On The Black Hill (Vintage Classics) (21 page)

She would be lying, a withered husk with wisps of silver hair on the pillow, and her hands stretched out over a patchwork quilt. The room would be filled with sunshine and birdsong; a breeze would stir the curtains, and the twins be standing, symmetrically, on either side of the bed. A beautiful picture – and one she knew to be a sin!

There were times when she chided Benjamin, ‘What is all this nonsense about not going out? Why can’t you find a nice young lady?’ But Benjamin’s mouth would tighten, his lower lids quiver, and she knew he would never get married. At other times, wilfully displaying the perverse side of her character, she took Lewis by the elbow and made him promise never, never to marry unless Benjamin married too.

‘I promise,’ he said, slumping his head like a man receiving a prison sentence; for he wanted a woman badly.

All through one winter, he became very jumpy and argumentative, would snap at his brother and refuse to eat. Mary feared a repetition of Amos’s black moods and, in May, she made a momentous decision: both the boys were going to the Rhulen Fair.

‘No.’ She shot a piercing look at Benjamin. ‘I won’t hear any excuses.’

‘Yes, Mama,’ he said, lifelessly.

She packed them a picnic lunch and waved goodbye from the porch.

‘Mind you pick the pretty ones!’ she called out. ‘And don’t come back till dark!’

She strolled into the orchard and gazed across the valley at the two ponies, one cantering round in circles, the other ambling at a trot, until they vanished over the skyline.

‘Well, at least we’ve got them out of the house.’ She scratched Lewis’s sheepdog behind his ear, and the dog wagged his tail and nuzzled his head against her skirt. Then she went indoors to read a book.

She had lately discovered the novels of Thomas Hardy, and she wanted to read them all. How well she knew the life he described – the smell of Tess’s milking-parlour; Tess’s torments, in bed and in the beetfield. She, too, could whittle hurdles, plant pine saplings, or thatch a hayrick – and if the old unmechanized ways were gone from Wessex, time had stood still, here, on the Radnor Hills.

‘Think of The Rock,’ she told herself. ‘Nothing’s changed there since the Dark Ages.’

She was reading
The Mayor of Casterbridge
. She liked it less than
The Woodlanders
, which she had read the week before, and Hardy’s ‘coincidences’ had begun to grate on her nerves. She read three more chapters; then, letting the book fall into her lap, she allowed herself to slide into a reverie of certain nights and mornings – in the bedroom with Amos. And suddenly, he came to her – with his flaming hair and the light streaming out round his shoulders. And she knew she must have slept because the sun had come round to the west and sunbeams were pouring past the geraniums, in between her legs.

‘At my age!’ she smiled, shaking herself awake – and heard the sound of horses in the yard.

The twins were standing by the gate, Benjamin puffed into a state of exalted indignation, while Lewis looked over his shoulder as if searching for somewhere to hide.

‘Whatever’s the matter?’ she burst out laughing. ‘Were there no young ladies at the fair?’

‘It was terrible,’ said Benjamin.

‘Terrible?’

‘Terrible!’

Skirts, since the twins were last in Rhulen, had risen not above the ankle, but above the knee.

At eleven that morning, they had stopped on the hilltop and looked down over the town. Already the fair was in full swing. They heard the hum of the crowd, the whine of Wurlitzer organs, and the odd snarl or bellow from the beasts in the menagerie. In Broad Street alone, Lewis counted eleven merry-go-rounds. There was a Ferris-wheel in the marketplace, and a little Tower of Babel, which was a helter-skelter.

For the last time, Benjamin begged his brother to turn back.

‘Mother’d never know,’ he said.

‘I’d tell her,’ said Lewis, and kicked his pony.

Twenty minutes later, he was wandering round the fairground like a man possessed.

Farmlads strolled the streets in gangs of seven or eight, puffing at cigarettes, ogling the girls, or daring one another to spar with ‘The Champ’ – a Negro boxer in red satin shorts. Gipsy fortune-tellers offered lilies-of-the-valley, or your fortune.
Ping
…
ping
sounded from the shooting galleries. An exhibition of freaks showed the ‘smallest mare and foal in the world’, and one of its larger women.

By noon, Lewis had ridden an elephant, flown in a ‘Chairoplane’, drunk the milk of a coconut, licked a lollipop, and was looking for other amusements.

As for Benjamin, all he saw were legs – bare legs, legs in silk stockings, legs in fish-net stockings – kicking, dancing, prancing, and reminding him of his one and only visit to an abattoir and the kicks of the sheep in their death throes.

Around one o’clock, Lewis paused outside the ‘Theatre de Paris’ where four can-can girls, encased in raspberry velvet, were doing a come-on act, while, behind painted draperies, a Mamzelle Delilah performed the ‘Dance of the Seven Veils’ to an audience of heavy-breathing farmers.

Lewis felt for the sixpence in his pocket, and a hand clamped around his wrist. He turned to meet his brother’s flinty stare:

‘You’ll not go in there!’

‘Just you try and stop me!’

‘Won’t I just?’ Benjamin sidestepped across his brother’s path, and the sixpence slid back down into his pocket.

Half an hour later, Lewis’s gaiety had left him. He moped around the booths looking desolate. Benjamin dogged him, a few paces behind.

A beatific vision had been offered – offered for the price of a drink – and Lewis had turned aside. But why? Why? Why? He asked the question a hundred times, until it dawned on him that he was not just afraid of hurting Benjamin: he was afraid of him.

At a hoop-la stand, he almost accosted a girl in flamingo straining every fibre of her torso to land her hoop over a five pound note. He saw his brother glaring through a stack of tea-sets and goldfish bowls; and his courage failed.

‘Let’s go home,’ said Benjamin.

‘To hell with you,’ Lewis said, and was on the point of relenting when two girls accosted him.

‘Want a cigarette?’ asked the elder one, poking her stubby fingers in her handbag.

‘Thank you very much,’ said Lewis.

The girls were sisters. One wore a green frock, the other a tunic of mauve jersey with an orange sash around her bottom. Their cheeks were rouged, their hair shingled, and their nostrils were cavernous. They winked at one another with insolent pale blue eyes, and even Lewis saw that skimpy hemlines looked absurd on their short, heavy-breasted bodies.

He tried to shake them off: they clung on.

Benjamin watched from a distance as his brother treated them to lemonade and brandy-snaps. Then, realizing they were no competition, he joined the group. The girls burst into fits at the thought of walking out with twins.

‘What a lark!’ said the mauve one.

‘Let’s go on the Wall of Death!’ said the green one.

A huge cylindrical drum stood beside its steam-engine at the top end of Castle Street. Lewis paid the grimy youth at the ticket kiosk; and all four stepped inside.

Several other passengers were waiting for the start. The youth shouted, ‘Stand against the wall!’ The door slammed
and
the drum began to spin faster and faster on its axis. The floor rose, pushing the passengers upward till their heads were almost level with the rim. When the floor fell again, they were stranded, pinned by centrifugal force, in attitudes of the Crucifixion.

Benjamin felt his eyeballs being squashed back into his skull. For three endless minutes, the agony continued. Then, as the drum slowed up, the girls slithered down and their frocks concertina-ed above their hips, so that gaps of bare flesh showed between their stockings and suspender-belts.

Benjamin staggered on to the street and vomited into the gutter.

‘I’ve had enough,’ he spluttered, and mopped his chin. ‘I’m off.’

‘Spoil-sport!’ squealed the girl in green. ‘He’s only putting it on.’ The sisters linked their arms around Lewis’s and tried to march him up the street. He did shake them off, and turned on his heels and followed the tweed cap through the crowd in the direction of the ponies.

That night, on the staircase, Mary brushed her cheek against Benjamin’s and, with a sly smile, thanked him for bringing his brother home.

SHE BOUGHT THEM
Hercules bicycles for their thirty-first birthday and encouraged them to take an interest in local antiquities. At first, they went for short rides on Sundays. Then, moved by the spirit of adventure, they extended their range to take in the castles of the Border Barons.

At Snodhill they ripped the ivy off a wall, and uncovered an arrow-slit. At Urishay they mistook a rusty pannikin for ‘something mediaeval’. At Clifford they pictured the Fair Rosamond, lovelorn in a wimple; and when they went to Painscastle, Benjamin thrust his hand down a rabbit-hole and pulled out a fragment of iridescent glass.

‘A goblet?’ suggested Lewis.

‘A bottle,’ Benjamin corrected.

He borrowed books from the Rhulen Lending Library and read aloud, in condensed versions, the chronicles of Froissart, Giraldus Cambrensis and Adam of Usk. Suddenly, the world of the Crusading Knights became more real than their own. Benjamin vowed himself to chastity; Lewis to the memory of a fair damsel.

They laughed – and laying their bikes behind a hedge, went off to laze beside a stream.

They imagined battering-rams, portcullises, crucibles of boiling pitch and bloated bodies floating in a moat. Hearing of the Welsh archers at Crécy, Lewis stripped a yew branch, hardened it with fire, strung it with gut and fletched some arrows with goose feathers.

The second arrow whizzed across the orchard and pierced a chicken through the neck.

‘A mistake,’ he said.

‘Too dangerous,’ said Benjamin, who, meanwhile, had unearthed a most interesting document.

A monk of Abbey Cwmhir relates that the bones of Bishop Cadwallader lie in a golden coffin beside St Cynog’s Well at Glascoed.

‘And where be that?’ Lewis asked. He had read about the Tomb of Tutankhamun in the
News of the World
.

‘There!’ said Benjamin, placing his thumbnail under some Gothic lettering on the Ordnance Survey Map. The place was eight miles from Rhulen, off the road to Llandrindod.

After Chapel next Sunday, Mr Nantlys Williams saw the twins’ bicycles propped against the palings, and a spade lashed to Lewis’s crossbar. He chided them gently for labouring on the Lord’s Day, and Lewis blushed as he bent down to fix his cycle-clip.

At Glascoed, they found the Holy Water gurgling from a mossy cleft, then dribbling away among some burdocks. It was a shady spot. There were cowpats in the mud, and horseflies buzzing round them. A boy in braces saw the two strange men and took to his heels.

‘Where do we dig?’ Lewis asked.

‘Yonder!’ said Benjamin, pointing to a hummock of earth half-hidden by nettles.

The soil was black and glutinous and wriggling with earthworms. Lewis dug for half an hour and then handed his brother a piece of porous bone.

‘Cow!’ said Benjamin.

‘Bull!’ said Lewis, only to be interrupted by a strident voice shouting across the fields: ‘I tell you to get from here!’

The boy in braces had come back with his father, a farmer who was fuming on the far side of the bushes. The twins saw a shotgun. Remembering Watkins the Coffin, they crept out, sheepishly, into the sunshine.

‘And I’ll be keeping the spade,’ the farmer added.

‘Yes, sir!’ said Lewis, and dropped it. ‘Thank you, sir!’ – and they mounted their bikes, and rode off.

Forswearing gold as the root of all evil, they turned their attention to the early Celtic saints.

Benjamin read, in a learned paper by the Rector of Cascob, that these ‘spiritual athletes’ had retreated into the mountains to be at one with Nature and the Lord. St David himself had settled in the Honddhu Valley, in ‘a mean shelter covered with moss and leaves’ – and there were several other sites within cycling distance.

At Moccas, they found the place where St Dubricius saw a white sow suckling her litter. And when they went to Llanfrynach, Benjamin teased his brother about the woman who tried to tempt the saint with ‘wolfsbane and other lustful ingredients’.

‘I’ll thank you for keeping your mouth shut,’ Lewis said.

In Llanveynoe Church, carved on a Saxon stone, they saw a sturdy youth suspended from the Tree: the church’s patron, St Beuno, had once cursed a man for refusing to cook a fox.

‘Fox wouldn’t pass my mouth neither,’ said Lewis, pulling a face.

They considered taking up the life of anchorites – an ivy bower, a babbling brook, a diet of berries and wild leek and, for music, the chatter of blackbirds. Or perhaps they’d be Holy Martyrs, clinging to the Host while hordes of marauding Danes looted, burned and raped? It was the year of the Slump. Perhaps there was going to be a revolution?

One August afternoon, pedalling as fast as they could go beside the Wye, they were ‘buzzed’ by an airplane.

Lewis braked and stopped in the middle of the road.

The crash of the R 101 had given a tremendous boost to his scrapbook, although his true loves, now, were the lady aviators. Lady Heath … Lady Bailey … Amy Johnson … The Duchess of Bedford: he could string off their names as if saying his prayers. His favourite, of course, was Amelia Earheart.

The plane was a Tiger Moth, with a silver fuselage. It circled a second time and the pilot dipped, and waved.

Lewis waved back, passionately, in case it was one of his ladies; and when the plane zoomed low on its third circuit, the figure in the cockpit flicked back her goggles, and showed her tanned and smiling face. The plane was so close that Lewis
swore
he saw her lipstick. Then she soared her machine, back into the eye of the sun.

Over supper, Lewis said that he, too, would like to fly. ‘Hm!’ Benjamin grunted.

He was far more concerned about their next-door neighbour than the likelihood of Lewis flying.