On the Black Hill

by Bruce Chatwin

  On one of Sarah’s visits, she found Jim squelching up to his ankles in the ooze:

  ‘An’ ’ow’s you?’ he grunted. ‘An’ what d’yer want anyway? Why can’t yer leave us alone?’

  ‘I come to see Meg, not you!’ she snapped, and he limped off, cursing her under his breath. A week earlier, Meg had been complaining of pains in her abdomen.

  Pushing past the hens, Sarah found Meg squatting by the fireside, listlessly fanning the embers in the grate. Her face was twisted with pain, and there were sores up her arms.

  ‘You’re coming with me,’ Sarah said. ‘I’m taking you to the doctor.’

  Meg shuddered, swayed back and forth, and began to drone a repetitive dirge:

  ‘No, Sarah, I’d not go from here. Very kind of you, Sarah, but I’d never go from here. Jim and me, we been together, like. We done the work together, like. Aye, and the foddering and the feeding and lived our lives together. And the poor ducks’d starve if I’d be gone. Aye, and the chicks’d starve. An’ that poor ol’ pullet in the box there! Her was all a-dying and I took her back to life. But her’d die if I’d be gone. And the birdies in the dingle, them’d die if I dinna feed them. And the cat? You canna say what’d happen to the cat if I’d be gone …’

  Sarah tried to argue. The doctor, she said, was only three miles away, in Rhulen: ‘Don’t be daft! You can see his house from the hill. I’ll take you down to surgery and bring you straight back.’

  But Meg had slipped her fingers under her hat-brim and, covering her face with both palms, said, ‘No, Sarah, I’d never go from here.’

  A week later, she was in Hereford Hospital.

  At dawn on the Friday Sarah was woken with a reverse-charge call from the phone-box at Maesyfelin. It was Jim the Rock, from whose incoherent sputterings she gathered that Meg was sick, if not actually dying.

  The fields around Craig-y-Fedw were frozen hard: so she was able to drive her van to the gate. The house and buildings were blanketed with fog. The dogs howled and tried to burst from their shelters. Jim was in the doorway, hopping up and down like a wounded bird.

  ‘How is she?’ Sarah asked.

  ‘Bad,’ he said.

  In the front room the hens were still drowsing on their perches. Meg lay on the floor, eyes closed, amid the droppings. She was moaning quietly. They rolled her on to a plank and carried her to the van.

  Halfway down the hill, the thought of taking Meg to the doctor in such a state made Sarah feel dreadfully ashamed. So instead of driving directly to Rhulen, she took the patient home, where, with soap, hot water and a decent coat, she made her look a little more presentable. By the time they reached the surgery, Meg was delirious.

  A young doctor came out and climbed into the back of the van. ‘Peritonitis.’ He spat the word through his teeth and shouted to his secretary to call for an ambulance. He was very offensive to Sarah for not having brought her in sooner.

  Later, Meg had only the haziest recollection of her weeks in hospital. The metal beds, the medicines, the bandages, the bright lights, lifts, trolleys and trays of shining implements were things so removed from her experience that she dismissed them as the fragments of a nightmare. Nor did the doctors tell her they had taken out her womb. All she did remember was what she was told: ‘Run down! That’s as ’em says I was and that’s as I was. Run down! But them didna say the harf of it what buggered me.’

  41

  THE FIRST TRACTOR to arrive at The Vision was a Fordson Major. Its body was blue, its wheels were orange, and it had the name ‘Fordson’ written in raised orange letters down the sides of the radiator.

  Lewis loved his tractor, thought of her as a woman, and wanted to give her a woman’s name. He toyed with ‘Maudie’, then ‘Maggie’, then ‘Annie’; but none of these names suited her personality, and she ended up with no name at all.

  To begin with, she was extremely difficult to handle. She gave him a bad fright by slewing sideways into a ditch; and when he mistook her clutch for the brake-pedal, she landed him in the hedge. Yet once he had her under control, he thought of entering a ploughing competition.

  He liked nothing better than to hear her firing on all eight cylinders, purring in neutral, or growling uphill with the plough behind.

  Her engine, too, was perplexing as a woman’s anatomy! He was forever checking her plugs, fiddling with her carburettor, poking his grease gun into her nipples, and fretting about her general state of health.

  At the slightest splutter, he would reach for the maintenance manual and read aloud from the list of possible ailments: ‘Wrongly set choke-valve … mixture too rich … defective leads … dirt in the float chamber’ – while his brother pulled a face as though he were listening to obscenities.

  Again and again, Benjamin groused over the cost of running the tractor and kept saying darkly, ‘We’ll have to go back to horses.’ Having paid for a plough, a seed-drill and a link-box, there seemed no end to the number and cost of her accessories. Why did Lewis need a potato-spinner? What was the point of buying a baler? Or a muck-spreader? Where would it ever end?

  Lewis shrugged off his brother’s outbursts and left it to the accountant to explain that, far from being ruined, they were rich.

  In 1953, they had a nasty brush with the Inland Revenue. They hadn’t paid one penny of taxes since Mary’s death. And though the inspector treated them leniently, he insisted they take professional advice.

  The young man who came to audit their books had the pimply and undernourished complexion of someone living in digs: yet even he was astonished by their frugality. They had clothes to last their lifetime; and since the grocery bill, the vet, and the agricultural merchant were all paid by cheque, they hardly ever handled cash.

  ‘And what shall we put down to incidentals?’ asked the accountant.

  ‘Like money in our pockets?’ said Benjamin.

  ‘Pocket money, if you like!’

  ‘About twenty pound?’

  ‘A week?’

  ‘Oh no, no … Twenty’d see us through the year.’

  When the young man tried to explain the desirability of running at a loss, Benjamin puckered his forehead and said, ‘That can’t be right.’

  By 1957, a large taxable profit had piled up in The Vision’s farm account; and the accountant, too, had ‘filled out’. A beer-stomach bulged over the belt of his cavalry twills. A hacking-jacket, yellow socks and chukka boots completed his outfit; and he kept foul-mouthing a Mr Nasser.

  He thumped his fist on the table: ‘Either you spend £5,000 on farm machinery, or you give it as a present to the Government!’

  ‘I suppose we’d better buy another tractor,’ said Benjamin.

  Lewis pored over prospectuses and decided on an International Harvester. He cleared a stable in which to house her and chose a fine dry afternoon to drive her up from Rhulen.

  She was not the kind of tractor one used. He would scrub her tyres, flick her with a duster, and drive her along the lane for an occasional airing; but for years he kept her, idly enshrined in the stable, under padlock and key. From time to time, he would peep through a chink in the door, feasting his eyes over her scarlet paintwork like a little boy peeping into a brothel.

  The Fifties were years of spectacular air-crashes: two Comets tumbling from the sky, thirty spectators killed at the Farnborough Air Display. Benjamin had a hernia, The Vision was hitched up to mains electricity, and one by one the older generation fell ill and died. Hardly a month went by without a funeral service in Chapel and when old Mrs Bickerton died in the South of France – at the age of ninety-two she had drowned herself in her swimming-pool – there was a lovely memorial service in the parish church and Mrs Nancy the Castle gave a sit-down lunch for all the old tenants and estate workers.

  The Castle itself lay crumbling into ruins until, one August evening, a schoolboy sneaked in to shoot rats with a bow-and-arrow, dropped a lighted cigarette butt, and the place went up in flames. Then in April of 1959, Lewis had his cycling accide
nt.

  He had been riding to Maesyfelin with a bunch of wallflowers to lay on the graves. The afternoon was bitterly cold. The buckle of his overcoat worked loose; the belt caught in the front spokes – and over the handlebars he went! A plastic surgeon rebuilt his nose in Hereford Hospital and, for ever after, he was always a little deaf in one ear.

  The day of their sixtieth birthday was almost a day of mourning.

  Each time they tore a page from the calendar, they had forebodings of a miserable old age. They would turn to the wall of family photos – row on row of smiling faces, all of them dead or gone. How was it possible, they wondered, that they had come to be alone?

  Their wrangles were over. They were inseparable now as they had been before Benjamin’s childhood illness. But surely, somewhere, there was a cousin they could trust? What was the point of owning land, or tractors, if the one thing you lacked was an heir?

  They looked at the picture of the Red Indian and thought of Uncle Eddie. Perhaps he had grandsons? But they would be in Canada and would never come back. They even considered their old friend Manfred’s son, a pale-eyed lad who sometimes came to visit.

  Manfred had started up his own poultry farm, in some Nissen huts put up for Polish refugees, and despite his thick guttural accent, he was now ‘more English than the English’. He had changed his name by deed poll from Kluge to Clegg. He wore green tweed suits, rarely missed a point-to-point, and was Chairman of the local Conservative Association.

  Proudly, he drove the twins to see his establishment; but the wire cages, the smell of chicken-shit and fish-meal, and the birds’ raw, featherless necks so nauseated Benjamin that he preferred not to go there again.

  In December 1965, the calendar showed a picture of the Norfolk Broads under ice. Then on the 11th – a date the twins would never forget – a rusty Ford van drove into the yard, and a woman in gumboots got out and introduced herself as a Mrs Redpath.

  42

  SHE HAD AUBURN hair going grey, and hazel eyes, and delicate rose-pink cheeks unusual in a woman of her age. For at least a minute she stood beside the garden gate, nervously fumbling with the latch. Then she said she had something of importance to discuss.

  ‘Come on in now!’ Lewis beckoned. ‘And you’ll have a cup of tea.’

  She apologized for the mud on her boots.

  ‘No harm in a bit of mud,’ he said pleasantly.

  She said, ‘No bread-and-butter, thank you!’ but accepted a slice of fruitcake, cutting it into neat little strips and placing each one, daintily, on the tip of her tongue. Now and then, she glanced round the room, and wondered out loud how the twins found time to dust ‘all those curios’. She spoke of her husband, who worked for the Water Board. She spoke of the clement weather and the cost of Christmas shopping. ‘Yes,’ she replied to Benjamin, ‘I could manage another cup.’ She took a further four lumps of sugar and began to tell her story:

  All her life, she had believed that her mother was the widow of a carpenter, who had to take in lodgers and had made her childhood a misery. Then last June, as the old woman lay dying, she had learned she was illegitimate, a foundling. Her real mother, a girl from a farm on the Black Hill, had left her to board in 1924 and gone overseas with an Irishman.

  ‘Rebecca’s baby,’ murmured Lewis, and his teaspoon tinkled on the saucer.

  ‘Aye,’ breathed Mrs Redpath, summoning an emotional sigh. ‘My mother was Rebecca Jones.’

  She had checked her birth-certificate, checked the parish register – and here she was, their long-lost niece!

  Lewis blinked at the handsome workaday woman before him, and saw, in her every gesture, a resemblance to his mother. Benjamin kept quiet. In the harsh shadow cast by the naked light bulb, he had noticed her unamiable mouth.

  ‘Just you wait till you see my little Kevin!’ She reached for a knife and cut herself another slice of cake. ‘He’s the spitting image of you both.’

  She wanted to bring Kevin to The Vision the very next day, but Benjamin was none too keen: ‘No. No. We’ll come up and see him some time.’

  All through the following week the twins were once again at loggerheads.

  Lewis believed that Kevin Redpath had been sent as a gift from Providence. Benjamin suspected – even if the story were true, even if he was their great-nephew – that Mrs Redpath was bent on their money, and no good would come of it.

  On the 17th, a Christmas card – of Santa Claus and a reindeer-sleigh – came ‘With Seasons Greetings from Mr and Mrs Redpath, and Kevin!!’ Tea was again on the table when she reappeared and asked if she could drive them, that very evening, to the nativity play at Llanfechan, where her son was playing Father Joseph himself.

  ‘Aye, I’d come with you,’ said Lewis, on impulse. And taking a kettle off the hob, he nodded to his brother and went upstairs to shave and dress. Left alone in the kitchen, Benjamin felt himself covered with embarrassment. Then he, too, followed upstairs to the bedroom.

  It was dark when they came to leave. The sky was clear and the stars revolved like little wheels of fire. A hoar-frost blanketed the hedgerows and floury shapes rose up in the glare of the headlights. The van skidded on a bend, but Mrs Redpath was a careful driver. Benjamin sat slumped in the back, on a sack stuffed with straw, gritting his teeth until she drew up outside the Chapel Hall. She hurried off to make sure Kevin was dressed.

  Inside, it was freezing. A pair of paraffin stoves did nothing to heat the benches at the back. A draught whined in under the door, and the floorboards reeked of disinfectant. The audience sat muffled in scarves and overcoats. The preacher, a missionary returned from Africa, shook hands with each member of his flock.

  Drawn across the stage was a curtain consisting of three grey ex-Army blankets, peppered with moth-holes.

  Mrs Redpath rejoined her uncles. The lights were switched off, except for the light onstage. From behind the curtain they heard the whispering of children.

  The schoolteacher slipped through the curtain and sat down at the piano-stool. Her knitted hat was the same puce pink as the azalea on the piano; and as her fingers hammered the keyboard, the hat bobbed up and down, and the petals of the azalea quivered.

  ‘Carol Number One,’ she announced. ‘“O Little Town of Bethlehem” – which will be sung by the children only.’

  After the opening bars, the sound of faltering trebles drifted over the curtain; and through the moth-holes, the twins saw flashes of sparkling silver, which were the tinsel haloes of the angels.

  The carol ended; and a blonde girl came out front, shivering in a white nightie. In her diadem there was a silver-paper star.

  ‘I am the star of Bethlehem …’ Her teeth chattered. ‘’Tis ten thousand years since God put a great star in the sky. I am that star …’

  She finished the prologue. Then the curtain jerked back with the noise of squeaky pulleys to reveal the Virgin Mary, in blue, on a red rubber kneeler, scrubbing the floor of her house in Nazareth. The Angel Gabriel stood beside her.

  ‘I am the Angel Gabriel,’ he said in a suffocated voice. ‘And I have come to tell you that you are going to have a baby.’

  ‘Oh!’ said the Virgin Mary, blushing crimson. ‘Thank you very much, sir!’ But the Angel fluffed the next line, and Mary fluffed the one after, and they both stood helplessly in the middle of the stage.

  The teacher tried to prompt them. Then, seeing that no amount of prompting could rescue the scene, she called out, ‘Curtain!’ and asked all present to sing ‘Once in Royal David’s City’.

  Everyone knew the words without having to open their hymnals. And when the curtain drew back again, everyone guffawed at the two-piece donkey that kicked and bucked and neighed and nodded his papier-mâché’ head. Two scene-shifters carried in a bale of straw, and a manger for feeding calves.

  ‘That’s my Kevin!’ whispered Mrs Redpath, nudging Benjamin in the ribs.

  A little boy had come onstage in a green tartan dressing-gown. Wound round his head was an orange towel. He had a
black beard gummed to his chin.

  The twins sat up and craned their necks; but instead of facing the audience, Father Joseph shied away and spoke his lines to the backdrop: ‘Can’t you find us a room, sir! My wife’s going to have a baby at any minute.’

  ‘I ain’t got a room in the place,’ replied Reuben the innkeeper. ‘The whole town’s chock-a-block with folks as come to pay their taxes. Blame the Roman Government, not me!

  ‘I got this stable, though,’ he went on, pointing to the manger. ‘You can sleep in there if you want to.’

  ‘Oh, thanks very much, sir!’ said the Virgin, brightly. ‘It’ll do very nicely for humble folks like us.’

  She started rearranging the straw. Joseph still stood facing the backdrop. He raised his right arm stiffly to the sky.

  ‘Mary!’ he shouted, suddenly plucking up courage. ‘I can see something up there! Looks like a cross to me!’

  ‘A cross? Ugh! Don’t mention that word. It reminds me of Caesar Augustus!’

  Through the double thickness of their corduroys, Lewis could feel his brother’s kneecap, shaking: for Father Joseph had spun round, and was smiling in their direction.

  ‘Yes,’ said the Virgin Mary towards the end of the final scene. ‘I think it’s the loveliest baby I ever set eyes on.’

  As for the Jones twins, they, too, were in Bethlehem. But it was not the plastic doll that they saw. Nor the innkeeper, nor the shepherds. Nor the papier-mâché donkey, nor the living sheep that nibbled at the straw. Nor Melchior with his box of chocolates. Nor Kaspar with his bottle of shampoo. Nor Black Balthazar with his crown of red cellophane and a ginger jar. Nor the Cherubim and Seraphim, nor Gabriel, nor the Virgin Mary herself. All they saw was an oval face with grave eyes and a fringe of black hair beneath a wash-towel turban. And – when the choir of angels started singing, ‘We will rock you, rock you, ro-ock you …’ they rocked their heads in time and tears dripped on to their watch-chains.

  After the performance, the minister took some snapshots with a flash. The twins waited outside the Chapel where the mothers were changing their children.