A Room Made of Leaves

by Kate Grenville

  I was hot with a sudden shame for being wilful, as well as for having no looks and no portion, ashamed that no one would want me. Ashamed for my mother too, in speaking that way of her daughter. I could smell the dust in the curtains and feel the cold draft from the crack where the skirting did not quite meet the floor. That smell and the feel of a narrow draft still fill me with the same terrible knowledge that came to me, hearing her words: I was not an orphan, but might as well be, for all I had a parent to look out for me.

  FLOCKING AND FOLLOWING

  The farm was entailed and, with Father gone, my second cousin John Veale got it. He did not hustle us out, exactly, but he sent us a cart full of empty chests and boxes, all the rope we’d need to bind them with, and a few bags of sawdust for the crockery.

  We were made welcome at Grandfather’s place—Mother’s childhood home—but he was an old man set in his ways. Our crockery was never fished out of the sawdust, the chests were committed to the barn without being opened, only a box of clothes for each of us, so it was Grandfather’s sheets we slept in and Grandfather’s dishes we ate off. Mother had a small dower, the one I later had, enough that she did not have to beg Grandfather for a pair of boots for me or a new bonnet for herself. But it was pin money. And from Grandfather originally, so that too was from his charitable hand.

  I yearned for Lodgeworthy. Soon after we went to Grandfather’s, Mother and I passed it and I ran to the gate, my hand on the latch I knew so well. Mother had to seize me by the wrist and pull me away. Had to explain that if I raised that latch and walked in as I had done a thousand times before, I would be something called a trespasser. That was like being a thief. The only way I could enter the place now was to be invited. I could have no rights there, only a guest’s temporary privilege.

  I stood at the gate, with Mother’s hand tight around my wrist, shouting. I remember, wilful girl that I was, wrenching away from Mother, with her calling Elizabeth! Elizabeth! after me, and running up the front path and lifting my hand to knock at the door. But I had never approached that door as a blank indifferent panel of wood, never had to knock to make it open, and the strangeness of the look of it now, and the picture of John Veale’s pale unfriendly wife opening it, made me draw back my hand.

  Mother was waiting outside the gate. She would not look at me. We went on down the lane in silence, though not before I pulled the gate closed so hard that I heard something crack.

  Yes, I was a difficult child, I see that now. Not that I meant to be difficult, but I had a sense of my own will. Did I not have the right to feel what I felt, be who I was?

  Like all the households about us, ours was one of comfort but thrift. Grandfather believed in using God’s great lantern, which cost nothing. Eating God’s bounty: eggs from our own hens, cabbage from our own garden, a shave or two of the pig killed at Christmas.

  Grandfather was a man perfectly weaned from the things of this world, conducted his life in the radiance of God’s glory. There was a lot of church-going, a lot of talk of Providence, endless heartfelt thanks for what we were about to eat. Church twice on Sundays, the Bible read every evening, prayers around the table before bed.

  Young though I was, I knew not to ask the question to which I knew there could be no answer: If God is good, why is Father dead? It was the first falsehood, to bow my head with everyone else, to say the Amen loud as if I meant it. I watched Mother from under my lashes to see whether she was being false too, but I never caught her out.

  But Grandfather was a kindly soul and loved me. Let me wander over the fields and make shelters with branches and leaves and creep into them. Did not stop me when I went out in the rain and spent hours diverting and damming the runnel of water down the slope behind the house.

  – A clean child is not a happy child, he said, when Mother scolded.

  Grandfather had a reasonable spread of acres and grew a little of everything: barley, turnips, hay. But what he loved was the sheep. He walked among them, his boots authoritative, and they scattered, running all earnest and stiff-legged and then, when they had got a safe distance away, staring back at him over their shoulders.

  – God has constituted them to flock and follow, Grandfather told me. They are creatures of fellowship. While we poor sinners believe we can do it all alone.

  Mother thought sheep were silly creatures, but they were not, only behaved in ways unlike us. I came to love them, understood their ways, cared for them. They were amenable creatures when you worked with their natures and not against them, and never quite stupid. Grandfather showed me how you stayed behind them, taking your time. How, when they turned to stare at you, you stared them out. How you waited till they were facing the way you wanted them to go, then you held out the crook to make yourself bigger than you were.

  How could you not warm to a creature that, when you came near her lamb, ran forward and stood stamping her feet? Poor thing, she had no other power to defend her young. I laughed in admiration at her courage.

  – God tempers the wind to the shorn lamb, Grandfather said, watching the lamb stumble, fall, get up again. Remember that, Lisbet, when life hurls its blasts at you.

  Grandfather taught me all I would have needed to become the wife of a farmer. How to churn butter, how to fix a sick chook. How to count sheep, not as straightforward as you might think.

  – You can never trust yourself, counting a flock, he said in his calm instructional way. There’s something about sheep makes the counting miss. When it comes to counting a flock, always make a knot. Or a notch. Keep it in twenties. That’s what you call keeping a score, see.

  He had a bit of twine that he got out of his pocket to show me, undoing the knots from the last count, and handed it to me.

  – Now you’ll be right, he said, and I heard the smile in his voice, the tenderness.

  Grandfather was what was called an improving farmer, which as a child I took to mean his reproving ways with a wilful child, and his rock-like sense of what was right and what was wrong, and how all that was right lay in the hands of Our Lord. Now I know that, in spite of his age, he was one of the new type of farmer, and that the word meant an attention to the breeding of stock. There was high excitement—even guarded Grandfather was excited—when he bought a ram from a Mr Bakewell. Until I saw it I thought it might be a sheep made of cake, or perhaps a sheep pie, something good to eat in any case, and was disappointed that it turned out to be wool and horn like any other sheep. It arrived on a cart with a man called Hale, who took it by the halter and led it like a prince through our gate while I petted the dog he had brought with him.

  – Take care there, lass, Mr Hale called out. If you stand still he’ll want to piss on your leg.

  I thought this a fine bit of humour, but Grandfather was stern, I could see he had judged Mr Hale as a common fellow.

  Grandfather was holding the ram’s head up by the horns and Mr Hale, all hat from my point of view, was bending over the creature, parting its fleece with big rough hands to show, under the grey matted surface, the creamy wool.

  – How’d you like a dozen like this fellow, he said, to get his end in among your pretty ladies?

  – Mind, Grandfather said. Mind your language, Mr Hale, if you please, do you not see the young lady here?

  Which was a surprise on two counts: that whatever it was Mr Hale had meant by those words, they must carry a weight of sin, and that a girl of nine was a young lady who had to be shielded from whatever those words meant.

  Mr Hale looked over at me, perhaps as surprised as I was that the ragamuffin in her mud-rimmed skirt was a young lady. Then he and Grandfather were murmuring on about crimp and grease while I swung on the gate, back and forth, back and forth, scraping the mud off my boots on the bottom beam till there was a neat row of lumps, though there was no point to it, as my boots would be heavy with mud again as soon as I got down. The watery spring sun, the bleating of lambs from the field, and Grandfather murmuring on and on with Mr Hale, the ram with its unblinking eye waiting
to be let go: that memory is as clear after seventy years as if it were yesterday.

  With Mr Hale gone, Grandfather and I stood among the flock, the sheep all rustling and bleating around us while he explained why he had got the ram, spent fifteen guineas on it, which to my ear sounded like a vast sum, and the ram looked to my eye much like any other sheep. But this ram had a wonderful heft on him, Grandfather said, and a grand fleece, and was a fine lusty creature. When he put this ram over the ewes, the lambs they would drop would carry that heftiness, that grand fleece and that lustiness in their own blood. Then it was a matter of doing something called in-and-in, which meant choosing the best lambs every spring and joining them back to the same lusty ram and to each other, making sure to get a new ram now and then to stop the blood getting too thin.

  Once I understood, I was entranced. It was like trying to look into the future, to see what would happen ten years later if you went one way, or whether it would turn out to have been better to have gone the other.

  Which, as I write this now, seems to me not so different from the life of humans, as well as fine lusty sheep.

  NOT TO BE TOO CLEVER

  Bridie, daughter of the Reverend Kingdon, had been my friend from our earliest years. Lodgeworthy was at the bottom of the hill beside the river and the vicarage was at the top of that same hill, beside the church. She and I spent most days together and, after Mother and I went to Grandfather’s, I stayed with her many nights too, because from the vicarage it was a fair step back to Grandfather’s house. It was simpler for me to stay with the Kingdons for a few nights on the trot, rather than go back and forth. Bridie and I shared the high bed in her room, Mrs Kingdon came to tuck us in and blow out the lamp, and it was as good as having a sister.

  Mr Kingdon was an Oxford man for whom learning was as important as food and drink. His sons were all sent away to school and although he did not consider school essential for a girl, he devoted much care to teaching Bridie, and he found that she paid more attention to her lessons when she had a companion. I was a quick study, quicker than Bridie if the truth be told, and he took pleasure in my quickness. Reading, writing, elementary arithmetic, the kings and queens of England, the principal rivers of the world in alphabetical order. Latin, but only enough to learn the Kingdon motto under the Kingdon coat of arms: Regis donum gratum bonum.

  Mr Kingdon was pleased with my progress, but when he took me aside into his study one afternoon, and showed me a list of words and asked me to read them one by one, I felt I should go carefully. How did I know? What did I know?

  I could not have told you then, cannot tell you now, only that I decided not to display quite how well I could read. The first words he showed me were easy, easy, easy. Bridie would read those words as well as I did. Then they became harder. I read on, but more slowly. From Mr Kingdon I felt some complicated thing: curiosity, pleasure, satisfaction, but something else too. So that when I got to the word colonel, a strange word now that I write it here, I baulked.

  – I cannot read it, I said, although I knew the word as perfectly as the easy ones before it.

  I felt a kind of relaxation in Mr Kingdon, as if he were relieved. I was disappointed, he should not have accepted so easily. I nearly said, Oh, now I see it is colonel! But even as a child I already knew, without anyone having told me, that it would be best for me not to be too clever.

  BUYING A RAM

  Then John Leach came to buy a ram from Grandfather and, if the rain had not started to pelt, he’d have bought the ram and gone. But it did, so Grandfather brought him into the house to eat dinner with us and wait out the storm. Turned out, John Leach knew Mother’s cousin over in Taunton, had met Father once at Holsworthy, and even a child of eleven could see Mother perk up at his attention to her.

  That child did not warm to him, did not like the way he set out to charm her mother, was sullen and sulky at his cajolings, his jocular enquiries after her pup and her needlework, and what did it matter—this big red-faced person was come to buy a ram, and would put it in his cart and go off—that a girl behaved scarcely this side of discourtesy?

  Until John Leach began to visit without wanting to buy a ram.

  So John Leach, widower, wanting I suppose someone to keep house and be in the bed with him, got his eye on Grace Veale, widow. I remember no discussion about my place in the arrangement, perhaps mercifully no sugared explanation for the fact that I was not invited to be part of the new marriage.

  Mother told me that she and Mr Leach would go to his place at Stoke Climsland, but I would stay on with Grandfather.

  – What a wonderful opening for you, pet, she cried. What a lucky girl you are! To keep on with your lessons!

  I knew this was no more than a pretext for leaving me behind. Mr Leach and I were like two dogs bristling. I wanted to keep my mother to myself, of course. And Mr Leach had no desire to share his life with a girl too big for her boots from all the learning the parson was giving her, a girl he considered indulged and indolent, with too many vicarage airs and graces, who would not take kindly to being told to get out at dawn and milk the cows.

  It was true, I had no wish to live with Mr Leach and have him watch every mouthful of his food as I ate, have him tell my mother that I needed to get my nose out of that book and do a hand’s turn. But a great emptiness opened up in me when I realised my mother had made a choice, and the choice did not include me. That wilful girl was not wanted.

  I held a bouquet at the wedding and stood alongside Grandfather and the other guests, all of us throwing rice at my mother. A handful struck her on the cheek—from my own hand, as it happened—and she flinched and for a moment looked at me square-on, as I seldom remember her doing. I knew then what I had always guessed: my mother did not much like me. She might believe she loved me, because what mother did not love her daughter? But there it was in that unguarded look: she did not like me.

  And that afternoon John Leach and Grace Leach rattled off in his gig, a spoke split on one wheel, I noticed. I remember it now, that split stave, and the way I was thinking hard about it as I smiled and waved. It was so as not to be too aware that I was bidding farewell to my mother. Stoke Climsland was not terribly far, not as far as Bath or Plymouth, but from that day on she might as well have been at the end of the earth.

  Soon she was mother to another daughter besides myself. Isabella Leach. Isabella was the final bit of dovetailing, wedging the new shape into place once and for all.

  But I had Grandfather, who loved me, and stood smiling as I tackled my first sheep with the shears, clipping away as he had shown me, until the creature was in two separate parts: bald bony shrunken animal in one place, a heap of fleece in another.

  FOLDED UP SMALL

  In some way, without it exactly being announced, it came about that I was to live at the Kingdons’.

  – Your grandfather is old, Mr Kingdon said.

  It was the nearest anyone came to explaining. But Grandfather has always been old, I wanted to say, but one did not answer back to Mr Kingdon, his holy face in stern iron folds.

  – We welcome you, Elizabeth, Mrs Kingdon said. We are glad to have you as family with us.

  At the Kingdons’ it was not done to walk about in the mud and shit of the farmyard in your old pinny, learning how to get hold of a ram without it butting you. Living there was different from visiting. A young lady of the vicarage did not get her hands dirty, but looked on while others dirtied theirs. Her life was not the sheep and the chooks, but drawn-thread work, French seams, run and fell.

  Things shifted, too, between myself and Bridie. Being Bridie’s almost-sister at the vicarage was my life now, and I had better make sure that she and I did not fall out, because what would happen then to a girl without looks, without money, and as good as without a family? Where would a girl go who had been abandoned, as it felt, first by her father, then by her mother, and at last by her grandfather?

  I had to be careful, and I became timid of a mis-step. In fact my new situation se
emed nothing but the possibility of mis-steps. I put a guard on my tongue, not to speak out boldly with something that might make them turn to me with the thought, oh, perhaps she will not do after all.

  Wariness became a habit, and brought with it a new irresoluteness. The brave girl Grandfather had smiled on cowered from thunder now, and was thrown into confusion by unimportant decisions. I became someone not totally removed from herself, but not quite herself either. Someone more obliging, more agreeable. Someone who had folded herself up small and put herself carefully away, where no one could see her.

  GOD’S ARRANGEMENTS

  I was twelve when I moved to the Kingdons’, Bridie a few months older. Mrs Kingdon took us both aside and told us that we would soon be experiencing what she called our time of the month. Her embarrassment made her sound cross as she tried to find a better word than blood. Told us how to manage the rags.

  It silenced us, cheeky girls that we were. Not to be believed, that stuff would come out—blood!—from between our legs, and have to be staunched under our skirts with these cloths, which then must be smuggled out to where Mary would take them, without John or Amos seeing, and wash them, and return them to our chest of drawers ready for the next month.

  – Every month? Bridie said, her voice a squeak of horror. Every single month?

  – Yes, dear, Mrs Kingdon said. If the month passes without it, you are with child.

  She sighed.