On the Black Hill

by Bruce Chatwin

  The crisis came when she experimented with a mild Indian curry. He took one mouthful and spat it out. ‘I want none of your filthy Indian food,’ he snarled, and smashed the serving dish on the floor.

  She did not pick up the bits. She ran upstairs and buried her face in the pillow. He did not join her. He did not, in the morning, make amends. He took to sleeping rough and went for long walks at night with a bottle in his pocket. One wet night, he came home drunk and sat staring savagely at the table-cloth, clenching and unclenching his fists. Then he got to his feet and lurched towards her.

  She cringed and raised her elbow.

  ‘Don’t hit me,’ she cried.

  ‘I won’t hit you,’ he roared, and rushed out into the dark.

  At the end of April there were pink buds in the orchard, and a vizor of cloud above the mountain.

  Mary shivered by the grate and listened to the tireless lapping of the rain. The house absorbed the damp like a sponge. Mouldy rings disfigured the whitewash, and the wallpaper bulged.

  There were days when it occurred to her that she had sat for years in the same damp, dark room, in the same trap, living with the same bad-tempered man. She looked at her chapped and blistered hands, and felt she would grow old and coarse and ugly before her time. She even lost the memory of having a father and mother. The colours of India had faded; and she began to identify herself with the one, wind-battered thorn-bush that she could see from her window, silhouetted on the lip of the escarpment.

  7

  THEN CAME THE fine weather.

  On the 18th of May – even though it was not a Sunday – they heard the peal of church bells on the far side of the hill. Amos harnessed the pony and they drove down to Rhulen, where Union Jacks were fluttering from every window to celebrate the Relief of Mafeking. A brass band was playing and a parade of schoolchildren passed down Broad Street with pictures of the Queen and Baden-Powell. Even the dogs wore patriotic ribbons tied to their collars.

  As the procession passed, she nudged him in the ribs, and he smiled.

  ‘Be the winter as makes me mad.’ He appeared to be pleading with her. ‘Some winters seem as they’ll never end.’

  ‘Well, next winter’, she said, ‘we shall have someone else to think about.’

  He planted a kiss on her forehead, and she threw her arms around his neck.

  When she woke next morning, a breeze was ruffling the net curtains; a thrush sang in the pear-tree; pigeons were burbling on the roof, and patches of white light wandered over the bed-cover. Amos was asleep in his calico nightshirt. The buttons had come undone, and his chest was bare. Squinting sideways, she glanced at the heaving ribcage, the red hairs round his nipples, the pink dimple left by his shirtstud, and the line where the sunburned neck met the milky thorax.

  She cupped her hand over his biceps muscle, and withdrew it.

  ‘To think I might have left him’ – she held the words within her teeth and, blushing, turned her face to the wall.

  As for Amos, he now thought of nothing but his baby boy – and, in his imagination, pictured a brawny little fellow who would muck out the cowshed.

  Mary also hoped for a boy, and already had plans for his career. Somehow, she would send him to boarding-school. He’d win scholarships. He’d grow up to be a statesman or a lawyer or a surgeon who would save people’s lives.

  Walking down the lane one day, she absent-mindedly tugged at the branch of an ash-tree; and as she looked at the tiny transparent leaves breaking from the smoky black buds, she was reminded that he, too, was reaching for the sunlight.

  Her one close friend was Ruth Morgan the Bailey, a small homely woman with a face of great simplicity and flaxen hair tied up in a coif. She was the best midwife in the valley, and she assisted Mary to prepare the layette.

  On sunny days, they sat on wicker chairs in the front garden, sewing flannels and binders; trimming vests, petticoats and bonnets; or knitting blue wool bootees that tied with satin ribbon.

  Sometimes, to exercise her stiff hands, Mary played Chopin waltzes on the piano that badly needed tuning. Her fingers ran up and down the keyboard, and a flight of jangling chords flew out of the window, and up among the pigeons. Ruth Morgan heaved with emotion and said it was the loveliest music in the world.

  Only when the layette was finished did they spread it out for Amos to admire:

  ‘But them’s not for a boy,’ he said, indignantly.

  ‘Oh yes!’ they cried in unison. ‘For a boy!’

  Two weeks later, Sam the Waggon came to lend a hand with the shearing and, rather than go back home, stayed on to help in the kitchen-garden. He sowed and hoed. He pricked out lettuce seedlings, and cut pea-sticks and bean-poles. One day, he and Mary dressed up a scarecrow in one of the missionary’s tropical suits.

  Sam had the face of a sad old clown.

  Fifty years of fisticuffs had flattened his nose. A lonely incisor lingered in his lower jaw. Nets of red string covered his eyeballs and his eyelids seemed to rustle as he blinked. The presence of an attractive woman drove him to acts of reckless flirtation.

  Mary liked his gallantries and laughed at his yarns – for he, too, had ‘run about the world’. Every morning he picked her a bouquet from her own front flower-bed; and every night, as Amos passed him on the way upstairs, he’d rub his hands and cackle, ‘Lucky dog! Ooh! If I were a younger man …!’

  He still owned an ancient fiddle – a relic of his droving days – and when he took it from its case, he would caress the gleaming wood as if it were a woman’s body. He knew how to knit his eyebrows like a concert violinist and to make the instrument quaver and sob – though when he hit the high notes, Mary’s terrier would raise its snout and howl.

  Occasionally, if Amos was away, they practised duets – ‘Lord Thomas and Fair Eleanor’ or ‘The Unquiet Grave’; and once he caught them polka-ing on the flagstones.

  ‘Stop that!’ he shouted. ‘Will ye hurt the baby?’

  Sam’s behaviour made Hannah so angry that she fell ill.

  Before Mary’s appearance, she had only to call out, ‘Sam!’ for her husband to hang his head, mutter ‘Aye, m’dear!’ and shuffle off on some trivial errand. Now, the people of Rhulen saw her storming down to the Red Dragon, filling the street with deep-throated cries, ‘Saa-am! … Saa-am!’ – but Sam would be out on the hillside gathering mushrooms for his daughter-in-law.

  One muggy evening – it was the first week in July – a clatter of wheel rims sounded in the lane, and Hughes the Carter drove up with Hannah and a pair of bundles. Amos was screwing a new hinge to the stable-door. He dropped the screwdriver and asked why she had come.

  She answered gloomily, ‘I belong by the bedside.’

  A day or two later, Mary woke with an attack of nausea and throbbing pains that raced up and down her spine. As Amos left the bedroom, she clung to his arm and pleaded, ‘Please ask her to go. I’d feel better if she’d go. I beg you. Or I’ll——’

  ‘No,’ he said, lifting the latch. ‘Mother belongs here. She must stay.’

  All that month there was a heatwave. The wind blew from the east and the sky was a hard and cloudless blue. The pump ran dry. The mud cracked. Swarms of horseflies buzzed about the nettles, and the pains in Mary’s spine grew worse. Night after night, she dreamed the same dream – of blood and nasturtiums.

  She felt that her strength was draining away. She felt that something had snapped inside; that the baby would be born deformed, or born dead, or that she herself would die. She wished she had died in India, for the poor. Propped up on pillows, she prayed to the Redeemer to take her life but – Lord! Lord! – to let him live.

  Old Hannah spent the heat of the day in the kitchen, shivering under a black shawl, knitting – knitting very slowly – a pair of long white woollen socks. When Amos beat to death an adder that had been sunning itself by the porch, she curled her lip and said, ‘That means a death in the family!’

  The 15th of July was Mary’s birthday; and because she was
feeling a little better, she came downstairs and tried to make conversation with her mother-in-law. Hannah hooded her eyes and said, ‘Read to me!’

  ‘What shall I read, Mother?’

  ‘The floral tributes.’

  So Mary turned to the funeral columns of the Hereford Times and began:

  ‘“The funeral of Miss Violet Gooch who died tragically last Thursday at the age of seventeen was held at St Asaph’s Church——”’

  ‘I said the floral tributes.’

  ‘Yes, Mother,’ she corrected herself, and began again:

  ‘“Wreath of arum lilies from Auntie Vi and Uncle Arthur. ‘Nevermore!’ … Wreath of yellow roses. ‘With ever loving memory from Poppet, Winnie and Stanley …’ Artificial wreath in glass case. ‘With kind remembrance from the Hooson Emporium …’ Bouquet of Gloire de Dijon roses. ‘Sleep softly, my dearest. From Auntie Mavis, Mostyn Hotel, Llandrindod …’ Bouquet of wild flowers. ‘Only good-night, Belovèd, not farewell! Your loving sister, Cissie …’

  ‘Well, go on!’ Hannah had opened an eyelid. ‘What’s the matter with you? Go on! Finish it!’

  ‘Yes, Mother … “The coffin, of beautifully polished oak with brass fittings, was made by Messrs Lloyd and Lloyd of Presteigne with the following inscription on the lid: ‘A harp! A magnificent harp! With a broken string!’”’

  ‘Ah!’ the old woman said.

  The preparations for Mary’s confinement made Sam so jittery anyone would have thought that he, not his son, were the father. He was always thinking of ways to please her: indeed, his was the one face that made her smile. He spent the last of his savings commissioning a rocking cradle from Watkins the Coffin. It was painted red, with blue and white stripes, and had four carved finials in the form of songbirds.

  ‘Father, you shouldn’t have …’ Mary clapped her hands, as he tried it out on the kitchen flags.

  ‘And it’s a coffin, not a cradle, she’ll be needing,’ Hannah mumbled, and went on with her knitting.

  For over fifty years she had kept, from her bridal trousseau, a single unlaundered white cotton nightdress to wear with the white socks when they laid her out as a corpse. On August 1st, she turned the heel of the second sock and, from then on, knitted slower and slower, sighing between the stitches and croaking, ‘Not long now!’

  Her skin, papery at the best of times, appeared to be transparent. Her breath came in cracked bursts, and she had difficulty moving her tongue. It was obvious to everyone but Amos that she had come to The Vision to die.

  On the 8th of August the weather broke. Stacks of smoky, silver-lidded clouds piled up behind the hill. At six in the evening, Amos and Dai Morgan were scything the last of the oats. All the birds were silent in the stillness that precedes a storm. Thistledown floated upwards, and a shriek tore out across the valley.

  The labour pains had begun. Upstairs in the bedroom, Mary lay writhing, moaning, kicking off the sheets and biting the pillow. Ruth Morgan tried to calm her. Sam was in the kitchen, boiling water. Hannah sat on the settle, and counted her stitches.

  Amos saddled the cob and cantered over the hill, helter-skelter down the quarrymen’s track to Rhulen.

  ‘Courage, man!’ said Dr Bulmer, as he divided his forceps and slid each half down one of his riding-boots. Then, shoving a flask of ergot into one pocket, a bottle of chloroform into the other, he buttoned the collar of his mackintosh cape, and both men set their faces to the storm.

  The rainwater hissed on the rooftiles as they tethered their horses to the garden fence.

  Amos attempted to follow upstairs. The doctor pushed him back, and he dropped on to the rocking-chair as if he’d been hit on the chest.

  ‘Please God it be a boy,’ he moaned. ‘An’ I’ll never touch her again.’ He grabbed at Ruth Morgan’s apron as she went by with a water-jug. ‘Be she all right?’ he pleaded, but she shook him off and told him not to be silly.

  Twenty minutes later, the bedroom door opened and a voice boomed out:

  ‘Any more newspaper? An oilskin? Anything’ll do!’

  ‘Be it a boy?’

  ‘Two of them.’

  That night, Hannah rounded off the toe of her second sock and, three days later, died.

  8

  THE TWINS’ FIRST memory – a shared memory which both remembered equally well – was of the day they were stung by the wasp.

  They were perched on high-chairs at the tea-table. It must have been teatime because the sun was streaming in from the west, bouncing off the table-cloth and making them blink. It must have been late in the year, perhaps as late as October, when wasps are drowsy. Outside the window, a magpie hung from the sky, and bunches of red rowanberries thrashed in the gale. Inside, the slabs of bread-and-butter glistened the colour of primroses. Mary was spooning egg-yolk into Lewis’s mouth and Benjamin, in a fit of jealousy, was waving his hands to attract attention when his left hand hit the wasp, and was stung.

  Mary rummaged in the medicine cupboard for cotton-wool and ammonia, dabbed the hand and, as it swelled and turned scarlet, said soothingly, ‘Be brave, little man! Be brave!’

  But Benjamin did not cry. He simply pursed his mouth and turned his sad grey eyes on his brother. For it was Lewis, not he, who was whimpering with pain, and stroking his own left hand as if it were a wounded bird. He went on snivelling till bedtime. Only when they were locked in each other’s arms did the twins doze off – and from then on, they associated eggs with wasps and mistrusted anything yellow.

  This was the first time Lewis demonstrated his power to draw the pain from his brother, and take it on himself.

  He was the stronger twin, and the firstborn.

  To show he was the firstborn, Dr Bulmer nicked a cross on his wrist; and even in the cradle he was the stronger. He was unafraid of the dark and of strangers. He loved to rough-and-tumble with the sheepdogs. One day, when nobody was about, he squeezed through the door of the beast-house, where Mary found him, several hours later, gabbling away to the bull.

  By contrast, Benjamin was a terrible coward who sucked his thumb, screamed if separated from his brother, and was always having nightmares – of getting caught in a chaff-cutter, or trampled by carthorses. Yet whenever he really did get hurt – if he fell in the nettles or walloped his shin – it was Lewis who cried instead.

  They slept in a truckle bed, in a low-beamed room along the landing, where, in another early memory, they woke one morning to find that the ceiling was an unusual shade of grey. Peering out, they saw the snow on the larches, and the snowflakes spiralling down.

  When Mary came in to dress them, they were curled, head to toe, in a heap at the bottom of the bed.

  ‘Don’t be silly’ she said. ‘It’s only snow.’

  ‘No, Mama,’ came two muffled voices from under the blankets. ‘God’s spitting.’

  Apart from Sunday drives to Lurkenhope, their first excursion into the outside world was a visit to the Flower Show of 1903 when the pony shied at a dead hedgehog in the lane, and their mother won First Prize for runner beans.

  They had never seen such a crowd and were bewildered by the shouts, the laughter, the flapping canvas and jingling harness, and the strangers who gave them pickaback rides round the exhibits.

  They were wearing sailor-suits; and with their grave grey eyes and black hair cut in a fringe, they soon attracted a circle of admirers. Even Colonel Bickerton came up:

  ‘Ho! Ho! My Jolly Jack Tars!’ he said, and chucked them under the chin.

  Later, he took them for a spin in his phaeton; and when he asked their names, Lewis answered Benjamin and Benjamin answered Lewis.

  Then they got lost.

  At four o’clock, Amos went off to pull for Rhulen in the tug-of-war; and since Mary had entered for the Ladies’ Egg-and-Spoon Race, she left the twins in charge of Mrs Griffiths Cwm Cringlyn.

  Mrs Griffiths was a big, bossy, shiny-faced woman, who had twin nieces of her own and prided herself as an expert. Lining the boys up side by side, she scrutinized t
hem all over until she found a tiny mole behind Benjamin’s right ear.

  ‘There now!’ she called out loud. ‘I found a difference!’ – whereupon Benjamin shot a despairing glance at his brother, who grabbed his hand, and they both dived through the spectators’ legs and hid in the marquee.

  They hid under a cloth-covered trestle, under the prize-winning vegetable marrows, and so much enjoyed the view of ladies’ and gentlemen’s feet that they went on hiding until they heard their mother’s voice calling and calling in a voice more cracked and anxious than a bleating ewe.

  On the way home, huddled in the back of the dog-cart, they discussed their adventure in their own secret language. And when Amos bawled out, ‘Stop that nonsense, will ye?’ Lewis piped up, ‘It’s not nonsense, Papa. It’s the language of the angels. We were born with it.’

  Mary tried to drill into their heads the difference between ‘yours’ and ‘mine’. She bought them Sunday suits – a grey tweed for Lewis and blue serge for Benjamin. They wore them for half an hour, then sneaked off and came back wearing each other’s jackets. They persisted in sharing everything. They even split their sandwiches in two, and swapped the halves.

  One Christmas, their presents were a fluffy teddy-bear and a felt Humpty-Dumpty, but on the afternoon of Boxing Day, they decided to sacrifice the teddy on a bonfire, and concentrate their love on ‘The Dump’.

  The Dump slept on their pillow, and they took him for walks. In March, however – on a grey blustery day with catkins on the branches and slush in the lane – they decided that he, too, had come between them. So the moment Mary’s back was turned, they sat him on the bridge, and tipped him in the brook.

  ‘Look, Mama!’ they cried, two stony faces peeping over the parapet at the black thing bobbing downstream.

  Mary saw The Dump get caught in an eddy and stick on a branch.