Ingenious Pain Read online

  James orders his rum, turns down an offer to join in the dominoes, and sits by himself at one of the other tables. The girl - for at fourteen or fifteen, despite her condition, it is hard to call her anything else - brings him his glass, wipes the table with a beer-damp cloth, and sets the glass in front of him. He asks her how she goes on, glancing at her great belly which seems on the verge of overwhelming her. Avoiding his eyes, she says: 'Right enough.'

  *You shall be brought to bed of it soon, Sally. You are not afraid?'

  *I shall be glad to be rid of it, sir.'

  'Who shall attend you?'

  'Mother Grayley.'

  'She has much experience,' says James, silently appalled that a woman known as a hard drinker and with a regiment of dead infants to her credit should be called upon by anyone other than the devil. This must be Caxton's wish.

  'Simple is best, Sally. You are young. No need to go dosing yourself with nostrums and the like.'

  The girl whispers her thank yous, hurries off. James takes up his glass and drinks. This brief interview with Sally, and the sight of her father, sHck and loutish, even of the farmers hunched over their Httle rectangles, a pile of grubby coins in the centre of the table, all of it depresses him. There is no real happiness here; little even of hope. In the girl's vulnerabiHty and in the hardness of the men there are equal measures of dogged suffering; and though some suffering is earned, some pain doubtless a kind of nemesis, what comfort, what satisfaction is there in that? All pain is real enough to those who have it; all stand equally in need of compassion. God knows he craves it for himself.

  The door opens; he looks up. A man of such size it appears he has been made from the material for two men, a man with black skin - or is it brown, or in fact a kind of grey, like night over snow? - enters the little room like an adult entering a house of children. Stooped under the beams, he shuffles in decayed crimson shppers towards Caxton. He holds out a small jug, a cream jug, and whispers in a voice like the soft raking of coals, a single word:

  'Gin.'

  'Gin?'

  The black man nods, points delicately at the jug. Caxton takes the jug and hands it to his daughter, who goes with it into the back room to fill. The black man reaches into the pocket of his short jacket, takes out a purse and shakes a sixpence into his open palm.

  Thinks James: You could hide a cricket ball in such a hand. How stiff the fingers are, like an old man's. Still powerful, though.

  The Negro receives his jug from Sally, thanks her and waits for his change from Caxton until, seeing he is to get none, he nods wearily and shuffles back to the door. The door swings shut. For two, three seconds, there is nothing but the erratic rhythm of the fire, then the farmers chatter excitedly, each telling the other what he saw, as if each were the sole witness of this marvellous encounter. Caxton is congratulated on cheating the stranger. A farmer warns him he will be eaten in the black man's cooking-pot. Roars of laughter. Another, turning to James, asks if a Negro is made the same as a white man, if perhaps their bones are black like their skin. 'No,' says James, feeling now an overwhelming desire to quit the place, 'they are made as we are.'

  'I hear tell their seed is black - beggin' yer pardon, Sally.'

  'I cannot say.'

  'And what of their hearts,' enquires Caxton. 'Are they black?'

  James says: 'No more than yours, sir, or mine.'

  To James's irritation the remark is mistaken for humour and he is forced to leave to a chorus of cheery farewells. I fail, he thinks, stepping cautiously on to the icy road, even in conveying my contempt.

  He clears his mind with a dozen deep draughts of cold air, thinks of the morrow, trusts it will be another brilliant, fiery day, another with air like champagne. He grins, remembering the Reverend's sudden vigour of the morning. A man must make a quiet store of such mornings, hoard them against more desperate times. If tomorrow is fine perhaps I shall take out my ink and paper, up to Lady Hallam's place, and do that little temple by the water there.

  He has begun to sketch it in his head when the sound of iron-shod wheels bouncing over the road behind him makes him step on to the greensward. For some minutes the cart exists only

  as a collection of noises; the groaning of axles, the crazed timpany of rattling pots and pans; squeaky, inebriated singing. Finally, he discerns the vehicle's form, a covered one-horse wagon, swaying down the hill from Cow. Coming up by James, the voice ceases to sing and calls out: 'Who goes there? Are you a Christian or what are you?'

  Says James: 'You have nothing to fear from me.'

  He is able now, beneath the soft halo of starlight, to see two figures, one very small, sized as a child, yet clearly, from her tone, and from the clouds of gin that wrap her words, not a child. The other is the Negro from Caxton's place.

  'Not decent, creeping 'bout in the 'edgerow this time a night,' says the woman, then, in the space of a breath, her voice fills with honey. 'Ain't you got nowhere to go, then? Poor bleeder. Cam 'e stop wi' us, John? He ain't got nowheres to sleep.'

  'Hush,' says the Negro.

  James says: 'Your offer is a kind one but I have a roof and a bed a short walk from here.'

  'Well, that's all right, then. Get 'er goin', John.'

  John clucks his tongue, the horse takes up the strain, and the wagon rolls forward, trailing its thin ribbon of song behind it.

  'Wouldyatastethemoontideair. . . toyourfragrantbowerrepair. . . wherewovenwiththepoplarbough . . . themantlingvineshallshelter-you . . .'

  James sleeps with Mary, finds her between his sheets when, candleless, he feels his way to his room. He climbs in behind her, his chest to her back. His leg aches like the devil but it does not worry him. He knows he will sleep, inhaling her skin as if it were one of his narcotic sponges. He kisses her shoulder in greeting, also in farewell, for she will have returned to her own small room while he is still sleeping and long before any of the household stirs.

  In the next chamber, the Reverend is sitting, in his dreams, naked and perfectly companionable with Lady Hallam over a hand of cards. Dido dreams of a man, tenderly sucking the blood from her elbow. James dreams of a cherry tree large as a house and of looking down through the flaked green flesh of its leaves to where the Negro, dressed in cherry silks and satins, holds up his arms to catch him.

  THIRD

  The winter of 1739 is the worst in living memory: a bitter, petrifying season that grips the country like a biblical revenge, beautiful and murderous. On the Ouse at York, on the frozen Thames, presses are dragged on to the ice to print news of the ice-world, as though from a freshly minted kingdom, suddenly and miraculously overlaying the old. In the cellars, wine and beer choke their barrels; cattle are found rigid in their stalls at dawn; strange lights are seen. The darkness crackles. Crows and other birds fall stiff as ornaments from the open sky. Driving, bone-infesting cold gathers the poor, the very young, the old, the sickly. Infants are buried beside hooped grandmothers and veterans of Blenheim. The gravedigger's heart-faced shovel rings like an axe on iron, and graves are so shallow there is talk in western villages of grave-robbers, until a pack of dogs tearing at the boards of a pauper's coffin in the yard at Kenn are shot at by the watchman.

  In Blind Yeo, a village that has dawdled from the grey walls of a medieval priory, and now, in the thirteenth year of the reign of King George II, straddles the road from Bristol to Coverton like a set of poor teeth clenched on a strap, little is moving save blue smoke uncoiling from thatched or slated roofs, and a few figures out of doors, hugging themselves in long

  coats, stumbling over ruts, each footfall audible in the glassy air, each breath visible.

  Tw^ilight comes hard on second milking, light seeping from the windows of farmhouses and cottages.

  Behind the village a hill-fort rises island-like above the moors. From there, an observer, stamping his boots for warmth, might assume the day was all used up, and that the village would slide into the long night like a launch slipping into black water. But by the bank o
f the river there is a gleam of light, then two more, then a dozen, and with them voices, cries of 'Clear the way!', and the grating, swishing, unmistakable hiss of skates.

  The skaters hang their lanterns from the lower branches of the trees. The trees arch, black and shiny, over the frozen river. A party, fifteen or twenty strong, glides over the illuminated ice. Some gracefully, propelling themselves with flicks of the trailing skate, hands clasped behind their backs, bodies leaning forward into the icy tunnels of their own progress. Others are hunched as if preparing to catch an enormous ball, or wave their arms like women folding sheets on a windy morning. Certain heads regularly disappear from view. There are shouts, amiable and neighbourly, shouts of 'Dammeyejohn!' and 'HoldfarstAlice!' - and laughter, high and drunken.

  A moon, tight as a fist, is planted in the west above the estuary. Dogs all over the moor, in farmyards where the muck glitters like diamonds, bay at its brilliance. Even the beagles of Coverton Hall press together blindly in their kennels, a velvety mass, and howl. The skaters are touched by it too: midwinter madness; the year's seductive zero.

  A bottle smashes on the ice. A figure drags himself to the bank. 'Zatyoujoshua?' The figure leans back against the base of an alder, nods his head and vomits a stream of warm cider between his knees. A young woman with a shawl tight about her shoulders draws up

  on the ice beside him. She says: 'You're mistaken if you think I shall carry you home. Useless man!'

  He ignores her. The voice is scolding, but there is a bubble of hilarity in it, and when a second woman sweeps by and catches her arm, she lets herself be taken.

  The air is set ringing from the single high note of a fiddle. A cheer goes up, and the fiddler, an old man, his skull wrapped in a woollen sling, begins a medley of dance tunes, music as familiar to them as the sounds of their own voices - 'Get Her Bo', 'Jumping John', 'Joyful Days Are Coming'. The skaters, sweating in the polar air, dance and fall and clutch at each other with new strength. More come, easing themselves down the bank on to the ice. There is no fear the ice will break. It is hard as bone.

  The fiddle stops. The dancers stop, their breath like gauze masks as they look up. Shooting stars! Above Pigs' Green, above Ladyfield; a first, then a second burst. A dozen arms reach up, pointing. The dogs, suspicious of the sudden quiet, fall silent.

  Elizabeth Dyer is on her skates by the bank in a block of darkness ten yards beyond the edge of the lantern light. She is twenty-nine, mother of three children, wife of the yeoman, Joshua Dyer. The skates she wears she has had since she was fourteen. Recently she has suffered from indefinable sorrows. Tonight the sky draws a tide of blood through her, so strong she feels in danger of floating up, disappearing over the rooftops of the village.

  From behind her comes a soft, granulous footfall; she does not turn to see who it is, and when a hand - not her husband's hand, not any farmer's hand, but a hand long and light and smooth -slips beneath her shawl and presses her breast, she remains looking up, though the stars have flickered out and the sky has resumed its stillness. In his haste, the stranger loses his balance; he slips and drags them both down on to the ice, his weight on top of her, knocking the wind out of her. They writhe in a heap, yet neither tries to stand. Her skirts are up. She knows she has the

  strength to fight him, to fling him off her. Instead, she gropes towards the bank, scrabbhng until she catches hold of a root, cold as brass, and clutches it with both hands, anchoring them, her and the stranger, like some clumsy vessel wallowing off a black coast. He hangs from the bones of her hips, jabs several times before he succeeds in entering her. It is over in seconds: a half-dozen thrusts; the dig of his nails; his breath hissing between his teeth. Then he drifts away from her, her shifts and petticoats and gown falling like curtains.

  She remains there long enough, her knuckles numb around the tree-root, to be sure that he has gone. Her body is trembling a little; she has a sharp vision of a man making his escape between hedges of fine lace, across hard, empty fields. She is amazed at her calmness. The risk has been huge and senseless. She cannot explain it. She eases herself up, touches the back of her dress, pulls her shawl tight about her shoulders and skates back towards the lights. The fiddler is playing again, jigging clumsily on the bank. A woman friend takes her arm, skates at her side a moment.

  'Don't this air make your skin smart, girl?'

  It does, Martha, it does.'

  'You won't have no trouble from your Joshua tonight.'

  'No, Martha, I think not,' and Elizabeth skates free, feeling as she goes a lick of the man's seed, already cold, on the inside of her thigh.

  The child is born in September, in a room hot with fire and the breath of women. The women crowd around the bed. Mrs Llewellyn, Mrs Phillips, Mrs Rivers, Mrs

  Martha BeU. Mrs CoUins from Yatton, Mrs Gwyny Jones from Failand and Joshua's mother, the Widow Dyer, who fiUs her nostrils with Virginia snuff and looks over the midwife's shoulder The midwife is sweating out her gin. She has not had a mother die on her for almost a year, but she wiU not answer for this one The infant won't emerge. It has been hours now, though she can feel the crown of its head, the wisps of sopping hair, like weeds in the river.

  Elizabeth Dyer is growing weaker. Her lips are pale, the skin grey around her eyes. The midwife has seen it often enough, how they pass beyond you, no more screaming, turn their faces to the waU. Another hour or two, then, God wiUing, mother or infant wiU be dead; then nothing more will be expected of her. Perhaps the child is dead already.

  Liza Dyer, nine years old, stands, caught between the curves of the women's dresses, looking on. She holds the fingers of one hand in the fingers of the other. Her face reveals a normal terror 1 he others note it, remembering their own initiations at the side of birth-beds and death-beds.

  Mrs Gwyny Jones whispers: 'Should Mr Viney not be sent tor?

  Widow Dyer says: We have no need of a man in here ' Such exhaustion! Elizabeth cannot think what it is Uke, cannot imagine words for it. Her belly is frozen. The child, a bung of ice IS kiUing her. A cold salt sweat burns her eyes, streams off her taut s^n, soaking the mattress. How will Joshua survive without her> Who will love the children as she does? Who wiU make the good butter? Who will rear the lambs of dead ewes or stitch shirts until eyes and fingers ache? She can remember no prayers, not one. Her head IS empty. A voice is nagging her, teUing her to push, push for aU life. How cruel they are to make her suffer so! She screams; a vast sound, josthng the women, rocking them, all save the Widow the most rooted. Liza is blown on to the floor, felled as though stmck

  between the eyes with a poker. Mrs Collins pulls her up. No one suggests the girl might leave.

  The midwife cries: It comes!'

  Traise be,' says Gwyny Jones. She strokes her heart; a reflex of

  joy-

  The midwife rakes the infant out, grips its slithery ankles in her fist and holds it up. It is dressed, head to toe, in blood, and hangs limply from the woman's hand.

  Says Widow Dyer: 'Is it quick?'

  The midwife shakes it; the infant moves its arms and hands, a blind swimmer, an old blind man feeling for the door. It does not cry. It is silent. The women cock their heads. Silent. Liza reaches out. The midwife cuts the cord with enormous rusty scissors.

  It is baptised three days later. Joshua, the Widow, Liza, and Farmer Moody, who is to be godfather, attend at the church. Elizabeth is too weak to leave her bed. Milk seeps from her nipples, undrunk. A wet-nurse feeds the child, a woman with skin like a shark.

  Though it is the middle of the afternoon, the church is so dark they can barely see each other. The child is not expected to live. Widow Dyer has persuaded them so. No healthy child could be so unnatural, not to make a sound in three days. Sleeps, wakes, feeds; does not cry, not once. It has a dozen curls of silk-black hair on its head. Its eyes are baby blue. Widow Dyer says it is best if it dies.

  The priest comes late from his lunch, expels, discreetly as he can, the gas from his stomach, takes the child, as
ks Moody if he abjures

  the work of Satan, and gives the child its names: James Dyer. One given name quite enough for such a sickly thing, and less work for the mason.

  There is no water in the font. The priest spits in his hand and makes the cross on the child's brow, feels it stirring, then passes it to the girl. Joshua Dyer fumbles in his purse, puts the money in the priest's hands, nods solemnly, awkwardly. They trudge home through the scraped fields, Liza hugging the baby tight against her ribs.

  From inside the house they hear the sound of his horse in the lane. Liza runs to the window. Widow Dyer looks up from her darning, hoists her bulk upright and bustles to the fire. There is a poker dug into the heart of the fire. Elizabeth says: 'Nay, let me, Willa,' but the older woman ignores her, draws the poker out, protecting her hand with a piece of scorched cloth. There is a bowl of punch set ready by the fire. She presses the tip of the poker into the liquid so that it hisses fiercely. The noise wakes the baby. It has been sleeping on a quilt in the kneading-trough. It looks at the fat woman by the fire, looks at her dipping her finger into the punch, then breaking off a piece of sugar loaf and mixing it in. The Widow says: 'He alius liked things sweet. Is his food ready? He'll be leery after the market all day.'