A Month in the Country by J.L. Carr Page B

dyke-side, on the empty road, between fields of corn blowing like water, I suddenly yelled, ‘Oh you bastards! You awful bloody bastards! You didn’t need to have started it. And you could have stopped it before you did. God? Ha! There is no God.’ Two horses grazing over a hedge looked up and whinnied.
    â€˜How did you get on over at Ferry?’ Mr Ellerbeck asked when, that evening, he walked in from Malmerby.
    â€˜Well, I learnt one thing,’ I said ‘ – that I’m not cut out for a preacher. I expect your Super will be round to tick you off when complaints come up the line with the rations.’
    â€˜He had his tea at Lucy Sykes’s,’ Kathy cried. ‘She asked him in. He’s been quiet ever since, because he’s fallen in love with her.’
    â€˜She’s a fine strong girl,’ Mr Ellerbeck said. ‘And she gets a lot out of that old organ at Ferry. Good Christian upbringing, too. We’ll ask her over to the Sunday-school anniversary and that’ll give you another chance to have a look at her.’
    It never seemed to have occurred to the Ellerbecks that I might have been married.
    In London I’d sometimes exchanged a word with the family next door on one side and nodded to the couple on the other, but, if I’d passed whoever lived beyond that, I shouldn’t have known them. Yet here,within twenty-four hours of my performance at Barton Ferry, word had got around about tea at the Sykes’s.
    â€˜Hear you’re haring round the countryside looking over the girls. Thinking of settling down in Oxgodby then?’ Moon said slyly. ‘Better keep it quiet that you’re wed: every second chap round about has a shot-gun.’
    Even Alice Keach had heard, but she put it more obliquely at the end of a conversation that had begun by her asking if I’d wanted to be an artist.
    â€˜No,’ I said. ‘Never thought of it. Didn’t know what I wanted to be. I only knew what I
didn’t
want to do. I didn’t want to be an engine-driver, a policeman or a rent-collector or have anything to do with the sea.’
    â€˜What about the Church? You would have made a good clergyman.’
    â€˜Good heavens! Really! That’s almost the last thing I’d be any good at. Not my style at all.’
    â€˜But you would have listened. You
do
listen. And you know how to be still. Don’t you know that, when people are with you, they don’t feel they have to say something? I mean just say anything to fill in silences. Were you always good at listening? When you were a little boy?’
    â€˜My sisters used to say my ears were too big: that meant that I was
too
good a listener. I’m sorry – I know that’s not what you mean. Well then, maybe I was. My mother was a quiet woman. She’d sit for an hour sewing or darning and not a word. Sometimes she’d pucker up her mouth and glance at one or the other of us. And, if anything had upset that one at school, she’d hear it all out and then ask one or two questions so, in the end, you found you’d answered yourself. Is that what you mean?’
    â€˜Yes,’ she said. ‘That’s exactly what I mean; I should like to have known her. And Mr Birkin – back to parsons. I hear you were a Great Success at Ferry …’
    She said this as she rose from the pew to go. ‘And that you’ve fallen in love.’ She’d gone before I had time to reply; her gay laughter slipped back through the open door.
    Well, she was right. I’d fallen in love. But not with sweet Lucy Sykes.
    You might wonder what I thought about during the many hours I spent up on that scaffold. Well, obviously, the work itself, the vast painting I was uncovering. But also about the nameless man who’d stood where I stood. Not his technical abilities although, quite properly, these were extremely interesting to me. For instance, he had a very very good line