‘All a bit different from Peele, eh?’ Riddler said, as they walked along. ‘Those few sheep of mine, now. Different from Sutton’s Leicesters, eh? Different from your little flock of Cotswold Lions, aren’t they, eh?’
Jim, at a loss, said nothing, and Riddler, perceiving his surprise, laughed deep down in his throat.
‘I see what goes on over there, you know, just as you see what goes on over here. And I hear most of the gossip, too, especially on market days. Well, this is where we part. Did I say thanks about the stack? Yes, well, I’m obliged to you ‒ if any man can be obliged when somebody brings him bad news!’
He went off with a wave of his hand and Jim went back to join the mowers in the cornfield.
‘What did he say?’ Joe Greening asked.
‘He said he was obliged to us.’
‘And what are things like up there, when you see the place close to?’
‘Pretty bad,’ Jim said, ‘but Riddler seems cheerful enough.’
‘Yes, well, from what I hear, there’s a reason for that,’ Greening said. ‘His wife’s expecting a little un. But if Morris Riddler is pleased about it, I doubt very much if his wife feels the same. Not at her time of life, poor soul, and with only middling health at that.’
Chapter Four
It was not the first hot stack Riddler had had at Godsakes, and probably wouldn’t be the last, for the two men he employed would sooner do a job badly than well. Whenever he grumbled at them they always made the same reply.
‘If you only pay us six shillings a week, master, you only get six shillings’ worth of work.’
‘I’d think myself lucky,’ Riddler would snarl, ‘if only you did three shillings’ worth!’
The stack had to be opened out. He sent Smith and Lovell to do it at once.
‘And don’t build it up again until I damn well tell you to!’
‘You told us to build it in the first place,’ said Smith, ‘and I knew all along that hay wasn’t fit.’
‘Then why the hell didn’t you say so?’ Riddler asked angrily.
Lovell and Smith merely walked away, ‘trying to see how slow they could go’, as Riddler often said of them, and he turned back into the yard, knowing that the job of opening the stack would probably take them all day. ‘They’ll see to that, sure enough!’ he said, muttering under his breath.
His daughter, Kirren, came out of the house with a tub full of washing to hang on the line.
‘How’s your mother?’
‘Just the same.’
‘Still in bed, is she?’
‘Yes, she’s asleep.’
‘H’mm,’ he said absently, and stood for a while staring into space.
The dairymaid, Florrie Dixon, came out of the dairy with two empty pails, filled them with water from the trough at the pump, and carried them back again, slop and splash. Riddler went across to the open cartshed and began rummaging about among a collection of old tools that stood in a corner. But all the time he was watching Kirren hanging up the clothes and when she had finished and gone indoors he left the cartshed, empty-handed, and went quietly into the dairy, pushing the door to behind him but not quite closing it.
After a while Kirren emerged from the house again with another tub full of washing. She set it down on the cobbles and began hanging the clothes on the line. Soon, however, she stopped and listened, hearing sounds in the dairy: her father’s voice, quiet for once; the rattle of a pail; a muffled laugh. She went across to the dairy door and pushed it open and at the sound of its creaking hinge her father and the dairymaid sprang apart, he to look under the bench, as though searching for something there, she to take up a pan of cream and set it in place over the cooler.
Kirren, without saying a word, returned to her task. Her father came out of the dairy, went into the cartshed again, and this time came out carrying a hoe. For a moment he stood uncertainly, watching Kirren as she hung up the clothes, but her young face was closed against him and he went off with the hoe on his shoulder, swearing softly to himself.
At midday he returned for his dinner and while he was eating he spoke to Kirren about the incident in the dairy.
‘You haven’t told your mother, I hope, about seeing me with Florrie Dixon?’
Kirren, in silence, flashed him a glance.
‘No, well, better not,’ he said. ‘She might go and get the wrong idea.’
‘I’ve no intention of telling her. She’s got quite enough to bear as it is.’
‘Yes. You’re right. She has, that’s a fact.’ He put a piece of bread into his mouth and chewed it noisily, clicking his jaws. ‘That girl, Florrie! She’s full of sauce. She asks for trouble, the way she goes on. But what you saw … it was only a lark … and it won’t ever happen again, not after today, be sure of that.’
‘No, it won’t, because Florrie is gone.’
‘Gone?’
‘Yes. I paid her off. She won’t be coming here any more.’
‘You had no right to do such a thing! How d’you think you’re going to manage, doing all the dairywork, and no Florrie to give you a hand? Your mother can’t do it. Not just now. And she’s going to have her hands pretty full ‒’
‘I shall manage perfectly well. In fact I’d sooner work by myself than have Florrie Dixon about the place. I never did care much for her.’
‘Ah, now we come to it, don’t we?’ he said. ‘You only got rid of the girl because you don’t care for her!’
‘You know why I got rid of her,’ Kirren said, quietly, and under her dark, critical gaze Riddler was forced to look away.
‘Well, if you think you can manage all right … It’s a lot to do, for a girl of fifteen.’
‘I can manage. I shall see that I do.’
He had finished his meal and now he rose.
‘I’m going up to see your mother and have a bit of a chat with her.’
‘How are you feeling now, Agnes? Feeling a bit better, are you?’
‘Yes, Morris. Not too bad.’
‘Then why aren’t you up and about, instead of lying in bed like this? Such a beautiful hot summer day it is, and you always did say you liked it hot.’
‘I don’t seem to have the strength. I come over giddy when I get up. All I want to do is sleep.’
‘There’s more than three months to go yet,’ Riddler said. ‘And it’s not as though it’s your first, neither. You were all right with the other two. You had no trouble with them at all.’
‘Didn’t I?’
‘Of course you didn’t.’
‘That was a long time ago, Morris, and I’ve lost three babies since then. I’m older, too.’
‘Yes, but not so old as all that. You’re forty-five, I don’t call that old. If it was, you wouldn’t be like you are, now, would you?’
‘Oh, I’m young enough to be having a child,’ Agnes said, wearily, ‘and old enough to be dreading it.’
‘Don’t say that, Agnes, don’t say that. It’ll be all right, you mark my words. Now, what about drinking up your milk? It came from old Daisy ‒ I milked her myself ‒ and it’s got a drop of something in it that didn’t come from any cow! You drink it up. It’ll do you good.’
Riddler, helping his wife to sit up, held the glass for her to drink. Then, having set the glass aside, he helped to make her comfortable, plumping the pillows up behind her and straightening the coverlet on the bed. He picked up the glass and stood looking at her.
‘There, that’ll soon buck you up,’ he said. ‘It’ll put some colour into your cheeks and make you more like yourself again.’ And after a pause he said huskily: ‘It’s lonely downstairs without you, old girl. I’ll be glad when you’re up and about again. I miss you, Agnes, and that’s a fact.’
Riddler could not believe that his wife was ill, right up to the very last, and when she died he was drunk for three days. Hopelessly drunk, in a blind stupor, so that Kirren had to do everything.
On the morning of the funeral she went into the scullery, where her father
lay on his back on the floor, and emptied a jug of cold water over him. Then she went back into the kitchen and a few minutes later he lumbered in after her and sat, groaning, in a chair at the table. Kirren put his breakfast in front of him, but he turned away from it, grey-faced and sick.
‘Do you expect me to eat that when I’ve got to go down to Marychurch and see my wife put into the grave?’
‘Eat it or not, as you please.’
‘First Eddy. Now her. And the parson will talk some cant about God! What sort of God is it that takes away as good a wife as any man ever had?’
‘It isn’t God you should blame ‒ it’s yourself.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘You know what I mean.’
Riddler put his head in his hands but after a while he looked up again. ‘We were hoping for a son.’
‘You were hoping for a son.’
‘We loved each other, your mother and me.’
‘You may call it love if you like. I do not.’
‘You’re only a girl, you don’t understand. You will do in time, when you’ve grown up a bit, especially when you’re married yourself. You’ll understand things better then … what a man feels for his wife. There’s more to it than you think, and when he finds himself alone … Well, you don’t understand, that’s all. You’ve no idea what it’s like.’
Suddenly Kirren turned on him.
‘You seem to think you’re the only one that’s got any feelings!’ she said. ‘It was the same when Eddy died! He was mother’s son as well as yours but you never gave her a single thought! It was what you felt! What you couldn’t bear! And now we have it all over again! But how do you think I feel now that my poor mother is dead and all I’ve got left in the world is you?’
‘It seems to me very hard that you should hold it against me for still being alive,’ he said.
‘I don’t see why it should be so hard! You’ve held it against me all these years, because I’m alive and Eddy is not!’
‘That’s not true. That’s rubbish, that is.’
‘I heard you say it, out there in the yard. “Why did it have to be the boy that died?” That’s what you said. I heard it myself.’
Riddler, sitting slumped in his chair, made a small, helpless gesture with his hands.
‘Times like that, people say these things … But I didn’t mean it, you must know that.’
‘How should I know? I’m only a girl! I’m no use to you compared with a boy. You hoped all these years for another son and you killed my poor mother trying to get one. That’s all I know.’
‘I never said you were no use to me. When did I ever say such a thing? Girls’ve got their place in the world just exactly the same as boys. They become women, all in good time, and us men need them, there’s no doubt of that. Where should I be if I hadn’t got you? You’re all I’ve got left to me now, Kirrie. You and the farm ‒ that’s all I’ve got left.’
Clumsily, he put out a hand, taking her arm and squeezing it.
‘You’re a good-sorted girl, I’ll swear to that, and a better daughter than I deserve. There’s only the two of us left now and we’ve both got to make the best of things. I should be lost without you, Kirrie, and I don’t mind admitting it.’
Kirren’s glance was sardonic. Firmly, she withdrew her arm. But her anger was gone. She spoke quietly now.
‘Eat your breakfast. It’s getting cold.’
Kirren had always been old for her years and at fifteen she was almost a woman: tall and slender, yet well-developed, with strong, supple arms and strong wrists, toughened by the work of the dairy: the turning of the heavy butter-churn and the long hours spent at the cheese-tub.
‘You’re growing into a good strong girl,’ Riddler said to her once. ‘You’re as strong as a man in some respects and you’ve got a sort of knack, somehow, for doing things quick and sure.’
‘It’s just as well,’ Kirren said, ‘or I’d never get through the day’s work at all.’
‘You shouldn’t have got rid of Florrie Dixon. I said you’d find the work too much.’
‘Well, we’re not having Florrie back, if that’s what you are hinting at.’
‘I can’t see what harm there would be in it.’
‘Well, you must decide between Florrie and me, because if you bring her here again, I shall leave home and never come back.’
‘Hah! And where d’you think you’d go?’
‘I should go into service on some other farm.’
Riddler muttered and grumbled and swore but, knowing that this daughter of his always meant what she said, he had perforce to give in to her and go without the dubious comfort that Florrie Dixon would have given him. For although he might grumble at Kirren, he depended on her in too many ways to run the risk of losing her. Nobody else would work so hard, or manage the house so thriftily, and anyway, as he often said, she was all the kin he had left in the world and he looked forward to the time when she would marry and produce children, who would grow up to work on the farm and take over when he died.
Marriage, however, was a subject that filled Kirren with angry disgust.
‘After seeing the life my mother had? One stillborn child after another? All the heartbreak, all the pain! And then to die at the end of it, aged forty-five, worn down to the very bone! Oh, no! That is not for me!’
‘You don’t know what you’re talking about. You’re still too young to understand. But somehow I can’t see you ending up as an old maid.’
‘You will see it, though, if you live long enough.’
And the next few years, far from changing her attitude, only seemed to harden it.
Kirren took after her mother in looks but was rather darker than Agnes had been, with hair so brown it was almost black, and skin as dusky as a gipsy’s, especially in the summertime when she worked in the fields without a hat. At sixteen, she was growing attractive. At seventeen she was comely indeed. At least she would have been, Riddler thought, if only she were a little less sullen; a little less given to looking at you as though you were something the cat had brought in. Certainly the higgler, Billy Hayzell, who called at the farm once a week to buy Kirren’s eggs and butter and cheese, found her attractive enough and was obviously very smitten with her.
Billy was rather a smug young man in his early twenties, deaf in one ear, and he used this as an excuse for coming right up to Kirren and putting his face close to hers.
‘I can’t properly hear you unless I can see your lips,’ he would say, but while standing so close to her he would try to steal an arm round her waist and once, catching her unawares, he succeeded in touching her cheek with a moist, warm, thick-lipped kiss.
Kirren, twisting away from him, let him have the full force of her wrath.
‘If you ever try to do that again I’ll fetch you such a mighty clout that you’ll end up deaf in both your ears!’ she said in a voice that rang round the yard.
Billy, calling at outlying farms, was apt to cheat his women customers, paying them prices well below those that their produce would have fetched in the market, knowing only too well that they could not get there easily themselves. Once when Kirren was grumbling to her father about the price Billy paid for her cheese he said he had little patience with her because it was all her own fault.
‘If you weren’t so hoity-toity with him, you could get good prices enough, I daresay. He’s smitten with you, you know that full well. And if only you played your cards right, you could have him eating out of your hand.’
‘You mean I should let him maul me about and fumble at me with his hot sticky hands? No, thank you! I’m not having that!’
‘No, you’d sooner lose us the farm!’ Riddler said with great bitterness. ‘God knows we’ve come desperate close to it for want of some ready cash sometimes.’
‘Don’t you dare say that to me!’ Kirren exclaimed, equally bitter. ‘If we are in danger of losing the farm, it’s you that’s to blame for it, not me! You with your drinking on market days and a
ll your foolish goings on!’
‘You call that drinking?’ Riddler said. ‘Just a few glasses of ale once a week? You should see the way some of the chaps there drink! The spirits and suchlike they put away ‒’
‘I don’t want to see your chaps! One drunkard is more than enough for me!’
‘You’re not speaking fair, Kirrie, because I haven’t been drunk since you know when. A glass or two, that’s all I have, after doing business, perhaps.’ Then, eyeing her critically and giving a shake of his head, he said: ‘You’ll never get a husband, the way you go on. You’ve no idea how to treat a man, Billy Hayzell or any other.’
‘A husband is the last thing I want.’
‘Hah, you don’t know what you’re missing, girl.’
‘I know enough about it to make sure I stay as I am.’
‘And who’s going to take over the farm when I die, if you don’t give me a grandson?’
‘The farm, in all probability, will have gone under the auctioneer’s hammer long before then,’ Kirren said, ‘and we may as well face up to that fact.’
Riddler, swearing, went off to the fields, and Kirren, studying her account book, tried to work out what profit, if any, she had made from the sale of her produce that day. The conclusion she came to so angered her that when Billy Hayzell called again, she told him in no uncertain terms that she would not deal with him any more, and she sent him away empty-handed.
Thereafter, to her father’s disgust, she went in to the market herself, walking the three miles there and back, her two baskets heavy with produce on the journey in, and rather less heavy with provisions on the journey back.
‘You must want seeing to,’ Riddler said, ‘traipsing all that way every week instead of dealing with Billy Hayzell at your own back door.’
‘I make nearly half as much again on my produce as I did when I sold it to him. And I pay less for my groceries than when he used to get them for me.’
‘Yes, and you’re gone very nearly the whole day, when you are badly needed here.’
‘Going in to Missenham is the one and only break I get. The one and only day in the week when I see a few fresh faces instead of just yours and Lovell’s and Smith’s. It’s also the one and only day when I don’t get shouted at all day long.’
The Two Farms: A moving family saga set in a Victorian farming community Page 5
