She’d been outside and lifted the tin bath from the hook on the wall and brought it in to lean against the cupboard door next to the fire, the door sneck rattling as she did so. The sound startled her. When they had first come here, she kept her spare bed sheets and tablecloth in there. It was a wide and useful cupboard, but when Dorothy at three was old enough to leave her mother’s bedside, Deakin decreed that the child could no longer sleep in their bed and that her mother must make her a bed in the cupboard.
She recalled gathering up sheep’s wool and duck down, washing and drying it and then filling a bolster case to make a mattress to put on the middle shelf. The child hadn’t liked it, of course, and cried piteously, so much so that Deakin had got out of bed and closed both doors on her, fastening them with the wooden sneck and threatening the child with a beating.
I lay all night listening to her cries and that sneck rattling, she remembered now. But what could I do? He was master here. He said she would get used to it and that it would be warm in there. And she did, and it was.
She sat down by the fire and pondered. The child slept in there every night for nigh on eight years, and then one day she asked for an old sheet to make another mattress, and went out that summer and gathered up more sheep wool and down, goat hair and some clean straw, and stitched two sides of the sheet together, filled it, and stitched it up and told me she’d sleep on the floor in front of the fire.
‘I telled her he’d not let her,’ she muttered, ‘and she said that he wouldn’t know, for she’d be up before him every morning and store the mattress in its usual place in the cupboard. I’m too big to sleep in there now, she said. An’ I said do as you please.’
It wasn’t until one morning when he rose earlier than usual that he found her and fitted out a space under the eaves so that she might sleep up there; I started to use the cupboard again for storage and discovered that at some time during her night-time imprisonment she’d whittled a gap at the bottom of the door so that she could jiggle it to loosen the latch and open the doors.
She gave a cackling laugh. The girl wasn’t dim even though she were only a little biddy; she’d managed to outwit him and he never knew.
She went back to the scullery window to peer out, but the couple had gone. It bothered her as to who the woman was. She saw so few people that when someone new came into her sight she was always curious. This one didn’t look like someone from the village; she didn’t have the bearing or style of a country woman. She was more of a townie, so why was she here? But wait, mebbe it was the Robinsons’ daughter, she worked in town. But no, she then bethought herself; she has red hair too, like her brother and the rest of the clan.
Although Mrs Deakin didn’t speak to anyone in the village, on rare occasions she went to the shop to buy flour for baking, and sugar – for if Deakin brought a parcel of tea home, she sometimes indulged herself with a spoonful of sugar in a cup of tea as a treat – and as she waited to be served she would listen to local gossip, which was discussed freely in front of her as she was unresponsive to their nods of greeting and appeared to be completely uninterested in what they were saying. I’ll think of an errand and go in again, she thought, and mebbe find out who she is.
She liked the days when Deakin went out on an all-day trip, for she could then please herself with her time; she’d feed the animals and the poultry, prepare food for the evening for when he returned, then bake herself some biscuits and sit in the easy chair that Deakin claimed as his own. She’d drink tea with a teaspoonful of brandy and eat all the biscuits and think of happier times when she was a child in Brixham, before she met Deakin.
If the weather was good she would put on her working boots and go outside and turn over a plot to grow vegetables. Never flowers, for you couldn’t eat them, but she grew enough food to keep them all the year round: potatoes, parsnip, swede and onions, leek and cabbage, peas and beans, carrots and winter sprouts.
I could survive without him if he didn’t come home, she often thought; I’m not that fond of fish even though I was brought up on it. I’d rather eat a slice of chicken breast. I’d miss the tea, though, and the brandy. I’m not so bothered about the Genever; the Dutch can keep it as far as I’m concerned, along with their cheese. She would lean back in the chair and occasionally make a plan about how she might live without his brooding presence if by chance he didn’t come back from one of his fishing trips.
It was after dark when she was dozing in front of the fire that she heard the muffled clod of the mule and the rattle of the cart as it came along the track, and then the squeak of the gate. He’d never had a horse, always used a mule, a more bad-tempered animal you’d rarely find; he drove it down to the creek where his two boats were kept and tied it on a long rope so that it could graze until his return, knowing that no one would dare go near it without risking a nip from its yellow teeth.
She
