On The Black Hill (Vintage Classics) (13 page)

She poked her arthritic fingers into her basket of eggs, pulled out a crumpled card, and passed it to Mary.

It was one of the Standard Field Service Postcards that front-line soldiers were allowed to send home after a battle.

Mary frowned as she tried to puzzle it out, and then relaxed into a smile.

‘But he’s not dead, Aggie. He’s fine. Look! That’s what the cross means. It says, “I’m quite well.”’

A spasm shook the old woman’s face. Glowering with disbelief, she grabbed the card. But when she saw Mary’s open arms, and the tears in her eyes, she dropped her basket, and the two women flung their arms round each other’s necks, and kissed.

‘Now look what you’ve done,’ Mary said, pointing to the egg-yolks smeared over the shiny wet cobbles.

‘Eggs!’ said Mrs Watkins, disdainfully.

‘And look!’ said Mary, recovering the card. ‘It’s got an address for parcels. Let’s send him a cake!’

That afternoon, she baked a big fruitcake, full of raisins and nuts and glacé cherries. She wrote the name ‘JIM THE ROCK’ in blanched almonds on the crust, and left it on the table for Amos to see.

He shrugged and said, ‘I’d like a cake like that.’ A day or so later, he passed Tom Watkins in the lane. They nodded – and a truce was assumed to exist.

But the news from the Great War was worse than ever.

In cottage kitchens, mothers sat helplessly waiting for the postman’s knock. When the letter came from the King, a black-bordered card would appear in one of the windows. In a cottage along the lane to Rhulen, Mary saw two cards fixed in front of the net curtains. After Passchendaele, a third card joined them.

‘I can’t bear it,’ she choked, clutching Amos by the sleeve as they drove by. ‘Not all three of them!’ The twins would be eighteen in August, and liable to serve. All winter, she had the
same
recurring dream – of Benjamin standing under an apple-tree, with a red hole through his forehead, and a reproachful smile.

On the 21st of February – a date Mary shuddered to remember – Mr Arkwright, the Rhulen solicitor, drove up to The Vision in his motor. He was one of the five members of the local Military Service Tribunal. A dapper little man with arctic eyes and sandy waxed moustachios, he wore a grey Homburg and a grey serge topcoat; and on the passenger seat sat his red setter bitch.

He began by demanding why, in the name of God, the twins hadn’t registered for their National Identity Cards. Did they, or did they not, realize they had broken the law? Then, taking great care not to muddy his spats or shoes, he jotted down particulars of the land, the numbers of stock, and the buildings, and wound up by pronouncing, with the solemnity of a judge passing sentence, that The Vision was too small a farm to warrant exemption for more than one son.

‘Of course,’ he added, ‘none of us likes taking lads off the land. Food shortages and all that! But the law’s the law!’

‘Them be twins,’ stammered Amos.

‘I know they’re twins. My dear good man, we can’t start making exceptions …’

‘Them’ll die apart …’

‘If you please! Healthy boys like them! Never heard such nonsense! … Maudie! … Maudie!’ The red setter was barking at a rabbit-hole in the hedge. She lolloped back to her master, and sat down again in the passenger seat. Mr Arkwright revved the engine and released the handbrake. The tyres cracked the ice-puddles as the car slewed off down the yard.

‘Tinpot tyrant!’ Amos raised his fist, standing alone in a cloud of blue exhaust.

NEXT MARKET DAY
, Amos approached the bailiff of a big farm near Rhydspence, who was said to be short of hands. The man agreed to take on Lewis as a ploughman, and sponsor him when his case came up before the Tribunal.

Benjamin almost fainted at the news.

‘Don’t worry,’ Mary tried to console him. ‘He’ll be back when the war’s over. Besides, it’s only ten miles away, and he’s bound to come and see us on Sundays.’

‘You don’t understand,’ he said.

Lewis put on a brave face when the time came to leave. He tied a few clothes in a bundle, kissed his mother and brother, and jumped into the trap beside Amos. The wind ripped at Benjamin’s coat-sleeves as he watched them disappearing down the lane.

He began to pine.

Though he ate his food, the thought of Lewis eating different food, off different plates, at a different table, made him sadder and sadder and he soon grew thin and weak. At nights, he would reach out to touch his brother, but his hand came to rest on a cold unrumpled pillow. He gave up washing for fear of reminding himself that – at that same moment – Lewis might be sharing someone else’s towel.

‘Do cheer up,’ Mary said. She could see the separation was more than he could bear.

He revisited the places where they had played as children. Sometimes, he called the sheepdog, ‘Mott! Mott! Come on, let’s find the master! Where’s he? Where’s he?’ And the dog would jump up and wag his tail, and they would clamber up the screes of the Black Hill, until the Wye came into view – all
a
-glitter in the winter sunshine – and the fresh brown plough around Rhydspence where Lewis might be ploughing.

At other times, he went alone to the dingle and watched the peaty water sluicing through their old bathing pool. Everywhere, he kept seeing Lewis’s face – in a cattle-trough, in the milk-pail, even in puddles of liquid dung.

He hated Lewis for leaving and suspected him of stealing his soul. One day, staring into the shaving mirror, he watched his face grow fainter and fainter, as if the glass were eating his reflection until he vanished altogether in a crystalline mist.

This was the first time he thought of killing himself.

Lewis used to arrive for Sunday lunch, pink in the face after a ten-mile hike across country, his leggings coated with mud and his breeches with dead burrs.

He kept them all amused with stories of life on a big farm. He liked his job. He liked to tinker with the new-fangled machinery, and had driven a tractor. He liked looking after the pedigree Herefords. He liked the bailiff, who instructed him in the mysteries of the stud-book; and he had made friends with one of the dairy-maids. He loathed the Irish stock-man, who was a ‘bloody drunken savage.’

One Wednesday, towards the end of April, the bailiff sent him by train to Hereford, along with some lots of store-cattle, which were due to be sold at auction. Since the lots came up at eleven, the rest of the day was free.

It was a very gloomy day and the clouds brushed low over the Cathedral tower. Lines of grey sleet smacked on to the pavements and rattled on the oilcloth hoods of the horse-cabs. In High Town, the poor cab-horses stood in line beside the swollen gutter; and under a green-painted canopy, some cabbies were warming their hands over a brazier.

‘Come on in, laddie!’ one of them beckoned, and Lewis joined them.

A military vehicle drove by, and a pair of sergeants strutted past in mackintosh capes.

‘Bitter day for a funeral,’ said a man with a cheesy complexion.

‘Bitter,’ agreed another.

‘And what age are you, laddie?’ the first man went on, rattling a poker in the coals.

‘Seventeen,’ said Lewis.

‘And your birth-date?’

‘August.’

‘Watch it, laddie! Watch it, or they’ll have you, for sure.’

Lewis fidgeted on the bench. When the sleet let up, he sauntered through the maze of lanes behind Watkins’s Brewery. He stood in the entrance of a cooper’s shop and saw the brand-new barrels amid heaps of yellow shavings. From another street, he heard a brass band playing, and walked towards it.

Outside the Green Dragon Hotel a knot of bystanders had gathered to watch the funeral procession go by.

The dead man was a Colonel of the Herefords, who had died of war wounds. The Guard of Honour marched with eyes fastened on the tips of their naked sword blades. The drummer wore a leopard skin. The march was the ‘Dead March’ in
Saul
.

The wheels of the gun-carriage grated on the macadam and the coffin, draped in a Union Jack, passed across the level-lidded gaze of the ladies. Four black automobiles followed, with the widow, the Lord Mayor and the mourners. Jackdaws spewed from the belfry as the bells began to toll. A woman in a fox-fur grabbed Lewis’s arm and clamoured, shrilly:

‘And you, young man, aren’t you ashamed to be seen in civvies?’

He nipped off down an alley in the direction of the market.

An aroma of coffee beans caused him to halt before a bow-fronted window. On the shelves sat little wicker baskets heaped with conical mounds of tea: the names on the labels – Darjeeling, Keemun, Lapsang Souchong, Oolong – carried him away to a mysterious east. The coffees were on the lower shelves, and in each warm brown bean he saw the warm brown lips of a negress.

He was daydreaming of rattan huts and lazy seas, when a butcher’s cart rolled by; the carter yelled, ‘Watch it, mate!’ and chutes of muddy water flew up and dirtied his breeches.

In Eign Street, he paused to admire a cap of houndstooth tweed displayed in the window of a Messrs Parberry and Williams, Gentlemen’s Hosiers.

Mr Parberry himself stood in the doorway, a pendulous man with strands of oily black hair coiled around his skull.

‘Come on in, my boy!’ he said in a fluty voice. ‘Costs you nothing to look round. And what takes your fancy this fine spring morning?’

‘The cap,’ said Lewis.

The shop smelled of oilskins and kerosene. Mr Parberry removed the cap from the window, fingered the label, priced it at five shillings and sixpence, and added, ‘I’ll knock the sixpence off!’

Lewis ran his thumbnail over the milled edges of the florins in his pocket. He had just been paid his wages. He had a pound’s-worth of silver.

Mr Parberry cocked the cap on Lewis’s head and turned him to face the pier-glass. It was the right size. It was a very smart cap.

‘I’ll take two of them,’ Lewis said. ‘One for my brother.’

‘Good for you!’ said Mr Parberry, and ordered his assistant to fetch down an oval hatbox. He spread the caps on the counter, but no two were identical; and when Lewis insisted, ‘No, I must have two the same,’ the man lost his temper and spluttered, ‘Get out, you young whippersnapper! Get out and stop wasting my time!’

At one o’clock, Lewis looked in at the City and County Dining-Room to give himself a feed. The waitress said she’d have a table in a jiffy and told him to wait five minutes. From the menu-board, he chose a steak-and-kidney pudding, and a jam roly-poly for afters.

Stubble-jowled farmers were gorging great quantities of suet and black pudding; and a gentleman chaffed the waitress for failing to serve him. From time to time, the clatter of plates broke through the hubbub, and a volley of curses was heard through the kitchen hatch. Whiffs of frying-fat and tobacco filled the room. A tabby cat slipped in and out among the customers’ legs and, on the floor, there were patches of beer-sodden sawdust.

The slatternly waitress came back, grinned, set her hands on her hips, said, ‘Come on, pretty boy!’ – and Lewis took to his heels.

He purchased a pasty from a street-vendor and, feeling very low, took shelter in the entrance of a ladies’ fashion-house.

Models in tea-gowns stared with blue glass eyes on to the rainy street, and there was a picture of Clemenceau beside the King and Queen.

He was about to bite into the pasty when he started to shiver. He watched his fingertips, whitening. He knew his brother was in danger, and ran for the station.

The train for Rhulen was standing at Platform One.

It was hot and airless in the compartment, and the windows had misted up. His teeth went on chattering. He could feel the goose-pimples rubbing against his shirt.

A girl with glowing cheeks stepped in, set down her basket and sat in the far corner. She took off her homespun shawl and hat, and laid them on the seat. The afternoon was very dark. The lights were lit. The train moved off with a whistle and a jerk.

He wiped his sleeve over the misted window and looked out at the telegraph poles that flashed, one after the other, across the rosy reflection of the girl.

‘You’ve got a fever,’ she said.

‘No,’ he said. He did not turn round. ‘My brother’s freezing.’

He wiped the window again. The furrows of a ploughed field went whizzing by, like the spokes of a wheel. He saw the Cefn Hill plantation, and the Black Hill covered with snow. He was waiting with the door open, poised to jump, as the train pulled in to Rhulen.

‘Can I help?’ the girl called after him.

‘No,’ he called back, and raced down the platform.

It was after four by the time he reached The Vision and Rebecca was alone in the kitchen, distractedly darning a sock.

‘Them’ve gone out looking for Benjamin,’ she said.

‘And I know where him do be,’ Lewis said.

He went to the porch and changed his wet cape for a dry
one
. He pulled a sou’wester over his face and walked out into the snow.

Around eleven that morning, Amos had looked towards the west and said, ‘I don’t like the look of them clouds. Better get the ewes off the hill.’

It was late in the lambing season and the ewes and early lambs were on the mountain. For ten days the weather had been lovely. The thrushes were nesting, and the birches in the dingle were dusted with green. No one had expected any more snow.

‘No,’ Amos repeated. ‘I don’t like the look of it.’

He had a chill on his chest, and his legs and back were stiff. Mary fetched his boots and gaiters and noticed, all of a sudden, that he was old. He bent down to tie his laces. Something cricked in his spine, and he sank back into the chair.

‘I’ll go,’ said Benjamin.

‘Quickly now!’ his father said. ‘Before it comes to snow.’

Benjamin whistled for the dog and walked over the fields to Cock-a-loftie. From there he took the steeper path up the escarpment. He reached the rim, and a raven flew off a thornbush, croaking.

Then the cloud came down and the sheep, when he could see them, were like little packs of vapour – and then it began to snow.

The snow fell in thick woolly flakes. The wind got up and blew drifts across the track. He saw something dark close by: it was the dog shaking the snow off his back. Icy trickles ran down his neck, and he realized his cap was gone. His hands were in his pockets but he could not feel them. His feet felt so heavy it was hardly worth bothering to take the next step – and, just then, the snow changed colour.