Today, it was more a mess, more crowded. As Molly opened the door, ten pairs of eyes looked up from the loaded table, ten knives and forks paused in mid-eating, and silence rushed in like a draught from the door. Jennifer wasn’t used to facing such a tableful, not only brawny Mick and his fierce five-foot-nothing mother, but all five Bertram children and three total strangers—two young men and one older, sitting in their socks, muddy boots left outside the door. Everyone looked shabby, dressed in working gear—stained and baggy sweaters, skirts and grubby jeans. Jennifer wished she hadn’t changed. Her skirt was too neat, her blouse too pale and prissy. These were all working people, without time to spare for fripperies like clothes. Lambing time was the busiest month of the year, a time when every pair of hands was needed on the farm. Molly was up at five each morning and still working late at night. She had more mouths to feed than usual, more clothes to dry, orphan lambs to warm and bottle-feed, her day stretched out in all directions.
Even now she was doing several things at once—serving up an extra lunch, keeping an eye on the stock-pot still simmering on the hob, hushing children, quietening dogs, making introductions.
‘Mick you know, of course, and Nan, his mother. This is Chris, my eldest. She was up in Glasgow when you came before. That’s Josh, our shepherd, Paddy and Colin next to him, and …’
Jennifer tried to remember all the names. The children she had sorted out already. The three girls came first—Ruth and Helen after Chris—Tim and Rory last. Paddy and Colin were students from the local agricultural college who were staying just a month or so, using their Easter holidays to help out with the lambing. Paddy was the shy gingery lad blushing as much as she was. Colin, fair and skinny, looked strange among the big-boned, brown-eyed Bertrams. Josh was permanent and older, so brown and gnarled, he looked as if he had been cut out of the hills on which he worked. He just mumbled something indecipherable and went on with his lunch. The others smiled and nodded.
‘Sit next to Mick, Jenny. You don’t mind Jenny, do you? Jennifer’s such a mouthful.’
‘No, of course not.’ Nobody called her Jenny. It felt strange, like wearing someone else’s shoes. Molly had piled her plate with chicken casserole, potatoes, parsnips, peas.
‘We’re half-way through ours, I’m afraid, but take your time.’
‘Where’s Lyn?’ barked Mick’s mother, laying down her fork. Her stiff grey curls were caged in a hair-net. Her bosom was a shelf on which she stored not just antique brooches whose silver claws held jagged lumps of stone or staring bright glass eyes, but also stray safety-pins and needles, jabbing dangerous things which warned you off.
‘He’s … er … not too well, Mrs Bertram.’
‘None of that ‘‘Mrs’’ for me, dear. No one calls me Mrs. I’m Nana to my grandchildren and Nan to everyone else. I told you that before. What’s wrong with him?’
‘I’m … not quite sure. He’s sleeping badly and he’s lost his appetite and …’
‘Thinks too much, that’s his trouble—always was. How a sensible lass like yourself ever managed to …’
‘Where d’ you live?’ asked Chris. All the Bertram children interrupted, barged in and out of any conversation as they pleased. Matthew would have muzzled them.
‘Cobham,’ Jennifer said, glad of the interruption. Nan and Lyn had little patience with each other.
‘Where’s that? Town or country?’
‘Sort of fake country. It likes to call itself a village, but it’s really commuter land with cows. There are fields and farms and things, but with a great bypass running through them. We live in a tiny terraced house which the estate agents describe as a workman’s cottage, but Lyn goes up to London every day and works in a cramped and noisy office in the city.’
‘I can’t imagine that,’ said Molly. ‘You could never cage Lyn up.’
‘He works for Matthew, actually. In fact, the house is Matthew’s, too. He bought it very cheap and doesn’t intend to sell until the market improves. He let us live there in return for doing it up for him—you know, painting and plastering and …’
‘Well, you’ll hardly need a workman’s cottage now,’ Mick cut in. ‘When you’ve got a place like Hernhope. I presume it goes to Lyn as Hester’s only son? Thomas left her everything, you know. Did you ever find the Will?’
‘No.’ Jennifer put her fork down. The whole subject of whether they stayed or whether they left was fraught with problems. All the Bertrams naturally assumed that they would stay, if for no other reason than the fact that Wintertons had lived up here for centuries and people hated change. Yet Lyn had been ailing and uneasy since the funeral. She kept suggesting they return to Cobham, where at least they would be removed from all those shadowy lives and memories which clogged the house like cobwebs, three hundred miles away from the grave he refused to visit and yet kept digging up in nightmares. But every time she tried to fix a date for their return, he just went silent, and if she changed her tack and made tentative plans for renovating Hernhope or centring their life there, then he snapped at her as a dreamer and a fool.
‘Perhaps Hester didn’t make a Will,’ said Chris.
‘She did. Lyn’s sure of that.’ Jennifer forked in a mouthful of chicken. He had told her about the Will before their marriage, yet now he disliked her even mentioning it. Strange how little he seemed to care about his property, whereas Matthew would have engaged a team of bloodhounds if a legacy were at stake.
‘Have you got a cow?’ asked Rory, bored with Wills. ‘One of those ones in Cobham, on the bypass?’
Everybody laughed.
‘No, I’m afraid we haven’t,’ said Jennifer. ‘I don’t know where we’d keep it. We’ve only got a tiny garden and that’s crammed full of bulbs. We do have an allotment, though, which is the nearest we get to farming, I suppose. We grow all our own vegetables and soft fruit in the summer and …’
‘You don’t mean to tell me Lyn Winterton turns his hand to gardening?’ Nan again, voice jabbing like the pins.
‘He’s very good at it.’ Jennifer tried to defend her husband. ‘Things grow for him when they sulk or wilt for me.’ She saw Lyn’s lean strong hands, grubby from the soil, bedding out begonias, then stopping a moment to grope her thigh or touch her nipples through her tee-shirt. She sometimes feared that was all they had in common—hoeing onion beds, debudding blackcurrants, groping. There was so much else she couldn’t share with him. Lyn had visions, nightmares, spiritual crises, revelations, crippling stomach pains, when she had only minor domestic problems like meringues which flopped or frayed stair carpet. She had married Lyn because he was all the things she wasn’t—clever, angry, artistic, anguished, gaunt. Even at her Church of England day school she had always admired the geniuses and rebels, those Higher Souls who dazzled or defied when she could only plod. She had carried their books for them, offered to clean their bikes or do their shopping. That way, some of their glory and their angst had rubbed against her own soul. It was much the same with Lyn. Except sometimes she felt exhausted by trying to cope with him or even understand him. Easier, really, to have married a stolid and uncomplicated Mick, a man who needed only simple things like clean socks and hot meals, and confined his talk to forage costs or stock improvement. Even now, Mick was deep in discussion with his shepherd about the morning’s work, Colin and Paddy chipping in to mention tricky births or feeding problems. She ought to show some interest. There were other things in life besides missing Wills and moody husbands. She waited for Josh to finish, his slow halting voice stumbling on the longer words as if they were boulders in a field.
‘Er … how many lambs are born each year?’ she asked. She knew almost nothing about sheep. They all looked much the same to her. The men had turned to stare at her. She still felt shy of them. Her own father had been a minor civil servant who commuted to the City from their gentrified Sussex village and always wore dark suits. He had never mixed with farming people, never grown so much as a Brussels sprout. Their garden had been mainly
crazy-paving with little clumps of lobelia and alyssum alternated with scarlet salvias.
‘Well, close on fifteen million are born in Britain as a whole,’ said Mick, shovelling in the last of his potatoes. ‘On this farm, it’s more like seven or eight hundred. You don’t get so many twins up here as in the valley, and almost no triplets. It’s a tougher life in the hills and the ewes have their work cut out to feed one lamb, let alone three. One or two of them can’t feed at all. Or won’t.
Josh had a problem-mum this morning. Refused to have anything to do with her lamb at all.’
‘What d’you do then?’
‘You can pen them up together and try to bond them. But sheep can be stubborn creatures, and if they still refuse, then it’s best to set the lamb on to another ewe—one that’s lost its own lamb or has plenty of milk for two.’ Mick wiped his mouth on his hand and pushed his empty plate away.
Jennifer still had half a chicken left. ‘But don’t they know it’s not their own?’
‘There are ways of fooling them. It’s the smell that counts, you see. The ewe knows her lamb by its smell, so if she’s just given birth, you can rub the mucous from her new-born lamb all over the motherless one. Or tie the two lambs in a sack together before presenting them both to the mother. That seems to do the trick. If her own lamb’s dead, it’s best to skin the little blighter and drape its fleece on the new one. I’ve even known a shepherd rub ewe and lamb with best Scotch whisky until they fairly reek of it, then pen them up together. Frankly, I wouldn’t waste it! Once the lamb has suckled the ewe and then excreted her milk, it seems to smell OK to her and she’ll accept it as her own. Mind you, there’s always the …’
‘Have you got any children, Jenny?’ Ruth asked, interrupting her father and rocking on her chair.
Jennifer torpedoed the tidy pile of peas she had heaped in the centre of her plate. ‘Er … no,’ she said. ‘Not yet,’ she added, and then regretted it as she saw Chris glancing at her stomach. She had made it sound as if she were expecting. Not much hope, with Lyn the way he was. Ever since their wedding she had been gently nudging him towards the idea of a family, but he went on buying Durex Extra-Safe in dozen packets. Even now he’d dispensed with them, he still contrived to have his sex without the risk of babies. The first time, it had intrigued her—that violent hurting back way, where pain and force were all mixed up with some new forbidden excitement, but now she was beginning to dislike it. He was doing it too often—seemed to have forgotten there was any other way of making love. Was it love at all, or some pent-up lust or anger released by Hester’s death? How could he love her when she wanted a child so much and he wouldn’t even consider one? She was twenty-four already—young, maybe—but she sometimes felt much older. Her father had died when she was just thirteen, and she had gone straight from child to black. She was still Chief Mourner and Mother’s Supporter when Lyn was introduced to her, and she had moved from her mother’s tissue-papered home to Matthew’s tutelage. There had never been a time between for discos, giggles, rave-ups, sharing flats or trying jobs, experimenting with life and liberty. Children would be life. She had never seen them as constraint and inconvenience, as some other women did, but as a challenge and fulfilment. She sometimes feared it was Matthew who kept them barren. It wasn’t that she didn’t like Lyn’s brother—admire and respect him even—but he somehow took them over, prevented them from flowering except as forced and grafted budlets in his nursery. She felt desperate on occasion, especially in the spring, when every other creature seemed to be broody and breeding, only she sterile and frustrated.
‘You don’t mind if we start on the pudding, do you?’ Molly was already stacking plates. ‘The men can’t stop too long, you see. This weather’s so grand, they like to take advantage of it. It could be snow tomorrow.’
‘Surely not?’ Jennifer took a sip of cider. It was stifling inside, sun blazing through the windows, heat blasting from the range.
‘Oh, yeah,’ said Mick. ‘This sun’s unusual. Last year we were lambing in six feet of snow and howling blizzards. We lost a third of all our lambs. That’s rare, of course, but you have to be prepared for almost anything.’
Jennifer laid her fork down. How precarious life was up here. Her father’s job had been utterly predictable. The steady increment each year, the four-square pension plan, the plodding progress towards a slightly larger office or marginally longer leave. Snow and blizzard might do their worst, but all they affected was the 8.02 to Charing Cross, or the journey home from the annual office party. Up here, they could demolish a farm, ruin a family, bankrupt a man like Thomas Winterton. Jennifer stacked her plate with the rest. She hadn’t finished yet, but Nan was already serving out the gooseberry pie, crust stained with burnt-on juices and blackened round the edge.
Ruth grabbed her helping and submerged it under half a pound of sugar. No one told her to stop, or pass the sugar to others first, or not start eating until everyone else was served. It was so different from Matthew’s house. Nan believed in discipline, but she was more or less ignored. The children still grabbed and jostled and shouted. They were such happy, easy kids, not stiff and submerged in rules as Matthew’s were.
If she and Lyn could somehow stay up here, then Matthew’s power would fade. There were other kinds of power—Molly’s, for example. Molly rarely raised her voice, yet she ruled the house and kept the farm together. She was its centre, heart and pivot. Although she was always busy, she still managed to enjoy her work, never thought in terms of women’s rights or oppression, nor counted her hours or begrudged her lack of pay.
Jennifer envied her. Back in Cobham, many of the women were bored and discontented, their husbands out of the house from eight till eight, their sparse and well-spaced children absent at boarding schools. Apart from one or two small farms, and their own shabby little backstreet which Matthew hoped would soon be redeveloped, Cobham was an expensive, exclusive suburb where coffee mornings or bridge parties were the norm. Jennifer had never felt she quite belonged there. She wasn’t plush enough. Matthew’s street was shunned by most of the ‘village’ where bay trees and burglar alarms stood guard outside double garages and neo-Tudor beams. Their do-it-yourself interior and junk-shop furnishings had never been accepted. She and Lyn would fit in better here, where Molly’s rooms bore battle-scars from claws and paws and children.
The dogs were rampant again, barking and circling as the men got up from the table and prepared to return to the fields. Molly was filling Thermoses, fetching anoraks. She finally closed the door on them and poured coffee for the rest.
‘I’m sorry it’s a bit stewed,’ she said ‘I can’t turn that damn range low enough. That’s why I burnt the pie.’
Jennifer turned to glance at the highly-polished range with its two separate ovens and little fiddly knobs and handles, all meticulously black-leaded. ‘I’d love a stove like that at home—all hot and bright and crackling, instead of my stiff white dead electric one which looks more like a fridge.’
‘You’re just a romantic, love. That thing’s more bother than it’s worth. I’d swap with you tomorrow! There’s no mains electricity at all up here, and we didn’t even get our generator until 1959. It was a real red-letter day when they installed it, I can tell you. Though I must admit I was scared stiff of the stuff at first—wouldn’t even turn a switch on, in case it blew the place up. I’d stand trembling over the toaster, ready to run a mile!’
1959—Jennifer had been only one year old then—an all-electric baby. Molly already had two babies of her own, lighting them to bed with oil-lamps, wringing out their nappies on an ancient wooden mangle, pressing cot-sheets and nightdresses with flat irons heated on the range. And Hester in the next house up, sitting in the gloom with Lyn …
‘I suppose you all … knew Hester?’
‘As far as you could ever know her,’ Nan rejoined, scooping pastry fragments from the table. ‘She kept herself to herself, you see. When Thomas was alive, I was in and out of that house like on
e of the family, but once she took over, I might as well have been a total stranger. All wrong, it was. You Wintertons have always been our nearest neighbours. The two farms shared boundaries once. Thomas and my husband often worked together, helped each other out. That’s the way up here. Everyone depends on everybody else. You couldn’t survive otherwise.’
Molly pulled her chair back, stretched her legs. ‘Nan used to help Susannah—you know, Matthew’s poor young mother.’
‘Well, someone had to, didn’t they? She was a fancy little minx, and frail with it. Never run a farm in her life. I was only six or seven years older, but I had farming in my blood. Her father was a financier—something grand like that. She needed someone practical around. When she died I had a bairn myself, only two months older. I fed them both, you know, until the housekeeper arrived.’
Jennifer took a sip of coffee. ‘You mean … Hester?’ Strange to hear Lyn’s all-powerful mother referred to as a housekeeper. Stranger still to think that Nan had suckled Matthew. Hester had stayed nearly fifty years. Changed housekeeper to wife. Swapped Matthew for her own son.
Molly was already on her feet again, clearing the table. ‘It can’t have been easy for Hester, taking the place of a young and pretty teenager everyone adored. Forgive me, Jenny, but your mother-in-law was rather … plain herself and a bit severe. And people always saw her as an alien.’
‘But I thought Lyn said she was born up here.’
‘Well, Fernfield. That’s still Northumberland, but it’s a good way south, you know. ‘‘Local’’ up here means not much more than a ten-mile radius. Anything more is ‘‘foreign’’, especially in the thirties when transport was less good. Anyway, Hester had been working down in London, so they regarded her as a ‘‘townie’’. And she never spoke about herself or had visits from her family or …’
‘Look, let me help with those.’ Jennifer picked up a sodden tea-towel and joined Nan at the sink where she was pummelling plates and dishes. ‘What was Matthew like as a baby, Nan?’
Born of Woman Page 7
