The Land Endures (The Apple Tree Saga Book 4) Page 5

  An element of negligence had been involved. That was what the coroner had said. But no single person could be blamed, and Mrs Wayman had met her death through a series of tragic circumstances, and because, in her concern for a helpless animal in distress, she had taken no thought for her own safety.

  ‘I know what he said!’ George exclaimed. ‘But it’s what the chaps’ve got to say!’

  ‘Do you want me to give you your cards?’

  ‘If I’ve got to put up with all these remarks ‒’

  ‘That’s something you’ve got to sort out with them.’

  ‘And what about you, Mr Wayman, sir? I reckon you blame me right enough!’

  ‘Get back to work,’ Stephen said.

  The holidays came; long hours to be filled; and once again Agnes took charge. She chivvied the children about the house until some order prevailed there each day, and she found them a great many things to do.

  ‘I can’t do everything myself! Mrs Bessemer’s having one of her turns. So just you get busy and show some vim!’

  There were chickens to feed and eggs to collect; there were pans in the dairy to be scoured out, and the dairy floor to be sluiced down and scrubbed; potatoes to be dug from the garden for lunch, peas to be shelled and mint to be chopped, and the carving-knife to be sharpened and cleaned. And when the household chores were done she would issue forth with them out of doors to help with the harvest in the fields. She would make a game of it, ordering them about, and they would work to some elaborate plan, seizing the sheaves and setting them up and arranging the stooks in such a way that they made a pattern across the field.

  ‘Damn and butter!’ Agnes would say. ‘I ent got enough to finish this star!’

  The way she scowled and pursed her lips, and the way she clumped across the stubble to snatch two sheaves from Trennam’s hands, made the children laugh aloud. They ran about after her, snatching up sheaves from one place and setting them down again in another, until the stooks on the slope of the field formed an enormous six-pointed star. And Stephen, seeing them at their game, hearing their voices across the field, gave thanks for Agnes and such as she, who kept things going and knew what to do.

  ‘When is your cousin coming, Daddy?’ the children asked almost every day.

  ‘Not just yet,’ Stephen said. ‘It’s a long journey from India, you know.’

  He had cabled his cousin, Dorothy Skeine, telling her of Gwen’s death, and Dorothy had answered by return that she would come at once to England, to keep house for him and look after his children.

  ‘What’s she like?’ the children asked. ‘Is she young? Is she pretty? Is she nice?’

  ‘I haven’t seen her for fifteen years, but no, she’s not young, not exactly,’ he said. He wondered himself what she was like. Fifteen years was a long time. ‘You’ll see for yourselves in due course.’

  ‘Why can’t Agnes live with us?’

  ‘Agnes has got her father and brothers to look after, as you well know. She’s working too hard as it is.’

  Their father’s cousin was on her way. She was coming to England in a ship. They tried to picture her but failed.

  ‘I wish she’d come,’ Joanna said.

  ‘I’m not so sure,’ Jamesy said. ‘Supposing we don’t care for her?’

  ‘Supposing she doesn’t care for us!’ said Chris.

  They were silent, sunk in thought.

  Sometimes at night while the children slept, Stephen walked in the empty fields. Harvest was almost over now, the earliest harvest in many years. They would begin ploughing soon, if the plough could cut through the hard-baked earth.

  ‘God! The ploughing!’ he said to himself.

  His mind veered away from it, rejecting it, unable to think. Yet he knew the ploughing would be done; the seed would be sown, the green blades would come; and the earth would tilt away from the sun, taking its quarterly season of rest.

  How was it that he could work by day, as though he cared about what he did? How was it that he could walk the earth; could eat and drink and go to sleep; talk to people; put on his clothes; when he was filled with such a rage? Even on the night of Gwen’s death, he had helped to deliver a new calf. The thing was hateful, unspeakable, and yet he did it just the same. Was this the way it would always be?

  One night he walked in the harvest field, and there was a moon very nearly full. The cornsheaves stood, leaning together in the stooks, and each stook had its long shadow, slanting towards him across the stubble. The air was hot and perfectly still but suddenly, as he walked in the Held, there was a little flaw of wind that blew on the ground among the stubble and spiralled upwards into the sky, carrying with it dust and chaff and little bits of pale-glinting straw.

  The play of the wind, and its rustling noise, were like a presence among the sheaves, and he came to a sudden startled halt. The earth had been so perfectly still that the wind touched him and took his breath. The rustling awoke something fearful in him. It seemed like the spirit of the earth, that moved on heedlessly, down the years, knowing nothing of the emptiness that death created in human hearts. The earth spirit would keep him alive even though he was dead within, and the knowledge of this made him afraid.

  Two miles away, beyond Blagg, a motor car ground up the steep road and changed gear about half way. Its headlamps came swinging over the hill, marked the course of the road for a while, and vanished again down into the dip that held the village. This brief intrusion from the outside world seemed to leave a greater silence behind. The aloneness and emptiness were everywhere. And he asked himself yet again: What in God’s name did a man do, who had had so much and then lost it all?

  On his way homeward, down the field, his foot kicked something on the ground. It was a single sheaf of wheat, dropped by a careless harvester, and it lay on the ground, having burst from its bond. Stooping, he gathered the loose sheaf, and tied it securely together again. The cornstalks rustled and so did the ears, and the bunch of straws that made up the bond were dry and brittle between his fingers, breaking into tiny splinters that pricked and penetrated his skin. He took the rustling sheaf in his hands, carried it with him a few paces, and set it upright against a stook. The moon watched him from overhead as he followed his shadow down the slope.

  One day when Stephen walked into the garden, he found his children close in a group, and in their midst, fawning, soft-eyed, a spaniel puppy three weeks old.

  ‘Mr Challoner sent it to us. Gerald brought it, it’s ours to keep. We can keep it can’t we, Dad?’

  ‘Yes, of course,’ Stephen said. ‘Have you decided on its name?’

  ‘We’re calling him Sam,’ Jamesy said.

  The puppy was everything to them. They took it with them everywhere. It gave some meaning to their lives. And Stephen felt a twinge of shame, because he had not thought of giving them a puppy, and John Challoner had.

  People were really very good. Mrs Bessemer, although still suffering from the heat, had them to tea once or twice a week and allowed them into Bert’s pigeon-loft, to see the pigeons and stroke their breasts. The children always had plenty to do. Everybody saw to that. Bob Tupper, in his dinner-hour, cut them each a pair of stilts, and they stumped about, up in the air, able to see over hedges and walls and to rat-tat-tat on the dairy window, making poor Agnes jump out of her skin.

  Gerald Challoner came over sometimes, driving one of his father’s tractors, and Chris was allowed to take the controls. Nate Hopson came over, with his leg in plaster, and challenged Joanna to a race, he on his crutches and she on her stilts, and the prize for Joanna when she won was Nate’s old Army cap-badge, which she wore with great pride, clipped to her blouse.

  But there were times, inevitably, when no one could fill the space in their lives. One day during piano practice, Joanna completed an exercise without any faults or hesitations, and swung round in triumph at the end, having heard someone come in at the door.

  ‘Did you hear that, Mummy?’ she exclaimed, and of course it was Agnes standing
there. The moment of triumph was splintered into bits. Joanna stared through hot surging tears. ‘Why did Mummy have to die?’

  ‘She didn’t have to! She just did!’ Agnes marched across to a chair and punched a cushion into shape. ‘As to the why of it, don’t ask me! The why is always followed by zed, and zed is the end of it, that’s what I say!’

  Agnes would do anything in the world for the four children, but she had no comfort to offer them. Death was death. It took the best. There was no rhyme nor reason in the world, and her attitude rubbed off on them.

  ‘You must miss your mother very much.’

  ‘Of course,’ said Chris, in a curt tone. ‘She happens to be dead.’

  The vicar was shocked. He himself never spoke of death. He felt he had a certain duty to these four children facing him.

  ‘Do you know where your mother is?’ he asked, eyeing each of them in turn. ‘Surely, now, you can tell me that?’

  Chris and Joanna looked away. The vicar’s question embarrassed them. They knew what he wanted them to say, but they had no use for the life hereafter, even if its existence could be proved. He turned his gaze on Jamesy instead.

  ‘What about you, young man? Can you tell me where your mother is?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Jamesy, ‘she’s in her grave.’

  When Stephen came, the vicar stood up. He would not stay more than a moment, he said. He knew how busy farmers were.

  ‘I came to see if I could help. With a young family like yours, I know what problems there must be, and if there’s anything I or my wife can do ‒’

  ‘You’re very kind,’ Stephen said. ‘But my cousin, Miss Skeine, is coming back from India soon. She’s going to make her home here, and look after us all, my children and me.’

  ‘So glad, so glad,’ the vicar said.

  Stephen went with him to the gate.

  ‘I wish she’d come, this cousin of Dad’s, if she’s coming,’ Jamesy said. ‘How much longer is she going to be?’

  The day came when cousin Dorothy was expected. Stephen went in the pony and trap to meet her train at Chepsworth station, and the four children remained at home, under orders to be on hand ready to welcome her on her arrival.

  When their father returned and drove into the stable yard, the children were at the kitchen window, where they could get the earliest glimpse. Emma stood on the kitchen stool. She was wearing her best blue cotton frock. Agnes, discreetly, was upstairs, but no doubt had her look-out post. The house was as clean as a new pin.

  The woman who descended from the trap was thin and loose-boned. She wore a grey silk blouse and a grey worsted skirt that reached to the tops of her old-fashioned boots. Her brown-skinned face was narrow and long, with strong cheekbones and strong-jutting chin, and eyes set deep under bristling eyebrows. She had already taken off her hat, and her grey hair, cropped amazingly short, covered her head in a close frizz, tough and tight-curled, like steel wool. When she descended from the trap, it was with a little ungainly leap, revealing stockings of dark grey lisle, gathered in wrinkles about her knees; and as she stood in the stable yard, gazing at the house and the farm buildings, she flung out her long ungainly arms in a wild gesture of ecstasy.

  ‘England!’ she said, in a powerful voice that rang round the yard. ‘England again! Oh it does smell so good!’

  At the kitchen window, the children watched.

  ‘Is that her?’ Joanna breathed.

  They eyed one another in dismay.

  ‘I do think Dad might have warned us,’ said Chris, lifting Emma down from the stool, and Jamesy said, resentfully, ‘Why do we have to have her here? We didn’t ask her. She asked herself.’

  When cousin Dorothy came indoors, the children stood in a formal row. Their father introduced them to her, and she shook hands with each of them, vigorously, squeezing their palms. She treated each child to a long, hard look, and her eyes were unexpectedly blue, looking out keenly from under her brows.

  ‘You needn’t think you are strangers to me, just because we’ve never met. I’ve seen your photographs, over the years, and had news of you now and then, when your father remembered to write. I know a lot about you, never fear, and what I don’t know I shall soon find out!’

  The three older children stood like posts. Looking at her, they were struck dumb. Only little Emma spoke and that was because, leaning towards cousin Dorothy, she was counting the tiny round black buttons sewn close together, dozens of them, down the front of the grey silk blouse. Stephen warningly cleared his throat, and Chris, with reluctance, began to speak. Sometimes he wished he was not the eldest of the four. All sorts of duties fell on him. He fixed cousin Dorothy with his scowl.

  ‘It’s very kind of you to come all the way from India. We hope you’ll be very happy here.’

  ‘What a beautiful speech,’ cousin Dorothy said. ‘I shall be happy, I promise you.’

  ‘We’ve certainly got a lot to thank cousin Dorothy for,’ Stephen said, pointedly. ‘She’s made a considerable sacrifice, leaving India to come here.’

  ‘Oh, don’t tell them that, for goodness’ sake! Do you want them to hate me from the start? Anyway, it isn’t true. I was glad to leave India. Very glad.’ Once again she threw out her arms, striding about the big kitchen, looking around her with rapturous eyes. ‘Oh, to be in England now that April’s there!’ she said in her powerful, loud-thrilling voice.

  Jamesy looked at her with scorn.

  ‘It isn’t April, it’s August,’ he said, and, turning stiffly towards his father, he asked: ‘Can we go out now? We did wait in.’

  ‘Very well,’ Stephen said. ‘No doubt cousin Dorothy will be glad to excuse you.’

  In another moment the children were gone, the puppy yapping at their heels.

  ‘I apologize for my children’s lack of grace. I hope you will bear with them for a bit.’

  Dorothy raised a brown-skinned hand.

  ‘They are the ones who must bear with me.’

  ‘It’s very good of you to come. What did Hugh say to your leaving him?’

  ‘Oh, never mind Hugh!’ Dorothy said. Her brother was dismissed in a single wave. ‘He’s well established out there. Plenty of servants to run round after him. You need me more than he does now.’

  There was a pause. Dorothy stopped striding about and stood with her hands on the back of a chair. She began to speak of Gwen’s death.

  ‘Tell me about it,’ she said to him.

  He realized, for the first time, that he had not fully faced the facts of Gwen’s death. The manner of it. The horror, the pain. The fear she had suffered, perhaps for hours. In keeping the details from his children, he had succeeded in keeping them from himself. Even at the inquest he had not really faced up to these things: the need for control had shut them out; and in the weeks that had passed since then, his mind had sheered away from them.

  He had faced the meaning of Gwen’s loss: what it meant to him and his family; but not the agony of her dying. That he had pushed deep into his mind; into some dark forgetfulness; and now, as he talked to Dorothy, the horror was still too great to bear. It threatened him, deep in his soul. Even the war had not prepared him for such a death as Gwen’s had been.

  ‘And all for the sake of a damned ewe! The stupid brute lived, did I tell you that? It trampled my wife to death in the mud, and Goodshaw found her, all bleeding and torn!’

  In his rage, he flung away. Dorothy watched him. She gave him time.

  ‘Is he still employed here, the man who didn’t finish the fence?’

  ‘Yes,’ Stephen said, ‘he’s still here.’

  ‘I hope I don’t meet him, then, that’s all.’

  ‘He’s no more to blame than I am myself.’

  ‘You’re talking nonsense, my dear boy.’

  ‘It’s Gwen herself I blame!’ he said. Again his anger overflowed. ‘She had no right to go down there, being so careless with her life! Why didn’t she fetch one of us? We were just up there, in the harvest field. We were less th
an half a mile away!’ After a while, controlled, he said, ‘I wish we’d never come to this farm. If we’d stayed in Springs she’d still be alive.’

  Hands clenched in his breeches pockets, he stood in front of the open window. Out in the yard, under the elms, the children sat in the stationary trap. Chris had the ribbons in his hands, and Joanna was nursing the puppy, Sam. Jamesy, frowning, patient, intent, was removing a cleg from Emma’s hair. Huddled together in the trap they looked forlorn the four of them, their faces wistful but lacking hope.

  ‘My poor children!’ Stephen said, but Dorothy Skeine, looking at him, knew that he would take longer to recover from the loss than they.

  At first there was some uncertainty as to what the children should call her. They resolved it themselves and called her Aunt Doe. Whether or not there was an element of derision in the name, as Stephen suspected, she accepted it without demur.

  ‘I see you’re looking at my hair, Joanna. Does it strike you as strange?’

  ‘It’s so short,’ Joanna said.

  ‘Six months ago I had no hair at all. It’s only recently begun to grow. Shall I tell you what made it fall out?’

  The children said nothing. They merely stared. But she needed little response from them.

  ‘Kala-azar! That’s what it was. It’s a nasty disease you get out there. India’s a terrible place for diseases, you know. It’s a terrible place for many things.’

  ‘Then why go there?’ Joanna asked.

  ‘Why indeed!’ Aunt Doe exclaimed.

  Dorothy Skeine had a great sense of duty. Because of it she had gone to India in 1907 with her bachelor brother, a clergyman, and had helped him to run a mission school in a village outside Ranjiloor. Now duty had brought her home again, but this time there was no hardship involved, and she made that clear right from the start. To be back in England was reward enough. She felt as though she had been reborn. Everything enchanted her. So that when Stephen talked to his children of the debt they owed to their Aunt Doe, and the need for showing some gratitude, they were quite unmoved.

  ‘Nobody asked her to come here. She came because she wanted to. She says so twenty times a day.’