On The Black Hill (Vintage Classics) (30 page)

She had counted on selling up the moment he died. Frank’s haulage business had been doing badly and, besides, The Rock’d make a ‘nice little nest-egg’ for her teenage daughter Eileen. She even had a purchaser in mind – a businessman from London who wanted to put up Swedish-style chalets.

Lizzie, for her part, maintained The Rock was her home as much as anyone’s, and she was entitled to her fair share. The argument volleyed back and forth – and Sarah became quite weepy and hysterical, prattling on about the sacrifices she’d made, the money she’d spent, the times she’d battled through snowdrifts, the times she’d saved their lives – ‘And for what? A kick in the teeth, that’s all!’

Then Lizzie and Sarah started screaming and yelling, and though Manfred shouted, ‘Pliss! Pliss!’ and Frank snarled, ‘Aw! Cut it, will you?’ the pub lunch almost ended in a fist-fight.

The barman asked them to leave.

Frank paid the bill and they walked up Broad Street, picking their way through the lines of slush till they came to the lawyer’s door. Both women blanched when Mr Lloyd lifted his spectacles and said, ‘There is no will.’ Furthermore, since neither Sarah nor Lizzie nor Meg were Jim’s blood relatives, his estate would be passed to the Official Receiver. Meg, Mr Lloyd added, had best claim on the place – for she was the incumbent and had lived there all her life.

So Meg lived on alone at The Rock. She said, ‘I can’t live for the dead ’uns. I got my own living to do.’

On frosty mornings she sat on an upturned bucket, warming her hands around a mug of tea while the tits and chaffinches perched on her shoulder. When a green woodpecker took some crumbs from her hand, she imagined the bird was a messenger from God and sang His Praises in doggerel all through the day.

After dark, she would huddle over the fire and fry up her bacon and potatoes. Then, when the candle guttered, she curled up on the box-bed with a black cat for company, a coat for a blanket, and a sack stuffed with fern for a pillow.

Having so little to separate the real world from the world
of
dreams, she imagined it was she who played with the badger cubs; she who soared with the hawks above the hill. One night, she dreamed of being attacked by strange men.

‘I heard ’em,’ she told Sarah. ‘A young ’un and an old. Poonin’ on the roof! Aye! And te-akin’ off the tiles and comin’ down in. So I lit me a candle and I shouted, “Git, yer buggers! I got me a gun in here and I’ll blaow yer bloomin’ heads off.” That’s as I said and I ain’t heard nothing since!’ – all of which went to confirm Sarah’s opinion that Meg was ‘losing her marbles’.

Sarah had arranged with Prothero’s for Meg’s groceries to be delivered to a disused oil-drum by the side of the lane. But this hiding place was soon found by Johnny the Van, a red-eyed rascal who lived in an old fairground waggon nearby. There were weeks when Meg almost fainted from hunger: and the dogs, without meat, howled all day and night.

When the spring came, both Sarah and Lizzie set out to curry favour with Meg. Each would arrive with cakes or a box of chocolates, but Meg saw through their blandishments and said, ‘Thank you people very much, and I’ll see you again next week.’ Sometimes they tried to get her to sign a prepared statement: she simply stared at the pencil as if it were poisoned.

One day Sarah drove up with a trailer to fetch a pony which, so she claimed, was hers. She walked towards the beast-house with a halter, but Meg stood, arms folded, by the door.

‘Aye, you can te-ake him,’ she said. ‘But what are you people going to do about them dogs?’

Jim had left thirteen sheepdogs; and these, cooped up in tin shanties, had grown so mangy and ravenous on a diet of bread and water that they were unsafe to be let off their chains.

‘Them poor ol’ dogs is mad,’ Meg said. ‘Them’ll ’ave to be shot.’

‘We could take ’em to the vet?’ Sarah suggested, doubtfully.

‘Nay,’ Meg answered back. ‘I’m not putting them dogs in no death-van! Get that Frank o’ yours to come up with his gun, and I’ll dig a hole and put ’em in the ground.’

The morning of the shooting was damp and misty. Meg gave the dogs their last feed and led them out, two by two, and chained them to a crab-apple in the pasture. At eleven, Frank gulped down a swig of whisky, tightened his cartridge belt, and walked out into the mist, in the direction of the tree.

Meg stopped her ears; Sarah stopped hers; and her daughter Eileen sat in the Land Rover listening to rock music through the headphones of her cassette-player. A whiff of gunpowder drifted downwind. There was one final whimper, one isolated shot; and then Frank came back, out of the mist, haggard and about to vomit.

‘An’ a good job,’ said Meg, slinging a spade across her shoulder. ‘Thank you people very much.’

Next morning she saw Lewis Jones driving along the skyline on his red International Harvester. She ran up to the hedge and he switched off the engine.

‘So them come and shot the dogs,’ she said, catching her breath. ‘Poor ol’ dogs what done no ’arm. Nor che-ased no sheep nor nobody. But what with them all a-hungered, and with the summer a-comin’, and the heat a-comin’, and the smell in them coops, and the che-ains’d bite into their necks, like … Aye! And bloody ’em! And then the flies’d come and lay eggs and there’d be worms in their necks. Poor ol’ dogs! And that’s why I ’ad ’em shot.’

Her eyes flashed. ‘But I’m a-tellin’ yer one thing, Mr Jones. It’s the people not the dogs as should be punished …!’

Not long afterwards, Sarah ran into Lizzie outside the chemist’s in Rhulen. They agreed to have a coffee in the Hafod Tearoom, each hoping the other would dispel a dreadful rumour: that Meg had a fancy man.

THEO THE TENT
was his name. He was the red-bearded giant whom Lewis Jones had met in the lane. He was known as ‘The Tent’ on account of a domed construction made of birch saplings and canvas, and pitched in a paddock on the Black Hill, where he lived alone with a mule called Max, and a donkey to keep Max company.

His real name was Theodoor. He came from a family of hard-nosed Afrikaners, who had a fruit farm in Orange Free State. He had quarrelled with his father over the eviction of some workers, quit South Africa, come to England, and ‘dropped out’. At the Free Festival near Glastonbury, he met a group of Buddhists, and became one.

Following the Dharma at the Black Hill Monastery made him calm and happy for the first time in his life. He shouldered all the heavy labour; and he enjoyed the visits of a Tibetan Rinpoche who came, now and then, to give courses in higher meditation.

His appearance sometimes put people off. Only when they realized he was incapable of hurting a fly, did they take advantage of his gentle, trusting nature. He had a little money from his mother, to which the leaders of the commune helped themselves. During one financial crisis, they ordered him to collect his entire annual income from the bank, in cash.

On the way to Rhulen, he stopped by the pine plantation and stretched out on the grass. The sky was cloudless. Harebells rustled. A peacock butterfly winked its eyes on a warm stone – and, suddenly, everything about the monastery disgusted him. The purple walls, the smell of joss-sticks and patchouli, the garish mandalas and simpering images – all
seemed
so cheap and tawdry; and he realized that, no matter how hard he meditated, or studied the
Bardo Thodol
, he would never come, That Way, to Enlightenment.

He packed his few belongings and went away. Soon afterwards the other Buddhists sold up and left for the United States.

He bought his paddock, on a steep pitch overlooking the Wye, and there he made his tent – or rather his yurt – from a plan in a book on High Asia.

Year in, year out, he roamed the Radnor Hills, played his flute to the curlews, and memorized the tenets of the
Tao Tê Ching
. On rocks, on gate-posts and on tree stumps, he would carve the three-line
haikus
that came into his head.

He remembered, in Africa, seeing the Kalahari Bushmen trekking through the desert, the mothers laughing, with their children on their backs. And he had come to believe that all men were meant to be wanderers, like them, like St Francis; and that by joining the Way of the Universe, you could find the Great Spirit everywhere – in the smell of bracken after rain, the buzz of a bee in the ear of a foxglove, or in the eyes of a mule, looking with love on the blundering movements of his master.

Sometimes, he felt that even his simple shelter was preventing him from following The Way.

One wild March day, standing on the screes above Craig-y-Fedw, he peered down and watched Meg’s tiny figure, bent under a load of brushwood.

He decided to pay her a visit, unaware that Meg had already been watching him.

She had watched him winding his way over the mountain in the grey winter rain. She had watched him on the skyline with the clouds piled up behind. She was standing, arms folded in the doorway, as he tethered up the mule. Something told her he was not the kind of stranger to cringe from.

‘I was wonderin’ when you was a-comin’,’ she said. ‘Tea’s in the pot. So come on in and sit down.’

He could hardly see her face across the smoke-filled room.

‘I tell you what I done,’ she went on. ‘I was up with the sun.
I
foddered the sheep. I gave hay to the horses. Ay! And a bit o’ cake to the cows. I fed the fowl. I fetched up a load o’ wood. And I was just havin’ my cup-o’-tea and thinkin’ to muck out the beast-house.’

‘I’ll help you,’ said Theo.

The black cat jumped on to her lap, clawed at her breeches and scratched the bare patches of thigh.

‘Ow! Ouch!’ she cried. ‘And where be you a-goin’, little black man? What be you a che-asin’, little darkie doll?’ – squealing with laughter until the cat calmed down and started purring.

The beast-house had not been cleared for years; the layers of dung had risen four feet above the floor; and the heifers scraped their backs on the roofbeams. Meg and Theo set to work with fork and shovel and, by mid-afternoon, there was a big brown pile in the yard.

She showed not a trace of being tired. Now and then, as she pitched a forkful of muck through the door, the bows on her sweaters came undone. He could see that, underneath, she had a nice tidy body.

He said, ‘You’re a tough one, Meg.’

‘’Ave to be,’ she grinned, and her eyes narrowed down to a pair of Mongolian slits.

Three days later, Theo came back to mend her window and rehang a door. She had found a few coins in Jim’s pockets, and insisted on paying him a wage. In fact, whenever he did a job of work, she’d reach for a knotted sock, untie it, and hand him a ten-penny piece.

‘Ain’t much pie in it for you,’ she’d say.

He took each one of these coins as if she were offering a fortune.

He borrowed a set of rods to clean her chimney. Halfway up, the brush snagged on something solid. He pushed, harder, and clods of soot came tumbling into the grate.

Meg chortled with laughter at the sight of his black face and beard: ‘And I’d think you was the divil hi’self to look on.’

As long as her gentle giant was around she felt herself safe from Sarah, or Lizzie, or any outside threat. ‘I’ll not
’ave
it,’ she’d say. ‘I’ll not let ’em lay their ’ands on one o’ m’chicks.’

If he stayed away a week, she began to look terribly dejected, imagining that ‘men from the Ministry’ were coming to take her away, or murder her. ‘I know it,’ she said gloomily. ‘It’ll be one o’ them things in the papers.’

There were times when even Theo thought she was ‘seeing things’.

‘I see’d a couple o’ townees’ dogs,’ she said. ‘Black as sin! Coursin’ down the dingle to buggery and che-asin’ ’em little lambs! And I’d be gone out and find ’em dead and thinkin’ ’em dead o’ cold but them was dead o’ fright o’ the townees’ dogs.’

She hated to think that he would, some day, go away.

For hours on end, he used to sit by the fire listening to the harsh and earthy music of her voice. She spoke of the weather, the birds and animals, the stars and phases of the moon. He felt there was something sacred about her rags and, in their honour, composed this poem:

Five green jerseys

A thousand holes

And the Lights of Heaven shining through
.

He brought her little luxuries from Rhulen – a chocolate cake or a packet of dates – and, to earn an extra pound or two, he hired himself out as a drystone waller.

One of his first jobs took him to The Vision, where Kevin had backed the tractor into a pigsty.

Kevin was out of favour with his uncles.

He was due to take possession of the farm in a year and a half; yet showed not the least inclination to take up farming.

He mixed with the ‘county’ set. He drank. He ran up debts; and when the bank manager refused him a loan, he demonstrated his disdain for life by joining a parachute club. Then, to compound the catalogue of his infamies, he got a girl into trouble.

Usually, his grin was so infectious that the twins forgave him everything: this time, he was white with apprehension.
The
girl, he confessed, was Sarah’s daughter Eileen; and Benjamin banned him from the house.

Eileen was a pretty, purse-lipped girl of nineteen with a freckled nose and a head of bouncy russet curls. Her normal expression was a pout; yet, providing she wanted something, she could assume an air of saintlike simplicity. She was mad about horses, won trophies at gymkhanas and, like many horsy people, her financial needs were large.

She first met Kevin at the Lurkenhope Show.

The sight of his trim figure, perfectly balanced astride the bucking pony, brought her flesh out in goose-pimples. She felt a lump in her throat as he collected the prize. On learning that he was rich – or would be – she methodically laid her plans.

A week later, after flirting through a Country-and-Western evening at the Red Dragon, the pair crept into the back of Sarah’s Land Rover. Another week went by, and he had promised to marry her.

Warning her to tread warily with his uncles, he brought her to The Vision as a prospective bride, and though her table-manners were excellent, though she studiously admired every knick-knack in the house, and though Lewis thought her ‘quite a little piece’, it made Benjamin far from happy to think she was one of the Watkinses.