On The Black Hill (Vintage Classics)

by Chatwin, Bruce

  Some nights he slept behind a haystack, others between linen sheets. People said he had sired a good few more offspring than Spanker: in fact there were farmers who, with an eye to fresh blood in the family, made a point of leaving their wives alone in the house.

  Every year, before Christmas, he took a week’s holiday in the capital; and once, when Lewis paid him twenty-five shillings for the stallion’s services, Merlin spread the coins in his palm: ‘Them’ll get me one woman in London,’ he said, ‘and five in Abergavenny!’

  In the spring of ’26 a girl delayed him in Rosgoch, and he arrived at The Vision a week late.

  Shreds of cloud hung motionless in the sky. The hills were silvery in the sunlight, the hedges white with hawthorn, and the buttercups spread a film of gold over the fields. The paddock was thick with bleating sheep. A cuckoo called. Sparrows chattered, and house-martins sliced the air. The two mares stood in their stalls, their muzzles in their oat-bags, kicking because of the flies.

  Lewis and Benjamin were expecting the shearers at any moment.

  All morning, they had been lashing the pens, boiling the tar-pot, oiling rusty shears, and taking the greasy oak shearing-benches down from the hayloft.

  Indoors, Mary made lemon barley water for the men’s refreshment. Amos was taking a nap, when a sharp voice sounded by the gate: ‘Giddy-up then! Here comes the old lecher!’

  The clatter of horseshoes woke the invalid. He went out to see what was going on.

  The sun was very bright, and it dazzled him. He didn’t seem to see the mares.

  Nor did the twins see him as he limped into the strip of shadow between the stalls and the stallion. Nor did he hear Merlin Evans bawling, ‘Watch it, yer old fool!’

  It was too late.

  Olwen had kicked. The hoof caught him under the chin, and the sparrows went on chattering.

  30

  FROM THE MOMENT he set foot on the staircase, Mr Vines the undertaker registered an expression of doubt. The doubts increased as he cast a professional eye on the gap between the newel-post and the passage wall. He took a tape-measure to the corpse, and descended to the kitchen.

  ‘He’s a big man,’ he said. ‘We’ll have to coffin him down here, I suppose.’

  ‘I suppose so,’ said Mary. A black crêpe handkerchief was tucked into her sleeve, in readiness for the tears that would not come.

  In the afternoon, she scrubbed the kitchen floor and, sprinkling some bed-sheets with lavender-water, tacked them to the picture rail, so that they hung in folds over the frames. She fetched a branch or two of laurel from the garden, and made a frieze from the shining leaves.

  The weather continued hot and muggy: the twins went on with the shearing. Five of the neighbours had come to help, clipping all day in competition for the prize of a costrel of cider.

  ‘I’ll put my money on Benjamin,’ said old Dai Morgan, as Benjamin dragged another ewe from the pen. He was five beasts ahead of Lewis. He had strong, agile hands, and was a wonderful shearer.

  The sheep lay quietly under the shears, and endured the torture. Then, creamy white again – though some with bloody cuts about their udders – they bounded out into the paddock, jumping in the air, as if over an imaginary fence, or simply to be free. None of the shearers spoke of the dead man.

  Two boys – Reuben Jones’s grandsons – rolled up the fleeces, teased the neck-wool into cords, and tied them. Now and again, Mary appeared in the doorway, in a long green dress, with a jug of the lemon barley water.

  ‘You must be terribly thirsty,’ she smiled, cutting short their efforts to commiserate.

  When Mr Vines drove up at four, the twins downed tools and carried the coffin in through the porch. Their hands were greasy and their overalls shiny black from the lanolin. They wrapped their father in a sheet and fetched him down the staircase. They laid him on the kitchen table, and left the undertaker to his business.

  Mary went for a walk, alone, over the fields to Cock-a-loftie. She watched a kestrel quivering under a curdled sky. Around sunset, like crows at the lambing season, women in black came to pay their last respects, and kiss the corpse.

  The coffin lay open on the table. Candles stood on either side, and their light flickered up through the bacon-rack and made a grid of shadow with the rafters. Mary, also, had changed into black. Some of the women were crying:

  ‘He was a fine man.’

  ‘He was a good man.’

  ‘The Lord have mercy!’

  ‘God be with him!’

  ‘God have mercy on his soul!’

  The coffin was lined with wadding and domett. To conceal the contusions on his chin, a white scarf had been wrapped around the lower half of his face, but the mourners saw the wisps of reddish hair poking out of his nostrils. The room smelled of lavender and lilac. Mary was unable to cry.

  ‘Yes,’ she replied. ‘He was a good man.’

  She showed her guests into the parlour and served each one a glass of mulled ale with lemon peel. This, she recalled, was custom in the valleys.

  ‘Yes,’ she nodded. ‘There are no friends like old friends.’

  The twins stood silently against the kitchen wall, eyeing the people who were eyeing their father.

  Mary went into Rhulen and bought for the funeral a black velvet skirt, a black straw hat, and a black blouse with a collarette of accordion-pleated chiffon. She was still in the bedroom, dressing, as the hearse drew up to the gate. The kitchen was full of people. The pall-bearers shouldered the coffin; but she continued to gaze at her reflection in the pier-glass, slowly swivelling her head and surveying her profile. Her cheeks were like crumpled rose-petals beneath the chenille-spot veil.

  She held up through the service and the committal. She walked from the grave without a final look – and within a week she gave way to despair.

  First, she blamed herself for Amos’s stroke. Then she assumed those aspects of his character which had once annoyed her most. She lost her appetite for the least of luxuries. She bought no clothes. She lost her sense of humour, no longer laughing at the little absurdities that had lightened her existence; and she even remembered his mother, old Hannah, with affection.

  She carried her devotion to the point of eccentricity.

  She patched his jacket and darned his socks, laid a fourth place for supper and would heap his plate with food. His pipe, his tobacco-pouch, his spectacles, his Bible – all were set out in their familiar places; also his box of chisels in case he wanted to carve.

  They held conversations three times a week – not through table-turning or the techniques of spiritism, but from the simpler belief that the dead were alive and would answer if called.

  She would take no decision without his assent.

  One November night, when a field belonging to Lower Brechfa was coming up for sale, she parted the curtains and whispered into the darkness. Then, turning to face her sons, she said, ‘Lord knows where we’ll find the money, but Father says we should buy.’

  On the other hand, when Lewis wanted a new McCormick binder – he no longer held to his hatred of machinery – she tightened her lips, and said, ‘Definitely not!’

  Then, havering, she said, ‘Yes!’

  Then she said, ‘Father says, “No!”’

  Then she said, ‘Yes!’ again; but by that time, Lewis was so confused he let the matter drop, and they didn’t buy a binder till after the Second World War.

  Nothing – not even a teacup – was replaced; and the house began to look like a museum.

  The twins never ventured out, rather from force of habit now than fear of the outside world. Then, during the summer of ’27, there was a very disagreeable incident.

  31

  TWO YEARS AFTER Jim the Rock came home from the war, his sister Ethel gave birth to a boy. His name was Alfie, and he grew up simple. Who the father was, Ethel wasn’t saying; but because the lad had Jim’s carroty hair and cauliflower ears, unkind people used to say, ‘Brother and sister! What can you expect? Small wonder
the kid’s a halfwit!’ – which was quite unfair, because Jim and Ethel were not blood-relations.

  Alfie was a troublesome child. He was always stripping off his clothes and playing naked in the beast-house, and sometimes he went missing for days. Ethel shrugged at these absences, and said, ‘He be bound to show up sooner or later.’ One summer evening, Benjamin Jones found him frolicking on the hill and, having a childish streak himself, the two of them went on playing till sundown.

  But the boy had only one true friend and that was a clock.

  The clock – its glass always filthy from peatsmoke – had a white enamel dial and Roman numerals, and lived in a wooden case on the wall above the fireplace.

  As soon as he was tall enough, Alfie would climb a chair, stand on tiptoe, open the tiny trap-door and peer at the pendulum swinging to and fro, tick-tock … tick-tock … Then he would crouch by the grate, as if his icy eyes could quench the embers, clicking his tongue, tick-tock … tick-tock … and nodding his head in time.

  He thought the clock was alive. He would come home with presents for the clock – a pretty pebble perhaps, a piece of moss, a bird’s egg or a dead fieldmouse. He longed to make the clock say something other than tick-tock … He fiddled with the hands and the pendulum. He tried to wind it up and, in the end, he broke it.

  Leaving the case behind on the wall, Jim took the mechanism to Rhulen. The clock-repairer examined it – it was a fine eighteenth-century model – and offered him £5. Jim left the shop whistling happily on his way to the pub, but little Alfie was heartbroken.

  He missed his friend, screamed, searched the barn and buildings, and butted his blazing head against the whitewashed wall. Then, convinced the clock was dead, he vanished.

  Ethel made no special effort to find him and, even three days later, merely grumbled that Alfie’d ‘gone the devil knows where.’

  Below Craig-y-Fedw there was a boggy pool, hidden among hazels, where Benjamin went picking watercress for tea. Some bluebottles were buzzing around a clump of kingcups. He saw a pair of legs poking out of the mud, and ran back home to fetch Lewis.

  By the time the police came on the scene, Ethel the Rock had thrown a fit of hysterics, and was moaning and wailing that Benjamin was the murderer.

  ‘I knew it,’ she bawled. ‘I knew he was that kind!’ – and poured forth a rigmarole of how Benjamin took the boy on lonely walks.

  Benjamin was dumbstruck: the presence of policemen carried him back to the terrible days of 1918. Escorted to The Vision for questioning, he hung his head and was unable to return a single coherent answer.

  As usual, it was Mary who saved the day: ‘Officer, don’t you see it’s a complete fabrication. Poor Miss Watkins! She’s a little bit out of her mind.’

  The interview ended with the policemen doffing their helmets and offering apologies. At the inquest, the coroner returned a verdict of ‘death by misadventure’; but relations between The Vision and The Rock were sour again.

  32

  AS AMOS’S WIDOW, Mary wanted at least one daughter-in-law and a brood of grandchildren. As the mother of twins, she wanted to keep both sons for herself, and in her daydreams made a mental picture of the scene at her death.

  She would be lying, a withered husk with wisps of silver hair on the pillow, and her hands stretched out over a patchwork quilt. The room would be filled with sunshine and birdsong; a breeze would stir the curtains, and the twins be standing, symmetrically, on either side of the bed. A beautiful picture – and one she knew to be a sin!

  There were times when she chided Benjamin, ‘What is all this nonsense about not going out? Why can’t you find a nice young lady?’ But Benjamin’s mouth would tighten, his lower lids quiver, and she knew he would never get married. At other times, wilfully displaying the perverse side of her character, she took Lewis by the elbow and made him promise never, never to marry unless Benjamin married too.

  ‘I promise,’ he said, slumping his head like a man receiving a prison sentence; for he wanted a woman badly.

  All through one winter, he became very jumpy and argumentative, would snap at his brother and refuse to eat. Mary feared a repetition of Amos’s black moods and, in May, she made a momentous decision: both the boys were going to the Rhulen Fair.

  ‘No.’ She shot a piercing look at Benjamin. ‘I won’t hear any excuses.’

  ‘Yes, Mama,’ he said, lifelessly.

  She packed them a picnic lunch and waved goodbye from the porch.

  ‘Mind you pick the pretty ones!’ she called out. ‘And don’t come back till dark!’

  She strolled into the orchard and gazed across the valley at the two ponies, one cantering round in circles, the other ambling at a trot, until they vanished over the skyline.

  ‘Well, at least we’ve got them out of the house.’ She scratched Lewis’s sheepdog behind his ear, and the dog wagged his tail and nuzzled his head against her skirt. Then she went indoors to read a book.

  She had lately discovered the novels of Thomas Hardy, and she wanted to read them all. How well she knew the life he described – the smell of Tess’s milking-parlour; Tess’s torments, in bed and in the beetfield. She, too, could whittle hurdles, plant pine saplings, or thatch a hayrick – and if the old unmechanized ways were gone from Wessex, time had stood still, here, on the Radnor Hills.

  ‘Think of The Rock,’ she told herself. ‘Nothing’s changed there since the Dark Ages.’

  She was reading The Mayor of Casterbridge. She liked it less than The Woodlanders, which she had read the week before, and Hardy’s ‘coincidences’ had begun to grate on her nerves. She read three more chapters; then, letting the book fall into her lap, she allowed herself to slide into a reverie of certain nights and mornings – in the bedroom with Amos. And suddenly, he came to her – with his flaming hair and the light streaming out round his shoulders. And she knew she must have slept because the sun had come round to the west and sunbeams were pouring past the geraniums, in between her legs.

  ‘At my age!’ she smiled, shaking herself awake – and heard the sound of horses in the yard.

  The twins were standing by the gate, Benjamin puffed into a state of exalted indignation, while Lewis looked over his shoulder as if searching for somewhere to hide.

  ‘Whatever’s the matter?’ she burst out laughing. ‘Were there no young ladies at the fair?’

  ‘It was terrible,’ said Benjamin.

  ‘Terrible?’

  ‘Terrible!’

  Skirts, since the twins were last in Rhulen, had risen not above the ankle, but above the knee.

  At eleven that morning, they had stopped on the hilltop and looked down over the town. Already the fair was in full swing. They heard the hum of the crowd, the whine of Wurlitzer organs, and the odd snarl or bellow from the beasts in the menagerie. In Broad Street alone, Lewis counted eleven merry-go-rounds. There was a Ferris-wheel in the marketplace, and a little Tower of Babel, which was a helter-skelter.

  For the last time, Benjamin begged his brother to turn back.

  ‘Mother’d never know,’ he said.

  ‘I’d tell her,’ said Lewis, and kicked his pony.

  Twenty minutes later, he was wandering round the fairground like a man possessed.

  Farmlads strolled the streets in gangs of seven or eight, puffing at cigarettes, ogling the girls, or daring one another to spar with ‘The Champ’ – a Negro boxer in red satin shorts. Gipsy fortune-tellers offered lilies-of-the-valley, or your fortune. Ping … ping sounded from the shooting galleries. An exhibition of freaks showed the ‘smallest mare and foal in the world’, and one of its larger women.

  By noon, Lewis had ridden an elephant, flown in a ‘Chairoplane’, drunk the milk of a coconut, licked a lollipop, and was looking for other amusements.

  As for Benjamin, all he saw were legs – bare legs, legs in silk stockings, legs in fish-net stockings – kicking, dancing, prancing, and reminding him of his one and only visit to an abattoir and the kicks of the sheep in their death
throes.

  Around one o’clock, Lewis paused outside the ‘Theatre de Paris’ where four can-can girls, encased in raspberry velvet, were doing a come-on act, while, behind painted draperies, a Mamzelle Delilah performed the ‘Dance of the Seven Veils’ to an audience of heavy-breathing farmers.

  Lewis felt for the sixpence in his pocket, and a hand clamped around his wrist. He turned to meet his brother’s flinty stare:

  ‘You’ll not go in there!’

  ‘Just you try and stop me!’

  ‘Won’t I just?’ Benjamin sidestepped across his brother’s path, and the sixpence slid back down into his pocket.

  Half an hour later, Lewis’s gaiety had left him. He moped around the booths looking desolate. Benjamin dogged him, a few paces behind.

  A beatific vision had been offered – offered for the price of a drink – and Lewis had turned aside. But why? Why? Why? He asked the question a hundred times, until it dawned on him that he was not just afraid of hurting Benjamin: he was afraid of him.

  At a hoop-la stand, he almost accosted a girl in flamingo straining every fibre of her torso to land her hoop over a five pound note. He saw his brother glaring through a stack of tea-sets and goldfish bowls; and his courage failed.

  ‘Let’s go home,’ said Benjamin.

  ‘To hell with you,’ Lewis said, and was on the point of relenting when two girls accosted him.

  ‘Want a cigarette?’ asked the elder one, poking her stubby fingers in her handbag.

  ‘Thank you very much,’ said Lewis.

  The girls were sisters. One wore a green frock, the other a tunic of mauve jersey with an orange sash around her bottom. Their cheeks were rouged, their hair shingled, and their nostrils were cavernous. They winked at one another with insolent pale blue eyes, and even Lewis saw that skimpy hemlines looked absurd on their short, heavy-breasted bodies.

  He tried to shake them off: they clung on.

  Benjamin watched from a distance as his brother treated them to lemonade and brandy-snaps. Then, realizing they were no competition, he joined the group. The girls burst into fits at the thought of walking out with twins.