Read The Line Between Us Online
Authors: Kate Dunn
The Line Between Us (3 page)
I remembered making a universe for myself out of books, to please my Dad to begin with. Get yourself an education, son. I set my sights on the West Monmouth Grammar School as a point of honour and I’d got myself a scholarship before the penny dropped that there was no longer any way of pleasing him, no way of him knowing what I’d achieved; that I’d merely been treating the symptoms of my loss all the while. I learned to love reading, though, for the protection it gave against Ma and Delyth and for the legitimacy it conferred: “I’ll just get to the end of the page,” I’d say, barely surfacing from a realm I’d found where fathers and brothers avoided slaughter, where mothers were not sent half mad with grief, where living happily ever after seemed a proper ambition for a person to have. “I’ll just finish this chapter.” It turned out education was good for all sorts of things – I’d never have known about the French Revolution, about Stephenson’s Rocket, about the elegance of Latin grammar – a system devised for creating order out of chaos if ever there was one, and I badly needed a sense of order. Without my time at West Monmouth Grammar, photosynthesis would have remained a mystery to me, ditto the circulation of the blood and the four moons of Jupiter named by Galileo after the lovers of Zeus. They say that knowledge is power, but to me it was insulation.
I should have realised I was a poor boy feasting at a rich man’s table, but I was dazzled by all that learning, the irresistible poetry of information laid out before me. When the boys at school started discussing the merits of Oxford over Cambridge, going to university also seemed like a proper ambition for a person to have, for a short time, at least.
I was doing my homework up in my room, safe behind a barricade of textbooks, struggling to translate Appian’s account of the second Punic war, longing for Hannibal to appear with his elephants, when Ma loomed over the crenulations waving a copy of the
Monmouth Guardian
. I hadn’t seen her look so happy since the end of the war.
“See what I’ve found!” she cried, pressing the paper against the skirt of her apron as she thumbed through the pages. “Not there … not there … where the goodness was it? Oh, just look at that, will you,” she tutted at the newsprint coming off on her fingers, always clean and tidy, my Ma. “Here we are! What do you think?” She creased the page flat as though it were an ironed sheet ready for folding.
I stared at the list of classified advertisements without so much as an inkling of what was coming. “What is it, Ma?”
She read the advert aloud for me: “Wanted: Gardener’s Lad. Eight to Sixteen Pounds a Year Depending on Age and Ability. Apply with References, Nanagalan.”
“But –”
“A job at the big house!”
“But I –”
“Just like your father. Gardener’s Lad at Nanagalan. That’s how he started and he ended up as Head Gardener, so there’s no limit – really. Think what you could do with a job like that, Ifor.”
I was fingering my pencil, tracing the letters embossed into the blue paint: HB. The Royal Sovereign Pencil Company Ltd. It’s a wonderful thing, a pencil with a sharpened point: a remembrancer. I let mine rest against my upper lip for the faint smell of the cedar wood. “There’s my studies …” I began, my gaze travelling along the line I’d been translating.
“You spend a lot of time with your nose in a book for a boy your age,” Ma said with some asperity. There was a note in her voice, a tension, and I was conscious of the freight she brought with her: the expectation of what a son might do, crushed into dust on that July morning five years ago. Lord Kitchener expresses his sympathy ...
“And there’s my examinations …”
She sat down on my bed. “Examinations won’t butter anybody’s parsnips, will they?” she said quietly.
There was a silence between us. I sat staring at my pile of textbooks, my blotter, my pencil case, my exercise book, all the apparatus of the written word. Each one had a place and a meaning of its own for me.
“And besides, it would be so close to home …” she said.
I glanced round at her. I could see the first salting of age in her face; all the scouring of the last few years. Something in the curve of her shoulders, the leaning of her elbows on her knees with her hands hanging loosely down, made her seem resilient and diminished at the same time. I suppose she was both of those things. Stoic, and forlorn. For a moment I wondered what the merits of Oxford over Cambridge really were. I thought about what my Dad said. It was the echo of an obligation, and here was my flesh and blood Ma who I loved until my heart hurt.
I laid my pencil on the table. “Do you think it would improve my chances,” I said, “if I mentioned Dad in my application letter?”
She stood up and rested her hand on my shoulder and the two of us remained, staring down at my Latin textbook, touched with regret that she had been bound to ask and I had been bound to comply, until I put my arms around her waist and leaned my head against her apron, the loss of expectation a transaction between us.
I remembered setting off for my first day of working up at the big house.
“Better three hours too soon than a minute too late!” Ma had sayings for everything, it was her way of making the world seem known and safe and I was braced for more – “A good beginning makes a good ending,” perhaps, but instead she gave me some sandwiches wrapped in a knotted handkerchief.
“Cheese and pickle,” she held my hands holding the package as she spoke, “your Dad’s favourite.”
I nodded, then I looked down the lane, biting my lip, thinking of other departures. I couldn’t shake off the feeling that we were relicts, Ma and I. There was something residual about us. She held me tightly for a moment and part of me wanted to bury myself in the kitchen warmth of her, but part of me couldn’t get out of the door fast enough. I kissed her cheek and her letting go of me was more than just any old letting go and both of us knew it, and I practically ran along Front Street and down the road out of the village to stop myself from feeling sad.
I was out of breath when I hurtled into the green bowl of your valley and the first glimpse I had of Nanagalan stopped me in my tracks. The house was built in the borderlands in sight of Offa’s Dyke, a dividing line keeping England and Wales at bay. They said in the village that it had been a nunnery once, built from good Welsh stone and simple faith sometime in the fourteen hundreds, and the windows were arched like hands held in prayer, contemplating the vineyard that unfolded down the hillside towards a copse of beech trees. The façade of the later, Georgian wing turned its pale shoulder away from the vines and gazed out at Dancing Green and the Herbar, then on to the nut tunnel and the wildflower meadow beyond, and I stood open-mouthed at the top of the drive, gazing down the length of the valley to the lopsided slope of Long Leap and on to Withy End and it could have been Eden on the first day.
I made my way round to the servants’ entrance at the side of the house and knocked, then waited an age for somebody to answer, as the house towered above me and I shifted my weight from side to side, glancing back along the driveway. The approaching footsteps I could hear must have travelled several hundred yards to reach me. It was Mrs Brown who opened it, flushed from the kitchen range, bringing the heat of it with her.
“I’m –” I began. Her blouse was open at the neck, and I mean open, although she was the same age as Ma, maybe older even. She was tucking and patting at her hair, but she interrupted the small adjustments she was making to follow the line of my gaze and I thought I was going to die of the embarrassment as she fastened one button of her blouse, and then another, taking her time about it.
“I’m the gardener’s new –” I gabbled, not knowing where to look.
“I know who you are,” she said and she leaned forward and whipped the hat from my head. “Sam’s told me,” she added, “and you take your cap off when you’re talking to your betters.”
“Yes,” I said. “Yes. Yes, of course,” then, stupidly, “Sam?”
“Mr Samuelson.” She raised her eyes, sardonic as you like, then handed me my cap. “He’ll be at the press,” she said. “That way. Down by there.” She pointed in the direction of some out-buildings on the far side of the courtyard and scrutinised me as I turned to leave. “Tell him from me that three o’clock is alright, will you? Tell him, when lunch is over, if you will.”
The press was in a wooden shed, hemmed with bricks around the bottom and small windows of occluded glass high up under the eaves. I put my cap back on so I could tug at the door to slide it open, then straight away snatched it off again. I stood in the vaporous gloom until I could make out the shape of the oak vat, and Samuelson mounted on a ladder propped against the side.
“Boy?” he said, without looking round and it struck me that he must have been the gardener’s lad to my father back before the war. The shed was full of the scent of pips and stalks and the sweet contusion of the grapes, and full of ghosts as well.
He was a mighty man, mightier than the space in which he found himself, and I remembered watching with apprehension the workings of his arm as he tightened the press’s wooden screw: muscle wrestling with sinew, with the kind of strength that cannot always be contained.
“Ifor Griffiths, sir, Mr Sam –”
“Well, boy,” he swung round. His face had an edge of hunger unsatisfied, in spite of his stature. His cheeks were veined and ruddy; he wore a neckerchief and had jaw-length hair that Ma would have taken the clippers to. He was chewing on a matchstick. He didn’t waste time taking stock of me. “Now that you’re here, hand me up one of them picking bins,” he jerked his head in the direction of a pile of crates, each one overflowing with bunches of red grapes. If I hefted one up to him that morning, I hefted a hundred, and in between I listened to the trickle of the juice.
“What happens next?” I asked at one point, to make conversation, “To the grapes?”
We’ve got a right one here, the expression on his face said. I watched the movement of the match as he chewed on it, but when I told him what Mrs Brown had said, that three o’clock was alright, when lunch was over, the stick was still for a moment in the corner of his mouth.
“We add yeast to the must,” he grunted, “to get the fermentation going,” and then he asked me: “Is there anything else you’ll be wanting to know?” in a way which made it clear that the answer should be no.
I remembered the first time I ever saw you. Mr Samuelson told me to go and clean all the terracotta pots ready for pricking out later in the month and I was in the tool shed on my own. It was a chilly morning and I had the paraffin heater on. There was dust in the air from the sacks piled under the workbench. The windows were all steamed up and it made me feel that I was cut off from the world, and I wiped the pane clear and there you were, peering in. The condensation on the glass glittered around you. Your face was white with cold, blue tinged and there were drops of moisture in your curls, which clung in wisps like tendrils on the vines and I reached out my hand without thinking, as if I was in the vineyard thinning the leaves.
You tapped on the window. “Can I come in?” you mimed, and I remembered how delicate you seemed: the different golds of your hair; the ripe fruit of your mouth, raspberries and strawberries not mine for the tasting; the perplexing violet of your eyes. You were fifteen, same as me; home from boarding school, not like me.
My fingers were freezing and the latch was stiff and you looked impatient when I opened the door. You slipped into the shed, glancing behind you as though you wanted to be sure you could find your way back to where you’d come from. I started to remove my cap on a reflex, even though I was indoors and wasn’t wearing one. I felt such a fool.
“Mother sent me.” You held your hands in the shimmer above the paraffin stove. “She wants to do her inspection this afternoon.”
“But it’s a Wednesday,” I blurted wildly. “The mistress always does her inspection on a Friday –”
You shrugged, and turned your hands over to warm the other sides and I was in awe of the smoothness of your skin. I shoved my fists into my pocket.
“Are you new?” You were studying the shelves, the tools hung on nails, the packets of seeds like index cards in their boxes. You were not looking at me.
“I’ve been here three months.”
“I haven’t seen you before ...” You ran one finger along the workbench, then rubbed your finger with your thumb and the way you did it made me think that this was a mannerism you had learnt, something you thought you ought to do, in the circumstances.
“I don’t go up to the big house much …”
“What’s your name?”
“Ifor.”
“Ifor.” You tried it out for size. You were standing close to me and I was lost to your curving softness. I breathed in your scent – within the paraffin fumes I could smell flowers and I was concentrating, trying to work out which one, and I said without thinking, “What’s yours?”
“Ella.”
It was gardenia. “Ella,” I said, inhaling again.
You withdrew your hands and tucked them under your arms. “You shouldn’t really call me that, you know,” you said, ducking your head as your cheeks turned pink from the warmth of the stove. You grimaced. “I’m meant to be Miss Ella, to you …”