On The Black Hill (Vintage Classics) (27 page)

‘And what shall we put down to incidentals?’ asked the accountant.

‘Like money in our pockets?’ said Benjamin.

‘Pocket money, if you like!’

‘About twenty pound?’

‘A week?’

‘Oh no, no … Twenty’d see us through the year.’

When the young man tried to explain the desirability of running at a loss, Benjamin puckered his forehead and said, ‘That can’t be right.’

By 1957, a large taxable profit had piled up in The Vision’s farm account; and the accountant, too, had ‘filled out’. A beer-stomach bulged over the belt of his cavalry twills. A hacking-jacket, yellow socks and chukka boots completed his outfit; and he kept foul-mouthing a Mr Nasser.

He thumped his fist on the table: ‘Either you spend £5,000 on farm machinery, or you give it as a present to the Government!’

‘I suppose we’d better buy another tractor,’ said Benjamin.

Lewis pored over prospectuses and decided on an International Harvester. He cleared a stable in which to house her and chose a fine dry afternoon to drive her up from Rhulen.

She was not the kind of tractor one used. He would scrub her tyres, flick her with a duster, and drive her along the lane for an occasional airing; but for years he kept her, idly enshrined in the stable, under padlock and key. From time to time, he would peep through a chink in the door, feasting his eyes over her scarlet paintwork like a little boy peeping into a brothel.

The Fifties were years of spectacular air-crashes: two Comets tumbling from the sky, thirty spectators killed at the Farnborough Air Display. Benjamin had a hernia, The Vision was hitched up to mains electricity, and one by one the older generation fell ill and died. Hardly a month went by without a funeral service in Chapel and when old Mrs Bickerton died in the South of France – at the age of ninety-two she had drowned herself in her swimming-pool – there was a lovely memorial service in the parish church and Mrs Nancy the Castle gave a sit-down lunch for all the old tenants and estate workers.

The Castle itself lay crumbling into ruins until, one August evening, a schoolboy sneaked in to shoot rats with a bow-and-arrow, dropped a lighted cigarette butt, and the place went up in flames. Then in April of 1959, Lewis had his cycling accident.

He had been riding to Maesyfelin with a bunch of wallflowers to lay on the graves. The afternoon was bitterly cold. The buckle of his overcoat worked loose; the belt caught in the front spokes – and over the handlebars he went! A plastic surgeon rebuilt his nose in Hereford Hospital and, for ever after, he was always a little deaf in one ear.

The day of their sixtieth birthday was almost a day of mourning.

Each time they tore a page from the calendar, they had forebodings of a miserable old age. They would turn to the wall of family photos – row on row of smiling faces, all of them dead or gone. How was it possible, they wondered, that they had come to be alone?

Their wrangles were over. They were inseparable now as they had been before Benjamin’s childhood illness. But surely, somewhere, there was a cousin they could trust? What was
the
point of owning land, or tractors, if the one thing you lacked was an heir?

They looked at the picture of the Red Indian and thought of Uncle Eddie. Perhaps he had grandsons? But they would be in Canada and would never come back. They even considered their old friend Manfred’s son, a pale-eyed lad who sometimes came to visit.

Manfred had started up his own poultry farm, in some Nissen huts put up for Polish refugees, and despite his thick guttural accent, he was now ‘more English than the English’. He had changed his name by deed poll from Kluge to Clegg. He wore green tweed suits, rarely missed a point-to-point, and was Chairman of the local Conservative Association.

Proudly, he drove the twins to see his establishment; but the wire cages, the smell of chicken-shit and fish-meal, and the birds’ raw, featherless necks so nauseated Benjamin that he preferred not to go there again.

In December 1965, the calendar showed a picture of the Norfolk Broads under ice. Then on the 11th – a date the twins would never forget – a rusty Ford van drove into the yard, and a woman in gumboots got out and introduced herself as a Mrs Redpath.

SHE HAD AUBURN
hair going grey, and hazel eyes, and delicate rose-pink cheeks unusual in a woman of her age. For at least a minute she stood beside the garden gate, nervously fumbling with the latch. Then she said she had something of importance to discuss.

‘Come on in now!’ Lewis beckoned. ‘And you’ll have a cup of tea.’

She apologized for the mud on her boots.

‘No harm in a bit of mud,’ he said pleasantly.

She said, ‘No bread-and-butter, thank you!’ but accepted a slice of fruitcake, cutting it into neat little strips and placing each one, daintily, on the tip of her tongue. Now and then, she glanced round the room, and wondered out loud how the twins found time to dust ‘all those curios’. She spoke of her husband, who worked for the Water Board. She spoke of the clement weather and the cost of Christmas shopping. ‘Yes,’ she replied to Benjamin, ‘I could manage another cup.’ She took a further four lumps of sugar and began to tell her story:

All her life, she had believed that her mother was the widow of a carpenter, who had to take in lodgers and had made her childhood a misery. Then last June, as the old woman lay dying, she had learned she was illegitimate, a foundling. Her real mother, a girl from a farm on the Black Hill, had left her to board in 1924 and gone overseas with an Irishman.

‘Rebecca’s baby,’ murmured Lewis, and his teaspoon tinkled on the saucer.

‘Aye,’ breathed Mrs Redpath, summoning an emotional sigh. ‘My mother was Rebecca Jones.’

She had checked her birth-certificate, checked the parish register – and here she was, their long-lost niece!

Lewis blinked at the handsome workaday woman before him, and saw, in her every gesture, a resemblance to his mother. Benjamin kept quiet. In the harsh shadow cast by the naked light bulb, he had noticed her unamiable mouth.

‘Just you wait till you see my little Kevin!’ She reached for a knife and cut herself another slice of cake. ‘He’s the spitting image of you both.’

She wanted to bring Kevin to The Vision the very next day, but Benjamin was none too keen: ‘No. No. We’ll come up and see him some time.’

All through the following week the twins were once again at loggerheads.

Lewis believed that Kevin Redpath had been sent as a gift from Providence. Benjamin suspected – even if the story were true, even if he was their great-nephew – that Mrs Redpath was bent on their money, and no good would come of it.

On the 17th, a Christmas card – of Santa Claus and a reindeer-sleigh – came ‘With Seasons Greetings from Mr and Mrs Redpath, and Kevin!!’ Tea was again on the table when she reappeared and asked if she could drive them, that very evening, to the nativity play at Llanfechan, where her son was playing Father Joseph himself.

‘Aye, I’d come with you,’ said Lewis, on impulse. And taking a kettle off the hob, he nodded to his brother and went upstairs to shave and dress. Left alone in the kitchen, Benjamin felt himself covered with embarrassment. Then he, too, followed upstairs to the bedroom.

It was dark when they came to leave. The sky was clear and the stars revolved like little wheels of fire. A hoar-frost blanketed the hedgerows and floury shapes rose up in the glare of the headlights. The van skidded on a bend, but Mrs Redpath was a careful driver. Benjamin sat slumped in the back, on a sack stuffed with straw, gritting his teeth until she drew up outside the Chapel Hall. She hurried off to make sure Kevin was dressed.

Inside, it was freezing. A pair of paraffin stoves did nothing
to
heat the benches at the back. A draught whined in under the door, and the floorboards reeked of disinfectant. The audience sat muffled in scarves and overcoats. The preacher, a missionary returned from Africa, shook hands with each member of his flock.

Drawn across the stage was a curtain consisting of three grey ex-Army blankets, peppered with moth-holes.

Mrs Redpath rejoined her uncles. The lights were switched off, except for the light onstage. From behind the curtain they heard the whispering of children.

The schoolteacher slipped through the curtain and sat down at the piano-stool. Her knitted hat was the same puce pink as the azalea on the piano; and as her fingers hammered the keyboard, the hat bobbed up and down, and the petals of the azalea quivered.

‘Carol Number One,’ she announced. ‘“O Little Town of Bethlehem” – which will be sung by the children only.’

After the opening bars, the sound of faltering trebles drifted over the curtain; and through the moth-holes, the twins saw flashes of sparkling silver, which were the tinsel haloes of the angels.

The carol ended; and a blonde girl came out front, shivering in a white nightie. In her diadem there was a silver-paper star.

‘I am the star of Bethlehem …’ Her teeth chattered. ‘’Tis ten thousand years since God put a great star in the sky. I am that star …’

She finished the prologue. Then the curtain jerked back with the noise of squeaky pulleys to reveal the Virgin Mary, in blue, on a red rubber kneeler, scrubbing the floor of her house in Nazareth. The Angel Gabriel stood beside her.

‘I am the Angel Gabriel,’ he said in a suffocated voice. ‘And I have come to tell you that you are going to have a baby.’

‘Oh!’ said the Virgin Mary, blushing crimson. ‘Thank you very much, sir!’ But the Angel fluffed the next line, and Mary fluffed the one after, and they both stood helplessly in the middle of the stage.

The teacher tried to prompt them. Then, seeing that no amount of prompting could rescue the scene, she called out,
‘Curtain
!’ and asked all present to sing ‘Once in Royal David’s City’.

Everyone knew the words without having to open their hymnals. And when the curtain drew back again, everyone guffawed at the two-piece donkey that kicked and bucked and neighed and nodded his papier-mâché’ head. Two scene-shifters carried in a bale of straw, and a manger for feeding calves.

‘That’s my Kevin!’ whispered Mrs Redpath, nudging Benjamin in the ribs.

A little boy had come onstage in a green tartan dressing-gown. Wound round his head was an orange towel. He had a black beard gummed to his chin.

The twins sat up and craned their necks; but instead of facing the audience, Father Joseph shied away and spoke his lines to the backdrop: ‘Can’t you find us a room, sir! My wife’s going to have a baby at any minute.’

‘I ain’t got a room in the place,’ replied Reuben the innkeeper. ‘The whole town’s chock-a-block with folks as come to pay their taxes. Blame the Roman Government, not me!

‘I got this stable, though,’ he went on, pointing to the manger. ‘You can sleep in there if you want to.’

‘Oh, thanks very much, sir!’ said the Virgin, brightly. ‘It’ll do very nicely for humble folks like us.’

She started rearranging the straw. Joseph still stood facing the backdrop. He raised his right arm stiffly to the sky.

‘Mary!’ he shouted, suddenly plucking up courage. ‘I can see something up there! Looks like a cross to me!’

‘A cross? Ugh! Don’t mention that word. It reminds me of Caesar Augustus!’

Through the double thickness of their corduroys, Lewis could feel his brother’s kneecap, shaking: for Father Joseph had spun round, and was smiling in their direction.

‘Yes,’ said the Virgin Mary towards the end of the final scene. ‘I think it’s the loveliest baby I ever set eyes on.’

As for the Jones twins, they, too, were in Bethlehem. But it was not the plastic doll that they saw. Nor the innkeeper, nor the shepherds. Nor the papier-mâché donkey, nor the living
sheep
that nibbled at the straw. Nor Melchior with his box of chocolates. Nor Kaspar with his bottle of shampoo. Nor Black Balthazar with his crown of red cellophane and a ginger jar. Nor the Cherubim and Seraphim, nor Gabriel, nor the Virgin Mary herself. All they saw was an oval face with grave eyes and a fringe of black hair beneath a wash-towel turban. And – when the choir of angels started singing, ‘We will rock you, rock you, ro-ock you …’ they rocked their heads in time and tears dripped on to their watch-chains.

After the performance, the minister took some snapshots with a flash. The twins waited outside the Chapel where the mothers were changing their children.

‘Kevin! … Kevin!’ came a shrill voice. ‘If you don’t come here, I’ll slap your bottom …!’

HE WAS A
nice boy, lively and affectionate, who liked his Uncle Benjamin’s fruitcake and loved to ride with Uncle Lewis on the tractor.

In the school holidays, his mother sent him to stay for weeks on end: they came to dread, as much as he did, the first day of term.

Perched on the tractor mudguard, he would watch the plough-share bite into the stubble, and the herring-gulls shrieking and swooping over the fresh-turned furrow. He saw lambs being born, potatoes harvested, a cow calving and, one morning, there was a foal in the field.

The twins said all this, one day, would be his.

They fussed over him like a little prince, waited on him at table, learned never to serve cheese or beetroot and, in the attic, found a humming-top that whined like a contented bee. Wilfully retracing the steps of their own childhood, they even thought of taking him to the seaside.

Some nights, his eyelids heavy with sleep, he’d rest his head in his hands and yawn, ‘Please, please will you carry me?’ So they carried him upstairs to their old bedroom, and undressed him; and put on his pyjamas, and tiptoed out with the night-light burning.

In a patch of garden, he planted lettuces, radishes and carrots, and a row of sweet-peas. He liked listening to the zinging sound of seeds in their packets, but saw no point in sowing biennials.

‘Two years,’ he’d moan. ‘That’s far too long to wait!’

With a bucket slung over his arm, he went off scouring the hedges for anything that took his fancy – toads, snails, furry
caterpillars
– and once he came home with a shrew. When his tadpoles grew into baby frogs, he built a frog-castle, on a rock in the middle of an old stone trough.