Rustication

by Charles Palliser

  They both stopped but didn’t look at me. I’m sure we were all remembering how intently we would listen for the way Father came up the steps trying to divine if he was himself or, as Mother used to say, “out of sorts”. If he stumbled on the steps we would brace ourselves.

  6 o’clock in the morning.

  I’m trapped in this house and in this body. I long to float away, to hover above the fields. I haven’t slept a wink since I woke up two hours ago. It’s the pain I get when I haven’t . . . So cold. It has frozen hard in the last few hours. My hands are numb as I write this. But at least the lanes will be iron-hard so perhaps that damned carter will decide to risk his axles. I’m sitting here wrapped up as warmly as I can with nothing to heat me but this candle, dreaming of that trunk coming towards me.

  Once Edmund and I tried to stop and we lasted just two days. This has been five. Tonight it has been worse than ever. Every bone aches and I feel on the point of vomiting. The thought of food nauseates me.

  Wednesday 16th of December, 7 o’clock in the evening.

  At last, at last. As I write I have it in front of me. The crack in the prison-wall of reality through which I can escape to the superreality of the Imagination! I can only hold back by an exercise of will. Tonight, when the house is asleep I will cast off the shackles of corporality and float free.

  · · ·

  When I awoke the light was fainter than usual and I found that there was ice on the inside of the window-panes and the glazing-bars, and it had formed thick teardrops. My first thought was that the carter will certainly bring the trunk now.

  Then began a restless, fretting morning. At last I could bear it no longer and hurried out of the house and up the lane and then along the path to the Battlefield.

  Strange incident. I came over the summit of a slope and saw a young labourer with a faded red neckcloth loosely wrapped around his neck. He was deep in conversation with a tall individual who looked like a gentleman though he had a raffish air and was shabbily clad. As I drew near, the latter strode away in the opposite direction so that I did not see his face. Was it the man I had seen in the half-dusk yesterday? I could not be sure.

  I was so curious that I accosted the younger man and asked him the way to Brankston Hill.

  He had a scowling brow and a great jutting jaw that made it seem he was gritting his teeth in irritation. His eyes were wide as if in outrage at an unspoken accusation and his gaze did not meet mine. At my question he merely pointed and turned away.

  · · ·

  At 3 we all set off for the tea-party with Mrs Paytress. As we were passing through Stratton Peverel I saw the Quance girls coming towards us. The younger was chattering away while Enid marched ahead sweetly silent and pensive. What a really beautiful creature she is. Her eyes swept briefly over me and I think I saw a slight flush in her cheek. I could not resist turning round a few yards further on. The younger girl was looking back at us. Not Enid.

  As we were welcomed into Mrs Paytress’s warm house, Effie and I made the introductions and we seated ourselves.

  We talked of the frost and when I mentioned that it made it easier for my sister to walk to Lady Terrewest’s house, Mrs Paytress said: I have heard of that lady as a relative of the Earl of Thurchester. Is she an old friend of yours?

  Mother replied in some embarrassment: In fact, she is related to me.

  (Strange that she has never told me that.)

  Conversation turned to Mother’s widowed status and Mrs Paytress said: I can sympathise. A woman without a husband has much to endure.

  She turned her attention to the teapot and I saw my mother glance significantly at Effie. She said cautiously: I understand you have lived in Salisbury? When Mrs Paytress nodded with a smile, Mother said: It’s a charming city. It must have been hard to leave.

  It was, Mrs Paytress said. I came here for the sake of someone who is very dear to me. I have made sacrifices for him as one does for someone one loves.

  Mother flushed and looked down and hardly spoke again. After a few minutes she stood up saying: We should be going.

  I think we were all surprised at the abruptness of this. We had been in the house less than an hour.

  As we shook hands at the door I said: We’ve forgotten to bring the umbrella that we borrowed.

  It’s of no importance, Mrs Paytress protested. But Mother said stiffly that she would send me back with it very soon.

  We had only gone a few paces when Mother announced: Our acquaintance with that lady is at an end.

  Effie and I began to protest but she said indignantly: You heard her. “I came here for the sake of someone who is very dear to me.” She even called herself “a woman without a husband”.

  Effie was about to speak but Mother held up her hand: I’m thinking only of you, Euphemia. As an unmarried girl, you cannot be associated with anyone touched by scandal.

  We walked on in a smouldering silence. As we were approaching the fork that leads to our house, we heard the sound of a horn and a few minutes later the rattle and clatter of a cart. It came up from our lane and it was, as I had hoped, the carrier who had brought me and my trunk to Whitminster. He pulled up and when we had drawn level with him he told us he had just left my trunk at the house. He said: A devil of a job it was on that narrow track. Then he added as Mother was handing him the money: And that woman, good riddance to her.

  I had forgotten about the cook.

  I was anxious to get home and take possession of the trunk but as the vehicle moved off Mother said: Richard, I am inviting Miss Bittlestone to tea tomorrow. I want you to go and ask her if she is free.

  I suppose the invitation is to be an overture of peace towards the Quance camp. Now that we’ve rejected the friendship of the only person in the district who is worth knowing, we have to woo her persecutors!

  I set off but I was soon lost. I stopped to ask an old countryman in gaiters and smock with a crushed and battered stovepipe hat on his head. He had the most magnificent side-whiskers I’ve seen for a long time: white as snow and curling out from either side of his face like a great cloudy ruff that had risen from around his neck. With his unlighted pipe held in front of him and his ancient blue eyes, he seemed to have been hewn from the living rock and to have been waiting there for me from the beginning of recorded time. He told me what I wanted to know and as I was about to walk on, he said: You’re a strange face. Are you from the family that’s living in the old Herriard house?

  I said I was.

  A dreary old place it is, and no mistake, he said. You know the story they tell about it?

  That a man was murdered there after eloping with a girl? The old man looked at me with a smile. He was killed by her brothers, I added.

  Aye, he said. By them damned Burgoynes.

  Is that true? I asked in surprise.

  That’s the tale right enough, but you don’t know about the babby?

  I shook my head.

  The wench had just birthed a child when her brothers came to the house. After killing her man, they threw the babby into the fire and dragged her home.

  I grimaced in horror and thanked him for his ghastly information.

  I found Miss Bittlestone’s cottage at last. It’s a tiny little hovel of a building constructed of lime-washed cobb with a thatched roof.

  I tapped on the knockerless door and when I heard a frightened squawk of surprise I entered. There is just a single room with a rickety stair up to the one above. It was very cold. The only heat came from a tiny fire in the single hearth and the tenant of the cottage was standing before it holding a toasting-fork on the end of which was an unappealing lump of bacon.

  Oh, Mr Shenstone, what a surprise, I wasn’t expecting anyone and you least of all! she exclaimed.

  I delivered my mother’s invitation. A summons from the Queen could not have brought more pleasure.

  She pressed me to seat myself in a battered but once-handsome old chair.

  She simpered and said: Mrs Quance sits in that cha
ir when she honours me with a visit. It’s one of the few pieces I managed to bring with me from Cheltenham.

  She confided that with such impressment that I had an involuntary image of her fleeing from a burning city with the chair strapped to her back like Aeneas in flight from Troy with his father on his shoulders.

  She suddenly exclaimed: Don’t worry, Tiddles. You’ll get your share.

  She was addressing a skinny black cat and now took the piece of meat off the end of the fork and held it out to the animal which gobbled it down. I suspect the creature eats better than its foolish owner.

  · · ·

  When I entered the house I almost tripped over the trunk. My glorious bountiful treasured trunk! It was too heavy to carry up here so I removed what I most wanted and concealed it in my room. Then I unpacked the rest and conveyed the items up here.

  While I was kneeling at the trunk a deep voice suddenly spoke: You’ll be young Master Richard.

  I turned. It was Mrs Yass, the cook. She is a large woman of about Mother’s age. She has a big doughy face with tiny black eyes like currants in an unbaked white bun and folds of flesh hanging down like uncooked pastry over the edge of a pie-dish. Mother said she’s a plain cook but she is plainer than I had expected.

  I asked her where she had been in service before and she named a number of places. Seems never to have stayed long. A mixture of boldness and evasiveness in her replies. I asked her what she most liked to cook. She stared at me from that paperwhite round face and eventually said: Paritch. Well, even I can cook porridge!

  Then Mother arrived. She said sharply: Mrs Yass, aren’t you preparing dinner?

  The woman looked at her impertinently and, turning like a great horse reaching the end of the furrow, lumbered toward the kitchen.

  I don’t want you to keep her from her work, Richard, Mother said.

  (In fact, her dinner turned out to be every bit as revolting as Betsy’s efforts. I don’t know why the mater has hired a cook who can’t cook. And frankly we couldn’t afford her even if she was a female Soyer.)

  11 o’clock.

  Twenty minutes ago I went into the parlour and found Effie sitting on the sopha, her eyes brimming with tears. She turned her head away. I asked her what the matter was and she responded ferociously: Do you think I can be happy living like this? Wearing these patched and darned old dresses. Seeing nobody from one week to the next.

  I said it was hard for me as well.

  She said indignantly: You were supposed to rescue us from this. To get your degree and start working for Uncle Thomas.

  I defended myself and at last she shouted: Just go away, can’t you.

  · · ·

  I wonder. Is she still nursing a broken heart?

  Midnight.

  ∑

  Mother must not know about poor Edmund and his damnable family of bloodthirsty leeches. It’s not the money his family is concerned with. They want revenge.

  · · ·

  I am haunted by the image of her sweet face, her serenity, her pale silence. Oh beautiful Enid, as lovely as your name.

  · · ·

  Dear Uncle Thomas,

  I decline your offer since I have no wish to become a superior shop-keeper.

  · · ·

  Where does that great white slug have her quarters? That huge peeled potato in its bed of pastry.

  · · ·

  I can hear my own blood coursing through my veins.

  · · ·

  After so long—what is it? nearly a week?—it is almost like the first time. Everything I see has meaning even if it slips from my grasp as if I were clutching at curlicues of mist. I float among hanging shrouds of cloud looking down at houses like toys scattered on a green carpet. I perch in a tree hundreds of feet above the ground. The startled birds fly from me. The moonlight is like cloudy milk poured into a glass bowl full of water.

  · · ·

  Frozen grass. Tiny green pieces of ice. As my foot comes down they seem to shatter.

  I raise my eyes to the vast dome above us sprinkled with white specks and I laugh at the tininess of our earthbound concerns.

  The pump is frozen and covered with ice like thick ropes of diamond or the crystal branches of a magic tree.

  · · ·

  The vast pat of uncooked dough has a room beside the girl’s. Damn damn damn. I found that out when I crept past and heard a jarring symphony of flutings and rumblings as she breathed, shaking the house with each expansion of her diaphragm.

  Thursday 17th of December, ½ past 11.

  Slept late this morning and felt terrible. I will be better in the future. The cold was so fierce that I did not want to get out of my warm bed. When I came down to breakfast Euphemia stood up and walked out.

  Mother shook her head at me and she was as angry as I have ever seen her. She said: What occurred last night must not happen again.

  I had to confess that I remembered very little.

  She said: You were blundering about in the night and you went out into the yard half-dressed in the bitter cold and shouting like a madman. From now on you are permitted only one glass.

  When Euphemia had departed for Lady Terrewest’s house, Mother told me there were things she wanted to say to me. I seated myself on the sopha beside her while she picked up her embroidery frame and then, her voice trembling, began: Richard, you should be aware that my life has seldom been free of cares. Your father wasn’t an easy person to live with. If he sometimes seemed harsh towards you, it was because he hoped so much that you would succeed in life. All the more because of his own disappointments.

  (I thought: Here comes the bishopric.)

  He never obtained his mitre, as you know. That’s why it was so important to him to see you launched on a successful career in the Church. I know that was never your wish and so we’ll say no more about it. But now you have to decide what you do want to do in life. You must write to Thomas and apologise for your conduct and say that if his generous offer is still open, you gratefully accept it.

  What, Mother? Am I to grovel for favours from a man who hated his own brother and did him harm?

  Don’t say that, Richard. He has paid your Cambridge expenses. Would he have done that if he hated your father? It’s a more complicated story than you’ve ever been told. The reason why he and your father quarrelled was because of our marriage.

  I know he was against it but I don’t understand why.

  I’ll tell you, she said. When your father and I became engaged, my aunts and uncles were horrified. They looked down on him and Thomas because their father had been nothing more than a lawyer’s clerk.

  But didn’t your father defend you?

  She fumbled nervously at her embroidery for a moment and then said: He was not in good health by that date.

  I began to have the strangest feeling. Mother was holding something back. Even distorting the truth.

  She said: But he gave your father and me a lease on this house for twenty-one years.

  But you said it was yours! That your father left it to you.

  He did but that was under the will that Cousin Sybille is disputing. Once the suit is settled, the house is mine.

  If we win it! But what if we don’t? When does the lease expire?

  Falteringly she said: Next December.

  Then if we lose, we will have nowhere to live. What does Boddington say?

  She looked down and mumbled: He’s worried about the costs.

  How high are they?

  I’ve paid a hundred pounds so far.

  A hundred pounds! Mother, the suit could ruin us! I should talk to Boddington about it.

  She put down her work: No! I forbid you. Don’t meddle in it.

  I’ve never understood why you had to go to court to get what was yours under your father’s will.

  She didn’t respond.

  · · ·

  I’m pretty certain that the man who broke Effie’s heart is the earl’s nephew—no less than the heir to his
title and to his whole estate. Did Effie come so close to becoming a countess?

  4 o’clock.

  It was a fine frosty morning and I had to get out into the fresh air. I passed the village and wandered on and rather to my surprise found myself in Lady Terrewest’s village of Thrubwell. I thought I might as well look at where she lives, so I asked my way and was soon standing outside a tall old redbrick house. It looked joyless and grim.

  Knowing that Effie would have to leave soon, I positioned myself a little way along the road behind the stout trunk of a tree. Sure enough, after half an hour she emerged from the house and, staying a long way behind her, I followed her all the way home. She went into the shop for a few minutes but apart from that she spoke to nobody.

  After luncheon I decided to extend the palm of friendship. I said to her: Shall we play a duet? I’ve got my flute now.

  She said: You can’t keep time.

  8 o’clock.

  I went into the parlour just now and found Mother sitting on the sopha coughing badly. When she left the room I noticed that she had dropped a handkerchief on the floor. There were specks of blood on it. Is she seriously unwell? Is that what Euphemia was implying? If so, perhaps that is the explanation of the towels and basins that I found when I arrived and that vanished so quickly.

  9 o’clock.

  Mother and Effie had another argument—raised voices and doors slamming—but by the time Miss Bittlestone arrived they had managed to patch together at least the semblance of good relations.

  Our guest—our first ever in this house!—was welcomed and I saw my mother slip into the role she had played so often in the old days when she presided around a tea-table encircled by the wives of senior clerics: charming, attentive, even amusing. Wielding her sugar-tongs like a rapier, as Father used to say.

  I was delegated to open the door and lead the old woman with all proper ceremony into the parlour. It was cold even though Betsy had been instructed to build up the fire in readiness for our guest.

  I had barely got the front-door open before the old biddy’s tongue was rattling away. We learned that Miss Bittlestone is the only child of an impoverished clergyman who was Quance’s curate in Cheltenham. When the Quances moved here about three years ago, she was “so sweetly” invited to come and live near them.