Who Was Changed and Who Was Dead (5 page)

Norah opened the great dark gates in a dream of happiness. When she got back to the house, she hardly noticed the fact that her sister was not there; nor did she notice when Eunice returned later, that her dress was strangely crumpled and buttons were missing from her bodice.

E
ARLY IN the morning the sun came streaming into Emma’s room. The reflected light from the river made golden patterns on the wall. She got up, dressed quickly, stole out of the sleeping house, and ran down to the water. Moored to the landing-stage was the old punt in rusty black, decorated here and there by dreaming moths. When she knelt down to untie the canoe, the boards of the landing-stage were already so hot from the sun she could feel the heat through her dress. She stepped into the light little boat and glided away on the still water. She felt completely happy. She was alone except for a swan and its family of cygnets. The swan gently passed. There were fields on either side of the river. Some were freshly green where the hay had already been cut, and one was all sparkling blue with early cabbages. In a small bay a group of cows stood knee-deep in the water and gracefully turned their heads to watch her as she passed. She came to a little wrecked pleasure-steamer, which had become embedded in the mud several summers ago and which no one had bothered to remove. It had been a vulgar, tubby little boat when it used to steam through the water with its handful of holiday-makers, giving shrill whistles at every bend and causing a wash that disturbed the fishermen as they sat peacefully on the banks; but, now it lay sideways in the mud with its gaudy paint all bleached, it was almost beautiful.

The morning stillness was broken by a young sheep dog’s excited barking, then by the voices of some farmhands driving a cart into a field. Disturbed from her quiet happiness, Emma realized that she was hungry and her dress wet from the water that ran down the double paddle. As she turned the boat homewards, suddenly she noticed that the muddy banks of the river had grown much deeper and that the water seemed to be receding. She remembered that during haymaking season the river was sometimes lowered so that carts could cross at the fords.

When she reached the landing-stage she saw Dennis lying on his stomach, looking into the water. She called him; but he did not answer, and she knew he was hurt because she had not taken him with her.

“Dennis,” she called again, “do you know they are letting out the water?”

The little boy jumped up and examined his harbour in the willow tree’s roots.

“Yes, look! It’s gone down quite six inches already!”

Happy again, he rushed away to tell Hattie. The children loved to dig in the exposed mud for treasure; and although they did this at least twice a summer there were always new embedded treasures—small pieces of coloured glass and china, keys, farthings, rusty corkscrews, long-lost lead soldiers, and, once, a shilling and a large china dog.

Emma entered the house through the kitchen, and a great smell of frying bacon met her. Norah was preparing a tray for her grandmother.

“Three duck eggs and all this bacon, Miss Emma,” she muttered crossly.

“The master’s coming down this morning, so perhaps you’d better call him; we can’t have meals hanging about all day!”

So Emma went to call her father; but, to her surprise, met him coming down his attic stairs all dressed in black and smelling of camphor.

“Breakfast ready?” he asked haughtily as he passed.

Astounded, Emma went to her room to do her hair, which was pouring down her back. She tried puffing it out at the sides, with a very low bun at the back, and from a drawer concealed by a nightgown she produced a silver mirror. She admired her changed appearance for a few moments, then carefully hid the mirror, which she had taken from her mother’s room on one of the few occasions her grandmother had left it unlocked.

As she went down to the dining room she could hear her father complaining bitterly because breakfast was not on the table. When at last it was ready, Norah banged the gong so ferociously that Grandmother Willoweed hurled a brass candlestick down the stairs. All through the meal Hattie and Dennis gazed at their father. Dennis dared to say, “I say, you do look posh, Father!” and his father glanced at him coldly and said, “I have not worn these clothes since your dear Mother died.”

The almost silent meal was disturbed by a loud knock at the door, and Ives appeared beaming all over his face. “I want to speak to the old Mistress,” he almost shouted. “She can’t go to the funeral up that little old river because it won’t be there, not to notice, it won’t.”

“What nonsense is this?” Grandmother Willoweed asked.

She had entered the room behind Ives, and no one had noticed her, which was strange considering the fantastic figure she made. She looked like a dreadful old black bird, enormous and horrifying, all weighed down by jet and black plumes and smelling, not of camphor, but chlorodyne.

There was an uproar for a few minutes while the two old people shouted at each other. Then, with Ebin walking morosely behind, they went down to inspect the river, and the children sat at the breakfast table laughing and crying at the same time.

At eleven thirty the sinister black group were still arguing by the river, while the sun beat down on their heads. Eventually it was decided by Grandmother Willoweed that the boat could be dragged through the mud to the water.

“But who will wade through all that mud?” wailed her son.

“You, of course, my dear, with a little help from Ives.”

“Mother, my clothes!” he shouted.

“You are dressed like a fool already, so what does it matter?” the old woman snapped, swinging her ear trumpet around in a threatening manner.

Ives went off to the potting shed and returned with two enormous pairs of waders that were sometimes used for fishing by the weir. Dejectedly the men crawled into them.

“Hurry, hurry!” their persecutor shouted, and her tongue protruded through her lips.

Without a word the men stepped into the mud and dragged and pushed the heavy old boat towards the water. They struggled in the mud and heaved and pushed, and in the end they did manage to get the boat into quite deep water. Ives remained holding it while Ebin returned for his mother. She almost leapt at him and twined her great legs round his body, and he reeled under her weight. Staggering and gasping, he managed to reach the funeral barge and push his awful mother into it. Relieved of her weight, he lent, doubled up, over the boat. Channels of sweat were pouring down his swollen, almost crimson face. Old Ives helped him gently into the boat; they were fellow sufferers.

When Ebin had sufficiently recovered, the men used punt poles and found the boat moved quite easily. Grandmother Willoweed sat in her draped arm-chair, a proud but rather muddy figure. She looked straight ahead which was just as well or she would have seen Eunice’s laughing face looking at her between the trees and Hattie convulsed with laughter sitting on the hen-pen roof. Ives’s ducks watched the boat’s progress from the island where they were preening themselves in the sun, and when the boat drew near most of them flew into the water with loud quacks of welcome.

“Send those foolish birds away!” complained the old woman; but Ives took no notice and they followed hopefully behind.

Quite a crowd had collected on the bridge. Many of them had never seen Grandmother Willoweed, and this was their chance. There were cries of “Here she is! There she is! Look at the old girl! Oh, my, ain’t she like a witch? Just look at Mr. Ives all dressed like a toff! Do you think they will stick in the mud?”

Ebin was overcome with shame and confusion; but his mother, who was unable to hear their remarks, thought the village was paying her homage, and bowed gravely.

The weir was near the bridge, so the crowd was entertained with the spectacle of the two men wading into the water and mud and struggling to open it and drag the boat through. The churchyard sloped down to the river. Ebin had to carry his mother across the mud while Ives waded behind bearing his sadly wilted wreath. The ducks had fortunately been eluded. A number of people hurried to the bank and jeered and tittered as Ebin staggered under the old woman’s weight. Within a few weeks funerals were to become a common occurrence in that village; but at this time they were rather scarce and looked forward to eagerly.

The mourners assembled in the little Norman church for a short service, and then shambled out. Slowly and with bowed heads they walked to the newly made grave, on one side of which were heaped great clods of earth. Doctor Hatt stood alone like a man in a dream. He seemed absent from his wife’s funeral. The mid-day sun burned down on the black group of people. They looked like bloated, sleepy flies at the end of the season. They were imprisoned by tombstones tumbling in all directions, some beautiful and others so rotted away that large holes had appeared in the stone, framing the green grass of the churchyard.

As soon as the funeral was over, and before the mourners had hardly left, the uninvited surged into the churchyard to watch the gravedigger fill the grave with the clods of clay so recently removed and to examine the dying wreaths. They were accompanied by many dogs.

R
OARS OF laughter came from the Willoweed coach-house, and rain beat down like bullets on the corrugated iron roof of the Dutch barn. In the coach-house it was almost dark, but the little light that filtered down from the apple-room above revealed Ebin Willoweed embracing the baker’s wife in the musty old carriage. Her corsets were draped over the window frame, and other garments were scattered carelessly around. They drank sour stout and laughed and made love, and above them mice gnawed the rotten apples.

In his lonely bakery the baker was experimenting again with his rye bread. He hoped that within a few days he would be able to give a small rye loaf to every customer, and the thought of their surprise and pleasure eased his own unhappiness. So he spent that wet summer afternoon baking his rye bread.

Hattie and Dennis waited for their father in his room. He had left them with Macaulay’s
History of England
early in the afternoon; but, as he did not return, they tore out its pages one by one and made them into paper hats and boats. In her room below their grandmother lay on her bed nibbling her charcoal biscuits. She could hear the children above, and thought she could distinguish their father’s voice mingled with theirs; and she congratulated herself on having insisted on their lessons being resumed. There had been quite a scene over this; but eventually Ebin had agreed to “coach” his children for several hours a day. He always referred to his spasmodic efforts at teaching his children as “coaching”—it sounded so much better.

His mother lay on her bed remembering the two figures she had seen changing colours in the stained glass of the boot-room window, and thought what a good thing it was she had put a stop to that nonsense. But she was bored. She had had her way; her son was teaching his children; the maids were doing their work; Ives had even agreed to dig over the long-neglected north border, which had become completely choked with ground-elder. She had not really cared if the bed was filled with thistles or ground elder; but she knew Ives dreaded taking a spade to the heavy damp clay of that north bed.

For the last few days Ives’s bent old figure could be seen digging away quite happily; and, although she had spent some time standing over him like a slave-driver with a trumpet instead of a whip, no complaints had passed the old man’s lips. She did not know that he had recently discovered a small box that had once been decorated with shells buried in that bed. The box had rotted almost away; but the two golden sovereigns and the florins it contained were as bright as ever. So the old man happily dug away in the hope of finding more treasure. He guessed the little box had been hidden by Jenny Willoweed. Perhaps it was a small hoard to help her escape one day. She had escaped without the help of those useful coins. But Ives was worried by his conscience. He very much wanted to keep the contents of the little box; but that afternoon, as he sat in his potting shed waiting for the rain to cease, he decided he would give Emma one gold sovereign and Hattie and Dennis a florin each. He need not say where the money came from.

This problem settled, Ives went out into the rain to fill his old red bucket with sharps from a large bin in the stable. As he crossed over the yard, he heard voices coming from the coach-house. He opened the door a chink; but, when he recognised Ebin Willoweed’s voice, he hastily closed it and trotted off to the kitchen to collect the boiled potato skins which were eaten with such relish by his ducks.

Emma had been left in the dining-room by her grandmother surrounded by a mountain of white sheets, which all had large holes and tears. She had mended several with the aid of a small and ancient sewing machine; but, to her horror, the patches were coming off already because the machine was only capable of a rather charming chain stitch and she had forgotten to secure the ends of the thread. She welcomed Eunice with the tea tray, and the two girls talked as they cleared the sheets from the table. Eunice was full of the news that Doctor Hatt was probably going to buy a motor car—“a beautiful yellow one, Miss, called a Sunbeam, and Mr. Fig will have to learn to drive it. Oh, Miss Emma, Norah can hardly wait to see him at the wheel!” cried the excited girl.

Grandmother Willoweed’s face, like a swollen wasp, appeared round the door. “What’s all this talk, girls?” and she held her trumpet eagerly to her ear. So Eunice told her about the beautiful yellow car, though this time without quite so much enthusiasm. The old woman listened eagerly, but seemed disappointed.

“Oh, is that all?” she remarked bitterly, “When you are as old as I am you will realize that men always behave like fools as soon as their wives die.” She suddenly turned to Eunice, “Get out of my way, girl! I want my tea!”

The children came rushing downstairs, for they had heard the sound of clattering tea cups from their father’s attic.

“What have you been learning, children?” the grandmother asked.