Who Was Changed and Who Was Dead (4 page)

When the girls tired of rowing they tied the boat up under a willow tree. It seemed as if they were in a green tent. They sat there for a little time; but the bottom of the boat smelt of fish, so they climbed out and lay on the river bank in the sun. The river breeze rustled the rushes and made a whispering sound. After a time Emma opened the picnic basket and they ate honey sandwiches with ants on them and drank the queer tea that always comes from a thermos. When there was no more picnic fare left they lay in the sun again in a straight line, and became very warm and watched dragon-flies. Some were light blue, small and elegant; others were a shining green; and there were enormous stripey ones that took large bites out of the water-lily leaves.

As Dennis lay in the sun, he thought how pleasant it was having a picnic with Emma in charge. He remembered other afternoons when his father had forced him to bathe from the boat, and, when he had clutched at the sides with his terrified hands, his father had bashed his fingers with a paddle and laughed and yelled at his struggles in the water. When at last he was allowed to climb back, his teeth used to chatter. That seemed to make his father laugh even more. He used to lie at the bottom of the boat while his father laughed and Emma dried him, grumbling at their father as she rubbed with a towel. So far this year there had not been any of those dreadful bathes. For sometimes the floods made the river unsuitable for boating and now Willoweed hardly noticed the children. It was weeks since they had had their morning lessons. They guessed this would go on until their grandmother suddenly realized what was happening. Then there would be a great tornado, in which their father would become almost crushed to a pulp, and the lessons would start again with new vigour, until Grandmother Willoweed lost interest in them and they would gradually peter out again. Dennis often wondered why his father, who seemed to set such store by bravery, was always so cowed by his mother. He thought perhaps it was chivalry.

The sun was very warm and there was the sound of music gradually coming nearer. A boat passed with a gramophone with a large green horn. A man in a striped blazer was punting, and a woman with golden hair sat under a red parasol. She changed a record on the gramophone and a grunting, wailing organ filled the air. “How I hate organs” thought Emma, “I’m sure people who like organs eat cheese cakes and call their drawing rooms lounges.” She lay on her back imagining the golden-haired woman sitting in her lounge, eating eternal cheese cakes and listening to a fruity organ. She would have several little girls she called “the kiddies.” They would have crimped hair with large pink bows on the top, and wear patent-leather shoes and shiny satin bridesmaids’ frocks on summer Sundays. Then she forgot about the family of cheese-cake-and-organ-lovers because the children seemed to have vanished. She sat up and saw they were in the field behind, throwing stones into cow pats; so she turned her back on them and sat watching the river.

She called to the children and they left off their disgusting game and returned. Hattie was carrying a rusty tin filled with newts they had caught with their hands in a nearby pond. They insisted on putting them in the boat to take home. Then it was discovered that all the strings of Dennis’s boats had become entangled and had to be sorted out before the boats would float properly. Emma rather welcomed these delays. She wanted to be certain the whist drive had really ended before she returned. She rowed home with leisurely strokes. There was no sound of screams coming from the house, so she gathered the party had been a success from her grandmother’s point of view.

The guests had all departed, and the maids were folding up the card tables in the drawing room. Then she heard her grandmother calling, “Emma, Emma,” in her nasal voice.

“Please God, don’t let her be in one of her rages,” prayed Emma, as she hurried to the dining room, where her grandmother’s excited voice seemed to be coming from. Grandmother Willoweed was pouring herself a glass of port. Both the ends of her tongue were protruding—rather a bad sign. When she saw Emma standing there looking so apprehensive, she put her glass down on the sideboard and said, “Doctor Hatt was called away in the middle of my whist drive. His wife was worse—her nose was bleeding.” She filled her glass from the decanter and gave Emma a strange glance.

“Well, peoples’ noses are always bleeding. You are supposed to put a large key down their back.”

Emma was rather perplexed at her grandmother making such a commotion about such an ordinary happening. Perhaps she was annoyed about the numbers of the whist drive being upset.

Grandmother Willoweed took a sip of port, and looked with her lizard-like eyes over her glass.

“Well, my dear, a key wouldn’t have been much use in this case; this was a peculiar kind of nosebleed. It went on and on until the bed became filled with blood—at least that is what I heard—it went on and on and the mattress was soaked and the floor became crimson; it went on and on until Mrs. Hatt died.”

She took another sip of port.

“Yes, Mrs. Hatt is dead now.”

She looked hopefully at Emma to see if she was sufficiently shocked and surprised.

Emma remembered Mrs. Hatt’s comfortable figure and the brown plaits twisted round her head. She recalled helping her make marmalade last spring. Would all that marmalade be wasted now? People couldn’t eat dead people’s marmalade, surely—and the Christmas puddings hanging up in her kitchen? Doctor Hatt couldn’t very well have a merry Christmas eating his dead wife’s pudding while she was lying so cold in the churchyard. Emma saw her grandmother watching her, her trumpet already at her ear, waiting for the words of surprise and sorrow; so she did her best. But her grandmother looked disappointed.

“You are a selfish girl, Emma, just like your mother. Other people’s sorrows mean nothing to you. I remember when the tom cat ate the salmon Cousin Tweed sent me from Scotland, your mother actually laughed—and another time when I burnt my lip on a hot chestnut …”

But Emma had gone, so she finished her port and wandered off in the hope of finding someone who had not heard about Mrs. Hatt’s death.

She eventually made for the potting shed, where she found Old Ives stewing a pigeon on his slow, but sure, combustion stove. Her audience was rather limited because for many years she had not left her own house and garden. She had an objection to walking or passing over ground that did not belong to her. For that reason she never visited the farms she owned. She would have had to pass through the village to reach them. Most of the village children had never seen her and she had become a terrifying figure in their minds. They thought she could hear everything they said with her ear trumpet, and that instead of a tongue she had two curling snakes in her ugly mouth. When the children grew up and some of them became maids in Willoweed House they were almost disappointed to discover she wasn’t so strange as they expected; but they told their friends how she had three freak moles all stuffed in her bedroom on a bamboo table, and that she had catgut laces in her corsets, and how they would often hear her whistling to herself in bed in the mornings when they took in her early morning tea—also that she used to eat black biscuits out of tins. They told these things in hushed whispers and they sounded sinister and dreadful. Then there were always stories to tell of the quantities of food she devoured and her raging tempers, and there were often bruises to be displayed.

O
LD IVES sat in the potting shed weaving a wreath of roses and thyme for Mrs. Hatt’s grave—full bloom roses because she was a full blown woman, although she had never had a child. Ives liked to choose suitable flowers for his wreathes. He often planned the one he would make for Grandmother Willoweed:—thistles and hogswart and grey-green holly—sometimes he would grant her one yellow dandelion. Ebin was to have one of bindweed and tobacco plants. Quite often people would die when the flowers already chosen for them were not in season. Then he made a temporary wreath for them, and months later they received the real one. At this moment he could see the old woman pacing to and fro on the top path, and he laughed to himself because he knew what was worrying her.

Grandmother Willoweed paced to and fro with her determined tread. Impatiently she kicked a tortoise that happened to impede her. She gnawed her horny thumb nail as she concentrated on the problem of attending the funeral without passing over ground that did not belong to her. Then her glance fell on the river shining between the fir trees, and suddenly the problem was solved. She would travel to the Church by boat. It would mean that the weir by the bridge would have to be opened for the occasion; but that was nothing. She strode towards the potting shed to give Ives his funeral orders. The old punt could be draped in black, and Ebin and Ives would attend her. She could see herself sailing in state under the bridge, the great black plumes on her hat gently swaying.

While the two old people discussed tomorrow’s funeral, Hattie and Dennis played with the peacock on the round lawn in front of the house. They fed it with breadcrumbs that had become hard and dry in Dennis’s pocket. The boy gave a startled cry as the great bird pecked his hand.

“No, hold your hand flat like this, and he won’t peck,” said Hattie; but he threw the crumbs on the grass where they were eagerly pounced on by waiting sparrows. The peacock spread his tail in anger and walked backwards, his feathers vibrating with emotion; but his furious beauty made no impression on the sparrows. The children watched for a moment, then wandered down to the river, where they were making a harbour in the roots of an old willow tree. Across the river they could see Eunice walking in the large flat meadow among the cows. The meadow had been divided so that half of it could be used for hay, and today young Joe Lott had started to cut the outer edge. The children watched and imagined they could already smell the hay. When Joe came near Eunice, she crossed to the fence, and he stopped the horse and they talked and laughed together. Then he mockingly drank Eunice’s health from a brown bottle. The children knew the bottle only contained cold, bitter tea, because they had often drunk from the haymakers’ bottles and found them disappointing. Ives came down to the river carrying a large bundle of rusty black material, which he dumped on the landing-stage; and cursing and grumbling he started to bale out the old punt. The children heard his angry mutterings and crept away to the strawberry beds.

It was one of those early summer afternoons when there is a constant hum of insects. Down the village street pranced the baker’s wife. About her florid face she wore a Dolly Varden bonnet, and the bodice of her dress was transparent and the pink ribbons of her camisole could be clearly seen. The women of the village said her face was rough with kisses. Sometimes in the Masons’ Arms the men would discuss how far they had walked to see their wives when they were courting them. They would turn to the baker and remark that it was unlikely that he had had to walk far.

Ebin watched the Baker’s wife’s progress through the village from his attic window. Then he combed his hair and moustache in front of his discoloured mirror, filled his tobacco pouch and started to leave the room. He seemed to change his mind for a moment, and stood frowning; but eventually he hurried out and ran lightly down the stairs. As he crossed the hall he heard his mother’s voice. He hesitated; then crept from the house. His mother called again and came clumping into the hall. Seeing it empty she went into the boot-room, which had a good view of the street. Peering through the stained-glass window she saw her son all crimson following a yellow baker’s wife. Then they changed colour and both became green and disappeared from sight.

While his wife planned to spend the afternoon in pleasure on the river bank, Emblyn the baker worked in the heat of his bakery icing a wedding cake for the postman’s daughter. He was a small grey-faced man. He had recently developed stomach ulcers which caused him considerable pain; but in spite of the pain and distress he suffered, his bread was still the best in Warwickshire. The paper it was wrapped in was stamped with his name, “Horace Emblyn,” and reproductions of his medals. Disappointed in his marriage, he devoted his life to the bakery; and his loaves were so delicious and crusty, and his sponge cakes such a miracle of lightness, and his fruit cakes so rich and damp, that people for miles round begged for them. But he would only serve the inhabitants of the village, and they kept him working all the day and half the night. His only assistant was a young boy—on whom the baker suspected his wife was already casting glances. As he worked an intricate design of flowers and doves in snowy icing on the bridal cake, his thoughts wandered and he planned to make a few loaves of rye bread as an experiment. He forgot his wife and the pinching pain inside him and happiness came instead.

Happiness also came to Norah on that summer afternoon. She was returning from Bennet’s fruit farm, where she had been ordering quantities of strawberries to be used for the Willoweeds’ jam. The road she walked was white with dust, but the deep verges on either side were still brilliant green all decorated with cow parsley like spangles and with tall buttercups. As she crossed over the little bridge that divided Worcestershire from Warwickshire, she heard carriage wheels and, turning round, she saw Fig driving Doctor Hatt’s gig and the dust flying round him like a shroud. She desperately hoped he would not pass without speaking, and, when he stopped and offered her a lift, she was so surprised that she climbed in beside him without uttering a word. Fig muttered something about meeting Doctor Hatt’s London relations at Honeywell Station and how they had not been on the train and his journey had been wasted. “Not wasted,” thought Norah, as she drove through the village like a queen. They reached the gates of Willoweed House without speaking; but, when Norah looked up to thank him, she looked so pretty with her usually pale, plain face all lit up that Fig found himself asking her to visit his mother again.

“You do her so much good,” he said, and then drove away dismayed at his own folly and weakness.