A Half Forgotten Song (12 page)

“Oh, don’t be upset! It’s all right, Mitzy . . . really. Daddy—you should have asked her first!” said Delphine. Unable to stand it, Dimity turned quickly and walked away down the hill, towards The Watch. She tried to think what Valentina would say about a strange man drawing pictures of her, even if it wasn’t her fault, and as clear as day the woman’s sneer curled across her mind’s eye. “Do come again, Mitzy! He’s sorry!” Delphine called after her. Then the man spoke as well.

“Ask your parents if they’ll let you sit for me!”

Dimity ignored them both, and got home in time to see the door opened, and a visitor ushered inside. She didn’t see who it was, and therefore didn’t know how long he would stay, so she went around the back and sat in the sty with the old sow, Molly, putting up with the stink for the animal’s warmth and amiable company. She wondered what
sitting
for Delphine’s father would involve. She thought hard, and could come up with no answer that didn’t make her uneasy. She scrubbed angrily at her eyes, where her few brief tears had made the skin itchy and stiff, and felt an unexpected pang of sorrow at the thought of not going back, and not seeing Delphine again.

T
he gates to Southern Farm had once been white, but most of the paint had flaked off to show the gray, aging wood underneath. They sagged on their hinges, drooping into the long grass that had grown up around them. It was a blustery day and the wind was cooler than before; Zach thrust his hands into his pockets as he walked into the yard. A sign at the top of the lane had said there were eggs for sale, and though he didn’t actually need any eggs, it seemed as good a reason as any to pay an uninvited visit. Zach wanted to see the standoffish Hannah Brock again, feeling an interest in her that went beyond the fact that she knew Dimity Hatcher. The yard was quiet and deserted. He thought about knocking at the door of the farmhouse itself, but it looked very shut, and unwelcoming. Farm buildings sat at either side of the concrete yard, and Zach walked to the nearest one, a low structure with crumbling stone walls and a corrugated tin roof. From the darkness within came a shuffling of straw as he approached, and he was greeted by the pebble-eyed stares of six light brown sheep, puffing curiously at him through their noses. The stink of them was sweet and pungent.

The next barn was much bigger, and housed a large stack of hay bales and an ancient piece of farm machinery with vicious-looking spikes and wheels and moving parts. It was rusty and festooned with cobwebs. The wind moaned through a hole in the roof, and beneath that bright patch of watching sky, nettles and chickweed were growing in a patch of moldy straw. Behind the sound of the wind was a silence that Zach suddenly found unnerving. Even the far-off cry of a sheep couldn’t change the fact that the place felt dead, forgotten, like the relic of something been and gone.

“I help you?” A man’s voice behind him made Zach jump.

“Jesus! You scared the hell out of me!” he said. He smiled, but the man standing behind him didn’t return the expression. He examined Zach with a steady, measuring gaze that put him on his guard.

“This is private,” said the man, with a wave of his hand to indicate the barn. He was medium height, shorter than Zach but stockier, with burly shoulders. His face was drawn, the cheeks a little hollow, but Zach still thought the man might be slightly younger than he was, maybe in his early thirties. Black eyes watched from beneath a fringe of straight black hair. His skin was dark, dark enough that Zach would have guessed him to be foreign, perhaps Mediterranean, even if he hadn’t spoken with such a thick, guttural accent.

“Yes, I know—sorry. I didn’t mean to . . . I was looking for the eggs. The eggs for sale?” said Zach, struggling to regain his composure in the face of such open suspicion. The man studied him a moment longer, then nodded and turned to walk away. Zach supposed he was expected to follow.

They crossed the ridged concrete yard to a low building, stone built with a wooden stable door that was black with age and bitumen paint. Inside, the cobbled floor had been scrubbed and a shop counter had been improvised at one end—a trestle table with a metal strongbox and a thick ledger upon it. There was also a large cardboard tray for eggs, in which five were sitting. The man eyed the tray with a look of irritation.

“There are more. Not picked yet. How many?” he said.

“Six, please,” said Zach. The dark-eyed man gazed at him with a neutral expression, and Zach fought the urge to smile. “Five is fine, actually,” he relented, but the man shrugged.

“I get it. Wait.” He left Zach alone in the small room, which Zach guessed had once been a stable. As the sun leaped momentarily out from behind a cloud, the whitewashed walls shone brightly. There were little pictures hanging all around, the biggest no more than twelve inches wide and eight high. A mixture of landscapes and sheep portraits, done in chalks on different-colored papers. Modest prices had been stickered onto their simple pine frames—sixty pounds for the biggest one, a flat-backed sheep standing in silhouette on a near horizon, against a sky aglow with a pink dawn. They were good, all of them. A local artist, Zach assumed. He couldn’t help thinking they’d have more luck in a small gallery in Swanage than here, in a farm shop that had five eggs for sale and no customers other than him.

He stood and looked at them, and wondered who the dark-haired man might be. Hannah Brock’s husband? Her boyfriend? Or just somebody who worked at the farm? The latter seemed unlikely—the farm hardly looked as though it would support one person, let alone an employee as well. That only left husband or boyfriend, though, and he found he didn’t like either idea. There were footsteps behind him and he turned, expecting to see the man return, but it was Hannah Brock who came into the stable. She pulled up short when she saw him, and he smiled as casually as he could.

“Good morning,” he said. “We meet again.”

“Yes, fancy that,” she said drily. She crossed to stand behind the table and flipped open the ledger, gazing down at it with a distracted frown. “Can I help you with something?”

“No, no. Your . . . that is . . . the man who was here . . .”

“Ilir?”

“Yes, Ilir. He’s just fetching me some eggs. Well, one extra egg, to be exact.” He gestured at the five already in the tray.

“Eggs?” She glanced up at him with half a smile. “Aren’t you staying at the pub?”

“Yes. They’re for . . . They’re for Dimity.” He smiled at her, and watched her reaction carefully.

“Mitzy has half a dozen hens of her own out the back. All of them good layers, as far as I know.”

“Yes. Well.” Zach shrugged. Hannah eyed him and seemed in no rush to speak, and Zach found the silence hard to bear. “Mitzy. So, you know who she is, then?” he said.

“And I’m guessing from your barely contained curiosity that you do, too,” Hannah replied.

“I’m an expert on Charles Aubrey. Well, when I say an expert . . . what I mean is, I know a lot about him. About his work and his life . . .”

“You don’t know anything compared to what Mitzy knows,” Hannah said quietly, with a shake of her head. She seemed to regret her words at once, and scowled.

“Exactly. I mean, it’s incredible that nobody has come to interview her before. The stories she must have about him . . . the insights into all the drawings—”

“Interview her?” Hannah interrupted. “What do you mean, interview her? Interview her for what?”

“I’m . . . well, I’m writing a book about him. About Charles Aubrey.” Hannah raised an eyebrow skeptically. “It’s coming out to coincide with the National Portrait Gallery’s retrospective, next summer,” he said, with a touch of defiance.

“And you’ve told Mitzy that, and she’s happy to help you?”

“I may not have mentioned the book, actually. I said I was interested in Aubrey, and she seemed really keen to talk about him . . .” He trailed off under Hannah’s ferocious glare.

“Going back up there soon, are you? So am I. And if you’ve not told her about the book, then I will. Clear? It changes everything, and you know it.”

“Of course I’ll tell her. I meant to. Look, you seem to have got the wrong impression of me. I’m not some kind of . . .” He waved his hand in the air, searching for the word.

“Snoop?” Hannah supplied for him. She folded her arms; an aggressive pose undermined by another blaze of sunshine, pouring through the window and setting her dark curls alight with shades of deep red. She waited for his reply.

“Right. I’m not a snoop, or some predator out to trick her. I’m a genuine Aubrey fan. I just want to get some kind of new insight into his life and work . . .”

“Well, maybe that insight isn’t yours to get. Mitzy’s memories are her own. There’s no reason she should have to share them with you, after what she suffered . . .”

“What she suffered? What do you mean?”

“She—” Hannah broke off, seemed to change her mind about what she was about to say. “Look, she loved him, okay? She’s still grieving for him . . .”

“After seventy-odd years?”

“Yes, after seventy-odd years! If she’s spoken to you about him already I’m sure you noticed how . . . fresh the memories of her time with him are. She’s very easy to upset.”

“I’m not trying to upset her, and of course her memories are her own. But if she’s happy to share them with me, then I don’t see that I’m doing anything wrong. And Aubrey is a public figure. He’s one of our greatest modern artists—his work is in public galleries all over the country . . . people have a right to know . . .”

“No, they don’t. They don’t have a right to know
everything
. I hate that idea,” Hannah muttered.

“Why do you care so much? I’ll tell her I’m working on a book about him, I promise. And if she’s still happy to talk to me, then that should be fine by you as well, shouldn’t it?” he said.

Hannah seemed to consider this. She flipped the ledger closed again, having not written anything new in it. Behind Zach, Ilir returned with a plastic bucket full of eggs. He made up a box of the five on the desk and one from the bucket.

“Still warm,” he said, closing his hand briefly around the egg.

“Thank you,” said Zach.

“One seventy-five,” Ilir told him. Zach looked up in surprise, and Hannah bridled.

“They’re organic and free-range. Not certified organic, but that’s just a question of bloody paperwork . . . I’m working on it. But they are organic,” she said.

“I’m sure they’ll be delicious,” said Zach, wondering what he would do with them. Give them to Pete to use in the pub kitchen, he supposed. “I like the sheep pictures,” he said, as he turned to go. “Local artist?”

“Very local. Want to buy one?” she said laconically.

“You did them? They’re really good. Maybe next time.” He shrugged apologetically, and wished he did have sixty pounds to spend on one of them. “I paint as well. And draw. Well, I used to. I have a gallery now, in Bath. It’s shut at the moment, though. Because I’m . . . here.” He looked back at the pair of them. Ilir was hovering near Hannah, putting the fresh eggs one by one into the tray. Hannah was watching Zach with that resolute silence of hers. “Well, I should probably get going,” said Zach. “I can see you’re busy. Okay. Bye. Thanks for the eggs. Bye.” He turned to go, and as he did, a smile flickered over Hannah’s face, quick like the sunshine that day.

O
n Tuesday he was at the butcher’s first thing, before it was even open. He bought the brand-new heart and went straight down to The Watch, not thinking that Dimity might not be up yet until he’d banged on the door and it was too late. When she opened it, he held the heart out to her.

“The butcher told me this bullock was slaughtered yesterday afternoon. It couldn’t be any fresher unless I’d gone to the abattoir and caught it as it dropped out,” he said with a smile. Dimity took the heart and unwrapped it, and held it in her hand. Zach noticed with a faint shudder that it smeared blood on her mittens, and that a dark clot was oozing from one of the vessels hanging from it. He caught the nauseating tang of iron in his nostrils, and tried not to inhale too deeply. Dimity performed the same tests on this heart as she had the first, then flashed Zach a small, pleased smile. With a flurry of long hair and skirts, she turned and vanished into the house, leaving the door open behind her.

Zach peered through into the hallway. “Miss Hatcher?”

“The pins?” Her voice drifted through from the kitchen. Zach stepped inside and shut the door behind him.

“Right here,” he said, handing them to her. She was sitting at the small table in the kitchen, and took the box of pins from Zach without another word. She seemed entirely focused on the heart and what she planned to do with it, and Zach sank quietly into the chair opposite her, fascinated. With a single deft movement, the old woman slit the heart open down one side with a paring knife, the blade of which looked wicked sharp. She wiped away the clots of blood inside it with her fingertips, and then opened the box of pins, covering it with rusty fingerprints. Under each of her nails was a dark red crescent. Humming softly, she pierced the wall of the heart from the inside with a pin, pushing until its head was flush to the meat. Mesmerized, Zach watched and didn’t dare to ask. Snatches of the song she sang were audible, and decipherable, but most of it was a wordless mumble of her buzzing
s
sounds and drawled vowels. Zach leaned closer, struggling to hear.

“Bless this house, and keep it whole . . . bless this house . . . keep thatch, keep stone . . .”

She finished when she ran out of pins. Taking a needle and thread from the pocket of her apron, she quickly stitched up the cut she’d made, patting the heart back into shape as best she could between its new armor of pins. It looked like a horrific surrealist rendering of a hedgehog; almost the kind of thing Zach might have created during his college years at Goldsmiths, when he’d fought his every natural urge to draw and paint, to produce figurative art. He’d wanted to shock, to be avant-garde
.

“What’s it for?” he asked tentatively. Dimity looked up, startled, and had clearly forgotten he was there. She chewed on the inside of her mouth for a second, then leaned towards him.