Peter Dickinson - Tulku

‘I didn’t tell Monty she’d been. I got him to take me down a couple of days later, pretending I wanted to look for another bit of ground in the same part of the world, but while we was there I said we might as well have a wander round this bit what we’d missed, as I’d never even seen it. Raining stair-rods it was when we get out of the carriage, but we walked all round under Monty’s big black brolly, arms round each other’s waists so as to keep out of the rain, and even so my shoes was falling apart and my skirt was sopping up to my knees by the time we’d been round – and my heart was breaking, too, ’cause I knew he had to have it. Seventy-three acres, running slant along a ridge looking out south-east. You couldn’t see fifty yards that day, but Monty said in decent weather you could see clear across to the Downs, twenty-five mile away – nothing much of a view round these parts, I suppose, but it’s a long way in England. I couldn’t see what made it so different from any other bit of farm on a hill-side, ’cept there was a huge old grove of sweet chestnut near the top and a long wood sweeping down half sideways, not too thick, just right for his lilies . . . Ah, he’s such a one for lilies. Me too . . . And as we went round he told me where he was going to put all his plants what we’d been collecting those two years, and what his gardening friends had been looking after for him, his clematis and his peonies and his eucryphias – you never seen a eucryphia in flower, I dare say, young man . . .’

‘I don’t know,’ said Theodore. The urgency with which she told her story, though she seemed to be talking as much to herself as to him, had somehow buoyed him out of sleep; but even so it was difficult to bring his wits together to answer the sudden question.

‘I suppose there were quite a lot of flowers round the Settlement, but I only got to know a few of their Chinese names,’ he explained.

‘No, there wouldn’t be a eucryphia round there,’ said Mrs Jones. ‘I wonder how he’s been getting his through the winter – they’re not that hardy . . .’

She sat brooding again, framed in the silver moonlight.

‘What did you say to Mr Monty?’ asked Theodore.

‘Nothing. Not straight off. I had to see his Mum again. Fix up about my income, fix up about the baby. You know, till she died last winter she wrote me a huge long letter, twice a year, telling me how the kid was doing; and when the doctors told her she hadn’t much time left she wrote again, saying she’d sent him down to live with Monty, giving out he belonged to one of Monty’s sisters what had died in France. I never seen him since he was two weeks old, and I was that sick having him, what with all the heart-break and the rows with Monty, that honest I hardly remember him. Monty guessed, you see. First off I told him I wasn’t going to marry him ’cause I wanted to go on fossicking round the world and I could see he wanted to settle down, but soon as that bit of land come back on the market he guessed we’d been going behind his back. He was that angry! Honest, I didn’t know he had it in him to get so stirred, him such a gentle bloke. It was me getting together with his Mum as done it . . . Whole evenings I was down on my knees beside his chair, begging him to see he’d be happier in the end . . . I wore him down, poor man, and in the end he went off and proposed to this girl and she said yes, and then he took her down to Sussex and showed her his piece of ground – I remember lying on my sofa, huge as a beer-barrel, I was that near my time, and looking out of the window and thinking they had a lovely sunny day for it.

‘Next time Monty come to see me – he wasn’t living in my house no longer, of course – I asked him what the girl had made of it and he smiled like a pawn-broker and said she had the right ideas. And then I knew they’d make a go of it, and there was nothing more for me to do except have my baby and clear out. I only seen him twice more, once when the doctors thought I was dying, after the baby, and once very formal when his Mum took me along, pretending I was just a pal of hers, to meet his new wife, what I never seen. Funny how stuffy he was about that – didn’t like it at all. I could tell, of course. Never seen him again.’

‘But you still send him the plants you find?’ asked Theodore, after a pause.

‘No. Course not. Couple of times, when I’ve got something special, I thought of asking Mr Hillier – he’s the bloke I send things to, big commercial gardener near Winchester, I know he’ll do right by my plants if anyone will – I’ve thought of asking him to send a rooted cutting or some seed on to Monty, not telling who it really come from, but it wouldn’t be right, would it? What do you think? What do you think about the whole thing? I’ve never told anyone all this before, but I’d like your opinion, young man.’

Her tone was odd, suddenly mocking but still somehow earnest. Theodore hesitated. There was an easy way out. Matthew 7. 1 – ‘Judge not that ye be not judged.’ But he guessed that if he simply quoted that it would bring out her full mockery. She needed something from him, but he wasn’t sure what. He had understood most of her story, in the sense that he had followed the events in it; but why these things had happened, what force had driven her and this man together, and what other force, or set of forces, had then prised them apart, he could not comprehend.

‘Spit it out!’ said Mrs Jones. ‘I’m past praying for, ain’t I?’

‘I don’t know,’ said Theodore. ‘Honest, I don’t know enough.’

Perhaps she chose to misunderstand him.

‘You want the story of my life, eh?’ she said. ‘So you can see how I come to set up with Monty in the first place? Fair enough, though I warn you it’s a lot different from anything you’ve known. Eight children, we were, the ones what lived past weaning, all in a couple of rooms in Battersea. Dad, he wasn’t a drunk, and he never hit my Mum, far as I know. No, they were decent people, but dead poor. Dad was a docker, but he’d gone and ruptured himself lifting weights too heavy, so all he could do was sweeping kinds of jobs and there ain’t much of a living in that, even when the work’s there. And all those kids. Mum must have starved herself, often as not, see we got a bite, and even so three of us popped off afore they was eight, and that left me third eldest, what had been fifth . . .’

She was talking in a low, even voice, almost a whisper. The memories seemed to drag her back to those sooty, slime-paved alleys and dank, tiny rooms so that her accent became more marked and harder to follow than Theodore had ever heard it. Pay became pie, with became wiv, getting became ge’in ’ as she relived that tatterdemalion strange childhood, as full of dangers as the wildest forest, with Saturday night stabbings as common as church-going, and the wheels of the always-drunk carters grinding along the cobbles – a life for the quick and the lucky to escape from and the rest to be submerged like rubbish tossed into the greasy Thames. Theodore was not aware of falling asleep.

He woke alone in the tent at dawn. Goodness knows how she had got him down there – woken Lung, perhaps, and between them carried him down the narrow steep steps in the moonlight. It was strange that she had not simply rolled him up in his blankets and left him to sleep in the cave. Her voice was still vivid in his mind, as if it had become part of his dreams. I’m past praying for, ain’t I?

He crawled out of his blankets, stiff with travel, and stood up outside the tent. Far up the rock pinnacle a dove was calling; the rock spired into an almost white sky, but the air was so clear he felt he could see the individual grass-blades all the way to the mountains. Mrs Jones was presumably asleep in the cave, and Lung was nowhere to be seen. The hobbled horses grazed near by.