Daniel Martin (51 page)

‘Then would you?’

He felt her hair shake up and down. Then she suddenly turned, and they kissed; a melting, a not teasing at all.

‘Oh Danny, I love you. I love you so much.’ Then, ‘You don’t think I’m wicked?’

‘Why wicked?’

‘Cos I tease you. ‘Cos I… ‘

‘Cause you what?’

‘Like you touching me and…’

‘And what?’

She spoke into his shoulder, hardly audible. ‘I’d do what Bill wanted. With you. If you really… if you’d love me more afterwards. If you’d promise you would.’

‘Would you let me touch you all over too?’

He felt her head nod, still buried against him.

‘You promise?’

Again she nodded.

‘Up over tomorrow?’

And once more she nodded her head against him.

They heard the sound of the tractor coming down with Mary and Louise: One swift kiss, one intense look from those shadow blue-violet eyes, then she was running to the barn door, out and down the side back to the house. He knew that they had been foolish, it was after his going home time. His bike was leaning in the twins full view by the gate outside, where he always left it. They came into the yard on the tractor. Normally he would have stopped and talked with them but now he waved, as if he was in a hurry, and went out to his bike. They might think it strange, but better that than have to lie about why he was still there.

So down the bumpy metalled road to the public lane, then over the bottom and the culvert that took the little stream, Thorncombe Leat. Up the hill past the kilns, too happy now, too excited to do more than give one passing thought to the possibility of Bill waiting there and he wasn’t. Halfway to the village he met Mrs Reed in the old Riley, and got off his bike to let her pass. He thought she would stop and give him his wages, that was always on Saturday, but she must have forgotten, she drove on with merely a wave, her eyes on the road. Probably she knew she was late for milking. She was all dressed up, she’d been visiting or mothers’-unioning.

No warning. Aunt Millie was her usual innocently inquisitive self about the day; easily dealt with. Father was preparing his sermon in his study; there was my favourite supper to come, eggs and bacon and baked potatoes. I went up to my room and lay on my bed and thought about Nancy and her breasts and her eyes and her still unknown body and being married to her and living at Thorncombe and… the gong sounded downstairs. And still no warning, even at supper: the same old fusty nothings of conversation. My father was rather silent and preoccupied, but that was a familiar thing on sermon-writing evenings.

The meal ended, and father said grace; then ringed his napkin and stood.

‘I have something for you in the study, Daniel. If you would spare me a moment.’

I followed him across the hail into his study. He went straight to his desk, hesitated a moment, then picked up a small brown paper parcel. He spoke to it, not me.

‘Mrs Reed came in this afternoon. She tells me her husband’s recovery will be a slower business than was at first thought. I understand the authorities have found a fully skilled farm-worker to help out over this winter. He starts on Monday. She will accordingly not require your assistance any more.’ He held out the parcel. ‘She asked me to give you this, Daniel. And your final wages.’ He turned away. ‘Let me see. Where did I… ah, yes.’ He picked up an envelope and put it on the re-extended parcel. I knew his eyes were on me and that I was going a deep and intolerable red. I guessed in a flash, of course; knew why Mrs Reed had passed me in the lane without stopping. I somehow managed to take the book and envelope from him.

‘Well. Aren’t you going to open it?’

I tried to undo the knot in the string, but in the end he took it away from me and used a penknife he had on his desk; then he handed it back. I unwrapped the paper. It was a book, The Young Christian’s Guide to English History. There was an inscription on the flyleaf in an old-fashioned laborious hand.

To Mr Daniel Martin,

With all our gratitude for his help in our hour of need and our sincere prayers for his future happyness.

Mr and Mrs W. Reed

My father took it gently from my hands, and read the words.

‘Most kind. You must write and thank them.’

He handed the book back. ‘There. Now I must get on with my sermon.’

I was back at the door before I summoned up enough courage, or sense of outrage, to speak.

‘Can’t I even go over and say goodbye?’

He had sat at his desk and made some pretence of settling to work, but now he looked up across the room at me.

‘No, my boy. You may not.’ He stopped any further protest by going on so calmly, neutrally, his eyes back on his papers. ‘I understand Nancy is going to her aunt near Tiverton tomorrow. For a holiday.’ I stared at him with a total incredulity, unable to move. He glanced up again and surveyed me for a moment. I have great confidence in your intelligence, Daniel. As also in your sense of what is right and wrong. The matter is closed. I wish you goodnight.’

It was monstrous, of course; the matter had never been opened, I went straight to my room without saying goodnight to Aunt Millie, consumed with the most un-Christian hatred and impotent despair that can ever have seethed inside that house’s walls. The cruelty, the stupidity, the vile meanness of adults! The shame, the humiliation! If only he had raged against me, if only he had given me a chance to rage back! The duplicity of Mrs Reed, the cunning of her! The agony of not knowing, and never knowing, what was happening to Nancy at that moment, her tears, her… I would steal out, I would go to the farm in the night, stand below Nancy’s window, we would run away together. I thought a thousand things; and knew I was trapped by convention, by respectability, by class, by Christianity, by the ubiquitous wartime creed of discipline and self-restraint as the ultimate goods. But the worst of all was knowing that I had asked for this terrible disaster. I believed in God again that night; he had my father’s face and I cried with my loathing of his power.

I came to see later that it was really my father who was to be pitied… perhaps even admired, in his trusting me to condemn myself and find my own way out of the consequent Slough of Despond. I think Mrs Reed must have put the matter diplomatically; not accused us of more than an illicit meeting, a stolen kiss or two. Whether she simply read Nancy’s face, whether Bill Hannacott sneaked on us in some way to her, I was never to discover. But if the charges had been more serious, my father would not have felt free to burke the issue. I suppose he must have been aware what he was doing by giving me no comfort, so pointedly not asking me, then or ever, what I felt about Nancy; for all his faults he was not a sadist. I suspect he regarded all sexual feeling as childish misbehaviour, something one grew out of as one ‘matured’. To be fair, both he and Aunt Millie, whom he must have spoken to that same night (since she showed no surprise at this abrupt end to my labouring) did their best to ignore my melancholy and sullenness and to Chivvy me out of it.

I sneaked back once or twice to Thorncombe, spying on the valley and the farm from the surrounding woods; and saw not a sign of Nancy. Only Old Mr Reed had been in church the day after the dreadful ukase. I had walked back to the Vicarage the moment the service was over. I thought the whole village must know (as they very probably soon did, Bill Hannacott and rural tongues what they were). I longed for a letter from Nancy, but none or none that I was allowed to see. The one consolation of lug back to school was that she might write to me there, as I had once suggested. But I was too scared to write to the farm myself in case my letter would be intercepted, and it was silly to suppose she should not feel the same. No letter came.

That following Christmas, perhaps to make certainty twice sure my father took his first holiday of the war. He and Aunt Millie and I went up to their other sister and her family in Cumberland. She was married to a solicitor at Carlisle: two of their children were away fighting, there was another son just about to go; and then their youngest child, Barbara, who was six months older than myself. I hadn’t seen her since 1939; she was very shy, but not unpretty; quite without the warmth and provocation of Nancy, yet I found her increasingly attractive in the fortnight we spent with them. We didn’t kiss, except under the mistletoe, but we agreed it would be nice to write to each other, to become pen-pals. I thought of Nancy, and Thorncombe, less and less. I did not return home that Christmas, but went straight back to boarding-school.

I saw Nancy just once, in church, that next Easter holidays. If part of me felt sorry for her not least because Aunt Millie had written during the previous term to say that Old Mr Reed had died—another and meaner part now found her provincial and farmery and plump beside my slim little middleclass cousin from Carlisle. We had been writing long letters and kept wishing we could see each other again. I had learnt my lesson and let them know at home I was ‘hearing’ from cousin Barbara. It was evidently approved; during those holidays Aunt Millie asked if I would like her to suggest Barbara spent part of the summer with us. I said yes, at once.

So she appeared at the Vicarage that following August. We cycled about together, did some harvesting, played tennis. I did not see Nancy once. Something seemed to have gone out of the Reeds’ religiosity with the old man’s death. Mr and Mrs Reed still appeared in church, but the girls were never with them now. I still hate going past the farm and avoided it as much as I could when I went out with Barbara. The face I dreaded meeting in that lane was no longer Bill Hannacott’s… not that I ever got very far with Barbara. Her shyness and niceness in the flesh proved far stronger than certain veiled emotion that had flavoured (or I had read into) some of her letters. Five years later she was to cause a great family to-do by ‘turning’ Catholic (not Anthony and Jane’s sophisticated kind) soon after becoming a nun. Her distaste for the flesh was already apparent beneath a very timid desire for young male friendship; I had no erection problems with her, though we kissed once or twice at the end of her stay. I needed to prove to myself that I had ‘overcome’ Nancy. She must have known ‘Mr Martin’s niece’ was at the Vicarage, poor girl.

That autumn I had news from home that did shock me deeply. Thorncombe was up for sale. Mary was to marry, young Mr Reed had never fully recovered, he had the chance of a smaller farm near another of Mrs Reed’s sisters, outside Launceston, they were taking the cattle with them… all the motives and details I didn’t care about… but Thorncombe without the Reeds! I couldn’t imagine it, in some way it seemed a worse denial of natural order than all the far greater upheavals going on in the outer world. I think I first began to get my guilt about them then; some sense I have never quite lost of having been the precipitating cause of all their disintegration, the old man’s death, the leaving the farm where they seemed to belong immutably, unimaginable elsewhere… it wasn’t only Nancy. I couldn’t see Mrs Reed in another byre and dairy, Mary or Louise perched on the tractor in any other fields, any other figure but Old Mr Reed’s, bowlegged gaiters and gold watch, thorn-plant and white moustache, about the garden and the yard. For the first time in my life I realized how profoundly place is also people. I could live a thousand years in this house where I write now, and never own it as they did; beyond all artifice of legal possession.

One last shot.

Many years later, as they used to say in the old subtitles… the early September of 1969, to be precise. I was down at the farm for a fortnight, alone one afternoon, Ben and Phoebe had gone into Newton Abbot shopping. I came out of the front door and saw a man leaning over the gate down by the lane. There was a car parked behind him. I shouted down, he seemed lost. He opened the bale without answering and started walking up, so I went to meet him halfway. I could see he was a townee, he wore a lapelled cardiganwith a zip, and looked like one of the countless Midland and North-country grockles that invade the West every summer.

A tall, thin man of about my own age, with hair plastered back over a bald patch and a gold tooth: he was grinning, a shade embarrassed.

‘Sorry to disturb you an’ all that.’ He had a faint Cockney accent He jerked his thumb back to the Cortina. ‘The wife used to live here. Years ago. Too shy to ask if she can come and have a dekko.’

I hardly recognized her, she’d got so heavy-limbed and stout, her tinted hair done back and up in a kind of bouffant style, like a pub landlady, in a pathetic last attempt at attractiveness. She was in absurd crimson-red pants with a gilt-buttoned navy blazer draped round her shoulders; just the eyes, they’d lost to the bloated cheeks below, but there was still a wash in them of that old azure-violet, the germander speedwell blue. She was hideously embarrassed. I realized at once that she must have known I owned the farm now, something had drawn her back to it, but she hadn’t really wanted to see me. Her no-nonsense husband had forced the issue. He was self-assured, and patently determined to let me know he was quite as good a man as the next. A foreman at Dagenham, it seemed; ‘nice little place’ in Basildon New Town, did I know it? He was very clearly used to handling the shop-floor and a fat wage-packet. They’d been touring down in Cornwall, ‘giving the old Continent a rest’ this year. Nancy still had a trace of a Devon accent, but she was so worried about intruding, so anxious to be nothing but correctly polite… it was painful.

Her father was long dead. Mary still farmed, upcountry, in Somerset. She was just become a grandmother now. Her mother lived with them there, same age as the century. Louise had never married. And she herself? Had they children? Three, the oldest had just got into university.