The Visitor

by Chris Simpson

  ‘Time for t’rounds, lass.’ He rose stiffly to his feet.

  ‘Maybe you’d like to go with him then? That is if you’re not too tired, it being freezin’ an’ all,’ she added.

  ‘Certainly.’

  The young man had been watching Emily, noting the brave face she put on a seemingly hopeless situation. He remained thoughtful whilst donning his long coat and muffler.

  * * *

  The two men crossed the yard together, the frost crystals crunching like powdered glass beneath their feet. It was, as Jos put it, cold enough to “curdle your marrow”. Their breath hung about them as if loath to leave and the skies were clear, the Milky Way filled with stars. Tip and Bess came out of their barrel houses wriggling with delight in anticipation of having their heads rubbed and chests tickled. The young man reached down and rubbed his fingers in their fur. Jos unclipped them and they spun away across the snow.

  The two men wandered from building to building.

  Jos was in his element now, on his home turf, surrounded by all that he knew and cared for. He explained to his nephew how the farm worked, how all the patterns dovetailed into the seasons, all of it logical, with the natural world balancing itself, weeding out the weak and providing for the strong.

  At one point they were standing by the midden, the ammonia-laden smell blanketed by the coating of frozen snow. Jos explained how they took manure out on to the fields in the “front end” of the year to soak the richness down into the earth to boost the hay meadows. Like the tree being fed with its own dying leaves, everything had its place in the rhythm of life.

  The round complete, they came back down the field towards the house, its windows glowing in the night. Jos stopped, leaning as he always did on the top bar of the gate. The young man stood silently beside him taking in the winter world.

  ‘It’s all I’ve ever known, lad.’ Jos’s voice was soft and low. ‘You’ve got Robertshaw blood in your veins. It’s still a part of you and I’m glad you got over ’ere to see us, but I think our times are coming to an end. Your aunt ain’t going to get better. You can see that. An’ Walter an’ me, well, let’s just say the times have changed far more than us. Arnold ain’t interested in the farm and I, for one, can’t see no way forward. It all seems like it was for nothin.’

  It was as if the veil were suddenly lifted from the quietly enigmatic young man of the past few hours and he spoke with a measured authority that wriggled under Jos’s defences like a bird beneath a wire.

  ‘How do you mean, all for nothing?’

  The old man was about to set off into a speech about the downhill slide but the timbre of the young man’s voice had an edge that stopped Jos’s words on his lip. ‘I have been here only a few hours and, relative or not, to all intents and purposes a stranger in your midst because you don’t really know me. I’m a stranger from a far away place.’

  He rested his elbows on the gate beside Jos. ‘Try to forget for a moment, who or what I am supposed to be. Perhaps it is difficult to understand exactly what I am saying because you’re so close to things, but I see here a little world which in its completeness and honesty and closeness to the earth and the natural harmony, stands as a signpost to something durable and fine. It is like the threads which, when pulled together, form the essence of the cloth.’

  ‘There is a goodness here that is all the better for being a part of the natural course of events, rather than something contrived. I doubt that anyone coming down to this place in need of care and help would be turned away.’

  Jos was silent.

  ‘Tonight – as we talked in the house – you said you felt awkward because here I am, having just crossed half the world in a few hours and you always regarded a trip into Langthwaite as an outing. That was as far as you ever went, you said, except for one day trip to York long ago. It seemed to me that you felt inadequate on account of that; that your horizons were too narrow.’

  He paused momentarily.

  ‘I don’t see anything wrong with being in the centre of your world when people are flying so far and so fast that half the time they don’t know who they are, where they’re going or where they’ve been.’

  Jos felt as if his very soul was being dissected and scrutinized and bits of him spread around like pieces of a jigsaw puzzle on the parlour table. It put him on the defensive, nettled but intrigued. He muttered half heartedly, ‘It were mostly work in them days. There weren’t much time for owt else an’ then I met Emily, started courting and that were it. Things are different now’.

  ‘But if you think about it,’ the other continued, ‘the earthshakers, the people who changed the past and affected our lives to this day, they were never high-rollers. They tended to be simple ordinary people, farmers like yourself, and fishermen; people who worked close to the earth and the elements.’

  ‘There’s a whole world out there that has forgotten what this season is really all about, the mystery of Christmas. It is based on an earth-shaking event when a child was born into the most wretched of circumstances but changed the course of history and much more.’

  ‘You have a quality here that has gone from other places. There is a peace that others have driven from their world, as if they are scared to face themselves in the silence.’

  Jos shuffled his booted feet on the packed snow. He’d never heard folks talk like this and the clipped accent and sureness of delivery was almost irritating, a bit like them clever so-and-sos on TV, full of their own importance and listening to no one but themselves. And yet. And yet… He knew in his bones that the young man was right, and he, Jos Robertshaw, after all these years was losing faith in himself and his way. God alone knew he had enough reason, but just when he’d got himself convinced that all was up, along comes this young upstart, who he hardly knows, telling him something different.

  He felt ashamed that he could think of his nephew in this way and for the second time that day he was taken aback and did not know what to make of it.

  The other paused for a moment. ‘You see no way forward, but what is forward? To make more money and then more, and more? How many of those so-called “forward” people know how to look backward? To enjoy just rewards is fair enough, but to chase the crock of gold at the end of the rainbow for its own sake? Where does that get you in the end?’

  His nephew’s face was almost unearthly in the light from the night sky. ‘You have a great phrase here, that a shroud has no pockets.’

  He weighed his words carefully, watching Jos’s expression.

  ‘When you are so troubled and carry the burden that you do, I hope you will pardon me for saying it, but to me you seem very complete here when so many folk with so much, worry themselves into an early grave striving for more.’

  He could see that Jos was unused to this kind of rhetoric; that he was confused and agitated. The old man was nobody’s fool but he clearly liked to savour a point of view and give it some time to settle. His natural wisdom was a philosophy born of a lifetime in the measured pace of the natural order, not slick arguments. Most importantly of all, he carried the unspeakable burden of impending loss.

  They walked on down to the house in silence. Jos chained Tip and Bess then both men took off their boots in the porch. He pushed the door slowly ajar, slipping through into the warm room. The fire had sunk low in the gate and Emily was asleep, her face pale, her eyes shadowed. Her hands were open on her lap, turned slightly upwards as if in supplication to some benign power.

  The rug had slipped from her knees to the floor.

  The old man turned to look at his nephew. Nothing was said, no move was made, but his unspoken words seemed to cry aloud between the walls, the unsounded words of a man watching the most precious being he had ever known being torn slowly but surely away from him. All the fine words in the world, all the clever sayings, could not alter that.

  He walked over to her chair, leaving the young man standing quietly by the table. The silence was the silence of an old house, comfortable with the fact
, its walls used to the quality, drawn down through four hundred years. Parties, arguments and gettogethers might be raucous, boisterous affairs, but then the silence would return like waves running in on the sand, restoring an equanimity and balance to the senses. It was something not to be feared and driven away but welcomed, more often than not as a comfort and balm to the toil of the day.

  Jos bent down and, as ever, touched his wife’s cheek. His hands, so calloused and rough from contact with wood, stone and weather, had the gentleness of thistledown.

  His nephew, his grey eyes deep as a bottomless pool, watched. There were words that could be said, but no words were necessary.

  Gently, Jos lifted her, holding the precious form to him, as a child would hold a rag doll. The young man moved to the door at the bottom of the stairs and lifted the sneck. For a second the eyes of the two men held each to the other in a moment of shared understanding.

  Jos went carefully up the stairs, looking down with each upward step at the ravaged face that had not even woken. One day soon, he knew, the face would sleep forever.

  He carried her into her room.

  Later he came downstairs again. The young man was still standing, gazing into the dying embers of the fire.

  ‘You have pain enough. I hope you don’t think I went too far.’

  ‘Think nowt on it, lad. It’s been this way for some time. Let me show you up to your room.’

  As they passed Emily’s room, the door was ajar and a candle burned on a bedside table. Jos had laid her hair neatly across the pillow and the young man realized that he had brushed it. The face was sunk in repose.

  Jos opened another door off the landing. A beam ran the length of the ceiling, the floor timbers were of polished pine with one rag rug, the window looked down to the snowy yard and another candle burned at the bedside.

  ‘We still use candles a lot,’ he whispered. ‘Old habits an’ all that.’

  The young man’s bag had been put by the bed and on the pine chest by the bedside an old Delft jug of water, basin and towel and a leather Bible with brass clasps lay alongside.

  ‘Remember if tha’ gets a bit cold there’s more covers in t’chest, oh, and yes, there’s hangers for your clothes in t’cupboard,’ said Jos, indicating a tall pine cabinet in the corner. Jos stood awkwardly, unsure of what to say next.

  ‘Goodnight then.’

  ‘Goodnight.’

  His figure retreated down the long upper corridor of Keld House. The young man watched him disappear into a side room.

  The moon sailed on behind islands of windblown cloud beyond the window and the familiar silence settled on the night. For a long time he remained motionless, the light bathing his face. Then, walking to the window, he raised his hands in solemn supplication to the heavens.

  Chapter 5

  TUESDAY, 24 DECEMBER

  HE WOKE to the lowing of cattle across the yard.

  As he lay looking up at the beamed ceiling, the white light reflecting from the snow outside was almost dazzling. He washed with a sharp intake of breath, splashing the icy water from the jug over his face and could not help but notice that there were fernlike patterns of frost on the inside of the windows.

  Down in the yard the cattle, their heads nodding in easy symmetry, were plodding on their unhurried way to the big shed where they spent the winter. The entire landscape seemed coated in white sugar and with the full light he was able to see just how snugged down into the hills Keld House was. Walter’s van was parked in its usual place next to the log store and he could see Jos wheeling barrowloads of manure out to the midden, the steam rising in dense clouds in the freezing air. They must have been up for two or three hours.

  A mouth-watering smell of cooking was drifting up from the downstairs kitchen.

  He made his way down past Emily’s room, noting that the door was shut, and stepped into the living room. Festive music spilled from a radio over by the settle.

  Laura had an array of pans on the range, the fire glowing with new life and, he noted, the wood box full of fresh, split logs. The table had been partially cleared again and four places set with a new wholemeal loaf on the bread board.

  ‘Good morning,’ he ventured, as an upbeat version of ‘The Holly and the Ivy’ seeped from the speakers of the radio.

  ‘Mornin’,’ she smiled at him. ‘Sleep well?’

  ‘I did. The first thing I knew it was morning.’

  ‘First thing I knew,’ said Laura, briskly stirring a pan of what appeared to be broken eggs, ‘Walter is on his back snoring fit to blow t’walls out and it’s time to get stirrin’ again. Felt like we’d hardly got to bed. It does get cold hereabouts in winter, but I ’ave to say I thought to misen as we came down t’lane, we might just as well be at t’North Pole.’

  He smiled.

  ‘Can you bring me that plate?’ She nodded towards the dresser. He followed her into the larder where she reached up and lifted the ham from the hook. Laying it down on a slab, she sliced the rashers with an expertise born of long practice and he carefully hung the flitch back up again when she decided that she had cut enough. Together they went back into the kitchen.

  The eggs went on a big dish into the oven, “egg scrimmage” she called it, while mushrooms and tomatoes went into the pan with the ham. Fried bread followed with slices of black pudding, made in the village. He could not believe the volume of food until it occurred to him that the two frozen individuals out there in the farm had begun work in the pitch dark, and in the dead of winter. Tea was made and left to “mash”.

  ‘That’s about it,’ she said, wiping a pink brow. ‘Give ’em a yell.’

  ‘What about Emily?’ he ventured, but she looked up at the ceiling and made a finger-on-the-lips motion, shaking her head. ‘She doesn’t get up that early these days. Best let her rest awhile.’

  He had not even got to the door when he heard voices and the stamping of rubber boots in the porch. The door swung open, bringing a chilly blast of winter undershot with the fragrance of the cowshed. Red-faced and noses sniffing in the warmth, Jos and Walter sat down.

  Between, ‘Mornin’,’ and, ‘Sleep well?’ and a good-natured, ‘It’s all right for some,’ directed at the visitor, they set about cutting great doorstops of bread. The hot plates were on the table, the iron pans of cooked breakfast placed on mats and everyone helped themselves. In his whole existence he had never tasted anything so good and any doubts he may have had concerning the actual consumption of the food were quickly dispelled.

  Apart from the festive radio, silence reigned, interspersed with munching and the rattle of cutlery. At length, after an audible sigh of pleasure, Jos made to wipe his mouth on the back of his hand then, remembering his guest, used his sleeve instead.

  The talk was of what was to be done that day.

  Winter closed everything in and no one would be venturing far over the fells, but there were still things to be done. Re-fuelling, bringing down more fother from the barn, kindling and logs and preparing foodstuffs for the animals.

  ‘Do you fancy ’avin’ a look round, nephew?’ There was no trace of the anguish of the previous night, just a certain knowledge behind the eyes.

  ‘Well, yes. I just don’t want to get in the way.’

  ‘Not much chance of that. We have to firstly get the milk up t’lane then grab some holly on t’way back, what with all the keltement coming on Christmas Day.’

  Everyone took their plates over to the sink in the kitchen. Walter headed out again after a surreptitious belch that earned him a sharp rebuke from Laura, and the young man got his coat and muffler.

  ‘Try these for size. I reckon they’re about you.’ Jos handed him a pair of rubber boots. He found that they fitted his stockinged feet remarkably well. Once out into the yard he was astonished at just how cold it was.

  Apparently the phone was still dead and looking up at the wires there was no wonder, for they sparkled with ice crystals. Cold or not, he had to concede that it was incredibly bea
utiful. The hills ranged about them like great pillows, smoothed by the crisp blanket of snow and under the blue sky everything shimmered in a blinding white light.

  While Jos went to start the tractor and shackle up the trailer, he wandered down through the garden with Tip and Bess leaping about him. The shrubs were twice their normal size under overcoats of snow, and the branches of the fruit trees picked out in a delicate tracery of ice. Bird tracks and cats’ paw prints led down to the beck which still tinkled between boulders in their glassy coats.

  The distant roar of Beelzebub firing into life prompted him to hurry back up to the yard. He clambered onto the tractor beside Jos and with a grinding of gears and a shattering racket from the exhaust pipe that sent clouds of startled rooks rocketing up out of the sycamores, they swung out of the yard and up onto the farm road. The trailer followed obediently behind with its complement of milk churns and they climbed up out of the Ghyll, the cold air stinging their faces and the big wheels throwing up a spray of dry snow. It was exhilarating and something totally new for the young man and he savoured every moment. The dogs, as ever, loped above and around them, streaking through the snow.

  He jumped down and opened the gates, four in all, and they arrived at the top and over the cattle grid. Jos expertly backed the trailer next to the stone gantry and they manhandled the heavy churns off it and loaded the waiting empties for the morning. This time there was no sign of the postman and, pulling Beelzebub round in a steep turn, they headed back down the lane.

  Jos stopped by the second gate where, in the lee of the wall, the wind had swept the snow away as if with a giant broom. On the other side, the holly tree stood starkly at an impossible angle from the frozen ground, its shape planed and sculpted by the prevailing weather.