The Pandervils (45 page)

He stepped a pace back from the cow and regarded his work with satisfaction; then stooped, with grunting difficulty, to wipe his hands on a tuft of grass. The cow turned her large purple irises towards the two men; she did not look at them, but she saw them. Nicky for an instant idly wondered what slow dim thought or dream went on behind that bovine mask: precisely the kind of question that Egg had once been in the habit of asking himself, but for a very long time now he had finished with such fancies and forgotten them. ‘She's mending, my boy,' he said. Nicky agreed. ‘Thanks to you, Dad.' And suddenly, out of nowhere as it seemed, there drifted into Egg's mind the beginning of a memory. He stood, staring at distance, listening to a silence in himself.

‘What is it, Dad?'

‘Funny,' said Egg, with a wondering smile. ‘Something just popped into my head. A brother of mine. The eldest he was.'

‘Not Uncle Algy,' asked Nicky.

‘No, Algy was the middle one. The eldest. Now what did we call him? … Willy we called
'im. Sakes alive, I haven't thought of Willy for a many years. Now what should have put
him
into my head, I wonder!'

‘Was that the brother that was killed at Inkerman?'

‘Inkerman? Battle of Inkerman? Why, so it was. Wasn't much older than you, wasn't Willy, when a was killed. Queer, that is. If I was to meet him now, same as it might be in the next world as they say, young Willy'd be a mere nipper side of me, woont he?'

Nicky considered. ‘I reckon he would. Rum idea that. But I tell you what, Dad. You might not even recognize each other. How about that?'

‘Not recognize him!' said Egg indignantly. ‘Not recognize my own brother!' He stared blankly, and then added, with mild surprise in his voice: ‘Well, I hadn't thought o' that. P'raps you're right.' He tried to recall Willy's image, but could find nothing but the faintest vaguest pencil sketch of a young man in a red coat. He felt puzzled and a little lonely. And he had a sense of the injustice of his predicament. He was the same Egg Pandervil as he had always been; however many years he had lived, he had not changed his identity, and the notion that young Willy, his elder brother, could regard him as an old man was absurd, though not quite absurd enough to be instantly dismissed. The old men of his own youth, with their white hairs and their bent backs, had seemed to be an alien race, almost an alien species, having little or nothing in common
with his own; but now he knew, he had cause to know, better than that. Old or young, one felt much the same inside: perhaps nowadays less hopeful, less greedy, less expectant, but fundamentally the same, and, but for the aches and pains of the body and the tiresomeness of taking care of oneself, wonderfully contented.

Nicky said, as though reading his father's thoughts: ‘You like being here, don't you?'

‘Eh? Like being here?'

‘Yes, here on the farm with Jane and me?' The boy spoke shyly, and turned away, afraid of his sentiment.

‘Why, yes,' said Egg. ‘What more could I want than this?'

‘Yes, you're properly settled in now. Just at first I thought maybe the change was too much for you.'

‘Nonsense!' Egg chose to forget that period of queer, cruel disappointment, when his beloved Mershire had seemed strange to him and he had hungered, perversely, to be back in his old shop. ‘You and Jane, I've got all I want, boy. Set your mind easy, my dear. … Unless,' he added, and paused in hesitation.

‘What else, Dad?'

Egg turned the question aside. ‘Time enough for that.' He took his son's arm and they sauntered slowly towards the house. ‘Don't like the look of that French barn, as you call it. Don't know what possessed 'em to go putting it there.'

This by now was ancient controversy. ‘Pretty
useful though,' said Nicky.

‘Spoils the character of the place.
We
got along well enough without it, me and your Uncle Algy. And that gate too! What they want to go altering everything for? They've picked the place to bits seemingly, and then put it together again all anyhow.' Nicky being silent, his father added after a pause: ‘This yard now! I'd hardly know it. Let alone what they've done to the house.'

Lifting his eyes the old man saw Jane standing outside the back door looking towards them with her hand shading her eyes from the sunlight. The poise of her body, young and lissom, spoke a new maturity. A fine lass he thought, and his eyes rejoiced in the sight of her. A fine lass and well mated to his son. ‘There's Jane,' he said.

‘Yes,' answered Nicky. ‘Looking for us, I expect.' He smiled at his father's enthusiasm.

Egg waved an eager hand to the girl. ‘Coming, my dear.' She waved back and turned into the house. Egg suddenly stopped in his walk. ‘I know,' said he. ‘I remember now, Nicky. Well
there's
a queer thing to happen!' Nicky's face questioned him. ‘Why, brother Willy. That's what I mean. Why I thought of him was this way. The orchard and Pansy it was that put it into my head. That's where I was the day we heard about him being killed.'

‘Pansy?' echoed Nicky. ‘What's Pansy got to do with it?'

‘Tell you I was in that very same bit of an
orchard. And there was a sick cow there. Same as it might have been this morning. And your Uncle Algy come running up to me face as white as a sheet. “Egg, my dear fellow, it's all up with poor Willy,” he says. “Died like a hero,” says he. And those were his very words.' Egg smiled triumphantly to find his memory so good.

Jane greeted them with a question. ‘How's Pansy?'

‘Mending,' said Egg. ‘Ah, we can teach 'em a thing or two yet, Nicky and me.'

She smiled maternally at him. ‘Ready for your dinner, I expect.' They took their places round the kitchen table. Nicky carved the cold joint; Egg poured the cider; Jane, at the sink, emptied steaming potatoes from her heavy iron saucepan into her bright new tureen. Nicky's eyes were on his task; he was not quite the boy he had been a moment ago, outside. Egg couldn't make it out, this strangeness in the house. It was a puzzle and a worry to him. His own glance, following the girl as she moved about the room, rested affectionately on her broad gentle face, whose beautiful candour, like Nicky's own, was now veiled, it seemed; but by what veiled? Not by anger, or at least not by confessed anger; not by unkindness, unless it were an unkindness hidden out of sight far below the surface of those calm eyes. Not by anything that Egg could give a name to. Yet he couldn't resist the suspicion that all was not quite as it should be between Nicky and Jane. They had been married two years now, and
there was no sign of a child. Did that mean anything or nothing? Well, said Egg to himself, times have changed a bit in that way, and no bad thing either perhaps, though I don't hold with all I hear. And so saying he dismissed the subject from his mind; or, at least, he gave it a nod of dismissal, and if thereafter it remained, to pester him at intervals, it was by no permission of his.

Not till the late evening, when Egg after his bread and cheese and milk had gone to bed, were the lovers left alone together; and then the constraint weighed still more heavily upon them. They sat in silence for half an hour, a silence which, though each laboured to break it by an occasional remark, survived all trivial interruptions. Nine o'clock had struck, and this was a traditionally sacred hour when they could sit together, the long day's work done at last, and taste lingeringly the sweets of their comradeship; but to-night, and for many nights past, it had been an hour quickening with anxiety and breeding discomfort between them. Two years of marriage, while diminishing the fever of delight, had deepened their love, which nowadays they were apt to express not in the old way, of frequent passionate avowals, but by various devices of indirection, by banter and mock-quarrelling and comical abuse: in which fashion they had invented between them a whole system and vocabulary of private nonsense that was more intimate than an embrace. And if these exchanges were a frequent substitute for loving demonstration they were sometimes perhaps a substitute
for that communion of mind of which Nicky had once dreamed. His marriage with Jane was beautiful and imperfect: it filled him and left him hungry. She was inarticulate; she astonished him alike by her wisdom and her ignorance, the wisdom of a child, the ignorance of one who resists knowledge of which the relevance to personal life is not immediately perceived. During their first year together Nicky somehow contrived in his spare time to write two acts of a poetic drama; and Jane listened to his reading it aloud, and loved him: loved his profile, his voice, the light in his eyes, and loved him for being able to write such difficult things. Her glance was fond and wistful, like that of a mother who is both gratified and intimidated by her child's cleverness. When he looked up to meet it she said with guilty haste: ‘That
is
nice, Nicky! What a wonderful boy you are!' He smiled love at her, but he felt lonely and frustrated, realizing that she had not understood a word of his darling work. ‘Well, now comes a little song by way of interlude.' She can't miss this, he thought. ‘Janey, you remember that day we went across the hills to Up Elston?—' But no, the idiom of verse utterly obscured his meaning from her. She greeted the lyric with a face rendered all but blank by the effort to conceal her unresponsiveness, a face that would have been null and void but for that hunted look, that desperate anxiety not to disappoint him. ‘Yes, I do like that,' she said. Heroic pretence! The pitiful gallantry of it made him fling his manuscript down and take
this lovely perplexed child into his arms. She received his kisses gratefully, glad to be comforted, and—though he hated himself the moment after— he could not quite stifle the thought: Yes, she understands this: a thought that was followed, after a long bitter interval, by its antidote—I'm not much of a poet, anyhow: Jane's poetry itself, the darling! … But he wasn't altogether convinced by this pretty pleading.

Since then, though his literary ambitions were far from dead, he talked to her in the evenings of matters nearer home, of sowing and reaping and breeding. The farm he never quite succeeded in seeing through his father's beglamoured eyes: he was inclined still to resent it because it was a destiny not of his own choosing. But it was his work and he accepted it, recognizing its wholesome qualities and enjoying its compensations, chief among which was Jane herself. It was good, it was good indeed, to come back after a hard day in the fields, or a disappointing day at market, to the comfort and rich plenty of Jane. In many ways, as he had to admit when taking stock of it, his situation was perfect. He possessed, at twenty-five, not only a farm of his own, and the wife he had wanted and still loved, but—in the person of his father—a veteran farmer to share the responsibility with him; for though Egg, after so deep a lapse of years, was at first almost as much pupil as teacher, it took him surprisingly little time to pick up the dropped threads. No doubt Nicky knew his job better, in fact, than Egg did; it was rather in enthusiasm that
Egg pointed the way. Egg's enthusiasm was infectious up to a point, and even beyond that point Nicky was obliged to put a good face on it; for to have confessed to discontent would have been to disappoint an eager child. His chief lack was the companionship of his own kind. Nicky, one might almost say, missed something he had never fully experienced. But in imagination, which had school memories to work upon, he had experienced it; he knew that somewhere in the world there was good talk to be had, ideas to be exchanged, fine theories to be filled with words and sent ballooning among clouds of tobacco smoke. Men, men who wrote for the newspapers, were meeting every day in Fleet Street taverns and talking philosophy over their beer: this was Nicky's picture of the journalistic life, and he would have given anything, he thought, to be in it. How wonderful in the midst of a roaring argument about Plato (one of Nicky's fourpenny-box discoveries) to be interrupted by the ‘printer's devil clamouring for copy'! How magnificent to dash off a column or two on the spot, with this same devil at one's elbow (his traditional post) and then order another drink as if nothing unusual had happened! But, above all, how intoxicating to hear good talk!—his thoughts, however far they went romancing, always came back to their starting-point. No doubt he wanted to discuss Beauty and Art and similar solemnities proper to his age, and to savour the grandeur of such discussions; but there was more to it than that, for he was consumed by a genuine passion for ideas.
Ideas visited him that were beyond, though not far beyond, his technique of expression; ideas bubbled in his mind, needing release and clarification; ideas came visiting him as he went about the farm. And having no one who could or would listen to him he was driven to confiding his thoughts to a diary; later he overflowed into essays and stories. Being a farmer and being married did not leave him much opportunity for this secret literary indulgence, and often, for weeks at a time, he allowed it to be crowded out. But on reading he stubbornly insisted. He had puzzled Jane, perhaps wounded her, by getting for his own use a camp-bed which he stuck in a corner of their room, with a bookshelf near it and a folding screen to shut in his candlelight, so that he might with an easy conscience read for a while before sleeping. His books included a couple of hundred English classics, a sprinkling of red sevenpennies, such volumes of the Home University Library as treat directly of literature or philosophy, and two volumes of Plato's Dialogues, very much tattered and very precious, for, as Chapman to Keats, so to Nicky Pandervil was the translator of the Apology. These were his friends, and he had few others. With no one outside his household to exchange a word with but people like Fred Curtis, who hadn't a notion beyond crops, and Harry Swan, who was everlastingly grumbling about the Government, and old Smart, his father's acquaintance, who drove by the farm every Sunday morning on the way to church and always stopped at Pandervil's to cadge a glass
of cider, Nicky sometimes felt like Robinson Crusoe.