Ralf opened his hand to Godric in silent farewell. The space next to Mary Ibbott was still free.
Ralf’s trepidation was eased by the complacent look she gave him as he sat down. “Hullo, Mary.”
“Hullo yourself.”
“Looking forward to the music?”
She pulled a face.
As they talked, Ralf decided she was even prettier than he had thought: prettier, more vital and feminine. The lamplight was needlessly flattering. Her eyes made free with his, she smiled and enlisted the opinions of her friend, and it dawned on Ralf that she was flirting with him: or he with her. The sensation was far from disagreeable. He was glad he had been brave enough to make his way here. He relished the prospect of sitting beside her for the evening, close enough to touch.
But, as the recital went on, he was also conscious, in the edge of his vision, of another girl. The calm she maintained was invariable and superior. The upright way she carried herself, the tranquil disposition of her limbs, the remembered gentleness of her speech, the mild exactitude of her manners: all these made stern reproof of his dalliance with a serf. The Mademoiselle was of the purest stock. Her father’s illustrious ancestor, Geoffroy de Maepe, had wielded a sword alongside the Conqueror himself, hacking down the oafish, nameless, tow-haired Saxons who figured somewhere in Ralf’s past.
Her eyes were her sword. The smith who had forged it had brought the edge to such sharpness that it sliced with a whisper and moved on, before the victim could feel pain or know that he had lost an arm, his legs, or even his head. She belonged to the opulent south; he to the north. Her people had a history of empire. His had nothing but memories of savagery: tribal wars, huts on fire, defeat at Norman hands.
Even as he stole glimpses of Mary, Ralf wondered whether he might after all stumble into that pot of powder. The lamplight was falling not just on Mary Ibbott. The Seigneur’s daughter had never looked so lovely.
But no. If he were going to fall in, he would have done so long ago. He was susceptible only to her disdain. Mary might not be a noblewoman, but at least she seemed to like him.
After the Baron’s closing speech, when people started rising to stand about gossiping with their neighbours, Mary, still seated, said quietly, “Can we go outside? I want to ask you something.”
Ralf did not see why her question, whatever it was, should not be posed in here, but the mystery was surely connected with the swell of her bodice and the radiance in her eyes, and he was more than content to thread his way through the crowd and follow her out through the small side door.
The night was cold and windless, with starlight enough to allow them, as the mystery grew, to find their way along the edge of the barn to the furthest and most remote corner. Once they had turned it, Mary leaned her back against the wall.
“I’ve seen you watching me, Ralf Grigg.”
“What do you mean?”
“I don’t mind. You’re the best-looking man in the village. You know you are.”
Ralf knew no such thing: nor had he ever been called a man before. Even coming from Mary Ibbott, such flattery was more heady than the knowledge that their presence here, alone together in the darkness yet only yards from everyone else, was both illicit and dangerous.
“What’s your question?” he said, half knowing the answer.
“Don’t be stupid.”
She raised her face to his, and Ralf understood that she wanted to be kissed, perhaps as much as, all evening, he had wanted to kiss her. He thought of the apprentices at Rushton and wished that he knew what to do, what kissing was like: and then he discovered that he was already finding out. The softness of her lips belonged to some new realm of sensation, unknown and unguessed at, but this was only the beginning. The pressure of her arms round his neck gave him licence to take her by the waist; and when, presently, he realized that her tongue was seeking contact with his own, he overcame his surprise and granted it. The last shreds of his shyness were discarded. He no longer needed to conceal the extent of his arousal, and pulled her even closer.
“You can do me if you want,” she whispered, when they broke for air. “Let’s go in the field.”
Ralf’s reaction was delayed. At first he thought he had misheard. He could not believe that she was so easy, and that she must have already, as the apprentices would say, done it, more than once, with another village boy – or boys. How many? He could not comprehend his own ignorance, the gulf in his understanding. What went on at Mape? What went on during the week, when he wasn’t here?
It would have to be confessed, what he was doing. And this was not just impure thought, fleeting and venial, but deadly sin. Before he could take communion again, he would have to tell Father Pickard through the grill.
Her embrace deepened. She was unaware of his qualms; her mouth had again found his. He knew this was wrong, but her power was too great. Easy or not, he wanted her. All his speculations and yearnings about girls had taken shape in the yielding, irresistible reality of her flesh. The confessional grill was far away: he would go with her into the field, on the ground, anywhere.
His indistinct preview of a grassy verge, chalky soil, flints, was augmented by an awareness of rustling and a quiet snapping of old hogweed stems. So lost, so drunk was he that for a moment he did not even understand the significance of the grasp on his shoulder that dragged him aside.
“Get your stinking hands off her!”
Aholiab Peake. That was his name. The voice. Ralf could scarcely see.
“I leave you alone and look what happens.”
“He made me,” Ralf heard her say.
Aholiab was a year older than Ralf, bigger, a vagueness, his face barely visible. He worked in the fields, was belligerent, lived down by the coast road with his ugly father. Without warning, the vagueness changed shape.
The blow arrived: unexpected, outrageous, brutal. Ralf felt as if his cheek, his teeth, had been stoved in. Then the pain began.
“Don’t mark his face,” another voice said. “Hit him in the gut.”
Ralf’s elbows had been seized. The second voice belonged to John Hollins, Aholiab’s invariable companion, even older and bigger. After the first vicious punch had been driven into Ralf’s stomach, as he grasped at his breath, he heard Aholiab speaking again.
“Next time you feel like prodding someone, tap that sister of yours. If you don’t mind waiting your turn.”
Ralf’s flaring, uncontainable rage was yet contained, held fast with superhuman strength. A harder punch landed, and a third, and then a fourth. The last left him unable to breathe at all. His legs gave way. He found himself on his knees and elbows, his face against the ground, among the texture and smell of raw earth, moss, last year’s hogweed and the newly emerged leaves of dogs’ mercury. He was expecting to be kicked, but nothing else happened. They had gone away, all three of them.
His breath came back. He remained crouching there, paralysed, eyes shut, and remembered that Aholiab Peake was the very first person he had seen on that far-off evening when he had arrived with Imogen’s chin on his shoulder and her sleepy arms round his chest. He remembered also having twice seen Aholiab and Mary together, on the green and again after church, and he wondered who in the Long Barn had directed Aholiab and John Hollins outside. Mary’s friend? Was there such a thing as a friend? As for Mary, Ralf now half recalled a lesson Father Pickard had given in church, from God’s laws in Exodus. It must have been meant for the young people of the village, though Ralf had not known it at the time. He had not imagined that it applied to him. “If a man entice a maid who is not betrothed, and lie with her, he shall surely endow her to be his wife.” That word, wife, made awesome by its permanence, belonged to the sacrament of marriage. What had Ralf been thinking of? Maid or not, even to muse upon Mary Ibbott had been blasphemous: there had been not the least idea of making her his wife. She was vain and shallow and, he now knew, worse. He could even accept as a penance the cowardly beating he had received.
But not wh
at they had said about Imogen. She did not belong in the same world as Aholiab Peake. Through carnal weakness, Ralf had allowed her name, as his sister, to be tainted and spoken aloud. He had failed in his duty to keep her high above such filth.
Up there, protected by their own discernment and chastity, dwelt the good people, the faithful, constant and wise. He thought of his parents, of Jacob and Father Pickard. Crouching in the weeds like a beast, Ralf saw how far he had fallen from their erroneous view of him. He belonged down here, not up there, not with Father Pickard, or the Baron, or Godric: or, most chaste and discerning of them all, Godric’s younger sister.
In the shameful darkness, still doubled up with pain, Ralf saw her as if for the first time. She was so far above Mary Ibbott that even to compare them was depraved.
The lightning hit him then, more catastrophic than any physical blow, so bright and searing that its impact came in the form of ready-made words, a complete and perfect sentence, burnt deep into his mind. I love her. At their earliest meeting, when Godric had introduced them, he had known it. Or even before. She resided in the predestination of his friendship with her brother. That was where he had known Godric before: in her. In Eloise. Her name was breath, it was life itself.
What had she thought of him this evening? Why had he done it? Because she had been watching. Why else, when sitting with Godric on the bale, had he wanted to join Mary Ibbott? Because he had known Eloise was coming. He had known where she would be seated and where her gaze must fall.
What had been behind it? What had he wanted to prove? That another could find him acceptable, even if she did not?
No wonder she viewed him with contempt. She was too mild, like her brother, like their brown-eyed father. Ralf deserved far worse. He was unworthy to be seen by her at all.
Clutching his belly and eager to doubt, he struggled to get up. This must not be true, he told himself.
This must not be true. This must not be true. He raised his face to the firmament.
She was infinitely distant, unreachable. She would never be his. The only one, the one formed by God to be his ideal: she could never be his. And even if a daughter of France could notice someone like him, even if she were not already bargained away in marriage, even then he had lost her, irrevocably, tonight.
He could not believe that only an hour ago he had viewed as amusing the idea of falling in love with her. There was nothing amusing about pain, or despair, or the certainty that his life would for ever be a lop-sided, empty, and crippled thing.
Fending off with one hand the supporting side of the barn, Ralf began his solitary and agonizing progress back to his grandfather’s house.
* * *
Ralf’s old room was now for the exclusive use of his sister. When he was at Mape he slept in the parlour, which meant he could not retire until everyone else had done so. More than that, he no longer had a retreat.
His father questioned him at length about his swollen face, his disappearance from the barn, and the manner of his return. While Ralf admitted that, yes, he had been in a fight, he did not want to divulge any more.
“Was it about that girl?”
His mother supplied the name. “Mary Ibbott.”
His father asked the question again. “Was it about her?”
Ralf remained sullen.
“Answer your father!”
“Yes. But it’s settled.” Ralf looked from one to the other of his parents, and down again at the floor. Jacob, seated in the corner, said nothing at all. Imogen too was watching. Ralf glanced at her. His isolation was complete.
“Who hit you?” his father said.
“I won’t say.”
“Another boy?”
“I won’t say.”
“Is it settled with him?”
No. It wasn’t. The sudden constriction in Ralf’s eyesight, his tightly shut lips and clenched fists, the quick breathing through his nostrils, all these, even if he had not already been burning with hatred, told him it wasn’t. John Hollins or not, anyone else or not, however many of them lined up against him, he was not going to let this pass. He was going to kill Aholiab Peake. Not for what he had done, but for what, in those few quiet, insinuating words, he had said.
“I said, is it settled with him?”
Ralf mulishly shook his head, as if refusing to reply.
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
In the end, his father, disappointed and hurt, gave up. Ralf spent the rest of the evening in a silence broken only by his monosyllabic replies to unavoidable questions. He did not know what distressed him more: the destruction of his easy relations with his father, or his mother’s disapproval. Behind everything, dominating his pain, was Eloise. The growing contusion of his face was a welcome distraction. So was the state of his abdomen, about which his parents knew nothing. When, unusually early, they all went to bed and left him to his own devices, he examined himself by the feeble glow of the rush-lamp and probed the damage that had been done. With a groan he lowered himself on his cot and stared into the darkness, remembering the fall of her dark-green robe and its scalloped cuffs, her brooch, her hair with its virginal chaplet, her face. He would never forget the way she had looked tonight.
He remembered the attention she had given to the performers. There had been no pride in that. If the tuneless organistrum had irked her, if the singing had been dull, if the evening had dragged for her as much as it had for the rest of the audience, she had given no sign. Unlike Ralf, she had joined wholeheartedly in the applause. With more than the politeness of good breeding, a smile on her lips, she had spoken an approving word to Godric; and when, still clapping, she had bent closer to catch his reply, the lamplight had glinted on the narrow chain at her neck.
For some reason Ralf thought of the vellum he had given Father Pickard: Ralf could never refer to, still less address, him by any other name. Parting on Wednesday, he had said as much.
St Matthew. It was Godric who had brought Ralf closer to the Sermon on the Mount, and Father Pickard who had let him commit the smoothly polished verses to memory. Ralf had tried to let them guide, or at least influence, him, but with little success. Christ’s teaching was too difficult and too beautiful to be followed.
Ego autem dico vobis non resistere malo. On the contrary, I tell you not to resist evil. Sed si quis te percusserit in dextera maxilla tua praebe illi et alteram. But whosoever shall strike you on your right cheek, offer him the other.
This was the most beautiful idea of all. As he again became fully conscious of the throbbing of his own, left, cheek, Ralf was tempted to smile. What was Aholiab Peake, but a poor, benighted thing? Was not Mary Ibbott punishment enough for him? He was as far below Imogen as Ralf was below Eloise.
Ralf painfully sat up, turned and put his feet on the cool earth of the floor. The creaking overhead, as his parents moved about their room while preparing for bed, had not yet ceased. Intermittently he had heard them talking in low tones, perhaps about him.
He stood up and felt his way to the stair-foot door, opened the turnbuckle and started to climb. The risers were so steep and the treads so narrow that the single flight of stairs was little more than a ladder.
Rushlight was showing only at the edges of the right-hand door, his parents’. He was about to knock when he realized for the first time that they were not just his parents, but people too. Two nights a week: that was all they usually had.
Then he heard the cupboard door being shut. One of them, at least, was still out of bed. Ralf knocked.
“I’ve come to say I’m sorry,” he said, when his father had brought him into the room. “And that it’s settled between me and him.”
“There won’t be any more fighting?”
“No.”
“Promise?”
“I promise.”
“What about Mary?”
“She’s not for me. She never was.”
Ralf’s mother, sitting up in bed, her hair loose, awarded him a slow smile of forgiveness.
“It’s all over, then,” Ralf’s father said, and in his eyes there was forgiveness too. “Forgotten. Now go back to bed.”
10
Ralf spent part of Monday morning making a removable tiller for a fourteen-foot shallop. He selected the pole himself, seasoned ash with a slight S-curve, and spokeshaved it to a regular circumference, comfortable to the hand. On the turning-table he made a spherical boss for the inboard end, its socket fitting so snugly that a trace of fish-glue and six blows of the mallet set it in place for life. All that remained was to shape the tenon at the other end.
Around him, at benches and boat-cradles, nine or ten others were busy. More came and went. There was the usual workshop talk, banter, occasional laughter: but Ralf’s thoughts were elsewhere.
His hopes of seeing Eloise at church had been dashed. On Friday, Godric had happened to say, she had gone to Alincester with her mother and Aunt Béatrice, and would not be returning until this morning.
Since Thursday Ralf had, more than once, thought of trying to invoke supernatural aid in winning her favour. Prayer was supposed to be the resort of the hopeless, but he was not in the habit of it. He also felt that praying for personal gain was against the rules and unlikely to yield results, especially in light of his neglect.
To make Eloise smile at him would be a miracle beyond any power above or below. He could not be the only one to worship her. Every adult male in the village must share his plight; and beyond this ineligible, irrelevant rabble, in high places to which Ralf would never have access, dwelt the noblemen among whom she had already found her match. Godric had said something about it, weeks ago. Ralf could no longer remember the details. They did not matter, and it was better that he did not know.
Soon she would be gone. All he could do for now was try for a glimpse of her at church, and dream, and yearn, and sigh.
The Tide Mill Page 10