‘Well, what then?’
‘It means a sort of valley.’ A blind valley. Hernhope had seemed blind—windows dark and shuttered, light filched by the forest, cloud-banks closing in.
‘But I thought you said your house was in the hills?’
He nodded. Jennifer unwrapped two fruit drops, passed him the red one. ‘Is the ‘‘Hern’’ bit short for heron?’
‘Mmm.’ He hated all her questions. For three sweet years he had let this landscape dwindle, shut out all the memories, built new ones with his wife. He slipped the sweet into his pocket, frowned against the sun.
‘Are there heron there?’
‘Oh yes.’ He had watched them as a boy, one-footed in the water, heads hunched between their shoulders, their amber eyes half closed, but missing nothing. Skilled and lethal killers. Stab, stab, stab—spearing a squirming fish and tearing the flesh from white and screaming bones, wolfing the small ones whole in a single gulp. Damned aggressive birds. Even their mating displays were like a wrestling match.
Jennifer’s fruit-drop sucked and scrunched at the silence. She folded the map into more manageable size. ‘Mepperton’s your village, isn’t it? I’ve found it now. It looks quite a way from Hernhope, though.’
‘Everything’s quite a way from Hernhope.’
‘Yes—there’s your house—just a little dot among the contour lines, sitting on its own. I can’t imagine living somewhere that remote.’
‘It was even worse in the old days. The road was only a track, then. It had thirteen fords across it and seven gates to open and shut. There’s a story about a shepherd’s wife who lived a mile or so from us when my father was a boy. The place is just a ruin now. Hester said that once that woman was installed there, she never went out again—not once in her whole life.’
‘I don’t believe it. She must have needed shopping or …’
‘No, her husband brought supplies back when he went to the mart. We were cut off ourselves when the snow was bad. I’ve been a prisoner there for weeks.’
He shivered. It was colder suddenly. The sun had gone behind a cloud, fields rearing up on end, the horizon creeping closer as suddenly the Cheviots marched over it, curve after curve closing in on them, ringing them round. Not green, these hills, but brown, bare, grazed and bruised as if someone had laid violent hands on them. Greyish smudges underneath their eyes. Deep puckers on their foreheads.
He stopped the car so suddenly, she fell against the dashboard.
‘What’s wrong, Lyn?’
They had been following the river. It had grown wider, steeper, gorging itself on tiny tributaries rushing from the hills. Lyn stumbled out, hearing the water suckle at the stones, sun breaking ripples into razzle-dazzle reflections, like a kaleidoscope. He stood trembling on the bank, legs unsteady, as if the whole force of the landscape had gathered itself together and punched him in the gut, the vast rolling sky crammed inside his head and splitting it apart. He had felt that force before, when he had learnt at school how ancient these rocks were and was dwarfed by such a time-scale, humbled by the enormity of things, the endless spaces stretching back and out. A puny lad who hadn’t made a decade yet, was only a sneeze or a pinprick in a world which counted in millennia. Was that the reason he had started drawing—to make himself more permanent? He could see those sketches, reprinted on the landscape, distorted copies, but still witness to his power. There were more as he got older, sent secretly to Matthew, or slipped between his floorboards, or hidden in the cellar. They would be faded rubbish now.
Jennifer had followed him and was plucking at his sleeve. ‘What is it?’ she repeated.
Couldn’t she see what he was seeing, the power and passion of this landscape which had moulded his whole vision, stunned and overwhelmed him? He longed to share it with her, swap her eyes for his. He was a child again, standing on the topmost rung of England, head in the sky, feet planted on a million million years of rock, watching the hills collide with the horizon, the clouds hurtle on to God. He had tried to explain before to her, cursed himself because the things he felt didn’t fit the language, sounded simply fatuous. Safer to keep quiet—lock away the feelings as he had done as a child, bury them with his art. Jennifer hadn’t seen that either—or very little of it. He’d had to renounce it before she came along. Matthew had produced her as the consolation prize.
He forced his gaze away from the grandeur of the hills, stared down at the river.
‘See that.’
‘What?’ She looked where he was pointing. A dead lamb was floating in the water, jammed against the bank, its fleece still white and woolly, but bloated, waterlogged—its tiny ears twitching with the pull and motion of the current as if it were still alive, its eyes only empty sockets.
‘The crows always peck their eyes out. They do it sometimes when the lambs are still alive but stuck in snowdrifts. The farmers have to kill them. That’s Matthew’s prime roast lamb.’ Cruel again, sadistic. Why point out carrion when he had meant to paint her splendour? Yet the two were always linked. One spring he had gone out with the ranger in the forest—a boy of nine awe-struck by the trees—stumbled upon a rotting pile of corpses, eleven roe deer perished from starvation after a fighting winter, their flesh half-gnawed by desperate crows and foxes. The ranger had been his only friend, taught him to sleuth shy and secret creatures, like shrews and slow-worms, otters and goosanders, pointed out badgers and birds’ eggs. But after that time, he refused to go out with him again. The ranger dealt in death, carried a gun, shot the deer the snow had spared. He preferred to stay inside and draw.
Except drawing was disapproved of—especially as he grew older. All those brawny foresters and farmers regarded art as child’s play or as a harmless little hobby for their womenfolk once they’d finished all the chores. Real men worked the land with sweat and tractor, turned stone and soil into flock or food or cash. Only poufs and sissies played with paints.
Lyn stared at his reflection in the rippling distorting stream. Did he look a pansy? He had always been too slight. Tallish, yes, but not broad or tough enough. Jennifer said nice things about his looks, but that might be love, or even pity. At least he had good features—full mouth, straight nose. He flung a stone in the water, shattered nose and mouth. Jennifer’s reflection approached his in the water.
‘We really ought to hurry, darling. Hester may be worse.’
He followed her back to the car. Not worse, he prayed, not angry, not reproachful. ‘Don’t worry, we’re not far now.’ He knew, because his palms were sweaty on the steering-wheel, his throat gritty and bad-tempered like the road. He drove doggedly round the twisting narrowing bends. Everything was harsher, the hills so steep, the stunted thorn trees clung to their sides almost horizontally. Bare rock grinned through scrubby yellowed grass. Even the sheep were different—Cheviot and Blackface—hardier breeds which could cope with months of snow, but whose bleating sounded thinner and more desolate. The light was fading, colour draining out of everything, as if the whole land had suffered a shock. Hills, car, earth, road, sky—all cut from the same coarse and fading fabric. It was a struggle to steer the car straight. Shale and boulders had fallen from the hillside and were littered on the track. He stopped in a sneeze of stones.
‘Are we there?’ Jennifer eager, trusting, too pink and bland for this pinched and pitiless landscape.
‘Not quite.’
‘So why have we stopped? Is the road too rough?’
‘Oh, no. It’s often worse than this.’
‘Why, then?’
‘I … think we ought to go … back.’ The hills closed around his words like ripples, pebbles sucked into a pond.
‘Back?’
He nodded.
‘But we’ve been driving all day, darling. Your mother’ll be expecting us. Mrs Bertram told her we were coming.’
The gentle, rational arguing again. If only she’d curse him, force him on.
‘Look, I, I … don’t want to disturb her. She may have gone to bed
.’
‘But it’s only just past seven. Anway, we don’t have to wake her up. We can wait a while, if you like, until she’s rested.’
‘No—I’d … rather turn round.’ Once the engine died, he could hear the silence moving in on them, seeping from the hills, stuffing all the gaps between them like the crumpled tissue paper she had folded between her dresses in the case. He didn’t want any gaps. He longed to be fused with Jennifer, be one with her, have her strength, her easy, blinkered power. He pulled her over to him, joined them with her hair.
‘Snookie …’ Silly secret name he used in bed. His mother must never hear it. If only they were in bed now, three hundred miles down south … She kissed him, more as child than man, got out of the car and coaxed him into her seat.
‘Let me drive, darling. You’re tired, that’s all. You should never have taken over in the first place.’
He didn’t argue, though the road tried every trick on her. Looped, twisted, doubled back, rumbled her with cattle grids, defied her with five-bar gates. She survived them all. Three gates more and they turned on to a cart track. The Morris groaned and juddered. He shut his eyes. At least he wouldn’t see when they turned the corner and the hills turned into forest. He felt the last wooden bridge sway and mutter as the car bumped over it.
Jennifer was slowing now. ‘Oh, Lyn,’ she cried. ‘Just look!’
He didn’t look. He feared to. That forest had killed the farmlands, as the farm had killed his father. There would never have been a forest without his father’s bankruptcy. His father was only a photo on the mantelpiece, a five by ten sepia-tinted half-plate who had married his housekeeper when he had nothing else left, then doubled his shame by dying on her. The funeral baked meats were barely cold when the Forestry Commission came to woo the widow. Hester had succumbed. She was tired of labour and they were short of land. He had been just a hump beneath a pram-rug. Those trees had lived nearly as long as he had, feeding off his father, off his fields.
He opened his eyes and glimpsed the dark stain on the landscape, grim and straight-spined conifers gobbling up the light. They were mainly sitka spruce, one of the hardiest trees in the world which had evolved in the age of the reptiles and still kept the thin scaly bark which proved they were coldblooded. They had been wrenched from the snows of northern Canada to withstand stony soils and slapping winds, where other, sissier trees would droop or die.
His wife was rhapsodising. He watched her watch the trees. The marriage service talked about one flesh, but he knew it was different forests they were seeing.
There had been sheep there once, his father’s sheep, the flock and father he had never seen. His first memories were sullen steel-jawed tractors, dragging vicious ploughs behind them, tearing up the pastureland, preparing it for trees. Five farms had gone in all. The other families which had sold out to the Forestry had all four moved away, their houses ruined now, their lands merged with the Wintertons’ to make a cage for conifers. Only he and Hester had remained inside the cage.
They turned the corner and Hernhope leapt towards him, a grim grey house dwarfed by the larger sky. Fold upon fold of hill curved and crisscrossed behind it, shreds of cloud caught on its roof like rags. He held his breath as Jennifer jammed the brakes on, dared not speak or move. He had to worship a moment, give thanks that the place still stood, as proud, as powerful as he had remembered it—grey stone, grey slate, merging into the pearlier grey beyond, until it lost itself in purple. The moment swelled into a lifetime—baby in the blanket, boy in the hayloft, man hiding from his mother. However tall he grew, the house was always taller. Now he lived in a doll’s house down in Cobham, playing at farming on a cabbage patch.
Jennifer switched the engine off and silence plunged between them. He hardly dared to look at her. Why had she stopped her chattering and exclaiming? Did she fear the house? See it as scowling, peevish, hostile—legs buckled, face cracked—no creepers round its neck to hide the damp-stains, no easy pretty garden to soften the stone; no smile, no open arms? He squinted through his eyelids and saw her hands twisted together on the steering wheel. The stillness was so utter, he could hear the trees holding their breath around him, the clouds rolling into void. He let his gaze inch up towards her face. Her eyes were shining, her lips parted as if he had just made love to her.
‘Oh, Lyn,’ she breathed. ‘It’s wonderful! So lonely, it’s like the last house in the world.’
Chapter Three
Jennifer entered first. The door was stiff, heavy, but unlocked. She jumped as something scurried away from her. Only two or three brown leaves from another season, bellying in the draught. Lyn heard a curlew rip the silence as he shut out cloud and conifer.
The dark passage hemmed them in as they tiptoed towards the kitchen. Strange to feel claustrophobic when there was no other house for miles and the horizon touched the floor of heaven. Three years had made no difference to the place. The same cold and echoing flagstones softened with Hester’s rag-mats; the same low, uneven ceilings, beams blackened with age and wood-smoke. Walls built two feet thick to withstand Scot and storm; windows small and suspicious with drawn-down brows to conserve every ounce of heat.
It wasn’t as cold as he’d remembered it. Someone had lit the range. That bad-tempered black-iron monster had watched him as a boy—a braggart growing fiercer as it gobbled peat and logs. He turned his back on it. Jennifer cooked on an all-electric Creda Circulaire, a wedding gift from Matthew. The room was barely breathing. The clock had stopped at half-past one (a.m.? p.m.?) There was no fruit, flower, light, air. A bunch of shrivelled onions hung above the sink. The sink tap dripped and plopped. Had it always been stained like that? Cracked so badly? Or did he only notice because his wife was there? She was marvelling at the table, swamping it with modern, mocking things—bright enamel cake-tins, hollow Easter eggs in glittering coloured foil. They had filled the car with presents—mostly peace-offerings, recompense for the time he had been away. The shopping looked too garish—tins with gaudy labels, packets screaming promises, food which grew in the glare and cackle of supermarkets rather than the silence of the soil. He removed her jacket from his father’s chair—a chair for corpses, ghosts.
Jennifer seemed tired now. The hills peering in at the windows had snatched the colour from her face. ‘Look,’ she said, ‘there’s a note from Mrs Bertram.’
His fingers trembled as he picked it up. Pain? Reproaches? Crisis? ‘Hester seems a little better now. I have given her milk and soup and left her dozing.’
The relief was so great, he shouted. ‘Look, I’ll go up and see her. You stay here and make some tea.’
‘Hush,’ she warned. ‘She’s probably still asleep.’
She wasn’t. He was glad she wasn’t sleeping. He might have run away if he’d found her with her eyes closed. He wanted to get it over, make her understand why he hadn’t come before, how it hadn’t been neglect, but … Reassure her that Jennifer wouldn’t stay long, wouldn’t interfere. But his mouth was a broken hinge and he couldn’t get the words out. All he could do was stare. The room was deep in shadow, the curtains semi-closed, but even so, he could see how she had aged. It was as if every second of every day he had been away had worn her down like water dripping on a stone. Her face was less flesh than bone now, her slack veiny hands smudged with age spots, her hair so thin, he could see her scalp staring through the grey straggly wisps. He touched her fingers a moment, as if that way he could speak to her. They were chilly. The hot and bossy blood which had once surged around her body had turned into a trickle of icy water.
She lay in the high, hard bed, shrunken and exhausted, but smiling slightly as if any other greeting was too much effort. He could hardly bear to look at her. Even her usual harshness was better than this impotence, her frown less cruel than that dumb and ashen smile. He wanted to kick and savage the years which had done such damage. Once she had kept the whole world in her pocket like a thimble or a coin. He closed his eyes, saw her towering over his boyhood, keepi
ng the terrors out, slapping his shirts with soap and vehemence as if they had no right to be dirty, turning milk into butter, wood into fire. Everything obeyed her then—hills, house, weather, soil—yet now she was too frail to move a finger.
‘Hester,’ he mouthed. He never called her mother. He supposed once he must have done, but he couldn’t remember when. The name had never fitted. He wanted to make it fit, force it on her while she was still alive to hear it, but he couldn’t get it out—couldn’t speak at all.
‘Matthew sends his love,’ he muttered, at last. Even a mumble sounded blasphemously loud in the silence of the sickroom. He knew she wouldn’t believe him, anyway. Matthew sent money, provisions, presents—never love. ‘We were with him yesterday,’ he added lamely. He longed to seize her, hug her, not sit there muttering bread-and-butter inanities.
She had hardly moved at all. He realised she was so old and tired, every tiny gesture cost. Her skin was stretched too taut across her face, as if some grudging tailor-God had cut her out of a remnant or an off-cut, and then sewn her up so tightly that all the fabric had puckered into creases.
He could feel tears pricking against his eyelids. Impossible to snivel. He fumbled in his pocket for a handkerchief, felt the still uneaten fruit-drop sticky at the bottom. He had always hoarded sweets. Cash had been tight in his boyhood. Hester had trounced bankruptcy by selling off the farm, but the proceeds had to last. He had copied her economies. A roll of Polos or a twist of sherbet might be saved up for a month or more. She had almost spun herself out, refusing to die or retire because there was always too much to be done. She had made everything herself—sheets, quilts, cheeses, soaps, soups, herbal remedies, even his shirts and trousers. He had loathed it at the time—caged and chafed in prickly serge and fly buttons when other boys had Terylene and zips; or swallowing murky potions with brown bits at the bottom instead of pretty coloured pills. He had been born to death and bankruptcy, but Hester had turned them sides to middle like her thinning sheets and made life and service out of them. She had never added trimmings. Never fun or flowers or laughter. They were Jennifer’s. Even now, Hester was smiling only with her mouth, a smile he couldn’t remember and didn’t like. His mother’s frown had crumbled the stars like biscuits, made the world hang loose upon its hinge. Smiles were as rare as Polos. Or had he remembered her wrongly? She was so feeble now, he could have blown her out like a candle.
Born of Woman Page 3
