Daniel Martin (47 page)

One late afternoon he went up on the tractor behind Louise with the hay-mower to cut the top ley clear of its nettles and thistles. He followed after her with a pitchfork, heaping the cut stems for later burning. But when it was done, she unhitched the mower and let him drive the tractor round the field, a waste of time and rationed fuel he knew delightedly was also an acceptance that he was useful after all, that he began to rate as one of the family. Louise had Nancy’s blue eyes; a ruddy skin, a slow laconic smile. He liked her better than her twin sister, in spite of the identity of looks. He began to admire and like them both, really; their asexual toughness and briskness and know-how was so much easier to cope with than Nancy’s ambiguities.

But he liked best the milking. It embarrassed him, too. He had too much imagination, it was too near suckling and masturbation, too erotic. Yet like them, nice. They showed him how to do it, but he never really got the strange wristy knack of it, just the right pressure and timing. Mrs Reed would be through three cows before he had finished one. The girls called her a show-off, muttered endlessly about the folly of not having installed machinery before the war and her continuing pigheadedness over it. She would smile and milk. No cow of hers would ever have rubber teat-holders instead of hands at its udders; and her dairy proved why. Daniel was usually put to lugging the pails to the churns and the separator, which gave him time to stand and watch the byre of female things at work; those smells and lights and shadows and murmuring voices among themselves and to the cows. The quick spurt of the first milk on the zinc. Like the woodlark.

There were times alone with Nancy; egg-collecting, once or twice she came to help him bring in the cows. They spent an hour one afternoon in the orchard, picking the first eating apples for Louise to drive into market the next morning, Daniel up the tree, Nancy below to take the full haversacks he handed down and transfer them to the boxes. One tipped over before she could reach up to grip it and she screamed and twisted aside and fell in the grass under the shower of Beauty of Bath. Astoundingly, they laughed. At ground-level they picked side by side and talked, shyly, politely, about her school and his, the war. Her parents wanted her to be a schoolteacher, but she didn’t know. For the first time in his life he found himself talking almost like a socialist. How snobbish his school was, how he hated it really: she said nothing but she seemed to understand. They did not talk about Bill or other boys and girls, or love, or anything like that. He was still the vicar’s son and she, the farmer’s daughter.

His father came out sometimes on his rounds. Daniel hated that, to be reminded who he was, even if it brought flattery. He came from one of the fields one day to find his father talking under the porch with Mrs Reed and Nancy. ‘Now if only your school ports were as good as the encomium I’ve just had from Mrs Reed, Daniel, I should be the happiest father in the country.’ Why did he have to use words like that? Nancy was biting her lips at me. And it wasn’t fair. I always got rather good reports.

We all had the midday meal together in the kitchen, with Old Mr Reed, Grandpa, at the head of the table. I think he liked me there, to have someone to reminisce to. He’d been a Regimental Sergeant-Major in the Devonshires in the First World War, all his medals were under a glass frame, on green velvet, in the living-room. I could see he bored the girls sometimes; or perhaps they were afraid he would bore me. But there was a great deal of love and tolerance in that room. It remains his room. I still eat in it, though it is no longer the kitchen; though none of the old furniture remains, something of the Reeds still does. Mrs Reed always sat opposite the old man, in her husband’s absence upstairs, at the other end of the long ash-wood table. Then the two twins side by side, and Nancy and I opposite them.

One day we were still at table drinking tea, there was always a pot of tea at the end of the meal, when my dreaded rival appeared in the door. I knew he was due to come, a huge beech had fallen in a gale the previous winter on the hill behind the farm, and had to be sawn into manageable lengths with the two-man crosscut before they could be dragged down to the circular saw in the yard. Bill had promised to come and help do it when he could get away from his father’s farm. He was a big seventeen-year-old, terribly ungainly, a much coarser stock than the Reeds; at all of that already ignominious breed, the grammary. He bobbed to the old man, Mrs Reed, the twins, Nancy. There was a brightness in his eyes as he looked at her. I was introduced, and had my hand wrung. He had a cup of tea before we started work. There was farm gossip, when they were going to ‘cut’ out over, Mr Reed upstairs. He said nothing directly to Nancy, just those little bright looks. He ignored me, I couldn’t tell what she was thinking, whether she was proud of him or thought he was talking too much. I thought he was talking too much, and I bitterly envied him his ease, his knowingness, his being of their same earth.

An hour later I was doing much more than just envying him; I was hating every inch of his body. I had had the foolish idea it was going to be (at least in work terms) something of a jolly afternoon off. That was before he and I started sawing the branches off the main trunk, while the twins stood by with the tractor and chains to haul the cut baulks down. Of course he was peasantsly, Nancy was also there watching, he was bound by rural law quite apart from what he might have already sensed in the situation, to turn it into a contest of strength. He set the saw across the first bough, as if I must know as well as he did how to use it; which gave him the chance, after the first few to-and-fros, laboriously to instruct me on how to stand and hold the thing. But once we got started he wouldn’t stop. After a minute or two I could feel my arms ready to drop off with exhaustion and pain, and we weren’t even halfway through. The return thrusts from my side got feebler and feebler. I had to stop.

‘Too fast, is it, then?’

‘Of course not. Just get my breath.’

‘Smoke?’

He thrust a packet of Woodbines at me.

‘No thanks.’

He lit one, then winked behind me to where Nancy was sitting; then spat on his palm and took the wretched saw-handle again. After a time he began sawing single-handed, and smoking, setting a much slower rhythm, but making it quite clear whose fault that was. He was so blatantly determined to put me down that he gave me strength; and it mercifully wasn’t all sawing, the stems had to be levered and rolled down to the cart-track where the tractor, waited and chained up for dragging. He was as strong as an ox, had to give him that. For the first time I realized that the the twins weren’t. After a while, I began to take the sawing better, exhausting though it was; but he was relentless, perhaps there was a bit of the old chapel-church hatred in it as well, in showing me up as a weak-muscled tyro. Then right at the end of that afternoon of torment, I’d just rolled down one of the smaller branches by myself to the track… he was standing watching beside Nancy.

‘Turn ‘im arsy-varsy, Danny.’ He had kept calling me by the hated version of my name from about mid-afternoon, another gross crime. ‘I keep telling ‘ee. ‘E’ll jag else.’

Nancy turned sharply away. The tractor engine was running, I couldn’t hear what she said to him, but I saw him take a step after her and put his hand on her shoulder—and have that sharply removed too. It didn’t mean much at the time, I just felt angrier: that she had had to pity me. He was still there when I went off home, and I knew he was asked to supper. Even the twins saw it had been a tough afternoon’s work and thanked me specially for it. From Nancy I got hardly a look. She had disappeared when I said goodbye. I cycled home aching, humiliated and furious with the world.

The next day she had gone shopping with her mother to Torquay and I didn’t see her at all. We were going to start the harvest in three days, this was their last day off before that started. I even begrudged them that; gadding about while I had to grease the reaper and file endlessly at the teeth of the mowing blades.

The weather held good, and we were up in the two big wheat-fields the following day scything the first swathe round the hedges for the reaper to get in. We took it in turns, the twins and I, tying up the sheaves by hand, then scything. Nancy brought our lunch up and helped for an hour with the binding, but it was very hot, and we hardly talked. Again she had disappeared when I looked into the dairy to say goodbye to Mrs Reed.

The road home led steeply up for a while, through a natural cutting, thick with trees and the thorn-bushes that must have given the combe its name. It was always shady, rather secretive, gloomy. There were old limekilns to the left, cut into a small broken cliff. Above and beyond that was a common, dense with brambles and bracken: this time of year, where we sometimes used to picnic before the war. After the incline the lane levels out, another valley; then up and in half-a-mile, the village. I was too tired that day to cycle up the first hill. I was pushing up the steepest part, thin old nothing, counting steps. Then something moved, where the limekilns were hidden behind the August leaves. Nancy stood out in the little path that led down from them above the lane. She was wearing a pink and white frock, one I had seen before, school-girlish, sleeves that ended just above the elbow. It had a darn at the bottom she had done herself, badly. Mrs Reed had joked about it one day, at midday dinner, and Nancy had naïvely raised the hem and I had seen above her knees for a moment. Now she looked at me, then down at the sycamore leaf she was shredding.

‘What are you doing?’

‘Nothing. Just a walk.’

‘Where you going?’

‘Old quarry. Mebbe.’

‘I didn’t know you could get that way.’

‘There’s a path.’

She went on shredding the leaf, as if she didn’t care whether I went on or stayed talking.

‘I didn’t know.’

‘It’s a secret.’

She didn’t smile, but she looked at me, and I knew it was a challenge, not an announcement. I turned my bicycle across the lane.

‘Can I come with you?’

She shrugged. ‘If you want to.’

‘I’ll just hide my bike.’

She nodded, and I hastily pushed it into the undergrowth on the other side of the lane, then went back across and started to climb up to where she stood. She turned before I reached her and led the way up through the trees to where the rocks rose vertically for twenty feet from the earth; then along the face beside the rubble choked mouths of the old kilns. She stopped where the cliff gave way and there was a steep scramble going up. She stood to one side and smoothed her dress.

‘You go first.’

So I went first. It was difficult at the top, one had to yank oneself up the last yard or two by holding a tree-root. I turned there and held out my hand. She took it and I pulled her up, wondering if I dared keep hold of it. But she moved away and led me on up through the more gently sloping trees. The sun still shone at this height. I caught a glimpse of the farm down below through the leaves, the sound of one of the sheepdogs barking, one of the twins’ voices stilling it. There was no wind. The pink stripes and bands of small roses of her back, the fair hair. She wore old black shoes, school shoes, no socks. I knew I had entered the Garden of Eden.

‘It’s not my real secret place.’

‘Where’s that?’

She pointed casually back, beyond the farm, as she walked. ‘Up over.’ Then, ‘when I was little.’

I wanted to say more, to make her talk, but I couldn’t think of anything that wasn’t silly, and she walked quickly, keeping to the trees on the east slope of the valley crest, though I could see the common in the evening sunlight to our right. It was peculiar, not a stroll at all; more as if we were walking somewhere with a purpose. At last she turned up towards the common and soon we were pushing through the green bracken. She still led the way. Then suddenly we were on the brink of the old quarry, looking out across the valley to the distant village. It was nice, a surprise, the sudden openness and view. The rabbits running, the green sward they had won from the bracken. She pointed.

‘There’s the church.’

I was not interested in the church.

She walked on a little, to where you could scramble over the lip of the quarry and climb down a grassy slope to its bottom. She began picking centaury and eyebright there, then knelt by a clump of the pink-headed starry flowers. Daniel sat beside her, then leant his elbow. He felt abominably gauche and tongue-tied, at a toss before her apparent composure; still sought for something to say, something that… ‘They’re not much good, actually. They won’t open indoors.’

‘My dad likes ‘em.’

‘They’re called centaury.’

‘Earth-girls.’ Her blue eyes met his a moment, then away. ‘That’s what we say.’ He didn’t find that quaint (or inexact, she meant earth-galls; but in embarrassing. His intellectual superiority, he was so anxious not to seem stuck up, he shouldn’t have shown off about the real name. The umbrage hovered permanently, and as if to prove it, she stopped picking and sat back; then unlaced her shoes and kicked them off, curled her toes in the short grass.

He tried again. ‘I thought you didn’t like me any more.’

‘Who says I liked you in the first place?’

‘After the other day.’

‘What other day was that then?’

‘You said something to him.’ He picked at the grass in front of him. Bloody girls, why were they so impossible? Why did they have bare feet? ‘When he was trying to boss me about.’