Read The Line Between Us Online
Authors: Kate Dunn
The Line Between Us (15 page)
I remembered the first wisp of smoke was like mist rising above the escarpment beyond the Drowning Pool, a vaporous breath lost against the blueness of the sky, and how in the course of one long day the mist darkened into something swollen and grey. Too late, we realised we should harvest the grapes and Brown drove to Morwithy to round up anyone who was able to come and help us. Ianto Pryce, Tom Ten Bricks and kindly Gwilym Jones the Ancient came bowling back with him in the Daimler looking as pleased as punch at the ride and before long all of us were busy with the picking bins. I ran to find Delyth, and Ma came too, and halfway through the morning Mrs Brown hurried down the hill with her sleeves still rolled up and flour smudged into her blouse, “I’ve made the family sandwiches for lunch. It won’t kill them, just this once,” and she set to work with a will, speeding up and down the rows of vines stripping the fruit. The skin on the grapes was taut, the flesh unyielding, but a poor vintage would be better than no vintage at all. It was backbreaking work, the stooping and the reaching, then the carrying of the overflowing crates to the fermentation shed, all of it done in heat which came over us like an ailment robbing us of our strength. I paused for breath at one point and raised my eyes to the plume now rising over the hill from the next valley. There were smuts peppering the air and the feathery remains of one came spiralling down onto my outstretched hand. After that, I started tearing the bunches from the vines, ripping the shoots and tendrils that I had tended so carefully all the summer through. Mrs Brown had made sandwiches for the workers as well, but none of us stopped to eat. As word got round, more people began trickling down from the village. I caught sight of Jenny carrying several crates full of grapes and Dick the Tick, still in his green apron with his watch mender’s torch strapped to his forehead, closed his shop and joined us, bringing Parry the Paint along with him too. I could taste the smoke, resinous and caustic, in my mouth and the heat chafed my skin red raw, but we couldn’t stop the race against fire and wind and time.
I looked up at the house, at Nanagalan under siege, the surface tension of its tall windows as glassy as still water. Framed in one of them I could see you and your mother watching in horror as the first flame sidled over the brow of the hill, flicking through the undergrowth, roiling round trunks and lapping at the lowest branches. There were live sparks in the air now, not perished cinders, and as Samuelson gave the order for all the men to leave off picking and form a human chain up through the woods, we heard the bell of the fire engine clanging out the alarm as it came rocketing down the drive towards us.
Captain Thomas was as cool as ice and twice as welcome – I’ll never forget the sight of his huge, slow-moving frame dismounting from the cab. He led from the front with a kind of ponderous certainty, suggesting rather than ordering – why don’t you, and it might be a idea to – so that soon his men had set up a pump in the Drowning Pool and we could begin to believe that things were under control. The hose they brought was as thick as a man’s wrist and the water they couldn’t pump through it we manhandled in buckets along our chain to fill the shallow trench that we had dug the day before. The women left off picking too, clambering up the slope and forming a line parallel to ours, passing down the empty buckets to be refilled. With our woodland turned into a pyre, a black pall hung above us so that we could hardly tell day from night. We kept the buckets coming, slopping water everywhere in our haste and once, when I was temporarily empty handed, I glanced with impatience down along the line, and there I saw you: you had seized a pair of filthy overalls from Brown’s workshop and pulled them on although they were far too big for you, and you were standing in an enormous pair of wellingtons knee deep in the Drowning Pool taking the empty buckets, filling them up and passing them on. We flung them up the line, spilling water, the bark exploding from the branches high above, scattering shrapnel over us. Then all at once, I noticed Brown standing white-faced further down the slope with his eyes pinned open. He appeared stricken. He was stumbling around in short, jerky trajectories, every route seemly barred to him; he had his hands pressed against his ears to block out the barrage, as though there was shellfire sounding in his head. I wanted to hurry over to him, but the buckets kept coming and before I could reach him Gwilym Jones the Ancient left the line and put an arm around him, and the two of them inched their way down through the chaos together. The pump was working flat out with Captain Thomas at the forefront manning the hose, the arc of spray high and hopeless, and without turning or ceasing, he gestured for us to retreat as well.
We went herding into the Drowning Pool like frightened animals, the valley floor a bright savannah all around us and we formed a new line horizontally, soaking the ground with as much water as we could. The flames reached a hundred feet into the air. I craned my neck to see the conflagration, stalled by the towering beauty of it. The heat was enough to flay the skin from your face and I put up my hand to shield myself and some drops of water spattered on to it. Captain Thomas was spraying indefatigably and at first I thought it was a wetting from the hose. I swung round. Above the house the sky was filled with billows of smoke, but further over in the direction of the village there were different shades of grey shelving into one another, not smoke, oh my God not smoke, but storm clouds: it was rain that I could feel, sweet, absolving drops of rain.
Our deliverance sent us all a little crazy, manic we were, sloshing our buckets everywhere: up at the trees, over the ground, over each other and those of us who didn’t have buckets scooped armfuls of water and hurled them all around, and all the while Captain Thomas and his men kept the pump in operation and the hose trained on the fire. The first bolt of lightning ignited, silver against gold, then we heard a cannonade of thunder as the heavens opened, loosing the rain down onto us.
We worked through most of that long night until the rim of the valley was luminous with the approach of dawn. There was no colour left in anything at all and we hardly knew if we were ghosts or survivors walking through the wasteland back towards the house. Jenny found me, somehow, she had been working through the night as well, and all of us trooped into the kitchens lightheaded with exhaustion, except you. Out of the corner of my eye I saw you detach yourself and make your way, forlorn and drooping in Brown’s overalls, around to the front door.
Mrs Brown ransacked the kitchen cupboards. There must have been thirty of us crammed around the table and she conjured up thick slices of bread and dripping, tranches of cheese, cold meats, potted shrimps and slabs of bara brith followed by pint pots of tea to finish with. I could have put my head down on the table and slept right there. Captain Thomas levered himself up from the bench and shook the hand of every one of us, thanking us each in turn and after his brigade had taken their leave, the men from the village, Tom, Ianto, Parry, Dick and all the other helpers began to troop in ones and twos towards the door. Jenny was sitting next to me, listing limply, and I put my arm around her shoulder.
“Time to go, old girl …”
We were halfway to our feet when the green baize door was tugged open and you appeared on the threshold, a grimy waif streaked with ash standing unsteadily in your trailing overalls. “Can somebody help me –?” Your eyes had that same shell-shocked look I’d seen on Brown’s face as Gwilym Jones the Ancient led him down the hill away from the inferno. “Upstairs –” you stammered, as if you had no idea where such a place might be.
“Show me,” I said, jumping to my feet at once, but it was I who led you through the hall of your great house and up your sweeping staircase which divided into separate galleries and you followed in my wake with a docile bewilderment that frightened me almost as much as the fire had done. One of the bedroom doors was open and at the sight of it you burst into tears. I held my breath and looked inside. Your mother lay splayed on the rug in front of the central window, a chair that she had clutched at to save herself toppled over onto her; she was as dead as the valley with the fire burnt out.
I remembered standing in the rain the day after, the ferny air filled with sulphur, surveying the smouldering remains of the beech wood and the wreckage round the Drowning Pool. The first few rows of vines were scorched black and would have to be cut down to soil level, perhaps we’d lose them altogether, but the trees – our wind snaring, echo sounding, sighing, threshing beech trees! I couldn’t take it in. It was like the aftermath of a massacre, the charred skeletons of our dead waiting to be buried.
I was standing there thinking that we’d have to do more than digging in some winter clover to replenish the soil after this, when Samuelson came shambling down the hill towards me, his hands shoved into his pockets and a ferocious scowl on his face. I stared down at the ground. A worm trickled out from the clod my boot was resting on. A nervous refugee, it dangled and coiled in empty space and I cupped my palm to catch it when it dropped, then tossed it into a fold of softer earth. He was huffing and puffing when he reached me, and he fished a pouch of tobacco from his trouser pocket and rolled himself a cigarette.
“The young mistress wants you up at the house,” he grunted.
I glanced up the hill at Nanagalan wreathed in the rain and smoke and steam that squalled down the valley, watching as the wind shifted and the house was revealed and then concealed, revealed and concealed, wondering if I would catch a glimpse of you.
Samuelson crooked his body to one side so that he could light his cigarette out of the draught. His veiny face, skin chapped red with a five o’clock shadow bristling through, hardened as he smoked.
“Did she say what she wanted me for?”
He shrugged, contemptuous as ever. “You’re the privileged one, though, boy. She’s seen the vicar and that fellow from Hammond and Burgess, the family’s solicitors, and now she’s asking to see you.” He glanced sideways at me, a dead-eyed, calculating stare.
“Better go,” I said, hesitating. There were questions in that sideways look I didn’t want to answer.
He picked a flake of tobacco off his tongue and spat. I left him swaying on the balls of his feet, staring beyond the hillside with his lips ruched up, lost in bitter speculation.
Mrs Brown was dressed from head to toe in mourning, with a jet brooch pinned to her collar, and I wondered what exactly she was grieving for. Piously she told me I’d find you in the little yellow sitting room on the first floor.
“It was Mother’s favourite room,” you explained when I knocked and entered, as though this was a fresh cause for grief. Your voice was split and raw and there were unspilled tears in your eyes. You were sitting hunched in a chair as if you couldn’t get warm, crumpled and distracted, pulling a handkerchief taut between your fingers. The wet material was translucent and I could see the pink of your skin through it. I reached into my pocket, ready to hand you mine, which was a bit grass-stained, but at least it was dry. I couldn’t do it. I didn’t know how to give it to you, with your mother gone and everything changed overnight. I cleared my throat and looked around the lofty room instead. The panelling was picked out in cream, and I was thinking that it could have been yellow once – the little yellow sitting room – and I was wondering if there was a blue one and a red one and a green one as well, and whether sitting rooms came in different sizes: large and small, and wishing so badly that you had come to see me in the tool shed or one of the greenhouses, instead of making me come to you.
“It was a heart attack,” you said. “What am I going to say to my poor Papa?” You covered your mouth with both hands, “I don’t feel very … capable …” The tears brimmed in your eyes and you stared upwards at the ceiling, so that they wouldn’t fall, “Not at the moment …”
I almost went across to you, thinking I might touch your shoulder or hold your hand, or just stand that little bit closer so that you would know – Oh Lord – what you must know, what you must surely know: that I would do anything for you, but you pinched the bridge of your nose, concentrating intently, then you marshalled a smile, a slightly broken one, “I’m perfectly alright, really.” You swallowed and then you nodded to convince yourself.
And all the while I stood clutching my dry handkerchief in my pocket, unable to offer you anything, not even that.
“I gave Samuelson the sack this morning,” you said. “He’s never been any good. I don’t know why Mama kept him on for so long. I was wondering if you would take on the responsibilities of Head Gardener for me …?”
I remembered the day of your mother’s funeral and how her death seemed to stand for the death of so much else. All of us were conscious that one door had closed, slammed shut, more like, but it was hard to see where another one might open, though it wasn’t for the want of looking.
The smell of burning wouldn’t leave our valley: the graphite scent of it was present everywhere, rising up from the hare bells and the musk mallows that clung on, wide-eyed with alarm, in the wildflower meadow. It was in our hair, the folds of our clothing, the seams of our pockets; it seeped from the curtains when we drew them in the evening, it was in our bed linen, our mattresses. It covered us like a shroud.
I made my first purchase as head gardener: a petrol-powered chainsaw. I had to go all the way to Gloucester to fetch it. I would have taken Jenny, but she couldn’t get the time off work. I spent the day before your mother’s burial out on the hillside facing my own bereavement, ankle deep in ash which foamed like surf, the black trunks of the trees broken lances, defeated cohorts of them. For the whole of that afternoon the chain saw roared as I lopped off the lowest remaining branches, but it wasn’t a job for one man –we’d need ropes and ladders and a cohort of our own.
As I was working, I spotted Brown standing at the top of the slope as straight as a lance himself, his hands hanging by his sides in an attitude of unwavering patience. I called to him and although he appeared to be keeping watch, he didn’t seem to notice me. When I looked his way again some twenty minutes later he was rooted to the spot, and then it dawned on me that he wasn’t watching, he was waiting, but what he was waiting for, I couldn’t tell.
The morning of the internment we were in our best clothes, which rendered us unfamiliar to one another and I was struck by how conventions separate us rather than bringing us together. People talk about observing a period of mourning rather than enduring it and we stood in the courtyard at the side of the big house in isolated clusters, observing each other. I assumed we were waiting for Samuelson to scuff his way around the corner and then I remembered that he didn’t work at Nanagalan any longer. I glanced around our little groupings.
“Is Mr Brown collecting the young mistress …?”
Mrs Brown, depleted by other losses, was staring into nothingness with a listening expression on her face, although I didn’t think it was the Daimler she was straining to hear.
“What?” she said, startled.
“Mr Brown –? Is he …”
“Search me,” she answered. “Mr Brown’s a law unto himself.”
Some of your relatives had come down from Scotland and there were two or three cars parked in front of the house waiting for your motor to take its place at the head of the cortege. A few people milled round, entitled and discreetly impatient, glancing up the drive in the direction of the village and fingering their watches. Brown wasn’t at the cottage and he wasn’t in his dugout and the Daimler was still standing in the garage. I was out of breath from searching and hot in our Glyn’s suit. The rain was coming on again. Out of the corner of my eye I saw an orchestration of umbrellas going up. Maybe it was thinking of the downpour, then the fire, but I remembered the solitary figure he cut at the top of the slope while I was working and I raced in the direction of the vineyard.
The sight of him, a lone sentry in his uniform and cap, standing in the same spot, was the first intimation I had that something in the core of him was wrong, something irrevocable and deep.
“Mr Brown –?”
He turned to face me and regarded me as though from an immeasurable distance. “Ifor?” he said with some misgivings, as though this were the last place on earth he expected to see me.
“It’s the mistress’s funeral,” I began. “This morning. Now, in fact …”
With the rain dripping from the brim of his hat he resumed his impassive contemplation of the destruction of the beech wood, as if there was nothing in the world that he could do about the funeral or anything else.
“They need the motor …”
He sighed, bowing his head. I took him by the elbow.
“Come on, Mr Brown.”
Although he was stone cold sober, he turned with a drunkard’s precision which made me see how careful of himself he needed to be. We made tentative progress past Esther’s Garden and into the courtyard: everything was done with slow caution. I hoped the sight of the Daimler gleaming in the garage might bring him back to himself, but I was disappointed.
“Right,” I said. “Here we are.”
He stood there in a quandary he seemed unable to resolve.
“Mr Brown?”
There was a flurry in the corner of the courtyard and I turned my head and saw you hurrying in our direction, driving the rain before you with your umbrella.
“Ifor,” you called. “What’s going on? We’re going to be late.”
“It’s alright, Miss Ella,” I called back as meaningfully as I could. “We’ll be round in a jiffy.”
“We’re going to be late,” you said, hesitating, peering uncertainly at Brown.
“Just give us a moment,” I said.
You glanced over at your guests and then at Brown and you nodded. You retraced your steps, looking back at us over your shoulder.
“Let’s get out of the rain,” I said gently, leading him into the garage. We stopped beside the door on the driver’s side. “It’s only as far as the village,” I said. “Just to the church. That’s all.” I didn’t want to treat him like a child, but the church was booked and the guests were waiting and I needed to get him into the motor. With infinite sadness he ran his hand across the paintwork almost as if it were the flank of the master’s hunter, then he leaned against the door, pressing his forehead against the glass of the window so that his cap fell off. He remained in that position without moving.
Disturbed, I stooped and picked his cap off the garage floor.
“I can’t do it any more,” he said, his voice shaking and I stared at him, appalled.
The Brown I knew seemed to have temporarily mislaid himself. I gripped him by the shoulder and straightened him up, dismayed to see my good companion so undone. I didn’t care about the funeral. I could see quite plainly that if he didn’t drive the motor now, he would never, ever drive it again and then all would be lost. “You can do it. It’s only from Nanagalan to Morwithy.” I held onto him with one hand and opened the door with the other. “Two miles, that’s all.” He regarded me helplessly, as if he would have come to my assistance if only he could. “You can do it. I know you can.”
He allowed me to lower him into the seat. Once there, he put his hands upon the steering wheel, though I sensed he was doing it merely to oblige me.
“That’s right,” I said, placing his cap back on his head. “Hold on now.” I took the crank out of its housing beneath the bonnet as I had seen him do so many times and ran round to the front of the car, where I cranked the engine vigorously until it started and then I jumped into the passenger seat beside him.
Brown was staring through the windscreen, his eyes narrowed with the effort of looking so far into the distance, way beyond the courtyard and the Herbar, way beyond Long Leap.
“Let’s make a move, shall we?” I suggested with more optimism than I felt.
The thrum of the engine filled the garage. Bleakly, he regarded the steering wheel, tracing the cloudy grain of the walnut from one strut to another. He was sat beside me, but he wasn’t there, he was holed up in some redoubt cut off from the line. Rousing himself, he turned to face me; his jaw was working and I saw him clench the muscle hard. He nodded grimly and his hand was trembling as he let out the clutch and we began to inch forward out of the garage and across the courtyard. The rain was streaming all around us. Painfully, we rounded the corner and came to a halt beside the front door. Everybody sprang into action, shaking their umbrellas and closing them, stepping into their cars. I jumped out and opened the rear door for you, with the smallest shake of my head.
“Don’t –” I said. “Don’t say anything.”
We drove in silence all the way to Morwithy, never moving out of first gear, grinding up the hill to the village with Brown hunched forward over the dashboard, staring straight ahead. When we stopped at the church he slumped back in his seat, then he wiped one hand across his face and closed his eyes.