Blood on the Wood (7 page)

The violinist was a real musician, with some of the fire of a gypsy fiddler. I glanced over and saw it was a woman, or rather a girl with long red hair. The girl in the blanket, now out of her chrysalis and seeming to fly in the firelight like some exotic moth. She was as thin and mobile as the flames, her whole body swaying with the music, booted foot beating the ground, sweeping the bow at full stretch of her long, bare arm.

The new dancers got in a terrible muddle even though the experts tried to push and pull them into line: they hit each other's shoulders with their sticks and yelled out, stumbled and had to be grabbed by their arms to stop them falling backwards into the fire. After all the earnestness, it was good to watch the Scipians having fun. Max touched my arm and pointed to Harry Hawthorne, galumping like a cart-horse among ponies, half-empty beer mug in one hand, stick in the odier. He wasn't trying to keep time or attending to the experts. As we watched he dropped the stick, grabbed a plump girl by the waist and twirled her round and round, faster and faster, still keeping a firm grip on the beer mug with his other hand. The dancers drew back from the whirling menace the two of them made, then gave up dancing altogether and formed a circle round them, laughing and clapping. And all the time the thin fiddler girl went on playing her wild music, with a face as blank as a hired mourner at a funeral. The plump girl tripped, Harry Hawthorne fell over on top of her and the beer went flying. The music stopped and a chant started, ‘Speech, speech, speech!'

He was breathless. He was at least half drunk. He had grass in his unkempt hair and beard, beer soaking into this thick flannel shirt. He roared at them from the ground, ‘You want a speech?'

Yes, after a day of talking, they wanted a speech from Harry. Several people helped him up. He started in a rambling way, glad they were all there, glad they were allowed a few grudging days off by their money-grubbing bosses who sweated the life out of them in factories or crushed it out of them in mines and foundries. A few shouts of support, but this was nursery stuff for the Scipians. They wanted more from Harry Hawthorne and they got it. You could hear him climbing out of the beer fumes and the twopenny-halfpenny oratory into what he really wanted to say.

‘You deserve more, you know that, I know that. But do you know
why
you deserve more?' He waited.

‘Because we're the producers of wealth,' somebody shouted.

Harry shook his head. ‘True, but that's not it.'

‘Because we need more.' From the fierce Lancashire woman.

‘True too, but that's not it either. Anybody know?'

He let the silence stretch out for some time, then answered his own question in a voice now so soft that it was almost a whisper. They had to move inwards to hear him; light from the bonfire flickered over their intense faces.

‘Because you can
enjoy
more.' He waited for it to sink in, then let his voice roar out, so that the people who'd crowded in got the full blast of it.

‘Enjoy! That's the word to remember, my friends and comrades. If you can't enjoy – if you haven't got strength and appetite and laughter in you – then you can have as many meetings and minutes and votes and amendments and statistics and percentages as you like – and they're all as useless as a picture of a mug of beer to a man dying of thirst. And that's the big difference between the likes of us down here and those up there.'

He was pointing up the hill to Oliver Venn's neat little mansion. It was perhaps unfair to Oliver Venn, given that he was after all a socialist of a kind and the host of the gathering. Still, somebody had to stand in for the capitalist system and as far as I was concerned Harry could be as unfair to him as he liked.

‘They keep the best things for themselves but the pity of it is they're so full of fear that somebody will come and take them away that they can't enjoy them. They have food and they can't enjoy it because they've lost their honest appetite. They have music and they can't hear it because they're too busy listening to their cash registers…'

I noticed Daniel Venn standing opposite us, nodding vigorously when Harry talked about music.

‘They have their womenfolk dressed up in clothes worth six months' wages, but there's no honest love or beauty there because they'll sell themselves to the highest bidder in the marriage market…'

Felicia? Surely not. Harry was firing at random, knowing nothing about the Venns. Anyway, why should I assume there was no honest love there?

‘So remember, demand your fair wages, demand your better working conditions, demand your eight-hour day.' A thump of his great boxer's fist into the palm of his hand on each ‘demand'. He dropped his voice again. ‘But remember, you deserve more than that. You deserve the fine food and wines, the pictures and the music and all the beautiful things they hug to their mean and frightened little hearts, because you're the ones who can enjoy them best. And if they won't give them – and believe me, they won't willingly give them – then it's your work and duty in life to go and take them. And enjoy them.'

Back to a roar for the last three words, and a storm of clapping and cheering. I thought: If he led a charge up the hill to the Venns' house, I do believe they'd follow him, and more than half liked the idea. But he didn't. He grabbed a mug of beer from somebody, put his arm back round the plump girl's waist and drank like a man with a steelworks thirst. The music started up again, the concertina at first then the fiddle joining in. The expert dancers formed up in the space lit by the bonfire, this time without sticks. They seemed less sure of themselves, probably a new dance they were learning. They appealed to Daniel and he took over somebody's place in the dance, calling out the moves when they wavered. In motion he was a jumping jack of a man with such buoyancy that you could tell he was having to rein himself in so as not to bound higher than the others. At one point the dancers got themselves in such a tangle that even Daniel was at a loss and the music died away. He ran a hand through his curls and called to the girl fiddler, ‘Daisy, how does it go? Is it leaders change places, then straight to two bars clap hands?'

‘No. Four bars change places, six bars side step, then clap hands.'

The fiddling girl's voice was working class with an accent that might be Wiltshire or Berkshire.

‘That's not the way I learned it from Mr Sharp,' he said.

‘Well, he learned you it wrong then. It's like I tell you.'

‘Six bars side step it is, then. Thank you, Daisy.'

The fiddle and concertina started up again and the dancers circled. I wondered if Daniel Venn had managed to get home yet to see his fiancée. I was curious about the relationship between the two of them. Why was he capering down here in a field instead of spending time with her? There was a pause in the music and I thought of going over to ask him if there'd been any progress about the picture, but then the violin and concertina started again and his head went up like a horse hearing the feed buckets clanking. This time it was a different kind of dance, with just four men taking it in turns to outdo each other in high leaps and fancy footwork and the crowd cheering them on as if at a sporting match. The girl fiddled faster and faster, the concertina player gave up in despair on a last dying wheeze and Daniel spun, leapt and capered like a man possessed until the other three simply gave best and stood back, admiring. One more run of notes from the fiddle and he spun until he was no more than a blur and collapsed panting on the grass.

Max had got into conversation with a Welshman about some detail of trade union politics that sounded as complicated as the Trojan war and would probably go on as long. I left them to it and went for a walk round the margin of the field, in no hurry to claim my uncomfortable bed in the cheesy dairy. On the whole my day had been difficult but not, I hoped, entirely wasted. Daniel might be a wild lad, but I'd got him to take the problem seriously. I cut across the field back towards the bonfire, which was no more than a red glow now, hoping for another word with him. Only a dozen or so people were left around the dancing place, with most people gone to their beds or elsewhere. The girl was wrapping up her fiddle in a cloth, a group of men and women were discussing something quietly together and Daniel was still there, sitting by the fire with a bottle of beer in his hand, talking to Harry Hawthorne. It looked like an intense conversation. I noticed Harry glancing up at the girl with the fiddle as if she were part of what they were talking about.

It was coincidence that I happened to be there just when Daniel made his announcement. It's likely that he was a little drunk, not so much from the ale as from the excitement of the dancing or Harry's speech, or perhaps from nerving himself for what he was going to do. Anyway, Daniel leapt up from a sitting position straight to his feet and spun round as if starting another dance, with only the last of the flames this time for accompaniment.

‘Everybody – friends, comrades, don't go. I've got something to announce.'

They all stared at him except the girl who went on calmly wrapping up her fiddle. They probably thought, like I did, that he was going to make a political speech, but what he said was, ‘I'd like to introduce you all to my fiancée.'

I looked round for Felicia, enchanted by this latest turn in their puzzling romance. So the demure young lady had got tired of waiting for her wandering lover up in the manor house and come down to meet him in the field, like the raggle-taggle gypsies-O. Appropriate in view of all the folk music, although surprising. But there was no sign of Felicia: not in the group of men and women, nor by the fire, nor in the direction that Daniel was looking. His eyes were on the fiddler girl and her mouth was wide open, swathed violin dangling in her outstretched hand. Daniel walked over to her, took the fiddle and tucked it under his arm, then took her right hand in his free hand.

‘Comrades, my fiancée, Daisy Smith.'

Chapter Five

A
FTER THAT BOMBSHELL, DANIEL AND HARRY
Hawthorne walked away with Daisy in between them. From the only glimpse I had of her face, she looked more dazed than delighted. There'd been a few puzzled murmurs of congratulation from around the fire but most people were too dumbfounded to react.

By the time I joined the other women in the old dairy to get ready for bed the news had spread. A good gossip was going on, which was a relief. High-mindedness and political dedication were all very well, but these women would have been less than human if they hadn't been interested. On the whole, they were in favour of Daniel Venn. Several of the girls from London were dance and folk-song enthusiasts and had met him at classes and displays. He wrote good tunes for singing, they said, and although he came from a rich family there was no side about him. He'd just proved it – with his money and looks he could have married nearly any girl in England and here he was, in front of everybody, getting engaged to that … And this was where they hit difficulties. They didn't know what to make of Daisy Smith. None of them, folk enthusiasts included, had known of her existence until she turned up at the camp. Simply, a brilliant traditional fiddler who had all the dances in her head better than any of them had dropped like a gift from the skies. Both gift and gifted, musically speaking, the ones who cared about folk had no doubt about that. What they couldn't understand was why nobody had heard of her before. But it was perfectly understandable that a musical man like Daniel should be interested in her. Politically, it was right too. From her voice and her attitude she was clearly one of the working class and Daniel was putting his theories into practice instead of, as one of them said, ‘scuttling back home to the bourgeoisie as soon as there's a whiff of wedding cake in the air'. But another woman wasn't so impressed: ‘Touch of the King Cophetuas, if you ask me.'

‘King whats?'

‘Didn't they teach you your Tennyson? “Cophetua sware a royal oath: This beggar maid shall be my queen!”'

‘She's not a beggar, is she?'

‘Janet didn't mean it literally. I see what she means, though. It was a bit, well … a bit stagey, as if he'd got carried away by the dancing and so on.'

‘You mean he might be regretting it in the morning?'

‘Too bad if he does. He said it in front of witnesses.'

I took no part in the debate because the thing I knew and they didn't would have been gunpowder on a bonfire. As far as Tennyson told it, when King Cophetua stepped down from his throne and took the hand of the beautiful beggar girl, he didn't have another fiancée stored away in his castle up the hill. So far, there weren't many people who knew that Daniel Venn had equipped himself with two prospective wives. If the decision had been as impulsive as it looked, it was possible that Daniel and I were the only ones. Normally I'd have been angry with him and concerned for the two women, but I have to admit that my reaction was a more selfish one – with the row that seemed certain to break out in the next few hours in the Venn household, how in the world could I get anybody to listen to sense about our picture?

*   *   *

We slept after a fashion but it wasn't a restful night, what with the hardness of the benches, the scratchiness of the blankets and patterings and scufflings around the floor that might have been rats, cockroaches or both. It was a tribute to the other women's strength of mind that after a morning wash in cold water from an old milk churn and a breakfast of dry bread and strong tea they were ready for another day of debating and resolution making. But we all knew that the first big question of the day was the one posed the night before – would Daniel have second thoughts in the morning? Then somebody spotted two figures walking along the cart track towards us, a little space between them. The man had dark curly hair and a red and white neckcloth. The woman was thin and young, with red hair scraped back from her face and a cloth-wrapped object in her hand. Daniel Venn and Daisy Smith.