Once he got up to peer out of the window, and could see the lanterns flickering small and blurred in the distance, all along the course of the river, where rescuers searched for those still lost in the swollen waters. He returned to the fire and after a while fell asleep, sweating inside his thick blanket.

  When he awoke grey daylight had come, and three other men sat like himself, hunched in blankets around the inside wall of the fire-place, their heads in their hands. Angelina was sweeping the floor of the taproom. Sylvanus was bringing more logs for the fire.

  ‘What’s the news?’ Jack asked.

  ‘They’re all accounted for now,’ said Sylvanus. ‘There’s sixteen left alive all told. Twelve of them are at home in their beds. Then there’s four of them dead, lying out there on the grass in the garden.’ He stood back from the fire and jerked his head towards the window. ‘Including our Stanley,’ he said in a flat, calm voice, and went to Angelina, who had stopped sweeping and was bent double over her broom.

  Jack put on his clothes and went outside. He was met by a cold pale glare of light, for the whole of the ham was flooded now, out as far as the eye could see, and the big sheet of water reflected the cold grey morning sky. The wind still blew strong, and the tarpaulin stack-cloth that covered the bodies was weighted at the edges with big stones. He removed three of these and turned back the stack-cloth, looking at the four dead faces revealed. Stanley Knarr. Jim Fennel. Peter Wyatt. Bevil Ames. The youngest ones. The children of promise. Each one less than half Jack’s age.

  He covered them up and put back the stones.

  ‘Why?’ Miss Philippa said harshly. ‘Why should Nenna want to see you? What comfort can you possibly offer?’ But, changing her mind, she stepped back further into the passage. ‘Very well,’ she said. ‘You’d better come in. Wipe your feet ‒ the maid has only just swept the carpet.’

  She showed him into the front parlour, a room not much used, evidently, for the heat of the fire had drawn out the damp from furniture and curtains, and it hung on the air like winter fog, filling the air with a strong smell of mildew. Nenna sat on the edge of the couch, her hands folded over a letter, her face towards the fire, though quite unwarmed by it, and still as a statue.

  ‘Mercybright has come to see you,’ Miss Philippa said, ushering him in. ‘He means well, I’m sure, so I hardly liked to turn him away.’ She remained standing close by the door.

  ‘I was there when it happened,’ Jack said to Nenna. ‘I was on the bridge with Bevil and the others. I thought I ought to tell you about it.’

  ‘Why did you let him?’ Nenna asked. ‘Why did you take him to The Bay Tree at all?’ She spoke without moving. She was still staring into the fire. ‘Why did you let him go on the bridge?’

  Jack was silent, not knowing how to answer. He stood with his fists in the pockets of his jackets, holding it tight around his loins. His clothes were still damp. He shivered inside them.

  ‘Look at that clock!’ Nenna said. ‘I would just be seeing him onto his train … We’d still be talking, Bevil and his father and his aunt and me, if you hadn’t taken him to The Bay Tree.’

  ‘I didn’t take him. Going there was his own idea. The Knarrs was giving a sort of a party.’

  ‘Couldn’t you have stopped him going on the bridge?’

  ‘It wasn’t just him. There was lots of men on it. Twenty of us altogether. How could we know it’d get washed away? Bevil was drunk. He’d been drinking pretty well all the evening. He might’ve stood a chance, otherwise.’

  ‘Who got him drunk?’ Nenna demanded, and turned to him for the first time, her eyes overflowing. ‘Who got him drunk if it wasn’t you?’

  ‘Don’t you blame me!’ Jack said fiercely. ‘Don’t you blame me for them four boys dead! I ent having that! Oh, no, not me!’

  ‘I do blame you!’ Nenna said, sobbing. ‘Why should all the young ones die and all the old ones be left alive? It’s all wrong and I do blame you! I do! I do!’

  Jack turned and walked out of the house. Miss Philippa followed him to the back door.

  ‘I told you!’ she said. ‘I told you it wouldn’t do any good ‒’

  But he was walking quickly away, determined to put the farm well behind him. He was chilled to the bone and walked without pause till he came to The Pen and Cob at Bittery, six miles upriver, where nobody knew him.

  He awoke with a smirr of small rain tickling his face, and opened his eyes to a sky that moved. He was lying on his back on an old barge, chugging along a narrow canal, with scrub willow trees at either side and yellow leaves drifting into the water.

  He got to his feet with some difficulty and limped along the deck to the stern. The bargeman and his wife were strangers to him, but seemed friendly and knew his name.

  ‘What damned canal is this?’ he asked them.

  ‘Well, it ent exactly the Grand Union, but it ent all that bad as canals go. This here’s known as the Billerton and Nazel and it links old Ennen up with the Awn.’

  ‘How did I get here?’

  ‘We picked you up at The Burraport Special. Day before yesterday. Half past noonday.’

  ‘What day is it now?’

  ‘Thursday, November the twenty-second,’ the bargeman said, filling his pipe, ‘in the Year of Grace, eighteen hundred and ninety four, though what bloody grace there might be in it I’d be hard put to say.’ He lit his pipe and flicked the match into the water. ‘You’ve been on a blinder, ent you?’ he said. ‘You don’t hardly know if it’s Christmas or Easter. You said you wanted to go to Stopford but maybe you’ve gone and changed your mind?’

  ‘I reckon I have,’ Jack said. ‘I reckon I ought to get back to Niddup.’

  ‘It’ll take you more’n a day or two, butty, but Owner George’ll see you right.’

  They put him onto the next passing barge, which carried him back to The Burraport Special. From there he travelled on a Kevelport snaker all the way to Hunsey Lock. By Friday night he was back in Niddup, and on Saturday morning he was out in the eighteen acre field at Brown Elms, singling mangolds.

  ‘So you’re back, are you, without so much as a word of explanation?’ And Miss Philippa stood on the headland behind him, her arms full of teazles and dead ferns, gathered from the banks of the Runkle Brook. ‘Did you hear me, man? I asked you a question!’

  ‘Yes, I’m back,’ he said. ‘Or someone like me.’

  ‘And what explanation have you got to offer?’

  ‘No explanation. I’m just back, that’s all.’ And he worked on without stopping. ‘Seems I’ve got a lot to catch up on.’

  ‘Do you realize how long you’ve been away? You’ve been missing from work for a whole week! And then you come sneaking back here without a word, hoping, I suppose, that your absence hadn’t even been noticed.’

  ‘I surely ent as daft as that.’

  ‘And what makes you think your job is still open? Doesn’t it occur to you that you may very likely have been replaced?’

  ‘If I’d been replaced, these here roots should ought to’ve been singled, but they ent been, have they, so just leave me be to get on with the job.’

  ‘Just look at you!’ she said, disgusted. ‘Dirty! Unshaven! Your clothes all covered in alehouse filth ‒’

  ‘Do I smell?’ he asked.

  ‘Yes, you smell like a pig in its muck!’ she said.

  ‘Keep away from me, then, and that way you won’t suffer nothing.’

  He went on steadily down the row, aware of the field stretching below him, so many steep wet muddy acres still to be hoed.

  ‘Our young Miss Nenna’s gone away,’ Oliver Lacey said to Jack. ‘She’s gone to stay with a school-friend of hers somewhere up near Brummagem. She went straight after the young man’s funeral.’

  ‘It’s a pity Miss Philippa don’t go too,’ Peter Luppitt said, swearing, ‘instead of always treading on our tails the way she does.’

  ‘Who’d pay our wages then?’ said his brother.

  ‘Yes, it’s nice to be Jack, coming and going as cool as you please, taking a holiday when he’s a mind to and nobody saying so much as an echo. How do you manage it, Jack, old butty? How does it come that you and Miss Philippa’s such close friends?’

  Jack made no answer. He walked away. He was still in a mood when too much talk made him impatient. All he wanted was to be left alone.

  Chapter Five

  Although he would not allow Nenna to blame him for Bevil’s death, he did blame himself, because now, whenever he remembered the man he had held in his arms in the water, it seemed to him it must have been Bevil.

  He saw the boy’s face all too plainly: the eyes closed and the pale lashes glistening wetly; the short upper lip drawn back a little, as though in a cry; the fair hair streaming out in the water. And as he remembered, his muscles would clench throughout his body as though now, if only he were given the chance again, he could find the strength to hold on, to bear the man up with him out of the torrent. As though now his determination would never fail.

  At other times he faced the matter with more common sense; knew he could never have saved the man in his arms; felt sure, even, that the man, had been dead already. But Bevil haunted him nevertheless. It was something he had to wrestle with. He kept himself busy to drive away the phantoms.

  He was working now on the south wall of the cottage. He had taken the old filling out of the panels, tarred the inner sides of the timbers, and was now putting in the new wattlework; four round hazel rods slotting upright into each panel, then the split rods in a close weave across. It was work he enjoyed. He was almost happy. The old cottage was gradually taking its proper shape again.

  The day was a mild one at the end of November, and the yellow leaves quitting the plum trees in the hedgerow behind him, were drifting down to brighten the ground throughout the garden. Two or three blackbirds were busy there, turning the leaves in search of grubs, and under the hedge a thrush was hammering a snail on a stone.

  ‘Poor snail,’ a voice said sadly, and Jack, looking round, found Nenna behind him. ‘How they must wish there were no such things as stones!’

  For a moment her face remained averted. She was watching the thrush. But then she looked at him directly, studying him with thought-filled eyes, as though seeking something in his expression, or reminding herself of something forgotten.

  Jack turned back to his work on the panel. He inserted a round rod into its hole in the beam above and bent it until it slotted into the groove below. He stopped and picked up a handful of split rods.

  ‘What do you want with me?’ he asked. ‘I’d have thought you’d said all you had to say to me when I saw you the last time.’

  ‘I said too much. I didn’t mean it. I’m sorry if I hurt you.’

  ‘Aye? So you’re sorry. And now you’ve got that off your conscience nicely perhaps you’ll go away and leave me alone.’

  ‘Is that what you want? Just to be left alone always?’

  ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘I like it that way. It means less trouble.’

  ‘But you must want company sometimes.’

  ‘When I do, I go out and look for it, don’t I?’

  ‘At The Bay Tree, you mean, or some other village public?’

  ‘That’s right. Why not? You walk in … you meet a few folk and chat with them … and when you’ve had enough you walk out again with no offence on either side.’

  ‘And is that all you ever want from life?’

  ‘It’s quite enough, just to keep me going. I’m past the age of worrying overmuch about anything.’

  ‘You talk as though you were an old man.’

  ‘I am an old man! You said so yourself.’ And he rounded on her. ‘It’s what you called me, don’t you remember? ‒ The young ones all drowned. The old ones left alive. ‒ That’s what you said if I ent much mistaken.’

  Meeting his gaze, her eyes were suddenly filled with tears, and he relented. She was too much a child to be punished for words spoken at such a time.

  ‘Ah, never mind!’ he said roughly. ‘Never mind what you said! It was true, anyway, every word.’ He took a split rod out of the bundle and went on working, weaving it in between the uprights. ‘I’m a man of thirty-seven with a gammy leg and more than half his life behind him. Of course you’d gladly swap me for Bevil, just as the Knarrs would swap me for Stanley. The trouble is, life ent arranged so’s we can make bargains over this and that, and I can’t pretend I wish myself dead, poor specimen though I may be.’

  There was no answer, and when he turned round he found he was talking to himself. Nenna had gone. His only companion was a cock blackbird still pecking about among the yellowing leaves.

  She was back, however, the following Sunday, feeding crusts of bread to Shiner and hanging a necklace of bryony berries round his rough neck.

  Jack was at the top of his ladder, up against the south wall, and saw her making a fuss of the horse in the orchard. He felt impatient, wishing she would keep away. He had nothing against her ‒ she was just a child ‒ but her presence there was an irritation; he felt she was making some claim upon him; asking for comfort he could not give. He dipped his trowel into his bucket and slapped the wet clay onto the wattle.

  A little while later, going to the pump for more water, he found her looking at the old stone trough, where Bevil had scratched her initials and his own.

  ‘Why do you come,’ he asked, wearily, ‘when everything here is bound to make you sad?’

  ‘I don’t know … I can’t help it, somehow … I suppose, when sadness is all you’ve got left in the world, it becomes almost precious in a way.’

  ‘That’s morbid,’ he said. ‘It ent healthy.’

  ‘I get lonely at home. I get so tired of listening to Philippa grumbling all the time. And I can’t go to The Bay Tree, can I?’

  ‘You ought to have friends. Young folk of your own age. Your own sort, not people like me. Miss Philippa ought to see about it.’

  ‘We never have company up at the house, except John Tuller of Maryhope, and the old Barton ladies now and then. Philippa doesn’t much care for having people visit the house. Anyway, I like coming here, because I can talk to you about Bevil.’

  ‘What is there to say?’

  ‘I don’t know ‒ just things,’ she said. ‘I think of those evenings we had round your fire and all the talk we had together … Bevil liked you. It makes a link. And then I don’t feel quite so lonely.’

  ‘I don’t think it’s right, all the same. You’re a lot too young to dwell on the past.’

  ‘I shall never marry, if that’s what you’re thinking.’

  ‘Yes, you will,’ he said, gently. ‘One day you will. You mark my words. You’ll meet some young chap and learn to love him and then you’ll get married and raise a few children. All in good time. You’ll see.’

  ‘No,’ she said, shaking her head. ‘I shall never marry.’

  ‘All right, have it your own way, but I must get a move on before my clay dries out again.’

  ‘Do you mind if I stay and watch you?’

  ‘Please yourself. It’s no odds to me. After all, you used to come to this old cottage long before I happened along, so what right have I to turn you off?’

  ‘Is there anything I can do?’

  ‘Ah. Maybe there is. You can chop up that straw on the block there. Little bits, about half an inch long. But mind you don’t go chopping your fingers. I sharpened that hatchet only this morning.’

  She came often after that, and one Sunday she brought him the deeds of the cottage to look at, having taken them secretly out of the safe in Miss Philippa’s office. Jack had difficulty in reading the old, faded, elaborate writing. Nenna had to read it to him.

  ‘It was built in sixteen hundred and one, by a man named Thomas Benjamin Hayward, and was known in those days as New Farm, Upper Runkle, near the township of Niddup-on-Ennen. The farm was then about two hundred acres. Mr Thomas Hayward is described as a yeoman, and the house is described as a “handsome new dwelling house of two bays with a fifteen foot outshot standing at the south western boundary of the holding”.’

  ‘So it is handsome,’ Jack said. ‘It’s a lot more handsome than the big new house you live in up there.’

  ‘Three hundred years,’ Nenna said, looking up at the cottage. ‘I wonder what people were like then.’

  ‘Not all that different, I shouldn’t think. What’s three hundred years under the sun? ‒ Nothing much more than a snap of your fingers. And if you picture six old grannies, hand in hand across the years, it brings it all up pretty well as close as close, I reckon.’

  ‘Why grannies? What about all the grandfathers?’

  ‘Oh, they will have played their part I daresay. But in my particular bit of experience, it was always the grannies that mattered most. My parents died when I was a babby. She was only a little hob of a woman, and us five boys was great big slummocking ruffians nearly twice her size, but if we done wrong, which happened often one way and another, she would put on a pair of heavy hobnailed boots and kick us round the kitchen till we howled for mercy.’

  ‘Rough measures,’ Nenna said.

  ‘They worked well enough. We had great respect for my grannie’s boots, specially when her feet was in them.’

  ‘But wasn’t there any tenderness at all?’

  ‘No. None. Just a feeling that we mattered, that’s all. And I never had the feeling again, not after she’d gone.’

  ‘What happened to her?’

  ‘She died when I was about eleven. My brothers went off ‒ emigrated ‒ and I was put in an orphanage. I didn’t care for it over much. I ran away after three months or so.’

  ‘And you’ve been on the move ever since?’

  ‘I suppose I have. It must’ve got to be a habit.’

 

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