On The Black Hill (Vintage Classics)

by Chatwin, Bruce

  ‘Nein, nein! Is good! Japan finish! War finish!’

  That night, the twins had an identical nightmare: that their bed-curtains had caught fire, their hair was on fire, and their heads burned down to smouldering stumps.

  Manfred showed no signs of wanting to go home when the first batches of prisoners were repatriated. He spoke of settling in the district, with a wife and a poultry-farm; and the twins encouraged him to stay.

  Unfortunately, he had a very weak head for liquor. Once the wartime restrictions were lifted, he struck up a drinking friendship with Jim the Rock. He would stagger home at all hours, and the twins would find him, next morning, dead drunk in the straw. Benjamin suspected him of messing with one of the Watkins girls, and wondered whether they ought to get rid of him.

  One summer afternoon, they heard the gander honking and hissing and Manfred gabbling away in German.

  Coming out through the porch, they saw in the farmyard a middle-aged woman in brown corduroy trousers and a blue aertex shirt. She held a map in her hand. Her face lit up as she turned to face them:

  ‘So!’ she exclaimed. ‘Tvinss!’

  39

  A TALL STATUESQUE woman, with slanting grey eyes and golden braids like hawsers, Lotte Zons had left Vienna not a month too soon. Her father, a surgeon, had been too ill to travel, her sister blind to the danger. She had arrived at Victoria Station with a domestic science diploma in her handbag; in the spring of 1939, to come as a servant was the only sure way of getting into England.

  Her love of England, deriving as it did from English literature, had mixed in her memory with hikes in the Vorarlberg, gentians, the scent of pines, and the pages of Jane Austen blinding her in the alpine sunlight.

  She moved with the ample grace of ladies in the age before Sarajevo. Her life in wartime London had been grimmer than anything she had known.

  First, she was interned. Then, because of her training as a psychotherapist, she got a job treating air-raid victims at a clinic in Swiss Cottage. Her salary scarcely paid the rent of a cheerless room. Her strength ebbed away on a diet of corned beef and packet potato. A solitary gas-ring was her only means of cooking.

  Sometimes, she met other Jewish refugees in a Hampstead café; but the nusstorte was uneatable, the backbiting made her even more miserable, and she would grope her way home through the foggy, blacked-out streets.

  As long as the war went on, she allowed herself the luxury of hope. Now, with victory, hope had gone. No word came from Vienna. After seeing the pictures of Belsen, she broke down completely.

  The head of the clinic suggested she take a holiday.

  ‘I could do,’ she said, doubtfully, ‘but where will I find some mountains?’

  She took a train to Hereford, and the bus to Rhulen. For days she lost herself along leafy lanes unchanged since the time of Queen Elizabeth. A pint of draught cider went to her head. She read Shakespeare in ivy-covered churchyards.

  On her last day, feeling so much stronger, she climbed the summit of the Black Hill.

  ‘Aah!’ she sighed in English. ‘Here at last von can breeze …!’

  She happened to walk back through The Vision yard and overheard Manfred talking, in German, to his geese.

  Lewis shook hands with the visitor and said, ‘Please to come on in.’ After tea, she jotted down Benjamin’s recipe for Welsh cakes, and he offered to show her the house.

  He opened the door of the bedroom without a trace of embarrassment. Her eyebrow arched at the sight of their lace-trimmed pillow-cases: ‘So you loved your mother very much?’

  Benjamin lowered his head.

  Before leaving, she asked if they would welcome her again.

  ‘If you would come,’ he said; for something in her manner had reminded him of Mary.

  In the following year, she came at the end of September at the wheel of a small grey coupé. She asked for ‘my young friend Manfred’ and Benjamin frowned: ‘We had to put him over the door, like.’

  Manfred had got Lizzie the Rock into trouble. He had, however, done the ‘gentlemanly thing’ and married her, thus securing his right to remain in Britain. The couple had gone to Kington to work on a poultry farm.

  Lotte took the twins on motoring expeditions round the countryside.

  They visited megalithic tombs, crumbling abbeys, and a church with a Holy Thorn. They walked along a stretch of Offa’s Dike and climbed Caer Cradoc, where Caractacus made his stand against the Romans.

  Their interest in antiquities revived. Against the chill autumn winds, she wore a plum cord jacket with big patch pockets and padded shoulders. She recorded their comments in a buckram-bound notebook.

  She seemed to have absorbed the entire contents of the lending library. There was something terrifying about her grasp of local history; and at times she could be quite tigerish.

  On a trip to Painscastle, they met an elderly man in plus-fours, an amateur antiquary who was measuring the moat. He mentioned in passing that Owen Glendower had defended the castle in 1400.

  ‘Qvite hrongg!’ she contradicted. The battle was at Pilleth, not Painscastle – in 1401, not 1400. The man looked flustered, excused himself, and fled.

  Lewis laughed: ‘Oooh! She do have her head screwed on!’ – and Benjamin agreed.

  She had taken a room in a bed-and-breakfast place in Rhulen, and showed no sign of wanting to return to London. Little by little, she broke through their shyness. She earned her place as the third person in their lives and ended up extracting their most intimate secrets.

  Not that she made a secret of her interest in them! She told them that, before the war in Vienna, she had made a study of twins who had never separated. Now, she would like to continue it.

  Twins, she said, play a role in most mythologies. The Greek pair, Castor and Pollux, were the sons of Zeus and a swan, and had both popped out of the same egg:

  ‘Like you two!’

  ‘Fancy!’ They sat up.

  She went on to explain the difference between one-egg and two-egg twins; why some are identical and others not. It was a very windy night and gusts of smoke blew back down the chimney. They clutched their heads as they tried to make sense of her dizzying display of polysyllables, but her words seemed to drift towards the borderland of nonsense: ‘… psychoanalysis … questionnaires … problems of heredity and environment …’ What did it all mean? At one point, Benjamin got up and asked her to write the word ‘monozygotic’ on a scrap of paper. This he folded and slipped in his waistcoat pocket.

  She wound up by saying that many identical twins were inseparable – even in death.

  ‘Ah!’ sighed Benjamin in a dreamy voice. ‘That’s as I always felt.’

  She clasped her hands, leaned forward in the lamplight, and asked if they would answer a full range of questions.

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

  Lewis sat upright on the settle and stared into the fire. He did not want to answer questions. He seemed to hear his mother saying, ‘Beware of this foreign woman!’ But in the end, to please Benjamin, he relented.

  Lotte followed the twins on their daily round. Neither was accustomed to making confessions; but her warm understanding and harsh guttural accent struck a proper balance of proximity and distance. She had soon compiled a sizeable dossier.

  At first, Benjamin gave her the impression of being a biblical fundamentalist.

  She asked, ‘Then how do you imagine Hell-fire?’

  ‘Something like London, I expect.’ He screwed up his nose and sniggered. Only when she probed a little further did she discover that his concept of the life-to-come – whether in Heaven or in Hell – was a blank and hopeless void. How could you believe in an immortal soul, when your own soul, if you had one, was the image of your brother across the breakfast table?

  ‘Then why do you go to Chapel?’

  ‘Because of Mother!’

  Both twins said they hated being mistaken for one another. Both recalled mistaking their own reflection for t
heir other half: ‘And once,’ Lewis added, ‘I mistook my own echo.’ But when she steered her enquiry in the direction of the bedroom, she drew an identical, innocent blank.

  She noticed it was Benjamin who poured the tea, while Lewis cut the loaf; Lewis who fed the dogs, and Benjamin the fowls. She asked how they divided their labour, and each replied, ‘I reckon we done it atween we.’

  Lewis remembered how, at school, he had given all his money to Benjamin and ever since, the idea of owning sixpence – let alone a chequebook – was unthinkable.

  One afternoon, Lotte found him in the cowshed, in a long brown work-coat, pitching the straw on to a cart. He was red in the face, and bothered. Skilfully timing her question, she asked if he was angry with Benjamin.

  ‘Bloomin’ mad!’ he said: Benjamin had gone into Rhulen and was buying another field.

  There wasn’t any sense in it, he said. Not without a man to work it! And Benjamin was far too tight to pay a man a wage! They should buy a tractor! That’s what they should do!

  ‘Catch him buying a tractor!’ he muttered angrily. ‘Sometimes I think I’d be better off on my own.’

  Her melancholic gaze met his. He rested his pitchfork, and the anger died in him:

  How he’d loved Benjamin! Loved him more than anything in the world. No one could deny that! But he’d always felt left out … ‘Pushed out, you might say …’

  He paused: ‘I was the strong one and him was a poor mimmockin’ thing. But him was always the smarter. Had more grounding, see? And Mother loved him for it!’

  ‘Go on!’ she said. He was close to tears.

  ‘Aye, and that’s the worry! Sometimes, I lie awake and wonder what’d happen if him weren’t there. If him’d gone off … was dead even. Then I’d have had my own life, like? Had kids?’

  ‘I know, I know,’ she said, quietly. ‘But our lives are not so simple.’

  On her last Sunday Lotte drove the twins to Bacton to see the memorial to Dame Blanche Parry, a maid of Queen Elizabeth’s bed-chamber.

  The churchyard was choked with willow-herb. Fallen yew-berries made little red scabs along the path to the porch. The memorial had columns and a Roman arch and stood at the far end of the chancel. On the right sat a white marble effigy of the Queen herself – a jewel-encrusted manikin weighted under a chain of Tudor roses. Dame Blanche knelt beside her, in profile. Her face was drawn but beautiful, and in her hand she held a prayer book. She wore a ruff, and below it there hung a pectoral cross on a ribbon.

  The church was chilly: Benjamin was bored. He sat outside in the car, while Lotte copied the inscription in her notebook:

  … So that my tyme I thus did passe awaye

  A maede in courte and never no man’s wyffe

  Sworne of Quene Ellsbeths bedd chamber

  Alwaye with the maedn Quene

  A maede did ende my lyffe.

  She completed the line. The pencil fell from her hand and bounced from the altar-carpet on to the flagstone floor. For suddenly all the loneliness of her life came back to stifle her – the narrow spinster’s bed, the guilt of leaving Austria, and the bitterness of the squabbles in the clinic.

  Lewis stooped to recover the pencil; and he too recalled the misery of his first loves, and the fiasco of the third. He squeezed her hand and pressed it to his lips.

  She withdrew it gently.

  ‘No,’ she said. ‘It would not be correct.’

  After high-tea, she took Benjamin aside and told him, in no uncertain terms, that he was going to buy Lewis a tractor.

  40

  AGGIE WATKINS DIED during the terrible winter of ’47. She was over ninety years of age. The snow had drifted over the roof, and she died in darkness.

  Jim had run out of hay. The cows kept everyone awake with their bellowing. The dogs whimpered, and the cats nipped in and out with hunger-swollen eyes. Seven of his ponies were missing on the hill.

  He shoved his mother into a sack, and laid her, frozen stiff on the woodpile, out of reach of the dogs, but not the cats or rats. Three weeks later, when the thaw set in, he and Ethel lashed her to a makeshift sled and hauled her down to Lurkenhope for burial. The sexton was staggered at the state of the corpse.

  Jim found his ponies a few days later, all seven together, in a cleft among some rocks. They had died on their feet, in a circle, their muzzles pointing inwards like the spokes of a wheel. He wanted to dig a grave for them, but Ethel made him stay and help with the house.

  A big bulge had appeared in the gable-end, and the whole wall seemed likely to collapse. Some rafters had given way under the weight of snow. The icy water had seeped through Jim’s stuffed animals, and poured from the attic into the kitchen. And though he kept on saying, ‘I’ll get me a few tile an’ fix ’em up like new,’ all he ever did was spread a leaky tarpaulin over the roof.

  When the spring came, he tried to buttress the wall with stones and railway-sleepers, but so undermined the foundations that it caved in completely. Next winter, no one lived in the east end of the house, and no one had to; for all the Watkins girls, except Little Meg, had left.

  Lizzie, married to Manfred, pretended The Rock did not exist. Brennie had gone off with ‘some kind o’ darkie’, a G. I., of whom nothing was heard until a postcard arrived from California. Then, at the May Fair in Rhulen, Sarah met a haulage contractor, who took her to live with him on his smallholding behind the Begwyns.

  Sarah was a big-boned, blowzy young woman, with a tangle of black hair and a very unpredictable temper. Her one great fear was of lapsing into poverty; and this sometimes made her seem callous and grasping. Unlike Lizzie, however, she kept her eye on The Rock and made it her business to see they never starved.

  In 1952, after another storm had made the kitchen uninhabitable, Ethel abandoned it to the hens and ducks and piled all the furniture into the one remaining room.

  This place now looked like a junk-dealer’s shed. Behind the curving settle was an oak chest, on top of which stood a tallboy and a stack of cardboard boxes. Strewn over the tables were an assortment of pots, pans, mugs, jamjars, dirty plates, and usually a bucket of fowl-mash. All three occupants slept in the box-bed. The perishable food was stored in baskets that dangled from the roofbeams. Heaped up on the mantelpiece was every kind of object – from shaving bowls to sheep-shears – rusty, worm-eaten, smeared with candle-grease and speckled with the excrement of flies.

  A file of headless lead soldiers marched along the window-sill.

  As the wall-plaster crumbled, Jim tacked up sheets of newspaper and roofing felt.

  ‘Aye,’ he’d say optimistically, ‘I be makin’ it wind-proof, like.’

  The smoke from the chimney covered everything with a film of brown resin. In time, the walls were so sticky that if a picture took his fancy – a postcard from California, the label off a tin of Hawaiian pineapple, or the legs of Rita Hayworth – all he had to do was slap it up – and there it stuck!

  If a stranger came near, he would reach for his ancient muzzle-loader – without the shot or powder to charge it – and when the Tax Inspector came asking for a ‘Mr James Watkins’, Jim poked his head over the stockade and shook his head: ‘’Aven’t see’d ’im in a good while. ’Im be gone to France! Fightin’ the Germins, as I did ’ear it.’

  Despite her attacks of emphysema, Ethel would walk into town on market day, striding briskly down the middle of the lane, always in the same dirty orange tweed coat, and a pair of shopping-bags slung at either end of a horse girth round her neck.

  One day, on the crest of Cefn Hill, Lewis Jones drove up behind on his new tractor, whereupon she waved him to a halt, and nipped up on to the footplate.

  From then on, she timed her departure to coincide with his. She never said a word of thanks for the lift, and would jump down at the War Memorial. The morning she spent scavenging round the stalls. Around noon, she called in at Prothero’s Grocery.

  Knowing her to be light-fingered, Mr Prothero winked at his assistant, as if to say, ‘Keep an
eye on the old girl, will you?’ A kindly, shiny-faced man, bald as a Dutch cheese, he would always let her lift a can of sardines or cocoa. But if she overstepped the mark and took, say, a large tin of ham, he would slip round the counter, and block the door:

  ‘Come along, Miss Watkins! What have we got in the bag this morning? That one shouldn’t be there, should it now?’ – and Ethel would stare stiffly out of the window.

  This went on year after year until Mr Prothero retired and sold his business. He told the new owners they should pardon her peccadilloes; yet the first time Ethel stole a can of Ideal Milk, they worked themselves into a fever of righteous indignation and called the police.

  The next time it was a £5 fine: after that, six weeks in Hereford jail.

  She was never the same again. People saw her moving through the market like a sleepwalker, stooping now and then to pick up an empty cigarette packet and stuff it in her bag.

  One drizzly November night, the passengers waiting for the last bus saw a figure slumped in the corner of the shelter. The bus drew up and a man called, ‘Wake up! Wake up! You’ll miss the bus.’ He shook her, and she was dead.

  Meg was nineteen at the time, a nice compact little person with dimpled cheeks and eyes that seemed to outglare the sun.

  She woke at dawn and worked all day, never leaving The Rock unless to gather whimberries on the hill. Sometimes, a hiker saw her tiny figure rattling a bucket on the edge of the pond, and a file of white ducks waddling towards her. She would bolt for the house if anyone came near.

  She never took off her clothes or her hat.

  The hat, a grey felt cloche, had with age and greasy fingers come to resemble a cowpat. Her two pairs of breeches – a brown pair over a beige – had ripped around the knees, leaving the lace-up parts as leggings, while the rest flapped, in panels, from her waist. She wore five or six green jerseys at a time, all so riddled with holes that patches of her skin showed through. And when one jersey rotted away, she would keep the wool and use it to mend the others with hundreds of tiny green bows.

  The sight of Meg in these clothes made Sarah feel very vexed. She brought her blouses and cardigans and wind-cheaters: but Meg only wore green jumpers and only if they were falling off her back.