‘Well, I don’t want this old umbrella,’ said Roddy. He considered the water. ‘Do you?’
‘No. Throw it away.’
He flung it. It alighted in the middle of the pond. It stuck – oh horror! – upright, caught in something, and refused to sink.
‘Oh!’
It stared at them across the waste of waters, stark, forlorn, reproachful. It said: ‘Why did you pick me up, encourage and befriend me when this is what you meant to do?’
‘Well, come on,’ said Roddy.
They fled from it.
They fled from it, but ah! – it pursued them. From miles away it wailed to Judith in a high thin squeak: ‘Save me! Save me!’ They made excuses to each other for spoiling the paper chase, and going back the same way. Their feet were compelled, driven.
The pond lay fair and flawless in the evening light. The umbrella was drowned.
Roddy stood at the edge and bit his lip. He said:
‘Well, I almost wish I hadn’t thrown the poor old chap away.’
She nodded. She could not speak.
The place was haunted for ever.
But what remained more deeply in her memory was the bond with Roddy, the sharing of an emotion, the secret sympathy. Avidly she seized upon it, and with it nourished her immoderate ambitions. One day they would all like her better than anyone else: even Roddy would tell her everything. Their lives, instead of being always remote and mysterious, would revolve intimately round her. She would know all, all about them.
From that far off unsubstantial time Roddy’s face was the last, the clearest, the strangest to float up.
There was a field with chalky pits in it and ripening blackberries and wastes of gorse and bracken. The curious smell of the bracken rose faint but penetrating, earthy and disturbing.
She was staring in horror at a dead rabbit lying in the path. It was stretched on its side with its tiny frail-boned paws laid out quiet, and the tender secret white fur of its underneath half revealed. One of them – which? – she could never remember – said:
‘Well, I never thought I’d touch it.’
It was like hearing a person speaking in a bad dream.
‘How did you do it?’ said Roddy’s voice.
‘Well, it was sitting, and I crept up and chucked a stone to startle it up, not meaning to hurt it. But I must have hit it plumb behind the ear, – I killed it outright anyway. It was an absolute fluke. I couldn’t do it again if I tried all my life.’
‘Hum,’ said Roddy. ‘Funny thing.’
He stood with his hands in his pockets looking down at the corpse, making his face a mask. The sun wavered and darkened. The surface of the bracken shone with a metallic light, the grass was lurid, the trees hissed. Judith struggled in a nightmare.
‘Well, what shall I do with it?’ said someone.
‘I’ll see to it,’ said Roddy.
Then he and she were alone. She bent down and touched the fur. It was dead, it was dead. She fell on her knees beside it and wept.
‘I say, don’t,’ said Roddy after a bit. He could not bear tears.
She wept all the more, awful sobs from the pit of the stomach.
‘He didn’t mean it, it can’t be helped,’ said Roddy. Then after another interval:
‘You know, it didn’t feel it. It died at once.’
It died at once. Oh, how pathetic, how unbearable … Then again, after a long time:
‘Look, we’ll take it home and give it a funeral.’
He gathered huge fern-leaves and gently wrapped the rabbit in them. She picked it up: she would carry it, though she almost fainted with anguish at the feel of its tender thin body. She thought: ‘I am holding something that’s dead. It was alive a few minutes ago and now it’s – what is it?’ – and she felt choked, drowning.
They set off. Weeping, weeping she carried the rabbit down the hill into the garden; and Roddy walked silently beside her. He went away and dug a hole under a laurel bush in the thickest part of the shrubbery. But when it came to the final act, the burying, she could not bear it at all. She was beyond all coherence now, a welter of sobs and tears.
‘I say, don’t, said Roddy again in a shaking voice.
She was suddenly quiet with shock; for he sounded on the verge of breaking down. He could not endure her grief. Out of the corner of a sodden eye she saw his face start to break up. Quickly she yielded the body, and he took it away.
He was gone a long time. When he came back he took her arm and said:
‘Come and look.’
Under the laurel bush, at the head of the little mound he had set up a beautiful tablet. It was the top of a cake tin, smooth and clean and shining; and on it he had hammered out with a nail the words: ‘In memory of a Rabbit.’
Peace and comfort flowed in upon her …
The rabbit was under all that quiet and green gloom, under the chill stiff polished moulding of the great laurel leaves, no longer terrible and pathetic, but dignified with its memorial tablet, lapped in the kind protecting earth, out of reach of flies and boys and the mocking stare of the sun. It was all right. There was not any sorrow.
‘Thank you!’
He had done it to please her. Charlie would not have done it, Martin could not have. It was a purely Roddy gesture, so unlike him, you would have supposed, and yet, when it was done, so recognizably his gesture and only his. Incalculable Roddy! She remembered how when Martin had sprained his ankle and moaned, he had hovered round him in distress, with a puckered face. He could not stand the unhappiness and pain of people.
She wanted to kiss him, and did not dare. She looked at him, the whole of herself flowing towards him in a warm tumult of gratitude, and quickly touched his arm; and he looked back, withdrawing himself for fear of thanks, smiling his obscure downward smile. She thought: ‘Shall I never, never understand him?’
She saw the sky beginning to blossom with evening. The sun came out below flushed clouds and all the treetops were lit up, sombrely floating and rocking in a dark gold wash of light. Across the river the fields looked rich and wistful, brimming with sun, cut with long violet shadows. The river ran a little wildly, scattered over with fierce, fire-opal flakes. But all was softening, flattening. The clouds were drifting away, the wind was quiet now; there would be an evening as still, as carved as death.
She saw it all with the quivering overclear senses of exhaustion. It was too much. Roddy’s pale face was all at once significant, and all the others, even Charlie, floated away while she looked at him and loved him. And as she looked she saw the deep light falling on him and he seemed mingled with the whole mysterious goldenness of the evening, to be part of it; and she felt herself lost with him in a sudden dark poignant intimacy and merging, – a lifting flood, all come and gone in a timeless moment.
But afterwards it did not seem true. She only remembered that next time she saw him he had been quite ordinary and indifferent, and she herself, still looking for signs and wonders, chilled with disappointment. Roddy as a child grew dim after that; and the rabbit’s grave that she had meant to tend and keep sweet with flowers through the changing seasons, grew dim too. After a while she could not even remember exactly where it was in all that shrubbery. The rabbit lay forgotten.
The others faded too. She could recapture nothing more of them. They were cut off sharp in a final group on the hillside, as if horror had in that instant made a night and blotted them out for good.
Then the grandmother let the house and went away to seek a less damp air for her rheumatism. Being alone came again as the natural stuff of life, and the children next door were gone and lost, as if they had never been.
2
Then they came again – straying so suddenly, strangely, briefly across the timeless confusions of adolescence, that they left behind them an even more disturbing sense of their unreality, – an estran
gement profounder than before.
It was winter – the time of the long frost and the ten days’ skating, – the time when crossing the river to get to the skating pool was dangerous because of the great blocks of ice coming down with the stream. Those ten days flashed out for ever in life, – a sparkling pure breathless intoxication of movement and light and air that seemed each evening too delightful to be allowed to last; and yet each succeeding morning – she first listening to the day then fearfully peeping at it – had miraculous prolongation. She prayed: Oh God, let the skating last. Let me skate. Take not my happiness from me and I will love thee as I ought. And for ten days He hearkened unto her.
Each day she abandoned lessons and, crossing the river, ran across the crunching frost-bound marsh to the edge of the pond. Over and over it the people supped, glided, swirled with shouts of laughter in the sun. Their lips were parted, their eyes shone, they were beautified.
She wore a white sweater and a crimson muffler. At first people looked at her and then they began smiling at her; and soon she was greeting all those who came regularly and smiling at fresh strangers every day.
There was a girl who came each morning from the London train. She was slender and fair, and she skated with the flying grace of a dream. Her pleated skirt swung out as she moved, her feet in their trim boots were narrow and small, and when she twirled her long slim legs showed to the knee. She appeared like a goddess in the midst of the cheerful sociable incompetent herd. Judith skated to and fro in front of her every day, hoping in vain for a look; for she was proud and absorbed and ardent, holding herself aloof and noticing no one, skating and skating till it got dark. One day she brought a handsome young man with her, and to him was not at all proud and indifferent.
They waltzed, they spun, they cut figures, they ran hand in hand, they laughed at each other; and when they rested they sat side by side talking and smoking cigarettes. Unlike his companion, the young man looked at Judith not once but many times: and then he smiled at her; then he whispered something to the goddess, and Judith’s heart beat wildly. But the cold scornful creature merely glanced once in a bored way, nodded and went on skating. When evening fell and they were preparing to go he looked up from taking off his boots as Judith passed, and radiantly smiling with white teeth and blue eyes, said ‘Good night.’ That was, to her regret, the only time she saw this handsome and friendly young man, whose wife she would have been pleased to be.
There was an old gentleman with glasses and a grey moustache who skated very sedately and who took a great deal of trouble to teach her the outside edge. He called her ‘my dear’, and his eyes gazed at her from behind his glasses with a hungry watery wistfulness. He had little if any conversation, but he would clear his throat and open his mouth as he looked at her as if for ever on the verge of some tremendous confidence. There was also a common but polite boy with pimples who could skate very fast indeed and who for several afternoons raced panting up and down the ice, while she hung on to the belt of his Norfolk jacket, and shrieked.
The tenth morning was Saturday. The London train brought several parties. The goddess had a little girl with her. There were many vulgar shouting groups of incompetents, and one or two quiet and moderately proficient ones. Judith noticed a curious trio of tall slender refined looking people – two boys and a girl. They sat on the bank and slowly ate sandwiches. When they had finished they got up and stood grouped together, making no movement to adjust the skates they carried. As soon as they stood up, Judith recognized them: Mariella, Julian and Charlie.
It had happened.
They had not changed much, but they had grown most alarmingly. Mariella must be close on six foot. Her body had merely been stretched out without much alteration of the long vague curves of childhood. She hardly dared look at the boys: they were enormous.
That was Charlie, really Charlie, that yellow-headed one, a little wild-looking, more beautiful than ever … She felt choked.
At that moment Mariella’s eyes fell on her. A fearful blush and heart-beating went all through her, and she turned hastily away. But she could feel them observing, questioning, conferring about her. She executed a perfect half-circle on the outside edge, and felt that now, if they did recognize her, she could just bear it.
Somebody was calling from the edge.
‘Hey! Hey! Hi!’
She looked round cautiously. There was no doubt about it. Charlie was calling her, and they were all nodding and beckoning. They could, it seemed, easily bear to recognize her, and the sight of her skating towards them caused them no apparent faintness or anguish.
Charlie said rather peevishly:
‘I say, how do you do it? That turn thing. Who taught you?’
Judith was dumb.
‘She doesn’t recognize us,’ said Mariella with a little giggle. ‘You are Judith Earle, aren’t you?’
‘Oh yes. Oh I do. Only you’ve grown so.’ She tried to look at them and to her horror felt the tears smart under her eyelids. ‘I didn’t expect –’ Her mouth was trembling, and she stopped in despair, hanging her head.
It was such a shock, such a deep pang of joy and misery … They would not understand … After all these years of thinking about them, seeing them so passionately, nursing in her imagination their unreal and dream-like existence, that they should all at once quite casually be there! It was almost as if dead people were to come to life. She prayed to be swallowed up in the ice.
‘Well, you’re no pigmy,’ said Julian.
And they all laughed. Then it was all right. They ceased to swell and waver before her eyes, settled down, began to grow real.
‘Well, I don’t know how it’s done,’ said Charlie, still rather angrily looking at the ice. ‘Mariella, what on earth did you drag us here for? You don’t know any more than I do how it’s done. What a stupid waste of a day!’ The stress of his petulance made his voice, which was breaking, squeak suddenly now and then, in the funniest way, so that nobody could have taken him seriously.
‘Well, you needn’t have come.’ Mariella’s voice was still cool and childish. With her little smile, she turned away from him to watch the skaters.
‘And my feet are so cold I can’t feel them,’ went on Charlie. Three great gawps, that’s what we are, three great gawps.’ He looked at Mariella’s back. ‘And Mariella’s easily the gawpest.’
That seemed to unburden him, for he suddenly threw off his bad temper and laughed.
‘Put on your skates, chaps,’ he said. ‘We’ll do our damnedest.’
He began to whistle and sat down, struggling with his boots.
‘Judith shall show us how it’s done. She is so extremely able.’ He looked at her, giving her his attention for the first time, and charmingly smiled. His eyes were amazing when they looked full at you – brilliant, icy-blue, a little too wide open. His long red girlish lips still parted a trifle in repose; and the whole head had a breath-taking extravagance of beauty.
‘How are you, Judith?’ he said. ‘Do you remember the dear old days?’
‘Yes, I do.’
What self-possession he had! She was not up to him. He lost interest in her, and went on with his boots, fiercely whistling.
‘Do you really still live here, Judith?’ said Mariella.
‘Yes, really. Where do you live?’
‘Well, we’re in London now. Grannie moved there to be near my school. Where do you go to school?’
‘I don’t. I have classes by myself with a man who coaches boys for Oxford and Cambridge. He’s a vicar. And then I have music lessons from a person who comes from London, and Daddy teaches me Greek and Latin. My Mother and Father don’t believe in girls’ schools.’ That sounded rude and priggish. She blushed and added, ‘But I do. It’s awfully dull by myself.’
‘Why don’t you get your Mother to send you to my school?’ said Mariella. ‘It’s ripping fun. You could come up to L
ondon every day.’
‘Mariella loves her school,’ said Julian. ‘It’s topping. She doesn’t learn anything and plays hockey all day. Judith’s parents want her to be educated, Mariella. You don’t understand. Isn’t that so, Judith?’
Judith blushed again and was afraid it was so.
‘I believe in female education,’ muttered Julian to his boots.
They had become extremely queer creatures as they grew up, thought Judith. The boys especially were very peculiar, with their height and pallor and their trick of over-emphatic speech. Julian was immensely tall and cadaverous, with a stormy, untidy, hideous face, and eloquent eyes that seemed to be changing colour in their deep sockets. He actually had lines in his cheeks, and his nose was becoming hooked, with dilated, backsweeping nostrils.
‘Well, I wish you’d come,’ said Mariella unruffled, after a silence. ‘It’s ripping. You’d love it.’
It was nice of Mariella to be so friendly and pressing. Perhaps she had always been very fond of you, had missed you … Judith’s heart warmed.
‘I wish you’d come back and live here, Mariella. It was so lovely when you did.’
‘I’d like to,’ said Mariella complacently. ‘P’raps we will some day. If Granny’s rheumatism would only get better we might come every summer.’
‘But it never will get better,’ said Julian. ‘Not at her age.’
The boots were all on at last, the skates fastened. They got up and wobbled out a few inches on to the ice. There was a chorus of ‘Hell!’ Wow!’ ‘Goodness!’
Charlie slipped up with a crash, Mariella followed him.
‘It’s beastly,’ he said furiously. ‘You can’t keep your skates still. I think I’ve broken my wrist. I shall go home.’ The others took no notice. They wobbled further and further out, giggling. They were too tall and thin to balance properly, and their ankles kept on betraying them.
Dusty Answer Page 3