As Meat Loves Salt (48 page)

Sitting alone, I took comfort against jealousy in going over everything he had told me as we lay together the night before: all about our first meeting, how I had at once wounded him, how when I stripped by the fire he could scarce breathe for delight, and for fear of my noticing - recalling it, I could scarce breathe myself. After a night and a day I would have him safely back, privileged now not only to gaze his fill but also to lay hold of me and possess me entirely.

And then it came to me that fiercely as he might fling about in my arms, yet he wanted to go to a place where we would have to keep off from one another. It seemed that, like wine and tobacco, I was delicious, but still not reckoned a necessity of life.

Becs brought in salt beef and mustard; I ate it reading over what he had left behind, a pamphlet on ploughing and setting. Using the setting board looked to be weary work. The house was dismal. I retired

early, and lay abed wondering what he was doing just then, and if he thought of me at all, and what it must be like to be him, and not believe in God nor the Devil.

The next day was bright. Aunt was downstairs before me and had evidently determined to be civil for all our sakes. She greeted me cordially and I readily returned her good will. Even the farming pamphlet seemed less disagreeable when spread under the sunny window and I further sweetened its lessons with spiced cake and some cider. The little key lay against my heart like a jewel.

'You'd be more comfortable at the table here,’ said Aunt. 'Becs will clear it directly.'

'No, no, Aunt. I'm very well where I am.' My window seat showed the street leading to Dan's house. I knew myself laughable, but what did it matter? After half an hour the front door slammed; I jumped, but at once saw Aunt herself step out with a basket, picking through the idlers on her way to market.

It was another hour before I had my wish, but I was lucky: Ferris had only just turned the corner when I glanced up and saw him ambling along, boyish next to a burly man who crossed his path. I was able to watch him the whole length of the street. He was smiling, eyes slitted against the white spring light and his arms full of papers and bags. I saw how he remarked everyone who passed and from time to time turned his face up to the sun. Evidently he was happy, and with a pang I wondered if he was often so happy without me. Though I willed him to look up at my window, he passed below, face hidden under his hat-brim, and I heard a key in the downstairs door.

When I descended he was setting out his treasures on the table, while Becs gaped at the bags.

'Seed samples,' he announced as I went in. 'Look: carrot, onion. We can grow beans and grey peas too.'

I prodded the seeds and pulses, put my nose in the pouches of coarse sacking and sniffed. 'So, can you tell good from bad?'

'Dan came with me to the seed merchant's and told me what to

look for.' He gloated over the tiny heaps of seed as another might over sacks of gold. 'And there's grain, too. Here.'

I reached into the bag he had pushed towards me and examined what lay in my palm.

'Dredge,' I said. 'Oats and rye.'

Ferris stared in surprise. 'You know it?'

'Too well.' Again I stood, filthy, among the furrows, heartsick to see my work stretching to the edge of the sky. ‘And this,' I went on, casting another grain upon the table, 'is the pure rye, and this, bullimong.'

'What's that last?' Ferris pounced upon the bag. 'The man told me buckwheat, has he cozened me?'

I shook my head. 'They are the same.'

Another time you shall come with us,' he said, excited. 'There was much to see, we had not time even though we were there before the rest.'

'You rose early then?'

'No sottishness, I told you! And look here!' Like a child thrilled by some newfangled thing, say a furred caterpillar, he implored my attention. The marvel turned out to be a thin book, entitled
On the Cutting and Stitching of Tents, With Diverse Plans and Examples Taken From Antiquity.
The frontispiece was of the Apostle Paul, cutting cloth.

'Examples from antiquity! A lucky find indeed,' said I.

'What's that?' Becs asked.

'No find, but a gift. Dan asked his friend for something a man could learn from, and this is the one James - that's the friend - learnt from himself. Take it.' He folded my fingers over the book. ‘And now I think on, there are bales of stuff still in store that might do. They were too marked to sell. You can cut out in the courtyard.’ He looked ready to hug me to him in the ecstasy of sudden good fortune, but the girl's presence kept him orderly. All this time she had held her face neutral as a mask. Ferris whirled towards her.

'Becs! Do you think you could show Jacob how to hold a needle?'

'Like this.' She pinched finger and thumb together in mockery. 'But if he's going to make tents he'll need to know a sight more than that.'

'But will you teach him? Ah, Becs — please? Please, for me?'

I was glad he did not say, 'For Jacob.'Becs hesitated, and it came to me that she might not want to hasten our departure.

'I will ask the Mistress,' she said at last.

"There's my best girl,' said Ferris. I did not quite like the way he spoke to her, so coaxing and all the while her secret and successful rival. He must know what it cost her to be constantly with me. It seemed that like his Bad Angel, where he was jealous, he too could be unkind.

Ferris produced maps. 'See here, the very latest and best. This one shows common and enclosed lands, dry and marshy, look—'

We all three of us bent over the table as he unscrolled them. A chill crept into my belly at the sight of these alien fields. Some carried ominous names: Marsh End, Breakback, Starveacre. I pointed these out to Ferris.

'You want a good black loam if you can get it,' he replied. 'Or clay.'

'Clay is cruel to work,' I told him. ‘All round Beaurepair was clay. It gets hard as—'

'Jacob!’ Ferris screamed.

'What, man!’ I cried. Becs clapped a hand to her jolted heart.

'Beaurepair - I had almost forgot - Jacob, there was a man in the tavern called Zebedee Cullen!'

I sat down on the nearest chair, feeling as if I had been shot in the chest. 'How do you know? Did you speak to him?'

'We drank in that place you know of, where we went with Dan, and I heard someone call out "Cullen" but thought little of it. Until I saw him.'

'He's like me?'

'Not so big, but — yes. Same skin, same black hair.'

'Oh God.' I rocked back and forth. ‘And did they also call him Zebedee?'

"That name was used too—'

'Was he proper? Pleasing? Much more so than me?'

Ferris hesitated.

I banged on the table. 'Come on! I've heard it all my life.'

He nodded. "The best-looking man I ever saw.'

'Zeb.' My eyes were filling and even brimming over, why I could not say; I was not sad, nor was I joyful. Across from me I could see Becs's hands tumbling one over the other, never ceasing, like a madwoman's.

Zeb. The more I knew it the less I could think. Ferris observed me, waiting for some other speech. At last he said, 'He had no woman with him.'

So he had guessed that part.

'Did you speak?'

Aye.' He coughed towards Becs, who at once left the room. 'Now Jacob, be wise for once and hear me out. He was in the company of gypsies—'

'But did you talk with him?'

'I had to wait my chance. They drank to freedom, so I let him see me raise my glass with the rest, and then I asked him had he been in the wars, and so fell into talk.'

'Yes, but to the purpose—!'

'Well.' He turned on me the gentle eyes which had pitied my thirst. 'Don't grieve at it, Jacob. He said that he had one brother. Isaiah.'

I measured the hatred that would deny me even in tavern talk with a stranger.

'He has a gold ring in one ear,' Ferris went on. 'I asked him was that to show himself a gypsy, and he said it was his wedding ring.'

'His what!'

'Those were his words.'

I tried to make sense of what I was being told. 'Did he seem well, and happy?'

As happy as a man usually is in his cups.' Ferris stroked my hand, saying, 'For what my advice is worth — and in speaking of a brother, perhaps that's not much — Zeb is best left alone.'

'I would know what is become of my wife.' I laid my head on my arms, pushing away a bag of seeds.

'Will he tell you if you ask?'

'I don't know,' I moaned. I was horribly afraid of meeting unprepared and of what he might say to Ferris. My face flushed with self-pitying tears.

'The old sorrow,' Ferris said. He laid his hand on the back of my neck. 'The one you never tell me.'

I lifted my head. 'Shame.'

'Can there be shame between us two?'

'Easy
for you
to say.'

His look showed hurt and disappointment. He doesn't believe in Hell, I thought, because he has never put himself there. He thinks he can love me better than I deserve.

We stayed silent awhile. I wondered should I go to the tavern alone. Zeb had every reason to seek revenge. Suppose Caro were sitting there with him?

'Very well, we go tonight,' said Ferris, breaking in on my thoughts. 'And start cutting out tomorrow, eh?' He began rolling up the maps and tying up the mouths of the seed bags. I rose and picked up the book on tents.

'I am sorry,' I said.

He looked at me enquiringly.

'You were happy when you came in.’ Again I saw him almost dance along the street.

'I
am
happy. And I chose. I could have kept it from you. Anyway, where shall I put all this? The printroom is too damp for seeds.'

'Not the cellar,’ I said. 'Put it upstairs.'

Aunt is out,' Ferris said.

We looked at one another.

He was stretched on his back, eyes closed, shirt up and breeches open; I lay further down the bed, playing the whore. I was come to understand him pretty well by now. I knew how to break his defences, when to draw back and make him beg, and it fired me up to hear my high-minded friend reduced by me to the words any man might use. I was planting kisses on his belly, not letting him have what he wanted, while he, lacking the strength to force me, twisted his hands in my hair.

A draught cooled the skin of my face and neck.

'Say you love me,' I ordered.

As meat loves salt.'

I took him inside my mouth until I felt him quiver, then pulled

away. Looking up to see how he liked that, I thought, not for the first time, how pleasure and pain resemble one another. I licked the sweat from the inside of his thigh and my fringe fell into my eyes.

'I'm going,' he panted. 'Jacob - please—'

I let him in then, and held tight as a hound who pulls down the stag.

Downstairs the clock chimed. Presently I raised myself and took off my shirt; Ferris ran his hands over me and kissed my chest. At that moment I felt the draught of air again, stronger than before. Looking up, I saw the door ajar, and in the opening Becs, a statue in servant's dress.

TWENTY-ONE

Discoveries

We lay confounded.
Ferris was pale as the bedsheets which I kept crumpling in my hands, then smoothing out again, until he shouted at me in Christ's name to stop.

'I could kill myself for not bolting the door,’ I said.

'Why you?'

"This is my chamber.'

'O what does it matter!' He rolled away from me.

'Will she tell your aunt?'

He shrugged. 'How should I know? Bad enough that she saw.'

'I think Aunt knows.'

'Not like this. O God, God.'

So he too could scald with shame, and even forget that he denied God. His garments were still undone, and I pulled the coverlet over his nakedness, then sat on the edge of the bed watching clouds through the window. It would soon be time for the midday meal. Was Aunt already come in? Were the two women even now in the kitchen, Becs savage in disgust, Aunt trembling at her revelations of our foulness? My fault, my fault. How could I have forgotten the door? Every night I had checked, only to betray us at this much more dangerous time.

'She will go to the officers,' I whispered. Ferris buried his face in the bed as the room suddenly filled with the roar of furnaces, the delirious sputter of fat in flames. In Hell you are as if alive.

'No. She would not.' The words came half stifled from the bolster. He rubbed the back of his neck and I pictured that gentle hand charred down to the bone.

He went on, his voice hoarse, 'She won't do that to Aunt.'

'But suppose she does,’ I urged. 'We must prepare a defence.'

He turned wearily towards me. "There's none but denial.'

I considered. 'Spite? She hates me because I didn't take her.'

"They will ask, why didn't you?' he countered. 'She came with money, you have none. It's not as if she were ugly or poxed.'