A Month in the Country (11 page)

‘What did he look like?'

Ah now, that was different. I couldn't put a face on him. But he was fair-headed; hairs kept turning up where his beard had prodded into tacky paint, particularly the outlining in red ochre which he'd based in linseed oil. There was no mistaking it for brush hair which was recognizable from its length, an inch, never more than an inch and a half. Sow's bristle for the rough jobs, badger's grey for precision.

‘Mm – quite impressive. And what else can be established about our departed brother?'

‘Right handed, about your build – he had to use some sort of stool to get up to six feet – that's if I'm right about the parts he did on his knees or crouched on his haunches. That's about all. Well, maybe he'd lived in some monastery. Only a guess, but his hands talk like monks' hands must have talked in the long silences. Oh, one last thing – he didn't trust his apprentice. He did the lot except this bottom bit, this corner of hell. Look, you can see; it's a rough job, a fill-in. Can't understand why he handed over to his lad when his nose was at the winning-post.'

‘More than I can tell from my damned stones,' Moon said. And went.

Ah yes, this was his Great Work. Whatever he'd been employed on before must, could only have been a work-out for this. He'd sweated here, tossed in his bed, groaned, howled over it. Those torn hands, those agonized fingers,

And he shal com with woundes rede …

And then I knew why that last yard of fire wasn't his. This was his last job. He'd had enough, could stick it no longer. He'd left, thrown in his hand. But in those days you couldn't leave; they'd have hauled him back and kicked him to a conclusion. So he must have died on the job. But his last brush-strokes had been steady and sure, he'd been as fit at the end as when he'd begun.

And then I understood. I turned and, shuffling to the scaffold's edge, stared down at the stone-slabbed floor. He'd fallen.

Great God! I scrambled down the ladder and ran from the church. Moon had almost reached his tent. ‘He fell,' I yelled after him. ‘This was his last job. He fell.'

Moon turned and, as it sunk in, he grinned. ‘OK,' he called back. ‘Mind your own step, then.'

Alice Keach came next day about tea-time, but I only knew when I heard someone on the ladder. ‘Too late again to stop me,' she said, ‘I'm here.' Then she didn't speak for some time. I'd have been astonished if she had: at close quarters, face to face, my wall was daunting and she was daunted. I heard her draw in breath. Then she said, ‘Do you believe in hell, Mr Birkin?'

Now that was a thought! Hell? Passchendaele had been hell. Bodies split, heads blown off, grovelling fear, shrieking fear, unspeakable fear! The world made mud! But I knew it was bible hell she had in mind, hell that went on and on, an aching timeless hell. So I answered, ‘Well, it depends. Hell's different things to different people and different things to the same person at different times.'

She didn't question this: I swear she read my mind. She
knew
. ‘Then what about hell on earth?' she said.

I told her I'd seen it and lived there and that, mercifully, they usually left an exit open. Then neither of us spoke for a longish time, and I thought that there might be something to be said for seasons in hell because, when we'd dragged ourselves back from the bloodiness, life had seemed brighter than we'd remembered it. We sloughed off the pals who'd gone down into death. While it was day that is. At night, in the dark, for a time they came back but we wanted no part of what they now were: theirs was another world – hell, if you care to call it that.

And then there was Vinny. That had been a sort of hell. But I'd crawled from its pit and, here in Oxgodby, life had flooded back, tingling to my finger-tips, a world of new people who only knew as much of what had happened to me as I cared to tell them.

‘Well?' she said.

‘Yes,' I answered, ‘I've been there; I have a map of it in my head, and Mr Moon will bear me out. They kept sending us back there and that hell was worse than this chap's.' But even as I spoke, I knew she wasn't answered. It was neither that nor a bible hell had made her ask.

‘Oh,' she said. ‘I'm sorry. It was a silly question …'

That was the missed moment. I should have put out a hand and taken her arm and said, ‘Here I am. Ask me. Now. The real question! Tell me. While I'm here. Ask me before it's too late.'

And maybe she knew this because she murmured that she must go and, turning away, climbed down. She's lovely, I thought. She's shy, alarmed easily like a wild animal. How did he get her? Trap her? Overwhelm her? What was it like that first night together? Had he knelt by the bed first? Those dark eyes staring into the darkness of some hotel room. She could scarcely have known what marriage meant before then. Yet who knows – doubtless she saw more, much more in Keach than the rest of us. Nothing's so secret as what's between man and wife.

I followed her down. ‘I've left you a few fresh eggs,' she said. Then, when she'd gone off to the village, I went across to Moon's tent and we sat on the grass in the evening sunshine. ‘Well?' he asked.

‘I've been talking over hell with Mrs Keach.'

He laughed.

‘Do you think about it often?' I said.

He pursed his lips, wrinkled his nose and studied the back of his hand. Then – and this was unusual – he looked directly at me. ‘Often,' he said. ‘Particularly at night; that's the bad time. Your window's open; you must have heard me.' He knew there'd be neither perfunctory sympathy nor questions. ‘But I tell myself it will be better as time passes and it sinks further back. But now we're different.
We
know. We're men apart. Maybe wives know. Yes, of course, they must. And people do understand. I met a chap who went back to teaching. Like you, he'd been a signaller out in the middle, out on his own, with only a wire trailing back to his battery. He told me that, for the first four weeks, if a pupil dropped a desk lid he'd throw himself on the floor. At first they used to snigger. Then they didn't laugh any more, only stared horrified or in pity. Finally they just pretended not to notice.

‘Me? In the middle of it I used to think, Well, we're in the shadows now, but they'll have to blow the whistle some day and then, all at once, it'll be different; we'll go from this to that. But, of course, it couldn't be like that, could it? It has to work itself out, so I keep reminding myself
that I'm still a bit round the bend and perhaps always shall be.' He laughed. ‘You too?'

It was a question that he didn't expect to be answered: the side of my face had been clicking away as he talked.

‘It's not anything like so bad as when you first turned up,' he said. I flushed but he went on. ‘I don't suppose you noticed it happening, but Oxgodby's just about ironed you out.'

We sat for a time without speaking. At dusk a few lads came into the meadow and began larking about; a platelayer crossed, pushing his bike along the path to the station.

‘Sometimes, I half wanted it to happen,' Moon said. ‘There were times when I'd had enough. Well, you know what I mean – when I was sure my nerve would give way and I'd lie down before I was hit. Or worse, wouldn't be able to drive myself over the top. So many had gone, chaps I cared for. Sometimes it seemed that they were the lucky ones. But I remember them less well now … they're dwindling.'

And I thought of the great picture at the top of my ladder. But theirs was a different hell from ours.

The moon had risen, a slight breeze stirred the shadows of trees across fields of barley, white like water.

‘Look here,' Moon said. ‘We need a break. Damn it all we're not wage slaves. They're not pouring money over us. Let's take each day as a dividend for what's past. I'll fix it with Mossop. Tomorrow we'll have a holiday.'

So, next day, we downed tools and went off to the big field where Mossop was working. Already it was a day of great heat, the barley heads were brittle and bowed and you could have sworn there was an oven smell in the air. When the dew had dried, the reaper-binder, its sails flickering, the team fresh and skittish, began tossing out sheaves and we started to stook. But heavens, the thistles! After a time I learnt to kick sheaves over until I saw a firm handhold before jamming them, heads together, into the stubble, four or five pairs to a stook. And we went on back and forth across the cracked earth in the growing heat till mid-day,
when each sheaf's shadow was no more than a black tip. Then it was dinner-time (‘t'Missus's expecting you two gents') and rabbit-and-potato pie put fresh heart into us and carried us on until, at four, ‘th'allooance' came, greengage pie and scalding tea in a can.

And we finished in the dusk, a first star rising above the dark rim of the hills. Kathy Ellerbeck was waiting in the deep roadside grass by the field gate. ‘Don't forget it's Sunday-school Treat tomorrow,' she said. ‘Mr Dowthwaite's expecting you; there'll be your dafties to keep an eye on.'

It was useless to claim that I'd been having a holiday all day. She was remorseless. ‘What about Mr Moon here?' I asked. ‘Can't he have a treat too?' But no, he couldn't come. The treat was a reward for service and Moon hadn't rendered any. ‘Anyway,' she said, ‘he's Church.'

‘How do you know that?' I asked. ‘As far as I know he doesn't go anywhere.'

‘From his twang,' she said. ‘Posh!'

‘Oh,' Moon said. ‘So by his vowel sounds shall ye know them? Well what about Charity? Aren't all Christians …'

She had the sense not to admit religion into the argument, young as she was, knowing it pointed the way to all manner of disagreeable conclusions, so he didn't finish his sentence. ‘It's a Rule,' she said. ‘And, anyway, Mr Birkin's nearly finished his job, whereas you've not found what you're being paid to look for.'

‘Will Miss Sykes from Ferry be coming along?' Moon asked, by way of a counter-attack.

‘They have their own Treat, I expect,' Kathy said shortly. ‘Don't be late, Mr Birkin. The carts pick up at eight and they don't linger.'

Next morning I pinned a note to the ladder,
BACK TONIGHT, UNSAFE
, and, pushing bread and cold bacon into my mouth, ran across Moon's meadow to the nearest roadside and joined a man and woman waiting with two small boys. I was still panting and munching when, beyond a bend, I heard the clipclop of hooves; even in that horse age, it was a marvellously exciting sound.

And then they came, the morning sun gleaming on their chestnut and
black backs, glinting from martingales medalled like generals. Their manes were plaited with patriotic ribbons, their harness glowed – those great magical creatures soon to disappear from highways and turning furrow. Did I know it even then? I suppose not, nor anyone else in Oxgodby. From childhood, they had always known the sound of hooves fitfully beating stable floors in the night hours and the bitter smell of burning horn at the smithy. How could they foresee that, in a few brief years, their fellow sharers of field and road would be gone for ever?

Whilst parents sat in back-to-back state on benches ranged down the middle of the flat four-wheeled carts, the lads and girls dangled their legs over the sides. Our party was hauled up on the second equipage, greeted heartily and told that the confidently expected heat would soon have our jackets off. And so we clattered off, calling farewell to those disqualified by infirmity or alien beliefs from joining us, conscious (as they were) that we were part of the ancient cycle of the farming year and that our passing was token that the harvest was almost in.

Am I making too much of this? Perhaps. But there are times when man and earth are one, when the pulse of living beats strong, when life is brimming with promise and the future stretches confidently ahead like that road to the hills. Well, I was young …

We picked up the Ellerbecks at the station – as Chapel Steward he'd been kept a seat at Mr Dowthwaite's right hand on the first rulley – then on to the town where market day slowed us to a walk and, sometimes, a half, as other wagons manoeuvred on the cobbled square. Farmers' wives stood with baskets of home-churned butter and eggs at their feet or offered for sale early apples, hazel pears, bunches of pinks, whatever country folk had more than enough of in their orchards and gardens. I saw a man swinging a bulldog, its teeth clamped on a bootlace. ‘Ye'll ha' bother brekking a beeatlaace like this yan if t'dog can't,' he cried. And, from another stall, the smell of bread baked that morning reminded me that my hurried breakfast had not quelled hunger.

Then we clattered over a bridge and travelled between fields again. Someone nudged me and a thick beef sandwich was passed over my shoulder. It was Mossop and Mrs Mossop nodding encouragingly at me: I had established a reputation for an invincible hunger.

‘What are you doing here?' I said. ‘You're Church.'

‘Nay,' he replied. ‘Ay've me feeat i' beeath camps. The lot of 'em ha' git ti come at t'finish ti let me put 'em ti bed.'

For me that will always be the summer day of summer days – a cloudless sky, ditches and roadside deep in grass, poppies, cuckoo pint, trees heavy with leaf, orchards bulging over hedge briars. And we rumbled along through it, turning away from a finger-post to Sutton-under-Whitestone Cliff and made for the pantile roofs of Kilburn where a joiner in his yard called to and was answered by an acquaintance in the cavalcade.

‘Look yonder, Mr Birkin.'

‘Where?'

‘There!'

And, strolling mildly across a steep grassy escarpment, an immense White Horse, a gigantic enlargement of the sort of horse journeymen painters used to knock out for a couple of sovereigns apiece for proud owners up for the Great Ebor Handicap or the Beverley Selling Plate. Its overlong back and swan neck perpetuated horses of an antique world.