On the Black Hill Read online

  There were no joys in that marriage.

  Rachel Jones obeyed her husband with the passive movements of an automaton. She mucked out the pigsties in a torn tweed coat tied up with a bit of twine. She never smiled. She never cried when he hit her. She replied to his questions with grunts or monosyllables; and even in the agony of childbirth, she clenched her mouth so tightly that she uttered not a sound.

  The baby was a boy. Having no milk, she sent him away to nurse, and he died. In November 1898, she stopped eating and set her face against the living world. There were snowdrops in the graveyard when they buried her.

  From that day Amos Jones was a regular churchgoer.

  3

  ONE SUNDAY MATINS, not a month after the funeral, the vicar of Rhulen announced that he had to attend a service in Llandaff Cathedral and that, next Sunday, the rector of Bryn-Draenog would preach the sermon.

  This was the Reverend Latimer, an Old Testament scholar, who had retired from mission work in India and settled in this remote hill parish to be alone with his daughter and his books.

  From time to time, Amos Jones had seen him on the mountain – a hollow-chested figure with white hair blowing about like cotton-grass, striding over the heather and shouting to himself so loudly that he frightened off the sheep. He had not seen the daughter, who was said to be sad and beautiful. He took his seat at the end of the pew.

  On the way, the Latimers had to shelter from a cloudburst and, by the time their dog-cart drew up outside the church, they were twenty minutes late. While the rector changed in the vestry, Miss Latimer walked towards the choir-stalls, lowering her eyes to the strip of wine-red carpet, and avoiding the stares of the congregation. She brushed against Amos Jones’s shoulder, and she stopped. She took half a step forwards, another step sideways, and then sat down, one pew in front of him, but across the aisle.

  Drops of water sparkled on her black beaver hat, and her chignon of chestnut hair. Her grey serge coat was also streaked with rain.

  On one of the stained-glass windows was a figure of the Prophet Elijah and his raven. Outside, on the sill, a pair of pigeons were billing and cooing and pecking at the pane.

  The first hymn was ‘Guide Me, O Thou Great Jehovah’ and as the voices swelled in chorus, Amos caught her clear, quavering soprano while she felt his baritone murmuring like a bumblebee round the nape of her neck. All through the Lord’s Prayer he stared at her long, white, tapering fingers. After the Second Lesson she risked a sidelong glance and saw his red hands on the red buckram binding of his prayerbook.

  She blushed in confusion and slipped on her gloves.

  Then her father was in the pulpit, twisting his mouth:

  ‘“Though your sins be as scarlet, they shall be as white as snow; though they be red like crimson, they shall be as wool. If ye be willing and obedient …”’

  She gazed at her hassock and felt her heart was breaking. After the service Amos passed her in the lych-gate, but she flashed her eyes and turned her back and peered into the boughs of a yew.

  He forgot her – he tried to forget her – until one Thursday in April, he went to Rhulen market to sell some hoggets and exchange the news.

  Along the length of Broad Street the farmers who had driven in from the country were tethering their ponies, and chatting in groups. Carts stood empty with their shafts in the air. From the bakery came the smell of freshly baked bread. In front of the Town Hall there were booths with red-striped awnings, and black hats bobbing round them. In Castle Street the crowds were even thicker as people jostled forward to inspect the lots of Welsh and Hereford cattle. The sheep and pigs were penned behind hurdles. There was a nip in the air, and clouds of steam rose up off the animals’ flanks.

  Outside the Red Dragon two greybeards were drinking cider and moaning about ‘them bloomin’ rogues in Parliament’. A nasal voice called out the price of wicker chairs, and a purple-faced stock-dealer pumped the hand of a thin man in a brown derby.

  ‘And ’ow’s you?’

  ‘Middling.’

  ‘And the wife?’

  ‘Poor.’

  Two blue farm waggons, strewn with straw and piled with dressed poultry, were parked beside the municipal clock; and their owners, a pair of women in plaid shawls, were gossiping away, trying hard to feign indifference to the Birmingham buyer, who circled around them, twirling his malacca cane.

  As Amos passed, he heard one of them say: ‘And the poor thing! To think she’s alone in the world!’

  On the Saturday, a shepherd riding on the hill had found the Reverend Latimer’s body, face downward in a pool. He had slipped in the peat bog and drowned. They had buried him at Bryn-Draenog on the Tuesday.

  Amos sold his hoggets for what they would fetch and, as he put the coins into his waistcoat pocket, he saw that his hand was shaking.

  Next morning, after foddering, he took a stick and walked the nine miles to Bryn-Draenog Hill. On reaching the line of rocks that crown the summit, he sat down out of the wind and retied a bootlace. Overhead, puffy clouds were streaming out of Wales, their shadows plunging down the slopes of gorse and heather, slowing up as they moved across the fields of winter wheat.

  He felt light-headed, almost happy, as if his life, too, would begin afresh.

  To the east was the River Wye, a silver ribbon snaking through water-meadows, and the whole countryside dotted with white or red-brick farmhouses. A thatched roof made a little patch of yellow in a foam of apple-blossom, and there were gloomy stands of conifers that shrouded the homes of the gentry.

  A few hundred yards below, the sun caught the slates of Bryn-Draenog rectory and reflected back to the hill-top a parallelogram of open sky. Two buzzards were wheeling and falling in the blue air, and there were lambs and crows in a bright green field.

  In the graveyard, a woman in black was moving in and out among the headstones. Then she passed through the wicket gate and walked up the overgrown garden. She was halfway across the lawn when a little dog came bounding out to greet her, yapping and pawing at her skirt. She threw a stick into the shrubbery and the dog raced off and came back, without the stick, and pawed again at her skirt. Something seemed to stop her from entering the house.

  He raced downhill, his heel-irons clattering over the loose stones. Then he leaned over the garden fence, panting to catch his breath, and she was still standing, motionless among the laurels, with the dog lying quietly at her feet.

  ‘Oh! It’s you!’ she said as she turned to face him.

  ‘Your father,’ he stammered. ‘I’m sorry, Miss——’

  ‘I know,’ she stopped him. ‘Do please come inside.’

  He made an excuse for the mud on his boots.

  ‘Mud!’ she laughed. ‘Mud can’t dirty this house. And besides, I have to leave it.’

  She showed him into her father’s study. The room was dusty and lined with books. Outside the window, the bracts of a monkey-puzzle blocked out the sunlight. Tufts of horsehair spilled from the sofa on to a worn Turkey carpet. The desk was littered with yellowing papers and, on a revolving stand, there were Bibles and Commentaries on the Bible. On the black marble mantelpiece lay a few flint axeheads, and some bits of Roman pottery.

  She went up to the piano, snatched the contents of a vase, and threw them in the grate.

  ‘What horrible things they are!’ she said. ‘How I hate everlasting flowers!’

  She eyed him as he looked at a watercolour – of white arches, a date palm, and women with pitchers.

  ‘It’s the Pool of Bethesda,’ she said. ‘We went there. We went all over the Holy Land on our way back from India. We saw Nazareth and Bethlehem and the Sea of Galilee. We saw Jerusalem. It was my father’s dream.’

  ‘I’d like some water,’ he said.

  She led the way down a passage to the kitchen. The table was scrubbed and bare; and there was not a sign of food.

  She said, ‘To think I can’t even offer you a cup of tea!’

  Outside again in the sunlight, he saw t
hat her hair was streaked with grey, and there were crow’s-feet spreading to her cheekbones. But he liked her smile, and the brown eyes shining between long black lashes. Around her waist there curled a tight black patent leather belt. His breeder’s eye meandered from her shoulders to her hips.

  ‘And I don’t even know your name,’ she said, and stretched out her hand.

  ‘But Amos Jones is a wonderful name,’ she continued, strolling beside him to the garden gate. Then she waved and ran back to the house. The last he saw of her, she was standing in the study. The black tentacles of the monkey-puzzle, reflected in the window, seemed to hold her white face prisoner as she pressed it to the pane.

  He climbed the hill, then bounded from one grassy hummock to the next, shouting at the top of his voice: ‘Mary Latimer! Mary Jones! Mary Latimer! Mary Jones!, Mary! … Mary! … Mary …!

  Two days later he was back at the rectory with the present of a chicken he had plucked and drawn himself.

  She was waiting on the porch, in a long blue wool dress, a Kashmiri shawl round her shoulders and a cameo, of Minerva, on a brown velvet ribbon round her neck.

  ‘I missed to come yesterday,’ he said.

  ‘But I knew you’d come today.’

  She threw back her head and laughed, and the dog caught a whiff of the chicken and jumped up and down, and scratched its paws on Amos’s trousers. He pulled the chicken from his knapsack. She saw the cold pimply flesh. The smile fell from her face, and she stood rooted to the doorstep, shuddering.

  They tried to talk in the hall, but she wrung her hands and stared at the red-tiled floor, while he shifted from foot to foot and felt himself colouring from his neck to his ears.

  Both were bursting with things to say to each other. Both felt, at that moment, there was nothing more to say; that nothing would come of their meeting; that their two accents would never make one whole voice; and that they would both creep back to their shells – as if the flash of recognition in church were a trick of fate, or a temptation of the Devil to ruin them. They stammered on, and gradually their words spaced themselves into silence: their eyes did not meet as he edged out backwards and ran for the hill.

  She was hungry. That evening, she roasted the chicken and tried to force herself to eat it. After the first mouthful, she dropped her knife and fork, set the dish down for the dog and rushed upstairs to her room.

  She lay, face down on the narrow bed, sobbing into the pillow with the blue dress spread round her and the wind howling through the chimney-pots.

  Towards midnight, she thought she heard the crunch of footsteps on gravel. ‘He’s come back,’ she cried out loud, gasping with happiness, only to realize it was a rambler rose, scratching its barbs against the window. She tried counting sheep over a fence but instead of sending her to sleep the silly animals awoke another memory – of her other love, in a dusty town in India.

  He was a Eurasian – a streak of a man with syrupy eyes and a mouth full of apologies. She saw him first in the telegraph office where he worked as a clerk. Then, when the cholera took her mother and his young wife, they exchanged condolences at the Anglican Cemetery. After that, they used to meet in the evenings and take a stroll beside the sluggish river. He took her to his house and gave her tea with buffalo milk and too much sugar. He recited speeches from Shakespeare. He spoke, hopefully, of Platonic love. His little girl wore golden earrings, and her nostrils were bunged up with mucus.

  ‘Strumpet!’ her father had bellowed when the postmaster warned him of his daughter’s ‘indiscretion’. For three weeks he shut her in a stifling room, till she repented, on a diet of bread and water.

  Around two in the morning, the wind changed direction and whined in a different key. She heard a branch breaking – cra-ack! – and at the sound of splitting wood, she sat up, suddenly:

  ‘Oh my God! He’s choked on a chicken bone!’

  She groped her way downstairs. A draught blew out the candle as she opened the kitchen door. She stood shivering in the darkness. Above the screaming wind she could hear the little dog snoring steadily in his basket.

  At dawn, she looked beyond the bedrail and brooded on the Holman Hunt engraving. ‘Knock, and it shall be opened unto you,’ He had said. And had she not knocked and waved her lantern outside the cottage door? Yet, at the moment when sleep did, finally, come, the tunnel down which she had wandered seemed longer and darker than ever.

  4

  AMOS HID HIS anger. All that summer, he lost himself in work, as if to wipe away the memory of the contemptuous woman who had raised his hopes and ruined them. Often, at the thought of her grey kid gloves, he banged his fist on the lonely table.

  In the hay-making season, he went to help a farmer on the Black Hill, and met a girl called Liza Bevan.

  They would meet in the dingle, and lie under the alders. She plastered his forehead with kisses and ran her stubby fingers through his hair. But nothing he could do – or she could do – could rub away the image of Mary Latimer, puckering her eyebrows in a pained reproach. At nights – awake, alone – how he longed for her smooth white body between himself and the wall!

  One day, at the summer pony fair in Rhulen, he struck up a conversation with the shepherd who had found the rector’s body.

  ‘And the daughter?’ he asked, making a show of shrugging his shoulders.

  ‘Be leaving,’ the man said. ‘Packing up the house and all.’

  It began to rain next morning as Amos reached Bryn-Draenog. The rain washed down his cheeks and pattered on the leaves of the laurels. In the beeches round the rectory young rooks were learning to flex their wings, and their parents were flying round and round, cawing calls of encouragement. On the carriage-drive stood a tilbury. The groom waved his curry-comb at the red-headed stranger who strode into the house.

  She was in the study with a ravaged, scant-haired gentleman in pince-nez, who was leafing through a leather-bound book.

  ‘Professor Gethyn-Jones,’ she introduced him without a flicker of surprise. ‘And this is plain Mr Jones who has come to take me for a walk. Do please excuse us! Do go on with your reading!’

  The professor slurred some words through his teeth. His handshake was dry and leathery. Grey veins ran round his knuckles like roots over rocks, and his breath was foul.

  She went out and came back, her cheeks flushed, in wellington boots and an oiled drabbet cape.

  ‘A friend of Father’s,’ she whispered once they were out of earshot. ‘Now you see what I’ve suffered. And he wants me to give him the books – for nothing!’

  ‘Sell them,’ Amos said.

  They walked up a sheeptrack, in the rain. The hill was in cloud and tassels of white water came streaming out of the cloud-bank. He walked ahead, brushing aside the gorse and the bracken, and she planted her footsteps in his.

  They rested by the rocks, and then followed the old drove-road, arm in arm, talking with the ease of childhood friends. Sometimes, she strained to catch a word of his Radnor dialect. Sometimes, he asked her to repeat a phrase. But both knew, now, that the barrier between them was down.

  He spoke of his ambitions and she spoke about her fears. He wanted a wife and a farm, and sons to inherit the farm. She dreaded being dependent on her relatives, or having to go into service. She had been happy in India before her mother died. She told him about the Mission, and of the terrible days before the monsoon broke:

  ‘The heat! How we nearly died of heat!’

  ‘And I,’ he said, ‘I’d not a fire all winter but the fire in the pub where they hired me.’

  ‘Perhaps I should go back to India?’ she said, but in a tone of such uncertainty that he knew that was not what she wanted.

  The clouds broke and columns of brassy light slanted downward on to the peat bog.

  ‘Look!’ he called, pointing to a skylark above their heads, spiralling higher and higher, as if to greet the sun. ‘Lark’ll have a nest hereabouts.’

  She heard a soft crack and saw a yellow smear on the toe of
her boot.

  ‘Oh no!’ she cried. ‘Now look what I’ve done!’

  Her foot had crushed the nestful of eggs. She sat down on a tuft of grass. The tears stained her cheeks and she only stopped crying when he folded his arm around her shoulders.

  At the Mawn Pool they played ducks-and-drakes on the dark water. Black-headed gulls flew up from the reed-beds, filling the air with mournful cries. When he lifted her across a patch of bog, she felt as light and insubstantial as the drifting mist.

  Back at the rectory – as though to quieten her father’s shade – they addressed one another in cold, terse phrases. They did not disturb the professor, who was buried in the books.

  ‘Sell them!’ said Amos, as he left her on the porch.

  She nodded. She did not wave. She knew now when, and for what, he would be coming.

  He came on the Saturday afternoon, on a Welsh bay cob. At the end of a lead-rein he held a piebald gelding with a side-saddle. She called from the bedroom the second she heard the sound of hoofs. He shouted, ‘Hurry now! There’s a farm for rent on the Black Hill.’

  ‘I am hurrying,’ she called back, and flew down the banisters in a riding habit of dove-grey Indian cotton. Her straw hat was crowned with roses, and a pink satin ribbon tied under her chin.

  He had dipped into his savings to buy a new pair of boots, and she said, ‘My! What boots!’

  The scents of summer had clotted in the lanes. In the hedgerows, the honeysuckle had tangled with the dog-rose; and there were cloud-blue crane’s-bills and purple foxgloves. In the farmyards, ducks waddled out of their way; sheepdogs barked, and ganders hissed and craned their necks. He broke off a branch of elder to whisk away the horseflies.

  They passed a cottage with hollyhocks round the porch and a border ablaze with nasturtiums. An old woman in a goffered cap looked up from her knitting and croaked a few words to the travellers.