On The Black Hill (Vintage Classics) (4 page)

He helped her over a stile and they walked uphill across two fields overgrown with gorse and blackthorn. The sun had dropped behind the escarpment, and swirls of coppery cloud were trailing over the rim. The thorns bit her ankles and tiny beads of blood burst through the white of her stockings. She said, ‘I can manage,’ when he offered to carry her.

The moon was up by the time they came back to the horses. The moonlight caught the curve of her neck, and a nightingale flung liquid notes into the darkness. He slipped an arm around her waist and said, ‘Could you live in this?’

‘I could,’ she said, turning to face him, as he knotted his hands in the small of her back.

Next morning, she called on the vicar of Rhulen and asked him to publish the banns: on her finger she wore a ring of plaited grass stems.

The clergyman, who was having breakfast, spilled egg down his cassock and stuttered, ‘It would not have been your father’s wish.’ He advised her to wait six months before deciding – at which she pursed her lips and answered, ‘Winter is coming. We have no time to lose.’

Later in the day, a group of townswomen watched Amos helping her into his trap. The draper’s wife squinted angrily, as if eyeing the eye of a needle, and pronounced her ‘four months gone’. Another woman said, ‘For shame!’ – and all of them wondered what Amos Jones could see in ‘that hussy’.

At dawn on the Monday, long before anyone was about, Mary stood outside the Lurkenhope Estate Office, waiting for the Bickertons’ land-agent to discuss the terms of the lease. She was alone. Amos had little control of his manners when confronted with the presence of the gentry.

The agent was a jowly, wine-faced man, a distant cousin of the family, who had been cashiered from the Indian Army, and had lost his pension. They paid him a wretched salary; but since he had a head for figures and a method for dealing
with
‘uppity’ tenants, they allowed him to shoot their pheasants and drink their port.

He prided himself on his humour and, when Mary explained her visit, he rammed his thumbs into his waistcoat and roared with laughter:

‘So you’re thinking of joining the peasants? Ha! I wouldn’t!’

She blushed. High on the wall, there was a moth-eaten fox’s mask, snarling. He drummed his fingers on the leather top of his desk.

‘The Vision!’ he said abruptly. ‘Can’t say I’ve ever been to The Vision. Can’t even think where The Vision is! Let’s look it up on the map!’

He heaved himself to his feet and led her by the hand to the estate map that covered one end of the room. His fingernails were stained with nicotine.

He stood beside her, breathing hoarsely: ‘Rather cold up there on the mountain, what?’

‘Safer than on the plain,’ she said, disentangling her fingers from his.

He sat down again. He did not motion her to a chair. He muttered of ‘other applicants on the list’ and told her to wait four months for Colonel Bickerton’s reply.

‘Too late, I’m afraid,’ she smiled, and slipped away.

She walked back to the North Lodge and asked the keeper’s wife for a sheet of paper. She penned a note to Mrs Bickerton, whom she had met once with her father. The agent was furious to learn that a manservant had driven down from the castle inviting Mary to tea that same afternoon.

Mrs Bickerton was a frail, fair-skinned woman in her late thirties. As a girl, she had devoted herself to painting, and had lived in Florence. Then, when her talent seemed to desert her, she married a handsome but brainless cavalry officer, possibly for his collection of Old Masters, possibly to annoy her artist friends.

The Colonel had recently resigned his commission without ever having fired at an enemy. They had a son called Reggie, and two daughters – Nancy and Isobel. The butler showed Mary through the rose-garden gate.

Mrs Bickerton was sheltering from the hot sun, beside a bamboo tea-table, in the shade of a cedar of Lebanon. Pink rambler roses tumbled over the south front, but holland-blinds were drawn in all the windows, and the castle looked uninhabited. It was a ‘fake’ castle, built in the 1820s. From another lawn came the knock of croquet balls and the noise of young, moneyed laughter.

‘China or Indian?’ Mrs Bickerton had to repeat the question. Three ropes of pearls fell into the ruffles of her grey chiffon blouse.

‘India,’ her guest replied vaguely; and as the older woman poured from the silver teapot, Mary heard her say, ‘Are you sure it’s the right thing?’

‘I am sure,’ she said, and bit her lip.

‘I like the Welsh,’ Mrs Bickerton went on. ‘But they do seem to get so angry, later. It must be to do with the climate.’

‘No,’ repeated Mary. ‘I am sure.’

Mrs Bickerton’s face was sad and drawn, and her hand was trembling. She tried to offer Mary the post of governess to her children: it was useless to argue.

‘I shall speak to my husband,’ she said. ‘You can count on the farm.’

As the gate swung open, Mary wondered if the same pink roses would flower so freely, high up on her side of the mountain. Before the month was out, she and Amos had made plans to last the rest of their lives.

Her father’s library contained a number of rare volumes; and these, sold to an antiquarian bookseller from Oxford, paid for two years’ rent, a pair of draught horses, four milch cows, twenty fattening cattle, a plough and a second-hand chaff-cutter. The lease was signed. The house was scrubbed and whitewashed, and the front door painted brown. Amos hung up a branch of rowan to ‘keep off the bad eyes’ and bought a flock of white pigeons for the dovecote.

One day, he and his father carted the piano and four-poster from Bryn-Draenog. They had the ‘Devil’s job’ getting the bed upstairs; and, afterwards in the pub, Old Sam bragged to his cronies that The Vision was ‘God’s own little love-nest’.

The bride had one anxiety: that her sister might come from Cheltenham and ruin the wedding. She sighed with relief to read the letter of refusal and, when she came to the words ‘beneath you’, burst into a fit of uncontrollable laughter and tossed it in the fire with the last of her father’s papers.

By the time of the first frosts, the new Mrs Jones was pregnant.

SHE SPENT THE
first months of her marriage making improvements to the house.

The winter was hard. From January to April the snow never melted off the hill and the frozen leaves of foxgloves drooped like dead donkeys’ ears. Every morning she peered from the bedroom window to see if the larches were black or crisped with rime. The animals were silent in the deep cold, and the chatter of her sewing machine could be heard as far as the lambing paddock.

She made cretonne curtains for the four-poster and green plush curtains for the parlour. She cut up an old red flannel petticoat and made a rag rug, of roses, to go in the kitchen hearth. After supper, she would sit on the upright settle, her knees covered in crochet-work, while he gazed in adoration at his clever little spider.

He worked in all weathers – ploughing, fencing, ditching, laying drainage pipes, or building a drystone wall. At six in the evening, dog-tired and dirty, he came back to a mug of hot tea and a pair of warmed carpet slippers. Sometimes, he came back soaked to the skin and clouds of steam would billow upwards to the rafters.

She never knew how tough he really was.

‘Do take off those clothes,’ she’d scold him. ‘You’ll catch your death of pneumonia.’

‘I expect,’ he’d smile, and puff rings of tobacco smoke in her face.

He treated her as a fragile object that had come by chance into his possession and might easily break in his hands. He was terrified of hurting her, or of letting his hot blood carry
him
away. The sight of her whalebone corset was enough to unman him completely.

Before his marriage, he had doused himself once a week in the wash-house. Now, for fear of upsetting her sensibilities, he insisted on having hot water in the bedroom.

A Minton jug and basin, stencilled with a trellis of ivy leaves, stood on the wash-stand under the Holman Hunt engraving. And before putting on his nightshirt, he would strip to the waist and lather his chest and armpits. A candle stood beside the soap-dish; and Mary would lie back on the pillow watching the candlelight as it flickered red through his sideburns, threw a golden rim around his shoulders, and cast a big, dark shadow on the ceiling.

Yet he felt so awkward when washing, that if ever he sensed her eyeing him through the bed-curtains, he would wring out the sponge and snuff the candle, and bring to bed both the smell of animals and the scent of lavender soap.

On Sunday mornings, they drove down to Lurkenhope to take Holy Communion in the parish church. Reverently, she let the wafer moisten on her tongue: ‘The Body of Our Lord Jesus Christ which is given for you …’ Reverently, she raised the chalice to her lips: ‘The Blood of Our Lord Jesus Christ which is shed for you …’ Then, lifting her gaze to the brass cross on the altar, she tried to concentrate on the Passion, but her thoughts would wander to the hard, breathing body beside her.

As for their neighbours, most of them were Chapel-folk whose mistrust of the English went back, centuries before Non-conformism, to the days of the Border Barons. The women especially were suspicious of Mary; but she soon won them over.

Her housekeeping was the envy of the valley; and at teatime on Sundays, providing the lanes were clear of ice, four or five pony traps would drive up to The Vision yard. The Reuben Joneses were regulars, as were Ruth and Dai Morgan the Bailey; young Haines of Red Daren, and Watkins the Coffin, a despairing pox-pitted fellow, who despite his club-foot would hobble over the mountain from Craig-y-Fedw.

The guests came in with solemn faces and Bibles under
their
arms: their piety soon vanished as they tucked into Mary’s fruitcake, or the fingers of cinnamon toast, or the scones with thick fresh cream and strawberry jam.

Presiding over these tea-parties, Mary felt that she had been a farmer’s wife for years, and that her daily activities – of churning milk, drenching calves, or feeding poultry – were not things she had learned but had come as second nature. Gaily, she would chatter away about scab, or colic, or laminitis. ‘Really,’ she’d say, ‘I can’t think why the mangolds are so small this year.’ Or ‘There’s so little hay, I don’t know how we’ll last the winter through.’

Up at the end of the table, Amos would be terribly embarrassed. He hated to hear his clever wife making a fool of herself. And if she saw him bridling with annoyance, she would change the subject and amuse her guests with the watercolours in her Indian sketchbook.

She showed them the Taj Mahal, the Burning Ghats and the naked yogis who sat on beds of nails.

‘And ’ow big’s them elephants?’ asked Watkins the Coffin.

‘About three times the size of a carthorse,’ she said, and the cripple creased with laughter at the absurdity of the idea.

India was too far, too big and too confused to appeal to the Welshmen’s imagination. Yet – as Amos never tired of reminding them – her feet had trodden in the steps of His Feet; she, too, had seen the real Rose of Sharon; and for her, Carmel, Tabor, Hebron and Galilee were as real as, say, Rhulen, or Glascwm, or Llanfihangel-nant-Melan.

Most Radnorshire farmers knew chapter and verse of the Bible, preferring the Old Testament to the New, because in the Old Testament there were many more stories about sheep-farming. And Mary had such a talent for describing the Holy Land that all their favourite characters seemed to float before their eyes: Ruth in the cornfield; Jacob and Esau; Joseph in his patchwork coat; or Hagar, the Rejected One, gasping for water in the shade of a thornbush.

Not everyone, of course, believed her – least of all her mother-in-law, Hannah Jones.

She and Sam had the habit of turning up uninvited; and she would brood over the table, wrapped in a fringed black
shawl
, gobbling up the sandwiches and making everyone feel uncomfortable.

One Sunday, she interrupted Mary to ask whether ‘by any chance’ she’d been to Babylon.

‘No, Mother. Babylon is not in the Holy Land.’

‘No,’ echoed Haines of Red Daren. ‘It be not in the Holy Land.’

No matter how hard Mary tried to be pleasant, the old woman had hated her son’s new wife on sight. She ruined the wedding-breakfast by calling her ‘Your Ladyship!’ to her face. The first family lunch ended in tears when she crooked her finger and sneered, ‘Past the age of childbearing, I would have said.’

She never set foot in The Vision without finding something to scorn: the napkins folded like waterlilies, the marmalade pot, or the caper sauce for mutton. And when she ridiculed the silver toast-rack, Amos warned his wife to put it away ‘or you’ll have us the laughing-stock’.

He dreaded his mother’s visits. Once, she jabbed Mary’s terrier with the ferrule of her umbrella and, from that day, the little dog would bare its teeth, and try to scuttle under her skirt and nip her ankle.

The final break came when she snatched some butter from her daughter-in-law’s hand and screamed, ‘You don’t waste good butter on pastry!’ – and Mary, whose nerves were on edge, screamed back, ‘Well, what do you waste it on? You, I suppose?’

Though he loved his wife, though he knew she was in the right, Amos flew to his mother’s defence. ‘Mother means well,’ he’d say. Or ‘She’s had a hard life.’ And when Hannah took him aside to complain of Mary’s extravagance and ‘stuck-up’ ways, he let her finish her diatribe and – in spite of himself – agreed with it.

The truth was that Mary’s ‘improvements’ made him more, not less, uncomfortable. Her spotless flagstones were a barrier to be crossed. Her damask table-cloths were a reproach to his table-manners. He was bored by the novels she read aloud after supper – and her food was, frankly, uneatable.

As a wedding present, Mrs Bickerton had sent a copy of
Mrs Beeton’s Book of Household Management
– and though its recipes were quite unsuited to a farmhouse kitchen, Mary read it from cover to cover, and took to planning menus in advance.

So, instead of the predictable round of boiled bacon, dumplings and potatoes, she served up dishes he’d never even heard of – a fricassee of chicken or a jugged hare, or mutton with rowanberry sauce. When he complained of constipation, she said, ‘That means we must grow green vegetables,’ and made out a list of seeds to order for the garden. But when she suggested planting an asparagus bed, he flew into a towering rage. Who did she think she was? Did she think she’d married into the gentry?