Sergeant Cluff Stands Firm

by Gil North

  He came into a backyard. A wall opposite to him held back the hill. Geese, above the level of his head, peered over the wall. The entrance to the living-kitchen and its window were to his left. From round a corner to his right he heard the grunting of pigs. Their smell was strong.

  The geese were noisy. He hadn’t reckoned with them giving warning of his approach. The door of the kitchen opened before he had a chance to reach it. The woman in the snapshot confronted him, her manner hostile and suspicious.

  She was older than she had seemed in the photograph, but younger than she appeared, less attractive in the clothes she was wearing than when she had posed for the camera. To look at her she did not seem capable of the adolescent sentences, scrawled in untidy, ill-formed handwriting, Cluff had read in her letter. He could not believe she knew anything of romance. She was close, on the farm, to the mechanics of reproduction, the breedings, the calvings and the lambings. His eyes roved over her shoulder, into what he could see of the kitchen. There was nothing to indicate the presence of children. Her husband was a vague recollection in his mind, which he could not recall with clarity.

  Sleep congealed in minute ivory globules at the corners of her eyes. She had not washed that morning. Her wispy hair was greying. If she had ever been shapely her shape had sagged into looseness. Big warmly-lined boots, their leather stained with dry mud, covered her feet. Her thick stockings were wrinkled. Her skirt hung askew round her waist. A tattered cardigan stretched across her swollen breasts. She had small eyes, pig-like and greedy.

  She barred Cluff’s way. He pushed past her into the kitchen. It was cleaner than herself, but higgledy-piggledy, its atmosphere the sort she would create, inevitably, wherever she was. The table against the wall was set for two. A big fire blazed in the old-fashioned range. A kettle spouted steam on the hob.

  Cluff stood with feet apart, his back to the fire. He listened intently. The woman listened too. He caught her more than once glancing swiftly at an inner door, which must lead to a staircase somewhere and to the front of the house. Her eyes shifted and she fidgeted uneasily.

  “What do you want?” the woman asked.

  Had he heard movement over his head, or not?

  “It’s not far to where I was born,” he said, “over the tops.”

  “Cluff’s Head,” she replied. “You don’t remember me. I knew you when I was a little girl.”

  “You must have been a lot younger than Cricklethwaite.”

  “His second wife,” she said.

  “Dead, I heard.”

  “Six months ago.”

  Cluff thought, “And you were free. For the first time. Your own mistress. Subordinate to no one, not to the parents of your youth, not to the husband of your middle years.”

  She watched him study the table.

  She said, “He went right away. As soon as he read about it.”

  Cluff understood that she was speaking now, not of her husband, but of Wright.

  “Did he sleep here?” Cluff asked.

  “Why not? He worked for me as he could. It’s not easy to go backwards and forwards to Gunnarshaw with the bus service as it is.”

  “The two of you alone in the house?”

  “Think what you like.”

  “Where is he?”

  “Can’t you leave him alone?”

  “Here? Upstairs?”

  “Get out!” she said. “I don’t want you here.”

  He was not mistaken. He could not be certain of the direction of the sound. Lies were implicit in her manner and in the arrangement of the table. She backed to the inner door, standing in front of it with her arms akimbo. He took a step forward and she faced him without moving.

  Her eyes mocked him, bold. Her face was brazen. She laughed at him. He swung round sharply. An old man grinned at him, coming into the kitchen from the yard.

  The woman drew her lips from her black teeth in a travesty of a smile. She hissed, “You don’t think I can run the farm by myself?”

  She said to the old man, “Your dinner’s nearly ready. Too close for you to start another job.”

  “Caleb Cluff,” the old man said.

  His boots were filthy below his woollen stockings patched with darns. His corduroy knee-breeches were stiff with dirt. His threadbare tweed jacket stank of cow manure. He was an odorous old man, his odour compounded of himself and his animal charges.

  The woman sidled to the oven by the fire. She looked inside.

  The woman said, “Ben works for me. He lives in the village, but he has his meals here. He eats with me, when I do.”

  “I wondered whose car it was,” Ben said. “Is he up about Wright?”

  “Ask him,” the woman said.

  Cluff said, “Yes, I am.”

  “You’re wasting your time,” Ben told him. “We don’t expect him back for a day or two. You’ll allow a chap that when his wife’s just gone.”

  Cluff said nothing.

  “I’m none so good on ladders nowadays,” Ben said. “The barn’s pretty high.”

  “And old,” the woman said.

  “It wanted doing badly,” Ben explained.

  His eyes were cunning. He spoke with confidence, leering at his mistress. He put out his hand to Clive, who was sitting quietly, waiting Cluff’s pleasure.

  “One of your brother’s breeding?” Ben asked. “He keeps good dogs at Cluff’s Head.”

  Cluff stared pensively at the door into the rest of the house. He was disappointed rather than angry. The table had deceived him. Whatever he had heard had been from Ben, not from upstairs.

  Cricklethwaite’s widow watched him insolently. Ben sucked with his tongue at a hollow tooth in the back of his jaw. His smell was stronger as the heat of the fire warmed him.

  Cluff put his hat on his head.

  The woman said, “Not that way. Through here.”

  She led him into a short passage, not hiding her triumph. Stairs on his right mounted to the upper part of the house, turning back on themselves halfway. In front of him an open door revealed a pantry. It had stone shelves, at waist-level, and a small, high window looking on to the barn.

  She took him into a living-room, opposite to the stairs across the passage. He had to take his time in order not to tread on her heels. He gazed about him as she intended he should do. Sides of bacon and hams, wrapped in white muslin, hung on hooks fixed in the ceiling beams. Her eyes looked up, matching his.

  “That’s right,” she said. “That’s my bedroom up there.”

  He crossed the raised, flagged walk. She was still by his side. She put her hand on his arm, guiding him away from the steps that descended to the lane.

  “It’s easier by the barn,” she told him.

  She swung back one leaf of the huge barn door effortlessly. He did not object. Her arms were brawny under the unravelling sleeves of her cardigan. Her muscles knotted as she pulled on the iron ring that served for a handle.

  He thought, “She’s too close to the earth. What she can’t get in other ways she’ll have by force. She won’t mind pain and suffering if they’re not her own. Cricklethwaite was a brute. He ruled his beasts with a stick. He’d rule her in the same fashion.”

  They crossed the barn. Hay was stacked on both sides of them. To their left an inner flight of steps led under the stone platform supporting the hay, to the shippon beneath where cows shifted in their stalls. A free space by the wall to the right of the door, bordered with feed bins, gave access up more steps at the back of the barn to the loose-boxes.

  She took him between the two haymows to a smaller door, facing the main entrance, and out on to the steeply sloping hillside. His car was below him, by the bottom yard.

  “Satisfied?” she asked. “Everybody is but you.”

  Cluff walked away with Clive.

  She called after him, “The
police don’t want Wright. I read the papers. I saw the inquest report. What are you—judge or detective?”

  Cluff went on his way.

  “Shall I tell him,” she shouted, “when he comes to finish the barn, you’re looking for him?”

  He did not get into his car at once. He stood in the lane. Clive stretched at his side to nose his fingers.

  He filled his pipe and lit it. A cloud of smoke floated about his head. The air was still, the sky low and grey, the moors closing in. Down on the road the houses in Thorshall were solid and forbidding, not accretions on the country, but growing from it, as the people who lived in them did.

  Ben leaned on the gate of the bottom yard. Drops of moisture strayed from his nose to pearl his moustache. Cluff and the old man glared at each other for a while.

  “You’ve been quick with your dinner,” Cluff said, breaking the silence.

  “She sent me to see if you’d gone.”

  Cluff shrugged.

  “I’ll stay put till you do,” Ben said. He looked through Cluff as if Cluff did not exist.

  Time passed.

  Ben said, as if to himself, “He was here when I went home that day. He was here when I came back in the morning.”

  “She told you to say that.”

  “Aye. She told me. You need telling.”

  Clive whimpered, nudging Cluff.

  “It’s not the first time I’ve said it,” Ben continued. “Ask the policeman yonder.”

  He paused.

  He said, “The Cluffs was always a stubborn lot. You couldn’t tell ’em owt.”

  Chapter XVI

  Cluff pulled up by the “Black Bull” in the village. The inn door was open. He went inside with Clive. Neither customers nor landlord were in evidence.

  The bar was at the end of a passage. An oak settle stood at right-angles to the fire. The bar counter was opposite to the fire, against the rear wall. Round black-oak tables and spindle-backed chairs dotted the space between bar and fire. Benches, their seats padded with shiny, black leather, ranged the remaining walls.

  The Sergeant sat on the settle, Clive at his feet. No one came in. For all the notice that was taken of Cluff the pub might have been his. He was cold from staying so long in the lane. He bent over the fire, letting the heat flow into him.

  A big, octagonal-shaped clock, its once-white face browned with age, ticked above the mantel. Here and there in the dim room horse-brasses glinted in the light cast by the flames.

  “Since you’ve lost your voice,” Cluff heard, “try this.”

  A hand thrust a pewter tankard under his nose.

  “Couldn’t you have shouted?” the landlord asked. “I was out at the back.”

  “I’d have shouted when the fire went down,” Cluff said.

  “It’s nobbut middling now,” his host said.

  The landlord picked up a log from a basket by the settle and threw it on the fire. He added. “It’s not often we see you this way.”

  “Not often enough,” Cluff said.

  The landlord looked at him quizzically.

  “You’ll not have had anything at Ghyll End,” the landlord stated. “Would a slice or two of beef do, with a few onions, and bread and cheese? Maggie’s at Gunnarshaw market.”

  “There’s not much you miss,” Cluff replied.

  “Joe’s lad saw you going up the lane. I’ll have a bite with you, seeing as I’m on my own.”

  “Well, George,” Cluff said, through a full mouth, “how’s things with you?”

  “So-so,” George replied. “I got rid of my lambs a three-week past. Mind you, if it wasn’t for the pub helping out the farm—”

  “Ghyll End looked in poor shape.”

  “Cricklethwaite tended it all right. He knew his job.”

  The Sergeant said, “I’ve been spending too much time in Gunnarshaw. I’m out of touch.”

  “I didn’t like the chap,” George said, “but I’ll say that for him.”

  “I’m surprised she kept the farm on.”

  “Aye,” said George, “Ben Crier’s not much help. You can’t tell with females.”

  “It’s a long time,” Cluff mused. “She knew me but I had to think before I could recall her. I’m not clear about her now. I must have been in my teens and she only a little lass.”

  “Flighty,” George commented. “Cricklethwaite drove her with a tight rein. Not like his first.”

  “Why he married her, maybe,” Cluff said.

  “He’d be fifty when he took her. She not much more than twenty.”

  “Hard for her,” Cluff replied.

  George took a forkful of meat. He chewed thoughtfully.

  “They didn’t get on,” George said. “Perhaps she’ll do better next time.”

  The Sergeant applied himself to his food.

  George said, “You can’t blame her for sampling the goods before she buys. Not when she’s been caught once.”

  “Like that?” Cluff murmured.

  “There’s more goes on at Ghyll End than pointing a barn,” George said.

  They went on eating.

  “What about Ben Crier?” Cluff asked.

  “He knows when he’s well off. She’s got him where she wants him.”

  George went to the bar and pulled a couple of pints.

  “You thinking of taking a farm?” George said.

  “No.”

  “There’s nothing to stop you having a look at Ghyll End if you like,” said George.

  He returned to the fire with the beer.

  “That chap’s wife died convenient,” George said.

  “She hasn’t waited long,” Cluff remarked, thinking of the woman at the farm.

  George picked his teeth with his thumbnail. He leaned back in his seat and stretched out his legs to the fire. He murmured, “He went sudden in a way, did Cricklethwaite.”

  “He’d had his life out.”

  “He wasn’t one for doctors,” George said. “Not that ours is much use.”

  “Old Dr. Henry? He brought me into the world.”

  “He did the same for most of us.”

  “I’ve seen him out in all weathers,” Cluff said. “He’d ride horseback through the drifts if he couldn’t get any other way.”

  “He stuck to that trap of his into the thirties,” George said. “There’s none about here but likes him.” He paused. “But you’d not call him one for progress. He’d always get there, only what good was he when he did?”

  “You die of old age in these parts. There’s not much he needs to know.”

  “If you say so.”

  “Wasn’t that what Cricklethwaite died of?”

  “You know where the doctor lives.”

  “I’m asking you.”

  “It got to where Cricklethwaite couldn’t keep his beer down, let alone his provender.”

  “It happens,” Cluff said.

  “Ulcers, according to the doctor.”

  “He ought to know.”

  “Too late when she called Henry in. But Cricklethwaite wouldn’t have him. I can’t say different.”

  It was a long time before Cluff spoke again.

  “Let me use your phone, George,” Cluff said.

  “It’s not been shifted,” George replied.

  “Hello,” Cluff said into the telephone. “John? I’m coming up for a few days.”

  He listened and added: “That’s so. I’m taking a holiday.”

  His brother said, “It’s all right, Caleb.”

  “I’ll get some things together,” Cluff said. “Expect me when you see me.”

  “You’re welcome.”

  He left the telephone. Cricklethwaite’s widow was standing in the passage.

  She said, “That’ll be nice for you.”<
br />
  George interrupted from the bar.

  “Here,” George said. “It’s after closing time. I should have bolted that door before now.”

  “When does your holiday start?” the woman asked Cluff. “Tomorrow?”

  She turned to George. “The usual,” she said. “No. Make it two packets this time.”

  George produced the cigarettes she wanted. She paid him and went out smiling. Cluff followed her to the door. He stood there and watched her down the village street.

  She could feel Cluff’s eyes on her back. She knew other eyes were plotting her progress from cottage windows.

  “There she goes,” one wife said to another.

  “It’s a wonder she dare mix with decent folk,” the second replied.

  “A bitch,” said the first. “And Cricklethwaite not half a year in his grave.”

  Jinny Cricklethwaite turned into the lane for Ghyll End. Her pace slackened. Her brain was busy. She walked automatically, seeing nothing.

  Ben Crier was waiting in the farmyard. He said, “He’s here, isn’t he?”

  “If you know,” Jinny said, “you don’t need to ask.”

  “I didn’t bargain for this,” the old man said. “Cluff won’t let go.”

  “You! Bargain!” she exclaimed contemptuously. “It’s too late for you to bargain.”

  “Is it?” Ben demanded. His face twisted. “With you, maybe. There’s others.”

  She made for the house.

  She stopped and called, “Come up. I’ve something for you.”

  He turned into the shippon, muttering, “That’s always your answer,” ignoring her.

  She heard the clatter of a shovel scraping up cow droppings.

  Her eyes glittered.

  Chapter XVII

  She tried to lose herself in Wright. He whined and protested in her arms. He talked endlessly about Cluff.

  The dark night enveloped them. She lay loose in the bed. She could see the room about her clearly, without the aid of light.

  She remembered her husband. She could hear Cricklethwaite hawking, his breath wheezing in his chest. She could feel the rise and fall of the mattress as he got up in the blackness to relieve himself and came back in again. His gnarled hands played in her soft, flabby flesh. The nausea his fumblings inspired flooded into her mouth. The futility of his aged, worn-out body filled her with loathing.