Authors: Elizabeth Buchan
It was hot. Matty pushed the rug off her knees and fiddled with the glass. Her eyes with their slightly startled expression assessed the world over its rim. I’m rich, she told herself, I’m twenty-three, my health is, at last, under control, and I
must
stop seeing things so blackly.
‘Got you,’ shouted Daisy. ‘It’s all over, bar the shouting.’
The figure of Robbie carrying lemonade reinforcements emerged through the lime trees that edged the tennis court. A large woman who walked with a confident sway of her hips, with dark, wavy hair plaited and coiled on the top of her head, Robbie was not so much fat as well made and well covered.
‘I should imagine you’re enjoying yourself, Miss Verral?’ Robbie made it sound like an order. She put down the jug and dabbed at the sweat on her upper lip.
‘Thank you, yes.’
Robbie had already formed her opinion of Miss Verral: a poor thing if ever she saw one. She replenished Matty’s glass and then, on closer inspection, changed her mind. Miss Verral’s chin had an obstinate look so the girl couldn’t be all pap.
‘Have you lived with the family long... Miss... er?’
‘Call me Robbie, Miss Verral. Everyone does.’ Robbie tucked the rug back around Matty’s knees. ‘I’ve been with the family over twenty years and looked after all three. They’ve become mine really, though they don’t like me to say it.’ She straightened up. ‘Instead of my own, I suppose. My fiance was killed in Belgium, you see. And after him I didn’t fancy marriage much. Besides there weren’t many to choose from the ones left. There.’
No, I don’t suppose there were many tough enough, thought Matty, as Robbie attacked the cushions behind her back. Retrieved from their winter dormancy in the shed, they released clouds of dust. ‘Of course,’ said Robbie, banging a cushion in emphasis, her body shaking with the movement, ‘things are quite different here now.’ She banged a second. ‘Money,’ she added cryptically.
Matty was not sure that she had heard correctly and if she had she did not want to discuss it. She deflected the subject.
‘Lady Dysart,’ she asked, ‘when did she die?’
‘When the children were small,’ replied Robbie. ‘She was American, you know.
She
had money, but of course that’s all gone.’
‘Thank you, Robbie,’ said Matty. ‘The cushions are very comfortable now.’ On occasions Matty could sound adamant and, once again, Robbie’s gaze flicked to the obstinately cast chin. The two women measured each other up – one small and nervous and on the brink of discoveries, the other used to running things to her satisfaction.
‘Leave some lemonade for us,’ shouted Flora from the court. ‘It’s blistering.’
Matty leant back against the bench. The sun was gathering strength by the minute, and the figures of the tennis players were outlined sharp and clear against the startling green of the limes. The ping of the ball on gut, the flurry of pigeons and, above all, a sense of encroaching summer laid a gentle compress on Matty.
After tea, Kit offered to show the Chudleigh party around the garden. ‘The house is being cleared up after yesterday and we would only get in the way.’
He led them down the pleached lime avenue at the back of the house towards the ha-ha, which was the only barrier between the garden and the fields where cattle grazed. Then on to the old boathouse and the river glinting in the afternoon sun.
‘I’m afraid it isn’t what it was,’ said Kit, pointing at the garden. ‘But one day...’
Matty could tell that ‘one day’ mattered to Kit very much. Daisy blew out a stream of cigarette smoke and said nothing.
‘Oh, never mind, Kit,’ said Flora, ‘I like it as it is, all wild and how it wants to be.’
‘I agree,’ said Marcus, who didn’t but who was rather taken with Flora.
They made their way down to the river and walked along the fisherman’s path past the plane tree. ‘Look,’ said Kit at one point. ‘The view.’ Obediently they scanned the horizon which was marked by a low ridge that sloped towards Alton. The landscape was not luxuriant or deeply wooded, except for dark patches of green here and there indicating a pocket of clay. Otherwise the chalk ridges ran alongside fields already jade with corn.
‘Nice, isn’t it?’ said Kit abruptly to hide his feelings.
Daisy stamped out her cigarette. ‘You have deep roots here, Kit.’
He flashed her a look which said, Yes, I do. They retraced their steps around the back of the house towards the walled kitchen garden on the west side of the house. ‘There’s Sheppey, the gardener, over by the raspberries.’
At their approach Ned put down his secateurs and pulled off his hat. He was a thin man, weatherbeaten and horny-nailed.
‘I hope you don’t mind us interrupting you, Sheppey?’
‘Oh no, Mr Kit.’ Ned did not smile, but he looked gratified. ‘I was just securing the raspberry canes. We shall have a good crop this year.’
‘Good,’ said Kit. ‘I’m sorry about the nectarine.’ He gestured towards the south wall where hundreds of nail holes pitted the bricks.
‘Yes, sir. That dratted bug got it.’
Daisy looked at her watch. Suddenly she felt out of place and thought longingly of London and of the Hansons’ houseparty she was due to join later in the week. She moved back a step and her foot crunched on splintered glass from an abandoned cold frame.
They left the walled garden and went to look at the grassy hump where the earlier Tudor house had stood. Matty was beginning to feel tired, and depression was drifting over her. Earlier Dysarts had worked on this garden. One of them had planted the roses, another the irises. Still another had put in the yew-encircled lawn and clipped it into conformity, while someone else had planted the pleached limes. Now the spirit of their efforts had slipped away and vanished.
At the south end of the lawn, the path petered out into dense bramble mixed into overgrown laurel. Daisy waved a finger in its direction. ‘Is there anything behind that?’
His eyes hooded, Kit said flatly, ‘Only another bit of overgrown garden.’
Puzzled by the note in his voice, Matty looked at the scrub and her attention was caught by a movement in the thicket — a flash of blue among the green. She peered harder and, without warning, abject misery streamed through her body. An anguish and desolation that she recognized from her own loss so long ago. Then it vanished, leaving Matty white and breathless.
‘Are you all right, Matty?’ Daisy asked, and then explained to Kit and Flora that Matty sometimes had ‘turns’. Matty went as red as, a moment before, she had been white.
‘I am perfectly fine, thank you,’ she said.
All the same, she allowed Marcus to slip his hand under her elbow. They returned to the house in silence, Matty holding tightly onto Marcus’s linen-sleeved arm, which felt so reassuringly normal, telling herself she had imagined the whole episode.
The history of Nether Hinton contained a blueprint which, if you cared to explore it, matched many such communities in the south of England. Bypassed by great events, including the railway line, rocked now and again by small changes, self-sufficient, self-absorbed, myopic in the best sense, it was a community as bound by its own laws as if they had been enforced by Parliament.
Originally the parish had extended over some 28,000 acres (including areas of nearby Farnham, Aldershot and Fleet) and the hundred of Nether Hinton is recorded in the Domesday Book, bequeathed to the Bishop of Winchester for the support of the monks at that holy centre. Since then, fate had treated the village with a reasonable hand. On the dissolution of the monasteries, Nether Hinton was seized by the Crown and, after the intercession of a politically adept Dysart, handed back to the Dean and Chapter. Over the years bits and pieces were hived off from the parish, leaving a tangle of tithing boundaries and long-established loyalties.
Much of Nether Hinton’s surrounding country formed part of an ancient forest, celebrated in the pub names, the Horns, the Old Horns and the North Horns. South of the village at Barley Pound traces of Roman and Norman occupation still linger. Close to that rises a grass mound over which are scattered traces of mortar and masonry and the experts will have it that it hides one of William the Conqueror’s castles. To the south runs the Harroway, along which trudged Saxon traders towards a southern port.
Nether Hinton is not without its own riches – the buried mosaic pavement and a Merovingian hoard of gold coins found on a partridge shoot, for instance, and who knows what more lies undiscovered? In the copses, marshes, streams, park, fields and uplands is a rich, diverse plant life, including bee orchids. Otherwise, there is an unusual mixture of London clay running alongside chalk (in Heath Lane there were both brickyards and tileries). Many natural springs continue to run water – even during the legendary drought of 1921.
After the excitement of the Civil War, in which actions of some importance were fought in the village, Nether Hinton settled down to the proper business of life and, variously at one time, there were a silk factory, watercress beds, a blacksmith, a hop kiln, a brewery, a grocery business, a basket factory – plus two pairs of stocks, both operational.
Besides Hinton Dysart, Nether Hinton boasted several big houses run along traditional lines, of which one was said to be haunted by a squire murdered by his servant. Ghostly carriage wheels were said to be heard in the drive from time to time.
Hinton Dysart was situated at the west end of the village on Well Road. Snaking between the fields bisected by hedgerows and in summer bright with poppies, corncockle, charlock and mayweed, the road was still paved in places so that occasional cars lifted blankets of dust. It led directly into the Borough at the centre of the village and out again, via Pankridge Street, towards Turnpike Road which, like many turnpikes, had a path beaten around the back by toll evaders.
At ploughing time, the rooks rose above windswept plough teams dancing on the turn of the land at the top of the ridges, and the dusk settled over horses plodding home to the rattle of chain and harness. In twilit winter days, the ground rang to the sounds of hoofs and the swish of the muck spreader, to the cries of workers harvesting ‘January King’ cabbages while lines of sugar beet and potatoes under straw and earth clamps shone in the frost. In summer flies rose in clouds over swaying crops, stooked cornfields and herb-rich meadows. The sweet smell of greenish flower-strewn hay and drying hops tickled the nose. Pigs rooted on the grasslands, poultry foraged under the sodden grass and fruit bushes, and the streams feeding the watercress beds ran clear and cold.
On a windy day, like this June afternoon, it was possible to hear the corn soughing, the crack of elm and oak branches over by the hopfields and the rusted tin-can caw of the rooks. And from Well Road, sheep and cattle dotted the horizon like the colourful, quirkily drawn images from a medieval book of hours. It was plain, unadorned southern England, content to be so.
The bakery at the top end of the village (known as Top Taylor’s’ in contrast to ‘Bottom Taylor’s’ at the other) was over-warm, and flour dust hung in the air. The shelves were stacked from the morning’s bake, and Jacko was loading up the oak wheelbarrow for the deliveries. In the back room, Mr Taylor was plastering strips of dough around the oven door to keep the heat in for the Coburg bake.
Mrs Taylor was coughing when Ellen Sheppey ushered Simon Prosser inside. She and Ellen exchanged a look over Simon’s head.
‘Slice of your rice pudding, please, Mrs Taylor,’ said Ellen and mouthed over the boy’s head, ‘Hungry again.’ She looked for her purse in her bag. Simon was half blind, had one foot turned inwards from a birth defect and a mother who did not care very much.
Mrs Taylor stopped coughing and reached under the counter for the circular baking tray in which she baked the rice pudding which had saved some of the villagers from absolute hunger in bad times. ‘I’ll give you an extra wedge to take home, Simon,’ she said, sweat glistening on her scraggy wrists. ‘But mind you eat it all. Don’t give it away.’
Simon took the pudding, pulled back the waxed paper, sank his teeth into the slab – and vanished. Wrung by the pity which always made her feel useless and disturbed, Ellen watched his progress along the street and longed to take him in her arms, absorb him into her sagging, generous body.
‘Those kids were having a fair old go at him,’ she said. ‘I gave ‘em what for.’
‘Thank you is a foreign word in some places,’ said Mrs Taylor, replacing the baking tin. ‘Mind you, I wouldn’t expect anything else.’
Ellen laughed and the two women spent fifteen minutes or so gossiping: a minute analysis of the Dysart wedding and the forthcoming jam-making session at the bakehouse.
‘I’ll be seeing you, then,’ said Ellen. ‘But I’ll take one of your best lardy busters for the old man.’ Mrs Taylor put her hand over her mouth and coughed, creating another haze of flour dust. ‘Take care of that cough, then.’
Run these days by his middle-aged, and less popular, grandson, Mr Barnard’s brewery lay adjacent to the blacksmith’s yard, housed in a one-time corn-drying shed, a section of which had been set aside for making ginger beer and lemonade. The women, dressed in identical overalls and buttoned shoes, were already at work – a multiplicity of curves cancelling any pretence at uniformity. They talked quietly among themselves with an occasional rise in volume whenever someone made a joke. Clean cod bottles and their marble stoppers were stacked ready beside them.
Fastidious at all times, Ellen tied a calico square around her head and pulled the knot tight: it made her feel queasy to think of anything joining the ingredients in the vats. Kat Harris chose that moment to shake with laughter and the marcelled ridges on her head bobbed up and down like wood shavings in water. Ellen frowned and looked away.
She scoured out a red earthenware pan ready for mixing up the big order for ginger beer that had come in from Farnham. Into it she measured root ginger, cream of tartar, yeast and essences, added the correct quantity of spring water and covered it with one of the thick, clean cloths stacked on the bench. Then she turned her attention to the contents of the pans she had made up two days previously. The liquid in them seethed and churned, and bubbles fizzing to the surface broke into the hush that had fallen over the shed. As Ellen skimmed, Simon Prosser’s blank-looking eyes haunted her, reminding her of dark things she did not understand and tried not to think about.