On the Black Hill

  They sat in silence. House-martins chattered under the eaves. Bees were humming round the night-scented stocks. Sadly, she spoke of her brother, Reggie:

  ‘We were all sorry for him. The leg, you remember? But he was a bad lot, really. Should have married the girl. She’d have been the making of him. And it was all my fault, you know?’

  Often over the years, she had tried to make amends to Rosie, but the door of the cottage always slammed in her face.

  There was another silence. The setting sun made a rim of gold around the ilex.

  ‘My God!’ she murmured. ‘The guts of that woman!’

  Only the week before, she had sat and watched her from the car – a bent, pigeon-toed figure in a knitted hat, knocking at the vicarage door to collect her weekly envelope of two five-pound notes. Only Nancy and the vicar knew where the envelope came from: she daren’t increase the sum in case Rosie suspected.

  ‘You must come again.’ Nancy clutched each twin by the hand. ‘It’s been such fun. Now promise me you’ll come!’

  ‘And you’ll come to us again?’ said Benjamin.

  ‘Oh but I will! I’ll come next Sunday! And I’ll bring my niece, Philippa! And you can have a good long natter about India.’

  The tea-party for Philippa Townsend was a tremendous success.

  Benjamin went to endless pains, meticulously followed his mother’s recipe for cherry cake, and when he lifted the lid of the willow-pattern dish, the guest-of-honour clapped her hands and said, ‘Gosh! Cinnamon toast!’

  When the table was cleared, Lewis unwrapped Mary’s Indian sketchbook, and Philippa turned its pages and called out the names of the subjects: ‘That’s Benares! There’s Sarnath! … Do look! It’s the Holi Festival. Look at all the lovely red powder! … Oh, what a beautiful punkah-wallah!’

  She was a short and very courageous woman with laugh wrinkles at the edge of her slaty eyes, and silver hair cut in a fringe. She spent several months of each year riding alone round India on a bicycle. She turned the last page but one and stared, thunderstruck, at a watercolour of a pagoda-like structure, standing among some conifers with the Himalayas stacked up behind.

  ‘I don’t believe it,’ she shouted at the top of her voice. ‘I thought I was the only white woman to see that temple.’ But Mary Latimer had seen it in the Nineties.

  Philippa told them she was writing a book about English lady travellers of the nineteenth century. She asked if she could have the picture copied to use as an illustration.

  ‘You can,’ said Benjamin, who insisted on her taking it away.

  Three weeks later, the sketchbook came back by registered mail. In the same parcel was a lovely colour-plate book, entitled Splendours of the Raj; and though neither of the twins was quite sure what they were looking at, it became one of the treasures of the household.

  Every month or so, the Radnor Antiquarians held meetings in the Village Hall at Lurkenhope; and whenever there was a lantern-slide lecture, Nancy took her ‘two favourite boyfriends’ along. In the course of the year, they listened to a variety of topics – ‘Early English Fonts in Herefordshire’, ‘The Pilgrimage to Santiago’ – and when Philippa Townsend gave a talk on travellers in India, she told the audience of the ‘fascinating sketchbook’ at The Vision, while the twins sat beaming in the front row with identical red polyanthuses in their buttonholes.

  Afterwards, refreshments were served at the back of the Hall and Lewis found himself being manoeuvred into a corner by a fleshy man in a purple-striped shirt. The man spoke very rapidly, slurring his words through a set of discoloured teeth, his eyes darting shiftily to and fro. He dipped his ginger-nut into his coffee, and sucked it.

  Then he slipped Lewis a card on which was written, ‘Vernon Cole – Pendragon Antiques, Ross-on-Wye,’ and asked if he could pay them a call.

  ‘Aye,’ Lewis answered, assuming ‘Antiques’ and ‘Antiquarian’ were the same. ‘We’d be pleased for you to come.’

  Mr Cole came the very next day in a Volkswagen van.

  It was drizzling and the hill was lost in cloud. The dogs kicked up a shindy as the stranger picked his way through the toffee-coloured puddles. Lewis and Benjamin were mucking out the cowshed, and resented the interruption; yet, out of politeness, they stuck their dung-forks in the steaming pile, and asked him to come indoors.

  The antique dealer was entirely at his ease. He eyed the room up and down; turned a saucer over, and said, ‘Doulton;’ peered at the ‘Red Indian’ to make sure it was only a print; and wondered whether, by chance, they had any Apostle spoons.

  Half an hour later, smearing strawberry jam over his bread-and-butter, he asked if they’d ever heard of Nostradamus:

  ‘Never heard of the prophet Nostradamus? Well, I’m darned!’

  Nostradamus, he went on, lived centuries ago, in France; yet he got Hitler ‘spot on’: his Antichrist was probably Colonel Gaddafi; and he’d predicted the End of the World for 1980.

  ‘1980?’ asked Benjamin.

  ‘1980.’

  The twins stared at the tea-things with crestfallen faces.

  Mr Cole then rounded off his monologue, walked up to the piano, laid his hands on Mary’s writing cabinet, and said, ‘It’s terrible!’

  ‘Terrible?’

  ‘Beautiful marquetry, like that! It’s a sacrilege.’

  The veneer on the lid had buckled and cracked, and one or two bits were missing.

  ‘I mean, it’s got to be repaired,’ he continued. ‘I’ve got just the man for it.’

  The twins hated letting the cabinet leave the farm, but to think they’d neglected a relic of Mary’s made them even more miserable.

  ‘I’ll tell you what,’ he pattered on. ‘I’ll take it with me, and show him. And if he hasn’t come in a week, I’ll bring it straight back.’

  He removed from his pocket a receipt-pad on which he scribbled something illegible:

  ‘What … er … what figure shall we say then? Hundred quid? … Hundred and twenty! Better be on the safe side! Here, sign this, would you?’

  Lewis signed. Benjamin signed. The man ripped off the bottom copy; grabbed his ‘find’; bade them a very good afternoon, and left.

  After two sleepless nights, the twins decided to send Kevin to recover the cabinet. Instead, a cheque – for £125 – arrived with the postman.

  They felt dizzy and had to sit down.

  Kevin borrowed a car and offered to drive them to Ross, but their courage failed. Nancy Bickerton offered to ‘box the man’s ears’ but she was eighty-five. And when they called in on Lloyd the lawyer, he took the receipt, deciphered the words, ‘One antique Sheraton writing-cabinet. For sale or return’ – and shook his head.

  He did, however, send a stiff solicitor’s letter, but from Mr Cole’s solicitor got a far stiffer letter by return: his client’s professional integrity was being impugned, and he would sue.

  There was nothing to be done.

  Embittered and violated, the twins retreated back into their shells. To have lost the cabinet through theft or fire, that they could have borne. To have lost it through their own stupidity, to a man they had invited, who had sat at Mary’s table and drunk from her teacups – the thought of it preyed on their minds and made them ill.

  Benjamin had an attack of bronchitis. Lewis, with an infection in his inner ear, took even longer to recover – if, indeed, he was ever the same again.

  From then on, they lived in dread of being robbed. They barricaded the door at night; and Lewis bought a box of cartridges to set beside the old twelve-bore. One stormy night in December, they heard someone thumping on the door. They lay motionless under the bedclothes until the banging died down. At dawn next morning they found Meg the Rock asleep among the wellingtons inside the porch.

  She was numb with cold. They led her to the firestool, and she sat with her hands on her cheeks, her legs ajar.

  ‘And Jim’s gone!’ It was she who broke the silence.

  ‘Aye,’ she went on in a low monotone.
‘His legs was all mossified and his hands was red as fire. And I put him a-bed and he slept. And I was woke in the night, and the dogs was yelpin’, and Jim was out-a-bed, on the floor, like, and his head was all a-blooded where he fell. But him was livin’ and talkin’, mind, and I put him back up.

  ‘“Well, cheerio!’ he says. “Feed ’em!” he says. “Feed ’em yowes! An’ chuck ’em a bit o’ hay if you got any! Feed ’em! Fodder ’em! And give ’em ponies a bit o’ cake if you got some o’ that. An’ don’t let Sarah sell ’em! Them’ll be all right with a bit o’ feedin’ …

  “‘An’ tell ’em Jonesies there’s plums up at Cock-a-loftie! Tell ’em to pick some plums! I see’d ’em … Beautiful yeller plums! An’ the sun’s up! The sun’s a-shinin’! I see’d ’im! The sun’s all a-shinin’ through the plums …”

  ‘That’s what him said – as you was to ’ave some plums. And I felt his feet, and them was cold. And I felt him up, and him was all cold. And the dogs was a-howlin’ and a-yowlin’ and a-yowlpin’ and a-rattlin’ at the che-ains … and that’s as I knew Jim was gone …!’

  46

  AN HOUR AFTER Jim’s funeral, the four principal mourners had wedged themselves in the Smoke Room of the Red Dragon, ordered soup and cottage pies, and were thawing out. The day was raw and drizzly. Their shoes were soaked from standing in the slush-covered graveyard. Manfred and Lizzie were dressed in shades of black and grey; Sarah wore slacks and a blue nylon parka; and Frank the haulier, a bulky man in a tweed suit several sizes too small, hung his head with embarrassment and stared at his crotch.

  At the bar, a cider-drunk slammed down his tankard, belched and said, ‘Aah! The wine o’ the West!’ A man and a girl were playing a computer game, and its electronic warbling filled the room. Manfred racked his brains to stave off a row between his wife and sister-in-law. He leaned across and asked the players, ‘What do you call zis game?’

  ‘Space Invaders,’ the girl said glumly, and emptied a packet of peanuts down her throat.

  Lizzie pursed her colourless lips and said nothing. But Sarah, her face already flushed from the fire, unzipped her parka and made up her mind to speak.

  ‘Nice onion soup,’ she said.

  ‘French onion soup,’ said the thinner woman.

  There was a silence. A party of climbers came in and dumped their rucksacks in a heap. Frank refused to touch his soup and continued to stare at his crotch. His wife tried once again to make conversation.

  She turned to a huge brown trout in a glass case above the mantelpiece, and said, ‘I wonder who caught that fish.’

  ‘I wonder,’ Lizzie shrugged, and blew at her soupspoon.

  The barman’s girlfriend came with the cottage pies: ‘Yes,’ she said in broad Lancashire, ‘that trout’s quite a talking point. An American caught it in the Rosgoch Reservoir. An airforce-man, he was. He’d have had a Welsh record if he hadn’t gutted it. He left it here to be stuffed.’

  ‘Quite some fish!’ Manfred nodded.

  ‘It’s a hen,’ the woman went on. ‘You can tell from the shape of the jaw. And a cannibal to boot! Has to be to reach that size! The taxidermist had a terrible time finding eyes big enough.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Sarah.

  ‘And where there’s one, there’s two. That’s what the fishermen say.’

  ‘Another hen?’ Sarah asked.

  ‘A cock, I should imagine.’

  Sarah glanced at her wristwatch and saw that it was almost two. In another half hour they had their appointment with Lloyd the lawyer. She had something else to say and gave a hard look at Lizzie.

  ‘What about Meg?’ she said.

  ‘What about her?’

  ‘Where’s she going to live?’

  ‘How should I know?’

  ‘She’s got to live somewhere.’

  ‘Get her a living van and a few fowls and she’ll be perfectly happy.’

  ‘No,’ Manfred interrupted, the colour invading his cheeks. ‘She not be happy. You take her from The Rock and she go crazy.’

  ‘Well, she can’t go on living in that pigsty,’ Lizzie snapped.

  ‘Vy not? She live there all her life.’

  ‘Because it’s for sale!’

  ‘I beg your pardon?’ Sarah swivelled her head – and the quarrel flared out into the open.

  Sarah believed The Rock should be hers. For twenty years she had bailed Jim out; and he had promised to leave her the property. Time and again, she’d gripped his arm: ‘Now you have been to the lawyer, haven’t you?’ ‘Aye, Sarah,’ he used to say, ‘I seed Lloyd the lawyer and I done what you said.’

  She had counted on selling up the moment he died. Frank’s haulage business had been doing badly and, besides, The Rock’d make a ‘nice little nest-egg’ for her teenage daughter Eileen. She even had a purchaser in mind – a businessman from London who wanted to put up Swedish-style chalets.

  Lizzie, for her part, maintained The Rock was her home as much as anyone’s, and she was entitled to her fair share. The argument volleyed back and forth – and Sarah became quite weepy and hysterical, prattling on about the sacrifices she’d made, the money she’d spent, the times she’d battled through snowdrifts, the times she’d saved their lives – ‘And for what? A kick in the teeth, that’s all!’

  Then Lizzie and Sarah started screaming and yelling, and though Manfred shouted, ‘Pliss! Pliss!’ and Frank snarled, ‘Aw! Cut it, will you?’ the pub lunch almost ended in a fist-fight.

  The barman asked them to leave.

  Frank paid the bill and they walked up Broad Street, picking their way through the lines of slush till they came to the lawyer’s door. Both women blanched when Mr Lloyd lifted his spectacles and said, ‘There is no will.’ Furthermore, since neither Sarah nor Lizzie nor Meg were Jim’s blood relatives, his estate would be passed to the Official Receiver. Meg, Mr Lloyd added, had best claim on the place – for she was the incumbent and had lived there all her life.

  So Meg lived on alone at The Rock. She said, ‘I can’t live for the dead ’uns. I got my own living to do.’

  On frosty mornings she sat on an upturned bucket, warming her hands around a mug of tea while the tits and chaffinches perched on her shoulder. When a green woodpecker took some crumbs from her hand, she imagined the bird was a messenger from God and sang His Praises in doggerel all through the day.

  After dark, she would huddle over the fire and fry up her bacon and potatoes. Then, when the candle guttered, she curled up on the box-bed with a black cat for company, a coat for a blanket, and a sack stuffed with fern for a pillow.

  Having so little to separate the real world from the world of dreams, she imagined it was she who played with the badger cubs; she who soared with the hawks above the hill. One night, she dreamed of being attacked by strange men.

  ‘I heard ’em,’ she told Sarah. ‘A young ’un and an old. Poonin’ on the roof! Aye! And te-akin’ off the tiles and comin’ down in. So I lit me a candle and I shouted, “Git, yer buggers! I got me a gun in here and I’ll blaow yer bloomin’ heads off.” That’s as I said and I ain’t heard nothing since!’ – all of which went to confirm Sarah’s opinion that Meg was ‘losing her marbles’.

  Sarah had arranged with Prothero’s for Meg’s groceries to be delivered to a disused oil-drum by the side of the lane. But this hiding place was soon found by Johnny the Van, a red-eyed rascal who lived in an old fairground waggon nearby. There were weeks when Meg almost fainted from hunger: and the dogs, without meat, howled all day and night.

  When the spring came, both Sarah and Lizzie set out to curry favour with Meg. Each would arrive with cakes or a box of chocolates, but Meg saw through their blandishments and said, ‘Thank you people very much, and I’ll see you again next week.’ Sometimes they tried to get her to sign a prepared statement: she simply stared at the pencil as if it were poisoned.

  One day Sarah drove up with a trailer to fetch a pony which, so she claimed, was hers. She walked towards the beast-house with a halter, but M
eg stood, arms folded, by the door.

  ‘Aye, you can te-ake him,’ she said. ‘But what are you people going to do about them dogs?’

  Jim had left thirteen sheepdogs; and these, cooped up in tin shanties, had grown so mangy and ravenous on a diet of bread and water that they were unsafe to be let off their chains.

  ‘Them poor ol’ dogs is mad,’ Meg said. ‘Them’ll ’ave to be shot.’

  ‘We could take ’em to the vet?’ Sarah suggested, doubtfully.

  ‘Nay,’ Meg answered back. ‘I’m not putting them dogs in no death-van! Get that Frank o’ yours to come up with his gun, and I’ll dig a hole and put ’em in the ground.’

  The morning of the shooting was damp and misty. Meg gave the dogs their last feed and led them out, two by two, and chained them to a crab-apple in the pasture. At eleven, Frank gulped down a swig of whisky, tightened his cartridge belt, and walked out into the mist, in the direction of the tree.

  Meg stopped her ears; Sarah stopped hers; and her daughter Eileen sat in the Land Rover listening to rock music through the headphones of her cassette-player. A whiff of gunpowder drifted downwind. There was one final whimper, one isolated shot; and then Frank came back, out of the mist, haggard and about to vomit.

  ‘An’ a good job,’ said Meg, slinging a spade across her shoulder. ‘Thank you people very much.’

  Next morning she saw Lewis Jones driving along the skyline on his red International Harvester. She ran up to the hedge and he switched off the engine.

  ‘So them come and shot the dogs,’ she said, catching her breath. ‘Poor ol’ dogs what done no ’arm. Nor che-ased no sheep nor nobody. But what with them all a-hungered, and with the summer a-comin’, and the heat a-comin’, and the smell in them coops, and the che-ains’d bite into their necks, like … Aye! And bloody ’em! And then the flies’d come and lay eggs and there’d be worms in their necks. Poor ol’ dogs! And that’s why I ’ad ’em shot.’

  Her eyes flashed. ‘But I’m a-tellin’ yer one thing, Mr Jones. It’s the people not the dogs as should be punished …!’