The Hidden Years (26 page)

'Water meadows, they be,' he told her. 'Rented from the
old master by Jimmy Sutton these forty year or more… Paid a
good rent for them, Jimmy did, but since the old master died, and that
son of his took over…'

Liz knew a little of the ways of country folk, having
observed them in her aunt's village.

Cautiously she asked Edward if he knew anything about the
receipt of rent monies on some of the land.

This was another facet of the man who was now her husband
she was coming to know. She realised how sensitive he could be, how
proud and touchy on some subjects, and she knew that he would not
welcome being told his business by a member of the class which, she
suspected, he tended to despise, deep down.

She was right to be cautious. He frowned over her question
and demanded to know what made her ask it. She said, as innocently as
she could, that she had noticed from the estate map which she had
rescued that the estate seemed to include some land along the river.

It wasn't entirely untrue. The estate map did show the
water meadows, but she doubted that she would have looked for them
without the fanner's tip.

She watched as Edward shifted uncomfortably in his chair.
He hated being confronted with facts that were unknown to him. Liz, who
was beginning to recognise his small tell-tale gestures of discomfort,
tried to smile and appear unconcerned. They were so desperately short
of money. Edward had told her that much. If there were rents due to the
estate…

'Perhaps your late uncle's solicitor might be the best
person to ask,' she suggested hesitantly.

Edward seized on her suggestion thankfully. The shock of
discovering the dilapidation of the estate had been a blow he was
finding difficult to throw off. The knowledge that he had inherited
Cottingdean—so much loved, so completely lost to
him—the knowledge that he would marry Liz, and that he would
after all have an heir, a child to pass that estate on to, had filled
him with such unexpected euphoria that the reality had seemed an even
crueller blow.

He felt lost, bewildered, almost resentful both of
Cottingdean and at times of Liz herself. And yet she was working so
hard, doing so much… He had no right to feel resentment. She
was wonderfully kind to him, always putting his comfort before her own,
and if she treated him like an old and infirm uncle, well, what had he
expected? He had always known that she would never feel desire for him,
and even if she had… He saw the anxiety darkening her eyes,
saw how her face had fined down, grown inexplicably more mature, so
that now for all her youth she was truly a woman and not a child any
more, and he felt the burden of his guilt increase intolerably.

It was he who had done this to her, who had brought her
here, who had made her in his way just as many false promises as Kit
had in his.

Only Ian Holmes knew the truth about the child she
carried. He too had known Kit and he had shaken his head over Edward's
insistence that Liz was to be allowed to retain her untarnished image
of his cousin.

'She's a very intelligent young woman. Sooner or later
she'll realise. He wasn't popular in the village… Right now
they're keeping quiet. They don't know her well enough to say anything,
but, sooner or later, it's going to come out. He used to come down
here, you know… bring women with him…' Ian Holmes
pulled a disgusted face. 'I know it was wartime and that men under the
kind of pressure he was under need a release, but with him…'

No, let Liz keep her illusions for as long as she could.
She had precious little else to sustain her, poor child.

Edward looked at her, and saw her red, swollen hands,
swollen from scrubbing floors, her skin scratched from where she had
spent an entire afternoon picking soft fruit from the tangle of canes
in what had once been the kitchen garden… He remembered his
mother and his grandmother, with their soft white hands. And cursed
himself again.

'I'll write to Peter Allwood,' he promised her. 'His
family have been our solicitors since my greatgrandfather's
time—but don't get your hopes up too high, my dear.' What he
didn't want to say to her was that Kit might well have sold off any
land that was of value, and that that could be why there was no rental
income from the water meadows she seemed to think belonged to the
estate, but he had always been a cautious man and he didn't wish to
disappoint her unless he had to.

It was the discovery of the water meadows that prompted
Liz to make her tour of the estate.

She set off early one afternoon, having checked that
Edward was comfortable. She had cleaned out the library as best she
could, but nothing would induce Edward to use it. He complained that he
felt the cold and preferred the warmth of the kitchen and its range,
although Liz knew quite well that he abhorred the necessity for them to
practically live in this room. Kitchens were for servants, in his view,
and she suspected that until now he had never done anything more than
walk through one in his life.

Her pregnancy showed now, all the more so perhaps because
the rest of her was so slender.

Food was short and money even shorter. It broke her
thrifty housewife's heart to see so much wastage in the garden, when
they were so badly in need of food.

She had persuaded Mrs Lowndes to sell some of her hens,
but as yet these temperamental birds had not started to lay for her,
and she was beginning to be concerned that they would cost her more in
food than they would ever produce in terms of eggs.

As to the goats… she was making discreet
enquiries about these beasts, although no one locally, it seemed, knew
where they might be obtained.

The best person to advise her would probably be her own
shepherd, Mrs Lowndes had told her.

This had surprised Liz. She had met young Vic, as he was
called, only once. He had arrived at the house three days after they
had moved in, apparently having heard on the grapevine of their
arrival. Liz, who had from Edward's description visualised the shepherd
as a gnarled old man in his seventies, had been taken off guard by the
arrival of a tall, dark-haired stranger, only a handful of years older
than she was herself, and at first, intimidated by the height and
breadth of him as he stood at the kitchen door, had automatically
stepped back from him, forgetting that she was a wife and soon to be a
mother, and conscious only that she was being confronted by a healthy
young male animal, who in some complex and illogical way was bringing
something threatening into her life.

When he had asked uncertainly for Edward, she had been
forced to admit him into the kitchen, but she had stood guard behind
Edward's chair as fiercely as a young vixen with a single cub while he
introduced himself, and Vic, who knew almost as little about women as
Liz did about men, knew enough about the female of the species to
recognise that her silent aggression concealed fear… fear
for herself and resentment on behalf of her husband.

Vic had been orphaned as a very young child, and had spent
his growing years almost exclusively in the company of his grandfather.

Since he had spent all this time either with his flock or
his dogs, Victor had grown up isolated from his peers, a quiet, intense
boy, who had quickly absorbed everything the older man taught him and
who in addition to those skills had an additional gift which his
grandfather had quickly recognised.

'A natural, he is,' he would boast to his cronies, on his
rare visits to the Lamb. 'Got a rare feel for the beasts…
Loves them like a woman, he does, big softie. Seems to know when one of
them's ill…'

It was this sensitivity that allowed him to see past Liz's
rejection of him, to sense her fear and feel compassion for it. He
could also sense her spirit, her strength, and he knew as instinctively
as he knew when one of his flock ailed that it would be this woman who
would hold together the inheritance of the man she stood guard over.

His grandfather had died the previous winter, and since
then Vic had been living alone in the small farmhouse which had always
been the shepherd's private domain. Once the Cottingdean flocks had
been famous for their wools, but over the years the stock had
deteriorated, decimated by sickness and disease. Now, despite the care
he lavished on them, the sheep were in poor heart. In the evening, with
nothing else to do, Vic read avidly. He had learned a good deal about
the art of cross-breeding sheep. It was his dream to produce a flock
which would give the richest fleece of any breed, a fleece that would
be prized the world over… But for that he needed a decent
ram, not the services of Tim Benson's old ram, whose progeny were
stringy and good for neither meat nor fleece.

But good rams, the kind of ram he had in mind, cost money.
They were experimenting now in Australia and New Zealand, producing
beasts from the old hardy British stocks, but more disease-resistant,
capable of much heavier fleece yields, and a different kind of fleece,
one far more suited for modern machinery.

Let others dream of producing a beast that gave the
maximum meat. A softie, his grandad had called him, and perhaps he was,
but no lamb of his rearing would be fattened and then slaughtered, when
it could instead be allowed to live, and every year reward his care and
patience with a fine rich fleece.

This was Vic's dream: that one day his flock, his ewes,
his ram would be talked about in tones of awe and respect everywhere
where men of sense and knowledge gathered to discuss such things. But
one look at Edward had told him that this man would never share such a
dream. That Edward could never have any conception of what such a dream
might mean. He felt heart-sorry for Edward, witnessed his wounds and
disabilities not with shock but with compassion, and saw also that
something in his life had also wounded the man's spirit.

He knew too with a knowledge he neither questioned nor
wondered at in any prurient manner—it was simply a matter of
knowing—that the child his wife carried could not be his.
That, though, was their affair and not his, nor anyone else's.

Edward looked at the young shepherd and felt an instant
frisson
of aggression and resentment… but his sprang from causes
very different from Liz's. His aggression came from the knowledge that
in Vic he was looking at a man who was the finest of his species, a man
whose goodness, whose essential spirit shone out of him, a man who
would never allow life to destroy him, because he would never blame
life for that destruction.

His resentment sprang from looking at Vic and seeing a
whole man, a healthy man, a young man.

A man who ought to have been serving his country in recent
years, not looking after sheep. He said as much, and waited for Vic to
react.

Vic smiled at him. Strangers often asked him that
question, with varying degrees of aggression. He never resented their
curiosity, understanding quite well what lay behind it.

He'd had rheumatic fever as a child which had left him
with a weak heart. The army had rejected him when he first tried to
join up, and, as Dr Holmes had gently told him, he would never be fit
for that kind of active service.

Sometimes in the spring when they were lambing, when he
worked exhaustingly through the day and night, his chest would grow
tight and pain would tingle in his arm, but then he would rest for a
while and the pain would go, and he was too content with what he was
doing to concern himself about something over which he had no control.

He said as much, explaining his disability without apology
or self-pity.

It was impossible not to believe him. Truth, honesty,
shone out of him.

And now, although Liz knew quite well that it would have
been the easiest thing in the world for her to ask Vic to show her
round the estate, to explain to her the working of the flock, to advise
her on how best she might restore some sort of order to her garden, and
turn it into the healthy, productive plot she had glimpsed on her one
brief visit to his farmhouse, she held back from doing so. Not just out
of reserve, but out of resentment as well, she acknowledged.

It was wrong of her to resent Vic. Without his care, she
had been told, the estate flock would have disappeared long ago. She
suspected humiliatingly that his wages had not been paid since Edward's
grandfather's death, but it was a subject she felt unable to broach
with Edward… Perhaps when the solicitor came they would know
more.

She spent the afternoon exploring the estate, using as a
guide the map she had copied from the one she had found, and taking
care to avoid Vic and his flock, without knowing why she felt this need
to do so.

A part of her recognised that he was essentially a kind
and gentle man whom she had no need to fear, but then there was his
maleness, and her awareness of it… an instinctive female
awareness of him as a man.

The visit from the solicitor was illuminating. The estate
did still own the water meadows and he was shocked to discover that
rents were not being paid on them. He would, he advised Edward,
recommend that the matter was dealt with straight away.

Peter Allwood was a small, thin man, with a dry, precise
way of speaking. If he found the state of the house a shock he hid it
well. If he found the fact that she was married to Edward and expecting
a child a shock he hid that equally well.

Once he had gone, Edward consulted Ian Holmes on the best
way to deal with the matter of the outstanding rent. He was beginning
to trust Ian, Liz recognised. She too liked the North Country doctor
with his forthright manner.

She was now approaching the seventh month of her pregnancy
and Liz's body was inexorably preparing itself for the birth. She had
an odd wish that her child might have been born in the spring at the
start of nature's life-cycle, and not in January, the heart of its
life's end. Although she did not wish to alarm Edward, she was dreading
the coming winter. Already in November there were signs apparently that
they would have snow. The stock of logs in the stable was dangerously
depleted. She had seen on her walks that there were trees which should
be cut down for wood, but who was to do it? They could not continually
rely on the help of their neighbours, and Edward was so sensitive about
his inability to do anything.