Autumn crocuses, that’s what we are missing. I wonder when it’s best to plant them? In the winter, do you think, like the cyclamen? Look how well the cyclamen I planted the first year are doing, under the cherry tree, they’ve begun to naturalise, the clump bigger now every year. And Charlie might say, But I thought crocuses came in the spring. And she would say, with a flash of irritation, That’s why these are called autumn ones, silly. I thought you knew about that sort of thing.
She had thought he knew. But he didn’t know. And he had brought her here.
Then she would fall within herself. She would feel herself falling, and have to grip the fork and work the harder. In the night, too, she would feel herself falling, when she woke in the night, or in the morning when she woke so early, she would feel herself falling behind closed lids and have to pull herself up before she could open her eyes to the day.
They had worked so hard at it all, learning all they had learnt, softening it with banter, he learning to farm, she making it her job to make things light, learning at the same time whatever it was she had to do, to be a good wife to him however he was, to cook, to be a housewife, a mother; and they had been happy, hadn’t they, for a time? Was that as happy as one was supposed to be, all things considered? Surely it was, as happy as others were, as others anyway appeared to be? They were doing whatever it was they were supposed to be doing, then, at that time, and what others were doing; but it wasn’t ever quite right. Normal, so normal; but they were in the wrong life. Charlie in the wrong life, trying to make the farm work, to be what such a man was supposed to be, then, at that time. She too. Had she known it even then, at the beginning? Had he? Or had it only come to him later, to make it clear to them both? To make it clear, and clear off, leave her behind. And now she was the one here, still here, doing it all still, for her boys.
Take the plunge, others said. You need a life of your own. They’ll get used to it soon enough.
Yes, maybe.
Or maybe not.
Now and then over the next year or so, in the term time when the boys were gone, Michael came to stay. She had Mrs T make up the spare room for him but the second time he came he slept in her bed, returned to his, sometimes but not always, before morning. What Mrs T noticed she couldn’t say. It wasn’t only Mrs T but the house that seemed to demand the propriety, even when almost a year had passed. Of course Michael, like most of the men she knew, had been in the war, but in the Navy, on the Arctic convoys. He almost never spoke of it. Only once he had mentioned that it was cold. And frightening? she had asked. Yes, he said, very frightening. But that was all he said, nothing else. And not a piece of it showed in him. How could she live again with a man who did not speak? Michael or any of these men she met. She was becoming used to being alone now, she knew that it wouldn’t work. She knew that it could be as lonely inside a relationship as outside of one. So she let him stay, only that. Sleep with her. She never told him about the broken city. Later there would be others, but never for long.
At half-term and end of term, she collected the boys from school and brought them home, driving and asking them questions as she drove, glancing across or back at them in the passenger seats, impatient to close the gap that had opened when they had been away. Each time, they looked the same and yet not the same. Each time, they knew more things that she didn’t know, Test Match scores, names of cars on the road, boys’ knowledge that set them apart. Never before had they had lives apart from hers. Billy would be there to help lift their trunks from the car and upstairs. Billy would greet them as if they’d never been away, Jess jump up and lick their faces and skitter after them about the rooms.
The noise was so sudden, even if long anticipated, breaking the accumulated silence of weeks. Was this how it had been, she thought, before? Last time? The boys or the sound of them seemed to fill every room at once.
Then there was the smell of them, the smell on the clothes that she unpacked the next day from the trunks and took in a great heap to carry down to wash. The dirt, the mess, the dried mud on their rugger boots that fell off in the pattern of their studs onto the bedroom carpet. So much she had forgotten, each time. She should have thought to have Billy leave the trunks downstairs so that she might have put all the dirty things into the scullery straightaway.
The summer holiday was the greatest liberation of all. The boys ran wildly through the house. With windmilling arms they mimed bowling, through the rooms and up the stairs. As she came onto the landing with their sports clothes in her arms she almost collided with Richard. She dropped all the clothes, shorts, shirts falling, as a hard red ball passed fast and close to her head and smashed the window behind her.
I didn’t mean to let go, Richard said. I was only practising my action. He cupped his hand again as if it held the ball. See, this is how I learnt to do it. Slowly, with deliberation, he raised his arm, wheeled it back and up, released his fingers, with a little twist of the wrist for spin. Like that, he said, his blue eyes direct and without apology.
But that ball was real, she said. It was a hard cricket ball. It might have hurt me.
He too, she saw, was real, substantial as the ball, separate from her idea of him. He had grown while he was away, at once taller and less sturdy. She thought of him always as such a sturdy boy. It would not be long before he was as tall as she was, but he was bold as if he had that height already, looking at her boldly eye to eye.
If you have a ball, she said, then you must do your bowling outside.
Outside, there was glass on the grass. She had to put on leather gloves and pick it up, piece by piece, before any person or animal walked there. She would wrap the pieces in newspaper before she put them in the dustbin. She didn’t want anyone cutting themselves. One of the splinters had made a tiny nick on her finger, where there was a tear in a glove. She took off the glove and put the cut to her mouth to suck away the blood. He was standing at the door watching.
You’ll have to pay for that window. You can clear out the garage and earn some money and pay for the glass.
She couldn’t help thinking how like his father he was. Those blue eyes, the squareness of the face, the long back that meant that he would be tall. Regular features, thick fair hair that wouldn’t brush down. Some silent weight in him, that she had found in Charlie, that she had not seen at first, that she had got to recognise over the years of their marriage, ugly and intractable. She had observed Richard intensely from the day he was born, because he was the first, and later perhaps with a kind of foreboding because he was like his father. He said nothing, but doggedly cleared the garage. He spent the whole day doing it. Never before and never again would she see it so tidy.
A morning like others
Time passed. Times returned. All days began the same way. They always had, days at the farm, days in the country, waking in her bed to that day’s degree of morning light.
This had been specifically a day in November. November one year was not so different from November any other. This particular morning there was almost no light at all, only a glimmer of grey where the curtains did not meet.
She woke, half woke, as he rose from the bed. He let in the cold between the sheets, so she pulled them closer when he was gone and curled back into herself and into sleep. Half-sleep.
What happened next she might have remembered or she might have imagined later, because the beginning of this day was indistinguishable really from that of so many other days. It was possible, after all, that this was one of the mornings when Charlie’s movements didn’t wake her and she slept on regardless, even spreading out into the warm space that he had left; but then there would have been no narrative, and memory requires narrative, requires this day to begin in consciousness. So there it was. In her memory she heard, half heard, him dress, open the door quietly so as not to wake her, pull it to, pad downstairs in his socks. She would think that he was wearing burgundy-coloured socks, because he had only one pair that colour, and it occurred to her later, when she cleared all his c
lothes, that she never saw them again. (The small things and the worn things taken from his drawers, folded as they were, and burned in the incinerator which was a black barrel at the back of the yard; other things given away; those particular socks never seen.)
He padded down the stairs, dark red foot after dark red foot, past the sporting prints dim on the wall, to the kitchen. (Uncle Ralph’s prints still there, before she redecorated and took them down.) Or first to his study, perhaps, to the gun cupboard there. Either then or later he took out the Purdey and a handful of cartridges to put in the pocket of his coat – or perhaps the cartridges were already in his pocket, for there would have been no reason for him to take so many if his intention were clear. Often she had found cartridges left in the pocket of his coat, even working their way through tears into the lining, weighing it down when you lifted it though the pockets when you turned them out were empty. The coat was of thick greenish Harris tweed, heavily worn. (That did not come back to her. If it had, then she might have kept it and put her hands to the tough weave and taken in its smell which had seemed to her so essentially a smell of him.)
Did she hear the shot? Her memory told her that she did. But this was a morning like many others. There had been other mornings when there were shots, when he or Billy had gone out early. One shot was much like another, coming from some indeterminate direction dully across the fields. The death of a rabbit sounds much the same as the death of a man. If she heard the shot she thought nothing of it, but only dozed the longer because it was a Saturday morning and there was no need to wake the boys to take them to school. Thank goodness for that, she thought, when finally she got out of bed and walked yawning across the room to draw the curtains, thank goodness, because there was such thick fog outside. They were still at the village school then; that was then, before, when they all lived at home and she drove them each day the mile to school. There was nothing she hated more than driving the boys to school in winter fog, leaning forward to the windscreen as if that would help her to see better, wiping the condensation with the back of her hand, worrying that there might be ice, at the same time going over their spelling or their tables with them as advancing bands of fog seemed to materialise in the headlights. No school this morning, but there would be homework, for Richard at least; not for Jonny as he was too young. She thought as she got up that she would make them all a good breakfast. Charlie would like that, if he had already been outside in the cold. But what could he be doing outside, in this fog? Not shooting, surely? And yet hadn’t there been a shot? He would barely be able to see further than the end of his nose. (And was it then at the time or was it only later when she remembered, that this simple thoughtless thought turned cold in her? How could she think that, why think that, just then? The day just passed, the day before, the evening just passed, had been a slow, easy day, an easy evening. Perhaps even for some days before it had been so, she could not count them now. Only she knew that there had been some time of calm, before. The brooding that was sometimes such a weight in him had seemed to be gone, that previous evening at least, like mud gone from his boots. How could that be, she would think later. Surely there had been a sign, something in his behaviour, some premonition? What had she seen, and what missed? Possibly the calm itself was the sign, a calm that meant that his plan was made and the intention had given him ease. And she had lived with him through those days and slept beside him through the nights, and known nothing. If these questions were not with her at the time then they would be with her ever after.)
He had made himself a black coffee before he went out. That was all. There was only the cup on the table with the dregs of the coffee. She thought, when she came down, how he would be needing a good breakfast when he came in.
He had stoked the Aga. The oven was good and hot.
It was kind of him to do that, she would think later. If he had in his mind what he was about to do, then it was a kind thought – or was it only thoughtless habit, persisting regardless, the habit of their lives, or proof that he meant to come back, after all, or just an option left open? He had taken the time on this his last morning to stoke up the stove so that his family should be warm when they came downstairs, and the bacon when she cooked it, if he were to come to eat it, would be crisp. (But he can’t have been thinking of them, not then. He can’t have been thinking of anyone but himself. It was so selfish, what he was doing, so appallingly, abominably selfish.)
What then? What happened next?
Calling to the boys upstairs. Hearing them moving, coming down.
The knock at the back door. Billy, the constable, the bedraggled dog held by a string tied to her collar, some other men.
I had to be putting her on the string, madam. She wouldn’t be going otherwise. I’d call her and she’d come along a little ways, and then she’d run back.
Thank you, Billy, she had said, taking the string in her hand, bending to untie it from the dog’s collar.
The men came on in, crowding the kitchen. Men who looked useless, their hair damp, eyes looking about, evasive; the smell of them the smell of a wood in the morning mixed with tobacco smoke. She wondered why they were all of them there; if the dog had been found straying somewhere, why they had all of them taken it upon themselves to bring the dog home? They looked about, shuffled. The boys had come in at the same time.
Perhaps we should go into another room, Mrs Ashe.
Yes, the sitting room. Just herself and the constable and Billy now. Billy had barely ever been in the sitting room before though he came almost daily to the kitchen. They didn’t sit in the room but only stood. That annoyed her. She felt annoyed with them for making her go there, for coming to her and taking her there to say whatever it was they were going to say, which already perhaps she knew, which was why she was angry. They were so awkward, standing there before her. Better if they had gone back outside. Outside at least they would have had space around them for what needed to be said. No weight of ceiling over their heads. No things pressing about them, no soft carpet or curtain or upholstery, but only cold space.
I have to go out and see. I want to see.
Are you sure? Perhaps you should wait a while, madam, let us bring him in first.
Yes. No. Now.
She led them back into the kitchen, where just the boys and the dog now remained, and spoke to Billy, her eyes to his high above the boys’ eyes, adult to adult. Her voice surprisingly controlled. Billy, would you be very kind and stay with the boys just a bit?
She put on her coat, hastily tied a scarf over her head.
Took up her gloves from where they lay on the table.
Put on her boots by the back door. Jonny’s stood beside them, neatly placed but wet with mud. How odd, could he have been out already? The thought registered but only superficially. It was nothing beside the shock of the other thoughts in her.
The air was cold, moist with fog.
The constable spoke plain words to prepare her. It’s a bit of a mess, Mrs Ashe. Might be best if you could wait and see him later, when they’ve tidied him up a bit.
How could she say that she must see the place? See him. Be outside in the cold air where words were not only words but visible as breath?
The constable knelt on the leaves on the ground of the spinney and lifted the edge of the coat that had been thrown over him. That was enough. She did not need to see the rest. She saw the twisted way that he lay, the length of his body, his hand that had let go its hold on the gun. The constable looked up at her with a question and she managed the smallest shake of the head that stopped him from going any further, an answer in her eyes as much as anywhere. No more.
In the kitchen, the boys had got themselves some cereal.
Billy had made a pot of tea. Always until now it had been she who made tea for Billy. He had made the strong tea she kept especially for him. Thought you’d be needing it, Billy said, his hands shaking as he poured her a cup, unsure of themselves, slopping milk white onto the blue-and-white saucer. Such competen
t hands they had seemed to her until now, big rough knobbly countryman’s hands, reddened with work or with cold.
The boys sat in their chairs and watched.
There’s been an accident, she said. She heard herself say that as if it was someone else’s voice speaking. She didn’t know what to say next.
She remembered the bacon then, that she had put in the oven before. She grabbed the oven glove, knelt before the stove, opened the door onto smoke.
The rashers quite black, welded to the roasting tray.
The tray hot through the glove.
She dropped the tray into the sink and ran water onto it. Stood back from the steam escaping the white walls of the sink.
The boys were watching. Billy was watching.
Think I should be off now, Billy said. If that’s what you’d like, madam.
Yes, Billy. Thank you, Billy.
Boys, come to the sitting room.
Again, to the sitting room. Out of the steam and the smell of burning.
We’ll be quiet there. Let’s go into the sitting room. There’s something I need to tell you.
Richard went stiff as ice before he cried. She saw the tears rushing to freeze in his eyes. And then he went red and they melted. But Jonny showed nothing. At first she looked at his blank face and wondered if he understood. He was just seven. What did a seven-year-old understand of death? (Everything, perhaps, or nothing. Perhaps no less than a grown woman understood. He’d seen dead things after all, birds, rabbits, rats. He knew what dead things were. Simply that when a person was dead he just wasn’t any more.)
The dog had come into the room with them, crowding against their legs where they sat all three on the sofa. She had her arms around the boys and then she held the dog. She felt the dog’s warmth, and the slight shiveriness within her, smelled the world outside that she had brought to them inside. She sensed that the dog understood. The dog of course had been there.
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