Ingenious Pain Read online

  The older children have run to the front of the house to glimpse their father coming down the lane. Now they run back into the kitchen, to the back door where they know he will enter when he has stabled the horse. After a minute they hear his boots and elbow each other to be nearest to the door. There is the sound of

  the iron latch, then the kitchen door opens and a wave of winter air sweeps across the kitchen.

  He lets the children crowd around him for a moment, then closes the door and pushes into the room. Widow Dyer ladles punch into a mug and hands it to him. She says: 'Bide by the fire, son,' and fusses him towards it. She does not ask him about the parcel beneath his arm. He sets it down with exaggerated care on the kitchen table, then drinks the punch as fast as he can bear to. The others watch him in a broken circle. He is a splinter of the outer world. From the deep half-frozen folds of his coat come odours of horse, leather, tobacco. Even the frosty, thrilling smell of the night itself.

  Sarah, no longer the youngest now the baby has come, reachs up on tiptoe and places an investigative hand upon the parcel. Liza plucks her away, scolds her. Joshua grins at the older girl. In a teasing voice he asks: 'Now, wouldn't you like a peek inside, wench?'

  Tou sold the geese then, father,' Liza says.

  He laughs and holds out his mug. 'Alius business with you, Liza. Fill this for me, then. Greetings, wife.' Elizabeth nods to him. She has picked up the baby and swaddled it in her arms. Joshua looks away at his mother. 'I got a good price for the birds.'

  Elizabeth wonders if Joshua has drunk much at market. She remembers the night, six months past, when he fell on his ride home, covering his side with plum-coloured bruises. She remembers him on the table, groaning, and not a moment's peace until Viney came with compresses and infusions.

  This year he seems himself more, but the parcel - a heavy, expensive look to it - worries her. She knows the minds of men like Joshua. Her own father was the same; happy to argue all night to fix the price of a ewe or a bushel of apples, but show him something new, something novel, and he would part with his money as though he were heir to a dukedom. No wonder the

  quacks and showmen never went without what was good. Fine mounts and fine cloth on their backs.

  She says: Tou bought something, then. Something useful.'

  Out of the corner of her eye she can see the Widow scowling at her. 'Ay,' she says, seeing her husband colour. He gives her a half-offended, half-angry look, which in the early days of their marriage might have brought an exchange of blows, and then a tumble in their new bed. Her needling sharpened their appetites then, but work, sickness, children, the constant wrestling with the weather, with animals that seemed to know only how to die, all that had worn the life out of them, so that they live only in fits now, in spasms. They hold each other's gaze a moment, then Joshua turns his back on her, pushes his hands close to the flames.

  Tood,' he says.

  The children step quietly away from him.

  He eats. The food dulls his temper. When he has finished, he wdpes the grease from his face and lights his pipe from a taper. He reaches along the table and pulls the parcel towards him, so that it sits on the table between himself and Liza. It is trapped in coarse sacking, exudes a faint distinctive odour of oily wool. He cuts the string with the knife he has been eating Mdth, pushes the parcel closer to the girl. He says: 'Tis for all of you, but as the wench has more sense and age, it's to stay with her to show you as she pleases.' To the boy he says: 'Bring that candle up, Charlie. There. Set it by her.'

  Liza, with the gravity of a child queen examining the gift of a foreign court, unfolds the sacking until she has uncovered a polished wooden box about the size of the family Bible. There is a brass catch at the front. She looks over at her father. He says: 'Open it, then, girl. It'll not open of itself

  She fumbles with the catch, frees it, opens the box, and stares in at its contents, then looks round at the others. All the faces, with the exception of her father's, show the same excited puzzlement as

  her own. Inside the box is a wooden disc, white, mounted with dehcate wires and globes of varying circumferences and colours; red and blue, one black and white, one golden, greater than the others. Around the edge of the white disc are the names of the months and pictures from the zodiac. At the side is a handle like the handle of a little coffee grinder.

  She runs her finger over the golden globe. Joshua says: 'Hot, baint it.' His face is fierce with pleasure.

  'Baint hot,' she says.

  'Hot in summer, cold in winter. All day you see 'im, but at night he's gone.' He has devised the riddle on the ride home and is well pleased with it.

  'I see it!' Elizabeth has forgotten for the moment the probable expense. She claps her hands. 'This is the sun, and this is our world . . . and this is the moon?'

  Joshua says: 'An' this is Mercury, and this Venus. Venus for love and Mercury for summat else. Turn the handle there, Liza. There, like so.' He places his hand over the girl's. 'See?'

  Cogs, the secret workings of the machine, bite and turn. The globes begin to move, each with a motion of its own, slow and stately, like bishops dancing a minuet. The children sit, bewitched, hardly breathing.

  "Tis called a horrory,' says Joshua, his voice almost a whisper: 'An' that's Greek for everything.'

  Widow Dyer nods sagely; Sarah and Charlie clamour for their turn, and in the liquid of the infant's eyes, the toy universe gently spins - the crab, the lion, the virgin - month after month, year after year.

  It is James Dyer's earliest memory.

  The kitchen is his first world. The fire jabbing at the irons, light shivering in the backs of copper pans. A cosy abattoir where creatures of the air, the field, the river are shorn and gutted and pampered for the flames. The servant, Jenny Scurl, is an alchemist of the flesh, transforming the corpse of a rabbit or the heaped, snowy carcass of a goose, her fingers thick as bottle-necks; tearing, scraping, cutting, tearing out the roots of guts and stuffing the tender hollows with onions, boiled eggs, sage, parsley, rosemary, chopped apple, chestnuts. To amuse the children she skins eels live.

  James lives in the lower regions, crawHng on the stone floor beneath the kitchen table where the shadows are haunted by thin, nameless, determined cats who sit beside him, watching feathers drift and flour shiver down, and who fight him in the war of scraps, finding him a hardier opponent than his predecessors. Unnoticed, he spends half his days there following the women's wooden heels and woollen-cased ankles beneath the sea-edge of their petticoats - to and fro, to and fro; never still.

  Later, after a score of unprotested falls, he learns to scale the kitchen chairs, sitting, his feet barely reaching to the end of the seat, soundlessly accepting the knocks and caresses, the dabs of bread or sweet pastry that come his way. Increasingly, his muteness draws the attention of the adult world. Some take him for a moon-calf, witless, and bounce him on their knees, talking to him as they would to the dog. The women coddle him for his blue eyes, for the comical gravitas of his stare. When Liza has him to herself she makes his face sticky

  with her kisses. He sits still upon her lap, remote as a spider or a star.

  Elizabeth says: 'He will change in time. Give the child time. Was Sarah not a backward, whispery sort of infant? Yet she speaks well and often enough now.' She watches James as though his first words will be a denunciation. She has put the horns on you, Joshua Dyer! Hearing some commotion in the village, she fears it is the Rough Music, the carnivals of hate that play beneath the windows of adulteresses. God forgive her, she tried a dozen times to lose the child, and it was not as if she had not lost others before their term. The last two had never gone beyond the fourth month. But this one was tenacious, bracing itself in her belly. Now, with his blue eyes, his silence loud as a huntsman's horn, he has come to shame her. The old woman, the Widow, blunt red face and ferret's eyes, her mind wringing intelligence out of the air, does not quite dare openly accuse her. She watches the boy, then settles a look on Elizabeth that needs n
o explanation.

  As the child grows, so the turn of her mind is darker. She senses the presence of darkness; a malevolent look in the eye of a ram, a branch slapping her face, a fly crawling on the white of her wrist. She remembers the stranger's hand, long and light, and the lines of a song she sang as a girl: 'The Devil is a Gen'leman, He dances very neat . . .'

  On an afternoon in the child's third year, alone with him, watching him gaze about with that quiet, empty look, as if he understood everything or nothing, she pinches him hard on his upper arm, fixes him with her nails, almost until he bleeds. When he looks at her, merely quizzical, and then looks down, calmly, at the raw, narrow ruby on his arm, she is filled with a horror of him, a nausea. But the panic passes and she is swept by waves of tenderness. How pretty he is! How absurdly sad, bolted into his silence. She hugs him and sucks the mark she has made on his

  arm, though she cannot shift it and sees it there long afterwards, memento of her shame, terror, love.

  Sometimes she is afraid that the Widow will speak to Joshua, yet they both know Joshua will believe only what he wishes to, the thing most comfortable to believe: that his wife is faithful and loves him as he loves her. Once a day he dutifully asks, 'How is it with the boy?', but he does not stay for an answer, nor does he whittle in the evenings wooden dolls and spinning-tops as has done for the others.

  Dumb beneath this canopy of adult fears, James's world expands. His mind, a room furnished with fires, cats and painted suns, now fills with the life of the farm. In hand-me-down rabbit-skin breeches he is led into the ooze of the yard, watching the hens squabble and spiders spin their webs about the hinges of wedged and unshuttable doors. He learns the smell of lime in the fields, sees the spoor of hares on the snow, listens to the threshers, their voices ghostly among the dust and shadows in the barn, old hats on their feet to save them breaking the thatching straw.

  He meets Tom Purely, the 'strawberry man' on account of a growth of pink skin from his neck. Tom takes the boy to see the pig and they find it in the orchard, a taU white pig with large ears, its breath smelling of apples and cabbage and sour milk from the dairy slops. He watches when it is slaughtered, the men flexing their hands and burning off the creature's bristle with torches of straw.

  Jenny Scurl takes him for walks in the orchard. By the hedge at the back she kisses Bob Ketch or Dan Miller or Dick Shutter. Bob Ketch squeezes her bubs and she sighs as if it made her sad. In May she puts flowers in her hair and in the boy's hair too. His hair is lighter, touched with gold in summer. His eyes, which everyone hoped would turn brown like the other children's^ stay blue. Mr Viney, stopping by one day, tells Joshua how it

  is not unheard of, one blue-eyed child among a brood, not unheard of.

  As soon as he is old enough he is moved from his parent's room to the chamber next to it. The room is small. Two flock mattresses on either side of the window, and two wooden chests for their things. There is a small fireplace in the corner, and on the wall above the girl's bed is Sarah's picture of a cow, flat and red against a flat blue sky.

  Waking in boyhood mornings, coming awake when the world outside is more night than day, this is how it is: the tap and scrape of a horseshoe, the hissed remarks of a ploughboy or horseman to Jenny as she comes from the dairy door to start the milking. Later he hears his parents. His father's boots shaking the house, his mother's whispering. Then the light of a candle inkling beneath the door, the door softly opening and the older children, Charles and Liza, swinging out their legs in rumpled nightshirts, pulling on clothes very fast, and without a word spoken following the candle downstairs.

  Later, Liza comes back, her hands scented with cream and fire-smoke and the musky-shitty smell of the animals. She scrubs them - James and Sarah - with a cloth and water she has carried from the well, searching the small folds of their faces with half-tender, half-violent movements. The day is open then. A dozen familiar voices rise out of yards and fields, calling to dogs, herding cattle, greeting neighbours. Saws and hammers and axes begin their work; a flight of doves circles out from the cote at Coverton Hall, and the poor, a dozen widows and orphans and men too sick to work, crawl from beds of straw and trudge towards the overseer's house, or stand, bow-headed, outside a neighbour's door, waiting for a dole of warm milk, a harsh word, a bite of yesterday's bread.

  In the reign of Queen Anne, Lady Denbeigh presented to the village of Yeo a modest schoolhouse. The masters are generally very young or very old, or in some manner broken down. The present incumbent, Septimus Kite, lives in two small rooms at the rear of the school. Here, between a small bed and a small table, he sleeps and eats and doses himself with laudanum. He has an assistant, a lame spinster out of the village. Miss Lucket. The money she receives, and money from the sale of her jams, keeps her, for the time being, off the parish.

  All the Dyer children have attended, as and when they could be spared from the farm. When James goes on his first day, he walks with Liza, though Liza has long since finished at the school. They walk the lane, under the hawthorn hedges where in spring the children chew the tender green. The schoolhouse, its bricks still raw beside the weathered greys of the priory walls, stands at the side of the lane. Liza presents the boy to Mr Kite. Kite stares down, grunts, says: 'This is the one who does not speak?'

  Liza says: 'Not yet, sir, though he understands very well.' 'Sit him there,' orders kite. 'I wish I had more like him.' James sits on a bench by the window. Liza puts a blood-warm baked potato into his pocket. She says: 'Do as they tell you, Jem.' He does not turn to watch her go.

  Miss Lucket, one leg three inches shorter than the other, her walk a grotesque rolling, which the children, following her down the lane to school, ape behind her back, is a kindly and dedicated teacher. Young men and women, babes in their arms, will stop

  shyly to talk to her, remind her of their names though she has not forgotten them.

  From her, James learns to shape his letters, chalk on slate. He is, in his way, an apt and able student, yet there is something about him that renders Miss Lucket uneasy. It is her boast that, within a month of a child coming to her, she has him placed, can see how he will go on with the others, how he will turn out. With James she remains as ignorant of his true character six months after his starting as she was on the morning he arrived. He is not well liked, she knows that, but the children do not tease him. The older boys think twice before making any trouble with him. There is an independence, an arrogance, out of place in a boy of six and which she did not find in his brother or sisters who are moody, impetuous, ordinary children. She has heard the rumours, of course, the pall of gossip that has hung about Elizabeth Dyer since the child's birth.

  She wonders if the boy is unhappy, and being herself a kind of expert in unhappiness she tries to draw him out with looks and little gestures of sympathy, none of which he appears to understand. His practical skills are excellent. He sews more neatly than the girls, stitches sized like midges. He draws well, which is to say he is a very neat copier of things; he never draws what is not in front of him. And stories bore him, a thing she has never known before. They seem to baffle him, such that when, during the afternoons that lie like vast blue or grey lakes over the moor, she reads from Gulliver's Travels or tells the tale of the Moonrakers or Tom Thumb, his is the one inattentive face; blank, almost moronic.

  There is one boy at the school - Peter Poundsett - a year older than James, whom every child delights in tormenting. There is nothing obviously different about him. He is neither fat nor thin; his features are regular. He is strong enough for his age, can throw a ball or jump a ditch as well as any. His father is a carpenter, his mother a baker of excellent cakes, and their house is far from being

  the meanest in the village. But the children, as if they saw on him markings such as bees see on certain flowers, markings invisible to adult eyes, twist his name into nonsense, into childish obscenities. His lunch is stolen and flung in the river. His back pelted with dung. He is accused of fornicating with far
m animals, of stealing marbles and pennies from other children, of uttering curses that make them sick. Those who hound him most mercilessly are the same as accuse him most virulently. It is the most notorious thieves who accuse him of stealing, the kickers of kicking them; and those who trap him and strip him of his breeches - a thing that occurs at least twice each winter - are the ones most likely to accuse him of precisely this offence against them. They wheedle at Miss Lucket's knee, or more daringly at Mr Kite's, in the hope of getting their victim thrashed. Often they succeed, and Peter Poundsett is stretched over a chair at the front of the class while Mr Kite works with the strap, the half-yard of seasoned leather that hangs from a nail beside Lady Denbeigh's portrait.

  James takes no part in these games, though he watches them from a distance, a small questioning frown on his face; and this Miss Lucket takes as evidence of a gentler heart. So too does Peter Poundsett who, desperate for an ally, makes eyes at James and does for love what he has never done from greed or fear; stealing titbits of food, and pennies from the box beneath his parents' bed, gifts that James accepts or refuses strictly according to whether or not he wants the thing itself. Peter Poundsett trembles with hope. His tormentors draw back.

  A month passes. The children watch. A second month, and still they hesitate. It is as if James has drawn a circle around the boy, and though the children press their toes against its edge, none of them dares step in.