The Mermaid's Child (5 page)

He led me out of the back door, towards a long low building
that half covered the burgage plot. As we passed, he pointed out where I was to collect the necessary water for my chores: a conduit brought a clean rill down from a nearby beck, and spilled it into a cool stone trough. He opened the brewhouse door: I caught the soft rich whiff of malt, and in the dim light saw heaped sacks, silken grain spilling out onto the floor. He pointed out the bags of hops, the pyramids of loaf sugar. He took down a broad-bladed knife from a hook on the wall, lifted a sugarloaf and peeled back the paper. He showed me how to scrape the sugar into flakes. He rolled up his sleeves and picked up a shovel to demonstrate the stoking of the fires for the mashing process. Leaning over the vast malty vats with a paddle, muscles standing proud on his arms, he showed me the best manner in which to stir the wort. And, at the end of the room, warmed to drowsiness by the mashing fires, he pointed out the yeasty, quietly bubbling fermentation casks.

In short, he showed me the instruments of torture, and there was nothing I could say, no confession I could make, which could get me out of the ordeal. He didn't want to hear a word from me.

But, I told myself, all was not lost. I could handle the work, I'd keep quiet, and I'd manage to stay on the right side of Uncle George. It would be worth it. I'd experience firsthand the after-dark masculine world of the bar room. I'd see what no other village kid had seen.

It took slightly less than two minutes, that first evening at the Anchor, for me to realize that the pub's dim corners held nothing more exotic or unusual than the village men I'd always known, just a little worse the wear for drink. They sat hunched over their beer in pairs or threes while Uncle George leaned armsfolded on the counter, talking loudly to whoever
came up to buy a drink, or bending his head to hear an appeal for funds or for a period of grace. Throughout the evening, coins were passed back and forth, even to my untrained eye clearly much more than was necessary just to pay for the quantity of beer that had been drunk, and a tally was notched up in a copybook kept underneath the counter. Sometimes a basket of produce, a dead hen or rabbit, a jar of pickles, was passed across the bar and handed on wordlessly to me, with just a jerk of the head towards the kitchen. For a man so forthright with his opinions, Uncle George was unusually reticent when it came to the intricacies of usury.

And that's how things went on, day after day, with little differentiation. Mornings were spent in the brewhouse, afternoons preparing a meal from the previous night's offerings, then in the evenings I worked on the bar. My nights I passed up in the attic, lying awake on a thin mattress, listening to the rain on the roof, or the wind rattling a loose slate, or the call of a nightbird. I'd find myself thinking of my father, of his presence at my shoulder as I sat on the hearth and he passed down cigarette after cigarette for me to light at the fire. I'd remember my grandmother in the doorway, her arm stretched out to block my way, not looking me in the eye. The grey hollow feeling would threaten to swallow me entirely.

I didn't have much sense of passing time. There were no landmarks. The boredom of my situation was so intense that if I had allowed myself to think about it, I would almost certainly have cried. So I refused even to consider thinking: I must have drifted into a kind of stupor, and completed my daily and weekly rounds of tasks in a daze, though I can't really give a clear account of it, having not paid very much attention at the time. Season must have shifted into season,
must have shifted back. I grew to fit my father's clogs: I outgrew my shorts. Uncle George provided me with a pair of blue worktrousers. I barely registered these concrete changes. I barely registered anything at all.

This state must have gone on for some considerable time; it could have gone on forever, if I hadn't been shaken out of it. It was a shock, or rather a series of shocks, that did it. Apparently as usual, I held out my jug to catch the water as it fell from the conduit's lip into the stone trough, and I found myself slowly waking, becoming aware of the continued lightness of the vessel in my hand. I can see myself slowly turning to look, slowly lifting the pitcher to my face, my eyes focusing on the concentric circles of the glazed brown base, a mere smear of water. That was the first shock. The second came when I turned back, ever so slightly quicker, still half expecting to see the fall of clear water, and saw instead soft stalactites of moss, a single gathering drip. Then the third shock—to find myself standing there, an empty jug in my hand, the sun beating down on my neck and shoulders and on the crown of my head, with no sense of how long I'd been there, or where I'd been before, or how I'd got into that state in the first place.

And as I stood there a cog in my brain began slowly to revolve. Its teeth locked with another, which turned a clogged-up axle, which gradually coiled a spring, which sprung, nudged a lever, and the penny dropped. My pool.

I should have already known what I would find, of course, and shouldn't really have needed to go and look. That slowly dripping stalactite of moss should have been evidence enough. But because my brain was still just crunching through its disused gears, its lubricants cold and thick with disuse, and a
good proportion of my mental cogs and wheels had yet even to become engaged, I was halfway down to the riverbank before I even noticed that the jug was still dangling from my hand, and the strings of my apron were fluttering loose. I tugged the apron off, stuffed it into the pitcher, set them in the bottom of the hedge and marched on.

If I hadn't quite managed to accept the significance of the dry stone conduit, I should have realized when I saw the whitened rocks in the riverbed, the baked and cracked mud at the banks. But even the dusty scrape of my clogs on the beck's dry bed was insufficient to prepare me for what waited up above, underneath the twisted hawthorn and the sky.

It was the silence that hit me first. I had always thought of the pool as a peaceful place, but now I realized that it had never quite been quiet: there had always been the hum of falling water. Now, the unaccustomed hush brought my heart to my mouth. I stepped up towards the bank. The waterfall was just a damp stain on the rock. Beneath me, bare stone sloped down to a shallow pond of algaed water. Dimly visible in its base, the pestle-stone rested, motionless. The place was dead. And I would have sank down, I suspect, on the parched moss, and put my head in my hands, had I not heard footfalls on the stream bed behind me. Someone had followed me there. I turned round. It was Uncle George.

I wasn't thinking. I barely noticed the angry flush of his face, the sweat of rage and exertion dampening his shirt. All I knew was that I couldn't let him be there, couldn't let him see. It was the one thing left that was mine. I grabbed his arm, shoved him away.

“Get out of here,” I said. “Get out.”

Which was, I soon discovered, just about the worst thing I could have done.

For a week afterwards it was agony. The following fortnight was painful, and I remained uncomfortable for the best part of the next month. I couldn't really blame him for the thrashing that he gave me. He had warned me, after all. I didn't even blame him for using, from time to time, the buckled end of his belt. My first night back in the bar, Mr. Robinson, who always smelt of goats, made it his business to point out to me that I had had that flogging coming, that it was the only way to deal with the likes of me. That George would put me finally in my place. Around the bar, the other men's heads were nodding in agreement.

The beating did let me know, quite clearly, where I stood, though at the time I wasn't, strictly speaking, standing. And afterwards, the tack of the weals against my Da's old shirt, the sting and lingering smart when a scab cracked open, kept me awake. Which was good: I couldn't risk drifting again, couldn't let myself sleepwalk through my life.

Senses vividly alert, I began to experience my circumscribed existence with a clarity and intensity I hadn't known since I was a tiny child. The patterns of wear in the stone flagged floor became beautiful to me. In the garden, the failed fallen apples, hard as shot, seemed perfect in their minuteness. The scent of mown grass on cooling evening air could make my throat swell with longing for I didn't quite know what. In the evenings in the bar room, I observed the way the day's dust lingered in the men's hair, the slopes and shadows of their faces as they leaned lower and lower over their drinks, how their nails looked white against their sunscorched hands, the reek of their unwashed and hardworked bodies. No one spoke to me, but I overheard that the cows were now licking
daylong at the damp places in the river bed, that someone's hen had laid an empty egg, that my grandmother now sat, head in hands, on the ferrysteps, and desiccated in the sun. And that somewhere, not so very far off, a wagon was coming pulled by steaming glossy horses, brasses jingling, courtesy of Lord Carus, barrelled up to the gunnels with water from the demesne wells. It would be here any day now, but:

“It'll be too little and it'll be too late.”

Each morning I joined the queue at the village pump, head pounding with the heat, and would become, in spite of the discomfort, utterly absorbed in the observation of the way the light caught the curls of hair escaping down the nape of the woman in front, or the workstained and cracking skin on her sunbrowned hands. Then the queue would step, as if ratcheted, one pace forward, as someone came staggering back along the line, laden with the regulation two buckets, sweat standing out on her skin from the exertion of cranking the pump. With the passing days, the work grew ever harder as the flow of water gradually diminished. The regulation two buckets was first cut to one, then to a quart pitcher, then to a pint, then to half a pint per person per day, which decisions were made and enforced by the Reverend Carr, who stood by the pump, day after day, pink-faced and sweating in his clerical black, blinking lizard-like under his hatbrim. And, once each household's rations were supplied, he clunked the pump's padlock into place, slipped the key into his waistcoat pocket, and walked away. He went up, I have to say, in my estimation, for that. I wouldn't have wished that job on anyone.

All that time I was constantly aware of the dryness of my mouth, the way my tongue stuck to my palate, the dusty catch at the back of my throat. Against my instincts, I was forced to spin out my half pint of water throughout the day, depleting
it in mouselike sips. The urge to drink it down in one quick swallow was fierce, but I kept the impulse at bay. It was necessary, this slight refreshment, even though it was never quite enough to dampen down my thirst. At night, sweltering beneath the hot tiles, no breath of air coming in through the opened window, I slept shallowly: I dreamt of rain.

The heat turned a whole tun of beer: it reeked of rot and no one, despite their constant thirst, could be persuaded to drink it. Uncle George had me empty it onto the vegetable patch, where the leeks had dried into straw and the feathered carrottops were parched as tinder. The plants were past revival: the only possible benefit of emptying the cask there was that the earth, dampened, would at least cease to blow away. Uncle George's other response to the loss was equally pragmatic: he trebled the price of a pint.

Waterless, I had taken to cleaning the glasses with vinegar. Each time Uncle George finished off a jar of pickles, he would leave me the vessel and remaining liquid. I would stand behind the counter, dipping a rag into the jar, polishing each fingerprinted glass back to clarity. The vinegar evaporated quickly in the heat, and left the glasses with just a faint acidic whiff, a taint of onion, cabbages or eggs. No one seemed to notice these slight contaminations: every mouth was already bitter and polluted (after a while Uncle George even began to regret the disposal of that rotten barrel) and, unable to perform even the most meagre of ablutions, let alone launder clothes and underclothes, each of us perspiring like cheese left out in the sun, there was not one single villager who did not reek to high heaven, whose skin was not filmed with oily filth.

My first thought, therefore, when I saw him, was how clean he was. He came into the bar room with a breath of mist and moss, and looking up, I saw a fold of crisp linen, the dip
and curve of skin over collarbone, and was suddenly acutely aware of my dirt-embedded fingernails, the stickiness beneath my arms and between my legs. My second thought was that I hadn't met him before. And I'd never met anyone I hadn't met before.

His hat and suit were clerical, black and clean, and his shirt was white and obviously of fine quality, but he wore it open at the throat and collarless, like a working man. He wore boots, not clogs: he'd come in softly on the usually clattering stone floor; and that spoke of quality, but a glance revealed the boots to be worn and dusty, and the laces were frayed with use. He raised a hand to his hat, and the hand was brown and strong, but wasn't scuffed or callused with work. His nails were neat.

He said, “Good afternoon,” and the vowel sounds were clipped and unfamiliar. I glanced round to see who he was speaking to. There was no one else there. I turned back to him, opened my mouth, and then remembered what happened the last time I stepped out of line. This would, I suspected, count as stepping out of line. And so I moved back from the bar (mouth still hanging open, no doubt) and turned to go into the kitchen, where Uncle George was finishing his dinner. As I came through the doorway he lifted his head to look at me, his jaw working as he chewed.

“There's a stranger—” I began to say. A line appeared between his eyebrows. “In the bar room.”

He scraped his chair back, turned down his cuffs, wiped his mouth with the back of a hand.

“What does he want?” he said.

“I don't know.”

“What did he say?”

“He said, ‘Good afternoon.' ”

Uncle George shook his head. Still chewing, he pushed past me and through the doorway into the bar room.