Turf or Stone (11 page)

Matt helped his wife down the steep grassy side of the Danes’ Mount to the tune of ‘dangerous cattle’… what might happen… pedestrians. He took her under the arms and set her on her feet. She wore high-heeled, snakeskin shoes which lent her an additional four inches, but the cubit she had contributed to her stature cost her something in grace of gait. She tottered, and yet in its way it was attractive, even fascinating, rather like a little, gay, artificial toy.

Matt wished she would do her hair another way, or else cut it really short. That mess of curls blurred her head.

He picked up her umbrella and hung her pink mackintosh over his arm. She went ahead, ran up the steps, waved to him cheerfully, and disappeared. Matt loitered.

Low-hanging clouds, lividly rose in colour, were rolling slowly before a sultry breeze, and more remote ones, bronze, indigo, greenish black, spanned the horizon. Above the house there still remained a ragged patch, calm and blue, through which the sun’s rays struck on the roof and the tree tops.

Matt lingered for a moment watching the glorious ominous colours. The air was blighted, a peculiar unnatural dusk closed in, and minute by minute the atmosphere thickened. The breeze died. Momentarily he expected the darting lightning. He stood in a kind of torpor.

Dorothy, dressed for dinner in a long, flowered gown which flowed to the ground, came outside and shutting her hand on his wrist, gave him a minute squeeze. When she was in a good humour she habitually made love to him by trivial gestures and intonations. A waft of scent, spicy and passionate, positively assailed him. He turned his head aside, and the greedy caressing perfume followed.

They went in to dinner, Dorothy running her fingers up and down his arm. While they were sitting at the table it began to rain very heavily; a long, crackling peal of thunder brought Philip flying to his mother, more excited than afraid. Matt pulled up his little chair for him, peeled him an apple and fell back into his abstraction. The storm had surprised him, but in going over his conversation with Mary, he remembered she had said it would thunder. There was the dawning of a nervous smile on his face which Dorothy remarked as being unusual for those days. He sat back from the table, hardly moving, his heavy eyes far away.

Philip soon jumped up, dragging his mother to the window to watch the rain flattening the flowers outside. It
was depressing, this broken, grey flood which beat and buffeted the fragile, velvety petals. Dorothy rubbed Philip’s straight black hair.

‘Matt, you really must tell Easter to get a scythe to this lawn. It’s unbearable… he does nothing at all.’

‘If you like,’ he acquiesced, and added after a long vacant pause, ‘I thought you liked it left long for the children.’

He had absolutely forgotten Easter, and now at his name he recalled him, startled. He pulled himself together. He was alert. Where was Easter? Could he have
overheard
? Matt felt sharp distress and apprehension. He rose; he, too, gazed out of the window from which part of the yard could be seen. Like an obedient apparition, Easter appeared before him, mounting the steps, his head bent beneath the rain.

Easter had overheard.

While he was eating his evening meal he was quite sprightly with Mary. His lively speech was very much at odds with his balefully corrugated brow, his sullen, watching eyes. Mary hardly noticed him and replied only occasionally. She finished first. She got up to put the kettle down on the embers, and while it was boiling she took up some sewing.

Easter, still bantering, fetched a bottle of liniment from the bedroom. Uncorking it and sniffing the strong, stinging odour, he asked: ‘Wouldn’t you like to rub my arm now? I strained it yesterday.’

She shook her head.

‘Come on,’ he said, holding it out.

‘No, I won’t. I don’t like the smell. You might do it in the harness room.’

‘I’ll go into the bedroom.’

He did, closing the door after him. The contents of the bottle were poured into the drawers where she kept her underclothes, and under her pillow. With the remaining spoonful he carefully soused her hairbrush.

Returning, he found her filling the teapot. He sat down morosely, and leant forward in his wooden kitchen chair, his bare arms crossed on the table, silent now with thoughts visible on his face like cloud shadows rushing across a field. She pushed a cup of tea over to him, resuming her sewing, but she lifted her head stealthily when he rose and stood in the doorway between her and the light.

With his back to her he rolled down his sleeves and put on his coat, then, raising both arms, he laid his hands flat on each side of the door, looking into the yard. He was outlined against drizzling, fine rain. The storm was passing off, but the day was closing prematurely; a heavy dusk was bringing on the night. Everything seemed gloomy and threatening. It thundered in the distance.

Mary, studying her husband’s back, felt her dreariness threaded with something new, scarcely joy, but resembling it.

Easter strode forward, brought his legs together, poised, his head beautifully balanced, and leapt into the greenish dusk. She heard him strike the ground, sat with one hand raised and dangling thread… then he walked across the yard.

Cross the toll bridge which connects Gamus and Brelshope, continue your way for two or three hundred yards through the shadows of a pine avenue, turn to the left, and your road will bring you to the village where there is always something doing… brawls, dances, or revivalist meetings.

It is a small village, unusually compact for these parts. There is a short, curving street with The Dog at one end opposite a timber yard; the church, the cottage post office, and the shop are at the other. It is one of those places of which one can hardly have the roughest idea without detailed poking. The cottages are placed hugger-mugger fashion, and most of them are white with wooden porches. The shop which looks as if it had been built of child’s bricks, and the church grotesquely copied from the Florentine style, are both supremely ugly.

No fewer than six roads radiate from Brelshope, and cottages extend for at least a mile on either side of the main village; they stand, sometimes one above another, on a high, steep bank under which it is thought the river once flowed. They have beautiful, simple gardens full of flowers and trees, and are approached by long flights of wood or sandstone steps. The Dog at the far end from the bridge is a spick-and-span white house whose twin bay windows look across a wide sweep of greyish gravel to the road and the timber yard beyond. The prospect is interrupted by a big elm which shades a bench beneath its branches. The timber yard goes back some distance into the gently rising meadows. Surrounded by piles of newly sawn timber, white planks, and lopped trunks, is a large, rusty steam engine slowly falling to pieces. The landlord of The Dog
was one Harry Lloyd, a Welshman, enormous in girth and ponderous in movement. He had played cricket for his county, but now he was too old and fat. This evening he was busy in the taproom. Now and then between serving he pushed his face outside the door to let the drizzle fall on his head, smalmed his hands over his hair, looked about and went back to work.

On one of these occasions he walked as far as the bench, where he could get a better view of the street, but there was no one in sight. He stood there, glad to be shut of the men for a bit.

He was a tall, pulpy man, very out of condition. His head was covered with rather long, wavy, blond hair, so fair, indeed, that it looked almost white, and his colourless appearance was heightened by a skin which resembled wet clay. His face was folded and creased, his bright, bulging eyes rolled from side to side. He was dressed in grey flannel slacks and a clean white shirt.

Presently he returned to the taproom. It was already pretty full. In his absence a dispute had broken out between two carters sitting in the window seat. They were arguing in loud shouts. He had heard it all before.

‘We aren’t getting ’alf enough wages. I want two pound… can’t ’ave a drop o’ beer or anything.’

‘Go to blazes with you! We
got
to do on less, an’ things be got a lot cheaper than they was.’

‘’Tis rates and rents as be dear…’

‘But the foodstuff’s down!’

‘God damn it, man, bread’s gone up tuppence!’

‘I knows you be wrong,’ cried the younger of the two, a thin-patched man sweated to a shadow.

The other grinned bitterly and fiercely, showing his long teeth.

‘Well, I must be going. I be one of they chaps as fought in the war.’

He got to his feet, suddenly shook his empty mug in the young man’s gaunt face. He also jumped up and grabbed his stick. Harry pushed between them.

‘Now then, I won’t have that. If you want to fight, out you goes.’

Both men began to curse venomously: ‘I’ll be damned if I’ll ever come near the bloody ’ouse agen.’

‘As you please. Come if you like or stay away,’ said Harry, knowing his men. ‘We’re all free.’

He watched them off the premises. They went with filthy lips making menacing gestures, and bawled at each other till they were out of sight. Harry thought it was no business of his if they came to blows.

‘What a life! Nothing but boozing and wrangling and sweating from morn till night…’

‘World without end,’ concluded an old man whose tanned face was misted over with white stubble. A rheumatic labourer joined in: ‘I likes a bit o’ fun. ’Tis only fun, ’Arry. When you’ve been working all day in a field… not a soul to speak to… well, beer’s all right after. I coulda’ wrung my shirt today.’

He passed the back of his hand across his mouth.

‘I’ll ’ave another pint thinking on it.’

He put three pennies down: ‘There, it’s all I got. You’ll ‘ave to trust me with a penny or draw a drop short.’

After he had served the labourer, Harry again went and stood at the door. The taproom behind him gave off a
warm, strong odour, the smell of wet sawdust blew across the road from the timber yard. The fields were darkening. A boy turning his bicycle in the street was the only creature in sight. Harry pressed his knuckles into his eyes, conscious of a sickening feeling that he was squinting. Even then, with the lids closed and his hand shutting out the light, he seemed to feel the aching pupils float over the eyeball and roll inwards. He was a ravenous reader; he used to read in bed at night by candlelight. Sometimes he read till three or four in the morning. Consequently he was always falling asleep in the daytime.

He groaned, still shielding his eyes. Beer and wrangling! He was a man who quarrelled with his bread and butter.

His wife was in the parlour. He felt he had something to say to her. He cast a last glance up and down the street which was still empty and turned back into the house.

Their parlour was fresh and well furnished. He himself had papered the walls with a curious orange and green paper. There were two leather armchairs, an upright piano of light wood, and slippery, polished linoleum on the floor. An expensive wireless whimpered; all the batteries were down. His wife stretched out her arm and turned it off. The action pulled her black cotton dress tight over her shoulders. She was a stumpy woman with freckles and a button mouth which was moist and full.

‘Sammy not coming?’ she asked.

‘Not yet. That reminds me…’

(This was not true; he had been thinking about what he intended to say all the evening.)

‘Listen, Ivy; if Easter Probert comes in here again we shall go losing custom. Sammy can’t do with him.’

‘I know that,’ she said in her sad, remote voice, which was beautiful and unforgettable. English was a foreign language to her.

‘Easter goes in the taproom along with the others. See?’

‘Well, I’m sure I don’t care,’ she said listlessly.

‘I’m only saying what I’ve said before. Now you pay attention, mind.’

He had seated himself on the arm of the chair which was the timber merchant’s special place. The better-class customers, commercial travellers, men from the breweries who occasionally called on business, landlords of other pubs who came with their wives, farmers and tourists, were all entertained in the parlour. One armchair pertained in the old-fashioned way to Sammy Collins, the other to Matt’s tenant farmer, both regular customers.

Harry’s wife aggravated and puzzled him by having in the policeman, the butcher and Easter. To her earnest husband she seemed heedless; her game was not his. He did not understand her. She was from Trefor on the coast of Caernarvonshire, the daughter of a blind pilot; Harry hailed from industrious Glamorgan.

He got up and arranged his belt. Half in, half out of the door he observed her, blinking his inflamed eyelids. She sat against the table, leaning on her elbow. There was a bottle of iodine near her, a cup of warm water and some clean rag. That afternoon she had had her ears pierced by a jeweller in Salus, but already she had removed the gold sleepers and complained of the pain. She dipped the rag in the water and began to dab at the holes which were sore and bleeding.

Harry went back to the taproom, which was empty save
for the old man and two nervous, rosy-skinned boys who were chewing their fingers and blowing the dust off a couple of bronze figures on the mantelpiece. They asked for lemonade. A few minutes later two men came in, a carter and a hedger. They leant against the wall, stuffing their clay pipes with coarse yellow tobacco. A brisk little man in blue overalls entered next; a carpenter he was, always in a hurry, but usually he lingered longer than any.

‘’Ere, ’Arry, bring us a quart. I ’aven’t got time to stop an’ drink two pints.’

‘Beer or cider?’

‘I aren’t ’avin’ cider; I be gwine to ’ave beer. ’Aven’t ’ad any fer a fortnight… dunno if I can drink it or no.’

‘Oh, you can swallow down,’ said the landlord, glancing at the two lolling fellows who were lighting up.

‘Give us a pint, ’Arry,’ said the hedger. The carter nodded and sucked his pipe. He felt depressingly tired.

‘Beer or cider?’

‘Cider.’

Money was short.

Harry served them. As he was bringing the drinks Sammy Collins appeared, leaning on his knotted stick.