‘Dairy and domestic,’ he said at last.
‘Cathie?’
‘Our Cathie,’ Pink agreed.
‘Mary’s given her the job back.’
Pink nodded but he had not listened. ‘Tail very much between the legs,’ he said unpleasantly. ‘I sent her packing.’
It was as if Chuff-chuff had been made a prefect on the death of the old head-master, and turned out to be rather a bully.
Mary said, ‘I absolutely demand that you bring back Cathie here.’
‘She’s gone now, old girl.’
‘Look, old girl,’ Pink said. ‘Economics. We can’t afford to pay chaps to come here for a couple of hours – agricultural rates, mind you, oh yes – and then hoof it back to their husbands with a basket full of ham and eggs.’
Macdonald moved. She said:
‘He’s right enough, Mary. She wasn’t doing much good after she was married.’
‘If I’m going to stay we’ll need somebody else in the house.’
Macdonald contained her surprise.
‘Are you thinking of staying?’ she asked slowly.
‘I may.’
‘Sorry,’ Pink said. ‘The whole thing was thoroughly discussed by the old sub-committee – Macdonald and Stiffy and me.’ He smiled. Then said cheerfully, ‘Rams-bottom and Enoch and me. Before your time. I suppose.’ He put some soda-water in another lime juice and opened his throat. He poured the tumblerful down in one gulp.
Mary said, ‘Please go and fetch her back, Macdonald, and tell her my word goes in this.’
‘Look, old thing,’ Pink said. ‘You don’t know much about it.’
‘I’m not interfering in the farm. Who comes here to help in the house is my business.’
‘She’s dishonest. She blatantly admitted it.’
‘Then she’s not dishonest.’
‘Oh, come off it, Mary—’
‘Please, Macdonald—’
Macdonald hesitated, then moved to the door. Mary’s shoulders dropped an inch.
She said, more calmly, ‘Do exactly as I say, please.’
‘A-huh,’ Macdonald said truculently, and when she left the room, Pink said:
‘You’re playing a bit senior, aren’t you?’
‘No.’
He said, ‘I don’t get it at all. Standing there, with all your jacket buttons done up. I don’t twig.’
She said quietly, ‘Pink, I heard about what happened this afternoon.’
Pink said cheerfully, ‘Fair enough. Pink let the party down.’
‘I didn’t say that.’
‘There was a young fellow called Pink,’ Pink went on bitterly, with his fattest smile, and she lowered her eyes.
Who did nothing but stutter and blink,
When they lowered his Dad,
He made off with the lads
To the clubs and the pubs, for a drink.
Possibly he had spent the reception thinking that one out; but not necessarily. He was capable of defending himself with astonishing speed. When she said, ‘I noticed you weren’t drinking,’ he replied, with a big nod:
‘All right then. “There was a poor fellow called Pink, Who took buckets of Gordons to drink”.’
He thought for a second, but before he continued, Mary said, ‘Shut up.’
Pink stretched his neck.
‘Pity,’ he said, speaking of their whole relationship. ‘These things happen.’
‘Pink, I promise I’m trying to help.’
‘Then give us a limerick,’ he said.
She replied, ‘Maybe you’d like to go and see how Stephen is. He looks awfully tired. I’m sure he overworks. Maybe you could help him.’
Pink’s face swelled up and then seemed to break into a thousand pieces. There was a loud wheezing sound, and for a moment Mary thought he was going to cry. But he changed from the music-hall comedian, laughing at his own last joke, into a prisoner with a phlegmy cough. Then he straightened up.
‘Poor old Mary,’ he said. ‘Quite right!’ in a sing-song voice. ‘Quite right. Busy hands. Think of the other fellow.’
‘Pink—’
He raised his hand. ‘All right, Sister. I’ll go quietly.’
As he left the room he sang gaily, ‘For I’m Popeye the sailor man.’ Then suddenly and savagely he slammed the door behind him. The pictures on the wall of shipwrecks and Fergusons shuddered, for a moment, then all was quiet. Ten minutes later, Mary made up her mind.
TWENTY
OCTOBER HAD BEEN fine, but the first week in November had brought rain, and the steadings were muddy. She therefore wore her gumboots which were lying by the sink in the back scullery, exactly where she had left them, over a year before. It was dark already, and cold enough for her to put on her sheepskin coat.
Four or five minutes later she appeared in the band of bright light outside the dairy. She exchanged a few words with one of the men who were loading the van. He pointed inside, and she nodded her thanks. With her fingers but not her hands in her pockets, she disappeared into the dairy.
Changes had come fast. There were many signs of heavy new capital investment. There was a new bottling machine. Before there had been a circular affair holding about eight bottles which had to be put in place by hand. They were shifted automatically now, in a continuous process, and the cows, too, poor things, had been ‘time and motion’ studied. They were not milked in their own stalls any more. They came in at one end of a special milking byre, which held three or four at a time, and went out the other. They had been milked by machine before, but now the milk was weighed and tested straight away. It ran directly to a larger tank which fed the bottling machine. Stephen had not wasted his year.
But the noise in the dairy, and then the smell in the byres, never changed. The clatter of bottles and the throb of the machines made talk impossible but Mary waved back to one of the girls who recognised her and shouted a greeting. The other girls looked at her oddly, as if she were some sort of actress dressed for a Technicolor serial, that had strayed on to the wrong set.
Stephen, at work, looked much more the factory manager than the farmer. He was still in his grey suit and black tie, but in gumboots too, and he was showing some visiting farmers round the byre. They turned out to be New Zealanders, staying for a week or two in Scotland. They were narrow men, one with thick smooth grey hair. But for their accents and odd manners, as if they had pins and needles in their feet and backs, they looked like a couple of Cavalry officers. Stephen, very calmly, broke off his lecture to introduce them to his wife. As soon as they had said ‘How-do-you-do’ (although they both avoided the actual expression of ‘How-do-you-do’ as if it stank of ‘actually’ and all the other gong words) Stephen continued his talk on the process. Even the feeding was rationalised, if not mechanised, now. In the byre, a little further away from the din of the dairy machines, Stephen still had to raise his voice. The visitors stood nodding and pouting, demonstrating that they were impressed. One of them often looked at Mary who was watching a hose, held by a dark young boy, as it played between the stalls at the other end of the byre that held a hundred cows. A couple of bulls were in their places in the last row, safely chained, separate from the cows who were ambling, in threes and fours, to their stalls. Above each place, marked in white chalk on a little blackboard, was the name of the cow. They had the same fascination as racehorses’ names, historical, topical and private. ‘Soraya, Mary IV, Greta, Hilary, Margaret Rose, Lolita, Kirsty …’ Most of the cows were in their places at this time; they had been washed and milked and now they found some turnips in their troughs. The shed looked busy and colourful. But in the early hours of the morning when they were turned out to the fields the byre looked like an illogical penitentiary, all concrete and metal, bathed in thirty arcs of direct white light.
At last Stephen parted from his visitors and he came back to find Mary in the corner where he had left her. She watched him as he came. He passed some cows as if they were people in whom he had no interest, dawd
ling about in an Underground. He shoo’ed out a dog that had strayed into the byre. But then Stephen, who was shaping up to be one of the best dairy farmers in the country, disliked all animals and was not particularly fond of the outside life.
He approached her with the same smile and in the same bright, slightly official manner that he would have, had she dropped into the byre a year before. He approached her as he had the New Zealand farmers. It was a sort of works manner, developed by a manager who was not absolutely confident of himself, but was certain that he knew more of what was going on around here than anybody else. His manner somehow betrayed that he had no capital interest in the place and his first words to Mary were, ‘Have you come to take a look how I’m mis-spending the family’s money?’ said, may it be added, with the confidence of a man who knew he had spent every penny of it well. As he explained to her, without her asking, some of the improvements he still wanted to make, asking, in an oblique sort of way, for her support where he needed no support, because Pink could sign the cheques, she said, suddenly:
‘I don’t suppose I ever would have married you, had I never seen you at work, and had I only seen you at work, I don’t suppose I ever would have left.’
He quite ignored the remark. But she was right. It was not only a question of his decision and authority here. There was a social factor too. Such things as the fastidiousness of his dress, the over-perfection of his Highland dancing, even the care with which he mixed a cocktail for Pink and her, had an uneasiness. Only here, of all places, in the cowshed, and perhaps in the office too, did he have any social confidence because it was here, alone, that he lost his self-consciousness. It was impossible for her to talk to him here, but by a dart of the eyes it was obvious that she knew she would get more out of him on his own ground. She therefore guided him carefully and as they strolled through the comparative quiet and complete privacy of the calf house, a wooden building just a few yards outside one of the side doors of the byre, she led the conversation away from those words which only farmers recognise as agricultural: cost, margin, return on your money, subsidy, loan, rate of interest, plough back, overhead, turnover and acres enough.
There were eight calves, in open boxes, the youngest ones trembling where they stood, and Mary leant over the first gate and let the calf suck her four fingers. The shed was lit by two unshaded bulbs which threw double shadows on the walls, on the straw and the roof. Although Stephen had plans for a new shed, Mary, who was usually quite unsentimental about the farm and the animals in it, was glad that it had not changed. It smelt the same; more powerfully and much more sharply than the main byre.
She said, when at last he paused, ‘You’re going to be furious with me.’
‘Oh yes?’ He was a little nervous.
She smiled and said, ‘It’s nothing too awful.’
‘You’d better own up.’
She did not see how much pain she had already inflicted. By her friendliness, more than by her breathtaking beauty, for in her own country, it was nothing short of that; by her smile alone, she had brought back the months when Stephen had the promise of her love, and the hope, not the task of its satisfaction. Not by a flicker of an eyelid did he give this away.
She said, ‘I’ve re-employed one of your ex-employees without reference to the sub-committee.’
‘Oh God,’ he said. ‘I know. Cathie?’
‘I couldn’t help it, Stephen.’
‘You know she got into the habit of lifting half the housekeeping home?’
‘Yes. But I think she feels she deserved it. Anyway it wasn’t for herself. It was for her John and her Alan.’
‘He’s a dreadful little child.’ Stephen had grown to the habit of thinking of the employees’ children much as he thought of the animals: necessary evils.
‘Why?’
‘He slobbers,’ Stephen said. The curious thing was that when Stephen was truly negative, in the sense of being totally cynical rather than simply without hope, he had a certain rather humorous charm.
She said meekly, ‘Anyway I’ve done it. I think Pink was rather cruel to her.’
He too leant over the stall but only to give the calf a long, uncompromising stare.
Then he said, ‘I’m not in the least surprised to hear that. Why anybody ever calls Pink unreliable I cannot fathom. He’s the most predictable man that I know.’
He moved to look at the next calf, and went on:
‘Pink’s got too much conscience to look someone in the face after he’s done them a bad turn—’
‘Don’t say that,’ she replied.
Stephen misunderstood. He raised his eyebrows, he said:
‘True enough. He refused her. So she went away and married the Bobby.’
‘I mean about looking people in the face.’
Stephen had obviously feared the moment when they would leave other people’s problems to talk about themselves. It was not a step he would willingly ever have taken. Eight months of work from dawn to dusk had almost seen him sane again. In the last five months he had been, he believed, as happy as he would ever be again. She was now looking him full in the face.
‘You seem to manage,’ he said.
She replied, ‘It doesn’t mean I haven’t got a conscience.’
He said, in a sensible sort of tone:
‘I told you at the time, or tried to, not to blame yourself. It was less your fault than you imagine.’
‘In which case you can’t have much of a conscience. You manage to look me in the face.’
He smiled slowly and said:
‘That’s my Boy Scout’s training. Patrol Leader of the Bull’s Patrol; hardly appropriate,’ he added. ‘I’ve got the firmest handshake north of the border. It’s a question of interview technique. Those New Zealand gentlemen are still sorting out their knuckles.’
She laughed and he went on, excited by her laughter. ‘I could stare out John Knox, and wouldn’t mind having a try.’ Then suddenly, he did not say, so much as hear himself say, ‘It is also because it’s a long time since I’ve seen your face.’
If it had not been plotted before, it was now that the intention formed hard in Mary’s mind. It was so clear to her and seemed to be so necessary to her that she feared her anxiety might show in her face. She turned away and moved down to the smallest calf at the end of the row, perhaps with what she hoped would look like modesty. Then she turned her face back towards him and asked, quite loudly, ‘Has my face changed?’
When he said, ‘Yes, I think it has,’ and followed it quickly, in a low, dry voice with, ‘It’s more beautiful, not less,’ she frowned and turned back to the calf. She shook her head.
He said, ‘I don’t imagine you want or need compliments from me.’
‘Stephen, I’m rather frightened. Would you mind if I stayed on for a little? At home.’
‘Of course not,’ he said. ‘Anyway, it’s your home, not mine.’
‘Why am I frightened?’
Stephen replied sensibly, in a low matter-of-fact sort of voice:
‘I don’t think you are frightened. You’re nervous. Death’s unnerving, anyway.’ He did not look at her.
Calmly, not really thinking what he was saying, he went on:
‘You just don’t know whether to take the plunge or stay at home.’ Then he said quietly, ‘I know you’ve left David,’ and it startled her, because somehow she was certain that he knew nothing of her year away. One of the calves began to moan and she went across to it, as she asked:
‘How did you know?’
Stephen said, ‘I told you. Pink’s a completely reliable character. I think I know everything you’ve done, while you’ve been away.’
She paused and calculated, then her shoulders dropped. Calmly she said:
‘I left of my own accord. It didn’t last very long, you know.’
‘I thought you said he’d seen you to the air terminal.’
‘Yes, he did. We’re quite friendly. But I’ve been on my own for a while.’
He stood up straight and banged the little gate on the stall.
‘I know this job now. It wouldn’t be very difficult for me to get a place elsewhere: maybe a better job. I’ve been asked more than once. If you want to come home for ever, say the word and I’ll make the arrangements.’
‘No, don’t be so silly, I wouldn’t think of it. I didn’t mean that, I promise. I meant something else, Stephen. I meant would it matter if I stayed here with you?’
‘Darling,’ Stephen rested his head on his hand. ‘You’re not using your brain, or your eyes.’ He looked straight at the calf’s back as he went on. ‘I love you. Even if I’ve never been able to show it very much, that happens to be true. It wouldn’t be possible for you to live your own life with my sheep’s eyes following—’
Then she said it in one breath. ‘I didn’t mean to live my own life. I meant to come back to you.’
‘No. After David,’ Stephen said, ‘after all that you couldn’t be happy for long—’
‘Yes, I could. I would be, I swear. I know it. If you didn’t want me in bed, it wouldn’t matter.’
Stephen wagged his head from side to side.
‘It wouldn’t, darling,’ she insisted. ‘I haven’t come back for that. I don’t expect a miracle. I’ve no right to come back, but I want to very much.’
He would not turn to her.
She said, ‘Believe me, I’m tired of all the whipped-up passion. I promise I am. Please, Steve. It wouldn’t be like last time. Really it wouldn’t. Don’t worry about that. I expect nothing.’
He kept his hands covering his face.
She said, ‘Everybody’s told me how wonderful you’ve been. You say you’re not particularly clever and look what you’ve done here. You said you were a coward and that’s not true either. I did my best to ruin your life and you didn’t let it be ruined.’
Stephen was pressing his eyes very hard, as if they were painful. He was like a school hero, appearing from the headmaster’s study, determined not to cry.
He said, ‘Let’s get out of here,’ and moved out of the shed into the dark. Just outside, there was a pile of coke for the boiler that heated the shed, and it crunched under their feet. The noise of the dairy machines sounded far away.
Household Ghosts Page 34