‘Well, come on. I’ll help you wash it out.’ And, as always, Clemmie’s anger disappeared in an instant. Feelings were like that with her – they flashed and fired, and then were gone again. Traces of the hurt stayed in her memory, but she forgave without hesitation.
‘Well, you do ask for it sometimes, Clem!’ Mary called after her, still angry, but mostly with herself by then. Later on they would be kind to her, to make it up; Mary would plait her hair before bed so it wouldn’t knot; Josie would whisper secrets to her in the darkness, and make her laugh; Liz would leave her alone.
One of Clemmie’s first memories was of being held in her mother’s lap in front of the inglenook at Weavern Farm, in the capering light of a fire, listening to her soft humming, and then her saying, close to Clemmie’s ear so no one else could hear:
‘You cried when you were a baby, you know, my Clem.’ Rose had wrapped strong arms around her, squeezing her sleepy body. ‘The day you slithered out you set up a wail they heard in the mill, above the paper machine. So I know you’ve a voice in there, whatever folk say. And you’ll use it when you’re good and ready.’ Clemmie remembered wanting to answer her, and the utter relief of not having to. She guessed, looking back, that she’d been around three or four years old, and that her lack of speech was becoming impossible to ignore. She remembered trying to talk, and something happening to the words between her mind and her mouth – a disconnection that made her impatient, then frantic, then panicky, and got worse the harder she fought. And the more she tried, the bigger the gap between her mind and her mouth got. It cleaved her tongue to the back of her teeth, and froze her lips, so that she ended up lowing like a cow, or making some other sub-human sound that made her schoolmates laugh but filled Rose’s face with fear. And so she stopped. She didn’t take to her letters at school – her mind was too ready to wander, and the teacher didn’t try very hard with her. However carefully she copied out the alphabet the letters were often back to front; when put together into words they shifted and changed their shapes, p becoming q, d becoming b; and they jumped around, refusing to stay in order. Clemmie was mystified by how easily her classmates came to recognise patterns in them, when she could see none. So they sent her home at twelve, saying she was simple-minded, and left her with nothing but gestures to tell the world what she thought. What she wanted; what she didn’t want. Clemmie didn’t mind it, though. There was precious little she wanted, and the world seemed precious unconcerned to know her thoughts. From the age of five, when she had stopped trying to talk, until now, rising eighteen, Clemmie hadn’t been troubled by any of it. But she was troubled now.
Once her hair was clean, and she’d listened to Josie prattle on about Clarence Fripp, an apprentice to the stonemason who was courting her with a kind of bawdy sweetness – all winks and laughs and suggestive remarks with his mates around him; all shyness and posies when he came to walk with her to church on Sundays – Clemmie finished her work as quickly as she could. A bucket full of eggs boxed for market; a shift at pressing Monday’s washing; the cheeses turned; the butter pats scoured and a portion of the twenty pounds of butter, summer-yellow instead of winter-pale, that they would churn each week done. A hapless old hen who’d stopped laying needed to be drawn, plucked and jointed for stewing, and wringing its neck was the only thing Clemmie wouldn’t do. She’d done it once, years before, and felt such a barb of sorrow as the inconsequential life ended in her hands that she’d burst into tears, and refused to do it ever since. It had been before Walter died, so her father had chucked her chin wryly, and called her a mollycoddle, and Mary had elbowed her aside declaring that she wasn’t scared.
The work was never done, of course; there was always more. Mending, scrubbing, sweeping, shovelling; putting away, getting out. Walking the cows from one pasture to another, through air ripe with their flatulence; watering the vegetables in the kitchen garden and hoeing out the weeds; kneading bread dough; skimming curds from whey and bagging up fresh cheese to drain. And since there was always something to be done, Clemmie slipped away. The farm work was a constant stream that had flowed without pause through every one of her days, and to wait for a break in it would be like waiting for the sun not to rise. Breaks had to be made, else it was a long wait for the Sunday school summer outing; the harvest home; the Slaughterford revel.
She got up before dawn and slipped away into the half-light, as she had often times before, when the course of the By Brook was shown by the white ghost of mist hovering over the water. She took the hump-backed bridge across the river to the south of the farm, and then the path up onto the ridge. From the top of the hill she could look down at Weavern Farm: the squat farmhouse three storeys high, its top floor nestling into the mansard roof. The yard was surrounded on three sides by stone barns and stables and skillings, and opened south onto pasture dotted with cow pats. Behind the house were the vegetable patch and privy, and then the land rose steeply up to Weavern Lane. Her sisters and her mother often complained about how cut off they were – how they only ever heard news from the villages second- or third-hand, at church or via their neighbours at Honeybrook Farm; or when William had been to the pub – and that was rare enough. But Clemmie loved it. She wasn’t interested in what other people did, generally; she liked the fact that there were no passers-by at Weavern – few callers, few intruders.
She’d all but stepped on the boy, at the edge of the steep woods near the Friends’ chapel, opposite the mill. She’d had her eyes on the sky; he’d been hunkered down behind a thicket of birch saplings, with a young rabbit – just a kit really – kicking in his hand. He’d had two more rabbits, tied by their feet to a length of twine, slung over his shoulder. An intake of breath and they’d both frozen, eyes locked. Clemmie had recognised him as a Tanner from his cornflower eyes and long face – his cheekbones making hard, slanting lines beneath his skin – and she’d got ready to run. They were thieves and thugs, the Tanners. Everybody knew. They were drunks and cheats, and murderers, and there were more of them, connected by blood ties as tangled as a bramble thicket, than anyone but the Tanners themselves really knew. The chapel wasn’t far from Thatch Cottage, where twelve members of one branch of the family lived, so Clemmie guessed he’d come from there. One of his uncles had beaten his wife to death, two years before, for no other reason than drink. The beatings were commonplace, but that time he’d delivered one too many blows when he should have left off. Gin had dethroned his mind, he said in court, but it wasn’t much of a defence and they’d hanged him for it, not that he’d seemed to mind, by all accounts. Another one – a woman – was hanged for killing her baby with a draught of opium. She’d mixed it herself, from the pale pink poppies that grew along the top and shivered in the morning breezes. She said she’d only meant to keep it sleeping while she got on with her work.
Clemmie had looked down at the little rabbit. Kicking away in terror, every bit of its strength in every futile movement, ears flat to its neck. One of the rabbits hanging over the boy’s shoulder had had a bubble of blood gleaming at its mouth, and a deep wound around its neck, but the little one had only been caught by the foot, so the snare hadn’t killed it. The boy’s fist around its neck had been filthy and thin, all tendons and smears, and something about it brought on a deafening roar of feeling in Clemmie – as though it were her hand about to crush the quickness of life from the animal. She’d seen enough animals go to their deaths and felt nothing much about it as long as she hadn’t done the killing, but suddenly she’d felt the rabbit’s manic heartbeat beneath its fur, and its unthinking terror; the briefness of its life and needlessness of its death – the butcher certainly wouldn’t pay the usual sixpence for such a small one. Nothing on it to eat. She’d felt her eyes fill up and her mouth gape in horror, and hadn’t been able to run even though he was a Tanner and she should have got away. But the boy had frowned slightly, never breaking off his gaze, and when the long moment had passed he’d lowered the rabbit to the ground and let it go. It had darted off into the u
ndergrowth, leaving a dark pearl of blood behind on a burdock leaf. Then the boy had stood up, and she’d seen from his height and the bony width of his shoulders that he wasn’t really a boy, but almost a man.
‘I’m Eli,’ he’d said. And when, a moment later, she’d found her feet and hurried away, she’d felt her own name poised behind her teeth. I’m Clemmie. She’d turned to look back before the trees hid him and he’d been in just the same spot, still watching.
That had been a week ago, and she hadn’t seen him since. But she’d been looking, and the more she didn’t see him, the more important it became that she should. As yet, she had no idea why this should be, but she had never worried much about the whys in life. She could picture his hand around the rabbit kitten so clearly – a starving, damaged hand. In an abstract way, she wondered if her need to see him again would be explained in the doing so. She walked a long route on high ground, going wide of the river and the mill’s long tail race, coming down past Spring Cottage and crossing the river north of Rag Mill. This was far smaller than Slaughterford Mill: three slope-roofed buildings with whitewashed walls, housing a big iron boiler to cook down old hessian rope, twine and grain sacks, and a small waterwheel to run the beaters that would pummel them for days, reducing them to the pulpy half-stuff that could then be turned into brown paper packaging. Clemmie liked to watch the spoked hammers turning in the tanks, and the beater man resting a cane on the drive shaft and putting it to his head, to feel from the vibrations when the half-stuff was ready.
From Rag Mill she went on to the big mill, and walked from building to building, always staying outside, always peeping from a place of shelter. Trying to find him. Her stomach dropped oddly when she saw a tall, thin figure at the bottom of the big winch, fastening a bale of old paper scraps to be hoisted up to the sorting floor. But when she blinked, and looked again, it wasn’t him. She peered into the bag room, and the canteen, and the machine spares sheds, and even spent a while watching the privies. There was no way to see into the machine room or beating house without going inside, and getting sent out with a flea in her ear. Frustrated, she slunk around the back of the old farmhouse and hunkered down in a spot beneath a window where she could see the workers coming into the yard. She picked daisies and threaded them into a garland, as the day got older and brighter, and heard Alistair Hadleigh come into the office to have his morning meeting with the foreman. They spoke of things that didn’t interest her, but when Alistair Hadleigh’s voice began to sound anxious, she paid more attention.
‘But what about Douglas and Sons? Have they still not placed their usual order?’
‘Not yet, sir. I wrote to them again last week, but they’ve yet to reply.’
‘It’ll be a close-run thing.’ Mr Hadleigh sighed. There was a long pause. ‘I’ll find a way, never worry.’
‘I don’t doubt it, sir. This mill has run without pause for centuries. Run on a while longer, it surely shall.’
‘Well spoken. Let’s hope you’re right.’
After that, they spoke more of customers and orders, of the problem of dye leaching into the By Brook downstream, and the poor quality of the last lot of rags from Bristol, and Clemmie stopped listening. As the sun began to burn her scalp through her hair, she got up and went back the way she’d come, towards Rag Mill. On the hill behind it, the brewery breathed out its ripe, yeasty smell, and alongside it was a long open storage shed, jammed to the rafters with rag scraps tied into bales, ready for pulping. As Clemmie headed for the trees beyond it all, she saw him at last. Tall, raw, angry. He came striding out of the mill and lit a cigarette, then held it between his teeth as he hauled out a bale and wrestled it into a handcart. Clemmie took a step forward, then stopped. Eli Tanner turned the handcart and wheeled it back into the mill, cursing through his teeth as it stuck in the hard ruts left after winter. He was lanky and angular; his nose was crooked, and looked like it had been broken more than once. She thought of the boy’s father, called Isaac but known simply as Tanner – patriarch of the lot who lived at Thatch Cottage.
He was a brute of a man, everyone knew. You didn’t cross him, and even then it didn’t make you safe. People edged back from him like sheep from a dog they didn’t know. He sometimes worked as a strapper on one or other of the farms; sometimes in the mill, doing unskilled work – sorting scrap paper or rags, scrubbing out the stuff tanks between runs, stoking the boilers. He worked wherever he could get work, and until he was dismissed for fighting, or stealing, or drinking. Once for passing out drunk and letting the steam generator go out – something that ought never happen. Mrs Hancock at Honeybrook Farm swore that the last time he’d gone to church the water in the font had boiled. They said his wife had given birth to twins over the winter and he’d drowned the littlest like a rat in a barrel, because they had too many mouths as it was. Only it couldn’t be proven because no one had attended the birth, or seen both babies, so Clemmie had no idea how the story got about. When she’d asked her mother – raised eyebrows, the tilt of her head that signalled a query – Rose had pursed her lips and said, There’s no smoke without fire. Clemmie couldn’t imagine what it must have been like to live beneath the cosh of such a man. Her own father could change the mood at Weavern Farm with a mere look or a word, and he never did anything worse than put the back of his hand across their faces now and then.
When Eli came back for another rag bale, he saw her. Clemmie twisted on the spot, uncertain of herself. Uncertain of him. With a glance back over his shoulder, Eli came across to her. He opened his mouth to speak but then didn’t, and scowled instead. He looked so angry, and she wondered why. She would have been afraid of that anger if it hadn’t been for the rabbit, and the conflict she saw in his every move and gesture – the suspicion, the doubt; of her, of himself. She wondered if his anger were somehow a means to survive.
‘Hello,’ he said at last, looking down at his bare feet, then up at her through the roughly cut ends of his fringe. He stank of the soda solution the rags cooked in. She raised her fingers to say hello back, and thought she saw disappointment in his face. As though he’d half hoped the stories weren’t true, and she wasn’t mute. She smiled a quick apology and saw him blush, and then how angry that made him. ‘You’re Clemmie Matlock. From down Weavern,’ he said, curtly, and she nodded. ‘I seen you before. Bringing the milk. And out walking, in the woods and that. I like it out there too. I like being out on me own.’ He stood askance, his weight in his toes, his arms loose at his sides. She got the feeling that if she made too sudden a move he might run. Or lash out. His hands were as restless as his gaze; always moving. In the pause where she should have spoken the boiler roared inside the mill, and steam plumed from the chimney, and the beaters thudded and rumbled. A blackbird in the trees behind them sang as loudly as it could; bees hummed in the ivy and the sun streamed down, gold and green. Clemmie wished she could say, Why did you let that rabbit go for me?
‘Eli, where’s that bale?’ came a shout from inside. Eli flinched, then glowered again. Clemmie wanted to put her hand on his arm, to still him. As soon as the thought occurred to her, it took over – sending its roots down into her bones. More than anything, she wanted to touch him, and still him. He looked back at her and shrugged one shoulder, shifting his weight.
‘I’d say you’re the loveliest thing I ever saw, Clemmie Matlock,’ he said, and even then he sounded angry. As though she’d taken the advantage, or insulted him. ‘I’ve got to get back to it. Maybe I’ll see you again though. Out walking.’ He pinched a fleck of tobacco from his lip and flicked it away, and then his hand hesitated in the air between the two of them, not dropping back to his side, not reaching for her. The tips of his fingers were stained, the nails all broken away, and they shook slightly. Almost too slightly to see, but Clemmie saw. ‘Maybe I’ll walk along this way when shift’s over,’ he said awkwardly, his cheeks burning. ‘Towards Ford; about sundown.’ Before he turned to go, Clemmie smiled again.
* * *
Alistair Ha
dleigh came to find Pudding one morning a little later in the week, and she felt a familiar little flood of happiness at seeing him approach. He had a diffident way of walking that she loved – he never just came striding up, even though he owned the place, and was usually busy. Instead he joined his hands behind his back and moved with a measured step, looking around as though taking in some magnificent garden, not the muck heap or the pig skillings, or Jem Welch’s baby leeks in their parade-day rows. She supposed it had to do with knowing that he owned it all, in fact – that whatever was happening, it would wait for him. Pudding’s father always seemed to be in a hurry – except when he was with his patients. Dr Cartwright galloped between house calls, bag swinging; he galloped to his consulting room in Biddestone – pedalling frantically, puffing as he pushed his bike up Germain’s Lane. Only once he was actually face to face with a patient was he calm and soothing – even if he hadn’t quite caught his breath.
Pudding had been stropping the cob, Dundee: whacking a folded cloth into his meaty parts, over and over, to promote circulation, muscle tone, and, as witnessed by the great clouds around them, beat some of the scurf out of his coat. It was probably unnecessary, given the amount of work the sturdy pony did, up and down the hills between Slaughterford and Chippenham, but it was what old Hilarius had taught Pudding to do, so it was what she did. She was pink, rather sweaty, and her nose was running, but there wasn’t much she could do about that. Alistair smiled as he reached her. That was something else she liked about him. The sun was bright in his fair hair, and on the shoulders of his tweed jacket. He gave Dundee a hearty pat on his neck.
The Hiding Places Page 6