‘Doesn’t look so little to me,’ says Josie, though it might be Betty.
‘Pleased to meet you.’ I offer my hand and they shake it in turn with pious formality. I know they’re teasing me.
‘You’re the musical one. The singer,’ says Josie, though again it might be Betty.
‘I can hold a tune but I’m afraid that I’m no singer. And you, ladies? Are you also singers?’
‘We can hold a tune,’ says Sal archly, the youngest of the three and, going by her accent, American. I’ve not met an American woman before and she’s imbued with instant glamour. Her dark eyebrows war with the yellow of her hair.
Edie whispers some remark and the three women are awash with laughter once again. The General clutches his whisky glass so tightly that I wonder it doesn’t shatter. Edie, slight, dark, reserved, is nothing like these girls but she seems perfectly at ease and unembarrassed. Although she notices the General’s displeasure, it does not concern her and I’m awed. If it’s possible, I adore her even more.
‘We’ve performed around the world together,’ Edie says, quietly.
‘Though I’m afraid we’re not such a class act as Edie here,’ adds Sal, giving Edie’s arm a little squeeze. She surveys the room with frank curiosity. ‘I’ve never been to a house like this before. It’s awful big. And awful cold.’ She rubs her thin arms. ‘Can’t you heat it right?’
As the General pales at her American audacity, Jack throws back his head and roars with laughter. ‘No, my dear girl, we can’t. We’re terribly poor.’
‘No you’re not,’ says Sal, with a hint of steel. ‘You ain’t got enough ready money is all. Don’t mistake that for being poor.’
I smile and decide that I like Sal very much. Edie catches my eye and I wink. Tonight isn’t going to be as frightful as I’d feared. It might even be fun.
Dinner is a hoot. The girls can send up anyone or anything. They’re perfect mimics. Sal, skinny and bright as a polished sixpence, can do a brilliant Churchill. She leans forward and frowns, her shrill, girlish voice becoming the familiar growl, and she wobbles her jowls. I glance at the General, who’s quite forgotten to disapprove. George is quiet but he looks happy for the first time I can remember.
The food is pleasant – the best that can be said of anything that has appeared from the kitchen in the last several months – and the wine excellent. That’s one thing about the General: he’s never mean with his cellar. With a nod and a murmur, Chivers reappears again and again with bottle after bottle.
When the pudding has been cleared away, Edie stands. ‘Come along, ladies, let’s leave the gentlemen to their brandy.’
Sal pouts. ‘I’m very partial to a brandy.’
‘Come,’ says Edie, more sharply, and they follow her to the drawing room with only a warble of reluctance.
After they leave, the dining room is abruptly silent. All the warmth and humour have been extinguished. We sit and clasp our glasses, feeling dull and uneasy. I wonder how long the General will force us to remain here. Long enough to punish us for the unexpected guests, I presume.
‘So you’re to marry the little Jewess,’ he remarks to Jack.
Jack flinches. I stare at him and then look away.
I didn’t know Edie was Jewish. I wonder how on earth the General can tell. I conjure her face in every detail, scrutinising her for hidden exoticism. I can’t find any. I’m stung that she hasn’t told me herself. I thought we were pals, she and I. Then perhaps she presumed I knew and maybe it’s the sort of thing that I ought to have known all along. I feel terribly stupid. Naively, I realise now, I’d imagined all Jews to be like the bearded fellows in tall black hats I’ve glimpsed occasionally on trips to London. I don’t think I know any other Jews apart from Edie. Then I wonder whether I actually know heaps of them and have simply been unaware.
I glance at the General who’s redder around the chops than usual. He’s clearly furious. For him a Jew is worse than a common singer or even a Catholic. No wonder Jack hasn’t uttered a word to him about the engagement. For a moment alarm at our father’s rage staunches my jealousy of my brother.
The General laughs. ‘Come, come. I’ve spared you the bother of telling me. See? I’m not quite the fool you all think.’
Jack swallows. A vein ticks at his throat. ‘I love Edie and she’s agreed to marry me.’
‘Then you’re the fool. With your crackpot scheme you need a good country girl. Someone bosomy and sensible who knows about running a farm. A nice young girl. Not some little-titted Jewey singer. She looks good, I grant you, but she must be getting on a bit.’
Jack rises to his feet and I think he’s going to strike our father but George grabs his wrist and holds him back. ‘Don’t,’ he murmurs. The General is chuckling. His anger is making him spiteful.
‘Don’t you dare speak about my wife in that way,’ says Jack, white as a ghost.
‘When she’s your wife, I shan’t,’ says the General serenely. ‘But if you do want to save the old place, I urge you to reconsider. She doesn’t love Hartgrove Hall; she loves you. And that isn’t good enough. A house like this won’t tolerate another mistress. She wants all of you. All your money. And your soul. I wouldn’t give her mine, and look what happened.’ The General points a finger at a florid damp stain blooming in the middle of the ceiling rose.
I don’t recall ever having heard the General talk so much. I wonder to whom or to what he gave his soul. The army, I suppose. He drains his brandy, pushes it away and, leaning back in his chair, studies each of us before turning back to Jack.
‘And of course it doesn’t help that George and Little Fox are quite besotted with the girl too. Can’t think why. Not my type at all.’
Jack stares at George and then at me, aghast, and I hate my father. My hate is hot and sharp. He has taken something private that is both painful and a solace – in the dark I retreat to thoughts of Edie – but in making it public, he has made it ugly. George and I both avoid Jack’s eye but we catch one another’s. Guiltily, we look away. The General rises to his feet, sporting a tiny smug smile beneath the uptick of his moustache.
‘Well, gentlemen, shall we go through to the ladies? I believe we’ve kept them waiting long enough.’
We follow. I am light-headed with anger and humiliation.
—
Thank God the girls are there. They can tell that something has happened. Edie raises an eyebrow at Jack who shakes his head and goes straight to the whisky decanter, pouring himself a large measure, sufficient to get properly sloshed. Josie and Betty try to draw George into conversation but he hunches in a chair beside the fire, barely seeming to hear them. The lightness and pleasure of earlier in the evening has popped as swiftly as the bubbles in a glass of champagne.
‘Some music!’ says Sal, clapping her hands. She’s right beside me and I hadn’t noticed her. I’m as bad as George.
‘The piano’s bust,’ I say. ‘And the gramophone’s simply awful.’
Sal shrugs. ‘We’ll have to sing then.’
The three blonde girls conspire in a rustle of whispers and then launch into a medley of caramel wartime hits. We applaud politely, the General alone with any volume or enthusiasm – his earlier revelation has clearly put him in a splendid humour. I can’t bear these trinket songs – I won’t call them music – but I smile enough not to be rude. Jack is the only one who professes to enjoy them, but tonight even he is remote and distracted.
Edie frowns. ‘I’m afraid you’ll have to try something else,’ she calls at the end. ‘Fox just loathes those fancy, feel-good numbers.’
Sal turns to me, throwing up her arms in mock offence. ‘Not smart enough for you, are we? Only Beethoven good enough for you?’
‘Not at all. Where are you from?’
‘Texas.’
‘Then sing me a song from there. Something your mama sang to you when yo
u were young.’
Laughing, she rebukes me. ‘You’ve got it all wrong, mister. I ain’t no farm girl and my mama didn’t sing to me.’
She studies me and for the first time I grasp that behind her bluster and pretend indignation she’s curious about me.
Jack and Edie feign tiredness and disappear to bed, keeping up a charade of decency by going fifteen minutes apart. The others vanish soon after until George and I are left alone. It’s some time before we can look at one another. At last I turn to him.
‘So you too?’ I say.
He nods, miserable.
I pour him another drink. We never speak of it again.
I presume that Jack has told Edie, but she must be a fine actress because, even when searching for it, I detect no change in her manner towards either George or me. There is no hint of pity nor condescension, no coquettish smiles. She’s her usual self – lively, friendly and slightly reserved. I can’t shake the sense that none of us really knows her, not even Jack. She professes to be thrilled that we’re going to save the house – that’s how we speak of it, never acknowledging that we’ve merely been granted a year’s reprieve, not a stay of execution. She makes no comment on the fact that we all know she’s Jewish and not quite one of us. Since she doesn’t acknowledge it, outwardly it makes no difference to things at all. Yet I wonder about her even more than before, hoping for snippets about her family or herself that she declines to give. She plays her part, knocking up aprons and work clothes on an old sewing machine that she lugs down on the train from London and even persuading Sal to stay for another fortnight to help.
I attempt a show of enthusiasm but really I want to steal away and work on my composition. The first movement is sketched and I’ve a super idea for the second. I long for a cello to try it out but instead I’m walking with the others across waterlogged fields, surveying the estate. Sal strides up the hill in home-made trousers that are far too big and held up with a pair of braces but on Sal they look good, as if she’s posing for a shot in a magazine. She pauses below the ridge and scrutinises George’s notes.
‘This soil is thin. Exhausted like the rest of you. You’d be crazy to try anything but grazing here.’ She turns to George. ‘But you gonna be crazy, aren’t you?’
He grins. Everyone likes Sal.
I study her, thin as a rod of hazel; the garish bottle-blonde of her hair has faded and a ripe catkin brown is showing through. ‘You lied,’ I say.
‘Excuse me?’ she asks, hands planted on her hips.
‘You said you weren’t a farm girl. You lied.’
She throws back her head and roars with laughter. ‘You got me there. Don’t like to be put in a box is all. I like to be able to stretch out.’
She stretches her arms high above her head as if to prove her point, revealing a sliver of smooth, freckled belly.
We walk for the rest of the afternoon but I can’t shake the feeling that it’s a game; we’re children playing make-believe. George has his notebook and writes copiously in it but I worry that he knows little more about how to run an estate than Jack or I do. Until the war, our boyhood was spent outside, roaming the hills and woods or fishing in the rivers. We’d helped at harvest time when every man, woman and boy was called out into the fields to gather in the wheat or tidy hay into bales before it could be spoiled by the frost, but it was a carnival where, as the General’s offspring, we were indulged, our presence tolerated rather than required.
The General never encouraged us to understand the day-to-day running of the farms. Since he took no interest himself, it never occurred to him that his sons ought to be involved. The tenant farms operated as a series of fiefdoms, each farmer the king of his own onions, sheep or cattle. As far as we were concerned this was a world that would never end. The house and the farms might be run-down but we’d limped along for years and years, untroubled by poorly hung gates and rotting fences. Life would continue as it always had and we had no reason to take more than an idle, pleasurable interest. I suppose I ought to wish now that we’d dangled less for trout and collected fewer birds’ nests but helped more with lambing and crop rotations.
For the first few days we discuss our future plans with Canning – George agrees to suspend his dislike. He blames Canning for mismanaging the estate – I’m not so sure. I think the man did the best he could, bustling between the dictates coming from the Ministry of Agriculture and the General, who was away in London for months on end or hunkered down in his bungalow for the odd weekend, shooting rabbits and declining to sign either paperwork or cheques. I’m surprised he lasted as long as he did.
However, after a week of watching Canning suck his teeth and shake his head as he declares, ‘No, no, I shouldn’t do that, it won’t work at all,’ I agree with George that ignorance is probably better than Canning. We have neither cash, experience, knowledge nor manpower. All we have is optimism and Canning is running through that at such a lick that we send him off to his retirement in Bournemouth a week early with a bottle of Scotch for thanks.
We agree to leave the tenant farmers alone. We need the rental income and, frankly, we can barely fathom how to cope with the land we do have. There are seven hundred ewes and lambs scattered across the higher ground, while the rest is in a rotation of wheat, barley and grass. The crops are ripening in the fine weather and we are in the lull before harvest, where, if I put my ear to the ground, I can almost hear the grass pushing up through the soil. Beside us an adder bakes in the sun, a smooth hot muscle.
George is determined to use this month of quiet to learn everything he can. He’s bemused by the acres of stunted yellow wheat at the bottom of the hill.
‘It’s unhappy. Wheat doesn’t like the wet and it’s marshland there by the river. I want to get rid of it all. We should have cows. The vale is supposed to have cows.’
‘Where did you hear that?’ I ask. ‘Why are we “supposed” to have cows?’
He hesitates and Jack senses weakness. ‘Yes, George, why the sudden preoccupation with cows?’
George studies his feet. ‘It’s in Hardy,’ he mutters.
‘I beg your pardon?’
‘Thomas Hardy. Tess of the D’Urbervilles to be precise. Hartgrove Hall is slap bang in the middle of the “Valley of the Little Dairies” in Tess. So we shouldn’t be breaking our hearts and sowing the hillside with wheat that can’t grow properly, when what we ought to be doing is buying three hundred head of dairy cows.’
‘George, just to be clear, our reference guide isn’t The Farmer’s Almanac but Tess of the D’Urbervilles?’
George plunges his hands deep into his pockets and won’t say another word.
‘Who’s going to milk the three hundred cows?’
George shakes his head, refusing to be drawn, but I can tell from the line of his mouth that he’s not finished with the notion.
Apart from us, the only one who knows anything about farming is Sal, but I’m not convinced that her knowledge of Texas cattle ranching is going to be terribly helpful for farming three hundred acres of Dorset clay and chalk.
Warding off despondency, we sit on the top of the ridge, eating stale biscuits and trying to feel restored by the glorious sunshine and the spread of green fields below. A woodpecker hammers for his lunch in a percussive volley of semi-quavers. I stand and find to my disgust that pellets of sheep turd are stuck to my trousers.
‘I’m going back to the house,’ I call.
‘We haven’t finished,’ says George.
‘Haven’t finished what?’ I ask. ‘We’ve been walking aimlessly. I’m tired of listening to you talk about crop rotations and cows. Sal’s right, the soil on this part of the hillside is dreadful. It’s only good for sheep. We need more but we haven’t any money and no one’s daft enough to lend it to us.’
I’m tired and angry and I don’t like the fact that Jack hardly speaks to me. He’s cordial and as p
leasant as a stranger. We’ve never been polite to one another before. He’s not asked me for a favour nor taken advantage of my good nature in more than a week and I can’t stand it. I want him and Edie far away. I know I’m being unfair but I can’t help it. I want to write. The frustration is making me ill-tempered and miserable.
George and I harvest a small field of potatoes. It’s a sweaty and filthy task and after eight hours the palms of our hands are blistered, but even with the assistance of two chaps from the village – the only labourers we can afford – our progress is paltry. It’s too hot, and the dust and muck dry our throats. My fingertips bleed, the blood running into the mud.
And yet there is a satisfaction to the work. The rhythms come back to me, as familiar as a tune, forgotten for a while and then heard again suddenly, unexpectedly, out of the mouth of a different singer. We spent our childhoods in these fields, these woods. I’m ten again, returned to glorious August days, warm and blue. We rise at dawn and fall into bed as the moon rises above Hartgrove Hill. I sing work tunes as we bend and sift. We ignore the gong and we do not dress for dinner.
George never seems to tire. He learns fast. As I watch, he seems to ripen and grow as quickly as a cricket willow, only thicker and more solid. I like to watch him work. He moves through the fields, stooping to fasten bales of hay, and hoisting them up on his shoulders with the smoothness of a dancer, while I sweat and Jack pants in the shade. George is not an elegant man. He’s tall and broad, and he fidgets as though his skin is a size too big, but outside under the sky and the broad back of the hill, he’s at ease. His reserve fits out here; the starlings and the wood pigeons and the wind through the leaves make enough noise. Lost and uneasy amidst drawing-room small talk, George is the quiet and steady centre here amongst the hedgerows and the winding streams.
In the evenings we all gather with bottles of wine filched from the cellar and laze in the garden, watching the bats drift out of the eaves, listening to George. He knows how he wants the estate to be.
The Song of Hartgrove Hall Page 13
