Encounters

by Barbara Erskine

  I resisted the urge to go more often, to walk melancholy down the paths I had walked with him, to stand as the thaw loosed the water on the lake and watch the ducks or, ever, to climb again up the spiral stair towards the forest ceiling where I knew that now the spring had come a blackbird would be rapping with its beak against the glass. After all, what was he but a passing nod of the head, a smile in my loneliness?

  Defiantly I put him out of my mind, this intruder into my consciousness and my calm. And I filled my life so I was no longer lonely and I was even happy, ignoring that strange unjustifiable emptiness which had settled somewhere below my left ribs.

  The man with whom I spent my evenings now was a tolerant conformist Englishman whose names I knew – not only the first and the last but the middle three as well. We fitted comfortably together without rasping at each other’s corners. I met his parents and he met mine. We ate strawberries and cream at Wimbledon and fish and chips in Leicester Square. We laughed tolerantly at one another’s jokes and did not always have to interpret our deepest thoughts. Our taste in films was similar – and music. I gave him Brandenburg 1–3 for his birthday; he gave me 4–6 for mine.

  And yet still that sneaking emptiness, that flickering, subliminal vision as I woke at dawn that made me think I must have been dreaming of the spiral stairs at Kew.

  We went to the Proms and twice I suggested concerts with Britten. The music was elemental; untamed. It reminded me of Peter. In the queues outside I found myself gazing, staring, probing the crowds with lonely eyes and I cursed myself for an ungrateful benighted fool of a woman; only a woman would be so crazy.

  And of course he knew, my lover of the five names – yes, we were lovers by now – he knew there was something strange about me. Delicately he probed around the fringes of my secret and equally delicately I rebuffed him. There was after all nothing to tell. But I saw him watch me watching and I saw the heavy burden of uncertainty in his eyes and I hated myself even as I turned in the cinema queue and let my gaze wander over that sea of animated faces. All the wrong faces. And he was always there afterwards to comfort me, my lover, his arm almost apologetic around my shoulders and I would turn and stand on my toes to kiss his cheek.

  I married him as the first coloured leaves pattered down onto the hot dusty streets. But still I could not tell and still he could not ask outright. Perhaps we both forgot. It was unimportant after all – a casual meeting in the cold of the winter when the blood was thin and vulnerable, a passing of strangers whose chemistries apparently fused for a time but who then were separated and lost to one another for ever.

  I had a child, and then another. I took a part-time job which I turned into a business and I was fulfilled and satisfied. That empty gap was so infinitesimal now I did not realize it was still there. I was full of love – for the man I had married, my children, my home, my work, even for my dog. I had no time to think; no time to dream or brood upon my dreams and that was good save for the fact that time passed so very fast and I did not see It passing.

  They went to school and I employed a staff to run my business. Their father and I talked and laughed: our faces made expressions over the breakfast table; our mouths formed words. We did not hear one another any more but we were content as in a stupor, lulled by our own narcotic dream.

  So it was strange that after all the years I should have thought again of Peter – suddenly, yearningly thought of him with such an urgency that it could not be denied.

  There was nothing to keep me at home; nothing to stop me going to Kew on that first day of snow, of a new, another, winter.

  I walked slowly along the paths, not looking especially for him, not thinking, my mind an emptiness as, hands in pockets, I passed down the line of white queen’s beasts, passed the iced fountain and climbed the steps towards the Palm House.

  He was sitting on the iron staircase. I did not raise my head as I approached, climbing methodically step by step towards him. Then I stopped. My heart was beating fast like a girl’s and I could feel the colour burning in my cheeks. Slowly I raised my head until our eyes met.

  ‘Last time we tossed a coin,’ he said. His face was a network of lines but the tan was the same, the blue eyes as intense, the costume the same too, though nowadays of course everybody wore it.

  ‘Why didn’t you come, that last time?’ I said quietly.

  ‘I had to cover a story in France. There was no way I could let you know.’ He made a rueful face. ‘I left a note for you later, pinned to the stairs here. I was so sure you would come back and find it. But I guess you never did. I came here every day too, after that, but I never saw you.’

  He had come each day. And I had nursed my little pain and refused to succumb and turned my back on him. I swallowed.

  ‘I did come. I walked by the lake.’

  ‘You’re married now.’ There was no ambiguity about the plain gold band on my left hand that rested on the white railing by his head.

  Was that sadness I could see in his eyes? Suddenly my own were full of tears. ‘I’m very happy.’

  ‘I’m glad.’ He did not say that he was too. ‘And you still go up the “up” and down the “down”?’ A glint of humour lit his eyes.

  I nodded. ‘You didn’t quite have time to convert me – not completely.”

  I wanted to touch him, to reassure myself that he was real and as if he understood he slowly reached up and put his hand over mine. ‘I somehow knew you would come today.’ Slowly he stood up. Still holding my hand he guided me down through the drifting summer fronds and out of the giant hot womb of the place into the whispering feathery snow and the tiny forgotten scar beneath my ribs opened, as his arm went round my shoulders, into a raw throbbing cavity and deep inside I could hear myself moaning as we walked through the empty silent gardens.

  This time we did not speak. Perhaps it had all been said in the silence of the long years. He guided me beneath the heavy blue arms of the cedar and there he kissed me – the long slow kiss which had lingered unacknowledged in my dreams and I forgot at that moment my husband and my children; I forgot my past and my future – everything but this man for whom I had waited here by the lake for a hundred years as the frost made spikes of silver on the willows over the water. We lived a lifetime in that afternoon before I fled.

  My courage was not enough to walk blindly out of the gates into the anonymity of the whirling snow. Now I knew his name and he knew mine and one day, I knew, he would call me to him once more and I would have to tear myself apart to heal the wound he had reopened in my breast.

  Meanwhile, cowardly, I sought the comfort of my husband’s arms and I knew at once that he understood again, as he had always understood, and our tears mingled in the darkness.

  A Summer Full of Poppies

  ‘… The surface of the moon must look like this. Imagine the chaste huntress engirdled with barbed wire! It is hard even to imagine it as it was before I was wounded and went away. I remember it all mud and rain and cold and smelling of mould and decay, and now it is a parched desert with, where the fields used to be, behind the lines, a scattering of poppies …’

  Maria raised her eyes from the crumpled letter to the dusty golden haze of the corn stubble which stretched down the slope before her, across to the woods and foothills in the far distance. There were poppies here, too, along the hedgerows; great splashes of blood-red colour in the dusty green and gold, and corn thistles, yellow patches in the hedge, with (too delicate and thinly growing to be seen from here) the pale blue of scabious and teasel.

  The sun beat down on the shoulders of her thin embroidered blouse and on the chestnut plait of hair carefully wound round her head but her hat, thrown carelessly on the grass beside her, lay unnoticed.

  ‘… Poor old Tom Kennedy has had a bad time. He’s lost a leg. They think he’ll be strong enough to come home by the end of the month and I’ve told him to look you up. Do you remember I told you he has no family of his own at all and I owe so much to him. Even now in that terri
ble hospital he manages to be cheerful; the nurses all adore him; I bet he gives them a bad time – teasing them I mean …’

  There had been a photo of Tom Kennedy in James’s wallet. He had shown her time and again the tall dark young man with widely-spaced light-coloured eyes and the new, so proudly borne uniform. ‘I wish I could be like him, Maria,’ James had said so wistfully as he sat, the healing arm still supported in its sling across his chest. ‘He’s such a good person, so gentle, yet so strong and always happy and cheerful.’

  Maria had smiled at her young husband, her throat tightening at his vulnerability, his own unassuming and unrecognized gentleness. What business had these boys in a war?

  She watched the shadow of a cloud race across the stubble towards her. It touched her with a finger of shivering cold and passed.

  They had married when the corn, this same corn, was green in the field, she and James, he fumbling with the still-bandaged arm to slip the gold band onto her finger and smiling so bashfully in the neatly pressed uniform. She had been one of the lucky ones. She had married in that year of 1916; married the man she loved, known him for those few short weeks of bliss as his bone knitted and the shattered muscles drew together and slowly healed beneath the puckered white scar and then she had waved him goodbye, standing on the station platform, her arm aching as the small white handkerchief fluttered above her head. She waved long after the train was out of sight and only the smudge of smoke hung over the line in the still air.

  ‘I’ll try and be back for Christmas, my love,’ he had said, as he bumped his bag into the carriage, his blue eyes twinkling down at her mischievously from the step. He was happy to be returning to his regiment, tired of the old men and the women and endless talk of war. They had no concept of what it was like out there and, though he sweated sometimes at night with the fear of returning and put his hands over his ears to block out the mind-breaking roar of guns, and the sound of screams, screams that had become for ever trapped within his own head, he could not bear any longer the inactivity; the knowledge that he, at home in England, no longer knew what was happening at the front.

  He was sad to leave Maria. She was soft and golden and smelt of the new mown hay. He laughed with her and buried his face in her long chestnut hair, letting the scented weight of it run through his fingers like slippery water. But he never showed her the slim notebook in which he had scribbled his poems, those words from his own aching guts, twisted and moulded till they screamed like the sounds in his head and echoed the horrors of the trenches and the poignancy of those who prayed to come home and then knew as soon as they were there that somehow they could not escape; that they must return to the depths of hell of their own free will just as soon as they were able.

  ‘… So many of the faces are new here, Maria, although a few of the old ones remain. Jones is here and Freddie Haytor and Timpson and Stuart, but I do miss Tom …’

  Somewhere beyond Square Acre Field a column of smoke was rising straight up into the air, dissipating in the whiteness of the hazy horizon. Perhaps it was a rick burning, or a cottage chimney. She watched lazily, not registering curiosity or concern. Just watching and waiting as the shadows lengthened across the field. A wood pigeon began to coo, the soothing notes slurring into one another in the echoing woods. One by one slowly the stray yellowing leaves had begun to fall, accidentally, from the trees: the first unbelieved messengers of autumn.

  She folded the letter into its worn creases and slipped it back into the pocket of her skirt, brushing off the dusty grass. Already the sound of hooves from Patterson’s wagonette had passed briskly on the road below. It was four miles to the station from the cottage she shared with her grandmother. James had lived there too for those weeks of their marriage. Maria smoothed the folds of her skirt and wedged the straw hat on her head, half listening for the whistle of the train, which when the wind was from the west, would echo across the country as it pulled out of the town and headed across the hills towards them.

  The door had slammed as James rushed in from the road that day when he found out. He ran into the parlour where Maria’s grandmother was sitting knitting socks for the men at the front.

  ‘They’ve told me she was Richard Week’s girl,’ he shouted at the old woman, his eyes red-rimmed from the sun. ‘That she was his long before she was mine. That she still loves him.’

  The old lady laid down her needles and peered up, noting the hands gesticulating, the arms hanging free, their strength regained. His eyes were wild with grief.

  ‘She’s a pretty girl, James. You must have known she had boyfriends.’

  He gestured impatiently, dismissing boyfriends as unimportant. ‘I hear Richard was different. He was everything.’ His face crumpled suddenly and he sat down beside the empty hearth, the line of unsunburned skin showing white where the folds of his cravat had loosened. ‘I can’t bear to think of her in another chap’s arms …’

  She smiled. ‘She’s yours now, James. That’s all that matters. Richard has been in Flanders some time now. I believe he had already gone when she first met you.’ She looked suddenly vague. Her eyes refused to meet his, slipped sideways and back down to her arthritic fingers and the tiring dark grey wool.

  James understood then. Richard was away. She had wanted a man and as the one she loved was not there …

  The quarrel they had that night was as unforeseen as it was unkind in its bitterness. Neither understood the passions that allowed them to hurl such insults at one another. They forgot the fears, the strains, the pent-up emotions with which they had been living and blamed one another.

  That night alone in her bed, Maria lay crying herself to sleep as James, slamming the door, had walked out to stride until dawn over the fields towards the hills, his boots soaked with dew, his fair hair blown back from his face, his brain seething with an unforeseen jealousy which appalled him even as he recognized its force.

  By some unspoken agreement neither spoke of Richard again. It was as though they both sensed a power to be released by his name which could tear them and their newly won marriage apart, and though James was often moved to do just that he refrained and forced himself to trust and love again.

  As he turned to her on the step of the train she wanted to shout: ‘It’s not what you think, James; we never did anything; it’s you I love now,’ but her pride forbade it. If he really thought so badly of her, let him. She didn’t care.

  But she had written it down. Three times she had begun the letter; three times thrown it aside in her writing case until at last she had found the words to explain what there had been between her and Richard and what had passed. Nothing with him, however dear the memory, could equal the waves of happiness with James and the knowledge that she was his wife. And this although she had heard now that Richard had won himself a medal and promotion at the front.

  It was only when her letter was posted at last that she stopped tormenting herself about what she might have done to James. His own to her, the letter in her pocket, had arrived some time later. She had read it again and again for signs of anger or remorse, unbending pride or forgiveness but the letter contained none. It was natural and friendly and being about other people was curiously impersonal.

  She walked briskly down the lane towards the station, her skirt stirring small whorls of dust at her feet, her boots gathering a strangely matt film on the soft polished leather.

  The wagonette would be there before her but it didn’t matter. It could pick Tom Kennedy up with the luggage and then collect her on the way back from the station after the train had pulled out. In a way she was glad. She didn’t want to have to see him climbing into the wagonette with his crutches and his stump and his wide-apart eyes, this man whom James had liked so much.

  Tom Kennedy’s letter had arrived only a few days after James’s. ‘… I would so like to meet you, Maria, (may I call you Maria?),’ he had said. ‘I know James means to write to you himself but my transport has come more quickly than I expected or dared hope so
I must risk my letter arriving unannounced. I have nowhere to go immediately and I would so like to stay with you and your grandmother. James said he was sure you wouldn’t mind. How I envy him, lucky old Jim, going up to where the action is. But then I always envy Jim. For the last few weeks I’ve been envying him his lovely bride …’

  I hear the thunder in my ears

  And weep aside

  For here there is no place for tears.

  It had been a surprise to her, the notebook. Of all the scanty belongings they had returned to her it had been the most personal, that and her own unopened letter which had arrived too late. She had not known that he wrote poetry or how he felt about the war. Beyond a vague almost nameless terror for his safety she had not thought about the icy mud or the broiling sun or the guns. It was all beyond her comprehension, or was it just too terrible for her to try and comprehend? She could not decide which.

  ‘You’re one of the lucky ones, my dear,’ her grandmother had said to James over the breakfast things the morning before he left, ‘You’ve had your terrible wound and God be thanked you’ve recovered. You’ll not be asked to suffer any more. I feel it in my bones.’ He hadn’t suffered any more of course. He could have known nothing of the shell that exploded at his feet, nothing at all.

  He had left a trunk in the outhouse for them to store for him, ‘until we find our own home when the war is over’. There had been four days of blank misery as she realized she would never see him again and then suddenly on a morning of misty warmth and felling scented apples she remembered that trunk. Perhaps there was a message for her there. Perhaps part of him lingered, something, some way of recapturing him for herself. The key was in the drawer of the table in their room.