The Wild Cherry Tree Read online

  ‘It’s treason!’ Miss Parkinson said. ‘It’s lower than kidnapping! It’s downright treachery.’

  Well, there it was. You couldn’t very well look a gift horse in the mouth, could you?

  ‘Her breath would probably strike you dead if you did!’

  Halibut started to say that sometimes he felt proper sorry for the old bit. Blind as a bat and shaking all over. He hadn’t the heart to let her down.

  ‘She’s sinister, that’s what she is. She pretends she can’t see but all the time her eyes are ten times as sharp as her ears and by George that’s saying something.’

  ‘Well, I don’t know about that, but I’m prit near dead broke meself. She was going to pay me yesterday but she couldn’t find her purse.’

  ‘Typical mean trick! She buys you off and then can’t find her purse. The plain fact is you probably never will see the colour of her money.’

  Then he would be down the course. He never would get the ruddy hooks. Or the trout. That’s if she still wanted them.

  ‘Of course I still want them. Well, I suppose there’s nothing for it but to match her offer. Seven shillings an hour – only two years ago it used to be three. I’ll be dead broke too.’

  Well, everybody had got to live, Halibut said. Everything was going up all the time. Grub, bacca, beer –

  At the mention of beer Miss Parkinson seemed suddenly to relent. Almost as if ashamed of her outburst and partly as if afraid that Halibut might think her mean she said she understood perfectly how it was. Hastily she poured out more beer and said:

  ‘But you will try hard for the trout, won’t you?’

  ‘It’s a thing you got to be very cunning about, this trout lark. Know what I mean? You don’t want to git me nabbed, do you?’

  Oh! no, no. She certainly didn’t want to get him nabbed, Miss Parkinson said. That would be dreadful. She earnestly begged him to help himself to more beer while she went into the house to find her own purse.

  While she had gone Halibut totted out the rest of the beer and finished up the last of the bread and cheese. It was going to be a stifling afternoon, he thought. There wouldn’t be much on the feed yet awhile. Still it would give him all the more time to get the hooks and the gentles.

  When Miss Parkinson finally came back she was carrying a brown paper bag.

  ‘I thought you might care for a few apples. There are such masses this year. These are the Pearmains. I tucked the dead horse in with them too.’

  Halibut slowly dragged himself out of the wheelbarrow, grunting deep thanks. He betted they’d taste like apples too. Not like some of the muck you got in shops nowadays. All colour and tasting like flannel.

  ‘I refuse to eat them. It’s the synthetic curse again, as I say. But thank Heaven there are still one or two of us who know the real thing.’

  She looked at him almost fondly. She might have been about to call him a kindred spirit. Instead she said:

  ‘Well, I shall keep my fingers crossed. What time do you think I might expect you? – that’s if you have any luck.’

  What time did she get up of a morning? Halibut said.

  ‘Oh! six. Never later.’

  That was it then, Halibut said. He’d be round at crack of dawn.

  He walked slowly down the lane, carrying his jacket in one hand and the apples and the dead horse in the other. By the little river the shade of a row of alders was dark and deep and the air struck almost cold.

  He lay down on the grass, by the waterside, his head on his folded jacket, and looked at the sky burning in bright blue scraps above the leaves. A ripple of water running over stones was the only sound to break the air. There was no doubt about it, he thought, as he closed his eyes, Miss Parkinson was right about Nature. There was nothing like Nature.

  It was too hot for fishing, though. He’d have to give the trout a good few hours yet, prit near till dark, he thought. Or would they bite just as well in the morning?

  Well, he’d have a bit of a kip in the meantime anyway. And then later perhaps, when it cooled off a bit, he might call and see Miss McIntyre.

  She was always good for a bob or two. And you never knew, he might even get her up to seven bob an hour. It was always worth a try.

  The Wild Cherry Tree

  While traffic on the six-track motorway scoured its passage across the valley, a procession of metallic beetles flashing chromium eyes by day and white hot feelers of light by night, the Boormans lived out their lives on a pig-farm, on the raw edge of a grey-white crack, almost a culvert, in the chalk hills above. It was sometimes difficult to tell, especially in the short, mud-dark days of winter, who were the Boormans and who the pigs.

  Difficult, that is, with one exception: Mrs Boorman.

  Every morning, as she slopped out of the house into the mouldering filth of the pig-yard, always ahead by an hour or more of Boorman and their five lumbering sons, she looked in fact less like a pig than a shabby, straddling scarecrow. Big, mud-caked gum-boots concealed whatever shape her legs had. A long sack-cloth apron shrouded her body into a flatness that might have been masculine. A wide grey felt trilby, tied under her chin, with a black fraying woollen scarf, concealed completely the colour of her hair and shaded the entire area of her face so fully that the eyes had no colour at all. And as if she were actually afraid of revealing any part of herself that might have given away the fact that she was a woman she wore, winter and summer, a vast pair of old leather driving gloves, so dark with dirt and use that they might have been perennially soaked in pig dung.

  In this disguise there was no saying how old she was. Except that she walked with a rapid, springing step she might have been an ancient hag, timeless and tough as an oak, out of some equally timeless saga of a lost and distant peasantry. She was in fact forty-five. Her sons, if not actually born all at once, in a litter, had come to her in such rapid succession and they now looked so much alike, in gross shabbiness, that they might in fact have been a litter. Life with pigs had made them pig-like, sleepy, slobbering carcasses wallowing their way about the stinking clutter of surrounding sties and shacks and yards.

  At one time a thick triangular copse had covered part of the hillside. Now generation after generation of pigs had rootled it into a churned morass of mud and stumps that resembled more than anything else a battlefield strewn with the fat corpses of the slain.

  There were seven or eight acres of this grotesque desolation, made still more desolate in spring-time by the stubborn survival of a single wild cherry tree, tall above the scores of stumpy hazels, its white-flowered branches like some graceful and pointless flag of surrender long since forgotten. There were never less than a hundred and fifty pigs rootling at the churned earth and of these Mrs Boorman constantly cherished and nurtured twenty-five or thirty of her own.

  This constant brood was her second family, a means for the bestowal of unspoken affection and above all a means to money of her own. From litter after litter she chose some ailing piglet, the dillin, the odd-one-out, and cosseted it with warmth and tenderness and teated milk bottle until it gained strength and, in the fullness of time, bore litters of its own.

  Regularly she drove an old Ford truck into market, a dozen porkers netted in the back, bargained a fair deal for them and then, for the rest of the day, went on the strangest shopping sprees with the greater part of the money.

  As jackdaws are supposed to hoard objects of useless brilliance and some women jewellery of equally useless beauty, Mrs Boorman hoarded clothes: not merely clothes consistent with her class or even clothes to wear or display, but clothes simply to hide and hoard, secretly. Nor were they ordinary clothes. With an infinite display of taste she bought everything from matching purple underwear to jumpers of dazzling gold, savage vermilion and tropical emerald, from dinner gowns of tulip sheen to fur wraps of silver mink, from hats of delicate sauciness to high-heeled shoes of exquisite elegance, all with jewellery, powder and perfume to match. Out of a life utterly deprived of colour she reached out with a so
rt of primitive thirst and snatched at things rich, expensive, dazzling.

  All these, like a secretive squirrel, she took home and stored in a vast oak bedroom wardrobe, promptly locking it up and hanging the key, tied to a piece of string, round her neck.

  Then, every night, after Boorman and the five pig-like sons had gone off on some lumbering spree of their own, beer-swilling, playing bingo or darts or scoffing fish and chips with girls at cinemas, she emerged from her sackcloth into her own world of elegant adventure. She first locked the doors of the house, then boiled a three gallon saucepan of water and carried it upstairs. The house had no bathroom but she filled a big galvanised bath with water, then stripped completely naked, stood in it and started to wash herself down.

  Her long bare figure, untrammelled by sackcloth, gum-boots and flabby trilby, now stood free in remarkable revelation. Hard, incessant work had made her muscular but also supple and spare. Her breasts, with their rather large rose-brown nipples, were so gaceful and firm-standing that they might have belonged to a woman twenty years younger.

  Her skin, of a curious smoky olive shade, was clean and smooth, without a blemish. The hair that could never be seen under the squashy trilby except when windy days blew the hat an inch or two off her face, was a deep coffee brown, without a trace of grey.

  But if all this was both startling and unexpected she showed, in her nakedness, a still more remarkable touch of revelation. The eyes were suddenly revealed as exceptional in colour: not of the same deep brown in harmony with her hair but a very pure, clear, limpid blue. This colour succeeded in giving to her entire face a look of extraordinary innocence curiously combined with guilt. It was almost as if she were ashamed of what she was doing while being sensuously and marvellously thrilled in doing it. She might have been taking part in a clandestine act of love with a lover perpetually kept in hiding by day and brought out every night to join her moment of furtive and miraculous wonder.

  When she finally dressed she did so unhurriedly, tasting the successive stages of it languidly, savouring the whole affair as if relishing exotic food. In the earlier part of it all she would pause to caress and uplift her breasts with fingers that were revealed as exceptionally long and, thanks to the eternal protection of driving gloves, remarkably well kept. Before putting on a dress – she had a great taste for long ones of rather flowing design, wideskirted and sown with sequins – she spent a long time brushing her hair. When this was finished she spent an even longer time choosing the earrings, necklace and bracelets she would wear. And then finally the fur coat.

  All this took her two hours or so. When she was finally ready it never appeared to disturb her, or to seem ridiculous, that she had no one to see her and nowhere to go. She had no desire to be seen, nor was there anywhere to go except into the sludge of the pig-yard.

  Not, in fact, for many years: until at last, unaccountably attracted by an April evening of exceptional warmth after a day that had dried out even the pig-yard into a crust resembling brown concrete, she broke her long habit of admiring herself in secrecy.

  Dressed in a light summer frock of a rich shade of apricot, rather low at the neck, with hat, gloves and shoes to match, she went out to look, for a few moments, at the wild cherry tree.

  It too was in flower.

  She had been standing there for five minutes or more, breathing the dry warm April air, the first tolerable breath of spring, when she heard a car coming up the hillside. Her first thought was of Boorman and the sons and she instantly turned in the act of running back to the house, in fear of being caught like a child in a guilty act.

  Before she had moved five yards the car, a dark green Cortina, stopped. A voice called from it, ‘Excuse me, madam’ and involuntarily she stopped very sharply, halted as much by the word ‘madam’ as by the politeness of the voice.

  She turned to see a man of about her own age, bareheaded, slightly grey at the side of the temples, looking out of the car window with something more than polite interest. The vivid discovery of her on that chunk of sordid landscape kept him completely speechless for another half minute or so and then slowly he gave an apologetic awkward sort of smile.

  ‘Did I scare you? I’m sorry.’ He laughed, awkwardly too. ‘Could you direct me to the Williamson house?’

  Suddenly she realised that she was actually clutching herself with both arms, almost in the act of trying to hide herself and abruptly she dropped her arms to her sides, woodenly, so that she stood there something like a clockwork doll that for some reason wouldn’t work properly.

  ‘I think it’s called Beechers House or something like that.’

  ‘Oh! no. Beechers, that’s not this way. That’s the next road. The one farther along.’

  She lifted one hand and it might have been stiff with fright as she started to point westward along the hillside.

  ‘Stupid of me. I thought I knew these Downs better than that.’ He stared at the pig-sties, the shacks, the incredible desolation of pigs and pig-muck drying in the serene evening sun. ‘But things seemed to have changed a bit up here.’

  Her arm fell as if severed. It was her turn to be speechless now and there was an awkward silence of several seconds before he said:

  ‘I used to come up here as a boy. Gathering wild strawberries.’ He cast a hand at the air. ‘It used to be full of flowers. Masses of them everywhere.’

  He stopped, stared again at the incongruous sight of her standing there in the apricot dress against the slum background of pigs and the tall white-flowered branches of the wild cherry tree, all the time as if he couldn’t believe his eyes, and then said:

  ‘Do you live up here yourself?’

  ‘Yes.’

  He looked with calm sideways distaste at the house, half of its tiled roof replaced by rusting corrugated iron, with an attendant stack of sacks of pig-meal and a pile of old oil drums piled against one end of it as if propping it up.

  ‘But not in that, I need hardly ask.’

  Instinctively and frantically she began lying. In oppressed confusion her mind, not her body, started trembling.

  ‘Oh! no,’ she said. ‘Oh! no.’

  ‘Greatly relieved to hear it. Somehow couldn’t imagine you as part of the pig world.’

  To her astonishment she found herself laughing, nervously, the laugh an echo of her trembling brain.

  ‘Oh! no. I live farther up. Over the top. You can’t see it from here.’

  Her nervousness was now so visibly strained that she actually began to pull off her gloves. As first one and then the other came off he couldn’t fail to notice her long, well-kept hands.

  ‘Well, I think I’ll get along now,’ she said. ‘I was just walking back.’

  Among other things he had been staring at the cherry tree. Its spring delicacy was still another part of the monstrous incongruity of the entire scene and now he suddenly saw how beautiful it was. It reminded him so much of the old days, when it was all as beautiful as that, all untouched.

  ‘Do you mind if I walk part of the way up with you?’

  In something near to panic she started biting the finger tip of her gloves. In fear of saying anything that would compromise herself her mind separated itself from her lips, so that what she actually said was not part of herself.

  ‘Well, I’m expecting my husband. I was waiting. He may be here any moment.’

  He suddenly found himself interpreting her continued open nervousness as a sort of innocence, perhaps a fear that he might behave improperly. He laughed, pleasantly this time, and said:

  ‘Oh! I assure you I’m perfectly respectably married too.’

  ‘Oh! I didn’t mean anything like that.’

  He now got out of the car, stared up the hillside and said:

  ‘That cherry tree’s marvellous.’

  ‘Yes, it’s nice.’

  ‘It’s a complete spring in itself.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Bird cherry they call it too, sometimes, don’t they?’

  �
��I don’t know. Do they?’

  He smiled, this time in open appraisal of the sleek trim figure in the apricot dress, at its matching gloves and shoes and above all at the compelling combination of dark brown hair and deep clear blue eyes. It was all in such marvellous taste, he thought.

  ‘Would you walk a little way up the road with me?’

  She felt suddenly as if she were standing on the edge of a high cliff, with nothing but a vast space below her, her entire body clenched in a stark white grip of vertigo.

  ‘Will you?’ he said. ‘Just a hundred yards or so. I promise I’ll keep my hands in my pockets.’

  In a sudden spasm of relief she smiled. He at once misinterpreted it as a gesture of invitation. Its absolute innocence had in it a disturbing intimacy.

  ‘Actually I mustn’t be long myself. I’m due at the Williamsons’ for dinner.’

  By now they were walking towards, under and past the cherry tree.

  ‘Do you know them at all? The Williamsons? I’m sure you must.’

  No, she said, she didn’t know the Williamsons.

  ‘I haven’t seen them myself for four or five years. I’ve been working abroad. Persian Gulf. You can’t think what it means to get back here. The English spring, I mean. That cherry tree. After the heat and the dust and – Oh! I tell you, it’s marvellous.’

  Every now and then, when he asked her a question, she delayed her responses. For a few seconds, not only with her lips but also her eyes, she seemed to close herself up. Withdrawn, almost fearful, she seemed to become altogether another person.

  Inevitably, in this way, he began to get the impression that she was not the person she seemed to be. At once baffled and fascinated, he found himself asking questions that might shape her identity into sharper outline. Did she play bridge? The Williamsons, as he remembered it, were bridge-mad. Did she travel at all? Go to London often? He supposed she rode a bit too?

  To all these questions she gave the same sort of withdrawn, delayed responses: no, she didn’t play bridge, didn’t ever go to London, didn’t travel, didn’t ride.