Death of a Huntsman (3 page)

‘Oh! no, no, no,' he said. ‘Oh! no.'

The pony was still facing the cucumber house, uneasy now. Sunlight was catching the angle of the roof panes, flashing white glare into the animal's eyes in spite of the blinkers, and Harry Barnfield put his hand on its nose, steadying it down.

‘I'll be putting up jumps next week,' he said. ‘In the meadows there.' The touch of the animal brought back a little, but only a little, of his assurance. ‘You could—well, I mean if you cared—you could use them. I'm never here weekdays.'

She smiled as if to begin to thank him but a flash of
light from the cucumber house once again caught the pony's eye, making it rear.

‘You'd better turn him round,' he said, ‘and take him along. It's the sun on the cucumber house.'

‘I will,' she said.

He moved forward to unlatch the gate for her. The pony also moved forward. A new wave of uncertainty ran through Harry Barnfield and he said:

‘Remember me to your mother, will you? If she would care—Oh! I don't suppose she would like a cucumber? We have masses. We have too many cucumbers by far.'

‘We neither of us care for them,' she said, ‘but I'll tell her all the same.'

She rode through the gate. He shut the gate after her, leaned on it and watched her ride, at a walk, up the path. After forty or fifty yards the path began to go uphill to where, against the skyline, clumps of pine grew from browning bracken hillocks before the true woods began. The morning was so clear that he could see on the tips of these pines the stiff fresh crusts of the light olive summer cones. He could see also the brown arms of the girl below the rolled sleeves of the yellow sweater, the flecks of white on the short legs of the pony and the knots of red on the pig-tails.

He was suddenly aware that there was something disturbing about her without being able to say what it was. In that insolent innocent way of hers she rode very well, he thought, but the pony was quite ridiculous. Her body and the pony simply did not fit each other, any
more than her body and her voice seemed part of the same person.

‘Edna should get her a horse,' he said aloud and then, with sweat breaking out again from under his misty spectacles, began to walk back to the cucumber house.

There he was overcome by embarrassment at remembering how he had been stupid enough to offer the girl a cucumber; and in remembering it forgot completely that he had called her mother by name.

Soon after that he began to come home on late September evenings to a recurrence of mild gin-dry quips from Katey. He did not really mind being quipped; the city gentlemen made him used to that sort of thing.

‘Your girl-friend was jumping again today. Here most of the morning and back again before I'd swallowed lunch. Stayed till five. I'd have offered her a bed but I wasn't tight enough.'

‘I wish you wouldn't call her my girl-friend.'

‘Best I can think of, Harry. You put her up to this game.'

Presently she began to use his jumps not only on week-days but on Saturdays and Sundays too. Sometimes he would wake as early as eight o'clock, look out across the meadows and see the yellow sweater dipping between the barriers of brushwood.

He saw it also as it faded in the twilights. And always he was baffled by the ridiculous nature of the pony, the
pig-tails and the long impossibly dangling legs of the girl as she rode.

‘Your girl-friend certainly works at it. Lewis tells me she was here at six the other morning. He was mad. The animal kicked up his mushrooms.'

‘I do wish you wouldn't call her my girl-friend. She's fifteen. Sixteen if she's that.'

‘From the day they're born,' Katey said, ‘they're women. Never mind their age.'

At first he found it an embarrassment, slight but uneasy, to join her at the jumps. He supposed it arose from the fact that in his inelastic way he often fell off the horse. That did not matter very much when he jumped alone but it was awkward, even painful, when people were watching.

In this way he began to ride more cautiously, more dumpily, more stiffly than before. For two week-ends he did not jump at all. At the third he heard a clatter of pony hooves on the stable yard, looked up to see her long legs astride the pony and heard her deep voice say:

‘I thought you must be ill, Mr Barnfield, because you weren't jumping. Mother sent me to inquire.'

Her voice, deeper than ever, he thought, startled and disturbed him; and he fumbled for words.

‘Oh! no, oh! no. Perfectly all right, thank you. Oh! no. It's just that the countryside has been looking so lovely that I've been giving the jumps a miss and riding up on the hill instead. In fact I'm just going up there now.'

‘Do you mind if I ride that way with you?' she said.

Some minutes later they were riding together up the hillside, under clumps of pines, along paths by which huge bracken fronds were already tipped with fox-brown. Late blackberries shone pulpy and dark with bloom in the morning sunlight and where the bracken cleared there ran rose-bright stains of heather, with snow-tufts of cotton-grass in seed.

‘You can smell that wonderful, wonderful scent of pines,' she said.

He lifted his face instinctively to breathe the scent of pines and instead was distracted, for it might have been the fiftieth time, by her incongruous legs scratching the lowest tips of bracken fronds as she rode.

‘My wife and I were having a slight argument as to how old you were,' he said. ‘Of course it's rude to guess a lady's age but——'

‘Oh! I'm ancient,' she said. ‘Positively and absolutely ancient.'

He started to smile.

‘And how old,' she said, ‘did you say?'

‘Oh! fifteen,' he said at once, not really thinking at all. ‘Perhaps I'll give you sixteen.'

‘Give me sixteen,' she said. ‘And then seventeen. And then eighteen. And then if you like——'

She stopped. Looking up from the pony she turned on him the enormous circular eyes that appeared so often to be full of naïve insolence and then waited for him, as it were, to recover his breath.

‘And then nineteen. And then if you like, next month, you can come to my twentieth birthday.'

He was too staggered to bring to this situation anything but absolute silence as they rode to the hill-top.

‘I think you're surprised,' she said.

‘Oh! no. Oh! no,' he said. ‘Well, yes and no, in a way——'

‘Don't you think I look twenty?'

‘Well, it's not always absolutely easy——'

‘How do you demonstrate age?' she said and he rode to the crest of the hill-top without an answer, his head sweating under his close tweed cap, his spectacles misting and turning to a premature fog-bound landscape the entire valley of morning brilliance below.

He was temporarily saved from making a complete and disastrous fool of himself by hearing the pony breathing hard, in partial distress.

‘I think you should give him a blow,' he said. ‘It's a pretty long drag up here.'

She thought so too and they both began dismounting. Then, as she swung to the ground, he had a second surprise.

This, he suddenly realized, was the first time he had actually seen her when not on the pony. Standing there, at his own level, she seemed to enlarge and straighten up. He was aware of a pair of splendid yellow shoulders. Riding had made her straight in the back, throwing her breasts well forward, keeping her head erect and high. She was also, he now discovered with fresh uneasiness, slightly taller than he was.

He turned away to tie his horse to a pine. When he had finished he looked round to see her walking, with
surprisingly delicate strides for so tall a girl, towards the ridge of the hillside.

Finally she stopped, turned and waved to him. For a single moment he thought she had in her hand a flower of some kind and it looked, he thought, like a scarlet poppy. Then he saw that it was one of the cords she had snatched from her pig-tails.

‘Come over and look at the view,' she called.

By the time he joined her she was sitting down in a patch of bracken. He sat down too: looking, not at the view below him, the map of copse and pasture and hedgerow flecked already with the occasional pure bright chrome of elm and hornbeam, the dense oaks and grass still green as summer, but at the sight of the girl now unplaiting and combing out the mass of bright brown hair into a single tail.

‘You look surprised,' she said, ‘but then I notice you always do.'

She started to let her hair fall loosely over her shoulders, until it half-enclosed her face. Then she put her hand in the pocket of her jodhpurs and pulled out a powder compact, a lipstick and lastly a small oval mirror with a blue enamel back.

‘Do you mind holding that?' she said.

He held the mirror in front of her face. Once or twice she stretched forward, touching his hand and moved the mirror to one side or the other.

In silence, for perhaps the next five minutes or so, he watched her make-up her face. He saw the lips, freed of their dull brownness, thicken, becoming very full, almost
over-full, in redness. He saw her smooth with the powder-pad the skin of her face, giving it a tone of milky brown.

Finally she threw back her hair from her shoulders and he had time to notice that the enlargement of the lips, so bright now and almost pouting, had the effect of bringing into proportion the large brown eyes.

‘How do I look?' she said.

His immediate impression was that the make-up, the loosened hair and the fuller, brighter lips had softened her completely. It was very like the effect on parched grass of warm and heavy rain.

At the same time he could not help feeling desperately, awkwardly and embarrassingly sorry for her.

‘Now do I look twenty?' she said.

It was on the tip of his tongue to say ‘More—older' and afterwards he knew that it would have pleased her very much if he had, but he said instead:

‘What made you do that just now?—just here?'

‘Oh! God!' she said and the sepulchral wretched cry of her deep voice shocked him so much that his mouth fell open, ‘I'm so miserable—Oh! God! I can't tell you how miserable I am.'

She turned suddenly and, not actually sobbing but with a harsh choke or two, lay face downwards in the bracken, beating her hands on the ground.

Pained and discomforted, he started to move towards her. She seemed to sense the movement and half-leapt up.

‘Don't touch me!' she howled.

It was the furthest thing from his mind. He stood for a
moment with his mouth open and then started blunderingly to walk away.

‘Where are you going?' she moaned.

At that second sepulchral cry he stopped.

‘I thought you'd rather have it out by yourself.'

‘I don't want to have it out!' she said. ‘I don't want to have it out! I don't want to have it out!'

It was beyond him to understand and he wished unhappily that he were back home, jumping or talking to Lewis or having a glass of sherry with Bill Chalmers, his neighbour, or with Punch Warburton, who sometimes came over and talked horses and weather and general gossip before Sunday lunch-time.

‘Then what do you want?' he said.

‘God only knows,' she said quietly. ‘God knows. God only knows.'

By that time she was really crying and he was sensible enough to let her go on with it for another ten minutes or so. During that time he sat on the ground beside her, mostly staring uneasily across the bracken in fear that somebody he knew would come past and see him there.

That would be a miserable situation to be caught in but as it happened, nobody came. There was in fact hardly a sound on the hill-top and hardly a movement except an occasional late butterfly hovering about the blackberries or a rook or two passing above the pines.

When she had finished crying she sat up. The first thing she did was to begin to wipe off the lipstick. She wiped it off quite savagely, positively scrubbing at it with
a handkerchief, until her lips again had that dry brownish undressed look about them.

Then she started to plait her hair. When she had finished one plait she held the end of it in her mouth while she tied it with the cord. Then she did the same with the other. Finally she tossed the two plaits back over her shoulders and, with a rough hand sweep, straightened the rest of her hair flat with her hands.

‘There,' she said bitterly, ‘how will that do?'

The bitterness in her voice profoundly shocked him.

‘It can't be as bad as all that,' he said, ‘can it?'

Her eyes stared at him, blank and sour.

‘As bad as all what?'

‘Well, whatever—can't you tell me?'

‘I've never told anybody,' she said. ‘I wouldn't know how to begin.'

He started to say something about how much better it was if you could get these things off your chest when he saw her standing up. Once again, for the second time that morning, he was aware of the splendid yellow shoulders, her tallness and the contradiction of the ridiculous scarlet-fastened pigtails with the rest of her body.

‘I'd better get back,' she said, ‘before she starts creating hell at me.'

‘She?'

‘Mother,' she said. ‘Oh! and by the way. I almost forgot. She sent a message for you.'

‘For me?'

‘She says will you be sure to come along on Tuesday
evening for a drink? She's having a few friends in. About seven o'clock.'

He began to say something about his train not always getting in on time, but she cut him short:

‘I think you'd better try and make it if you can. She said to tell you she positively won't take no for an answer.'

‘Well, I shall have to see——'

‘You won't,' she said. ‘You know mother, don't you?'

‘I did know her. Years ago——'

‘If you knew her then,' she said, ‘you know her now.'