On The Black Hill (Vintage Classics)

by Chatwin, Bruce

  ‘I see.’ Lewis hung his head, and sadly walked home to tea.

  He was right: The Rock was no fit place for any baby. Old Aggie, her face a web of grimy wrinkles, was too frail for housework except to jab a poker at the fire. Jim was too idle to sweep the chimney and, on windy days, the smoke blew back into the room, and they could hardly see across it. The three adopted girls – Sarah, Brennie and Lizzie – padded about with smarting eyes and snivelling colds. Everyone itched with lice. Ethel was the only one who worked.

  To feed her hungry mouths, she would slip out after dark and snaffle what she could from other farms – a duckling, perhaps, or a tame rabbit. Her thefts from The Vision were unnoticed until the morning Benjamin opened the door of the meal-shed, and a dog shot past his legs and raced up the fields to Craig-y-Fedw. The dog was Ethel’s. She had raided the corn-bin: he wanted to call the police.

  ‘No,’ Mary restrained him. ‘We shall do nothing about it.’

  Because of his reverence for animal life, Jim never sent a single beast for slaughter and his flock became more and more decrepit. The oldest animal, a wall-eyed ewe called Dolly, was over twenty years old. Others were barren, or missing their back teeth, and in winter they died from lack of feed. After the snowmelt, Jim would collect the carcasses and dig a communal grave – with the result that, over the years, the farmyard became one big cemetery.

  Once when Ethel was at the end of her tether, she ordered him to sell five ewes in Rhulen; but on the outskirts of town, he heard the bleats of other sheep, lost the will to continue and drove his ‘girlies’ home.

  At the end of an auction, he would hang round the sales clerks, and if there was some clapped-out nag that nobody wanted – not even the knacker – he’d step forward and stroke her muzzle: ‘Aye, I’ll give her a home. All she needs is a bit o’ feedin’ up.’

  Dressed like a scarecrow, he would drive his cart through the neighbouring valleys, picking up bits of scrap metal and cast-off machinery, but instead of trying to turn a profit, he turned The Rock into a fortress.

  At the outbreak of Hitler’s war the house and outbuildings were encircled with a stockade of rusty hayrakes and plough-shares; mangles, bedsteads and cartwheels, and harrows with their teeth pointing outward.

  His other mania was to collect stuffed birds and animals and, eventually, the attic was crammed so full of moth-eaten taxidermy that the girls had no place to sleep.

  One morning as Mary Jones was listening to the nine-o’clock news, she looked up and saw Lizzie Watkins pressing her nose against the kitchen window. The girl’s hair was lank and greasy. A skimpy floral dress hung from her wasted body, and her teeth were chattering with cold.

  ‘It’s Little Meg,’ she blurted out, wiping her nose with her forefinger. ‘She’s dying.’

  Mary put on her winter coat and walked out into the wind. For the past week she had not been feeling well. It was the time of the equinoctial gales, and the heather was purple on the hill. As they approached Craig-y-Fedw, Jim came out and cursed the yelping sheep-dogs: ‘Atcha! Yer buggers!’ She ducked her head to clear the lintel, and entered the murky room.

  Aggie was feebly fanning the fire. Ethel sat on the box-bed with her legs apart; and Little Meg, half-covered with Jim’s jacket, gaped at the rafters with brilliant blue-green eyes. Her cheeks were inflamed. A tinny cough rattled in her throat. She had a fever and was gasping for breath.

  ‘She’s got bronchitis,’ said Mary, adding in an expert tone: ‘You’ll have to get her out of this smoke, or it’ll turn to pneumoma.’

  ‘You take her,’ Jim said.

  She looked him square in the eyes. They were the same as the eyes of the child. She saw he was pleading and knew that he really was the father.

  ‘Of course I will,’ she smiled. ‘Let Lizzie come with me and we’ll soon make her better.’

  She prepared a eucalyptus inhaler and, even after the first few gulps, Meg began to breathe more freely. She spooned some cream of wheat between her lips, and camomile as a sedative. She showed Lizzie how to sponge her with water, and so keep the fever down. All night they kept vigil, holding her warm and upright by the fire. Now and then, Mary sewed a few black stars on to her patchwork quilt. By morning, the crisis had passed.

  Long afterwards, when Lewis cast his mind over his mother’s last years, one particular image remained in his memory: the sight of her sewing the patchwork quilt.

  She had begun the work on threshing day. He remembered coming indoors for a drink and shaking the chaff-dust from his clothes and hair. Her best black skirt lay like a shroud on the kitchen table. He remembered her look of alarm in case the dust disfigured the velvet.

  ‘I shall only go to one funeral now,’ she had said. ‘And that will be my own.’

  Her scissors sliced the skirt into strips. Next, she cut into the dresses of gaily-coloured calico – all reeking of camphor after forty years in a trunk. Then she stitched together the two halves of her life – the early days in India, and her days on the Black Hill.

  She had said, ‘It will be something to remember me by.’

  The quilt was ready by Christmas. Some time before that, though, Lewis had stood behind her chair and noticed, for the first time, her shortness of breath and the solid blue veins on her hands. She had seemed far younger than seventy-two, partly on account of her unlined face, partly because of her hair which grew, if anything, browner with the years. He had realized then that the triangle – of son, mother and son – would shortly cease to be.

  ‘Yes,’ she had said, wearily. ‘I have a heart.’

  For some time, the household had been troubled and divided.

  Lewis suspected both his mother and brother of conspiring against him: the fact that he was womanless was all a part of their plan. He resented the way they kept him in ignorance of the farm’s finances. Surely he too should have his say? He insisted on checking the accounts; but as he puzzled over the columns of credits and debits, Mary would brush his cheek with her sleeve and murmur softly, ‘You’ve no head for figures, that’s all. It’s nothing to be ashamed of. So why not leave it to Benjamin?’

  He resented, too, their stinginess, which seemed to him unjust. If ever he asked for a new piece of machinery, she would wring her hands and say, ‘I’d love to give it to you. We’re broke, I’m afraid. It’ll have to wait till next year now.’ Yet they always had enough money when it came to buying land.

  She and Benjamin bought land with a passion, as if with each new acre they could push back the frontier of the hostile world. But extra land meant extra work; and when Lewis suggested replacing the horses with a tractor, they gasped.

  ‘A tractor?’ said Benjamin. ‘You must be cracked.’

  He was terribly angry when both came back from the lawyer’s in Rhulen and announced that they had bought Lower Brechfa.

  ‘Bought what?’

  ‘Lower Brechfa.’

  Three years had passed since Mrs Musker’s death and her smallholding had gone to ruin. Docks and thistles had invaded the pasture. The yard was a sea of nettles. Slates were missing from the roof and, in the bedroom, there was a barn-owl nesting.

  ‘Farm it yourself,’ Lewis snapped. ‘It’s a sin to take a dead woman’s land. I’ll not set foot on the place.’

  In the end he relented – as he always relented – though not before he had sinned on his own. He drank in pubs and went out of his way to befriend some new people who had settled in the neighbourhood.

  At Rhulen market, he had found himself standing within a few feet of a strange, long-legged woman, with scarlet lips and nails, and sunglasses set in wedges of white bakelite. On her arm was a large wicker basket. A younger man was with her and, when he let fall a couple of eggs, she pushed the sunglasses up on to her forehead and drawled in a gravelly voice, ‘Darling, don’t be so hopeless …’

  36

  JOY AND NIGEL Lambert were an artist’s wife and an artist, who had rented a cottage at Gillifaenog.

  The artist had
once had a successful exhibition in London and was soon to be seen, with paintbox and easel, sketching the effects of cloud and sunshine on the hill. His wreath of fair curls must once have been ‘angelic’, and already he was running to fat.

  The Lamberts shared a conspiracy of gin, but not a bed. They had kicked around the Mediterranean for five years, and had come back to England in the belief that there was going to be a war. Both lived in terror of being considered middle class.

  Because of their fondness for peasants – the ‘Earlies’ as they called them – they drank three nights a week at the Shepherd’s Rest, where Nigel impressed the locals with his stories of the Spanish Civil War. On wet nights, he would sweep into the bar wearing a thick wool cape with a brown smear down the front. This, he said, was the blood of a Republican soldier, who had died in his arms. But Joy was bored by his stories, having heard them all before: ‘Did you really, duckie?’ she’d chip in ‘God! It must have been ghastly!’

  As long as she was decorating her house, Joy was too busy to pay much attention to her neighbours: if she did take in the Jones twins, they were ‘two boys living with their mum.’

  She had always been famous for her taste, and her ability to ‘make do’ on a shoestring. She would add a touch of blue to the whitewash of one wall, and a dash of ochre to the other. Instead of a dining-table, she used an old paper-hanger’s trestle. The curtains were made of wadding, the sofa covered in horse-blankets, and the cushions in saddler’s plaid. She loathed ‘amusing’ objects on principle. She owned one work of art, a Picasso etching, and she banished Nigel’s paintings to the studio-barn.

  One day, looking round the room, she said, ‘What this room needs is one … good … chair!’ And she must have cast her eye over hundreds of rush-seated cottage chairs before finding the one, beautifully battered example at The Rock.

  Nigel had been sketching there all day, and she went up to fetch him: her foot was hardly through the door before she whispered, ‘God! There’s my chair! Ask the old girl how much she wants for it!’

  On another occasion, calling in at The Vision to buy some of Mary’s farm-butter, she spotted an old brawn jar poking out of the rubbish dump: ‘Gosh! What a pot!’ she cried, fingering the crackled grey glaze.

  ‘Well, you can have it if you can use it,’ said Lewis, doubtfully.

  ‘I need it for flowers.’ She grinned. ‘Wild flowers! Hate garden flowers,’ she added, sweeping her arm contemptuously over Benjamin’s pansies and wallflowers.

  A month later, Lewis passed her in the lane with a foxglove in either hand, one of them freakishly pale:

  ‘Now, Mr Jones, I need your advice. Which one would you choose?’

  ‘Thank you very much,’ said Lewis, completely nonplussed.

  ‘No! Which one d’you like best?’

  ‘That one.’

  ‘Quite right,’ she said, chucking the darker one over the hedge. ‘The other was awful.’

  She asked him to call in, and he went, astonished to find her, in pink sailor pants and a red headscarf, hacking down a lilac bush and dragging the branches onto a bonfire.

  ‘Don’t you absolutely loathe lilac?’ she said, the smoke billowing round her legs.

  ‘I can’t say I’ve given much thought to it myself.’

  ‘I have,’ she said. ‘Smell’s made me sick as a dog all week.’

  Later in the afternoon, when Nigel came in for his mug of tea, she said, ‘Know something? I’ve rather taken a shine to Lewis Jones.’

  ‘Oh?’ he said. ‘Which one’s that?’

  ‘Really, darling! You are unobservant!’

  She next met Lewis, on the day of the sheep drive, in the bar of the Shepherd’s Rest.

  From seven in the morning, farmers on horseback had been clearing the hill, and the bleating white mass was now safe in Evan Bevan’s paddock, waiting to be sorted after lunch.

  The day was hot, the hills hazy, and the thornbushes looked like little bits of fluff.

  Nigel, in a boisterous mood, insisted on buying drinks all round. Lewis was leaning on his elbows with his back to the sill. The net curtains ballooned around his shoulders. His hair was glossy black, parted in the centre, with a fleck or two of grey. He blinked through his steel-rimmed glasses, smiling occasionally as he tried to follow Nigel’s story.

  Joy glanced up from her gin. She liked his strong white teeth. She liked the way his belt bunched up his corduroys. She liked his big hand around the dimples of the tankard. She had caught him looking at the lipstick on the rim of her glass.

  ‘OK. You prude!’ she thought. She stubbed out a cigarette and came to two conclusions: (a) that Lewis Jones was a virgin; (b) that this was going to be a long operation.

  Halfway through the shearing, Nigel walked up to The Vision and asked if he could make some drawings of the men at work.

  ‘I’d not be the one to stop you,’ said Benjamin, pleasantly.

  It was cool and dark in the shearing shed. Flies were spinning round the dusty sunbeams that fell through the chinks in the roof. All afternoon, the artist sat crouched against a hay-bale with the sketch-pad on his knees. At sunset, when the cider keg came out, he followed Benjamin to the fowl-house and said he had something to discuss.

  He wanted to make a set of twelve etchings to illustrate ‘The Sheep Farmer’s Year’. He had a poet friend in London who, he was sure, would write a sonnet for every month. Would he, Mr Jones, consent to pose as the model?

  Benjamin frowned. Instinctively, he mistrusted anyone ‘from off’. He knew what a sonnet was, but wasn’t so sure about an etching.

  He shook his head: ‘We’re busy just now. I couldn’t see my way to sparing the time.’

  ‘It wouldn’t take time!’ Nigel cut him short. ‘You’d go on with your work, and I’d just follow and make drawings.’

  ‘Well,’ Benjamin stroked his chin apprehensively. ‘That’s all right then, isn’t it?’

  During the summer and autumn of ’38, Nigel sketched Benjamin Jones – with his dogs, with his crook, with his castrating knife, on the hill, in the valley, or with a sheep slung over his shoulder like an Ancient Greek statue.

  On the damp days, he wore his Spanish cape and carried a brandy flask in his pocket. He always bragged a bit when he drank; and it was a relief to have, as an audience, someone who knew nothing of Spain and couldn’t check the details of his stories.

  And there were things in the stories that reminded Benjamin of his weeks in the Detention Barracks – things the guards made him do; dirty, shameful things; things he had never told Lewis, which now he could get off his chest.

  ‘Yes, they often do that,’ Nigel said, eyeing him up and down, and then looking at the ground.

  Both the Lamberts grated on Mary’s nerves. She knew they were dangerous and tried to warn her sons that these strangers were only playing games. She despised Nigel for lacing his plummy voice with working-class slang. To Benjamin she said, ‘He’s such a wet:’ to Lewis, ‘I can’t think why you like that woman. All that make-up! She looks like a parrot!’

  Every week or so, Mrs Lambert hired Lewis to take her riding. And one misty evening, when they were out on the hill, Nigel appeared at The Vision with news that he’d be leaving next day for London.

  ‘How long’ll you be gone?’ asked Benjamin.

  ‘Can’t say,’ the artist answered. ‘It all depends on Joy; but we’re bound to be back for the lambing.’

  ‘Better be!’ Benjamin grumbled, and went on cranking the beet-pulper.

  At two that afternoon, Joy had gulped down a quick snack, swallowed three cups of strong black coffee, and was pacing up and down outside her cottage, waiting for Lewis Jones.

  ‘He’s late! Damn and blast him!’ She whisked her riding-crop at a dead thistle.

  The valley was lost in the fog. Spider’s webs, wavering white with dew, were stretched over the dead grass; and all she could see, down the line of the hedge, were the grey receding shapes of oak trees. Nigel was in his studio, pla
ying Berlioz on the gramophone.

  ‘Hate Berlioz!’ she cried out loud when the record came to an end. ‘Berlioz, my dear one, is a bore!’

  She examined her reflection in the kitchen window – a pair of long, clean-cut legs in beige breeches. She flexed her knees so that they fitted more snugly into the fork. She undid the button of her russet riding-coat. Underneath she wore a pale grey jersey. She felt comfortable and energetic in these clothes. Her face was framed in a white headscarf and, pinned to it, there was a man’s pork-pie.

  She smoothed her lipstick with her little finger. ‘God! I’m too old for this kind of caper,’ she murmured, and heard the ponies thudding over the turf.

  ‘Late!’ she grinned.

  ‘Very sorry, mam!’ said Lewis, smiling shyly from under his hat-brim. ‘I had a spot of bother with my brother. Him was none too keen on it. Says as we might get lost in the fog, like.’

  ‘Well, you’re not afraid of getting lost?’

  ‘No, mam!’

  ‘So there! Besides, it’ll be sunny on the tops. Just you wait!’

  He handed her the reins of the grey. She cocked her leg and swung into the saddle. She led and he followed. They trotted along the track to Upper Brechfa.

  The hawthorns made a tunnel over their heads; the branches ripped against her hat, and showered her with crystal drops.

  ‘Hope to God the pins stay in,’ she said and kicked the horse into a canter.

  They passed the Shepherd’s Rest and stopped at the gate that leads on to the mountain. She opened the latch with her riding-crop. When she closed it behind him, he said, ‘Thank you very much.’

  The path was muddy and the gorse brushed their boots. She leaned forwards, rubbing herself against the pommel. The damp mountain air filled her lungs. They saw a buzzard. On ahead it was already looking lighter.

  Coming to a clump of larches, she cried, ‘Look! What did I tell you? The sun!’ The golden hair of the larches shone out against a milky blue sky.

  Then they cantered on into the sunlight with the clouds spread out below, on and on, for miles it seemed, until she reined in her pony at the edge of a gully. In a hollow, out of the wind, there were three Scots pines.