The Wooden Shepherdess Page 5

  Poor Bramber! For Bramber Woodcock adored his children, and yet all summer he hardly saw them at all. He worked the whole week in New York, arrived each Saturday worn to a frazzle, slept half Sunday, woke to face bills and overdue handyman jobs—and late that night worn anew to a frazzle was back in the steam of New York: while even those precious weekends his darling Ree, the daughter he mostest adored—all day and half the night too the girl would be out.

  Jess Woodcock also got little good from her daughter. Stuck at the farm from June till Labor Day, driven half-crazy by ants (let alone by children and chores, for none of these summer folk had the money to modernise), Ree was her great disappointment: the eldest, yet nowadays no help at all.

  The Woodcocks of course were by no means alone in their woes. In these last few years (whether due to the War or the I.C. Engine or Freud) from ocean to ocean thousands of half-grown young had suddenly all like that burst out of their families, cut themselves loose and advanced on this dangerous rudderless post-war world in packs of their own: self-sufficient as eagles, unarmoured as lambs—like some latter-day Children’s Crusade, though without any Cross on their banners or very much else and indeed little thought in their heads but their youth and themselves. You’d have thought they’d been found and reared under gooseberry bushes for all it apparently meant nowadays having mothers.

  The holiday teenage young from all over the township had formed their own pack and lived in it wholly all summer, ignoring their homes except when hungry or sleepy or needing money. Their oldest ultimate Nestor (and only local among them) was Sadie: the pack had allowed that “kinda his niece” of the blacksmith to keep her place in their ranks however long-in-the-tooth, because of the glamour attached to a girl believed to have paid her way through Law School driving occasional liquor-trucks only to get a machine-gun burst through her shoulder just before sitting her finals. And down at the younger end little Anne-Marie Woodcock had just scraped in before quite reaching her teens by acting hard-boiled. She was game for adventure as any and everyone liked her; but what had undoubtedly turned the scales was the name she had earned as a bit of a biscuit already if given the chance—and young as she was, the males in the pack gave her plenty.... Maybe she simply reckoned this intimate fingering part of her price of admission, or maybe she found herself missing her father’s erstwhile fondling: in earlier happier times he had fondled her more than a lot, and his loving fingers had left very little untouched.

  For Ree, it was only this new-found life-in-the-pack which had meant very much before she took up with Augustine; and granted the essence of life in a pack is forty-feeling-like-one this wasn’t so very much changed even now, for she felt “like one” with Augustine. His company kept her blissfully happy—provided she didn’t begin to wonder.... But wondering left her sorely puzzled. He seemed to like her, and yet.... Indeed you’d have thought he liked her a lot, but.... Well, what boy had ever behaved a bit like Augustine provided he liked you at all?

  For Ree’s was a culture-pattern where no boy out of his diapers failed to get all the manual fun they allowed from the bodies of girls he liked once out of their diapers too: yet Augustine’s fingers had never shown even the faintest desire to molest her, however lonely the places she took him. True, she was well aware that as boys grow big themselves they lose their taste for a “child” in the skinny, physical sense; but the thought that Augustine’s culture-pattern was one so deranged as to class her a child even now that her “turtle was soft” (as she’d told him the first time they met) never entered her head. It is quite on the cards that the burning desire she had lately begun to feel for his lips and his fingers was partly at least no more than her need for their bare reassurance he liked her.

  *

  As for Augustine, where Ree was concerned his head was still in the clouds—or the sand, you can take your choice which; and here she was, dancing around on his porch agog with a plan that had come to her in a dream—which surely augured success!

  Last night she had dreamed of a golden, sleeping, fairy palace with rows of beautiful marble pillars to stroke, where she found herself changed to a dazzling fairy princess with a prince on his knees at her feet. As she woke, her plan was already half-formed. This sleeping palace must mean the Big Warren Place (since to her that ruinous derelict breathed of romance): so today they two must battle their way through the bushes and climb in together where no one had entered for years, whereupon her dream would come true.... Therefore she routed Augustine out of his shack, and told him with dancing eyes she was tired of dreary old woods but this would be something new.

  When a rather reluctant Augustine (aware that he couldn’t afford to get caught on a prank of this sort) inquired what on earth she expected to find when she got there, she waxed mysterious: told him, the place being haunted she hoped for a ghost—and ghosts were the Cat’s Pajamas, apparently.... Anguish so suddenly clouded her eyes at his hesitation he finally had to say Yes.

  10

  As Augustine lifted her over the boundary ditch her breath on his cheek felt cool, which proved what a scorcher the day was. Alas, here on land there was nowhere at all to get out of the heat: even here in the depths of the trees they were both of them soaked in sweat. It was better by far at sea, where even down in the tropics was cooler than this: in the belly perhaps of a close-hauled mainsail, half-standing and half-reclining, cooled by the steady downflow of air with your back in the curve of the canvas and feet on the boom.... Once, though, for a lark the skipper had put her about and he’d only just woken in time not to get catapulted into the ocean!

  At this recollection he burst out laughing; but Ree squeezed his fingers to stop him (and Ree was quite right, for there might be someone in earshot across the road at the store and they simply mustn’t be heard).

  When at last they had fought their way to the house Ree just couldn’t wait to get in: so Augustine tore off a sagging shutter, and heaved her light weight up and over the sill—but he did it with so much strength that she tumbled inside on her nose. Her jeans were too tight and too tender: they split, and a pale efflorescence of all that incongruous crêpe-de-chine escaped through the rent on her rump. Then she stood up; and the fingers she’d used to wipe the sweat from her eyes had streaked her features with dirt, for the floor where she’d fallen was thick.... But before he could even begin to tease her she pressed her grimy self to his side and “Just you and me!” she began, in a tense little voice which sounded rehearsed.

  Then she stopped abruptly—appalled: for were these those golden and faery halls she’d expected to find? The room where they stood was dark except where some broken shutter admitted a pallid influx of ivy with glimmers of daylight among it: dazzled eyes from outside only started to see again slowly, but now her sight was returning and never in all her life had she seen or imagined such dirt! The cobwebs hung in swags and festoons from the ceiling. Felted dust had shrouded the shelves and walls, leaving never an edge nor sharp carved cornice anywhere—only everywhere curves with a surface like heavy sheenless silk (till you touched it); and faint but horrible smells. Though the furniture mostly was gone, some pieces had proved too massive and ugly for moving.... The springs of a cozy-corner had burst through the covers, displaying the grinning and mummified corpse of a rat in the spirals of one of them.

  Dust on the floor was so soft and deep it accepted their footprints like snow. So Ree (like the page in the carol) imprinted her small ones inside his big ones; and thus they moved off, a procession of two—but only to find that the whole ground floor was shuttered and dark and silted like this with dust, while in places the smells were far worse.

  They came to the staircase. The elegant spidery handrail felt sticky under its dirt like toffee partially sucked; but it had to be clutched if you wanted to get up at all, for most of the stairs were rotten or missing.

  Above there was rather more daylight; but little to see by it, other than drifts of dirty dead flies as if someone had started to sweep them in heaps; and
flies’ wings stuck to their sweat, like feathers to tar. It was not till high in an attic, at last, that they came on a relic of even the smallest romantic interest: a closet, stacked with Civil-War-Period journals (the Last of the Warrens was killed in that war Augustine was told, and the house shut up ever since). But even those newspapers crumbled to bits when you touched them.

  Almost in silence, and more depressed every moment, they wandered from garret to garret where giant fungi throve under shingles gone missing and hundreds of birds had flown in to add their droppings to those of the bats. Then all of a sudden they burst a door which was jammed, and ... found themselves high on the rickety brink of a wing which had burned: so below them, the whole way down to the ground, there wasn’t a floor.

  Dead-sick at her stomach and almost too giddy to stand, Ree cringed from the gulf in fear; but Augustine stood right on the edge, looking down. Ree reached out a wavering hand to grab him but couldn’t force herself near enough: hating herself for her cowardice, knowing she’d die if he fell, yet ... almost wanting to give him a shove. Augustine’s topsail yards had cured him for good of vertigo: now when he saw how she in her turn was green with the fear of heights the fool began showing-off on a charred and teetering beam—he balanced along on his sea-legs with nothing below him for three stories down.... Ree crammed her grimy fist in her mouth like a baby, and screamed.

  When Augustine got back safe-and-sound, he was laughing; and that was The End! It made her so mad that she kicked him—hard, on the shins—with her eyes full of tears: while her firm resolve not to cry in front of him gave her the hiccups. They started down. In silence except for her hiccups they both climbed out of the window they’d used to climb in—and now she wouldn’t be helped. In silence (except for the hiccups) they parted. But once he was well out of sight she let the tears flood.

  How horrible everything was, and how horrible he was!

  11

  There were times when Augustine was downright homesick for Alice May. In this limboish mark-time life he was leading, past recollection was often so strong that even here—cooped up in his inland shack—he would hear the slatting of sails. The morning after that fairy-palace fiasco, while waiting for Ree to appear (for he took re-appearance for granted in spite of yesterday’s tantrum), he sat on his only chair with nothing to read but a Sears-Roebuck catalogue someone had left—for use—in the jakes. Thumbing the leaves, he came on a page of sou’-westers and oilskins.... The air smelled suddenly salt in his nose, the floor began to heave and he found himself seized with a terrible longing for ships and for adult masculine company. Clank of the pawl as you heaved on the winch: the smell of Stockholm tar as you worked it into the dead-eyes, of linseed oil as you rubbed it into the mast: monkeying up the ratlines to spend a misty hour aloft on watch at the masthead....

  Suppose he up-anchored from here, went down to the coast and hung about waterfronts? So many seamen these days jumped ship in American ports that there might be a chance of a berth and no questions asked, in spite of no seaman’s card! Other men did it.... Arthur Golightly, that ox-like American found at a café table in Paris reading Macpherson’s Ossian: when Arthur wanted to cross the Atlantic he always worked his passage—if “working” was ever the word to apply to Arthur, who boasted he’d lost on merit alone more jobs than anyone else in Montmartre (he had just succeeded in losing a night-watchman’s job in a graveyard: or else, as he grandly invited, Augustine was welcome to doss in his canvas booth any time). At sea, said Arthur, once out of port you could only be “sacked” in the literal sense (i.e. with a weight in the bottom and string drawn tight round the neck). But it never quite came to that, even if once the pilot was dropped you did no work whatever as usual. Signing of course for the whole round voyage, once the ship docked on the other side if Arthur wandered ashore and never came back the skipper was only too glad.

  Monumental American Arthur, the son of a Great War General, only taking to this way of life as a means of avoiding West Point himself! But his rough-hewn face was the face of the norm-busting proletarian worker on Bolshevik posters (apart from his pimples): the muscles he never used were those of an elephant.... There of course was the rub: for if Arthur put in for a job as a stoker he looked it, whereas Augustine’s all-too-obvious Oxford-and-upper-class skin was something he wasn’t yet snake-like enough to know how to slough. Who would ever believe he could work with his hands? And once they began asking questions the risk of arrest was appalling. Still, if things went on much longer this way he would bloody well have a try: it was better than sitting around like a mesmerised rabbit, awaiting the coup-de-grâce....

  But where on earth was Ree? She had never before been as late as this in arriving to claim him.

  Even a job in the galley’d be better than nothing, if all else failed.

  Alice May’s galley was built on the deck, amidships: once, he’d been put on to cook while the schooner was bowling along with half-a-gale on the beam (somewhere off Chesapeake Bay, but a long way out to keep the Gulf Stream under her). Somehow the cowl on the chimney which ought to swivel was jammed so the wind blew down it, and sulphurous almost invisible smoke blew out of the ash-pit. In order to breathe at all the galley door had to be open, so every wave which swept the deck as she rolled had flooded him up to the knees and hissed into clouds of scalding steam on the stove—but he’d had to stop in there with his eyes tight shut and coughing his lungs out in order to hold the great iron stewpot on to the top of the stove whenever it tried to dance....

  How he wished he was back there now!

  From earliest childhood, most of Augustine’s happiest memories seemed to be men. His mother had babied him terribly. Right till the age of four he’d been made to ride in a pram while Nanny pushed sedately behind with the Under-nurse in attendance, and lucky Mary capered in front. He remembered that shameful vehicle now: it was white with Oxford-blue wheels, and when he got big his carroty curls were squashed between his skull and the canopy.... Therefore no wonder his favorite sport was always escaping from Nanny! Nanny herself of course couldn’t run, but Mabel the young Under-nurse had been picked for her legs—and clocked pretty good on a fifty-yard sprint. So Augustine in turn had grown adept at going to ground the moment he got out of sight. Thus, the very first time he’d been taken to Newton Llanthony to visit his uncles in state, the child had been bolting like this with the whole open length of the terrace ahead but had slipped inside through a door left ajar while Mabel was rounding the Orangery. This was the door of the sacred gunroom; and there was Great-Uncle William, surrounded by guns one of which he was taking apart!

  Great-Uncle William those days had smelled of black gunpowder even more than cigars, for right to the end of his shooting career the General stuck to an old muzzle-loader for wildfowl as lighter to handle (a connoisseur’s choice which nearly cost him an eye, reloading too quickly on top of a smouldering spark so the old clay pipe he used to pour in the powder blew up in his face). Uncle William had greeted the fugitive “baby” gravely, as man to man; and most of the rest of the morning was spent discussing the whole art of shooting as well as the cleaning and care of a gun. Meanwhile Mabel had raced all over the garden, hollering: “Come out of that bush this moment Master Augustine—I see you as plain as plain!” Or again: “If you don’t come down from that tree I go straight to y’Runcle.” But uncle and nephew were equally deaf to her hollers.

  Thenceforth, whenever he had to ride in that beastly pram he insisted that Nanny must pile his snowy quilt with fircones: these he threw in the air one by one, and sat in his pram-harness blazing away with his popgun and crying “Hi lost!” while Mabel earned her pay in the brambles retrieving his birds....

  “Hello, there!”

  Startled clean out of his skin by a stranger’s voice in the silence Augustine looked up; and gaped at an unknown girl’s silhouette framed in his doorway against the light—and fuzzed by the fine wire mesh of the screen.

  “Well.... Do I walk right in, or are you sayin
g your prayers or sum’p’n?”

  Without waiting an answer she strode straight past Augustine across to the window, remarking: “Believe me, I sure would hate to intrude!” There she paused to curse (with affection) the horse outside she had hitched to a tree, then flopped on his bed in her oil-stained ill-fitting two-dollar ex-army cotton-drill breeches, flipped out a Lucky and struck a match on her teeth.

  “C’m on! Let us get us acquainted. You’re Augusteen. I’m Sadie.” He looked a bit blank, so she added; “Your durned little two-timing woodchick’s kid-buddy.” A continuing pause.... “Woodcock, bonehead!” And when it was clear that Ree’s surname really meant nothing at all to him, “Darrrrrling Anne-Marie—do you get me?”

  He’d got her at last.... So this of course was the blacksmith’s ambiguous niece! All the same “kid-buddy” my foot, for the girl was all of twenty and could be no younger than he was.... She reeked of powder and scent, and he studied her now with a growing distaste. In the “Pack” an especial glamour attached to Bootlegger Sadie: to him however this slab-faced wench seemed far from attractive. All he saw was a stocky brunette in unbecoming attire, with heavy eyebrows, greasy white skin, yellow-stained fingers and hair coiled over her ears in snails with the pins falling out.

  She stopped the best part of an hour. She pumped him with personal questions and said she thought Limeys were cute; and only left in the end when he couldn’t give her a drink. Even then her scent hung around; and he stripped off the bedding she’d sat on to air it outside in the sun.

  *

  Of course it couldn’t have gone on for ever, Ree keeping Augustine her private discovery hidden from all the others—not with her absence so frequent and friends so inquisitive. Yesterday, blundering tearfully home from the Big Warren Place she’d been caught by inquisitors right off-balance and far too upset to fence.