How tall he was! And it was only now, close to it, that I saw that its coat had been glossier and more even, that its muscles had been firmer. This animal had grown used to the attentions and kindness of men. It was restful to be close to it. So much more painful, then, to see the blind side of its head. The eye had been taken out altogether and skin had grown over the socket. The skin there was quite whole, so that on the blind side the horse’s head was like sculpture.
I had an oblique view from my cottage sitting room of the paddock and the water meadows beyond. The water meadows were now the cows’ grazing area, and twice a day the cows came out there after milking, swaying heavily in the wet fields (and sometimes preferring to walk in the ditches). Twice or four times a day, then, calling his cows in or sending them out, the dairyman saw the old horse.
The sight of the horse, noble, famous, partly blind, standing alone, had its effect on him. And he, who had mangled a spirited young pony in the same paddock — he on whom the ax was about to falclass="underline" the town from which he had been rescued was the place to which he and his family would soon have to go back — he, whose own life was so full of torment, worked himself up into a state about the abandoned horse (as he saw it), so close to death.
He came to my cottage one Sunday evening. He had never come to the cottage before.
Some friends had called, he said; and they had talked about the horse and the tragedy of its last days. So famous, so pampered, earner once of so much money; and now alone in a small, roughly fenced paddock, waiting for death, without crowds or acclaim. It wasn’t fair, the dairyman said. It was terrible for him, seeing that every day.
Who were these friends he had been talking to? What kind of people? Were they his wife’s friends as well? Did they come from that “town” where things had gone wrong for the dairyman? Did the friends know that their own friend was about to get the sack, and had they come to commiserate? Or had they just come for the day in the country?
What the dairyman had come to ask, almost in tears at the end of this Sunday afternoon with his friends, was that I should help to “get a book off the ground” about the old racehorse, to do justice to the old animal.
I gave him no encouragement. His sentimentality frightened me. It was the sentimentality of a man who could give himself the best of reasons for doing strange things.
In a short time the horse ceased to be in the paddock. It had died. Like so many deaths here, in this small village, like so many big events, it seemed to happen offstage.
The winter turned unexpectedly mild. The sun came out, a kind of blossom came out.
When I went for my walk I met the dairyman coming down the hill from the barn. He smiled broadly — he had forgotten about the horse. He turned around and waved at the hillside. He said, “May in February!”
He didn’t mean the month of May; he meant may, the blossom of the hawthorn. It was the last expression of delight in country things I heard from him. There was an element of acting about it; he was like a man living up to a role that had been given him.
And he was wrong. What had come out at the top of the hill was not the hawthorn, but the blackthorn. At the top of the hill, on a long lateral lane, broken by the paved farm road and the windbreak, there was a line of these trees. (It was on a section of this lane that in my earliest days I had met Jack’s father-in-law and exchanged the only words I had ever exchanged with him.) The morning sun struck full on these trees, on the side you saw as you came up the hill from the public road. And in the sudden mildness the trees had turned white with blossom above the black winter mud and the puddles created by the tractor wheels.
THE DAIRYMAN and his family left; unnoticed, quietly. One week they were there, noticeable, in possession of the house and garden; the next week the house felt empty, became more purely a house again, and seemed to be touched again with something of its country-cottage character.
And there were bigger changes. The farm manager retired; he was no longer to be seen making his rounds with his dog in the Land-Rover. The farm passed into new hands. And soon there was new activity: more tractors, more farm machinery, a greater busyness.
The winter that seemed to have retreated so early that year returned. At last the true spring came. It touched Jack’s garden. But — though all around was activity, on down and droveway and field lane, with tractors of new design and brighter colors — there was no human celebration in Jack’s plots of ground, nothing of the rituals I had grown to expect.
The mud-spattered, autumn-clipped hedge burst into life, and the apple trees and the shrubs and the rose bushes; but there was no controlling hand now. No cutting back and tying up; no weeding; nothing done in the greenhouse. No work on the vegetable plot: scattered growths of green there, stray roots and seeds. No turning over of the earth in the bedding-out plot below the old hawthorn tree. Smoke rose from the chimney of Jack’s cottage while his garden ran wild. Only the geese and ducks continued to be looked after.
And all around was activity and change. The pink cottage had another couple, young people, in their twenties. The man did not work in the dairy. He was a more general kind of farm worker, and he was like the other workers the new management had brought in. They were young people, these new farm workers, educated up to a point, some of them perhaps with diplomas. They dressed with care; clothes, the new styles in clothes, were important to them. They were not particularly friendly. They might have been reflecting the seriousness and modernity of the new management; or they might have been anxious to make the point that, though they did farm worker’s jobs, they were not exactly that kind of person.
The man in the pink cottage had a new or newish car. On fine afternoons his wife sunbathed in the ruined garden, seemingly careless of showing her breasts. She was a short woman with heavy thighs. The contemporary fashions she followed didn’t flatter her figure; they made her look heavy, badly proportioned, a little absurd. But one day I saw how the long dresses of an earlier era, with high, narrow waists and full hips, might have been absolutely right for her, would have made her voluptuous. And I felt that this was how she saw herself, immensely desirable; and that this sunbathing in the wreck of the garden, this care of what had at first seemed to me a slack, heavy body, was something she might have thought she owed to her beauty. The new car, her husband’s careful clothes — these were further tributes.
New people, young people as well, took over the other two cottages in Jack’s row at the bottom of the valley. New brooms down there, in both cottages: they swept clean. They dug up what had been left behind in both gardens, leveled the ground and planted grass.
Jack’s garden was wild.
I saw Jack’s wife outside the cottage one day. She said, talking of her new neighbors but making no gestures that might have betrayed her, “Have you seen? All lawn, my dear.”
The turn of speech, the irony, was a surprise. I had never thought Jack’s wife capable of such things; but then I had thought of her — and she seemed to have been content to be regarded — as an appendage of Jack’s.
“And the horses,” she said.
The people in the middle cottage had a horse.
I said, “How’s Jack?”
“He’s all right, you know. He’s working again.”
“There’s a lot for him to do in the garden.”
She said, “You think so?”
As though I had said something untrue. Why did she want to deny what was so obvious? We were standing outside the garden. Had I mentioned something she felt I shouldn’t have mentioned? Was I putting a curse on the sick man?