On The Black Hill (Vintage Classics) (7 page)

In another room – in what had once been the parlour – two
heifers
were munching hay; and an acrid smell oozed round the kitchen door and mingled with the smell of peat and curds. Aggie Watkins wiped her hands on her apron before putting a pinch of tea in the pot:

‘An’ the weather,’ she said. ‘Bloomin’ freezing for June!’

‘Freezing!’ said Sam.

Lewis and Benjamin sat on the edge of a chair, while the red-haired boy crouched over a kettle and fanned the flames with a goose’s wing.

The boy’s name was Jim. He stuck out his tongue and spat. ‘Aagh! The devil!’ Aggie Watkins raised her fist and sent him scampering for the door. ‘Take ye no notice,’ she said, unfolding a clean linen table-cloth; for, no matter how hard the times, she always spread a clean white linen cloth for tea.

She was a good woman who hoped the world was not as bad as everyone said. She had a bad heart brought on by poverty and overwork. Sometimes, she took her spinning-wheel up the mountain and spun the wisps of sheep’s wool that had caught in the gorse and heather.

She never forgot an insult and she never forgot a kindness. Once, when she was laid up, Mary sent Sam over with some oranges and a packet of Smyrna figs. Aggie had never tasted figs before and, to her, they were like manna from Heaven.

From that day, she never let Sam go back without a present in return. ‘Take her a pot of blackberry jam,’ she’d say. Or ‘What about some Welsh cakes? I know she likes Welsh cakes.’ Or ‘Would she have some duck eggs this time?’ And when her one scraggy lilac was in bloom, she heaped him with branches as if hers were the only lilac in creation.

The Watkinses were Chapel-folk and they were childless.

Perhaps it was because they were childless that they were always looking for souls to save. After the Great War, Aggie managed to ‘save’ several children; and if anyone said, ‘He was raised at The Rock,’ or ‘She was reared at The Rock,’ you knew for sure the child was illegitimate or loony. But in those days the Watkinses had only ‘saved’ the boy Jim and a girl called Ethel – a big girl of ten or so, who would spread her thighs and stare at the twins with glum fascination, covering one eye, then the other, as if she were seeing double.

From The Rock a drovers’ trail wound up the north shoulder of the Black Hill, in places so sharply that the old man had to pause and catch his breath.

Lewis and Benjamin gambolled ahead, put up grouse, played finger-football with rabbit-droppings, peered over the precipice onto the backs of kestrels and ravens and, every now and then, crept off into the bracken, and hid.

They liked to pretend they were lost in a forest, like the Twins in Grimms’ fairy-tale, and that each stalk of bracken was the trunk of a forest tree. Everything was calm and damp and cool in the green shade. Toadstools reared their caps through the dross of last year’s growth; and the wind whistled far above their heads.

They lay on their backs and gazed at the clouds that crossed the fretted patches of sky; at the zig-zagging dots which were flies; and, way above, the other black dots which were the swallows wheeling.

Or they would dribble their saliva onto a gob of cuckoo-spit; and when their mouths ran dry, they would press their foreheads together, each twin losing himself in the other’s grey eye, until their grandfather roused them from their reverie. Then they bounded out along the path and pretended to have been there all the time.

On fine summer evenings, Sam walked them as far as the Eagle Stone – a menhir of grey granite, splotched with orange lichen, which, in the raking light, resembled a perching eagle.

Sam said there was an ‘Old ’Un’ buried there. Or else it was a horses’ grave, or a place where the ‘Pharisees’ danced. His father had once seen the fairies – ‘Them as ’ad wings like dragonflies’ – but he could never remember where.

Lifting the boys onto the stone, Sam would point out farms and chapels and Father Ambrosius’s monastery nestling in the valley below. Some evenings, the valley was shrouded in mist; but beyond rose the Radnor Hills, their humped outlines receding grey on grey towards the end of the world.

Sam knew all their names: the Whimble, the Bach and the Black Mixen – ‘and that be the Smatcher nearby where I was born’. He told them stories of Prince Llewellyn and his dog, or more shadowy figures like Arthur or Merlin or the Black
Vaughan
; by some stretch of the imagination, he had got William the Conqueror mixed up with Napoleon Bonaparte.

The twins looked on the path to the Eagle Stone as their own private property. ‘It’s Our Path!’ they’d shout, if they happened to meet a party of hikers. The sight of a bootprint in the mud was enough to put them in a towering rage, and they’d try to rub it out with a stick.

One sunset, as they came over the crest of the hill, instead of the familiar silhouette, they saw a pair of boaters. Two young ladies, arms akimbo, sat perched on top of the stone; a few paces off, a young man in grey flannels was bending behind a camera tripod.

‘Keep still,’ he called out from under the flapping black cloth. ‘Smile when I say so! One … Two … Three … Smile!’

Suddenly, before Sam could stop him, Lewis had grabbed his stick and walloped the photographer behind the knees.

The tripod lurched, the camera fell, and the girls, convulsed with giggles, almost fell off the stone.

Reggie Bickerton, however – it was he who was the cameraman – turned crimson in the face and chased Lewis through the heather, shouting, ‘I’ll skin the blighter!’ And though his sisters called out, ‘No, Reggie! No! No! Don’t hurt him!’ he bent the little boy over his knee and spanked him.

On the way home, Sam taught his grandsons the Welsh for ‘dirty Saxon’, but Mary was crestfallen at the news.

She felt crushed and ashamed – ashamed of her boys and ashamed of being ashamed of them. She tried to write a note of apology to Mrs Bickerton but the nib scratched and the words would not come.

THAT AUTUMN, ALREADY
wearied by the weight of the oncoming winter, Mary went on frequent visits to the vicar. The Reverend Thomas Tuke was a classical scholar of private means, who had chosen the living of Lurkenhope because the squire was a Catholic, and because the vicarage garden lay on greensand – a soil that was perfect for growing rare Himalayan shrubs.

A tall, bony man with a mass of snowy curls, he had the habit of fixing his parishioners with an amber stare before offering them the glory of his profile.

His rooms bore witness to a well-ordered mind and, since his housekeeper was stone-deaf, he was under no obligation to speak to her. The shelves of his library were lined with sets of the classics. He knew the whole of Homer by heart: each morning, between a cold bath and breakfast, he would compose a few hexameters of his own. On the wall of the staircase was a fan-shaped arrangement of oars – he had been a Cambridge rowing blue – and in the front hall, ranked like a colony of penguins, were several pairs of riding boots, for he was also Joint Master of the Rhulen Vale Hunt.

To the villagers their vicar was a mystery. Most of the women were in love with him – or transported by the timbre of his voice. But he was far too busy to attend to their spiritual needs, and his actions often outraged them.

One Sunday, before Holy Communion, some women in flowery hats were approaching the church door, their features reverently composed to receive the Sacrament. Suddenly, a window of the vicarage banged open; the vicar’s voice bawled out, ‘Mind your heads!’ and he fired off a
couple
of barrels at the wood-pigeons crooning in the elms.

The shot fell pattering among the tombstones. ‘Bloody heathen!’ muttered Amos; and Mary hardly held back her giggles.

She liked the vicar’s sense of the ridiculous, and his sharp turn of phrase. To him – and him alone – she confessed that farm life depressed her; that she was starved of conversation and ideas.

‘You’re not the only one,’ he said, squeezing her hand. ‘So we’d better make the best of it.’

He lent her books. Shakespeare or Euripides, the Upanishads or Zola – her mind ranged freely over the length and breadth of literature. Never, he said, had he met a more intelligent woman, as if this in itself were a contradiction in terms.

He spoke with regret of his youthful decision to take Holy Orders. He even regretted the Bible – to the extent of distributing translations of the
Odyssey
round the village:

‘And who, after all, were the Israelites? Sheep-thieves, my dear! A tribe of wandering sheep-thieves!’

His hobby was bee-keeping; and in a corner of his garden he had planted a border of pollen-bearing flowers.

‘There you are!’ he’d exclaim as he opened a hive. ‘The Athens of the Insect World!’ Then, gesturing to the architecture of honey-cells, he would hold forth on the essential nature of civilization, its rulers and ruled, its wars and conquests, its cities and suburbs, and the relays of workers, on which the cities lived.

‘And the drones,’ he’d say. ‘How well we know the drones!’

‘Yes,’ said Mary. ‘I have known drones.’

He encouraged her to replace her own hives. Halfway through the first season, one of them was attacked by wax-moth, and the bees swarmed.

Amos ambled into the kitchen and, with an amused grin, said, ‘Your bees is all knit up on the damsons.’

His offer of help was worse than useless. Mary posted the boys to keep watch in case the swarm flew off, and hurried to Lurkenhope to fetch the vicar: Benjamin would never forget
the
sight of the old man descending the ladder, his arms, his chest and neck enveloped in a buzzing brown mass of bees.

‘Aren’t you afraid?’ he asked, as the vicar scooped them up in handfuls and put them in a sack.

‘Certainly not! Bees only sting cowards!’

In another corner of his garden, the vicar had made a rockery for the flowering bulbs he had collected on his travels in Greece. In March there were crocuses and scillas; in April, cyclamen, tulips and dog’s-tooth violets; and there was a huge dark purple arum that stank of old meat.

Mary loved to picture these flowers growing wild, in sheets of colour, on the mountains; and she pitied them, exiled on the rockery.

One blustery afternoon, as the boys were booting a football round the lawn, the vicar took her to see a fritillary from the slopes of Mount Ida in Crete.

‘Very rare in cultivation,’ he said. ‘Had to send half my bulbs to Kew!’

Suddenly, Lewis lobbed the ball in the air; a gust carried it sideways, and it landed on the rockery where it smashed the fragile bell-flower.

Mary dropped to her knees and tried to straighten the stem, stifling a sob, not so much for the flower as for the future of her sons.

‘Yokels!’ she said, bitterly. ‘That’s what they’ll grow up to be! That’s if their father has his way!’

‘Not if I have my way,’ said the vicar, and lifted her to her feet.

After Matins that Sunday, he stood by the south porch shaking hands with his parishioners and, when Amos’s turn came, said: ‘Wait for me a minute, would you, Jones? I only want a word or two.’

‘Yes, sir!’ said Amos, and paced around the font, shooting nervous glances up at the bell-ropes.

The vicar beckoned him into the vestry. ‘It’s about your boys,’ he said, pulling the surplice over his head. ‘Bright boys, both of them! High time they were in school!’

‘Yes, sir!’ Amos stammered. He had not meant to say ‘Yes!’
or
‘Sir!’ The vicar’s tone had caught him off his guard.

‘There’s a good man! So that settles it! Term begins on Monday.’

‘Yes, sir!’ he had said it again, this time in irony, or as a reflection of his rage. He rammed on his hat and strode out among the sunwashed tombstones.

Jackdaws were wheeling round the belfry, and the elm-trees were creaking in the wind. Mary and the children had already mounted the trap. Amos cracked his whip over the pony’s back, and they lurched up the street, swerving and scattering some Baptists.

Little Rebecca yelled with fright.

‘Why must you drive so fast?’ Mary tugged at his sleeve.

‘Because you make me mad!’

After a silent lunch, he went out walking on the hill. He would have liked to work, but it was the Sabbath. So he walked alone, over and round the Black Hill. It was dark when he came home and he was still cursing Mary and the vicar.

ALL THE SAME
, the twins went off to school.

At seven in the morning, they set off in black Norfolk jackets and knickerbockers, and starched Eton collars that chafed their necks and were tied with grosgrain bows. On the damp days Mary dosed them with cod-liver oil and made them wrap up in scarves. She packed their sandwiches in greaseproof paper, and slipped them in their satchels, along with their books.

They sat in a draughty classroom where a black clock hammered out the hours and Mr Birds taught geography, history and English; and Miss Clifton taught mathematics, science and scripture.

They did not like Mr Birds.

His purple face, the veins on his temples, his bad breath and his habit of spitting into a snuff handkerchief – all made a most disagreeable impression, and they cringed whenever he came near.

For all that, they learned to recite Shelley’s ‘Ode to a Skylark’; to spell Titicaca and Popocatepetl; that the British Empire was the best of all possible empires; that the French were cowards, the Americans traitors; and that Spaniards burned little Protestant boys on bonfires.

On the other hand they went with pleasure to the classes of Miss Clifton, a buxom woman with milky skin and hair the colour of lemon peel.

Benjamin was her favourite. No one knew how she told the difference; but he was, most certainly, her favourite and, as she bent forward to correct his sums, he would inhale her warm motherly smell and snuggle his head between her velvet
bodice
and the dangling gold chain of her crucifix. She flushed with pleasure when he brought her a bunch of sweet-williams, and, during elevenses, took the twins to her room and told them they were ‘proper little gentlemen’.

Her favouritism did not make them popular. The school bully, a bailiff’s son called George Mudge, sensed a challenge to his authority and was always trying to part them.