The Elderbrook Brothers (5 page)

‘So that's where y' are, hey?'

Joe stood in the doorway of the cowshed where Matthew was busy on the late milking. He stood firmly planted, feet well apart, hands on hips: a sturdy stocky figure. Under black eyebrows, which nearly met above the broad nose, his eyes were glinting bright.

Balanced on the milking stool, his head pressing against Blossom's velvet flank, Matthew glanced up at his father and back again at once to the business in hand. The resonant spurt of the milk into the pail was all he had ears for at the moment. He was a little behind time.

‘Ah,' said Matthew. It was a simple affirmative.

‘She the last one, boy?'

Talkative mood this evening, what's biting him?—he can see for himself she's the last.

‘Ah,' said Matthew again.

‘When you've finished and cleaned up a bit,' said Joe, ‘we'll be getting along out. Hey?'

‘Blackie didn't give much tonight,' said Matthew. ‘Seems sulky.'

‘Still fretting for her calf,' said Joe. ‘She'll get over it.'

Very different in figure and feature as they were, for Matthew was already a shade taller as well as less broad than his father, and his habitual expression placid and thoughtful rather than alert, there was beginning to be a hint of likeness between them, a likeness the more amusing because it was based not in nature but in an unconscious imitation. Since his translation
from schoolboy to farmhand Matthew had begun to cultivate, unknowingly, a curtness of phrase, a grown-up casual manner, which sat oddly on a boy who was in fact all eagerness and admiration. Yet, if the apparent casualness belied his enthusiasm, the leisurely approach that went with it reflected truly enough a deep-seated unhurrying acceptance of life as it came.

And now the sense of his father's earlier remark had penetrated Matthew's preoccupations.

‘Going out, did you say, Dad? Where to?'

‘On the spree, boy. You and me. What d' ye say?'

Immensely flattered, Matthew said again, with a shy grin but with eyes only for his work: ‘Where to? Cutting clover?' An idle question, this last: he knew Joe would never consent to start on such a job so late in the day. ‘But, I say—isn't it Lutterthorpe for you to-night, dad?'

‘That's the size of it,' said Joe. ‘We're playing a match tonight, boy. Losers pay for the beer.'

Matthew was now in possession of the whole story. It was a proud and unprecedented moment: for the first time, and in consonance with his new dignity, he was to be taken to the bowling club at Lutterthorpe and introduced to his father's cronies and acquaintances. All he needed to complete his satisfaction was to hear Joe say that they could cut the clover tomorrow, since the weather looked like holding; but Joe said no such thing; he stamped his way back into the house saying he'd go fetch his ‘woods' while Matthew was getting the trap out. Too well trained by his father to let himself be hurried in such a matter as milking, Matthew drained the last drop from the now slack udder before carrying his last bucketful to the diary, where Nancy was waiting to run it through the separator. Then he must wash himself, and change into clean boots, and give himself a good brush down, and fetch his jacket from its peg in the byre. He was in two minds whether or not to put on his town-going clothes; but Father had said nothing of that, and maybe it would take too much time. A lucky
conclusion, as it turned out; for by the time he got to the stable-yard there was Joe,, already seated in the trap, reins in hand, and with eyebrows shooting up in a way that boded ill for anyone who should delay him further. Seeing Matthew he set the pony moving at a walking pace towards the road, leaving Matthew to follow.

‘Jump up, boy, or we shan't be there by dark!'

Since nearly three hours of daylight remained, the remark served no purpose but to show that Joe was nettled. Matthew, having first shut the gate behind him, jumped in as he was bidden, and pony and trap moved off at a sharp trot down the road. Matthew's elation was sensibly diminished by his failure to do the impossible—finish the milking and harness the pony, all in five minutes—and for a moment he resented his father's having put him in the wrong by first asking him to get the trap out and then impatiently doing it himself. That's Father all over, he thought. But his resentment was as short-lived as Joe's ill humour, and father and son were in good spirits when they drove up to the entrance of the Lutterthorpe bowling green half-an-hour later.

Their reception was in keeping with the importance, for Matthew, of the occasion.

‘How do, Mr Elderbrook!'—‘How do, Charlie!'

‘Evening, Joe!'—‘How's yourself, boy?'

‘Here we are again, old soldier!'—‘Large as life, Harry.'

It gratified Matthew, increased his own stature, to find his father so well liked by these strangers. Some indeed were not strangers entirely. Charlie Meadows he had seen at market, and Fletching, the long lean dark-browed baker, was known to everybody; but for the most part these faces were unfamiliar to Matthew. So was the scene itself, though often enough from the roadway he had caught a glimpse, through the narrow copse of beeches that flanked it, of the level green, the smooth shaven grass terrace jutting like a giant stair out of the sloping ground. Now he saw it near at hand and in another aspect, with a wide grass way going up past and beyond to its left, a broad
curving byway of the river to its right, and behind all, rising steeply, the wooded hill. On a ledge above the green stood a shed or miniature pavilion in which were kept the roller and the mower and a few deck-chairs and a spare set or two of bowls for the chancecome visitor.

‘Not me, boy, I've brought me own,' said Joe, declining an invitation before recognizing it as a joke. ‘Ha, you know that, you rascal! Fetch 'em, Matt, will ye? We left 'em in the trap.'

Things proceed at a leisurely pace on a leisurely occasion, and five minutes more of daylight were gone before the players, having taken each his precious pair of woods out of the russet canvas bag in which he carried them, and having sagaciously weighed each one in the palm of the hand, at last settled down, not to the game itself, for they were still an odd number, but to play the trial ends, once up and once down, to see how the rink was, whether heavy and slow, or sleek and easygoing. The green was divided by chalklines into three rinks, and of these number one was voted the best. Even had it not been so, Jimmie Andrews the groundsman, who had spent hours at it with the roller, would never have suffered them to use any other tonight. ‘She runs pretty sweet,' was the general verdict, to which the knowing Mr Elderbrook added, in an aside to his son: ‘And pretty fast too, you mark my words, boy!'

Matthew had no motive for marking his father's words beyond a spectator's interest in the game, and his attention was a little distracted by the arrival of two people who at first glance seemed strangers to him. It gave him a moment's discomfort that one of them was a young lady. In Matthew's world, or on the fringe of it, were girls, women, and young ladies; the first two categories were unalarming, but in the presence of young ladies he was apt, nowadays, to feel a little confused. This one, as he now realized, he had seen before but never spoken to. She looked strange, remote, unapproachable. There was beauty in her eyes and a beautiful pride in the shape of her nose. Her escort, splendid in white flannels, approached
the party with outstretched hand, eager to show that if there were any social disparity between himself and the rest he was unaware of it. He was manager of the Lutterthorpe sub-branch of the Mercester Bank, and in spite of his comparatively youthful bearing he was in fact the father of Eva Linnet.

‘Well, well, and here's Miss Eva!' cried Joe, alert in gallantry. ‘It's not often we're so much honoured.' He shook hands with her father, saying: ‘Better late than never, Mr Linnet. But we'll say naught of that since you've brought your daughter with you.'

‘That makes eight,' said Mr Fletching. ‘How about picking sides?'

‘Who'll you have, Joe?' said Charlie Meadows. ‘Toss for first pick?'

‘Ah,' said Joe,' ‘but who's skippering the other side?' It was taken for granted by everyone, including Joe himself, that Joe would command one team. ‘What about yourself, Charlie?' said he.

‘Not me, boy,' said Charlie. ‘I'm on your side, like it or not. Mr Linnet's the one.'

‘Of course! Of course!' said Fletching, in a slightly shocked tone. ‘Who else indeed?'

‘Right you are,' said Joe. ‘It's you and me, Mr Linnet. Brought plenty of banknotes along with you? You'll need ‘em to pay for the beer.'

Joe took a tolerant rather than sympathetic view of those flannels and that sporting blazer. Men alive in his grandfather's time had played cricket—let alone bowls—in top hats; and he himself would have stayed away altogether rather than wear white trousers instead of the brown corduroy riding breeches he more or less lived in. Still, there was no harm in this Linnet, and the girl was a neat little thing.

‘Come along then. Heads or tails?' cried Joe.

The business of the evening began.

MATTHEW, content to be a spectator, had planted himself some distance away from Eva Linnet, lonely in her deck-chair. ‘Can't have that,' said Joe, with a mixture of roguery and indignation. ‘Come and talk to the young lady, Matt. What are you made of, boy?' Poor Matthew, obediently and sheepishly changing his place, was secretly, oh so secretly, already half-aware of being made of very similar stuff to his father. For this reason, however dimly surmised through a mist of adolescent disturbances, he was put out at having attention called to him; was inclined to be angry with his father; was envious of that middle-aged nonchalance. Yet Eva Linnet was only a girl after all: a girl same as other girls. A bit smarter perhaps, with a bit of something about her, an air of well-bred composure that made one feel like a clodhopper. But a girl same as others, all said and done. And nothing to be afraid of.

‘Does your father play a lot, Miss Linnet?'

‘Oh no,' said Miss Linnet. ‘Tennis is his game.'

‘What about you? Do you play?'

‘What? Tennis?'

‘No. Bowls.'

‘Oh no,' said Miss Linnet again, with an air of delicate deprecation.

‘I don't see why not,' said Matthew, conscious of blunder and stubborn not to admit it. ‘Lots of girls do.'

‘Do they?' She opened her blue eyes very wide.

‘Well, I don't know that they do, but they could,' said Matthew, retreating from an impossible position. ‘If they wanted to,' he added, making the thing incontestable.

‘That's rather different, isn't it?' she retorted primly.

‘Is it?' said Matthew. ‘Not so very.'

The softness and fairness of her skin was a miracle. Her downiness made him think of newly hatched chicks. The curve of her cheek and the blue of her eyes, like the sky with a hint of gold in it …

She glanced at him half-amusedly, prodding the ground with her parasol.

‘Pigs might fly,' she said. ‘But they don't.'

‘They haven't got wings, that's why,' said Matthew. ‘There's no comparison.'

‘No comparison? Who said so?'

‘Between girls and pigs,' said Matthew, laboriously explaining himself.

‘Well, I suppose
you
ought to know,' she said.

‘About pigs I do, anyhow.'

But not about girls, he thought. I know nothing about girls. Sex was no mystery to this farm-bred boy. No one had tried, far from it, to hide the ‘facts of life' from him. Nor could they by any mistaken zeal have succeeded in such an enterprise. But though he had that knowledge, and though he had sisters who were (he supposed) in some sense girls, of girls and the wonder they symbolized, beyond mere sex, he knew almost nothing: it was a mystery dimly, doubtfully, breathlessly apprehended. And it seemed to him that he had never been nearer to it than in this moment of artless idiotic disputation about nothing at all.

‘I expect you do,' she said softly.

He hardly knew what she referred to now. Nor could he be sure she was not laughing at him. It made no difference. He did not care. For the moment, for no discernible reason, he was in a state of peace and blessedness. The summer evening was luminous and tranquil, and beyond time. It had suddenly the quality of a golden age. Could the curve of a cheek, the soft gleam of eyes from under dark lashes, do that? The lantern of the day glowed with a mellow light. The evening stillness was enriched by a multitude of small unurgent sounds: the occasional clean tap of wood on wood, bird-calls from the wooded hills, a horse and cart going along the road behind the row of beeches, and the varied voices of men, laughing, exclaiming, disputing, admonishing. Without pause, without haste, the game went
on, a leisurely ritual but full of surprises for those who played it.

It is a feature of this absurd beautiful pastime that after the first few woods have been played the man who is to bowl next must rely largely on the advice of his forerunner. And how willingly that advice is given! Forerunners they are in a double sense, for having played their second wood they do, with most delicate caperings, run with it up the green, and plant themselves behind the jack to give advice to those of their side who follow them. With arms outstretched like the conductor of an orchestra they move this way and that, reporting on relative positions, improvising tactics, shouting advice.

‘Try the fore hand, boy. Come in round George's wood and you'll just do it. Take plenty of land now. That's right. That's nice. That's slipping along nice…. Ah, but has it got the
legs
, boy? Will it
make?'

Sometimes, lacking ‘the legs', the wood would run short of its goal. Sometimes the cry would go up ‘It's running away, it's running away! … Bit too heavy, boy!' or, with genial sarcasm, ‘Good wood! Another one for the ditch!', the ditch being the ultimate sepulchre of misguided or over-impetuous woods. Each player had his own quality and style. Matthew privately thought his father looked very funny, dancing up and down the rink, studying with prodigious sagacity the lie of the woods, and at intervals flinging up his blunt fingers with a yell of ‘Shot! That's shot!' (the Mershire vowel made it sound more like ‘shaht'). But the others seemed too intent on the game to enjoy its mere comedy, to which, indeed, each was contributing his own share. Rufus Fletching, however, even to his fellow-players, was a source of innocent mirth, though they could not but respect and applaud his results. Behind his back grown men would nudge each other and begin to giggle softly when long Rufus, wood in hand, addressed himself to the solemn task. His procedure never varied. With immense care he would go down on his right knee, then raise the wood in his right hand slowly to the level of his nose, remain in that
posture for precisely five seconds, then lower the hand with funereal unction and play his shot. And a very good shot it commonly was, so what was there to laugh at? Nothing, of course; but these people liked laughing and believed it did them good.