Every Living Thing Read online

  Chapter 12

  “THIS HOUSE IS A woman-killer, Mr. Herriot.”

  I was seeing a farmer out and he was looking down at Helen scrubbing the front doorsteps. His words went through me like a knife. He was stating baldly something that had been eating away at my mind for a long time.

  “Aye,” he said again. “It’s a grand old house, but it’s a woman-killer.”

  That was the moment when I decided that somehow, some way, I had to get Helen out of Skeldale House. We loved the old place but it had vast disadvantages for a young couple of moderate means. It was charming, graceful and undoubtedly a happy house in its atmosphere, but it was far too big and a veritable icebox in cold weather.

  I looked up over the ivy-covered frontage at the big bedroom windows, then further to the next storey where there was a suite of rooms where in the early days, we had had our bed-sitter. Then there was another storey if you counted the tiny rooms under the tiles; here there was a big bell on the end of a spring, which used to summon a little housemaid down to the ground floor in the early days of the century.

  The old doctor who lived in it before we took over had had six servants including a full-time housekeeper, but Helen looked after the whole place with the aid of a series of transient maids, most of whom soon grew tired of the hard work and the impossible inconvenience of the house.

  Before going back inside I looked down again at my wife scrubbing away. This was crazy, and the words “Please stop it!” bubbled up in my mind. But I didn’t speak them. It was no good, I had tried to stop her again and again but it was a waste of time. That was the way she was made. She was domestically minded and she just couldn’t sit back and admit defeat. She was absolutely determined to keep inside and outside clean and tidy.

  This was something that worried and exasperated me. I was married to a beautiful, intelligent, warm-hearted woman, but I wished with all my heart that she would be kinder to herself and take more time to rest, and when we were first married I tried by pleading and at times by making angry scenes, which I wasn’t much good at, to make her alter her ways, but it was like talking to a wall—she slogged on regardless. Cooking, too. I had never met anybody who could work such magic with food, and as a dedicated eater I realised my good luck, but I wished fervently that she would spend less time over the oven. But when all my entreaties were in vain and she went her own way I consoled myself that I could hear her singing as she went round the house with her Hoover and duster. At this moment she was actually humming softly to herself as she scrubbed that accursed step.

  Even now, fifty years later and when we are coming up to the supreme accolade of getting our Golden Wedding pictures in the Darrowby and Houlton Times she still sings as she potters busily around in another, mercifully much smaller house. It dawned on me long ago that she’s happy that way.

  From the front door, I went along the tiled passages, which would have been full of sunlight and character in the summer, but, on this cold spring day, were just as cold and shivery as the street outside, on and on past dining room and sitting room then turned left down to the dispensary then right and left again and to another stretch past consulting room, breakfast room and finally to the kitchen and scullery at the end of the long offshoot at the back of the house. I seemed to have travelled about fifty yards, and who could blame Tristan in the old days for riding his bicycle to get to the front door?

  On the way I passed little Rosie, clattering over the tiles in her strong shoes, her legs muffled in thick pantaloons as Jimmy’s used to be. I sometimes wondered how we had brought the children up in this relentless cold and I was grateful that they didn’t seem to suffer from more coughs and sneezes than other children. The main casualty was Helen, who was plagued with terrible chilblains round her ankles.

  Next morning as soon as I awoke my decision welled strongly in my mind. We had to get out. Skeldale would be fine as the practice quarters but we had to find something smaller to be our home.

  It was the beginning of a kind of obsession, and I could think of nothing else as I jumped out of bed, tried in vain to see out of the frosted windows and dressed quickly in the icy atmosphere. I threw open the bedroom door and, at full gallop, began my morning routine. Down the stairs two at a time, full tilt along the freezing passage—the secret was to keep running—to the kitchen, where I put the kettle on. Back along at top speed to the dining room, where the bloody-minded anthracite stove was out again. It was the only source of warmth in the whole house but I hadn’t time to relight it now.

  Back over the long stretch to the kitchen, where I made the tea and took up a cup to Helen. Then, blowing on my hands and jumping around to stop the blood freezing, I started a fire in the kitchen. I was never much of a boy scout at fire-lighting—unlike Helen who could have a fine blaze going in no time—and by the time the family came downstairs I had my usual fitful flame peeping out among the coals.

  Breakfast was a cheerless affair with a little one-bar electric fire fighting an unequal battle and all of us trying to stop our teeth from chattering. I was silent over the meal, my mind wholly occupied with my fierce resolve, and I kept thinking back over previous festive seasons, remembering how we huddled round the fire in the big sitting room while our backs froze and the Christmas decorations swayed in the assorted draughts.

  It was still uppermost in my mind when I called at Mrs. Dryden’s little semi-detached house on the outskirts of Darrowby. I had been treating her cat for a very bad attack of otodectic mange in the ears.

  “Come on, Sooty,” I said as I lifted him onto the table. “You look a lot better today.”

  His mistress smiled. “Oh, he is. He’s stopped shaking his head and scratching. He was goin’ nearly mad before you cleaned his ears out.”

  I did some more swabbing, then trickled some lotion into the ears as the black cat purred happily. “Yes. He won’t need any more attention from me. Just keep putting the drops in the ear night and morning for another few days and I’m sure he’ll be fine.”

  I went over to the kitchen sink to wash my hands and looked out of the window at the neat garden. “This is a nice little house, Mrs. Dryden.”

  “Aye, it is, Mr. Herriot, but I’m leaving it soon.”

  “Really, why is that?”

  “Well, I need the money. That’s the top and bottom of it. When Robert died he didn’t leave much.”

  I could believe her. She was a retired farmer’s widow, and I knew what a struggle they had had to scrape a living on their smallholding. Bob Dryden and I had shared some hard experiences up there on the hills. Tough calvings and lambings, and I could remember a disastrous spring when many of their calves died of scour. He was a fine man and I remembered him as a friend.

  “But where will you live?” I asked.

  “Oh, I’m going to live with me sister in Houlton. I’ll be all right there, but I’ll be sorry to part with this nice little house. Robert and I were that pleased to be able to buy it when he retired. Still, I’m hopin’ to get two thousand pounds for it and that’ll be a godsend to me in my old age.”

  I had one of my blinding flashes then. This was just the place for us. It was perfect, and I felt sure I’d be able to get a mortgage to buy it.

  “Would you sell it to me?” I asked eagerly.

  She smiled. “I would if I could, Mr. Herriot, but the arrangements are all made. It goes up for auction at the Drovers’ Arms on Wednesday.”

  My heart started to thump. “Well, I’ll be there bidding, Mrs. Dryden.”

  I was positive I would get the house, and as I looked round the kitchen all my worries seemed to dissolve. What a piece of luck! I could just see Helen at that window, looking out on the little garden, which gave on to green fields with the church tower rising from the trees on the other side of the river. And everything was so compact. There was a hatch into the living room—no hiking for fifty yards with the food. A little hall out there with the stairs leading to three bedrooms, almost an arm’s length away. You could