Born of Woman (4 page)

Jennifer had followed him and was plucking at his sleeve. ‘What
is
it?' she repeated.

Couldn't she
see
what he was seeing, the power and passion of this landscape which had moulded his whole vision, stunned and overwhelmed him? He longed to share it with her, swap her eyes for his. He was a child again, standing on the topmost rung of England, head in the sky, feet planted on a million million years of rock, watching the hills collide with the horizon, the clouds hurtle on to God. He had tried to explain before to her, cursed himself because the things he felt didn't fit the language, sounded simply fatuous. Safer to keep quiet—lock away the feelings as he had done as a child, bury them with his art. Jennifer hadn't seen that either—or very little of it. He'd had to renounce it before she came along. Matthew had produced her as the consolation prize.

He forced his gaze away from the grandeur of the hills, stared down at the river.

‘See that.'

‘What?' She looked where he was pointing. A dead lamb was floating in the water, jammed against the bank, its fleece still white and woolly, but bloated, waterlogged—its tiny ears twitching with the pull and motion of the current as if it were still alive, its eyes only empty sockets.

‘The crows always peck their eyes out. They do it sometimes when the lambs are still alive but stuck in snowdrifts. The farmers have to kill them. That's Matthew's prime roast lamb.' Cruel again, sadistic. Why point out carrion when he had meant to paint her splendour? Yet the two were always linked. One spring he had gone out with the ranger in the forest—a boy of nine awe-struck by the trees—stumbled upon a rotting pile of corpses, eleven roe deer perished from starvation after a fighting winter, their flesh half-gnawed by desperate crows and foxes. The ranger had been his only friend, taught him to sleuth shy and secret creatures, like shrews and slow-worms, otters and goosanders, pointed out badgers and birds' eggs. But after that time, he refused to go out with him again. The ranger dealt in death, carried a gun, shot the deer the snow had spared. He preferred to stay inside and draw.

Except drawing was disapproved of—especially as he grew older. All those brawny foresters and farmers regarded art as child's play or as a harmless little hobby for their womenfolk once they'd finished all the chores. Real men worked the land with sweat and tractor, turned stone and soil into flock or food or cash. Only poufs and sissies played with paints.

Lyn stared at his reflection in the rippling distorting stream. Did he look a pansy? He had always been too slight. Tallish, yes, but not broad or tough enough. Jennifer said nice things about his looks, but that might be love, or even pity. At least he had good features—full mouth, straight nose. He flung a stone in the water, shattered nose and mouth. Jennifer's reflection approached his in the water.

‘We really ought to hurry, darling. Hester may be worse.'

He followed her back to the car. Not worse, he prayed, not angry, not reproachful. ‘Don't worry, we're not far now.' He knew, because his palms were sweaty on the steering-wheel, his throat gritty and bad-tempered like the road. He drove doggedly round the twisting narrowing bends. Everything was harsher, the hills so steep, the stunted thorn trees clung to their sides almost horizontally. Bare rock grinned through scrubby yellowed grass. Even the sheep were different—Cheviot and Blackface—hardier breeds which could cope with months of snow, but whose bleating sounded thinner and more desolate. The light was fading, colour draining out of everything, as if the whole land had suffered a shock. Hills, car, earth, road, sky—all cut from the same coarse and fading fabric. It was a struggle to steer the car straight. Shale and boulders had fallen from the hillside and were littered on the track. He stopped in a sneeze of stones.

‘Are we there?' Jennifer eager, trusting, too pink and bland for this pinched and pitiless landscape.

‘Not quite.'

‘So why have we stopped? Is the road too rough?'

‘Oh, no. It's often worse than this.'

‘Why, then?'

‘I … think we ought to go … back.' The hills closed around his words like ripples, pebbles sucked into a pond.

‘Back?'

He nodded.

‘But we've been driving all
day
, darling. Your mother'll be expecting us. Mrs Bertram told her we were coming.'

The gentle, rational arguing again. If only she'd curse him,
force
him on.

‘Look, I, I … don't want to disturb her. She may have gone to bed.'

‘But it's only just past seven. Anway, we don't have to wake her up. We can wait a while, if you like, until she's rested.'

‘No—I'd … rather turn round.' Once the engine died, he could hear the silence moving in on them, seeping from the hills, stuffing all the gaps between them like the crumpled tissue paper she had folded between her dresses in the case. He didn't
want
any gaps. He longed to be fused with Jennifer, be one with her, have her strength, her easy, blinkered power. He pulled her over to him, joined them with her hair.

‘Snookie …' Silly secret name he used in bed. His mother must never hear it. If only they were in bed now, three hundred miles down south … She kissed him, more as child than man, got out of the car and coaxed him into her seat.

‘Let
me
drive, darling. You're tired, that's all. You should never have taken over in the first place.'

He didn't argue, though the road tried every trick on her. Looped, twisted, doubled back, rumbled her with cattle grids, defied her with five-bar gates. She survived them all. Three gates more and they turned on to a cart track. The Morris groaned and juddered. He shut his eyes. At least he wouldn't see when they turned the corner and the hills turned into forest. He felt the last wooden bridge sway and mutter as the car bumped over it.

Jennifer was slowing now. ‘Oh, Lyn,' she cried. ‘Just look!'

He didn't look. He feared to. That forest had killed the farmlands, as the farm had killed his father. There would never have been a forest without his father's bankruptcy. His father was only a photo on the mantelpiece, a five by ten sepia-tinted half-plate who had married his housekeeper when he had nothing else left, then doubled his shame by dying on her. The funeral baked meats were barely cold when the Forestry Commission came to woo the widow. Hester had succumbed. She was tired of labour and they were short of land. He had been just a hump beneath a pram-rug. Those trees had lived nearly as long as he had, feeding off his father, off his fields.

He opened his eyes and glimpsed the dark stain on the landscape, grim and straight-spined conifers gobbling up the light. They were mainly sitka spruce, one of the hardiest trees in the world which had evolved in the age of the reptiles and still kept the thin scaly bark which proved they were coldblooded. They had been wrenched from the snows of northern Canada to withstand stony soils and slapping winds, where other, sissier trees would droop or die.

His wife was rhapsodising. He watched her watch the trees. The marriage service talked about one flesh, but he knew it was different forests they were seeing.

There had been sheep there once, his father's sheep, the flock and father he had never seen. His first memories were sullen steel-jawed tractors, dragging vicious ploughs behind them, tearing up the pastureland, preparing it for trees. Five farms had gone in all. The other families which had sold out to the Forestry had all four moved away, their houses ruined now, their lands merged with the Wintertons' to make a cage for conifers. Only he and Hester had remained inside the cage.

They turned the corner and Hernhope leapt towards him, a grim grey house dwarfed by the larger sky. Fold upon fold of hill curved and crisscrossed behind it, shreds of cloud caught on its roof like rags. He held his breath as Jennifer jammed the brakes on, dared not speak or move. He had to worship a moment, give thanks that the place still stood, as proud, as powerful as he had remembered it—grey stone, grey slate, merging into the pearlier grey beyond, until it lost itself in purple. The moment swelled into a lifetime—baby in the blanket, boy in the hayloft, man hiding from his mother. However tall he grew, the house was always taller. Now he lived in a doll's house down in Cobham, playing at farming on a cabbage patch.

Jennifer switched the engine off and silence plunged between them. He hardly dared to look at her. Why had she stopped her chattering and exclaiming? Did she
fear
the house? See it as scowling, peevish, hostile—legs buckled, face cracked—no creepers round its neck to hide the damp-stains, no easy pretty garden to soften the stone; no smile, no open arms? He squinted through his eyelids and saw her hands twisted together on the steering wheel. The stillness was so utter, he could hear the trees holding their breath around him, the clouds rolling into void. He let his gaze inch up towards her face. Her eyes were shining, her lips parted as if he had just made love to her.

‘Oh, Lyn,' she breathed. ‘It's
wonderful
! So lonely, it's like the last house in the world.'

Jennifer entered first. The door was stiff, heavy, but unlocked. She jumped as something scurried away from her. Only two or three brown leaves from another season, bellying in the draught. Lyn heard a curlew rip the silence as he shut out cloud and conifer.

The dark passage hemmed them in as they tiptoed towards the kitchen. Strange to feel claustrophobic when there was no other house for miles and the horizon touched the floor of heaven. Three years had made no difference to the place. The same cold and echoing flagstones softened with Hester's rag-mats; the same low, uneven ceilings, beams blackened with age and wood-smoke. Walls built two feet thick to withstand Scot and storm; windows small and suspicious with drawn-down brows to conserve every ounce of heat.

It wasn't as cold as he'd remembered it. Someone had lit the range. That bad-tempered black-iron monster had watched him as a boy—a braggart growing fiercer as it gobbled peat and logs. He turned his back on it. Jennifer cooked on an all-electric Creda Circulaire, a wedding gift from Matthew. The room was barely breathing. The clock had stopped at half-past one (a.m.? p.m.?) There was no fruit, flower, light, air. A bunch of shrivelled onions hung above the sink. The sink tap dripped and plopped. Had it always been stained like that? Cracked so badly? Or did he only notice because his wife was there? She was marvelling at the table, swamping it with modern, mocking things—bright enamel cake-tins, hollow Easter eggs in glittering coloured foil. They had filled the car with presents—mostly peace-offerings, recompense for the time he had been away. The shopping looked too garish—tins with gaudy labels, packets screaming promises, food which grew in the glare and cackle of supermarkets rather than the silence of the soil. He removed her jacket from his father's chair—a chair for corpses, ghosts.

Jennifer seemed tired now. The hills peering in at the windows had snatched the colour from her face. ‘Look,' she said, ‘there's a note from Mrs Bertram.'

His fingers trembled as he picked it up. Pain? Reproaches? Crisis?
‘Hester seems a little better now. I have given her milk and soup and left her dozing.'

The relief was so great, he shouted. ‘Look, I'll go up and see her. You stay here and make some tea.'

‘Hush,' she warned. ‘She's probably still asleep.'

She wasn't. He was glad she wasn't sleeping. He might have run away if he'd found her with her eyes closed. He wanted to get it over, make her understand why he hadn't come before, how it hadn't been neglect, but … Reassure her that Jennifer wouldn't stay long, wouldn't interfere. But his mouth was a broken hinge and he couldn't get the words out. All he could do was stare. The room was deep in shadow, the curtains semi-closed, but even so, he could see how she had aged. It was as if every second of every day he had been away had worn her down like water dripping on a stone. Her face was less flesh than bone now, her slack veiny hands smudged with age spots, her hair so thin, he could see her scalp staring through the grey straggly wisps. He touched her fingers a moment, as if that way he could speak to her. They were chilly. The hot and bossy blood which had once surged around her body had turned into a trickle of icy water.

She lay in the high, hard bed, shrunken and exhausted, but smiling slightly as if any other greeting was too much effort. He could hardly bear to look at her. Even her usual harshness was better than this impotence, her frown less cruel than that dumb and ashen smile. He wanted to kick and savage the years which had done such damage. Once she had kept the whole world in her pocket like a thimble or a coin. He closed his eyes, saw her towering over his boyhood, keeping the terrors out, slapping his shirts with soap and vehemence as if they had no right to be dirty, turning milk into butter, wood into fire. Everything obeyed her then—hills, house, weather, soil—yet now she was too frail to move a finger.

‘Hester,' he mouthed. He never called her mother. He supposed once he must have done, but he couldn't remember when. The name had never fitted. He wanted to
make
it fit, force it on her while she was still alive to hear it, but he couldn't get it out—couldn't speak at all.

‘Matthew sends his love,' he muttered, at last. Even a mumble sounded blasphemously loud in the silence of the sickroom. He knew she wouldn't believe him, anyway. Matthew sent money, provisions, presents—never love. ‘We were with him yesterday,' he added lamely. He longed to seize her, hug her, not sit there muttering bread-and-butter inanities.

She had hardly moved at all. He realised she was so old and tired, every tiny gesture cost. Her skin was stretched too taut across her face, as if some grudging tailor-God had cut her out of a remnant or an off-cut, and then sewn her up so tightly that all the fabric had puckered into creases.