by Betty Burton
“It seems a shame to eat it,” said Jude. “I should like to take it home, just as it is, so that I could look at it – like a picture.”
She said it lightly, but it was an expression of what she felt about going back home. She wanted to take with her something of the essence of the Warren household: chatter, frippery, the clutter of Molly’s furnishings and Fred’s books and papers.
The female members of the household went upstairs to wash and change. Mrs Warren had engaged a hairdresser to call early so that she could put on her new turban head-dress long before necessary.
“If you leave things like that till there’s people all around you and you have to be concentrating on them, you forget you’re wearing something new and you don’t get the full pleasure.”
She offered the hairdresser to Jude, who declined, saying that if Peg did not mind then she would prefer her to do it. So Peg was allowed to have Jude’s share of the hairdresser’s attentions, and finished up heavy with pleasure and pinned-on curls, frizz and ribbon. Mrs Warren then called Fred to be attended to.
“He’s always had this notion about a wig bringing him out in a rash,” Mrs Warren confided. “Well, I have to admit he do get this on his neck when he wears one, but this man has got Fred made a nice toupee of real hair which can’t surely bring him out in spots? He is very careless of how he looks about the head. I don’t hold out no hope of him if he hears how men of fashion in London and places is going back to wearing their own hair.”
The hairdresser agreed. If it became the fashion for people to wear their own hair, how would anyone tell a gentleman from a cowman? Why, the next thing you knew linen smocks would be in fashion, and skills such as his own would be lost in a generation and they would all be starving in the streets. So Fred was shaved, bewigged and powdered in the latest Blackbrook fashion.
They were waiting, dressed, powdered and perfumed, for the first guests to arrive.
“Do you know what occurs to me?” said Fred. “We are waiting to go on stage, like players.”
“You say some queer things sometimes, Fred,” said Mrs Warren.
“I can see what he means,” said Jude. “There’s going to be a play here tonight. We are actors waiting to go on and the other players are just putting on their costumes.”
“That’s a nice idea, now you put it like that,” said Mrs Warren.
“I hope it won’t be a dreary play,” said Freddie, suspicious of any gathering in which he was expected to attend to neighbours and other boring old people.
“How can it be dreary with all this?” Hanna indicated generally the splendour of their surroundings.
“What shall the play be called then?” said Mrs Warren.
“The Jolly Rabbits,” said Jack, whose schoolboy humour was understood only by Sam until he explained the “warren” connection.
“I would call it, ‘Lady Geraldine’s Grand Party’,” suggested Hanna.
The play started with the arrival of the Gardines, Carters and James, the guests of the Monday supper. Mrs Gardine and Mrs Carter – in confidence with one another quite amazed at what you could do with a market girl if you put her in silk and saw to her hair – complimented Jude on how pretty she looked.
“See, Mr Carter,” said his wife, “this is the sapphire stripe I told you was coming in – and this straight style.”
Mr Carter said it looked very well, but he was more a man for old-fashioned things, which was evident from his untied physical wig of a style that had been in fashion when he was a young man.
Jude sat beside him in the little card room, talking as though she had known him longer than the four hours of Monday. Hanna was listening, watching, not wanting to miss anything, wanting to be everywhere at once. He was a genial little man of sixty or so, who said he liked nothing better than a game of cribbage and a good old-fashioned supper of the sort provided by Mrs Warren. “None of your little glasses of ice-mush that’s put out at supper these days, but an honest pudding. It’s a great pity fermity has gone out. We was brought up on fermity.” He gnashed his teeth at Jude. “Fermity grows you good teeth!” If his own unusually full jaw was anything to judge by then, if it did not grow teeth, it kept them in the gums.
“Fermity hasn’t gone out with us,” said Jude. “We never have nothing else in the mornings, do we Hanna?”
“Show us your teeth, Missie.”
Hanna did as she was bid.
Holding Hanna’s jaw, Mr Carter leaned over in his wife’s direction.
“Look at this. Good fermity teeth!”
Mr Carter was one of those people who, in company, do not converse very much – unless they find a companion who starts them off on a subject dear to their heart. They will then talk constantly, and of nothing else. Having met a young woman who was the living, breathing confirmation of his belief in fermity, he did nothing but extol her virtues and her teeth.
Whilst Jude was entertaining Mr Carter, she saw Will in the passageway. She marvelled that she had been so unobservant as to scarcely notice his looks the first time he came to Croud Cantle. Nobody would have said he was handsome, and if each feature were to be described individually without seeing the face – a tilted nose; full, bowed lips; wide eyes – one might have been forgiven for believing these were the features of someone as effete as Harry Goodenstone. But he was indeed a man, head and foot, and with no doubt about any part between.
Will came to where Jude was sitting and immediately Mr Carter talked to him about teeth and fermity.
“It would be in the interests of Barnabas White, if you was to try and bring back good fermity breakfasts to people in towns. He’s a grain dealer. It’d increase his sale of wheat no end and he’d not even have to take it to mill.” He offered Jude’s teeth to Will as proof of his point, and Will took the opportunity to hold Jude’s chin between thumb and finger and look with merriment, not into her mouth but into her eyes. And Jude did not lower them.
The house was soon filled with many of the trading people of Blackbrook. For the most part they were still close enough to their origins not to have too many airs and graces, yet had sufficient income to have no worry about where the next meal was coming from, with something over to buy their wives and daughters fur for muffs and tippets.
Not knowing how to play at cards – and not understanding why anyone should like to when there were people to talk to – Jude moved about the other rooms and passages. Earlier, Molly had said: “It will be such a treat to have you and Peg to help at seeing they’m all comfortable. There’s mostly Blackbrook people as know you already that’s coming. I can’t wait to see some of their faces.” Molly had felt it a great achievement to get Jude into the sapphire stripe and take up her hair. It went as much against Molly’s grain to have an undecorated person as to have an undecorated wall or side-table, and now that Jude was less plainly got up Molly claimed her, displaying her and looking for compliments.
“What do you think of our dress then, Kathleen?”
“Why, Molly, you’ve done wonders. I shouldn’t ha’ known you . . .”
Here the compliment tended to trail off – how should they address Jude? Most Blackbrook people knew who she was, had known her since she was a little thing standing with Bella Nugent outside the Star. She was the pie-girl, the butter-girl, the cheese seller, but not a shop-keeper, not one of them. Yet here she was visiting with the Warrens, and on first-name terms. And the Warrens, you couldn’t deny, were higher even than Alfred Herbert the draper, who had put up his name in gold letters above his shop and who never soiled his hands these days with dimity or bombazine. Could you call her Miss Nugent, when you knew who she really was – even though Bella Nugent was reckoned to have a long stocking with gold coin in the toe from her deals with the honey merchant. Or should you use her first name? But first names were strictly for close acquaintances and servants.
Jude was quite unaware of the terrible quandary that the shop-keepers (who planned for their children to take a step up the ladder) were
in. Like everyone else, she was born with the knowledge that one’s betters must have curtseys bobbed to them, have forelocks tugged, be allowed free passage, and that kind of thing. What Jude did not know was how many betters there were these days or the trouble they had with protocol. Throughout history it had been simple: you followed the example of the Church. There were those to whom God had given the right to communicate directly from the privacy of their own private chapel or pew – and everyone else. Now, however, society was beginning to create for itself a complicated classification system in which any grocer who changed his shirt on Sundays might pay for the privilege of having himself partitioned off from his inferiors when praying.
Blackbrook traders and their wives were constantly having to weigh respectability against money; acceptable trades against the dresses and houses they provided. It was difficult having to decide whether an apothecary was higher or lower than a surgeon; whether the grain fortune of Barnabas White was to be preferred to the elliman money of Ben Hannable; or where a pie-girl – who you might not tell from one of themselves if it wasn’t for her hands – fitted in.
Solving their problem, she said, “Call me Judeth, if you like.”
“Well, she seems a nice enough girl,” was the general opinion.
Mrs Hart, though, born a bailiff s daughter and married to a well-off lawyer, considered herself to be of some quality in Blackbrook society, and thought it a mighty dangerous thing to raise country people up, and girls especially. She knew ’em!
Mrs Carter agreed. “She can read and write you know.”
This information made Mrs Hart even more concerned. “I never found a need for it, and you won’t find a better run home than mine. You’ll agree that, Mary?”
Mrs Carter agreed, extolled the running of her own home and added that any woman that did her job properly shouldn’t have time for anything of that sort.
“I should a thought there was enough to do on a farm without a man, as it is, and it don’t hardly seem like what I know of that mother of hers to agree to such a useless thing in a girl.”
But as Molly Warren had given the information not only that the pie-girl could read and write, but that it was her husband, Barnabas White’s junior partner, who had taught the girl, they had to agree that you never knew what people would do and that Bella Nugent could find herself having trouble with that girl.
Jude was quite ignorant of any interest in her as Molly drew her into the circle.
Jude had danced on many a Mayday and at harvest supper but to have a fiddler in the house was a great novelty. She would have loved to dance, but her leg was still not fully recovered, so she had to watch when all the young people danced their elders off their feet, enjoying themselves a great deal more than they would when they achieved the higher social position they expected. Will danced himself breathless with Hanna as partner, who giggled and laughed with pleasure. Peg, whose heart appeared fully mended, linked arms and twirled with young James Carter.
Jude and Will were constantly caught in one another’s eye, and often found themselves standing or sitting close. Time had the quality of being both slow and rapid. Each would make a dozen new discoveries about the other only to find that a mere ten minutes had passed: then suddenly the party was finished. Will’s warm, dry hand held Jude’s quite long in taking his leave.
“I have to be in Cantle before quite soon,” he said.
“Well, then, I hope you won’t miss calling on us.”
Between these two lines of farewell and the eye-holding they made other promises to each other.
Only the thought that Will Vickery would come there made the return home bearable. She had done the journey between Blackbrook market and Cantle scores of times, feeling content that she was returning to the security of the farm and her protectors, the chalk-hills. Yet this seemed to be a going-away rather than a return journey.
They started for Cantle early and were waved off with promises of other visits very soon. Fred had a call to make in Motte, so rode with them: he upon his heavy horse, Jude and Hanna upon the donkeys. The day was dry and the cloud-layer was a grey slab. They agreed that after the rain the lower track was likely to be impassable, so after leaving Blackbrook they took the southern road which eventually branched. One part became the track over the crest of Winchester Hill. Saturday was the last day of Fair Week and people were streaming into Blackbrook. Boots, hoofs and wheels churned up the rain-moist surfaces. It reminded travellers of the winter quagmire that lay ahead, especially along the stretches of road where landowners did not fulfil their obligation to put down stone or hoggin, making life for carters, coachmen and people who earned their living like Bella Nugent doubly hard.
Jude had expected that Hanna would have been as reluctant to leave as she was herself, but she appeared to be quite happy.
“It wasn’t too bad after all, was it?” said Fred.
Jude pulled her brows together, realising that he was joking her, but not quite sure about what.
“Giving yourself time off.”
“It has spoilt me for a quiet life. I shall want a party every week and visitors every day.”
“I think you will have one caller quite frequently.” He raised his eyebrows at her.
“You mean Mr Vickery?” said Hanna. “He said he was coming.”
“I do mean Mr Vickery. He’s got a good many calls to make on the Berol estates, so he will be going close by Cantle.”
“I hope he does then,” said Hanna. “He is nice. He is nice, isn’t he Jude?”
Jude had to agree that Mr Vickery was nice.
They left Fred in Motte, went on up Winchester Hill and down past Bell Tump. It was only a matter of weeks since Jude had sat there with Mrs Trowell, yet it seemed almost as though most of her life had been lived since then – everything crammed into that short space of time. All the experiences: the terrible harvest day; the weeks of convalescence; the attempt at writing; Harry Goodenstone’s strange visit.
Then the whole crush of experience in a week. Living surrounded by comfort and pleasure, being in rooms full of people and holding conversations with more than one person at a time.
There were, too, the conflicting emotions stirred by her mother’s grim leave-taking; the new physical awareness of herself. The same old desire to touch and be touched, to hold and be held, to have contact with another human being – as with the warm, dry handshake of Will Vickery. As she half-listened to Hanna her mind was on fire. She felt as though she had glimpsed another life through a crack and that she had only to push at the door and step through into it.
From across the valley, as they went down Bellpitt Lane, they could see Croud Cantle: the pinkish brick and grey flint of the cottage and dairy and the adjoining barns with their sagging roofs – like a small, natural outcrop on the green slope of Tradden Raike. Jude’s experienced eye saw where crops had been cleared and where the rough turning of the soil to catch the frost was under way. She noticed the small changes that had taken place, where the trees in the orchard were almost bare and most of the hives had been dismantled down to their stone walls, leaving only one or two wearing their conical, straw hackles.
Hanna called excitedly, “I can see home,” and urged the donkey forward.
“Take care!”Jude told her.
“I want to see Grandmother and I got all my presents to give.”
Jude felt a familiar pang of guilt and a wince of anguish at the mention of Bella. It would all be spoiled. She knew how warm experiences of frivolous pleasure, stored away, could become instantly mildewed if Bella dampened them – it’s all right for some! She felt guilty at not being as pleased as Hanna at going home. It’s the place you ought to want to go to more than anywhere.
“When we get home, Jude, I got a present for you as well.”
“Goodness! A present!”
“It’s from the money you gave me. You got to promise to use it every time. Will you Jude?”
“What is it?”
“Pro
mise.”
“I can’t promise to use it if I don’t know what it is. It might be knitting pins, and you know what a tangle that’d be.”
“Oh, Jude! It isn’t anything like that. I got one for you, one for Grandmother and one for me and we shall all use them every day. I shall make Grandmother promise; then when I go to the fair next year I shall get some . . .” Hanna began giggling. “I nearly told you. Then you would guess what the present is. Promise Jude. It a make us like Mrs Warren.”
“All right, I promise.”
They were almost home, going along Howgaite Path, when Hanna said, “The best present is for Johnny.”
“You brought something for Johnny-twoey?”
“A course I did. I wanted him to come to the fair, but he said he couldn’t leave the farm. I think Grandmother could have let him. So I brought him a thing.” “Is that a secret too?”
“If I show you, you won’t tell?”
“I won’t tell.”
Hanna reached inside the bodice of her jacket and brought out a fist of soft paper in which Jude assumed there would be a lump of clove or peppermint fair-sweet, but when the paper had been carefully unrolled, a small, blue china bird was displayed.
“Look,” she said, cupping it in her hands like a live creature.
“It is beautiful,” said Jude. “What is it for?”
Hanna gave Jude a look such as children do when they are amazed at grown-up stupidity at something blatantly obvious.
“It is for looking at and holding,” she said. “I shall tell him to make a little shelf to put it on – like Mrs Warren.”
Hanna had brought with her mementoes of the fair that were unlikely to be mildewed by Bella.
As they approached the house, Jude felt apprehensive because of the tension there had been between them on Thursday.
In Portsmouth on this same Saturday afternoon, Charlotte Trowell was sitting beside Mary’s bed waiting for a doctor to call.