by Sarah Perry
I’d’ve liked to put my arms around him like I did when Christopher was a boy, but I think he hated me a little, for believing I thought so badly of him, so instead I stayed away and said, ‘I never thought so. Not ever, not when I saw the woman on the path, or later when we all talked it over on the way home. Hester –’ Pity for Alex was erased by a burst of rage, and it was a while before I could speak again. ‘She’s mistaken, Alex – that’s all. She must have misheard. No-one believes it of you, and neither do you, and you must think of something else now.’
He stood for a long while with the sun putting lights in his hair, and the sycamore keys spinning from their branches. Then he bent to pick one up, and said, ‘I saw a woman once who wore a necklace with one of these in silver hanging from a chain. She said inside the silver was a real one and I remember thinking that it seemed wrong, walking about with something dying round your neck.’ Then he smiled, in the old frank way I knew, and said, ‘All right. I won’t think about it any more. I’ll put it away somewhere, and won’t take it out again. That’s the best way.’
So we walked together across the grass, and our shadows were long and reached in front of us, and behind us the cat came slowly. We could hear Eve playing the ‘Maple Leaf Rag’ much too fast, and Clare calling from a window upstairs, and as we walked I repeated to myself over and over, under my breath: put it away somewhere and don’t take it out again.
Eve Eve Eve
Western wind, when wilt thou blow?
The small rain down can rain.
Christ! That my love were in my arms
And I in my bed again.
I have known that poem all my life!
I can’t write any more.
MONDAY
I
On the morning of the sixth day John woke to find a grey haze gathering at the lower edges of the sky as though all the fields east and west were on fire. He stood watching a while at the window, buttoning a shabby blue shirt he’d found, wondering if the haze would rise and gather into storm clouds.
The changing sky made him ill at ease; certain he could not sustain the deceit another day and would soon be leaving, he wanted to memorise every detail of the house, as he’d once memorised poems to be recited in front of a class of boys he never came to know. Alone again in his ordered flat, would he remember what he’d seen and heard? Surely he’d forget the flight of steps and the green door, the blue lights in the blue room where they ate, and the lichen that crept across the terrace stones?
When he made his way downstairs he paused in the cool dim air of the hall. It stretched ahead of him, surely far longer than he’d first thought, and a bunch of keys hung in the lock of the front door. He heard a quiet dry rustle from somewhere very near, and looking up saw a strip of wallpaper peel from the damp plaster behind and droop towards the floor. Stooping to smooth it back against the wall, he saw for the first time the design of tangled leaves and branches, with small birds caught in the dense undergrowth. The pattern was so deep and dark he wouldn’t have been surprised to hear little furtive movements, and he stared for a long time at a goldfinch until he was sure he saw its black eye blink. He smoothed his palms against the paper, hoping it would fasten back against the wall, imagining Eve painted there and hiding in the thicket. He felt again the painful tugging in his stomach, and was so absorbed in imagining her there that when she passed by a moment later he thought he must have summoned her.
She said: ‘I have to talk to you,’ and put out her hand. It hung in the air between them an inch from his sleeve. The thin bluish skin was pulled tight over the strong musician’s bones, and there were blue shadows between the knuckles. Her voice had lost its particular musical tone – it was terse, all seriousness. The hand crossed the last inch between them and touched him lightly on the forearm, and the ends of her fingers were hot.
John met her gaze with difficulty, remembering Walker’s long sly glance at him as he had drawn her closer against his side – had he told her they’d been watched? Was he going to be mocked all over again?
‘Oh?’ said John. ‘What is it?’
‘I need your help.’ It had the rising cadence of a plea; he made a half-step towards her and brought his own hand out from his pocket, then, not knowing what to do with it, instead reached up to smooth his beard. She said, this time leaning on the first word, ‘We need your help.’
‘Of course,’ he said.
‘Of course. Well…’ She glanced over his right shoulder, where down the stone step the kitchen door stood half-open, then brought her eyes up to his with the snap of a key fitting its lock. ‘But no – shall we go for a walk?’ She slipped away down the dim hall, beckoning as she went, and he followed the flash of her bare feet on the carpet.
Outside, as he watched her walk ahead of him on the scorched sharp grass, John felt again the change of air, as though there’d been a disruption overnight. The stillness now wasn’t like the calm before a storm, which would surely be a gathered sort of stillness, like a muscle bunched before a blow: this was complete inertia, and more unsettling than a lightning strike.
She stood waiting on the lawn beyond the blighted elm. Around him the sun picked out every shallow fissure in the dried-out earth, and gave each blade of grass its own black shadow. But as he came near to her, he saw that she stood within a bluish shadow slowly moving. It spread for several feet around her to a blurred edge, and shed a softer light on the fine white lines of her face and hands. She beckoned – ‘Hurry up!’ – then lifted her arms above her head. The sky, empty for thirty-five days, was punctuated by a single cloud moving east, shedding white air at its fringes, as solitary as if it puffed out of the chimney stack. John came and stood beside her in the shadow. ‘You wanted to tell me something?’
‘Yes, I did.’ She drew her black brows together.
‘Is it Alex? Did that woman call again?’
‘No…’ She waved distractedly, as though pushing the stranger out of their dark circle. ‘It’s not that. At least, it’s not quite that. Look – I want you to take this.’ She reached into the pocket of her shorts and took out a small envelope. It was stamped, though the stamp wasn’t franked, and had been opened and closed several times until the pale brown paper was soft. Above the address the name ALEXANDER was written in poorly-made capitals.
‘Another letter,’ said John. The sight of it depressed him, and he took it reluctantly, as if the stupidity and spite inside might be contagious.
She nodded. ‘I found it yesterday. It was under the doormat. You don’t need to look at it’ – John had half pulled out a folded piece of newspaper – ‘it’s more of the same, another drowning – Wales this time, I think. Oh, John – who’d do this? Who’d be so childish?’ She plucked at the fragile skin on her throat and left it mottled and red. ‘I want you to hang on to it. In books they burn them, don’t they? But don’t burn it. Keep it. Maybe we’ll need it sometime. No good my taking it – Alex comes to my room too much, so does Clare; and I don’t want Hester to know. Did she speak to you this morning? About anything important, I mean?’
John shook his head, pushing the letter into his back pocket and feeling it weighing on him.
‘It’s her birthday tomorrow.’
‘I remember. Sixty.’
‘And not for the first time! Anyway – there’s supposed to be a party. You’ll be the only guest – no-one else is invited. There isn’t anyone else to invite.’
For a moment he was tempted by the old polite uncertain formula – ‘Oh, well, that really is kind, but I don’t’ – but it was much too late for all that. Eve, seeing his hesitation almost before he felt it, raised an eyebrow and said: ‘It’s all planned. More than she knows. Clare has made a cake.’ She threw him a glance from under her fringe: you and I will both be kind, however awful it is. It made him complicit, and gave him far more pleasure than it ought to have done. She lifted the curls from the back of her neck in a gesture he’d begun to recognise, arching her back as though testing the stre
ngth of her bones. Her shadow reached beyond the circle of shade, and then retreated as she lowered her arms.
‘And Walker wants to show a reel of film he found in the attic: Hester As a Young Woman. You can’t imagine, can you? I think she was an actress for a while. She has the voice. I suppose I’ll play something. Elijah might sing. Everyone has to do something. We did it once at St Jude’s you know…’ She looked anxious for a moment, as though she were afraid she’d been insensitive. John felt a pricking at the back of his neck and flicked at it, expecting to dislodge a sucking gnat, but it was only a leaping nerve.
‘What I need you to do,’ said Eve, stretching her bare foot ahead of her so that her long toes, already dirty, poked out of their circle of shade, ‘is talk to the woman. She wants to call it off – says it wouldn’t be right to celebrate. In the light of events.’ She shook her head. ‘It’s no good. I know what will happen because I know Alex better than her – he’ll spend all day down by the reservoir, feeling miserable and guilty because it will be his fault there’s no music and no-one’s dancing, and no-one ate his sister’s cake. We have to carry on as if everything is all right because if we don’t, it will never be all right again – especially after yesterday. You agree?’ It wasn’t really a query, but he nodded, glad again to be needed. ‘There’s no use at all my speaking to her. You’ll have to do it. You have a beard. It counts for something.’ So she couldn’t keep the mockery from her voice for long – the seriousness briefly left her and her speckled eyes roamed speculatively over his face. Then, as if regretting the change, she became grave again and said, ‘Please do. Please. She’ll listen to you.’
‘Of course I’ll try. But what shall I say to her? Has anyone ever changed her mind about anything at all?’
Eve turned to look at him. In the mild light of their little dark territory on the lawn her eyes brightened. Oh, but they’re not green after all, not quite, he thought. I’ll have to think what colour they are, so I can write it down. ‘Don’t you understand?’ she said, then paused, smoothed a damp curl from her forehead, and said: ‘Look, she doesn’t mean what she says. Nobody ever does! Dear John, you’re so like Clare. Don’t you ever pick things up, and look to see what’s underneath?’ Dear John, she said, on a cadence like the music he heard her playing at night, and without warning there began an insistent pulling in his stomach, so like the painful drawing of the day before that he put his hand to his stomach as though he felt sick. Then, afraid she’d notice, he arrested the movement, and instead hooked his thumb in the warm brass buckle of the stranger’s belt.
‘She doesn’t mean it – oh come on, follow me, it’s getting ahead of us: there must be wind, up there! – it’s just she needs to be heard saying the right things. She must have the correct feelings. D’you see? After all, how could we love her if we thought her selfish? And of course if we’re made to plead with her, and tell her how loved she is, how we can’t believe she can be sixty, how there’s no-one in the world quite like Hester, for she’s a jolly good fellow – well, then she’ll know we love her.’ John nodded, thinking not for the first time how changeable they all were, and how mistaken he’d been on almost every score. He said, ‘If I do this can I be excused from any – from any kind of performance?’ He said the word distastefully, then to show that of course he looked forward to her playing, if to nothing else, he added, ‘Because I’ve no talents at all, you know.’
‘We need a listener: they also serve, who only stand and wait. Now then,’ she touched him lightly again above the elbow, and this time her fingertips were cold. ‘Thank you… I don’t suppose you imagined we’d all need your help like this – but I promised Walker this will be the last thing we ask of you.’
The mention of the other man soured John’s pleasure, and he crossed the lawn slowly, setting his back straight like a soldier doubting orders. He looked once behind to see Eve standing in her diminishing circle of shade. She was waving down the garden towards the valve tower – someone was coming to meet her. Ahead of him, the house in shadowed replica on the lawn tilted towards him, and at the kitchen window Hester stood half-concealed by the lowered blind, her forearms plunging and withdrawing at the sink.
‘More tea?’ she said when he opened the door, rehearsing how best to begin.
‘Yes – thank you.’ He watched her move heavily between the table and the draining board. Something bubbled on the stove and gave off a thick floury scent he couldn’t place. She dried a teacup on her apron, which was not clean.
‘How’s Alex?’ he said, implying that she alone would have the full story. The kettle sang on the hob.
‘Tired, I think.’ She poured the water too rapidly into the pot and splashed her arm without flinching. When she came to the table with two overfull cups, scald marks bloomed on the back of her hand. ‘He didn’t sleep much. He was down at the reservoir most of the night, though I don’t think he went in the water. These days I think he just likes to be there. Hard to say by now whether it’s a curse or a comfort. It’s always the way, don’t you think,’ she said, getting up to stir the pan on the stove, ‘after a while our troubles are the only thing we have that never change and we wouldn’t lose them, even if we could.’
She sat opposite him in a chair that groaned under her. Her fine black eyes were hooded with sleep. ‘She called once more last night. There’s really nothing wrong with the child. He’d come to more harm at school! She didn’t thank us, not quite, but everything’s cleared up. There is – what do they say, on the news? – there’s no case to answer.’
She sucked thoughtfully at her cup, and a thick drop spilled from the rim. ‘Best just to leave him awhile. Best to let him sleep. There’s all the time in the world for talking.’ She began to sort through the piles of letters and magazines and books on the table, impatiently clearing a space, then returned to the stove and left her tea to stain a long-outdated headline (Austrian Excavators Return Empty-handed).
The table was scored with knives and burnt by pots hurriedly set down. John traced the words NOT THIS TIME with his forefinger, and felt a chill pass through the damp high-ceilinged kitchen. Behind Hester, in the cool green-painted alcove where the night before Alex had sat with his knees drawn up under his chin, Elijah was silently reading. Some trick of the light, coming at him from the windows and the harsh strip-lights set in the vaulted ceiling, doubled his shadow in the recess, and his heavy down-turned head was reproduced over each shoulder. Leafing through a paperback, he caught John’s surprise at the title and smiled. ‘Not exactly required reading in the seminaries, eh?’ Hume: On Suicide said the cover, in a pretty typeface unsuited to its subject. ‘You’ve read it?’
‘I went in for that sort of thing,’ said John, gripping his teacup. ‘When I was young.’ The handle was loose, and rasped when it was touched.
‘This sort of thing?’
‘Oh, you know. Thinking.’ Stirring at the stove Hester let out a quiet blow of amusement.
‘Ah.’ The preacher stroked the embossed paper cover. ‘Perhaps I’d’ve done too, if circumstances had been different. I find it hard to disagree with now. Might even have done then, when I lay down in green pastures so to speak.’ He smiled ruefully, and John could not have said whether he regretted having once been content to lie down, or having got up again.
‘I preached on it, you know,’ he said. ‘Very often. Popular sermon subject, nice and clear-cut: ending your own life goes against the will of God, which is that we would all live long enough to serve Him. What is the chief end of man?’ he recited thoughtfully: ‘To glorify God, and enjoy him forever. But this man here’ – he shook the slim white book – ‘says that if one day you went out walking, and saw a rock rolling down towards you, no-one would condemn you for stepping aside and averting your death, and diverting the will of God. Taking your own life in that case – isn’t it just the same, like putting your finger in the path of a raindrop on the window and changing its course? The raindrop will carry on rolling, because gravity tells i
t to; it’ll just take a different path.’ He shrugged, turning back to his book; and John, relieved of the need to reply, turned back to the kitchen table.
‘Have you seen outside?’ he said, tense with the burden of a duty not yet carried out. Hester bent over the pan on the stove and breathed in its steam. When she lifted her face it was blotched and wet. ‘Looks like the storm’s coming.’
‘Oh?’ she brought the pan to the table and sat opposite him, thoughtfully stirring. I hope that’s not lunch, thought John, looking at the thick translucent liquid with distaste. One final bubble burst weakly on the surface and left a shallow crater. ‘Good. I feel like my bones have been boiled for soup.’ She caught his gaze and laughing said, ‘Oh, this isn’t soup, you know. It’s glue.’ She reached behind to the dresser with its chipped crockery stacked on the shelves and brought out the bald china head and shoulders of a handsome man. His eyes were open and all over his brow and scalp were written the qualities of his character, which must have been a trial to his friends: Blandness, Order, Mirthfulness, Combativeness. The white packed bundle of nesting spiders’ eggs John had seen fastened to the shelf the day before had burst, and several black dots scurried, frightened, over the mouth and nose. Hester blew them away, scooped her middle finger into a pot of Vaseline and smeared a thick layer of jelly over the glazed features. Then she said, ‘Tell me how you are. I thought last night you looked tired – could you take this? Don’t let it stick.’
John took the pan from her and stirred the thick paste with a wooden spoon. ‘I’d walked a long way,’ he said.