‘Quite nice people,’ said Nicky. ‘Been very decent to me.’
‘How did you meet ’em?’
‘Oh, I just met them. Sort of got to know the daughter.’ He tried to make the talk more general. ‘Funny how you meet people, isn’t it. A chance word or two and so on.’ Egg gravely agreed, his heart warm; and Nicky, encouraged by his gravity, could not forbear telling him: ‘There were some birds nesting in the wall of the old church, the ruined one. And we got into conversation about it.’
‘You and Mrs Marsh. I see,’ said Egg innocently, with hardly a smile.
‘Not Mrs Marsh. Her daughter it was. Jane, they call her.’
A good name that, thought Egg. Jane Marsh: a good honest name. ‘Sounds a pleasant body, this Jane.’
‘She is,’ agreed Nicky: not with enthusiasm, but rather with the air of one determined to be just. ‘Oh, quite pleasant. And quite young. A child almost. Only just twenty, I think they said.’
‘She’ll be pretty, I dare say,’ ventured Egg.
‘In a way,’ Nicky agreed. ‘Pretty’s not exactly the word. But good-looking, yes. You might almost say beautiful.’
‘Tall, I expect?’ suggested Egg.
‘Yes, tall and sort of fine-looking.’ He was warming to his theme. ‘The kind of face a sculptor would be attracted to. A sculptor rather than a painter, if you know what I mean. There’s something very open and generous about it, and yet … oh, I dunno. What I was going to say was they’ve been pretty decent to me, asked me to tea and sort of took an interest, lonely young man and all that. I thought it might be the polite thing if we were to run them over to see this farm of ours.’
Egg was taken aback for a moment. ‘What, this morning?’
‘Oh, not if you’d rather not. I could tell the driver to turn at the toll-gate and take a short cut through Winsted Rising. But it was only a passing thought of mine. We’ll not bother now.’
After a silence Egg said suddenly: ‘I like the sound of that young woman. Jane, d’ye call her? Tell me more about her, won’t you?’
‘Told all I know,’ said Nicky.
‘You said she was tall, didn’t you?’
‘Tallish.’ Nicky stared out of the window. ‘Toll gates,’ he remarked, desperate to say something.
‘About five foot six?’ asked Egg with a twinkle.
‘Oh, about that, I spose.’
‘And lots of black hair, dint you say? And pulls it straight back from her forehead and does it in a little bun at the back. Eh?’
Nicky blushed in meeting his father’s glance.
‘Now how the dickens did you know that, Dad?’ he asked, though he knew well enough.
‘Never you mind!’ said Egg. ‘Have I got it right?’
‘Near enough. But how-!’ He still had to pretend.
Egg jumped up, put his head out of the window, and shouted to the driver. The car stopped. ‘D’you know Upridge, young man? Well, you’ll have to turn and go back a step or two. Back to the toll-gate, d’ye see? … And then take the road through Winsted Rising.’
‘But I say!’ Nicky took alarm, seeing his plan put so unexpectedly into effect. ‘Do you think we’d better? It’s another twenty miles pretty near. And she’s—they’re not expecting me. They may be out.’
All the way to Upridge Nicky was restless and preoccupied, hardly answering when spoken to. Egg, stealthily watching him, suffered and rejoiced. He did not for many minutes share his son’s anxiety, for the years had not taught him pessimism, and seeing that Nicky was in love with this Jane he had no doubt at all that he would win her. His only fear, which he dared not boldly face, was that she should bring trouble to her lover; and when she alone, and not her mother, was handed into the cab—for it all fell out as Nicky had recklessly planned—she was so touchingly shy, and Nicky so awkward and so radiant, that Egg hadn’t the heart to take careful stock of her. He thought on the whole he liked her looks, but now, the prospect of seeing the Ridge Farm being so near, he was glad enough to absent himself in spirit for a while from these young people, who looked as eagerly forward as he looked wistfully back, and to indulge his many memories.
The car began climbing Saffron Ridge, and a quietness enclosed him into which the voices of his companions could not penetrate; but, when the time came for him to get out, nothing was left in him but an expectant curiosity. It was all so long ago, that past in which he had been living for a strange hour or so, that he could not identify himself, as yet, with the young fellow he remembered; it was easier far to identify himself with Nicky, in whose life his own was so marvellously and at times sensibly extended. Yet entering the farmhouse kitchen, he was startled almost into asking ‘Where’s Mother?’ And, going to the window, from which the cobbled yard was visible, he stood gazing and forgetful at his vanished boyhood, scarcely rousing when Nicky said: ‘Sit down for a bit, Dad. I’ll show Jane the rest of the house while you’re resting.’ There was sunlight in the yard, and Egg, unfastening the window with fingers that remembered even more than he did, stretched out his hands towards it. He leaned out, slantwise, to get a glimpse of the dairy, of which the door stood half-open: a sight that kept him staring for a long while, longer than he knew, till at last he caught himself expecting to see his young sister, Felicia, come out of that dairy carrying an empty pail hung from her arm and screwing up her eyes in the strong sunlight. That barn’s new. Spoils the place, that barn does. There was no one in the yard: it was deserted; no life except the life his memory peopled it with. His eyes saw what they saw, but into his mind crowded the fields beyond, the cart-track between two high hedges, the orchard, the twelve-acre plough, the green valley, and the long slope to the field they had called Flinders; and he was again with his brothers, ploughing, scything, trimming hedges, loading hay. It was strange, marvellous, and at the last unbelievable, that that had once been real, a living present reality, and now was nothing but an old tale. …
He turned at a sound in the room behind him, and, seeing a young man and a young woman come smiling towards him he made as if to cover his eyes with his hand, as though fending off the intrusion.
‘Hullo, Dad! Sorry we were so long away.’ Nicky stared anxiously, ‘Not feeling bad, are you?’
His son’s voice recalled him. ‘No, no, my boy. I’m right enough.’ He noticed that the boy and the girl were hand in hand, and he guessed them to be full of their tremendous secret. He smiled, looking from one to the other.
The two came nearer. ‘Jane and I—’ said Nicky, and no more words would come.
‘That’s a good boy!’ Egg gave them each a trembling hand. He was proud and glad. But when his glance came to rest at last on Jane, whom pride and gladness had transfigured, his eyes dimmed and the pain of unbearable beauty shot through his heart. All the years of his life were distilled into one sweet, one bitter drop. I must get away, I can’t bear any more of it. He longed to be safe back in his shop at Farringay.
Chapter the Fourth
The Waiting
1
Pansy, the most ladylike of cows, had sprained her leg and was suffering. She stood in the near orchard meekly enduring the attentions of her two masters. ‘Come along, my beauty!’ said old Egg Pandervil; and gently, but with a secret rapture of which his son Nicky was more than half-aware, he applied a handful of yellow ointment to the swollen joint and began rubbing it in. ‘You’re a wonder, Dad!’ But it did not need Nicky’s remark, which he cunningly pretended not to hear, to make Egg happy, for nowadays everything was conspiring to his happiness. He was in Mershire; his son was a farmer, and he was the father of his son: that was enough. After half a century of exile he was back where he belonged, living on the very soil he had himself farmed as a lad, and moving among sounds and smells and beasts that were like the incidents of an old beloved story miraculously made actual. And it gave him profound satisfaction to know himself—despite the variety of new habits learned during that exile— still countryman enough, and farmer enough, to do more for Pansy than
ever that smart young vet at Mercester could have done. Nothing to do but put the poor creature out of its pain—that, he told Nicky, was what they all said, and that was what this fellow would say if he were given a chance. ‘Steady, my lass!’ murmured Egg. ‘I’m making it well again, that’s what I’m doing.’ Continuing the massage, he rested his head gratefully against the cow’s flank. The smell of the animal was pleasant in his nostrils; her solid bulk reassured him; he was home again. Moreover, the cow was getting better, thereby affording one more piece of corroborative evidence that he hadn’t lost his country nous. On days when strength assailed him he could plough as straight a furrow, build as fine a stack, and with bottle and shears as dexterously tend a maggoty sheep as young Nicky himself could. He would draw water from the deep well with never a sick glance—such as Nicky couldn’t forbear giving—into that hideous hole; he would tar a fence with the enthusiasm of a child; and nothing pleased him better, in those early days, than to take a scythe and mow down a few of the thistles that disgracefully choked the valley meadow. At seventy-five his strength wasn’t what it had been; but, though he could not do everything, he could do enough to feel that he was of some use to the place. He was forever poking about the farm at Nicky’s side, helping, advising, hindering maybe, with his ‘Here, lemme have a go, Nicky!’ and ‘Now this is the way ’twas done in my time.’ Nicky, admiring and teasing the old man in the same breath, divined at last the secret of this strange zest of his: it was that every fresh task yielded him not only proof of his capacity but the bitter-sweet delight of reminiscence. What Nicky could not know was the exact proportions in which were mixed the fancies, the feelings, and the history of which this reminiscence was compounded. More often than not there was no conscious memory of the past, but only a flavour, subtle and satisfying; though sometimes, with a bill-hook in his hand, or squatted in the byre and watching the milk warm from the udder spurt resonantly into the pail, Egg did play at pretending he was back for an instant in the past. Yet he was aware—now and again, but not often, mournfully aware—that the essential quality of that past eluded him. Everything looked the same, or nearly so; but everything was different. It was nothing—or at least it was no more than a little disconcerting—that where men in his time had mowed grass with a scythe and reaped corn with a sickle they now used a machine drawn by horses; and nothing—except an occasion for genial sneering—that chemical manures were the fashion, and the rotation of crops a solemnly deliberated affair. The difference went deeper than that; it was in the very nature of things. Or was it, perhaps, in himself alone? Yet he did not think of himself as old, and it was sometimes the queerest thing to realize what a great gulf of years divided him from Nicky and Jane, and he caught himself wondering how and why he came to be pent in this old body, he and his rich treasure of memories. This new life bred strange thoughts, and none more strange than the fancy, only half playful, that his marriage and his life at Farringay were things that had never really happened. Yes, they had happened, but not so truly as things happened here on the farm; too real for a dream, maybe, but surely not real enough for full, waking life. Boyhood itself seemed less remote than that lifetime of grocering.
He stepped a pace back from the cow and regarded his work with satisfaction; then stooped, with grunting difficulty, to wipe his hands on a tuft of grass. The cow turned her large purple irises towards the two men; she did not look at them, but she saw them. Nicky for an instant idly wondered what slow dim thought or dream went on behind that bovine mask: precisely the kind of question that Egg had once been in the habit of asking himself, but for a very long time now he had finished with such fancies and forgotten them. ‘She’s mending, my boy,’ he said. Nicky agreed. ‘Thanks to you, Dad.’ And suddenly, out of nowhere as it seemed, there drifted into Egg’s mind the beginning of a memory. He stood, staring at distance, listening to a silence in himself.
‘What is it, Dad?’
‘Funny,’ said Egg, with a wondering smile. ‘Something just popped into my head. A brother of mine. The eldest he was.’
‘Not Uncle Algy,’ asked Nicky.
‘No, Algy was the middle one. The eldest. Now what did we call him? … Willy we called ’im. Sakes alive, I haven’t thought of Willy for a many years. Now what should have put him into my head, I wonder!’
‘Was that the brother that was killed at Inkerman?’
‘Inkerman? Battle of Inkerman? Why, so it was. Wasn’t much older than you, wasn’t Willy, when a was killed. Queer, that is. If I was to meet him now, same as it might be in the next world as they say, young Willy’d be a mere nipper side of me, woont he?’
Nicky considered. ‘I reckon he would. Rum idea that. But I tell you what, Dad. You might not even recognize each other. How about that?’
‘Not recognize him!’ said Egg indignantly. ‘Not recognize my own brother!’ He stared blankly, and then added, with mild surprise in his voice: ‘Well, I hadn’t thought o’ that. P’raps you’re right.’ He tried to recall Willy’s image, but could find nothing but the faintest vaguest pencil sketch of a young man in a red coat. He felt puzzled and a little lonely. And he had a sense of the injustice of his predicament. He was the same Egg Pandervil as he had always been; however many years he had lived, he had not changed his identity, and the notion that young Willy, his elder brother, could regard him as an old man was absurd, though not quite absurd enough to be instantly dismissed. The old men of his own youth, with their white hairs and their bent backs, had seemed to be an alien race, almost an alien species, having little or nothing in common with his own; but now he knew, he had cause to know, better than that. Old or young, one felt much the same inside: perhaps nowadays less hopeful, less greedy, less expectant, but fundamentally the same, and, but for the aches and pains of the body and the tiresomeness of taking care of oneself, wonderfully contented.
Nicky said, as though reading his father’s thoughts: ‘You like being here, don’t you?’
‘Eh? Like being here?’
‘Yes, here on the farm with Jane and me?’ The boy spoke shyly, and turned away, afraid of his sentiment.
‘Why, yes,’ said Egg. ‘What more could I want than this?’
‘Yes, you’re properly settled in now. Just at first I thought maybe the change was too much for you.’
‘Nonsense!’ Egg chose to forget that period of queer, cruel disappointment, when his beloved Mershire had seemed strange to him and he had hungered, perversely, to be back in his old shop. ‘You and Jane, I’ve got all I want, boy. Set your mind easy, my dear. … Unless,’ he added, and paused in hesitation.
‘What else, Dad?’
Egg turned the question aside. ‘Time enough for that.’ He took his son’s arm and they sauntered slowly towards the house. ‘Don’t like the look of that French barn, as you call it. Don’t know what possessed ’em to go putting it there.’
This by now was ancient controversy. ‘Pretty useful though,’ said Nicky.
‘Spoils the character of the place. We got along well enough without it, me and your Uncle Algy. And that gate too! What they want to go altering everything for? They’ve picked the place to bits seemingly, and then put it together again all anyhow.’ Nicky being silent, his father added after a pause: ‘This yard now! I’d hardly know it. Let alone what they’ve done to the house.’
Lifting his eyes the old man saw Jane standing outside the back door looking towards them with her hand shading her eyes from the sunlight. The poise of her body, young and lissom, spoke a new maturity. A fine lass he thought, and his eyes rejoiced in the sight of her. A fine lass and well mated to his son. ‘There’s Jane,’ he said.
‘Yes,’ answered Nicky. ‘Looking for us, I expect.’ He smiled at his father’s enthusiasm.
Egg waved an eager hand to the girl. ‘Coming, my dear.’ She waved back and turned into the house. Egg suddenly stopped in his walk. ‘I know,’ said he. ‘I remember now, Nicky. Well there’s a queer thing to happen!’ Nicky’s face questioned him. ‘Why, br
other Willy. That’s what I mean. Why I thought of him was this way. The orchard and Pansy it was that put it into my head. That’s where I was the day we heard about him being killed.’
‘Pansy?’ echoed Nicky. ‘What’s Pansy got to do with it?’
‘Tell you I was in that very same bit of an orchard. And there was a sick cow there. Same as it might have been this morning. And your Uncle Algy come running up to me face as white as a sheet. “Egg, my dear fellow, it’s all up with poor Willy,” he says. “Died like a hero,” says he. And those were his very words.’ Egg smiled triumphantly to find his memory so good.
Jane greeted them with a question. ‘How’s Pansy?’
‘Mending,’ said Egg. ‘Ah, we can teach ’em a thing or two yet, Nicky and me.’
She smiled maternally at him. ‘Ready for your dinner, I expect.’ They took their places round the kitchen table. Nicky carved the cold joint; Egg poured the cider; Jane, at the sink, emptied steaming potatoes from her heavy iron saucepan into her bright new tureen. Nicky’s eyes were on his task; he was not quite the boy he had been a moment ago, outside. Egg couldn’t make it out, this strangeness in the house. It was a puzzle and a worry to him. His own glance, following the girl as she moved about the room, rested affectionately on her broad gentle face, whose beautiful candour, like Nicky’s own, was now veiled, it seemed; but by what veiled? Not by anger, or at least not by confessed anger; not by unkindness, unless it were an unkindness hidden out of sight far below the surface of those calm eyes. Not by anything that Egg could give a name to. Yet he couldn’t resist the suspicion that all was not quite as it should be between Nicky and Jane. They had been married two years now, and there was no sign of a child. Did that mean anything or nothing? Well, said Egg to himself, times have changed a bit in that way, and no bad thing either perhaps, though I don’t hold with all I hear. And so saying he dismissed the subject from his mind; or, at least, he gave it a nod of dismissal, and if thereafter it remained, to pester him at intervals, it was by no permission of his.
The Pandervils Page 35