On the Black Hill

by Bruce Chatwin

  ‘No, sir!’ It was Haines of Red Daren. ‘We are not ready to begin. We are ready to put an end to this nonsense. Is it right to put up property of this kind without giving the tenants a chance to buy?’

  Mr Whitaker turned from the muttering crowd to Mr Arkwright: they had been warned in advance to expect a disturbance. He laid down his ivory gavel and addressed the chandelier:

  ‘All this, gentlemen, is a little late in the day. But I will say the following: as farmers you advocate open markets for selling your stock. Yet you come here expecting a closed market against your landlord.’

  ‘Is there government control of the price of land?’ It was Haines again, his sing-song voice rising in anger. ‘There is government control of the price of stock.’

  ‘Hear! Hear!’ – and the Welshmen started clapping, slowly.

  ‘Sir!’ Mr Whitaker’s mouth quivered and turned down at the corners. ‘This is a sale by public auction. It is not a political meeting.’

  ‘It’ll turn political soon enough.’ Haines waved a fist in the air. ‘You Englishmen! You think you’ve had troubles enough in Ireland. I can tell you, there’s a room full of Welshmen to make trouble enough right here.’

  ‘Sir!’ The gavel sounded, rat-tat-tat! ‘This is not the time or place to discuss imperial questions. There is one question before us, gentlemen! Do we, or do we not, wish this sale to proceed?’

  From all sides came cries of ‘No!’ … ‘Yes!’ … ‘Chuck the bugger out!’ … ‘Bloody Bolshevik!’ … ‘God Save the King!’ – while the core of Welshmen joined hands and sang in chorus, Hen Wlad Fu Nhadau, ‘O Land of My Fathers’.

  Rat-tat-tat-tat-tat-tat-tat!

  ‘Unfortunately, I cannot compliment you on your singing, gentlemen!’ The auctioneer paled. ‘I shall say one thing more. If this disturbance continues, the lots will be withdrawn and offered for sale by private treaty in a single block.’

  ‘Bluffer! … Chuck him out! …’ But the shouts carried little conviction and soon petered off into silence.

  Mr Whitaker folded his arms and gloated over the effectiveness of his threat. In the shadows, David Powell-Davies was remonstrating with Haines of Red Daren.

  ‘All right! All right!’ Haines raked his fingernails down his pitted cheeks. ‘But if I catch any man, woman or dog bidding against a tenant, I’ll boot him——’

  ‘Very well, then.’ The auctioneer surveyed the lines of tense, self-centred faces. ‘The gentleman has given us permission to proceed. Lot One, then … Lower Pen-Lan Court … Five hundred pounds, am I bid?’ – and within twenty-five minutes he had sold off the land, woodland, and fourteen farms, every one of them to their tenants.

  Dai Morgan gave £2,500 for The Bailey. Gillifaenog went to Evan Bevan for £2,000 only, but the land was poor. The Griffithses had to pay £3,050 for Cwm Cringlyn; and Haines bought Red Daren for a full £400 below the estimate.

  That certainly perked him up. He circulated round his cronies, pumping their hands and promising a round of drinks at opening time.

  ‘Lot Fifteen …

  ‘This is it,’ breathed Mary. Amos was trembling, and she slipped her grey-gloved hand over his.

  ‘Lot Fifteen, The Vision Farm. House and outbuildings, with a hundred and twenty acres and grazing rights on the Black Hill … What am I bid? Five hundred pounds? … Five hundred it is! Your bid, sir! … At five hundred …!’

  Amos pushed his bids against the reserve: it was like pushing a cart uphill. He clenched his fists. His breath came in sharp bursts.

  At £2,750, he glanced up and saw the gavel poised to fall.

  ‘Your bid, sir!’ said Mr Whitaker; and Amos felt that he had reached a sunny summit and the clouds had all dispersed. Mary’s hand lay over his relaxing knuckles, and his mind flashed back to that first evening, together in the overgrown farmyard.

  ‘Very well, then,’ Mr Whitaker was winding up the sale. ‘Sold to the tenant for two thousand, seven hun——’

  ‘Three thousand!’

  The voice fell like a pole-axe on the base of Amos’s skull.

  Chairs squeaked as the spectators turned to stare at the unexpected bidder. Amos knew the bidder, but would not turn round.

  ‘At three thousand,’ Mr Whitaker beamed with pleasure. ‘The bid is at the back of the room at three thousand.’

  ‘Three thousand one hundred,’ Amos choked.

  ‘And five hundred!’

  The bidder was Watkins the Coffin.

  ‘And six at the front!’

  And where was Red Daren now, Amos wondered. Where was his boot now? He felt, with each bid, that he was going to burst. He felt he was fighting for air, that each hundred was his final breath, but the cold voice behind him continued.

  Now he opened his eyes and saw the complacent, coaxing smile on the auctioneer’s face.

  ‘Yours at the back,’ the voice was saying. ‘Sold to the bidder at the back for five thousand two hundred pounds. Have you all done? Against you, sir!’

  Mr Whitaker was enjoying himself. You could tell he was enjoying himself by the way he moistened his lower lip with the tip of his tongue.

  ‘Five thousand three hundred!’ said Amos, his eyes agape in a trance-like stare.

  The auctioneer caught the bids in his mouth, like flowers flying.

  ‘Near me, at five thousand three hundred!’

  ‘Stop!’ Mary’s fingers clawed at her husband’s shirt-cuff. ‘He’s mad,’ she hissed. ‘You’ve got to stop!’

  ‘Thank you, sir! Five thousand four hundred at the back!’

  ‘And five,’ Amos barked.

  ‘Near me again, at five thousand five hundred!’ Again, Mr Whitaker stretched his gaze beyond the chandelier – and blinked. A look of perplexity passed over his face. The second bidder had bolted for the door. People were leaving their seats and putting on their coats.

  ‘Very well, then!’ He raised his voice above the crinkle of oilskins. ‘Sold to the tenant for five thousand five hundred pounds!’ – and the gavel descended with an onanistic thud.

  28

  IT WAS SLEETING again next afternoon as Mary drove the dog-cart on her way to the solicitor. The fields were full of sodden sheep, and there were sheets of muddy water in the lane. Amos had taken to his bed.

  The clerk showed her into the office, where a coal fire was blazing.

  ‘Thank you, I’d prefer to stand here a moment,’ she said, warming her hands while she collected her thoughts.

  Mr Arkwright came in and rearranged some papers on his desk: ‘Dear lady, how good of you to call in so soon!’ he said, and went on to discuss the deposit and exchange of contracts:

  ‘We’ll soon have the matter sewn up.’

  ‘I haven’t come to speak of the contract,’ she said, ‘but the unfair price at the sale.’

  ‘Unfair, madam?’ The monocle popped out of his eye-socket and swung to and fro on its black silk ribbon. ‘In what way unfair? It was a public auction.’

  ‘It was a private vendetta.’

  The steam spiralled up from her skirt as she explained the feud between her husband and Watkins the Coffin.

  The solicitor toyed with his paper-knife, adjusted his cravat-pin, leafed through a journal; then he rang for his secretary and asked, very pointedly, for ‘one cup of tea’.

  ‘Yes, Mrs Jones, I am listening,’ he said, as Mary came to the end of her tale. ‘Is there anything more you wish to tell me?’

  ‘I was hoping … I was wondering … if the Trustees would agree to reduce the price …’

  ‘Reduce the price? What a suggestion!’

  ‘Is there no way——?’

  ‘None!’

  ‘No hope of——?’

  ‘Hope, madam? I call it sheer effrontery!’

  She stiffened her backbone and curled her lip: ‘You won’t get that price from anyone else, you know!’

  ‘I beg your pardon, madam. On the contrary! Mr Watkins came to see me this very morning. Only too willing to place h
is deposit if the purchaser defaults!’

  ‘I don’t believe you,’ she said.

  ‘Don’t,’ he said, and pointed to the door. ‘You have twenty-eight days in which to decide.’

  A pity, he thought, as he listened to her footsteps on the linoleum. She must have been a handsome woman once: and she had caught him lying! But then she had – had she not? – betrayed her class. He was twitching nervously when the secretary fetched in the tea.

  The evening clouds were darker than the hill. Great flocks of starlings flew low over Cefn Wood, expanding and condensing in arcs and ellipses, then sweeping in a whirlwind and settling on the branches. On ahead, Mary saw the lights of her home, but hardly dared advance towards it.

  The twins came out, unharnessed the pony and wheeled the cart into its shed.

  ‘How’s Father?’ she said, shivering.

  ‘Acting strange.’

  All day, he had called on God to smite him for the sin of pride.

  ‘And what can I tell him now?’ she said, crouching on a footstool by the grate. Benjamin fetched her a mug of cocoa. She closed her eyes to the blaze and seemed to see the lines of red corpuscles streaming over her eyelids.

  ‘What can we, any of us, do?’ she addressed the flames; and the flames, to her amazement, answered back.

  She stood up. She went to the piano and opened the marquetry box in which she kept her correspondence. Within seconds, she had fished out Mrs Bickerton’s Christmas card from last year. Under the signature was an address, near Grasse.

  The twins ate their supper and went off to bed. A gale blew over the roof and, in the bedroom, she could hear Amos groaning. The flames crackled, the nib scratched. She wrote letter after letter, crumpling them up until she achieved the right effect. Then she stamped the envelope and left it for the postman.

  She waited a week, two weeks, twenty days. The twenty-first day was a bright chilly morning, and she told herself not to run out to the postman, but to wait for the postman’s knock.

  The letter had come.

  As she slit it open, something yellow, the colour of a baby chick, bounced out on to the hearthrug. She held her breath as her eyes raced over Mrs Bickerton’s confident scrawl:

  ‘Poor you! What an ordeal! I do so agree … some people are absolutely mad! Thank heavens, I still have some clout with the Trustees! And I should think so too! … Wonderful invention, the telephone … Got through to London in ten minutes flat! … Sir Vivian most understanding … Couldn’t remember offhand what the reserve on The Vision was … Under three thousand, he thought … But whatever it was, you can certainly have it for that!’

  Mary raised her eyes to Amos and a tear dropped on to the notepaper. She went on reading aloud:

  ‘… Garden lovely! … Mimosa time … and almond blossom … Heaven! Love you to come down if you can get away … Ask that awful Arkwright to get you the ticket …’

  Suddenly, she was terribly embarrassed. She looked again at Amos.

  ‘Big of them!’ he snarled. ‘Very very big of them!’ – and he stamped out on to the porch.

  She picked up the thing that had fallen from the letter. It was a flowerhead of mimosa, squashed but still fluffy. She held it to her nostril and inhaled the smell of the South.

  One year, in the late Eighties, she and her mother had met the missionary’s ship when it docked in Naples. Together they had travelled through a Mediterranean spring.

  She remembered the sea, the olives blown white in the wind, and the scents of thyme and cistus after rain. She remembered lupins and poppies in the fields above Posilippo. She remembered warmth and ease in her body, under the sun. And what would she give now, for a new life, in the sun? To shrivel and die in the sun? Yet this letter, the letter she had prayed for, was it not also a sentence to stay, trapped for ever and ever, for the rest of her existence, in this gloomy house below the hill?

  And Amos? If he could have smiled, or been grateful, or even understanding! Instead of which, he banged and stamped and broke crockery, and cursed the bloody English, and the Bickertons in particular. He even threatened to burn the place down.

  And finally, when the Trustees’ letter came – offering The Vision for £2,700 – all the years of brewed-up resentment burst into the open:

  It had been her connections that got them the lease. Her money that stocked the farm. Her furniture furnished the house. Because of her, his daughter had run off with the Irishman. It was her fault that his sons were idiots. And now, when everything’d gone to whinders, it was her class and her clever clever letter that had saved all that he, Amos Jones – man, farmer, Welshman – had worked for, saved for, ruined his health for – and now did not want!

  Did she hear that? DID-NOT-WANT! No! Not at that price! Nor at any price! And what did he want? He knew what he wanted! His daughter! Rebecca! He wanted her. Back. Back home! And the husband! Bloody Irishman! Couldn’t be worse than them two halfwits! And he’d find them! And bring her back! Bring ’em both back! Back! Back! Back!——

  ‘I know … I know …’ Mary stood behind him, cradling his head in her hands. He had collapsed onto the rocking-chair, and was shaking with sobs.

  ‘We’ll find her,’ she said. ‘Somehow we’ll find her. Even if we have to go to America, we’ll somehow get her back.’

  ‘Why did I put her out?’ he whimpered.

  He clung to Mary as a frightened child clings to a doll, but to his question she could find no answer.

  29

  SPRING HAD DUSTED the larches. The cream was coming thick and yellowy in the cream-separator when a call from Benjamin made Mary drop the handle and rush for the kitchen. Amos lay stretched out on the hearthrug, mouth open and fish-eyes gaping at the rafters.

  He had had a stroke. He had just passed his fifty-fifth birthday, and had been bending to tie a bootlace. On the table there was a mug of primroses.

  Dr Galbraith, the jovial young Irishman who had taken over the practice, congratulated his patient on having the ‘strength of an ox’ and said he’d have him on his feet in no time. Then, taking Mary aside, he warned her to expect a second attack.

  Yet despite one paralysed arm, Amos recovered sufficiently to hobble round the yard, wave his stick, curse the twins and get in the way of the horses. He was very hard to handle when his thoughts harked back to Rebecca.

  ‘Well, ’ave you found her?’ he’d snap each time the postman brought a letter.

  ‘Not yet,’ Mary’d say, ‘but we’ll keep on trying.’

  She knew the Irishman’s name was Moynihan, and wrote letters to the police, to the Home Office, and to his old employers on the railway. She advertised in the Dublin newspapers. She even wrote without success to the immigration authorities in America.

  The couple had vanished.

  That autumn, she announced with an air of finality, ‘There’s nothing more we can do.’

  From then on, since neither twin went out, and even Benjamin had lost the habit of handling money, it was she who ruled The Vision; she who kept the accounts; she who decided what to plant. She was a shrewd judge of business and a shrewd judge of men, knowing when to buy and when to sell; when to placate the stock-dealers and when to send them packing.

  ‘Phew!’ a man was heard to complain after she’d struck some ferocious bargain. ‘That Mother Jones is the stingiest woman on the hill.’

  The remark was passed back to her, and it gave her great pleasure.

  To avoid any question of paying death-duties, she put the deeds of The Vision in the twins’ joint name. Her triumphant stare was enough to send Mr Arkwright scuttling down the street. She hooted with laughter at the news of the solicitor’s arrest – for murder.

  ‘Murder, Mother?’

  ‘Murder!’

  At first, Mrs Arkwright was thought to have died from nephritis and the effects of insanity. Then a rival solicitor, Mr Vavasour Hughes, asked the widower certain embarrassing questions about a client’s will. At a tea-party designed to dispel his doubts, M
r Arkwright pressed him to eat a bloater paste sandwich, from which he nearly died in the night. A fortnight later Mr Hughes received a box of chocolates ‘from an admirer’; and again he nearly died. He reported his suspicions to the police, who found that each chocolate had been syringed with arsenic. They put two and two together, and ordered the dead woman to be exhumed from Rhulen churchyard.

  Dr Galbraith professed himself shocked by the result of the forensic tests: ‘I knew she was martyr to indigestion,’ he said, ‘but I never expected this.’

  To avail himself of her capital, Mr Arkwright had laced his wife’s Benger’s Food with arsenic purchased for the persecution of dandelions. He was convicted in Hereford and hanged in Gloucester.

  ‘They’ve hanged old Arkwright,’ Lewis waved the News of the World in his father’s face.

  ‘Eh?’ Amos was now very deaf

  ‘I said, they’ve hanged old Arkwright,’ he bellowed.

  ‘An’ ’e should a-been hanged at birth,’ he said, decisively, bubbles of saliva dribbling down his chin.

  Mary watched for signs of the second stroke; but it was not a stroke that killed him.

  Olwen and Daisy were The Vision’s two heavy brood-mares, and they foaled alternate years.

  Lewis loved them dearly, saw whole worlds in their gleaming flanks, and liked to scrub them, comb them, polish their brasses, and fluff the white ‘feathering’ out around their hoofs.

  A mare came on heat around the end of May, and waited for the visit of the stallion – a magnificent animal called Spanker who made a tour of the hill-farms with his master, Merlin Evans.

  This Merlin was a wiry, tow-haired fellow with a pitted triangular face and a set of brown broken teeth. Around his neck he wore a number of ladies’ chiffon scarves – until they rotted off – and a single gold hoop through his earlobe. He astonished the twins with his tales of conquest. They had only to mention some saintly, Chapel-going woman and he would grin: ‘’Ad her in the dingle over by Pantglas,’ or ‘’Ad her standing up in the beast-house.’