On The Black Hill (Vintage Classics) (3 page)

‘I’d like some water,’ he said.

She led the way down a passage to the kitchen. The table was scrubbed and bare; and there was not a sign of food.

She said, ‘To think I can’t even offer you a cup of tea!’

Outside again in the sunlight, he saw that her hair was streaked with grey, and there were crow’s-feet spreading to her cheekbones. But he liked her smile, and the brown eyes shining between long black lashes. Around her waist there curled a tight black patent leather belt. His breeder’s eye
meandered
from her shoulders to her hips.

‘And I don’t even know your name,’ she said, and stretched out her hand.

‘But Amos Jones is a wonderful name,’ she continued, strolling beside him to the garden gate. Then she waved and ran back to the house. The last he saw of her, she was standing in the study. The black tentacles of the monkey-puzzle, reflected in the window, seemed to hold her white face prisoner as she pressed it to the pane.

He climbed the hill, then bounded from one grassy hummock to the next, shouting at the top of his voice: ‘Mary Latimer! Mary Jones! Mary Latimer! Mary Jones!, Mary! … Mary! … Mary …!

Two days later he was back at the rectory with the present of a chicken he had plucked and drawn himself.

She was waiting on the porch, in a long blue wool dress, a Kashmiri shawl round her shoulders and a cameo, of Minerva, on a brown velvet ribbon round her neck.

‘I missed to come yesterday,’ he said.

‘But I knew you’d come today.’

She threw back her head and laughed, and the dog caught a whiff of the chicken and jumped up and down, and scratched its paws on Amos’s trousers. He pulled the chicken from his knapsack. She saw the cold pimply flesh. The smile fell from her face, and she stood rooted to the doorstep, shuddering.

They tried to talk in the hall, but she wrung her hands and stared at the red-tiled floor, while he shifted from foot to foot and felt himself colouring from his neck to his ears.

Both were bursting with things to say to each other. Both felt, at that moment, there was nothing more to say; that nothing would come of their meeting; that their two accents would never make one whole voice; and that they would both creep back to their shells – as if the flash of recognition in church were a trick of fate, or a temptation of the Devil to ruin them. They stammered on, and gradually their words spaced themselves into silence: their eyes did not meet as he edged out backwards and ran for the hill.

She was hungry. That evening, she roasted the chicken and tried to force herself to eat it. After the first mouthful, she dropped her knife and fork, set the dish down for the dog and rushed upstairs to her room.

She lay, face down on the narrow bed, sobbing into the pillow with the blue dress spread round her and the wind howling through the chimney-pots.

Towards midnight, she thought she heard the crunch of footsteps on gravel. ‘He’s come back,’ she cried out loud, gasping with happiness, only to realize it was a rambler rose, scratching its barbs against the window. She tried counting sheep over a fence but instead of sending her to sleep the silly animals awoke another memory – of her other love, in a dusty town in India.

He was a Eurasian – a streak of a man with syrupy eyes and a mouth full of apologies. She saw him first in the telegraph office where he worked as a clerk. Then, when the cholera took her mother and his young wife, they exchanged condolences at the Anglican Cemetery. After that, they used to meet in the evenings and take a stroll beside the sluggish river. He took her to his house and gave her tea with buffalo milk and too much sugar. He recited speeches from Shakespeare. He spoke, hopefully, of Platonic love. His little girl wore golden earrings, and her nostrils were bunged up with mucus.

‘Strumpet!’ her father had bellowed when the postmaster warned him of his daughter’s ‘indiscretion’. For three weeks he shut her in a stifling room, till she repented, on a diet of bread and water.

Around two in the morning, the wind changed direction and whined in a different key. She heard a branch breaking –
cra-ack!
– and at the sound of splitting wood, she sat up, suddenly:

‘Oh my God! He’s choked on a chicken bone!’

She groped her way downstairs. A draught blew out the candle as she opened the kitchen door. She stood shivering in the darkness. Above the screaming wind she could hear the little dog snoring steadily in his basket.

At dawn, she looked beyond the bedrail and brooded on
the
Holman Hunt engraving. ‘Knock, and it shall be opened unto you,’ He had said. And had she not knocked and waved her lantern outside the cottage door? Yet, at the moment when sleep did, finally, come, the tunnel down which she had wandered seemed longer and darker than ever.

AMOS HID HIS
anger. All that summer, he lost himself in work, as if to wipe away the memory of the contemptuous woman who had raised his hopes and ruined them. Often, at the thought of her grey kid gloves, he banged his fist on the lonely table.

In the hay-making season, he went to help a farmer on the Black Hill, and met a girl called Liza Bevan.

They would meet in the dingle, and lie under the alders. She plastered his forehead with kisses and ran her stubby fingers through his hair. But nothing he could do – or she could do – could rub away the image of Mary Latimer, puckering her eyebrows in a pained reproach. At nights – awake, alone – how he longed for her smooth white body between himself and the wall!

One day, at the summer pony fair in Rhulen, he struck up a conversation with the shepherd who had found the rector’s body.

‘And the daughter?’ he asked, making a show of shrugging his shoulders.

‘Be leaving,’ the man said. ‘Packing up the house and all.’

It began to rain next morning as Amos reached Bryn-Draenog. The rain washed down his cheeks and pattered on the leaves of the laurels. In the beeches round the rectory young rooks were learning to flex their wings, and their parents were flying round and round, cawing calls of encouragement. On the carriage-drive stood a tilbury. The groom waved his curry-comb at the red-headed stranger who strode into the house.

She was in the study with a ravaged, scant-haired
gentleman
in pince-nez, who was leafing through a leather-bound book.

‘Professor Gethyn-Jones,’ she introduced him without a flicker of surprise. ‘And this is plain Mr Jones who has come to take me for a walk. Do please excuse us! Do go on with your reading!’

The professor slurred some words through his teeth. His handshake was dry and leathery. Grey veins ran round his knuckles like roots over rocks, and his breath was foul.

She went out and came back, her cheeks flushed, in wellington boots and an oiled drabbet cape.

‘A friend of Father’s,’ she whispered once they were out of earshot. ‘Now you see what I’ve suffered. And he wants me to give him the books – for nothing!’

‘Sell them,’ Amos said.

They walked up a sheeptrack, in the rain. The hill was in cloud and tassels of white water came streaming out of the cloud-bank. He walked ahead, brushing aside the gorse and the bracken, and she planted her footsteps in his.

They rested by the rocks, and then followed the old drove-road, arm in arm, talking with the ease of childhood friends. Sometimes, she strained to catch a word of his Radnor dialect. Sometimes, he asked her to repeat a phrase. But both knew, now, that the barrier between them was down.

He spoke of his ambitions and she spoke about her fears. He wanted a wife and a farm, and sons to inherit the farm. She dreaded being dependent on her relatives, or having to go into service. She had been happy in India before her mother died. She told him about the Mission, and of the terrible days before the monsoon broke:

‘The heat! How we nearly died of heat!’

‘And I,’ he said, ‘I’d not a fire all winter but the fire in the pub where they hired me.’

‘Perhaps I should go back to India?’ she said, but in a tone of such uncertainty that he knew that was not what she wanted.

The clouds broke and columns of brassy light slanted downward on to the peat bog.

‘Look!’ he called, pointing to a skylark above their heads,
spiralling
higher and higher, as if to greet the sun. ‘Lark’ll have a nest hereabouts.’

She heard a soft crack and saw a yellow smear on the toe of her boot.

‘Oh no!’ she cried. ‘Now look what I’ve done!’

Her foot had crushed the nestful of eggs. She sat down on a tuft of grass. The tears stained her cheeks and she only stopped crying when he folded his arm around her shoulders.

At the Mawn Pool they played ducks-and-drakes on the dark water. Black-headed gulls flew up from the reed-beds, filling the air with mournful cries. When he lifted her across a patch of bog, she felt as light and insubstantial as the drifting mist.

Back at the rectory – as though to quieten her father’s shade – they addressed one another in cold, terse phrases. They did not disturb the professor, who was buried in the books.

‘Sell them!’ said Amos, as he left her on the porch.

She nodded. She did not wave. She knew now when, and for what, he would be coming.

He came on the Saturday afternoon, on a Welsh bay cob. At the end of a lead-rein he held a piebald gelding with a side-saddle. She called from the bedroom the second she heard the sound of hoofs. He shouted, ‘Hurry now! There’s a farm for rent on the Black Hill.’

‘I am hurrying,’ she called back, and flew down the banisters in a riding habit of dove-grey Indian cotton. Her straw hat was crowned with roses, and a pink satin ribbon tied under her chin.

He had dipped into his savings to buy a new pair of boots, and she said, ‘My! What boots!’

The scents of summer had clotted in the lanes. In the hedgerows, the honeysuckle had tangled with the dog-rose; and there were cloud-blue crane’s-bills and purple foxgloves. In the farmyards, ducks waddled out of their way; sheepdogs barked, and ganders hissed and craned their necks. He broke off a branch of elder to whisk away the horseflies.

They passed a cottage with hollyhocks round the porch and a border ablaze with nasturtiums. An old woman in a
goffered
cap looked up from her knitting and croaked a few words to the travellers.

‘Old Mary Prosser,’ he whispered, and, when they were out of earshot, ‘them do say as she’s a witch.’

They crossed the Hereford road at Fiddler’s Elbow; crossed the railway line, and then climbed the quarrymen’s track that zigzags up the scarp of Cefn Hill.

At the edge of the pine plantation, they paused to rest the horses and looked back down over the town of Rhulen – at the jumble of slate roofs, the broken walls of the castle, the spire of the Bickerton Memorial, and the church weathercock glinting in a watery sun. A bonfire was burning in the vicarage garden, and a scarf of grey woodsmoke floated over the chimneys and streamed away along the river valley.

It was cold and dark among the pines. The horses scuffed the dead pine-needles. Midges whined, and there were frills of yellow fungus on the fallen branches. She shuddered as she looked along the long aisles of pine-trunks and said, ‘It’s dead in here.’

They rode to the edge of the wood and they rode on in the sunlight, out onto an open slope and, when the horses felt the grass underfoot, they broke into a canter and kicked up crescents of turf that flew out behind them, like swallows.

They cantered over the hill and trotted down into a valley of scattered farms, down through lines of late-flowering hawthorns, to the Lurkenhope lane. Each time they passed a gate, Amos made some comment on the owner: ‘Morgan the Bailey. Very tidy person.’ ‘Williams the Vron, as married his cousin.’ Or ‘Griffiths Cwm Cringlyn what the father died of drink.’

In one field, boys were gathering hay into cocks and, by the roadside, a red-faced man was whetting his scythe, his shirt-front open to the navel.

‘Nice mate o’ yours!’ he winked at Amos as they went by. They watered the horses in the brook; and then they stood on the bridge and watched the waterweeds wavering in the current, and the brown trout darting upstream. Half a mile further, Amos opened a mossy gate. Beyond it, a cart-track wound uphill to a house in a clump of larches.

‘Them do call it “The Vision”,’ he said. ‘And there be a hundred and twenty acre, and half gone to fern.’

THE VISION WAS
an outlying farm on the Lurkenhope Estate, whose owners, the Bickertons, were an old Catholic family made rich by the West India trade.

The tenant had died in 1896, leaving an old unmarried sister who had carried on alone until they fetched her to a madhouse. In the yard, a young ash-tree reared its trunk through the boards of a hay-waggon. The roofs of the buildings were yellow with stonecrop; and the dungheap was overgrown with grass. At the end of the garden stood a brick-built privy. Amos slashed down the nettles to clear a path to the porch.

A broken hinge prevented the door from opening properly and, as he lifted it, a gust of fetid air flew in their faces.

They went into the kitchen and saw a bundle of the old woman’s possessions, rotting away in a corner. The plaster was flaking and the flagstones had grown a film of slime. Twigs from a jackdaw’s nest up the chimney were choking the grate. The table was still laid, with two places, for tea; but the cups were covered with spiders’ webs, and the cloth was in shreds.

Amos took a napkin and flicked away the mouse-droppings.

‘And rats!’ said Mary cheerfully, as they heard the scuttle of feet in the rafters. ‘But I’m used to rats. In India you have to get used to rats.’

In one of the bedrooms she found an old rag doll and handed it to him, laughing. He made a move to chuck it from the window; but she stayed his hand and said, ‘No, I shall keep it.’

They went outside to inspect the buildings and the orchard.
There
’d be a good crop of damsons, he said, but the apple-trees would have to be replanted. Peering through the brambles, she saw a row of mouldering beehives.

‘And I’, she said, ‘shall learn the secrets of the bee.’