Dead-Nettle

by John Buxton Hilton

  He had been closeted all night in the fearful stench and mess of that cottage. It is true that a corpse and a broken wall cannot harm a man, but Lomas was in a highly emotional state. I did not know whether, or how much, he had been able to sleep. From the look of him, not at all. Yet here he was, beginning to talk as he might have talked at any time. It is remarkable what resources a man can sometimes find in himself. I had to keep him going, to have him making explanations – to me and to himself – until, if such were the case, he unwarily played self-condemnation into my hands. I make no attempt to defend the morality of interrogation. It is not always, not even usually, a question of bullying. The trick is, more often, to offer a much needed friendship. Whether he was a murderer or not, Lomas was in desperate need to talk to someone – and talk, and talk. All I had to do was listen – in the hope of becoming his confessor.

  ‘You’ve probably never been down the coal-face,’ he said.

  ‘I have, actually. When I first joined the force I was stationed in the east of the county. Sometimes my work took me down in the cage.’

  ‘You’ll have some idea, then. Some idea, even as a visitor. The dark, the heat, the wet, the walls hemming you in.’

  ‘Some idea,’ I said sententiously.

  ‘And I was cack-handed into the bargain. Whatever I touched went wrong. I was the laughing-stock even of my own family – only it went further than a joke. They’d never have trusted me on a shift where the real money was. Not that there was ever very much in it, but I was always employed on the mugs’jobs. By the time I was rising twenty, I was still only throwing points on the tub railway. Do you know what that means?’

  ‘I have a rough idea.’

  Lomas shifted his bottom on the broken stone wheel.

  ‘There was a line of wagons, travelling empty to the face, then brought back loaded to the winding-shaft, pulled by an endless cable from which they could be unhooked. Ours was a skinflint pit, and over one stretch, to save boring, they ran for thirty yards through a single-line tunnel. Two cables, moving either way, passed over trunnions down the middle. The hooks on the cable were spaced for safety – provided the lads on the points didn’t make mistakes. If they did, there was a derailment, a pile-up in the tunnel, a jammed cable, deliveries from the face stopped and a piece-work shift losing money. To say nothing of the life and limb of two pointsmen.’

  Lomas’s mind was far from Dead-Nettle now.

  ‘I had the top end, with loaded wagons coming down to me, and at the bottom was Neddy Wardle, who was barely right in his head. It was always considered a job for someone who wasn’t up to much else. All you had to do was keep your mind on what you were doing. If you hadn’t it in you to think of anything else, so much the better. It was a matter of listening. Sometimes four or five hooks in a row would go by you empty, and you could leave the points across, but as soon as you heard a truck coming, you had to see that they were set to let it through. It was a miserable job; one of the wettest reaches in the pit, only your lamp for company, and if you wanted to piss even, it had to be with one hand on the lever. I’d done an eleven-hour day on that for six years.’

  He was unaware now of our present surroundings. The pale blue sky of the spring morning over Dead-Nettle meant nothing to him.

  ‘As often as not I had to think for Neddy Wardle as well as myself. I was expected to. We couldn’t see each other. We could barely make our voices heard down that tunnel. But I had to keep my ears strained for what was happening at Neddy’s end, and many’s the time I’ve saved a catastrophe by yelling to him in the nick of time to push his lever over. I felt sometimes as if I were using every ounce of the will-power I had, to keep Neddy Wardle from wrecking that cable-way.’

  He wiped his forehead with the back of his hand.

  ‘The last day – my last day – my mind had wandered. I’d sent a full truck down before I realised that Neddy hadn’t swung over to receive it. That was his mistake, not mine, but if anything ever went wrong, I always took the blame. There was a crash, a pile-up of wrecked wagons before the cable could be stopped. The tunnel was blocked with spilled coal. They told me at the pithead that I was under suspension whilst the deputies went into what had happened. My one thought was to get clear of the gates before my father and my brothers came up from the face – before I could run into any of my cousins, or my cousins’in-laws. I expected to be sacked, and there wouldn’t be another pit in the valley that would take me.’

  A pair of rabbits came scampering from a warren within yards of us. They were not bothered by us, and I do not believe that Lomas even saw them.

  ‘It hadn’t occurred to me that I wouldn’t go home sooner or later that evening. In the end, I would have to face it out. But first, I just walked. And going through the town I heard a drum-and-fife band, coming over Bolsover Hill, into the Market Place. I can’t describe it to you, Mr Brunt – the rhythm, the uniforms, the marching limbs, the crunching boots, men’s eyes over lean, tanned cheeks that had seen all parts of the world. The thump and roll of the drum-sticks on the donkey-skins seemed to be beating right down into me. There they were in their ceremonial reds, and there was I, big boned and weakly, pale-faced behind the coal-dust, still in my pit clothes. I marched behind the band – not marched, slouched – but in step, on the soles of my feet rather than my heels. If only I could march into battle with them! It’s funny, isn’t it? I didn’t even think they would have me.’

  There was some sort of amusement in his eyes for a moment, but it was short-lived and embittered.

  ‘It was a small detachment: a platoon, I can tell you that now. They halted in the middle of the market cobbles, and were given the order to Fall out, and I, like many another, lads from the pits and the work-benches, girls from the mills and the shop counters, hung about watching them. My eye was caught by a trio of whom Gilbert Slack and Harry Burgess were a couple, and when they went stamping into the Grapes, I felt as if I’d lost them for ever. But I was still loitering on the pavement when they came out, hoping, I suppose, that they would fall in again, and the band would start up. And this time Gilbert caught my eye – they’d had a glass to drink but were far from drunk – and he jerked his head for me to tack on to them. We only went across the road to the Chequers, and I’d never been in such a place before. It was very much against Chapel, but I think I knew by then that I had to leave hearth and home for good.’

  He looked at me as if begging my credence.

  ‘They talked loudly, for the benefit of everyone in the tavern – and, of course, for free drinks. Tales of distant places – none of which, I know now, they had ever been to. They were still a home battalion. They told yarns of how they had bested their sergeants and officers. And all the while, in a sly, winking way, Gilbert Slack was making himself my friend. Half an hour later it was A man like you ought to be one of us. “I’d never thought,” I said. “Do you reckon –?” and then we were in a third inn, the Hammer and Nails, where there was a sergeant sitting at a table with a knot of civilians. Gilbert brought me to him, and he bought us more ale. And I was enlisted.’

  ‘Slack sold you into bondage, for a quart for himself and his mates?’

  ‘It’s an honourable calling,’ Lomas said earnestly. ‘We have no right to call it bondage.’

  ‘But you know what I mean.’

  ‘I know only too well what you mean.’

  I would need to know a good deal more about the love-hate between Lomas and Slack, if I was ever to understand this affair. But would I ever need to understand it? I went on trying to drive in the wedge.

  ‘All the same, Slack was thinking of no one but himself.’

  ‘People do Gilbert an injustice,’ Lomas said.

  I wondered what people he meant – if any. I later grasped he was thinking of Isobel Fuller.

  ‘It was very different, coming into barracks for the first time – a very different sergeant from the fat man laughing over his tankard. I was in a lot of trouble in the army in my early days – an
d after. But I’d have been in even more if it hadn’t been for Gilbert. He taught me more about soldiering than my sergeant ever did.’

  ‘You mean about column-dodging?’

  He managed a faint and fleeting grin. ‘That, too. A man has to learn to survive. But we didn’t dodge the column when the Boer lead was flying about.’

  ‘No. And you were in Gilbert Slack’s company, were you, when you met your wife?’

  Frank Lomas nodded gravely, and his eyes strayed over to the uncurtained windows of the dreadful hovel. ‘I’d like to tell you about that, Mr Brunt.’

  ‘Please do.’

  I was his friend. Like Gilbert Slack.

  Chapter Fifteen

  The battalion had mustered in Nottingham and marched in laps through the Midlands and round London to Rochester. Frank Lomas survived all his scrapes, his extra guard duties and his penal fatigues and attained the status of a trained soldier. There was an extended field exercise on the Isle of Thanet, followed by a sudden release from frayed tempers and discipline. After days of pointless standing to in dew-drenched hedge-bottoms, there was a cleaning-up of uniforms and a relaxation of training. Officers disappeared on furlough. In warm spring sunshine men pipe-clayed equipment, furbished brass buckles and set off in twos and threes to look for uncritical hearts to charm.

  That was the afternoon when Slack shocked Lomas by stealing from the counter of a village shop. They came into St Nicholas-at-Wade where the striped canvas canopies were fluttering over the booths and roundabouts of a fair on the green. Steam-driven wooden horses with bulging eyes and flaring nostrils; ostriches and peacocks, their plush seats crowded with laughing girls in bonnets, waving parasols. Brandy-snap, warm and sticky from the stalls; coloured paper balls on elastic, which a man was entitled, in the happiness of carnival, to bounce into the face of a laughing stranger. Gilbert Slack almost got into a fight with a man in charge of a shy, whom he accused of weighting the coconuts to their plinths with lumps of lead. The try-your-strength machine was out of commission for the rest of the day after Frank Lomas had brought down the mall on its wooden peg. There was nothing weakly about him after the months of fresh air and physical exercise.

  Squeals of delight and admiration behind him, and that was when they picked up the three girls: Gilbert took Patsy, a nut-brown, shiny-cheeked nubile girl from Whitstable, whose breasts would surely burst at any moment out of her bodice; Harry took Kate, a slow moving, slow spoken Amazon even bigger than himself; Frank Lomas paired off with Hetty, surely the outstanding trophy of the three, a girl in gossamer, with the innocence and scrubbed happiness of a dairy-maid cast in Derby china.

  They went off towards a wood on the edge of a water-meadow, Harry with his arm about the big girl’s waist, Gilbert and Patsy so closely entwined that it was a wonder they could walk at all. Frank Lomas held Hetty Wilson’s hand. He was surprised that she did not repel him. Hitherto his sole aspirations had been hopeless day-dreams about a chapel choir-girl on whom he had gazed over the brilliantined heads of respectable miners on Sunday nights.

  He worshipped Hetty Wilson from the moment that their eyes met. The miracle to him was that she seemed content to eschew other company that afternoon for his. He did not, of course, tell me all that they talked about as they strolled down that lane, its banks a floating vapour of bluebells. I dare say he could have remembered it in affectionate detail – and I am sure that it was as proper as anything he could have found to say to his choir-girl. I am equally sure that Hetty Wilson – at first, at any rate – must have been fascinated by him. She laughed gaily at some of the things he said, sometimes with the sharp, cynical wit of a town girl, but never unkindly, for she saw how seriously he seemed to take life. It seems obvious to me that Frank Lomas was a challenge to Hetty Wilson from the start. He must at the time have been in the prime of a superb physique. He was a good looking man, probably with a good deal of the overgrown boy still in his features. He was clean shaven – and, of course, not yet lame. Most of all, consciously or otherwise, it was his integrity that enticed her. It was something she had to overpower. I know the likes of Hetty Wilson. When Frank Lomas talked about her, he gave her away more vividly than he understood her himself.

  Once in the wood, the three couples went separate ways. Harry and Kate sank down in a hollow on the river bank. Gilbert and Patsy disappeared behind an alder-bush over which Gilbert’s scarlet tunic was presently thrown unceremoniously, its buttons glinting haphazardly in the sun. Frank Lomas led Hetty some distance away from the others, towards a hummock overlooking a bend of brook that was embraced by an are of pollarded willows. Turning over his shoulder he caught a glimpse of Gilbert Slack, his trousers loose about the knees, his pink buttocks wriggling as Patsy lay under him, her legs splayed out on either side of his in wooden surrender.

  Lomas’s desire was to steer Hetty past the place before she could catch sight of what was going on, but she seemed to know better than to look. He led her round to the opposite rim of the rise.

  ‘Are we going to sit up here, then?’ she asked him.

  They commanded a view of the close hedgerows of the Kentish countryside, the steeples of the church behind a shimmering haze, the bunting and pavilions of the fairground, a stream of couples strung out between the green and its perimeter of orchards and meadows.

  ‘It’ll be more fun down there – more private.’

  She skipped down the slope ahead of him, whilst he followed in his parade-ground boots, catching a sudden objective image of himself as something of an oaf on whom this sudden fortune had inexplicably descended. There can be no doubt that Hetty was the picture of delicate femininity, her skirts of heliotrope chiffon rustling against the pollened grass, as if herself a personification of the lady’s-smocks with which the terrain was strewn.

  She led him along the water’s edge to an overgrown bank which had already been pressed into a receptive bed by other shoulders.

  ‘No – not there. Let’s make a corner of our own,’ she said, and he was ashamed of himself for having implied that another man’s left-over palette was good enough for her.

  She lowered herself to the ground and sat back on her elbows with her knees raised. He dropped self-consciously beside her, was shy of initiating physical contact, though they were so close that he was aware of the warmth of her body. For minutes they sat thus, in desultory conversation, commanded by the bowl of blue sky with its fleecy clouds, the water breasting reeds a few yards away from them, a cuckoo calling from a copse on the further bank. A blue and green dragonfly hovered over them, as if on a visit of inspection. She gave a little squeal, mistaking it for a stinging insect. Two hands waved to ward it off: his huge and weathered, hers slender and pale. Flesh touched flesh and his fingers closed over hers.

  She leaned her head back against the greenery and looked up into his face, blue eyes titillating him with friendly impudence. At the same time, she lowered her knees and brought up her limbs alongside his. He plunged then, bent his chest over her with his hand under her shoulders and kissed her with an immense release of fervour. A minute later she pushed him away, not in complaint, but with gasping laughter, coming up for air. She adjusted her position, put her hands about his cheeks with her fingers in his hair and brought down his face for her to kiss, now with full lips. He drew himself down to the length of her, marvelled at the softness of her breasts and the warmth of her secret places. He felt then the committal flush of his whole body, the sum of his instincts surging for release. A short while later it was he who had to break away, turn partially from her, edge himself back, but even then too late to prevent a private catastrophe. He thanked God that she could not know what was happening to him. And he was desperately afraid that she might misunderstand his apparent rejection of her. But she smiled at him like a kind of conspirator.

  ‘It’s a long time, isn’t it, since you were out with anyone like me?’

  He did not tell her that it was the first and only time.

  ‘You need to
calm yourself down a bit.’

  And how little, he thought, she knew the truth of her words. If love was blind, in Frank Lomas’s case it was also gratuitously swathed in the bindings of the years. They remained for a long time on that river bank, talking. When they got up to go back to the village, to look for something to eat and drink at one of the fairground stalls, the two other couples were not to be found. Lomas was concerned about them.

  ‘Good heavens!’ Hetty said. ‘They’re big enough to look after themselves, I should think. And we don’t need them, do we?’

  In the next few days, in the wave of slackness and leisure that seemed to have descended on the regiment, they saw a great deal of each other. Hetty appeared to have no more calls on her time. She told him that she was not from this district, but from a village in Hampshire, and was holidaying with relatives on Minster Marshes. They trespassed over farm-fields and paddocks, and one day she took him to a lonely shed where, on a hay-pile, with the smell of dry chaff and old sacking in his nostrils, he made love to her for the first time.

  It was rapidly, one might say brutally, broached and soon over. But she seemed to accept this philosophically and was not woebegone in her disappointment.

  ‘And now that you’ve got that out of your system,’ she said, ‘it’s time that you learned a few things.’

  ‘Learned a few things?’

  ‘Learned to take your time. Be strong, Frank – be as strong as you like. But you’ve got to learn to be gentle at the same time. Love is a gentle thing. I’m only a little girl, remember. Not a sack strung up on a frame for bayonet practice.’

  ‘I’m sorry.’

  ‘Don’t be sorry, Frank. It was nice. Only it could be nicer.’

  It is amazing that he did not see through her then, that he had not seen through her already. But men can have a remarkable obstinacy in not believing what they do not want to believe. And in Frank Lomas’s case, his purblindness was cluttered up under a huddle of additional blinkers. It must surely have occurred to him that Hetty Wilson was not inexperienced. But perhaps he thought he was to be the last of her adventures. Perhaps he was overwhelmed by the single-mindedness with which she wanted him. And this was no delusion. She did want him. She had wanted him savagely on that first sight of him on the fairground. I do not doubt his virility, and I expect that as he became accustomed to intimate contact with her, he arrived at a better command of his timing. Moreover, she found him an attractively curious man; she had never met anyone like him. Even his manner of speech added piquancy to their walks.