Cut and Come Again (24 page)

‘Better look at yer taters, boy. And bring us one if they're done.'

Going across the yard and along by the hedge to the
fires I was haunted and moved by the look on her face. The potatoes were baked, the skins blackened, and I rolled them into my handkerchief and went back to the yard.

‘Gie one to Joe,' said my grandfather. ‘Roast taters!' he half-shouted to Joe.

There were six potatoes and I gave one each to the blind gipsy and the woman and my grandfather. Seizing hers with ravenous fingers the woman split the skin hastily so that the white snowy flesh spilled over her fingers and down her dress. Afterwards she sucked the crumbs off her fingers and picked them off her dress and then crammed the black skin of the potato into her mouth, smacking her lips and staring at me with wild hunger until I gave her another.

‘Lukey, boy; Lukey, boy,' the gipsy was saying, ‘they're good, the taters, Lukey. Got another for us, I'll bet, Lukey, ain't yer?'

‘Gie Joe another,' said my grandfather.

‘Good boy, good boy,' said the gipsy. ‘Bless yer. You'll be lucky. I know you will. Bless yer.'

The woman watched me desperately as I took the other potato across to the girl in the corner. The girl had picked up her shawl and her body was at last tranquil, though her hands as they held the shawl were knotted tight across her breast.

‘Starlina don' want no potato, boy,' the woman began. ‘Starlina, you don' want no potato, do you? Give it to me, boy, I'll eat it. Give it to me. Starlina wouldn't eat it if you gave it to her. It's a waste to give it her I tell you, I tell you.'

The words were muttered in a low recital, in the flowing half-soliloquizing gipsy sing-song, and they broke off as I gave the last potato to the girl, who took it in both hands and said nothing. Leaning against the
wall of the hovel I watched her warming her hands on the hot potato, never troubling to eat it, and gradually the warmth of the potato seemed to find its way into her blood, putting life into her face, banishing the old deathly look completely, and leaving only a kind of fragile quietness in her body and a deep tranquillity in her eyes as they rested softly on the rainy fields and the wind-driven gulls flashing white in the afternoon darkness. Presently the old grey she-cat came across the stackyard and into the hovel out of the rain, and the girl called to her in a whisper and the cat leapt up and sat in her lap. ‘Starlina, if you don' want the potato, don' have it. Don' you want it?' recited the woman; but the girl, absorbed in running her fingers softly down the back of the cat, took no notice. I could see the pleasure the cat gave to her in the way she smoothed it with a slow prolonged caress from its head to the curling tip of its tail, and I could hear the pleasure in her voice as she kept saying: ‘You're lovely, you're lovely,' with her head lowered to speak.

Sitting there, at rest, comforting herself with the slow rhythm of stroking the cat, she also looked lovely. Sometimes as she glanced up from the cat and over the fields at the seagulls again the tired, languid grace of her uplifted head was painful in its loveliness. Turning her head from the fields to the cat again she caught me looking full at her once, and we looked at each other for a second or two without moving. Her black gipsy eyes shone with sick brilliance that was like the light of a restless passion.

The woman went on muttering about the potato and the cold and the delay, her voice a mournful accompaniment to the voice of the blind gipsy telling my grandfather a long tale about a horse. ‘A white horse, Lukey boy, white as milk. We had him in the little
cart, we did, in this 'ere same cart as you're a keeping, Lukey, and we painted the cart pink, colour as the gal wanted it, Lukey, we did. She loves that little cart. It's hers by right, Lukey, an' all.' My grandfather also broke in with a tale about a white horse he had once had, and the two stories about white horses became intermingled with the moaning voice of the woman and the freezing whine of the wind.

The girl and I alone sat silent. We looked across at each other sometimes and then at the seagulls and then at each other again as though we wanted to speak, but we never did. All the time she stroked the cat, and I could see the blissful pleasure in her face as the cat curled its tail in her slow hand. Sometimes as she bent over the cat her hair fell down in black tangles over her face and in the sudden jerks of her head as she tossed it back again, and in the gold flash of her earrings I would catch for an instant the flash of her own spirit and the spirit of her race before sickness and poverty had degraded them, wild, careless, proud, passionate-blooded.

Suddenly she broke into an awful fit of coughing. When it came upon her she tried to stand up, but she only staggered forward a little and half-fell. The cat jumped away in alarm, and the potato bumped to the ground, and I saw the woman snatch it up as she darted forward to the girl.

‘Starlina, Starlina,' she wailed.

She began cramming the potato into her mouth and trying to coax the girl upright at the same time. Suddenly there was a brief spurt of blood, and the gipsy let out a wild gipsy-wail as the bright scarlet splashed her hands and the girl's yellow shawl.

It was all over in a moment, and as though she felt better the girl staggered to her feet. As she leaned
against the woman she looked at me. Her face was full of a dazed bewilderment that was terrible.

A moment later the woman and my grandfather were half-carrying her away. ‘Starlina, Starlina!' the woman kept moaning as they went. It was raining faster and the wind seemed to be wilder, and half-way across the yard the girl staggered and my grandfather picked her up in his arms and carried her the rest of the way to the van out on the road, the woman running on behind, moaning and wailing, with the scarlet-splashed shawl that the wind had torn off the girl's shoulders.

‘Boy, boy,' said the gipsy to me, groping with his hands, ‘where are you, boy? Gimme yer hand, boy. That's right. Bless you, boy, bless you.'

I led him across the yard, and to the van. ‘Good boy,' he kept saying to me. ‘Bless yer.' His hands were trembling. My grandfather was coming out of the caravan as we reached the road, and from inside came the voice of the woman complaining over the girl.

‘Where are ye, Lukey boy?' said the gipsy. ‘Ah, here y'are, here, y'are. Give us yer hand, Lukey, bless yer. Let's feel th' old thumb, Lukey. Bless yer, boy, bless yer till we see ye again.'

The voice of the woman came wailing that they ought to be getting on, and finally the gipsy climbed up into the caravan and as the horse struggled forward against the wind his last words were:

‘We'll see yer in the spring, Lukey. We'll be back for the cart in the spring.'

We stood for a moment watching the van swaying slowly along the road against the storm, and the rain came in invisible bitter gusts and the sky was a desolation of storm-darkness deepening into the darkness of evening. Over the fields the seagulls, no longer
visible, were screeching with wilder and wilder cries against the storm.

As we went back in the rain to the yard I kept thinking of the girl, enchanted and haunted by the memory of her as she sat stroking the cat and by the half-terror of death in her face as she stood with the blood still on her lips and looked at me. From the yard we watched the caravan struggling along the wind-lashed road and as it vanished out of sight I kept thinking of the gipsy's words:

‘We'll be seeing ye in the spring, Lukey. We'll be back for the cart in the spring.'

But we never saw them again.

Never before published as part of a collection, ‘The Tree' portrays the final day in the life of a fifty-year-old elm tree. Here Bates evokes the ever-present narrative of nature – a complex and nuanced beauty, constant and often overlooked.

The tree was an elm. It was actually no larger than a host of others grouped within sight about the hill side, but in its isolation it had the powerful appearance of a giant. Short branches and wiry twigs bristled out from the long trunk until at the head a profusion of boughs made a great crown, doubling the suggestion of power. The tree was leafless, but through the boughs, from the frail topmost structure downwards, the wind made a low noise, scarcely ever broken, like a murmur of satisfaction.

The mid-winter day was approaching twilight. The tree had murmured constantly since dawn, the noise filtering through the boughs in a quiet flow. As dusk gathered and everything lay as if dead, the heart of the evening still gave up that murmur, descending like a sigh of content.

In a neighbouring tower four o'clock struck with something about the notes not quite true, as if the sound had travelled through a thousand years. In the north distance rose a younger cry, with that effect of a sharp blade ripping the closing fabric of night. It died suddenly as if suffocated: the cry of a single plover travelling to shelter. Thereafter the silence expanded and seemed to cover the earth like a great hand over a mouth. Only the murmur of the tree, unchanged, escaped and rose in air. Night fell rapidly. In the west, however, touching earth, still stretched what might have been a great strip of steel, held at a sharp angle to an intense light so that the rays shot through the whole length of earth. In the north and east lay something like a dim reflection of those beams, a faint greyness, which in contrast began to ascend and advance as the strip of steel was pulled out of sight. In the darkness it was the only hint of light: there were no stars.

Across the sky the greyness moved in great strides. The tree murmured continually. The clouds came climbing over each other, menacing, ugly, spreading ultimately to a sombre host that gradually blotted out all light from the west. Everything crouched in the silent attitude of a prisoner. And suddenly even the tree was still.

The silence broke with a thin, frightened sound, circling above the tree: the cry of a second plover. In the blackness the shape was invisible but the cry went on, the bird drumming her wings in fear, rising and falling and dropping away at last.

Other sounds woke. Across the road shot the dim shape of a hare, whimpering quietly. The sheep protested from a bramble hovel, and another bird cried before a surge of wind deadened all sound but that of the tree.

The wind rose abruptly. The tree sighed above the noise of shifting leaves and the long whistling stir of grass beneath. Even the sharp, melancholy voices of a score of plovers, risen suddenly from nowhere, did not cover that sound. It knew no respite. In the storm that took its first vicious sweep down the land it leapt to a great shriek.

For a minute after nothing happened. The calm momentarily banished all suggestion of storm. In the silence the “Cheep-cheep” of a linnet was like a tremendous shout.

Then the silence burst. The shrieks and wails of the tree led an army of sound against the terrific wind and the dark sky which suddenly belched a storm of snow. There was no pause in the onslaught, and the tree never ceased to fight in protest. It struggled and screamed, bending towards earth and shooting back in vigorous sweeps of defiance, twisting in its nakedness, stiffening against the blast.

The struggle went on into the night. Out of the northern sky the snow came in great rushes, with a noise as if every flake were in pain. Drifting fiercely it blurred the road-pools darkly and the whole land lightly as if by a multitude of diagonal sweeps from a silver pencil. The wind battered the tree in fury until the branches cracked in terror. Then it sprang back until the tree shook and stilled itself with a great groan. There was no rest. The retreat of the wind was over quickly. In the upper darkness it seemed to gather itself, blowing like an over wrought body before extending its infinite limbs for an advance. The snow came down in a false languor, caressing the tree with a quiet touch. The elm murmured.

With a great roar the enormous body of wind hurled itself to earth, writhing and smiting angrily. An immense sigh, increasing to a shriek, shot through the woods and careered forlornly over the fields. The snow was whipped to a fast, icy frenzy. For a moment the tree remained stiff, as if frozen into an unconscious immobility that nothing could break. Then, as the wind declared itself again, it appeared dwarfed, half-lost in a universe of furious whiteness. But in another moment it stood entirely stark against the sky, looking greater than ever, its upmost branches stirring as if groping for an impossible support. The trunk seemed to have bulged with strength, taut and defiant, with all muscles set.

The wind closed in from all sides, descending as if to rip open the stomach of earth itself. A low scream went up from the tree. The scream continued, rising higher and higher until it stopped, as if some vital chord had been abruptly severed. An echo of it seemed to live on in the wind. Then from the tree came the old murmur, in crescendo, subjecting every sound.

It seemed that the tree had over-lived the shock: a shiver of relief went through it. The wind had withdrawn for another onset, gathering strength up in the darkness. The snow had begun its old delusion, falling lazily.

The tree nodded languidly to the south-west. High up the wind rumbled as if impatient at its own delay. The tree began slowly to fall. Its long flight to earth culminated in a great crash. Then the body lay stiffly across the snow, no sound or strength in it. The last noises of the fall had fled before the wind came down with a shriek of disappointment, angrily drifting snow against the black limbs.

But there was no resistance of movement and no sound but a low murmur of which the wind bred in the tree. The snow began to cover the elm as it had already covered the land. There was no pause. All night the wind wandered and rushed through the body of the tree, producing mournfully and without break that murmur which for fifty years had been a life song and was now a dirge.

‘The Man from Jamaica' recalls a boyhood summer tending cows, in which the narrator meets a boy named Dodfish who tells him tall tales about a version of Jamaica that involves lions and ambushes. Years later, he recognises Dodfish at a dance and watches him charm an adoring partner with the same lies.