Another Time, Another Place

by Jessie Kesson

  ‘Wood. Come wood. Today posseeble.’ The young woman turned to find Luigi at her shoulder. ‘You promise. You promise one day. Today. Posseeble.’

  For the first time, for a long time, armoured by truth, she could look Luigi in the face. ‘Today no possible. No possible wood. Me byre. Cows. Milk.’

  ‘No posseeble. No posseeble. Sempre no posseeble, no posseeble, no posseeble, NO POSSEEBLE . . .’ The anger rising in Luigi’s voice had reached the others, quiet and speculative, as, turning on his heel, Luigi rejoined them at the bothy door.

  ‘What’s she seeking now?’ Meg broke through the silence as Else, like some runner from a battlefield crashed in amongst them. Their relationship with the farmer’s wife’s servant was cautious. Wary. Something in domestic service seemed to eat up character, to form the spy, the gossip, the snob and the hypocrite, seeing always the underside of their employers’ lives. Sometimes though, on occasions like this, Else had her uses, warning them now that ‘the mistress is on the road. Collecting for the foreign missions, making her way up to the shepherd’s house at this very minute.’

  There was no call to warn her, Kirsty claimed. The Queen herself, if so be she’d a mind, was welcome to come into Kirsty’s house without warning. Not so, the young woman. The sun had infiltered itself between her and her morning chores, and the farmer’s wife would be more interested in the state of her husband’s cottar house, than in far-flung foreign missions.

  ‘Wood,’ Luigi was urging Else. ‘Everybody go wood. You like? You like go wood?’

  He had no need to take that one the length of the wood, Meg observed, as they watched the giggling tug-of-war that waged in front of them. No need to go further than the barn door with that one. That, Meg impressed on her avid listeners, was why the last servant was sent packing. Bag and baggage down the road. It was Meg’s own man that had ‘catched them at it’. With a lorry driver. Up against the barn door. He’d gotten a right fleg, had Jamie. All he could see was big bare thighs. ‘Disgusting, just.’

  ‘Big bare thighs’. The image haunted the young woman, all the way to the byre. Usually she liked the byre. She was good at milking the cows. At ease and at one with the job in hand. Her face pressed against the cow’s warm flank, sensing the intimacy between them. A need on the cow’s part to give. And on her own to receive.

  ‘Yield’—they used the right word for it, country folk. For although the cow could be serenaded, or talked into yielding her milk freely, she could never be forced. But the young woman was in no mood to apply such persuasion. ‘Big bare thighs’. She should, she knew, share Kirsty’s disgust at such an image, but found herself instead, resentful of Else, in envy of her.

  ‘She’s slow in letting her milk down.’ Her man, puzzled, hovering by the side of the stall. ‘She shouldn’t be going dry yet. She’s not that long calved. I’m saying . . .’ His words lost impact within the vision of Luigi, squatting brown and shirtless in the sun. ‘I’m saying she shouldn’t be going dry yet.’ The sharp and sudden outbursts of anger that had of late begun to possess her at inexplicable times, were threatening now. She recognised that by the trembling that had come over her body, by the word of accusation, fighting within her. Pounding to get out . . . ‘It’s not fair. You had your life. You had time . . .’

  The trembling was easing down now and she hadn’t uttered. The relief of that poured out from her in a sweat that was cold, but set her on her normal course again. Grasping the cow’s teats firmly within her hands, she drew them down, until the beat of milk falling into her pail kept rhythm with the song rising in her throat . . .

  Will you gang to Kelvin Grove

  Through its birches let us rove

  Will you gang to Kelvin Grove

  Bonnie lassie O . . .

  * * *

  If the wild hyacinths couldn’t endure being plucked from their wood in full bloom, they might, the young woman thought, as she planted out the bulbs she had uprooted, accept and survive transfer to her own yard. That such tiny bulbs could produce such a profusion of blossom intrigued her. The improbable becoming possible. Their tiny comet tails curling round the bulbs, transforming legend into a truth. Sudden and clear, she remembered, the wild hyacinths were, she had learned at school, Persephone’s favourite flower, and had followed her deep and down and halfway to Hades. Hades. The word, shooting up out of memory, pleased her. She must, she thought, smiling, use it for the confusion of Kirsty . . . It isn’t hell, Kirsty. It’s Hades, that’s what the Greeks called it . . .

  ‘Perche? PERCHE?’ Getting to her feet she confronted Luigi. ‘Perche? You no come bothy. Perche?’

  ‘Because . . .’ Answers in their multitudes swirled in her head, too elusive to be caught, to be worked in concrete. ‘Because. Me busy. Work outside. Finish . . .’ It wasn’t explanation enough. She knew that by the rigid disbelief on Luigi’s face. Turning away, she was unable to look on him in the clear light of day, for she had raped his privacy, had conjured up his every intimacy in fantasies covered by the night. She felt the shame of it, tangible, porous, oozing out to settle on her face.

  ‘Come,’ Luigi loosened his grip on her shoulder. ‘Come. Speak bothy. One minuto. Paolo. Umberto gone camp. Come.’

  * * *

  The drought had settled itself down to stay. The cows, huddling together in splatches of shade under the trees, shifting as the shade shifted. The last of the summer’s flowers drooping in the yards. The hot iron that was earth pinching away at their roots. Only the corn throve and rejoiced in the thick blanket of heat that had flung itself across the land, but then corn always grew harsh and strong. With neither flower nor fragrance. For utility’s sake . . . ‘If only the rain would come,’ Kirsty lamented, ‘it would wash away all the dust.’ There seemed little sign of that. The mist was rising up across the firth, eliminating the sea itself . . .

  ‘Mist from the sea brings honey to the bee,’ the young woman reminded her.

  ‘You wouldn’t think,’ Kirsty commented, as the Italians drooped past them, ‘that the heat would affect them like that, coming from a hot place like Italy.’ At least, she remembered, they’d always had the manners to give you ‘Fine morning’ in passing. ‘It must be this heat affecting them.’

  It was neither the heat, nor lack of manners, that had set the seal of silence on the Italians. The young woman sensed that. It was a subtle change that had come over their relationship with herself, and with each other. She had sensed it since the day she had accepted Luigi’s invitation to the bothy.

  Her waking dreams of the night taking on confused dimensions. Her body that had taken her unaware, asserting a life of its own, clamouring for its needs, lay quiet now, cold with apprehension. While her mind whirred blind and bat-like, seek­ing for escape. Her thinking taking on a quality of nightmare. Naked. She would go into the bothy, offering herself to Paolo and Umberto. So that by this act of giving herself in bribery, they would feel no resentment. Sometimes, her thinking extended to include all the friends of the Italians. She was sure that she had seen speculation in their eyes, and had heard the sound of knowingness in their salutations.

  ‘You no speak. No speak Paolo. No speak Umberto,’ she would urge Luigi, when the need for his re­assurance overwhelmed her. ‘No speak no person.’

  ‘No speak me. Me no speak persone. One time. One more time. Posseeble. Me no speak.’

  She would like to believe that, despite the hint of blackmail, she would like to believe it. Sometimes, times like now, she could will herself into belief. Standing safe, flanked between Kirsty and Meg, as if time itself had moments of compassion. Willing to turn back on itself and allow her a momentary illusion of security in familiar things. Although she was discovering familiar things could no longer be taken for granted, but commanded an absolute concentration on themselves . . . ‘That’s that then. For another day . . .’ Even her man’s nightly greeting, when he got in at night from the byre, although never varying and heard a hundred times, took on a new significance. Ano
ther day ‘got through’. Brought without mishap to a satisfactory close. Ordinary things, enclosing her briefly within their own assurance.

  ‘It’s come round again,’ Kirsty was saying, as they gazed down on the grain-ranked fields. For, it seemed to Kirsty, ‘like yesterday, since we were at the stooking last year.’

  ‘O it is but a week the morn’

  The young woman sang. In sudden remembrance.

  ‘Since I was weel and hairstin corn

  But something in my head gaed wrang . . .’

  An old song that, Meg said, older than themselves. A long time since they’d heard it. ‘The Dying Ploughboy’, Kirsty informed them, taking up the words herself.

  Farewell my nags my bonnie pair

  For you I’ll yoke and lowse nae mair

  Farewell my maister . . .

  God but they were in good voice the day, Finlay commented, on his way to the tractor shed. ‘The Glasgow Orpheus Choir will have to look out for itself.’

  At least, they consoled themselves, when Finlay had passed out of hearing, they didn’t need ‘The Barley Bree’ to put them in good voice.

  They should have said that to Finlay. An odd thing that, they agreed, contemplating its oddness. You always knew the right thing to say, when the chance to say it had gone.

  * * *

  The binder had broken down. Now that the damned thing was at a standstill, Finlay informed the women, there was no need for them to stand around claiking. One of them, he suggested, might just take a turn up to Achullen, to see if Elspeth was of a mind to give a hand to the stooking. Now that they had lost the Italians . . . Lost the Italians. The phrase took the young woman by surprise. The unexpected kindness of it. She would go, she volunteered. She was used to the climb. More than that, she needed to go. Needed to know that if Elspeth decided to work with them again, whether it could be if not in friendship, at least in tolerance. Not in a silence that would straddle itself across the seasons of their lives on the land.

  It would have been easier to take the track through the heather, but she was not ready to take that track again. In years to come maybe, in another time, she might return to the place. But the climb released something within her self. Straightening up to stand high and knee-deep amongst the russet bracken crackling round her legs, the sun, it seemed, had never set with such fire and flame as it was setting now, a hill-crest fire, she remembered. Far beneath her the Cottar Row took on a new perspective, dwindling, huddling within the farm-steading, as if seeking for anonymity. Only yesterday, it had been the pivot around which the whole world revolved, before it had whirled and shuddered to a stop.

  U U U

  ‘No more corn. No more hayeerst. No more tatties,’ Luigi had proclaimed, as he rushed past her window, dodging the bikes of prisoners from the camp, and shouting through the clamour of their bells. ‘Tomorrow. Go home. Italia. Home Napoli.’

  Again, the young woman had the feeling that the whole of Italia was squeezed into the narrow length and breadth of the Cottar Row, even Kirsty startled by the sudden din, disapproving of the uninhibited displays of emotion taking place in front of her eyes, laughter and tears no longer rational, no longer manifestations which separated joy from sorrow. Even Kirsty was disarmed, as Luigi swept her off her doorstep, whirling her along the length of the Cottar Row . . .

  O are you sure the news is true

  And are you sure he’s weel

  Come Jade put on your Sunday frock

  Good wife put by your wheel . . .

  Relief, in one great gush, was the young woman’s first reaction to the news. Like one who has been granted a last minute reprieve. ‘One time,’ Luigi was whispering. ‘Today. One time. For last . . .’

  She would truly never know whether she had yielded to the instinct of her body or to a sense of long loss that the word ‘last’ had evoked within her. ‘The dream’, both the Bible of her childhood and those who read from it, had tried to din into her, ‘the dream’ could only come true ‘through a multi­tude of busyness’. The ‘busyness’ was now all that remained. ‘One last time,’ she said to Luigi.

  * * *

  They had taken separate tracks up through the heather, herself and Luigi, apprehension increasing as she watched him come towards her.

  Come to the stolen water

  Come leap the guarded pale

  Come pluck the flower in season

  Before desire shall fail

  Her apprehension was justified. A subtle change had come over their relationship, as if their roles had been reversed.

  The man who stood before her was no longer a prisoner. No longer a servant of circumstances, as she herself remained. Tomorrow he would be free to return to a world in which she would have neither part nor power. The triumph of this glistened on Luigi’s face, glinted in his eyes, as he leant forward to embrace her . . . ‘Napoli. Pronto. Napoli.’ The words, gasped in her ear, were not intended for her hearing, but words of affirmation. Of confirmation for himself. She was aware of that, as he eased her down into the heather.

  In her fantasies of the night, consummation had been a perfect thing, requiring no comment. Needing none of the reassurance she heard herself beseeching now. ‘ME amo, Luigi? ME amo . . . ?’

  ‘Si, si. Ti amo.’

  ‘Sempre, Luigi. Sempre.’

  ‘Sempre. Si.’

  It was to the sky above that Luigi spoke, staring up at it as he lay, his hands clasped beneath his head. Staring as if Napoli itself was reflected within it. Raising herself slow and clumsy up from the heather, she had stood wondering how she could get her feet to carry herself, and the corpse of illusion within her, down from the hill with some small remnant of dignity.

  * * *

  The eyes of the workers gathered round Kirsty’s door seemed to measure each step of her approach to the Cottar Row. The silence that had come over them when she turned the gate of her cottage, exploded the instant she reached them. Where had she been then, they demanded in chorus, as if she had forgone the privilege of being witness to great events.

  For Else, taking the short cut through Achullen Wood, on her afternoon off, had been jumped on. Assaulted. Near enough ravished. If it hadn’t been for Beel there, taking a turn through the wood. He’d heard the skirls of her in the nick of time. One of the Italians. Though which one, Beel wasn’t rightly sure. For the man had taken to his heels, and Beel only got a glimpse of his back.

  That could well be, they agreed, with all the Italians that were around the day. And the height they were at. Forbye, Kirsty’s Alick remembered, Else was very thick with the Looeeshee one. They’d all noticed that. So thick, Kirsty remarked, that he’d have no need to ravish her.

  It wasn’t Luigi. It couldn’t have been Luigi, the protest forced itself up in the young woman’s mind, but stuck, somewhere down in her throat. What was more, Jeems reminded them, there was neither hair nor hide of the Looeeshee one. The other two Italians were in by the bothy, it seemed like there was nothing on their conscience.

  Don’t let Luigi come in sight . . . The young woman’s prayer rose up in panic . . . Make him take the back way. Dear God, don’t let them see him coming down the hill . . .

  If it was the Looeeshee one, Meg prophesied, there would be no Italy for him. No Napoli, that place he was always on about. As if it was the only place on the face of this earth.

  It could have been any of the Italians, the young woman found her voice at last. There was a crowd of them here the day. They’d all know soon enough, Alick promised. According to Beel, they were taking the prisoners back to the camp to interrogate them, Else and all, to identify. As for himself, Alick declared, there was no doubt in his mind. No doubt at all, for there was still no sign of the Loogee one. And that, surely, spoke for itself.

  Only she could speak for Luigi. Something she felt compelled to do. But in the doing she was aware that her world as she now knew it would change, that the relationships she had begun to form would alter. She herself might survive the condemn
ation of the Cottar Row. It was the burden of shame within herself, and which would be extended to, and cast over her man, that was beyond enduring.

  They could go away though, to another farm. They would easily get a job. They were good workers. A clean breast. A new start. The pros­pect beginning to light up in her mind, was snuffed out by the sudden remembrance of the Stand Still Order, that prevented farm-workers from leaving the land. There would be no other farm, no hiding place. No Roma. No Napoli.

  So this was what it was like to be a prisoner. Small wonder that her attempts to console the Italians had been futile. Unable to interpret their language, which might have given more shape, more meaning to their experience.

  Nothing for look . . . She remembered in a sudden despairing survey of the landscape in front of her . . . In Scotland. Nothing for look . . . She knew now, how it must have seemed to Luigi.

  * * *