A Month in the Country (7 page)

‘
The Coral Island
and Edgar's having
Children of the New Forest
.'

‘Isn't it a bit beyond him?' I asked.

‘He'll grow to like it later,' she replied. ‘I've heard it's a good story with two girls in it. This is Mr Birkin, Emily. He's the man living in the church.'

‘I've heard about you,' the dying girl said. ‘I'm longing to see what you're doing and, when I'm better, I hope you'll still be here, Mr Birkin.'

An apple tree grew outside her window, its boughs almost pushing into the room. The sun came through the leaves with a soft burnished light. No birds sang in the heat. Summer's heaviness oppressed me. Brother and sister stared at the pale girl: in adults such curiosity would have been indecent. ‘Who was there today?' she asked. ‘Tell me who was there.'

She listened to the names. Even as late as early spring, she must have gallivanted across ditches and through hedges with some of them. ‘What hymns did you have?' she demanded. ‘I like “You in your small corner and I in mine”,' she said. ‘It's my favourite but it's not suitable for summer. It's a cosy sort of one; it makes me think of winter and dark
nights and going to bed with a hot water bottle. I like your straw hat, Kathy. Let me try it on.'

The crimson streamers flamed against her pale face. She turned to a mirror and her eyes shone. ‘I think it suits me,' she said. ‘I like hats. Wearing a hat's part of the fun of Sunday-school.'

‘When you come next, our Kathy'll let you wear it,' Edgar said daringly: no doubt it was an oblique revenge.

Emily did not answer him. Oddly enough, she turned to me and our eyes met. Then we trooped downstairs and had our jam tarts. When we were back on the road and Edgar was picking cornflowers again, Kathy said, ‘She knows she's dying, doesn't she? You're coming back for your tea, aren't you? Mam said you could.'

By this time, I'd got down to my last bob and still Keach showed no sign of forking out a first instalment. It hadn't slipped his mind because he wasn't that sort of man; he was going to make me
ask
for it and this irritated me. But, when I walked up to the village grocer's and found I hadn't a penny to buy a
Daily Mail
, there wasn't much left but to knuckle under.

His vicarage turned out to be in a small wood. Of course it hadn't been built in one: the saplings planted by some earlier incumbent as garden features had become immense spreading trees, and their undergrowth had blotted out any lawns or flower beds that may once have been there. In fact, the drive was now a tunnel and the scuffle of my boots sent wood-pigeons threshing through branches and boughs into the sky. And, round a turn, I came across a hare: it gazed in amazement at me. A jay flew across. A jay! I'd only seen one in books. Why the place was a latter-day Eden!

The house was in a clearing, but what once had been a drive-around for carriages was now blocked by a vast stricken cedar, its torn roots heaving up like a cliff-side and supporting a town-sized garden, its crevices already colonized by wild plants. The once white bricks of the house walls had taken on an unpleasing greenish tinge so that they had a damp look, the windows were mostly shuttered and the building's squarish severity was only ameliorated by a twin-pillared portico.
Advancing on this, I found a miniature easel displaying a pallid print of mountains and a lake framed in red plush, the kind of fancy nonsense Victorians posed in fireless grates. As I knocked at the door and then dragged the bell, I considered the significance of this extraordinary decoration and found none.

My several well-mannered tugs were unanswered and, had I not been penniless, I would have gone away. So, quite annoyed by this time, I gave the thing a really savage drag. A good six inches of wire scraped from the hole and, when released, shot back like a catapult. Deep inside the house I heard a bell tinkling. Like distant laughter. As a matter of fact, for a moment, I believed it was someone laughing at me. Perhaps Mrs Keach.

Feeling vaguely guilty, I looked around. Really it was quite oppressive and I marvelled that any practising novel-reader dared put a nose beyond the door at night: an entire tribe of thugs come to retrieve green eyes from little yellow gods stolen by an incumbent's ne'er-do-well brother could have camped there unseen for weeks. As for the vicarage, it could have housed a family of ten with supporting coachman, cooks, maids and all. Whereas it was plain that Keach could not afford a gardener.

Then the white-painted door opened and Alice Keach looked out. Her eyes were larger and darker than I'd remembered them. When we had met in the churchyard she had been cool, almost too self-contained but, here on home ground, she was overwrought and, before I had time to ask if I might see her husband, she had come out upon the portico and had launched into a rather wild account of what it was like living there, as though she mistook me for a diocesan investigator of clerical dwellings. It occurred to me that perhaps she was one of those shy people who, given notice, can put on a bold front but, caught off-guard, go to pieces.

It was astonishing. Here I was, almost a stranger, being told of a most alarming nightmare she'd been having – how trees had been closing in on her, first swaying menacingly, then dragging up their roots and actually advancing, closing in until mercifully fended off at the last minute by the house walls. And the air, it too had pressed in till she felt the house had become a compression chamber. Actually, she infected me with this obsession – Yes, yes, I told her, I knew exactly what she was talking
about, because it was like that when a really big shell exploded; the air in a dug-out is sucked out then blown in, a quite stupefying sensation. I'm sure that she didn't hear me.

Then she pulled herself together. I managed to say that I'd like to have a word with her husband and we set off down a longish stone-flagged corridor, passing by several outsize doors. She opened one of these. The room had two large windows blinded by interior shutters and, but for an unusually small fireplace, was absolutely empty. This plainly was how they'd found it and this was how it would stay until the removal vans came again. As we passed along she touched each door and murmured, ‘This one too … just the same.'

Their living-room was at the end of this passage and was very long and lofty, with four immense uncurtained windows rising from the floorboards almost to the ceiling. In all normal rooms, the first thing to catch the eye is furniture, pictures, mirrors, bits and pieces with significance for their owners. But, in this room, it was bareness. The floor was bare, well not quite bare – there were a few skimpy rugs leaping-distance apart. Three of the walls were blank but the fourth had a single immense piece of furniture like an internal buttress. In any ordinary room it would have been grotesque but, here, it fell into perfect scale. I've no idea what it was. It could have been a Baroque altar-piece, an oriental throne, a gigantic examination exercise performed by a cabinet-maker's apprentice. Perhaps it was none of these things. Perhaps it was only a folly. I would like to have examined it: I mean to say, almost everything has
some
purpose.

‘My husband's father bought it at an auction sale. No-one wanted it. He got it for just the removal costs. He just thought it would help fill the room,' Mrs Keach said. ‘We're not sure what it is. Actually, we think part of it's missing.'

The room was built for giants and Keach himself had my attention last of all; he was sitting on a hard chair by a rickety music-stand and evidently had been playing the fiddle which now was lying on a small table. Oddly enough, he didn't seem at all put out by his wife's hysterical commentary on their domestic hardship: instead, he listened carefully as though he too was hearing this for the first time, so that it struck me that perhaps they bottled up their trouble until some stranger turned up
to have it all poured over him. Truthfully, I was fascinated because it had never occurred to me that too big a house might have the same appalling drawbacks as too small a one, and only the reflection that I'd no home at all, except the precarious tenancy of a belfry, shielded me from black depression.

Then a most extraordinary thing happened. She stopped talking and both stared in horror at something behind me. Frankly, the hair rose on my neck and I turned with utmost reluctance, really very afraid of what I might see. It was only a cat. But it was the largest cat and certainly the fiercest looking animal that ever I saw in my life. It had a fluttering song-thrush clamped in its bloody jaws and glared through the window, malevolently eyeing each of us in turn. Then it slipped back amongst the rank grass and briars.

This roused Keach to suggest that I might like to see the rest of the house.

There was no staircarpet and even the long first-floor landing was bare boards. ‘Empty,' said the Vicar, doing some door-tapping on his own account. The bathroom was a very large converted bedroom. In one corner stood a smallish painted iron bath with rusty drip-stains below both taps. There was a wash-basin, of course, and a towel-horse, but all these fitments were overwhelmed by a monstrous water-tank, so massive that it was supported not only by cast-iron brackets built into the wall, but by two free-standing painted iron posts. ‘Mossop comes on Monday evenings,' Keach explained. ‘He pumps up water from a well at the back of the house; a tankful lasts us until Thursday.' ‘If we're very careful,' his wife put in. Neither bothered to tell me how they got through the rest of the week.

We trailed along into another large room: it was empty but for an altar, probably a cabin-trunk covered with a spare bedspread. Before it were two kneeling-hassocks. Next door, there was a little more furniture – a very small desk and a cheap little book-case. On a card-table some washing waited to be ironed, a clothes-horse stood before an empty grate. ‘Look!' Mrs Keach exclaimed pointing to the window: fig leaves like immense hands pressed against it. ‘Alice has her fancies,' her husband murmured.

That flat iron and the washing made a deep impression on me. In this wilderness of a house, they huddled together for the comfort of each
other's company. Neither cares to be left alone in the awful place, I thought. But outside, they're quite different people.

Keach pointed to the ceiling. ‘Attics!' he said, adding ironically, ‘And there's a complete suite of cellars too.'

We tramped downstairs where I was offered a cup of coffee, but I said that I really must go. Frankly, I was eager to get outside again; that house seemed to gather around one like a shadow. They shouldn't have been made to live in it. And yet both seemed able to throw it off like a cloak. Alice Keach – inside, nervy, obsessive; outside, charming, well within herself. As for her husband, until we met again, I felt quite sorry for him.

She walked out into the clearing with me and paused by a bush of roses rampaging on to the gravel. ‘Sara van Fleet,' she said. It was a pink rose, a single. ‘It's an old variety. Mind! It has sharp thorns. And it keeps on blooming. You'll see – there'll be some right into autumn.' She smiled. ‘Even if you don't visit us again, you'll know – I usually wear one in my hat … Here, take one.'

Later in the day, when I had to turn down Moon's suggestion that we go up to the pub, I remembered why I'd visited the vicarage. But Mossop turned up next day with an envelope containing an instalment – a couple of crumpled pound notes and a receipt for me to sign.

That rose, Sara van Fleet … I still have it. Pressed in a book. My
Bannister-Fletcher
, as a matter of fact. Someday, after a sale, a stranger will find it there and wonder why.

There was so much time that marvellous summer. Day after day, mist rose from the meadow as the sky lightened and hedges, barns and woods took shape until, at last, the long curving back of the hills lifted away from the Plain. It was a sort of stage-magic – ‘Now you don't see; indeed, there is nothing to see. Now look!' Day after day it was like that and each morning I leaned on the yard gate dragging at my first fag and (I'd like to think) marvelling at this splendid backcloth. But it can't have been so; I'm not the marvelling kind. Or was I then? But one thing is sure – I had a feeling of immense content and, if I thought at all, it was that I'd like this to go on and on, no-one going, no-one coming, autumn
and winter always loitering around the corner, summer's ripeness lasting for ever, nothing disturbing the even tenor of my way (as I think someone may have said before me).

Each day still began much alike. I brewed up, fried a couple of rashers and a round of bread and emptied my slops from the window into a nettle patch. Then I climbed down to go behind the lilac bushes (one wary eye on the scythe) and, afterwards, using Elijah Fletcher's tomb as my wash-stand, shaved. By this time Moon was stirring and waiting for me to go across and have a mug of tea – we'd made it a rule not to make a start on the work until the first flat clang of the elementary school's bell.

Once we got on the job we worked hard enough – but for a shortish mid-day break – until six or seven in the evening. Up on my platform I used to warily circle my quarry (if that isn't too dramatic a way of putting it) in my mind's eye trying first this and then that for, in my job, there can't be a second shot. In fact, usually for several minutes, I'd sit cross-legged like a Hottentot and
think
my way through the day's work.

Anyway, a couple of days after my visit to the Keaches, I was going through this performance when Kathy Ellerbeck made her normal noisy entrance. ‘Hello up there, Mr Birkin!' she called, ‘I haven't come to bother you.' Then she seated herself in a pew which caught the sunlight.

‘People always tell me that before they
do
begin to bother me,' I said. ‘So say what you've come to say and then I can get on. And why aren't you at school? And why didn't we hear the bell this morning?'