, what with the new wages, the employers could have gone and got other people to work for them, but they did not want the paperwork. Our lot still were not asking for contracts or anything like that, you see. It had been discussed by everyone, including Mr Royce, and everyone had decided against it. Nobody wanted to be on any kind of official radar, much. And that was not for tax reasons. It was just nobody wanted the authorities – least of all the police – to know anything about any of it. That held true for the farmers as much as for the workers. That was the pressure-point on which all of this seemed to operate. Both sides were trying to push each other but not so much as the police would get involved.

  Given that, when the recriminations started, as Daddy warned they would, Mr Price’s men did not hold back as there was no fear that we or any of the others would report it. After at first agreeing to the demands, both Gerald Castor and Jeremy Higgins and any of the others who had initially conceded, then went back on their words. It was suspected, with good reason, that they had consulted with each other and then with Price, and – though cowed by the initial shock of the workers’ and Mr Royce’s activities – had then thought again, taken stock, composed some kind of plan.

  Reports came that they were hiring work from elsewhere. Bussing people in. Standard practice, said Mr Royce, you just had to know how to handle it. We had to find out where they were getting them from and where they were being picked up and dropped off. I did not learn what the plan was after that.

  The real fuss arrived when the end of the month came and went and no rents had been paid from any of the houses in the entire area. That was a bigger deal. Mr Royce said it would be. That was where the real money lay, he said, and up here it was a lot harder to get new tenants than new workers.

  There were recriminations. Mr Price and some of the others employed men all year round to collect their rents and sort out their problems. They were big men, strong and mean. If a tenant got behind with his or her payments they would come round and see to it. They were full-time, private bailiffs. They would knock on the door. They would make threats. If still the money did not come they would knock down the door and take what was owed in kind. They were hard men, big and tough and ruthless. But they were nothing to Daddy.

  Daddy was king. A foot taller than the tallest of these men, Daddy was gargantuan. Each of his arms was as thick as two of theirs. His fists were near the size of their heads. Each of them could have sat curled up inside his ribcage like a foetus in a mother’s womb. These men did not move Daddy, and when they began prowling in earnest, he knew how to respond.

  The bailiffs started knocking on doors. At first they would concentrate on a few houses in a certain area. This made it easy for Daddy. Gary, our man from the potato sorting, had use of his uncle’s car and as soon as he got a call from any of the tenants he would drive Daddy over as quickly as he could. Daddy would get out and make his hulking presence known. The bailiffs would leg it.

  So the bailiffs started mixing up their routine. They would only go to one house in a neighbourhood and then get in their cars and drive away before Gary and Daddy could get there. But Daddy stepped it up as well. When he did catch up with a couple of them he dragged them down a snicket into a patch of overgrown grass, laced with wild flowers, cut off from view by high hawthorns. There, he broke ribs and fingers and sent them on their way.

  Daddy did that a couple of times with a couple of different groups of them. The bailiffs began to lose interest. For them it was just a job, after all. They were only getting paid. And the landlords couldn’t pay them enough to make risking their necks worthwhile, not without paying out to bailiffs more than they would make back in rents.

  It seemed as if we were winning. Morale was high. We met regularly, up at our house, to drink and chat and urge each other on. There was a real spirit behind it all, and people were excited.

  But, of course, it could not last. And on a Tuesday, late on in the evening, but not so as it was yet dark, Mr Price drove up to our house.

  I was scuffing up the path when Mr Price drove his Land Rover up the hill. There
had been heavy summer rains this last fortnight and the torrents had run down the slope with half a tonne of mud, silt and rocks, and had pooled at the bottom of our path near where it met the bridleway. I had taken a rusted iron rake from the tool-shed and was shunting sediment back into a path shape. It was all clay up here. The claggy earth clung to the teeth of my rake as I scraped it into place, such that I could barely see the metal through the topsoil.

  I heard Mr Price’s jeep coming up the bridleway. I knew of no one else with an engine that grand and smooth. He turned the corner onto our path and the front wheels of his vehicle sunk right far into the standing sludge. That deep engine revved and the wheels spun for a bit, kicking up muck and water that would have splattered me had I not seen it coming. He did not dare take the hill, so slowly reversed back out onto the bridleway and parked the jeep on the verge.

  He opened the door and stepped out. If he was flustered and bothered behind those blacked-out windows he did not show it when he stepped into the outside, out in the evening light. He came towards me with a sinking sun at his back, illuminated. ‘You’re just the man,’ he said.

  I stumbled. ‘I think I’ll just go and get my Daddy.’

  ‘No, no, no.’ He held out a hand to gather me back round, so as I would go with him out into the bridleway. His tone was sweet, generous. His face was kind.

  I looked up at my house. The lights were being lit.

  God, I was a coward sometimes.

  Mr Price was still standing there, with his arm outstretched, waiting for me. It was a case of pleasing the person who was right there in front of me, you see.

  I picked my way through the puddles and out into the lane. Mr Price took us to a place where we were hidden from the house by the honeysuckle.

  He stood in front of me. He was wearing wellington boots, corduroy trousers, and in the warm summer evening just a chequered cotton shirt, unbuttoned at the top.

  He put his left foot up on the banking and leaned on it with his left elbow so that his whole posture opened and dipped. Like this, he stood a few inches smaller than me, and he looked up at me with brindle eyes.

  I noticed that I was fidgeting with my hands and feet, rubbing the soles of my shoes back and forth against the damp grass and winding my fingers in rings about themselves.

  ‘What’s your surname, lad?’

  ‘Oliver.’

  ‘Daniel Oliver?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘Daniel and Catherine Oliver.’

  ‘Yeah. What of it?’

  ‘What’s your Daddy’s surname?’

  ‘Smythe.’

  ‘Smythe?’

  ‘Aye. You know that.’

  Mr Price nodded. ‘I do know that. I just wanted to ask.’

  He shifted his weight so that he was standing tall, but there was still warmth in his manner as far as I could discern.

  ‘You and your sister were given your mother’s surname.’

  ‘Aye. So what? That happens lots of times.’

  ‘I suppose it does.’ Mr Price paused and wetted his lips, looking at me the whole while. ‘You see, I’ve got a great deal more time for an Oliver than I do for a Smythe. It’s fortunate for you, then, that that is what you are.’

  I shrugged. ‘I can’t say I knew my mother all that well. Daddy’s been both for us. Both mother and father. Daddy and our Granny Morley were, I mean. Before we came here. I might be an Oliver by name, but I’m a Smythe by nature.’

  Mr Price considered these words for a moment and then shook his head, ever so slightly. ‘No,’ he said. ‘No, I don’t see that at all. You are not a bit like your father.’

  An ounce of extra stubbornness shot through me with this declaration.

  Mr Price continued: ‘I don’t suppose you’re enjoying the current state of affairs much. I shouldn’t think it would be in your nature to seek out or prolong proceedings such as these. The strike, I mean. This business about the rents for the properties I own. It’s all a bit silly, isn’t it? That’s my take on it, if you want to know. It should never have come to this. Why are your father and his friends approaching things in this way, I ask myself? Why not just come to me straight away to discuss their grievances?’

  ‘You threatened to kick us off our land, that’s why.’

  ‘Did I? You heard that, did you? You were there, were you?’

  ‘No, I wandt there. But Daddy said.’

  ‘Daddy said?’

  ‘Aye.’

  Mr Price gathered himself, folded his arms on his lower chest. ‘I would give you this land tomorrow,’ he said. ‘This tiny copse with a handful of good trees and clay that’s running down into the Levels? I would give it up to you tomorrow. Not to your Daddy, but to you. Not a Smythe, but an Oliver. Your Daddy is a brute. You are your mother’s son. What do you say to that?’

  ‘I … I don’t really understand.’

  ‘I’m telling you I would give you the land, where your Daddy’s built that house, tomorrow. It would be yours, officially. I would sign over the papers. There would be no further problems.’

  ‘But I woundt want it by myself. I would still want to live with Daddy and Cathy.’

  ‘And I suppose that’s it, right there. The thought of handing over your mother’s land to your father doesn’t sit well with me. Never has. But he just placed himself on it, didn’t he? He’d been after it for years and then, one morning, he just turned up and started building. And the first I heard of it, he’d already got the best part of a house up. Does that sound right to you?’

  I said nothing.

  ‘You knew it was your mother’s land, didn’t you? Your father told you that much, surely?’

  Still I was silent.

  ‘You knew that she lived up here, all her life? She inherited the land from her parents. And when she fell on hard times – which you’ll know all about, being her son – she came to me for help. And so I bought this land off her for a very high price indeed, and she should, would have been able to put herself back together again, start afresh, if it wasn’t for your father. And although this land is rightfully mine, and even after all that your parents have put me through, both when your mother was alive, and now that it’s just your father left causing me bother, I would happily sign it over to you, Daniel Oliver. I would give it to you out of the affection I held for the girl she was. But instead, your father seized it. He seized it from me when he had no right.’

  I shrugged again. ‘No one else was doing anything with land.’

  ‘Maybe so. But that’s not the way the world works. That’s not how good, decent people operate.’

  ‘We’re decent people. We needed somewhere to live, is all.’

  Mr Price looked me up and down and then walked around me towards his Land Rover. I thought he was going to drive away. I was feeling just a little bit proud of myself, like I had seen him off, like I had done one for the family, but he was not leaving just yet. He opened the door of the front passenger seat and reached into the glove compartment. He emerged with a clear plastic folder, containing a thick pad of documents, most in white, others in pastels: pink, yellow, blue, green.

  ‘I have the documents here,’ he said. ‘I am willing to sign the land over, officially, to you, Daniel Oliver. Look, you’re the named party.’ He pointed to the wording on the opening page. I saw my name laid out in black block capitals. ‘But knowing, as I do, that you would want to live here with your father – you are still a minor, after all – I have certain conditions. I need to know that your father isn’t going to be as hostile a neighbour as he has shown himself to be in recent months. I don’t want someone living so close to me who is going to give me a hard time, who is going to threaten my business and my property. Who would want that? Nobody. So you must tell him, first of all, that if he wants to be sure of a home for you all, and he wants the land to be in his son’s name – because he can be sure it will never be in his name – he must call off this stupid business. He must get those scroungers back to work, and he m
ust make sure those rents are paid. Now I’ve spoken to the local farmers, and we’ve all agreed to up the pay a little bit. That’s only fair. And there won’t be any increases in rent for the next two years, and then only in line with inflation. Do you know what that is? No, well never mind. I’ve laid it all out in here.’ He waved the folder. ‘Here’s a letter to be given to your father, along with copies of the documents that I will sign if he agrees. That way he can think on it. He can weigh up the situation and make his decision. And then that’ll be that. Done.’

  I took the folder from him and tucked it under my arm. ‘Are those conditions? That Daddy calls it all off?’

  ‘Not entirely,’ said Mr Price. ‘Your Daddy must work for me, from time to time, as he always used to. He must return to the fold. I used to own that man’s muscles, and I owned his mind. I owned his fists and his feet; his eyes and his ears and his teeth. How do you think he met your mother?’

  ‘I’ve never really thought about it.’

  Mr Price made no answer. He folded his arms then unfolded them, and then placed them on his hips. ‘Just you get that message to your father,’ he said, pointing at my chest. ‘Tell him that’s all I want from him. I want to use him again. Him and that great, hulking body, the like of which I’ve never seen, not in this county, not in this country. Tell him I want to see those muscles tested, and those fists put to their proper use. Aye, I know he’ll never go round the houses for me, knocking about whoever I want him to knock about, like he might have done when he was a pup. But tell him I’ve got prouder work for him, if he’ll do it. Tell him I’ve found a man for him to fight.’

  He turned his back on me and went back to his jeep. He drove away. Mud spat like shrapnel.

  I had left my rake sticking straight up from the silt. It was the wrong tool for the job. I suckered it out of the ground, swung it over my right shoulder and bobbed up the hill to our house.

  The front door was swinging, caught on a small, bouncing breeze with no particular direction. Cathy had left the door hanging so that this light, dewy wind could sweep the floors for us, and dance through the curtains, and the nooks in the walls, and leave our home with soft freshness and the smell of damp pollen and snapped greenwood.