* * *
She was daft, they assured the young woman, as they stood waiting for the butcher’s van. For they concluded that the hen she was holding preparatory to barter was ‘worth a damned sight more than anything the butcher would give her in exchange’.
That wasn’t important, it was just that the young woman couldn’t face the thought of eating a hen that she had become acquainted with, had reared from a chicken. The farmer’s wife, she pointed out, with all that sheep and pigs and cattle she owned, would never have thought of eating the creatures. There was no difference, in that respect, between herself and the farmer’s wife.
There was, Kirsty insisted, all the difference in the world. ‘The law’ didn’t allow the farmer to kill his own beasts. Hens were a different thing. You could please yourself what you did with your own hens. You had the choice. ‘And that hen,’ Kirsty concluded, eyeing it regretfully, ‘would have made a fine pot of cock-a-leekie broth, enough to last two days.’
‘And second day’s broth’s aye best,’ Postie sang out, as she creaked past them on her bicycle towards the hill.
‘You’ve got a letter for Elspeth then?’ Meg ventured to ask.
‘Official,’ Postie said, in her postwoman’s voice. ‘Official.’
She never did give much away, did Postie, but, as Meg assured them, they would know the ‘news’ soon enough, when Elspeth made her way down to the van.
‘No sign of that butcher yet?’ Kirsty’s man shouted from the tractor shed. The only thing the men folk could think of was their bellies, Kirsty snorted, ignoring her man’s query. For Kirsty and Meg disliked weekends. It upset their routine, with the bairns out of school, in and out amongst their feet all the time. She should consider herself lucky, Kirsty turned in attack now on the young woman, what with her man being a cattleman, with no weekends off, and no bairns to drag around her tail all the time.
It depended, of course, on what Kirsty meant by ‘luck’. That time, the young woman remembered, that time when the sick and squeamishness wouldn’t leave her, and she had gone to the doctor. Pregnant he thought, insisting that she return with a sample of urine. She couldn’t be pregnant, she had insisted, rejecting both his diagnosis and his sample bottle. Why not, he had demanded. Pointing out that she was young, strong and married. Because. She had tried to explain it to him . . . Because . . . You must know. When something important like that is happening. You must know. You must feel something. I never feel anything. That, he had assured her, was by no means uncommon. But it should be. She remained convinced of that, not to feel anything should be the most uncommon thing ever.
Did Kirsty or Meg know, or feel? She had never been able to ask them. If Elspeth had been married, and if Elspeth and herself were still friends, she might have asked Elspeth.
‘Down in the valley
Where nobody knows
Stands a young lady
Without any clothes’
The bairns, circling around in front of the Row, giggled themselves to a standstill. ‘God alone knows where the bairns pick up dirt like that,’ Meg said. At the school, Kirsty thought. Where else, she demanded. They themselves had learned more than lessons, after they went to school.
‘She sang and she sang
And she sang so sweet
She sang Alick Corbie
Off his feet’
‘Keep your noise down,’ Kirsty admonished, when they caught sight of Elspeth making her way down the hill, ‘and run off and play yourselves somewhere else.’
* * *
It was as if they suddenly needed both space and quietness to observe Elspeth’s approach, to read from her lineaments, the contents of the letter marked ‘official’. Her secret still. Her gait, stately, deliberate as always, revealing nothing. Even the men, pausing to watch, were aware of the dignity with which Elspeth surrounded herself, although it proved no armour against the crude familiarities they voiced behind her back. ‘I wouldn’t touch Elspeth with your cock,’ Beel boasted, laughing to Kirsty’s man.
‘You’ll never get that chance,’ the young woman assured them, quick with contempt. ‘Elspeth happens to be particular.’
* * *
‘I’m sorry, Elspeth,’ Kirsty was saying.
‘Me too,’ Meg echoed.
‘And me, Elspeth.’ Compelled into utterance, the young woman spoke, knowing her words would be received in silence. ‘I am sorry too.’
For it was, as Postie had described it, ‘official’. Elspeth’s Callum, no longer missing, had been discovered, identified and dead. A confirmation leaving no loophole for hope. All their condolences combined seemed to bring no consolation. Had it been some calamity that had befallen themselves now or in the past, they could have keened together in lament. But their men were safe, in reserved occupations. The realisation made the young woman feel uncomfortable, as if their immunisation might be offensive to Elspeth.
‘I’m the King of the Castle’
Kirsty’s small son declaimed from his stance on top of the dyke,
‘Get down you dirty rascal.’
‘Don’t you dare,’ his mother warned him, ‘don’t you dare jump.’ He would go head-first into the ditch if he did, Meg remarked objectively, ‘good trousers and all’.
‘Jamie has found a puddock,’ the small girls screamed, as they scrambled up out of the ditch, their coloured knickers bobbing up amongst the bracken like wild convolvulus flowers. ‘He’s found a puddock. He’s away for a reed to blow it up.’
Swerving to catch him as he rushed past her, the young woman grabbed Jamie by the shoulders, shaking him to a standstill. ‘If you blow up that puddock,’ she warned him, ‘I’ll kill you.’
Gathering up the small frog that sat stunned at her feet, she carried it back to the bank and set it down amongst the bracken. The force of her anger surprised herself, as she stood waiting for the trembling that had come over her to die down. It, she realised, had been no idle threat, but uttered in a moment when she felt capable of, and inclined to, murder.
‘I was just saying to Meg,’ Kirsty informed her when she rejoined them, ‘I was just saying we never go down to the rocks to gather winkles now.’
‘We always used to,’ Meg remembered, ‘when the tide went out.’
They had spoken. The young woman had the feeling that they might never utter again. Elspeth never would. She accepted that. But at least she would not have to walk in perpetual silence through the high places of this upland country.
* * *
It was not until Elspeth had gone, that they got down to the heart of the matter. There would be neither widow nor war pension for Elspeth, her not being married, like. You had to be legally married to get a widow’s pension, or badly wounded to get a war pension.
Still, they concluded, having pondered it over, it could have been worse. Elspeth could have been left with fatherless bairns to bring up. Though that would have been unlikely in her case, for she was well into her forties was Elspeth, and bound to be ‘past it’ by now. Come to think of it, when you really got down to it, if it had been one of their men that had been killed in the war, their loss would have been far greater than Elspeth’s. That stood to reason . . .
Dear God forgive me. The young woman was appalled by the thought that had sprung so sudden and unbidden into her mind. If her man had gone to the war and been killed, she would have had a second chance. Another time to start a new life, to be up and away from the ingrowing, incestuous way of the farm, in search of something that had eluded her. Often, in the evenings, when she stood watching the flow of traffic far down on the main road and the smoke rising up from trains rushing past on the other side of the firth, it seemed as if a whole vista of escape unfolded itself before her eyes . . .
So many roads lead outwards
There’s one that leads to London
And one that leads to Rome
Some lead to the mountains
Others to the plain
But every road that’s taken
Must lead you back again
Dear God. Forgive me . . . Forgiveness, though, she had discovered from the Italians, was never automatically granted, but paid for by penance, which she attempted now, dedicating this fine spring day to dirt, scouring her kitchen from top to bottom.
‘My! But you’ve been hard at it the day.’ Her man’s appreciation of the bright kitchen moved her by its innocence. Sometimes, now and again, she would have liked to have been blind, so that the small externals that always seemed to surround him could never disarm her—hacked hands, threadbare shirts.
‘You’ve cut yourself with the neep hasher,’ she said, covering his hand with her own. Her frock, she remembered, was almost paid up, in Kirsty’s catalogue. She could put a new order in now. ‘A couple of working shirts,’ she suggested, as they sat down to their supper. ‘You’re in need of them.’
‘What about you. Is there nothing you’re needing for yourself?’
‘Nothing,’ she assured him, ‘I’m fine.’ The truth of her statement took herself by surprise.
* * *
Meg had ‘gone clean off Kirsty’. The young woman now found herself in the circumference of their triangle. ‘A certain party’, according to Meg, had ‘let the cat out of the bag’.
‘A certain party’, always unidentified, always malevolent, who drifted invisible in and out of the perimeter of cottar life, causing havoc whenever she appeared, intrigued the young woman. This time, the nameless one threatened to disrupt the old order of turnip hoeing.
According to Meg, Kirsty and her family had decided to take on piece-work at the hoeing this year. And you knew what piece-work was, paid by the length of the work done. Couldn’t you just see Kirsty and her brood taking down the neep drills like the hammers of hell. Anything for an extra bob or two. Leaving them, the ordinary workers, all behind like cows’ tails. And paid by the hour. Showing them up. That, Meg emphasised, was what ‘got her goat, a showing up’. She didn’t, she assured the young woman, mind the fat wage packets that Kirsty and her family would collect, for, strictly between herself and the young woman, Kirsty needed every extra penny she could get, to keep up with the payments on all the stuff she was forever ordering out of that catalogue of hers.
There might, the young woman suggested, be no need of piece-work, now that they’d got the Italians. ‘The Italians’, Meg reminded her, made a right soss-up of thinning the kale. Riving everything that grew right up out of the drills, driving Finlay demented. God help the crop if the Italians were let loose with the hoe, amongst small finnicky things like young neeps. But the young woman, Meg conceded, pausing in her tirade, to make the allowance, the young woman could please herself about taking on the hoeing. As for Meg, she was by no means sure if she ‘would be in the mind to put in an appearance’ at the turnip field.
The soil was in fine tilth for hoeing, softened by last night’s rain, so that everybody on the farm—including Meg—had turned up to get the hoeing over and done with, while earth and weather were in such fine fettle. Even Else, the servant girl from the farm, had joined them in their task.
Meg was right. Hoeing was proving competitive. The blisters were already beginning to rise on the young woman’s hands. Tomorrow, Meg pointed out, the blisters would break and then the real agony would begin. But by the end of the week, her hands would become as hard as the handle of the hoe itself. She just wasn’t holding her hoe at the right slant, Meg said, holding out her own unblistered hands for inspection.
Times like these, the young woman felt imprisoned within the circumference of a field. Trapped by the monotony of work that wearied the body and dulled the mind. Rome had been taken. The Allies had landed in Normandy, she’d heard that on the wireless. ‘News’ that had caused great excitement in the bothy, crowded with friends, gesticulating in wild debate. Loud voices in dispute. Names falling casually from their tongues, out of books from her school-room days. The Alban Hills. The Tibrus . . . ‘O Tibrus. Father Tibrus. To whom the Romans pray . . .’ Even in her schooldays, those names had sounded unreal. Outdistanced by centuries, from another time. Another place. The workers in the fields made no mention of such happenings. All their urgency was concentrated on reaching the end riggs at the top of the field. The long line of army jeeps roaring down along the main road provided nothing more than a moment for straightening their backs, never impinging on the consciousness of the turnip field.
‘Che?’. . . tugging at her shoulder, Luigi gesticulated towards Else. ‘Ragazza . . . Che?’
‘Servant,’ she told him. ‘Works for boss’s wife.’
‘Bella . . . Bella ragazza . . .’ She could hear Luigi shouting. She could have misheard of course, she was so used to Luigi applying the words to herself.
‘She’s a daft bitch, that.’ Meg drew their attention to Else, as they stopped for a moment, before starting up on a new rigg. ‘Skirling round the field there, with that Italian panting at her tails.’ It was easily seen that Finlay wasn’t around. He’d soon put the clampers down on a carry-on like that.
‘You’re supposed to start a new rigg when you’re done with the old one,’ Kirsty shouted in warning to Luigi, ‘so you’d better get a move on.’
‘Non capisco me,’ Luigi grinned as Else dodged giggling past them. ‘Me no understand.’
‘Me no understand,’ Kirsty mimicked, turning aside to the others. ‘He can understand fine when there’s a bit of skirt around. And that Else is just as bad,’ she concluded. ‘Anything in trousers.’
* * *
Ragazza. Ragazza. The words stuck in her mind, and depressed the young woman as they made their way home from the turnip field. Ragazza. A title to which she felt she was losing her claim.
She hadn’t got much to say for herself tonight, Kirsty commented. If it was the blisters on her hands that was bothering her, she would get used to that, all she had to do was to steep them in water as hot as she could thole, with a good fistful of coarse salt thrown in. It would nip right enough, Kirsty assured her, but, by faith you, it would fairly harden up the skin on her hands.
It was jealousy that ailed the young woman. Not of Else, herself, but of the single freedom Else enjoyed. Older than the young woman, Else was still ‘ragazza’.
I’m here for ever, she thought, staring round the dim kitchen, before bracing herself to tackle its demands.
The bourtrees, in full blossom, arched themselves across the track that led to the main road, breaking up the vista of the world beyond the farm. The young woman could no longer nip round the side of the house to gaze on the traffic far down the road, could no longer imagine that time when she would slip quiet down the track into the wide world. She had always imagined that moment, but had kept postponing it . . . Tomorrow. Next Friday. This time next week. Still holding on to its bright secret possibility. Some day. One day . . .
With the bright pennies cold on my eyes
I shall fly up to the warm sun
And leave my shift where it lies . . .
The bairns had already plundered the blossoms of the bourtrees, leaving them strewn across the track, froths of cream-coloured lace. Soon their berries would hang down in long purple chaplets, safe from the bairns. Warned off by their mothers’ cries of ‘poison!’. Or near enough safe, for danger itself was a compulsion to taste. And bitter to the tongue. Eyeing each other with apprehension, in anticipation of one or other, or all, dropping dead on the spot.
She came upon them congregated round the Italians, squatting on the steps of the bothy, shirtless in the sun. Their attention concentrated on the toy bogie which Paolo was hammering out for Kirsty’s son.
‘Who’s the lucky boy
That’s going your way’
the singer on the wireless enquired through the open windows, to send the young woman waltzing down the length of the Cottar Row in accompaniment.
‘To kiss you good night
In the doorway?’
‘Finlay wouldn’t like that,’ Kirsty proclaimed, bursting out fr
om her hens’ ree, and breaking up both the solo performance and the carefree mood of the sunlit day, commanding their attention to Beel’s tractor, which stood facing up to Achullen. That tractor, she informed them, would never start off first go—not facing up the hill like that. Still, she admitted, before disappearing back into the hens’ ree, that was Beel’s concern, and she, Kirsty, ‘washed her hands of the whole affair’.
* * *
Kirsty’s knowledge of the tractor, and of the demerits of Beel who worked it, always impressed the young woman. She always seemed to know when Beel had ‘cleaned’ the plugs, and, even more frequently, when he had ‘forgotten’ to clean them.
‘It was just,’ Meg said, sidling across from her doorstep to confide in the young woman, it was just that Kirsty’s man was fed to the back teeth working the old Davy Brown tractor, and was ettling to get his hands on Beel’s International. That, Meg concluded, was all there was to it.
Who was of a mind to go for firewood then, Finlay, stumping round the corner, demanded to know. For although it was still summer, they were already getting ready for winter, all set to cut down the old trees for cottars’ firewood.
They could all freeze to death if they liked then, Finlay threatened, confronted by their lack of response, but, by God, he vowed, if he were to set eyes on a one of them, crawling round the steading in search of paling posts when winter did come . . . There was nothing, he informed them, that he himself liked better on a winter’s night, than just to fling a leg up on each side of the mantelpiece, and spit into a good roaring fire. But it was up to them, he admitted, for Finlay realised that the cutting down of old trees was voluntary. Free firewood for those who took the trouble to cut it down for themselves.
Another Time, Another Place Page 8
