Gordon Williams (2 page)

They had advertised in
The Times
(of London) for a suitable house in the West Country and it was Louise who had plumped for Trencher’s Farm. A farm in name only, the land having been sold off many years ago, the house was a long, white-walled building with a study, sitting-room, dining-room and kitchen on the ground floor, and four bedrooms, bathroom and lavatory upstairs.

The general effect was of a squat, immensely sturdy building designed to stand up to the worst winds and snow the Moor could hurl down on the two parishes. The clay and straw walls – a method of construction known as ‘cob’ – were two feet thick. In the main part of the house, which was said to date back four hundred years, the windows were little more than three feet square, as though the original builders begrudged every inch that didn’t give the inhabitants massive protection. Giant, smoke-blackened oak beams traversed the ceilings of the downstairs rooms. At the rear the kitchen and the upstairs bathroom formed an extension built on since the war, its walls of brick and its windows more in accordance with modern ideas. When they were inspecting the house George had pointed out several diagonal cracks on the matt white walls of the downstairs rooms, but the estate agent had laughed and said those cracks had probably been there since the days of Cromwell.

They had taken a six months lease in the first instance at what Louise said was a fairly steep rent of twelve guineas a week. He had converted this into dollars per month (as rent was calculated in America) and found it remarkably cheap. However, having been married so long to an Englishwoman he was well aware of the reputation Americans had for money consciousness and he took care, when speaking to English people, not to boast about the deal.

When he had shaved, his cheeks and chin tingling with Old Spice, he went back to the bedroom and dressed in his fawn Levis and red tartan shirt. For a man who was thirty-five and did nothing more strenuous than walk and swim he thought he was in pretty fair shape.

“It’s my morning walk that does it,” he said to Louise, who was still in bed. She seemed bored. “I know you think I’m silly, my routines and all, but it isn’t as silly as you think. If I didn’t have a routine I couldn’t keep in the swing of the work.”

“As the monk said to the abbess, you’re a creature of habit, George. Who are you keeping in good shape for?”

“Who?”

“What, then? D’you still think they’ll maybe ask you to run in the Olympics?”

It was better to leave Louise alone in this mood. For a long time he’d been sure the difference in their nationalities was of no significance, but in the three months they’d been living here at Trencher’s Farm she’d changed, somehow. Had she ever felt like a stranger in the States? He was sure she goddam well had not, but he certainly was beginning to feel like a stranger here in England, here in his own home.

When they’d first arrived, he’d gone walking, to establish some kind of orientation. The obvious way was to turn right at the junction of their track and the “real” road, which was, admittedly, metalled but so narrow that when cars met one had to back up to a field gate or to one of the shallow indentations cut into the high banking. Having turned right, the road went downhill for about two miles, the longest two miles he had ever walked in his life, until it wandered into the village of Dando Monachorum. The name, he
thought, was ridiculously at odds with the look of the place, which was not one of those thatched villages they used for British ads in the
New Yorker
. The name was the
only
picturesque thing about it.

Louise had said she wanted to find a house ‘off the beaten track’, away from the ‘touristy’ parts. By Heaven, she’d achieved her wish. Any tourists who came to Dando Monachorum had to be nuts. There were seven or eight shabby cottages with low roofs, some thatched and some corrugated. There was a red-brick Methodist chapel, an ill-favoured building which, for some reason, seemed to have been built in such a way that all sides of it were always on the wrong side for the sun. There was a grey-stone school no longer functioning as a school and used for bingo on Monday nights and occasional village functions. And there was the pub, the Dando Inn.

Louise had said the locals would take some time getting used to them, but he had seen no reason for encouraging mutual suspicion and one night he’d walked down to the Inn hoping to strike up some kind of thing with these fearsome villagers. The bar was smaller than their sitting-room. It contained seven or eight men and youths who seemed to do little drinking but a lot of dart-playing. He’d felt like a complete stranger who had walked uninvited into someone’s family home. The men stared at him and then turned their eyes away when he stared back and said good evening.

At the bar, a small counter hardly longer than his desk, he asked for a small beer. The landlord seemed pleasant enough, although it did strike George Magruder that the man showed very little curiosity. After all, how many Americans did they get in a joint like this? While most of the men looked like farm-workers or automechanics, the landlord had a faint air of having come down in the world. He wore a shirt and tie and the jacket of a blue suit.

He tried casual conversation about the weather and the beer, but the landlord made only non-committal replies, the kind that leave no conversational bridges. If he’d been in a similar situation at home (unlikely, he thought) he might have asked the man to give everyone a drink on him, but Louise had warned him against such typically unwelcome American habits. She said these kind of country folk would only respect you if you were as close with money as they were themselves. What the hell, he wasn’t interested in respect, only in getting somebody to talk to, but the customers ignored him for their interminable darts and the landlord offered not one word that could be construed as conversation.

“What was it like, darling?” Louise asked when he got home.

“I was hardly overwhelmed by traditional English hospitality, if that’s what you mean,” he said. “Going by tonight we’ll have to learn to make our own conversation.”

Louise had been slightly worried all the time he’d been gone. She knew more about the kind of people who lived in a place like this than George could ever hope to. To them a Londoner was a foreigner – an American might as well be from outer space. Yet she’d often been surprised by George’s American ability to crash into situations which she found delicate – and to come out on top. It was one of the things she had admired him for.

After that night George Magruder began to wonder constantly if a man
could
exist purely within the society of his own family. Much as he loved Louise they had been married for nine years and the time for mutual exploration by conversation (or anything else) was past. And there was a limit to the satisfaction one could obtain from the company of an eight-year-old girl.

It seemed likely that for at least six months Trencher’s Farm would
be his only world. Well, countless men had lived like this in the frontier days. A man and his wife alone in a brutal, unknown world, living on their own resources. A man who’d come to a virgin valley and carved out a piece of land and fought off Indians and survived drought and ploughed and reaped and lived through hunger and blizzards and... it was the kind of childish thought, Louise said, that prevented him from turning completely into a stuffy old academic with his nose buried in the late eighteenth century.

That same evening, after he’d left the bar, the men had talked about him. They, of course, knew who he was, the rich yank who’d rented Trencher’s, some kind of professor. The ones who had been in the army didn’t like Americans for they knew that Americans were loudmouths with fat bellies and a yellow streak down their backs a yard wide. This view had come to be accepted by those who hadn’t been in the army.

Tom Hedden, a Dando farmer, had been throwing for double sixteen to win the game when George Magruder left. Normally he could throw three darts into the treble bed ten times out of ten, but his concentration had been broken.

“They’m yanks be takin’ over the whole world,” he said, pulling out his darts with an open petulance often found among simple, masculine men. “How does ’ee afford Trencher’s then, what they’m say the rent be, Norman?”

“Twelve guinea a week, I hear. More’n some folk get for feedin’ whole family.”

“He seemed a nice enough bloke,” said Harry Ware, the landlord. The men made a joke of this landlord’s impartiality.

“Oh aye, ’ee’s a friend o’ yourn so long he’m not short o’ a bob or two.”

Harry Ware had grown used to the sarcasm and the jeers and the insults which formed most of the conversation of his customers. They were people who liked nothing better than to put something ‘over’ on somebody else, friend or foe didn’t matter. Harry Ware had bought the Dando Inn
because
it was so small and so far out of the way of crowds. He and his wife had thought it would give them a nice easy living after several years in a busy place on a main road not far from Torquay. He had been a grocer in Sunderland, where he was born, before going into the licensed trade. Although he had lived in the West Country for more than twenty years he didn’t really understand the people. In this he showed greater intelligence than many allegedly cleverer men, for he knew he didn’t understand them. If you came from anywhere else in England, these thicknecked, round-faced West Countrymen were regarded almost as clowns; they had a reputation for being the most obsequious and servile and obedient soldiers in the nation. They would touch their forelocks or salute an officer and take the most ridiculous order without question when a Geordie or a Taff or a Scouse or a Jock would argue – or fight.

Yet beneath this stolid, almost bovine exterior, he knew there were dark twists in their minds. A Glasgow Jock was quick with his fists but these men were different, they could go for years without showing emotion and then... their blood was said to be very old, going back to ancient days. He was always very careful. These men were his regulars and he more or less lived off what they spent every night. On Saturdays and Sundays other farmers and villagers increased his takings, but without the men in the bar that night he could not make his week’s wages.

Tom Hedden had a small farm, only fifty-one acres which he
worked alone with the help of his fifteen-year-old son, Bobby. Then there was Bertie Scutt, who lived off his wife’s ten family allowances and the unemployment pay he drew between intermittent spells of casual work. Chris Cawsey was about twenty-two, he worked as a mechanic as the Compton Wakley garage; Harry Ware thought there was something almost girlish about Chris Cawsey even though he owned a motor-bike and wore big leather belts with fancy buckles.

Phillip Riddaway was the biggest man present, a thick lump of a farm-worker with a big round red face and hands like a bunch of bananas. Phillip worked for Colonel Scott at the Manor Farm. Everybody knew he was thick in more ways than one. Sometimes Chris Cawsey and Norman Scutt – Bertie’s son – would tease him to a point where an ordinary man would have lost his temper, but Phillip never did. The more they laughed at him the more he seemed to like them.

Bert Voizey was a carpenter and, it was said, an expert poacher. An insignificant looking man, he had a reputation for being able to snare foxes with wire and whenever a local farmer was infested with rats he would be called in to clear them for a flat price of two pounds. He had some recipe of his own for poison.

Norman Scutt was Bertie’s oldest son, although in the bar they spoke to each other like mates rather than father and son. Harry Ware didn’t like Norman, who wore his hair in some new fancy style with long black sideboards. For one thing Norman fairly often got drunk (something the other men rarely did, it being a matter of pride not to show it), but apart from that, he had a record. His last sentence had been nine months for burglary and before that he’d been in court for various offences, some of violence and some purely larcenous.

When closing time came it was generally Norman Scutt who wanted to go on drinking and while, like any other landlord of an out-of-the-way pub, Harry Ware was willing to stretch the law by half an hour or so to keep the goodwill of his regulars, he always had a slight fear of Norman turning nasty.

“I don’t get twelve in my wages, do I?” said Phillip Riddaway, who took his time about entering conversations.

“That’s because you’m thick, Phil,” said Norman. “Them yanks aint thick, they’m richer’n you nor I’ll ever be. You see his wife, then? Cor, Phil, she’d give you a good time, you dirty big booger.”

Phil grinned. Norman was always telling him about women. Phil had never done anything to a woman. Norman was always saying he’d have to try it before he reached forty or it would be too late. Phil liked hearing Norman talk about women. Norman had done it with lots of women.

“Aye, it’s all right for them yanks, bein’ rich like,” said Tom Hedden. “Us got to scratch for the price of a pint’r two.”

Harry Ware wondered if Norman, who had not been out of Exeter gaol for two months, might be thinking of doing a bit of burglary up at Trencher’s. The others always said in Norman’s favour that he’d never stolen from anybody in Dando, but a Yank wasn’t local...

When he went downstairs it was George Magruder’s routine to pick up the morning’s post from behind the front door and then to rake out and fill the two fires. In the sitting-room there was an
Esse,
a glass-fronted slow burner which heated water for six radiators throughout the house. Every morning when he raked out the night’s ash he told himself how lucky they’d been to find an English house with central heating.

Having made a parcel of the
Esse
ash, using
The Times Business Section
as a wrapper, he then went through the sitting-room and the dining-room to the kitchen, having to duck his head to avoid the low oak beam above the dining-room door. In the kitchen he cleaned out the
Aga,
which the estate agents had called the Rolls-Royce of cookers. On its two hot plates, normally capped by massive stainless steel lids on hinges, Louise did all their cooking, and the slowburning fire also provided hot water for the kitchen and bathroom. Although he knew the
Aga
was of modern and scientific design he liked to think it was the kind of stove women cooked on when men were out ploughing virgin prairies or branding longhorn calves. It was the first time in his life he had seen anything seriously cooked by other means than electricity. It gave life a kind of barbecue flavour.