In the Time of Greenbloom

by Gabriel Fielding

  “Do you think it’s something in love that makes them feel guilty?”

  “It must be, mustn’t it?” she said. “I’m sure it is with George. He’s always either all grinning and awful about it, or else he’s like a cat walking on eggs; but he’ll talk about money without using his mask.”

  “Down with George!” he said.

  “Down with George!” she echoed. “If it wasn’t for the farm, for Nettlebed, I wouldn’t let Mummy see him at all. But I love this place because it’s in the moors and because you’re here to share it with me. After this holiday I may even let her marry him so that we can keep on coming here if we don’t go to Anglesey.”

  “Could you stop her?”

  “Easily—” she took his hand. “Come on, let’s go down very quietly—I’ll bet you they’re talking about money again.”

  “How could you stop her?” he whispered as they tiptoed down the thick stair carpet.

  “By giving her looks at the right time when she’s with him—”

  “Looks?”

  “Yes, nasty ones, amused ones, as though I thought she was looking silly or stagy; and not only that, but I could make little jokes about him when Enid and I are alone. It’s the easiest thing in the world to make her feel old and ridiculous about men.”

  They walked quietly over the hall rugs and as they neared the dining-room door heard the clatter of George’s knife and fork punctuating the murmur of his conversation.

  “Settlement,” they heard. “Mumble… Transfer my Canadian holdings… Clop… Dollars.”

  Victoria glanced brightly at John and then flounced ahead of him into the room. They sat down at the foot of the long refectory table.

  Mrs Blount smiled at them briefly and then turned her attention again eagerly, almost deferentially, to George Harkess on whom the gesture was as lost as were all gestures when he was at table. His face remained directed downwards, so that from where John and Victoria sat the full length of his yellow parting was visible between its banks of iron-grey hair: only his moustache and his hands moved as he ravaged busily beneath a chicken bone on his untidy plate. John found himself watching his manoeuvres with a fascination which made him momentarily oblivious of his own appetite. Some people were not safe to watch under such circumstances; but there were others, and George Harkess was one of them, whose senses extended no farther than their skins; and so it was not until Victoria’s knee nudged him beneath the table that he was able to take his eyes from the grown-ups at the far end and give her all his attention.

  “We’ll go up past the Stump Cross,” she was saying quietly, “and then cut directly across to the dingle. I’ve got the kettle ready-filled for our tea, in case there’s no water in the cave, and Annie Moses has been a brick, she’s done us a hard-boiled egg each.” And then, as she noticed his attention straying once more to the other conversation at the darker end of the room, “John! you’re not listening.”

  “Yes, I am,” he said. “You said a hard-boiled egg each, and with all the things I bought we’ll be able to have the most super meal. Do you know what I vote?”

  “No.”

  “I vote we actually picnic in the cave.”

  “All right. But only if it’s perfect and I think it will be; in fact I know it will be.”

  “I thought you said you’d never been in it before.”

  “I haven’t, but my hiker has, and he said that if you once get through the narrow bit beyond the entrance, it opens out into a great chamber hung with those icicle things.”

  “Oh how exciting!” he said flatly.

  He felt a sudden distaste for the whole afternoon; it was disappointing to know that they were not going to be the first to discover the depths of the cave. If only they were at his home away from all these strangers: George Harkess, the village people, Annie Moses and the hiker. The hiker was a stranger himself, a stranger to the dales, a motor-car man who had no business to pretend that he was a hiker. The thought that he knew the very cave to which they were going and claimed to have been in it more than once, made it seem depressingly public. Nothing was so easily made public as a wild place, he thought angrily; corners of the parks in Eastbourne were quite wild simply because they were surrounded by so much ‘publicness’; but one charabanc or a small group of hikers could spoil a whole mountainside.

  He wished again that they were at the Vicarage together where he could have her safely to himself. He imagined the days they would have shared in the absence of all the others: meals in the kitchen with Lizzie, dreamy afternoons in the haystack, whole mornings in the orchards adjoining the strawberry beds. But, of course, he had forgotten, that could never be again. The Vicarage had gone; without moving a brick or tile it had gone for ever: by now it would be empty! just the same, but empty and vanished.

  With little appetite he continued to chew the same mouthful of tasteless chicken, was half-aware of a resumption of conversation at the far end of the table. Grown-ups, he thought, seem to have the trick of almost inaudible conversation without ever having to resort to whispering. What were they saying?

  “A short trip only, Enid! say a month at the most … mumble slop…” Annie Moses must have left the pudding on the sideboard. The first-course plates had disappeared and George Harkess was now shovelling large spoonfuls of sponge-roll and custard beneath his incessantly moving moustache. Mrs Blount’s head was turned half away from John as she continued to give all her attention to whatever it was he was telling her. He glanced at her plate, at the spoon and fork which never seemed to move in the useless little hands and noticed that a small section of the sponge had disappeared; yet there was nothing in her cheek and no movement of her smooth boneless chin, not even any audible betrayal of the presence of food in her mouth as she murmured some question to her companion. He hoped Victoria would never grow like that: so frightened for herself, so careful of her getting up, her sitting down, walking and eating, even of her smiling. Victoria was so different; she—

  “What’s the matter?” her whisper penetrated his preoccupation like a sudden breeze through woodland. “Are you cross again?”

  What was he saying? What was George Harkess on about?

  “Lawyers my dear … mumble mutter… Settlement … Clop… Never lack for anything again.” His enormous hand momentarily abandoned its spoon and briefly overlaid that of Mrs Blount who smiled up at him resignedly.

  “John! I asked you if you were cross,” said Victoria.

  “No not exactly,” he whispered back. “Things just seemed flat suddenly, that’s all; but I’m not cross.”

  “Please don’t be,” she implored. “If it was the hiker, I promise I won’t mention him again.”

  He smiled across at her. “It’s all right,” he whispered. “I don’t think it was that exactly; I just didn’t like the thought that he’d been there before us—”

  From the other end of the table George Harkess’s ordinary voice boomed down at them.

  “What’s all this?” he enquired. “All this whispering and tragedy? Have you two been quarrelling?” He turned to Mrs Blount and put on his quizzical face by raising one eyebrow and narrowing his normally wide nostrils. “Little birds in their nests should agree, shouldn’t they Enid? It’s no good leaving these young people to themselves for the afternoon if they’re going to spend their time in bickerment and disorder.”

  They smiled apprehensively up the length of the table towards the two attentive faces.

  “Victoria dear!” Mrs Blount’s cheeks were smooth with concern. “Don’t you think it is all rather silly? I’m sure you’d be much better to come to the races with us instead of spending your time in a dreary old cave—and I’m quite sure you won’t find a single truffle for your trouble.”

  “Oh but we will darling—I know we will. Someone told me only this morning—”

  “Who dear?”

  Victoria glanced swiftly at John; a signal.

  “Annie Moses,” he said quickly. “She told us that the villagers
often find truffles at the mouth of the Stump Cross cave.”

  “Oh Annie Moses!” George Harkess’s laugh frothed out over his raised tankard. “You don’t want to listen to Annie Moses. She’s lived here all her life but she could give you a better description of the Scarborough Cinema than the Stump Cross caves. I’d lay a pony to a pound-note she doesn’t even know where they are,” and he sank his face into the tankard for a moment and then brought it up again with froth clinging to his moustache and the small whiskers which grew on the tip of his nose.

  “Well, my dear,” he went on. “We haven’t time to argue with these young scallywags! we’ve got a twenty-mile drive ahead of us to Redcar.”

  Mrs Blount teetered down the length of the table and kissed Victoria.

  “Very well, my darling, if you must go to your nasty cave, you shall go; but will you be sure to remember to post this letter for me on your way through Corby? I do so want it to catch the early post in the morning, and George is going to be so horribly impatient once he gets me into the car that it will be quite impossible to persuade him to stop at the Post Office.”

  “Going to be!” roared George Harkess from the doorway. “It’s not a question of going to be, I am impatient already. I give you just five minutes to take off your theses and put on your thoses, and then we’re off.” He marched like a drum major into the hall. Mrs Blount smiled after him and then looked waveringly at John; her eyes surveyed him like prisoners over the barbed wire of her mascaraed lashes. “You’ll take care of her, won’t you John? She’s all I’ve got, you know; everything in the world.”

  “Yes, Mrs Blount, I’ll look after her.”

  She moved delicately over to the door. “Goodbye, my dears.”.

  “Goodbye!” they said. She waved a hand, the door received her, closed behind her, and they were alone.

  “Phew!” said Victoria. “Thank heaven for Annie Moses. Mummy hates me talking to strange men.”

  “So do I,” said John.

  “I know you do! and I love you for it; I love you both terribly.”

  She got up and coming round to where he sat, hugged him impulsively. He responded eagerly. In her cotton frock she was as sweet as the haystack. She moved away over to the window and facing him put her hands behind her on to its white paint and leapt easily on to the sill.

  “I expect it’s because she’s frightened of them,” she said swinging her legs, “and the funny thing is that I could swear that George Harkess is much more terrified of Enid than she is of him—”

  “What are you talking about?” he interrupted.

  “About Mummy, about her being afraid of me talking to strange men.”

  “Oh I see, well, I think she’s quite right.”

  “If men are so dangerous why is it that George Harkess is so frightened of Mummy? I’m sure all that shouting and banging and pretending to bully her is just a game; and if that’s so why does he pretend? Why is he so nervous of her?”

  “I don’t really know,” said John. “I think it’s something like that money-idea of yours. It’s not that people despise love or that men are afraid of women or that women are afraid of men; but they’re all afraid of something to do with love. I often think of love as a tiger; you know, Blake’s tiger ‘burning bright in the forests of the night’.”

  “What a lovely idea,” she said jumping down from the window-sill.

  “I think it’s rather a frightening one,” he said.

  “Oh no,” she said, “the tiger of love. Beautiful—”

  He opened the door and she ran out ahead of him through the shadowy hall to the kitchen chanting at the top of her voice:

  “What the hammer? what the chain?

  In what furnace was thy brain?

  What the anvil? What dread grasp

  Dare its deadly terrors clasp?”

  Later, they climbed eagerly out of the Dale, following the farm-track between its black lichen-clad walls until finally it petered out altogether on the high periphery of the moorland. From there onwards heather grew on either side of the close-cropped grass which ultimately led them to the flint-road encircling the southern side of the Dale.

  Below them they could see the whole of Danbey, an ovoid green saucer over which the cloud-shadows sailed like dark birds from end to end, covering in their flight the little villages the fleecy woods and the steeples of the three churches. The wind brought them the rumble of carts the thin paeans of laying hens and occasionally, the sound of a motor-horn. They could watch the total life of the Dale going on in miniature beneath them: a group of cyclists hump-backed on tiny flashing circles making their way between one village and another, the cottage-women stringing up their flags of washing in the green fields, and the windmilling of the harvesters cutting the last of the Summer’s wheat.

  Sharing their baskets they were content to say nothing under the merry wind, to watch the blown saunterings of butterflies and grasshoppers disturbed by their passing, and to tread the dusty road easily to the crown of the moor where the Stump Cross, lacking half an arm, stood like a grey priest in sorrowful benediction over all that lay beneath them. Reaching it, they sat down for a moment on the crumbling hexagon of steps which encircled its base. Victoria gave him a peppermint and waved down at the vale.

  “As long as they stay down there, I don’t mind them so much; they can have the old Dale, but they’re not to come up here.”

  “Who, the cyclists?”

  “Yes, all of them, ‘trippers and soochlike’ as Annie calls them.” She chewed her mint happily, “anyway, there is one good thing.”

  “What?”

  “Charabancs! they can’t even get them into Corby, let alone up this far, can they?”

  “No, but they can get motor-cars up here.” He shaded his eyes and pointed. “Look! there’s one just starting on its way up now.”

  “So there is.”

  They watched it as, far below them, gleaming and minute, it began the long hairpin-weave to the top.

  Victoria got up hurriedly. “Curses! I wanted to climb the Stump Cross and balance on the top, and now I shan’t be able to. Come on, let’s run and get into the dingle before they get here. Give me the basket and you keep the haversack; we’ll be quicker like that.”

  He followed her as she fled like a pale butterfly over the heather and the smooth pathways, never pausing until they were safely below the steep lip of the dingle.

  “Don’t stop,” he said. “Let’s get right to the bottom where the stream is, and then actually into the cave itself. We’ll be safe there.”

  She looked at him for a moment and then ran on ahead weaving her way between the larches and mountain-ash which grew amongst the fallen boulders on the floor of the dingle. Suddenly she disappeared from his view behind an enormous grey cube of rock on the top of which heather green plants and even small trees were growing. It thrust through the standing bracken like the stern of a great grey ship moored to the wall of the dingle, and for some minutes he was quite unable to discover where Victoria was hidden. At length, however, he found her waiting for him on its shadowed side behind the standing curtain of the bracken. Behind her, too, hidden until now by the bulk of the rocks he saw the mouth of the cave, a small dark triangle with stone lips and a green earthen tongue in which small ferns were growing. Between the lips above and the tumble of mossy boulders beneath was total blackness; but even from where he stood he could hear the glassy music of the unseen water which must be feeding the ferns and moss as it passed underground to join the stream in the floor of the dingle.

  “Why were you hiding?” he asked as he came up to her.

  “I wasn’t hiding,” she said; “at least not from you; I was just escaping because I was being chased.”

  “Only by me.”

  “No,” she said, “it’s never ‘only’ by anyone. If anyone ever chases me, I always feel there’s a tiger after me. Don’t you get that feeling if someone’s chasing you?”

  “But nobody was chasing you,” he
protested.

  “No I suppose not, but what does it matter if I felt that they were?”

  “But who Victoria, who?”

  “Oh I don’t know, how should I know? I’m only telling you that if I run, and someone else runs after me I always get in a panic.” She frowned at him. “I’ve told you, it’s the tiger-feeling; we’re always ready to run and he’s always ready to chase. I thought you’d understand like you usually do when I tell you anything secret about myself.”

  He dropped the haversack and approached her, stepping out of the bracken into the steep circle before the mouth of the cave. “I do understand,” he said. “I’ve had the same feeling myself; the person behind you seems to be growing larger and larger, and you seem to be getting smaller and smaller, until at last you have to stop and turn round and break the spell.”

  “Oh yes, that’s it. I’m so glad you did know what I meant; I hate to be alone inside myself all the time.”

  With great certainty he put his arm round her shoulders. He wanted to kiss her but he didn’t; it would be silly to kiss flowers, young rabbits, kittens, all small delicate living lovely things, at his age; it would be silly. Instead he comforted her; he said:

  “Anyway, you’re quite safe now, Victoria! there’s nothing to worry about now.”

  “No, there isn’t, is there? I was just being stupid I suppose. Nothing could happen to me when I’m with you, could it?”

  “Nothing,” he said, and he meant it.

  She was being silly; she had frightened him, standing there like that, large-eyed and white in the shadow of the rock. How could anything happen to her when he was with her? She was what he saw; and because he loved her, because he loved what he saw, the love must have been present within him and awaiting her, before ever her image came to claim it. People didn’t carry love with them like they carried shining hair or hurtful smiles, they simply found and assumed what was already there like a garment, gathering it from the person who loved them and then walking away in it looking newly beautiful.