A Month in the Country (8 page)

‘We've broken up,' she cried. ‘For a month!'

‘Far too long,' I said. ‘But you can always help your mother.'

‘Mam says she doesn't see how you can make a living at your job,' she said. ‘She says there can't be all that many pictures hidden on walls.'

‘Well I don't make much of one,' I said.

‘One what?'

‘Much of a living. Isn't that what we're talking about?'

‘Well then,' she said. ‘Why don't you change your job and stay on at Oxgodby?'

I asked her what I should live on. Did she think her dad would find me a job portering on his station?

‘Well, no,' she replied. ‘A porter doesn't need as much education as you have.'

‘What then?' I asked.

‘You could work for the Council like being a rent-collector or a school teacher – you've been to a college.'

Not that kind of college, I told her.

‘I've asked Miss Wintersghyll and she says, as long as you've been to a grammar school, you could be an ordinary teacher if you get it into your head right from the start that you never could rise to be a headmaster.' And, when I remarked that she seemed very eager for me to remain in Oxgodby, she explained that her parents had taken a liking to me, and also I'd be much missed by others of her acquaintance as I was quite well thought of for my reformative work at the Sunday-school, as well as for my hardihood roughing it in the belfry.

‘Ah, in that case, I'll think about it,' I said. ‘A teacher eh? With a cane behind the cupboard? Laying down the law. Can you see me at it?'

‘No,' she admitted. ‘But I expect I might get used to the idea. And so could you if you set your mind to it. Dad says anybody can do anything if he sets his mind to it.'

‘Right!' I said. ‘That's settled then. I like being highly thought of, so I'll set my mind to it. Someday, you'll be able to boast “It was Little Me changed his ways: he owes it all to Me.”

‘But now I must see about earning the balance of my pay which I confidently believe Mr Keach will hand over any day now.'

And so it went on until, after a longer than usual silence, I looked down and she had gone. But she'd put the axe to the very roots of my self-esteem: surely we shouldn't be required, even by worthy Ellerbecks, to justify the ethic of our labour? Our jobs are our private fantasies, our disguises, the cloak we can creep inside to hide. And to be brought to book twice in one week is against natural justice. But I was.

Alice Keach always stayed below too. She would discreetly leave the door slightly ajar and then seat herself in the back pew and shelter behind her wide-brimmed straw-hat (a rose pushed into its band). But for the occasional creak in the scaffold whenever I shuffled back a pace to see what I'd been doing, the building was so still that, although I was a good thirty paces away and my back towards her, we talked casually as we
might have talked in a parlour. Not a conventional conversation – no more than a remark, a question, answer, exclamation. Really, there was no need to look: from the way she put things I could see her face.

‘How did you come to take up this kind of occupation, Mr Birkin?' (a mischievous twist to her lips, a mock innocent gaze). ‘I mean how did you discover that such a job existed? Was it in the family?'

(If she could have seen Dad in his office at the scented-soap factory, packing his Gladstone bag of samples!) ‘Well, yes, in a way it was, Mrs Keach. How clever of you to guess. We
were
in the cleaning business.'

‘How very interesting! And did you travel around with your father to pick up the finer points?'

‘Oh no – never. He couldn't stand anyone with him when he was travelling. He found the work a strain on his nerves. Always came home in a foul temper. Didn't speak. Went straight down the back garden. Didn't even take off his hat. Cutting down things helped. My mother used to shudder for her roses. The first ten minutes were the worst; anything might happen. Temperament, you follow. All artists have it.'

I was working up the three brothers (see Luke 16), blissfully heedless of the judgement to come. The second magnate's cloak was a splendid garment – red outside and green lining. A very good red, the best in fact, no expense spared, sinoper haematite that is, not to be confused with what some fatheads call sinoper which, as often as not, is red earth, the stuff they used to bring in by the shipload from Pontus Euxinus (and don't ask me where that was). That's the red which darkens almost as soon as you turn your back on it: it survives and that's all that can be said for it. In fact, on damp walls, it's all that does survive. Well, back to this chap's cloak. It was resin-based and that doesn't ooze out, by the gallon; they found a scallop-shell with a caked deposit amongst rubble in the Gifford Chantry at Boyton.

Well, there it is, you can't get away from it, if you want quality you have to pay in one way or another. (Vinny had quality and I paid for it all right.)

‘I can't see much from down here, Mr Birkin. Please – what are you at now?'

‘I'm valeting a gent's overcoat.'

‘Is it very soiled?'

‘Very! You can't beat tallow candles for laying down a nice grease base for other muck to stew in. You modern women don't know you're born.'

(The thing that keeps you from screaming … well, that's extreme … let's say, it helps if you can guess how things once were. What I'm really getting at is that it's not all that easy to find your way back to the Middle Ages. They weren't us in fancy dress, mouths full of thees and thous, quoths, prithees and zounds. They had no more than a few entertaining distractions to take their minds off death and birth, sleep and work and their prayers to the almighty father and his stricken son when things got too awful. So, in my job, it helps if you can smell candles, guttering in draughts, petitioning release for souls in purgatory, if you can see their smoke trailing amongst images, threading nave arcades, settling on corbels and bosses, blackening stone too high for the cleaning women to get at.

I suppose it all sounds airy-fairy but I stick to my point. If you can see or guess at the comings and goings from first daylight to dusk, crouching, nodding, stubbing breasts and heads with fingers just out of the cooking pot, grubby faces staring up at the only picture they'll see till next they see it – well, then you put that bit extra into the job, you go at it with emotion as well as diluted hydrochloric.)

‘Mr Birkin … Mr Birkin … is it an oil-painting or a watercolour or what is it for goodness sake?'

‘It's all sorts of things, Mrs Keach. Item – blew bysse at 4s. 4d. the pound, item – one sack of verdigris at 12d. a pound, item – red ochre, 3 pounds a penny, item – 3 pecks of wheat flour … I suppose you could lump it all as tempera. And let's not forget the wall itself – down in the sinful south, plastered with chalk bound with parish offerings of skimmed milk; up here, slaked-limestone putty damped just enough to stiffen. That's about what it is.'

‘You're making fun of me. I'm not utterly stupid you know. An aunt once gave me a paint-box for my birthday: I recall it had a marvellous slab of purple.' And then that spurt of laughter like a bell.

‘I'm not making fun, Mrs Keach. Ask Mr Dowthwaite at the smithy – he understands having to make-do, flatten this, splay that, till it's something not listed in the Ironmongers' Catalogue. My departed
colleague's lad (at 10 pence a week) would do his best with a slab of flat marble and scrape his knuckles grinding Spaynishe white, Baghdad indigo, Cornish malachite, terre verte. And he would need a tin bowl to break the skimpy eggs of his day: I'm told they were no bigger than a wood pigeon's. Naturally he'd suck the yolk before stirring colour into the white. And my departed friend would yell down, “Hey you, Idle Jack, some more green. Which green? The cloak-lining green, fathead! The malachite! And look sharp; we're on piece-work. We have to be off to Beverley first thing Tuesday and God knows what the roads will be like in those Holderness swamps.” '

‘Poor boy!'

‘Lucky boy! He might have been soaking out on the plough-strips. He might have been having his backside whipped at the abbey school. Anyway, you of all people shouldn't spare him a ha'porth of sympathy: he used your husband's altar slab to do his grinding on.'

‘Good gracious! How can you possibly know what the poor fellow did?'

‘Found a tinge of red in an undercut of one of the consecration crosses.'

That was how we talked. And, after a longer silence than usual, I would know she had gone.

Before those few weeks of my stay in Oxgodby I hadn't attended a place of worship since I was a boy. Looking back, I think that I became an unbeliever when I was eighteen, well maybe seventeen, and it can't have been a momentous decision. My parents weren't churchgoers but they'd had a church wedding, seen me baptized and, I fancy, believed vaguely in a hereafter. In the season, very early most Sundays, Dad used to go off coarse-fishing. He used to stick his head into my bedroom – ‘Just off to praise my Maker on the river bank: look after your Mum.'

Well, up there in the North Riding, I was thrown back in at the deep-end, on Sundays shaken into consciousness when Mossop began to toll the bell above me, although I immediately shut my eyes again – the rope slipping up and down through my floor and ceiling made me giddy. And then half-hearing Keach's eucharistic rites oozing up round
the baluster. The evenings found me roaring away in the Ellerbeck pew with the Wesleyans because, although I had a standing invitation to have a bit of supper any Sunday at the station-house, I felt conscience-bound to earn my keep by turning up at the chapel. Frankly, I'm not at all sure that, once I got into the swing, if I didn't enjoy it. Yes, I
enjoyed
it.

It was a livelier performance than Keach put on. To begin with there was a different preacher each time – clerks, shop-keepers, one even was a yeast-salesman. But mostly they were pretty rough stuff, farmers or their labourers, men who'd left school at twelve or thirteen. Their convictions were firm as a bishop's but, employing the vernacular in common usage behind Kilburn and Rievaulx, they might have been preaching in a foreign language, certainly in a tongue my southern ancestors had forgotten. Some of their English was so wild that even Kathy at the harmonium and those of the choir whose faces I could see, choked behind their handkerchiefs.

I remember one old gent extolling his zeal. ‘T'missus and me, yam's doon a claay laane, a lang claay laane, and roond ooor spot t'claay's claggy. Yan sabbath t'missus says “Faither, ah'll nut be gannin ti t'chapel, t'muck'll be ower me beeat tops.” “Nay,” I says, “thu maunt let a bit o' muck keeap thee yam, ah'll hump thi on me back an' thu m'clag on till we git ower t'wast o' t'claay …” '

Nowadays, I suppose comprehensive schools and the BBC have flattened that splendid twang with their dread stamp. But then, at the end of the horse age, each purveyor of the gospel had no exemplar other than some earlier preacher he had admired. Indeed, it was so with Mr Ellerbeck himself, who had left a village school at fourteen and had become a local preacher in his late teens. Though the mildest, most self-contained of men, once in the pulpit he became his own father who, it appeared, had been a passionately violent and irrational man.

It's not strictly true that climbing the pulpit stairs transformed him; he was mild enough when announcing hymns and only mildly extravagant in his tediously supplicatory obeisance at his oriental despot's skirts. But once launched upon the waves and billows of his sermon, he roared and raved like a madman, now and then bashing down his big fist on the podium so that the water decanter leapt. The while, his wretched wife hung her head in shame and only her twitching fingers revealed suffering.
Mercifully, once at ground level again, he came-to like one revived from a convulsive fit and not remembering it.

Well, after their evening services, it was customary to repair to the station-house's front-room where there was an American pedal organ, a fantastic confection with parts which glided in and out, parts that could be squeezed and swung, swell stops, mirrors, pillared flower stands, elbow-rests for baritones overcome by emotion, four brass candleholders that could be adjusted to cast advantageous light on both singer and song; and all this topped by a fretted parapet behind which glass and pot heirlooms were safely displayed.

Anyway, after Sunday evening service, it was open house around this splendid machine and, between bouts of hymn singing, guests were invited to favour the assembly with a solo. In those long-gone days I rather fancied myself as a light baritone and, when my turn came, sang something that had always gone down well in barracks and clubs. It began,

‘There sat one day in quiet
In an alehouse by the Rhine
Three hale and hearty fellows
And quaffed the flowing wine …'

When I'd finished – and it ran to six verses – the roomful either looked uneasily past my neck, or at the pricked hearthrug: it was disconcerting. At last Mrs Ellerbeck said, ‘That was very nice, Mr Birkin. But not the drink part of it. It all sounds so romantic, but oh the misery and despair of many a wife and child!' Well, that knocked my end in.

Afterwards, Mr Ellerbeck accompanied me up the lane towards the church. ‘You mustn't be put out,' he said, ‘Mrs Ellerbeck meant it for the best. Keep it q.t. but her dad was a boozer who didn't know when to stop. You often find them like that, up on the Wolds: it's the Danish blood in them. In fact,
he
had a long fair beard and blue eyes. I don't think he ever liked me.

‘Living in London, I don't imagine you know how most of them live in the East Riding. You go from one bedroom into the next, no passages. Then, as likely as not, the last bedroom has the staircase, very steep, no banisters and a door at the bottom held-to with no more than a sneck.
From what they let drop, her dad got up in the middle of the night, in need of the chamber-pot, and drink confused him. So he fell straight down the stairwell and, being a big heavy man, straight through the door.'