On The Black Hill (Vintage Classics) (22 page)

THE FARMHOUSE AT
Lower Brechfa lay in a very windy position and the pine-trees around it slanted sideways. Its owner, Gladys Musker, was a strong meaty woman, with glossy cheeks and tobacco-coloured eyes. A widow of ten years’ standing, she somehow managed to keep a tidy house and support her daughter, Lily Annie, and her mother, Mrs Yapp.

Mrs Yapp was an irritable old scrounger, more or less crippled with rheumatism.

One day, soon after the Joneses bought her field, Lewis was pleaching a hedge between the two properties when Mrs Musker came out and watched him hammering in the stakes. Her defiant gaze unnerved him. She heaved a sigh and said, ‘Life’s all moil and toil, isn’t it?’ and asked if he’d come and rehang a gate. At tea, he polished off six mince-pies, and she put him on her list of possible husbands.

At suppertime, he happened to mention that Mrs Musker was an excellent pastrycook, and Benjamin shot an anxious glance at his mother.

Lewis warmed to Mrs Musker, and she was certainly very friendly to him. He stacked her straw, slaughtered her porker, and one day she came running over the fields, out of breath:

‘For the love of God, Lewis Jones. Come and help me with the cow! She gone down like the Devil kicked her!’

The cow had colic, but he succeeded in coaxing her to her feet.

Sometimes, Mrs Musker tried to show him upstairs into the bedroom; but he never went that far, preferring to sit in her nice fuggy kitchen and listen to her stories.

Lily Annie had a pet fox cub that answered to the name of Ben and lived in a wire-netting cage. Ben ate kitchen scraps and was so tame she could handle him like a dolly. Once, when he escaped, she ran down the dingle, calling, ‘Bennie! Bennie!’ – and he bounded out of the brambles and curled in a ball at her feet.

Ben became quite a local celebrity, and even Mrs Nancy the Castle came to see him.

‘But he’s very choosy, you know,’ crowed Mrs Yapp. ‘He don’t take to every Tom, Dick or Harry! Mrs Nancy brought the Bishop of Hereford a while back, and Our Bennie jumped up on the mantelpiece and done his business. It was an awful foxy smell, I can tell you.’

Unlike her mother, Mrs Musker was an uncomplicated soul, who enjoyed having a man about the place; and if a man did her a favour, she’d give a favour in return. Among her callers were Haines of Red Daren and Jim the Rock – Haines because he gave her tiddling lambs, and Jim because he gave her a good long laugh.

Lewis hated the idea of her seeing these two and she was plainly disappointed in him. Some days, she was all smiles: at other times, she’d say, ‘Oh, it’s you again! Why don’t you sit and have a chat with mother?’ But Lewis was bored by Mrs Yapp, who only wished to talk about money.

One morning, having strolled over to Lower Brechfa, he saw the fox’s skin nailed to some barnsiding and Haines’s grey cob tethered to the gate. He left, and did not see Mrs Musker again till February, when he met her in the lane. Draped around her neck there was a red fox-fur.

‘Yes,’ she said, clicking her tongue. ‘It’s poor old Ben. He bit into Lily Annie’s hand, and Mr Haines says that’s the way to get lock-jaw, so we had him shot. I cured him myself with saltpetre. And fancy! I only fetched him from the furrier’s Thursday.’

She added, smiling silkily, that she was alone in the house.

He waited two days and then trudged through the snowdrifts to Lower Brechfa. The pines were black against a crystalline sky, and the rays of the setting sun seemed to rise, not fall, as if toward the apex of a pyramid. He blew through
his
hands to warm them. He had made up his mind to have her.

The cottage was windowless on the north side. Icicles hung from the gutter, and a drop of cold water trickled down his neck. Coming round the end of the house, he saw the grey horse and heard the groans of love in the bedroom. The dog barked, and he ran. He was halfway across the field when Haines’s voice came bawling after him.

Four months later, the postman confided in Benjamin that Mrs Musker was expecting Haines’s baby.

She was ashamed to show herself in Chapel, so she stayed at home, cursing the lot of women and waiting for Mr Haines to do the proper thing.

This he did not. He said his two sons, Harry and Jack, had set their teeth against the marriage, and offered to pay her.

Indignantly, she refused. But the neighbours, instead of despising her, overwhelmed her with sympathy and kindness. Old Ruth Morgan offered to act as midwife. Miss Parkinson, the harmonium player, brought a lovely gloxinia, and Mr Nantlys Williams himself said a prayer at the bedside.

‘Don’t fret, my child,’ he consoled her. ‘It is the woman’s part to be fruitful.’

She held her head high the day she drove to Rhulen to register the birth of her daughter.

‘Margaret Beatrice Musker,’ she printed the capitals when the clerk handed her the form, and when Haines came knocking on the door to see his daughter, she shooed him away. A week later she relented and allowed him to hold her for half an hour. After that, he behaved like a man possessed.

He wanted to have her baptized Doris Mary, after his mother, but Mrs Musker said, ‘Her name is Margaret Beatrice.’ He offered wads of pound notes: she threw them in his face. She cuffed him when he tried to make love to her. He begged her, pleaded on his knees for her to marry him.

‘Too late!’ she said, and locked him out for good.

He would mooch round the yard, uttering threats and curses. He threatened to kidnap the baby, and she threatened him with the police. He had a terrible temper. Years earlier, he and his brother had slogged at one another with bare fists,
for
three whole days, until the brother slunk away and disappeared. Somewhere in his family there was said to be a ‘touch of the tarbrush’.

Mrs Musker was frightened to leave the house. On a page of almanac, she scribbled a note to Lewis Jones and gave it to the postman to deliver.

Lewis went; but when he came to the gate, Haines was lurking by the beast-house with a lurcher straining on a leash.

Haines yelled, ‘Get yer dirty interfering nose from here!’ The dog slavered, and Lewis headed for home. All afternoon he wondered whether to call the police but, in the end, thought better of it.

A gale blew in the night. The old pine creaked; windows rattled, and twigs flew against their bedroom window. Around twelve Benjamin heard someone on the door. He thought it was Haines and woke his brother.

The hammering went on and above the shrieking wind, they heard a woman’s voice calling, ‘Murder! There’s been a murder!’

‘God in Heaven!’ Lewis jumped out of bed. ‘It’s Mrs Yapp.’

They led her into the kitchen. The embers were still whispering in the grate. For a while she sat babbling, ‘Murder! … Murder!’ Then she pulled herself together and said, grimly, ‘He done hi’self as well.’

Lewis lit a hurricane lamp and loaded his shotgun.

‘Please,’ said Mary – she was on the staircase in a dressing-gown – ‘please, I beg of you, be careful!’ The twins followed Mrs Yapp into the darkness.

At Lower Brechfa, the kitchen window had been broken. Dimly, in the lamplight, they saw the body of Mrs Musker, her brown homespun dress spread round her, hunched over the rocking-cradle, in the centre of a blackish pool. Lily Annie crouched in the far corner cradling a dark object, which was the baby – alive.

At nine o’clock, Mrs Yapp had gone, as she usually went, to answer Haines’s knock; but instead of waiting on the doorstep, he had slipped round the house, smashed his gunstock through the window, and fired both barrels, point-blank, at his lover.

She, in her final flash of instinct, threw herself over the cradle, and so saved the child. The shot sprayed Lily Annie’s hands; and she hid with her grandmother in a cupboard under the stair. Half an hour later, they heard two further shots, and after that there was silence. Mrs Yapp had waited two hours more before she went for help.

‘Swine!’ Lewis said, and went outside with the lamp.

He found Haines’s body in the blood-spattered Brussels sprouts. The gun was at his side, and his head was off. He had tied a length of twine around the triggers, passed it round the stock, put the barrel in his mouth, and pulled.

‘Swine!’ he kicked the corpse, once, twice, but checked himself before blaspheming the dead three times.

The inquest was held in the hall at Maesyfelin. Almost everyone was sobbing. Everyone was in black except for Mrs Yapp, who arrived dry-eyed in a hat of crimson plush with a pink chiffon sea-anemone that waved its tentacles when she nodded.

The Coroner addressed her in a sad, sepulchral voice: ‘Did the Chapel folk forsake your daughter in the hour of her distress?’

‘No,’ said Mrs Yapp. ‘Some of them come up to the house and was very nice to her.’

‘Then all honour to this little Bethel which did not forsake her!’

He had intended to pass a verdict of ‘wilful murder followed by suicide’, but when Jack Haines read his father’s final note, he changed his mind to ‘manslaughter in a sudden transport of passion’.

The inquest adjourned and the mourners trooped out for the funeral. There was a sharp wind. After the service, Lily Annie followed her mother’s coffin to the grave. Her wounded hands were wrapped in a flapping black shawl, and she carried a wreath of daffodils to lay on the mound of red soil.

Mr Nantlys Williams bade all present stay for the second committal, which took place in the far corner of the churchyard. On Haines’s coffin there was a single wreath – of laurel
leaves
with a card affixed: ‘To dearest Papa, from H & J.’

Mrs Yapp ransacked the house for anything of value and went with Lily Annie to live at her sister’s in Leominster. She refused to spend ‘one single penny’ on her daughter’s memory: so it was left to Lewis Jones to buy the funerary monument. He chose a rustic stone cross carved with a single snowdrop and a legend reading, ‘Peace! Perfect Peace!’

Every month or so, he forked the gravel free of weeds. He planted a clump of daffodils to flower each year in the month of her death; and though he never, ever pardoned himself, he was able to enjoy some consolation.

BEFORE LEAVING THE
district, Mrs Yapp let it be known she had no intention of harbouring the ‘child of such a union’; and without telling his mother or twin, Lewis offered to raise her at The Vision.

‘I’ll think about it,’ the old woman said.

He heard nothing further until the postman told him that Little Meg had been parked at The Rock. He ran over to Lower Brechfa, where Mrs Yapp and Lily Annie were piling their possessions on a cart. The Rock, he protested, was no place to bring up a baby.

‘It’s where she belongs,’ the old woman retorted tartly: letting it be known that, to her way of thinking, Jim, not Haines, had been the father.

‘I see.’ Lewis hung his head, and sadly walked home to tea.

He was right: The Rock was no fit place for any baby. Old Aggie, her face a web of grimy wrinkles, was too frail for housework except to jab a poker at the fire. Jim was too idle to sweep the chimney and, on windy days, the smoke blew back into the room, and they could hardly see across it. The three adopted girls – Sarah, Brennie and Lizzie – padded about with smarting eyes and snivelling colds. Everyone itched with lice. Ethel was the only one who worked.

To feed her hungry mouths, she would slip out after dark and snaffle what she could from other farms – a duckling, perhaps, or a tame rabbit. Her thefts from The Vision were unnoticed until the morning Benjamin opened the door of the meal-shed, and a dog shot past his legs and raced up the fields to Craig-y-Fedw. The dog was Ethel’s. She had raided the corn-bin: he wanted to call the police.

‘No,’ Mary restrained him. ‘We shall do nothing about it.’

Because of his reverence for animal life, Jim never sent a single beast for slaughter and his flock became more and more decrepit. The oldest animal, a wall-eyed ewe called Dolly, was over twenty years old. Others were barren, or missing their back teeth, and in winter they died from lack of feed. After the snowmelt, Jim would collect the carcasses and dig a communal grave – with the result that, over the years, the farmyard became one big cemetery.

Once when Ethel was at the end of her tether, she ordered him to sell five ewes in Rhulen; but on the outskirts of town, he heard the bleats of other sheep, lost the will to continue and drove his ‘girlies’ home.

At the end of an auction, he would hang round the sales clerks, and if there was some clapped-out nag that nobody wanted – not even the knacker – he’d step forward and stroke her muzzle: ‘Aye, I’ll give her a home. All she needs is a bit o’ feedin’ up.’

Dressed like a scarecrow, he would drive his cart through the neighbouring valleys, picking up bits of scrap metal and cast-off machinery, but instead of trying to turn a profit, he turned The Rock into a fortress.

At the outbreak of Hitler’s war the house and outbuildings were encircled with a stockade of rusty hayrakes and plough-shares; mangles, bedsteads and cartwheels, and harrows with their teeth pointing outward.

His other mania was to collect stuffed birds and animals and, eventually, the attic was crammed so full of moth-eaten taxidermy that the girls had no place to sleep.

One morning as Mary Jones was listening to the nine-o’clock news, she looked up and saw Lizzie Watkins pressing her nose against the kitchen window. The girl’s hair was lank and greasy. A skimpy floral dress hung from her wasted body, and her teeth were chattering with cold.

‘It’s Little Meg,’ she blurted out, wiping her nose with her forefinger. ‘She’s dying.’

Mary put on her winter coat and walked out into the wind. For the past week she had not been feeling well. It was the time of the equinoctial gales, and the heather was purple on
the
hill. As they approached Craig-y-Fedw, Jim came out and cursed the yelping sheep-dogs: ‘Atcha! Yer buggers!’ She ducked her head to clear the lintel, and entered the murky room.

Aggie was feebly fanning the fire. Ethel sat on the box-bed with her legs apart; and Little Meg, half-covered with Jim’s jacket, gaped at the rafters with brilliant blue-green eyes. Her cheeks were inflamed. A tinny cough rattled in her throat. She had a fever and was gasping for breath.