The Stepson

by Martin Armstrong

  ‘O down in the meadows the other day,

  A-gathering flowers both fine and gay,

  A-gathering flowers both red and blue …’

  She finished the tune without the words, aware suddenly that the words turned at the end of the verse into an unforeseen path….

  Meanwhile, Ben and David were nearing Elchester. The great grey and crimson mound of the town-covered hill was already visible through the new green leafage of the trees which veiled but did not hide the view.

  For some way they had driven in silence, each following his own reflections to the rhythm of the mare’s trot. David was driving, for when, after his hunt for Kate, he had come running out of the house, he had paused before climbing into the gig and said to his father with a grin:

  ‘Hadn’t I better drive, Dad? We’re ten minutes behind.’

  And Ben, grinning back - for the difference in their respective methods of driving was an acknowledged fact — had replied:

  ‘Right you are. Up you get, then.’

  Ben was anxious to know what David thought of his stepmother, but he was shy of asking, for Kate was of David’s generation, not of his own; indeed, in Ben’s eyes his young wife and his son were almost of the same age, and indeed she was much younger than his other children. And so Ben, in the presence of his boy, felt a kind of shame at having married a girl more fitted by age for David himself. ‘The boy must think me a damned old fool, and a nasty old fool into the bargain,’ he thought to himself. ‘Well, anyhow,’ - he resigned himself philosophically — ‘he ought to know my peculiarities by this time,’ and he continued his attempts to find a suitable way, off-hand and not too serious, of discovering David’s opinion of Kate.

  ‘Well, I hope you’ve enjoyed your holiday, lad,’ he said at last.

  ‘Why, of course I have,’ said David. ‘It would be a strange thing if I didn’t.’

  ‘Did you notice things being more comfortable now?’ the old man asked.

  ‘More comfortable? You mean with … er …?’

  ‘Exactly. With Kate here.’

  ‘Look here, Dad,’ David broke through the thread of their talk. ‘What have I got to call her? Somehow I don’t feel like calling her Mother, and Mrs. H. doesn’t seem as if it would do.’

  ‘Why, call her Kate, of course.’

  ‘Well, so I did once.’

  ‘And she objected?’

  ‘No, not she.’

  ‘Of course not. Why shouldn’t you? Don’t you like her?’

  ‘Like her? Yes, I like her, but I didn’t know what you expected or what she expected. O, yes,’ he repeated, ‘I like her right enough.’

  ‘Well, I’m very glad to hear that, lad; because I was just the least bit afraid that you mightn’t altogether cotton to it.’

  ‘What? To her?’

  ‘No, not exactly to her, but to the notion of me bringing a new mistress to The Grange at this time of day.’

  ‘I don’t know if it ’ud have been much good if I’d objected.’ David glanced at his father with a grin.

  Ben chuckled. ‘Well, maybe it wouldn’t, seeing that I hardly gave you time. All the same and speaking serious, I’m mighty glad you like her, for she’s a rare good girl and no mistake.’

  When he had left David and his bag at the station it occurred to Ben that he would drive up into the town and call at the ironmonger’s for a new snathe for a scythe, of which George had told him that morning they were in need. There, as he sat waiting in the gig outside the shop in Bargate, a loud voice made him turn his head.

  ‘Why, bless me,’ the voice was shouting, ‘if it isn’t the Squire.’

  It was Bob Reed, standing large and expansive on the pavement below him, his feet planted well apart and one hand thrust into the front pocket of his riding-breeches, the noble dome of his great belly buttoned into a bold black and white check with a broad red stripe in it.

  ‘Hello, Bob!’ said Ben. ‘You oughtn’t to come here, you know, except on market-days. You’re too much for eye and ear, man, when the town’s not crowded.’

  Reed threw out a laugh with that familiar swing of his great top-heavy body.

  ‘Well, it’s not often I’m here except on market-days,’ he said. ‘What are you after, yourself? Put up the gig and come and have a bite of something to eat. It’s barely an hour from dinner-time.’

  Humphrey shook his head. ‘Can’t,’ he said. ‘Got to get back.’

  ‘What? As busy as all that? Can’t the farm wait for a couple of hours?’

  ‘Maybe the farm can, but I can’t’; and Ben’s lips narrowed into a smile showing the even, white row of his false teeth. His blue eyes shone, and the tightly stretched red skin of his face.

  ‘You can’t?’ Reed had not grasped the meaning of Ben’s haste. Then the truth dawned on him. ‘O, I’ve got you,’ he said. ‘I’ve got you.’ He shook a large, reproving finger at Ben. ‘Ah, you newly married young men! You wait a few years: you’ll be glad enough then to get away for an hour or two.’

  ‘I’m not so sure of that,’ said Ben, thinking of the beautiful young woman who, now that David had left them, would once again be even more intimately his.

  A man came out of the ironmonger’s carrying the snathe which he stowed away under the seat of the gig.

  ‘Well,’ said Humphrey to Reed, reaching out his right hand for the whip, ‘I’ll be seeing you as usual on Wednesday, I suppose’; and he clicked his tongue at the mare who moved off, filling the quiet Bargate with the ring of hoofs and the rumble of wheels.

  XIV

  Weeks passed and the light spring foliage of the trees and thickets, in which every leaf was a separate and individual thing, changed imperceptibly to the mounded, indiscriminate, darker green of summer. In the woods the white and yellow of the early spring flowers had made way for the blues of wild hyacinth and forget-me-not, and these too had withered. Daffodil and narcissus were gone from the gardens, and the tall blue iris. The hard spherical buds of the peonies, pied green and crimson, had unfolded into great shocks of crowded rosy petals and under each plant fallen petals already sprinkled the ground. In the little front garden at The Grange the rose-trees on either side of the flagged path and the climbing rose over the door were covered with large buds. Calm, uneventful, industrious, the life of the farm moved on. Before long they would begin to cut the first hayfield and the busy days of haymaking would follow. Kate threw herself energetically into her share of the work and it seemed to her during all those weeks that there was never a minute for thought or idleness from the moment of getting out of bed in the early morning until bedtime. She enjoyed her work and she was contented.

  Yet her contentment was not a mere immersion in the present, a contentment like that of the beasts for whom life is one long present undisturbed by any mysterious and alluring call from beyond. It was, rather, a kind of peaceful purgatory, willingly endured because of a salvation to which it was leading, a contentment nourished by a richness past and some vaguely hoped-for richness to come. Each time she paused in her work her heart was aware of a tune, faint but of an incredible sweetness, clearly heard through the busy noise of the present, and she was content to listen to it from time to time without asking herself what could be its source. Indeed, she felt a vague fear of questioning herself lest she should discover, if that rational self of hers were to lay hands on it, that it was delusion and folly. Why should she, whose life had been so long starved of ecstasy and rapture, deny herself the comfort of this exquisite secret which moved at her side and sang in her ear like a familiar angel, invisible and inaudible to all but her?

  One thing only brought occasional disturbance to the calm of her contentment, and that was her relation to Ben. For though as a rule it was harmonious enough, yet she began to find that her feelings towards him were subject to moods. The memory of the mysterious quarrel which she had overheard on Easter Sunday still troubled her sometimes with its raven-croak, bringing to her a sudden sense of insecurity and making her wonde
r whether all this cheerful, industrious life at the farm were a sham which might collapse at any moment in some sinister disaster. Perhaps it was partly this mystery and the vague suspicion that it awoke in her that tinged and vitiated her feelings towards her husband; but more strong than that was the natural distaste of her healthy youth for his clinging, amorous age. Her heart rebelled passionately against the giving of herself to this old man whom she did not love; but, though she rebelled, she would not, even if she could, have cancelled the giving, for she had given herself deliberately and after weighing the consequences, deciding that it was worth while to make that sacrifice in order to gain a fuller and freer life; and still she told herself that she had acted wisely. But that such a sacrifice should have been necessary was a hard thing to her: her heart, with its burning need of love, resented it implacably; and illogically and unconsciously she had fixed some of that resentment on the innocent Ben. Nor was that the only effect of her act, for by thus doing violence to herself she had also made herself a prey to moods and revulsions of feeling, and sometimes when the old man, finding her alone in the parlour, would come up to her and she felt his arm creep round her and his lips press themselves against her cheek and neck, she would be unable to endure it and would break away from him with a shudder. Then Ben would laugh good-humouredly, and that good-humour of his only exasperated her the more, for it told her as plainly as words that he misunderstood the meaning of her outbursts, considering them to be mere woman’s petulance which he was strong enough and lenient enough to tolerate. Hard and lustful as he was, how should he have thought otherwise? Kate was his, and though he loved her as well as he was capable of loving, he had neither the understanding nor the humility to see that her outbursts were the fierce protests of an outraged individuality. And so he took a lustful joy in thus provoking her, and one day when she had broken away from him, he had followed her and caught her again in his arms and, pinning her arms to her sides, had planted kiss after kiss on her face. The sinister ghost signalled wildly in the fierce, crossed look of her grey-green eyes staring closely into his like the eyes of a trapped animal; and Ben, catching in that stare a glimpse of dark and turbid depths, must have loosened his grip, for next moment she had wrenched her body free and had struck him with her fist in the face.

  Something like a flame rushed over Ben’s face, spreading and mounting from the place where her knuckles had struck, round his eyes, over his forehead, and up into the roots of his hair. His eyes, with the narrowed pupils, blazed at her like blue glass. She saw his nostrils distend as he drew a deep, whistling breath.

  ‘What’s the matter with you, woman?’

  Her unexpected violence had astounded and outraged him, and now, as she could tell from his tone, he was both savagely indignant and deeply wounded. They stood two yards apart, staring at each other while the tick-tick of the parlour clock measured out the silence. And then Kate’s breath caught in a sob, and then came another and another, and turning away with her hands to her face she dropped into the arm-chair near the hearth in a passion of weeping.

  With the breaking of the tension Ben’s fury collapsed too, and letting a great breath go out of him he went over to the chair and bent over her.

  ‘What is it, lass?’ he asked. His voice had suddenly become gentle. ‘Tell me what’s wrong.’

  Kate, crouching in the chair, her body shaken by deep, spasmodic gasps, her face hidden in her arms, made no reply. She was horrified and humiliated by what she had done. Her fury against Ben was forgotten: she remembered only the look of his face as she had struck it and the sense of the blow itself, printed upon her knuckles and upon her mind as though it was she and not he who had been struck. She was deeply remorseful for what she had done and after a while she held out one hand.

  ‘Can you forgive me, Ben?’ Her voice was muffled, for her head was still bowed and her face still buried in the other arm.

  ‘Of course I can, my dear. But it was a bit of a surprise, you know.’ He laughed ruefully.

  ‘I get mad sometimes,’ she said, lifting her head, ‘when you worry me like that. I … I can’t bear it.’

  ‘Well, well! I never thought …’ He did not finish his sentence. ‘However, I’ll not do it again if it worries you so.’

  Kate raised a hand to her pale face to brush back her disordered hair; and then, her heart flooded with pity for the old man, she rose to her feet, laid her hands on his shoulders, and kissed his cheek where she had struck it.

  ‘Kissing it better, are you, my dear?’ said Ben, patting her gently on the back. ‘Well, that’s kind of you, that is.’

  That storm of theirs cleared the air, and for some while after it Ben treated Kate less as a plaything and more as a woman whose feelings and wishes must be considered, and Kate in consequence fell into a more equable mood of friendliness towards her husband; and once again time flowed full and smooth at the farm and the hay was cut and raked into wind-rows and heaped into cocks and carted and stacked, and summer lay on the farm and on Elchester, so that the farmers standing on market-days under the heavy sunshine in the market-square lifted their hats and pulled their coloured handkerchiefs from their pockets to mop their sweating brows. Twice the usual quantity of beer was drunk during these days at the ‘Ring of Bells’ and cold joints instead of hot joints were provided at the weekly ordinary there.

  For Kate these hot, sunny days brought new sensations and emotions. As she moved about the farm she was aware of the constant interchange of heat and coolness, glaring sunshine and soft shade, warm scents of sun-baked grass and full-blown roses. The noise of the grass-cutter, two fields away, like the dry, sultry, mechanical sound of a giant grasshopper, filled the hot air. For Kate it was the very voice of summer, the audible presence of the pulsating heat that shimmered up visibly from the surface of the earth. It was wonderful, during such days, to step out into the yard from the cool stone-flagged passage and feel the sunny heat enclose her in a hot bath of light, or to turn out of the searching glow into the sudden cold twilight of the great barn that seemed always to be listening, vast, cool and silent, to the unceasing drift of time. In the house a warm fragrance stirred in the passages on the hardly perceptible draught that moved between the yard-door and the door which opened into the little front-garden and which now stood open all day long, and Kate, reminded one afternoon of the garden which she had not visited for over a fortnight, went down the front passage and looked out.

  The grass plots and the flagged path were dappled with yellow light and the shadows cast by the overshadowing trees. The two rose-bushes beside the path were covered with pink roses which filled the place with delicious scent. Kate with a murmur of delighted surprise hurried down the path and stood between the two bushes, entranced by the sight and scent of them. The blooms were large and sturdy and they covered each bush, too many to be counted, some full-blown, some with deep-coloured hearts still half hidden, some still in the bud; and as she stood gazing at them Kate longed to possess and take into herself all that fragrant loveliness. She put down her face to a great half-open bloom and took in a long, deep, ecstatic breath, becoming for a brief moment one with the spirit of the tree. But next moment she had returned to her separate self and the rose-tree stood before her once more a thing apart and inaccessible. She lingered there, enraptured yet thwarted, and then, remembering that the rose-trees and the garden were hers as much as anything could be hers, she determined to gather some of the roses for the parlour. She turned to go back into the house to get some scissors and as she turned she saw that the climbing rose which overhung the door was also covered with flowers. It was a Gloire de Dijon: the hanging yellow blooms, when she looked up into them, were tawny at the heart like the yolk of an egg.