Turf or Stone (8 page)

She lay down again, cold and depressed. She heard Matt walk past her door.

‘Matt!’

‘Yes?’ he answered, entering.

‘Are you going out?’

‘I was. What else is there to do?’

‘Nothing… don’t go.’

He stayed with her, relieved that her reserve was over, yet terribly depressed and jaded. He wanted to tell her that she was wrong to put a distance between them; very
seriously wrong. That coldness did not draw him to her, but each time she let him feel it drove him farther from her, deeper, deeper, into a vague mental state where nothing held any significance.

‘My blind island,’ he called it to himself.

But he did not love her and he held his tongue.
She
took advantage of the moment.

‘Matt, I want you to send Easter away.’

‘Yes, I believe you’re right. He must go.’

‘Are you sorry?’

‘In a way. I shan’t sack him until the baby’s born.’

‘Is he a good groom?’

‘Oh, not too bad.’

They did not discuss Easter farther on this occasion. Dorothy congratulated herself on gaining her point. In reality, Davis had gained it for her.

Matt hereafter often watched Easter, regretting he must part with him, yet aware of the uneasy malevolence which seemed to animate the man. Also he could not fail to observe his entire lack of respect.

‘But why should anyone respect me?’ he asked himself.

He fell into a sombre calm, and his thoughts were all sad: ‘How is it people are happy in this world, or even at their ease?’

One morning Mary opened the door to let the spring air blow into the kitchen while she was cooking, and as she did so she saw that a sapling which grew in the heart of the wood pile was showing leaf. She began reckoning up the time she had been at The Gallustree, wife to the groom, living in two rooms above an old brewing house.

‘It is
not
for ever,’ she said, ‘I’ll kill myself rather than go on always.’

As the days grew longer, Easter went out later each evening; he was waiting for the dusk to conceal his meetings with a woman. They used to wander about the fields after dark. She was a limp, shuffling person, whose nature was hardy and indifferent. She had a creased, yellow face, her black hair hung over her forehead as far as her wide-open shining eyes, which moved so swiftly that they appeared to flash. A dirty merry little woman,
she walked with one hand thrust into the neck of her dress against her warm skin, and the other in the band of her apron. She was a charwoman.

She was always laughing and made him laugh too. She told him about the foul-mouthed old farmer who rented Matt’s home farm, and his great, shouting, stingy wife and daughter who had a fine name for charity off their own acres. How Mrs Williams never let her have butter with her meals, gave her old mouldy cheese ends, and flew into a passion when she ate a cold potato; and how they abused each other, almost coming to blows, and Miss Margery went away to hunt for a husband. They were fond of entertaining; she had to wash up after the spreads, and sometimes she would be washing up by herself at midnight, afraid of the gloomy old kitchen where the mice ran over the range and played on the shelves. They gave a huge tennis party. The table was loaded – a whole salmon, meat pies, cakes, jellies, fruit piled up almost to the ceiling; cream stuck about like snow. While they were playing she nipped in and stole a banana. Then she heard their elephant footsteps, so she hid round the back of the house. They followed.

‘Very angry they was, oh, they was vexed! They was going to take it from me, but the old man come up and he says, stamping his foot, “Let her ’ave it. I tell you she’s to ’ave it, and if I ’ear any more talk she shall sit in my place to table. Now you knows!”’

‘Don’t you hate ’em?’ Easter asked.

‘Oh, ay,’ she said, laughing. She made everything funny by the tone of her light-flowing voice, and she seemed to feel no lasting resentment. Taking her hand, all warm,
from her bosom, she laid it on Easter’s face, inviting him with her eyes.

She wore untidy shapeless blouses, a dark skirt that dipped at the back, cracked boots, and a soiled cotton or sacking apron. In her bundled, draggled hair she stuck a sham tortoiseshell comb, twinkling with coloured paste. She was furtive, yet joyous, looking like a woman who worked in the fields.

While he was in her company he would imagine himself in his youth, which had been passed among just such careless, fatalistic folk; often just after leaving her it would come back on him so strongly that the present seemed a dream.

She made him think of one woman in particular whom he had loved after his fashion. The first…. On a cloudy night in the beginning of May he left her behind the haystack where they had embraced, and made his way home through the fields. The river, full of dark water, ran bank high; everything was growing. What a fine thing it was to feel warm and well and to be able to look forward to the summer!

Easter, turning his face up to the sky to see if it would rain, observed a dim familiar constellation tilting in the southern sky. He stood still and watched it until the clouds hid it and it began softly to rain. He lit a cigarette and walked on, remembering…

He was lying on a shawl on the grass beside a rough stony road which went straight uphill and stopped dead at the top as though it had been shorn off at the horizon. Within a foot of his head a colt was grazing. It moved forward; he lay between its forelegs and then, without touching him, it
walked right over him. He did not stir. Its belly was silky, almost white. This was the first thing he could remember; not very clearly, for he was hardly able to walk.

Then again it was summer dusk. He was naked, sitting on the bald ground; round him were a number of low shelters built of withies and tarred sacks. There were several fires on the ground and a crowd of people. He smelt the smoke and sat staring at a stream which ran between the camp and a cottage garden full of heavy pink flowers which clustered along the stem. He did not know what they were. In the garden a big brown and black dog lay beside a barrel; it kept getting up and turning round, and each time its long bright chain rattled against the barrel. Suddenly he heard a rustle, scarcely louder than a breath, in the long grass by the stream, and poking his head forward, he saw three beautiful water-rats run down the bank into the water and swim away out of sight – they were gone in a minute, those fascinating creatures, while he longed with all his heart for one more glimpse of them…. Now it was noon, blazing hot on a huge swerving field. He was kneeling on the edge of a shady spinney, pulling at the deep moss with both hands. The field was pink, but countless green lines ran across it converging in the distance; between these lines men and women were bending and hoeing. Among them was his mother, very far away, down in a hollow.

That year he was four. In the middle of November when the sugar-beet harvest was over, and she knew there would be no more work for her in the fields until spring, his mother moved into a town where they shared a room with the Fitzgeralds.

Easter’s mother was small and sinewy. She wore a drab shawl over her head. Her face was rather manly.

Mrs Fitzgerald, a handsome, wild girl with
yellowish-brown
eyes, a tanned skin and a haughty manner, spent most of her time making pegs or going round the streets with a barrel organ. She always wore a voluminous plaid frock, quantities of jewellery, and, indoors or out, a black befeathered hat was perched on her plaited hair. She was odd: she hardly ever spoke, but sang and whistled and made a great deal of wooden noise by rattling her heels on the board floor while she spliced pegs and made mats and brooms.

Mr Fitzgerald was thin and stooping: his head hung forward, and his hands appeared to weigh his thin arms down close to his flanks. He seemed to be frail, but in reality he was very powerful. He was always in the street or sitting on the doorstep. He was eighteen; his wife sixteen.

Easter often helped Mrs Fitzgerald make the pegs. In return she would hang her necklaces round his neck and give him a ride now and then on their donkey which they kept in a shed up an alley. He also accompanied them into the town on Saturday nights, standing by his friend at the side of the road while she ground out the tunes.

He loved her, and when, in April, they went back to camp without her, he was almost stunned by grief.

However, he continually saw her in the fields,
pea-picking
, harvesting, and getting up the potatoes….

One day he saw her go into the shelter of a group of trees which stood back from a bushy hedge. She stooped her back in order to pass through a hole as smoothly as a
supple weasel at play. Easter ran after her. She was standing with her back towards him, stark naked and flawless, holding her hat in her hand. When she heard him, she turned very slowly, lifting her chin as if she expected to see someone very much taller than herself.

Easter fled, puzzled by adult nakedness which had never been revealed to him before because the half-bred, hedge gypsies amongst whom he lived scarcely ever removed their clothes.

In the autumn his mother left the camp for good with what she had saved since Easter’s birth. She took a
two-roomed
cottage near the summit of Riggs’ Pitch, three miles south of Chepsford on the Salus road, at a low rent. Nobody else would live in it as, besides being very small, it was round and dismally overgrown, having been a toll house. It was a district of sharp hills, thick woods, and narrow lanes. In the garden was a well of drinking water which never dried in the driest summer, and quantities of old, half-wild roses, yellow and white. Easter’s mother did away with the rats. She took in washing and went out charring.

When Easter was five years old he went to school at Petersthorn. There were three teachers at the school: an ignorant, insipid infants’ mistress who was not capable of teaching the children to read; a blustering, raw young woman who had just taken her certificate, and was attempting to find her feet and keep discipline in the middle standards; and an indolent, neurasthenic, headmaster, whose one idea was to conceal his illness and incompetence from the school managers and the County Council inspectors.

After eighteen months with the infants, Easter went up to the first standard, not only unable to read, but desperately muddled in his head. His new teacher had nineteen children of all ages from seven to thirteen in her charge; the distracted master conducted his class of the big rude boys in the same room by striding about as though he were possessed by a fiend, knitting his heavy black brows above his furious, frightened eyes, and slashing the desks with his cane. Slash, slash, and the untouched boys bent back like standing corn in a gale.

At eight, Easter still was not able to read. One day a County Council inspector came, made himself extremely disagreeable to the terrified staff and intimated to the gruff assistant-teacher that she might expect her dismissal, which in the course of three weeks she duly received. She went, and soon after the other two followed. The County Council took over the school from the church.

Easter learnt to read. He could do nearly all his sums in his head and painted flowers in water-colours most wonderfully well, so well that one might have thought the blossoms had blown down on the paper. He was insolent, hating the boys because they were all taller than himself, and excited by the girls beneath whose pinafores he sought to discern the alarming nakedness of Mrs Fitzgerald. That memory became fearfully vivid as he grew older. He used to dream he was in the woods with her and awoke with a hot skin and a longing to drink. Then he would go out, often in the middle of the night, and light a fire under a hedge where he would sit until morning, or take an old bicycle which had been given to him in exchange for a stray pup and skim down the pitch without brakes or lights.

He began to display a cold cruelty. The schoolmaster adored birds. He taught the boys about them, and begged them with passion to refrain from tearing nests to pieces. After one of these lectures, Easter sought for nests. He found several, among them a goldfinch’s, threw out the fledglings, stamped them to death and, arriving at school very early, laid the miserable shapeless carcasses on the master’s desk.

He was never found out. The man looked once on his desk and those infinitely-delicate shattered bones and glistening trailing guts moved him to agonised tears. He asked no questions, merely ordered Easter to throw the fledglings away, and never spoke about birds again.

Petersthorn was named after one of the plentiful blackthorns supposed to have been generated from St Peter’s staff, which were believed to burst into flower on Christmas Eve. People came from all over the country and even farther to mark the miracle.

The tree grew on a hilltop. One Christmas Eve, before it was dark, Easter left home and, shutting his eyes against the prickles, climbed into the thickest part of the thorn, where he was completely hidden. A pigeon flew out, buffeting its heavy wings. Opening his eyes, he regarded his bleeding hands and felt the long, sore scratches on his face. His coat was ripped, his legs red. For a long time nobody came. The tree was, indeed, in bud, but he was used to that – it had been for at least a week. The sky was a deep living blue, between the twigs the keen star points twinkled fiercely. He found his favourite cluster which he fancied resembled a terrier, and watched him slowly tilting up on his stiff hind legs.

Then he heard voices: a party of awe-stricken men and women were coming up out of the darkness, carrying lanterns which shone upon their legs, a fold of their clothes, their hands, faintly revealing their faces. Some touched the tree: ‘Look, it really
is
in bloom!’

Easter, hidden, began to chant the legend as he had read it at school. He had taken the trouble to learn it off by heart, and, really, it did not sound ineffective in his clear voice.

He heard the exclamations, then a man’s stern voice which he knew very well, having at times unwillingly listened to it in the pulpit, ordering him to descend instantly. He did not, but shook the branches tempestuously and sang.

The Rector, who hunted and had a just reputation for being a ‘sportsman’ and a man of tact, which he intended to retain at practically all costs, persuaded his party to retire. His attention was decidedly drawn towards Easter.

By all accounts the boy was solitary, reckless, and spiteful. With complacent conceit the Rector decided ‘to take him in hand and make a man of him’. When Easter left school he offered him a place as stable-lad under his own competent groom. Easter accepted the job, but steadily refused to be confirmed or even to go to church.

The groom, far cleverer at his job than the Rector at his, at once perceived that he would never make a regular smart lad out of this sly, gypsyish creature.

He stayed two years. Meanwhile his mother died in Chepsford Poor Law Infirmary, of a bleeding cancer. Towards the end she was considered to be off her head because she was always declaring that if they would only let her out, she would cure herself with herbs; however,
she was not emphatic, as were the rules and regulations which had so curiously closed on her independent, free little body, and she died, in pain.

Easter missed her.

The summer that he was sixteen he gave the astounded Rector notice, and went with the Fitzgeralds – whom he had seen working in the fields – down to South Leyfordshire in time for the pea-picking. That would be June.

Mrs Fitzgerald was now twenty-eight, splendidly graceful, and much more free and easy in her manners.