Читать книгу Shabby Summer - Warwick Deeping - Страница 5

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Frost. Ghent, going to look at his azalea beds, saw all the brilliant blossom hanging limp and pulped in the deceitful April sunlight. There had been three nights of such frost, with a coldly malicious breeze blowing from the north-east, but the azaleas were not the only live things that had suffered from the vagaries of a temperamental spring. Young rhododendrons had had their young blooms frozen; wistaria had been cut back, the blossom browned on the flowering cherries. Succulent young shoots, fooled by the March sunshine, were looking flaccid and discoloured.

In the Green Way Ghent met Bob Fanshaw. Bob might be a taciturn soul, but on occasions his language could be picturesque and forceful. Yes, this was one of those sanguinary years when the weather went mad, and played every sort of devilish trick on you. Evil spirits were abroad. The ruddy spring was bewitched. And, no doubt, in the old days, Fanshaw would have been able to point a damning finger at some poor old hag who had cast a spell upon the weather.

“There ain’t no sense in it. A March like June, and an April like January. And dry at that,” and Bob spat to show his opinion of the weather.

Peter was looking a little sad.

“Well, we don’t grow fruit, Bob.”

“Fruit! There won’t be a plum or a pear in the valley. And as for apples! Silly, I call it. What’s more, these bloody cold nights aren’t doing our young stuff any good.”

“A pity we can’t put it all down to old Crabtree, Bob.”

“Him! The old blighter. That’s what gets one, sir, these days. There ain’t anyone to curse.”

“No God, Bob?”

“Exactly. I’ve been on the land thirty years, and things just happen. It looks like spite, and of course it ain’t nothing of the kind. Things just happen without our being able to do a damn about it. Seen those big thuyas we moved last autumn?”

“No.”

“Well, they’re looking a bit dicky.”

“They can’t be, Bob, as early as all this.”

“I tell ’ee they are, sir. My meaning is that anything can happen in a year like this. Everything’s upside down. Them thuyas, if they were going sick, wouldn’t have shown it, in a decent God-abiding year, till June. Well, some of ’em are sick now.”

Peter made himself smile.

“Let’s go and have a look, Bob.”

They went together to the five-acre plot south of the boundary hedge, where a group of Thuya Lobii stood, seven foot trees that had been moved the previous autumn. Ghent saw that Bob was right. Some of the trees had lost their green gloss, and were dry and brittle to the touch. Ghent let some of the foliage run through his fingers, and from the feel of it he knew that the trees were sick. The root-balls were drying out in this cold, windy, rainless year. His young face became very grave. He hated losing trees, and in this case the financial loss might be considerable, for these conifers were worth perhaps ten shillings apiece on a private order, and five or six shillings to the trade, and there were two hundred of them.

“Yes, Bob, I’m afraid you’re right. They’ve been hoed, too.”

“Been through them twice with the hoe, sir.”

“Seems funny, doesn’t it, with the river so near, that trees should be short of water! Rather a joke against us.”

“We’re on a bit of gravel here. All right in a decent season. But you know, sir.”

“Yes, I know, Bob. Nothing to be done about it. We can’t hand-water a whole plantation.”

“It’s all along with the damned dry February and March, and not a shower yet in April. The subsoil’s dried out.”

Ghent found two letters on his breakfast table, and directly he glanced at them he had a feeling that both letters were carriers of trouble. Mr. Peter Ghent, Marplot, Farley, Loddon. Marplot? Had the old country folk been mordantly wise in their choice of names, and had this piece of ground held a hint of tragedy in the title that it bore? The old people had been cunning and observant in their christening of plants and places. Coldharbour, Burntheath, Clayhanger, Deadly Nightshade, Foxglove, Coltsfoot, Devil’sbit Scabious!

Peter opened his letters, and one of them in particular left him feeling a little sore. Dr. Bacchus had sent in his account, though Peter did not know that Dr. Bacchus had a new assistant to whom had been delegated the task of going through the ledgers. The other letter was from a firm of seed and artificial manure merchants, enclosing an account that was overdue and a curt request for the debt to be settled.

Peter finished his breakfast, lit a pipe, and pushed the two communications into a drawer of his oak bureau. How much had he in the bank? Oh, about fifty-three-odd pounds, money that was being cherished for the first claim Marplot made on him, the paying of wages. Four pounds a week. Then, there was Mrs. Maintenance and the housekeeping, and the extra men he had to engage during the lifting season. Very little money would be coming in until the autumn sales. Well, perhaps he could just manage. Once or twice before the manager of his Loddon bank had allowed him to overdraw.

But that bill of Bacchus’s? He felt a little hurt about it, and sensitive as to its challenge. Nine pounds ten. Well, couldn’t he borrow the money, and from whom? Lady Vandeleur? Oh, quite impossible. John Lynwood? John was not quite down on the rocks like he was, and John understood the way the land held you in fee.

Since his old car was in dock, and the front tyre of his bike happened to be punctured, Ghent set out to walk to Chesters Farm. The evening was fair, provokingly so, and Peter paused on the bridge to watch the water tumbling over the weir, and Folly Island floating like a green-sailed ship in the evening sunlight. Yes, plenty of water in the river, and hardly a cloud in the sky, and the fruitful earth praying for rain. Was Bob Fanshaw’s prophecy likely to prove true, that anything might happen on a freak year such as this?

Some fifty yards beyond the bridge two trackways left the main road, the one on the right going to Folly Farm, the other a black cinder road to Mrs. Prance’s Blue Lagoon. Ghent noticed that the white gate of Folly Farm hung open, and in the distance he could see the red rump of a pantechnicon parked beside the white garden fence. Folly Farm had been empty for a year, the gentleman who had been responsible for its “Jacobethan” renovations having suffered losses in speculative finance. Ghent had no particular interest in Folly Farm, nor did The Blue Lagoon promise to satisfy the restlessness of his particular temperament, for, if the youth in him sometimes suffered from divine discontent, it was not a mood that could be ministered to by chatterings and splashings.

Chesters was the place for him, Chesters with its great fields and its crumbling fragments of Roman wall, and big John Lynwood with his quiet, stubborn yet gentle face, his country mind, and his feeling for the way life vexed you when your world was a world of live things. Chesters had courage, even in a drought; it endured; it confronted Nature’s whimsies with steady eyes and a jaw that did not quiver.

Half-way between the Weir Bridge and Farley village a lane which was the ghost of a Roman road ran straight as a spear-shaft to Ebchester. The Roman town had stood on a little plateau, and its main road going towards Londinium had crossed the river above Folly Island and passed across what was now Peter’s nursery, and followed the upper course of Badger’s Lane. Some of the Chesters Farm fields lay outside the line of the old walls, the rest within the circuit, and every ploughing turned over fragments of potsherd, tile and brick, or the little chalk coloured or red tesserae of Romano-Celtic floors. He could see a strip of grey flint wall, and the roofs of the farm and its outbuildings half hidden by the young foliage of a group of beech trees. To the right and outside the wall rose what looked like a low green mound covered with a smother of old white-thorns which were in flower, Ebchester’s amphitheatre.

He paused and turned right towards this mound, following a grass track between ditches full of chervil. The place had a particular fascination for him, for it seemed to smell of that strange, old other world before the Saxon terror.

The amphitheatre was like a great green bowl, its banks lined with short sweet turf and shaded by the thorn trees. There had been two gateways, one on the east, and the other on the west, where the green vallum was broken. Its roof was the sky, grey or cloudless or filled with white cloud masses, and Ghent had spent many an hour here, lying on his back, reading or dreaming.

It so happened that Peter did not enter the grassy hollow by one of the old gateways. He climbed the bank between two thorn trees, and suddenly stood still. For he was not alone here. Someone else had found this secret place, a girl whose face was strange to him.

She was sitting on the southern bank and in the full evening sunlight, her knees drawn up, her elbows resting on them, and her chin cupped in her two hands. Her frock was a cheap, flowery thing that could be bought for seven and sixpence, but almost, to Ghent, it made it appear as though the green bank had broken into flower. She had very dark hair, a crisp, insurgent mop of it that shaded her forehead and clouded over ears and neck.

She had not heard his footsteps in the grass and for perhaps ten seconds she sat there wholly unconscious of his presence, absorbed in a mood, or in her own thoughts, whatever they might be. Ghent stood very still, feeling half ashamed of watching her, and ready to slip down the green bank and away. Then, her hands fell and her head turned sharply. He was aware of eyes that looked black in a wide, pale face. She was startled and not pleased. He thought her rather plain at that first, full glance, her nose too broad, the black eyebrows somewhat heavy. Moreover, he got the impression that he had seen her before, but where or when he could not say.

He felt challenged, an interloper who had broken in upon her aloofness. He smiled, and stepped back and down.

“Sorry.”

She saw him sink back and disappear below the bank’s green rim, and suddenly her face lost its unfriendliness. Her strong white teeth showed; her eyes lit up. His sensitive flinching from the confrontation had amused her. She gave her vigorous hair a shake, and glanced at the watch on her wrist. This was an unusual Adam who came and looked and fled.

Peter might know his flowers and be fooled by a face, but at the moment he was puzzled by one. He was walking towards the beech trees of Chesters, and seeing them, yet not seeing them, like green clouds upon which the evening sunlight glowed. Everything was very brilliant, the dormers and chimneys of the house, its casements and old bricks, the white slats of the garden fence, two beds of Cottage tulips in the garden. Ghent stood in the red brick porch and put his hand to the brass knocker. There were oak seats in the porch, and he sat down on one of them, to wait and listen, with the evening landscape spread before him. No one answered the knock, and the house was very silent with a silence that suggested that it smiled and said: “Waste no time. I am empty.” Ghent got up and wandered through the garden into the farmyard. The sunlight was shining into the long, open shed with its oak posts and tiled roof in which carts and wagons and farm machinery lived, and a man was standing there, bending over a reaper, a spanner in one hand, the light playing upon his brown head and face and forearms.

John Lynwood overhauling his reaper, though in this dry year the hay crop might not be worth the reaping, but that was John Lynwood all over. He was like some symbolical figure with a scythe, playing Time to the earth’s seasons, and Ghent, looking at that tawny head and those great strong hands, felt accused of cowardice. He had come to beg and now he knew that such a thing was impossible. Friendship failed when favours were asked for or granted. You could go to your banker, but not to your friend.

“Hallo, Peter.”

Lynwood had one of those slow, sure smiles.

“Been knocking?”

“I thought I might find you out here.”

“Think I’m an incurable optimist?”

“Not quite that.”

“Well, one has to be on the land, you know, or one might go potty.”

Ghent sat down on the shaft of a tumbril, and watched Lynwood’s big hands at work. Here was a man with the courage and endurance which alone could carry him through bad seasons.

“Like to see to things yourself, John.”

Lynwood straightened his back, and wiped his hands on some cotton-waste.

“That’s it. Machinery plays tricks on you, like a woman, if you don’t flatter it with attention. By the way, Mary is here.”

“Mary?”

“Yes, taking a country breather. Stay and have supper. I’m knocking off in a minute.”

Ghent was looking out upon the broad fields lying lovely and spacious in the evening sunlight.

“That explains it.”

“Explains what?”

“It must have been Mary I saw in the amphitheatre. It always pulls me, that old place. Is she dark?”

“Yes, not like me. And here she is.”

Mary Lynwood came striding across the yard with her quick, swinging walk, and a vigour that was self-evident. Hair, throat, shoulders, her firm young breasts, were flawless. Her smile was almost her brother’s smile, save that it lacked John’s profound and inherent sensitiveness. She was a purposeful and successful young woman, was Mary, a junior partner in a London secretarial agency, but though second in command she ran the show.

Her brother threw the wad of cotton-waste aside, and smiled at them both.

“I hear you two have met.”

“Not exactly,” said Peter, with his eyes on the girl’s face.

“He ran away,” said Mary.

She was so full of life and vigour that it spilled over into mischief. Also, she was ready with her tongue, and her eyes, which were more the eyes of a child than of a woman, were rather merciless in their candour. She would see if your tie was out of order and tell you so; she was like a Black Eyed Susan, and no violet or wood anemone.

“This is Peter,” said her brother. “He keeps a nursery, but not for babes.”

Her dark eyes were teasing.

“Good evening, Peter. Supper’s ready, Jack.”

“Peter’s joining us. Can you manage?”

She could, and said so with an abruptness that left Ghent wondering whether she was pleased or not. She was quicker in her reactions than her brother, but not so deep.

The parlour at Chesters was panelled with old oak, and it could be a somewhat gloomy room, save on an evening such as this when the sun was shining in, for the window faced west. Its furniture betrayed the improvisations of a man without too much money.

Mary had gone off to collect more plates and cutlery and an additional glass, and Lynwood, taking a tobacco tin from the mantelshelf, filled the pipe he would smoke when supper was over.

“Mary’s here to help me out. Things are a bit tight.”

Ghent nodded. He understood. John had had two indifferent years, and this dry spring was adding to his problems. With rain-starved meadows he was having to feed hay and cake to his stock. Also, like Ghent himself, the bulk of his money came in once a year, and all through the other months he had to pay wages, and meet the other outgoings of the farm. Yes, things were a bit difficult.

Ghent asked a question.

“I thought Mary was working?”

“So she is,” and Lynwood smiled, “mothering my overdraft for a month. She volunteered. Wanted a change too. She’s——”

The passage from kitchen to parlour was floored with flagstones, and they heard her sharp footsteps, and became silent. Peter was sitting on the hard black sofa, and facing the door, and when John’s sister entered with the tray, his eyes met hers. She smiled at him.

“I’m afraid it’s all cold.”

He made some banal reply about the coldness of the meal not mattering, while thinking that her firm, full face had a chilliness of its own. Yes, rather like a cold April day with elusive sunlight coming and going. He watched her lay his place at the table, and even the movements of her hands suggested a harsh, capable confidence.

They sat down. The joint was a cold leg of mutton, and it had served on several occasions. Lynwood carved. And suddenly a cloud covered the setting sun, and the room grew dark.

Mary gave a toss of her vigorous hair.

“You ought to have all that old wood painted.”

She looked across at Peter as though challenging him to agree with her.

“Too damned dark.”

Ghent was watching the brother’s big hands at work. They were as capable as his sister’s, but differently so.

“I think John likes it.”

“He would. I’d like to take him into my new office.”

Her brother smiled his slow, deliberate smile.

“Easier carving, Mary, what? I’m rather fond of the old wood. It’s warm and deep in winter, when the fire’s alight.”

She was cutting bread. She passed Ghent a slice on the blade of the knife.

“Give me light, and plenty of it.”

She looked at Peter, and her strong white teeth showed.

“Know anything about wireless?”

“Not much, I’m afraid.”

“Jack’s old set’s not functioning, and I like the nine o’clock news.”

Ghent laughed gently.

“Like my car.”

“You’ve got a car?”

“I have and I haven’t. It’s in a nursing-home at Loddon being doctored.”

“Oh, Loddon, yes. I have to shop there. Farley’s hopeless. The ham tastes of boots, and I suppose the boots smell of cheese. Do you shop in Loddon?”

“Sometimes.”

“I might cadge a lift on occasions.”

Lynwood passed Peter his plate, and a whimsical look. It said: “There’s nothing concealed about Mary. If she wants a thing, she’ll ask for it. But she’d do the same for you, my lad.” And Peter accepted the plate. He was not quite sure whether he wanted to drive Mary Lynwood into Loddon.

There was still a little light in the sky when Ghent took the road home, and as he turned out of the Chesters’ gate he saw the Roman amphitheatre and its crown of thorns very black against the fading afterglow. Yes, its Crown of Thorns!

The hedges had turned black when he came to the gate of Folly Farm and heard the thunder of the weir. He heard other sounds, voices, the shuffling of feet. Four dim figures were moving towards the gate.

Said a voice: “One of them beerless jobs, brother, what! Gosh, I’ve got a thirst.”

“You’ll go to bed with it, Bill. Pub’s shut.”

“And I’ve sweated a pint carrying furniture up those bloody stairs.”

“Another van load tomorrer, my lad.”

Someone spat with a suggestion of grieved disgust.

“Nice little bit o’ goods, but that sort o’ lady don’t think. You can be as polite as yer please, but she won’t see yer tongue ’anging out.”

“Ladies don’t, brother. They’re brought up refined.”

Ghent walked on and over the bridge and the voices of the furniture-men were lost in the moist music of the weir. So, his vis-à-vis across the river was to be a woman. He thought no more about it at the moment, and coming to the lane, heard Bunter give tongue. The dog knew his footsteps, and would lie by the garden gate, listening and watching, to get on his legs and utter half a dozen sharp barks when the god of his world returned.

Bunter had his forepaws against the slats of the gate. The whole of him seemed to be wagging.

“Hallo, old man.”

Peter picked him up, and the dog licked his face. He felt very tender towards this warm, furry thing, and consciously so, for, somehow, dog’s love, wonderful though it might be, was not sufficient.