Cut and Come Again (3 page)

‘Nassingham?' he said at once. ‘You come through Nassingham?'

‘Yes.'

‘That's where I were married,' he said. ‘That's where she comes from.'

Gradually, after that, he talked a little more, but still repetitively, as though nervous of himself or me.

‘What's it like now, Nassingham? What's it like? Changed, I expect. I ain't been down there for ten year. I reckon it's bigger?'

Then he would stop talking of the town, and talk of the weather. At the spring or by the cattle-tub, after he had set the buckets down, we always stood for a moment and looked at the cloudless sky, a dark tawny yellowish-blue at the horizon edge. Then as we made more journeys it seemed to grow hotter and more oppressive. I could feel the sweat running in warm trickles down my back. And finally Thompson said:

‘Might be some thunder about. God, we ain't had a drop for three weeks, not for three weeks.'

It was after eight o'clock before we made the last journey and the water-tub was full. I was hungry, and glad when Thompson said:

‘She say anything about your supper?'

‘Yes. We arranged it,' I said. But I knew that whatever supper I had he would have to get. And I went on: ‘I'll have mine when you have yours. That's all right.'

‘I'm going to have mine now. You sit and rest. I'll call you.'

Half an hour later we sat together in the kitchen and ate fried eggs and thick fat bacon and drank big cups of strong tea. Thompson hardly spoke and I was relieved when it was over and we went outside again.

‘I got to shut the chicken up,' he said.

After we had shut the chicken house we sat outside the front door. Thompson on a sawing-horse, I squatting on the doorstep. With the falling dusk odd owls were beginning to cry across the silent fields, the only sound in the hot air. There was no wind: the only trees, the old damson trees beyond the potatoes, drooped their scorched leaves, half-dead, in a stillness that was almost ominous. The world seemed in suspense. It seemed as if the thunder must come up with the darkness.

We sat there for a long time, keeping up a kind of vigil while the twilight thickened and deepened, our eyes fixed alternately on the sky and the darkening fields.

‘It ain't been so bad as this since I bin here,' Thompson said. ‘Never had to carry water afore. They reckon it were as bad nineteen-'leven, but that were a year afore I come. But I never remember it as bad.'

Once I asked him how large the farm was, and he said:

‘Near enough eighty acres. Pretty near all grass. It gits a-top on me. I only got a man and a boy.'

‘You've got your daughters,' I said.

That began it. It was as though the remark had touched a hidden spring in him. He almost turned on me:

‘What good d'ye think they are? Eh? What good d'ye think they are?'

I couldn't answer. He answered for me.

‘Nothing! Not a damn thing.
You
see how it is, don't you? Anybody can see how it is! You can see, can't you?'

‘Yes.'

‘You know why she put you up?'

‘No.'

‘That's her idea – wants to make a damn boardinghouse of the place. Tennis court. Tables in th' orchard. She was a servant in a boarding-house before she married me – down in Nassingham. That's how I met her.'

‘Would it pay?' I said.

‘Eh? Would it what?' Then the echo of the word seemed to reach him. ‘Pay? That's all she thinks about. Money. Pay. Money to throw about. And she's bringing the gals up like it too – money, tearing about, men, drink, everything. They used to be nice kids. Now look at 'em.'

He would go on like this for several minutes, talking in his soft husky voice, almost to himself, pouring out to me all the grievances pent up in him by time and solitude. And then suddenly he would break off, as though too exhausted and disgusted to go on, or as though he were uncertain of my confidence.
After the nervous sound of his voice the silence seemed profounder than ever, the air more oppressive and hushed. Every moment it seemed that the thunder must come, but the air never stirred and the silence was never broken except by Thompson's voice going on in bitter complaint again.

‘They gone off somewhere to-night. Dancing. A booze-up somewhere. I shan't see them gals till four o'clock to-morrow afternoon. They'll stop a-bed all day. What d'ye think of that? That's a nice damn thing, ain't it?'

‘Why don't you do something?' I said.

He was silent. I thought for a moment that perhaps he hadn't heard me, and I repeated the words. But he still kept silent. He sat staring at the ground, in thought, dejected.

And finally when he did speak he said:

‘What could I do?'

I didn't know what to say to him. What could he do?

‘I tried all ways,' he said. ‘She never lets me speak to 'em. I don't have to say half a word afore she's down on me. As if they never belonged to me.'

So, gradually, from what he said and from what he didn't say, I began to see that somewhere there was a fundamental weakness in him: a lack of aggression, of spirit or vindictiveness, something hard to define, a little crack of gentleness running right across his nature. All his anger and bitterness was shadowy: shadowed over by his affection for the two girls. Underneath he was heart-broken. Whenever he spoke of the daughters that unconscious tenderness for them asserted itself, softening his voice and his rage.

‘I told her she wanted to make street women on 'em,' he said, ‘tarts, and she's done it. That's what
she's done. And she's as bad. Worse. I don't know what I shall do. But one o' these days I shall do summat. I shall do summat. I waited long enough.' He was trembling.

We sat up till nearly midnight. There was no sign of rain. Long after I was in bed I was woken up by the sound of voices under the window.

‘Don't be silly. You can't come up.' It was the younger daughter's voice. ‘You can't.'

‘Why not?'

‘He's there. I told you. A boarder.'

‘Boarder. Huh. Can't I come in at all? Rita! Rita!'

Then silence; and then softly again, ‘Rita, Rita!' until the words changed to mere whispers and the whispers at last to silence.

In the morning it was six o'clock by the kitchen clock when I came downstairs. The kitchen door was open, but the place seemed deserted. I waited about in the kitchen for a time, but no one came, and finally I went into the front room, wondering if breakfast had been laid there for me.

There was no breakfast. Gramophone records lay strewn about the table and the room was sour. And suddenly I saw the girl, Rita, lying asleep, still in the red dress, on the sofa under the window.

I went out again and into the kitchen, and then I noticed a teapot standing on the dresser and by it a cup with dregs in it. The pot was warm, and I found myself a cup and poured out the tea and then drank it standing up, staring out of the window at the sunshine on the yard outside. The air was as hot as ever and beyond the yard the scorched fields stretched out parched and dewless, the sky beyond them as clear as glass.

Finally, when I had finished the tea I put eight-and-six on the table and went outside. The Sunday morning world seemed empty except for Thompson's hens pecking round a stack of early wheat. I waited about for a time but nothing happened, and at last I began to walk away.

Then, half-way down the cart-track, I saw Thompson. He was standing in the field across which we had journeyed with the water. He was standing on the brow of the field, quite still, staring away from me, towards the sun. I called him. ‘Hi! Mister Thompson.' Nothing happened. He did not move. Then I called again. ‘Thompson. Hi! Mister Thompson.' But still nothing happened. Then I realised that he could not hear me, and at last I began to walk on, slowly, turning at intervals and watching him in case he should turn too.

And when, far down the road, I turned and looked back, he was still standing there. He stood with a slight droop of the shoulders, like someone partly in dejection and partly in hope, his eyes fixed on the distance, as though he were waiting for something: for the chance of a cloud, for rain, for something altogether beyond his control and perhaps beyond his understanding.

The man cutting the hedge between the roadside and the field of winter wheat was quite young and slight. But he was wearing gloves: large hedger's gloves, having deep gauntlets scarred and ripped by thorns of bramble and haw, and for some reason they gave him an appearance of greater age and muscularity. The hedge, old and wild, branched high up with great trunks of ash and hawthorn dwarfed and thickened and misshapen by long confinement with each other. And the young man was laying it: half-splitting the boughs at the foot and bending them prostrate and staking them into a new order. He worked slowly, but with concentration, rather fiercely, and almost at times with anger. In the mild February air the sweat broke out on his fair skin abundantly, renewing itself as soon as he had wiped it away. He would take off his right glove repeatedly in order to wipe his face with his hand; and once he dropped it and it lay on the ground like a flat dry pancake of cow-dung. He picked it up, swore, and flapped it across his knee with exclamations of anger that were really against himself.

Then, at intervals, he stood still and looked down the road. It was almost noon, the sun was quite high, and the road, seen across the new prostrate hedge and in the quiet sunshine, would surprise him. It gave him a fresh sense of space; it was part of a new world, vanishing to a new horizon.

And he seemed to be angry even with that. He stared always as though expecting to see someone, but the road remained empty. And he would vent his anger at that emptiness on the hedge, slashing the
hawthorn trunks almost clean through, hooking out the brambles viciously with the point of the bill, his quick sweat filling the wrinkles that ran across his forehead like ploughed furrows.

Then, at last, as he paused to wipe off the sweat and look down the road again, he saw someone coming. It was a young woman. He had no sooner sighted her than he was slashing the hedge again, with great deliberate blows of concentration, in an energetic pantomime of indifference.

In another moment or two the girl was quite near. He behaved as though he did not see her, as though he did not want to see her. But every now and then, furtively, with a kind of cross-glance, he would watch her. And each time she was walking as though he did not exist, looking at the wide winter fields of bare earth and corn stretching away in the sunshine.

Then he was angry again at her display of indifference. And automatically he increased his own. So that as she came nearer he kept up a pretence that she was going farther away; and she in turn walked as though she wanted to make the pretence a reality.

But suddenly he was aware of her standing there, close to him, in the grass, beyond the barricade of bushes he had thrown down. She was younger even than he was; and her gloves of thin creamy cotton, in contrast to his own, made her look still younger. She was very dark, her black hair only half-covered by her red woollen hat, her lips very small and tight, so that she seemed to be for ever biting them.

He looked up quickly, saw the basket she was carrying, and then looked away again. For a moment he did not know what to do with this pose of preoccupied indifference. He felt a fool. And then suddenly he dropped it. He muttered to her:

‘Thought it looked like you.'

She did not speak. She was staring at the bushes. They formed a barricade so that she could not pass.

‘I'll move 'em,' he said.

‘You needn't bother yourself!'

She was already walking along the grass again, towards the gate into the field. He threw down the bill-hook, furious. Then he picked it up again and stood helpless against his sudden anger. He heard the gate click, and then the girl's feet in the dry hedge-grass. Slowly he took off his gloves, his anger evaporating, the sense of foolish embarrassment coming back again.

Then, for the first time, as the girl halted and set the basket on the ground, he looked full at her, but sullenly.

‘What's the matter?' he said.

‘Nothing.'

The world was like a bubble: very light and airy and careless. He broke it abruptly, almost savagely.

‘I wonder you come at all.'

‘I wonder.'

The sudden retaliation, quicker even than his own, silenced him. He picked up the basket, lifted the napkin, looked in, and then stared at the girl again.

‘Had yourn?'

‘No.'

‘Better stop.'

‘I don't want none.'

As he sat down, under the hedge that was still uncut, with the basket on his knees, she was looking across the wheat-field as though fascinated by some object afar off.

‘Stand up there like somebody half-sharp,' he muttered.

‘I can go!' she flashed.

He seemed not to hear.

‘You don't want me!' she said.

‘Who said so? Who said so?'

‘Well …'

‘I never said so. When did I say so? When did I say it?'

He waited for an answer; and when she said nothing it was almost a triumph for him; as though his words were irrefutable.

‘You don't want
me,'
he said. ‘That's what it is. That's the drift on it.'

Once again she said nothing. But now her face had lost its look of mock preoccupation, and was in pain, filled with thoughts and miseries too complex for her to express. When she did not answer again he took out the knife from the basket, and then the food: the bread and cheese and onion and meat.

He sat for a moment waiting, as though for her. Then he began to eat, sullenly, staring at the food, not really tasting it. He tried to think of something to say. Then while he was still thinking she came and sat down. And they sat for a moment or two in silence, waiting for each other to speak, but as though at peace with one another, in the warm half-spring, half-winter sunshine under the shelter of the great hedge.