A Field Full of Folk (10 page)

Smelly was finished. His bag over his shoulder he was beginning to move off, a hobo into the blue.

“Thank you for the money, sir,” he said, tipping his rancid cap.

“God bless you,” said the minister. For a moment he had an overwhelming desire to speak to Smelly and they stared at each other quivering with the warm dialogue that could have gone on between them, that would leave them naked to the day, but the instant passed and Smelly moved on towards his cave and his breakfast.

Once he turned and waved, and the minister was still standing by the bin. Maybe he could get a sermon out of this, how we put our sins in hiding for the rats to gnaw at, how we are a chest of orts and fragments, a treasury of scurrying guilts and shames, how the bitten apple cores of our lives lie in the darkness, how the seagulls feed on them, the seagulls with their wide white wings and blood-flecked beaks. The angels who refuse nothing, whose gaze is intent and voracious.

He turned home towards his study.

15

A
S
D
AVID
C
OLLINS
was standing at the gate he saw the German coming towards him. Spectacled and wearing shorts, the visitor had a fishing rod in his hand; his hair was closely cropped.

“I am not moving from here,” thought David. “Why should I? This is my country. This is my village. What is he doing fishing in our rivers anyway? Who does he think he is? I shall speak to him.”

The German was wearing boots and his legs looked thin and meagre. He also wore a peaked green cap which was probably to keep the sun out of his eyes.

“They come here and they think they own the place. Where is he staying anyway? It's probably with Maisie Campbell.”

He trembled with excitement and fever. His heart beat fast and his hand was hot and sweaty on the gate, but like a sentry who refuses to give up his post even in the middle of danger he waited stubbornly. The sun above him was golden and round in a perfectly blue sky. Out of the morning sunlight the German came and it was as if his green cap became a grey helmet, thorny and vicious, and the rod in his hand was like a rifle pointing at David's heart.

To be old was shameful, to feel the heart hammering in one's breast as if it were trying to break free of the cage of flesh and bone: to feel oneself so often wishing to urinate, unable to contain one's water. All that was humiliating. The German was very close to him now. He would stare at him and then go back into the house. He owed himself at least that, he owed it to all the others who were dead in those fields so far away, he owed it to Iain, to William, and all the rest whose names were engraved on the village memorial. The German stopped in the pouring innocent sunlight and faced him. “Good morning, sir,” he said and for a moment David was confused. It wasn't so much that the German had spoken to him, it was rather that he had called him “sir” as if he were an officer, for the officers were those who strolled, sticks in hand, about parade grounds or were seen waving elegantly from staff cars, distant, clean, smiling, and falsely encouraging. The German looked quite young, not more than forty, and his glasses flashed in the sun. His expression was polite and enquiring and he stood there in front of David like an overgrown schoolboy slightly ridiculous in his shorts, his knees so plainly white. “He doesn't have the legs for the kilt,” thought David. “He looks like a scholar. The rod seems new. He wouldn't have been much use in the trenches.” The German was standing awkwardly in front of him and saying, “I am going to fish.” He spoke very distinctly and looked anxious as if afraid that he would not be understood. Without his knowing exactly that he was doing it David pointed towards the river and said, “Over there. The river's there.” He spoke to the German as if he were addressing a child. The German's eye obediently followed where he pointed. Many a time he himself had fished in that river bringing home trout in the evening, dipping his rod in the shadows, watching the circles widening as the midges bit at the backs of his hands.

“Thank you,” said the German standing there awkwardly. What did he want to know now? When it came to the point he couldn't not speak to him. His loneliness and good manners had betrayed him, he could not after all stand there and outstare the German and he was angry with himself. What did good manners have to do with war? Had the Germans been good-mannered on mornings such as these, the glaring sun rising ahead of them as they charged.

“Good fish there?” said the German on a rising note, fitting the words together carefully as if each were a stone to be selected with the greatest care.

“Yes,” said David, “the fishing is good,” though he hadn't been to that river now for many years. His rod was in the shed at the bottom of the field and he never touched it now. So also was his gun.

“Thank you,” said the German again tipping his green cap, and then he was on his way while David gazed after him. From the back the German looked even more ridiculous than he had from the front, meagre and thin, a plucked chicken.

“I shouldn't have spoken to him,” thought David. “I should have ignored him. I should have stared at him and let him know that he is my enemy, that he was my enemy. But I was too weak and lonely.” He had an impulse to go and shout names after him as children sometimes did with Kenny Foolish if they were feeling in a cruel mood. He would say, “Why did you kill William and Alisdair then? Why did you try and kill me? I was a shepherd and suddenly I found myself in the filthy trenches. There was one time I pulled a pair of boots off a German whose body was hanging on the wire. His face was green but his boots were serviceable. One thing you could say for them, they produced good stuff.” And now that German was going down to the river, to fish in his water, to sit there quietly in the water, and cast his rod for his trout. Was there no end to their impudence?

But, then, thank God there was nothing wrong with his eyesight. He could still recognise a German when he saw one.

And at that moment a pure intense feeling pierced him as if it were the taste of the strawberries that he had once stolen from the schoolmaster's garden on a day perhaps exactly like this many years ago. It was as if his shoes were peeled from him and he was running on his bare feet towards that same river to which the German had gone, and he and William were dipping their hands into the water in search of the small fish that glanced about it. The shadows from the trees that lined the bank overhung them and he could see quite clearly the network that they cast on William's face. He could see the pair of white legs trembling, askew in the water, and he could hear a lark singing in the sky, and his
own heart ran over with happiness. He heard himself shouting and though he couldn't make out the words he knew he was speaking and then the two of them were out of the water and dashing along the bank avoiding any sharp stones that they saw, and in search of the nest from which the lark had sprung so suddenly and so piercingly. The two of them were now staring down at the speckled eggs, touching them lightly with their fingers, feeling them warm and inexpressibly delicate, William's head beside his own, fragile and tousled, his eyes open with wonder: they were on their knees and their feet wet and the parts between their toes muddy. It was the greatest, most radiant, morning of the world and it was as if his heart had stopped for he felt it and not only saw it, and the gush of its advent was heartbreakingly pure. The eggs were so small, so vulnerable, it was as if the two of them were gods with the power of life and death, the world was so open and so fragile, so full of marvels, the sun so hot on their speckled wrists which seemed to echo the freckles on the eggs. It was a treasury to which there was no end, it would always be like this, compact of mornings such as these, which one opened like a box, so strongly scented with the most airy perfumes. The small heart beat in his aged breast, like the lark that had now fallen silent. They had turned away from the nest, and now they were running past the tree with the trembling quick green leaves, dancing in light and in shade, and the sun, a golden eye in its socket, and then it all suddenly changed and it was his wife who was saying, “That box with the powder puff now.” Her eyes were turned on him, faithfully demanding, she had had so little in her whole life: her poverty, echoing his own, made him angry because he couldn't relieve it. A cloud passed over the day, the pools darkened, her eyes dulled, the fish slid under the bank, and the sockets became gaunt and old. They stared at him out of the box, the matron was putting her hands in his, and his whole body was shaking with a ruined emptiness.

He shook his head like a dog emerging from water with a stone in its mouth and the world steadied again to the habitual landscape which confronted him.

16

“O
F COURSE
,”
SAID
Mrs Scott to her husband, “They've never really accepted us. That's just an example, the refusal to lease the church hall.”

“I wouldn't exactly say that,” said her husband, “not exactly.” He was of course Capricorn and she Taurus and the Capricorns were the quietly persistent ones, ambitious, determined, hard-working, as Gerald had been all his days as bank manager in Surrey and now retired to this village. Taurus people on the other hand were flesh-centred, faithful and constant, and liable to butt their heads at gates.

“The fact is,” he said calmly, “they think differently from us. Their priorities aren't ours.”

“What priorities?” she asked, placing in the sink the coffee cups from which they had just drunk.

“Well, they preserve their links with the past in a way that we don't. We have to remember that. And in any case I don't think Mr Murchison is well.”

“What's wrong with him?”

“I don't know. I just have that feeling. I've been noticing him recently in the pulpit. He's a good man, you know.”

“Of course. I'm not saying that he isn't. But this idea of having a sort of outdoor feast is ridiculous. It's like the loaves and the fishes. And then holding a Sale of Work to pay for it.”

“At least they're trying, you must admit that they try, that they're go-ahead.”

“If you say so. Sometimes I wish we had never come here in the first place.”

“I think you're in a mood, that's all. It will pass.”

“You admit yourself that they're different from us. One of them hinted to me the other day, it was that woman Campbell, would you believe what she said to me? She asked me if my father and mother were buried in England and when I said yes she more or less implied that she couldn't understand that sort of barbarism. That I could leave them there. Imagine that.”

“I can imagine that,” said her husband quietly. “Strangely enough, I can understand it. You see, they are used to deriving their strength from the dead. I saw the minister doing that. I think he himself was surprised that he made the decision that he in fact made. For a moment I thought that he would go the other way but his psychology prevented him from doing so. It was very interesting. It was as if another voice spoke through him and he was in the power of a ventriloquist.”

“What voice?”

“I think the voice of his ancestors. That's the only way I can explain it. But he did look ill. He was sweating a lot. There's something wrong with him.”

“Why isn't he in his bed then?”

“I don't know. I'm not sure that it's wholly physical. You see, there are strains on a minister that we don't understand.”

“Fiddlesticks. It's a job like any other job.”

“No, it's not, Martha. It's not a job like any other job. In England one might think the clergy had forgotten their roots, the holiness of their calling. But there's something thistly here, and something you can get a grip of though it pricks you.”

“How holy for instance is Annie then?” said his wife plumping herself down on the sofa beside him.

“Oh, that's different. She doesn't fit and she's looking for a cage.”

She stared at him blankly.

“A cage?” she echoed.

“Yes. We all need a cage. We can't be allowed to be free. It's not good for us.”

Certainly after leaving the bank himself he had felt the terrors of freedom for a long time though he was reconciled to them now. They didn't peer out at him from unexpected corners as they had done in the past with their hollow haunting eyes. Which was why he couldn't understand someone like that Murray girl for instance making such a daring leap into the void. She interested him. His own life had been one of routine all his days, clocking in at nine in the morning, leaving at five in the evening, staring through the grille at faces at times delirious with guilt and despair. No, he couldn't understand that girl and yet when he thought of her some deep sorrow moved in him, as if he had missed in that clean office the fertile bacteria of existence. He imagined her as young and hopeful, casting her rope off, setting off into the blue, a sex-stricken and trampish waif. What had been her thoughts as she had left, that day, as she had made her way through the fields to the train, as she had boarded it, radio in hand? Often he himself had felt like taking the startling leap but he had never had the courage to do it. He had remained in the net, however much his wings had quivered for elsewhere.

“I don't understand what you're talking about,” said his wife briskly. “Sometimes I think you are becoming as demented as the rest of them.”

He smiled carefully as if he were putting on a face to a customer, drawing him politely into his little office, sitting opposite him, alert and helpful on his swivelling chair.

He felt sorry for his wife that she was not accepted truly into the community, that she was like a newcomer to an old school, always on the edge of things, and because she was being too brash, too opinionated. Would she never learn that this was the home of the villagers, that they were what they were, and that it was she who must change? Why had she objected to Mrs Murchison's gathering in the open air? There was something imaginative and Biblical about it. She had only objected to it because she felt she ought to, not because there was anything wrong with the idea itself. He felt protective towards her but at the same time baffled by her almost invincible stupidity.