The Hollow Land (12 page)

“Not exactly. My father's met her once or twice.”

“Then I'll speak as I find. I've never taken to her. She looks fast.”

“You've got to be fast in that trade,” said James. “In television it's the quick and the dead.”

“She's going to find us fairly dead then,” said Mrs. Teesdale with a firm mouth.

 

But the following Friday afternoon when the Household Word's car stopped outside the Teesdale farm on the village street, it did not appear to be so.

She sat with the face everybody knew so well lifted to the sun, and turned the head which everybody watched so often and knew even to the kink in the parting, and said in the voice which was part of the lives of everybody who just happened to be about at that time in the afternoon—though usually they were all round the back snoozing—“Oh how divine!”

“How d'ye do?” said an old man who lived in a shed by the roadside all day, but today was sitting in front of it in a clean shirt.

“What a
beautiful
village! What
beautiful
lupins.”

“Mrs. Teesdale's,” said the shed-sitter, graciously indicating her as she weeded about.

“Afternoon,” said Mrs. Teesdale.

“I'm looking for a house called Eight Trees.”

“Light Trees,
Light
Trees,” said Kendal, who wasn't busy with chimneys or the shop that day but happened to be out for an examination of the dry beck to see if any trout had lost their bearings and needed assistance. “Now that is very interesting. One of the explanations of the name is that it is a mistake by map-makers. Eight Trees it should be, it's thought by many, but being uncertain of the lettering as many has been before and since, up to and including Shakespeare, two strokes got left off.
Light
Trees it is—and they called the next and last fell house Dark Trees for company, though most folks round here calls it Ladford. You're on the track. Straight ahead.”

“
Fas
cinating.”

“Straight ahead,” said old Mr. Hewitson, “and round about. Upsides and over.” He came up to the car and put his gnome head in at the passenger side.

The Household Word looked bewildered. “Straight ahead and round about?” You could hear the hard bit in the voice she used to get clear answers out of famous people who wanted to be mysterious.

“Take no heed of him,” said Kendal. “Just straight ahead and keep going on up. When you're at the top there's Light Trees to the left of you.”

“
Wonderful
,” breathed the Household Word dropping her eyelashes, and a small fierce head beside her bowed over a book suddenly jutted upwards and said, “Oh let's get
on
Ma, for goodness' sake. You know the way. We saw it on the map. You're just showing off.” And the car whizzed under the Quarry Bridge and left the village gaping.

“What a little vixen!”

“I'd up-end her!”

“Poor young woman with a child of
that
description.”

“Poor young child,” said Grandad Hewitson, “with a dandy-dee of
that
sort for its mother.”

When the car reached Light Trees the Household Word and her daughter were both rather set in the face, but soon the Household Word—when Harry's father had embraced her and guided the car into the fleece shed, where there was just room for it, and taken her indoors—seemed happy again.

The fleeces in the shed were amusing, she said. And oh, wasn't Light Trees amusing? So dumpy and long and facing all the wrong way from the view. The view was amusing.

“Farmers never like a view,” said Harry's mother. “They have too much of it all day. At night they want to get indoors and away from it.”

“But don't their wives want a view? I suppose the poor little things never get asked what they want.”

“The wives wouldn't wait to be asked,” said Mrs. Bateman. “The wives rule the farmhouse. It's ‘No boots in here', ‘Wash yourself after that yard' and ‘Don't let the dogs in or you stop out with them' since the beginning of time. No, they don't want a view in the evening, they are too tired to look at it. The main thing is that there is only one door to these farmhouses and that faces away from the east wind. They're the same as Viking houses you know. This one is hundreds of years old.”

“
Darling—
you sound just like the quaint folk I've been talking to in the village street. Oh yes, I'd
love
some tea, sweetie. What a heavenly rustic lounge! No, don't bother about Poppet. She wants to stay in the car.”

“In the car? In the fleece shed? She'll roast. She can't—”

“She's fine, lovey, she's fine. She's deep in a book. She'll come round in time.”

“Oh dear—won't she want some tea?”

“A funny old man in the village dropped some gingerbread on her knee. I don't suppose for a minute it was clean, but we can't help it. Just leave her, darling, do come back. She's one of these clever, difficult ones. She's eleven. And we all know what
that
means.”

“What does it mean?” Harry asked Bell later, telling about it over the sheep dips.

“Don't know,” said Bell. “When I was eleven they'd have killed me if I'd sat in a car in a fleece shed when I'd been asked away on my holidays.”

“Shall we go and get her out?”

They looked through the fleece shed window. The car had all its windows shut and appeared to be empty, but when they went inside there was a bent, small creature beside the driver's seat trying to read in semi-darkness. Bell knocked at the window.

The creature wound down the window and said “Go away” and wound it up again. Bell opened the door.

“Get out.
Get out!
” said a violent, furious face covered in gingerbread crumbs.

“You're all over cake,” said Bell.

The creature kicked him.

“OK—stay,” said Bell.

“I'm reading.”

“I'd have thought you were a bit old for Enid Blytons. Your ma says you're doing your A levels or something.”

The creature, like a hurtling cat, flung itself on Bell and Harry and all three somehow landed in the roly poly fleeces. Ten or twenty of them came bouncing down on top of them. Harry began to laugh and when he had spluttered out of the heap, laughed more.

“Shut up you
kid
,” said the Household Word's daughter.

“You both look so daft—your great eyes flashing in all that wool,” said Harry.

“Gis 'and,” said Bell. Then the two of them pulled out the girl, whose glasses were broken, and who was still looking very dangerous. Bell grabbed her in the small of the back and held her by her T-shirt as the voices of people being polite to each other—talking more loudly than they need and laughing as if they were listening to themselves laughing—approached.

“We're all going for a walk,” Harry's father called. “Going to Dark Trees. You children staying here?”

“No, coming,” said Bell with a jaw of iron, and frog-marched the girl forward.

“
I
don't want to come,” said Harry with eyes astounded at Bell.

“We're all going,” said Bell.

“Come my poppet,” called the Household Word and Poppet shook herself free and went and walked beside her mother, speaking to none.

“
Why
're we going? I don't want to go,” said Harry. “Not with them.”

“She ought to.”

“Well that's her mother's affair.”

“Sitting there sulking in fleeces.”

“You're not her mother. What's it to you, Bell?”

“She's a rotten kid.”

“So why're
we
going?”

“We've got to. Since we've made her.”

“Oh I see. So you wouldn't have gone, wouldn't you, if she'd not played up? You're setting an example.”

“I am not.”

“You are. You're a prig, Bell Teesdale. Hey!”

“Stop it you two,” called Harry's father.

The party, rather straggly, followed the road from Light Trees to the beck that sometimes runs on top of the ground and sometimes below it, then on up the hill, turning before the fell gate. Before dropping down Dark Trees' deep lane between its high stone walls, the Household Word and Poppet were shown the view. Hills like grey elephants ambled towards them from the south-west. Hard blue and green peaks thrust down from the north. Direct west ahead, on the far horizon, swung the Saddleback with its patch of snow.

The Household Word, who had been talking about frozen assets and the unions, said, “Oh yes. The Lake District,” and went on talking.

Down at Dark Trees as they approached the yard gate and Tatton's half-dozen uncontrolled dogs dancing, she was still talking. Chickens pecked about, the cow was happily rubbing its neck along the top of the byre door and snuffling, and Hannah was sitting on the porch quietly making a rag rug for the signal box. The Household Word was saying that England no longer existed and in her job she had learned to trust nobody in this awful country any more.

“Come in and see my cats,” said Hannah to Poppet, holding out her hand. But Poppet turned her back, hanging over the brown beck that ran deep and busy alongside the farm door.

“D'you like our beck?” said Tatton. “That little bridge is old as history. Everyone comes taking photographs of it. D'you know our beck's never dried up they say in five hundred year? Not like all the rest. There's some becks around here you don't know where you are with. Here today and gone tomorrow like the gypsies. There's some becks, they tell me, that even is
called
gypsies—and they was called gypsies before there
was
any gypsies, if you can understand that. I'm not sure I can, but it's in the dictionaries.”

The Household Word had had to stop talking about how awful England was because everyone else was making a racket about such things as what was to become of Hannah's chickens and where Tatton would be selling the dogs and who would look after the six new cherry trees planted last autumn for a windbreak. “Seems hard on them,” said Hannah, “to come through '78 like us and we take off and they has to stay and die.”

“Surely the next farmer will see to them?” said the Household Word in the voice she used on people who weren't being perfectly sensible.

“There's likely to be no next farmer,” said Tatton. “The farm's rented. The rent's high. The sheep are heafed. That means you can't move them. They've been here since the Vikings this flock, and they'd get nervous breakdowns if you tried to move them. The sheep and the land will maybe be rented separate, maybe by Teesdales, and the barns and byres, like Light Trees. But nobody but crackpots'd want this house. It's the farthest on the fell. They'd have to be even more crackpots than Batemans. There's limits. No, Light Trees is a solitary house enough, but if you don't live in Dark Trees through the winter it'll fall to pieces. Dark Trees'll be a ruin five years from now.”

“But such a
beautiful
house!” And the Household Word, a light of a very disturbing sort appearing in her eye, swept past Hannah—though she had not yet been invited in—over the doorstep of Dark Trees and started briskly opening and shutting doors. When she saw the great grandfather clock and the meal chest and the settles and the man's knitting chair the size of a throne, she said, “Did you say you were going to live in a
signal box
?”

“Oh, these we're leaving—or selling for a pound or two. They'd not be wanted most places. They were born here in the house and lived here all their lives.”

“I expect you've had the dealers after them?”

“Oh, we couldn't do with dealers. We'll maybe put an advert in the
Herald
for someone to take them away.”

The Household Word asked if she could see the bedrooms and look at the plumbing. When she came down—an uneasy, glum sort of feeling had settled over everybody—she asked how much money the owner wanted for the house. When she was told, her eyes became brighter and clearer than ever.

Going out again to find Poppet, who was sitting on the gate with her back to everybody, the Household Word looked carefully at the thick strong walls, the tiny, deep-set windows, the huge old door that had been made and opened and shut for the first time by somebody who wore sheepskins and rags on his feet and spoke a language nobody in the yard today would understand and who only ever went to the village on special occasions—to sell sheep or see the great Lord of the Marches set off to the coronation in his rubies and pearls. The Household Word said, “You say the water supply is good? That's what is usually the matter with these places I suppose, lack of water?”

Tatton, who thought very slowly, could not tell why his heart was heavy when he said again—as of course he had to—that no, the beck had never dried up in five hundred years.

“
Simply
wonderful,” said the Household Word on the way home. “So
cheap
! I'm most definitely tempted. Poppet darling—we're
definitely
tempted, aren't we?”

The London father said, “But my dear girl, what about your work? You would never get up here. The place would stand empty for months of the year.”

“Not at all. I'd let it to friends. There are dozens of people in the media just
longing
for a place like this to relax in. And a wonderful place for parties!”

“They'd not like the weather. It's not always like today. Is it, Teesdale?”

Mr. Teesdale was coming past them down the fell with long strides behind a little cluster of sheep. Two dogs swept round, holding the sheep together.

“What a wonderful country scene,” said the Household Word. “How marvellous to see a real
shepherd
.”

Mr. Teesdale gave her a quick sharp look. “Weather's not as I'd like it even today,” said he. “Too bright. We'll not get dipped tomorrow.”