The Wooden Shepherdess (7 page)

How horrible everything was, and how horrible he was!

There were times when Augustine was downright homesick for
Alice May
. In this limboish mark-time life he was leading, past recollection was often so strong that even here—cooped up in his inland shack—he would hear the slatting of sails. The morning after that fairy-palace fiasco, while waiting for Ree to appear (for he took re-appearance for granted in spite of yesterday's tantrum), he sat on his only chair with nothing to read but a Sears-Roebuck catalogue someone had left—for use—in the jakes. Thumbing the leaves, he came on a page of sou'-westers and oilskins.... The air smelled suddenly salt in his nose, the floor began to heave and he found himself seized with a terrible longing for ships and for adult masculine company. Clank of the pawl as you heaved on the winch: the smell of Stockholm tar as you worked it into the dead-eyes, of linseed oil as you rubbed it into the mast: monkeying up the ratlines to spend a misty hour aloft on watch at the masthead....

Suppose he up-anchored from here, went down to the coast and hung about waterfronts? So many seamen these days jumped ship in American ports that there might be a chance of a berth and no questions asked, in spite of no seaman's card! Other men did it.... Arthur Golightly, that ox-like American found at a café table in Paris reading Macpherson's
Ossian
: when Arthur wanted to cross the Atlantic he always worked his passage—if “working” was ever the word to apply to Arthur, who boasted he'd lost on merit alone more jobs than anyone else in Montmartre (he had just succeeded in losing a night-watchman's job in a graveyard: or else, as he grandly invited, Augustine was welcome to doss in his canvas booth any time). At sea, said Arthur, once out of port you could only be “sacked” in the literal sense (i.e. with a weight in the bottom and string drawn tight round the neck). But it never quite came to that, even if once the pilot was dropped you did no work whatever as usual. Signing of course for the whole round voyage, once the ship docked on the other side if Arthur wandered ashore and never came back the skipper was only too glad.

Monumental American Arthur, the son of a Great War General, only taking to this way of life as a means of avoiding West Point himself! But his rough-hewn face was the face of the norm-busting proletarian worker on Bolshevik posters (apart from his pimples): the muscles he never used were those of an elephant.... There of course was the rub: for if Arthur put in for a job as a stoker he looked it, whereas Augustine's all-too-obvious Oxford-and-upper-class skin was something he wasn't yet snake-like enough to know how to slough. Who would ever believe he could work with his hands? And once they began asking questions the risk of arrest was appalling. Still, if things went on much longer this way he would bloody well have a try: it was better than sitting around like a mesmerised rabbit, awaiting the coup-de-grâce....

But where on earth was Ree? She had never before been as late as this in arriving to claim him.

Even a job in the galley'd be better than nothing, if all else failed.

Alice May
's galley was built on the deck, amidships: once, he'd been put on to cook while the schooner was bowling along with half-a-gale on the beam (somewhere off Chesapeake Bay, but a long way out to keep the Gulf Stream under her). Somehow the cowl on the chimney which ought to swivel was jammed so the wind blew down it, and sulphurous almost invisible smoke blew out of the ash-pit. In order to breathe at all the galley door had to be open, so every wave which swept the deck as she rolled had flooded him up to the knees and hissed into clouds of scalding steam on the stove—but he'd had to stop in there with his eyes tight shut and coughing his lungs out in order to hold the great iron stewpot on to the top of the stove whenever it tried to dance....

How he wished he was back there now!

From earliest childhood, most of Augustine's happiest memories seemed to be
men
. His mother had babied him terribly. Right till the age of four he'd been made to ride in a pram while Nanny pushed sedately behind with the Under-nurse in attendance, and lucky Mary capered in front. He remembered that shameful vehicle now: it was white with Oxford-blue wheels, and when he got big his carroty curls were squashed between his skull and the canopy.... Therefore no wonder his favorite sport was always escaping from Nanny! Nanny herself of course couldn't run, but Mabel the young Under-nurse had been picked for her legs—and clocked pretty good on a fifty-yard sprint. So Augustine in turn had grown adept at going to ground the moment he got out of sight. Thus, the very first time he'd been taken to Newton Llanthony to visit his uncles in state, the child had been bolting like this with the whole open length of the terrace ahead but had slipped inside through a door left ajar while Mabel was rounding the Orangery. This was the door of the sacred gunroom; and there was Great-Uncle William, surrounded by guns one of which he was taking apart!

Great-Uncle William those days had smelled of black gunpowder even more than cigars, for right to the end of his shooting career the General stuck to an old muzzle-loader for wildfowl as lighter to handle (a connoisseur's choice which nearly cost him an eye, reloading too quickly on top of a smouldering spark so the old clay pipe he used to pour in the powder blew up in his face). Uncle William had greeted the fugitive “baby” gravely, as man to man; and most of the rest of the morning was spent discussing the whole art of shooting as well as the cleaning and care of a gun. Meanwhile Mabel had raced all over the garden, hollering: “Come out of that bush this moment Master Augustine—I see you as plain as plain!” Or again: “If you don't come down from that tree I go straight to y'Runcle.” But uncle and nephew were equally deaf to her hollers.

Thenceforth, whenever he had to ride in that beastly pram he insisted that Nanny must pile his snowy quilt with fircones: these he threw in the air one by one, and sat in his pram-harness blazing away with his popgun and crying “Hi lost!” while Mabel earned her pay in the brambles retrieving his birds....

“
Hello, there!
”

Startled clean out of his skin by a stranger's voice in the silence Augustine looked up; and gaped at an unknown girl's silhouette framed in his doorway against the light—and fuzzed by the fine wire mesh of the screen.

“Well.... Do I walk right in, or are you saying your prayers or sum'p'n?”

Without waiting an answer she strode straight past Augustine across to the window, remarking: “Believe me, I sure would hate to intrude!” There she paused to curse (with affection) the horse outside she had hitched to a tree, then flopped on his bed in her oil-stained ill-fitting two-dollar ex-army cotton-drill breeches, flipped out a Lucky and struck a match on her teeth.

“C'm on! Let us get us acquainted. You're Augusteen. I'm Sadie.” He looked a bit blank, so she added; “Your durned little two-timing woodchick's kid-buddy.” A continuing pause.... “Wood
cock
, bonehead!” And when it was clear that Ree's surname really meant nothing at all to him, “Darrrrrling Anne-Marie—do you get me?”

He'd got her at last.... So this of course was the blacksmith's ambiguous niece! All the same “kid-buddy” my foot, for the girl was all of twenty and could be no younger than he was.... She reeked of powder and scent, and he studied her now with a growing distaste. In the “Pack” an especial glamour attached to Bootlegger Sadie: to him however this slab-faced wench seemed far from attractive. All he saw was a stocky brunette in unbecoming attire, with heavy eyebrows, greasy white skin, yellow-stained fingers and hair coiled over her ears in snails with the pins falling out.

She stopped the best part of an hour. She pumped him with personal questions and said she thought Limeys were cute; and only left in the end when he couldn't give her a drink. Even then her scent hung around; and he stripped off the bedding she'd sat on to air it outside in the sun.

*

Of course it couldn't have gone on for ever, Ree keeping Augustine her private discovery hidden from all the others—not with her absence so frequent and friends so inquisitive. Yesterday, blundering tearfully home from the Big Warren Place she'd been caught by inquisitors right off-balance and far too upset to fence.

So now the news of her find was finally out, and the Pack were poised for the pounce.

Sadie was only advance-guard. Late that night, long after Augustine's bedtime, the Pack arrived in a bunch: he was wakened by Ree reluctantly yodeling “Whoopee!” right in his ear (but soft, like the note of a song-bird), and opened his eyes to find his room was full of electric torches and shadows. They'd come (Ree explained rather glumly, avoiding his eye) to throw a surprise party for him here on his roof, and he'd got to get up.

Augustine looked round him indeed in surprise: boys and girls of school age out together—at night, with no one in charge! He was more than a little dumbfounded. The British upper-class culture Augustine himself had been reared in had tended to “sex its pubescents in half” as Douglas had put it at Oxford. They kept the two halves apart and taboo to—indeed, repelled by each other by means of hideous protective disguises and ritual masks: “Les jeunes-filles-en-herbe all covered in gym-tunics down to their calves,” said Douglas; “And boys right down to their heels in repressions and acne, until....”

“Till all of a sudden the girls ‘come out'—like sweet-peas!” put in Jeremy (whereupon someone had said something coarse about pods).

But Augustine had got to admit this lot looked gay and as pretty as pictures! The party ought to be fun....

The night was dark, so they climbed the ladder they'd brought and hung their lantern high on his chimney, the only light otherwise coming from fireflies and fitful glimmers of lightning. The night was sultry as well as dark, so the whole lot stripped to their underwear: boys in their white cotton B.V.D.s and girls in their crêpe-de-chine cami-knicks. Up the ladder they went in the dark, and perched astride the ridge of his roof in a row. Soon they were singing and joking pretty inanely, eating huge slices of melon they dribbled all down them and drinking red wine from the neck of a carboy they heaved hand to hand. The wine was heady, so presently each now-and-then one lost his or her balance: rolled down the shingles and fell from the ten-foot eaves with a plonk.

Augustine had lost touch with Ree from the start and his first next-neighbor up there was a girl called Janis, a charmer who claimed to be gone eighteen (which wasn't quite true) and also claimed to be Scottish. Augustine liked her a lot.... But Janis fell off; and this left him now next Ree's cousin Russell, a beautiful lad with contortionist's double-joints in his shoulders who wrapped his own arms round his own neck from behind like a scarf, and could also talk if he liked in blank verse. Augustine and he got on fine ... until he too fell off in the very act of contorting, and dropped with his hands clasped under his chin.

Bella beyond in the draggled next-to-nothing she wore had had too many swigs at the carboy by now for a fifteen-year-old to talk very clearly; and yet she was all too keen to converse. But it didn't last long; and instead of astride the ridge she was sitting side-saddle, which meant when Bella finally went that instead of rolling she slid and tore what little she'd got. They all fell off like that in the end—or else fell asleep and fell off.

As dawn broke Augustine and Sadie were left to the last: so Augustine fell off on purpose, leaving Sadie up there alone. Silhouetted against the pale green sky in exiguous pink crêpe-de-chine and stockingless garters (and scented this time with Citronella, to ward off the bugs) Sadie the lone survivor had started to sing, in a powerful deep operatic contralto. Augustine kept under the eaves to be out of her sight on his way back to bed in the waxing daylight, picking his way through the light-colored sleeping heaps—for, feeling the cold, they had mostly crept together in heaps in their flimsies (he found Bella's puppy-fat arm right across Russell's face obstructing the breathing, so moved it).

But Ree was sleeping alone, and shivering. Made slightly reckless by wine, this way and that he divided the swift mind as to whether to carry her in under cover; but thought in the end “better not,” and brought out a blanket instead. Just as he tucked it round her she sat up straight and was sick out loud (since she “didn't drink liquor” it must be the melon had done it?). Then, without noticing who he was, she wound herself tight in the rug and was instantly back asleep.

That morning Augustine slept late. When at last he went out to retrieve his blanket he found his green purlieus battered and trampled, but everyone vanished. The blanket however still lay exactly as Ree had crawled out, like an empty cocoon. The carboy was gone. But when he looked up he saw they'd forgotten their lantern: there it still hung from his chimney, the tiny flame still orange through smoke-blackened glass in the face of the noonday sun.

Augustine's letter to Mary (in which he'd already described the wooden church as “a little deserted shepherdess, scorned by her faithless swain the derelict Ford”: “Ali Baba's Cave” with its stills and its staybones and so on) remained to be finished. But last night's party was surely a bit altogether
too
Malinowski.... Those fabulous Trobriand Islanders, this with a vengeance was Whites keeping up with the Browns! He'd never seen, never
dreamed
of anything like it.... He felt most loth to write home about it because it had left him far too disturbed, as if something was cracking inside—and excited. The fact is he didn't know yet what to think: was this Progress or Decadence? Augustine didn't feel ready as yet to commit himself—quite. It was shocking, girls getting drunk—even anyone not quite grown-up.... Yet one thing at least was fully apparent: life here could be mighty enjoyable—Sadie apart.

The better to think he sat down, and at once fell asleep in the sun. Sleeping, he dreamed of that fateful day back in Wales, the day he came home from the Marsh to his empty echoing house with a drowned child doubled over his shoulder, and found to his horror on lifting it down it had stiffened bent double. But there things changed: for he knew in this dream (without knowing the reason) that this time he couldn't just leave the tiny waterlogged body all night as it was in its sopping clothes on the sofa—he'd got to undress it, like putting a live child to bed. Yet as soon as he started to do so, he found that instead of bare skin underneath this child was downy all over with delicate fur; and a fur attractively soft to the touch, like a mole's.... When he pulled her last vest over her head—leaving all the downy body uncovered except for the socks—he saw that the wide-open eyes in the small dead face were alive and were eagerly watching him take off her clothes: nor were these even the pair of eyes which belonged, they were Ree's....