The Town House (24 page)

I knew that what I should do was to call Mary down, hand the child to her and busy myself with the mother. I thought about it, knowing exactly what Agnes the midwife would do. I knew I couldn’t do it. That old, shuddering loathing was back on me now: her precious load delivered, she had become once more the woman from whose lightest touch I had shrunk. But that was not all. I had no need to touch her. I could have called Mary and told her what to do.

The truth was, I wanted her to die. I thought how happy we could be now. What life was left to me I could devote to bringing up the baby. But not if she stayed. And she would. She spoke of a baby being ruin to a dancer. Besides, any woman, however wild, is settled by motherhood. Martin would be so pleased with the child that there’d be no question of
forgiving her wandering off, it would just be forgotten; she’d be reinstated, more than ever mistress of the house, and I should be back with Peg-Leg.

Oh, I know that women do die in childbed, every day, every night, but not without a fight, not until every measure has been tried. Agnes the midwife had had many a hand to hand fight with death, and knew all the tricks.

I, I did nothing. I sat down with the child on my lap and saw to him, while behind me on the bed the Romany blood, the witch’s blood, the woman’s life blood soaked away.

Interval

Of Martin’s ventures the Baildon people had said, ‘Ah, the bigger you blow a bladder, the louder the bang’, and‘The higher a kite flies the farther it has to come down’. As year followed year they waited for him to overreach himself, for the bladder to burst, the kite to fall. Nobody but Martin himself knew how often their ghoulish hopes had come near to being fulfilled. And he himself could not have said what it was that drove him, time and again, to take another risk, exchanging a certain, comfortable security for a touch-and-go chance. He just knew he must go on and on.

Most of his ventures had an element of makeshift about them.

He went into the yard one morning, beckoned to Peg-Leg who was in the stables and asked brusquely,

‘What sort of sailor
are
you? Could you take a ship from Bywater to Calais, or Amsterdam?’

‘If she was sound I could sail a ship to Constantinople and back.’

‘The one I have my eye on is old, but she’s sound. How d’you know that you could?’

‘It weren’t my head that clumsy barber-surgeon cut off, you know,’ Peg-Leg said in an offended voice. I’d done eleven years with the best sailing man ever breathed, devil in seaboots though he was. And what you’ve learned at the rope’s end you tend to remember.’

‘If I buy this ship, with all I’ve got tied up there,’ he nodded towards the wool shed, ‘I couldn’t, straightaway, offer a hired captain enough to keep him honest. I’ve been over, I’ve seen all their tricks. Good wool marketed at half price, cash in their pockets and written off washed over-board or some such. One deal like that, just now, could be ruin. But a couple of
honest trips, Peg-Leg, would see me clear, and after that you should have a share, a good share, one in forty of the whole cargo.’

‘You mean
me
be Captain?’

‘What d’you think I’m talking about?’

‘Mother of God, I’d do it for nothing. I’d pay you to let me – if I had the wherewithal. I trudged, soon’s I got this wooden leg fixed, I trudged from Bywater to Hull … Dunwich, Lowestoft, Yarmouth, Lynn, all the way to Hull. I begged for any job, just to be at sea again. Always the same answer – we can get plenty chaps with two sound legs.’

If Martin remembered the time when he had been in a similar case he gave no sign.

‘It’ d mean staying sober.’

‘I’m sober afloat. Sailors ashore … well, they make up for lost time. And beached like I was, in my prime. What other comfort was there? Look at old Agnes.’

‘Agnes?’

‘Yes. Rolling drunk every time she had the money. Can’t you remember? She steadied up as soon as she had a kitchen. I could steady up if I had a ship. You say you got your eye on one. How’s she named?’

‘
Mermaid.
’

Peg-Leg rubbed his nose. ‘I knew one by that name once. but that’s a common name. Where do she lay?’

‘Down at Bywater.’

‘Then s’pose we went down there … is she manned?’

‘More or less. The man that owned her, was master; he’s sick, he wants to sell, but the crew is ready to sign on with whoever buys her.’

‘They would be, ready and anxious. Them s’pose we go and go aboard and you tell me where you want to steer for and I’ll land you there.

‘Yes,’ Martin said, ‘I think you will, Peg-Leg.’

‘I got a name,’ Peg-Leg said. ‘And it’s Bowyer. Jacob Bowyer.’ He turned away to prop the pitch-fork he had been holding against the stable wall. ‘Captain Bowyer,’ he said softly to himself, ‘Captain Bowyer of the
Mermaid
.’

The next sudden promotion from common yard hand to a post of responsibility was made when Richard was six years old, and concerned the unfrocked priest who had joined Martin’s gang of workmen when the house was being built and the land cleared, and who had stayed on and had lately been working as a pack-whacker. He had a hut in the new Squatters Row behind the stables; it was set a little apart from the
others, and he lived alone, aloof of manner, surly of temper.

One evening Martin surprised him by inviting him into the house and taking him into his own room, where upon the table a piece of virgin parchment, two newly cut quills and an inkhorn were laid out.

‘I take it you can write, Peter,’ Martin said.

‘It’s not a thing one forgets entirely.’

‘Sit down then.’ Peter did so and picked up one quill, rejected it, took the other and said,

‘Who cut this? He was no scribe!’

‘Cut it to suit yourself,’ said Martin, handing him a knife. Although he had cut the quills himself the criticism pleased him.

‘What do you want me to write?’

‘This. This is a deed of grant, made to one Martin and the heirs of his body, in perpetuity, of all the property and messuage known as …’ He paused and the pen caught up with him. Peter Priest looked up and asked, ‘What is this? A forgery?’

Still unoffended, Martin said,

‘No. A test.’

He rose and went to the heavy chest that stood beside his bed and took out another parchment, one with a dangling seal. He took Peter’s writing, and scowling heavily, compared the two.

‘There is a fault,’ he said a last. ‘You have spelt my name with an “e”.’

‘E or I, both are correct. It is a matter of opinion, not a fault,’ Peter Priest remarked coldly.

‘Otherwise it is well done. How is your reckoning?’

‘By tally or mentally?’

‘In your head, the answer then written down.’

‘In Roman figuring or Arabic?’

‘Both!’

‘Try me.’

Martin went to his bed and from there dictated four problems in arithmetic, laying out, behind the priest’s back, the answers as he made them by tally.

‘Read me your makings.’

All but one of the answers fitted, and in that one, when they reworked it, the error was Martin’s.

By this time the possible purpose of the test had occurred to Peter Priest; the accounts and records of the business had outrun Martin’s ability to deal with them; so he, Peter Priest, was to be taken off the road and
installed as clerk. The prospect was pleasing; how infinitely preferable to sit indoors, plying his real craft once more, instead of being on the roads in all weathers, handling greasy bales of wools, urging – sometimes having to pull for sheer force – pack ponies through the mire.

‘You see,’ Martin said, ‘my way is slow and cumbersome, and can be wrong. That is why …’

He came round the table and sat down, facing Peter.

Why, Peter wondered, is he so cursed slow stating his business?

Martin was slow, partly because any but the briefest speech now came hard to him, partly because speaking of Richard brought the child to mind, and roused, as his actual presence did, many conflicting emotions. He delighted in the boy and loved him dearly, but he was an ever-present reminder, not of Magda, but of the two other little boys, especially Stephen. To be troubled by this, not to enjoy his fatherhood to the full, was, he knew, absurd, but he had felt from the beginning, from the day when he had come home and found the baby there, that in some way Richard was a usurper. For a long time even to watch the child being fed, and then later, feeding himself, had been both a pleasure and a pain. Stephen, his first born, had lived on water gruel, on stale bread thinly smeared with fat, and had spent his days on the stinking wool floor, and finally died because his father was trying to save the miserable hut which was all the home he had. Richard fed on the fat of the land, enjoyed old Agnes’s whole doting attention. Stephen had been a very good, quiet little boy; Richard was naughty and wilful. The whole thing was in such sharp contrast that comparisons forced themselves upon Martin many times every day.

At the same time, simply because he felt this way, he also felt guilt. It wasn’t Richard’s fault that he had been born after the tide of luck had turned. So, each time that the affection which should have streamed out, full and free, towards the new child, suffered the inevitable check and recession, Martin would, by some act of indulgence, endeavour to make up to the boy. He could deny him nothing; he could never punish him lest into the punishment should go some of his unjust resentment because Richard was Richard, not Stephen.

It had all mattered less, been more easily smoothed over, while old Agnes lived. Doubtless, in her time, Richard had been naughty, ungovernable, wild, but she had never complained; she had acted as a buffer, explaining, excusing, saying, ‘He is very young. He will learn’, saying, ‘For myself I like a lad to show a bit of spirit.’ Once, jerked out of silence by her ridiculous attempt to defend some particularly prankish behaviour, Martin had snapped out,

‘Stephen was never like that.’

And Agnes had made – for Martin – the most terrible answer possible.

‘Ah, there’s the difference between the colt fed corn and the cold fed grass. You can’t expect them to act the same.’

Agnes had died when Richard was four and within a week Dummy’s Mary was crying and saying she couldn’t manage the housework and Richard; he didn’t come when she called him and when she picked him up he kicked her. The answer to that had been a strong, active young woman named Nancy, whose sole duty was to see to the child. She had had one of her own, illegitimate, which had died at the age of two. Martin, engaging her, had cherished the secret hope that her heart might share, with his, the defence of memory, that she might be a little less doting and lenient than Old Agnes who had never had a child of her own. If Nancy arrived thus armed, she was disarmed almost immediately. Richard was a remarkably handsome little boy, so charming when allowed his way, so disagreeable when crossed, that anyone crossing him was almost bound to feel that the change of mood was in some way his or her fault, not the child’s. In a very short time Nancy, too, was enslaved. And so had happened the stupid, inexcusable incident with the bear.

Richard was almost six, and ever since he could toddle he had seen Uncle Tom go to the shed where Owd Muscovy lived, open the door and place food within the bear’s reach. The muzzle, no longer needed, hung on a peg in the wall, and the chain, attached to the bear’s collar at one end, was hooked at the other over a strong nail driven slantwise into the wall of the shed.

Pert Tom, after that one summer on the road during Magda’s brief rule as mistress of Old Vine, had grown slack and old. Dummy’s Joan’s leaving him had, as Agnes expected, been a turning point in his life. It, or rather the difficulty he had found in replacing the young hussy, had loosened his mainspring. But he had kept his bear. And when Richard was five, at Christmas time, he had actually brought Owd Muscovy out on to the wool floor and put him through his tricks.

Richard watched entranced.

‘Uncle Tom, let me blow the whistle and make the bear dance.’

‘He wouldn’t do it for you,’ said Pert Tom, who was the only person who ever treated Richard as an ordinary human being, an equal.

‘Why not?’