The Land Endures (The Apple Tree Saga Book 4) Page 6

  ‘It’s very good of her all the same.’

  When Aunt Doe’s tin trunk arrived at the farm, there were presents for them from Ranjiloor: a soapstone model of the Taj Mahal; a pair of slippers with upcurled toes; a sandalwood box with a secret compartment; and a woodwind pipe such as snake-charmers used when charming snakes in the market-place.

  ‘No snakes, I’m afraid!’ she said to them. ‘They would never have survived the journey to England.’

  The children thanked her with formal politeness, and carried their gifts away with them, up to their playroom in the attic. They examined them, but without any joy. Somehow the gifts were rather bizarre. They came from India, a place unknown, and there was a certain shoddiness about them. The soapstone model was chipped and cracked; the gilding on the slippers was flaking off; and the secret compartment of the sandalwood box kept springing open by itself. As for the snake-charmer’s wooden pipe, it proved extremely difficult to blow.

  ‘Here, you have a go,’ Jamesy said, pushing the pipe towards Joanna. ‘You’re the one that’s supposed to be musical.’

  After trying for ten minutes, all Joanna ever achieved was a few squeaks of piercing shrillness and an ache in the glands below her chin.

  ‘Let me try,’ Emma said, and her efforts were so unexpectedly successful that the other children fled from her, leaving her alone in the attic, where she remained until supper-time.

  ‘Where’s Emma?’ their father asked.

  ‘She’s up in the attic, charming snakes! Can’t you hear her?’ Joanna said.

  The children were bored by Aunt Doe’s stories of India. They listened with perfectly blank faces and changed the conversation as soon as they could.

  ‘Who on earth cares,’ Joanna said to Chris one day, ‘how many annas make a rupee?’

  ‘The mysterious east can remain mysterious as far as I’m concerned,’ said Chris.

  But when she tried to talk to them about the farm, the fields and the woods and the district around, they were equally unresponsive.

  ‘I’m hoping you’ll take me for some walks. I thought we might go blackberrying.’

  ‘They’re not worth picking, after the drought. And anyway, it’s still too hot.’

  Aunt Doe took over the running of the household, and Agnes was glad to hand it over to her. She and Agnes got on well. They worked together as a team. And in dealing with Mrs Bessemer, still suffering from the heat, Aunt Doe was brusque but sympathetic.

  ‘It’s hotter than this in Ranjiloor. But it’s just as well for you to take care. Heatstroke can be a terrible thing.’

  The children resented the changes she made. When she wanted to wash their hair, Joanna led an open revolt.

  ‘Agnes always washes our hair.’

  ‘Not any more, now that I’m here. Agnes has got enough to do.’

  ‘We’re old enough to do it ourselves.’

  ‘I don’t think Emma is old enough.’

  ‘I’ll see to Emma’s,’ Joanna said.

  ‘Very well. It’s just as you please. So long as you’re clean, that’s all I ask.’

  ‘We always were clean, before you came,’ Joanna muttered, under her breath. ‘We never suffered from kala-azar!’

  Stephen, a witness of this behaviour, was worried by their hostility. He liked his cousin well enough. She had been a good friend to him during his youth. But she had altered in the past fifteen years, and sometimes, seeing her through his children’s eyes, he had to admit that she made a ridiculous spectacle, with her outlandish clothes, much mended and patched, the hem of her skirt often hanging down or else fastened up with a safety pin, and her habit of groping inside her blouse, twisting herself into dreadful contortions as she searched for an errant handkerchief.

  Her voice and her manner embarrassed them, especially when outsiders were present. They were barely civil to her face, and behind her back they mimicked her.

  ‘Not Skeine as in wool,’ Chris would say, catching her intonation precisely, and the manner in which she used her hands, ‘but Skeine as though to rhyme with bean!’

  Sometimes Stephen was on the point of breaking out angrily at them. Aunt Doe saw it and restrained him.

  ‘If it doesn’t work, my being here, I shall have to go,’ she said.

  ‘They have no right to behave like this, when you’ve come all this way for their sake.’

  ‘They want their mother back again, and no one else will do,’ she said. ‘We must make allowances.’

  To the three older children she was a fool. They avoided her whenever they could. If they had any problems to be resolved, they went to Agnes, not to Aunt Doe.

  One afternoon, however, when Agnes was needed, it so happened that she was not there. She had gone in the trap on an errand to town and had taken Emma along for the ride. The other three were in the barn, hunting out old pieces of wood for the house they were building up in a tree, and during an argument between the two boys, a long shiny nail, sticking out of a plank, passed through one of Jamesy’s fingers.

  At first the boy felt nothing at all, but somehow the plank was stuck to him, and when he looked down to see why, there was the shiny point of the nail impaling the top joint of his finger and protruding two inches on the other side.

  ‘Now look what you’ve done,’ he said to Chris, and his voice had the calmness of disbelief. ‘My finger’s stuck on this duddy old nail.’

  Chris and Joanna were appalled at the sight. Neither of them knew what to do. Their father was miles away, up in the fields, and Agnes Mayle had gone into town.

  ‘I’ll have to fetch Aunt Doe,’ said Chris. He dashed off quickly into the house.

  Within a few seconds, Aunt Doe was there. Jamesy, frowning, looked up at her, and his face, though calm, was deathly pale. No blood had come from the finger yet. Nor did he feel the slightest pain. The pain would come when the nail was removed.

  ‘Look away,’ said Aunt Doe, and her strong bony fingers closed over his. ‘Look away and take deep breaths. This won’t take long, but you’ll have to be brave.’

  Obediently Jamesy looked away. He fixed his gaze on the barn door and tried to think of other things as Aunt Doe, without delay, eased the finger off the nail and wrapped a white handkerchief round his hand.

  ‘There! It’s done!’ she said to him. ‘Now come indoors and we’ll clean you up, and put a bandage on it, eh?’

  Jamesy nodded, unable to speak. He went, under escort, into the house and through to the scullery, with its stone sink. The handkerchief was bloodstained now; his finger bore two bright red blobs; he saw them welling, and looked away. Aunt Doe turned on the tap and held his hand in the stream of cold water. Chris and Joanna stood and watched.

  ‘It’s a lucky thing the nail didn’t go through the bone,’ said Chris.

  ‘It’s a lucky thing, too, that the nail was clean,’ said Joanna, ‘or he might have got lockjaw, mightn’t he?’

  ‘Fetch the first-aid box, will you, please?’ Aunt Doe quelled them both with a frown.

  Jamesy swallowed and said nothing. The injured finger was coming to life. He watched as the first-aid box was brought and a clean piece of lint was taken from it. Aunt Doe dried his hand, smeared the finger with antiseptic ointment, and bound it up with a gauze bandage, taken, new, from its paper wrapping. She snipped down the last ten inches of gauze, tied a knot between the two strips, and fastened them with elaborate care, round the finger, across the hand, and one last knot around the wrist.

  ‘There, now, is that comfortable?’

  ‘Yes, thanks,’ said Jamesy, in a husky voice.

  But he was beginning to feel rather sick. The whole of his hand was full of pain. And Aunt Doe, observing his pallor, sent the other two back to their games.

  ‘Jamesy needs to rest a while. He can sit and watch me washing the eggs.’

  ‘Shall we go and tell Dad?’

  ‘Yes, go and tell him, certainly. But there’s nothing for him to worry about. Jamesy’ll be fine when he’s had
a rest.’

  The instant Chris and Joanna were gone, Jamesy, his face like candle grease, turned and was sick in the scullery sink. He had always hated the sight of blood. Afterwards, when it was all over, Aunt Doe gave him milk to drink and a lump of barley-sugar to suck. She took him into the living room and put him to sit in the big wing-chair, with his bandaged hand on a cushion to rest, and a favourite book for him to read.

  ‘How do you feel now?’ she asked. She leant over him, anxiously, and touched his forehead with her hand.

  ‘All right, thanks,’ Jamesy said.

  ‘It was a nasty thing to happen, and you were a very brave boy.’

  Jamesy’s lip was tremulous.

  ‘I don’t call it brave, being s-sick!’ he said, and, what with his shame and his self-disgust and the violent throbbing in his hand, he suddenly burst into childish tears and flung himself forward into her arms.

  ‘Poor boy!’ she said, holding him close, and his face was against her cool silk blouse. ‘I still think you were very brave.’

  In a little while, when he was more himself again, and all traces of tears had gone, he forced himself to meet her gaze. ‘You won’t tell the others I cried, will you?’

  ‘Of course I won’t! Whatever next?’

  ‘You won’t tell them that I was sick?’

  ‘I won’t tell them anything. Honour bright!’

  And Aunt Doe, as all four children were to discover, was a woman who always kept her word.

  A little later that afternoon, Stephen came in with Chris and Joanna to see how Jamesy was getting on.

  ‘I hear you’ve been in the wars, my son.’

  ‘Yes, but I’m all right now,’ Jamesy said. He showed his beautifully bandaged hand. ‘The puttee wallah bound it up.’

  ‘Puttee wallah?’ Joanna said.

  ‘That’s what they say in India. A puttee’s a bandage, did you know?’

  Later still, after supper that evening, Chris and Joanna were out in the yard, helping their father to shut up the hens.

  ‘Aunt Doe’s all right, you know,’ Chris remarked, poking a chicken down from a tree.

  ‘Of course she’s all right! What did I tell you?’ Stephen said.

  In his heart he was much relieved.

  So Aunt Doe was accepted by them. When the house in the tree had been completed, she was their first visitor, and she brought with her an old salt-stained telescope that had once belonged to her uncle John, a seafaring man from Deal, in Kent. As she climbed the ladder up to the house, Chris watched anxiously from behind, one hand holding her by the skirts.

  ‘I’m sorry about the missing rungs.’

  ‘It’s better to have a few missing rungs, to baffle the enemy coming at night.’

  Exploring the inside of the house, she poked into corners here and there, and gave them unexpected advice.

  ‘You want a few handy rocks, you know, for repelling invaders when they come. And you want some hard tack to store in that chest in case you need to withstand a siege. I’ll let you have some biscuits and nuts.’

  On leaving she made them a present of the telescope.

  Aunt Doe, they discovered, was always ready to take part in whatever scheme they had in hand: to bowl a few overs in a game of cricket; stand by with a watch to time their races; or hunt out a couple of old twill sheets for them to erect a tent on the lawn. Once she took part in a game of rounders and hit the ball right over the barn, into the yard on the other side, where it hit Reg Starling on the skull. And once when a sow got into the garden, she flung herself astride its back, caught hold of it by its flapping ears, and rode it through the open gateway, back to the stockyard where it belonged.

  Whatever she did she did with verve and then, suddenly, recalled to a sense of domestic duty, she would give a cry and throw up her hands and hurry off, with her long mannish stride, back into the house again.

  ‘I’ve got six beds to make before lunch,’ she would say, or: ‘The egg-man is coming at twelve o’clock.’

  She got through a great deal of work in a day, and she was a stickler for perfect detail. Her linen-cupboard was a model of tidiness and organization; beds were made most beautifully, with ‘hospital corners’ and unwrinkled sheets; and all four corners of every pillow had to be insinuated meticulously into all four corners of the pillow-case, clean and white and stiff with starch.

  ‘Aunt Doe’s beds,’ Joanna said, ‘are a lot better dressed than Aunt Doe herself.’

  She was also an excellent cook. They enjoyed the curries she made for them. Only Mrs Bessemer disapproved.

  ‘I could never eat that. Oh dear me no. What’d my Bert have to say to me if I went home to him smelling of that?’

  ‘What does he smell of,’ Agnes asked, ‘after his evenings at the pub?’

  ‘She needn’t eat it,’ Aunt Doe said. ‘Chris and Jamesy will soon scoff that.’

  She enjoyed cooking meals for these young cousins of hers, with their hearty appetites, but one thing she could not abide and that was waste. If any food was left on a plate, she would point at it with a bony finger, and would fix the offender with a stern blue gaze. ‘The people in Calcutta would be glad of that!’ she would say, and the phrase became a family joke, so that someone had only to leave a tiny morsel, such as a single green pea, to provoke the inevitable chorus.

  One morning at breakfast, their father was the guilty one; he left some bacon-rind on his plate; but when the expected chorus came: ‘The people in Calcutta would be glad of that!’, he looked around with a bland smile. ‘Oh no they wouldn’t! ‒ It’s pig meat!’ he said, and Aunt Doe, clicking her tongue, snatched the plate away from him.

  ‘I don’t know who’s the worst,’ she said, ‘you or these four scallywags here.’

  The household, under her influence, was gradually coming back to life. There was laughter in the house again; a sense of purpose, a meaning in things; a feeling that everything mattered again. It was not that Aunt Doe had taken their mother’s place with them: nobody could ever do that; but she was there, and they leant on her. She gave herself willingly to their needs, and allowed them to draw on her woman’s strength.

  Stephen, finding that this household of his went on the same though his wife was dead, was sometimes filled with hurt for her. Hearing laughter about the place, or Aunt Doe’s voice as she called to the hens; seeing the baskets of new-laid eggs, and remembering Gwen’s pride in them; watching Joanna in the dairy, skimming the cream off the pans of milk in exactly the way Gwen had taught her: he would sometimes stand, arrested by pain, overcome by the sense of his loss.

  But he was moved to wonder, too, and gave thanks for such as Aunt Doe, another like Agnes, a giver of life.

  By the time term began, Aunt Doe had been at the farm almost a month. She was accepted. She was part of their lives.

  Aunt Doe had been born in Sussex, but she was happy in Worcestershire, and one of the happiest things she did was to buy a second-hand bicycle. All through the tropical autumn that year, she rode about on it everywhere, eager for every sight and sound, and speaking to everyone she met. She was soon well-known all around Huntlip, riding her old ramshackle machine, and sometimes, in the fields at Holland Farm, the men while working would see her go by, rattling down the steep snakey lane, and would joke about it among themselves.

  ‘There goes Miss Skeine on that warhorse of hers. Better keep off the roads today, if you value your lives, all of you.’

  It was certainly true that Aunt Doe on her bicycle constituted a danger to the public at large, for her lamp battery was always flat, and her brake-blocks were worn to ‘no more than a cheese-rind’ as Bob Tupper once said. One evening at dusk, careering at speed down Holland Bank, she passed so close to the elderly retired schoolmaster, Mr Quelch, as he stepped from his gateway into the lane, that she knocked his Panama off his head.

  ‘Dammit, woman, where are your lights?’ the old man shouted after her.

  ‘Next to my liver!’ Aunt Doe called back, and rode
on merrily down the lane, tinkling her bell now and then lest anyone else should be fool enough to get in her way. As always, on a Sunday evening, she was late for evensong.

  Aunt Doe’s bicycle, with its sit-up-and-beg handlebars and its broken mudguards tied up with string, was a great embarrassment to Chris and Jamesy and Joanna. They knew how people laughed at her whenever she rattled through the village, and they heard the remarks of the men on the farm, and, since Aunt Doe herself had no sense of the fitness of things, they decided to take the matter into their own hands.

  One Saturday afternoon, when she was busy making jam, they wheeled the bicycle into the barn, lugged it up the ladder into the hayloft, and hurled it out of the hayloft door, down into the stackyard below. There, with relatively little noise, the wheels parted company from the frame, bounced a few times on the straw-littered ground, and at last lay still, buckled and broken beyond repair.

  ‘Well!’ said Chris, brushing his hands. ‘She’ll never ride that old thing again!’

  They were not present when Aunt Doe discovered the mangled remains. They were up in the fields with Tupper and Rye. But when they went to the stackyard again, the bits and pieces had all gone, and they found them later on the farm’s golgotha, the rubbish heap behind the cartshed, among the old bits of harrows and ploughs.

  ‘She may not know it, but we’ve done the old girl a good turn,’ Chris said as they walked away. ‘Sooner or later she’d have killed herself, riding that thing down Holland Bank.’

  ‘What do you think she’ll say to us?’

  ‘Oh, there’ll be the deuce of a row, I daresay.’

  But in fact Aunt Doe said nothing at all, and her sad silence in the days that followed somehow spoilt the splendid joke, bringing a feeling of anticlimax. The three children followed her example; they resolved to stay dumb as long as she; but after three days of this, poor Jamesy lost his nerve.

  ‘Where’s your old bike, then, Aunt Doe?’ he asked.

  ‘I’m afraid something happened to it,’ Aunt Doe said, looking at him sorrowfully.

  ‘What sort of something?’ Jamesy asked.