Linn sat down wearily. She had her own story to tell, for her work at Tinkerdine, skivvying for Mrs Frail, would come to an end in another week. Mrs Frail had been displeased because Linn had left at two o’clock on the day Robert had eaten the berries. Now that a replacement had been found, Linn had been told that she could go. But the bad news would keep until after supper. Her father, she saw, was in pain with his leg. She leant across to her little son and dropped a knob of margarine into the centre of his mashed potatoes.
The day was already growing dark. It was raining heavily again. Overhead, in the room above, there was a rapid thud, thud, thud, as the rain dripped through the cottage roof, into the bucket placed to receive it.
When, a few weeks later, the Wages Board was reinstated and the minimum wage for a farm labourer was set by law at thirty shillings, Challoner promptly sacked two men. For him the issue was simple enough. ‘I can’t afford you at that wage.’ His choice of two men was also simple: he sacked those two who belonged to the union, Fred Cox and Johnny Marsh.
Betony, shopping at Jeremy Rye’s, met Fred Cox coming away, and they stood talking for a while. Fred was in a bitter mood. It was the day he had been dismissed.
‘Funny it’s always us union chaps. It was the same at Holland Farm, with the chap that was sacked at Easter time. The only union man on the farm and he was the one that got the push. You don’t mean to tell me it’s just by chance!’
‘That wasn’t the same,’ Betony said. ‘Morton George was a bad lot. He was an idler and a mischief-maker. Mr Wayman had no choice but to dismiss him.’
‘That’s what all the farmers say. No doubt Challoner says it of me! Am I an idler, I’d like to know?’ Cox’s wrath and bitterness brought a hint of tears to his eyes. ‘It ent only me. It’s Kitty as well.’ His wife cooked and cleaned for Challoner. ‒ She also was losing her job. ‘And of course we’ve got to quit our cottage. We’ve got a week to find some place else. Jesus, what a bloody life! No job! No home! No bloody dole! Is this what I fought in Gallipoli for?’
‘Can’t the union do anything?’
‘What can they do? They can’t make jobs!’ Cox took out a newspaper, some days old, and showed it to her, open at an advertisement in bold black type: ‘There is NO unemployment in Canada. Men and women are wanted here.’
‘Are you thinking of going?’ Betony asked.
‘When I got home, after the war, I swore I’d never leave England again. But what is England doing for us? It’s treating us as if we was dirt. It can’t be no worse in Canada.’
‘What about Billy John?’
Fred’s eldest son, as expected, had won his free place at the Grammar school and was due to take it up in September.
‘Where’s the sense of his going to a good school if his dad’s a pauper begging his bread?’ Fred took the paper and pocketed it. ‘I wonder, if I was to apply to emigrate, whether you’d write me a character?’
‘Yes, of course,’ Betony said. ‘If it’s what you really want.’
But it made her sad to think of men like Fred Cox being driven from their own country to seek a living elsewhere.
In a field of oats lying behind Jack Mercybright’s cottage, he and the other Outlands men were at work with their scythes, for the corn had been badly lodged by the rain and could not be cut by the reaper-and-binder. Challoner came down to see how the work was going on. He picked up a musty sheaf here and there and threw them from him in disgust.
‘Not even fit for the pigs!’ he said. ‘I shall soon be bankrupt at this rate!’ He stood beside Jack and watched him at work. ‘Your leg playing you up?’
‘Not so’s you’d notice,’ Jack said.
‘How old are you now, Mercybright?’
‘Why do you want to know?’ Jack asked.
‘Strikes me you’ll soon be putting in for your pension.’
‘Well, I ent the only one, come to that.’
Challoner glanced at him narrowly, but Jack seemed intent upon his work, and his bearded face gave nothing away. The weather was humid; close and warm; Jack sweated as he worked with his scythe, and the sweat ran down into his beard. The other men worked some way away; they were keeping clear of Challoner.
Linn came out of the back of the cottage, carrying a mug of beer for her father. She faltered when she saw Challoner there, but then she came on, through a gap in the hedge, and so up the field to where Jack stood. Robert followed close behind, dragging a horseshoe on a piece of string. Jack took the beer and drank it half down. He wiped his mouth with the back of his hand.
‘Good morning, Mr Challoner,’ Linn said.
John Challoner gave her a nod.
‘You got a holiday from your work?’
‘I don’t go to Mrs Frail any more.’
‘Can’t say I blame you,’ he said. ‘A bit of a Tartar, from what I’ve heard.’
Jack finished his beer and she took his mug. Challoner watched her as she walked down the field. The dress she wore was too big for her; it hung in ugly folds round her hips. Her shoes were badly trodden down and a piece of brown paper, lining one sole, had worked its way up at the back of her heel. Challoner noted all these things. He also noted her shapeliness; the set of her head on her smooth slim neck; the roundness and whiteness of her arms; a certain something in the way she walked. If she had money to spend on clothes … He pictured the stir the girl would cause, arriving, perhaps, at the Hunt Ball. It was a pity she had red hair, and yet it was striking in its way; and he wondered, not for the first time, how Jack Mercybright, a common labourer, had come to produce such a beautiful daughter.
The following morning, when Jack arrived at the farm for work, Challoner met him in the yard.
‘I need a woman to come in and cook and clean for me now that Kitty Cox is going. What about that daughter of yours? Would she be willing to come in?’
‘You’d better ask her,’ Jack said.
‘Can’t you ask her when you get home? It’s not too much trouble for you, is it?’
‘All right, I’ll ask her,’ Jack said, ‘but I dunno that she’ll want to come.’
He was against the idea from the start. He made that plain when he spoke to Linn.
‘But why shouldn’t I take the job? It would be so convenient, being close at hand.’
‘You’ll have no peace if you go to that house. He’s got a bit of a name, you know, and I’ve seen the way he looks at you.’
‘Oh, what nonsense!’ Linn exclaimed. ‘Mr Challoner’s always treated me very politely. You do exaggerate sometimes.’
‘You know the man better than I do, no doubt!’
‘You want me to turn down a pound a week when we are as hard up as we are nowadays?’
‘Whose fault is it that we’re hard up? It’s Challoner’s fault and don’t you forget it!’
‘We need that money,’ Linn said.
‘We can manage without it if we try. At least I’m back to thirty bob.’
‘No, father, I’m taking the job.’
‘All right. You suit yourself. But you’ll have trouble with that man as sure as God’s in Gloucestershire, and then you’ll wish you’d listened to me.’
Jack’s tone was so earnest that Linn for a while experienced some fear. But later that evening, mending her small son’s shabby clothes, she thought of the things she needed to buy, and the fear receded to the back of her mind. She went to the farmhouse on Sunday morning and told Mr Challoner she wanted the job.
‘There is just one thing, however,’ she said. ‘I shall have to bring my little boy.’
‘Isn’t there someone you could leave him with?’
‘I’d sooner have him with me, Mr Challoner, at least until he goes back to school.’
‘My house is not a nursery, you know,’ Challoner said, in his jocular way. ‘I’ll be paying you to cook and clean for my son and me, not to be coddling that boy of yours.’
‘The work will be done, I promise you, and I’ll see that Robert gives no trouble.’
‘Very well. You bring him along. We’ll fit in together, I daresay.’
It was agreed. Challoner shook hands with her and saw her to the door. Linn looked at his good-humoured face and was sure that her father must be mistaken.
‘I wonder if I might ask you something, Mr Challoner?’
‘Ask away! I’m all ears!’
‘It’s the roof of our cottage,’ Linn said. ‘I know you’re a very busy man, but it is in rather a bad condition, and what with the weather we’re having now ‒’
‘Leaking, is it? Well, that won’t do. I’ll get a man to come along and see what wants doing as soon as possible.’
‘Oh, if you could! I’d be ever so grateful, I really would.’ Linn felt rather pleased with herself. She went home to her father and repeated Mr Challoner’s promise.
‘As soon as possible?’ Jack said. ‘And when is that, I’d like to know? The roofs been leaking for nearly three years. I’ve asked him and asked him a hundred times but it ent made no difference that I can see.’
‘Perhaps you went the wrong way about it. You can be very surly sometimes.’
‘And you went the right way, I suppose?’ Jack raised his newspaper and shut her out. His anger rose with the smoke from his pipe. After a while he spoke again. ‘Is it all fixed up, then, that you’re going there to molly for him?’
‘Yes, father, it’s all arranged. I start tomorrow at seven o’clock.’
Thus Linn went to work at Outlands Farm, and Robert went with her every day. She thought her father’s fears were groundless, but if by any chance he was right, Robert would be her best protection.
‘So this is young Master Mercybright?’ Challoner said, on the first morning. ‘He’s a solemn little chap, isn’t he? And dark as dark! I can’t see that he’s much like you, so I take it he favours his father, eh?’
Challoner knew, as everyone in Huntlip did, that Linn had not been married to Robert’s father. She glanced at him, suspecting some slyness in the remark, but he was still looking at the little boy, and was pressing a coin into his hand.
‘Robert’s father is dead,’ she said.
‘I know that,’ Challoner said. ‘Chap called Tom Maddox, wasn’t it? A carpenter down at old man Tewke’s? But does the boy take after him?’
‘Yes, there’s a likeness,’ Linn said. She was shedding her mackintosh. ‘Where would you like me to start work?’
Within a week, Linn knew she had made a mistake. Challoner was in and out of the house all day. He hung about while she cooked the meals. Sometimes he came and stood by her, looking over her shoulder, into the pans, as she stirred a thickening into the stew or prodded the potatoes to see if they were done. He would lean against her, thigh to thigh, his body pressing hard against hers. He would take the wooden spoon from her, and would taste the broth, looking at her through the rising steam.
‘A bit more salt!’ he would say to her, and when she was putting the salt in, his big hand would clamp down over hers, squeezing her fingers very hard till the salt-lump was crushed and sprinkled in. ‘Don’t be afraid to bung it in! We’re both salt-herrings, my son and me. Let’s try it again and see if it’s right. Here, you have a taste and see what you think.’
Sometimes, when she was down on her knees, scrubbing the flagstones, he would stand in the doorway, watching her, eyeing the shape of her bent body. Although Robert was in the room, his presence was no protection to her, for the man made remarks to the little boy, playing upon his innocence.
‘She’s got a fine figure, this mother of yours. She’s worth better things than scrubbing floors, don’t you think so, young Mercybright?’
More than once, as he made these remarks, he stooped over Linn and touched her body, his hands going over the curve of her hip or tracing the slender course of her spine as she stooped to her work. And each time, when she squirmed away, pushing at his hand with her scrubbing-brush, he would step back, laughing deep in his throat, and would stand for a while in front of her, watching the colour that rose like a fire in her fair-skinned face. Once when he laid his hand on her, Robert ran forward and pushed at him, looking up at his face with a dark-eyed frown.
‘Don’t do that, my mother don’t like it!’ the little boy said.
‘How do you know what your mother likes? You don’t know everything, young fella-me-lad!’
He was always trying to catch Linn’s eye. His admiring glances were meant to please. But Linn found it hard to look at him. In the past she had thought him a handsome man, but now his big face and easy smile and the meaningful softness in his eyes had become disgusting and loathsome to her. She knew that if she met his gaze her loathing would be betrayed at once.
Challoner’s admiration for Linn was not confined to her looks alone. She was a cut above the rest of her kind. Her speech was less broad and her voice itself was pleasant to hear. Her work in the house was full of little touches that took him by surprise. When laying the table for a meal, she put out the cruets and serving-spoons that had long lain idle in their black bags, and when serving the meals, she made use of the gravy-boats and soup-tureens and saw to it that they were hot. The meals themselves were excellent. She took trouble in making savoury sauces to go with the carrots, the marrow, the swedes; and her light fluffy pancakes delighted him.
‘Where did you learn to do these things?’
‘I was in service at Meynell Hall.’
‘Seems to me we’re in clover, my boy,’ Challoner said to his son Gerald. ‘We haven’t been so well looked after since your mother was alive.’
Gerald agreed. The house was a pleasant place these days. It was clean, comfortable, cheerful, and bright. There were fresh sheets on the bed every week; there were beautifully ironed shirts to put on; clothes were mended, boots were cleaned, and messages were got from the shop. There were even flowers in a bowl on the hall table.
‘Why not ask her to come full-time?’ Gerald suggested to his father one evening.
‘What, come and live in?’ Challoner said. ‘I doubt if she’d leave that father of hers.’
‘She might if you made it worth her while.’
‘I’m not sure that I know what you mean.’
‘If you were to marry her,’ Gerald said, ‘that would make it worth her while.’
‘You’re jumping the gun a bit, aren’t you, my boy? She’s only been here a couple of weeks!’ But the thought was not new in Challoner’s mind, and he saw that Gerald suspected as much. Casually, yet choosing his words, he said: ‘What would you really say, I wonder, at having a stepmother in the house?’
‘I’d say good luck to you,’ Gerald said. He was already courting a girl at Blagg and hoped to marry her in the spring. As he was only nineteen, he was bent on winning his father’s goodwill. ‘You could do a lot worse than marry the Mercybright girl, I reckon, though the boy’d be a nuisance, I suppose.’
‘I wouldn’t say that. He’s a nice little chap in his funny way. I’ve taken quite a fancy to him.’
‘Well, so long as you don’t go and leave him the farm!’
‘What, another man’s child, and a bastard at that? Don’t talk rubbish!’ Challoner said.
But the thought of marriage, endorsed as it had been by his son, began to take firmer root in his mind. He began to watch Linn in a different way; weighing her up; all the pros and cons. He would be marrying beneath him, of course. He could hear what some of his neighbours would say. ‘One of his own labourers’ daughters, and with an illegitimate child at that!’ But he had no taste for marrying a woman of his own class, for that meant some widow, nearer his age. He would prefer a young wife like Linn; someone he could cosset and spoil; someone who would be grateful to him for lifting her up out of poverty; someone he could dote on and enjoy.
Linn was a very beautiful girl. He saw her, in his mind’s eye, dressed in good clothes and some jewellery, presiding at his table when friends came to dine. He saw her accompanying him to whist drives and dances and the N.F.U. social eveni
ngs. He saw her wearing smart little hats, coming to him from the hairdresser’s in town, smelling of scent and face-powder, her golden-red hair set in rippling waves.
One morning he woke with his mind made up. He would soon be sixty-two. He had been a widower for eight years. Where was the sense in hanging back?
The harvest weather was terrible. Most of the corn had to be cut by hand. And all day, across the fields at Outlands, came the tseep-tsawp-tseep-tsawp of the mowers sharpening the blades of their scythes.
Linn, when she took her father’s dinner up to him in the Big Piece, found him wearing sacks tied like gaiters round his legs, and some of the other men the same. The corn as they cut it was sodden and heavy; the grain was sprouting in the ear; the straw was blackened and smelt of mould. There was no harvest jollity in the field. Jack took the basket with scarcely a word. She noticed that he was limping badly.
‘Is granddad cross with us?’ Robert asked, returning with her to the farmhouse.
‘His leg is hurting him,’ Linn said.
One day when she had been picking beans in the garden at Outlands, she suddenly found that Robert was missing.
She went into the house, calling him, but only Challoner was there. He stood in front of the kitchen range, booted feet wide apart, hands deep in his breeches pockets.
‘The boy’s not here,’ he said to her. ‘I sent him to the village to buy some sweets.’
‘But he never goes to the village alone! And I don’t like you giving him money to spend, Mr Challoner. I mentioned it to you once before.’
‘Don’t be a spoilsport. He’ll come to no harm. I wanted the chance of a word with you, without little pitchers listening, all ears.’
‘I’d rather you didn’t, Mr Challoner.’
‘You haven’t heard what I’ve got to say.’
‘I don’t think I want to hear it,’ she said.
‘You’ll soon change your mind when you know what it is.’
Challoner was deeply amused. He watched the movement of colour in her face and wished she would look him straight in the eye. He had arranged things pretty well; he meant to savour this courtship of his. The girl’s show of modesty did her credit; it was only what he expected of her; and he would enjoy breaking it down. He was going to be very gentlemanly. He meant to treat her with perfect respect. He was going to show her, in fact, what marriage to a man of his sort would mean for a woman such as she.
The Land Endures (The Apple Tree Saga Book 4) Page 22
