The People on Privilege Hill Read online

  Below the girls’ bedroom window a long green tendril was caught in the branches of a silver birch tree and for a moment that seemed to submerge her whole life Eleanor thought it was Jacquetta’s discarded body.

  But it was only the empty dress.

  And now, a quarter of a century on, Eleanor opened her eyes in Green Park, aware of an acrid, frowsty smell, and found that beside her on the long seat sat a tramp. He was deep in grime, head bent on chest, eyes turned up to her, mouth bloated. “Can you give me forty pounds?”

  “No, I can’t,” she said and stood up.

  “It’s for my fare home to Reading.” He had a sack full of bottles.

  She walked away, stepping among the lovers, consulting her watch.

  “Oh dear, I’m late. And I was going to be so early. Oh dear, oh dear,” and she flagged down a taxi and said, “Please, the Goring Hotel. I’m half an hour late for lunch.”

  “Let him wait, dear,” said the driver and spun off towards the Mall. “Love you all the more.”

  She smiled and gazed at the crowds where nobody looked as if they loved anybody. Nobody looked happy at all. Everybody was frantic.

  For example, that woman standing beside Marshal Foch on the plinth. She looks as if she’s going mad. Good heavens, it’s Rosie!

  “Stop!” cried Eleanor. “Stop! It’s my daughter. Can you toot at her?”

  Rosie fell into the cab. “Where have you been? We’ve been waiting an hour. And they’ve done a silver wedding cake for pudding and all the children are here. And Jacquetta.”

  “The grandchildren? Oh! Oh, that’s wonderful.”

  “Yes. It was to be a surprise. My silver wedding. Nicholas ... And then you didn’t turn up. We all met the train. We’ve been running the streets. All of us.”

  “I took an earlier one.”

  “Oh, Ma! Ma, Ma! Come on, quick. We can’t start without you. Take care. Don’t fall. Where’s your stick?”

  “I seem to have left it somewhere.”

  “What, Pa’s Airedale? Oh, no! Oh, Ma!”

  “I’m afraid I fell asleep in Green Park. And—I think the Airedale may be in Reading. But I really don’t need it at all. Not at all.”

  “In Reading? You don’t ever go to Reading.” (In Rosie’s eyes, fear. Dementia. The first signs of the bitter end.)

  “Ma, your memory is terrible.”

  “No, dear. That’s not true. It is certainly not true. Memory is a miracle. My memory is the best thing I have.”

  DANGERS

  Jake was six and lived in America in the city of Boston where he had never seen a cow. Or a sheep. Or a waddling goose. Or a dazzle-coloured pheasant in the garden. (He had no garden.) Or a rabbit. Or a mole with tiny hands. Or hens scratching about and laying eggs and talking to each other in rusty voices.

  Jake’s granny lived in England down a country lane. Pheasants came marching through her garden. Rabbits hopped about in it. Cows loitered down past her gate four times a day, to and fro, to the milking shed. Sheep leaned against her fence, broke it down and ate her apple trees. The cows ate her blackcurrants and raspberries, stretching out their necks over the stone walls. When this happened Jake’s granny went tearing out of her cottage flailing towels in the air. When Jake came on a visit, he thought it was very funny.

  On Granny’s birthday everyone went for a picnic by the river. The river was toffee-coloured with swirls of creamy bubbles rushing noisily in circles. Jake could not believe that he could just walk in up to his knees and play, and watch the fishes the size of needles examining his toes. When he wiggled his toes all the fishes turned together in the same direction and darted off in fright. Soon Jake began to make a great deal of noise in the river with a pretend gun.

  Then Granny fell in the river.

  Or, at any rate, she fell down the river bank, down on to the fat white pebbles. She fell sideways and downwards from a light canvas chair that had been placed not so much on the river bank as on what looked like a river bank but was really a web of tree roots covered in grass. Under the tree roots the river had scooped out a hole and round the sides of the hole was a honeycomb of rabbit holes. Granny had actually been sitting on air.

  Bang, bang, bang went Jake’s imaginary gun from the middle of the river. Sometimes he pointed the gun at Granny for fun. He pointed it at Granny and she fell slowly sideways down upon the stones.

  “Dead?” called Jake in a nonchalant way.

  Granny had hurt her finger and had to go to the doctor. Jake became quiet and that night cried when he went to bed.

  He thought that he had tried to kill Granny.

  “Of course not,” she said. “It was an imaginary gun. Mind, you should never point a gun at anyone, ever, not even an imaginary gun.”

  “I never will,” said Jake.

  The next night it was pheasant for supper and he didn’t like it. He had a tummy ache. Granny searched about in an old cupboard and found some arrowroot to tempt his appetite, which had been lost. He spat out the arrowroot and said that the pheasant was better than that. His mother and father said, “You are being rude to Granny. Apologise.” And Jake did. But that night he had dreams and said it was the poison.

  “What poison?”

  “The poison in the pheasant when they killed it.”

  “Of course there was no poison. It was shot.”

  “With a gun?”

  “Yes.”

  “Was it a real gun or an imaginary gun?”

  “A real gun.”

  “I will never use a real gun.”

  “I agree with you,” said Granny.

  The next day Granny and Jake went for a walk together along the lane. Jake couldn’t believe a lane could be so empty of people and cars. “I expect they’re watching out for us,” he said from Granny’s white wicket gate. “I’d better take my rod.”

  “Who’s watching out for us?” asked Granny, nursing her finger, which had turned purple.

  “The gunmen,” said Jake.

  “Oh, come on,” said Granny. “We’re not pheasants.”

  “I’ll still take my rod.”

  “Do you mean a fishing rod?”

  “No, I’ll catch fish with my pretend rod. This is just a rod,” and he went back into the cottage and rattled about in the umbrella stand where there were some mysterious things.

  A shepherd’s crook with bits of fluff in it.

  Three tall walking sticks.

  And a folded kite. A queer long branch with a ‘v’ at the end. You were supposed to hold tight to the ‘v’, one bit in each hand, and then the other end would twitch when you held it over invisible water, like a metal detector that doesn’t twitch but screams. Jake knew you should try to have the water-finding stick with you whenever you are in a desert but as it was nearly always raining at Granny’s—soaking, sparkling, lovely rain—the stick was seldom used. It was called a dowse.

  “That’s a dowse,” said Granny, “not a rod.”

  “No. This is what I have to take,” said Jake, burrowing about among thin sticks with little flags on them that other children had once run off with during a bike race. “Here!” And he brought out a metal rod a metre long with orange plastic rings and a spike on one end. It was heavy.

  “I don’t like the look of that,” said Granny. “I think we could do without it on this walk. It might go in someone’s eye. Oh, all right then, but keep it pointing down.” They set off.

  Soon the cows came thoughtfully along the lane. Jake jumped for the stone wall and flourished the rod. The cows stumbled a bit and swung away but on the whole decided that he was just being foolish.

  “I’m protecting us,” he said and held the rod high, like a harpoon.

  “I hate that thing,” said Granny. “Wherever did we get it? Give it to me to carry.”

  “I want to protect us.”

  They came upon a heap of brown and green moss that somebody had dumped under a red rowan tree. Jake prodded the heap with the rod. “It’s a dead cow,” he said.
“We don’t have horrible things like that in America.”

  “It is a heap of beautiful moss,” said Granny. “Now give me the rod and we’ll pick blackberries. See how perfect they are, black, red, pink, green, white.”

  “They’re full of seeds,” said Jake.

  “Of course they are, but we only pick the ripe ones. We cook them with sugar and they’re lovely with cream.”

  “What is cream? We don’t have cream in America, only ice cream.”

  “You’ll see. It’s delicious. It comes from cows.”

  “From cows? I think it wouldn’t agree with me. You’d give me more horrible arrowroot.”

  “Here,” said the exhausted Granny, “my finger hurts. You can pick the blackberries. I wish you’d throw away that iron rod.”

  “O.K.,” said Jake and suddenly did so. He flung the rod sideways so fast that it vanished like a needle-fish. It vanished through the stones of the field wall. It was gone in a second.

  “Goodness!” said Granny. “That was a quick decision. Had you had enough of it?”

  “Oh, I’ll get it back some time, I expect.”

  They all ate blackberries and cream for dinner and Jake, after a few sips of the juice on the edge of the spoon, said they were very good and finished them up. “I’ll carry the bowl next time we go picking,” he said. “I shan’t mind not having the iron rod.”

  “What iron rod?” asked Grandpa, walking in.

  “Something he found in the stick stand,” said Jake’s mother. “I’m afraid it seems to have disappeared through a hole in a wall.”

  “That would be the arrow we found,” said Grandpa, “last year, lying in the stream at the foot of the ghyll near the waterfall. We couldn’t think how it got there. It was a real archery arrow. A very dangerous thing.”

  “Had it real feathers on it when you found it?” asked Jake. “Like cowboys and Indians?”

  “That is history,” said Grandpa. “We’ve not had that sort of arrow in England for a long time.”

  “Yes. There are none in Boston,” said Jake. “It’s quite dull there really, compared to here.”

  Before he went home to America, Jake and Granny had another walk down the lane. The blackberries were over but the rowan trees still blazed red. Jake put an eye to various chinks along the stone wall but neither he nor Granny could remember exactly where they had been standing.

  “I think it went right through the wall and swish, pang! Deep into the grass on the other side. Like in films. But I hope it didn’t hit a sheep or a cow or a hen.”

  “I think we’d have heard,” said Granny, holding her hand out to him and saying as she jumped him into the lane again, “Not too tight now because of my finger.”

  “I’m sorry about your finger.”

  “It wasn’t your fault.”

  “Do you think my arrow will grow?” he asked, “over the wall in the field? Will it grow an arrow root?”

  “I expect something will grow,” she said, “maybe a story. When you get home.”

  WAITING FOR A STRANGER

  Lizzie Metcalfe leaned into the wind and took great plodding steps forwards and upwards to her line of washing blowing above the farmhouse on the fell. “My, it’s a tempest,” she said, opening her arms to the sheets that flung themselves against her, licked at her, enveloped her like living things. She batted them down, felt for the pegs along the line, somehow released them and gathered the whole great blossom of washing against her wide chest. Bending to the clothes basket, which she anchored with her foot, she toppled everything in and was almost blown away, down into the river valley.

  “I don’t know when there’s been such a storm,” she said. “End of October. Hot and wild. Winter next.” Holding the basket against herself she looked down past the farm, far, far down to where the river wound out of sight eastwards between bands of trees.

  The trees were thinning. “You can see traffic through the trees already.”

  A car glittered for a moment along the banks. “Like winter.”

  The glitter came again, now rather nearer, and the car like a bright bead shot out of the trees and turned towards the bridge and Lizzie’s side of the river. “Here he comes, then,” she said. “Why couldn’t he have said whatever it is he has to say on the phone?”

  The car disappeared into another fold in the land beside the water meadows. Invisibly it would now be climbing up beside the ghyll and the fosse. By, and that’ll be a spate today, she thought, with all the torrents we’ve had, and the trees tossing.

  She pressed forward into the house, dumped the washing basket on the table, calculated the time she had before the car arrived and decided there was just enough of it to shake out the sheets and put them in the back-boiler house for airing. Cars had to stop at the foot of the home field, which was too steep for anything but a tractor. You walked the final bit. She went outside again, shading her eyes with her hand. The car, busy and bright, was turning the last bend, plunging under the two sweeping larches. “Kettle,” she said, went back in, filled the electric jug, switched it on. She looked in the mirror at her wild hair and glowing face. “I’ll do,” she said. “Anyway, I’ll do for the minister.”

  A knock at the door.

  “Lizzie? Hullo. Jim Carritt. The minister.”

  “I know,” she said, “I’ve watched you from miles back. Kettle’s on. Are you blown to bits? Come on in.”

  “Nearly,” he said. “A gale and a half. Hallowe’en weather.”

  “That’s tomorrow.”

  Clouds crossed the sun. Doors banged about the farmhouse and there was a long tearing crash as some stone roof tiles fell from a byre on the yard.

  “Don’t you get frightened, up here alone?” (He thought, There’s something odd up here today. As if there’s sorrow coming.)

  “Never,” she said. “I’m not alone at night. There’s Edward and the boy.”

  “Are they far now?”

  “No, down Dale. Working with sheep. They’ll be back for their teas.”

  “They should leave a dog up here with you.”

  “Whatever harmful could come by?” she said. “Sugar? Teacake?”

  “No, thanks. Yes, please. You are a famous cook, Lizzie. Lizzie, I have something to ask you.”

  “You said on the phone. But if it’s the butterfly cakes, you’ve asked already. I’m making a hundred tomorrow. I’m bringing them down well in time for the Ecumenical. I’d not forget.”

  “It’s something else. Lizzie, I’m going to ask you to have one of the delegates. To the council. Coming to the cathedral.”

  “Have?” she said. “Delegate?”

  “He’s a bishop. An African. We’ve had people back off, and I’m left with this one bishop stranded. Would you have him?”

  “High Place is no place for a bishop,” she said. “There’s no en suite here. Would it be just B&B?”

  “And evening meal. I’d bring him and call for him first thing next morning. He won’t want entertaining. He’ll be just off his plane. And he’s decided he wants to drive up straight from the airport, which will just about kill him, I’d think. He’ll want early to bed.”

  Lizzie sat down on the kitchen stool with her tea. She had forgotten to take the minister into the sitting room. People of his substance usually sat in one of its armchairs with the lace arm pieces.

  “You have a spare room?”

  “Oh yes, there’s mother’s. It’s full of boxes. And her clothes. It takes time to get rid of the clothes, you know, but they’ll have to go one day. It might force my hand.”

  “Would it be a trouble?”

  “No, no. I only have your cakes to make.”

  “So you’ll do it?”

  “Well, I dare say. Will he be in robes? We’re Chapel here, you know.”

  “Well, I’m Chapel,” said the minister, “in case you’ve forgotten. We’re Ecumenical now. That’s what this council is about. I’d think he would be very unlikely to be in robes on the motorway.”
/>   “And I suppose,” said Lizzie, “that he’ll be black?”

  “Well, I’d think so. He’s from Central Africa. Gurundi. I hope that doesn’t worry you?”

  “It gives me a funny feeling,” she said. “I’ve never seen anybody black in the ... in the flesh. Just on the telly.”

  Another thought struck. “Mr. Carritt, is the reason you’ve had to come all the way up here to find him a bed because he’s black?”

  “No, no, of course not. Shall we say that some people are, well, just a bit shy. You know the Dales.”

  “Oh, I know ‘shy,’” she said. “I’ve no time for ‘shy.’ They’re happy to watch ‘Casualty,’ aren’t they, and ‘The Bill’ and them funny London Indians taking the mike out of themselves and making you laugh like nobody. But when it comes to giving one of them a bed, it’s ‘shy.’ Bring him here. I’ll get his clean sheets on.”

  “An African bishop?” said Edward later, in from sheep. “Coming here? What’ll we talk about?”

  “Well, we’ll talk about Chapel, can’t we? And the Ecumenicals and the church and the choirs we’re in.”

  Their son, Alan, who was no talker, suddenly said that if the bishop was coming he’d not be there.

  “Why not?”

  “It’ll be voodoo and that. I’ll stick to my bedroom.”

  “You’ll do no such thing. You’ll do as you’re told.”

  “I’m eighteen.”

  “It’s because he’s black, isn’t it? Yet you’re mad for Venus Williams.”

  “It’s not that. It’s because he won’t like us, that’s what. What can we be to him? We’ve never been anywhere and he’s from Africa and driving himself up the A1, which none of us could do. He’ll think we’re primitives. He won’t know what to mek of us. He’ll tell them back home we’re Neanderthals.”

  All next day father and son dipped sheep while Lizzie cleared the spare bedroom, made a steak and kidney pie and a hundred butterfly cakes. The wind still roared. The house was still restless. At teatime the men blew in through the yard door to find Lizzie in the sitting room in her good dress. Just sitting. The waiting house seemed full of the storm. Ill at ease. There was no sign of the bishop.