A Month in the Country (3 page)

‘Now,' he said, ‘… to touch on a delicate topic.' It apparently was going to be very delicate, because he lowered his voice. ‘Should you … when you feel a call-of-nature you can use the hut in the north-east corner of the burial yard. You'll find it quite private – behind some lilac bushes. When last I looked there were a few tools Mossop uses, but there's room enough. Kindly sprinkle a little Keating's once a week and shovel down some earth: it controls the flies.'

This must have been a very great effort for him, and there was an interval whilst he gathered reserves of goodwill for a further concession. ‘The scythe,' he said.

‘The scythe?'

‘Mossop's scythe hangs from a nail there. It is rusting. The nail.'

‘Ah.'

‘Perhaps you should ensure that it is safely secured before …'

I thanked him, speculating if it was loss of life or only manhood he was concerned about.

‘I told Moon he might use it too. What period do you suppose it to be?'

He couldn't possibly have meant the earth-closet, so I supposed he meant the stove and said, ‘Oh, about 1890 … 1900 … somewhere about that time' and wondered who Moon, my secret sharer, was.

‘No, no,' he exclaimed irritably. ‘The mural … the wall-painting …'

I told him I couldn't possibly know until I'd uncovered part of it. The costume would tell me within ten or twenty years; dress fashion didn't change all that quickly even for the well-to-do and, as for the poor, theirs scarcely altered at all, so I was hoping that there'd be one or two rich women. I said that kirtles went out and snoods came in about 1340. But, if he wanted me to guess – and guessing was all it would be – I'd say fourteenth century, after the Black Death, when surviving magnates were swallowing dead neighbours' estates at disaster prices and while fear for their own skins was still sweating out some of their profits.

He began to say something quite irrelevant – perhaps that was one reason why it was hard to keep listening to him. But there was a quality in his voice too which sapped the spirit and possibly there was a great deal that I missed (I may have been brooding on Moon and Mossop's Damoclean scythe).

‘When will you start?'

I picked up
that
. Well, here I was: I'd started. Surely, that was plain enough. Then I heard him say, ‘We shan't entertain any Extras.'

‘There won't be any.'

‘There
mustn't
be any. You agreed to 25 guineas, £12.10s. to be paid half-way and £13.15s. when Finished and Approved by the Executors. I have your letter here.'

‘Why just the Executors?' I asked. ‘Why not you too?' That was a shrewd thrust.

‘Merely Miss Hebron's omission in the form of bequest,' he lied bitterly. ‘An oversight, of course.'

Of course, I thought. Naturally!

But he struck back. ‘However, for all intent and purpose, I represent the executors. I shan't mind if you touch it up … any faint areas or even bits which may have disappeared … you can fill them in. So long as it's appropriate and tones in with the rest. I leave it to you' (he added doubtfully).

Incredible! I thought. Why are so many parsons like this? Must one excuse their defective sensibility towards their fellows because they are engrossed with God? And what about their wives? Can they possibly be like this at home?

‘Of course, it isn't absolutely sure anything's there,' I said, trying to sound matey.

‘Of course there's something there. I may have a certain reservation (which I'm not prepared to discuss) about Miss Hebron but she was no fool. She went up a ladder and scraped a patch until she found something.'

Good God, this was appalling! Scraped a patch! ‘How big a patch?' I moaned, sounding hysterical and staring wildly into the gloom above my chancel arch – (my cheek-bone clicking away like mad).

‘One head, I believe,' he said. ‘Certainly not more than two.'

A head! Perhaps
two
heads! Probably half a dozen heads! She would have used sandpaper and a pan-brush. I felt like running up the ladder and beating my head on the wall.

‘Then she whitewashed it over again,' he went on, quite oblivious to my distress. ‘You might as well know here and now your employment
has not my support. But, no doubt, you guessed this – reading between the lines of my letters. It would never have reached this stage but for the unreasonable position taken up by her solicitors when I asked their agreement to an alternative use for your twenty-five guineas and their pig-headed refusal to pay out her £1000 bequest to our Fabric Fund until the will's conditions were fulfilled.'

I gazed up into the darkness. However had she known it was there? But what if there was nothing except what was left of her heads? But if Keach, plainly a notable unbeliever, believed there was, then there must be. It occurred to me that perhaps he'd had a scrub too.

‘It will be in full view of the people,' he complained.

‘It?' I asked. ‘It?'

‘Whatever it is,' he said curtly, looking up the ladder. ‘It will distract attention from worship.'

‘Only for a short time,' I said. ‘People tire of colour and shapes which stay in the same place. And they always believe that they have more time than they will have and that, someday, they'll come on a weekday and have a proper look.' I should have said ‘we' – I'm just the same.

Do you know, I believe that he actually did consider the validity of this argument before rejecting it. Then he went. He hadn't told me who Moon was. Perhaps we should run into one another behind the lilac bushes.

I ran up the ladder again and did a few gentle bounces on the platform; it was commendably firm. Then I contemplated the great sweep of lime-washed wall before me. Yes – ‘contemplated' – no other word will serve: it was a solemn moment. It went (the wall, that is) up to the roof timbers and sideways and downwards to the limits of the arch. Like a blind man I ran the flats of both hands along its surface until I found the places she'd distempered again. By nature we are creatures of hope, always ready to be deceived again, caught by the marvel that
might
be wrapped in the grubbiest brown paper parcel.

But I
knew
it was there. And I knew it was a Judgement. It was bound to be a Judgement because they always got the plum spot where parishes couldn't avoid seeing the God-awe-full things that would happen to
them if they didn't fork out their tithes or marry the girls they'd got with child. It would be St Michael weighing souls against Sin, Christ in Majesty refereeing and, down below, the Fire that flameth evermore – a really splendidly showy crowd-scene. Perhaps I'd have done better to have bargained for payment per head.

I was so excited that only darkness stopped me from making a start. What luck! My first job … well, the first job on my own account. Mustn't make a mess of it, I thought. The pay's terrible but, somehow, I'll survive and have something to show future customers. And I willed it to be something good, really splendid, truly astonishing. Like Stoke Orchard or Chalgrove. Something to wring a mention from
The Times
and a detailed account (with pictures) in the
Illustrated London News
.

Then I climbed down the scaffold ladder and up the belfry ladder, but before I lit my oil lamp, I crossed to the window and looked across the darkness to the village's scattered lights glittering through the rain. Well, I thought, this is home for a few weeks; and I don't know a soul and no-one knows me. I might as well be a man from Mars. No. Already this wasn't true. I knew the Revd. J. G. Keach, probably all I needed ever to know about him. And the Stationmaster; hadn't he offered me a meal? Practically Oxgodby's entire Establishment with Mossop and Moon Bros. waiting in the wings. I was Somebody already – in less than a couple of hours. Marvellous!

That night, for the first time during many months, I slept like the dead and, next morning, awoke very early. In fact, I didn't sleep long after daybreak on any of the succeeding Oxgodby days. The work was tiring – I was on my feet most of each day, often eating whilst standing – and then, at night, up there in my loft high above the fields and away from the road, too far for voices to carry, there was nothing to disturb me. Sometimes awakening momentarily, I heard a vixen howling at the edge of some distant wood or the scream of some small creature set upon in the darkness. For the rest, only the sounds of an ancient building, a tremor on the bell-rope coming down and out through the hole in the floor, a stir in the roof timbers, stone still settling after five hundred years …

During my weeks there I had only two bad nights. Once when I dreamed that the tower was crumpling and, once, sliding forward into machine-gun fire and no pit to creep into, slithering on through mud to mutilating death. And then my screams too joined with the night creatures. Well, there was a third sleepless night but that came much later and for a different reason.

So, that first morning, I rolled up my blanket and, avoiding the bell-rope, walked across to the south window and pulled away my coat hitched across to keep out the rain. It was a simple two-light window, unglazed of course, with a simple mullion strong enough to take my weight. The rain had ceased and dew glittered on the graveyard grass, gossamer drifted down air-currents, a pair of blackbirds picked around after insects, a thrush was singing where I could see him in one of the ash trees. And beyond lay the pasture I had crossed on my way from the station (with a bell-tent pitched near a stream) then more fields rising towards a dark rim of hills. And, as it lightened, a vast and magnificent landscape unfolded. I turned away; it was immensely satisfying.

Then I unpacked my foodstore, tea, marge, cocoa, rice, a loaf, thinking that I should need to scrounge a couple of tins with tight lids to keep the stuff airtight. I primed my stove with meths, fried a couple of rashers and made a thick sandwich. It was very pleasant sitting on the boards, leaning against a wall, because through my window I still could see the hills heaving up like the back of some great sea-creature, dark woods washing down its sides into the Vale.

And then, God help me, on my first morning, in the first few minutes of my first morning, I felt that this alien northern countryside was friendly, that I'd turned a corner and that this summer of 1920, which was to smoulder on until the first leaves fell, was to be a propitious season of living, a blessed time.

I told myself that I didn't care how long the job took me – what was left of July, August, September, even October. I was going to be happy, live simply, spend as little as paraffin, bread, vegetables and a bit of bully-beef now and then might cost me. I could have managed on a couple of pints of milk a week, but this weather it wouldn't keep so I should have to have three: oatmeal porridge is very sustaining and needs only warming to make a second meal. So I reckoned that, with no rent
to pay, I could manage comfortably on fifteen bob a week, maybe even ten or twelve. In fact, the twenty-five quid they'd agreed to pay me might be made to spin out until cold weather drove me back to winter quarters in London.

The marvellous thing was coming into this haven of calm water and, for a season, not having to worry my head with anything but uncovering their wall-painting for them. And, afterwards, perhaps I could make a new start, forget what the War and the rows with Vinny had done to me and begin where I'd left off. This is what I need, I thought – a new start and, afterwards, maybe I won't be a casualty anymore.

Well, we live by hope.

There was a second window in the loft; I'd noticed it the previous evening. It had some sack-cloth tacked across, so I'd supposed that it must cover some sort of opening. Now I pulled it away.

Over the years I suppose that I must have grubbed around scores, maybe hundreds of churches, but do you know, that tug revealed the most extraordinary sight of all. There, almost scraping my nose, was a baluster, a hulking big Anglo-Saxon baluster. And I began laughing. Although I'd never seen one before, I recognized it immediately from good old
Bannister-Fletcher
, our bible in Miss Witherpen's English Architecture class. ‘Draw a baluster,' she used to chide. ‘Go on, never mind fiddling about with fancy Corinthian capitals – draw an English baluster.' (I still can.)

And now here was one – a crude tub of stone with a pair of double hoops top and bottom. ‘Go on – draw a baluster!' If I'd been Joseph Conrad I'd have gone into a peroration about the lost land of youth. My first real-life baluster! And for a few weeks, to all intent and purpose, I owned it: it was
my
baluster. So I stroked its belly – once for Bannister, once for Fletcher and once for the Workmen of the World long dead, and those, like me, still quick.

I looked down into the nave. The light wasn't good and, on the platform near the roof timbers, far too dark to make a start on the wall. So I went down and had a look round the building. Overall, because of its low nave arcade and the pair of wide aisles, it was a good-looker; in detail (excepting, of course, my baluster) it was on the dull side. However, there was one good wall monument – a Baroque bas-relief of
a well-built young lady, Laetitia Hebron, modestly hiding her essential glory by hanging on tight to a shroud as she clambered from an elegant catafalque. All very nicely carved by one A. H. in 1799 – along with a few rather fine lines by her young husband. Well, anyway, I wanted to suppose that he hadn't found them in a catalogue. Latin, of course, but I got its drift …

Conjugam optima amantissima et delectissima
Most loving and delightful wife

and on through eleven lines listing her matchless charms, until the twelfth, a single word, his sad last farewell –
Vale
.

I had a second look at Laetitia, a long look after that testimonial. Her tightened shroud showed her to advantage. And she had a friendly face with a teasing upward turn of her lips, ‘
Conjugam optima amantissima et delectissima
…' Well, he was right. He'd had better luck than me.