‘It will look even better then,’ he said, and he sat on the bed and opened his arms for her.
She came towards him very slowly, an enigmatic look in her dark eyes, a half smile on her face.
He felt that she already knew, and he wanted to get down on his knees and beg her forgiveness. He took her in his arms, pulling up her nightdress and fondling her small, firm breasts. But immediately there came into his mind the memory of Annie’s breasts, as soft and pliable as the udders of a cow when his palms pressed against them. He tried to block the vision from his mind and, putting a hand between Eliza’s legs, found it was warm and inviting, moist and welcoming, open and yielding.
They made love for an hour that night, husband and wife thrashing and rolling, groaning and grunting like youthful lovers amuck in the hay. Fantasies of Eliza were blended with fantasies of Annie, the one with voluptuous, milk-bearing breasts, the other with a moist, dark, infinitely mysterious interior. There lovemaking was so sweet, so rapturous that, when it was over, he lay wrapped tightly in her arms.
He vowed then that he would have nothing more to do with Annie McQueen.
How near he had come to the brink of the precipice.
The following day he drove over to the house full of good intentions, his speech all prepared.
‘I love my wife,’ he would say, ‘it would hurt her so much if I did anything to destroy that love. I like you, Annie, and thank you. I ...’
The pony and trap was in front of the house, but the boy was standing by Annie’s side waiting for him. He had his knee pads on and was carrying his leggit to smooth down the bundles of reeds. He looked very businesslike.
Maybe he would make a thatcher after all.
‘Billy thought you could start him off,’ Annie said with a wink, ‘and then maybe come over and let me have a peep at the house.’
‘I ... good idea,’ Ryder said, but he thought he could tell by the look in her eyes that she had already guessed. He was very bad at hiding his feelings. He thought he saw her own expression change from excitement to disappointment, but he couldn’t be sure. ‘I don’t have my key today,’ he said, feeling in his pocket. ‘I must have left it in the office.’
‘Oh dear!’ Annie said with heavy sarcasm as her mouth tightened into a hard line. He knew she didn’t believe him. ‘What a waste of time,’ she went on, in the tone of voice she used to say ‘Time gentlemen, please! ‘I could have gone with Father and Mother on a shopping trip to Yeovil. What a waste.’
‘I’m very sorry,’ Ryder said. Then, turning his back on her, he put an arm round Billy’s shoulders.
‘So, young man, you want to do some proper thatching, do you?’
‘Yes, zur,’ Billy said, tightening his hold on his leggit.
‘I might as well come and watch,’ Annie said sulkily. ‘Maybe I can learn something there.’
Ryder gave Billy a little push and sent him off towards the cart with the golden bundles stacked high upon it.
‘I am sorry,’ he said to Annie.
‘Changed your mind, didn’t you? It’s your wife, I suppose?’ She stopped and gazed hard at him. ‘Does she know?’
‘Of course not! It’s just ... that I love her.’
‘I see.’ Contemptuously Annie looked him up and down. ‘Well, next time you change your mind, dear, do try and let me know. If there is a next time ...’
Billy was waiting for them by the cart. He had Ryder’s knee pads in his hands, and as Ryder knelt down to put them on Billy began to get the bundles out of the cart and heave them up the ladder to the roof.
‘You could sit by the cart,’ Ryder said, feeling a little ashamed of himself. ‘I am sorry, Annie ...’
But she spun round and took no more notice of him, shaking her shoulders in an offended way.
Ryder felt full of remorse and unhappiness as he began to climb the ladder on to the roof, where Billy awaited him with the bundles he had already stacked.
The sun was hot, and Billy and Ryder removed their shirts while, beneath them, a look of supreme boredom on her pretty face, Annie sat in the shade of her parasol.
Ryder felt humiliated but also strangely happy. He had made a vow and he had kept it. He had been tempted and, to a certain extent, he had succumbed. But he had not given in. He had beaten the devil.
‘Get thee behind me, Satan,’ he thought, and his mind dwelt on the frenzy o£ desire he and his wife felt for each other the previous night, and the repose and happiness he’d known as he lay in her arms.
‘Maybe I could go and get a drink,’ Billy said after a while. ‘It’s terrible hot.’
‘Yes.’ Ryder, also panting, paused and looked towards the ridge of the roof. The job was half over, and he would be very glad when it was completed and his inadequate assistant, unwanted and, now, no longer necessary, could be sent on his way.
For a while, too, there would be no more visits to the Baker’s Arms. He would take his custom, and that of his men, to the Lamb and Flag on the other side of Wenham Bridge.
He looked down at Annie sitting rather dejectedly under her parasol in all her finery. He felt that he had treated her badly and was sorry. He had aroused in her hopes of something that had not happened. She was a good woman, a sad woman and now, maybe, a wiser one.
As Billy put down his leggit and went towards the ladder Ryder stood, arms akimbo, looking down at her, and just then she put aside her parasol, looked up at him and waved. He thought she had forgiven him and waved back.
He turned abruptly to heave another bundle up the roof and shake it into place in its set, when suddenly from behind him there was a cry. Turning, he saw Billy, who had missed his footing on the slippery reeds, grab the edge of the thatch with both hands as his legs frantically searched for the ladder.
Swiftly Ryder moved down the roof and reached out just as one of Billy’s hands flew up in the air. Ryder managed to clasp it, but Billy’s desperate flailing and the weight of his body propelled Ryder forward.
Then, just as Billy got a foot on the ladder, Ryder flew over his head, did a somersault in the air and landed with a thud on the ground below.
Eliza sat in the yard behind the house with Beth, Elizabeth and Beth’s new baby, Jo. All her own children were now at school, and it was that pleasant time of the afternoon when she could take it easy, do a little gardening, read a book or chat to Beth before it was time to go and get the children.
Elizabeth was now nearly old enough for school. She was a good-natured, even-tempered child and, although no one could see it but Beth and Eliza, like her father to look at.
Eliza loved her very much. Although she slept at Beth’s, she lived among her cousins as much as was possible and frequently had meals with the family. But Ryder always seemed to resent Elizabeth a little, as though she had come between him and his own children, as though she had no right to be there. It was not true at all, but Eliza knew that Elizabeth was a tiny bit afraid of Ryder, which made her often prefer her home with kindly Ted and Beth to her visits to the big house. In many ways, however, she showed that she felt she belonged to neither.
Beth still suckled Jo, although he was nearly eighteen months old. He was a large baby and toddled confidently about, but he would climb on his mother’s knee to feed at her breast, and now, he lay curled up in her arms, his large knowing eyes looking at her every now and then while Beth dropped kisses on his cheeks or held him even closer.
‘Oh, I do love you,’ she said, squeezing him to her.
Eliza had a book on her knee, but she was not reading. Lazily she looked up at the sky through the trees and felt an overwhelming sense of stillness, of the greatness and peace of the world. She felt she was on the verge of an experience of some magnitude, but she had no idea what it was. She had no intuition of alarm or apprehension at all.
Her eyes already half closed, she was about to nod off when they heard a commotion from the front of the house, voices calling and the noise of wheels on the gravel.
As Eliza flew out of her chair Jo
started, opened his eyes and, beginning to cry, tried to push his mother’s nipple away from his mouth.
‘Whatever be it?’ Beth, also half asleep, rose, startled, the baby still in her arms.
At that moment, her face ashen, her hat awry, her eyes already swollen from weeping, Annie McQueen ran round the house. She collided at the corner with Eliza, who clasped her by the shoulders and shook her hard.
‘Whatever is the matter, Mrs McQueen? Whatever has happened? What a state you’re in. Is there something wrong at the Baker’s Arms?’
‘Oh, ma’am,’ Annie cried wildly, clutching at Eliza’s hand, grasping her dress. ‘Your husband’s had a turrible accident. Fell off the roof, ma’am, and –’ her free hand clutched her stricken face and, drawing her sharp nails right down her cheek, she fell full length at Eliza’s feet, her hand still in her frenzy clawing the ground ‘– I do think ‘e be dead.’
The streets that had been empty for Ryder’s wedding fourteen years before were thronged on the day his funeral cortège wound its way from his house by the river to the church a third of a mile away. People, many clad in black or with black armbands, stood with bare heads bowed. Women wept openly, and the muffled bell of the church tolled mournfully as the black-draped hearse, drawn by two of Ryder’s favourite horses, stopped outside St Mark’s and the pallbearers – his brother-in-law Guy, his brothers Robert and Hesketh, his wife’s uncle Prosper Martyn, and Julius Heering as a close family friend – shouldered the coffin and carried it into the church for the funeral service.
The same Rector who married him buried him, not a very different man from the one who had preached the offensive sermon about the woman taken in adultery, but, perhaps, a little wiser. He was well aware of the respect and affection with which Ryder was now regarded in the parish, so he chose his words more carefully. His funeral oration drew both tears and murmurs of appreciation from the congregation that not only filled every pew but stood in the side aisles and at the back of the church, and even formed a column down the middle.
The Reverend Lamb took as his text I Samuel Chapter 3 verse 18. ‘It is the Lord: let him do what seemeth him good.’ What had happened to a man who was well liked and respected in the community, a man in his prime, was shocking and incomprehensible. It seemed, the Rector suggested, completely to defy any rational explanation, because Ryder was, above all things, a master thatcher, a man of great skill in his trade.
If there was any comfort for his family it was in the mysterious workings of God, and in the sight of God what had happened to Ryder was good. God had taken him to his bosom, although no one doubted that he left a grieving family behind. But it was the only explanation that one could offer. In the wise words of the Bible also: ‘To every thing there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the heaven.’
For Ryder Yetman, difficult as it was to accept this, his time had come. It was good in the sight of the Lord, who wanted him for his own.
Eliza, listening with bowed head, Dora’s hand tightly clenched in hers, found little comfort in the Rector’s words; only rebellion and rage about what had happened. Such a stupid, unnecessary accident, and one, moreover, brought on by someone else – a young lad who should never have been up on the roof at all.
But that day, and for many days afterwards, she behaved as Ryder would have wished her to behave. Her face hidden behind a dark veil, she carried herself erect, with dignity, and even stepped forward resolutely, while those gathered round the grave were snivelling into their handkerchiefs, to cast the first clod of earth upon his coffin. Ashes to ashes. Dust to dust.
A huge reception at the house followed, and only at the end of the day could she sit down and weep; weep, she felt, as no one had ever wept before.
Prosper and Lally were staying at a hotel nearby. Julius Heering was with his sister. The following day they would all gather around her again to support and comfort her; but that night was hers to mourn, to be alone with the children, to try and explain to them the mysterious words of the Rector, the comfort he had vainly tried to give:
The Lord had done what seemed to Him good.
Laurence Yetman was thirteen years of age when his father died. He had been coming home from school when he saw the pony and trap go helter-skelter into the drive of the house and only later did he realise that the object lying in the back covered with a cloth as though it had been carelessly tossed there had been the body of his father. This shocking fact lingered in his mind for many years and would be the subject of recurring nightmares. He recalled glancing casually into the cart, noting the long object, and then he stayed for a few minutes to stroke the head of the pony, an animal he knew because it belonged to the Baker’s Arms and grazed in the field next to Riversmead.
The fact that his father’s body must still have been warm, that he could have reached out with his hand and touched it, even seen it, perhaps revived it, preyed on his mind and turned him from a carefree young boy to someone with the burdens of a man. He was now the head of the family. He found he was able to become his mother’s support in her time of trial; together with his brother and sister he seemed to understand not only her need for them, but her need to be alone too.
That night after the funeral, after the guests had taken their leave, they all went up the hill to the church and the newly dug grave and prayed there for a while silently, together. Eliza wished, as far as possible, to be alone with the children, to go about her daily tasks and, above all, to look after her father-in-law, who had suffered a minor heart attack on the news of Ryder’s death and now lay in his bedroom watched over constantly by little Connie.
The family at that time seemed of paramount importance: her family and John. But Ryder’s brothers were people she did not particularly wish to see, and when, a few days after the funeral, they announced their intention of paying her a visit, she thought it was to see about the stone, the situation of their father and the various matters pertaining to Ryder’s estate.
She received them alone in the drawing room, still dressed in deep mourning. She kissed each of them – rather cold unemotional men – perfunctorily on the cheek and offered them coffee or sherry, whichever they preferred. It was eleven o’clock in the morning, ironically a bewitching summer’s day and, sad though she knew they were, she was glad that the children could still play in the garden, temporarily forget their grief and relieve the gloom with the sound of their laughter.
Eliza had only seen her brothers-in-law, Robert and Hesketh, about a dozen times since her marriage, at family christenings and similar occasions. The two had so little in common with their elder brother that it was difficult to believe they had sprung from the same seed, or issued from the same womb.
Coffee was duly brought, Robert had a glass of sherry beforehand, and all three stood rather awkwardly by the window exchanging platitudes about the weather, the sadness of the occasion, the shock of their father’s ill-health – a double blow – and so on.
‘I suppose you’ve come to see your father,’ Eliza said, taking her cup to a nearby chair and sitting down to ease her aching limbs. Her whole body seemed to have seized up with shock, and she ached literally from head to toe.
‘As a matter of fact, we’ve come to see you, Eliza,’ Robert, the middle brother, said, while Hesketh buried his face in his cup. ‘It concerns the disposition of the business,’ he went on.
‘What disposition?’
‘The disposition of shares.’
‘Ryder saw no need to change things.’ Eliza suddenly had a moment of apprehension, of panic, and she could see Julius as he begged Ryder, years before, to take the controlling interest and buy out his brothers. Because of her he had not done so.
‘But things have changed with his death.’ Hesketh felt emboldened enough by his brother’s opening remarks to remove his face from his cup. ‘Ryder has left his share of the business to Laurence, his elder son, and Laurence is a minor. He can therefore take no part in it until he is twenty-one. What will happen to the
business now, Eliza?’ Hesketh concluded, sitting down and crossing his legs.
‘I thought it would go on as it is.’
‘How?’
‘Ryder had some very good men working for him. I thought the foreman Perce Adams could take over.’
‘Adams is a yokel,’ Robert said sarcastically, examining his nails.
‘But you have never taken any part in it,’ Eliza exclaimed. ‘Do you mean to tell me you intend to do so now?’
‘Yes, we do.’ Robert looked at her in surprise. ‘We intend to take a very active part in it, or it will go to the wall. Father has built up a very good business.’
‘Ryder built up a very good business,’ she replied angrily.
‘Ryder, Father, whoever.’ Robert waved his hand in the air. ‘Alas, not very satisfactory in the current situation. Father is ill, Ryder is, alas, no more ... and I don’t suppose you could run a building business, could you, my dear?’
‘I don’t suppose you could either,’ Eliza retorted. ‘You never have in the past.’
‘That’s because it was well taken care of. We were able to employ our fortune doing other things. In the last few years Yetman’s has expanded so that it was run to capacity. God knows what Ryder was doing on a roof thatching. If he had been seeing to his proper affairs, managing as he should and not performing as a labourer, he would never have been killed.’
‘If he had been in Dorchester, as he said he would be,’ Eliza thought to herself, that question mark that had tormented her since his death forming in her mind again. What was he doing up on the roof? And why was Annie McQueen watching him?
‘He was showing an apprentice the trade,’ she said, repeating what she had been told. ‘You know what happened. The young lad lost his footing and, slipping backwards, grabbed at Ryder’s hand.’
‘We know what happened, my dear,’ Hesketh said with a note of compassion in his voice. Rising, he crossed the room and put a hand on her shoulder. ‘Don’t distress yourself by telling it all over again. The point is now that we are here to help you. We – Robert and I –virtually control the business. Laurence is too young to have a vote – the shares are held in trust for him – and Father is too ill. Naturally you have no vote at all.’
The People of This Parish (Part One of The People of this Parish Saga) Page 38