On The Black Hill (Vintage Classics) (24 page)

The path was muddy and the gorse brushed their boots. She leaned forwards, rubbing herself against the pommel. The damp mountain air filled her lungs. They saw a buzzard. On ahead it was already looking lighter.

Coming to a clump of larches, she cried, ‘Look! What did I tell you? The sun!’ The golden hair of the larches shone out against a milky blue sky.

Then they cantered on into the sunlight with the clouds spread out below, on and on, for miles it seemed, until she reined in her pony at the edge of a gully. In a hollow, out of the wind, there were three Scots pines.

She dismounted and walked towards them, dribbling a pine-cone over the close-cropped turf.

‘I love Scots pines,’ she said. ‘And when I’m very very old I’d like to look like one. Know what I mean?’

He was breathing beside her, hot under his mackintosh. She clawed at the bark, a flake of which came away in her hand. An earwig scuttled for safety. Judging that the moment had come, she transferred her lacquered fingers from the tree-trunk to his face.

It was dark when she pushed through the door of the cottage, and Nigel was drowsing by the fire. She banged her riding-crop on the table. There were moss-stains on her breeches: ‘You lost the bet, duckie. You owe me a bottle of Gordon’s.’

‘You had him?’

‘Under an ancient pine! Very romantic! Rather damp!’

From the moment Lewis crossed the threshold, Mary knew exactly what had happened.

He was walking differently. His eyes roamed the room like a stranger’s. He stared at her, as if she too were a stranger. With trembling hands, she served a giblet pie. The silver spoon glinted. A wisp of steam curled up. He went on staring as though he’d never sat at supper in his life.

She toyed with her food, but could not bring herself to eat it. She sat waiting for Benjamin to explode.

He pretended to notice nothing. He cut a sliver of bread and began mopping the juices off his plate. Then his voice rasped out: ‘What’s that you got on your cheek?’

‘Nothing,’ Lewis faltered, fumbling for a napkin to wipe away the lipstick, but Benjamin had nipped round the table and rammed his face up close.

Lewis panicked. His right fist smashed into his brother’s teeth, and he ran from the house.

HE WENT AWAY
, to work on a pig farm near Weobley in Herefordshire. Two months later, drawn irresistibly in the direction of home, he got a job in Rhulen, as a porter for an agricultural merchant. He bunked on the premises and spoke to no one. The farmers who came into the offices were astonished by the blankness of his stare.

Because he sent no word to his mother, she arranged, one afternoon, for a neighbour to give her a lift into town.

A sharp wind was whistling down Castle Street. Her eyes watered; and the shops, the housefronts and pedestrians dissolved into a greyish blur. Holding her hat, she pushed her steps along the pavement and then turned left, out of the wind, into Horseshoe Yard. Outside the merchant’s a cart was being loaded with meal-sacks.

Another sack came out through the double doors.

She gave a start at the sight of the bony, sunken-eyed man in dirty dungarees. His hair had gone grey. Around one wrist there was a vicious purple scar.

‘What’s that?’ she asked when they were alone.

‘If thy right hand offend thee …’ he murmured.

She gasped, covered her mouth – and breathed out, ‘Thank heaven for that!’

She slipped her arm into his, and they walked towards the river and out along the bridge. The Wye was in spate. A heron stood in the shallows and, on the far bank, a fisherman was casting for salmon. Snow lay on the tops of the Radnor Hills. With their backs to the wind they watched floodwater sluicing past the piles.

‘No.’ She was quivering all over. ‘You can’t come home
yet
. It’s terrible to see your brother in such a state.’

Benjamin’s love for Lewis was murderous.

Spring came. The celandines made stars in the hedgerows. It still seemed that Benjamin’s anger would never die down. To take her mind off her misery, Mary wore herself out with housework; she darned every moth-hole she could find in the blankets; she knitted socks for both her sons; she stocked the store-cupboard and cleaned the dirt from hidden crevices – as though these were preparations before leaving on a journey. Then, when she could work no more, she would collapse into the rocking chair and listen to the beating of her heart.

Images of India kept passing before her eyes. She saw a shimmering flood-plain, and a white dome afloat in the haze. Men in turbans were bearing a cloth-bound bundle to the shore. There were fires smouldering, and kitehawks spiralling above. A boat glided by downstream.

‘The river! The river!’ she whispered, and shook herself out of her reverie.

One day in the first week of September, she woke with flatulence and indigestion. She fried a few rashers of bacon for Benjamin’s breakfast but lacked the strength to fork them from the skillet. A pain gripped her chest. He had carried her to the bedroom before the attack.

He jumped on his bike, rode to the call-box at Maesyfelin, and phoned for the doctor.

At six that evening, Lewis came in from delivering a load of cow-cake. In the office the clerk was glued to the wireless, listening to the latest news from Poland. He glanced up and told him to call the surgery.

‘Your mother’s had a coronary,’ Dr Galbraith told him. ‘Looks like a bad one to me. I’ve given her morphine and she’s hanging on. But I’d get up there quick as you can.’

Benjamin was kneeling on the far side of the bed. The evening sunlight raked in through the larches, and touched the black frame of the Holman Hunt engraving. She was sweating. Her skin was yellowish, and her gaze fixed intently on the doorknob. The name of Lewis rustled on her lips. Her hands lay motionless on the black velvet stars.

A motor sounded in the lane.

‘He’s come,’ said Benjamin. From the dormer window, he watched his brother paying off the taxi.

‘He’s come,’ she repeated. And when her head dropped sideways on the pillow, Benjamin was holding her right hand, and Lewis her left.

In the morning they hung black crêpe over the beehives to tell the bees that she had gone.

The night after the funeral was the night of their weekly bath.

Benjamin boiled the copper in the back-kitchen, and spread a cloth over the hearthrug. They took turns to soap each other’s backs, and scrub them with a loofah. Their favourite sheepdog crouched beside the tub, his head on his forepaws, and the flamelight fluttering in his eyes. Lewis rubbed himself dry and saw, laid out on the table, two of their father’s unbleached white calico nightshirts.

They put them on.

Benjamin had lit the lamp in their parents’ room. He said, ‘Give us a hand with the sheets.’

From the chest of drawers they unfolded a pair of fresh linen sheets. Grains of lavender fell at Lewis’s feet. They made the bed and smoothed down the patchwork quilt. Benjamin plumped up the pillows; and a feather, that had worked its way through the ticking, floated upwards in the lamplight.

They climbed into bed.

‘Goodnight now!’

‘Goodnight!’

United at last by the memory of their mother, they forgot that all of Europe was in flames.

THE WAR WASHED
over them without disturbing their solitude.

Now and then, the drone of an enemy bomber, or some niggling wartime restriction, reminded them of the fighting beyond the Malvern Hills. But the Battle of Britain was too big for Lewis’s scrapbook. An invasion scare – of German parachutists on the Brecon Beacons – was a false alarm. And when, one November night, Benjamin saw a red glow on the horizon and the sky lit up with incendiary flares – it was the Coventry Raid – he said, ‘And a good job t’isn’t we!’ – and went back to bed.

Lewis thought of joining the Home Guard but Benjamin dissuaded him from doing so.

In Chapel, the twins sat side by side in their parents’ pew. Before each meeting they spent an hour or so, lost in silent meditation by the grave. Some Sundays, especially if there was a Bible-class beforehand, Little Meg the Rock came with one of her foster-sisters; and the sight of her, an angular waif in a moth-eaten beret, revived in Lewis memories of lost love, and sadness.

One blustery morning, she came in, blue with cold, clutching at a bunch of snowdrops. The preacher had the habit of reciting the first verse of a hymn, and then making one of the children repeat it line by line. After announcing Hymn Number Three – William Cowper’s ‘Praise for the Fountain Opened’ – his finger fell on Meg:

There is a fountain fill’d with blood

Drawn from Emmanuel’s veins

And sinners plunged beneath that flood

Lose all their guilty stains
.

Tightening her grip on the snowdrops, Meg struggled through the first line, but the effort of ‘Emmanuel’s veins’ choked her to silence. The crushed flowers fell at her feet, and she started sucking her thumb.

The schoolteacher said there was ‘nothing to be done with the child’. Yet, though Meg neither read nor wrote nor did the simplest sums, she could mimic the voice of any animal or bird; and she embroidered white lawn handkerchiefs with garlands of flowers and leaves.

‘Yes,’ the teacher confided in Lewis, ‘Meg’s a handy little needlewoman. I believe it was Miss Fifield as taught her the art’ – adding, for the sake of gossip, that young Billy Fifield was a pilot in the R.A.F., and that Rosie was alone at The Tump, laid up with bronchitis.

After lunch, Lewis packed a basket of provisions and filled a can of milk from the dairy. A pewter sun hung low over the Black Hill. The milk sloshed against the lid as he walked. The beeches were grey behind the cottage, and rooks flew off, their wingtips glinting like flakes of ice. There were Christmas roses flowering in the garden.

It was twenty-four years since they had met.

Rosie shuffled to the door in a man’s overcoat. Her eyes were blue as ever, but her cheeks were hollow and her hair was grey. Her jaw dropped when she saw the tall greying stranger on the doorstep.

‘I heard you was poorly,’ he said. ‘So I brought you some things.’

‘So it’s Lewis Jones,’ she wheezed. ‘Come on in and warm yourself.’

The room was cramped and dingy, and the whitewash flaking from the wall. On a ledge over the fireplace were tea-canisters and her clock of the Heavenly Twins. A chromolithograph hung on the back wall – of a blonde girl picking a posy along a woodland path. Slung over an armchair was a needlework sampler, half completed. A tortoiseshell butterfly, awoken by the sunlight, flapped against the window, although its wings were trapped in a dusty cobweb. The floor was strewn with books. On the table were some jars of pickled onions – which were all she had to eat.

She unpacked the basket, greedily examining the honey and biscuits, the brawn and bacon, spreading them out without a word of thanks.

‘Sit down and I’ll make you a cup of tea,’ she said, and went to the scullery to rinse the teacups.

He looked at the picture and remembered their walks along the river.

She took a bellows to sharpen up the fire, and as the flames licked the sooty underside of the kettle, her coat fell open revealing a pink flannelette nightie slipping off her shoulder. He asked about Little Meg.

Her face lit up: ‘She’s a good girl. Honest as the day! Not like them others and all their thieving! Ooh! It makes my blood boil the way they treat her. Her as never harmed a living thing. I’ve seen her in the garden here, and the finches feeding out of her hand.’

The tea was scalding hot. He sipped it, uneasily, in silence.

‘He’s dead, isn’t he?’ Her voice was sharp and accusing. He paused before taking another sip, and said, ‘I’m very sorry to hear it.’

‘What’s it to you?’

‘In an aeroplane, was it?’

‘Not him!’ she snapped. ‘I don’t mean my Billy. I mean the father!’

‘Bickerton?’

‘Aye, Bickerton!’

‘Well, him’s dead for sure,’ he answered. ‘In Africky, as I did hear it. It was the drink as killed him.’

‘And a good job!’ she said.

Before leaving, he foddered her sheep which had gone a whole week without hay. He took the milk-can and promised to come back on Thursday.

She clutched his hand and breathed, ‘Till Thursday then?’

She watched him from the bedroom window walking away along the line of hawthorns, with the sunlight passing through his legs. Five times, she wiped the condensation from the pane until the black speck vanished from view.

‘It’s no good,’ she said out loud. ‘I hate men – all of them!’

On the Thursday, her bronchitis was better and though she
was
able to talk more freely, only one topic held her attention: Lurkenhope Castle, which had just been requisitioned for American troops.

The place had lain empty for five years.

Reggie Bickerton had died, of D.T.s in Kenya, in the year that his coffee plantation failed. The Estate had passed to a distant cousin, who had had to pay a second round of death-duties. Isobel, too, had died, in India; and Nancy had moved into a flat above the stables – which, so her father said, were better built than the house. And there she lived, alone with her pugs, fretting about her mother who was interned in the South of France.

She gave a dinner-party for some black G.I.s and people said the strangest things.

Apart from the Negro boxer at the Rhulen Fair, the twins had never set eyes on a black man. Now, hardly a day passed without their meeting these tall dark strangers, sauntering round the lanes in twos and threes.

Benjamin pretended to be shocked by the stories coming out of the Castle. Could it be true they ripped up the floorboards and burned them in the grate?

‘Ooh!’ he rubbed his hands. ‘It be hot where them do come from.’

One frosty evening, walking home from Maesyfelin, he was hailed by a nattily turned-out giant:

‘Hi, feller! I’m Chuck!’

‘I’m not so bad myself,’ said Benjamin, shyly.

The man’s expression was grave. He stopped to talk, and spoke of the war and the horrors of Nazism. But when Benjamin asked what it was like to live ‘in Africky’, he creased with laughter, and clung to his stomach as if he were never going to stop. Then he disappeared into the darkness, flashing a broad white grin over the turned-up collar of his greatcoat.