Red Sky at Sunrise: Cider with Rosie, As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning, A Moment of War (12 page)

Granny watched them awhile, then her jaws snapped shut; worse still, her gums stopped chewing. Then she clapped her hands with a terrible crack.

‘You baggages! You jumped-up varmints! Be off, or I’ll fetch me broom!’

The girls retreated at the dainty double, surprised but in no way insulted. Their sense of fashion was unassailable, for were they not up with the times? How could the old girl know about belts and bandeaux? – after all, she was only a peasant…

But later Gran Trill took our Mother aside and spoke grimly of her concern.

‘You better watch them gels of yourn. They’ll bring shame on us one of these days. Strutting and tennis-playing and aping the gentry – it’s carnal and blasphemy. Just you watch ‘em, missus; I don’t like their doings. Humble gels got to remember their stations.’

Mother, I fancy, was half with her there; but she wouldn’t have dreamed of interfering.

For several more years the lives of the two old ladies continued to revolve in intimate enmity around each other. Like cold twin stars, linked but divided, they survived by a mutual balance. Both of them reached back similarly in time, shared the same modes and habits, the same sense of feudal order, the same rampaging terrible God. They were far more alike than unalike, and could not abide each other.

They arranged things therefore so that they never met. They used separate paths when they climbed the bank, they shopped on different days, they relieved themselves in different areas, and staggered their church-going hours. But each one knew always what the other was up to, and passionately disapproved. Granny Wallon worked at her flowering vats, boiling and blending her wines; or crawled through her cabbages; or tapped on our windows, gossiped, complained, or sang. Granny Trill continued to rise in the dark, comb her waxen hair, sit out in the wood, chew, sniff, and suck up porridge, and study her almanac. Yet between them they sustained a mutual awareness based solely on ear and nostril. When Granny Wallon’s wines boiled, Granny Trill had convulsions; when Granny Trill took snuff, Granny Wallon had strictures – and neither let the other forget it. So all day they listened, sniffed, and pried, rapping on floors and ceilings, and prowled their rooms with hawking coughs, chivvying each other long-range. It was a tranquil, bitter-pleasant life, perfected by years of custom; and to me they both seemed everlasting, deathless crones of an eternal mythology; they had always been somewhere there in the wainscot and I could imagine no world without them.

Then one day, as Granny Trill was clambering out of her wood, she stumbled and broke her hip. She went to bed then for ever. She lay patient and yellow in a calico coat, her combed hair fine as a girl’s. She accepted her doom without complaint, as though some giant authority – Squire, father, or God – had ordered her there to receive it.

‘I knowed it was coming,’ she told our Mother, ‘after that visitation. I saw it last week sitting at the foot of me bed. Some person in white; I dunno…’

There was a sharp early rap on our window next morning. Granny Wallon was bobbing outside.

‘Did you hear him, missus?’ she asked knowingly. ‘He been a-screeching around since midnight.’ The death-bird was Granny Wallon’s private pet and messenger, and she gave a skip as she told us about him. ‘He called threc-a-four times. Up in them yews. Her’s going, you mark my words.’

And that day indeed Granny Trill died, whose bones were too old to mend. Like a delicate pale bubble, blown a little higher and further than the other girls of her generation, she had floated just long enough for us to catch sight of her, had hovered for an instant before our eyes; and then had popped suddenly, and disappeared for ever, leaving nothing on the air but a faint-drying image and the tiniest cloud of snuff.

The little church was packed for her funeral, for the old lady had been a landmark. They carried her coffin along the edge of the wood and then drew it on a cart through the village. Granny Wallon, dressed in a shower of jets, followed some distance behind; and during the service she kept to the back of the church and everybody admired her.

All went well till the lowering of the coffin, when there was a sudden and distressing commotion. Granny Wallon, ribbons flying, her bonnet awry, fought her way to the side of the grave.

‘It’s a lie!’ she screeched, pointing down at the coffin.

‘That baggage were younger’n me! Ninety-five she says! – ain’t more’n ninety, an’ I gone on ninety-two! It’s a crime you letting ‘er go to ‘er Maker got up in such brazen lies! Dig up the old devil! Get ‘er brass plate off! It’s insulting the living church!…’

They carried her away, struggling and crying, kicking out with her steel-sprung boots. Her cries grew fainter and were soon obliterated by the sounds of the grave-diggers’ spades. The clump of clay falling on Granny Trill’s coffin sealed her with her inscription for ever; for no one knew the truth of her age, there was no one old enough to know.

Granny Wallon had triumphed, she had buried her rival; and now there was no more to do. From then on she faded and diminished daily, kept to her house and would not be seen. Sometimes we heard mysterious knocks in the night, rousing and summoning sounds. But the days were silent, no one walked in the garden, or came skipping to claw at our window. The wine fires sank and died in the kitchen, as did the sweet fires of obsession.

About two weeks later, of no special disease, Granny Wallon gave up in her sleep. She was found on her bed, dressed in bonnet and shawl, and her signalling broom in her hand. Her open eyes were fixed on the ceiling in a listening stare of death. There was nothing in fact to keep her alive; no cause, no bite, no fury. ‘Er-Down-Under had joined ‘Er-Up-Atop, having lived closer than anyone knew.

Soon after the First World War a violent event took place in the village which drew us together in a web of silence and cut us off for a while almost entirely from the outside world. I was too young at the time to be surprised by it, but I knew those concerned and learned the whole story early. Though it was seldom discussed – and never with strangers – the facts of that night were familiar to us all, and common consent buried the thing down deep and raked out the tracks around it. So bloody, raw, and sudden it was, it resembled an outbreak of family madness which we took pains to conceal, out of shame and pride, and for the sake of those infected.

The crime occurred a few days before Christmas, on a night of deep snow and homecoming; the time when the families called in their strays for an annual feast of goose. The night was as cold as Cotswold cold can be, with a wind coming straight from the Arctic. We children were in bed blowing hard on our knees; wives toasted their feet by the fires; while the men and youths were along at the pub, drinking hot-pokered cider, cutting cards for crib, and watching their wet boots steam.

But few cards were dealt or played that night. An apparition intervened. The door blew open to a gust of snow and a tall man strode into the bar. He seemed to the drinkers both unknown and familiar; he had a sharp tanned face, a nasal twang, and convinced of his welcome he addressed everyone by name, while they lowered their eyes and nodded. Slapping the bar, he ordered drinks all round, and then he began to talk.

Everyone, save the youths, remembered this man; now they studied the change within him. Years ago, as a pale and bony lad, he had been packed off to one of the Colonies, sent by subscription and the prayers of the Church, as many a poor boy before him. Usually they went, and were never heard from again, and their existence was soon forgotten. Now one of them had returned like a gilded ghost, successful and richly dressed, had come back to taunt the stay-at-homes with his boasting talk and money.

He had landed that morning, he said, at Bristol, from an Auckland mutton-boat. The carriage he’d hired had broken down in the snow, so he was finishing his journey on foot. He was on his way to his parents’ cottage to give them a Christmas surprise; another mile up the valley, another mile in the snow – he couldn’t pass the old pub, now, could he?

He stood feet apart, his back to the bar, displaying himself to the company. Save for his yelping voice, the pub was silent, and the drinkers watched him closely. He’d done pretty well out there, he said, raised cattle, made a heap of money. It was easy enough if you just had the guts and weren’t stuck in the bogs like some… The old men listened, and the young men watched, with the oil lamps red in their eyes…

He sent round more drinks and the men drank them down. He talked of the world and its width and richness. He lectured the old ones for the waste of their lives and the youths for their dumb contentment. They slogged for the Squire and the tenant-farmers for a miserable twelve bob a week. They lived on potatoes and by touching their caps, they hadn’t a sovereign to rub between them, they saw not a thing save muck and each other – and perhaps Stroud on a Saturday night. Did they know what he’d done? what he’d seen? what he’d made? His brown face was aglow with whisky. He spread a sheaf of pound notes along the bar and fished a fat gold watch from his pocket. That’s nothing, he said, that’s only a part of it. They should see his big farm in New Zealand – horses, carriages, meat every day, and he never said ‘sir’ to no one.

The old men kept silent, but drank their free drinks and sniggered every so often. The youths in the shadows just gazed at the man, and gazed at his spinning watch, and as he grew more drunk they looked at each other, then stole away one by one…

The weather outside had suddenly hardened into a blizzard of cutting snow; the night shut down to the blinding cold and the village curled up in its sheets. When the public house closed and turned down its lamps, the New Zealander was the last to leave. He refused a lantern, said he was born here, wasn’t he? and paid for his bill with gold. Then he buttoned his coat, shouted good-night, and strode up the howling valley. Warm with whisky and nearing home, he went singing up the hill. There were those in their beds who heard his last song, pitched wailing against the storm.

When he reached the stone-cross the young men were waiting, a bunched group, heads down in the wind.

‘Well, Vincent?’ they said; and he stopped, and stopped singing.

They hit him in turn, beat him down to his knees, beat him bloodily down in the snow. They beat and kicked him for the sake of themselves, as he lay there face down, groaning. Then they ripped off his coat, emptied his pockets, threw him over a wall, and left him. He was insensible now from his wounds and the drink; the storm blew all night across him. He didn’t stir again from the place where he lay; and in the morning he was found frozen to death.

The police came, of course, but discovered nothing. Their inquiries were met by stares. But the tale spread quickly from mouth to mouth, was deliberately spread amongst us, was given to everyone, man and child, that we might learn each detail and hide it. The police left at last with the case unsolved; but neither we nor they forgot it…

About ten years later an old lady lay dying, and towards the end she grew light-headed. The subject of her wandering leaked out somehow: she seemed to be haunted by a watch. ‘The watch,’ she kept mumbling, ‘they maun find the watch. Tell the boy to get it hid.’ A dark-suited stranger, with a notebook in his hand,appeared suddenly at her bedside. While she tossed and muttered, he sat and waited, head bent to her whispering mouth. He was patient, anonymous, and never made any fuss; he just sat by her bed all day, his notebook open, his pencil poised, the blank pages like listening ears.