On the Black Hill

by Bruce Chatwin

  ‘What a lark!’ said the mauve one.

  ‘Let’s go on the Wall of Death!’ said the green one.

  A huge cylindrical drum stood beside its steam-engine at the top end of Castle Street. Lewis paid the grimy youth at the ticket kiosk; and all four stepped inside.

  Several other passengers were waiting for the start. The youth shouted, ‘Stand against the wall!’ The door slammed and the drum began to spin faster and faster on its axis. The floor rose, pushing the passengers upward till their heads were almost level with the rim. When the floor fell again, they were stranded, pinned by centrifugal force, in attitudes of the Crucifixion.

  Benjamin felt his eyeballs being squashed back into his skull. For three endless minutes, the agony continued. Then, as the drum slowed up, the girls slithered down and their frocks concertina-ed above their hips, so that gaps of bare flesh showed between their stockings and suspender-belts.

  Benjamin staggered on to the street and vomited into the gutter.

  ‘I’ve had enough,’ he spluttered, and mopped his chin. ‘I’m off.’

  ‘Spoil-sport!’ squealed the girl in green. ‘He’s only putting it on.’ The sisters linked their arms around Lewis’s and tried to march him up the street. He did shake them off, and turned on his heels and followed the tweed cap through the crowd in the direction of the ponies.

  That night, on the staircase, Mary brushed her cheek against Benjamin’s and, with a sly smile, thanked him for bringing his brother home.

  33

  SHE BOUGHT THEM Hercules bicycles for their thirty-first birthday and encouraged them to take an interest in local antiquities. At first, they went for short rides on Sundays. Then, moved by the spirit of adventure, they extended their range to take in the castles of the Border Barons.

  At Snodhill they ripped the ivy off a wall, and uncovered an arrow-slit. At Urishay they mistook a rusty pannikin for ‘something mediaeval’. At Clifford they pictured the Fair Rosamond, lovelorn in a wimple; and when they went to Painscastle, Benjamin thrust his hand down a rabbit-hole and pulled out a fragment of iridescent glass.

  ‘A goblet?’ suggested Lewis.

  ‘A bottle,’ Benjamin corrected.

  He borrowed books from the Rhulen Lending Library and read aloud, in condensed versions, the chronicles of Froissart, Giraldus Cambrensis and Adam of Usk. Suddenly, the world of the Crusading Knights became more real than their own. Benjamin vowed himself to chastity; Lewis to the memory of a fair damsel.

  They laughed – and laying their bikes behind a hedge, went off to laze beside a stream.

  They imagined battering-rams, portcullises, crucibles of boiling pitch and bloated bodies floating in a moat. Hearing of the Welsh archers at Crécy, Lewis stripped a yew branch, hardened it with fire, strung it with gut and fletched some arrows with goose feathers.

  The second arrow whizzed across the orchard and pierced a chicken through the neck.

  ‘A mistake,’ he said.

  ‘Too dangerous,’ said Benjamin, who, meanwhile, had unearthed a most interesting document.

  A monk of Abbey Cwmhir relates that the bones of Bishop Cadwallader lie in a golden coffin beside St Cynog’s Well at Glascoed.

  ‘And where be that?’ Lewis asked. He had read about the Tomb of Tutankhamun in the News of the World.

  ‘There!’ said Benjamin, placing his thumbnail under some Gothic lettering on the Ordnance Survey Map. The place was eight miles from Rhulen, off the road to Llandrindod.

  After Chapel next Sunday, Mr Nantlys Williams saw the twins’ bicycles propped against the palings, and a spade lashed to Lewis’s crossbar. He chided them gently for labouring on the Lord’s Day, and Lewis blushed as he bent down to fix his cycle-clip.

  At Glascoed, they found the Holy Water gurgling from a mossy cleft, then dribbling away among some burdocks. It was a shady spot. There were cowpats in the mud, and horseflies buzzing round them. A boy in braces saw the two strange men and took to his heels.

  ‘Where do we dig?’ Lewis asked.

  ‘Yonder!’ said Benjamin, pointing to a hummock of earth half-hidden by nettles.

  The soil was black and glutinous and wriggling with earthworms. Lewis dug for half an hour and then handed his brother a piece of porous bone.

  ‘Cow!’ said Benjamin.

  ‘Bull!’ said Lewis, only to be interrupted by a strident voice shouting across the fields: ‘I tell you to get from here!’

  The boy in braces had come back with his father, a farmer who was fuming on the far side of the bushes. The twins saw a shotgun. Remembering Watkins the Coffin, they crept out, sheepishly, into the sunshine.

  ‘And I’ll be keeping the spade,’ the farmer added.

  ‘Yes, sir!’ said Lewis, and dropped it. ‘Thank you, sir!’ – and they mounted their bikes, and rode off.

  Forswearing gold as the root of all evil, they turned their attention to the early Celtic saints.

  Benjamin read, in a learned paper by the Rector of Cascob, that these ‘spiritual athletes’ had retreated into the mountains to be at one with Nature and the Lord. St David himself had settled in the Honddhu Valley, in ‘a mean shelter covered with moss and leaves’ – and there were several other sites within cycling distance.

  At Moccas, they found the place where St Dubricius saw a white sow suckling her litter. And when they went to Llanfrynach, Benjamin teased his brother about the woman who tried to tempt the saint with ‘wolfsbane and other lustful ingredients’.

  ‘I’ll thank you for keeping your mouth shut,’ Lewis said.

  In Llanveynoe Church, carved on a Saxon stone, they saw a sturdy youth suspended from the Tree: the church’s patron, St Beuno, had once cursed a man for refusing to cook a fox.

  ‘Fox wouldn’t pass my mouth neither,’ said Lewis, pulling a face.

  They considered taking up the life of anchorites – an ivy bower, a babbling brook, a diet of berries and wild leek and, for music, the chatter of blackbirds. Or perhaps they’d be Holy Martyrs, clinging to the Host while hordes of marauding Danes looted, burned and raped? It was the year of the Slump. Perhaps there was going to be a revolution?

  One August afternoon, pedalling as fast as they could go beside the Wye, they were ‘buzzed’ by an airplane.

  Lewis braked and stopped in the middle of the road.

  The crash of the R 101 had given a tremendous boost to his scrapbook, although his true loves, now, were the lady aviators. Lady Heath … Lady Bailey … Amy Johnson … The Duchess of Bedford: he could string off their names as if saying his prayers. His favourite, of course, was Amelia Earheart.

  The plane was a Tiger Moth, with a silver fuselage. It circled a second time and the pilot dipped, and waved.

  Lewis waved back, passionately, in case it was one of his ladies; and when the plane zoomed low on its third circuit, the figure in the cockpit flicked back her goggles, and showed her tanned and smiling face. The plane was so close that Lewis swore he saw her lipstick. Then she soared her machine, back into the eye of the sun.

  Over supper, Lewis said that he, too, would like to fly. ‘Hm!’ Benjamin grunted.

  He was far more concerned about their next-door neighbour than the likelihood of Lewis flying.

  34

  THE FARMHOUSE AT Lower Brechfa lay in a very windy position and the pine-trees around it slanted sideways. Its owner, Gladys Musker, was a strong meaty woman, with glossy cheeks and tobacco-coloured eyes. A widow of ten years’ standing, she somehow managed to keep a tidy house and support her daughter, Lily Annie, and her mother, Mrs Yapp.

  Mrs Yapp was an irritable old scrounger, more or less crippled with rheumatism.

  One day, soon after the Joneses bought her field, Lewis was pleaching a hedge between the two properties when Mrs Musker came out and watched him hammering in the stakes. Her defiant gaze unnerved him. She heaved a sigh and said, ‘Life’s all moil and toil, isn’t it?’ and asked if he’d come and rehang a gate. At tea, he polished off six mince-pies, and she put him
on her list of possible husbands.

  At suppertime, he happened to mention that Mrs Musker was an excellent pastrycook, and Benjamin shot an anxious glance at his mother.

  Lewis warmed to Mrs Musker, and she was certainly very friendly to him. He stacked her straw, slaughtered her porker, and one day she came running over the fields, out of breath:

  ‘For the love of God, Lewis Jones. Come and help me with the cow! She gone down like the Devil kicked her!’

  The cow had colic, but he succeeded in coaxing her to her feet.

  Sometimes, Mrs Musker tried to show him upstairs into the bedroom; but he never went that far, preferring to sit in her nice fuggy kitchen and listen to her stories.

  Lily Annie had a pet fox cub that answered to the name of Ben and lived in a wire-netting cage. Ben ate kitchen scraps and was so tame she could handle him like a dolly. Once, when he escaped, she ran down the dingle, calling, ‘Bennie! Bennie!’ – and he bounded out of the brambles and curled in a ball at her feet.

  Ben became quite a local celebrity, and even Mrs Nancy the Castle came to see him.

  ‘But he’s very choosy, you know,’ crowed Mrs Yapp. ‘He don’t take to every Tom, Dick or Harry! Mrs Nancy brought the Bishop of Hereford a while back, and Our Bennie jumped up on the mantelpiece and done his business. It was an awful foxy smell, I can tell you.’

  Unlike her mother, Mrs Musker was an uncomplicated soul, who enjoyed having a man about the place; and if a man did her a favour, she’d give a favour in return. Among her callers were Haines of Red Daren and Jim the Rock – Haines because he gave her tiddling lambs, and Jim because he gave her a good long laugh.

  Lewis hated the idea of her seeing these two and she was plainly disappointed in him. Some days, she was all smiles: at other times, she’d say, ‘Oh, it’s you again! Why don’t you sit and have a chat with mother?’ But Lewis was bored by Mrs Yapp, who only wished to talk about money.

  One morning, having strolled over to Lower Brechfa, he saw the fox’s skin nailed to some barnsiding and Haines’s grey cob tethered to the gate. He left, and did not see Mrs Musker again till February, when he met her in the lane. Draped around her neck there was a red fox-fur.

  ‘Yes,’ she said, clicking her tongue. ‘It’s poor old Ben. He bit into Lily Annie’s hand, and Mr Haines says that’s the way to get lock-jaw, so we had him shot. I cured him myself with saltpetre. And fancy! I only fetched him from the furrier’s Thursday.’

  She added, smiling silkily, that she was alone in the house.

  He waited two days and then trudged through the snowdrifts to Lower Brechfa. The pines were black against a crystalline sky, and the rays of the setting sun seemed to rise, not fall, as if toward the apex of a pyramid. He blew through his hands to warm them. He had made up his mind to have her.

  The cottage was windowless on the north side. Icicles hung from the gutter, and a drop of cold water trickled down his neck. Coming round the end of the house, he saw the grey horse and heard the groans of love in the bedroom. The dog barked, and he ran. He was halfway across the field when Haines’s voice came bawling after him.

  Four months later, the postman confided in Benjamin that Mrs Musker was expecting Haines’s baby.

  She was ashamed to show herself in Chapel, so she stayed at home, cursing the lot of women and waiting for Mr Haines to do the proper thing.

  This he did not. He said his two sons, Harry and Jack, had set their teeth against the marriage, and offered to pay her.

  Indignantly, she refused. But the neighbours, instead of despising her, overwhelmed her with sympathy and kindness. Old Ruth Morgan offered to act as midwife. Miss Parkinson, the harmonium player, brought a lovely gloxinia, and Mr Nantlys Williams himself said a prayer at the bedside.

  ‘Don’t fret, my child,’ he consoled her. ‘It is the woman’s part to be fruitful.’

  She held her head high the day she drove to Rhulen to register the birth of her daughter.

  ‘Margaret Beatrice Musker,’ she printed the capitals when the clerk handed her the form, and when Haines came knocking on the door to see his daughter, she shooed him away. A week later she relented and allowed him to hold her for half an hour. After that, he behaved like a man possessed.

  He wanted to have her baptized Doris Mary, after his mother, but Mrs Musker said, ‘Her name is Margaret Beatrice.’ He offered wads of pound notes: she threw them in his face. She cuffed him when he tried to make love to her. He begged her, pleaded on his knees for her to marry him.

  ‘Too late!’ she said, and locked him out for good.

  He would mooch round the yard, uttering threats and curses. He threatened to kidnap the baby, and she threatened him with the police. He had a terrible temper. Years earlier, he and his brother had slogged at one another with bare fists, for three whole days, until the brother slunk away and disappeared. Somewhere in his family there was said to be a ‘touch of the tarbrush’.

  Mrs Musker was frightened to leave the house. On a page of almanac, she scribbled a note to Lewis Jones and gave it to the postman to deliver.

  Lewis went; but when he came to the gate, Haines was lurking by the beast-house with a lurcher straining on a leash.

  Haines yelled, ‘Get yer dirty interfering nose from here!’ The dog slavered, and Lewis headed for home. All afternoon he wondered whether to call the police but, in the end, thought better of it.

  A gale blew in the night. The old pine creaked; windows rattled, and twigs flew against their bedroom window. Around twelve Benjamin heard someone on the door. He thought it was Haines and woke his brother.

  The hammering went on and above the shrieking wind, they heard a woman’s voice calling, ‘Murder! There’s been a murder!’

  ‘God in Heaven!’ Lewis jumped out of bed. ‘It’s Mrs Yapp.’

  They led her into the kitchen. The embers were still whispering in the grate. For a while she sat babbling, ‘Murder! … Murder!’ Then she pulled herself together and said, grimly, ‘He done hi’self as well.’

  Lewis lit a hurricane lamp and loaded his shotgun.

  ‘Please,’ said Mary – she was on the staircase in a dressing-gown – ‘please, I beg of you, be careful!’ The twins followed Mrs Yapp into the darkness.

  At Lower Brechfa, the kitchen window had been broken. Dimly, in the lamplight, they saw the body of Mrs Musker, her brown homespun dress spread round her, hunched over the rocking-cradle, in the centre of a blackish pool. Lily Annie crouched in the far corner cradling a dark object, which was the baby – alive.

  At nine o’clock, Mrs Yapp had gone, as she usually went, to answer Haines’s knock; but instead of waiting on the doorstep, he had slipped round the house, smashed his gunstock through the window, and fired both barrels, point-blank, at his lover.

  She, in her final flash of instinct, threw herself over the cradle, and so saved the child. The shot sprayed Lily Annie’s hands; and she hid with her grandmother in a cupboard under the stair. Half an hour later, they heard two further shots, and after that there was silence. Mrs Yapp had waited two hours more before she went for help.

  ‘Swine!’ Lewis said, and went outside with the lamp.

  He found Haines’s body in the blood-spattered Brussels sprouts. The gun was at his side, and his head was off. He had tied a length of twine around the triggers, passed it round the stock, put the barrel in his mouth, and pulled.

  ‘Swine!’ he kicked the corpse, once, twice, but checked himself before blaspheming the dead three times.

  The inquest was held in the hall at Maesyfelin. Almost everyone was sobbing. Everyone was in black except for Mrs Yapp, who arrived dry-eyed in a hat of crimson plush with a pink chiffon sea-anemone that waved its tentacles when she nodded.

  The Coroner addressed her in a sad, sepulchral voice: ‘Did the Chapel folk forsake your daughter in the hour of her distress?’

  ‘No,’ said Mrs Yapp. ‘Some of them come up to the house and was very nice to her.’

  ‘Then all honour to this lit
tle Bethel which did not forsake her!’

  He had intended to pass a verdict of ‘wilful murder followed by suicide’, but when Jack Haines read his father’s final note, he changed his mind to ‘manslaughter in a sudden transport of passion’.

  The inquest adjourned and the mourners trooped out for the funeral. There was a sharp wind. After the service, Lily Annie followed her mother’s coffin to the grave. Her wounded hands were wrapped in a flapping black shawl, and she carried a wreath of daffodils to lay on the mound of red soil.

  Mr Nantlys Williams bade all present stay for the second committal, which took place in the far corner of the churchyard. On Haines’s coffin there was a single wreath – of laurel leaves with a card affixed: ‘To dearest Papa, from H & J.’

  Mrs Yapp ransacked the house for anything of value and went with Lily Annie to live at her sister’s in Leominster. She refused to spend ‘one single penny’ on her daughter’s memory: so it was left to Lewis Jones to buy the funerary monument. He chose a rustic stone cross carved with a single snowdrop and a legend reading, ‘Peace! Perfect Peace!’

  Every month or so, he forked the gravel free of weeds. He planted a clump of daffodils to flower each year in the month of her death; and though he never, ever pardoned himself, he was able to enjoy some consolation.

  35

  BEFORE LEAVING THE district, Mrs Yapp let it be known she had no intention of harbouring the ‘child of such a union’; and without telling his mother or twin, Lewis offered to raise her at The Vision.

  ‘I’ll think about it,’ the old woman said.

  He heard nothing further until the postman told him that Little Meg had been parked at The Rock. He ran over to Lower Brechfa, where Mrs Yapp and Lily Annie were piling their possessions on a cart. The Rock, he protested, was no place to bring up a baby.

  ‘It’s where she belongs,’ the old woman retorted tartly: letting it be known that, to her way of thinking, Jim, not Haines, had been the father.