The Mermaid's Child Read Online Free PDF Page B

understand?”
    â€œYes.”
    Uncle George wasn’t really my uncle. He wasn’t anybody’s uncle. He was the principal tallyman and moneylender of the area. Maybe Gran gave me to him to service a bad debt: certainly what with the funeral and the weather it had been a difficult year for her, and I don’t recall ever being paid. But like I said, my memory isn’t what it ought to be. Maybe I got that wrong.
    Uncle George assumed that I was ignorant of everything: mostly he was right to do so. He stood in the kitchen, armsfolded, and told me the best way to pluck a hen, to clean enamel, to prevent a loaf from spoiling. He pushed the larder door open and gestured me in. The cool slate shelves were laden with jars of pickled eggs, vegetables and nuts, a grey and cloudy canister of mushrooms looking unpleasantly familiar. These preserves, he told me, were to be served with his meals. He had, he said, a taste for vinegar.
    Behind the bar, he showed me the appropriate angle at which to hold a pint mug while filling it with beer, how to wipe the lip-prints off its rim after use. He opened a cupboard door to reveal a broom, a scrubbing brush and pail, and explained the sweeping, and, following that, the scrubbing of the flagged floor. He tossed me a donkeystone, informed me of its use in rubbing down front steps, and that this activity was to be performed once a week, on Thursdays. He mimed the action of rubbing. The enquiry as to how his last slave might have died was on the tip of my tongue, but I managed to swallow it back down. Such good behaviour on my part could not go on indefinitely, but for the time being my throat was still sore from where he’d held me.
    He led me out of the back door, towards a long low buildingthat half covered the burgage plot. As we passed, he pointed out where I was to collect the necessary water for my chores: a conduit brought a clean rill down from a nearby beck, and spilled it into a cool stone trough. He opened the brewhouse door: I caught the soft rich whiff of malt, and in the dim light saw heaped sacks, silken grain spilling out onto the floor. He pointed out the bags of hops, the pyramids of loaf sugar. He took down a broad-bladed knife from a hook on the wall, lifted a sugarloaf and peeled back the paper. He showed me how to scrape the sugar into flakes. He rolled up his sleeves and picked up a shovel to demonstrate the stoking of the fires for the mashing process. Leaning over the vast malty vats with a paddle, muscles standing proud on his arms, he showed me the best manner in which to stir the wort. And, at the end of the room, warmed to drowsiness by the mashing fires, he pointed out the yeasty, quietly bubbling fermentation casks.
    In short, he showed me the instruments of torture, and there was nothing I could say, no confession I could make, which could get me out of the ordeal. He didn’t want to hear a word from me.
    But, I told myself, all was not lost. I could handle the work, I’d keep quiet, and I’d manage to stay on the right side of Uncle George. It would be worth it. I’d experience firsthand the after-dark masculine world of the bar room. I’d see what no other village kid had seen.
    It took slightly less than two minutes, that first evening at the Anchor, for me to realize that the pub’s dim corners held nothing more exotic or unusual than the village men I’d always known, just a little worse the wear for drink. They sat hunched over their beer in pairs or threes while Uncle George leaned armsfolded on the counter, talking loudly to whoevercame up to buy a drink, or bending his head to hear an appeal for funds or for a period of grace. Throughout the evening, coins were passed back and forth, even to my untrained eye clearly much more than was necessary just to pay for the quantity of beer that had been drunk, and a tally was notched up in a copybook kept underneath the counter. Sometimes a basket of produce, a dead