The Daffodil Sky (2 page)

The girl who answered their advertisement for help was short and dark, with rather sleepy brown eyes, a thick bright complexion and rosy-knuckled hands. She called at the house with her mother, who did most of what talking there was.

‘She's been a bit off colour. But she's better now. She
wants to work in the fresh air for a bit. You want to work in the fresh air, don't you, Elsie?'

‘Yes,' Elsie said.

‘She's very quiet, but she'll get used to you,' her mother said. ‘She don't say much, but she'll get used to you. She's not particular either. You're not particular, are you, Elsie?'

‘No,' Elsie said.

‘She's a good girl. She won't give no trouble,' her mother said.

‘How old is she?' Mortimer said.

‘Eighteen,' her mother said. ‘Eighteen and in her nineteen. She'll be nineteen next birthday, won't you, Elsie?'

‘Yes,' Elsie said.

The girl settled into the house and moved about it with unobtrusive quietness. As she stood at the kitchen sink, staring down across the farm-yard, at the greening hedgerows of hawthorn and the rising fields of corn, she let her big-knuckled fingers wander dreamily over the wet surface of the dishes as if she were a blind person trying to trace a pattern. Her brown eyes travelled over the fields as if she were searching for something she had lost there.

Something about this lost and dreamy attitude gradually began to puzzle Mrs Mortimer. She saw in the staring brown eyes an expression that reminded her of the glazed eyes of a calf.

‘You won't get lonely up here, will you?' she said. ‘I don't want you to get lonely.'

‘No,' the girl said.

‘You tell me if you get anyways lonely, won't you?'

‘Yes.'

‘I want you to feel happy here,' Mrs Mortimer said. ‘I want you to feel as if you was one of our own.'

As the summer went on the presence of the girl seemed occasionally to comfort Mrs Mortimer. Sometimes she was a little more content; she did not despise herself so much. During daytime at least she could look out on new fields, over new distances, and almost persuade herself that what she saw was a different sky. But at night, in darkness, the gnaw of self-reproaches remained. She could not prevent the old cry from breaking out:

‘Don't come near me. Not yet. Soon perhaps—but not yet. Not until I feel better about things. I will one day, but not yet.'

Once or twice she even cried: ‘You could get someone else. I wouldn't mind. I honestly wouldn't mind. It's hard for you. I know it is. I wouldn't mind.'

Sometimes Mortimer, distracted too, got up and walked about the yard in summer darkness, smoking hard, staring at the summer stars.

All summer, in the afternoons, after she had worked in the house all morning, the girl helped about the yard and the fields. By July the corn was level as a mat of thick blue-green pile between hedgerows of wild rose and blackberry flower. In the garden in front of the house bushes of currant were bright with berries that glistened like scarlet pearls from under old lace curtains.

The thick fingers of the girl were stained red with the juice of currants as she gathered them. Her fingermarks were bright smears across the heavy front of her cotton pinafore.

As the two women knelt among the bushes, in alleyways of ripe fruit, lifting the bleached creamy curtains in the July sun, Mrs Mortimer said:

‘I'm glad of another pair of hands. I don't know what I should have done without another pair of hands. Your mother will miss you back home I reckon.'

‘She's got six more to help,' the girl said. ‘She don't need me all that much.'

‘Six? Not children?'

‘When I was home there was seven. Eight before the baby went.'

‘Before the baby went? Whose baby? What happened to the baby?'

‘It was mine. I gave it away,' the girl said. ‘I didn't know what to do with it no sense, so I gave it away. My sister adopted it. They all said it was best like that. I gave it to my married sister.'

‘Gave it away?' Mrs Mortimer sat on the earth, between the bushes, feeling sick. ‘Gave it away? A baby? You gave it away?'

‘Yes,' Elsie said. ‘It's no bother to me now.'

Towards the end of the month the first corn began to ripen. The sheen of olive on the wheat began to turn pale yellow, then to the colour of fresh-baked crust on bread.

As he looked at it Mortimer remembered what the doctor had said. ‘You go away and you come back and your corn's still there. It's a wonderful thing, corn. There's something marvellous about corn.'

Now as he looked at it he could not help feeling proud of the corn. It helped him too as he thought of his wife. It hurt him to hear her cry that he must keep away
from her, that the pride in her was still tortured, the love in her not smoothed out. The corn helped to soothe him a little. The wind that ran darkly across it on cloudy days had a beautiful twist as if long snakes were slipping among the ears.

In the evenings, after supper, while the two women washed the dishes, he was often alone with the corn. And one evening as he stood watching it he did something he had always liked to do. He broke off an ear and began to thresh it in his hands, breaking the husk from the grain with the pressure of the balls of his thumbs.

While he was still doing this the girl came down the hillside from the house with a message that a man had called to deliver a sailcloth. Mortimer blew on the grain that lay in his cupped hands, scattering a dancing cloud of chaff like summer flies.

‘I'll be up in a minute,' he said. ‘Here—tell me what you think of that.'

‘The wheat?' she said.

She picked a few grains of wheat from the palm of his hand. She did not toss them into her mouth but put them in one by one, with the tips of her fingers, biting them with the front of her teeth. Her teeth were surprisingly level and white and he could see the whiteness of the new grains on her tongue as she bit them.

‘They're milky,' she said.

‘Still want a few more days, I think,' he said.

As they walked back up the field she plucked an ear of wheat herself and began to thresh it with her hands. The corn, almost as high as the girl herself, rustled in her fingers. When she bent down to blow on the husks
a small gust of wind suddenly turned and blew the chaff up into her face. She laughed rather loudly, showing her teeth again, and he said:

‘Here, you want to do it like this. You want to bring your thumbs over so that you can blow down there and make a chimney.'

‘How?' she said.

A moment later he was holding her hands. He stood slightly behind her and held her hands and showed her how to cup them so that the chaff could blow out through the chimney made by her fingers.

‘Now blow,' he said.

‘I can't blow for laughing.'

Her mouth spluttered and a new gust of laughter blew into her hands and a dancing cloud of chaff leapt up in a spurt from her fingers. She laughed again and he felt her body shaking. A few husks of wheat blew into her mouth and a few more stuck to the moist edges of her lips as she laughed.

She pulled out her handkerchief to wipe her lips, still laughing, and suddenly he found himself trying to help her and then in a clumsy way trying to kiss her face and mouth at the same time.

‘Elsie,' he said. ‘Here, Elsie——'

She laughed again and said, ‘We don't want to fool here. Somebody will see us if we start fooling here. Mrs Mortimer will see us. Not here.'

‘You were always so quiet,' he said.

‘It isn't always the loud ones who say most, is it?' she said. She began to shake herself. ‘Now I've got chaff down my neck. Look at me.'

She laughed again and shook herself, twisting her
body in a way that suddenly reminded him of the twist of dark air running among the ripening corn. He tried to kiss her again and she said:

‘Not here I keep telling you. Some time if you like but not here. Not in broad daylight. I don't like people watching me.'

‘All right——'

‘Some other time. It's so public here,' she said. ‘There'll be another time.'

By the end of August the corn was cut and carted. The stubbles were empty except for the girl and Mrs Mortimer, gleaning on fine afternoons, and a few brown hens scratching among the straw. ‘I could never quite give up the hens,' Mrs Mortimer said. ‘It would be an awful wrench to give them up. I didn't mind the cherries and I didn't even mind the calves so much. But the hens are company. I can talk to the hens.'

About the house, in the yard, bright yellow stacks stood ready for threshing, and there was a fresh clean smell of straw on the air. During summer the face of the girl had reddened with sun and air and as autumn came on it seemed to broaden and flatten, the thick skin ripe and healthy in texture.

‘Soon be winter coming on, Elsie,' Mrs Mortimer said. ‘You think you'll stay up here with us for the winter?'

‘Well, I expect I shall if nothing happens,' Elsie said.

‘Happens? If what happens?'

‘Well, you never know what may happen,' Elsie said, ‘do you?'

‘I want you to stay if you can,' Mrs Mortimer said.
‘They get a lot of snow up here some winters, but perhaps we'll be lucky. Stay if you can. I got now so as I think of you as one of our own.'

In a growing fondness for the girl Mrs Mortimer occasionally remembered and reflected on the incident of the baby. It was very strange and inexplicable to her, the incident of the baby. It filled her with mystery and wonder. It was a mystery beyond comprehension that a girl could conceive and bear a child and then, having delivered it, give it away. She felt she would never be able to grasp the reasons for that. ‘You'd think it would be like tearing your own heart out to do a thing like that,' she thought.

Towards the end of November the first snow fell, covering the hillsides down to within a hundred feet of the valley. The house stood almost on the dividing line of snow, like a boat at the edge of a tide, between fields that were still fresh green with winter corn and others smooth with the first thin white fall.

‘I got something to tell you,' the girl said to Mrs Mortimer. ‘I don't think I'll be staying here much longer.'

‘Not staying?'

‘No.'

‘Why not?'

‘I don't think I will, that's all.'

‘Is it the snow? You don't like the snow, do you? That's what it is, the snow.'

‘It's not the snow so much.'

‘Is it us then?' Mrs Mortimer said. ‘Don't you like us no more?'

‘I like you. It isn't that,' the girl said.

‘What is it then, Elsie? Don't say you'll go. What is it?'

‘It's the baby,' Elsie said.

‘The baby?' Mrs Mortimer felt a pain of tears in her eyes. ‘I somehow thought one day you'd want it back. I'm glad.'

‘Not that baby,' the girl said. ‘Not that one. I'm going to have another.'

Mrs Mortimer felt a strange sense of disturbance. She was shaken once again by disbelief and pain. She could not speak and the girl said:

‘In the Spring. April I think it'll be.'

‘How did you come to do that?' Mrs Mortimer said. ‘Up here? With us——?'

‘I know somebody,' the girl said. ‘I got to know somebody. That's all.'

‘I don't understand,' Mrs Mortimer said. She spoke quietly, almost to herself. She thought, with the old pain, of her years of sterility. She remembered how, in distraction, she had so much despised herself, how she had turned, out of pride, into isolation, away from Joe. ‘I don't understand,' she said.

At night she turned restlessly in her bed. Splinters of moonlight between the edges of the curtains cut across her eyes and kept them stiffly open.

‘Can't you sleep again?' Joe said.

‘It's the girl,' she said. ‘Elsie. I can't get her out of my mind.'

‘What's wrong with Elsie?'

‘She's having another baby,' she said. ‘In the Spring.'

‘Oh! no!' he said. ‘Oh! no. No. You don't mean that? No.'

‘It seems she got to know somebody. Somehow,' she said. She felt across her eyes the hard stab of moonlight. She turned and put her hand out and touched Joe on the shoulder. ‘Joe,' she said. ‘That doesn't seem right, does it? It doesn't seem fair.'

Joe did not answer.

‘It doesn't seem fair. It's not right. It seems cruel,' she said.

The following night she could not sleep again. She heard a westerly wind from across the valley beating light squalls of rain on the windows of the bedroom. The air was mild in a sudden change and she lay with her arms outside the coverlet, listening to the rain washing away the snow.

Suddenly Joe took hold of her hands and began crying into them.

‘I didn't know what I was doing. She kept asking me. It was her who kept asking me.'

She could not speak and he turned his face to the pillow.

‘I didn't think you wanted me. You used to say so. I got so as I thought you didn't want me any more. You used to say——'

‘I want you,' she said. ‘Don't be afraid of that.'

‘Did she say anything?' he said. ‘Did she say it was me?'

‘No. She didn't say.'

‘Did you think it was me?'

‘I'd begun to think,' she said. ‘I thought I could tell by the way you couldn't look at her.'

She heard him draw his breath in dry snatches, unable to find words. Suddenly she was sorry for him,
with no anger or reproach or bitterness, and she stretched out her long bare arms.

‘Come here to me,' she said. ‘Come close to me. I'm sorry. It was me. It was my fault.'

‘Never,' he said. ‘Never. I won't have that——'

‘Listen to me,' she said. ‘Listen to what I say.'

As she spoke she was aware of a feeling of being uplifted, of a depressive weight being taken from her.