On the Black Hill

by Bruce Chatwin

  Since the day of the peace celebrations, the twins’ world had contracted to a few square miles, bounded on one side by Maesyfelin Chapel and on the other by the Black Hill: both Rhulen and Lurkenhope now lay on enemy soil.

  Deliberately, as if reaching back to the innocence of early childhood, they turned away from the modern age; and though the neighbours invested in new farm machinery, they persuaded their father not to waste his money.

  They shovelled muck on to the fields. They broadcast seed from a basketwork ‘lip’. They used the old binder, the old single-furrow plough, and even did their threshing with a flail. Yet, as Amos was forced to admit, the hedges had never been neater, the grass greener, the animals healthier. The farm even made money. He had only to set foot in the bank for the manager to slip round the counter, and shake his hand.

  Lewis’s only extravagance was a subscription to the News of the World, and after lunch on Sundays, he would riffle through its pages in case there was an air-crash to paste in his scrapbook.

  ‘Really,’ Mary pretended to protest. ‘What a morbid imagination you have!’ Already, though they were only twenty-two, her sons were behaving like crabby old bachelors. But her daughter gave her greater concern.

  For years, Rebecca had basked in her father’s infatuation: nowadays they seldom spoke. She would steal off to Rhulen and come back with cigarette smoke on her breath and rouge rubbed off around her lips. She raided Amos’s cash-box. He called her a ‘harlot’ and Mary despaired of reconciling them.

  To get her out of the house, she found the girl a job as a sales assistant at the old Albion Drapery, which, in a flush of post-war francophilia, had changed its name to ‘Paris House’. Rebecca lodged in an attic above the shop and came home at weekends. One Saturday afternoon, as the twins were washing out the milk-churns, they heard the shouts and screams of a dreadful row in the kitchen.

  Rebecca had confessed to being pregnant – and worse: the man was an Irish navvy, a Catholic, who worked on the railway. She left the house with a bleeding lip and fifteen gold sovereigns in her purse, astonishing everyone with her sly smile and the coolness of her behaviour.

  ‘And that’s all she’ll ever have from me,’ Amos thundered.

  They never heard from her again. From an address in Cardiff she sent her old employer a postcard with news of a baby girl. Mary took a train-journey to see her grandchild, but the landlady said the couple had emigrated to America, and slammed the door in her face.

  And Amos never recovered from her disappearance. He kept crying out ‘Rebecca!’ in his sleep. An attack of shingles maddened him to the point of frenzy. Then, to add to his troubles, the rent went up.

  The Bickertons were in financial trouble.

  Their Trustees had lost a fortune in Russian bonds. Their stud-farming experiments had failed to repay the investment. The sale of Old Masters was a disappointment and, when the Colonel’s lawyers broached the subject of avoiding death-duties, he flared up: ‘Don’t speak to me about death-duties! I’m not dead yet!’

  A circular letter from his new agent warned all tenants to expect substantial rises in the coming year – an awkward time for Amos, who was hoping to buy some land.

  Even at his angriest, Amos assumed that both the twins would marry, and continue to farm; and since The Vision could never support two families, they needed extra land.

  For years he had had his eye on The Tump – a smallholding of thirty-three acres, set in a circle of beeches, on high ground half a mile from the Rhulen lane. The owner was an old recluse – a defrocked priest, so they said – who lived alone in scholarly squalor until one snowy morning Ethel the Rock saw no smoke from his chimney and found him spreadeagled in his garden, with a Christmas rose in his hand.

  On making enquiries, Amos was told the place would be sold at auction. Then, one Thursday evening, he took Lewis aside and said sourly:

  ‘Your old friend, Rosie Fifield, moved herself into The Tump.’

  26

  WHILE WORKING AT Lurkenhope, one of Rosie’s duties had been to carry the bathwater upstairs to Reggie Bickerton’s bedroom.

  This place, to which few people were ever admitted, was situated in the West Tower, and was a perfect bachelor’s den. The walls were hung with deep-blue paper. The tapestry curtains and bed-hangings were worked in green with a design of heraldic beasts. There were chintz-covered chairs and ottomans; the carpet was Persian and in front of the fireplace lay a polar-bearskin rug. On the mantelpiece was an ormolu clock, flanked with figures of Castor and Pollux. Most of the paintings were of oriental subjects, bazaars, mosques, camel caravans and women in latticed rooms. His Eton photographs showed groups of young athletes with imperturbable smiles; and the evening sun filtering through roundels of stained glass, shed flecks of blood-red light over the frames.

  Rosie would spread out the bath-mat, drape a towel over a chair, and lay out the soap and sponge. Then, after plunging a thermometer into the water – to be sure of not scalding the young master’s stump – she tried to slip away without his calling her back.

  Most evenings, he’d be lying on the ottoman loosely wrapped in a yellow silk dressing-gown, sometimes pretending to read or jotting down notes with his serviceable hand. He watched her every movement from the corner of his eye.

  ‘Thank you Rosie,’ he’d say, as she turned the door-handle. ‘Er … Er … Rosie!’

  ‘Yes, sir!’ She would stand, almost to attention, with the door half-open.

  ‘No! Forget it! It’s of no importance!’ – and, as the door closed behind her, he would reach for his crutch.

  One evening, stripped to the waist, he asked her to help him into the water.

  ‘I can’t,’ she gasped, and rushed for the safety of the passage.

  In 1914, Reggie had gone to war with a head full of chivalric notions of duty to caste and country. He had come home a cripple, with a receding hairline, three fingers missing from his right hand, and the watery eyes of a secret drinker. At first, he made light of his injuries with upper-class stoicism. By 1919, the first wave of sympathy had worn off, and he had become ‘a case’.

  His fiancée had married his best friend. Other friends found the Welsh Border too far from London for frequent visits. His favourite sister, Isobel, had married and gone to India. And he was left in this huge gloomy house, alone with his squabbling parents and the sad, stuttering Nancy, who showered him with unwanted affection.

  He tried his hand at writing a novel about his wartime experiences. The strain of composition tired him: after twenty minutes of left-handed scribbling, he would be staring out of the window – at the lawn, the rain and the hill. He longed to live in a tropical country and he longed for a tumbler of whisky.

  One May weekend, the house was full of guests and Rosie was mouthing her supper in the Servant’s Hall, when the bell of Bedroom Three began to ring: she had already seen to his bathwater.

  She knocked.

  ‘Come in.’

  He was on the ottoman, half-dressed for dinner, trying with his wounded hand to press a gold stud through his shirtfront:

  ‘Here, Rosie? I wonder if you could do these for me?’

  Her thumb felt for the back of the stud, but just as it went ‘pop’ through the starched-up hole, he caught her off balance and pulled her on top of him.

  She struggled, shook him off and backed away. A rush of crimson coloured her neck, and she stammered, ‘I didn’t mean to.’

  ‘But I did, Rosie,’ and he protested his love.

  He had teased her before. She said it was mean of him to make fun of her.

  ‘But I’m not making fun of you,’ he said, in real despair.

  She saw he was serious and went out slamming the door.

  All through Sunday, she pretended to be sick. On the Monday, when the house-party was over, he apologized with the full force of his charm.

  He made her laugh by describing the private lives of all the guests. He spoke of travelling to the Mediterranean, and the Isles
of Greece. He gave her novels, which she read by candlelight. She admired the clock above the mantelpiece:

  ‘They’re the Heavenly Twins,’ he said. ‘Take it. It’s a present. Anything here can be yours.’

  She held him at bay another week. He suspected a rival. Maddened by her resistance, he proposed to her.

  ‘Oh!’

  Calmly and slowly, she walked towards the leaded window and looked out over the topiary, and the woods behind. A peacock squawked. In her imagination, she saw the butler bringing in her breakfast-tray; and in the deepening evening, she slipped between the sheets.

  Thereafter, they established a regular pattern of deception. She felt humiliated by having to leave him at five, before the house began to wake. When the whispering started they had to be even more careful. One night, she had to hide in the wardrobe while Nancy lectured him to lay off:

  ‘Re-eally, Re-eggie!’ she protested. ‘It’s the s-s-candal of the village!’

  Rosie pressed him to tell his parents. He promised to do so once the peace celebrations were over. Another month went by. He came to his senses when she missed her first period.

  ‘I shall tell them,’ he said. ‘Tomorrow, after breakfast.’

  Three days later, his mother had left for the South of France, and he said, ‘Please, please, please, please will you give me a little more time?’

  The leaves were yellowing in the park, and sportsmen came from London to stay in the house. On the second Saturday of pheasant shooting, the butler ordered her to take a picnic to the Colonel’s party over by Tanhouse Wood. A groom was driving her and the hampers back across the park. She saw a blue motor speeding towards the West Lodge.

  Reggie had packed his bags and was off, abroad.

  She did not cry. She did not break down. She was not even greatly surprised. By creeping off like a coward, he had confirmed her opinion of men. On her bed, she found a letter and tore it to contemptuous shreds. A second letter advised her to visit a Mr Arkwright, Solicitor, in Rhulen.

  She went. The offer was for five hundred pounds.

  ‘Make it six,’ she said, returning to Mr Arkwright an even icier stare.

  ‘Six,’ he agreed. ‘And not a penny more!’ She walked away with the cheque.

  That winter, she took lodgings at a dairy farm and paid her way by making cheeses. When her boy was born, she left him with a wet-nurse and went out to work.

  She had always suffered from bronchial troubles, and loved the clean air of the mountains. One summer evening with the swifts whooshing low over her head, she was rambling back along the ridge from the Eagle Stone, and stopped to talk to an old man resting by a hump of reddish rock.

  He told her the names of the surrounding bluffs: she asked him the name of the rocks they were sitting on.

  ‘Bickerton’s Knob,’ he said, perplexed by the hoots of derisive laughter with which she greeted his reply.

  The old recluse was lame and stiff. He pointed to his cottage, far below in its ring of beech trees. She escorted him down the slope, then sat with him till dark while he recited his poems. She took to fetching his groceries. He died two winters later, and she was able to buy his property.

  She bought a small flock of sheep, and a pony, and taking her son, she shut herself off from the world. She burned the poet’s rubbish, but saved his papers and his books. Her only protection was a squeaky door, and a dog.

  One day, Lewis Jones went chasing after a runaway ram. He came to a stream in a copse of hazels, where the water combed over a rock, and there were piles of bleached bones brought down by the winter flood. Peering through the leaves, he saw Rosie Fifield, in a blue dress, sitting on the far side of the gully. Her washing was laid out to dry on the gorsebushes, and she was buried in a book. A little boy ran up to her, and held a buttercup under her chin.

  ‘Please, Billy!’ she stroked his hair. ‘No more now!’ – and the child settled down to make a daisy-chain.

  Lewis watched them for ten minutes, frozen as you would watch a vixen playing with her cubs. Then he went back to the house.

  27

  ON BOXING DAY of 1924, the hounds met at Fiddler’s Elbow and began drawing the coverts of Cefn Wood. Around eleven-thirty, Colonel Bickerton was thrown from his hunter and kicked in the spine by an oncoming horse. The schoolchildren were given a holiday for the funeral. In the pub, the drinkers toasted the old squire’s memory, and said, ‘It’s the way he’d have wanted to go.’

  His widow came for three days, and went back to Grasse.

  Having quarrelled with the rest of her family, she had chosen to live in France, painting and gardening in a small Provençal house. Mrs Nancy lived on at Lurkenhope, ‘holding the fort’ for Reggie, who was away, on his coffee plantation, in Kenya. Most of the servants were given their notice. In July, Amos Jones heard a rumour that the hillfarms would be sold to pay the death-duties.

  This was the moment for which he had waited all his life.

  He called on the land-agent, who confirmed, in confidence, that all tenants of ten or more years’ standing would be offered their farms at a ‘fair valuation’.

  ‘And what would a fair valuation be?’

  ‘For The Vision? Hard to say exactly! Somewhere between two and three thousand, I expect.’

  Amos next called in on the bank-manager, who foresaw no difficulty in securing a loan.

  The prospect of owning his own farm made him feel young again. He seemed to forget his daughter. He looked over the land with the new eyes of love, dreamed of buying modern machinery, and delivered moralistic sermons on the decline of the gentry.

  The Hand of God, he said, had delivered the land unto him and his seed; and when he spoke of ‘seed’, the twins both blushed and looked at the floor. One day, during the grouse season, he hid among the larches and watched Mrs Nancy striding up the pasture with a party of guns and beaters.

  ‘And next year,’ he shouted down the supper-table, ‘next year, if they so much as show their fat faces in my field, I’ll see them off … I’ll set the dogs on them …’

  ‘Good heavens!’ said Mary, as she set down a dish of shepherd’s pie. ‘What did they ever do to you?’

  Autumn slipped by. Then, towards the end of October, two valuers came from Hereford and asked to be shown the fields and the buildings.

  ‘And what do you two gentlemen think the place might be worth?’ Amos asked, deferentially opening the door of their saloon.

  The older man rubbed his chin: ‘Around three thousand on the open market. But I’d keep that figure dark if I were you.’

  ‘Open market? But it’s not to be sold on the open market.’

  ‘I dare say you’re right,’ the valuer shrugged, and pulled the self-starter.

  Amos suspected that something was wrong. But never, in his wilder moments of anxiety, was he prepared for the announcement in the Hereford Times: that the farms were to be sold, at public auction, on a date six weeks hence, at the Red Dragon in Rhulen. Apprehensive of the new Labour Government, and alert to new legislation that might go against the landlord, the Lurkenhope Trustees had opted to go for the last farthing, and were forcing their tenants to compete with outside buyers.

  Haines of Red Daren called a meeting in the hall at Maesyfelin where, one after the other, the tenants protested against ‘this monstrously underhand behaviour’, and promised to disrupt the sale.

  The sale went ahead as planned.

  It was sleeting on the big day. Mary put on a warm grey woollen dress, her winter coat, and the hat she wore for funerals. As she took her umbrella, she turned to the twins and said, ‘Please, do come! Your father needs you. Today, he needs you more than ever.’

  They shook their heads and said, ‘No, Mother! We’d not go to town.’

  The Banqueting Hall of the Red Dragon had been cleared of tables, and the manager, alarmed for his parquet floor, was hovering in the entrance on the look-out for hobnail boots. The auctioneer’s clerk was setting slips of paper on the chairs reserved fo
r bidders. Nodding to friends and acquaintances, Mary sat down in the third row, while Amos went to join the other tenants, who – Welshmen to a man – stood in a ring with waterproofs over their arms, speaking in low murmurs as they tried to agree on a strategy.

  The ringleader was Haines of Red Daren, now a gaunt, stringy man in his fifties with a squashed-up nose, a mop of greyish curls and crooked teeth. He had recently lost his wife.

  ‘Right!’ he said. ‘If anyone bids against a tenant, I shall kick him from this room with my own boot.’

  The room was filling up, with both bidders and spectators. Then a youngish, frowsy-looking woman came in wearing a rain-drenched hat of green feathers. On her arm was old Tom Watkins the Coffin.

  Amos broke from the circle to greet his former enemy, but Watkins turned his back and glared at a hunting print.

  At twenty past two, Mr Arkwright, the vendors’ solicitor, appeared as if dressed for a shooting-party, in chequered tweed plus-fours. He, too, had recently lost his wife; but when David Powell-Davies went up to commiserate ‘on behalf of all members of the Farmers’ Union’, the solicitor returned a withering smile:

  ‘A sad business to be sure! But a mercy! Believe me, Mr Powell-Davies! A great mercy!’

  Mrs Arkwright had spent her last year in and out of the Mid Wales Insane Asylum. The widower walked away to engage the auctioneer in conversation.

  The auctioneer was a Mr Whitaker, a tall, bland, sandy-haired man with a high complexion and oyster-coloured eyes. He was dressed in the uniform of the professional classes – a black jacket and striped trousers – and his Adam’s apple jerked up and down in the V of his winged collar.

  At half-past two precisely, he mounted the rostrum and announced, ‘By Order of the Trustees of Lurkenhope Estates, the sale of fifteen farms, five parcels of accommodation land, and two hundred acres of mature forest.’

  ‘Shall I not die in the farm I were born in?’ A deep voice, resonant with irony, sounded from the rear of the room.

  ‘Of course you shall,’ said Mr Whitaker, pleasantly. ‘By making the appropriate bid! I do assure you, sir, the reserves are low. Are we ready to begin then? Lot One … Lower Pen-Lan Court …’