by Tim Pears
William slowed the horse. Lottie walked over and clipped the rope back to the head collar. Helena came into the paddock and rushed over to the horse and grabbed her brother’s leg and body. ‘William,’ she said. She turned to Lottie. ‘Help me get him down,’ she said.
‘Helena, I’m fine,’ he gasped.
‘You don’t sound it,’ she said. ‘Nor look it.’
Lottie held the rope and asked William if he was all right to dismount. He said he was. He kicked clear of the stirrups and leaned forward and swung his right leg over the back of the horse and slid down. Helena stepped forward and held on to her brother as he did so, making the manoeuvre more awkward than it would have been, and making the gentle solid horse a little jittery so that it stepped this way and that as William gained the ground and recovered his standing balance. Helena staggered with him, away from Pegasus. Lottie did not doubt that Helena imagined that if she were not there her brother would topple over. William’s sister turned him away from the horse and hurried him out of the paddock.
Lottie led Pegasus back to the yard. She removed his saddle and his bridle. He’d worked up a little sweat and she brushed him down and watered him, and before she put him back in the field she told him he was a good horse, a noble beast, and she thanked him. It was a gamble but she believed it had paid off, despite Helena’s interruption. Not all horses would have had Pegasus’s patience. But with such horses, what could not be done?
In the morning at breakfast Helena announced that they were leaving today, and would appreciate a ride to the station. She rose from the table and went back upstairs to pack their suitcases. William sipped coffee. Otherwise he sat in silence, impassive. Lottie could not tell what he was thinking. Perhaps his eyes would have told her.
Then he cleared his throat. ‘I’m sorry, Lottie,’ he said, quietly. ‘My sister needs me as much as I need her. I have to go with her.’
‘Of course.’
‘She can’t understand what you did last night, but be assured that cantering on your Pegasus, I felt human again.’
Lottie reached over and put her hand upon his on the table.
At Wiveliscombe Station the porter unloaded the luggage from the buggy and stacked it on his trolley. Lottie accompanied the Carews. Helena said that there was no need for her to wait, she must have many things to do with her estate management and her veterinary practice requiring her attention. Lottie said that of course she would stay and see them safely onto the train.
They stood and watched other passengers arrive. After the clear moonlit night, the morning was cool. People wore more coats and hats than they had done in months. In due course the Exeter train pulled in. Lottie kissed William goodbye. Helena helped him up the steps of their carriage and told him she would be along shortly. ‘Wave your cane,’ she said. ‘People love to help a blind man.’
William walked on into the carriage.
‘I knew we should not have come,’ Helena said. ‘I had established some calm, a certain order, in my poor brother’s life.’ She spoke in a fierce whisper. ‘I have only this to say to you. Many women felt some obligation to marry their sweethearts who’d been wounded.’ There was hatred in her eyes, as if all the tension her body could muster was concentrated there. ‘Who’d made such a sacrifice. I knew there were women who felt no such obligation, no such sense of duty, I might say even love. But I had not met one face to face before.’
The shock of Helena’s words thumped the air from Lottie’s lungs. She could hardly breathe. ‘We,’ she gasped. ‘We were not sweethearts.’
‘My brother certainly thought you were.’
Lottie shook her head. ‘I don’t see how.’
Helena held her arms out to either side and pulled a mocking expression at Lottie’s obtuseness, or insincerity. ‘Letters exchanged?’ she said. ‘Keepsakes sent, between this slice of West Country heaven and the hell of the trenches?’
‘We were friends,’ Lottie said.
‘Friends?’ Helena spat.
‘But,’ Lottie said, ‘William never said anything. All these years. Never asked anything of me.’
Helena smiled. ‘We may have no money, Miss Prideaux,’ she said. ‘But my brother remains a gentleman.’
She turned and climbed up into the carriage. Lottie stood trembling on the platform. She waited, as if to wave away her guests, but was not sure if she could move anyhow. The porter trotted along the platform, shutting the heavy doors, which closed with a resounding clang. The guard waved his flag, the coal-shoveller fed the oven of the locomotive, the driver engaged the gears. The big steam engine hissed, smoke rose from the chimney with the smell of cinders and burning coal, and the wheels began turning slowly. The solid weight of train pulled out of the station. Lottie watched it leave, motionless. She waited until it was out of sight and when she turned she saw that she was the last person on the platform. The whole station appeared deserted. The young porter had disappeared. The stationmaster had retreated to his office.
Lottie walked unsteadily out to the buggy and released the brake and climbed up. She took the reins and clicked her chattering teeth, and Pegasus pulled the buggy in a broad half-circle out of the station yard and back towards his home.
5
There was a weeping silver birch in the hedge of Leo’s field. Its green leaves turned autumnal and fell first from the crown of the tree so that it gave the impression of a man with long yellow hair balding on top. There was an old oak with tufts of twigs sprouting from the trunk like an old woman’s bristles.
At night his small hut was like a cave, so quiet that at times Leo could hear his heartbeat, and other rumblings from within his own body. It was unsettling. He rose and went outside and rolled a cigarette, and smoked it surrounded by the cool dark.
One evening, the thrum of rain upon the roof sounded so much like horses approaching that he stepped outside to greet them but there were no animals there. It happened again, and he told himself that it was only rain drumming as before but he could not quite convince himself, yearning so for the sight of a rag of half-wild horses.
One morning towards the end of the year he was disturbed by a fluttering about him. There was a sudden diminution of the dour winter light. Leo raised his head. Birds flocked and swooped. Starlings, making no noise except for the faint swooshing of their wings. How many were there? He tried to count them but could not. A flock of thousands, perhaps the coming together of the twelve tribes of West Country starlings in some avian exodus, flying headlong together. The flock all but disappeared over a stand of elm then veered south and flew around and came back not far away. Heading now for a sycamore, only to wheel around and pass above him. He could see no reason nor pattern to their flight yet they flew together, each so close to those all around, as if they knew what they were doing, as if they were following some crazed choreography of flight. He decided that the only possible explanation for their display was that they performed it for a witness, a spectator. Who else but him?
Leo had constructed his hut around a brick fireplace which he now used. He gathered wood that had broken off but been caught in other branches of a tree, without ever touching the ground, and he cut ash, for it burned well when still green. He cut hawthorn and piled it up for a second winter, for he remembered his father saying that he’d as soon have hawthorn logs as coal. Elm he knew was good too. Perhaps the nocturnal visitor who showed up one night had been waiting for smoke. He could not tell in the dark which of the girls it was who took off her dressing gown and nightdress, who lowered herself to the straw mattress and slipped in beneath his blanket. He asked her what she was doing and she laughed, soft and low, and he knew it was Ethel. Leo said he was sorry, he could not love her, his heart was pledged elsewhere, that was his fate and he could not help it.
Ethel said she did not demand his heart. She lay beside him on the mattress and snuggled up to him. Her skin was cold and she was shivering and he put his arm around her and pulled her strong ample body close to his hard bony fra
me, and slowly she warmed. Her breath smelled sweet and milky. When she moved upon him he knew he could not escape nor did he wish to.
Afterwards, they lay in the dark. Leo listened. He could hear her breathing and he could hear wood burning. ‘It’s so quiet out here,’ he whispered.
Ethel did not reply at first. Perhaps she too listened, to verify the truth of his statement, or perhaps she slept. But then she said, ‘They call us the heathens. I suppose you know it already.’
Leo said that he did not. How could he?
‘When Mother died,’ she whispered, ‘Father asked God why He’d took her. Leaving him all alone with three young maids to care for. God didn’t say nothing. Father said if He couldn’t even be bothered to reply then Father couldn’t be bothered to visit Him and he took us out a church. Father said it proved that God was an illusion, and he did not have time to waste on what did not exist. It would be like trying to run the farm with our toy animals. There was only flesh and blood, he said, and that was all there was. We none of us been back since.’
They lay in the dark. Somewhere outside an owl hooted in the distance, and after that the night seemed even more silent than before. Ethel’s meaty body smelled faintly like the cattle she tended, her sweat gave a beefy odour that was not unpleasant. It made Leo hungry for her. They each whispered as if someone might be listening. Some person or animal or other entity. Perhaps God Himself.
‘I believe Father was wrong,’ Ethel whispered.
‘You want to go to church again?’
Ethel chuckled. Her laughter was soft and deep and murmurous, and he could feel it in her body against him. ‘Not particularly, Leo. It ain’t that. It’s more that I don’t reckon the fact that God did not speak to Father proves He don’t exist.’
‘Perhaps He spake but your father did not listen?’
‘I’m sure He never spoke,’ the girl said. ‘People talk about the silence of God but that’s where He is, I reckon.’
They lay in the warm quiet dark, nestled one into the other, the embers of the fire still glowing.
‘That’s why you can feel Him this time a night,’ Ethel whispered. ‘The quiet is His clue for us, Leo. The hint of His great silence, see?’
Leo squeezed Ethel’s ribs where he held her. He felt her turn to him. She kissed him on the cheek then she disentangled her limbs from his and rose from the mattress and pulled on her nightdress and gown, and her boots, and slipped out of the hut.
On some winter nights Leo left his fire and his warm cabin and went outside and lay on the cold hard earth and gazed at the star fields in the black sky above. The world was empty and if in the distance a vixen squealed, a dog fox barked, it did not make the world seem less empty but more so. He was alone in this great silence. He lay shivering on the ground. He was nothing. As if the times he should have died had wiped his name out anyhow from the unwrit annals of time. He was no man or perhaps he was every man. Leo lay watching stars that hung as they had for a hundred thousand years until it came to him that he could slip into numb sleep and freeze there, an icy corpse, so he rose stiffly and returned to the cabin.
Pigeons roosted on the branches of leafless trees. Crows guarded the evergreens. When the pigeons rose into flight, their wings smacked with a sound that brought back to him his mother flapping wet crumpled linen before she hung it on the line. One day he heard what his brain told him was the horn of a bike or motorcycle parp in that empty landscape and he gazed around. Then he looked up and saw five, six, seven geese flying in lopsided formation, an irregular chevron, south across the grey sky. Later that day and on the days following he saw other geese leaning forward, hurrying, in their annual airborne trek along paths wired into their blood. Once he saw a flock of twenty-five or thirty. Usually they pilgrimed in smaller scrums, with even the odd solo goose, left behind or lost or perhaps just cussed birds preferring their own sullen company to that of their kin.
Ethel came to him that winter, dead of night, unannounced, a few times more. She assured him she knew what she was doing. She understood enough of women’s cycles to be sure when it was safe. Once he heard her footsteps crunching on hardened snow as she approached the cabin. She always gazed at the fire when they lay together. Leo told her that he’d heard that the stems of Brussels sprouts, left to dry and harden, burned well. She said that some folk on the hills were said to bank their fires up with pomace, the apple husks from the cider press, which dried like peat and gave a good slow burn. They spoke in low whispers, until she rose and pulled on her clothes and left.
One morning the ground was covered in frost. In the low winter sun a pair of magpies flew across Leo’s line of sight, bothering each other all the way, whether in combat or play he could not tell.
Made frisky by what the weather had done to their world, the Luscombes’ dogs rolled like horses in the white frosty grass. Leo carted manure to the fields, dug over Agnes’s kitchen garden, helped Ethel turn out her stock. Then it came time to turn the soil.
They moved amongst the horses by the light of oil lanterns, feeding them with corn and chaff in the manger and with clover in the rack.
Leo helped Myrtle put harness on Shadow and one of the other horses, Scarlet, for a two-horse team. They put the collars on, that would take the weight and pull of the plough on the horses’ shoulders, and their bridles, then led them outside to drink from the stone trough below the pump. Then they hooked the traces to the collars.
Wally said he knew last year he was getting too old for the plough. Myrtle was strong but even a man’s thicker wrists and ankles could be ruined by the work. If he was honest, it was the first thing he’d thought of when Leo turned up. Ploughing.
Leo worked the teams in the Luscombes’ arable fields for three weeks. Today was the last field, in a high corner of the farm, and a sharp wind blew. All horses hated the wind. Leo tightened the handkerchief around his neck and pulled his felt hat tight on his head. He passed a coppice in which poplar trees squealed as their trunks and branches rubbed together.
The day was cold and clear, the cool air clean in his lungs.
He urged the horses up the hill, and turned them on the headland, and brought them back down. A plough wheel squeaked. The odd snort issued from Shadow’s steaming nostrils. The soil up here was light and stony and fell in soft almost crumbling furrows. In wet muddy patches it stuck to the share or to the board, and Leo stopped the horses and cleaned the mud off with a thin spade Myrtle had given him. At a click of his tongue, the team plodded on.
Peewits foraged behind them in the soil they turned over, dark brown until it reacted with the air and paled. Seagulls squawked and bullied the smaller birds. Leo’s hands had blistered from holding the wooden handles, and chapped in the cold wind, then hardened. His feet inside his socks and boots had chilblains. His frame had accustomed itself to the work, bent to the plough. The sharp coulter cut into the vegetation ahead of the ploughshare and the share negotiated its passage through the stony soil, and turned it over. Leo could feel himself walking with a rolling gait, shoulders swaying with the plough. It was how his father had come to walk always. The gait of a ploughman.
Though it must have happened by degrees and he’d not really noticed, by late morning Leo was no longer cold but sweating in his shirt and jacket, his corduroy trousers, Wally’s leather leggings strapped below the knees. When he glanced around he glimpsed a weak watery sun behind the clouds.
The two horses had different temperaments, and aptitude for work. Scarlet had a tendency to laziness and slowed down, to let her partner in the traces take the strain. Leo told her to gee up and she would do so for a while, then lapse again. His father had explained to him that all his horses had names with two syllables. When you urged one on you stressed the second syllable. Here on the Luscombes’ farm likewise. ‘Scarlet. Gee up.’ Occasionally Leo took up the long thin whip, not to strike the mare but for the sound. He swung it towards her and with a flick of his wrist the whip cracked the air beside her head. The loud repo
rt had a more durable impact upon her exertions than his voice.
Shadow, the hair thick on his rounded rump, was steadfast. He kept a regular pace. Leo did not need to hurry nor to urge the black gelding faster. Whether he walked at the same speed as Wally Luscombe or the horse somehow adapted his clip to that of the man behind him, Leo did not know. Shadow slowed as soon as Leo whoa-ed them, and when he made a sound with his tongue and teeth the carthorse resumed without hesitation. It seemed that Shadow knew what Leo wanted at precisely the moment he himself thought it. He understood all of a sudden that this was what it meant to be a horseman. Not what a man or a woman did or how they acted but the alliance between human and animal. The affinity between them.
Leo finished this last field early in the afternoon. He looked across the ploughed furrows and knew a satisfaction all ploughmen must feel. He rode side-saddle on Shadow back to the yard. Scarlet followed. Their harness jingled. Sweat marks on the big black horse dried white in the wind.
Myrtle told Leo that he needed a pig. She said that Ethel haggled for one each spring from an old farmer by the name of James Sparke on the Prideaux estate, over beyond the far side of the village, itself two miles away. They would get him one as well. Leo asked Myrtle to tell him more of this estate, but she admitted ignorance of anything else. ‘A pig would like it here. You could give it the run of your orchard.’ She said its meat would have a subtle taste of the fruit. ‘If you eat pork from an orchard pig,’ Myrtle said, ‘you can save yourself the bother of making apple sauce.’
One Sunday lunchtime Myrtle asked Leo why he had no friends. She thought it sad. None came to visit and he never went anywhere, not ever. Agnes bought his tobacco for him when she went shopping. Myrtle’s eldest sister reproved her. Agnes said Myrtle took advantage of being the youngest to say what should not be said. Wally Luscombe apologised to Leo and poured him another glass of rhubarb wine.
