in the middle of the night.
It was full moon. I had been out to dinner at Mealbeck. I had only been living in the North for two months and for one month alone. I had joined my husband near Catterick camp the minute he had found us a house, which was only a few days before he found that the regiment was being posted to Hong Kong. The house he had found was beautiful, old and tall in an old garden, on the edge of a village on the edge of the fell. It was comfortable and dark with a flagged floor and old furniture. Roses and honeysuckle were nearly strangling black hedges of neglected yew. There was nice work to be done.
It was the best army house we had ever found. The posting to Hong Kong promised to be a short one. I had been there before and hated it – I hate crowded places – and I decided to stay behind alone.
He said, “But you will be alone, mind. The camp is a good way off and most people will have gone with us. It’s the North. You’ll make no friends. They take ten years to do more than wag their heads at you in the street up here. Now, are you sure?”
I said I was and I stayed and found that he was quite wrong. Within days, almost within hours of my miserable drive home from Darlington Station to see him off, I found that I was behaving as if I’d always known the people here and they were doing the same to me. I got home from the station and stopped the car outside my beautiful front door and sat still, thinking, “He has gone again. Again he has gone. What a marriage. Always alone. Shall I forget his face again? Like last time? Shall I begin to brood? Over-eat? Drink by myself in the evenings – rather more every evening? Shall I start tramping about the lanes pretending I like long walks?” I sat there thinking and a great truculent female head with glaring eyes stuck itself through the car window.
“D’you want some
“Oh!”
“Some
“Oh I don’t—? Can you spare—?”
“Beans, beans. Masses of beans. They’re growin’ out of me ears. Grand beans. Up to you.”
“I’d love some beans.”
A sheaf of them was dumped on the seat beside me. “There’s plenty more. You’ve just to say. So ’e’s off then? The Captain?”
“Yes.”
“Well, yer not to fret. There’s always a cup of tea at our place. Come rount back but wear yer wellies or you’ll get in a slather int yard.”
In the post office they asked kindly for news. Of how I was settling, of where I had come from. The vicar called. A man in a land-rover with a kind face – the doctor – waved his hat. A woman in the ironmonger’s buying paraffin in gloves and a hat invited me to tea in a farmhouse the size of a mill with a ha-ha and a terrace at the back, gravel a foot thick and a thousand dahlias staked like artillerymen and luminous with autumn. The tea cups must have been two hundred years old.
I was asked to small places too – a farm so isolated that the sheep and cows looked up aghast when I found my way to it, and the sheepdogs nearly garrotted themselves on the end of hairy ropes.
“You’ll be missin the Captain,” the farmer’s wife said as she opened the door. Her accent was not the local one.
I said, “You talk differently,” and she said, “Well, I would do. I come from Stennersceugh. It was a Danish settlement long since. It’s all of ten miles off.”
Never in my life had I had so much attention paid to me by strangers, nor been told so many intimate things from the heart – of marriages, love and death; of children or the lack of them, fears of sickness, pregnancy; of lost loves and desperate remedies. Three old ladies living by the church, I heard, drank three crates of sherry a week (“It’s the chemist delivers”). A husband had “drowned ’isself in Ash Beck for fear of a thing growing out of the side of his head”.
There seemed to be total classlessness, total acceptance, offence only taken if you gave yourself airs, offered money in return for presents or didn’t open your door wide enough at the sound of every bell. There was a certain amount of derision at bad management – “She never gets out to the shops till twelve o’clock.” “She hasn’t had them curtains down in a twelve-month” – but I met no violence, no hatred. There were threats of “bringin me gun” to walkers on the fells with unleashed dogs, but not one farmer in ten possessed a gun or would have known how to use if he had. Language addressed to animals was foul and unrefined, ringing over the fells and sheep dips and clipping sheds – but bore no relation to conversation with humans or at any rate not with me. “Come ere yer bloody, buggerin little – ’ello there, Mrs Bainbridge, now. Grand day. Comin over for yer tea then?”
Alan had told me that when he came home I’d be used to my tea as my supper and then more tea just before bedtime and I would forget how to cook a steak. However he was wrong again, because it had been dinner I had been invited to at Mealbeck the night of the waving woman, and a much better dinner than I’d ever have got in Aldershot.
Mealbeck is the big Gothic house of two sisters – a magnificent cold, turretted, slightly idiotic house, something between the Brighton Pavilion and the Carpathians. We ate not in a corner of it but the corner of a corner, passing from the tremendous door, over flagged halls, a great polar-bear skin rug and down a long cold passage. At the end was a little room which must once have been the housekeeper’s and crammed into it among the housekeeper’s possessions – a clock, a set of bells, a little hat-stand, a photograph of servants like rows of suet dumplings, starched and stalwart and long ago dead – were a Thomas Lawrence, photographs by Lenare and haunted Ypres faces in 1914 khaki. On the housekeeper’s old table where she must have handed out the wages were some fine silver and glasses fit for emperors.
Good wine, too. The sisters, Millicent and Gertie, knew their wine. They also knew their scotch and resorted to it wordlessly after the best pheasant and lemon pudding I think I’ve ever eaten.
I said, “Oh this has been lovely. Lovely.” We stood under the green moon that did not so much light the fells as isolate them in the long clean lines of the faded day.
“You are from Sussex,” said Millicent. “You must find this very bare.”
“It’s wonderful. I love it.”
“I hope you’ll stay the winter,” said Gertie. “And I hope you’ll come here soon again.”
The two of them walked, not too steadily to the iron gates and I roared off in the little Fiat down the drive and out on to the fell, between the knobbly blocks of the stone walls flashing up in the car lights. I felt minute between the long lines snaking away, the long low undercorated horizon, the clear hard pencil lines cut with a very sharp hard point. Gigantic lamp-eyes of sheep now and then came shining into the headlights. It was midnight. I did not meet a single car between Mealbeck and Naresby and the road rippled up and down, narrow and sweeping and black and quiet. I thought of Alan in Hong Kong. It would be breakfast time. I wished he were with me. Then I forgot him in the emptiness of the road under the moon and the great encircling ball of the stars.
I went flying through High Thwaite, hurtling through Low Thwaite and the same landscape spread out still in front of me – endlessly deserted, not a light in any cottage, not a dog barking, not a cry of a bird. It was just after what appeared to be the loneliest part of the road that I took a corner rather faster than I should and saw the woman standing in her garden and waving at me with a slow decorous arm, a queenly arm. You could see from the moonlight that her head was piled up high with queenly hair. I think I was about two miles on before I really took it in. I was so shaken by it that I stopped the car.
I was not many miles from home now – my village, my new house, my heavy safe front door. The road had dropped low to a humped bridge, and after a moment when I had switched off the engine I could hear the clear quick brown water running deep and noisy below it. I thought, “There can’t have been anyone. I’m drunk.”
I got out of the car and walked about. It was cold. I stood on the bridge. Apart from the noise of the beck everything was absolutely quiet. There was not a light from any house in any direction. Down here by the beck I could see no horizons, not the fell’s edge, not even the sweet nibbled grass beside the road. The air smelled very clean like fresh sheets.
This was the pedlars’ road. For five hundred years, they had walked it with packs of ribbons and laces and buttons and medicines, and a great many of them according to all the stories had been murdered for them or disappeared in the snow in winter – often not found until Martinmas. If my car doesn’t start now, I thought, I shall be very much alone.
Had the woman been asking for help? I wondered whether to go back. I felt absolutely certain – and it is amazing how much even at midnight under only the palest moon the eye can know from the angle of a moving arm
