Cut and Come Again (16 page)

We went on talking for a long time about the tree. From the very first moment together we had talked as it were inarticulately, with a kind of distant embarrassment, impersonally. Her shyness was so conscious and painful that it was infectious. We never looked at each other. Now, in the summer darkness, we began to talk more easily. I often looked at her directly and she would return the look unquiveringly for perhaps half a minute and would let her glance flicker away again with only the faintest unsteadiness or embarrassment. Talking of the tree we grew almost intimate. She even raised her voice a little. Quite soon there were times when it sounded light and gay, the voice of a different woman. At last she broke off in the middle of a sentence, with abrupt anxiety, and
looked up at the bedroom window. For a moment or two she listened acutely and then, aware of my looking and listening too, suddenly desisted.

‘It's nothing,' she said in answer to my question. ‘I was wondering about my father.' Her voice trembled a little with the old shyness, but she steadied it quickly. ‘He's a little tiresome sometimes.' She paused, but I said nothing. ‘I hope nothing annoyed you – I mean about supper or the dominoes?'

‘Not at all. I enjoyed them both.'

‘You saw me look at you? I mean when he wanted to play for money? I hope you understood?'

‘Oh, yes.'

‘And you didn't mind? You see …' she gave a sudden curious shrug of her shoulders, quick, a little impatient and with something bitter in its very brevity. It was a gesture at once of protest and resignation, at once stoical and cynical. It was scarcely perceptible and gone in a moment, but in it, I thought, was her whole life, the loneliness, and drabness of it, in the middle of luxury, the trial and suffering with the old man, the deadly dreariness of waiting for him to die, the bitter consciousness that it was growing more and more pointless. Like the apricot tree, she was both rich and barren, strong and useless, and the old man, like the tap root, fed her with his riches but kept her starved of joy. A moment later the faintest smile crossed her face and vanished as quickly as the shrug of her shoulders had done. It was so secure and serene, as though she were deep in the preoccupation of some inner joy, that I began to feel that I had been mistaken about her.

In the morning she gave me my breakfast in the garden, on a patch of grass running along the highest
terrace. The eggs were under a heavy silver cover and the coffee in a tall silver pot. There were little china dishes of quince jelly and white honey and lemon marmalade. It was all delicious. She had set the table full in the sunlight, so that silver and jelly and honey winked and gleamed with clean flashes of light.

As I sat down at the table she fluttered up the terrace. I could see she was nervous by the way she was folding and unfolding her hands.

Was it all right? She wanted to know. Had I got what I liked?

It was perfect, I said.

That was so nice of me. She was so glad. And had I slept well?

Very well. I didn't think I had even turned over.

She was so glad. I was sure I hadn't heard anything in the night?

Nothing. Not a sound.

Hurrying up the steps and across the lawn in the bright early sunlight she had looked tired and old and a little haggard, as though she had not slept well. As I spoke the look of relief in her face was startling. It rejuvenated her. She smiled again with that serene security which had surprised me in the half-darkness the night before. Remembering her words, ‘Sometimes he is a little tiresome', I could guess at the reason for her tired face, but the smile was a mystery. It was as though something precious and comforting which she had forgotten had flashed across her mind again, startling her into joy. Without another word she went across the terrace and down the steps to the flower-beds, where I could not see her. But later I could hear the snip of her scissors at the flowers and the sound of her voice, almost girlish, singing tranquilly.

After breakfast I was walking upon the terraces, looking at her carnations, when she came up to find me, as timid as ever again, with a note in her hand.

If I were going upon the hills, she said, in the old timid voice, would I mind very much dropping in this note at the house, the farmhouse she had told me about, where the road branched? There wouldn't be an answer and I needn't even wait to see anyone. I could just slip the note into the letter-box in the front door.

I took the note and promised to deliver it and before I departed she gave me a packet of sandwiches and some little yellow summering apples. I had told her that I should walk all day and not come back till evening.

‘If you bring back any flowers,' she said in her calmer, natural voice, ‘I'll show you how to press them and keep their natural colours.' And as I finally went off through the garden gate she called, ‘It's a lovely day for you.'

I thought there was relief in her voice and that perhaps she was glad to be rid of me. When I turned to shut the gate and say ‘Good-bye' she had gone.

Down in the village and along the road winding gradually up to the hills beyond it there was a strange empty Sunday silence over everything. The earth was still fresh and sweet, though the sun was lifting up clear and hot, burning the dew away quickly except where the trees and the stone walls of the roadside threw wet shadows. In the sunlight the dewless campanulas were like little bells of blue transparent glass. The big wild geraniums were opened flat as blue pennies, and the little yellow snapdragon spikes growing on the walls and in the sun-parched grass were as clear and pure as daffodils. As
the road climbed up the flowers grew thicker and finer, the harebells more exquisite, their hair-stems frailer and finer and the colour of the flowers themselves changing from place to place like the blue of the sea. On the hills behind the village the willow-herb lay in vast patches, as soft as pink clouds between the dark young trees.

In a dip of the land before the hill climbed finally up I found the farmhouse. I opened the iron gate and went across the deserted cowyard. Nothing stirred.

The house itself looked empty. It was a large, three-storied place of dark stone, early Victorian, with a blue slate roof and tall sash-windows set in regimental lines in the high flat walls, green with many damp-stains where the roof-spout had leaked. A strip of garden had once been laid out before the front door, but the wooden palings had rotted and fallen and patches of nettle and sunflower had grown up and obliterated them. Rabbits had left their dung-tracks over what had once been the flower-beds and where nothing now bloomed except the rank sunflowers. The place was dead and rotten, and the silence of it alone lived on with something sinister and rotten about it also. The door had no letter-box and with the letter in my hand I hesitated. And wondering what to do I looked for the first time at the name, ‘Mr. Abel Skinner', written in large, clear, candid handwriting across the full width of the envelope. Finally I put the envelope under the door and walked away across the deserted yard and up the road again without having seen or heard a soul.

High up, on the bare sun-baked hillside, the morning was wonderful. The heat of the August sun was strong and naked, the stone walls of the cornfields
already shadowless, the shadows of the trees gradually shrivelling also to black spots, the leaves above them drooped and motionless.

Half-way up the road I struck away across the bare downland, and climbed to the spine of the hill and walked westward along the ridge. Up the road, across the field, and along the crest of the hill itself, wherever I went, the harebells went with me, pure and ineffably lovely, as unstained and perfect as though it were the first morning of the world, the very beginning of flowers and light.

Below me was the farmhouse and beyond it the village and farther beyond were the hills I had crossed the day before. The air was so clear and still that I could see a man, far off, walking in a half-mown oat field with a white dog at his heels. I was watching him, feeling that he and I and the dog were alone in that vast expanse of sun-washed land when a voice hailed me, blustering:

‘You know you're trespassing?'

I turned. Leaning on the field gate a man of forty-five or so, red, heavy-jawed, sullen, in dirty tweeds and a greasy felt hat, with a gun under his arm, was regarding me with exaggerated hostility, scowling, his loose red underlip curled open, as though to frighten me. I looked at him in silence, trying to frame a reply in my mind.

‘D'ye hear me?' he shouted, incensed. ‘You're trespassing.'

I began to walk towards him. ‘There's no law against trespassing,' I said.

‘None o' your cheek!' He lifted his gun, as though to intimidate me. ‘Who d'ye think you're talking to, eh? Eh?'

I didn't answer. He spat in sudden anger.

‘I say who d'ye think you're talking to, eh?' he shouted. ‘What the bleeding 'ell are you doing up here? Didn't you hear me say you were trespassing?'

I was angry. ‘How do I know you're not trespassing yourself?' I said.

My words maddened him. I could see his temper colour his face an even darker, dirtier red as he climbed the gate and blundered across the grass, his body waddling a little on its slightly bowed legs, his long arms swinging loosely at his knees, like an ape's. He was very tall but his shoulders were weak and rounded, and as he came nearer I could see his whole body trembling with a kind of nervous depravity. He might have been drunk. His eyes, narrow and washed-out, were servile and weak. He came towards me puffing out his cheeks and snapping his jaw soundlessly open and shut.

We stood for a moment facing each other, I looking at his face, he staring me up and down until at last he saw the flowers in my hand.

‘Flowers,' he sneered slowly.

‘And what's that to do with you?'

‘What's it to do with me?' he half shouted. ‘What's it to do with me, eh? I'll bloody well show you what's to do with me. Any more of your bleeding cheek and I'll drop you one! See? You clear off while your shoes are good.'

‘I'll go when I'm ready.'

‘You'll go when I tell you to! I own this bloody land.'

‘How do I know that?'

‘How do you know that? How do you know that, eh? I'll bloody soon show you. Here, see that? Eh?' He held out his gun. ‘See that?'

He ran one finger along the breech of the gun and
I saw his name engraved in beautiful flowing letters on the steel.

‘Read that!' he said. ‘Abel Skinner. See? Well, that's me.'

‘Is that your house?' I pointed to the farmhouse in the hollow below us. I remembered his name on the envelope.

‘My house and my land all the way up the hill. Satisfied?'

For a moment I hesitated about telling him of the note, but finally I told him.

‘Took a note?' he said. ‘Took a note? Who from?'

‘Miss Jefferson.'

‘None o' your bloody sauce. What d'ye mean, eh?'

I began to explain, and as I was speaking a curious change came over him. He quietened down. By degrees he concealed his anger with me. He lost his aggressiveness. But all the time he kept looking at me uncertainly, in doubt as to what attitude to adopt.

‘Why didn't you tell me?' he muttered at last. ‘Why didn't you tell me?' His voice was half-apologetic, half-grousing.

‘I put the note under the door,' I said. ‘There didn't seem to be anyone about. Was that all right?'

‘All right, all right,' he muttered.

‘If you'll tell me where the footpath is I'll take it and go on.'

‘Go on?' he said. ‘Where you going?' It was the old half-menacing tone.

‘I'm out for the day.'

‘Well, you can't go on here. I don't allow it! I don't allow nobody up here. I got traps and things set. I don't want nobody interfering.'

‘All right. I'll go back.'

He became half-apologetic in an instant again.

‘That's all right. That's all right.'

And then – ‘It's bleeding hot. Drink wouldn't be in your line, would it?'

‘Why not?'

‘Better come down with me and have a wet at the house. You can come up again by the cart-track. It goes right along the hill there.'

I hesitated. I wanted to go straight on, alone, along the hot bare spine of the hill. He saw my hesitation.

‘Too proud,' I heard him mutter.

Without a word I followed him down the hill.

We struck across the burnt grassland diagonally and climbed the fence into a field of barley and walked down the slope of the unploughed headland. Once he stopped and bent down and plucked off a barley ear and muttering something put the straw into his mouth. At the end of the headland he halted, took the straw out of his mouth, spat and remarked:

‘Might cut it if the weather lasts.'

By the very tone of his voice, careless and a little cynical, I knew that he did not mean it. When I said nothing he looked at me cunningly, his mouth askew, half-smiling, and I felt that he knew that I knew. The field was a wilderness. Thistles and knapweed and great docks like sprays of burnt meadowsweet had strangled and dwarfed the barley. The whitening stalks were thin and starved. If they were reaped the sheaves would stand no higher than a child.

He must have known what I was thinking. ‘No bleeding money in corn nowadays.'

And later, as we went on, out of the barley field and down a cart-track under a row of wych-elms: ‘No bleeding money in anything.'

On a low branch of a wych-elm I saw a string of dead stoats, a few weasels, a jay or two and a line of
magpies, quivering with white maggots and giving off a faint stench in the warm air.

‘That's the trouble in this farm,' he said, pointing up. ‘Pests. Alive with 'em. Time you're done contending with pests there's no time for nothing. The money I waste on shooting the damn things and laying traps! You wouldn't credit it. You wouldn't. You wouldn't credit it.'