A Month in the Country (5 page)

Medieval wall-paintings keep to a well-thumbed catalogue. There are the three voluptuaries displayed in jolly dissipation, then racked in hellish torment; there is Christopher wading through fishes and mermaids with the Christ-child on his shoulder; there are those boring female saints stoically enduring wheel, rack and sword-slicing (these fitted conveniently along aisle walls or above the nave arcade). But the great spread of wall between chancel arch and roof timbers almost always got the Big Treatment – a Judgement.

Well, it's reasonable enough. Big casts need big stages and the tall wall around the great arch could be arranged very appropriately with Christ in Majesty at its apex, the falling curves nicely separating the smug souls of the Righteous trooping off-stage north to Paradise, from the Damned dropping (normally head-first) into the bonfire.

So I began my labours at Oxgodby by testing this likelihood, using a short ladder to reconnoitre the apex. And it was so. By the end of the
second day a very fine head was revealed. Yes, a very fine head indeed, sharp beard, drooped moustache, heavy-lidded eyes outlined black. And no cinnabar on the lips; that was a measure of my painter's calibre: excitingly as cinnabar first comes over, he'd known that, given twenty years, lime would blacken it. And, as the first tinges of garment appeared, that prince of blues, ultramarine ground from lapis lazuli, began to show – that really confirmed his class – he must have fiddled it from a monastic job – no village church could have run to such expense. (And abbeys only took on the top men.) But it was the head, the face, which set a seal on his quality.

For my money, the Italian masters could have learned a thing or two from that head. This was no catalogue Christ, insufferably ethereal. This was a wintry hardliner. Justice, yes there would be justice. But not mercy. That was writ large on each feature for when, by the week's end, I reached his raised right hand, it had not been made perfect: it still was pierced.

This was the Oxgodby Christ, uncompromising … no, more – threatening. ‘This is my hand. This is what you did to me. And, for this, many shall suffer the torment, for thus it was with me.'

Moon saw this at once. ‘Mmmmm,' he murmured, ‘I wouldn't fancy being in the dock, if he was the beak.

“And he shal com with woundes rede
To deme the quikke and the dede …” '

And, lying abed on Sunday mornings, hearing them bleating away downstairs, I could see him up there in the shadows, unseen above their heads, and wondered if he was the honoured guest the Revd. J. G. Keach and Co. were so blithely expecting.

‘Ha! How say you. Did you fede the hongry? Did you give drynke to the thirsty? Did you clothe the naked and nedye, herbowre the houselesse, comfort the seke, visite prisoners?

‘And what about poor Birkin, did any of you offer him bed and board?'

Yes, you blasted smug Yorkshire lot, what about Tom Birkin – nerves shot to pieces, wife gone, dead broke? Yes, what about me?

But those condemnatory eyes! ‘And you too, Birkin! Don't think I've
forgotten you. Out there in the barrage, taking my name in vain! It's all down on the slate.'

But, for me, the exciting thing was more than this. Here I was, face to face with a nameless painter reaching from the dark to show me what he could do, saying to me as clear as any words, ‘If any part of me survives from time's corruption, let it be this. For this was the sort of man I was.'

Kathy Ellerbeck was the first native who came to see what I was up to. She was the girl who had stared from the stationmaster's house at my coat and me, and she was fourteen years old, in her last term at the village school. She was big for her age, blue-eyed and freckled, a knowing-looking girl. In those days I didn't dislike children; in fact, I got on very well with most of them. And I had really great pleasure from the sort I could talk to tongue-in-cheek, who knew this and enjoyed it too – talk for talk's sake like many kids enjoy ice-cream.

Well, Kathy Ellerbeck was one of that rare breed and, to boot, she had the sense to know a kindred spirit wasn't going to be on hand for ever and that she must catch the fleeting moment e'er it fled. We understood each other perfectly from the moment she flung open the door. ‘Hello there!' she called. ‘Mr Birkin, can I come up?'

I came to the platform's edge, looked down and told her that I'd made a rule that no-one must come upstairs whilst I was working. An absolutely right-down-the-line rule and no favourites. Except Mr Moon. We had a reciprocal agreement – I could go down his hole and he could climb my ladder. Did she know Mr Moon? And how did she know my name?

Yes, she knew Mr M. all right; everybody in Oxgodby knew him and, even though I hadn't had any letters yet, that's why everybody knew I was Mr T. Birkin: Mr Moon had spread it around. And I was right; he wouldn't let anyone into his tent nor go down his hole. And what did the ‘T' stand for?

‘Well, then,' I said, ‘that proves it; it's the Union. So, even if King George came, he'd have to look down on Mr Moon and up to me. Absolutely no exceptions. Except ourselves. We need to consult on
technical matters and also check that one isn't working faster than the other. But I'm willing, grateful even, to talk to devotees of the arts so long as they speak up and don't mind me turning my back on them. And never mind what the “T” stands for – young girls call me “Mr”.'

‘I saw you get off the train,' she said. ‘In the rain. My dad's Mr Ellerbeck, the stationmaster. Dad said, “That chap from Down South, the one who's going to do a cleaning job in the church … he's just got here.” I'm Kathy Ellerbeck.'

‘How did your father recognize me?' I asked. ‘I wasn't carrying a bill-board.'

‘Oh, we know most folk who get off the train and those we don't know, well we know whoever meets them. In your case, Mr Mossop warned us you were coming. And you looked like an artist.'

‘I'm not an artist so how can I look like one?'

‘We know artists don't care what they look like and that coat of yours gave the show away. My dad said I was to look in and enquire how you were getting on. He said you were an opportunity that mightn't come again in a lifetime in a little spot like this – watching an artist at work, I mean.'

‘Look, how many times have I to tell you I'm not an artist. I'm the labourer who cleans up after artists. And my coat doesn't signify a thing: I wear it because I feel the cold round my ankles like other people feel it round their ears.'

I was glad that her parents knew where she was. After all, no-one knew much about me and I guessed what it was like in the country – everything had to have a sexual overtone, if it wasn't someone else's wife, it was little girls, boys, or, worse still, animals. Though having a ladder between me and visitors must have been a block to their imaginations but, doubtlessly, not an insuperable one.

‘My dad says it must be a miserable job working all day on your own up there, no-one to talk to or nothing.'

‘Ah,' I said enigmatically.

‘We have a picture painted on our chapel wall,' she said. ‘Behind the pulpit. Three big arum lilies. It's very beautiful.'

‘Why?'

‘Why what?'

‘Why is it lilies? Why just lilies? Why not lilies and roses or just roses? Or roses and daisies?'

‘Underneath it there's printed, “
CONSIDERTHE LILIES
” in old-fashioned lettering. It's a text.'

‘What an odd text to have on display in a chapel. I shouldn't have thought you chapellers would agree with that.

“Consider the lilies how they grow.
They toil not neither do they spin.”

Aren't you supposed to be great supporters of nose-to-the-grindstone? Yet here you are, in a public place, recommending malingering.'

She considered this and evidently decided it was unanswerable.

‘The man who put the transfer on came from York,' she said. ‘He had a book of suitable transfers and we had to pick one. Mam liked the one he had of roses – “By cool Siloam's shady rill” – it's a hymn. But, in the end, Mr Dowthwaite and Dad decided that, since it was to be in full view of the congregation, it had better be lilies.'

‘Oh,' I said. ‘And why? Why not roses?'

‘Oh I don't know,' she exclaimed savagely and changed the conversation. ‘About you being on your own up there, Dad said I could leave the gramophone under a seat and, whenever I called, I could play you some records. Sacred songs and solos.'

‘Right!' I said. ‘It's about time I stopped talking and got on with some work. Play something.'

She wound up the spring and a fruity contralto began to rattle off,

‘Angels ever bright and fair
Take, O take me to your care …'

It was no trouble at all conjuring up her heaving bosom and starting eyes as she worked up to a final convulsive wail.

‘Ah,' I shouted over my shoulder when the record had stretched to its end, ‘very touching! And very suitable! I'm expecting to come across two or three angels up here any day now.'

‘Yes,' she replied. ‘It was. Would you like it once more or shall I continue on the other side?'

And she did, working her way through ‘O for the wings of a dove',
‘The Lost Chord' and ‘The Holy City'. She was an honest young girl and an intelligent one. The sort who, if ever she roamed far from Oxgodby, in the right place and in the right company, might find Purcell and perhaps Tallis and come at last to Byrd.
Nunc dimittis
!

She leaned back, her flecked moon-face shining. Plainly, she had set herself to cultivate me and recognized the strength of her position – there I was up a ladder; escape would not be easy.

After that, she used to come on most days, sometimes bringing her younger brother Edgar who had wide believing eyes and who only spoke on demand – normally a sharp elbow. From their accounts and from judicious pumping, their mother worked out how it was with me and usually sent a bit of whatever was being manufactured in her kitchen – rabbit pie, a couple of currant teacakes, two or three curd tarts. So, over the weeks, a splendid repertory of North Riding dishes was performed
amanti bravura
to an applauding Londoner, dishes Mrs Ellerbeck had helped her mother bake, who had helped her mother bake who … Sometimes I'd share this bounty with Moon and it was he who suggested that we were eating disposable archaeology.

Anyway, encouraged by this bounty, I began to cherish the hope of lasting out until Christmas if the weather didn't turn too cold or Keach too hostile.

It must have been nine or ten days before Mrs Keach (the Vicar's wife) visited. I didn't work to set meal-times and came down the ladder when I was hungry. And, in the middle of those hot August days, I usually cut two rough rounds of loaf and a wedge of Wensleydale and took it outside to eat. On Saturdays and Sundays, I had a bottle of pale ale; weekdays, water.

It was so hot the day she came that the grey cat let me approach almost to within touch before it slipped off Elijah Fletcher's box tomb into the rank grass and then into its bramble patch. It was here, above Elijah, that normally I sat and ate, looking across to Moon's camp, letting summer soak into me – the smell of summer and summer sounds. Already I felt part of it all, not a looker-on like some casual visitor. I should like to have believed that men working out in the fields looked
up and, seeing me there, acknowledged that I'd become part of the landscape, ‘that painter chap, doing a job, earning his keep'.

So I nudged back my bum and lay flat on the stone table, covered my eyes with a khaki handkerchief and, doubtlessly groaning gently, dropped off into a deep sleep. When I awoke, she was leaning against the grey limestone wall looking towards me. She was wearing a dusky pink dress.

‘Have you been here long?' I asked.

‘May be ten minutes … I'm not sure.' She spoke shyly. Awide-brimmed straw hat cast a shadow across her face so that I couldn't tell how old she was. Then, for a few moments, she stood without speaking, her look wandering across the fabric of the church, then turning to follow the haphazard flight of a red admiral until it flattened against a headstone, pinned to its lichen by the sun. I slipped down from the slab but still leaned against it, drowsy, only half-awake.

‘Are you comfortable in the bell-loft?' she asked. ‘Is there anything that you need? Are you sleeping well? I could lend you a travelling rug; we don't use it at this time of year. My husband said you walked here. From the railway station, I mean. You can't have been able to carry much, so I'm supposing that you're sleeping on the floor. Perhaps you guessed that I'm Mrs Keach, the Vicar's wife – Alice Keach.'

I told her that I had a sleeping-bag and there was my topcoat if I needed it, and I was using a hassock for a pillow.

The butterfly flew into the air once more. For a moment it seemed that it might settle on the rose in her hat, but it veered off and away into the meadow. The sound of bees foraging from flower to flower seemed to deepen the stillness.

‘I'm afraid that you must think us inhospitable,' she said. ‘All of us in our beds and you up there on the floor-boards.'

I said that it suited me very well and that it's what I'd bargained for. At the end of each day I was so tired that it didn't need a feather bed to send me to sleep.

I saw Moon's head rising above the grass as he heaved himself into the sunshine and began an elaborate dance, waving his arms upwards and sideways. I'd seen him at it before. He hadn't found anything out of the ordinary; he was just working off cramp.

‘All the same I shall bring a rug,' she said and left the wall. She walked forward only a few paces but near enough for me to see that she was much younger than Keach, no more than nineteen or twenty, and that she was very lovely. More than just pleasant-looking I mean; she was quite enchanting. Her neck was uncovered to her bosom and, immediately, I was reminded of Botticelli – not his Venus – the Primavera. It was partly her wonderfully oval face and partly the easy way she stood. I'd seen enough paintings to know beauty when I saw it and, in this out of the way place, here it was before me.