Cold Comfort Farm (17 page)

Occasionally, while taking her daily walk on the Downs, she saw Elfine: a light, rangy shape which had the plastic contours of a choir-boy etched by Botticelli, drawn against the thin cold sky of spring. Elfine never came near her, and this annoyed Flora. She wanted to get hold of Elfine, and to give her some tactful advice about Dick Hawk-Monitor.

Adam had confided to Flora his fears about Elfine. She did not think he had done it consciously. He was milking at the time, and she was watching him, and he was talking half to himself.

‘She’s aye a-speerin’ at the windows of Hautcouture Hall’ (he pronounced it ‘Howchiker’, in the local manner) ‘to get a sight of that young chuck-stubbard, Mus’ Richard,’ he had said.

Something earthy, something dark and rooty as the barran that thrust its tenacious way through the yeasty soil had crept into the old man’s voice with the words. He was moved. Old tides lapped his loins.

‘Is that the young squire?’ asked Flora, casually. She wanted to get to the bottom of this business without seeming inquisitive.

‘Ay – blast un fer a capsy, set-up yearling of a womanizer.’ The reply came clotted with rage, but behind the rage were traces of some other and more obscure emotion; a bright-eyed grubbing in the lore of farmyard and bin, a hint of the casual lusts of chicken-house and duck-pond, a racy, yeasty, posty-toasty interest in the sordid drama of man’s eternal blind attack and woman’s inevitable yielding and loss.

Flora had experienced some distaste, but her wish to tidy up Cold Comfort had compelled her to pursue her enquiries.

She asked when the young people were to be married, knowing full well what the answer would be. Adam gave a loud and unaccustomed sound which she had with some difficulty interpreted as a mirthless laugh.

‘When apples grow on the sukebind ye may see lust buy hissen a wedding garment,’ he had replied, meaningly.

Flora nodded, more gloomily than she felt. She thought that Adam took too black a view of the case. Probably, Richard Hawk-Monitor was only mildly attracted by Elfine, and the thought of behaving as Adam feared had never occurred to him. Even if it had, it would have been instantly dismissed.

Flora knew her hunting gentry. They were what the Americans, bless them! call dumb. They hated fuss. Poetry (Flora was pretty sure Elfine wrote poetry) bored them. They preferred the society of persons who spoke once in twenty minutes. They liked dogs to be well trained and girls to be well turned out and frosts to be of short duration. It was most unlikely that Richard was planning a Lyceum betrayal of Elfine. But it was even less likely that he wanted to marry her. The eccentricity of her dress, behaviour and hairdressing would put him off automatically. Like most other ideas, the idea would simply not have entered his head.

‘So, unless I do something about it,’ thought Flora, ‘she will simply be left on my hands. And heaven knows nobody will want to marry her while she looks like that and wears those frocks. Unless, of course, I fix her up with Mr Mybug.’

But Mr Mybug was, temporarily at least, in love with Flora herself, so that was another obstacle. And was it quite fair to fling Elfine, all unprepared, to those Bloomsbury-cum-Charlotte-Street lions which exchanged their husbands and wives every other weekend in the most broad-minded fashion? They always made Flora think of the description of the wild boars painted on the vases in Dickens’s story – ‘each wild boar having his leg elevated in the air at a painful angle to show his perfect freedom and gaiety’. And it must be so discouraging for them to find each new love exactly resembling the old one: just like trying balloon after balloon at a bad party and finding they all had holes in and would not blow up properly.

No. Elfine must not be thrown into Charlotte Street. She must be civilized, and then she must marry Richard.

So Flora continued to look out for Elfine when she went out for walks on the Downs.

*

Aunt Ada Doom sat in her room upstairs … alone.

There was something almost symbolic in her solitude. She was the core, the matrix, the focusing-point of the house … and she was, like all cores, utterly alone. You never heard of two cores to a thing, did you? Well, then. Yet all the wandering waves of desire, passion, jealousy, lust, that throbbed through the house converged, web-like, upon her core-solitude. She felt herself to be a core … and utterly, irrevocably alone.

The weakening winds of spring fawned against the old house. The old woman’s thoughts cowered in the hot room where she sat in solitude … She would not see her niece … Keep her away …

Make some excuse. Shut her out. She had been here a month and you had not seen her. She thought it strange, did she? She dropped hints that she would like to see you. You did not want to see her. You felt … you felt some strange emotion at the thought of her. You would not see her. Your thoughts wound slowly round the room like beasts rubbing against the drowsy walls. And outside the walls the winds rubbed like drowsy beasts. Half-way between the inside and the outside walls, winds and thoughts were both drowsy. How enervating was the warm wind of the coming spring …

When you were very small – so small that the lightest puff of breeze blew your little crinoline skirt over your head – you had seen something nasty in the woodshed.

You’d never forgotten it.

You’d never spoken of it to Mamma – (you could smell, even to this day, the fresh betel-nut with which her shoes were always cleaned) – but you’d remembered all your life.

That was what had made you … different. That – what you had seen in the tool-shed – had made your marriage a prolonged nightmare to you.

Somehow you had never bothered about what it had been like for your husband …

That was why you had brought your children into the world with loathing. Even now, when you were seventy-nine, you could never see abicyclegopast your bedroom window without a sick plunge at the apex of your stomach … in the bicycle shed you’d seen it, something nasty, when you were very small.

That was why you stayed here in this room. You had been here for twenty years, ever since Judith had married and her husband had come to live at the farm. You had run away from the huge, terrifying world outside these four walls against which your thoughts rubbed themselves like drowsy yaks. Yes, that was what they were like. Yaks. Exactly like yaks.

Outside in the world there were potting-sheds where nasty things could happen. But nothing could happen here. You saw to that. None of your grandchildren might leave the farm. Judith might not leave. Amos might not leave. Caraway might not leave. Urk might not leave. Seth might not leave. Micah might not leave. Ezra might not leave. Mark and Luke might not leave. Harkaway might leave sometimes because he paid the proceeds of the farm into the bank at Beershorn every Saturday morning, but none of the others might leave.

None of them must go out into the great dirty world where there were cowsheds in which nasty things could happen and be seen by little girls.

You had them all. You curved your old wrinkled hand into a brown shell, and laughed to yourself. You held them like that … in the hollow of your hand, as the Lord held Israel. None of them had any money except what you gave them. You allowed Micah, Urk, Caraway, Mark, Luke and Ezra tenpence a week each in pocket-money. Harkaway had a shilling, to cover his fare by bus down into Beershorn and back. You had your heel on them all. They were your washpot, and you had cast your shoe out over them.

Even Seth, your darling, your last and loveliest grandchild, you held in the hollow of your old palm. He had one and sixpence a week pocket-money. Amos had none. Judith had none.

How like yaks were your drowsy thoughts, slowly winding
round in the dim air of your quiet room. The winter landscape, breaking under spring’s pressure, beat urgently against the panes.

So you sat here, living from meal to meal (Monday, pork; Tuesday, beef; Wednesday, toad-in-the-hole; Thursday, mutton; Friday, veal; Saturday, curry; Sunday, cutlets). Sometimes … you were so old … how could you know? … you dropped soup on yourself … you whimpered … Once Judith brought up the kidneys for your breakfast and they were too hot and burned your tongue … Day slipped into day, season into season, year into year. And you sat here, alone. You … Cold Comfort Farm.

Sometimes Urk came to see you, the second child of your sister’s man by marriage, and told you that the farm was rotting away.

No matter. There have always been Starkadders at Cold Comfort.

Well, let it rot … You couldn’t have a farm without sheds (cow, wood, tool, bicycle and potting), and where there were sheds things were bound to rot … Besides, so far as you could see from your bi-weekly inspection of the farm account books, things weren’t doing too badly … Anyway, here you were, and here they all stayed with you.

You told them you were mad. You had been mad since you saw something nasty in the woodshed, years and years and years ago. If any of them went away, to any other part of the country, you would go much madder. Any attempt by any of them to get away from the farm made one of your attacks of madness come on. It was unfortunate in some ways but useful in others … The woodshed incident had twisted something in your child-brain, seventy years ago.

And seeing that it was because of that incident that you sat here ruling the roost and having five meals a day brought up to you as regularly as clockwork, it hadn’t been such a bad break for you, that day you saw something nasty in the woodshed.

The bull was bellowing. The steady sound went up into the air in a dark red column. Seth leaned moodily on the hoot-piece, watching Reuben, who was slowly but deftly repairing a leak in the midden-rail. Not a bud broke the dark feathery faces of the thorns but the air whined with spring’s passage. It was eleven in the morning. A bird sang his idiotic recitative from the dairy roof.

Both brothers looked up as Flora came across the yard dressed for her walk upon the Downs. She looked enquiringly at the shed, whence issued the shocking row made by Big Business, the bull.

‘I think it would be a good idea if you let him out,’ she said. Seth grinned and nudged Reuben, who coloured dully.

‘I don’t mean for stud purposes. I meant simply for air and exercise,’ said Flora. ‘You cannot expect a bull to produce healthy stock if he is shut up in the smelly dark all day.’

Seth disapproved of the impersonal note which the conversation had taken, so he lounged away. But Reuben was always ready to listen to advice which had the good of the farm at heart, and Flora had discovered this. He said, quite civilly:

‘Ay, ’tes true. We mun let un out in the great field tomorrow.’ He returned to his repairing of the midden-rail, but just as Flora was walking away he looked up again and remarked:

‘So ye went wi’ the old devil, eh?’

Flora was learning how to translate the Starkadder argot, and took this to mean that she had, last week, accompanied her Cousin Amos to the Church of the Quivering Brethren. She replied in tones just tinged with polite surprise:

‘I am not quite sure what you mean, but if you mean did I go with Cousin Amos to Beershorn, yes, I did.’

‘Ay, ye went. And did the old devil say anything about me?’

Flora could only recall a remark about dead men’s shoes, which it would scarcely be prudent to repeat, so she replied that she did not remember much of what had been said because the sermon had been so powerful that it had driven everything else out of her head.

‘I was advising Cousin Amos,’ she added, ‘to address his sermons to a wider audience. I think he ought to go round the country on a lorry, preaching—’

‘Frittenin’ the harmless birds off the bushes, more like—’ interposed Reuben, gloomily.

‘—at fairs and on market days. You see, if Cousin Amos were away a good deal it would mean that someone else would have to take charge of the farm, wouldn’t it?’

‘Someone else will have to take charge of it, in any case, when the old devil dies,’ said Reuben. Stark passion curdled the whites of his eyes and his breath came thraw.

‘Yes, of course,’ said Flora. ‘He talks of leaving it to Adam. Now, I don’t think that would be at all wise, do you? To begin with, Adam is ninety. He has no children (at least, he has none so far as I know, and, of course, I do not listen to what Mrs Beetle says), and I should not think he is likely to marry, should you? Nor has he the legal type of mind. I shouldn’t imagine he would trouble to make a will, for example. And if he did make one, who knows who he would leave the farm to? He might leave it to Feckless, or even to Aimless, and that would mean a lot of legal trouble, for I doubt if two cows can inherit a farm. Then, again, Pointless and Graceless might put in a claim for it, and that could easily mean an endless lawsuit in which all the resources of the farm would be swallowed up. Oh, no, I hardly think it would do for Cousin Amos to leave the farm to Adam. I think it would be much better if he were persuaded to go on a preaching tour round England, or perhaps to retire to some village a long way off and write a nice long book of sermons. Then whoever was left in charge of the farm could get a good grip of affairs here, and when Cousin Amos did come
back at last, he would see that the management of the farm must be left in the hands of that person in order to save all the bother of getting things reorganized. You see, Reuben, Cousin Amos could not think of leaving the farm to Adam then, because the person who had been managing it would obviously be the person to leave it to.’

She faltered a little towards the end of her speech as she recalled that the Starkadders rarely did what was obvious though they were only too embarrassingly ready to do what was natural. Nor did her remarks have the wished-for effect upon Reuben. He said, in a voice thick with fury:

‘Meanin’ you?’

‘No, indeed. I’ve already told you, Reuben, that I should be no use at all at running the farm. I do think you might believe me.’

‘If ye doan’t mean you, who do ye mean?’

Flora abandoned diplomacy, and said, ‘You.’

‘Me?’

‘Ay, you.’ She patiently dropped into Starkadder.