Jassy, p.1
Jassy, page 1
Table of Contents
Cover
Jassy
Book One
Book Two
Book Three
Book Four
Jassy
Norah Lofts
Published by arrangement with the author’s Estate
Copyright © Clive Lofts 2008
Cover illustration ©Jose Luis Munoz Luque (Córdoba, Spain).
www.jlmunoz.com
Originally Published in Great Britain by Michael Joseph
All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations
in critical articles or reviews, no part of this
book may be reproduced in any manner without
prior written permission from the publishers.
The moral right of the late Norah Lofts to be identified as the
author of this book has been asserted in accordance with the
Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988
All characters in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
This Kindle edition 2011 by
Tree of Life Publishing, Birmingham UK.
ISBN: 978-1905806-60-7
www.treeoflifepublishing.co.uk
BOOK ONE
GENESIS IN EXILE
‘She was a local girl, of rather peculiar parentage ...’
So this story is told by BARNEY HATTON, who lived next door and took an interest in his neighbours.
I first set eyes on Jassy Woodroffe on the Michaelmas Day before my fourteenth birthday. I was supposed to be working in the garden; but the scene of my labour was well out of sight from the house so as soon as I heard voices and hoof-beats and wheels on the road outside, I went to the place where our garden wall had fallen in and watched our new neighbours take possession of the last cottage at the end of the Green.
There was little to hope for of interest or excitement in the arrival of mere cottage people; but I hated gardening and the circumstances that made it necessary for me to do it so, bored and miserable, I was in a mood to welcome any interruption. I scrambled to the top of the heap of fallen stones and. with the afternoon sun warm on my back, stared across the narrow track which divided the Green from the end of our garden.
The family and their furniture had come in a farm wagon, driven by a surly-looking fellow with a dirty beard. There were three of them; a tall, gaunt, awkward-looking fellow, a woman, brown-faced and very upright, and a little girl whom I took to be about six years old. They climbed out of the wagon and the surly man got down too, without speaking, and began to throw their furniture out of the vehicle with an air of haste rather than helpfulness. As soon as the wagon was empty he turned it and drove away. It was his manner as much as anything which aroused my interest. His haste and his silence made him seem like a man who was, with the least possible trouble, getting rid of something: I could imagine someone saying to him—take these people as far away as you can and throw them out as soon as possible. And so soon as my imagination set to work on this theme I became interested in the family and watched more closely to discover whether there was anything really peculiar about them.
I noticed several things. First of all I observed that their furniture was very different from that of the usual cottagers. Out there on the Green, huddled together in the rays of the afternoon sun, it looked, as all furniture does out of doors, slightly pathetic. But, piece by piece, it was good. There was a tall clock with a brass face surrounded by a wreath of enamelled flowers; there were several sturdy chairs with red cushions, a dower chest, black with age and curiously carved. There were articles of brass and copper whose high lustre caught the sun’s rays; a good deal of china and far more bedding than there was in any other cottage on the Green. As I took note of this I began to wonder whether these people, like ourselves, had come down in the world. For I was already, for various reasons, acutely aware of social differences, and the sight of this good farmhouse furniture going into a clod cottage reminded me of the incongruity of the tulip-wood escritoire in our own low-beamed parlour.
Thinking in this strain I watched the people who were moving the furniture more closely. I decided that the female was lazy. She went into the house and came out again, never carrying anything of any size, never moving with any decision of purpose. She seemed totally uninterested in what should have been her particular province. The man worked hard but clumsily, heaving and pushing and pulling like an amiable but not very sensible giant confronted by a task that was only just within his scope. The ruling spirit, the brains of the movement, seemed to me to be the little girl who, alone of the trio, knew what she was about. She issued orders—I was sure they were orders because some activity always shaped itself upon her words—in a low queer voice of which I could catch the sound but not the sense. Occasionally she would attempt something beyond her strength and the great man would say, rather helplessly, ‘No, no, Jassy, that is too heavy.’ Then he would call, ‘Sary, Sary,’ or the child, articulate for once, would shout ‘Mother,’ and the woman, moving lithely but indolent, would emerge from the cottage and lend a dissociated but wiry strength to the business in hand.
I lost sense of time and place in watching them. I began to notice trivial things, the cunning patches in the shirt which the man revealed when he took off his jacket; the fact that his voice, though countrified and unaffected, never uttered a sentence which the Reverend Saunders, my tutor, would have corrected; the difference in the child’s manner when she spoke to her mother; and the oddity of the child herself. She was so tiny her head hardly reached the top of the chest of drawers which, with the man’s aid, she attempted to shift; yet she behaved like a grown-up person. And she was ugly and beautiful at the same time. Her face, I thought, was queer and hideous. The brow was enormous and emphasised by the way her hair was dragged back and plaited behind. From this great brow her face sloped away to a sharp chin, yet her mouth was so large that it seemed to occupy the whole of the lower part of her face and, although the rest of her skin was the colour of meal, her mouth was so red that, even to me, seated upon the broken wall, it shone like a hedge berry. And everything she did was beautiful. When she stood still, regaining her breath after an exertion, when she stooped or pushed or braced herself beneath a burden, when she handled anything or hurried from place to place, every movement was perfect. Finally, when every other source of interest was exhausted, I sat just watching her move. I remembered Sharples, Nick Helmar’s groom, saying of a colt, ‘Bad bone and bad temper but the movement makes up for all,’ and, except for her temper, of which I could judge but little, the verdict applied to this little girl.
Presently the woman came out of the cottage and, without a word to the others, walked away rapidly in the direction of Layer Wood. The child hunched her shoulders and spoke to the man and then went indoors. Very soon a plume of smoke rose from the one chimney of the cottage. The awkward gangling fellow, after a glance at the sky where the sun was sinking behind those same woods, redoubled his efforts and with graceless haste gathered the rest of his household goods and hurried them under the new roof. In the dimming light I could see the window of the cottage glow golden. At the same moment I was aware that the sun was no longer warm upon me; the sudden chill of an autumn evening had fallen upon the earth. I rose from my seat and went slowly into the house.
It was nearly time for our evening meal. The fire glowed red in the kitchen and from the brick oven by the side there came a savoury odour. Mingled with it was the acrid unhappy scent of the smoky fire in the dining-room. Either mother or Meggie, our maid-of-all-work, had been trying to coax the damned thing to blaze.
I took a jug from the row that hung from hooks at the edge of a shelf and was tilting the kettle of boiling water into it when mother, with an apron over her tidy blue dress, hurried into the kitchen.
‘Have you seen your father?’ she asked.
‘No,’ I said. ‘I haven’t been in the yard though. I came straight from the garden.’
‘Well, get along and wash then. Everybody’s late to-night. I’m not going to wait any longer.’ She pushed back her sleeve and jerked a pan from the centre of the fire. Snatching off the lid she prodded the pan’s contents with a fork. As she did so I heard the rattle of Dane’s hoofs on the cobbles.
‘Here he is now,’ I said.
‘Get along then,’ she said impatiently. ‘And mind you clean your nails.’
‘Clean nails and gardening don’t go together,’ I said, addressing the words less at mother than at the injustice which demanded that I should work like a farm-hand and yet look like a gentleman.
‘What doesn’t go has to be driven,’ said mother in a more amiable voice. ‘Hurry, Barney. This is no time to argue.’
I dashed away up the back stairs, reached my room, washed myself, brushed my hair and put on a clean neckcloth. When I reached the dining-room the food was already on the table and my father was standing on the hearth, pretending to warm his back by the smoky fire. Mother was fussing about the table, tweaking a crease out of the cloth and altering the places of the cutlery. Never in a thousand years could Meggie have set a table to her liking.
Father said, ‘Ha!’ as I entered and moved, rubbing his hands, to the head of the table. He lifted the silver dish cover, stared at the small joint thus revealed and began to carve it. He managed one slice and then, with an air of defeat, looked down the table at mother and said, ‘My dear, mumble mumble mumble quite impossible.’
The greater part of father’s speech always consisted of quite unintelligible mutter ings. I often thought that his method of talking was the logical outcome of his policy of leaving all exertion to other people. When he spoke, whoever heard him must set to work and guess at his meaning. And that was usually easy enough to do, for he never thought to convey an idea and his system of mutterings, punctuated here and there by a few loud words, was quite adequate for the business of giving an order or making a complaint. It was not lack of filial respect upon my part to consider him stupid past the ordinary: he was known as the most stupid and most handsome man in the whole county. He was extraordinarily good-looking, with the leanness and the muscular development and the narrow head of a good hound; and since he never bothered about anything or anybody under the sun there was even now, in the forty-ninth year of his age, no line of worry or frustration or ill-humour upon his clear chiselled, high-coloured face, nor was a grey hair visible in the profusion of dark brown curls which clustered about his elegant stupid skull. In looks as well as in behaviour he was like a cunningly-made model of a man, made so that it could acquire certain habits, learn a few phrases and perform a trick or two. And, like a model man, he would go on and on, unchanging, until at last some cog or bolt within him gave way and failed. Then he would come to a standstill and it would be very different from the act of dying which overtakes the normal, living human being.
Mother went round to his end of the table and, with her lips pressed together from concentration of effort, severed, efficiently but not skilfully, several slices of the inferior meat. As she laid them upon the plates I stretched out my arm and served the vegetables from her end of the table. She looked at me in a peculiar way she had, possessively grateful, and I wriggled with discomfort in my spirit; because I was not consciously trying to help her, I was not trying to take father’s place: I was merely trying to hasten forward the moment when I should be able to start eating.
That half-conspiratorial gratitude of mother’s was the final proof—if proof were needed—of her inability to deal with people. It was not that she was stupid. In fact, she was an extremely shrewd and intelligent woman. That we had a roof over our heads, a horse to ride and meat, however tough, upon our table, was entirely due to mother’s activities and schemes. She could deal with things well enough; but with people she failed. She never saw that by shouldering all the burdens she left father free to be himself. If, long years ago, she had seated herself on a sofa and played pretty and said I want this and I must have that, things might not have turned out differently but father would have been changed somehow. This very evening, for instance, if she had remained in her place long enough sheer hunger would have made him hack the tough meat at last. But mother came from a family—the Symmons of Suffolk—who were bustling ambitious and successful to a man and I suppose managing and endurance and contrivance were in her blood, just as indolence and carelessness were in father’s. So she had failed with him and she was failing with me because, by her almost cajoling air to me, as though she were asking me to be a prop, to be different from father, to league with her in being bustling and ambitious, she made me obscurely ashamed. And many things that I might have done I did not do out of sheer perversity because I hated to see myself conforming to the pattern of a son which she had in mind. An adolescent male is a tricky creature; he has many and strange desires but to be a paragon is seldom amongst them.
We ate almost in silence, as was our custom. But presently, knowing that sooner or later my failure to dig the garden would be revealed and mourned over, I volunteered the information that I had spent the greater part of the afternoon watching the Woodroffes’ arrival. We knew the name of the family because Nick Helmar, to whom the cottage belonged, had mentioned it to father.
‘What’s the woman like?’ asked mother, who was always on the look out for a miracle of cheap efficiency in dairy work. ‘I’ve been thinking that if I could find a really good woman I’d try another couple of cows and let her have a stall in Bywater on market day. Did she look likely, Barney?’
‘I don’t think so,’ I said slowly. ‘She looked rather like a gypsy to me.’
‘Good gracious! Surely even Nick Helmar wouldn’t wish a gypsy on me for a neighbour. What about my chickens? And the drying line at the end?’
‘Gypsy,’ said father, ‘mumble mumble steal from next door. Mumble mumble, risky.’
‘Any family?’ mother asked. ‘A teachable girl would do.’
‘Only one, very tiny. She looked about six,’ I said. ‘But she had the whole business of moving in hand. She and the man—her father I guess—did most of the moving and got the fire going. The woman just went off.’
‘How peculiar,’ said mother.
‘Woodroffe’s a mumble mumble carpenter. Mumble,’ said father, with a spark of interest. ‘I’ve got the idea, mumble, old Nick, mumble, great alterations mumble at Mortiboys. Stucco mumble, up-to-date, mumble panelling, new floors, Woodroffe mumble useful. Wouldn’t have mumble else. Troublesome fellow, preacher mumble, agitator Nick’s sort. Surprised when mumble let him the cottage. Mumble be sorry. Fennel turned him out.’
I tried to fight, as one may try to fight a nightmare, the feeling that had begun to come over me when father mentioned alterations at Mortiboys. Making an effort, I said:
‘I thought somehow they’d been turned out by the way the man who drove the wagon behaved.’
Mother—of father I expected nothing—might have asked about the man’s behaviour and then I could have described it and perhaps lost myself in the description and escaped the moments of anguish which were lying in wait for me, just as one may escape a moment of danger or embarrassment. But mother, disappointed of her good woman or teachable girl, had lost interest in the Woodroffes. She rang her handbell, gathered the plates and waited for Meggie to come in with the pudding.
It was a blackberry pie, the last of the season, and I could smell the rich dark fruity scent and see the crisp brown pastry. But I knew that I should be unable to swallow a morsel. I knew how inflexible mother was about table behaviour, I knew also that if I stayed there and ate nothing she would be suggesting a dose. So I did the one thing left to me. I clapped my hand to my head and said:
‘I must go. I’ve just remembered. I have a task set that will take me four hours and I haven’t looked at it. Tomorrow’s Friday.’
Nick Helmar’s going to alter Mortiboys now, said the demon in my mind.
‘Will ten minutes make such a difference?’ mother asked, but she asked it diffidently. The whole business of my schooling was to her mysterious and awesome.
‘Indeed it will,’ I said.
And now, said my demon, Nick Helmar’s going to alter Mortiboys.
‘Very well,’ said mother, giving me a fond, doting glance.
‘Meggie shall keep the pie warm and bring you a piece in an hour’s time. That will make a little break for you.’ And I knew, by the way in which she watched me out of the room, that she was thinking what a boy I was for my lessons and how probably I should be ambitious and industrious and emulate my uncle, Edgar Symmons who, through sheer ability, had worked his way up until he was Dean of Ely. What would she have thought could she have known that as I hastened out of the room I was hating her and loathing father? Father was responsible for the loss of Mortiboys; and mother, though blameless, was capable of hearing of Nick Helmar’s sacrilegious plan and of proceeding to cut into a pie as though the news meant nothing.
I reached my room, rucked the mat in front of the keyless door, so that anyone entering would be halted and obliged to give me a moment to recover myself, opened a few books and flung them about and then went to the window where, curled on the low wide sill, I stared out into the darkness and gave myself to the demon.
Four years ago I had chosen this room for my own because it had the only southward-looking window on the bedroom floor and, on a clear day in winter when the trees were thin and leafless, it was possible to stare out across the tongue of Layer Wood which licked down into the marshes and see a wavery, ochre-pink line which was the roof of Mortiboys.
