by Nina Bawden
He was like a bear, Carrie thought: a friendly, silly, strong bear.
He was certainly stronger than anyone at Druid’s Bottom. The hay had been cut a few days before and dried in the sun and Frederick made light work of heaving it up to Albert on the cart. Carrie and Nick and Mister Johnny helped too, to begin with, but their efforts were puny beside Frederick’s and they tired much more quickly. Though the sweat poured down his red face his arms went on working like pistons and Albert barely had time to stack one great, whiskery load before another came up. He lurched from one side of the cart to the other, glasses flashing in the sun, his face pale and determined.
‘Leelachalima,’ Mister Johnny said, and put down his pitchfork.
Nick interpreted. ‘He says, leave it to Fred and we might as well, really. Fred by himself is enough to wear Albert out.’
‘Poor Albert,’ Carrie said, thinking how shameful for him, not being able to keep up with Fred with all of them watching.
She had forgotten that Albert was never proud in that way. He heard what she said and shouted down to her. ‘Help’s what I want, not your pity. You stir your idle stumps, Carrie, and get up here with me! This isn’t a man I’ve got pitching up hay to me, it’s a flipping machine!’
It was lovely on the top of the cart. Carrie stood knee deep in the dry, sweet-smelling hay and helped Albert take Frederick’s huge forkfuls that were so heavy, sometimes, it made them both stagger. They were glad to rest briefly, the sun warm on their backs, while Mister Johnny took the old horse’s head and led the cart a little farther along. They were moving nearer the house all the time and by one o’clock they had finished the field. Carrie was hot and tired but wonderfully happy. She lay on her stomach on top of the hay, dusty spikes tickling her ears and her nostrils and said, ‘I wish I was a farmer, I could go on harvesting for ever and ever and ever.’
‘More than I could,’ Albert said. ‘I’m dead as a door nail. I don’t think I’m constructed for physical labour. Is that Mr Evans’s son you’ve got with you? Brawny chap, isn’t he?’
‘Not much brain though, I don’t think,’ Carrie said.
Frederick was leaning on his pitchfork, apparently listening to Mister Johnny who was waving his small hands and gabbling. Nick lay on the ground, watching them. It was all very peaceful: Mister Johnny’s voice bubbling away like a lark and the sun on the hay field and on the tall-chimneyed house and on the quiet mountain behind it. Carrie’s feeling of happiness grew until her bones seemed to ache with it. She yawned and stretched and said, ‘This is the best place in the whole, wide world. In the whole universe. Don’t you think so, Albert?’
Albert wasn’t listening. He was kneeling up. ‘Stop that,’ he shouted. ‘Stop it at once!’
Carrie looked where he looked. Frederick was dancing round Mister Johnny, twisting one side of his face in grotesque imitation and fluttering his hands. ‘Gobble-gobble, gubble-gubble, tickledly pouffla ha!’ he cried in a silly, mimicking voice, then laughed raucously and flipped Mister Johnny’s bow tie undone.
Carrie heard Albert gasp beside her. Then – in the same second, it seemed – he was off the cart and racing towards them. But before he could get there Mister Johnny gave a high, piercing cry, quite unlike any sound Carrie had ever heard him make before, and flung himself on Frederick, arms flailing. Frederick stepped back, lost his balance, and went down like a tree falling. And Mister Johnny picked up a pitchfork …
Carrie screamed and put her hands over her eyes. Shut away in panicky, red-spotted darkness, she heard Albert shout, ‘Come on, Nick, help me hold him,’ and then looked and saw Mister Johnny struggling between Albert and Nick, and Frederick crawling away, on the ground.
It was all over very quickly. By the time Carrie had jumped from the cart, Mister Johnny had stopped throwing himself about and had started to cry, his face screwed up and scarlet. The boys let him go and Nick found his handkerchief in his breast pocket and wiped his face and said gently, ‘It’s all right, Mister Johnny, all over now, let’s go and find Hepzibah.’ He took his hand and led him away and Mister Johnny went like a lamb.
Frederick was sitting up, white as chalk. ‘Look,’ he said, and Carrie saw the blood on his hand where the pitchfork had caught it.
She said, ‘Serve you right. Serve you right if he’d killed you,’ and he stared at her, his lower jaw drooping.
He said, ‘He ought to be locked up, vicious loony like that,’ and stood up. He walked as far as the cart, took a packet of cigarettes from his jacket that was hanging on the tailgate and stood, sullenly smoking.
Carrie said loudly, meaning him to hear her, ‘What a foul, wicked beast!’
But Albert shook his head. ‘Beast all right but stupid, not wicked. Just doesn’t know how to treat someone like Mister Johnny. And he’s not alone in that. Most people don’t know, after all. They’re either scared, or they laugh. Mister Johnny can’t bear to be teased, really can’t bear it! It sends him into a terrible rage. Hepzibah says when they lived in Norfolk she had an awful time looking after him because he was always in fights and he was young then, too young to hurt anyone much. It’s been all right since they’ve lived here because so few people come. But Hepzibah says if they ever had to leave and go where there were strangers about who didn’t understand his sensitive ways, then he might have to be – well – what he said!’ He nodded at Frederick and said, in a low voice, ‘Shut up in a madhouse, or something.’
‘Mister Johnny’s not mad!’
‘No. At least, I don’t think so. But you saw what he did, didn’t you?’ He pulled a helpless face, took off his glasses, and wiped them on the tail of his shirt.
Carrie said, ‘See who’s coming,’ and he put them back on.
Mrs Gotobed was walking towards them, leaning on Hepzibah’s arm. She wore a long, pale grey dress, trimmed with pink ostrich feathers round the hem. One thin, ring-studded hand held the skirt up at the front but the back went trail, trail, trail on the ground, sweeping up wisps of hay with the feathers. She was thinner than when Carrie had seen her before and had a transparent look, like a skeleton leaf: all her veins and bones showing. But her voice sounded strong as a bell. ‘Well, Frederick, still playing the bully boy, are you?’
He came and stood in front of her. His expression was surprisingly meek. ‘It was only a bit of a game, Auntie Dilys. A bit of a silly joke, see?’
‘Silly’s the right word. You always had a silly sense of humour, didn’t you, Frederick?’ Then she smiled though her eyes remained cold as winter and said, ‘Are you enjoying your time in the Army?’ – as if she were making conversation in the drawing-room, Carrie thought, instead of standing in a hay field in summer in a long, silk ball gown.
‘Yes, Auntie Dilys.’
‘And what will you do afterwards. When the war’s over? Come back to the grocery shop?’
There was contempt in her tone, Carrie saw Frederick’s neck redden. He said, ‘No, I won’t. That’s one thing I’m fixed on. It’s a narrow place, this valley, Auntie Dilys. Too narrow for me, I want something bigger.’
She looked him up and down. Then she said, ‘It’ll break your father’s heart, I suppose you know that?’
Frederick didn’t answer and she sighed a little. Then looked at Carrie.
She said, ‘Well, Miss Emerald-Eyes? Enjoying yourself in my hay field?’
Carrie nodded. She was looking at Mrs Gotobed’s dress. Pale grey silk with pink ostrich feathers. The one her husband had said made her look like a Queen. I’m keeping that one till the last, was what she’d told Carrie.
Carrie felt as if she were falling through space; falling and falling with the air pressing her chest and making her gasp. She dragged her gaze upwards but it was an effort: her eyelids seemed weighted with stones.
Mrs Gotobed’s eyes were smiling at her; not cold now, but kind. As if she knew what Carrie was thinking and found it mildly amusing.
She said, ‘Things are seldom as bad as you think they’re going to be.
Not when you come to them. So it’s a waste of time, being afraid. You remember that!’ She laughed softly, leaning on Hepzibah’s arm, then went on, ‘And remember the other thing, too. Do you remember? The message I gave you?’
‘Yes,’ Carrie said. ‘Yes, I remember.’
Chapter Ten
Mrs Gotobed died one hot day in July. Albert came to the shop in the late afternoon with a letter for Mr Evans from Hepzibah. He said, ‘It happened this morning but there was no one to send till I came home from school.’
Mr Evans stood behind the counter and read the letter and Albert and Carrie watched him. He folded it neatly and put it back in its envelope and stared into space for a minute. Then he went to the front of the shop and pulled down the blinds. ‘Respect for the dead,’ he said, speaking to Carrie quite angrily, as if she had questioned this action. And went to the kitchen to tell Auntie Lou.
Carrie and Albert went up the mountain. Neither of them spoke as they climbed. Still without speaking, they sat on a hump of cropped grass, backs against a dry stone wall, the evening sun in their eyes. Carrie thought of all the people she knew in the world, all of them still eating and breathing and walking about, and then of Mrs Gotobed, lying still. Sweat stood cold on her forehead. She said, ‘She’s the first person I’ve ever known die, in my life.’
‘She won’t be the last, so you might as well get used to it,’ Albert said – rather cruelly, it seemed.
‘Do you have to speak like that?’ Carrie said. ‘In that tone?’
‘No. But it was the way you spoke! This is the first sorrow of my life, poor little me!’
‘I didn’t mean that.’
‘Didn’t you?’
‘No, I didn’t.’
Albert poked a twig at a loose lump of earth. He lifted it and red ants scurried and bustled, pulling and pushing their torpedo-shaped eggs to safety. Within a few seconds they had all vanished into tiny, black holes. ‘Amazing team work,’ Albert said. ‘What do you think they think happened?’
Carrie said, in a hurt, distant voice, ‘Much what you’d think, I suppose, if someone took the roof off your house. Or a bomb blew it off.’
‘People wouldn’t act so fast, though. Not conditioned to it. They’d stop and think and wonder and while they were doing that someone’s great boot would come down – crump – and that ’ud be the end of them …’ He paused and looked shyly at Carrie. ‘Sorry if I was beastly.’
‘It’s all right.’
‘No, it isn’t. I was upset and taking it out on you. That’s a rotten trick.’
‘It doesn’t matter.’
‘Yes, it does.’
They looked at each other and grinned. Carrie said, ‘Did she – I mean, did it hurt her much? Dying?’
‘Hepzibah said it was just like putting a light out at the end of a day’
‘Oh,’ Carrie said. Then, ‘What’ll happen to Hepzibah? Will she have to leave Druid’s Bottom? I mean, she’s just the servant, she can’t stay there, can she? Where will she go? And what’ll happen to Mister Johnny? Oh, Albert!’
‘Hang on, Tragedy Queen,’ he said, ‘it’s all right. At least I suppose it will be because Mrs Gotobed told me. She said it would be a sin if they were turned out when she died, with Mister Johnny the way he is, and after Hepzibah had cared for her so well all these years. She said she was going to make a Will saying they could both stay on, without paying rent, as long as they wanted to. She couldn’t leave them any money because all she had was an annuity that would come to an end when she died, but Mister Johnny’s got a little bit that his parents left him and Hepzibah makes some from the poultry, so they should have just enough. Mrs Gotobed had worked it all out. She said she had no close relations to bother about on her husband’s side and only the Evanses on hers. I think she’s left her bits of jewellery to your Auntie Lou – there’s not as much as you’d think, mostly glittery junk, paste copies of real stones. And the house to Mr Evans though it won’t be much use to him. He can’t sell it or let it, of course, while Hepzibah’s living there.’ He pulled a wry face. ‘I expect he’ll be flaming mad when he knows that, won’t he? I expect he’s counted on it. After all, he’s her brother!’
‘Her own flesh and blood. But sometimes you owe more to strangers,’ Carrie said solemnly.
Albert stared at her and she laughed excitedly. ‘That was what she told me to tell Mr Evans, once she was dead. That she’d done what she’d done – made this Will, that is – not to spite him but because it seemed the right thing. And the Right Thing was to take care of Mister Johnny and Hepzibah Green. I didn’t understand what she meant at the time, I just thought she was mad!’
Now she did understand, it seemed beautiful, even if sad. Although they had quarrelled so bitterly Mrs Gotobed had still loved Mr Evans, deep down in her heart, and the message she had asked Carrie to give him would show him this plain. ‘Oh,’ Carrie said, ‘it’ll make him so happy.’
‘I wouldn’t be too sure of that,’ Albert said.
‘But it will,’ Carrie cried. ‘Don’t you see? He worried about her all the time, he was even jealous of Hepzibah because she was looking after her and he wasn’t! So he’ll be glad to know that she thought about him and wanted him to know it.’
The way Albert was staring at her, dry and disbelieving with one eyebrow raised, was so maddening! ‘Of course you wouldn’t understand,’ Carrie said. ‘You haven’t got a brother or sister so you just don’t know, do you, how someone might feel! I know how I would, because I’ve got Nick. If we’d not spoken to each other for years and he died it would make all the difference to have someone say he was still fond of me. I expect it’ll make all the difference to poor Mr Evans.’ She thought of him, of how he must feel now, mourning his dead sister and wishing he had had some last word from her; and then, how she would give him Mrs Gotobed’s message, to comfort him. She thought of a beautiful phrase – to comfort his sad heart – and tears came into her eyes. ‘I expect he’ll just weep for joy when I tell him,’ she said.
‘Well, if you say so,’ Albert said doubtfully. ‘Though if I were you, I wouldn’t be in too much of a hurry.’
But Carrie couldn’t wait. Good news couldn’t wait. She told him the first chance she had, when they had had tea and he was eating his lonely meal in the parlour.
She said, ‘Mr Evans, I’ve got something to tell you, something important,’ and then rushed straight into it before he could stop her and say, ‘Clear out while I’m eating.’ She told him what Mrs Gotobed had asked her to tell him, her exact words, and then explained what she was sure she had meant. Mr Evans listened in bulging-eyed silence, and when he still didn’t speak, even when she had finished, she thought he hadn’t taken it in.
She said, ‘So you see, she did think of you, and wanted you to know that she had. I didn’t understand what she meant about sometimes you owe more to strangers, but I do now. She meant Hepzibah and Mister Johnny and how she owed it to them to let them stay in the house because there was nowhere else they could go, not with Mister Johnny’s shy ways. And of course she knew you wouldn’t mind. I mean, I expect she knew how you felt about the only things worth having being the things you’d worked hard for and earned for yourself, so you wouldn’t want her to leave you the house! But she didn’t want you to think she’d forgotten you, or that she was just being spiteful, or something …’
‘I knew it,’ he said. His eyes bulged as if they were coming out of his head. ‘I knew it.’
‘Of course you did,’ Carrie said kindly. ‘I suppose I’d know, really, if it was Nick and me. Even if we hadn’t seen each other for ages and ages. I’d know he was still fond of me because I’m his sister. But it would be nice to be told that he was, all the same, even if it did make me feel a bit sad.’
‘Sad?’ he repeated wonderingly. ‘Sad?’ As if this was some peculiar new word he’d not heard before.
‘Well, a bit,’ Carrie said. ‘Only in a nice way, of course.’
He said nothing. The silen
ce grew and grew. Carrie tried to think of some way to break it.
At last she said slowly, ‘What I mean is, looking back over the past is always a bit sad, even if what you’re remembering is happy times, because it’s over and done. Like if Nick was dead and I was remembering the things we’d done this year, perhaps. Living here with you and Auntie Lou, and going to Druid’s Bottom, and getting the hay in, and listening to Hepzibah’s stories. Only of course I can’t really imagine Nick dying …’
But thinking of it, thinking of Nick being dead and herself being lonely without him, made her eyes start to swim. When Mr Evans stood up his face wobbled in front of her.
He said, in a terrible voice, ‘Hepzibah, Hepzibah, Hepzibah! So she’s got at you too, has she? Bewitched you with her lying tales and slippery ways as well as my poor sister!’
He pushed roughly past her and out of the room. He roared down the passage, ‘Louisa, LOUISA …’
He had knocked over the water jug when he got up from the table. Carrie tried to mop up the mess with the edge of the tablecloth and put a mat under the worst of it to stop the damp marking the table, but her hands seemed all thumbs and she couldn’t stop crying. It had all gone wrong somehow; she didn’t know why, but it had. Mr Evans was angry and he shouldn’t have been, she had tried so hard to explain …
Nick said, beside her, ‘What on earth have you done?’
‘T’wasn’t me,’ she sobbed. ‘It was him. He knocked the jug over.’
‘I didn’t mean that, you half-witted dope! Just listen to him. Did you start him off?’
He was shouting at Auntie Lou in the kitchen. ‘… told you what was going on, didn’t I? Told you she’d got her claws in, but you wouldn’t have it. Miss Green this, Miss Green that! So kind to poor Dilys! Oh, there’s kind she’s been! She knew what she was doing, that snake in the grass, that viper! And I daresay she thinks she’s succeeded – done me out of my rights and fixed up a snug home for herself for the rest of her days! But I shan’t let it lie, she needn’t think it. Not if I have to drag her through every court in the land …’