Daniel Martin (46 page)

This very ancient earth, first turned before the Saxons came, its flints broken and rebroken and broken again by the ploughshare by countless anonymous generations even more obscure than my Pueblo Indians in the Jemez, seemed to say this silently for me… was a cold, austere, rather sad place. It would have done, as Jane pointed out, perfectly for a Tess turnip-hoeing or stone-picking. It was also rich with time, the mother of metaphors. Science was like the camera there: a prison.

We had finally, an hour later, almost to drag Paul away. He was quite evidently content to spend all day, and night, tracing the old ridges and whatnot over the fields. But I promised that I’d drive him over into Dorset again one day, perhaps in the summer, and give him more time to measure and explore. It would have been quicker to return to the A4, but I suggested we go by the southern route, via Dorchester, which Jane didn’t know; and soon we were going past Hardy’s statue, mournful and traffic-disapproving as ever, and climbing up into the coastal hills past Maiden Castle and across what is for me one of the frontiers of that mysterious entity, the West of England… the first glimpse of silvery Lyme Bay reaching down to Start Point and, on days clearer than this, of Dartmoor on the western horizon; the first smell of home. Paul, dull old champaign England at last left behind, the green and closed, dense with retreat, ahead.

We stopped and had a cup of tea in the last ‘foreign’ town, Bridport; then we were into Devon, the first deep-red fields… a pearly sunset, all lemons and greens, the sun sinking fire into vapour, the squat dusk silhouette of Exeter Cathedral on its hill. It was dark by the time we were going through Newton Abbot, the nearest town of my childhood, every street and corner known, and better known still, every bend and hedge and barn on the road up out of it and away. Then Paul was in the headlight, undoing the gate from the lane for me; and up by the house the front door opened, they must have been listening for the sound of the car: old Ben and Phoebe waiting, as if they were the real hosts For nearly a year after I had bought the farm and the builders done their job, it was empty when I was away from it. The already derelict garden grew increasingly unkempt. During one absence the roof leaked over one of the bedrooms and brought half a ceiling down with it, a wretched mess. I had had one of the barns behind the house converted into living accommodation, I didn’t quite know what for, perhaps as a studio, perhaps as a den for Caro and her school-friends… and somehow the place never got used. There was the strong feeling of a white elephant, of a silly auction bid come home to roost. Then I had a script, three months’ work, and I decided to do it at Thorncombe; and face a few property-owning responsibilities at the same time.

Many of the older people in the village remembered me, though I rarely shopped or went there at all. I could hear the church bells occasionally, and that was enough. But one evening, soon after I was installed for my three months, I went to the village pub to buy some cigarettes. An old man there knew me. He had briefly helped look after the vicarage vegetables in the Thirties—and I suddenly, if dimly, remembered his face. He had disappeared in the war, someone else had done the digging. In fact Ben was the son of the bowlegged old man with the heartsease in his hat from my wartime harvest-field. Now he was in his sixties.

I bought him a pint of cider, and asked him, after the usual chat, if he still did a bit of gardening. He played Devon canny, he wasn’t up to heavy work any more, he didn’t know, he had a back, he’d have to ask the missus, maybe he’d cycle over one day. I did raise the question of money, but ‘bless you, it weren’t that’. It was, of course. It always is, in Devon and when I pressed, he shook his head in disapproval at my folly. ‘T’ain’t like the ol’ days, rate’s gone up something terrible’; which neatly skewered both my father’s past parsimony and the present real deciding factor. But I think also e was deathly curious to see what this odd cup of foreign tea, ‘ol’ Parson Mart’ns son’, had done with the place.

He turned up the next afternoon, as promised, and clicked his tongue over the state of the garden, though he thought the house and barn were a proper neat job; accepted another glass of cider in the kitchen. I made the second gesture he had been waiting for, a marked contribution to the local inflationary spiral, and clinched by insisting that he counted bicycling time into wage-time. Old Ben knows a sucker when he sees one, both in a rosebush and on the tree of life. Thus I acquired a part-time gardener… and a rather sad village history. He and his wife, Phoebe, had no children, his two brothers and a sister had all left the village; and he had a drink problem. I learnt later from Phoebe that he was also a rough character in his cups, she had twice left him in the past. My father must have known all this, and been playing practical Christian; or perhaps, as I did, he simply grew to like the man. He was a slow worker, but very thorough: in spite of his demon, palpably honest; and devoted to his wife.

I didn’t meet her till a month later. His bicycle had a puncture one day and I gave him and it a lift into the village in the car. She was gossiping with another old girl at the front gate of their tiny cottage as we pulled up and insisted I came in for a cup of tea, a typically Devon-faced little woman, younger than him, still faintly girlish, squirrelishly inquisitive, in spite of the grey hair. I took to her at once, even to her innocent curiosity ‘Ben says ‘tis all so pretty what you done, Mr Martin.’ I said it might be pretty, but it wasn’t very clean, I wished (because I’d already tried to find one) all the village girls didn’t go off to Newton Abbot for work nowadays. Nothing was said to that, except the usual comment on the decline of village mores, but the seed must have germinated because a few days later Ben turned up with a proposition. They had a neighbour who drove into Newton every day for his job; and who would bring him and Phoebe over in the morning and pick them up when he came back. She had done maid’s work once, she’d clean the old place up proper. She got bored at home. It really was a tiny half-cottage, like a doll’s house.

I came to know the simplicities and subtleties of their two souls very rapidly; though she was outwardly philosophical about that, Phoebe’s inability to have children had deeply scarred her somewhere. There was a kind of underlying metaphysical bitterness fl her that balanced her general disposition to mother anything. She was the boss, too, despite Ben’s occasional violence—I very soon heard about all that as well, how he had broken her arm once, how they’d had to lie to the doctor, how he’d kill himself, dreadful old rotgut he would drink… and they were a mine of village gossip as well, and slowly linked me closer to the place. I’m sure everything about me equally got carried back there. I told them enough about my past since leaving the village and my present to satisfy their curiosity, and they met Caro. Phoebe took to cooking me a hot lunch when she came. Her kitchen notions were very simple, and she boiled every green vegetable to a mash, but I came to look forward to it. Rather rapidly she began to take charge of the domestic side of things; and the house was much, much cleaner. She was long-lapsed chapel, but her devil remained dirt. When I had to go away, we agreed she would continue coming once a week to give the place a dust, while Ben kept on as usual with the garden. I left the keys with them without fear.

This went on for two years or more. Then one day when I was there again they came in great distress: their cottage had been condemned. They didn’t own it, of course, and paid an absurdly low weekly rent for it, a few shillings; but the owner wasn’t contesting the order… had even initiated it, according to Phoebe, to be rid of them. It wasn’t even sure they could be rehoused in the village, a bureaucratic cruelty that infuriated me so much that I went into Newton Abbot the next day prepared to have someone’s blood; but met my match in a clerk obviously used to handling people like me. It was not quite as bad as Ben and Phoebe thought; they couldn’t have a council house because they were for families, but old people’s homes were planned for the village, and they would have priority there. She even showed me a list, with their names newly pencilled in.

So I took them on. They could have the converted barn rent-free, and we’d come to an agreement over the work they did. I made them go away and think about it for a day or two; and had the pleasure when they diffidently said that if I was sure, then ‘yes’, of knowing that for once in their ill-starred lives something had turned out well. Phoebe once said to me, about their lack of children, ‘if us only knew what ‘twas we done wrong, why the Lord had to punish us so.’ My father at least would have been pleased with the blow struck against the God of Methodism.

It wasn’t quite a decision I’d never regretted. Their personal and functional failings I grew to live with: that is, Phoebe’s cooking and Ben’s drinking. He did now confine it, at least when I about, to Saturday nights; and I got used to the clatter of upset pails, the bangs and dangs and bumps and buggers, as he negotiated the last stretch home. One such Saturday I’d gone to bed and heard through the open window his drunken singing, strangely solitary and forlorn, down the hill opposite the farm; he was almost poetical then. He always walked to the village for these weekly sprees, being rarely in a state on his return to manage even that primary mode of transport without difficulty; on at least one occasion (so Phoebe told me) he spent the night sprawled in some hedge in a drunken stupor, and didn’t get home till dawn. Luckily it was summer. But he tamed the garden, began to grow lovely vegetables, and all the simple cottage flowers. Plants were a little like the children he’d never had, and he doted on them.

Phoebe also came gradually to accept that garlic and onion and suchlike exotic fancies did not drop one dead at the first mouthful, and learnt, except in occasional reversions, to cook vegetables and meat something short of total extinction. And she kept the house beautifully.

What bothered me much more was their continual presence and gratitude. I suppose it counted as a very soft billet for them, and they were frightened of losing it, of growing too old to cope; and I, as usual, was a little frightened of the responsibility they represented. But the most difficult thing to bear was their simple frame of values. It is all very well, in theory, from a city life, to laugh at village parochialism, the yokel assumption that the rest of the world thinks and behaves like us here; but that is also to laugh at a philosophy that has carried generations of land people through bitter and savagely exploited times. Any Freudian could nail Phoebe’s obsession with polishing and the spick-and-span; but what entailed was a faith in certain elementary decencies of in method, habit, routine, as a prerequisite of conflict is a wisdom that only people who have spent their lives in plant-growing and animal tending can ever profoundly gain. They can’t put it in words, but they feel it. I saw it in his praise for his own plants and flowers was always grudging, there was always something not quite right; yet sometimes I would spot him staring at them or touching them. This wasn’t some elementary form of false modesty; simply his bone knowledge that if everything grew perfectly, the world and he had nothing to live for. He had really grasped a very profound truth: that failure is the salt of life.

It was the more carnal condiment in my own that was the great problem: not simply to make them accept that I was sleeping with someone I wasn’t married to, but that I had no intention of marrying and also that it was a matter, or series of matters, to be kept secret from my most frequent visitor, Caro. I did eventually take the bull by the horns and explain to Phoebe that there were other masculine sins besides Ben’s. If she was shocked it would have been more at my frankness than at the actual fact she hid it. It wasn’t their business, they owed me so much, live and let live… I was showered with all the old adages of village tolerance, rather along the lines of Aunt Millie’s eternal ‘Perhaps it’s for the best’.

But if that gave me licence to live and love as I wanted, it didn’t quite surmount all hurdles. I sensed a lingering, though completely hidden, disapproval. Perhaps Ben and Phoebe were shrewd enough to work out that they were better off with a succession of mistresses, in both senses of the word, than with a permanent wife with a domestic mind of her own. But I knew their profound belief was that I ought to settle down instead of ‘carrying on’; and I took a little to judging friends, and not only the ones I shared my bed with, by Phoebe’s reaction… how much she would chat with them, how discreet or voluble she would be, how much put on her old maidservant self or show her real one. It was all rather absurd, perhaps; but people got a bad mark if they didn’t get on with Phoebe and learn to walk the delicate tightrope between giving her a hand in the kitchen and not taking possession of it. I was allowed to laugh lat her faults and more latterly, Caro, but other women had to learn to be diplomats.

I had once or twice rebelled under this gentle tyranny and contemplated easing them out of my life. But then there were all the times I was absent, and to think of them there was reassuring; the returns, the hearing of their hoarded quanta of news, gossip, the pleasures of an intense small world after a diffuse great one, their Devon voices… and the ghosts of all the others in that house.

‘What a plague is love! how shall I beare it?

She will unconstant prove, I greatly feare it.

She so molests my minde that my wit fayleth.

She wavers with the wind, as the ship saileth.

Please her the best I may, she looks another way.

Alacke and weladay! Phillida flouts me.

In the vicarage days Thorncombe had been owned by a family called Reed. They were of that now nearly extinct class, the educated yeomanry. There weren’t many like them in the parish; plenty of uneducated yeoman farmers with thick accents and thicker grammar, but the Reeds were different. Though they all had the accent of the South Ha, they articulated clearly, without most of the dialect words. There were six in the family headed by a widowed grandfather, the senior churchwarden, ‘Old Mr Reed’, a great favourite of my father’s, constantly cited as an example of a ‘natural gentleman.’ The patronizing cliché is foul, but he really was a splendid old fellow, with an innate dignity and courtesy… almost a grandeur. With him, you could believe about the backbone of England. Elsewhere you played polite to those who lacked a standard accent; in his patriarchal presence you wanted to be it naturally. He was never ‘Old Reed’; he had earned his Mr. I remember him best for his lesson-reading. He knew many of the great passages of the Bible by heart, and he would recite them in a slow, deep voice straight from memory, not looking down at the lectern, with a simple conviction I never heard in my father… or in many far more accomplished actors in later life, for that matter. He is excepted for eternity from all I have ever hated in the Church of England. He was like a folksong, a folk-poem; Drake and Raleigh’s voice. My father might preach and practise faith, but Old Mr Reed was it.

He was too old to work Thorncombe by the time the war came, and that was done by his son, who was nondescript by comparison, a rather taciturn, soft-spoken man in his early fifties. He had a wife and three daughters, the youngest of whom was the Nancy I had once liked to watch covertly in Sunday School and who was so good at staring out. The elder two, the twins, Mary and Louise, helped their parents run the farm as soon as the war started. They were regarded as odd by the village, always dressed more like men than women, except at church; eternally in breeches, jumpers and shirts, a pair of wiry, brown-faced agricultural Amazons, though they were slightly built. Their skill and toughness and general air of self-confidence intimidated me before I really knew them—I thought they were very unattractive, as girls.

The Reeds had a fine herd of Guernseys and made the best cream in the district; still brewed their own cider; poultry; the mother was a crack beekeeper as well, my father wouldn’t touch any other honey. Although the farm was at a far corner of the parish, and of course they didn’t come into the category, we could meet on equal social terms, we had quite a lot to do with them. There was church business, Mrs Reed was also a leading light in the Mother’s Union which meant that messages had often to be taken out there. Then during the war, food… my father shook his head at such scandalous defiance of the Holy Laws of Rationing, but there was a surreptitious trade in cream, butter, eggs, chickens, ‘fat rabbit’ (illegally killed pork), all over the village. We did well from several quarters. There was an air of the tithe in kind about it, as Aunt Millie claimed. But our main supply line ran from Thorncombe. I was in love with the place long before that. It was isolated, orcharded in a little valley of its own, backed up against a steep wooded hillside and facing southwest. A simple whitewashed house, with just one touch of distinction, a plain but massive stone porch with the date 1647 carved on it. I was attached to that porch and its simplicity even as a small boy; it, too, had faith. And the house inside as well, always with that characteristic Devon smell, rich and sweet, of old cow-dung and hay and beeswax; and it was comfortable, immensely lived in. There was some good china, solid old furniture, a lack of the cheap-bargain trash, the linoleum and oilcloth so prevalent in the average farmhouse of the area. At Thorncombe life wasn’t centred round the kitchen, though it was used for ordinary meals. Perhaps it was the preponderance of women in the household. It always made me strange to myself, in those days. There was the class thing, the way Mrs Reed always made a fuss of me, gave me tea, lemonade, a glass of cider when I was considered old enough; the vicar’s son, the honoured guest; and Daniel suddenly conscious that he didn’t sound natural or rather, that this was one place where it permanently worried him that he didn’t. Then it had some mysterious warmth, some inner life, some grace that we lacked at the Vicarage, although ours was a bigger, more spacious home, with an infinitely finer garden. That must have been partly the girls, an unconscious dream of sisters, of a true mother, not poor Aunt Millie; partly the analogous aura of sexuality; and living close to animals, the earth, to the tangible, not the spiritual. I always looked forward to going out to Thorncombe. My father made me share my unskilled labour among as many different farmers as asked for it during the wartime harvests, which riled me secretly. I was for the Reeds first, and everyone else afterwards.

And Nancy.

The agonies of Nancy.

I virtually forgot her for two years when I went to boarding-school. I knew she had gone on to the local grammar-school in Newton Abbot, was a daygirl there. I saw her on holiday, in church. She seemed rather gauche and fat and to have grown much shyer, to have mislaid her old tomboy self, it was difficult to get a glance now from her eyes, let alone a stare. I was no better. I had heard too much sex talk in the dormitory and taken most of it literally. Mine was not a particularly queer school, but queer undercurrents were rife and they disturbed me. I had to lie and supposed I was the only one who had to about my own sexual experience. Of course I had kissed girls, of course I had touched their tits of course… the full distance one was excused, that was for later, but my real total inexperience was shameful. I found one or two other boys attractive, and I hated it; being blasphemous was one thing, but secretly perverted was another. I blamed home not without some justice; the other boys all seemed to have sisters and sisters had girlfriends and dances and wizard parties… while all I got was the odd tennis afternoon with dull and standoffish creatures who seemed far more interested in hockey and ponies and each other than in walks in the shrubbery. Not that even that was on, given the phalanx of adult chaperones who generally supervised such occasions. I was terribly scared of being laughed at, too, if I did make some timid advance… or if a fuss was made, and Father or Aunt Millie heard. School at least drove girls out of mind. We met none, saw none who were remotely attainable. There was work, and the feel of a shared repression and impossibility. But on holiday at home I was condemned to my own resources and Portnoy’s complaint.

I was saved by the younger Mr Reed. Just before I returned for the summer holidays that year, he strained his back lifting a gate to its hinges. He was ordered off all heavy work, an order he promptly ignored, like any decent working farmer the world over; and duly paid the consequences, a fortnight in bed, and at least four more in a chair. We had received too much kindness from the family over illegal food for my father to be able to refuse Mrs Reed’s suggestion that she needed my help that summer more than anyone else in the parish. I arrived home to find the matter cut and dried. I was hired out for thirty bob a six-day week, which even for those times was slave labour.

But the sixteen-year-old slave didn’t care. Those previous Easter holidays he had met Nancy only once and in the far from erotic setting of a Mothers’ Union tea-party at the Vicarage; but it had been enough. He and she had been set to handing round the cups and saucers to the assembled logorrhoea of ladies. Her fair hair was done in something approximating the Betty Grable style, which he liked; and if she lacked the svelteness of a Deanna Durbin (his current ideal woman), the dark blue satin short-sleeved party dress she wore, puffed at the shoulders, flared skirt, showed that ‘rather fat’ was unjust. A shade plump perhaps; but very clearly breasted and waisted; and he’d grown fast, he was an inch taller than her. She was shy, probably for class reasons, and they hardly talked.

He wondered if he dared ask her out into the garden, but so many messes… and he couldn’t think of a good excuse. She had lavender-blue eyes, arched eyebrows, long lashes, a face that might have been too round-checked without the eyes, but somehow suited them as it was. She sat demurely by her mother after a while and he had to be content with stealing glances. But that night… He was head over heels in love with her after just one day’s happy slavery at Thorncombe; awful, terrible, unable to look at her when she was beside him, unable to think of anything else when she wasn’t; and the endless banal questions over supper at home. Yes, Old Mr Reed had showed him how to scythe, he’d scythed half the orchard, all the nettles, it was terribly skilled really. The impossibility of telling them even that, the old man showing him how to set his hands, the rhythm, the slow-and-easy, not-too-much-lad, who labours longest labours best, the old man leaning on his walking-staff beneath the apple-branches, smiling and nodding. The art of whetting. How hard it all was, look at the blisters on his hands. They had brought a chair out for the old man to sit and watch, by the beehives. He told that, but not of the girl who came with their ten o’clock bait, cake and tea, and gave him one smile. She wore a red scarf, she was covered in flecks of down, plucking chickens in the dairy; but those shy eyes, a subdued awareness of him, that one curve at the corner of the pressed lips. Then ‘dinner’. Pasties and potato-cake (Mrs Reed was half-Cornish). Then mucking the byre out with Louise, dung to the midden, spreading straw. Then this, then that, Aunt Millie smiling, his father approving.

To bed at nine, dead with sleep, just two minutes to recall the untellable worst, the end of the day. Collecting eggs, alone with her, holding the basket while she delved in the boxes, watching her profile, the stink of the henhouses, the clucking, her soft voice to the hens, as if he wasn’t there, but knew he was; less shy in that, if still not with her eyes. Suddenly feeling how small she was, how frail, how female. Sensing a sudden erection, using the basket to hide it, ducking more than he need under the roof. Better outside, hunting down the hedge for the wild layers; the slanting sun, an angle of skin through her cotton blouse when she bent; then finally to the barn where an old Rhode Island Red called the Loony laid up in the straw, ‘if the bloomin’ rats haven’t got ‘em’. The hen ran in circles on the cobbled floor, in outrage and alarm. Nancy clambers down with two eggs, puts on a broader accent than her usual one.

‘Oh, do ‘ee be quiet, Loony!’ And she bends forward, kissing at the agitated russet bird.

He says, ‘Nothing’s loony that lives here.’

She comes and takes the other side of the handle of the basket he is holding, as if to see how many eggs there finally are.

‘It’s just a farm. Working.’

‘Don’t you like it?’

‘Sometimes.’

‘Are you glad I’ve come to help?’

Her bent head. ‘Course we’re glad.’

‘I meant you.’

‘If you’re not stuck up.’

That shocks him. ‘Do you think I am?’

‘Used to be. At Sunday School.’

‘I didn’t mean to be.’ She says nothing. ‘I wanted to talk to you. At home. Last Easter.’

She turns over a brown egg and rubs a speck of straw from its shell; then turns away into the wide barn door; gives him a quick shy look, and down.

‘Do you remember Bill?’ She gives a little nod backwards, to the north. ‘From out over. Bill Hannacott?’

He knows rather than remembers the Hannacotts; they are chapel, not church. They have a farm the other side of the main road.

‘Not really… I know who you mean.’

She crosses her arms, in a way her mother does, speaks to the ground.

‘We’re in the same class now.’ What could be more delicately put? Yet at the time it seemed brutal, catastrophic, an atrocious letdown after the promise that day. Imminent zenith to realized nadir, all in two seconds. He saw her with Bill Hannacott down and back every day to Newton; in class; giggling hand in hand. Stupid! As if it alI were some secret island, nonexistent without him, unknown to anyone but him. He felt his background again, intolerably, now it alienated from this simple world she lived in, how he was condemned always to do the rural equivalent of slumming. Perhaps it should have devalued her in his eyes, this fancy for some clodhopper from ‘out over’; but it didn’t, it made her ten times more desirable.

He followed her with the egg-basket to the dairy, where Mrs Reed was and insisted at once he went off, it was ‘after his time’. He went for his coat in the orchard. But as he came back past the farm, Nancy ran from the side with a paper bag in her hands, up to him.

‘Mum says to take to Miz Martin. ‘Cos you worked so hard.’

Six of the brown eggs lying on a handful of straw.

‘Oh… thanks awfully.’

‘Now doan’ee drop ‘em.’

Again that mocking exaggeration of accent. He looks hurt.

And just for a moment she has a strange little doubtful look that somehow isn’t about eggs; that is curious, and puzzled. Then she turns, waves her hand back to his ‘See you tomorrow?’ as she runs to the dairy.

He sleeps on that look.

He doesn’t get much else for… how long, I can’t remember now, but it must have been two weeks or more, the beginning of harvest. He discovered that Nancy was the spoilt pet of the family, most of her work was helping her mother round the house, in the dairy, with the meals. Usually he was out with one or both of the twins. Mary was engaged to a young man from the other side of Tomes, exempted because of his farming; Louise was also ‘walking out’. They were twenty-one, far too old for him, and in a way he found them easier to be with, though at first he felt they thought he was just a nuisance, they so often told him to do things and then moved to do it themselves at his slightest bewilderment or clumsiness. Neither of them talked much. They lived for the farm, for getting the work done, for proving that they could run it quite as well as the sons their parents must originally have hoped for. It was the first time he had really done the countless jobs besides harvesting at a farm demands. He learnt to use hook and hoe, how to hoy the cothset gins for rats, there was a plague that summer; the coming hardness of some of it the poetry of it too.