A Month in the Country (10 page)

Of course, she was right. Anyway, partly right. Standing up there on the platform before a great work of art, feeling kinship with its creator, cosily knowing that I was a sort of impresario conjuring and teasing back his work after four hundred years of darkness. But that wasn't all of it. There was this weather, this landscape, thick woods, roadsides deep in grass and wild flowers. And to south and north of the Vale, low hills, frontiers of a mysterious country.

I had my dinner with the Ellerbecks each Sunday now. Perhaps they'd talked it over and weighed me up as an amiable wanderer who might be brought back to the fold. Who knows? Perhaps they merely liked me and felt that they needn't stand on ceremony when I was their guest. Anyway, I recall one particular meal early in August. We'd finished the main course (they didn't serve a sweet pudding on Sundays) and were drinking our tea when Mr Ellerbeck, with no more than a hint of holy
martyrdom in his tone, remarked, ‘Well, it's Barton Ferry for me this afternoon, Mother.'

‘The Superintendent shouldn't have planned you then,' his wife exclaimed indignantly. ‘He's planned you for Malmerby for their six o'clock. Planning you for morning and evening in different chapels is bad enough, but afternoon and evening is over much. And Ferry!'

‘Poor little Ferry!' Mr Ellberbeck said, showing no inclination to hasten there. ‘Well, we have to keep those little spots going, and chapel is about all that ever happens there.'

‘You're tired out,' Mrs Ellerbeck said fiercely. ‘At your age you should be having a lie-down, not pedalling down that long road.'

‘And the wind always against you, whether you're coming or going; you always say so,' Kathy put in, rooting her dad more firmly in the armchair. Feeling something was expected of me, I made a mournful noise.

‘Perhaps Tom here will go for you,' Mrs Ellerbeck said resourcefully, turning on me and knowing that, after one of her splendid dinners, I was defenceless. ‘There'll be only two or three there.'

‘Yes,' said Kathy pitilessly. ‘There's nothing to be afraid of, is there, Dad? You said yourself there was nobbut a great farm lad, two or three kiddies and Lucy Sykes on the organ. With all your education, Mr Birkin, you can deal with that poor little lot?' She made me sound like a fair-to-average all-in wrestler.

Mr Ellerbeck did not rush forward to succour me. Instead, he looked quizzically at me, only committing himself as far as ‘Well, there's no denying that Tom's legs are younger than mine.'

‘You can have Dad's bike,' Kathy said, advancing rapidly into the breach. ‘It's a three-speed and the chain has an oil bath.'

The assault's development had been far too rapid and my defences too over-run for me to mount more than a makeshift counter-attack. ‘I've never done anything in that line,' I protested. ‘Preaching! Or praying! Praying aloud, that is.' (Conscience compelled ‘aloud' because I'd prayed eloquently enough in my signal-pit during big strafes. And had I felt disposed to reproduce one of those very particular prayers, it would have been the most remarkable utterance heard in
any
chapel, let alone Barton Ferry.)

‘You can tell them what you're occupied with,' Kathy said. ‘They'll be very interested because they've got nothing like it in Ferry.'

‘But the praying …' I mourned.

‘The Lord will put words into your mouth,' Mr Ellerbeck said, abandoning his neutral position to carry the day.

Well the Lord vouchsafed me no answer to that, and, as token of my unconditional surrender, Edgar (who very decently had preserved impartiality) found me a pair of bicycle clips.

Until then, I'd always been rather fond of Edgar.

Barton Ferry lay four long miles distant along a featureless road. Farmhouses along the way stood a field's length back, and a broad dyke carrying seepage from ditches and drains followed the dusty way to where it stopped at the river's brink. There were a few cottages, a bell on a stout post which also restrained a rowing boat and, on a patch of grass sprinkled with ducks' feathers, a brick chapel scarcely bigger than a large room.

I'd arrived in good time but a brown-faced young woman, a fine healthy child-bearer, was waiting by the door. She was pretty but terribly shy, and gazed away over the river and the road beyond, as I explained lamely that Mr Ellerbeck was off-colour and that I was his inadequate reserve. She made no comment but neither did she seem overly cast down by this news as she let me in and asked for the hymn numbers. I said I'd leave them to her but would be obliged if she'd pick long ones and, preferably, with choruses between each verse.

There were only half-a-dozen pews and these huddled before an enormous varnished pulpit which I scaled and found my exalted position afforded an excellent view of the river through the rear window. Behind my head an enormous clock would share, perhaps engross my fellow worshippers' attention. Then I busied myself finding two very long chapters in the Old and New Testaments and put the tasselled markers in. The clock's loud ticking was much slower than my heart beats. The organist made no sound at all, her strong brown hands on lap, her head hanging. I don't think she was praying. It was very hot and I began to sweat.

On zero hour and not a second earlier, two freckled children, a red-faced farm lad and an elderly man trooped in and penned themselves like sheep below me. I then announced the first hymn, ‘O for a thousand tongues to sing my great redeemer's praise', which we sang surprisingly loudly for so tiny a band. The succeeding prayer limped from despairing silence to silence, the Lord signally not honouring Mr Ellerbeck's guarantee on His behalf to put words into my mouth. Nevertheless I stumbled on, tossing in pleas to be forgiven for unmentionable sins I felt were His responsibility (with Passchendaele in mind) rather than mine, and sprinkling around plenty of Thees and Thous as cover: I deceived nobody. Opening my eyes once, I saw the organist's bowed shoulders were twitching slightly.

After we bellowed hymn 4 (‘Crown him with many crowns') I basely determined that I must abandon my awful impersonation, even if I did land the stationmaster in trouble with the Circuit Authority. ‘Look here,' I declared quite fiercely. ‘I'm just filling in and, as I've not preached before and certainly shan't again, I'm going to tell you what I'm doing in Oxgodby and, if you want to leave or nod-off, that's alright by me.' Actually, they recognized the good sense of this and listened with great attention and, in fact, the children put up their hands and asked several sensible questions. Afterwards, the old boy who was their grandfather said he'd drive them over in his trap so they could see what I'd been talking about.

When they'd drifted off on their several ways I thanked my organist, and as she was locking the door, made to put on my bicycle clips. ‘You could come on home for your tea,' she said.

‘Well, I'm expected back I think,' I said but then thought, ‘Why not? Perhaps I can ask her to meet me again.' (I was missing a woman badly.) So I added, ‘But I'd like to come; I need a cup of tea in this heat; I know the Ellerbecks will understand.'

She lived at a farmhouse gable end to the road – not a big place. Deep red hollyhocks pressed against the limestone wall and velvet butterflies flopped lazily from flower to flower. It was Tennyson weather, drowsy, warm, unnaturally still. Her father and mother made me very welcome, both declaring they'd never met a Londoner before. They gave me what,
in these parts, was called a knife-and-fork ‘do', a ham off the hook, a deep apple-pie and scalding tea. In conversation it came out that I'd been Over There (as they called it) and this spurred them to thrust more prodigious helpings upon me. Then I noticed a framed photo of a young soldier on the piano top.

‘That's our son, our Perce,' Mrs Sykes said. ‘He had it taken on his last leave, on his nineteenth birthday.' A glance across those faces made it unnecessary to ask what had befallen Perce. But, when I got up to go, I went across and looked more closely at him; he'd been a stocky youth, open-faced, a pleasant-looking chap. His father came up beside me and was looking over my shoulder. ‘He was a right good lad, Perce,' he said, ‘a real worker. Would give anybody a hand; they all liked him.'

And on my way home by the dyke-side, on the empty road, between fields of corn blowing like water, I suddenly yelled, ‘Oh you bastards! You awful bloody bastards! You didn't need to have started it. And you could have stopped it before you did. God? Ha! There is no God.' Two horses grazing over a hedge looked up and whinnied.

‘How did you get on over at Ferry?' Mr Ellerbeck asked when, that evening, he walked in from Malmerby.

‘Well, I learnt one thing,' I said ‘ – that I'm not cut out for a preacher. I expect your Super will be round to tick you off when complaints come up the line with the rations.'

‘He had his tea at Lucy Sykes's,' Kathy cried. ‘She asked him in. He's been quiet ever since, because he's fallen in love with her.'

‘She's a fine strong girl,' Mr Ellerbeck said. ‘And she gets a lot out of that old organ at Ferry. Good Christian upbringing, too. We'll ask her over to the Sunday-school anniversary and that'll give you another chance to have a look at her.'

It never seemed to have occurred to the Ellerbecks that I might have been married.

In London I'd sometimes exchanged a word with the family next door on one side and nodded to the couple on the other, but, if I'd passed whoever lived beyond that, I shouldn't have known them. Yet here,
within twenty-four hours of my performance at Barton Ferry, word had got around about tea at the Sykes's.

‘Hear you're haring round the countryside looking over the girls. Thinking of settling down in Oxgodby then?' Moon said slyly. ‘Better keep it quiet that you're wed: every second chap round about has a shot-gun.'

Even Alice Keach had heard, but she put it more obliquely at the end of a conversation that had begun by her asking if I'd wanted to be an artist.

‘No,' I said. ‘Never thought of it. Didn't know what I wanted to be. I only knew what I
didn't
want to do. I didn't want to be an engine-driver, a policeman or a rent-collector or have anything to do with the sea.'

‘What about the Church? You would have made a good clergyman.'

‘Good heavens! Really! That's almost the last thing I'd be any good at. Not my style at all.'

‘But you would have listened. You
do
listen. And you know how to be still. Don't you know that, when people are with you, they don't feel they have to say something? I mean just say anything to fill in silences. Were you always good at listening? When you were a little boy?'

‘My sisters used to say my ears were too big: that meant that I was
too
good a listener. I'm sorry – I know that's not what you mean. Well then, maybe I was. My mother was a quiet woman. She'd sit for an hour sewing or darning and not a word. Sometimes she'd pucker up her mouth and glance at one or the other of us. And, if anything had upset that one at school, she'd hear it all out and then ask one or two questions so, in the end, you found you'd answered yourself. Is that what you mean?'

‘Yes,' she said. ‘That's exactly what I mean; I should like to have known her. And Mr Birkin – back to parsons. I hear you were a Great Success at Ferry …'

She said this as she rose from the pew to go. ‘And that you've fallen in love.' She'd gone before I had time to reply; her gay laughter slipped back through the open door.

Well, she was right. I'd fallen in love. But not with sweet Lucy Sykes.

You might wonder what I thought about during the many hours I spent up on that scaffold. Well, obviously, the work itself, the vast painting I was uncovering. But also about the nameless man who'd stood where I stood. Not his technical abilities although, quite properly, these were extremely interesting to me. For instance, he had a very very good line in hands, his speciality being knuckles and wrists. His hands spoke to each other and were answered. But he wasn't much good at feet. Let's leave it at that. No, it was his quirks which really fascinated me. As when, for instance, he'd dropped iconographic rules to slyly lift the line of a man's lips or turned aside to rattle off a string of grace notes on a costume's edge – things just done for the hell of it.

And there always was the enigma of this final falling man. Simon Magus? The chap who'd tried to buy the Holy Ghost? His torments were well documented; the Establishment had seen to that. Keep to the Party Line. Or Else! But, if he was that famed apostate, why had he been painted with so much verve, and why had he been blotted out so much earlier than the rest? And why, why plunging into hell, was he
himself
? Had the painter known him? Was it a portrait recognizable to kinsmen, who had hidden him from public view almost before the paint was dry? Well, it was several hundred years too late to ask now.

‘How are you two getting on together?' Moon would say, waving a hand at my wall. ‘Do you ever feel him breathing down your neck, nudging you – “Good lad, Birkin! Attaboy!” You must know him pretty well. Go on – tell me about him. Who was he?'

Who was he! I couldn't even name him. People don't seem to understand those far-off folk. They simply weren't us. Our idea of personal fame was alien to them. This man of mine, for instance, knew nothing of earlier artists, so why should he suppose anyone would want to know anything of him? So it wouldn't even occur to him to sign his work. Of the hundred, yes at the least a hundred wall-paintings, I knew of only a single signature – Thomas of Malmesbury at Ampney Crucis.

And the idea that his work might be minutely observed five hundred years after his death would have been preposterous. In his day, buildings were being drastically remodelled every fifty years as fashions changed, so that my man would calculate his painting, at the longest, would last no more than a couple of generations.