“Saw Sally Bowes as I went through . . . oo looks pretty close,” he remarked.
“Fat as a farrowin’ sow. If it isna twins it’ll be triplets. If I looked like her, I’d keep in, ’stead of displayin’ myself,” said Mrs. Nadin. “Did yo’ see Dot?”
“Never looked for her.”
“Once she’s out, she’s satisfied, the flit-about,” said Mrs. Nadin, leaning over the fire-bar filling up her second cup by tilting the kettle. “Doesna matter a tinker’s damn about me stuck in workin’ my guts out.”
“You’ll have a bit of help naa,” he pointed out smoothly.
“Ay, an’ like enough she’ll be as bad by she’s bin here a two-three weeks. Get another cup,” she said suddenly, looking straightly at Flo. “If yo’ dunna look after yourself, no one else will. It’s find your own way to hell or heaven, an’ if you havena got enough grit, you’ll rot.”
Flo helped herself. As she was doing so she heard someone else and looked round to see another man coming in. He was tall like Clem, but slimmer and neater, with longer features like the farmer, and a sandy tint in his hair and eyebrows. He looked at her in a straight but friendly way and said at once: “Hello, who’s this? Anythin’ left?”
“No; it’s all supped,” answered Mrs, Nadin promptly. “You dunna expect us always to have just what you’re wantin’. It’s non a restaurant.”
“Oh, I thought it was.” His voice was gentle, a bit like a woman’s. He turned to Clem. “There’s five geese just come in; the bonniest lot you ever seen. Across by Wood Corner.”
“Oh, ay.” The contrast in the men’s interest was very marked.
“Come over from Redesmere, I guess. I hope they settle. A prime goose any good to you, Ma?”
“Ay, but if that young brat of Willox’s sees them, it’ll be someone else as’ll be havin’ goose, non us.”
“The little blighter,” murmured the last-comer, whom Flo had guessed was Bert. “If he does any more, he’ll get a dose where he doesn’t want it.”
“But where he damn well needs it,” said Mrs. Nadin. “What about milkin’? Are you leavin’ your father to it all?”
They got up evenly. Clem moved to the door, but Bert went to the corner farthest from the window where for the first time Flo saw a rack in which were four upright guns, the oiled barrels standing to different heights. He took up the tallest, a single barrel, and even to Flo, who knew nothing about guns, there was something in his manner that told that he was as used to the weapon as he was to a knife and fork.
“If all fathers took as much care of their brats as he does of his guns, there’d be a crowd on ’em a seet better off,” commented Mrs. Nadin, and called shrilly: “Dunna forget th’ way ta th’ shippon. It’s non daan th’ meadow.”
Bert gave no indication of having heard.
“Run after him and see which way he goes,” ordered Mrs. Nadin.
“Through the gate,” Flo reported.
“The devil shoot him an’ welcome,” was the little woman’s bitter comment. “Come on let’s see if tha knows how ta wash up.”
Chapter 6
Mrs. Nadin was finnicky. The pots, for instance, could not be wiped simply, but had to be polished. She did not like even a smear of damp to be left. So that they could be dried properly there was a supply of good dry soft cloths made economically out of different shapes and sizes of odd materials, but all neatly hemmed and finished with a little loop of white tape by which they could be hung on any of three brass cup-hooks at the end of the mantlepiece nearest to the sink.
“Naa then, a dry cloth for knives always,” Mrs. Nadin ordered when Flo was about to go on with one on which she had dried only half a dozen pots.
The water was soaped till there was a froth of shiny bubbles. Mrs. Nadin’s arms swished round in it with spasmodic energy that matched her incisive jerky way of talking. Suddenly she interrupted: “Go, see whether Bert’s in th’ shippon,” and she almost snatched the cloth out of Flo’s hands. “If he isna, he’ll be by the watter; fetch him back,” she ordered.
“Please . . . please I don’t know where the . . . the shippon is.”
“There’s non so many doors if tha tries the lot,” snapped the little woman.
Flo went out. There was the faint first blur of dusk coming, emphasised in the yard by the shadows of the buildings on three sides.
In the building that faced her as she walked down the path a yellow light glowed from a small square window at the end near the road. Hesitantly she went towards it across the rough cobbles. A wind came touring over the roofs and touched her with coolness and suddenly the strangeness of everything affected her and she stopped, wondering what was going to happen to her. The utter silence after the wind had passed seemed ominous. There had never been silence like it in Barrow. Almost directly over her was a star, so tiny that at first she was hardly sure whether it was a star or not. Its pinprick light in the vastness of grey-blue made her aware as she had never been before of insignificance. Among houses she had never felt small like this. Past the roofs she could see the hills and even they seemed dwarfed under the great sky. She felt helpless. Why had she come? She thought of the distance that separated her from her mother and home and her eyes ached. Tears as large as thunder spots welled over and trickled warmly down the sides of her nose. She smudged them hurriedly with the back of her hand and broke into a run. A door waited open and she blundered in, being surprised to see turned towards her the back ends of thirteen cows in a long row. She had expected to find Mr. Nadin, but saw no one; and then his voice coming mysteriously from somewhere at the far end said: “Eh now?” It was a quiet, friendly question, and abruptly she put up her hand to smooth away the tear signs more effectively.
The farmer’s head came from between the flanks of a black and a roan, his cap comically pulled down the left side of his face.
“Is Mr. Bert here?” she asked.
“Mister Bert,” he repeated with the slightest sarcasm. “And what would you be wantin’ with him?”
“Missis sent me. She . . . she said if he wasn’t here, I was to go down to the water.
“Oh, ay,” said the farmer more sarcastically, and in a way that indicated that that was all there was to say about that. “How’d you like ta milk?”
“Ay, try a hand,” said the voice of Clem, and a kind of steady swishing that had just begun to puzzle Flo stopped, and out unexpectedly from between the two end cows poked Clem’s head, also with cap askew. “Yo’ll be more use than traipsin’ after yon mon every time.”
“But . . . but Missis said . . .”
“There’s a stool an’ pail,” interrupted the farmer, nodding to an oblong opening cut back into the tremendously thick wall, “an’ Polly ’ere is a good ’un to start on.”
He lifted himself with a single heave, balancing in his left hand a polished bucket half-full of milk and in his right the stool which he had picked up from between his legs.
“Ee, I don’t know. I never . . .” began Flo surprised and hesitant.
“Put it here,” said Mr. Nadin, taking no notice. He moved the stool a bit closer, and when she held the bucket gingerly between her calves, he thrust it snugly up between her thighs. “If you dunna hold it, yo’ll have it punced away like a football. Sit up to her; Polly’s a good gal, she winna mind.”
Flo got the slightly musky cow smell for the first time. She felt chokey and wondered how she could escape, but the farmer was standing over her and Clem was on the gangway leaning against the wall, an expectant grin under the down curve of his cap. Flo looked up and caught the full flare of the flame in the wall-lamp and then could not see when she tucked her head down to peer under the cow.