Born of Woman (37 page)

The ‘sissy' swelled into a roar, the roar of four wheels and an engine fighting with the miles. The road was galloping now, towns and houses left behind, city lights and dazzle long ago extinguished. Nothing existed except the yard or two of tarmac created by his headlights. There was no horizon, no kindly guiding star, only the prison bars of hedgerows with darkness closing in behind them.
He
could go to prison. It was a crime he had committed. He had looked it up in a lawbook in the library. To hide a Will was an indictable offence which could be punished with imprisonment. But since he was the rightful heir, it was only himself he was defrauding, concealing his own rights because he feared them. He had always feared them, but especially since November 1969, when Hester had made her Will. It was the day of his twenty-first birthday, and the two events were linked. The house was his birthday present—something more substantial than the two small books she had stuffed in a paper bag for him or the meagre cake she had burnt on her moody range. It was as if she were saying, ‘Wait until I'm dead, son, and I'll leave you everything. When I'm gone, you'll have a present worthy of you.'

He didn't want her dead, didn't want everything. Property brought worries, duties, involvement in a wilderness, obedience, ties, hard work. He was already planning to leave her and, there she was, tying the knot between them still more tightly by bequeathing him her house. It had been her property for over twenty years. His father's Will had been revoked on the second marriage and when he died, Matthew inherited nothing but his debts. Those were settled by selling the land to the Forestry. The house and Lyn survived.

He remembered the day she had bought the Will-form, journeying all the way to Newcastle in the stern black coat she had worn only once before, for someone else's funeral. She refused to employ a solicitor, wrote it herself in secret and had it witnessed by two odd-job men who were all but illiterate and weren't allowed to read it anyway. He had never read it himself. He simply knew that Hernhope would belong to him. He tried to forget the fact, to dodge the labour and responsibility she was laying on him like a burden. She mentioned it only rarely. ‘You'll remember what I told you, Lyn, about my Will. You know where it's hidden, don't you? You'll do what I ask?'

He had always nodded, changed the subject. A Will meant death and Hester couldn't die. Death would only shroud him in guilt and terror, and he had guilt enough from marrying Jennifer. The last time Hester reminded him, he had already run away, shackled himself to Jennifer and the South, tied his work to Matthew's.

After her death, he found the Will in the locked drawer in her bureau, exactly as she had said. More than a Will, a package tied in ribbons. He had left it there, scared even to touch it. The funeral roared past him. Everyone was buzzing about a Will, the Bertrams interfering, the vicar cross-questioning him, the whole village speculating, even Jennifer probing.

‘It's not where she said', he told her. I can't understand it. It isn't anywhere.'

When she searched, he searched along with her. He had already hidden it, still unopened and unread. That couldn't be a crime. Crimes were cool, deliberated things, plotted for one's gain, whereas he had acted in a frenzy—sweating, shivering, dithering—and only for his loss. It was partly all the tittle-tattle which had confused and frightened him. The village was encroaching, using Hester's funeral as an excuse to suck them in. Jennifer was oblivious. ‘So friendly,' she kept saying, as greedy hands stretched out to grab her time, her mind.

Now, he saw things differently. A buzz of country cackle was nothing compared with the whole of England shouting out his name. His wife was not just Queen of Mepperton, but Toast of the British Isles. She had become a piece of public property, gabbling on the radio, sobbing on the television, barging her way into all the newspapers. They had even tried to hassle
him
, grill him about his childhood, pry into his marriage. He had to get away. Putney wasn't safe, not with Susie-Susannah prowling through every chink and crack of it, but Hernhope could be a sanctuary, too far away for most of the fans to follow, and too dead-and-alive for Susie. Susie would never settle somewhere without a disco or a take-away. If he put all these miles between them, she would shrivel and diminish, fade into a caged and muzzled photograph, no bigger than Susannah's. He could make the house his stronghold and escape-tower, fence and fortify it, shut out not only Susie, Matthew, and the whole of London, but his own lusts and crimes and fears.

The roar of the road was like a blessing now. Only twenty short miles left. The Morris slowed and laboured as the hedgerows narrowed and the road began its tricks. A faint white mist clung like sheep's wool to the blue-black blur of fields and hills. Dawn always broke so stealthily, tiny shreds and glints of light seeping over the horizon, the stars still faint grey pinpricks on the slowly unfurling blackout of the sky. An owl flapped white against the gallows of two blasted elms, its screech disturbing the burble of the river. Shapes and textures began to free themselves from the clogging darkness which had made them all one mass. Lyn could distinguish colours now—blue from black, grey from blue, could see the fuzzed dividing-lines between field and sky, grass and corn. The wheat was high, soon ready for the scythe.
‘In the morning it is green and groweth up, but in the evening
…'

A startled flock of sheep shambled away from the snort of his wheels. The lambs were no longer skittish, but grubby plodders munching like their mothers. In a few short weeks, they would be bleating through the mint sauce on someone's carving dish. Nothing could stay young up here for long. Calves were veal, kittens drowned, pups must be trained for their serious work as sheepdogs, fledglings learn to fly before hawks or foxes scrunched them, children learn to fear.

The village was deserted as he rumbled through it. A dog barked threateningly, a woman tugged a curtain back, let it fall again. The sky was now a dull watery grey, thick with birdcalls. The road began to climb. Astounding, really, that the car had ever made it. Even now, it was rattling like a rickshaw on tracks that were meant for sheep. Five more miles to go. Lyn dared not pass the Bertrams' house. The shepherds would be stirring, the dogs set up a racket as he passed. A mile from their farm, he drove off the road and concealed the car in one of the straggling offshoots of the forest. He sat there a moment, dwarfed by the giant's-back of hills which had loomed out of the shadows, changed from black to grey to olive, and were now tinged pink from the first wavering radiance of the sun. Their beauty almost hurt. He wanted to wrench it from them, fling it on to paper, pin it down in brush-strokes. If he had been born to different parents, he might now be a painter, a proper landscape artist. Hundreds of artists starved, of course, if they refused to compromise or didn't have the talent or the luck. But at least he would have tried—gone to decent art school instead of that crass commercial course where slickness counted more than vision.

He licked his finger, drew a second range of Cheviots on the window of the car which his breath had misted up. He longed to hold a brush again, swap his London office lay-out pad and Letraset for oils and canvas in this heady landscape. He still had vision, even skill. All he needed was time, peace, money, independence. The sun sparkled on the window. It had broken through at last, the whole eastern flank of hills blazing scarlet while the west still slumbered grey. The sky was like a palette with all the golds and reds he would ever need. He sprang out of the car. He would do the rest on foot now, climb the back way up to Hernhope, avoiding the main track.

The ground was steep and rocky. He used his hands to heave him up, slipping on patches of damp and tussocky grass, stubbing his toes on stones. Despite the sun, the moon still hung pale and glassy like a lemon fruit-drop sucked to its last sliver in the sky. He watched it fade to nothing, caught his breath as he breasted the hill and glimpsed the solid walls of Hernhope frowning in the distance. How could a simple house set off such fear? Or was it fear? Everything was peaceful—plash of the burn, lovesick morning wooing of the wood pigeons.

He tiptoed towards the house, as if scared he might startle or offend it. It looked tidy and well-groomed. The garden they had planted was neither choked with weeds nor had reverted back to wasteland. He glanced around. Who had been working on it? Had Hester jumped up from her coffin and come with spade and trowel to carry on his labour? She had never idled all her life, so how could she lie dead and disabled now, when weeds were choking cabbages or debris blocking drains? He fumbled in his pocket. Thank God he had kept the keys. However much he feared its obligations, this house was his inheritance and he wanted entry to it. He made straight for the kitchen—Hester's chief domain. Last time he had seen it, Jennifer's handiwork had brightened all the surfaces—buttercups in jamjars, bread and cakes and cheeses in the larder, jellies glistening in the fridge. The shelves were empty now, but not as damp or dusty as he had feared. Molly must have come from time to time, kept her promise to guard and tend the house. He hadn't time to linger. Molly might appear this very morning, with garden fork or duster, or a solicitor with a warrant. It surprised him really that Matthew had choked off all the lawyers, stopped pressing for him to be administrator. Christ! That was a relief. It would have been a second crime to swear on oath that there was no Will when he himself had hidden it. Why the hell should he
want
to be administrator, when he'd gone to so much trouble avoiding all official ties?

He picked up the torch he had brought from the car, unlocked the cellar door. It was night again in the cellar, a second night, arriving prematurely, blotting out the hour or two of dawn. The chests and trunks were stacked as neatly as Jennifer had left them thirteen months ago. Only the shadows were ragged and untidy. Lyn groped his way to the very end of the cellar. Three suitcases were piled against the wall, concealing a low flush door which led into a second smaller cellar. Jennifer had never found that door, knew nothing of this secret hidey-hole. You had to crawl to get into it at all, and the door was still stiff despite the fact he had eased and oiled it last time. He had chosen a day when his wife was safe at Molly's, crept in like a criminal, quaking and sweaty-palmed. Stupid to feel so guilty. All he had done was hidden a Will he hadn't even glanced at. Deliberately, he had never opened it, never so much as slit the envelope, so that he could say more honestly, ‘I've never seen it—
never
.' If you were bequeathed a house, you had either to live in it or sell it—and both had seemed impossible. Gossip and accusation would babble forth again, ‘Lyn Winterton refused his mother's gift. She left him her house and he doesn't even bother with it … denying his wife a proper home, letting down his ancestors …'

Once it was hidden, he had felt smaller—like a child again—lighter with relief. He and Jennifer had simply lingered on at Hernhope, without the onus of ownership, the tie of heirs—no long-term plans, no binding obligations, until Jennifer told him she was …

He crashed the cases out of the way, heaved himself against the tiny secret door until he had rammed it open, then crawled on his hands and knees beneath the low confining ceiling. He sneezed in the dust, wishing now he had never hidden the Will in so dark and grimy a dungeon. Yet Jennifer would have found it otherwise. She had explored every chink and cranny of the house as she might have explored a lover's body. At least he could make her happy if he brought her back to Hernhope. All he had done so far was reject and deny her, turn his back in bed. He hated himself for his coldness to her, even cruelty. He had become prickly like those hawthorns which only survived on their bleak and wind-torn hillsides by growing stunted and distorted. In the book, the hawthorns glowed with berries, their thorns disguised by whorls of new spring leaves. That was what he disliked about the book—its dishonesty, its gloss—the way it romanticised his mother and the landscape, played down all their quirks and cruelties.

Damn the book. He must drag his wife away from it, kidnap her here before the media world devoured her. He need never admit he had hidden the Will at all—just pretend he'd found it on this second visit when he was searching for some childhood toy or keepsake.

He glanced around the dingy shivering space. A pre-war sewing machine lay half dismantled on the floor, a carton of old newspapers latticed with grey cobwebs. Nice to have recognised some loyal old friend like a sturdy rocking horse, a box of bricks. He couldn't remember childhood toys at all, not ones that came from toyshops. He had played mostly with his mother's buttons, which shone and rattled in a huge square biscuit tin with a picture of a thatched and rose-blown cottage on the lid, the sort of cottage Jennifer had sprung from. He had sat for hours under the dark oak table, sorting the yellows from the reds, creating pictures with them, shading the blues into greys and the greys into browns; making stepping-stones or mazes, banquets or flower-beds, or just holding a button in his palm and feeling it cold, hard, knobbly, smooth or rounded.

Hester had always saved her buttons, even if the garments themselves were shrunken or outgrown. Those buttons spelt the scenes of her past—tiny mother-of-pearl ones from Matthew's baby clothes, swanky brass from his father's hunting coat; drab, battered things from a housekeeper's overalls; triumphant blue from her wedding outfit. The younger buttons were as old as he was. Some of them had fallen from his mother's underclothes, had touched her breasts, sat against her skin. He would pick them up and sniff them, but all he could smell were his own grimy sticky hands.

Why did he keep stopping, wasting time? He crawled along again, nose down like a dog. There was work to be done, a Will to be read, a whole new life and property to grapple with. He dragged himself towards the smallest case which he had double-locked and draped in a tarpaulin. He almost hoped the lock might stick, but it opened eagerly. He rifled through the pile of magazines he had laid on top as a decoy and disguise. The Will might not be there. Despite all his precautions, someone might have stolen it—Hester, even, come from her grave to snatch the thing away.