by Tim Pears
Lottie found Alice in her father’s office, seated at his desk. She asked if her stepmother had a moment. Alice looked up, through her spectacles, and blinked.
‘Lottie, my dear,’ she said, ‘I have these letters to write. Why don’t you go and change out of those filthy clothes? Come back and join us for lunch, then you and I can talk afterwards.’ She returned to the letter she was writing.
‘Just tell me one thing,’ Lottie said. She tried to keep her voice even. She was not sure how successful she was. ‘Where is my father’s groom?’
Alice did not look up, or take off her spectacles. ‘I do not know’, she said, ‘where he’s gone.’
‘What do you mean?’ Lottie asked. She began again. ‘Do you know then why he has gone?’
Alice shook her head slightly, perhaps to express her irritation at being disturbed. She removed her glasses and looked up at Lottie and said, ‘I have dismissed him.’
It occurred to Lottie that she should sit down, for her legs felt unsteady, but instead she leaned forward and placed her hands on the desk and remained standing. ‘On what grounds?’ she asked. She could hear her voice wavering.
‘On what grounds?’ Alice said. ‘He let Arthur ride that monster.’
‘So did I,’ Lottie said. ‘I mean, we both tried to dissuade him, but we could not. Papa insisted.’
‘Then I shall blame you too, if you wish.’ Alice shrugged. ‘He then shot the beast, without my permission. Have you any idea what that horse cost? Yet the groom took it upon himself to …’ She raised her hand and swept some invisible object off the surface of the desk. ‘Dispense with him.’ Alice shook her head. ‘What else could I possibly do? Shattock left me no choice.’
Now Lottie stepped back and sat down, in the chair against the wall. Her head spun, the room turned, the world was upside down. Or the world was turning, coming round to where it had been before. Didn’t her father believe he had no choice, when he dismissed Leo’s father all those years ago and threw the family out of their estate cottage? Perhaps the world was locked into a groove and though people thought they had free will, in truth they were condemned to repeat the actions of others and all men were little different one from another.
‘In the countryside people may act without reason,’ Alice said. ‘I’m afraid they cannot presume to do so with impunity. I had no alternative. None.’
‘Who do you intend to take over the stables?’ Lottie asked. She heard the words issue from her mouth, and understood them to be meaningless.
‘I don’t care.’ Alice shook her head again. ‘Dear Lottie, I have lost Arthur. I am twenty-nine years old, with three young sons to look after. I do not care about the stables, or about this ugly great house.’ Lottie looked up and saw that Alice’s cheeks were flushed. ‘I do not care about the garden, or the farms. I do not care about any of this, do you understand?’
‘What are you planning to do?’
‘We shall move to London now, of course.’
Lottie nodded. ‘Of course.’ The world was collapsing. ‘You will sell the estate?’
Alice laughed. ‘Oh, no,’ she said. She had an expression on her face that suggested she had bitten into an orange only to discover it was a lemon. ‘Your father inserted certain stipulations in his will. In the event of his death, the eldest son should inherit the estate when he comes of age. In the meantime, the estate will be held in trusteeship.’
Lottie nodded. ‘What does that mean, for now?’
‘I’ll mothball the house. We might visit in the summer holidays, but I doubt whether any of the boys will want to be country bumpkins, do you? As for the estate as a whole, you are welcome to stay and manage it if you like. Since it is your brother’s birth right, no doubt you’ll be motivated to look after it better than some land agent.’
Lottie leaned her head back against the wall. There was a rose or dome around the chandelier in the middle of the ceiling, with some kind of patterned inlay decoration. She wondered how many times a month or year it was dusted, by one of the maids standing on a stepladder, to keep it so clean. She lowered her gaze and looked at Alice. Her stepmother was only a few years older than she was. She had been so pretty, it was hardly a surprise that Arthur Prideaux had fallen for his best friend’s daughter. Yet she looked older now, her child-bearing figure no longer that of a slender maiden, the once sweet youthful face hardened.
‘What about the staff?’ Lottie asked.
‘Some may join us in London,’ Alice said. She fiddled with the papers on her desk. ‘Others will need to find new employment.’ She glanced across at Lottie. ‘Don’t look so disapproving. I shall provide them with good references.’
Lottie nodded slowly. She rose to leave. ‘All right,’ she said. She understood that she had no say in any of it, none at all. Even staying in the little cottage would be at Alice’s discretion. She walked to the door but turned and said, ‘If you thought Papa was a country bumpkin and you don’t like living here, tell me this. Why did you marry him?’
Alice lowered her gaze, summoning up memories. She looked up. ‘I returned home from Switzerland, agreed to come to a ridiculous pheasant shoot here with my father, and fell in love with yours.’ She smiled sadly. ‘I thought I could change him, Lottie,’ she said. ‘But he was more obstinate than I’d realised, and I could not. Perhaps Arthur was too old. Or I was too young.’
Lottie wiped her face with her hand. She shook her head. ‘But why?’ she asked. ‘Why change a man you love? Why would you want to?’
‘That is what we women do, dear Lottie,’ Alice said. ‘You’ll find out soon enough, if you haven’t already. They are simple creatures. We mould them. That is why they need us. We make them into the men they can become.’
Lottie sighed. She turned and opened the door and walked out. She went through the house and out of the front door and along the drive. Then she cut across the lawn in her customary short cut to the cottage. A light drizzle had begun, warm rain falling softly. Lottie walked on alone.
Part Seven
THE RETURN 1927–1929
1
Leo Sercombe surveyed the rolling land north of Maundown. Growing up, he’d seen the wooded cleeves in the distance, looming beyond the village, and now was drawn in that direction and walked here and there. Exmoor rose to the west, the Quantocks to the east. Leo had neither map nor plan, but he knew what he was looking for. A field. And so he strolled to and fro, round about, at random.
Leo stowed his old Navy kitbag in undergrowth and walked out for the day and came back to it in the late afternoon. The days were warm but the late-August nights were cooling. Leo lit a fire and slept close to it. If he woke in the night, he leaned over and set fresh wood upon the embers and left it to catch of its own accord. If such it did then in the morning he had only to blow into the coals to rejuvenate the fire and heat up his billycan for tea.
He entered the village of Clatworthy to buy food in the stores there but did not linger. He passed road workers who had made a fire. One fried bacon on his shovel while the other made tea. He passed a pair of tramps, each travelling one side of the road, eyes down, on the lookout for fag-ends.
One hot day Leo picked his way through bracken and gorse, in a valley of rough-split, broken shale. He saw sloughed-off skin. A place of snakes. As soon as he saw one alive, he saw another, then another, and trod slowly. The adders came in a range of colours. Reddish, yellowish, charcoal grey. One was almost black.
The summer was ebbing but haphazardly. Flowering grasses were going haywire. On hot nights gorse pods popped with a cracking sound like a horse whip, provoked to seed by the day’s sun.
When it rained Leo plodded on in his oilskin, his boots clobby with mud, rain dripping off the sodden rim of his felt hat, or took shelter beneath a tree, leaning against the trunk. He rolled a cigarette and smoked it while looking out at the rain falling in the wood, listening to the sound of it, a background roar over which were laid the taps and tocks of raindrops on the ground. A ci
garette was sometimes ruined by a single splodgy drop.
One afternoon the rainclouds rolled north and the sun shone from the south and a bright rainbow with a full spectrum of colours such as Leo had never seen arced across the grey sky over Exmoor like a dazzling gateway to another world. Then the sun dimmed, and Leo turned and watched a cloud move across in front of the sun, and when he turned back the rainbow was gone and all was as before. There was this world only, no other.
The wandering man doubled back on himself, criss-crossing his own designless tread. He dogged his own footsteps. He imagined he might crest a slope or enter a gully and see before him the back of his own figure walking. Or hear boots on the ground behind him and turn and behold himself in unremitting pursuit. Was such a thing possible?
Leo explored the coombes and woods, the sloping fields and steep pastures of the crooked landscape. Like some deluded cartographer he mapped that territory but haphazardly, and kept no record writ on paper or even scrawled in his mind. The perambulations of a crackpot.
He remembered his brother Sid once telling him of mornings after snowfall, tracing fresh nocturnal tracks of the animals with whom he shared this earth. Their unseen presence revealed. He told Leo that you could trail the habitual paths of badgers or study the logic in how foxes traversed the ambit of their domain. But sometimes you came across an animal’s prints that had no pattern. Bereft of logic.
Sid had paused then. Leo waited for him to continue.
‘Well?’ Sid said.
‘Well what?’ he replied.
‘Bain’t you goin to tell me the reason?’
Leo frowned. ‘How should I know the cause of such behaviour?’
‘Well, bain’t you goin to hazard a guess?’ Sid had sat back, watching his younger brother, and grinned.
‘Has such an animal been wounded?’
Sid shook his head. With the forefinger of his left hand he pointed to his temple. ‘Them prints tell me,’ he said, ‘that creature’s gone doolally.’
‘How?’ Leo asked. ‘Like rabies?’
Sid shrugged. ‘Could be rabies. Or some such. All manner a malfunctions of the brain, which is but an organ and one that animals possess just like humans, so stands to reason some a them’s mazed as a brush. Don’t tell me none of your horses is.’
Leo gasped at this recollection of his brother. He heard the sound come out of his throat. How he missed Sid. He’d shut the thought from his mind all these years. Along with memories of his mother Ruth, his other brother Fred, his sister Kizzie. This familiar landscape brought them back. He missed them all. Then he took a deep breath and swallowed the memory again, pushing it back down into his guts where it was hid.
On he wandered. Then one evening he came across a hidden coombe, a depression between the hills of buckled rock thrown up from below in the heat of the earth’s eruption. Here the ruins of a hovel were surrounded by fruit trees, some gnarled, ancient, others self-seeded recently, randomly, from the pips that had passed through the bodies of hungry birds or simply from fallen fruit. A small untended field lay below the rubble. It curved steeply down then up again, little more than an acre scooped out of the south-facing hillside.
On one side of the ruin extended a shelf of land that might once have been a vegetable garden. The whole was bounded by wild hedges. It was like a child’s idea of where a smallholding might be created. It was perfect.
Leo found a spring a short distance from the ruins and placed his jerrycan there and watched it fill with cool water that tasted of clean stone to him. He ate the last of his bread and cheese and some ripe plums off one of the trees. There was plenty of wood lying about. Leo built a fire and heated water and made tea, and he sat gazing into the ungrazed pasture in the hollow below him, drinking tea, smoking, watching bats that came out as dusk fell and flew in veering circuits to catch insects in the twilight.
In the morning his blanket was covered in dew and his face wet with dew but he was not woken by it. What woke him came into his sleep as water flowing over stones. Downhill, but also uphill, which in the dream was strange but acceptable. Leo opened his eyes and saw that a blackbird occupied the branch of a tree above him and sang notes of a liquid song, over and over, urging him to action. If only to get up, and leave its domain.
Leo rose and drank the clean water from the spring and packed his rucksack. He crossed two fields and walked along a lane towards a farmhouse. Grass grew along the centre of the lane. There was no movement and little sound but as he approached the yard two dogs came around a corner running. They bared their teeth and snarled at him. Leo stopped.
‘What’s up with you?’ he asked them. He stood. The dogs crouched low to the ground and slunk about, unsure what to do following their initial hostile welcome. One still eyed him sideways, growling, her hackles raised, but the other ceased. Her hair lay along her back and she came towards him bent low and submissive. Leo did not know dogs. This one’s meekness might provoke the other to further aggression. Or its servility give way to a resentful snap. He waited. Then he heard a voice calling. A figure appeared around the corner of the house, a stout moon-faced girl who did not stop moving when she saw him but came forward.
‘Sorry,’ the girl called. When she reached the angry dog she grabbed it by the scruff and with one meaty arm lifted it clear of the ground, turning it to look into its eyes. ‘Don’t be a gurt noodle,’ she said, then lowered her arm, directing the dog towards the yard. When it was a foot from the ground she let it go but at the same time propelled it in that direction. ‘Git on,’ she said. The dog landed and padded away. The other followed meekly.
The girl turned to Leo and enquired as to how she might help him, trespassing as he was on their land. He asked if this was her farm. She frowned.
‘Me?’
‘Are you the farmer?’ he asked.
She laughed at him. ‘Do you want to speak with the farmer?’
‘I do.’
The girl turned and walked back towards the house. Leo followed. Two other girls appeared around the corner and stood watching. They stared at him unblinking, unabashed. The pair looked much alike and though not identical were both similar to the first girl. He stole glances at them. They each had blonde hair so fair it was almost white, and round faces. They were solid, sturdy. He guessed their ages to be around eighteen or twenty, but could not discern which was the elder, which the younger. Perhaps they were triplets.
The farmer was their father. He received the visitor in the kitchen. The family, such as it was, was evidently partway through breakfast. The farmer invited Leo to join them. One of the girls laid a fifth place, another fried bacon, the third brewed more tea. The farmer asked where he was from and Leo told him he was from around here originally, but he had come down from Scotland only recently.
The farmer rose and walked to the far wall. He indicated with his left hand the large framed painting he stood before. Woolly-haired cattle with extravagant horns grazed in rough pasture beneath misty mountains. ‘Glencoe,’ he said. ‘My father painted it. Your grandfather,’ he told the girls, as if they could not work out such a connection for themselves. The farmer was built on sturdy legs like his daughters. His round stomach pushed out against a white shirt and red waistcoat. His face was circular like theirs but in addition he had lost most of his hair so that his round face and the dome of his bald pate made his whole head look like a globe. He came back over to the table and sat down. Then he spoke of Glencoe and other parts of Scotland that he himself had seen as a young man. ‘A wild country,’ he said approvingly. ‘A wild people.’
Leo listened and ate bacon and eggs and drank strong, sweet tea. The farmer spoke about the painting. He said that his father was a good painter as their guest could see for himself, but not good enough. Farming was his second choice and that was why they were here now. Then he said, ‘And you, young man. How can we help you? I’m told you’ve been mooching about our land.’
Leo looked at the three daughters. Each gazed back at hi
m unperturbed. He explained that he was looking to purchase a small plot of land on which to rest and grow a few vegetables and graze an animal or two. He described the scooped-out field beneath the ruin. The farmer stared at him. He turned to his daughters and shrugged, then turned back to Leo. ‘Show me,’ he said.
They walked in the warm but overcast morning. The dogs joined them. The sun was there behind grey clouds but struggled to break through. Leo led the way over the farmer’s own land. The daughters followed three abreast behind and the two dogs ran ahead of them, pretending to know where they were going but checking every few seconds that they were right. It felt like some extempore Sunday excursion from the farmhouse.
They stood on the shelf of flat land and looked at the rubble of whatever hovel had once stood there and at the fruit trees and saplings and at the little dip of a field. Spiders had strung cobwebs over the tall grass and the flowers in the grass, and the dew was still caught on the webbing and revealed them all across the field. The dogs went sniffing amongst the grass, chasing animal scents only they could smell, and they came out with their coats soaking wet from the dew and with spiderwebs all over their faces and their eyes so that they were blind, and lay beside the ruin trying to clear the mess from their faces with their forepaws.
The farmer looked upon this pocket of his farm as if it was a surprise to him. His daughters gazed in silence. Then he turned to Leo and said, ‘If me and my three girls here are to have you as a neighbour, we’d best see how we get on afore I sell you the land.’
Leo nodded.
‘Dost thou know aught of animals? Of farm work?’
‘I know best of horses,’ Leo said. ‘But the rest I know a little, and am quick to learn.’
‘Horses,’ the farmer said, turning to one of the girls. ‘Could be useful, Myrtle.’ He turned back to Leo. ‘I ask,’ he continued, ‘because I shall gladly rent you this portion of our estate. You can pay me five pound a year and also give me one day a week of your labour. And if we all get on as I hope we will, I’ll sell you the land in one year’s time. How does that sound to you?’