The Stories of William Sansom

by William Sansom

  ‘Messy things,’ she said.

  And grinning with pride, half in terror, half in gladness, he took her arm, as he thought, for ever.

  A Country Walk

  LIVE in Town?’ he used to say to others in the City. ‘Don’t know how you people stand it. Give me the country any day.’

  And in his pocket, in the little card-case, he liked to think of his name engraved so steadily, so secure: Norman Harris, and Four Acres, and the name of the village, and lastly, deep and green spurning of all suburban Surreys, the rare remote words West Sussex. It was as good as looking in the mirror.

  He had the face of a dog. Early grey hair, thick and stiff and occasionally yellow, he combed back straight from his small square forehead, no parting, and set the stiffer with a gummy cream: he used a wide-toothed comb, and the tooth-marks stayed set and deep, exact as the chalk-stripes on his suit, all day. Black eyebrows, pale eyes set close, and all the rest of the face pushed squarely forward, big-jowled but firm and strictly oblong, completed the mask of one of those square-faced dogs by far the greater part of whose faces gruff out beneath the cheekbone-line. His big teeth shone with the clear translucent light of dentures, but they were all his own.

  ‘Got a little place in the country,’ he would say. But when the street market became lively and he was kept late he was the last to complain: his attitude was one of polite pity to those who tried to condole with him on the long late drive south—Oh no, it was worth it every time. And he would smile broadly and strongly, as if he was full of the good gruff strong air, of beer and cheese and bits of tweed: it was nevertheless a coy smile.

  Four Acres was three cottages. Good flint stuff, two thatched and one slated, and whoever had once knocked them into one had set up an old iron verandah, faded garden-blue, along part of one side: this, simply because of its age, seemed in keeping. But Mr Harris had had the windows out, new steel lattices put in, and a good coating of bright railway green put on the frames. The paths had been straightened and carefully, crazily paved. Stainless mesh netting was set along the front hedge, and a rock garden put where once hollyhocks had made a ragged jungle. Not for Harris the whimsy of those who smarted a place with coloured dwarfs and bird-coconuts: it was order, neatness and strong light modern equipment he liked to introduce—‘not only sanitation but sanity’ he was fond of saying. Thus there was that rock garden not for prettiness but because it was neat, low-growing, compact. He had most of the older trees down, leaving a few pruned fruit-bearers. His sheds were full of bright new lawn-mowers and newly devised clippers with springs.

  In this way, although he bred no animals and grew few vegetables, and even these through the hands of a local gardener, he nevertheless caught the impression of himself as a ‘model farmer’. He could be one, he felt, if he so wanted: he had the right technological attitude. Five days a week of contrasting himself with the pinstriped companionship of his city brothers bolstered this: two days’ acquaintance with his neighbouring rustics did not unseat him. At Four Acres he dressed in old tweeds, but of gentlemanly cut: he had spent a whole evening battering about a new felt hat in his bedroom, going so far as to soak this in muddy water, to get it properly weathered. He bought a thick knobbled ashplant, and discarded his golfing brogues for a pair of dubbined boots.

  He was not a bad fellow. These little deceptions were backed by a sincere enthusiasm for ‘the country’—perhaps he was simply going a little too fast, and affectation would drop from him as the soil itself took effect. His wife was more or less satisfied: the children were packed off to school, she had friends in the near-by county town, and a motor-car. ‘Of course we have “the car”,’ she used to say, as if she had a not too painful fashionable disease. Moreover, she quite liked gardening. Her husband was a man of regular habit, he always came home, no trouble of that kind—in fact it was she who gave the alarm, unnaturally early but as it turned out necessarily, when he did not come back from his walk that stormy summer’s day.

  They had been moved in two months—it was already high May—and Harris really had to face it: all this time he had never been for a good tramp. Of course, there had been much to do around the house, and they had driven round the narrow roads a little—along the narrow tar, between high hedges, canyon drives of no contact with the fields—and he had strolled in and out the village and round. But there, rolling out from his end of the village, and his was nearly the end house, lay the great green question-mark—pastures, dells, copses, streams, all the enormous green mystery compounded of a hundred smaller ones, each hill-crest concealing he knew not what, each path wandering where?

  Accordingly, one fine afternoon shortly after five o’clock, he took his ashplant and set out. He felt a pleasant sense of adventure, indeed of purpose. Even a few steps away from the village, as the last cottages fell away and the lane narrowed and the hedges grew on each side more thickly, there fell upon him a strong illusion of entering uncharted, uninhabited territory. Green leaves high all around, earth rougher underfoot, silence but for his own footfall soft itself on grass and clay—a bird started from a bush and he smiled to catch himself jump. It sounded at least as big as a badger.

  How big did a badger sound? It occurred to him that he had no idea. He remembered seeing a badger in a museum somewhere; and feeling awed that an animal of such considerable size—thick as a little hog—should go wild in the peaceful English countryside. Though at night. And anyway, no one had ever heard of a badger at bay. As he walked on he felt distinctly relieved. Animals were so difficult.

  Then the lane suddenly widened, dwindled up to a crest—and there was the open country rolling away beneath. And a gate.

  Harris paused, glanced at the latching of the gate, then leant on it instead. He must have been walking slightly uphill, for this was a relatively high point from which much could be surveyed. The sun shone over a wide undulation of patched green and bright brown, fields of all shapes flowed, nestled, sloped, rose, but always exactly fitted together. The bright red of a Dutch barn twinkled in the distance like a dwarf pillar-box. Trees smeared their dark patches here and there, sometimes clustered together round some secret in a hollow—but up on the opposite hills, where downland began, they made immense and magnificent black shapes, like giant caterpillars stalking across the skyline.

  At one point a chalk cliff shone white—a quarry? Lanes or roads could sometimes be discerned by their thin lines of thorn hedge: but often they disappeared as the ground rose and fell. Topography, he thought. Now where are we? For a few minutes he stood and worked out his walk. He decided to skirt the low ground where he knew a small river lay and make for the crescent of downland rising above. He took another look down at the gate-latch. But the alternative path to the right was no good. He smiled at himself, and put his hand to the iron contraption.

  For a time he tugged and messed about with rods and slots. He knew he must be careful to close these farmers’ gates, but here were his townsman’s hands not able even to open it. It was exasperating. He felt absurdly incompetent. At last he saw that the whole thing had to be lifted free of the ground—and he heaved it up, fearful of never being able to close it, or that some piece of rotting wood might simply break off for ever. But it swung quite easily; and as he replaced it he muttered ‘something attempted, something done’ and walked forward with far greater confidence than before.

  Two black starlings were sitting on a cow’s back. He saw the cow itself first, and had already begun to alter his course, before the position of the birds came home to him. Birds there on its back? He stood for a moment startled. The birds were busy pecking along the length of the cow’s red back, the cow munched unconcerned. Harris stared at the birds with positive dislike, his lip curled up as at the sight of an open wound. Then he shrugged. Must be after ticks, he thought: or salt, or taking hair for a nest? Accountable at all events. But what he really disliked was the unconcern of the cow: he had never got used to the way animals got on together in the country, horses nuzzling at go
ats, piglets playing with geese, ducks and chickens passing the time of day. And who had once said that hedgehogs take an occasional drink off a sitting cow? Even a cat-and-dog companionship he found vaguely horrible. And now, he thought, it was blackbirds and cows.

  Well … there was much to learn. He gave the cow a wide berth, the cow watched him moodily, following him with its eyes all the way, munching like a fat woman watching him cross the length of a long, long restaurant—and came to the opposite hedge. Briar and thorn, no way out. He looked carefully at the size of the thorns: monstrous black teeth, sharp and wicked, oversize, and there was a ditch too. But … right over at the far corner he saw what looked like a gap. A stile? It was a good pace out of his way, but the only chance. He turned along the field, and found at the very end a large patch of mud, ending in sog, a muddy drinking-pool. But he had been right, across this lay a break in the hedge and a kind of stile.

  That mud was made of hoofmarks, in each hoofmark a separate puddle had formed. He tried, sank to his welts, retreated and tried again. One boot went right to the ankle, he brought it out with a difficult squelch. But now the boots were thoroughly muddied it was not really so bad—his first instinct, booted or not, had been against mud. Then he found a kind of hard causeway, jumped the last mud, slipped, regained himself, clutched at a thorn-branch and made the stile, panting and bleeding a little at the hand.

  He stood in fact on a length of low brick, a yard-long mossy quay, that dribbled. Such a wayward brick erection so far from anything was itself disconcerting. He wondered what it was, and finding no proper answer, turned to the stile. Once, he remembered, he would have vaulted it. But a true countryman scarcely vaulted, in any case he was too stout, and with some difficulty balanced himself over, caught absurdly astride for a moment in the middle, one foot too high, one too low—but then was free, rescuing his coattail from a sharp post at the last moment.

  He was off his course, but thankful to see that this next field had something growing—although indeed cabbages like small trees, unnaturally high to his eye—and a well-beaten path along its side. His spirits rising on this substantial path, he felt he would easily find a way round. He took a direction point on three distant trees, gnarled old boles sprouting a fuzz of new branches. What were they? Poplars? Ash? Beech … Birch? He made a mental note to get one of those little books.

  At the end of this field another gate—but this time it swung easy and clear. But then the path turned a corner and there he was faced with sudden activity—a farmyard. Or rather, an activity of buildings: for it seemed to be quite deserted, nothing moved, though great stretches of hoofmarked mud, troughs, litters of hay, and the dark eyes of byres and sties and stalls suggested a meeting-place of considerable herds. But now—not even a chicken.

  The problem was—could one pass through this, which was plainly private property? He hesitated. He saw the small farmhouse itself further on, saw the curtains unmoving and the door shut, and because there seemed to be thus absolutely nobody about, walked casually forward. If he walked slowly enough nobody could accuse him of using the yard as a right-of-way, he was simply strolling and had not realized. In any case he saw, as his eyes grew accustomed, that the path did really continue, all these outbuildings and the farm simply lay to one unfenced side of the path.

  He continued along, swaggering rather—if he had had a switch he would surely have swished it—and the great consoling smell of dung fattened the air: somehow this heartened him, this was the round odour of life, fatstock, folk … but a moment later the stench of mashed swede-stew and a pile of acrid fishy fertilizer made him take a second thought.

  He had just drawn level with the farmhouse itself, and was steadily looking away from it, when the dog began to bark. At first two short hairy coughs—like a man disturbed from sleep behind his paper—but then as obviously the dog grew certain of its trespasser this rose into a long quavering wail, one could hear the dog’s head pointed to the sky. Harris quickened his pace. Then slowed it—it was vita not to show fear, animals smelled it. His ears strained for the clanking of chains. His eyes searched the sides of the farmhouse, fearful to see this snarling ball of hair come hurtling round a corner, teeth bared, furious, certain master of his own ground.

  But nothing happened. After all, the dog must have been chained up. He quickened his pace again—the dog was making enough noise to wake the countryside, at any moment someone was sure to appear. Yet he passed the house and came opposite a kitchen garden without trouble. He breathed more freely.

  What then happened was a piece of pure bad luck. Certainly in the country something or other mildly disconcerting, or exhilarating, is likely to happen: one finds a mole, a dead crow, gipsies, a steamroller—any number of minor interests to liven the outwardly placid scene. But Harris’s lot, for a man like Harris, was indeed hard.

  Suddenly, from nowhere, screeching like an angry bird, a small pink pig flew at his ankles. It came at a low run, he had never seen a pig run, like a heavy pink obus it came screeching low across the mud at him and its snout was at his boots before he really knew.

  Memories flashed in a second—maddened boars, pigs nuzzling up dead bodies, an awful story somewhere of an ailing hermit, too weak to move, being devoured by his own famished pigs. They had inward-bearing teeth like rats. And now he saw this muscular pink body beneath him had long gristly white hairs, whiskers on pink rat-body.

  He gave a great skip—and took to his heels. The pig came squawking its mad bird-sound after him. How could he know that piglets run as nimbly as little dogs? Or that this, the runt of a litter, nuzzle-tripe as some said, had been raised on the bottle, and indeed on buttered toast in the very bedroom of the farmer’s wife, and in its newfound strength thrilled with such affection for anything human that now it was simply squawking with love to cover Harris with kisses from a wet, adoring snout?

  It was bad luck that it had somehow got loose: and that perhaps the dog’s barking had excited it. In effect, it chased Harris a good hundred yards or more, Harris’s dog-like face gritted like a pointer towards the barred gate ahead, his legs kneeing like bounding wheels beneath him. He cleared the gate with an agility unknown for years, and stood breathing heavily as the pig rammed its snout at the bars, wicked small eyes glinting beneath ears saucy as little hats, pawing the ground with high heels, suddenly switching sideways and butting the gate like a bouncing foal.

  Hell—would it burst the gate? But now behind bars it looked its size, much smaller indeed—yet Harris turned and quickly made off in case it found a way through the hedge. He was breathing hard and thoroughly upset. However much one liked to eat pork, being bitten by a pig was nauseous, far worse than feeling the teeth of a dog, even of a horse, even a bull’s horn. Perhaps the similarity was too near—long pig? But all the same he could see now how small the thing really was, a baby—and felt foolish.

  No doubt now that he was upset. As he walked along this next field he felt there were eyes watching him, and put his hands in his jacket pockets to give himself a firmer appearance. Once his foot struck a hard rut, and he stumbled and nearly fell. Nerves out of balance, he lost some of his physical balance. A horse’s head appeared over the high hawthorn and stared at him inquisitively: he looked away, the beast was playful, and now followed him slowly thudding along the other side of the hedge. They all seemed to want something, these animals.

  And suddenly he thought: Pray God I don’t meet a wounded beast. Pray God I don’t meet anything limping or in pain, a horse or a cow or a stoat or even a bird. The animal would implore help, he would be utterly powerless to give it, he simply would not know how. Once he had found a wounded thrush in the bushes of his old garden in London: its back had been bitten by a cat, he had chased the cat away and then found himself alone, eye to eye, with this mauled bird. The bird had looked at him blearily through lizard-lidded eyes, and hopped a little further away. What in heaven’s name to do …? Bang its head on a tree? A penknife? Take it in and foster it … but it was
too late. He had peered down, thunderously alone with that little scruff of feather, and had seen to his horror that white worms were already milling among the bloody feathers. The blue-bottles had been there before him! He could scarcely bear to remember what finally he had done—he had lifted his boot and stamped on it, squashed it dead. And only through clumsiness, only because he had not known what else to do.

  He plunged his useless hands further into his pockets—and an awful vision arose of a sad-eyed spaniel caught in a trap. Then suddenly he saw a dozen cows walking with interest in his direction. He did not know that cows were liable to do this, mistaking him for their boy—and once again had to quicken his pace. They lumbered across at him, a surprised look in their eyes—perhaps they were in calf, or with newborn, enraged. He quickly checked over their udders, just in case it was even worse.

  Again he got to his gate in time, and this time steeled himself, having judged the distance and the cows’ pace carefully, to open it slowly and surely. But it was barbed and chained! He had to climb it, the barbed wire ripped a sleeve. He stood cursing. By the hedge he saw a patch of giant docks, they were far too big. He thought: Time I was getting back. And he looked round for his three gnarled trees, his location mark. They had disappeared.

  But straight ahead, and curiously near, for he seemed to have gone no great distance, the downland began. Distances were deceptive. He decided to go on, achieve higher ground, and find his trees again.

  The thorn hedge changed to a stone wall and he soon found himself on turf. Up here the sky seemed to have grown much bigger—a clearer air blew across the rough ancient stones littered about. The sky’s great width could be felt all around, the clouds themselves seemed to hang nearer, a feeling of the immensity of the heavens befell.

  Harris took a deep breath. But instead of drawing relief, his upset nerves went their shaken way and drew even greater unease from this vast new desolation that lay everywhere around. He glanced over the stones and turf up to where a monstrous ring of black trees gathered on the rim of the hill making a dark mystery of their depth.