Turf or Stone (14 page)

Nearly eight weeks after Shannon’s birth in the middle of August, the weather turned hot again. It was three o’clock in the afternoon. Phoebe and Rosamund were going down to bathe.

They undressed by the river in an oval hollow in the meadow; a threshing machine was droning and they both felt sleepy and languid.

A watcher saw them standing on the bank, then sit down, and with upflung arms slide out of sight. A moment later they reappeared, wading through the shallows, Rosamund with eager limbs, Phoebe shading her eyes from the sun which flashed on the rippling water. When they were in the middle of the river they plunged. It was Dorothy who was watching them from the summerhouse where she was sitting with a basket of coloured wools on her lap, and a piece of canvas between her fingers. Near
her, lying close to her feet on the warmed, wooden floor, Philip was playing with her pearl necklace.

The grass under the trees had been mown. Pale green apples hung glossy among the leaves. There were clumps of pink and yellow columbine growing near the
summer-house
which was blistering in the sun. The ants ran over the steps.

‘Don’t do that, darling.’

‘What, mummy?’

‘Drag my pretty pearls across your teeth.’

He unclasped the pearls, wound them twice round her bare ankle above the strap of her thin sandal, and, in trying to fasten them, snapped the clasp.

‘Can I get up?’ he asked, looking at her slyly.

‘Yes, if you’ll promise not to run about in the sun. Does your mum’s nose want powdering?’

‘No.’

Dorothy raised her hands to her curls, stretched, lit a cigarette and rose. The pearls fell off when she moved. Philip saw them; he said nothing.

‘Let’s go down to the river and watch the girls swim.’

‘Phib can’t swim much, mummy.’

‘No, but Rosamund can.’

They left the summerhouse and the pearls lying on the floor. Dorothy pick-a-backed Philip through the meadows and he tickled the back of her neck with a grass. He sang her a song, but all the time the pearls were at the back of his mind.

The river was low. They were able to sit on a little pebbly beach. Philip wanted to catch minnows, and then he wanted to bathe. Dorothy undressed him and he
capered into the water with his tongue hanging out. He kept looking over his shoulder – he thought something queer lived in the sandmartins’ holes, something like a large spider.

He was quite right; Phoebe was not even an average swimmer, although she forced herself to go into deep water.

Under the opposite bank a slowly turning pool curved into the red clay, overhung by fresh young alders thick with leaves whose dipping branches swept the water. Phoebe swam froggily into the pool with her neck strained, her mouth tight shut, her head far too high. Suddenly she saw a fishing line lying on the surface. It was Easter’s; he was having a half day off and spending it fishing. His voice came through the green leaves flurrying Phoebe. She was dismayed.

‘I’m sorry, I can’t stop swimming,’ she panted in answer to his request that she would throw the broken line ashore.

Her loose swimming suit frequently slipped off her breast. She felt terrified in that clean green water….

‘He’s smiling behind those leaves,’ she thought, and put herself about.

‘Let yourself go, miss; you’d enjoy it!’ Easter called.

‘Thank you; keep your advice. Miss Phoebe can swim,’ cried Rosamund haughtily.

She had seen Easter all the time. What on earth did he hope to catch there? She was diving off a submerged rock into a narrow pool between two boulders. Each time the current brushed her softly against rocks. She had nerve, and a passionate love of flinging herself into water.
Directly after her aristocratic speech she hitched up her behind and disappeared.

Over them all the sun flashed and sparkled, caught by the broken current. The meadows were bathed in the full calm flood; the trees flung clear green shadows. Behind the alders, Easter slowly lit his pipe, gathered up line and bait, and strolled away.

Philip stayed in until he began to turn blue. Dorothy dragged him out. She dried him on his sisters’ towels, gently butting her face into his thin body, hiding it in the folds.

‘Eat you… eat you… with a big wooden spoon.’

He grasped her hair.

‘Mammy, your pearls are broken.’

‘What, what? Who broke them? You naughty boy! Where are they?’

‘In the summerhouse. They came off.’

‘Are you sure? Then come along at once.’

‘Oh, you’re cross…’

‘A little. No – no, my darling.’

She kissed him again, heedlessly picked up the towel, wandered away with Philip leaning fondly against her.

Phoebe and Rosamund went and lay down in the yard on the hot cobbles. Rosamund rolled her bathing suit down to the waist, and Phoebe lay with her face turned up to the sky, her open hand pressed over her eyes. The yard was very quiet.

‘We’re ripening,’ said Rosamund, who was in a good temper.

‘Now we’re the Modest Marys again,’ she continued, while she tried to twist her hair into curls. The ‘Modest
Marys’ were two young ladies of their invention who loved to take off their clothes, particularly in public places. They made a habit of lying in the yard after swimming.

Several years ago, a grumpy old Methodist groom who had worked for Matt before Easter, raised objections to this and threatened punishment. Even now an unexpected footstep would make them jerk with involuntary wariness and turn their eyes instinctively towards the harness room which was their old refuge.

‘Supposing Brant came now…’ Rosamund murmured idly.

Phoebe smiled. She was happy, untroubled. Her piteous, puzzled brow was relaxed. She began humming to herself, but broke off as her sister asked: ‘Why don’t you always lie here like you used? This is the first time this summer.’

‘Oh, I don’t know.’

‘That’s a lie,’ observed Rosamund.

Phoebe was ashamed.

‘Well, then, I shan’t answer the question.’

She lay still, assured that no Easter would appear. Presently she went in, dressed, and practised for two hours.

Matt did not have dinner with them that evening. Dorothy had quarrelled with him again. She began, as usual, to abuse him to the children: ‘The fact is, your father is a thoroughly careless, indolent man.
Thorougly
. He allows everybody far too much freedom. I told him I’d left my pearls in the summerhouse this afternoon, and when I went to get them they were gone. He took them out of his pocket: “Here they are; Mary picked them up,” he said, as though that was quite an ordinary thing to happen.’

‘Mary?’ Phoebe exclaimed.

‘That’s Easter’s wife apparently. I can’t bear that couple. The idea of letting her sit in the summerhouse! Your father said he’d given her permission. Is nothing mine, I’d like to know? It’s absurd, ridiculous. It’s ridiculous. Eh? Disgraceful.’

She could not resist knocking on his door as she passed on her way to bed.

‘I think you’re disgraceful. It’s humiliating to have to live with such a person; absolutely degrading.’

Matt did not reply. His eyes were on the book before him.

‘Behold thou art fair, my love; behold, thou art fair; thou hast dove’s eyes within thy locks.’

Dorothy, her long skirts gathered in one hand, her ear inclined towards the door, awaited some sound or retort from within. The unbroken, stony patience that Matt had shown towards her for the last few weeks enraged her.

She retired to her room, flung off her clothes in a heap on the floor, wrenched a strap off her shoe, patted herself all over with stinging perfume and jumped into bed, where she dragged the clothes close round her neck as if it were winter.

She was among those people who cannot hide their anger in their minds: rage shook her bodily and vented itself in violent action. She did not remain lying in the bed for more than a couple of minutes.

‘He’s drinking,’ she exclaimed, sitting up. She sprang to the floor and ran impetuously down the passage.

‘Matt, you’re getting drunk in there by yourself. How disgusting!’

‘Why; do you want to join me?’

‘So you
are
.’

‘No, I’m not. Worse perhaps,’ he added to himself.

‘You’ve locked the door. I
will
see what you’re doing. Let me in,’ she cried, shaking the panels.

He rose from the table: ‘Very well.’

He unlocked the door. Dorothy leapt into the room like a toy termagant, her hair flying, her feet bare. Her eyes glanced here and there, flashing over Matt as if he were too contemptible to dwell on. He was standing by the uncurtained window. He moved and sat down at the table again, looking at her sideways.

‘Do you know you’re naked?’

Her nakedness roused him but not towards herself. She was soft and white with a fascinating angularity about the shoulders and hips, of which one was slightly more developed than the other. The strange charm of it used to delight him when they were first married. She abruptly dragged the curtain over the window, then, standing opposite him with the table between them, leant her two thin arms on it and sank her head between her shoulders. She stared into Matt’s strained, bright eyes; she had reason to dread that stimulated brilliance.

‘You’ve hidden it!’

She flew to the corner cupboard, flung it open and peered inside. It contained a tin of tobacco, an old calendar and a pair of broken spectacles.

She looked carefully around the bare room. Her face was flushed, so that she looked painted.

‘There, now you’ve seen,’ ejaculated Matt, suddenly rising, ‘you’ve had a good look round, now go. Now leave
me alone, for I’ve had enough. Do you hear me? Go!’

‘You can’t order me about. I don’t care a twopenny damn for what you say. I won’t go until it pleases me, and before I do you’ve got to promise me something…’

‘Well?’ he said with a sort of alarming restraint, striking his knee softly with his fist. ‘Well, I can guess what that is.’

‘Yes, because you know you ought to do it,’ she shouted, quivering all over, ‘because it’s on your conscience that you haven’t kept your word. Months ago you said you’d get rid of Easter. Now you must do it. Tomorrow.’

‘Listen to me, Dorothy, and remember what I’m going to say, for I shall neither repeat it nor go back on it: I am not going to sack Easter – how
dare
you interrupt? Be quiet – he works satisfactorily, his wife has been ill, and they have a delicate baby. I won’t have a decent man thrown out of work for your whim.’

He grasped her shoulders.

‘Let go of me!’ she spat.

‘In a moment I’m going to put you out of the room and you’ll run bleating to Phoebe. Do as you please, of course – what do I care what she or anybody else thinks of me?’

‘Nothing, you never did,’ she screamed bitterly, and began to sob, so that the tears dripped off her chin. Matt took his hands off her shoulders. She thought she could reproach him.

‘If you were called by your right name it would be “coward”…’

‘And “bully”…’

‘And “brute”.’

His face flamed so suddenly into fury that she fled,
banging the door after her, as the Bible flung by her husband crashed against it and fell open to the floor in a rustle of thin pages.

Trembling all over, he stooped and picked it up.

‘Behold thou art fair, my love; thou hast dove’s eyes.’

Matt shook as if he were moved to the very heart. There were deep furrows of pain in his face; he stood breathing in great sighs and his eyes were closed.

As a result, the next day he rode over to Davis’ and remained a week, drinking persistently, although his carousals were even more spiritless than usual, and the memory of Mary, which haunted his senses, lay like a vision in the bottom of his cups. Mrs Davis was away with Marge; the two men kept to one room of the ill-kept old house, a room which was largely taken up with an incubator and smelt of straw. There was a grey pall of dust everywhere, and lumps of mud lay on the floor brought in by their boots. Davis’ mongrel was always whining to get in or out, or lying in his basket, yawning like a crocodile and growling at Matt. Davis would pick him up; he would sit on his master’s knee with his long snout pushed into Davis’ ear, making the most horrible grunts while his eye rolled and glittered like a glass ball. Davis himself was not particularly lively, as he had taken a woman and kept lachrymosely wondering what his wife would say to it if she knew.

One evening he brought her in, a tall, stout, pale girl with dancing eyes, dirty hands, and ragged skin round her nails. She kissed Matt. He pushed her away, and Davis laughed, and they danced light-heartedly; but when she was gone he was more depressing than ever, and said he should give her up.

‘I know I should take these things as they come,’ he lamented, ‘but I don’t suppose Jean would like it, and for the life of me I can’t help thinking what she’d say.’

At last, one night Matt went out and saddled his horse. There was a moon giving out a pale bluish light which made everything look hard and cold. It was just above the chimney stack and wavered like a reflection in rushing water as the invisible smoke shimmered across it.

Davis came running up.

‘Why, where are you off to?’

‘I’m going home.’

Davis remarked the shaking hand, the hag-ridden expression.

‘Never – it’s too late. Wait till the morning.’

‘I
cannot
wait.’

Davis was startled by the fervent tone, and slightly offended.

‘’Ave you forgot summat you ’ad ought to ’ave remembered last week?’

Matt mounted unsteadily.

‘“I have left undone those things which I ought to have done, and I have done those things which I ought not to have done, and there is no health in me.” Goodnight, Davis; many thanks for the respite, although I’ve been in teeming hell.’

His horse moved, Matt swaying forward over its withers. He rode into his own yard at midnight. A lantern was burning in the saddle room; a thin line of amber light showed under the door and, where a board was broken, escaped in a single, soft ray across the cobbles. Matt called out: ‘Hallo there – Easter!’