The House at Tyneford (42 page)

“I must go,” said Mr. Rivers.

He placed his cup on the table and left the morning room. I knew he avoided the house at mealtimes. Neither of us could help staring at the empty chair. He now took his lunch out in the fields, bread and cheese and a flask of beer, as though he really were one of the common labourers on the estate. The farmers avoided eating with him—he was the squire, after all—and I knew he did not correct them, as he desired no company. Most evenings he stayed out so late that I had already dined before he returned. I knew it was because he couldn’t bear the formality of the dining room. It belonged to another time. I resolved on speaking to Mrs. Ellsworth.

“I have never heard of such a thing, not in my forty years of service,” she said, clattering the wooden rolling pin down on the kitchen table and flipping over her pastry. Little flurries of flour billowed across the surface, forming drifts beside the butter dish.

“But, Mrs. Ellsworth, his son is dead,” said Mr. Wrexham in a quiet voice. He pulled out a chair and sat beside the whistling range. “Our duty is to serve their comfort. The practices and customs of our profession are to attend the comfort of the household. If, as Miss Land says, the needs of the master are best fulfilled by serving him dinner in the kitchen, then it must be done.”

I looked at him with gratitude. “Thank you, Wrexham.”

“My pleasure, miss. I take it that you would prefer to inform Mr. Rivers of this alteration in present arrangements?”

“Yes. And”—I hesitated—“I shall tell him that it is at Mrs. Ellsworth’s request. I shall explain that now, with so few servants, it will make things very much easier.”

“Very good, miss,” replied Mr. Wrexham with a slight nod.

Mrs. Ellsworth coughed in annoyance. The butler stiffened and his eyes narrowed. “My dear Mrs. Ellsworth, in this one instance it is required that you feign an incapacity that we all know is, in truth, a gross misrepresentation of your remarkable capabilities. But this is what must be done to serve the master of this house.”

He looked past us both, fixing on some indefinable point in the distance.

“The son and heir is dead. We must serve the last master of Tyneford with our very best, until the end.”

I walked through the valley carrying Mr. Rivers’ lunch. He’d left in such a hurry that morning he’d forgotten to take it with him, and despite her irritation Mrs. Ellsworth handed me a neat wax paper parcel to deliver to him in the fields. It was a warm August day, and I wore my broad-brimmed straw hat and a short-sleeved summer dress, enjoying the sensation of the sun warming my bare arms. Everything had sprouted lush and green, the grass speckled with pink willow herb and ugly nubs of figwort. A family of wrens patrolled beside the path, churring at me, while a pair of clouded yellow butterflies landed on the drystone wall. It was hot work rambling through the valley bottom in the midday sun, and I was grateful when I spotted Mr. Rivers. He stood upon a large wooden cart hitched to a team of working horses. The cart was piled with hay, and Mr. Rivers stooped with his pitchfork to gather the dry grass into higher and higher peaks, as a pair of youths, barely men, tossed up more toward the cart, which Mr. Rivers caught on the prongs of his fork. I paused at the edge of the field, leaning against the flint wall, and watched them. I remembered the haymaking during my first year in Tyneford when the new tractor had been used. Now, with petrol rationed, they had reverted to using the great shire horses. There was a steady rhythm to their motions, like the elegant whir and tick of the movement inside a clock; the back and forth of the boys throwing up armfuls of hay and Mr. Rivers receiving them with the inevitability of a pendulum. I felt a sense of peace as I watched, a congruity of time like the bud and fall of leaves on an oak tree. Men had been haymaking in these fields, in exactly this way, for more than a thousand years. Birth and death, rain and sun, were simply part of the rhythm. One of the boys glanced up and saw me. He mumbled something to Mr. Rivers, who stopped and beckoned me over.

“I brought your lunch,” I said.

“You can set it down over there in the shade. On the wall, out of the way of the rats.”

I shuddered at the mention of rats, and the boys laughed.

“An’ he wis telling us that yoos are a country girl now an’ all.”

I felt myself grow prim. “Well? No one likes rats.”

“Stanton does,” said one of the boys, a fair-haired youth, his cropped head almost the same colour as the downy dandelion clocks. He pointed at the small spaniel rolling in the cut grass, blissful as a pup.

“Come. More to be done,” said Mr. Rivers, returning to work.

“We needs some of them land girls,” muttered one of the boys as he bent over his pitchfork.

I set down Mr. Rivers’ lunch and returned to the cart. “I can help.”

They surveyed me dubiously.

“I’m as strong as any land girl. Besides, they’re all pasty things from the city.”

“Fine.” Mr. Rivers tossed me a rake. “Use that to tidy the stray pieces of grass into rows.”

I caught it in my fist and started to comb through the loose strands that the horse-drawn rake had missed. Within a minute, the sweat rolled down my forehead and into my eyes. My cotton dress clung to my back. I could feel the muscles in my stomach and shoulders ache but I kept doggedly to my task, pulling the cut grass into neat lines. Here and there were strewn sun-dried wildflowers—chamomile, buttercups and stinging nettles that prickled my bare legs. I found a lilt to my work, a rippling dance, and saw in my mind the Brueghel landscapes in the Vienna galleries. I was like one of the peasant girls in those paintings, and I hummed a snatch of Beethoven’s
Pastoral
Symphony. My arms burned with tiredness, but I lost myself in the pulse of the work. From beneath the broad brim of my sun hat, I glimpsed Mr. Rivers, shovelling, catching, shovelling, and I knew the physicality of the labour helped him too. The calm was pierced by a bark and a high-pitched scream, as the spaniel snapped its jaws around a fat, black rat and shook. The unfortunate prisoner squealed, a horribly human sound, its ropelike tail flicking back and forth from the dog’s jaws. Then quiet. The spaniel abandoned its victim beneath a hedgerow. The tiny corpse twitched and was still. The boys chuckled, and I reddened, realising I’d dropped my rake in horror.

“Enough,” snapped Mr. Rivers. “Break for lunch.”

The boys downed their tools and ambled across to the far side of the field and the shade of a spreading oak. I hesitated, watching Mr. Rivers.

“Come. You can share with me. Mrs. Ellsworth packs enough for half the village.”

I sat beside him on the stone wall, taking the proffered bread and cheese. We ate in silence. My face was sticky with sweat, husks of grass clinging to my skin, and I sported painful blisters on my palms. I glanced over at Mr. Rivers’ hands. His nails were encrusted with dirt and his once soft, gentleman’s hands had grown coarse. His skin had toughened from the work and blistered no longer. Apart from the empty, cadaverous look in his eyes, he looked healthy, a man in his prime exuding strength. He tossed scraps of bread to the spaniel, which careered through the meadow in joyous pursuit. Clearing my throat, and studying to appear casual, I explained about dinners in the kitchen. He nodded absently and said nothing. I wriggled, the stones of the jagged wall digging into me.

“So you’ll come back tonight before supper?” I asked.

“Yes. I’ll come,” he said and turned to look at me.

I was suddenly self-conscious about the husks congealed in my hair and the seed cases stuck to my skin.

“Alice,” he said, and I stiffened, still unused to my new name, “why don’t you grow your hair again?”

I shrugged and looked away, unable to meet his steady gaze. “I can’t. Not anymore.”

Elise was the girl who had hair reaching down her back in a black python plait. Alice’s hair was bobbed below her ears, strands tickling the base of her neck, but cool and swishing as she raked in the field or walked along the sun-soaked hillside, watching the sheep in the swell of the afternoon.

“That was before,” I said, not managing to explain.

“I like it this way too,” he said. “Just makes you look older.”

I smiled. “I am older, Mr. Rivers.”

We toiled for hours, until day mellowed into evening and the chirping of the birds was replaced by the whining of the gnats and the whir and tick of the crickets in the uncut grass. My eyes stung and itched from the pollen, and I gave my nose a surreptitious wipe with the back of my hand. The men had inched around the field, the cart steadily gobbling up the lines of hay, but the lengthening shadows told me it was growing late.

“Mr. Rivers,” I called, “I’m going back to the house. I need to help Mrs. Ellsworth with the dinner. You’ll be back before eight?”

From his position on top of the hayrick, he gave me a wave and resumed his task. I watched for a second and then turned for home. I dawdled along the dry valley bottom, tracing the route of the underwater stream, noting the dark green marsh grasses, fed from below. The sea glittered like a thousand mirrors, while a pair of fishing boats bobbed in the mouth of the bay. In the distance I heard the growl of an aeroplane engine. It was odd. The bombers usually came at night, but the onslaught had increased over the last couple of weeks—Swanage, Portland, Weymouth and even Dorchester had been pounded, and I supposed day raids were bound to start. The papers no longer listed all the details—there were too many, and they didn’t want to give the Germans confirmation of what they had hit. Sometimes as I sat on the bottom rung of the shepherd’s hut, I saw the planes swoop along the valley below, engines screaming, wingtips appearing to brush the sloping fields on either side.

The engine noise grew deafening, and I clapped my hands over my ears. I looked up and saw not one but two Messerschmitt fighters dive out of the sun, wings and snouts mustard yellow, black crosses daubed beneath their wings. Fury bubbled in my throat. How dare they fly here? Under these English skies, men and horses trawled the meadows, gathering hay for the winter. The skies belonged to the sparrow hawks and greylag geese, not these dirty machines with their stuttering roar. The Messerschmitts rushed closer and closer, hurtling along the valley so low that their yellow bellies seemed to brush the blackthorn scrub. I was not frightened but angry. Hate pooled in my stomach like indigestion and I clenched my fists, fingers stiff with rage, and stooped to pick up a lump of flint. I drew my arm back and hurled it toward the first plane as it skimmed the valley.

“Get out! Get out!” I shouted.

The pebble curled in an arc, and I felt a moment of exhilaration and triumph—I’m going to hit it! I’m going to get the bastard! A second later, the pebble fell to earth and landed impotently. I swore and bent to find another pebble. In my fury, I did not notice that the engine note had changed and that one plane had soared in a loop and was now rushing back along the valley toward me. I watched for a moment, more interested and angry than afraid, as the black nose and yellow snout rushed at me until suddenly, as it neared me, the ground exploded with machine-gun fire. I was paralysed, openmouthed with rage and surprise. Then I started to run. I ran faster than I had ever run in my life. The plane sprayed the valley with bursts of bullets. The hills rattled with gunfire and the staccato roar of the engines. It was a game. Just a game. I was its run, rabbit, run. I couldn’t feel my legs—I was a blur, a sweating, running thing. I was nothing. I was a hurry of speed and fear. I heard that silly hit of the previous summer playing in my mind—
Run, rabbit, run . . . Here comes the farmer with his gun, gun, gun.
Bullets. Running. The purple head of a thistle flew off, decapitated. I was aware of everything and nothing. Only running. The record played around and around, my mind a spinning turntable.
On the farm every Friday it’s rabbit pie day. So run, rabbit, run, rabbit, run! Run! Run!
My tennis shoe came off. I did not slow. I sprinted, conscious of my skin slicing open on the sharp rocks and pricked by the nettles, but, numb with adrenaline, I couldn’t feel the pain.