A Country Marriage (12 page)

‘How do you mean, in her way? In her way… how?’

She regarded him carefully, watching as he affected interest in a dock leaf; turning the mottled, leathery foliage this way and that in his hand.

‘Oh,
I
don’t know. I just know that she makes me feel real unwelcome.’

‘I’m sure she doesn’t mean to.’

‘Oh but that’s just it, she does. You can see it in her eyes and she’s so
rude
sometimes, too. And she don’t care who it’s in front of, neither.’

‘Mary,’ he suddenly said, driving the trowel firmly into the soft earth and turning to look at her, ‘it don’t do to talk about people behind their backs, especially if there’s a chance that… well, that maybe you’re
mistaken
.’

Struck by the weariness of his tone, she thought carefully this time before opening her mouth.

‘So what are you saying, then? That I just let her go on being mean to me?’

‘Look, are you sure you ain’t… well, you know, imagining it? You sure that—’

‘Definitely. I never bothered you with it before since I
knew
you’d think it tiresome but the other day she—’

‘All right, all right. Spare me the details.’ Closing her mouth, she pressed her lips together. The exasperation in his voice was obvious and the last thing she wanted was to rile
him
as well. ‘Next time I see her, I’ll speak to her for you.’

‘No! You’ll only tell her what I said and that’ll make it look like I been telling tales.’

‘Very well. If that’s not what you want.’ The speed with which he acquiesced took her by surprise. ‘Just try not to fret so much. Even if what you say is true, Ellen likes you well enough.’

‘Aye, I know, and I like her too; she’s real nice to me but that don’t make up for the fact that Annie makes me feel so—’

‘Look, Mary, please stop belabouring the matter. If you don’t want me saying anything to her, then why are you still going on about it?’

‘Sorry.’

‘Look, I don’t mean to sound harsh, truly I don’t and I know that you’re anxious to… to fit in here but oftentimes you just have to accept that not everyone’s going to like you and that there ain’t much you can do about it.’ Leaning towards her, he reached to pat her hand. ‘So if, as you say, the two of you can’t rub along together, then don’t go stirring up trouble, just keep out of her way.’

In that brief moment, she felt as though she had left her own body and was looking down, seeing herself in the same way that perhaps he was. She looked small and beset by a tantrum. No wonder it felt as though he was humouring her, then: he was. He had patted her hand. So had Ma Strong. And so had Ellen. And if she remembered rightly, so had her mother. You patted the hand of a child. You did it to soothe their woes. Oh, good Lord: that must be how they all saw her. Then thank goodness for the good fortune to have seen it for herself.

*

‘Shouldn’t be surprised to see snow before nightfall,’ Thomas Strong commented, blowing on his hands as the family came out of church on Sunday morning and braced themselves against the wind whipping without pity across the hillside. In the adjacent field, a murder of crows choosing that moment to rise piecemeal from the pasture was taken by the same ragged gust, their melancholy
caw
,
caw
,
caaaaaws
seemingly in protest.

In response to her father-in-law’s gloomy forecast, Mary’s spirits fell; she was already finding the cold of Keeper’s Cottage almost as perishing as being in church but unfortunately, looking to the low, angry clouds, she was inclined to agree with his prophecy. The entire landscape seemed without colour today; as though the cutting north-easterly had sucked the lifeblood from every living thing. Risking a quick glance into the wind, she wondered just how many shades of grey there could be; the damp earth, bare of its vegetation, looked leaden, while the tussocks of grass being flattened into low mounds by the gale had taken on the sheen of gunmetal. Then there were the skeletons of the elms dotted along the wayside that, while appearing the colour of granite, could be heard cracking and creaking with the fragility of old bones; their bare and brittle twigs as pale as puffs of bonfire smoke. With the bitter wind stinging her eyes, she glanced further out across the valley to where the charcoal-coloured hedgerows had no choice but to faithfully define ancient boundaries under a sky that was now barely a single shade lighter than pitch. And among all of this greyness was the river, meandering slowly from one side of the broad valley back to the other, deprived – as if by an oversight of Nature – of a colour of its own and bound instead to reflect the capricious mood of the heavens, such that today it appeared as a ribbon of slate.

She turned her watering eyes aside from the gale and through the flicking rats’ tails of her hair, noticed how even the faces of the family members seemed to have been struck with an ashen pallor.

‘Oh please don’t let it snow,’ she remarked wearily to her mother-in-law.

‘He ain’t often wrong,’ Hannah replied, bending her head into the wind and reaching to retrieve the flapping end of her shawl.

‘I heard tell of places in Kent where folk are already knee-deep in snow. Never known it so early,’ Thomas Strong called across to her.

‘Aye, I’ve heard much the same,’ George replied, slowing his pace as they drew level with Keeper’s Cottage. But as they went to descend the steps, they heard Hannah’s voice raised above the buffeting of the gale.

‘Ain’t you two forgetting summat?’

Together, they turned to look at her but it was Ellen who grabbed for George’s arm and started pulling him onwards down the hill.

‘Stir up, we beseech thee, O Lord, the wills of thy faithful people; that they, plenteously bringing forth the fruit of good works, may by thee be plenteously rewarded…’

Skipping a pace or two to catch up, she caught his eye and shrugged.

‘Last Sunday before Advent: Stir-Up Sunday or some such. I’d clean forgot.’

‘Oh,’ she mouthed into the wind and resigned herself to following the family huddle on towards the farmhouse.

Once there, the women replaced their outer layers of clothing with pinafores while the men hovered in front of the fire and, without a purpose of her own, she looked around. On the table was an assortment of what appeared to be bowls covered with cloths – but it was the unfamiliar scent hanging in the air that she found most intriguing; faintly medicinal but fragrant – spicy yet sweet – and after the bone-numbing coldness of the church, comforting and warming. She sniffed the air, thinking how the smell reminded her of musty papers.

‘This better not take long, woman,’ Thomas Strong broke the silence as his wife removed the cloths one by one to reveal the array of ingredients underneath.

‘Every year you say that, my dear Thomas, and every year I offer the same in reply; the less you moan the quicker it’ll be over with and the sooner we’re done here, the sooner you can go about your business.’ The orderliness of everything on the table piqued Mary’s interest. Had she been anywhere but here, she might have asked what it was all in aid of but if she had learned anything in the last few weeks, then it was the value to be had from keeping her mouth shut when in doubt. And besides that, there was no need to add more fuel to Annie’s fire. The less she gave away, the less she could be derided. ‘Pass me the stirring spoon then, Ellen.’ It was Hannah again and she was starting to tip the ingredients into a vast earthenware bowl; an enormous mound of suet chopped into tiny, glistening shreds, then a heap of powdery grey flour, a mound of ragged breadcrumbs and a large saucer of coarse sugar granules. Nearby, Annie had started peeling a rosy apple from the fruit loft, but as the paring knife sliced cleanly between the skin and the crisp flesh, Mary noticed how she kept casting her eyes in the direction of Tom and George, propped side by side at the fireplace. ‘Grate in the nutmeg for me, Ellen. And Mary, you tip in them cherries and prunes, if you please.’ Doing as Hannah said, she watched Ellen’s gingery-coloured nutmeg gratings falling into the mixture, realising then that it was the source of the curious aroma. It seemed a calming fragrance, and careful not to draw attention to what she was doing, she inhaled deeply. At the other side of the table, Annie was now coring the apple, her eyes, though, still flitting now and again towards the fireplace. Thinking that she must be watching Tom, she looked in the same direction, puzzled to see that it was in fact George’s eyes darting away from Annie’s gaze. With a frown, she looked back at the table, where in the almost reverential hush, Hannah’s spoon was scraping rhythmically against the bottom of the basin and Annie was starting to chop the flesh of the apple, her attention, momentarily at least, back on the task in front of her.

‘So many ingredients,’ she heard George muse and turned to look at him.

‘Aye, ʼtis the oldest of receipts, son.’

‘But so many vittles for just a single pudden,’ he persisted.

‘Which is most likely why we only make it just the once a year,’ Hannah answered him evenly.

‘And it ain’t like we don’t deserve it,’ Tom now observed. ‘We work hard for what we eat.’

She closed her eyes. It was almost as though Tom enjoyed waving red rag at a turkey cock. And unfortunately, George wasn’t slow to be baited, either.

‘There are folk everywhere working hard to eat but many can’t even put a loaf on the table, let alone a figgety pudden.’

She looked back at the mixing bowl. Annie was scraping in the apple from the chopping board and Hannah was stirring it into the mixture but she found herself paying little real attention, her thoughts taken instead by her husband’s unlikely concern with the pudding.

‘Eggs then, Ellen, if you’d be so kind,’ Hannah directed, seemingly unmoved by George’s last remark.

Tom, though, didn’t seem about to let the matter drop,

‘So let me see whether I understand you correctly, brother.
You’re
saying that just because
some
can’t have it,
we
should all go without, too? Because I don’t see how that helps anyone…’

‘I wasn’t saying that at all, as well you know. I was simply pointing out the lavishness of it.’

Uneasy with the way that George seemed to be spoiling for an argument, she glanced at Hannah. Her lips were pressed in a straight line.

‘One of you boys make yourself useful and go an’ fetch me a glass of brandy.’

But in the event, in the stiff silence that followed Hannah’s command it was Will who went to get it, leaving Tom free to continue his querulous exchange with George.

‘See, when I hear you spouting such foolishness, I’m minded to fear for the rest of us,’ he was saying, his tone sufficiently patronising to cause several faces to shoot a look in his direction. ‘Only it seems to me that since you been working up that estate, you’ve started talking like one of them troublemaking
Radicals
.’

She lowered her head, willing her husband to ignore his brother but glancing to Annie, she was surprised to see that behind the fall of her hair, her face bore the smile of someone savouring a secret.

‘I don’t see how
you’d
know anything about it,’ George countered. She looked across the table. At least she didn’t seem to be the only one feeling awkward; Ellen was shifting uncomfortably, too. ‘I mean, what would
you
know about
any
of it?’

Oh, please, George, she willed. In a moment, surely, one of his parents would consider this discussion to have gone far enough.

‘Oh believe me, brother, I’ve seen enough to know that all their sort want is summat for nothing.’

Even Will, who had taken no side in the argument and was only now returning with the brandy, seemed to avoid looking at either of them. Without comment, he handed the glass to his mother and Mary watched as she poured it into the bowl, picked up her spoon and resumed stirring the stiff mixture, the blue veins on the back of her puffy hands distended from the effort.

‘Summat for nothing, eh?’ George was continuing regardless, his voice pitched levelly as though pretending to consider his brother’s statement worthy of consideration. ‘Tell me then, Tom; since when was a fair wage for a day’s labour summat for nothing?’

‘Come on now, you two, not while we’re about this, if you don’t mind,’ Hannah seemed finally unable to refrain from saying. ‘Why can’t you both just be grateful that this family gets a decent share of the Lord’s bounty?’

‘Oh but I am, Ma,’ she heard her husband agree and in anticipation of a riposte from Tom, she held her breath, grateful when the short silence was unexpectedly broken by the click of the latch as the door flew open and Tabitha burst in.

‘Nearly too late there, missy,’ Hannah remarked without looking up, even though the rush of cold air that accompanied her whipped at the cloths on the table.

‘Sorry.’ Bringing with her the smell of woodsmoke, Tabitha hovered breathlessly, dishevelled and pink cheeked, casting around at their faces. ‘Ooh! What did I miss?’

‘Nothing; it’s done with.’
Done with for you, maybe
, Mary thought, watching as her mother-in-law cast her eyes at the family around her. ‘Now, need I remind you, one stir of the bowl and make your wish.’ Intrigued, Mary glanced over at George but he was staring across to the window and drumming his fingers on the mantel, his face rigid with displeasure. ‘Thomas, you go first.’