The Land Endures (The Apple Tree Saga Book 4) Page 7

  ‘As to that, I’m not quite sure, but I think it must have fallen from a very great height.’

  Jamesy gave a nervous snort. Chris and Joanna looked away. And little Emma, helping Aunt Doe to make sausages, looked up at her sister and brothers accusingly.

  ‘Aunt Doe’s bike is all smashed in bits. There’s nothing to laugh about in that.’

  ‘Who said there was?’ Joanna asked.

  Aunt Doe went everywhere on foot now. The children’s father noticed it.

  ‘Why no bicycle?’ he asked.

  ‘It needs a few repairs,’ she said.

  The children met in the tree-house to discuss what they felt they ought to do.

  ‘You know what I think?’ Chris said. ‘I think we should buy her a new bike.’

  They were agreed. They fetched their money-boxes and tipped the contents onto the floor. Between them they had eleven-and-six. But before their discussion could go any further, a noise drew them to the window, and there was Aunt Doe, riding triumphantly into the yard on another ramshackle bicycle, just as shabby as the first; bought, she announced when they gathered round, from a man with a junk-cart at Otchetts End.

  ‘He wanted ten shillings but I got it for five. I haven’t shopped in the market-place at Ranjiloor all these years without learning a thing or two!’

  Watched by the children, whose feelings were mixed, she rode round and round repeatedly, ringing her old rusty bell with such brio that Stephen came hurrying from the piggery.

  ‘What do you think of my new bicycle?’ she asked.

  ‘New?’ he said, incredulously.

  ‘I think,’ she said, with a glance towards Chris and Joanna and Jamesy, ‘I shall have to keep this one chained up.’

  ‘Why?’ said Stephen. ‘Does it bite?’

  The long drought ended at last, and rain fell on the tired earth. Suddenly the weather was cold. The nights especially were sharp. But because of the heat stored in the soil, as soon as the rain soaked the ground, there was a quick growth of grass, so that brown parched meadows and brown leys were all a fresh bright green again before winter came to check their growth. The first sowings of wheat were up, green enough to cover the ground, and oats, sown as the first snow fell, were up in flag when the snow had gone.

  By the end of November, water ran in the ditches again, and Copsey Pond was brim-full. Stephen went to the pond one day and stood at the edge, under the trees, watching a moorhen swimming across to vanish, darkly, among the reeds.

  He had had the wire fence removed, so that cattle and sheep could drink there again, and had had the fletchers all cleaned out. But he himself had kept away. Now he had come, in secret, alone, to look at the place and test himself. But the pond, having filled with water again, was not a place of fear for him. He looked at it and was perfectly calm. It was the drought that had killed Gwen, and the word drought, with all it meant, would always strike terror into his heart and fill him with the sickness of hate. The pond itself was innocent. It was a place where moorhens lived; where the farm animals came to drink; where alders grew, and willows and oaks; and where, in the springtime every year, the martins collected mud for their nests.

  Stephen turned and walked away. He was meeting his shepherd in Long Gains, to overlook the flock of ewes. The rams would be put in to run with them soon, so that the lambs would be born in May, and the flock be renewed. Rain fell on him as he walked. He drew his collar up to his ears.

  Chapter Four

  Early in the new year, the threshing tackle arrived. For days its smoke and smell filled the stackyard, and its noise could be heard all over the farm. John Challoner strolled over one afternoon. He was next on the list for the threshing team. He had come to see how long they would be.

  ‘I can lend you a man or two if you like. Get done that much sooner, what do you say?’

  ‘We can manage, thanks,’ Stephen said, pausing in his work of pitching the sheaves.

  Challoner went to the grain-shute and took a handful of grain from the sack. He allowed it to run between his fingers.

  ‘I hear you’ve got two horses sick. I can lend you a tractor if you like, to get this lot into town when you’re done.’

  ‘We can manage, thanks,’ Stephen said.

  ‘Suit yourself! Suit yourself!’ Huffily, Challoner walked away, pausing only long enough to speak to the man in charge of the tackle. ‘You know your way up to my place by now? I’ll expect you on Tuesday evening, then.’

  Stephen, on the stack, resumed his work, pitching sheaves down onto the drum. Tupper, beside him, gave a snort.

  ‘He’s in one of his lending moods. I wonder what he wants in exchange.’

  One morning at the end of the month, the hunt met at The Black Ram, up on the edge of Huntlip Common, and the chase led across Holland Farm. Billy Rye’s son, a boy of thirteen, earned himself a shilling by opening the gate into Turner’s Piece, and the hunt, trampling the soggy ground, ruined five acres of young tender rape.

  The next day was market day. Challoner and Stephen met at the pens.

  ‘I heard you were looking for two new tups. I think I can do you a favour there. A friend of mine from Porsham way ‒’

  ‘There’s just one favour you can do for me. You can damn well stop hunting across my land.’

  ‘Eh? What’s that? Did we damage your rape? Hang it, man, you must send in a claim! We always pay for damage done.’

  ‘I don’t want paying,’ Stephen said. ‘I only want you to keep off my land.’

  ‘You ought to join us,’ Challoner said, clapping Stephen on the shoulder. ‘Then you could get your own back a bit, hunting across the other chaps’ land!’ But, seeing that Stephen was not amused, he said: ‘I’ll have a word with the M.F.H.. He’s a reasonable chap. We all are. I’ll tell him you lost that field of rape.’

  A few days later, half a dozen bottles of port were delivered at Holland Farm, with a message written on a card: ‘Apologies. The Crayle Hunt’. Stephen was somewhat irked by the gift, but to send it back would be churlish indeed. He walked over to thank Challoner straight away.

  ‘Think nothing of it,’ Challoner said. ‘I told you we always paid our debts.’

  ‘There is just one thing,’ Stephen said. ‘I still don’t want hunting across my land. I’ve given orders to my men that no gates are to be opened for you.’

  Challoner went very red in the face.

  ‘That’s hardly sporting of you, man!’

  ‘Then the port was intended to buy me off?’

  ‘Dammit! Of course not! I never said that! We merely thought, the Master and I, that a show of goodwill on either side ‒’

  ‘I made my feelings clear to you when I first came to Holland Farm.’

  ‘But it cramps our style no end, you know, to have your land out of bounds to us.’

  ‘The answer’s still no,’ Stephen said.

  ‘Well, Wayman, I’m disappointed, I must admit. I never thought you’d hold out like this. That port came from the Master’s own cellar ‒’

  ‘Maybe I’d better send it back?’

  ‘No, no! Good God, that’s absurd!’ Challoner made a mighty effort and managed to laugh away his chagrin. ‘I’ll come over and help you drink it if you like!’

  ‘Yes, do,’ Stephen said.

  Although he and Challoner got on quite well, Stephen could never really like the man, and later that year, in the middle of June, something happened that renewed his mistrust.

  The sheep-shearing, shared as always between the two farms, took place at Outlands that year. Challoner’s ewes were shorn first, and the fleeces were stacked at the end of the barn. Then Stephen’s ewes were shorn, and the fleeces were loaded into his cart, drawn up in readiness out in the yard. When the first of his fleeces came, and Stephen went forward to pick them up, Eddie Templer, one of Challoner’s men, spoke to him in an undertone.

  ‘I’d count them fleeces if I was you.’

  Stephen stared. He was taken aback. The year before, and th
e year before that, his fleeces had gone uncounted to market and been sold there according to weight.

  ‘Why should I need to count them?’ he asked.

  ‘It’s the best way of making sure they’re all there.’

  So Stephen, when he loaded the fleeces into the cart, kept a careful count, and at the end of the afternoon, instead of the ninety there should have been, there were only seventy-five.

  ‘Seems I’m a few short,’ he said, as Challoner came up to him.

  ‘Short? By how many?’ Challoner asked.

  ‘Short by fifteen,’ Stephen said.

  ‘How the hell did that happen? Someone’s been careless! I’ll have his guts!’ Challoner strode into the barn and called to his shepherd, Arthur Thorne, to bring fifteen fleeces from the heap. ‘Mr Wayman’s fifteen short. Whose fault is that, I’d like to know? It’s all this chatting and larking about! That’s how these mistakes are made. If I’m not around to watch you men —’

  The fifteen fleeces were brought out and thrown up into the cart. Challoner stood and counted them, in a loud voice, for all to hear. Eddie Templer was one of those who helped to bring the fleeces out. He took good care to avoid Stephen’s eye.

  ‘There! All correct?’ Challoner asked.

  ‘All correct,’ Stephen said. ‘I think I’ll drive them down straight away.’

  ‘Before they can vanish again, eh?’ Challoner gave a great hearty laugh. ‘I hope you don’t think I’m to blame?’

  ‘No, of course not,’ Stephen said.

  Driving the load of fleeces home, he pondered over the incident. Although he had always mistrusted Challoner, he now found it difficult to believe that the man would stoop to such an act, merely for the sake of a few pounds’ worth of wool. It could just as easily have been a trick, played out of spite by Eddie Templer, to cause his employer embarrassment. Challoner, as Stephen knew, was much disliked by the men he employed. Whatever the truth, it would probably never be known, for Challoner’s manner gave little away and his greeting when Stephen met him again was as bluff and hearty as ever before.

  But Aunt Doe, it seemed, shared Stephen’s mistrust.

  ‘What was all that I heard about fifteen fleeces?’

  ‘A misunderstanding,’ Stephen said. ‘They got in with Challoner’s by mistake.’

  ‘By mistake? I wonder!’ she said.

  All through the spring and summer that year, when Stephen walked about the fields, it seemed to him there was always a wind. It whispered in the green corn and ran like the ghost of a grey-green hare through the long grass in the leys and meadows. Under the sunlight, under the wind, the green blades of grass and the green blades of corn bowed themselves down in humility, while the green stalks stood upright in their pride, flowering and coming to seed.

  Every year, this miracle. A green excitement possessing the land; touching everything; sparing nothing. Stephen stood in the Home Field, and the green corn came surging up to his feet. He saw how the sheath at the top of each stalk was beginning to open, split by the ear, and he felt the excitement in spite of himself. He walked in the fields of mowing-grass, and the grassflowers touched him, blown by the wind. They left their coloured dust on him. He saw it, golden, on his hands.

  By the middle of June the corn stood so high in the Home Field that Emma, creeping between the rows, could stand upright and not be seen. The cool green blades touched her bare arms, and the tall green stalks, with their green ears of grain, towered up above her head. She liked the cool greenness of the corn, and the whispering of the wind among the blades.

  Once when she walked in the corn like this, she suddenly came on a hare in its form: a soft-furred doe, nursing her young, her ears drawn back and her eyes protruding as she crouched in her hollow in the ground. Emma stared at the crouching doe, and the doe stared through her with unblinking eyes; without so much as a twitch of a whisker. Child and hare were stillness itself, confronting each other in the green swaying corn. Then Emma turned and tiptoed away. Leaving the corn, she danced and ran. The hare was a secret that had to be shared.

  But when she led Chris and Joanna and Jamesy there, creeping, small, between the rows, the hare and her young were not to be found.

  ‘Are you sure this is the place?’

  ‘I think it is,’ Emma said.

  ‘You must have scared her away, then.’

  ‘No, I didn’t. She stayed quite still.’

  ‘Well, she’s not here now, is she?’ said Chris.

  ‘If she was ever here at all,’ Joanna said, walking away.

  ‘She was there, I saw her,’ Emma said. ‘She had two babies suckling her.’

  ‘Well, I haven’t got time to search the whole field. I’ve got better things to do. You can go on searching if you like.’

  The three older children went away. Emma was left alone in the corn. But although she searched up and down the rows, that day and on other days, she never saw the hare again, and the others often teased her about it.

  ‘Seen your hare today, Emma?’

  ‘Next time you see her, put salt on her tail.’

  ‘Or make a noise like a lettuce leaf. She’ll follow you home if you do that.’

  Sometimes when Emma walked in the corn, she would hear Aunt Doe calling to her from the garden, or her father calling across the fields. She would hear them saying to each other: ‘Where’s Emma? Is she with you? Then she must have gone off with Chris and Joanna.’

  Hearing their voices speaking so close, Emma would laugh without sound to herself, knowing that she was hidden from them, although she walked upright in the corn. Gathering poppies and corncockles, or looking for larks’ nests full of brown eggs, she would wander the corn-rows by the hour, while Aunt Doe went searching everywhere, calling her name again and again.

  ‘Where have you been?’ Stephen asked, as Emma appeared in the cowshed doorway.

  ‘I’ve been in the corn,’ Emma said.

  ‘I hope you didn’t trample it down.’

  ‘Of course I didn’t. I walked in the rows.’

  ‘The others not back yet?’ Stephen said. But he knew they were not. It was a Saturday afternoon; the two boys were playing in a school cricket match; Joanna was camping with the Girl Guides at Springs. ‘What about helping me wean this calf?’

  The calf in question was six days old. Stephen had a pail of its mother’s milk and was trying to persuade the calf to drink. He held his hand under the milk, his upturned fingers breaking the surface, but the calf ignored this enticement and nibbled the edge of the pail instead. Emma came close and watched, dark-eyed.

  ‘Supposing you try,’ Stephen said. ‘Put your hand in under the milk and let him lick it off your fingers.’

  ‘No, I don’t want to,’ Emma said. She put her hands behind her back.

  ‘You’re not afraid of a little calf?’

  ‘Yes, I am. They always nip.’

  ‘That’s not the reason,’ Stephen said.

  ‘What is the reason?’ Emma asked.

  ‘You don’t want to get your hands in a mess, that’s your reason,’ Stephen said.

  ‘How do you know it is?’ she asked.

  ‘I know my Emma!’ Stephen said.

  The calf was beginning to suck at last, curling its tongue round Stephen’s finger. Gradually, he withdrew his hand, and the calf supped the milk till the pail was empty. Raising its head, it shook itself. Emma stepped back to avoid being splashed. She watched the calf as it licked its lips.

  Nearby, in the straw, the farm cat, Maisie, also watched, waiting to lick up any milk that might be spilled over the cobbles. Emma went and picked the cat up, but it struggled free and leapt away, leaving a scratch on the palm of her hand. She licked away a drop of blood.

  ‘Did she hurt you?’ Stephen asked.

  ‘Yes,’ Emma said. She showed him her hand. ‘But I forgive her. She’s only a cat.’

  Stephen let the calf out into the paddock, to join the other, older calves. It lowed a little, wanting its mother
, and the cow answered from the pasture behind the barn. Stephen turned back and looked at Emma, who was tying a handkerchief round her hand.

  ‘I’ve got to go up to Blagg,’ he said. ‘Would you like to come with me and see Mr Maule?’

  ‘No, thank you,’ Emma said.

  ‘What are you going to do with yourself, then?’

  ‘I’m making a sweetshop,’ Emma said.

  ‘Well, Aunt Doe’s around if you want her,’ he said. ‘She’s in the garden, hoeing the beans.’

  Sometimes it worried him that Emma, being so much younger than the other children, was often left to play by herself. Yet she never complained of loneliness. She would watch the others getting ready to go out: the boys assembling their cricket gear, Joanna dressing up in her Guides uniform and packing her rucksack to go to camp; and, waving to them as they set out, she looked a sad little figure indeed. ‘Can’t I go to the cricket match? Can’t I go camping?’ she would ask.

  But she never moped, once they were gone. She would play by herself for hours on end, heaping up empty flower-pots in the old garden shed, or painting the slatted garden-seat with a pot of white paint and a tiny brush, or scraping the moss from the farmyard walls. And when, at the end of these self-chosen tasks, she found that her smock had somehow become stained and grubby, she would run indoors to find Aunt Doe.

  ‘Can I have a clean pinny? This one’s not nice!’ she would say.

  Today, when Stephen left her, she was already dragging a box across the yard to set up her ‘sweetshop’ in the shade. She scarcely bothered to wave him goodbye. So long as he was about the farm, she would come to him many times in the day, to show him some prize or watch him at work, and it was the same with her sister and brothers. But once they were gone and she was alone, she became self-absorbed, in a world of her own, occupied until they returned.

  The sweetshop was set up close to the door where the boys, coming home from their cricket match, were bound to see it. In little glass dishes, set out on the counter, were coloured pebbles, coloured beads, and small chips of stone wrapped in coloured papers. In front of each dish stood a carefully printed price-ticket.

  ‘What’s this?’ said Chris, easing his cricket-bag from one hand to the other; and Jamesy, his cap on the back of his head, his blazer slung over one shoulder, said: ‘Our little Emma is after our money.’