The Complete Stories of Alan Marshall

by Alan Marshall

  Mrs Herbert spoke to her mother like a kid when anyone was around. Like she’d take over when her mother came into the room and put her hand on her arm and say, ‘Over here now mother . . . steady . . . on the easy chair now. Wait till I fix it. Now sit down. That’s good. Stop there. I’ll get you a cup of tea. Alan and Joe have just come in. You know Alan and Joe, don’t you? They meet you down the paddock. This is Alan and Joe, mother. You know . . .’

  Her words were kind but her eyes never seemed to fit them somehow.

  I don’t think she was ever talking to Mrs Bilson when she went on like this. When Joe and I were there she’d talk to us, but pretend she was talking to Mrs Bilson. Mrs Bilson knew she was talking to Joe and me, but she never said anything. She just sat there looking.

  Sometimes Mrs Herbert would talk about Mrs Bilson while Mrs Bilson watched us carefully from the other side of the table.

  ‘It’s hard to work out what she sees in wandering round the paddock. Old people get like that sometimes. They walk around and enjoy themselves, then they stop for a while and have a look around. Mother gets a lot of pleasure out of things like that. She goes down to the haystack and looks for eggs. She never seems to be in a hurry to get home. If she finds an egg, she brings it back to me. It’s an interest I suppose. But I don’t like her climbing over the fence into the big paddock.’ Mrs Herbert stopped pouring the tea and held the teapot motionless in her hand while she looked at Mrs Bilson and wondered why she went into the big paddock. ‘She lives in a world of her own’, she said at last, shaking her head and getting back to pouring out the tea. ‘If only she wasn’t so helpless.’

  While Mrs Herbert was talking, Mrs Bilson would close her eyes and begin pulling back into herself like a snail after it has been touched, back into the silence and the dark. I used to think of her sitting a way back in there, away from it all. She would come out before we left, just long enough to mutter angrily, ‘Helpless! eh!’

  Old Mrs Bilson wasn’t that bloody helpless. Joe and I knew her a damn sight better than Mrs Herbert ever did. We often met her down the paddock when we were setting traps at the pop holes along the fence. She never needed any help down the paddock. She’d hold the spring down on the trap with her foot; she’d chop a stake with a tomahawk—she was a champion. But we shut up about that.

  Mrs Herbert liked her being helpless. Sometimes while we were there, Mrs Rogers (she lived down the road about a mile and loved talking) would drive in to get some eggs or something. One day she said, ‘And how’s your mother today, Mrs Herbert?’

  ‘Oh, not bad. She keeps quite well. She gets rheumatics a bit. But all old people suffer from that.’ Mrs Herbert loved talking about sufferings of all sorts, especially Mrs Bilson’s.

  ‘She looks well.’ Mrs Rogers didn’t like giving people this pleasure.

  ‘Yes, I think she does. I feed her up. It’s her mind that’s the trouble. Her memory’s quite gone. She just can’t carry on a conversation. She wanders off on some subject that has nothing to do with what you are talking about.’ She spoke as if she were blaming Mrs Bilson.

  ‘Yes, that would be a problem. You’re lucky she is able to look after herself.’

  ‘Yes, that’s a blessing. I’d hate to have to send her to a Home.’

  ‘As long as she doesn’t take to wandering there should be no need for that.’

  ‘I hope not. That will be two shillings. The hens are starting to lay again; I should have plenty next week.’

  Mrs Rogers looked hard at Mrs Bilson while she paid Mrs Herbert for the eggs.

  ‘She was trying to work out whether Mrs Bilson was square dinkum or not’, Joe explained later.

  ‘I often see her down the paddock.’ Mrs Rogers made the remark sound like an accusation.

  ‘She does wander a bit’, Mrs Herbert was quick to explain. ‘You know—round the paddock and that, nothing to worry about. But up to date she always comes home at night . . . touch wood. She never stops out after dark. She’s always been interested in cows and she likes looking at the pigs. She would never wander far away. Everyone knows her. I never worry over her. What’s the use. Anyway, the boys keep an eye on her. Joe and Alan often bring her home, don’t you boys?’

  We agreed we always watched out for her. The truth of the matter was that Mrs Bilson kept her eye on us.

  ‘Don’t you tell that old bitch where I am’, she warned us once, after we had given her a butt to smoke down behind the pig-house. ‘She’s got eyes like a hawk.’ Mrs Bilson started to chant, ‘Don’t go there, don’t do that, don’t sit in pig shit, don’t stand in cow shit, tidy your hair . . .’

  As Joe said once, ‘No one would ever think to look at Mrs Bilson that she could swear like a trooper.’

  ‘I wonder why she hates her daughter so much’, I said.

  ‘You can’t never tell’, said Joe. ‘She was boss once you see; now she’s not. That would get on your nerves you know. I can’t stand being bossed around; old Mrs Bilson don’t like it either.’

  ‘But I’ve never heard Mrs Herbert bossing her much.’

  ‘That scrap’s over’, said Joe. ‘Mrs Bilson’s just working her way round the ring waiting to hop in and have another go. One of these days she’ll king Mrs Herbert. It will be because of something she says like.’

  But Mrs Bilson never seemed to be interested in trying to take a rise out of Mrs Herbert. She just didn’t trust her. Mind you, the way she talked to you sometimes made you want to answer her back. She’d talk to you as if the words she was saying were stones. She’d throw them at you, then veer off and throw them in another direction. Like she’d say, ‘I’ve seen the day when I chopped wood, milked cows, carted wood, reared kids and bedded down with the biggest bastard that ever booted a calf . . .’ Then she’d go all sad-like and moan while she rocked from side to side, ‘But I should never have taken the kids to the Show that day . . . but they loved going out . . . Ah . . . they were fine kids . . . in those days they were.’ She’d suddenly throw her head back and yell out savage and sharp—‘To hell with her.’ Then she’d start to cry without her face crumpling up. She’d just cry while her face was looking across the paddock.

  Joe’s mother told him that Mrs Bilson had had a hard life. ‘She’d had four sons who’d shot through to get away from the old man’, Joe reckoned. Joe had an idea they all came to no good. She had a daughter who stuck to her after the old man died, mainly because the bloke she married wanted to get hold of the farm. Then he kicked the bucket and now there were only the two of them left.

  What interested me about Mrs Bilson was what she was thinking. Joe was more interested in what she did.

  ‘All right’, said Joe. ‘You reckon Mrs Bilson knows that her daughter thinks she’s mad. Well now, why doesn’t she tell her off about it? Why doesn’t she say to her, “You think I’m mad you stupid old bitch. You’re bloodywell mad yourself.”?’

  Joe seemed to think this was a clever retort.

  ‘I think Mrs Bilson’s only mad at times’, I said. ‘But she’s never so mad as not to know what’s happening around her. That’s how I reckon she thinks. As a matter of fact, I think a hell of a lot of old Mrs Bilson.’

  ‘Yes, now that is, at this moment’, said Joe. ‘But Mrs Bilson is under the whip. She just won’t do the distance.’

  We’d talk about Mrs Bilson like this when she was with us. We’d just go on talking as if she wasn’t there because half the time she didn’t seem to listen. We’d give her a butt (I never knew where Joe collected the tin of butts he always seemed to have in his pocket), then I’d lean back against a sheaf of hay and I’d say, ‘Hey, Mrs Bilson! Where did you knock about when you were a kid?’

  If it was a day when she wasn’t feeling too good, she’d mumble something or other and keep looking across the paddock.

  ‘It’s one of her bad days’, Joe said one day. ‘Let her have a rest for a while. You never know, she might come good.’

  ‘She likes talking’, I said. ‘I think it do
es her good. I like to have a talk to her every day.’ While I was speaking, Mrs Bilson kept looking at me. She suddenly looked up at the sky and called out, There’s nothing I wouldn’t do for her; nothing at all.’

  ‘There you are’, said Joe. ‘There’s no end to talk like that. She’d go on for weeks if you let her.’

  ‘But I’m tellin’ you this, Jim Bilson, fat and big as you are, I won’t have a bar of it. Tell ya own lies and rot in hell for it.’

  ‘It’s a funny thing about Jim Bilson’, said Joe. ‘Mother told me she can remember Jim Bilson when she was a little girl. He was a big, handsome bugger she reckons.’

  ‘I always wanted a daughter’, moaned Mrs Bilson. ‘Just one daughter to look after me in me old age.’

  ‘Well’, said Joe. ‘That’s one thing she got and a lot of bloody good it did her. She wanted a daughter and she got Mrs Herbert, who is always frightened her mother’ll get lice in her hair.’

  ‘Her name was Rose Buckley’, went on Mrs Bilson. ‘You couldn’t fool me, Jim. I knew what you were doing down at the pub every Friday night.’

  ‘I’ll tell you a funny thing’, said Joe. ‘Mum has an old photograph taken at the annual Sports Meeting when she was a girl. There was a group there . . . Jim Bilson was one of them. Then this girl, Rose Buckley, who worked at the pub; she was there. My grandmother was there too.’

  ‘Well, I took her in’, said Mrs Bilson. ‘I reared her.’ She kept repeating, ‘I took her in . . . I took her in . . .’ as if remembering something heard, till I caught hold of her hand. She straightened up and looked hurriedly around her as if there were a jailer somewhere. ‘Is that bitch looking for us?’

  ‘She’s back again now’, said Joe, ‘Hey! Mrs Bilson. We’re going to pinch some apples down at Forster’s orchard. Do you want to be in on it?’

  When we asked Mrs Bilson to come pinching apples with us, she always jumped to her feet and wanted to be in it straight away. I thought this was because she wanted us to get going before she had time to think about it and change her mind, but Joe reckoned it was because it was something she had wanted to do all her life but never had the chance.

  When we were going to sneak into a place to pinch fruit, we all changed somehow. We talked in whispers like crooks and sneaked along the fences like farm dogs ganged up to kill sheep. We walked in a crouch and I swung my crutches wide so as to keep low. We went through the grass like hares. Mrs Bilson always took over. She was the boss. We just did what she said. It came natural to us to do what she said. We just knew she had the game by the throat. It didn’t start off that way. Joe would have a plan and I would have a plan and he’d say we’d do this and I’d say we’d do that, but it always ended up by Mrs Bilson, with her long neck pointing down at us, saying firmly, ‘Alan, you know the dog now. Take this bit of bread and crawl under the back fence. Sneak along till you reach the apple shed. Make friends with the dog and bring him back here. Once you get him here, I’ll keep patting him while you and Joe fill your pockets with apples.’

  It always worked. It was bloody marvellous. I knew every dog about the place. One day old Bluey Harvey caught a glimpse of Joe and me in the orchard and started bellowing out like a bull. Old Mrs Bilson always told us, ‘Remember—it’s every man for himself when the whips are cracking. Get to hell out of the place once somebody sees you.’

  Joe and I always felt a great need of Mrs Bilson when anybody was trying to cut us off. We’d follow behind her like a couple of pups and I tell you, she could go. She went over the grass, holding her dress above her knees and bent like a question mark. She didn’t give a damn about showing her legs. Joe said to me once, ‘I can’t stand seeing Mrs Bilson’s legs above the knees. They are so bloody thin. You’d think they would break. I’m buggered if I know how she walks with legs as thin as that.’

  If we could keep Mrs Bilson in sight we’d be set. She’d slip under a fence like a hare. She never waited to get her dress off a barb—she just kept going. She used to worry over it a bit when we were sitting in safety behind the stack. ‘When I was a girl’, she’d say, ‘we wore so many clothes that we’d walk a mile to go through a gate. We were too bloody frightened to climb over it.’

  We’d sit there eating apples and if Mrs Bilson took her mind and went off with it somewhere we’d still talk about her while she sat there beside us. We talked in our ordinary voices and when we wanted her to be in it with us we would raise our voices. Mrs Bilson knew the difference between the two ways of speaking. When she was expected to be in on it, she seemed to stretch herself as if she had just woke up. After that, if she got up and started walking, she’d move in a crouch like a fox.

  I’ve seen Mrs Bilson running long-legged over the grass with Joe just behind her and me bounding along behind them both. When I came up to them their heads would be sticking out from behind the stack, Mrs Bilson’s head just above Joe’s. She was alive then. You could see it in her eyes. She was thinking quickly and she was moving good too, and it would be all because we heard Mrs Herbert’s voice coming across the paddock—‘Mum! Mum! Come home at once. Your tea is getting cold. Mum! Do you hear me?’

  When we were going home, Mrs Bilson gradually became older until, when we reached the back door, Mrs Herbert would exclaim, ‘Mother! You look exhausted. You know you are seventy-six. I tell you, you’ll never see eighty if you keep on like this. Why do you do it? You’re killing yourself.’ Then she would say to us, ‘How is she today—wandering? Did you get any sense out of her?’

  ‘She’s always sensible with us, Mrs Herbert’, I said.

  ‘Has she kept herself clean?’

  ‘Hell yes’, said Joe. ‘She’s the cleanest woman we’ve ever met.’

  We had to be very careful not to get any pig shit on Mrs Bilson. Nothing made Mrs Herbert more wild than that. She didn’t mind cow shit, which was natural, but a smear of pig shit on Mrs Bilson’s dress made her froth at the mouth.

  ‘Have you been climbing into the pigsty again, mother?’ she would exclaim in anguish. ‘Look at the filth on your clothes. You must never go near those pigs. I’ve told you again and again.’ Then she turned to Joe and me, ‘Please see she doesn’t get filth on her, boys. I’m always scraping stuff off her frock.’

  Mrs Herbert didn’t like Joe and I using the word ‘shit’, especially in front of her mother; so we couldn’t say it till we were down the paddock the next day and met Mrs Bilson again.

  ‘Hey, Mrs Bilson’, said Joe after we were sitting down for a yarn, ‘Why can’t we say “shit” to you in front of Mrs Herbert?’

  ‘The old bitch is mad, that’s why’, said Mrs Bilson.

  I don’t think she liked Mrs Herbert much. Mind you, she didn’t hate her or anything like that; she just didn’t give a bugger for her.

  Joe’s mother told Joe a lot about Mrs Bilson. She said to him—‘Don’t ever be hard in your judgements on the auld lady, God bless her. It’s meself that knows the truth of it all and wild horses wouldn’t be after draggin’ it from me.’

  Then she told Joe and Joe told me and it was sad to know it. It was too big for Joe to hold.

  ‘I’d like to die on the grass’, Mrs Bilson told us, pulling a tuft of it and holding it against her face.

  Joe didn’t like her talking like this. He’s a Catholic and death meant a hell of a lot to him.

  ‘Joe and I will be sorry if you die, Mrs Bilson’, I said.

  ‘Yes, yes’, she said quickly. Then she laughed. ‘No one will ever know the truth of things. I’d like to have told you two kids—but that’s how it is . . .’

  Joe looked thoughtfully at the sky, then leant over and touched her shoulder. ‘Mum told us, Mrs Bilson; we know Mrs Herbert is not your daughter. Don’t ever worry about us knowing.’

  Mrs Bilson sat very still when Joe told her this. She just kept looking across the paddocks. I felt we shouldn’t be there. I nudged Joe and we went away.

  Joe and I were never shy with Mrs Bilson. She was a mate to us, another kid li
ke ourselves.

  ‘You know why I like Mrs Bilson’, Joe said to me.

  ‘No. Why?’

  ‘Because you can sit with her and you just don’t give a bugger. You can say anything you like.’

  I felt like that. I said to her once, ‘If ever you want to do a piss, Mrs Bilson, just tell us and we’ll look away. Never piss yourself, for Christ’s sake, or we’ll get into a hell of a row from Mrs Herbert.’

  Me saying that seemed to please Mrs Bilson a terrible lot. She smiled and it was a bloody lovely smile.

  ‘I think I’ll have one now for the hell of it’, she said getting to her feet. She went behind the stack and pissed there.

  You couldn’t help but love Mrs Bilson. Like she said once to us, ‘It’s good to be alive in the spring when you are young. The heifers are coming in and the cows chew their cud while lying in the grass. You can smell the breath of them when you shake out the cloth at the back door after tea at night. It comes across the paddock, it does. On frosty nights . . . yes, I love the frosty nights; they are bloody good.’

  There was a frost the night they found her dead in the paddock. She was white as snow, ‘Pudden’ told us, lying on her back near the pigsty with her frosted face looking up at the sky.

  ‘She ran out into the night when she felt it coming’, ‘Pudden’ said. ‘I’m a light sleeper I am an’ I never heard her go.’

  Joe and I stood there in the morning holding our traps, but Mrs Bilson wasn’t there waiting for us. She was dead and in all the world there was no one we could talk to like we had talked to her.

  Miss Armitage

  Miss Armitage walked to the Post Office every day. She was forty.

  ‘I was engaged once’, she used to say, ‘but my friend was killed in the war.’

  Time had robbed this statement of its anguish. She now made it as proof of the gay youth she once possessed, as evidence of a past victory over her pale personality.

  She walked to the Post Office to help Mrs Robinson sort the letters and put them into pigeon-holes. Mrs Robinson was the Post Mistress and had a thin mouth. She held her head to one side as if listening at a half-opened door.