The Hollow Land (15 page)

Henry Roberto Hewitson III's heart, however, nobody could imagine beating strongly. It was difficult to imagine it beating at all. More likely, under his silky silvery suit and his silky silvery tie and his shirt so white it made you blink, inside his ribcage, much more likely you would have found a neat little silvery box clicking away with bleeping signals to keep Henry Hewitson III
 
moving. Henry's blood was hard to imagine too. Cut him and out would come—surely—not blood but a clear and silvery powerful fluid rather like expensive gin.

Henry Hewitson III
 
was a specialist in money, and in mining, and he got up in the morning and went to bed at night without a fear in his head that anything might ever go against him. He was more successful, and grander in every way, than the other people at Jimmie's party and he stood a little to one side of them. He only stayed for half an hour as he had his private aeroplane to catch. He stood in his silvery suit with his slim and silvery briefcase in his hand and spoke to nobody much. When he went to say goodbye to Jimmie Meccer, Jimmie took his clean pale hand and said, “Now then—
Henry
Hewitson? You'll be Mary's auntie's mother's grandson then? Old Jimmie Hewitson's wife up at Light Trees. Light Trees was always Hewitsons. You'll have to pay it a visit.”

And in the aeroplane going home, Henry's small junction box of a heart clicked away and his pale eyes stared straight ahead of him at the back of the seat in front because he never was one to look out of windows: and then crack! The little chink that set the landscape melting and changing underfoot happened in his mind.

Bright Trees? Eight Trees? What had Jimmie Metcalf said? Hadn't there been something? Something his father had told him? No—his grandfather. Long ago, when he was hardly at school. “Light Trees will be Henry's. It's always gone to a Hewitson through the cousins. Fine old house away up in the fells. Wonderful land, stuffed full of minerals never worked out. Left lying there under the ground when the slump came. Maybe oil there, I always thought.”

But then the aeroplane began to land. The chink sealed over leaving the surface of Henry's mind as smooth as silk for many years.

 

Down in Teesdales' farm kitchen many years later, Mrs. Teesdale took a letter from the postman with a South American stamp on it. “Jimmie Meccer,” she said. “He still keeps writing. He's early for Christmas this time. It'll have to keep till tonight. It's hay-time.”

She stood the letter on the kitchen mantelpiece and got on with packing baskets with field dinners they were carrying up on a harness to the men. It was a doubtful day but Mr. Teesdale and Bell and Eileen's husband had decided to start. They were beginning by tradition with the Home Field, which always had to be done before Batemans arrived for their holidays. Nobody remembered now, after so many, many summers, why the Home Field had to be cut before Batemans arrived. And in so many, many summers nobody remembered one so queer as this. First burning sun, then long soaking days of rain, then thunder, then sun again for six weeks. Never two days right together. Poppet Teesdale said she'd never heard them say anything good about any year, but Grandad Hewitson said no, this one was different. Old Hewitson sat about a lot now and was far past even thistling—for it was the year 1999—but his memory was perfect. “The last time we had a summer like this,” he said, “was 1927, when there was an eclipse of the sun. As there's to be this year. Though whether I'll be turning out to see this one is something still to be thought about.”

“You'll see it, Grandpa. We'll carry you on up.”

“Carry me on up? Sounds as if you're angels.”

“On up onto the top. You know what we mean. We'll all be going. On up above Light Trees for the eclipse.”

“You'll not get me up there this time. I'm beyond going up the Nine Standards.”

“Everyone'll be up the Nine Standards. Except the odd crank like old Kendal who's booked his place years ago for Cornwall, where it's to be total.”

“Total eclipse,” said Grandpa, “total eclipse of the sun. They held a total eclipse up here in 1927 on this very spot. Better than it'll be this time where we're a fraction off the track. In '27 we all got let out of school for it. We had to lie on our backs in t'school yard with little bits of black glass in front of our eyes. We laid out in rows, all laughing on and chit-chattering. There was ale! Granny Crack's lass lying out next to me in her black woollen stockings and button shoes. Alice Crack she was then, from over Kisdon. Bright red hair. My—she was a talker. She changed. ‘Alice Crack,' she said—the schoolteacher—‘Alice Crack, if you don't stop talking, we'll all go inside and you won't any of you see it and if you don't see it now you'll never see it, for there won't be another till 1999 and that one won't be total.' ‘Don't see why I shouldn't see that'un,' says Alice Crack, ‘I'll be scarcely ninety. You won't see it though, will you, Miss?' So she had to go inside and she didn't see it. She had to sit at her desk. She cried an' all.”

“Well, she'll see it this time,” said Mrs. Teesdale. “We promised we'd take her. Lord knows how. Maybe in a pram. She's a fair weight yet, too.”

“I don't ever see,” said Poppet, who was over for hay-time from down the road, her husband being up the fell all day with the rest, “why it's got to be up at the Nine Standards we have to do things.”

“Always was,” said her mother-in-law, “it's a tradition.”

“Time some traditions was looked over and sorted out,” said Old Hewitson. “Traipsing here and there. The Jubilee—all the jubilees. Why some of them still goes up for Guy Fawkes to this day.”

“Old Mr. Kendal says that people have gone up there since before the Romans,” said Poppet. “He says the Nine Standards are probably Roman soldiers turned to stone. Says it's part of the Lost Legion of the Ninth they used to write about in the old children's books. They never got to Scotland, Mr. Kendal said. They only got as far as the Rigg and got turned to stone.”

“Kendal,” said Old Hewitson, “always read over-many fond books.”

“He says before the Romans the Rigg was where the Celts used to drive their cattle through the smoke.”

“That,” said Grandad Hewitson, “is pure ridiculous Kendal talk. No folks, not even Romans, was daft enough to take cattle up yonder.”

“For sacrifice and that,” said Poppet's girl, Anne.

“It'd be sacrifice all right, sacrificing good money int' market. They'd be good for nowt, hiked all the way up to them Nine Standards and put through smoke.”

“Nor us neither going gawking at eclipses of the sun eleven o'clock in the morning of a good day's hay-making,” said Bell, coming in to see after the baskets setting off. “I'm warning you, I'm not going looking at eclipses on August whatever 'tis. I'm cracking on.”

“You'll not get much done int' dark.”

“It's not going to last five minutes.”

“There's the coming and going of it. And it's bad luck not to take notice.”

“It'll be darkness all right,” said Old Hewitson.

“All darkness is darkness.”

“No. Darkness is all sorts. And let me tell you, Bell, darkness from eclipses of the sun is not like owt else. It's neither darkness of night nor gloom of twilight nor darkness from the Helm Wind over Dufton, like there can be on a bright day.”

“Darkness is darkness. I don't care about missing out on seeing some darkness.”

“There's more'n darkness about it. Stars come out. You can spot the planets—Venus, Mercury. Birds stop singing. All animals up at Light Trees from Hartley Birket to Nateby Birket will be falling silent and standing mazed.”

“Aye well. I dare say we'll not ignore it, Grandpa.”

“And another thing I remember. Lying there int' school yard. Under them currant bushes she kept. You remember them currant bushes, Bell?”

“Not there in my time, Grandpa. Nor yet in Dad's.”

“Well under them currant bushes and the two-three trees they had there was little wee bits o' light scattered. For an hour before, maybe. Little pieces like of light, and as the sky changed to like sunset, every little speckle under them trees turned crescent-shaped like the new moon.”

“There'll not be yon up the Nine Standards. There's not a tree to speak of. And Standards themselves is too solid to show any crescent moons scattered about.”

“Which is why I'll be staying down here,” said Old Hewitson. “I'll seat myself int' garden by Mary's lupins. Alice Crack, the Egg-witch, can go gallivanting in prams.”

“Anyways, it'll likely rain,” said Bell, who had grown over the years more like his father than his father had ever been. “Like it's about to do today. Come on. Let's get moving. It's nine o'clock already.”

“In my day,” said Old Hewitson, “hardest part of hay-time was over by nine o'clock of a morning. That's when we rested, nine o'clock, horses being tired out. Good fast go at it we had from five int' morning till eight. Then breakfast. In the hedge back. Tatie pies. You could only cut properly with dew upon the ground. People got out of their beds them days. I were called out at five from under my bedroom window. I were earning by time I were eleven.”

“You's talking of scything days.”

“I'se talking of horses. Same as it's horses again now. There was scything and leading with horses, then cutting and leading with horses. Then away went the horses and in came the machinery. And now, since the oil went, we're back to the horses. I never thought I'd live to see the old tractors go. Grand they were, though dangerous. Rolled on you many times more often than any horse if you didn't handle them right. I liked the old tractors mind. Historic.”

 

“I don't know,” said Eileen to her mother as they started to walk the Quarry Hill, empty these days of lorries and with creepers showering down the deserted limestone cliffs, “we get more history lessons the older he gets. His memory gets sharper every day.”

“It's better than with some,” said her mother. She shifted the heavy harness which held the buckets for the field dinners. “He doesn't go in for holy traditions, saying things never should change and the only good things are the things that are over. He's all for the present and the future still. Grandpa's himself.”

“Oh but he likes traditions.”

“Aye, but he casts about among them. Thinks them out. He's not like poor old Jimmie Meccer, still wambling on about being homesick after all these years. There was a letter from him this morning.”

“Is he right?”

“I don't know. Hadn't the time to read it. It'll likely be usual sort of an affair. His letters don't change. He might be still in his shed.”

But “Oh my word!” said she later, in the warm, wet, impossible morning, with no haymaking done and back down at the farm again. “Oh my word—but this
isn't
from Jimmie Meccer. Lord knows who it's from, except he calls hisself a Hewitson and he's from South America somewhere-other and he's coming here.”

“Here?”

“Aye. To us. Any day. He's on his way.”

“Who is he? How's he getting to travel?”

“Well I don't know. He'll be great auntie's lad's lad. Or lad's lad's lad. I'd think. Or someone. Wonderful letter-paper he uses. Beautiful script. He says he's booked at a hotel.”

“Coming to see the old home likely. Is he bringing Jimmie back?”

“No. He says he's not seen Jimmie in donkey's years. Not since Jimmie's arrival party. Says he meant to come here, but with the oil crisis and his work—now he's retired. And he's coming about—he's coming about his
inheritance
!”

“Inheritance?” said Mr. Teesdale coming in thinking of more vital matters, like getting in some investigations for fluke-worm in mules since the rain had dished everything else. He carried the tools for flukeworm searches and a black frown. “Inheritance! He can inherit this weather. We've not much else to give him. He'll soon be away back again. Right out of his depths he'll be here.”

“Inheritance,” said Mrs. Teesdale reading, “of the farmhouse Light Trees.”

“Oh,” said Bell.

“Ah,” said Old Hewitson. “Ah. Aha.
That
.”

And everyone was silent, like the birds at an eclipse of the sun.

 

On August the first, Henry Roberto Hewitson III
 
arrived in a gleaming car and unannounced. He knocked on Teesdales' door and it was opened at once because Mrs. Teesdale still did her own floors and was on her knees behind it washing the lino. She was in her sacking apron because she had been feeding hens earlier and doing the other dirty jobs while the fire got hot for the oven and she changed into her cooking pinny. She looked first at the car and said, “A car!” Then she looked at her cousin many times removed, his silvery suit, moustache and head of hair and no-coloured eyes, and he looked at her broad brown face and broad brown hands and eyes as blue as the headless woman's dress. She said, “Are you coming in?”

“I am Henry Roberto Hewitson III.”

“You're Auntie Win's brother-in-law's father's son's boy and you're the image of William!”

“William?”

“William my only other cousin, who died. Of Whin Gill over Brough Sowerby way.”

“I am from Brazil.”

“My but I can see it in the hands! No hands for a farmer or a miner, we always said. Didn't know where they'd hailed from, them narrow hands. And them shoulders! Well! He died young, poor William. He never prospered.”

Henry Roberto Hewitson III, who had done nothing but prosper since the day he was born, walked behind her to the kitchen with a blank expression.