He was given hot milk and a small cup of coffee. The bread was pushed towards him, a hand waved at a bowl of eggs in the shell, presumably boiled, the platter of cheeses. He thought, I could live here. He thought, This is the way we should live, and then was ashamed of himself, remembering the brutal labour of farming and the price you paid for such plenty. And you didn’t earn it alone: you needed those sons and daughters.
They walked out into a blustery morning with flecks of moisture flying in the air to strike their faces like sea spray. Frost glittered on the stones. The farmer insisted on showing them his castle: the house, huge, one end of it unused and derelict; the yard, ankle deep in dung and the mud made by cow urine. Chickens strode across the mire, several climbing the head-high dungheap in one corner. Along each side of the house’s back door, heavy boots were ranged under the eave, the same foul mud caked on them. The wife didn’t allow anybody to track dirt inside: the men and women, Denton remembered, had worn home-made, heavy slippers in the house. The women wore pattens outdoors but left them inside the door.
On the left side of the yard stood stone stables with five huge Percherons in them, a warm place that smelled like brewer’s mash and urine; along the entire back ran the barn, Norman (or so Heseltine said), slashes like arrow slits high in its stone walls, raftering like a church. The farmer smiled at it all, smug with the pride of possession.
They walked up a cow track to the house where Himple and Crum had stayed. It was a quarter of a mile off, no road to it; on their right, a field of beets lay grey-green, the topmost leaves glinting with frost, the wind gusting through them and changing the colours like water. As they walked, Denton asked questions and Heseltine translated the answers that came back: the milord and the servant came here in the summer; the oak leaves were big; we were cutting hay the second time. They took the house for the summer but they didn’t stay, they were city folk. The milord painted pictures; we’d see him and his easel up here on the horizon. You can see the coast from up there. We supplied them with milk — one of my daughters carried a pail up every morning — and cheese and gammon and vegetables. Sometimes one of my daughters would cook, not always; they asked each time. I made sure they paid her well.
In the beginning, the servant went into Caen and came back with a buggy-load of artificial food. (Denton took this to mean canned goods.) They left some behind; we had to use a chisel to open them; it wasn’t worth it; we sold them back to somebody in Caen.
They kept to themselves. The servant spoke good French, better French than I do, but he didn’t have much to say. The milord smiled when he saw us. He knew a few words. We weren’t their kind of people. Sometimes we didn’t see them for days.
When they left, they gave me five days’ notice. I made them pay another month, because of my losses. They left early one morning in a buggy. Both of them? You think one of them stayed to help on the farm?
Denton was thinking of Mary Thomason. ‘Ask him if there was ever a young woman with them.’ He got his answer without translation: the farmer laughed the haw-haw roar of double entendre, meaning, Denton guessed, that they weren’t that sort of men.
Denton had given Heseltine one of the photographic copies of the drawings that Augustus John had done. Yes, that was the servant, only he had no beard when he got here. He grew it while he was here. Not much of a beard. He wasn’t much of a man, really. A day on the farm would have killed him.
I don’t know what they did except paint pictures. I know when I’m not wanted. They stayed to themselves. They paid their money; that was what mattered to me.
The three of them reached the house, and Denton stopped asking questions.
The house was stone, certainly old, much smaller than the farmer’s. One chimney had fallen in. It had a stone privy and a lower stone building, perhaps a smokehouse, whose roof had collapsed. Inside, it was dead and cold. If Himple and Crum had left any traces, the farm women had erased them: there were signs of vigorous cleaning in the sparkling windows, the swept hearth. The kitchen had no sort of modern stove, but a series of shelves, almost terraces, took up much of a vast fireplace, with places to shovel in coals and cook over them on iron plates. It would have been a brutal place for one person to have to cook, he thought — perhaps a factor in their leaving.
Behind the house, a low hill sloped up to the clean horizon, the oak copse off to its right. At the top of the slope was a building that looked like a cathedral without a steeple — the stone barn. The farmer pointed at it. ‘When it rained, the milord painted up there.’
Denton insisted on seeing it. They trudged up the slope into the wind. The thin spray was threatening to turn to snow. The barn loomed over them until, when they were right under its walls, it wrapped them in its shadow and seemed to freeze them. Doorless, it had an earth ramp up to the opening for wagons.
The inside was vast. Pigeons flew in the rafters, the sound restless and irritating. Smaller birds, swallows and sparrows, flew in and out of the vertical slits that were meant to aerate the hay the barn had once held. It must have been, Denton thought, a horrible place to paint in, maybe another reason they had left. The light was bad except near the door; it was cold; the pounded dirt floor made the place smell like a grave.
Denton walked around the inside, taking stock of the farming implements left there to decay, most of them broken, antiquated, speaking of some misplaced sense of thrift — a culture where nothing was ever thrown away. One corner of the building was taken up by four horse stalls whose plank floors had fallen in, the oak boards now porous and spongy, although once they had held the weight of animals as huge as those down at the farm. He walked along the edges of the stalls, bending to look under the boards where he could, seeing nothing. Along the outside of the stalls, ancient straw still lay in a damp pile, the fibres broken short, the pale amber long since turned to brown and black as it had moulded and declined towards earth. Partway along, where the pile ended and the dirt floor began, he scraped his toe over the earth, pushed some of the straw back. It was compacted into clumps almost like horse dung. He moved more of it with his foot and exposed uneven earth.
‘Take him outside and keep him busy for a bit, could you?’ he said to Heseltine.
Heseltine looked uneasy. He didn’t like to lie and didn’t invent very well. After several seconds, he said, ‘I’ll ask him to point out what things the milord painted.’
Alone, Denton went back to the decayed hay. He moved more of it with the side of his boot and then went to an untidy heap of broken tools and rattled around in it until he found a wooden hay fork with one broken tine. He began to move the hay with it; the easy swaying motion coming back to him as he moved along, pitching it deeper up the pile. When he was done, he had cleared an area about ten feet by six. He got down on his hands and brushed wisps of hay out of his way, studying the dirt and even, close to the wooden wall of the old stalls, bending close to sniff it. Satisfied, he took the fork and pitched the hay down again until it lay as it had before.
They walked back down to the farm compound and shook the farmer’s hand and paid him. He gave them the sly grin that meant he thought they were idiots, city pigeons ripe for the plucking. When they came down from their rooms, nonetheless, their buggy was outside, the horse in the shafts, its coat brushed and sleek. One of the younger women gave them a sack, rather heavy. Heseltine peeped in, said it was bread and cheese and apples and a bottle of wine. ‘It’s like the hotelier who gives one a free drink when one’s paid several pounds too much.’